by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn [link]
Earth monitoring: Cinderella science [link]
From Urban to National Heat Island: New paper finds changes in energy consumption can affect national temperatures [link] …
The science is in — city trees are enormously good for us. But in many cities, they’re struggling [link]
Evidence of rising & poleward shift of storm surge in W. North Pacific. [link]
A layer of solid ice could be speeding up the flow of an Antarctic ice shelf into the ocean [link]
Coral reefs are helped by better fisheries governance, with participation and property rights [link]
Summer temperature trends in Greenland [link]
Study finds climate scientists are more credible when they practice what they preach [link] … Duh
The First Mammal Has Gone Extinct Due To Climate Change [link]
#Didyouknow the Grindelwald Fluctuation 1560-1630 was one of the coldest periods of the LIA? [link] …
A chiral link to life’s origins? Scientists find mirror molecules in interstellar cloud [link]
The Atlantic: How trigger warnings are hurting mental health on campus [link]
“Risks are real and endless, so prioritize risks as opposed to trying to avoid all risk.” [link] …
Newest photo of Pluto stuns scientists [link]
Fascinating historical perspective on empiricists vs rationalists re medical knowledge [link] …
Dan Kahan: On the Sources of Ordinary Science Knowledge & Ignorance [link]
Half of extension educators, who R tasked with “translating research from universities to farmers” skeptical of AGW [link]
CliSci in the vanguard of conservatives’ loss of confidence in science shown in this study: [link]…
How a “liberal” bias is killing science.[link]
“Ten Simple Rules for Effective Statistical Practice”: [link] …
All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?
We paid for the research with taxes, and Internet sharing is easy. What’s the hold-up? [link]
Jason Box’s overview of this Season’s Greenland melt [link]
Ecological Consequences of Sea-Ice Decline [link] …
GOP AGs warn Dems that if climate skeptics can be prosecuted for ‘fraud,’ so can alarmists [link]
Why Texas is prime flood territory, and how #climatechange is making the problem worse [link]
Research: Permafrost thawing below shallow Arctic lakes [link] …
Emergency rescue launched for ill worker at South Pole [link]
Paper: “quantification of influence of solar flux variability on climate system remains an open scientific question” [link] …
With iPhones and computer models, do we still need weather forecasters? [link]
Examination of two kinds of political correctness [link]
A CHANGING RIVER: MEASURING NUTRIENT FLUXES TO THE SOUTH CHINA SEA [link]
Pingback: Week in review – science edition – Enjeux énergies et environnement
Interesting discussion of why the Southern Ocean has not warmed much: Armour et al., “Southern Ocean warming delayed by circumpolar upwelling and equatorward transport”, Nature Geoscience. Non-paywalled version here.
Typical skeptical cherry picking of temperatures in greenland
There are 41 stations, 26 active.
It looks like this
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Regional/TAVG/Figures/greenland-TAVG-Trend.pdf
Steven Mosher: Typical skeptical cherry picking of temperatures in greenland
You are never bothered by the cherry picking of the activist credents. Most of the “cherry picking” by us lukewarmers and skeptics is to restore some balance to the discussions and aim for completeness. A rat species has gone extinct and some corals have suffered bleaching; concomitantly, seaweeds have expanded, kelp is thriving, coccolithophores are thriving, cephalopods are thriving and terrestrial forests have benefitted measurably from the increase in CO2, rainfall, and temperatures. Over the past 40 years, as urban areas have warmed faster than the undisturbed rural areas, the Sahel has greened considerably and the incidence of malaria has declined.
And so it goes.
The whole premise of Berkeley Earth was to consider the data that others ignored
“You are never bothered by the cherry picking of the activist credents.”
1. Actually I started my study PRECISELY because I was concerned about cherry picking.. using monthly data when daily was availble,
Only using GHCN when there were other sources, using USHCN.
” Most of the “cherry picking” by us lukewarmers and skeptics is to restore some balance to the discussions and aim for completeness. ”
Really? I prefer to use all the data. Show that result and then explain
why certain data may be suspect and the effects of removing it.
In terms of balance in My field, which I try to limit my discussion to,
the people who cherry pick are always skeptics.
Oh wait, its cold in denver today…
You dont balance cherry picking by picking a different batch. you
show all the data you can and explain why you excluded some if
you had to.
“A rat species has gone extinct and some corals have suffered bleaching; concomitantly, seaweeds have expanded, kelp is thriving, coccolithophores are thriving, cephalopods are thriving and terrestrial forests have benefitted measurably from the increase in CO2, rainfall, and temperatures. Over the past 40 years, as urban areas have warmed faster than the undisturbed rural areas, the Sahel has greened considerably and the incidence of malaria has declined.”
And billy won a trophy in the science fair!! dont forget that!
Look when you have a theory that predicts species will go extinct
you actually get to tell people about evidence that CONFIRMS
the theory.
When you develop a climate theory then you will get to point to evidence that confirms or disconfirms it. And yes
Theories can be SILENT about certain observables. Climate science
is silent about billys science fair.
your approach is to try to counter confirmation of a theory
( a rat died) with observations that either also confirm the theory
of observations the theory was silent about.
yes the planet is getting warmer, and billy won the science fair.
You do not achieve balance by pointing at squirrels. you just distract.
errata
‘your approach is to try to counter confirmation of a theory
( a rat died) with observations that either also confirm the theory
of observations the theory was silent about.”
your approach is to try to counter confirmation of a theory
( a rat died) with observations that either also confirm the theory
OR observations the theory was silent about.
Steven Mosher: your approach is to try to counter confirmation of a theory
( a rat died) with observations that either also confirm the theory
OR observations the theory was silent about.
What observations have I cited that the theory has been silent about? The science is as applicable to cephalopods and coccolithophores as to coral; terrestrial forests as much as island rats; Earth surface non-radiative energy fluxes as to radiant fluxes measured from space.
I respect your work with BEST, but the rest of your postings are replete with absurdities and idiocies in the name of “the science”. For example, you brought in Billy’s science fair project, not I. You are the one who likened mechanisms not yet known to “unicorns”.
Show me the predictions about kelp.
As far as I can tell I see no gm prediction about kelp or billys science fair.
So detail how and where climate science spoke about the things you mentioned. Predictions. Find them.
Prediction: lots of rare island “species” are going to go extinct. Climate change or no climate change. Just because people travel to those islands, bring invasive competitors, predators, and diseases. Often without knowing it. Not to mention changing the environment.
Been happening for millennia, ever since humans invented boats.
Big picture: rare island “species” don’t matter. They’re tiny offshoots of larger populations, which usually still exist and can re-colonize when/if conditions are right. And if the larger population’s gone extinct, what difference does it make whether the island population goes extinct now or a few thousand years from now?
Whole “living fossil” ecosystems, now, like Tasmania, New Zealand, or Madagascar, that’s a different story. But the vast majority of those extinctions aren’t due to “climate change”. They are (probably) anthropomorphic, though.
Steven – You say “I prefer to use all the data. Show that result and then explain why certain data may be suspect and the effects of removing it.”. Sounds good, but on inspection the B.E. method is seriously flawed, and the problem lies with how they “use all the data”. B.E. are obsessed with temperature trends. All of their analysis is based on trends – trends are used to identify and eliminate outliers, to infill neighbouring stations’ missing data, etc, etc. The whole approach is up the creek. A totally different approach is needed in order to truly “use all the data”: work with the data, and when and only when you have finished working with all the data should you begin to look at trends. By definition, a trend is something that is given by the data. ie, data is what you start with, a trend is something you may end up with. The moment you start using your perceptions and expectations of trends to adjust or infill or remove any data, you have corrupted the process. B.E. corrupts the process in spades.
Steven Mosher: So detail how and where climate science spoke about the things you mentioned. Predictions.
That’s a good one. No one in the crusade has ever distinguished between the outcomes of CO2 increase or warming that would be beneficial and those that would not be beneficial. It’s all about how they would be bad for everything.
It’s the same with polar bears as with cephalopods: their importance was discovered post hoc (possibly the people who surveyed the cephalopods had expected to document population decrease — I think the writing is ambiguous on that point). However, there was a prediction that malaria incidence would increase, and that has not happened, instead malaria incidence has decreased. For the coccolithophores the prediction was that every marine population that constructed a skeleton out of calcium carbonate would suffer from acidification (perhaps you remember the chalk and vinegar demonstration by the EPA director), which was why the coccolithophore population was studied.
warming threatens kelp forests: http://www.westcoast.fisheries.noaa.gov/habitat/habitat_types/kelp_forest_info/kelp_forest_threats.html
Not a word about faster growth rates at higher CO2 concentrations.
Too funny.
Now go get what I asked for.
Steven Mosher: Now go get what I asked for.
You asked for a kelp prediction. So far, there has been a prediction for warming (bad) but not CO2. So far, the outcome has been increased kelp growth.
What exactly is your point? The “all bad” prediction is disconfirmed all over the place — are you saying that for some reason it does not count? Is it your contention that good outcomes are ignorable or distractions if they were not explicitly predicted by one of the alarmist credents?
matthewrmarler,
Using data from two temperature stations when aggregate global data above and below the surface show warming is the exact opposite of balanced or complete. Irrespective of what thermometers say, I think we can rule out invisible farting unicorns being involved with the accelerating landed ice mass loss at both poles and concomitant rise in sea levels.
In *combination*, those three indicators render the statement, “There is nothing here to suggest that the climate in Greenland in the last century is any more than a reflection of natural cycles such as the AMO”, nothing less than an exercise in reality impairment.
And you only know these things because the very government agencies tasked with studying changes to climate and its effects on the biosphere published their findings.
Thus you’re left with “but activists” and changing the subject to “warming isn’t bad”.
That’s a pretty important point. In fact it is the only point that is relevant for policy. If warming isn’t bad, or can’t be shown to be bad, there is no rational justification for spending money on GHG abatement.
My understanding is the case has not been made that GHG emissions are bad.
1. “The Social Cost of Carbon should be set at zero” http://reason.org/files/social_costs_of_regulating_carbon.pdf
2. IPCC does not give an estimate for the net benefit of GHG abatement for the period through to 2100, or any shorter period.
3. From DICE-2013R (default inputs), the net benefits of GHG emissions abatement are negative for this century – that is the estimated costs of abatement would be greater than the hypothesized benefits.
I’d welcome anyone making the case that GHG mitigation would for more good than harm. I am not asking for advocacy, assertions, appeal to authority, or of quotes of want the advocates say. I am looking for proper cost-n=benefit analysis with basis of estimate provided so we can drill down to find how the estimates of the costs and of the benefits were derived.
Alternatively, pick what is believed to be the probable highest damage cost and show the basis of estimate. Commonly the broad groupings of damages are:
Storms
Agriculture
Water
Sea level rise
Health
Energy
Ecosystems
e.g. Richard Tol, 2013, Figure 3 here: http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/climate_change.pdf
brandonrgates: And you only know these things because the very government agencies tasked with studying changes to climate and its effects on the biosphere published their findings.
Quite true. I always advocate more research on open questions. Have I ever written otherwise? I have gotten my information from peer-reviewed publications.
It is an open question whether the warming of the past 135 or so years has been a net benefit or net detriment to life on Earth. Some alarmism begun in the 1980s asserted that all change would be bad, and that was the gist of “An Inconvenient Truth”. I think that the aggregate of the information assembled since then is that the changes have been mostly beneficial (even the anti-CO2 Science Magazine has published papers showing benefits to wildlife), but it is an open question. I support more scientific investigation of the topic.
We may not be able to extrapolate accurately from the recent past to the near future, but at least we can learn a lot more about the recent past.
Mosh
That is presumably an average of all the Greenland stations. The modern temperature rise is as steep as the one from around 1918
It would be interesting to know whether ALL stations warmed then and are warming now or whether some then and now are bucking the trend?
Tonyb
It would not matter if some buck the trend.
We expect that.
It is also un interesting to note earlier warming.
The question is. How much more warming in the future.
