by Judith Curry
The scientific debate is now over; the moment of closure has arrived. – Shaun Lovejoy
EOS has published an opinion piece by Shaun Lovejoy: Climate Closure. Below are excerpts; see the paper (open access) for the figures and methodological details.
In the battle of public opinion over climate change, we can play to science’s strengths by shifting tactics: Instead of struggling to prove humans are to blame, let’s prove denialist fantasies wrong.
A straightforward line of reasoning demonstrates that the only viable explanation of postindustrial warming is an anthropogenic source. This explanation is compatible with the “pause” in the warming since 1998, and it demonstrates that, in a statistical sense, such a pause is extremely likely.
Global warming science has concentrated on proving the theory that the postindustrial warming is largely caused by human activities. Yet no scientific theory can be proved beyond all doubt, and our attempts to convince people of the science are entering a period of diminishing returns.
Below, we summarize a straightforward disproof that achieves this closure so that the only viable explanation of the warming is anthropogenic. The same methodology also shows how the anthropogenic theory is compatible with the “pause” in the warming since 1998 and, indeed, in a statistical sense, that such a pause is extremely likely.
Figure 1a shows the global annual temperature plotted not as a function of the date, but rather as a function of the CO2 forcing. Even without fancy statistics or special knowledge, it is easy to see that the temperature (plotted in green) increases very nearly linearly with some additional fluctuations; these represent the natural variability. The slope (black), 2.33°C per CO2 doubling, is the actual historical increase in temperature due to the observed increase in CO2: the “effective climate sensitivity.”
The difference (residues) between the actual temperature and the anthropogenic part is the natural variability. So knowing only the slope of Figure 1a and the global annual CO2, we could predict the global temperature for the next year to this accuracy. Clearly, this residue must be close to the true natural variability.
The range of the straight line in Figure 1a is an estimate of the total anthropogenic warming since 1880—about 1°C. What is the probability that the denialists are right and that this is simply a giant natural fluctuation? This would be a rare event but how rare?
To check that comparisons of the current period against the historical record are valid, L1 reconstructed records of volcanic and solar activity. That study concluded that the statistics of the industrial epoch variations are no different from the preindustrial ones. Volcanic activity was highly intermittent but no more so than usual; solar activity, which denialists often blame for the observed warming, has, if anything, diminished over the last 50 years [Foukal et al., 2006].
Then, L1 used preindustrial temperature series drawing on several sources to estimate the likelihood of a given amount of natural temperature change. Applying the usual statistical approach—the bell curve—to these data leads to the conclusion that the chance of a 1°C fluctuation over 125 years being natural is in the range of 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 3,000,000. This is a rough estimation: for long periods, the standard deviation of temperature differences is twice the 0.1°C value. Hence a 1°C fluctuation is about five standard deviations, or a 1 in 3,000,000 chance.
However, nonlinear geophysics tells us that the extremes should be far stronger than the usual bell curve allows. L1 shows that 1°C, century-long global-scale fluctuations are more than 100 times more likely than the bell curve would predict. This gives a probability of at most 1 in 1000, which is still small enough to confidently reject this possibility.
One can apply the same type of analysis to the hiatus in the warming. Figure 1b shows that it is actually a natural cooling event sufficiently large (≈0.3°C) that it has masked the more or less equal anthropogenic warming over the period.
Although this cooling is somewhat unusual, it is not rare: statistical analysis shows that similar 15-year coolings have a natural return period of 20–50 years. Additionally, in this case, the cooling immediately follows the even larger prepause warming event (1992–1998). That is, the pause is no more than a return to the mean; it can be accurately hindcast.
In any case, far from supporting denialist claims that the warming is over, this return is a necessary consequence of the theory of anthropogenic warming that predicts that the natural variability will cause fluctuations to stay near the long-term anthropogenic trend.
The scientific method is much more effective at rejecting false hypotheses than in proving true ones. By estimating the probabilities of centennial-scale preindustrial temperature changes, with 99.9% confidence we are able to reject the denialist hypothesis that the industrial age warming was from solar, volcanic, or other natural causes, leaving anthropogenic origin as the only alternative.
The scientific debate is now over; the moment of closure has arrived. Although climate scientists must move on to pressing scientific questions such as regional climate projections and the space–time variability, our species must tackle the urgent issue of reducing emissions and mitigating the consequences of the warming.
JC comments
Ok ‘denialists’, this is your opportunity to poke holes in Lovejoy’s argument. Its pretty easy, actually.
First point: The IPCC attributes the warming since 1950 as due to human greenhouse gas emissions. Lovejoy discusses the warming since 1880. About 40% of the warming since 1880 occurred prior to 1950, and is not attributed to human greenhouse gas emissions. Further, according to the IPCC paleo analysis, the globe has been warming for the past 400 years, which also cannot be attributed to human greenhouse gas emissions. The statistics of Lovejoy’s analysis are entirely different if you are looking at a warming period of 65 years rather than 125 years.
Second point: After finally getting the ‘mainstream’ climate scientists to pay attention to the AMO and PDO as possibly being important in the attribution of warming (or lack thereof) in the 20th and 21st century, we need to be reminded that there are centennial scale and even millennial scale internal variations in ocean circulation, that have an unknown impact on global temperatures.
Third point: Dismissing multidecadal to century scale variations in solar radiation is frankly ludicrous. You can argue about the magnitude of the impact of these variations on global climate, but dismissing the existence of these variations is completely unjustified.
Fourth point: Major volcanic eruptions do not occur uniformly in time. E.g. the early part of the 19th century had a relatively large number of strong volcanic eruptions.
Finally, I am appalled that EOS has published an article that liberally uses the word ‘denialist’ to refer to scientists (such as myself) that consider the possibility that ocean oscillations and solar variability play significant roles in determining the 20th and 21st century climate variability.
Lovejoy’s agenda is clear, and it isn’t a scientific one:
our species must tackle the urgent issue of reducing emissions and mitigating the consequences of the warming.
Fuzzy reasoning by the proponents of human caused warming and urgent emissions reductions do not help their ’cause’.
I can only wonder what the EOS editors were thinking when they published this.
Why is it that not one of the warmists’ models factored in the “pause” since 1998 that Lovejoy now claims was so “predictable”? Could it be their models were not based on the science but were influenced by an agenda they were trying to foist on the public? It seems to me Lovejoy should worry about defending the alarmists’ position instead of attacking the “denialists.” No, Mr. Lovejoy, the science is not settled.
“The scientific debate is now over; the moment of closure has arrived. – Shaun Lovejoy””
As I read somewhere recently, If the science is settled, why can’t we stop funding all these endless studies?
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Ten years ago they said we must act now because in ten years’ time it would be too late. Those ten years have elapsed. It is now too late to do anything. So let’s go back to leading normal lives. QED.
“The scientific debate is now over; the moment of closure has arrived. – Shaun Lovejoy””
From Roger Harrabin, BBC climate correspondent, May 2010:
I remember Lord May leaning over and assuring me: “I am the President of the Royal Society, and I am telling you the debate on climate change is over.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10178454
leaving anthropogenic origin as the only alternative.
=================
the only alternative you can think of, you mean. big difference between the limits of your mind and the limits of the universe.
Don’t worry, this research is too different; no funding agency funds this type of work!
Shaun
Not so different that 20 years ago David J Thomson from Bell Labs didn’t make a better fist of the model fitting and stats than you did in his “Dependence of global temperatures on atmospheric CO2 and solar irradiance”.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA Vol. 94, pp. 8370–8377, August 1997 Colloquium Paper.
He claims accuracy in hindcasting… But regrettably he forgets to mention the error bounds which accompany the hindcast…and the question marks surrounding attribution… And some other stuff
“And some other stuff”
Love that part Owen.
Don’t forget that in the satellite data there are two pauses of about 17 years duration when there has been no statistically significant warming.
The first pause was that on going as from launch in 1979 through to the run up to the Super El Nino of 1997/8. ie., a period of about 17 years.
The second pause is the current pause (ie., that following the Super El Nino of 1997/8) and which is now causing concern to those proffering the AGW conjecture.
Whilst no detail is given of the models that allegedly predict (project) a pause of about 15 years duration, and in particular at what level of CO2, how many of these models predicted (projected) not one pause but rather two pauses, each of more than 15 years duration, closely following on from one another?
Our host maintains that :
” Dismissing multidecadal to century scale variations in solar radiation is frankly ludicrous. You can argue about the magnitude of the impact of these variations on global climate, but dismissing the existence of these variations is completely unjustified.”
A century of radiometric data proves otherwise : those teth of a percent variations are trivial relative to both the observed temperature trend and the order of magnitude larger radiative forcing from CO2 and other anthropogenic factors.
Whether the fault is defective physical inuition, selective citation , or willfull ignorance of the scientific literature , Curry’s problem goes beyond denial :
She is denying the obvious.
Read the literature and the IPCC. There are INDIRECT effects of solar on climate.
Sphincter-boy, with nothing but purely irrelevant and flagrantly insulting argumentum ad hominem (do you really conceive that there’s something substantive in your spew about how “A century of radiometric data [allegedly] proves otherwise : those te[n]th of a percent variations are trivial relative to both the observed temperature trend and the order of magnitude larger radiative forcing from CO2 and other anthropogenic factors”?) addressed against the host of this Web site, do you honestly expect to evade the banhammer?
No one with any understanding of the error intrinsic to the legacy instrumental analysis techniques involved in the recording of those “observed temperature trend” data (even before they’d been systematically, mendaciously, and with malice aforethought “adjusted” to impose a speciously exaggerated warming bias) is going to take your crap as anything other than proof of your intent to act as accessory after the fact in the perpetration of fraud.
The clueless and infamous [http://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=russell+seitz] denies solar influences by denying over 100 solar-amplification mechanisms described in the peer-review, published literature:
hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=solar+amplification+mechanism
“Read the literature and the IPCC. There are INDIRECT effects of solar on climate.”
Ball in your court Judy. You can shout all you want at the referee , but having examined the data base playback, the IPCC has ruled that , no surprise, the indirect effects are even more trivial than the third decimal place variations in the solar flux.
As to the abyssal rollover , mere diffusion and ( look it up) mass transport and hence heat mixing by biological activity in the oceans operate over kilometers on decadal scales , except in regions with exotically steep halo- and thermoclines like the Chain Deep.
A purely POLITICAL excrescence of the United Nations – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which has neither a mandate to conduct scientific investigation into the alleged causes of politically predetermined “man-made climate change” nor the technical expertise to undertake the evaluation of investigations conducted either within or without these participating governments’ purviews – is somehow supposed to be accepted as an authority capable of having “ruled” on anything you’re psychotically perseverating about?
The bureaucrats of the IPCC are empowered by law to have “ruled” in any sense whatsoever? On any aspect of physical reality?
Do you have to be this obtuse, you friggin’ disgrace to the species?
Seitz: “IPCC has ruled that , no surprise, the indirect effects are even more trivial than the third decimal place variations in the solar flux.”
False, the IPCC said so such thing. Provide a direct quote and link to AR5 supporting your claptrap, Seitz. And, since when is the IPCC the climate “ruler” according to you?
The IPCC is highly biased and selective in the literature it decides to include and exclude, including over 100 solar amplification mechanisms described in the peer-reviewed literature:
hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=solar+amplification+mechanism
And literally thousands of peer-reviewed papers linking solar activity to climate change over short, intermediate, and long-term timescales.
Here to remedy Hockeyschticks ignorance of the subject is IPCC %’s section TS.2.4
Radiative Forcing Due to Solar Activity and Volcanic Eruptions
Continuous monitoring of total solar irradiance now covers the last 28 years.
The data show a well-established 11-year cycle in irradiance that varies by 0.08% from solar cycle minima to maxima, with no significant long-term trend. New data have more accurately quantified changes in solar spectral fluxes over a broad range of wavelengths in association with changing solar activity. Improved calibrations using high-quality overlapping measurements have also contributed to a better understanding. Current understanding of solar physics and the known sources of irradiance variability suggest comparable irradiance levels during the past two solar cycles, including at solar minima.
The primary known cause of contemporary irradiance variability is the presence on the Sun’s disk of sunspots (compact, dark features where radiation is locally depleted) and faculae (extended bright features where radiation is locally enhanced). {2.7}
The estimated direct radiative forcing due to changes in the solar output since 1750 is +0.12 [+0.06 to +0.3] W m–2, which is less than half of the estimate given in the TAR, with a low level of scientific understanding. The reduced radiative forcing estimate comes from a re-evaluation of the long-term change in solar irradiance since 1610 (the Maunder Minimum) based upon: a new reconstruction using a model of solar magnetic flux variations that does not invoke geomagnetic, cosmogenic or stellar proxies; improved understanding of recent solar variations and their relationship to physical processes; and re-evaluation of the variations of Sun-like stars. While this leads to an elevation in the level of scientific understanding from very low in the TAR to low in this assessment, uncertainties remain large because of the lack of direct observations and incomplete understanding of solar variability mechanisms over long time scales. {2.7, 6.6}
Empirical associations have been reported between solar-modulated cosmic ray ionization of the atmosphere and global average low-level cloud cover but evidence for a systematic indirect solar effect remains ambiguous. It has been suggested that galactic cosmic rays with sufficient energy to reach the troposphere could alter the population of cloud condensation nuclei and hence microphysical cloud properties (droplet number and concentration), inducing changes in cloud processes analogous to the indirect cloud albedo effect of tropospheric aerosols and thus causing an indirect solar forcing of climate. Studies have probed various correlations with clouds in particular regions or using limited cloud types or limited time periods; however, the cosmic ray time series does not appear to correspond to global total cloud cover after 1991 or to global low-level cloud cover after 1994. Together with the lack of a proven physical mechanism and the plausibility of other causal factors affecting changes in cloud cover, this makes the association between galactic cosmic ray-induced changes in aerosol and cloud formation controversial. {2.7}
And here for those who prefer primary scientific sources to the fulmination of Anthony Watts is the paper both he and Hockeyschtick fail to link :
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4737323/Seitz_BrightWater.pdf?sequence=1
Hey Seitz, are you incapable of understanding the IPCC said “evidence for a systematic indirect solar effect remains ambiguous” DOES NOT mean what you falsely claimed “the IPCC has ruled that , no surprise, the indirect effects are even more trivial than the third decimal place variations in the solar flux.”?
Furthermore, are you incapable of understanding the IPCC is ONLY referring to ONE (Svensmark’s theory) of over 100 solar amplification mechanisms described in the published literature?
The IPCC selectively ignores the dozens of other potential amplification mechanisms, as do you Seitz.
Here’s also an update from Svensmark refuting the IPCC claims:
http://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2015/02/epn2015462p26.pdf
Living up to the General Theory of Cranks by changing the subject, Hockeyschtick links not to what the 259 scientists on the IPCC , but Svensmark citing Svensmark:
7 of his 9 references are to himself.
Seitz: “Living up to the General Theory of Cranks by changing the subject”
I didn’t change the subject at all crackpot-in-chief-Seitz, I quoted your comments twice proving your claim an absolutely FALSE and gross misrepresentation of what the IPCC actually said about indirect solar effects.
“Hockeyschtick links not to what the 259 scientists on the IPCC , but Svensmark citing Svensmark: 7 of his 9 references are to himself.”
Seitz is incapable of understanding this this link leads to HUNDREDs of posts, each of which is in turn explains and is LINKED to one or more PEER-REVIEWED PUBLISHED papers in the literature describing more than 100 solar amplification mechanisms that Seitz and the IPCC conveniently choose to ignore.
hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=solar+amplification+mechanism
Many other PUBLISHED, PEER-REVIEWED papers specifically supporting Svensmark’s cosmic ray theory that Seitz and the IPCC choose to ignore:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=cosmic+ray+theory
russellseitz,
You quote –
“The estimated direct radiative forcing due to changes in the solar output since 1750 is +0.12 [+0.06 to +0.3] W m–2, which is less than half of the estimate . . . ”
What is the relevance of this nonsense?
Are you suggesting that sunlight is somehow “stored” so that tomorrow is warmer than today? This is about as stupid as measuring sunlight intensity at solar noon in the Libyan desert, and predicting the night will be hot, after the sun goes down.
Solar insolation yesterday has no impact on solar insolation today. Regardless of the number of watts supposedly absorbed by the surface during the day, the surface cools at night. And winter temperatures do not depend on how hot it was last summer.
So you might well wonder why the Earth has managed to cool after absorbing all that sunlight for four and a half billion years.
Just because others take stupid pills, you don’t have to.
Cheers.
Put another nickel in,
Crank the Nickelodeon.
================
Don’t be such a hick, schtick:
Svensmark’s gambit is that ascosmic rays can “seed” clouds, and clouds reflect sunilight. fewer GCRs reaching Earth because of because of deflection by a strong solar magnetic field means fewer clouds, and more solar forcing ans global warming.
But research at CERn and elsewhere has shown energetic cosmic rays are not very effective at seeding clouds, and while the the number of GCRs reaching Earth has peaked over the last half century , contrary to Svensmark , this increase did not cause global cooling over that interval – from past five decades,
On the contrary, while GCRs are up, so are global temperatures – 2015 is already outside the envelope as the warmest year on record.
There is UV,
Also ozone,
Cosmic rays, and
Aerosol biome.
===========
New paper finds “Robustness of causal effects of galactic cosmic rays on interannual variation in global temperature”
“New paper finds another solar amplification mechanism by which solar activity & cosmic rays control climate”
“Analysis finds global warming of 20th century entirely explained by changes in solar activity and clouds”
“New paper finds significant solar dimming 1950-1980’s followed by brightening 1980’s-2011 in Spain”
…just the first 4 posts of dozens corroborating Svensmark’s theory, with LINKS to published papers:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=svensmark&max-results=20&by-date=true
Cover your eyes Seitz:
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/uploads/RTEmagicC_Grafik8.jpg.jpg
And stop denying that Svensmark’s theory is the ONLY ONE of over 100 theories in the literature of indirect solar effects.
Assertier is purtier.
Denier, no liar.
==============
Not another DIY self citation !
PNAS speaks for itself:
To make a fair comparison, the embedding time lag, embedding dimension, and optimal time lags are set to the same as those in ref. 1. Four global temperature datasets are HadCRUT3 (the one used in ref. 1), HadCRUT4, Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), and NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) datasets. Although different selection methods lead to different results, none suggests significant causality between CR and ΔGT. In addition, we have done the same analysis but without time shift between CR and ΔGT; and for method 1 we have also used the phase-randomized surrogate to determine the confidence interval. In these cases, results still do not show any significant causality. Our conclusion is robust to library selection methods and temperature datasets.
In summary, our analysis of the same datasets does not yield any statistically significant indication. Considering the possible effect of multiple testing, it is more appropriate to conclude that no significant causality between CR and ΔGT can be uncovered by CCM.
Seitz tries to confuse others with his DIY citation of a reply to the original PNAS paper that found a “robust” relationship between cosmic rays and climate, while excluding the reply from the authors of the original PNAS paper. The reply finds,
“Fig. 1 examines the Cosmic Ray –ΔGlobal Temperature relationship using all three library-sampling methods as well as the four temperature time series examined by Luo et al. (3). As shown, this relationship is robust to both library sampling and reasonable data choices. We note that the significance of causality is determined only at the largest library size, with convergence being a further necessary condition to demonstrate causation.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/new-paper-finds-robust-relationship.html
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/34/E4640/F1.medium.gif
Fraudster Seitz once again proves to be a highly biased AGW-nutcase who refuses to even read much less consider any scientific papers contrary to his CAGW religion.
About 2000 years ago, there was a Roman Warm Period and then it got cold. About 1000 years ago, there was a Medieval Warm Period and then it got cold. That was called the Little Ice Age.
It is warm now because it is supposed to be warm now.
It is a natural cycle and we did not cause it.
This would be a rare event but how rare?
In our lifetime, we got one. The Romans got one. Medieval times got one.
Look at the past data, about every thousand years, give or take a few hundred. The really good news is that it is predictable from past data. After a few hundred warm years, it will get cold again.
I LOVE DATA!
The Minoans also got one.
As you say, it is lucky if one is fortunate to live in such times.
It is also worth noting that whilst man in his many incarnations has been around for quite some time (many hundreds of thousands even a couple of million years depending upon how you view matters), it is only in the present interglacial, when conditions were benign, that there was rapid development. Just look at what has been achieved since the Holocene Optimum. That alone tells one all that one needs to know about the benefit of a warmer world.
If one looks at the cradle of western civilisation one can trace the rise of civilisations by the regional temperature, Egyptians, Minoans, Greek, Romans, Northern Europe. like wise skill sets such as bronze age, and iron age etc. Warmer places get these skill sets earlier.
Whilst Stonehenge is a wonderous achievement, it pales in to insignificance when compared to the pyramids. It is no coincidence that the Egyptians were able to build the Great Pyramid, whist Northern Europeans could only muster Stonehenge. In Northern Europe, conditions were harsh, it was a daily struggle just to survive, to get from one day to another. Whereas in Egypt the warmth and better climate freed the people from the daily chore of survival, allowing them time to learn skill sets, pass these down from father to son, develop writing etc. This enabled them to create a great civilisation with wonderous buildings and fine artworks (considering the tools available and no magnifying glasses etc, Egyptian jewellery is truly remarkable).
I completely fail to understand why so many are so blinkered and fear a warmer world when in practice were it something to come to pass, it would bring with it enormous benefits.
I grew up in the 5th coldest city in the lower 48. I don’t understand why people fear the cold. We grew boatloads of food, lived in a winter wonderland – the snow queen festivals, and the cockroaches all died.
An eloquent Jesuit, having won the applause of Versailles by proving the existance of God to Louis XIV’s satisfaction, is said to have responded to courtiers’ calls of “Encore !” by declaring
” I can of course disprove His existence should your majesty prefer…”
…there were a couple of…
“About 2000 years ago there was a Roman warm period”
The phrase ‘Roman Warm Period’ first appeared in a 1995 Nature article Lead author William Patterson is better known as the scientist behind the instant ice age scenario of The Day After Tomorrow
Both isotopi systemics and the fragmentry accounts of Classical climate in the works of Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus suggest Mediterranean region temperatures agriculturally indistinguishable from today’s.
Not so i am afraid . I learned about the roman warm period at my junior school in England which unfortunately was some time before 1995 . Tacitus was also aware of it and remarked on the growing warmth which allowed grape vines to flourish in England and that caused beech trees to suffer in Rome.
Tonyb
Well, if it isn’t the infamous nut Russell Seitz.
Read all about it here folks: http://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=russell+seitz
Earth to Seitz: Ice cores from BOTH poles clearly show the Medieval, Roman, Minoan, Egyptian, Holocene Climate Optimum, etc. were warmer than the present, and GLOBAL.
Can Climate reason please show us the textbook in which the words “roman Warm Period appeared in his curriculum ?
He clearly didn’t do his Latin homework, asTacitus declared Britannia’s climate “objectionable”, and unsuitable for growing vines, suggesting that unlike today , establishing vines was problematic- an abundance of amphorae attest archaeologically to a roaring cross-channel wine trade from Republican times to the fall of the Empire.
Since today even Scotland is producing wine, it might be more accurate to speak of the ‘Roman Cooler Than Now Period.’
That goes double for its Medieval equivalent.
Russell
Are you seriously saying you kept your decades old textbooks? I am afraid I left mine at school.
“Recent archaeological investigations in Northamptonshire have uncovered evidence to suggest that vineyards were established on a commercial scale during the Roman occupation. Initial surveys at a 35-hectare Romano-British site at Wollaston in the Nene Valley (near Wellingborough), has revealed deposits of grape vine pollen dating from this time”
According to Tacitus, roman wine was ‘nectar’ anything else from any of the provinces including Germany was considered inferior, especially the type of wine produced in Britain which can not match that from much further south and did not benefit from modern advances in viticulture and selection of suitable grape vines
Of course he considered our climate ‘objectionable.’ Modern day Britons think its objectionable let alone those hailing from much sunnier, warmer and drier climes.
Speaking of advances in viticulture and the far greater time people have to spend on producing drinkable wine these days and the selection of suitable grape vines, Scotland still does not do what you claim. I have referenced this before to you but still you persist in believing that Scotland has some sort of viable wine industry
http://www.scotsman.com/news/scotland-s-first-home-grown-wine-undrinkable-1-3828808
With the advances in viticulture Scotland may well produce drinkable wine in future but it does not at present, but good luck to them as sufficient time money and passion can achieve many things.
On a more serious technical note we do not fairly compare like for like when comparing the methodology and technology of the distant past wine growers with that available today.
tonyb
Tony, as someone who walked on Hadrian’s Wall a lot, I thought that there was viticulture even in the Roman settlements near the Wall. Might be wrong. Non-commercial elderberry wine was about all that was made in the 1950s and ’60s.
Who knows? Maybe the Roman Warming skipped Scotland, that new Napa Valley of the north. Just remember that to get a ship to where the Claudian invasion of Britain came ashore in 43 AD you’d now have to drag it a long way inland.
Faustino
As you well know British weather is notoriously unreliable and fickle so even during the generally warmer and settled weather of the Roman and Medieval warm periods there would have been times when grape harvests would not be that great, even in the south of England.
I suspect that obtaining good quality wine around the borders and in Scotland would not be achieved reliably. especially with the poorer viticulture techniques and the importations of Roman vines unsuitable for our climate.
tonyb
I am always amused by the intensity of the effort to disprove the existence of the MWP or Roman Warm Period. It is far in excess of any consensus skepticism applied to Mann’s proxy tree rings.
opluso – don’t the Roman & Medieval Warm periods prove that the atmosphere is very sensitive to climate forcings? What was it that caused these warming periods you claim were so robust? Is there something specific that caused them? So if the climate is that sensitive, as seen by the R&MWP’s, adding 40% more CO2 will = more high climate sensitivity.
https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/J_Gunn_Climatic_1981.pdf
Here is a 1981 paper that casually mentions the Roman Empire Climatic Optimum as though it were fact right above figure 6. There must have been a 97% consensus it was real to treat it in such a manner.
Lou Maytrees:
You raise interesting questions but I did not assert the warm periods were “robust” though I will accept that they did, in fact, occur. What I actually asked was why there was so little concern expressed by the consensus about Dr. Mann’s abuse of proxy (e.g., tree ring) data? Prior to global warming becoming an ideological issue it seems that almost everyone accepted the existence of relatively colder and warmer periods over the past 12,000 years.
