by Judith Curry
A major disconnect in the discourse surrounding climate change is interpretation of the ‘threat’ of climate change.
Last week I attended the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Seattle. It was a very good meeting; once the talks are online, I will discuss a few of them.
One of the best things about such conferences is the opportunity for extended face to face discussions with other scientists. I had one such discussion that triggered the theme for this post. This scientist (who will remain unnamed) does not disagree with me about climate change science in any significant way, although he has more confidence in climate models than I do. In particular, he has publicly discussed the uncertainty issue.
He doesn’t take the ‘heat’ that I do largely because, in spite of these substantial uncertainties, he makes statements about the ‘serious threat’ of climate change, substantial risk of dangerous or even calamitous impacts, reducing this risk requires a reduction of carbon emissions.
We both agree that there is the ‘possibility’ of extreme impacts if the warming is on the high end of the model projections. We agree that we can’t quantify the probability of such impacts; it is best to regard them as ‘possibilities.’
So, what is the differences in reasoning that lead us to different conclusions regarding policy responses?
Definitions of ‘threat’ and ‘risk’
Some definitions of ‘threat’:
- indication of an approaching or imminent menance
- an impending danger that has the potential to cause serious harm
- a person or thing likely to cause damage or danger
- the possibility of trouble, danger, or ruin
- The related terms “threat” and “hazard” are often used to mean something that could cause harm.
Two of the definitions imply something that has a high probability of occurring: ‘approaching’, ‘imminent’, ‘impending’. A third definition includes the term ‘likely’, which (at least in IPCC parlance) implies a probability > 66%. The last definition uses the word ‘possibility’.
The ‘possibility’ definition seems to be used for military threats and for threats to computer security. For issues related to extreme weather events, food and water shortages, the ‘imminent’ or ‘impending’ definitions are arguably the more common parlance.
As per the Wikipedia, ‘risk’ has connotations of ‘probability’ and ‘quantifiable damage’:
A probability or threat of damage, injury, liability, loss, or any other negative occurrence that is caused by external or internal vulnerabilities, and that may be avoided through preemptive action.
The probability or threat of quantifiable damage, injury, liability, loss, or any other negative occurrence that is caused by external or internal vulnerabilities, and that may be avoided through preemptive action.
The words that are used — threat and risk — provide connotations of impending damage and that this is quantifiable and avoidable.
I think that use of these words mislead the public debate on climate change — any damages from human caused climate change are not imminent, we cannot quantify the risk owing to deep uncertainties, and any conceivable policy for reducing CO2 emissions will have little impact on the hypothesized damages in the 21st century.
‘Threats’ or ‘reasons for concern’?
I do not question that the possibility of adverse impacts from human caused climate change should be under consideration. However, the human caused impacts of climate change have been overhyped from the beginning — the 1992 UNFCCC treaty on avoiding dangerous human interference on the climate. This implied warming was dangerous before any work had actually been done on this.
Some much needed clarification is presented in a recent article published in Nature: IPCC reasons for concern regarding climate change risks. This article provides a good overview of the current IPCC framework for considering dangerous impacts. A summary of the main concerns:
The reasons for concern (RFCs) reported in AR5 are:
- Risks to unique and threatened systems (indicated by RFC1)
- Risks associated with extreme weather events (RFC2)
- Risks associated with the distribution of impacts (RFC3)
- Risks associated with global aggregate impacts (RFC4)
- Risks associated with large-scale singular events (RFC5)
The eight overarching key risks are:
I think that qualitatively, these are the the appropriate risks to consider. Where I don’t find this analysis particularly convincing is their links of ‘undetectable’, ‘moderate’, ‘high’, ‘very high’ to specific levels of temperature increase.
The confounding societal effects on all of these risks are overwhelming, IMO, and very likely to be of greater concern than actual temperature increase. Apart from (vii) and (viii) related to ecosystems, these risks relate to vulnerability of social systems. These vulnerabilities have put societies at risk for extreme weather events throughout recorded history — adding a ‘delta’ to risk from climate change does not change the fundamental underlying societal vulnerabilities to extreme weather events.
The key point IMO is one that I made in a previous post Is climate change a ‘ruin’ problem? The short answer is ‘no’ — even under the most alarming projections, human caused climate change is not an existential threat on the timescale of the 21st century.
JC reflections
So what are the words that we should use to talk about the potential harm from human caused climate change? I think that the following phrases are appropriate:
- potential harm
- reasons for concern
- possible catastrophic impacts
I think that ‘threat’ is overly alarmist, since it implies imminent harm. ‘Risk’ is not overly alarmist, but it does imply that the harm is quantifiable and mitigable — which I have argued that it is not.
How do we deal with potential harm and possible catastrophic impacts? This puts us in the domain of decision making under deep uncertainty — a topic I have written about many times at CE.
I have been planning a full post on this, but I am way behind, so I will point to this here: Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty — deep uncertainty.org — under the leadership of Robert Lempert (who has been featured in several previous CE posts). This society and its website is a gold mine of information that can be used for thinking about how we should respond to the wicked climate change problem.
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Good clear post thank you. This may sound strange, please bear with me. Looking to history, one can find many examples of “great flood myths”. This is not to say Climate Change is another such myth. Nor is it to say these myths are unimportant mumbo jumbo to be discounted by science. It is to say that each civilisation has had one and now we too. If we assume for arguments sake our modern society has a ‘collective psyche’, then its possible the idea of Climate Change is signalling our so called collective psyche is deeply concerned about something deeper than the superficial scientific facts. There are several areas science directed by virtuous politics can go into here. For example it’s 100% certain scientifically there’s more wealth produced per capita today than in all of history yet still millions die from starvation related disease annually when there’s no shortage of food – quite a striking impending end of time scenario being left well unattended! I’m wondering if its worth our scientists looking into the so called psyche of this civilisation if nothing else than to commence a dialogue which can produce fruit on the real world problem?
millions die from starvation related disease annually when there’s no shortage of food
Both food distribution and the distribution of inexpensively extractable coal suffer from the same problem. Cost of transportation.
Inexpensive energy leads to inexpensive irrigation leads to bountiful harvests. If you live in sub-Saharan Africa and you have to buy the coal to power your irrigation system mail order from Gillette, Wyoming you are in trouble.
And yet the Millenium Development Goal of halving hunger was reached four years early, in 2011.
Look at temperatures recorded in Northern Hemisphere (SH) ice cores and look at temperatures recorded in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) ice cores for the past ten thousand years. Many times were warmer than now in both hemispheres. In that time, a large reduction in insolation occurred in the NH and a large increase in insolation occurred in the SH and temperature bounds did not change. Both hemispheres are clearly regulated by internal factors that keep temperature in the same bounds even when the insolation changes by a larger amount than CO2 can ever cause. Temperature changes in Natural Cycles and Man did not and does not cause them. Whatever we do, nature will respond and keep temperature inside the same upper and lower bounds. The cycles of the modern ten thousand years is the new normal.
The record low sea ice is only a record because our “record” is only a little over a hundred years when thermometers were invented. That is not back far enough to see the many times that the sea ice record was lower than now. The current records are not near to records in Proxy data that goes back thousands and millions of years. The data shows that warm periods always follow cold periods and then end with another cold period. What has always happened is more likely to happen again than anything different.
“Both hemispheres are clearly regulated by internal factors that keep temperature in the same bounds even when the insolation changes by a larger amount than CO2 can ever cause”
Nope. Global insolation did not change all that much.
William Happer had a long interview with thebestschools.org where he provided an excellent discussion on AGW. Here are is comments on risk:
“Promoters of the “good insurance” argument would have you believe that there is a small but finite risk of catastrophic consequence from more CO2, irreversible “tipping points,” and other doomsday scenarios. This is not true. CO2 levels were thousands of ppm over most of the Phanerozoic eon — the last 550 million years (when there is a good fossil record of multicellular life), as shown below in the figure from R. A. Berner and Z. Kothvala, “Geocarb III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic Time” (American Journal of Science (PDF), 2001, 301: 182–204).”
The URL is:
http://www.thebestschools.org/special/karoly-happer-dialogue-global-warming/william-happer-interview/
The range for climate models is 1.1 to 5.4 C warmer than 2012.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature-projections
The 1.1 includes significant reduction in emissions, so I find it false to claim there is nothing we can do that will limit the temperature change by the year 2100.
That is true in dubious models. But it is also true in reality. We could for example build nuclear electricity generation. But climate obsessed Germany is shutting nuclear down instead.
The general question is whether any affirmative action on limiting CO2 is merited at all based on the actual evidence at hand (NOT models). Except for the now rapidly cooling 2015-16 El Nino blip, no warming this century despite this century comprising ~1/3 of all the atmospheric CO2 increase since 1958 (Keeling curve)–says natural variation is a big deal. There is no comceivable climate action that fixes that. And that also says parameter tuned models fail on attribution. Observational TCR 1.3C and ECS ~1.6-1.7 says no general problem. And all the proposed specific problems are refutable with evidence.
Except we can measure the big deal of natural variation and find it to be +/- 0.2 C, which is dwarfed by TCR and ECS that you cherry pick.
Try measuring the standard deviation of any of the data sets, you have claimed to have some statistical chops, that will give a clue to how much natural variation exists.
No wants to fix natural variation, but the amount of warming due to natural variation and natural causes since 1958 has not been identified and measured to be different from zero.
No models without a CO2 greenhouse forcing can match, and one that have it match, so it definitely does not fail on attribution.
You can not reject one set of models and put faith in another set of models, ie, the Keeling Curve is modeled, the satellite data is modeled, TCR 1.3 and ECS 1.6 is modeled, etc.
And the actual result from Curry and Lewis is 1.2 to 2.2 C, not 1.6-1.7, remember the uncertainty monster.
At least what scientists mean when they say uncertainty.
Bob, for all we know all of the warming is natural. ECS and TCR are abstractions.
The range for climate models is 1.1 to 5.4 C
Can you explain how a given global mean surface temperature is a threat?
GMST does vary some 4C from January to July.
This is because of Northern land mass, of course.
Nevertheless, the world doesn’t end in July.
Getting to the actual threat of warming appears to be elusive.
The 1.1 includes significant reduction in emissions, so I find it false to claim there is nothing we can do that will limit the temperature change by the year 2100.
If you examine CO2 emissions, you will find that more than 72% of CO2 emissions come from countries with lower than replacement rates of fertility. An emissions fall is baked in the cake without any policy change.
The high end projections are based on unrealistic fossil fuel resource estimates. This point has been discussed in this blog in extensive detail in recent weeks.
How can a guy who trusted his safety to high school educated workers at Electric Boat (or Newport News) get his skivvies twisted over climate?
All I would add to this otherwise excellent post is one more item to the list of risks: “ix) the risk to hyperpartisans of CAGW of terminal exhaustion from continuous hyperventilation.”
“Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic.” Uncertainty in weather and climate prediction – Julia Slingo, Tim Palmer
The reality is that the theoretical foundations for perturbed physics ensembles – as opposed to opportunistic ensembles – are not well established. Qualitatively choosing a solution out of 1000’s of feasible and divergent solutions – to partake in an opportunistic ensemble – seems inherently unsatisfactory.
James C. McWilliams of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California discussed chaos and climate in a 2007 paper titled ‘Irreducible imprecision in atmospheric and oceanic simulations’. ‘Sensitive dependence and structural instability are humbling twin properties for chaotic dynamical systems, indicating limits about which kinds of questions are theoretically answerable’. Sensitive dependence refers to qualitative shifts in climate and models that occur as a result of small changes in initial states. Structural instabilities are qualitative shifts in modelled outcomes as a result of plausible (within the limits of accuracy of measurements) changes in boundary parameters.
Over a century it may be that models can’t say anything useful. We may be better focusing on decadal modelling in far finer detail.
James Hurrell and colleagues in a 2009 article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society stated that the ‘global coupled atmosphere–ocean–land–cryosphere system exhibits a wide range of physical and dynamical phenomena with associated physical, biological, and chemical feedbacks that collectively result in a continuum of temporal and spatial variability. The traditional boundaries between weather and climate are, therefore, somewhat artificial.’ Somewhat artificial is somewhat of an understatement for a paradigm shift in climate science.
The weight of evidence is such that modellers are frantically revising their strategies. They are asked for an international climate computing centre and $5 billion (for 2000 times more computing power) to solve this new problem in climate forecasting.
In the interim we have perhaps greater certainty in far simpler calculations.
Anastasios Tsonis, of the Atmospheric Sciences Group at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and colleagues used a mathematical network approach to analyse abrupt climate change on decadal timescales. Ocean and atmospheric indices – in this case the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the North Pacific Oscillation – can be thought of as chaotic oscillators that capture the major modes of climate variability. Tsonis and colleagues calculated the ‘distance’ between the indices. It was found that they would synchronise at certain times and then shift into a new state.
It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.
Four multi-decadal climate shifts were identified in the last century coinciding with changes in the surface temperature trajectory. Warming from 1909 to the mid 1940’s, cooling to the late 1970’s, warming to 1998 and pausing since. The shifts are punctuated by extreme El Niño Southern Oscillation events. Fluctuations between La Niña and El Niño peak at these times and climate then settles into a damped oscillation. Until the next critical climate threshold – due perhaps in a decade or two if the recent past is any indication.
The warming over mid century cooling and late century warming regimes is some 0.4 degrees C. About 0.07 degrees per decade. If we assume that it is all anthropogenic and project it forward – warming is negligible over several decades to come. Think of it as a reality check.
Shifts imply chaos and I am far from complacent about small changes in chaotic systems. There is however real global risk in some of the desperate solutions proposed that seem relatively important in a broad risk assessment.
I agree Rob, the skill of GCM’s is something where most “scientists” are just ignorant of the details and the real issues. I found that even with KenRice, aka, ATTP. He argued with me ad nauseum on many threads and recently admitted over at cliscep that I was actually right about this. Of course Rice is a particularly hard case because of his tendency to activism and consensus enforcement. Just goes to show that even “physicists” are often simply ignorant of the real issues and have no rigorous basis for their statements about GCM’s and often feel the pressure of consensus enforcement.
The real issue is the nature and properties of the attractor. This is an area of deep ignorance. Recent results suggest that the dimension of the attractor may be very large, rather invalidating amateurish attempts to show asymptotic statistics with the Lorentz system justifies GCM’s long term skill. Of course, people like Pat Franks are just as wrong and confuse the issues too. And then you get ignorant debunking of Franks. It reminds me of why the climate dialogue is just so profoundly silly especially the consensus enforcement arm. Pseudo-science is the only appropriate term for it.
“AOS models are therefore to be judged by their degree of plausibility, not whether they are correct or best. This perspective extends to the component discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupling breadth: There are better or worse choices (some seemingly satisfactory for their purpose or others needing repair) but not correct or best ones. The bases for judging are a priori formulation, representing the relevant natural processes and choosing the discrete algorithms, and a posteriori solution behavior…
Although we may expect a chaotic AOS model to be structurally unstable, it is difficult to explicitly make this determination. The attractor cannot be fully visualized or measured because the phase space has such a high dimension (i.e., high order). Probability distribution functions (PDFs) (Fig. 1) give at least a rough view of an AOS attractor. There are many aspects to the equation set for a model, most notably in the choices of discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupling scope, and these are usually not systematically explored in AOS practices. To do so requires formulating multiple models for a given problem. Even systematic scans in the parameter values of a complicated AOS model are rarely published, although parameter variations are commonly made while tuning a model to improve its plausibility…
Simplistically, despite the opportunistic assemblage of the various AOS model ensembles, we can view the spreads in their results as upper bounds on their irreducible imprecision. Optimistically, we might think this upper bound is a substantial overestimate because AOS models are evolving and improving. Pessimistically, we can worry that the ensembles contain insufficient samples of possible plausible models, so the spreads may underestimate the true level of irreducible imprecision (cf., ref. 23). Realistically, we do not yet know how to make this assessment with confidence.” James McWillians
I always like realistically. There are several interlinked problems. Sensitive dependence and structural instability, the lack of numerical representations of important climate processes, a deficit of detailed understanding of processes and coupling and this bit about posteriori solution behavior.
The latter is where one solution is chosen out of 1000’s of plasable solutions on the basis that it looks right. Predictably the non-unique solutions chosen are all too hot.
Yes you’re right – the wider community don’t have a freaking clue and the dissimulation by some modellers amounts to
scientific fraud.
Rob, Yes its fraudulent. I see the same thing in CFD all the time. There are a lot of people “selling” themselves and their work. There is no check and balance on their Colorful Fluid Dynamics.
This is simply not true. What I said is here:
which I then clarified again here:
Given that it’s clear that I was simply agreeing with DY’s technical comments about the details of CFD, but not with what he suggests this implies about climate models, I will leave it for others to decide what his suggestion that I agree with him about GCMs implies.
Yes Ken, You never agreed with Nic Lewis or me about GCM’s. What you did is try to change the subject to whether ECS is high or low. Since you have said nothing about GCM’s on that thread, do you have any reason to believe they are any better than CFD simulations, given that they model a far more complex system. Nic Lewis gives it seems to me gives virtually irrefutable reasons to believe that “GCM’s don’t give us scientific information about ECS.”
He was refuted before he happened:
[Response: Wayne, please note that this is Kyle’s article not mine, though I did encourage him to write it for us. I think the interesting question raised (though not definitively answered) by this line of work is the extent to which some of the pause in warming mid-century might have been more due to decadal ocean variability rather than aerosols than is commonly thought. If that is the case, then a pause or temporary reduction in warming rate could recur even if aerosols are unchanged. Learning how to detect and interpret such things is important, lest a temporary pause be confused with evidence for low climate sensitivity. –raypierre]
JCH, Huh?? Did you post this in the wrong place?
DY,
Let me just repeat the point. I did not say what you claim I said. How I might (or might not) have responded to something on another blog does not somehow justify you saying things here that are not true.
Ok, Ken, As usual you make a small and unimportant nontechnical point and refuse to address the real issue, an ordinary artifice of disingenuousness. You are correct about what you said. It is also true that in the past you have argued ad nausium with me about CFD and only now admit you were wrong and rather transparently stupid. That’s OK. Everyone is entitled to honest mistakes. In your case however, its fits a pattern of dishonesty and hypocrisy.
However, the technical and important question concerns GCM’s and their skill. If you have something to say about the real content Rob and I were discussing I’d entertain it. If not, why do you even bother?
DY,
I really can’t help laughing at your response. Let’s recap. You said something untrue, and then accuse me of being dishonest. This is not the first time this has happened (in fact, it is probably pretty typical). FWIW, your summary of our past interactions is also not true.
Ken Rice,
1. I want to express my deepest thanks for your very minor and technically irrelevant concern, which you have repeated twice.
2. You statements on GCM’s in my view are vague and simply hard to interpret, so it is easy to represent them accurately. You have defended GCM’s as providing “scientific understanding” which is of course not a measure of quantitative skill, but a well worn Colorful Fluid Dynamics marketing tool.
3. If you would like to make a technical statement, rather than an obfuscatory deflective statement, I would entertain it.
4. I believe that my views on turbulence and CFD by themselves imply that GCM’s are inadequate for giving evidence about ECS. Nic Lewis gives many more detailed reasons too. Convection is one of the big ones.
Being a born again adult, perhaps you would like to say something substantive.
For those even remotely interested in why Rice does what he does, here’s an excerpt from his most recent blog post. Bottom line for Ken: If you don’t respect those who you engage with and never learn anything (I think this may be a memory failure or egotistical trope on Ken’s part), that attitude is easy to detect even on the internet. To communicate with someone effectively, you must put aside your personal hostility and focus on the issues. Unless of course, you are so full of disgust and negativity you are incapable of doing that.
Indeed. For some reason, however, you seem to think that this only applies to others; they have to put aside their personal hostility and focus on the issues. You – on the other hand – somehow think you’re entitled to maintain yours and to focus on anything but the issues.
Ken, My purpose in spending time on blogs is to learn. I would be excited to learn something from you about GCM’s for example. I have learned a lot from Nick Stokes for example and Michael Tobis. Nic Lewis is also an excellent learning resource as is Rob Ellison. This statement is very real and genuine on my part. What you said on your blog about interactions with “skeptics” is not really helpful if you want to learn as well from them.
DY,
Going around insulting individuals is an odd way to indicate that you’re possibly interesting in learning from them. YMMV, of course.
We could of course go round and round infinitely with focusing on personalities and style. Focusing on technical substance is a better way to communicate. I would like to know what you thought of Lewis’ points about GCM’s and their apparent structural lack of stability.
Over a century it may be that models can’t say anything useful. We may be better focusing on decadal modelling in far finer detail.
We don’t have records that tell us anything about century models. We have records that tell us the decadal models are worse than useless. I believe that means that the century models are most likely also worse than useless.
Simply put, any model that cannot show cooling over the next century is unrealistic. I know of none that can.
The Roman and Medieval Warm periods lasted several hundred years. This Warm period will last several hundred years. We will have massive winter snowfalls for several hundred years but we will not have significant warming or cooling in the next century. What has happened will happen again. The ice will advance after the ice volume and weight builds enough to flow faster than the melting and ice shelf breaking off. These warm and cold periods alternating is normal natural and necessary.
In any case, you are right, none of the models are realistic.
” Sensitive dependence and structural instability are humbling twin properties for chaotic dynamical systems, indicating limits about which kinds of questions are theoretically answerable.” JamesMcWilliams
You have missed the point guys. This is a schematic of solutions of a single model with a perturbed physics ensemble. It may theoretically be used in a probabilistic forecast.
http://d29qn7q9z0j1p6.cloudfront.net/content/roypta/369/1956/4751/F2.large.jpg
What they do is pick one and send it off to be graphed with other picked solutions from other models. How would you pick the one that is right? Literally – it looks good. It fits within a range of expectations – generally agreed in the modelling community – of the evolution of climate.
It is just such a bizarre and meaningless procedure. It persists only because people haven’t grasped the shell game being played.
The question of the deterministic evolution of climate is theoretically unanswerable using this particular tool. It is invalid scientific methodology. The answer is known before the model runs – and a solution chosen from many feasible solutions on the multi-dimensional attractor to give the answer they want. This is not science at all and the whole lot should be laughed out of court.
They all can.
Can we be a little more cryptic?
Simply put, any model that cannot show cooling over the next century is unrealistic. I know of none that can. – DW
They all can. – SM
“There are many aspects to the equation set for a model, most notably in the choices of discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupling scope, and these are usually not systematically explored in AOS practices. ” But then someone would have to systematically explore to find out.
Mosh, re cooling in the models, can you show us an ECS or TCR range that includes negative values? I must have missed it.
Probably not, but that’s because the ECS and TCR are almost certainly positive. The models, however, could show cooling over the next century.
Climate, at least on a continental scale, is sensitive to initial conditions.
Evidently very sensitive:
https://nar.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/labs/cgd/2016/cesm-le.png
ATTP, your reply illustrates the fundamental confusion with ECS and TCR. Are they abstractions, such that the actual climate could be very different when CO2 doubles, or predictions? If it can cool when CO2 doubles and ECS and TCR are positive, then they are merely abstractions. But they are uniformly treated as predictions, such that a positive ECS and TCR is taken to imply that it will in fact be warmer when CO2 doubles.
Warmers can’t have it both ways. Which is it?.
David,
Technically, the ECS and TCR are model metrics. They are defined as how much warming will occur if you double atmospheric CO2 at 1% per year (which takes 70 years) while leaving everything else unchanged and while considering only fast feedbacks. The ECS being the amount of warming when the system has retained equilibrium and the TCR being the amount of warming at the time when CO2 has doubled (averaged over years 60 to 80, I think). Under these definitions they are both almost certainly positive.
In the real world, however, we could have a period of enhanced volcanic activity, an asteroid strike (hopefully not), or we could stop emitting CO2 and start drawing it down via negative emissions. If one were to model some of these processes using a climate model it could produce cooling over the next century, even though the TCR and ECS would still be positive.
Yes and we could also have one or more of a large number of natural processes that are not well understood, such that it is cooler when CO2 doubles. Thus ECS and TCR are merely abstractions, like the rate of fall of a feather in a vacuum (compared to its actual behavior in a windstorm). Yet these abstract metrics are constantly taken as predictions of what the temperature change will actually be when CO2 doubles. This is a huge mistake.
> Technically
You just lost DavidW, AT.
Imagine yourself in his shoes, writing a K-32 program selling contrarian crap for a think tank.
Try with less syllables.
Or try with maths – DavudW brags he’s a logic guru or something.
> Can we be a little more cryptic?
For that we’d need one of the three usual “but chaos” quotes you got, Chief.
whoops – https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/29/the-threat-of-climate-change/#comment-836095
David,
What might they be? They can only really be responses to temperature changes (remember we’re defining it as the warming due to doubling CO2 while keeping everything else fixed, apart from the fast feedbacks). The dominant ones are water vapour, lapse rate, and clouds. The first two are fairly well understood, the latter less so. However, the current evidence suggests that the cloud feedback is small and probably positive – almost certainly not large enough to produce a negative ECS or TCR.
ATTP, you mentioned volcanoes, asteroids and zero emissions, I am adding things such as I list here: https://judithcurry.com/2016/08/29/refocusing-the-usgcrp/. You can restrict ECS and TCR to an ‘other things being equal’ abstraction, but then they tell us nothing about what the temperature will actually be like when CO2 doubles. If so then you cannot claim that there will be warming just because these abstractions are positive.
But given chaos even these abstractions should probably have negative cases, for certain initial conditions, such that increasing CO2 causes cooling.
Yes Willard, my Ph.D. specialties were analytic philosophy of science and mathematical logic. My research focus has been the logic of complex issues, especially uncertainty. (I am pretty confident that you do not understand what I am talking about.)
Climate models are not going to be affecting our energy policy, for at least the next 8 years. Climate alarmism is sucking wind. Trump rules! Get used to it.
David,
No, I don’t think so. I think this would almost certainly violate conservation of energy. I think there is also a basic logical inconsistency. CO2 alone cause warming. Feedbacks either amplify, or diminish, this warming. However, it can’t go overall negative because that would require going through “0”. At “0” there can be no feedbacks and hence the only effect would be CO2, which causes warming. This doesn’t really make logical sense.
> I am pretty confident that you do not understand what I am talking about.
Wanna bet?
I am a little worried about this. In a chaotic (there’s that word again) climate sensitivity is dynamic and can be positive, negative or zero.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/unstable-ebm-fig-2-jpg1.jpg
A little more detail here.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2014/06/23/the-unstable-math-of-michael-ghils-climate-sensitivity/
It goes without saying that there are very significant natural sources of climate variability.
i>Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.”
Natural, large-scale climate patterns like the PDO and El Niño-La Niña are superimposed on global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and landscape changes like deforestation. According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”
I’d guess it is solar modulation of Pacific Ocean upwelling.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2017/01/12/an-earnest-discovery-of-climate-causality/
So if models are not fit for the IPCC purpose – what are we to do? This is just GISSTEMP data to 2000 smoothed over 5 years. I am going to use satellite data post-2000. The surface records have a latent heat artefact that is a movable feast.
http://woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut4gl/from:1900/mean:60/to:2000
An interesting pattern emerges from this simplest of transformations. The early century warming was solar and El Nino, the middle century cooling was all La Nina, the late century was El Nino. There is clearly satellite evidence over the last few decades of the 20th century in support of this. The plateau in solar activity is relevant – because direct heating is not relevant. The level of solar activity predisposes the Pacific system to more or less upwelling over millennia. Activity was high through to the end of the century. Frankly, I am expecting El Nino frequency and intensity to take a slide of a 1000 year high as the sun cools this century.
The early century warming was some 0.4 degrees C – and the late warming about the same. So even if assume that late century warming was all anthropogenic (and that’s a highly dubious proposition) and project forward – it is 0.7 degrees C/century.
Fossil fuels are hardly likely to remain viable past a few decades – and we can sequester 100 Gt(as C) in soils and ecosystems over 30 or 40 years.
Seriously, what is the risk?
David, Nic Lewis in fact makes the point that most GCM’s can show a very broad range of ECS with plausible adjustments to parameters that are not really constrained by any data.
https://niclewis.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/briefing-note-on-climate-sensitivity-etc_nic-lewis_mar2016.pdf
The bottom line for Nic is “This study, together with the other findings cited in the two preceding paragraphs, strongly suggests that neither the range of ECS values exhibited by AOGCMs nor their mean can be viewed as scientifically satisfactory evidence as to the value of ECS in the real climate system.”
There are other very convincing reasons to believe this as well having to do with turbulence modeling used for far simpler systems.
P. S., I suspect one could in fact get a small ECS if one wanted to with plausible cloud and convection models.
Missed you Chief.
There you are. I promise to be a sweeter gentler person. :)
No need to do that on my behalf. I’m pretty thick skinned. Helps to have a dad who was really good at sticking the needle in. Like telling me one time that he should have named me Hemi. When I asked what that meant he replied it was because I was such a pain in the ass. And going through grade school with a name like Gasser pretty much ensures growing a tough epidermis. Have yet to come across a group more inventively cruel than elementary and middle school kids.
All I would add to this otherwise excellent post is “ix) the risk to hyperpartisans of CAGW of terminal exhaustion from continuous hyperventilation.”
It is sometimes useful to decompose a ‘problem’ into discrete bits rather than consider it generally or generically. The general threat issue is the supposed C in CAGW, immanent or not. Warmunists have offered many refutable specifics. Extreme weather-nope per SRES. Future e treme weather. Well, build tornado shelters in tornado alley and such. Polar bears-nope, dont depend on late summer ice so no future problem ever. SLR– nope, no acceleration, no credible tipping points, but some clear academic misconduct. Ocean acidification-nope, buffered plus biological pumps for calcification plus clear academic misconduct (guest post Shell Games). Food-nope most crops are C3 and greening.
Debating some general tipping point threat at 2C as Schellnhuber believes is debating a vague premise. Don’t accept the general premise. Demand specifics with timing.
And, often the best decision under deep uncertainty is to do nothing different. Just carry on while waiting for more clarity. Sort of the China/India approach to the Paris accord.
In this essay, the reader will not find a detailed critique of the Kyoto mechanisms. Nor will the reader find a proposal for a different single solution in place of Kyoto. We have refrained from this because climate change is not a discrete problem amenable to any single shot solution, be it Kyoto or any other. Climate change is the result of a particular development path and its globally interlaced supply system of fossil energy. No single intervention can change such a complex nexus (although as the earlier sections have shown, the attempt to do so has produced unintended and unwelcome effects). There is no simple silver bullet. Instead, we suggest that in cases like this, the best line of attack is not head-on. We suggest that the policy response to climate change should assemble instead a portfolio of approaches—silver buckshot, rather than silver bullet—that would move us in the right direction, even though it is impossible to predict which of these approaches might stimulate the necessary fundamental change. This is a process of social learning in which we must be always alert to maintain our trajectory towards the goal by constant course corrections and improvements which, by definition, cannot be prescribed precisely beforehand.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/mackinder/pdf/mackinder_Wrong%20Trousers.pdf
I don’t have any specific objection except to suggest that climate extremes are much greater than anything seen in the 20th century.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2015/06/06/obama-and-the-syrian-drought/
Global risk has multiple dimensions and focusing solely on the risks of changing the atmosphere – known or unknown – can create unintended consequences elsewhere. The legitimacy of responses will be lost if broader objectives are not considered. Alleviating poverty, improving health and education, restoring soils, halting biodiversity loss, technology innovation – are all legitimate ways to ameliorate carbon emissions – whether there is risk or not – but also bring benefits to humanity and environments. A portfolio of approaches with multiple objectives. Instead – the major focus has been on expensive energy with significant risk to global development. The latter cannot work.