Rural temps also need to be comped to regional economic data, and not just financials.
Mosh
Of course it would matter if some buck the trend.
Of course it is interesting to note past warming otherwise how do you know it is warming now, or whether or not it is unusual?
Tonyb
…or whether or not it is unusual?
This is the one that is the most abused and confused.
What is the distribution of these temperature stations?
Presumably most of them are on the southern coast where people are.
What does a plot of geographically equalized stations look like?
PA.
They are geographically modelled. That’s the method.
Tony why would it matter? What matters is the future.
Therr is only one way to deny that GHG drive the temperatures. And that is to produce a better theory.
There will always be short bumps on path to warmer climates. We know that. It’s uninteresting.
Therr is only one way to deny that GHG drive the temperatures.
1. It is “there” not “Therr”. “Therr” is a contraction of “The err” and should have an apostrophe.
2. There are multiple ways to deny GHG drives global temperatures. Claiming there is only one way is narrow minded.
Global warmers haven’t proven that CO2 is more than a passenger, let alone driving global warming.
Steven Mosher,
You wrote –
“Therr is only one way to deny that GHG drive the temperatures. And that is to produce a better theory.”
More Warmist nonsensical assertions, accompanied by two grammatical errors in the first sentence. Maybe you should take an English expression course?
I am not sure sure why you think rises in temperature are caused by magic, rather than a body absorbing more energy than it is emitting (in basic terms). As a wannabe scientist, you might care to learn some calorimetry, and then proceed to thermodynamic theory. Quantum electrodynamics will answer many of the questions you might still have.
In essence, temperature is dependant on heat. Without heat, a body has no temperature. Increasing heat generally leads to increasing temperatures, and vice versa.
There is no scientific theory stating that GHGs drive temperatures. Just unverifiable assertions from a motley collection of second rate bumblers who quite possibly were unable to properly absorb the content of their physics lectures (if they actually attended any, of course!),
So your blanket claims of “the one true way” may suit you, and no doubt a few other people. The remaining seven billion or so may not be quite so gullible.
Cheers.
Most typical skeptics don’t cherry pick temperatures in Greenland.
“Risks are real and endless, so prioritize risks as opposed to trying to avoid all risk.
What an idea! I wonder who thought of it first.
Needs proofreading
“Up to now our understanding of the 11-year ozone solar cycle signal (SCS) in the upper stratosphere has been largely based on the SAGE II (v6.2) data record which indicated a large positive signal which could not be reproduced by models, calling into question our understanding of the chemistry of the upper stratosphere. Here we present an analysis of new v7.0 SAGE II data which shows a smaller upper stratosphere ozone SCS, due to a more realistic ozone-temperature anti-correlation. New simulations from a state-of-art 3-D chemical transport model show a small SCS in the upper stratosphere which is in agreement with SAGE v7.0 data, and the shorter HALOE and MLS records. However, despite these improvements in the SAGE II data, there are still large in current observational and meteorological reanalysis datasets, so accurate quantification of the influence of solar flux variability on the climate system remains an open scientific question.”
Translation.
Early data suggested a large SCS and people questioned the models.
New data shows a smaller cycle, better models are in agreement with this.
However.. send more money
Nasa draws a picture of our future model airplane and posts it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/science/nasa-electric-plane-x57.html?_r=0
Once more… send more money too.
Glad someone got the joke
If this AGW believer turns out to be right on…
http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/681653/IMMORTALITY-ALMOST-THERE-You-will-be-able-to-SPEAK-to-loved-ones-AFTER-they-die
I wonder Willard, do you believe that we might still be able to sell our intellectual property rights to Harvey W. before we die, since science has now shown us our future? What is your opinion? We know Harvey owns a few of them already.
Steven Mosher: However.. send more money
You missed (or chose to ignore) the “open scientific question” part.
You missed the joke.
I missed nothing
Steven Mosher: You missed the joke.
I missed nothing
OK, it’s a matter of emphasis. You emphasized more money, via a joke, without advocating more or less research. I focused on the “open question”, and I advocate (elsewhere) continued research.
Mosher sez it needs poofreading. That’s a good one.
We could ask for a poof to read it, but that might be a microaggression.
I don’t question your statement “Up to now our understanding [] was [not very good] .., … [but now] better models are in agreement []”. But the folly of the whole of the modelling fraternity has been to fiddle the models so that they match measured outcomes, without understanding the mechanisms. And your statement shows that they are still doing it!!! A much much better way would be to model everything we do know, identify everything we don’t know, and accept that while there are large unknowns there will be large discrepancies between model and measured. [And the models can never work as currently structured, but that is another issue.].
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse admonishes conservatives in NYT Letter to the Editor in response to a plea for bipartisan efforts to fight global warming, saying Exxon Mobil, the Koch’s etc. are the “dark forces in the shadows” holding the club on government spending. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/opinion/the-republicans-failure-on-the-environment.html?_r=0 . When a fence is built there will always be two sides to the fence; calling names and pointing fingers from one or the other side will not help reach a happy bipartisan solution and will only make things worse and not better. A good analogy to this behavior is the kids in my grandson’s learning center pre-school class arguing about whose toy is it, “hey, it’s my toy,” and “you aren’t sharing,” and “that’s not fair” !!
Love it how the warmies can’t lose. Check out that trashy phys.org article on Houston.
You have a two horse race, pluvial or dry phase, and you can ascribe either to that vaporous concept “climate change”. Since the climate has to change, duh. By now the all but meaningless expression has sufficient emotional charge that no case needs to be made, no definitions or qualifications are expected.
And to add to the self-loathing, just chuck in increased urban development by those scamps we call humans. Either way, it’s bad…and we dun it.
Rest assured, if there were (improbably) no change whatever in Houston’s rainfall or flood frequency…why, they could ascribe “an eerie sameness of precipitation” to those ever present villains of climate change and human activity.
Heads they win, tails we lose. And it’s all so settled they don’t even need a coin. Science, doncha know.
It is the art of reporting the truth (in Russian, Pravda, also a Communist Party official newspaper). The story goes: An American president and a Russian Secretary General competed at a 100 m run, and the American won. Pravda reported: At yesterday’s event, Comrade Secretary General won a honorable second place, while the American finished next to last.
Rice University graduates like to live in rice fields.
Also this. WSJ will have climate change ads on its op-ed page for the next few weeks.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wall-street-journal-climate-change-ads_us_57602f98e4b071ec19ef45d8?utm_hp_ref=climate-change
The science is in — city trees are enormously good for us. But in many cities, they’re struggling [link]
Reforestation and afforestation belong with flood control and irrigation in my list of projects to start and enlarge while continuing to study the effects of CO2 on climate and warming/cooling on well-being. New Orleans, to pick one example, is a lot more likely to benefit in this century from massive reforestation than from reducing its carbon footprint by a similar dollar and labor investment.
Ten simple rules for effective statistical practice.
Thank you for the link.
Rob Kass was on my thesis committee, was the most cited statistician for about 10 years (maybe still is), and was the lead author on a book I highly recommend called “The Analysis of Neural Data”.
In time for the heatwave.
I looked to reproduce the Christy plot of 100 degree days.
https://turbulenteddies.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/gt_100.png
I did the same for 90 degree and 80 degree days as well:
https://turbulenteddies.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/heat.png
Looks like global warming might cause average warming, but not maximal heating.
Shouldn’t the >110 be >80?
It’s a count. Not a temperature
SM, it was an error in the legend
blueice2hotsea noted the error better
TE
Nice graph.
But the color temperature legend:
>90 yellow
>100 red
>110 taupe
should be:
>80 taupe
>90 yellow
>100 red
‘What ids happening right now is we are catapulting ourselves
out of the Holocene,’ says Professor Stefan Rahmstorf.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/17/shattered-records-climate-change-emergency-today-scientists-warn
Fair’s become foul alright. Too much eye of newt and toe of frog
in the science models I guess.
The real solution is to make climate records out of a more resilient material so they don’t break as often.
More.
Interesting the 1936 incurred some of the hottest summer temperatures, and also some of the coolest winter maximums:
https://turbulenteddies.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/cold.png
Here is an animation of the stations wrt 100F:
https://turbulenteddies.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/stations100.gif
It’s clear that the drought, not only in the Great Plains, but also in the MidWest and East, caused the high heat of 1936:
https://turbulenteddies.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/map_1936.png
As I’ve said before: drought causes extreme heat, heat does not cause drought.
AGW is probably real. But in comparison with natural precipitation variation, AGW is irrelevant as a factor of extreme heat.
Re: Extinctions Due To Climate Change?????
Claiming a small rodent is the “first mammal extinct from climate change” is an equivocation that “climate change” only means “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming”!
A quick examination of geology reveals that the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event
Britanica Encyclopedia.
1 rare rodent possibly extinct does not come close to “80% of all species of animals” etc.!
The bigger problem is the island is literally the size of a football field. Turtles and birds ate/killed 80+% of the grass. The rodents suffered from “Isle Royale” syndrome as well. Once the population hit 12 at the turn of the century it was all over.
Thanks for the ref to “Isle Royale” syndrome. ( & more sites. So how did they determine “climate change” caused it? What about the climate change causing the rise in sea level at the end of the last glaciation/start of the Holocene period?
The high point on the island is 10 feet.
Without the vegetation it wouldn’t take much of a storm to wash the less than 10 inbred rodents out to sea.
Did they do the genetics to prove this rat was really some new unique species of rat, not an imported rat that is just a local variant of a ship rat left by man? How did they know this rat was unique and found no where else in the world? I saw one of these global warming activists going on and on about a fish, the only one left of his kind on earth found living in an old cistern. When I asked if this was really a unique species genetically and how come if it was living in a cistern made by man, it was so special? Crickets.
About that not melting ice sheet…
Zwally and others (2015) do not address this discrepancy. In our opinion, estimates of surface height trends and ice-volume change generated for East Antarctica and elsewhere with the inter-campaign biases presented by Zwally and others (2015) are therefore highly questionable.
If we accept the net IC-bias corrections of Zwally 2015 and their subsequent elevation change results, then we must assume: (1) that two CryoSat-2 studies of EAIS elevation changes
have errors of three to ten times their stated uncertainties; (2) that all other studies of recent Antarctic mass balance
(Fig. 1) are in error; (3) that EAIS balance velocities based
on accumulation models, which currently approximate
observed velocities well, are wrong by a large margin; (4)
that field studies dedicated to the determination of surface
height change over the Subglacial Lake Vostok area did not
detect ∼20 cm (or greater) increases between 2001 and
2013 (4 × their reported uncertainty); (5) that the assessment
of subglacial lake hydrostatic equilibrium is in error; (6) that
all other studies of IC-biases are wrong by a considerable
margin.
The links don’t work for some reason.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=10305215&fileId=S0022143016000605
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=10305225&fileId=S0022143016000599
So far I do not see a response. It will be interesting.
Much ado about nothing.
The precipitation at the south pole is less than 2 inches per year.
Driving a pole into the snow pack so at least 20 feet sticks out is the obvious solution. Drive the pole into the ice. Take data with all the measurement systems. When the pole is buried take measurements again.
The system that gets the correct answer is right. If none do they are all wrong.
This piece: “All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it? We paid for the research with taxes, and Internet sharing is easy. What’s the hold-up?: is the usual open access drivel, with nothing new that I can see. The hold-up is that publishing journals costs money, about $10 billion a year. Publishing a journal and Internet sharing are two different things, making the title a sham argument.
Well, the current system evolved when science was privately funded. The scientists would get prestige (and perhaps payment?) from publishing an article.
With the current system of government funded science the data and output from a study is taxpayer property and Congress could require the data and study results be publicly posted.
“A chiral link to life’s origins? Scientists find mirror molecules in interstellar cloud [link]”
I’ve never been sold on the popular chirality arguments.
If the ‘original’ chiral self-replicating molecule was chiral, then we shouldn’t be surprised to see chirality in its descendants.
