by Judith Curry
Since the early 1990s, sea level rose at a mean rate of ~3.1 mm yr−1. However, over the last decade a slowdown of this rate, of about 30%, has been recorded. – Cazenave et al.
For background on the topic of sea level rise, see these previous posts:
- PDO, ENSO and sea level rise
- 20th century mean global sea level rise
- Sea level rise discussion thread
An interesting new paper published by Nature Climate Change:
The rate of sea level rise
Anny Cazenave, Habib-Boubacar Dieng, Benoit Meyssignac, Karina von Schuckmann, Bertrand Decharme & Etienne Berthier
Abstract. Present-day sea-level rise is a major indicator of climate change. Since the early 1990s, sea level rose at a mean rate of ~3.1 mm yr−1. However, over the last decade a slowdown of this rate, of about 30%, has been recorded. It coincides with a plateau in Earth’s mean surface temperature evolution, known as the recent pause in warming. Here we present an analysis based on sea-level data from the altimetry record of the past ~20 years that separates interannual natural variability in sea level from the longer-term change probably related to anthropogenic global warming. The most prominent signature in the global mean sea level interannual variability is caused by El Niño–Southern Oscillation, through its impact on the global water cycle. We find that when correcting for interannual variability, the past decade’s slowdown of the global mean sea level disappears, leading to a similar rate of sea-level rise (of 3.3 ± 0.4 mm yr−1) during the first and second decade of the altimetry era. Our results confirm the need for quantifying and further removing from the climate records the short-term natural climate variability if one wants to extract the global warming signal.
Published in Nature Climate Change.
This paper is being spun in interesting ways. An article from Reporting Climate Science is titled Sea Level Rise Has Not Stalled Says Study. Reuters has a better article entitled Shifts in rainfall, not warming pause, slow sea level rise. Excerpts:
Sea level rise has been one of the clearest signs of climate change – water expands as it warms and parts of Greenland and Antarctica are thawing, along with glaciers from the Himalayas to the Alps.
But in a puzzle to climate scientists, the rate slowed to 2.4 millimetres (0.09 inch) a year from 2003 to 2011 from 3.4 mm from 1994-2002, heartening sceptics who doubt that deep cuts are needed in mankind’s rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday, experts said the rate from 2003-2011 would have been 3.3 mm a year when excluding natural shifts led by an unusually high number of La Nina weather events that cool the surface of the Pacific Ocean and cause more rain over land.
In La Nina years, more rain fell away from oceans, including over the Amazon, the Congo basin and Australia, she said. It is unclear if climate change itself affects the frequency of La Ninas.
The apparent slowing of sea level rise coincided with what the U.N. panel of climate experts calls a hiatus in global warming at the Earth’s surface, when temperatures have risen less sharply despite record emissions of greenhouse gases.
“The slowdown in sea level rise … is due to natural variability in the climate and is not indicative of a slowdown in the effects of global warming,” Nature Climate Change said.
Many scientists suspect that the “missing heat” from a build-up greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is going into the deep oceans as part of natural variations in the climate.
But, because water expands as it warms, that theory had been hard to reconcile with the apparent slowdown in sea level rise.
Sea levels have risen almost 20 cms since 1900. The U.N. panel of climate experts expects an acceleration, with gains of between 26 and 82 cms over 100 years to the late 21st century.
JC reflections
Recall this figure from AR5 on 20th century sea level rise:
Consider the following statements from Cazenave regarding global sea level rise:
- the 20th century average is 2 mm/yr,
- observations from 1992-2002 are 3.4 mm/yr
- observations from 2003-2011 are 2.4 mm/yr
- when corrected for an abundance of La Ninas, sea level rise from 2003-2011 is ‘adjusted’ to 3.3 mm/yr
Rather than adjusting the period 2003-2011, instead adjust the period 1992-2002 for a surplus of El Ninos. Perhaps this would lower the sea level rise for this period to 2.5 mm/yr (or lower). I don’t think there is any objective/convincing way to filter out the effects of El Nino/La Nina. They seem to be an intrinsic part of sea level variations, as is the PDO/AMO on multidecadal time scales.
Can someone then tell me how you can infer that sea level rise is accelerating due to AGW, when compared with sea level rise for the first half of the 20th century?
It is clear that natural variability has dominated sea level rise during the 20th century, with changes in ocean heat content and changes in precipitation patterns.
Once again, the emerging best explanations for the ‘pause’ in global surface temperatures and the slow down in sea level rise bring into question the explanations for the rise in both in the last quarter of the 20th century. And makes the 21st century of sea level rise projections seem like unjustified arm waving.
Reminds me of the old idea that if all you have is a hammer (CO2), then everything looks like a nail.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/apr/24/global-warming-human-caused-not-stadium-wave
Speaking of getting hammered, poor Wyatt. Shame she was led to this like a lamb to the slaughter. At least it was mercifully quick.
‘First we construct a network from four major climate
indices. The network approach to complex systems is a
rapidly developing methodology, which has proven to be useful in analyzing such systems’ behavior [Albert and Barabasi, 2002; Strogatz, 2001]. In this approach, a complex system is presented as a set of connected nodes. The collective behavior of all the nodes and links (the topology of the network) describes the dynamics of the system and offers new ways to investigate its properties. The indices represent the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the North
Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the El Nin˜o/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the North Pacific Oscillation (NPO).’ http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/21743.pdf
The stadium wave is an inevitable consequence of looking beyond the climate indices to the underlying complex dynamical system.
It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.
Poor little Barty is on the wrong side of – well everything – yet again.
BartR
Hmmm. Prof wyatt or Dana/Mann/ guardian?
I know who I would back. Let’s see if prof wyatt comes up with a refutation
Tonyb
Does it even embarrass him when he references an article by Dana? A proven liar? Not to mention dataless Mann.
Generalissimo Skippy | April 24, 2014 at 6:17 pm |
Citing a seven year old citation of what was then a seven year old citation of something to irrelevant to the paper in question, then making insupportable assertions about inevitability (which, ironic, as complex dynamical systems pretty much argue against the precept of predetermination), and ending with an implied causal relationship from the symptoms of Forcings to the Forcings themselves, served with a dollop of ad hom.. at least regardless of how often the pseudonym varies, the pseudoscience remains as telling as a fingerprint.
The Stadium Wave is a bad guess, shown to be unsupported by the data, produced by bad methodology adapted from fields none of the authors understand or have backgrounds in.
It’s been predictably smacked around hard by the worst possible lead author to have standing over the wreckage of any scholar’s debunked first paper in Climate. And this could have been avoided by a little self-discipline on the part of the supervisors, who shoulder the entire blame for this fiasco.
Having one’s only paper Cold Fusioned in the mass media is a very deep embarrassment. Fleishmann & Pons careers didn’t survive it, and they were established and reputable.
— Bart R | April 24, 2014 at 5:57 pm |
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/apr/24/global-warming-human-caused-not-stadium-wave
Speaking of getting hammered, poor Wyatt. Shame she was led to this like a lamb to the slaughter. At least it was mercifully quick.—
“they are likely an “artifact of this flawed procedure.”
Likely doesn’t make the grade, when one has the Guardian and Mann combination. Even if real scientist were saying likely or unlikely. Or IPCC and it’s 95% confidence should not be taken as a serious statement..
Tonyb | April 24, 2014 at 6:55 pm |
SCIENCE IS NOT FREAKING ABOUT THE PEOPLE YOU WANT TO BACK, IT’S ABOUT THE FREAKING EVIDENCE AND INFERENCE THAT BACKS THE MOST ACCURATE AND THEREBY NEARLY FREAKING TRUE EXPLANATION.
It’s not about favorites. It’s not about nice people. It’s not about personality.
I mean, you’re a nice guy and all, but your logic is the last thing in the world I’d want backing me.
BartR
The logic is surely you wait for a refutation from the original author before believing that something has been proven wrong
Tonyb
It is not the evidence, but the seriousness of the charges.
Tonyb | April 24, 2014 at 7:15 pm |
Your argument confuses logic, which is what the scientific mainstream will choose, over courtesy, that admirable quality much of the mainstream holds fifth or sixth rank below logic.
The track record of people in the position of Wyatt and the treatment accorded by the 97% is not good, as a historical truth.
I’m sure Marcia Wyatt is a nice person, a smart person, a strong person of excellent character. And none of that will matter when her paper has been found so egregiously lacking by such a thoroughgoing and rigorously argued critique. These are not small potato issues, Tony; the napalm-level incendiary burndown of the Stadium Wave is as mathematically solid as I’ve seen done in any field in a long, long time, beyond the autism-vaccine link.
You know that from the start I found the Stadium Wave mathematically and methodologically wanting, but even I winced when I read the shredding it received. And on top of that, the Guardian waved around the gory remains for laymen to read all about.
I’d like if people were kind, understanding, and courteous with the authors. They are, I know, people of good heart.
But my experience — which is not brief — of academia — which is broad — leads me to expect a very hard time will be had.
BartR, “I’m sure Marcia Wyatt is a nice person, a smart person, a strong person of excellent character. And none of that will matter when her paper has been found so egregiously lacking by such a thoroughgoing and rigorously argued critique.”
Upside down Mann?
Bart R: Speaking of getting hammered, poor Wyatt. Shame she was led to this like a lamb to the slaughter. At least it was mercifully quick.
You quote the Guardian quoting Mann? lol
BartR, your glee is unconcealed by your wincing. But relying on Mann has proven perilous in the past.
Bart R, the paper was paywalled, so all I could get was this abstract: Abstract
We estimate the low-frequency internal variability of Northern Hemisphere (NH) mean temperature using observed temperature variations, which include both forced and internal variability components, and several alternative model simulations of the (natural + anthropogenic) forced component alone. We then generate an ensemble of alternative historical temperature histories based on the statistics of the estimated internal variability. Using this ensemble, we show, firstly, that recent NH mean temperatures fall within the range of expected multidecadal variability. Using the synthetic temperature histories, we also show that certain procedures used in past studies to estimate internal variability, and in particular, an internal multidecadal oscillation termed the “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation” or “AMO”, fail to isolate the true internal variability when it is a priori known. Such procedures yield an AMO signal with an inflated amplitude and biased phase, attributing some of the recent NH mean temperature rise to the AMO. The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming. Claims of multidecadal “stadium wave” patterns of variation across multiple climate indices are also shown to likely be an artifact of this flawed procedure for isolating putative climate oscillations.
Was the Wyatt and Curry stadium wave in the North Atlantic? My memory is that it was a North Pacific oscillation. Also, as you’ll recall, Wyatt and Curry had actual data, whereas this is a simulation based on abstracted models of the NH; it seems that they show their models do not reproduce the data patterns found by Wyatt and Curry. It would be nice to get this paper and its supporting online material out in the open where we could discuss it.
The 2007 paper was called – “A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts”.
‘This is the first time that this mechanism, which appears consistent with the theory of synchronized chaos, is discovered in a physical system of the size and complexity of the climate system.’
‘The global climate system is composed of a number
of subsystems – atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere – each of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a
fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’ http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.303.1951&rep=rep1&type=pdf
The original paper defines the nature of the system – as nodes on the surface of the underlying global system. The Ghil paper describes it in a different way – but with the same idea of an underlying system consisting of a number of sub-systems. The paper was updated in 2009 – and there have been several contribution since – including the Wyatt and Curry paper last year. The underlying complex and dynamic system is an inevitable reality – the maths is simply an approach to describing the system.
Barty of course has not a freakin’ clue about anything. Maths, physics, Earth sciences – all without exception misrepresented and an excuse for stream of calumny diversions into bizarre and tortuous circumlocutions.
I had a little look at Mike’s paper the other day. The first thing I noticed was he seemed to have the phase of the AMO reversed compared to conventional understanding. The second thing I noticed was there was no data used, only synthetic data. Another thing was there was only an aside reference to the stadium wave hypothesis.
It is my opinion that Dana is not known to be shy, and that he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Now it is possible he has had some encouragement to throw stones, but it seems he has totally missed the point of Mike et al’s paper. Maybe he was just looking for a headline.
Barty
I hope you dont go to the track soon, since you seem to be betting on the wrong horse. Mann has given nothing but failed predictions. He is batting worse than a minor leaguer.
dalyplanet | April 24, 2014 at 10:05 pm |
You think it was Dana who wrote it?
Posted by John Abraham suggests you may err.
To repeat, this isn’t about the likability of people, but about the reading the mainstream scientific community will give this issue.
The mainstream isn’t burdened by special love of one person or another, or by unreasoned hatred of one person or the other, as happens here. They don’t fixate on old misinterpretations of old misinterpretations, by and large. They look at the arguments and evidence, and apply independent judgment.
And they’ve seen this before. Fleischmann and Pons. The autism-vaccine link. Hoaxes and bad papers and worse. McIntyre McKitrick. Wegman. They know how this goes.
However, this case has a different element involved, too, that makes it special, and to my mind far worse.
This could have been avoided had the thesis supervisor and more experienced academics involved shown integrity and self-discipline, done more validation, called in someone with expertise in the methodology to check the work and avoid the gross and obvious errors. I don’t blame Marcia Wyatt for her naivete. She was let down by the people she trusted, because they let zealotry overrule good prudence.
So, “good” scientists only publish in echo chambers?
And Prof. Wyatt’s naivete’?
Keep your day job. Jon Stewart has no threat from you.
Bart
Thank you for correcting my error. I apologize for not reading hard enough. Please allow me to correct my last paragraph.
It is my opinion that John is not known to be shy, and that he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, although much sharper than Dana. Now it is possible he has had some encouragement to throw stones, but it seems he has totally missed the point of Mike et al’s paper. Maybe he was just looking for a headline.
To be clear Bart, Mike,s paper was about the phase and amplitude of the AMO and, and by his understanding, this may be different than conventional understanding, and how this affects the present temperature today as well as the near future.
‘These studies employed what we will henceforth refer to as the “Detrended-AMO” approach: the AMO signal was defined as the low-frequency component that remains after linearly detrending surface temperatures. Other studies, however, have demonstrated likely artifacts of that procedure [Trenberth and Shea, 2006; Mann and Emanuel, 2006; Delworth et al, 2007; Ting et al, 2009]. For example, Mann and Emanuel [2006] show that such a procedure misattributes at least part of the forced cooling of the NH by anthropogenic aerosols during the 1950s-1970s (especially over parts of the North Atlantic) to the purported down-swing of an internal “AMO” oscillation. A number of climate modeling studies support their finding [Santer et al, 2006; Booth et al, 2012; Evan, 2012; Dunstone et al, 2013], though the precise role that anthropogenic aerosols have played in recent decades continues to be debated in the literature [Koch et al, 2011; Carslaw et al, 2013; Stevens, 2013].’ http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/research/res_pages/GRL_AMO14/GRL_AMO14.html
Using a questionable fudge factor projected onto NH temperature – we can ignore the raw AMO signal? This is the dregs of scientific inference.
But instead of bogging down with more unseemly tricks from Michael – brought up as in the same spirit by Bart. It still misses the major point. Funny about that. Climate is a globally interconnected system. It is such an obvious truth.
The Guardian title could be “Regional reanalysis of synthetic data finds all others wrong”
Uh, correct me if I’m wrong, but has Bart produced anything in the way of an actual debating point here, or is it all invective disguised as erudition?
It remains the case that first attempts at describing a difficult truth are of much greater scientific interest than a pedestrian attempt to disprove an evident reality.
Mann’s that is – Bart hardly ever – if at all – rises above circumloquacious stream of calumny.
“The mainstream isn’t burdened by special love of one person or another, or by unreasoned hatred of one person or the other, as happens here. They don’t fixate on old misinterpretations of old misinterpretations, by and large. They look at the arguments and evidence, and apply independent judgment.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worse misreading of “,mainstream” climate science.
NW | April 25, 2014 at 3:13 am |
Shooting the messenger much?
I’m not debating; I’m reporting.
X happened at Y time in Z place, showing us the bad consequences from A happening at B time in C place.
You want to engage in debate?
Propose a worthy topic and a disinterested moderator.
Which, wouldn’t be happening now here.
dalyplanet | April 25, 2014 at 1:38 am |
I get your objection. A refutation paper needs meet a very much lower bar in so many ways than an original paper, that there is a perception of unfairness. But that perception you harp on.. it’s backwards.
The validation method used by Mann et al is very standard, and almost trivial. Steve Mosher frequently suggests when people propose ideas about data doing something not terribly dissimilar to test the validity of the idea.
The whole point of the Mann paper is that synthetic regional data could entirely fool the Wyatt et al method, which in effect is shown to predetermine Wyatt’s outcome. Her investigation would have produced a Stadium Wave out of noise.
Readers of CE should be familiar with this concept in the context of Mann, as it is exactly one of the favorite attacks on the Hockey Stick to produce hockey stick lines from noise. Google “hockey stick red noise mann ipcc” if you need a reminder.
Except, y’know, Mann et al did their math right; and no one else can find a matching Stadium Wave using any other method than Wyatt’s. And the precepts of Big Data analyses fail in the Wyatt paper. And the cumulative uncertainty of the observations make the Stadium Wave confidence level practically the same as the confidence level a James Bond novel is the literal truth.
So, sure, the Mann et al paper wouldn’t be a very good original paper to support a new claim. But to obliterate a bad claim, it’s exactly the way to go about invalidating a thesis paper.
pokerguy (aka al neipris) | April 25, 2014 at 6:39 am |
You appear to be confusing mainstream with administration. A common mistake: many academic administrators make the same error.
BartR, “Her investigation would have produced a Stadium Wave out of noise.”
So? There is not a lot of difference between “weather” noise and data noise. The point of the “Stadium Wave” is that there is a somewhat predictable relationship between noise sources. That would be autocorrelation. If the AMO is in such and such phase and sea ice extent in such and such phase it takes times for the system to shift phases which is directly related to the inertia of the “noise” sources.
Robert I Elison | April 25, 2014 at 1:12 am |
Yes, climate is a globally interconnected system.
You can create a model of six planets whose orbits produce eccentricities in each others’ paths, because we have well-formulated laws of the motions of bodies in space and the influence of gravity, and we can actually see planets and know their position, velocity and mass.
No, you cannot construct a six phase intermodulated wave model of a dynamic integrated system with any confidence when the underlying functions are unknown.
So while in principle, there’s some sort of interconnected system, in practice we can dismiss the notion that the Stadium Wave captures it in a model in any sense.
captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2 | April 25, 2014 at 7:38 am |
Missing the issue: regardless of the ‘somewhat’ (where ‘somewhat’ is in the range of 5% to 40%?) relationship between noise sources, the method used to generate the wave produces exactly the same wave over and over and over again on multiple other known not valid values when run in simulation.
The hypothesis of autocorrelation as explained in the Stadium Wave model is therefore invalid.
Yes, there’s no doubt autocorrelation at some level, too low to be useful for any practical purpose. No, the Stadium Wave can’t be said to model the real thing, since it tunes itself to produce what is essentially a predetermined result regardless of the inputs. The method in effect begs the question.
That’s now been demonstrated in a published paper, formally.
Just because a specific formulation of synthetic data could fool a particular method doesn’t mean that it has. The method, and its results, remain valid science, appropriate for publication and study.
And, considering the identity of the lead author of the paper, the presumption of any objective observer must be that the results were probably cherry-picked: they kept trying different approaches until they found one that could “fool” the methods they were
attackingtrying to attack. (Not to mention probably using some of their data upside down.)Not to say they necessarily did this, but given past history, Mann et al. (whoever the “et al.” is) must be considered guilty until proven innocent. IMO.
“You appear to be confusing mainstream with administration. A common mistake: many academic administrators make the same error.”
Hey Bart,
You’re a smart fellow, I’ll certainly give you that. But you seem to be confusing real life with some sort of idealized abstraction.
BartR, Nope, you miss the point pretty much like Upside Down Mann does. Since the “real” noise is related to physical processes you have the ability to estimate the inertia. The trick is finding the “real” physical aspect of the system. Mann just fools himself with his expectations leading to silly discoveries like trees must take time outs since their annual rings don’t agree with his preconceived notions.
BartR, “Her investigation would have produced a Stadium Wave out of noise.”
Most cycles are formed from noise,ice ages (Nicolis and Nicolis) biological, business cycles (Slutsky) Enso (Zaliaplin and Ghil) there is even a very adept name for it stochastic resonance eg Benzi.
In some sense, we can think of a “resonance”
as follows. In the standard resonance mechanism, think for
instance of a damped harmonic oscillator, the amplification
of the external forcing can be related, mathematically, to a
singularity in the complex plane of the Green function of the
problem. The real part of the singularity is, of course, the
resonance frequency. In chaotic or stochastic systems, there
are singularities in the complex plane but on the imaginary
axis. The mechanism of stochastic resonance provides a
way to shift the singularity in the complex plane
AK | April 25, 2014 at 7:51 am |
Wishful thinking and ad personam does not get us very far.
1+1=2.
1*(4000/(2000+2000)) + 1^(7-6)=2
That is a case of synthetic data tossed into a simple model not invalidating the operation. Addition remains a real and true function.
The Stadium Wave, however, does not.
Just because you don’t like the lead author, or know that the other two authors are distinguished specialists with sterling track records and citations for this sort of work that eclipse the authors of the original paper in this particular specialty, doesn’t mean you can make crap up about them and call that vindication of the idea they have shown false.
Well, clearly you _can_ make up crap about people and call that vindication of some false idea, as you have. But it doesn’t make it persuasive except to those already drinking the same koolaid, or valid reasoning.
maksimovich | April 25, 2014 at 8:02 am |
How does that bit of trivial hairsplitting about the definition of the word noise even begin to approach relevance here?
Capt;n says “Mann just fools himself with his expectations leading to silly discoveries like trees must take time outs since their annual rings don’t agree with his preconceived notions.”
Which seems to be the hallmark of Bart’s revered mainstream climate science these days. Of course it’s endemic in all science, but there’s something so willfully blind among the climateers that it begins at times to stink of something close to fraud.
captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2 | April 25, 2014 at 7:57 am |
By ‘inertia’ in this case, you appear to mean ‘foregone conclusion’.
The inertia is an artifact of the method, and has no real world counterpart.
If it does, produce it from any other method than that used in the Wyatt et al paper.
Otherwise, it is fairy dust.
pokerguy (aka al neipris) | April 25, 2014 at 8:11 am |
The hallmark of mainstream science that cures preconceived notions is independent verification. Mann’s “upside down” results have over a dozen times been arrived at (better) by methods that do not rely on Mann’s (technically inferior) method.
Wyatt’s Stadium Wave appears to only be reproducible using Wyatt’s Stadium Wave.
Do you see the difference?
No?
Well, mainstream science can.
BartR, “By ‘inertia’ in this case, you appear to mean ‘foregone conclusion’.
The inertia is an artifact of the method, and has no real world counterpart.”
No mini-Mann, I am talking about inertia, the ocean don’t stop on a dime, tides lead currents and stay 6 car lengths back or suffer the consequences. That is a part of the “noise” that needs to be teased out if you wish to model “climate” or “weather”. Because of the limits of ocean heat transport you have “real” thermal inertia, not just heat capacity.
@Bart R…
It isn’t that I “don’t like the lead author”, it’s that he has a track record of producing bogus work, then using methods not appropriate to science to defend it from actual investigation by would-be replicators. He clearly isn’t a scientist, whatever “credentials” he has, and either doesn’t understand what modern science is about, or is deliberately guilty of perverting it for political purposes.
As for the “sterling track records” of the other authors of the paper, even assuming them all this new paper does is raise valid questions regarding the “stadium wave”. Whether it’s really applicable, when all it’s actually working with is the AMO, remains sub judice. It can hardly be (honestly) said to be a “refutation” of Wyatt et al..
And as for “wishful thinking”, I’m not especially enamored of the “stadium wave” hypothesis; IMO the regularity they seem to find is probably an artifact of the short period under study, while it’s much more probable that actual fluctuations are much more “random”. Given the large number of varying factors involved in controlling the path of “weather” (in n-dimensional phenomenistic space), it seems very likely that even major effects shouldn’t be expected to repeat themselves.
IOW, while I regard the “stadium wave” approach as far superior to the “equilibrium with ‘external’ forcing” approach based on obsolete “science”, it’s just a baby step in what I consider the right direction.
All of which doesn’t change the fact that a paper with this particular lead author should be considered guilty until proven innocent. Of perverting science for the sake of politics. Not to mention, of course, the extent to which a website with a known track record of distorting real science for political purposes has distorted the findings of this paper.
Shame on you for joining in!
“Do you see the difference?”
Yes Bart, I see the difference. Generally speaking, don’t you think it’s a good idea to wait to hear what the original author has to say WRT to criticisms. Of course Mann’s a loony, hypocritical jerk, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be right…though I wouldn’t bet on it
I do believe I recall Judith mentioning a post in the works to address some of these issues.
Pokerguy, “Of course it’s endemic in all science, but there’s something so willfully blind among the climateers that it begins at times to stink of something close to fraud.”
Stupidity is fraudulent it is alive and well in statistics. Since most of the “climate signal” is just “weather noise” the more you manipulate you methods the more “discoveries” you can make.
Real climate appears to vary in a range of +/- 1.25 C globally and with ~0.8 C of “sensitivity”, AGW has broken out of the “noise”.
Mann is probably right when he states the AMO has contributed to cooling for the last decade. OHC in the N Atlantic started dropping about 2007. The AMO probably contributed to warming for about 3 decades prior to 2007. The AMO is still in the warm phase but heading down to the cool phase. Expect about 3 decades of contributed cooling from the AMO before it reaches minimal heat transport and begins to speed up again assuming it won’t get stuck in a negative phase as at least one reconstruction shows it did during the LIA.
Also notice that, as of posting this comment, RealClimate has nothing about this article. Why not? If it justified the sort of things being said at the “Guardian”, why aren’t they being said by Mann or one of his henchmen somewhere more “reputable”?
pokerguy (aka al neipris) | April 25, 2014 at 8:50 am |
Generally speaking, don’t you think it’s a good idea to wait to hear what the original author has to say WRT to criticisms.
You’re mistaking conversations. I’m not judging what is to come, I’m reporting what has already happened, and why.
In the ordinary course of an ordinary first thesis, all of this ought never have happened. The thesis advisors would have foreseen objections as obvious as the ones raised and ensured the author had established in the paper a solid bulwark against such a slam.
Heck, if the Stadium Wave paper had simply more clearly said it was presenting a Pretendland model based on real world metrics as an example of the family of models that might be plausible, that almost would have been enough, if not for the autotuning inherent in the Stadium Wave.
If the problem of autotuning had been mentioned as a challenge for further study later, that would have sufficed.
As it is, those failures are pretty appalling, and if they come out in rebuttal now, they’re just going to fall flat.
Far better to withdraw.
Bart R. I’m so happy that finally you have realized that the climate so physically complex, that all mathematical and computer models of it exist only in Pretendland. That’s a big step forward for you. Congrats!
So, Bart R., Mann’s new paper uses models to show the stadium wave isn’t a good model. Have you learned your lesson about models yet?
Barty is very good at digging very deep holes.
Wow,
people sure freak out over scientific blunders, presupposing that the stadium wave is a blunder.
lets be crystal effin clear.
1. climate science is an observational science.
2. this ENTAILS that controlled experiments cannot be conducted.
3. Controlled experiments are REQUIRED to isolate the influence of various causes.
4. The state of the climate system is the result of various causes.
5. Consequently all understanding of the climate system will less certain
than our understanding in fields where we can do controlled experiments.
6. This understanding may or may not be solid enough to form policy.
7. With no ability to do controlled experiments scientists are left with
these rational options.
A) throw up their hands and quit. A purist might do this.
B) propose an “empirical model” to explain the low dimensional
aspects of the system.
C) model the whole damn climate so you can do controlled “experiments”
Those are your three options boys. Quit, build empirical (statistical) models, or simulate.
Option A: option A takes many forms. Usually appeals to an ideal of science
or the scientific method is involved. Proponents hold our experimental science as the only pathway to knowledge or understanding. They will also make various appeals to things like the unpredictability of chaotic systems.
In short, they hold the position that controlled experiments is not merely
the best path to understanding, they imply it is the only path and any other
path to understanding is bankrupt. They are also susceptible to epistemic
hypocrisy, in short if you press them about their other beliefs you will find
that they don’t employ their ideal of knowledge consistently. Thankfully, policy makers dont listen to them. A good parallel would be economics or defense planning. Like climate science these two fields are observational sciences. We cant run controlled experiments on the economy, and we can’t run controlled experiments on defense policy. In both of these realms policy makers rely on expert opinion, opinion which is supported by data analysis as generated by scientists who employ Option “B” from above or option “C”
Policy makers are not interested in folks who preach about the ideal of science. In defense planning for example, no expert mistakes his war simulations for “real experiments” and those models are not validated in any meaningful way: there is not enough data from war to test against.
But the models are relied on not as truth per se but rather as our best understanding of what might happen. The same with economics. Take the recent calculations of job loss from obamacare. You won’t find any of my right wing science purists arguing that the models that predict this job loss are not evidence. take the Laffer curve. You wont find any of them arguing that the econony is too complex to capture with a simple equation. In short their worship of a science ideal is entirely opportunistic and selective.
Option B: In option B the scientist tried to understand some low dimensional aspect of the system ( global temperature for example) by constructing a function that operates over a variety of parameters. Say, temp = f(sun, c02, stadium wave, etc) It goes without saying that this approach will always be limited by the fact that many many many functions can be fit to the temperature series. It also goes without saying that overfitting is a problem.
Here I find two schools of thought. Let us call them the Muller school and Pratt school. The Muller school aims at identifying the smallest number of parameters that capture the essence of the curve. The Pratt school strives for millikelvin accuracy. Sitting through a discussion by proponents from both schools, my sense was.. they both make sense. The biggest issue with this approach is that it only tackles one dimension of the climate: temperature.
Option C: the option folks love to hate. Do experiments in models.
In practice many people who do B also rely on C. In any case those are your three options with observational science. Quit, build phenonmenalistic
models of low dimensional aspects of the system, or model the whole thing.
Here is a clue, more data, just waiting, isnt going to make the problem go away.
Bart
You are not understanding that Mike’s paper is a possible attempt at refutation of two papers by Chylek et al and the reference to Wyatt is only a snide aside.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL059274/pdf
You may notice that Chylek conclusions and Mann conclusions are at odds with each other.. Perhaps you may not have noticed as you may have only seen the Abraham rather confusing interpretation..
Yes, climate is a globally interconnected system.
You can create a model of six planets whose orbits produce eccentricities in each others’ paths, because we have well-formulated laws of the motions of bodies in space and the influence of gravity, and we can actually see planets and know their position, velocity and mass.
No, you cannot construct a six phase intermodulated wave model of a dynamic integrated system with any confidence when the underlying functions are unknown.
So while in principle, there’s some sort of interconnected system, in practice we can dismiss the notion that the Stadium Wave captures it in a model in any sense.
It is evident that there are connections between sub-systems from the poles to the equator. What was done was with multivariate statistical analysis of indices over the past century. Mann et al did nothing to dispute this merely invoked the specter of sulphides in respect of just one of these indices.
I suppose multivariate statistics are impossible? Bart invents nonsense from whole cloth for some inscrutable purposes of his own.
Bart: If Mann and company had an open-and-shut case refuting the stadium wave, they could have submitted a comment concerning the original stadium wave paper and the reply of Wyatt et al would be known. Instead they published a stand-alone paper. Did the editor use any of the authors of the stadium wave paper as reviewers? If not, the last word on the stadium wave certainly has not been heard. So why jump to conclusions, especially since some of Micky’s past work has not withstood intensive scrutiny or the test of time? How can you be sure that this paper won’t turn out like Santer’s refutation of Douglas on the existence of the hot-spot in the upper tropical troposphere? In that case, simply applying the method in Santer’s paper to the full record available at the time was enough to prove Santer wrong.
Whenever activist scientists on either side of a issue are involved, remember Feynman’s “Cargo Cult Science”: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.” Those who are convinced they already have all of the answers generally are the ones most likely to fool themselves.
In any case, it will be interesting to see what, if anything, our host choses to say about the subject and how it develops.
Nice summary Mosh. I’ll go with option B.Mueller. I like to think that climate science is science in slow motion, so option C is out until it demonstrates some skill, or at least better skill. I find the cause/effect relationships within Option B.Pratt questionable. This includes other models with >2 input timeseries. So for GMST my model is temp = f(radiative forcing, enso). Unfortunately the error bars on human aerosols are so large that even TCR can’t be reasonably constrained. So I agree, the problem (whatever it is) hasn’t gone away.
Steven Mosher, I’ve seen simulations of systems hugely less complex than the climate system, which have turned out to be wildly inaccurate because of some misunderstanding of the relationship between a couple of parameters.
I’m not suggesting that is the case with climate models, of course, just that it might not be good to be too sure of them.
Steven Mosher | April 25, 2014 at 1:18 pm |
I’ve seen you clearer. I’m not even sure I’ve seen you less clear.
dalyplanet | April 25, 2014 at 1:45 pm |
Wow. It might also be an attempt to refute Einstein’s paper on Brownian motion in tea, by the same logic.
Grasping at straws does not undo the harm. If two birds killed with one stone, so what? The Wyatt paper is damaged beyond repair.
Generalissimo Skippy | April 25, 2014 at 3:36 pm |
What was done was with multivariate statistical analysis of indices over the past century.
Bzzt. Wrong. What was _failed_ was with multivariate statistical analyses of indices, without recognizing that the cumulative uncertainties rendered the outcomes virtually no more valid than random.. but with the added bonus of autotuning the results to a foregone conclusion regardless of the inputs.
You have to see how that’s a bad thing.
Frank | April 25, 2014 at 3:48 pm |
That’s an awful lotta coulda-woulda-shoulda speculation on the options and motives of others in an alternate universe sort of way. Who are you asking? Some random guy on the Internet in no way connected with the events? Why?
I neither know, nor care, nor need to know the answers to any of your speculations to report on what has happened. That you struggle to accept the reality of what has happened is understandable. It must be hard for you. I sympathize. Take all the time for grieving you need.
Just stop whinging to me about it. I am just. the. messenger.
AJ | April 25, 2014 at 4:30 pm |
At least it was clear to someone. Yay.
phatboy | April 25, 2014 at 4:50 pm |
Thank you for the inoffensively vague handwaving back at Mosher’s vaguely indecipherable handwaving.
It’s so much better than the Bartspiracy Theorist bafflegab.
Bart, don’t metnoin it
Bzzt. Wrong. What was _failed_ was with multivariate statistical analyses of indices, without recognizing that the cumulative uncertainties rendered the outcomes virtually no more valid than random.. but with the added bonus of autotuning the results to a foregone conclusion regardless of the inputs.
You have to see how that’s a bad thing.
So the elevation of Mann’s projection of his sulphate fantasy onto the AMO to a critique of a multi-index analysis transmogrifies into an ill-mannered and ill-informed rant about the music of the spheres and then to some vague handwaving about inaccuracies in the indices sans any analysis at all?
The heights of rational discourse again I see Barty.
“”
The Differenced-AMO approach indeed suggests a very different AMO history, regardless of whether the EBM, CMIP-GISS or CMIP-Full series is used to estimate the forced component. Most importantly, a positive peak is now observed during the 1990s, with a subsequent decline through present (Figure 2). That decline is associated with the much-discussed [The Economist, 2013; Allen et al, 2012; Stocker et al, 2013] deficit of observed vs. model-predicted warming over the past decade. It is thus reasonable to infer that the real AMO has played at least a modest role in that deficit. To the extent that the AMO is an oscillatory mode, it is furthermore reasonable to assume that this cooling effect is fleeting, and that the AMO is likely to instead add to anthropogenic warming in the decades ahead.
“”
This paragraph seems to be the “money shot” of Mann’s paper Bart. It is far from proven that Mike is right and everyone else is wrong about the phase of the AMO. And if Mike overcomes some hurdles and is proven more correct it still does not invalidate Wyatt’s entire hypothesis, but only alters the fit of a single component. It seems clear you are not understanding “On Forced Temperature Changes, Internal Variability and the AMO” and its regional nature compared to Wyatt’s NH tele-connected climate system hypothesis.
dalyplanet | April 25, 2014 at 10:50 pm |
Let’s have a close-up look at what Mann’s paper is arguing.. because this part is hilarious:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:101/mean:103/plot/esrl-amo/mean:101/mean:103/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:204/trend/plot/esrl-amo/last:204/trend
The similarities of the AMO with the global temperature trend are often commented on, and much chicken-or-egging is made of which one drives the other. In particular, let’s look at “The Pause”.
If there’s a temperature ‘Pause’ globally, there is an even more pronounced AMO ‘Pause’ regionally.
However long the global ‘Pause’, the AMO ‘Pause’ appears to be just as long.
Whoever argues that on the figures the global temperatures have stopped rising (they haven’t), must by the same logic agree the AMO is cooling (it has), because the AMO has all the hallmarks in actuality claimed of the global temperature in David Rose fiction.
Not that I have a cat in that bag. I don’t care much about trendology worse than the 95% confidence level, or the one-in-20 time when the trend bucks the best fit. Which both are.
