by Judith Curry
I have prepared two new talks on sea ice to present in Nanjing.
But first, some recent context on sea ice.
2014 sea ice minima
The last several years I have written a post on sea ice around the time of the Arctic sea ice minima
- Arctic sea ice minima? (2013)
- Reflections on the Arctic sea ice minimum Part I (2012)
- Reflections on the Arctic sea ice minimum Part II (2012)
Well this year, the sea ice minima was sort of a non event, essentially the same as 2013, with a continued (significant) increase in sea ice volume. Last June, I did a post What can we expect for this year’s Arctic sea ice? Which included my ‘expert’ forecast for the 2014 sea ice minima: “similar to last year.”
At the end of this post I’ll make my 2015 sea ice minima ‘forecast’.
Royal Society Meeting
Last September, the Royal Society hosted a Workshop on Arctic sea ice reduction: the evidence, models, and global impacts. Objectives of the meeting:
This meeting explores the recent, rapid Arctic sea ice reduction. We will discuss the evidence for change, the inability of our climate models to predict these changes, the processes responsible for sea ice reduction and improved representation of these processes in climate models, and the impacts of sea ice change on local and global weather and climate.
Here is the list of speakers
- Julienne Stroeve, Reduction of summer sea ice extent
- Mark Serreze, Changes in Arctic sea ice and the polar atmosphere
- Peter Wadhams, Sea ice thickness from submarines
- Ronald Kwok, Satellite observations of sea ice thickness
- Andrey Proshutinsky, Arctic circulation regimes
- Helene Hewitt, Using models to understand and predict Arctic Sea Ice
- John Turner, Why is sea ice increasing in the Southern Ocean?
- Marika Holland, The capabilities and limitations of Arctic sea ice ocean climate models
- Daniel Feltham, Sea ice mechanics and the next generation of sea ice physics
- Dirk Notz, Processes controlling the Arctic sea ice mass balance
- Don Perovich, Field studies of sea ice melt
- Professor Grae Worster, Sea ice thermodynamics and brine drainage
- Gavin Schmidt, Atmospheric composition and radiative impacts of Arctic sea ice loss
- Jennifer Francis, The impact of Arctic sea ice loss on extreme weather
- Sheldon Bacon, The Arctic Ocean freshwater budget and implications for climate
Unfortunately, the presentations are not publicly available; previously the RS has posted audio recordings of the presentations but none are available for this Workshop.
Several of the meeting participants tweeted heavily during the Workshop, notably Gavin Schmidt. There is a good summary of the meeting at envision nation. It seems that Gavin got overly snarky, both on twitter and in his presentation. Apparently he was dissing the presentation of Peter Wadhams (of ‘spiral of death’ fame), and also the idea of a methane bomb in the arctic. See this post by Nick Breeze at climate change psychology and an entertaining post by William Connolley: Wadhams and the mighty shtwit storm.
Context for Nanjing lectures
Nanjing University invited me to lecture on Arctic sea ice, presumably based on my expertise in Arctic sea ice (see this link for my publications during the period 1983-2005). It is relatively rare for atmospheric science students (or even oceanography students) to be exposed to sea ice in their university curriculum. In particular, they are hoping for some perspective on why their climate model is having difficulty with simulating sea ice.
With this context, I prepared two lectures:
- Sea ice physical processes
- Climate dynamics of sea ice
Presentation #1: Sea ice physical processes
My .ppt presentation can be downloaded here [sea ice physical processes ].
This presentation is mostly based on Chapter 10 of my text Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans LINK, supplemented by images from google (obtained before I left for China) I used a few schematic diagrams that I downloaded from google images without noting the source, so my apologies in advance for a few schematic diagrams that aren’t sourced.
On the RS list of speakers, I was pleased to see Don Perovich, who was my co-conspirator in the 1990’s in planning the SHEBA field experiment in the Arctic Ocean. I emailed Don and asked him for a copy of his slides, which he graciously sent to me and gave me permission to use in my Nanjing talks. His presentation has some very interesting results on sea ice mass balance that are unpublished, which I didn’t use, but I did include and some slides from Perovich’s RS presentation illustrating some previously published field observations (labeled ‘courtesy of Don Perovich’). Here is a link to Perovich’s publications.
The topics that are included in this presentation include:
- Annual cycle of sea ice extent in the NH, SH
- Sea ice morphology (images of sea ice)
- Sea ice formation
- Salinity flux to the ocean from sea ice freeze/melt
- Sea ice growth
- Brine pockets and salinity
- Sea ice dynamics
- Ice thickness distribution
- Sea ice mass balance in the Arctic Ocean
- Annual cycle of sea ice thickness and surface fluxes
- Surface albedo
- Disposition of solar radiation in the sea ice and upper ocean
- Ocean heating and melting at the sea ice bottom
- Internal melting of sea ice
- Lateral melting of sea ice from leads
- Observing the sea ice mass balance
- Challenges to modeling sea ice variability
Presentation #2: Climate dynamics of sea ice
My .ppt presentation can be downloaded here [sea ice climate dynamics ]. In this presentation I cover a lot of territory that I’ve covered in previous posts.
I’ve selected some slides here that directly respond to the issues discussed by the RS Workshop, a perspective on Arctic Ocean sea ice variability that apparently was NOT included in the Workshop.
Lets consider the second hypothesis.
The stadium wave hypothesizes that the Arctic regional sea ice max/min are out of phase with the hemispheric warming/cooling periods, with the minima lagging the hemispheric warming period and occurring in the early half of the hemispheric cooling period.
Specifically with regards to the current period of sea ice minimum, the stage was set in the early 1990’s with anomalously positive Arctic Oscillation.
Understanding the current reduction of Arctic sea ice requires that regional variations and processes be considered.
In context of the stadium wave, we see that the Kara Sea sea ice (WIE) may have begun recovering, with an expected continued reduction of East Siberian sea ice. Note that the Beaufort Sea sea ice was not considered in the stadium wave analysis because we used a Russian data source for early 20th century sea ice (which did not include the American Arctic). In any event, I’ve hypothesized in the previous slide that the Beaufort sea ice responds more to local thermodynamics and atmospheric circulations (rather than ocean advection).
JC reflections
In my post at Climate Dialogue, I stated:
So . . . what is the bottom line on the attribution of the recent sea ice melt? My assessment is that it is likely (>66% likelihood) that there is 50-50 split between natural variability and anthropogenic forcing, with +/-20% range. Why such a ‘wishy washy’ statement with large error bars? Well, observations are ambiguous, models are inadequate, and our understanding of the complex interactions of the climate system is incomplete.
At this point, I think anthropogenic is 50% or less. Critical to our understanding of the attribution of the sea ice decline is to flesh out the pre-1979 sea ice observations, a task that is being undertaken by John Walsh et al.
See also Tony Brown’s post Historic variations in Arctic sea ice. Part II: 1920-1950.
And finally, my prediction for 2015 sea ice minima. I predict minimum sea extent will be the same or greater than 2014, with a continued recovery of sea ice volume. I expect continued recovery in the Atlantic portion of the Arctic, with continued low sea ice extent in the Siberian Arctic.
My decadal scale prediction is either no trend in sea ice minima or an increase (I do not expect continued decline in the coming decade).
I don’t place too much confidence in mine or any predictions on these timescales, but my confidence could increase once I can analyze Walsh et al’s forthcoming historical sea ice analysis.
Stay tuned.
x
I always thought the “methane bomb” idea was ridiculous. Why didn’t it go off during the Holocene Optimum, or the Eemian?
There is that new study of the PDO and the US Pacific north-west. These patterns of decadal variability of surface temperature repeats in Alaska, the US generally certainly and in the Arctic it seems. Decadal cooling seems a reasonable bet.
FYI
http://www.gallup.com/poll/178268/voters-give-gop-edge-handling-top-issues.aspx
Poll includes 13 issues ranked in importance. Climate change is last by a large margin being ranked important or very important by only 40% of respondents followed by abortion at 50% then a tie for third least important between immigration, income distribution, and affordable care act at 65%.
Most important economy 90%, jobs 85%, the way the federal gov’t works, 80%.
More at link above.
Climate change just doesn’t get any respect anymore. The pause isn’t killing the cause. The pause killed the cause. Catastrophic climate change we hardly knew ye. hahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!111111
The “methane bomb” is dumb for a couple of reasons.
1. The lifetime of methane in the atmosphere is about 9 years.
2. Can’t maintain hydrocarbons in the warm layers of the ocean – something will mistake them for food. Deepwater Horizon reduced oxygen levels in the sea 30% (there was that much hydrocarbon to CO2 conversion by bacteria).
http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2012/06/
3. 99% of gas hydrates are in deep ocean sediment (a few degrees of surface warming has no effect).
I agree with you that his post is pretty lame.
I understand how important it is for global warming alarmists to believe the productive are destroying the globe: the alarmists know they’re better than the rest of us and have no problem voting for those who are eager to tell us what to do… for our own good.
With an opening Arctic comes increased winter snowfall and a spring runoff that reduces AMOC.
http://www.climatedata.info/resources/Impacts/Snow-Cover/NH-SnowCover.gif
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/smeed-fig-7.png
We presume that the decadal pattern is in the driver of the NAO. The likely cause of this is top down modulation.
e.g. http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/3/034008/fulltext/
A cooling influence in the NH seems quite likely – on a centennial scale. Instability in the broader climate system can’t be discounted.
Adding Swirling Vortex theory to Stadium Wave theory would give us a better chance of designing global climate models that are better able to capture real world weather phenomena.
http://i1.huffpost.com/gen/2176456/thumbs/n-TORNADO-large570.jpg?w=400
Whenever I hope you are wrong,
I turn the kaleidoscope long.
================
It was essentially the taking over of government by a new means of control over the masses that animated the spirit of global warming in the conceited mind of Al Gore. The political outcome in Florida was, however, not a part of Gore’s plan. So, Gore changed the plan and decided instead to satisfy himself with simply burning down the country.
Well, climate science is kind of like a kaleidoscope.
A box of colors. You never know which one you’re gonna get.
==========
Unfortunately, climate changed… so, Al Gore, Minister of Global Warming of a Unified Earth must now change plans, now that nature suspended global warming.
Wagathon – “…Al Gore…must change his plans…”
He did, he sold his interest in a carbon trading scam, er, I mean scheme.
An open letter from Petr Chylek to John Carter
am sure that most of you are aware of the incident that took place recently at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The identity of the whistle-blower or hacker is still not known.
The selected release of emails contains correspondence between CRU scientists and scientists at other climate research institutions. My own purely technical exchange of emails with CRU director Professor Phil Jones is, as far as I know, not included.
I published my first climate-related paper in 1974 (Chylek and Coakley, Aerosol and Climate, Science 183, 75-77). I was privileged to supervise Ph. D. theses of some exceptional scientists – people like J. Kiehl, V.Ramaswamy and J. Li among others. I have published well over 100 peer-reviewed papers, and I am a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Optical Society of America, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Within the last few years I was also honored to be included in Wikipedia’s blacklist of “climate skeptics”.
For me, science is the search for truth, the never-ending path towards finding out how things are arranged in this world so that they can work as they do. That search is never finished.
It seems that the climate research community has betrayed that mighty goal in science. They have substituted the search for truth with an attempt at proving one point of view. It seems that some of the most prominent leaders of the climate research community, like prophets of Old Israel, believed that they could see the future of humankind and that the only remaining task was to convince or force all others to accept and follow. They have almost succeeded in that effort.
Yes, there have been cases of misbehavior and direct fraud committed by scientists in other fields: physics, medicine, and biology to name afew. However, it was misbehavior of individuals, not of a considerable part of the scientific community.
Climate research made significant advancements during the last few decades, thanks to your diligent work. This includes the construction of the HadCRUT and NASA GISS datasets documenting the rise of globally averaged temperature during the last century. I do not believe that this work can be affected in any way by the recent email revelations. Thus, the first of the three pillars supporting the hypothesis of man-made global warming seems to be solid. However, the two other pillars are much more controversial.
To blame the current warming on humans, there was a perceived need to “prove” that the current global average temperature is higher than it was at any other time in recent history (the last few thousand years). This task is one of the main topics of the released CRU emails.
Some people were so eager to prove this point that it became more important than scientific integrity.The next step was to show that this “unprecedented high current temperature” has to be a result of the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
The fact that the Atmosphere Ocean General Circulation Models are not able to explain the post-1970 temperature increase by natural forcing was interpreted as proof that it was caused by humans. It is more logical to admit that the models are not yet good enough to capture natural climate variability (how much or how little do we understand aerosol and clouds,and ocean circulation?), even though we can all agree that part of the observed post-1970 warming is due to the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Thus, two of the three pillars of the global warming and carbon dioxide paradigm are open to reinvestigation.The damage has been done. The public trust in climate science has been eroded. At least a part of the IPCC 2007 report has been put in question. We cannot blame it on a few irresponsible individuals. The entire esteemed climate research community has to take responsibility. Yes, there always will be a few deniers and obstructionists.
So what comes next? Let us stop making unjustified claims and exaggerated projections about the future even if the editors of some eminent journals are just waiting to publish them. Let us admit that our understanding of the climate is less perfect than we have tried to make the public believe. Let us drastically modify or temporarily discontinue the IPCC. Let us get back to work.
Let us encourage students to think their own thoughts instead of forcing them to parrot the IPCC conclusions. Let us open the doors of universities, of NCAR, NASA and other research institutions (and funding agencies) to faculty members and researchers who might disagree with the current paradigm of carbon dioxide.
Only open discussion and intense searching of all possibilities will let us regain the public’s trust and move forward.
Regards,
Petr Chylek
What’s Petr Chylek been up to the past few years?
No arxiv preprints either.
Ouch. It seems that Chylek talked-the-talk, then didn’t walk-the-walk.
Not obviously a role model for young climate-scientists, eh Climate Etc readers?
‘A multiple linear regression analysis of global annual mean near-surface air temperature (1900–2012) using the known radiative forcing and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation index as explanatory variables account for 89% of the observed temperature variance. When the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) index is added to the set of explanatory variables, the fraction of accounted for temperature variance increases to 94%. The anthropogenic effects account for about two thirds of the post-1975 global warming with one third being due to the positive phase of the AMO. In comparison, the Coupled Models Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) ensemble mean accounts for 87% of the observed global mean temperature variance. Some of the CMIP5 models mimic the AMO-like oscillation by a strong aerosol effect. These models simulate the twentieth century AMO-like cycle with correct timing in each individual simulation. An inverse structural analysis suggests that these models generally overestimate the greenhouse gases-induced warming, which is then compensated by an overestimate of anthropogenic aerosol cooling.’
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL059274/abstract
‘Understanding Arctic temperature variability is essential for assessing possible future melting of the Greenland ice sheet, Arctic sea ice and Arctic permafrost. Temperature trend reversals in 1940 and 1970 separate two Arctic warming periods (1910–1940 and 1970–2008) by a significant 1940–1970 cooling period. Analyzing temperature records of the Arctic meteorological stations we find that (a) the Arctic amplification (ratio of the Arctic to global temperature trends) is not a constant but varies in time on a multi-decadal time scale, (b) the Arctic warming from 1910–1940 proceeded at a significantly faster rate than the current 1970–2008 warming, and (c) the Arctic temperature changes are highly correlated with the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) suggesting the Atlantic Ocean thermohaline circulation is linked to the Arctic temperature variability on a multi-decadal time scale.’ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009GL038777/abstract
‘The Greenland δ18O ice core record is used as a proxy for Greenland surface air temperatures and to interpret Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) variability. An analysis of annual δ18O data from six Arctic ice cores (five from Greenland and one from Canada’s Ellesmere Island) suggests a significant AMO spatial and temporal variability within a recent period of 660 years. A dominant AMO periodicity near 20 years is clearly observed in the southern (Dye3 site) and the central (GISP2, Crete and Milcent) regions of Greenland. This 20-year variability is, however, significantly reduced in the northern (Camp Century and Agassiz Ice Cap) region, likely due to a larger distance from the Atlantic Ocean, and a much lower snow accumulation. A longer time scale AMO component of 45–65 years, which has been seen clearly in the 20th century SST data, is detected only in central Greenland ice cores. We find a significant difference between the AMO cycles during the Little Ice Age (LIA) and the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). The LIA was dominated by a ∼20 year AMO cycle with no other decadal or multidecadal scale variability above the noise level. However, during the preceding MWP the 20 year cycle was replaced by a longer scale cycle centered near a period of 43 years with a further 11.5 year periodicity. An analysis of two coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models control runs (UK Met Office HadCM3 and NOAA GFDL CM2.1) agree with the shorter and longer time-scales of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and temperature fluctuations with periodicities close to those observed. However, the geographic variability of these periodicities indicated by ice core data is not captured in model simulations.’
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL051241/abstract
There is no sceptic science – merely actual science that is reaching an inconvenient conclusion. Ouch.
BREAKING NEWS FROM ROB ELLISON
Petr Chylek and colleagues embrace James Hansen’s
consensus climate-change worldview!
It’s good to see more-and-more rational skeptics are convinced by the ever-strengthening scientific evidence … that climate-change is real, anthropogenic, serious, and accelerating.
Thank you for this fine up-to-date thorough Chylek reference, Rob Ellison!
In a world where the sea-level is rising, the oceans are heating, and the polar ice is melting — all without pause or evident limit — it’s no wonder that more-and-more serious yet formerly skeptical scientists — like Dr. Petr Chylek and Adm David Titley for example — are embracing James Hansen’s climate-science consensus!
‘Our analysis suggests that the ratio of the Arctic to global temperature change varies on [a] multi-decadal time scale. The commonly held assumption of a factor of 2-3 for the Arctic amplification has been valid only for the current warming period 1970-2008. The Arctic region did warm considerably faster during the 1910-1940 warming compared to the current 1970-2008 warming rate (Table 1). During the cooling from 1940-1970 the Arctic amplification was extremely high, between 9 and 13. The Atlantic Ocean thermohaline circulation multi-decadal variability is suggested as a major cause of Arctic temperature variation.’
https://www.lanl.gov/source/orgs/ees/ees14/pdfs/09Chlylek.pdf
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/chylek-arctic-temps.png
Good to see FOMBS so warmly embracing vigorous decadal to cenntennial variability and what that might imply for the Arctic, the US, Alaska and parts of Europe.
Here’s a new one that attributes Pacific Northwest US 20th century warming to natural variability.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/40/14360.abstract
Here’s someone else charting the decline of AMOC – http://www.ocean-sci.net/10/29/2014/os-10-29-2014.pdf
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/smeed-fig-7.png
OMG – could the stadium wave be right and we are looking at substantial temperature declines across much of the NH as the AO turns negative and AMOC declines?
Correct me if I am wrong – but I don’t believe Hansen has picked up on this. You’d better let him know FOMBS.
‘The underlying net anthropogenic warming rate in the industrial era is found to have been steady
since 1910 at 0.07–0.08 °C/decade, with superimposed AMO-related ups and downs that included the early 20th century warming, the cooling of the 1960s and 1970s, the accelerated warming
of the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent slowing of the warming rates. Quantitatively, the recurrent multidecadal internal variability, often underestimated in attribution studies, accounts for 40% of the observed recent 50-y warming trend.’
http://depts.washington.edu/amath/old_website/research/articles/Tung/journals/Tung_and_Zhou_2013_PNAS.pdf
Tung and Zhou of course famously put it at 40% of the 50 year trend – leaving some 0.4 degrees C at 0.07-0.08 degrees C/decade as the anthropogenic warming.
This puts sensitivity at less than 1 degree C from recent observations. Can’t get better than that. Nothing to be unduly alarmed about it seems.
Happy to see you are finally on board SS Sceptic FOMBS – after your last ride hit an iceberg.
Rob Ellison, have you never heard the fundamental maxim of science?
Consequence The sole climate-change worldview that is solidly backed by both theory and observation is Hansen’s energy balance worldview.
That’s why the overwhelming majority of scientists embrace Hansen’s climate-change worldview.
That’s why the overwhelming majority of scientists reject denialist spinning, cherry-picking, and quibbling.
Pretty much *EVERYONE* nowadays appreciates this common-sense principle, eh Rob Ellison?
Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.”
Natural, large-scale climate patterns like the PDO and El Niño-La Niña are superimposed on global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and landscape changes like deforestation. According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.” http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
We are even getting intriguing suggestions of low frequency climate variability from satellites.
‘Based upon the revised (Edition 3_Rev1) ERBS record (Figure 3.23), outgoing LW radiation over the tropics appears to have increased by about 0.7 W m–2 while the reflected SW radiation decreased by roughly 2.1 W m–2 from the 1980s to 1990s (Table 3.5).’ AR4 3.4.4.1
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/erbs.png
Yes we really like observations in Earth sciences FOMBS – happy to see you are on board with vigourous decadal variability for which a great deal of science exists. It is very bracing.
Recent scientific evidence shows that major and widespread climate changes have occurred with startling speed. For example, roughly half the north Atlantic warming since the last ice age was achieved in only a decade, and it was accompanied by significant climatic changes across most of the globe. Similar events, including local warmings as large as 16°C, occurred repeatedly during the slide into and climb out of the last ice age. Human civilizations arose after those extreme, global ice-age climate jumps. Severe droughts and other regional climate events during the current warm period have shown similar tendencies of abrupt onset and great persistence, often with adverse effects on societies…
What defines a climate change as abrupt? Technically, an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause. Chaotic processes in the climate system may allow the cause of such an abrupt climate change to be undetectably small. National Academy of Sciences – Abrupt climate change: inevitable changes
We appreciate the clear understanding of dynamical mechanisms given to us by the climate scientists – a large number of the best known – at the prestigious US national Academy of Sciences. Forewarned is forearmed – aye FOMBS?
Climate-science shows us plainly that humanity faces a stark choice: the end of civilization as we know it or the end of capitalism as we know it.
The folks who concretely prefer the former, “provided it’s after my time,” are predominantly older, angrier, whiter, more shortsighted, more self-serving, more privileged, males.
Whereas thoughtful folks appreciate both the opportunity and necessity for radical change, eh Rob Ellison?
Nowadays *EVERYONE* appreciates these intertwined scientific economic, political, and moral realities, eh Climate Etc readers?
Uncertainty in science means there is a case for an uncertain, poorly defined AGW. … Desperate wishes for impending calamity aside
FOMBS…what fatuous nonsense you write, intellectual folderol. So Gates thinks that Piketty is right and that income inequality is built into Capitalism. This is Marxist twaddle of the first order and Gates should be ashamed of himself for being captured by it. It really proves that one can be good at business and make a billion dollars and still be an idiot.
Income inequality is built into LIFE because inequality of talent, of intelligence, of drive and ambition are facts of life and only to Progressive Pukes worshipping at the altar of Government power where all things are possible in their fantastical thinking does the assumed magic of Government power take on the sorcerer’s robes and become the instrument by which inequality will be or can be or should be addressed. What utter and complete hogwash. The Tyranny that ensues from these attempts will be rationalized away of course, and as the corpses pile up there will be propaganda mills working feverishly to rationalize away the bodies and all the while the people who should have stood up to this moral depravity are doing what? Wondering how to get a piece of the action?
Where are the columns condemning Piketty and Gates for their moral obtuseness? Where are the comedians making jokes about these idiots? Where is the cultural revulsion to protect us from another assault on Freedom and Liberty and Prosperity?
Piketty’s whole immoral argument is absurdity on steroids that would make an Existentialist blush. That FOMBS picks it up and runs with it ought to tell you something.
Huh?
Climate science shows us what?
I would think that after about 17 years of an at least 30 year period of relatively flat temperatures, claims that “civilization as we know it” is ending would appear a little silly or that people would at least be embarrassed to repeat such claims.
The fact that mankind is restoring the CO2 level to higher and more normal level and literally saving the little plants and animals from starvation should be a source of pride for humanity.
Don’t worry, PA, the plants are agitating for the vote. It’s a huge constituency.
==============================
True, true, instead of the economic transformation for which Minister Al Gore opines — a unified Earth under a centralized European-style secular socialist government, as he blames the practice of capitalism by a wasteful and over-consuming free people as the cause of, climate change and extreme poverty and disease — the success of America should be a source of pride hope and an example to be emulated: Gore should have, like George Bush, supported with America with his whole heart on behalf of those everywhere who long for individual liberty.
Wagathon – “Gore … blames …capitalism”
Reminds me of a, slightly modified, line from George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV” routine.
George Carlin: “…you ever notice your own (crony capitalism) smells ok?”
Captalism FOaM’D? The Indians, Indonesians, Bangladeshis, Philippenos, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Mexicans, Africans, Vietnamese, NORKS, … Are going to be flat-out-of-luck
What common sense tells us, Fan…
… is that despite the growing disparity between models and what robust measuremrents we do have, the overwhelming majority of government-funded climate scientists endorse the alarmist worldview tells because that is what benefits their paymaster and ideological agenda.