Yet chiral excesses happen by chance all the time in organic chemistry. There is no chirality ‘mystery’ to be solved. Consequentially, it is probably intellectually fruitless to speculate about any specific individual source of compounds that display an enantiomeric excess.
Agree. The Science paper was widely and poorly reported. They detected the spectral signature of propylene oxide, which has chirality. They did not detect the proportions of the chiralities. That all amino acids are now left handed chirality, and all simple sugars are right handed chirality, strikes me as the evolutionary result of precisely the random organic chemistry results you describe.
Enantiomeric Excesses in Meteoritic Amino Acids (“free with registration”), sci-hub by John R. Cronin and Sandra Pizzarello Science 14 Feb 1997: Vol. 275, Issue 5302, pp. 951-955 DOI: 10.1126/science.275.5302.951
A discussion contemporary with the 1997 release of this report may be found here.
Enantiomer excesses of rare and common sugar derivatives in carbonaceous meteorites by George Cooper and Andro C. Rios PNAS June 14, 2016 vol. 113 no. 24 doi:10.1073/pnas.1603030113
From the paper originally mentioned (above):
AK, what point are you making?
When mankind has evolved to once again casting chicken bones to forecast the coming of the next draught they will marvel at the end of the modern era.
Chiral excesses happen because the biochemical mechanisms are highly specific, and don’t recognize the similarity of stereoisomers.
The traditional assumption is that this is an inherited characteristic of life. However life arose, once it did its mechanisms reinforced the general chiral differences.
But since the late 20th century, the presence of chiral excesses in meteorites has forced that assumption to be questioned. Until the arm-waving dismissal of the phenomenon as “contamination” had been effectively falsified, nobody had to deal with it.
But it’s pretty clear now (much more “settled” than most of climate science), that such chiral excesses were present in many meteors prior to entering the atmosphere.
So the search for a pre-biotic explanation is now a hot topic. Either that, or it would have to be assumed that something at least analogous to “life” was present in the early solar system.
“Chiral excesses happen because the biochemical mechanisms are highly specific, and don’t recognize the similarity of stereoisomers.”
AK, I am well familiar with this. It is actually a fundamental prerequisite for ‘life’ on statistical-theoretical grounds that I agree with. Life has to be be stereo-specific in 3 dimensions, otherwise we would have to live in a 2-D world.
(this is not the place for a discussion of chemical terminology).
However, that was not the point of my post. As I attempted to state succinctly, unpredictable chiral-imbalances happen all the time, every day, in abiotic chemistry and biochemisty, for very mundane reasons. One therefore cannot draw any inferences from any observed chiral imbalances that occur in what may, or may not, have been the primogenital molecules of life.
No they don’t. Not unless they have inputs from bio-chemical sources (that are already chirally imbalanced).
AFAIK, anyway. And I’ve looked into it. Why not post some links?
Global warming today is the product of natural variation compared to the massaged, manipulated, adjusted — and, simply gone missing when inconvenient — data of the record-shattering global warming alarmists which is more like using performance enhancing drugs in athletics to “win” by cheating.
Judith
Interesting link to the Grindewald fluctuation of temperatures that plummeted from 1565
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/11.jpg
I noted this warm period prior to this date and the cold period after this date in my article The Long Slow Thaw referenced above
I went to Grindewald and noted the results, and also referenced dozens of science papers. I think Mosh attributed the outcome as being the anecdotal work of random monks.
Tonyb
Sorry I cannot replicate your results.
And Europe is not the world.
Send more money
I am in the pay of big frack. How much do you need?
Tonyb
The modern temp record ain’t really the world either.
Kahan’s paper on the ‘science communication problem’. Rather woolly thinking from Yale Law School. The two concrete examples he uses are CAGW and HPV vaccination. He treats them the same for ‘DRS’ (decision relevant science’) public policy purposes. They aren’t. So his general rather vacuous analysis fails at several different levels. And his general solution amounts to an appeal to authority fallacy.
The problem with CAGW ‘science’ is simple: everything the ‘settled’ science says is either flat wrong (sensitivity, accelerating SLR, trustworthy models), overstated to the point of misrepresentation (Arctic ice, polar bears, coral bleaching), or purely speculative (anthropogenic attribution). It is not a communication problem. It is a basic climate science credibility problem. The ‘settled science’ is shonky enough for many to see and understand. That includes the IPCC summaries. The proposed DRS solutions are hugely expensive and unreliable, or just plain silly/unworkable (Drax woodchips).
The problem with HPV vaccination is not that it may not prevent HPV infection and so cervical cancer. It definitely does. The problem is that there are vocal but irrational antivaxers ever since the Wakefield MMR/autism scientific misconduct scandal. To them, the science is irrelevant; they have their vaccine truthiness. A further problem is religious conservatives who argue HPV protection will lead to more promiscuity. Yes, and Rev. Massey preached that small pox vaccination was diabolical because smallpox was sent by God as punishment. No matter how solid the HPV science may be, it is irrelevant to such beliefs.
There is no science communications problem as warmunists argue. CAGW was communicated; the communications proved false. HPV vaccination saves cervical cancer lives; that communication is irrelevant to those with contrary belief systems.
Nicely put, ristvan. What I see over the timespan of science is a series of disputed assertions – one party makes an assertion, a “sceptic” challenges it. Sometimes the original assertion proves to be correct (eg. Einstein, tobacco damage) and sometimes incorrect (eg. Lysenko, vaccination autism). It is therefore wrong to draw parallels between a current dispute (eg. climate) and a past dispute, as in “tobacco sceptics were wrong so climate sceptics are wrong”. Every dispute needs to be treated on its merits. Uncertainty and dispute go together, and in a civil world that’s healthy.
Commented a few days back at Kahan’s cultural cognition blog on this, that we should be at least as concerned about the cultural ‘pollution’ of science itself, as the cultural pollution of science communication. Response that essentially this is not a major issue, because science is self-correcting. On a civilizational scale, I guess I agree, but a socially enforced consensus posing as science authority can cause a lot of damage in the interim. Albeit completely off-the-cuff, he estimates an average likelihood of disruption at 0.05, with the correction at 7 years. No idea how real figures could be assessed, but large excursions can cause major damage even if they’re uncommon; the consensus on saturated fats lasted maybe ~50 years, and while the consequences have yet to be measured, it’s likely that the health of hundreds of millions of folks has been adversely affected, a proportion seriously so. And I’d say the cultural pollution of science in the saturated fats case is writ small, peer pressure and closed ranks of scientific authority etc. When writ large, as fear and salvation memes really take off in both the science community and the general public, amplifying in each sphere as a positive feedback loop, worse consequences can occur.
Climategate meets reality and concludes:
https://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2016/06/07/climate-science-industry-negotiation/#comment-226569
Looking at the idea of a climate equilibrium, I came across this and wish I had paid more attention to Gleick:
“Their natural bias is to make models with a strong tendency to return to the equilibrium we measure every day on the real planet. Then, to explain large changes in climate, they look for external causes—changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, for example.” – James Gleick
Hansen & Lacis took this approach in 1984 I think. It has been said that CO2 is only thing that makes the GCMs work. I think there is a bias towards looking for external causes.
“Climatologists who use global computer models to simulate the long-term behavior of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans have known for several years that their models allow at least one dramatically different equilibrium. During the entire geological past, this alternative climate has never existed…”
The White Earth equilibrium. Lots of snow and sea ice.
“Then, for no reason whatsoever, it shifts into a different sort of behavior, still fluctuating but producing a different average. The people who design computer models are aware of Lorenz’s discovery, but they try at all costs to avoid almost-intransitivity. It is too unpredictable.”
It’s unclear to me if he’s still talking about GCMs or models in general? We may agree there is a bias towards one equilibrium or the current equilibrium. In some ways that’s preferable to an unpredicted state.
“Computer models have such a strong tendency to fall into the White Earth equilibrium that climatologists find themselves wondering why it has never come about. It may simply be a matter of chance.”
It’s my understanding that the White Earth is colder than the recent glacial periods. If it’s true that they try at all costs to avoid this, why do the models go there?
“Yet it takes no great imagination for a climatologist to see that almost-intransitivity might well explain why the earth’s climate has drifted in and out of long Ice Ages at mysterious, irregular intervals. If so, no physical cause need be found for the timing. The Ice Ages may simply be a byproduct of chaos.”
And I would take the long time scales of ice ages and shorten them all the way down to decades and shorter time spans. I like the idea of understanding the glacial interglacial cycle to find the same processes that governs the time spans we worry about.
“The system is not in equilibrium, never was and will never be. It is even its defining feature. It can’t “return” to some equilibrium it has never been in to begin with. I thought at least this basic truth would be known.” – Tomas Milanovic
“…components in the system are inherently chaotic; there are feedbacks that could potentially switch sign, and there are central processes that affect the system in a complicated, non-linear manner. These complex, chaotic, non-linear dynamics are an inherent aspect of the climate system.” – IPCC 14.2.2
I finding it difficult to accept the idea of a climate equilibrium. I do agree that that point of view will often work (the shorter the time span the better), and is more tractable than multiple climate states. Equilibrium states solve all kinds of engineering problems, are practical and economical. But perhaps on the limits of an equilibrium state, we find other states.
“Equilibrium” is a myth (WRT climate).
AK,
I’ll give you one thing: your own political science skills are certainly above reproach.
Damage to what exactly, Mr. Lags not Leads?
Here’s a blurb from Shell:
Shell is a long-time supporter of government-led carbon “pricing” mechanisms. We have a number of vehicles to support investment in new technology, such as Shell Technology Ventures (STV) – a venture capital body with an investment focus on a mix of traditional oil and gas, clean and green technology. In recent years, STV has supported both solar-based and wind businesses.
We are also committed to reducing our emissions intensity and continuing efforts to improve the energy efficiency of our operations as well as ending continuous flaring.
Shell Scenarios and pathways to decarbonisation
Shell Scenarios* envisage a future where renewable energies could eventually become the largest component of the global energy system. But, despite the rapid growth of renewables, they anticipate that it will only be possible to provide the full range of energy products by combining renewables with cleaner hydrocarbons such as natural gas, and deploying technology to capture and store emissions of CO2.
To achieve such an outcome for a global population of at least 9 billion by mid-century will require an enormous global undertaking supported by effective policy, a sense of urgency, and long-term vision.
Exxon’s current stance is not quite so urgent (“… action must be taken to further quantify and assess the risks …” — well yeah, and we’ve *been* doing that), but they’re not shying away from invoking scientific consensus:
Our position on climate change
We have the same concerns as people everywhere – and that is how to provide the world with the energy it needs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The risk of climate change is clear and the risk warrants action. Increasing carbon emissions in the atmosphere are having a warming effect. There is a broad scientific and policy consensus that action must be taken to further quantify and assess the risks.
ExxonMobil is taking action by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in its operations, helping consumers reduce their emissions, supporting research that leads to technology breakthroughs and participating in constructive dialogue on policy options.
Addressing climate change, providing economic opportunity and lifting billions out of poverty are complex and interrelated issues requiring complex solutions. There is a consensus that comprehensive strategies are needed to respond to these risks.
I like this one better:
ExxonMobil Statement on COP 21
The recently concluded talks reflected the complexities of enacting thoughtful policies that address climate risks in a meaningful way while also ensuring accessible and affordable energy supplies for societies throughout the world.
As policymakers develop mechanisms to meet the goals set in Paris, ExxonMobil encourages them to focus on reducing the greatest amount of emissions at the lowest cost to society. At the same time we urge them to recognize important shared humanitarian needs, including providing reliable and affordable energy to improve living standards.
As a global issue, climate change requires global solutions. Both developed and developing countries must now work together in crafting policies aimed at mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, while recognizing differing national priorities.
ExxonMobil believes that effective policies to address climate change will put a price on greenhouse gas emissions and will:
* Ensure a uniform and predictable cost of carbon across the economy;
* Let market principles drive solutions;
* Minimize regulatory complexity and administrative costs while maximizing transparency;
* Promote global participation; and
* Provide flexibility for future adjustments in response to scientific developments and the economic consequences of climate policies.