> It is sometimes useful to decompose a ‘problem’ into discrete bits rather than consider it generally or generically.
One does not simply posit AGW is a wicked problem and then pretend we can decompose it if we wish to be taken srsly in Mordor.
I think it safe to safe to say that governments/media promote symbolic threats that play to political identities for the purpose of power hoarding.
Actual threats are often hidden or downplayed because the establishment looks weak if people become overly conscious of them.
Example: police misbehavior vs. economic decline of cities …
of course “climate change” is the greatest Trojan Horse of all time.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
I do not believe that the possibility of adverse impacts from human caused climate change should be “under consideration”. Not if consideration means that some action should or might be taken.
In human decisionmaking, vague and tenuous mere possibilities are appropriately beneath consideration. These abound in ordinary life. If I stand I may fall; if I walk I may trip; if I drive I may crash; if I eat I may choke. etc. All of these and more are possibilities, at all times.
And so it is with human induced climate change, which we do not even know is happening or will happen in future, much less to a harmful degree. Dangerous AGW is literally beneath consideration, from a policy perspective.
“In human decisionmaking, vague and tenuous mere possibilities are appropriately beneath consideration. These abound in ordinary life. If I stand I may fall; if I walk I may trip; if I drive I may crash; if I eat I may choke. etc. All of these and more are possibilities, at all times.
And so it is with human induced climate change, which we do not even know is happening or will happen in future, much less to a harmful degree. Dangerous AGW is literally beneath consideration, from a policy perspective.”
Right then:
So you have no life insurance. No health insurance.
No car insurance. No holiday insurance. No house insurance?
Eh?
Life is full of possible risks that we sensibly prepare for.
And what is more important than the environment humans live in?
If not for ourselves then for our great grandchildren and beyond.
It’s called the precautionary principle.
Tell me – if a pilot of a plane carrying your (say), daughter, when asked of the chances of his plane crashing on the flight, said …. what? – 1%, 10%, 30% ?
I need not go further – you would NOT let her fly beyond that, and I’d suggest you’d waver at even 1%.
And what are the chances of dangerous climatic effects by the end of this century, the next?
You would no doubt say less than 1%?
What exactly?
That going against common sense behaviour as exhibited by you when buying insurance.
And you do.
Unless of course it is because it would all happen beyond your lifetime (and mine), and so not worthy of consideration.
And by what measure do you take this decision?
Have you decided that nothing is currently happening and so never will (despite there being no forecasts of dangerous consequences until decades from now)?
Have you decided you know more about climate science than the VAST majority of the world’s experts?
Have you decided that the VAST majority of the world’s experts are acting out a fraud?
Or perhaps a combination of these?
This when the world’s experts have decided with >95% confidence human induced climate change “is happening”.
So, to sum up human kind, has advanced to the point we are to place the uncertainty monster ahead of all evolutionary advantage to not even proceed with every-day sensible precautionary measures to mitigate what would be the greatest challenge human-kind may have to face in the centuries to come ?
Even though you will happily buy insurance on a domestic disaster such as your house burning down.
What are the chances of that my friend?
1%?
No, this site estimates 1 in 3000…..
http://www.freeby50.com/2012/04/how-common-are-house-fires.html
I suggest that your position is based entirely on an ideological stance and has nothing to do with proper quantification of risk.
This statement says so ….
“Dangerous AGW is literally beneath consideration, from a policy perspective.”
And the proof of that is my friend?
Beyond any shadow of doubt in YOUR mind?
Too emotional, Tony.
The only insurance I pay for is that required by governments, such as third party damage with our automobile. The economic case is clear, it costs us less this way because we are not helping pay for those many lovely insurance company buildings all over the world, or the non-productive drones that fill them.
There is no valid science with the precautionary principle. The science approach is to reduce uncertainty by further investigation. If that is not possible, the topic should not be a topic for social discourse.
Think asteroids that might hit earth. Insurance fails. Precautionary principles fail. All that can be done is to note a risk, get a feel for it and get over it.
Same applies to climate threat. Has not yet been shown to be a threat, cannot be unless natural variation can be separated from any anthro effects yet to be seen.
Geoff
Tony Banton
“Have you decided you know more about climate science than the VAST majority of the world’s experts?
Have you decided that the VAST majority of the world’s experts are acting out a fraud?”
The claim that the vast majority of the world’s experts believe as you do is flawed, based on bad social psychology research.
Rest Well,
Richard
Tony, the various economic projections done by the IPCC in the 1990s as a basis for the climate models tended to show world GDP at end-century seven times what it was in 1991. If any long-term problems emerge, the very rich people of the future, with many decades of scientific and technological advances to assist them, will surely be better placed to determine their needs than we will be. Meanwhile, we impose huge economic costs on societies (including poor ones) to possibly make a tiny reduction in future temperatures. Better to build our capacity and economic strength to better enable us to deal with any future problems, whatever they are. [Not that I have any faith in those economic studies. I recall one that showed the GDP of South Africa in 2100 exceeding world GDP in 1991. When I used economic modelling, it was to estimate the potential impacts of different policies over a ten-year horizon, going beyond that to provide input to climate modelling for 2100 is pretty silly. And, of course, Ian Castles and David Henderson showed that the IPCC modelling was seriously flawed and not in accord with the accepted basis for national accounts modelling.]
Richard writes- “Have you decided that the VAST majority of the world’s experts are acting out a fraud?””
What is your source to claim that the vast majority of “experts” believe that AGW will result in a worse climate for humans?
“The claim that the vast majority of the world’s experts believe as you do is flawed, based on bad social psychology research.
Rest Well,
Richard”
Wrong way round Richard.
I believe that the world’s experts (via consensus – as in all things, even science, psychological make-up can override in extremis), have the science correct.
Even if not understanding of science, it’s just plain common-sense.
There, that’s where your psychological research comes in.
Rest well.
Tony
From the post above:
“I think that qualitatively, these are the the appropriate risks to consider. Where I don’t find this analysis particularly convincing is their links of ‘undetectable’, ‘moderate’, ‘high’, ‘very high’ to specific levels of temperature increase.”
It is particularly unconvincing since any potential increases in temperature will most likely appear in the world’s coldest places. Clive Best has a fine explanation why changes in GMT anomalies don’t mean what people think. The threat is raised in the wrong places.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/temperature-misunderstandings/
Has the last 150 years of global warming made any significant difference to the intensity of ENSO episodes, AMO & Arctic warming cycles, or the intensity of atmospheric teleconnection anomalies and all that stuff that actually drives regional climate variability? I don’t think so.
A useful diagram from the IPCC is this.
http://www.pelicanweb.org/IPCC.WG2.AR5.3June%202014.png
It is about vulnerability and tipping points. By tipping points, not just the big ones like Greenland melting, or the Gulf Stream stopping, but small local ones in vulnerable populations. A few extra drought years leads to famine in some populations, a small sea-level rise causes major problems in others, an unusually hot summer month leads to problems in others, unexpected scales of floods in others. Climate change is like a rising tide, and vulnerable communities already on the edge may be tipped by the increased frequency of events that turn out disastrous for them. Understanding these vulnerabilities is important, and these are not just in underdeveloped countries as the French heatwave showed. Agriculture and water in fairly advanced countries also has vulnerabilities and tipping points, and climate change will push them, not with the decadal trend alone, but with the increase of extreme events that comes with it.
Jimd
An interesting chart but one that does not take into account all the stresses on population. The best climate in the world could not have salvaged the Syria situation where a perfectly ‘normal’ drought that takes place every forty or fifty years was compounded in a population growth from around 4millipn in the 1960’s to over 20 million prior to the exodus.
There are many countries that will need to be enormously favoured by the weather gods if they are not to experience severe stress, from Iraq to Ethiopia, Sudan to Nigeria. Any effects by man on the climate pale into insignificance compared to the stresses on the environment on too rapidly growing a population
Tonyb
Yes, there are more threats than climate and that should not be ignored either. Climate is just another added stressor for some areas, and the main risk for others. Some sources of stress, we can’t help with, but others we can.
Problems in one place could be balanced by benefits in others.
Do the people with the benefits pay the amount to help those with the problems? Think it through. This is why benefits don’t count.
A few extra drought years leads to famine in some populations
What is the evidence or physical basis of even thinking this would happen?
What is the evidence or physical basis of thinking drought might become less frequent?
Drought is mostly determined by precipitation.
Precipitation is determined by discrete dynamic events ( e.g. mid-latitude cyclones, tropical cyclones, easterly waves ).
These dynamic events occur in very wide range of fluctuation.
These dynamic events are not predictable.
These events are not determined by the global average temperature.
These events are determined by wave undulations, which are determined by the pole to equator gradient.
For every given gradient, ( which varies through out the year ) there are an infinite number of equally valid wave states of differing wave lengths and amplitudes.
Seems to me climate change may have been a good marketing move away from global warming, but a false narrative.
Like I said, climate change is a tide. Annual variations would be like waves in that analogy. An advancing tide leads to more extreme waves that reach further in. It is the extreme events that increase, and it is these that do the damage, not the decadal trend per se. You may be saying that extreme events won’t increase, or if they do, they won’t do more damage anywhere, but I don’t see your reasoning for that.
Like I said, climate change is a tide.
By that analogy, we’ll assume you mean temperature rise.
But precipitation frequency is not a function of temperature.
The temperature rise has a consequence on the severity of droughts and floods. These are not unconnected.
If that were true, there would be some amount of predictability.
I’m not aware that has ever been demonstrated.
And models are in error even predicting the past.
This all does bear a closer look, but I certainly question this assumption.
TE, it has often been said that droughts and floods would be expected to increase, along with dry places getting drier and wet places getting wetter. Perhaps you missed it.
TE, it has often been said that droughts and floods would be expected to increase, along with dry places getting drier and wet places getting wetter. Perhaps you missed it.
Yes, things can be said.
I’m questioning why anyone would believe precipitation is predictable.
The units of action of precipitation ( mid-latitude cyclones, tropical cyclones, ITCZ, etc. ) are not predictable past a few days.
There is no verified accurate climate model of precipitation or change.
“An advancing tide leads to more extreme waves that reach further in. It is the extreme events that increase, and it is these that do the damage”
Well, someone hasn’t bothered thinking it through.
Can you provide any evidence at all for the first statement? Where has it been shown that sea level increase leads to bigger or “extreme” wave action? Don’t have to bother asking for evidence of the second statement. Already know there is none. Unless you believe that assertions made from running model projects count as evidence.
JimD, I find this diagram unintelligible. For example it seems to say that risks cause impacts which then cause climate, which is gibberish. Tipping points are not mentioned, so you apparently have your own personal interpretation. But if it somehow says that anthro climate change exists, has adverse impacts, etc., then it is pure speculation, IPCC style.
The diagram has nothing on tipping points, but those are related to the concept of vulnerability to gradual change. It is important to be able to distinguish impacts and risk from threat or hazard. The diagram shows you can have hazards like climate change that only are a risk if you have both exposure and vulnerability. Dismissing the idea of a threat is to say nowhere that is exposed is vulnerable or that the hazard (significant global warming) doesn’t exist in the first place. When you say it looks like risks cause impacts, no, the risks are the risks of impacts.
“It is important to be able to distinguish impacts and risk from threat or hazard.”
Huh??
Jim, it is important to distinguish between reality and projection. Running a model and claiming the output is real is effectively living in a fictional world. While there might be some possibility of reality matching model output, it is also very possible, indeed more likely, that it won’t. One signal that the possibility of matching is real would be observed evidence now. Too bad for the existential threat crowd that such evidence doesn’t exist.
Except that one, there is as yet no good evidence that occurrences of drought or flooding increase in a warming climate or two that the only localities where a small rise in sea level might represent significant impacts are those areas experiencing subsidence.
In other words Jim D is talking about events and impacts which have always been with us, with no evidence they are increasing. In fact the loss of life from natural weather events is declining, not increasing.
Guess we add risk assessment to the list of topics that Jim doesn’t have a solid grasp on.
The impact so far is only a small fraction of what it will be in 50-100 years. Climate is statistical. Impacts grow in significance by the decade. I think it is true that some skeptics need to see the devastation in their backyards before they may even concede it could possibly happen. It’s a backward view of climate. They enter the future rear-end first.
So then you agree that +95% of modern warming is all natural then, right.
All and more in the pipeline is manmade. Check the imbalance some time.
It isn’t going to be in balance, the surface temperature is not symmetrical in either dimension. Just the difference between air temp over land vs ocean make “balance” nonexistent.
The rising ocean heat content comes from a positive imbalance. No disputing the sign of it.
Except it’s only in some places , others are nearly unchanged. And we always get back to the poor data collection.
The positive global average is an inconvenient observational fact that you refuse to believe, but most other skeptics have accepted that the OHC has been rising for many decades.
I guess having spent plenty of time taking well controlled measurements and knowing how difficult that can be, I’m a more skeptical skeptic.
Or, a positive imbalance destroys your whole argument against manmade warming, so you can’t accept those observations on that principle.
It’s flimsy science with enough holes that they can make up whatever they want, and in fact the calibrated the measurements against the modeled imbalance because the instruments themselves are not accurate enough to quantify the actual Balance.
Your position of hoping the imbalance is the opposite sign of what measurements show is very fragile.
The only thing I claim is that at any time there isn’t a balance at toa.
Exactly. The imbalance has been positive for decades.
How would they know, the calibration was done based on the theoretical calculated imbalance based on a failed theory.
It’s not “calibration”. It’s plain old observations of the global ocean heat content.
And what exactly do they look at it with and measure Balance over at least a year to +/- 1W/m^2? The answer is nothing does.
The global ocean heat content is rising and at a rate that requires a global imbalance of 0.5-1 W/m2, as you probably already know.
What I know is that number is about as meaningless as you can get. Jim, how to they calculate a balance difference at a fraction of a watt after at least a full year of constant measurements?
They just need to see how much the ocean is warming, and from there it is mathematics, and it is decadal scales of measurements that show the ocean warming, as you know.
Except we have no way to measure the heat content of the ocean and get an accurate accounting. They measure a fraction of the ocean, mix in poorly taken measurements, and then make up the rest.
It is very easy to tell whether the ocean is warming or not on decadal time-scales. You would be surprised.
Only if you ignore that they make up data whenever they feel like it, and don’t really care if it’s true or not, only whether it aids the cause.
https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus-climate-data/
You continue to make stuff up Jim.
The impact so far is only a small fraction of what it will be in 50-100 years”
You, nor anyone else, has a clue what climate is going to be like in 100 years. If it is going to create huge problems then the trends should already be evident. Or you have to throw in imaginary “tipping points”.
“Climate is statistical” – and you are nonsensical. What sort of statement is this?
If a warmer climate leads to increased drought, increased flooding, increased forest fires, increased “extreme: weather events, etc etc, then after a 100 years of warming there should be evidence of this happening. There is not. To use your future analogy, you are entering with your eyes closed, your eyes plugged, singing la, la, la, la, la in order to avoid the complete lack of evidence saying the future is bleak due to changing climate.
The change in ocean heat approximate equals the energy in less energy out.
Forcings may be increasing at a rate of by 0.032 W/m2 – and oceans are reported to be warming at 0.042W/m2
There seems to be nothing in the pipeline. As is common with climate memes.
There may, however, be another problem.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/carbom-dioxide.jpg
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ocean-temp1.jpg
The ocean heat content has a positive trend over the last few decades and this means that the forcing has led the warming in this period. The forcing is anthropogenically dominated so this means that all the warming we have had so far has not kept up with the manmade forcing, meaning the attribution is >100%.
Jim D,
Showing that the oceans are warming is not the same as proving extreme weather and other destructive events are unavoidably headed our way.
You jump to conclusions and use evidence that has no connection to those conclusions as proof you are right.
The “rising ocean heat content” claim is one of my personal favorites, because the hydrosphere is 300x more massive than the atmosphere and the average temperature in the hydrosphere has barely changed enough since 1950 to be reliably measured.
Heat flows from warmer to cooler, therefore either the warmer ocean warms the cooler atmosphere, or vice versa (or a lot of work gets done). Since the modern atmosphere is supposed to be a hockey stick, the flow should essentially all be one way on timescales of interest. But if the entire heat transfer since 1950 (most of the anthropogenic effect) barely registers, equilibrium won’t be reached for millennia, and the heat transfer must be an increasingly greater negative feedback for the atmosphere the farther out of equilibrium it is with the hydrosphere (in either direction).
Circulation matters and work happens, but models betting against the Second Law on a global centennial scale aren’t persuasive.
What natural scientists cannot fathom is the risk of climate POLICY (making energy more expensive and less reliable, and wasting resources in the process of a political ‘solution’).
The risk of the solution versus the problem, in this case ‘government failure’ in the quest to correct ‘market failure’. This is where opportunity-cost and other economic concepts come into play.
Any hope that physical scientists will find the incentive to understand social science?
Any hope that governments will understand rational economics and act accordingly? The biggest risks from any climate change lie in bad government policy, which has already generated more costs than can be attributed to any change in climate.
Thanks Judy
The IPCC’s use of “risks” is biased by not addressing benefits, and not addressing cooling as well as warming. e.g., contrast the benefits of the Roman and Medieval warm periods with the calamitous Little Ice Age. Similarly compare long term cooling from the Holocene Optimum with the recent warming from the Little Ice Age.
The IPCC diagram is not very useful. It would like to paint “possible risk” in terms of “possible impacts” while any element of possible risk and possible impacts are interpretations and projections based on data + models. These need a perspective of the quality both the data, data reduction + analysis and projection (models) to understand the magnitude of risk that is supported by demonstrable technical critique as opposed to the barrage of opinion that normally accompanies discussion of risk and impacts. Remove the smoke and stick to facts and truly “supportable conclusions” and with what statistical reliability…
Note that there is essentially no basis for judging the accuracy of impact predictions. Based on the historical track record of such environmental predictions, though… well, ask Ehrlich if hundreds of millions of Americans have starved to death yet.
Current climate science has a lot of ideas that just appeared in the last 30 years or so, and not just the cooling trends that Lamb and Nicor confidently predicted. Warming has almost always been a boon to human civilization, not surprising since the planet glaciates so often lately, and can support so much less biomass at glacial maxima — and there’s little or no acceleration in sea level rise.
*Firor at NCAR, not Nicor
Yep, Talldave2, the scare mongers have had their day. They’ve clearly lost the argument. They are now desperate. They are displaying all the signs of denial! :)
Judith,
You’re absolutely right. Climate ‘science’ has become mostly about nuance. If climate change turns out to be not that much of a threat, then many reputations will fall. For this reason it is very unlikely that any young climate scientist would dare question the orthodox position, for fear of losing their position.
In 1740 a terrible winter hit UK and Ireland, after several mild winters. The Thames froze for 2 months. One third of the Irish population perished.
This is what I would call a threat.
Clive
It was much worse than that. During the 1730’s Britain had enjoyed the warmest decade for perhaps several centuries. It was the warmest decade in cet until the 1990’s. We then had the catastrophically cold 1740 of which Phil Jones remarked that it made him realise that natural variability was greater than he had previously realised.
Should such an event happen again it would appear we have no plan b.
Tonyb
tonyb
No plan b needed. If it happens again activists can declare it is another sign of CAGW and cut more industry and transportation from the peasants.
Scott
Tony:
“Phil Jones remarked that it made him realise that natural variability was greater than he had previously realised.”
A one season outlier LOCALLY (in a Global sense) is not the same as natural variability causing a long-term trend in climate.
Could happen now, given the hemispheric wavelength drivers all falling into place (E’ly QBO, MJO, ENSO, Eurasian Oct snow advance, open E Siberian seas, low solar and a few others including happenstance.
It would be like lifting yourself up by yer boot-laces. For the observed warming be due entirely to “natural variation”. As we have the OHC rising almost continuously for 100 years and accelerating, while at the same time for the last ~50 years that OHC has been also warming the troposphere.
Even though the sun’s TSI has decreased in that time.
Yeah yeah, it’s “natural variability” …. for 100 years.
Also bear in mind that before industry we were on a cooling trajectory since the HCO, which GHG forcing had to overcome, and until around 1970 atmospheric aerosol -ve forcing too.
Tony
I enjoyed the question of you over at WUWT.
I hope you can handle it. :)
Tony
Relax, it was meant for my Brit Brother, the other Tony. Only after I posted my comment did I realize there were 2 Tonys above.
Someone at WUWT had lectured him about England, apparently not knowing where he is from.
That is like someone telling me how pathetic the Detroit Lions have been since 1957.
Yep. Roger that. Over and out.
Ceresco kid
I realised you were referring to me over at wuwt. The other tony used to comment over there as toneb and I used to get some abuse as people thought it was me. Which makes the other tony’s point of course as it is now difficult for a warmist to comment over there.
only nick stokes now tends to defend the line, which is a pity as without dissenters the place will become an echo chamber.
use your full name and get back over there, tony!
Tonyb (still the original and best)
Tonyb
“only nick stokes now tends to defend the line, which is a pity as without dissenters the place will become an echo chamber.
use your full name and get back over there, tony!”
Nick has a happy knack of ignoring the most obnoxious posters there (I found Andyg55 the worst, but there are several others).
I cannot ignore.
Bad manners is never excusable..
So how to counter when not matter what I say is not no avail and met with more bad manners?
So, in steps Watts and singles me out as the originator of the “argument”.
Well it’s his rabbit-hole but no consideration of the hand-waving ad hom coming my way, and it seems a response in (muted) kind (well I got away with a few and I think he was fed-up) is VERBOTEN.
Oh, and no.
I would not use my own name there (you don’t?).
I was once physically threatened by a particularly nasty redneck (TBF Watts did temp ban-him as a Sky-dragon slayer).
Monckton (of whom my contempt knows no bounds) dug around and found my full name.
Not difficult as I post on here using my FB account.
There comes a point when it all becomes like talking to a goldfish who forgets he has swum around the bowl just few seconds before and spouts the same nonphysical myths and lies, along with the same deceptive graphs… with ad hom to boot.
They go there to give hugs and kisses to their omniscient citizen-scientists whose only aim is to do ABCD “science”. (Anything But Carbon Dioxide).
They are far, far beyond where the fairies live.
This is my name, but for various reason, including ones mentioned I want to keep the two worlds separate to the casual observer. So you can’t search between them.
And it isn’t nonphysical nonsense, it’s just beyond you I guess. It is very common in electronic, used to regulate voltages and currents, in climates case it’s switching between a high and low flux values to regulate a temperature, as opposed to switching a current on and off into a capacitor to regulate a voltage.
“And it isn’t nonphysical nonsense, it’s just beyond you I guess. ”
micro:
More expert despising rhetoric, that feeds your DK hubris.
I spent many many years watching by dint of forecasting, on pain of peoples lives mind – the behaviour of our atmosphere. I know full well what you espouse and it is correct, as far as it goes.
It it of no surprise to any meteorologist.
It is NOT however the control mechanism of the climate system.
It cannot lift itself up by it’s own boot-straps becasue H2O condenses out, commensurate with temp. CO2 does not.
I know you wont get it, and I do not care a jot.
But while you talk bollocks will counter it (except now on WUWT).
Oh, and do consider a world where there is no non-condensing GHG’s will you.
If you cannot see the logic of a quick descent into an ice-ball planet then you really should just shut up my friend.
Actually that is a point I’ve also made in the last week even, co2 did act as a ghg when most of the water condensed out.
And yes water has a shorter lifespan, but it’s always being replenished, so the lifetime argument is specious.
But, since water is the dominate ghg, it now sets morning min temp under clear skies, and in fact you can see how min temp follows dew point. Co2, now with water vapor dominant doesn’t affect cooling at night, but a small fraction of its linear forcing, and I’ve proven this beyond any doubt.
You’re just wrong, if you don’t agree with the data.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/1980-series1.png
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/1997-daily-cooling-sample-zoom-with-inset1.png
Tony banton
As you use your proper name here I assumed it was just one of thôse things that you use toneb over at wuwt. Sorry to hear you have been threatened. It just diminishes the site if there are few dissenting voices.
I suspect nick stokes must have perfected the art of ‘Zen and climate science’ as he does manage to maintain his equanimity. Mind you, there are a number of us who treat his comments with respect.
Its up to you of course, but now I know the reasons I shall swallow had when readers mix the two of us .
Tonyb
tonyb,
You have been tonyb to me since 2010. Tony Banton should pick his own nome de plume. Just not scotts5sf.
Always like to hear you thoughts. Not I don’t see threats under every cloud.
Like turbulent eddy as a clever name.
Scott
“Actually that is a point I’ve also made in the last week even, co2 did act as a ghg when most of the water condensed out.
And yes water has a shorter lifespan, but it’s always being replenished, so the lifetime argument is specious.
But, since water is the dominate ghg, it now sets morning min temp under clear skies, and in fact you can see how min temp follows dew point. Co2, now with water vapor dominant doesn’t affect cooling at night, but a small fraction of its linear forcing, and I’ve proven this beyond any doubt.”
Micro:
I don’t know if you are working at being obtuse or just can’t help it. But to me, even not considering the science it’s just plain common sense.
“fact you can see how min temp follows dew point.”
FFS: Of course it does. It’s basic meteorology!!
CO2 is a GHG. Of that here has been no doubt since Tyndall and Arrhenius.
That you say atmos H2O is replenished, is beyond specious, it’s entirely missing the point.
It IS being replenished BUT it can NEVER get a higher concentration than the atmospheric will ALLOW.
CO2 can keep accumulating. And in doing so it causes warming and hence MORE evaporation, hence more warming etc.
Cool the atmosphere and it will slowly go to a sink BUT it does not rain/snow out within around 10 days.
That is why it is vital in an inhabited planets climate.
Without it rain would turn to snow. It would accumulate over NH land masses and by doing so increase albedo > further cooling > less evaporation > cooling > less Atmos WV > cooling > greater albedo ….. ( IOW: H2O becoming increasingly harder to replenish) and so on until ice covers the planet. Which can then never recover unless there is volcanic outgassing of non-condensing GHG’s.
Sigh:
I am a (retired) Meteorologist my friend. Again. Don’t teach me to suck eggs.
The point is that the atmosphere has depth. There is nearly always a dry region where CO2 will have a sig effect. Many times I observed Ci cloud at 6 miles up back-radiate and warm a road surface. That happens on a surface fog top as well EVEN THOUGH, as you say, water regulates the surface temp.
So LWIR still proceeds to space my friend.
And is back radiated by both H2O AND CO2.
“I’ve proven this beyond any doubt.”
Nope only to yourself and to people who are desperate to believe any ABCD “science” – of which there are many on contrarian blogs.
Certainly not to me or any meteorologist/climatologist.
A little, but let’s go on
You haven’t proven part A being true make part B true, and surface data doesn’t agree with it either.
So I know you don’t see the logical inconsistency. Min temps follow dew point as you say is not new, so minimum temps do not follow increasing co2. And it doesn’t. What the evidence of water vapor show, it is just follows warm ocean waters, and if you moved a bunch of warm water north of the equator displacing cold water, it would cause a global increase in temps, just from the land water/hemispheric asymmetry.
And yes dry places experience the greatest impacts of co2, and yet they cool the fastest, and longest once the sun sets as any place on the planet, and in a desert that is 100F during the day, you can freeze to death at night.
What I discovered is why the cooling rate at night follows an exponential decay.
“It just diminishes the site if there are few dissenting voices..
It does indeed Tony, and I have said so on there several times, with even that not long lamented Stealey agreeing with me.
However when different rules apply to me as to the deluded there then, sorry. I’m not playing.
Just note the nastiness that andyg55 and MarkW refer to Nick, Griff and DWR54, Oh and Tony Mcloed.
They can of course.
As for any forum that allows that lying worm the honourable Moncton ( I note that that forum seems to be his last resort – as his evasion and discourtiousness have just doubled down on his lies and cherry -picked distortions too much – even for the cheering fan boys).
I note also that Spencer has “come out of the closet” and called AGW a scam. That immediately eliminates the person saying that as unhinged. The denizens there are even worse than at Watts’ to boot.
“A:CO2 can keep accumulating. And in doing so it causes warming
A little, but let’s go on
B:and hence MORE evaporation, hence more warming etc.ou haven’t proven part A being true make part B true, and surface data doesn’t agree with it either.”
Pt A is empirical science micro and denial of it is not big nor clever. That fact is not up for argument my friend.
And you, it seems, also failed to notice the surface data sets warming whilst TSI has been falling this last 50 years ( you are on WUWT so ask Leif ).
OHC has been rising, and accelerating (save for volcanic eruptions) for ~100 years.
Even the the Trop temp sat data says so, especially if you put UAH v6 TLT in the bin along with RSS V3.3 TLT. As being too cold vs sondes.
So we have denial that it even warming as well?
“So I know you don’t see the logical inconsistency. Min temps follow dew point as you say is not new, so minimum temps do not follow increasing co2. And it doesn’t. ”
Again micro: Things can and do happen in tandem you know.
Of course min temps can/do follow rising CO2. It’s just that you cannot see it over the short term as you can with WV!
2ppm increase CO2 annually is hardly the same as a local surface increase of RH from say, 30% to 90% now is it? And the effect of that slaps you in the face.
Not so that 2ppm CO2 extra in a year. Hence a long term trend with attribution for the noise in the system is needed to see it.
That humans are focused on the here and now, or at most an adult life span, does not make the effect meaningless.
Your common or garden moist air/cooling rate is blindingly obvious. Doesn’t mean that the CO2 GHE is not happening.
“What the evidence of water vapor show, it is just follows warm ocean waters, and if you moved a bunch of warm water north of the equator displacing cold water, it would cause a global increase in temps, just from the land water/hemispheric asymmetry.”
No.
That’s called movement of internal energy and if you shift warmth to the north then ergo the south will cool.
However it would still be the case that the CO2 GHE would still be active in tandem.
“And yes dry places experience the greatest impacts of co2, and yet they cool the fastest, and longest once the sun sets as any place on the planet, and in a desert that is 100F during the day, you can freeze to death at night.”
I’ve (tried) to explain this to you around 3 times now.
You do NOT know how much deserts would cool at night WITHOUT that 400ppm CO2 now do you.? It would be greater.
BUT: as you say, and I have agreed – WV HAS the most significant ( By a long, long way) effect on attenuation of local surface cooling. Given, especially, desert conditions.
Once more….
You cannot see the wood for the trees my friend.
You don’t get to dismiss what the non-condensing GHG’s do as regards a GHE just because that of WV is so obvious and marked to the human eye.
An analogy:
It’s like having your classic car engine splutter due to the points having a spur on them ( very noticeable ) whilst at the same time the air filter is restricting breathing a tad. So you fix fix the points problem with a bit of sand-paper and you immediately improve your mpg by 10. However when you finally look at the blocked filter and clean it you retrieve another 2 mpg. But with atmos CO2 you don’t get to fix it.
The marked effect is (in the case of airmass humidity) local/ temporary BUT the air filter restriction continues unabated and slowly becomes more restrictive.
If that hasn’t made the penny drop micro then as I say to all the Sky-dragon slayers I “talk” to…… The conversation is ended.
Sure it is, it’s science. And in fact in the atm physics we live in, co2 causes almost no warming to minimum temp, and you yourself said it follows dew points.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/1997-daily-cooling-sample-zoom-with-inset1.png
Let me try to explain again, there’s 2 cooling rates, a high speed rate that likely varies a little due to absolute water vapor when rel humidity is below ~70% (again likely varies a bit), and a low speed cooling rate once rel humidity exceeds ~70% rel humidity. And energy from co2 during the day, since most inland (and therefore land based data) areas do not have an excess of available water vapor, only some of the water that condensates last night, re-evaporates the next day, as some of it end up in the water table. So you’re argument that this warming causes more water vapor over land is basically nonsense. It’s not happening.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/1980-series1.png
80 million land based weather stations, note rel humidity actually is dropping, while the step in global temps at the end of the 97 El Nino shows it was from an increase in dew points.