Rob Ellison, pretty much *ALL* of the articles — the ones that you’ve been frenetically citing —accept Hansen’s long-term energy-balance climate-change worldview. … nowadays it’s mighty hard to find *ANY* climate-scientist who thinks differently … `cuz the scientific evidence, long-term economic consequence, and generational moral implications are too serious to be ignored.
Conclusion The time has come for climate-change skeptics to grow up.
*THAT* sobering reality</b< is evident to *EVERYONE*, eh Climate Etc readers?
Energy balances change abruptly. Climate change occurs as discrete jumps in the system. Climate is more like a kaleidoscope – shake it up and a new pattern emerges – than a control knob with a linear gain. it makes for an unpredictable system.
The theory of abrupt climate change is the most modern – and powerful – in climate science and has profound implications for the evolution of climate this century and beyond. The planet moves past thresholds and the climate response is internally generated – with changes in cloud, ice, dust and biology – and proceeds at a pace determined by the system itself. Thus the balance below is pushed past a point at which stage a new equilibrium spontaneously emerges. The old theory of climate suggests that warming is inevitable. The new theory suggests that global warming is not guaranteed and that climate surprises are inevitable.
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.
We were very excited too when FOMBS joined the serried ranks rising and cheering in celebration of the stadium wave – the second most exciting climate discovery of the century thus far – after and supplementary to the dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts. Welcome to the stadium FOMBS.
FOMD touches on the truth – hardly any climate scientist today make pronoucements with any basis measurements or reality. It’s all about the models and what they do for political correctness now.
The paper by Dr. Petr Chylek et al., you linked to suggests that 2x[CO2] is approximate 1.7 degrees, which is pretty much the same as that calculated by anyone who uses ocean warming/cooling cycles in their deconvolution.
Have you become a lukewarmer all of a sudden?
If not, why endorse “The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation as a dominant factor of oceanic influence on climate”?
If you go out to “climate change” journal there are 11 citations (articles that reference the Curry paper).
I’m skeptical about anything from “Skeptical Science” since they aren’t very accurate and don’t seem to know a lot about climate.
“Sigh” the threading appears to be broken. My previous comment was a response to this:
AK | October 18, 2014 at 8:25 am
“Peer-reviewed skeptic papers by Judith Curry
This page lists any peer-reviewed papers by Judith Curry that take a negative or explicitly doubtful position on human-caused global warming.
• Reasoning about climate uncertainty
(Year: 2011, Journal: Climatic Change, Citations: 0)”
There are actually 11 citations of the paper.
@PA…
I was responding to FOMBS’s link to SkS about Petr Chylek.
Wag,
The Dansgaard Oeschgear events and El Nino, La Nina causes plus PDO and AMO are all unceraintiy areas. How the settled science meme has been sold to the low information voter is astonshing. Plus the deep ocean heat storage, then the cooling deep ocean and then the missing hot spot. What is hard to accept is sophisticated climate scientists not speaking up for the work to be accomplished ahead. They should stand for what is right like Dr. Curry and Dr Koonin.
Scott
Scott – ” How the settled science meme has been sold to the low information voter is astonshing.”
It is a common human bias called the “availability heuristic”. Complex difficult concepts, especially statistics and math, are replaced by ideas or images that are more available. All the graphs, stats, equations, characteristics of the scientific method, or facts from physics are replaced by an image of a lone polar bear swimming in open water. One frame from Al Gore’s crockumentary is worth more than all the sceptics info. It stinks, but life is hard.
Justin,
Lincoln said, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail, without it nothing can succeed. ” So the issue is effective and convincing communication. The thought that “you can fool some of the people all the time, All the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time” give us hope that as the hiatus extends or even cooling begins the tide can begin to turn to science based climate investigations.
Scott
That paper has 11 citations, which is not bad for Aug 2011.
http://citations.springer.com/item?doi=10.1007/s10584-011-0180-z
‘Uncertainty’ means thst science is inconclusive. Uncertainty means that science has failed to demonstrate, etc …
Uncertainty means the truthiness is lacking.
;) :(
The Janus mask was fer Justin’s Al Gore comment above.
Bts – I don’t understand your meaning. One definition of Janus is ” two-faced”. Another more complex description is in Wikipedia. A Janus for Al or for me?
JW, big Al gits the Janus Award of the Week.
Kinda like a rainbow UN committee of African WHO appointees
When I last contacted Florence Fetterer a couple of months ago she had hoped to get the new work on arctic ice up by the end of September but obviously she has been delayed a little
She mentioned that ‘the data set will be called “Gridded monthly sea ice extent and concentration, 1850 onwards.’
Judith kindly reference Part two of my paper on Arctic sea ice above. It was an edited version of the much longer version with many more references that tried to rival ‘War and Peace’ in its length. It is here;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/22/historic-variations-in-arctic-sea-ice-part-two/
Especially interesting in the longer version is the statement from Julienne Stroeve in her personal email to me (reproduced with permission) regarding the interesting definition of what constitutes ‘ sea ice.’
Bearing in mind the likely extent of ice melt in the 1920-1950 period, the melt in the 1816 to 1850 period, the likely melting in the 1730’s and the mid 1500’s (from references I researched at the Scott Polar institute in Cambridge),the extensive 400 year long melting during the Viking period and the discoveries of the Arctic townships of the Ipiatuk from the Bronze age it seems certain that the extensive arctic ice melt we can observe through the ages is by no means unusual.
50% anthropogenic? I’m not sure about that until someone puts previous melt periods into context with the modern one. Going back to 1850 won’t do that.
What is interesting from the 1920-1950 period is that the Antarctic ice A:LSO melted.
tonyb
What’s odd is the lack of focus on what should be a pivotal matter. If people were concerned about changes to Arctic ice the very first thing they’d do is investigate to see if the phenomenon had precedents. Most of the study and activity would be in that direction.
Yet the historical record is the very last thing the klimatariat are ever willing to consider…if they consider it at all. The past is a boring old sepia photo in the bottom of a drawer and can’t possibly have equivalency with a fresh video backed by mock-medieval music of steam coming out of a power station, or vivid colour spread in National Geo showing a flooded village or calving glacier.
Their trick is to use comparatives without allowing points of comparison. Things are worse, hotter, more extreme, more intense, more frequent than…[censored!].
The reason no one looked, was so that they could hype it up as a CO2-driven problem. The Arctic is not as cold and icy as it has been in the past, so can’t be used as a ‘fingerprint’ for CO2. First you need to know what the arctic would be like now without the human emissions. Impossible.
It doesnt have to be unusual to have a cause. You and others are still living and thinking inside of mann’s approach to attribution. A forest caught on fire here in california outside weed. Nobody asks the question: “is fire unusual?” to determine the cause of the fire. Yes fire is natural. It has happened before. The causes are varied. Further even if the ice loss today were unusual, that wouldnt help us very much in determining the cause. Abduction is merely the Beginning of investigation, the spark.
“determining the cause”
In the case of AGW, aren’t we just supposed to assume the cause?
Andrew
“In the case of AGW, aren’t we just supposed to assume the cause?”
no. the best you can do is construct explanations (quantified) explanations that are either consistent with or not consistent with known data.
To date there is no quantifiable explanation of the warming since 1850 that does not include C02 and other GHGs. Note: “it’s warmed before is not a quantified explanation”; ‘it could be some unknown solar process’ is not a quantified explanation. “its natural variability” is not a quantified explanation. Note also: when one does have a quantified explanation
the matter is still not settled.
Cool. (haha). So here we sit with an explanation but not a determination.
Andrew
Steve Mosher: Note: “it’s warmed before is not a quantified explanation”;
It is evidence that the only quantified explanation that we have depends on our ignorance of how the earlier warming was produced. All of the estimates of the size of the CO2 effect (the quantitation part) depend on assumptions about what the current warming would be like in the absence of CO2.
“its natural variability” is not a quantified explanation.
Nevertheless, “It’s natural variability” might be true.
We have no adequate and accurate explanation for the full range of stuff that has been measured and estimated. That is not a reason to act as though the only explanation for a short portion of the record is necessarily accurate.
“It has happened before” should not be forgotten: alternation of hot and cold,alternation of dry and wet, episodic fires, episodic cyclonic storms and ice storms. Regardless of beliefs and actions taken with respect to CO2, those alternations and episodes will persist, even if the causes are not known, as long as the unknown or partially known causative mechanisms persist.
Lastly, “Fires happen all the time due to many causes” is a perfectly good reason not to suspect a particular individual of arson absent a solid case based on something other than a known mechanism and association in time and space. A person with cigarettes and a lighter, or a model airplane, seen in the vicinity of the origin of a fire may not have started it; it may instead have been started by the fire marshal who first reported the fire (yes, that has happened in California.)
I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying that if the only quantitative model you have is wrong (or based on dubious or clearly counterfactual assumptions), then the fact that there are no adequate alternative quantitative models does not have any strong implications for guiding action.
Whoa. Mosh, go back and read what you wrote.
How can you have a “quantifiable” explanation for warming when you lack any understanding of what caused previous warming? You’ve gone so deep into the looking glass world of models that even Humpty Dumpty would be appalled.
You may be a follower of the Queen and believe all manner of impossible things, but I’m with Alice.
“How can you have a “quantifiable” explanation for warming when you lack any understanding of what caused previous warming?
Very Simple.
1.) we dont lack ANY understanding, we have limited understanding.
2.) you dont need ANY historical data to construct a quantifiable
explanation or prediction for the future.
3. Of course it helps to have historical data but you dont need it.
Example: 1896.
“we have limited understanding”
Nailed it.
Andrew
From the prior post —
“But of all the causes to which we alluded, no one contributed so powerfully to give rise to a false method of philosophizing as the entire unconsciousness of the first geologists of the extent of their own ignorance respecting the operations of the existing agents of change.”
Mosher why is “quantified” explanation the big divider here? Climate models quantify the role of ghgs, Judith quantifies the role of internal dynamic ( 50:50). I could pick a possible number for the role of unknown solar processes. Surely what matters is the method of quantification, not just that its quantified. If people think models ( or Judith or me) give unreliable estimates then aren’t they allowed to consider those estimates no better than unquantified guesses?
I think its safe to say ( broadly speaking) that modelled climate change, on centennial timescales, can only occur witth a change of forcing. According to models, noise aside, the climate is forced. nothing but forcings are going to move GST or sea ice or SLR of any of the other important metrics in the debate. We sorta all know that, the question is whether the models are correct in that general point that centennial change is largely forced.
Steven Mosher, you have really excelled yourself with “To date there is no quantifiable explanation of the warming since 1850 that does not include C02 and other GHGs. Note: “it’s warmed before is not a quantified explanation”; […]”.
That is a stunning argument from ignorance. To date there is no quantifiable explanation of any of the climate fluctuations, before or after 1850. It’s warmed and cooled before, and we don’t know why. That’s why we don’t know now.
“even if the ice loss today were unusual, that wouldnt help us very much in determining the cause.”
Yes, it would. Previous similar events mean that the likely cause of all such events are the same or similar – by finding similarities in connected events over multiple instances, and by comparing magnitudes between instances, we can create a list of likely causes and their estmated contribution. It’s called “attribution” and diverse investigation into attribution is yet another sorely under-researched area of climate science as witnessed by the response to “the pause” – prior to its (the pause) recognition by mainstream climate science, consensus was that most warming circa late 20th C was anthropogenic. Now it seems “natural variability” is at least as strong, thus significantly increasing its potential role in the warming with concomitant reduction in anthropogenic contribution.
You may argue that it doesn’t change much, but I disagree – from 110% to 50% of the “forcing” is significant if you ask me. If cooling ensues (or even an extension of the pause) for 10-20 years, that 50% may drop even further although it may take the mainstream some time to accept this.
Cee oh two going through the ceiling
global warming going out the door.
Mike Jonas
공자 앞에서 문자 쓴다
“Mosher why is “quantified” explanation the big divider here? ”
because if you dont have a quantified statement you are not saying anything interesting.
Example: the warming could have resulted from unicorn farts. Yes, it could have resulting from “natural varaibility” or “something the sun does we dont understand” or frog burps.
Without a quantified guess, quantified story, quantified theory, you have nothing but farts and burps.
시작이 반이다
Matthew
“I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying that if the only quantitative model you have is wrong (or based on dubious or clearly counterfactual assumptions), then the fact that there are no adequate alternative quantitative models does not have any strong implications for guiding action.”
Given that you must act. Given that we are ALWAYS acting, always making decisions, the fact that a theory is wrong doesnt prevent you from using to to act.
doing nothing is also acting. and doing nothing because you aren’t sure makes the mistake of thinking you need knowledge to act. You dont.
HR, models produce variations on the centennial time scale without changing the level of forcing.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~jsmerdon/papers/2012_jclim_karnauskasetal.pdf
Models also show that a change in poleward ocean heat transport can create large changes in the climate.
http://water.columbia.edu/files/2011/11/Seager2005OceanHeat.pdf
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~brose/page1/files/Rose_Ferreira_JClim2013.pdf
Reconstructions indicate we may have experienced an increase in ocean heat transport beginning around 1750.
This is all quantifiable and has been discussed here many times with variations depending on who was discussing it but to say there are no quantifiable hypotheses seems ofdd to me and further clarification would be appreciated.
Steven Mosher – you say “공자 앞에서 문자 쓴다”. Why Korean? Are you so embarrassed at what you are saying that you don’t want to put it in English so that everyone can read it? Please note : saying that we don’t know and an argument from ignorance are completely different things. Yours was the argument from ignorance.
By quantifiable explanation you simply mean hypothesis.
You are describing a process of feeling around in the dark for truth, and a process that has some history of success. What your process can’t do is constrain reality to what is currently known. The Ontological argument for the existence of God was shot down on the grounds that God was therefore limited by man’s imagination and the scope of man’s reason.
Well, existence of God aside, nature is not limited in any way by man’s power to reason about it.
I would say that CAGW is a conjecture at this point, and AGW is a hypothesis people are trying to prove. It’s a trilemma, I tell you.
“doing nothing is also acting. and doing nothing because you aren’t sure makes the mistake of thinking you need knowledge to act. You don’t.” – Mosh
Well, I would like to have some knowledge before spending trillions, thank you very much. Absent better knowledge, I choose “muddling” as the better course.
“Given that you must act.”
Huh? Saddle up the unicorns. Because you have to. lol
Andrew
Mosher writes—
“Given that you must act. Given that we are ALWAYS acting, always making decisions, the fact that a theory is wrong doesnt prevent you from using to to act.
doing nothing is also acting. and doing nothing because you aren’t sure makes the mistake of thinking you need knowledge to act. You dont.”
My response- I appears wise that you do not frequently discuss implementation of government policy since your approach seems befuddled at best. People and governments never stop acting. The issue is what is the basis or rationale for the acts government is implementing. Yes, actions can and frequently are based on poor information or inaccurate models. Actions taken based on poorly performing models are prone to be inefficient or counterproductive.
@Steven Mosher
You seem to be falling into the same binary trap many alarmists are setting. “doing nothing” isn’t the same thing as not doing what they want.
For instance, we know the models are wrong. Some models suggest we have time. (Older, discredited, models suggest we don’t.) So WRT to, say, electricity development in Africa, do we:
• Go with coal as the cheapest?
• Put a stop to all financing of new fossil-fired electricity in Africa, steering investment into “renewables”? (What the alarmists want.)
• Go with gas-fired, as a “bridge”?
What kind of bridge? What do we know about gas-fired, other than that the plants themselves are cheapest, and can be made small enough to pick up and move if necessary?
A working “proof-of-concept” for cheap, efficient conversion of energy from solar PV to gas would change the parameters, even with the “unknowns”:
We don’t know for sure that “Swanson’s Law” will continue to apply, driving cost reductions to, say, 1/100 the current price for solar PV, not including inverters which aren’t needed for hydrolysis. But there’s some good probability.
• If it does, all that investment in gas will be useful as carbon-neutral infrastructure.
• Even if it doesn’t, if the (newer) models are correct that we have time, transitions to carbon-neutral energy can still take place, on a more leisurely time-frame.
• How urgent is it that we panic, and force all of Africa to wait for somebody to put up the money for “renewables”
Until we have a working “proof-of-concept” for cheap, efficient conversion of energy from solar PV to gas, we don’t know for sure that it’s doable. Once we do, we do.
Bottom line, that’s as much of an urgent priority as getting good models. Maybe more.
Depending on what you’re actually trying to accomplish, of course.
I think what we should do is transition away from coal as quickly as possible. At the same time, the wealthier nations should put incentives in place to encourage research and development and the private sector to produce the next generation of low carbon technologies. The poorer nations should have the flexibility to use coal, but I think it where it can be cost effective they should use low to no carbon alternatives. When the next generation of alternatives gets to the market the developing nations can transition more rapidly.
If wishes were windmills, turbines would turn.
==================
I trust in supply and demand to give consumers what they want. And the government can artificially create that demand. I also trust the dynamism and entrepreneurship of the private sector to develop the technologies we need.
The ‘government’ with it’s visible and clumsy mitt. I’ll bet you admire the Solyndras of this administration.
Did you notice your self-contradiction?
=======================
Arrrgghh!, ‘its’. Sorry, Ma.
===========
Steven Mosher: Given that you must act. Given that we are ALWAYS acting, always making decisions, the fact that a theory is wrong doesnt prevent you from using to to act.
doing nothing is also acting. and doing nothing because you aren’t sure makes the mistake of thinking you need knowledge to act. You dont.
You have to act on many things, but your limited knowledge does not imply that you must take incorrect or ineffectual actions. You have to act against threats with some cognizance of their relative risks and the likelihoods of successful outcomes.
Perhaps in response to fire you have to arrest an arsonist; that does not imply that there was an arsonist, or that the particular accused is the arsonist.
What you need knowledge for is to act other than as a chicken with its head cut off. Or as a Cargo Cultist.
Everybody has analogies: you and a group are in a lifeboat after your ship has sunk, in the night, in the Indian Ocean. You want to row toward land. It’s overcast. You really would be well advised to save energy by waiting until sunrise so that you can tell which direction the nearest land might be. There is a severe penalty for rowing the wrong direction. If some of you have wounds, you really ought to dress the wounds first. You might even be better off slowly rowing in small circles to examine and possibly collect the flotsam, as it may include packets of food and fresh water.
Back to acting for the good of humanity: there are lots actions other than taxing and regulating CO2 that are much more likely to be beneficial.
AK: You seem to be falling into the same binary trap many alarmists are setting. “doing nothing” isn’t the same thing as not doing what they want.
Well said. I liked the post overall.
Kim, I think the approach should be as general approach as possible, for example, a carbon tax and or limiting carbon pollution from power generation. I think a carbon tax should be rebated to the public and support should be provided to help deal with any associated increase in electricity bills with regulating carbon from power generation. I also think we should increase investment in the science related to new energy sources done in the universities and colleges. I think there should be a limited loan program with strict requirements. Also see this:
http://johnhanger.blogspot.com/2013/05/stunning-fact-98-of-doe-34-billion-loan.html
@Matthew R Marler…
Thanks.
But notice that little word “seem”. I know he doesn’t fall into that trap (at least not usually). But it was a good chance to repeat my constant drumbeat for the solar PV to methane option.
Because IMO it would be a major game-changer.
You really have to wonder when unicorn farts and frog burps are given more credence than precedent.
Matthew R Marler | October 15, 2014 at 2:07 pm | sums up the problem faced by those claiming we must act now rather well:
“Steve Mosher: Note: “it’s warmed before is not a quantified explanation”;
It is evidence that the only quantified explanation that we have depends on our ignorance of how the earlier warming was produced. All of the estimates of the size of the CO2 effect (the quantitation part) depend on assumptions about what the current warming would be like in the absence of CO2.
“Its natural variability” is not a quantified explanation.
Nevertheless, “It’s natural variability” might be true.”
Dismissing natural variability even though it is well demonstrated by now that the consensus view on so-called “global warming” has failed seems to invert the scientific process of (in rough form):
Observe > hypothesis> test/predict > measure result > Compare to observation > reconcile to reality. Instead we have hidden data, ignored history, dismissed observation, blame the observations, etc.
Stirling efforts
by the rest of
you on this
thread, comments
even in Vietnamese,
but from Kim, this
wins the silver plated
trophy award. ‘ If
wishes were windmills
turbines would turn.’
http://www.scipublish.com/journals/ACC/papers/846
,i.”Simulations including an increased solar activity over the last century give a CO2 initiated warming of 0.2 ̊ C and a solar influence of 0.54 ̊ C over this period, corresponding to a CO2 climate sensitivity of 0.6 ̊ C (doubling of CO2) and a solar sensitivity of 0.5 ̊ C (0.1 % increase of the solar constant).”
German atmospheric study said the CO2 feedback was 50% negative.
The “nameplate rating” for a 120 PPM CO2 increase is 0.36°C (1.9 W/m2 forcing). About the best case that can be made by activitist types is that CO2 has contributed at most 0.3°C to the post 1900 warming. It isn’t insignificant, but it isn’t really significant either.
This leaves most of the post 1900 warming to be explained, with solar in a starring role.
Steven Mosher
“Given that you must act. Given that we are ALWAYS acting, always making decisions, the fact that a theory is wrong doesnt prevent you from using to to act.
doing nothing is also acting. and doing nothing because you aren’t sure makes the mistake of thinking you need knowledge to act. You dont.”
1. There is no compulsion or need to act. We don’t have a gun to our heads. Things aren’t any worse today than they were 16 years ago.
2. Higher CO2 is beneficial, it makes plants grow more with less water, There is no reason to limit CO2 and lose the benefit from higher CO2 until a convincing case can be made that there is some harm from higher CO2 that outweighs trillions annually in benefit. That case hasn’t been made yet and might not ever be made.
3. “makes the mistake of thinking you need knowledge to act. You dont.”
You don’t need knowledge to act – just a nervous system. Knowledge is only needed if you wish to act intelligently. Most of the alarmist crowd isn’t interested in cost/benefit analysis or acting intelligently.
Steven ( mosher?)
Thanks for the 3 papers, the 1st was a real eye openner but was essentially confirming what I said which is that most model attribution expts based on comparison of historical forcing and runs held at pre- industrial condition suggest long term change is essentially forced.The point is the Karnauskas paper bucks the trend in understanding as expressed by the Ipcc ( the consensus or whatever ). It’s a direct challenge to previously quantified estimates. That was essentially my point and i think other here. I don’t get the value of a badly quantified estimate compared say to a ” way of thinking” that allows for the possibility that understanding on certain processes is limited
Mosher : doing nothing is also acting. and doing nothing because you aren’t sure makes the mistake of thinking you need knowledge to act. You dont.
True. You only need knowledge to act RATIONALLY.
HR, I believe that is a different ‘steven’. He rarely beats his own drum, but his comments are usually pertinent and powerful.
=====================
Re: Joseph’s “carbon pollution”
OOOOO, scary! You’re two weeks early for Halloween.
(nobody who uses that term should have any expectation of being taken seriously)
It’s not about downgrading the importance of recent events by saying something has happened before. It’s about getting the klimatariat to look at the bare fact that it has happened before. What’s extraordinary is their persistence in not even glancing at bare facts which are enormous and pivotal.
To repeat: Previous melts are enormous and pivotal facts. I’ll understand about lack of “quantification”. It’s a lot easier to quantify the contemporary conditions and events, though (eg) a September cyclone can scramble estimates even now. But let’s start with the enormous reality of past melts.
Same principle applies to fire. If the freak fire conditions of Peshtigo/Chicago/Port Huron 1871 (mid-autumn!) were ever to be repeated they would no doubt be used, by the worst and silliest, to establish modern climate exceptionalism. The first job of a “climate scientist” should be to point out what happened in 1871 and separate the many natural from the many human causes. So when those conditions recur the Michigan region will be in better shape to deal with them.
The cost of this wilful ignorance cloaked in scienciness? We stop confronting problems and we fiddle expensively. Instead of putting resources toward conservation and better management of fire (or cyclones or floods) more billions flow into subsidised white elephants and global carbon rackets. The villains we neglected to lock up after 2008 must need a rake for all the futile climate monies we are throwing at them. They must be weak with laughing.
Steven Mosher: To date there is no quantifiable explanation of the warming since 1850 that does not include C02 and other GHGs
Actually, it’s only the period since 1970 that needs CO2 forcing to be invoked in order to explain the warming.
This is well known.
There is a schematic from 1975 that shows why that is the case. It certainly became more noticeable shortly after this prediction which turned out to be on track.
http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Broecker_Prediction.png
Oh wow. Broacker was right in principle – but the detail was out by a lot.