To respond to your questions about MWP, etc., I don’t believe that CO2 sensitivity has anything to do with it. Natural variability (even in the absence of changes in atmospheric CO2) is sufficient to reverse many longterm trends, whether they be cooling trends or warming trends.
And what drives natural variability? Good question. I would start my quest for an answer in the ocean depths and end up in the clouds.
opluso, yet your reasoning still shows that the climate is very sensitive to forcings.
Most likely variable heating of the ocean by the sun, most likely mediated by the clouds, most likely by a variety of mechanisms.
======================
RE: Lou maytrees
“don’t the Roman & Medieval Warm periods prove that the atmosphere is very sensitive to climate forcings?”
Lou, they don’t “prove” anything. They suggest that climate may be cyclic and/or naturally variable. If past periods of earth’s history experienced temps / climate similar to what is being experienced now, it calls into question the hypothesis that CO2 is the primary influencer of tempertures. So far those pushing the CO2 hypothesis have tried to eliminate these past warm periods or have claimed they were only localized and in no way represent what was happening on a global scale. They could be correct on the latter argument, but so far all they have to base it on is :we don’t have global records for back then”. Unfortunately for this line of reasoning, Chinese researchers have been publishing work that shows similar climate regimes in historic China that correspond to the MWP.
Timg, maybe ‘prove’ was the wrong word, yet it does show that the climate is very sensitive to any kind of forcing, whether it is something cyclical or natural ‘variabilities’ or man made. The claim was that these periods were as warm as now, so if we have 400-500 year periods of warmth (like the Roman) with no known reason for the warming beyond vague ‘variabilities’ or ‘cyclicals’ which no one seems to know how or about, it still shows the climate is highly sensitive.
Lou Maytrees:
That is a conclusion you may draw but one could also assert it shows the climate system is resistant to forcing (rather than “very sensitive”) since negative feedbacks appear to moderate — and even reverse — positive forcing.
opluso – Something caused the so called RWP & MWPs temp rises, the climate was very sensitive to whatever that was. Now we have the same situation except stronger b/c this warming has happened faster, so obviously the climate is highly sensitive to forcings whether its your ‘negative feedbacks’ as those negatives were in quick response to the positive forcing if the RMP&MWP were as warm as claimed. Either way, the climate is highly sensitive to forcings.
Not necessarily the same. In fact almost certainly not the same.
That certainly doesn’t follow.
Lou, to show that the climate is sensitive to any forcing because of a RWP and MWP, you would have to show that the feedbacks to what caused those are the same feedbacks as you would get from increasing CO2.
Stevenreincarnated – Not at all. The claim was the RWP & MWP happened and were near or just as warm as now. You don’t need to show the forcings are the same, it clearly shows without a doubt that our climate is highly sensitive to any forcings.
No it doesn’t. Except to “true believers” who indulge in confirmation bias.
AK – LOL, the ‘conspiracy’ thing eh? hahaha
Look! A squirrel!
There are positives, and there are negatives. Is there a negative that causes up, or a positive that causes down?
Plenty of both.
JCH, is melting ice a positive or a negative feedback? I guess that depends on comparing changes in albedo to changes in poleward heat transport. It could be both. Now why should I assume that the ice will melt in exactly the same way if forced by a well mixed GHG, or forced by solar, or forced by internal variation? Why would I assume I’d get the same cloud cover in the same locations? There is the potential for huge differences in feedbacks to different types of forcings.
Lou, how do you come up with that? By assuming the feedbacks to all forcing types are relatively equal?
Stevenreincarnated – its a quite simple deduction. If the global temp could rise and fall quickly, as the claim is for both the RMP&MWP, the climate is obviously very sensitive to forcings.
Lou, a simple deduction which follows simple assumptions.
True believing has no need for conspiring.
================
What a hackneyed view of sensitivity and of forcings. No wonder the farce is strong with this one.
==================
Lou Maytrees:
You haven’t paid much attention to what others have been saying.
When you only have paleo data, you actually don’t know how fast (or even how far) temps changed in the past. So people (not just you) should be cautious when making such claims.
However, if you restrict your observations to the instrumental era, where you can compare apples to apples (or at least mcintosh to granny smith), you will see the same temperature metrics changed just as rapidly prior to the major GHG emissions of post-WWII.
opluso -the claim was made here that ‘the RMP & WMP were as warm as the warming today’. Then AK claimed ‘CO2 follows temperature on a time scale of centuries, millenia”. So obviously (again) you, kim, & AK don’t pay attention. AK’s claim can only be made with ‘paleo data’, the same you now claim i can’t use b/c it does not let you know how fast temps changed. So now your first two paragraphs are useless and your second disproved your own point.
As for pre WW2, GHG’s were on the increase from the early 1900’s and they echo the rise in global temps from 1900 thru 1940. Temp and Co2 were both rising in tandem pre WW2. Not just temperature went up. CO2 went from 295 to 310 ppm. So again there is the correlation between CO2 and global temp even prior to 1940. And not on the centuries/millenial time scale as previously claimed.
That was in a different thread, referring to “research” claiming that “[d]ecreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50 million years ago,”. First of all, it was referring to much longer time-scales than the modern rise(s). Second, I didn’t say that “CO2 follows temperature […]”, I said that “evidence […] strongly suggests that temperature changes precede pCO2 changes […]”. If you don’t understand the enormous difference between your misquote and what I said, you have no business getting involved in any scientific discussion.
Actually, its you who doesn’t pay attention. And you end up creating a string of nonsense straw-man arguments.
Total category mixing. Paleo data can be used for changes on a century/millennial scale while being useless for annual/decadal scales, because most paleo data is smoothed relative to anything less than a century. Certainly for temperature, and to some (as yet unknown) extent for pCO2.
The rise in temperature pre 1940 is similar to that from 1970 to 1997. The proportional rise in pCO2 is most certainly not.
AK – your misconstruing of words is mind boggling.
First, your comment about ‘temperature changes precedes CO2 …’ pertained directly to your fake ‘italicized’ quote from your post of Hansen’s abstract, one which you summarized in your own words yet deliberately ‘italicized’ to make it look like it was from the abstract, which it was not.
Second, your reply to that faked Hansen quote in your words is ” … the evidence from Antarctic cores STRONGLY suggests that temperature changes PRECEDE pCO2 changes on a time scale of centuries to millennia. Whatever the relationship between pCO2 and “global temperature average” on an annual to decadal scale (if any), best evidence would suggest that the COOLING CAUSED THE pCO2 DECREASE in the “cooling trend that began 50 million years ago.” Your words.
Now you’re trying to bs your way out of it by claiming ‘suggests’ was the operative? Your paragraph clearly shows what were your original operative words of choice and their meaning. So, not even a good try at your own bs. It seems its you who doesn’t understand the enormous difference in the meaning of the words you use for your misquotes.
@Lou Maytrees…
You’re an obvious l1er, as anybody can tell by following this link to an abstract of the original paper and comparing it to the entire abstract blockquoted here:
As you can see, my excerpt was taken directly from that abstract, just as I said.
Your resort to such deceptions just shows how worthless you are as a debater. And how useless it is for anybody to pay attention to anything you say.
AK, i didn’t expect anything else from you except to double down once again. Its a habit with you folks. You’ve reposted the full abstract and yet your original ‘italicized’ quote is 40 words long.
And not once in the total abstract does Hansen mention “large scale glaciation” as you claim he did in your ‘italicized’ abstract quote. Then you simply go on to rearrange out of context phrases to fit your agenda and to make it look like a direct quote from the abstract.
You could have easily done better esp since your the fella who claimed “theres an enormous difference between (a) misquote and what i said,”.
LOL, i’m betting you’ll triple down again mr “obvious l1er”.
@Lou Maytrees…
OK, I apologize for what I called you. The actual copy/paste was from this draft in arxiv.org, which does include the phrase:
I guess I was caught by the difference between the last draft and the published piece. (Which I assumed was paywalled, although as it happens it’s not.)
That doesn’t change the fact that that’s what they wrote, probably modified at the last minute due to review objections (or perhaps somebody pointed out that “the planet being nearly ice-free” is stronger language than “large scale glaciation occurring”). Note that this presentation also includes that phrase.
I probably should have checked the actual original for that phrase, but since they have very similar meanings, I didn’t.
We don’t know what the forcings are causing temp change today, yet Lew presumes to know what the forcings were for every temp change in the past.
You need to breathe together a little more with your pack of fellow students, Lou. Your indoctrination has been leaden, your critique lacks tactility.
========================
Just one more ign0rant cheerleader, come to yell about stuff they don’t understand. They first came to my notice in 1997, and have been polluting the innertubes ever since.
AK – and i’ll bet since 1997 you and kim have both been saying ‘just wait til next year, it’ll get cooler then you’ll see’. Good luck with that one too.
Nope. What I’ve been saying is that the vast majority of people yelling on
bothall sides of the “debate” don’t know what they’re talking about. That would include you. (Not Kim, although you have to have read a lot of her comments before it becomes obvious.)You see!
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/global-land-ocean-mntp-anom/201401-201412.png
From here. Your own fellow-breathers.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_September_2015_v6.png
AK – i wasn’t yelling, just making fun of your previous comment.
Some of the alarmist drones who are sent in here don’t even know their own dogma. I won’t mention any names, but the latest iteration is particularly weak.
Lou,
“Something caused the so called RWP & MWPs temp rises, the climate was very sensitive to whatever that was”
Do you realize this is pure speculation on your part. Earth’s climate fluctuates. What causes it to do so? Well that is a good question. We suspect certain things, but we don’t know. As to what caused the two warm periods you reference? Again, we don’t really know. We can eliminate at least one possible cause though – human generated emissions of CO2. And if we don’t know what caused them to occur, we cannot make any statement claiming the climate was very sensitive.
On the other hand, based on real data we can begin to challenge the hypothesis that climate is sensitive to CO2 concentration. Note that is not saying that CO2 has no effect. Simply that claims of it being the primary “control knob” are not being supported by the data being collected. Yet when reasonable people try to point this out, they get called deniers. I haven’t denied anything. Asking someone to support their claim that sea levels will rise 10 meters by the end of the century or that average global temperature will be approximately 4C higher by that time is not denial. If I asked you to fork over half of your net worth so I could protect you from the horde of zombies I assure you is on its way, wouldn’t you ask to see some evidence? If all I could provide were a copy of some XBox video game or episodes of the Walking Dead, would you consider that sufficient evidence? That is pretty much what we are being provided. Computer simulations. And as more people start to notice the divergence between real world data and simulated output, the more we see efforts to make that divergence disappear or the more we see claims of “record” or “historic” associated with normal weather events. Just last night the network news was touting an “incredible” , “record” rain and wind storm in the northeast. It was a fricking wet, windy day. Nothing more.
timg56 – so over the last 2300+ years we’ve had the RWP, the MWP, the LIA, and now AGW. Any more? So of those 2300 about 1600 of those years have been on an up and down temperature roller coaster. That is not speculation, its a very sensitive climate.
That’s not (necessarily) “a very sensitive climate”, it’s a very ign0rant comment(er).
Give me a H; give me a O; give me a T; what does that spell?
Hot.
October is hotter than the blazes.
Team HOT is kicking team KOLD into a koma. Brutes. We’re ignorant brutes.
You’ll find, Lou, that many of the SS talking points are inadequate. Here’s the sad thing. Years ago I told one of the propagandists at SS that this was hogwash as an argument for climate sensitivity. Either he didn’t understand or the simple-mindedness of it as a meme was too attractive, because here we are, years later, and the naive are still exposed to the same inadequate argument.
My fellow, you are being thrust into the fray inadequately defended. You cannot count on your talking points. You have to think, and wonder, and heh, you have to deny.
So keep it up. I was getting bored, and here we are slouching at full speed vers Paris. No time to nod off.
===================
JCH, I would prefer that the globe warmed than cooled. But if wishes were of courses, so would you ride.
================
Here’s the way it goes, Lou. Well, we can’t have people believing in large natural variability in the past so we’ll tell them that large natural variability means a highly sensitive climate. There, that’ll fix ’em.
You are putting two left boots on two right feet, Lou. Please keep on trukkin’, the squeaks, the moans, they just keep rollin, they keep on rollin, along.
==============
kim – so the MWP and LIA ran into each other over a 900 year period (950 – 1850ad)) and according to you folks there was a swing of at least 2-3+* between the two. The MWP being 1-2+* above the average, the LIA being 1-2+* below the average. It only took a 5*C drop in temp to bring on the last Ice Age, so your conjecture is that a 40-60 or even 80% of that variation in climate temps does not show high sensitivity?
It took a 5* swing to give us an Ice Age but a 2, 3, or 4* temp swing as some AGWDenier sites claim happened in those MWP-LIA years is not high climate sensitivity?
You folks do live in a dream world.
Lou Maytrees: “You folks do live in a dream world.”
LOL!
You’re funny.
And that the forcings were small and short lived.
I meant ‘ductility’ not ‘tactility’. What were the forcings, young feller?
==============
kim, yer ‘funny’. And thats a funny question you asked. So what do specific forcings have to do with a 4*C swing in climate temps, as you folks claim, from 950ad to 1850ad? Why you hung up on that?
Lou
No, the MWP and LIA didn’t run into each other over a 900 year period. Earlier this year I wrote an article on the LIA
http://judithcurry.com/2015/02/19/the-intermittent-little-ice-age/
the LIA was of an intermittent nature with a core few cold decades but mostly comprised of cold years or severe winters, being juxtaposed with hot summers and warm years. Probably the warmest period in this record is around 1540.
So we can see great natural variability. Phil Jones wrote an article on it in 2006 when he expressed surprise that the warm 1730’s decade can be brought to a halt by the extremely severe winter of 1740.
The extremes happened before the advent of mans co2 input so whatever the climate is sensitive to, during the period under review it obviously wasn’t that gas.
If we accept that both the MWP and LIA probably weren’t monolithically warm or cold periods but were characterised by those traits, we can perhaps begin to better understand cyclical factors and that such aspects as winds coming from predominantly one direction for decades will likely considerably affect the characteristics of that decade.
Kington of CRU recently wrote a book in which he enumerates the characteristics of each decade over the last 500 years.
tonyb
k, tks for some observations on the MWP and LIA. But they do not matter as the claim is there was a 4*C swing in temp extremes between those two ‘periods’ which shows a rather high climate sensitivity on this planet.
No it doesn’t. Internal variability is perfectly capable of explaining it.
AK, but it does not matter if its ‘internal variables’ or whatever. The point is, a 4*C swing in global temps in 4-500 years (MWP-LIA) shows that we have a very sensitive climate.
No it doesn’t.
AK – So a 5*C change in global temps gives us an Major Ice Age that lasts many thousands of years but a 4*C swing in earths global temp over a 500 year period does not qualify as anything serious? Okay.
I just don’t think he’s going to get it, like the monkey who can’t let go of the prize within the narrow necked jar.
Look at it this way, Lou; the higher the climate sensitivity to CO2, the colder we’d now be without man’s efforts.
=================
so you have no answer to a 4*C swing in climate temps and so simply pass on a known fact. You have no point other than to misdirect i see. Good on you funny girl.
Lou, if you’re going to insist on perverting discourse by not observing temporal discipline, your readers will end up as confused as you are.
===============
tony b
“The extremes happened before the advent of mans co2 input so whatever the climate is sensitive to, during the period under review it obviously wasn’t that gas.”
Logical fallacy.
The easiest way to see it is with a simple analogy.
According to climate theory, the climate is a function of forcings
ALL forcings. Some are negative and some are positive. They
change over time.
If you have more positive forcings then your energy balance goes UP.
and the planet warms.
So imagine you have a bank account: And you have incomes
and expenses.
on the incomes side you have Rents and Wages.
Now suppose for the 10 years you have no increase in rents
you have rents of 10 bucks and wages of 10 bucks for total income
of 20 bucks. looking at your balance it ranges bewteen 0 and 20 bucks.
same total income, but the balance changes. Why? well because your expenses change.
Now suppose your rental income starts to increase at 2 bucks a year.
IF ALL ELSE REMAINS EQUAL ( wages, and expenses ) then your balance will increase.. it will STILL fluctuate, but the general drift will be upwards.
Now suppose you looked at the balances for the prior 10 years, documented the swings in balance and ASSERTED that the account
was not sensitive to rents?
That would be stupid.
basically, you cant tell very much from the past without an accounting
of all the incomes and expenses.. or at least an accounting of the significant incomes and expenses.
Changes in the past are driven by forcings: Total forcings. Not “gas”
but the forcings created by those gases. You cannot understand the past by only looking at the account BALANCE. the balance tells you nothing about the individual expenses or incomes. Look at the balance “obscures” the details that are important.
“The extremes happened before the advent of mans co2 input so whatever the climate is sensitive to, during the period under review it obviously wasn’t that gas.”
Another way to see the fallacy here is to understand that change has
many causes. Another simple example. A bunch of people died from
AK 47 attacks. we see the murder rate increase.
Tony comes along and points to historical data showing past increases.
he concludes.. since there were changes in death rates before the existence of the AK 47, that the AK 47 can have nothing to do with increasing rates today.
studying the past is cool.
abusing it? not so cool
Lou, Lou, Lou. You’ve got temps, sort of. You’ve not got forcings. You can’t talk about sensitivity, except, heh, in your little propaganda class.
==================
Mosher
You say “Tony comes along and points to historical data showing past increases. he concludes.. since there were changes in death rates before the existence of the AK 47, that the AK 47 can have nothing to do with increasing rates today.”
That is not accurate. A more proper interpretation of his comment would be: since there were changes in death rates before the existence of the AK 47, those death rates could not be attributed to the AK 47.
Also, You say “According to climate theory, the climate is a function of forcings ALL forcings. Some are negative and some are positive. They
change over time.”
I don’t buy that theory. IMO, it is very possible that the climate behave similarly to an inductance/resistance/capacitance circuit, with the oceans being the capacitance. The voltage and current fluctuations in the circuit will not be a function of the forcings, but rather a function of the LRC parameters. There would have to be intermittent energy input due to the resistance, but the fluctuations would be independent of that input.
Richard
Lou:
You say 4C for the swing from the high of the MWP to the low of the LIA.
I have only seen 1.5C for that swing.
Are you sure about your data?
Maybe you are mixing up C and F?
You might want to check again.
JCH said:
“Give me a H; give me a O; give me a T; what does that spell?
Hot.
October is hotter than the blazes.
Team HOT is kicking team KOLD into a koma . . .”
It sure looks like cheerleading to me!
Richard Arrett
Yes, looking at the link to my LIA article the trend line is roughly 1.5C from the bottom of the LIA in the 1690’s to the top of the Warm 1730’s. That is not to say that there weren’t some individual years much greater than this but that seems to be the trend line.
I don’t know where the 4 degrees came from.
tonyb
I prefer “kheerleader”.
Go team Hot!!!!
Climatereason:
I was more thinking about the peak of the MWP at around 1250 A.D. and the coldest part of the LIA at about 1730ish (going off memory).
What does your data show for the difference between these two extremes almost 500 years apart?
Richard said;
“I was more thinking about the peak of the MWP at around 1250 A.D. and the coldest part of the LIA at about 1730ish (going off memory).
What does your data show for the difference between these two extremes almost 500 years apart?”
I am working on the period approx 1200 to 1350 at present so can not give you an answer, other than to say the peak of the MWP was substantially before 1250, although there were a number of other peaks in the subsequent centuries..
The coldest part of the LIA was 1690 and one of the warm MWP type peaks was in the 1730’s, from which you get the 1.5C difference. This was also the most rapid rise, eclipsing the modern era.
tonyb.
The large fluctuations in the account balance happened when the rental income was stable, so it obviously wasn’t due to changes in rental income.
We can assume that nobody was killed with an AK 47, before the thing was invented.
Bad analogies are not cool.
Thank you Climatereason.
I was using the Lamb graph – which is admittedly pretty crude. But it is 1.5C from peak to trough.
Steven Mosher,
You wrote –
“According to climate theory, the climate is a function of forcings
ALL forcings. Some are negative and some are positive. They
change over time.”
There is no “theory” of climate. Climate is the average of “weather”.
No “function of forcings”. No “forcings.”
“Climate as a function of forcings” is nonsense that even climatologists cannot explain coherently!
What is the climate of California? Trick question? I suppose you might say it requires many years of intense and dedicated study to understand the answer. Possibly it might take that long for a climatologist to work it out.
Seems pretty simple to me. How about you?
Cheers.
Mike Flynn wrote–
There is no “theory” of climate. Climate is the average of “weather”.
No “function of forcings”. No “forcings.”
“Climate as a function of forcings” is nonsense that even climatologists cannot explain coherently!
———————–
Oh. Looks like some theory to me…about climate and external forcings…looks pretty fundamental too…at least the parts I shaded.
http://i1285.photobucket.com/albums/a593/mwgrant1/climate%20theory%20leith_zps5iyvulet.png
Cheers :O)
1978, eh? I wondered what C E Leith might have done since then, but Google links seem to relate to that paper or “work done by C E Leith in the 1970s.”
Faustino
1978, eh? I wondered what C E Leith might have done since then, but Google links seem to relate to that paper or “work done by C E Leith in the 1970s.”
1970’s. Yes, but I like that earlier reference–it is pre-climato-hubbub :O). Also it is about getting a handle on external forcing and climate response using pretty fundamental physics way, i.e., very much theory. I had similar google results. I found googling on things like “fluctuation-dissipation theorem” climate lead to a number of citations and I think there was a couple of other Leith papers found but like the ’78 paper I could not get to them. They caught my interest because of the FDT is really special, linking thermodynamic and rate processes across a number of physics subdisciplines. FDT is deep stuff.
Heh, Lou, here’s what’s funny re: your late, out of place, Hallowed Eve’s comment at 1:24 PM above: You’ve apparently given up on Michael Mann and the Crook’t Stick.
=======================
kim – Lol, you are funny! my 4 minutes later reply (yours 1:20 – mine 1:24pm) is somehow ‘late’ to you? oh those maths eh?
And b/c you see, its only you folks who claim there was a 4* swing in temps between the MWP and LIA. No actual climate scientist, like your Mann, has ever claimed that large a swing in temps ever happened. None that i have read anyway.
So again Kim, as mentioned numerous times its only the Deniers who claim that huge swing in temps, i was just trying to see if you’d admit that that large a temperature swing is as bogus as it has to be ;-)
Yeah, Lou, I was confused by a day, but you are more confused than by days. In your daze, your argument has become incoherent.
What is the equation for sensitivity? What were the forcings by which you once, and seemingly no longer, argue that the climate is sensitive?
=====================
I had it right early, the farce is strong with this one.
===============
Kim
Where and when did this claim of 4 degrees (C?) come from?
tonyb
The forces that are strong with Lou include understanding and intelligence. At this blog cesspool, that’s a refreshingKleansing.
How is that “we’re getting kolder” krock going?
JCH, in your own words, would you please explain Lou’s argument(s)?
By the way, I trust the satellite series more than the surface series.
============
Tony, I have a reply in moderation, I believe, for using the M-man word. Lou introduced the 4 degrees but now repudiates it in his dissonance.
He can’t decide, per his argument, if the climate is sensitive or not, nor does he seem to understand the meaning of sensitivity, bound as it is by forcings.
================
richardswarthout | October 30, 2015 at 2:44 pm |
Mosher
You say “Tony comes along and points to historical data showing past increases. he concludes.. since there were changes in death rates before the existence of the AK 47, that the AK 47 can have nothing to do with increasing rates today.”
A better example is the M16 rifle, the M16/AR15 and its derivatives tend to show up at “spree killing” incidents.
However the current murder rate is as low or lower than when the weapon was first released in 1963.
It difficult to argue that the M16/AR15 has had a significant effect on the murder rate particularly given that “semi-automatic weapons with flash suppressors, bayonet lugs, magazines, and other features that make them look menacing” make up less than 2% of the weapons used in crimes.
In fact the homicide rate dropped after “semi-automatic weapons with flash suppressors, bayonet lugs, magazines, and other features that make them look menacing” ban expired.
Thanks, Dr. Judith. Even at best, Lovejoy’s analysis only proves short-term correlation (65 years) of CO2 and temperature.
It is immediately contradicted by, inter lots of alia including your comments above, the fact that the Greenland ice cores show that CO2 continued to rise for a couple thousand years after we came out of the last Ice Age … but temperatures were generally
dropping all that time.
As to your question about what the EOS editors were thinking, I fear that as they say in court, “that question assumes facts not in evidence” …
Thanks as always,
w.
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page38.html
The CO2 data was sent to me in 2009 by:
Thomas C. Peterson, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist
NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center
I still have the email he sent with the data attached.
He did not say where it came from, but he said he had presented it.
Willis, I keep coming back to a quote of yours that I keep on my website.
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page60.html
It is not the sun, that is external. It is the water, it is abundant and it freezes and thaws at a thermostat set point that regulates snowfall on Earth.
Amazing Stability requires a thermostat and forcing that is turned on and off when the thermostat switches on and off.
There is a thermostat and there is forcing that is turned on and off.
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page55.html
Consider this and consider if anything else exists that could possibly be responsible for Amazing Stability.
Willis, there are enough points of inverse correlation between the Greenland ice core proxies, and temperature proxies for Europe, the Mediterranean and the Levant through the last 5000 years that show assumptions that GISP reflects changes in global temp’s, are fully specious.
the fact that the Greenland ice cores show that CO2 continued to rise for a couple thousand years after we came out of the last Ice Age … but temperatures were generally dropping all that time.
=================
evidence that CO2 causes temperatures to drop. As well, we did not come out of the Ice Age until CO2 levels were low. Which means it could be CO2 that causes Ice Ages.
I use a lot of rules of thumb in this life. My rule of thumb regarding settled arguments is:
If one side claims the debate is over and they won … it isn’t, and they didn’t.
w.
++++++++++++++++++++++
George Will’s quote is similar:
“If a politician is speaking on a subject involving science or technology and declares the debate is over, you can be sure of two things: The debate is raging, and he is losing.”
You can probably assume a third thing.
