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This has been on lots of news.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25383373
This is the large increase of Arctic sea ice volume, this year over last. It has not changed my guess that Arctic sea ice is recovering, but I wonder if Bob Droege may have had second thoughts.
Why on earth would he have second thoughts? You never do.
Jims buying the uptick. Going back to 1979 this is a losing strategy.
so ask yourself, why would jim adopt a buying strategy that has poor performance since 1979?
Take a look at this graph from PIOMAS,
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2.png
I notice that the recovery of ice volume this year is the same more or less as the last 4 years. PIOMAS has the volume less than the mean volume for 1979-2012 by a long shot so I don’t see a recovery there. The ESA’s cryosat hasn’t been providing data for as long as others, and though it may provide a better measure, I think it will take more than one years data to overturn the long term trend.
I bring numbers on the ice extent, comparing this year to last year, and since I don’t think much of your technical skills, I am going to use percentages.
Here are two numbers, 66.1% and 99.5%.
Straight from the IJIS website, a comparison of what the ice extent was at the minumum this summer and where it is right now.
Like the pause, the arctic ice recovery is gone, gone, gone.
Thanks, Bob. We will see next September.
Steven Mosher asked, ” … why would jim [sic] adopt a buying strategy that has poor performance since 1979?”
Baron Rothschild (and others) said, “Buy when there’s blood in the streets.”
“Like the pause, the arctic ice recovery is gone, gone, gone.”
.Let’s give it a few years, see if we can get to 2 full decades with no additional warming. If we do get warming in that time, you’ll of course consider yourself vindicated. If it doesn’t, you’ll move the goal posts again. We’re already at Santer’s 17 years, and well past NOOA’s 15 year interval. Funny how we’re not hearing much about that from them, or you.
I can see why you guys like to be warmists….it’s a no lose proposition.
% comparisons are not a good idea for sea ice extent.
If sea ice was at only 0.1km^2 a mere increase to 1km^2 would be a 1000% increase!
They say that low Arctic Sea Ice Extent is BAD NEWS and that high Arctic Sea Ice Extent is GOOD NEWS.
They do not understand the ICE CYCLES!
The warm oceans and open Arctic are necessary to rebuild ice on land.
It snows more when oceans are warm and wet and it snows less when oceans are cold and frozen.
This is what keeps temperature tightly bounded.
If you have something else with a set point and powerful forcing comparable to turning snowfall on and off, I would like to hear about it.
If any of you understand this, I would like to hear your thoughts.
Steve, would you vote on the AMO staying in the same phase as it has been in for the last decade.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/timeseriesimeseries/AMO/
The plot of AMO vs sea ice extent looks rather good.
broken link doc
you might have meant this one
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/timeseries/AMO/
Ha Lolwot,
Did you notice what I said before I said I was going to use percentages?
As usual, I totally agree with you, peace out.
Pokerguy,
1. Are you saying we haven’t had warming for the last 2 decades?
2. Or are you predicting that by 2018 we will have had 2 decades of no warming?
3. I believe, and if you can correct me with a proper cite, go ahead, that both Santer and NOAA were saying zero trends and some sort of ENSO adjusted trends for the 15 and 17 year periods, and I have cited the 15 and 17 year trends often enough to know that they are not zero nor are they ENSO adjusted.
By the way, right now, at skeptical science’s trend calculator, all 17 year trends are positive, most are near 0.1 C per decade with Spencer’s even above 0.1 C per decade, put that in your pause and smoke it.
Why don’t you fit a 6 degree polynomial to any temperature series so you can predict it’s cooling?
Doc I won one bet on ice. Pulled my money out of the market. Too many factors to make year to year bets. My bet for 2014? No change. But I wouldn’t bet money.
You won a bet with ice?
You need to wear big boy pants.
I won a wife with a chunk of carbon ice.
Jim, if you haven’t read my paper on the Arctic, get it now. Arctic warming started with the twentieth century but in mid-century it stopped for thirty years and then resumed in 1970. That pause was not just cessation of warming but a cooling at the rate of 0.3 degrees per decade. I hypothesized that it could have been a temporary resumption of previous flow pattern of currents but did not venture a prediction. It occurs to me, however, that what has happened before can happen again. If there should be another rearrangement of currents we could get another bout of Arctic cooling as we had in mid-twentieth century. If this increase of Arctic sea ice keeps going for a few years we just may be on the way to a new Arctic cooling like that.. Whether it will happen, how much cooling to expect, and how long it will last are all up in the air. One thing is sure: it will not be good for Arctic navigation or resource exploiation.
By the way, right now, at skeptical science’s trend calculator, all 17 year trends are positive, most are near 0.1 C per decade with Spencer’s even above 0.1 C per decade, put that in your pause and smoke it.
Uh, huh. Well then you’d best get on the phone to Kevin. T. and tell him the missing heat’s not missing after all. I’m sure he’ll be tremendously relieved.
Sorry, by Bob. D, and should have been placed in quotes “By the way, right now, at skeptical science’s trend calculator, all 17 year trends are positive, most are near 0.1 C per decade with Spencer’s even above 0.1 C per decade, put that in your pause and smoke it.”
I don’t have trenberth’s number on by speed dial, although I do have more drug dealers on speed dial than Chad Kroeger does.
But maybe the pause ain’t all the skeptics make it up to be.
Saint Nic I laud!
============
Presumably Kim is referring to Nicholas Lewis’s submission to the UK House of Commons committee, which JC called a Tour De Force:
http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/WrittenEvidence.svc/EvidencePdf/3989
The Lewis paper is a case where all the skeptics who didn’t trust GCMs a few threads ago, now do. He uses not one but two models. The only difference is the bottom line. What do we infer from this? Motivated reasoning? Confirmation bias? We have had threads on this phenomenon. Not surprised, I am just pointing it out when I see it.
Kim, you could have been more succinct with: “Lord Nic”
Lewis is acting like a deal-maker, offering up a low TCR in the hopes that pols will take it and not do mitigation because it appears inconsequential.
The problem is that science does not make deals. It exposes truth, and the truth is that TCR is 2C and not Lewis’s lowball 1.3C.
Jim D,
You are correct to point out the bias in sceptics comments. But you display your own bias by not spending just as much time arguing with and pointing out the bias in the warmist’s comments, and admitting to your warmist bias.
Jim D and many other Urgent Mitigationists seem constitutionally unable to understand the perfectly logical process of arguing in the alternative, i.e. “I don’t believe that your general approach is valid, but if I use it anyway it still comes up with the opposite answer to the one you are pushing.” Astrologer tells you that you are going to meet a tall, dark, stranger who will try to kill you so that you should sell all your belongings and leave town. You audit the astrologer’s horoscope and find that using their own canons the prediction is only that the tall, dark, stranger is going to give you a paper cut and that you could easily avoid him in any case by not going to Starbucks on the day in question. It doesn’t mean that you suddenly believe in astrology or that you are foolish not to sell out and leave town.
If I have a bias, it is towards using longer term temperature records and explanations based on physics rather than statistical games. You only have to read the Lewis abstract to see what a house of cards he has built to come up with his outlier number.
No Jim, you specifically argued that it was contradictory to applaud Nic Lewis’s analysis while being skeptical about the usefulness of GCMs. I refuted that argument and now you’re changing the subject. Can we count on you to stop propounding the erroneous contradiction claim in the future?
“Jim D
If I have a bias, it is towards using longer term temperature records and explanations based on physics rather than statistical games”
How lucky that our understanding of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and non-linear dynamic system analysis is so jolly good. Why economists and biomedics have life so damned easy because we can use ‘physics’ to understand our systems from first principles.
“Lewis is acting like a deal-maker, offering up a low TCR in the hopes that pols will take it and not do mitigation because it appears inconsequential.
The problem is that science does not make deals. It exposes truth, and the truth is that TCR is 2C and not Lewis’s lowball 1.3C.’
Is this how you know, Webbed Wonder?
http://dnatestingsystems.goodbarry.com/images/cannibal%20spirit%202.jpg
stevepostrel, you may be right that some skeptics are just playing devil’s advocate and don’t actually believe their own arguments very much, and this is supported by how self-contradictory those arguments are as I pointed out. People who have self-contradictory arguments do not deserve to be taken seriously, do they?
DocMartyn, you may also want to pass judgement on Lewis’s level of certainty given how complex he has to make his analysis, and that it just doesn’t hold up to the warming rate since 1970, where he would need to invoke a second warming mechanism to account for the other half.
Lewis’s level of certainty given how complex he has to make his analysis, and that it just doesn’t hold up to the warming rate since 1970, where he would need to invoke a second warming mechanism to account for the other half.
Lets back peddle 100yrs and look at the period 1870-1900.The first observation is that a decrease in external forcing such as volcanic’s and solar increases SAT.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1870/to:1900/normalise/plot/gistemp/from:1870/to:1900/normalise/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1870/to:1900/normalise
willard and other academic bullies may like this
http://www.breitbart.com/system/wire/upiUPI-20131220-014515-8677
Willard might be an aspirant to that description but that’s about it.
Besides we’re supposed to be avoiding ad homs. Didn’t you get the memo?
It used to be called “mobbing”:
http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/unkindlyart.htm
Proposed risks and safety tips:
:”At a practical level, every professor should be aware of conditions that increase vulnerability to mobbing in academe. Here are five:
• Foreign birth and upbringing, especially as signaled by a foreign accent;
• Being different from most colleagues in an elemental way (by sex, for instance, sexual orientation, skin color, ethnicity, class origin, or credentials);
• Belonging to a discipline with ambiguous standards and objectives, especially those (like music or literature) most affected by postmodern scholarship;
• Working under a dean or other administrator in whom, as Nietzsche put it, “the impulse to punish is powerful”;
• An actual or contrived financial crunch in one’s academic unit (according to an African proverb, when the watering hole gets smaller, the animals get meaner).
Other conditions that heighten the risk of being mobbed are more directly under a prospective target’s control. Five major ones are:
• Having opposed the candidate who ends up winning appointment as one’s dean or chair (thereby looking stupid, wicked, or crazy in the latter’s eyes);
• Being a ratebuster, achieving so much success in teaching or research that colleagues’ envy is aroused;
• Publicly dissenting from politically correct ideas (meaning those held sacred by campus elites);
• Defending a pariah in campus politics or the larger cultural arena;
• Blowing the whistle on or even having knowledge of serious wrongdoing by locally powerful workmates.
The upshot of available research is that no professor needs to worry much about being mobbed, even in a generally vulnerable condition, so long as he or she does not rock the local academic boat. The secret is to show deference to colleagues and administrators, to be the kind of scholar they want to keep around as a way of making themselves look good. Jung said that “a man’s hatred is always concentrated on that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.”
stevepostrel, excellent post on mobbing.
However, as a Prof. of Music I feel compelled to point out that our standards are unambiguous and are at a very high level. No post modern shenanigans here :-)
Our undergrads are expected to practice 5 hours a day 7 days a week in addition to a full academic load in theory and musicology. And then there is piano, ear training and sight singing.
I have had a number of undergrads go on to law school and med school. They all remarked on the lesser workload of those studies.
TMJ: I never disrespect music or art history majors. Unless things have changed a lot, they get killed in training and seem to come out with a corpus of reliable knowledge. I’ve seen some architecture and fashion-design boot camps that get similar results, too. It used to be that the comparative literature majors were the special forces of the text-reading army. And Anglo-American philosophy departments are often not for the faint of heart, either. Only parochial people think rigor is necessarily restricted to STEM.
From the met office prognosticators
Global average temperature forecast for 2014
The global average temperature in 2014 is expected to be between 0.43 °C and 0.71 °C above the long-term (1961-1990) average of 14.0 °C, with a best estimate of 0.57 °C, according to the Met Office annual global temperature forecast.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2013/global-temperature-2014
From Smith et al Science August 2007, the UK Met Office forecast that the average temperature for 2014 would be 0.30 +/-0.21 C warmer than 2004. The average for 2004 was 0.42 C. So the original forecast was 0.72 +/- 0.21. So the Met. Office has been forced to concede that next year will be at least 0.15 C below their original forecast. And the original forecast is now outside the current limits.
Why use the old 1961-1990 average? There have been 2 additional 30-year periods calculated. How does the forecast compare to those? We should be looking at those periods also. I would if I were paid to make a forecast.
@ Philbert
“Why use the old 1961-1990 average? ”
Could it be because that period is centered on the ’70’s, when the RECORD (according to contemporaneous reporting) Arctic ice and unusual cold worldwide was being cited as unequivocal evidence of an impending ice age. And that governments worldwide needed to quit waffling around and take immediate, coordinated action to save us?
There was a programme on TV last weekend that claimed that Britain was experiencing warmer summers and colder winters, and referenced the Hadley Centre Central England Temperature record, which is the longest continuous temperature record in the world. Fortunately, it is very easy to download seasonal data from 1659 from the Hadley Centre CET website, and plot it in Excel, for example.
Since 1659, the linear trend in summer temperatures has been +0.0009 degrees Celsius per year (they went up in about 1995-2005 and are now declining again) and for winter temperatures, the trend is +0.0037 degrees Celsius per year (with an increase from about 1995-2010, followed by a decline) so the difference (summer minus winter temperatures) is in fact becoming less extreme by 0.0028 degrees Celsius per year.
Why are temperature anomalies used instead of absolute temperatures in the climate context? What is the advantage? How well would climate models compare with actual measurments if absolute temperatures were used instead of anomalies?
“The reason to work with anomalies, rather than absolute temperature is that absolute temperature varies markedly in short distances, while monthly or annual temperature anomalies are representative of a much larger region. Indeed, we have shown (Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987) that temperature anomalies are strongly correlated out to distances of the order of 1000 km.”
From: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
in absolute terms the models do do very well with a 3K spread around the truth.
Mosh, 3K? not even good enough for horse shoes.
Brian. My typing sucks. They dont do well. 3k spread
Steven Mosher, 3K spread on absolute temperature and how do they do on surface winds?
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/TAdBeWcn2CWAftiTCqxL6W9avHg4yJpKPz98JaJ5Lzo=w578-h346
The ICOADS v-wind data has quite a few gaps but it seems to me that “climate” models should be able to get more of the basic stuff right. The “pause” and tropical SST should have been something that “real” climate models should have pointed out earlier in the game I would think.
I see the point lolwot is making. However, it is not valid for example when comparing global average temperatures. In that case it seems more like a trick to hide the 3K spread Steven Mosher is talking about.
Hardly a trick to hide since the data is there
From the article:
…
Importantly, the trend of shale oil production in general marches onward and upward. In December’s Energy Information Administration drilling report (DPR), the following production was reported:
(click to enlarge)
Basin
Rig count (NOV) Oil production/rig Total Dec prod (m/b/d)
Permian 462 82 1.334
Bakken 174 480 1.000
Eagle Ford 283 408 1.226
Niobrara 100 312 0.275
Total 3.84 million b/d
Looking more closely, the notable metrics are that in the Bakken and Eagle Ford, with higher oil productivity per rig, the effect of horizontal rigs and oil production. In the past, the Permian has been drilled mostly with vertical wells. As this changes, the productivity per well will increase. The last data point is the total oil production figures. By December 2013, a projected 3.84 million barrels of oil per day were being produced by the four main oil-producing shale basins (minus Haynesville and the Marcellus with low oil production). In October 2012 from a base of 2 million b/d from the shale plays, the consultancy IHS predicted production would reach 3.5 million by 2015. The milestone was already passed this year.
…
Finally, in spite of depletion concerns in regards to shale oil wells – that they burn out fast and furious – they do burn faster upfront but they continue at a “normal” production rate for up one, two and possibly three decades. (Most industry experts I have spoken with indicate this to be true.) This final chart, from the December 16th early release from the EIA, indicates the U.S. government view of the impact of shale oil, also known as tight oil. They expect shale oil production to peak at 4.8 million b/d around 2020. IHS expects 4.5 million b/d to continue through 2035, in contrast to the EIA forecast.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1901321-shale-oil-developments-pioneer-and-the-permian
Jim2, EIA is more likely to be right than IHS. Horizontal fracked tight oil production per well follows something called a decline curve. You can find them on line by shale and by company. Typically they start at a few hundred bbl/ day. That is much lower than a typical oil reservoir well. In the Bakken the average was 400 to start but is dropping as less productive pay is increasingly drilled. The initial output declines rapidly to stripper status where it is will remain for decades. Again using the Bakken, the decline curve is by about 90 percent in just three years.
So the only way to increase total tight oil output is to drill more wells. And from what is now known about all the major US plays (excepting the Moneterey shale, where because of folding and faulting no one has yet figured out how to successfully use the technology), EIA has simply figured out how many more wells could be drilled before all the known pay is fully drilled. Again using the Bakken for illustration. North Dakota said in 2012 that in the five known “sweet spots”, 5000 wells had been drilled, rigs were running at a rate of 1500 new wells/ year, and that there was physically (vertical and horizontal spacing between wells) room to infill another 11000. That means the Bakken will reach peak production in 7.3 years, and permanently and rapidly decline thereafter.
If you dig through the EIA background reports,mor some of the stuff in OGJ, you can find equivalent analyses for every tight oil shale play in North America, except for the Monterey for reasons previously given.