Still, funny as all get out, to see Michael Mann formalizing and endorsing a method used to attack his views, to sink the underpinnings of the attackers’ stance. It’s not the first time he’s done that in this paper, either. Maybe Dr. Mann has a sense of humor after all.
This view looks even funnier:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:101/mean:103/plot/esrl-amo/mean:101/mean:103/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:132/trend/plot/esrl-amo/last:132/trend
AMO’s been cooling for 11 years. (PDO’s been warming for four years, btw.)
If the AMO retains its habit in the 40-60 year up/down history, it has under 20 years, and perhaps under ten years, of contributing cooling, at the same time as the PDO appears to have been entering its longer, slower, far higher amplitude warming phase for the past half decade.
Looking at the amplitude the AMO could have conceivably contributed to global warming, perhaps one fiftieth to one thirtieth of the total, we are very far away from having to consider this, or any of the even smaller parts of the stadium wave, significant.
‘Using this method, and by considering both internal natural climate variations and projected future anthropogenic forcing, we make the following forecast: over the next decade, the current Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will weaken to its long-term mean; moreover, North Atlantic SST and European and North American surface temperatures will cool slightly, whereas tropical Pacific SST will remain almost unchanged. Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.’ http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/abs/nature06921.html
Indeed over the next decade to three – at least – as the Pacific stays cool and the Atlantic cools further. In the bigger scheme of things the Pacific gets yet cooler over centuries.
Wood for dimwits ‘analysis’ notwithstanding.
We’ll see very soon, if Wyatt is correct then no global temperature record nor a record low sea ice extent, area or volume within the next year.
Nothing to see here at all. Climate is a complex network.
In no way will surface temp challenge early 1998 levels this year. I have predicted near record low Arctic Ice this year for a couple of reasons – but it does seem likely to recover over the next few decades.
bob droege | April 26, 2014 at 9:55 pm |
Specious reasoning. No one year tells us anything for certain about climate. A single year contributes no more than one seventeenth of the trend of a global climate curve at the 95% level, one thirtysecondth at the 97.5% level, one fortysecondth at the 99% level.
More specifically, every year regardless of what happens cannot much ‘disprove’ Wyatt’s autotuning algorithm. That’s one of the flaws with it: it produces the same outcome regardless of input.
Next year could be the hottest on record. Does not prove AGW or Stadium Wave. Could be the coldest on record. Does not disprove AGW or Stadium Wave. In a year’s time, this decade will be the warmest decade on record compared to any decade ending before it, for the third decade in a row. Those facts go a long way to proving AGW and disproving Stadium Wave, but are not by themselves enough.
It’s the mass of all the evidence, all the inference, all the work to simplify the assumptions needed to draw valid conclusions, all the efforts at parsimony of exceptions, all the care to ensure the universality of the explanation that is most accurate, and therefore most nearly true based on all we know that is what proves AGW, and disproves the Stadium Wave.
Generalissimo Skippy | April 26, 2014 at 12:57 pm |
You should be careful when throwing around decade-old decadal predictions to note the start date.
The paper was published 2008. Means the predictions were based, at the latest, on 2007 data.
We’ve had seven years to see the prediction go off the rails already.
Would that http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:84/trend isolated the regions in question better to show just how contrary their behavior to the predictions have been.
‘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).’ Anastasios Tsonis
The parsimonious theory is that climate is a complex and dynamic system in the sense of complexity theory. This is so removed from the AGW meme that they are mutually inconsistent. It is one or the other.
The warmest decade? Should we believe Tsonis or Bart – one a respected professor of atmospheric physics the other an ardent practitioner of the arts of obscurantism?
Bart throws around terms like auto-tuning without a skerrick of science attached as if merely throwing around technical sounding jargon – howsoever ludicrously unsound it is – is a sufficient argument. It is all stream of calumny circumloquacious nonsense surrounding a kernel of ignorance. It proceeds from an irrelevant and erroneous link stubbornly to madly unsupported puffery.
“The use of a coupled ocean–atmosphere–sea ice model to hindcast (i.e., historical forecast) recent climate variability is described and illustrated for the cases of the 1976/77 and 1998/99 climate shift events in the Pacific. The initialization is achieved by running the coupled model in partially coupled mode whereby global observed wind stress anomalies are used to drive the ocean/sea ice component of the coupled model while maintaining the thermodynamic coupling between the ocean/sea ice and atmosphere components. Here it is shown that hindcast experiments can successfully capture many features associated with the 1976/77 and 1998/99 climate shifts. For instance, hindcast experiments started from the beginning of 1976 can capture sea surface temperature (SST) warming in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific and the positive phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) throughout the 9 years following the 1976/77 climate shift, including the deepening of the Aleutian low pressure system. Hindcast experiments started from the beginning of 1998 can also capture part of the anomalous conditions during the 4 years after the 1998/99 climate. The authors argue that the dynamical adjustment of heat content anomalies that are present in the initial conditions in the tropics is important for the successful hindcast of the two climate shifts.’ http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00626.1
Here’s on from last year.
It is quite evident that temperatures have plateaued since the 1998/2001 ‘climate shift’ – and no amount of dissimulation makes Bart any more credible.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2007/trend
Bart imagines it’s a real stadium wave in an actual stadium. Perhaps he believes in butterflies as well and not as a metaphor. Is that where one of the many problems of cognition arises?
“the 20th century average is 2 cm/yr,”
I need to double-check that. Here in North Carolina, I think that the historical average was 30 cm/century, so this strikes me. This would imply (obviously) 2 meters per century, right?
Or am I stupider than a 5th grader? (please delete if this is the case!)(Please delete if you post a correction too…)
No, you’re not.
It’s meant to be 2mm/yr.
geek49203
According to Holgate 2007, the 20thC average was around 1.7 mm/year, based on the tide gauge record at various locations across the globe.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3206/3144596227_545227fbae_b.jpg
It varied on a decadal basis from -1 mm/year to +5 mm/year.
Over the first half of the 20thC it averaged around 2.0 mm/year.
Over the second half of the 20thC it averaged around 1.4 mm/year.
Other estimates have it between 1.7 and 2.0 mm/year over the 20thC.
Latest estimates cited by Cazenave et al. are based on a completely different measurement method (satellite altimetry) and scope (all of the ocean except shorelines and polar regions, which cannot be captured by satellites).
According to Cazenave, these showed around 3.4 mm/year until recently when this decreased slightly to around 2.4 mm/year.
As IPCC stated in its AR4 WG1 SPM report:
Since the “decadal trend” was as high as 5.2 mm/year in the 20thC, I’d say anything under this trend is not “unusual”, and we’ll have to see if the current slowdown continues for a while or not.
Max
“Consider the following statements from Cazenave regarding global sea level rise:
the 20th century average is 2 cm/yr,” – Judith
Really??
Methinks this is a typo. And even at 2 mm per year, I’m not sure that is accurate — would be more like 3 mm/year here.
typo fixed
Once again, it’s the Sun stupid!
That figure from AR5 on 20th century sea level rise looks VERY similar to solar variability, AMO (or better GlobalMO) and untortured (raw) global (and less so) temperatures.
“But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”
look very similar?
Awesome calculation dude! waaay better than Mann.
try this. there is no secular increase in solar output from 1900 to today.
the sun is flat ( aside from a 11 year cycle ) and a flat sun doesnt explain
a rise in temperatures.
To understand why there is no secular increase in solar output I refer you
to Svalgaard.
“C02 makes it warmer”
Sun? What sun?
Andrew
The sun is flat? That’s outright denial!
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/6/60/Solar_Activity_Proxies.png
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1900/trend
Svalgaard is in denial too. The ‘modern maximum’ is obvious – no calculation necessary to see it.
Mosher: “there is no secular increase in solar output from 1900 to today”
There is a significant difference in mean sunspots from 1945 to 2000.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1900/mean:132
Steven Mosher: To understand why there is no secular increase in solar output I refer you to Svalgaard.
Svalgaard focuse his attention on total solar irradiation. Whether some other aspect of solar variation affects climate is undecidable on present evidence, imo. There are correlations but not a thoroughly demonstrated mechanism. Sort of like with AIDS in 1980 or malaria in 1850, or the Wegener observations before plate tectonics.
Matthew Marler
Excellent point.
IPCC has somehow myopically fixated on solar irradiance as the only solar impact (forcing) on climate.
To its credit it has conceded that its “level of scientific understanding of solar forcing is low”.
Max
It is obviously a typo, it should be the 20th century avg was 2 mm /year
Filtering out shorter term natural variability in any data set to find a longer term signal as well as changes in that longer term signal is a completely legitimate technique as long as that filter is applied consistently across the full range of the data. When doing this with sea level data, as with OHC, as with tropospheric sensible heat, as with glacial ice mass loss, we are seeing a background, longer-term change that is non-linear, and for several decades now, accelerating. All of these proxies, including sea level, for changes in energy of the Climate system point strongly to the same conclusion– energy is increasing and accumulating faster with each succeeding decade since the 1970’s at least.
Specifically, smoothing sea-level data (adjusting for natural variability of ENSO) over the past century fits most closely with a 4th degree polynomial model, and there has very likely not been any slowing in the longer-term background rate of sea level rise over the period of the tropospheric “pause”.
except that they’re not “filtering” the data they’re rigging it.
“when corrected for an abundance of La Ninas, sea level rise from 2003-2011 is ‘adjusted’ to 3.3 mm/yr”
So when the data is “corrected” for the fact that global warming is stalled it it still warming. And when sea level rise is adjusted for the fact it’s not rising , it is still rising. Duh, give him a Noble [sic] Prize.
What would be interesting is an update of Jevrejava’s paper with post 2000 data. Her treatment showed clear patterns and just a hint of slow down but the data used cut off in 2000. We now have nearly 15 years to add on to that and it would be very interesting to see what it looks like.
Unfortunately the satellite atimetry is in the hands UC Bolder who have such and agenda problem they can neither be trusted nor taken seriously with thier science.
Sadly, yet another dataset that has been contaminated by ‘politically correct’ corrections and is not longer of any scientific use.
climategrog,
All the data you need to reproduce and extend Jevrejeva’s reconstructions is available from psmsl. I’ve been updating the tide-gauge-only record from Church & White 2011 using psmsl data (about 700 tide gauge records in total though about 200 reporting at any one time) and find trends up to 2012 are very much consistent with satellite data.
Aside from CU there are at least five other groups analysing and producing sea level datasets from satellite altimeter data. CU are a user of data rather than an owner – they use AVISO-processed datasets. The raw data comes from NASA.
Sadly, yet another dataset that has been contaminated by ‘politically correct’ corrections and is not longer of any scientific use.
The ‘health and safety gone mad’ corrections are the real problem.
climategrog,
Some time back, I thought I had found an interesting relationship between SLR and GMST, where the rate of SLR seemed to lag the rate of GMST by about 20yrs or so. This was using HadCRUT4 and Jevrejava data from climate explorer:
https://sites.google.com/site/climateadj/multiscale-trend-analysis—hadcrut4
However, since the relationship didn’t hold when using C&W data, I decided to create my own SLR reconstruction for comparison purposes. My results were broadly consistent with C&W.
https://sites.google.com/site/climateadj/nh-sea-level-reconstruction
Given that C&W and UC Bolder are compatible, I don’t really have a problem with either. But I wouldn’t be surprised if SLR decelerated significantly over the next couple of decades.
I wonder if some of the methods used for Berkeley Earth’s GMST reconstruction could be used to construct SLR? Perhaps Mosher could chime in if he happens to read this? I like the idea of using breakpoint analysis to split a station’s record and then using kriging. I imagine the kriging would be done without consideration of land/ocean boundaries, but then the land results would be masked out.
PaulS: “All the data you need to reproduce and extend Jevrejeva’s reconstructions is available from psmsl. ”
The problem is Jevrejeva does some fairly complex processing creating a “virual tidal gauge” that is only out lined in her papers. Far from enough to reproduce it from raw data.
I’m usually dubious of that sort of thing but the results are interesting and go back beyond 20th c. linear rise portion.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=933
There is a clear c.60 y oscillation, with what looks like a notable decay in amplitude. Slight accel pre 1950 and probably slight decel since. Hovering around 2mm/y which is interesting in relation to sat altim. which IMO is getting pumped and adj to fit the agenda. It also goes right back to 1800.
Now she’s no AGW skeptic but I do think she is make an attempt at objective science and this record looks to be the longest and most informative I’ve seen anywhere.
Now I also suspect there is some kind of infilling going on to get that result to run to the end of the data, which is why I’d like to see an updata.
I have plenty else to do and just don’t have the time to try and back-engineer what she’s done.
Rather than adjusting the period 2003-2011, instead adjust the period 1992-2002 for a surplus of El Ninos. Perhaps this would lower the sea level rise for this period to 2.5 mm/yr (or lower).
This makes no sense. For one thing they do adjust for all ENSO variability through the whole record, not just recent La Niña activity. The effect of these adjustments on the 1994-2002 trend is shown in the SI – a shift from 3.5mm/yr to 3.3mm/yr.
This is indeed an interesting development. But the stories from the press are not misleading. They are fraudulent.
Climate alarmism must be an exhausting enterprise with so much real world data that stubbornly refuses to cooperate….like trying to herd cats, or trying to putting socks on an octopus.
Don’t you guys get sick of always being on the defensive. So many ad hoc explanations to be dreamt up. I get tired just thinking about it.
No, it is not an exhausting thing. First, most of the shills are still stuck back at the “hockey stick” thing, believing we are on the edge of disaster. Second, so many bogus numbers are released they have a ready supply of “facts” to annoy me (or at least cause me to explain).
Alarmism is a lot of trouble, but it pays very well.
popes,
You’re right. Nice work if you can get it.
“Rather than adjusting the period 2003-2011, instead adjust the period 1992-2002 for a surplus of El Ninos. Perhaps this would lower the sea level rise for this period to 2.5 mm/yr (or lower).” – JC
Maybe it’s not that simple?
The rainfall variations associated with the 2 events are very different. If you look at the increased rainfall areas for El Nino’s it is quite significant over the Pacific. There’s much less of the delayed water return to the ocean that is seen with La Nina’s.
Its not simple at all! I don’t think you can easily or convincingly separate out the El Nino/La Nina effects; that is my point.
My point is that there seems a reasonable case for adjusting for La Nina events and less so for El Nino’s.
Impossible to produce a “reasonable case for adjusting” for either one without making the unwarranted, and highly simplistic, assumption that the whole ENSO thing varies along a single dimension. Even if you can find a principle component in the whole thing, and even demonstrate that the remaining components are minor, that doesn’t mean it actually represents a physical phenomenon. And if it doesn’t, any “adjustments” are simply artifacts of your preconceptions.
I think there’s some confusion here. They don’t actually explicitly adjust for either El Niño or La Niña – they only mention those because ENSO is understood to be the principle cause of inter-annual variability. What they actually did was adjust for land water storage due to hydrological variability, directly affecting the mass of the oceans, and detrended variability in thermosteric SL contribution. Figure S3 in the Supplementary Information gives the rub.
This article has been on the Colorado sea level site for a long time.
Do we have a confidence interval for these observations, at all, on this timescale?
There is, after all, no significant surface temperature pause on the 84% of the globe that is interpolated from weather stations on climate timescales greater than seventeen years. Perhaps the sub-decadal escalator steps we see like the ones http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:101/mean:103/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:29/mean:31/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/to:1988/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987.5/to:1995.5/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1996.5/to:2001.5/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2003/to:2008/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:72/trend from ’79 to ’88, ’87 to ’95, ’96 to ’01, ’03 to ’08 and in the last six years all forming part of the longest and sharpest sustained rising global interpolated surface weather station temperature rise on record tell us not to be overly interested in a short-term variation in what is, after all, much less measured and much more difficult to measure?
Perhaps some gross thermomechanical process of restructuring the climate mechanisms (some small fraction of these were identified in the Stadium Wave paper, for instance) is ongoing, and the energy of restructuring — melting, subliming and carrying away Arctic sea ice and Greenland and Antarctic land ice net to the atmosphere, higher humidity absorbing gross water amounts to a level impacting sea level rise on the millimeter or sub-millimeter level, expansion of land due heat, or more likely erosion, silting and subsidence, and so on — is responsible for a Black Swan.
With so little data, it’d be premature to fingoistically speculate.
Volcanic events and ENSO are natural thermodynamic cycles, and at their conclusion the net heat exchanged with surface is zero. Their signal must be removed for long term climate projection. Otherwise we will repeat the same mistake of projecting higher temperature or lower than the actual. The “pause’ is a hasty conclusion just as the “warm” of the last decade. Global warming is in force, up and running as projected.
“My point is that there seems a reasonable case for adjusting for La Nina events and less so for El Nino’s”
_____
Of course there is, and it really all comes down to how is the mass moving around within the system over the short-term (ENSO effects) and over the long-term. One can even add the intermediate term (PDO effects) to this analysis. With the Grace satellite data, we now have a comprehensive and extremely revealing way to follow the mass over the short, medium, and longer-term. Net mass flow is moving from mainly cryosphere (Greenland and Antarctica) to the ocean, with the resultant sea level rise from each region affecting global sea level is amazingly different ways, but a consistent story beginning to take shape that tells us to expect this shift in mass from cryosphere to ocean to accelerate as the 21st Century progresses.
I think you would have to adjust for a super El Nino (1997-1998), just as you have to adjust for a super La Nina (2011-2012).
It appears the up and downs of more normal La Nina events and more normal El Nino events counterbalance.
“My point is that there seems a reasonable case for adjusting for La Nina events and less so for El Nino’s.”
That’s a good point. But it is also worth mentioning that adjusting for La Nina episodes merely smooths the very short term dips in the sea level curve, and likewise, adjusting for El Ninos would smooth the less pronounced spikes. So, one could adjust only for La Ninas, only for El Ninos, for both, or make no adjustment at all, and in all cases the effect on the apparent rate of sea level rise would be close to nil so long as one isn’t cherry picking temporary dips or spikes at the outside ends, or at the junction, of the two periods one wishes to compare. One only really would needs to look at the longest available record and use some running average or other smoothing method. This ought to make any alleged slowdown (or acceleration) readily apparent. If it isn’t, then the alleged slowdown from the first period to the second one is an artifact of cherry-picking features of the short term noise.
“The “pause’ is a hasty conclusion just as the “warm” of the last decade. Global warming is in force, up and running as projected.”
________
Hence the better proxy for gains in energy of the climate system is not to use tropospheric sensible heat, except maybe on a decadal average basis. OHC is a much more stable proxy.
BartR
You are quite right, since you started in 1979. However, your graph plainly shows that a comparable 30 year temperature increase started in 1910 prior to the advent of massive production of Anthropogenic CO2. Isolated here http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000
The whole of the CO2 argument is based on the uniqueness of that period from 1970 to 2000. If there is not something unique about the increase in that period, than you cannot dismiss natural variation. And if you are catastrophic in your view, that difference cannot be “some small fraction” or subtle difference in inclination. In fact if you were attempting to quantify the Anthropogenic faction, you might start by subtracting out the rate of warming in the first 30 year period to arrive at a difference that could be attributable to CO2 increases. Or as you put it, “Filtering out shorter term natural variability in any data set to find a longer term signal as well as changes in that longer term signal is a completely legitimate technique”
CMS | April 24, 2014 at 4:19 pm |
I’d considered including more escalator steps in the graph, but the earlier period is so patently not comparable that I saw no point when anyone could easily reproduce the process of mapping escalator steps themselves and see it first hand.
The earlier rise:
1. Is not as steep a rise.
2. Is not as long a rise.
3. Had temperatures are so far below the current rise (on what is after all a third order relation of temperature and energy required to further raise temperature) as to immediately discredit comparison.
4. Is so long before the satellite era we cannot well apply Cowtan & Way analyses to it.
5. had an Arctic that behaved differently in that period.
6. Glacier retreat wasn’t a feature restructuring the climate system significantly during that period.
7. We have far less ARGO-type information.
8. We have far less GRACE-type information.
9. Information we do have about Arctic sea ice indicates it was orders of magnitude thicker.
10. Black carbon particulates were up to order of magnitudes higher and more variable.
Specifically to the escalator steps, though there are few of them, one can confidently show that the steps prior to the 1970’s could be seen as belonging to the same population, but would have to reject the claim that the ones in the 1979 and later period belonged to the same population.
So uniqueness is indeed apparent about the modern period.
However, even if it were not manifestly present on these and a total of some fifty essential climate variables, the CO2E relation of AGW would not suffer an insurmountable challenge, or a challenge at all.
The Physics at the foundation of AGW is well-established in the radiative transfer lab at the molecular level.
Also, ‘catastrophe’ is a meaningless term here. We’re discussing confidence intervals, statistics, constraints on what we can say based on available data, and not if someone’s poodle drowned.
So, thank you for your contributions to some other discussion, wrong though every point you raised was. We all value open dialogue on issues, however irrelevant.
Take a look at sea level trend, U. of Colorado. http://sealevel.colorado.edu/, with and without the seasonal signal. In a long trend, the signals of all internal and natural variation simply are not there. The published paper recommendation is, therefore, warranted.
There will be much less controversy if the internal and natural variabilities are removed from long-term climate projection. This however is unlikely to be welcomed by those who thrive on controversies.
Paul S: What they actually did was adjust for land water storage due to hydrological variability, directly affecting the mass of the oceans, and detrended variability in thermosteric SL contribution. Figure S3 in the Supplementary Information gives the rub.
How did you get the whole article and the supplement?
BartR
Points 1 & 2 both 30 year periods. Here is just the trend from the graph I sited http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend
Both 30 year and there may be a miniscule amount of difference in the slopes, but I can’t see it. As to 3 in absolute temperature terms, not that much difference. Most of the rest of your points say that we don’t have as good a data, so can’t compare. Always true for historical data, in fact, the trend might very well have been higher. So by your analysis, it is impossible to compare. So you fall back on a very simple physics model and say, it explains it all. No doubt that CO2 is a Green House gas. The question is it enough to account for the later period. If you cannot account for the earlier period than, you do not know enough to make any kind of strong statement about the later trend. No matter what the IPCC says about attribution.
CMS | April 24, 2014 at 7:01 pm |
Wishful thinking, aka confirmation bias, is coloring your argument and clouding your judgement:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/trend
See? Not both 30-years, and the difference in slope is apparent to the naked eye. Or, you could click on http://www.woodfortrees.org/data/hadcrut4gl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/trend and see:
#Selected data from 1910
#Selected data up to 1940
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0133194 per year
1910 -0.450034
1940 -0.0504506
#Data ends
#Number of samples: 2
#Mean: -0.250242
vs.
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0161852 per year
1970 -0.142926
2014.17 0.57192
#Data ends
#Number of samples: 2
#Mean: 0.214497
Now, to be fair, I should have gone from 1970.17 to current, to avoid skewing the rate for starting and ending in different months, but the trend only becomes more extreme and the mean even higher (albeit by so small an amount it hardly matters).
The second period is 21.5% steeper than the first, and almost 50% longer, and that’s just so far. And that’s just ham-handedly selecting start and endpoints by eye; any legitimate statistical selection method would show an even bigger difference.
The mean of the second period is 0.47C, which while it sounds small represents so much additional energy at the surface of the Earth and such a higher rate of accumulation vs. heat loss on the cubed (or fourth power) relationships involved as to make the two periods utterly incomparable. And that’s only 67 years difference between the midpoint of the first and second period.
On that alone, your claim falls. But there’s four dozen other metrics all showing roughly the same thing in the same period, sometimes more reliably, and no good measures that call these figures and conclusions seriously into question on examination.
On point 4, we can’t compare exactly, but we can reason that Cowtan and Way would show an even more dramatic difference between the two periods, interpolating what we do know about them from other measures.
Which leaves two of seven, so NOT “most” in the position of not good comparisons for the earlier period than the later, but then the current period has so many ways to correlate and investigate what’s happening between ARGO, GRACE and CRU that we can use the evidence to make the current period _more_ reliable and reduce uncertainty about it.
So despite all your efforts to minimize what I say, my argument remains valid and unchallenged by the contents of your false doubts.
It don’t need anything stronger than to say the RISK of harm to my interests is increased by the emission of CO2E, and so I am owed compensation and ought be consulted for my permission to contaminate my air.
It’s a weak on crime argument to complain that people pissing in my well ought be protected by the cover of darkness when their fingerprints and DNA are all over the scene.
Correction: The mean of the second period is 0.47C higher.
Changes the sense slightly.
“any legitimate statistical selection method would show an even bigger difference”
Because, I guess, we can identify the quality of the statistical method by the degree to which it confirms theoretical priors? Isn’t there a name for this? Con… conf… something. Can’t quite remember.
BartR I had suggested that as an approximation that one could subtract the average increase from the earlier period which represents one expression of temperature increase caused by natural variation from the later period where the increase is augmented by Anthropogenic CO2 in order to get some idea of what one might attribute to natural variation and how much to CO2. Using your figures 0.0161852 per year – 0.0133194 per year gives us a difference of 0.0028658 per year or .28658 per century. I think your honor that almost certainly falls in the margin of error.
NW | April 25, 2014 at 3:30 am |
Sadly, because the method of selecting start and end points has the appearance of being deliberately selected by CMS to find the figures that most confirmed the prior reasoning, than any valid method — we’ve had this discussion here at CE, years ago, when Girma was pulling the same stunts — it is of course going to be the outcome that valid methods find this flaw in the endpoints CMS proposed. On top of all the other flaws pointed out.
CMS | April 25, 2014 at 3:41 am |
What?! No. That’s a terribly irrational suggestion.
The two periods are of different length, and at different temperature levels, with different error bars, and we already know from Cowtan & Way and other basic observations that the so-called ‘global’ dataset isn’t representative of the scale of the change but tends to minimize differences: you can’t simply subtract one rate from the other and get a valid result.
Simplest is to point to the ratio of rates, for an approximation of the scale of the changes between the 1910-1940 gross weather station global interpolated average under lower (but rising) CO2E conditions, and the later average under higher rising CO2E conditions at higher net energy levels. It’s not a great metric, but at least it doesn’t introduce four different kinds of mathematical error.
Or you could plot the fourth powers of the temperatures in K, approximate a uniform function that fits both periods taking into account what observations from sea ice and land area deglaciation and humidity levels tell us, and derive a metric.
On top of which, we know there were major other anthropogenic inputs in the form of particulates (which didn’t likely have much effect, but we can’t really be sure of that), so ‘natural’ variability remains off the table as a number we can extract from the data we have.
BartR
So we finally come to an overall point of agreement. ” so ‘natural’ variability remains off the table as a number we can extract from the data we have.”
Nice work, CMS. Barty has been Perry Masoned.
CMS | April 25, 2014 at 10:17 am |
Ayup.
We can at best estimate that natural variability is an order of magnitude or two smaller than the GHE for climate timescales, which is good enough, since our precision on temperatures on climate timescales barely has enough significant digits to be affected by a two order of magnitude lower effect.
However, on timescales below 17 years, we have to admit natural variability is going to make climate trend detection too uncertain to be worth discussing, until we get past the 17th year, and preferably 30 years or more.
Isn’t the GHE mostly natural, barty?
“on timescales below 17 years, we have to admit natural variability is going to make climate trend detection too uncertain to be worth discussing, until we get past the 17th year, and preferably 30 years or more.”
When we soon get past the 17th year, it will jump right up to 30. When we hit 30 years it will be, or more, which is sufficiently vague to put off the day of reckoning likely beyond all out lifetimes.
You are very often prominently featured in these threads that meander on forever, barty. And you typically end up at the bottom of a very deep hole.
“Volcanic events and ENSO are natural thermodynamic cycles, and at their conclusion the net heat exchanged with surface is zero.”
At long enough timescales, sure. Clearly, existing GMST estimates at “climate scale” are not long enough because they still show ENSO, AMO and PDO “oscillations”, as witnessed by consensus explanations (note plural and speculative) of the pause. The “stadium wave” as a partial systemic or meta explanation of the natural evoultion of climate affecting factors is an intersting, cogent and logical step to understanding this sort of thing – it might mot be right, but at least it’s an attempt, even if it will take years or decades to determine if it’s on the right track and what other factors need to be added/removed to make it an effective and usefully predictive tool.
Much like COAGCM’s at present, IMO.
Kneel | April 25, 2014 at 8:34 pm |
Nothing like the Stadium Wave has been shown to exist as a stable or reliable phenomenon anywhere, ever, in any complex system, without an external synchronizing mechanism.
In a real stadium wave, people provide that external mechanism, by intelligently timing their actions to keep the stadium wave going. It isn’t because of a natural human rhythm, or instinctive drive. If you blindfolded half the stadium occupants randomly, the wave would break up into chaos. No hive of insects demonstrates a stadium wave. No herd of cattle does. No mass of migratory butterflies or bird forms a stadium wave. Brownian motion doesn’t exhibit stadium waves. Monetary systems don’t stadium wave. Planets in six-body problems don’t stadium wave.
It’s a fictional model made up by people who found a formula that autotunes so virtually any input of mere random noise will produce the same output.
As an explanation, it’s a dead end, a non-starter, a mistake, a cul-de-sac, bogus, disproven, defunct, and wrong. Following up in its course wastes the time of everyone who gets quagmired in it, with no advantage to be had.
It is an exercise in exaggerating the importance of coincidence into a fiction of patterns, to minimize simpler, more parsimonious, more universal and thereby accurate or nearly true explanations.
Network theory is in fact the most dynamic area of mathematical investigation currently. Networks are found everywhere in biology, physiology, ecology, economics, electronics, the internet and climate.
e.g. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/networks/networks_1.html
It’s amazing the things that Bart imagines is so but isn’t.
Typically on these endless threads where barty is the main troll, he goes from being half-baked early in the going to being overcooked and overwrought at just around midnight. The stadium wave deserves a more coherent critique than that mess of histrionics, barty. Remember whose house you are in.
He’s still a bad Bart and still tells taradiddles.
Bart is not the troll. A mirror is a useful tool.
Use it.
Generalissimo Skippy | April 26, 2014 at 12:10 am |
No network has ever stadium waved without a Denial of Service hack, and those don’t typically stadium wave, and don’t typically last.
Networks might exhibit thrashing, or other perverse performances especially as complexity increases, but they just don’t behave as the Stadium Wave model suggests the climate does.
Tell me, you’re a hydrologist. Do many sewer pipes in Australia get stadium waves from random flushing?
I know I’ll probably regret asking this, but what in the world is a “denial of service hack”?
I am the anti-troll, webby. Sometimes that necessarily involves using trollish tricks to trip up the little malicious miscreants. Shouldn’t you be cloistered somewhere with your little charts furiously fitting curves for the furtherment of CAGW alarmism? Do I have to remind you of what the pause is doing to your cause, webby?
Please explain this, barty:
“We can at best estimate that natural variability is an order of magnitude or two smaller than the GHE for climate timescales, which is good enough, since our precision on temperatures on climate timescales barely has enough significant digits to be affected by a two order of magnitude lower effect.”
Show your work, if you got it.
Brandon Shollenberger | April 26, 2014 at 10:50 am |
Regret away: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=denial+of+service+hack
In particular, if you were in that life when it was popular with the mom’s basement dwelling set and got bored enough with a vanilla DoS, and you wanted to establish cred that you were not just another script kiddie, you hacked your DoS to do tricks, like roll over, go to sleep, play fetch, shake a paw, or bark. I’m surprised you wouldn’t have known that.
Don Monfort | April 26, 2014 at 10:55 am |
Simple. If it was any bigger, you could find the freaking thing. It would swamp out AGW signals instead of being swamped out by them, the way the Hale cycle’s correlation with global temperature has been swamped out for the past half century by AGW.
Bart R’s haughty response shows exactly what should be expected.
For those who don’t know, I suggest using Bart R’s proposed Google search. It’ll show the correct term in “DoS attack.” DoS attacks are obnoxious and potentially damaging, but they are not hacks. They don’t even try to be.
@Brandon Shollenberger – I would give poor bart a pass on that. In the trade, we hear such terms all the time. My worst (in that I hate it) is when I hear “NIC CARD” – the C stands for card. But those not in the trade tend to mangle terms and combine them into nonsensical phraseology.
I know it’s not a big deal. But look at his response. He acts like he was right.
@Brandon Shollenberger – I noted and responded. I found it somewhat amusing. He throws around terms ignorantly hoping that no one will notice. Alas, those of us in the field deal with it on a daily basis. We have to know.
Brandon Shollenberger | April 26, 2014 at 11:45 am |
Or, you could read the explanation of hacking DoS’s, and not get all caught up in hacker elitist hairsplitting over whether a DoS is a hack, when a DoS itself can _be_ hacked. From smurfing to lemming, to whatever other childish terms hacker culture use as putdowns for the shallow end of their gene pool, certainly the first of any kind of DoS is a network hack, and unless the network is meant to bog down and seize up as a matter of design, by the definition of hack as an unintended use, DoS fits the dictionary usage.
Thank you Brandon, for this opportunity to examine the skeevy underbelly of computer criminal thinking.
@bart – sorry, the first part of a DoS is not a network hack. The perps never enter the intended victim. instead, they merely flood the network with garbage data to prevent legitimate data from entering or exiting.
That is why it is a “DENIAL OF SERVICE” and not a hijacking of service.
barty,barty
You made the silly comparison of natural variability with the GHE. How does AGW compare with the GHE? How much swamping has AGW done in the last 17 years, barty? We have continued to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, but it ain’t doing it’s swamping thing. It should be increasingly swamping.
If the AGW regime is so obviously stronger than natural variability, why has it stalled? As CMS suggested, superimpose the chart of the 30 year period of alleged AGW 1970-2000, directly over the chart of the 1910-1940 period of warming.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000
Not a dimes worth of difference.
Just for giggles, barty. Compare the chart of the whole alleged AGW swamping period, 1970-2014, with the earlier 20th century warm period:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2014
AGW doesn’t look so tough, barty.
Here is another angle for you, barty:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997/to:2014
How much swamping does the ole AGW have to do over the next 13 years to produce a respectable amount of warming to catch up with the 1910-1940 warming period?
Tch.
Denying there are differences by spinning around looking for spurious similarities doesn’t unmake the differences.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1919/to:1936/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1918/to:1935/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/to:2014
Comparing like for like, we see the two same-length periods compared from the rangesof interest have not so different a trend line, at ~0.007 for the earlier, and ~0.005 for the later, on the more slightly more accurate (though still only interpolated from weather stations on 84% of the surface) HadCRU4.
They’re still both very short spans considering the data, and we know the later period has the very suspect selection of the Super El Nino as its initial endpoint. But let’s not make too much of those invalidating factors, when everything about the comparison is invalid already.
You are funny, barty. That spurious similarity thing is a hoot. They are either similar, or they are not. Nobody is claiming they are exactly the same. They are obviously similar.
You are in denial, barty. And to pretend that there have not been other similar periods of warming in the long history of the earth, is patently absurd. The most recent warming period is clearly not unique.
Here is one last big headache for you, barty:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1984/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1984/to:2014
This is the most relevant perspective for comparing the recent natural warming trend to the alleged AGW trend. The last thirty years should have been the period of strongest warming from anthro CO2 forcing. My recollection is that back during the hay day for CAGW, coinciding with the big El Nino event, we were told we would be ice free, snow free and sorry to be alive in a few years. What happened, barty?
Don Monfort | April 26, 2014 at 5:10 pm |
Transparent cherry-picking tricks seeking to exclude the differences that make unique things unique only show by the desperation of their proponents that they too know the differences, else they couldn’t so purposely try to hide them.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1984/to:2014/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1984/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/to:2000/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1896/to:1926/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1896/to:1926/trend
Your ‘recollections’ appear to be as faulty and half-true as your graphs, selective memories purposely spun to support an argument that cannot stand up under the scrutiny of the whole truth.
If you remember someone saying they’d be sorry you were alive, however touching that personal recollection may be, it’s nothing to do with climate data. And if you actually thought James Lovelock’s nonsense was credible enough to call the predictions of climate science then.. small wonder you have such a messed up view of how science works now.
As for headaches, not so much.
You are trapped, barty. You will have to fabricate a very clever a story to refute the fact that the last thirty years are the most relevant period to look for an AGW signal. You can start with some lie about anthro CO2 concentration in the atmosphere going down instead of up. But you got Mauna Loa to contend with. Just say it’s the volcano. You are funny but desperate dude, barty.
Don Monfort | April 26, 2014 at 8:35 pm |
30 years good. 44 years better.
30 years exceeds 95% confidence. 44 years exceeds 99% confidence. 44 years is more than five times better than 30 years.
Where’s your 44 year comparable period from the past?
Can you say “unique”?
“Nothing like the Stadium Wave has been shown to exist as a stable or reliable phenomenon anywhere, ever, in any complex system, without an external synchronizing mechanism.”
This is completely false. Read Strogartz’s Sync for a vast number of examples of spontaneously synchronizing phenomena.
Not clever, barty. Unique is a big claim that requires big proof. In fact, it’s impossible to prove. Try something else. Also, try explaining why the CO2 keeps going up but the temp has stalled for 17 years. The swamp ain’t swamping. Natural variability rules! The pause is killing the cause. This useless circular discussion is over. Carry on without me. Your case is closed.
stevepostrel | April 26, 2014 at 10:37 pm |
..not one of which is a six-barrel stadium wave.