He doesn’t have a clue about the science.
RE: Willis Eschenbach | October 23, 2015 at 2:51 pm | Reply
I use a lot of rules of thumb in this life. My rule of thumb regarding settled arguments is:
An argument can only truly be settled when both sides agree it’s settled. That said, perhaps in my lifetime both sides of the climate issue will agree there is in fact, an argument and that there are (at least) 2 sides to the argument . . . but I won’t hold my breath.
Kind Regards,
barn
Not gonna happen. The warmunists (the “true believer” cement-heads of the climate catastrophe ruck, if not the lying, thieving, predatory politicians and “consensus” quacks masquerading as scientists) are obliteratively committed to the Social Justice agenda, meaning that there is nothing in the way of logic or reason impelling their thoughts and actions.
For the AGW alarmists to climb back down out of their trees and cease flinging their dung at humanity, they have to learn better.
They have to accept the fact that their hysteria is driven by error, and because their error serves the emotional needs by which they’re driven, they’re far less likely to agree that factual reality vitiates the “man-made climate change” premise than that the average drug addict will voluntarily go cold turkey on his various psychoactive substances of choice.
Ok ‘denialists’, this is your opportunity to poke holes in Lovejoy’s argument. Its pretty easy, actually.
There is no need to poke holes. Just read the stuff, it is self poking.
Global warming science has concentrated on proving the theory that the postindustrial warming is largely caused by human activities. Yet no scientific theory can be proved beyond all doubt, and our attempts to convince people of the science are entering a period of diminishing returns.
It gets more and more difficult when the Mother Earth does not do what the Climate models promised us.
“Global warming science has concentrated on proving the theory that the postindustrial warming is largely caused by human activities.”
I think he means that it has concentrated on disproving that warming is largely caused by human activity… But of course it really hasn’t…
On the chart with CO2 and temperature, “CO2 Radiative Proxy”, that axis should be “Vapor Pressure of CO2” as a function of ocean temperature.
The oceans are carbonated water. A hot carbonated drink spews more than a cold one.
The oceans are getting warming and more acidic at the same time. If I dig through my comments I can find where a warmist explained that to me. And of course that explains how the oceans are currently able to absorb so much more co2 than they did in 1950. The debate is over, CAGW is just wrong. Every study they do contradicts a previous statement. I read your statement below. The IPCC refuses to discuss those events as anything other than local and not world wide (going so far as to rename those events, I’m sure you have them right on the tip of your tongue) . If they had to explain it, they’d have to throw the whole co2/ temperature chart out. Co2 levels didn’t fluctuate during those times. (according to the IPCC)
By estimating the probabilities of centennial-scale preindustrial temperature changes, with 99.9% confidence we are able to reject the denialist hypothesis that the industrial age warming was from solar, volcanic, or other natural causes, leaving anthropogenic origin as the only alternative.
We have warmed from the Little Ice Age because Ice Extent on Earth has decreased and ice volume on Greenland and Antarctica and other Glaciers and ice fields around the world were more depleted because it did not snow enough in the cold times. This natural cause has not even been considered as a cause. It has only been considered as a result. It is easy to reject what you don’t understand.
This modern warm time is happening with the same causes as the Roman and Medieval Warm times.
“There is no need to poke holes. Just read the stuff, it is self poking.”
Mmmm … it is self porking!
The more effective the counter-arguments to the simplistic CO2-forced model become, the more the people in favor of that model try to declare the topic closed.
Which is, at its core, anti-science.
“I can only wonder what the EOS editors were thinking when they published this.”
When a cultural narrative dominates, the thinking of folks is rather less about reasoning, and rather more about emoting.
Who publishes this junk science?
It is almost beyond belief if it were not happening.
Does EOS have a good impact factor rating?
scott
Scott
To answer your question on the other thread here is an update to CET from the MET office.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
Basically, all the temperature gain through the 1990’s has now been lost this century.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
There is a (statistically insignificant ) marginal decline From 1990 to the present day
I think sea level is very hard to define due to all the numerous factors involved and think it best to look at specific regional examples ( like the UK) rather than attempt any global reconstruction, as within all the ocean basins there are numerous examples of levels rising and falling .
Tonyb
If I were you, I would not like global either.
Scott
A promised, here is the US data so you can see Britain and the US in context.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.D.gif
To answer your original question, as you know there is a lot of controversy over the US temperatures in the 1930’s with claims they were downgraded by James Hansen. If someone wants to make a point about this they need to produce a peer reviewed paper. As you know there was a fair bit of controversy over this on CA.
However, my main point does not concern this but that there has been cooling over the last decade in the US just as there has been in the UK.
tonyb
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Regional/TAVG/Figures/contiguous-united-states-TAVG-Trend.pdf
Heh, it’s shortsheeted, but still paused there, otherwise comfy under the covers.
===========
JCH
Here is the full page of BEST US data
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/contiguous-united-states.
They use a 12 month and10 year moving average (not 5 year like Giss) but the end results are the same, cooling since 2000.
As I said in my original post yesterday 2014 was a record temperature in the US and the UK. 2015 has been pretty cool here and the temperature increase since 1990 has been virtually wiped out but the year isn’t finished yet.
tonyb
Your BEST US only graph shows warming until around 2003 (not 2000) and then the 10 year moving average stops around 2013 so that it does not include the large spike for 2014 + 2015, which would of course then show the warming rising once again, nullifying any exaggerated ‘cooling’ you claim.
Lou
I can only use the graphs that BEST have produced and their 10 year moving average does not include 2014 and can not of course include 2015 as yet. 2014 was a record warm year. All of which i said in my posts.
At present the graphs for both countries show cooling. In the uk the cooling this century has virtually erased the warming at the end of the last century.
There has been a warming trend since 1700 and this current cooling is probably only a temporary reversal of this, although why it should happen at all in an era of rapidly rising co2 needs clarifying.
It suggests that natural variability is greater than some realise.
Tonyb
C’Reason – you made a US cooling claim based solely on a single high anomaly (not the 10yr moving) in 2000, while ignoring the even much higher single anomaly of 2014 b/c BEST did not include it in the 10yr moving? The BEST graph still shows an almost +1*C increase over the 2000 anomaly. And your UK chart is simply of a small area in Central England, not even closely inclusive of all GB, so it suggests absolutely nothing about all of the UK.
Yeah, natural variability seems to be able to overwhelm the CO2 effect at will. Also, right now is close to the right sort of timing for this pause to be the recent top in the series of downward trending optima during the latter half of the Holocene.
We shall see, and probably sooner rather than later. But not by the time of the Masque of Paris, and that we may regret.
===========
Lou
Here is the data for the Contigious US year to date. It is the eigth warmest on record
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/201509
It comes from NOAA rather than BEST so is not strictly like for like. I used BEST as Steve Mosher often posts here who works at BEST and may be able to give us an update
Tonyb
Natural variation cannot overwhelm ACO2 at will. At the zenith of its power, negative PDO index numbers and La Nina dominance, it did not even break even.
You’re building in an assumption of no longer-term fluctuations. Given the frequent references to such fluctuations, this makes your comment a typical example of dishonest rhetoric.
It’s a nonlinear, dynamic system. I cannot stick my feet into the same river twice, and yet, my family has been sticking their feet, thousands and thousands of times, into the creek that was named for them in 1720. These things are not hard.
Ah! JCH creek, I know it well. It is overlooked by climate bluff.
Tonyb
It’s safer in his ignorance, AK, and it allows him to ignore the rest of my comment.
============
Every morning I update my Milankovitch cycle chart. The anticipation for this, the most exciting part of my day, is palpable. Watching its progress is so rewarding.
It’s been suggested that the relationship between Milankovitch cycles and glaciation is just an exercise in curve-fitting.
Nothing between AnthroCO2 and Milankovitch.
Chart, chart, on the wall,
Who’s the most ignorant of them all?
===========
If you have a mirror on your wall, then you’ve got ignorance framed.
ONI – up
SLR – accelerating
GMST – spiking
PDO – strongly positive
SOI – persistently negative
AMO – spiking upward
SST – spiking upwards
ICE – melting
kooling poetry – dumb as ever
but but but – at a frantic pace
According to Huybers & William Curry (2006):
[…]
It suggests that natural variability is greater than some realize.
Natural Variability takes care of 97%.
I just made that up,
Natural Variability is more likely 99.97%
Update is coming.
2015 will be interesting. Skeptics may learn that failure to interpolate gives you a warmer record..
Ha.
As for the pause. It only exists in Models of the data.
EOS is a magazine not a scientific journal. Hype is always welcome.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2324-9250/homepage/categories_of_contributions.htm
Belongs with this: http://thelapine.ca/monsanto-cucumbers-cause-genital-baldness-immediately-banned-nova-scotia/
I like it. Assume everything I assume is true actually is true and it is proof beyond reasonable doubt.
Paris is predictably failing. So warmunist desperation predictably grows. Even enlisting the Pope didn’t help. We learn this week that the G77 won’t play unless bribed with a guaranteed $100 billion per year. China and India won’t play even if bribed.
As for EOS editors, the little disclaimer at the bottom of the piece says this is not the opinion of AGU or EOS, only the author. Right. And there is oceanfront property available in Arizona, too.
Lovejoy is multifold illogical. Not only does he include the pre 1960 temperature data where even IPCC AR4 said the warming was not anthropogenic, he argues the current pause is a just a natural cooling spell masking AGW without recognizing the warming from 1975 to 2000 (statistically indisinguishable per Lindzen from the ‘natural’ warming from 1920-1945) could be mostly natural also, using his very same argument. And, his overlaying log delta CO2 concentration ignores that CAGW requires positive feedback amplification of almost 3x. QED, indeed NOT.
Logical clarity and consistency never were warmunist attributes. Shown yet again here.
Yeah, and I’ve got some bottomland to sell you. Just don’t ask what it’s on the bottom of!
Oh, yes, the old ‘in the summer the river is at the bottom of the garden and in the winter the garden is at the bottom of the river’ spiel.
We are incessantly being told a tale it would shame the shadiest real estate agent to retale.
H/t to the Plum.
==================
But there has been no ‘pause’. The 5 warmest years on record have happened in the last ten years. 2015 is turning into the warmest year on record of them all, so now the 6 warmest years will have been in the last 11. Your ‘pause’ is a misnomer and straw man argument simply meant and used to obfuscate.
Lou maytrees | October 23, 2015 at 3:27 pm
Lou, that’s only true if you ignore the best temperature records that we have, the ones from the satellites. These do not suffer from station closings and openings, station moves, lack of coverage, change in thermometers, or UHI.
It’s also only true if you ignore the over 50 scientific papers which have purported to explain the “pause” … while they obviously can’t all be right, they are all studying a real phenomenon.
Finally, the constant adjustment of the “official” temperature data continues apace … here’s how they create new “records” to fool the gullible …
w.
Both RSS and UAH adjust all of their data. Satellite measurements are all adjusted. So how does that make them the ‘best’? UAH just readjusted all its data, and a few years ago Spencer of UAH wrote an article about the reasons why RSS was so erratic b/c of orbital decay, etc. Again, how does that qualify as ‘best’? And Monckton and Heller are conspiracy theorists as are the articles from them you posted. Besides that, UAH’s graphs certainly show warming over the past 18 years, as do RSS’s at their website. All you have to do is look and read the graphs they post.
Sat temps have the VERY BEST sampling density of any of the atmospheric temp methods.
If you are skeptical of machines that have to use complex data reduction methods, then consider almost any medical machine. Even the humble BP monitor you buy at the drugstore has complex electronics to convert the data to a blood pressure reading.
So, next time you go to the doctor, be sure to tell him you want him to use only a stethoscope and hack saw.
And the very worst at estimating the surface air temperature of the the earth.
“do not suffer from station closings and openings, station moves, lack of coverage, change in thermometers, or UHI”
Well each of these has an analog
Station closings = satellites no longer working.
Count the number of different satellites.
Station move = orbital decay
Lack of coverage.. Yup you have that too.
Change in tob… Yup diurnal drift..
Change in thermometer.. Yup 9 changes in 30 years.
Uhi… Nope but Uhi is small. Look at MAT
Stethoscope and hacksaw for you, Mosher.
Me, I’ll take the awesome CT machine that sweeps the electron beam around a circular anode, effectively moving the x-ray source at a very high speed – so much so that it can freeze the motion of a beating heart.
Great, let’s put a CT machine on a satellite, and put you in a room two meters above the land surface. My son is a radiologist. I used to build hot-air balloons. I’ll stick an x-ray in a basket and we’ll validate.
JCH,
Are you validating, or doing the other thing that supposedly makes you go blind?
Maybe you validated too much, and it has affected not only your eyesight, but your mental acuity as well.
The world wonders (but not very much).
Cheers.
I’m doing radiology by satellite.
JCH: ” I’ll stick an x-ray in a basket and we’ll validate.”
Good luck catching it!
Steven Mosher | October 24, 2015 at 10:52 pm |
Thanks, Mosh. As you point out, all known methods have problems. But my claim still remains that the satellites give us the best, most internally consistent temperature records. Looking at only one metric, the satellite records have orders of magnitude better coverage than the surface records.
And while the satellites have an analog of “station moves”, and an analog of “changing thermometers”, what they don’t have are undocumented station moves and undocumented thermometer changes, which are the bane of the surface records.
Finally, you claim that “Uhi… Nope but Uhi is small. Look at MAT” … I’ve looked at the MAT (marine air temperature), and it is quite different from the land station results, so I’m not sure what you mean by that. I’ve also noted that the Berkeley Earth averaging method adjusts the marine (buoy) temperature records, which seems quite strange to me, and cuts against your argument about MAT vs land temps. Finally, I don’t see how you could draw any general conclusions about UHI (urban heat islands) from the MAT in any case. We have good documentation of things like up to a 6°C winter UHI in Barrow, Alaska … and since that is the only station for hundreds and hundreds of miles, your claim that the effect of that is “small” seems quite doubtful. Heck, GISS is extrapolating temperatures 1200 km. from Barrow using those UHI-corrupted temperatures … and you think they don’t make a difference? How does that work?
In any case, if you have evidence that “UHI is small”, perhaps you could provide a link. I haven’t seen it, but that means little with as much information as is out there.
Thanks as always for your comments, they’re sometimes cryptic but always interesting,
w.
Valid. Would it be better to say, however, that the satellite systems give us the more methodologically consistent temperature records relative to the artifact-raddled surface surface stations’ thermometry?
Mosher argues that the other crap is just as bad as his crap. But apparently his team does a better job of turning the crap into a pile of gold. Even better than Rumpelstiltskin did with straw.
So let’s go spend another trillion. ‘Cause all crap is equal, but some crap is more equal than others’.
Most of the time Mosher is just taking pot shots at you. For his tribe. He is just needling you.
Jim2: “Most of the time Mosher is just taking pot shots at you. For his tribe. He is just needling you.”
Just common or garden tr0lling, in other words.
Willis
” But my claim still remains that the satellites give us the best, most internally consistent temperature records. Looking at only one metric, the satellite records have orders of magnitude better coverage than the surface records.”
the only problem is that better coverage doesnt buy you anything except
a reduction in spatial uncertainty.
next… check the coverage that matters. the coverage of the radiosond data that is used to “verify” the sat records..
Bottom line… There is reallly no place to stand to say that one system is better than another… except perhaps CRN…
more on that latter..
Steven Mosher,
It’s obvious that you believe that measuring constantly changing air temperatures will provide a window into the future.
It won’t, any more than measuring preciptation, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, cloud cover, base, type, and depth, evaporation, sunshine hours, or insolation intensity will.
Completely and utterly pointless. As a hobby, it may be satisfying to you. To ascribe any more usefulness to your hobby than the guy who decided to use a manual adding machine to print out every whole number between 1 and 1,000,000, is possibly erroneous.
What value to you see in your hobby? Why not study alchemy, like Sir Isaac Newton? Don’t you believe it is useful? Or maybe climatology – there’s a fine, well paid hobby!
Cheers.
“Sat temps have the VERY BEST sampling density of any of the atmospheric temp methods.”
I note that people say this without really understanding the meaning of the term over sampled.
More sampling doesn’t buy you that much when the field is highly correlated.
Also as Willis proved you can account for almost all of the variance in temperature from latitude and altitude.
You don’t need that many samples.
Ask Tony b about cet
Also, the sats measurement instruments precisely measure the various incoming microwaves. I dare say the sat error bars are smaller than those in the hit and miss thermometer readings.
You can argue about the processing, but that has been vetted in published papers and the resulting temps correlate well with radiosonde data.
All in all, sats are much more reliable than hit and miss ground thermometer readings. Although the modern ground stations are much more reliable that in years past. But it’s the years past readings that are suspect.
And yet, they’re dead wrong. But I will grant they agree with your politics. Don’t fool yourself.
Certainly there is a pause in both RSS and in UAH. And certainly NCEI and NASA have been ‘adjusted’ (Karl 2015 is latest overt attempt). As for statistical validity, see McKitrick’s 2014 paper doing all the heavy lifting to correct for autocorrelation. Depending on which data set, a statistically valid ‘pause’ for 16, 19, or 26 years.
Finally, your onservations about hot years do not bear on the pause issue. And, 2015 will NOT be the warmest year on record in either of the satellite records, DESPITE the El Nino.
This just illustrates what a lousy job they do at estimating the surface air temperature.
Per ristvans ref to Ross McKitrick:
Thanks David.
JCH:”This just illustrates what a lousy job they do at estimating the surface air temperature.”
So, the radiosondes that agree with the sats also do a lousy job? How many techniques will you slime to fabricate your propaganda?
http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air-temperature/validation
The cooling trend in UAH:USA48 is pretty close to the cooling trend in USCRN (new pristine data set) and also to ClimDiv.
This validates the data collection procedures of UAH and RSS and show GISS and HadCrut up for the fabricated mess that they are.
In fact, because the 1998 El Nino step of approx 0.26C is the only warming in the whole of the satellite record, there is absolutely no CO2 warming signal in the whole of that 37 years of satellite data.. NONE whatsoever.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/plot/rss/from:2001.2/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1996/trend/plot/rss/from:2001.2/trend/offset:-.26
RSS and UAH adjust all of their data. And both RSS and UAH show the planet has continued to warm for the past 16,18, or 26 years, all one has to do is look at any of their graphs to see it.
Lou maytrees
Asserting that a refereed paper is wrong without addressing the method or statistics is meaningless. Try a substantive comment addressing McKitrick’s published statistical findings.
Lou Maytrees
Perhaps you can understand a least squares fit of the RSS satellite lower tropospheric temperatures. See the flat temperature trend (aka “pause”/”hiatus”) for 224 months – 18 years 8 months calculated and graphed by Christopher Lord Monckton.
The surface air temperature is measured at two meters above the land surface.
Weather balloons?
http://www.tshirtlaundry.com/assets/images/photos/Lmao9-30-2014-2.jpg
Rud. ” Certainly there is a pause in both RSS and in UAH.”
There is no certainty.
There is no pause IN the data. First you have to pick a model. Then fit the model. Then read the trend in the model. Data have no trend. Models do.
And the choice of models is not certain.
Mosher still attempts to conflate the iffy, approximated, and under-powered climate model to the well-understood process of converting the microwave signal from atmospheric gasses into temperatures and other data. One is currently impossible to model. In comparison, the MSU/AMSU process is easy-peasy.
Steven Mosher,
You wrote –
“There is no certainty.”
In practical terms, there sure is. The Earth has cooled since its creation, you will die, and Governments will keep taxing the populace.
If you want to perform the Warmist fire dance, leaping in all directions furiously picking nits, just concentrate on the first question, and demonstrate the opposite, ie that the Earth has warmed since its creation, without looking like a complete tosser and a waste of oxygen.
You may not need my assistance to look foolish, but feel free to ask if you do.
Cheers.
Jim2
See radiative transfer.
Mosh wrote
“Data have no trend. Models do.”
Do not think I’ll bite so quickly on that, Mosh. To ask if data have a trend requires at least a conceptual model of trend–one has to define what one means when asking the question. Or from another perspective, trend is a qualitative attribute; seems cognition gets balled up in there.
jim2
“Mosher still attempts to conflate the iffy, approximated, and under-powered climate model to the well-understood process of converting the microwave signal from atmospheric gasses into temperatures and other data. One is currently impossible to model. In comparison, the MSU/AMSU process is easy-peasy.”
Look at the code and you’ll see that you are wrong.
Plus RSS adjusts their data with a GCM.
Didnt know that did you?
mwgrat
“Do not think I’ll bite so quickly on that, Mosh. To ask if data have a trend requires at least a conceptual model of trend–one has to define what one means when asking the question. Or from another perspective, trend is a qualitative attribute; seems cognition gets balled up in there.”
No it is pretty simple. the data QUA data have no trend. its merely X and Y. to GET a trend you have to Assert a data generation MODEL.
then you test… can this model produce that data. and the trend is read off THE MODEL..
Briggs has a good essay on this.
Mosh,
Looking at the context –
There is no pause IN the data. First you have to pick a model. Then fit the model. Then read the trend in the model. [The(se)] Data have no trend. [The] Models do.
I read last two sentences with loss of specificity and as a general assertion while regarding data as a set of ntuples including observation and location (or time, etc.). Of course the is the matter of data reduction, processing….
So I’ll stand pat on my comment given that read. Thanks for your clarification.
Lou,
whether or not the last 5 or 6 years are the warmest or not is irrelevant to the topic of there being a pause. Note it is also referred to as a plateau. As in you climb up from the valley and reach the top plateau. You now continue on walking. Your elevation doesn’t change significantly. Because you are already on the plateau.
Perhaps you should find another topic of interest. You are overmatched on this one.
Tim, you are obviously overmatched by the meaning of words. A definition of plateau is ‘a state of little or no change following a period of activity’. With 6 of the past 11 years being even warmer than 1998, when the alleged ‘pause’/plateau you claim started, that is not little or no change, its a 56% increase of activity in the last 11 years that is all above that plateau line. Its the exact opposite of a ‘pause’/plateau.
Walking up the hill, it got steeper after 1998.
Steeper.
So there was no plateau before 2006.
how the pause since ~1998 fooled some very smart people
With 6 of the past 11 years being even warmer than 1998,
=========
then 5 of the past 11 were cooler. which sounds a whole lot like things are on overage pretty much unchanged since 1998. about 1/2 were warmer the other half cooler.
yes ferd, with your kind of logic, the 1990s, where 9 of the 10 years were below the very high anomaly of 1998, the planet must have been cooling then too.
This lewd mattress character is amusing.
LOL thanks Dom, glad to keep you amused. But not half as amusing as yours and all the other nonsense replies from y’all denier folk.
You are no longer amusing, lewd mattress. Send in another clown.
aww wazzamatter Dom, teh record breaking global 2015 warm got you down a bit?
Lou maytrees,
As 2015 has not finished yet, are you perhaps referring to 2014, which, according to NASA had 1 chance in 3 of being THE HOTTEST YEAR EVAH (well, apart from the past, of course).
The dim leading the gullible, perhaps?
Cheers.
Mike F, Your misunderstanding of the ‘percentages’ for 2014 that NASA used and their meaning only shows your own ideological gullibility. But i understand, the Maths can be very hard to do.
And sorry that you have trouble keeping up with current affairs but the first 9 months of 2015 have been the warmest global surface temp average yet recorded for that period. So yep, the year is 2015 and its record warm whether you choose to understand it or not.
cheers to you mate
Lou maytrees,
Gavin Schmidt quote re 2014 being HOTTEST YEAR EVAH! –
“It is *likely* to have been the warmest year for the planet. Exact estimates of that likelihood are difficult to calculate (though a simple calculation we did – assuming that errors are uncorrelated from one year to another – does suggest ~38%, [which is] some one and a half times more than 2010,” he said. “With the same assumptions, the chances that 2014 was warmer than 2010 is about 60%.”
So yes, I apologise. I rounded the probablity to cope with the mathematical ability of the average Warmist.
Notice Gavin’s words. It’s likely, it’s difficult, it suggests, assumptions. Obviously wishing and hoping. As I pointed out, 2014 was not nearly as hot as the past.
You must be a Warmist to deny that before the crust solidified, it was colder than you claim 2015 will be. Long term average? Surely you want to use the longest there is, lest you be accused of cherry picking?
Don’t like facts and reality? Just deny them – other dim and gullible Warmists do. It is well known that pixie dust, or unicorn faeces have superior warming powers to CO2, which has precisely none. As a matter of fact, interposing CO2 between a radiation source and target reduces the amount of radiation reaching the target, causing a reduction in temperature.
Pixie dust, or unicorn faeces, allow radiation to pass unhindered.
All quite simple, really.
As matter of interest, what do you think will happen if the climate stops changing? Does the concept of climate change bother you?
Cheers.
MikeF, LOL real nice gish gallop into a strange fantasy world. Me mind went blank when you veered off into talking about the earths crust and pixie dust, etc.
But anyway, the temp readings have error margins so 2014 at 38% and 1998 at 9% only means that 2014 was 4+ times more likely to be the warmer year than 1998. So its not 1 in 3 as you ideologically misclaim, its really 4+ x’s more likely. Its the Maths.
And sorry, not interested in answering silly questions that are only meant to intentionally manipulate.
Cheers
MikeF, of course the climate has changed over the 4.5B years the planet has existed. No one argues that. What is different now is that the planet has never had a species living on it that has added 40% more CO2 to its atmosphere in115 years time. We are in that experiment now.
The sun and the biome conspire to nearly irreversibly sequester carbon. Gaia gazes fondly and thankfully at her newborn carbon-freeing prodigy.
===================
Lou,
And yet, over the longest average, the Earth cooled. Molten to not molten.
Even when CO2 was higher than the present, the temperature kept dropping. Don’t you find that at all odd?
Cheers.
Pingback: Climate closure (?) | Enjeux énergies et environnement
He doesn’t understand natural variability and is falling into the same mistake as so many others of assuming it is white noise when is 1/f
Scottish Sceptic
More particularly its Hurst Kolmogorov Dynamics (aka climate persistence). In essence, natural variability is about twice as large with different persistence trends from random noise often assumed by climate modelers. See D. Koutsoyiannis et al. at ITIA
e.g., See Fig. 2 in The Hurst phenomenon and fractional Gaussian noise made easy
More detailed: Markonis, Y., and D. Koutsoyiannis, Climatic variability over time scales spanning nine orders of magnitude: Connecting Milankovitch cycles with Hurst–Kolmogorov dynamics, Surveys in Geophysics, 34 (2), 181–207, 2013.
