by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Conservatives Don’t Hate Climate Change, They Hate The Proposed Solutions: [link]
David Ropeik: The danger of advocacy masquerading as science [link]
Breakthroughs in energy storage [link]
Must read exchange between @mattwridley and @mark_lynas about climate change and policy [link]
Climate Change Communication interview with Katherine Hayhoe [link]
“Predictions of warming-induced war more likely to result in higher military $$$ than lower fossil-fuel emissions” [link]
Recovered satellite images:Antarctic sea ice swung from near-record high ’64 to record low ’66 [link]
Superb article by Dan Voosen on Dan Kahan: Striving for a Climate Change [link]
Marcel Crok: IPCC bias in action [link]
Cliff Mass: The U.S. is Falling Further Beyond in Numerical Weather Prediction: Does the Obama Administration [link]
Interesting new book: “Mathematics and Climate” [link]
It is very strange that none of the articles on energy storage batteries mention what they actually are. It isn’t another scam is it?
I think this is it.
From the article:
…
It’s a 32-megawatt-hour lithium-ion energy storage project in a region with a potential 4.5 gigawatts of wind.
…
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/The-Biggest-Battery-in-North-America-Gets-Unveiled-By-SCE-Today
If it is lithium ion, then no wonder they don’t want to list how much it will cost. From the prices in that article ($53M for 8MW, 32MWh) it costs a fortune and they want to go to 1.3GW!. It is also only storage so the generating plant will be on top of that. The way California’s energy prices will have to increase to pay for it, the power won’t be needed as all the industry (and jobs) will have moved to Texas, leaving behind just the pensioners.
And the actors.
Yeah, the “breakthrough” seems to be finding a sucker. But California can do what California wants to do. When rates go through the roof, look for them to blame everybody else but themselves though.
The line “Breakthroughs in energy storage [link]” seems a bit exaggerated. The breakthrough is in how to lobby a state legislature and associated regulatory authorities into behaving irrationally. I suppose this is what one can expect from Californians.
The denial propaganda machine has been spreading the idea that global warming has “paused” or is on “hiatus”. This is seen mostly on Fox News and other extremists media.
This right wing propaganda ignores the scientific basis for global warming, which as President Obama explained –From Fernando’ blog
What are you trying to accomplish with a post like that? Basically you are hammering on a partisan divide? Are you trying to make progress on the climate issue? Nope, you have some other non climate agenda, apparently, and are dragging climate into its service.
My favorite part is citing Obama as some kind of authority.
Lithium/ion batteries have limited service life. I suspect if you dig down you’ll find that state & federal taxpayers are heavily subsidizing this boondoggle.
250 MW is 0.2% of world pumped hydro installed generating capacity (Figure 1). http://www.climatechange.gov.au/sites/climatechange/files/files/reducing-carbon/APPENDIX4-ROAM-report-on-pumped-storage.pdf
I have no idea what the % of world pumped hydro energy storage capacity (in GWh) would be but I guess it would be best measured in ppm. :)
Peter Lang: 250 MW is 0.2% of world pumped hydro installed generating capacity (Figure 1). http://www.climatechange.gov.au/sites/climatechange/files/files/reducing-carbon/APPENDIX4-ROAM-report-on-pumped-storage.pdf
That does not imply much. At one time, only 0.2% of transoceanic travel was by flight; at a later date, only 0.2% of transoceanic air travel was by jet aircraft. (Air travel in general and engine development in particular received substantial government subsidies.) A more interesting omission from the article that Prof Curry linked was the cost of the system; also omitted were the expected lifetimes of the systems. On the other hand, they were chosen to replace the “early failing” San Onofre nuclear power plants, so some allowance in the comparisons should take account of these failures as well.
there might be places in the world where batteries are really a better option than pumped storage.
Matthew Marler,
I agree. I wasn’t meaning to imply that the proportion at the start has any ability to project the future. I just thought I’d give some perspective. Another perspective is that 99% of all world’s electricity storage is in pumped hydro. Nothing else comes close to being viable for large scale energy storage (GWh).
I agree with you on costs and energy storage capacity, life cycles. life expectancy etc. I asked a question on this somewhere else on this thread.
I also pointed to my 9 GW, 400 GWh pumped hydro project. I just need a bit of funding ($20 billion or so should do) and a solution to few technical and other issues, and we should be away :)
Seems a little over-hyped at least.
>While the sheer scale of the announcement is staggering (no utility has ever purchased 250 MW of non-pumped-hydro energy storage before), the details of the announcement are even more impactful.
I the early 1990s a “rural” cooperative serving parts of Alabama and North West Florida put in 110 MWs of non-pumped-hydro energy storage (compressed air energy storage) for just their own use. It’s worked fine, but it’s hardly revolutionary stuff. 250 MWs from a huge California entity, maybe less so. For sure until we can hear something about its cost effectiveness and potential for greater applicability,
Planning Engineer.
I agree. Appendix A here lists 16 demonstration storage projects. They range up to 10 MW and have between most have 15 minutes to 2 h of storage. One with NAS batteries has 7 h storage.
“Appendix A. – SCE’s Existing Storage Projects”
https://www.sce.com/wps/wcm/connect/2e4abe8b-d988-48d1-96fc-840179b03424/SCE_StorageTestimony.pdf?MOD=AJPERES
Put the windmills on top of the $100 billion bullet train to nowhere!
I ran down the SCE procurement. The 250MW is not a monolith. Itnincludes several different storage technologies for Peaking, including 15 MW of ive making for building air conditioning. The single largest chumk is. 100MW x 4hr AES Storage ‘Advancion’ system with a claimed (by them) cost of $1000/Kw. The website cost comparisons are a bit goofy because they do not include any of the lifecycle costs-batteries degrade and die; gas turbine peakers do not. I coild not find a levelized cost comparison, but thismsolutionnhas tombe muchmmore expensive than a small peaker.The technology is based on lithium ion, and this would be the 4th Advancion installation, and 3x bigger than next largest.
Under the 2013 CPUC mandate, SCE (and the other California utilities) must install 1.3GW of storage by 2020. And peaker turbines, hydro, and pumped storage are expressly excluded. The AES claimed cost is comparable to that claimed for the various flow battery technologies, which are much riskier and less mature. See essay California Dreaming for details.
Rud Istvan: Under the 2013 CPUC mandate, SCE (and the other California utilities) must install 1.3GW of storage by 2020.
I had not realized that. How many GW-hours?
Matthew, that is the joke. The mandate is GW only! The CPUC official reason was ‘not to constrain innovative solutions’. The unofficial reason is as written, in power not energy, it gives all the California VC backed battery startups a shot, and it was their Association (CESA) lobbying that led to this strange result, and also why peaker turbines were not part of the mandated solution.
The problem is that as mandated, the mandate does not solve the grid stability problem the 2020 renewables level presents (1/3 required by the 2006 law). They just put 377 megawatts of solar on grid at Ivanpah, which needs more than 8 hours of backup PLUS more for peaking morning and evening loads. The problem was well described by Planning Engineer.
The wind, solar, and energy storage situations each have an essay in the new ebook that give lots of specific illustrations.
Knowing GWhours would be helpful. That number is likely challenging because batteries will degrade significantly. If they could
provide full output for 8 hours and then you could charge in 16 hours, the GW hours per day would be GW times 8. At least while they are new. But I bet it is more complicated than that even at the start as after Its started providing power, the GW capacity probably drops as you get further away from full charge. I don’t know, but expect if they had good news on other fronts we’d hear that too. What’s not said is probably more Important than what’s been said. Just seems like they are taking existing technology and scaling it up.
With the transformation of a Pacific typhoon into an extra tropical cyclone we can easily see a direct link between a warmer Pacific and he coming outbreak of cold weather next week in the US.The effect on the jet stream is the key. Conclusion: a warming planet can be connected to severe cold outbreaks.
Yes. “One of the most important and mysterious events in recent climate history is the climate shift in the mid-1970s. In the northern hemisphere 500-hPa atmospheric flow the shift manifested itself as a collapse of a persistent wave-3 anomaly pattern and the emergence of a strong wave-2 pattern.” https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/kravtsov/www/downloads/GRL-Tsonis.pdf
I assume around 2001 the wave-3 anomaly returned with that climate shift. We are going to see one of the lobes head South. At the same time that vacancy will be filled by warmth from the South. The net result may be increased meridional heat transport, that is cooling. The above quote is one of Tsonis et al banner statements and I have to think there’s a reason it was. I am assuming a wave-2 anomaly reduces meridional heat transport and contributes to global temperature rise.
RE: R. Gates “Conclusion: a warming planet can be connected to severe cold outbreaks.”
And thereby can also be connected to all the more ‘nice’ days, no?
Yes. Although the cold weather can also be connected to natural variability, otherwise known as ‘weather’. It’s pretty normal for tropical cyclones to become extra-tropical when they reach the extra-tropics.
R. Gates: With the transformation of a Pacific typhoon into an extra tropical cyclone we can easily see a direct link between a warmer Pacific and he coming outbreak of cold weather next week in the US.The effect on the jet stream is the key. Conclusion: a warming planet can be connected to severe cold outbreaks.
On present knowledge, No actual event can disconfirm the theories of CO2-induced global warming.
On present knowledge, No actual event can disconfirm the theories of CO2-induced global warming.
On present knowledge, No actual event can confirm the theories of CO2-induced global warming.
Conclusion: a warming planet can be connected to severe cold outbreaks.
Conclusion: warm causes cooling and cold causes warming. It snows more when oceans are warm and thawed and it snows less when oceans are cold and frozen. this explains the well bounded temperatures that we have had for ten thousand years.
Yes, consensus “science” is remarkably like “doublespeak”.
We have a physical result that demonstrates that CO2 can trap heat, if all other factors are held equal. This result has a rock-solid theoretical basis in QM. It is
highlyextremely unlikely that that result is incorrect. We don’t know much more than that though. It would seem perverse were this effect to cause cooling, but “would seem” is not standard of proof, I just can’t see how a thoughtful person can say anything other than it is more likely than not that AGW is happening.As for how much warming? I think we have to measure, measure, measure, because GCMs are no more reality, and no more the basis for “experiments,” than opium pipe dreams.
Of course, the stratosphere should also be cooling, especially if the heat is going into the ocean, and it hasn’t really cooled in twenty years, so maybe we are at some kind of limit.
Particle physics requires a six-sigma signal before declaring a discovery, but they can run millions of experiments and this is no barrier because if an effect is real, it will show up at six sigma. That is never going to happen with climate science, beyond the measurement of the effect that CO2 captures IR photons whereas the dominant gasses in the atmosphere are transparent to photons.
What put me off for so long from accepting this, was the risible arguments from sites like “skeptical science” and the innumerate rants of so many commenters on sites like this one. For instance, on the point about stratospheric cooling, they will refuse to accept that it has not cooled since before the pause started and “prove” this by pointing back to eras where vulcanism muddied the signal, in order to conjure up a cooling.
People pushing the cause of acceptance of AGW as a reality have a responsibility not to make transparently idiotic arguments.
cogniscentum: We have a physical result that demonstrates that CO2 can trap heat, if all other factors are held equal.
It’s that “if all other factors are held equal” that is the sand in the gears of thinking. Nothing else is held constant, most notably the evaporation of surface water and the subsequent clouds and rainfall. Solar theorists are full of conjectures about solar changes, but the overall science there is more wispy than the science of cloud-cover change.
Nothing else is held constant, most notably the evaporation of surface water and the subsequent clouds and rainfall.
That is undoubtedly true. It is just that the odds that all of these factors balance to anything but warming seems low, “seems” not being any kind of scientific argument.
I suspect that there are so many factors involved that balance one way or the other that the warming probably works out to bare CO2. I don’t know, but I don’t think anybody does.
It is clear, isn’t it, that all the other things cannot balance to warming? If they did, then anytime CO2 started to rise the temperature would spiral out of control on the high side. Which it doesn’t. Thus, something or somethings clearly counter balance the warming.
That is how we have benefited from constrained temperatures for thousands of years.
@denison
+1
Negative feedback from clouds. Albedo change is the elephant in the room.
“It is clear, isn’t it, that all the other things cannot balance to warming? If they did, then anytime CO2 started to rise the temperature would spiral out of control on the high side. Which it doesn’t. Thus, something or somethings clearly counter balance the warming.”
———-
The climate system has a natural negative feedback to counter increased CO2 which involves the rock-carbon cycle and increased rock weathering that comes from an acceleration of the hydrological cycle when the climate warms. But this process takes tens of thousands of years and is vastly overwhelmed by the rapidity at which GH gases have spiked. More likely this spike will or already has initiated a series of events that will cause the system to significantly change in the coming decades and centuries should these GH levels stay high or continue this upward spike.
cogniscentum: It is just that the odds that all of these factors balance to anything but warming seems low, “seems” not being any kind of scientific argument.
As I wrote elsewhere, water vapor pressure increases supralinearly with temperature. Downwelling LWIR is principally absorbed in the upper thin layer of water. Both effects imply a higher rate of evaporation of surface water given temperature and CO2 increases, though quantitative effects entail intractable calculations. It looks to me like the “balance” is toward slower warming than has been calculated (actually, they do not work much with rate of warming, as the calculations are equilibrium based, and the rates depend on the rates of CO2 increase that are assumed) as a result of CO2 increase and greater cloud cover.
The supralinearity of the response of vapor pressure to temperature increase is one of the reasons that the assumption of a constant “climate sensitivity” is suspect.
“natural negative feedback to counter increased CO2 which involves the rock-carbon cycle and increased rock weathering”
Negative temperature feedback is from clouds and it’s very fast.
Reducing excess CO2 is done by plants and shell-forming animals. That too is fast. So fast in fact that half of anthropogenic CO2 emission is immediately taken up by those reservoirs.
David, I agree. Fish also breed fast. Plant life in the ocean is consumed quickly. I brought this up in a couple comments on this post. http://judithcurry.com/2014/11/07/week-in-review-34/#comment-646123
Danny, I meant a decrease in the emissions growth rate. We seem to be approaching a linear growth rate.
Sinks are growing. With emissions rates growing, sinks have grown so much that concentration growth is almost linear.
I would think it is largely an increase in biomass, but not primarily vegetation. Think of the oceans, how much old plant growth is there? I imagine much is consumed by animals…
The oceans are huge, there is a lot of plant mass which reproduces quickly, is short-lived, and may be growing because of warming and CO2 (and keeping upper ocean CO2 lower than equilibrium with the increased atmospheric concentration). This mass is likely consumed by animal life rather quickly. Fish also breed very quickly, so both CO2 and energy may be sequestered in large increases in ocean biomass, and waste sinks and transports it to the deep ocean to decay (some of Trenberth’s direct deep ocean heating :) )
http://test.classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/340/flashcards/355340/jpg/biomass_period_-_aquatic_ecosystem.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)#Ocean_biomass
Warming can lead to warming or cooling. Therefore, if it is warming it is warming and if it is cooling it is also warming. Furthermore, warming is the “unsrcewable pooch” of “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe.
The real point is about climate teleconnections and the danger of trying to assess what is going on globally by simply taking local observations as a proxy. When it is the warmest or coldest year on record for your city or state or even country, that is far less meaningful, and in fact could even be counter to what is happening globally. It is counterintuitive that a warm Pacific could cause a cold outbreak in the US, but the teleconnection is there.
Yes Randy, that’s a good point. What you originally said suggested something a little different (that global warming somehow contributed to this weather event).
Sometime in the next several years, we might see a bunch of heat move from the northern pacific into atmosphere and into the arctic. We’d see a huge hotspot in the upper tropo in the arctic, but this would be heat leaving the system and there’d be a gain in arctic sea ice that would reduce warming and possibly act as a carbon sink.
And so if, as seems very possible, 2014 is the warmest year globally, the significance of it takes on a greater importance as it speaks to generally more energy in the global climate system, and all the more significant as there has been no big El Niño to boost temps as there was in 2010 and 1998.
“Sometime in the next several years, we might see a bunch of heat move from the northern pacific into atmosphere and into the arctic. We’d see a huge hotspot in the upper tropo in the arctic, but this would be heat leaving the system and there’d be a gain in arctic sea ice that would reduce warming and possibly act as a carbon sink.”
—
Neither the facts nor the physics would back up this scenario.
“The real point is about climate teleconnections and the danger of trying to assess what is going on globally by simply taking local observations as a proxy.”
Yes and the real point about the inaccuracy of the GCMs is that natural+unconsidered variability in the outcome is so great and of such long time scale as to overstep the human time frame. Therein is the real danger of the precautionary principal. We have no ides of technology, society and it’s expectations 50 years hence, let alone the 100+ year scales involved with climate chsnge.
By way of example, I challange you to realistically estimate carbon emissions 10 years down the road. Global society, expectations and technology are evolving so rapidly that it is a challenge to even guesstimate such a number. Cabon emission could either blow up or collapse that far into the future. Rapid industrialization of India and Indonesia or global economic depression are two familiar paths that could drive emissions to those extremes.
Do you seriously presuppose to know the global population size and it’s energy requirements a hundred years from now? Keep in mind that we fought 2 world wars and one or two cold wars and energy wars in the past 100 years, as it is.
R. Gates: Neither the facts nor the physics would back up this scenario.
Why do you say that? If in fact there is a region of the N. Pacific that has higher than average temperature, as claimed, then the rest of the scenario is reasonable. Which “physics” prohibits it, and which “facts”? It is no more unreasonable than the explanations of how “global warming” produces unusual cold spells. Not saying you are wrong, but some explanation would be informative.
You can link almost anything to almost anything else if you really want to
Why the smart grid is a dumb idea. Do you use a web-connected camera to monitor your baby? Or do you have a security camera in your livingroom? bedroom?
Watch this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/european-industry-flocks-to-cheap-us-gas/2013/04/01/454d06ea-8a2c-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e_story.html
I’m not sure how that happened!!
From the article:
…
It shouldn’t be so easy to peer into a stranger’s bedroom, much less hundreds of strangers’ bedrooms. But a website has collected the streaming footage from over 73,000 IP cameras whose owners haven’t changed their default passwords. Is this about highlighting an important security problem, or profiting off creepy voyeurism—or both?
Insecam claims to feature feeds from IP cameras all over the world, including 11,000 in the U.S. alone. A quick browse will pull up parking lots and stores but also living rooms and bedrooms. “This site has been designed in order to show the importance of the security settings,” the site’s about page says. But it’s also clearly running and profiting off ads.
…
http://gizmodo.com/a-creepy-website-is-streaming-from-73-000-private-secur-1655653510
I’m having a really hard time accepting that climate change is promoted as so definable. Climate is “regionalized” weather patterns, from the gist of my understanding. And we cannot forecast “weather” with 100% certainty. So does it not then follow that I’m having difficulty with climate issues and those climate issues are being expanded from regionally to globally? I’m no scientist, but why can’t “scientists” understand that I, and others, have problem with the certainty surrounding this topic? And that applies to all sides.
Thanks to Dr. Curry for providing resources.
Danny – more high quality reading can be found here:
http://climateaudit.org/
Jim2, Thanks. I’ve got that one bookmarked also. Haven’t had time to get through all the resources that folks are kind enough to share. I’m talking with all sides and conversation is educational and enlightening. But it’s hard for me to provide the perception to “scientists” that they should look at us (the non scientists and vast majority of the populations) as if we’re teenagers. I can remember what I was as a teenager, but as a teenager I could never have known what I am now (In other words, I can’t know what it is to be a scientist). It’s about the only analogy that I can come up with. Hence the reason for my above post. Sure hope this make at least a bit of sense.
I am not sure I am following your question, however this might be an answer:
“This is because climate is a boundary value problem in physics, while weather is an initial value problem.” http://judithcurry.com/2014/05/26/the-heart-of-the-climate-dynamics-debate/ Lacis is worth paying attention to.
Milanovic may be addressing your question: http://judithcurry.com/2014/05/23/how-simple-is-simple/
Hi Ragnarr,
Dr. Curry summed it up well in her conclusions at the end of the Heart of the climate debate thread. I’ll save this and look through the balance later.
The second article will take much more time for me to read and try to absorb.
If you get a chance, please refer to my response to Jim2 above as it may make my dilemma a bit more clear (hopefully).
Thanks,
“Climate is “regionalized” weather patterns, from the gist of my understanding.”
err no.
close, but read harder
Hi Steven,
I’m a reading, I’m a reading. I got this: Climate: “a region with particular prevailing weather conditions” and when I looked further I see that vegetation is part of the definition of a climate, but I’m not clear on if the vegetation arises as a result of the typical weather patterns or not.
This was an simplistic way for me to try to describe perceptions. I don’t try to generate my own weather forecasts other than seeing fronts on maps and low/high pressure systems, and wind isobar patterns. And then I don’t try (as I’m not educated) to then do probabilities for rain, for example.
So when I’m communicating with scientists as to how to communicate with me (and all the other non scientists out there) about climate, I don’t want it dumbed down, but I do need it in a language I can digest. And even then, based on the accuracy of weather forecasting, I seek out several sources and (for lack of a better description) I “meld” them in to a generalized forecast in my little bitty brain.
I guess I’m then transposing that thought process (and I bet I’m not the only one) on to the topic of “climate change”.
Point me. I’ll go.
Indeed, that is the holiday brochure definition of climate. Not quite what the journals or the title of this website are talking about, but OK as another use of the term.
No? what then? and don’t be so patronizing. Not everybody is as smart as you!
I’m reasonably smart. Eh, average intelligence, I’d say. But I’m not at all afraid to admit I’m ignorant in this which I’ve not yet been educated. I can learn and am willing. No one can know all about all.
Chris, I appreciate your consideration more than you can know. I have a distinct feeling that Steven is setting me up for something positive and I’m up for a teaching moment even if I’m the student. Frankly, that’s part of why I’m here.
What Rob shared above I also find to be of high value. I’ve been out of school for way more years than i care to share. I’ve got to re learn how to learn. I recognize my limitations and know that there will be things out of my grasp. Which was what I was attempting to convey in the original posts.
Some others will just have to meet some of “us” part way or communication will never take place.
Heh, excellent schtick, DT. My most valuable clue is the tone of the debate. Then you take your own numeracy and scientific ability as deep as you can and watch the fray from the distance, binoculars help, sometimes a telescope won’t even. Then, listen to the actual spectators returning from the front. After awhile, the veterans speak for themselves.
======================
Kim,
I assure you it’s not a “schtick”. I’m learning a lot. I’m sorry if you received something from the communication that I did not send.
But I’m also disillusioned. There so much politics, at least on the blogs, and seemingly inherent to the “science” as “the two sides” won’t even talk to each other.
I’m here, where I perceive at least some balance in the discussion, but still self supporting. I’m “there” (also self supporting). And I’m taking “beatings” from both sides. Yes, folks go after each other, but there is (in many cases) substance behind the fray. I don’t profess to keep up with all the science. My curtain is wide open. I’m hiding nothing. But other folks (from what I see) are. There are agendas behind the scenes.
I’m not planning on going anywhere. I’ll take what you or anyone wants to dish out. I am human and get snarky when others get snarky with me. Human failing. But when the so called “authorities” on both sides stoop to that level isn’t that telling in and of itself?
So many are at then ends of their journey’s in this debate. I’m just starting mine. So please share, but don’t dictate. And if you’ve got a question please ask. Don’t presume you know my intentions. There’s no ID card that one can sign up for, but if I had one it say I’m as close to agnostic as anything.
Danny.
climate is long term statistics for a given spatial region.
global climate is long term statistics for the entire globe.
start with the basics.
For example: I cannot predict the weather for NYC dec 2018
But I can predict that NYC in december 2018 will be colder than
death valley in July of 2018.
when you average weather for a region over a long time you get a number.
that number is called “climate”
climate isnt a thing. its produced from weather by doing math on the weather.
“when you average weather for a region over a long time you get a number”
Actually you don’t. Weather is not a number.
Andrew
Climate and weather are both local and neither is global. Local weather is perturbations in local climate. There is little need to focus on any aspects of global climate. Primary focus should be on the advantages, and dis-advantages if any, of the status and changes in local weather / climate.
The climate and weather at a location are fundamentally set by the relationships between the geometry of the earth, the geometry of the revolution of the earth around the sun, the relationship between Earth’s axis of rotation and the plane of Earth’s orbit, and the rotation of the earth about its axis.
The climate and weather at a location are determined to first order by these factors and the latitude and altitude of that location. With possible exceptions for locations that are dominated by significant, more-or-less thermally stable, bodies of liquid or solid water; primarily near the oceans but including also other large bodies of liquid or solid water.
Meso-scale ( larger than local, smaller than global ) topology of Earth’s surface can also affect local weather / climate. Mountain ranges that significantly affect regions relative to precipitation are an example; rain shadows, monsoons.
The solar-system and Earth’s geometric relationships, and local altitude/latitude, are the primary reasons that we can know that the temperature, and the climate / weather in general, at a location will be different, for example, at January and July. The degree of differences between the seasons primarily is determined by the local latitude and altitude. The degree of differences over the seasonal / yearly cycle is a strong function of location. Variations over the seasonal cycle are more or less distinct; the variations are either small or large depending on the location.
The weather is said to be chaotic. The average of a chaotic response is itself chaotic. It is the Earth-Sun geometry and the axis of Earth’s rotation that determines that January and July are easily differentiated. That differentiation is independent of the chaotic nature of weather.
The day-to-day variations in local weather and climate, are determined by the effects of the external supply and rejection of radiative energy on the physical phenomena and processes occurring within and between the climate systems. Basically, weather is the distribution, and internal redistribution, of the energy supply of sensible and latent thermal energy within Earth’s climate systems.
Validation, fidelity of the simulation relative to the physical domain, of GCMs thus firstly requires that the calculations be shown to be correctly simulating the distribution and internal redistribution of the internal variations that are responsible for the local weather / climate. Validation relative to effects of increasing concentrations of CO2 must then require that the GCMs are correctly simulating how the distribution and internal redistribution of the internal variations have been altered by the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is a very difficult problem.
A first major difficulty will be in devising and development of procedures and processes that can be used to determine that changes in the phenomena and processes that are responsible for changes in local weather and local climate are in fact due to changes in CO2 concentration.
Global metrics for assessing GCMs fidelity are not very useful relative to assessing the correctness of simulations of local climate / weather. The changes in local climate and local weather are required for decision support. Additionally, none of the fundamental laws describing weather and climate can be usefully expressed in terms of global quantities. The state of the atmosphere and the state of liquid and solid phases of water, and changes in these states, are determined by local conditions. What are the physical phenomena and processes, governed by the fundamental natural laws, which have been demonstrated to scale with global averages of anything?
The temperature of the atmosphere, which has been chosen to represent changes in climate due to increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, on the other hand, is determined by the path of the thermodynamic processes that the atmosphere experiences at the locations of interest. As the initial states are different, and the changes in weather and climate are different, so will the temperature be different. Again, little, if any, dependency on the global-average state.
Climate is local, weather is local. Weather is the variations in local climate. The variations in local climate are what must be correctly simulated by GCMs. The models are required to be able to correctly simulate the changes in the weather variations due to changes in the concentration of CO2.
So, in my simplistic mind, my original definition wasn’t that far off? Thank goodness for those holiday travel brochures :)
This leads me back to the original (for me) thought. What am I doing wrong in trying to get folks on both sides (ugh) of the discussion to understand that if climate includes (is defined by) weather (patterns) and we have accuracy issues with weather forecasting, how are those of us w/o science degrees to trust forecasting climate?
Seems like a fools paradise and I’m the fool.
Danny, the simplest way to put it is that doubling CO2 is like adding 1% to the sun’s energy. The skeptics think this magnitude of effect won’t do much, while the IPCC suggest the temperature might change coincidentally by about 1% in response. The sun normally takes 100 million years to increase by anything approaching 1%, while solar cycles are more like 0.1% and show warming and cooling of about 0.2 C even in those short cycles. It’s Natures own sensitivity experiment.
Jim d
Way to completely throw a completely false simplification of climate science. To use your analogy, that it is like adding 1% to the sun, the ipcc expectations were not about 1% increase in temps. Have you even read any of the ipcc reports?
The ipcc says that doubling of co2 will cause an increase of forcing roughly equivalent to about 1-1.2 degrees c of warming, your 1% increase in sun. Then they try to estimate the climate systems responses to that small amount of forcing, the feedbacks, and come up with an estimate of 2-5% solar increase equivalent increase ( using your simplified analogy) on top of the direct co2 forcing. You completely missed most of how the agw theory is expected to work.