Compare http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync with the stadium wave.
Sync just happens; it doesn’t take being smart, having a brain, or being alive. Stadium waves take work, and devolve rapidly in the absence of intelligent participants. Just try to get one going where most of the crowd is drunk. Or baseball fans.
Go ahead, try to construct a set of simple rules for individual members of a school or swarm across six distinct species that tightly syncs.
Can’t mathematically be done on less than six choose for rules (that’s 6x5x4x3). 360 rules of Physics would be required for the stadium wave to work. Can you name 360 rules of climate physics?
Don Monfort | April 26, 2014 at 10:53 pm |
Your argument comes down to just slogans repeated over and over. Shake off the dogma. Think for yourself. Have the humility to accept logic over personal agenda. Reject groupthink. Deslogan. Depropagandize.
Bart imagines it’s a real stadium wave in an actual stadium. Perhaps he believes in butterflies as well and not as a metaphor. Is that where one of the many problems of cognition arises?
Generalissimo Skippy | April 27, 2014 at 2:56 am |
You’ve got that backwards. It isn’t the stadium I imagine to be real. It’s the “Stadium Wave” paper that imagines something unreal.
(6|4) rules of climate physics are necessary for Wyatt et al to be right. List them. Start with the 360th, and work your way down.
Because if you can’t, it isn’t real.
Bart R,
Nothing like the Stadium Wave has been shown to exist as a stable or reliable phenomenon anywhere, ever, in any complex system, without an external synchronizing mechanism.
“…a wave can be described as a disturbance that travels through a medium, transporting energy from one location (its source) to another location without transporting matter. Each individual particle of the medium is temporarily displaced and then returns to its original equilibrium positioned.” – http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/waves/Lesson-1/What-is-a-Wave
The author doesn’t seem to have a problem comparing a stadium wave to natural waves.
We would agree that waves occur in nature. Is the Stadium Wave inconsistent with nature? Perhaps it’s a large slow moving wave, unfamiliar to us. Light has been described as a wave. Water too. At what larger size scale are there no longer waves? On what larger time scale are waves no longer waves?
The synchronizing mechanism for the metronomes in the Strogatz Ted Talk video was the metronomes themselves acting through a medium upon which they rested.
Bart R,
Does this look like a Stadium Wave?
http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/pages/cacf515b-a1c4-4c9a-9ac6-f44039fd991e/images/atfg005.jpg
The Antarctic Circumpolar Wave.
Ragnaar | April 27, 2014 at 4:44 pm |
No one is challenging the idea of waves, even circumpolar waves that actually act as waves travelling in the same medium without interruption.
What’s being challenged is that six distinct, disconnected phenomena as set out in http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/stadium-wave1.pdf — not an actual wave, but a ‘signal’ seen in Megadata methods (aka Shopping Cart Analysis) from haphazard multiple databases and those that didn’t fit the pattern being dropped (to Hide The Decline) can be shown to exist as a real effect as opposed to an oddment of the way the data was strung together, when in some cases the components of the ‘signal’ have no plausible connection, no ‘underlying medium’ like the synchronizing metronomes in the video.
To synchronize, the complex interactions must follow rules, just as fish in schools follow rules of orientation in similar direction, mutual attraction, forward motion and predator avoidance. That’s one set of four simple rules across the same species, as few rules as you can have and still obtain stable synchronization. In an actual stadium wave, the rules are something like: 1) stand up as the upward wave approaches you, 2) lift your arms as you rise, 3) hold your arms up as long as the people near you do, then 4) lower your arms and sit down. Of course, you also have to let out a shout and watch the game and not topple over or spill your drinks and hand change to the guy selling hotdogs, and so on, but let’s stick to the simplest possible set.
There are six separate Stadium Wave species in the Wyatt paper. They have to have rules for interacting, one set of rules setting out how each species responds to the rules in each other species: that’s six sets of at least four rules, or (6|4) = 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 / 2 — oops, my earlier figure of 360 was incorrect, surprising no one caught that slip– or 180 rules of climate; that complex set of unexamined and unknown rules practically makes the Stadium Wave impossible to sustain as a model. It certainly demolishes the Wyatt paper as hopelessly mathematically underdeveloped.
Find something like that in the natural world.
Bart R,
You’ve certainly brought up an interesting subject. I am probably barking up the wrong tree, but when you look at this standing wave:
http://www.premierflightct.com/newsletters/Newsletter-Images/Content/StandingLenticular/StableFlow-MountainWave.jpg
And allow oneself to say the mountains move as ice conditions in the Arctic change, that is swap in ice conditions for the mountains, we might believe that the standing clouds above would follow the mountains/ice conditions. A slowly moving standing wave with both insulating and albedo effects.
Interesting paper on standing waves in the Arctic: https://bib.irb.hr/datoteka/231075.BLM05_ThorstenGB.pdf
WAVE FLOW SIMULATIONS OVER ARCTIC LEADS
Trying to figure out Bart’s question of what in nature would cause the Stadium Wave, I had a tangential idea. The Arctic Ice is like a slow moving weather system that works on much longer time scales. It’s major change is to not ice, or to not sea water. What other region can make such a slow and major change? Slow being its one year cycle. Major being the difference between the weather over sea ice compared to the weather over cold sea water. Perhaps this would make it a driver, though perhaps it’s just capturing and processing some other driver.
Ragnaar | April 28, 2014 at 9:28 pm |
Alas. Confirmation bias is a terrible malady. Easily caught, hard to shake, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
There is no ‘Stadium Wave’ in the natural world to find the cause of; you don’t need to search for the Stadium Wave’s causes. Mathematically, the ‘Stadium Wave’ as Wyatt describes is impossible to demonstrate, implausible to exist, and requires overthrowing virtually everything we understand of Statistics, Inference, Chaos Theory and Physics.
Search for other wonderful, real things in nature. There’s much left to discover, and much of true significance and merit.
Wyatt’s Stadium Wave isn’t one of them.
Oh for God’s sake – days later he is still at it saying the same wrong headed thing in the same absurd language.
There is no doubt at all that the Earth system is comprised of interacting sub-systems. The mechanics of the interactions are what is being investigated. As I said days ago – an attempt at a difficult idea is far more scientifically interesting than ill informed denial of an evident reality.
“…is that these oscillators (perhaps indices) are in reality not causally independent but they are ALL just emergent local manifestations of GLOBAL dynamics of the system.” – Tomas Milanovic, on Tsonis 2007.
The 4 indices used by Tsonis and the apparent 6 used by Wyatt perhaps indicate a syncing. And I think we can say in nature that sometimes when things sync we get a regime change. I think Milanovic was saying the indices are not the system. I don’t think they are syncing as a control of the system, just providing information about the system.
I guess it’s still an interesting question if the Arctic has larger than expected impact on the system. Maybe it’s just that signals are easier to see there.
‘The network approach to complex systems is a
rapidly developing methodology, which has proven to be useful in analyzing such systems’ behavior [Albert and Barabasi, 2002; Strogatz
, 2001]. In this approach, a complex system is presented as a set of connected nodes. The
collective behavior of all the nodes and links (the topology of the network) describes the dynamics of the system and offers new ways to investigate its properties. The indices represent the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the El Niño/Southern Oscilla-
tion (ENSO), and the North Pacific Oscillation (NPO).’ http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/21743.pdf
That is the case Ragnaar.
philjourdan | April 29, 2014 at 7:47 am |
I’ve been doing this since the Rainbow Book only had one color. When I’m on an interview panel, and some candidate spouts off like you and Brandon, he doesn’t get hired. The distinction between your server being penetrated and your network being penetrated is paper-thin. A hack is simply any unintended use of a computer resource, not just code executing on one of your CPU’s. A server hack, an application hack a network hack, an OS hack, a phone hack (once upon a time called a ‘phreak’), even a social hack, all are correct uses of the term, accepting that ‘social engineering’ is more commonly used to describe that last one..
You can hack a pocket watch or a doorbell, though that type of hack is more often called a MacGuyver, among those old enough to remember how to use their hands in the analogue world.
DoS is generally an attack, though DoS tools can also be applied purposely by the network admin or an admin of a server on a network as a test, for example, or to trigger a remote event. Moreover, DoS can be used to lay a false trail or otherwise cover an actual penetration of server security, and very often (almost always in significant cases) launched through botnets acquired by other hacks.
This script-kiddie-think, “Oh, I wasn’t penetrated; I’m too 733t for that; It was only a DoS attack,” is a sign of lack of ability to think about the greater context of security, and is fail.
Moreover, the point was that even hacks can be hacked. If you wanted to interlink six different species of DoS, daisy-chaining them into a pattern for amusement or to show off, and were a ‘competent’ hacker, you’d have set yourself apart from the more usual crowd misspending their youth, in the mind of that subculture. Hacking others’ hacks is the predominant sport of that set, proof they can go one better, improve on, and thereby ‘pwn’ their rivals.
@bart – sorry, you would never work in any organization I know of. A DoS is not a network penetration (there are plenty of them), it is a DENIAL of service which is caused by flooding the network with garbage packets. They are not designed to do anything other than flood the bandwidth. No server is penetrated. And unless no traffic is allowed into the network (which would defeat the purpose of connecting it to the Internet in the first place), your network is not being “penetrated”. It is being flooded.
The latest trick is a DNS DoS. Of course you can do away with DNS, but most people find it useful. While “hackers” (crackers actually, which also shows your ignorance on the subject) are usually behind the DoS, that does not mean they are “hacking” (or “cracking”) your network. Nothing is being taken. Service is being denied.
And yes, those same people who instigate a DoS can then turn around and hack your network. But that is 2 separate activities. Just as Assault and Robbery are 2 separate crimes. Criminals are behind both. But they are not the same.
It is no shame not to know the difference. Just stop pretending you do.
Don Monfort | April 26, 2014 at 12:51 pm |
Since you mention swamping, why not explore that topic?
For at least a century and a half, the global temperature curve correlated with the Hale Cycle to a remarkable degree. You can see a clear signal varying as sunspots varied, superimposed on the pattern of global temperature. It was never perfect, but it was reliably observable.
And then it stopped, half a century ago, swamped out by AGW.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/mean:85.33/mean:128/isolate:256/plot/sidc-ssn/normalise/mean:29/mean:31/scale:0.2/from:1820/plot/esrl-co2/normalise/scale:0.2
That’s a lot of swamping.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:191/mean:193/plot/esrl-co2/normalise
And at the 32 year level, it’s complete swamping of every other climate signal on interpolated weather station surface temperatures, due CO2E emission.
Schwenck | April 26, 2014 at 1:28 am |
You’ve caught me. I may be bad. I might even know someone named Tara. I certainly have been known to put Persian Flaws in my comments, leave math errors just to see if anyone checks them.. or knows enough math to know how to correct them (generally, disappointed), even require people to check the facts I cite for themselves to decide for themselves and think for themselves.
There’s all too much Pablum-sucking gullibility in the so-called ‘skeptic’ community. People will cut and paste the worst nonsense from WUWT or other targets on Dr. Curry’s Blogroll as if they were from sovereign authorities, repeating bad math, bad science, even bad spelling, in an endless echo chamber of errors.
So if, being a ‘bad’ Bart, I can encourage even one simpering slave of whatever they read so long as it strokes their prejudices to learn a little to fact-check for themselves, to spark independent thought, then to that I plead guilty.
Shame you can’t say the same.
Brandon “hack” is BOTH a generic term and a specific term.
This is a feature of linguistic change. Like climate, the language changes.
hack, which used to be specific is now a general term.
There are Life hacks,
kitchen hacks,
hacker hacks
hacked hacks
DoS hacks.
Of course, you dont get to decide what the language means.
The debate goes on. Practical folks just accept that terms change meaning.
like the weather
http://www.nmrc.org/pub/faq/hackfaq/hackfaq-05.html
there is absolutely nothing wrong with the term Dos Hack.
The right question is ‘Bart, what do you mean?”
First paragraph in your link:
Even they know it is not a “hack”.
And hack is a generic term. You can hack away at a tree. You can use a hack saw. And of course you can have a hacking cough.
But “hack” when used with networks and computers means to compromise for illegitimate purposes. DENIAL is not a compromise. It is a denial. There is a reason that different words mean different things.
And just as food for thought. There are Worms, Trojan Horses, Viruses, Malware, Root Kits, Phishing, etc. They have different names because they behave differently. Some people, like your Aunt Ida, call them all Viruses. But anyone in the trade does not because the solution to each type is often as different as the methods of infection.
Steven Mosher, even if one accepted “DoS hack” was a valid term (it isn’t), this certainly is not valid:
You cannot hack a DoS. The concept doesn’t even make sense.
The fact the meanings of words change does not mean the moment someone misuses a word their usage becomes correct. I don’t “get to decide what the language means,” but the people speaking it do. I’m merely saying what they’ve decided.
@Brandon – Perhaps what they were trying to say is you can hack the code that is used to initiate the DoS? A DoS is not the code that causes it, but the action. It is like saying the program is “hello world”, instead of the 3 lines of code that it takes to print that message.
philjourdan | April 29, 2014 at 7:44 am |
Brief history lesson.
In 1975, General Electric was issued a patent for what many consider the foundation of Network Interface Controllers.
EtherNet cards were the first commercial NIC-on-one-card units generally available, although others claim earlier, or rival, or ‘more like a real NIC’ candidates. At that time, it would have been correct to say “Network Interface Control Card”, with no redundancy, to disambiguate from the multi-part Network Interface Control circuits.
After the 1990’s, hardly anyone used anything but Network Interface Cards as controllers, so “NIC Card” would have been redundant, except to distinguish from archaic technology.
Since about 2007 (when a later round of patents were granted), NIC more properly means Network Interface Chip, or Network Interface Circuit (part of a card with other circuits), and “NIC Card” is once again useful to disambiguate what is meant.
All in all, objection to “NIC Card” was valid for less than 17 years, too short to even be a valid climate timespan.
Surprising people who speak with such passion and certainty don’t know this.
And Brandon, have we not yet seen the last of parsomatism? Anything can be hacked. I mean, look how often you’ve been socially hacked, here.
@bart – and ATM means Automated teller machine, except when it means asynchronous transfer mode. I can show you a gazillion examples of initials standing for multiple things. That does not change the fact that since the dawn of the PC age (generally accepted to coincide with the release of the IBM PC), NIC has stood for Network Interface CARD. Since the computers required an add on CARD.
Which does post date your GE story, but then Ma Barker does predate a Motherboard. But MB is used for the latter today.
Nice sleuthing. Hope you learned something.
philjourdan | April 30, 2014 at 9:38 am |
Keep writing. The more you say, the more cracks appear in what you write.
Or is that hacks?
Put up independently verified, bona fide security credentials, or you’re just another guy who thinks he knows something from browsing online. From the tone of your comments, the latter seems likelier.
@bart – You mean like CISSP? CISA? CISM? GSEC? etc. etc. etc.???
Why? I doubt more than a handful of people here know what they are or what they stand for. They have nothing to do with Climate Science. And they are merely alphabet soup.
I think my 35 years in the business, with over 20 in my current field speaks for itself.
And you? Is that how you respond when you are shown to be wrong? petulant and angry? You are amusing. But your blind obedience and lack of supporting arguments for your own obedience belies the worth of your opinions.
BTW: As most have noted (you excepted of course), I did not appeal to authority for any of my answers. I presented the facts. Shame you cannot say the same.
philjourdan, I’d imagine that’s what he meant, but it’s definitely not what he said. Given Bart R tried to insist his earlier incorrect terminology was actually correct, I decided not to be generous. Better to show the person insisting his made up terminology is correct is using more made up terminology.
Plus, it was incredibly stupid. Saying you hack a DoS is like saying you sue a land deal. You don’t hack or sue an outcome. You can hack a program to cause or alter a DoS. You can sue a company to prevent, alter or cause a land deal.
@Brandon – I agree. But Bart seems to have a problem with admitting when he is wrong. Perhaps age will grant him wisdom.
philjourdan | April 30, 2014 at 3:28 pm |
When wrong, and moved to comment about it by the same sort of whim that moves anyone to comment on anything, I admit it. I’ve admitted to being wrong more than once on Climate Etc. this week.
That you seem not to READ HARD enough to find it, not my issue.
For instance, it was wrong of me, though not very, to fail to point out for you in my brief history, that the ‘dawn’ of the IBM PC era, or the ISA era, was 1981, while the first commercial network topology for IBM PC’s wasn’t until late 1984, two generations of computer technology later.
Many of us who at the time had been used to distributed computing topologies for years were mystified by the fuss made over the Network Interface Controllers and other LAN products, but we all agreed it was a good thing. After EISA came in half a decade later, Network Interface Cards became possible, all components needed for LAN connectivity finally could be put on one card. So from 1989 to 2006, your linguistic quibble about Network Interface Card Card being redundant was more or less true. After 2007, Network Interface Circuit Card or Network Interface Chip Cards would be not redundant, and might disambiguate.
In the spirit of disambiguation, it was also wrong of me to not clarify that I’d accept _any_ credential for a person claiming superior linguistic authority: BA (English), Certificate in ESL, own a copy of the OED.. all of which contradict what you claim.
Also in the spirit of disambiguation, did you not just write that you have been watching the whole IT industry pass you by for TEN generations, without advancement, stuck in the same field for 20 years.. and without a smidgen of embarrasment about that?
Brandon, I see you still haven’t read Halmos.
@bart – Sorry, but you are WRONG again. And I have yet to see you admit you are wrong. Your fake admission is also wrong. Netware 86 came out in 1983. I know, I implemented it. Originally on G-Net, and 2 years later on ArcNet.
So Indeed, EISA came out 5 years later (1988). However EISA (like Microchannel – circa 1987 – which was the proprietary IBM architecture that EISA was in answer to) were not a criteria for NICs, as they were already in existence since neither architecture took off (EISA did well in servers, but was too expensive in desktops).
And you are of course WRONG again in your implication/assumption that IT has passed me by. If you were in the business, you would realize that the only constant in IT is change. Anyone letting it pass them by is not in the business very long. But you are welcome to your mis-assumptions and stated ignorance of what was clearly written.
for the record, I do not “read hard”. I read accurately. Perhaps if reading is too hard for you, you should try audio tapes?
philjourdan | May 2, 2014 at 1:20 pm |
Novell Netware 68 came out in 1983. That was S-Net, a simple Star LAN product that only worked on Motorola 68000’s. 68000’s had a cooperative multitasking capacity that meant they didn’t need a NIC Card at all.
Netware 86v1.0a wasn’t until 1985, after IBM’s LAN product hit the market, stealing Novell’s lunch money. And IBM documented NIC to be “Network Interface Controller”. See their patent, if you want to check.
Novell in those days preferred after the fashion of pioneering Xerox PARC the term “Network Card”, over rival IBM’s “Network Interface Controller”, but would shorten the term to “NIC” for convenience when they had to after entering the ISA competition. There’s no “i” in “etwork”, so the C stood for Controller.
All of which anyone who can read accurately can check; documentation on all of this is easily obtained online from Novell, Xerox PARC, and IBM.
And all of which is a pretty sad digression: the Stadium Wave analogy used by Wyatt is a nonesuch; there are none in the natural world, and only a few far-fetched cases in the world at all based on purposely imitating the stadium wave of fans at sporting events. Wyatt’s Stadium Wave is refuted.
@bart – sorry, I implemented it in 1984! On Intel. The server was an IBM AT with a whopping 16mb of ram! And a 30mb hard drive. Now maybe I was beta testing it. All I know is that it worked and worked great. On G-Net. A bus topology (coax).
So dig a little deeper. Your slip is showing. http://www.networkworld.com/research/2000/0731feattime.html
@bart – btw – Wyatt’s Stadium wave has not been refuted. But your proclamation shows your ignorance of science.
@bart – your spelling sucks to. i is for INTERFACE. C is for CARD.
NIC – network interface CARD. It fits into the slots of a PC.
philjourdan | May 5, 2014 at 10:52 am |
That’d be “too”, not “to”; which no one would point out, really, except for it’s in the line, “your spelling sucks, to[sic]”.
Nothing you’ve said dislodges anything I’ve said. And it’s doubtful you were a special Novell NOS beta site in 1984 as opposed to just another Novell customer treated as beta because they didn’t get their act together for a couple of years, but anything’s possible.
Netware-X was a cludge and wonky as all get out compared to Netware-S, until the 1985 release, and yes, would have used a Network Interface Card, just as IBM used a Network Interface Controller Card, and Netware-S used a Network Card (not needing a controller). So for disambiguation, people would call it a NIC, a NIC Card, or sometimes a Network Card, and they’d often incorrectly call one thing by a different name in a meaningless way, because if you were on Netware-S, your CPU was your Controller. It’s all angels dancing on the head of a pin, and complaining that NIC Card is redundant depends on a narrow lumpen version of the full story.
You still haven’t shown Wyatt’s Stadium Wave anywhere in nature.
@bart –
#1 – glad you caught the sarcasm.
#2 – It blows you out of the water. It proves you have no clue what you are talking about. But it does show you can google and jump on the first site you see.
#3 – Wyatt is not debunked any more than Wegman was. But your pontificating and hand waving and unilateral declarations are making many laugh here. Regardless of your emperor complex, you are still naked.
@bart – BTW – Again, you need to read smarter. I said an IBM AT (intel 80286). Which S would not run on. It was 86. It was G-Net and it was 1984.
Read smarter. Then you will not be making the same stupid mistakes over and over again.
BartR, PhilJourdan and others… would be real nice if you guys would text or instagram or email each other with your bantering comments. Maybe Curry will close down her web with so much blabber being posted, you probably don’t give a hoot. Judith can you block these guys?
@Danley Wolfe – You are correct. I should have let bart to his ignorance. As it is, the debate is over. The facts are on the table. And I do not tweet (or facebook). So he will have to stew in his own comments. back to the topic.
But Dr. Curry neither shuts down nor bans. Some say that is bad. Some say it is good. It is neither. it is her policy.
According to Pres. Obama, the seas have already stopped risein’.
I find it shocking that may not be the case.
Andrew
The concept of “adjusting” the data to remove natural variability seems peculiar to me.
But I guess it is just the flip side of “adjusting” the data to remove human influence. Like adjusting the temperature data to remove urban island heat effect.
It would seem to me that the human effect would be shorter term and the natural variation the longer term – but I guess nature works on many time scales. It gets colder almost every night, and it gets colder every winter. We also see it get colder on a scale of a few years (la ninas) or on a 30 year scale (PDO/ENSO). It seems like it gets colder on a century scale as well (LIA for example). Probably it gets colder on a millennium scale (before or after the Roman warm period for example). Then lets not forget orbital cooling, which seems to operate on 41k or 100k scales (Milankovitch cycles).
It seems like it would be very hard to remove natural variability at all scales, to leave just the human influence behind.
“It would seem to me that the human effect would be shorter term and the natural variation the longer term.”
_______
? The anthropogenic forcing on the climate is multifaceted, with both warming and cooling sides– cooling from aerosols over shorter time frames but warming from GH’s over much longer time frames. But the net anthropogenic effect is warming, and that forcing is a long-term prospect and has been increasing in strength. It is now the dominant long-term forcing, with natural variability acting as shorter-term noise that rides on this longer-term signal To see the longer-term signal accurately, the shorter term noise needs to be filtered. The big issue is really one of accurately filtering that natural variability, as it seem likely the anthropogenic signal is affecting that as well.
R. Gates said “But the net anthropogenic effect is warming, and that forcing is a long-term prospect and has been increasing in strength.”
I agree with all that. Still, the actual forcing is from 1950 to 2014, is only 64 years. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the timescale of Milankovitch natural forcings.
“I agree with all that. Still, the actual forcing is from 1950 to 2014, is only 64 years. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the timescale of Milankovitch natural forcings.”
Which is just to say that the variation in anthropogenic forcing over the last few decades (and the next few decades) is several order of magnitude larger than the change in Milankovitch forcing over the same short period. Also remember that the Milankovitch forcing has been trending down over the last 8,000 years or so. And hence, it hasn’t accounted for any of the recent warming or sea level rise.
Pierre-Normand:
I agree that the rate of the forcing is greater over the short time humans have applied it (and for the short time until 2100). So I agree with your point.
My problem is that the total forcing over the entire Milankovitch cycle can result in a 10C degree swing – while we are talking about a short term (although higher rate) swing of .7C or so, with maybe another .5C or .6C until 2100.
There is no reason to believe that we humans will be able to keep the CO2 pump going for very long because we are going to run out of hydrocarbons to burn shortly (like maybe 80 years). So this is a short term blip, totaling maybe 2 or 3C, which is 1/5 to 1/3 less than the total temperature swing over an ice age.
So I merely quibble with R. Gates use of the phrase “dominant long-term forcing” when discussing the human forcing. Dominant in that its short term rate (the blip) is higher than the long-term background rate, but not dominant in total magnitude of temperature swing from long-term Milankovitch versus human forcing.
I guess what I am really saying (perhaps badly) is that I don’t think humans are going to be applying our warming forcing for 41,000 years – because we won’t be able to dig up and burn hydrocarbons for 41,000 years. In the blink of an eye (couple hundred years), all the carbon we can dig up will be burned, and that forcing will stop. We will either switch to solar, wind or nuclear (probably mostly nuclear) – which don’t produce carbon.
So how can we be considered the dominant long-term forcing when we are only going to be a forcing for 150 years or so? Compared to 41000 or 100000 year long forcings.
“So how can we be considered the dominant long-term forcing when we are only going to be a forcing for 150 years or so? Compared to 41000 or 100000 year long forcings.”
Gates meant “long term” as multi-decadal to centennial, compared to short-term inter-annual natural variability from ENSO, the 11-year solar cycles, volcanoes, etc. The issue is that the former long term anthropogenic forcing is strong enough to emerge from the noise from the latter over just a couple decades. Call it middle term if you wish. Of course the slow changing Milankovitch forcing can also emerge from the short-term noise over several millennia (or faster when ocean circulation or glacial-melt tipping points are reached). Gates clearly didn’t suggest that the antropogenic forcing that dominates now (and will do so over the next several centuries) will go on dominating over tens of millennia. But that’s irrelevant to our present concerns with sustainability, adaptation, mitigation, etc.
R Gates : “But the net anthropogenic effect is warming, and that forcing is a long-term prospect and has been increasing in strength.”
Assuming the very thing that needs to be proved.
Again, neat.
“So I merely quibble with R. Gates use of the phrase “dominant long-term forcing” when discussing the human forcing. Dominant in that its short term rate (the blip) is higher than the long-term background rate, but not dominant in total magnitude of temperature swing from long-term Milankovitch versus human forcing.”
——
Now you realize that astronomical forcing (so-called Milankovitch) does not provide enough change in solar insolation in and of itself to account for the full temperature swings we see from the bottom of the glacial to the top of the interglacial. It is only through positive feedback in which the smaller astronomical forcing triggers the increase in CO2 that then leads to more warming, and more CO2, etc, that the full warming can be accounted for. Thus, anthropogenic additions to GHG’s does indeed represent the dominant long-term forcing in the climate. But what really must be remembered is that the RATE OF INCREASE in CO2 overwhelms all natural negative feedbacks. This Human Carbon Volcano seems to be already triggering other positive feedbacks that could substantially accelerate the warming further.
It’s nice to see such intelligent reasoning from RG and Pierre-Normand on this technical subject.
When ice age cycles are concerned Milankovitch cycles and feedback through CO2 are surely involved, but
– Milankovitch cycles are weak, at least on global level. They are stronger at higher altitudes (north and south in opposite phases), but even so they are a trigger at best.
– The basic feedback from temperature to CO2 concentration is weak. Warming by 1C might increase CO2 by 10ppm and that adds very little to the warming.
So far we have a weak trigger and a weak feedback. That’s not enough to produce major changes.
Thus something more is needed. That must be something in glacier dynamics. Ice ages involved changes over wide continental areas. Hypotheses have been proposed to explain the glacial growth over a period around 100000 years and the much more abrupt deglaciation,
AGW that leads to warming of several degrees without glacial feedback is a little different. Additional CO2 is not from some feedback that involves both the temperature and icesheet dynamics, but it’s introduced by human action. That makes it somewhat easier to estimate changes in Greenland and Antarctic icesheets, but very much remains unknown even in this forced case.
Pekka, it’s nice to see that cool heads, such as yours, still prevail.
Seems to me there’s a profound misunderstanding here of the “Milankovitch Cycles” and their proposed effect on climate. For example, consider the case of Axial tilt (obliquity), which is “roughly periodic, taking approximately 41,000 years to shift between a tilt of 22.1° and 24.5° and back again.” Leaving aside for the moment the fact that this 41 Kyear cycle doesn’t really match the major component of glacial activity (for the last million years, anyway), there seems to be a general assumption that the effect of this “forcing” is minor. But even with Milankovitch’s early studies, this assumption wasn’t present. Increasing insolation at the poles and decreasing insolation at the equator can’t be assumed to “cancel out”. In fact, depending on their mechanism of affecting climate, they could well reinforce one another, Given that any such mechanism remains speculative, and that there isn’t much correlation between the cycle involved and actual glacial “cycles”, there’s no real justification for any assumption(s) regarding how important such “forcing” is.
In fact, according to Wiki, the only “cycle” that appears to closely correspond to glacial activity is Orbital inclination:
There doesn’t seem to be any plausible mechanism proposed by which this “cycle” can produce any sort of “forcing” that can be compared to that of CO2 or other “greenhouse gases”.
The correlation seems to be compelling, although it has been questioned. In addition, the fact that prior to perhaps 1MYA the 41 Kyear cycle seemed to be dominant raises additional questions regarding the nature and relative contribution of any “Milankovitch” forcing. Given all this, comparisons to “greenhouse forcing” are completely unwarranted at this point.
“The basic feedback from temperature to CO2 concentration is weak. Warming by 1C might increase CO2 by 10ppm and that adds very little to the warming.”
——-
Astronomical forcing seems to provide a weak trigger that leads to a variety of positive feedbacks that amplify this trigger. These include biosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere, and even lithosphere. Increases in CO2 are certainly a key part of that amplifying feedback. The interesting thing is that there were associated negative feedbacks working at different time frames such that CO2 could be drawn down, ice would begin to accumulate again, more dust would begin to fall in the ocean, etc., and we truly had a cycle of glacial to interglacial and back again. The essential thing about the HCV is that natural negative feedbacks to draw down CO2 are being overwhelmed, and certain potentially very strong positive feedbacks seem to be kicking into high gear.
Unicorns. (H/T Steven Mosher)
RGates,
We have solid evidence that ice ages have indeed occurred. Thus we can conclude that something has led both to the glaciation and deglaciation, but the case seems to be that we cannot say what that “something” is. Science of Doom has been digging in the theories and evidence that exists on those issues. He is not an expert and may have missed something important, but what he has found out and reported seems convincing. His interest has led also me to read many papers on glacial cycles.
The mechanisms of glaciation and deglaciation are is being studied actively by a number of scientists. They keep on publishing papers that propose significant additions to the earlier hypotheses and models. Based on the most recent papers we might choose the optimistic view that the theories are finally staring to converge to something that can be tested rather than presented only as hypotheses. This seems, however, still be only an optimistic view rather than an established state of science, as very little has been confirmed at even the level that two independent modeling groups would have confirmed that their approaches support the same conclusions.
Personally I have become to believe that Milankovitch cycles are not the essential driver but only the final factor that triggers the turnaround, when the state of the Earth is ready for that. The glacial cycle seems to be in some other way a natural property of the Earth system.
The Milankovitch cycles are weak from the point of view of net solar forcing, but they affect the albedo through systematic changes in northern ice cover during the months when there is more daylight. The forcing is really a net albedo forcing from the varying ice extent, and the albedo has a positive feedback effect both on itself and with CO2/H2O as the earth cools into an Ice Age. From the forcing viewpoint, I think it is best to view the Milankovitch mechanism as albedo cycles with the insolation distribution affecting this rather than net insolation.
Jim,
The albedos of the hemispheres are approximately equal. During ice ages the albedo of the Northern Hemisphere is larger. Your proposal has difficulties in explaining the termination of the ice age.
Pekka, the northern hemisphere albedo drives the ice ages because the glaciers can extend over land there becoming more permanent. In the southern hemisphere, no significant continental area is available for such an extension. This is why Milankovitch is focused on the northern hemisphere insolation distribution. The ends of Ice Ages appear to correspond to periods of the 25k year precession cycle when the sun is closer in the northern summer, which tends to remove the glaciers over time. These glaciers appear to be delicately maintained by northern summer insolation. There was, for me, a very convincing paper by Roe (2006, GRL) that showed the close correspondence of rate of change of ice cover to insolation.
Jim,
I still think that your mechanism would work exactly in the opposite direction from what you propose. As long as the albedo is high, it cannot lead to warming, but assures that the albedo remains high.
Have you read the recent posts of SoD on this issue. He has collected all papers he has found. It’s clear in this case as it is in all complex issues that cherry picking one paper (or mutually supportive papers) you can find confirmation for many interpretations, but it’s equally clear that the overall picture is not at all as simple.
What I have presented as my own (present) view agrees largely with some recent work. My view is formed in accordance with the common process. First I start to form a view, and then I’m happy to notice that resent papers support that view. That’s a biased mechanism, but I like the bias.
Pekka, it should be no coincidence that thousands of years in unfavorable insolation conditions can remove the northern glaciers. It is a slow process but systematic and with the same strong positive feedbacks in that direction too. Just the timing points to this.
Jim,
Every period of glaciation has several similar periods of more Northern summer insolation. They occur at a lower value of albedo. Why does the deglaciation start only, when the albedo is at it’s highest value?
The idea that i like is that the large scale picture has nothing to do with Milankovitch cycles. According to that idea the most natural state of the Earth is the buildup of ice in icesheets. That stage has lasted up to 100000 years in the past, but the length of that period has been shorter in earlier glacial cycles. When that has gone on for long enough the state becomes unstable. Then a limited disturbance related to Milankovitch cycles triggers deglacification that is another persistent state. Deglacification is, however, much faster making that state shorter. Now we are in the relatively short stage that separates last deglacification from the beginning of next long stage of glacification.
That kind of mechanisms have been studied by Abe-Ouchi and her collaborators. They might not agree fully on my description, but their model has much common with that.
@ Tuppence
“Assuming the very thing that needs to be proved.
Again, neat.”
Remember: Within ‘Climate Science’, ‘Anthropogenic CO2 is causing the Temperature of the Earth to rise at an unprecedented rate.’ is an axiom, not a theory.
Axiom: “An axiom, or postulate, is a premise or starting point of reasoning. A self-evident principle or one that is accepted as true without proof as the basis for argument; a postulate. As classically conceived, an axiom is a premise so evident as to be accepted as true without controversy.”
And that is exactly how Climate Science treats ACO2 the knob that controls the ‘Temperature of the Earth’: a premise so evident as to be accepted as true without controversy. Questioning the axiomatic nature of the premise is the source of the controversy; those who do so, even mildly, are instantly labeled ‘deniers’.
‘We find that when *correcting for interannual variability,*
the past decade’s slow down of the global mean sea level
disappears.’
Those see-saw coasts_ subsidings -uprisings …
I like to keep in mind that ol’ mean bench mark
at The Isle of the Dead_down under, and what
constitutes evidence and what is all at sea.
http://www.john-daly.com/ges/appendix.htm
It’s La Nina’s fault for the drop in sea level rise rate. As Gilda Radner said , “Its always something”. Apparently, La Nina will take a siesta for the rest of the century and we can get back to the usual hysteria about rising sea levels.
I take great comfort knowing the supply of excuses for missing the dire projections is inexhaustible.
To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the science to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by adjusting, end them.
Apologies to The Bard.
They went for the fortune and adjusted a bit.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/22/sierra-club-top-officials-drive-gas-guzzling-jaguars/
beth, +1000
Jim,
Hey 1000 ?!?:)
Thx.
bts
beth, I don’t often read a blog, and then have to laugh out loud. Which is exactly what I did when I read what you wrote. It made my day, and is worth all the praise I can give it.
R. Gates
When a “non-expert” can so easily recognize the problems, that “hypothesis” is in very severe trouble.
Recall the Emperor’s new clothes
It only takes a small child speaking the truth to trigger the restoration of sanity and truth.
Luv it!
I was only saying to my fellow toffs over tokay the other night: we don’t beat our serfs…we adjust them.
Terribly O/T
I am disregardin’ the slights regardin’ serfs and focus on ‘Tokay.’
A film feast awaits yer in the film ‘Dean Spanley’ best EVAH film
where Tokay has a central role. An oh so elegant script and subtle
visuals – if yer get that sort of thing :) – and casting +1 ( or more.)
Jeremy Northern, Peter O’Toole, Sam Neill, Bryan Brown. it’s a little masterpiece…Tokay produces an altered state of mind in the film,
perhaps akin ter climate scientists discovering missing heat in
ocean depths …
Are you sure you weren’t playing a Clint Eastward movie in a minimized window?
Reason I ask is I was watching a horror short – The Woodcutter’ – while typing away and wondered what the galloping horses in the audio was a metaphor for. Talk about your altered state.