Here’s on from 2009.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/swanson-et-al-2009.png
A better fit was obtained by Vaughan Pratt with an exponential.
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/fig10.jpg
The temperature rise from 1944 to 1998 was 0.4 degrees C. It is unlikely in the extreme that this was all anthropogenic – given the millennial peak in both solar activity and El Nino activity. The rate of rise was 0.07 degrees C/decade. Not at all alarming even if it were all anthropogenic.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT4.png
Most rise prior to 1944 was not anthropogenic – despite Pratt’s naive trendology.
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/38/16120.abstract
Rob Ellison,
When one looks at the axis scales of the graphs you posted, it looks a lot more like the graphs were designed to manipulate a response than to inform thoughtful opinion.
” There is a good summary of the meeting at envision nation. ”
The organisers of the meeting, Mark Brandon and Sheldon Bacon, do not agree that Nick Breeze’s post is a good summary. I think they say that he misrepresented what Gavin said in his talk.
In fact rather stronger than ‘do not agree’:
Mark Brandon
@icey_mark
“… outright destructive dishonesty by @NickGBreeze hard for me to fathom”
Paul Matthews: The organisers of the meeting, Mark Brandon and Sheldon Bacon, do not agree that Nick Breeze’s post is a good summary. I think they say that he misrepresented what Gavin said in his talk.
Did they make specific objections to specific summary statements made by Nick Breeze? Phrases such as “outright destructive dishonesty” have been directed toward lots of things, including the benign statement that the CO2 effect might be overestimated, or the the water vapor feedback is improperly assumed to be positive..
Good question – No, they didn’t. Shub raised this question on twitter and I agreed with him. If you’re going to accuse someone of lying, you should say exactly what you’re objecting to.
Paul Matthews: . Shub raised this question on twitter and I agreed with him.
Thank you for your reply to me, and for checking that out.
I think dismissal of the methane bomb is important. If it is as likely as proposed by some researchers it should have also happened in the past. Where are these events in the paleo records?
Thanks Dr. Curry for the enriching read.
I would certainly be interested in understanding more about how we measure the deep water brine currents. I would envision they are at anomalous levels with all the ice that has been created recently.
Excellent post. I hope the students appreciate the resource they have before them. And if augmented by the usual good stuff from Tony, a lot of food for thought and a chance for learning about some new perspectives. Maybe even a few “ahaa” moments for the students. Expressed in Chinese, of course.
This stood out for me.
Implication: understanding the role of increased pCO2 requires understanding its effect on each of those “regional variations and processes” mentioned above.
And, given that in hyper-complex non-linear systems there’s no necessary correlation between the magnitude of a “perturbation” and the magnitude of its effect on the system trajectory, we have no reason to suppose that the planetary greenhouse effect is any larger than any of the half-dozen or so regional effects.
Does the deposition of particulates (carbon black/brown, agglomerated sulfur/nitrogen/bacteria) influence albedo and summer melting rates?
Yes. See arctic.noaa.gov.
Rose
Thanks for the link Rose. These are air concentrations, not snow/ice deposit concentrations. The effective black carbon levels (in air) are down ~50% since the early 90’s following the collapse of USSR. These data are only suggestive of albedo impacts. The good news is that the effects going forward with all of the new ice should be less.
Just found this website which might address your question: Dark Snow.
I really enjoy reading about measurement campaigns like this, including the beautiful pictures.
To readers of this blog: Measurements from these campaings are put into parametrized equations which are then put into the GCMs. I think GCMs are still pretty bad with precipitation estimates (like new snow cover), however.
Thanks again for the link. One of the interesting features of particulate accumulation that these Dark Snow scientists show is how multiple years of accumulation coalesce when the ice/snow melts.
Besides albedo, the complex chemistry of particulates includes sulfur, nitrogen, carbon and bacteria. Add water and watch it grow, creating even more melt potential.
If one looks at the full glacial record, every retreat and collapse of ice sheets are preceded by ever increasing dust accumulations.
http://www.clim-past.net/8/2061/2012/cp-8-2061-2012.pdf
http://mycgenie.seao2.info/pubs/ridgwell_and_watson_2002.pdf
http://www.climategeology.ethz.ch/publications/2009_Thevenon_et_al.pdf
The permafrost Methane bogeyman disappears in the light of the facts.
1) When there was warming in places like Alaska, atmospheric methane did not increase.
2) Permafrost depletion in the NH stopped since 2005.
3) When permafrost thaws, vegetation grows and removes more CO2 than is released by the melting. The region acts as a sink, not a source of CO2.
4) Past warm periods (Medieval and Holocene warmings) did not produce increases in methane.
Runaway warming from permafrost thawing has not happened before, is not happening now, but we should believe it will happen if we don’t do something?
Obviously we should believe it because it is scary.
And why should anybody listen to somebody who doesn’t understand the functional difference between methane and CO2?
Why not listen to the scientists monitoring the permafrost in Siberia?
“Indeed above at the surface it has gotten warmer, but that’s just part of a normal cycle. The permafrost is rock hard, And that is how it is going to stay. There’s no talk of thawing.” Michali Grigoryev
http://notrickszone.com/2012/11/19/russian-arctic-scientist-permafrost-changes-due-to-natural-factors-its-going-to-be-colder/
“It seems that the permafrost should be melting if the temperature is rising. However, many areas are witnessing the opposite. The average annual temperature is getting higher, but the permafrost remains and has even started to spread. Why? An important factor is the snow cover. Global warming reduces it, therefore making the heat insulator for the permafrost thinner. Then even weak frosts are enough to freeze the ground deeper below the surface.”
Nikolai Osokin is a glaciologist at the Institute of Geography, the Russian Academy of Sciences.
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20070323/62485608.html
“The Russian Academy of Sciences has found that the annual temperature of soils (with seasonable variations) has been remaining stable despite the increased average annual air temperature caused by climate change. If anything, the depth of seasonal melting has decreased slightly.”
“This is just another scare story . . . This ecological structure is balanced and is not about to harm people with gas discharges.”
Vladimir Melnikov is the director of the world’s only Institute of the Earth’s Cryosphere. The Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute is located in the Siberian city of Tyumen and investigates the ways in which ground water becomes ice and permafrost.
“The boundaries of the Russian permafrost zone remain virtually unchanged. At the same time, the permafrost is several hundred meters deep. For methane, other gases and hydrates to escape to the surface, it would have to melt at tremendous depths, which is impossible.”
Yuri Izrael, director of the Institute of Climatology and Ecology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20050822/41201605-print.html
The “methane bomb” idea refers to deep water seafloor hydrate deposits. They seem to forget the hydrates are frozen inside a mud/silt/ooze framework.
“Which included my ‘expert’ forecast for the 2014 sea ice minima:”
The modest quotation marks alone are admirable….and eminently likeable. Makes a nice contrast to Professor Mann who can’t seem to stop awarding himself Nobel Prizes…
Arctic sea ice minima is a very tricky subject. I hope it keeps increasing as if it does it places a very large nail in climate sensitivity to CO2.
I feel it is still all guesswork at this stage.
If it is going to turn we need at least 3 years with increasing ice minima from 2012, preferably 4 years.
Pro is the PIOMAS, AMO and sun cycle.The increase in the Antarctic.
Against is the history of the last 30 years. The rise in sea levels.
Personally I see all the current changes as well within natural variability, If we can have a 30 year fall [one in a two hundred year event] we can have a 90 year fall [one in a thousand year event] and in general it would still not prove or disprove the current arguments as the time frame is far too short.
What it does show if there is a reversal however, like the pause in atmospheric temperatures, is that those who tie calamity to short time frame changes must accept that they are wrong when a reversal occurs in a similar short time frame.
This is the far more likely to happen scenario that should transpire.
a nail?
more settled science from skeptics.. published in a blog comment no less
Right.
Increasing Arctic Sea Ice wouldn’t contradict CO2 being an absorptive/emissive gas that would tend to force climate.
Increasing sea ice would, however, be a reminder of ‘climate change’ exaggerations and misatribution.
Steven Mosher: a nail?
more settled science from skeptics.. published in a blog comment no less
angech: Arctic sea ice minima is a very tricky subject. I hope it keeps increasing as if it does it places a very large nail in climate sensitivity to CO2.
Note the conditional: if.
It is OK. Steven agrees with my comments, he did not attack them, just the degree to which they may nail global warming theory.
The IF doesnt help.
He is still talking in absolutist terms.
“Arctic sea ice minima is a very tricky subject. I hope it keeps increasing as if it does it places a very large nail in climate sensitivity to CO2”
“Arctic sea ice minima is a very tricky subject. I hope it keeps increasing as if it does it may influence estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2”
The first is absolutist. In fact, the state of the ice has no bearing on estimates of sensitivity. So it’s not only skeptical over reaching, it’s wrong.
Better would be
“Arctic sea ice minima is a very tricky subject. I hope it keeps increasing as if it does and if temperatures remain stagnent, it could influence estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2 depending on the time frame involved”
Steven Mosher: The IF doesnt help.
I disagree with you there. I don’t think a clearly phrased conditional expresses anything in absolutist terms. Clearly, “If you heat water enough it will boil (as long as the pressure isn’t too high)” might seem “absolutist” in some sense; but it is not an absolute claim that water will boil.
Arctic sea ice minima is a very tricky subject. I feel it is still all guesswork at this stage.
These are my views, absolutist, no.
I hope it keeps increasing as if it does it places a very large nail in climate sensitivity to CO2.
It is not an absolutist view to say that climate sensitivity may be small, a lot smaller than even Judith is prepared to go.
The nail reference is just helping on the way.
Increasing Arctic sea ice for a decade should by itself wipe out AGW, C and W, Arctic Sea Ice Blog [ Neven “here I am with a gray beard and there is still more ice but just wait and see”…] and scrap the current models.
Will it happen? No, but again hopefully 6 up years and 4 down years creating a second pause.
The third pause will be sea volume flattening out.
Steve, discussing how a nail might look is not = settled science.
In fact consider the implication of your comment: Do you think there is a nail possible to the consensus apocalyptic view?
Steve,
Wow, what happened to you? Seriously. The climatocracy has been promoting end of glaciers in Tibet, end of sea ice in Arctic, less ice in Antarctica, steadily increasing temps, more storm frequence and more storm intensity.
All in absolute terms by your standards. And it turns out all wrong.
And you reject someone over your interpretation of “if” and its use in a friggin’ metaphor?
You have been had, man.
hunter, Steve, Wow, what happened to you? Seriously.”
He was a philosophy major, you are not suppose to understand much of anything he says… especially when it is in Korean :)
“Wow, what happened to you? Seriously.”
I think Mosher sometimes gets so focused on building intellectual sand castles, he forgets they’re not real.
Mosher is being consistent… he is p1ssing over denier IF sand castles.
NB, the KlimatoKleptocracy has been promoting no ice meltoff with their GCMs and mocking the methane clathrate catastrophists.
This IF garbage and Antarctic excuses for the Arctic melt demonstrates that Joshua and Michael are correct about motivated and wishful thinking from the psuedo-scientific denier wing. You look like fools when you keep spiking the football on the 20-yard line. This disgusting attitude also recalls Garo Ypremian hitting his first field goal and exclaiming “I Keek a Touchdown”
Read More, Post Not
capt.,
Thank God for google translations. ;^)
Howard seems a bit of a Steve Mosher wannabe. But he does a poor job.
And the deni**er bit just makes Howie look more like a neverwuzzer.
I love it when Enlightened and Benevolent Warmers get mad at Skeptics.
You are supposed to be saving us despite ourselves, anyway. Why do you have to be pr*cks about it? ;)
Andrew
hunter: IF sand castles.
All of global warming alarmism, and all policy recommendations, are built on IF.
Hunter: I guess you missed the days when I was on Kloors Collideascape accusing Mosher of being a lukewarmers in denier clothing to sell his ClimateGate Book on WUWT. Or the frequent times I accused Mosher of being a self-important narcissist, a number crunching dweeb, a dilettante with no actual real world experience.
Most recently, I made fun of the old boy (at Lucia’s) over his carbon dioxide control knob fantasy spurred on by the comical presentation by Dr. Mann’s Penn State Colleague, Mr. Noodle, that Mosher peddled on several blogs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RffPSrRpq_g
All in all, he is more than OK in my book. He can dish it out with the best and he can take it on the chin like a man without whinging or flinching. He is “all in” putting his time to figuring problems out. Also, his views on climate are constantly evolving. Evolution is a foreign concept secretly feared and publicly scorned by Yenta’s like you and your fellow enablers in the peanut gallery.
The Kara Sea data is really interesting. We have been looking at the Kara because it has large hydrocarbon resources, but the Kara Gate made the tanker costs really unmanageable.
I suspect ExxonMobil may have been heavily influenced by the drop in the sea ice summer surface area observed in 2012. I had some dealings with EM in the 1990´s and prepared the concept for a polar class ice breaking tanker navigation and mooring simulation. Amazingly, it seems they stuck to it over the years and are somehow convinced they can move tankers throught the Kara Gate?
You ‘gotta love the irreverence:
Following a link on the Nick Breeze link, this person (Michael Mann who is obviously proud of the fact the Huffington Post accepts his articles) apparently does not know his ‘hubris’ from his ‘humility’ when it comes to taking sides in the AGW analysis game.
–e.g.,
This is an example of what he believes is an incorrect way of thinking that is due to the hubris of and an unfair caricature of other scientists by, the putative writer of such a sentiment:
He believes the real problem is that scientists lack humility. And yet, he has no problem at all with naked pronouncements by Kevin Trenberth, whom he refers to as a ‘leading climate scientist,’ as follows:
this person apparently does not know his ‘hubris’ from his ‘humility’ seems to rhyme with does not know his elbow from his knee.
Comment was vaguely humerus.
The confirmation bias is that ‘Arctic Amplification’ is taking place due to CO2, and that accounts for the higher temperatures in the Arctic, leading to sea ice loss.
But slide 15 from Dr. Curry’s Sea Ice PP:
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/sea-ice-physical-processes.pdf
demostrates that the converse may be occuring.
That is, Arctic Sea Ice loss ( and more importantly, first year ice instead of multi-year ice ) is leading to higher Arctic temperatures due to greater input of Arctic Ocean heat to the atmosphere.
If dynamic forces led to the Arctic sea ice decline and lead to an Arctic sea ice increase, we should expect a reversion to the mean in temperatures ( that is, cooling ). Were this to occur, it would also call into question ‘Arctic Amplification’.
This is a clear dichotomy of theories. Stay tuned.
Even simply measuring net flux of energy into the Arctic via ocean currents from record high OHC would call into serious question the possibility that the long term decline in Arctic sea ice would reverse or “revert to the mean”. Too much energy is accumulating in the Earth climate system for the long- term trend to reverse.
So if it happens, you’ll reasses your beliefs?
Remember that the sensible heat flux OUT of the Arcitc Ocean has increased dramatically since 1979 due to thinner ice.
And that there is always enough heat content in the waters beneath the ice to melt it completely.
And that thicker sea ice ‘traps heat’.
“So if it happens, you’ll reassess your beliefs?”
Absolutely. I reassess my “beliefs” every single day, and sometimes several times a day. If I find any evidence that the net energy of the climate system in not increasing on a decadal basis, I will gladly alter my “beliefs”. In fact, that is exactly the kind of data that I seek. If you have some, please pass it along. With the oceans storing the majority of the energy and gaining energy for at least the past 50 or 60 years on a decadal basis, it would take a huge negative forcing to counter the increased GH gas forcing we’ve seen over that period.
“Remember that the sensible heat flux OUT of the Arcitc Ocean has increased dramatically since 1979 due to thinner ice.”
_____
This is at least partially the reason why the Arctic sea ice is in a “spiral” down and does not simply drop every single year to a new low. After the big sea ice decline in 2012, a huge amount of latent and sensible heat was released from the ocean (with a few big Arctic Cyclones helping to churn up even more and flux it out to the atmosphere). Thus, 2013 and 2014 saw cooler temps in the Arctic as there was a net loss of energy from the Arctic ocean in 2012. Sea ice had a chance to rebuild a bit, thicken a bit, and energy rebuild in ocean. In this way, 2008 and 2009 did the same after 2007’s big drop. So, we can expect a few years of rebuilding of OHC in the Arctic before the new summer sea ice low is set. Sometime before 2020 certainly, but based on the 5 year rebuilding time between 2007 and 2012, we might see a new lower low in Arctic sea ice around 2017, as the spiral continues down to an ice free condition this century. Too much energy being stored in the Earth system to save the Arctic sea ice from completely disappearing this century.
R. Gates, the energy in the Arctic ocean doesn’t have much to do with Arctic atmospheric forcing. Remember there is a THC with that pronounced Gulf Stream flow into the North Atlantic.
\https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-KmG9nUeZiGo/VEAbgB0qcxI/AAAAAAAALmo/B48TL4ZP7Ns/w741-h485-no/arctic%2Bcircle%2Bsst.png
Low frequency ocean internal oscillations are primarily driven by the THC. The Arctic surface air temperature is strongly effected by atmospheric forcing and atmospheric energy circulated poleward which creates the Arctic Winter Warming and Sudden Stratospheric warming events. If there is any climate observation most unlikely to be CO2 forcing driven, it is the Arctic Sea Ice Extent. It is an abberation even in the best of climate models along with the land surface temperature amplification from 30N to 60N also driven by the THC (AMOC portion).
Since all that information is already out there, I doubt you will reconsider your HCV position anytime in the near future.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-KmG9nUeZiGo/VEAbgB0qcxI/AAAAAAAALmo/B48TL4ZP7Ns/w741-h485-no/arctic%2Bcircle%2Bsst.png
“After the big sea ice decline in 2012, a huge amount of latent and sensible heat was released from the ocean. Thus, 2013 and 2014 saw cooler temps in the Arctic as there was a net loss of energy from the Arctic ocean in 2012.”
What I am hearing is a see-saw process of less ice more atmospheric heat, more ice less atmospheric heat in the short term. Would this relationship hold over longer time frames?
R.Gates. Your description of a potential 5 year build/release cycle in the Artic is intriguing. Is there any research that suggests this or is this your own insight. I eye-balled (linked below) a mean ice volume graph 1972-2014. It is at least plausible.
http://rationalspirituality.com/sea_ice_NSIDC_72-2014.jpg
“Since all that information is already out there, I doubt you will reconsider your HCV position anytime in the near future.”
_____
Capt. Dallas, I’ve always respected your perspective, and you’ve been more than civil to me over the years I’ve posted here. If a more plausible explanation that matches the physical model of GH forcing was out there, I would gladly consider it. But yes, as it stands, the massive anthropogenic transfer of carbon from lithosphere to atmosphere is rapidly (from a geological time scale perspective) changing the climate of the planet. This transfer I’ve dubbed the Human Carbon Volcano or HCV. We’ve also altered the nitrogen cycle, so there is a corresponding Human Nitrogen Volcano (or HNV) going on as well. Each of these is adding more net energy to the climate system, which is manifesting itself in multiple ways.
The temperature rise from 1944 to 1998 was 0.4 degrees C. It is unlikely in the extreme that this was all anthropogenic – given the millennial peak in both solar activity and El Nino activity. The rate of rise was 0.07 degrees C/decade. Not at all alarming even if it were all anthropogenic.
There is even data that suggests that CO2 was at current levels at the start of the Holocene.
e.g. 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
Warming of some 1 degree C happened from the late 1880’s. Some 0.8 seems quite natural. If this turns around – while anthropogenic warning continues at it’s snails pace – natural CO2 flux will drop by >15 Gt/year.
Nor is there any evidence that CO2 is notably involved against a backdrop of large natural toa radiant flux.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/loeb2012-fig1.png
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png
Mark Lewis,
Thanks for that chart. Very interesting. I’ve come across this notion several times, and it is hardly my own. The approximate 5 year cycle between release, rebuild, release, could be a coincidence or have a real physical basis in sea dynamics. The Arctic is changing so fast though that we may not know what “natural” variability is anymore as the anthropogenic fingerprint is so ubiquitous.
R Gates, are you sure that we ever did know what natural variability is?
R. Gates, “Capt. Dallas, I’ve always respected your perspective, and you’ve been more than civil to me over the years I’ve posted here. If a more plausible explanation that matches the physical model of GH forcing was out there, I would gladly consider it.”
That is what I said, you can’t get beyond GH forcing :) There have been quite a few folks trying to tease out ENSO since it is an “internal” variable. The 5 to 7 year fluctuations are most likely ENSO related, though ENSO would be better replaced with tropical ocean SST imo.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/iersstv3b_0-360E_-30-30N_na.png
There has been a 100 year rise without a hint of acceleration in the tropical oceans. The ~1910 minimum was most likely due to volcanic/solar forcing
.http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/periodiersstv3b_0-360E_-30-30N_nm1:12sdfae-h.png
~60 years is the only notable frequency.
The near Arctic SST has a lag
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/iersstv3b_0-360E_55-65N_na.png
Closer to 1920 for the minimum.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/periodiersstv3b_0-360E_55-65N_nm1:12sdfae-h.png
More noise but about the same ~60 year main frequency. GH forcing wouldn’t create a 60 year cycle, but it could amplify it. So when Dr. C mentions “about half” with a fairly large margin of error, it would appear her “expert” opinion on Arctic Sea Ice is worth consideration.
“…when Dr. C mentions “about half” with a fairly large margin of error, it would appear her “expert” opinion on Arctic Sea Ice is worth consideration.”
——
I come to CE specifically because of Judith’s expert opinions and if sea ice and Arctic dynamics were linear her “50% or less” estimate might be about right. But the effects clearly are not linear, and thus, when we get an ice free summer Arctic later this century while there might be natural variability involved in deciding the exact year, the fact of an ice free summer Arctic at all this century will be 100% anthropogenic.
R. Gates commented
So it’s not linear, but you’re going to extrapolate a linear trend into an ice free summer. Do you not see how internally inconsistent that is?
R, Gates, “But the effects clearly are not linear, and thus, when we get an ice free summer Arctic later this century while there might be natural variability involved in deciding the exact year, the fact of an ice free summer Arctic at all this century will be 100% anthropogenic.”
Since things aren’t linear, I would think there would be a string of “Ice Free”, say 2mkm^2 or less, Arctic summers if 100% anthropogenic is the cause. In other words, CO2 equivalent forcing should make things more linear, it is a simple linear function right? Since the tropical oceans have flattened out and solar does have its largest impact on the tropical oceans, I would expect about the same possibly some increase in Arctic sea ice over the next decade Not a consistent increase by any means, but I doubt it will make it to the 2 mkm^2 and will trend towards a 6 million km^2 average which is hardly “ice free”.
Black carbon and dust though is the key. Remember 2010 was the worst fire year evah in Russia and a couple years later was the lowest Arctic sea ice extent evah. Once sea ice melts, that carbon and dust sinks into the ocean and you get a do over. Between Russian fire and Chinese smog, there could be more dips in extent, but that is nothing to be concerned about or there would have already been a treaty to reduce particulate emissions right?
OHC is primarily determined by OHT. Arctic sea ice extent is determined primarily by OHT. When you can find a correlation between CO2 and changes in OHT let me know. The last I heard there should be a negative correlation.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00466.1
http://www.ocean-sci.net/9/1057/2013/os-9-1057-2013.pdf
http://www.whoi.edu/science/GG/people/wcurry/Curry_pdf_files/nature05277.pdf
steven commented
I can’t see the first one, but the second on OHT driving surface temperatures is exactly what I think is happening.
The Oceans store up heat near the equator, then pumps it poleward where the heat is radiated to space.
But these large reservoirs of heat warm the air over them, that warm air and water vapor is then transported over land, which adds to surface temps. If this transport takes decades to evolve, you would get entirely natural large surface temp excursions.
One way you might be able to distinguish between this type of surface warming and Co2 based surface warming is you’d see a difference in the ratio of night time cooling to day time warming, with Co2 reducing this cooling. But in fact what the actual surface measurements show (and not the artificial trash GAT’s), night time cooling matches day time warming, with regional disturbances in daily min temp.
http://content.science20.com/files/images/Northern%20Continents_0.png
Mid Latitude Northern Hemisphere Stations (24.950-49.410Lat, 180.000- -8.000 Lon and 24.950-49.410 Lat, -67.00- -124.800 Lon) divided into Eurasia(32M samples) and the US(24M samples).
http://content.science20.com/files/images/Southern%20Continents_0.png
Mid Latitude Southern Hemisphere stations (-23.433- -66.562 Lat, -30.000 – 180.000 Lon, -23.433 – -66.562 Lat,-30.000 – -100.000Lon and -23.433 – -66.562 Lat, -100.000 –180.000 Lon ) divided into South America(4.6M), Africa(1.8M) and Australia(62K).