So the alarmists “Extreme weather” due to “Climate change” is in reality but common natural variations when you understand the statistics of persistence.
They pretty much all pay attention to the AMO, which is pointless.
Trenberth is one of the few who pays attention to the PDO.
It’s not pointless to economies in Europe or the arctic. So, what happens when the AMO is negative, the PDO is in a negative phase, the PDO is stongly positive, there is a moderately strong el Nino, the circum-polar vortex is weak, and the NH jet-stream gets wavey?
I think we’ll see a remarkably warm winter-spring, in the northern most latitudes and the upper troposphere.
The AMO goes where the ACO2-driven GMST goes, so its going negative is unlikely to happen again for a very very very long time.
JCH
Interesting comment. Unlike most, yours is one that can actually be confirmed in a short time period. Kudos for that.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/from:1850/to:2015
He lost me at “denialist fantasies”. If the pause was to be expected then why are so many advocates trying to prove that it doesn’t exist? The debate seems to be split down an ideological divide with one side, mostly progressive with democratic socialist leanings and the other side more classical liberal-libertarian or conservative leanings. Shaun Lovejoy appears to be in the progressive group as shown on his linked in page:
Causes Shaun cares about:
Environment
Human Rights
Politics
Science and Technology
So I question his conclusions due to his ideological bias. That, and this statement is just plain non-sense:
“By estimating the probabilities of centennial-scale preindustrial temperature changes, with 99.9% confidence we are able to reject the denialist hypothesis that the industrial age warming was from solar, volcanic, or other natural causes, leaving anthropogenic origin as the only alternative.
1940-1980 was a period of 40 years during which man started spewing CO2, yet temperature was flat. 40 years. The same thing now has happened for the past 18 years. Where’s the correlation, Warmists?
Like Karl et AL it’s a matter of selectivity. First up,
be selective about long term temp-measurements,
fergit pre-industrial warming, Roman and Medieval.
The ‘Pause’ ? Well yer select the homogenized temps
not the danged inconvenient satellite recorded data.
Next be selective about proxies, ahem, them Yarmal
trees, those precious few, jest the ones that showed
a hockey schtick. And upside down Tiljender … is that
in there somewhere?
“Even without fancy statistics or special knowledge, it is easy to see that the temperature (plotted in green) increases very nearly linearly with some additional fluctuations…”
Yeah, that’s not hard to do when the temperatures have specifically been adjusted to track CO2 concentration.
https://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/screenhunter_3233-oct-01-22-59.gif
This is what we call “drinking your own bathwater”.
What a great chart! Maybe the adjustments are due to the increasing CO2 modifying the brains of the adjusters. Just a thought.
David
I tracked co2 against CET a couple of years ago and think the outcome is more realistic than the chart above
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/clip_image0028.jpg
(Note-there was a record 2014 and to date the 2015 anomaly is around 0.2C.)
Temperatures now are roughly at the same anomaly as in 1990, in other words the temperature increases we saw during the 1990’s (in the UK) has been lost this century despite further rises in co2.
tonyb
tonyb
Are there adjustments to the recent historical record temperatures from 1880 or 1930 with the past cooled and the recent period heated?
Scott
I thought so. I came across it in the thread here.
Scott
Last year I went to the MET Office and met David Parker who originally compiled the 1772 version of CET that I have posted. I have also met some of the others there who compile the information.
To answer your inferred question, no I can’t believe that as soon as I left the building they had a cup of tea as they falsified data.
All temperature data goes through a variety of filters and peer reviewed, which is not to say I would always agree with adjustments, but they are transparent.
CET takes data from a number of stations from the centre of the country. These periodically change when, for example, it is felt that due to urbanisation a station is no longer representative. Britain is only the size of New York state and has 60 million people and I suspect the allowance for UHI is not enough.
However, as a gardener I can confirm that yes, the temperatures warmed up throughout the 1990’s and yes, they have definitely cooled down since.
Our warmest ever year (in the last 500) was probably around 1540 and the coldest around 1740 so I would say we are currently operating within the range of natural variability.
Why the temperature has risen and fallen in recent decades I have no theories other than wind direction/sun hours/jet stream/cloud cover, all must have an impact
tonyb
David Wojick: “What a great chart!”
Yes, isn’t it just!
This sums up the attitude of the climate “scientists”:
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
~ Prof. Chris Folland ~ (Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research)
I mean, who would be so foolish as to believe a $10 thermometer when it disagrees with the output of a $100,000,000
computer gameclimate model? That would clearly be ridiculous, so obviously the data has to be Mannipulated to match the model output.Stands to reason, right?
It is called iteration. Let us hope this approach in this case goes the way of the fabled Oomey Goomey bird which iterated in ever decreasing circles until it flew up its own fundamental orifice.
Bartemis
Contrast CO2 lagging temperature in the ice cores – with much LONGER lags when cooling vs when warming. Expelling CO2 when warming is relatively constant and fast while absorbing CO2 when cooling takes much longer.
ushcn is not the world.
is single digit percentages..
And we dont even use the data
Then, show me the same plot for the data you do use.
Lovejoy is right. All the denialist climate scientists such as Lindzen and Curry are rapidly getting debunked in their views. And it is just not AGW but elementary climate science behaviors that the denialists get wrong
http://contextearth.com/2015/10/22/pukites-model-of-the-quasi-biennial-oscillation/
Webby, you have been missed. As for rapid debunking, you have apparently chosen the wromg side. Care to be a bit more factually explicit, so we can counter with many verifiable facts (heck, for you I will even get off iPad and onto a real computer to provide reference links in replies…like in my ebooks).
Lets maybe start with Bjorn Stevens recent paper seeming to support, rather than debunk, Lindzen’s adaptive infrared iris hypothesis– something Judith covered recently in your absence. Or, we could start with Koonan’s APS testimony, for example the missing tropical troposphere hotspot. Or, we could start with the lack of accelerating SLR. Or the recovery of Arctic ice, or the non-decline of polar bears. Or anywhere else on the topic of CAGW you might wish to begin. Consider the glove thrown. Your move.
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSK6LOOUEAADnQ6.png
Hi WHT. Long time no see. How about a critique of the latest Karl “piece?”
The strongest critique I have found came from James Hansen.
Either way, it is not going to make a bit of difference. ACO2 warming is shooting back up the tailpipe.
WebHubTelescope: “Lovejoy is right.”
Well, that settles it.
If you believe that, it’s sure to be a load of old donkey droppings.
Couple of things:
I went looking for the CO2 forcing index but couldn’t easily find. Can anyone post a link? Out of idle curiosity I just wanted to fit a linear model to the 20th century and see how well it performed in the 19th and 21st.
In searching I did find this post from RealClimate back in 2007 that essential ran the same argument, similarly ending with a QED :). http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/the-co2-problem-in-6-easy-steps/
I see EOS claims: “Eos is the leading source for trustworthy news and perspectives about the Earth and space sciences and their impact.” Neither news or trustworthy on this account, but perhaps a perspective.
Shouldn’t have bothered really – it all gets less clear.
Lovelock is reporting on his 2014 “Return periods of global climate fluctuations and the pause” in which he says “The relatively accurate CO2 concentration (ρCO2) reconstructions from [Frank et al., 2010] were used to determine log2ρCO2. Since the reconstruction was only up to 2004, we extended it to 2013 using annually averaged Mauna Loa (i.e. local) concentrations and subtracted 5.3 ppm in order to estimate the global average concentration in optimal accord with the CO2 reconstruction over their common period, 1959-2004.”
Frank et al. is “Ensemble reconstruction constraints on the global carbon cycle sensitivity to climate” that uses pre-industrial CO2 and temp to constrain positive feedback from CO2 on temp. It doesn’t seem to use or report CO2 concentration estimates beyond the 19th century, and reports as its source as: “Highly resolved CO2 data spanning the past millennium were compiled from Antarctica. Three CO2 histories were considered: one based on the Dronning Maud Land … data only, one based on the Law Dome … and one considering the combination of these data plus sparse measurements from the South Pole …”.
So I guess there’s my answer. A reference to a paper that at least on the face of it doesn’t seem to directly report the index in question (letter, methods or supp. info.) as far as I can see.
I think he is just defining ‘CO2 forcing index’ as log(CO2 density) as it says on his graph.
It’s where he got the CO2 reconstruction from that was of interest so I could replicate.
So Judith, are you telling us that CO2 emissions do not pose a danger and that we should continue dumping it into the atmosphere? Do you really think the planetary system can effectively absorb what we are expelling without any adverse consequences? Or are you just interested in taking a contrary position? Is this responsible skepticism or irresponsible avoidance? Wouldn’t it be better to figure out the discrepancies rather than feeding the denial that there is a problem of human making?
I am critizing the logic and arguments of a published paper. Given these criticisms, I don’t think this paper adds support to either side of the debate.
UR, please read my last two ebooks. You presume much in your comment. It turns out that the planet can absorb what is being emitted, within the constraints of what fossil fuels have previously sequestered. Learn the difference between C3 and C4 photosynthesis. Learn about greening. Learn about biological CO2 sequestration (carbon sinks). Learn about the intrinsic fatal weaknesses in all GCM climate models (a non-book summary free over at WUWT). Learn about the attribution problem. And a bunch of related stuff. Then get back. Your question indicAtes much ignorance of actual facts and science. Translation, you drank the CoolAid, Zombie.
I think history might one-day show that the shift from industrial grain based diet to more diverse fruit, vegetable, fish diet is mostly possible because of increasing CO2.
I wonder how much organic produce growth is primarly due to nitrogen and phosphorus from industrial farm by-products (manuer and urine) and high CO2 emissions, particularly where we grow food.
I wonder if fashionable, “sustainable” foods would be sustainable without increasing emissions?
Burbles Uncle Robot:
Well, if she’s not, I am. The evidence (remember EVIDENCE, putzele? as in factual reality valid where your neurotic whackjobbery is not, and beyond the control of that government thuggery for which you lust?) holds that your catastrophist caterwauling is nothing more than null noise.
This has been my argument for years. If the hockey team thugs were put under oath and subject to cross-examination by a competent attorney, their credibility would be shredded so completely that the jurors would be asking the judge if they had the power to sentence the experts.
The system is already at the least is removing 19 billion tons of co2 each year. That compares to the 12 billion that was produced in 1965. How is the system removing 7 billion more tons than was produced in all of 1965? How is that possible when we have increased production and shrinking sinks? For example the Arctic tundra is supposedly releasing more co2, the oceans are warmer, therefore the capacity is lower, and millions of acres of tropical forest have been cut down. Also, there is another problem, 1998 remains the highest year of co2 increase ppm in the face of growing production of co2 since then. Is the sink constant or expanding? If it was constant then how could there possibly be an increase in co2 ppm in 1965? If the size is limited, then was there other sources that led to an increase in co2 ppm?
I have a lot of questions.
Uncle Robot
Check out The Many Benefits of CO2. CO2Science.org
Greenhouse growers love CO2. So much so that they PAY extra to BUY CO2 and inject it. eg. to 250% of ambient to 1000 ppm.
Carbon Dioxide In Greenhouses Government of Canada.
Earth’s most bio productive ages had 5000 to 7000 ppm CO2
We currently are CO2 starved.
Uncle asks–“Do you really think the planetary system can effectively absorb what we are expelling without any adverse consequences?”
Some “alarmists” like to ask that question but it actually quite silly. Of course there will be “adverse consequences” somewhere sometime. The better question is whether there is reliable evidence that human CO2 emissions will result in a worse overall climate. You can ask this question for either an individual nation or the planet overall.
In neither case is the reliable evidence of net harms
The amount of CO2 we can expel is limited by fossil fuel resources, the peak CO2 concentration is likely to be limited to about 630 ppm (medium confidence). The world faces more important problems, including the public deficit, religious conflicts, the rise of Chinese style ex communist now fascist dictatorships, and the growing tendency to distort information and lie to the public.
+1000
We tried to force bio-fuels too early. Most of the world is still dependent on cheap carbs. But if concentration get high enough, that could change as more variety becomes economical as vegetables become more productive and grasses produce more carbs relative to protein (so it may make more sense to use them to produce meat, bio-fuels, and, of course, tasty social beverages).
But sinks are growing faster than our emissions. We should be more worried about whether we can keep concentration high enough to see the projected benefits.
Paul Erhlich gets a lot of flack for being consistently wrong, but the general idea is not. Malthusian events happen all the time in biology on smaller scales. Past performance is not a guarantee of future success. He may be wrong until he’s not.
The biggest risks of global warming are societal, our tendency to create problems when none exist and our tendency to ignore real risks of the past when we experience long boom times.
The biggest problem of global warming way be that the benefits cause us to grow for lean times to come. Perhaps it is contributing to unusually good weather, food productivity, water availability etc. On top of that, we may have been incredibly lucky during the past 50 years. We expanded into riskier territory where people just didn’t go in the past and just didn’t get hit with the disasters that kept people away in the past.
The biggest problem of global warming may be that the benefits cause us to over-grow for lean times to come.
A useful point, but would you rather or rather not have had the Holocene?
Also, the clear solution seems to be keeping energy cheap enough to raise all the people out of abject poverty and into a state rich enough to adapt to the coming cooling, to the extent that such can be done.
We may not have much time left to do this. Glad you’re aware of the danger.
==================
What problem. As someone posted in this thread, by every objective measure, our world has improved dramatically as co2 has gone from 300 to 400 ppm. Because of fossil fuels, including coal, we can provide such minor necessities as clean drinking water, improved food production, improved biomedical research and health care. The list goes on. Possibly the biggest lie of all in the entire agw meme is that fossil fuel use causes great harm while producing no benefit.
Why do you assume the consequences must be adverse?
A victim of exaggerated dangers and unnecessary guilt. Our liberation of this tiny aliquot of fossilized carbon can only have long term benefits. It is a perpetual task to attempt to demonize our use of fossil fuels, and our release of the monumentally marvelous compound, CO2.
================
Uncle Robot.
Sort of says it all. Preprogrammed to throw out non-science, emotion based comments.
Unc,
Get a clue. Science can’t tell us with much accuracy what sort of consequences increasing CO2 concentrations will have. Hell, science can’t give us an accurate accounting of how “the planetary system” cycles CO2. For example, it was just a couple of years ago they discovered huge plankton blooms off of South America. No idea how long they have been happening or how much CO2 gets absorbed by these blooms.
To date climate change due to CO2 is a hypothesis. Look up what a hypothesis is and then get back to us.
Since every question has been answered and all disputes settled (thanks, Shaun!) can we cut off all future funding for climate researchers and move it something more productive?
Standing ovation! The problem is they would probably want to use the money to build windmills.
+ many. A true zinger.
I would vote we spend some of the money searching for asteroids that might hit Earth and prepare to deflect them. It is not an if another asteroid will hit us, it is a when and where and how big and how fast will the next asteroid hit.
We have been really lucky for 60 million years. asteroids have hit and done a lot of damage, but not where many people were injured, at least, not many who survived to tell us.
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/21/us/asteroid-earth-nasa-halloween-feat/index.html
Well said and thank you for a valuable takedown of the latest dreck from EOS.
Why is Transactions of the American Geophysical Union publishing dreck that insists on using denialist for anyone who disagrees? As I see it there are those within the ‘consensus’ who want to make it impossible to ‘virtue signal’ in the area of climate without using denialist or denier of one’s enemies. They have been much displeased by small departures from the true way this year. Thus the use of the esteemed organ of the AGU to drive home the party line.
To me the worst bit seems to be the 1:3M probability claim. That’s complete drivel. It’s a disgrace that any scientist should say such a thing.
Of course EOS is not a proper scientific journal and has form for activist drivel.
Worse, he is supposed to be a physics professor at McGill. A leading Canadian University, according to them. Aren’t such profs supposed to learn statistics, probability, and the rest of applied math theory as undergrads? Then teach same? Feynman is somewhere groaning.
and not in a good way…..
My high school physics teacher, “If two variables correlate well in a complex system with many variables that are not well understood, never assume causation. Do the hard work to understand the whole system and start over with your analysis.”
The Emperor’s New Models: UNPREDICTABLE, INSIGNIFICANT & lack skill
From Talim’s preliminary results, given their very large number of variables,
John Christy shows the mean of 102 CMIP5 climate model predictions from 1979 -2014 are ~ 400% hotter than the actual mid tropospheric tropical temperature since then.
Valen Johnson calls for 5 time more stringent statistics for results to be significant or highly significant:
Consequently, CMIP5 global climate models lack the skill needed for public policy. They are now just “INsignificant” or actually “highly INsignificant”
The Global Warming Audit papers show climate models violating most principles of scientific forecasting.
von Neumann said:
As quoted by Freeman Dyson in “A meeting with Enrico Fermi” in Nature 427 (22 January 2004) p. 297; and
Boris Porfiriev who affirms
Climate Change as Environmental and Economic Hazard p 196.
Climate scientists advocating catastrophic anthropogenic global warming are deceiving themselves and being misled by Noble Cause Corruption
Nonsense. If that was true, why haven’t climate scientists been able to explain all previous warmings with equal certainty?
Anyway, so what. Does it matter? Are GHG emissions doing more harm or mor good? Where is the persuasive, objective, unbiased evidence the GHG emisisons are likely to do more harm than good this century?
And, since all articles like this are in reality advocacy for mitigation, policies, where is the persuasive case that advocated mitigation policies will do more good than harm?
Oh no he di’in’t… Or, did he call scientists like Shaun Lovejoy, bleeders?
There’s a difference between beliefs that delay us in learning the real truth and those that kill! The victims of the fables and fantasies of the professional global warming alarmist community in the West, live out of sight in the developing and third world.
A few more holes:
Temperature and CO2 are auto-correlated time series. False correlations are to be expected.
Lovejoy’s argument appears to be consistent with the argument that the CO2 increase is caused by the temperature increase.
Take the CO2-temperature correlation and extrapolate to 2100. The temperature increase over pre-industrial is likely under 2.0 K (using total forcing and T gives 1.8 K). So there is no pressing problem.
Global Warming seems to be highly correlated with unemployment and the minimum wage:
http://politicalderby.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Unemployment-and-Minimum-Wage.jpg?
See also http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/01/a-way-to-calculate-effective-n/
Lovejoy’s logic is the nuttiest “proof” yet. Hundreds of natural and social functions could be matched to the CO2 curve in his figure one. Virtually anything that has or does grow over time would be a “fit”.
If I’m not mistaken, Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, presented a paper On the recovery from the Little Ice Age that used pretty much the same argument as Lovejoy to show that the linear rise in temperature since 1880 is a natural, ongoing continuation of the warming that ended the little ice age.
Lovejoy’s argument would be more convincing if he were able to demonstrate that there was a lower rate of increase from 1880 to 1950 (recovery from LIA), and then a higher rate of increase from 1950 to the present. Basically, he has undermined the detection of unprecedented warming in the latter half of the 20th century; he has shown that the rate of warming in the latter half of the 20th century, which is supposed to be due to anthropogenic CO2, is indistinguishable from the rate of warming in the first half of the 20th century, which is supposed to be due to natural variation. That is, the warming in the latter half of the 20th century is a continuation of the natual warming in the first half of the 20th century. He has demonstrated the opposite of what he intended.
A more accessible version of Dr. Akasofu’s argument can be found on Ole Humlum’s website climate4you.com. See the article “20080911: Is the global temperature increase 1981-2005 unique compared to the general temperature rise since the end of the Little Ice Age?” on the “Climate Reflections” page.
nhill,
“Lovejoy’s argument would be more convincing if he were able to demonstrate that there was a lower rate of increase from 1880 to 1950 (recovery from LIA), and then a higher rate of increase from 1950 to the present.”
I have done such fits myself, using the various available temperature data sets (global, land, sea). The slopes for the early period (I used 1880-1947 and 1895-1954) were from 1/3 to 2/3 of the slopes for the later period (I used 1947-2014 and 1955-2014) depending on the data set used. The early and late periods each cover roughly one full cycle of the stadium wave, so that should not have much effect. It is very hard to explain such results unless there is some anthropogenic contribution.
But that, of course, is not the issue. There is surely some anthropogenic warming. The question is whether that warming is enough to worry about. It isn’t, IMO. And Lovejoy’s argument is, at best, demolishing a straw man.
Mike M,
If one generates heat, a rise in temperature will assuredly follow. If one burns stuff to generate heat, CO2 and H2O will assuredly follow.
How much warming is due to CO2, and how much due to generating heat?
How hot is a cylinder of highly compressed CO2 compared to an empty cylinder (1bar) of CO2, after both cool to ambient?
So, anthropogenic warming, sure. The reason, totally unrelated to CO2 in the atmosphere.
Cheers.
“How hot is a cylinder of highly compressed CO2 compared to an empty cylinder (1bar) of CO2, after both cool to ambient?”
This is a false analogy to the atmosphere for 2 reasons:
1. If your cylinders were 100km tall like our atmosphere, a Boltzmann distribution within the gravity field would indeed establish a gravito-thermal temperature gradient just like our atmosphere. This is explained in the Feynman lectures, Vol. 1, Chapter 40 on the statistical mechanics of our atmosphere, and by Carnot’s book, Maxwell’s book Theory of Heat, etc etc
2. If your cylinder had a leak (just like a real atmosphere) and therefore you had to use a compressor (like the force of gravity F=mg) to continuously fill the cylinder to maintain the pressure, that cylinder would indeed maintain a temperature higher than ambient. This is what actually happens in the atmosphere continuously to maintain the tropospheric 68K temperature gradient. Your analogy does not apply to the atmosphere since it assumes a static, closed cylinder without the continuous expansion, rising and cooling of air parcels, as well as the compression, falling, and warming of air parcels which continuously maintains the gravito-thermal GHE/lapse rate.
hockeyschtick,
I wasn’t using an analogy. Most climate science analogies are both misleading and irrelevant.
I asked a simple question. It has nothing to do with the atmosphere, but much to do with the alleged heat trapping or accumulating properties of CO2.
A CO2 cylinder is not 100 km high, nor are such likely to be available in the foreseeable future. I suggest you reread Feynman. Nowhere does he support your contention. As he points out – “It is not an isothermal atmosphere.” This hardly surprising. The base of the atmosphere is sitting on comparatively warm (although solid) rock at, say, 288 K, whilst the upper reaches are progressively closer to the 4 K of outer space.
Under such circumstances, there must be, and is, a thermal gradient. In general, at night, the atmosphere calms down and becomes stable. No external heat source to stir things up. The warm, denser air, sits quietly at the bottom of the atmosphere. Density, rather than heat content, determines flotation. An example of this is seen in convection free solar ponds, where denser saline solution at the bottom of the pond can be heated by the sun to 90 C or so, without convection through overlaying cooler water.
Gravity is a force. People who try to build gravity motors, or, like Graeff, to extract energy created by a gravito-thermal device, can even get patents in the US. It still doesn’t work!
But back to my question, and your lateral arabesque in relation to an answer.
Neither cylinder contains a leak. At 250 K, 273 K, 300 K, they will both be at the same temperature, as would be a cylinder of nitrogen, oxygen, neon and so on. No magical properties. No gravito-thermal effect. No phlogiston or universal ether, either. Conventional physics has simpler answers, which seem to be experimentally verifiable so far.
Hmmm. I appear to have answered my own rhetorical question. If you disagree with my answer, you might like to tell me why two or more objects at the same temperature, (as per my original question), are somehow at different temperatures. You might have trouble, unless you are a Warmist.
Cheers.
Mike Flynn,
You asked “How much warming is due to CO2, and how much due to generating heat?”
Roughly 99% and 1%. Global energy use is ballpark 10 TW = 1e13 W (within a factor of 2). Surface area of the earth is 500 million square kilometers = 5e14 m^2. So the direct heating is roughly 0.02 W/m^2. Anthropogenic radiative forcing is 100 times that.
“A CO2 cylinder is not 100 km high, nor are such likely to be available in the foreseeable future.”
Ever heard of a thought experiment, like the exact same one Feynman uses in his chapter of a “column extending to great heights?”
“I suggest you reread Feynman. Nowhere does he support your contention. As he points out – “It is not an isothermal atmosphere.” This hardly surprising. The base of the atmosphere is sitting on comparatively warm (although solid) rock at, say, 288 K, whilst the upper reaches are progressively closer to the 4 K of outer space.”
No, I suggest you re-read Feynman and I’ve highlighted here where he discusses the inter-conversion of gravitational potential energy PE to kinetic energy KE back-and-forth, which is what establishes the Boltzmann distribution gravito-thermal temperature gradient:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/07/feynman-explains-how-gravitational.html
“Gravity is a force. People who try to build gravity motors, or, like Graeff, to extract energy created by a gravito-thermal device, can even get patents in the US. It still doesn’t work!”
I see. I have a crazy un-patentable idea called a hot air balloon. The 10,000kg balloon first uses its kinetic energy to oppose the force of gravity, accumulating gravitational potential energy along the way until the accumulated PE exceeds the remaining KE and the ballon reaches ~ambient temperatures, at which point the 10,000kg ballon is pulled back to the surface exchanging PE for KE. This is what air parcels do in the atmosphere, and what they would also do in a 100km cylinder in a gravitational field as explained by Feynman for a PURE N2 atmosphere. Mike Flynn falsely assumes that gravity is not performing the thermodynamic Work on the balloon or air parcels, of the adiabatic expansion/cooling and adiabatic compression/warming. This is absolutely false and known since the early 1800’s. Please read up on this basic meteorology:
How Gravity continuously does Work on the atmosphere to control pressure & temperature:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-gravity-continuously-does-work-on.html
“If you disagree with my answer, you might like to tell me why two or more objects at the same temperature, (as per my original question), are somehow at different temperatures.”
I never said that. I said firstly your analogy is false, and said with the correct analogy of a leaky tank being continuously inflated, the temperature will remain higher than ambient, and the leaky tank with a higher pressure will also be even warmer than the leaky tank with less pressure as long as both are continuously inflated to maintain their respective pressures.
hockeyschtick,
Here’s a direct quote by Feynman from your reference. This is Feynman’s summation of his thought experiment.