A revenue-neutral carbon tax is the best option to fulfill these key principles and could be a workable policy framework for countries around the world. It is the policy most likely to preserve the ability of every sector of society to find new efficiencies and develop effective technologies.
BP? Same story, calling for a global carbon price. Chevron? More vague about carbon pricing, but clear on the requirement for coordinated global action.
Basically, nobody who matters is listening to your rants about pseudo-science. As far as policy goes, Big Oil is fine with carbon pricing so long as the global playing field is more or less level as far as they’re concerned. The writing is on the wall, and to their credit they have apparently read it.
Damage to science. The “settled” IPCC “science” is built on an obsolete paradigm, the “consensus” was built using social and bureaucratic hooliganism rather than real scientific methods, and the result is defective science with a track record easily turned against any use in policy.
Damage to policy. Whatever the desirability of dealing with the fossil carbon problem, it’s based on risk, not certain catastrophe. There is plenty of real scientific reason to question the relationship between GHG’s and “global temperature”.
Rather than look at balancing the risks from CO2 against the risks involved in various actions (e.g. Kyoto), the political process centered in the IPCC was used to demand a “solution” that would have been very risky to the world’s economy, and left much of the world in abject energy poverty.
This was backed by widespread claims that “science” predicted “certain catastrophe” if their “solution” wasn’t implemented. (I’ll grant, the “certainty” wasn’t present in the original scientific writings, but by AR4 it was in the political documents the IPCC produced.)
Well, of course. These are among the major power blocks already in place. “Carbon pricing” won’t hurt them (assuming a level playing field), and it’ll give them plenty of time to develop the technology to replace their fossil product.
But they weren’t saying that during the ’90’s, when solar technology wasn’t ready to play its part. And even now, IMO, there are approaches that would offer much more opportunity to smaller, more agile and innovative players. Approaches that could have the world’s energy converted to fossil-neutral sooner, and allow for “negative emissions” to deal with what gets emitted near-term. The big oil companies wouldn’t like that, because it would nurture a host of agile competitors. Force them to get out of their rut and innovate.
That you could say that simply shows that you don’t understand how hyper-complex non-linear systems work.
And besides, I’m not really saying anything that many others aren’t saying, in other ways. Many of them highly qualified in climate science. If somebody re-uses my phraseology to effect, I’ve played a productive part.
The writing was on the wall in the ’70’s, and as far as I can tell they’ve been following pretty much the same plan since then. (Of course, much of what looks like planning to me could have been accident.)
AK,
Again your political science skills remain supreme. Funny thing is, Exxon’s own PR department disagrees with what you’re peddling:
What these documents actually demonstrate is a robust culture of scientific discourse on the causes and risks of climate change that took place at ExxonMobil in the 1970s and ’80s and continues today. They point to corporate efforts to fill the substantial gaps in knowledge that existed during the earliest years of climate change research.
They also help explain why ExxonMobil would work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and leading universities like MIT and Stanford on ways to expand climate science knowledge.
As they say in a previous paragraph, you should read the documents — in the second paragraph, they conveniently supply a link to them hosted on their very own website. I’ve done so, and they have some interesting things to say:
Projections on When General Concensus Can be Reached
It is anticipated by most scientists that a general concensus will not be reached until such time as a significant temperature increase can be detected above the natural random temperature fluctuations in average global climate. The earliest that such discreet signals will be able to be measured is after the year 2000.
[…]
In a recent AAAS-DOE sponsored workshop on the environmental and societal consequences of a possible CO2 induced climate change, other factors such as the environmental effects of a CO2 growth rate on the less managed biosphere were studied. For example, lhe impact of a temperature increase and a higher atmospheric CO2 concentration on weeds and pests was considered. The general concensus was that these unmanaged species would tend to thrive with increasing average global temperature. The effects of atmospheric CO2 growth on the managed biosphere such as in agriculture would also tend to benefit from a CO2 growth. It turns out that CO2 can fertilize agriculture, provided the other key nutrients, phosphorous and nitrogen, are present in the right proportions, Agricultural water needs can be met by new irrigation techniques that require less water. In addition, with highest CO2 and higher temperature condjtions, the amount of water that some agricultural plants may need will be reduced. It is expected that bioscience contributjons could point the way for dealing with climatological disruptions of the magnitude indicated above.
From another document:
Although the increase in atmospheric CO2 has not yet resulted in a measurable change in the earth’s climate. The concerns surrounding the possible effects of increased CO2, have been based on the predictions of models which simulate the earth’s climate. These models vary widely in the level of detail in which climate processes are treated and in the approximations used to describe the complexities of these processes. Consequently the quantitative predictions derived from the various models show considerable variation. However, over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged regarding the expected climatic effects of increased atmospheric CO2. The consensus is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2, from its pre-industrial revolution value could result in average global temperature rise of (3.0 ± 1.5)°C. The uncertainty in this figure is a result of the inability of even the most elaborate models to simulate climate in a totally realistic manner. The temperature rise is predicted to be distributed nonuniformly over the earth, with above-average temperature elevations in the polar regions and relatively small increases near the equator. There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere.
[…]
In our climate research we have explored the global effects of Newell’s evaporative buffering mechanism using a simple mathematical climate model. Our findings indicate that Newells’s effect is indeed an important factor in the earth’s climate system. As Newell predicted, evaporative bufferlng does limit CO2-induced temperature changes in the equatorial regions. However, we find a compensatingly Iarger temperature increase in the polar regions, giving a global averaged temperature increase that falls well within the range of the scientific consensus. Our results are consistent with the published predictions of more complex climate models. They are also in agreement with estimates of the global temperature distribution during a certain prehistoric period when the earth was much warmer than today. In summary, the results of our research are in accord with the scientific consensus on the effect of increased atmospheric CO2 on climate. Our research appears to reconcile NewelI’s observations and proposed mechanism with the consensus opinion.
These two documents date from 1980 and 1982 respectively. They speak favorably of a scientific consensus which had already emerged, and to which they wished to further contribute on the basis of their own internally conducted science which they found to agree with the consensus of the time. The IPCC was founded in 1988. The UNFCC was drafted in 1992 at Rio and made effective in 1994.
From whence the “bureaucratic hooliganism” in 1982, AK? Scan through those documents and find the opposition to worldwide government-sponsored research and policy efforts based on science they themselves knew at the time to be fundamentally sound, and which has not much changed since they first internally endorsed it in the 80s.
Not according to the climate change position statements from four — count them: one, two, three, four — FOUR major oil and gas companies I cited in my previous post. Also not disputed by a 1995 GLOBAL CLIMATE COALITION-(GCC) document, Primer on Climate Change Science:
The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.
[…]
The potential for a human impact on climate is based on well-established scientific fact, and should not be denied. While, in theory, human activities have the potential to result in net cooling, a concern about 25 years ago, the current balance between greenhouse gas emissions and the emissions of particulates and particulate-formers is such that essentially all of today’s concern is about net warming.
Not only “cannot be denied” but “should not be denied”. The questions raised elsewhere in that document, as in the two Exxon documents cited above, are about detection, attribution and forward-looking estimates about magnitude of change and impact risks.
No proper citations to source references, of course, only more hand-waiving assertions based on implied knowledge (from where, exactly?) that the economic risks of an unspecified solution outweighs the estimated but as yet largely unknown and as yet unrealized (this is a good thing) risk of continued unabated emissions.
I’ve got to hand it to you: it takes a lot of sack to condemn an entire body of research stretching back to the 19th century for being politically motivated pseudo-science while simultaneously regurgitating political talking points fed to you by activist think tanks and post-Kyoto industry groups:
Because the science underpinning the global climate change theory has not been challenged effectively in the media or through other vehicles reaching the American public, there is widespread ignorance, which works in favor of the Kyoto treaty and against the best interests of the United States. Indeed, the public has been highly receptive to the Clinton Administrations plans. There has been little, if any, public resistance or pressure applied to Congress to reject the treaty, except by those “inside the Beltway” with vested interests.
[…]
The advocates of global warming have been successful on the basis of skillfully misrepresenting the science and the extent of agreement on the science, while industry and its partners ceded the science and fought on the economic issues. Yet if we can show that science does not support the Kyoto treaty – which most true climate scientists believe to be the case – this puts the United States in a stronger moral position and frees its negotiators from the need to make concessions as a defense against perceived selfish economic concerns.
[…]
Charlton Research’s survey of 1,100 “informed Americans” suggests that while Americans currently perceive climate change to be a great threat, public opinion is open enough to change on climate science. When informed that “some scientists believe there is not enough evidence to suggest that [what is called global climate change] is a long-term change due to human behavior and activities,” 58 percent of those surveyed said they were more likely to oppose the Kyoto treaty. Moreover, half the respondents harbored doubts about climate science.
GCSCT members who contributed to the development of the plan are A. John Adams, John Adams Associates; Candace Crandall, Science and Environmental Policy Project; David Rothbard, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow; Jeffrey Salmon, The Marshall Institute; Lee Garrigan, environmental issues Council; Lynn Bouchey and Myron Ebell, Frontiers of Freedom; Peter Cleary, Americans for Tax Reform; Randy Randol, Exxon Corp.; Robert Gehri, The Southern Company; Sharon Kneiss, Chevron Corp; Steve Milloy, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition; and Joseph Walker, American Petroleum Institute.
[…]
Victory Will Be Achieved When
* Average citizens “understand” (recognize) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom”
* Media “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science
* Media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints that challenge the current “conventional wisdom”
* Industry senior leadership understands uncertainties in climate science, making them stronger ambassadors to those who shape climate policy
* Those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extent science appears to be out of touch with reality.
Average citizens have NOT been understanding that uncertainty is not their friend ever since — in addition to being blissfully unaware from whence the science was politicized, who has really been flip-flopping on positions and changing paradigms.
Wake up.
@brandonrgates…
I am astonished you posted this comment.
Politics isn’t a science.
I’ve been there, read the whole site, and the documents linked. They prove my point.
Straw man.
I didn’t say anything about 1982. Compare the first IPCC report with the fourth. There’s been plenty of “social and bureaucratic hooliganism” during that interval.
They appear to have been quite satisfied with “worldwide government-sponsored research and policy efforts based on science”.
Long before the IPCC.
As for “fundamentally sound”, no. The paradigm wasn’t obsolete in the (early) 80’s, although some of the work that would later show it to be obsolete had already been done.
The fact that it “has not much changed since they first internally endorsed it in the 80s” is what makes it obsolete. The science of non-linear dynamics (“chaos” or “complexity” theory) has gone beyond the assumptions that underlay that science, and underlie it today.
Oh, I see. Like most of your ilk, you can’t seem to distinguish between questioning, questioning details, and “denial”.
Your excerpt completely supports my position: “While, in theory, human activities have the potential to result in net cooling”. They mention “concern” but not certainty. Because there is no certainty. (And I have never denied the risk.)
Moreover, your argument is a total straw man. The statement you’re responding to was made in the context of “deep paleo”, wherein the glacial “Mr. Lags not Leads” was actually at the shortest end of the list.
No, but your references do a fine job. Anyway, I’d assume everybody really interested in the “Climate” debate already knows what the vote was on Kyoto.
And if you want references, you should perhaps try reading back posts in a blog before jumping in arm-waving.
Another straw man.
Sorry, but you’re wrong. I lived through the debates over Kyoto, and the key message I picked up from alarmists was that the “precautionary principle” applied to climate, but not to the effects of massively raising energy prices.
I woke up in ’97. I’ve been following this issue (on and off) since then.
As I’ve already said, the IPCC and IPCC-centered “science” was part of an effort by socialists and UN bureaucrats to hijack an effort that was already under weigh to solve the problem. And it became a worse problem itself.
AK,
Policy is known to be reversible.
But not its effects.