Hmmm….
don’t see any evidence of OHC into the Arctic Ocean, rather, appears to be OHC out of the Arctic Ocean, which is what we expect with thinner sea ice allowing more ocean heat to escape to space:
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/figure-2-comparison-w-arctic.png
Lucifer, if you look at my references you’ll see that ocean heat transport has been going down over the last decade3 and the OHC of the N Atlantic has been decreasing since 2007.
“So it’s not linear, but you’re going to extrapolate a linear trend into an ice free summer. Do you not see how internally inconsistent that is?”
______
The extrapolation to an ice free Arctic later this summer is decidedly not a linear curve, but more likely follow some polynomial trend with feedbacks and natural variability deciding the exact shape of that trend down to an ice free Arctic. It is the downward trend, over the long term, that is anthropogenic in nature.
The essential point is that with net energy in Earth’s climate system steadily increasing decade by decade, there is no way for the Arctic sea ice to not go to zero eventually. It did the last time CO2 went over 400 ppm in the mid-Pliocene, and even though it’s happening much faster this time and also taking methane and N2O along for the ride, it’s just a matter of time before the Arctic is ice free.
Lucifer,
Highly cherry picked graphs by Bob Tisdale (known as Tisdale Cherries) are to be treated with extreme skepticism as to telling us anything meaningful about net gains or losses of energy in the full climate system. His graphs are usually picked to be so geographically constrained or qualified (hence called “cherries”) that they are essentially more misleading than useful. Eat these Tisdale Cherries with caution: they are often psychotropic.
The data is from the Argo system ( here’s another view ):
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/figure-4-trends-zonal-means.png
It indicates that at least for the Argo era, Arctic Sea Ice loss is not related to increasing Arctic Ocean heat content, because the Arctic Ocean has lost heat content.
I’m skeptical, RG, that those warm grapes are as sour as you imagine.
=============
“R. Gates, the energy in the Arctic ocean doesn’t have much to do with Arctic atmospheric forcing.”
_____
I don’t think I said anything remotely like that. Much of the energy in the Arctic comes from advection from lower latitudes. What increased GH concentrations do is increase the net energy in the climate system, and some of that increased energy will eventually be advected to the Arctic via multiple paths. What the Arctic is really good at is taking small changes in energy input and multiplying the effect via positive feedbacks.
Arctic temperature anomalies in the 1930s were
apparently as large as those in the 1990s and 2000s
“Lucifer | October 16, 2014 at 10:56 pm |
Arctic temperature anomalies in the 1930s were
apparently as large as those in the 1990s and 2000s”
____
There were indeed some warm period in those decades, but the sea ice came no where close to the summer lows we’re seeing now.
“There were indeed some warm period in those decades, but the sea ice came no where close to the summer lows we’re seeing now.”
And you know this how?
So a small extra amount of energy flowing into the Arctic is multiplied into a large increase in energy – from where exactly?
R. Gates, “What the Arctic is really good at is taking small changes in energy input and multiplying the effect via positive feedbacks.”
The interesting thing is that a positive forcing for the Arctic can be a negative feedback for the ROW. When that Arctic forcing is SST related, it would be lagged and could be out of phase meaning a global cooling or pause would produce stronger Arctic Winter Warming and stronger more frequent SSW events. One of the biggest problems with dT=lambda dF is that the rate that the oceans can cooling can be faster than the oceans can warm, entropy and all that doncha know. Because of the land mass choke points that reduce northward ocean flow, it takes longer to cool the oceans in the NH which is why the average SST of the NH is about 3 C warmer than the SH.
That is why I showed this,
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-KmG9nUeZiGo/VEAbgB0qcxI/AAAAAAAALmo/B48TL4ZP7Ns/w741-h485-no/arctic%2Bcircle%2Bsst.png
Out of phase polar warming/cooling would not be indicative of GHG forcing. That is why the “Global” tag is applied. Given that the best estimates of “sensitivity” for whatever that is worth since it is unlikely to be linear, are falling, there could be another phase shift in our future. So I take the tales of catastrophic climate change with a grain of salt. This is anthropogenic climate change and most of that would be in the NH where most of the anthros live, but is a longer growing season and easier shipping in the Arctic really a bad thing? Try convincing the Russians that it is.
Rgates
Thought you might enjoy this article concerning a meeting to consider changing the name of our current epoch to the anthropocene
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/11167165/Scientists-wonder-what-in-the-world-will-we-leave-behind.html
Tonyb
The human carbon snail.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Grapevinesnail_01.jpg
Lucifer,
What the cliamte obsessed like R. Gates can’t accept is the idea of a dynamic Arcit sea ice coverage. They are only able to consider this from the pov of, to borrow Steve Mosher’s phrase, “absolutist’ terms. The climate obsessed have boxed themselves into a very small box and the inside of the box is all they can see. And “climate doom” is printed all over the insides.
(Oh, no! absolutist terms! and on a blog no less!)
I keep wondering why Gates has dropped the deeply amusing “skeptical warmist” moniker. I miss it.
“Black carbon and dust though is the key. Remember 2010 was the worst fire year evah in Russia and a couple years later was the lowest Arctic sea ice extent evah.”
more .. ABC
Start from Dr. Curry’s presentation.
Top melt
Bottom Melt
Transport.
let’s see an example. When we get a arctic season with great cyclones, those cyclones can lead to a break up of the ice ( more lateral melting), If currents conspire
we end up with more transport out of the arctic ( ice then melts in the warmer water), and we get Eckmen pumping and more ice melts.
But the skeptic says: black carbon, is the KEY. On what evidence?
This pattern of argumentation is clear. We have elements of the system which are known, lets say fairly well known and measured:
SST, winds, air temps, currents. And we have evolving explanations that try to understand ice melt in terms of these known measured quantities.Progress is slow.
Along comes a skeptic: He identifies some OTHER cause: ice breakers, dust, black carbon, submarines surfacing, volcanos. And in all cases it’s a cause where we don’t have good measurements. And then the assertion is made that THIS THING is key. The pattern is the same
“You guys working in the light are alll wrong. the answer is over here in the dark, where we cant see”
There is another pattern. We have current sea ice data from 1979 on. The first move is to attack this data. Multiple satellites, changing algorithms, PIOMAS is only a model etc. You’ve read the attacks. And while attacking this data with phenomenal coverage, this data with a full audit trail, this data which is open and free to all.. The skeptical turn comes. In this case the approach is: Point to things that are LESS WELL KNOWN to
scuttle the efforts to understand what is more well known. So, instead of sensor reports with great coverage we get a quote from a newspaper .We get a passage from a text, a single photo, a chinese myth. A village. We get shoddy evidence used to undermine better evidence.
In both these approaches the move is the same. make the less well known the enemy of the more well known. Now, the rational thing, from my perspective is to use the more well known to understand the less well known. When we understand the roles of wind, sst, air temps, and circulation better, then we will be able to frame and isolate the less well known: soot and dust. And, the better we understand the CURRENT arctic conditions the better we will be able to interpret the very limited historical data we have about the arctic. This approach doesnt deny that these dark areas exist, but the approach taken is to start in the light and push outward. In this case it very may well turn out that our current understanding will imply that historical records are wrong.Looking at the life span of people today I conclude that biblical tales of people living to ages well over 100 years are false. Or if we found ourselves able to predict ice loss without regard to soot, then that fact would lead me to believe that understanding soot was not critical.
Steven Mosher commented
But that is the problem, you are either taking a few decades of data and extrapolate a 50+ year trend, or you have data that doesn’t have good coverage and you extrapolate that until you fill in places that have never been measured and make a trend out of that.
NIMBUS pokes great holes.
=======
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/inodc_temp2000_0-360E_65-90N_n.png
I plotted the NODC data for 0-2000 meters north of 65°.
There seems to be a 0.1°C drop in arctic sea temperatures in 2009 that has continued to this day.
Seems odd – has the arctic actually cooled since 2009?
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/figure-2-comparison-w-arctic.png
Looks like there’s been a change. Tisdale’s look a bit like like step change. The 2007 spike reminds me of the 1998 El Nino upward temperature spike.
This was very well done post with lots of great links and resources. I have a great deal of skepticism that the long term downward trend in Arctic sea is only “50% or less” anthropogenic. Given the clear dynamic where anthropogenic forcing impacts the Arctic so strongly, this graph is one of strongest human climate change fingerprints we have:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G3p3-AWgoVw/UD0kCTKEL7I/AAAAAAAABEk/pH8l37zOo0E/s1600/kinnard2.gif
“Given the clear dynamic”
Given by whom? ;)
Andrew
RGates
Whilst glad to see you back the above kinnard graph has been discussed at depth. It bears no relation to reality. I mention it in my extended article linked above,. It follows the hockey stick in as much that shows a steadily declining temperature which kinnard mirrors with steadily increasing ice,
How did the Viking get around in a frozen arctic sea? Why did sea ice decline during the worst period of the LIA?
tonyb
They didn’t, the Vikings went across the Denmark Strait to Greenland.
Bob
I suggest you read ‘the Viking world’ by spink and you will know the extent of their wanderings
Tonyb
How did the Viking get around in a frozen arctic sea?
The Arctic does open during warm periods. The Vikings took advantage of the Warm Period to move into the Arctic. The Chinese mapped the Arctic during this same time period, using ships to sail in the open Arctic Ocean. The Chinese sailed to the spot under the North Star. It was open water.
This warm period is much like the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods. Now, snowfall has started that will bring our next cold period, in a few hundred years.
Hi Tony,
Yep, I read CE daily, but have found little reason to post too often. Sea ice and the Arctic in general are among my favorite topics though, and certainly Judith has a great deal of expertise in those areas. I do however completely disagree with her “50% or less” assessment of the role of anthropogenic forcing in sea ice decline and Arctic changes in general. The Arctic is among the most sensitive areas on the planet to AGW effects, and those effects are showing up in so many different ways that it’s getting harder and harder to even keep track of all of them. I think you discount the Kinnard et al general findings way too easily, and some upcoming soon to be published research is going to strongly corroborate them in fact. The findings will show that the sharp “hockey blade shape” downward trend in sea ice, while having some natural variability, has been very likely to be PRIMARILY caused by human activity. Primarily meaning much greater than 50%.
“The Chinese sailed to the spot under the North Star. It was open water.”
Extremely unlikely.
popesclimatetheory: The Chinese mapped the Arctic during this same time period, using ships to sail in the open Arctic Ocean. The Chinese sailed to the spot under the North Star. It was open water.
I doubt that. Do you have links or references that we can read?
Chinese had from time-to-time world class science, exploration, sailing, astronomical observatories, and manufacturing, but your claim requires substantiation.
@ Matthew R Marler
you want a reference
Read “1421” The Year China Discovered America, by Gavin Menzies
start on page 355 and read the next few pages to the end of that section.
I do think this is a great book. I recommend it very highly.
I especially find the section about Longitude very interesting.
Start on page 363 and read Chapter VI. It is a very short chapter.
You should be able to borrow this book from a Library and read this little bit there. I recommend the whole book.
the Vikings went across the Denmark Strait to Greenland.
The Vikings did not walk, they used ships.
Rgates
I did look at the kinnard graph in some detail for my article. Lucifer described some of the inherent problems but as I said above kinnard followed the hockey stick version of events which lacks credibility.
For what ts worth I’ve never been convinced by Menzies Chinese theory. There are various web sites that specifically debunk it. I would like to see more evidence but the Menzies team seemed reluctant to divulge it when I asked them for it some five Years ago.
Tonyb
Menzes is a complete crackpot.
Right Tonyb
Got any cite that shows the vikings were in Greenland anywhere north of the same latitude as Iceland?
You know where all the Viking settlements in Greenland were, right, around the southern tip of Greenland much south of Iceland.
I could show you a map but what good would it do?
Got any cite that shows they were in the actual Arctic Ocean.
Please
Upernavik, well north of Arctic Circle, looks like the limit for Greenland. Really, how far north were they expected to go?
Inuit may have traded goods further north but 72+ degrees looks like the northern limit of settlement. Who knows what the Norse were doing erecting cairns and runestones that far north, but they did. Disko Island and other places within the Arctic Circle were frequented for hunting and fishing by the Viks, though one doubts there was any real estate boom in the area. There still isn’t. Interesting evidence of a Norse presence well north in the Canadian Arctic – but you can imagine how popular that research isn’t in the present academic climate.
I dare say Greenland settlement died for a complex of reasons, everything from exhaustion of wood and soil to plague and Basque pirates. Oddly, there’s one major and obvious reason we’re not supposed to mention any more.
popesclimatetheory: Read “1421” The Year China Discovered America, by Gavin Menzies
If that is the evidence, I’ll pass.
For what ts worth I’ve never been convinced by Menzies Chinese theory. There are various web sites that specifically debunk it.
I read the book. it seems reasonable to me. I have not found the web sites that debunk it. I have heard about them. Please provide the links.
I looked both sides over. These are old forgotten far off things, and travels long ago. The Chinese were good navigators and traders over much of their known oceans. Surely they’d have records of the Arctic had they been there.
Heh, years ago I hoped for cricket chirp counts as a temperature record.
====================
Surely they’d have records of the Arctic had they been there.
The Chinese destroyed their ships and their records after lightning struck the palace and burned their new forbidden city.
They went from the most advanced people in the world, at that time, back into the dark ages.
Some of the maps they made did get into the hands of people in Europe, but the credit was not given to the Chinese. Old maps exist and no one else could have produced them. They even got the longitudes right before accurate clocks were developed, centuries later. Read about how they did that.
Read the book and judge. The websites that debunk the book may be wrong.
Heads or Tails (Antarctic Sea Ice Hits A New Record)?
http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/typo3temp/pics/dc9cd9b433.jpg?w=400
Side stepping for the moment all the assumptions in ‘Reconstructed’, let’s consider:
Given the clear dynamic where anthropogenic forcing impacts the Arctic so strongly
Which dynamic is that?
I was interested to read in the IPCC reports that radiative forcing over the polar regions is less than radiative forcing elsewhere.
That means the Arctic Amplification would have to come from ‘dynamics’, not radiative forcing and it would have to occur just to catch up with the deficit in radiative forcing at the poles relative to the global mean.
Given the messiness and nonlinearity of dynamics, it is anything but clear.
I would suggest you do a simple Google Scholar search of “arctic response global warming” and read for a few days before making any more comments about the effects of global warming on the Arctic. Really.
@ R Gates of course a Google search is going to turn up alarmist stuff promoted by the alarmists and the media.
You must look beyond the consensus to find true correct answers.
Consensus is head buried in the sand.
Real science is always skeptical.
“@ R Gates of course a Google search is going to turn up alarmist stuff promoted by the alarmists and the media”
Yes, we must only rely on sources approved by Heartland or the State of Texas. We know that the majority of climate scientists are alarmist robots controlled by the MSM, right?
@ R Gates
We know that the majority of consensus climate scientists follow the money, right?
Yes, Heartland Scientists are really good references. They are not a consensus bunch. They have different theories and opinions. They are really skeptical scientists.
The State of Texas has some really good scientists and some Alarmist Climate People. I suspect most states have both.
The consensus people were invited to the Climate Change Conference we had in July and none of them came.
There were 66 scientists from all over the world and not one consensus Climate Person was willing to present and defend his or her theory.
“The consensus people were invited to the Climate Change Conference we had in July and none of them came.”
____
None of them are apparently willing to or desperate enough to throw their careers away or waste time with a lot of nonsense.
Sorry for your bitterness, RG.
===================
@ R Gates
“None of them are apparently willing to or desperate enough to throw their careers away…………”
Bingo! We have a winner!
“sorry for your bitterness”
Heh. I hear they have sympathy cards now for excessive bitterness.
R. Gates, aka The Bitter Warmist.
R. Gates: I would suggest you do a simple Google Scholar search of “arctic response global warming” and read for a few days before making any more comments about the effects of global warming on the Arctic. Really.
Before I do that, a question: How does the reduction in ice cover in the Arctic change the rate of non-radiative transfer of energy, sensible and latent, from the sea surface? For example, as summer ice cover declines (as it has since the 70s), has the summer evaporation of water from the surface increased? As you wrote, most of the energy for melting the ice comes from currents, and if they melt more ice now because they are warmer than they were decades ago, do they also evaporate more water? (obviously, the effects would not necessarily be proportionate, because of the different latent heats involved in the two phase transitions.)
Confusing a google count of papers on Arctic responses to so-called global warming is to confuse an echo with a chorus.
R. Gates | October 15, 2014 at 3:08 pm |
‘“@ R Gates of course a Google search is going to turn up alarmist stuff promoted by the alarmists and the media”
Yes, we must only rely on sources approved by Heartland or the State of Texas. We know that the majority of climate scientists are alarmist robots controlled by the MSM, right?’
It isn’t wise for a warming alarmist to admit the truth about the “alarmist robots”. I thought you were supposed to deny any factual statements about climate or the global warming movement and plead “consensus”…
I looked at the Kinnard paper.
Repeat after Kinnard: “extensive uncertainties remain”
The proxies are not of sea ice ( the evidence of which disappears ) but temperature, and are widely and irregularly scatter, many far from the Arctic, and include biologics ( tree rings ):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7374/images/nature10581-f1.2.jpg
Randy just love the reconstruction!
Doesn’t match up very well with the studies cited here. Note that the study MD99 2275 was used in your paper and appears to be an outlier.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n6/fig_tab/ncomms1901_F5.html
The key word here is “Reconstructed”
The Vikings moved into the Arctic and the Chinese mapped the Arctic.
The “Reconstruction” is clearly another false “upside down” hockey stick. The Arctic opens in every warm period.
Sea ice does not provide ice for long term core studies.
Reconstructions are based on theory and opinions, not data.
Different people look at the same data and come up with different theories and opinions.
I am always skeptic of hockey sticks.
Go feed it to the IPCC, they may buy it once, but after that, the real skeptic scientists would tear it apart.
I assume the plot uses proxy data. Which leads me to wonder if they used land data, and what’s the resolutio? I ask because lately I have seen too many unreliable papers and data in fields I know about first hand. So I wonder just how this was accomplished?
RGates, your Kinnard chart has been debunked in several ways, several times. As bad as Mann’s hockey stick. Try to do better with actual facts. My essay Northwest Passage in the forthcoming book provides some. Climate Reason has provided many others..
Historical record dismissed as ‘anecdotal’ as in mere chat
when it’s so much more than that, archeological findings,
farmers’ almanacs, shipping records, long term CET etc
temperature record indicating no Hockey Stick CO 2 knob
unprecedented warming.
This posted by Lucy Skywalker, @ CE 12/04/13
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/Arctic.htm
“RGates, your Kinnard chart has been debunked in several ways, several times”
He literally doesn’t care, Rud. LIke all warmists, he’s absolutely impervious to counter-arguments. It’s really quite amazing.
If the trend in both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent were down, then “global” energy accumulation would be the most likely “cause”. Since they are out of phase, at least some portion of the Arctic melt is likely due to something other than a common “Global” forcing. I believe Black Carbon, has been considered a larger than anticipated factor on Arctic ice and snow melt than Antarctic. Black Carbon along with other factors that reduce snow albedo which are more likely in the northern high latitudes than southern should at least get an honorable mention before leaping into the Human Carbon Volcano.
I believe that the “enourmous” energy accumulation once converted into temperature anomaly not only doesn’t explain the variation between hemisphere sea ice changes, it also doesn’t explain the “unprecidented” Arctic melt or the two points 2013 and 2014 that are missing from your frigthening graphic.
https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/comparison_to_gaspe2.png
There has been a bit of discussion on the reliability of Arctic temperature reconstructions that might apply to your peer reviewed “evidence”.
That graph looks like part of a Waldham presentation- did it come from his recent presentation?
Mr. Gates…
The chart is not current or accurate.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/schmitt_sea_ice2.gif
http://osisaf.met.no/quicklooks/sie_graphs_new/osisaf_nh_iceextent_seasonal.png
The average sea ice extent – looks pretty average.
This year’s average extent will be over 11 million km2. Last years average was over 11 million km2. The chart of Mr. Gates is simply wrong.
The sea ice in the arctic has been increasing in volume for about 2 years. It might be recovering or it might just be torturing CAGW aficionados. Time will tell.
Given the close correlation between latent heat of fusion and net energy in the Arctic, this excellent animation of sea ice volume gives one of the indications of the total energy in the Arctic. In the animation, the smaller this ice cube gets, the greater the net energy in the system:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=nuKVk1gMJDg
Yes, around the same amount of energy is absorbed by the melting ice over six months of the year as that released by the re-freezing of the ice over the next six months.
…in fact, enough energy to heat the equivalent mass of water by 80 deg C!
Some points:
1. 1000 years ago Vikings were growing wheat and cattle on Greenland soil and navigating the North West passage in wooden boats – not icebreakers with cargo capacity.
2. The arctic sea ice hit a maximum during the 70’s that was at least 10-15% above average.
3. The 1880s and 1940s were about as bad as today.
4. According to NODC data the 0-2000 meter layer of Arctic ocean is cooling – which means there is less energy in the system.
And a final point:
The Arctic only receives an average of about 48W/m2 solar and loses about 150 W/m2 for a net average loss of about 100 W/m2. Until the ice/snow melts in the summer the arctic basically receives no net solar radiation. The lack of atmospheric water vapor in an area that is black (no sun) half of the year turns the arctic into a huge radiator. A lack of insulating sea ice vastly increases energy loss since open water loses much more energy by convection and latent heat loss.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/graphics/multi6.gif
R. Gates:
“Given the close correlation between latent heat of fusion and net energy in the Arctic, this excellent animation of sea ice volume gives one of the indications of the total energy in the Arctic. In the animation, the smaller this ice cube gets, the greater the net energy in the system:”
In view of the above discussion I’m not sure what point you are trying make. Delayed regrowth of arctic sea ice cools the planet.
Downright thermostatic. Now, attach the brine densitometo and open the switch to the oceanic oscillations. Dayuum, it’s alive.
===================
R. Gates:
“Given the close correlation between latent heat of fusion and net energy in the Arctic, this excellent animation of sea ice volume gives one of the indications of the total energy in the Arctic. In the animation, the smaller this ice cube gets, the greater the net energy in the system:”
In view of the above discussion I’m not sure what point you are trying make. Delayed regrowth of arctic sea ice cools the planet.
—–
Uh, all that mass of water that is no longer ice represents a net energy gain to the system. This net loss of ice has occurred globally, and no, the growth in Antarctic sea ice has not come even close to making up for net ice mass loss globally.
R. Gates, “Uh, all that mass of water that is no longer ice represents a net energy gain to the system. This net loss of ice has occurred globally, and no, the growth in Antarctic sea ice has not come even close to making up for net ice mass loss globally.”
Not really. the open water would mean a net gain in surface temperature provided the surface air temperature is lower than the SST which is normally the case, but since the atmosphere has lower specific heat capacity and can lose energy to space more easily, it would be a net reduction in energy of the system. Sea Ice insulates the ~-2 C water from the average ~-30 C air. How much energy was lost with a major SSW event again?
Capt. D,
The insulation that ice provides is a completely separate issue from the energy added to the system to change ice to water. Globally, there is less net ice on the planet, representing a net addition to the energy in the climate system. Net additions to climate system energy is the bottom line result for increasing GHG’s. But you know all this.
Regarding SSW events, and the loss of energy from the system, I have yet to see a reliable estimate, and more very general guesstimates, but they certainly release a great deal more than several large typhoons combined.
R. Gates, “The insulation that ice provides is a completely separate issue from the energy added to the system to change ice to water. ”
As long as the ice recovers to about the same maximum, the latent fusion energy would be about a wash. Ocean area for evaporation thought is a much bigger deal.
For the THC, the changes in ice variation and the shape of the ice has another of those not very well known impacts.
PA: The Arctic only receives an average of about 48W/m2 solar and loses about 150 W/m2 for a net average loss of about 100 W/m2. Until the ice/snow melts in the summer the arctic basically receives no net solar radiation. The lack of atmospheric water vapor in an area that is black (no sun) half of the year turns the arctic into a huge radiator. A lack of insulating sea ice vastly increases energy loss since open water loses much more energy by convection and latent heat loss.
thank you for that. Do you have a reference?
We can see that heat is also going into the earth and not just the oceans, through the use of Boreholes.
http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu/climate/core.html
What is especially interesting is that we can see this has been happening for some 300 or 400 years
Tonyb
R Gates:
Or representing increased or changed flow of energy from warmer areas, representing little or no addition to the energy in the climate system.
Given that the energy required to melt a mass of ice would be enough to raise the temperature of the same mass of water by 80 deg C, the latter seems to be the very much more likely explanation.
“As long as the ice recovers to about the same maximum, the latent fusion energy would be about a wash.”