@Rud Istvan | December 20, 2013 at 4:19 pm |
Hi Rud,
I realize reservoirs can be modelled. But what can’t be modelled is technological progress on exploration, drilling, and extraction; and what reservoirs are yet to be discovered. This isn’t predictable. Also, production from shale oil, in most cases recently, have exceeded predictions, sometimes by a lot.
jim2, Better listen to what erstwhile climate change denier Rud is saying. He is referencing simulations that many of us have done that project peak in Bakken in about 7 years
http://contextearth.com/2013/10/06/bakken-projections/
I have it projected about 8 years from earlier in the year.
The trick is that some of us bat 1.000, both oil and climate change. It’s called applying science and systems thinking to challenging problems.
The “model” is that extraction transport is governed by advection, dispersion and diffusion. This is the way the world works and Euler popularized the notion in the “natural log”.
WHUT is claiming that fracked wells move rapidly to diffusion-limited transport.
He might be right. Also, playing with data on the Euler curve is an age-old tactic to encourage speculation on bubbles. Therefore, some caution is advisable because past performance does not necessarily predict future performance. Because of this possibility, the best strategy is Drill, Baby, Drill.
The heuristic model is referred to as a parametric hyperbolic model. That is what is taught in petroleum and reservoir engineering textbooks. For one range of exponent selected the transport is dominated by diffusion. The empirical data collected from the Bakken support this diffusive transport characterization. What to do — go against the empirical observations?
@WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | December 20, 2013 at 6:25
Estimates of recoverable crude from the Bakken doubled between 2008 and 2013. The Bakken has been drilled since 1953. If you can show me your prediction from, say, 2008, certify the date, and it be right, I’ll be impressed.
Based on history, you and Rudd can’t predict squat concerning oil production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_formation
I am wondering how skeptics to AGW are rationalizing November 2013 being the warmest November on record and also how it looks like 2013 will be the warmest non-El niño year on record. How do you balance this with your “globe is cooling” meme?
You’re forgetting about the non-alarming part where the suns turns off.
Steam pipes
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2013/12/denier-weirdness-russian-steam-pipes.html
Yes of course…the sun is shutting down into a Maunder Minimum II nap time. But simple “natural variability” has led to the warmest November on record. The highest GH gases in several million years “don’t matter”.
Another case of ignoring uncertainty when it’s convenient to do so?
R. Gates wrote: I am wondering how skeptics to AGW are rationalizing November 2013 being the warmest November on record and also how it looks like 2013 will be the warmest non-El niño year on record.
Ah, so many fallacies in a single post. Very nicely done.
First, conflating the secular warming trend since 1880 with AGW. How much of the warming from 1880-1940 is anthropogenic?
Then cherry-picks a single data point and tries to use it to prove that cooling could not be happening. This while lumping all AGW skeptics into the “cooling” crowd. Let’s do a little math, mmmkay? Given the statistics of month-to-month variations and the fact that the temperature has been roughly flat for ~12 years, what is the probability that one of the months in 2013 would not be the warmest of that month on record? Even if the temperature trend were slightly negative? What’s that? You have no idea how to calculate that? Quelle surprise.
Finally, conveniently glassing over that the “record” only goes back to the 1880s. “Warmest on record” sounds so much like “warmest EVAH,” doesn’t it? Was that warm November around 1930 (warmest November on record at the time) due to AGW?
If you want to engage in a scientific discussion, you might find it helpful to learn how to reason. If, on the other hand, your interest is entirely in polemics, then you are doing an excellent job.
R. Gates, you write “I am wondering how skeptics to AGW are rationalizing November 2013 being the warmest November on record”
First let us correct this statement by adding “according the GISS and NOAA”. The satellite data, UAH and RSS shows no such record.
Second we are at the “top of the mountain”. It would be surprising if there was not the odd record still to be set, before the inevitable decrease in temperatures starts to take effect.
Fizzy said:
” “Warmest on record” sounds so much like “warmest EVAH,” doesn’t it?”
—
Perhaps to someone unfamiliar with what “instrument record” means or the immense paleoclimate history of the Earth. Certainly though, to a very high degree of certainty, the current string of warm years (the last decade being the warmest on record) is very likely (probability at least 95%) due to a large degree to the current effects of the Anthropocene, with GH gases leading the way. See:
http://www.whoi.edu/pclift/Ruddiman.pdf
This is what the Anthropocene climate looks like– and indications are it will become more like the mid-Pliocene.
In terms of UAH, the decade so far (ie since 2010) has been the warmest four year period on record.
Jim C. said:
“First let us correct this statement by adding “according the GISS and NOAA”. The satellite data, UAH and RSS shows no such record.”
—-
Are you suggesting that we could look at the satellite data across this full instrument record, which is not extended back as far, or are you doubting that November 2013 was the warmest on instrument record? What exactly are you suggesting? I suppose denying that November 2013 was the warmest on record is one way of trying to cope with the cognitive dissonance.
How are you handling the 2000 low temp records set in early Dec13 in the USA? (since temps in Russia make up the “global” november number)
Where does your last 1 or 2 decades go on this graph? (ends 1950)
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo3.png
I’m thanking my lucky stars I don’t live in 2000 places,
It’s always cold someplace.
R. Gates, you write “What exactly are you suggesting?”
I am merely stating a fact. I am not suggesting anything. Don’t you like facts?
One month out of twelve was a warmest month.
Eleven out of twelve were not a warmest month.
That is not really an exceptionally warm year!
How do you balance this with your “globe is warming” meme?
You left yourself open for this.
R. Gates says: Certainly though, to a very high degree of certainty, the current string of warm years (the last decade being the warmest on record) is very likely (probability at least 95%) due to a large degree to the current effects of the Anthropocene, with GH gases leading the way.
Ah. Another try. Not so good this time, though. Your original post was an attempt to use the current “warmest” temperature as evidence for AGW (or what you call the “Anthropocene”). When challenged on whether you would claim previous (prior to 1940) “warmest” temperatures as proof of AGW, you explain that those wouldn’t count because they weren’t during the Athropocene epoch.
Lovely, but completely circular, argument. You must find it very comforting to use it to ignore any evidence you don’t like. Unfortunately, it is not a scientific argument.
OBTW: citing that “”95%” probability when you don’t have a clue how it was derived doesn’t make you look smart.
The deniers are forgetting that the recent trend in statistical climate science is to include the natural variability in the models. Then one gets agreement such as this:
https://imageshack.com/i/e9oa57g
Which is the model, and which is the data?
Of course the sun is included in the model to high resolution:
http://contextearth.com/2013/12/18/csalt-model-and-the-hale-cycle/
Pity on poor Team Denier as they can’t even keep up with their own suggestions.
It takes 17 years to get the warmists to even talk about a “pause”. But it only takes one month, in one outlier temp series, for R. Gates to get his faux skepticism on and declare it’s over.
I’m wondering how the warmest November squares with the least severe hurricane season since 1964 in the minds of CAGW apologists. Cognitive dissonance much?
WUWT are already on top of this and have denied that November was that much warmer. Damage control mode is in full swing. Let’s give the warming trend a few more months, which will submerge all their methodologies.
The UK Met Office says their final 2014 numbers won’t be available until March 2014, which suggests that they are doing some quality control checking and waiting for late data to be submitted. So I would say that we don’t have definitive numbers yet. I recall that previously NOAA has pulled back subsequently on a preliminary ‘warmest month’ estimate.
R. Gates,
How long is the record?
Does it include the Holocene maximum? Does it include the Eocene? If not, so what?
In November the southern seaice excursion was bigger then Texas.The Temperature excursion in the Antarctic peninsular was around -3c and from 1-3 C in the western area of the SO.
Fastest cooling off period ever after most massive UHI effect ever supporting predictions of coldest winter ever (or at least since 1947 in the UK) leads climatists to make most absurd warming claims on record as solar activity continues to be as quiet as ever. Whatever.
Perhaps they won’t believe you (two links from drudge today):
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/2013-one-of-the-ten-coldest-years-in-us-history-with-the-largest-drop-in-temperature/
http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/20/the-top-seven-global-warming-alarmist-setbacks-in-2013/
Nice range of answers to the ways that skeptics try to fit in the warmest November on record with the meme of ‘globe is cooling’. Furthermore, if 2013 turns out to be the warmest non-El Nino year on record, it will be interesting to see how those who doubt AGW will fit that into their memeplex.
Not only is it likely to be an ENSO neutral year, it’s possible, with ten periods already reported, to be La Nina leaning on all 12 periods. I figure as few as three El Nino leaning periods would have sent it to hottest year EVAH! It’s been climbing the ladder all year, and it will keep right on climbing in 2014.
I love it. NOAA might change its mind. True. For instance, they could determine November was even warmer.
I think they dropped in the past was a claim that 2012 was the warmest La Nina year. I think it’s the 3rd warmest year. In a photo finish.
Re: (undefined NaN NaN:NaN),
It’s a record!
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/record.htm
Just take a look at this before spouting your Hottest November crap.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/thirteen-years-of-nasa-data-tampering-in-six-seconds/
Note it uses actual GISS data.
We are talking about global temperatures. Hottest November on record globally. Not US temperatures.
As confirmed by the NOAA and anyone else who cares to look. HadCRUT4 has come in at 3rd warmest November on record.
“It takes 17 years to get the warmists to even talk about a “pause”. But it only takes one month, in one outlier temp series, for R. Gates to get his faux skepticism on and declare it’s over.”
____
I’ve been acknowledging the “pause” for many years, and closely following the research of climate scientists looking for the causes. What needs to be put into the context is not just the causes for the “pause” but the importance of it in context of Earth’s overall energy imbalance.
Causes, and they are multiple, appear to be:
1) Natural variability of ocean to atmosphere sensible and latent heat flux
2) Modest increase in natural volcanic aerosols
3) Slight decrease in solar output
So even thought the energy imbalance at the TOA may have decreased slightly during the pause (from around .9 w/m^2 to around .7 w/m^2), the “pause” is really a tropospheric phenomenon, as total energy in the Earth system continued to accumulate during the period.
R.Gates said:
“I’ve been acknowledging the “pause” for many years, and closely following the research of climate scientists looking for the causes. What needs to be put into the context is not just the causes for the “pause” but the importance of it in context of Earth’s overall energy imbalance. ‘
Interesting that you try to shift from temperature anomaly, the predominant metric used to say AGW, to energy imbalance.
“Interesting that you try to shift from temperature anomaly, the predominant metric used to say AGW, to energy imbalance.”
____
I’ve never been a fan of using purely sensible tropospheric heat as a proxy for Earth’s energy imbalance. I’ve been a big fan of at least using moist enthalpy in the troposphere, but now that Argo is getting more and more accurate ocean heat content measurements and we have better measurements of total glacial ice mass, I think that a combination of ocean heat content, moist enthalpy of the troposphere and glacial ice mass would represent the best overall proxy for changes in Earth’s energy balance.
“R Gates
Causes, and they are multiple, appear to be:
1) Natural variability of ocean to atmosphere sensible and latent heat flux
2) Modest increase in natural volcanic aerosols
3) Slight decrease in solar output”
1) has been denied by the mainstream climate scientists for decades. Those who mentioned the possibility of natural waves of storage and release of heat were dismissed as ‘cyclists’.
2) No a God damned chance. Aerosols since 2000 have been uncharacteristically low, see Sato’s work.
Note also, having aerosols a cooling means that your relationship between CO2 and temperature in the ice-cores is blown away; dust levels increase by three orders of magnitude going from warming to cooling, and dust changes occur before temperature changes, which occur before CO2 changes.
3) you would not believe the abuse heaped on people who have suggested a linkage between solar flux and climate; the oft quoted 0.1% change in solar flux means that YOU cannot use solar changes to dig yourself out of your hole.
I said:
” Interesting that you try to shift from temperature anomaly, the predominant metric used to say AGW, to energy imbalance.”
Then R.Gates said:
“I’ve never been a fan of using purely sensible tropospheric heat as a proxy for Earth’s energy imbalance. I’ve been a big fan of …..”
But, R.Gates, you started this with just that:
“I am wondering how skeptics to AGW are rationalizing November 2013 being the warmest November on record…”
What you always were a fan of, is not of interest.
What is interesting is that you’re trying to shift.
“What you always were a fan of, is not of interest.
What is interesting is that you’re trying to shift”
___
What is of interest is what tropospheric sensible heat can and can’t tell us, and those who try to tease from the data something that isn’t there. The troposphere is pretty bad at both storing heat and given it’s low thermal inertia, it’s bad at showing consistent long-term trends in the storage of energy in the climate system. But those weaknesses are also strength’s if you’re looking for a sensitive metric for short-term forcings (both internal and external) to the system. The forcings to the troposphere are a combination of solar, sensible and latent heat flux from the ocean, and GH gas concentrations. For November to be warmer than the long-term average in the troposphere, we would have had to see solar output increase over the measurement period (it has not), or sensible or latent heat to be higher than average (it is not, in fact we ware in a ENSO neutral or cool PDO situation), or we would have to see GH gases having an effect. This last possibility makes the most sense.
“What is of interest is what tropospheric sensible heat can and can’t tell us, and those who try to tease from the data something that isn’t there. The troposphere is pretty bad at both storing heat and given it’s low thermal inertia, it’s bad at showing consistent long-term trends in the storage of energy in the climate system. But those weaknesses are also strength’s if you’re looking for a sensitive metric for short-term forcings (both internal and external) to the system.”
It’s the metric you were talking about in your post about skeptics, and before you tried the switch.
The current Nature Climate Change Alert carries an article by Barrett & Dannenberg. As experimental social psychology, it looks interesting. It relates to the point at which people will perceive that a risk is high enough to ensure effective collective action. They stress importance of bolstering a perception that uncertainty about the risk is low.
If this were in a psychology journal, it would be unremarkable. Here, it’s kind of scary. Of course, it’s for our own good and all that …
“They stress importance of bolstering a perception that uncertainty about the risk is low.”
The use of the term “uncertainty” is really bugging me. Uncertainty is not used in a way that equates to accuracy with respect to the real world. The claim is that there are too many unknowns with their source data to be able assign an accuracy value to a prediction so uncertainty is the correct term. Huh?
Yes, I understand that it is difficult to determine precise accuracy values to the factors that are used to make up a climate prediction even an estimate would be nice. Instead, we find that “uncertainty” is actually being used to express the statistical PRECISION of the computer modeling output sets with respect to each other, not with respect to the real world. Remember, they are saying it is too hard to figure out how accurate their numbers are with respect to real world measurements.
The concept of risk includes the uncertainty, and is not independent of it. It is not one or the other. Risk is a sector of the uncertainty spectrum, and the only disagreement is about the size of this sector.
In economics, “risk” simply means the spread of the probability density, without regard to whether the outcomes involved are positive or negative. Formally, there is a concept of “second-order stochastic dominance” that applies even to distributions without finite variances. So distribution A is riskier than distribution B if B second-order dominates A (the implicit idea behind that dominance naming convention being that risk is bad holding everything else constant).
SteveP,
It’s good that you have included some discussion about the formal meaning of risk. It is always helpful to know what someone means when they use that term. My concern is actually about how the terms are used in public discussions. “Uncertainty” is tacked onto a number without explanation that it is not meant as accuracy as used with real measuring instruments. “Risk” is used to indicate some bad will likely happen.
When pressed on these usages, the response is usually a verbal dance implying that only an uneducated person would make those assumptions. Most folks deal with uncertainty and risk in their daily lives. Claiming you know the limits of uncertainty on a number you quote to them implies you are talking about real world values. A range of possible outcomes that includes things getting better would not be understood if the word “risk” was used.
This is one of the great errors of the Grand Catastrophic Narrative, that warming change is bad. Where would we be without the warming from the depths of the Little Ice Age(and the depths of the Holocene)? The greater man’s effect on that warming, the colder we would now be without that effect.
Better hope that Nature caused most of that rise, because otherwise we’d be slip slidin’ out of the Holocene, and only Anthropogenic CO2 holding off the glaciers.
===================
Another meanderin’ mini would barely make a ding. No, we’re talking a brown out to a black out. Sub Brr, like my fridge.
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/12/19/lawrence-solomon-for-global-warming-believers-2013-was-the-year-from-hell/
Mosher, why on your poster with Zeke, do the different methodologies for estimating the average temperature of the CUS give the same history, and yet the regional levels of warming and cooling are quite different? (e.g. PRISM and BEST have warming and cooling in quite different places, if the pixels are drawn to the same resolution).
Because the average is insensitive to local variation.
If I was a representative of the CDC, took 40,000 blood samples, split them into 7 aliquots, then mailed them to seven different labs and they all reported that 0.56% were positive for syphilis, but all reported completely regional distributions of STD infection, it wouldn’t be something to worry about?
You meant to say completely different regional distributions?
Good question. At this point, after initially misinterpreting the question thus answering a strawman, Mosher usually fails to notice your clarification.
Simple doc. Prism uses non homogeneous data. You end up with tiny areas of cold trend and tiny areas of very warm. On average these biases cancel. Further since they represent small areas even when they dont balance the residual bias is small. Take a sample of 20k. Polllute a small pportion of these. The effect will be visually strong but mathematically mousenuts. Your eye cant integrate color.