Seriously: once such a policy is in place, a growing crowd of people will be benefiting from it, and will resist, and attempt to sabotage, any reversal. Moreover, everybody involved in implementing that policy will have a stake in pretending it’s successful, and will work to hide the fact that it isn’t.
Thus, there’s a huge risk that a policy decision of that sort won’t be reversed until it’s too late: until the disaster is already too far along for saying “no, I didn’t mean it!” to do any good.
Do you really not understand that? One thing I can tell you for sure: however ignorant they might be about the science, the congresspeople who turned thumbs down on Kyoto all know that down in their bones. Even if they’re not willing to come out and admit it.
Imbalance, which is where we are relative to equilibrium, is the more useful concept. It is measurable and gives an prediction of the sign of the climate trend due to forcing changes.
“Forcing” is a myth.
You are saying Milankovitch was wrong then. What is your alternative theory?
Imbalance, which is where we are relative to a nonexistent equilibrium, is the more useful concept. It is measurable .. is it? How?
Rate of change of heat content (mostly ocean) = imbalance. This is measurable.
Nope. (Though he may well have been.) But the nature of the mechanism involved, if he was right, is certainly much more complex than anything most people would mean by “forcing”.
I’ve seen at least one paper demonstrating that the glacial cycles are consistent with stochastic unforced variation. With perhaps some minor triggering from orbital variations.
I’d give the Milankovitch correlations a “probably”, but calling the (so far unspecified) mechanism “forcing” is worse than calling it “unicorns”. At least with the latter, we know there are critical details to be worked out.
I think I have asked you this before, but is there any part of paleoclimate that you think you understand? P-T boundary, K-T boundary, Antarctic Glaciation onset, Ice Ages, Holocene Optimum, etc.? Or is the whole thing, along with the textbook explanations, one big mystery to you? You have to start somewhere, but it looks like you are starting from zero, and still struggling with even that.
JimD, “Rate of change of heat content (mostly ocean) = imbalance. This is measurable.”
Right, it could be as low as 0.2 Wm-2 or as high as 1.0 Wm-2, appears to confined to the southern hemisphere and due to extremely slow intermediate and deep water currents it may take 300 or more years to reach some meaningful “equilibrium” which would actually be a fairly complex steady state.
Imbalance is by definition a global quantity but most of the ocean is in the south and most of the imbalance is in the ocean. It is positive meaning the forcing still exceeds all the warming response we have had so far. The forcing is still rising by 0.4 W/m2/decade too, which it why it is no surprise that the imbalance is that significant, and the warming rate too because it is just keeping up.
Marshall and Clark:
..Our simulations suggest that a substantial fraction (60% to 80%) of the ice sheet was frozen to the bed for the first 75 kyr of the glacial cycle, thus strongly limiting basal flow. Subsequent doubling of the area of warm-based ice in response to ice sheet thickening and expansion and to the reduction in downward advection of cold ice may have enabled broad increases in geologically- and hydrologically-mediated fast ice flow during the last deglaciation.
Increased dynamical activity of the ice sheet would lead to net thinning of the ice sheet interior and the transport of large amounts of ice into regions of intense ablation both south of the ice sheet and at the marine margins (via calving). This has the potential to provide a strong positive feedback on deglaciation.
The timescale of basal temperature evolution is of the same order as the 100-kyr glacial cycle, suggesting that the establishment of warm-based ice over a large enough area of the ice sheet bed may have influenced the timing of deglaciation. Our results thus reinforce the notion that at a mature point in their life cycle, 100-kyr ice sheets become independent of orbital forcing and affect their own demise through internal feedbacks.
– Science of Doom
I like to think of the Antarctic ice sheet not as a result, but as having a purpose helping to cause a survivable climate. With a slower growth of the ice, the demise takes longer.
What I know is that science doesn’t really understand any of the items you mentioned. Oh, there are guesses, sometimes general ideas that are well accepted. But all the real scientists involved know that those ideas might well be wrong, and many important details are hotly debated.
So we have had 2-3 W/m2 of forcing due to GHGs, a temperature rise of 1 C, and an ongoing imbalance, and you are not ready to agree that the observed imbalance could even possibly mean that the warming has not yet caught up to the forcing, which is what the energy balance implies.
What “textbook explanations”? If there are any “science” textbooks claiming science really understands any of the events you mentioned, they’re wrong
Even Wiki admits:
Just to pick one of your items.
The Eocene was very warm and also had high CO2 levels and high sea levels. Similarly periods in the Mesozoic Era. It is understood in terms of physics. The mystery you quote appears to be how the CO2 levels became high, not whether those high levels had any effect on global temperatures because that part is a given.
Only in the minds of simpletons.
Or rather, yes, it may well have had an effect, but it wasn’t linear, and there’s still a great deal science doesn’t know about it.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif
The Eocene was very warm, and the scientifically understood effect explains it. You can deny it, but you have to explain two things: why it was so warm and why it wasn’t high CO2 levels.
Look at the picture! You’re the one in denial. The Eocene is one little blip on a much larger pattern of non-linear relationship. Notice how the pCO2 progressively dropped while the “GAT” stayed roughly constant through most of the Cretaceous and into the Tertiary.
Sorry, but there’s no good correlation there to support any theory of paleo-CO2 “control knob”.
So you believe schematics like that, but not more recent actual work like this. What decides which plots you believe?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/All_palaeotemps.png
I like your paleotemps chart. All those squiggles showing temperature varying by a 1-2C all through the Holocene (Marcott’s redline is smooth because it only has a resolution of 300 yrs). And then varying regularly by 3C during the Pliocene and varying 5C through the Pleistocene. So it’s pretty clear that 1-2C change isn’t unusual within normal natural variability.
In fact, it makes the projections for 2050 (+2.2C) and then 2100 (+4.1C) look really out of place.
I note that your chart is temperature only — no CO2.
Going by its description page:
Actually, your graph is garbage: here’s what Gavin says about it:
The data for the deepest time-block (pre-tertiary) comes from Royer et al. (2004), and here’s what he has to say about it (from the first comment in the link above):
Bottom Line: your picture is only good for propaganda.
It is a mile better than your picture, which derives from hand-drawn guesses. Gavin has some things to say about its provenance too. In fact Realclimate has made some effort at better paleo record displays.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/03/can-we-make-better-graphs-of-global-temperature-history/
Here is one for CO2 from their responses.
http://descentintotheicehouse.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Capture8.jpg
Maybe, but none of them really supports a “CO2 control knob” paradigm. At best, they just don’t contradict it, given the wide error margins.
But that’s not the same thing. Basically, paleo doesn’t prove anything.
Take a look at the Eocene and since. CO2 and temperature reached the highest levels about 50 million years ago, and both declined since, until now, when both started to rise back towards what may eventually become Eocene levels again. Coincidence? I think not. Explained by science? Yes.
You’re confusing to many time-scales. Not to mention, when you get to the short time-scale (glaciation), it’s pretty clear that it goes in the other direction: temperatures precede CO2.
It proves nothing without massive question-begging.
CO2 did not cause the detailed Ice Age cycles, so that explains that. However, they didn’t start until the background CO2 level dropped below about 400 ppm, so the reduced CO2 enables them.
Sheer speculation.
Look, we’re both just using up comments (out of our alloted 50/1000) and we’re not going to change each other’s minds.
We could just agree to disagree, unless you’re sure there’s nobody else you want to debate.
Sure, you can call established science speculation. That’s your opinion. You had no other science to counter it, so it is just saying no.
If that was aimed at me, it’s a total straw man.
First of all, AFAIK there’s considerable question-begging involved in turning “the observed” into “imbalance”. Satellite measurements are only relative (IIRC), and deep-sea measurements are so spotty they might as well be anecdotal.
Second, I think it certainly could “possibly mean that the warming has not yet caught up to the forcing, which is what the energy balance implies.” Maybe even probably, assuming the mythical “forcing” happens to actually describe the effects of CO2 at a global scale. Which I’d give a 50/50 chance at the current level of scientific knowledge.
The problem is, there are other perfectly plausible explanations. And before you do Mosher imitations about “unicorns”, remember that there are plenty of “unicorns” built into the notion that a concept like “equilibrium” should apply to global climate.
We are still waiting for any papers that show any other forcing terms comparable with GHGs since the 1800’s. Once you have established that the dominant forcing is GHGs and that the remaining imbalance is positive, the warming attribution argument is settled.
“Forcing” is a myth.
Including the 350 W/m2 solar forcing that quantifiably explains earth’s surface temperature?
Not quantifiably. Not without introducing a bunch of fudge factors with no proof. AFAIK the so-called solar warming can’t explain the variations in pCO2/temperature in the picture above, much less the putative “snowball earth” events shortly before the Cambrian.
The sun with its 350 W/m2 has an effect, right? Add one percent to that, equivalent to a CO2 doubling, that would also warm things up, right? Reduce it by 1%, you trigger an Ice Age. It is a delicate system.
WRONG!
You clearly don’t understand how non-linear systems work.
A 1% change is usually a very linear change, but, yes, tipping points could make it nonlinear. Tipping points are generally not considered to be good things. In one direction you get the Ice Ages and in the other you get rapid glacial melts.
You’ve just proven again that you don’t understand how non-linear systems work.
Semi-OT, but IMO the daily and seasonal “forcing” probably pushes the planet over multiple “tipping points” every cycle. Combine that with the time-scale of weather evolution…
Nope. It’s almost certainly much more complex than that. In principle, raising the pCO2 could push the planet over a “tipping point” where it suddenly got colder, due to local/regional cloud interactions.
I say “in principle”, because even that model is so hideously simplistic that it almost certainly wouldn’t apply. The reality is much, much, much more complex than that.
Bottom line: we just don’t know. Oh, there’s some chance that a linear “model” might have some predictive power. I’d give it 50/50 in the absence of better evidence. But no certainty.
You have described Hansen’s Greenland scenario which is a repeat of a meltwater pulse that has punctuated our recovery from the last Ice Age. In these, sea-levels have risen by a few meters in a century. Little cause for comfort even though it cools Europe off for a while by killing or truncating the AMOC.
I also said it was “so hideously simplistic that it almost certainly wouldn’t apply.”
But note: I’ve also never denied the risk from digging up all that fossil carbon and dumping it into the system. Even if I think there are other ways the risk could be greater than via climate.
My issues with “climate science” have to do with its inability to qualify as a real science. (And that only applies to the IPCC-sponsored paradigm.)
My issues with “solutions” to the fossil CO2 problem have more to do with political economics: IMO technology and capitalism are well on their way to solving the problem sooner than any “solution” proposed by the left can do it.
Which makes my science perfectly good (for an amateur) since it’s not politically motivated. The issue of paradigms is a separate one.
Whether you personally have accepted the science and evidence behind it or not, the world has, and has moved on to set mitigation targets. New technologies are already being developed with the goal of reducing emissions. Coal is now seen as something to replace as quickly as possible.
Only in your fantasies.
There are manifold holes in the IPCC paradigm, as well as the documented history of corruption in trying to implement it. The “blowback” from those mistakes will be around for decades.
While I (personally) think the proper replacement paradigm incents similar actions to reduce fossil emissions, the many defects and dishonesties in the IPCC process will offer many opportunities for agenda-driven sophistry.
“New technologies are already being developed” for almost every “problem” anybody sees with how the current technology supports the world. “New technologies” are BAU, and have been since before “global warming” became an issue.
Well, IMO there are things that could speed the process up.
For instance, right now almost everybody thinks of gas/oil-fired CCGT as a “lesser evil”, that could help a little due to its lower carbon emission for energy released. But the reality is much more optimistic.
As the price of solar PV continues its exponential decline, it will become cost-effective for more uses. In 10-15 years, it’ll be cost-effective for power→gas/liquid hydrocarbon fuels (e.g. methane, gasoline, kerosene/jet fuel, diesel), which means an expanding infrastructure for those items today could become completely fossil-neutral in 20-30 years.