Generallisimmo :) altered states can do strange things to the mind,
but no, not a Clint Eastward movie, I’m quite certain … well 97%
confident.
Our hostess writes “Once again, the emerging best explanations for the ‘pause’ in global surface temperatures and the slow down in sea level rise bring into question the explanations for the rise in both in the last quarter of the 20th century. And makes the 21st century of sea level rise projections seem like unjustified arm waving.”
The obvious explanation to what has been happening to climate ever since forever, is that ALL observed changes are natural, and adding CO2 to the atmosphere from recent levels has a negligible effect. In the end, I am convinced, the observed data will demonstrate that this is undeniably true.
In the meanwhile our politicians are faced with a geopolitical situation, in the Ukraine, where energy is a major factor. I only hope that this is the time when a politician who really matters, is going to WANT to believe that CAGW is a hoax. I have all my fingers and toes crossed.
“ALL observed changes are natural, and adding CO2 to the atmosphere from recent levels has a negligible effect. ”
—-
The eternal pipe dream. Quintessential denialism.
No, AGW is a pipe dream. ALL observed changes being natural is the null hypothesis in regard to the A(CO2)GW pipe dream.
R. Gates, you write “The eternal pipe dream.”
There is no empirical, measured data to show that adding CO2 to the atmosphere from recent levels has any effect whatsoever on anything to so with climate. Zero, nada, zilch. All the warmists have are hypothetical estimations, and the output of non-validated models. In other words, SWAGs (Scientific Wild Arsed Guesses}.
Jim – you are too generous. I’d simply call them WAGS – there’s nothing even remotely scientific about AGW alarmism.
They’ve run out of latitude to abuse the accounting of aerosols, so now the universal fudge factor has become ENSO.
When it is politically convenient to do so, ENSO is claimed to be an effect of ‘global warming’ – i.e. that ‘global warming’ causes more and larger El Nino and fewer and weaker La Nina episodes. So when a big El Nino puts a bump in surface temperature, or a train of El Ninos puts a step change in in surface temperature, you have cover to blame it on ‘global warming’ and shout “AHA! Bend over and give me your money!.”
When it is politically convenient to do so, ENSO is claimed to be ‘natural variability’ – i.e. that El Nino and La Nina episodes are merely noise that is unrelated to ‘global warming’. So when an inconvenient pause in temp and sea level rise occurs, you have cover to ‘adjust’ the data for ENSO, fabricate the rise you were looking for, and shout “AHA!. Bend over and give me your money!”
The science truly is settled – ‘global warming’ exists. Every other fact about the universe will be situationally reinterpreted to fit.
Re: Altimeter Upward Adjustments
Are the modern satellite altimeter upward adjustments legitimate?
Sea level rate of rise shown to be partially a product of adjustments
Satellite sea level data has been “adjusted” upward by 34% over past 9 years alone
Re: “Sea levels have risen almost 20 cms [sic] since 1900.”
With SI never add “s” to units. See: SI Unit rules and style conventions
NIST Writing with Metric
When will Reuters ever learn?
Jo Nova finds Man made sea level rises are due to global adjustments
Thanks for this reference
David L. Hagen | April 24, 2014 at 9:18 am |
Jo Nova finds Man made sea level rises are due to global adjustments.
——–
Oh, is that what she found? Too bad she is not an expert.
David
Excellent links. I should amend my comment above to say that apparently the supply of excuses and adjustments are inexhaustible.
The article at Jo Nova’s is interersting but does not catch all the fiddling that has been going on.
I started looking at the altimetry data in 2011. Since I can see no logical reason to apply a “barometer adjustement” to a global average I select no-barom dataset.
About a year later I wanted to up date the data and found nobarom was no longer on the menu. Now logically barometric effects can only make water higher in one place than another they can make the worlds ocean expand ! So for global averages it should not matter. I took what was on offer and plotted it up.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=524
The data bore not the slightest resemble to what it had shown barely a year earlier.
I emailed and asked if the nobarom dataset was available anywhere, even though it was not on the front page public offering.
Rudely, my request was simply ignored.
We also get force-fed the GAIA [sic] adjustment where what they call “global mean sea level” is floating, phantom like, somewhere above the waves.
The REAL GMSL is no longer available !
If we are supposed to be worrying on the behalf of low lying nations and our own coastal areas surely it is the REAL sea level ( the one that makes things wet ) that we are interested in. Not someone’s hypothetically adjusted because they guess that the sea bed is getting lower.
At this point we have to realise that this dataset have been corrupted by activists posing as scientists and has no objective value for investigative science.
oops: [barometric adjustments] can NOT make the worlds ocean expand
Adjustments recognizing the 60 year oscillation etc.
The NIPCC posts reviews of papers on sea level rise. e.g.
Chambers, D.P, Merrifield, M.A. and Nerem, R.S. 2012. Is there a 60-year oscillation in global mean sea level? Geophysical Research Letters 39: 10.1029/2012GL052885.
Scafetta reviews Discussion on common errors in analyzing sea level accelerations, solar trends and global warming
Judith said:
“I don’t think you can easily or convincingly separate out the El Nino/La Nina effects; that is my point.”
——-
Easily? That’s relative, based on the tools available. Convincingly? That’s also relative based on the person being convinced. Grace satellite data during the period of “the pause” is pretty convincing to many experts who believe the data pretty clearly displayed exactly where the mass was displaced to as ENSO related wind shifts caused more moisture to fall over land versus ocean.
and exactly how far back do we have GRACE satellite data? Since 2002. We don’t have it during the warming regime of 1976-2000.
Take a look at the Multivariate ENSO Index from ~1950-2013. If you’re adjusting for “La Nina” events, the period from about 1977-1997 shows a distinct dearth of them, relative to both later and prior. Therefore, even if adjusting for “La Nina” events, the adjustment should be applied to the earlier period as having an unusually small number.
Oh, and BTW, using periods like 1992-2002 vs. 2003-2011 is likely to introduce artifacts, given it has little relationship to ENSO conditions.
Another BTW: I think I see a sort of saw-toothed effect in the blue (La Nina) areas of the graph, on scales ranging from 4-20 years. Could well be an artifact, but it’s interesting and might have something to do with the underlying mechanisms.
If you adjust for most La Nina events, would you not potentially be reducing the rate of sea level rise? Most La Nina events result in additional ocean warming.
I’m pretty sure the effects of delayed return of rainfall are orders of magnitude greater than that of warming of a small fraction of the Pacific Warm Pool. Sure enough that I’m not going to run the numbers, but feel free…
Is there always an imbalance in rainfall on continents versus rainfall on oceans. The first mention of this is the 2011 La Nina, the 2nd most powerful in the instrumental record.
“Another BTW: I think I see a sort of saw-toothed effect in the blue (La Nina) areas of the graph, on scales ranging from 4-20 years. Could well be an artifact, but it’s interesting and might have something to do with the underlying mechanisms.”
Doing a sliding trend is just another form of running mean with all it’s inherent defects and distortions.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/triple-running-mean-filters/
This is just more amteur-hour science, by professionals.
Personally, I’m highly skeptical of the whole paradigm behind “smoothing” and “averaging”. When applied to complex non-linear systems, they appear to me to incorporate an unwarranted assumption: that “smaller” phenomena will “cancel out”, leaving “larger” effects to be studied for general principles.
(I’m using size here as a general metaphor for any sort of scale, such as actual size in space, time-scale, etc.)
The problem with this is that any “simple” index, especially a multivariate index, flattens a phenomenistic space with dimension n to dimension m where m<<n, often just 1 or 2. Given that the number of interacting nonlinear deterministic components is some large fraction of n, such “simple” indices are actually highly simplistic, simplifying to the point of major distortion.
Given that the “size” of effects from various interacting nonlinear deterministic components can vary over many orders of magnitude, and their effect on the behavior of other components can also vary to such an extent, any assumption that “smaller” effects can be “smoothed” away to expose underlying mechanisms is certainly unwarranted, and probably totally wrong.
“Is there always an imbalance in rainfall on continents versus rainfall on oceans. The first mention of this is the 2011 La Nina, the 2nd most powerful in the instrumental record.”
_____
This is surely a great area for research.
Dr. Curry said:
“and exactly how far back do we have GRACE satellite data? Since 2002. We don’t have it during the warming regime of 1976-2000.”
_____
Certainly Grace is a new and extremely powerful tool to add to the other tools that we can use to really understand what is happening in the full system. For example, when sea levels dropped during the 2010-2011 La Nina, without Grace data, one might have assumed incorrectly that the drop was due to the “cooling” of the ocean during the La Nina. The Grace data allowed a more detailed analysis to be done, that showed in fact that the water mass was actually moved from ocean to land as wind patterns shifted where the moisture was being deposited. Once this La Nina faded, sea levels rebounded sharply, and that rise might have been incorrectly interpreted as some rapid acceleration in the long-term sea level rise, when in fact, mass was shifting back from land to ocean as rainfall patterns changed once more, but also much of the excess water on the land was draining back to the oceans. More than anything, this Grace data adds great credibility to the idea of filtering out these shorter-term ENSO effects in the shifts of water mass between ocean and land and back again.
Regarding the period of 1976-2000, certainly we all know this period was dominated by El Nino’s over La Nina, and as a warm phase PD, we were getting more sensible and latent heat flux from ocean to atmosphere. Without Grace data from the period, we can only use other proxy measurements to guess at exactly how movements of mass might have changed between ocean and land. But since the greatest impact on ocean mass over the longer term is from mass moving from continental glacial ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica, these probably serve as the best proxies for long-term mass changes in the ocean. They tell a consistent story– net movements of mass to the ocean are higher in the past two decades then a background 20th century average. In other words, linear projections of sea level rise are likely to be widely off the mark by the end of the 21st Century as the net flow from cryosphere to ocean is looking to be nonlinearly accelerating. This could be especially pronounced after 2050.
Correction: 1976-2000 was a warm phase PDO, not “PD”, unless your local Police Department was particularly warm during this period.
It seems like this needs stating again: The study does not use any ENSO index information. It doesn’t adjust for La Niña or El Niño. It looks at short-term variability in factors which are known to directly affect the volume of the oceans. The variability in these factors just happens generally to correlate with ENSO variability.
“The variability in these factors just happens generally to correlate with ENSO variability.”
______
Fortunately, the Grace satellite data shows quite clearly exactly why there are shifts in mass of the ocean that correlates with ENSO variability and we know that it does not just “happen” to correlate, but has a very specific, measurable, and scientific explanation. The mass can run, but with Grace, it can’t hide.
I have only made the briefest scan of the paper, but a couple of points:
(1) The thermosteric correction changes midway through the time period: “thermosteric data are from ref. 28 over 1994-2006 and Argo for 2007-2011.” Ref. 28 covers 0-700 m; Argo (ref. 29) covers 0-1500 m. One can’t help but wonder what happens if a consistent method is used for the entire period.
(2) The filtering which they used — “we applied a high-pass filter (removing all signal >5 years) to the thermosteric time series” — seems to smooth out month-to-month changes as well, which is puzzling.
(3) It would have been helpful to find in the supplemental information the code used, or at least a spreadsheet with various time series, e.g. the unfiltered thermosteric time series and the filtered version. There isn’t a lot of data here, one would think that would be easy to provide.
The speed of photons is dependent on the media it moves through, radar waves move more slowly through moist air than through dry air. The satellites use a timed pulses to estimate the distance. They use dual-band radar altimeters, two different frequencies which should be slowed down by water vapor by a different amount. The problem is that they have to pass through the ionosphere too and this also alters the speed of the two pulses.
Trying to deconvolute out the differential effects of the amount of water vapor and the ionosphere temperature/thickness is non-trivial.
Bats use a sonar pulse that has a long period of a single low frequency and then the end shoots up in pitch, just like a hockey stick. Bats deconvolute out water vapor and Fourier- transformation using the end frequency sweep.
Some climate scientists initiate a study only if data go against the religious dictates. This has happened time and time again. If the rate of sea level rise were increasing, there wouldn’t be any study of it. We would hear only “I told you so!”
“Fortunately, the Grace satellite data shows quite clearly…”
I’m hoping that, someday soon, we’ll get over the idea that twelve years of data will “show quite clearly” anything with a period of two or three years. Until then I’m trying not to vomit.
Even back then, as a warmist, I was struck by the errant lunacy of Obama’s proclamation, that ” this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
Such grandiosity is more suited to the loony bin than the White House. It’s one of the things that started my journey toward, as Fan so endearingly puts it, “denialist cognition.”
Someone should start a website titled “The Ad Hoc Hypothesis of the Day.” It should begin by explaining that use of “ad hoc” hypotheses has roughly the same merit as using your fingers to shovel food into your mouth at a formal dinner. If cleverly done, the website could be both entertaining and beneficial to the public at large.
The data used in a paper published by Jevrejeva et al (2006) in the JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH indicates that the rate of sea level rise from the mid 19th century until the end of the 20th century was constant. In short, it did not go up in response to increases in CO2.
If it is true that the sea is like a vast mercury thermometer, then this constancy means that global temperatures have also been rising at a constant rate and have also not responded to increases in CO2. Since, obviously, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we must conclude that the CO2 warming feedbacks are negating rather than enhancing the original CO2 warming.
So: Although CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it’s not actually able to warm the planet. Curiouser and curiouser.
It’s only curiouser and curiouser because of the CO2 (significant) GHG paradigm. Outside of the paradigm, it’s incurious.
Duh, When oceans are warmer, there is more precipitation in the form of rain and snow and that takes ocean water and dumps it on land as water and ice. Of course this natural cycle always kicks in in warm times to limit the upper bound of Temperature and Sea Level. Look at the data for the past eleven thousand years. There was very tight bounding.
Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! Natural Cycle! One after another and another and another . . . . . . .
It’s all about the adjustments. Climate science doesn’t care much about raw measurement data any more. After all the folding, spindling and mutilating, the only thing that matters is how to spin the ‘adjustments’.
Climate science is to numbers what Humpty Dumpty was to words.
A long while ago I ran some cost numbers on just pumping water onto Antarctica, northern Siberia, or other places where it won’t be seen again for ten thousand years, and it wasn’t all that expensive. It would take about two years worth of new Chinese coal plant construction to create an installed sea-level reduction capacity of about 5 mm/year, and I recall it was less than $15 or so billion per year for the coal to run the plants.
Of course nuclear would have higher up-front costs, but I figured after the fad passed, we could just quit buying coal, whereas we couldn’t quit paying down the sunk costs of the nuclear installations.
Other simple methods for controlling sea level are almost as simple, using heavy equipment to move shoreline dirt inland, thus increasing the total volume of the ocean basin.
Are you pumping sea water, salt water, on land for storage?
Mother Nature takes water out of the oceans and then delivers fresh water as ice or snow to land for rebuilding ice on land. this natural process works just fine and it does not need your salt water on land. You could take the salt out, but now you don’t have a process that is not expensive or you don’t have fresh water stored on land.
The natural cycle has worked perfectly for eleven thousand years in the same bounds. Just spend some time and effort to understand the natural cycle.
“Our results confirm the need for quantifying and further removing from the climate records the short-term natural climate variability if one wants to extract the global warming signal.”
You more importantly have to remove long term variability, which mathematically cannot be done.
There is no detectable global warming signal, and there will never be.
Long term noise swamps everything, and it cannot be removed.
ah yes, your science is certain. brilliant demonstration.
1. long term variability can be removed. the question is can you
remove it all, and how confident can you be in this operation.
2. There is a detectable global warming signal, the question is
how confident can we be in this detection ( no detection is perfect)
and more importantly what are the various causes of this warming.
3. you claim there never will be a detectable global warming signal
never is strong claim. That requires and awesome proof, you nobel
prize awaits you.
4. long term noise? please demonstrate how you identified this
math required beware.
“There is no detectable global warming signal, and there will never be”
____
Thank you for another quintessential example of denialist thought. Would anyone like to characterize this is simply “skeptical”. Really?
The proof isn’t that hard. You can do it yourself.
You can’t distinguish a trend (=global warming signal) from a cycle (=long term variability) without data long compared to the cycles to be excluded.
It’s just a mathematical fact.
Set up the distinguishing matrix that finds coefficients on
1. A trend
2. a half dozen sines and cosines with periods long compared to the data they’ll be working from.
Even before you finish writing the code, you’ll think, “You know, this is really really going to be ill-conditioned. The curves are essentially just multiples of each other.”
You may give up there, or if that insight doesn’t hit you, just produce the coefficients and notice that they mutliply the noise in the measurements by ten to the thirtieth or so.
Not only that, but for a small signal this linear distinguishing is optimal. If you get around it somehow, you’ve made a mistake.
It’s the climate change denialist vs. the math denialists, I guess.
I deny that the scientists know what they say they know, owing to this and one other fact, that you can’t solve the Navier Stokes equations.
Duh.
Like I said you can detect trends subject to your assumptions about long cycles. Everyone knows this.
However one doesnt simply get to posit the mere possibility of lpt. Thats mere skepticism more akin to philosophy than science.
In short asumming that there are no unicorns one can fit the data since 1750 with a model that has a positive trend term. Of course if you want to imagine some unicorn
Cycle to explain away the trend term you are welcomed to your fairy tale
Duh.
Like I said you can detect trends subject to your assumptions about long cycles. Everyone knows this.
Explain the difference between a trend and a bunch of long-period sines.
What feature are you detecting exactly?
rhhardin | April 25, 2014 at 7:45 am |
Could you list this bunch of long period sines you suggest exist with evidence for a physical mechanism for each and their exact periodicity?
Because if you can’t, Occam’s Razor.
Could you list this bunch of long period sines you suggest exist with evidence for a physical mechanism for each and their exact periodicity?
Because if you can’t, Occam’s Razor.
Occam’s razor goes the other way.
A sum of sines and cosines is the general representation of a stationary gaussian random process, which would be the default assumption for everything.
The earth has gone through aeons of huge long period cycles, which incidentally demonstrates stability under perturbation, so perhaps resisting change ought to be assumed until proven otherwise, not the reverse.
The strange science of climate change seems to reverse everything.
Using maths, rhhardin mansplains that the maths of geology is beyond our current comprehension. That’s not to say that there is no CO2 contribution to warming and that it is responsible for most, if not all of the recent warming.
Due to our ignorance, it may be even worse than we think it is because CO2 warming could be pushing up against a natural downcycle.
The natural cycles cannot be reasonable removed until it is known what in hell drives them, how long they last, what sort of feedbacks do they create independently and among other cycles, how they interact with CO2 and other first order anthro-forcings that alter the earths surface, atmospheric and oceanic physiobiochemistry.
rhhardin | April 25, 2014 at 8:06 am |
Howard | April 25, 2014 at 11:49 am |
What a bunch of hogwash. No offense intended.
If Occam’s, then for all of these very long sine and cosine waves that can’t be identified and haven’t been meaningfully detected, we call them even and estimate them as zeroed out.
If identified and meaningfully detected but without substantial resolution, we estimate their range and include that in the Uncertainty.
So, no list of sine and cosine functions — how wonderfully, purposefully, senselessly vague a generalization — then Occam’s says they don’t exist.
What we do know exists is a wide and diverse list of regional and global effects that appear mostly to net zero out over any long enough period. The day/night cycle after a day and a night. The lunar cycle after a month. The seasons after a solar year. The moon-sun cycle after 13 months. The Hale Cycle after 22 years (to be on the safe side). The epicycles and pseudocycles appear to be truly lower in scale by an order of magnitude for global effect, so the AMO and PDO and all the other regional currents and flows and exchanges and bends, being that they don’t all or even mostly synchronize in any demonstrably regular way, are small compared to the whole globe and net out to nearly zero.
How big is the area of the AMO? Bigger than the USA? Smaller? The USA is under 2% of the globe’s surface. It’s one of over four dozen regional climate basins. It _CAN’T_ do enough to meaningfully mess up the signal, and it _CAN_ be pretty much treated as negligible on its own.
No demonstrated physical mechanism, no demonstrated synchrony, no case for considering in the model that explains the system in simple terms.
Now, if you’re building a GCM at millikelvin precision and sub-km granularity of cells, which we’re a way off from doing, you of course want to include the whole gamut of what you can demonstrate physical mechanisms for.. which still excludes all these pretend sine waves vaguely floated about without cause.
Sines and cosines are the eigenfunctions of a stationary autocorrelation function.
That’s where the come from.
You want eigenfunctions because then their coefficients are independent random variables.
Otherwise, using non-eigenfunctions, it’s just a coordinate transformation without special significance.
A stationary random process is more or less the simplest description of time varying data. From the spectrum (squared coefficients of the sines and cosines) you get all the properties of the time series.
If you know more, you can assume more, though perhaps you’ll stay with sines and cosines because of all the literature on what happens with them.
If the series isn’t stationary, you don’t get sines and cosines, but some other set of eigenfunctions. They will have the same problem for long term variability, I dare say.
rhhardin | April 25, 2014 at 5:36 pm |
Mumbo. Jumbo.
List them, provide particulars of each one. When they start. When they end. Their amplitude. Their periodicity. Their skewness or bias or modulation or kerning or weighting. Describe the underlying physical mechanism.
OR. THEY. DO. NOT. EXIST. AND. WE. IGNORE. THEM.
rhhardin and steven mosher
There may well be a long cyclical temperature variation, like the shorter term ones we can see in our relatively short term global temperature record..
There may be an underlying warming trend, which started as we began emerging from the LIA, long before humans were emitting any substantial amounts of GHGs.
There may also be an underlying AGW temperature trend since humans have been emitting substantial amounts of GHGs.
All of the above variations are possible – and could well all be occurring at the same time.
Trying to sort out and quantify the AGW signal from all this is very difficult if not impossible.
I believe our hostess refers to this as “uncertainty”.
Max
Is a millikelvin the same as a millicelsius, just with an offset?
Mumbo. Jumbo.
List them, provide particulars of each one.
Think of it as the noise background against which you have to detect a trend signal.
You will find that you don’t have a good detector at all.
The noise background is identical to the trend signal.
PS Here is one analysis of longer term temperature cycles
http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm
Bart
“OR. THEY. DO. NOT. EXIST. AND. WE. IGNORE. THEM.”
rhhardin is about 7 years behind on the argument.
max
“There may well be a long cyclical temperature variation, like the shorter term ones we can see in our relatively short term global temperature record..
There may be an underlying warming trend, which started as we began emerging from the LIA, long before humans were emitting any substantial amounts of GHGs.”
Yes max, this is know as the hypothesis of LTP.
we cannot rule out LTP.
It could be there is an LTP which of course makes the currennt 250 year trend we see “spurious”
There could be.
Of course “there could be” is the WEAKEST of all “scientific” arguments
because
A) the job of science is to give the best explanation on the GIVENS
B) it could be unicorns.
The argument of “it could be” or “there could be” is epistemically equivalent to saying “we could be a brain in a vat” as a counter to any and all scientific arguments.
So yes, there could be LTP. Monkeys could fly out of my butt.
But the last colonoscopy I got showed none in the launch position.
merely positing the possibility of LTP is a chump move. It works against
ALL SCIENCE and therefore works against none.
Steven Mosher
Sorry to hear you’ve got a problem with monkeys flying out of your butt. A not uncommon ailment among climatologists. Talk to your doctor.
But back to long term cycles in our planet’s climate (ex: Minoan Warm Period, Roman Optimum, Dark Ages, Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, Modern Warm Period).
These have been observed in the paleo record including ice core data plus many historical references, so are very likely to be real (unlike unicorns, which have only been sighted after a night of heavy drinking).
Shorter-term cycles of roughly 30 years have been observed in the physical record. We just went through a cycle of rapid warming, which appears to have stopped for now.
So has an underlying warming trend, which started long before humans were emitting any significant quantities of GHGs
And so has an accelerated warming trend after humans started emitting significant amounts of GHGs.
Trying to explain all this is not that easy, but to deny any of the above is simply sticking one’s head in the sand.
Max
Steven Mosher
“Science” tries to explain observed phenomena.
I agree with you on that.
But “science” does NOT ignore or reject observed phenomena, which it cannot explain.
And that was my point all along, Mosh.
Max
Manacker and Mosher,
What do you say about the possible “cycles” suggested by Figure 15.21 here:
Coxon and McCarron (2009), ‘Cenozoic: Tertiary and Quaternary
(until 11,700 years before 2000)’
http://eprints.nuim.ie/1983/1/McCarron.pdf
I interpret this together with text and other figures as follows:
1. Very rapid warmings occurred in the past before human GHG emissions; in fact, the climate as recorded in paleo data in Ireland, Greenland and Iceland, warmed from near glacial temperatures to near current temperatures in two events in 7 years and 9 years at 14,500 and 11,600 years ago respectively.
2. Life thrived during the warming events (Life loved warming and warmer conditions).
3. There is a periodicity of about 500 to 1000 years represented by minimums at about (eyeballed from the chart):
years before present:
16,000
15,500
14,500
13,800
13,000
12,600
11,600
11,200
11,000
10,600
10,200
9,500
9,200
This paper provides an update to an earlier work that
showed specific changes in the aggregate time evolution of
major Northern Hemispheric atmospheric and oceanic
modes of variability serve as a harbinger of climate shifts.
Specifically, when the major modes of Northern
Hemisphere climate variability are synchronized, or
resonate, and the coupling between those modes
simultaneously increases, the climate system appears to be
thrown into a new state, marked by a break in the global
mean temperature trend and in the character of El Nino/
Southern Oscillation variability. Here, a new and improved
means to quantify the coupling between climate modes
confirms that another synchronization of these modes,
followed by an increase in coupling occurred in 2001/02.
This suggests that a break in the global mean temperature
trend from the consistent warming over the 1976/77–2001/02 period may have occurred. Citation: Swanson, K. L., and A. A. Tsonis (2009), Has the climate recently shifted?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L06711, doi:10.1029/2008GL037022.
It is emergent behviour in a complex dynamical system characterised by changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation and consequential changes in cloud radiative forcing. Not so much skeptical as quite evident, mainstream freakin’ climate science.
Peter Lang
That’s interesting.
Rapidly occurring longer term climate cycles of around 500 years each in the distant record seem to also correspond roughly with those seen in the more recent paleo record (as reported by Richard Alley), including the Minoan, etc. periods, which I cited earlier.
Is this what rhhardin refers to as “long term noise”, and (if so) does it have any significance with regard to the current warming?
Mosh seems to prefer to ignore anything that doesn’t fit in with his climate models, but I think this approach is shortsighted.
Max
The dangerous warming does not come from CO2. All the sides agree on this.
Consensus Alarmist theory says that the dangerous warming comes from complicated feedbacks from a man-made fraction of a trace gas.
Occam’s razor just says there is no such thing as complicated feedbacks from a man-made fraction of a trace gas. Whatever regulated temperature in extremely tight bounds for eleven thousand years has to be something simple.
And, simple it is! When the oceans get warm, it snows and limites the upper bound of temperature and sea level. When oceans get cold, and the surface of polar waters freezes, it snows much less and the sun takes away ice and limites the lower bound of temperature and sea level.
Occam’s Razor says that the answer must be simple.
The Polar Ice Cycles are Simple. They developed and perfected and now they do the fine tuning of temperature. They have a Set Point and they always work in the right directions at the right time.
Green house gases really don’t warm the earth. Green house gases do send IR to space and do cool the Earth. They have no Set Point and No Feedback that is always in the right direction to maintain a Set Point. They do radiate at temperature to the fourth power and do get rid of much more energy when the Water Vapor is more and warmer and much less when Water Vapor is less and colder, but no means of a Set Point in our temperature range over the last eleven thousand years.
Water vapor and water in the atmosphere take care of most of the IR cooling of earth. CO2 is a trace and takes care of a trace of the cooling of earth. They do a lot of the cooling, but they cannot regulate temperature in the current bounds. Temperature was not regulated in the current bounds before the Polar Ice Cycles came to be. Look at the actual data.
…and one more thing. There is no climate noise, rhhardin. Noise is an engineering term for non-target signal to be filtered or ignored. The noise that many want to cancel out or dismiss or claim that it all adds up to zero is a cacophony of interfering and amplifying signals from the elsewhere that are poorly understood at best. This is why getting paleo right matters. We don’t get the luxury of deep time from the data collected during the mercury bulb and satellite eras.
To those whom dismiss natural variability, how is it known that 20th Century climate was not riding the crest of a rouge wave? …and another thing… atmospheric physics is the tail that occasionally wags the ocean dog. IOW, it’s the ocean, stupid. That’s where the matter is.
As some denizens say: I’m not going to do it for you. If you want to understand climate, go out and map several square miles of the crust, log ten miles of core, then figure out a hundred million years of earth history 10Ka at a time. About 10,000-hours should do it. Then you might have a proper respect for the scale and complexity of the problem. This is the journeyman stage that is just the beginning of another 10,000-hours of real practice to become a master and develop an intuition of how Gaia actually works. You can’t short-cut this process by clever bean-counting and slugging few beers with the kool kids who never revered people like Tom Dibblee or earned the trust of roughnecks.
@ rhhardin
“The strange science of climate change seems to reverse everything.”
I suspect that Mssrs Nyquist and Shannon, after spending a few hours contemplating the endless plotting of ‘trends’ by Climate Scientists and their pontificating on the dire consequences thereof–with 97% certainty, no less, would consider the whole field to be comedy comparable to Abbot and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First’, were it not for the fact that this ‘comedy’ is being cited as justification for governments taxing and regulating every human activity that either produces or consumes energy.
Sampling theorem? WHAT sampling theorem?
… a plateau in Earth’s mean surface temperature evolution, known as the recent pause in warming, the hiatus, squatty, puninest, death-rattle, weak, insignificant, paltry, trifling, tiny bit, small, scanty, trivial, mediocre, feeble, slight, hibernating, hesitating, minute, slender amount of… warming.
Thousands of miles away from any sea coast, smack dab in the middle of the Northern American continent lie the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are an extended river of fresh water, carved by ancient glaciers, and running to the sea.
The Great Lakes water levels are rising; half a foot rise so far this winter. The water level rise is from the large snowfall the region had this winter as well as the extensive ice cover that cooled the waters like ice cubes and substantially reduced evaporative water loss from ice cover’s blanketing effect.
I view the Great Lakes water rise as a reflection of precipitation coming from the major source of water, the oceans thousands of miles away. Claims for increase global precipitation and the current La Nina with a negative PDO are being invoked for this precipitation increase.
The Great Lakes water levels are measured by gauges at various locations with records going back to the mid-19th century. I realize that tidal gauge measurements for assessing sea level rise has met with some skepticism because of multiple measurement issues including tides, ground water pumping and subsidence, tectonic plate movement, glacial rebound, etc. Most of these sea measurements issues are not relevant for the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes had their record high water measurements in 1986 and record low water level in 1964.
Using the Great Lakes water levels as a measuring device to assess global precipitation, can we assess impact of the Equatorial Pacific and North Pacific at the times of high and low water levels as seen in the Great Lakes? The hypothesis would be: ENSO and PDO (IPO) controls global precipitation and this is reflected in the Great Lakes water levels.
Something I am curious about.
Another thing: does anyone have good figures for sedimentation in the Great Lakes? If you assume their combined drainage is 1/50 that area of the oceans, a 5cm (2 inch) net removal deposited in the Great Lakes would correspond to 1mm ocean rise. (Since the displaced water could be expected to end up in the Ocean.)
Small changes in the outflow path to the ocean can dominate lake levels. For an extreme example, the level of Lake Cumberland Kentucky has been rising dramatically this spring because the Corps of Engineers finally finished repairing the dam.
So I’d go with rain gauges as a measure of rainfall.
“I view the Great Lakes water rise as a reflection of precipitation coming from the major source of water, the oceans thousands of miles away.”
Brilliant math dude.
AK
From my experience scuba diving in the Great Lakes and reading about the ship wrecks on their bottom, sedimentation does not appear to be a major factor; i.e., covering the Great Lakes floor. So, I doubt an annual sedimentation, especially 5 cm would be involved in the Great Lakes water levels.
George Turner
When the Great Lakes recently were approaching record low water levels, there had been great clamor to “do something”. This was especially true of our Canadian neighbors as many publicly stated that the Army Corps of Engineers’ (ACE) dredging of the initial portions of the Sinclair River for navigation of deep draft ships, draining Lake Huron, was causing the lowering of the water levels, especially the Siamese twin lakes Michigan & Huron joined at their tops by the Straits of Mackinaw. All sorts of suggestions were made including placing rumble strips on the Sinclair River bottom to slow water egress.
Watching the data from the Detroit District ACE on water levels over the years, it seems that the rise and fall of the individual Great Lakes occurs in synchrony. Lake Superior would be the best indicator of outlet variation since egress from Lake Superior is through the St. Mary’s river, above all the other Great Lakes. Water levels are reported in feet (of meters) above sea level.
Rain gauges are good for measuring rain fall in a very local areas. I am suggesting using the Great Lakes as a broader measure, homogenizing many local areas into a much larger water shed basin with a reasonable historical measurement archive readily available.
Steven Mosher
Since I did no math in my post, I assume you are panning my statement that the oceans are the source of water for precipitation on lands thousands of miles away. That I had made a statement, the content of which is obvious to everyone as such a statement is superfluous. Is that correct?
I suggest using the Great Lakes water levels as a measuring device since there is a wealth of data on water levels since 1851. Connecting GL water levels with ENSO, PDO, and Northern Annular Mode may prove informative.
St Clair not Sinclair River
Hmmm. The data could be used to find a proxy for enso/pdo in the lakes area to look further back in time. But then, our proxies for temp and ghg suck. It might give us some clues as to how much they suck though, when we don’t see the temp changes we should from big PDO and ENSO events. But then, simple folk will just say “pdo and enso don’t affect temps,” again.
The adjustments have broken my faith in science and scientific integrity. We need to see original measurements and tracking of adjustments with a basis to separate out a bias.
Scott
Scott,
Anyone who doesn’t find himself appalled at what’s going on among scientists today is, if not a hopelessly closed minded warmist, someone who had to have been a profoundly cynical individual to begin with.
I could be wrong- so shoot down if so. Did they adjust down by 0.2mm for el Nino and up by 1.0mm for la Nina? Sounds like the temp adjustments- always in the “right” direction for the settled science.
I wonder why you are using your own graphs when you can link to IPCC graphs directly (and much less misleading):
For instance:
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig13-7.jpg
Also since you seem to be a major fan of Jevrejeva – what do you think when the confidence interval for that paper is nowhere near the average of the other papers (which are close together) for instance around 1922 and again 1955?
Nuke — hate those graphs. They squish the X axis to the point where it all looks “the same.” When we’re looking for “point-something-MM” or “point-something-degrees” as “proof” then it hardly is helpful to make that axis so course that it isn’t readable, let alone usable.
Same things that Arctic Ice / Antarctic Ice people do to prove their points. One side uses a course graph, the other side uses a very very very fine one.
In high school debate we called those “gee wiz” graphs. And hey, didn’t this entire debate start out with a “gee wiz” hockey stick graph that wasn’t exactly in context?
And Nuke — if I accept your warmist website, you won’t have any trouble with my cites to WattsUpWithThat, right? ‘Cause, you know, you expect me to accept a warmist site and fair is fair?
Nucular – do you know why 2012 data is not included in those 2013 graphs?
A fine example of the “heads I win, tails you lose” logic found in climatology today.
Right, it doesn’t indicate the effects of global warming have slowed down, it indicates they we’re never even close to as big as suggested.
I am very bad at the find-the-pea-in-the-shell game, otherwise known as explaining where the AGW heat is going if the global atmospheric temps are pausing. Last time they lifted that shell, I thought all the missing heat was going into the oceans. Now I am surprised that that shell was not raised again to claim that the unexpected sea level rise behavior is due to the “heat going into the oceans” pea via thermosteric mechanisms. I just never know where that pea is going to turn up after they move the shells around.
Judith, This probably is the wrong thread but in my holiday season I’ve been catching up on some of the debates – especially, your testimony before the House – and I came across this, from 2012, which was very ‘reasonable’ – with Lindzen and Hadi Dowlatabadi on ‘tvo’, of which I know nothing- you probably know it but I thought it worth a re-rehearsal:
Once again, Judith has insulted all rational thinkers calling into question undeniable physics. The science is settled! 97% of scientists agree. Global Warming (strike that) Climate Change is Happening.
Whenever there is a difference in observation and predictions, it is clear it is one of several elements:
Natural Variability. At least Judith understands this properly: natural variability can only ever work to mask the settled science. Any deviation from the models is temporary and will be smoothed out soon. You can see that fine, scientifically sound principle in this article.
Overestimation of Historical Records. As has been shown repeatedly, first in the Hockey Stick, and subsequently in any published science on Global Warming, if it appears in the recent past warming was higher than today, or warming rates were higher than the CO2 age, it’s merely a matter of finding the right science that proves it is wrong. Failing that, the appropriate adjustments will be made to the data, using new and better statistical methods. These too operate in *one direction only*. This scientific principle is so well established, it may well be a new Universal Law.
Billionaire outside influence. Pesky Koch brothers trying to tear down sound scientific reasoning. Judith, can you admit the Koch brothers are financing this blog?