Mosher, the problem with your response that the average is insensitive is a problem with the “Average”. Averages are the problem, often they are non-sensical. As an example, more than 95% of humankind have greater than the average number of feet. Think about that for a bit. It is completely true, but a completely meaningless statistical fact. Take ten thousand random people, several of them are likely to be amputees. Therefore the average number of feet for that population is 1.9999999. So everyone else has greater than the average number of feet. Does that make the “average” a meaningful statistic? No it just makes it a stupid statistical measure. Lots of averages are similar to this. “Averages” are more often than not very misleading, what does your “average” really mean? If it changes depending on how it is considered, it probably doesn’t mean anything more than “the majority of humans have less than the average number of testicles” Again a completely non-sensical statistic, even if completely true.
Averages are most often artifacts of the researchers bias, rather than meaningful statistics.
Steven, please do not take this as personal attack on you or your colleagues, but I really think that looking at temperature records for ‘average temperatures’ contain a fatal, systemic, flaw.
Biochemistry 101 was telling us that ‘Biochemistry is the study of dead or dying systems’. To do what we do we change the nature of what we wish to observe; and we should always have this in mind.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer to the question, ‘why are thermometer stations moved’ is important in the measured temperature record.
I suspect that many temperature stations are on the run from the great ‘land price monster’. A station is placed in an idyllic dell where it spends a decade or more recording the temperatures of Elysian fields. Then some body builds a road and a whole set of houses spring up around it, like zits on a teenager. The land the station sits on changes, not only due to urban encroachment, but in value. This sweet spot becomes more and more valuable, as it becomes an green oasis in the ‘burbs’.
Then it is sold and the station is moved away from the thermal heat sinks.
After the move, the recorded Tmin’s and Tmax’s are different, because the UHI effect is abolished. However, if you splice the record, using NEARBY sister sites that are themselves being enveloped by the ‘land price monster’ you will give an artificial upward bias. The stations locations are surfacing the property price wave, where the conurbation is spreading, the stations are pushed fastest, always recording the rapid rural to urban temperature profile.
How would one test this? Does the PRISM data not already show this effect?
Doc. We solve the field. We are more interested in the spatial variation. We integrate the field to compare with those folks who average. Not because averaging is informative but because its a simple diagnostic. The detail is more interesting.
I think we should start a sweepstake. We’ve all seen comments from scientists saying that they’ll have to re-evaluate things if the hiatus continues.
So how long before they start jumping ship? Maybe we need a list of scientists. And a definitive definition of “jumping ship”. Then we can all place our bets.
Let the fun begin.
I think you’d have better results if the sweepstake was for which prominent skeptic admits the world is still warming first.
Yea, the first ones to jump ship will be the ones that have been stressing natural variability, such as Scafetta with the luni-solar cycles, Wyatt & Curry with the stadium wave, Bob Carter with the SOI, etc.
They will start jumping ship to warmer waters, as all those factors revert to the mean, while the CO2 signal keeps growing.
Science is fun when done correctly.
Web
Scafetta’s models are doing alot better than the IPCC’s.
Look also at the Global Warming Prediction Project using automatic detection of underlying trends.
The Global Warming Prediction Project consists of a bunch of gutless wonders, frightened to use any past historical data, preferring instead to concentrate on a flat period where there is no need to apply a long term forcing trend … such as CO2.
Oh, and by the way Hagen, I am using Scafetta’s ideas in the CSALT model and it works much better than his rather crude approximation.
At least they’re not so gutless they use anonymous internet handles like WebHubTelescope. Some people have no shame and project their own insecurity and gutlessness onto others.
http://www.climateprediction.eu/cc/About.html
SpringyBoy, ooh, is that the best you got?
Again why do they only go back as far as 1988? The CSALT model goes back another 100 years to 1880, and can get this kind of agreement:
https://imageshack.com/i/e9oa57g
I am but an amateur proxy following the work of Lean, Foster&Rahmstorf, Trenberth, Cowtan, and others. They all realize that non-deterministic GCM simulations will never get the details correct, but statistical climate models work wonders on the attribution.
“I think we should start a sweepstake. We’ve all seen comments from scientists saying that they’ll have to re-evaluate things if the hiatus continues.”
____
“Jump ship” from what? Basic thermodynamics? All things being equal over the long-term horizon of the 40% increase in GH gases, there is no other physical thing that could happen other than the Earth system gaining energy– which it has. Over an even longer-term perspective, a strong case has been made by Ruddiman that humans have been altering the climate of this particular interglacial for many centuries, as he looks at the null hypothesis to this quite closely, here:
http://www.whoi.edu/pclift/Ruddiman.pdf
The real unknowns are:
What is the total amount of energy per year that the system is storing (mainly in the deeper ocean)?
How does natural and internal variability affect the apparent rate of storage as measured by the current proxy for storage of sensible heat in the troposphere?
Is there a better proxy for energy storage in the system, such as total ocean heat content, or even better- total system enthalpy, which would include OHC, moist enthalpy in the troposphere, and total ice mass decline? This better proxy might give us the best overall answer to the question of ECS, which can’t possibly be answered only by looking at sensible tropospheric heat.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | December 21, 2013 at 3:55 am |
“I am but an amateur”
from Princeton wordnet database
amateur n. 3. Someone who is unqualified or not skillful enough
A good self-assessment I’d say but I think it still inflates your standing.
amateur n. 3. someone who
SpringyBoy, Here is my best attempt at pulling the control knob warming signal out of the temperature series using the CSALT model:
http://imageshack.com/a/img23/8418/qvv.gif
The left over noise is shown as the fluctuation curve. That is what the scientists are attributing pause behavior to. This includes mechanisms such as volcanic aerosols, SOI, etc.
Note the highlighted point at 1982.25. That is a point that is right before the eruption at El Chichon. Interesting that there is a cooling spike which can’t be accounted for by the other forcing factors. Is it possible that some other forcing term preceded the eruption?
What makes climate science fun and not boring is that there are always unanswered questions left for us amateurs to figure out.
I asked the House Committee on Space Science & Technology for help getting answers to two questions:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/WHY.pdf
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/WHY.pdf
It looks like the transition phase of the stadium waves could be occurring? It says there would be a north Atlantic warm etc.. as the last hot wave wanes:
4.5 Transition: After temperatures peak, surface temperatures begin to decrease, while AMO continues to warm and sea-ice extent continues to wane. This short duration of seemingly incongruent index trends marks regime transition, indicated by dashed line on Figure 12, from the peak of Group IV to the regime reversal at the peak of Group –I. Once the peak of Group –I is reached, a maximally warm AMO reverses trend; WIE begins to rebound. A new regime of cooling begins – punctuation on a continuum of an ever evolving, quasi-oscillatory system.
Here is an article about the hot October and it shows the OISST anomoly:
http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2010/11/north-atlantic-sea-surface-temperatures.html
Here is today’s OISST anamoly:
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/oisst/navy-anom-bb.gif
is any research underway hypothesizing a possible coupling of the ‘pause’ (perhaps an apex) with GG-IR-forcing saturation?
From the article:
For years now, despite Russia coming a horrible second out of the Cold War, and despite the endemic corruption that led one U.S. Ambassador to call Russia “a Mafia State,” the Russians have been able to control the price at which Europe buys its energy. The reason why European gas prices are pegged, quite unjustifiably, to the price of oil, is simply because Russia wills it so. Being able to keep the price of gas artificially high has been an absolute trump card for the Russian economy.
…
Russian oil and gas sales, he points out, have always emphasized long term, 20 year, “take or pay” pipeline contracts, with the cost of gas based on a basket of crude oil and oil product pricing. “Take or pay” means that the client country has to contract to take a fixed volume of gas every month, and has to pay at least 80% of the value of that contract even if it doesn’t use that much gas:
“Yet with the advent of new unconventional availability, combined with an acceleration of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, the Russian preeminence in the availability of hydrocarbons is now under threat. Here’s why […] Both shale gas and LNG are providing new opportunities for local spot gas markets to form in places that used to be dependent upon Russian pipelined product. As these localized markets begin to have assured volume, the spot nature of the transactions will undercut the price needed by Russian companies to make a profit on their exports.”
Gazprom’s (OTCQX:GZPFY) reaction to shale gas, until recently, has been to dismiss it as a short lived phenomenon while pushing ahead as hard as possible with the extraction of coal bed methane and going full steam ahead with the game changing vista of Arctic oil and gas, which I will look at in a separate blog.
…
There are other very substantial reasons for thinking that the impact of shale gas on the Russian economy may be pretty well cushioned after all. The entire potential output of the first and second strings of the Nord Stream pipeline, which connects the Russian Unified Gas Supply System with the Trans-European Network (gas pipeline system) via the Baltic Sea, and which will amount to 55 billion cubic meters per year when complete, is already fully contracted out, according to Gazprom. Since the contracts will presumably be under Russia’s normal take-or-pay 20-year contract arrangements, that is an awful lot of high priced gas already bought and paid for, for years ahead.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1910071-could-shale-oil-and-gas-sink-russias-economy
From the article:
There is a lot of talk these days of the U.S. becoming energy independent because of the new horizontal drilling and fracking techniques, which have opened up the vast shale plays across the country. Much credit has been taken by the current administration for this growth in production as well as the economic growth created by the oil booms taking place in areas such as North Dakota, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Our argument has been, and continues to be, that all of this has happened in spite of, not because of, what Washington has done over the past few years.
…
t is important to remember that the economy is a very complex landscape and altering one project, such as a pipeline, can dramatically alter how companies do business. With the government not approving TransCanada’s pipeline project due to left-wing environmentalist groups, the hope was that “dirty” oil would not be imported from the tar sands in Canada to the US. It was also seen as a way to potentially slow the fracking taking place in North Dakota, a state in favor of the drilling.
…
One can only hope that some of this regulatory nonsense can stop, which we think that it will. Ohio is going to be building a lot of pipelines to connect production to interstate pipelines already in place as E&P companies there ramp up drilling in the Utica shale, and with elections coming up we doubt many lawmakers will want to step in front of that economic driver that is helping Ohio’s battered industrial complex recover after years of declines.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1909901-commodities-today-the-bakken-and-pipeline-capacity
Jim 2,
The credit for this is due to George Bush and Dick Cheney. They were the President and Vice President who were from the oil industry and understood what industry needed to allow it to make real progress. Industry doesn’t need handouts from government to succeed. It needs the government to get out of the way and to remove the mass of impediments that are put in its way by governments.
George Bush and Dick Cheney removed some of the impediments that were blocking the oil industry. They understood what they needed to do to free it up. The success is largely due to them, and certainly not to Obama or his administration. The Obama administration seems to be doing all it can to frustrate industry and productivity.
What Bush and Cheney did for the oil industry – by lowering the costs of energy for all Americans and their industries, boosting US’s productivity and international competitiveness – the next US President needs to do for nuclear energy. Obama is a next to useless US president (in the same socialist mold as Australia’s last two prime Ministers, Kevin Rudd and Juila Gillard), so USA and the world will have to wait and hope the US voters makes a wiser choice next time.
PL – Obama and his Alinsky-esqe minions don’t care about energy – they only care about buying voters with Obama phones, extended unemployment, legalizing illegal immigrants, Obamacare, etc and pleasing environmentalists with anti-fossil fuel regulations and subsidies to inferior “green” energy sources – and much of that money goes to political supporters. They know if they can give enough free money, stuff, and services to enough people; they can be re-elected in perpetuity.
The AGW supporters are already looking for an explanation to the so called ‘climate change hiatus’; natural variability will be pursued relentlessly in the years to come.
Here is a helping hand (as posted on the Gavin’s RealClimate blog).
IPCC: Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends.
Correct, but the short term natural variability may provide an insight into origins of natural variability, then extended to many decades even centuries.
In recent years, number of articles published suggest that solar wind which exerts well known, defined and measured magnetic pressure on the Earth’s magnetosphere, also has some less defined effect on the upper layers of the atmosphere (known as the Mansurov effect).
It may be obvious that such an effect would vary in step with the sunspot cycle, but that is not the case for a simple but a lesser-known reason.
The Earth’s field sustains the magnetosphere and it is not constant either, it shows similar decadal variability, as shown in the data from and used by number of distinguished geo-magnetic scientists and researchers (Jault Gire, LeMouel, J. Bloxham, D. Gubbins, A.Jackson, R. Hide, D. Boggs, J. Dickey etc,)
Since changes in either of two fields affect strength of the magnetosphere, it would be expected that the ‘magnetospheric variability’ time function could be produced by combining two sets of available data.
That is exactly what I did some months ago introducing terms ‘Geo-Solar Oscillation’ and ‘Geo-Solar Cycle’.
Comparing the GSC to two well known climatic sets of data opens a way into an unexpected and fascinating direction for climatologists’ research
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSC1.htm
The above graph when back extrapolated to 1700, gives a favourable comparison to two other well known AMO reconstructions.
Not that I expect, but if the author of the above article would be tempted to add these data to the ‘hypothesised’ CO2 effect, the GSC data would be available.
Yes indeed, Vuc, Stefan Rahmstorf has posted a nice review on RC of how natural variability is being included in the recent crop of models, including those by Judith Lean, Trenberth, Foster&Rahmstorf, Kosaka&Xie, and Cowtan&Way.
Based on their lead, I simply apply these natural variability terms in a free-energy minimization approach called CSALT and get agreement such as this:
https://imageshack.com/i/e9oa57g
Again, which is the model, and which is the data? Compare this to your mess, Vuc.
And fear not, Vuc, as your solar variability and stadium wave is included and provides a small but distinguishable factor from the much larger CO2 control knob signal:
http://contextearth.com/2013/12/18/csalt-model-and-the-hale-cycle/
Maybe you can play catch up, eh?
Telescope, you got to clear dust out of your optics. I looked at your recommended reading ‘csalt-model-and-the-hale-cycle’ and is worthless.
Why you may ask?
Simply because it got Hale cycle periodicity wrong, assuming it is constant 22 years, it ain’t, it is continuously variable (changes with periods of actual cycles, since 1900, the HC periods were : 21.67, 20.75, 20.66, 21.42, 22.58 ), hence it doesn’t have fixed harmonics. Further more ‘harmonics’ periodicity you quote (11, 7.3, 5.5, 4.4, and 3.7 years) have no physical meaning in this context and make nonsense of whole thing.
If you whish to go down that path then you could consider odd number ‘sub-harmonics’ i.e. 3x @ ~64/65 (the AMO etc) and important one 5x @ ~ 105 years as extensively discussed by Dr. Svalgaard and myself on numerous occasions on WUWT (1705, 1810, 1915, 2020 solar cycle minima)
What you refer to as ‘your mess, Vuc’ (Vuk-cevic) happens to take in proper and accurate representation of the Hale cycle.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSC1.htm .
Now, when you get your solar stuff learned and the CO2 misguided enthusiasm sorted out (sensitivity = 0.8 or 4 or whatever number you daydream of), you can come back.
Don’t like corresponding with ‘anonyms’ of any kind, have courage of your conviction and post under your name, if you whish to be taken seriously.
Vuc, just like Ian Wilson, you no like when someone applies the data in a way contrary to your agenda.
The higher frequency harmonics are important as those shape the waveform. As I wrote, the 7.3 year cycle does appear as a component of the Atlantic oscillation.
You will persist with your nonsense.
Sun is not a harmonic oscillator (definition: oscillator with a constant amplitude and a constant frequency which does not depend on the amplitude).
Solar oscillations are not of constant frequency and cycles with lower amplitude are usually longer.
Further more you misunderstand what Hale cycle is, it is change of magnetic polarity from N to S and reverse, so you can’t have something at 7 or 3 or whatever shorter years. You could just possibly consider length of 2, 3 or more periods, i.e. ~42 , ~65 (variable AMO), ~ 85 (Gleissberg), ~105 (see previous post) etc., years.
Note how the attribution of “nonsense” has reversed polarity.
To the deniers such as Vuc, it is all about ABCD.
The “CSALT” model makes false sun-climate geometric assumptions that are strictly ruled out by law-constrained observations.
“CSALT” is a relatively stimulating contribution in the context of generally dull CE commentary, but there are gross errors in its variance partitioning due to total ignorance of geometry.
Judy, since it’s an ongoing pattern, I recommend firmly penalizing “WebHubTelescope (@WHUT)” for harassing other CE commentators. When active thought-policing has root here, you (as blog host & authority figure) lose all trust.
Sincerely.
PV said:
Too funny. The “harassing” amounts to needling people like PV about showing their work.
These guys make the constant claims that periodic elements exist in the temperature record. When I come along and tease those features out, and show how inconsequential they are, suddenly they get cold feet and claim harassment.
You see, as long as the claims are nebulous they are alright with it, as it simply adds to the FUD, with an emphasis on the Uncertainty and Doubt. But the minute something becomes concrete, out pops the wails of derision and gnashing of teeth.
They probably realize that these are small effects. It’s the reason people like P.Vaughan NEVER put units on their axis of the graphs they show. If they put the units on a graph, then people will realize the effects are indeed small. It would be too funny if a professor of climate science didn’t penalize a student for not placing units on an exam answer, for fear that the student would claim harassment.
Conflating contributions from different commentators isn’t helpful. I have not claimed multidecadal climate is periodic. Quite the contrary.
The “CSALT” model makes false sun-climate geometric assumptions that are strictly ruled out by law-constrained observations.
It will be informative to observe whether the model gets fixed or left geometrically wrong.
Judy: I recommend temporary bans of increasing length for repeat offenders.
Regards
Mr. Cryptic seems to be pleading to geometry to make his case. That’s a new one. Getting close to The Mentaculus territory.