This means that people who are serious about solving the fossil carbon problem should be supporting the fastest possible roll-out of CCGT (flex-fueled by gas or oil) along with ambient CO2 capture for conversion to fuel using electrolytic hydrogen from solar PV.
What I see instead is an effort to class CCGT as fossil-dependent along with coal, while pushing solar. This could be very counter-productive.
The support for new technologies, not just for energy generation, but transport and efficiency is incentivized and made more urgent by everyone wanting to stabilize the climate. Maybe the IPCC process is still too loose to succeed well, but it is a global effort and it is a start, and that is what is needed.
Nope. It’s exactly what we don’t need.
Like most bureaucracies, it’s using the problem as a raison d’être while in fact doing everything it can to prevent a real solution. After all, if the “climate problem” is solved, what excuse would there be for the IPCC to exist?
The climate problem is not solved. Far from it. Temperatures are rising as fast as ever. Emissions are still rising. Not solved at all.
The solution is under weigh. The IPCC is the biggest obstacle. (Along with all the bureaucrats and diplomats involved in travesties like Paris.)
The solution is global agreements. If you have something else in mind, what is it?
Technology. There’s been great progress without any “global agreements.”. Other than an agreement in principle that reducing fossil emissions is desirable.
“Global agreements” are part of your socialist agenda. They aren’t necessary for getting things done.
So what do you do if China, seeing no objection, sticks with coal?
China will do what they want, objections or no objections.
What they want it to switch to fossil-neutral (renewable) energy as quickly as is consistent with their other priorities. They’re well on their way to it. Nobody needs any “global agreements”.
OK, so your policy rests on hope.
And yours rests on fantasy: the fantastical notion that
nation-states“nation-states” will behave in any way other than their perceived self-interest at that time.These international agreements worked for ozone and acid rain, but for you continued emissions of CO2 are something so obviously harmful that people will change voluntarily. Why would it have been so obvious to these countries without the IPCC reports? Would they have gleaned it from scientific papers or an Al Gore movie?
But they didn’t work for CO2, as the follow-on to Kyoto showed.
Nope. What’s “so obviously harmful” is the approach to “mitigation” used by activists. And as Kyoto showed, “global agreements” are just as voluntary.
The whole IPCC thing, IMO, did as much damage as good. Yes, it brought the issue to people’s attention.
But it also perverted the science. The IPCC “paradigm” was based on obsolete science (by at least the ’90’s), and shoehorned in by using social as opposed to scientific means to create a “consensus”.
Meanwhile, the technology was progressing, as it had since the ’70’s, and as at least the people inside Exxon had predicted. A variety of incentives were established in 1978 as a belated response to the 1973 energy crisis. This included the first feed-in tariffs (under a different name).
http://www.buildingefficiencyinitiative.org/sites/default/files/legacy/InstituteBE/media/Library/Images/Renewable-Distributed-Energy/Feed-In-Tariffs2.jpg
IMO the whole IPCC thing was an attempt by socialist pseudo-scientists and internationalists to hijack the very real concern over CO2 for their own political/ideological agenda. It did as much damage as good.
What really drove the progress was the widespread concern and voluntary action by many actors, the quest for mandatory governmental agreements was an agenda-driven side issue.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LjG2tBqhugs/V2aFqXfd5LI/AAAAAAAAAp4/lnrt4IrXJEwfIfs4BSwH8-2WjptDg3SXACLcB/s1600/Feed-In-Tariffs2.jpg
The important thing about Paris is that it is voluntary. It collects and evaluates targets. It revisits targets every five years and monitors how countries stick to them. Given the importance of stabilizing the global climate, this kind of ongoing international evaluation process is just what is needed.
The important thing about Paris is that it was a total mess. The whole “targets” approach is ridiculous.
AFAIK China’s been going about it right, subsidizing PV manufacture to take advantage of Wright’s “Law”, along with similar subsidies in the US and Europe.
Technology growth is (usually) exponential, so the pretty much linear “targets” are just political interference with processes that would work better if the politicians and activists had stayed out of it.
But oh, no! If they hadn’t created the IPCC, jumped into the middle of everything, and made messes all over, everybody would have realized the world doesn’t need their sort.
That’s probably why they’re going after Exxon: Exxon knew pretty well early on how the whole PV thing would play out. And I bet lots of other people knew too. The IPCC, and Kyoto, were just efforts to hijack something that was already in process.
Explain why having emissions targets and formally reporting them to other countries is wrong.
It doesn’t have anything to do with solving the problem.
On the contrary, it recognizes the global nature of the solution to the problem.
It doesn’t have anything to do with “the solution to the problem.”
There is no single solution. These need to be explored and shared between countries while also paying attention to what the biggest emitters are doing, because otherwise local solutions are worthless.
Jim D,
You asked for other papers, presumably those that don’t need forcings or energy budgets, or the rest of the folderol that comprises the general Warmist Waffle.
“From Urban to National Heat Island: the effect of anthropogenic heat output on climate change in high population industrial countries.”
Provided by Professor Curry.
If you read the introduction in full, you will notice the effect is not even restricted to individual countries. You might care to read some of the references as well.
You may believe or disbelieve normal physics and science, of course. Even Lord Kevin went to his death bed convinced that his calculations proved the Earth could not be more than twenty million years old. You are in good company if you reject normal science, and prefer to believe the Cargo Cult variety.
Cheers.
That’s not forcing. Try again. How do you suppose the oceans warmed because of this urban effect? Think, man.
Pot:Kettle:Black.
Think about the number of times I’ve mentioned that the person you’re responding to is probably a false-flagging warmist. When you go haring off after his red herrings (heh!) you leave yourself open to the accusation that you’re fleeing the real field.
Jim D, I guess what you call Equilibrium is what most other people call a long-term sliding average. The “base” for anomalies.
No, it is not an average, it is the climate you would get if you kept the forcing constant for long enough, but currently that forcing change is outpacing the temperature change, hence the imbalance.
Jim D,
You wrote –
“That’s not forcing. Try again. How do you suppose the oceans warmed because of this urban effect? Think, man.”
Maybe your English comprehension is as execrable as your knowledge of science.
It seems obvious to anyone except a Warmist that the oceans have actually cooled since they were boiling (some time after the crust cooled from its molten statement). Your initial response was the usual Warmist deny, divert, confuse attempt, when faced with an uncomfortable answer to a stupid “gotcha” question. But no matter!
If you choose to believe the Earth is heating up after four and a half billion years of cooling, good for you! Have you considered inventing a heater which uses CO2 as its energy source? Or would it only work outdoors in direct sunlight?
Maybe your fantasy is getting a bit tatty around the edges?
Cheers.
Thanks for your input.
Equilibrium is then an irregular sequence of ice ages and interglacials – have forcings changed since?
Orbital changes affect the albedo, which is a term in the energy balance.
Jim D,
“Mars/Venus Aries conjunction is closely trine Leo Mars. The synastry aspect is obvious.”
Astrology. Sets the standard for incomprehensibility to which climatology can, as yet, only faintly aspire.
Practitioners of astrology often derive income by providing information to the paying public. Climatologists demand money from the Government trough, by dint of strident threats and menaces, with promises of death, imprisonment, or more subtle punishments to those who challenge their arcane beliefs.
Climatology. Created by God to give economics a veneer of respectability.
Cheers.
If you want astrology take a look at Scafetta’s climate theory.
Jim D – so is there anything like an equilibrium? Has it ever been achieved? If so, when?
There is an equilibrium level. Do we get there? Not for a while because it is rising too fast.
Jim m D,
You wrote –
“There is an equilibrium level. Do we get there? Not for a while because it is rising too fast.”
Complete and utter balderdash. More unsupported assertions.
Drivel uttered by the acolytes of the Warmist Church of Latter Day Scientism! Maybe your personal equilibrium needs looking to.
It may well be unbalanced.
Cheers.
Thanks for your input.
+
Looking at the Murphy paper on the Earth’s energy budget there is something very weird. The authors discuss it briefly but the implications are quite big.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/figures/doi/10.1029/2009JD012105#figure-viewer-jgrd15636-fig-0004
They derive an estimate of the Earth’s total heat uptake in 1950-2000. Only 10% of this is what we actually consider ‘heat uptake’ by the oceans and such; 20% has been radiated away, another 20% has been offset by stratospheric aerosols (volcanoes), and 50% has been offset by tropospheric (i.e. manmade) aerosols. However, the last figure is calculated as a residual of everything else so it’s the weak link so to speak.
The thing is, the authors’ estimate is of stable or slowly declining forcing since the early 1970s – until an absurd jump in the late 1990s. Their study stops in 2000, which is a pity as by then the aerosol forcing in their reconstruction is again coming down quickly – and also because comparison with the IPCC or Stevens figures for forcing is more difficult. The authors themselves call this jumping up an down ‘questionable’.
In any case, their reconstruction puts the bound on forcing at about 1w/m2 right before the ‘jump’; the central figure seems 0.6 or 0.7 w/m2. Certainly this seems more in line with the Stevens result (0.5 best estimate, 1w/m2 upper bound) than the AR4 or even AR5 estimates (the latter had an upper bound of 1.9w/m2, and I don’t remember the former but it was even higher).
In short, the only reason the authors could avoid contradicting the IPCC figures was thanks to this jump; other than that their results very much support a smaller uncertainty in aerosol forcing… which implies also a smaller uncertainty (less fat tail) in sensitivity.
It’s also unclear how they arrived at the ‘total heat’ figure, which was the whole point of the paper. Presumably they used for 1950-1984 the same feedback factor they got from ERBE/CERES but if they say so explicitly I missed it.
Alberto,
AR5 specifically warns about the use of short term satellite data for abstraction of estimates of feedback factors. Murphy et al does indeed use a fixed value of 1.25 W/m2/deg K which was loosely derived from the satellite data. Forster and Gregory using almost the same ERBE data with GISS temperature data (as it was in 2006 at least) came up with a value of 2.3W/m2/deg K. The substantial difference gives you some idea of the uncertainty attached to the Murphy estimate.
The aerosol forcing estimate is abstracted by difference between, on the one hand,the net flux calculated from the sum of all forcings except for anthro aerosol, a GMST series and the fixed feedback estimate of 1.25, and, on the other hand, an estimate of net flux as the derivative of the total Earth system heat content sourced from “measured temperatures”. The absolute estimate of aerosol forcing is therefore very sensitive to the value of feedback used. A higher value of feedback would reduce the magnitude of the estimate of aerosol forcing.
The sudden jump in the estimate of aerosol forcing is shown starting in about 1994 in the Murphy paper, but you should note that the series have been subjected to an 8 year linear smoothing. The jump is clearly an error since measured optical depth is decreasing over this period. The authors not unreasonably attribute the error to problems with their estimates of heat content, arguing in particular that the ocean heat gain is probably underestimated. This probably explains some of the cause of the error. However, the other possibility which is ignored by the authors is that there was an additional large negative forcing applied in the late 90s which is not accounted for in the Murphy model. The ISCCP data shows a sudden upturn in upwelling SW after about 1997 which looks suspiciously like an unaccounted for forcing manifesting itself as a change in cloud albedo. This of course would translate into a large (ca 3 W/m2/de K) unaccounted for negative forcing (smeared by Murphy’s smoothing back into the mid-90s) which would look like a jump in aerosol forcing in Murphy’s methodology.
Fascinating historical perspective on empiricists vs rationalists re medical knowledge [link] …
It’s really hard to prospectively determine where diagnosis and treatment are about to go when first encountering a patient. In the first phase, cues are assessed and categorized within the first seconds of an encounter. How a patient looks and speaks, sick, distressed, frightened, stand-off-isa. How a patient relates their story, responds to questions. Not only the content of the information provided but also the quality of the information: is it helpful? conflicting? adding to a first impression? calling into question one’s first guess?
And so the interview proceeds, then, the examination: focused? or complete? anticipating what one will find to confirm a diagnosis, or refocussed once a new or unsuspected finding comes up. The exam is almost the second phase of diagnosis.