The battle is not what forcing is caused by the increase of co2, but what the feedbacks will do with that initial input of energy. So far the estimates of strong positive feedbacks so popular in the cagw crowd have not materialized, and neither have the strong negative feedbacks championed by the extreme sceptical position. This is also made harder by trying to estimate the natural temp changes that are not caused by changes in co2, but instead natural climate forcings. It is not simple or evidently well understood.
But simply fix the simplistic initial analogy jim presented. The increased co2 causes a 1% increase in the suns power. The ipcc estimates that this will cause a 2-5 % increase in temperatures.
The earth’s temperature is about 288 K, so a 1% increase is about 2.88 C. This coincidentally is similar to the expected equilibrium change in response to a 1% change in forcing 3.7 W/m2 over 340 W/m2. I am not sure where you went wrong.
Thanks Jimmy D, I didn’t know that only ~50W/m^2 of solar energy reached the earth’s surface until now.
aaron, it is true that the GHGs and clouds do most of the insulating and provide far greater surface downward contributions than 50 W/m2. This is precisely where their importance comes from. Most skeptics have not realized this yet, but maybe you have. Encouraging.
Jim D | November 8, 2014 at 10:49 am |
Danny, the simplest way to put it is that doubling CO2 is like adding 1% to the sun’s energy.
__________________
Um, you forgot the “all other things being equal” part. And as increasing CO2 has never led to temperatures spiraling out of control on the high side, nor has decreasing CO2 ever caused temperatures to spiral out of control on the low side, clearly all other things are NEVER equal.
ksd, you are having trouble with the positive feedback concept. It is an amplification factor , not “spiraling out of control”. Common error, and a surprisingly frequent one here among the skeptics. Warmists are better informed about what a positive feedback means.
Heh…. at last we get an inside view of the climate model engine rooms:
“….doubling CO2 is like adding 1% to the sun’s energy…”
NOW we know how it is calculated. :-)
A global climate is like a global book. It doesn’t exist. It’s a misuse of terms. Nonsense. Books and climates are broken down into types by classification systems. The Dewey Decimal system and The Köppen system are common examples of both, respectively.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
But wait. There are “global” contributors such as the sun, oceans, CO2, so why isn’t there a global “machine” with sets of “gears” within?
David, I’m not quite comfortable with that so I’ll need your assistance to get through that thought. Are you implying (or stating) that global contributors can have regional then local responses? And that there is NO interconnection?
To clarify my post, Jim made the analogy that CO2 doubling would be like a 1% increase in solar input and the IPCC estimates a corresponding 1% increase in temp. My interpretation was that he was implying that there was a direct 1 to 1 relationship between CO2’s direct effect and the expected temp response. I apologize if this was not your intention but were instead meaning to indicate the 1% to 1% was just coincidental to measures you chose to use and not to indicate that there is a direct equal forcing of CO2 to temp.
The IPCC estimates actually say that CO2’s direct forcing would be between 33% – 20% of the estimated temp effect. And that non CO2 feedbacks would cause 66% – 80% of all the temp effects (warming) they estimate.
@Danny Thomas
There is no climate type in the Koppen classification system called “global”. I don’t know how to make the point with more clarity.
David,
I getcha! This stuff is coming back to me from long, long, long……….ago. I appreciate you information and patience! I’m using inappropriate terminology (but in my defense, I’m only one outta a bazillion) :)
David
I have suggested to Mosh several times that it would be interesting to create a BEST data set based on Koppen classifications. He does not seem keen on the idea, no doubt for good reasons.
The late Marcel Leroux commented to the effect that there is no such thing as a single climate and I think our understanding of the nuances of what happens hemispherically, regionally and locally is hampered by our insistence that there is a single global climate with a single temperature that has a meaning.
tonyb
Tony – I agree with you that there is more than one way to define a global temperature. But I don’t agree with those who say there’s no such thing as a global temperature. If we can define one, then it exists. If we define it well, it will convey a physical meaning.
“If we can define one, it exists”
If we define a unicorn, does it exist?
Andrew
It does if it’s “observable”. Right? :)
Sry, but I chose not to resist.
We do have a word for it and the concept exists. But, it conveys no physical meaning – the second part of my statement.
Also, Bad Andrew, does a Hilbert space with an infinite number of axes exist? Can it have physical meaning?
@ Neutron-Powered High-Side Sideways Racer |
Re your post at 9:17: Sounds to me like a reasonable summary of the facts in evidence.
As opposed to ‘We gotta stop using fossil fuels immediately or the positive feedbacks (never before in evidence) resulting from injecting ACO2 into the atmosphere will cause the Temperature of the Earth to shoot up wildly, thus wiping out the biosphere and all that dwell therein.’, which is the official position of the Climate Consensus.
tony
“I have suggested to Mosh several times that it would be interesting to create a BEST data set based on Koppen classifications. He does not seem keen on the idea, no doubt for good reasons.”
been there done that. The problem is the Koppen classification is NOT
an objective or natural classification system.
to start with you can try to divide the planet of the past into Koppen areas.
The concept is built on the idea that vegetation is the best expression of the climate. You define areas using 3 elements: temperature, precipitation and the seasonality of the precipitation.
Take the Am class for example: all 12 months have to have an average of 18C or higher. Why 18C? why not 17.896C? depending on this
number you get different zones. How much does uncertainty matter?
Further, how do you draw these lines back in 1800?
Next the Am class has a driest month with either 60mm of rain OR 1/25
of the total.. why not 55mm or 1/20.
basically you have zones that change depending on how you tweek those numbers. The zones are not natural kinds
it gets really fun when you move to the definitions of Dry Zones.
take BW
multiple the Annual temperature by 20C add 280 to this number if 70%
of the precipitation falls in the April through Sept time period in the NH.
However, if more than 30% and less than 70% falls in this period, then add 140 to the number.. otherwise add zero.
Next, if the annual precipitation is less than 50% of this number then the climate is BW
or should we use the Trewartha modifications to the system.???
The bottom line is you can use the system to show how the areas have changed, but that is a different question.
we want to know how temperature has change. Koppen classification doesnt help you answer that question BECAUSE IT DEPENDS on the answer to that question.
logic.
some reference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_kind
“Climate is “regionalized” weather patterns, from the gist of my understanding.”
—–
Hope your did not pay much for your “gist”.
Naw. It was free.
Danny, one ‘Cliff Notes’ primer to CAGW you might try is the Climate chapter in The Arts of Truth. Without reading the rest of the book, the ‘truth arts’ referencing may be a little obscure. But the entire waterfront as of AR4 is covered. Alternative hypotheses (cosmic rays), homogenization biases, GCM model problems, IPCC selection bias, overwrought possible consequences in the categories defined by the IPCC. Portions of water bapor feedback selection bias, and IPCC internal sensitivity illogic were guest posted here in different form back in 2011 and 2012.
Rud,
I will look for that reference. Thanks so much!
Danny Thomas:
I’ve been reading comments over at Real Climate and see you had asked for something like proof CO2 causes global warming. John Cook’s remarks from 2010:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-warming-intermediate.htm
His main points:
# We’re raising CO2 levels
True, though we have lost track of 25% of the CO2 and keep learning new things about the carbon cycle.
# CO2 traps heat
True. What is needed is to know is how much, with the IPCC saying in could be from 1.5 to 4.5 with no most likely value. Since James Hansen’s 1984 paper on sensitivity, I don’t see we’ve made much progress in narrowing the range. We also need to know how the feedbacks are changed as a result of our adding CO2 to the atmosphere?
# The planet is accumulating heat
This might be the weakest point with the oceans having the most sparse data and worse data the further back we go. TOA measurements aren’t as precise as we’d like them to be.
I suppose his 3 points are supposed to be an argument that CO2 causes global warming. I find it’s easy enough to concede the point. If we knew how much heat has been accumulated we might know how much heat CO2 traps. Moving to the next question, how much heat does CO2 trap:
https://www.masterresource.org/site/uploads/2014/09/Equilirium-Climate-Sensitivity.jpg
Ragnaar,
Wow! Thank you for that.
Ugh. The single worst internet experience I’ve had so far. I was only directed to sites in support of AGW and CAGW instead of being offered educational sites where I could arrive at my own conclusions. Assimilation in to the Borg?
I will look more fully in to the information you’ve provided. I’ve gained some understanding but cannot express via this venue how much I appreciate your offering.
The closest I can get (at this point in my learning curve) is the correlation does not mean causation. And so much of what I see is exactly that. Am I missing something?
I cannot differentiate if I’m suffering from confirmational bias in that I glean that CO2 is increasing but do not find attribution of that CO2 to being definitively causative of warming. I’m looking for more. I’ve done the math based on Mauna Loa. I can see that CO2 is increasing (since 1958) and the rate of increase is increasing (in the last decade). I’m missing where the linear warming has gone. But being in a subordinate position as I lack any background in physics, and in seeing that the National Academy of Science and the American Physical Society (et al) describe the coincidence as “likely” being attributed to CO2 I find that bothersome. For lack of a better description it’s like “damning with faint praise”.
I do find evidence of warming but lack connection to CO2 predominately vs. natural variability. And from what I read here and elsewhere I am not alone.
Presuming you have much more experience than I any further resources would be appreciated.
If I’m reading the chart you provided correctly, it appears that the researchers listed have pretty much all concluded that sensitivity (expected reaction to CO2 emissions) will fall in a range of approx. 1.7C to approx. 2.7C (2C as “median”). Is that reasonably accurate? And the ranges are predominately less than the IPCC “consensus”. I do not see a time range.
I think some of this is congealing in my little bitty brain, but that’s prior to your evaluation.
Danny Thomas:
In reply to you recent reply:
Your question, something like, Where is it proved that CO2 causes warming?
We pass the ball to NASA for an easy slam dunk, and we get these bullet points in regards to, ‘Climate change: How do we know?’
Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:
Sea level rise, Global temperature rise, Warming oceans, Shrinking ice sheets, Declining Arctic sea ice, Glacial retreat, Extreme events, Ocean acidification, Decreased snow cover
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
It’s changing ‘rapidly’. Some of the above are subject to disagreements as to the amounts and the weakest case once again is warming oceans due to dodgy long term data. So we agree, the climate is changing.
Does CO2 cause warming?
Here: http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
What I see is NASA saying, See what the IPCC says. And this paper gets gets a reference: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change – Naomi Oreskes
I might think this is a missed opportunity for NASA to make its case that CO2 causes from 1.5 C to 4.5 C of warming per doubling. This approach may work fine. People say, NASA said so, because the IPCC said so, because the Scientists said so.
“I’m missing where the linear warming has gone.” Some say the oceans. Some of it may have left through the TOA. The accounting for isn’t what we would prefer. The climate system is not strictly linear but sometimes small ranges can be treated as linear. Google: ‘Robert Sapolsky chaos’ for an idea of the limits of reductive science. It was a bonus from my interest in climate science. It might give insight into how big the problem is they are trying to tackle. The chart I linked was from CATO (Koch Brothers), and was meant to show the wide ranges and uncertainties.
“…seeing that the National Academy of Science and the American Physical Society (et al) describe the coincidence as “likely” being attributed to CO2 I find that bothersome.”
Our Hostess was part of determining the APS’s Climate Change Statement I believe sometime in early 2014 and I don’t know how that turned out. When we ask, how did you determine ‘likely’, we might hear that’s what the experts assessed. I don’t expect to see a lot of data or a statistical distribution in their assessment, but I really don’t know about that.
Ragnaar,
I will go thru this post in detail and wanted to say thanks again.
I got this on the APS so wanted to share back:http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/jc-aps.pdf
My understanding is Dr. Curry is 50/50 Anthro/natural +/- 30%. I got this as counter: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/08/ipcc-attribution-statements-redux-a-response-to-judith-curry/comment-page-2/
Danny for some perspective, see
http://www.climate4you.com/
Thanks Jim2,
I’ll look at that too! LOL. Not sure I’ll ever catch up. You feel that way? I’ve doubled or more my bookmarks in the last few months.
Danny Thomas:
To reply to your recent reply, the 50/50 attribution was supported by a recent paper Judith Curry highlighted here about the missing heat going into the Atlantic. As I recall, one of the paper’s authors supported that 50/50 attribution. About Real Climate. They post some stuff I agree with. Sometimes they disagree not with the skeptics, but the warmists.
Comment from the Ropiek piece:
==> “But any critical thinker ought to smell the distinct possibility of bias when research, by known advocates, goes out of the way to pose questions that produce the ‘right’ answers, answers that support their advocacy.”
How do you suppose that might apply to your work, Judith?
It is the government funders of research that pose most of rhe questions and thus create a lot of the bias. The USGCRP funds a huge carbon cycle program but almost no solar cycle research. They also fund a lot of so-called impact assessments that assume 3 or 4 degrees of warming, or more. Paying for scary stories instead of understanding climate.
The assumption is being made that if an advocate produces a result in a scientific study that supports their advocacy, it should be looked at with greater scrutiny.
Seems reasonable to me.
How might such thinking apply to Lewis and Curry?
Joshua | November 8, 2014 at 8:32 am |
“How might such thinking apply to Lewis and Curry?”
How dare you!
How might such thinking apply to Lewis and Curry?
1. the paper uses a method that originated in 2002 and had the
blessing of the IPCC. In short, the IPPC relied on the method
for years.
2. The paper uses data blessed by the IPCC.
Using the other sides method and the other sides data gives you some sort of improved bias control.
That said.. expect folks to take a look at #2. There are new data coming
that will change the results of L&C
Steven Mosher, “That said.. expect folks to take a look at #2. There are new data coming that will change the results of L&C.”
Not by much, unless you found some alien lower troposphere data squirreled away in Atlantis.
‘Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.’ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/
So ‘97% consensus’ on ‘The Science’ that is systematically and demonstrably wrong on the simplest level. Not bias so much as completely nutso.
Steven Mosher, now that the new and improved HADCRUT4 with C&W kriging is available on Climate Explorer you can “see” just how regional “Global Warming” really is.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-NZyZ5X-Hl2w/VF6TiKvHNdI/AAAAAAAALtw/LHOnSES9ChM/w908-h510-no/C%26W.png
Some might think there is a very long term persistent trend for the majority of the “Globe” and something bit more unusual than a uniform forcing by a well mixed gas happening in the northern extratropics.
I am sure though with the proper amount of motivational thinking that CO2 can get the lion’s share of the blame.
So if Michael Mann uses a method accepted by the IPCC, it should be discounted because he’s an advocate, and we should be skeptical when advocates produce science that support their advocacy.
But when Lewis and Curry use a method accepted by the IPCC, we don’t need to be skeptical even though they’re advocates.
Because the added scrutiny applied to the potentially biasing influence of advocacy only need be applied to scientific analyses that I disagree with.
Got it. Thanks.
It always boils down to the same argument. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, the biasing influence of advocacy, noble cause corruption, self-interest, conflict of interest, in-group biases, the destructiveness of name-calling (the label of “denier” in particular)….they only matter when otters do it.
Or if that won’t fly, then we can always just say that “they did it first.”
Joshua its not that hard.
The two easiest ways for bias to occur in any study is via the method selection and the data selection
This is why we publish methods and data and share them.
We do so so that other people can test whether or not our method choice or data choice plays a role in the results.
Lets take mann for example. For a long time he hid his methods. And for good reason. They were flawed. Even Osborne briffa and Jones knew they were flawed. And he also hid his data. Here too Osborne knew something was wrong and wanted to see the residuals– or dirty laundry as mann called it.
Today he is a bit more generous with his code and data. However, as a discipline there remains an adversion to testing the results with a full scale sensitivity test on data selection.
With Curry and Lewis they choose the approach of using vetted methods and vetted data to show a conclusion at the lower end of the IPCC.
In other words, their advocacy is not an issue. Why? because for the two choices they have to make ( method and data ) in both cases they choose what there advocate opponents had previously choosen.
But the story is not done.. the science press moves slowly but there is stuff in the pipeline that will change L&C conclusions.
At that point people who like the method today ( skeptics) will probably attack it. And people critical of the method today, who actually like the method before it gave results they didnt like, will actually come to like it again.
basically peoples criticism and acceptance of method and data is controlled by their motivated reasoning.
Its not that hard
Steven Mosher | November 8, 2014 at 6:10 pm |
“Lets take mann for example. For a long time he hid his methods. And for good reason. They were flawed. … And he also hid his data.”
Yes…but Michael Mann.
Of course.
Clown
Regarding the excerpt from the Rokiek piece, Joshua, how many climate scientists have you posed your question to?
From the article:
…
A destructive “Trojan Horse” malware program has penetrated the software that runs much of the nation’s critical infrastructure and is poised to cause an economic catastrophe, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
National Security sources told ABC News there is evidence that the malware was inserted by hackers believed to be sponsored by the Russian government, and is a very serious threat.
The hacked software is used to control complex industrial operations like oil and gas pipelines, power transmission grids, water distribution and filtration systems, wind turbines and even some nuclear plants. Shutting down or damaging any of these vital public utilities could severely impact hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Hackers Breach White House’s Unclassified Computer Network
DHS said in a bulletin that the hacking campaign has been ongoing since 2011, but no attempt has been made to activate the malware to “damage, modify, or otherwise disrupt” the industrial control process. So while U.S. officials recently became aware the penetration, they don’t know where or when it may be unleashed.
…
http://abcnews.go.com/US/trojan-horse-bug-lurking-vital-us-computers-2011/story?id=26737476
This reminds me of the unknown sources telling Bush to invade Iraq because Saddam had gobs of WMDs. I don’t trust the USA media nor the government when it comes to global warming…and I also learned not to trust them in foreign policy. We get too many lies.
And those WMDs were found later.
==> “And those WMDs were found later.”
I love you boyz.
Uranium from NIger (as stated in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union)?
Thousands of aluminum tubes for use in centrifuges?
Long-range scud missiles?
Chemical weapons issued to front line troops?
http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/uebndp/abandoned-wmds-in-iraq
http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/aywapn/abandoned-wmds-in-iraq—c-j–chivers
Yup. Bush was vindicated.
built in close collaboration with the west? Prove it.
The Colbert Report? Really?
Did Tiny Tim weigh in also?
Colbert Report is comedy, Joshua. We didn’t find a lot of weapons of mass destruction but we found a lot of mass executions with bodies dumped and buried in mass unmarked graves. You think governments that do that to their own citizens and where same governments are hostile to the United States and where those governments control trillions of dollars in national wealth which can be used to build weapons and train terrorists should not be considered a threat to the United States and be dealt with accordingly? Saddam Hussein rose to power by assassination not by popular vote, by the way. Removing him from power by violent means is not unfair. Live by the sword die by the sword. Poetic justice if you ask me. George W. Bush is a hero.
=> “Colbert Report is comedy, Joshua.”
Good insight, Dave.
And the comedic piece where he skewered the “they found WMDs” nonsense, and interviews the author who penned the story that conz base that nonsense on is hilarious.
==> “George W. Bush is a hero.”
See, this is why I love Climate Etc. Your run-of-the-mill con won’t bother to try to defend Bush at this point. They’re willing to acknowledge that the war was ill-conceived and even worse, completely incompetently executed. But I can come to Climate Etc. and find smart and knowledgeable people that promote arguments that provide clear evidence for how the motivated reasoning we see in the climate wars is paralleled in the same folks as a more general phenomenon in other politically polarized issues as well.
Nice to see you back, Dave. Stick around. Climate Etc. has not been as amusing w/o you, bro.
Joshua
What was the complete, in context, Niger statement in the state of the union address?
Richard
“George Bush is a hero.”
Yes, well, I suggest that next time we go to war we raise taxes to pay for it. I’d also like to see a return to the draft. Easy peasy to support…or just not think about… a war your own kids don’t have to fight in. Not directed to you personally D.S., although I couldn’t disagree more about Bush being a hero.
I’m all for a draft. 2 years. Everybody serves. The odds of a young American dying by hostile action in a foreign conflict is lower than if they’d stayed home because the mortality rate for auto accidents is higher than combat-related deaths.
I might buy in if it was a discussion about Geo. H. W, Bush (veteran, and Iraq 1) but can’t with Jr.
Jr. may have gotten lucky “after the fact” on Iraq 2, but financially he devastated this country, unless you’re a big Halliburton fan.
I understand on the part of many conservatives, the impulse to elevate bush to something more than he was. As much as I detested him when he was in office, I never thought of him as the loathsome narcissist Obama has turned out to be. But then again, maybe bush was even more dangerous, a recovering drunk with the lunatic conviction that God was on his side. There’s only so much our once great country can withstand. One or two more bad presidents will just about do us in.
Poker,
It’s just not that bad out here. I’ve spent the last almost 7 years travelling this wonderful country and meeting lots of hard working folks. We “hit the road” in 2008 in the midst of the worst economy in years. And every day, every one, folks get up, got to work, farm, volunteer, whatever. We just don’t break that easily. You, I’d suggest, just need a fresh perspective.
Are there bad decisions & bad politics? You bet! But both sides do that and have done that for as long as I’ve been alive. I’m actually more proud every day to call myself an Independent because neither represents ME. I’m sure you don’t need a pep talk from me (that guy on the internet) but it’s just not that bad.
Seriously thinking about writing my own book about “My America” (no copyright infringement intended) because what I’ve seen from “the bottom-2008” is not what I get from TV, radio, and much of the internet.
Go snow skiing in Texas, or take a beach vacation in Alaska.
My two cents.
Pokerguy
Federal spending as %GDP under Bush 2001-2008 was slightly lower than under Clinton. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesglassman/2012/07/11/the-facts-about-budget-deficits-how-the-presidents-truly-rank/
Pokerguy
There appears to be no reason to go back to the draft; people today have the freedom to choose to serve and there are no sectors of the population being hurt. Recruits are coming mostly from middle and upper income families and represent the races equitably. http://freakonomics.com/2008/09/22/who-serves-in-the-military-today/
Richard
Congress controls the purse strings. They are to blame for fiscal irresponsibility. Moreover it’s impossible to go back in time, not intervene in Iraq, and see what happens when Saddam’s ambition to rule the Middle East and hold a third of the world’s oil supply ransom in the process. No one can say what the global financial ramifications of that would have been.
However, we do have a sterling example of what happened when G.W.Bush was chief executive with a fiscally responsible legislature. The Great State of Texas whose vibrant economy far outstrips comparably sized economies in New York and California is what happened.
A universal draft isn’t because the military needs it. It’s because the civilian population needs to do more than simply be born in this great nation to appreciate the benefits of that birth. Losing your constitutional rights for two years and be forced to learn what it’s like to live in an authoritarian world with rigid class structure you cannot escape is a great way to learn what great good fortune is to be born an American.
David Ropeik
“But any critical thinker ought to smell the distinct possibility of bias when research, by known advocates, goes out of the way to pose questions that produce the ‘right’ answers, answers that support their advocacy.”
Which is why I wonder why our hostess pays any attention to Mann, Schmidt, Trenberth, and the others in this motley crew. They have demonstrated a lack of integrity, which poisons the well of dialogue.
I don’t believe there can be a surgical excision within the EPA, carving out the CO2 advocates with Greenpeace, WWF, and Sierra Club credentials, who advocate these group’s positions in their regulatory zeal.
Defunding EPA entirely and reconstituting an agency with a revised Clean Air and Water act focusing upon a judicious application of the known science of air and water pollution and not computer projections of what might be based upon what might have been.
Meteorology seems to be the important area where the greatest good for the greatest numbers can be our Government’s focus.
At least we only have to wait a week or four to see that progress in predictions is proceeding in the appropriate direction. Immediate feedback. Science at its finest. Much less hanky-panky where scientists “know” what we public should know. NOT.
=> “Which is why I wonder why our hostess pays any attention to Mann, Schmidt, Trenberth, and the others in this motley crew. They have demonstrated a lack of integrity, which poisons the well of dialogue.”
Fascinating, indeed, how selectively our much beloved “denizens” integrate what they read.
Why would the quote you excerpted only apply to the work of scientists you disagree with? Why aren’t Lewis and Curry included in the “motley crew”: Judith shouldn’t pay any attention to?
Oh. Wait.
I forgot.
“Advocacy” is just another word for “science I don’t agree with.” Once we agree on that definition of terms, your comment makes complete sense.
Nevermind.
Goodnight, Joshua; your constant tone is soporific.
==============
ZZZZZzzzz.
Huh?
Sorry, what was that, kim?
The capture of three physicists by the shadow of the waxwing slain.
H/t to the Lepidlooker.
======================
Kim,
when you see a Joshua comment here just allow a few words to wash over you like a mantra to be endlessly repeated:
That way you don’t need to lose time reading the actual comments… I find it works well….
I like to reply to Joshua without actually reading his comment – works a treat.
Kim
As well as sophomoric
When Judith starts practicing the same deceit, double-standards and general nastiness of those mentioned, I’ll start lumping her in with same.
Until then, she could at least claim a Nobel to start the ball rolling.
Kim,
soporific and sophmoric.
mote, beam.
The article on energy storage contains a major RED FLAG, namely that the peak power capability of the energy storage system is listed at 250 MW, but without mention of HOW LONG it can provide said power. [Or alternatively, a energy number measured in MWh, GWh, GJ, or TJ, given your preference.]
An energy storage system that can provide peak power for only a few seconds is less useful than one that can provide peak power for a few minutes which is less useful than one that can provide peak power for a few hours which is less usefull than one that can provide peak power for a few days.
The pumped storage station in my neck of the woods, Bath County, can provide 3000 MW for over 7 hours. 22 GWh total. I’d be curious to know how puny SCE’s purchase of battery storage is in comparison. Sadly, no one can tell, because they haven’t listed a run time!!
Brian,
This pumped hydro storage concept is 9 GW and 400 GWh. It joins two large existing dams with about 1000 m head, so no new dams required. There is one technical hitch – I’ll let readers work it out.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/04/05/pumped-hydro-system-cost/
Peter, I wouldn’t trust fractured rocks to hold 400 to 500 meters of positive head in an unlined 12 meter tunnel. The valve and turbine pressure rating isn’t that easy a problem to get around in those sizes. Those are two items which really concern me.
Fernando,
Thank you for the comment. I am not sure if you read the Reviewers comments and the comments on the thread. If you are interested, there are many interesting comments. One thing you’ll notice I explained is that the post was intended as a simple explanation of some of the important issues considered in designing a pumped hydro scheme. I did not write the title. I did not infer it was feasible – it was intended to be an exercise to help explain to BNC readers the issues involved in design and cost estimating such schemes. It has remained one of five top posts on BNC,
I took the approach of using the costs for the Tumut 3 Power station and escalating the original costs and scaling the quantities. That was easier to explain than a detailed cost estimate.
However, in reality, a large high head power station would have to be located underground. It may have an unlined low pressure tunnel for 47 km, lined shaft to the underground power house and low pressure tailrace tunnels. Or it may have mostly unlined, sloping tunnels to the underground power house and low pressure tail race tunnels.
BTW, I understand it was the engineers on the Snowy Mountains Scheme (together with Norwegians) who led the world in developing the analyses for calculating the distance (vertical and perpendicular to valley surface) that the tunnels should be without lining and what lining was required. I have references on that somewhere.
There are many things that would be done differently. But there’s one key gotcha that I think makes it impossible. You haven’t hit on it yet.
“Already influential is work he did on climate engineering, which found that when global warming was posed as a problem that could be solved through human ingenuity, not by limiting growth, hierarchical-individualists were more likely to support action.”
So the unctuously idolised Kahan believes in closing sales with demographically tailored pitches. He’ll sell you a white elephant with hierarchical-individualist appeal.
Please. Gimme a break from these I’m-on-your-side warmies who are going to get me where I’m culturally cognitive. I actually prefer the old mullahs of alarmism like Gore. At least those forlorn polar bears were cute.
“Conservatives who reject the science of climate change aren’t necessarily reacting to the science, according to a new study from researchers at Duke University. They’re reacting to the fact that they don’t like proposed solutions more strongly identified with liberals.”
Er, guess again, matronising lady at HuffPo. Conservatives reject the slobbish anti-science which, for example, would dare to hijack a common English expression like “climate change” in order to push an all too familiar collectivist agenda and flog still more white elephants. (I hate those large, pale beasts!)