I count 6 rude misrepresentations made by “WebHubTelescope (@WHUT)” in “WebHubTelescope (@WHUT)”‘s last 2 comments alone.
This is unacceptable & unhelpful.
The “CSALT” model can be reduced to 3 terms.
The “CSALT” model should not include more than 3 terms.
Then go and do it !
at least one person of the two acknowledges that there may be language problems in the communication.
“Then go and do it !”
Already did it long ago, taking proper account of sun-climate geometry as informed by law-constrained observations (instead of naively double-counting and ignorantly mis-partitioning variance components as “CSALT” does).
Monotonic rise term accounts for at most 15% and needs to be shared with centennial-to-multicentennial natural variation (which is a dark area of deep unknowns).
For the record: I’ve never voted right-wing — ever. I’ve been a hardcore environmentalist most of my life, but since Hollywood hijacked the environmental movement with fiction, I’ve reduced my advocacy to only core environmental issues. It would take a very, very long conversation with tremendously patient, eminently sensible parties to even begin understanding why I regard “AGW” as being among the environmental issues least deserving of serious concern.
Judy: Recently you ran an article in which you indicated a desire to clean up CE commentator behavior. I support that. It only takes one bad apple to infect the barrel with unhelpful incivility. Before they conclude that you were bluffing I challenge you to be more uncompromisingly insistent with the commentators who are lowering bar of civility.
Happy Holidays and Best Wishes
to *ALL* Climate Etc Readers!
There’s no better way to celebrate the holidays than gathering family to watch NASA’s just-released (and amazing!) video Earthrise: The 45th Anniversary.
Science-minded Climate Etc readers will enjoy too this week’s arxiv special Increased insolation threshold for runaway greenhouse processes on Earth like planets. This article explains (concisely and lucidly) the physics behind runaway planetary-scale greenhouse effects.
So if you’ve ever wondered why foresighted all-nation all-age all-gender teams of scientists are publishing articles like Assessing Dangerous Climate Change: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature — especially now that “the Pause” is over — well now yah know!
On the other hand, if what yah *REALLY* like is photos of leaky Siberian steam-pipes accompanied by moronic ideology-first denialist drivel … than the above links ain’t gonna satisfy yah!
What *would* satisfy committed denialists, the world wonders?
“…astronomers are certain the asteroid will miss”
“Increased insolation threshold for runaway greenhouse processes on Earth like planets”
Approximately 1 billion years ago the Earths atmosphere consisted of N2, CO2, CH4, H2, NH3 and a load of organoamines. Then bacteria evolved water splitting and converted the reducing atmosphere into an oxidizing one, which also precipitated out all the highly colored transition metal salts from the ocean.
At this time the land was a mixture of sand and amine-rich tars. Of course, with the conquest of the land, there was a huge change in the albedo of the land mass around 450 million years ago, and the albedo changed completely when the vast majority of the land was eventually covered by plant life some 200 million years ago.
The Earth is Earth-like because it is alive and from miles down to 70 miles up, everything on the planet is a product or byproduct of life.
This paper is a sad indictment of Climate Science, where studies as execrable as this are published in peer reviewed journals.
LOL … Doc Martyn, why don’cha click on the author names tah’ see whut *else* these folks have published?
An’ while yet at it, reflect that they’re studying oxygen-world life-bearing planets, with a view toward surveyin’ just how many of these life-bearing worlds there might be in our galaxy?
It’s a continuing pleasure to help enlarge Climate Etc appreciation of the galactic scope of 21st century climate-science, DocMartyn!
Just when we think we have sighted the depths of your stupidity you offer up
“oxygen-world life-bearing planets”
The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. There are rocks in Australia aged some 3.5 billion-year-old that probably have traces of microbes.It then took more than a billion years for O2 to make it to the atmosphere at all, and >20% O2 level is only 0.5 billion years of the total 3.5 billion year biosphere. Oxygen rich environments are a product of long evolution times, most Earth-like, life-bearing worlds will be anaeobic; as 6/7ths of Earths history was essentially anaerobic.
Given the ratio of nucleoide’s generated by stars, the chances of a rocky planet forming with an oxygen atmosphere are essentially zero; the oxygen will be found as water, CO2, methane, ammonia and silicon/iron oxides. You can get O2 and O3 if you radiate CO2 in the upper atmosphere of a reducing atmosphere with hard uv and get the “trickster effect’, but you need a star with a lot of uv emission.
An oxygen rich atmosphere is an indication of the evolution of water splitting, so your “oxygen-world life-bearing planets” is both oxymoronic and misleading, rather like yourself.
“What *would* satisfy committed denialists, the world wonders?”
____
Nothing rational. Theirs is a faith-based system, and hence, no rational argument will alter their perspective. Reason will only increase their cognitive dissonance and cause them to dig deeper into their faith-based trench. As with any such faith-based system, only a complete alteration of their memeplex will change them. Sadly, only very few people are converted from Saul to Paul on the road to Damascus.
Save the data,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10530048/Irreplacable-scientific-data-must-be-saved.html
Digital decay. For many, many years it appears that only NSA saved all electronic traffic. When e-mail started back in the early 1990s, very few agencies had the funding or expertise to save and index all their e-mails. It is likely they are lost.
In the really old days, every official letter flowed through a professional secretary and then saved in a filing cabinet. We have doomed ourselves to losing potentially millions of data sets, personal e-mails, and letters that reside on USB drives people will take with them when they leave or retire. How do we find these files?
Years from now, scholars will give the digital generation an “F” for failure to preserve this information. “Madness,” just like the end of “The Bridge over the River Kwai.” We all “drank the digital cool aid.” The results will be deadly.
Now that was research worth doing, because it sheds such light on so much else of the rest.
The evidence for AGW is not good but global warming alarmists are supremely confident in their conclusions. That sort of certainty has led to the death of billions of people over the years of that you can be sure.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/untrue-statements-anger-over-work-to-make-h5n1-birdflu-virus-more-dangerous-to-humans-9018666.html
“The evidence for AGW is not good…”
_____
Correct…it is not just good, but excellent.
If the evidence was credible there never would have been the need for all of the fraud, deceit and corruption. There is a limit to breadth and width of society-wide derangement, corruption, superstition and ignorance until the baseless fearmongering, inhumanity and social pathology finally brings the Tower of Babel down around our ears: Bush derangement syndrome, Palin derangement, McCain derangment, Romney derangement Ryan derangment, Tea Party derangment, skepticism derangement, Hot World derangement, capitalism derangement, Judeo/Christian derangement, disastrous climate change derangement, CO2 is a pollutant derangement, its Ozone Hole derangement, Melting Glaciers derangement, its Seas Will Swallow us derangement, Man is causing earthquakes derangement, Death of polar bears derangement, GlacierGate, AmazonGate, PachauriGate, UN-IPCCGate, ChinaGate, CRUGate, HimalyaGate, SeaLevelGate, RainForestGate, HurricaneGate, GreenpeaceGate, SternGate, KiwiGate, HockeyStickGate, WeatherStationGate, HansenGate, NASAGate, GISSGate and NOAAGate, NobelGate…
It’s time to close the cellar door!!!
http://www.rtcc.org/2013/12/12/carbon-dioxides-effect-on-global-warming-understimated/
“You may think the prospect of climate change is alarming, a call to action to slow down our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
You’re almost certainly right. But some scientists are now suggesting you should be much more concerned than you are, because they think we may be seriously underestimating the problem.
The Geological Society of London (GSL) says the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate to CO2 could be double earlier estimates.
The Society has published an addition to a report by a GSL working party in 2010, which was entitled Climate change: Evidence from the Geological Record.”
Imagine being able to ask a climate alarmist back in 1996 what it would take to change his mind. For example, what if he knew then that there would be no global warming over the next 17 years? Obviously, his belief in AGW would be seriously challenged by such knowledge despite what models predicted and irrespective of Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. But, here we are, 17 years later — still no global warming — and, climate alarmists are more certain than ever.
One of the most delud…I mean funniest people on this blog site is Web HubTelescope!
As a HubTelescope from many Moons ago myself, I am surprised at how out of touch this person is with the current observational climate science.
Our best estimates of the total infra-red optical depth of the atmosphere over the last 60 years show that it has remained virtually unchanged.
This means that the increase in infra-red optical depth from CO2 is being negated by a corresponding decrease in optical depth due to H2O. Most of the decrease is caused by a decrease in the specific humidity in the upper troposphere but hey… why mention that when you can scare the beeJesus out of people with pseudo-science.
Ian Wilson is upset that I am using his ideas to model the global temperature anomaly so accurately. It doesn’t fit his agenda of being able to create FUD.
What’s the deal with the 7.3 year cycle? Is it a harmonic of the Hale cycle which happens to resonate with a tidal cycle?
What scares him is that this factor is distinguishable in the temperature signal yet small with respect to the CO2 control knob signal. That is no good, as he wants natural variability to dominate, just like the rest of the deniers.
Ian Wilson seems to refer to the claims of Miskolczi. There are, however, two questions:
1) Has the optical depth really been constant?
2) If id had been, would that negate GHE?
The answer to the second question is certainly: No, it would not negate GHE, only reduce it a bit, because a very large part of the effect comes from the upper troposphere, where CO2 dominates over H2O as GHG.
The answer to the first question is also very likely; No, the whole claim lacks proper justification. van Dorland and Forster have looked at the issue a bit more.
I won’t go near Wilson’s claims of optical depth and CO2. It is simply a diversionary tactic on his part to change the subject from the soli-lunar forcings. Take a look at his latest post
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com/2013/12/variations-in-earths-climate-on-decadal.html
and compare it to what I am writing about
http://contextearth.com/2013/12/18/csalt-model-and-the-hale-cycle/
The fact of the matter is that the orbital oscillation contributions may in fact be measurable. However, they also may be rather inconsequential in comparison to the larger CO2 control knob contribution to global warming. That is why he is upset and wants to change the subject to optical depth.
Aren’t these deniers so transparently phony when it comes down to it?
Webster, “I won’t go near Wilson’s claims of optical depth and CO2.”
I am not surprised since the rapid adjustments producing the nearly “fixed” lapse rate above the atmospheric boundary layer are actually interesting and likely caused by combined regulating effects of H2O and CO2 equivalent gases in the free troposphere.
To enjoy getting into those claims you would have to consider the impacts of differing rates of advection in the different ocean and atmospheric layers from the stratopause to the deep oceans. Then you would end up getting into the whole greenhouse fluid effects and variations in mixing efficiencies between boundary layers.
Pekka, the lapse rate is a very practical demonstration of the photonic recycling mechanism of molecules with a strong absorbance in the IR.
As one measures temperature, up the gravity well, from sea level, the temperature drops even though solar flux is constant.
We know that data was gathered, and tables were prepared, of the planets lapse rate prior to large changes in atmospheric CO2 caused by fossil fuel burning. It would be a trivial exercise to compare the present day relationship between temperature, humidity and height above sea level, when [CO2] is 400 ppm with the data collected when [CO2] was <[300] ppm.
We can be sure that the optical properties of H2O and CO2 have not changed, and we also know that the old school physicists were very, very careful.
This would provide experimental evidence for the postulated level of photonic recycling of CO2, which is generally considered to be incapable of either measurement or of being determined by any means other than modeling.
Should the water amplification mechanism of CO2's GHG effect be true, one would also expect to see an increase in the humidity, at altitude, at the same light flux.
However, as this would be very much old school science, collecting and analyzing data, I can understand why no modern day physicist has bothered.
Doc,
What do you mean by “photonic recycling”?
re 7.3: picking up 3rd QBO subharmonic
also see Dickey & Keppenne (1997) re 4.5
wake up call: Hale cycle length varies (just like Schwabe) so efficient thing to do is use generalized approach, as I’ve illustrated
Reminder: The generalized approach to solar cycle length changes works regardless of the nature of terrestrial “internal” oscillations.
This is based on simple acoustic theory and confirmed by observations — i.e. what’s observed matches theory.
Ignorance of this isn’t helpful for advancing discussion.
Where did it all start going wrong in the mainstream?
One possibility:
This is completely wrong:
“There are three possible sources for the 65-70-yr ‘global’ oscillation: (1) random forcing, such as by white noise; (2) external oscillatory forcing, such as by a variation in the solar constant; and (3) an internal oscillation of the atmosphere-ocean system. Atmospheric white-noise forcing of the ocean, evoking a red-noise response, was proposed by Hasselmann [22] and has been invoked to explain the non-GHG+ASA component of the observed temperature record [12]. Putative variations in the solar constant have also been proposed to explain this [23,24,10]. But it is unlikely that either of these forcings is the source of the 65-70-yr oscillation—solar forcing should generate a global response [25,26] and white-noise forcing an ocean-wide response, but the 65-70-yr oscillation is neither global nor pan-oceanic. The most probable cause of this oscillation is therefore an internal oscillation of the atmospheric-ocean system.” [GHG = greenhouse-gas; ASA = anthropogenic sulphate-aerosol]
Schlesinger, M.E.; & Ramankutty, N. (1994). An oscillation in the global climate system. Nature 367, 723-726.
http://lightning.sbs.ohio-state.edu/geo622/paper_amo_Schlesinger1994.pdf
It’s not helpful ignoring how/why this reasoning is fundamentally flawed.
When Watts recently pointed to that paper, it dawned on me why Judy wants to call the stadium wave “internal”.
With a sufficiently narrow definition of “internal”, I could almost (almost) agree with her, but such a narrow definition isn’t helpful for efficiently advancing broad understanding of climate.
Maybe we (tentatively & artificially) need to break sun-climate impacts into 2 categories based on whether they look energy-neutral to an (ignorant) observer (stirring only, via equator-polar-night gradient modulation) or not.
Maybe our collective progress is like one of those Chinese finger puzzles where you need to lead backwards before you can guide forwards — 1 step back, 2 steps forward.
[…like in Lana Del Rey’s new ‘Tropico’ 27 minute film provocatively recommending a path from darkness to enlightenment — highly recommended]
In the interest of streamlining mutual understanding, it seems we’re going to have to get loose with our semantic expectations until we bridge language barriers.
Temporarily (at least) I’m willing to grease the gears of diplomacy on the semantic front. I may use the term “internal” where I suspect it will efficiently conjure up “close enough” images in audience members, even though I know the term to be technically incorrect in a strict sense — choosing to be practical rather than pedantic to expedite communication. Maybe it won’t work — we won’t know if we don’t try.
Ian Wilson | December 20, 2013 at 7:17 pm
You wrote:
“Our best estimates of the total infra-red optical depth of the atmosphere over the last 60 years show that it has remained virtually unchanged.”
What do you mean under “total infra-red optical depth of the atmosphere” The cloudy+cloudless (about 50/50) global mean atmosphere? But clouds are opaque in infra-red, so at least in half of the cases the optical depth is practically infinite.
What is the IR optical depth of the clear-sky part? As you seem to refer to the claims of Miskolczi here, his papers are based on calculations on “radiosonde data from hundreds of weather balloon observations” (Miskolczi, Energy and Environment, 2010, Abstract). But weather balloon observations (including the NOAA data set) do not indicate cloud cover fraction. (That’s why in radiative transfer calculations satellite data are used).
So, if Miskolczi’s IR optical depth of 1.87 is all-sky, then it is meaningless, if it is clear-sky, it is not known how the cloudless cases were sorted out of the whole.
In reality, the IR optical depth might be increasing or might be stable, but Miskolczi’s method seems to be invalid.
Vilnius
Re: “What is the IR optical depth of the clear-sky part”
Miskolczi is modeling the radiative absorption/radiation from ALL the greenhouse gas components of the atmosphere. This explicitly separate from the reflection / albedo of clouds. Modeling clouds is a separate exercise. Please revise your criticism accordingly.
Re David L. Hagen | December 27, 2013 at 6:49 pm at
http://judithcurry.com/2013/12/20/open-thread-weekend-41/#comment-429721
You wrote re my question ‘What is the IR optical depth of the clear-sky part’:
“Miskolczi is modeling the radiative absorption/radiation from ALL the greenhouse gas components of the atmosphere. This explicitly separate from the reflection / albedo of clouds. Modeling clouds is a separate exercise.”
Albedo/reflection of clouds is for the short-wave part of the spectra. It cannot be done from the weather balloon data; it can be separated out only from the satellite data where clouds are visible. That’s why atmospheric IR transmission calculations in the literature are based on satellite observations, NOT on radiosonde measurements.
Again, how much is the clear-sky infra-red optical thickness of the global average atmosphere, according to your model?
Re David L. Hagen at
http://judithcurry.com/2013/12/20/open-thread-weekend-41/#comment-429721 :
Pls visit my further comments re Arno Arrak at:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/10/the-stadium-wave/#comment-429656
the pust on “climate change disasters and development has failed to appear, so it is appropriate to provide comments here.
Wiley is a well=known publishing firm, not a research institute, so I can’t see it having enough clout to lead the world in such a diverse endeavor.
Predictions,
an early baby El Nino this coming year, 2014, will fade and 2014 will be the 9 nth coldest of recent years
Arctic Sea Ice extent will speed up in the coming months and go through the average to record a positive anomaly within 12 weeks.
To much gnashing of teeth.
Happy Xmas WHT etc, without you guys this blog would be so straight and full of real facts. Kim, thanks for all the fish. You others know who you are , Happy Xmas too.
Back to work [2 weeks left] then DOTA 2 and Climate Blogs for the rest of my life , decisions, decisions, but sheer bliss awaits.