The third phase is treatment, not only what may be appropriate for the condition, appropriate for this particular patient (will they take the medicine? or consent to the procedure or testing?)
A fourth phase of the diagnosis and treatment is the follow-up to determine if the diagnosis is correct and if the patient is better. Did the patient go elsewhere? see someone else? try alternative regimens/treatments/ philosophies? Part of the diagnosis and treatment is the physician learning from their own efforts. Did my initial guess work out? were there confounders but essentially I was correct? was I wrong? did I do harm?
The fifth phase is the practitioner reassessing and learning from the outcome of the patient: was there a cue I missed? did I get deliberately misguided (patient drug seeking behavior)? Did I get led down the “garden path” from my own limited focus or locked into thinking of only one possibility? Time for reflection and self assessment.
The Art of Medicine seems to mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, However, continuously engaging the patient, incorporating what each patient has to teach you, and then educating one’s self about what is new and may be applicable to one’s “practice” of medicine probably reflects an amalgamation of empirical and rational medicine; just not one or the other.
Steven Mosher and others –
Re : “From Urban to National Heat Island: New paper finds changes in energy consumption can affect national temperatures [link] …”
From the paper –
“It is clear that the fluctuations in ∆t are better explained by energy consumption than by present climate models, and that energy consumption can contribute to climate change at the national level on these timescales.”
Duh, as they say! At least somebody has published a paper explaining what is blindingly obvious to anyone except a dedicated Warmist. No Weird Warmist physics required, no hidden heat, no miraculous non reproducible CO2 heating powers needed.
The authors have actually stated some of their assumptions, and pointed out the reproducible nature of their research.
“The reliability and importance of our conclusions does not rest on the probabilities returned by our statistical tests, significant though these are by conventional standards:
• First, our hypothesis was not suggested by the data, but by its qualitative reasonableness.”
• Secondly, our results are reproducible, in that our statistical study of the UK data was completed, and the results noted, before testing our conclusions by consideration of the Japan data.
• Third, we carried out no other statistical study of these or any other data sets.
• Fourth, the effect seems large, in that variations of heat output correlate (Fig.2, bottom row) with temperature changes of a few tenths of a degree.
The authors express a little puzzlement when they write –
“It may seem that, reasonable though it is, our hypothesis is harder to justify quantitatively, in the sense that heat output (of order 1 J m-2 s-1 ) is much smaller than insolation, by two orders of magnitude. On the other hand, what is at issue is the relative importance of fluctuations in these quantities.”
They fell into the same trap that Warmists fall into. It is easy to confuse heat, energy, and temperature. But no matter, in spite of their reservations, they go with the observations.
So here is an alternative proposal for temperature increases, backed by observation and normal physics. No CO2 heating necessary. Heat produced by nuclear processes works just as well to warm things. I predict howls of outrage from the usual suspects, but the paper seems generally reasonable to me. It appears to follow the scientific process, rather than the Cargo Cult Science approach used to promote Warmism.
Cheers.
“No CO2 heating necessary.”
Global human heat production is about 15 terawatts, or about 0.03 W/m2. GHG forcing is about 2 W/m2.
Put another way, climate sensitivity to heat input is generally said to be about 0.5-1.5 °C/(W/m2). If waste heat is to explain the rise in global temperature observed, the sensitivity to it would need to be about 30 °C/(W/m2).
Nick Stokes,
A block of ice at -2 C emits around 300 W/m2. You cannot even heat a cup of cold coffee with the heat energy of a giant iceberg at this temperature, regardless of the amount of energy it is emitting, continuously. Trying a giant lens or parabolic mirror to “concentrate” the energy is fantasy. Your talk of forcing is just nonsense. Your supposed GHG does not appear to work indoors, at night, or in the shade. Actually, it doesn’t provide additional heat anywhere, any time.
There is no climate sensitivity to heat input, in the Warmist sense, at all. Climate is the average of weather, no more no less. If the Libyan desert receives more insolation in summer, its climate changes not a jot. Its temperature, however does, on an annual basis. On the other hand, if temperatures rise around the globe due to energy production, weather changes may occur, resulting in changed climate.
The quality and quantity of such changes, if any, is a completely unpredictable mystery.
Your attempt to equate a body’s exposure to energy per unit area with a resultant temperature is just silly. If you have a cup of coffee at 70 C, and expose it to 300 W/m2 from a block of ice, its temperature will change in a downward direction, you might think. Not necessarily of course. There is insufficient information to make a scientific judgement, as to the direction, time, or rate of any resultant change in temperature.
Obviously, I agree with the authors. You may not. Maybe you should write a paper of your own, and provide your own Warmist theory to explain their measurements. I’ll stick with non Warmist physics for the present.
Cheers.
Global human heat production is about 15 terawatts, or about 0.03 W/m2. GHG forcing is about 2 W/m2.
First, up front, I agree that was heat likely isn’t the source of average temperature trends.
Second, your global numbers are in the ball park ( though I recall the calculation being 0.04 W/m2).
That said, if you read Oke, the numbers for a city are very much higher. If I recall, human energy use for Manhattan was on the order of 100 W/m2.
Since Manhattan isn’t tens of degrees warmer than the country side, it’s an opportunity to reflect on the power of diffusion. Is there some effect of all that energy on it’s way out of town? Dunno. Most of the diffusion is upward. Depending on the winds, some smaller portion is also outward.
Turbulent Eddie,
With respect, temperature reflects heat (or EMR, or light, or energy or . . . ) absorbed by a body, minus the amount emitted by that body (phase changes notwithstanding, of course.)
CO2 provides no heat of itself.
All energy produced by combustion, nuclear processes, work, friction, or anything else, inexorably escapes to outer space. Along the way, it may be absorbed and emitted, raising the temperatures of objects when absorbed. These objects lower their temperature as a consequence of emitting energy.
A thermometer exposed to a log fire in a cold castle room may show a temperature of, say, 100 C at a particular distance. Standing a little further away, your front may be pleasantly warm, while your backside is literally freezing. The air temperature may be below freezing in the room, as hot combustion gases are being borne upwards through the chimney, and not introduced into the room’s atmosphere.
The thermometer is responding to heat from the fire, not the CO2 in the room, or being produced by the fire. And on and on . . .
Heat, energy, temperature, all widely misunderstood. For example, a Warmist might think that concentrating the 300 W/m2 emitted by a block of ice with a surface area of 1 m2, with a lens, to an area 1 cm2 (10,000 times more concentrated) would result in a temperature 10,000 times as great as the emitting body (or something equally silly).
Unfortunately, there is no warming at all. Talk of temperature increases by dint of energy budgets is just nonsense, without very specific initial conditions, of very particular types.
Generally, Warmists are inclined to fantasy rather than fact. The greenhouse effect as proselytised by Warmists is complete nonsense. CO2 warms nothing. In simple terms, things are warmed by heat. They cool when they lose heat.
No offense intended. If I have erred in fact, corrections are always appreciated. Quoting what I wrote would be nice, if you feel that I am wrong.
Cheers.
CO2 provides no heat of itself.
An old radiator heating system doesn’t provide heat either, heat was typically added through steam pipes.
Paint that radiator and it radiates heat to the room.
Paint that radiator silver ( low emitting aluminum in the paint ) and not much heat radiates from it.
Add the same amount of solar heat to a 2x CO2 atmosphere and it similarly doesn’t radiate as well.
Turbulent Eddie,
You wrote –
“An old radiator heating system doesn’t provide heat either, heat was typically added through steam pipes.
Paint that radiator and it radiates heat to the room.”
Sorry, but no it doesn’t. An unconnected radiator in a freezing room is the same temperature as another unconnected radiator, or cup, or knife. It doesn’t matter what colour it is, or how shiny it is.
As surprising and possibly counter intuitive this seems, it happens to be true. As a test, take a small mirror like object and a similar highly absorbent object, immerse them in a container of water, and freeze them solid in your freezer.
Some Warmists will tell you that the ice, and the objects within it are all at different temperatures, and will remain so. This in some ways the basis of Warmism – acceptance of the impossible, without batting an eyelid.
Black paint, white paint, CO2 – heat nothing.
Cheers.
turbulent, “Paint that radiator silver ( low emitting aluminum in the paint ) and not much heat radiates from it.”
2/3rds of the energy transfer is via conduction and convection and 1/3 is direct radiant for a “standard” cast iron plate radiator. The plates are designed to induce a draft. Choice of paint impacts about 50% of the radiant efficiency.
You have the same situation with insulation, a perfect radiant barrier can improve performance by about 1/3 or 50% compared to no radiant barrier.
So while it is true, “not as much heat radiates from it” there is still considerable heat transfer and a higher temperature radiator (less radiant transfer) would induce more convective/conductive transfer.
The La Niña will not be as cool as the El Niño was warm. We are very, very sure of that,” says Scaife.”
That is not what Anny Cazenave et al (2014) find. Se level is independent of ENSO.
It’s poorly phrased, but all Scaife means is the looming La Nina will not offset the warming that has taken place since 2011… not even remotely close. A major ENSO effect on sea level is precipitation… where it does and does not rain.
I think we’ll see ocean heat move to the North Pacific. Winds and storms will transfer heat to northern latitude atmosphere. This will keep atmosphere temps high through the year, but we’ll be measuring the heat as it finds its way out of the system. Next year, maybe years, will probably be cooler, back to pre 2010 levels.
We’re either going to have either a very weak La Nina or no La Nina at all, followed by the resumption of the CO2 control knob global warmunista heatwave.
My gut was saying you’re right earlier this year and last fall. Some good forecasters have predicted a strong la Nina though. I think even so, it won’t keep global average temps down, particularly in sets that give good weight to arctic troposphere and pacific sea surface.
My hunch is that not a great percentage of the heat from el Nino made it into the tropical and mid latitudes atmosphere, el Nino left overs will give us a warm blog repeat and that will impact indexes with SST this year and strong representation of the arctic atmosphere in fall and winter.
Fer Christsakes people; many of you sound like “Wandering In The Weeds” Mosher! Get a grip! There is no way to predict future average temperatures of the globe.
Want proof? None of the climate models hindcast accurately. None of the climate models accurately predicted temperatures (and trends) of the 21st century.
All of the other prediction methods will bankrupt you in Vegas (see the failures of economic modeling).
Get real! Wanna have an impact? Keep pointing out the obvious lies presented in the MSM. Warmist hysteria will be their downfall.
Dave Fair
From the Purdue study:
“More than 90 percent of the 173 scientists and climatologists surveyed said they believed climate change was occurring, with more than 50 percent attributing climate change primarily to human activities. An additional 30 percent said they believed climate change was due to a combination of human activities and natural causes.”
How does this reflect the popular meme?
I believe climate change is happening and some of it may be caused by humans especially on the micro climate scales where humans have modified the environment. But I am a d3ni3r.
Are there really 10% of scientists and climatologists in this survey population who do not believe climate change is occurring? I find this extraordinary.
Fortunately this is a settled science and we do not have to concern ourselves with these and other questions.
What is your answer to the 7 Tops questions? Over 650K years there have been seven waves that peak in Temperature, CO2 and then Dust. Why did it happen and how should be a good question to ask.
Sorry Arch, could you articulate (write down) these questions of which you speak?
Why how?
percentages
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/02/12/study-global-warming-skeptics-know-more-about-climate-science.html
Oh, that wasn’t this study that showed skeptics know more about climate science than global warmers…
http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2014/Q4/study-farmers-and-scientists-divided-over-climate-change.html
Must be this study.
Hmm. 50 4% believe climate change is occurring and mostly due to human activities.
How does that become a 97% consensus that GHG causes the majority of the warming? I don’t see how you can get there from here.
The Cinderella science article and the summer temperatures in Greenland “study” where several of the temperatures in recent years are missing bring to mind a theme that is popular with me at least.
If the IPCC actually cared about climate, each assessment report would include recommendations for further study, assign funding for the further study and Institute processes to ensure the work was started.
Of course if your goal is to promote the idea of a concensus there are no questions that require further study.