—–
But Arctic sea ice has not been recovering to the same volume, but has a shown a long-term significant decline. Volume is far more important for latent heat calculations.
Arctic Sea Ice Volume at minimum has practically doubled in two years. Anyone know what it’s doing the rest of the year?
===================================
R. Gates, “But Arctic sea ice has not been recovering to the same volume, but has a shown a long-term significant decline. Volume is far more important for latent heat calculations.”
It is recovering to the same general extent. For volume to increase would require clean snow and less pollution. Even then it may never recover because the baseline was a Little Ice Age that had its greatest impact in the NH. So instead of wishing for something that hopefully never happen again, try looking at the current heat flows, unless you have some devious plan to anesthetize the Russians for a decade or two. They own the biggest ice breaker fleet and don’t mind melting sea ice for fun and profit.
Been to the Arctic R. Gates? Gives a person a different perspective on things.
See this for another perspective yet. No what one would have imagined. http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/TV+Shows/The+National/ID/2560306789/
Dr Curry,
When considering changes in albedo due to melting, pools, etc, is there also consideration that the Sun is very low in the sky and much of the incoming Solar is reflected off water as glare?
Second, I’ve long wondered if the arctic melts as a response to increased amounts of warm water getting pumped in from the tropics, allowing this “hot” water to cool directly to space. This would delay the melting to being between the warming and cooling phase in the stadium wave.
My rough calculations show open arctic water being energy positive say 6 hr’s per day, for a few months a year (at most), the rest of the time it’s dumping very large amounts of energy to space, unless it’s cloudy. Overall I think it’s a energy sink.
Yes, we account for solar zenith angle effects and the effect of diffuse radiation (scattering by clouds) in our albedo model. See my 1992 paper where I addressed these issues (the story hasn’t changed qualitatively with time)
Somewhat OT, an update on the real uncertainty problem with AGW:
http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
Lockheed is claiming to have invented a small, viable, powerful fusion reactor.
“Crucially, by being “compact,” Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations. It may even revive the concept of large, nuclear-powered aircraft that virtually never require refueling—ideas of which were largely abandoned more than 50 years ago because of the dangers and complexities involved with nuclear fission reactors.”
It would be nice to leave all that coal in the ground.
It will be fun to watch who opposes this ;)
Hint, it won’t be the Kochs.
I am sure the rationalizations to oppose it are already buzzing and whirring in the green left’s heads.
JeffN: Lockheed is claiming to have invented a small, viable, powerful fusion reactor.
they claim to have a design in that in 5 years of iterative design-build-test “generations” will demonstrate that all of the physics is correct, and will be capable of operating without input for 10 seconds. That’s really something if they can do it. If in another 5 years they have operating modules for the market, as they are aiming for, they’ll have lots of investors and copycats.
It is always fun to read about new fusion devices. I am hopeful that I shall live long enough to read about one actually working.
At one point the article refers to it as an “invention” but I think you make a good point that this is far from working prototype at this point.
It is interesting that it’s Lockheed and not some basement lab and they seem to have announced some sort of discovery, invention, theory, that moves things along.
But that’s why I headlined this “the real uncertainty problem.” If you’re in charge of investing a few hundred billion over the next decade or so in energy projects with 30-40 year lifespans, ya might want to be keeping an eye on this and other nuclear research. Because it’s a given that the future will demand cheap and plentiful energy and it’s a race to see what will accomplish that.
I wrote about nuclear rather extensively in the forthcoming book, Blowing Smoke: essays on energy and climate. Both strongmforce mediated fission and fusion. Covered weak force mediated LENR in the last book.
Today’s Lockheed announcement signals two things IMO. First, their T4 high beta magnetic confinement experiments worked as predicted last year in the Solve for X talk. That is a very significant step. Second, they have the basic patents on the breakthrough filed. So inviting in ‘partners’ is at much reduced future commercial risk.
But there is a long way to go. Cryogenic Superconducting magnets operating in close proximity to hot fusing plasma is one obvious issue. Neutron embrittlement of the steel vessel is another. Bothnalsomissues discussed in re ITER.
I would have thought the Navy would have already been all over this if the road to commercialization was reasonably clear. The appeal for national lab partners suggests it isn’t.
JeffN: It is interesting that it’s Lockheed and not some basement lab and they seem to have announced some sort of discovery, invention, theory, that moves things along.
After reading that article, I would not want to bet against Lockeed being successful. OTOH, they also have their failures, and the engineering challenges are great.
Actually I would bet a decent bit of money against lockheed. In spite of their cumulative achievements you can generally bet that every claim they have needs about 20 added years and doubling/tripling of costs. In fact that is a good general rule for defence contractors, and their ilk since the second world war. The reason is that the system incentives them to make embarrassingly optimistic projections, because once they get approved, they have no incentive to follow through and they have huge political support (they are brilliant at it actually). The ridiculous video they posted says nothing at all except the telling remark about a high-risk high-reward investment!
From the Nick Breeze blog post linked to above:
“Schmidt’s view is based much more on modelling data and theory, which is viewed with suspicion by some, due to the inability of the models to keep pace in real-time with the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice. The argument goes that if you cannot get the model to reproduce what is happening today, how can you draw conclusions of what the sea ice will do in 10, 20 or 100 years?”
So climate models are viewed with suspicion by some climate scientists? So much for that vaunted consensus. Please note: Breeze is a global warming true believer.
To Professor Curry, thank you for linking to the slides from the talks.
Judith audios are available when you click on some of the names of the speakers listed on the linked page.
For example click on Marika Hollands name and a mp3 link appears. Same is true f,or others
I have a question. I listened to a few of the presentations. I get the sense that interannual variation aside that essentially modelled changes in the arctic are pretty much all forced and the uncertainty is around the magnitude of the impact of that forcing in terms of feedbacks etc? So again broadly speaking the expectation is decline (with a bit of noise) and the uncertainty is really is the rate of decline. Would that be a fair generalization of where the consensus is at?
The debate is less about whether their is a decline, than whether that decline is unprecedented in the last (say) 2000 years.
Neither surface-temperature analyses nor “stadium wave” models cannot speak to this question … but the paleo-data can.
The paleo-data speak plainly: Present rates of Arctic-warming are unprecedented.
Thank you for your thoughtful question HR!
Sometimes I envy you Fan. Planet-fan is black and white. Planet-reality contains shades of grey. When in doubt on planet-fan, all one needs to do is ask the Pope, or Hansen, or Naomi, or Wendell Berry since these individuals, near to god-like in their wisdom, know all and see all. In the case of the Pope, that’s pretty much literally so. On planet-reality, the pursuit of truth is painful, and arduous, and demanding. On planet-fan, there is only one kind of information…the information that is consistent with previously held beliefs. Any information that’s contrary to these beliefs are to be rejected with all possible haste, and with extreme prejudice. On planet-reality, one must entertain the unpleasant possibility that one’s beliefs might in fact be wrong.
Planet-fan is easy. Planet reality is hard.
Yes. This reality is difficult in that the scientific reality of climate-change exposes the scientific, economic, historical, and moral bankruptcy of market-fundamentalism.
*EVERYONE* appreciates *THAT*, eh pokerguy?
Everyone except the mainly older, mainly male, mainly white, mainly uninformed … and mainly angry! … cohort of committed market-fundamentalists, that is.
FOMD, what are you going to say if this announcement of compact fusion reactors brought to you courtesy of the free market pans out?
I hope it is a celebration something like V-E day, and not time spent sulking finding more rationalizations to hate the free markets.
FOMS is *ALREADY* saying “Welcome to the non-exclusive and GROWING! club of folks whose fusion reactors work GREAT … on paper” …
Needless to say, over the past 50 years, nobody has yet graduated to the far-more-exclusive club of folks whose fusion reactors work in practice.
Summary It is concerning (to FOMD) that Lockheed’s press release does not mention any breakthroughs in plasma simulation algorithms … because without reliable models, no-one’s design is likely to get much traction … plasma machines being too complicated and expensive for “cut-and-try” engineering to work very well.
Still, we *COULD* get lucky … and build a successful fusion machine whose detailed workings we’ll figure out later.
But in the past fifty years, plenty of folks have tried to be lucky … without success.
“Everyone except the mainly older, mainly male, mainly white, mainly uninformed … and mainly angry! … cohort of committed market-fundamentalists, that is.”‘
You make my point concerning planet-fan far better than I could possibly have made it myself. For that, I thank you.
Are you willing to consider the possibility that you are wrong about climate change and its impacts?
You are not, Joseph.
So even though the probability of success of this compact design may be just 5%, I don’t really know how to “calculate” such a probability, it’s still proposing some particular things and changes of the strategy that should be discussed using scientific arguments and the critics, even those related to plasma physics at famous universities, aren’t doing that. – Lubos Motl
I agree with Lubos on all points here FOMD.
But I never expect you to discuss any science that has a political dimension using scientific arguments.
Maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t. But saying it hasn’t happened in the past is no argument, it is more motivated sophistry.
That’s because the most useful discourse tempers science with engineering, mathematical analysis with common sense, the vigor of capital with the dignity of labor, and pragmatic utility with the quality of mercy.
A list of recommended works follows.
Advisory Precisely *NONE* of these works align with too-simple ideologies of the far-left communists and the far-right market-fundamentalists.
So let’s just leave the ideologues to enjoy their ignorance, while the STEM-world focuses upon pragmatic solutions, eh TJA?
Best wishes for enjoyable learning and rational discourse are extended to all Climate Etc readers!
@book{Barber:75, Author = {R. J. Barber}, Publisher = {Richard J. Barber Associates}, Title = {The Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1958--1974}, Year = 1975} @book{James-R.-Killian:1977fk, Author = {James R. Killian, Jr.}, Publisher = {{M}{I}{T} Press}, Title = {Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: a Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology}, Year = {1977}} @article{Ramo:84, Author = {R. Booton and S. Ramo}, Journal = {{IEEE} Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems}, Month = jul, Pages = {306--9}, Title = {The development of systems engineering}, Volume = {{AES}--20}, Year = 1984} @book{Johnson:2002ph, Author = {Stephen B. Johnson}, Publisher = {JHU Press}, Title = {The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs}, Year = {2002}} @book{Collins:04, Author = {H. M. Collins}, Publisher = {University of Chicago Press}, Title = {Gravity's Shadow : the Search for Gravitational Waves}, Year = 2004} @book{Venter:2007lq, Author = {J. Craig Venter}, Publisher = {Viking}, Title = {A {L}ife {D}ecoded}, Year = {2007}}Still no answer, same as you haven’t explained why 500=1500 or how numerical models of closed physical systems like a jet engine or a contained high energy plasma = numerical model of an natural system on the scale of our planet.
Fan’s a drone strike with an unacceptable rate of collateral casualties.
===============
“Are you willing to consider you might be wrong?”
Yes! A thousand times yes! In fact, I’ve already changed my mind once as I came to this discussion as a warmist. I remain ready and willing to change it again should the facts warrant.
HR,
Here’s a map of Arctic buoys and their subsequent paths:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/gifs/Drifts_thru_2006.gif
The released all the buoys in the ice pretty close to the North Pole.
Notice where the buoys went? The ice went with them.
This is not global warming metling ice, but motion of the sea ice to warmer, lower latitudes.
Here is the Navy’s nowcast of Arctic Sea Ice:
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticictn_nowcast_anim30d.gif
Notice where the thick ice is? Along the Canadian Archipelago?
Motion can explain where the ice is, temperature does not.
So even though the probability of success of this compact design may be just 5%, I don’t really know how to “calculate” such a probability, it’s still proposing some particular things and changes of the strategy that should be discussed using scientific arguments and the critics, even those related to plasma physics at famous universities, aren’t doing that. – Lubos Motl
I agree with Lubos on all points here FOMD.
But I never expect you to discuss any science that has a political dimension using scientific arguments.
Maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t. But saying it hasn’t happened in the past is no argument, it is more motivated sophistry.
Weird similarity in arctic ice area and 5 million year temperatures
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/slide5.png?w=1500&h=1125
http://cnx.org/resources/f015ada7caba7bc99f16d8ef2ab91b12/Picture%205.png
A slow gradual decrease followed by huge oscillationsbin a new regime
The large oscillations began with the closing of the Isthmus of Panama
Doc
No. The Central American Seaway (CAS) closed between 3.2 and 2.7 Myr. It’s important to understand that shoaling prior to closing occurred beginning as much as 5 Myr which began the major shift in equatorial ocean circulation toward the poles.
It’s not confirmed, but is believed that this established the Gulf Stream leading to the Northern Hemisphere glaciation (NHG), the build-up of the Laurentide and Scandinavian ice-sheets.
The large oscillations began ~1 Myr when the cycles shifted from 41 Kyr to 100 Kyr cycles. It is not known what caused this shift. Recent research indicates it may be related to increasing friction at the base of the ice sheets slowing ablation and allowing greater thicknesses. These thicker sheets then collapse more catastrophically. Also, warmer ocean temps seem to be associated with the thicker ice sheets. Lots of great new research on this very important aspect of unsettled science.
My own theory, looking at the graph Hans posted, is that the closing of Panama took roughly 2 Myr (from 3 Myr to 1 Myr) to reach it’s equilibrium climate response.
This type of geologic time frame, if representative of the actual time required to achieve equilibrium, is one reason why I think that CO2 sensitivity calculations based on less than a century of data all have to be *not even wrong*
“The Central American Seaway (CAS) closed between 3.2 and 2.7 Myr”
Draw a line on the graphic posted by Hans at 3 Myr and look at the before and after
Oh, OK. You meant the relatively moderate oscillations on Hans’ graph. The relatively large oscillations and longer glacials started ~1 Myr and their cause remain a big mystery.
For those who believe in Snowball Earth theory, it is interesting to note that based on climate models you won’t get a melting of the global ice cover without atmospheric CO levels of 130,000 ppm.
Judith – you say “The stadium wave hypothesizes that the Arctic regional sea ice max/min are out of phase with the hemispheric warming/cooling periods, with the minima lagging the hemispheric warming period and occurring in the early half of the hemispheric cooling period.”. At the end of a warming period and the start of a cooling period the water is still warm so the ice is still melting. Obviously ice minimum would occur some time after the start of cooling (think first derivative of a sine wave). So the stadium wave hypothesis isn’t exactly adding much in this case. NB. I’m not saying it’s wrong. However, I do think that the stadium wave has not been established – yes, things do appear to occur in a certain sequence, but it doesn’t mean that each step is caused by the previous step as in a stadium wave.
I haven’t heard much discussion of Dr, Curry’s stadium wave theory. Or possibly you are more interested in discussions of the uncertainty monster. Where nothing is really known and this provides you the vehicle for questioning the science as a whole.
OK Joseph, What do you think is certain?
Dr. Curry-
Does your Arctic albedo model include and differentiate the anthropogenic effects of black carbon (soot), and might that black carbon forcing be stronger than the GHG forcing in the Arctic, and also explain the difference between Arctic and Antarctic melting?
I have asked this question many times; what is the 14C age of the various CH4 reservoirs that have been identified as climate disruptors.
DocMartyn, please verify for yourself that nowadays 14C is created in the atmosphere, from nitrogen nuclei, by cosmic rays (for awhile some was made by H-bombs, but fortunately those days are past).
Not much 14C is made in coal-seams, because (a) they’re buried, and (b) they don’t contain much nitrogen.
Once made, 14C decays with a half-life of 5,730 years… essentially immediately relative to geological time-scales.
In consequence All molecules originating from fossil carbon … including coal, oil, gas, and synthetic organic molecules … contain (to a good approximation) no 14C at all, and thus carbon-date as “infinitely old”. This class includes the three main carbon-containing greenhouse gas molecules, namely CO2, CH4, and CFCs.
It is a pleasure to answer your question DocMartyn!
Go play in traffic you Fraud.
Doc,
That is actually a difficult question, it seems clathrates are very deficient in C-14 cause they are older than wetland sources and I would guess that permafrost somewhere in between.
here is the best source I could find this afternoon
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2009/April/23040902.asp
Dr. Curry, what are your thoughts on Antarctic record sea ice? Related question is should the trend of record Antarctic sea ice continue, will there be measurable effects on Southern Hemisphere weather?
Is the overall, annual, heat flux into space greater for a unit of arctic ice or for arctic sea water, in the same local?
I would expect water with an emissivity of 1 will emit about 319 w/m2 and ice will emit less than 20% of this. Has anyone looked at this as you approach the pole?
DocMartyn commented
I’ve done some S-B calculations based on a range of temps. 80% of 239W/m^2 incoming solar for 25% of the day vs a 32F surface radiating to a -58F clear sky (which I see regularly at 41 N, 81W).
4 times more energy is radiated away compared to incoming.
That was roughly my back of the envelope guestimate; do we have a global lat/long incoming flux calculator that covers the seasons on line anywhere?
DocMartyn commented
http://www.powerfromthesun.net/Book/chapter02/Image14.jpg
and
http://profhorn.meteor.wisc.edu/wxwise/radiation/sunplot6.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissivity
The emissivity of ice at thermal wavelengths is apparently 0.97 vs 0.96 for water. Both ice and water are essentially “black” at thermal wavelengths.
Ice has a higher conductivity than water, 1.6 W/m K vs 0.6, but the amount of convection in ice is much less than water.
http://www.whoi.edu/science/po/pickart/Online_pubs/labsea_heatfluxes_v10_nfc.pdf
http://www.agu.org/books/gm/v085/GM085p0399/GM085p0399.pdf
Under windy conditions open sea water can lose up to 600 w/m2. 100-200 W/m2 is typical for the Wendell Sea at 75° S.
According to the Weddell sea paper there is a 5-10 watt transfer from ice due to latent heat flux.
A ballpark estimate for the maximum heat loss from the sea through 2 meters of ice with air temps of -40°C is about 30 W/m2. So ice is pretty effective insulation.
Surface ocean temperatures along the West Coast have a strong influence on nearby land weather, affecting air temperatures, and they are closely linked with daily fog coverage. These sea-surface temperatures are influenced by winds. When winds are strong, they can churn over the water, sucking cool water up from the ocean’s depths. They also shape ocean currents, which can shift water between polar and tropical climates. The winds can affect rates of evaporation, which cool an ocean in much the same way as sweating can cool the skin, affecting the amount of heat that moves between the sky and the ocean.
These ocean winds, in turn, are affected by variations in natural cycles that manifest in changes at the surface of the ocean and immediately over it. The most influential cycles are the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is a mighty cycle that typically takes 20 to 30 years to switch between its warm and cool phases.
While Mass was not involved with the new study, his prior research reached similar conclusions regarding a strong influence of Pacific Ocean cycles on changes in annual snowpack levels in the Cascade mountains. Other studies have linked these oceanic cycles with earlier snowmelts and warmer winters in California since the 1940s, and with a decline in California’s coastal fog since the early 20th century.
The new research built on those prior findings. “This was an effort to try and refine our understanding of the causes, or trends and variations, in the climate of the Eastern Pacific and West Coast states,” said Nate Mantua, now a NOAA fisheries scientist, the other author of the newly published paper. Mantua and Johnstone compared sea surface temperatures since 1900 with sea-level air pressure observations, which can be used as proxies for wind speed measurements.
The pair reported finding a “strong” correlation between sea-level pressures, or wind speeds, and sea-surface temperatures. They found evidence that changes in atmospheric pressure fields preceded changes in ocean temperatures by several months.
They wrote that their comparisons of sea-level pressures, sea-surface temperatures and land-based air temperatures provided “consistent evidence for strong” regulation of temperatures by changes in ocean cycles “from monthly to century time scales.” http://www.climatecentral.org/news/west-coast-warming-natural-variability-18067
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/arctic-temps.png
Globally – the temperature increase from1944 to 1998 was 0.4 degrees C. It seems quite unlikely that all of that was anthropogenic. Or that a rise of 0.07 degrees C/decade is all that alarming.
Judith, signing off with an “x”, eh? Does this indicate a change in your relationship with your CE followers?
Not joshua, surely? )
Hah! I’d missed that. I like it. Could “SWAK” be next?
Judith-
Apart from the general anthro vs. natural disussion of sea ice, I’m always wondering: has anyone seriously considered/studied the possible anthropogenic contribution from NON-CO2 sources (black carbon soot/aerosol deposits on the ice surface, increasing the albedo, melting the ice faster in the sun)? Is it possible that is signficant, has that been ruled out as insignficant, has it been entirely ignored? Does IPCC cover this in their reports? This would apply to glacier melt as well.
Hmmm
Black carbon/soot is often discussed and has been known about since the first scientific arctic expeditions in the 1820’s. It undoubtedly has an effect on ice melt although it is difficult to see it precisely quantified anywhere or who is to blame. In the 1820’s it was thought to be mainly due to the US.
I think most here are agreed that it is low hanging fruit that could be plucked without anyone from either ‘side’ complaining.
I am not sure however if there is an active programme to deal with it or if it is considered ‘;serious’ enough to warrant expensive action.
tonyb
Probably a harder sell than one might think.
Check the first figure:
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_Ch08SM_FINAL.pdf
US and European black carbon emissions peaked a century ago and are now minimal. BC is now a matter for China/India/South America/Africa and the politics of that reality are probably ugly.
Of course, CO2 emissions are a shrinking percentage from the old developed world and more and more from the developing regions.
Good for them.
Lucifer
As you rightly point out black carbon (and co2) are becoming problems that are outside of our direct control, although the US could do more on the latter of course.( I make no comment on its cost)
There have been several excellent Arctic programmes on our TV recently and the amount of clack carbon, even at the bottom of the deep ice canyons was astonishing.
I remember it was my job to put the cold soot from our open fireplace on to our icy paths many years ago and it cleared them rapidly.
The stuff MUST be a problem but how big it is difficult to quantify as we are so fixated on co2.
tonyb
The reason Tony probably classified black soot as low-hanging fruit is that as the second largest forcing (? Something that was published last year) it is orders of magnitude easier to address than CO2, arguably the largest forcing. If it costs pennies to address black soot and megabucks to address CO2, well, you have to start somewhere. C’mon Mosh, Tony is making very good sense here.
ABC
Anything but co2
Mosh
So you think we should just ignore Black carbon/soot as any sort of contributory cause or problem?
I am sure I have seen you arguing otherwise but that could have been another Steven Mosher of course
tonyb
ABCAnything but co2
That the converse logical trap – it’s ALL Because of CO2
ABC Always Be C02.
Yawn.
Andrew
Come back with your snark when you know something Mosh.
“So you think we should just ignore Black carbon/soot as any sort of contributory cause or problem?
I am sure I have seen you arguing otherwise but that could have been another Steven Mosher of course”
1. Of course you should not ignore it.
2. If you came home to your house burned down and found a burn
pattern consistent with flamable liquid being poured in the room
where the fire started, would you be insisting that the investigators
also look at lightning as a cause? or would you say, based on the
best evidence, it looks like arson, and you will PRESUME that
its arson until someone can prove that it was lightening. And further,
you dont want the police delaying their search for an arsonist. You want them acting on the best evidence while of course someone will
go on and eliminate lightening as a cause. But in the meantime you
have evidence that points at an arsonist.. it could be something else,
but you would not delay the police while you carried on with your skeptical due diligence.
Can we ignore black carbon as cause? Well when it comes to the ice loss as a result of bottom melt, probably. When it comes to ice that is lost through transport ( through the fram straight for example ), probably.
When it comes to top melt, you probably should not ignore it.
However, the argument you and others make is not that we should also include black carbon in the explanation. Your argument is different.
Your argument is that the warming of the ocean, the warming of the atmosphere, the warming of fresh waters dumping into the arctic has nothing to do with ice melt. Your argument and those who agree with you explain the loss by more ice breakers breaking up the ice. Or you argue that there nothing to explain because its happened before.Or on more generous days, you might say that some of it , maybe a tiny portion,could be down to warming.
Mosh
I point out that it has happened before but when have you seen me use the other arguments?
All I originally pointed out was that black soot was low hanging fruit. It’s you who has construced other arguments based on things I never said.
Tonyb
==> “It’s you who has construced other arguments based on things I never said.”
Mosher? No way. He’d never do that.
So tony you accept that ice melts for causes other than black soot?
List the causes.
One trick in handling people who refuse to make an argument is to attribute an argument to them and then watch.
So: List the causes that You think should be looked at. Black soot is one. List the others.
Steven Mosher: ABC
Anything but co2
Everything for which there is a good case. And everything for which there is a good remedy, such as flooding and soot, should be addressed first.