To help you come back into the fold, Judith, you should repeat everyday, twenty times before bed (preferably while prostrating yourself in humility):
“97% of Scientists Agree. The Science is Settled. Climate Change is Happening.”
Climate change does happen so, 100% of everyone can agree on that.
Predictions are always right (especially IPCC predictions). Observations are always wrong.
It would help if you actually could recite the argument at hand.
“Climate Change” is happening ’cause it has always happened. “Global warming” is probably happening ’cause we’ve been warming since the last glacial period. Human-based climate impact is a fact ’cause, well, have you ever stood on a parking lot in summer? Those are not the issues.
What is the issue is that “your side” said that we are on the verge of catastrophic climate ruin due to human activity, specifically the use of carbon-based fuels. Your “proof” was a spike in temps, with data “smoothed” and “corrected” to look like a hockey stick. And to remedy that, your side proposes drastic, draconian measures that seem to fit into a socialists paradise.
That almost 100% of those getting money and power and recognition for that catastrophic view believe that “climate change” or “global warming” is happening is besides the point… we all believe that (see above). IT is proof of nothing, except the ranting of those who don’t want to actually learn the arguments at hand.
“What is the issue is that “your side” said that we are on the verge of catastrophic climate ruin due to human activity, specifically the use of carbon-based fuels.”
Isn’t it scary when satire and strongly held positions are nearly indistinguishable?
Ground water.
So the sea level rise is around 3mm/year now, but it appears that
0.7/year of that has nothing to do with climate, but comes
from human groundwater use:
http://www.nature.com/news/source-found-for-missing-water-in-sea-level-rise-1.10676
And that contribution is accelerating in line with the acceleration of
human use:
http://cnx.org/content/m41397/latest/graphics17.png
I am humiliated and saddened by irrationality – yes, humiliated – for in a world in which merely rhetoric and ‘persuasiveness’ tells us ‘what is true’ and, therefore, ‘might is right’ and the bigger is the better, I crawl in a ball and hope for the bullies to pass. Perhaps that’s extreme (for I’m not that weak) but irrationality terrifies me. Simply all one asks is for a rational discussion of climate science and, then, separately, a rational and democratic discussion of policy, the two, absolutely, separated. Is that to much to ask?
I discussed this Cazenave paper at length in my post last month called “Sea Water Level, Fresh Water Tilted“. Short answer? Lots of theoretical flaws, very little real science.
w.
A much much better paper:
http://www.ocean-sci-discuss.net/11/123/2014/osd-11-123-2014.pdf
And one that everyone interested in the topic should read.
R. Gates, I’m curious to know why you think a paper about what happens in models of sea level into the future is much better than (or even has much to do with) a critique of a paper analysing empirical observations over the recent past?
Could anyone tell me how enso or other ocean flows should change the sea hight?
They are all cirkulation of waters with different temperatures, but the overall average temperature is not changed very much.
The ENSO related variability is not primarily about temperature, but about movement of mass from ocean to land and visa versa. When more rain/snow falls on land, sea level declines. During the 2010-2011 La Nina, there was a significant amount of mass that transferred to land. This was measured quite nicely by Grace satellites. Amazing tool that shows that actual mass transfer trumps any thermal effects. Longer-term, the acceleration in the melting from Greenland and Antarctica will be the major mass additions to the oceans over the 21st century. Thermal and fresh water effects are secondary, but not insignificant.
If sea level rise of the 18th and 19th centuries constitutes the elephant in the room, we shouldn’t be surprised that climate “science” ignores most of the hot, mushy ball called Earth – which is the full Aida production in the phone booth.
“Rather than adjusting the period 2003-2011, instead adjust the period 1992-2002 for a surplus of El Ninos. Perhaps this would lower the sea level rise for this period to 2.5 mm/yr (or lower). ”
Cynic says…if you want to get published in Nature…
Hey if they want to make a big deal of these adjustments and think they are real that is fine, but I would like to see them maintain these exact algorithms for several decades. Many times these adjustments tend to come back and haunt you later, providing a reverse affect, at which point they are conveniently discarded by those with a bad case of confirmation bias.
And always show the raw data before adjustments, or at least at key processing steps that make a material difference in results.
Grace and sea level rise:
“SUMMARY
Ocean mass, together with steric sea level, are the key components of total observed sea level change. Monthly observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) can provide estimates of the ocean mass component of the sea level budget, but full use of the data requires a detailed understanding of its errors and biases. We have examined trends in ocean mass calculated from 6 yr of GRACE data and found differences of up to 1 mm yr−1 between estimates derived from different GRACE processing centre solutions. In addition, variations in post-processing masking and filtering procedures required to convert the GRACE data into ocean mass lead to trend differences of up to 0.5 mm yr−1. Necessary external model adjustments add to these uncertainties, with reported postglacial rebound corrections differing by as much as 1 mm yr−1. Disagreement in the regional trends between the GRACE processing centres is most noticeably in areas south of Greenland, and in the southeast and northwest Pacific Ocean. Non-ocean signals, such as in the Indian Ocean due to the 2004 Sumatran–Andean earthquake, and near Greenland and West Antarctica due to land signal leakage, can also corrupt the ocean trend estimates. Based on our analyses, formal errors may not capture the true uncertainty in either regional or global ocean mass trends derived from GRACE.”
Uncertainty in ocean mass trends from GRACE
Katherine J. Quinn andRui M. Ponte
Any comparison between grace and tide gauges is a joke. Any attribution of sea level rise based on Grace is a joke. The only thing Grace is good for is to show if the trend is negative or positive compared to the previous trend and that is only assuming the same processing methods are consistently used.
“The only thing Grace is good for is to show if the trend is negative or positive…”
_____
Incorrect. The clear correlation between the net displacement of ocean water mass to land and the lower sea level during the last La Nina is a dynamical connection, showing far more than just “trend”.
We can NOT derive precise trends from imprecise data: a derivative of a function with noise is mostly a derivative of the noise. Let’s wait until more sea level data is available; to compute a sea level change directly is hopeless.
Gates, saying it is so doesn’t make it so. I just showed you a summary of a paper that shows how much imprecision there is in Grace measurements and you show me a statement of belief unsupported by anything other than your font.
I would add that this summary discusses the variance in methodolgy of processing Grace measurements. It doesn’t mean that the actual changes are even within the bounds of the methods.
Regarding Grace satellite accuracy Quoting from a 2010 study versus using the latest information is dangerous. Yes, as with any new technology there was a period of recalibration. The accuracy with which Grace can model changes the movement of mass around the planet is nothing short of amazing. Without this data, one could easily have drawn the exactly wrong conclusion from the dip in sea level during the 2010-2011 La Nina. Here’s a few great reads on Grace accuracy and the 2010-2011 La Nina related movements of mass from ocean to land:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120316195351.htm
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50834/abstract
http://climate.nasa.gov/news/570
Gates, none of your links, as poor as they were anyway, even vaguely addressed the methodology issue.
“. . global sea levels rose at only 1.1 – 1.3 mm/year (+/- 0.9mm) from 2005-2012.”
And it then rose at a rate of 10mm/year from 2011 to 2013. Right now it’s slightly above the 20 years trend line.
Reminded of NOAA’s 2012 report:
NOAA – The Budget of Recent Global Sea Level Rise 2005–2012
http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/SeaLevelRise/documents/NOAA_NESDIS_Sea_Level_Rise_Budget_Report_2012.pdf
. . global sea levels rose at only 1.1 – 1.3 mm/year (+/- 0.9mm) from 2005-2012.
Judith Curry wrote: “Rather than adjusting the period 2003-2011, instead adjust the period 1992-2002 for a surplus of El Ninos. Perhaps this would lower the sea level rise for this period to 2.5 mm/yr (or lower). I don’t think there is any objective/convincing way to filter out the effects of El Nino/La Nina.”
There is no need to adjust either period. Just sum them up and also update the latter period to include the two most recent years. This filters out most of the effects of ENSO. It is extremely cherry-picky to break up the whole 20 years satellite record onto two 10 year periods and then truncate the last two years from the second period. Ignoring the latest two years just magnifies the temporary dip that occurred in 2011 and ignores the spike that occurred right after it. A lot of water was dumped on land in 2011 and it pretty much all returned to the sea the following year. If you truncate the record after 2011 and only look at the 8 years leading to 2011, of course you create the illusion of a slowdown. Looking only at the last 4 years from 2010 until now would create the illusion of a tremendous acceleration. But it would be equally silly. If there is no objective way to cherry pick, then don’t.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2007JCLI1840.1
the last sentence of which is:
At best, the determination and attribution of global mean
sea level change lies at the very edge of knowledge
and technology. The most urgent job would appear
to be the accurate determination of the smallest
temperature and salinity changes that can be determined
with statistical significance, given the realities of
both the observation base and modeling approximations.
Both systematic and random errors are of concern,
the former particularly, because of the changes in
technology and sampling methods over the many decades,
the latter from the very great spatial and temporal
variability implied by Figs. 2, 6, and 8. It remains
possible that the database is insufficient to compute
mean sea level trends with the accuracy necessary to
discuss the impact of global warming—as disappointing
as this conclusion may be. The priority has to be to
make such calculations possible in the future.
“…the 21st century of sea level rise projections seem like unjustified arm waving.”
That’s because they don’t have a leg to stand on.
Outrageously wrong ‘IPCC’ predictions, or just scandalously wrong predictions? It’s a difficult choice, but the Bertier et. al. abstract tries to subtly tread the middle ground.
““…the 21st century of sea level rise projections seem like unjustified arm waving.”
That’s because they don’t have a leg to stand on.”
______
The physical effects of increasing energy in the Earth climate system will be for the net transfer mass from Greenland and Antarctica glacial ice to the liquid oceans with this transfer already showing signs of nonlinear accelerating behavior. After 2050 it will really ramp up in all likelihood make at least a projected 1 meter rise by 2100 not at all unreasonable, if not a bit low.
RGates
Here are sea level trends from Noaa. I have set it to North America.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.shtml
This is global sea level trend data from the bar down the side
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/MSL_global_trendtable.html
From this it can be seen that in some places sea level trend is rising whilst in others it is falling, so giving a global average disguises the nuances of what is happening locally, where it matters.
Grace is accurate to 2cm (ten times the overall trend) and does not actually measure at the coastline. It is also a very recent measure.
Any study of sea level needs to take into account deposition and erosion, land movement often through post glacial rebound- and tectonic activity, as these can cloud the picture.
This means that the rate that the land itself rises or falls is often greater than the sea level change, so it is very difficult to give a definitive answer as to what the sea level change is globally.
The rate of sea level change around the UK (up and down) can be seen in this paper
http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/19/9/pdf/i1052-5173-19-9-52.pdf
In general-sea levels are lower now than during the MWP and Roman periods as can be seen here (note 1999 study so around 2cm needs to be added)
http://www.glaciology.net/Home/PDFs/Announcements/gslprojection
So, some places need to take precautions against a general (but by no means universal) rise that has been happening since around 1700, others are not threatened by it. To look at some notional ‘global’ figure when our interest is in the local circumstances is perverse. It is more useful to examine your local tide gauges which do a much better job than Grace.
tonyb
R Gates, what mechanism do you propose for transferring all that energy from the ocean depths to the tops of the continental ice plateaux of Antarctica and Greenland?
“R Gates, what mechanism do you propose for transferring all that energy from the ocean depths to the tops of the continental ice plateaux of Antarctica and Greenland?”
_____
Of course this ignores the more accurate description of the real dynamic of where most of the mass is being lost from both Greenland and Antarctica– which is along the margins mainly, and from underneath on the glaciers that are in the water. Just as is the case with Arctic sea ice, glaciers moving into the ocean are being melted from underneath by the rapidly warming waters.
Tony,
Thanks for those. I highly suggest you read:
http://www.ocean-sci-discuss.net/11/123/2014/osd-11-123-2014.pdf
Need to take a global perspective, on both sources and destination for the mass exchange of waster into ice and between land and ocean that is likely to occur in the 21st Century. Far more complex dynamics than one might assume– but the trend (and an accelerating one) is clear– more ice mass melting into water and flowing into the ocean.
Tonyb,
Thanks for pointing the way with real data again.
Always look at your comments for the useful pointers and discussion.
Scott
R Gates, can you quantify that?
tony b
Thanks for some real “hands on” info on SL changes around the globe.
It is clear, as you say, that this is much more complex than the oversimplified “global average” SL rise based on satellite altimetry or even more doubtful GRACE estimates.
Max
The reason we know sea level rise will be different by location is due to sea level rise scientists. You know, like the ones who arrive at a global average.
Is Mitrovica saying a global average cannot be determined. No.
Seem to be stuck in moderation since 5:39pm
Gates
There are certainly complex dynamics involved but tony’s point is still valid. Every land water interface location is going to be affected differently, even with the same global sea level rise due to local geographic conditions. If the local land is rising faster than the seas are rising then that presents a different situation than a location affected by subsidence, where the effects will be more dramatic. Over half of the Chesapeake Bay region “sea level rise” is in fact caused by subsidence, which in turn has been caused by ground water abstraction. It is unfortunate more attention has not been paid to the other part of the equation unrelated to the issue of CO2. But then how could that get the chicken littles running around. And it might confuse the poor little dears, with a complex message that is clearly over their heads.
From Tony’s links:
We project a sea level rise roughly 3 times higher than the predictions of the IPCC.
We are able to calculate a high resolution sea level curve for the past ~2000 years.
Even if we stop temperature from rising then sea level will still rise 20-40 cm (see T0 in table 2)
To stop sea level from rising then we should lower temperatures by ~0.6 degrees C (see ΔT|S=0 in table 1).
projected sea level rise for the most optimistic scenario ~80cm (B1 in table 2 – this scenario has a warming of 2degrees by 2100)
projected Sea level rise for the most pessimistic scenario ~135cm (A1FI in table 2 – this scenario has a warming of 4.5 degrees by 2100)
RGates
Your 10.42
What can we learn from the link?
* That sea levels have twice been higher in the past
*That sea levels oscillate (I suspect to greater amounts than shown but they have used an average)
*That this current rise predates man made co2 increase by several hundred years. (as do temperatures)
*That the projections are a model.
*That changes are dependent on temperature.(how quickly sea level change follows temperature change is not certain)
*That in order to rise further than the past, temperatures need to be higher than the past, for presumably prolonged periods.
*The LIA was the coldest prolonged period in the Holocene. Presumably that equated to more ice/snow being built up than in previous periods.
* As there is more snow/ice to melt than in previous cold periods presumably even a rise to the levels of previous warm periods will cause more melting than in previous eras.
*This rise is due to a natural long established process and even equivalent natural warmth to the past is likely to lead to higher levels than previously as there is more material to melt. This will be nothing to do with man.
I think we need to look to the past in order to prepare for the future. Sea levels and extreme weather were worse in the past than today and we ought to prepare our infrastructure to reflect this.
In turn you need to demonstrate that man has a hand in raising temperatures higher than in previous eras. (which hasn’t happened yet)
tonyb
Still in moderation – try a repost:
R. Gates, two comments.
“After 2050 it will really ramp up in all likelihood make at least a projected 1 meter rise by 2100 not at all unreasonable, if not a bit low.”
(1) You should read what IPCC WGP1 AR5 Chp 13 has to say about this. Having argued for a mid-high scenario rise of 0.475m by 2100 (RCP6) they note:
“We have considered the evidence for higher projections and have concluded that there is currently insufficient evidence to evaluate the probability of specific levels above the assessed likely range. Based on current understanding, only the collapse of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic ice sheet, if initiated, could cause global mean sea level to rise substantially above the likely range during the 21st century. This potential additional contribution cannot be precisely quantified but there is medium confidence that it would not exceed several tenths of a meter of sea level rise during the 21st century.”
(2) You again quote T. Howard et al suggesting this modeling exercise, with limited validation of the models, demonstrates something about the performance of future ocean/climate dynamics. It doesn’t.
R Gates:
Now you’re going to tell me exactly how AGW has radically altered ocean currents.
JCH
Global average SL rise is as meaningless as the average depth of a river you are planning to wade across.
What counts for us landlubbers is the SL at various shorelines, as measured by tide gauges there.
Max
Maxed hogwash.
“I think we need to look to the past in order to prepare for the future. Sea levels and extreme weather were worse in the past than today and we ought to prepare our infrastructure to reflect this.”
—–
This is reasonable and necessary but not sufficient. It seems increasingly likely the HCV will kick the climate into something Homo sapiens have never experienced. So, yes prepare for extremes, as they will surely come as black swans always do, but expect a dragon king or two.
RGates
You said;
‘It seems increasingly likely…’
Why ‘increasingly likely’ bearing in mind the Met Office recognised pause? Surely its ‘less likely?’
BTW perhaps you can tell me how and when co2 stopped raising the temperature of the land and instead just raised the temperature of the deep sea and missed out the land?
tonyb
As far as I can determine, Climate Science is the ONLY physical ‘science’ which, when observations conflict with theory, routinely, as a matter of ‘Standard Operating Procedure’, adjusts the data to confirm theory rather than revising theory to explain observations.
The ‘adjusted’ sea level data base is only one example. Is there ANY climate data base that has NOT been adjusted, some multiple times, to ‘confirm’ that ACO2 is causing the Temperature of the Earth (never defined) to rise rapidly? And has there EVER been a modeled projection of anything related to climate whose consequences are NOT predicted to be somewhere in the realm varying from undesirable to catastrophic?
Theory inoculations … Real world must conform
to our expectations.
The interesting bit is the steric sea level rise of 0.2 ± 0.8 mm/yr since 2005. Are the oceans warming at all? And last I heard the oceans were losing mass what with all these pesky La Niña.
e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/vonSchuckmannampLTroan2011-fig5PG_zpsee63b772.jpg.html?sort=3&o=121
What’s really hilarious is that they hope the pesky La Niña aren’t intensifying in the cool IPO.
http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/SeaLevelRise/documents/NOAA_NESDIS_Sea_Level_Rise_Budget_Report_2012.pdf
“The interesting bit is the steric sea level rise of 0.2 ± 0.8 mm/yr since 2005.”
You forgot to mention that this referenced period ends in 2011. So it’s just a 6 years period ending in a temporary dip. How is it interesting? The mere interest is that it shows that La Nina episodes can dump lots of water on land, and this water rapidly makes its way back into the sea over the following 18 months or so.
You do understand what steric means and where it come from? Or are we just flapping gums for the heck of it?
Yes, you’re right. My comment wasn’t relevant to the steric contribution to sea level rise. Still, it’s a very short period and the Argo coverage was sparse over that period. Nevertheless, the central estimate is rather low. Do you think it’s likely to be representative of longer periods? Might the glacial contributions to recent sea level rise have been very grossly underestimated in your view?
ARGO had decent coverage since 2005 – which is why the record starts there. ARGO is consistent with CERES – no warming this century. Ocean salinity is increasing apparently – which implies a loss of mass.
Someone’s wrong – go figure who.
So, if it isn’t thermal expansion or glacial melt, or any combination of the two, what is causing the sea levels to rise then?
The heat and salinity data are inconsistent with satellite data. Duh.
Just pick the one you like and go with it. I am sure it will make absolutely no freakin’ difference at all to whatever freakin’ narrative you subscribe to.
Skippy said:
“ARGO is consistent with CERES – no warming this century.”
—–
100% fabricated nonsense. ARGO shows robust warming of the oceans this century.
http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/SeaLevelRise/documents/NOAA_NESDIS_Sea_Level_Rise_Budget_Report_2012.pdf
Steric sea level rise – 0.2 ± 0.8 mm/yr.
Randy is his usual boorish and misguided self.
Skippy with his rabid cut and paste of unrelated studies, that even when they are by chance related, often indicate the opposite to the point he thought he was making.
The Budget of Recent Global Sea Level Rise
2005–2012 – Eric Leuliette – NOAA
The only thing robust about Randy’s argument is the progressive denialism. The reality is that science is at odds with his narrative and it only getting worse. It obviously must mean the reverse of what it says in plain English. Down the rabbit hole again – aye Randy? Not me – I am over following twits down rabbit holes.
Table 1 – steric sea level rise – 0.2 ± 0.8 mm/yr
Table 1 – steric sea level rise – 0.2 ± 0.8 mm/yr
Do you understand what this means? Or would you rather remain in ignorance with your narrative? Either way it makes not a skerrick of difference.
“Since the early 1990s, sea level rose at a mean rate of ~3.1 mm yr−1. However, over the last decade a slowdown of this rate, of about 30%, has been recorded.”
Also worth mentioning is that the authors of this Nature Climate Change paper who refer to this 30% slowdown over “the last decade” footnote five papers all of which, but one, have been published in 2011 or earlier. So, “the last decade” actually refers to a period ending no later than 2011. The following years until now have already erased that temporary slowdown and thereby, at least in part, vindicated their adjustment method. The method strongly suggested that the slowdown merely was a blip, and indeed it has been.
I quote:
” …when correcting for interannual variability, the past decade’s slowdown of the global mean sea level disappears, leading to a similar rate of sea-level rise (of 3.3 ± 0.4 mm yr−1) during the first and second decade of the altimetry era. Our results confirm the need for quantifying and further removing from the climate records the short-term natural climate variability if one wants to extract the global warming signal.”
They seem to think it needs corrections and perhaps it does. But that 3.3 plus or minus 0.4 mm per year rise is too high. The correct rate of global sea level rise is 2.46 mm per year. I take it from Chao, Wu, and Li [Science 320:212-214 (2008)]. They corrected all available data for the effect of water held in storage by 29,484 reservoirs built since 1900. They found that the sea level curve, so corrected, became linear for the last 80 years, with a slope of 2.46 mm per year. Something that has been linear that long is not likely to change anytime soon. I see no reason not to take it as a norm and ignore various temporary deviations from it that aren’t even corrected for water held in storage. Extrapolating their data gives us 24.6 centimeters as the most likely centennial sea rise to be expected. This is just under ten inches and lower than any of the IPCC values that I have seen. I suggest that within a reasonable margin of error, Chao, Wu, & Li are right and their centennial value will be the most likely one to be correct. As to the Nature Climate Change paper, if they had done their homework and gone with Chao Wu & Li they would have saved all that trouble of adjustments and avoided short term judgments that are bound to be inaccurate in the long haul.
It appears so many new Greenland Ice papers are in the offing, and so much improvement in methodology, that we might see a virtual doubling in both the quality of the data and the span of time accurate mass change data is available.
Which is still less than a quarter century. Long enough to prove people who use words like “impossible” about ice collapse wrong, but not long enough to give us much confidence in data for high resolution models or predictions.
If we’re in the shallow part of the sigmoid, as appears likely from the latest studies, then the sharply rising portion has every indication of being far faster than we had previously suspected possible.
And that’s just Greenland. The Antarctic, in a 14m higher sea level world (what, you think the Antarctic won’t at least keep pace with Greenland?), will collapse far more interestingly.
Yay. I get my beachfront property sooner than I’d hoped.
Consider the following statements from Cazenave regarding global sea level rise:
the 20th century average is 2 mm/yr,
observations from 1992-2002 are 3.4 mm/yr
observations from 2003-2011 are 2.4 mm/yr
when corrected for an abundance of La Ninas, sea level rise from 2003-2011 is ‘adjusted’ to 3.3 mm/yr
Rather than adjusting the period 2003-2011, instead adjust the period 1992-2002 for a surplus of El Ninos. Perhaps this would lower the sea level rise for this period to 2.5 mm/yr (or lower). I don’t think there is any objective/convincing way to filter out the effects of El Nino/La Nina. They seem to be an intrinsic part of sea level variations, as is the PDO/AMO on multidecadal time scales.
Can someone then tell me how you can infer that sea level rise is accelerating due to AGW, when compared with sea level rise for the first half of the 20th century?
If a linear increase in the first half of the century is “natural variation”, then there is no way to decide whether an equal rate of linear increase in the last quarter of the century is or isn’t “natural variation”. If you assume such a rise as “natural” variation (the residual variance in the hypothesis test) then the effect of anthropogenic CO2 is nil. If you assume that the linear rise in the late 20th century was not “natural”, then the association of the late rise to the CO2 is statistically significant.
WebHubTelescope has a nice model with temp linearly dependent on the log of CO2 concentration, but it hasn’t been published in the peer-reviewed literature or been tested against out of sample data. I hope he submits it for publication.
Prof Curry, I think your question is most pertinent, and can’t be answered now. Answers depend on untested assumptions.
What people commenting here are not aware of is that the slight steric sealevel rise and OHC increase has to be compatible with the overall warming.
If the steric SLR or OHC increase were too big, it would be inconsistent with the measured global warming.
As it is, the numbers do match up and if there was any fudging it would be singled out.
“As it is, the numbers do match up and if there was any fudging it would be singled out.”
—–
Yep, but conspiracy thinking does not rely on the logic of numbers matching up, but on political or economic or religious dogma.
“Conspiracy thinking” being what the politically gullible call rational thinking.
18-yr “trends” in tendentiously adjusted data for a metric with a pronounced natural ~60yr oscillation? Brilliant, simply brilliant!
Judith Curry
Your “reflections” are spot on.
“Adjusting” observed changes in SL to remove La Nina impact is simply “fudging” the data to make it fit a preconceived story of ever increasing rates of SL rise resulting from AGW.
The same “adjustment” could be made (in the opposite direction) to account for the many El Ninos during the 1980s/1990s.
As a matter of fact, the “global” temperature record could also be adjusted in this fashion.
The chart you posted shows that there were major decadal swings in the annual rate of SL rise over the 20thC. Holgate 2007 showed decadal swings from -1mm/year to +5mm/year, so the present decadal rates are not at all unusual compared to the 20thC.
The mere fact that Cazenave et al. felt obliged to add in this “adjustment” (in order not to offend the “consensus” crowd?) shows how political (and non-scientific IMO) this whole issue has become.
Max
I think one has to understand that climate scientists are all pretty stupid to start with, and their explantion of the data above can be analogized like this:
There is a truck cruising down the road, with the gas pedal down. Around every 4-5 miles, the driver puts her foot on the brake to slow down the truck for 1-2 miles, and then releases it again to allow the truck to regain speed. At no time does the driver take her foot off the gas pedal.
As you can imagine, this is a very stupid way to drive a truck, but thats the way its done in climate science, the stupid way (TM).
A far simplier way to acheive the same result is for the driver not to wear out her brakes, but to simply take her foot of the gas. The problem with this logical way of driving, however, is that the climate scientist must then admit that the process that is driving the truck is the very same process that slows it down….
And we could’nt have that now, could we?
Bob Tisdale argues fron compelling analysis that the supposedly anthropogenic warming during 1970-2000 is attributable to several el Nino events which elevated global temperatures in a stepwise manner. However warmists counter that more el Ninos are simply the mechanism by which CAGW takes place. For Bob, el Ninos are natural while for warmist revisionists, they are man made.
Now however Bob Tisdale’s argument is turned on its head and used as a get out clause for the pause. Has man made warming stopped? No – the little girl ate it. La Nina trade winds are blowing the warm water below the surface. ENSO now goes back to being natural – how curious.
Except that it does not make sense, especially in the context of the subject of this thread, slowing sea level rise. IF ongoing planetary heating from CO2 back-radiation is continuing but being hidden a-la-Trenberth in the oceans, then this ocean heat would be visible as an increase in sea level rise. However the opposite is observed – sea level rise is slowing. So this heat absent from the atmosphere is absent from the oceans also. So where is it?
CAGW is so profoundly wrong that at every objective test it never misses an opportunity to falsify itself.
After 1998, almost the entirety of the run up in atmospheric global surface temperature vanished.
And OHC went down.
What step change?
“However warmists counter that more el Ninos are simply the mechanism by which CAGW takes place. For Bob, el Ninos are natural while for warmist revisionists, they are man made.”
—-
This is absurd. El Niños represent a temporary higher than normal rate of sensible and latent heat flux from ocean to atmosphere as that energy literally flows from the IPWP into the troposphere. Some if it gies into space, and some flows to other parts of the climate system. They have gone on for millions of years.
It used to be the natural state that El Ninos caused rises and La Ninas caused cooling in equal amounts and canceled over the long term. Now, with increasing background warming tilting this behavior, El Ninos cause sharper rises and La Ninas can just cause pauses, which is what we have seen. It has turned from waves to steps.
JimD
your 10.33
Citation please?
tonyb
“It used to be the natural state that El Ninos caused rises and La Ninas caused cooling in equal amounts and canceled over the long term. Now, with increasing background warming tilting this behavior, El Ninos cause sharper rises and La Ninas can just cause pauses, which is what we have seen. It has turned from waves to steps.”
—–
Now there are periods, both long and short, where one may be more prevalent than the other– the phase of the PDO being one such example, but there are longer cycles as well. But if you want to understand what is really happening with the energy storage in the climate system, it is far better to keep an eye on the source of energy for El Niños, which is the IPWP. In doing so we see that even though El Niños over the past 60 years or more remove a bit of energy each time, the longer term trend is net warming and expansion of this major reservoir of energy in the climate system.
JimD R Gates
your 10.33 and 10.46 respectively
Citation please?
tonyb
R Gates: But if you want to understand what is really happening with the energy storage in the climate system, it is far better to keep an eye on the source of energy for El Niños, which is the IPWP. In doing so we see that even though El Niños over the past 60 years or more remove a bit of energy each time, the longer term trend is net warming and expansion of this major reservoir of energy in the climate system.
IPWP is just a small part of the total, only partially observed (or recorded) over an inadequate period of time. Some parts of the total reservoir have warmed, perhaps, while some have cooled, maybe, over long periods of time; just as some parts of the ocean surface have risen and some parts of lowered. Looking at all of the records together shows that evaluating or estimating an effect of human CO2 has the Rohrschach like effect of depending on unstated or subjectively weighted assumptions. There is no persuasive and clearly articulated case why the IPWP is more important than the more spread out but less capacioous (as an energy store) and more sensitive troposphere. Despite many requests, you have never explained how human CO2 in the troposphere can raise IPWP heat content without raising the temperature of the troposphere. Your emphasis on IPWP is entirely capricious or arbitrary.
tonyb, it is an observation anyone can make that La Ninas are not the cool phases they used to be. It is a long time since we had a La Nina that dropped the global temperature below the long-term average. The pause had a couple, and they were still among the warmest years ever. In the last few decades there have only been pauses and rises, not drops and rises.
“Despite many requests, you have never explained how human CO2 in the troposphere can raise IPWP heat content without raising the temperature of the troposphere. Your emphasis on IPWP is entirely capricious or arbitrary.”
——-
First, no, my emphasis on the IPWP is hardly arbitrary, and your insinuation that it is tells me that you are not well read on the subject. Second, your confusion about the direction of energy flow in the Earth climate system also tells me that you are not well read on the subject. Globally, the net flow of energy is from ocean to atmosphere, very very strongly. Your expectation that a warmer atmosphere would warm the ocean is not aligned with basic laws of physics. If you put a jacket on (which is essentially what the atmosphere is in relation to the ocean) that jacket does not warm your body, but allows the heat from your body to move to the cold air outside the jacket less readily. The sun warms the ocean, and the atmosphere (and sea ice) reduces the net flow of energy from ocean to space.
Tony,
I’ve linked these before for you, but whatever, you’re a good man:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0121-x
http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140401/srep04552/full/srep04552.html
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-009-0526-7
JImD
So you are basing this on personal observations over a couple of decades rather than a peer reviewed citation? How do you know this isn’t a frequent occurrence if you look back through history?
tonyb
Rgates
Thanks for the three links. You may have referenced these to me before but unfortunately only the Nature one still isn’t hiding behind a pay wall.
What question of mine do you think it answers?
tonyb
tonyb, why do you need a peer-reviewed citation to look at the published temperature records? A rise rate of 0.16 C per decade does that to the ENSO cycle which itself has a standard deviation of only 0.1 C in annual temperatures. You can infer what I said for yourself directly from the temperature record.
Tony,
Not sure what question these articles answer except for the fact that the “pause” in tropospheric temperatures is interesting but quite irrelevant to the strong gains in the overall energy of the climate system for 60+ years. Tropospheric sensible heat should only be used as a weak proxy for energy changes in the system on a decadal average at best, whereas the IPWP is a much more stable proxy over shorter timeframes.
JImD
As you know I like to put things into its broader historic context. Saying something has been happening for merely a couple of decades doesn’t prove anything, let alone that natural processes have been subverted by AGW.
tonyb
RGates,
The sun warms the ocean, and the atmosphere (and sea ice) reduces the net flow of energy from ocean to space.
How does it warm the deep ocean, the supposed home of the hidden heat ?
The sun’s radiation penetrating the oceans to depths of thousands of feet?
Conduction downwards from the sea surface?
There was a step. It was not directly caused by the 1998 El Nino. The 1998 El Nino caused the globe to lose energy.
Does that sound like a step to a hotter globe?
Starting in 1998, a 33-month La Nina episode commenced. It loaded the deeper oceans with energy from the sun. It cannot get out with the TOA situation we have: more E in than E out.
The El Nino events since then have not unloaded much of that energy from the oceans.
From the oceans to the atmosphere. The pause is hot because of the 33-month La Nina that started in 1998. La Nina dominance is the biggest fairy to enter the ring since “no mas”. It feeds its foe.
“RGates,
The sun warms the ocean, and the atmosphere (and sea ice) reduces the net flow of energy from ocean to space.
How does it warm the deep ocean, the supposed home of the hidden heat ?
The sun’s radiation penetrating the oceans to depths of thousands of feet?
Conduction downwards from the sea surface?”
——
Downwelling and Ekman pumping more than conduction. Interestingly, during cooling phases of the PDO this activity seems to intensify based on changes in the winds. Stronger easterlies in the Pacific spin up the gyres in both hemispheres and Ekman pumping in those regions intensifies, bringing warmer surface waters to depth. During El Niño and warm PDO cycles, Ekman pumping slows and more net energy flows out of the ocean to the troposphere.
tonyb, the broader historic context also tells you how unusual 0.8 C in a century is, with the current multi-decadal rate even double that. This is why it makes sense to talk about this as an unusual background rise, and what it does to ENSO. It is highly relevant to today’s state of the climate to talk about this, which is what I was doing.
“The 1998 El Nino caused the globe to lose energy.”
———
Temporarily, yes, or at least leveled the rate of energy increase for a short time. Some of the energy that moved from ocean to atmosphere during this event certainly went into space, but some went to other parts of the climate system, where it would not be measured as tropospheric sensible heat.
JimD
‘tonyb, the broader historic context also tells you how unusual 0.8 C in a century is, with the current multi-decadal rate even double that.’
A modest rise from the coldest era in the entire Holocene would not seem unusual to me, even if I hadn’t researched records back to 1200AD and seen fluctuations greater than this.
Ps That 0.8 is not evenly spread i.e. it is not ‘global’ warming.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
We in Britain are at the same temperature (or cooler) than the 1730’s.
tonyb
Tony, even you must not be completely blind to the last bar, April 2014, of this chart:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
A very warm black swan, standing above the others, like a long tall dagger through “pause”.
there is this obvious La Nina-style mechanism for warming the deep oceans
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations_Rev_png
You don’t mean second (or plausibly third, fourth or fifth) coldest, or do you mean to say that the Dark Ages cold period was the start of this modest rise, as opposed to a blip itself, and the “Pause” in the Middle Ages was the blip, while discounting the huge uncertainty attached to the severe dip 9,000-8,500 years ago?
That’s an interestingly confident take on trendology and reconstructed low-resolution patterns, even if one hadn’t limited ones searches to the past 900 years.
JCH, the westward tilt of the thermocline is the normal state of the Pacific. Easterlies dominate normally. If they get stronger, the thermocline will deepen further in the western pacific. But see my post above about the spinning up if the gyres, as it is a another way that warm water is brought to depth in the Pacific and it fluctuates with ENSO and PDO frequencies.
The Holocene trend was downwards including the LIA, as expected from Milankovitch arguments, being past the Holocene Optimum. The rise very quickly reversed almost the whole Holocene’s several thousand year trend in just 100 years with several times this amplitude to come. This fact should not be minimized. It hasn’t happened like this before. Sea level rise also shows this century being unusual in the multi-millennial context. This rise is the most interesting thing that has happened to climate in thousands of years, and discussion of it and its causes and consequences is highly important at this time. The recent pauses are a consequence of this new stepping behavior, as I mentioned first.
Yes, multiple ways, but the anomalously high winds put that picture on steroids.
Rgates
Your 12.31,.
Its still April and the CET calculation for April will come down as it doesn’t remotely look like it will be a record.
tonyb
R. Gates responds to Matthew R. Marler’s question with the following gobbledegook:
“If you put a jacket on (which is essentially what the atmosphere is in relation to the ocean) that jacket does not warm your body, but allows the heat from your body to move to the cold air outside the jacket less readily.”
MRM’s question, repeatedly asked of R. Gates, is straightforward: How can human CO2 in the troposphere raise ocean heat content without raising the temperature of the troposphere?
R. Gates, your continued refusal to answer this question is not doing your credibility any good. Your jacket analogy does not come anywhere close to an answer.