Of course if your goal is to promote the idea of a concensus there are no questions that require further study.
Climate science papers are full of discussions of things that need additional study.
JCH
+ 5
tonyb
Of course they are. And should we spend all of our time and money chasing after all these questions? Would it not be helpful to prioritize these questions? Shouldn’t an alleged summary of our current knowledge base identify the questions that have the greatest impact on our understanding?
The IPCC is maybe 3% science and 97% politicians.
And Tony has demonstrated the concept that the enemy of my perceived enemy makes a good point.
Regarding monitoring, the Republicans are defunding NASA satellites aimed at monitoring the earth and diverted it to putting a lander on Europa in an accelerated timeframe that even the Europa scientists didn’t ask for.
Link, please.
Use search terms like Republicans, Europa, NASA, funding, satellites.
Equilibrium as always.
Sorry, I was too cryptic. As always you don’t know anything.
It was something I read a while back and I did not want to search for it again. Here is one related item for you, but you weren’t interested enough to do your own search, so you probably won’t read this either.
http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/house-authorizers-join-pro-nasa-chorus-on-hill
Thanks for the link: “Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), continued his quest to get NASA to agree to send people to Mars in 2033.”
You’ll also find there, it is Lamar Smith who doesn’t want NASA satellites pointing at earth.
“Lamar Smith (R-TX) complained that the request for earth science is more than the amount requested for astrophysics, the James Webb Space Telescope and heliophysics combined. He and other Republicans insist that other government agencies should be funding earth science research while NASA focuses on human and robotic exploration of space.” Is this the defunding you are referring to?
Yes, since NASA is the only agency that does satellites, he seems to be against using them for earth sciences. No surprise there, right?
Who started ARGO? Was it Lamar Smith?
Just came to me, but I’m notoriously dim, but wouldn’t the IPCC increase their credibility by publication of errata as a stand alone report with each subsequent AR?
They’re periodically summarizing something that is self correcting. Eyes should always be on Google Scholar.
Thinking is that since they’re considered ‘the source’, and ‘conservative’ in nature. So a self evaluation is reasonable.
Since the WG’s are converted to the SPM then a comparison would be in order.
The greatest minds are involved and should not be adverse to a review of the process, right? Any good reasons why not?
Misinformation is an issue troubling me at the moment.
–
take GHCN-Daily.
“The Global Historical Climatology Network – Daily (GHCN-Daily) V3 dataset integrates daily climate observations from 30 different data sources. updates to occur 7 days a week rather than only on most weekdays.
Version 3 contains station-based measurements from well over 90,000 land-based stations worldwide, about two thirds of which are for precipitation measurement only.”
Does not fit with “Over 25,000 stations are regularly updated with observations from the last month
.and 11/17/2015) The GHCNM v3 has been released. The station network for the time being, is (7280 stations).
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Respected people continually make wrong comments and unspecific comments about it
“There are 43500 sites in both qc and adjusted data.
Deal with it.
51000 in raw.
“All of the raw data that is thrown out is there. All 8,000 stations”
“data from reliable ftp sites. . In the merge step you try to “join” the data In the end you have about 51,000 Distinct stations. a QC process. About 8000 stations are dropped at this step. bad metadata, no metadata, or series are too short.
Then QC flags maybe 75 distinct reasons why data can be dropped. We add a few additional checks At this stage you have 43K stations.
avoid GHCN V3 altogether, and work with raw daily data. That dataset has 26,000 stations ( actually 80K when you start )”
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A far as I can work out there are only 25,000 stations that are updated daily and only 7280 stations that are actually reporting temperature.
When stations fail checks or fail to report a value has to be derived from surrounding stations to fit out a value for that day, as the record depends on continuous records for all sites.
Ie a site is not allowed to have no record for that day.
I might be wrong in this assumption but they do not declare what they actually do with their flagged or missing values and they do talk about regressing from surrounding sites to get an expected value for all sites.
–
Anyone with better knowledge out there able to flesh it out more?
There are no inductive inferences.
Karl Popper.
“Jason Box’s overview of this Season’s Greenland melt”
Here is what is driving Jason’s roller-coaster, with the negative NAO/AO periods driving increased Greenland melt, and increased Arctic sea ice loss, due to episodes of weaker indirect solar forcings:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zn9MUBGHRYJH1x7vt4E9fuYbHLROrMCpePuJcUQE1VI/pub
My long range forecasts for the last three summer seasons have been exacting in detail.
I’m interested to hear more about the basis for your forecasts, and any verifications
sun nut
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/geoff-sharp-solar-based-nh-winter-forecast/comment-page-1/#comment-56665
“Ok Ulric, But I do remember you sending me an email where you said I got it right and you got it wrong on the NH winter some years back. Do you remember?”
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/geoff-sharp-solar-based-nh-winter-forecast/comment-page-1/
Judith, fantastic thanks, I will mail you.
Steven Mosher, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and careful you don’t shoot your toes off. Your first link, the solar element of the forecast performed well, what I failed to anticipate was the huge blocking effect of the NE Pac warm-blob, but then so did the UK MetO who said Jan-Feb 2014 would likely be cooler and drier than normal. My 2014/15 winter factored in the blocking and performed well for the UK.
Your second link, was Geoff Sharp misquoting me, as my reply explains.
“Steven Mosher, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and careful you don’t shoot your toes off.
Building forecasts is not city building. false analogy.
I don’t own firearms.
two fails in one sentence. not good
“Your first link, the solar element of the forecast performed well, what I failed to anticipate was the huge blocking effect of the NE Pac warm-blob, but then so did the UK MetO who said Jan-Feb 2014 would likely be cooler and drier than normal.”
1. Post hoc excuse making, is not measuring skill, it’s excusing failure
2. Justifying your failure by pointing to someone elses failure is
not convincing. I too failed to anticipate the blocking event. that
makes my forecast as good as yours.
My 2014/15 winter factored in the blocking and performed well for the UK.
Your second link, was Geoff Sharp misquoting me, as my reply explains.
1. Performed well is not a skill score.
2, he said, she said.
Lets be clear about how physical forecasting works. A physical forecast takes account of as much data as it can and then forecasts everything.
The temperature, the wind speed, highs and lows, rain, snow… everything.
So, you dont get to pick and choose which thing you forecast, you
have to forecast all of it. And you dont get to choose a specific areas,
you have to forecast the whole planet.
So for grins, test your system. Please predict the average monthly
temperature for Inchon, South Korea.. August of this year. Include
a wind forecast, and rain forecast. Use numbers. IF your system “understands” how thr climate works, then this should be no problem.
and when you fail ask yourself why doesnt my system work for any place in the future, any time in the future and all variables of interest.
well in the real world of weather forecasting, most of the interest is in regional forecasts (few individual forecasts wanting global). Some variables are more predictable than others, with temperatures being more predictable than solar, precip.
There is a big market for local/regional temperature forecasts
Also, on longer time scales the regimes such as NAO, AO etc have greater predictability than surface variables, so schemes to predict the regimes are of considerable value
In fact I have chosen to just forecast AO/NAO anomalies this year, and you don’t get to pick and choose how to test the forecasts. If you want “the wind speed, highs and lows, rain, snow… everything” in your long range forecast, you need to ask someone like Piers Corbyn.
“Justifying your failure by pointing to someone elses failure is
not convincing.”
No I learned from it and produced a better regional forecast for the following winter.
Mosh said ‘you have to forevast the whole planet’
What? Why? Unless we are policy makers We are primarily interested in the weather for where we live. It is micro climate forecasting that is most relevant as we generally Iive and work in places close to each other.
Here on the coast in south Devon the met office, some 18 miles away, are hopeless on the longer range regional forecasts and wrong as often as they are right on the short term micro climates. They are working on the latter following the severe Boscastle flooding a few years ago. This was caused by a stuck rain bearing front which snuck under their radar.
So accurate- or at least indicative – regional forecasts covering as far ahead as possible I.e next winter and also highly accurate micro climate forecasts for the next three days.
A forecast for the whole planet? Let the Met office with their 100 million pound supercomputer try that.
Tonyb
12,000 Years Ago, Humans and Climate Change Made a Deadly Team
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/science/patagonia-extinctions-global-warming.html?WT.mc_id=SmartBriefs-Newsletter&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=smartbriefsnl&_r=0
When I went to Patagonia several years ago, I was told that the Patagonians ran around in loin-cloths (or nothing) and burned every speck of wood they could find to keep warm. Chief Patagonia was described as BIG in EVERY detail. Maybe those big sloths were skinned and used.
The way things are going the first cognizant AI will be speaking Mandarin.
China tops global supercomputer speed list for 7th year in a row.
“The TaihuLight is capable of 93 petaflops, or quadrillion calculations per second, according to TOP500. It is intended for use in engineering and research including climate, weather, life sciences, advanced manufacturing and data analytics.
Its top speed is about five times that of Oak Ridge’s Titan, which uses Cray, NVIDIA and Opteron technology.”
http://phys.org/news/2016-06-chinese-supercomputer-tops-world-fastest.html#jCp
“At least 15 of those stores must use advanced refrigerants, such as carbon dioxide, that have far less potential to contribute to global warming.”
Does this make sense?
R-22 vs CO2 as refrigerants and CO2 is stated to have “far less potential to contribute to global warming”? Guess I’ve been misunderstanding things.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article85084847.html#storylink=cpy
Because the effect of any GHG is logarithmic, the less there is of it already in the atmosphere, the greater the effect of releasing a specified amount.
That’s mostly why methane is considered such a much stronger GHG than CO2, and it’s even more true for refrigerants where the total amount is so tiny.
It’s not really that simple of course, it also depends on the spectrum overlap with other species present. But that gets to the gist of it.
AK,
Thanks AK. I’d not followed that. I still (obviously) have a long way to go.
I was unaware of this: “As an additional environmental concern, R-22 is a powerful greenhouse gas with a global warming potential equal to 1810 (which indicates 1810 times as powerful as carbon dioxide).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorodifluoromethane
(Basically what you stated)
Ignorance is not blissful!
Yr welcome.
Ignorance can be blissful enough until you discover it. Sort of like the man who jumped off the 100-story building, and halfway down said “fine so far.”
Is that what I’ve done (jumped off a building) by getting myself in to this climate mess?
I recognize I’m ignorant. Just trying to become less so.
Thanks again.
And if you’ve got to be ignorant, it helps to know it. Maybe even quantify it. That’s really what science is all about.
Perhaps. Or perhaps our entire world-society has jumped off the cliff. Hard to know at this stage.
Well, I can give you the same advice Michael Tobis gave me: get a decent textbook of the subject, and study it till you understand. (I believe our hostess has published a good textbook.)
Fortunately, I took 1st year calculus in my senior year of high-school, so I had no trouble understanding the relevant differential equations.
If you haven’t already taken a good course in the calculus, that would be a good place to start…
Danny Thomas,
If you watch the EPA video, you might find that it contains many assertions and inherent contradictions.
Before you get very far, however, you will notice that the “greenhouse effect” explanation requires a sunlit surface. NASA even demonstrate the entire Earth being illuminated at once, in some of their graphics (they have to flatten the Earth a wee bit to do this, of course!)
At night of course, all the bits heated by the Sun cool down again, which sort of defeats the “greenhouse effect”. Even as the Earth moves around the Sun, when it gets further away, it loses all the heat it was subjected to when it was closer. Similarly, when the combination of axial tilt and distance enable the shift from summer to winter, all the summer heat vanishes – not trapped, stored, or hiding in the ocean.
If you agree that the Earth’s surface was once molten, you should come to the same conclusion as myself. The Earth’s surface has cooled. The inside is still molten, and therefore still cooling (being hotter than what surrounds it – laws of thermodynamics rule!).
The constitution of the atmosphere, changes in the Sun’s output, meteoric impacts – nothing prevented the cooling.
Will this cooling stop, and reverse itself? I assume not, but maybe I’m wrong – a few billion years should tell.
Cheers.