Why do people like matronising lady at HuffPo (and like Kahan) prefer vague and bendable terms like “global warming” and “climate change”? They’ll say it’s for that “communication” thing they do. Actually, it’s for the emotional charging and wriggle-room they get when they’re doing their spruiking and push-polling.
“Conservatives Don’t Hate Climate Change, They Hate the Proposed Solutions”
not sure I would call myself a “conservative”
but I am a “denier,” therefore I must a “conservative”
according to the authors of this “study,” I “deny” science because I find the implications “scary”
no
they only thing I find scary is trash “research” like this
however, photos of Mitch McConnell are scary
even when they have no relevance to the subject
Really, the mindlessness of this kind of stuff is disturbing
From the study:
I’d be curious to read from my much beloved “denizens” some of their speculative explanation for the described results (assuming their comfortable doing so w/o reading the study’s methodology section).
I mean such results might suggest motivated reasoning on the part of SWIRLCAREs, but as we all know from reading Judith and the comments at Climate Etc., motivated reasoning only applies to SWIRMCAREs.
ugh. They’re.
“But when the proposed policy solution emphasized the free market, such as with innovative green technology, 55 percent of Republicans agreed with the scientific statement.For Democrats, the same experiment recorded no difference in their belief, regardless of the proposed solution to climate change”
wow they got away with that?
they should have asked
“But when the proposed policy solution emphasized fracking , massive nuclear and hydro programs”
maybe they did vary the policy options more than your text suggests.
Ill check
33% of Republicans increased their trust of scientists when the solutions were agreeable to them. If I hear the scientists say it’s going to get a lot warmer and 10 seconds later I hear the answer is a tax on carbon I have a problem and a painful answer. In the other case I have a problem and an answer. Maybe an aversion to painful answers has me looking back at the problem. Facing a more rosy scenario is easier to go along with. Facing a worse one is time to focus, to start asking questions.
==> “wow they got away with that?”
Despite what Judith and my much beloved “denizens” think, there’s no reason to think there’s disproportionality in the influence of “solution aversion” among SWIRMCAREs and SWIRLCAREs, respectively. As the paper discusses.
Relatedly:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2012/2/20/could-geoengineering-cool-the-climate-change-debate.html
Joshua no solution aversion?
No aversion to nuclear hydro franking adaptation?
Sure
I have said this before here, but if AGW did not have major policy implications no one would be paying attention to it. So what Kahan has concluded makes perfect sense to me.
The theory rests on a symmetrical hypothesis.
Measuring the impact of free market solutions on conz and fracking or nuclear on libz is obviously not parallel. Why would a “solution aversion” to nuclear have a commensurate influence on libz – who are ideologically identified as SWIRMCAREs – as free market solutions on conz, who are identified as SWIRLCAREs? In one case, you’re swimming upstream and the other downstream. Thus, since the experimental conditions wouldn’t be parallel, there’s no compelling to test them in relation to one another. That isn’t to say that it wouldn’t have provided interesting information.
The effect they were testing: That is, Republicans more than Democrats see climate change solutions as a greater threat to the economy, and Republicans’ economic beliefs about climate change policies mediate their skepticism of climate change science…
So why would we then measure the impact of a fracking or nuclear “solution” on Demz – who might be opposed to fracking of nuclear, but not necessarily (or even likely?) because they are seen as a greater threat to the economy than climate change?
Again, it would be an interesting question – and a relevant question. I’d say it would make an interesting follow-up study.
But a failure to include a different experimental paradigm doesn’t change the explanation of their findings: ”We predicted that Republicans would be more likely to agree with climate science [admittedly, that’s a pretty vague wording] when the policy was free market friendly than when it involved government regulation. For Democrats, however, we expected agreement with climate science to be relatively similar across the two policy solutions. Further, we predicted that the changes in Republican skepticism would be mediated by change in Republican participants’ views that the climate change solutions threaten the economy”
Would Demz, in a similar fashion, become more skeptical if they were presented information of how solutions to climate change were economically harmful? Presumably. That would be consistent with the hypothesis of symmetry. Try reading Kahan’s blog post that I linked. It’s related.
Joshua, when a statement has little impact on their lives they tend to go along to get along. When the statement has what they perceive as a negative impact they tend to be negative about the whole issue BECAUSE THE SURVEY GIVES THEM NO OPTION. If you ask me the same question in a similar survey I would get mad at the way the question was designed and I would give you the answer I feel would bug you the most. In other words, surveys like this are helpful because they make you feel smug, happy, and superior. And this is the condition the republicans want you in for the 2016 elections. Me? I’m not keen on being labeled, I focus on efficient government. And neither party seems to be any good at it. However, if the democrats are all going to behave like Californians I got a big problem with democrats.
If you had read the Voosen article you’d have an answer – cultural values can bias the way we respond.
But you may be immune to that Josh, seeing you have all of the culture of a petrie dish.
Tim –
==> “If you had read the Voosen article you’d have an answer – cultural values can bias the way we respond.”
Thanks, bro. I hadn’t realized that*.
*Even though that’s what I’ve been saying for years here at Climate Etc.
Too funny.
Fernando –
==> “When the statement has what they perceive as a negative impact they tend to be negative about the whole issue BECAUSE THE SURVEY GIVES THEM NO OPTION. ”
These kinds of studies that rely on responses to surveys tend to suffer from some basic problems – such as social desirability bias, or yes, the kinds of reactions that you’re describing.
I would say, however, that your explanation is not particularly plausible for explaining the size of the effect they measured.
==> ” If you ask me the same question in a similar survey I would get mad at the way the question was designed and I would give you the answer I feel would bug you the most.”
I have noticed a tendency of my much beloved denizens to generalize from their own beliefs or experiences to explain large-scale and general phenomena. Personal and anecdotal experiences are certainly important information, but they should be viewed in context against empirical evidence. I’d say that it’s highly problematic for you to try to explain broad-scale phenomena based on your own experiences. In fact, I would say that such a tendency is antithetical to authentic skepticism (even though we all tend to do it).
==> ” In other words, surveys like this are helpful because they make you feel smug, happy, and superior. ”
I think that the phenomena the paper describes are universal – not disproportionately applicable to one side in the climate wars in contrast to the other, not true of libz and opposed to conz, not true of Demz as opposed to Repubz.
And indeed, the authors describe a symmetry – because the effects they’re describing are rooted in human cognitive and psychological attributes.
Don’t you think that it’s interesting that you look at a description of symmetrical phenomena, and react in an identity aggressive fashion?
Well, I do.
Joshua fails to see the point.
researchers have a choice.
It’s interesting to note what they didnt test.
the funding effect shows up in questions not answered.
like questions about the 22%
==> “It’s interesting to note what they didnt test.”
I agree. As I said.
There are many interesting questions to research. It can be interesting to note which questions don’t get researched. It’s also possible to construct conspiracy theories by extrapolating about counterfactuals from those questions.
1. They described a symmetical phenomenon. They talked about the symmetry. They designed their research to test for the symmetry.
2. Whether they might have asked other questions does not explain the results that they found. “Look, squirrel,” doesn’t explain the results that they found, either. Their results are interesting, and potentially relevant for gaining understanding about the climate wars.
==> “the funding effect shows up in questions not answered.”
“The” funding effect. So there’s only one funding effect – and it just happens to be one that confirm’s steven’s biases as well as his interest in not discussing what the study found.
Curious, that.
Same ol’ same ol’, Steven.
Forgot #3. Never forget #3.
3. Your proposed questions would not test for symmetry. They would comprise, to a large degree, a different study. An interesting study. Perhaps a follow-up study. But they did test for symmetry. They designed a test for symmetry, for which your questions would not have been instructive. And they found symmetry, and they discussed symmetry
But why talk about that when “Look squirrel” is soooooooo much more satisfying?
“There are many interesting questions to research. It can be interesting to note which questions don’t get researched. It’s also possible to construct conspiracy theories by extrapolating about counterfactuals from those questions.”
actually when studying the funding effect in health science looking at how corporate science is biased, one doesnt have to suppose a conspiracy.
I would not say there is a conspiracy. Quite the opposite. It’s quite normal
and expected to find the same funding effect across all sciences. No conspiracy required. When you fund research to find the opposite.. well, you find the opposite. Not in all cases of course, but in enough cases for one to form a rational and justified expectation.
Any researcher in their field should have known this.
““The” funding effect. So there’s only one funding effect – and it just happens to be one that confirm’s steven’s biases as well as his interest in not discussing what the study found.
Curious, that.”
no there is more than one funding effect.
What the study found was accurate boring and well known, but they misrepresent what they did.
They didnt, for example, present people with science.
Still not discussing their findings?
Curious, that.
Lots o’ squirrels in these here parts.
As a liberal and progressive Democrat, I might suggest that you compare results with similar experiments conducted on liberal and progressive Democrats. I think you might find the same mechanism and similar results at work. Perhaps a meta communications study that included GMOs and vaccines as well as climate change might be interesting.
Tom I would expect that you would find the same thing. The authors even mention that.
The point is these studies are scientifically uninteresting. You learn nothing about the science.
You do give a tribe a club. The interesting thing is how they hand out clubs. Given that the argue that both tribes do this the question is which tribe and which issue they focus on.
Joshua the sky is blue. What is to discuss.
Agreed the sky is blue.
==> ” I think you might find the same mechanism and similar results at work.”
Geebus. Try reading the study. Try reading about the study, for that matter. Try reading the freakin’ thread, for that matter.
==> “Perhaps a meta communications study that included GMOs and vaccines as well as climate change might be interesting.”
Not parallel situations. And actually, read Kahan – he’s looked at both and neither GMOs nor vaccines are significantly polarized along political lines.
I did read the piece by Kahan. I don’t accept your characterization. And I must say it’s hard to read the thread–too much Joshua in the way of any meaningful statements.
Simplez. Conservatives are smart enough to question the 3.2C warming proposition, which comes out of liberal-progressive academia, when the suggested solution involves government takeover of the private sector which is a liberal-progressive agenda.
The study was designed to make conservatives look bad which is also something one expects given the source of the study was a liberal-progressive academia. How about we let Heartland design the study and Gallup do the polling. Would that change your belief in the validity of the study, Joshua? LOL
You really don’t have much depth or nuance about you, Joshua. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see the bias in the Duke study.
Hi Tom –
==> “I did read the piece by Kahan. I don’t accept your characterization.”
???
The link I gave earlier was to a study where Kahan shows that like with conz, the perception of libz w/r/t the risks posed by ACO2 are mediated by perceptions related to solutions.
As for your speculation about GMOs and vaccines being significantly politically polarized, knock yourself out (and don’t let evidence get in the way of your speculation).
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/3/9/if-you-think-gm-food-vaccine-risk-perceptions-have-any-conne.html
moi: It’s interesting that the “denizens” don’t seem to want to discuss that paper that shows how with conz, their perceptions about the risks of ACO2 are mediated by their ideological orientation w/r/t solutions.
mosher: They didn’t ask other questions.
moi: But those questions wouldn’t be directly relevant. They did show that perceptions about solutions affect how libz view politically polarized issues also.
mosher: They didn’t ask other questions:
moi: True. Those would be interesting questions. But what do you think about the effect they found? Whether or not they asked other questions bears no direct relationship to the effect that they found.
mosher. They didn’t ask other questions.
moi: Why won’t you address their findings?
mosher. Their findings are boring.
moi: So you think that the effect they found is valid, and obviously a factor in the public discussion about climate change, and it is clearly true that the perception “skeptics” w/r/t risk posed by ACO2 is mediated by their political orientation vis a vis solutions?
mosher: Did you see that squirrel? Hey Tom, check out the squirrel.
Joshua | November 9, 2014 at 3:05 pm |
“It’s interesting that the “denizens” don’t seem to want to discuss that paper that shows how with conz”
Not half as interesting as the fact that I answered and you ignored it.
Let me repeat:
Conservatives are smart enough to question the 3.2C warming proposition, which comes out of liberal-progressive academia, when the suggested solution involves government takeover of the private sector which is a liberal-progressive agenda.
The study was designed to make conservatives look bad which is also something one expects given the source of the study was a liberal-progressive academia. How about we let Heartland design the study and Gallup do the polling. Would that change your belief in the validity of the study, Joshua? LOL
John –
BTW –
I’d be curious to read your explanation for why it is “trash.” You seem to be convinced w/o reading it, but I’m not as bright as you and can’t see why it is so obviously flawed.
And I know that it would be a waste of your time actually reading it since you can tell that it’s “trash” w/o reading it, but in case you are interested you can get a copy sent to you:
http://www.dailypress.com/news/politics/shad-plank-blog/dp-duke-study-solution-aversion-not-science-denial-on-climate-change-20141106-post.html
Hmmm, what could’ve motivated Kahan to reason in such a fashion?
=========
kim –
????
Josh
what x,y, or z person believes has no bearing on the veracity of anything
a “belief” is an opinion one has based on insufficient information
the social sciences in general lack rigor
only read the link, not going to read the actual study, so your point is valid
the salient issue here IMHO is how the study is reported in the press
associating Mitch McConnell with this issue is lame
I don’t know his position on carbon mitigation and don’t care
Look at the polling predictions in the last US elections
almost all opinion research is designed to push an agenda … the agenda of them that’s paying the freight
despite being a Neanderthal, I read you comments on CE with interest and consider your knowledge set much greater than mine
John Smith, you probably should define where you think the science ends and the “trash” begins. How about the Milankovitch cycles and their explanation of the Ice Ages? Was that “trash”? Or how about understanding past epochs like the Eocene and Cretaceous in terms of coincidental higher levels of GHGs? Was that whole area of paleoclimate “trash” in your humble opinion? What about the cooling in the Maunder Minimum or just after volcanic episodes? This would be a helpful exercise for you to draw your lines, or maybe you are not a fan of science or academics in general, which is useful to lay out too.
John –
==> “the salient issue here IMHO is how the study is reported in the press
associating Mitch McConnell with this issue is lame.”
I agree. Associating the results with McConnell is pushing an agenda.
==> “Look at the polling predictions in the last US elections
almost all opinion research is designed to push an agenda … the agenda of them that’s paying the freight”
Not sure what that is in reference to. Almost all the polling in this year was off by underestimating Republican votes. Off-year election polling is often considerably more off than presidential election years. In 2012, the polls were off in the opposite direction (i.e., overestimated Republican votes) – despite claims by folks such as GaryM that the polls were being “skewed” to push an agenda.
John Smith,
I agree with you. Speaking for myself, I am not overly concerned about GHG emissions. I am not persuaded it is a large risk and I reckon we’ll manage.
I believe progress has been blocked for 50 years and continues to be blocked by the very people who are most concerned about CAGW – i.e. those who would like to be called ‘Progressives’. They are the real deniers. They are the ones blocking and delaying progress.
The anti-nuke activists have a lot to answer for. If not for them, CO2 emissions would be 10% to 20% lower now than they are and we’d be on a much faster track to reduce them in future. We’d also be a wealthier world and humanity would be better off.
The USA is the country with the greatest ability to lead the world on this. But it won’t happen as long as the so called ‘Progressives’ continue to push their socialist policies.
==> “They are the real deniers. ”
Time to express concern, Judith. Peter’s using the d-word.
Peter Lang
100%
So I guess I have unwittingly become a “conservative” on the basis of educating myself about climate science alone
JimD, I think I read where Richard Feynman, my serious hero, once said most research is trash, or close to it
so the boundary is difficult
but I think the social sciences are weak
like, even since Freud
:)
Does Lewis and Curry fall into the “trash” category for you? How do you discriminate the good from the trash in your own mind? Why even spend any time here if you don’t respect the profession of the host? I think WUWT is more your speed, where they unanimously think all the science is trash. Probably too much science talk for your taste here.
JimD
I think most of us toil in obscurity
If a tiny fraction of any of our work, in any field, is known beyond our lifetimes, it is rare
the great % of scientific work ends up in the dust bin
there are mountains of it gathering dust quite close to where I sit at this moment
overtaken by new facts and new techniques of data gathering
it is part of the process
so in my IMHO a large number of “papers” are trash
especially the one from Duke we are talking about
in terms of hanging out at WUWT
I known my way home from this bar when drunk
Plus, I’m trying to better meself by hanging out with a better class of folk
“settled science” is a laughable conceit
Judith Curry does not seem to think things are settled
and is eager to expose her views to the sharp knives of examination
she takes punches like a champion
I admire her a great deal
I appreciate your opinions as well and recognize you contribute much more to the debate than me
the people who comment are freaking fierce
and I enter with humility
‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.’ Immanuel Kant – http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html
There was a discussion yesterday of the nanny state – http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/nannies-and-nudgers/5856694 – the new threat to the Enlightenment. Climate get’s a mention of course.
Dan Voosen: Year by year, the evidence for human-caused global warming has grown more robust. Greenhouse gases load the air and sea. Temperatures rise. Downpours strengthen. Ice melts. Yet the American public seems, from cursory glances at headlines and polls, more divided than ever on the basic existence of climate change, in spite of scientists’ many, many warnings. Their message, the attendees fretted, simply wasn’t getting through.
You got problems right there.
I was kinda brought up short by this in para two by
Mister Voosen too.
Do u mean ‘robust feedback evidence,’ Mister Voosen?
Or mebbe predicted ‘Troposphere or Deep-Ocean-Hot-Spot’
evidence?’ Could u, perhaps, be referring ter rising CO2 and
temperature correlations?’ Or do yer mean those IPCC
‘modelled temperature projections,’ Mister Voosen?
http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=083b57b9b6&e=f4e33fdd1e
Say, who checks the confirmation-bias-checker?.
Downpours strengthening! The Precipitation Strengthenification Index (PSI) is looking like a hockey stick! Meanwhile, the Climate Alarmist Relevance Index (CARI) is drooping like…never mind.
What to do? Who you gonna call?
Chill, doubters and other d-word people. A schmoozing Dan Voosen review of Kahan’s Culturally Cognitive Snake Oil Dressing should get us all eating our Big Greens again.
Beththeserf – “Say, who checks the confirmation-bias-checker?.”
We do. Here in the US, we just checked the status quo on Tuesday. Let them think about that for a few years.
Fer yer hafta’ be
a skeptic, Mister Voosen.
when the chorus of
‘it’s worse, much worse
than even we believed!’
fills the airways
and the corridors
of power constantly.
‘Advocacy Science,’ ( hmm)
‘Consensus Science,’ (huh)
‘send money,’ (lots) and
subsidize, tax the very
air we breathe, regulate
and tax some more.
So Mister Voosen yer see
wehave become kinda’
wary of moochers
and weary of smoochers
moochin’ ‘n smoochin
them doomsday
scenarios oh so,
so unremittently.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlgnHpfEogo
The music clip gives me an idea, serf. If the climate gig starts to fizzle, Voosen and Kahan can go into business selling whole communities on equipping marching bands (or constructing monorails).
But for now you’ve got climate trouble, right here In River City.
– h/t Shirley Jones and Robert Preston.
And it starts with ‘T’ and it rhymes with ‘P’ which stands for Pool…ution.
=======================
Yeah, ‘Trouble’ with a capital ‘T’ … Gotta figure out a way
ter keep the young ones moral after school. ‘
(Green citizenship classes, environmental message song
contests, Indoc camps ‘n such?)
Ice melts, water freezes, the Wheel In the Sky keeps on turnin’.
Must read exchange between @mattwridley and @mark_lynas about climate change and policy [link]
Mark Lynas has apparently reproduced Matt Ridley’s response in its entirety. That makes for an interesting debate.
He also apologized.
Looking at “Mathematics and Climate,” lacking wave theory coupled with the mathematics of swirling vortices to simulate the dynamics of ocean wind circulation pretty much dates the book at the outset.
The article on conservatives was on the mark for a large faction here. They don’t like the implied decarbonization policies, so they disbelieve the science. Furthermore they project their way of thinking onto the scientists, who they think want a particular policy, for some reason, so promote a version of science that leads to it. It is a classic example of projection. Science is science. Policy is policy. Policy doesn’t drive science. Science can drive policy. As a result conservatives are not participating in the policy debate, and just denying the science in the first place. Witness the US Republican politicians, for example, where not one of them believes the science of significant manmade warming coming, and so they focus on the scientists themselves rather than coming up with a policy.
Yes science is science. But the false physics which claims the surface would receive not a scrap more radiation if the clouds were removed, and have emissivity of 1.00000 to boot, is not science.
Of course policy drives science. Policy determines which scientific endeavors get funded.
==> “Of course policy drives science. Policy determines which scientific endeavors get funded.”
Far too simplistic to be meaningful.
I just wrote a comment on another blog about how often we see complex issues reduced to simplistic patterns in these discussions – IMO the result of the pattern-finding nature of our reasoning combined with the tendency to have ideology influence our reasoning. As a result, we see over-confidence resulting from simplistic pattern-finding.
So far science has been free of congressional interference. Perhaps you would prefer politics to influence the course of science, but it doesn’t, and mainly because it is global. If one country blocks it, others won’t, so I think any politicians with those goals realize the futility of quashing progress, and it only makes them look bad. It’s a no win, if you think about it.
Global Warming
“Far too simplistic to be meaningful”
Andrew
AK and Jim D –
Just used your exchange of views to illustrate a point on another blog:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/some-thoughts/#comment-36865
Joshua, when I say policy can’t drive science, I mean you don’t get scientific results that are influenced by policy. Science is objective. If it is warming, it is warming, whoever is governing.
The only thing “simplistic” about it is your interpretation.
“you don’t get scientific results that are influenced by policy”
Far too simplistic to be meaningful.
Andrew
Jim D –
==> “Science is objective”
In some abstracted sense, science is pure – but the results of scientific research, conducted by humans, aren’t.
I think that it’s legitimate to say that policy doesn’t “drive” science, in the sense of being the singular causal mechanism – but in the real world policy influences science.
My point is that the relationship between policy and science is complex. IMO, it’s worthwhile to discuss complexity of that relationship, and I don’t think that simplistic and categorical statements really move in the direction of greater understanding.
It reminds me of the arguments about estimation vs. measurement and whether or not Muller is a “skeptic.”
Billions for running the same old climate models, little or nothing for actually looking at how complex non-linear systems work.
Of course it does, primarily by determining which questions will get funding to answer them.
==> “The only thing “simplistic” about it is your interpretation.”
Right. Saying that Policy drives science and determines which endeavors get funded, isn’t simplistic.
It should be clear that:
– There are no other “driving” influences other than policy.
– There is not a bi-directional relationship between science and funding policies.
– No science is conducted except as the result of funding policies.
To start with.
Gotcha.
It would be if that statement said it’s the only driver. But that tacit assumption wasn’t included in my statement, only in your interpretation.
Anybody who makes that tacit assumption is unqualified to discuss the CO2/climate issue. That would include the vast majority of people on both sides of the debate here.
AK –
You said that policy drives science. You didn’t say that policy influences how science is conducted.
You said that policy determines> which scientific endeavors get funded,
First, that treats it as if there is a uni-directional relationship between funding policy and research. Obviously, that isn’t the case. Second, it simplifies the relationship between funding and “scientific endeavors.”
If you want to walk your statement back, by talking about the realistic complexities in the relationship between policy and science, have at it.
That was my point!
AK, I’ll give you that policy can get in the way of science. Look at Australia defunding climate science, but thankfully science is a global endeavor so it doesn’t stop progress.
You’re taking it out of context. Look at the statement I was responding to: “Policy doesn’t drive science. Science can drive policy.”
It does. There are other sources of funding, but only because policy allows them. This wasn’t true (AFAIK) in e.g. Soviet science under Lysenko. It is policy that (some) scientific results are allowed to influence government funding decisions. (While others aren’t. Look at Salby.)
It would be a policy change, for instance, to implement my proposal that businesses be allowed to invest a fixed percentage of their taxes due in research, with some stake in any resulting IP (rather than handing it over to the government to do what it wanted to with it). That would change how and which research was funded.
Here’s another policy proposal: require NGO’s to dedicate at least three dollars to original research for every dollar they contribute to any political activity (PAC’s etc.). That would also have a great effect on how, how much, and which research was funded.
That was never part of my statement, as any objective look at the context would show. To say that, in context, I would also have had to deny the statement “Science can drive policy.” Which I didn’t. The complexity is then implicit in the two-way driving.
Your point was knocking down a straw man you set up.
AK, maybe you misunderstood me. When I said policy can’t drive science, I meant it can’t influence scientific results. If you disagree with that, you need to provide an example.
The IPCC.
==> “It does. There are other sources of funding, but only because policy allows them. This wasn’t true (AFAIK) in e.g. Soviet science under Lysenko.”
So you double-down on the simplistic explanations, to explain why the earlier explanations weren’t simplistic?
Broadly speaking, voters determine policy. So then it isn’t policy that determines what gets funded, it’s voters.
Broadly speaking, science influences funding policy in a bi-lateral dynamic. To illustrate – no scientists are asking for funding to study whether the Earth is flat, and hence there are no policies to fund flat earth studies. However, scientists are asking for funding to study what causes obesity, and hence there are policies to fund obesity studies. Hence, broadly speaking, science influences funding policy.
There is science conducted without funding.
There is a great deal of science funded by the private sector – hence no significant influence of funding policy. Yes, if we lived in communist Russia, or in a different branch of the multiverse, there would be no private sector-funded science
Stop doubling down. Saying that “policy drives science” is simplistic. You made a simplistic statement. It’s no better than saying that “policy doesn’t drive science.” Defending simplistic statements is not instructive. Enriching the statements is a more meaningful goal, IMO.
So what’s the meaningful issue being discussed, here? The point of origin in this discussion was the article that illustrates an influence of “solution aversion” to how people assess the science related to climate change.
There is a meaningful issue issue, IMO, where there is crossover/confusion/conflation between discussion of the science of climate change and positions on the policy implications of the science. There’s plenty to talk about there w/o simplistic and categorical statements – and that was my point; the meaningful discussions morph into simplistic, categorical statements. It happens over and over. I used the example of your exchange with Jim D. to illustrate the point.
Anyway – that’s how I see it. Not much more point in this handbag fight.
This is where we came in. You don’t like the scientific results so you blame politics rather than any specific science.
Which results? The numbers that, when run through a straightforward model give a “TCR of 1.33 K. ECS 17–83 and 5–95 % uncertainty ranges are 1.25–2.45 and 1.05–4.05 K; the corresponding TCR ranges are 1.05–1.80 and 0.90–2.50 K”? Or the way in the past seven years that climate sensitivity disappeared from the SPM of the Synthesis Report?
What I see is that, from the beginning, the IPCC was a political institution dedicated to creating a manufactured paradigm intended to “prove” that humanity was catastrophically impacting the climate. An almost perfect example of policy driving scientific “results”. And now that the science is finally starting to recover, the IPCC is showing its political nature ever more clearly.
Joshua don’t you know that politicians want there be global warming so they can raise taxes, control energy production, and drive up electricity rates etc.So they make up a problem (AGW) and then try to convince people that they might need to sacrifice. What a winning agenda! Everyone is going to fall in love with for sure.
Or the other possibility, as you say, is that the science is driving the increase in funding and attention and not the policy makers scheming in the background trying to fool the public into going along with their evil master plan (whatever that might be)
Joseph –
==> “Joshua don’t you know that politicians want there be global warming so they can raise taxes, control energy production, and drive up electricity rates etc.So they make up a problem (AGW) and then try to convince people that they might need to sacrifice. ”
You forgot the most important part. It’s all so they can destroy capitalism and starve poor children in Africa.
And here we go:
A simplistic total certainty. There is no aspect of the IPCC where science is driving science, or where science is driving policy initiatives. There is no possibility that there is a scientific basis for evaluating the risk posed by continued ACO2 emissions.
What I love most about “skeptics” is that they say that they don’t doubt that ACO2 might warm the climate – they only have questions about the certainty related to the magnitude of the effect, but then they turn around and offer an argument like AK’s that effectively argue that there is no scientific basis for reducing the uncertainties related to the magnitude of the effect.
What other reason could there be for such logic except that they are certain that there is no effect even as they don’t know what the effect might be?
That kind of logical incoherence is probably explained, IMO, by the biasing influences of ideology. I think that AK actually believes both that we don’t know the magnitude of the effect and that we do know the magnitude of the effect (and that it’s small), and that the biasing influence of ideology allows him to….well…
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/8/19/what-exactly-is-going-on-in-their-heads-and-in-mine-explaini.html
Joshua, I am more interested in the individuals behind this IPCC trojan horse that is supposed to panic the public into doing something about climate change. It always the most difficult part for conspiracy theorists to explain.