You are always talking about “the science”. Where is the “the science” that increases in CO2 have been dangerous to date? (frequency of destructive weather events is about the same, crop yields and natural vegetative growth have increased, rainfall has increased slightly) Where is the “the science” that CO2 in future will cause rapid, destructive climate change? (maybe in 150 years a mean temp increase of about 1.25K, and probable increase in the rate of the hydrological cycle ) Where is “the science” that dramatic reductions in fossil fuel use by humans will make a difference? note, by the way, that this is where “it might all be natural variation”, despite not being a quantitative explanation, might have an actionable consequence if true, namely that actions to reduce CO2 will produce no benefit.
There are at least 10 threats to civilization that are more of a “clear and present” danger than CO2, including:
recurrent droughts;
recurrent floods;
Ebola, E68, Chikungunya and other potential pandemic virus;
resistance of TB, HIV/AIDS, STDs and pneumonia to drugs;
ISIS and other expanding Islamist groups like Boko Haram;
The growing Islamist sections of European cities that are implementing strict Sharia Codes;
chronic inflation;
uncontrollable agricultural pests.
add in your favorites.
Anti-intellectual though it may sound to you, “anything but CO2” right now looks like a better bet than “CO2”.
Autobiography isn’t relevant to this discussion of science, but I might add, in response to a question that appears here from time to time, that I have changed my overall evaluation of the threat of CO2 in the last 5 years of reading. The case against CO2 is full of liabilities; if there is any bad consequence due in future to future CO2 it will take at least a century to produce an effect large enough to matter; there is no case that reducing human fossil fuel use will produce a climate benefit sooner than it produces a fuel benefit.
This comment from March 21 2005 can be extended/modified to be applicable to sea ice.
Sorry mosh, but I’m not interested in doing homework or falling for one of your ‘tricks’ so why don’t you invent some causes on my behalf?
I’ll just nod silently if you List any I agree with
Tonyb
Tony.
Unless you come to the table with a list of causes you are willing to consider, then you are not interested in understanding or having a dialog.
period.
Your aim is something different. Who knows what. All that it is clear is that you are not interested in understanding. Not interested in sharing methods. Not interested in testing your ideas in anything resembling a
“scientific” practice.
Like I said, you are part of the ABC crowd–Anything but C02 –unless and untill you distance yourself from them by listing what factors you consider important.
Mosh
You are really making a mountain out of a molehill just because I won’t do homework for you to mark. If you go back to the original question you will note he was specifically suggesting looking at NON co 2 Sources. That was why I was discussing them.
I am on topic whilst you have gone off at a tangent.
Tonyb
Attribution, she’s a bitch.
Puff, the Magic Climate,
Lived by the CO2.
Nature turned and bit him, someplace rich.
==================================
Ooops, insert:
Don’t know how just scratch that itch.
for the second line.
Then one came through a vortex of lacunae from the past.
==================
C’mon Steve–Tony wasn’t the one who labeled black suit the second largest forcing agent–it was scientists from the consensus. If it is the second largest, why should he be forced to list lesser contributors? (Warm water currents, mechanical breakage into smaller and meltable components, changes in wind patterns and…oh, yeah! CO2!)
Looking at my comment, I forgot to also mention pin-striped suits…
Tom
We talk about co2 constantly but very rarely about black carbon so it would ne nice if Mosh could have got away from his fixation on the former and contributed more on the latter. Its an interesting subject that doesn’t get explored enough.
As I say its low hanging fruit whereas co2 is way up there at the top of a swaying tree and difficult to tackle, even if we can identify that its a fruit worth pickling.
tonyb
Matthew
In Your 2.18 you listed some major threats.
I would add in malicious electronic hacking at individual and state level which if directed at infrastructure such as electricity would bring us down in days as money, energy, food etc all became tied up in an electronic tangle.
In this context I would add in a Carrington event the last of which affected us peripherally as we were only at the start of the electronic age.
According to Leif, it is certain that we will have another and it would be devastating. If so should we be putting as many resources into combatting it as we do fighting co2? We do seem to have become fixated on the latter when there are far more things we need to worry about including those in your excellent list.
tonyb
Max Anacker pointed out, @ CE Goldilock’s Thread,
23/12/12, 1000pm is the absolute maximum warming
we would reach from human CO2 emissions. Not enough
carbon from all the remaining fossil fuels to get us even to
3 degrees c warming let alone any doomsday 5 degrees.
https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Logarithm++of+CO2+ClimateEtc+Max+Anacker
The Iceberg in the Gray Flannel Soot.
==========
This page might be of interest.
http://transport.nilu.no/projects/rapsifact
“Recently, awareness has grown that air pollution also affects Arctic climate. Climate change is proceeding fastest in the Arctic, and while most of the predicted future change is due to long-lived greenhouse gases and feedback processes in the Arctic, it is likely that air pollution also has a warming effect on the Arctic (see review by Law and Stohl, 2007). Several processes all go into the same direction: BC aerosols are most effective in the Arctic in absorbing solar radiation because of the high reflectivity of the underlying snow and ice surface; deposition of BC on snow/ice reduces the surface albedo, potentially a particularly powerful effect leading to enhanced snow/ice melting (Hansen and Nazarenko, 2004); a recently discovered indirect effect of aerosols produces increased longwave emissivity of thin Arctic clouds, leading to surface warming (Garrett and Zhou, 2006); and ozone causes a larger radiative forcing in the Arctic than anywhere else (Shindell et al., 2006). These effects were recently discussed in a workshop in New York as reported by Quinn et al. (2007b). While the magnitude of these effects is highly uncertain, their combined impact on Arctic surface temperatures and snow/ice melting could be of a comparable magnitude as that of the current long-lived greenhouse gas forcing. It might be the best (and perhaps the only feasible) short-term strategy to slow down climate change in the Arctic. On the other hand, reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, while essential in the long term, would have no immediate effect on the Arctic climate because of their long lifetime.”
Capt’nDallas
Thank you for the article.
What seemed important to know was the impact of Eastern Europe (mainly Russian) agricultural burning plumes and releases from the oil and gas industry (Gaspom). Data collection was to take place after 2007.
I wonder if you have any further information on findings?
Rih008
Not anything significant. The Transsiberian railroad though runs close to the Arctic circle and just about all efforts to keep the road open would have had an impact on snow fields. Russian data prior to 1936 is just about non-existant which makes it tough. The Virgin Lands Campaign in the 50s and 60s would have also had a huge impact especially the dust bowls and drain down of the Aral sea. Erosion and smoke/BC with the right atmospheric circulation should have a major impact on sea ice and snow field extent in addition to the millions of acres of new argiculture improperly attempted.
Since keeping routes open as long as possible is a big deal in Russia, they have about the primere snow removal and ice breaking technologies which would have a huge impact on sea ice stability and the number of days snow fields last. I am sure the Russian energy projects have an impact, but it might be small compared to keeping the trade routes open.
All this isn’t a real research focus since land use change is a “negative” forcing right?
We hear every once in a while from alarmists that Lake Champlain is not freezing over like it used to. They date the time of the change to just about the introduction of a couple new ice-breaking ferry routes. Never mention them in the analysis.
“They date the time of the change to just about the introduction of a couple new ice-breaking ferry routes. Never mention them in the analysis.”
Right and they never consider the ice breaking to keep ports open or the northern sea route open as long as possible. I would think that would make it easier for sea ice to flow out of the Fram Strait. It doesn’t matter how poorly the models perform, it has to be the CO2.
Capt’nDallas
“All this isn’t a real research focus since land use change is a “negative” forcing right?”
As you know Captain, GCM’s have no “negative” forcing control knobs, just “positive” forcings with big gains.
Russia is really vast and open. The sight-lines from the Ural Mountains to St Petersburg to the West and Ural to Vladivostok to the East are almost unbroken. Your recapitulation of the Russian mentality of past and present was a good reminder for me.
I do have trouble however, keeping track of which forcing is doing to which gizmo on which climate model that gives us global warming/cooling. Land use changes, and in particular how land, rivers, lakes and oceans are connected; i.e.,what happens upstream impacts subsequent water and air down stream/wind, and does matter for climate changes.
The Great Lakes are in the news these last several days reflecting on last winter’s cold and ice and in turn highlighting what happened to their watershed’s on subsequent Lake ice development.
RiHoo8, I put this together to show how much the northern hemisphere amplification really is,
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-jy4MU-KmIrM/U_diMCDIZgI/AAAAAAAALT8/M6oVDbtGWPk/w812-h512-no/co2ref7_2014.png
Because of the poor quality of data in general and the obligatory smearing of the nether regions, the much lower average temperature/energy is of the highest northern latitudes and land areas above 30N have their own erratic warming trend. 75% of the globe is marching to a different drummer. Other than a blurb by BEST, the unanticipated land amplification gets very little press.
oops wrong chart
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-jjod0aCb_zw/VEG9afL66AI/AAAAAAAALm8/PEjIzbaVRDU/w602-h408-no/global%2Bwarming.png
Capt’nDallas
The 90S to 30N and 30N to 90N graph is interesting. I can see why you chose 30N since it passes just North of New Orleans and circumnavigates the globe Eastward, Northern Africa to the lower portions of the “Cradle of Civilization”, China, & Taiwan. A lot of land use changes observable.
The dates of the land use changes temperature impact seems to be at a plateau around 1935 to 1975 coincide with the beginning of the Rural Electrification Act of the New Deal. Rural electrification went from 3% to 98% during that time interval. After 1975, the 30N to 90N graph then takes off “North” al la a hockey stick.
So land use changes and rural electrification appears to impart a major impact upon the global temperature increase. No wonder the CAGW evangelists are worried about providing electricity to the rest of the global 1.8 billion people currently doing without.
Catastrophe just around the corner. Since the 90S to 30N is where most of those 1.8 billion people live and giving them electricity would increase their land use productivity and quality of life, global temperatures would go off the charts as Mike Mann has clearly known all along. Its a good thing that Greenpeace and the WWF has kept an eye on this situation, letting us and especially our non and elected officials all know of this 1C jump up. No use buggering-up global temperatures any further.
Keeping 1.8 billion people without electricity and living on < $1/day means of course: 40% infant mortality; 20% mortality for those survivors <5 years of age; 1/3 of those survivors dying before age 30 and mean age of survival 45 years for men and 48 years for women with no relief on the horizons as developed countries spend research dollars keeping things as they are.
RiHoo8, You know John Deere claims to have invented the steel plow in 1837. The Tractor didn’t come along until around 1850 in steam form and gas around 1900. Wheat became a major war effort financial tool not long after.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-4rh-741loSo/VEKphwNa1_I/AAAAAAAALnQ/TokMZox6eRo/w640-h434-no/global%2Bwarming%2Bthe%2Bnorth%2Bcountry.png
Of course none of that had any impact on “global” climate change doncha know. Though that wee 25% of the globe with most of the thermometers might have experienced a bit of “regional” climate enhancement. According to that chart the period formerly known as the Little Ice Age was a bit cooler than the 1901-2000 mean.
Capt’nDallas
Best seems to get lost in the mean of GISS.
In making a comparison to the previous graph (90S-30N and 30N-90N).
the SST is now from 30N to 90N, right? The 25% is driving the beat, but I just can’t quite make out what the song is about.
It appears that there are at least 2 drummer boys, Northern 25%ers and the Southern 75%ers, playing: “Name That Tune.” It also appears that 25% land use has fed 6 billion OK. Now we need to get the other 75% land to feed the remaining 1.8 Billion, all of which requires juice.
NOW I get it. The natural variation that has led us out of the Little Ice Age has a bit of frosting on the cake by land use; and, part of that land use has resulted in a change in vegetation and soil CO2 loss so that we see a rise in CO2 and the CO2 continues to rise without a temperature accompaniment (piano player went to take a leak), as the land use has all but gobbled up most of the arable land North of 30N and we are starting to see low till farming and some soil conservation just beginning when the soil will again take up the CO2, and the GMO’s will increase yields, then CO2 will start coming down on its own and we can go to bed listening to Ave Maria to address another global crisis to get the populous all scared begging governments to tell us much ado about…nothing. Yes, I got it.
As a layman (which probably 99% of us are on the topic of sea ice) and trying to learn something — it appears that people who are posting are sometimes not distinguishing between (1) surface area and (2) volume (surface area plus depth of old ice). In the big picture, its only volume that matters, right? In the big picture of AGW, is surface area coverage all that important?
Heh, several years ago I figured out that after a nadir, ice volume would recover faster than extent or area. Now that I review, I can’t remember why that was so.
Still think it’s true, but less sure why.
==============
Good understanding by Stephen Segrest, further improvement by FOMD.
`Cuz when the ice volume-on-land goes, the Earth’s coastal cities drown.
There Is No Uncertainty Monster Multiple redundant surveys show plainly that global ice volume-on-land is decreasing without pause or obvious limit.
Your thoughtful question is appreciated, Stephen Segrest!
There is no uncertainty monster. We know it all!
Please show me a single analysis of error bounds in climate models. Not necessarily physics (where uncertainties as how to handle turbulence, convection, aerosols, etc) abound; just the mathematical part of a model: the influence of a grid size, for example.
There is a (relatively) easy way to estimate it: use an interval arithmetic. Did any modeler try it ever?
Folks who experiment with interval arithmetic packages soon appreciate that even the simplest simulation elements (matrix inversion for example) are computationally intractable for even small-scale interval-arithmetic models.
For a broader prespective, see Don Easterbrook’s TEDx talk: Should we trust climate models?
The short answer is: yes (guardedly).
Thanks for your question, Curious George!
So he managed to refute Naomi Oreskes 1995 paper then about climate models in his TED talk? Are TED talks peer reviewed?
Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic. The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change. http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full
Interval arithmetic involves estimating the feasible range for a parameter. It is certainly done in models where it is called sensitivity analysis. There is an additional dimension in non-linear models where small changes in inputs lead to exponentially diverging solutions.
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751/F2.expansion.html
Atmospheric and oceanic computational simulation models often successfully depict chaotic space–time patterns, flow phenomena, dynamical balances, and equilibrium distributions that mimic nature. This success is accomplished through necessary but nonunique choices for discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupled contributing processes that introduce structural instability into the model. Therefore, we should expect a degree of irreducible imprecision in quantitative correspondences with nature, even with plausibly formulated models and careful calibration (tuning) to several empirical measures. Where precision is an issue (e.g., in a climate forecast), only simulation ensembles made across systematically designed model families allow an estimate of the level of relevant irreducible imprecision…
These model families are known as perturbed physics ensembles. An appreciation of the AOS property of sensitive dependence has led to the practice of ensemble weather forecasting on the basis of a set of solutions using initial conditions perturbed around the estimated atmospheric state (24, 25). The evolving spread among the individual forecasts exposes the degree of reliability in the ensemble-mean forecast. Similarly an appreciation of the property of structural instability ought to lead to the practice of ensemble AOS modeling on the basis of a set of deliberately varied model formulations, to expose the reliability and precision of the simulated behaviors. § It can even be useful in a forecast ensemble to include variations in the model formulation if the structure of the long-time attractor manifests in limited-time integrations relative to the initial-state influence (27)…
The use of single runs of multiple models is known as an opportunistic ensemble. In each of these model–ensemble comparison studies, there are important but difficult questions: How well selected are the models for their plausibility? How much of the ensemble spread is reducible by further model improvements? How well can the spread can be explained by analysis of model differences? How much is irreducible imprecision in an AOS?
Simplistically, despite the opportunistic assemblage of the various AOS model ensembles, we can view the spreads in their results as upper bounds on their irreducible imprecision. Optimistically, we might think this upper bound is a substantial overestimate because AOS models are evolving and improving. Pessimistically, we can worry that the ensembles contain insufficient samples of possible plausible models, so the spreads may underestimate the true level of irreducible imprecision (cf., ref. 23). Realistically, we do not yet know how to make this assessment with confidence. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full
FOMBS utterly inconsequential and ignorant ravings aside – we can trust models to do what?
FOMD, are you sober?
Rob: To use an interval arithmetic in a model, all you have to do (not a small task) is to replace all ‘REAL’ (‘FLOAT’, etc, depending on your programming language) variables with ‘INTERVAL’ (again, if your programming language supports it). As a result, you would get answers which include computational errors – for example 2/3 would show up as [0.66666666,0.6666667]. If you start with a temperature in a 100km x 100km grid, you would better enter it as [7.3, 12.4] degrees rather than 9.85 degrees. And so on. This is not a sensitivity analysis; this is an exact procedure, yielding strict bounds. Probably too pessimistic for comfort; that may well be why we spend millions on re-running models with slightly changed parameters.
Prediction of weather and climate are necessarily uncertain: our observations of weather and climate are uncertain, the models into which we assimilate this data and predict the future are uncertain, and external effects such as volcanoes and anthropogenic greenhouse emissions are also uncertain. Fundamentally, therefore, therefore we should think of weather and climate predictions in terms of equations whose basic prognostic variables are probability densities ρ(X,t) where X denotes some climatic variable and t denoted time. In this way, ρ(X,t)dV represents the probability that, at time t, the true value of X lies in some small volume dV of state space.’
(Predicting Weather and Climate – Palmer and Hagedorn eds – 2006)
The output of a perturbed physics ensemble is a probability distribution function. Not what we have now.
‘As the ensemble sizes in the perturbed ensemble approach run to hundreds or even many thousands of members, the outcome is a probability distribution of climate change rather than an uncertainty range from a limited set of equally possible outcomes, as shown in figure 9. This means that decision-making on adaptation, for example, can now use a risk-based approach based on the probability of a particular outcome.’ http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full
50 in the set at last count.
-50 FOMBS
Rob: – “the outcome is a probability distribution of climate change rather than an uncertainty range.” Do you really believe that running a flawed model thousands of times yields a reliable probability distribution? It yields a probability distribution of getting similar model results, that’s all.
How about the “pause”? Or how would a probability distribution be affected by using a correct formula for a latent heat of water vaporization?
It provides an estimate of the irreducible impression of the model.
I too find a quality of climate models irreducibly depressing.
Stephen Segrest: In the big picture of AGW, is surface area coverage all that important?
It can be more reliably estimated than ice volume and ice mass. And present measurements can be better compared to past records (photographs, diaries, reports of expeditions, locations of human artifacts, distributions of sediments, and so on.)
Lots of salient questions you won’t discuss, eh Fan?
For instance, you continue to defend the hockey stick when there is no study that shows the current warming is unprecedented in the past 1500 years.
There are studies that say it is a close matter, but none that support Mann’s central claim.
I wonder if you can understand that your refusal to accept this simple truth reflects on your credibility?
Or, you prattle on about numerical models of laboratory experiments where conditions are tightly controlled and measurements are highly accurate, and about which the physics are known, and compare them to models of the planet as a whole, where the data inputs are incredibly sparse, open to interpretation, and where assumptions have to be baked in because so little is known, and you pretend it is apples to apples.
These are not wrong questions because they go to intellectual honesty.
Fan, I hate to point out to you that we are talking about something else. I don’t want to interrupt your droning on, but please, have a little mercy.
===================
Foundations of Denialism
(1) Obsess over wrong questions.
(2) Insist upon wrong answers.
(3) Refuse new ideas.
(4) Embrace abusive discourse.
Thank you, Kim, for helping Climate Etc to recognize these denialist practices!
So define “wrong question” for us?
Would that be a question that has been thoroughly settled?
Or a question that is unhelpful to “the cause”?
Please let me acknowledge that your point is entirely valid, TJA … foundation “(1)” now has been amended to focus upon the denialist obstruction to discourse that is associated to rhetorically limiting the questions-asked.
Example Please don’t discuss the scientific reality of accelerating polar ice-mass loss … because the denialist-preferred focus is the drama of Michael Mann’s twitter-remarks and similar high-jinks.
Thanks again for your helpful contributions to rational science-respecting climate-change discourse!
Lots of salient questions you won’t discuss, eh Fan?
For instance, you continue to defend the hockey stick when there is no study that shows the current warming is unprecedented in the past 1500 years.
There are studies that say it is a close matter, but none that support Mann’s central claim.
I wonder if you can understand that your refusal to accept this simple truth reflects on your credibility?
Or, you prattle on about numerical models of laboratory experiments where conditions are tightly controlled and measurements are highly accurate, and about which the physics are known, and compare them to models of the planet as a whole, where the data inputs are incredibly sparse, open to interpretation, and where assumptions have to be baked in because so little is known, and you pretend it is apples to apples.
These are not wrong questions because they go to intellectual honesty.
Regarding your link, did Curry drag David Appel into court over it? Or is he wrestling with a straw man?
Who cares? Twitter-type drama == high-school-type drama!
Unsupported claims by TJA, verifiable references by FOMD.
The Steyn-Mann Lesson Oft-times its best for Party “A” to apologize; Party “B” to accept the apology, and *BOTH* sides to move on.
THE MAIN CONCLUSION James Hansen’s various legal cases are likely to advance upon solid scientific AND substantive constitutional grounds.
Good on `yah, James Hansen.
Because for our children, Hansen’s cumulative scientific and legal advances are *HUGELY* more significant than transitory twitter-squabbles, eh Climate Etc readers?
Fixed second linky!
Good on `yah, paleo-scientists!
‘Good on ya’, paleontologists,’ says fan.
Good on this paleontologist, Craig Loehle for his multi-proxy
study, ‘A 2000 year Global Temperature Reconstruction
Based on Non Tree Ring Proxies.’ .
https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Craig+LoehlCraig+Loehle%27A+2000+Year+Global+Temperature+Reconstruction+Based+on+Non+Tree+Ring+Proxies.%27.%27+proxies+
As Craig Loehle has noted at Climate Audit, 13/04/14, trees
respond far more to rain or snowfall than temperature. Say, fan,
some there are whose only understanding of trees is the core
they drill. Can’t see the trees fer the wood, yer might say.
bts
kim,
The fan is busy confessing his modus. Let him wave away.
The fact Arctic ice is not in a death spiral is not something a climate kook can admit. Reflect on Waldham’s recent melt down over his claptrap being called claptrap. No wonder fan is stuck on stupid.
Being a very occasional lurker, it is interesting to actually read fan’s diatribes- nearly everyone posting here has made some movements and progress. fan, on the other hand, could just cut and paste most what he is saying from months ago and no one would notice.
Stephen, yes sea ice surface area is very important (heat and gas transfer across the sea-air interface, albedo…)
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~louisab/sedpage/basics.html
Edim — your link raises another question I had in trying to understand stuff. Where sea ice is expanding, has the composition of fresh water versus saltier water been changing there (i.e., difference in freezing temperature of fresh water)? Thanks.
a fan of *MORE* discourse: Example Please don’t discuss the scientific reality of accelerating polar ice-mass loss …
the title for the thread is (Prof Curry’s) New presentations on sea ice , and she included links to her presentation slides. By all means, *discuss” the evidence with respect to accelerating polar ice-mass loss, including both poles, and all evidence. The “-ing” part of the claim of “accelerating sea ice loss” is poorly substantiated.
Whatever you think are the “right” questions, you are never prevented from posing them here, and there is nearly always an answer to your question. We who follow your links have found that they seldom (if ever?) support your claims, especially your claim that the Earth climate is warming “[as foreseen by James Hansen]”.
Yep, links-to-science don’t hurt, Matthew R Marler!
Your appetite for scientific understanding is appreciated!
Of course the troposphere isn’t warming.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_September_2014_v5.png
The surface record is affected by a reduction in latent heat flux.
http://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/map/drought/Global.html#app=cdo
And net radiative flux at TOA shows no trend.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ceres_ebaf-toa_ed2-8_anom_toa_net_flux-all-sky_march-2000toapril-20142.png
Nor is it clear that oceans are warming independent of toa radiant flux changes occurring as a result of ocean and atmospheric circulation.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/von-schuckmannn-2013.png
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ceres-bams-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif
It’s clear to anyone with sense that the world is still warming, and will continue warming as humans keep emitting vast quantities of pollutants into the atmosphere.
Climate change occurs as discrete jumps in the system. Climate is more like a kaleidoscope – shake it up and a new pattern emerges – than a control knob with a linear gain. It makes for an unpredictable system and surprises are more likely than guaranteed warming.
‘A vigorous spectrum of interdecadal internal variability presents numerous challenges to our current understanding of the climate. First, it suggests that climate models in general still have difficulty reproducing the magnitude and spatiotemporal patterns of internal variability necessary to capture the observed character of the 20th century climate trajectory. Presumably, this is due primarily to deficiencies in ocean dynamics. Moving toward higher resolution, eddy resolving oceanic models should help reduce this deficiency. Second, theoretical arguments suggest that a more variable climate is a more sensitive climate to imposed forcings (13). Viewed in this light, the lack of modeled compared to observed interdecadal variability (Fig. 2B) may indicate that current models underestimate climate sensitivity. Finally, the presence of vigorous climate variability presents significant challenges to near-term climate prediction (25, 26), leaving open the possibility of steady or even declining global mean surface temperatures over the next several decades that could present a significant empirical obstacle to the implementation of policies directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions (27). However, global warming could likewise suddenly and without any ostensive cause accelerate due to internal variability. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the climate system appears wild, and may continue to hold many surprises if pressed.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/106/38/16120.full
It is not clear that the world is warming post the 1998/2001 climate shift – that involved a climatically significant step change in albedo as a response to abrupt changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/earthshine.jpg
‘Earthshine changes in albedo shown in blue, ISCCP-FD shown in black and CERES in red. A climatologically significant change before CERES followed by a long period of insignificant change.’