BartR
The lia was the coldest multi century period in the Holocene or the coldest period since the beginning of the Holocene I.e over the last 10000 years, not the very start of it
http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall12/atmo336/lectures/sec5/holocene.html
However, it had numerous warmer periods and much extreme weather. The period I am researching is from 1200 to 1450AD. I am calling the article ‘tranquility, transition and turbulence’ as within it we have temperatures warmer than today, colder than today and extremes of weather including prodigious rainfall. Much of this seemed to have occurred during the cold periods rather than the warm interludes.
Tonyb
“MRM’s question, repeatedly asked of R. Gates, is straightforward: How can human CO2 in the troposphere raise ocean heat content without raising the temperature of the troposphere?”
Average sea surface temperature and troposperic temperature (over sea) are closely coupled. When external forcing increases, the radiative imbalance causes the oceans to gain heat. They will go on gaining heat until the radiative balance is restored, and this happens when the sea surface temperature has increased sufficiently for it to shed more heat to space through the longwave atmospheric window. Troposperic temperature follows.
If internal variability (such a a cool PDO phase) reduces the rate of increase of surface temperature, while the eternal forcing still is increasing, this means the radiative imbalance is impeded from being cancelled by surface warming. And so the ocean rate of heat accumulation can’t decrease. Hence, contrary to what you seem to be assuming, ocean surface temperature (together with lower tropospheric temperature) are *inversely* related to the rate of ocean heat gain.
Simply put, cold things tend to warm up and warm things tend to cool down. If the troposhere is cold, that means sea surface also is cold, and it is still gaining shortwave energy from the Sun at the same rate while it radiates a lesser amount longwave radiation to space. Hence, it gains energy in the form of heat.
Pierre-Normand, thanks for responding. You write:
“If internal variability (such a a cool PDO phase) reduces the rate of increase of surface temperature, while the e[x]ternal forcing still is increasing, this means the radiative imbalance is impeded from being cancelled by surface warming.”
This explanation is plausible when the external forcing is something other than CO2, for instance an increase in SWR from the sun or a change in Earth’s albedo. However if the forcing is from the GHE, then the forcing is coming from the troposphere. So how can the troposphere generate a forcing without changing temperature?
willb, just increasing the CO2 concentration at the same temperature increases the atmosphere’s longwave emission which is just proportional to the number of CO2 molecules. This is how the surface can warm before the troposphere as you increase CO2.
Pierre-Normand, thanks for providing the general overview of ocean-atmosphere heat exchanges. What so many fail to grasp is the nature of an external forcing and how a little heat can control a greater amount, not dissimilar to a power transistor by the way. What gets interesting is that at any given time, at least 50% of the energy in the atmosphere has come via sensible and latent heat flux from the ocean, but the oceans will retain disproportionately more energy as the atmosphere warms. Thus, as long as as external forcing is present, the oceans will retain far more energy than the atmosphere, but the GH composition of the atmosphere is the control knob that regulates the overall flow out of the ocean.
Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global
climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.
http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
Without data it all just worthless narrative.
Tonyb | April 26, 2014 at 4:38 pm |
Do you happen to know the source of the information in your link?
The link itself appears to be a slide show for a lecture, absent footnotes or bibliographic notes identifying the origins of the graphs, how the data was compiled, the method of graphing used, or any of the niceties.
I’m pretty sure the wiki image I linked to also lacked these details.
But as no source I can find confirms reliably the claims you make based on that graph, or provides adequate metadata, can I ask why you are so confident in it?
Bart R, maybe this will help.
http://climateaudit.org/2008/05/09/where-did-ipcc-1990-figure-7c-come-from-httpwwwclimateauditorgp3072previewtrue/
It seems to originate from a hand-drawn HH Lamb 1965 image based on central England. McIntyre looked into it at CA in 2008.
Jim D | April 26, 2014 at 8:08 pm |
Very helpful, thanks.
Lamb’s +/-3 degree error bar graph, the one that allegedly mysteriously shows changes to emphasize the LIA that aren’t seen in the original data, from five decades ago?
Jim D, your explanation implies that there is an energy flow due to the GHE from the atmosphere to the ocean. This completely contradicts R.Gates’ numerous assertions that the direction of energy flow is always from the ocean to the atmosphere. One of you must be blowing smoke.
willb, there is always energy flow in both directions. Heat energy, which Gates talks about, is net from the ocean, which is obvious if you think about it. Radiation goes both ways. It is very important to realize that the atmosphere does not have to get warm, you just have to add CO2, to affect ocean temperatures via its energy budget. This has been done probably countless times in a lab. Add CO2 to a gas without changing its temperature, and watch its radiative emission increasing in the CO2 bands. This is the forcing mechanism in a nutshell.
willb, further, heat plus radiation is net from the ocean, but what CO2 affects is the downward IR, which offsets part of that net, and results in a higher equilibrium ocean temperature. Similar effects are observed where cloudy nights cool more slowly than clear nights due to more downward IR, despite the net still being upwards. Clouds have this greenhouse type of effect below them too which is common knowledge in meteorology.
“Jim D, your explanation implies that there is an energy flow due to the GHE from the atmosphere to the ocean.”
There isn’t a contradiction. The increased longwave flux from atmosphere to ocean surface is a gross radiative flux, not a net flux. The main heat flux into the ocean is from the Sun. This flux is roughly compensated by the sum of the sensible heat, latent heat, and *net* upwelling radiative fluxes. Since the ocean surface is warmer than the troposphere the net longwave radiative flux, which is the difference between the downwelling and upwelling fluxes, always is from surface to atmosphere (and to space, through the atmospheric window). So, the effect of the increase in downwelling flux, which, as Jim D states, only require an increase in CO2 concentration to occur, just is to *reduce* the net upwelling flux from the ocean surface. There is thus less compensation for the incoming Solar radiation and the ocean thereby gains heat.
Thanks for clarifying, I should have said net IR plus sensible heat is net from the ocean. When you add net solar radiation plus latent heat to these, everything almost balances (see the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram). What CO2 affects is one component, namely downward IR, and the adjustment that occurs is that the ocean gets warmer to balance it.
Increased photon scattering in the atmosphere implies a temperature increase – the two are inextricably linked in the thermodynamic statistics of molecules in the atmosphere.
“Increased photon scattering in the atmosphere implies a temperature increase.”
It is surface temperature and the convective lapse rate governs the whole tropospheric temperature profile. TOA radiative balance determines net heat gains or losses in the whole system, but primarily in the oceans. Surface temperature eventually adjusts owing to finite heat capacity of the system, and then the troposperic profile follows from the bottom up. Photon scattering doesn’t overcome the lapse rate — it just determines TOA emissions.
Photon scattering in a greenhouse gas rich environment in where it starts. Duh.
You might note that this is not actual changes in emissions spectra but observations of photon scattering as seen through a space based aperture.
e.g. https://www.eumetsat.int/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_FILE&dDocName=pdf_conf_p50_s9_01_harries_v&allowInterrupt=1&noSaveAs=1&RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased
The point is unchanged – statistically in practically any volume you like you can’t have increased scattering in the atmosphere without a temperature increase. Unless of course – other things aren’t equal.
If the atmosphere isn’t warming and greenhouse are increasing – it simply means that there is less energy entering the troposphere from the oceans as a result o cool SST or from the Sun via the oceans.
The lapse rate is – btw – a ridiculous abstraction. Temperature profiles are irrelevant – the energy content of the troposphere is what is being discussed here.
“The point is unchanged – statistically in practically any volume you like you can’t have increased scattering in the atmosphere without a temperature increase. Unless of course – other things aren’t equal.”
Other things aren’t equal. If CO2 concentration is immediately increased, then scattering will increase in the lower troposphere, for sure. But then, latent and sensible fluxes at the sea surface boundary ensure that there can’t be a sustained temperature discontinuity, and convection ensures that the lapse rate is maintained throughout the troposperic column. So, what happens is that the stratosphere cools. It has to do so since it is now better insulated from the warmer surface and troposphere. It then downwells a lesser amount of radiation and this restores the radiative balance throughout the atmospheric column. But since the TOA emissions now are reduced, because of the cooling of the stratosphere, the surface now receives more solar energy than it is giving up by other means. And so it eventually warms up.
“If the atmosphere isn’t warming and greenhouse are increasing – it simply means that there is less energy entering the troposphere from the oceans as a result o cool SST or from the Sun via the oceans.”
I can’t make sense of this. You might consider rephrasing.
When you get upwelling in the eastern Pacific that propagates across the equatorial Pacific – there is less IR loss from the surface and the troposphere cools.
When there are more clouds – the oceans tend to cool and there is less energy loss from the surface.
It must after all balance at the surface and at TOA – eventually give or take some planetary warming and cooling.
What happens, when CO2 increases, but tropospheric temperature is the same, is first that IR from atmosphere to surface increases. That raises the temperature of the skin, and that leads to more evaporation and convection. These two mechanisms are so strongly dependent on the temperature difference between the ocean surface ant the atmosphere that the net influence on the skin temperature and on the net heat transfer between the ocean and the atmosphere is negligible. The explanation of Jim D is not correct.
Pierre-Normand has given more correct explanations. Internal variability in the heat flux and more persistent changes operate in parallel. Recently we have evidently been in the phase of internal variability where more heat is retained by the ocean and less released to the atmosphere. That would have resulted in a clearly cooling troposphere (like the drop from the maximum around 1940 to the cooler 1950s). The longer term warming trend has now been approximately as strong as the cooling from internal variability leading to plateau in the tropospheric temperature. Thus we have the extra warming of ocean based on the internal variability on top of the situation we have based on global warming.
This is the likely situation, but I don’t think that we can exclude the possibility that another type of internal variability has also a significant effect. That would be a change in albedo that would have reduced the imbalance at TOA leading to less overall warming of the Earth as whole.
Both types of variability are likely to be part of alternation of slower and faster warming of the surface and the troposphere. Thus this period of plateau is very likely to be followed with a period of much faster warming, similar to the period 1975-2000, but perhaps still stronger as the basic imbalance is growing all the time with additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
What happens when there is more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is that there is a potential for warming. If the atmosphere doesn’t warm it means there is less energy leaving the surface for one reason or another. I gave the 2 possibilities.
Keep it simple Pekka – and do us the courtesy of not going with your first thought.
BartR
your 8.26
The origins of Lambs graph is of no surprise. I dealt with at great length in my 2011 article carried here.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
In it I compared Dr Manns and Hubert Lambs reconstruction from 1538 to the start of the CET instrumental record in 1659. There are many hundreds of references cited.
My new article is entitled ‘Tranquility, transition and turbulence’ and deals with the deterioration of the MWP towards the LIA from 1200AD to 1450AD. Now there’s a treat you can look forward to,
I am surprised you are querying that the LIA was the coldest prolonged period since the Holocene was established, i.e. over the last 10000 years or so. It has been researched by many climatologists and as Ladurie demonstrated in ‘Times of feast times of famine’ the advances of the glaciers in a variety of locations worldwide was unprecedented in the record.
Raymomd s Bradley in ‘ past global changes and their significance for the future’ quarternary science reviews 2000, also regarded the lia as the coldest period in the Holocene.
Hubert Lamb likewise in ‘climate history past present and future’ and other books, as did Jean Grove in her epic 2 volume’ little ice ages.’
No one is saying that for five centuries there was unremitting cold. the period is typified by sharp oscillations of climate during which for example Phil Jones noted that the warm British Climate in the 1730’s wasn’t exceeded until the 1990’s (since when the temperature has dropped back) In consequence he confirmed that natural variability was greater than he had originally believed.
tonyb
Jim D, re your April 26, 2014 at 5:39 pm:
You seem to be implying that if I have two IR-transparent containers, both filled with CO2, both at the same temperature but one contains twice as much CO2 as the other, then there will be considerably more IR radiation emanating from the container with more CO2.
Did I get that right?
Pierre-Normand, your explanation only makes sense if the surface is warming. It is not. Jim D seems to think that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration, without increasing its temperature close to the surface, will increase downwelling IR reaching the ocean. This is his explanation for the GHE forcing. Do you agree with him?
climatereason | April 27, 2014 at 6:01 am |
To clarify, I am not questioning that there may have been an LIA in the paleo record, nor that it may have been the coldest climate period in the Holocene. I don’t question that literary and historical clues might suggestively lend some support to this contention.
I’m simply asking about the adamant certainty offered about something we have so little good evidence for. Given the evidence we do have, I fully accept that the simplest explanation is an LIA that was very cold and may have been as cold as any climate period in the Holocene. I’d expect the mainstream of Science to concur on the balance of probabilities.
I’d have to be much less confident of such an assertion than, say, of the conclusions of the recent Lovejoy paper, at perhaps 67% for yours and 99% for Lovejoy’s, based on the quality of the evidence and inference. Lovejoy, to go further, doesn’t self-cite blog posts, doesn’t post support material absent bibliographic references, does readers the courtesy of observing those niceties that make qualifying the quality of the evidence easier and more straightforward, thereby more honest.
That’s where my question is.
BartR
you said;
‘Lovejoy, to go further, doesn’t self-cite blog posts, doesn’t post support material absent bibliographic references…’
I merely self cited so that you could read the discussion about Lambs graph in which you seemed interested, and also so you could directly access the numerous bibliographic references from external well regarded sources that I mentioned in the post. If I had just airily said there are lots of references in my article you would rightly have asked for a citation.
tonyb.
R. Gates: Globally, the net flow of energy is from ocean to atmosphere, very very strongly. Your expectation that a warmer atmosphere would warm the ocean is not aligned with basic laws of physics.
You always totally miss the point about increased CO2 in the troposphere allegedly causing increase heat in the ocean without causing increased heat in the troposphere where the CO2 resides. You turn to jackets and ignore the physical mechanism on earth. If increased CO2 is the proposed mechanism, it can’t cause increased heat retention in the ocean without causing increased heat retention in the troposphere where it resides. That was why climate scientists constructed the “tropical hot spot” in the first place, wasn’t it.
First, no, my emphasis on the IPWP is hardly arbitrary, and your insinuation that it is tells me that you are not well read on the subject.
That is not an insinuation but an outright assertion: You focused on just one part of a huge system that might still be warming. You have never cited more than one study with an inadequate evidence base for its conclusion. So cite some more of this vast literature that you have heretofore ignored.
Matthew Marler, yes, the troposphere responds fairly immediately to surface warming through convection. This is also how the water vapor feedback works. It can’t happen until the troposphere has warmed. Currently some areas (e.g. land and Arctic) are warming faster than others. The tropical ocean surfaces are not warming as fast, which is also why the hot spot lags.
R Gates: Pierre-Normand, thanks for providing the general overview of ocean-atmosphere heat exchanges. What so many fail to grasp is the nature of an external forcing and how a little heat can control a greater amount, not dissimilar to a power transistor by the way.
A general overview is not what I have requested. And a transistor is an inadequate analogy to CO2-induced global warming.
I am not denying that an increase in CO2 can result in an increased accumulation of heat in the ocean; I am asking for an explanation of how that can happen without the troposphere warming, since that is where the CO2 resides.
willb, you say “You seem to be implying that if I have two IR-transparent containers, both filled with CO2, both at the same temperature but one contains twice as much CO2 as the other, then there will be considerably more IR radiation emanating from the container with more CO2.”
Yes, CO2 emits in its bands. Take the CO2 away, you don’t get its emission. Double CO2, and these bands emit more strongly, all at the same temperature. The air actually loses energy by emitting more, so the net IR effect in the atmosphere is one of cooling, and this is what happens in the stratosphere. The troposphere however has a temperature closely tied to the surface’s, so as the surface warms, so does the troposphere. The troposphere is in radiative-convective equilibrium (check out Isaac Held’s work on this). Convection warms, radiation cools, and they are in equilibrium.
“Pierre-Normand, your explanation only makes sense if the surface is warming. It is not. Jim D seems to think that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration, without increasing its temperature close to the surface, will increase downwelling IR reaching the ocean. This is his explanation for the GHE forcing. Do you agree with him?”
I am not assuming that the surface is warming. Either it warms as a response of an increase in external forcing, and the radiative balance at the top of the atmosphere thereby tends to be restored, or it doesn’t (because of internal variability, for instance) and in that case oceans accumulate heat at a enhanced rate because of the larger imbalance.
Jim D is right about the direct effect of increasing the CO2 concentration, which is to increase the downwelling radiation. This also results in decreasing the upwelling radiation from the stratosphere. The stratosphere is allowed to cool immediately because it isn’t convectively coupled with the surface. Hence there occurs an imbalance at the top of the atmosphere and the oceans gain heat in roughly equal measure. This doesn’t depend on the troposphere warming at all. The warming of the troposphere follows the eventual warming of the surface. This takes place later and is how the radiative balance at the top of the atmophere tends to be restored. Internal variability can delay it. But when it does, the oceans (and cryosphere) keep accumulating heat.
Nature Climate Science (NCS) said “…the slowdown in sea level rise is due to natural variability in the climate and is not indicative of a slowdown in the effects of global warming.” This statement does nothing at all to explain the scientific effect (sea level change) being caused by …what? It is a nothing statement. It also is a statement of the author or editor’s opinion that manmade GHGs effect on the trajectory of temperatures is invariable and continues monotonically regardless and that any variability in the rise of temperatures is due to not man made causes. What complete b.s. malarkey. NCS go on, “…scientists suspect that the “missing heat” from a build-up greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is going into the deep oceans as part of natural variations in the climate.” what does “suspect” mean; it means this is the “exclamation excuse of the day” to explain away variations without changing the storyline on manmade GHGs causing global warming. Do they think people are this stupid and gullible? I would have been kicked out of my PhD program (25 years ago) talking this way; the standards have really dropped during this time.
I don’t agree with the slowing of the sea level rise as it has multi-decadal oscillation. The current long term sea level rise rate is 2.7mm per year and the global warming rate is about 0.1 deg C per decade, not IPCC’s 0.2 deg C per decade.
The acceleration of the sea level rise is 0.019 mm per year^2 and that of the global warming acceleration is 0.00072 deg C per decade per year.
Sea level rise (SLR) and change in global mean temperature (GMT) are related by the equation
Change SLR = 26 (cm/deg C)*Change in GMT
For the 20th century, the Change in GMT was 0.62 deg C and this gives Change SLR = 16 cm, which is the observed SLR.
The projected SLR for the 21st century is 34 cm. This gives:
Change in GMT = 34/26 = 1.3 deg C warming for the 21st century.
I don’t agree with the slowing of the sea level rise as it has multi-decadal oscillation. The current long term sea level rise rate is 2.7mm per year and the global warming rate is about 0.1 deg C per decade, not IPCC’s 0.2 deg C per decade.
The acceleration of the sea level rise is 0.019 mm per year per year and that of the global warming acceleration is 0.000072 deg C per year per year.
Sea level rise (SLR) and change in global mean temperature (GMT) are related by the equation
Change SLR = 26 (cm/deg C)*Change in GMT
For the 20th century, the Change in GMT was 0.62 deg C and this gives Change SLR = 16 cm.
The projected SLR for the 21st century is 34 cm. This gives
Change in GMT = 34/26 = 1.3 deg C warming for the 21st century.
A different but related topic. I am interested in seeing comments. In Science magazine just received online news / table of contents “Climate Outsider Finds Missing Global Warming”
POTSDAM, GERMANY—Kevin Cowtan had a clear message to deliver earlier this month when he spoke to researchers here at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK): Standard data sets of worldwide surface temperatures underestimate recent global warming, and the much-publicized slowdown in warming isn’t as slow as it seems. Crystal clear, one might say: Cowtan is not a climate scientist … but a protein crystallographer at Univ of York, UK.
Cowtan … reanalyzed data underpinning key global temperature data sets: two most prominent data sets, one maintained by a British collaboration and the other by NASA, underestimate the pace of warming between 1997 and 2012 by an estimated 158% and 49%, respectively…. shows that the slowdown, or “hiatus,” has been less pronounced than previously described, he says, correcting the data sets “should have been done ages ago.”
Cowtan and partner Way filled in the gaps in the network of stations over Antarctica, Africa, and the Arctic. The various data sets deal with the gaps in different ways. HadCRUT omits missing regions from its calculations of global mean temperature trends; NASA extrapolates temperatures for those areas using data from their edges. Both groups have previously warned that that sparse coverage may lead to underestimates of global warming. Cowtan and Way set out to quantify those underestimates. They applied a new method that fills in missing temperatures over sea ice by combining satellite data for missing areas with a method known as “kriging,” which calculates missing data by checking nearby temperature station readings. Then they compared their method’s skill in interpolation with that of the NASA and Hadley approaches in the Arctic by systematically removing known data and using each of the three techniques to reconstruct the data set. Cowtan says his and Way’s approach proved the most reliable, and data from Arctic buoys and three weather models support it.
Unfortunately he only presented data for the entire period 1997-2012 as follows “Warming, oC):
Climate models 0.102-0.412
NASA 0.080
HadCRUT 0.046
Cowton/Way 0.119
Another example of looking for more data to shore up the religious cause.
Cowton and Ways paper was published by Royal Meteorological Society November 2013 and is available open access via links at http://www.skepticalscience.com/open_access_cw2013_update.html
It is clear that sea level rise acts as a natural low-pass filter of average atmospheric temperature, as we would expect. It even shows the, effect of the 1940 atmospheric temperature singularity, lagged by about 3 years, by the ocean’s filter, in the AR5 graph. See my figure 1 underlined above). Note that the 3 year lag is not the same as the time constant of ocean lag which may be larger. But the sharpness of the peak of some observations lends weight to the singularity theory. Note also that the sea level actually fell quite steeply after the after the 1940 singularity peak, which adds to the theory of the on/off nature of climate change. The consequences of the latter are of great importance to climate change modelling, indicating that continuous differential equation dynamic models cannot work.
Alexander Biggs: But the sharpness of the peak of some observations lends weight to the singularity theory. Note also that the sea level actually fell quite steeply after the after the 1940 singularity peak, which adds to the theory of the on/off nature of climate change. The consequences of the latter are of great importance to climate change modelling, indicating that continuous differential equation dynamic models cannot work.
For examples of continuous differential equation models that produce nearly on/off behavior, go to “Modern Thermodynamics” by Kondepudi and Prigogine, the last few chapters. There are other texts, but I cite this one because of its focus on thermodynamics; the examples are chemical oscillations.
Matthew: I am not suggesting continuous differential equation models cannot produce on/off behavior. What I am saying is that, first, we have to recognise a singularity in climate temperature in 1940 and second, that it is unlikely to be produced by a continuous differential equation dynamic model. Can you think of a set of simultaneous differential equations feasible in climate context that would produce such a singularity?
Alexander Biggs: Can you think of a set of simultaneous differential equations feasible in climate context that would produce such a singularity?
What I can think of doesn’t limit nature very much. I don’t think you made a good case that a “singularity” has occurred.
And then there is this :
“Obvious signatures of the cooling lithosphere
The most obvious signals of lithospheric cooling appear in measurements of heat flow, depth, geoid height, and surface wave velocity and they are best understood in terms of conductive cooling models. Heat flow is a measure of surface temperature gradient and is most sensitive to shallow thermal structure. Unfortunately, conductive heat flow versus age data do not confirm the cooling models because much of the heat is advected by hydrothermal circulation near the ridge axes (Hofmeister and Criss, 2005; Pollack et al., 1993). Seafloor depth reflects the integrated heat loss from cooling. The depth vs. age signal dom- inates the topography of the ocean basins and provides a firm foundation for plate tectonic theory (Parsons and Sclater, 1977). Geoid height mainly reflects the temperatures at the base of the lithosphere (Haxby and Turcotte, 1978). Unfortunately the lithospheric signal is masked by contributions from deeper in the mantle. Similarly velocities derived from surface waves reflect lithospheric cooling although there is uncertainty in mapping from velocity to temperature (Ritzwoller et al., 2004). Combined, these data sets provide a definitive picture of the bulk cooling and volumetric contraction of the lithosphere with age.”
from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Notice the term geoid height. Notice also the terms bulk cooling and volumetric contraction.
Now look at tectonic plate movement both vertical and horizontal, both short term and long term, and their effect on the sea level. If you can still convince yourself that your odd theory that heat somehow trapped by greenhouse gases is causing sea level rise or fall, and that you can somehow account for things like totally unknown vertical displacements in sea beds in your measurement, you can probably qualify as a climate scientist.
Or you can just substitute fantasy for fact, and press on regardless.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
I guess it could be easily confirmed by taking a snap shot of the ocean ground and then taking another snap shot 10 years later to determine if there had been tectonic plate movement that could have increased ocean rise, or in this case reduced it. http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2012/20120416_bathymetry.html
But it is taken into consideration when they see it happen on land regarding tide gauges. “Long-term tide gauge records provide a measure of the water level relative to a fixed, land-based reference mark. However, in order to precisely determine any apparent sea level change, it is important to know whether or not the land upon which the tide gauge is located is actually moving.” http://www.lpi.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/1827292013_Janssen_etal_SSSC2013_using_GNSS_CORS_to_augment_tide_gauge_obs.pdf
Michael Whittemore,
Unfortunately your guess is impossible to implement, which is why it has never been done. The problem of course is a complex one, and as the Scripps Institution points out, involves the unknown.
In relation to your comment regarding tide gauges, you have no doubt noticed that the procedure cannot provide details of past tide gauge movements, and will hopefully be of use some 10-15 years into the future. Further, the use of tide gauges in an attempt to measure global sea levels – however defined – is nearly as pointless as using tree rings to measure temperatures.
Warmism is based on faith, not fact. I appreciate your comment, even though it seems to be based on wishful thinking.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Seas warm and cool as energy from the Sun
is gained and lost from the surface. This seems to be one of those self evident truths that eludes the inscrutable Flynn.
Sea level rise at points can be measured with pin point accuracy using conventional surveying methods – as they have been for more than 100 years. Basin and global sea levels are arrived at – more or less satisfactorily – by intercomparisons.
Satellites provide a much more accurate ‘picture’ of land and basin movements. Although the sea level results do seem at odds with ARGO OHC and salinity derived estimates of expansion and ocean mass.
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/eas/PeoplePlaces/Faculty/matt/vol59no7p68_69.pdf
I read the workshop paper you referenced by Sandwell, I guess he works/worked at the Scripps Institution, so I am unsure if your statement that “Scripps Institution points out” is right? That paper was not published in a journal from what I have seen either? Also after reading it the paper tends to focus on plate tectonic theory and how it can cause a cooling effect, I cant see from the paper any point about up/down lift of the ocean floor causing a change in sea level?
Whatever, sea level is doing, Greenland is steadily accelerating its contribution, which is more than 7 mm since 2002.
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/report12/images-terrcryo/g-fig5.19.jpg
So the rest of the sources must be decelerating their contributions. Over a century that would be about 56 mm. Not very impressive.
What do you mean?
setting aside the issue of declining rates, lets take the CU rate for the last 20 years of 3.2 mm per year. That has been a fairly steady rate and if the Greenland contribution is increasing, with the total being static, then some other element must have been reduced.
Does anybody know if somebody has the annual rates from 1992 thru 2013?
Because it used to be common to see numbers like this.
JCH
This is the chart I was referencing, updated as of yesterday and showing a 3.2 mm/yr trend, although the last few years a bit of a roller coaster.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu
I challege you to find the sea level data at UCB that haven’t been corrected for basin movement, seaonality, salinity, barometric pressure, etc. The supposedly “raw” data listed by the charts are just a table with the “corrected” data. Wonder why the uncorrected sea level is so hard to find?
Say the nurse left the butt thermometer on top of the toaster. It goes in at 120F. It comes out at 115F.
You want uncorrected numbers, there are two.
Every scientist on the face of the earth can look at the corrections. Or they can just b*i*t*c*h about it.
ceresco kid – the implication I am seeing a lot is that it has been a pretty constant 3.2 mm since 1992, and I do not believe that is the case.
You are right, it has been all over the map. My point to Jim D is that the overall trendline is still 3.2 mm and if his point is that during the last 12 years Greenland has increased its share of the rise then by simple deduction some other component went down.
Greenland’s contribution doubled from 0.5 mm/yr to 1 mm/yr in 5 years. The acceleration of 0.5 mm/yr in 5 years is not noticeable against the noise yet yet, but will be soon if it persists which signs indicate it will.
Due to the increasing temperatures in the ocean found below 700m, it makes me wonder if due to the added pressure under the ocean, maybe the extra heat is due to the lack of thermal expansion, due to increased pressure? It would also explain why ocean rising is slowing. But if that was the case, I think it would contradict the explanation given for the reduced surface temperatures we are seeing.
“Is water incompressible or not? And if not, how much can you compress it?”
…
“In the sense that “steel is incompressible”, it’s also true that “water is incompressible”, but these things only approximate to being true. The approximation fits with everyday life experiences.”
…
“Scientifically, there is a measurement of incompressibility. It’s known as “Bulk Modulus”. One way to explain bulk modulus is to say that the bulk modulus of a material is the amount of pressure which, if you applied 1% of it, would reduce the volume of the material by 1%.”
..
Air has a bulk modulus of about 1 atmosphere, 15 pounds per square inch, and at 10 atmospheres you can get ten times as much air into a strong container. Water also has a bulk modulus, (ie water is not incompressible). The bulk modulus of water is about 22,000 atmospheres.
At the bottom of the deepest depth of the sea, the Mariana Trench, the pressure is about 1100 atmospheres. This is a heck of a lot of pressure, 7 tons per square inch, and the number of submarines that have ever been built to withstand that pressure is… about five or six.
Someone asked “If you took a very strong 1 gallon container and took it down to the bottom of the deepest sea and then put the lid on, and then brought it back up again, how much water would it contain?”. The answer is about 1.05 gallons, or 5% more than if it had been filled up with water at the surface.
So, to put that in perspective: The deepest sea, with the highest pressure of water on earth, can compress water by 5%.”
http://www.zyra.org.uk/water-incompressible.htm
Michael Whittemore,
Once a gas is compressed and heated, it then radiates the excess heat away, until it achieves equilibrium with the surrounding environment. It does not store it, trap it, hide it, or retain excess heat in any way shape, or form.
If you don’t believe me, wander down to a dive shop, and try to determine which cylinders contain air at 3000 psi, and which contain air at ambient pressure, ie empty cylinders, by means of checking their temperatures.
Provided the pressurised containers have been allowed to cool down, they are at exactly the same temperature as empty cylinders in the same surroundings.
Given present technology, attempting to measure the heat content of the oceans, and draw any useful conclusion from such a measurement is an exercise in futility. Best left to climatologists, I would think. Well above the abilities of mere mortals to achieve.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
“So, to put that in perspective: The deepest sea, with the highest pressure of water on earth, can compress water by 5%.”
I would bring some compressed water to a desert trip as it would save space.
Pierre Normand,
Even better, just take a good supply of dehydrated water. This will save the expense of high pressure containment vessels.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn,
It is actually best to carry both. Compressed water can be used to rehydrate powdered water. Water quenches thirst better when it isn’t too dry.
”
Water quenches thirst better when it isn’t too dry.
”
Unlike a good martini, which should have a small desert ecosystem at the bottom of the glass.
Dihydrogen monoxide powder … just add water!
gbaikie | April 25, 2014 at 1:09 am |
Mike Flynn | April 25, 2014 at 1:37 am |
Just to clarify what I am saying, due to the increased pressure the deeper you go under the ocean, does it effect the ability of the water to thermally expand?
At 700 meter depth [70 atm] I would say, probably not much.
They measure down to 2000m and it is inferred that there is also warming below that level.
Michael Whittemore,
Simply, no.
And once water expands, thermally or otherwise, if it becomes less dense, it will ascend, until it becomes as dense as the water surrounding it. It then stops rising.
Conversely, when water becomes more dense, it will descend until it stops – I know it sounds trite, but that’s how it is.
As for heat hiding in the ocean depths, one must first heat water and at the same time increase its density, otherwise it will just float on the denser, colder water below. This requires magical Warmist physics, as normal non-Warmist physics shows that ordinary water expands when heated.
I hope this helps.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn | April 25, 2014 at 5:56 am |
“This requires magical Warmist physics, as normal non-Warmist physics shows that ordinary water expands when heated.”
The physics of the ARGO data seems fine. As ocean water heats up the surface is warmest and the temperature decreases at depth. This graph shows the ARGO data. http://tinylink.net/5taij
Here is a link to ARGO graph http://postimg.org/image/qdkx4plgd/
Pingback: Sea Level Rise Slowing | The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)
If rigour was a desirable objective, none of these papers would pass.
The thermal expansion or contraction of a discrete body (here the combined oceans) HAS to consider the whole body. There has been very little measurement of its deep ocean properties – say about 50% of the body. It is possible, but currently unknown, that a temperature change is present in that undermapped 50%. The magnitude of such a temperature change, if spread over the whole 50%, would be beyond present measurement capability if it produced a change of 3 mm per year. Of course there are infinite possible scenarios about the undermapped deeps, but the important point is that a measurment expressed as (say) 3.4 +/- 0.4 mm per year is nothing more than a guess. The error magnitude is NOT known and it will likely be many years before the deep oceans yield their uncertainties. Quoting +/- 0.4 is a scientific absurdity and an insult to those seeking to maintain scientific respectability in the face of the poor climate change work that is prostituting a noble profession
People wonder why independent scientists like me question the perceived wisdom of the Establishment. Surely any thinking scientist would reject the inclusion of a guess (or the exclusion of a critical caveat) in a measurement that is already being used for widespread, costly, coercive law making
Is I
Geoff Sherrington | April 25, 2014 at 7:37 am
“If rigour was a desirable objective, none of these papers would pass”
Could you please explain why the paper would not pass?
“Quoting +/- 0.4 is a scientific absurdity and an insult to those seeking to maintain scientific respectability in the face of the poor climate change work that is prostituting a noble profession”
The satellite data confirmed the tidal gauge data. The satellite has an error of ±5mm. The 3.3 ± 0.4 mm yr−1 you are refereeing to is regarding the rate of increase. http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/images/CSIRO_GMSL_figure.jpg
“It is possible, but currently unknown, that a temperature change is present in that undermapped 50%. The magnitude of such a temperature change, if spread over the whole 50%, would be beyond present measurement capability if it produced a change of 3 mm per year.”
The ARGO measures the temperature of the ocean down to 2000m. Due to thermal expansion, warm water rises to a level that corresponds to its density. The data shows a layered effect with warmer water at the top and cooler water at the bottom http://tinylink.net/5taij .
Given that the ARGO floats only go down to 2000m, it is only logical to infer that there would be more warming below 2000m which followed a gradual cooling the deeper it went.
But if you are only talking about thermal expansion, then it does not matter what is happening in the deep ocean, sea level rise explains it.
Here is a link to the ARGO graph http://postimg.org/image/qdkx4plgd/
I don’t recall any skeptic making such claims about sea level rise dropping. Mostly we claim only that alarmists have the bad habit of comparing high altimeter readings with low historical tidal guage results when just using the tidal guages consistently shows that nothing unusual is happening one way or the other – as Judith adroitly pointed out. As usual skeptics are in line with the real scientific consensus and the alarmists are the outliers, using rank bad methods, extreme confirmation bias, hysteria and strawman argumentation.
It is unclear if climate change itself affects the frequency of La Ninas.
Rather clear. I recommend Wittenberg (2014, http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00577.1): “Previous studies have revealed a wide range of ENSO responses to forcings from greenhouse gases, aerosols, and orbital variations, but they have also shown that interdecadal modulation of ENSO can arise even without such forcings. “ “… multidecadal epochs of extreme ENSO behavior can arise not only intrinsically but also delicately and entirely at random.”
AMO – aerosols.
What is AMO?
Wang & Zhang (2013, http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00721.1): “Both observations and most of the phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) models also show that the warm (cold) phase of the AMO is associated with a surface warming (cooling) and a subsurface cooling (warming) in the tropical North Atlantic (TNA). It is further shown that the warm phase of the AMO corresponds to a strengthening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and a weakening of the Atlantic subtropical cell (STC), which both induce an anomalous northward current in the TNA subsurface ocean. Because the mean meridional temperature gradient of the subsurface ocean is positive because of the temperature dome around 9°N, the advection by the anomalous northward current cools the TNA subsurface ocean during the warm phase of the AMO. The opposite is true during the cold phase of the AMO.”
Is not (for the above conclusions) possible that: “The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming temporarily.”( Michael E. Mann told).
This phrase is simply nonsense, but …
Let us compare these three figures:
(http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GISSTemperature/Images/greenland_sulfur.gif,
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6044/866/F2.large.jpg, http://i1054.photobucket.com/albums/s499/WeatherDem/AerosolOpticalDepth525nm-Neelyetal2013_zps8ba54484.png)
Indeed, we see a strong correlation between stratospheric sulfur aerosols and changes in global temperature. In models with a dominant role – influence, GHG’s to changes in temperature, the impact of aerosols is underestimated. Therefore, it is obvious, undisputed that the impact of GHGs in these models is likely to be significantly overestimated.
Neely (2013 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50263/abstract): “Comparison of the model results to observations reveals that moderate volcanic eruptions, rather than anthropogenic influences, are the primary source of the observed increases in stratospheric aerosol.”