Nope. I don’t believe that we know the magnitude, or the nature of the effect. I actually believe very little. But what I see is a political institution designed to achieve a political goal, whatever the science turns out to be.
And what I do think highly likely is that the actual effect of adding fossil CO2 is far too complex to be defined, or even safely described, by any sort of “sensitivity”.
IMO (subject to some uncertainty) is that without the IPCC the science of climate would have gone far deeper into more sophisticated models of hyper-complex non-linear systems, rather than trying to use ever bigger (GCM) hammers to drive an oscilloscope.
AK, the skeptics forget that the scientific basis of AGW predates the IPCC or even any inkling of a policy. The IPCC followed the Montreal Protocol on ozone, and other local policies on sulphates causing acid rain, in using the already known science as a basis for policy. These are clear examples of policy following science that was already established.
You can look at how Lewis and Curry got their number. One is that the IPCC forcing central estimate is 40% larger than that from CO2 alone since 1950 (due to other GHGs and possibly reduced aerosol impacts relative to previous reports), so if you are going to use CO2 alone, you should really add this other 40% to match what has happened since 1950 and that is what they did. Their 1.33 C was for the CO2 part alone, which was not the whole story or even the bottom line. Using 1.33 *1.4 gets you nearer 2 C per CO2-equivalent doubling which explains why 1950 was 0.7 C cooler than now. They forgot to mention this. The other thing they did was use local warm peaks in 1870 and 1940 as baselines rather than century-long mean, or more recent, trends. The warming since 1940 is similar to that since 1980, but since 1980 we had a smaller forcing change though more dominated by CO2, and again you get a higher sensitivity by using the record of the last few decades of warming, which LC have just ignored. Using recent or mean trends, you again get nearer 2 C per CO2-equivalent doubling for the TCR. There are ways of using the IPCC numbers, but you have to tell the full story, otherwise people get misled too easily. Alternatively, you can just match the warming rate to the Keeling curve CO2 rise since 1960 and get 1 C per 100 ppm, again nearer 2 C per doubling. None of this uses models.
Of course it uses models. Maybe not GCM’s…
AK, if I was to say Lewis and Curry used a model, people would complain. They seem to advertize it as observations.
What is that to me?
Seriously, it’s models all the way down. The only thing physically real is patterns of neural activity, and even there the information that informs our perceptions and responses constitutes models.
AK, some people’s braincells fire in such a way to look for reasons things can’t be connected, even when basic science predicts it and their visual cortex indicates that they are, such as
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1950/mean:12/plot/gistemp/from:1950/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.3
And some people’s braincells fire in such a way to look for reasons things must be connected…
But anybody using a scientific approach will recognize that such connections must be treated as hypothetical, with more or less probability, along with recognition that the causation could go either way, or neither (when both are effects of a different cause).
AK | November 8, 2014 at 8:40 pm |
“But anybody using a scientific approach will recognize that such connections must be treated as hypothetical, with more or less probability, along with recognition that the causation could go either way, or neither (when both are effects of a different cause).”
Known physics makes it more than just a game of hypotheticals.
No it doesn’t. It’s still only a hypothesis, and an unlikely one at that, that a hyper-complex system like the Earth’s climate can be treated like a simple radiating body. You can’t even define a real surface temperature, for purposes of radiation.
AK,
Pretending that we know virtually nothing, and it’s all just way too complex, gets a little too close to the creationists ‘irreducible complexity’ argument.
michael, “Pretending that we know virtually nothing, and it’s all just way too complex, gets a little too close to the creationists ‘irreducible complexity’ argument.”
It is not pretending we know virtually nothing, it is recognizing we don’t know everything. Climate models represent the state of our knowledge and they uniformly over estimate impact. So you look at where the models miss and try to figure out why. The why appears to be in the feedbacks which were estimated to produce 2/3rds of the warming. You have clouds, aerosols including black carbon and natural variability which are major not well enough knowns.
It is not that hard, try to keep up.
Who thinks we know everything about climate??
Jim D: Witness the US Republican politicians, for example, where not one of them believes the science of significant manmade warming coming, and so they focus on the scientists themselves rather than coming up with a policy.
You ought to pay more attention than you do to the Democrats who promote policies that have little or no basis in science, or who pervert science. And to those Democrats who oppose useful projects such as enhancing and refurbishing irrigation and flood control infrastructure. Consider, for example, the famous demonstration by a Democratic appointee before a committee of Congress that vinegar dissolves chalk: that provides no basis for the belief that reducing CO2 emissions will provide any benefits to the environment.
I think the Democrats support the new EPA coal standards, regulating fuel-efficiency, promoting energy efficiency, and making the US a green energy industry leader in the world with suitable government backing. The also support resilience against rising sea levels. It’s just a more forward-looking view in general.
“the Democrats”
Well, well, well. lol I’ll be darned. Jimmy “D”.
Andrew
JIm D: Science is science.
1. climate warming over the last 150 years has been largely beneficial to humans and other biota.
2. over the last 150 years rainfall has shown a slight mean increase.
3. TCS to a doubling of CO2 concentration is about 1.25C, but any future warming may be blocked by increased cloudiness.
4. Doubling of CO2 concentration may take 150 years, or may never occur.
5. Estimating the exact role of CO2 increase in the warming of the last 150 years depends on a well-known unknown, namely the amount of warming that would have occurred without the increase in CO2.
6. CO2 and H2O absorb and emit light in a narrow band of the spectrum corresponding to the current mean temp of Earth.
And the policy implications are what, exactly? Ban coal-fired power plants in Africa? Subsidize more Solyndras? Halt the construction of dams in Australia? Haul oil by train instead of through the Keystone XL pipeline? Build a fast train in California that avoids the population centers of San Diego, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Francisco? Transfer manufacturing capacity to India and China?
Nobody in either party in Congress is especially well-educated in science, but the policy recommendations of the Democrats with respect to CO2 are idiotic in light of the science. The Republican plan to oppose them is considerably better justified.
Matthew,
Please help me with a couple of these.
I can’t argue with #1,2 or 3.
#4 I need assistance on. What is to stop the CO2 either from increasing (if we don’t do it?) or from the continued increase of the increase? Some have shared they expect levels to “top off” from between 577 ppm and 620-630 ppm. But I believe they didn’t see my post asking what would stop it so I’ll ask you.
I get a kick outta the whole Keystone discussion as portions have/are being built anyway so that’s a political football. I’ve met the guys (a few of them doing the work). I do get the resistance to many of the renewables.
But instead of the “republicans” just saying no to the “democrats” policies, what can be agreed upon? Can you help with your perspective here? It seems to me we need to move the conversation forward, and I’m not bashful about talking with my representatives on issues I’m comfortable discussing. So asking for your help here.
Thanks,
Dan, I believe the problem is developing the capital to extract ever more difficult to reach reserves.
In addition, sinks are growing even faster than emissions. If our emissions stopped growing, it is likely concentrations would soon level off or even fall.
Also easier to extract reserves dwindle, more capital needed to get at smaller fields. This makes investment riskier. The high cost of production puts some producers at risk from negative price shock. Low prices are already slowing the growth of oil and gas production in the US.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-07/rigs-seeking-oil-in-u-s-drop-to-11-week-low.html
This in not necessarily a bad thing, low interest and lack of competition from other countries may have been causing over investment in the US. If Poland, Israel, Aus, etc. open up to new techniques, it will make more sense to deploy resources there than on some of our more marginal prospects.
There are limits to how fast we develop the people and produce equipment to get at ever more diffuse reserves.
Aaron,
I wasn’t sure if this was addressed towards me.
So you’re thinking that Mathew is/was thinking that due to an increase in sinks and reduced emissions that the CO2 will stop increasing in our atmosphere? How? Vegetative growth? Reforestation? And reduction of industrial emission? Can you clarify?
And, are you saying Republicans will be comfortable with policies oriented those directions?
I need lots of clarification of your post if you don’t mind.
Thanks,
Matthew Marler, the carbon budget is such that you only keep in the vicinity of 500 ppm by leaving at least 2/3 or known fossil fuels in the ground, and that excludes unexplored areas like the Arctic Ocean. That requires a policy or at least more people to know this trade-off in quantitative terms.
Matthew Marler, we don’t need to worry about Africa and India. They are only burning at about 10% the per capita rate of advanced countries, and 20% of the global average, so they don’t need to reduce, or it would have very little effect even if they increased a bit, assuming they even prefer coal. Much more effective on the global scale is for the advanced countries to cut back by 30-50% in their per capita CO2.
Danny, I meant a decrease in the emissions growth rate. We seem to be approaching a linear growth rate.
Sinks are growing. With emissions rates growing, sinks have grown so much that concentrations growth is almost linear.
I would think it is largely an increase in biomass, but not primarily vegetation. Think of the oceans, how much old plant growth is there? I imagine much is consumed by animals.
I have no idea what republicans might think.
I would think reducing barriers to nuclear and hydro power (this would also free up resources for the developing world) and civil engineering projects to protect against weather would be welcome by most people. Infrastructure to move resources to deal with disasters. Excess capacity, spare equipments and parts to rebuild after disasters…
Danny Thomas: What is to stop the CO2 either from increasing (if we don’t do it?)
Estimates of total recoverable fossil fuels have been discussed here. It’s possible that the limit will be reached before CO2 concentration doubles from its present value.
But instead of the “republicans” just saying no to the “democrats” policies, what can be agreed upon? Can you help with your perspective here?
With or without warming, the climate will continue to fluctuate between hot and cold, dry and wet. So we can do what California voters have just voted for: enlarge, enhance, refurbish flood control and irrigation infrastructure. Continue to develop “all of the above” energy technologies (relax restrictions on oil and gas exploration on federal land, for example.) Continue research on climate and weather, including mathematical/statistical modeling.
Matthew,
Thanks for that.
I can see reasoning and evidence for a conclusion that GW is occurring, but what I can’t see is “where’s the fire”. I admit I can only do the science lightly, but the more I read, listen, and research the more comfortable I’m becoming that we have time.
I think JimD has great points and excellent evidence, much of which is over my head, but I really don’t see that much of a divide.
Jim D: the carbon budget is such that you only keep in the vicinity of 500 ppm by leaving at least 2/3 or known fossil fuels in the ground
I don’t think that is a useful goal anyway.
Matthew Marler, burn-it-all, find-some-more, and burn-that-too gets you to 700 ppm and rising. Is that a useful goal to you, or would you suggest stopping somewhere short of that?
Jim D: Is that a useful goal to you, or would you suggest stopping somewhere short of that?
Over what time span? I already advocated an “all of the above” energy development strategy, along with the enhancement of water control facilities. My goals would be to reduce the harmful effects of recurrent floods and droughts and develop electricity and fuel sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels. CO2 emissions look irrelevant for at least 50-100 years, and a goal of limiting them to some atmospheric concentration looks irrelevant.
The current concentration is about 400 ppm, and there is nothing good that can be reasonably expected in the climate from restricting the total to 500 ppm, which is what you mentioned.
Matthew Marler, if fossil fuels continue to occupy the same fraction of energy use, 700 ppm is feasible by the end of the century given growth rates. You seem to think this fraction will decline even without a realization of what CO2 does to climate. We won’t see that experiment carried out, however, because that realization is already here and there are efforts at reducing the fossil fraction already. The policies to encourage this are already working in the ways many nations are planning for the future, and the main thing now is to extend it to more nations. So, while you hope that depletion will drive change at the right rate by itself, I don’t think that is a safe bet at all.
Danny Thomas: I think JimD has great points and excellent evidence, much of which is over my head, but I really don’t see that much of a divide.
I am not sure what you mean by “divide”. After considering his points and mine, I nearly always conclude that, in terms of policy, reducing CO2 is unimportant but there is an urgent need to build better flood control and irrigation facilities. He has written about phasing out fossil fuels in 50-100 years, though I think he came up short of actually advocating that as an appropriate timeline. (It was in a possibly rhetorical question to another comment.) If that is the appropriate time frame, I think that “business as usual” is the appropriate policy toward fossil fuels.
JIm D: So, while you hope that depletion will drive change at the right rate by itself, I don’t think that is a safe bet at all.
I think it is a better bet than that government programs will work as hoped (think of the manufacturing that has moved from the US and EU to China to escape environmental regs.) “Business as usual” isn’t well defined, but it includes private entrepreneurship, inventiveness, and government R&D. Think of the people who, 10 years ago, “bet” that the US energy industry would overcome fossil fuel shortages, and the people who bet against. Or the people who, decades ago, bet against automobiles, transoceanic passenger travel. Or the people who in recent years have bet on Solyndra and the Ivanpah project. Consider the contrasting GDP growth rates of California and Texas. I would bet on a plurality of approaches to energy, and I would not bet against entrepreneurship.
What Is the Carbon Limit?
That Depends Who You Ask
Or will we need to increase CO2 to assist agriculture and avoid the next glaciation?
Joshua, I am more interested in the individuals behind this IPCC trojan horse that is supposed to panic the public into doing something about climate change. It always the most difficult part for conspiracy theorists to explain.
Joseph, it is not like there is a ring leader, it is a mind set. One of the lead authors for the Himalayan Glacier melt “typo” was quoted as saying it was left in for effect. You can call it overselling or whatever, but it is pretty transparent marketing. The selected demographic appears to be the sensitive but not particularly sensible green cluster.
.
“They don’t like the implied decarbonization policies”
Want to have a vote on the ‘Conservatives’ here who would endorse a switch from coal to nuclear, and to increasing the amount potable water in new reservoirs?
We sure as hell could live with ‘decarbonization’, only not with your stupid mixture of windmills, solar-power, ‘energy efficiency’ measures and the warm glow of your reradiated self-satisfaction.
I agree with Hansen and Emanuel that short-term, nuclear is a path to follow, but wind and solar, especially when storage is developed, or something like solar-to-fuel, are better answers than nuclear in the long term.
We have no storage system, or will we for decades.
We cannot convert atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuels to supply our transport needs, as mass action is against us. We could at a pinch get a reasonable using nuclear and sea water DIC, generating fresh water and hydrocarbons, but running atmospheric CO2 and wind/sunlight hydrocarbon conversion is impossible.
Nonsense!
AK, pray do tell me how one can sequester atmospheric CO2, generate hydrogen, catalytically generate hydrocarbons, fractionate the hydrocarbons, when all the time one has a discontinuous supply of energy? Or are you going to have a magic electrical energy storage device that will deliver steady state electricity no matter the fluctuations in solar and wind?
DocMartyn,
I agree “wind/sunlight hydrocarbon conversion is” impracticable and unlikely to ever be viable to supply a large proportion of the world’s demand for transport fuels. If anyone thinks differently they should post the arguments succinctly here. I’d suggest they state the cost per GL of fuel And the land area required to supply 10 billion people who will be consuming perhaps 10 times more fuel by 2100.
I don’t understand why you think “we could at a pinch” get transport fuels from nuclear and seawater? From my perspective, with cheap nuclear power, which I believe is inevitable eventually, people in the future will be able to get unlimited transport fuels from seawater. US Navy is already doing it at small scale. Can you please explain you reservations?
Peter, the amount of carbon one requires to replace liquid hydrocarbon fuels is huge, the levels of DIC are low and so one would require staggering amounts of sea water and would discharge staggering amounts of carbon denuded sea water. The ecological effects would be immense and I suspect that we would prefer to have a functioning aquasphere and the harvestable food than liquid fuels.
DocMartyn
Peter, the amount of carbon one requires to replace liquid hydrocarbon fuels is huge,
the levels of DIC are low
and so one would require staggering amounts of sea water
and would discharge staggering amounts
of carbon denuded sea water.
The ecological effects would be immense
and I suspect that we would prefer to have a functioning aquasphere
and the harvestable food than liquid fuels.
Wow! Plenty of alarmist and scare mongering there. No context. No proportions. plenty of adjectives but no numbers. N/A=0 (numbers/ adjectives ratio)
Is that where rational debate has got to?
Build your systems around an “on-energy-supply” philosophy rather than “on-demand-energy”.
For instance, connecting PV directly to hydrolysis, hydrogen would be produced when there’s sunlight, the system would go dormant when there isn’t.
Feeding that through bio-converters based on tailored methanogens, that system too would simply go dormant when the partial pressure of H2 fell low enough. There are probably methanogens in nature with that capacity of going dormant, but even without it shouldn’t be all that hard to build their systems into existing archaea with that ability.
CO2 could be removed by using the draw-down from such methanogens, especially if they are supplied with carboxysomes (via GE). But I suspect the process the Navy is working on, for directly removing CO2 from sea-water with a small amount of electrical energy, will turn out more cost-effective. The requirements for innovative membrane materials would be much less. Either process could be designed to go dormant when the supply of PV energy isn’t present.
While existing methanogens create methane, which would, IMO, be the most important product, it shouldn’t be any harder to tailor them to create specific hydrocarbons than with Joule, Unlimited’s algae.
‘Just how battered and tattered is Enlightenment thinking? We seem to still live in a reasoned age — we’re surrounded by scientific thinking; governments now pursue evidence-based policy: great medical and technological breakthroughs are still being made.
So is it even right to say the Enlightenment is in crisis? Maybe it’s doing okay. Or does all our talk of evidence and science, or THE Science as campaigners against climate change refer to their scientific material, disguise a deeper distrust of mankind and his powers of reason and rationality? The Enlightenment – thriving or dying?’ http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/hold-back-the-tide/5856756
Here is an interesting discussion with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Frank Furedi.
It touches on the role of scientific expertise and ‘The Science’ especially. We pay lip service to the idea of science and expertise – but what happens if ‘The Science’ is utterly mad? It demonstrably is on the simplest level. The rate of warming last century was 0.07K/decade and in the unlikely event of this rate persisting this century – it takes an awful long time on the timescale of human technology to amount to much at all. There are much more fundamental errors – on the nature of the Earth system to the proper use of models.
So what of scientific expertise if expertise systematically fails?
No, if you correctly eliminate the 60 year cycle then (as I have proved in my March 2012 paper) the long-term rate of increase was 0.06C/decade a century ago, and has now reduced to 0.05C/decade. Warming will start again between 2028 and 2058 but that will be the last 60 year peak for about 934 years.
‘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
The 0.07K/decade is the warming across two complete warming and cooling regimes – 1944 to 1998. These are not cycles but system shifts between climate states.
Inherently unpredictable and certainly not predictably periodic.
Nutso pseudo science is certainly not restricted to one side,
If and when you prove that there is no statistical correlation between Earth’s climate and the 934-year and 60-year cycles that are obvious in the inverted plot of the scalar sum of the angular momentum of the Sun and all the planets then your argument might hold water – but not until you do prove such. (See foot of first page at earth-climate dot com )
Pierrehumbert made the huge mistake of reducing solar radiation by 30% for a non-GHG planet, forgetting there would not be any clouds reflecting that 30% of solar radiation back to space and shading the real planet. Hence the 255K figure is wrong and the radiating temperature of the surface of this dry rocky planet sans water, CO2 etc would be 278K.
He also failed to realise that his “hydrostatic equilibrium” is one and the same as the state of thermodynamic equilibrium which the Second Law says will be approached as entropy increases until there are no unbalanced energy potentials.
BREAKING NEWS
North-Pacific surfers and fishermen freak-out
‘For the moment, oceanographers and atmospheric scientists don’t see a link to human-caused climate change, but also say what they’ve seen doesn’t match other recognized patterns in ocean conditions.
They believe the severe warmth may well be the result of poorly understood natural variability — in this case a ridge of high pressure that kept the normally stormy Pacific unusually calm through two winters. That helped prevent cold water at depth from churning up and cooling the ocean surface.
“I don’t know that there’s much to make of this, other than you’ve got a really unusual two-winter pattern of weather that left a huge imprint on the ocean,” said Nate Mantua, with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in California.’ http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024932135_warmpacificxml.html
Will the pattern of unusual calm conditions persist through another winter?
“…but also say what they’ve seen doesn’t match other recognized patterns in ocean conditions.”
—–
Yep, it’s been over 3 million years since the oceans have been affected by GH gas levels this high. Our Austalopithecus ancestors were able to really record the state of the ocean back then.
I am not sure what Austalopithecus were recording – but it has been several thousand years since CO2 in the atmosphere was this high.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/steinthorsdottir-fig-9.png
The warm North Pacific is good news because it increases outgoing long wave radiation….or does it?
Fernado, “or does it?”
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/olr/olr.anom.90day.gif
Doesn’t look like it, but then the warmest Northern Pacific EVAH, is only a few tenths of a degree warmer than the 1950s. In fact it is about the same as it was in the 1890s if you believe ERSST.
“Doesn’t look like it, but then the warmest Northern Pacific EVAH, is only a few tenths of a degree warmer than the 1950s.”
What? This happened before? About 60yrs ago? Before emissions were supposed to matter?
Inconceivable.
Captain, I had looked at the olr anomaly maps. But we need the cumulative anomaly over the last 12 to 18 months and compare it to the similar figure over the two previous periods? That’s just me as an engineer writing. Maybe scientists don’t like to look at data backwards and forwards. I mention it bacause in theory they should be able to tie the temperature anomaly to surface olr. And they get top of the atmosphere from the satellites. So the olr change, coupled to temperature and cloud cover over the last 3 years should give the data to estimate the climate sensitivity???
FOMT should write a book of “Just So Stories” for climate hysterics….
An update on “How the Leopard Got His Spots”….
FOMBS – attribution escapes you.
Yep, the Pacific has been crazy warm for over a year, and in fact has been showing decadal increases in heat content for over 50 years, really only pausing for Pinatubo. This gain in heat content is all quite in line with the continual gains in GH gases the planet is seeing. And as we’ve seen with the species migration and formation of Super Typhoons– the heat is not just dispersed harmlessly throughout the ocean.
Mr. Gates, could you please explain in layman terms how the increase in GHG’es warm the deep oceans but not the atmosphere these GHG’es reside in? What is the mechanism for it?
Actually it continues to warm the land surface which just warms anyway, but the ocean is complicated by its overturning circulation, so its warming surface keeps being replaced by cooler water in some modes of motion.
Please define what you consider “deep” ocean. Also, the net energy flow globally via latent and sensible heat flux is from ocean to atmosphere. The atmosphere does not warm the ocean, but quite the opposite. It is the sun and SW solar that warms the ocean. What the atmosphere does do is control the RATE at which the ocean loses or gains energy, but it is not the source of that energy.
RGates, thanks I think I understand: the warmer atmosphere above the ocean acts as a blanket allowing less heat (inserted by the sunlight) to leave the ocean due to the change in temperature gradient. Correct?
That seems pretty straightforward.
However, it seems to me to be in conflict with the statement by scientists that the recent hiatus/pause/plateauing of the global temperatures is due to the heat going into the oceans now. What am I missing there?
“However, it seems to me to be in conflict with the statement by scientists that the recent hiatus/pause/plateauing of the global temperatures is due to the heat going into the oceans now. What am I missing there?”
—–
It is really a matter of sloppy semantics and even in some cases, poor grasp of dynamics. On a global basis, the atmosphere never ever ever “warms the ocean”. That would be an impossible thermodynamic situation. The atmosphere is the valve through which energy passes both ways- from sun to ocean, and then from ocean to space.
R Gates – the idea that the GHG slows the cooling of the ocean is a good one. So, if the surface of the ocean is hotter, what is the knock-on effect on clouds?
Gates
You said ” It is the sun and SW solar that warms the ocean. ”
So apparently we should blame the sun and SW solar for warming the Pacific and not AGW. Is that what you meant to say?
“So apparently we should blame the sun and SW solar for warming the Pacific and not AGW. Is that what you meant to say?”
—–
Still missing the major point aren’t you. The atmosphere determines rates of energybflow in and out of the ocean– but is not the source of the energy. More GH gases mean slower net flow out and the oceans therefore warm.
‘More GH gases mean slower net flow out and the oceans therefore warm.’
Only if the atmosphere is warming.
“‘More GH gases mean slower net flow out and the oceans therefore warm.’
Only if the atmosphere is warming.”
——-
All that matters is net flow into the ocean versus net flow out. With the atmosphere maintaining the warmest level of temperatures on record, that acts like a valve set at a certain point and the flow out is clearly constrained at less than the flow in and so the oceans warm. A warming atmosphere with more GH gases will only constrict the outbound flow more, and OHC will rise even faster.
‘Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ AR4 3.4.4.1
What really happens is that ocean heat follows TOA radiant flux and the recent warming was mostly the cloud radiative effect.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/net-usage-item/
Whoops
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/wong2006figure71.gif
Ocean warming and cooling are far more dynamic than in Randy the video guy’s little world.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/wong2006figure71.gif
Why am I having so much trouble with this?.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/argo-temperature1.png
R Gates, I am in general agreement with you about ocean heat to atmosphere, I doubt many would disagree on that. I am also in agreement about ocean warming (upper layer) during the last warm thrust 74-98 and that it is possible that it extended past that time. Much like surface temperatures, however, that warming may have diminished somewhat since 1998 that may be not what you’d agree with. Depending on who provides the info ocean temperature seems to have waned somewhat.
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ohc10.jpg
I know that’s a bit dated but you get the idea. If sst is any reflection of heat transferred from the ocean the arctic seemed to have provided plenty this last summer. None the less, I would be interested in your opinion on this paper released just a few days ago by some Nasa scientists:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n11/full/nclimate2387.html
Some of the conclusions are that the deep oceans are not rising in temperature nor contributing to sea level rise. In particular I wonder what you think of the final sentence of the abstract, “The net warming of the ocean implies an energy imbalance for the earth of 0.64 +/- 0.44 W m -2 from 2005 to 2013.
ordvic,
Thanks for that link. I was aware of that paper and general conclusion of:
“The net warming of the ocean implies an energy imbalance for the earth of 0.64 +/- 0.44 W m -2 from 2005 to 2013.”
—–
I think the conclusion is valid overall and agrees with TOA energy imbalance estimates in the bounds of uncertainty. Somewhere around 0.6 w/m2 seems to be what the system is adding each year, and the bulk of that is stored in the ocean., with the remainder spread out between the atmosphere, cryosphere, and lithosphere.
RGates, thanks, I didn’t know what you’d think of that energy imbalance assessment so that is good to know.
Changes in ocean heat imply a radiative imbalance. Can’t happen otherwise. This changes on an annual cycle but also over much longer periods.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/argo-temperature1.png
The most obvious cause of warming in Argo last decade – modest as it was – is cloud radiative forcing.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ceres-bams-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif
The most obvious source of a recent uptick is the Sun.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/data/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_640x480.png
That Randy the video guy agrees with anything is a ringing endorsement I’m sure – but the reality is vastly different to the narrative.
Chief, thanks for the charts and narrative. I can’t say I disagree with any of that. I noticed the solar output has gone up the past week or so. There seems to be less sunspots but there were several M class discharges. It’ll be interesting to see the effect of solar as the sun wanes at the end of this cycle. I guess activity has waned again. Also, solar wind has all been negative for all of Bz, solar wind and pressure for about a month now.
a fan of *MORE* discourse: Details HERE
All over the world, some places are unusually warm, and some places are unusually cool. Details here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/atmosphere-page/
You can follow the links provided to the original sources.
All that matters is globally averaged temps to see what the energy balance is doing. With both atmosphere and oceans running at or near record highs, we know that the climate has been accumulating energy right on through the much beloved “hiatus”.
R. Gates: All that matters is globally averaged temps to see what the energy balance is doing.
You need to remind FOMD: he posted that an isolated hot spot is big news.
Fan
From your link;
‘The change in surface water temperature doesn’t appear to be a manifestation of global warming, but rather the result of weather and wind patterns that change quickly and vary year to year, Mantua said.’
Fortunately I live close to Plymouth where there are records that stretch back nearly 1000 years with ones barely less old at other local fishing ports.
We have had some very exotic fish turning up from time to time
tonyb
As usual, Climate Etc’s denialists love to quote pundits, disdain to quote scientists!
Q1 Traditional cold climate-dynamics flipping to new hottest-ever climate-dynamics?
Q2 Isn’t this EXACTLY how Hansen-style climate-change is supposed to look?
Q3 Isn’t this EXACTLY how lengthening Mann-style “hockey-stick blades” are supposed to look?