Judy, thank you for your blog throughout the year and I hope you get some good recognition from the MSM.
Re moderation, a bit of argy bargy is good fun and the stuff that should be moderated is pretty obvious and should be removed when it occurs.
A little el nino is all it will take to beat 1998, but the GISS record might still stand.
A little warmer than this year would easily take third by GISS.
Have you looked at what the ice extent by Jaxa is doing lately, the record freeze has slowed down a lot, it is down to third lowest for the current date.
I would bet it would go back into record low territory before getting back to average.
Any takers?
angech, is that the way you think down under? That when I represent the consensus science and, not only that, but use ideas of desperate skeptics that it is in some way not “full of real facts”?
You are at the end of the rope.
consensus science, nice, safe, dependable consensus science.
Lighten up a little, look over the fence , take a walk on the wild side. enjoy life and think for yourself, Don’t let consensus science do your thinking, WHT. You could be so good with a black hat on.
Bob D. said:
“I would bet it would go back into record low territory before getting back to average.”
——-
The odds are strongly against you.
Gates,
Angech didn’t specify which average so here they are
1980s 13244498
1990s 12853842
2000s 12300615
present 11812458
record low 11533422
2 months ago it was 1.5 M off of the record low, things can change fast.
One problem though, I don’t know who publishes an arctic ice extent anomaly.
But it is like betting whether it will rain or not on a day 6 weeks from now.
Still no takers, I see.
bob droege ” I would bet it would go back into record low territory before getting back to average”. Cryosphere Today – Arctic Climate Research at the University of Illinois Current Northern Hemisphere sea Ice area
lets say 0.00 or positive on this scale proves you wrong
” before record low territory”
lets say any line that dips below all other lines on NSIDC 1979 onwards you are right.
I see Angech,
That’s two different things, sea ice area and sea ice extent.
Ice area right now is pretty much in the middle between a zero anomaly and a record low for any given date in the near future, so it’s a more even bet.
Sea ice area returns to positive anomaly or record low, it’s a bet.
Looks to me like the refreeze is losing it’s steam!
Willis says climate sensitivity is not linear, and decreases with temperature rise http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/18/the-fatal-lure-of-assumed-linearity/
ah willis, the gift that keeps on giving. Turning roy spencer into a warmist one stupid post at a time.
Oh well. Open thread.
For all who like a really long term average –
Earth surface temperature 4.5 billion years ago – hot enough to keep rock molten.
Earth surface temperature now – not nearly as hot.
The world need wonder no longer. The Earth has cooled. It continues to cool, losing energy at a rate of 44TW, give or take. If you want to delude yourself that the Earth is warming by standing near a radiation source, be my guest. Just remember when the fuel for your radiation source runs out, don’t be in a place like a Libyan desert at night, or where it’s getting down to -90 C at the height of summer in the Antarctic (I think the Summer Solstice is today in Antarctica).
The lunatic fringe is alive and well. Disguising themselves as Scientists was a master stroke. It will be interesting to see what the next bizarre Western infatuation will be, after Warmism joins Lysenkoism in the dustbin of History.
Ah, the rich tapestry of life continues to amaze and amuse. I wouldn’t be dead for quids, as the rustic philosophers are wont to declaim.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
LOL … the seas just keep a-risin’, and the ice-caps just keep a-meltin’, and the climate-science just keeps gettin’ stronger!
Conclusion Most folks (and Mother Nature too!) appreciate that James Hansen’s climate-change worldview is turning out to be just plain right!
morediscourse@tradermail.info
A fan of *MORE* discourse
From the article:
Before NASA and NOAA start tampering with the data, 2013 is one of the ten coldest years in the US since 1895, and has had the largest year over year decline on record.
NOAA of course won’t talk about this, and will massively tamper with the data before releasing it.
The graph below is the monthly average of all daily high and low temperatures at all NOAA USHCN stations.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/2013-one-of-the-ten-coldest-years-in-us-history-with-the-largest-drop-in-temperature/
“NOAA of course won’t talk about this, and will massively tamper with the data before releasing it.”
Absurd.
Unbelievable!!
From the article:
Overlooked in Climate Talks
By Rudy Ruitenberg Dec 20, 2013 9:30 AM CT
Photographer: Brendon O’Hagan/Bloomberg
Ruminants, which ferment plants in a specialized stomach before digestion, are… Read More
Cattle and other ruminants are probably the biggest human-related source of methane, a gas adding to global warming, and climate negotiators have paid too little attention to livestock, a team of researchers said.
Cows, sheep, goats and buffalo produce “copious amounts” of methane in their digestive systems, Oregon State University wrote in an online press release, citing analysis published in the journal Nature Climate Change today. One of the most effective ways to cut the gas would be to reduce the global population of ruminant livestock, the university said.
Ruminants, which ferment plants in a specialized stomach before digestion, are estimated to be the largest single human-related source of methane, with greenhouse-gas emissions from sheep and cattle 19 to 48 times higher than beans or grains per pound of food produced, according to the report.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-20/cows-role-in-global-warming-seen-overlooked-in-climate-talks.html
The United States consumes a very large amount of beef. We have, depending upon the source, somewhere between 97 million and 130,000 head of cattle. When I was a kid it close to 140 million, and I think I loaded almost every one of them into Dad’s chute.
Dairy cows are usually counted separately. I would guess no more than 30 million.
The US cattle population is not that big. India has at least 300,000 million, and I once saw an estimate of 450 million. China also has a very large number.
If we had a dollar every time some moron like Lush Rimbaugh talked about cow farts, we could build a few million wind turbines. It’s burps. They burp it.
Dad was a large animal Vet, and we would go from ranch to ranch, and back then ranches were full of kids. They always wanted to see Dad work. One of the common things we saw was bloat. One part of the treatment was to stick a bloat needle into the cow. Gas would come out. To impress the kids Dad would sneakily light a match and ignite the gas plume. Then he would start running while screaming, “She’s gonna blow! Get out of here!” And the kids would run for their lives.
97 million to 137 million.
Good lawd – India” 300 million to as many as 450 million.
“One part of the treatment was to stick a bloat needle into the cow. Gas would come out. To impress the kids Dad would sneakily light a match and ignite the gas plume. Then he would start running while screaming, “She’s gonna blow! Get out of here!” And the kids would run for their lives.”
Excellent!
Human culture would be smart to worship an entity which provides yoghurt and shortening from its mammary glands, fuel from its alimentary tract, and cleanses the environment with its browsing mouth. Deifying it might give it a little protection during famines.
=============
That’s funn, JCH. We will probably be breeding cows like mad as the climate cools. Enjoy you steak, I know I do.
I have to admit when the the slaughterers of innocent veggies enter the debate, I do not think much of them. There is an alternative to eating beef.
Eat horsies. I mean, after his loyal horse died, Roy Rogers stuffed Trigger. What do people think happened to the meat? Did they throw it away? No, supposedly a crooked butcher sold off Trigger’s flesh to people who wanted a bite of the celebrity horse.
Why aren’t the climate alarmists taking to the streets, whipping their backs bloody and bemoaning, never a cold day again? Snow will be as rare as mittens and roasted chestnuts. If the Left is so worried about it, why not simply outlaw air conditioning. The warmer it gets the less fuel is required to stay warm. Self-correcting!
fanciful – has it ever been proposed that ocean heat uptake during interglacials might be the planets way of preparing for the next ice age, when the oceans give up the heat to preserve continuity of life on the surface – I know, sounds a bit link an intelligent Gaia mythology, but doesn’t the notion of synergy suggest the possibility?
Cause and effect if far more plausible–i.e., the Earth takes on heat during times of increased solar activity and gives up heat when solar activity decreases.
Four stage of life.
1. You believe in Santa Claus.
2. You don’t believe in Santa Claus.
3. You are Santa Claus.
4. You look like Santa Claus
Merry Christmas.
Here’s a pressy from KD Lang.
Have a very merry Xmas Chief. Here’s some Yuletide cheer for ya:
“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.
“God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.
“Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”
–PJ O’Rourke
LOL. PJ O’Rourke is a favourite of recalcitrant (classic) liberals everywhere.
It is good that your scientific understanding is “evolving,” DocMarty!
All over the galaxy, whose billions of G-type stars (like our sun) are slowly gaining in luminosity, planetary ecologies are facing climate-change of the kind that Jérémy Leconte et al. describe:
This death-by-heating will be Earth’s fate within a billion years or so … that is, unless we foolishly burn all Earth’s carbon for cheap energy … in which case death-by-heating will come much faster (as is climate-change common-sense).
Your ever-polite ever-rational sustained interest in climate-change science is commendable, DocMartyn!
3.25 billion years ago the Earths atmosphere contained 30% CO2 and 10% CH4; at the same time solar flux was 30% less.
However, the albedo of the land was >0.4 rather than <0.2; so overall we have 76% of the the light absorbance of present.
3.25 billion years gives us 10 doublings of pre-industrial CO2 and 17 doubling of methane.
According to our valued contributor WHT, the climate sensitivity of a doubling of CO2 is three degrees at 100% current light flux; so (0.76*3)*10 = 22 degrees more heat from CO2.
Methane is is supposed to be 20 times more potent as a green house gas than is CO2.
It follows that an atmospheric composition of about 8% methane gives one 360-430 degrees of heating, with a fainter sun and a slightly lower albedo.
So the Earths temperature 3.25 billions of years ago, using the currently believed climate sensitivities would have been around 300-350 degrees warmer than today.
Watching a warm planetary wave move up over Greenland at 10 hPa. Could be the early signs of a future SSW event over the pole in late December-Early January. Depends on the preconditioning of the polar stratospshere.
Why was November warm? Have to wait for the data to get in. I was cyber chatting with a friend about empiricism – as you do – he was claiming to be a lapsed humanist whereas I think of myself as an heir to the Scottish Enlightenment – which evolved from the religious impulse – Martin Luther – on the one hand and the scientific method on the other. The enlightenment started much earlier of course with people like Cervantes and Rebelais – and perhaps more practically – Gutenberg. Thus a melange of the practical and the visionary came to characterise this new movement. Edmund Burke and Adam Smith on the one hand and the visionary poets on the other – Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Whitman, Villon culminating in the Beat Generation. The Scottish Enlightenment added the practical aspects best discussed by Hayek. Democracy, the rule of law, free markets – defined in very specific ways – and individual liberty.
Voltaire – as an example humanist – was a little inclined to studied witticisms – think a pompous Oscar Wilde. So humanism has always seemed to me to be pale and wanly cerebral. Much better a solid foundation – and visions and dreams. This is where empiricism comes in. A data point – such as the invariance of the speed of light wrt different inertial frames of reference leading to astonishing ideas of time, space and mass. Without data there is nothing but Angels and Demons – which have their place in the scheme of things but are quite insubstantial.
In the case of November – I would suspect a little less energy leaving the planet in the last couple of years combined with the current TSI cycle peak.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_EBAF-TOA_Ed27_anom_TOA_Net_Flux-All-Sky_March-2000toJune-2013_zps13c30ec3.png.html?sort=3&o=0
A decade here or there – let alone a month – what does it matter?
As for your question: at the end of the century we were sitting on the highest global temperature value of the modern record. Since then we have leveled off and we may in fact be cooling. “We have reached the top of the mountain”, therefore it’s not surprising that the last decade is one of the warmest on record. Think about it! The important aspect is that the warming of the 80s and 90s has stopped and the models missed it completely! The important issue is that we have entered a new regime in global temperature tendency. In fact, I find it very misleading that scientists will present “the warmest decade” argument to justify their beliefs (or failures).
Regarding the oceans absorbing heat, it is another argument without solid proof.
Best
Prof. Tsonis
And they call him a denier – go figure.
Fascinating context-setting on the Scottish Enlightenment Chief. Hope you stick around these parts.
Hi Richard,
The thing about beating your head against a brick wall is that it feels really good when you stop.
Cheers
Weak.
Voltaire pompous? No way. A true son of Socrates,like
Montaigne, grounded in skepticism and witty like Oscar
Wilde though not so aesthetic. Tsk!
“Regarding the oceans absorbing heat, it is another argument without solid proof.”
And contrary to basic thermodynamics. The oceans are not “absorbing” heat from the atmosphere, as the thermo gradient between the two is strongly from ocean to atmosphere.
I tend the garden; then I wanna see what’s over the next hill.
===========
Oh how cute. He’s trying to ignore me. I can hear the heat building up from the opposite side of the world. tink tink tink that thin metal skin can’t hold the flames inside for long.
“Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”
― Voltaire
Montaigne was was a subject of my cyberchat – and so I am reading the essays now. While listening to Dumas – The Three Musketeers – on audiobook. I’ll get back to you Beth.
This site is fun – https://librivox.org/ – the quality is a bit mixed.
Nice to see you couldn’t stay way Chief and in this case I’m glad you are not a man of your word. CE is a lot less interesting without you.
Randy
New ideas and new data. Refreshed – as opposed to mimetic talking points repeated endlessly.
Speaking of which – you don’t really expect that Anastasios Tsonis doesn’t understand global energy dynamics?
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Atmospheric-Thermodynamics-Anastasios-Tsonis/dp/0521696283/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1387650384&sr=1-1
As I said – I continue to follow the site – ignoring most of the comments. Judy is far to clever and dedicated not to. But I can waste less time by being more discriminating – and I expect that new ideas and new data are not all that common.
Frankly – I am having much more fun planning to start cooking at 3.00 a.m. on Christmas morning. Very slow roasted free range turkey that was personally known to the family, a refreshing garden salad, prawns in the shell, mango and avocado, a cheese and fruit selection on a platter I know Santa has left under the Christmas tree, perhaps a sugarless trifle made from scratch. This is Australia and it is glorious summer.
Did I answer your November riddle?
Have a merry Christmas and a happy new year.
Chief, “Free range turkey known to the family.”
That is always a plus. This year we will be having Colin, the free range organic across the board chicken.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErRHJlE4PGI&w=640&h=360]
Merry Christmas :)
Capt Dallas
I had a bantam called Dr Who – Who had a bad habit of flying up to waist level to furiously attack. One Christmas eve I swore he was Christmas lunch.
Lucky I relented because he left a personalised mug under the Christmas tree. I would have felt terrible.
Merry Christmas to you.
Arctic sea ice, nearly normale as the Italians would say. 2013 has been a great year
And yet the seas have kept on rising, and the polar ice hs kept on melting, and planetary heat-records keep on breaking
Why do denialists keep trying to “spin-doctor” Nature’s plain message of planetary heating?
The world wonders!
A fan of *MORE* discourse | December 21, 2013 at 3:08 am | Reply
‘Why do denialists keep trying to “spin-doctor” Nature’s plain message of planetary heating? ”
Why do you keep beating your wife?
Climate-science, rationality, and civil public discourse … are they the 21st century light-sabers of human understanding?
Best wishes for a Merry Christmas are extended to you (and everyone) Dave Springer!
I would’ve said he keeps beating something else.
Fan- Yes, the seas have kept on rising. For the last 160 years at Battery Park, NYC they have risen at the rate of .91 feet per century, with no sign of an increased rate.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8518750
But in California at Crescent City they appear not to be rising for the last 80 years, and in fact are dropping.
http://www.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9419750
These are only 2 locations with their own data points but it should give “pause” to those who are hyperventilating about the natural processes that we have experienced before.
Even the IPCC acknowledges similar rates in the 1930s to the current 3.2 mm global rates we have now.
Nothing is new or catastrophic. Only in the minds of warmists.
Fan, the denialists’ message must be part of Nature’s message, eh?
Or is Man supernatural? Your upper case denotation and exclusion of the human animal, signals a religious conviction underlying the statement.
His chest?
curryja | December 20, 2013 at 7:50 pm |
The UK Met Office says their final 2014 numbers won’t be available until March 2014.
Dr. Curry
UK numbers could be a bit misleading, because UK is a pronouncedly ‘meridional’ country. The CET is a more compact and a better observed entity.
Monthly numbers are usually available within 2-3 days, hence the annual data will be too.
As far as November is concerned, both maximum and minimum daily CE Temperatures were lower than for November 2012.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-dMm.htm
From the above graph one could estimate that the 2013 CET will be slightly below the 20 year CET average, so it would be a gross misrepresentation of taking 2014 CET as the warmest on record.
It is nice to know that my attack on the IPCC claim that they are 95% certain of things related to CAGW, is supported by one extremely eminent scientist, namely Pierere Darriulat. In http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/WrittenEvidence.svc/EvidenceHtml/4360
he writes “Such behaviour is unacceptable. A proper scientific summary must rephrase the main SPM conclusions in a way that describes properly the factors that contribute to the uncertainties attached to such conclusions.”
I am sure what I have written does not carry much authority, but I hope the warmist denizens of Climate Etc will note what Pierre has written. I would be interested in any criticism of his submission to the UK Parliamentary Committee.
Why don’t you look at Nic Lewis’s submission which says the range of warming since 1950 is mostly due to man? Mirroring the IPCC attribution statement.
lolwot, you write “Why don’t you look at Nic Lewis’s submission which says the range of warming since 1950 is mostly due to man?”
Assuming you are correct, which I dispute, that is not the issue I am addressing. Prof. Darriulat is talking about the certainty with which the IPCC claims the reasons for this warming are known with 95% confidence. The discussion Nic Lewis has, is nothing to do with this number of 95%. What I am looking for is a discussion as to whether Pierre is right in saying that the claim of 95% certainty is completely and utterly unscientific.