No, it means that it’s not affecting cooling rates, if you can measure those rates (which I have on a number of scales), if it’s not affecting cooling rate, it’s not affecting the temperature, at least not enough to be the cause of any of the modern warming. Do you agree that co2 is not responsible for for modern warming?
No, the land areas are not equal between hemisphere’s, an equal warm pool in the NH, vs SH would not equally warm the planet, as there’s more land in the NH and all of that warm water vapor gets blown over land, which warms more during the day. Equal warm water in the SH would not as likely blow over land, and 2 meter air temps by area over water are vastly different between hemispheres, the same warm water would not cause equal warming. and when you look at warming there’s hardly any in the SH
Here’s the SH’s slope of temp change as the insolation changes due to tilt
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/sh.png
and the NH’s https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/nh.png
And SH Anomaly https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/sh.png
and NH https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/nh.png
These are the day to day changes in min temp, and the day to day change of max temp in reference to min temp. So again we see min temps move up and down, and max temp follows min temp.
To summarize, min temps follow dew points, max temps follow min temps, none of which follow CO2.
Interesting discussion. Tony Banton, you write:
“A:CO2 can keep accumulating. And in doing so it causes warming …”
“Pt A is empirical science …”
Until you have a CO2-climate metric that is actually observable (ECS is not), you can’t possibly know whether the warming effect of CO2 is now saturated or not. Without an observable metric, you cannot invoke empirical science to shut down this argument from micro6500.
Worse not only is it not saturated, it actively change during the night to regulate morning temps.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/1997-daily-cooling-sample-zoom-with-inset1.png
Tony Banton, I am working on something else, I intend to address your salient points. I’ve not insulted you, and you’ve not proven you point, and I can rebut them once I have a bit more time. You can dismiss me, but that just proves your arguments are cut out of old science books that do not apply or lack proof (as in Co2 causing measurable increases in WV).
It’s regulated by water. It changes as required. Nothing is getting restricted.
Doesn’t seem much like I’m the one doing the denying, when its you denying the measurements of the radiation you claimed I denied.
But go ahead and run away.
micro6500 — the dewpoint argument is interesting, I clicked your name.
It seems like there ought to be ways to design experiments to test this empirically with some reliability and relatively easy replication. Perhaps the new management at the variously lettered agencies would take an interest.
Yes, in fact the scientist the associated paper was from was planning to do that. But he missed the connect because it’s nonlinear. But any real time weather station should recorded the changing rate of temp, I had been looking at it for years, and knew it wasn’t just a decay rate, cause the optical window was still frigid.
Temp station and ir thermometer. But a real radiation detector, though a spectrum analyzer would be ideal.
If you haven’t, you should get a copy of my latest data set, lots of stuff in there to mine, I’ve only scrapped the surface.
@micro6500
I scanned your night time cooling hypothesis and was wondering if you had factored in that 70% of the earth’s surface ocean and it doesn’t cool down at night over the ocean but by a couple degrees C at most (not counting high latitudes with very long nights).
Common mistake people make is thinking about what happens over dirt when in the first approximation it’s only the ocean that matters.
Yes I did.
Here’s what I think.
First, we live on land, and the land is drug around by the oceans.
Second, having lived by the ocean, the same processes happen, in the morning everything was always wet, even boats. So the same process is happening it’s just the sensible heat from the ocean keeps surface temps fairly stable, but the same process has to be going on, just higher up so we don’t notice it. It similar to concrete and asphalt, they stay warm all night, and don’t get wet unless it’s a really heavy dew. One thing I noticed was my grass cooled off quickly, but the ground hadn’t. I think the grass just acts as a air gap insulator.
So, I don’t think it matters.
Also, over land the night is warming and not just slowly. Ask Mosher.
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Regional/TMIN/Figures/global-land-TMIN-Trend.pdf
Tony Banton: If you cannot see the logic of a quick descent into an ice-ball planet then you really should just shut up my friend.
Given the rest of the state of the Earth now, are you saying that without CO2 the summer time daytime insolation of the Equatorial ocean could not melt any of the ice you suppose would be there? That’s about 1440 W/m^2. That the water vapor would not then absorb any of the upwelling LWIR? That the O2 and N2 would not be warmed by advection/convection and evaporated H2O?
Given the ice-melting effects of insolation elsewhere on Earth, say springtime on Lake Erie, it seems to me that the idea of a perpetually frozen Equatorial ocean is “not physical”, however logical it may seem non-quantitatively. Even in the Arctic increased insolation produces increased melting, evaporation, and sublimation or the ice.
“Given the rest of the state of the Earth now, are you saying that without CO2 the summer time daytime insolation of the Equatorial ocean could not melt any of the ice you suppose would be there? That’s about 1440 W/m^2. That the water vapor would not then absorb any of the upwelling LWIR? That the O2 and N2 would not be warmed by advection/convection and evaporated H2O?”
Mathew:
It seems that equatorial oceans may not (hypothetically) become ice-bound if all the Earth’s CO2 were removed…..
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/sohl_01/
“Temp station and ir thermometer. But a real radiation detector, though a spectrum analyzer would be ideal.”
micro:
You mean like this …..
http://cyber.sci-hub.bz/MTAuMTAzOC9uYXR1cmUxNDI0MA==/feldman2015.pdf
Trying to save you from flogging the sky-dragon even after slaying it ( if there were one)
The surface data from land stations specific humidity will tell you nothing.
The thermometers are at 4-5 ft agl.
The radiating atmosphere is ~ 50 km thick.
Look up Beer-Lambert Law.
Additionally (as Jim has said) 70% of the Earth does not chill the atmosphere ( unless affected over it).
Again:
You are seeing the *noise* in the system.
The GHE is NOT noise.
Just Like the base *central heating* effect that the oceans have on climatic temp (base level for GSMT’s)
So the non-condensing GHG’s are the base from which H2O operates, and the overland diurnal variations of humidity are just a small part of the instantaneous *noise* within that Global radiative flux.
Tony, this is why you don’t know what you’re talking about. What time was this taken? And then all the other plots are long term averages. You don’t even see what I’m showing you.
You can not be more wrong. It is not noise, it’s 30W/m^2 that is not noise!
It’s dynamic, you can not take static pictures and learn anything, and long term averages hide what you’re looking for. You clots have never figured out how to solve a circuit you’re never seen before, because what you are doing is the last thing you do.
Tony Banton: It seems that equatorial oceans may not (hypothetically) become ice-bound if all the Earth’s CO2 were removed…..
In that case, water vapor will always be one of the thermoregulatory controls (at least until insolation changes), and CO2 can not be considered THE “control knob”.
Mathew, To9ny Banton and others:
None of this discussion is on the topic of this thread. It does not deal with the threat of climate change – i.e. the economic impacts. Hundreds of other threads deal with down-in-the-weeds issues regarding climate science and human caused climate change. Why not, for once, focus on what is actually relevant for supporting and justifying ‘climate policies’? Or NOT justifying ‘climate policies’ as the case may be?
Fair enough.
There is no justification. None.
Oh wait, that’s why I made my posts…
Micro6500,
We need to focus the discussion on the justification for the belief that GHG emissions and global warming is a threat – i.e. the economic impacts. Not the down in the weeds climate science.
The problem is that Tony Banton, Jim D and other CAGW Alarmists use innuendo to imply that GHG emissions and warming are a threat. However, they do not provide evidence or rational arguments to support their beliefs. They avoid this issue like the plague. It is the Achilles Heel of the CAGW activists belief that global warming will do more harm than good.
This is where we should focus the debate. Keep asking questions. keep bringing it back to the topic and to what is relevant for rational policy analysis.
Tony Banton: Without it rain would turn to snow. It would accumulate over NH land masses and by doing so increase albedo > further cooling > less evaporation > cooling > less Atmos WV > cooling > greater albedo ….. ( IOW: H2O becoming increasingly harder to replenish) and so on until ice covers the planet. Which can then never recover unless there is volcanic outgassing of non-condensing GHG’s.
You seemed to back away from your claim, here quoted, that the entire surface of the Earth would be covered in ice. Was that indeed so?
Peter Lang: Mathew, To9ny Banton and others:
You can skip this tangent.
“In that case, water vapor will always be one of the thermoregulatory controls (at least until insolation changes), and CO2 can not be considered THE “control knob”.
Mathew:
What a bizarre nether world statement !
That a vastly smaller WV concentration is still present after a hypothetical complete removal of no-condensing GHG’s from the atmosphere, can be used as the means to say…
“CO2 can not be considered THE “control knob”.
Boggles my mind.
CO2 CANNOT alter the proximity of the Earth to the Sun.
Because that is why some small amount of GHE effect will remain via WV IN that case.
So you are saying in effect that because WV will still be present on Earth if we were closer than the “Goldilocks” zone (that needs non-condensing GHG’s) it is not the control knob of the our plant in it’s current orbital path?
It is the “control knob” as the Lacis paper shows, BECAUSE it “controls” the Earth’s total GHE, via it not condensing as does WV and thus controlling the base GSMT such that more/less WV can evaporate/condense.
The ultimate “control knob” is of course our closeness to our Star.
That cannot be buggered up by mankind (yet).
The concentration of fossil pollution can.
TB – CO2 is NOT the control knob. It is the PILOT LIGHT. It keeps water vapor in play. Water vapor is the real fuel, though.
Tony Banton: What a bizarre nether world statement !
That a vastly smaller WV concentration is still present after a hypothetical complete removal of no-condensing GHG’s from the atmosphere, can be used as the means to say…
“CO2 can not be considered THE “control knob”.
Boggles my mind.
I have thought all through this that your mind was boggled. You brought in the counterfactual world without CO2, and I pointed out that the Equatorial oceans would not freeze in that hypothetical world given current insolation, and that there would always be H2O warming the atmosphere (O2 and N2), by evaporation/condensation/refreezing and by absorption of upwelling long-wave radiation. Given all that, the actual effects of adding CO2 are difficult to calculate, but it makes no sense to call CO2 THE “control knob”.
ONLY IF (counterfactually) the insolation were actually low enough that ALL the water would freeze without CO2 present could CO2 be THE “control knob”.
Given insolation,, N2, O2, and H2O as they are, CO2 in the atmosphere raises the temperature somewhat.
Your phrase “vastly smaller WV concentration” is unjustified. Has anyone shown that, absent CO2, the global WV concentration (ignoring for now the clouds and rainfall in the hydrologic cycle) would be even as much as 25% less than it is now? Can you even show that there would be even wintertime ice cover on the oceans anywhere between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn?
jim2: It is the PILOT LIGHT.
I like that.
My claim is more: it might be the pilot light if the insolation were so low that all the water would freeze in the absence of CO2.
TB,
CO2 in not the “control knob”. Plate tectonics is the control knob. The planet cannot warm much until the plates realign. That will take 10’s of millions of years.
Don’t wait up!
Don’t lose any sleep.
Don’t fear catastrophe; it wont happen.
Plate Tectonics and Climate — Episodes of Extensive Glaciation and Extreme Global Warmth https://www.ucar.edu/communications/gcip/m10histclimvar/m10pdfc1.pdf
Plate Tectonics and Climate Change, see especially section: Ocean Gatways, pages 6 to 8 here: https://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/papers2/deconto_tectonics&climate.pdf
Some Thoughts on Global Climate Change: The Transition from Icehouse to Hothouse Conditions https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275277369_Some_Thoughts_on_Global_Climate_Change_The_Transition_for_Icehouse_to_Hothouse_Conditions
The water vapor drops to 10% of its current value.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/lacis10-no-ghgs-hd.jpg
CO2 is the control knob because if you remove water vapor, the oceans will restore it. If you add water vapor, it condenses out, so the water vapor amount is stable unless you change the temperature in another way, which is where the CO2 comes in.
“TB,
“CO2 in not the “control knob”. Plate tectonics is the control knob. The planet cannot warm much until the plates realign. That will take 10’s of millions of years.”
Peter:
Rock weathering reduces atmos CO2 over many millions of years but mankind has upped it by 40% in ~150!
That can be sunk into the biosphere in 100’s to a thousand years.
NOT 10’s of millions
You may as well say that Photosynthesis is the control knob!
Or digging back further – that the Earth’s closeness to the Sun is.
“Don’t wait up!
Don’t lose any sleep.
Don’t fear catastrophe; it wont happen.”
Don’t worry, I come on here to marvel at the contortions naysayers perform in order to conform to their ideology.
And try in a small way to deny that.
A bonus is if neutrals see and have a light shone for them.
PS: We’re not all bleeding-heart “Librals” my friend.
TB,
Evidence for each of these unsupported assertions?
Evidence that your assertion make the slightest difference to whether or not the planet can get out of the coldhouse phase while the plates are located as they are?
Evidence that the location of the tectonic plates is not the main control knob controlling whether the planet is in a coldhouse phase or hothouse phase, or somewhere between them?
Evidence that the planet can get out of the coldhouse phase while the plates remain in their current configuration?
Evidence that you have the slightest clue about what is relevant? You keep referring to CO2. You don’t seem to understand anything. It appears you haven’t read the links I gave you, or if you did, you clearly didn’t understand.
Peter,
I appreciate you indicating that your views on the threat of climate change are probably strongly influenced by a dismissal of the scientific evidence. This probably explains why you are incapable of having a discussion that does not degenerate into name calling and in which you don’t end up calling others clueless. It’s not really your fault; it’s clearly difficult to defend a position for which there is so little available evidence.
ATTP,
You are the one dismissing the scientific evidence. Physics is not the only science. And you have already shown you don’t understand the difference between temperature change and economic impacts. You revealed you haven a clue and ran away with a kicked butt and tail between your legs.
Peter,
So, even when someone points out that you seem incapable of having a discussion in which you call the other party clueless, you still can’t stop yourself from doing it. Can’t you even try to not behave like a typical internet troll – you seem to take yourself very seriously, so why not try to behave like someone worth taking seriously?
Also, if you’ve dismissed the scientific evidence indicating that CO2 will have an impact on our climate, then there isn’t much point in discussing the threat of climate change with you. You do need to at least get the basic physics correct if you’re then going to try to determine whether or not it poses a threat.
But you don’t have the basic physics right. I won’t post it again here, because I’ve probably posted it more than once in this thread, and you can follow my name if not. But in that one graph there almost 20F of warming, or better there an additional 20F of cooling that didn’t happen in one night, and it. as controlled by water vapor. Co2 isn’t anywhere near that large.
And the old trope that water will condense out, it just arm waving, at this current solar out put, sure it condenses, while at the same time it’s all replaced, so over all it isn’t condensing out at all.
You’d think a physicist might be smart enough to see the two forces just might not add linearly. And a really smart physicist would recognize a “transistor” in operation when he sees one. Or even that cool isn’t linear.
But I bet you never bothered to even look at cooling rates. The lack of trouble shooting/diagnostics skills show is pitiful.
micro,
If Tony Banton can’t get through to you, I doubt I’ll have any luck. However, that’s rather irrelevant. All I’m pointing out is that it’s a waste of time to discuss the threat of climate change with those who dispute the role of CO2 in producing warming – you’ve already decided that there is no threat. Just own it!
The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) defined abrupt climate change as a new climate paradigm as long ago as 2002. A paradigm in the scientific sense is a theory that explains observations. A new science paradigm is one that better explains data – in this case climate data – than the old theory. The new theory says that climate change occurs as discrete jumps in the system. Climate is more like a kaleidoscope – shake it up and a new pattern emerges – than a control knob with a linear gain.
Not really clear these guys are capable of integrating broader science into their thinking. Instead they waffle on about a hypothetical. There really is no control knob.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2014/06/23/the-unstable-math-of-michael-ghils-climate-sensitivity/
And the next climate shift is due in a window of 2018-2028. They can’t quite get it.
“But in that one graph there almost 20F of warming, or better there an additional 20F of cooling that didn’t happen in one night, and it. as controlled by water vapor. Co2 isn’t anywhere near that large.
And the old trope that water will condense out, it just arm waving, at this current solar out put, sure it condenses, while at the same time it’s all replaced, so over all it isn’t condensing out at all.”
micro:
ATTP one last try.
The answer to your confusion lies in what you have written.
Yes, your “20F of warming” or cooling is/was controlled by H2O, but it is acting at a base set by the non-condensing GHG’s
But you cannot “know” that their contribution isn’t “anywhere near that large” ….. unless you do as happens with H2O, and that is to vary them from being large to being something very small.
Has your experiment varied CO2 similarly? (rhetorical).
If you were able to, then what?
Why cant you understand the principle of a *base* level that CO2 sets and to which H2O then responds? – At an average GSMT, and, as you have discovered in your paradigm shattering *experiment* (sarc) – locally, with LARGE temp variations, which is merely noise about the GSMT.
Old trope, eh?
Again the fallacy is in your own words.
What has “replace” to do with an increase in overall WV content ??
To “replace” simply keeps H2O AT THE SAME concentration.
Ensuring that (averaged globally) it is always at the same concentration, dependant upon atmospheric temperature/pressure.
CO2 is free to increase and so it’s increasing GHE contribution then makes it warmer …. then what? (answers on a postcard).
A Gold Star …. if you said, then there can be more WV evaporated before condensing out (remember) – because it’s warmer – (why?) – because of CO2.
The Control Knob.
Why I have heard for years it was 3.7W/m^2.
I understand the principle very well, it’s a subject I learned when I learned electronics 40 years ago. But in this case it’s more like the threshold voltage on the gate of a fet, but more importantly it seem it’s it might be wavelength specific. You know tuned circuits stuff. All basic reactive circuits.
Well, I’ve got the data, at least land data. And the only thing there is it looks like the end of the 98 El Nino ended with a quick increase of dew point, when the temp step happened 1999/2000. But that was mostly a regional effect in the 20 to 30 N Lat, a big increase in temp in response to solar. And you know what happened at the same time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_multidecadal_oscillation#/media/File:Amo_timeseries_1856-present.svg
Look at that, and that was what cause the step, a big bump in dew points in the NH due to the AMO. It’s all in my blog.
Only in the afternoon, and on land, there isn’t a lot of free water, it gets sucked up, even some of the dew in the morning before it’s evaporated away again
To add water, it has to persist from one day to the next, more has to be left in the morning from the prior day’s warming. Well we already know when it cools at night moisture condenses out, and the only sign it’s going up is in the spring because tomorrow has a longer day, and less time to cool at night, but in the fall the opposite happens. You can see this in this data https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/temp_relhumidity.png
Lastly, as an overall trend, rel humidity is going down.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/1980-series1.png
TB,
Also, if you’ve dismissed the scientific evidence indicating that CO2 will have an impact on our climate, then there isn’t much point in discussing the threat of climate change with you.
Misrepresentration again. Blatant lying!
And, the fact you cannot stay on topic and address the issue of the thread displays your intellectual dishonesty https://judithcurry.com/2013/04/20/10-signs-of-intellectual-honesty/ (Sign 4).
Your other personal comments demonstrate projection and hypocrisy.
You haven’t shown that you are capable of a rational discussion on topic
http://twentytwowords.com/a-flowchart-to-help-you-determine-if-youre-having-a-rational-discussion/ .
Jim D: CO2 is the control knob because if you remove water vapor, the oceans will restore it
So sea ice cover increases by 40%, leaving the oceans nearly as ice-free as they are now, and despite no change in insolation the vast warm oceans, that are the source of so much atmospheric moisture are so shut down that atmospheric water vapor (so rare above the polar ice) declines 90% even above the Equator. Is that the story? And because global mean temp falls about 20C on a base of about 288C, from eliminating all CO2, CO2 is called THE “control knob”? Not because it is actually THE “control knob” but because humans can not in principle change water vapor or insolation? This based on the kind of models that overpredict recent and current warming because (maybe) they entail too great a sensitivity to CO2?
MM, I am not sure what you mean about sea-ice cover. If it is 50%, sea ice reaches into the tropics. As for the control knob, CO2 is the one accessible to mankind, since we can’t control natural variations. Aerosols are arguably another control knob, but with much shorter duration. We could also paint large areas white and have an albedo control knob. No one says CO2 is the only control knob, but it is the one we are dialing up now.
Jim D: I am not sure what you mean about sea-ice cover. If it is 50%,
According to the graph, sea-ice cover increases 50%.
MM, the text says “and the global sea ice fraction goes from 4.6% to 46.7%,” Also, only a third of the ocean remains ice free after 50 years.
Clive:
“This is what I would call a threat”
Apart from that being weather and very much an outlier in climatic possibility for these shores, 2017 is hardly 1740 in the population being unable to “weather” it.
Weather cannot be mitigated against, but the long-term trend in human induced climate change can.
“In your dreams, TB.”
It’s not even difficult.
By “In your dreams, TB” I meant we can’t by any practical measure stop CO2 increasing. Getting that comment purged seems a little bit on the snowflake-sensitive side.
“By “In your dreams, TB” I meant we can’t by any practical measure stop CO2 increasing. Getting that comment purged seems a little bit on the snowflake-sensitive side.”
We can by “practical measures procede with making investment into energy production that will slowly reduce and eventuallystop CO2 accumulation.
Which is what most sensible people, including “warmists” such as me advocate.
I would have thought that it was blindingly obvious that the world cannot “stop CO2 increasing” in one fell swoop!
Oh, and not “snowflake” at all, just responding to an ignorant hand-wave, that didn’t even get the common-sense interpretation of my words, as explained above.
And just the usual from the *sceptic” gang, that I have spent many years trying to rebut by the mere dint of referring them to the real science and not the pseudo ABCD kind that is the fare of these blogs (that if they even recognise any science at all).
It gets wearying my friend – and your comment on my comment doubly so.
Tony Banton,
“I have spent many years trying to rebut by the mere dint of referring them to the real science ”
And exactly where does the real science prove CO2 is the control mechanism? Must have sleeping that day in my graduate Atmospheric Physics class. As I understand what the science says, a doubling of CO2 concentration will result in ~ 1 degree C increase in atmospheric average temp, “ALL OTHER FACTORS REMAINING CONSTANT.”
Can you show us the science which has shown all other factors are remaining constant?
Judith,
Have I seen anything to suggest the climate is becoming different from normal? The answer is NO!
What I have recognized is the broadening of knowledge in the natural factors affecting climate, a very positive development.
Psychopathy has been a recent interest of mine for various reasons mainly to gain insights. In relation to climate alarmists, factors, from 30+, which fit their profile would include: the need to have power,( to lead), the need for others to feel the pain (a lack of human empathy) and the ability to avoid responsibility for their actions ( a lack of objective, self-critical thinking).
When you consider their antics across the board, they might qualify. A brain scan which shows reduced activity in the frontal and temporal lobes indicates a tendency to psychopathy. I would love to see some of these individuals tested. in general, psychpaths can, and do, cause big failures with severe consequences for others. Treatment for the condition would the best course of action.
Judith Curry,
Why do you believe there is a possibility of extreme impacts?
What are the extreme impacts you believe could occur?
What is the estimated damage to the global economy as a percentage of GDP?
Peter, anything is possible, including that the Earth will be completely destroyed by a supernova next Tuesday. (The percentage of GDP lost is 100%.) The point is that mere possibility is no basis for action.
When the USDA quotes Park, et al, that–
“It has also been estimated that a 1-meter increase in sea level would lead to the potential inundation of 65 percent of the coastal marshlands and swamps in the contiguous United States,”
I think it’s pretty sure they want to be understood as believing this is a very real possibility in our generation or it most the next due to humanity’s burning of fossil fuel.
In which case they are both wrong and stupid, even though the fact as stated may be true. Of course new coastal marshes and wetlands, and bays, would form, higher up. Do they realize how much sea level has risen already? One meter is round off error.
Wagathon,
Help me please, can replacement wetlands develop naturally at thempace required to keep ahead of that mm a year sea level change? Do we face the threat of wetland destruction or merely a natural retention of status quo through small gradual:positional changes? I do not know.
Geoff
We more likely to drown in a rising sea of government-sponsored global warming alarmist bureaucracy…
Geoff
The natural process of sedimentation and siltation within delta’s and associated wetlands if left alone certainly work toward equilibrium to offset SLR. But the rates of both are also impacting the ability to renourish those areas. The problem has been man’s actions within the watershed upstream and in the delta itself.
I’m sure at some point any acceleration in SLR would overwhelm those normal processes to replenish wetlands, etc., but for the time being the loss of those resources are a result of man made changes in the watershed.
Just like the many coastal cities threatened by “SLR” are really sinking much faster than SLR. The Houston area , by some estimates have had subsidence sinking the land by 10 feet since 1900, due to both oil and gas extraction but more recently groundwater extraction to accommodate the population growth in the area.
Do we face the threat of wetland destruction? – Yes.
Of course that threat is overwhelmingly dominated by human development driven land use change.
The Electrify Africa Act, S. 2152, would require the President to establish a strategy to encourage sub-saharan African countries to provide access to sufficient reliable energy for their citizens. The bill specifies a goal of promoting first-time access to power for 50 million people in urban and rural areas by 2020.
The bill passed both chambers with bipartisan support and was signed by the president Feb 2016. It requires that the president/Secretary of State submit reports to the congress, but I cannot find such a report; probably something that the new US president can do quite easily.
Richard
So, where does the climate change threat and risk assessment come from? This is a rhetorical question of course. There are three sources of information that have driven and continue to drive climate change threat and risk assessments. First of all, the information used for most climate change predictions and the resulting threat and risk assessments stem from the data outputs of global climate models. The second and third sources of information relate to historical and modern data sets that reflect historical climate change through direct and proxy indicators and actual global weather and climate measurements. All of these sources of information have varying degrees of problems that significantly increase the uncertainty associated with the threat and risk assessments that are derived from them.
My focus in this reply is the loss of knowledge uncertainty during communication of data analysis results to policymakers. In this particular case, the uncertainty related to numerical models and the results they generate is lost due to the high degree of trust that is placed in them by policymakers. This trust in the models is developed for three completely different reasons. The first reason is that the degree of uncertainty associated with the models themselves is lost in the translation from model creator to model user to the policymaker because of the need to simplify the information presentation. In the information reduction process, the complex nature of the uncertainty that is introduced by the modeling process and their resulting data outputs is simplified and lost. The second reason is that a specific interest develops between the climate modelers, climate model users, and policymakers to perpetuate climate science through funding. This is a positive feedback process that reinforces uncertainty loss. The third reason is also related to interests, but is much more insidious, and includes political pressures to achieve specific climate change results to further global political changes in favor of one or another political movement. This third step applies substantial pressure to climate scientists to produce results that conform to the climate change dogma that is generated by the political influences. This same political pressure also attempts to force scientific consensus through ridicule and rejection. Independent and critical thought on this subject matter is strongly discouraged at all levels. This is the politicization of climate science and is having very detrimental effects at a wide variety of levels in the climate science community and potentially the global community.
In the context of understanding the uncertainty of numerical models, let me make the following statement without reservation. All numerical models are wrong! There is no room for debate in this matter. The question is how wrong are they for any given application. I am an electrical engineer and a geophysicist. I have used numerical models throughout my career in both fields. The models are always wrong with respect to reality, even with real data that supports any given model or set of models. We always have to make simplifications to make the model(s) computationally tractable.
Then there is also the problem of uncertainty in climate science itself. This is the infernal problem (as Donald Rumsfeld famously stated) of “the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.” This is not unusual for science; it’s just the way life is in science. There are always known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. There is still a significant amount of climate science that falls into the known unknowns, and unknown unknowns categories. The climate models that are used today are better than those used 20 years ago, but they still have major uncertainties in their ability to model the physics, account for all of the variabilities, and predict future climate with any substantial degree of certainty.
This is not a statement of climate change denial, it is a statement of uncertainty in the science and impact of the related political dogma that surrounds it at a variety of levels.
Well said. I remarked in another post that the biggest dangers and highest costs in the CAGW arise from bad government policy, not climate.
It would seem that Trump will make it easier to discuss the uncertainty, so more will. I mean Galileo wasnt the only scientist that knew/believed the earth revolved around the sun, but he was the only one speaking out..
I don’t think Trump knows what uncertainty means. He definitely seems to be oblivious to words such as “consequences”, “ramifications”, and “reality”. This means he’s absolutely sure this is all a Chinese conspiracy and he’s going to nuke them as soon as Steve Bannon has prepared the Executive Order to start the war.
China will have to wait in line; Iran will be first!
The word “uncertainty” is not part of Trump’s 14-word vocabulary.
Well I’m pretty sure he is certain about one thing.
How easy it is to get progressives, the MSM and China peeing themselves and acting like spoiled 3 year olds.
You guys see the research on the impact of fake news on the election? Conclusions – no impact at all. It appears most American voters are not as stupid as the media assumes.
“This means he’s absolutely sure this is all a Chinese conspiracy and he’s going to nuke them ”
Yeah, right. It would not surprise me if Trump believes the Chinese are smart enough to give lip service to policies that disadvantage their competitors. Anyone paying attention (well except for Obama) can see that is true. I also think he believes China needs the US far more than the US needs China. The Chinese certainly understand that. There is nothing wrong with having people fear you from time to time. Particularly when that fear results primarily from uncertainty. Keep them off balance, keep them guessing and keep them afraid of making the wrong move. You’ll be inside their decision loop in no time and they are then easy targets.
I would like to tell you of my latest book and documentary.
‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science’.
My latest documentary and video of my presentation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPzpPXuASY8
My website is
Thank you.
Tim
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPzpPXuASY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO08Hhjes_0
http://www.drtimball.com
Ah yes, the self proclaimed “Climatologist”, but who isn’t.
Someone with an B.A, M.A, PhD but what in is mysteriously missing from his CV. And who earned his living as a geographer.
Trying to hide something perhaps?
Stands to reason he knows more about climate science than those trained and active in the field.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ball
“Ball received a bachelor’s degree with honors from the University of Manitoba in 1970, followed by an M.A. from the University of Manitoba in 1971 and a PhD from Queen Mary University of London in England in 1983.[4] Ball became an instructor at the University of Winnipeg in 1971, and a lecturer the following year. He then served in the latter capacity for 10 years. In 1982 he became an assistant professor there, and was promoted to associate professor in 1984 and full professor in 1988.[4]”
Allan
I would add another source of knowledge uncertainty; dishonestly at NOAA and GISS, and at their compliant press. They have been brought to task with a pointed and fact-filled article in The Federalist:
http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/27/new-york-times-our-readers-are-too-dumb-to-understand-numbers/
Cheers,
Richard
The threats and risks from extreme weather and other natural variability are increasing irrespective of global warming because man does what he does. Using the same intensity and frequency and trends existing in 1850 as a baseline, the simple population and development growth have put us at greater risk.
A single dwelling in a 10 miles square part of the Kansas prairie had nearly zero chance of being struck by a tornado in 1850. Put 50,000 dwellings in that same space, even with 1850 incidents of tornadoes, the number of people threatened goes up exponentially.
Dhaka’s population went from 300,000 in the early 1900s to a projected 20 million in a few years. Of course the threats expanded, especially after altering the natural processes to mitigate flooding and SLR.
The Swantou area lost 100,000 souls, more than the population of the city proper, in 1922, from a typhoon. Now , 6 million are at risk from the same kind of storm.
When groundwater acquifers in Syria are exploited beyond their productive capacity, of course any kind of drought puts millions at risk from drought, even when not at unprecedented levels.