Answer The world doesn’t wonder. This IS what scientists tell us climate-change is supposed to look like.
Fan
The reply was quoted back from YOUR own link. If it isn’t good enough or doesn’t say what you want, why not link to s9mething better in the first place?
Now, you can make yourself useful. I assume you are a practising Catholic judging by the number of Pope related items you post?
I am currently researching 13th weather in England. There are many instances when reference is made to the weather around such and such a religious date.
One such concerns the octave of St Benedict . I have googled this and it seems to suggest it could be one of two dates separated by some months.
Do you ever come across this festival? if so when is it?
tonyb
” Traditional cold climate-dynamics flipping to new hottest-ever climate-dynamics?”
2013 hottest EVER
Australia hottest EVER
tropical storms worst EVER
polar vortex worst EVER
OMG…EVER?
and ya wonder why the public is yawning
With so many extremes likely to be coming our way, it is true that the public will likely get ( or is already) overwhelmed and even desensitized to the continual steam of record breaking events. When what previoisly were “once in a century” extreme events begin to happen every few years, the extreme becomes the norm and such is the nature of regime change or dragon Kings.
Yep, the climate warmists have screwed the pooch with all their mendacious “communications” concerning “climate change.” This last election is proof of that.
We can’t possibly be thinking that this most recent election was about “climate change” and “climate change” alone, can we? The constant communications about the topic has raised it a bit on the “radar”, but with the “zillions” of other issues out there is this what you truly mean?
When I speak with the CAGW side, I share the same with them. It’s not all and only about CC so please tell me why you think it is. And usually that’s met with silent disbelief that I could think that way.
Rgates
Extremes? You need look no further than the historic record.
How about this humdinger from 1703?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Storm_of_1703
tonyb
The Great Storm of 1703 was indeed an extreme outlier — a true black swan event. It would of course be wonderful to know the exact sequence of dynamics that went into the formation of this storm. What was the heat content of the Atlantic like? What was the Atlantic hurricane season like in general? What was the atmosphere over the NH doing? Extreme outliers are always most interesting, but more relevant to climate change will be the Dragon King events that usher in new climate regimes.
RGates
Dragon KIng? The record is littered with such events. Try this in 1287
1287 the autumn was very wet with floods. In dec some 500 people drowned in sea flood in Norfolk. This was the great flood which swept over Holland creating the Zuider zee drowning 50000 people. ; a great gale and storm surge. The chronicle of Bury st Edmunds and of Florence of Worcester and anglo saxon chronicles 1854
In February that year England was struck by a “Great Storm” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_England_flood_of_February_1287
that caused the River Rother in Kent to change its course. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Rother,_East_Sussex#History
Then in December, both Holland & England were struck again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lucia%27s_flood
The previous 3 summers had been nice and warm with good harvest with no sign at all of any lingering impact from the 1257 volcano.
As for the 1703 event if you read Defoes account you will see a lot of observed information there. Lamb spent some 14 pages reconstructing the conditions that led to this storm, which was by no means the worst in the record. You can read his reconstruction from page 59 onwards of his book ‘Historic Storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwest Europe,’
tonyb
Danny – I didn’t say the election turned only on “climate change,” whatever that might be, but if “climate change” were on the front burner of everyone’s mind, the election would have gone the other way.
Jim2,
Phew. Thought I’d lost it there (and that’s still a possibility).
Thanks to (all) you guys for sharing your knowledge, views, and maybe as importantly your mutual respect. It’s refreshing to see folks who can sit down, discuss issues, agree to disagree and (mostly) leave out the vitriol.
It’s a pleasure to be here and learn.
so many EVERs
I’m gonna pour myself a nice whiskey
and reread a Tonyb paper
Tony, no one can say with complete certainty that the warmth is or is not related to anthropogenic climate change. Warming oceans is completely consistent with the highest GH gas levels we’ve seen in 3.2 million years.
Rgates
For that comment you can reapply your ‘Skeptical warmist’ tag, which has been noticeably missing for several weeks.
BTW I promised to look out for SSW in the records and you gave me these guidelines. Are they still current?
“Tony,
I Look forward as usual to the results of your research. Regarding SSW events and N. Europe or British Isle weather, without the modern satellite data some potential clues on these would be sudden outbreaks of extreme cold (20C or more below average) with persistent NE or E winds (as the vortex is disrupted). These would typically occur late Dec. through the end of Feb, with the peak frequency being mid-January. Warming over the Arctic proper during such periods would also be common with a wind reversal from the common winter westerlies to the vortex disrupted easterlies, but of course historical documentation of this is virtually non-existent prior to the modern period.
When the vortex “splits” as can happen during SSW events, the position where the two lobes descend over the lower latitudes is critical for location of severe weather outbreaks at lower latitudes. Extreme cold in the descending center low pressure of the lobe with potentially extreme warmth on the ascending side of course, with the lobes guiding the upper level winds. The elongated vortex we had this past winter is an example where the vortex doesn’t actually split but is extremely distorted by the planetary wave breaking and air descending over the Arctic. Finding historical, non-satellite evidence of this would be difficult, but not impossible I suppose.”
tonyb
Ha! My skeptical Warmist tag is still quite accurate but seemed confusing to some who could not grasp that you could be both a rational skeptic and think it is more likely than not that humans are altering the climate.
Regarding the SSW effects, Yep, those are still pretty accurate for what can occur over GB and N. Europe.
“no one can say with complete certainty that the warmth is or is not related to anthropogenic climate change. ”
Should have stopped there, Gates. Except I would suggest that a more accurate statement would be, No one can say “with anything approaching certainty.” But let’s not get carried away. From a scientific point of view, it’s the warmists who’ve failed to make their case. T
Despite your salivating eagerness to embrace C/AGW, the basic questions remain wide open. Your habitual appeal to logical fallacies such as “post hoc ergo proper hoc” demonstrate that the “skeptical warmist” moniker you seemed to have dropped lately, was spectacularly inaccurate.
sorry, propter….autocorrect
Pokerguy,
You seem particularly inept at grasping nuances of things that really make a difference in fully understanding the dynamics. I’ve got a physical theory with cooboratung data that can explain why 2014 May turn out to be the warmest year on record and why the Pacific Ocean has been warming for over 50 years, with this year being the warmest Pacific of those 50 years. What you got?
R Gates, “Warming oceans is completely consistent with the highest GH gas levels we’ve seen in 3.2 million years.”
Warming oceans are also completely consistent with the Earth’s climate currently going through an interglacial period.
“R Gates, “Warming oceans is completely consistent with the highest GH gas levels we’ve seen in 3.2 million years.”
Warming oceans are also completely consistent with the Earth’s climate currently going through an interglacial period.”
—-
Yes indeed! And we know that these interglacial periods are always marked by higher GH gas levels be necessary for such higher tempertatures. But we have now pushed beyond GH gas levels seen in any interglacial to levels not seen since the mid-Pliocene or even further back in the case of methane and N2O.
R. Gates, “And we know that these interglacial periods are always marked by higher GH gas levels …”
Yes, marked by but evidently not maintained by, as the climate invariably plunges into an extended glacial period ahead of any drop in CO2 levels. Whether CO2 levels are high or low, as long as we are in an interglacial period it seems entirely reasonable that the oceans will continue to warm.
For some interesting insights into glacial-interglacial transitions, see Science of Doom’s “Ghosts of Climates Past” series.
I wonder if the higher CO2 shouldn’t get credit for putting the brakes on a very dangerous temperature descent into a new ice age? We may need to cut back on burning fossil fuels so we can use them over the next 100 thousand years to sustain a CO2 blanket over the planet. Did anybody give this much thought?
So then, man caused CO2 emissions is causing warming?
This is like watching a ping pong match.
It is nice to seemingly have the old Randy back.
Randy, Before you disappeared you were sounding a bit crankish and lacked substance (I was a bit worried about you). Nice to have your technical commenting back. Reading past your spin, you provide a lot of knowledge and insight.
“So then, man caused CO2 emissions is causing warming?”
——
Best to put it this way, to adhere both to honest rational skepticism as well as the physics:
It is highly likely (better than 95% probability) that human activities, mainly the burning of fossil fuels, is adding more net energy to the climate system.
How much energy, where it will go, what positive and negative feedbacks are in play, what natural variability might do to mask or add to this anthropogenic efffect are the real interesting issues IMO.
Thank you for that. I’m not getting at all that “skepticism” is a bad word (unless I visit elsewhere–and I am). In a nutshell, but this non scientists view, there is a reasonable level of (wait for it) concensus that man is impacting the climate. The level of that impact seems to be the question.
Even when I visit the sites of what I would expect to be reasonable “authorities” (National Academy of Science, American Physical Society, Science Policy {.org} and the like) all indicate AGW and promote reduction of CO2 due to “likely” concequences of that CO2.
I’m not clear on “where the fire is” meaning what’s the emergency. Is there not some time (a couple of decades) for more study and data gathering. Some say all the associated money funding the studies is “the big evil” but I’m not buying that. The alternative “smart money” seems to focus on that CO2 reduction and removal.
Do I post this at my own peril? Oh, well.
Fernando Leanme, I thought about it for a split second. My preliminary conclusion:
Until we have a much better understanding of what is driving glacial-interglacial transitions, your CO2 blanket idea is premature.
@ R. Gates
“How much energy, where it will go, what positive and negative feedbacks are in play, what natural variability might do to mask or add to this anthropogenic efffect are the real interesting issues IMO.”
So if we don’t know the answer as to whether we even have an ‘AGW’ problem, or whether the AGW, if any, is on balance beneficial or detrimental to our society overall, don’t you think that it is a bit premature to dictate massive cuts in our fossil fuel consumption absent cheap, reliable replacements for it?
“So if we don’t know the answer as to whether we even have an ‘AGW’ problem, or whether the AGW, if any, is on balance beneficial or detrimental to our society overall, don’t you think that it is a bit premature to dictate massive cuts in our fossil fuel consumption absent cheap, reliable replacements for it?”
——-
If there was but one bullet in a gun that could hold 100, would you put it to your child’s or grandchild’s head and pull the trigger?
@ R. Gates
“If there was but one bullet in a gun that could hold 100, would you put it to your child’s or grandchild’s head and pull the trigger?”
No.
But that is essentially what we are doing when we cut off the undeniable benefits of energy derived from fossil fuels on the 1 in 100 chance that there MAY be undesirable effects from ACO2 at some unspecified time decades to centuries in the future.
And this: “Warming oceans is completely consistent with the highest GH gas levels we’ve seen in 3.2 million years.”
Warming oceans is also completely consistent with ocean temperatures being totally unrelated to GH gas levels.
From ‘completely consistent with’ to ‘ex cathedra attribution’ in one swell foop is ‘consistent with’ every other ex cathedra proclamation of attribution by ‘climate science’ to ACO2 whenever an undesirable event, climate or otherwise, happens anywhere in the world.
“This is like watching a ping pong match.”
+1.
Once again, gatesy demonstrates the simplistic nature of the alarmist mind by coming up with yet another irrelavant and useless analogy to support “solving” an unknown problem at any cost with solutions that will have no effect beyond bankrupting our economy.
“Warming oceans is also completely consistent with ocean temperatures being totally unrelated to GH gas levels.”
———
Not based on the known laws of physics in this particular universe. We know based on those laws that GH gas levels dictate the rate of flow of energy between ocean and space. On one extreme, if we suddenly removed all GH gases from the atmosphere, the ocean surfsce would freeze solid many tens of meters thick all the way from pole to equator. There would be liquid water below this thick surfsce ice, supported by the planet’s own internal heat. On the other extreme, if we suddenly increased the GH gas concentrations a hundred fold, we would see the oceans warm rapidly, evaporation increase, all the ice melt and even perhaps warm to a Venus-like planet. Note, Venus is not in a “run away” state, but has a very stable, albeit very hot temperture, with no surface water, as it has all been boiled off. So our current geologically rapid spike in GH gas levels has forced the oceans into a warming mode.
Someone flies into your city from a country with ebola, do you perform blood letting on your grandson just in case ebola might be coming?
R. Gates: Best to put it this way, to adhere both to honest rational skepticism as well as the physics:
It is highly likely (better than 95% probability) that human activities, mainly the burning of fossil fuels, is adding more net energy to the climate system.
There is that phrase “the physics” again, without a list of even a few postulates.
“The physics” includes the demonstrated relationship between temperature and water vapor pressure: vapor pressure increases supralinearly with temperature, meaning that a 1C increase from 15C to 16C causes a larger increase in vapor pressure than a 1C increase from 5C to 6C. Vaporization rate increases with vapor pressure, so that as the surface temperature warms up, increasingly large amounts of energy are transferred to water vapor instead of more temperature increase — and that leads in turn to more clouds (blocking the sun and transferring energy to the upper troposphere) and rainfall. The “usual” calculation that concludes that water vapor is a positive feedback ignores this dynamic rate effect, and focuses instead on the counterfactual Clausius-Clapayron equilibrium-based calculation of water vapor concentration.
Thus, the burning of fossil fuels in the future might have no effect of increasing temperature. Also, the physics and other science taken together is compatible with the idea that the increase in global mean surface temperature over the last 150 years happened independently of human CO2.
If you are a “skeptical” warmist, of what exactly are you skeptical, the hydrologic cycle in general? Latent heat of evaporation and freezing of water?
R. Gates, you haven’t exactly nailed “the known laws of physics in this particular universe” with your pronouncements.
1. “…GH gas levels dictate the rate of flow of energy between ocean and space.”
a) According to physics, in equilibrium energy_in = energy_out and therefore only the sun ‘dictates’ the rate of flow of energy. GHG levels don’t play a role.
b) In a transient condition, according to the physics, there are several paths besides GHGs that energy can take travelling between the ocean surface and space: convection, conduction, mass transfer, evaporation, condensation, sublimation, reflection, diffraction, absorption and emission. None of these energy pathways can change in isolation from the others “in this particular universe”. Exactly how they interact is in the realm of unknown physics at this point.
2. “… if we suddenly removed all GH gases from the atmosphere, the ocean surface would freeze solid many tens of meters thick all the way from pole to equator.”
According to physics, the oceans are a huge source of GHGs. In this particular universe, if you were somehow able to remove all GHGs, you would also have to remove the oceans. There won’t be any ice at all. There also won’t be any clouds.
3. “… our current geologically rapid spike in GH gas levels has forced the oceans into a warming mode.”
Our oceans are in a warming mode because the climate is currently going through an interglacial period.
willb said:
“a) According to physics, in equilibrium energy_in = energy_out and therefore only the sun ‘dictates’ the rate of flow of energy. GHG levels don’t play a role.”
_____
A really vital piece of my statement was left off there willb. Did you do it intentionally just to make whatever irrelevant point you wanted to make?
The Earth’s atmosphere acts very much like a two-wave valve, controlling both how much solar energy the surface receives (the majority of which is stored in the ocean) and how much then flows back from surface to space. Understanding this bi-modal operation of the atmospheric energy “valve” is key to understanding how increased GH gases can allow the climate system to accumulate more energy. The RATE of flow of energy between ocean and space is primarily dictated by GH gas levels. Your statement about the sun dictating this rate of flow does not follow basic physics.
Warmists like R. Gates like to ignore the other non-radiative modes of heat transfer between the surface and the space.
http://file.scirp.org/Html/3-9801007/2786aedf-f5fe-470c-8af9-4710598bf569.jpg
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=1539#.VF_Hnsk4QxE
From the conclusions:
“The decreasing of the cover (atmospheric) temperature causes the decreasing of the core (surface) temperature. Anti-greenhouse effect realizes on this way, and the decreasing of atmospheric transmission causes global cooling. It is found as the additional result that the radiative heat transfer qr has small influence on the integral heat balance.
Greenhouse effect in it traditional interpretation realizes when one of the following conditions is satisfied: qs > 50 W/m2; εs > εa; γ < 0.4.
It is found that trends of the climate change caused by the increasing of the carbon dioxide emission depends on the whole set of parameters realized actually nowadays. There is the great interest to determine the values of the parameters as reliably and quickly as possible. Small changes of the basic parameter values established after 12 years [7] don’t influence on our results."
So, increasing atmospheric CO2 cools the atmosphere and therefore the Earth's surface, just as some of us skeptics suggested. However, it's very likely insignificant.
R. Gates: With so many extremes likely to be coming our way, it is true that the public will likely get ( or is already) overwhelmed and even desensitized to the continual steam of record breaking events.
Record colds and record hots occur every year even if the distribution is stationary. They occur more frequently when more and more attributes are measured every year. Overall, the complete data are consistent with a stationary distribution with power in some high periods (appx 1,000 years, appx 60 years, etc.), or possibly a somewhat declining mean since 11,500 years ago.
The passage of Proposition 1 by Californians, calling for enlargement of the California flood control and irrigation system, might be evidence that the public have become alerted to the threat of repeated floods and droughts, and are starting to take appropriate action. Now the test will be how long each project is held up in court by people who do not heed warnings of record floods and droughts in the future.
All alarmist comments are based on IPCC documentation, and that documentation says the Earth’s surface would be 33 degrees colder without greenhouse gases. Water vapour is thus meant to be doing most of that warming from about 254.5K to about 287.5K to the nearest half degree.
But in calculating the 254.5K temperature they fail to alter the albedo which, according to their energy diagrams includes 30% of solar radiation reflected back to space by those clouds which would only exist if the greenhouse pollutant, water vapour actually existed. But they have assumed it doesn’t in this scenario. So they incorrectly use only 70% of a quarter of the solar flux (1365W/m^2) and then they also assume incorrectly that emissivity is 1.0000, and so then then incorrectly get that temperature of 254.5K in Stefan-Boltzmann calculations.
The ramifications of this enormous oversight are huge, because if they had not reduced the radiation by 30% due to the clouds that don’t exist. and if they had used a more realistic emissivity for a dry, rocky planet – say 0.88, then they would have got a temperature of 287.58K which is close enough to what is the existing mean temperature with GH gases that are thus doing no warming at all.
Conservatives Don’t Hate Climate Change, They Hate The Proposed Solutions: [link]
I’ve suggested this multiple times in comments on this blog alone.
What is also just as clear (but apparently not yet on this blog) is that this dislike for the proposed or anticipated strategic responses, has greatly skewed the response to the basic science of the issue. And it has led to a lot of “fighting” of the issue on the science which has fed into itself with all sorts of things that have nothing to do with the basic issue, or that constitute the normal ongoing process of scientific examination, questioning, correction, mistake, or that misrepresent or misconstrue some of the relevant science, and even data, as well as the issue itself.
This is what climate change skepticism has become; an attack upon the idea of redressing climate change, by strong self reinforcing self convincing, that the science reality itself doesn’t pose a huge threat to the stability and moderate-ness of our climate; and there are sites and outlays of information and rhetoric everywhere that feed on this and make it seem more and more legitimate and increasingly self fulfilling. And the process becomes viewed as true skepticism on the issue of climate change, when what it has ultimately become is a true misconception of and misunderstanding on the basic issue.
Here’s an example<:
Here is an example of a lot of interesting – and very relevant – factors that wind up getting dismissed, simply argued away, or often misrepresented, such as “the pause”) – but that, objectively and with dispassionate apolitical and bias free examination, are relevant and compelling.
John C. You seem very confident that global warming will be a problem that needs immediate steps be taken toward the eventual decarbonisation of the Western economies.
Your “solution” seems more likely to cause more problems to humanity, especially if the 3rd World countries are not able to get the economic and technical assistance from the Western economies that they desperately need.
Peter –
What’s evidence have you used to conclude what is more likely? What is John’s “solution?”
And how is your comment a response to the “solution aversion” issue that John discussed?
@ Joshua
“What’s evidence have you used to conclude what is more likely? What is John’s “solution?””
Good point.
I asked John the same thing, with no reply.
He is adamant that conservatives are blocking ‘solutions’ for political reasons, but doesn’t identify the solutions being blocked, predict their efficacy, or explain how we (the planet) would be better off, compared to ignoring the effect on our energy policies on climate change, if they were implemented.
Joshua wonders how I reached my conclusion that John’s solution is more likely to cause more harm than good. As Bob Ludwick has said, the evidence that John has used in reaching his conclusions has not been properly addressed by orthodox climate science and I suspect that Joshua himself would not be able to identify this evidence either.
My belief or opinion is simply based on the likely damage to the Western economies if decarbonisation were to be implemented, to the exclusion of the developing nations, which presumedly will be allowed to continue their industrialisation policies unhampered by such restrictions.
My “solution aversion’ is partly based on this damage that would likely occur if John’s solution (you asked what it was: its decarbonisation) were implemented and for this reason my response is considered to be on topic. My other reason for “solution aversion” is the apparent lack of reliable data on current global warming trends and the poor peer review processes that have taken place in the climate science field so far.
I would prefer to see you exercise your excellent logic auditing skills more on the warmist dogma such as that put out by John and others, because if you don’t, I would have to conclude that your bias is showing.
Peter –
==> “My belief or opinion is simply based on the likely damage to the Western economies if decarbonisation were to be implemented,..”
???
I’m asking you what evidence you are using to determine what is or isn’t “likely.” I ask that because I haven’t seen evidence one way or the other that I think convincing – because I think that the uncertainties are too large in a number of ways (w/r/t to the range of sensitivity, w/r/t the massive unknowns about positive and negative externalities, w/r/t modeling future economies, etc.)
==> “My “solution aversion’ is partly based on this damage that would likely occur if John’s solution…”
Again, you keep talking about what is “likely” and I am asking for evidence that lead you to your conclusions about likelihoods. From what I’ve seen, economic projections are pretty much all over the map, and can be more or less predicted if you know the political orientation of the prognosticator. IMO, this is about decision-making in the face of uncertainty – which requires dealing with “fat tail” distributions of perhaps unlikely but very damaging outcomes. So even if we did really know what is or isn’t “likely” (which I doubt), simply drawing conclusions on the basis of “likeliness” seems quite insufficient, IMO.
==> “My other reason for “solution aversion” is the apparent lack of reliable data on current global warming trends and the poor peer review processes that have taken place in the climate science field so far.”
Solution aversion, as a non-specialized term is to be expected. The term “solution aversion” as framed in the article linked, however, is referencing a tendency to have perceptions of (undesirable) outcomes of solutions to directly influence interpretation of the science. Where aversion to solutions affect how people conceptualize a threat (not the outcomes of solutions). It is a form of bias. It happens on both sides of the debate. There is evidence of the phenomenon (on both sides, of course). It is only logical to be “averse” to solutions that you think will have costs that outweigh benefits – of course! But you seem to me mixing phenomena here.
===> ” I would have to conclude that your bias is showing.”
Of course my bias is showing. But that doesn’t answer questions related to other people’s bias. It could be that my bias leads me to conclude bias in other where it doesn’t exist. Or, it could be that others’ biases exist, and I’m pointing them out, The fact that I’m biased cannot support a conclusion that I am not validly pointing out bias in others.
So here we have a paper that empirically points to a bias among “skeptics,” and not one person has taken on the bias shown in the paper to explain the effect they found – other than to say (based on a priori assumptions) that the researchers were biased. Maybe they are, but that doesn’t explain their results. What we see here is a steadfast and stubborn adherence to fallacious (ad hom) reasoning.
Thanks for responding Joshua. My use of the word “likely” is based on what little evidence there is of the damage that has been caused by the imposition of a carbon tax by the former Gillard Government in Australia.
Peter Lang has written at length on this subject and on the push toward the use of renewables instead of coal for the future generation of electricity in Western economies, which has often been the subject of debate on Judith’s blog. The nuclear option seems to be ruled out by green activists and others who have been shocked by the Chernoble, Three Mile Island and Fukushima accidents.
I agree that evidence is pretty scant all around and I find your thoughts on this topic to be generally true for both sides of the debate, but I have recently noticed that you rarely post anything that would offend the warmists, notwithstanding that their evidence also leaves a lot to be desired. Silence in your circumstances can only be interpreted as tacit support.
”A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-Development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
Paul Ehrlich
The real climate facts stripped of extreme and incoherent verbosity is that recent warming (1944 to 1998) was some 0.4K at 0.07K/decade. It seems very unlikely that this rate will continue in the 21st century.
The rational approaches to new energy sources in the 21st century – and these are needed – are fairly obvious. It includes this – http://www.ga.com/energy-multiplier-module – as a fallback if nothing better comes along.
So ‘The Science’ is nutso – and so to are the so-called solutions.
“The real climate facts stripped of extreme and incoherent verbosity is that recent warming (1944 to 1998) was some 0.4K at 0.07K/decade. It seems very unlikely that this rate will continue in the 21st century.”
—–
True, warming likely to accelerate in the 21st century, and we may finally see a leveling in the 22nd century, assuming the HCV is successfully shut off.
As the Sun cools with amplification through the systems – as El Nino gives way to La Nina dominance – as Atlantic meridional overturning circulation declines over the century.
Assume that some of the 0.4K was quite natural and this is turning around – thus the rate of warming declines in 21st century from the 0.07K/decades of the 1944 to 1998 period.
On the most basic level – ‘The Science’ is nutso.
@ John Carter
“Conservatives Don’t Hate Climate Change, They Hate The Proposed Solutions: [link]”
So if you had carte blanch control over the world’s ‘energy policy’, with no interference from those pesky conservatives, what energy policies would you establish and what would the Temperature of the Earth (TOE) be in 10, 20, 50, and 100 years after you established them, what would the TOE be in 10, 20, 50, and 100 years if our energy policy were to simply supply our energy needs via the cheapest, most expedient sources available, and why would the TOE produced by your dictatorial energy policies be ‘better’ than the TOE resulting from ignoring the effect of our energy policies on ‘climate change’ completely?
John Carter | November 8, 2014 at 5:42 am | Reply
Conservatives Don’t Hate Climate Change, They Hate The Proposed Solutions: [link]
I’ve suggested this multiple times in comments on this blog alone.
What is also just as clear (but apparently not yet on this blog) is that this dislike for the proposed or anticipated strategic responses, has greatly skewed the response to the basic science of the issue.
Well, the basic problem is that people on the left end of the spectrum have a problem with veracity.
Most people don’t like being lied to.
1. CO2 is not pollution. No CO2, little or no life. More CO2 means more life. We need more CO2.
2. Warming is bad. No it isn’t. It hasn’t been in the 20th century. The combination of CO2 and warmth caused 50% increase in plant growth in the 20th century. This helps the whole planet – even the whales and little animals – the cute and furry ones.
3. CO2 is bad. No it isn’t, more CO2 reduces plant water requirements and makes them grow faster.
4. Solar and Wind integrate well into the power grid and are cost effective. To this point that hasn’t been true.
5. Biofuels are good. No, just no. Sacrificing rainforests and food to make biofuel is simply stupid.
6. Wind and solar are as clean as nuclear energy. No.
7. We can double atmospheric CO2. The “doubling” estimates originally specified going from 315 PPM to 630 PPM which could conceivablely come close to happening. At 400 PPM that horse has left the barn. The IPCC 940 PPM high end is just laughable.
8. Urgent action is needed on CO2. Well, this has been yelled for over 14 years and for the last 14 years not much has changed. Whatever disaster is coming is sure taking its time. Perhaps it had to hit a rest stop or got tied up in traffic.
At this point the renewable energy and alternative fuels folks need to come clean and get their story straight. Right now I don’t believe a word they say.
Renewable technologies are closing the gap and will be competitive in the future. But we need honest figures for total levelized cost so that intelligent choices can be made and recognition of the limitations of these technologies. We should add them in sensible amounts when and where they are efficient and cost effective. Finding a cheap clean way to store massive amounts of energy would be a big enabler.
There are some biofuel ideas like fuel from garbage that don’t seem to have a downside. Biofuel that is cost effective and made from unutilized resources isn’t very controversial.
CO2 caused warming could be bad if there is too much of it. But it would require forcing on the extreme end of the forcing confidence interval to make it happen. It is pretty clear the climate for whatever reason isn’t matching the models. So we don’t understand climate well enough (mostly clouds) and those confidence intervals don’t look very confident. Until we understand climate better the forcing estimates and predictions are just someone’s opinion (and a not particularly well informed opinion). To this point the dire predictions have a bad track record, just check on Arctic sea ice volume.
Looks like the NYT actually asked the right question,
not Is climate change real? or some such but
Is climate change a serious problem?:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/clip_image002_thumb.png?w=600&h=166
Interesting.