So now volcanoes decide … Even if Asia will reduce “anthropogenic influences” of sulfur aerosols,
nothing we gain …
We can not “hope” that abruptly we have a “volcanic silence ” and anthropogenic GHGs “will triumph” …
An aerosol “the end” of global warming?
“Today, Hansen’s team estimates the human forcing from greenhouse gases to be about 3 watts per square meter (warming) and the forcing from aerosols to be about minus 1.5 watts per square meter (cooling).”
“… 1.5 watts per square meter …” however, is “burdened” with a big mistake, because: “… the aerosol effect is complicated because aerosols are distributed inhomogeneously …” Hansen said.”( http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GISSTemperature/giss_temperature4.php).
Whether against this “… we will find a planet that is 2-3°C warmer than today”?
Sea level rise will accelerate?
By the way supposed (absolutely certain) a small role of Suns … I suggest my (only two) “favorite” quotes:
NASA (http://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/index.cfm?fuseAction=datatools.view&&project_id=38&navOrgCode=610&navTab=nav_researchers):
“… and how solar variations influence the Earth’s climate over long time scales REMAIN UNRESOLVED.”
NOAA (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/faqs/climfaq10.html ) :
“… our understanding of the indirect effects of changes in solar output and feedbacks in the climate system is minimal […]
The way I look at the figure from AR5 I don’t see anything particularly alarming – unless you happen to be the type of person who automatically extends any upward trend at the end of a time-series with a ruler to infinity. Looks to me like there has been LOTS of variability in the record over the last century,including several periods with very sharp increases AND decreases especially if Jevrejeva et al. is to be believed.
As Planet Three continues its recovery from the LIA we can probably expect some more sea level rise. The only real cause for concern I see is if you happen to live on a flood plain, river delta, or coral atoll and you have interrupted the natural mechanisms by which nature has always kept those locations above sea level – if so look to it. If you happen to have built in a very low lying area, well, it’s probably flooded before and will definitely flood again; make your own decision about how much flood danger you are willing to put up with and act accordingly – just don’t expect the rest of us to pay for your beach bonanza.
W^3
So when the La Nina started in 2010 sea level dropped precipitously. The explanation was that ocean evaporation ended up raining a whole bunch on continents instead of on oceans.
The SLR budget is made up of two buckets: the steric bucket and the mass bucket.
So from which bucket did most of the evaporation come?
The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land,
They look at the sea all day.
…
They cannot look out far,
They cannot look in deep,
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep.
Robert Frost.
It is interesting that so many people seem to claim to “know” what global sea level was doing to such precise measurements prior to the satellite era. Imo, there is a lot of speculation but very limited reliable data of sufficient fidelity to really claim to know when the rate of rise changed with much precision.
What do we know?
We know that the rate of sea level rise has been pretty steady since there have been reasonably reliable means of measurements (1992)
We see no evidence of an increase in the rate of sea level rise which does lessen the largest single fear associated with AGW.
We do not really know much more that is relevant to government policy except that endless speculation continues.
Warmers pretend they think they can prevent the seas from rising (or lowering?).
Just like they pretend to think they can prevent the world from getting warmer (or colder?).
Yeah.
Andrew
I would like to make some observations on what I’ve been reading in these posts, but first let me warn you that I am not a scientist and have no formal training in climate science. As a result, I’m guessing my observations can be shot down quickly. First, it appears to me that sea level rise is a proxy for what you experts consider important—ocean expansion due to warming and run-off from melting land-based glaciers, and from what I’m reading in these posts it is a poor proxy. Second, one of the messages that the IPCC has for policymakers is the danger of sea level rise. Of course, local sea level rise is what is most important for a particular policymaker, but the message I most often see relates to average sea level rise with the implicit and reasonable assumption that local levels will likely also rise. However, is the IPCC warning based on adjusted or observed sea level measures? The latter would seemingly be more important for what policymakers are interested in—storm surges, encroachment etc.?
Interested bystander, you write ” However, is the IPCC warning based on adjusted or observed sea level measures?”
I suspect you are interpreting, and believing, that the IPCC reports are scientific. They are not. They pretend to be, but they are really political statements. So their warnings are not based on anything to do with science. They are merely the opinions of a bunch of extremely biased individuals.
They have satellites that take measurements. Sort of like Roy Spencer takes measurements.
Interested, you raise reasonable questions for someone uninformed, speaking uncritically. Re to local sea level rise is what is most important for a particular policymaker …. relates to average sea levels. You are right and right. Local sea level rise is important to the local policymakers situation. He has to develop prevention and adaptation policy for his jurisdiction. But it is also true that the local situation is related to the entire oceanic situation so long as we are talking about coastal regions. Water seeks its own level. However, the IPCC objective is to related a link to manmade global warming which is the basis for their objective to have a unified global government action on carbon control and mitigation. The rising sea levels is just one of many legs on the IPCC octopus.
Jim Cripwell:
”
So their warnings are not based on anything to do with science. They are merely the opinions of a bunch of extremely biased individuals.
”
Citation needed.
I have to admire the beautiful irony of that argument-by-assertion.
Some people are so desperate to reject evidence that they have become post-modernists – without even being aware of it…
Interested Bystander:
”
…is the IPCC warning based on adjusted or observed sea level measures?
”
No “IPCC warning” – Just projections, based on different emissions scenarios.
Short answer is both. If you want to know the secular increase in mean sea level, you need to factor out the non-secular effects – For example, there is an 18.6 year periodicity due to the motion of the Moon’s orbital nodes that has an amplitude of about 17 mm. So, if you looked at less than 18.6 years worth of data without considering that effect, you might be mislead into thinking that the rate of change of mean sea level had slowed down or sped up, when, in fact, it is doing the opposite.
Start here, and follow the links:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/11/sea-level-rise-what-the-experts-expect/
Reverend, you write “Citation needed.”
The IPCC reports are the citation.
Jim Cripwell:
”
The IPCC reports are the citation.
”
That would merely be the opinion of one extremely biased individual.
Denialist cognition never fails to amuse!
Reverend
Speak for thyself, Reverend.
Max
Judith Curry:
“ It is clear that natural variability has dominated sea level rise during the 20th century, with changes in ocean heat content and changes in precipitation patterns.”
Can you please explain this further?
“Can someone then tell me how you can infer that sea level rise is accelerating due to AGW, when compared with sea level rise for the first half of the 20th century?”
A resent paper by Lovejoy 2014 (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-014-2128-2) shows the forcing from CO2 and the corresponding aerosols over the last 100 years http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8 . Due to anthropogenic warming, it is expected the oceans will warm http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/images/CSIRO_GMSL_figure.jpg.
A correlation with global surface temperatures http://media.web.britannica.com/eb-media/15/106515-004-540A3E17.gif
When we look at the last 2000 years, the sudden increase in sea level rise that corresponds to anthropogenic warming confirms Lovejoys (2014) paper http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/images/gehrels_donnelly.jpg
Michael
Your link to a sudden increase in sea level doesn’t work. There has been no sudden increase but a series of well documented oscillations over the centuries with the current rise dating to around 1700 or so. Please repost
tonyb
I believe the link I provided is only down due to it being Sunday. It should work again soon. It’s CSIRO. But one of the graphs I link to is from this paper http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/13/1015619108.full.pdf
Michael
Thanks for the reposting of the link.
I note that it is a paper centred on salt marsh in one small area of the US.
I posted this earlier in the thread. It shows US and global sea level trends from NOAA plus a study looking at sea levels over the last 2000 years
http://judithcurry.com/2014/04/24/slowing-sea-level-rise/#comment-531985
How does what you have posted relate to a ‘sudden’ increase in AGW induced sea level?
tonyb
Tonyb
The paper I linked also looks at other proxy sea level estimates on page 4. Regarding your link, from what I saw you had North America resent trends and then a link about global trends being different then you finish off with this link http://www.glaciology.net/Home/PDFs/Announcements/gslprojection which seems to be saying exactly what I am saying? Also can you show me the link that you say explains that sea levels were higher during medieval warm period?
Michael
From my link
‘Over the last 2000 years minimum sea level (-19 to -26 cm) occurred around 1730 AD, maximum sea level (12 to 21 cm) around 1150 AD. Sea level 2090-2099 is projected to be 0.9 to 1.3 m for the A1B scenario, with low probability of the rise being within Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confidence limits. ‘
The large diagram shows the sea levels over the past 2000 years. On the end has been tacked a modelled projection. There is no sharp modern rise that has ACTUALLY happened. There have been some steep rises and falls in the past.
tonyb
Tonyb
In relation to why I linked this paper to explain a sudden increase in sea level rise during the resent anthropogenic warming of the last century is because that is what the paper is saying. It should be expected too, the earth is warming http://media.web.britannica.com/eb-media/15/106515-004-540A3E17.gif and Lovejoys 2014 paper http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-014-2128-2 clearly shows the warming is at a much higher rate then any time during the last 500 years.
Tonyb
Just using the numbers from the paper you linked, there was a highest sea level at (12 to 21 cm) around 1150 AD, then it takes 580 years to go down to (-19 to -26 cm) around 1730 AD. The paper I link you says anthropogenic warming did not increase sea level rate until about 1892 but that aside we have seen the same change up until today in sea level rise but only 270 years have passed . The rate has increased.
Michael
It took a long time to go down as that represents the LIA-the coldest period in the last 10000 years. I am not sure I see the comparison.
Holgate did an examination and reckoned that the levels rose faster in the first half of the 20th century than in the second half although it was not statistically significant.
Temperatures have been rising since around 1700 with a notably warm period around 1730. Giss are merely a staging post of rising temperatures not the starting post.
tonyb
” I am not sure I see the comparison.”
Like I said, it took a long time to get that low, but almost half the time to go back up, with most of the up happening during the last century. This is what the paper I referenced was explaining http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/13/1015619108.full.pdf
“Giss are merely a staging post of rising temperatures not the starting post.” ??
Michael
There was an enormous amount of snow and ice to melt at low levels following the lia and when the temperatures started rising around 1700 it started to melt. It can not be compared to whatever the levels were in earlier eras. As I say, holgate did not see this acceleration you believe happened.
In pointing to giss I am saying that temperatures have been rising for a very long time and pre date the co2 rise.
Tonyb
Michael
“As I say, holgate did not see this acceleration you believe happened.”
The paper I referenced makes a case that it has and is why I linked it.
“In pointing to giss I am saying that temperatures have been rising for a very long time and pre date the co2 rise.”
Yes they have have but at a natural rate as fully explained in Lovejoys paper http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-014-2128-2
Michael
Natural rate?
Here is my article showing that warming can be traced from the start of the instrumental record in 1659.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
You will note the hockey stick around 1700 is greater than the more famous one around 1900.
At what point did the many centuries long ‘natural rate’ with its sharp temperature uptick suddenly become the unnatural rate with its less sharp uptick?
tonyb
“Natural rate?”
I dont know if you noticed my reference to a paper so I will cut and paste it (Yes they have, but at a natural rate as fully explained in Lovejoys paper http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-014-2128-2)
“Here is my article showing that warming can be traced from the start of the instrumental record in 1659.”
Yes I have looked at your blog post and how you refer to a regional proxy in central England.
“At what point did the many centuries long ‘natural rate’ with its sharp temperature uptick suddenly become the unnatural rate with its less sharp uptick?”
I think you mean to say, when did the natural warming become anthropogenic warming. If you read the paper I referenced you would see it was 1885.
Michael
You do realise
a) that the Lovejoy article you reference is pay walled?
b) That CET is thought by many scientists to be a reasonable proxy for global temperatures?
c) That Britain is one of those places that is cooling?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
If AGW has been apparent since 1885 it is difficult to see how man can live on this planet as we can never get back to the sort of co2 levels that appertained in 1885 and will always influence the climate.1885 was the final pulse of the LIA. Are you saying that man caused the world to warm from that cold period?
tonyb
Seriously, what are the names of the scientists who think a region of a smallish island in the Atlantic can, all by its little self, be a good proxy for global temperature?
We estimate an acceleration of 0.02 ± 0.01 mm·yr −2 in global sea level by the conventional method…
JCH, why shouldn’t it be? What in a global forcing would cause some parts of the globe to warm, but not others?
phatboy | April 27, 2014 at 4:10 pm |
If I run the engine in my car hotter to drive the air conditioning, the interior of the car might get colder, as the overall car gets hotter.
If polar vortices are driven further and further south, drawing up warmer air from middle latitudes toward the pole and supplanting them with Arctic chill, then many nations might experience cooling, while the generally unmonitored Arctic Circle region experiences substantial restructuring of sea ice as well as surface warming and deep ocean warming too.
There are all sorts of simple, parsimonious explanations for the generally well-known effect of weather systems changing their behavior. It would be difficult to imagine a globe that didn’t have at least some of these contrary effects for a span of time in a small group of places.
The assumption of equipartition makes no sense in a complex global system. Why cling to it?
Bart R, over timescales of decades to centuries?
Why then cling to the idea of a few isolated weather stations at the fringes of the polar regions serving as proxies for the entire regions?
Bart R, besides which, you’d do well to remember your words the next time you start sprouting off about the MWP and LIA not being global events
There is always lots of information about papers that are pay walled.
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/esubmissions/Questions.Answers.17.4.14.pdf
“That Britain is one of those places that is cooling?”
Does that not completely prove my point?
“Are you saying that man caused the world to warm from that cold period?”
You seem to be missing the point, anthropogenic CO2 forcing started the moment we began adding it into the atmosphere http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8 all warming/cooling before that is considered natural.
phatboy | April 27, 2014 at 4:45 pm |
Thank you for this response. It is always interesting to discuss the content of topical comments, rather than the character of strangers.
Your reasoning, however, eludes me. Is there any?
The problem with under-coverage of polar and remote regions for representation on global surface temperature estimates even so late as today is a shameful comment on how little commitment to understanding our world better those with resources have. The little work that has been done to overcome the assumption of equipartition with regard to this lack, such as in Cowtan and Way, falls all too short of what could be achieved had, for example, companies who use words like “exploration” and “discovery” in their advertising and lobbying, in the Luntzian sense, put a tiny amount toward maintaining weather stations for real exploration and real discovery. After all, they’re the ones who we have known for decades were making changes to the atmosphere that might most affect those unexplored and undiscovered aspects of our changing world.
Still, that little work to throw off equipartition has shown it likely, by a probability of something like 7/8ths, that significant warming has occured in those unmeasured expanses filling some sixth of the planet surface.
Who ought remember what now, when?
There’s some evidence for both MWP and LIA. The evidence is of course almost all paleoclimatology or non-instrumental historical documentation. Speculated start and end dates vary widely, again based on weak and indirect evidence of relatively low quality. On the balance of probabilities, with perhaps 67% probability, we can say there may have been an LIA that was largely global and possibly as cold as the Holocene has seen for a climate period.
At roughly the same confidence level, or somewhat lower, an MWP that was warmer than the LIA is probable, though the start and end dates are obscure. At slightly lower confidence, a Dark Ages cold period is plausible, possibly global too, possibly as cold as the LIA or colder. And on and on, paleoclimatology speculates over probable causes of observations that are _better_ than an assumption of equipartition of a constant-temperature Holocene, but are themselves reliant on an assumption of homogenous distribution of temperatures globally causing locally sourced effects, too.
We _can_ improve this evidence. A set of Holocene-spanning simulations, like the simulations Mann et al used to destroy the Wyatt paper, compared to every known paleoclimate plot and used to create an ensemble of probable global climates by filtering on likelihood each physical observation could have happened under each model run, would be persuasive in settling the likelihoods of all these episodes. Moreover, it would also settle the ‘uniqueness’ of the current warming period multiple ways, and might even find recurring cyclic patterns if there really are any.
Sure, it would take a lot of computing power to go from 100-year to 10,000 year runs, constrained by what paleoclimate data we have. But if we could get three or four hundred good runs for the entire Holocene, we’d be able to have this discussion with some statistical foundation, instead of assumptions and guesses and gut feelings.
A question – and not intended to be negative or derogatory. Is it correct that many of the commenters on J Curry’s blog are Brits? I kind of get a sense…. I can tell when a liberal American comments by the snotty remarks and ad hominems.
Danley Wolfe | April 27, 2014 at 9:24 pm |
You caught me. I’m the Prince of Chichester. Stiff upper lip, eh wot?
Michael said
‘You seem to be missing the point, anthropogenic CO2 forcing started the moment we began adding it into the atmosphere http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8 all warming/cooling before that is considered natural.’
So you DO think that man helped us come out of the last pulses of the LIA around 1890? What caused all the eras as warm or warmer than today? The Minoan, The Roman and the MWP?
tonyb
Tonyb
“So you DO think that man helped us come out of the last pulses of the LIA around 1890?”- “What caused all the eras as warm or warmer than today? The Minoan, The Roman and the MWP?”
I like to let the science do the talking, not blogs about very small regional temperature records (CET)
“Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.”
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/full/ngeo1797.html
Michael
Your 5.06
Sorry you are so dismissive about CET. Many of the worlds leading climate related organisations such as the Met Office and DeE Bilt believe there is a reasonable correlation. As noted in my article already referenced, so do the following;
“Writing about tree rings in the same chapter (this was of course many years before Mann’s 1998 reconstruction made extensive use of this proxy) Lamb commented on the University of Arizona ‘Laboratory of Tree Ring Research’ (who Mann collaborated with for his later study) concerning bristlecone pine trees in the White Mountains. ‘…this long series at the upper tree line essentially registers summer temperatures. It is of interest that from AD800 to the present century (20th) its hundred year averages are correlated in a statistically significant degree, with the temperature derived for central England.’
Coming closer towards the modern era this paper ‘British Winters in relation to World Weather’ written by E W Bliss and published in 1926 by the Royal Meteorological Society provides a scholarly examination of the relationships discovered, which gives us an insight into what was happening elsewhere in the world. This portion from the summary is intriguing;
“The results indicate that conditions in the Southern Hemisphere play a part comparable with that of the North Atlantic oscillation in controlling subsequent winter weather in the British Isles.” (45)
In the 1997 book ‘Climate of the British Isles’ edited by Mike Hulme and Elaine Barrow (previously referenced) the authors distill a great deal of information from such luminaries as Phil Jones (a successor to Hubert Lamb at CRU) (46)
‘An examination is made of the correlation between the British isles and Northern Hemisphere. The CET series is related to average land temperatures over the Northern Hemisphere, but probably no more than would be expected from any other region of comparable size in the hemisphere. The relationship appears to strengthen when temperatures are averaged over decades or more but considerable caution should be exercised in extrapolating trends from the long CET record to the hemisphere as a whole.’
This comment below from Physics World quotes an academic study by Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading (47)
‘Comparing the changes in English temperatures (which the researchers say are representative of European temperatures as a whole) with fluctuations in solar activity, the researchers found a strong correlation.’
A further reference from Mike Hulme in his paper “Sensitivity to Climatic and other factors”
‘The Central England Temperature is perhaps the single most important and representative measure of the surface climate of the UK. It is also quite well correlated with land temperatures over the entire Northern Hemisphere. At an annual level this correlation is about 0.4, but when average values over 10-year periods are compared this correlation rises to about 0.75.” (48)
Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of KNMI makes the following comment;
‘…like most temperature records in Northwest Europe the Cet time series over the 20th century shows a striking similarity with the world average.’ (49)
In this study by Phil Jones and Michael Mann Figure 2 demonstrates that CET is a good proxy for much of the time for the Northern Hemisphere (49a)
——- ——–
There were at least another dozen or so scientists who had also worked out the correlation but it was not possible to include all of them without turning an already long and highly referenced article into a mini novel.
I am not claiming a perfect relationship but the evidence from many sources is that CET is a useful proxy.
tonyb
climatereason | April 28, 2014 at 5:26 am |
What is the more reasonable inference to draw:
(1) that a single, very tiny, region of the surface of the globe adjacent to ocean currents known to shift so dramatically as to shut up or open up whole areas the size of nations with ice (as Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard show) for decades or centuries at a time is coincidentally a wonderful predictor of the overall world trend and resists all smaller regional influences so much that it continues to reflect the global mean, up until by sheer coincidence we obtained the resolution on global instrumental weather station measurements to see that it is just another random spot on the globe, with trends wandering up and down as out of sync with the rest of the world as any other spot; or,
(2) CET has always been just another random spot on the globe, with trends wandering up and down as out of sync with the rest of the world as any other spot?
Sure, your historical documents (h/t Galaxy Quest) show some other incidents that can be loosely correlated with the CET; however, we have no idea of the historical documents you do not include that might hide the decline in correlation, and broader paleoclimatology efforts — the most inclusive to date being Marcott et al, no? — do not well agree with your claims. In Lamb’s times, when pretty much only CET and a single ice core were all the observations Lamb had, it might have been an acceptable basis, with very wide error bars, for a guess. But we have so much more information now, and need no longer rely on Lamb’s assumptions.
The LIA was not a single event, but a series of events or more accurately, combinations of forcings that led to one of the coolest periods globally. The two prime forcings involved were volcanic aerosols and lower solar output.
Regarding CET as a good proxy, it is an okay proxy for NH temperatures but, but a worse proxy for global temperatures. It should also be remembered that solar forcing affects the NH climate disproportionately stronger than the global climate due to high energy UV effects on the jet stream patterns. Solar effects are particularly strong on CET temperatures versus global temperatures. It is here especially that CET begins to be a poor proxy for global temperatures. For Volcanic effects, though location is critical, in general volcanic effects have a more even, global impact.
Lastly, it should also be remembered that troposphere sensible heat (the proxy for climate energy used by CET), is only reasonably good at being a proxy for energy gain/loss in the climate system over decadal and longer time frames. The reason for this is because the troposphere holds such little energy and is so reliant on sensible and latent heat flux from the ocean– and as we all know, natural variations in the flux of energy from the ocean to atmosphere are hugely dependent on cycles such as ENSO.
CET has a good correlation with GMST in 30 year averages over the time GMST is available (short for this comparison). The correlation is significantly weaker for 10 year averages. The correlations are about as good for global and for hemispheric averages, but that may be partly due to limited data from SH.
CET is not a relevant proxy for short term comparisons. Noting that it has been declining recently is just an example of that.
The warming around 1700 was also so significantly due to the preceding short minimum and the following short maximum that it has little evidential power on wider area temperatures. Furthermore it’s so early that we may wonder, how reliable the data is.
BartR
There are numerous other scientists who believe CET to be a reasonable but by no means perfect proxy for global and or NH temperatures. I quoted some of them.
As for Lamb, he corresponded very widely with other scientists and collected a huge mass of data from around the world, much of which is detailed in his many books and papers. So he by no means only had CET with which to work.
There are many federated stations that recorded temperature and other data on a consistent basis , the earliest from around 1690. The most famous is probably the Mannheim palatine. So scientists have been exchanging data for hundreds of years.
Hubert Lambs archives are held at CRU. I hope to get over there one day. Fortunately there is a much wider selection of material at the nearby Met office library and archives that I visit frequently. We have a huge amount of scientific data relating to past climatic conditions and much more that requires its ‘anecdotal’ nature to be married up with corroborating evidence,
Unfortunately the vast majority of material has not been digitised so is invisible to the internet based commentator.
With regards to historic reconstructions I observe Lambs maxim that ‘we can understand the tendency but not the precision.’ It would be useful if other researchers were more circumspect with their respective claims
tonyb
CET is not a relevant proxy for short term comparisons. Noting that it has been declining recently is just an example of that. …
IMO, that is what he what he has been selling.
JCH
I am not ‘selling’ anything.
Cet has been declining over the last decade which illustrates that not all the globe is warming which I am sure was true also of the mwp etc.
Cet also, unusually, has a uhi factor deducted. The global temperature does not, perhaps it should.
Having spoken to David Parker who created the met office 1772 series I would hazard a guess that their changeover to ‘warm’ stations a couple of decades ago had an impact on the surprising ( to uk residents) peak around the year 2000 . They have since changed the warm stations to ones which they believe is more representative .
Tonyb
Pekka
Regarding the warming commencing around, it was well documented and wider spread than you think;
This from a 2005 paper by Jones and Briffa about the very warm period noted in old records and especially CET;
” The year 1740 is all the more remarkable given the anomalous warmth of the 1730s. This decade was the warmest in three of the long temperature series (CET, De Bilt and Uppsala) until the 1990s occurred. The mildness of the decade is confirmed by the early ice break-up dates for Lake M¨alaren and Tallinn Harbour. The rapid warming in the CET record from the 1690s to the 1730s and then the extreme cold year of 1740 are examples of the magnitude of natural changes which can potentially be recorded in long series. Consideration of variability in these records from the early 19th century, therefore, may underestimate the range that is possible.”
UNUSUAL CLIMATE IN NORTHWEST EUROPE DURING THE PERIOD 1730 TO 1745 BASED ON INSTRUMENTAL AND DOCUMENTARY DATA’. Jones and Biffa. Revised version published 2006.
http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-006-9078-6
The following, condensed from the records of the Hudson Bay Company, also demonstrate that climate change is not a new phenomenon, and was not restricted to Europe.
“Over the fifteen years between 1720 and 1735, the first snowfall of the year moved from the first week of September to the last. ”
tonyb
Bart R, thanks for your measured response.
I will respond in due course, but probably not before the weekend – things have become somewhat hectic on the work-front.
climatereason | April 28, 2014 at 11:46 am |
When you need a wrench, and all you have is a hammer, you make do with a hammer, even though what you expect to end up with is banged up, bent and broken. When all that could be had was the CET, people just made do, even though the expectations for precision were lower.
The work you do could be valuable, if diligently and assiduously documented and balanced. The data you gather together could contribute to a Holocene-spanning parameter set for GCMs. It’s unlikely, and frankly the doubts sewn by the preconceptions you bring to your efforts do them some damage in the confidence one might ascribe.
But by all means, do continue. After all, we don’t have that wrench.
BartR
Your 9.38
Preconceptions? I doubt there is any article I write that doesn’t present an opposing viewpoint. For example see the first comment by Simon holgate here, who in a private email that he gave me permission to reproduce, contradicted my comments about sea level oscillations.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/12/historic-variations-in-sea-levels-part-1-from-the-holocene-to-romans/
I can only present the evidence I find. If there is nothing contrary to , for example, my finding numerous references about a period of cooling in the 1200’s I can not present alternative data. Where possible I try to correlate anecdotal material with other similar material or a science paper. That is invariably why my pieces have numerous references.
Tonyb
BartR
I had previously mentioned the Mannheim palatine as an early effort to document temperatures. As you still seem to be under the impression that CET was the only instrumental record people like Lamb had to work with, you might be interested in this first attempt in the 1780’s to create a global record.
http://www.dcassidybooks.com/palatine.pdf
GS Callendar, when creating his co2 theory, also compiled in 1938 a record of global temperatures. Very many other organisations and individuals also created temperature records of varying worth at various times. CET is especially interesting because of its usefulness in its wider geographical correlation, according to many scientists.
Tonyb
Uk?
cooling?
hardly
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/united-kingdom-(europe)
Mosh
No one mentioned the UK did they? You are aware there is a difference between the uk and CET?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
If you disagree with David Parker I have his email address, I am sure he will be delighted to debate temperatures with you.
That period around 1780 is interesting isn’t it, although it does have large error bars.
Anyway, what do you mean UK-Europe’. Obviously ukip have been wasting their time?
Tonyb
Mosh
Cet recognises that Britain has become a large heat island and consequently the met office takes into account UHI. Does your uk product do the same?
Tonyb
“Policy makers”
The cat’s out of the bag again, Mosher.
So tell us more about the policy makers. Since they aren’t interested in the ideals of science, what are they interested in? You know, since you know everything.
Andrew
policy makers of course have various interests. Talk to some, ask questions. listen. watch their behavior.
and dont expect me to do your homework, slacker.
Bad Andrew.
I am a “policy maker”
My fiscal budget is always short of tax revenues, but I have lots of good ideas on where I could spend tax-payer funds on all sorts of pet projects or to reward deserving supporters, for other noble causes, etc.
So I see a wonderful opportunity to impose a tax on carbon to help me finance all my good ideas, to be borne by anyone who uses energy (who doesn’t these days?)
I also dole out the tax-payer funding for climate-related “science”.
So I can preferentially fund those scientists who give me the kind of answers I need to support my agenda of imposing a carbon tax.
This is not a “conspiracy”. Just “doing the right thing for humanity”.
Ain’t policy making wonderful!
Max
I can’t believe that Mosher denied me a 1000 word pseudo-scientific comment about policy makers.
Guess he jus don’t know dat much about ’em.
Who could have guessed?
Andrew
http://www.skepticalscience.com/how_global_warming_broke_the_thermometer_record.html
The search for the best way to fabricate data continues :)
Mosh
If you fudge the data long enough…
Max
Seems odd that Dr Curry didn’t point out the implications of this study for ocean heat content.
The study shows that sea level is still rising. Therefore the ocean must still be gaining heat, which means the Earth is still warming.
Given this blog is frequented by a crowd that likes to pour scorn on the idea that the heat is building up in the ocean, I would have thought this was the #1 biggest implication of this study (for this venue).
But no instead we focus on the rate of change over the period 2003-2011, which is quite clearly biased low by the large (and temporary) dip in 2011.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
I mean come on, sea level is quite clearly still rising. I thought the Earth was meant to be cooling? Quiet Sun, negative PDO. You skeptics are running out of excuses aren’t you?
If’n so, surely they musta left the El Niner in dah data.
”
You skeptics are running out of excuses aren’t you?
”
Ha! Never. Shiny new ones with every post.
Didn’t you know? – Everyone’s a Galileo around here…
You are clearly not cynical enough for this blog.
lolwot
The “implications” are simply that the current rate of SL rise is not unusual compared to past decades in the 20th C.
It rose during the 30-year cooling period between 1944 and 1975, just as it is continuing to rise during the current “pause”.
What’s the big deal?
Max
I believe it could be called easy ice. The fruit is higher now, and the giraffe is still getting fat. He wants to eat Miami. Once he has a taste for big fancy cities, watch out.
Oh yeah, the skeptics are running out of excuses, that is for sure.
> Oh yeah, the skeptics are running out of excuses, that is for sure.
A common train of thought amongst the gullibles.
I thought the excuse was that the ocean ate the warming? That was not a skeptic.
lolwot : I mean come on, sea level is quite clearly still rising.
Oh come on, why is it rising less, even though CO2 is going ever-higher?
I thought the Earth was meant to be cooling? Quiet Sun, negative PDO. You skeptics are running out of excuses aren’t you?
Cooling? Who says that? Anyone at all, or just one of your strawmen? You gullibles really are running out of excuses, aren’t you?
“Oh come on, why is it rising less, even though CO2 is going ever-higher?”
It isn’t rising less. It has risen exactly as much over the last 10 years than it has over the 10 years before. It has risen about twice as fast over the last 20 years than the 20th century average. And it has risen ten to fifteen times as fast over the last century that it has over the previous several centuries and millennia. Only through cherry picking a very short period that ends in the temporary dip in 2011, while failing to mention the sharp rise that immediately follows, can you create the illusion of a slowdown.
The sea levels are still less then the Holocene Highstands a period when GHG levels were substantially less,similarly the Pliocene epoch hence the paradox.
There is no paradox. The recent increase in the CO2 concentration has been *extremely* fast, quite unlike anything that occurred in the last several million years, The sea levels haven’t equilibrated yet, nor were they expected to have. If the CO2 concentration were to be stabilized to 400pmm from now on, the sea levels would be expected continue to rise for a couple more centuries — though at a slowing rate — before they equilibrate to current concentrations.
where did the energy come from for the Holocene high stand,?
“where did the energy come from for the Holocene high stand,?”
Do you mean to ask what caused the latest deglaciation? Increasing Milankovitch forcing, together with albedo and CO2 feedbacks, and glacial isostatic adjustment caused the highstand. The declining Milankovitch forcing then caused sea level to fall again until something else took over.
here are the parameters for ghg for the mid Holocene (pmip3 for cmip5 experiments)
CO2 = 280 ppm ] – [ CH4 = 650 ppb ] – [ N2O = 270 ppb ] –
[ CFC = 0 ] – [ O3 = same as in CMIP5 PI ]
There is a 12 hour difference in the vernal equinox so orbital forcing is similar.
So now there only remains for you to factor in the time lagged responses of isostatic adjustments, albedo feedback, ice melt and ocean heat accumulation to rapid forcing changes. Why would you expect a full Earth-system response, free of hysteresis, within just a few decades? Past responses to Milankovitch forcing display lots of system hysteresis. So, in order to relate such simple parameters a sea levels to total forcing you need a model that incorporates dynamical interaction. You can’t expect exact correlations, let alone instantaneous ones with no time lag.
Pierre Normand, when you say “The recent increase in the CO2 concentration has been *extremely* fast, quite unlike anything that occurred in the last several million years” you say it as if fact.
Is the resolution of the ice core CO2 data sufficient to allow a valid comparison with the instrumental (Keeling) data?
Have a sea level reconstruction that shows declining sea level for 6,000 years?
–Phil Brisley | April 26, 2014 at 6:41 am |
Pierre Normand, when you say “The recent increase in the CO2 concentration has been *extremely* fast, quite unlike anything that occurred in the last several million years” you say it as if fact.
Is the resolution of the ice core CO2 data sufficient to allow a valid comparison with the instrumental (Keeling) data?–
The ice core don’t provide a record for several million years.
And unlikely any glacier have existed much more than couple million years and ice are a record for less than a million years and which become more murky with older parts of ice cores.
gbaikie, agreed, and I am familiar with the limits of the ice core data, my question stands, slightly revised:
Pierre-Normand is the resolution of the pre-instrumental CO2 data sufficient to allow a valid comparison with the instrumental (Keeling) data?–
“I mean come on, sea level is quite clearly still rising. I thought the Earth was meant to be cooling? Quiet Sun, negative PDO. You skeptics are running out of excuses aren’t you?”
—–
Dogma never runs out of excuses. Of course the Earth climate system is still accumulating energy, and more importantly, we seem to be at an important nexus point where that accumulation is showing nonlinear accelerating behavior. In all the myopic talk of “pauses” or reference to linear changes, the changes seem to fit more likely some sort of 4th degree polynomial nonlinear trend, with temperatures, sea levels, and overall energy in the climate system at a significant upward inflection point.
Dogma never sees a lack of consistency in argument. When did sea level rise reach equilibrium? 6000 years of cooling didn’t cause it to go down but 60 years of warming and we can attribute the rise without hesitation. Funny how we know we just aren’t heading for 7000 years where sea level and temperatures just don’t match up all that well.
steven, this one is worth pondering. It was in equilibrium for a long time until just recently.
http://ourchangingclimate.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/post-glacial_sea_level-incl-3-mm-yr-1-trend.png
What’s to ponder, Jim? Should have been going down like a rock, right?
“Is the resolution of the ice core CO2 data sufficient to allow a valid comparison with the instrumental (Keeling) data?”
It is sufficient to draw the relevant conclusion — that the recent episode of CO2 increase is unprecedented over the last several hundreds of millennia. That’s because although the ice-core record can’t exclude all by itself a very narrow spike to CO2 levels comparable to the current one (about 400ppm), such spikes are likely impossible anyway on independent ground. Although there are conceivable mechanisms for very fast CO2 release, such as strings of major volcanoes, there aren’t mechanisms that permit the recapture of 100ppm+ excesses in mere decades. That means a very quick rise would have been followed by a decline slow enough to allow for it to be recorded in the ice cores.
steven, you can work it out for yourself. The cooling rate was about 0.1 C per thousand years, and the current warming rate is about 1 C per hundred years. What difference do you expect in the sea-level response rate?
The usual facile nonsense informing – if it can be called that – progressive climate memes.
http://www.academia.edu/2949675/Stomatal_proxy_record_of_CO2_concentrations_from_the_last_termination_suggests_an_important_role_for_CO2_at_climate_change_transitions
Jim, on a chart of thousands of years and tens of meters why would I care what the rate is? The point is the sea level had plenty of time to respond and never did. Is your point that 0.6 C can’t affect the sea level? In that case you couldn’t possibly be attributing the recent change.
steven, you have interesting ways of misunderstanding simple comments. If sea level drops 20 cm in 5000 years, as it might have, that is a barely noticeable gradient of 4 mm/century. What we have now is 3 mm/yr which is very noticeable.
@Jim D – 3mm a year is roughly 1/8″. And that is very noticeable? Perhaps you meant to say it is measurable. It is not noticeable.
Jim, no I am not misunderstanding anything. You say that a 0.6 C cooling would cause an imperceptable change in sea levels. OK, I accept that may have happened. No need to worry about sea levels then, is there?
steven, no, where did I say that? This seems to be one of your misunderstandings. There is no linear relation between temperature and sea level, especially as we are at a tipping point for Greenland.