I would note that this is an issue of general physics, and is not specific to climate science. Surely, Prof. Darriulat is eminently qualified on the subject of general physics.
Pierre Darriulat refers in his text only to the SPM. He does not accept the normal practice that summaries contain conclusions and brief statements on their level of certainty, while the support for that is presented in the text. Telling the conclusion that human influence is with 95% certainty more than 50% of warming since 1951 is exactly what a summary should contain.
The support for that can be found in Chapter 10.3.1.1.3 of the full report. SPM does not misrepresent the full report, as the same conclusion is presented in the full report with several pages of supporting arguments.
It’s totally unscientific to dismiss the conclusion of AR5 without explicit criticism against the actual arguments used in AR5 in support of its conclusion.
To take a different case, Nic Lewis presents criticism on some of the arguments used in the AR5 to support estimates presented. That’s a valid approach, whether I agree on the specifics or not. We may, however, notice that values considered by Nic Lewis as more correct would still attribute well over 50% of the warming to human contribution. When the AR5 results tell that the most likely human contribution is about 100%, Nic Lewis’ preferred values would lower that to something like 75%.
Chillier without man, fo’ shoo.
============
http://daily.sightline.org/2013/12/16/the-entire-ipcc-report-in-19-illustrated-haiku/
Pekka, you write “The support for that can be found in Chapter 10.3.1.1.3 of the full report.”
You have no idea whether Prof. Darriulat read the appropriate chapter in the AR5 or not. I would be very surprised if he had not. Sure, he only addressed the SPMs , but the completely incorrect physics is, as you state, in the full report. The only basis for the 95% certainty, is the opinion of climate scientists. There is no physics whatsoever to support it. Further, the physics that supports the idea that the 95% has been overstated, is contained in some of the chapters of the main report, and completely ignored by the people who wrote the SPMs.
Jim,
I can read, what he wrote. I commented on that.
“When the AR5 results tell that the most likely human contribution is about 100%,”
Pekka, where does it say this 100 %? Doesn’t it say “most” – which is anywhere above 50%?
Are you confusing certainty with contribution?
thisisnotgoodtogo,
Half of the warming corresponds to a TCR of about 0.9C, The best estimate of TCR is about 1.8C according to AR5. That particular value is not emphasized, but rather the likely range 1.0-2.5C. The total human contribution is estimated to be a little larger than warming by CO2 alone.
In SPM we can read also “The best estimate of the human-induced
contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.” Supporting arguments can be found from Chapter 10.3. of the full report.
“Chillier without man, fo’ shoo.
============
And Ruddiman would strongly agree:
http://www.whoi.edu/pclift/Ruddiman.pdf
Now the question really is– when does it become too much of a good thing?
Which of course then leads back to Anthropocene management, which is the only viable way forward considering the widespread effects of the planet’s dominant species.
Not yet, RG, and not likely to get there, either.
===========
Kim said: (related to the Earth getting too warm from the anthropogenic effects of doubling or tripling of GH gases):
“Not yet, RG, and not likely to get there, either.”
___
Based on what data? This would be helpful to know in terms of Anthropocene management.
Max Manacker has shown you the calculations til’ he’s blue in the face. Face the odds. Besides, managing climate is like riding the tornado.
================
“Besides, managing climate is like riding the tornado.”
================
Not, not at all. A tornado is short-term weather event subject to extreme variability in atmospheric conditions. Climate is mainly based on ocean heat content and the sensible and latent heat flux from ocean to atmosphere. Given the high thermal inertia of the ocean and it’s large heat capacity, the climate can be controlled to the extent the ocean heat content can be controlled. The modulating factor for ocean heat content is GH gas levels in the atmosphere and solar input to the oceans. We can control both of these if we want to. What we need to do is make sure we know the long-term effects of any management before we proceed with a plan of climate managnement.
Giddy-yap go.
======
Pekka, are you demonstrating that the warming is way over-accounted for?
That’s not impressive.
2013 in Top Ten Coldest Years in US History
2012-2013 Largest Ever Year over Year Drop in US Temperature
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/2013-one-of-the-ten-coldest-years-in-us-history-with-the-largest-drop-in-temperature/
http://www.motherjones.com/files/blog_us_temperature_2012.jpg
I thought regional records don’t count? Last year hottest, this year coldest, the average is no change. Sort of like what’s going with the global average temperature – no change – for 17 years and counting.
Even going by Steven Goddard’s fraudulent graphs this year isn’t the coldest.
Pekka Pirilä | December 21, 2013 at 4:40 am |
and
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | December 21, 2013 at 5:17
Read this and weep!
http://jennifermarohasy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/AGW_Falsified_Michael_Hammer.pdf
Ian,
Unfortunately there are so many issues of data quality in the OLR measurements that span decades that little can be concluded from them.
You may check this post, and also the discussion where further issues are brought up, and also links to the graphs used by Hammer are presented.
LOLWOT protests that 2013 US is top ten coldest on record because it isn’t a global record.
Okay. Here’s a global record.
Global Sea Ice Second Highest On Record Closing in on Highest
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/global-sea-ice-area-closing-in-on-record-high/
Let’s see if his “concern” about global trends over regional trends is sincere. I’m betting it ain’t. Anyone want to bet against me?
The subject was warmest November on record (for over 100 years)
I protest at the lame distraction attempts. Attempts to make the warmest November on record go away by changing the subject to US temperatures (and now sea ice).
Open thread little buddy. I know you’d like to focus on the only real news you have ‘NASA again prematurely saying warmest ever [fill in the blank]’ but there’s lots more to talk about than a warm month which is only the warmest according to a single source.
actually, the Met Office shows preliminary ranking of Nov 2013 as 3rd warmest Nov
All those other things were only said in response to the warmest November globally on record. Quite clearly they were distraction attempts.
“actually, the Met Office shows preliminary ranking of Nov 2013 as 3rd warmest Nov”
You mean the CRU climategate temperature record? Obviously we can’t trust that because they lost the data or something.
We’ll see where the southern sea ice is when the sun is actually shining on it and it actually makes a difference.
Looks like UAH ranks this November as the 8th warmest lower trop temp.
And the lower trop hottest UAH November being 2009.
Sensible tropospheric heat has been the traditional proxy measurement for the energy imbalance in the Earth system, but the low thermal inertia of the troposphere, the low energy storage, and the troposphere’s reliance on sensible and latent heat flux from the ocean, makes’s it a very poor proxy. This is not just true from a purely scientific perspective, but from a policymaking perspective as well, as consistent long-term policies are needed to address the long-term anthropogenic effects on the Earth, including on the climate system. The estimate of ECS in particular needs to be based on the most stable, long-term effects, and not a short-term natural and internal variability in the climate. When estimates of ECS are made using sensible tropospheric heat, periods such as “the pause” can confuse both scientists and policymakers. I would suggest that a new proxy for heat being stored (or lost) from the Earth climate system be developed based on Total System Enthalpy, using a combination of moist enthalpy in the troposphere (after Pielke Sr.), ocean heat content, and total ice mass on the planet. This would give the most stable long-term estimate of both total energy in the climate system, and by extrapolation, the ECS for a doubling of GH gases.
“Sensible tropospheric heat has been the traditional proxy measurement for the energy imbalance in the Earth system”
If the concentration of CO2 was 28 ppm, 280 ppm or 2,800 ppm the outgoing radiation would be the same as the incoming radiation.
There can be no ‘energy imbalance’ overall, the energy going in has to match, within measurement error, energy coming out.
Gosh, R.Gates, it almost sounds like now you don’t like atmospheric temperature measurements (possibly because they’re not producing the results you expected?). The thought is late coming to you.
OK. Just tell us the heat capacity of the entire troposphere, the oceans, and the segment of the earth’s crust you think is relevant….
Since it’s Christmas, I’ll ignore any of the processes that might do work (photosynthesis, geopotential changes, etc)
“Gosh, R.Gates, it almost sounds like now you don’t like atmospheric temperature measurements (possibly because they’re not producing the results you expected?). The thought is late coming to you.”
_____
I love atmospheric temperature measurements and think we should take as many as we can as consistently as we can. I just think they are poor proxies for overall energy storage in the climate system. As far as “results I expect”, since I don’t have any expectations, that is illogical.
“If the concentration of CO2 was 28 ppm, 280 ppm or 2,800 ppm the outgoing radiation would be the same as the incoming radiation.
There can be no ‘energy imbalance’ overall, the energy going in has to match, within measurement error, energy coming out.”
______
Only once equilibrium is reached, which can’t happen as long as the levels keep going up. What is of interest is how much energy will ultimately be stored in the system for any given level of GH gas concentration. Each of those levels of CO2– 28, 280, or 2800 ppm, implies a different level of energy in the climate system once equilibrium has been reached. Thus, at 28 ppm there would far more total glacial ice and thus a lower sea level than at 2800 ppm, even though energy in and energy out would be equal in both cases, once equilibrium has been reached.
“Only once equilibrium is reached, which can’t happen as long as the levels keep going up”
My planet rotates on its own axis every 24 hours, has an axial tilt and rotates around its star in an elliptical orbit every 365.25 days.
On my planet there is never an equilibrium, sun comes up warming, sun goes down, cooling. The system is dynamic and not static. The temperature difference of the land and upper 100 m of the ocean, between summer afternoons and winter nights is more than an order of magnitude than any proclaimed, creeping, heating process.
Claiming that the heat content of the Earth will reach ‘equilibrium’ is rather like claiming that a pendulum will reach equilibrium. The fact that people still use the term ‘equilibrium’, which is a carefully defined thermodynamic state, when what they mean is a cyclical steady state shows a degree of ignorance typically only found in journalist majors.
Instead of using ‘ equilibrium’ why not coin something else ‘fluffelweed’ or janispheric’ or ‘thermodelphic’; you see words have meaning and are methods to transmit information between minds, when you deliberately misuse a word, like equilibrium, then you are not seeking to explain, but to misinform. One does not have a ‘equilibrium’ in an open system, in an open system the steady state levels of a quality are dependent on the influxes and effluxes of the system.
Calling a steady state an equilibrium is wrong, and treating a steady state as if it is an equilibrium is the same as treating a helicopter as a helium balloon.
The last millennium was a near equilibrium with decadal temperatures staying within a half degree of the average only modulated by volcanoes and the sun, and to a small extent by the Milankovitch cooling trend. When it starts to change by degrees, it won’t be in equilibrium, but once CO2 levels hold more steady, staying within a 5% range, as they did in the last millennium, that kind of equilibrium will be reached again. Equilibrium is a matter of degrees.
“Claiming that the heat content of the Earth will reach ‘equilibrium’ is rather like claiming that a pendulum will reach equilibrium.”
____
Doc, you’re a smart and educated person, why do you insist on talking so obscurely? We know, with a high degree of confidence, that during interglacials CO2 levels reach somewhere in the 280ppm range. This level corresponds to a certain sea level gain (as glaciers melt) and retreat of those glaciers. The planet reaches an essential equilibrium during these periods in that it reaches a certain temperature range for 10,000 or 20,000 years and does not continue the warming it did to rise out of the glacial period. Of course their are always diurnal fluctuations and seasonal fluctuations and volcanic eruptions and minor solar variations, but overall, from the largest perspective, the climate reaches an equilibrium during an interglacial- before the cooling once more sets in. This has been the consistent pattern for millions of years, initiated by Milankovitch cycles and reinforced through various positive feedback paths by CO2 increases. During this particular interglacial, one particular species has managed to develop the technology to move massive amounts of carbon from the lithosphere to the atmosphere and oceans (the human carbon volcano). This has boosted the GH gas concentrations to levels not seen since the mid-Pliocene, and the planet will warm to a new equilibrium. Basic physics. Furthermore, the dominance of this species on the planets biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere lends itself to calling at least the later part of this particular interglacial the Anthropocene. This doesn’t set well with some.
Help. Reading more about planetary temperatures, I find the Universe Today has a page quoting “The average temperature on Earth is 7.2°C.”.
http://www.universetoday.com/35664/temperature-of-the-planets/
Does anyone know where this number comes from and why other people think it is 15degC?
Surely in 2013, we can measure temperature…..
blouis,
That is definitely an error. The average is around 14.5C, depending on exactly how you want to measure it, but it is not even close to 7.2C no matter how you choose. See:
https://www2.ucar.edu/climate/faq/what-average-global-temperature-now
University of Wisconsin Space Science and Engineering Centre course notes sect 3-13 “the global mean temperature of the earth-atmosphere system is only about 250 K”
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/library/coursefiles/03_abs_emiss_ref.pdf
I am more interested in the temperature of earth+atmosphere as observable from space, as that is the temperature determined by radiative equilibrium adn for which we have comparative data for other planets.
The temperature, as measured from space, is generally taken to be 255 K (-18 C). The difference between this and the surface 15 C is the famous 33 C due to GHGs (and clouds).
Blouis79
I think they have taken into account the average temperature of the oceans which is around 4 degrees centigrade.
Tonyb
Who believes in Kirchoff’s Law? According to Kirchoff, at local thermodynamic equilibrium, absorptivity = emissivity. Pekka has been arguing that these can be different, and that T=Tblack(abs/emis)^1/4.
They are equal for every wavelength separately, usually not for a mixture of many wavelengths. (To be more precise, also polarization and direction of radiation must be the same, not only wavelength.)
blouis79, local thermodynamic equilibrium is a requirement for Kirchoff’s law of thermal radiation so there is no believing involved as far as the law goes. Since the atmosphere is not only not in thermal equilibrium but has considerable convection and advection with varying composition/density it is questionable how well Kirchoff’s law applies to a system with sensible and radiant transfer plus a good deal of latent heat transfer along with a splash of mechanical energy transfer. At the top of the atmosphere it seems to hold, since that is radiant transfer, but as you descend in to the thermodynamic onion it gets difficult to justify.
CD,
The original 19th century formulation of Kirchhoff’s law required an isothermal cavity fully in thermodynamic equilibrium. From that it’s possible to derive the more detailed modern form that’s not dependent on an isothermal system. Practically all small volumes of the atmosphere are in local thermal equilibrium at a level of accuracy needed for applying Kirchhoff’s law.
An equivalent quantum mechanical law is valid even for individual molecules.
Pekka, ” Practically all small volumes of the atmosphere are in local thermal equilibrium at a level of accuracy needed for applying Kirchhoff’s law. ”
Right, but since those small volumes are moving in a chaotic manner relative to each other, that is a warm and fuzzy comfort but not necessarily useful. I mentioned the other day how a stable polar vortex provides an effective dynamic thermal barrier. There you would have synchronization of the small volumes creating a larger isothermal surface. That tends to get lost on the masses.
Pekka, if absorptivity = emissivity for every wavelength separately, then they must also be equal for every possible mixture of wavelengths.
Captdallas, as this point I am only interested in whole of the transparent onion, since I am tryign to understand the purely radiative effects of sunlight on earth.
The inside of the onion could be different from teh outside even if the whole of transparent onion is the same temperature as measurable radiatively from outside.
The main point is that for a spherical body in radiative thermal equilibrium with the sun, where absorptivity = emissivity, then the temperature is independent of albedo and emissivity, because they cancel out of the equation.
blouis79,
Two mixtures of wavelengths have usually different shares of various wavelengths. If two bodies have different temperatures, they emit different spectral mixtures, etc. Therefor the average absorptivity/emissivity of one mixture is almost always different from another mixture.
.. and in particular the absorptivity for SW and emissivity for IR are in most cases very different. One may be more than ten times the other, and that may be the case in both directions.
Therefore the temperature of a body in sunlight may be much higher (like 200C higher) or much lower (like 100C lower) than that of a black or gray body that has equal absorptivity for SW and LW.
I think some confusion by the skeptics here is that they equate absorption and emission to absorptivity and emissivity. Absorptivity and emissivity are molecular properties or normalized efficiencies, while absorption and emission depend on the number of molecules and photons explicitly, and therefore on the environment.
blouis79, “The main point is that for a spherical body in radiative thermal equilibrium with the sun, where absorptivity = emissivity, then the temperature is independent of albedo and emissivity, because they cancel out of the equation.”
The start at the skin of the onion, the real top of the atmosphere. There the annual average Ein=Eout=~341.1 Wm-2 for a spherical shape. There is still a difference even there since visible and higher wavelengths are different out than in because Earth is not at the same temperature as the sun. The total energy has to balance over some reasonable time scale or Earth would not exist as we know it. There the temperature is independent of albedo and the total radiation leaving equals that of a black body at ~4.2 C degrees. The travel down to the stratopause where the average energy is 315 Wm-2 or 0 C degrees. That is an effectively isothermal layer which based on Kirchoff’s law cannot exceed 341.1 Wm-2. In fact is ~92.6% of the maximum pretty much like Stefan-Boltzann’s “fudge” factor for real black bodies. Below that you are no longer at the shell of the blackbody but inside of the black body where radiant energy bounces around until it it finds a home in some spectrum that adds to the emissivity.
Pekka will disapprove, but Kirchoff ans S-B are never violated just what is a “surface” can be debatable since there is a shortage of isothermal layers or shells.