All across the globe man is occupying space and engaging in activities never contemplated in 1850. Those activities, unrelated to AGW have already upped the ante.
We can’t expect nature to just roll over with paws up because we say so. There were and are numerous actions to mitigate threats and risks before even considering our carbon footprint.
Just face it JC, the sky is possibly falling (>Pr O.O (2016-2100) but we are all going to die naturally well before it does >Pr1.0. But will rainfall be adequate in the Mid West this year? Dunno ;-)
So no one will be found out in their fancy guesses, and never can be if they keep “correcting” the data and gain in their model’s parameters to make the models of future disaster fit. Most probably we will run out of fossil fuels and go nuclear as the only intense controllable anf affordably secure enrgy source left and still have time to see what zero carbon electrical enrgy for most uses actually does to “the climate”, just on likely reserves and the periodicity of climate change. We can defend against what change there is at marginal locations. BUT…
I just thought how 50,000 or so generations of people lie between the first humans and us, and how all but the last 200 years have lived short. brutal, superstitous existences, with no medical science to save us, little justice and kept ignorant by our rulers, exploited as carbohydrate power and canon fodder using religion, fear of the unknown and social pressure by those with power, to hold to these few the limited wealth their technology of wind and water mills, people and draft animals could deliver
Our privileged generation now understands so much, mostly from 200 years of science fuelled by plentiful cheap enrgy, that allows us to engineer our selves, our crops and our environment and travel anywhere on our planet and beyond, a life unimaginable even 200 years ago, which keeps getting better IF we deploy the technology we create to improve our destiny wherever possible
And what are we doing instead? We have pointless people having arguments about relatively insignificant issues of unprovable hypotheses who are holding back a woefully innumerate and ignorant society by exploiting the same ignorant fear we have overcome by 50,000 generations and maybe 400 years of scientific struggle, using fatuous arguments that are more to religion than scientific method. People with typewriters, opinions and a gullibable belief prone audience to exploit. So the masses have not progressed much.
Have we, in a few generations, already lost the will to understand and/or trust real experts to lead progress and deal proportionately with risk, as we have to raise up human civilisation by managing the processes nature imposes on us through our technology replacing god, thus allowing irrational pressure groups to hijack science by politicising it for their own power and control. Post truth pseudo science, the new religion, preventing progress as risky, denying the tools of our progress to those in the 3rd World. Can you hear RF spinning when all the bad science (BS) is asserted on populist media?
These groups simply deny objective science, assert pseudo science as fact, and claim every new development will somehow be a disaster. Never happened yet, and we get better at this stuff all the time.
Where am I going with this? I blame physicists for this endemic cluster fraud.
We are the professionals people rely on for the truth. Yet most physicists have not even taken the time to understand climat change science and validate its supposed cures for a supposed imminent disaster, ALL bogus. But no one says.
Some lazily recite pseudo science they haven’t checked, and most recite the snake oil energy prescripions as solutions to unquantifiable AGW they aren’t in science fact, with little actual change forecasted this century, even by the screamers.
Even this hard reality is never pointed out, by celebrity scientists on the unknowingly opinionated social consensus media in particular. There are too many so-called scientists who have a greater regard for their hypotheses, egos and grant money than they do for the truth and the application of skeptical scientific method. So many more cowardly physicists who deny their profession and their science every day by lending undeserved credibility to deceits and outright frauds, for a quiet life and a pay check.
This has an actual and massive cost to those who don’t understand, and believe science is telling them facts, and an even greater cost to those yet to be raised up to our level of energy use and hence developed nation quality of life..
The people should be told the truth, by those who society trained to understand it, not politicians, nor the pseudo scientist egotists – who long ago forgot how real science is proven – and what real disaster, risk and proportionate response all mean. 15,000 dead from the Japanese Tsunami, no one died or wil from radiation effects, only largely unnecessary evacuation. What gets reported.
The people are being misled instead. Shame on us.
The sky is still not falling. Tell the truth, guys.
And if Feynman were alive today, you would be blaming him for your inability to negotiate the landscape.
Well done. I like my comments in bulk.
This might help.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/drought_freq-pdo-amo.jpg
I’m pretty sure it’s -pdo and +amo. Pretty much worst case scenario.
brianrlcatt ,
Excellent comment. Very well written. Thank you.
+1,000
Meanwhile everyone else realized it was cheaper to mitigate than let climate change just happen, so that is where we are now. Mitigation is the policy. Fossil fuels are realized to be bad by the general public. Energy modernization is going on. Sad for the stick-in-the-muds who just get angrier, but there it is.
Sorry about the typos, done in one go on line.
The Wikipedia definition of risk is poor. Risk is the consequence of an event or condition multiplied by the probability it will occur.
In some definitions the consequence can be positive or negative (i.e. a benefit); therefore risk can be positive or negative.
For example, The Project Management Body of Knowledge defines risk as:
An uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on a project’s objectives.
For best results, options analysis, feasibility analysis, design and implementation of a policy to achieve objectives (such as GHG mitigation) should be undertaken using best practice project management.
I agree.
I use the definition you points to in my profession:
risk = probability * consequence
We decide the design and thereby level of investment based on that relation.
By using this definition, risk can be quantified. There will be subjective considerations involved. Both in quantifying probability and consequence. However, probability and consequence should be traceable to these judgements in a manner that makes them open to scrutiny.
Climate change risks, threats, data loss etc. are the least of our problems with the monarchy established on 1/20/2017. You only need to read the 1930’s history to see where Bannon is guiding this country and the rest of the world.
“I think that ‘threat’ is overly alarmist, since it implies imminent harm. ‘Risk’ is not overly alarmist, but it does imply that the harm is quantifiable and mitigable — which I have argued that it is not.”
The stronger forms of these words dominate precisely because, while overlapping the meaning of the more moderate forms, they open a window to greater / nearer / knowable negative consequence, hence also greater emotion reaction (which itself is not all negative – hope of salvation / renewal also features).
When wide uncertainty cannot be resolved and there is potential social impact, or merely perceived potential social impact (think fictional religious Armageddon), emotive reaction trumps veracity during iterative selection of the most successful narratives. This process can continue to the extent of creating a socially enforced consensus based upon the dominant narrative, which counter-intuitively promotes certainty in the face of the unknown (i.e. unresolvable uncertainty). This is an emergent process, most individuals contribute to it honestly albeit emotively. In this case, the certainty is of near-term (decades) climate calamity.
I think this video by Pat Frank speaks well to this topic (https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/11/22/the-needle-in-the-haystack-pat-franks-devastating-expose-of-climate-model-error/).
If you haven’t seen it yet you should take a look. It is the first time I’ve seen a proper analysis of error propagation in the models and it was reviewed by really well qualified folks.
He ends with a conclusion that GCMs reveal nothing about human CO2 effects on climate and nothing about future climate conditions. If the GCMs are that useless for prediction, they are of no use in identifying the possibility of a threat let alone the extent of the threat.
He has been saying the same thing for many years now, and the reason no one else says this after all this time is that it is flat wrong.
Yeah so has Tim Palmer, Julia Singo, James McWilliams, etc. lmfao
Not the same thing. Think.
So you are saying that Tim Palmer, Julia Singo [sic], and James McWilliams are saying the same thing Pat Franks is saying?
So let’s ask them.
There is a great deal to be admired in the extensive work on chaos that has appeared in recent years, including some startling but simple theorems, and also the best art work produced by mathematics. However, in my opinion, it is also surrounded by an unnecessary amount of hype, considerable zeal and possibly some illogical arguments and confusion. – Clive W. J. Granger
Hype and zeal… did he know you?
Unlike Palmer, Slingo, and McWilliams, Franks seems to know little about errors characteristics in climate models as his video proves. Spot the error.
I read a similar sentiment from another economist. I remember it being much more charming, elegant, amusing and erudite – I wish I could find it. He did of course go on to discuss chaos. But he ain’t Tim Palmer – head of the European Centre for Mid-Range Forecasting. Julia Slingo – head of the British Met Ofice. Or James McWilliams – Louis B. Slichter Professor of Earth Sciences/ UCLA Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. I mention a few but there is a solid consensus on models and chaos.
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of (perturbed physics) ensembles of model solutions.” IPCC 14.2.2.2
I’d recommend that you read the section on “Predictability in a Chaotic System” if I imagined you that you cope with it.
I listened to Pat Franks. I admit I had to speed it up 1.25 times. He is without any doubt correct. We have known these systems are chaotic since the 1960’s quite without any doubt at all. Although solutions don’t diverge linearly but in accordance with quite unpredictable shifts in the state space. You can get the idea if you find an animation of the Poincare 3 body problem.
This is however only an example of the intellectual dishonesty you are sadly well known for – and not any real pursuit of knowledge.
It is exactly the same thing – couldn’t be otherwise. Exactly as the IPCC said 16 years ago.
http://d29qn7q9z0j1p6.cloudfront.net/content/roypta/369/1956/4751/F2.large.jpg
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709/F1.expansion.html
You’re gonna have to learn a new trick Jim.
Did you even look at the Pat Frank video? It looks like not. He says a completely different thing which is furthermore wrong. This is a teachable moment if one of the skeptics or Judith could critique what Frank is saying, and why he is so wrong. Even his audience laughed at his great reveal, not with him, but at him. They knew it was wrong just because the graphic was so crazy.
It is a prevarication to lump Tim Palmer, Judith Slingo, and James McWilliams in with the likes of Pat Franks and Gerald Browning. Those three scientists – Palmer; Slingo; McWilliams – would not go near that foolish Franks mess with a ten-foot pole. I have no doubt McWilliams, if he has even heard of you, winces in agony every time you cite his name and work. You’re probably not worth his time.
Frank is wrong.
Robert I. Ellison | January 30, 2017 at 5:29 am |
“Error is perhaps best categorised as irreducible imprecision.”
Error tells you how big your mistake is.
Drive your car at indicated 100 kph in a 100 kph limited zone – something is wrong, all others are overtaking. Drive through a radar speed gun at indicated 100 kph, speed gun shows actual 80 kph. Your big mistake is 20 kph. Your speedo is wrong, calibrated improperly. (20 years ago here the approved calibration was with a Black and Decker 1440 rpm nominal household electric drill pre dash installation). The big mistake is accurately definable and has nought much to do with irreducible imprecision. A driver might see irreducible imprecision if the speedo needle was a bit loose on its little axle and shook around with (unpredictable?) bumps, too fast to read the excursion at a nominated time, but slow enough to see roughly the envelope of the shaking.
These are 2 different animals.
Dr Frank is talking about the 20 kph mistake. You are talking of the 2 kph wobble in the speedo.
One of my major criticisms for years now has been the grossly inadequate and often bog ignorant treatment of formal, procedural error analysis in climate work. The formal knowledge is abundant and available (I often reference the Paris based Bureau of Weights and Measures, BIPM). As Dr Frank says, he has met climate researchers who do not know this difference. So have I.
You seem to be putting an argument that climate modelling and related research has to have a special set of its own error estimation procedures and I must confess that there is some beautiful lyricism in your quotes here. So sensitive, this special pleading, so deep down the Alice in Wonderland hole that the good Charles Dodgson must be spinning too.
“It tells of a girl named Alice falling through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthrogenic creatures. The tale plays with logic, giving the story lasting popularity with adults as well as with children.[1] It is considered to be one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre.” (Wiki).
Is it not sad when an 1865 novel and a 21st C speculation both carry similar societal threat themes, with different gravity determining which is fun and which is work.
Geoff.
Well no – irreducible imprecision in perturbed physics ensembles is quite different to measurement error.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/slingo-and-palmer.jpg
It is the forecast uncertainty in the schematic by a couple of the globes leading modellers. You see I refer to actual science because I very rarely pull things out of my hat.
I admire your closely reasoned scientific analysis – although I never quite get it and suspect you of being a space alien.
oh it ain’t willard – it’s Geoff – where are yu willard…
I’m here, Chief. And here’s your missing citation:
http://research.atmos.ucla.edu/tcd/PREPRINTS/Ghil-A_Met_Soc_refs-rev'd_vf-black_only.pdf
Note that your favourite figure comes from Ghil’s older work.
I’m not sure how going from a fixed point to an attractor helps the contrarian case. More wobbling means more risks. Risk turns into money.
I have hundreds of favourite figures. You’ll have to show me yours sometime.
Strange to say – I did link to a little more detail just below. Maybe I should be more charitable to resident (space) aliens with attention deficit disorders. Let me correct my failure. The only fixed point is in your brain.
The figure I’m talking about is the one we can find both in the thread and in your relevant blog post, Chief. The fixed point is the one Ghil suggests should be modelled as an attractor in the paper you forgot to cite properly in your post.
Fixed points and attractors are not as alien as chaos freaks may insinuate.
This was linked to – https://watertechbyrie.com/2014/06/23/the-unstable-math-of-michael-ghils-climate-sensitivity/
And no it wasn’t modelled as a strange attractor – it is a simple EBM.
The fixed point is the Idée fixe of a strange and disturbing person.
‘Happy lily, never to be saddled with an idee fixe, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or love or fulfilment.’ Aaron’s Rod D. H. Lawrence.
> And no it wasn’t modelled as a strange attractor
What’s that “it,” Chief? I doubt that “it” is what I’m talking about. Here’s a hint: read the title, and try to find where it us being discussed.
Since you had many years to RTFM, there won’t be a second chance.
***
The bifurcation diagram illustrates results since the 70s, BTW. I doubt you could claim they are or have been ignored. Ghil mentions something about some ice age threat that has been read out of it.
Try the 2nd version which is the 1st version modified:
He ends with a conclusion that GCMs reveal nothing about human CO2 effects on climate and nothing about future climate conditions. If the GCMs are that useless for prediction, they are of no use in identifying the possibility of a threat let alone the extent of the threat.
He ends with a conclusion that GCMs reveal little about human CO2 effects on climate and little about future climate conditions. If the GCMs are poor tools for prediction, they are of limited use in identifying the possibility of a threat let alone the extent of the threat.
And this video speaks well of the confused errors in Pat Franks “analysis”…..
In short – if he were correct then the individual runs in the cmip suites of runs would diverge ridiculously from the outset.
They don’t.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=rmTuPumcYkI
Tont Banton.
Others wiser than me have recommended for a decade now that climate researchers should engage professional statisticians, as a result of so many howlers being passed off as serious work.The ‘refutation’ by Dr Brown of Carnegie is another howler.
There are many reasons why. To cut to one chase about one reason, the researcher does not have freedom to choose which error is used in the subsequent process of propagation. It is customary that the largest error is of most interest because correcting or choosing tiny other errors still leaves you the shag on the rock. Dr Frank chose the largest available error.
Dr Frank and I have corresponded on the point of using one year as a rest period in the propagation process, akin in many ways to the 3 step example Dr Brown gave at the start of his video. It is the case that in a model run, there is a stepped process. It is appropriate to calculate the error propagation at such a step. (I do not recall Dr Frank being wedded to annual). Br Brown might have tried to make his point by running the exercise at various time steps, though the period used in the model is best. He would soon see the same ballooning of the propagated error for non- extreme values.
Last, it is not scientific for Dr Brown to say that the appearance of Dr Frank’s graph is aphysical. That is a guess. It is so fundamentally wrong to do this, which is the grounds that Dr Frank has to claim that the models are unfit for purpose. The way to refute Dr Frank’s work is to learn the correct methodology for error analysis and apply it to the case in question. If you can show that Dr Frank’s estimate was wrong, use numbers to do so and then you can claim to have played a part in the advancement of science.
Geoff.
See this is a problem in terminology. Error is perhaps best categorised as irreducible imprecision. It is perhaps better to stick to peer reviewed science. This one is very difficult – it took me months to begin to get across it. McWilliams is a very distinguished leader in the field.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full
This is what it looks like.
http://d29qn7q9z0j1p6.cloudfront.net/content/roypta/369/1956/4751/F2.large.jpg
I stress that this is a single model with a number of divergent solutions. It is a perturbed physics ensemble and not an an opportunistic ensemble. Each solution has a slightly different starting point and marginally different boundary conditions and we can’t predict beforehand what the trajectory of the solution will be. That was Lorenz’s problem when he discovered chaos theory.
That’s a key idea that needs to be grasped. I can guarantee that no one much here has much of a clue. I suggest not even Curry – who is, however, enigmatic enough to resist categorisation. I certainly include you who plants something that you have not the slightest capacity to evaluate. It just fits the tribal narrative aye? Which is in fact all that I have seen from you. The result is duelling Youtube dingbats. I haven’t seen your video and don’t intend to. If it has the divergence slide – as with Franks – then possibly it has some validity. But if it puts confidence bounds around a single solution – it is nonsense.
“Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic.” This is from Julia Slingo – head of the British Met Office and Tim Palmer – head of the European Centre for Mid Range Forecasting. There are a very small pool of competent modellers – so let’s focus on actual science.
What is apparent is that there are thousands of combinations of initial and boundary conditions that result in thousands of rapidly divergent solution trajectories. It is sensitive dependence to initial conditions.
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.”
If you want to have a discussion with some honesty and integrity I am happy to. If not – I won’t waste my time and spiritual capital.
Geoff:
“Last, it is not scientific for Dr Brown to say that the appearance of Dr Frank’s graph is aphysical. That is a guess. It is so fundamentally wrong to do this, which is the grounds that Dr Frank has to claim that the models are unfit for purpose. The way to refute Dr Frank’s work is to learn the correct methodology for error analysis and apply it to the case in question. If you can show that Dr Frank’s estimate was wrong, use numbers to do so and then you can claim to have played a part in the advancement ”
And what gives you the expertise to say “it is not scientific for Dr Brown …..”?
Just asking.
I cannot show Dr Frank’s estimate to be correct better than he.
Can you show it to be incorrect?
With your own workings.
So, rather than ask me to do so. You prove him wrong.
It is enough for common-sense to make me appreciate that you do not itterate a starting point error at each step of the integration. That error was at the start, and is at the start only.
That GCM’s do not diverge to a ridiculous degree is proof that Pat’s analysis is incorrect.
‘That GCM’s do not diverge to a ridiculous degree is proof that Pat’s analysis is incorrect.’
Naw – he still doesn’t.
It’s hilarious to see both sides arguing through their arses and insisting it is certifiable science.
Statistical error analysis produces bounds for the answers reliability. The bounds have dimensions but say nothing about the process being evaluated. The error ellipse is the area in which you can expect the correct answer to reside. However you can’t say if any specific answer in that ellipse is better than any other. Error propagation is not determining a field of possible physical results for the given problem but the field in which you have assurance the right answer will fall. The model result will always wander around in the models precision limits it is just that you can’t say that is correct with any more certainty than something that is not even physically possible if the systematic errors are not removed from each iteration where one solution is dependent on a previous one.
Hmmmm….
You need to learn the difference between ensembles of opportunity and purturbed pgysics ensembles.
Until you do – you can’t understand or evaluate this other guy. You are just repeating mermes.
In short, Pat Frank’s assumption of a random walk is not the way either the real climate, nor models of it, work. There are long-term constraints. It’s the well known analogy of the man walking the dog that gives a more correct picture. Frank just has the dog in his model.
Pat Franks didn’t assume a random walk. He tried to explain the significance of the Lorenz attractor for the trajectories of solutions of climate models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP3qAq9RNLg
There are thousands of feasible solutions for any climate and they all wildly diverge.
It is a fundamental mathematical property of the set of non-linear equations of fluid transport.
Nothing to do with climate properties at all. You are trying to salvage a tribal meme with a very inadequate understanding.
… climate model…
RIE, Frank’s error grows in an unlimited way, like a random walk and exactly not like an attractor. That’s the point.
You are welcomed to your imaginary world. Here’s the real world:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2a.jpg
Trust in a construct.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/11/22/the-needle-in-the-haystack-pat-franks-devastating-expose-of-climate-model-error/
“In short, there’s no reason to assume that because the sun was responsible for early 20th century, it is responsible for all warming. The evidence strongly suggests that current warming is mainly the result of increasing greenhouse gas levels.” SkekicalScience would you believe
Models aren’t models. The particular issues with climate models arise from nonlinear equations of fluid transport along with the complexity and breadth of coupling of components. To compare this with other ‘models” is utter nonsense.
The idea of natural warming and cooling being +/- 0.2 degrees C is based on changes between 1944 and 1976 and 1976 and 1998. it is silly as well – everyone is different.
The temperature rise to 1944 – since the cooler time is the last millennia – is about a degree C. Not globally synchronised? Who cares. We may lose all of it this century as both the sun and Pacific sea surface temperature come off a 1000 year high. .
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/pages-2k-temps.jpg
The rise since 1945 is some 0.4 degrees C. Not worked that out yet. All the warming happened between 1976 and 1998. The satellite evidence says that most of that was reduced cloud cover.
Global warming seems ill-considered in very simple ways – and models are a shell game.
For some years now, I’ve been wondering if the so-called – but increasingly tarnished – “gold standard” IPCC reports, with their emphasis on the demon CO2, have been partially used and/or designed to keep our eyes off the “sustainable development” prize. Consider the following (my bold throughout) …
As I had noted in March 2011, as early as July 2009, Rajendra Pachauri, the now disgraced (but still globally gallivanting) former IPCC Chair, had declared:
To the best of my knowledge, this “vision” did not materialize in AR5. There are many signs, however, that this may well occur in AR6. While “sustainable development”, aka SD, may not “pervade” this forthcoming masterpiece, there are several indications that SD may well have a much higher profile – along with the now conveniently and officially untagged “[Expansion of] sources of evidence through regional collation of grey literature.
One such sign, IMHO, is the apparently increasing contribution of a relatively new kid on the “climate change” block, i.e. that of (former IPCC chair) Bob Watson’s baby, FutureEarth – an organization I first noticed a little over three years ago. Here’s their headliner:
This being the case, I cannot say that I was too surprised to see Future Earth tweeting many IPCC announcements. Particularly since this organization now has a rather high profile seat at the IPCC table [take a look at the list of attendees in Annex 1]:
This same pdf – which is a report of the IPCC meeting in Oct. 2016 – also notes (p.4):
I could go on, but I won’t. Except to say that perhaps it is time (if not long past time) for the real democracies of the world to no longer come to the aid of this party ;-)
… ‘disgraced ( but still globally gallivanting )
Nice one Hilary, lol, and so true of many a supra- colleague
of Pachauri. Hammurabi doesn’t rule within the IPCC, the UN
or the EU.
There is no such thing as “sustainable development.” The nature of the world is constant change, ultimately nothing is sustainable. If we try to sustain a present state, we do so without knowledge of the changes which will occur both naturally and through innovation, invention and discovery. Not to mention that all too often political issues and conflict will radically change whatever it was we sought to sustain. An idea fit only for the bin and for self-serving charlatans such as Pachauri.
” This puts us in the domain of decision making under deep uncertainty”
I disagree. I think that it is certain reducing CO2 concentrations to more natural levels will also reduce global warming to more natural levels.
The climate IS changing naturally, but I would rather let things change naturally over hundreds of years.
And who determined what “natural” levels are?
So what is the practical approach to these multiple issues of humanity and environments I discussed earlier. Each of these 19 goals is achievable in the timeframe – to 2030. Each of them reduces carbon dioxide and black carbon emissions in different ways. They all have more than $15 of benefit for every dollar spent. It costs nothing to refocus existing aid into far more productive outcomes. It’s great for business.
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/post-2015-consensus/nobel-laureates-guide-smarter-global-targets-2030
People
Lower chronic child malnutrition by 40%
Halve malaria infection
Reduce tuberculosis deaths by 90%
Avoid 1.1 million HIV infections through circumcision
Cut early death from chronic diseases by 1/3
Reduce newborn mortality by 70%
Increase immunization to reduce child deaths by 25%
Make family planning available to everyone
Eliminate violence against women and girls
Planet
Phase out fossil fuel subsidies
Halve coral reef loss
Tax pollution damage from energy
Cut indoor air pollution by 20%
Prosperity
Reduce trade restrictions (full Doha)
Improve gender equality in ownership, business and politics
Boost agricultural yield increase by 40%
Increase girls’ education by 2 years
Achieve universal primary education in sub-Saharan Africa
Triple preschool in sub-Saharan Africa
And please. Not interested in foreign aid? Tell someone who cares.
These are not by the way the 169 UN Millenium Development Goals. Most of the latter are merely photo opportunities for politicians and NGO. You may as well have no goals.
85% of people live under corrupt government. Take China. We have helped them become a nascent world military power. They rattle their saber in our direction. We lifted them up. We shouldn’t have. We need to help other countries judiciously and selectively, never through a world body like the UN. We should never help countries that have the potential to turn on us.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/01/27/217233/new-data-shows-85-of-humans-live-under-a-corrupt-government
I couldn’t agree more. For God’s don’t give your money o the UN. If they don’t like western values – well they don’t like western money.
Reblogged this on Patti Kellar and commented:
Brilliant Woman.
Sensible ground for common language when discussing climate change.
I found this view from last week rather refreshing:
That’s good.
This is a statement of opinion. Is there persuasive evidence to support it? The improvement in human wellbeing as a result of development over the past century, and especially since WWII (e.g. in countries such as Germany, Japan, South Korea, China) shows that development occurs much faster than climate change. And it could occur faster if we stopped implement policies that retard progress.
Whatever warming does occur will be at a much slower rate than we can adapt. Societal problems are best addressed by focusing on maximising the rate of global GDP growth, lifting people out of poverty, and lifting countries to higher standards of living so they have better governance, law and order, infrastructure, hospitals, education, power supply, houses, etc.
Any policy that tries to address GHG mitigation by increasing costs off energy is the opposite of what is needed.
An increase of 3C amounts to around 1C warming of the tropics. This is negligible. All other latitudes will get improve their climate – milder nights and winters and longer growing seasons.
IPCC AR5 has already largely discounted the earlier belief that GW will substantially increase the threat of extreme weather events. The best way to address this threat is by faster development.
Sea level rise is not a major cost impact. Richard Tol has shown the cost to the world is small over the century.
We are barking up the wrong tree. By continuing to advocate for highly damaging policies we are retarding world growth and making matters worse, not better.
I doubt that Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty can replace cost-benefit analysis to justify government policies. Governments have to justify any expenditures of public funds and all policies will cost the budget. Other programs that would be far more beneficial have to be deferred to pay for “climate policies”. I fear it is simply another way to empower advocates of a belief. I fear it will prolong the advocacy of policies that are retarding development.
Well said, Peter, I’ve been making some of those arguments for many years, but the CAGW bandwagon has great momentum.
Chaos is a very tricky idea. I keep trying to explain it. Some people have an aversion to chaos and they may never get it. So sad – too bad.
Here is the simplest of chaotic systems. Henri Poincaré’s 3 body problem. Something he developed 80 years before Lorenz.
ttps:
“Climate is ultimately complex. Complexity begs for reductionism. With reductionism, a puzzle is studied by way of its pieces. While this approach illuminates the climate system’s components, climate’s full picture remains elusive. Understanding the pieces does not ensure understanding the collection of pieces.” Marcia Wyatt
The nature of a chaotic system – it doesn’t behave as a linear summation of the parts. There are all sorts of odd terms – Lyapunov functions, strange attractors, slowing down – attempts to understand features of the class of chaotic dynamical systems.
“Technically, an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause. Chaotic processes in the climate system may allow the cause of such an abrupt climate change to be undetectably small.” https://www.nap.edu/read/10136/chapter/3#14
Models are different in that they have thousands of initial states as a result of imprecision in defining starting points. Here are two trajectories – of thousands of wildly divergent trajectories possible. Only an illustration. It is impossible to visualise the multi-dimensional phase space of even a relatively simple system.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709/F1.expansion.html
There is a bottom line which may be of intrerest.
In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of (perturbed physics) ensembles of model solutions.” IPCC TAR 14.2.2.2
I mean who but a dyed in the wool, mentally incompetent reprobate would deny IPCC science and fail to acknowledge this 140-year-old idea? :-)
Models are unable to predict climate – as Pat Michaels and many others keep saying. Those who don’t are either thick or dissimulating.
And yet everyone wants to talk about ECS and TCR as specific numbers, which requires predictability. Endless debate over impossible concepts.
Absolutely. In a chaotic climate sensitivity is dynamic and not static.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/unstable-ebm-fig-2-jpg1.jpg
Ghil’s simple EBM shows that climate sensitivity (γ) is variable. It is the change in temperature (ΔT) divided by the change in the control variable (Δμ) – the tangent to the curve as shown above. Sensitivity increases moving down the upper curve to the left towards the bifurcation and becomes arbitrarily large at the instability.
The problem in a chaotic climate then becomes not one of quantifying climate sensitivity in a smoothly evolving climate but of predicting the onset of abrupt climate shifts and their implications for climate and society. The problem of abrupt climate change on multi-decadal scales is of the most immediate significance.
This is where models come in – while recognising that they still about as accurate as tossing a coin.
http://www.geomar.de/en/news/article/klimavorhersagen-ueber-mehrere-jahre-moeglich/
“the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” Quite so, undermines the whole she-bang.
Whatever words that are used to describe the degree of risk it is first of all necessary to characterise and quantify the different possible physical risks being considered. This is what, when, where, how much, potential impact and effective mitigation measures.
What – Sealevel rise, storm damage, flooding, drought, freeze, what else?
When – Now, 25, 50, 75, 100 years in the future?
Where – Coastal Areas, Latitudinal Zones, Flood Plains, Desertification, Other??
How much – Rises, Storm Energy, Precipitation, Temperature?
Potential Impact – Physical Damage, Loss of Life, Disruption of Economies?
Mitigation measures – Sea walls/ River barriers, Stronger/Better Designed Buildings, Relocation of populations, Improved Water Storage, Avoiding future risks?
And much more I’m sure.
We know where the issues are now affecting lives, we can plan and act now, we can review every 5/10 years and revise plans and act appropriately.
It’s real stuff that folk will be able to get their minds around not seemingly abstract words of risk.
Anything that has a known potential to cause damage to, for example a building, can be considered a hazard e.g. a tornado. We occasionally get these in the UK.
Risk is a probability or chance of some adverse damage and can be expressed as a percentage, for example, there is a 9.3% chance of a tornado occurring in the UK.
Though I have a suspicion that what constitutes a tornado in the UK may be different from the USA.
I don’t like the way the word threat has been used in the OP, to me there is an implied conscious decision to commit a hostile act by someone.
Or is this another example of two people being separated by a common language?
bobdroege | January 29, 2017 at 2:55 pm |
Except we can measure the big deal of natural variation and find it to be +/- 0.2 C, which is dwarfed by TCR and ECS that you cherry pick
This remains another of the biggest disconnects in the climate debate. There are way too many uncertainties for values like this to be knowable with any reliability, but they’re often treated as “measured” fact. Plausible models could be (and are) built for a huge range of possible values, and there’s no way for anyone to discern which model is closest to the true state of affairs.
The idea that risk is defined by the criterion “…and that may be avoided through preemptive action” (Wikipedia?) seems novel. Financial markets are there to hedge and diversify (monetary) risk which is effectively treated as being unavoidable. Also medical insurance, travel insurance life insurance etc. People will get sick, will have accidents regardless of ‘precautionary principles’ (which probably lurks behind this strange definition)
‘Atmospheric and oceanic computational simulation models often successfully depict chaotic space–time patterns, flow phenomena, dynamical balances, and equilibrium distributions that mimic nature. This success is accomplished through necessary but nonunique choices for discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupled contributing processes that introduce structural instability into the model. Therefore, we should expect a degree of irreducible imprecision in quantitative correspondences with nature, even with plausibly formulated models and careful calibration (tuning) to several empirical measures. Where precision is an issue (e.g., in a climate forecast), only simulation (perturbed physics) ensembles made across systematically designed model families allow an estimate of the level of relevant irreducible imprecision.’ James McWilliams
We have seen the usual suspects focus on discrediting a Youtube video with another Youtube video – with claims based on inadequate knowledge or on bare assertions. It serves to distract from the wider scientific consensus in a perhaps subconscious shell game designed to defend tribal memes in the climate war.