“So, ultimately, of course, the temperature becomes the same at all heights in a gravitational field.”
Note “. . . the temperature becomes the same . . .”
He then goes on to say that reality is somewhat different, and the atmosphere is not, indeed, isothermal, and If you read Feynman’s other lectures, and his books, you will understand why. It is as I said, you will find.
I have made no analogies, as far as I am aware.
I’m not sure why you find the physics of a less dense fluid rising through a more dense fluid surprising. Your apparent contention that the force of gravity can somehow create heat without work being performed is nonsensesical.
A thousand ton rock sitting on the ground does not heat up due to gravity. A hundred kilogram weight suspended by a chain, exerts a force on the chain due to the effects of gravity, but neither chain nor weight continuously heat up.
But here’s a thought experiment for you.
A body the size of the Earth is created at absolute zero of solid iron. No additional source of energy external or internal. It has a gravity field. You apparently claim it will heat up continuously, due to the gravito thermal effect.
I say not.
Your example of the hot air balloon is nonsensical, inasmuch as you supplied quie a lot of energy to enable the flotation of the balloon through the surrounding atmosphere. Had you not done this, your balloon would have lain on the ground, an inert lump.
You misunderstand gravity, physics and heat, but at least you don’t need understanding to generate hot air.
Cheers.
“Here’s a direct quote by Feynman from your reference. This is Feynman’s summation of his thought experiment.
“So, ultimately, of course, the temperature becomes the same at all heights in a gravitational field.”
Note “. . . the temperature becomes the same . . .”
You obviously didn’t understand that this is the first assumption made in Feynman’s thought experiment, which he immediately goes on to prove is wrong.
“He then goes on to say that reality is somewhat different, and the atmosphere is not, indeed, isothermal,”
Exactly, just as I said.
“and If you read Feynman’s other lectures, and his books, you will understand why. It is as I said, you will find.”
I see. And specifically what other lectures are you referring to? Feynman’s only writings on the atmosphere I’m aware of are Vol 1 Chapter 40, and which proves all of my points, NOT yours.
“I have made no analogies, as far as I am aware.”
Ok, your apology accepted for the false gas cylinder “analogy”
“Your apparent contention that the force of gravity can somehow create heat without work being performed is nonsensesical.”
Gravity does thermodynamic WORK on GASSES, causing adiabatic compression and converting gravitational potential energy to kinetic energy. This is elementary meteorology 101, 1st Law of Thermo and the Poisson Relation, well known since the early 1800’s. Here are lecture slides for this very basic thermo:
http://clas-pages.uncc.edu/matt-eastin/files/2014/01/METR3210-adiabatic-process.ppt
“A thousand ton rock sitting on the ground does not heat up due to gravity.”
You are confusing SOLIDS with GASSES.
GASSES are compressible and subject to the Ideal GAS Law and warming with compression. Solids are not. Duh.
“A body the size of the Earth is created at absolute zero of solid iron. No additional source of energy external or internal. It has a gravity field. You apparently claim it will heat up continuously, due to the gravito thermal effect. I say not.”
Another false analogy. There would be NO atmosphere with Earth at absolute zero, and no compressible gases, since all of the N2 and O2 would collapse to the frozen surface. Duh.
“Your example of the hot air balloon is nonsensical, inasmuch as you supplied quie a lot of energy to enable the flotation of the balloon through the surrounding atmosphere. Had you not done this, your balloon would have lain on the ground, an inert lump.”
Guess what? The fossil-fueled kinetic energy KE supplied to heat the balloon is exactly equal and of opposite vector to the gravitational potential energy PE, and the two types of energy are converted back and forth as Feynman explains many many times over in Chapter 40. The mathematics of such a balloon analogy, which you are afraid to address, are also in the powerpoint slides I linked to above.
“You misunderstand gravity, physics and heat, but at least you don’t need understanding to generate hot air.”
Hilarious. You know better than Poisson, Maxwell, Helmholtz, Clausius, Carnot, Feynman, Boltzmann, US Std Atmosphere 100’s of scientists, etc etc. Pray tell, specifically (give the link) did all of these giants go wrong?
hockeyschtick,
How about getting to the point of the matter.
In spite of your attempts to evade, misunderstand, falsify, and mischaracterise, the facts appear to indicate that the Earth was created with a molten surface
The surface is no longer molten. It has cooled.
It has done this in spite of gravity, CO2, models, or repeated applications of horse manure.
If you or Feynman, Poisson, Maxwell etc etc believed that the Earth has warmed over the last four and a half billion years, then yes, they were wrong. But none of them did. It’s all in your mind, isn’t it?
Can we agree that the surface of the Earth was once molten and now is not?
Cheers.
“How about getting to the point of the matter.
In spite of your attempts to evade, misunderstand, falsify, and mischaracterise, the facts appear to indicate that the Earth was created with a molten surface
The surface is no longer molten. It has cooled.
It has done this in spite of gravity, CO2, models, or repeated applications of horse manure.”
Uhhh, apparently you are unaware that the Earth formed BECAUSE of GRAVITY and the resultant PRESSURE from the gravitational force is what caused the molten core.
Regardless of this, the Young Earth was at one point a “snowball Earth” with ice at the equator, so if we cherry pick that as a starting point, the Earth has clearly warmed. Thus, your argument from 4.5 billion years ago does absolutely nothing to prove or disprove a radiative greenhouse effect, although it does ironically demonstrate that gravity controls PRESSURE, and temperature is a function of pressure.
“If you or Feynman, Poisson, Maxwell etc etc believed that the Earth has warmed over the last four and a half billion years, then yes, they were wrong. But none of them did. It’s all in your mind, isn’t it?”
I never claimed the early Earth 4.5 billion years wasn’t molten. Once, again, that is irrelevant to the Earth of the Holocene. You really should concentrate on the overwhelming proxy evidence that the Earth was warmer 1000, 2000, 3000, 6000-8000 years ago as your argument, rather than 4.5 billion years ago, which is irrelevant.
“Can we agree that the surface of the Earth was once molten and now is not?”
Sure, but that makes no difference to the Earth of the Holocene and doesn’t prove or disprove an Arrhenius GHE.
There is surely some anthropogenic warming.
Provide data that supports this. Alarmist Theory does, Alarmist Climate Models do, but Model output is always wrong. The Models are based on the Theory so the Theory must be wrong. It could be right but it is too small to measure and verify. The Theory says Temperature changes are large and the measurements show that Temperature changes are small. The Theory and Models are wrong.
Lovejoy: To a good approximation, if you double the world economy, double the carbon dioxide (CO2), double the methane and aerosol outputs, and double the land use changes, you get double the warming. This justifies using the global CO2 forcing since 1880 as a linear surrogate for all the anthropogenic forcings (L1; using CO2 equivalent yields nearly identical results).
As has been plentifully noted for other approaches, this explicitly confounds CO2 with everything else. It thus provides no new support for the CO2 part of the theory, and no new support for the campaign to divest from fossil fuels. How much warming to attribute to each component remains a mystery.
It provides a totally inadequate approach to natural variability, assuming that only the residual from the fitted function is natural variability. If, as shown in the analyses of periodicity, there is a periodic component of natural variability, and if it results from a persistent process, then this is an overestimate of the combined human effects. Whatever one may think of such a process (what Mosher on more than one occasion called “unicorns”), Lovejoy’s does not rule it out, as he claims.
The Earth surface loses heat to the atmosphere via three processes (pending further development of Vaughan Pratt’s hypothesis that the latent heat is returned to the Earth surface by the hydrological cycle.) No one has yet shown, given what is known of those three processes, that the increase in CO2 concentration ()producing the equivalent of an increase of about 4 W/m^2 downwelling LWIR at the surface) could produce even a 1C increase in surface temperature. Lovejoy completely ignores the physics of warming the surface via CO2 increase.
It would be unfortunate if this essay were to have influence.
corrrection: Lovejoy’s analysis does not rule it out, as he claims.
@MRM: (pending further development of Vaughan Pratt’s hypothesis that the latent heat is returned to the Earth surface by the hydrological cycle.)
Two corrections to that:
1. It returns in the form of sensible heat, having been previously converted from latent heat by condensation. As such the calculation in your paper that I was commenting on should add it to the thermal radiation sent back to Earth (DLWR).
2. Only a fraction of that sensible heat returns, carried by precipitation. The rest is eventually lost to space by radiation as you say. My objection to your calculation is that you assume the fraction returned to the surface is zero. For example if it is 1/3 then the contribution of your LH term to heat lost to space should reduced to 2/3 of what you have. Obviously precipitation leaving a cloud starts out with whatever sensible heat it acquired from the cloud, much of which came from the latent heat, so it is not reasonable to assume that the fraction is zero.
The same is true of a laptop’s heat pipe: although some of the sensible heat at the external end escapes, the refrigerant that is wicked back to the CPU is quite warm and therefore carries whatever sensible heat doesn’t escape back to the CPU where it together with sensible heat from the CPU are converted back to latent heat.
Obviously precipitation must carry some sensible heat back to Earth (unless it’s at absolute zero). Any “development” of that obvious fact can only consist of improved estimates of the fraction of LH returned to Earth as SH vs. the fraction lost to space as thermal radiation. Your paper assumes the fraction is negligible; can you justify that?
Incidentally, since my last comment about your paper a couple of weeks ago I realized that you had increased your 0.33 °C per doubling of CO2 to a more plausible 0.9 °C in the paragraph you added at the end that took downward radiation into account. My apologies for overlooking it, I had been expecting to see it higher up in the paper since it’s not reasonable to assume zero downward longwave radiation. 0.9 is a plausible estimate for no-feedback sensitivity when using indirect approaches to estimating it such as yours based on frequency of lightning strikes.
To a good approximation, if you double the world economy, double the carbon dioxide (CO2), double the methane and aerosol outputs, and double the land use changes, you get double the warming. This justifies using the global CO2 forcing since 1880 as a linear surrogate for all the anthropogenic forcings (L1; using CO2 equivalent yields nearly identical results).
That is what we did
Vaughan Pratt: 2. Only a fraction of that sensible heat returns, carried by precipitation. The rest is eventually lost to space by radiation as you say. My objection to your calculation is that you assume the fraction returned to the surface is zero.
The energy flow diagrams of Stephens et al and Trenberth et al have a net flow of energy from the surface to the atmosphere via evapotranspiration. I merely assumed that the rate of increase in that rate was the same as the rate of increase in rainfall (from models about 3%, from empirical estimates up to 7%.) How has anyone else estimated the change in the rate of evaportranspirative energy loss from the surface as the surface warms up.
Incidentally, since my last comment about your paper a couple of weeks ago I realized that you had increased your 0.33 °C per doubling of CO2 to a more plausible 0.9 °C in the paragraph you added at the end that took downward radiation into account. My apologies for overlooking it,
Apology accepted. As with the other estimated changes in the paper, I wonder how anyone else has made such estimates, if they have been published. Notice how I did it: since the sensible and latent heat go up fairly high (just a little higher than the middle of the troposphere), I doubt that any of it is radiated back as far as the surface. Net LWIR radiation from that high or thereabouts is to space, so a concomitant increase in heat from the surface and increase in CO2 ought to increase the radiation to space from those upper levels — at least at the “hand-waving” level of analysis.
To me, the important thing in Romps es al was the calculation of a 12% increase in CAPE*PR, not the directly proportional 12% increase in the lightning strike rate. Important from my view would be a good calculation of CAPE*PR baseline rate, and how much of that is net transferral to the upper half of the troposphere.
Steven Mosher: This justifies using the global CO2 forcing since 1880 as a linear surrogate for all the anthropogenic forcings (L1; using CO2 equivalent yields nearly identical results).
It does not, however, justify a campaign to reduce fossil fuel use, unless you that that divestiture from fossil fuel will reverse the changes that accompanied CO2 increase.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/11/163/2011/acpd-11-163-2011-print.pdf
Here’s a paper on tropospheric overshooting. They state:
“Since, the tropospheric air flux derived from CALIOP observations during north Hemisphere winter is 5-20 times larger than the slow ascent by radiative heating usually assumed, the observations suggest that convective overshooting is a major contributor to troposphere-to-stratosphere transport with concommitant implications to the Tropical Tropopause Layer top height , chemistry, and thermal structure”
Steven Mosher: “This justifies using the global CO2 forcing since 1880 as a linear surrogate for all the anthropogenic forcings”
I seriously doubt it.
VP says “As such the calculation in your paper that I was commenting on should add it to the thermal radiation sent back to Earth (DLWR).”
Unless it is high in the atmosphere, little radiation is produced. The energy is distributed via collisions. Therefore, if the air in question is rising, it will carry almost all the heated air to top of troposphere.
@jim2: Therefore, if the air in question is rising, it will carry almost all the heated air to top of troposphere.
Excellent point, jim2. But don’t forget to take into account that rising hot air loses almost exactly as much kinetic energy (the source of its temperature) as it gains in potential energy. By the Stefan-Boltzmann law, radiation decreases as the fourth power of decreasing temperature, so by the time it reaches the top of the troposphere it is barely radiating at all.
Also take into account that the cooling effect of rising results in rising hot air losing its impetus to keep rising.
But if it leaves the ground 5 C hotter, it will still radiate more energy top of troposphere.
Thank you, Dr Curry for your excellent site. It seems to me that we should be entirely relaxed about accepting that CO2 warms globe – other things being equal. Whether it is 1.6 C or 2.3 C for a doubling is neither here nor there. In most places in the World the temperature varies by 10 C or more over each 24 hour period. Why is one tenth of a degree supposed to matter?
As CO2 has risen from 0.03% to 0.04% every objective measure of Human and Natural wellbeing has improved – food production, life expectancy, global greening and the rest. What are we afraid of?
Thank you and please maintain your stalwart stance.
Good Gaia, man
this is the climate blogosphere
making sense and refusing to wave one’s hands over 0.01 change in a squiggly line chart is unacceptable
don’t you know the the strongest hurricane EVER is about to hit Mexico
meaningful social change requires fear
:)
There has just been an interview on the BBC with the leader of the US team that collects the hurricane data by flying planes into it. He pointed out that this data had only been collected in this form since the late 1940’s/early 1950’s and there may well have been stronger hurricanes prior to this.
tonyb
TonyB, a historical footnote to you comment. My late father (interred at Arlington with one of two US neck orders) was commander of the 409th typhoon chasers from 1948 to late 1950, when he went off to Tokyo to fly the Korean war. Converted B-29s off Guam, western Pacific. He once landed after a 24 hour mission with his plane’s tail bent 17 degrees out of true from the turbulence of what now would be recognized as a Cat 5 typhoon. That plane never flew again. He did.
There for sure were hurricanes and typhoons as strong as this one before. Only, most did not survive to render eye witness reports. My Dad was lucky, else I would not be writing this (since was born on Guam). Regards.
You called it. The ‘Climate Negotiator’ for Mexico just said we’ve got to pass a new agreement because big-a$$ storm!
http://news.yahoo.com/mexican-plea-climate-consensus-hurricane-nears-172328643.html
Not sure if he mentioned anything about the dearth of such storms the past decade.
I’m curious about the historical frequency and areal coverage of sampling of past hurricanes regarding windspeeds and barometric pressures.
The current practice to declare a single hurricane “the biggest” or “the baddest” leaves out the rather obvious observation that tropical cyclones Camille, Patricia and Haiyan all approached an apparent upper limit on hurricane intensity.
Incredibly small differences in random measurements are insufficient, IMO, to distinguish amongst them.
Rud
Thanks for your interesting footnote. We do seem to have lost a historical perspective and context in so consistently believing that events that happen in the modern era always constitute some sort of record.
What I find intriguing is that there are obviously lots of ingredients that make up a hurricane than just warm sea surface temperatures. The proportion of the ingredients and the manner in which they need to be mixed perhaps need to be studied before we get too excited about the potential for big ‘history making’ storms.
Tonyb
What we should not be relaxed about however is that United Nations has established a political body, a body based on unscientific principles, a body called Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That is an unscientific body!: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles.pdf
This, on the other hand, is science!:
http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/popper-logic-scientific-discovery.pdf
(The logic of scientific discovery – by Karl Popper – First 26 pages contains the easy read essence.)
A scientific body would have recognized:
– the problem of induction / justification.
– the risk of group think
– that argument by consensus is a well known logical fallacy
– that to state subjective probabilities, so called level of confidence, is incompatible with objective science
– that models are not nature
A scientific body would have recognized that:
– an idea, hypothesis or theory is merited by the severity of the tests it has been exposed to and survived
– a theory which allows everything explains nothing
– a theory which cannot be falsified, not in the past and not in the future but now, is not knowledge
It is irresponsible of United Nations to establish a body on unscientific principles, pretend that it is acting in scientific ways, and try to govern the world on basis of the product of this body. A body which is heavily influenced by political processes. This demonstrates that it is not only IPCC which needs to be abolished, the role of United Nations should be reconsidered.
By its charter, these are the things United Nations is supposed to provide:
– To maintain international peace and security…
– To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples …
– To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character,
– To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
– Albert Einstein
“As CO2 has risen from 0.03% to 0.04% every objective measure of Human and Natural wellbeing has improved – food production, life expectancy, global greening and the rest. What are we afraid of?”
The future unintended bad consequences that hold the potential to undo all the GOOD we have achieved
“The future unintended bad consequences that hold the potential to undo all the GOOD we have achieved”
While true the reliable evidence that those negative consequences will actually occur is very weak. Following the same logic, humans should be spending far more on detecting and preventing objects from hitting earth.
Really? What’s to wonder?
Logical Fallacies
A few of the logical fallacies in climate models are described in reverse by J Marks relating to detecting Near Earth Objects to prevent the far more deadly threat of asteroid impacts. Heaven Can’t Wait: A Critique of Current Planetary Defence Policy
‘Tis the nature of the beast not to be settled.
It might have been more convincing if the figures had shown Lovejoy at a blackboard with his finger on the graphs and a sort of serious and concerned look on his face.
Hi Judy. Your comments on his paper are correct. I have urged Shaun to consider the issues you raise as well as the effects of other human forcings such as from black carbon and land use change. Shaun has shown on longer time periods that natural variations actually become larger. Why he assumes that we actually understand natural multi-decadal variations is a puzzle as well his focus just on added CO2. Seems either agenda driven or he is naive on these other issues.
I hope EOS is not going to become an advocacy journal. It has accomplished a lot recently in its format change but it must retain its objectivity. I urge you to contribute an article to EOS which I would be glad to help you with if you would like.
Roger Sr
Roger, EOS seems to be another publication of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) – an organization established by the US National Academy of Sciences, apparently to advocate (promote) the geo-engineering agenda of the Geophysics Section of NAS. You may recall Peter Glick recently chaired AGU’s ethics committee.
I dropped my membership in the AGU in 1999 because EOS was publishing drivel like this.
Professor Shaun Lovejoy is entitled to his opinion. He is not entitled to presenting it as science. My opinion of Professor Shaun Lovejoy just took a nosedive.
JC: Ok ‘denialists’, this is your opportunity to poke holes in Lovejoy’s argument. It’s pretty easy, actually.
SL: As you will see, it can’t be that easy because each of the points you raise below is wrong.
Indeed the denialists will have to radically change their discourse in order to be able to deal with this quite different approach.
JC: First point: The IPCC attributes the warming since 1950 as due to human greenhouse gas emissions. Lovejoy discusses the warming since 1880. About 40% of the warming since 1880 occurred prior to 1950, and is not attributed to human greenhouse gas emissions.
SL: Regardless of the IPCC, the science (see fig. 1 of Climate Closure) shows that most of the warming since 1880 is attributable to GHG.
JC: Further, according to the IPCC paleo analysis, the globe has been warming for the past 400 years, which also cannot be attributed to human greenhouse gas emissions. The statistics of Lovejoy’s analysis are entirely different if you are looking at a warming period of 65 years rather than 125 years.
SL: As far as the warming is concerned, the effective climate sensitivity is nearly the same from 1880-1945 and 1945-2004, see fig. 1 (the same regression works well over the whole range since 1750). The figure also shows that the warming since 1750 is perfectly explained – it is nearly on the same regression as 1880-2004. At some level, this is not even very important since this only serves to estimate the total warming since 1880. Anyone would agree that it is at least 0.6oC and this is already a 3 standard deviation event, and even taking into account the “black swan” extremes, such a flucutiaon is still very unlikely (see fig. 2 of L2:
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/neweprint/GRL.final.pause.22.7.14.pdf
JC: Second point: After finally getting the ‘mainstream’ climate scientists to pay attention to the AMO and PDO as possibly being important in the attribution of warming (or lack thereof) in the 20th and 21st century, we need to be reminded that there are centennial scale and even millennial scale internal variations in ocean circulation, that have an unknown impact on global temperatures.
SL: Yes, but the high pass filter I used makes variations at scales longer than 125 years irrelevant. The 125 year variations (including volcanic and solar responses) are fully dealt with using the pre 1900 multiproxy reconstructions.
JC: Third point: Dismissing multidecadal to century scale variations in solar radiation is frankly ludicrous. You can argue about the magnitude of the impact of these variations on global climate, but dismissing the existence of these variations is completely unjustified.
SL: They were only dismissed following the demonstration that their 20th statistics were the same as the pre-20th century statistics. My conclusions fully take into account – in a statistical basis – solar and volcanic activity, see fig 1 in the ref. L1:
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/neweprint/Lovejoy.Clim.Dynamics.final.online.2014.pdf.
JC: Fourth point: Major volcanic eruptions do not occur uniformly in time. E.g. the early part of the 19th century had a relatively large number of strong volcanic eruptions.
SL: This was also fully taken into account, see L1- the activity was even accurately stochastically modelled quantitatively taking into account the clustering. The analysis fully accounts for the clustering of the events via the intermittency exponent. Can you tell which of the plots in fig. 1a are real and which are simulations?
Hi Shaun – The fundamental errors you make, in my view, include
i) the attribution of the trend to primarily added CO2,
ii) the assumption that your sample of the past captured natural variations for the recent time period,
and
iii) your acceptance that the surface temperature record is a robust metric of global warming. As I communicated in the past there is a warm bias in the minimum land surface temperature if it is being used to diagnose a deeper tropospheric temperature trend. .
I have urged you to apply your approach to the upper ocean heat content changes and obtain an estimate of the global radiative imbalance from that.
Best Regards
Roger Sr.
Hi Roger!
I’ll answer your points sequentially;
RP Hi Shaun – The fundamental errors you make, in my view, include
i) the attribution of the trend to primarily added CO2,
SL Actually, the CO2 forcing is only used as a linear proxy for all human forcings so that aerosols and other GHG, lad use etc. are statistically included.
Strictly speaking, attribution is not needed in order to obtain probabilities, we only need some simple way to estimate the total change since 1880. In fact, if the change was only 0.4oC, it would already be significant at the two standard deviations level so that a change since 1880 of more than 0.4oC would normally be considered to be significant at the 97.5% level (this still includes the “black swans” which only become important at even lower probability levels).
RP ii) the assumption that your sample of the past captured natural variations for the recent time period,
SL I checked that there was no evidence that the statistics of volcanism or solar activity changed over the last century or so. However clearly one needs assumptions about the extremes. While the usual assumption (“bell curve”) is not appropriate, there are theoretical reasons (the space-time scaling) and empirical evidence that the tails of the probability distributions are bounded between power laws with exponents 4 and 6. This already gives extremes of at least 100 times more probable than the bell curve.
Of course, if you reject the past data as a guide, then you can get any result you want.
and
RP iii) your acceptance that the surface temperature record is a robust metric of global warming. As I communicated in the past there is a warm bias in the minimum land surface temperature if it is being used to diagnose a deeper tropospheric temperature trend. .
SL: Even this assumption isn’t needed! If you take the position that the surface temperature estimates are unrelated or weakly related to global warming, then my statistics still show that the change in the series since 1880 has a very low probability of occurring naturally. All I demonstrate is that since 1880, the estimated global surface temperature has had a large, low probability excursion.
However, you can always reject the connection of the global averaged temperature series with global warming. You can claim an inverse relation – or anything you like. But we quickly lose any connection with any science.
RP I have urged you to apply your approach to the upper ocean heat content changes and obtain an estimate of the global radiative imbalance from that.
SL The problem with this series is that it is too short (roughly twenty years) to get a useful result.
Shaun Lovejoy,
I have a couple of observations:
1) Simple attribution of warming to increased GHG forcing is not very interesting, and hardly worth discussion. You appear to me to be fighting the wrong battle. Yes, there are some people who suggest GHGs in the atmosphere have virtually no influence on surface temperature, but these people are the extreme. The real question is not whether GHGs in the atmosphere warm, but how much (equilibrium sensitivity) and how fast (transient response)….. and most of all, what the consequences for that warming will be.
2) Your use of CO2 alone as a proxy for total forcing (and so climate sensitivity) strikes me as essentially uninformative. It ignores a wealth of data which gives better guidance: forcing from changes in concentration of other GHGs, aerosol influences, and ocean heat uptake. AR5 provides best estimates for all these, so why ignore them? Providing a reasoned (and more rigorous) empirical estimate for climate sensitivity, both transient and equilibrium, is what Otto et al, Lewis, and many others have been doing for some time. I don’t see than looking at CO2 alone provides useful information, especially in light of much more rigorous published empirical estimates.
3) Sensible public policy WRT fossil fuel use, nuclear power, wind power, and solar power ought to be based, at least in part, on reasoned estimates for likely warming and reasoned estimates of its consequences. The most reasonable warming estimates, and estimates I think could garner broad public acceptance, are the aforementioned empirical studies. Insisting that unreasonable estimates of sensitivity guide public policy will only delay the public addressing the issue in a meaningful way. The truth is that the public may weigh risks, costs, and benefits of warming differently than you or I would, and so public policy may not match up with what we would prescribe if we were kings of the universe (you: wind, solar, and heavy carbon taxes, I expect; me: lots of nuclear plants ASAP). That is the nature of democracy.
My impression of Saun Lovejoy’s process:
How a strawberry smoothie is made
ice = CO2
yogurt = natural variability
strawberries = other factors (aerosols, land use, etc)
1) Assume your ice already includes the strawberries.