Jim, what’s going to cause that tipping point of Greenland? Basal lubrication? Even the IPCC, the denier den that it is, doesn’t think basal lubrication is going to dramatically change ice dynamics. Have you ever considered the possibility that you are prone to taking the worst case scenario and, no matter how unlikely it is, declaring it as a fact that our future lies there? Assuming that the Marcott reconstruction and the SLR construction are both correct, a huge assumption I know, the facts are that a 0.6 C decrease in temperature caused an imperceptable decrease in SL after it had a chance to do all it was going to do. As far as the rate of change, I hope you understand why that is such a pitiful argument. That reconstruction doesn’t have the resolution to show the present as anything but still flat. It could have raised and lowered several times as fast in the past and we would have no way of knowing, other than…just knowing….that is.
steven, Greenland had no glacier last time CO2 levels were 400-500 ppm. It is just not the right climate for it. We see the decline there accelerating for the last decade. The continued rise in CO2 won’t help this situation at all, and Antarctica becomes threatened too possibly around 500 ppm. Greenland was stable for the last few millennia because CO2 levels remained near 280 ppm, but not now, hence the sea-level rise started. Just like the Ice Age glaciers, it is all or nothing with these, and tipping points pertain.
Jim, you say there was no Greenland ice mass the last time co2 was at 400-500 ppm. I suppose that’s all the evidence you need for someone that is convinced that CO2 is the control knob. I don’t happen to be included in that group.
steven, yes, if you don’t like models or theory, at least you have observations to look at. The earth has been here before in terms of CO2, and we can learn from it, as an independent line of evidence.
Jim,I have been talking about the models, theory , and observations of heat transport for years. It must have slipped by you.
lolwot
Check Holgate 2007.
SL rose by 4 mm/year over the 1950s, while global sea surface temperature was cooling slightly.
No big deal, lolwot.
Temperature and sea level do not move in lockstep in the real world.
Max
A sustained 3mm/year or 4mm/year increase means the ocean must be expanding. Which requires thermal expansion unless you have an alternative mechanism (ice sheet destabilization?)
Thus if sea level is rising at 3mm/year today then the ocean must be gaining heat.
Meaning skeptics should admit the Earth is still heating up and Trenberth is right about the heat in the deep ocean.
Can someone help me.
I’m looking at the overall world precipitaion levels from 1900 to 2014 complements of the EPA website. If global warming were causing the precip rates to increase, I would expect to see an increase in precip as the world has gotten warmer. There is an increase… But… It happened in the 1950’s and after a dip from about 1980 to the late 1990’s, the rate now is only equal to what it was in the 1950’s, especially if you look at the five or ten year trends. If more heat causes more precip, then, since the climate has definitely warmed since the 1950’s – a 60 plus year period, we should definitely see more precipitation, shouldn’t we? Where is the actual increase caused by the extra heat?
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/weather-climate/precipitation.html
PS. I would like to be snarky and say the apparent lack of rise of world precipitation levels is due to it’s being absorbed and hiding in the deep ocean…. But I’ll refrain. :-)
Where do you think the sun hides at night? ;-)
Mike A – You are looking at trends over land only; precipitation over oceans is poorly constrained but substantially exceeds that over land. Truly global trends are not easily evaluated; see, for instance, Adler at al..
There is a recent (paywalled) review by Kidd and Huffman.
Different ‘climatologies’ are used with ARGO data that each produce quite different results. Here’s on from NOAA that shows a 0.2+/-0.8mm/yr trend in steric sea level rise. Thermal expansion – in other words – is indistinguishable from zero to purloin a phase.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ARGOGRACE_Leuliette2012_zps9386d419.png.html?sort=3&o=0
Total sea level from Jason is shown along with mass from GRACE – which are consistent showing a mid range sea level rise of 1mm/yr. They are both inconsistent with ARGO salinity data which shows that the ocean are getting more saline and therefore losing mass.
Then there is the problem of large interannual to decadal variability in top of atmosphere radiant flux in both shortwave and infrared.
Here is SW from CERES.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_EBAF-TOA_Ed28_anom_TOA_Shortwave_Flux-All-Sky_March-2000toDecember-2013_zpsfa182355.png.html?sort=3&o=1
Here’s the IR.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_EBAF-TOA_Ed28_anom_TOA_Longwave_Flux-All-Sky_March-2000toDecember-2013_zps8db123ce.png.html?sort=3&o=3
Here’s the net TOA flux.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_EBAF-TOA_Ed28_anom_TOA_Net_Flux-All-Sky_March-2000toDecember-2013_zps56df6132.png.html?sort=3&o=2
None of these show any trend over the period – but show interannual variation two orders of magnitude greater than changes in greenhouse gas forcing. Interannual variability is dominated by SW changes.
To imagine that you can pull consistent millimeter accuracy out of all this – and attribute simple causality – seems to be a chimera of the climate war. They look at a result and claim vindication by science without considering the limitations of data that scientist themselves ultimately do understand.
Chief-
What makes your comments & links especially interesting, besides the content, is that the usual suspects are not baying in unison at the moon challenging what you have said. You must be on to something.
Chief:
For the benefit of the accountants in the audience, I’d respectfully ask that add ‘Earth Warming’ and ‘Earth Cooling’ or some such phrases to the proper upper and lower halves of the TOA flux charts. If this accountant wanted one chart to sum things up, your TOA flux chart would be it. This reminds me of one of the key points we were taught. Accountants are supposed to provide information that is useful to management,
Don’t know whether to be disturbed or enchanted that the word sesquipedalian is onomatopoetic(sic) –
Neil deGrasse Tyson
But to get back to the point – interesting question and not without an unexpected twist.
Up in SW and IR is outgoing energy – so cooling – and vice versa. Net – however – is by convention warming up.
net = – SW – IR
tomozza – dude
You can see the steric contribution to sea level rise here:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/totalsteric_2000m.png
Up it goes indicating the ocean is still gaining heat
Obviously only one ARGO ‘climatology’ is required for some.
Sorry, totally don’t get any of it. Sea level rise – this time around! – began in the late 1700s (with greater fluctuations early on in the trend). Or not? The twentieth century showed its most marked rise between 1930 and 1960. Or not? So we are arguing about…what now?
mosomoso, if everyone had your common sense, there would be little scope left for long-drawn out disputation. Mmmm …
OPEN LETTER TO Dr ROY SPENCER
Your very first item is completely rebutted with sound physics in my book and in none of your 10 items do you come even close to understanding the whole new 21st century paradigm. Instead you continue to repeat IPCC arguments (like that about effective radiating altitudes rising) which are spoken about by John O’Sullivan whom I quote from his article today …
“After 30 years of these ‘Chicken Little’ alarmist scare stories independent scientists, specialists in a myriad of related disciplines, are speaking out about what they see is junk science. The “experts” – those generalists that dominate the undeniably infant field of research that is climate science – are finally being called to account. Climate realists are increasingly telling the alarmists to stop computer-modeling Earth as if it were a greenhouse! The reason is two-fold: first, it is obvious to experts from the “hard” sciences that Earth’s atmosphere does not act in any way like a greenhouse. Second, and more embarrassing for the “experts,” despite a huge increase in human CO2 emissions over recent decades our planet stubbornly refuses to get any warmer. In short, the real world shows no proof of any CO2-driven GHE whatsoever.book.
You have no understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which “states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems always evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with maximum entropy.”
Instead you quote a corollary of the Second Law which only applies in non-gravitational systems, or in a horizontal plane in a gravitational system. Read what Wikipedia says …
“For this reason, gravitational systems tend towards non-even distribution of mass and energy.”
The “lapse rate” is not a result of air rising and cooling. The gas in a planet’s atmosphere can also fall and warm. The thermal gradient (badly named a lapse rate) allows heat transfer downwards by diffusion into warmer regions when the thermodynamic equilibrium is disrupted with new energy absorbed higher up. That is the only valid explanation as to how energy gets down into the Uranus troposphere and into the surface of Venus. Your understanding of what happens on other planets is, frankly, “school-kid fissics.”
The thermal gradient forms at the molecular level because it is the state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
You have a lot of real physics yet to learn.
As this open letter will also be posted on several other climate blogs you might do well to actually read what is in my book and admit your errors, Roy, because the longer it goes on, and slight cooling continues until at least 2027, the more embarrassing it is going to be for you eventually.
Michael Whittemore | April 25, 2014 at 1:10 pm |
Sorry, but you are wrong. If the deeps were contracting thermally, the given surface elevation estimate would be too low. Vice versa, too high.
You are wrong because of the obvious point I made, that you cannot attribute a measurement made at the surface, mainly related to a global warming hypotheses, to the whole of the ocean, where different mechanisms (although little known, but some plausible) will affect the surface sea level height independent of any global warming/cooling. For example, we know that there is extensive hydrothermal venting activity on some parts of some ocean floors. We have no idea of its thermal magnitude and variability over time. We cannot assume constancy without measuring it.
Geoff Sherrington | April 25, 2014 at 8:22 pm | Reply
“You are wrong because of the obvious point I made, that you cannot attribute a measurement made at the surface”
I am not saying that. I linked you the layered data from ARGO, it shows in “some” areas there is a considerable warming down to 2000m. Just because the ARGO floats stop at 2000m, does not mean at 2100m there is no warming. It is only logical to expect that as can be seen over the the whole 2000m of warming, as you go from 2000m to 2100m, there would just be a descending of temperature that correlates with thermal expansion density. http://postimg.org/image/qdkx4plgd/
You could have walked from Victoria to Tasmania as recently as 10,000 years ago. So is it fair to say that sea level rise does not muck about?
The depth of Bass Strait is 180–240 feet. So I’d say sea level rise definitely does not muck about. Happens after every ice age. You want lower seas? Have a bloody ice age.
My favorite response to the problem of seas rising is, everyone just eat more fish. There are clearly too many fish in the oceans.
“My favorite response to the problem of seas rising is, everyone just eat more fish.”
Either that or breed more sponges.
A question for those with more knowledge than me in the matter: does rainfall over the oceans increase the rate of sea-level rise? I ask this because I found two images (sea level trend, and annual rainfall) that show the trend in sea level and the areas of the oceans with the greatest rainfall. Curiously, the area where the seas are rising the most is the same area where the most rain falls. This area is in the Pacific Ocean just to the east of the Philippines and New Guinea.
In contrast, the area just to the west of North America and South America shows a declining trend in sea level. That area also has a small amount of annual rainfall.
There may be some valid, scientific explanation for this. I have searched, briefly, for such but to no avail. Can anyone shed light on this?
For the images I referred to, please see the linked article:
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/sea-level-rise-and-annual-rainfall.html
Roger Sowell | April 25, 2014 at 11:24 pm |
I hate to speculate, which is after all mere fingoism, absent a thorough examination of the data. However, as both SLR and increased rainfall are known to happen as a result of warming, perhaps there is an answer in regional basin temperature trends. Which is nothing new. People have sailed those seas for centuries and correlated rain with warmth and the East-West sloshing of mass at the equator that correspond with ENSO for at least part of that time, after some fashion.
Though the areas you describe are some of the most complex in the world, I admit I’m just spitballing.
But the SLR trends you’re apparently trying to deconstruct.. they aren’t the ones captured by graphs like those, on their own, for such short periods as the graphs cover.
If you look at the sea level rise graph from Colorado University, there are lots of ENSO events along the way. They’re usually slightly detectable. Only the Super El Nino in and 1998 and La Nina starting in 2010 did snot knockers on the sea level trend.
Look for the Paul S. comments. He knows his stuff pretty well.
It’s a sad state if Bart and JCH are the experts coming forward.
Sea level changes in the regions you discuss are driven overwhelmingly by secular changes in Pacific trade winds.
e.g http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n3/full/nclimate2106.html
“Once again, the emerging best explanations for the ‘pause’ in global surface temperatures”
http://youtu.be/OwKDyiR1f4o
I’ve had a comment on “In defense of free speech” in moderation for some time. Seems to be a bit of a contradiction there …
Oh the irony. )
Now, Faustino, are you sure you hit the “post comment” button? Too many cucumber sandwiches can cause protein deficiency, which can affect memory. I’ve warned you before about the Marylebone Diet.
Good thing I can’t stand cucumber, then. The post is still in moderation. Perhaps citing Brendan O’Neill alerted the Thought Police. I missed him in Brisbane recently, unfortunately, he gave a talk on the day of my op (yes, much better now, thanks, Beth.)
Strange times, when conservative/skeptic types like me can have far more in common with a Marxist than with a New Class advocate of “markets”. Brendan O’Neill is fresh air after all the pseudo-capitalist groupthink, and I particularly like his non-ingratiating delivery and manner. Brendan is selling ideas, not selling Brendan. My Laborite Irish forbears would have liked him.
I expect Judith is probably having a snooze since it’s early morning her time – balk there at the back end of the world. It’s a pity Europe and USA can’t catch up with us at the front and leading the way for the world.
But, Faustino, don’t feel lonely. I have a very valuable comment awaiting moderation too. It’s a response to Manacker on the coal thread, and I expect it will put an end to all uncertainties about climate change and policies.
“Here we present an analysis based on sea-level data from the altimetry record of the past ~20 years that separates interannual natural variability in sea level from the longer-term change probably related to anthropogenic global warming…
Our results confirm the need for quantifying and further removing from the climate records the short-term natural climate variability if one wants to extract the global warming signal.”
—
So … if it isn’t interannual, it’s caused by man, since nature doesn’t have long-term changes.
Neat. Very neat indeed.
Really, chaps, all this fuss and worry about “adjusting” data.
It’s a well-established part of correct climate science, don’t ya know, the archetypal Neat Trick ( (c) Mike ).
What else is a clever boy to do when *he* knows the desired conclusion, but the dumb data doesn’t ?
In that water vapour has something to do sea water, may I point out that Roy Spencer, in his current article about skeptics, wrote
“the net effect of greenhouse gases is to cool the upper atmosphere, and warm the lower atmosphere”
So, given that the greenhouse gas, water vapour makes the temperature gradient less steep, maybe you’d care to explain this strange anomaly, Roy. (We’ll confine it to the troposphere, as 99% of water vapour is therein.)
Your physics gets worse and worse, Roy.
What is sea level rise? We do not have a measuring stick or sticks of any consistency to measure against. Both the land and the sea “rise” and “fall”” all over the globe. Volume measurement, the amount of water in the sea varies with the amount of rainfall on the land and the amount of ice on land. There is no way of putting it in a bucket every 6 months and measuring it. Grace is unable to give measurements to within a cm.
Jo Nova has a post up claiming that the raw satellite data over the last two individual satellites is flat.
There is a made up 0.3 mm a year adjustment made for land rise to to rebound ( a question here is has it been put on the record for the last 10,000 years 3 meters or is it just for the satellite era only?.)
Boats are found inland in Scandinavia, Western Australia,Rome etc yet the sea has swallowed Mediterranean cities.
All arguments on “true” measurements seem pointless.
Cowtan is ridiculous (had to add that)
Angtech, you write “What is sea level rise?”
I know little or nothing about this subject, but is Length of Day a measure of sea level rise? And if so, what are the indications from this measure?
Re : missing extra GHG-induced heat supposedly getting to the deep oceans.
How?
Longwave GHG-enhanced back-radiation penetrating to depths of thousands of feet?
Conduction downwards from a warmer sea surface?
If so, are SSTs going up, or have they too paused in concert with the surface atmosphere ?
Joe Postma is also wrong in assuming solar radiation can heat the Earth’s surface to that extent, especially when 70% of the surface is a thin (say 1 centimetre deep) surface layer of water which transmits most of the radiation down into the ocean thermoclines. The average temperature of the ocean is down around 4C, so there’s a general propensity for heat to transfer downwards in the water.
Suspend a shallow glass bowl (using thin wire or string) above the ground but in the sunshine. Pour a small amount of very cold water (say at 2C – well below ambient temperature) into the bowl.
Question: Will the Sun at noon make the water hotter than the air, cooler or the same temperature?
Answer: None of the above. Conduction makes the water the same temperature as the air. So too does the surface layer of water reach about the same temperature as the gravity-supported temperature at the base of the troposphere – yes, the temperature of the air determines the ocean surface temperature, not vice versa.
If you want to work out how much radiation will raise a temperature you use absorptivity, not emissivity. You also deduct radiative flux that is reflected and transmitted. When considering the effect of radiation heating 70% of Earth’s surface that is a thin layer of water, Postma did not estimate what percentage of the radiation is actually absorbed in that thin layer. Instead he effectively calculated its temperature as if 100% of the radiation stopped and heated that thin layer. When you consider the number of molecules, maybe even just 1 millimetre would be enough to set the surface temperature, so his calculations (and the IPCC’s) are way out.
What I’m saying is just so obvious in the real world. We all know that the Sun can make a black asphalt road surface far hotter than the surface of the ocean. We all know that the Sun doesn’t succeed in melting ice and snow at the top of very high mountains, even if they are near the tropics. Surely the surface layer of water transmits at least as much insolation as ice reflects. Even rocks transmit some energy below their thin surface layers on a hot sunny morning. The Earth’s surface acts nothing at all like a black or grey body which, by definition, transmits nothing. So you can’t just bung these radiation figures into Stefan-Boltzmann calculations and expect to show that radiation is doing the job. There’s no significant radiation at the base of the nominal Uranus troposphere, but it’s hotter than Earth’s surface down there.
Sorry, Joe Postma, but I’ve been telling you and John O’Sullivan about the gravito-thermal effect for nearly two years now. You need to try to understand what thermodynamic equilibrium is all about.
So, this proves my case …
If you still think that it is solar radiation which sets the temperature of the water in that glass bowl, then repeat the experiment on another similar clear sunny day in the same week of the year and at the same time, but when (due to weather conditions) the ambient temperature is significantly different. The water still takes on the ambient temperature, even though there is very similar solar flux.
Yes there is of course a huge amount of energy stored in the oceans and it is mixed around by currents that have a propensity to even out temperatures. But the water in the bowl is the same as a similarly shaped section of the ocean surface. The molecules in that small region of the ocean surface do not “know” anything about molecules beyond the region, any more than the molecules in the water in the bowl know about the glass in the bowl, or what is beyond. Radiation acts the same way on all these molecules in either situation, and it does next to nothing because the thin layer of water is almost completely transparent to solar radiation. And, seeing that the ocean thermocline gets colder as you go down, you can’t assume that energy is coming back up from the colder regions and warming the surface. So what is? Energy from the air transferred by conduction at the interface.
Now, why is it so?
Why doesn’t the air just above the ocean way out in the middle of an ocean, far from land, just keep on getting colder, along with the thermocline regions? After all, that air is fairly transparent to solar radiation also. The answer lies in an understanding of thermodynamic equilibrium and how that state (which the Second Law says will evolve) does in fact have a thermal gradient which allows energy to “creep” to warmer regions (normally at lower altitudes) and even into the surface, as must happen when the Venus surface rises in temperature.
My hypothesis explains all observations. Nothing else does.
DC get off my thread, please.
‘Comparisons of global steric height trends based on different gridded fields of Argo in situ measurements show a range of 0–1mm/yr which can be lead back to data handling and climatology uncertainties. Our results show that GOIs derived from the Argo measurements are ideally suitable to monitor the state of the global ocean, especially after November 2007, i.e. when Argo sampling was 100% complete. They also show that there is significant interannual global variability at global scale, especially for global OFC. Before the end of 2007, error bars are too large to deliver robust short-term trends of GOIs and thus an interpretation in terms of long-term climate signals are still questionable, especially since uncertainties due to interannual fluctuations are not included in our error estimation.’ http://www.ocean-sci-discuss.net/8/999/2011/osd-8-999-2011.pdf
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/vonSchuckannandLeTroan_zps45e82e5b.png.html?sort=3&o=12
von Schuckmann and Le Troan are in the middle of the range for a period that was dominated by SW changes – the so called missing energy.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_EBAF-TOA_Ed28_anom_TOA_Shortwave_Flux-All-Sky_March-2000toDecember-2013_zpsfa182355.png.html?sort=3&o=1
Ocean heat – and therefore sea levels – follow net TOA flux. Over the full CERES record there is no trend.
Skipmeister said:
“Ocean heat – and therefore sea levels – follow net TOA flux. Over the full CERES record there is no trend.”
——
JC SNIP
‘Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system. ‘
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Wong2006figure7.gif.html?sort=3&o=214
Judith – there is obviously an overwhelming case to remove the empty headed gunk from gates above.
Sorry – forgot the link – http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-4-1.html
It is actually quite a lot simpler than that. Energy is conserved.
d(W&H)/dt = energy in (J/s) – energy out (J/s)
W&H is work and heat. The change in planetary energy content is equal to the difference between energy in and energy out. Energy in changes very little. The big changes are in energy out mostly as albedo changes.
Here’s the SW. Up is more energy leaving the planet – cooling – and down is less energy leaving.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_EBAF-TOA_Ed28_anom_TOA_Net_Flux-All-Sky_March-2000toDecember-2013_zps56df6132.png.html?sort=3&o=2
Here’s the IR – ditto.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_EBAF-TOA_Ed28_anom_TOA_Longwave_Flux-All-Sky_March-2000toDecember-2013_zps8db123ce.png.html?sort=3&o=3
Here’s the net – up by convention is warming.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_EBAF-TOA_Ed28_anom_TOA_Net_Flux-All-Sky_March-2000toDecember-2013_zps56df6132.png.html?sort=3&o=2
The planetary heat content – and therefore OHC – must follow the changes in TOA radiant flux by the first law of thermodynamics. Which mostly changes as the result of changes in outgoing energy. QED.
Without data it is all just fantasy physics. People like gatesy prefer it that way.
Skipmeister seems to like the illusion that the changes in
TOA is a better proxy for total energy in or out of the system than actual direct measurements of that energy. It must be a profound mystery to the Skipmeister why ARGO data over the past decade and sea level data so dramatically disagrees with his errant TOAanalysis that no energy is being retained by the climate system. It does not fit with his errant memeplex. What else to do but rabid cut and paste in such a situation?
Quoting the IPCC – showing the direct results from CERES – linking to NOAA and to leading researchers on the ARGO data – is all a little too difficult for Randy. He retreats into a fantasy of his own making. Any quotes from science that he personally disagrees with – notwithstanding how simply and obviously relevant it is – must be rabid cut and paste. It is all such mad nonsense.
CERES is not a proxy – it is a direct measure of the anomalies in outgoing energy. The anomalies are very accurate – it is the absolutes that suffer from the calibration problem. It shows quantitatively the changes in SW and IR leaving the planet.
‘Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
I have quoted this again somewhere here – but it is very worthwhile to consider the implications of the ‘large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget’.
Different ‘climatologies’ are used with ARGO data that each produce quite different results. Here’s one from NOAA that shows a 0.2+/-0.8mm/yr trend in steric sea level rise. Thermal expansion – in other words – is indistinguishable from zero to purloin a phase.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ARGOGRACE_Leuliette2012_zps9386d419.png.html?sort=3&o=0
Any science that fails to agree with the groupthink goes in one ear and out the other.
The most important metric in the whole GHG story is surely the energy budget. But of course we have no robust, absolute data for units of energy entering and leaving the earth system.
So while the principle of AGW seems sound, we really have no idea when, if ever, it will pose a serious problem. Decades, centuries, millennia … ?
Potentially we do – but we go back to the initial quote from von Schuskmann and Le Troan at the head of this thread.
d(W&H)/dt = energy in (J/s) – energy out (J/s)
W&H can be approximated by OHC – which we don’t yet have a good enough handle on but can in principle be used to close out the LHS terms using differences and not absolutes.
CERES remains the only way to understand changes in albedo – which are huge.
The principle of AGW is absurd. The system is deterministically chaotic – climate is a product of emergent behavior in the system. It is characterized by abrupt shifts between states and multiple equilibria.
it is likely not to warm for a decade to three and then abruptly and unpredictably shift to a new state. Including the possibility of an extreme shift in as little as 10 years.
This is far from skeptical – it is mainstream freakin’ climate science.
Generalissimo Skippy | April 26, 2014 at 6:47 pm | Reply
“Ocean heat – and therefore sea levels – follow net TOA flux. Over the full CERES record there is no trend.”
Steric (thermal) sea level change does not change the mass of the ocean, which is why data from GRACE and ARGO both need to be considered http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/fig2.jpg
(http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/sea-level-and-la-nina/)
Michael,
Skippy is convinced that Ceres explains everything, despite the fact that multiple other measurements such as ARGO and Grace tell a different and consistent story. Would he only understand there are times when there is lower energy input to the system, but even lower energy out, still leading to net energy gain for the system.
The NOAA reference discusses ARGO and CRACE – the von Schuckmann and Le Troan reference calculates the gain or loss of freshwater in the oceans using ARGO salinity.
The oceans became saltier at the same time as mass moved from the land to the oceans. Odd indeed.
CERES provides information on radiant flux leaving the planet and SORCE the incoming radiant flux. It is data that needs to be understood and evaluated for accuracy and reliability – and then all put together in a coherent picture.
gatesy would rather indulge in abuse and unfounded narrative. It’s simpler that way.
“The oceans became saltier at the same time as mass moved from the land to the oceans. Odd indeed.”
Fresh water from ice melt still needs to be considered from GRACE. This does not change your claim that “Ocean heat – and therefore sea levels – follow net TOA flux” As you state ARGO can determine mass of the ocean but you did not consider it in your graphs. Mass and thermal sea level rise both need to be considered http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/fig2.jpg
Mass was certainly included in the von Schuckmann and Le Troan graph – net loss – and in the NOAA paper – net gain.
Get a grip – whoever you are.
Generalissimo Skippy
“The oceans became saltier at the same time as mass moved from the land to the oceans. Odd indeed.”
Are you sure about that? I’ve looked at the global average salinity data at NODC and there is a clear correlation between inter-annual salinity variability and inter-annual sea level change, such that salinity increases at the same time as SL decreases. That’s what would be expected if the oceans became saltier when mass moved from oceans to land, not the other way around.
Generalissimo Skippy,
Looking at the numbers given in the Leuliette study left me a little confused at first. Their 0.2mm/yr figure is taken to be consistent with an observed total sea level rise of 1.6mm/yr from JASON-1 and 2, but global averages from those satellites indicate a rise of about 2.5mm/yr over the same period. Having looked around at referenced papers (e.g. http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/24-2_leuliette.pdf) I think what’s going on is that they’ve limited the analysis spatially for various reasons and over the recent period this limitation has caused an analysis bias where some regions with large steric SLR – in particular the Western Pacific – have been missed out.
In other words the numbers given are not actually intended to be representative of global averages, but rather the average of the analysed area, which clearly represents an underestimate of the true global SLR and very likely steric SLR.
While most Argo profiles reach at least 1500 m depth, the tropics
lack sufficient coverage at that level. To determine SL steric, we integrate ocean density to a depth of 900 m. … – Eric Leuliette
I hadn’t previously considered the ARGO coverage hole around Indonesia. Over the generally-recognised ARGO period (2004/2005 to present) spatial variation in subsurface ocean temperature change has been huge, as evidenced by altimeter SLR trend maps. The fact that ARGO sampling pretty much misses out one of the fastest warming regions in the world while having no such deficiencies in regions of cooling means any analysis using only ARGO data will produce trends lower than the true global average, unless the analysis somehow accounts for this bias.
Are XBTs etc. available to fill in the gap over this period?
Reblogged this on pdx transport.
Our knowledge of what goes on in the depths of the ocean is poor to lousy, but this is central to the question of sea level rise and the current debates on manmade climate change. The long-term evolution of sea level remains poorly understood, even though the theories of sea floor spreading and of plate tectonics have been established for nearly fifty years. Changes in the activity of mid-oceanic ridges have long been identified as a potential mechanism for sea level change. In the long-term, sea level is mainly controlled by the thermal evolution of the mantle and by the movement of the continents, and for sea level to remain constant there must be a balance between mantle cooling and continental growth. The area of emerged land depends on sea level and on the distribution of continental elevations as a function of continental area that is given by the continental hypsometric curve. Due to the occurrence of plate tectonics, the earth displays a unique hypsometric character that consists of a continental domain and an oceanic domain. Small changes in sea level trigger flooding of large areas because of the gentle slope described by the continents between 200 m and -200 m. The present sea level rise now observed is very small relative to sea level changes on geological time scales. Thermal expansion of seawater and melting continental ice sheets relevant to global warming are tiny effects relative to secular sea level change of ancient times. The difference of more than two orders of magnitudes between sea level change on a human time scale and sea level change on a geological time scale is the result of several mechanisms affect sea level at different amplitudes and over different time periods. Nicolas Flament’s “Secular cooling of the solid Earth, emergence of the continents, and evolution of Earth’s external envelopes” at http://hdl.handle.net/2123/6334
Sea levels rise and fall partly as a result of thermal expansion and contraction, and partly to do with water vapour, the water cycle, cloud levels and weather conditions in general. As for the thermal effect, you will be surprised to learn what sets the sea surface temperature – it is not radiation from the Sun, as that mostly passes through the thin transparent surface layer.
So called greenhouse gases (mostly water vapour, of course) do not raise the temperature of the lower troposphere and cool the upper troposphere because, if they did, the wet adiabatic lapse rate would be steeper than the dry one – the opposite of reality.
All this is physics – pure and simple – well established thermodynamics. That’s what you need a degree in, and that I have. If you don’t understand the maximum entropy conditions for thermodynamic equilibrium, then you will not understand what is determining planetary temperatures. Of that I can assure you. But if you want answers, ask.
Well handled GS or CH . As said Gates unable to handle real science data.
rather you and GS are in denial of the greenhouse effect.
It’s basic science lad.
Hi Angtech,
There is so much of climate science that progressives are in denial about. The denialism manifests as ill informed rants about denialists.
There are 2 keys to climate. The large variability of top of atmosphere energy dynamics that is related – neglecting solar variability – to emergent properties of ocean and atmospheric circulation in the climate system as a whole.
The 1998/2001 climate shift was to a cooler state with increased cloud cover – and these prominent decadal modes last for 20 to 40 years.
Not skeptical at all – but mainstream freakin’ climate science.
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lolwot. It’s not the greenhouse effect but the net effect of all variables on changes in earth temperature. The greenhouse effect does not act in isolation. And you cannot say that other factors besides GHG physics are not affected by other variables producing “cross” variable or net effects. You are too smug.
I can afford to be smug because I am so right
And yet you are not right. Your smugness is born of ignorance.
lol, no one in this room denies the physics of ‘the greenhouse effect.’ But cause and effect of global temperature change (rising, dropping or hiatus) is more than greenhouse effect. Your smugness hides deep flaws.
A resent paper by Lovejoy 2014 (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-014-2128-2) shows the forcing from CO2 and the corresponding aerosols over the last 100 years shown in this graph http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8 .As can be seen, there is “(rising, dropping or hiatus)” but CO2 forcing is the driver of the trend.
I should add that this surface warming from anthropogenic CO2 is expected to increase the temperature of the oceans which can be seen in this graph correlation http://media.web.britannica.com/eb-media/15/106515-004-540A3E17.gif
Michael Whittemore. There is no commentary discussing what this chart means.
http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8.jpg
It appears that the author drew a line through the data and called that CO2 forcing and he assumes natural variation is the difference between the data and the line drawn. It is nonsense. If you have a two variable system Y= mean global temperature = f(X1, X2) you don’t do that. You obtain independent data for each of the Xi variables and then develop the evidence by e.g., statistical multivariable regression analysis to determine how much contribution comes from each. What the chart suggests is nonsense.
I did link you the paper Wolfe? not just the graph.. but here is the “commentary” to it, but from my reading of the paper it is best read it as a whole.
http://oi62.tinypic.com/ixv2m8.jpg
Five year running average of the average temperature. The brown line is the estimate of Tanth(t) from Eq. 6 with k2xCO2 = 2.33 and the difference (residue) is the estimate of the natural variability Tnat(t). Also shown is the
regression of the latter with time (straight line) as well the overall estimates DTanth = 0.85 ± 0.08 for the unlagged relation and the overall range DTglobe,range = 1.04 ± 0.03 K which presumably bounds DTanth.
Michael Wittemore, with all respect the link you provided is the same link before and does not provide commentary. My opinion is drawing a line through a set of data with a high degree of variability and saying the line represents manmade forcings and the difference between the data and the line represents natural variations doesn’t hold water at all. Natural variations occur to the longer term variations as well as day to day fluctuations. The only way to verify what you said is to have a lot of data and, if possible, to regress out with high confidence the importance/impact of each variable. This assumes you know all the variables which you never do. One of the problems with IPCC models is the “missing variable problem.” The difficulty is you never know if you have found all the missing variables, you just have to keep looking and testing.
Mainstream physics tells us that there is a propensity towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The law that tells us this is the poorly understood Second Law of Thermodynamics. Yes, there is a corollary to that law which applies in a non-gravitational field, namely that heat transfer is from hot to cold in a non-gravitational field, or in a horizontal plane in a gravitational field.
Thermodynamic equilibrium does not imply isothermal conditions in a gravitational field, as Dr Roy Spencer thinks.
The state of thermodynamic equilibrium in a gravitational field has a thermal gradient which evolves at the molecular level and more than explains all that “33 degrees of warming.” This autonomous temperature gradient would cause surface temperatures (which are supported by the temperature at the base of the troposphere) to be at least 40 degrees higher in dry regions. But instead, water vapor plays a part in reducing the temperature gradient and keeping us cooler, just like carbon dioxide would if it had any noticeable effect at all, but it doesn’t.
People like Dr Roy Spencer openly claim that “greenhouse gases” (like water vapor) raise the temperature in the lower troposphere and lower the temperature in the upper troposphere. This would be a steeper “lapse rate” supposedly due to water vapor. What a joke!
Alex Hamilton, search on non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Many systems never achieve equilibrium although they might achieve a steady state condition. “Most systems found in nature are not in thermodynamic equilibrium; for they are changing or can be triggered to change over time, and are continuously and discontinuously subject to flux of matter and energy to and from other systems and to chemical reactions. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics is concerned with such things as transport processes and chemical reactions.
Odd sentence structure:
“But in a puzzle to climate scientists, the rate slowed to 2.4 millimetres (0.09 inch) a year from 2003 to 2011 from 3.4 mm from 1994-2002,”
Surely “slowed from from 3.4 mm from 1994-2002 to 2.4 millimetres (0.09 inch) a year from 2003 to 2011” is more logical and clearer.
See Curry post on “Nonequilibrium thermodynamics and maximum entropy production in the Earth system” paper by Axel Kleidon (downloadable) http://judithcurry.com/2012/01/10/nonequilibrium-thermodynamics-and-maximum-entropy-production-in-the-earth-system/
“The Earth system is maintained in a unique state far from thermodynamic equilibrium, as, for instance, reflected in the high concentration of reactive oxygen in the atmosphere. The myriad of processes that transform energy, that result in the motion of mass in the atmosphere, in oceans, and on land, processes that drive the global water, carbon, and other biogeochemical cycles, all have in common that they are irreversible in their nature.”
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I feel indeed very uncomfortable when reading Anny Casenave paper, because I work for the same organization than she does.
Trying to “correct” sea level rise data (or temperature data as performed for HADCRUT4 data) by removing ENSO oscillation is a complete non-sense, since El Nino / La Nina oscillation is intrinsic part of the climate system and natural variations. Such corrections are necessarily biased and definitely junk science.
Read this comment.
Eric,
You are brave. Good luck.
Scott
Trying to “correct” sea level rise data (or temperature data as performed for HADCRUT4 data) by removing ENSO oscillation is a complete non-sense,
Casenave admits that the model does not work in the southern ocean nor in mid latitudes of the SH as the signs are inverse due to pressure changes ie msl decrease during el nino and increase during La Nina.
In addition PDO is an incorrect model for the SH especially mid to high latitudes,rather the IPO should be used.
Mosh wrote,
“Here is a clue, more data, just waiting, isnt going to make the problem go away.” The problem of understanding climate isn’t going to go away- too many variables and no controlled experiments. Option C won’t make it go away either because simulations are so massaged by confirmation bias that many reasonable people, understanding this, may tentitively choose option A. On the other hand, the problem of catastrophic global warming may well go away with additional data. The problem of unprecedented climate change may also go away with more data. Many of the option C folks are skillful at creating simulations that explain or interpret data according to their own bias. If Option C is our best option, then it gives added importance to waiting for more data because the data will eventually determine if there are climate problems as opposed to climate understanding problems.
Steven Mosher | April 29, 2014 at 3:26 pm |
Thanks, Mosh. Actually, an examination of your cited data shows that in fact, like much of the world the UK has been cooling for a while. Have a look at the graph here.
And no, I’m not cherry picking that interval. In fact, if you look back from the end of the record, the trend doesn’t even become positive until you get back to 1994:present. If you start on any date after 1994, the trend is negative, i.e. cooling.
And of course, that’s just where the trend goes positive, it’s not a significant warming trend at that point … to find a statistically significant warming trend you have to go back all the way to 1986-present.
On the other hand, we have a significant UK cooling trend from 2002:present … go figure.
In other words, I’m sorry to say that the Berkeley Earth data clearly shows that the UK is indeed cooling during all post-2000 periods extending to the present, and even statistically significantly cooling in some periods during this century.
Best regards.
w.
North Sea levels and a tsunami 8200 years ago: BBC online
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27224243
A bit late, but this post showing the beach at flood tide with some larger-than-normal ocean swells at Santa Monica Bay, California documents with photos the extent of flooding as of May, 2011. If the seas actually do rise to the extent predicted by the alarmists, the homes shown in the photos will be regularly flooded.
see http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/is-sea-level-rising-in-santa-monica-bay.html
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