The other side adopts the uncertainty meme with equally limited command of the topic and a refusal to accept the implications of profound uncertainty.
We don’t know what the level of irreducible imprecision in particular AOS is. To find out would require immense computing resources that are not available. The modelling community – with honourable exceptions – substitutes a second rate methodology without being transparent about the theoretical limitations.
Risk is a combination of consequences and the likelihood of occurrence of an event. In deep uncertainty we can evaluate consequence but have no basis for assigning probabilities. Risk is indeterminate.
We are changing the atmosphere with potentially severe consequences including global climate and ecological disruption. I’m not about to detail them. I made the mistake yesterday of following a red herring down a rabbit hole. I am not playing that game again.
Where risk is indeterminate and consequences potentially severe – the sound public policy response is to reduce the likelihood of occurrence without creating adverse consequences elsewhere. This involves reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in ways that make economic, societal and environmental sense. The 19 ‘smart development goals’ of the Copenhagen Consensus just make sense. Along with research into and development of 21st century energy.
There is some certainty. The future is inevitably cyberpunk. The singularity occurs on January 26th 2065 – when an automated IKEA factory becomes self-aware and commences converting all global resources to flat pack furniture. Until then – endless innovation on information technology and cybernetics will accelerate and continue to push the limits of what it is to be human and to challenge the adaptability of social structures. New movements, fads, music, designer drugs, cat videos and dance moves will sweep the planet like Mexican waves in the zeitgeist. Materials will be stronger and lighter. Life will be cluttered with holographic TV’s, waterless washing machines, ultrasonic blenders, quantum computers, hover cars and artificially intelligent phones. Annoying phones that cry when you don’t charge them – taking on that role from cars that beep when you don’t put a seat belt on. Space capable flying cars will have seat belts that lock and tension without any intervention of your part. All this will use vastly more energy and materials this century as populations grow and wealth increases.
You are still talking about the wobble of the loose speedo needle from my coarse analogy above. You should be thinking of the big mistake, the speedo calibration that resembles the divergence between say CMIP projected global temperatures and observed. I say ‘resembles’ because it is invalid to present selected model run paths to the comparison while rejecting other runs. To be valid, all runs except those with known mechanical style errors must be included within the final error bounds. This correct procedure removes subjectivity, comes closer to reality, could well give envelopes like Pat Frank displays and acts to avoid horrendous social policies.
The next customary step of taking an ensemble average is the stuff of nightmares. Mathematicians should be up in arms.
As I have noted before, from time spent in the science of new mineral resource discovery and development, there are maths and stats operations in common with slabs of climate research. There is a huge difference in the ways these two groups operate. The first is focussed on finding and evaluating geological anomalies put there by Nature. Adjustment of data is known not to be helpful, but known to be a belief ritual problem for the corrupted mind. OTOH, climate work has a high population of people who seem to believe that the best answer can be got only by manipulation of data.
We knew of the near impossibility of accurate event forecasting of volcanic eruptions, cyclones etc 50 years ago. You cannot create their timing with models any more than you can create a new ore deposit.
Threat is a tag in many climate papers; not in ore resource papers. I ask why and can only answer speculatively, ‘from incompetence’.
Geoff
Koonin, Curry, Lindzen, and Wojick make news!
Scientists Criticize ‘Hottest Year on Record’ Claim as Hype
http://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2017/01/29/scientists_criticize_hottest_year_on_record_claim_as_hype.html
My focus is draining the government funded hype swamp.
Hilarious.
Real world is January 2017. It’s hot… shooting up like a rocket. It’s going to have a higher anomaly than several of the months in 2016.
And it’s getting hotter. With this map, there is no way to get to cool:
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2017/anomnight.1.30.2017.gif
WTF??? It’s just ENSO – which is neutral at the moment.
“All climate models indicate that the Pacific Ocean is likely to remain ENSO neutral through the southern summer and autumn. Model outlooks that span the autumn period tend to have lower skill than outlooks made at other times of the year, therefore outlooks beyond May should be used with caution.”
Especially the JCH model.
Broadly we may expect La Nina conditions to emerge next followed by another El Nino. That seems to be the way it works.
First, yet another in a long line of “the warmest La Niña in the record” is not going to make your pipe dream of “no warming for years” real.
ENSO neutral is now an opportunity for a lot of warming. December anomaly was .81 ℃, what used to be a high anomaly and is now a La Niña cool one; January anomaly is likely plus .93 ℃.
Yeah, global kooling has returned. What a total joke.
You had your La Niña. It died young. In a few days they’re going to bookend it with a -0.5 ONI and read it its last rites.
The record includes lots of examples of back-to-back El Niño events and back-to-back La Niña events.
It is really very odd. Such vehemence in bald assertions, The models suggest neutral conditions for a bit with no confidence at all in predictability beyond May. Neutral suggests little deviation from the mean over the past 20 years of non-warming.
I suggest that there is no back to back nothin’ – just events that have variable persistence is the usual way to understand it. Then the inevitable oscillation.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ts.gif
I suspect that more frequent and intense La Nina will happen over the next few centuries as El Nino retreats from a 1000 year high.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.jpg
And quoting anomalies without context is a bit of a nonsense.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_December_2016_v6.jpg
All in all – it is up to his usual standard.
Chief
I like your forecast, especially the magic carpet cars which will whisk an aged and more enfeebled me off to visit my daughter long past the time I had to give up my driver’s license.
I do find dark and troubling:
“The singularity occurs on January 26th 2065 – when an automated IKEA factory becomes self-aware and commences converting all global resources to flat pack furniture.”
as I don’t like black furniture, and my grand daughter likes pink, and occasionally light green.
Whatever happen to choices and the freedom to choose?
Sorry can’t reply – there may be some problem with heads in glass jars.
Amusing post from Smithsonian.
Smithsonian uses common skeptic arguments to “debunk” wind turbine effect on regional climate in 2014.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/myth-debunked-wind-farms-dont-alter-climate-180949701/
I wonder how they decided on the “and far less than the long-term effect of greenhouse gas emissions in driving global climate change” for the .3C rise in winter temp for a 20% target for europe wind production when the greenhouse effect for all energy production to date is around .3C.
The article apparently compares the total effect of all AGW emissions ever to the effect of a few major wind installations — a nice trick. Maybe we can try something similar with the IRS: “My back taxes are much less than the national deficit!”
Something that is lacking in the discussion of “ruin” is an example of it. What have human beings ever done that has resulted in “ruin” (i.e. the total destruction of everything)? Why do we obsess about something that has never happened? In fact, since “ruin” has never happened as a result of human activity, what makes us think that it can? Frankly, the whole discussion of climate “risk” is complete BS, given that no physical mechanisms for Armageddon have ever been proposed.
Serfs are wary of Armageddon threats, thinking on
H.L Mencken’s observation:
‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace
alarmed ( and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by
menacing with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary.’
Begone EPA , encroaching institutional arm of political power
over a hyped-up populace.
Hi Beth
Risk is a combination of consequences and the likelihood of occurrence of an event. In deep uncertainty we can evaluate consequence but have no basis for assigning probabilities. Risk is indeterminate. We are changing the atmosphere with potentially severe consequences — including global climate and ecological disruption. Where risk is indeterminate and consequences potentially severe – the sound public policy response is to reduce the likelihood of occurrence without creating adverse consequences elsewhere. This involves reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in ways that make economic, societal and environmental sense. The 19 ‘smart development goals’ of the Copenhagen Consensus just make sense. Each of these goals can mitigate emissions while creating economic and social opportunities and conserving environments.
You haven’t argued that it isn’t happening. But many will argue that there is certainty in dire risk or certainty in no risk. Both are arguments from ignorance.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/
Hi Chief,
Agree with yr point, ‘w/out creating adverse consequences
elsewhere.’ Cautious trial and error and keeping adaptable,
that means not bleeding the economy by top down subsidies
and carbon taxes, seems to me.
By the way, enjoyed yr poem on Serf Under _ground Journal .
I am suggesting refocusing aid to the smart development goals – with of course measurable outcomes.
Domestically – it is with ‘direct action.’ Refocusing envitonmental spending into actually productive areas.
Shhh – don’t mention poetry. Do you miss the old days of the eSalon that started with such promise?
Stupidity annoys me, especially if it requires you to follow endless word games. There is not a shred of science in this argument to legitimize an illegal system of value judgements that their fraudulent “climate science” uses in abundance. When I say fraudulent I mean exactly that. One example I documented was to transmogrifying an eighteen year long standstill of temperature in the eighties and nineties into a warming period. This conveniently fit into the warming they showed starting in 1980. If removed this missing warmth would leave a giant gap into that otherwise smooth temperature rise they show there. I discovered this while working on my book “What Warming?” that came out in 2010. I used it as figure 15 in the book, but just as I finished it the data changed. My protests were ignored and I was obliged to put a note about that fake warming into the preface of my book. Nothing happened, however, and that fake warming is still displayed as big as life by GISS, NOAA, and the Met Office. By now they know it is there and are deliberately keeping it in their data-set. It has the effect of increasing all temperatures that follow it higher by 0.2 degrees Celsius than they really are. This shows itself directly when the 2015/2016 El Nino becomes higher than the one from 1998 is which is impossible. As for risks in general they do exist in abundance as Judy’s example of eight risks shows, but they simply do not belong in the lexicon of science. Science quantitates risks by using the statistical concept of standard deviation. It is a precision measure, not a definition of any particular dangerous happening. It applies to measurable quantities that are numerous in climate science. If you cannot make use of it you are not allowed to excuse yourself and play word games instead. You need to rewrite your paper until you get measurable quantities or until you find correct variables to use.
This might be an appropriate thread for me to ask if any poster has read about and/or used Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (CEEMD) to decompose observed and model global mean temperature series into secular trends, cyclical components and red/white noise. I have been looking at observed and CMIP5 RCP 4.5 series with CEEMD and in a further analysis doing simulations (using an ARMA model of the residual noise) in order to obtain confidence intervals (CIs). The decomposition with the extraction of an approximate 60 to 70 year reoccurring cycles for the observed series dramatically changes the common view of the secular trend to one beginning around 1900 and proceeding apace up to present time. For the model series there is wide range of reoccurring cyclical frequencies that can dramatically affect the secular trend. The trend increases in most cases, but by insignificant rates, in the recent 1975-2016 period. The CIs are quite wide and make estimating the quantitative warming from a secular trend very uncertain and particularly so for the short time period of 1975-2016. There are number of papers that have used CEEMD and found essentially the same results as I have, although none as I recall estimated CIs. Those papers can be found by Googling.
The main reason I have put forth this query is that with the very different view this decomposition presents from the more commonly published ones, I am most surprised that it has not received more attention in the climate science literature.
Try calculating some trends,
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/38/16120/F3.medium.gif
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/38/16120.full
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.”
I said I was moving on. Obviously not. Jim prompted me to reconsider. I said that Pat Frank wasn’t the major player – but that the scientific consensus around this was. From the TAR on scientists have been saying that climate prediction is impossible. Jim replied that not only wasn’t Pat Frank a major player – but that essentially he was one of these crazy dumb old white guy science deniers. You know how it goes – whoever is arbitrarily on one of the thousands of denier lists is a legitimate target.
Jim seems to imagine that personal denigration is a substitute for knowledge. That if he insists that you, me or someone else is a denier that it negates any necessity for actual thought and learning. It wasn’t that, it didn’t look like this, it was something else. Each invented rationale crumbling in turn – an unedifying scramble after another rationale – it all terminating in the pureiy pejorative. Is this not a familiar pattern?
I have seen them shirtfront distinguished scientists with embarrassingly naive memes they learned in insular echo chambers like realclimate and worse. They have no capacity at all to evaluate science and repeat like parrots the memes they have learnt by rote. It is really that horrible. They defends the indefensible by playing the person and not the ball. This is of course an organised and relentless tactic.
But let’s just talk science,
“Atmospheric and oceanic computational simulation models often successfully depict chaotic space–time patterns, flow phenomena, dynamical balances, and equilibrium distributions that mimic nature. This success is accomplished through necessary but nonunique choices for discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupled contributing processes that introduce structural instability into the model. Therefore, we should expect a degree of irreducible imprecision in quantitative correspondences with nature, even with plausibly formulated models and careful calibration (tuning) to several empirical measures. Where precision is an issue (e.g., in a climate forecast), only simulation (of perturbed physics) ensembles made across systematically designed model families allow an estimate of the level of relevant irreducible imprecision.”
Yes models are tuned. It was always laughable to suggest otherwise. It was always as a meme parroted without reflection. Including the statistics of error bounding the result. No it obviously can’t diverge chaotically because that’s not we were exposed to in the echo chamber. I advise everyone to leave these sites unless you have some serious knowledge upfront or can keep an open mind in diverse forums. Neither of these things apply to Jim.
This I believe is from climateprediction.com I believe. It’s what McWilliams talked about in the abstract above.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/CPGrandensemble.PNG
It is a perturbed physics model showing logarithmic growth rates of the perturbations. This is what Pat Franks – despite not being a major player – showed in his presentation. It is absolutely correct to say that these trajectories of solutions of a perturbed physics model diverges radically to create an envelope of plausible solutions. Yes it doesn’t look like a stange attractor Jim. The multi-dimensional phase space is actually impossible to visualise. It is however chaotic.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/CPGrandensemble.PNG
To insist on any and everything else is just silly anti-science posturing in the service of obfuscation. But we are used to that,
“A perturbed physics ensemble (PPE) is generated by varying the values of parameters in a given climate model, thus creating different variants of that model, and making simulations using each variant. The production of PPEs in UKCP09 takes into account parameter errors, which arise as a result of incomplete or imprecise knowledge of the actual values of the climate model parameters that are used to represent processes within the climate model. By perturbing (varying) climate model physical parameters within plausible ranges to create different variants, and making a projection of climate change for each variant, it is possible to quantify the impact of this source of uncertainty in resultant climate projections.
This is the ensemble of opportunity we are used to. Which is what everyone imagines the discussion is about. I just don’t think they know any better. We can tune to the present – but then the model is on its own. Going forward – they choose one solution from thousands of divergent plausible solutions possible and email it off to the IPCC. I’d like you to consider how they choose?
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/cmip.png
‘In each of these model–ensemble comparison studies, there are important but difficult questions: How well selected are the models for their plausibility? How much of the ensemble spread is reducible by further model improvements? How well can the spread can be explained by analysis of model differences? How much is irreducible imprecision in an AOS?
Simplistically, despite the opportunistic assemblage of the various AOS model ensembles, we can view the spreads in their results as upper bounds on their irreducible imprecision. Optimistically, we might think this upper bound is a substantial overestimate because AOS models are evolving and improving. Pessimistically, we can worry that the ensembles contain insufficient samples of possible plausible models, so the spreads may underestimate the true level of irreducible imprecision (cf., ref. 23). Realistically, we do not yet know how to make this assessment with confidence.’
I think we know which end of this spectrum Jim is on.
Pingback: The ‘threat’ of climate change | ajmarciniak
A question for Robert Ellison. You have posted this graphic several times:
https://i2.wp.com/d29qn7q9z0j1p6.cloudfront.net/content/roypta/369/1956/4751/F2.large.jpg
What does “current climatology” mean? What puzzles me is why the forecast lies within it?
I put it up multiple times so people don’t have to look for it. Is that a problem?
I have wondered about that myself. I have emailed Tim Palmer.
“The global coupled atmosphere–ocean–land–cryosphere system exhibits a wide range of physical and dynamical
phenomena with associated physical, biological, and chemical feedbacks that result in a continuum of temporal and spatial variability. The traditional boundaries between weather and climate are, therefore, somewhat artificial.”
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/jhurrell/docs/hurrell.modeling_approach.bams10.pdf
This is another very interesting approach – nested models at a number of scales. They just need a $5 billion dollar computer. Dammit. Even then we are not going to get past a decade out.
But if you are suggesting that seasonal to decadal forecasting is weather – we need to rethink that.
Figure caption for Figure 2 here.
Right… thanks… it rings a vague bell… I have asked Tim Palmer to disregard.
Emphasis on weather forecasting.
Here is the diagram for seasonal:
http://d29qn7q9z0j1p6.cloudfront.net/content/roypta/369/1956/4751/F8.large.jpg
Figure 8.
Schematic of ensemble prediction system on seasonal to decadal time scales based on figure 1, showing (a) the impact of model biases and (b) a changing climate. The uncertainty in the model forecasts arises from both initial condition uncertainty and model uncertainty.
The crucial scientific question is what these two very different uncertainties look like separately? This should be a major research area, but as far as I can tell it is not, by far.
Ah… https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/29/the-threat-of-climate-change/#comment-836086
JCH, that does not work. If the current climatology is all the possible states then it cannot change to a future climatology.
Can’t predict future climate states.
“Dear Robert
I don’t think I made this schematic (but I may be wrong!). Perhaps try Roberto Buizza at ECMWF. My guess is that there is no particular climatology being used. It’s just indicating that the forecast pdf hasn’t asymptoted (to climatology) and therefore denotes some inherent predictability.
Best wishes
Tim”
Thank God we cleared that up.
Political instability, civil war, death by refugee, world war III, America going full commie.
There is plenty to worry about.
Climate?
Meh.
Yeah – I have been staring at this and going mad. I might have better luck with a goat.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/hazard.png
I doubt that the IPCC risks are based on a rigorous methodology. The hazards are something like black carbon. Hazards are something like black carbon. Obviously both probability and consequences are high giving a severe risk.
There are thousands of hazards which need to be systematically evaluated. You then devise responses and do a cost-benefit analysis. Available resources are split between the highest value actions.
Carbo dioxide has a few highly damaging consequences with low probability – and some low damage outcomes with a high probability. The risk is perhaps moderate so you need some moderate cost actions. Of course some people think it’s severe consequences and high probability. But it ain’t.
The risk assessment phase of this is best done using the Delphic method. It’s just a lot of fun and you can have sandwiches and cake.
A lot can be done on multiple risks with Bjorn Lomberg’s smart development goals – including on carbon dioxide and black carbon. http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/post-2015-consensus/nobel-laureates-guide-smarter-global-targets-2030
That’s the point, it seems, where gut instinct, and even (scientific minds explode) prayer might be the better way to arrive at a risk assessment!
My opinion, of course. I mean, you do what you can with science, but the number of degrees of freedom in most problems that are called ‘science’ today are way too extreme to do much better.
:) I was hinting at asking an oracle.
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Delphic+technique
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats
“:) I was hinting at asking an oracle. ”
Ahhh! I can be dense…
Political instability, civil war, death by refugee, world war III, America going full commie. There is plenty to worry about. Climate? Meh.
Yes, a favorite meme of mine. Weather doesn’t make the list of causes of death.
However, cancer has long had association with diet ( and of course, smoking, drinking, drug abuse, sexual practice. etc. ).
It also turns out that Alzheimers may be ‘Diabetes Type 3’.
So most of the leading causes of both mortality and morbidity ( diabetes, heart disease, dementia, cancer, … ) are preventable. This has some ramifications. It means the enemy is us, of course, but it also means people who won’t put down their Oreos or Marlboros are making demands of your lifestyle for things that don’t matter.
You are conflating the climate nonsense with the environment. Different things.
Yes, environment is important.
Check out a guy named Peter Zeihan.
Things are not as bleak as some think. At least not for the US. However for those nations built to take advantage of the Bretton Woods framework, things are likely to get a whole lot more difficult.
He’s a neocon :(
What is the value of a comment like that. it says nothing constructive to say. it is simply ad hominem.
Peter you misunderstand.
The neocon’s have a very specific agenda and Zeihan fits right into it.
Specifically: Russia is the big evil. American superiority lends it moral credence to takeover the entire world.
Not an ad hom, I research Zeihan’s positions.
Nickels,
Thank you. You’re right, I did misunderstand what point you were trying to make.
Well, you were right that I use ‘neocon’ as a slur, though, lol.
The neocon agenda:
https://www.amazon.com/Neoconservative-Threat-World-Order-Washingtons/dp/0986076996
Contrast this adept analysis of Ukraine:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/gallup-ukrainians-loathe-the-kiev-government-imposed-by-obama/5497679
With Zeihan’s absurd statement:
“Russia also sees the Middle East as a means to other ends. With its inherent demographic and geopolitical challenges, Russia needs a distraction and that alone explains why it is in Syria. The Russian play, Zeihan posits, was to flood Turkey and Germany with so many refugees that it sours bilateral relationships, making them incapable of taking steps to counter Russian ambitions in Ukraine .”
https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2016/05/25/peter-zeihan-on-geopolitics-a-world-that-will-fragment/
This thread is about the threat of climate change; i.e. the potential consequences, impacts, net benefits or damages. It is about policy relevant climate science and economics; it is not about physics, or down-in-the-weeds climate science. I asked on this thread: ‘Are GHG emissions likely to be net beneficial or net damaging this century? How do we know? What’s the evidence?’ https://judithcurry.com/2016/11/25/week-in-review-science-and-policy-edition-3/#comment-826495 . Then I explained in the first 12 comments why I am not persuaded GHG emissions are a significant problem (other than politically, of course). We do not know if they are doing net harm or good. But it does seem we can rule out a significant negative impact. There was a lot of discussion on this thread and on David Wojick’s “Discussion thread – social cost of carbon’ https://judithcurry.com/2016/12/30/discussion-thread-social-cost-of-carbon/ , but core issues were mostly not addressed. And they are not addressed on this thread either.
I am interested in global temperatures during the Phanerozoic Eon (542 Ma) because of what they can tell us about the consequences of much higher global average temperatures and temperature distributions from poles to equator during much warmer times. And also what they may tell us about a possible exaggeration of the negative impacts coming out of the IAM analyses.
According to Scotese (2016) the global average temperature over the past 650 Ma was ~21.5C; i.e. 7C warmer than now. Life thrived during most of this time.
One reason I am particularly interested in the paleo temperatures over the Phanerozoic Eon is because of what seems to be a discrepancy between Scotese’s and the climate models’ estimates of tropical and extra tropical temperatures when the planet is warmer. This discrepancy may mean that the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are significantly over estimating the impacts and damages of warming – and overestimating SCC (even without considering the other highly uncertain inputs to the IAM analyses). More on this below.
Richard Tol is one of the foremost authorities on estimating the regional and global impacts (i.e. biophysical) and benefits/damages (i.e. economic) of global warming. His IAM, FUND, is the most sophisticated of the commonly used and cited IAMs. Figure 3 (output from FUND) here http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/climate_change.pdf shows net benefits and damages by sector up to about 4 C warming. I am interested in understanding the assumptions and empirical evidence that was used to derive the impact functions and damage functions used in FUND (especially for energy consumption, which is the only significant negative of global warming, according to this analysis). The inputs are explained in the Technical Description and Tables, downloadable here http://www.fund-model.org/versions .
I want to understand the reason for the apparent discrepancy between Tol’s Regional Temperature Conversion Factors and Scotese’s Figure 12 https://www.academia.edu/12082909/Some_thoughts_on_Global_Climate_Change_The_Transition_from_Icehouse_to_Hothouse . This is important because the justification for the belief that GHG emissions are a significant threat depends on the outputs from the IAMs.
Richard Tol, 2013, FUND 3.9, Technical Description, (p5) https://05f0e81c-a-5f9963c9-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/fund-model.org/fund-model/Fund-3-9-Scientific-Documentation.pdf
says:
Table RT (FUND 3.9, Tables, p33, https://05f0e81c-a-5f9963c9-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/fund-model.org/fund-model/Fund-3-9-Scientific-Tables.pdf ) says:
Most of the country groups/regions from CAM down (except CHI and NAF) are in the tropics. They have factors of 0.75 to 0.91. However, from Scotese Figures 12 and 13, I interpret the tropics warms by only about 1C for a 3C increase in GMST. That suggests the conversion factor should be around 0.33, not 0.75 to 0.91. Likewise, the higher latitudes would warm much more according to Scotese’s chart below; e.g., for a 3C GMST increase the average temperature at latitude 45 degrees would increase by around 4C and the poles from -36C to -7C, i.e. about 29C increase).
https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/235ko6pvuo4jol5p/images/21-975a2df8d8.png
https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/235ko6pvuo4jol5p/images/22-20227bbb57.jpg
What is the explanation for the apparent discrepancy?
Which is correct?
Is FUND significantly overestimating the damages and underestimating the benefits of increasing GHG concentration in the atmosphere?
Dr Curry,
This post touches the primary reason I became interested in the climate change issue. Had nothing to do with the science, but the resulting claims of threat, harm and risk. It has been obvious from the start that risk analysis and risk management rank up with statistical analysis as an area climate science in general is completely lacking in understanding, let alone competence.
So here’s a PPPE – pesky perturbed physics ensemble based on the SRES 1B scenario. I have a feeling that the results are within the bounds of a plausible global climatology – which implies some predictability (Tim Palmer – perscom – LOL) It shows the IPCC ensemble of opportunity range. The range is defined by single solutions from each model arbitrarily chosen out of thousands of plausible solutions after the fact. It is a complete sham and reveals absolutely nothing reliable about the future of climate.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ppe.png
The PPPE in a sense shows the boundaries of the solution space of a single model. We have no clue at all where climate will fall within – or not – the solution space. The limits of the solution space is called irreducible imprecision – and we are pretty much stuck with it. The IPCC and IPCC ranges overlap. No real mystery – the models are siblings and equally physically implausible. The PPPE are better because there is less obvious duplicity.
The black line is the observation trend linearly extrapolated. It is an upper bound – unless climate does something weird. Which is entirely possible. The NAS called this latter potential inevitable surprises. The trend in the second half of the 20th century is shown here. It is a reality check.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/gisstemp-trend.png
I am expecting natural cooling this century – as the sun cools and El Nino slides off a 1000 year frequency and intensity high. We can even do better than the SRES 1B scenario – by sequestering 100 GtC in soils and ecosystems and by transitioning to 21st-century energy systems within a few decades.
And before you have conniptions – https://watertechbyrie.com/2016/06/18/safe-cheap-and-abundant-energy-back-to-the-nuclear-energy-future-2/
They try hard to back us into a corner where the high authority of climate priests is unchallengeable. But seriously – most of them are freakin’ idiots.
And before Peter Lang has conniptions – risk is a child of probabilities and consequences. Poetic aye? Science helps us determine consequences instead of having it rammed down our throats. Can we challenge these high priests? They say we can’t because it is all too complex for our little brains to comprehend. Well – f..k them – we may we wrong but that’s our privilege. Retain an open mind and we may yet correct our errors. They are off in cloud-cuckoo land where Kool-Aid is more likely than a reality check.
… IPCC and PPPE ranges…
You’re expecting cooling this century… from what level to what level? When?
The stadium wave has come and gone… in this century. Its advocates are so delusional they didn’t even notice it.
This is what it looked like in the 20th century.
It didn’t look like that this time. Is it so hard for you to figure out?
Warming is some 0.7 degrees /century. Not much of a worry, There are other high impact/low probability. Mostly with changes in terrestrial and aquatic assemblages. We are changing the atmosphere and don’t have full knowledge. It’s ducking an obvious reality to insist we do.
Judith,
Sorry to bang-on on my pet subject, but some clarification is necessary.
I quoted a figure of ’30+’ which may have been misread as an age figure. In fact this is the number of characteristics which can be seen in psychopathy. Manipulation of others is one example where they can influence others to do their will.
These people are not murderers but lack a normal human compass to guide their actions. If I had revealed climate alarm as a real problem, I would have carried the load myself. These alarmists expect others to feel the pain, but not themselves!
The numbers involved would be small but enough to have influence.
I hope that explains it better, since I am merely interested from a scientific perspective.
Minimum temps are following dew points. So unless anyone really thinks the planet is going to sudden turn into a tropical planet from pole to pole, nothing is going to happen.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/1980-series1.png
As soon as the oceans move more warm water south of the equator the global temperature will go down. Surface asymmetry demands it.
Previously, …and Then There’s Physics wrote
No, I don’t think so. I think this would almost certainly violate conservation of energy. [bold by edh]
(a) CO2 is a GHG; interacts with radiative energy transport. (b) As the concentration of CO2 increases in Earth’s atmosphere, assuming all other physical phenomena and processes remain constant at the initial states, the planet will warm. (c) Eventually over time, a balance between the incoming and outgoing radiative energy at the Top Of the Atmosphere (TOA) will obtain.
The hypothesis (b) contains an assumption that is a priori known to be an incorrect characterization of the physical domain to which the hypothesis is applied. All other physical phenomena and processes never remain constant at the initial states.
The hypothesis (c) requires that all the phenomena and processes occurring within the physical domain, many of which directly and indirectly affect, to lesser and greater degrees, radiative energy transport, will likewise attain balance. So long as changes that affect radiative energy transport occur within and between Earth’s climate systems, the state at the TOA will be affected.
Earth’s climate systems are open with respect to energy; energy is always both incoming and outgoing. Additionally, physical phenomena and processes, driven by (1) the net energy that reaches the surface, (2) redistribution of energy content already within the systems, and (3) activities of human kind, directly affect the radiative energy balance from which the hypothesis was developed. Very large scale natural phenomena have significantly changed in the past and will continue to change in future the radiative energy budget at the TOA.
To invoke conservation of energy under these conditions is a red herring. Energy is everywhere and at all times always conserved. If an argument is based on conservation of energy principles, the exact conditions under which a supposedly violation of the principle occur must be explicitly stated.
All very interesting but, Excuse me, isn’t the physics model hypothesis for AGW that it is caused by water vapour, not CO2. CO2 has a very small contribution, and that effect is assumed to be amplified by a change in the very low CO2 atmospheric content, CO2 is not a significant direct cause of a change in energy radiative balance. The models assume some gain in CO2 influence through “forcing” water vapour warming in their assumptions to justify themselves. Or am I wrong about this most fundamental modelling assumption?. (Oh, and as long as you forget abour the oceans and the places you don’t measure).
The fundamental difference is that H2O only can respond to the temperature while CO2 being noncondensing controls it while water vapor just amplifies the effect of the CO2 by a factor of two or three.
The very definition of fake science. Jim it does not such thing, and you seem to forget it cools off every night and all of that I’ll gotten water vapor if there was any to evaporate, gets condensed right back out.
“The fundamental difference is that H2O only can respond to the temperature while CO2 being noncondensing controls it while water vapor just amplifies the effect of the CO2 by a factor of two or three.”
Jimbo, that’s dire even by your parlous standard.
It’s total, utter, scientifically illiterate drivel.
You really haven’t a clue, have you?
Explain.
http://moscow.sci-hub.bz/648bdcef75b93c6903639ebc7ec37b0a/lacis2010.pdf
Brian,
I think the answer to this is yes. Here is a paper for you to consider. Jim D’s point is also relevant.
The Lacis control knob paper, linked by Tony Banton above, is a go-to resource for this question. It is written in an easy to understand way, and shows that the climate is highly sensitive to the level of CO2 even when it is only 400 ppm. Taking just this much CO2 away leads to an ice world. Paleoclimate also is largely explained by CO2 variations between the iceless hothouse and recent to current colder conditions that occurred within the last 100 million years. Note that emissions of just the fossil fuels we have can bring us back to the iceless high sea levels that existed in the Eocene. It’s good to also read up on the big picture that includes paleoclimate because what we have learned from that is highly relevant to today.