From the point of view of radiation there are no surfaces in the atmosphere, exept cloud surfaces. (For convection there are.) In thermosphere the temperature (or what’s closest to a temperature in very rare gas) may be as high as 1500K. Thus there are no simple limits for the maximal temperature of upper atmosphere. That’s true also for the stratopause that’s heated by UV absorption by O2 and O3 and cooled by IR emission by CO2. The resulting temperature depends on the CO2 concentration among other things.
Pekka, ” In thermosphere the temperature (or what’s closest to a temperature in very rare gas) may be as high as 1500K.”
Yes, but the thermosphere is not in local thermodynamic equilibrium likely not even considered part of the “radiant” atmosphere since there are considerable high energy photons and particles passing through it at various angles impacting molecules that cannot easily share their energy level.. Kirchoff and S-B deal with a more specific cased that involves a small window or aperture not every nook and cranny in the universe.
As far as there not be layers other than the cloud base/tops, the Effective Radiant Layer is a layer by definition that supposedly was the tropopause in a no greenhouse Earth thought experiment. With real isothermal layers like the Stratopause and turbopause available, the ERL seems a bit selective.
The effective radiant layer is not a real layer, just an alitude number calculated from various other numbers. Nothing special happens at that altitude.
CD,
Similar arguments can be presented on the roles of UV and IR at stratopause as you present on thermosphere. That was my point, and the level of local thermal equilibrium does not change this observation. Absorption and emission are controlled by largely independent factors.
Pekka, “The effective radiant layer is not a real layer, just an alitude number calculated from various other numbers. Nothing special happens at that altitude.”
Exactomundo! The Stratopause though is an important part of the atmosphere as Solomon and Santers have found out with the stratospheric water vapor and Brewer-Dobson cirulation. The “sensitivity” of the stratopause to solar forcing tracks “global” sensitivity remarkably well and the turbopause has that uncanny temperature that happens to equal the lowest temperature ever measure at the real surface. they are “layers” in a much more realistic sense than the ERL.
Pekka, as a btw, without the stratosphere and the Brewer-Dobson circulation the poles would be about 50C colder than they are now. That is due to a combination of poleward ozone transport mainly and somewhat due to compressive heating.
http://www.ccpo.odu.edu/~lizsmith/SEES/ozone/class/Chap_6/6_3.htm
Since the estimated temperature range is from -113C to -73C that would be a polar impact of ~53Wm-2 or a “global” equivalent impact of about 6.7 Wm-2 which based on my lack of proper a proper math education is significant with respect to 3.7 Wm-2.
If the radiaitve thermal equilibrium is both with the sun (a blackbody) and space (a blackbody), then no matter what kind of non-blackbody the earth is, absorptivity must still equal emissivity at every wavelength, unless someone is arguing that Kirchoff’s law no longer holds.
The Earth is not in thermal equilibrium with the sun, space, or even internally.
Pekka, when you say Earth is not in thermal equilibrium, is that equivalent to saying that equilibrium thermodynamics isn’t a sensible framework for analyzing earth system energy relationships? Just curious: I suspect this but am far from understanding, and so appreciate being taught.
blouis79, “absorptivity must still equal emissivity at every wavelength, unless someone is arguing that Kirchoff’s law no longer holds.”
Nope, as Pekka said Earth is not in radiative equilibrium with anything including itself. The “equilibrium” required by Kirchoff is for a small volume or aperture at one temperature which is required for local thermodynamic equilibrium. That limits how you can apply Kirchoff’s Law simply to a single isothermal surface/volume. Then if energy is not thermalized in that volume, it is reflected or passes through. The spectrum of the energy passing through does not have to be the same in all directions.
Understanding that you can expand the Kirchoff volume to an isothermal surface which allows you to integrate the energy of an “ideal” body. If you are assuming the body is a sphere that simplifies the integration. However, if the actual isothermal surface is not spherical, then the problem becomes more of a challenge.
This is were Pekka and I start to diverge. I can use any isothermal surface to create an isothermal “shell” in order to properly apply Kirchoff and S-B as long as I consider the real shape of the “shell”. Earth doesn’t have concentric spherical “shells” more like near concentric oblate spheroids out to a nearly spherical Turbopause. At that point there is no longer convective mixing so it is effectively the top of the atmosphere.
Inside the Turbopause is 99 plus percent of the mass of the atmosphere If you are looking for impact of a 1% change in radiant forcing it is nice to include 99% of the atmosphere instead of ignoring ~15%
captain dallas should try publishing his disproof of Kirchoff’s law
in the meantime I suppose it’s good for some cheap laughs
Springer, if you only had a brain. “captain dallas should try publishing his disproof of Kirchoff’s law”
There is no “disproof” but Kirchoff’s can be misapplied by assuming something is in equilibrium when it is not. You should research the furnace experiment that started the whole field of spectrum analysis.
http://physics.ucf.edu/~ishigami/Teaching/Phys4083L/lab%20descriptions/NETD/blackbody%20theory.pdf
From the article:
…
In a set of filings in the two long-running cases in the Northern District of California, the government acknowledged for the first time that the N.S.A. started systematically collecting data about Americans’ emails and phone calls in 2001, alongside its program of wiretapping certain calls without warrants. The government had long argued that disclosure of these and other secrets would put the country at risk if they came out in court.
But the government said that despite recent leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that made public a fuller scope of the surveillance and data collection programs put in place after the Sept. 11 attacks, sensitive secrets remained at risk in any courtroom discussion of their details — like whether the plaintiffs were targets of intelligence collection or whether particular telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon had helped the agency.
“Disclosure of this still-classified information regarding the scope and operational details of N.S.A. intelligence activities implicated by plaintiffs’ allegations could be expected to cause extremely grave damage to the national security of the United States,” wrote the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.
So, he said, he was continuing to assert the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to seek to block information from being used in court even if that means the case must be dismissed. The Justice Department wants the judge to dismiss the matter without ruling on whether the programs violated the First or Fourth Amendment.
…
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/us/white-house-tries-to-prevent-judge-from-ruling-on-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=0
The Telegraph on the Reddit ban of climate change deniers
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100250918/reddit-has-banned-climate-change-deniers-and-ripped-its-own-reputation-to-shreds/
Here is the justification for the Reddit ban
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-allen/reddits-science-forum-ban_b_4455825.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
Judith you’ve had the same issue – concern over the low level of comments; repetitive, polemic, uninterested in discussion.
They’ve taken action to render the comments section readable/useful/constructive.
Judith, Nathan Allen at Reddit makes some reasonable points in defence of the policy for that particular forum. However, he falls into some of the traps he claim the banned posters do. In particular, Allen uses in his support that “When 97 percent of climate scientists agree that man is changing the climate,” with a link to the Cook, Nuccitelli et al paper as his source. Surely he should be aware of how thoroughly this work has been debunked? Perhaps one of our more statistically numerate denizens could enlighten him on this.
Faustino, I missed the reference to the Cook and a Cast of Thousands paper. As for enlightening anybody, I’m a little weary of banging my head against the wall of statistical insouciance. I failed, as ever.
I also noticed how Nathan Allen plays the PhD card in the way that rightly makes every self-respecting citizen want to ransack the nearest university. (And he’s not even at a university… would he please STFU?) And also inserts “peer-reviewed” like a fetish. I may vomit.
After reading the article and some of the commnets – the same warming memes are there:
1. We can’t explain the warming other than that it must be CO2.
2. “Deniers” are funded by Big Oil.
3. Extreme weather events are due to CO2.
4. Water vapor is a positive feedback. (But what about clouds and the fact that it is a condensible gas?)
5. 97% consensus.
6. No mention of the pause.
7. No mention of the missing tropical hot spot.
8. No mention of natural variation.
This reaction is like that of my father-in-law when I wanted to show him some global temperature charts. He got mad and said he “believes” in global warming and that’s that! Period!
The catastrophic global warming hypothesis hasn’t been proved.
And also, no mention of clouds and the 31C limit on tropical sea surface temp. That will limit in turn feedback via water vapor. Maybe that’s why there is no tropical hot spot.
“31C limit on tropical sea surface temp” – jim
Huh?
Michael – this effect is well known. It will be great if you learn something new today … not being snarky, I mean it.
See …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/08/upwelling-longwave-over-the-ocean/
and scientists have found the same relationship before Willis …
see here …
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/10/citizen-scientist-willis-and-the-cloud-radiative-effect/
and here …
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Stephens-review-of-cloud-feedback.pdf
Pekka Pirilä | December 21, 2013 at 12:13 pm said:
Ian,
Unfortunately there are so many issues of data quality in the OLR measurements that span decades that little can be concluded from them.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My reply:
You may want to mute your criticisms as I am fully aware of the difficulties of on-board satellite calibrations as I spent many an evening in the Pub with Dr. Toon Snijders who was heavily involved with the absolute calibration and long-term drift of the IUE and Hipparchus satellites.
Ref: http://scienceofdoom.com/2013/02/07/ceres-airs-outgoing-longwave-radiation-el-nino/
This post indicates that the long term OLR measurements covered by the CERES and AIRS [over a period from ~ 2003 to 2012] show a decrease in total OLR. However, a caveat is given that the negative trend in total OLR over this 9 year period are are almost certainly the result of water vapor changes caused by the ENSO and the fact that the 9 year period starts out with a strong EL Nino [2002-2003] and ens with a strong La Nina [2011-2012]..
However, longer term OLR measurements [over a period from the early 1990’s to 2013] indicate an increase in in total OLR of ~ 30 %. Of course the magnitude of this trend is bought into question by the problem of meshing of OLR measurements between satellites. This is particularly true given that the result is at odds with the [fore-gone] conclusion that we are all going to fry because of CAGW. However, the important point is that the discussion at the reference you have cited openly admits that long term changes in total OLR are strongly influenced by the ENSO climate system.
This breaks the whole discussion down to the one that occurred between
Kristian and Payne on this site:
Kristian said:
“That process [i.e. the ENSO], fed by energy from the Sun, is after all what drives global temperatures. Not CO2.”
and DeWitt Payne said:
Oh, please. ENSO drives cyclic variation in global temperatures. That’s cyclic variation around a long term mean. CO2 is a driver of the long term mean.
My money is on the form rather than the latter since Bob Tisdale has clearly shown that the contribution of the ENSO cycle to global energy balance is decidedly non-linear.
Ian Wilson,
Look at what Loon and Meehl are finding:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013GL058670/abstract
Important note on generality: The central limit would be the same whether excited by white noise, chaos, or lunisolar oscillations. ENSO’s not a driver. It’s a scrambler.
I would like to see some serious consideration of the economic impact of a cooling world. Richard Tol has assessed the likely benefits to the world of warming work up until at least +2degC.
From his paper recent it is possible to roughly assess the probable downside of cooling. But as a cooling world is now much more likely than a warming one for the next half century in the light of the current sunspot cycles and the ocean oscillations it would seem absolutely negligent to ignore the possibility, however politically incorrect it might be to entertain the thought.
I believe that this prospect should be being considered and planned for by the governments and international bodies who are still so concerned by Global Warming which at best has future benefit into the later years of this century.
+1
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | December 22, 2013 at 6:21
Here is a bit of free advice:
It is possible to describe a phenomenon and yet not understand it’s workings.
So the following part of the abstract that you posted is essentially meaningless:(except for the last 7 words):
“The relationships are physically consistent with previously identified processes and mechanisms, and point the way to further research.”
I am sure that there were “great minds” in the distance past who enthralled the masses with such pearls-of-wisdom like, “if you have a larger than usual high tide, count roughly 14 days and you will have another larger than usual high tide”.
When someone had the temerity to ask the self-appointed gurus, why do you have to wait roughly 14 days for the next high tide to occur, they immediately were silenced and marginalized with comments like:
“The relationships are physically consistent with previously identified processes and mechanisms…”
and
“Don’t listen to the wackos who claim its due to some outside influence.. the 14-15 day period is set by internal resonances in the oceans…. move on… nothing to see here…we’ve got it all under control…”
.
Vilnius | December 22, 2013 at 4:50 am said:
“But weather balloon observations (including the NOAA data set) do not indicate cloud cover fraction. (That’s why in radiative transfer calculations satellite data are used).”
and
“So, if Miskolczi’s IR optical depth of 1.87 is all-sky, then it is meaningless, if it is clear-sky, it is not known how the cloudless cases were sorted out of the whole.”
My reply:
The total infra-red optical depth that I am referring is clear sky.
It I were talking about the atmopsheric temperature increase caused by a doubling of CO2 without water vapor feedback – you wouldn’t bat an eyelid before you continued the discussion. However since, I am talking about clear sky total infra-red optical depth – which has remained roughly constant over the last 60 years, it immediately becomes meaningless to you, and not worthy of further discussion.
Of course, when it comes to the atmospheric temperature increase caused by a doubling of CO2, the water vapor feedback is critical in determining the final outcome.
The same is true for changes in total clear sky infra-red optical depth. It is imperative that you eventually factor in the effect of changing cloud cover. To see the effects of this please read the following post:
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/why-do-long-term-periodicities-in-enso.html
This post shows that:
a) The flux optical depth anomaly is a rough measure the total column density of water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere from year to year.
b) The ENSO must play a major role in setting the overall column density of water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere.
c) The ENSO must also be an important factor in setting the World’s means temperature, since water vapor is the dominant green-house gas in the Earth’s atmosphere.
What is even more remarkable, is the fact that common frequencies seen in the two data sets [i.e. the flux optical depth anomaly and the SOI index] are simply those that would be expected if ENSO phenomenon is a resonant response of the Earth’s (atmospheric/oceanic) climate system brought about by a coupling between it and the Earth’s forced (18.6 year Nodical Lunar Cycle) and unforced (1.2 year Chandler Wobble) nutations.
No problem that warming spikes that occur during ENSO add water vapor to the atmosphere. So does the warming due to the CO2 control knob raise the specific humidity.
Re: Ian Wilson | December 22, 2013 at 7:51 am
You say:
“The total infra-red optical depth that I am referring is clear sky.”
and:
” I am talking about clear sky total infra-red optical depth – which has remained roughly constant over the last 60 years”
The 2010 Miskolczi paper says: “The NOAA 61-year dataset is used to demonstrate that the global average annual infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere has been unchanged for 61 years, with a value of 1.87.”
That is, the paper does NOT talk about the clear sky infra-red optical depth. He computes the all-sky (average clear+cloudy) atmospheric data with a clear-sky (no-cloud) radiative transfer program. That is, it follows the paths of the long-wave photons downward and upward in the air, up to 60 km in the stratosphere as if there were no clouds at all. But there ARE clouds in the air, at 2 km and 6 km and at other altitudes, and they block the way of the long-wave photons completely. So this method is meaningless, its results is invalid, it describe an unphysical radiation structure.
You cannot conclude from this method (contrary to Miskolczi) that the CLEAR SKY infrared tau has remained roughly constant over the last 60 years; he cannot conclude what he is saying that the global average ALL SKY annual infrared optical thickness has been unchanged; and of course no one can conclude the opposite: this method proves nothing.
For those who would like to consider a scientific consideration of the differences in the southern sea ice response versus the northern, here’s an interesting new paper to consider:
http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/~gf905417/Publications_files/rs_polar_happenings_marshall_et_al.pdf
November was the warmest on record and yet some claim warming has paused.
It’s possible December could rival it, maybe even set a record.
Mother Nature’s child is Macaca Nature, and she is not agreeing with kimooling.
According to UAH, November was only the 8th warmest (global temperature LT) on satellite records. Therefore, there is no way it’s the warmest.
I know it is not climate, but…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/21/new-york-city-temperature-record_n_4487182.html
This is the kind of thing that affects the public perception about climate change, especially when it happens in an influential population center like this. The skeptics will be in damage control mode here again.
That is simply wrong, the temperature series often disagree on a monthly basis. HadCrut4 (I believe they’re saying 2nd warmest), NOAA (warmest), and GISS (warmest) all showed strong upticks in November.
I considert the sat data definitive over the highly processed land data. Remember, stay away from that processed food!!
See the data here …
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc_lt_5.6.txt
Well, it’s not. It’s way better than RSS. It close to GISS. That’s a plus for it.
satellite has much better coverage than land and ocean based measurements.
Yes, that’s why UAH shows more 21st Century warming. The more cover, the hotter it is.
So, as I said, UAH shows this November to be the 8th hottest.
Over the entire 21st Century, UAH shows a stronger warming trend.
HADCRUT4 shows a slightly higher global warming trend than UAH …
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/plot/uah/from:1979/plot/uah/from:1979/trend
After stabilization from the 1998 El Nino, there probably isn’t any difference.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/plot/uah/from:2002/plot/uah/from:2002/trend
I have a rationalization for my cherry pick: the 21st century; you have stabilization from the 1998 El Nino. Gotta cite for that?
I cite the sat chart and my eyeballs.
Deniers committing “crimes against humanity”?
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-1-billion-dollar-climate-change-cover-up-crimes-against-humanity
Projecting climate change denial on skeptics. And all that goes with it, such as support from Big Oil, Banks, Bureaucracies etc.
Edim, it is no coincidence that the largest concentrations of climate change deniers are found in the Republican congress and in the Tea Party membership. This is a trickle-down form of politics from those with the money that can buy influence with these groups.
Jim, Big Money of one sort or another has been backing the AGW issue all this time. Hence all the media support. Big Money runs Big Media. However, Mother Nature cannot be fooled in the long run.