2) Pour the yogurt through a filter to keep it out of the blender
3) Blend at high speed
Viola! one strawberry smoothie.
Dear Shaun Lovejoy, it is good of you to show up here:
My comments follow.
SL: Yes, but the high pass filter I used makes variations at scales longer than 125 years irrelevant. The 125 year variations (including volcanic and solar responses) are fully dealt with using the pre 1900 multiproxy reconstructions.
You ignore millennial scale oscillations outright. The approximate periodicity of previous high points (Medieval Warm Period, etc) make the current warming approximately “on time” even without CO2.
SL: Regardless of the IPCC, the science (see fig. 1 of Climate Closure) shows that most of the warming since 1880 is attributable to GHG.
What you show is that the warming since 1880 is attributable to some amalgam of the processes whose changes since 1880 are correlated with GHG changes. That does not refute, as you claim, the skeptical claim that reducing fossil fuel use may have little or no effect. That debate has a long ways to run before the causal analysis might be considered thorough, or even “nearly” complete.
First point: by looking at temperature CHANGES one is high pass filtering the data. Lower frequency variations (such as the millennial scale variations you mention) are indeed irrelevant. My analysis therefore does not rule out 1oC changes over longer periods such as the 800 years needed for medieval warming (assuming that the latter was actually a global not only European) phenomenon.
For your second point, I agree that attribution is only established indirectly – by eliminating the natural variability hypothesis, one is only left with the anthropogenic one.
“…medieval warming (assuming that the latter was actually a global not only European) phenomenon.”
We’ll just settle for Europe, China (especially), Americas, Africa and leave New Zealand right out of it…Heaven knows, we don’t want to make it too global. Hard enough already keeping the bend out of that hockey stick.
Good try, warmies.
This seems to be question begging or at least ignoring the point you were ostensibly trying to address. Similar examples in your earlier response to Roger Pielke, Sr.
Shaun Lovejoy: My analysis therefore does not rule out 1oC changes over longer periods such as the 800 years needed for medieval warming (assuming that the latter was actually a global not only European) phenomenon.
Why then claim that you have refuted them, as in your essay, so that disputation is no longer to be permitted?
To answer that question may require more self-insight than this dedicated, but dissonant, soldier of alarm is able to muster.
======================
Better to have published here:
http://thelapine.ca/
Pofessor Lovejoy, nowhere in your opus do you mention ice ages. Surely you can explain why we live in an interglacial now.
Once again, my analysis only concerns CHANGES over 125 year periods. It has nothing to say about the ice ages which have larger changes but which occur over much longer periods of time.
Thank you for your kind answer. So we don’t know it all – yet. But we have a closure, already.
Shaun
Can you help me and point me to actual CO2 concentration time series you used. Were the ice core measures directly supplied to you by Frank et al, or did you calculate them yourself, or are they available somewhere and if so can you point me to them?
As indicated in the Clim. Dyn. paper, I used the Frank et al CO2. This is publicaly available. You will get the same result if you use CO2 equivalent from the IPCC.
Hi Shaun
If you need it Frank et al have deposited their data at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/frank2010/frank2010.html.
Have you deposited yours somewhere?
Just looking at this data Shaun, as someone else here asked what did you do about auto-correlation in the regression residues?
Adding lagged terms of temps in time helps deal with it but it progressively reduces the significance of the Ln CO2 term (two lagged temp terms and it’s gone). Didn’t get to the point of testing the ability to perform outside range because I didn’t have a well behaved model with CO2 in it.
Not sure that that says about your hypothesis, but the idea of natural persistence in the weather is just as attractive physical explanation as it all being down to CO2. Probably bit of both.
I was lazy and only used GISS and didn’t bother extending the CO2 beyond 2004.
Shaun
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman Cargo Cult Science, Caltech commencement address 1974.
Sadly, your 99.9% confidence only proves you have fooled yourself.
“Significant” or “highly significant” findings require 500% greater stringency. “Revised standards for statistical evidence” Valen E. Johnson, PNAS vol. 110 no. 48 19313–19317, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1313476110
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Albert Einstein
You ignored the 400% error in tropospheric tropical temperatures of 25 year CMIP5 projections running too hot (1979-2015) See John Christy’s testimony to Congress May 13, 2015 http://1.usa.gov/1RtecdB
You underestimated natural variations, ignoring Hurst Kolmogorov Dynamics (climate persistence). http://bit.ly/2042cFQ etc.
Thank you, Shaun, for being here.
I am an AGW “denier” because I have yet to find an AGW “believer” who will openly address the precise experimental data and observations that indicate Earth’s heat source is the pulsar remains of the supernova that:
1. Made every atom in the solar system,
2. Birthed the solar system five billion years ago, and
2. Sustains every atom, life and planet in the solar system today.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280133563
If you are an AGW “believer” willing to discuss openly the experimental data summarized above, please say so and post your interpretation of the data on ResearchGate.
Again, thank you for being here to open the discussion.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11434-014-0317-3
Prof. Lovejoy:
You criticize climate models, reject important IPCC findings and assert that all who’ve gone before you were inadequate to the task. Other than the fact that you over-estimate CO2’s contribution to AGW and underestimate natural variability, most skeptics would probably cite your work approvingly.
However, your inability (perhaps strategic unwillingness?) to distinguish between crackpots and honest scientists who disagree on the details provides us all with a cautionary example.
Shaun, here is a hypothesis I have been batting around for a while. I don’t really see how your analysis has falsified it, but perhaps it did and you could be kind enough to point it out to me how it did.
Ocean heat transport is sensitive to changes in solar forcing and has the opposite reaction to changes in LWR. This is based on the penetration depth of the energy.
This paper claims increasing the depth of SWR accelerates the AMOC:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00343-015-3343-3
If this were the case then we should see an increase in poleward ocean heat transport and there is evidence we have:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n6/fig_tab/ncomms1901_F5.html
It goes down from the MWP to the LIA and then back up again to the modern warming period. I suppose it could be internal variability but I like the solar explanation so much better because that allows for answers to other questions such as how a small change in insolation brings us out of glaciation.
Could a change in ocean heat transport bring us out of glaciation? According to these models it seems to make quite a difference:
“We investigated the effect of increased ocean heat transports on climate in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) general circulation model (GCM). The increases used were sufficient to melt all sea ice at high latitudes, and amounted to 15% on the global average. The resulting global climate is 2°C warmer, with temperature increases of some 20°C at high latitudes, and 1°C near the equator.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/91JD00009/abstract
“A coupled atmosphere-ocean-sea ice general circulation model (GCM) has four stable equilibria ranging from 0% to 100% ice cover, including a “Waterbelt” state with tropical sea ice. All four states are found at present-day insolation and greenhouse gas levels and with two idealized ocean basin configurations.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JD022659/abstract
Explaining how the strong solar cycles mid 20th century doesn’t really eliminate solar as a primary cause of the warming with ocean heat transport as the mechanism isn’t too difficult when one just considers what we don’t know. We don’t know how long it would take for ocean currents to come to equilibrium with changes in solar forcing. It seems like it must take some extended period of time or there would be no explaining the prolonged period following the Younger Dryas event before it managed to reorganize.
I look forward to reading how the science on ocean heat transport has been settled to be an unimportant bit of trivia.
Shaun,
From your op-ed:
“…our attempts to convince people of the science are entering a period of diminishing returns.”
You should try name calling.
Shaun, I liked your article a great deal and to me at least the analysis that you present is thought provoking. However, your use of the word “Denalist” was completely unnecessary. Resorting you calling people with different opinions names will never strengthen you argument and will more likely cause people to rightly question your motives. Should have been an A+ but only a B- as a result.
Such a shame . . .
Solar wind variability has a profound effect upon atmospheric teleconnections and hence oceanic modes. Overlook that and you are merely spinning yarns.
Shawn, you fail to take into account the natural changes in atmospheric and oceanic dynamics that causes the oceans to either rapidly discharge stored heat in a now thinly spread calm top layer of warm water, or slowly store it under clear sky, windy mixed layer conditions. Regime shifts between these two conditions, whereby one or the other of these two conditions predominate, will result in a long term temperature trend rapidly up (discharge), or slowly stepped down (recharge).
What works now to warm us, is likely the thing that warms us over long term scale, and is likely the thing that warms us over millennial scales. Intrinsic processes, including our strange orbit around the Sun, demonstrates shifts in oceanic/atmospheric conditions causing temperature fluctuations. These intrinsic shifts are capable of driving temperature fluctuations way outside the energy-available boundaries of the anthropogenic only portion of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations in ppm.
I suggest the following article that concludes there is evidence to suggest that the Earth’s orbital dynamics change the position and strength of oceanic/atmospheric processes that drive land temperature, and not CO2, and that lead to extreme regime shifts marked by long, deepening ice ages and fast, short warm periods.
These same system fluctuations, less impinged upon by intrinsic orbital changes, in the short term also cause shorter weather and climate regime shifts. So I see no compelling reason to come up with something ELSE to explain temperature trends. Indeed, one MUST be able to EXCLUDE these natural short, long, and millennial scale oceanic/atmospheric intrinsic processes before looking for something else.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/E1406.full.pdf
“Regardless of the IPCC, the science (see fig. 1 of Climate Closure) shows that most of the warming since 1880 is attributable to GHG.”
It shows a 50/50 proposition that the two time series happen to be moving vaguely in the same direction.
“As far as the warming is concerned, the effective climate sensitivity is nearly the same from 1880-1945 and 1945-2004, see fig. 1 (the same regression works well over the whole range since 1750).”
All this shows is that both series are dominated by affine progressions over the time interval.
“Yes, but the high pass filter I used makes variations at scales longer than 125 years irrelevant.”
Don’t know much about filtering theory. Were that true, you would not see trends lasting longer than about 1/10th of that period, i.e., a little more than a decade at a time.
“They were only dismissed following the demonstration that their 20th statistics were the same as the pre-20th century statistics… see fig 1 in the ref. L1”
That would only speak to whether the processes could be considered stationary, not what their impact might be over a finite interval.
“The analysis fully accounts for the clustering of the events via the intermittency exponent.”
Just one?
Your analysis is one long and tedious cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Shaun, I think your problem is to equate ‘natural variation’ with a simple noise process (Gaussian or otherwise). P-value analysis is completely inadequate for this problem. Have you applied the same reasoning that leads you to say the probability of the 20thC warming is <1/1000 to the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, or the Roman Warm Period?
I think you would conclude that the probability of these events occurring as a 'natural fluctuation' was also very small. But of course nobody thinks any of these events are simply large noise events. The alternative hypothesis is that there are century and multi-century variations in climate, which are as yet unexplained. If you accept there were a RWP, MWP and LIA, with natural causes, then the probability that a new natural warming event contributed to the 20th century warming is plausibly much greater than 1/1000.
Is his ignorance willful, or tortured?
============
Honestly Shaun, you are a professor – but did not refrain yourself from name calling. To me, name calling is something I do not expect to see in opinion pieces by professors.
“Name calling is abusive or insulting language referring to a person or group, a verbal abuse. This phenomenon is studied by a variety of academic disciplines from anthropology, to child psychology, to politics. It is also studied by rhetoricians, and a variety of other disciplines that study propaganda techniques and their causes and effects. The technique is most frequently employed within political discourse and school systems, in an attempt to negatively impact their opponent.” Ref. Wikipedia.
And I really wonder – did your complete courses on scientific theory?
“Instead of struggling to prove humans are to blame, let’s prove denialist fantasies wrong”
Your miss the point of science entirely:
Ideas, hypotheses and theories are merited by the severity of tests they have been exposed to and survived.
If you want to strengthen your pet theory, you should expose your pet theory to severe testing. Only then will you be able to utter a scientific statement, a statement having the form:
These are my ideas, hypothesis and theory. These are necessary deduced consequences thereof. If my idea is correct, I deduct that the following will have to be observed, in nature, or as the output of a a test.
Then – I would list, and refer to in traceable ways, the tests which has been conducted – the observations which has been made. I would also state the uncertainty level of the dependent variable – the output of my theory – and the uncertainty level of the observed quantities – the results of my tests.
I would also know that a theory is more valuable the more it excludes from happening, A theory which allows everything explains nothing.
These are the first lines of the Logic of scientific discovery by Karl Popper:
“A scientist, whether theorist or experimenter, puts forward statements, or systems of statements, and tests them step by step. In the field of the empirical sciences, more particularly, he constructs hypotheses, or systems of theories, and tests them against experience by observation and experiment.”
http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/popper-logic-scientific-discovery.pdf
Please note that Karl Popper did not say:
In addition to struggle to prove that he is right, a scientist should try to prove that his opponents fantasies are wrong.
This seems to be your approach.
However, what you have provided, is only another line of justification for your pet theory, justification based on inductive reasoning. Reasoning which has been properly debunked in this post, its comments and replies.
I hope, for the future of your students, that you are not the one who holds the courses on scientific theory.
Hi Shaun, thanks for your comments here, apologies for my slow response (just returning from travel).
In this comment, i would like to address the following:
JC: First point: The IPCC attributes the warming since 1950 as due to human greenhouse gas emissions. Lovejoy discusses the warming since 1880. About 40% of the warming since 1880 occurred prior to 1950, and is not attributed to human greenhouse gas emissions.
SL: Regardless of the IPCC, the science (see fig. 1 of Climate Closure) shows that most of the warming since 1880 is attributable to GHG.
I refer you to figure 10.1 of the AR5
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_FigFAQ10.1-1.jpg
The climate models used in these simulations have an average ECS of 3.45 C (substantially greater than your estimated value of 2.33 C). The climate model simulations reproduce the warming post 1970 (apart from the hiatus); however the climate models do NOT reproduce the warming from 1910 to 1940. I am the last person to accuse climate models of being UNDER sensitive to CO2 warming. Your argument that your figure 1 ‘shows’ that the warming during the first half of the 20th century is caused by CO2 simply is not convincing by known mechanisms for atmospheric CO2 forcing to warm the surface (direct radiative forcing and thermodynamic feedbacks).
Your analysis confuses the chicken and egg of the CO2-temperature relationship. Ole Humlum and Murry Salby have argued that CO2 is leading temperature, which seems to be the case for early 20th century warming (not necessarily the case for the later warming).
Also, with regards to your estimated value of ECS. It seems that you are calculating something closer to TCR (not ECS). Nic Lewis did something similar to what you did, but using total forcing time series from AR5, and found TCR ~ 1.3 C.
Under Prof. Lovejoy’s stated assumptions, if his CO2 forcing curve incorporates all other forcings and feedbacks and natural variability is miniscule how does he distinguish between TCR and ECS? It would seem there is nothing left to consider after the initial “CO2” forcing is applied in his stochastic model.
Suddenly I got the chills, you do require all students at your university to complete courses within scientific history, logic and scientific theory don´t you?
At the web site of McGill – I found a few courses e.g.: “PHIL 221 Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 2 (3 credits)”. But I did not find any indication that all students are actually required to take courses within scientific theory. Can you shed some light on what kind of courses all students at your university are required to complete within scientific theory?
By scientific theory I mean philosophy of science.
> But I did not find any indication that all students are actually required to take courses within [philosophy of science].
That would be a great idea for these students, and for anyone who’d like to pontificate online about philosophy of science, Fiction.
willard, all philosophy of science ended with Popper. That debate is over..
haha
:O) !!!!
Lovejoy : … the warming since 1750 … is nearly on the same regression as 1880-2004.
So no significant difference between pre- and post-industrial rates of warming – ie no hockey stick ?
I didn’t know that McGill encouraged satire.
http://thelapine.ca/
Apparently when people take leave of their senses, deductive reasoning is the first to go. Go ahead and ignore the entire body of work, especially by some of the giants in the profession. There is no longer any need
to ask a few thousand questions, most of which begin with the word “Why”.
Judith,
“I can only wonder what the EOS editors were thinking when they published this.”
In light of calls for prosecution of ‘energy executives’, RICO investigations of ‘denialists’, prosecution for ‘crimes against humanity’ for those opposed to draconian reductions in fossil fuel use, I believe what they were thinking is pretty obvious: they don’t care how it is accomplished, they want fossil fuel reductions. The editors are green activists and politicians, not scientists. They gave up their credibility as scientific editors.
It seems to me that Lovejoy’s graphical method is a plausible way to obtain a first-order estimate of the climate sensitivity. His residual seems to show a ~60 year period natural cycle which is interesting.
But, as others have noted, since his logarithmic CO2 scale is approximately linear with time, he can’t distinguish the CO2 from other linear or long-period components, the most important of which would be the pre-industrial recovery from the LIA, at ~0.1C/Century. Taking that into account would reduce his slope to a little above 2C/doubling.
Then he is not so very far away from the ‘denialist’ estimate from Lewis and Curry http://judithcurry.com/2014/09/24/lewis-and-curry-climate-sensitivity-uncertainty . Most of the difference can be explained by the fact that Lewis and Curry explicitly factor in known volcanic activity.
Are the warmist and skeptic estimates of TCS actually converging, as the tone gets ever more bad tempered?
It is not a linear time axis. It is highly stretched with later times doubling and quadrupling the rate of earlier times, yet the temperature response is linear to it, not to time. This plot is exactly what makes the CO2-driven temperature argument so compelling. It has to be looked at closely to fully appreciate what it says.
Yeah, but prior to 1950 the correlation is probably not significant. The temperature rise is similar with a linear time axis, while the rise in CO2 is much smaller, and the actual amounts are little different from baseline.
Not only that, but the rise in atmospheric pCO2 shows a strong likeness to an exponential curve taking off over a century before significant fossil-carbon emission.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/processes/metropolitan/mpo/boston_mpo/bostmpofiga1.gif
No ‘yeah buts’, that is what the graph tells you. Small CO2 change, small temperature changes within natural variability, large CO2 change, large temperature changes above natural variability accelerating at the same time and on pace. It is that simple.
No it’s not. It never is. In this case, it’s certainly consistent with his explanation. Unfortunately, it’s also consistent with natural internal variability. Or all sorts of combinations involving a much smaller effect from CO2.
Of course, tracking any sort of “global average temperature” is like following a red herring. The hounds follow, but what’s at the end of it has nothing to do with what you’re after.
“large CO2 change, large temperature changes above natural variability accelerating at the same time and on pace”
No warming for almost two decades while atmospheric CO2 content continues to rise proves you don’t know what you are wittering about.
There is no significant pause in the surface record since the 1970’s. Take a closer look.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1950/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.25/plot/gistemp/from:1985/trend
AK, the point is that the natural variability has to have the same shape as the CO2 feedback would have to keep this line straight. This seems extremely unlikely unless what you mean by “natural variability” is also CO2-dependent in some way.
Warming increased from 1999 until 2006. How can that be possible if the pause started in 1999?
2005:
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2005/anomnight.9.2.2005.gif
The Pause was caused by a predominance of La Nina events after 2005, and the slide of the PDO – which had been sliding in opposition to warming since 1985 – into persistent negative index numbers… making a vast area of the surface look persistently like this, 2011:
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2011/anomnight.3.31.2011.gif
The current warming rate appears to be solidly above the .2C per decade put forth by the IPCC. If the rate for the last 60 months is “decadalized”, the warming rate exceeds .4C per decade… at half way to a decade:
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2015/anomnight.10.22.2015.gif
The trend in the ENSO-related component for 1999-2008 is +0.08+/-0.07C decade, fully accounting for the overall observed trend. The trend after removing ENSO is 0.00+/-0.05C decade.
Not a perfect quote because I had to type it out but close enough for government work.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/j/j/global_temperatures_09.pdf
Steven – after 2000 there were three back-to-back El Nino events, which is one reason warming continued throughout 2005.
Can people deceive themselves and erase them and end up at 1999? Of course people can fool themselves. Some guy named Feynman warned people to not do that, but they keep right on doing it. So in 2012 the La Nina dominance began subsiding and the surface warmed like crazy… very fast. What’s that tell you? Do you ignore tooth pain?
JCH, I just read the literature, compare arguments, and try to decide what makes the best sense. I don’t do the science. Do you have a paper showing they are wrong? If not then I have nothing to compare with.
No it doesn’t. Not prior to 1950 when CO2 emissions started climbing rapidly.
The fact is that he’s shortened the scale so much prior to 1950 that it’s only a tiny amount of the actual length of his graph. (Note he didn’t put the years along the bottom so we could see that.) Then he imposed a curve on the data, and threw away all the non-correlation into the residual. Which, again, is almost invisible being so foreshortened.
As far as I know, I am the only person who has ever said the fact that warming increased between 1998 and 2006 constitutes a small problem for the self-deceptive notion that warming has been flat since 1998.
AK, it is not he that shortened the scale. The forcing just wasn’t changing much prior to the early 20th century, and 70% of the forcing change has occurred since 1950 together with the most steady temperature rise in the whole record. It is no wonder that this part of the scale dominates both records.
Yes it is. Why did he shorten the scale?
Exactly
No, it fits what he was trying to do. Unfortunately, it also means that everything pre-1950 is too rough to prove anything.
If you look at the temp changes on a linear time-scale, the slope of warming from 1910-1940 is roughly the same as that from 1970-2000. While the rise in forcing was tiny during the former rise (see above).
AK, the scale is forcing, not time. It is a linear scale with forcing, and it turns out that the temperature rises linearly with the forcing (who knew?).
The plot below it is on a linear time axis where you can see that 1910 was a cold anomaly, probably due to solar inactivity.
No it doesn’t.
Denial in its purest form. Perhaps 150-250 years is not long enough for you to think AGW is even possibly right.
“Global warming science has concentrated on proving the theory…”
Why would anyone make such an unconsidered, self-accusing statement? Where is the heed, the measure and the curiosity of a scientist? Why the bar-room rhetoric like “99.9% confidence” in a supposedly scientific paper? Why the smug treatment of climate as simplistic mechanism while the bulk of our planet remains unvisited and unexamined?
Simple. The person writing is a slob – and typical of the breed.
Based on yer propositions
yer conclusion holds.
What a slight and slovenly affair is this kiddie-console “climate science”! A resort for inveterate brats.
It all depends on who you are talking with at the time.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/21820-un-boss-the-united-nations-is-the-parliament-of-humanity
Shine on this big beautiful world, shine on.
+10
Agreed. And the smug sophomoric name calling (denialists) among unseasoned logical discourse.
“What is the probability that the denialists are right and that this is simply a giant natural fluctuation?”
Lovejoy’s big (and common) mistake is in translating “natural fluctuation” into “random noise process”. Of course the chance of the late 20th C warming (or the MWP, or the LIA) happening as a purely random noise fluctuation is small. It does not matter exactly how you model it, Gaussian or otherwise, this is a statistical straw man. The alternative hypothesis (to AGW) is not random noise, it is a combination of natural cycles.
One may as well argue that the planets must be pushed by angels, because it is vanishing unlikely the planets would move in ellipses “by chance”. This is the problem with p-value statistics, which do not explicitly recognise that you must have two hypotheses to compare. Sometimes “chance” (noise) is a sensible alternative hypothesis, sometimes it isn’t. in this case it isn’t.
It is not possible to calculate how much of the late 20th Century warming was due to natural cycles until more is known about those cycles (but we know there are cycles, on several time scales). Until natural climate variation is properly studied as a phenomenon in its own right, this question can not be answered.
+10
Yep. I don’t understand why this seemingly obvious point seems so obscure to so many.
“Of course the chance of the late 20th C warming (or the MWP, or the LIA) happening as a purely random noise fluctuation is small.”
It’s not so small, indeed not small at all, if the random process involved has long term autocorrelation. Put another way, the “cycles” may be quasi-periodic, such as occurs when the process is a natural mode of the system excited by wideband random forcing. Or, it may just be a random walk, or pink noise, which can appear to be cyclic on a finite time scale.
I’m not disagreeing with you, per se. Just widening the options for alternatives.
Stripped of its pretensions to “straightforward disproof” of AGW skepticism, Lovejoy’s notion of “closure” rests on nothing more susbtantive than mistaking correlation for causality. The sort of regressional correlation seen in his Fig. 1a can be obtained via non-linear transformation between any pair of strongly trending data series wherein one of them is rising virtually monotonically. The manufactured “global temperature” indices are likewise strongly correlated with global automobile sales, postal rates, etc.
+10
Warmist Fantasy …
From Lovejoy’s paper –
“Even without fancy statistics or special knowledge, it is easy to see that the temperature (plotted in green) increases very nearly linearly with some additional fluctuations; these represent the natural variability. The slope (black), 2.33°C per CO2 doubling, is the actual historical increase in temperature due to the observed increase in CO2: the “effective climate sensitivity.”.
The man is confused. He’s got it back to front, he obviously mis wrote.
What he meant to write, quite obviously, was –
“Even without fancy statistics or special knowledge, it is easy to see that the CO2 . . . decreases very nearly linearly with some additional fluctuations; these represent the natural variability. The slope . . . per temperature reduction . . . , is the actual historical decrease in CO2 due to the observed decrease in temperature . . .”
– which is still complete and utter nonsense.
The Earth has demonstrably cooled since its creation. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have likewise demonstrably decreased due to natural processes, unless you choose to believe that the quite large amounts of carbon in fossil fuel didn’t come from the atmosphere, but were magically created by the fairies.
The proposed magical warming abilities of CO2 have never been demonstrated to exist. Mr. Lovejoy should be aware of this, but promotes his absurdities regardless. He appears to be firmly anchored in the past, where phlogiston, the caloric theory of heat, the luminiferous ether and other things we now reject, were believed to be fact.
He also wrote –
“The scientific debate is now over; the moment of closure has arrived. Although climate scientists must move on to pressing scientific questions such as regional climate projections and the space–time variability, our species must tackle the urgent issue of reducing emissions and mitigating the consequences of the warming.”
What a load of claptrap! For all his declaration that the debate is now over, the facts remain. His call to reduce emissions carries all the weight of a beauty contestant’s desire for world peace, or and end to poverty.
If he is referring to emissions as that basis of all human life, CO2, then he is deluded. No CO2 – no plants. No plants – no humans. A worthy desire? I think not!
Another doomsayer who fervently desires the extermination of the human race! Mitigating the consequences of the warming? What warming? What consequences?
He doesn’t know of course – it’s all in the future, but trust him, he’s a scientist!