I presume that a wild climate comes with a spectrum of risk – not remotely all attributable to CO2 – something like a log-Pearson distribution. Log-Pearsons are used for hydrological distributions. Frequent low impacts events and a long tail of low probability high impact events. Not by any means solely as a result of CO2 changes.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/log-pearson.png
Presuming that we need to respond on this basis of risk management – there are certain minimum conditions to be met. One of these – to my mind – is maximum economic growth this century at least. This is not negotiable. It is a fundamental value – but available responses are broad and flexible.
Building resilience to climate variability that will happen regardless remains a central objective of rational policy. Economic development is the core of building long term resilience. Fast mitigation is not merely possible with reductions in population pressures and emissions of black carbon, tropospheric ozone, methane, CFC’s and nitrous oxide – but are outcomes of health, education and economic development strategies. We may also reduce carbon emissions by building soil fertility on agricultural lands and conserving and restoring ecosystems. There are practical and pragmatic approaches that provide real no regrets policy options.
a fan of *MORE* discourse: “[as foreseen by James Hansen (1981)]“.
Yep, links-to-science don’t hurt, Matthew R Marler!
Excerpt from the paper:
Discussion
The global warming projected for the next century is of almost unprecedented magnitude. On the basis of our model calculations, we
estimate it to be -2.5°C for a scenario with slow energy growth and a mixture of nonfossil and fossil fuels.
To date, Hansen is way off: the Earth has warmed considerably less than he predicted for this century, despite the great increase in fossil fuel use since the prediction. If it is true that heat continues to accumulate in the deep ocean somewhere, that also is out of line with Hansen’s prediction.
‘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
There is lots of evidence for all sorts of things happening in the climate. Large interdecadal to decadal changes in cloud radiative forcing, decadal to millennial variability in a wide range of factors, abrupt changes in the system state. There is no trend in net energy in CERES – although with large short term fluctuations. Argo climatologies are wildly divergent depending somewhat on which short period is analyzed. .
‘Using a new measure of coupling strength, this update shows that these climate modes have recently synchronized, with synchronization peaking in the year 2001/02. This synchronization has been followed by an increase in coupling. This suggests that the climate system may well have shifted again, with a consequent break in the global mean temperature trend from the post 1976/77 warming to a new period (indeterminate length) of roughly constant global mean temperature.’ https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/kswanson/www/publications/2008GL037022_all.pdf
The pattern of decadal variability in surface temperature is especially evident in North America, Alaska and the Arctic.
Only space cadets like FOMBS and gates don’t recognize the uncertainty emerging from all this.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1970
“In summer, the oceanic heat anomaly is enhanced by the ice–albedo
feedback, but in winter the excess oceanic heat is lost to the atmosphere due to a lack of insulating sea‐ice cover. This leads to an anomalously warm atmosphere, which in turn causes increased heat loss by longwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere and decreased heat gain by atmospheric advection from lower latitudes. A lasting impact of the ice–albedo feedback is not possible because the large‐scale heat fluxes quickly adapt to release the excess oceanic heat from the Arctic.
Hence, we find that even dramatic perturbations of summer sea‐ice cover in the Arctic are reversible on very short time scales of typically two years. This suggests that a so‐called tipping point, which would describe the sudden
irreversible loss of Arctic summer sea ice during warming conditions, is unlikely to exist.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010GL045698/pdf
Recovery mechanisms of Arctic summer sea ice
So lacking ice, the Arctic ocean is a bad place to store slightly warmer sea water. So while it will store more during the Summer with a lack of sea ice, it can’t hold onto it. It will have months of energy gain, and the conditions for that gain, work to reverse it.
My take on their tipping point comment. The tipping points happen billions of times with each square meter loss of sea ice.
On page 16 here:
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/sea-ice-physical-processes.pdf
There is the ‘Annual cycle of net surface heat flux for various ice thicknesses’
Roughly interpolating the no sea ice flux I got an average of – 310 Wm2 over the course of a year. Using the same chart of J. Schramm’s, thick sea ice seems about break even on fluxes.
The open water would seem to be emitting on average 310 Wm2 more LW than the SW it is absorbing. I think the important thing is the Arctic ocean heat loss rather than the relatively short term atmospheric temperature results as any long term answer depends on the oceans, and the oceans giving off heat moves it one step closer to the TOA.
If the Arctic sea ice is 3% of the Earth’s surface that would be about a (310/33.3) 9 Wm2 change, the thick ice versus no ice.
Is this enough watts to turn a cooling into a pause?
The sea ice loss is not 100% but if it’s 1/3 that’s still 3 Wm2 averaged over the Earth. I hope I am not reading charts upside down but it seems as we were told, the heat is coming out of the oceans.
Another thing I wonder about is given the insulating properties of sea ice as well as that of CO2, are we sure which changing insulation effect we are seeing in the Surface Average Temperature?
I know Miskolczi is not very well considered here, but for me it was a revelation when I read and began to understand what optical depth was, and that his model of radiative transfer, or similars, were important to understand an one dimensional atmosphere. I made myself a “mental experiment” imagining a “atmosphere tube” with water in one extreme -down-, an atmosphere gravitationally attached down, and a radiation source in the other extreme, up, and how it would evolve… to a steady state, evaporating part of the ocean to the atmosphere until the adequate optical depth were reached. Attending to Miskolczi and others, that steady state wouldn’t change too much if we add some CO2 to that atmosphere. In some way, that’s the engine where all the other variations must be hanged (specially variations in albedo because of clouds -maybe connected with solar cycles as other authors are trying to prove-, variations in albedo because of sea ice extention, linked with the oceanic currents -as in the “stadium wave” that was presented by Curry and others, etc., variations in heat exchange between atmosphere and oceans, and so on. All this remembers me (I know it’s not very original) those “perpetual motion” toys. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IKNgcwnxFc
I know I’m not original, but just wanted to write my reflexions about how I think It will evolve the knowledge about climate change.
OT, but a Fossil Fuel etc. The price of oil is up today. Nice price on gasoline, too.
OIL (WTI) 83.85
BRENT 86.86
NAT GAS 3.777
RBOB GAS 2.2298
So we have a possible CO2 rise at a time coincidental with a possible temperature rise which seems to have stopped. We have a possible sea level rise with possible Antarctic land ice loss by an unexplainable mechanism as the Antarctic gets colder with more sea ice.
We have a definite decrease in Arctic sea ice which is showing a minirecovery and a made up Arctic temperature rise by estimating temperatures where there are no gauges let alone sun.
We have heat hiding in the depths with no way proven for it to get down there and no way of measuring it if it has and no way for it ever to heat the atmosphere as it is too cold anyway.
We have an unknown climate sensitivity which has some how kept life on earth going for 2 billion years through extremes but is now going to roll over and die because of a little Co2 burp by an organism that has only been around 100,000 years.
Luckily I have an engagement party to go to this weekend so will be able to avoid the drivel by the alarmists for the next 2 days.
It’s all so immediate and horrifying that it’s a wonder any of us gets out of bed in the morning! We would just pull the blankets over our heads if it weren’t so darned hot!
Another interesting theory for increase/decrease of ice,
http://www.forskningsradet.no/prognett-polarforskning/Nyheter/Winds_from_Siberia_reduce_Arctic_sea_ice_cover/1253955174381?lang=en
@jcurry
“So . . . what is the bottom line on the attribution of the recent sea ice melt? My assessment is that it is likely (>66% likelihood) that there is 50-50 split between natural variability and anthropogenic forcing, with +/-20% range….
At this point, I think anthropogenic is 50% or less.”
______
Once again, these conclusions make little sense.
The IPCC by its very nature is extremely conservative (Something that Curry egregiously mistakes for “forced consensus,” when in fact it represents a low mean of assessments so that none are made above what most feel comfortable with, albeit much is far below.)
Here from the same post is what the IPCC says.
“Internal variability could account for half.”
Just as changes in the rate of air temperature change over multi several year periods could be due to internal variability, even cessations (*which over a ten year plus period we haven’t even seen) or drops in them (which we haven’t seen) it’s not likely. Yet funny how that can’t be contemplated: but a far more geologically radical alteration in arctic ice extent from a larger increase in arctic temperature changes and other factors, is so easily perceived and, taken as truth, even.
But “could” in the scientific sense means that it is not outside of the range of reasonable probability, although it is very unlikely, or could be so.
The fact this is seemingly not fully recognized – or here integrated – by Curry goes to the same reason Curry does not recognize why the so called “pause” is a fiction, why the “slowing” of the “rate” of increase in average ambient global land and ocean surface air temperatures over a shorter term period from the larger spike beyond the longer term mean of the 90s is also meaningless in terms of the basic issue, and why the average ambient increase in global air temperatures over such a short term is by far the least important empirical indicia of the issue.
If you don’t know these things (and I confess a few scientists who quasi study this issue and generally support the consensus position that we are affecting the climate and our past and present actions present significat risk of major future shifts don’t fully) then you don’t really know this issue – because it goes to what Climate Change actually is, and why it presents the range of future shift that it does. If you don’t know that, it is like writing all sorts of hifalutin physics on problems or non problems with bicycles, when the issue being discussed is a car. (or vice versa.) or a mountain liion, versus a riding lawn mower. Which is what almost all Climate Change refutation, and predominantly this site, does. . Curry doesn’t, yet testifies before Congress on it. *(For a good reason, too – there are so inordinately few somewhat qualified or learned and somewhat credentialed individuals on this subject who take the manufactured “anti Climate Change theory: view one that should be pursued by nearly every scientist on the planet were it to have merit, as it is a far better end result if true, yet nevertheless is not, but persists in fact due to the enormous ideological, macroeconomically frightened (and myopically presumptive), and “good thing going” industry based pressures, behind it.)
Getting back to the IPCC, even though half could in fact be internal variability, the range of exactly how much is broad. It could even be negative – that is, the change would have been greater but for internal variability. The mean is that the change we observe is what the early effect from major long term atmospheric alteration is, but again, the real “change” upon what otherwise would be could be more or less, though we might conjecture.
Curry not only takes the extreme range of this – which is illogical since, contorted arguments to argue otherwise aside, she even goes beyond it: to, as quoted above, ludicrously conclude from all this that not only is it not just “reasonably possible” that half could be due to natural variation that just happens to coincide with what we would expect to see from the atmospheric alteration inadvertently undertaken, but that rather than it being somewhere in the middle of up to half being due to variability , or a similarly large portion in fact being veiled, but all of what “could” on the one end of the range be, in fact, IS, but then goes beyond that.
The first part alone is somewhat fascinating in itself – the one end of the spectrum, and likely very low probability, becomes the IS – since it requires an understanding of just exactly what the earth would have done in our absence, which by the very nature of variability and our inability to predict climate, we as humans don’t yet have the capacity to do.
Not only that , Curry goes past it, to, somewhat fantastically, conclude that “My assessment is that it is >2/3 likely that there is such an extreme end “coincidental” natural variability mimicking effect (just as laid out above) and then on to say – after limiting the range of possible natural variability (“coincidentally” enough ) to only that which is close to this high “could” be (acc’ to the IPCC) state of 50%”natural” effect ( that is, giving that itself only a 20 percent range in either direction (meaning, depending on interpretation, either a positive40% or 30% floor to the input of “natural” and a ceiling of 60 to 70%)), and thereby negating any possibility of the opposite – TO, again, the new mean representing the one directional and full extent of what, could plausibly be natural variability, and then concluding from there that “At this point, I think anthropogenic is 50% or less.” Thusk adding further to it!
In other words, of the possible variation which Curry first suggests, off of the extreme reading that the “could be” one end of the equation =- the one that just happens to have the maximum plausible natural variability that the IPCC could even reasonably conceive, in Curry’s estimation, be exactly what the natural variability here in fact IS, but then from there goes extreme again, and concludes that within her own plus minus 20% range – guess what – IT ALSO goes in the extreme direction, away from the mean of natural variability averaging out and the change we see is our influence (which assuredly it is not, but the point is it is impossible to pinpoint any small range, though Curry here does it anyway) so that in effect IT IS 50% to 60% (or 70% when she adds on that “anthropogenic is 50% or less.
It “could be” up to 50%. Unlikely, but Curry takes it is as the IS, adds in a new pseudo range to that, then takes the side of that range that mimics her first extreme interpretation, and thus takes her assessment of what is all the way past what even the IPCC says “could be” at one end of the range. In essence, Curry takes that extreme, or the extreme but reasonably plausible, although not likely end of the range, as the new mean, narrows he total range from there, and then adds more to that extreme by opting in the directin of even more “coincidental” natural variability on top of that. Takine the extreme, and then adding more to it.
This is a minor result in comparison to many of the posts I’ve seen here. But the process of taking even such a more dispassionate seeming analysis and moving it the same extreme direction, is classic, what they call denialism, in the form of the more learned, normally (outside of this issue) more reasonable, thinking and somewhat general issue conversant “denier.” (Which then would, by not outright “denying” as do some wildly misinformed politicians who don’t know the slightest bit about the science, make the questionable “denier” term inapplicable here -, but “skeptic” is highly misleading, and naysaying might sound negative, so,.. hence, “contrarian”- a very nice term).
So, “contrarian”: who of course recognizes that our actions to the atmosphere will have an affect upon climate, who then always takes the extreme therein no matter how tortured the path to get there, with the ability to make it seem smooth as silk, playing the lute to the many commenters who want to believe all this, and just think it’s brilliant. While most real climate scientists are pulling their hair out over it; which Curry naturally then egregiously mistakes for dismissal of “various interpretation rather than basic and rather extreme error on the issue, and fundamental disagreement with that error.)
It’s really quite clever, which is in part why my response seems so difficult (and in part my limitations in expressing this in a mere, if long, comment.)
Just in case anyone REALLY wants to legitimately dispute this (@jcurry?, let’s pull in twenty of the world’s leading geologic, atmospheric or climatalogical scientists who have predominately professionally studied the climate and climate change issue, and we will likely find ALL essentially agree with this general assessment. Not the specifics of where the mean should be, that was just used as a neutral example, as we could, albeit possibly mistakenly – hence why we can’t predict weather more than a week in advance, nor the variability that makes up climate – deduce natural complementary or masking factors. But that’s not the point here.
The point here is the extreme interpretation, always in the same direction. ONCE AGAIN, just like this guy.
But by bringing in real experts who actually study this, and not a hodge podge of those who ran to it from other disciples (or outside science) because of ideological drive and who fundamentally don’t know the issue and, in further flourishes of rhetoric, represent them to the world as “large lists,” and denounce the basic consensus -as Curry has erroneously bought into – implicitly or directly calling the National Academy of Sciences, a stodgy conservative organization that by it’s nature (and the nature of caution in scientific assertion) understates, part of the large plot or hoax.. we run into the catch 22 of CC Naysaying — oops, I nicely mean “contrarianism” (and others call denial)…
Which is to say any scientist who studies this who recognizes that our geologically radical alteration of the atmosphere naturally would present a threat of very simple – if to us quite major – accompanying, if lagging and inherently non linear and somewhat chaotic and volatile, shifts in the general global climate, and various major regions then again within it, as almost all, who actually professionally study this issue and professionally work in this field do, is immediately dismissed.
Which is another necessary way to perpetuate the myth under the wildly ironically labeled guise of “realism”.
It’s sort of like made up science, posing, as serious, analytical work (and with real effort being put in).
That this is not seen is of course the entire point of the Naysaying (contrarianism) – rather than simply “disparate interpretation” – problem.
Which is to say a goal on a complex futuristic multi function probability and range phenomenon is desired, and regarding such a matter, can always be self reinforcing if that is what one is driven to believe. Or convinces oneself IS. (And this delusion that those who know this to be a problem have this, for most, is LUDICROUS, since most want the opposite, not to have the problem, not to have the issue polarizing us, not to have the effect upon us all and our progeny. and not to have to constantly battle about the issue, fighting misinformation, rhetoric, and even often massive ignorance, at every turn.)
And every single post by Curry I have observed, does this exactly. Even this rather interesting one, which then rather illogically takes the extreme as the middle, and then even goes further outside of that under a convoluted contortion of analysis and conflation.
I am sure this analysis here will now in response be mangled as well (and my comments taken out of context, misrepresented, or me insulted), because, as usual, for most commenters, the goal is to refute Climate Change science and conclusions under the self deluded guise of “objective, open minded analysis.”
That is, ‘belief: or “view” need not change, and the delusion of objectivty and having the “right” knowledge be maintained in the human mind if I and everybody else making sensible points can be dismissed, or the points massaged into something else entirely – calling them names, for instance, a common response, or my prose mangled, when frankly not everything is twitter simple. And maybe a lot of people really aren’t the experts on this issue they think they are. And maybe that isn’t their natural thing in life.
Yet funny how on this issue millions, however, are so brilliant as to be able to fundamentally disagree with the world’s leading climate scientists on a complex multi layered probability and time range global dynamic biologic, ecologic, energy problem). And yet once dismissal or castigation or fundamental misrepresentation or misconstruction accomplished (as on the basic underlying issue itself), why then, once that’s done, then the points need not be considered.
And the pre-existing belief under the guise of science self sealed, or at the least self reinforced, particularly on sites that congregate one end of a bizarre spectrum like minds, who then conflaate that with the broad realm of examination on this issue, when it is anything but.
And hence why Climate Change “contrarians” have, ludicrously relative to Climate Change Naysaying sites, convinced themselves that “John Cook is a liar” and that “Skeptical Science” Censors comments and misrepresents, when it is one of the most objective sites out there (in fact understating a lot of the critiques of Climate Change Naysaying) but one that systematically breaks down most of the basic myths that do drive Climate Change “Naysaying” or Misunderstanding.
So to accept Skeptical Science, one has to reconsider the basic position – which Climate Change Naysayers, as evidenced by responses to my comments (and others, and multiple other responses to more public pronouncements) don’t seemingly want to do.
Prove me wrong.
P.s. I picked the Jets last night to keep it close and battle tight with the Pats. Just saying. See the link atop, there’s some good stuff, and can get away from all this polarizing quasi related political crap for a while.
Also, thanks though for considering my comment, and others. Although it is generally consistent with the great majority of scientists who professionally study this precise issue directly, it conflicts with a great deal of the perception on this site, which I “think” (Most climate scientists who professionally study the issue “know”) has a lot of things wrong.
John Carter,
Thank you fer yr twenty-nine paragraph comment (plus
sundries) explaining where skeptics err. Good ter hear
from consensus science yet again ( and again and … )
bts.
Bet you had difficulty calling it a comment. Also, he betrayed himself. Jets fans are known to have delusions of superiority.
rls,
In the interest of civilized (er) *discourse* one is obliged ter
resort ter ambiguity, ( of witch i believe there are seven kinds)
bts.
beththeserf — Where you have problems with John Carter’s post (you counted 29 paragraphs) — why is it that you’ve never said a peep about the numerous and very long diatribes from folks like Wagathon? Why are Wagathon’s posts OK, and John Carter’s not? What’s the standard?
Stephen, trying ter recall where Wagathon wrote twenty-nine
paragraphs (plus sundries.)
bts
Stephen Segrest asks’ What’s the standard?’ Seems it’s
‘keep non consensus papers O – U – T.’ See the CRU
emails regarding gate-keeping tactics.
Phil Jones, July 8, 2004… ‘Kevin and I will keep them
out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the
peer literature is!’
And more, Michael Mann, Uncle Tom Quigley and al
within those consensus-publicly-funded-cli-sci-enclaves.
http://www.passionforliberty.com/2013/08/19/climategate-coverup/
Hi Beth — My comment is only within a context of our CE blog. Also, I balk in a big way how people use things like Climategate (where clearly some bad things were going on) as a “blanket” to cast over all Scientists that you (and others here at CE) don’t agree with. There are many Scientists with very high integrity (like Dr. Muller’s BEST team) that saw wrongs and have been trying extremely hard to fix it through their open access efforts.
Beth — The Marshall Institute is an example of what I’m saying. Many here at CE argued that some highly questionable historical positions that Marshall has taken should not be used as an ubiquitous “blanket” to cast and discredit their current efforts on AGW.
Stephen perhaps sees blankets when there are none. Could it be getting too cool?
John Carter,
Climate is defined as the average of weather over an arbitrary period. Does the study of an average of figures relating to events which have already occurred qualify as a science?
Any reasonably intelligent twelve year old can do this.
Climatology was created to make astrology look credible. It has achieved nothing of benefit to humanity to date. Like all doomsday cults, its adherents become ever more shrill as the predicted apocalypse fails to materialise. Tomorrow, tomorrow, it happens tomorrow – again and again and again.
The world is not warming. As to the future, I’m betting that the relentless, remorseless, slow cooling of the Earth will continue. Please excuse me if I choose not to join your cult. I’m too busy taking it easy.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
John Carter — Could you list (in bullet format) of what your opinion is of what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe “consensus” means. Please try (to the extent possible) phrasing these bullets so that most laymen can understand.
Could you also list what you believe is a consensus to the major areas of uncertainty that scientists believe — applied to the “how much” and “how fast” question.
Thanks.
Looking at AR5, these seem to be the take away messages:
“Comparing trends from the CCSM4 ensemble to observed trends suggests that internal variability could account for approximately half of the observed 1979–2005 September Arctic sea ice extent loss.”
“In the case of the Arctic we have high confidence in observations since 1979, from models (see Section 9.4.3 and from simulations comparing with and without anthropogenic forcing), and from physical understanding of the dominant processes; taking these three factors together it is
very likely that anthropogenic forcing has contributed to the observed decreases in Arctic sea ice since 1979.”
I can’t find error bars for the first statement. I am left to speculate how to read the word, ‘could’? I see that you’re writing that Curry ended up centering on 50%. I imagine some scientists are on the high end of 85% to 100% anthropogenic forcing. So whatever distribution lies behind their above statement there’s going to be a range of opinions.
The second statement says, yes there has been an anthropogenic forcing. They do not attempt to quantify what percentage which I find curious. I think it weakens their above first statement possibly lowering the anthropogenic range. Very likely there’s been a contribution which might mean 1% to 100%. I think they botched their message when we try to reconcile the two.
John Carter – “Once again…wrong.”
It’s nice to be concise.
“In 2007 a team of NASA and university scientists has detected an ongoing reversal in Arctic Ocean circulation triggered by atmospheric circulation changes that vary on decade-long time scales. The results suggest not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming. ” Here: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2007-131
Interestingly, 2007 marked an abrupt change to the decades long downward trend which had persisted in Arctic sea ice extent, since the late 1970’s (the satellite record).
2014 Arctic sea ice extent at summer minimum was larger than 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 – and about the same as 2013. Except for 2012 (monster winter cyclone storm broke up the ice pushing it into warmer waters – NASA concurs), 2007 marked a turning point – a reversal in the long downward trend of the summer melt season.
Connection?
Is John Walsh looking at the recovered 1960s polar orbiter data that has just recently been released? That will be a fascinating addition to the information about the areas and oddities of the polar regions. For example I understand there is evidence of a large hole in the ice in the mid to late 60s that only now shows up on the recovered data:
http://barentsobserver.com/en/2014/10/american-scientists-unearth-lost-1960s-polar-satellite-images-worth-billions-14-10#.VD1bCUcp6oU.twitter
That is awesome!!
The latest instalment of the saga concerning Prof Wadhams. The Royal Society and Arctic ice
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzOmEySKhRVOUEMzazZnOFkzeFk/view?pli=1
tonyb
I propose a debate between Gavin Schmidt and Peter Wadhams.
========
Pistols at dawn would be more interesting
Tonyb
Seconds.
Heh, twitter is probably more lethal than flintlocks at 20 paces.
Now swords, that might work.
=========
To take place in the arctic or Antarctic? Is there a “dawn” in either location?
By the way, in my role as second, I cry foul. Three against one with his hands tied is not according to Hoyle, and tain’t cricket, neithuh.
====================
How about Roy Spencer and Peter Wadhams?
If one of them is too chicken to turn up it will be your job to cry fowl
Tonyb
Aren’t you over-egging it?
“stadium wave hypothesis predicts a reversal in the sea ice decline in the next 1 to 2 decades.”