‘Cause what I often here is that “skeptics” don’t doubt that anthropogenic CO2 emissions warm the climate, but they uncertain as to the magnitude of the effect.
If they’re uncertain about the magnitude of the problem, then how can they be certain that it isn’t a serious problem?
It goes backs to these stages of denial:
1. AGW Does not exist. It is a scam, hoax, plot, etc.
2. Might exist but very minor if so.
3. Okay, probably exists but definitely minor effects.
4. Exists but we can adapt or net beneficial effects.
5. I don’t care, we’re all going to die eventually.
6. I’m angry and I hate anyone who believes in AGW.
These are not pure stages, but you’ll see deniers with all sorts of mixtures of these and bouncing back and forth. Very fun to watch!
Simple Josh,
We look for evidence. And when the evidence starts indicating that the magnitude of the effect may be small, we question just how serious of a problem that can represent.
Hmm. Which direction do the steps go?
I started out at 4 about 20yrs ago. Where do I go next?
Joshua| November 8, 2014 at 8:36 am | Reply
Interesting.
‘Cause what I often here is that “skeptics” don’t doubt that anthropogenic CO2 emissions warm the climate, but they uncertain as to the magnitude of the effect.
If they’re uncertain about the magnitude of the problem, then how can they be certain that it isn’t a serious problem?
Gee.
If you do the math the 200 zettajoules of ocean warming since 1960 amounts to 0.2 W/m2.
Hadcrut land/ocean says the air temperatures have increase 0.55°C or about 2 W/m2 of downdraft into the ocean. If you ignore the fact that temps have been flat for 14 years the average over the 54 year interval is about 1 W/m2 more forcing.
The ocean has absorbed less that 20% of the heat from the air above it. It is like the CO2 IR was boiling off the surface water or something.
This makes the claim of hidden heat really dubious because the ocean isn’t even in equilibrium with the current air temperature (the water is too cold).
The other fun observation is temperatures track with cloud cover better than CO2 for the last 30 years (less clouds – higher temperature) with cloud cover being basically flat in the 21st century.
If you sample the Republicans in an exit poll, climate would rank somewhere behind Benghazi and having a black President as a serious problem:-) Other recent more general polls have had more than 50% of Republicans rating climate change as an important issue.
The problem with the whole debate is that it has been oversimplified beyond all recognition. The polls try to make it a binary question. If each person could be interviewed after given the voluminous scientific studies then they would understand the innumerable nuances to the debate. Even the consensus would be spread all over the placed if asked to give a precise percentage between these three factors: man-made vs natural forcing and natural variability.
But it is encouraging when even the majority of Republicans favor the EPA coal-plant regulations. This shows that it should not be political suicide to support this. There are other major issues where the Republican Party in Congress differ from the national polling even among their own supporters.
Those proposed regulations throw a huge bone to “States’ Rights”.
JimD
FYI
the very serious problem with Benghazi is the known false cover story
(BTW I know a lot about the specific details of this event)
not so bad
except for the poor wannabe movie maker they arrested to cover their lie
free speech…once a liberal value
I am a “denier” because of my best evaluation of the evidence
not because I’m “scared” of a carbon tax
not because I don’t like Obama
the Duke study is silly because it is based on a false premise
that “conservatives” can’t and or don’t evaluate the claims of CAGW
on it’s own merits
it is agitprop in construct and purpose
“I am a “denier” because of my best evaluation of the evidence.”
——-
You trust your own skills of evaluation versus the majority of those who have actually spent their lives studying this topic?
R Gates
Yeah I do trust my own evaluation
’cause apparently I’m an “individualist” not a “communitarian”
Also I read Tonyb, Judith Curry, the Pielkes and many others who aren’t part of the “consensus”
but really, reading damn near everything on Sks and Real Climate turned me into a “denier”
plus, my weak mind was warped by the Koch bros. and fossil fuel industry propaganda…and don’t forget Limbaugh
perhaps if I audit John Cook’s class on the “science of climate change denialism” I can rehabilitate myself
wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/clip_image002_thumb.png
Lawrence describes well the lonely walk away from the consensus science crowd.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/i-can-see-russia-from-my-house/#comment-453353
@ Dr. Curry
“Breakthroughs in energy storage [link]”
Followed the link and found that the contract was for a 250 megawatt battery farm.
In terms of stored energy, would that be in megawatt-days, megawatt-hours, megawatt-minutes, megawatt-seconds, or megawatt-milliseconds?
Bob, it is not monolithic system, There are several different SCE energy ‘storage’ procurements for different purposes. Including several megawatts oce ice making capacity to shift commercial building peak air conditioning demand. The biggest chunk is a 100Mw x 4hour LiIon ‘Advancion’ peaker system from AES Energy Storage. Under the 2013 CPUC mandate. SCE could not purchase a much less expensive small gas turbine unit to meet same system need, part of the plan to replace the lost San Onofre nuclear capacity. The main procurement is a large CCGT. Those run best baseload rather than varied.
Hi Rud
Whether the storage is in one lump or many, my point remains: 250 megawatts is not a measure of energy capacity, it is a measure of rate of consumption of energy. I could purchase a high voltage capacitor weighing less than five pounds and charge it to its 50 kilovolt rated voltage. If I shorted it out and discharged it at its rated 25 kilo amp discharge rate it would, for a short while, be providing over a gigawatt. But it wouldn’t do it for long.
So what is the ENERGY capacity of the contracted for battery back up? I. e., For how LONG will it provide the 250 megawatts?
Bob, Understood your power vs energy thrust first go. For the relevant piece of peak storage from AES, I provided your answer. 100MW x 4 hours is the spec. Total 400MWH.
@ Rud Istvan
Thanks.
In the intellectual-sounding article on Kahan, the Florida part doesn’t even mention subsidence. This makes me think the article is just more politically motivated supercilious BS.
man, I just finished that article myself
I’m with you jim2
what is this arrogant notion of intellectual elites that they are of course right about everything
and disagreement with them is unwitting subconscious bias
and after the truth is presented to the unwashed in the proper way
we can become enlightened like them
to Hades with that, even if it were true
so call me an “individualist” not a “communitarian”
blah, blah, blah
supercilious BS is right
Hmmm. How’s this narrative. Global warming is used to get liberals to go along with long needed civil engineering projects.
yeah right aaron & JimD
everyone who disagrees with you is either a conspiracy theorist or Tea Party member
since the physical science is falling apart for CAGW predictions
why not turn to the social “sciences” to argue your case
why not create “denier” therapy groups in your neighborhood
maybe Pharma will come up with a drug to treat “climate change denial”
Why are you lumping me in with Jim?
I just noted that liberals and environmentalist often prevent needed civil engineering projects. The fear of global warming is starting to get them to start advocating for them. Maybe there’s hope for nuclear and hydro.
apologies aaron
flummoxed reading on my end, got it second time
good point
Thanks.
At least calmer pragmatic thinking prevailed over the Tea Party buffoons there. It shows it can be done.
Marcel’s IPCC article focuses in the climate sensitivity shennanigans in the new AR5 synthesis report. There is an excellent new eqivalent in Der Spiegel (available on line in English translation) that exposes similar shenanigans concerning global warming and species extinctions. Similar to my post here and longer essay No Bodies in Blowing Smoke.
Both examples make a mockery of the ‘settled’ IPCC science synthesis.
Steven Goddard, aka Tony Heller, is doing a remarkable job exposing the corruption at NASA:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/corrupting-the-global-temperature-record-at-nasa/
From the article:
…
As the polar vortex gets displaced to the south, the door will open for arctic air to plunge over the most of the United States as the new week progresses.
Only the Southwest, Hawaii, Alaska and South Florida will escape the grip of the upcoming arctic blast that the polar vortex can be blamed for.
“The polar vortex is a large pocket of very cold air, typically the coldest air in the Northern Hemisphere, which sits over the polar region,” stated AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski.
“Occasionally, this pocket of very cold air can get dislodged farther south than normal, leading to cold outbreaks in Canada and the U.S.”
…
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/polar-vortex-42-states/37049255
Nat gas is already at 4 bucks. At 4 bucks, some of the nat gas producers enjoy a 80-90% margin.
From the article:
Even though it’s still early November, a January-like cold wave just entering Montana and the Dakotas on Sunday will bring 30 below zero temperatures to scattered locations in Montana and Wyoming by Wednesday morning.
The cold will fill the nation’s midsection by mid-week, with no let up in sight. The coldest air to arrive in a series of reinforcing surges is still a week away.
Temperatures are forecast to run 15 to 30 deg. F below normal for at least 5 days over a large portion of the central U.S. starting late in the coming week (graphic courtesy of Weatherbell.com, click to enlarge):
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/11/siberian-express-to-bring-30-deg-f-to-wyoming/
http://images.intellicast.com/WxImages/RadarLoop/usa_None_anim.gif
Amazing to see energy that originated as warmth in the Western Pacific cause a cold outbreak in the US. The teleconnections on this planet are remarkable.
The cold wave is about to wash over Oklahoma. Brrrrr ….
This caught my eye.
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2014/11/20141107_seriously.jpg
Yep, companies have been doing the very thing highlighted in the cartoon. The Federal government is at fault as it has supplied companies with money at interest rates very close to zero. Wonder what Krugman thinks about that?
FEAR induced social insanity in 1945:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/CHAOS_and_FEAR_August_1945.pdf
FAITH can restore mankind to sanity:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Yellow_Lark's_Prayer.pdf
The Voosen article was excellent. Interesting that it quoted Robert Brulle. If I had to choose taking a course from Dan Kahan or Brulle, there is no choice. Prof Kahan all the way.
Unless I want to go to clown school. Then Brulle may be the better choice.
Also this – Few people can admit that they let their cultural values trump facts. Could you?
Sure I can. I consider people that can’t as dishonest.
Nature Nanotechnology is making double-blind peer review an option.
“Our decision to offer double-blind has been driven by concerns from sections of our community that biases, such as those against female authors or researchers based at less prestigious labs and institutions, could play a role in the review process.”
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v9/n11/full/nnano.2014.273.html#close
First of all, someone needs to clue Kahan in that the behavior observed in the double-slit experiment is no longer a mystery. He should read up on decoherence.
From the paper:
…
Funding for research described in this paper was supplied by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in connection with the Annenberg/Cultural Cognition Project “Cognitive Adaptation Research Initiative,” and by the Skoll Global Threats Fund, in connection with the “Southeast Florida Evidence-based Science Communication Imitative.”
…
His paper then in the summary splats out this gem of BS:
…
Moreover, in the science of science communication as in quantum physics, assessment perturbs this dualism. The antagonistic cultural meanings that pervade the social interactions in which we engage
individuals on contested science issues forces them to be only one of their reasoning selves. We can through these interactions measure what they know, or measure who they are, but we cannot do both at
once.
…
Yep, Kahan is a true genius alright.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2459057
The psychology behind those who study conservatives and global warming probably goes something like this.
The psychologists and sociologists who took up the study of conservative’s belief that climate change isn’t significant first looked at what to them was the obvious explanation: These conservatives are just a bunch of Bible-beating, gun-toting yahoos. They wouldn’t know a scientific theory if it bit them on the butt.
So, they fashioned some studies and found that conservatives are more science-savvy than their dark-beer swilling, pot smoking, socialist buddies at Greenpeace.
After they began to emerge from the fog of gut-wrenching, mind-blowing, Earth-shattering bout of cognitive dissonance; they began, dejectedly, to cast about for another explanation that they could peddle to the public. Because they knew in their heart of hearts that conservatives simply couldn’t be correct that the science was just too shaky to justify turning society on its head to cut CO2 emissions.
So, they came up with the idea that even though conservatives were science savvy, they couldn’t shake their political world-view and admit the warmist climate scientists were right.
So, the researchers made up some authoritative sounding terms, fashioned in the manner of a climate scientist making up statistical procedures, and came up with the current crop of nonsense. It will be flushed down the leftist toilet of history just as so many other half-baked ideas before it.
Pingback: The Global Warming Scam Is Being Exposed - Page 7 - Christian Forums
From the article:
U.S. crude ended the session 74 cents higher at $78.65 a barrel, having dropped from a high above $107 five months ago.
Brent crude futures were last up 0.7 percent at $83 a barrel. The benchmark hit a four-year intraday low of $81.63 on Wednesday, down from a high above $115 in June.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102162143
Although Ban is trying to show the EIA has better EUR numbers than the companies, it seems to be the other way round.
From the article:
…
Needless to say that the industry claims and the EIA estimates cannot both be right. It is probable that neither one is right and the truth lies somewhere in-between. But what we do know based on Shell’s performance in Dimmit county is that it reflects the EIA data more closely, given the size of the loss it took.
According to the Texas Railroad Commision, there were 7,600 wells drilled in Dimmit county as of May, 2014, of which about 3,500 were drilled since the beginning of 2010 when hydraulic fracturing took off in the field. Production in the same month totaled 2,47 million barrels of oil and about 4.55 million barrels of oil equivalent in gas, for a total of 7 million barrels of oil equivalent. Just five years ago, production in Dimmit county was less than one tenth of the current level. A rough estimate of cumulative production to the end of May, 2014, from the beginning of 2010 comes out to just under 400 million barrels. I decided to adjust that number downwards by 10% in order to account for production from wells drilled before 2010. Production per well from all wells drilled from the beginning of 2010, till May, 2014 comes out to about 103,000 barrels of oil equivalent. Given that most shale oil wells produce about 35-50% (I will explain this number later) of their potential during the first two years, and the average age of all wells drilled since 2010 is about two years, it is unlikely that average EUR in Dimmit county will ever surpass 200,000-300,000 barrels of oil equivalent for these particular wells.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2656515-shale-oil-and-gas-eur-company-claims-compared-to-eia-estimates
Oil price falls? Why you should relax: OPEC head
Drilling chief calls bottom on U.S. oil
Pro: Energy investors should prepare for $60 oil
Crude oil hasn’t bottomed yet, traders say
OPEC cuts oil price forecasts as ‘price war’ bites
T Boone Pickens: The real problem with oil
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102162143
“Science, after all, is simply a logical, rational and careful examination of the facts that nature presents to us.” ~Randi
Gates
You state confidence in AGW, based on your knowledge of the physics, but you also believe the system is chaotic and that knowledge of the system is incomplete. Would the better AGW statement be something that incorporates both of these views? Just trying learn something about the climate system; about where we are in knowing it.
Regards
Richard
Richard
this article I wrote a couple of years ago might help as its subject is the Unknown knowns and known knowns that relate to climate.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/23/little-ice-age-thermometers-%E2%80%93-history-and-reliability-2/
tonyb
Tony,
Thank you, I will study it. BTW, didn’t know until your recent comment that the UK gets hurricanes. How/where do they originate?
Keep warm,
Richard
Richard
Strictly speaking whilst we may get hurricane force winds we don’t actually get hurricanes. This may be a fine nuance but the reasons are described here by the Met office.
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2013/10/26/the-severe-storm-this-weekend-and-why-its-not-a-hurricane/
However, it’s difficult to explain this nuance and I think in general conversations its fine to refer to such strong winds as hurricanes
We have numerous events such as these over the centuries and the point I was trying to make to Rgates is that in the past we got more of these extreme events than we do these days.
Looking through the 1000 year old record it seems we are currently living in relatively benign climatic times
Tonyb
Tony,
Thank you
Richard
“the point I was trying to make to Rgates is that in the past we got more of these extreme events than we do these days.”
Tony, can you quantify that statement in any way to make it an actual scientific conclusion?
Moy et al (2002) present the record of sedimentation shown above which is strongly influenced by ENSO variability. It is based on the presence of greater and less red sediment in a lake core. More sedimentation is associated with El Niño. It has continuous high resolution coverage over 12,000 years. It shows periods of high and low ENSO activity alternating with a period of about 2,000 years. There was a shift from La Niña dominance to El Niño dominance some 5,000 years ago that was identified by Tsonis (2009) as a chaotic bifurcation – and is associated with the drying of the Sahel. There is a period around 3,500 years ago of high ENSO activity associated with the demise of the Minoan civilisation (Tsonis et al, 2010). Red intensity was over 200 in the period compared to 98 for the 1997/98 El Niño. It shows ENSO variability considerably in excess of that seen in the modern period.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/moys-20021.png
I guess a climate disaster which hasn’t happened yet can be as bad as you like. Even a St Mary Magdalene’s Flood (1342) is limited by its reality.
You’d think the Younger Dryas and Early Holocene, both pretty recent and close together, would be top of the pops as extremes within a brief span of time. But they actually happened and they’re totally old. Probably older than Cliff Richard.
Something which actually occurred? Before 1980? Bo-ring.
Joseph
I previously referenced a book by Lamb to Rgates.
There are books by Kington and Groves and Brian fagans book The little ice ago’ which make this point as well.
I have met the dept of the Met office ŵho take an interest in these things but they really only concentrate on the period snce1850
I am currently writing a fellow up to my article ‘the long slow thaw’ which extends CET to 1538 from it’s instrumental limit of 1659. This will examine the period covering the transition between 1190 to 1380 or so, when the weather became more turbulent as the climate made its initial shift frm the MWP to LIA
I have accumulated lots of data through research at the met office and other places, such as Cathedrals, to recognise that the extremes of the past are greater than those of today. The data bases will eventually be made public but before that can happen my follow up article ‘tranquility, transition and turbulence’ needs to be written. It will take several months.
Tonyb
Mosomoso
It is well known that climate did not exist until 180 and that only computer generated data can be accepted. Which leaves poor old Matthew Paris and those who chronicled the manorial records out in the cold.
Tonyb
Mosomoso
Sorry, that should read climate did not exist until 1980
Tonyb
Tony, I will take that as a “no” in answering my question?
I was just about to say that 180 is very early to be having a climate. Marcus Aurelius whined about his big flood; the Mayans copped a half century of drought; the cold dip caused misery in Asia…but that was probably Taupo erupting. Blame the Kiwis, certainly not climate. What climate?
Joseph
I have referenced you four books which collectively total over 3000 pages as jean groves work runs to two volumes.
I would also recommend Lambs book ‘climate history and the modern world’ plus le Roy laduries ‘times of feast, times of famine.’
Then there is ‘history and climate’ by Phil jones, ogilvie, Davies and Briffa then you might try ‘since records began’ by Paul Simons.
In addition there is this online resource
http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/wxevents.htm
Of course you could always do your own research rather than taking my work for it or that of, lamb, groves, fagan, Kington, ladurie, jones, Briffa, Davies, ogilvie, And the tens of thousands of observations they chronicle.
Btw kingtons book is called ‘climate and weather. ‘
By the time you have finished reading all these I might hope to have my own database up which will further extend the records we have, which sadly, don’t get as much attention as they should.
Tonyb
Mosomoso
I can confirm that climate actually begun at 3 .09 pm gmt on 14 th march 1980 .
There is simply no point you quoting anything prior to that date as it will obviously be merely anecdotal and is therefore worthless. This of course obviously refers only to text, not to numbers which are always robustly brilliant no matter how old.
Tonyb
Tony
You asked earlier about the Octave of St Benedict. I’m a lay member of the Benedictine Order and got some information on it. There are two days that celebrate St Benedict; March 21 for his entry to heaven and July 11 for an event regarding the Benedictine Order. In times past the July event was the first day of the Octave, which extended for the following eight days. Therefore the octave was July 11-19.
http://brotherjuniper.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/st-benedicts-summer-feast/
http://www.benedictinemonks.com/frame.htm
Richard
Richard
Thanks for that. I am researching 13 th century records written by Benedictine monk Matthew Paris.
As might be expected many of his references include various feast days. I Had assumed the date I wanted was July as the context was that it rained non stop from the festival I quoted until mid August.
I like to ensure what I write is factual so I wanted to sure I didn’t get it wrong. Constant rain from march to mid August would have put a different complexion on things than merely 3 or 4 weeks of rain which seems to be the reality.
Tonyb
You said:
I ask you to quantify the difference between now and the past. All you do is give me references with no evidence of your own. You need to quantify the data so you display it visually in the form of graphs and examine trends, etc. Without that your statement that the extreme weather was more common in the past is practically worthless. Do you have any supporting evidence that quantifies your statement?
Joseph
You can do one of two things.
You can either buy or borrow from the library the various books I have suggested which contain numerous well referenced climate events that will help you to put the current climate into context
Alternatively you can remind Big oil where I live so they can fund these expensive activities you want me to carry out because you don’t seem willing to read the collective wisdom put together over many years by noted historians who have gleaned the weather observations from numerous sources.
I have remarked in the past that if climate material has not been digitised it doesn’t exist. Unfortunately much of the past has not yet been digitised. I try to do my best with no funding and hope you will be satisfied with the end results of my own work when it will be ready in a few months.
In the meantime I urge you to read the books I have recommended.
Tonyb
I quantified with a Holocene spanning high resolution ENSO proxy. We may also do it with Vostek or Greenland ice cores.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/gisp2_vostok.png
For some reason a comment about answering lame arse questions disappeared – but it remains a lame arse question.
This blog gets more tedious and ill informed by the day it seems.
Tonyb
Matthew Paris
you’re giving me warm fuzzies
I would prefer actual numbers, to historical, anecdotal, globally sparse records that can’t be quantified, Otherwise you can’t scientifically say that extreme weather events were more common in the past period.
John
Matthew Paris is a good chronicler but he does have this habit of habitually relating weather events to religious holidays, many of which are very obscure.
It takes a lot of time to translate these to real dates then determine if a previous researcher has taken account of the changes between the gregorian and Julian calendar. It is all very time consuming which s why it Often takes me a year or two to research then write an article
Tonyb
Joseph
I am flattered that you seem to believe i maintain a large well funded research team that can immediately carry out myriad tasks. . I don’t.
John gets the warm fuzzies at the mention of Matthew Patis. Why don’t you read some of the books I suggest and see if any of the accounts give you the warm fuzzies as well? Historical context is important.
Now if you will excuse me it’s getting on for 11 pm over here and it’s time for bed.
Tonyb
Joseph confuses science with numeracy. Next up, numerology.
===========
You don’t have to know the details to have confidence in the general trends. Natural variability is always present in chaotic systems and will lead to a “wiggly” path forward, and this the models are always wrong in getting the exact path correct, but we can have a high degree of confidence in the overall dynamics. Here’s a nice analogy to models and potential evolution of the actual climate: there are billions of dust particles floating in the air in your room. We know that over a period of time, many of them will settle on horizontal surfaces in the room based on the law of gravity. If you take any single particle at time T, and try to predict its exact path down to an exact point on a surface, even our most advanced supercomputer could not do that. Indeed, some particles may even reverse couse and float upward over short periods. Yet we know that surfaces get dusty. The aggregate tells us about the “system” of dust, rooms, and gravity. The climate system is more complex and we don’t have all the pieces, but we have enough to have a high degree of confidence (but never 100%) in the general direction as we add more GH gases.
R. Gates – An excellent explanation!
R. Gates
Thank you. It was a great answer. However, the work of Tony Brown is relevant to climate prognostics. The journals of farmers, sailors, and the Chinese Emperors cannot be ignored, and those journals show that the land temperatures of today may not be unprecedented in the last millennium. Probably a topic not discussed among consensus scientists
Regards,
Richard
R. Gates,
I thank you for your clear (even to me) discussion. May I chime in ask what your impression is, based on the unknowns, of the immediacy of the focus on CO2 emissions reduction and then to removal? My CAGW buddy has stated that we could reduce levels for no more than “what the U.S. spent on health care from 2000-2004.” If there is no “fire” why would we divert those funds and not use them for “more health care”?
‘The Earth’s climate system is highly nonlinear: inputs and outputs are not proportional,
change is often episodic and abrupt, rather than slow and gradual, and multiple equilibria are the
norm. While this is widely accepted, there is a relatively poor understanding of the different types of
nonlinearities, how they manifest
under various conditions, and whet
her they reflect a climate system
driven by astronomical forcings, by internal feedbacks, or by a combination of both. In this paper, af-
ter a brief tutorial on the basics of climate nonlinearity, we provide a number of illustrative examples
and highlight key mechanisms that give rise to nonlinear behavior, address scale and methodological
issues, suggest a robust alternative to prediction that is based on using integrated assessments within
the framework of vulnerability studies and, lastly, recommend a number of research priorities and
the establishment of education programs in Earth Systems Science. It is imperative that the Earth’s
climate system research community embraces this nonlinear paradigm if we are to move forward in
the assessment of the human influence on climate.’ http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/climate/rial_2004.pdf
‘ The global climate system is composed of anumber of subsystems — atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere andlithosphere — each of which has distinctcharacteristic times, from days and weeks tocenturies and millennia. Each subsystem,moreover, has its own internal variability, allother things being constant, over a fairly broadrange of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus giverise to climate variability on all time scales.’ http://www.academia.edu/3226175/Mathematical_Theory_of_Climate_Sensitivity
‘The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past. We are trying to understand how the earth’s climate system is engineered, so we can understand what it takes to trigger mode switches. Until we do, we cannot make good predictions about future climate change… Over the last several hundred thousand years, climate change has come mainly in discrete jumps that appear to be related to changes in the mode of thermohaline circulation.’ Wally Broecker
The theory suggests that the system is pushed by greenhouse gas changes and warming – as well as solar intensity and Earth orbital eccentricities – past a threshold at which stage the components start to interact chaotically in multiple and changing negative and positive feedbacks – as tremendous energies cascade through powerful subsystems. Some of these changes have a regularity within broad limits and the planet responds with a broad regularity in changes of ice, cloud, Atlantic thermohaline circulation and ocean and atmospheric circulation.
Dynamic climate sensitivity implies the potential for a small push to initiate a large shift. Climate in this theory of abrupt change is an emergent property of the shift in global energies as the system settles down into a new climate state. The traditional definition of climate sensitivity as a temperature response to changes in CO2 makes sense only in periods between climate shifts – as climate changes at shifts are internally generated. Climate evolution is discontinuous at the scale of decades and longer.
In the way of true science – it suggests at least decadal predictability. The current cool Pacific Ocean state seems more likely than not to persist for 20 to 40 years from 2002. The flip side is that – beyond the next few decades – the evolution of the global mean surface temperature may hold surprises on both the warm and cold ends of the spectrum (Swanson and Tsonis, 2009).
We have typical narrative nonsense from Randy the video guy. It is not simply true that climate is predictable.
“It is not simply true that climate is predictable.”
——-
This seems to be what Rob Ellison got from my “dust particle” analogy and the impossibility of predicting the path of exactly how a climate system might evolve, yet knowing general trends. Was my analogy too complex for him?
> Yet we know that surfaces get dusty
And what is the equivalent climatic certainty here, please ?
No fuzziness or Bovver Boy boot shuffles, just answer the question
We are somewhere over 95% certain that human activity (mainly fossil fuel burning) is adding more net energy to the system. We don’t know the exact path to a warmer future but the physics is pretty solid.
‘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. Prognostic equations for ρ, the Liouville and Fokker-Plank equation are described by Ehrendorfer (this volume). In practice these equations are solved by ensemble techniques, as described in Buizza.’ (Predicting Weather and Climate – Palmer and Hagedorn eds – 2006)
Randy the video guy is confident in his simplistic analogy – that’s a surprise. I prefer reality.
R. Gates, “We are somewhere over 95% certain that human activity (mainly fossil fuel burning) is adding more net energy to the system. We don’t know the exact path to a warmer future but the physics is pretty solid.”
We are very confident that human activity is allowing the system to store more energy but there is a huge leap from there to blaming extratropical storms on that energy. It is quite likely that most of the human related warming is due to land use and black carbon/dust pollution.
https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/Press_Photo_10_465_0.jpg
That is a photo of a Greenland Glacier.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pxgwumuPMoA/VF99wHAT2XI/AAAAAAAALuQ/qX-CS9bsqdc/s1600/C%26W%2Bwith%2Bco2%2Bref.png
That is surface temperature in extra-tropical and tropical bands. Except for the northern latitudes from 30 to 90, the “world” is warming at a pretty boring rate. Them what don’t wax so poetic about the Human Carbon Volcano, think that starting with particulates and land use sounds like a pretty sensible idea. Then there are some in the northern extratropical region that aren’t all that stoked on the idea of hosting year ’round snow fields and abandoning agriculture to save the “Globe” from a degree of warming, possibly. I believe that is a socio-economic thing.