And the cheque’s in the mail, and he’ll still love you in the morning.
Cheers.
This paper by Lovejoy illustrates what is IMO fundamentally wrong with the AGW debate. Lack of long term and reliable data and no shortage of bias.
Could we get the real Lovejoy, you know, Ian McShane, to help clear up this matter?
===============
And still the Climatologists claim that an ill defined unmeasurable average temperature proxy can be used as a quantitative indicator of time-based energy retention in ill defined layers of matter. Temperature is an imaginative creation of the human mind. Energy is the parameter that must be pursued, real science based, and quantitative.
I get the feeling Lovejoy is one of those guys who, in the course of his schooling, was great at True/False and A, B, C or D…though he would have preferred just A,B or C. (Lovejoy would have totally hated the “none of the above” option.) If an essay had to stretched to one and a half A4 he would have aced it to the line…by length, if not content.
And such sloths and dullards now occupy the influential posts and fill the “literature” with their facile, mechanistic explanations. Their very shallowness helps them declaim and dogmatise with certainty not available to true scholars and inquirers.
It’s not the climate but the Climatariat which is “worse than we thought”. Kick it to the kerb.
The denialists are asserting that the fit of T to CO2 forcing is only random chance, and can’t be explained by a 2.33 C per doubling effective sensitivity.
https://eos.org/opinions/climate-closure/attachment/presentation9
In this case, they need to calculate the odds of this being a random fluctuation, as Lovejoy did for them, otherwise they have not made a dent in the argument.
Regarding millennial trends, these are downwards if anything because that time scale is where Milankovitch comes in, and we are in a long-term cooling phase since the Holocene Optimum, but as the PAGES2k reconstruction showed, the current warming is 20 times larger than the long-term cooling of the last 2000 years.
Jim D,
I have calculated the probability of T to CO2 forcing being due to random chance as 1, being absolute certainty.
So, sorry, Lovejoy is obviously incorrect. He and you obviously share the same mental defect, which leads to preferring fantasy to fact. Alternatively, believing that you can foresee the future without using officially certified chicken entrails.
There is no point presenting your strange view of the future as fact, if only for the very cogent reason that it hasn’t happened yet.
Cheers
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page85.html
Huge Milankovitch changes do not make even a small change to temperatures in Greenland or Antarctic Ice Core Temperatures.
Earth Temperature Regulation has been very Robust in the same bounds for ten thousand years.
More CO2 did not, can not and will not change that, it only makes green things grow better with less water.
current warming is 20 times larger than the long-term cooling of the last 2000 years
Current warming is well inside the bounds of the past ten thousand years.
You must be using Climate Model Output, no real data agrees with you.
This is back to saying the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods did not really happen and now we are warming for the first time. That is total BS, past warm periods are in the actual data and are in the history records. Roman and Medieval Warm Periods were warmer than now and were good times for people. The Little Ice Age was harsh. Those past warm and cold periods were all real, they are part of a natural cycle that has repeated in the past and will repeat in the future.
To say we have warming that is 20 times larger than times that were warmer than now is not something that anyone who looks at actual data will believe.
To say we have warming that is 20 times larger than times that were warmer than now is not something that anyone who looks at actual history books will believe.
“the current warming is 20 times larger than the long-term cooling of the last 2000 years.”
No it isn’t.
Stop making stuff up.
Jim D:
You should read the multiple posts by Steve McIntyre regarding the claims and methodologies of the PAGES2k authors. You can start with the one that specifically mentions the “20 times larger” proclaimation:
http://climateaudit.org/2015/09/04/the-ocean2k-hockey-stick/
McIntyre only questions that the warming was obtained from the same paleo sources. There is enough other non-paleo evidence of the warming rate, e.g. thermometers. It is 20 times faster than the millennial cooling trend that everyone agrees is there. Similar complaints were made about the spike at the end of Marcott not being supported by the same paleo evidence, when of course it is supported by actual thermometers.
Jim D:
First, McIntyre does far more than that.
Second, the large paleo Bin size produces inadequate resolution for 100 year periods. Therefore, you cannot support a claim that instrumental data shows “20 times faster” warming over short periods by using the PAGES2k study.
http://phys.org/news/2015-08-years-global-ocean-cooling-halted.html
Jim D: “Similar complaints were made about the spike at the end of Marcott not being supported by the same paleo evidence, when of course it is supported by actual thermometers.””
Come off it!
Even Marcott himself has debunked that, on skepticalscience, no less!
Funny thing, you’ve posted that bit of mendacity before, and it has been shown to be entirely untrue, why do you keep making the same old stuff up?
The problem is not that he is not remembering the correction, the problem is that he is not recognizing the truth. Eh, no body’s perfect.
====================
Burl – in the early 1980s, I used to be the national training manager for a company that used chassis dynamometers and exhaust gas analyzers to tune cars. I was born a gear head. I once accepted the haze argument, but I no longer do. I think warming from 1910 to 1940 was caused by a confluence of a rapidly increasing PDO index, EL Nino dominance, ocean heat transport, and increased solar. The mid-century cooling, which many climate scientists attribute the haze, imo, was caused by a rapidly decreasing PDO index and, possibly, a reversal of OHT.
Then, around 1952, ACO2 blew it all out and has never relinquished its dominate role as the control knob of the climate.
This is what I am referring to. Note that the end of it is thermometer data. If you have thermometer data, you can use it. There is no law against this in paleoclimate. It gives the results some present context.
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
Jim D:
Sorry I just saw your last comment in this thread. Just wanted to post this for the record.
There are many problems inherent in asserting an amazingly precise global temperature anomaly for thousands of years BP. Marcotte’s is another example of the bias in favor of consensus-supportive papers, IMO.
In any event, tacking on recent thermometer data (which has it’s own issues regarding error bars) doesn’t provide any context for how rapidly actual annual temperatures changed in the distant past.
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
Jim D: The denialists are asserting that the fit of T to CO2 forcing is only random chance, and can’t be explained by a 2.33 C per doubling effective sensitivity.
I don’t know whom you are citing here, but the dominant skeptical and lukewarmer positions are that the possibility of natural variability causing (most of) the warming since 1880 can not be ruled out on present evidence. Shaun Lovejoy claimed in the EOS essay that the possibility of natural warming has been refuted, but conceded in the comments above that his analysis does not rule it out.
You have it backwards: everybody already knows that, if you assume that everything else does not matter, then you can show that the warming since 1880 was caused by and can be “explained by” CO2.
Regarding millennial trends, these are downwards if anything because that time scale is where Milankovitch comes in, and we are in a long-term cooling phase since the Holocene Optimum,
That may be so, but it ignores the possibility of a millennial cycle, about which there is considerable evidence and justifiable dispute.
Very clear, Matt. He has to assume there can be cyclical elements in the downward trend, which is plainly against paleontological evidence.
I really can’t think of any better explanation than cognitive dissonance engendered by the necessity of sustaining alarm against the evidence of his own eyes.
I’ve said for a long time, that one day we’ll pity these climate scientists, laboring like serfs in the unwilling soil, hounded by beasts, and whipped with disdain.
=====================
Dang, ‘no cyclical elements’. Nothing quite like inadvertently writing the opposite of the truth, which is something Shaun Lovejoy seems able to to subconsciously.
============
You say that natural variation could have caused the warming, but given the strong linear relation between CO2 forcing and temperature over the last couple of centuries, this “natural variation” has to have been doing a pretty good imitation of CO2 feedback in its timing that accelerates with CO2 forcing to maintain the linear trend. The “skeptics” are asking for a large coincidence to have occurred for their “natural variation” to be apparently so correlated with CO2 forcing, and not be just a feedback response which is what it imitates.
Name the natural variation that can both warm the oceans and the land to record levels simultaneously, and then produce some evidence it was doing it.
We just lived through a test… a planetary-wide lab experiment.
Natural variation had, supposedly, both caused the warming and nullified the warming:
an 18-year, natural pause in natural warming.
Then the natural cooling regime rapidly, in just a couple of years, lost out to the natural warming regime – when all known natural phenomena were known to be exhibiting a cooling influence:
PDO – negative
AMO – sagging
ENSO – La Nina state, or La Nina leaning neutral
Solar – weak
Nature supposedly held a pitched civil war right before our eyes, and the side with no natural army supposedly won:
GMST – sky rockets
The pause made fools out of a lot of very smart people. Warming increased to 2006. Whatever the pause was, it happened after 2005, and it started labored breathing in 2012… dying… going paws up. Call it what it was… barely more than nothing. 18 years my butt.
JCH:
On Oct.25 (7:15 pm), you wrote “name the natural variation that can both warm the oceans and the land to record levels simultaneously, and then produce some evidence that it was doing it” and other astute comments.
I can give you the answers, but you probably won’t like them. First, you should view the graph “Global Anthropogenic SO2 emissions” in the paper “Anthropogenic Sulfur Dioxide Emissions, 1850-2005”, by Smith, S. J. et al.
This graph shows that global SO2 emissions peaked around 1972 at approx. 131 Megatonnes. then steadily decreased over the years due to Clean Air efforts, but began to rise again between 2000 and 2005 due to increasing pollution in the Far East.
(Data for later years can be found in “The Last Decade of Global Anthropogenic Sulfur Dioxide: 2000-2011 emisssions, by Z. Klimont et al.)
This decrease in SO2 aerosol pollution was detected by both land stations and satellites as a period of “Global Brightening’, which began around 1983 and ended around 2000, due to the Eastern emissions.
The cleaner air resulting from the reduction in aerosol emissions resulted in greater insolation, and this natural warming was wrongly attributed to warming due to greenhouse gasses.
From the 1991 volcanic eruptions, a Climate Sensitivity factor of .02 deg. C. temp. rise for each net Megatonne of reduction in global SO2 emissions can be determined. This is applicable identically to both stratospheric and tropospheric emissions.
Multiplication of the Climate Sensitivity factor times the cumulative net reduction in SO2 emissions over the years results in agreement with average global temperatures so closely that there can never have been any additional warming due to greenhouse gasses. For example, between 1972 and 2015, net reductions in global SO2 emissions amounted to approx. 38 Megatonnes. .02 x 38 = 0.76 deg. C. temp. rise, almost precisely the current anomalous temperature.
The “pause” resulted from the near balance between Western reductioins in SO2 emissions and increases in Eastern emisssions. That balance has now tipped a bit, due to beginning Chinese efforts to address pollution, with the result that warming is now increasing again, as evidenced by 2015’s “Super El Nino”–the majority of its warming is due to the cleaner air–and it will continue upward as more cleansing of the air takes place.
What should absolutely NOT be done is to try for even
cleaner air (as the EPA is pushing, and is the major agenda of the forthcoming December Climate meeting).
Mitigation will be extremely difficult. Perhaps injection of SO2 into the atmosphere, as has been proposed.
You’d better hope that the rebound from the coldest depths of the Holocene have been primarily natural, because if man is responsible for the recent warming, we’ve chosen an unsustainable method to stay warm.
The higher the sensitivity, the colder we’d now be without man’s efforts.
===================
“You’d better hope that the rebound from the coldest depths of the Holocene have been primarily natural, because if man is responsible for the recent warming, we’ve chosen an unsustainable method to stay warm”
If the math and physics is correct in regards to CAGW, then there has already been a real drop in temperatures as the slight warming has not reached the levels expected that the consensus has at 95% certainty
The question remains has to how effective is co2 at controlling atmospheric temperatures when something seems to have overridden it?
My alarm is co2 levels, or the growth of it. If the numbers are correct, in 1965, 12 billion metric tons of co2 were produced. If you do the math, (rate of rise for that year was 1.03 ppm) roughly half was sunk into natural sinks (or something) . Brining us up to present day 38 billion tons were produced. Again roughly half disappeared . I have about 6 billion tons unaccounted for each of the last 5 years. (in other words instead of 2.3 ppm it should be 4 to 7 ppm) NOAA has 26% going into the land, and 24% into the ocean. Discounting the 6 billion missing tons that I have and using only the 19 billion tons as being sunk each year, it still is an overwhelming amount that is being taken up Something is consuming more co2 by 7 billion tons than all was produced in 1965. Admittedly, this in the face of declining forests, lungs of the earth if you remember, and warming oceans that can’t hold as much co2. (in other words the sinks are shrinking) You have a case of declining sinks, increasing production of co2 and increasingly larger amounts of co2 disappearing. We can calculate the total amount of co2 is in the atmosphere, the rate of depletion, and how long it would take to completely bring the level of co2 down to zero. On the high side, 24 to 25 billion tons could be disappearing each year out of the current 38 that is being produced.
So that means that in 1965, in order to get a 1 ppm increase in co2, some natural event was adding that much additional co2 and has now dropped off. Which is also part of another question or 2. If that much co2 is being sunk, how can they tell where the co2 is coming from? with certainty they said from co2 isotopes. Really? And co2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years? That is a cornerstone for their alarm. I have depletion in a 100 years or less without additional input. To heck with global warming, how will plants grow? In less than 50 years plants would begin to suffer. Those are real numbers folks, do the math yourselves.
The debate on this is far from settled. Something is definitely wrong. And this is just one issue.
rishrac writes– ‘If the math and physics is correct in regards to CAGW”
There is no reliable physics that leads to the conclusion of cagw.
rishrac
What do you believe the rate of warming will be over the next 50 years?
What data have you used to conclude where the ‘climate” will worsen vs. benefit?
You seem to be forgetting that many of the sinks can change their rate of uptake depending on the current pCO2. The common, simplistic, analysis would say that the increased uptake, around 50% of the fossil emissions, is due to the increased partial pressure. While almost all of the sources act almost independently of that partial pressure.
There are obviously many unwarranted assumptions built into that simplistic analysis. But, AFAIK, it’s also behind the assumption that the added CO2 will take centuries to go away: as the partial pressure drops back down, the rate of absorption is assumed to decrease.
I think the biomic sink is increasing, and why shouldn’t it?
=============
Jim D: The “skeptics” are asking for a large coincidence to have occurred for their “natural variation” to be apparently so correlated with CO2 forcing, and not be just a feedback response which is what it imitates.
Prof Lovejoy said he had proved that the warming could not have occurred due to natural variation, but he had not done so. The timing is provided by the ca 950 year periodicity in the warm periods: modern, Medieval, Roman, Minoan, etc.
JCH: Name the natural variation that can both warm the oceans and the land to record levels simultaneously, and then produce some evidence it was doing it.
Can anyone show that an doubling of CO2 concentration will produce a surface warming of as much as 1C if all three of the mechanisms by which the surface is cooled are taken into account? Has anyone shown that a 4W/m^2 increase in downwelling LWIR can warm the ocean surface, given the increase in evaporation that is likely to take place?
This exercise in statistical flimflam reminded me of this:
http://cdn.twentytwowords.com/wp-content/uploads/Spurious-Correlations-02-685×442.jpg
http://twentytwowords.com/funny-graphs-show-correlation-between-completely-unrelated-stats-9-pictures/
JIM2, this is a spurious claim. It fails to include deaths while in other people’s bedsheets. However I shall wait and see if Mr Lovejoy has a view.
More important, what could possibly explain the unpredicted divergence in 2009?!?
Wasn’t that the date of ShortSheetGate?
=================
opluso,
Global warming. Less good skiing days. Meanwhile peole are still getting tangled in their bedsheets.
timg56:
Possibly. Of course, 2008-2009 was also the period of the Great Bush Recession. Lower Disposable Income = Lower Luxury Spending.
opluso,
I like your hypothesis better.
It is really interesting that you support the CO2 flimflam and then you show us correlations between the CO2 flimflam with other flimflam.
You prove correlation is not causation.
You totally wipe out the only support you think you have.
pct – I’m not sure if you aimed that comment at me, but I don’t support no CO2 flimflam. While I do believe CO2 will tend to warm the atmosphere, thankfully, I believe the climate response to increasing levels isn’t well understood. And I’m not buying in to the “precautionary” principle when it will tend to bankrupt me and harm us all.
This is really more of a worry. It’s Dark Matter wot we must fight! From the article:
…
Earth may be in great danger as the sun’s path through the galaxy sends comet flying towards our planet, scientists have warned.
Researchers have identified a 26 million-year cycle of meteor impacts that coincides with the timing of mass extinctions over the past 260 million years.
The doomsday events are linked to the motion of the sun and its family of planets through the dense mid-plane of the Milky Way.
…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3287126/Earth-grave-danger-catastrophic-comet-shower-triggered-sun-warn-scientists.html
I’m sure Mr. Lovejoy subscribes to this, from the article:
…
Only a period of enforced “planned austerity” can save the world from dangerous global warming, a warmist academic has claimed at a TED lecture.
Alice Bows-Larkin, a climate researcher from the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester, said in her talk – which has since been viewed over 332,000 times – that “wealthy nations” must stop economic growth in order to avert disaster. (H/T Climate Depot)
…
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/22/warmist-academic-rich-nations-must-combat-climate-change-planned-austerity/
Say, Jim,hat Ms Bows-Larkin will present a different
image if she becomes subject to the savage economic
constraints she would like to enforce. The eye glasses
she wears now, she’ll have to do without.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Uq_ZlymdQ
And more. Machine made clothing on her back,
under-wear, from head to foot, dental care… ?
And for how long have I been warning about TED talks and preachy Pommie sheilas with hyphenated names? (This just has to get me moderated, but, oh, the brief satisfaction!)
She won’t be subject to the rules, only the Serfs.
I read that alarmist junk and I tensed up and then I relaxed.
The alarmist liberals will try to make much of this.
The skeptical people will recognize this as junk and reject it.
It will most likely not change anyone’s mind
She says we must shoot ourselves. If we don’t ruin ourselves, the rest of the world will be ruined. Actually, she says we must ruin the whole of humanity to save the world. We must give up abundant, affordable energy and keep abundant, affordable energy away from the rest of the world.
The world is not going to abide with this and I will fight it however I can.
I have to wonder why liberals who are environmentalists are distributing free hand guns to all.
“are” should have been “are not”
popesclimatetheory: She says we must shoot ourselves. If we don’t ruin ourselves, the rest of the world will be ruined. Actually, she says we must ruin the whole of humanity to save the world. We must give up abundant, affordable energy and keep abundant, affordable energy away from the rest of the world.
I think what she is saying is that everybody else has to, not “we”. If everybody else does it, maybe she’ll join in. If there are to be “last” aircraft flights to and from a vacation or global climate conference, she wants to be on them.
Will someone please explain to me why 2015 is so hot?
The ENSO temperatures through Aug. are : 0.5, 0.4, 0.5, 0.7, 0.9, 1.0, 1.2, in the low to moderate El Nino range. Historically, this results in an average global temp. rise of about 0.2 deg. C. Between 2014 and 2015, avg. global temps. have risen more than 0.6 deg. C.
What is causing the excess warming? CO2 only rose 2 ppm.
That’s the problem. We really don’t know. Nino takes a bunch of warm water that has been forced so moderate depth by the trade winds
Burl I dont get how you think ENSO is moderate. Every off icial site has it running at just about as strong as ever recorded.
eg
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/#tabs=Overview
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
Through September, its effect can be described as moderate. October is looking like a kick-butt El Nino is now in the room.
JCH:
You have been a cheerleader for the el nino for some time now.
It would seem you are happy it will get warmer – regardless of whether the warming is natural or human caused.
I assume you realize the more natural warming – the less the past warming can have been caused by humans.
Humanityist:
I refer you to the “Historical El Nino/La Nina Episodes (1950-present)” table published by the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center.
Here, the ENSO values can easily be compared, and the 2015 values are much lower than those of 1998, for example.
Also see”El Nino and La Nina Years and Intensities”.
The July update which I printed out lists the 2014-2015 El Nino in the “Weak” category.
I repeat my question.
I am not a cheerleader. There is physics, and there is steerchit.
Ulriclyons (7:57 pm.)
Values that I reported were after dividing by 100.
Yes, you can compare annual 2014 with current 2015–with the obvious expection that it will change. Even if ENSO goes higher, as your comments suggest, it will not be enough to account for the amount of warming that has already occurred in 2015. For example, the very strong El Nino of 1982-83 only raised average global temperatures by about 0.25 deg. C. .
Burl Henry | October 24, 2015 at 10:46 pm
“Values that I reported were after dividing by 100.”
Nonsense, it’s 0.06°C, not 0.6°C. You also failed to provide a working link to the data.
“Yes, you can compare annual 2014 with current 2015–with the obvious expection that it will change.”
Not in the manner that you have, for reasons already given.
“Even if ENSO goes higher, as your comments suggest, it will not be enough to account for the amount of warming that has already occurred in 2015.”
I said no such thing, I said that Nov or Dec could turn out colder and bring the 2015 annual average lower than the Jan-Sept 2015 average.
You are, of course, correct. By bad. (too accustomed to simply placing a period in front of the NASA double digit values–slipped by me).
The link was copied from one of my downloaded NASA pages–I hadn’t tried it myself.
Thank you.
Burl’s intuition that it is significant surge in warming is entirely correct.
The last 5 years have averaged .0465796C per year, and not all of the 2015-2016 El Nino is in the number.
“Between 2014 and 2015, avg. global temps. have risen more than 0.6 deg. C.”
Very funny…
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2011/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2011/trend
Not only that.
But just yesterday in Minnesota we had a temperature swing of 7 F.
Why I have even seen a temperature swing of 50 or 50 F in single day.
By taking the low point in 2014 and the high point in 2015 – that is what was done above.
ulriclyons:
Cited temperature rise was from NASA’s “GLOBAL Land-Ocean Temperature Index. Avg. Global temp, anomaly, J-D, for 2014 was 0.75 deg. C. Avg. for 2015, through Sept. is 80.8 deg. C.
ACO2 is causing the warming. The enhanced greenhouse effect. The pause fooled a lot of very smart people. The AMO is a pretender; the PDO is a beast. The beast and an EL Nino is ACO2’s playground: a vast ocean surface that is holding still for a complete 2015 barbecue, and 2016 could easily be even warmer. A 3-peat. 3 warmest years in a row – possible; a 2-peat is in the bank.
Burl Henry
2015 is hot in some places but not in others. Where did you get this 0.6c from?
Tonyb
Tonyb.
As noted above, from NASA,s GLOBAL Land-Ocean Temperature Index table:
data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3’GLB.Ts+dSST.bd
Burl is out by a factor of ten. At the foot of the data, it says:
“Divide by 100 to get changes in degrees Celsius (deg-C)”
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
And you cannot compare annual 2014 to Jan-Sept 2015 as Nov or Dec could go colder and take the 2015 average lower.
Also, EL Nino (NOAA) is at +1.5 for the most recent 3 month running mean of ERSST.v4, and over +2 weekly:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/indices.shtml
And the cold SST anomaly in the North Atlantic is shrinking look:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
With ENSO strengthening, the AMO going ever more positive, and the PDO index high, it seems likely the run of record warmest monthly land and ocean numbers will continue throughout 2015.
October is hot… very hot.
JCH:
ENSO values through Sept. 2015 are: 0.5, 0.4, 0.5, 0.7, 0,9, 1.0, 1.2, 1.5
ENSO values for the very strong 1982-83 El Nino were 0,5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 1.0, 1.5, 1.9, 2.1, 2.1, 2.1, 1,8, 1.5, 1.2, 1.0, 0.7. Average global temperatures were raised about 0.25 deg. C. Since 2015’s ENSO values are still much less, their effect on the climate should be 0.2 deg. C., or less.
So why is 2015 so hot?
This
Because each day 125 ppm of ACO2 works.
“because each day 125 ppm of ACO2 works”
I guess that rules out any El Nino/ ENSO effect on the climate
Ultimately, the effect of ENSO is approximately zero.
Burl Henry repeats:
“So why is 2015 so hot?”
There’s 3 months yet to go, so unless you can outdo Nostradamus, you don’t know exactly how warm 2015 is. And please acknowledge that you that your figure of +0.6°C was out by a factor of ten.
http://berkeleyearth.org/berkeley-earth-temperature-update/
and spreads it out over the surface of the Pacific so its energy transfers efficiently to the atmosphere. No new energy is created. No net increase in ocean heat content takes place, yet ninos correlate very well with global seal level.
During the default state of the Eastern Pacific sunlight warms the surface layer. ACO2 slows the escape of that warming to the atmosphere. The oceans warm. The wind skims the surface and pushes that warm water to the Western Pacific. Cold water upwells. Millions of years of stored energy reaches the surface of the eastern Pacific and sunlight starts warming it. And then the wind skims it and pushes the warmed water to the Western Pacific, where it mounds. The mound pounds the warm water downward, where is is stored, and where it is not counted in the GMST.
After 2005 there were two back-to-back La Nina events, which do the above to a far greeter degree, and a prolonged period of negative, La Nina-like ONI, and actual persistent negative PDO index numbers = a pause.
And now it has gone paws up = dead.
That means there will be a surge, a major surge, an enhanced greenhouse warming, in the warming of the surface air temperature.
“pounds the warm water downward, where is is stored, and where it is not counted in the GMST.”
Thermally expanded water displaces at all depths and it IS counted in GMSL.
” Millions of years of stored energy reaches the surface of the eastern ”
Upside down statement fundamentally true, but the oldest abyssal waters are about 1500 years old.
https://geosciencebigpicture.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/2500-metre-age-from.png
There will certainly be an increase in tropospheric temperatures measurable by satellites as well as louvered boxes as a result of the current nino. The radiative energy absorbed by the atmosphere from the ocean will be 90% from atmospheric water and 10% from atmospheric CO2. Humans are responsible for at most 1/3 of atmospheric CO2 so human CO2 will be responsible for at most 3% of the radiative warming of the atmosphere.
Wunsch -the oceans never forget.
The steric component of sea level rise captures some of it. As Trenberth explains, one of the places with the largest amount of expanded water is in the Western Pacific, and it is not sampled by ARGO. (Paul S. often tried, unsuccessfully, to get this through the hard head of the water chef).
Which may in part explain the current spike in sea level rise:
http://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/fileadmin/images/data/Products/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_J2_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.png
“Thermally expanded water displaces at all depths and it IS counted in GMSL.”
Gymnosperm, note that JCH was mentioning GMST — global mean surface temperature — not global mean sea level.