There is great deal of very poor climate science – and the control knob is one of the most hilarious.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1190450334404560
RIE, I recommend you read the Lacis paper too. It is not what you think.
I have of course read the Lacis paper already – otherwise I wouldn’t be calling it hilarious.
“There is great deal of very poor climate science – and the control knob is one of the most hilarious..
Robert: – rather than hand-waving dismissal, just what is “lilarious”, even “most hilarious” re the Lacis et al paper?
So you want me to explain to you why climate is more like a kaleidoscope – shake it up and a new pattern emerges – than a control knob with a linear gain? Naw.
“So you want me to explain to you why climate is more like a kaleidoscope – shake it up and a new pattern emerges – than a control knob with a linear gain? Naw.”
Naw, like I said, I would like you to say why the Lacis et al paper (re CO2 as the climate control knob as explained in said paper ) is one of “the most hilarious”.
The world awaits your Sky-dragon slaying physics.
In the absence of your paper rebutting it this, is your opportunity my friend.
No nonsense about climate hundreds of mya – just addressing the physics of both H2O and CO2 re their relative stability in the atmosphere at terrestrial temps please.
“You see this is where the average urban – and you are very average Tony – doofus hipster falls flat on their face. They imagine that the physics of CO2 is difficult and interesting.
I am an engineer, hydrologist and environmental scientist. My strength is a broad background in science, technology and policy.”
Robert:
I do t give a flying f**k what your qualifications are, but if you wish to appeal to (false) authority, I studied Engineering to degree level and thereafter work for the UKMO for 32 years, the last 20 as an on the bench forecaster.
So whose dick is biggest then? (Rehetorical)
I can tell you that the physics are the same in the same two disciplines.
And that you again fail to say why you believe your *opinion* on this paper gainsays over 150 years of empirical.
You do know what “empirical” means?
Your posts here speak of someone with enormous self regard, hubris and ideological bias, driving an similarly enormous DK syndrome.
I return to my question.
What does CO2 do different to water when terrestrial temps go below 0C and beyond that to -40C.
And what do you *think* happens when the NH land masses are increasingly covered with snowfield as a result.
Either give a straight answer to that OR do the world an enormous favour and shine your enormous intellect on the subject with a Nobel winning paper.
Unless and until then, all you do here is hold yourself up to ridicule.
That you do not see it is, of course, part of the psychosis.
Oh, also..
“I’m going to talk about your tiny little intellectual pretensions? Naw.”
I didn’t, ask you to …
I ASKED YOU TO PROPERLY CRITIQUE THE LACIS PAPER. FFS
The mark of the man my friend, that is worth it’s weight in gold as showing up a remarkably abnoxious and arrogant poster.
TaTa
I had a comment deleted for some reason, so I will just post the Abstract from Lacis.
“Ample physical evidence shows that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the single most important
climate-relevant greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere. This is because CO2, like ozone, N2O, CH4,
and chlorofluorocarbons, does not condense and precipitate from the atmosphere at current
climate temperatures, whereas water vapor can and does. Noncondensing greenhouse gases,
which account for 25% of the total terrestrial greenhouse effect, thus serve to provide the stable
temperature structure that sustains the current levels of atmospheric water vapor and clouds via
feedback processes that account for the remaining 75% of the greenhouse effect. Without the
radiative forcing supplied by CO2 and the other noncondensing greenhouse gases, the terrestrial
greenhouse would collapse, plunging the global climate into an icebound Earth state.”
You know it’s funny, This is a correct statement for the most part. What’s total BS is that Co2 is the cause of the modern warm period, it’s the 75% water vapor, and not the changes to Co2.
Water vapor is the means the planet regulates daily min temp to dew point.
A 98% correlation.
https://micro6500blog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/upload.php?item=195
I think the skeptics need to find a way to argue against the Lacis paper. Do they say if you remove all the CO2, the earth won’t cool much, will cool much more, will warm, or what? Then use physics to back up your answer. Lacis says when you remove CO2, the cooling causes reduced H2O through colder air holding less vapor, which is a water vapor feedback causing even more cooling, and there is also an albedo feedback that helps cool it even further as more of the surface becomes ice covered. If skeptics have an alternative scenario, we haven’t yet seen one published. I think they’ve got nothing.
The issue is that the Lacis paper relates to very very long time scales. This does not imply that CO2 is the major control knob on timescales of decades to centuries
Mod’s that is the wrong url, this is the correct one.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/relh_dewpoint.png
“You know it’s funny, This is a correct statement for the most part. What’s total BS is that Co2 is the cause of the modern warm period, it’s the 75% water vapor, and not the changes to Co2.
Water vapor is the means the planet regulates daily min temp to dew point.
A 98% correlation.”
micro: I’ve many times told you, you state the obvious.
(there is a basic rule of thumb for calculating an overnight min temp (McKenzies method) that states:
Tmin = 1/2(Tmax+Td) – K
where K+ local constant (stn behaviour with given wind/cloud)
Tmax from current day.
Supposing no air-mass change.
So of course Dp is correlated FFS
The GHE due to CO2 runs in parallel and cannot be similarly calculated
So apart from the usual…..
Yes, very funny indeed….
That graph shows increasing RH.
This study doesn’t….
http://sci-hub.bz/10.1038/nature06207
“We identify a significant global-scale increase in
surface SPECIFIC humidity that is attributable mainly to human
influence. Specific humidity is found to have increased in response
to rising temperatures, with RELATIVE humidity remaining approximately
CONSTANT.”
Neither des this…..
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI3816.1
“During 1976–2004, global changes in surface RH are SMALL (within 0.6% for absolute values), although DECREASING trends of −0.11% ∼ −0.22% decade−1 for global oceans are statistically significant.
Of course SH is expected to go up with warming, and RH stay about the same.
Can you provide a (working) link to data/code please?
Same as it was. But I’m a nice guy. http://sourceforge.net/projects/gsod-rpts/
All the reports and the code are there.
What is Td?
Because it doesn’t matter!!!!!!!!!!!!
:)
And I keep explaining why it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t make it past the years of indoctrination.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/1980-series1.png
This is better picture of dew point and rel humidity. What happened was when the AMP went positive in 1999/2000 it move more warm water into the the NH, the water vapor from it blows inland and that was where the step in temps came from. And you can see rel humidity is dropping over the modern period.
Should be AMO
I seem to have lost a comment to Tony Banton – and in which he insisted that he has a bigger dick. A reply – btw – full of vituperation and disparagement at my modest comment saying that no – his insistence on talking CO2 is both irrelevant and uninteresting – and no I wasn’t going to do it because of the intellectual inflexibility of the global warming zealot.
https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/29/the-threat-of-climate-change/#comment-839513
My claim was that I had sufficient physics for greenhouse gases – and that is not really a big call. One can agree broadly with the simple physics of CO2 – but there are far more modern physics that suggest that things are a little more complex than Tony Banton suspects. Lacis likewise is hilarious because he insists that there isn’t a bigger picture.
I asked you – Tony – where is CO2 in this?
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1190450334404560
RIE, you keep using the word “hilarious” for the Lacis paper without explaining why you think it is wrong in showing that removing all the CO2 makes the earth colder. Why does that result surprise you so much?
micro:
“Same as it was. But I’m a nice guy. ”
Congrats and so am I
Sorry but I’ve not long come across you sky-dragon slaying so if that link is elsewhere I’ve missed it.
Suffice to say the link above didn’t work for me.
“What is Td?”
T dew
BTW: K is an integer, normally between 1 and 5.
“”The GHE due to CO2 runs in parallel and cannot be similarly calculated”
Because it doesn’t matter!!!!!!!!!!!!
:)”
Of course it doesn’t matter FFS.
That is what the F*ing McKenzie calc says !!
The CO2 bit is inherent in the calculation re the k part !!!!!!!!!!!
The main determinant (by a long way) being the humidity as CO2 is buried in the baseline from which the above calc goes forward, BUT take enough CO2 away and then the whole 1/2(tmax-td) bit would become invalid.
Like I keep trying to tell you – there can be (and is) both going on.
Just because the H2O forcing is most apparent doesn’t mean that the whole thing isn’t supported (at current terrestrial levels) by CO2.
It is.
Thanks for the working link.
Your graphs show considerable rise in min temp anomalies since the ’70’s.
Consistent with global warming theory.
However your RelHum calc does not chime with the literature.
There you go.
Go for it!
Astound the world with your discovery.
Robert:
“and in which he insisted that he has a bigger dick.”
You don’t seem to be that clever at English comprehension despite your self professed mastery of physics beyond all others
My exact words where (in response to your appeal to (your) authority)….
“So whose dick is biggest then? (Rhetorical)”
That is a question (hence the (?)).
Not a statement.
The (rhetorical) part was me expecting you to proclaim that yours is as that seems to be your general MO.
And if you use language like …
“I’m going to talk about your tiny little intellectual pretensions? Naw.”
Than you deserve all you get my friend.
That is the comment of nasty-mouthed braggart – but typical of the genre I’ve found.
From your link to that well know denialist Ole Humlum’s climate4u site….
“Cooling in the early record is not explicable in any manifestation of global warming theory.”
But, but what cooling? – that in not what this graph depicts….
And it is from another arch denialist Bob Tisdale (of WUWT fame).
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/figure-26.png
curryja: The issue is that the Lacis paper relates to very very long time scales. This does not imply that CO2 is the major control knob on timescales of decades to centuries
Some one wrote that the CO2 is more like an on/off switch and the H2O more like a volume control. However, the system is not much like an electronic circuit, and the analogies are misleading.
Is there an actual scientific case that without CO2 all of the water would freeze, even in summer daytime, at Earthly insolation?
What a long and clumsy thread – and getting more tedious and fruitless by the moment. The problem with you Tony is that you never say anything that could be remotely construed as showing any willingness or capacity to indulge in a scientific discourse. Merely a claim to 97% consensus and a litany of climate denier calumny. Along with some vague allusion to old, white guy politics and moral turpitude. I will have to report you to my lord and master President Trump.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/argo-to-december-2016.jpg
But you did supply a truncated Argo plot from Bob Tisdale and declared ‘what cooling’. Thanks for that.
To quote myself – the oceans are by far the greatest part of Earth’s energy storage – and the Argo record gives us a real sense of whether the planet is warming or cooling – or both at different times.
Here I will give you the link again in case you missed it. https://watertechbyrie.com/2017/02/18/21st-century-climate-data-gives-new-insight/
Now you might try closing the energy budget with the other data sources.
Jim D: Lacis says when you remove CO2, the cooling causes reduced H2O through colder air holding less vapor, which is a water vapor feedback causing even more cooling, and there is also an albedo feedback that helps cool it even further as more of the surface becomes ice covered.
That makes CO2 one influence alongside others, not “THE” control knob. Calling it “THE” control knob is the kind of exaggeration that has characterized the CO2-AGW alarmism from the start. And it is completely incidental to the public policy debates about anthropogenic CO2.
MM, it is by far the dominant forcing change of the last century with other GHGs and aerosols a distant second and third, and the sun and volcanoes not even in the frame. The warming is not keeping up with the net forcing change either, as shown by a significantly positive imbalance and the rise rate of the OHC.
Jim, such nonsense.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/1997-daily-cooling-sample-zoom-with-inset1.png
Extend the high cooling rate down to the right, till it crosses the a vertical line when radiation starts rising rapidly, and see how much colder it would get without water vapor reducing the cooling rate.
That is the dynamic range the regulating effect of the system has, about 15F at that location.
There could be 15F more worth of co2 forcing, and the temp would be the same.
All of your other points are typical fake science. Both toa balance and OHC aren’t well measured, and toa balance isn’t even possible, the surface is not symmetrical in lat or lon.
I am not sure what you are saying and I don’t have the patience to sort it out.
Of course you don’t, and that’s the problem.
Not my problem.
And I’m not talking about patience.
I pointed out those are clouds/fog (100% RH) slowing down the cooling rate weeks ago, and don’t have the patience to go through all that again.
You can’t do this thru fog and clouds. https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/ic434_11122010_excellent_ps.jpg
That would not have been the scene at your station, which is the point.
That was taken at the scene of of my station.
Not after the RH reached 100% I would bet. Your mirrors/lenses would have clouded up at that point, or was the RH sensor wrong?
No, I have a heater on the lens, because it gets wet because it’s pointed at -50 or -100F space. See you don’t know wtf you’re talking about.
100% RH is fog or cloud. Any questions?
Then maybe it’s 99% because there is not fog, and the outgoing radiation level drops by 2/3rds
Mist has that effect.
When are you going to actually base anything you say on opening your eyes? Why don’t you get yourself an ir thermometer and a weather station and then sit out all night the next clear night and take some readings. Instead of just making stuff up? You see, I’ve done that. And you havent.
The effect you are seeing is from mist. Maybe you don’t see it, but any droplets have an enormous effect on IR and account for what you are seeing. Clear air just doesn’t do that to the IR. Try the same thing on a dry-air night. You must have them there. I bet the IR just continues down until dawn.
Jim, I have gone out after the cooling rate has dropped in the middle of the night, with my ir thermometer and it is about the same temp. It is not warm.
In your case, the water vapor (dew point) probably did not change, the RH is responding to the temperature not vapor change. How do you explain the sudden IR jump without cloud droplets? I should have asked this first.
That is it regulating cooling. I think it is 15u ir from water condescending above about 70% rel humidity and that interacts with co2. At the same time the optical window is still open to space. But whatever the cause, it is regulating cooling to dew point.
OK, so now you agree water is condensing and affecting IR. Where dos the CO2 come in?
It doesn’t. And I never said there wasn’t condensation, that’s what dew is. It just starts well below 100% rel humidity. There isn’t any fog, nor are there clouds.
Dew doesn’t really change the IR that much, so what are you saying changes the IR so much?
blobs of water, little tiny spherical lenses. Or it could be just a resonance at 15u between water and co2.
Also, it doesn’t really matter why(it does, but that’s another debate), it is a measurement.
What do you think happens at high rel humidity levels? At some point, water has to be condensing out. Now I’ll also point out we get a lot of dew, prior to the slowing of the cooling rate.
But it has nothing to do with clouds, how many time do I have to tell you I’ve stood out side looking up, and it was still clear.
It is an atm effect near the surface.
It does not slow down until air temps near rel humidity, here it needs to be greater than 70 to 80%. I don’t have data from but a few locations, but they all do about the same thing with regards to cooling rate.
But deserts and the tropics prove this out, the tropics cool slowly because of the water vapor, deserts cool quickly because of the lack of water vapor.
The enthalpy in the US SW deserts, is half the average of the tropics, yet it loses twice the energy at night.
It slows down only at 100% from what you have shown so far (and you seem to be saying the timing is just coincidence). Until you show such a thing at well below 100% where you can also establish there were no elevated clouds, I will not think you have anything surprising. Call me skeptical.
Are you blind or just don’t know how to read a graph?
Color blind maybe?
It starts dropping around 70%
Find a night where it doesn’t reach 100%, and we can go from there. Just because it reaches 100% later at the surface doesn’t mean it is not already 100% above. The trends in these nights are towards surface saturation. These are not clear cases at all.
It’s plainly clear. And it plainly starts slowing before 100%.
Your words there say it needs a high RH to happen. Why is that necessary is all I am asking?
And I already answered it.
You said you don’t need high RH, but your text said you do. It is contradictory.
I said it didn’t have to be 100%, look at the data, it’s right there!!!!
Here’s temp and humidity showing the same decay in cooling rate
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/annotatedtemphumidity.png
This is from the other side of the planet from the other data.
Why are you surprised that the cooling rate slows down later in the night? It’s an exponential decay governed by the sky temperature. Do yo expect the cooling to be linear through the night or what?
Yes, did you read the paper I linked to the study?
No, what is the point.
That the nightly cooling rate changes, and they don’t know why. That it has 2 separate cooling rates. Exactly what I am saying. I intentionally down played it, because I wanted to see who the fools were, who would react like you did. Who would be the deniers of the data, who can’t analyze a circuit based on measurements. You and Tony B rose to the top of the pile here. Got some more on Facebook, fools.
It is all explained by known radiative transfer theory. Only you think you have to re-explain it, which is why I say what is the point? You have invented a mystery that doesn’t exist.
Only to people who won’t look at the evidence. The issue Jimmy, is you have a clue about any of this, other than what you copy and paste, and I’d be surprised you understand that. If you really want to continue your stupid nonsense, and least go read the paper.
You seem to realize that water vapor has a greenhouse effect, and that even when there isn’t much, in a desert, there is also a greenhouse effect due to both water vapor and CO2. What are you actually disputing?
The control knob is water vapor.
Plus CO2.
Does it look like co2 matters? How does warmth accumulate if it isn’t left in the morning min temp? And min temp has a 98% correlation with dew point, doesn’t leave much room for co2.
You don’t change the correlation by adding a constant background, which is what CO2 provides.
But it’s supposed to be changing, causing the am temp be higher. And it’s not doing that.
So you will believe it has an effect if someone shows you that daily minimum temperatures are higher? How about maximum or mean?
What, you want to show me data that the 140 million surface station records I already doesn’t show?
You can find studies by people who have done the global spatial average as easily as I can. If you don’t believe them, I can’t help you.
https://climateequilibrium.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/josh-knobs.jpg
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/therealcontrolknobof-temperature.png
While CO2 has less or no variability you won’t see its effect in this type of plot, but a significant fraction of the total greenhouse effect is from CO2. CO2 provides 30 W/m2 downwards at the surface in a standard clear US atmosphere, for example with 230 W/m2 from water vapor (see MODTRAN to quantify this). As a fraction of the net it is even larger.
Modtran is being used wrong. The atm is dynamic, and as its used, it is analyzing a static average. It will never detect this that way.
You can take any sounding and MODTRAN will give you the correct surface flux for that profile. If you don’t believe radiative transfer models what do you have left?
No, I believe in in radiative transfer, I’ve gotten a job based on that 40 years ago. What I’m pointing out, as a simulation expert for 14 years, MODTRAN is being used wrong,and interpreted wrong. As the data shows the radiative properties change throughout the night, a single static analysis does not capture this dynamics.
Do you think models like this have not been verified against real soundings? An error of 30 W/m2 due to ignoring CO2 would show up, plus from the measured spectrum, they can even see the significant contribution of the 15 micron band. If you saw a spectrum would you believe in the CO2 effect?
It’s obvious that they haven’t. And do you think I haven’t seen a spectrum? Thick.
If you see the 15 micron band in a spectrum, your whole argument falls apart, surely? Do you not think CO2 can contribute tens of W/m2 on any given clear night? If not, why not?
You shouldn’t be doing your observing pre-dawn. It makes much more sense to do it before it gets that cold and misty, maybe around midnight.
That’s just it Jim, it’s not misty, it’s dew. And the colder the better, there’s less thermal noise in the digital image.
I took over 40 hours of exposure, this is the best 18 hours. https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/09132009b_ps1900hires.jpg
OK, so you can’t tell whether some of that exposure had clouds or not?
Yes, it didn’t have any
The dominant driver in the last or any other century is the solar UV. And really it is a trigger for feedbacks in the Earth system. you have to account for natural variability.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/berkley-trend1.png
Jim D: MM, it is by far the dominant forcing change of the last century with other GHGs and aerosols a distant second and third, and the sun and volcanoes not even in the frame.
Again with the absurdities and exaggerations. a 40% increase in CO2 concentration (280 to 400 ppm) has possibly produced part of a 0.4% increase in global mean temp (1.25K on a base of about 288K). Daily and seasonal variations in local temp caused by changes in insolation vastly exceed that. Even without CO2 the Equatorial oceans would never freeze and places like the Arctic and Lake Erie would continue to experience seasonally related increases and decreases in ice cover — unless Earth orbit around the sun changed dramatically.
CO2 is not THE “control knob”.
MM, we know that CO2 is not the control knob for the Ice Ages. There it just serves to amplify an effect. The point is that in the last few millennia, the Milankovitch mechanism has only provided cooling, while CO2 has provided a positive forcing of an amount that explains the temperature rise because a 40% increase is a significant change in surface forcing in the paleo context.
http://descentintotheicehouse.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/forcing1.jpg
Hi Jim, I’ve got a compromise that maybe works here.
You say: The point is that in the last few millennia, the Milankovitch mechanism has only provided cooling…
I hope all agree that M-cycles are extremely weak and only effective at their reinforcement points at tipping an unstable accumulation glaciation, or in the opposite phase, allowing interglacials to fall vulnerable to any circumstance (or combination of events) that could cause a sudden GMST drop, i.e. super-volcano, asteroid, DO event, pause in the AMOC, solar minimum, whatever over a multi-millennial window.
The role of CO2 is a positive feedback just like ice albedo. In addition we have water vapor positive feedback, and possibly, restricted meridonal heat circulation as a positive feedback. This all makes thing unstable in the ice age. The question is whether that instability carries at higher temperatures. Do the feedbacks remain positive?
1) CO2 is not a positive feedback when the sea neutralizing it rather than emitting or absorbing due to temperature dependent solubility.
2) Once the Arctic is not ice capped year-round ice albedo falls off in effect as wells as changes in circulation.
3) Water vapor is already high so its increase may not be as effective.
4) Water vapor becomes a negative feedback when it is bringing latent heat to the TOA.
5) Increased vapor could also mean increased clouds, increased precipitation in places, and perhaps in polar regions, adding to snow accumulations.
The point is that if restricted meridonal heat transport due to plate tectonics is a major reason for the ice age in conjunction with CO2, instead of CO2 doing it all, then there is a good chance a little increase in CO2 will produce only an increase close to its non-feedback amplified 1.0-1.2C per doubling.
What will we do if that is the case? Go to the beach and have a good time I suppose.
Ron, I think I am going to disagree with every one of your points.
“1) CO2 is not a positive feedback when the sea neutralizing it rather than emitting or absorbing due to temperature dependent solubility.”
No, warming water also outgasses CO2. It contributes in a positive sense.
2) Once the Arctic is not ice capped year-round ice albedo falls off in effect as wells as changes in circulation.”
Arctic sea-ice and continental snow cover changes still provide a positive feedback, even if it is smaller than during the Ice Age transitions.
3) Water vapor is already high so its increase may not be as effective.”
Physics says it is just as effective as the temperature warms a few degrees,
4) Water vapor becomes a negative feedback when it is bringing latent heat to the TOA.”
The lapse rate feedback is negative and accounted for in the standard model. It requires the hot spot, but with that being weak it may not be as negative as expected.
5) Increased vapor could also mean increased clouds, increased precipitation in places, and perhaps in polar regions, adding to snow accumulations.”
RH stays the same, so the cloud amount is the same. In the short term, as land warms faster, RH may decrease leading to less clouds and a positive feedback that way.
Jim D: MM, we know that CO2 is not the control knob for the Ice Ages.
that is a step in the right direction.
CO2 is not THE “control knob” ever. When Spring turns to Summer in the Arctic and the ice warms enough to start evaporating and subliming, the temperature stabilizes within a narrow range. Wherever there is water, the water evaporation limits temperature rise, and the condensation limits temperature fall.
The Lacis et al paper has some merit, but the phrase “the control knob” is at best highly misleading.
Yes!!!! progress is being made :)
Willis (and others) have shown strong limits on warming from water feedback, and I’ve shown there are limits from water to cooling. Both are far, far larger than co2. As long as we’re warm enough for the water cycle to run, co2 does very little.
Micro, that’a a fine clown dance Jimbo has inveigled you into.
You are aware you are not going to get anywhere attempting to debate with Jimbo, as he has zero interest in the elucidation of any scientific issue, I hope.
Jimbo isn’t here to debate, he’s here purely and simply to wind you up. That’s his sole interest in the blog, he is utterly uninterested in any aspect of climate science, he has made up his mind, he regards anyone with different views as intellectually and morally inferior, and thus considers it amusing to play mindgames with them.
You need to peruse this exposition on the subject by the most estimable and much-missed MemoryVault.
http://libertygibbert.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/dobson-dykes-and-diverse-disputes/
Read it and all will be made clear, and you will never need to waste bandwith playing silly buggers with Jimbo or his ilk ever again.
Yes, but I was planning on running him over with the clown car………
CATWEAZLE666
You’re explanation of Jim D(enier)’s motives and agenda describes his motives and behaviour perfectly.
CO2 and GHG changes that largely result from geological changes explain 99% of the last 100 million or billion years, the rest being Milankovitch that can only matter when it is cold enough or perhaps the occasional asteroid hit. You can claim to not understand paleoclimate, but you should look into it if you are interested in this stuff. What we are doing now is comparable to what volcanic eras did in the past but on a faster time scale.
Jim D, I know you have been at this day and night for years and I am not likely to change your mind on any facts. But I think #1 is so clear that perhaps we are saying the same thing and just fighting semantics.
“1) CO2 is not a positive feedback when the sea neutralizing it rather than emitting or absorbing due to temperature dependent solubility.”
No, warming water also outgasses CO2. It contributes in a positive sense.
I have seen the term feedback stretched into many forms. I see a climate feedback as a self-reinforcing response to temperature change. For example, the cold makes ice sheets grow. The larger ice sheets make it colder in a reinforcing loop. And the opposite is true. So feedbacks are reversible. During the Quaternary ice age, before burning of fossil fuel, CO2 in the air followed the global temperature, lagging it by several hundred years before intersecting with its new temperature dependent equilibrium. So cooling begat less CO2, which begat more cooling until an other forces overpowered that reinforcement. The same occurred in the warming phases into interstadials and interglacials.
Now with burning of fossil fuel, CO2 is the new forcing. The environment sees it as way out of equilibrium and wants to restore that equilibrium by absorbing it. There are influences against full restoration, including temperature rise and saturation (or loading) rate.
I realize you believe the temperature is sure to go sky high and the ocean to be an acid lake in the blink of an eye but at least we can agree there is a different dynamic with CO2 here than in the paleo times.
Ron, the main difference from paleo is the rate at which we are adding CO2 compared to how natural volcanoes or methane sources can do it. In the end, the effect is the same. CO2 resists earth’s cooling, like damming a river, the warming is like the river level rising to overcome the extra resistance.
Jim, I could be wrong but I believe volcanoes have not been controlling CO2 for many millions of years. In the Pleistocene it’s the ocean and moist soil saturation equilibrium.
Ron, exactly, it was the Permian-Triassic transition and a few times around the Eocene where CO2 increased. Most of the last 50 million years, it has been decreasing due to mountain building, especially the Himalayas, and other sequestering effects, so this is how we cooled into the glacial period. Fifty million years ago was probably one of the warmest periods in the last billion years, and it was an iceless hothouse with forests in Greenland, etc. CO2 levels may have been 1000 ppm. I think more skeptics need to become familiar with paleoclimate changes. It’s a really interesting topic, apart from being background for the types of climate change to expect.
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/2001/20120294
“But you did supply a truncated Argo plot from Bob Tisdale and declared ‘what cooling’. Thanks for that.”
Robert:
Don’t mention it.
It’s always a pleasure to put a denialist in touch with correct data – even if this is from another naysayer.
Oh, and I think you will find (if you just simply look) that the period that your (Humlum’s), err, graph shows cooling in part of the period that Tisdale’s shows overall warming.
Notably 2005 to 2008
Say what does Tisdales graph show from 2005 to 2008 ?
Suggestion:
For Tisdales benefit and that of the greater delialist “cause”, do get in touch with Tisdale and put him right.
He’s missing a trick (sarc)
“To quote myself – the oceans are by far the greatest part of Earth’s energy storage – and the Argo record gives us a real sense of whether the planet is warming or cooling – or both at different times.”
Yes, yes correct,
Which is why you (Humlum’s) data is “incorrect “and this is correct …
https://static.skepticalscience.com/pics/1_OHCdoublesinrecentdecades-Gleckler2016.gif
“Now you might try closing the energy budget with the other data sources.”
OK do that – What is causing deep ocean heating then Robert?
Jim D: Most of the last 50 million years, it [CO2] has been decreasing due to mountain building…
Yes, rock weathering. This has made the oceans more alkaline, neutralizing CO2, (carbonic acid), by shifting the equilibrium of the oceans capacity for aqueous bicarbonate. Also, temperature shifts the equilibrium of dissolved gases, as we all know warm soda goes flat faster than cold.
The Pleistocene likely saw little change in ocean PH or volcanic activity thus the main variable was the glacial/interglacial swings in global temp. This explains the CO2 tracking, while lagging, temperature for the last four cycles seen in high resolution ice cores. Richard Alley and many of the other climate rock stars forget to mention this. Al Gore blew this too in his movie when he displayed the graph in his Nobel Prize winning movie.
The biggest question in my mind is not how hot it was during the super-continent of Pangea but whether the breaking up of Pangea affected the merdional heat flux. Antarctica planted itself on the previously unoccupied south pole and the north pole got isolated by the Bering Strait. Javier and many other scientists who are not cashing in on the CO2 only train believe these restrictions in global circulation had a hand in cooling the poles and allowing ice albedo feedback to attract Earth into the ice age, along with CO2. If this is the case your extensive recitation of knowledge of paleoclimate is missing the most important puzzle piece.
micro6500
“The control knob is water vapor.”
Jim D
“Plus CO2.”
micro:
I keep trying to tell you that as Jim says IT’S BOTH.
What you see is the everyday and large, if you like “control knob” on WV AT THE SURFACE. Why is it a surprise to you that you CANNOT see the *insulating* effect of CO2?
Could it because it does not precipitate out as dew/mist/fog? (rhetorical)
The Earth’s total GHE is +33/34C.
Which is due to both non-condensing GHG’s and H20.
You cannot have H2O in the atmosphere (to any sig degree) without CO2.
CO2 IS the “control knob” in the sense that it regulates the amount of H2O in the atmosphere.
It woud NOT be there unless CO2 were present.
Why??
Because it would rain/snow out at the temps that would pertain were it not!
Leading to increased albedo and a further -ve (ice-ball maintaining) feedback.
That you see what you do is not surprise – it is like saying that gravity cant be making me weigh 12 stone as I can see I weigh less when I diet. So it’s food!
It is the basic underlying FUNDAMENTAL.
You will not see it the way you are looking.
It is seen at the TOA in that Earth’s radiating temp as seen from space is 255K, corresponding to TSI.
Yet we are nice and snug at a GMST of 288/289K.
Without CO2 we would not be.
It IS the “control knob” because it CONTROLS (along with CH4, O3, N2O ) how much H2O can exist in the atmosphere and not because it regulates radiation in a 4 hour cycle.
As you see yourself it rains/snows/fogs/mists/dews.
CO2 does neither of those.
It has/is lifting the BASE at which WV does however
I know you will never give up your Sky-dragon slaying *theory*, however it is ultimately futile in doing so.
There are no Sky-dragons.
And they therefore don’t need slaying.
.. to which in reply he insisted…
Jim – it is hilarious because it is far too simple to base your entire view of climate on.
So it surprises you that removing all the CO2 creates an ice world? Is that the funny part? Or is it that the result is so obvious that it is hilarious? Just trying to get your drift because it could be either extreme from what you have said so far.
Oh for God’s sake. the complete removal of CO2 any time soon is a moot point. It has no significance in the real climate. And there is a bigger picture believe it or not. It is hilarious to spend so much time on this idealised thought experiment – and ignore the big picture – including data from the most precise and comprehensive monitoring system ever assembled.
Not an answer, but let’s go on from there. It wasn’t just academic because it was in response to something Lindzen said in a congressional testimony where he misled congress as a so-called expert. This kind of thing needs correcting on the record.