Captain
I have commented on the soot at the arctic a number of times. The Bbc recently did a documentary on the arctic and it was very striking how much soot was around from the top of glaciers to the bottom of the fissures hundreds of feet below.
It must have an impact on melt levels as I know from my school days how effective soot is at melting ice. It was my job in the freezing winter mornings of 1962/3 to spread the previous night soot from our open fire over our icy paths. It worked a treat
Tonyb
This seems to be what Rob Ellison got from my “dust particle” analogy…
Seems to be what randy the video guy got from 3 quotes and links to actual science and scientists. Not unexpected.
tonyb, Black carbon, regular ash and wind erosion along with other hydro-logical changes from decimating beavers to draining wet lands to fight malaria likely have and will continue to have large impacts on climate, but who is to say that most of that hasn’t been a good thing in terms of mankind?
There should be limits but other than international air pollution standards that deal with real pollutants, it will be a long row to hoe.
‘The overall slow decrease of upwelling SW flux from the mid-1980’s until the end of the 1990’s and subsequent increase from 2000 onwards appear to caused, primarily, by changes in global cloud cover (although there is a small increase of cloud optical thickness after 2000) and is confirmed by the ERBS measurements.’
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/zFD/an9090_TOTnet_toa.gif
I have shown the net graph here – up is warming. The most interesting feature is the step change in cloud – associated with a change in ocean and atmospheric circulation – in the 1998/2001 climate shift. A result confirmed by Project Earthshine.
These chaotic shifts occur every few decades and involve large changes in climate states. What we have then is small changes in greenhouse gas forcing against a backdrop of large changes in climate means and variance. Where surprises on both the cool and warm ends of the spectrum are more likely than not.
Is it reasonable to think in terms of global warming and abrupt at the same time? Or is it better to think in terms of control variables in a chaotic system?
The Gergis team in Australia has been awarded what is said to be a top prize in Australian science (the “Eureka Prize”) for the work that includes that fatally flawed, withdrawn, and never–seen-again paper that had been shredded by Jean S and Steve Mc, et al., at Climate Audit. It seems that failures in science can be highly rewarded so long as they come with the politically correct favored “message” —
http://climateaudit.org/2014/11/07/gergis-and-the-pages2k-regional-average/#comment-740074
Did the Eureka Prize rely upon the work of this paper (below), and if so is it normal for prestigious prizes to be awarded based upon withdrawn and/or unpublished work? According to the Gergis personal website, what appears to be (possibly) the revision of the withdrawn paper may still be in play, although not yet accepted or published. The paper which had been announced as “published” with such fanfare including press conference in May 2012 seems to be the predecessor of that which is listed now as “in review” with the Journal of Climate. Is this an ongoing “review” from long long ago or is it something new:
“in review”
some of the relevant background from 2012, in case this is indeed the successor or vestige of the May 2012 paper by the same co-authors (a 5th original co-author Phipps does not appear on the later version…. his scruples, or some other reason??):
Gergis et al. vs. Journal of Climate
Seen the regersistation over on Aisle CA that Steve is trying clean up?
=====================
I see you have seen. Three Halloweens in a row for the paper to be in review is pretty much a contagious biohazard. Stop(start?) the quarantine, Free the Paper, who will rid me all this regurgis?
==========================
To Wagathron, CWON, Jim2 (and Others):
Do you think Senator Murkowski’s (next chair of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee) statement on volcanoes and global warming is appropriate?
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/11/sen-murkowskis-climate-comments-are-completely-wrong
I’ve looked into this. Since Murkowski’s quotes were cherry picked and presented without context, it is impossible to answer your question in any meaningful way.
From the NPR cherry tree …
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/06/361896179/republican-sweep-highlights-climate-change-politics-in-alaska
I always get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing my tax dollars are being used to parrot the liberal line.
I tried, and tried to make myself leave this alone:”I always get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing my tax dollars are being used to parrot the liberal line.”
But I gotta ask, is parroting, “the conservative line” or the “independent line” or any other line any better? Really?
With my tax dollar? The operative phrase. When PBS leans right you will have a point.
Murkowski aside, since we don’t have the complete text of her remarks. There is this:
…
Our planet has about 1,000 volcanoes on land, such as Holuhraun and Bardarbunga, but most of our volcanoes are under the sea. “Some 85 per cent of volcanoes are unseen and unmeasured yet these heat the oceans and add monstrous amounts of CO2 to the oceans,” notes Dr. Plimer. “Why have these been ignored?,” he asks.
…
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/19197-icelands-volcanic-pollution-dwarfs-all-of-europes-human-emissions
So she’s just confusing CO2 with SO2. No biggie. Hopefully by the time she is the chairperson of the committee, she can get the facts straight and realize she has to change her mind on some things. Science is a wonderful thing when you try to understand it.
Another case of major questions remaining due to the IPCC predetermined views skewing research away from true scientific inquiry. The IPCC set back climate science for decades.
Jim D peers into the mind of Murkowski. Creepy!
I’m still waiting to see if Guam is going to tip over.
The new crop of Republicans should provide some entertaining perspectives on climate change if this is anything to go by.
Jim, I have my doubts that anyone can top that one but I have heard some pretty ridiculous things said by politicians so there is always hope my favorite will be replaced.
Next time Rohrabacher starts to talk to Judith about Mars in one of these congressional hearings, I think it will be hard for her to suppress a giggle.
Mars icecaps, global warming:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7136/abs/nature05718.html
Peer reviewed science.
“They believe changes in albedo should be an important part of future studies on atmosphere and climate change.”
Ragnaar,
Please walk me thru this as best you can. Where I am now is albedo is a synonym for “reflectivity” or a “coefficent of reflectivity”. At this point, projections are for an approximate projected warming on earth of about 2C. Is the .65C increase in the temp on Mars (based on the Corrigendum) from between “1970’s to 1990’s” somehow to be extrapolated to some equivalent here? There are many other factors in the differences between atmospheres so I’m expecting that to not be the case. Hope you don’t mind that I asked.
Ya’ll are my proxy for a class on climate change as I’m not in a position to attend one at this time, so if I’m speaking out of turn let me know.
Oh, and is this change on Mars anthropogenic? We’ve stirred up the dust up there ya know. (Very poor attempt at a CC joke). Sighs expected.
Danny Thomas
Fenton et al did a paper on Mars, and then it was used by politicians to make a case for uncertainty and natural variability. And Dr. Curry may have been asked about it while testifying. The Mars ‘connection’. I like the idea of looking at Mars. If all else is equal, it was the Sun on Mars.
Here’s a take on it:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-on-mars-basic.htm
Where you can read, we don’t know enough to say what caused the change on Mars. The uncertainty monster. However the apparent simplicity of Mars appeals to me. I like natural detectors. Lake temperatures, vegetation, glaciers. Things that broadly record weather. I do not think we are ready to leap from changes on Mars to parallel changes on Earth, inditing the Sun. Albedo is the bounce. How much shortwave radiation (energy) from the Sun bounces right back out the system. This does not rule out a surface bounce that then bounces back to to surface off of a cloud back to Earth. Fenton’s study dates were perfect if you believe 1977 to 1999 was a warm regime here on Earth.
Thank you. I’ll read more on this later.
After reading this: http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-11-06/melting-arctic-sea-ice-doubles-chances-harsh-winters-other-parts-world
Which had a link leading me to this: (don’t support Francis’s viewpoint): http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/01/08/embarrassed-global-warming-alarmists-sink-to-comedic-lows-with-polar-vortex-excuse/
and within this (deflecting), (about UFO’s) to this: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1104/1104.4462.pdf
I’m going to bed.
Thanks for not commenting on my little joke.
Danny Thomas
I’d expect Forbes to disagree with Francis when possible. Earlier I linked this: “One of the most important and mysterious events in recent climate history is the climate shift in the mid-1970s [Graham, 1994]. In the northern hemisphere 500-hPa atmospheric flow the shift manifested itself as a collapse of a persistent wave-3 anomaly pattern and the emergence of a strong wave-2 pattern. The shift was accompanied by sea-surface temperature (SST) cooling in the central Pacific and warming off the coast of western North America [Miller et al., 1994]. The shift brought sweeping long-range changes in the climate of northern hemisphere.” https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/kravtsov/www/downloads/GRL-Tsonis.pdf What I find interesting is the wave-3, wave-2 shift, which I assume shifted back about 1998-2001. I might guess that some small part of what Francis is seeing overlaps with the assumed current wave-3 (3 lobes) pattern that I think Tsonis et al found important enough to lead off their paper’s introduction.
But what about the UFO’s? ;)
Thanks Ragnaar!
There are plenty of politicians who have no idea what they are talking about on any number of topics. Murkowski is obviously one of many. There are many who would say that we should “act now” or that we should “do something”, but have no understanding what actions would would have a reasonable effect or at what cost.
I am much more alarmed by Hilary saying that businesses don’t create jobs.
sorry, that should have been in reply to Stephen Segrest
Check out Dr Hayhoe in that Climate Change Communication article. She’s just a humble “physician of the planet” doin’ her job around the ‘hood. She’s not pushing anyone around. She’s even read Kahan’s “landmark study”!
“In my communication, now, I begin with the values that I share with whomever I am talking to.”
So if I’m worried about water she’ll talk to me about water. If I’m worried about kittens, she’ll talk kittens. Communication, you see. (Though I suspect that when she’s doing drought workshops in Texas there’s not too much communication about the droughts of the 30s and 50s. One must have some reasonable limits to open discussion of climate.)
This scientifically proven fact we keep deliberately fuzzy called “climate change” is just there, everywhere you turn. So Dr Hayhoe will be able to give you some of her conciliatory “outreach” no matter what you do. Lawn bowls? Rugby? Persian miniatures? Falconry? There’s an “outreach” for that.
The trick of these “communicators” is, of course, to avoid all clarity and definition, assume that the claims of the alarmists and warmists are true just like the sky is blue…then congratulate skeptics on their skepticism. You’re a skeptic? How marvellous! And a conservative? Some of our best friends are conservative! Now, how may we help you to a better understanding?
Not buying any of this. Any more of this “communication” and “outreach” and I’m starting a grass roots Union of Concerned Skeptics. (If you say “grass roots” and “concerned” someone might throw an award or money at you. Worth a try.)
No, Wagathon, consensus scientist have conclusively shown that Earth’s climate is immune to any changes in the Sun.
Does Earth’s strange climate influence the Sun? https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Solar_Energy.pdf
A climate that don’t change is like a dog that don’t itch, a worm that don’t squirm.
When you look at what might be called data, I just don’t see any ill effects of man-made CO2. So, after over a century of man-made CO2 released to the atmosphere …
1. Places troubled by encroaching sea are usually subject to subsidence. This in combination with the fact that sea level has been rising for hundreds of years, makes this phenomenon seem to be ordinary. Even Manhattan is still above water.
2. There are no climate refugees.
3. The US had a record corn crop this year and most other crops fared quite well. Even the world harvest has been hardy, an increasing trend rather than a decreasing one.
4. There is no tropical hot spot as predicted by climate models.
5. Arctic ice appears to be recovering and total sea ice is simply meandering about in a constrained range.
6. The pH of the ocean is still OK. In fact, in many places local variations in CO2 concentration overwhelm the man-made contribution.
7. There has been warming of the atmosphere, but attribution to man-made CO2 is little more than a gut feeling at this point. This due to an inadequate history of climate data.
8. Proxies are a mixed bag. Some proxy studies are out and out fraudulent. Some of the better ones can be used. Some of those show the current warming to be unremarkable.
9. I’m a conservative libertarian, so that means man-made CO2 isn’t a problem. Right.
in case anyone is wondering, some places are colder than usual:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/11/siberian-express-to-bring-30-deg-f-to-wyoming/
No one who is paying attention is wondering. Furthermore, we know the energetic roots of this were in the warm waters of the western Pacific.
‘We use geochemical data from a sediment core in the shallow-silled and intermittently dysoxic Kau Bay in Halmahera (Indonesia, lat 1°N, long 127.5°E) to reconstruct century-scale climate variability within the Western Pacific Warm Pool over the past ~3500 yr.
Downcore variations in bulk sedimentary δ15N appear to reflect century-scale variability in basin ventilation, attributed to changes in oceanographic conditions related to century-scale fluctuations in El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). We infer an increase in century-scale El Niño activity beginning ca. 1700 yr B.P. with peaks in El Niño activity ca. 1500 yr B.P., 1150 yr B.P., and ca. 700 yr B.P. The Kau Bay results suggest that there was diminished ENSO amplitude or frequency, or a departure from El Niño–like conditions during the Medieval Warm Period, and distinctive, but steadily decreasing, El Niño activity during and after the Little Ice Age.’ http://www.atmos.albany.edu/deas/faculty/howe/Langton%20et%20al.%20%282008%29.pdf
There is millennial scale variability in ENSO.
Arctic Blast, Siberian Express, Alberta Clipper, Polar Vortex, let’s call the whole thing cold.
============
MRM – the warm Pacific is just the “climate change” hysteria of the moment. Kind of like the Arctic Death Spiral. Or Britain will never see snow again. Or, Manhattan will be under water.
“…the warm Pacific is just the “climate change” hysteria of the moment…”
—-
So long as by “moment” you mean the past 60 years of warming.
Gates
Or maybe last 150 years of warming and you have no data to refute it.
I am very bored with Randy the video guy’s simplistic but oh so confident pronouncements.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/smeed-fig-71.png
Rob,
You can easily not read or respond to my posts. Your whinny tone is unseemly to a man your age.
I could ignore a tedious little video guy with a misleading and simplistic narrative?
I suppose so.
Substitute facts for simplistic narrative and there is what he has confidence in.
R. Gates: Furthermore, we know the energetic roots of this were in the warm waters of the western Pacific.
Maybe. You have a lot of confidence in one of the narrations.
As you did not say in response to FOMD, you have to look at all the regions of the system, not just at the occasional hot spot.
“Maybe. You have a lot of confidence in one of the narrations.”
——–
Given that we the full history of the development of the Cyclone into an extra tropical system and the related effects then on the jet stream– yes I do have a great deal of confidence in the facts.
Should be here – substitute facts for simplistic narrative and there is what he has confidence in.
This looked to me to be a good overall report on ocean heat.
Probing the deep: An in-depth look at the oceans, climate change and the hiatus:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/10/an-in-depth-look-at-the-oceans-climate-change-and-the-hiatus/
http://www.carbonbrief.org/media/344578/oceanheatcontent_balmaseda-et-al.jpg
There are several serious errors in the “physics” of the radiative greenhouse conjecture. As discussed in a comment last week, there is not necessarily any significant difference between what the surface temperature would be without all greenhouse gases and what it is today. The issue comes down to whether the emissivity of a rocky dry planet would be greater or less than 0.88 and, given that many rocks, as well as soil, have a lower emissivity than that, then we can deduce that it would have been warmer without GH gases. That really should not surprise you, because you know that water vapour is what forms clouds (even though the IPCC authors thought the oceans and clouds would still be there without water vapour on the planet) and we know that there is 30% reflection by clouds (well at least that’s what NASA et al tell us) and we are also told that the atmosphere absorbs about 20% of incident solar radiation.
What maintains the surface temperature is thus not radiation from GH gases, because it would have been hotter without them, rather like the Moon that reaches temperatures around 130C. But Earth would not cool down as quickly as the Moon does if it had the same atmosphere but no GH gases, because nitrogen and oxygen would then hold 100% of the energy in the atmosphere – even more than the 98% they currently hold.
What does maintain the surface temperatures of Earth and Venus (and that at the base of the nominal troposphere of Uranus) is the gravitationally-induced temperature gradient which a correct understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics let’s us deduce is in fact the very state of thermodynamic equilbrium which that law says will evolve autonomously.
And that’s why it doesn’t matter how much back radiation slows that small portion of surface cooling which is by radiation. All the cooling by radiation and non-radiative processes (unaffected by back radiation) slows down and possibly stops in calm conditions in the early pre-dawn hours because the gravito-thermal effect is maintaining the supporting temperature. Then, especially when there is excessive cloud cover over the oceans, the Sun’s energy absorbed above the clouds can actually make its way down to the ocean surface (and below) warming the oceans by non-radiative processes, not by direct solar radiation which mostly passes through the thin surface layer and could barely raise the mean temperature of an asphalt paved Earth above -35C.
‘There are several serious errors in the “physics” of the radiative greenhouse conjecture.’
There are rather multiple obvious eccentricities in Doug’s account.
In reply to Rob Ellison Nov 4, 5.00pm
And there’s not a word of physics in Ellison’s response. Why did the IPCC authors use albedo of 30% (due to reflection by clouds) when “calculating” the Earth’s surface temperature of 255K without water vapour and other greenhouse “pollutants” my friend? Why did they assume emissivity of 1.0000 for a dry rocky planet? That’s the only way they can get 255K as any silent reader can check. They use 0.7(1365/4) for the flux and 1.0000 for emissivity. Try it in the online Stefan Bolztmann calculator at tutorvista.com and any reader can see that the IPCC assumption is wrong. Then try 1365/4 for the flux and emissivity of 0.88 (which is closer to that of rock and soil) and you get 287.6K which is very close to the assumed mean surface temperature and thus obviates any need for that “33 degree of warming” In fact the 0.88 should be even lower and that gives higher temperatures above 290K.
(continued)
Three commenters on Roy Spencer’s October data thread have agreed I’m correct with comments like: “That is absolutely right.” “Very glad to see that someone else recognizes that some of which you write is right on.” “Doug makes an excellent point” whilst on the dedicated thread on Jeff Condon’s “The Air Vent” he concedes “Checkmate” with “Whatever.”
The tide is turning Rob Ellison – sorry if your pecuniary interests in maintaining the status quo somehow suffer, but at least a few billion others will benefit from less economic waste and misuse of agricultural land and products.
I am not about to pretend to take Doug’s mad eccentricities seriously. If he wants climate physics – http://cips.berkeley.edu/events/rocky-planets-class09/ClimateVol1.pdf
There are the basics – that are fairly obviously not what Doug believes – and there are far more interesting physics.
Typical Rob Ellison – doesn’t understand thermodynamics – quotes “authorities” who also don’t understand thermodynamics and Ellison never answers a fairly straight forward question or two.
So that’s checkmate and he’s lost the argument totally and utterly unless and until he can explain why there’s 33 degrees of warming. After all, my comment was pointing out the huge errors in the typical IPCC authors’ arguments, and all he can do is reference such authors. What a joke.
The huge mistake in the cited reference which Rob Ellison depends upon is on their page 78 where they write “The same temperature appears in both equations, since thermodynamic equilibrium dictates that all components of the system have the same temperature.”
The content of my book proves beyond doubt that isothermal conditions are not the state of thermodynamic equilibrium in a gravitational field or any force field.
If they were then the Ranque Hilsch vortex tube would not work in the way we observe, and the base of the Uranus troposphere would be far, far colder.
Since the reference there is talking partial gas pressure in a volume of gas – it is all pointless misdirection.
Neither you nor your reference proves any error in my explanation that Earth would be just as hot or hotter than the present if there were no water, water vapour, clouds, vegetation, carbon dioxide or other radiating gases in it atmosphere which would thus have no albedo due to lack of clouds, and which rocky surface would have emissivity less than 0.88.
So the radiative greenhouse has no warming to “explain” with their false physics.
No Rob Ellison it’s not irrelevant, and because your cited authors make such a huge error in their “physics” and clearly have no idea of what thermodynamic equilibrium is all about, we should have no confidence in any deductions they make from such physics. Obviously if they think there would be isothermal conditions, then they are never going to be able to explain why a region of the surface covered with thick clouds for several days and nights, still warms by day and cools by night. And until such is explained (as I have) then anyone not understanding the relevant physics cannot correctly understand observed temperatures in any planetary surface.
The fundamental text for climate physics is talking partial pressures. Different gases in the same volume. The perils of even just the giving a semblance of taking Doug seriously.
The Steffan-Boltzmann fdormula is really not all that interesting. But even here it seems everyone but Doug makes an error in this exceedingly simple relationship. It is in fact of course Doug that makes the silly error – but this is not something worth discussing with him.
Not a word of physics in the above two comments of Rob Ellison – a typical response from Climatology Carbonland where personal attack is considered the best line of defence. In other words he has no legal move to get his king out of check. So Checkmate.
Oh, and he never could answer the questions about Venus and Uranus,or produce a study showing water vapour warms rather than cools. So he doesn’t qualify for the $5,000 reward I’ve offered.
From the article:
…
Tom Quirk tracks the seasonal shifts in CO2 and finds that the northern Boreal forests are probably drawing down something like 2 – 5 gigatons of CO2 every year, and because the seasonal amplitude is getting larger each year, it suggests there is no sign of saturation. Those plants are not bored of extra CO2 yet. This fits with Craig Idso’s work on plant growth which demonstrates that the saturation point — where plants grow as fast as possible (and extra CO2 doesn’t help) is somewhere above 1000 and below 2000ppm. We have a long way to go.
…
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/11/where-have-those-fossil-fuel-emissions-gone/
Well, here is the carbon cycle.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Carbon_cycle.jpg/690px-Carbon_cycle.jpg
http://media.whatsyourimpact.org/graphs/human-sources-of-carbon-dioxide-emissions.png
http://media.whatsyourimpact.org/graphs/natural-sources-of-carbon-dioxide-emissions.png
Some corrections:
1. 119 gigatones of carbon from forest fires isn’t listed (Wiki says 437 GT of CO2 from forest fires – which is ignored because it is assumed to be recycled by plants.
2. 2.9 GT from burning rainforests to grow biofuels (happens in September every year).
The 9.8 gigaton annual anthropogenic number includes cement production (“industrial processes”) and a gross underestimate of deforestation (“land use changes”). The amount generally credited for land use changes looks closer to the amount of carbon sinking eliminated than actual emissions which are 30+% of fossil fuel emissions.
annual anthropogenic).
PA, you have taken the lead in the “Best CE picture of the month” award.
Prob too late to get much response, but appreciate any critiques from CE denizens on below tract, before I seal into print form:
FEARS OF A WARMING PLANET
***Four Doubts from a Radical Gaian POV***
[Many other critiques exist, these are only the biggest ones that might flow from a perspective that accepts that life and geological processes as co-evolutionary partners in creating the Earth as we know it today. OUR POINT is to illustrate that it is quite possible to have a *radical ecological* critique of consensus climate change doctrine and policy. True, the vast majority of climate skeptics are on the right — but not all. Not all criticism of the ‘alarmist’ climate change narrative is misinformation funded by the fossil fuel lobby.
Of course, it may still be wrong, in part or whole. Or not :-)))) ]
1. AN ENERGY GAP AT THE TOP-OF-ATMOSPHERE IS NORMAL ON ANY PLANET COVERED WITH WATER AND LIFE.
The Earth stores incoming solar radiation in the form of biological complexity – LIFE. The pivot of the technical/physics argument around anthropogenic global warming is this Top of the Atmosphere Energy Imbalance – Lacis & Hansen, “Carbon Control Knob” . This argument views the earth as an INORGANIC thermodynamic [closed (?)] system, where the incoming energy must equal the outgoing energy (or at least, be constantly striving to do so). This is clearly and simply wrong, in principle, despite the fact that it seems to be at the root of the entire IPCC global warming paradigm. Any system where energy is being accumulated in the form of ordering will by definition have a discrepancy between incoming “low-entropy” energy (visible photons) and outgoing “higher entropy” energy (heat).
This is a more technical version of the “thermos” or “blanket” analogy, wherein the system is constantly seeking to balance energy flows. GHGs slow the release of Outgoing Long wave radiation (“OLR”), allegedly reflected in the energy imbalance at the top of atmosphere. Some skeptical scientists use this as their starting point as well (Christy), making the same paradigmatic mistake.
This is typical of much global warming theorizing that over-relies on radiative physics (based on lab tests & QM) and views the climate as as a primarily linear chemical-thermodynamic system, rather than one modulated by biology and interacting feedbacks. [A technocratic bias not unlike reliance of GMO engineers on the Central Dogma of Darwinism.]
(In addition, based on the recent, controversial but as yet unrebutted research of Gerald Pollack & Co, water itself stores radiant energy (both visible light & infrared) in order as well (“Exclusion Zones” – ice-like hexagonal sheets and clusters); life may also leverage this stored energy in water to supplement photosynthesis.)
2. CO2 IS AN INDISPENSABLE INGREDIENT OF LIFE AND ITS NATURAL DYNAMICS OVERWHELM ANTHRO-DRIVEN CO2 — as are water (the strongest GHG – believe it or not – 1-4% of the atmosphere, vs. CO2 at .04%), methane (the third strongest GHG – measured in parts per BILLION). CO2 IS NOT A POLLUTANT, PERIOD. Organic (respiration) & inorganic CO2 (oceanic flux, volcanism) massively dominates anthro CO2 (~91-96% natural vs. ~3-9% anthro – “a rounding error in any other analysis”). These broad numbers are widely accepted, but their implication is not publicized in activist & media accounts. At first glance, this framework puts a heavy burden of proof on those claiming that the current spike in CO2 levels is mostly derived from industrial emissions – despite the apparent similarity of the curves over the last 50-100 years. (This similarity may be deceptive, per dissident climate scientist Murray Salby.) (Additional problems are the claimed longevity of CO2 in the air – taken to be in the hundreds of years by IPCC, but put by many other papers at in the few to dozens of years (Engelstadt). In other words, its not just the relative %, its the accumulation of human-generated CO2 in the atmosphere. 50% is acknowledged to be removed annually (mostly by biomass?). The remaining increment supposedly forms the current spike in CO2 levels from 180 pre-industrial to 380+ today.
Currently the divergence of ever-climbing CO2 from average surface warming is another problem that undermines the *runaway* warming argument. CO2 emissions are going higher all the time, but the temperature (average combined sea and surface) is flat, for 18 + years, (depending on which dataset one looks at.) The latest studies undermine Trenberth’s claim that the excess heat is “going into the deep ocean.” To date there are 52 different explanations for this “pause”.
• The CO2 and methane variation resulting from “land use change” (deforestation, monocrop ag) must play some role, but is difficult to measure reliably, and, according to “Biotic Regulationists” Makarieva & Gorshkov, ecosystem disruption itself may be driving abnormal metabolic activities among plants, microbes & fungi (speculative but interesting). Aside from just measuring gas intake/output, there are undoubtedly ecosystemic dynamics we are still completely clueless of – coordinated metabolic activity across species, for example? (again a speculative point; but see study w sea plankton genomes)
• There is a claim (assumption?) in the Cli Sci literature that CO2 sources and sinks roughly cancel each other out on an annual basis. Even assuming that is the case (and we have only a few decades record), the problem is, the volumes are so large that a very slight shift in the volumes or phases of these big sources and sinks could easily leave a bump in CO2, possibly larger than the net annual emissions.
• This challenge has supposedly been “solved” by the CO2 isotope difference between fossilized biomass (oil, coal)(C12) vs. living biomass (C13), and by a reduction of O2 in the atmosphere that parallels the growth of industrial CO2 emissions (O2 eaten up in burning oil and coal and gas). This is accepted without question in the consensus IPCC literature. But it may have other explanations. O2 is also a biological metabolite, and the microbial and oceanic phytoplankton biosphere is still a vast undiscovered wilderness and extremely difficult to quantify – do we really know the carbon isotope types and volumes emitted by ALL oceanic phytoplankton and algae? Is it possible that O2 levels are a sign because of stresses put upon wild ecosystems? (see Murray Salby’s analysis, which shows that CO2 rises in response to warming and atmospheric moisture level. This is in fact what the ice core records show – warming precedes CO2 rise by hundreds of years, repeatedly. Presumably this would be a microbial response, though that has not been proven.)
3. GENERAL CIRCULATION MODELS – MAIN SOURCE OF “ALARMIST” WARMING PROJECTIONS, broadly do not integrate “carbon cycle” models, nor do they incorporate biologically based negative feedbacks such as
• CO2 fertilization effect (to be expected based on greenhouse grower use of CO2, and now a proven environmental reality via multiple satellite datasets (CSIRO) and other types of studies, not to mention lengthening of growing seasons). Some of the most recent GCMs may be attempting to do so. But how do they model biotic feedbacks?