Vilnius,
I will check with Ferenc and his collaborators. What you say contradicts my understanding and I need to clear this up. My understanding from direct talks with Ferenc and his collaborators is that he used weather balloons to calculate the clear-sky total infra-red optical opacity. This included the clear-sky H20 column density but not clouds.
Re: Ian Wilson | December 22, 2013 at 2:04 pm
You may want to ask the followings:
— 1.87 is the clear-sky, or the all-sky annual mean infrared optical thickness;
— if clear-sky, how the cloudless cases were selected out from the radiosonde data set;
— if it is the clear+cloudy (all-sky), how did he get it as global average value, when the cloud infrared optical depth is infinite (in half of the cases);
— if 1.87 is for all-sky, how much is the clear-sky value (if he got it).
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | December 22, 2013 at 8:18 am said:
No problem that warming spikes that occur during ENSO add water vapor to the atmosphere. So does the warming due to the CO2 control knob raise the specific humidity.
Reply:
Not if most of the warming can attributed to the no-linear effects of the ENSO cycle. Then their is no need for invoking a significant contribution from the CO2 control knob.
How do the “non-linear effects” manifest themselves? If an ENSO event is a spike, does it get more spiky, as the non-linear effects magnify the extreme?
What we are dealing with are perturbations to the global temperature and these are always linearizable as first-order effects.
So if an ENSO was a value of T~X and it was non-linearly magnified to T~X^2 then dT is still only dT~2XdX, which is first order to dX.
That’s why a model such as CSALT works as well as it does, as it linearizes all the energy fluctuation terms, including the ENSO term as an SOI factor.
Further, since the SOI always reverts to a mean of zero, the factor can not have any long term effects and simply compensates with other factors to create apparent pauses in warming.
Another pause compensating factor is Wyatt&Curry’s Stadium Wave, which has the same long term shape as the earth’s LOD time-series. This can generate a pause for a longer period.
When all these factors are put together, we can separate the fluctuations from the long term nearly-monotonic secular trend caused by the CO2 control knob. See how the fluctuations are removed from the time series to reveal a much smoother warming trend:
http://imageshack.com/a/img23/8418/qvv.gif
I just listened the Stephen Schneider Lecture: What should a climate scientist advocate for? presented by Gavin Schmidt at AGU Fall Meeting. There wasn’t much in what he said that I would disagree with, but somehow I’m still disappointed. The actual took about 40 minutes, but up to the time 29:30 it was so general that I don’t think that it would serve even as a starting point for deeper considerations.
The last 13 minutes (29:30 – 42:00) were better. Over that time Gavin presented his idealistic view of the right way of presenting science and advocating what the scientists considers right to advocate. What he presented was very closely related to the concepts of Honest broker, open advocate, and stealth advocate discussed by Pielke Jr. in his book. The remaining problem with that part of the talk is that Gavin didn’t address sufficiently the difficulties in following the ideal model. He mentioned the main issues, but couldn’t make them concrete enough.
What he presented during those 13 minutes could, however serve as an introduction to interesting debate on this site as well.
Heh, try dissenting at RealClimate. You’re a hoot, Pekka.
=========
post on this coming later today
Could be very amusing.
===============
On the science side, I find this overall summary of the state of climate science in the summer of 2013 by Richard Alley to be interesting. He covers everything: warming, sensitivity, crop yields, paleoclimate, melting glaciers, etc. in 40 minutes. It is not advocacy, just science. Lots for skeptics to try to deny there, and he pokes at skeptics a little too.
Thanks for that link Jim D. Dr. Alley is both an excellent scientist and doesn’t pull any punches. He certainly rates high on my list of most respected.
Richard Alley makes climate science look “not boring” in a nerdy kind of way.
Jimd and r gates
In deference to you both i took the trouble to listen to the Richard alley lecture that was linked to.
The last third I thought was rather confused and on his own admittance highly uncertain.
As for the main part of his talk it illustrates the problems of someone having a sole platform and the information being imparted not being challenged or clarified. From my own perspective I thought the lack of recent historical context over the last 500 or thousand years to be problematic as looking at say 30 years of an upward trend without looking at what went before is rather misleading.
I object to being called a ‘climate zombie’ and thought his various graphs to be on the whole not that helpful.
It does strike me that a one sided presentation such as this, or by someone
Like Monckton,, does nothing to advance the discussion
. If Judith is looking for new topics or new ways of presenting information I would suggest that a scripted webinar with someone like Richard alley whereby pre submitted questions can be asked and developed within a structured context, might be a worthwhile enterprise.
I think it would need to be within the framework of someone asking the pre submitted questions (Judith?) and ensuring they are answered and then developed by follow up pre submitted questions.
I think the sort of one sided presentation given by Richard alley was not helpful but I have no doubt he and others on both sides of the debate might be able to move the discussion along from its somewhat currently moribund state if the appropriate format was adopted which enabled a debate to take place
Tonyb
Richard Alley’s use of the term “climate zombie” is apropos when you consider the profile pic that Ian Wilson uses on his blog:
http://www.blogger.com/profile/00390339452469614741
Jim D.
Constantly referring to skeptics as deniers as though we are deniers of “The Gospel Truth” is as unscientific as any person can get. The word “denier” has very heavy historical connotations which skeptics in the same class as Holocaust Deniers. How would you like it if we constantly referred alarmist to rapists [of the public purse] or molesters [of the scientific evidence].
Disagreeing with so called evidence that is used to bolster a fore-gone conclusion is not denial – it is only denial if what is being disagreed to is “The Gospel Truth”. Such a requirement is the anti-thesis of the science and the scientific method.
Congratulations for being the poster boy for anti-science.
Usually I only use the verb ‘to deny’ as I did here which is fitting enough when the science is not accepted. Denier is a very specific term that I use sparingly usually to describe a form of motivated idiocy just like the original meaning.
Ian Wilson,
“How would you like it if we constantly referred alarmist to ..”
Be careful of those terms, because there is one commenter here that fits the description, first initial O and second initial M. He is allowed to comment here, even though any mention of his heinous acts are deleted.
I like to be sarcastically polite to alarmists.
I call them global warming advocates.
The fact that they off their trolleys when one looks at the ongoing hard evidence is their problem.
As a denier I am convinced that we are seeing the beginnings of a cooling world. Truly scary for the grand kids.
Richard Alley,
This “Genius” actually shows the 30 year warming period from 1975 to 2005 and claims it is “evidence” that human-induced global warming has not stopped. What he leaves out is the comparable 30 year cooling period from 1945 to 1975. What he doesn’t seam to realize is that a new 30 year cooling period has just started between 2005 and 2035.
These 30 year climate regimes are governed by the ratio of the El Nino to La Nino intensity/frequency.
Ian,
You apparently did not see the part where ENSO effects were accounted for. The short-term climate is indeed governed by ocean cycles, but AGW is not a short-term forcing. Richard Alley is very knowledgable but his expertise is ice. He understands how much energy must be going into the climate system to have the kinds of glacial ice mass we are seeing in Greenland and Antarctica. This level of change in Earth’s energy balance is well outside of simple ENSO cycles.
Richard Ally is someone with his head firmly stuck in the sand. He is the epitome of delusion. 80 % of what he talks about makes the a priori assumption that CO2 is a dominant driver of atmospheric warming.
101:
• “[…] the observed decades-long fluctuations in the Earth’s rotation rate are not due to the rotation and polar motion of the whole Earth but rather to changes in the speed of drift of the lithosphere over the asthenosphere. […] the moments of the like-sign forces arising in the process of fluctuations in the global water exchange operate for decades. […] the asthenosphere underlying the lithosphere does not behave like a solid body but rather flows like a viscous fluid. […] the decades-long global water exchange can result in the lithosphere’s sliding over the asthenosphere without having a noticeable effect on the Earth’s deeper layers. In astronomical observations, changes in the lithosphere’s drift rate are recorded as “the irregularities in the Earth’s rotation” and “polar motion.” However, such apparent “irregularities” and “motions” require the redistribution of water masses that are 28 times lower than in the case of rotation of the whole Earth.”
• “[…] only atmospheric air movements, and […] currents in the ocean […] cause the Earth’s rotation instabilities. The power of other geophysical processes is small compared with the power of variations of the Earth’s rotation. Note that such important […] effects as transport of water from the ocean to the continent (including the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland) and global redistribution of air masses would be impossible in the absence of atmospheric air movements. Bearing all the above in mind, as well as the fact that currents in the ocean are mostly generated by winds, we come to the conclusion of the paramount importance of atmospheric processes […]”
Sidorenkov, N.S. (2009). The Interaction Between Earth’s Rotation and Geophysical Processes.
Sidorenko tells about the factors that affect Earth’s rotation, both that short term variability is largely due to changes in the atmospheric air movements and ocean currents, and that the decades-long fluctuations have another source, speed of drift of the lithosphere.
From the former originate the strong correlations that are observed between Earth rotation and climate variables. Whether the the changes in Earth rotation have any significant influence in the opposite direction on any time scale shorter than thousands of years is less obvious. What Sidorenko writes in that paper does not tell that changes in rotation would affect weather or climate more than the really small relative changes in the LOD and axis of rotation unavoidably do.
If that’s all, it’s not of any significance for climate. Changes in LOD can be used to infer changes in AAM, but the causality is one-way.
Whether the the changes in Earth rotation have any significant influence in the opposite direction on any time scale shorter than thousands of years is less obvious
Short scale variability is well known in the literature,it is poorly advertised.Nutation (1)for example provides good explanations for changes in the growing season in the US (earlier)(2) and changes in sea level variability(3)
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutation
2 http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/9657/2010/acp-10-9657-2010.html
3 http://www.jcronline.org/doi/abs/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-11-00169.1
PV quotes with emphasis:
Winds are a manifestation of kinetic energy and along with the thermal energy constitute the components of free energy. If we add the AAM — which is a measure of wind energy — together with the SOI and other free energy terms to the temperature anomaly, and then seek to conserve that measure we can account for the temperature fluctuations observed.
That’s what the <a href="
maksimovich says:
Right, and so we try to extract these short-scale variability factors from the global temperature series. That’s what the CSALT modeldoes, it book-keeps all these factors that people like PV and Ian Wilson and maksimovich and vukcevic claim are important but who don’t want to get their hands dirty and actually do the analysis like I am willing to do. And now that I do it and find the impact relatively inconsequential in comparison to the strength of the CO2 control knob, all I hear from them is howls of derision.
Pekka Pirilä wrote:
| December 23, 2013 at 2:42 am |
“If that’s all, it’s not of any significance for climate.”
I don’t interpret this as a serious comment.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT)’s conflation of dramatically differing views of different commentators is unhelpful.
@ maksimovich
thanks for the links
Paul Vaughan,
I’m 100% serious.
If you wish to make a serious point that contradicts my statement, please make and justify it.
You have written many comments related to LOD and climate, none of them contains justified statements that contradict my comment as far as have understood them. If you disagree, start telling your thoughts in a way that someone can understand.
Yes, crypticism is an old pseudo-scientific ploy. And then getting the vapors when called on it is transparently phony.
The CSALT model is simply analyzing the temperature record in terms of contributing factors. This chart by Judith Lean snapped by a WUWT attendee at the AGU shows the principle decomposition of the 5 main ingredients:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/wpid-wp-1386700870107.jpg
We can also add other minor factors that you and Ian Wilson and others have proposed to see if it improves the fit. These are cyclic, based on fairly well known orbital periods, so it is really very straightforward to add to the mix.
Too bad that you don’t like it. You would think that a real scientist would get excited and perhaps want to see if they could improve or extend on the concept. But not pseudos — they just want to add to the FUD for their own amusement.
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maksimovich has contributed positively.
No problem. It’s all good stuff as the minor factors are constructive and help fill in the background noise.
The idea is to give you enough rope.
I have been trying to make point on Climate Etc and elsewhere. There is no empirical data that shows that adding CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels has any appreciable effect. There is no CO2 signal in any modern temperature/time graph, and no signal in the OHC data.
If scientists have no empirical data then they should STFU.
Exactly. They could do some experiments if they wanted to test their ‘hypothesis’.
My proposal is to create an artificial CO2 dome in a pristine area, for example by relocating the emission point of a coal fired power station. So, there would be variable CO2 concentrations in the air, with the maximum concentration in the immediate vicinity of the emission point and declining concentrantions with increasing distance. Then, one can measure temperatures, surface energy fluxes and other relevant parameters and see how they vary with the CO2 concentrations.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | December 23, 2013 at 7:18 am |
Richard Alley’s use of the term “climate zombie” is apropos when you consider the profile pic that Ian Wilson uses on his blog:
http://www.blogger.com/profile/00390339452469614741
My profile picture is a mirror.
Vilnius | December 23, 2013 at 2:09 am |
Re: Ian Wilson | December 22, 2013 at 2:04 pm
As is clear from a reading of his papers, Miskolczi’s infra-red optical depth is no more than a quantity calculated from radiosonde data through the use of a precise and well-constructed radiative transfer algorithm. Miskolczi’s quantity depends heavily on the radiosonde data. Some people question the quality of the water vapor measurements made by the radiosondes but I’ve been informed that Miskolczi believes that the presently published water vapor measurements are the current best bet. Also Garth Paltridge considers that they may perhaps have some degree of reliability.
Miskolczi’s infra-red optical depth does not deal with the issue of clouds, but treats the data as if it came from a clear sky. This is means that the results are not directly useful for purposes which require very accurate energy balances that are affected by clouds. But they are useful for other purposes, such as year by year comparisons of the global effective greenhouse gas activity of the atmosphere.
Your specific questions presuppose that Miskolczi’s algorithm should take clouds into account. It does not. That is clear from his papers, as you have pointed out from your reading of them. Absent the presupposition for your specific questions, they can hardly be answered.
Re Ian Wilson | December 23, 2013 at 4:55 pm |
You wrote:
“Miskolczi’s infra-red optical depth is no more than a quantity calculated from radiosonde data”
and
“Miskolczi’s infra-red optical depth does not deal with the issue of clouds, but treats the data as if it came from a clear sky.”
I hope your explanation is not intended to replace a correct description of his method.
I must say, the infra-red optical depth is a well-defined quantity: it comes from the infra-red transmission (the negative logarithm of it). To calculate the IR transmission (1 minus absorption) of an 60 km high air column as if there were NO CLOUDS, when in reality there ARE clouds at several levels blocking the way if the IR photons completely is, sorry to say again, entirely meaningless. To conclude from this method that this quantity has remained the same in 60 years is nonsense. It may be good for the non-scientific non-peer-reviewed journal Energy and Environment, but it cannot be the foundation of such a heavy claim for anyone in real science. (With this I do not say that AGW represents the real science).
I would say the behavior of the REAL CLEAR SKY tau could be really interesting, + a study of the variation of the cloud IR effect. If they ALTOGETHER remained unchanged, THAT would be the big deal.
Let me continue my reply at
Vilnius | December 23, 2013 at 2:09 am |
Re: Ian Wilson | December 22, 2013 at 2:04 pm
You wrote:
(the results) “are useful for other purposes, such as year by year comparisons of the global effective greenhouse gas activity of the atmosphere”
Water in the air is in form of vapor and in form of ice (in clouds). The latter is NOT measured by the radiosonde. If in the radiosonde data water vapor amount has declined it the past 60 years globally (as the 2010 paper Fig 9 shows), this might also mean that more water in the air is there in clouds as ice. This may say something about the cloud amount and ice content, but not about the “effective greenhouse gas activity”. I am talking here about the directly measured radiosonde water vapor data, not about the useless clear-sky transmission calculations on cloudy profiles.
Vilnius, “Water in the air is in form of vapor and in form of ice (in clouds).”
Water vapor, Ice and Water as in mixed phase clouds. Mixed phase can exist to temperatures less than -30C producing a wonderfully complicated IR transmission problem.
A livelier iris changes on the burnished dove.
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Pekka Pirilä | December 23, 2013 at 2:42 am |
Your not the sharpest tool in the shed are you?
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/connecting-planetary-periodicities-to.html
It’s well known that variations in movement of ocean water involve angular momentum, and that variations in angular momentum of oceans affects LOD. Thus variability in tides leads to variability in LOD at some level.
The question is not, whether some effects exist, it’s whether those effects are strong enough to affect significantly something else, like climate.
Your explanation may be correct or not, I haven’t tried to confirm or disprove it, but your own results tell that the effect is so small, that it’s hard to see, how it would affect anything else significantly.
Indeed, the effects of tides on climate have to be there on some level, it is just a matter of being able to discriminate the periodic signal — it has to be periodic if it is due to tides — from the overall temperature signal.
So what happens if one can detect the signal and it happens to be in phase with the expected maximum tidal effect:
http://contextearth.com/2013/12/06/tidal-component-to-csalt/
Then we can place bounds on the tidal contribution to the climate temperature signal and use that knowledge to further delineate the long-term driving forces.
That is the way one does scientific characterization. It is an ebb and flow of testing hypotheses and tuning the comprehensive model. Fun stuff, not boring.
An item of interest is that now the US government will allow people to take the costs of rising sea-levels into account when doing a cost-benefit analysis for applying for government money to protect coastal properties. This realization is a step forwards. I am guessing other countries may be ahead with this.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/23/fema-flood-program_n_4495117.html
I am not a big fan of Bill Nye’s explanations, but he did OK here, plus who could go wrong when you have shouting Republican denialists scattered through your video.
http://www.upworthy.com/bill-nye-is-too-busy-saving-the-world-to-say-i-told-you-so