When does this is a totally pointless exercise become an answer. I checked Lindzen made an off the cuff remark and the answer depends on the time frame. Immediate or long-term? Immediate – very little. longer term – I don’t care because it has no practical relevance to anything real.
It is simply a diversion from real climate issues – the ones you refuse to deal with.
The forcing is changing by at least 0.3 W/m2 per decade. This is not long-term change, it is now as we speak. It is not small as one decade of this change represents the sum of what the sun can do going into a solar lull. The land response is fast, and the Arctic response is even faster. These are warming at 0.3 C per decade and nearly 1 C per decade respectively. Slow is in your mind. These changes are real, fast and proceeding based on what we do now.
0.3 is about right – based on emissions – but it is less clear that the world is co-operating – http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13428. The instantaneous rate of increase is 1E-9W/m2. It is a very small change set against the large natural variability.
This is as well a more realistic projection of future emissions – negative in agriculture and forestry and neutral in energy.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2017/02/15/the-climate-problem-and-the-solution/
The raw net change in TOA in the annual cycle is +/-10W/m2 – the anomalies this century are +/- 1W/m2.
It has been assumed that greenhouse gas forcing accumulates at TOA in an energy imbalance. A more realistic scenario is that due to large natural variability – the planet overshoots greenhouse gas warming. The planet retains extra heat as it cools back to a higher equilibrium temperature.
You will have to go into a little more detail on why you imagine that the land response is fast. You cannot at any rate dismiss the drought artefact so easily.
Your surface temperature changes are not quite right.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/berkley-trend1.png
Figure 1: GISS global temperature with trends – source: Dr Kevin Cowtan’s Trend Calculator
But surface temp is the least of the problem.
The current trend from GISTEMP is about 0.17 C per decade. Yours looks like it is about 20 years old. Where do you dig these up?
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1950/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.2
30-year CRUTEM4 land trend is about 0.3 C per decade.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vgl/from:1950/mean:12/plot/crutem4vgl/from:1985/trend
Obviously the land responds faster to forcing changes because it has a lower thermal inertia than the ocean, so that its warming rate is double the ocean’s is consistent with external forcing rather than anything originating with the ocean. Big trouble for your ideas there.
Land isn’t really warming https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/min-max1.png
This says it is. Where’s your map?
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/gistemp/NMAPS/tmp_GHCN_GISS_ERSSTv4_1200km_Anom112_2007_2016_1951_1980_100__180_90_0__2_/amaps.png
Climate shifts at 20 to 30 year intervals – and there are 4 of these in the 20th. If you want to make even a partial accounting – proper start and ends point are required.
And it was graphed the other day at Dr. Cowtan’s Trend Calculator.
For the future – the shifts every 20 to 30 years are phase shifts to regimes with different means and variances. Over time the result is climate. It makes no sense at all to graph across regimes and declare a uniform trend.
Bottom line is that until you gain an appreciation of the scope and depth of natural variability you will continue to be wildly misguided. Can we see that happening?
https://watertechbyrie.com/2017/02/11/a-primer-for-climate-science-deniers/
And the land trend is not only double but also leads the ocean, consistent with external forcing rather than anything happening first in the ocean.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vgl/mean:240/mean:120/plot/crutem4vgl/from:1985/trend/plot/hadsst3gl/mean:240/mean:120/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1985/trend
How do you persist in the face of such crushing evidence?
Land surfaces heat and cool rapidly – but the atmospheric temperature is maintained with ocean heat storage. The difference is that there is less latent heat flux at the surface and more sensible heat – which is what is measured by thermometers. Obviously.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem4vgl/mean:120/from/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:120
Ha ha – that could be my graph. You don’t have evidence Jim you have loony tunes interpretations of wood for dimwits graphs.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-290.pdf
The are fundamental physics here.
As it is, the land is heating rapidly all the time (not cooling), and it started before the ocean. The temperatures are separating under a steadily growing forcing because of the relative thermal inertias in no surprise to anyone who understands daily and seasonal land/water warming contrasts.
That’s the Jim we know – any desperate narrative to save the meme?
But let me get this right. There is no change in latent heat flux at the surface – or if there is it doesn’t affect the surface thermometer readings – or that drought has no intensified since the divergence became noticeable?
“Updated precipitation and streamflow data and the self-calibrated PDSI_pm all show consistent drying during 1950–2012 over most Africa, East and South Asia, southern Europe, eastern Australia, and many parts of the Americas. While these regional drying trends resulted primarily from precipitation changes related to multi-decadal oscillations in Pacific sea surface temperatures, rapid surface warming and associated increases in surface vapor pressure deficit since the 1980s have become an increasingly important cause of widespread drying over land.” http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-016-1705-2
And I presume that surface warming refers to land and sea.
Here – you might need this.
http://climate.ncsu.edu/edu/k12/.breezes
OK, so because the land is warming faster than the ocean, it is also getting drier and less cloudy and less rainy. Why is it warming faster? Low thermal inertia. This is why sea breezes exist, and why summers are hotter over continents. If you subject the earth to an increasing forcing, of course the land will warm faster than the ocean, at least until their temperature difference is limited by the atmospheric flow, which doesn’t seem to have happened yet, but you don’t escape the lower humidities that causes.
Jim D: So it surprises you that removing all the CO2 creates an ice world?
Would that happen? Summer daytime insolation on the Equatorial oceans (ca 1440 W/m^2 at noon) would melt a lot of ice, evaporate a lot of water, heat the O2 and N2, and carry heat poleward — at least with the current sun and current orbit. Exactly what could be affected by then adding 280 ppm CO2 is not much.
About the only thing you can really say is that if something cooled the Earth so much that the Equatorial oceans did freeze, there would still be an effect from the unfrozen CO2.
To repeat myself, there is some value in reading Lacis et al, but the phrase “the control knob” for CO2 is a disaster impeding understanding.
Jim D: Why is it warming faster? Low thermal inertia.
Well, “low thermal intertia” is another name for the phenomenon, but hardly an explanation. The best explanation to date is the lack of evaporable water on dry land. Compare West N. Africa to the offshore stretch of the Atlantic ocean: for the ocean, evaporable water absorbs radiation and evaporates, keeping the temperature of the surface cooler than it would be if it were dry — in those locales, insolation and CO2 are nearly equal, so the “control” (but not a nob, as on an electrical circuit) accounting for the difference is the nonlinear water vapor response to temperature increase, and the transport of latent heat up into the troposphere.
Land by virtue of having less water always has a low thermal inertia (marshes are an exception). It therefore always warms faster subject to any forcing, whether from daytime warming, the arrival summer season or increasing GHGs. Thermal inertia is a unifying concept in explaining land-water warming differences whatever the cause,
Lower soil water moisture means that thermometers read high – but that’s just an artefact of changing latent heat flux. It means nothing in terms of the global energy budget. Land is not warming faster than oceans – it is a monitoring artefact. It happens at 2m but not in the troposphere.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-290.pdf
We live at 2 m, so that is what matters. Those who say it doesn’t change the troposphere have to explain the discontinuity because there are lapse rate constraints that tie the tropospheric temperature to the surface.
Jim D: Land by virtue of having less water always has a low thermal inertia (marshes are an exception). It therefore always warms faster subject to any forcing, whether from daytime warming, the arrival summer season or increasing GHGs. Thermal inertia is a unifying concept in explaining land-water warming differences whatever the cause,
Thermal inertia is explained by the evapotranspiration of water; it is not the thermal inertia that explains the transport of heat by evapotranspiration. From the wording of that paragraph, you seem to have taken another step back from the claim that CO2 is THE “control knob”. With 3/4 the Earth surface being water, and much additional land that is wet from marsh or rainfall, you begin I think to see that water plays a strong role in controlling temperature.
We live at 2m? Now there’s an argument. Yes – all well and good for the nightly weather report.
The surface thermometers miss latent energy – now you could compensate by using humidity to determine an equivalent temperature and eliminate the drought artefact. Maybe not.
The land and the oceans warm the atmosphere. But the atmosphere is still a negligible part of the energy budget,
Thermal inertia plays an important role in moderating climate change. This is why there is an imbalance in the first place. The imbalance would be zero if the ocean was able to keep up with the forcing change, but we end up with a deficit called the imbalance. It only goes away when the ocean catches up. Thermal inertia is more a function of the absorbed heat than the latent heat. Latent heat is just one component of lost energy, but the largest of those is emitted IR, which applies to land too, so it doesn’t explain thermal inertia. A shallow pool has low thermal inertia despite a lot of evaporation. It’s the depth of the ocean than gives it a high thermal inertia.
There was a nominal increase in greenhouse gas forcing of 0.864W/m2 since 1990 – although the real world isn’t cooperating (Keenan et al 2016). The global warming theory is that a very, very small increase in greenhouse gas forcing – an instantaneous rate of increase of 0.00000001W/m2 (Watts per metre squared) – caused an energy imbalance of some 0.5W/m2 to accumulate at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) – more energy in than out – over time due to the thermal inertia of the planet.
If you put a candle under a pot – water in it will warm over time until the energy losses equal the energy input from the candle. The time delay is a result of thermal inertia. If you overheat the pot with a blowtorch – which you then take away – the pot will cool to the equilibrium temperature. Of course, the planet is many orders of magnitude more complex. There are multiple sources of energy in the system – certainly in the short term much greater than the instantaneous change in greenhouse gas forcing.
Extra heat from all sources – including the interior of the planet, fossil fuel burning, nuclear fission, solar radiance and – the big one – cloud radiative forcing – is retained in planetary systems as longwave emissions and shortwave reflectance adjusts to balance the global energy budget. Just like with the blowtorch – the system overshoots the mark and the planet cools to a new equilibrium.
The heat flux, for instance, from the interior alone is 0.09W/m2. Without extra greenhouse gases – this would just continue out into space. With greenhouse gases – a portion of this heat is retained in the system.
The secular change in TOA net flux this century this century is sufficient to explain changes in ocean heat. The parsimonious explanation is that there is no notable energy imbalance from greenhouse gases at TOA.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2017/02/18/21st-century-climate-data-gives-new-insight/
Another nail in the coffin. Even if we presume that only half of last ceturies warming was natural – that will be lost this century.
In the first half of this century emissions will go into reverse. Rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are a blip in history.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2017/02/15/the-climate-problem-and-the-solution/
How did they get it all so wrong?
“It happens at 2m but not in the troposphere.”
But it does.
Unless the surface has a sig inversion layer (it wont in summer) then that surface sensible heat will rise.
If the surface layer is conditionally unstable it will rise to a considerable height and develop Cu/Cb cloud which will additionally release LH into the trop.
This is the reason why upper tropospheric warming will occur in the Tropics, regardless of any cause of surface warming.
The drought artefact is the reduction in latent heat flux – and increase in sensible heat m. The heat is of course realised as water condenses at higher altitude. I don’t know what you are talking about.
Thermometers at 2m miss latent heat.
Jim D: It’s the depth of the ocean than gives it a high thermal inertia.
In this and other comments you are committed to an Earthly “water” that does not evaporate from the surfaces of oceans, marshes, cornfields and forest leaves; hence an Earthly “water” that never transfers the latent heat of phase change into the the near surface air, lower troposphere air or cloud condensation layer. No wonder that your Earthly “water” has no thermoregulatory effect. Can this Earthly “water” of yours absorb upwelling long-wave infrared-radiation?
All the chatter in this subthread is about “Climate change” not “the threat of climate change“. It’s irrelevant to addressing the issue this thread is about. It’s off topic. There are hundreds of CE threads on climate change, temperatures, CO2 etc. Why not, for once, focus on the threat of climate change – measured as economic impacts – as opposed to climate change and climate science?
If I were flippant I would call this missive – goodbye doofus’ and thanks for all the red herrings.
I am an engineer, hydrologist, environmental scientist. My skills are as a writer, hydrodynamic modeller, occasional science journalist and inveterate blogger. I have about a 100 followers. My friend who takes photos of flowers and beaches has 1000’s of followers and hundreds of 1000’s of views. I tell myself its apples and oranges and manage to be pleased for her. Who cares right? And you are only as good as your last idea. I have studied climate for 30 years – environmental science, policy and management nearly as long. All she has is a Nikon I bought for her birthday and an obsession with smartphones.
Economically the world is locked into a growth cycle – despite any and all reservations and interventions. Personally, I welcome a high growth planet. It brings resources to solve people and environment problems. The clearest way to economic growth is markets – and the biggest risk is market mismanagement.
Smart money is on trade and innovation in stable economies. Stability requires a disciplined approach to markets, government regulation and spending and reserve bank interest rates. There are rock solid numbers for monetary targets.
Economic growth – like a living system – requires energy. It is just as much vital for life as is water. Manage interest rates, moderate spending and taxes, prudential regulation, credibly balance budgets, write fair laws – and economic growth is the prize of a steady hand at the economic levers. Whole economies can collapse if these things get out of hand – which does less than nothing for global peace and development.
We can best help Africa, Asia, China and Ind¬¬ia – with open trade links and innovation. These are the bulwarks of liberal (in the original meaning) economic and social theory. Trade and Productivity. Personal freedom, robust democracies, personal property, privacy… In terms that were vouchsafed by God.
Smart money is on energy growth – strongly in non-OECD countries. Even the much vaunted Paris climate agreement envisaged an increase in energy emissions of 3.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide to 2030.
The alternative doofus vision involves narratives of moribund western economies – governed by corrupt corporations – collapsing under the weight of internal contradictions – leading to less growth, less material consumption, less CO2 emissions, less habitat destruction and a last late chance to stay within the safe limits of global ecosystems. And this is just in the ‘scholarly’ journals.
The biggest risk to the planet is not climate change but urban hipster doofus’ drawing up the wagons of doofus ideology. Their tactics are relentlessly personal in defence of an idée fixe. It’s the reason I gave up climate blogs – and not just of the urban doofus hipster variety.
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.” (Allinsky – Rules for Radicals)
They don’t seem capable of – or perhaps motivated to – marshalling honest or compelling argument. Suh as is required for a productive dialectic. They substitute relentless nitpicking. They seem to not much care for science or policy. Communication is one way and serves only to buttress their need to feel moral, intellectual and hip. Always better in a group. It stems from deep insecurity I presume. They have 4th rate brains at best. I was told yesterday I wasn’t good enough to waste James McWilliams time – by referencing actual science from a global leader in climate modelling. References he remotely sensed – unless he follows my comments at CE – hah 101 followers – which resulted in me giving him conniptions. I don’t want to play these games anymore. At some point you have to understand that the aim is not dialogue. It is to distract, trivialise and obscure. They are not worth the time and energy wasted. There are far more interesting and useful things to do. So goodbye doofus’ and thanks for the red herrings.
The great challenges for the 21st century are two monumental and related tasks. The restoration of grasslands, forests, rivers and oceans and the creation of prosperous, secure and resilient human communities. My great frustration is that for decades we have neglected these tasks for wild diversions around climate change. Land continues to degrade, forests are lost and deserts proliferate – flora and fauna populations are crashing. Good responses in the 21st century are technically, socially and economically complex and interconnected. There are no panaceas – as Elinor Ostrom often said – but the solutions to extreme environmental degradation over much of the planet brings immense benefits to people. The dream is of prosperous and resilient – resilience is a key to managing an inevitable climate risk – communities in rich and vibrant landscape.
If you are the chief hydrologist under a new guise, welcome back. I like your thoughts but you are overly pessimistic. forests are rebounding in the US Eastern rural ares. Rivers are flowing free as dams like Klamatha in CA, Elwa in OR and lots in the New England region are removed. Let the rivers flow unvexed to the sea. Buffalo are returning to the plains and more open areas restored. In fact that area is less populated than in the 1870s. So reason for optimism. We have plenty of work to do but Condors and river otters have returned to SF bay area.
We need to help poor areas become energy rich to raise those levels of industry and domestic consumption to stop burning wood and dung fires for cooking. Energy resources and optimism under freedomw and free markets can transform those areas with some controls to stop tragedy of the commons issues that devastated buffalo and salmen in US. But thanks for articulating an idealistic vision of recovering ecosystems. Not obsessing about carbon dioxide but fixing NOx SOx and mercury and sewage treatment. Lots to do but the pathways exist.
Scott
G’day buddy,
I agree entirely. I have written about US environments. The key is rich economies. But things still slip through the cracks.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2015/10/04/biological-abundance-and-economic-growth/
Chief Hydrologist was a Simpsons reference. I refuse to take myself too seriously. I am amused that the handle persists.
Robert styles himself in the blogosphere as a Chief Hydrologist. ‘Cecil Terwilliger (brother to Sideshow Bob) was Springfield’s Chief Hydrological and Hydrodynamical Engineer. He opined that this was a sacred vocation in some cultures. The more I thought about this the more it resonated with me. I am a hydrologist by training, profession and (much more) through a deep fascination with water in all its power and beauty. Given the importance of water to us practically and symbolically, there is more than an element of the sacred.’
I had much more fun with Captain Kangaroo on my blue pony in the early halycon days of the CE eSalon. Before the deluge of misrepresentation became just too trying.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/blue_horse.jpg
Cheers
One of the constant refrains was that I was a sanitation engineer. Yeah – no problem. Getting sewerage effluent out of my beloved Jervis Bay was why I became an engineer.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2014/06/23/reinvent-the-toilet/
Hope Captain Kangaroo and that blue horse Shibboleth
are still ridin’ the range ‘n kickin’ up their heels…yeyhah!
Shibboleth has had an honourable retirement. :)
Chief
By coincidence I was on holiday in Austria and the apartment we stayed in had a picture on the wall of that horse. I thought, ‘chief used to post that. I wonder what happened to him?’
The following day you resurfaced.
tonyb
Hi Tony
Good to hear from you. Shibboleth was given to me by someone here when I asked for a blue horse. it was love at first sight.
Cheers
As usual, no consideration given to the most severe result of recent (or future) climate change: another Ice Age. 12,000 years ago, there was 2 miles of ice above the site of Toronto, a mile or so above New England and much of northern Europe. Sea level was around 400 ft lower than today. A repeat would put severe stress on even our richest nations. Canada and Scandinavia would pretty much cease to exist.
The “major risks” cited by IPCC look pretty ludicrous, compared to what actually happened just 10,000 years ago. Cold is the killer.
Even if climate change caused by CO2 is real, there is nothing we can do about it, and the cost of fighting this Quixotic war is measured in multiples of the World’s GDP. We have far more pressing issues to solve with money.
Just How Much Does 1 Degree C Cost?
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/just-how-much-does-1-degree-c-cost/
BTW, the “science” behind these claims of CAGW are a joke.
Climate “Science” on Trial; The Smoking Gun Files
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/climate-science-on-trial-the-smoking-gun-files/
Large, abrupt climate changes have repeatedly affected much or all of the earth, locally reaching as much as 10°C change in 10 years. Available evidence suggests that abrupt climate changes are not only possible but likely in the future, potentially with large impacts on ecosystems and societies.
This report is an attempt to describe what is known about abrupt climate changes and their impacts, based on paleoclimate proxies, historical observations, and modeling. The report does not focus on large, abrupt causes—nuclear wars or giant meteorite impacts—but rather on the surprising new findings that abrupt climate change can occur when gradual causes push the earth system across a threshold. Just as the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light, the slow effects of drifting continents or wobbling orbits or changing atmospheric composition may “switch” the climate to a new state. And, just as a moving hand is more likely than a stationary one to encounter and flip a switch, faster earth-system changes—whether natural or human-caused—are likely to increase the probability of encountering a threshold that triggers a still faster climate shift.
We do not yet understand abrupt climate changes well enough to predict them. The models used to project future climate changes and their impacts are not especially good at simulating the size, speed, and extent of the past changes, casting uncertainties on assessments of potential future changes. Thus, it is likely that climate surprises await us.
When orbital wiggles and rising greenhouse gases warmed the earth from the last ice age, proxy records show that smooth changes were interspersed with abrupt coolings and warmings, wettings and dryings. By analogy, the expected future warming may come smoothly, but may come with jumps, short-lived or local coolings, floods or droughts, and other unexpected changes. Societies and ecosystems have an easier time dealing with slower or better-anticipated changes, so the abruptness and unpredictability of the possible changes may be disquieting.
https://www.nap.edu/read/10136/chapter/1#vi
These are high impact events – that include major shifts in global hydrology over the Holocene – with unknown probabilities. The other possibilities – again with severe impact and unknown probabilities – is chemical changes in aquatic systems. With cascading effects on trophic webs that are the basis of the oceanic food chain – ditto probabilities. Changed terrestrial hydrology as a result of stomata responses to increasing C02 – likewise have the potential to impact on ecosystems.
Whether changes are natural or anthropogenis doesn’t seem to be the critical problem.
The solution is building prosperous and resilient communities. This involves returning 100 GtC to soils and forests – and the availability new, cheap and abundant energy sources. For me that seems to be the current generation of nuclear engines.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2016/06/18/safe-cheap-and-abundant-energy-back-to-the-nuclear-energy-future-2/
@everyone who has taken an interest in models in this thread – perhaps especially those who advise me to read the title so I can understand better
Atmospheric and oceanic computational simulation models often successfully depict chaotic space–time patterns, flow phenomena, dynamical balances, and equilibrium distributions that mimic nature. This success is accomplished through necessary but nonunique choices for discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupled contributing processes that introduce structural instability into the model. McWilliams op.cit
I remember this as an information rich article from a guy who has been doing this for a long time. I remember reading it dozens of times to get a handle – but I may just – on popular opinion be delusional. It is relevant to risk as it reveals the underlying causes of forecast uncertainty – and suggests that there are limits to how much uncertainty can be reduced.
There are to the precision with which parameters can be measured or estimated. We may call this a speedo wobble but I would rather not. This gives rise to multiple plausible starting points – thousands – that are slightly different. Multiple solutions – model runs – then diverge exponentially over the period of the simulation. This is of course known as sensitive dependence on initial condition. Yes these solutions do diverge wildly and unpredictably. It arises from the nonlinear set of governing equations of fluid transport.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709/F1.large.jpg
Generic behaviors for chaotic dynamical systems with dependent variables ξ(t) and η(t). (Left) Sensitive dependence. Small changes in initial or boundary conditions imply limited predictability with (Lyapunov) exponential growth in phase differences. (Right) Structural instability. Small changes in model formulation alter the long-time probability distribution function (PDF) (i.e., the attractor).
Models are not climate if that’s unclear. There are no guarantee that the path of climate evolution will fall within even the limits of wildly divergent solutions. We may tune models to reality but the future is another country and it is a trifle churlish to whine in hindsight about departures from the temperature record. Even so the models can always be retuned progressively. It doesn’t invalidate – but the reliability of the forecasts so far out can be questioned. These are not the errors you are looking for. Go about your business with a greater understanding of the immense difficulties of the undertaking. But to insist that there are no uncertainties is equally disturbing.
Of course I may just be a chaos tragic with a propensity to quote lyrical passages from highly selective texts. I have a very much broader style – but I do appreciate elegant and erudite language in science. There is an art to it.
It is important, however, to distinguish between model uncertainty that arises from imperfect knowledge of the real system, such as the representation of the carbon cycle, and uncertainty that comes from sub-gridscale phenomena that are understood quite well, but are inadequately represented because of the resolution of the model. In weather forecasting, there has been a continuous drive to higher-and-higher resolution with substantial benefits in terms of model performance and forecast skill. Furthermore, recent studies with ultra-high-resolution (approx. 3 km) global models, the so-called cloud system-resolving models, have shown a remarkable ability to capture the multi-scale nature of tropical convection of the type seen in figure 4 [28]. However, the resolution of climate models, still typically 100 km or more, has been constrained fundamentally by a lack of computing resources [29], even though there is compelling evidence to suggest significant improvements in climate model performance with higher horizontal and vertical resolution in both the atmosphere and ocean [27].
Finally, Lorenz’s theory of the atmosphere (and ocean) as a chaotic system raises fundamental, but unanswered questions about how much the uncertainties in climate-change projections can be reduced. In 1969, Lorenz [30] wrote: ‘Perhaps we can visualize the day when all of the relevant physical principles will be perfectly known. It may then still not be possible to express these principles as mathematical equations which can be solved by digital computers. We may believe, for example, that the motion of the unsaturated portion of the atmosphere is governed by the Navier–Stokes equations, but to use these equations properly we should have to describe each turbulent eddy—a task far beyond the capacity of the largest computer. We must therefore express the pertinent statistical properties of turbulent eddies as functions of the larger-scale motions. We do not yet know how to do this, nor have we proven that the desired functions exist’. Thirty years later, this problem remains unsolved, and may possibly be unsolvable.
There are key climate processes that are very little understood. Models may never be fit for the purpose of long range forecasting. A much better purpose may be to forecast climate shifts over much shorter periods. This is well beyond our scientific capacities as yet.
http://www.geomar.de/en/news/article/klimavorhersagen-ueber-mehrere-jahre-moeglich/
Climate shifts btw are the big known unknowns of the climate system – presumably guaranteeing that reality will continue to diverge – perhaps dramatically – from models. But reality continue to diverge from the narratives forged in the encampments of the climate. I presume most of you have open an curious minds. The rest will continue to dogmatically assert propositions with little to no scientific or mathematical justification. Although the risk is that they will just continue to play the person and not the ball.
GISS anomaly for January 2017 is predicted on WUWT to be .95 ℃.
Before your CargoCult Etc. hiatus, .95 ℃ would have been the 2nd highest monthly GISS anomaly since 1880. January 2007 was .96 ℃.
Tell David Rose. January 2017 has Kooled since January 2007!
And the climate has shifted… to a warmer regime. The stadium wave has come and gone. So sorry its fans missed it.
There was a shift to higher global temperatures around 1998 or so. Since then, all the hottest years ever aren’t, because they are statistically indistinguishable. Collectively, they are hotter only than what came before in the instrumental record, not in the history of the Earth. On top of that, global temps have been warming since the LIA. CO2 may have added a skoch to that, but not a lot. It’s difficult to get excited about this.
As the 97-98 El Nino finished there was an ocean cycle change in the Atlantic, warm water in the Northern Hemisphere increases continental dew points, which changed the minimum temp for 80% of the surface stations, and about what 70% of global land areas?
You can see it’s effect in the climate sensitivity of the 20 to 30 North Latitude band.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/latband_n20-30_sensitivity.png
You are completely lost. The climate did not shift in 1998. It shifted around 1983… a cooling regime that lasted until 2013. The PDO went positive in 2014, and since then the rate of warming is through the roof.
From a paper that Professor Curry says is important:
…The synthetic series in Fig. 5a also show examples of greatly accelerated warming lasting a decade or more, which are evidently spring-back effects as an internal variability cooling episode is followed by a strong internal variability warming episode. The strong warming episodes are further amplified by the underlying forced warming trend. One extreme example shows a warming of almost 1 °C in 15 years—a much greater 15-year warming rate than has occurred in the observations to date (red curves). These spring-back warmings illustrate another important potential consequence of strong internal multidecadal variability as simulated in CM3, and reinforce the need to better understand whether such internal variability actually occurs in the real world. …
The clouds have shifted… pray for the Kooling Kimikamikaze to return. It’s all you have… prayer.
The AMO does practically nothing. One of the biggest teases in scientific history.
But no doubt, this week yet another climate scientist will predict flat temperatures for decades because of the expected downturn of the AMO. Look at the graph of the downturn of the AMO mid century. See how the GMST completely ignores it. Why does anybody buy the AMO nonsense?
The Eastern Pacific is where it all happens.
You’re not looking at the right data then.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/latband_n20-30_sensitivity.png
This is it’s affect taking place at the end of the El Nino.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/us-slope.png
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/eurasia-seasonal-slope.png
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/diff-rising-and-forcing.png
The four surges of the PDO since 1980 and their affect on GMST… during which the PDO experienced a 30-year downward trend.
What does the AMO do? Nothing. Unless the AMOC shuts down, it cannot cool the GMST.
All that takes is a reduction of warm water in the northern hemisphere.
Our surface temps are all driven by the oceans. I do agree the eastern Pacific is a big player, any change that disturbs the downwind pattern of water vapor distribution affect land temps.
The great big blue blob appeared in the North Atlantic… AMO territory. It did nothing.
The North Pacific gets cold, and ENSO agrees, then the GMST will go down. Then, and then only:
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2010/anomnight.11.29.2010.gif
The PDO cycle runs at a different pace than the AMO.
Land surface temps just follow dew point temperature.
The wind blows warm water vapor evaporated mostly in the tropics towards the poles to cool. If the wind blows the water vapor inland, the land there warms up.
When you compare the ratio’s of land to ocean between hemispheres, knowing that the same energy input has a large difference in change of air temp when over land or over ocean, so the same heat content will have different GMST’s depending where that heat is. All of this is just warm water getting shuffling heat around the planet. And because of spin and tilt, the heat is firehosed all over, so the planet is one big messy ball of everyone trying to reach equilibrium.
At the end of the 97 el nino, there was a significant change in dew point, leading to warmer min, and max temp, all because more warm water vapor was blown over the northern hemispheres land masses. If it had been blown over the ocean, even if it was measured, it wouldn’t have been as big a change if it was a change at all.
Look to see where the warm was blowing off the oceans if you want to see what caused it. I was working on the exact where (it’s 20-30 North Lat band around the globe as show in the graph posted here), but side tracked into redoing a bunch of stuff.
But in the end none of these temp trend mean anything, the temp is regulated and it’s entirely based on water vapor, co2 will effect the edges of the limits of the two cooling rates work to control the temp, but co2 is a fraction of atmospheres overall capacity to cool.
Like you cars cooling capacity to keep the engine temperature cool and stable over a very large range of outside temperatures. Exactly that.
January NOAA PDO dropped from .54 to .21… remains positive, so JIASO should also remain positive… for 37 straight months in a row.
ENSO ONI for NDJ just posted at -0.7… That puny little anorexic global chiller is now officially a La Niña.
According to the expert… next up… El Niño!
hmmm…
.. encampments of the climate war…
Not a war… just physics.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2017/anomnight.1.30.2017.gif
No cooling due to the anorexic La Niña… because of physics.
So fully embrace the garbage satellite GMST nonsense. Won’t do a bit of good. Unless you’re a migrating bird, it’s a load of useless krap.
@ Tony Banton
Listen carefully – I am only going to say this once. I’m boring myself.
Let’s make it simple. John Cook is a spectacular urban doofus hipster. His is one of the 97% of climate sites I never visit. But apparently – this is the climate consensus.
We classified each abstract according to the type of research (category) and degree of endorsement. Written criteria were provided to raters for category (table 1) and level of endorsement of AGW (table 2). Explicit endorsements were divided into non-quantified (e.g., humans are contributing to global warming without quantifying the contribution) and quantified (e.g., humans are contributing
more than 50% of global warming, consistent with the 2007 IPCC statement that most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations).
It is a spectacularly low bar. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases are changing the radiative properties of the atmosphere. It increases photon scattering. I can show the science of space-based narrow aperture detectors that definitively show the increase in photon scattering. Proof positive of AGW. But just take my word for it.
Beyond that the consensus gets a little dodgy. Hell, I’m probably still on SourceWatch as a sanitary engineer talking ENSO+PDO. Specifically shifts in the Pacific state around 1912, 1944/45, 1976/77 and 1998/2000.
A full reading of Tsonis and Swanson’s research shows that internal variability from climate shifts merely cause temporary slow downs or speeding up of the long-term warming trend. When the internal variability is removed from the temperature record, what we find is nearly monotonic, accelerating warming throughout the 20th Century. SkepticalScience
Quite apart from the fact that it doesn’t say anything of the sort. Tsonis and Swanson – there is a third guy that no one ever remembers – did use neat network math to identify that these climate shifts are there – but that the future of climate shifts is spectacularly uncertain. Instead of a wobble on a steadily rising line – the future is likely to be a complete surprise.