Let us not forget that the carcitalant triangulate oscillation variant strongly projects that sea ice decline will reverse in 8 to 10 years, which is not mutually exclusive with the stadium wave hypothesis,
The bestodian trang function equivalent however, implies that sea ice decline reversal has already begun.
This is also consistent with the bonchardi mechanism mode, which fairly consistently indicates we can expect a reversal of ambient air temperature increase with the next day, as the dual modality of reverse recapture recombination functions as an equalizer, and the increase in low level re radiation acts as a “heat shield” keeping more air from reaching and warming the ground, allowing ice to reformulate, while most of the temporary heat, which will largely be offset by the Atlantic shift paradigm anyway, given the lower absolute percentage of (so called?) “greenhouse” gases in the atmosphere, since, as anybody but a climate change advocate nut knows, heat rises, most will then waft back harmlessly up into space, as the earth, as all functions seek equilibrium and homeostasis (those scientists believing that is a function of physiology and biology or entropy in a closed rather than open and single ended variant and changing input system don’t know what they are talking about) then shifts back into balance, which is really what it is doing all along, since
A) we can’t change climate, and it is arrogant to think we can. (Splitting the atom and being able to procure massive amounts of energy from a golf ball of matter, landing a human nearly 300k miles away in the vacuum of space, nearly half a century ago, having enough firepower to blow up the surface of the earth multiple times over, being able to recreate the dna of a being and even clone – duplicate, advanced life forms, those were all accidents.)
B) the climate self regulates
Because the earth (mother earth, or Gaia, to all you tree hugger freaks) knows what we want, and what is best for us, and what is best is our nice Goldilocks climate that supports the inviolate and constitutionally protected right to cheap, atmosphere changing fossil fuels even though said usage essentially reverses 10s of millions of years of earth lower atmosphere affecting energy balances within a mere speck of time) and not you eco fools who want to harm the poor (something climate change would never do, bill gates and the world’s leading scientists and thinkers and economists are fools to even think it – climate change will affect the wealthy) just to give the even more power over our individual lives.
It’s patently obvious. When will it become so to those led by the lies of climate “alarmism” over an increase of a wonderful system that is the
Never mind it’s not an increase, just a shift. And never mind it’s not the amount that counts, but as with everything in nature (which is secondary to the inviolate law that we can not much affect the world in which we live, unless we WANT to) it’s the balance that counts. Those are just hi falutan best students and researchers at the best universities in the world kind of idiotic science concepts, not meat and potatoes stuff that anybody with a horse’s hair of sense couldn’t figure out. I mean, the gall, the lies, we breath out carbon dioxide fer cryin’ out loud, you fools. (We breathe out cyanide too, but its such a small amount, it doesn’t count.)
In case you forget, it’s not the balance that matters. It’s the amount.
And, if it’s not that.
It’s the stadium wave hypothesis, which only fool climate scientists can’t seem to grasp the OBVIOUS relevancy.
Duh.
Scientists can be such fools.
Unlike, politicians, and lobbying organizations. They know truth. They seek it. Scientists seek B.S. Vetted journals that are awash in support of their bizarre Climate Change shift threat supporting findings and concepts? Yet nary anything to the contrary?
Part of the same large anti humanity ferret loving science crowd conspiracy to just allow Obama to be able to tell us when to pee.
For the province of government, the banding together for some protection of liberty or opportunity, in a free world the most, that would only do what must be addressed collectively and broadens basic rights more than it impinges, would NEVER make sense to address, or help US address, the ONE thing that by it’s very unalterable definition we must and have no choice but to share, not having to share a single thing else – the environment.
Rather in the name of freedom and liberty, it is for the advocacy and imposition upon individual choices and rights and “morals” under the guise of “societal fabric,” putting the whole before the individual, but NOT The whole that we HAVE so share (the – in case you forgot – environment) and each have some individual right to, that a true “liberty and limited” government, is created to do.
The only reason our forefathers roll over in their graves at such a concept? They were old fogies anyway, who wore wigs, and don’t understand the challenges of modern times. That to protect individuals we need to tell individuals what to do regarding that which does NOT affect others or, directly the whole. But never set forth sensible policies, or even market motivations, regarding the actions of us – even us most individualist and liberty leaning individuals – that DO affect others, or DIRECTLY, the whole that each of us, and our progeny after us, was and will be born, with the most basic inherent of rights to, therein.
In case you forget.
Heavy usage alert! CE plugged by the mainstream media!
The Weekend Australian lead editorial on “Global warming facts must give us all pause to think” references Judith’s work and concludes after considering the pause that “The gatekeepers of scientific media and political debate should not be afraid of a discussion about the facts and their ramifications. And we urge readers to google Britain’s Met Office and Dr Curry’s blog to get to the truth.”
Score one for the mainstream media. Score ten for Judith Curry.
These rookies. Oh well, the pasture is looking promising.
===========
If we’re going to have visitors we had better pretend to be Intelligent
Tonyb
I’ll put the kettle on …
Quick – bring out the fine China.
Tony, too late, I fear! And even if we are on our best behaviour, the trolls will have a bigger incentive to trash the site, especially those who are aggravated by the number of opinionated Aussie posters.
My contribution to the environment today was to severely cut back an over 20 metres high bamboo which was thrashing and trashing (word of the day) a much taller native quandong tree whenever (often) there was a high wind. Where is mosomoso when you need him?
Sorry, I got bogged in a John Carter post and have only just managed to wade ashore. (I like a thread-hijacker with a sense of humour about his work, so I’m not complaining. Look, he’s even got me parenthesising!)
Faustino, cut any inferior bamboo you like, especially if it’s some pussycat species that can’t top 20 metres. Mature moso wouldn’t even get out of bed for sub-25.
Faustino,
The Oz?
Ho hum.
It wasn’t that long ago it was plugging Christopher Monckton…..
Uh oh. Apologies if this has already been linked. Some kind of threshold has been crossed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-e-mann/judith-curry-climate-change_b_6000636.html
Andrew
Gesundheit, gesundheit, gesundheit, gesundheit, gesundheit. Oh wait, those were sneers not sneezes.
===============
The same bunch of defenders of the cause!
Since increasing emissions gives mankind and the furry little animals a net benefit, just why are Mann et. al. advocating for reduced emissions?
Do they want to starve the poorest humans, and the furry little animals?
That the deserts are shrinking is an obvious clue that more CO2 is good for everybody.
Today’s Weekend Australian devotes the front two pages of its Inquirer section and a long editorial to the CAGW issue. Graham Lloyd’s article, the best I’ve seen on the topic in the MSM, quotes Judith extensively. The editorial advises readers to visit her blog.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/global-warming-facts-must-give-us-all-pause-to-think/story-e6frg71x-1227094264289
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/a-pause-for-this-message-climate-change-numbers-arent-adding-up/story-e6frg6zo-1227094300232
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/new-climate-change-battlefront-pits-abbott-against-the-anticoal-brigade/story-e6frg74x-1227094299657
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/coal-is-good-for-humanity/story-e6frg71x-1227090541610
I very much liked the ‘Sigh.’ in the middle of your first link. Evocative.
===================
I very much liked ‘Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity’ in the middle of your fourth link. It’s provocative.
I was going to very much like something in your second and third links, but they are paywalled. I was going to find somethings in the middles of them that are seductive and productive.
==========================
Kim, Peter Lang knows Greg Hunt, our Environment minister, and assures me he is a firm warmist believer. I wonder if his position is tenable in the face of his leader’s strong defence of the fossil fuel energy sectors. I hope not.
I e-mailed the four articles to Judith. Perhaps she’ll cite them in a future round-up post. Given she’s the Oz’s new darling, they shouldn’t mind if she does.
I’ll have to re-read to find that “sigh.” A sigh’n’ of the times perhaps.
Wait. I thought Iraq didn’t have chemical weapons? Liberals? You kept saying it didn’t have any. What’s up with that?
From the article:
…
The New York Times published a lengthy article Wednesday about chemical weapons found in Iraq. When it comes to chemical weapons, the New York Times charged that the culprits are the Bush administration and the Pentagon, which allegedly covered up the medical risks that the illegal weapons posed to American and Iraqi soldiers.
It essentially gives a free pass to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, which built the illegal weapons, used them against Iran and its own Kurdish opposition and failed to destroy them as required by numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions.
…
http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/17/iraqs-chemical-weapons-lingering-threat/
4500+ chemical weapons shells found according to the NYT “but no WMD”.
Interesting statement.
Bush tried, the Left lied;
Now so many more to die.
===================
PA, they don’t count. They were all full of infant formula which must have soured.
Always interesting to see what my much beloved “denizens” leave out of the discussion (by coincidence, of course)…
by coincidence, of course.
I like how the NYT claims sarin gas is NOT a weapon of mass destruction. They just can’t admit that Bush was right.
j2, on one level, a primitive one, it’s just a hit on Karl and his latest love. The New York Times has no problem with hypocrisy and dissonance. Its readers glory in it.
============
I don’t have the energy to care. Bush was a terrible President. The war was sold as a preventative measure, otherwise the “smoking gun” as Condi so dramatically put it, might well be a mushroom cloud. How laughable, whether they had WMD or not.
Then along came Obama. who turns out to be just as bad or perhaps worse. He’s the most crooked, mendacious, divisive President I can remember, except perhaps for Nixon.
It’s exhausting, being an American, and deeply demoralizing.
==> ” They just can’t admit that Bush was right….”
Yes, indeed, they just can’t admit that Bush was right all those times he told the public that we needed to invade Iraq to protect against the existential threat of abandoned chemical weapons programs built in close collaboration with the West (his vice-president, in particular).
You boyz (in kim’s case, girlz?) are hilarious.
Joshua tries to hide the pea under a different thimble.
jim2, kim (and maybe sevepostrel?)
For your viewing pleasure:
http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/uebndp/abandoned-wmds-in-iraq
Don’t say I never did anything for you.
And this is particularly beautiful:
==> “It essentially gives a free pass to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, which built the illegal weapons, ”
Given that the weapons were built in close collaboration with the U.S.
Ah, the magnificence of a Climate Etc. “denizen’s” argument.
A work of art and a thing of beauty.
Pitiful, Joshua. What are you doing conceding the existence of WMD by Saddam. C’mon, be strong. Lie harder.
=============
What’s particularly beautiful is how O’Bumbles has plunged the entire Middle East into a violent chaos. Even with the war on during Bush’s Presidency, the Middle East was in better shape than now. We need to massively bomb areas known to support militant Islam. A “targeted” war just disposes of more American blood and treasure. They are going to have to feel massive pain before a cultural shift can take place.
No worries, j2; President Obola has appointed a spinmeister to contain the contagion. This one so good he doesn’t even need to wear a protective suit.
===================
The Iraq war was a predictable disaster based on the transparent lie that if we didn’t go in there and clean out the WMD, the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud (courtesy of the mendacious henchwoman Condi).
Then Obola comes in and promptly causes another predictable disaster, taking out all our remaining troops in what at that point looked like a reasonably stable situation, thereby inviting the Junior Varsity ISIS to occupy the vacuum he’d created.
I don’t know which is worse. They’re both so unfathomably stupid it’s hard to say.
I see that you are off to discussing sea ice in China but nowhere is there any mention made of what I have written about it. Not because anyone has criticized me but because the mainstream, including yourself, has ignored it. That is a pity, because much of what is circulating about that subject is plain nonsense. Let’s start from the beginning. Observations of Arctic ice melting show it goes much faster than the greenhouse theory predicts. That is small wonder because demonstrably Arctic warming cannot be greenhouse warming. This is because it started from scratch at the turn of the twentieth century and to do this is impossible without an increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Laws of physics, you know. And we know for sure that there was no such increase of CO2 simply by looking at the Keeling curve. Right off the bat the greenhouse theory is in trouble but numerous authors writing about it ignore this fact and go off analyzing side issues. Refusing to face a fact will not make it go away and choosing to deal with side issues just obfuscates the situation. Further, the warming, once started, came to a halt in mid-century and thirty years of cooling followed. The cooling in turn came to an end in 1970 but none of the papers on Arctic warming even know it happened. Now we have two mysterious happenings – sudden start of warming and thirty years of cooling – that must be explained. And that means you too because you are one of these Arctic experts. Add to this the fact that prior to 1900 there was nothing in the Arctic but two thousand years of slow, linear cooling, and you have an unfinished research program on your hands. Look at the Kaufman et al. temperature graph in my article.It shows a couple of slight warmings as well as a slight cooling for LIA but a straight line for 2000 years is a reasonable overall approximation to it. And don’t overlook the NOAA Arctic report card I include. If you do it right you will have to explain at this point both the origin of warming and the mid-century cooling as well before going on. Since carbon dioxide is ruled out as cause the only reasonable physical explanation boils down to ocean currents. They would have to carry warm water to the Arctic to make this happen. The sudden start of warming most likely corresponds to a discontinuous change of North Atlantic current system when it first started to carry warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic Ocean. Its origin is unknown and someone with their billions of climate research money should look into it. In this context, the thirty year pause in mid-century would correspond to a temporary return of the previously existing current system. There is no way that any greenhouse effect could perform such changes of direction in the short time available for this. All the papers on ice loss are blissfully unaware of these facts. But we know that something that has happened in nature can happen again. If that thirty year cooling should return it would not be too good for Arctic transportation or resource development. The last few years have shown a cooler side of the Arctic and the Northwest Passage has not been open to yachts that had planned to pass through. Perhaps the North Atlantic current system is ready to change its flow pattern again. I am not willing to guess, I am just watching to see how it will turn out.
I wonder why the larger part of the ice extent curve is never discussed. The minima and maxima get all the attention but the interesting part is the rate of change (slope) year after year appears quite consistent. I would have thought in a warming climate the ROC would necessarily be affected. What’s up with that?
The other obvious thing seen in the slopes is the relative length of seasons. This too is missing in the conversation. The minima and maxima are subject to all manner if wind and sea current whims. The ROC is an indication of the planet’s ability to absorb and shed heat at the poles. I’d like to know more about this.
Unknown and poorly defined ‘uncertainty’ reveals settled science’s desperate wish to assert CAGW, regardless
All the GCMs and peer reviewed papers in the universe cannot deny that the world remains cool. Nor can such expert authority claim credibility
JC:
“Specifically with regards to the current period of sea ice minimum, the stage was set in the early 1990’s with anomalously positive Arctic Oscillation.”
More like the stronger negative NAO episodes in 1993, 1995-98, and generally 2005 onwards:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/month_nao_index.shtml
I see a whole string of summers with very negative NAO conditions from 2015-2024, so I think we will see some very low September sea ice minima again.
Interesting item on why expanded Antarctic sea ice may not be good news.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/antarctic-sea-ice_n_5978238.html?cps=gravity
JimD
From the article. “There are simply too many unknowns at present to say that this paper makes a prediction that is useful for future flooding risks,” Severinghaus said. “But they have proposed an interesting hypothesis.”
Its all pure speculation once again promulgated by a publication (green Huff Post) that doesn’t have an objective bone in its body
tonyb
Yes, the sea ice froze unusually easily this year and it could be all that fresh water coming off the glaciers making it unusual. We’ll see if it does it again next year and if someone can go out there and check this hypothesis.
Thoughts on Antarctic Sea Ice
In warm times, when southern polar waters are warm and the ice around the Antarctic continent is small, the snow falls on the ice on land and builds up. The ice gets heavy and the outflow of ice increases and cools the ocean and allows more sea ice to form.
In cold times, when southern polar waters are cold and the ice around the Antarctic continent is large, the snow falls on the ice shelves and does not feed the ice on land. The ice on land diminishes and the outflow of ice slows down and allows the oceans to warm and remove the ice sheets.
The Arctic Polar Ice Cycle does control the thermostat of earth, but the Antarctic Polar Ice Cycle does augment the control.
This normal cycle has been operating in the same way in the same bounds for ten thousand years.
During the past ten thousand years, temperature has been bounded in very tight bounds, compared to all time before. It has cycled between warm and cold, inside the same bounds, always cycling and never staying the same. When it gets warm, it melts polar sea ice and always snows enough to cause cold. When it gets cold it freezes polar oceans and always does not snow enough and allows the sun to remove ice and it always gets warm. This cycle is clearly in the ice core data for Greenland and the Antarctic.
The widely used Chapman&Walsh and HadISST sea ice datasets overestimate the arctic SIE before the satellites .
It`s worth to check them against the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute’s (AARI) sea ice maps, that rely on actual observations (from ships and aircrafts) and are available from 1950 onwards here: http://www.aari.nw.ru/gdsidb/sea_ice/arctic/scripts/aari_n.html
End of August 1950 (Chapman&Walsh) vs. August 22nd 1950 (AARI – dark blue means open water): http://diablobanquisa.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/image0041.png
End of August 1951 (Chapman&Walsh) vs. August 21st 1951 (AARI): https://diablobanquisa.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/image004_khg311.png
End of August 1952 (Chapman&Walsh) vs. September 1st 1952 (AARI): https://diablobanquisa.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/image006_mgb6.png
End of August 1953 (Chapman&Walsh) vs. August 20th 1953 (AARI): https://diablobanquisa.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/image004.png
August 16th 1951 (HadISST) vs. August 21st 1951 (AARI): https://diablobanquisa.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/image0071.png
September 16th 1952 (HadISST) vs. September 10th 1952 (AARI): https://diablobanquisa.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/image005.png
September 16th 1953 (HadISST) vs. September 12th 1953 (AARI): https://diablobanquisa.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/image007-52.png
The recovered imagery from Nimbus I, II and III also suggest lower extent at 1964, 66 and 69 minima than Chapman&Walsh and HadISST do.
I hope they correct it in the ‘Back to 1870’ new dataset.
Nice, and thanks bq.
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The ‘Back to 1870′ release is now a month overdue from the timescale Florence Fetterer gave me recently and that revised deadline is many months later than had been originally proposed.
Let’s’ hope the team have gone back to basics
tonyb
I hope they have gone back to basis as well, but I’m afraid that the result of the ‘Back to 1870’ project could be as the graph shown in the slide 23 of this presentation: http://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/star/documents/meetings/Ice2013/dayTwo/Walsh_Wed.pdf
It´s nearly identical to Chapman&Walsh: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2010.png
If they have incorporated AARI data into HadISST, why the result is nearly identical to Chapman&Walsh? Chapman&Walsh don’t use AARI data, and in the maps I posted above we have seen that they greatly overestimate the sea ice extent in the Siberian sector.
We have seen that HadISST overestimates the SIE in the Siberian sector as well. Incorporating AARI data should push down HadISST (at least most years between 1933 and 1952), but I don’t see such thing (this is the previous version of HadISST arctic sea ice data: http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/nhem140.jpg ).
I’m afraid that the ‘Back to 1870’ project will continue overestimating the sea ice extent in the Siberian sector, despite their claims of using AARI data.
I hope I’m wrong.
This is the presentation I wanted to link in my previous post (slide 25): http://www.tims.ntu.edu.tw/download/talk/20120920_2311.pdf
When the Earth is warm, when the oceans are warm, polar sea ice melts and provides moisture for clouds and rain and snow that does cool the Earth.
When the Earth is cold, when the oceans are cold, polar oceans freeze and they do not provide moisture for clouds and rain and snow and that does allow the sun to warm the Earth.
This simple cycle does regulate the temperature in tight bounds.
The temperature that Polar Sea Ice melts and freezes does determine the set point for Earth Temperature.
The temperature of Earth became better regulated as the Polar Ice Cycles developed and improved and got perfected.
Look at the temperature data. the evidence is easy to understand.
Look at Pope’s Climate Theory.
When Ice Extent on Earth is low, when the oceans are warm, when Polar Oceans are thawed, much more water is exposed to the fierce Polar Winds and becomes available for clouds, rain and snow.
When fierce winds make the water surface turbulent, the effective water surface area exposed to the atmosphere is multiplied many times. The snowfall and the ice accumulation is huge in these times. Ice advances after this and this increasing Albedo does cool the Earth.
When the oceans are cold and Polar Oceans are covered with ice, much less water is exposed to the fierce Polar Winds and does not become available for clouds, rain and snow. The snowfall in these times does not replace the ice that is melted by the sun in every warm season. Ice retreats after this and this decreasing Albedo does warm the Earth.
This simple explanation shows why temperature has been tightly bound in the same bounds for ten thousand years and why A Roman Warm Period was followed by a cold period and why that was followed by the Medieval Warm Period and why that was followed by the Little Ice Age and why that was followed by this Modern Warm Period and why this warm period will be followed by another cold period. This cycle is between 800 to 1000 years and has repeated for ten thousand years in the same bounds.
This is what the data does show did happen before and is happening now.
The oceans are warm, the Polar Regions did open, and the snow has started falling. This increased snowfall will continue until the oceans cool and the Polar Oceans do freeze and turn off the increased snowfall.
You should not look at and curve fit a century of data and use that to predict a climate that has a thousand year cycle that you ignore.
A lot of effort has gone into identifying the cycles of sixty years and less.
Very little effort has gone into identifying the cycles of more than sixty years.
The Little Ice Age Happened after the Medieval Warm Period. The sun did not change that much. The CO2 did not Change much. Ice Extent changed a lot. It did not get cold and start snowing. It started snowing when it was and because it was warm and Polar Oceans were thawed.
It did get cold after that snow piled up and advanced.
It really is that simple.
Unfortunately there seems be no role for external forcing in your beloved Pope’s Climate Theory, and as such, it becomes impossibly inadequate to explain the evolution of Earth’s climate.
The only true external forcing is the Sun (and probably GCR), ocean evaporation and Arctic freeze, thaw cycles do all of the regulation.
Well, no, not quite. Volcanoes, large asteroids, changes to GHG composition, biological changes, can all represent huge external forcings to the climate system and have repeatedly altered Earth’s climate in the past and will do so in the future.
Asteroids external, volcanoes and biology are internal.
Micro mistakes internal/external; as a spatial metaphor.
It’s not.
Only in the deluded minds of climate “scientists”.
Alright, I’ll give you volcanoes are mostly forcing, we haven’t shown a link between crustal compression and rebound and activity, yet.
Biological changes are internal to the entire system, which is what you need to look at, considering such factors as Dimethylsulfide Emission: Climate Control by Marine Algae?
And of course the biggie of external forcing– Milanokovitch astronomical cycles.
And of course the biggie of external forcing– Milanokovitch astronomical cycles.
In terms of problems that is a biggie ie how can a change in global forcing of 0.1% cause a shift in the Quaternary advances and retreats?.
question Why are the quaternary advance and retreats temporally coincidental on two planets ? ie earth and mars
“question Why are the quaternary advance and retreats temporally coincidental on two planets ? ie earth and mars…”
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Had no idea we had Paleoclimate data from Mars covering the past several million years, which is the only way you could make this claim. Please share this exciting new research. Or better yet, stop making such ridiculous claims.
Its well known,and is an open problem (albeit poorly advertised).
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v243/n5408/abs/243459a0.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103507000383
Given that NASA isn’t reporting a change in the Mars polar caps, Mars must be undergoing a “hiatus” too!
R. Gates: “Had no idea we had Paleoclimate data from Mars covering the past several million years, which is the only way you could make this claim.”
We do, however, have astronomical data on Milankovitch cycles for Mars. So, maybe that was one original basis for some claims.
@ R. Gates the external forcing comes from the sun in Pope’s Climate Theory. This has been true during the total evolution of Earth’s Climate.
Water, in all of its states, Water, Ice, Water Vapor, Clouds does regulate Earth’s Temperature in narrow bounds. The temperature cycles between the upper bounds and the lower bounds. Over time the temperature cycles have changed and the bounds have tightened. The upper bound has moved down and the lower bound has moved up. The Polar Ice Cycles provided the improvements to this regulation.
My Theory provides a reasonable theory to explain the behavior of the data.
You have no theory that could be used to explain the behavior of the data.
You can look at the years with open Arctic Records and see the immediate cooling that prevents new records for several years. It takes a lot of years with more snowfall to put enough ice on land to produce significant ice advance. We will have several more sixty year cycles inside this modern Warm Cycle before the Arctic Closes, but it will close. Anyone who believe the Arctic did not open during every warm period in the past ten thousand years is ignoring the repeating cycles in the data. Every one of the warm periods ended because it snowed more while it was warm.
test
Ah – a rare working threading.
Arctic temps.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/chylek-arctic-temps.png
Arctic ice.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/seaiceinfourarcticseas20polyakov2003.jpg
AMOC.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/smeed-fig-7.png
Hmmm!!! All ‘weak statistics’ of cycles of course.
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/sea-ice-climate-dynamics.pdf
Questions raised by the discrepancy between models & observations
• Are climate models too sensitive to greenhouse forcing? Yes!
• Is climate model treatment of natural climate variability inadequate? Yes!
• Are climate model projections of 21st century warming too high? Yes!