I agree with Curry and Pielke Sr’s responses. But isn’t it true that the debate will be fully settled only with the passage of time, say the next 10 -15 years or so, when the CO2 – temperature patterns will provide more clarity:
– meanwhile we will continue to develop better understanding of anthropogenic / natural forcings/causes;
– anyhow, social cost analysis tells us the benefits of warming significantly dominate costs in the first ~50 years or so in a millennial time frame
– finally, taking major steps in restructuring the global energy system will significantly detriment the development of the poor nations most of all, achieving a massive wealth transfer from rich to poor countries may be the liberal / socialist ultimate grand plan of the powers that be at the U.N. So maybe we should not be so rash.
“Third point: Dismissing multidecadal to century scale variations in solar radiation is frankly ludicrous. You can argue about the magnitude of the impact of these variations on global climate, but dismissing the existence of these variations is completely unjustified.”
Especially when the Gleissberg (century-scale) cycle is so easy to identify, as I show in my blog: https://geoscienceenvironment.wordpress.com/
I estimate that the entire increase in temperature between 1935 and 2005 might be accounted for by the Gleissberg Cycle. In effect, the Gleissberg Cycle stores in the world ocean the excess solar energy of several solar cycles and releases the energy in oceanic oscillations. This phenomenon is then misinterpreted as a monotonic trend in global warming, when in fact it is only the warming phase of a cool-warm-cool pseudo-cycle.
What empirical evidence of global warming can be linked to CO2? Between 1950 and 1975 there was not much warming and not much after 1995, except for the 1998 El Nino event(s). Before 1950 there were land-use changes that could cause warming but not much CO2 emitted from fossil fuels.
That leaves us with 20 years or so in which CO2 emissions can be correlated with global warming. If this warming can be explained by the Gleissberg Cycle, there is little evidence left to show that mankind’s CO2 emissions have enough power to overcome internal (natural) variability of the Earth’s climate system.
There are a couple of recent items on the Gleissberg Cycle here: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.my/2015/10/new-paper-finds-gleissberg-cycle-of.html
I especially enjoyed learning the Richard Feynman’s sister is co-author of one of the papers.
So it seems that in some ways this work is doing something similar to Nic Lewis in estimating climate sensitivity. Although I’m not sure how effective climate sensitivity relates to TCR or ECR but it does seem to share some similarities to Nic work. It suggests that based on observations warming will be lower than the IPCC model mean value (3oC). This estimate is higher than Nic’s but from memory I believe that IPCC aerosol negative estimates appear to have been overstated based on more recent work. This might account for why the Lovejoy estimate is higher than Nic’s. What are the main differences between lovejoy’s and Nic’s work?
I think part of the problem is that Lovejoy seems to pose the problem in a very binary way. The ‘ denialist’ that make most sense dont see it that way arent looking for a single natural process to explain away all of the 20thC trend.
Does anybody remember how Nic Lewis handled the significance of his own work, I mean did he think to call an end to further scientific enquiry on this aspect of thescience based on his own maths.
Actually Dr Lovejoy how do you handle other investigators climate sensitivity estimates when calling for closure based on your own maths?
I do find the graphs interesting, but like so much of this, it only serves to confirm what one already believes. If you believe CO2 drives temperature then this is conclusive proof, although it does then undermine much of what the IPCC has published. On the other hand, if you believe that CO2 levels are determined (at least in the short term) by temperature, then this proves that temperature increases cause increases in CO2 levels. Either way, some poor taxpayer probably paid for this rubbish to be printed. It cannot in any way be regarded as science.
“The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.”
“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”
“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”
– Karl Popper
the first 26 pages of his masterpiece should be sufficient to see that Shaun Lovejoy approach is unfamiliar with theory of science:
http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/popper-logic-scientific-discovery.pdf
Shaun Lovejoy even fully admits that the approach largely applied by global warming science, United Nations IPCC is largely flawed:
“Global warming science has concentrated on proving the theory that the postindustrial warming is largely caused by human activities. Yet no scientific theory can be proved beyond all doubt, and our attempts to convince people of the science are entering a period of diminishing returns.”
If he had understood the progress of knowledge he would have seen that:
An idea, hypothesis or theory is merited by the severity of the tests it has been exposed to and survived, and not at all by inductive reasoning in favor of it – justificationism – the approach largely applied by United Nations political organ IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Accumulation of knowledge requires being able to operate in several modes – both being creative in the making of possible hypothesis, and critical when eliminating all the false ones.
Oh Karl Popper, oh Socrates, our knowledge is finite,
provisional, not even ninety-seven per cent certain.
Dr Lovejoy,
Jennifer Mahrosy has a wonderful quote on her website:
I wrote the following two statements down on a scrap of paper when I was an undergraduate at the University of Queensland in the early 1980s. They seemed to resonate more with me as each year passes:
1. Belief in the truth of a theory is inversely proportional to the precision of the science.
2. The creativity of a scientist is directly proportional to how much [s]he knows, and inversely proportional to how much [s]he believes.
I don’t want to be patronising but given your professed 99.9% confidence level I think it is worth reflecting on.
Peter, to me you are the sun, the moon, and stars, and yet, I am told on good authority, that you don’t matter. C02 is all that matters.
True, Wendy, CO2 and pixie dust coded in mammoth computers gives any temperature result you want.
Listen, if not to me, then Tinkerbel for the settling science
It would not hurt for climate science to have an intuition for stationary gaussian random processes, and then non-stationary gaussian random processes, and then what happens when it’s not gaussian at all.
1. Pick indepenent complex gaussian coefficients for each frequency, take the real part. Variance = power spectrum.
2. Pick independent complex gaussian coefficients for each eigenvector (taking the role of sines and cosines), take the real part. Variance = eigenvalue.
3. All bets are off. The coefficients are not indepenent. Statistics no longer works.
The climate is the latter. You can’t go from data to inference.
rhhardin:
I believe that is why Prof. Lovejoy substituted CO2 as a proxy for all forcings and feedbacks combined.
He aims to “end the scientific part of the debate—to reach “climate closure”’ but this seems unlikely to occur given that he mirrors the approaches of Chris Monckton and Dr. David Evans. Boiling down all observations until you can fit the warming curve to a single variable has been, until now, rejected by consensus members as unscientific and even ignorant behavior. Now that Prof. Lovejoy has adopted a “one curve fits all” approach, perhaps a real debate can be engaged.
See the analogy on how to make a strawberry smoothie above.
Dr Lovejoy is explicit on his blog regarding his motivations and ideology.
AGW policy offers the best possible means to retard or prevent economic growth in light of “carrying capacity” concerns.
cAGW – Plato’s noble lie wrapped in 21st century “science” speak.
” A somewhat different way to understand this through the related idea of carrying capacity, quantified by the human “ecological footprint” (see: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/footprint_basics_overview/). For example, it has been estimated that since 1978, the global per capita ecological footprint has exceeded the per capita biocapacity, and today it exceeds this by more than 50%.
From a humanistic point of view, stopping economic growth – at least for the developed countries would thus seem to be both a sine qua non for stopping emissions growth as well as for preventing our further collective impoverishment by free market driven GDP growth. Similar arguments against continuing growth have been made by Robert Heinberg ([Heinberg, 2012]), Hervé Kemp ([Kempf, 2011]) and Jeff Rubin ([Rubin, 2012]). Even ending growth – which in of itself will not solve the climate problem – will be incredibly difficult to achieve since the end of exponential economic growth over an extended period spells the end of the system. It is enough to recall that just recently – the 2008 – 2009 crash – we witnessed the immediate consequences of stopping growth if only for one to two years. Longer term halts will require alternative economic models and fundamental political and social change. We have already hinted at the difficulty of such a transition with reference to the 1% who have swallowed up much of the growth over the last 30 – 40 years. A more accurate measure of the difficulty can be gathered by considering not the concentration of wealth by rather the concentration of economic control and hence power. A recent pioneering study by [Vitali et al., 2011] using new tools of network analysis borrowed from statistical physics, analyzed a data base with 37 million private companies and discovered that the most powerful 147 controlled 40% of them. This is closer to 0.004% than 1%. Such concentrated power – vested in organizations that only exist by extracting a nonzero return on investment – will likely to be refractory to rational discourse.”
http://scienceforpeace.ca/anthropogenic-warming-climate-closure
(From the latter link.) Here is an exemplary presentation of Lovejoy’s dishonest rhetorical style. A simple assertion, contrary to reality, used to support a fundamentally socialist agenda.
Even today, prototype technology has been developed that can extract ambient CO2 from the upper ocean, equivalent to the atmosphere.
“[U]nlikely technological breakthrough[s]” aren’t needed. The routine process of technological development is perfectly capable of bringing the cost of such technology down to cost-effectiveness.
The actual amount of surface, not necessarily land, needed for enough solar power to meet a projected 2070 need of 100 terawatts is only a small fraction of the land currently used for agriculture. If it can be plowed and planted, it can be covered with solar panels. Costs of such are decreasing exponentially, and will drive down the costs of ancillary technology with increasing volume.
The same logic applies to the obvious power→gas/liquid fuel option for storage. The above statement involving surface area requirements allows for the projected 30% round-trip efficiency between the electrodes of the solar cells and the output of CCGT generators. Building gas/oil pipelines is several orders of magnitude cheaper (per energy carried) than long-distance electrical transmission, and temporary substitution of vehicles for permanent constructions is far cheaper, easier, and more flexible.
Moreover, a substantial commitment to converting solar power to fuel will preserve current and near-term future investment in resources for transport, storage, distribution, and use of such fuels. Contra Lovejoy’s erroneous assertion, humanity is not “addicted to fossil fuels”, at best a case could be made that we’re addicted to hydrocarbon fuels. But those fuels could be supplied from fossil-neutral sources using only existing scientific understanding and reasonably predictable technological development.
No, any realistic look at the “logic” of Lovejoy’s linked article will show that it’s nothing but dishonest rhetoric in the service of a socialist agenda: ending the Industrial Revolution.
N.B. The same applies to Lovejoy’s statements there about nuclear fission, although I’m not going to waste time detailing the nonsense. Perhaps one of the fans of fission energy will do so.
For a layman, the article is convincing. I happen to be a logic driven layman, but I follow this issue as a hobby so I can see problems
1) He determined the value of ECS to be 2.33. The scientific community as a whole does not concur.
2) He attributes all the warming, since we could “measure” global temperatures to be caused by man. The scientific community as a whole does not concur with this either.
3) He starts his analysis in 1880 becasue that is when we have global temperatures and CO2 emissions. Those dates are cherry picked and does not include any time that is not impacted by man. His comparison assumed no change happened in the past.
4) He states:
“What is the probability that the denialists are right and that this is simply a giant natural fluctuation? This would be a rare event but how rare?”
“Denialists” do not believe that to be the case. “Denialists” believe that part of the warming is natural and part is antropogenic. How is it possible that a person could know so much about climate science, but know so little about the opinion of those opposing him?
5) In his “Natural Causes” section he recognizes that natural causes can cause impact climate, yet his discussion assumes it is 0% natural and 100% caused by man.
6) There is no new science here. It is simply an exercise in analysis of long knowns information. If his analysis was supported by the scietific community he would be correct. However clearly they do not.
That was pretty much my feelings on the work. There are dozens of estimates of climate sensitivity both higher and lower. His position would have to be that closure should occur around his own figure of 2.33 (btw no confidence limits, it’s 2.33!).
I have no problem with that sort of arrogance, in my experience many scientist over estimate the importance of their own work, even the nice ones. I think their ego’s are very closely tied to their work, again not something I’m criticizing. I think its probably the job of journals to reign in that sort of nonsense and keep the work firmly centred in the whole body of work. Having said that this is an opinion piece so maybe its allowable.
Surely there must be a number of scientists working on the isssue of climate sensitivity ATM, I wonder what they think about the idea they are participating in a pointless exercise?
Wow…the guy made the argument I have been making all along. I bet a lot of skeptics would agree.
All other things being equal…a doubling of CO2 should result in an increase of about 2C. The Global community has argued that we should limit the temperature increase to 2C. Dr Lovejoy believes a doubling of CO2 will result in slightly more then 2C.
So instead of the 350PPM limit wanted by the climate crazies we can set a limit of say 600 PPM and still stay pretty close to the agreed 2C.
A goal of limiting CO2 to 600 PPM allows plenty of time for the GenIV nuclear R&D to be completed and an orderly roll-out beginning in the mid 2020’s without wrecking the worlds economies.
If the CO2 curve perfectly matches over a century of warming with zero lag it does imply that equilibrium climate sensitivity is achieved almost instantaneously.
Lest this be misunderstood at some later date, I should have made clear that I was referring to Prof Lovejoy’s proxy-CO2 radiative curve which incorporates the other forcings and feedbacks.
“Figure 1a shows the global annual temperature plotted not as a function of the date, but rather as a function of the CO2 forcing. ”
Lovejoy defines a relation between Temperature and CO2 ‘forcing’ then plots them and gets a correlation that he claims proves the relation. It’s all just a wee bit circular don’t you think?
The correct procedure, which many have carried out and published, is surely to plot both temperature and CO2 against Time. When this is done one sees that there is either no correlation whatever or that any correlation that may exist is obscured by other factors not on the plot. There is no simple correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration. Either way I’d expect more from a professor at McGill, which in my youth was considered a highly reputable institution of higher learning.
Hmm, if the “depths” of the little ice age was about 1 C less than “normal” and occurred around 1700-1750, it would seem that would contribute to some uncertainty in what should be considered “normal” in the 125 year long instrumental record. Based on the rate of ocean heat uptake and paleo ocean studies by Oppo, Rosenthal and Linsey and others, which would be a more heat balance related metric than predominately land based paleo, I would think that should get at least a brief mention prior to going five sigma on the rather short and limited prior to 1950 “surface” temperature data. js
The claim that The Pause was predictable makes the warmist climate models look even more ridiculous for the simplest of reasons that the mods faild to predict it.
This man is lost in confusion.
//models not mods.
Great – but you are still missing the reduction in Equatorial Easterly waves – increasing surface albedo and reducing cloud condensation neucli. This unholy trinity reducing the ITCZ cloud mass ensuring +85w or 2kwh per day. This produces the Atlantic Ocean temperature gradient advertised as Anthropogenic Global warming. Don’t take my word for it – get HADISST1 and crunch the numbers yourself: August 1N to 20N. Cumon Judy, I could do with a bit of help here.
For me, the current direction of part of the climate science community has brought illumination to what I thought was bizarre human behavior.
That being an absolute conviction in the existence of witchcraft. and the rationale of eugenics.
Sadly, both are coming alive once again in the science community.
Hurricane Patricia has political implications. What we see happening in Europe may happen here in the US. From the article:
…
Hurricane Mitch is estimated to have generated a very high human and material cost. Mitch is estimated to have caused 20,000 deaths and 13,000 injuries; to have left 1.5 million homeless, and to have affected another 2 million in other ways (FAO, 2001). The hurricane also destroyed a large part of these countries’ road networks and social infrastructure, including hospitals and schools. Overall, FAO (2001) estimates that about 28,000 kilometers of roads and 160 bridges were destroyed. According to U.S. Aid, in El Salvador 60% of the paved roads were damaged, and 300 schools and 22 health centers were destroyed or damaged by the hurricane (US Aid, 2004). In addition, Mitch largely destroyed these countries’ crops and flooded agricultural land, reducing future production in the agricultural sector. The share of agriculture in the region’s GDP dropped from 21.2% before the hurricane to 17.8% after Mitch (FAO, 2001).
…
According to the World Bank, the main way in which Central American men responded to the disaster was by migrating North (World Bank, 2001). According to information from Migration Departments in these countries, external migration from Honduras almost tripled and external migration from Nicaragua increased by about 40% (FAO, 2001). In January 1999, Reuters and the New York Times headlines announced “Desperate Hurricane Survivors Push[ing] North to [the] U.S. Border.”
…
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/23/hurricane-patricia-could-spell-massive-ongoing-border-crisis-for-u-s/
comment is in moderation
I’ve been waiting to see a point by point rebuttal of Dr Lovejoy’s “rebuttal” of Dr Curry’s analysis. I hope Dr C will provide one herself, but so far I have only seen pot shots and nothing really substantive. I see fundamental flaws in Dr L’s logic and reading of his statistical analysis.
SL: As you will see, it can’t be that easy because each of the points you raise below is wrong.
It can be that easy because each of the points she makes is right.
SL: Regardless of the IPCC, the science (see fig. 1 of Climate Closure) shows that most of the warming since 1880 is attributable to GHG.
No it doesn’t. It shows nothing of the sort.
It does show a warming trend, not contested by skeptics, albeit the extent sometimes is. But you have no basis to attribute that warming to GHGs other than they have been rising as well. You can fairly state that some warming effect must have been contributed but beyond that you cannot say with certainty (much less 99.9% certainty) that it caused the warming in the first place.
It is entirely plausible that the GHG increase in the atmosphere is CAUSED by the warming, and not the other way round. The ONLY reason to say that anthro-GHG’s has had an effect is as Dr C pointed out (accepting the IPCC view on this) that the period post 1950 is the period where man made any significant contribution to atmospheric concentrations. During this period we have had a significant rise in temps, which illicited alarm over the extent to which we influence climate, and also an equally long period with no warming despite even greater and increasing emissions.
…the warming since 1750 is perfectly explained……Anyone would agree that it is at least 0.6oC and this is already a 3 standard deviation event, and even taking into account the “black swan” extremes, such a flucutiaon is still very unlikely
It is not “very unlikely”. This is the climate! Your expectation clearly is that it should be in some sort of steady fixed state. You have no justification for that and presented no evidence to support it.
In order to convince me that the increase of temps since 1880 are a “3 standard deviations” from normal, you need to define what “normal” is and you need to convince me that the climate does not vary that much ordinarily on those time scales. I’ve got to say – that’ll be a tough job because what evidence there is for that is against you.
The 125 year variations (including volcanic and solar responses) are fully dealt with using the pre 1900 multiproxy reconstructions.
They are “FULLY dealt with”? Is this ‘settled science’ again? Nothing new to find out about the climate response to volcanic forcing and solar direct and indirect effects? Or any other multi-decadal naturally occurring internal phenomena? And multi-proxy reconstructions are utterly fool-proof are they? Would this be Michael Mann’s famous hockey-stick graph that you would be referencing? What other “multi-proxy” reconstructions are using that are so infallible as to make 99.9% in your conclusions?
My conclusions fully take into account – in a statistical basis – solar and volcanic activity, see fig 1 in the ref. L1:
You conclusions may well take “fully” into account, but you have two fundamental errors in your assumptions here:
– That solar and volcanic effects are accurately accounted for and
– Your calculation of climate sensitivity is correct.
The analysis fully accounts for the clustering of the events via the intermittency exponent. Can you tell which of the plots in fig. 1a are real and which are simulations?
It really doesn’t matter since you are trying to tell yourself that you “know” the intermittency component on far too small a sample size. Somebody doing statistical analyses such as this should be extremely cautious of this surely?
It would be one thing if you introduced your article with the caveats “given these (x,y,z) assumptions are true then this analysis shows…etc”. Then we could work at trying to understand a bit more about the assumptions and argue and debate them. But you are virtually holding them to be immutable knowns – things that are extremely uncertain, poorly measured, and sparsely and incompletely covered.
Can you understand how a reasonably skeptical person can find it difficult to accept your conclusions Dr Lovejoy?
Note, i am acutely busy at the moment, just returned from travel. I will respond to SL comments later today. thanks for your patience
One point that’s easily refutable is how rare spurious correlations are. Point being, they are not all that rare. Hence the saying correlation does not imply causation.
See …
http://judithcurry.com/2015/10/23/climate-closure/#comment-738613
I don’t know how many times I wrote the correlation was only good in the last quarter of the last century on the Blackboard.
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“But you have no basis to attribute that warming to GHGs other than they have been rising as well”
Yes, we do.
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-carbon-dioxide-greenhouse-effect.html
No we don’t. Read that article again and carefully examine the assumptions.
….and in any case, the article in question was Dr Lovejoy’s and he made a priori assumptions about the correlation of CO2 and temperature.
The article you are referencing does much the same: “They attribute the rising trend to CO2 increases from fossil fuel emissions.”
All they are doing is measuring the first order forcing from increasing CO2 – something skeptics do not contest. They attribute the rising CO2 to manmade emissions but it is entirely possible that CO2 levels would have risen anyway as consequence of warming.
Furthermore, if that’s all it was it would still be a non-issue since the effect of increasing CO2 is logarithmic – you have double CO2 levels from any given starting point in order to have the same effect.
I’m afraid you article makes exactly the same mistake in assumptions in attribution as Dr Lovejoy.
Hi Shaun – Thank you for replying to my comments. I will further comment here where you write
“the CO2 forcing is only used as a linear proxy for all human forcings so that aerosols and other GHG, land use etc. are statistically included.”
But in your article, you wrote
“our species must tackle the urgent issue of reducing emissions and mitigating the consequences of the warming.”
Thus one has no other choice but to assume you have concluded that CO2 dominates the changes you report on. Even if we can reduce emissions, humans would still influence a major effect of climate from land use change, as we have shown in our work and that of others. This was one of the motivations for our paper
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/12/r-354.pdf
Also, with respect to your statement that
“All I demonstrate is that since 1880, the estimated global surface temperature has had a large, low probability excursion. However, you can always reject the connection of the global averaged temperature series with global warming.”
This is fundamental. Our research shows that any quantitative estimate of what has been called “climate sensitivity” [using the relationship between CO2 levels and global average temperature trend] based on the surface temperature data will overstate the magnitude of that sensitivity.
There are multiple reasons for the inadequacy of sfc T as a global warming metric (including concurrent trends in absolute surface air humidity; the fact that T trends are a function of height near the surface; site observation quality; etc), but a warm bias is introduced using minimum temperatures over land.
This is why we concluded there has been a widening divergence between the surface temperature and lower tropospheric temperature trends that we reported in
Klotzbach, P.J., R.A. Pielke Sr., R.A. Pielke Jr., J.R. Christy, and R.T. McNider, 2009: An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102,doi:10.1029/2009JD011841.http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/11/r-345.pdf
Klotzbach, P.J., R.A. Pielke Sr., R.A. Pielke Jr., J.R. Christy, and R.T. McNider, 2010: Correction to: “An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102, doi:10.1029/2009JD011841”, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D1, doi:10.1029/2009JD013655.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2010/03/r-345a.pdf
Thus, I urge you to at least match your analysis to the lower tropospheric temperature and upper ocean heat change for the period of record in which there are robust observations [1979 for the former, and early 1950s for the later].
Finally, the reaction to your article by others in this thread was, i assume, motivated for your call to urgent action to reduce emissions. The article then reads as an advocacy position rather than just presenting your results and then inviting discussion.
Best Regards
Roger Sr.
Dr Lovejoy
Thanks for turning up to debate your paper.
You seem to believe that climate was virtually flat until the modern era and that post 1950 warming can be attributed to co2
Phil jones gave up believing climate was static in his 2006 paper when he confirmed that natural variability was greater than he had hitherto believed. The MET office followed suit around 2009 when they removed the static climate reference from their web site and moved into the post hockey stick era which you still seem to inhabit.
CET provides an interesting reference point wth climate flictuations clearly visible through history and the present warming trend commencing around 1700
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
All sorts of interpretations can be put on the reality that the temperature gains during the 1990’s were reversed this century
Bearing in mind that temperature increases since 1950 are supposed to be attributed to increased co2 what are we to make of the current temperature anomaly being the same as in that year? Where has the warming gone?
Tonyb
Two points:
1. Interestingly, evidence of the pause is abundant in several metrics (regardless of surface sensor temperature data manipulations). Evidence of life-sustaining Northern Hemisphere short lived peak warming (likely through ocean heat disgorgement) followed by long-lived downward life-killing step-reductions to decidedly colder regimes (in which solar heat is stored in the oceans instead of warming the land) is abundant in several paleo-reconstructions.
2. Evidence of disgorgement of previously accumulated ocean heat that was accomplished under a regime of predominantly equatorial clear sky and normal trade wind conditions that then changed to predominantly a relaxation of surface winds and an uptick in evaporation and cloud cover of now layered waters, can be modeled and is based on sound physics.
Maybe what is needed is for engineers, schooled in fluid dynamics, heat transfer, and the interaction between water surface dynamics and atmospheric gases, to take over climate research.
There should be turbulence, so let it be.
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I am unable to follow your short comment. Please expand.
No need to expand; you’ve done that well yourself.
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Maybe what is needed is for engineers, schooled in fluid dynamics, heat transfer, and the interaction between water surface dynamics and atmospheric gases, to take over climate research.
Give them the actual real data and turn them loose and they can take you to the moon and back. We did not have any data to show how to get to the moon and back. We have a lot of Climate Data in Proxy records that go back thousands and millions of years. This can be understood with the data that is already available. Include the climate scientists. Not the 97% climate scientists. I would kick out anyone over 50%.
Even the idea of a current energy accumulation (above the unknown, multi-decadal/centenial baseline avg.) is highly uncertain. It is plausible that we’ve lost some energy in recent decades. With the lack in temp. rise, imbalance should be increasing, but it’s often estimated at a fairly steady .6w/m^2 IIRC and some analysis puts it likely less than 0.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/11/28/is-earth-in-energy-deficit/
Also, response is very likely variable. Quasi-cyclical regimes will change the response and it is ridiculous to assume this will average out on any particular time scale.
Damn good paper on the attempt to apply physics laws related to my comment above. Includes the issue of salt concentration on layering.
http://shoni2.princeton.edu/ftp/lyo/glm/large_etal_kpp_94RG01872.pdf
I’m almost out of chalk, but ignore the millenial at your perennial.
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Again, I an unable to understand your short comment. Please expand.
Beth Cooper has the decoder ring franchise, but others, pointing to Lovejoy’s ignorance of longer scale natural cycles, have made the point more elegantly if less trenchantly.
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Your point still escapes me. I don’t consider my comments to be sharp or cutting. The word trenchant is on the acid side of on-topic discourse. Pointedly descriptive and straightforward would be a better choice. I try to be quite dry with the occasional adjective.
And why are you almost out of chalk?
LOL! As I was writing that last question, I just got the “ignore the millenial at your perennial!!! You mean “peril”! Too funny!
::grin::. Love ya, most of the time.
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