• biological aerosol seeding of clouds (phytoplankton and forests releasing isoprenes, Lovelock, Makarieva/Gorshkov),
• and the “biotic pump hypothesis” (Makarieva/Gorshkov)
• … among others…
In addition, AGW-theory advocates systematically downplay the number and contribution of damping/stabilizing (or “negative”) feedbacks (both of heat and CO2) in the global climate system – most implicated directly or indirectly with the activities of life, as illustrated in point #3. New such feedbacks are coming to light on a daily basis but are ignored in favor of hyping positive feedbacks and “runaway tipping points” such as arctic methane burps, emissions from melting permafrost, collapsing ice shelves, etc. This goes to the question of abrupt climate change in the past, and what role do both positive and negative feedbacks play. However the basic question of runaway global warming seems countered by the fact that the planet has sustained life for 4.5 billion years, despite periods in the past when CO2 levels were many times higher than they are now.
4. OVER-EMPHASIS ON INDUSTRIAL CO2 emissions as the dominant “forcing agent” on global temperatures & weather dynamics obscures regional impacts on weather from human industrial and agricultural activities (R. Pielke). Destruction of forests clearly undermines myriad ecological functions served by large forests, including cooling and humidifying effects on the surrounding area. This weakens the ability to deal with climate change on a regional/local basis – where it matters most. Disruption of soil ecosystems by monocropping with massive dumping of pesticides destroys the microbial and fungal infrastructure which is nearly invisible to the naked eye, and whose effects and dynamics we are barely starting to understand.
BOTTOM LINE(S),
…from our “Radical Gaia/bio-Centric POV”:
YES. THERE HAS BEEN A WARMING TREND FROM THE 70s THRU THE LATE 90s, … accompanied by other changes tied to a warming trend (record low arctic sea ice extent & thickness, retreating glaciers, retreating snow lines, warming ocean surface temps, increases in sea height, de-alkalinizing oceans). However all of these changes may be cyclic or quasi-chaotic in nature and not mainly driven by the “forcing CO2”. Equally, there are other changes that seem, on the surface, to undermine the AGW argument: record antarctic sea ice extent, 18 year pause in temperature, poor explanation for previous pauses or declines (1940-1970), no predicted vapor maximum in the upper atmosphere, no predicted “tropospheric hotspot”.
YES–CO2 HAS BEEN ON AN UPWARD CLIMB, to levels above those seen for the last few ice ages (with the proviso that ice cores records have poorer resolution the further back in time one goes; there may have been short-lived CO2 spikes that we cannot see); is all of that human-driven, or is there a natural warming trend driving the release of biotic CO2?
YES–INDUSTRY IS PUMPING CO2 METHANE AND OTHER ‘GHGs’ INTO THE ATMOSPHERE (but is it really only 50% that is being removed?)
YES–HUMANS ARE DISRUPTING ECOSYSTEMS IN MANY DIFFERENT WAYS. BUT. Is the risk of climatic change/warming/chaos/disruption really the biggest threat we face? Is this where we should really be putting most of our resources and focus, given the many layers of uncertainty, complexity, convolution, feedback dynamics and relative youth of climate studies as a discipline (not even 50 years worth of satellite data)?
ARE WE RUNNING AN UNCONTROLLED EXPERIMENT ON THE PLANET?
Yes, but so has Gaia for 4.5 billion years. We are part of that experiment, but now in the leading role. The experiment with the climate may be minor compared to other experiments now and in the future (GMOs & synthetic biology, saturation of topsoils and runoff with synthetic pesticides, carcinogens, endocrine-disruptors, plastic particles in the food chain, accelerated environmental degradation due to monocropping, deforestation, habitat break-up and loss of larger-size mammal and fish populations, self-propagating AI & robotics, ad infinitum…). Not to mention external threats: meteor impacts, CMPs from the sun, space weather…
IS OUR DISRUPTIVE ACTIVITY GOING TO TRIGGER RAPID WARMING “TIPPING POINTS”?
It’s hard to deny that there may be some risk, just as its impossible to deny one might get hit by a car tomorrow morning, but this is speculative in the extreme, and ignores a vast number of counteracting “negative” feedbacks from the biosphere, as well as the lack of average global warming of the last 18 years. Rapid temperature swings of 8-10 degrees over a few decades have happened repeatedly in the past — without human help. It’s equally possible to argue that human-generated warming, to the extent it exists, might be deferring the next Ice Age.
IF THERE IS ANY RISK AT ALL, SHOULDN’T WE DO WHAT WE CAN TO MITIGATE IT BY REDUCING EMISSIONS AS FAST AS POSSIBLE?
Maybe, maybe not, depending on how you define the problem, and how you understand the pros and cons of social demand for energy, energy generation technologies and different economic theories. At a minimum, one would think there is a need for MORE debate of alternatives, not less.
DOESN’T THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE SAY WE SHOULD AVOID UNNECESSARY RISKS?
It does — assuming the underlying physical science is as solid and settled as some claim it to be, and assuming the projected dangers are actually as “clear and present” as some claim them to be. It would be one thing if CO2 were an obscure toxic synthetic compound that can only be manufactured in the lab. But it isn’t – along with water its the largest component of living things.
HOW MUCH OF CURRENT WARMING IS DUE TO HUMAN ACTIVITY?
Possibly a lot, possibly some, possibly none, and if any, possibly not just due to industrial CO2 alone — but very difficult to tell for sure (the “fingerprinting” or “attribution” problem.) The science was not and is not settled. (As if science ever truly is.) Debate between all perspectives should be encouraged not shut down in favor of political correctness or predetermined policy mechanisms (“De-carbonize Now!”)
WHAT ABOUT ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE RISK?
Maybe, but there is always a risk of abrupt climate change, especially towards the end of each interglacial. A risk of global cooling as well. There are many different ways to think about risk – how to assess likelihood, impacts and mitigation.
WON’T A RAPID SHIFT TO 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY SAVE US FROM CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE CHANGE?
Poorly posed question. Abrupt climate change has happened historically, without human help. Arguably abrupt cooling could be much more of a threat to civilization than abrupt warming (as conservatives argue). Warming, up to a certain point, has benefits. Cooling has fewer. There are other reasons to promote renewables, but equally reasons not to believe they are the silver bullet for all our energy needs.
DOES ANYBODY TAKE THE GAIA HYPOTHESIS SERIOUSLY ANYMORE?
Two recent books have come out strongly criticizing the Gaia Hypothesis (Peter Ward, The Medea Hypothesis; Toby Tyrrell, On Gaia). Yet many core tenets of Gaia Theory of Lovelock & Margulis now form the basis of “Earth Systems Science” programs in top universities around the world. What has mostly been abandoned is the variant “Strong, Optimizing” Gaia Hypothesis – the idea that life actively organizes conditions to guarantee a comfortable environment in the future. Russian proponents Gorshkov & Makarieva have developed new dimensions to what they call instead, “Biotic Regulation” – http://www.bioticregulation.ru. But that is material for a different tract.
…meanwhile, …here are some COUNTER-questions to ask yourself next time you bump into the Catastrophic AGW story:
• Is the climate a linear or non-linear system?
• Can a system with hundreds of interacting feedbacks of different scopes and time scales really be modeled and drive reliable predictions?
• How do they know that, and with what degree of certainty or uncertainty?
• Is that the effect, or is that the cause? Does one cause the other, or are they both caused by some third, unknown factor?
• Are there risks of abrupt climate change that might have nothing to do with human activity? If so, what do we do to mitigate those risks?
–Rhyzotika
http://www.wordpress.com/rhyzotika
http://www.facebook.com/rhyzotek
http://www.facebook.com/4thphaseofwater
I suggest you first try answering the two questions I posed to Rob Ellison in this comment.
Thanks Doug. I’ve been following your arguments here & on TallblokeTalkshop, have your ebook wishlisted. Trying to understand the difference between your critique & the guys at Talkshop. You both attack the NASA Hansen / Schmidt / Lacis axis, arguing they defined the Earth as a thermodynamic blackbody, taking no account of the oceans. & you seem to be saying CO2 is entirely a COOLING effect, whereas Tallbloke maintains it has a slight warming effect. But you both subscribe to the gravity-driven model of “base warming”. Am I warm?
Rhyzotika: I haven’t been allowed to write on Roger’s TB blog for a couple of years because I’m seen as a competitor of theirs in the race to explain the gravito-thermal effect. Well I’ve won that with my book, but they don’y know that because they would not deign to read such. (Let me know if I’m wrong about that.) WIlde really doesn’t understand thermodynamics and so he has invented a wild hypothesis about upwards and downward moving pockets of air in his struggle to explain what is only vaguely like the “heat creep” process in my book. Let me know if they write more about it all and I’ll perhaps have my new website up by then and respond to all such posts that stray from valid physics.
Very interesting and entertaining. A lot to read, I only read to The Bottom Lines, time for bed.
I think you made a typo or error, pre industrial CO2 is generally considered 280ppm, 180ppm I think is the end of the ice age.
I’ve though many similar things before, see my comment earlier in the thread:
The oceans are huge, there is a lot of plant mass which reproduces quickly, is short-lived and may be growing because of warming and CO2 (and keeping ocean surface CO2 lower than equilibrium with the increase atmospheric concentration). This mass is likely consumed by animal life rather quickly. Fish also breed very quickly, so both CO2 and energy may be sequestered in large increases in ocean biomass, and waste sink and transports it to the deep ocean to decay (some of Trenberth’s direct deep ocean heating :) )
http://test.classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/340/flashcards/355340/jpg/biomass_period_-_aquatic_ecosystem.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)#Ocean_biomass
Thx Aaron. I wasn’t even thinking of accumulating ocean biomass from CO2 & warmer waters percolating upwards thru the foodchain.
Rhyzotika,
I think you have missed the most important reason why conservatives are opposed to what the Left are arguing for. The conservatives believe and I am convinced that the policies they advocate would be very damaging and not deliver the benefits the CAGW alarmists they claim they would deliver. Any polices that appear to be high risk should be thoroughly checked. Every aspect and every statement that is used to justify the policies must be checked. That is what is happening. The chart here shows that the cost of the proposed policies – like carbon pricing – would exceed the projected benefits for all this century and beyond. http://catallaxyfiles.com/2014/10/27/cross-post-peter-lang-why-the-world-will-not-agree-to-pricing-carbon-ii/
We are right to scrutinise everything that is relied on to justify such policies.
Rhyzotika, as a non-scientist, no comments on the substance of your post. But I agree with Peter Lang.
Also, yYou say that “Not all criticism of the ‘alarmist’ climate change narrative is misinformation funded by the fossil fuel lobby.” I would say that the great bulk of criticism is neither misinformed nor funded by “the fossil fuel lobby.”
As regards your question re a “rapid shift to 100% renewable energy is impossible,” no sensible and informed person could propose it – it is not an option. Peter Lang could explain.
I’d call this a critique of GCMs, but they’ll be a later installment:
http://scienceofdoom.com/2014/11/01/natural-variability-and-chaos-three-attribution-fingerprints/
In a study he looked at, they did this:
# model runs with GHG forcing
# model runs with “other anthropogenic” and natural forcings
# model runs with internal variability only
And then kind of calculated the difference. He also mentioned model drift. Seems that should be solved.
New study by Jennifer Francis,
“…when sea ice melts, the dark ocean underneath absorbs much more energy from the sun during the summer, which warms the water more than usual. When fall arrives and cold air moves in again, all the energy stored in the water gets released into the atmosphere, which, in turn, causes the air above the water to warm up more than usual. This warming has the effect of pushing the jet stream northward.”
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-11-06/melting-arctic-sea-ice-doubles-chances-harsh-winters-other-parts-world
I had read that the solar uptake mostly netted back to zero. I suppose I could see some volume expansion of the polar air. Let’s say the jet stream reaches on average Minnesota in the dead of Winter. That’s half way to the equator, 6000 miles. Are we pushing the jet stream another 60 miles South? 6 miles? I suppose this local warming effect would’ve be somewhat lost to the TOA. It’s trying to store energy in a place that seems to emit it.
I learned some time ago to ignore anything Jennifer Francis says. She has a record of making definitive statements out of what at best is hypothesis.
She has also displayed her character, or lack of it, in how she responded to another researcher who took her work apart.
“Note, none of these centers are predicting, yet, (a) strong, super or monster (El Nino). I’m not as smart as those others [predicting the super and the monster], so right now I am steering away from “monster,” and looking forward to what we learn about prediction, the climate as a whole and, of course, how we communicate our science.” http://www.wunderground.com/blog/RickyRood/comment.html?entrynum=305
In reply to Rob Ellison: Your cited reference is in error on page 78 where they write “The same temperature appears in both equations, since
thermodynamic equilibrium dictates that all components of the system have the same temperature.”
You have not answered the questions I asked about the 255K temperature, and that’s because you can’t, and neither does your cited reference.
As I said above the gold standard reference for climate physics is – on p78 – talking partial pressures in a volume of air. Gases in the same space are at the same temperature. It is not the immense error Doug seems to imagine.
And the problem with taking these types at all seriously is that it is never ending. There is always another egregious error of atmospheric physics.
The Steffan-Boltzmann formula is really not all that interesting. But even here it seems everyone but Doug makes an error in this exceedingly simple relationship. It is in fact of course Doug who makes the silly error – but this is not something worth discussing with him.
Replying to Rob Ellison Nov 10, 2:18pm
You still cannot explain why the input data which gives 255K is not wrong, so you cannot prove there is any warming by greenhouse gases, because Pierrehumbert certainly does not prove it with valid physics. Nor have you produced or cited a single study which shows from world temperature and precipitation records that water vapour could warm the surface. I have produced such a study which shows it cools.
In your “gold standard” Pierrehumbert converts the correct (entropy) version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics” on page 81 to what is a mere corollary of the Second Law which only applies when all forms of energy other than kinetic energy are held constant. For the “hot to cold” Clausius 19th century corollary a prerequisite is thus that gravitational potential energy be held constant. (Ask any physicist to prove me wrong.) So the “hot to cold” corollary only works in a horizontal plane, which of course is not what we are considering when discussing another corollary of the Second Law, namely that a gravitationally-induced density gradient evolves in a vertical plane and so does a temperature gradient and thus, as a further corollary of that corollary, a pressure gradient also evolves.
So unfortunately Pierrehumbert’s physics is incorrectly stated and the error he makes in not using the gold standard statement of the Second Law (as stated in physics documentation) leads to incorrect “explanations” of assumed greenhouse warming, which then require incorrect input data (assuming clouds exists in an atmosphere free of water vapour, and emissivity of all rocks, soil etc is 1.0000 – all this fudging, (plus another variation of the Second Law regarding “net” results of independent processes) so that the “uninteresting” Stefan-Boltzmann Law (spelt with one f) gives the right (albeit fudged) mean surface temperature after assuming the back radiation helps the Sun to achieve higher surface temperatures than it could possibly achieve with its own direct radiation. Well, at least we deduce that using the “uninteresting” Stefan Boltzmann Law.
(continued)
Now, Rob, this is the most ludicrous and unsubstantiated statement in Pierrehumbert’s “gold standard” where, on page 100, he clearly assumes (from his incorrect computations) that 10% water vapour in the atmosphere would raise the temperature from 250K to 350K whilst at the same time reducing the temperature gradient. So how on Earth would radiative balance with the Sun be achieved in both situations? We know that radiative imbalance at TOA rarely varies outside of ±0.5%. The radiative flux from a surface at 350K would be nearly four (4) times that from a surface at 250K. No wonder you relegate the Stefan Boltzmann equation into the “uninteresting” basket – it’s pretty threatening for those dwindling numbers still trying to promulgate the hoax.
So where is there any empirical evidence that water vapour warms by about 10 degrees for each 1% in the atmosphere? Normally it varies between 1% and 4% so that would be 10 degrees of warming for a dry desert region with 1% and 40 degrees of warming for a moist rain forest region with 4% water vapour, thus making the rain forest 30 degrees warmer than the dry desert at a similar latitude and altitude. Evidence please!
Rebuttal of Pierrehumbert
Whether Rob Ellison likes it or not, Pierrehumbert certainly uses the Stefan Boltzmann equation. It’s used on p.116 where we read “Earth’s albedo is on the order of .3, leading to a blackbody temperature of 255K. The observed mean surface temperature is about 285K.”
So silent readers can see (even if Rob can’t) that the clear implication is that there is 30 degrees of warming from 255K to 285K, but he also clearly spells out that the albedo is 0.3. This is in agreement with NASA energy diagrams that show 30% of solar radiation reflected by clouds. But there would be no clouds without GH gases, so with an IR transparent atmosphere (say 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen) the albedo would be zero. Hence there is no justification for reducing the solar flux by 30% which is what Pierrehumbert does when using the Stefan Boltzmann equation to deduce that 255K figure. The truly mean flux is 1365/4 = 341.25W/m^2 (for a flat disc Earth) which gives a black body temperature for Earth’s surface (without greenhouse gases) of 278.53K. But that’s the absolute minimum calculated with emissivity 1.000. Even so it is only 9 degrees colder than the now accepted mean temperature of about 287.5K. If we use emissivity of 0.88 we get 287.5K and so no warming at all. But emissivity of a rocky planet would certainly be less than 0.88 and so the temperature would be over 290K and thus there is actually cooling by greenhouse gases, as empirical data proves to be the case for water vapour.
Pierrehumbert is way out with his 10 degrees of warming for each 1% of water vapour, and I have proven him wrong (showing water vapour cools) and explained why he is wrong with valid physics..
‘The truly mean flux is 1365/4 = 341.25W/m^2 (for a flat disc Earth) which gives a black body temperature for Earth’s surface (without greenhouse gases) of 278.53K.’
The incident radiation form the Sun is 340.25W/m2 – but that’s a minor point.
‘But there would be no clouds without GH gases, so with an IR transparent atmosphere (say 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen) the albedo would be zero. Hence there is no justification for reducing the solar flux by 30% which is what Pierrehumbert does when using the Stefan Boltzmann equation to deduce that 255K figure.’
The 30% is used on the left hand side of this exceedingly simple equation to determine the net radiations hitting the atmosphere and surface taking into account earth albedo. All of this is absorbed and emitted – and the formula gives an equivalent black body temperature.
Rob Ellison
As I said there are no clouds in a GHG free atmosphere. It is clouds which NASA tells us reflect 30% of solar radiation back to space. That is why albedo is 0.3 – but only when there are clouds shading the surface.
So what if the black body temperature is 278.326K (using your 340.25W/m^2) ?
I am making the point that the surface temperature would be more like 299K if, for example, the emissivity of the dry rocky planet without water or vegetation were 0.75 rather than the 1.0000 value used for the black body temperature. So GH gases cool, just as my study of 30 years of temperature data proved with statistical significance. Water vapour does not warm by 100 degrees for a 10% concentration, as Pierrehumbert claimed. It cools because it reduces the temperature gradient an dthe whole thermal profile rotates about a pivoting altitude (explained in my book) and lowers at the surface end in order to maintain radiative balance with the Sun – as virtually always happens within ±0.5%.
In more detail …
Now let’s consider the thin surface layer of the oceans. The emissivity of ocean water surfaces has been measured and is discussed here where they deduce it is 0.984 ± 0.004. But emissivity only tells you about what is being emitted and it does not tell you how a water surface got to the observed temperature in the first place. Because the thin surface layer is not a black or grey body (being fairly transparent) the absorptivity is not necessarily the same as the emissivity. It’s pretty obvious that, since the solar radiation passes on down to perhaps a 20 metre depth or more, that only a small portion of it is absorbed in, say, the first 10cm. Climatologists counter this by saying the whole 20 metres all gets mixed up by waves and turbulence. Perhaps it does, but I would suggest that there still must be a considerable amount of thermal energy that conducts downwards from that warmer layer to the colder thermocline in non-polar regions. But anyway, we know none of the back radiation penetrates more than about 10 microns (because it is actually pseudo scattered and only slows radiative cooling) so to what temperature can the Sun’s radiation warm that 20 metres of the ocean? There’s only 163W/m^2 so, using the above 0.984, that gives a mean temperature of 232.5K. Clearly something’s wrong here.
So we have two major problems with what climatologists claim. Firstly they don’t calculate correctly the surface temperature for a GH free atmosphere because they still leave non-existent clouds shading the surface in their calculations, and they don’t reduce the emissivity to a realistic value for a dry rocky planet. My best estimate is that the emissivity would be in the vicinity of 0.75 and that would give a temperature of about 299.3K though there are too many significant figures in there. None-the-less it gels with the amount of cooling which I found water vapour provides in my study of temperature data. It also gels with about 12 degrees of total cooling that I calculate as being due to water vapour reducing the temperature gradient.
It really would be best if you read my book which explains the “heat creep” process which is deduced from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The fundamental thing to understand is that the Second Law says thermodynamic equilibrium evolves and this is not an isothermal state in a gravitational field. When molecules are in motion they interchange kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy. All forms of energy affect entropy and thermodynamic equilibrium. That is why thermodynamic equilibrium includes mechanical equilibrium, and so it stuns climatologists when I tell them that the density gradient is there because of the Second Law and it is the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. It also has a temperature gradient because at every altitude the mean sum of molecular (KE+PE) is constant. Because only KE affects temperature, and PE has a gradient, it follows that temperature has a gradient opposite to that of PE. This fact is inescapable and it is fundamentally important to understand that the temperature gradient is the state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
You see, once you understand this, then you can understand why newly absorbed thermal energy disturbs the equilibrium and there is thus a propensity for it to be restored. But this restoring process happens with the new thermal energy being dispersed by conduction, diffusion and convection in all accessible directions, including downwards. So, for example, when there has been extensive cloud cover for several days in any particular region, the downward non-radiative heat transfer still happens during the day, transferring thermal energy absorbed in and above the clouds down to the surface. So the surface temperature still rises by day and falls by night despite the cloud cover blocking virtually all solar radiation. And that’s why the oceans are at the temperatures we observe and why radiation into the surface is not the primary determinant of the surface temperature.
So you, Rob Ellison have not as yet countered my argument that GHG do not warm because the surface temperature would have been even warmer without them. You totally ignored the two key reasons I gave you, namely that albedo is close to zero without clouds and oceans, and secondly that surface emissivity for a dry rocky planet is more like 0.75 than 1.000, this giving a temperature of about 299K without GHG..
Footnote:
Regarding the Solar constant, Encyclopaedia Britannica says 1366W/m^2 here whilst Wikipedia says 1361 to 1362W/m^2 measured by satellites, but there has already been some absorption in the thermosphere above the satellites..
As I said – the problem is that Doug takes himself seriously enough for both of us.
No your problem is that you can’t explain why the albedo would not be close to zero without clouds, nor the emissivity closer to 0.75 than to 1.000. So I take it that you concede I’m right.
Yes this is a serious matter involving many billions of dollars of wasted money on a totally false premise that carbon dioxide warms.
‘Central to the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is the assumption that the Earth and every one of its subsystems behaviors as if they were blackbodies, that is their “emissivity” potential is calculated as 1.0. [1]
But this is an erroneous assumption because the Earth and its subsystems are not blackbodies, but gray-bodies. The Earth and all of its subsystems are gray-bodies because they do not absorb the whole load of radiant energy that they receive from the Sun and they do not emit the whole load of radiant energy that they absorb.’ http://jennifermarohasy.com/2011/03/total-emissivity-of-the-earth-and-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/
Is this the new meme?
It doesn’t absorb all of the radiant energy – because of both clouds and reflective surfaces generally. So the energy it does absorb is 240W/m2 on average. And the calculation asks what the emitting temperature of a black body would be.
Secondly – the planet does emit all of the energy it absorbs – eventually. .
Now you really have put your foot in it dear Rob. That is not what emissivity is about. The emissivity of a substance has nothing to do with how much radiation has been reflected or absorbed on its way to that substance. Emissivity of a rock, for example, is the same no matter where or on what planet you place it.
Check this reference ,,, http://www.coleparmer.com/TechLibraryArticle/254
where you’ll see these emissivity values …
Basalt: 0.72
Clay: 0.39
Granite: 0.45
Sand: 0.76
Soil 0.38
My value of 0.75 (giving a surface temperature of 299K where albedo and atmospheric absorption are zero) may even be too high for a rocky dry planet without water, vegetation or greenhouse gases.
Even Wikipedia could have helped you Rob my boy …
“Quantitatively, emissivity is the ratio of the thermal radiation from a surface to the radiation from an ideal black surface at the same temperature as given by the Stefan–Boltzmann law.”
Emissivity is an intrinsic property of a surface, and for a dry rocky surface is would quite likely be 0.75 given the lower values for some rocks and soil. Then you calculate the solar radiation received (a mean of one quarter of 1362W/m^2) without any further deductions because we are assuming a transparent atmosphere that neither reflects or absorbs solar radiation. I would accept that the surface may reflect about 3% but not 30% of the solar radiation. (NASA says the surface reflects 6% but that’s with water, snow and ice.)
There is a fundamental relationship (Gustav Kirchhoff’s 1859 law of thermal radiation) that equates the emissivity of a surface with its absorption of incident light (the “absorptivity” of a surface). Kirchhoff’s Law explains why emissivities cannot exceed 1, since the largest absorptivity – corresponding to complete absorption of all incident light by a truly black object – is also 1.[6] Mirror-like, metallic surfaces that reflect light well thus have low emissivities, since the reflected light isn’t absorbed. A polished silver surface has an emissivity of about 0.02 near room temperature. Black soot absorbs thermal radiation very well; it has an emissivity as large as 0.97, and hence soot is a fair approximation to an ideal black body.[10][11] Wikipedia
How can you explain complete and utter cluelessness to the completely and utterly clueless? It is like explaining colour to the blind I suppose.
BTW. Sorry for the length of my post above. But prob few are reading this far down anyway.
When is Judy going to comment on this study:
“The response of the climate system to a forcing may not have the same sign as the forcing because of feedback effects although we do not know if this can happen in the lower part of the atmosphere as well.”
If it can go from global warming to freezing ass cold fronts, why not from cold trend to regional record-setting heat? A positive becomes a negative & vice versa. How would we know where we really are?
http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/study-polar-vortex-feedbacks-can-reverse-forcings.html
I disagree that Voosen’s article is “superb.” If you want to learn about climate science there is nothing in it for you. And Kagan, his hero, is a law professor. More lawyers is not what this country needs.
Japan is going nuclear again. From the article:
…
We expect roughly half of Japan’s 48 functional reactors will eventually re-enter service, as economic imperatives overcome health and environmental concerns. Along with a wave of new builds in China and other emerging markets, uranium demand growth over the next decade should be the strongest since Chernobyl. Set against a continued drawdown of finite uranium inventories and underinvestment in mines due to low prices, we expect uranium prices to perform strongly though the end of the decade.
…
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=672879&SR=Yahoo
Rob, Doug – I see the 255K problem elsewhere. It is a blackbody temperature – they approximate the Earth as a black body with an infinite thermal conductivity – no temperature difference between day and night, no difference between summer and winter. Guess what – it yields an incorrect result. A “good” modeler never faults the oversimplified model – it must be greenhouse gases, stupid.
That’s the problem with trying to model climate with a one dimensional static equation – and then getting it wrong.
It is an equation that says almost nothing useful about climate – but the argument is that it says something else about climate than the usual idea of an effective radiating temperature.
It assumes that some energy is reflected and that energy absorbed equals energy emitted. The LHS is 240W/m2 and on the RHS emissivity is 1.
That at some periods there is a radiative imbalance – seems fairly obvious. But the system at TOA – which is what we are talking with the simple formula relating radiant flux and temperature – tends to equilibrium as non-equilibrium thermodynamic systems do. This is in fact the only real conceptual relevance of Steffan-Boltzmann – that emissions vary proportional to temperature to the fourth power.
Oh I see – not been moderated – threading all over the place again. Doug’s missing comments?
I have been catching up with this series. Pretty good. This one is on Australian – so naturally – but the African one is fascinating too. Eungella in central Queensland is a much nicer place to view platypus.
http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/rise-of-the-continents/ZX9660A002S00#playing
In a video that surfaced on Friday, economist and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said “lack of transparency” and “stupidity of the American voter” were “critical” to passing the president’s unpopular health care law.
The doctor you wanted to keep,
The climate you couldn’t keep.
Hear how the dopes roar.
Just behind the green door.
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Isn’t that what Justice Roberts said… It’s not constitutional, but I’m going to let it stand because the voters need to learn a lesson.