A plus or minus wobble is so 20th century. It seems more likely that ENSO+PDO will take a nosedive off a 1000 year high instead.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2017/01/12/an-earnest-discovery-of-climate-causality/
It is interesting to note that the spin put on the same work makes Tsonis the arch climate villain and Swanson the compliant little twit who is unable to assert intellectual independence from the gatekeepers of global warming.
I note also that Cook insists that 1944-1976 cooling was caused by aerosols.
Mid-century cooling involved aerosols and is irrelevant for recent global warming. SkepticalScience
This may be unlikely given the monotonically increasing forcing in the 20th century. You are welcome to resolve the discrepancy and avoid cognitive dissonance. I’m sure you can do it.
I wanted to say something about the PPE of Rowland et al 2012.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ppe.png
There is really no way to divine where – if at all – climate will fall in the model phase space. Let’s just assume a continuation of the trend.
So you can see that I am totally on board, you can take my name off SourceWatch and we really don’t need to hear about the consensus 25 times a day.
*the extension of the trend is mine*
What is most likely is +PDO and +El Niño…
The stadium wave has already come and gone. It caused a rather anemic pause in warming. It tricked a bunch of really smart people into believing climate sensitivity is low, and that a cooling event is in the future… it’s not.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Zhou-et-al-2016-Fig3ac-1024×269.png
I have been letting this go – but too much misinformation is misleading. A lie told once is a lie – a lie told a 1000 times is truth.
Climate will shift again and likely within the next decade. We shall see where it goes – and not just pull something out of our arses.
I’d suggest a reversion to the mean is always a good statistical bet.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.jpg
Whether or not – with a cooling sun – it happens next time around is anyone’s guess. By all means have a guess,
The stadium wave is not and never has been about sensitivity or cooling. It is about understanding more about how it all comes together.
Climate is ultimately complex. Complexity begs for reductionism. With reductionism, a puzzle is studied by way of its pieces. While this approach illuminates the climate system’s components, climate’s full picture remains elusive. Understanding the pieces does not ensure understanding the collection of pieces. This conundrum motivates our study.
Our research strategy focuses on the collective behavior of a network of climate indices. Networks are everywhere – underpinning diverse systems from the world-wide-web to biological systems, social interactions, and commerce. Networks can transform vast expanses into “small worlds”; a few long-distance links make all the difference between isolated clusters of localized activity and a globally interconnected system with synchronized [1] collective behavior; communication of a signal is tied to the blueprint of connectivity. By viewing climate as a network, one sees the architecture of interaction – a striking simplicity that belies the complexity of its component detail. Marcia Wyatt – and she is someone who can make the language of science elegant.
Say hello to the hottest La Niña in the instrument record. Don’t look down for cooling ’cause it ain’t there, and don’t blink or you’ll miss it.
And, NOAA PDO for January is .21, which means it’s likely the JIASO PDO will register 37 straight months in positive territory.
The stadium wave came and went… a 30-year cooling trend in the Eastern Pacific. Fooled a lot of smart people.
The AMO-based stadium wave is nonsense. It’s never going to happen. Just like it never happened ~1943 to ~1970. She’s just warmed over Girma.
It was most likely a period which saw this same ~1983 to ~2014 Eastern Pacific pattern:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Zhou-et-al-2016-Fig3ac-1024×269.png
Beyond bifurcation: using complex models to
understand and predict abrupt climate change
… Sea ice falls in between these extremes. Although a tipping point is very unlikely to occur in the future, the freezing point as a non-linear threshold, the relative homogeneity of the Arctic Ocean and the ice-albedo feedback make the Arctic prone to rapid ice loss. In our review, we have pointed out that abrupt change goes beyond the question of multiple equilibria. In this regard, the hunt for alternative stable states in models is not always the most meaningful endeavour. Instead, the development and application of new methods to detect and understand abrupt change in general deserves more research emphasis. As we have outlined above, traditional methods that arise from a low-order logic can fail to capture the mechanisms behind abrupt change. …
I am now a little hurried. It strikes me that if you don’t have much idea of what the mechanisms are then modelling is impossible. Lattif is exploring mechanisms for Pacific shifts with models – I quite like models except where . they are misused.
I am intrigued by top down methods utilising behaviours of chaotic systems.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14308.full
This is more alarmist tripe, maybe for 2 months for a qtr of the day a single longitude line is positive, the rest of the day it’s losing more energy than it gains, it basically boils down to what % is clear vs cloudy.
Because the high angle renders almost as much light is reflected off open water as while it’s ice, and it has the advantage that open water is a much better emitter than ice is.
When you do not know what causes climate change, when you believe in tipping points that have not showed up in past climate, your simple models and your complex models are missing the most important factors in climate change.
Temperatures are clearly bounded. Climate Theory and Climate Models are clearly unbounded.
Ice extent always correlates with temperature. It always snows more in warmer times. Ice always advances after more snowfall and earth cools as the ice advances.
the hunt for alternative stable states is a useless exercise. there is no stable state that stays in that state. there is a well bounded cycle that alternates between the bounds. in between the bounds every factor pushes on temperature but the bounding forces always keep temperature in bounds and push temperature back past the middle toward the other bound.
Evidence for climate change in the satellite
cloud record
… The primary drivers of these cloud changes appear to be increasing
greenhouse gas concentrations and a recovery from volcanic
radiative cooling. These results indicate that the cloud changes
most consistently predicted by global climate models are currently
occurring in nature. …
According to Richard Tol’s, Figure 3 here http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/climate_change.pdf , the cost of sea level rise is small to negligible. GW is beneficial for Agriculture and Health up to beyond 4 C warming. Damages are small to negligible for all other sectors except energy consumption. Only energy consumption is a projected to be a significant negative cost at large GMST increase (according to the FUND analysis shown in Figure 3 in the link above).
However, I doubt energy consumption cost is likely to be significantly negative for two reasons: 1) because there is effectively unlimited energy available on Earth at potential low cost, and 2) because I doubt GW will cause an increase in energy consumption for the reasons presented in this comment: https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/29/the-threat-of-climate-change/#comment-836115
Whether or not GW is a significant threat depends not on the magnitude or rate of temperature change, but on the impacts and the net benefits or damages. The whole justification for the claims of “dangerous climate change” depends on the impacts and benefits or damages. Yet, this has hardly been touched on in this thread.
I’d urge CE followers to read up on the basis for the impact and damage functions. A good start is Nordhaus, 2007 “A Question of Balance” http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/Balance_2nd_proofs.pdf . The basis for the latest impacts and damage functions in FUND are explained in FUND 3.9 documentation and Tables here: http://www.fund-model.org/versions
Here is a “we must act now” moment if ever I saw one:
Rationing of lettuce and broccoli in UK supermarkets due to cold and wet weather devastating harvests:
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-38851097
The threat of global
warmingcooling doesn’t get any more real than this.We must act now. No more denia1 of climate change.
“We had snow covering the Greek Islands, we had snow in Italy and we saw that pushing into Spain,” he said.
This is natural and normal and necessary. This more snowfall occurred during the Roman and Medieval Warm periods. That is why those warm periods ended as the more ice advances and cause the cold periods that always follow. This warm period will persist about the same as the Roman and Medieval warm periods and then the ice will advance and cause another cold period such as the little ice age. It is a natural cycle and we do not cause it.
ISO/Guide 73:2009(en) Risk management — Vocabulary
https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:guide:73:ed-1:v1:en
ISO 31000 Risk Management Definitions in Plain English – Praxiom
http://www.praxiom.com/iso-31000-terms.htm
>
That’s a lot of words Peter.
Risk is the probability of bad stuff happening.
No! It is not just bad stuff. In the ISO definition it is probability of “good stuff” and “bad stuff” happening! This is important to recognise.
The consequence can be positive or negative (i.e. a benefit); therefore risk can be positive or negative.
For example, The Project Management Body of Knowledge defines risk as:
Read the “lots of words” in my previous comment.
Climate change could be net beneficial or net damaging. We don’t know.
GHG emissions could be net beneficial or net damaging. We don’t know.
Peter
I stand corrected. However has the meaning of “risk” been stretched somewhat in the technical use that you describe? In everyday conversation risk would normally have a negative connotation. I agree of course that CO2 increase and climate change – whether or not related to each other – are just as likely to be good or bad.
ptolemy2,
There are different definitions in general use and in different technical disciplines. The definition I quoted in my previous comments is the ISO Risk Standard. The definition I quoted from the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) hs been unchanged for over 20 years. PMBOK is the US project management standard and is widely accepted internationally as the standard for project management.
If one thinks about it, risk is the consequence of an event or condition if it occurs multiplied by the probability of occurrence. Events and conditions can be positive (i.e. beneficial for project objectives) or negative, just as temperature change can be positive or negative. Here are some more definitions from the 1996 Edition of PMBOK.
Just downloading the latest release of the Global Marine Argo Atlas.
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/Marine_Atlas.html
Let’s see where ocean heat has been. My feeling is that it is flat to 2010/12 and rising a little since due to the solar cycle peak and a little less cloud. But we don’t have to depend on my feeling – we can see the CERES data to see where the heat is coming from.
There’s something been worrying me for a long time.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/gw-photons-animated.gif
Incremental additions of greenhouse gases trap more photons and go to a higher energy state – they warm other molecules vibrationally – energy out kicks up proportionately to temperature to the 4th power to again nominally balance the energy budget.
The rate of increase in greenhouse gas forcing is some 0.032W/m2. The question is not the energy imbalance but how long it takes the planet to equilibrate.
Many nations began, about a decade ago, to deploy floats around the world ocean that could “yo-yo” an instrument measuring ocean temperature to a depth of 2 km. By 2006 there were about 3000 floats covering most of the world ocean. These floats allowed von Schuckmann and Le Traon (2011) to estimate that during the 6-year period 2005-2010 the upper 2 km of the world ocean gained energy at a rate 0.41 W/m2 averaged over the planet.
So I am willing to stipulate that the warning is proceeding at about the same rate as the forcing.
The theory may, however, have a problem.
http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13428/figures/1
I’ll be back.
The point is to avoid adverse consequences. If the consequence is living in Big Rock Candy Mountain then there is no problem. If the consequence is going to hell in a hand basket – with a reasonably high probability – then we need to take action to reduce either the severity or the probability.
Costs and benefits apply to the action. If the consequence of greenhouse gas emissions is a 200 year drought with some likelhood – the solutions include sequestering 100 billion tonnes of carbon, switching to 21st century energy or going out with a party. Cost benefit analysis will tell you which to chose.
And clouds is where I started at CE.
Zhu et al (2007) found that cloud formation for ENSO and for global warming have different characteristics and are the result of different physical mechanisms. The change in low cloud cover in the 1997-1998 El Niño came mainly as a decrease in optically thick stratocumulus and stratus cloud. The decrease is negatively correlated to local SST anomalies, especially in the eastern tropical Pacific, and is associated with a change in convective activity. ‘During the 1997–1998 El Niño, observations indicate that the SST increase in the eastern tropical Pacific enhances the atmospheric convection, which shifts the upward motion to further south and breaks down low stratiform clouds, leading to a decrease in low cloud amount in this region. Taking into account the obscuring effects of high cloud, it was found that thick low clouds decreased by more than 20% in the eastern tropical Pacific… In contrast, most increase in low cloud amount due to doubled CO2 simulated by the NCAR and GFDL models occurs in the subtropical subsidence regimes associated with a strong atmospheric stability.’
https://judithcurry.com/2011/02/09/decadal-variability-of-clouds/
There are actual observations in the Pacific.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/clementetal2009.png
ENSO is currently neutral and is expected to stay that way for a couple of months – according to all the models. There is a prediction barrier inherent to ENSO beyond that.
I predict nothing. Merely make statistical inferences and have an idea that ENSO+PDO is a terrestrial amplifier of solar variability. For that you need data or it is just pissin’ in the wind.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.jpg
More salt is La Nina and the rainfall is in Australia. But there are global repercussions. I suggest a reversion to the mean of the past 1000 years over the next few centuries. Associated with lower solar activity. You do know the sun is cooling?
The 20 to 30 year patterns of global warming and cooling fit within a longer term variability. It depends entirely on the volume of deep ocean upwelling in the Pacific. At some stage upwelling will increase and the new 20 to 30 year shift will be from cool to cooler. The current rather neutral Pacific state has run its course over nearly 20 years. What shall we see in the next shift as the sun cools?
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.jpg
I really like that graph so I included it twice.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00003.1
The problem is it stayed.
https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/latband_n20-30_sensitivity.png These are the derivatives of ten some thousand stations change in temp during change in solar from tilt, both min and max temp, in Degrees F/W/m^2. These are day to day change to day to day change peaks. So March to Oct is cooling cycle, and Oct to Mar is Warming, as that is how the day to day change is. https://micro6500blog.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/1950-2010-d100_0.jpg
I seem to detect some snark – which is not appreciated.
You plotted 50,000 years of station data in Excel? I’m amazed.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ceres-net-toa.png
Up is warming by convention.
You can get interactive detail at – https://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/products-info.php?product=EBAF-TOA
Wasn’t being snarky. The surface has strong signals of regional temperature change. And there are ~20k stations, I work from daily NCDC data, now is ~140 million samples. Generally I filter only based on how many records are collected on any one year.
Not familiar with all sky toa data. But from the surface, you can see the regulation in action.
So while I am here again.
The change in ocean heat is approximately equal to energy in minus energy out.
I can see it a little ENSO in there – a transfer of energy between oceans and atmosphere- and some solar warming. Perhaps we should just invent a narrative that it is warming and people are responsible – although there may be a problem there. If we don’t talk about it perhaps no one will notice.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/carbom-dioxide.jpg
Ocean heat
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ocean-temp1.jpg
CERES net toa flux
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ceres-net-toa.png
Solar intensity
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/solar-flux.png
Here’s the toa anomalies
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/toa-anomaly.png
That is a bit disjointed.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1190450334404560
“What factors have limited the growth of this La Niña event is a great research question, one that I am sure many people will be investigating in the near future,” McPhaden added. “The climate system is very complex, and many processes are at work at any given point in time and space. It could be just the randomness of the climate system that kept this La Nina from taking full flight. Or maybe it is the fact that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has been in a mostly warm state since 2014, with elevated temperatures in the tropical Pacific making it harder to develop cold anomalies there.”
Mike Halpert, deputy director of the NOAA Climate Prediction Center, noted that the current pattern is somewhat similar to 1982–83, when another strong El Niño was followed by a relatively modest La Niña. “Just when you think you have seen everything and think you know what to expect, something happens that you just can’t explain,” he noted. “There are many rhythms and natural variabilities, and nature will always keep it interesting.”
………………
“Last year’s Niño was huge in area, duration, and magnitude,” said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “My take is that because it lasted so long and covered such a large area, it damped the return of strong trade winds needed for a healthy Niña. Note the strong positive heat content north of the equator—the entire tropical Pacific between Central America and Hawaii—that lingered into the fall.” …
The positive PDO swallowed the skeptic’s skinny hero La Niña whole.
Some may remember the negative PDO was going to last for decades. I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I said it was about to end.
So now it’s 36 straight months positive… heatwave.
JCH is right in one sense. The Pacific is where the big physical changes occur that change temperature, hydrology and biology. But practising divination from ENSO entrails is laughable. And the expectation that we should get solid cold, blue in the north Pacific in a negative PDO is, again, ludicrous and intended I presume to make a very silly blog-science point or other.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/argo-to-december-2016.jpg
My hypothesis is that the Sun modulates cold upwelling in the Pacific via UV/ozone interaction at the poles.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1182549161861344
As the Sun declines from an 11 year high – more La Nina seem possible in the current regime of marginally enhanced (over 1977 to 1998) upwelling. More importantly – the last Pacific climate shift happened in 1998-2001.
Not – I might add – in 1983 or whatever as claimed by JCH in one of the most egregious examples of wood for trees, blog pseudo-science ever seen.
The next Pacific Climate Shift – due in a window of 2018 to 2028 – I predict from my hypothesis – will be to yet cooler conditions.
Whoops wrong one –
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/energy-in.jpg
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A few years ago I entered the world of Environmental Management; I like to think of EM people as those who have to clear up the crud of everyone else or get everyone to stop producing it in the first place (best option).
Two weeks ago a posting on Linked in from a farmer in Africa was bewailing his situation. He and his family, farmers, were becoming destitute and staving because he had insufficient water for his crops. Each year the rain was less and the ground was becoming increasingly barren. His other complaint was that of climate change and global warming which he blamed for his predicament.
I cannot help but think that, in the western nations at least, we have gotten our priorities wrong. Even if all the hype surrounding renewable and nuclear power are true and that reducing atmospheric CO2 actually achieved what some suggest, then this would take many decades, may be century’s despite of the billions being spent on it. This will not avail this farmer anything, who needs resolution to his, and many others like him, now. Help seems to come from charities in the main.
It is inadequate supplies of water suitable for crops, livestock and people that is a far greater and immediate problem than global warming.
RJ-T. Consider how our thirst (actually, the billionaire company owner’s thirst) for cheap goods is in the process of creating a military power that opposes us: China.
We need to be very selective in who we decide to help. We shouldn’t cure ills, only to have those we have helped turn against us.
The world is not a friendly place. We must pick and choose.
There are many solutions and none of them involve impoverished and energy poor people.
https://watertechbyrie.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/
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Repost of something from the JC thread.
The climate damage problem is related to the actuarial problem. Damage, as in the current climate is related to tail events. With a rapidly changing climate, tail events and their damage become both more frequent and more extreme. An example of this was the question of whether to rebuild in NJ after Sandy. This kind of question becomes even more common with an increasing frequency of those types of events, and eventually the decision will be made not to rebuild. For 100-year events, rebuilding makes sense, but as they shift towards 10-year events, it makes less sense, and may even be uninsurable. Similar decisions would be related to agricultural losses or river flooding. Climate change occurs one disaster at a time.
Over the Holocene – immense variability is evident in a high-resolution sediment record. Christopher Moy and colleagues examined a sediment core from Laguna Pallcacocha in southern Ecuador. More rainfall and runoff from a warmer sea surface in the eastern Pacific washes more red sediment into the lake. So we know it was pretty rainy in South America a 1000 years ago. Some 5,000 years ago there was a change from more upwelling to less – that dried the Sahel. Just 3,500 years ago there were a long series of cool Pacific events with red intensity greater than 200 and civilisations fell. For comparison – red intensity in the ‘monster’ 1997/1998 El Niño event was 99. Extremes in the Holocene put those of the 20th century to shame. All climate activist hydrology, on the other hand, starts in the 1950’s and everything since is extreme.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/moys-20023.png
Jim only makes sense if your hydrological memory only goes back to 1950.
Seems to have no connection to what I said.
That’s because your hydrology starts in1950 Jim. 20th century extremes are not even close to Holocene extremes.
https://i2.wp.com/watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.jpg
Nosediving off a 1000 high El Nino high seems possible – good for Australia – although more cyclones – super good for Africa and the Middle East – bad for the US. You ain’t seen drought yet.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00003.1
Hmmmm… nosediving off a 1000 year El Nino high…
So you find comfort in the fact that some places can quickly turn to deserts, or what? Not sure I follow.
It is just reality Jim. Not sure you are familiar with the concept. And the aim for the future is to build resilient and prosperous communities in vibrant landscapes.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1186433338139593
And yes I did note your obnoxious little post hoc rationalisation for losing the climate war. You and your with ilk with propaganda, obfuscation and 5th rate science have set back science, society and the environment 40 years.
Will history forgive you? I certainly won’t.
With a rapidly changing climate, tail events and their damage become both more frequent and more extreme.
===============
nope. could become less frequent and less extreme. that is the nature of change. for example:
In one of the most comprehensive studies on trends in local severe weather patterns to date, an international team of researchers found that the frequency of hail storms, thunderstorms and high wind events has decreased by nearly 50 percent on average throughout China since 1960.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-china-severe-weather-patterns-drastically.html#jCp
Climate change since 1960 is a fraction of what it would be by 2100, China is not the world, and severe thunderstorms are not the only type of tail event. Apart from that, great news. Not so good for the monsoon and droughts, but you can ignore that part.
We could safely ignore Jim too – and his patent brand of blogospheric pseudo-science. He imagines a log-pearson type 3 distribution – as if has has just discovered skewness – with data that starts in 1950. Everything is extreme in that time frame – and everything is assumed to be the result of greenhouse gases. Neither is true. It is just scamming statistics.
Then he tells us with one face that the problem is solved – and with the other that it’s getting worse. Does anyone else find this amusing?
The measurements are on the side of the science. Over 2 C per doubling. Ignore that if you want, but you are in a diminishing minority for whom the observations are inconvenient rather than enlightening.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1950/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.2
In fact, given the rate the those trends are going downhill, by about 2022-2025, CO2 sensitivity will have gone negative.
Observations I showed don’t support that.
Your ‘measurements’ are pseudo-science – your graphs ridiculous wood for dimwits fabrications – and your conclusions absurd.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1182829681833292
There are so many unwarranted assumptions that extreme scepticism is entirely justified. And fervent representatives like you Jim – give us further confidence – and a few laughs along the way.
You show lots of graphs with wiggles, but none that actually show anything convincing. I think you wish your data were as good, and actually are just envious. Here’s more. Spot the “pause” in 30-year global temperature trends.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:240/mean:120/plot/gistemp/from:1985/trend
Jim – I am not convinced that convincing you is a feasible objective. At this stage I am just playing it for laughs. I think you should try harder on your wiggles though. Something like this.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1190450334404560
I can extend your plot out a bit.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8FGhz-48F0s/V57F9E1PyHI/AAAAAAAAGjU/M3ZAPCAIy4UxxW2zmkL18blU-FiMaSYmACLcB/s1600/OHC%2B0-2000m%2B2Q16.png
Just showing them the published science. They seem unaware of it sometimes.
” I am not convinced that convincing you is a feasible objective”
Quite so, Robert.
It would be easier to convert the Pope to Satanism than to prise Jimbo loose from his apocalyptic visions.
One could be forgiven for believing that he truly ardently desired a catastrophic outcome, such is his evangelical ardour in propagating his conviction that we are doomed.
It is well said that you can’t fix stupid.
No you can’t. The point was precision – which is certainly not the case with earlier records – and closing the energy budget. All of the variability this century seems quite natural – and very large. A cooler Pacific after the next climate shift – due within the decade – will increase low-level cloud and cool the planet.
It’s a lot warmer now than it was. That’s for sure.
“It’s a lot warmer now than it was. That’s for sure.”
If you go back around 11,000 years, true.
But in the past half a century or so, two or three tenths of a degree – possibly.
Nowhere near enough to be noticeable, certainly.
You believe we had global temperatures for 11 000 years? Some skeptics don’t even believe we have them now. Which ones do we argue with?
“Furthermore, the observed interannual variability of near-global ERBS WFOV Edition3_Rev1 net radiation is found to be remarkably consistent with the latest ocean heat storage record for the overlapping time period of 1993 to 1999. Both datasets show variations of roughly 1.5 W m2 in planetary net heat balance during the 1990s.” http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/JCLI3838.1
This is not the first time that ocean warming has been attributed to secular changes in TOA net radiant flux – merely the most precise. A warm sea surface and atmosphere increases radiant losses and reduce albedo – with net warming. You’ll probably keep imagining that nothing else is happening but greenhouse gases – it may be treatable some day.
While this demonstrates that there is a positive cloud feedback, as models also predict, the driving force is the GHG change. Clouds themselves don’t drive anything. Too short-lived.
It’s all clouds to these people, but they have ruled out positive cloud feedback as an explanation. Not sure how. Perhaps you can discuss it with them.
Models predict nothing of the sort – well some do and some don’t. It is more clearly a Pacific feedback.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/clement-et-al.png
Is global warming net beneficial or net damaging? Consider these points:
1. Average global temperature for the past 650 Ma (i.e., since complex life began) was 7C warmer than now (Figure 15 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275277369_Some_Thoughts_on_Global_Climate_Change_The_Transition_for_Icehouse_to_Hothouse_Conditions . Life thrived during warm times and struggled during cold times. That does not support the belief that 2C or 3C increase in GMST would be harmful.
2. There is 4 to 10 times more carbon tied up in the biosphere now (3,000 GtC) than at the last glacial maximum (300-700 GtC). This is an indication that life thrives in warmer times.
3. The planet will not get out of the current coldhouse condition until the tectonic plates re align (tens of millions of years in future). This does not justify the belief that GHG emissions will cause substantial increases in GMST.
4. Empirical studies suggest ECS is much lower than the IPCC has been saying for the past 30 years. Again, this does not support the belief that GHG emissions will cause substantial increases in GMST.
5. Richard Tol (2013), using FUND, projected that global warming would be net beneficial to beyond 4C of warming (excluding the projected cost of energy consumption) – Figure 3 (bottom chart) here: http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/climate_change.pdf . The projected cost of energy consumption may be grossly exaggerated for reasons I explained here: https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/29/the-threat-of-climate-change/#comment-836115
6. A replot of DICE-2013R to show net benefits per 5 years to 2100 resulting from proposed mitigation (carbon price) policies and using the default inputs, shows net benefits would be negative this century. That is, even optimum mitigation policies cannot be justified. It’s even less justified if realistic inputs are used (for ECS, RCP, available fossil carbon fuels, discount rate, participation rate). The red line is the nearest to being possible (but still highly improbable – see text here: https://anglejournal.com/article/2015-11-why-carbon-pricing-will-not-succeed/ )
https://anglejournal.com/site/assets/files/1727/lang_1.png
Given the above, it’s hard to see valid justification for the belief that GHG emissions are doing or will do more harm than good.
@tony banton
https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/29/the-threat-of-climate-change/#comment-839645
I guess I should of used the sarc tag but I thought truncated was sufficient. An Argo graph several years old is not quite right.
Balancing the energy budget is a little more than handwaving at a graph.
Δ(H&W) ≈ Ein – Eout
The change in energy content of the planet – and the work done in melting ice or vaporising water – is approximately equal to energy in less energy out.
Ther is some hint from earlier data sources.
“Furthermore, the observed interannual variability of near-global ERBS WFOV Edition3_Rev1 net radiation is found to be remarkably consistent with the latest ocean heat storage record for the overlapping time period of 1993 to 1999. Both datasets show variations of roughly 1.5 W m2 in planetary net heat balance during the 1990s.” http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/JCLI3838.1
NET TOA radiant flux in the CERES era is sufficient to account for Argo ocean heat changes. The Argo data is a product of the Global Marine Argo Atlas – http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/Marine_Atlas.html – with a 13 month running mean.
You may plot it yourself if you care to Tony.
Closing the energy budget requires precise and comprehensive data – only available this century.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1190450334404560
If Tony doesn’t understand – who gives a rat’s arse.
tony’s graph co-joins disparate data sources – one with almost zero coverage to 2000m to the Argo record. And the mere fact of warming is utterly irrelevant without understanding where the heat is coming from. ERBS says that 90’s warming was overwhelmingly the cloud radiative effect – reduced cloud in a warm Pacific.
CERES data shows conclusively that ocean heat changes can be accounted for by net toa radiant flux variability. It is the Global Marine Argo Atlas data – it’s available and he could plot it himself – but it is the right graph for closing the global energy budget. What it means is that there is no room for a greenhouse gas energy imbalance.
This is probably the wrong graph too.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/carbom-dioxide.jpg
Still the wrong “graph” Robert……
https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content2000m.png
If my math is right, that equates to .4J/~gram of water.
And that’s with doubling the energy because i couldn’t find the volume of the first 2,000 M so I used the entire ocean, which is less that 2x, so this should be a conservative value.
The off-topic, chatter about “Climate change” not “the threat of climate change” continues.
The fact that the real Deniers (i.e. those who ignore or deny the relevant facts) avoid dealing with the real issue – i.e. the threat – and instead keep yapping about down in the weeds irrelevancies, is revealing. It suggests they realise they’ve lost. It suggest they recognise (but cannot bring themselves to acknowledge it) that GHG emissions, and/or human caused global warming if it does occur, are not a threat.
I do wonder, if GHG effect is warming earth from -19c to 14c, and the hydro cycle and atmosphere cool earth, what is the real GHG effect? How much does the hydro cycle and atmosphere cool earth? 20c? 30c? So if the GHG effect is 33c and the hydro cycle and atmosphere cools earth another 20 or 30c, isn’t the GHG really almost double what is claimed?
Mark Wynne,
Thank you for your question. However it is not on topic for this thread. Your question is about climate science. It not about the topic of this thread – the threat of climate change.
If you are interested in my summary of the arguments regarding the threat (or lack of threat) of human caused global warming, refer to these two links (on this thread):
1. Six reasons why global warming may not be a threat at all:
https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/29/the-threat-of-climate-change/#comment-839486
2. Why the effect of global warming on energy consumption may be grossly exaggerated: https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/29/the-threat-of-climate-change/#comment-836115
If you want more detail, and links to sources, see my 12 comments starting here: https://judithcurry.com/2016/11/25/week-in-review-science-and-policy-edition-3/#comment-826495
http://notrickszone.com/2017/02/23/observations-show-no-warming-trend-mostly-stable-glaciers-in-the-himalayas-contradicting-ipccs-fake-news/#sthash.s3HoNxfm.T9Ib3wBn.dpbs
Warming seems to be not a threat in the Himalayas. Of 2018
glaciers mapped and monitored in climate-diverse terrains
between 2000 and 2010, 86.8% observed have stable fronts,
0.9% are growing, and net loss of area found to be less than
0.2%
Plate Tectonics and Climate—
Episodes of Extensive Glaciation
and Extreme Global Warmth
“The most persuasive evidence for global climatic
change in Earth history is the record
of extensive glaciations separated by periods
for which there is little or no evidence of year round
ice (Figure 2). From an Earth-history
perspective, the climate of today is distinctly
glacial. Much of the research that attempts to
explain the major changes in climate, illustrated
in Figure 2, focuses on periods of the greatest
contrast. The warm climate of the Cretaceous
period (approximately 100 million years ago)
exhibits the largest well-documented contrast
to the present glacial climate.
The evidence for global warmth comes from
every facet of the geologic record including
paleontology, geochemistry, and sedimentology.
More than 400 plant species are recorded
from latitudes above the Arctic Circle, and these
polar floras are indicative of seasonal conditions
with mean annual temperatures between
5 and 10°C. Fossils of large ectotherms (coldblooded
organisms) are found at latitudes as
high as 60 degrees, whereas we know that modern
relatives (alligators and crocodiles) become
inactive below 20°C and are restricted to much
lower latitudes. In the marine realm, no evidence
of cold-water faunas from Cretaceous
time has been discovered. Paleotemperature
data suggest that deep ocean temperatures
were between 15 and 17°C, compared to modern
values of 1–2°C. Tropical surface temperatures
were evidently similar to modern values,
or a few degrees higher. A combination of
these data (Figure 3) suggests that the globally
averaged surface temperatures were 6–12°C
higher than at present, with polar temperatures
20–50°C higher.
Not only did the Cretaceous show substantially
greater warmth over millions of years, but
the transition from the warm climatic conditions
of the Cretaceous to the modern glacial
climate occurred slowly, over tens of millions
of years. This evidence argues for a causative
mechanism that operates over a long time.
Since the formulation of the plate tectonic
theory of crustal evolution, the changing distribution
of continents has become a frequently
cited explanation for the occurrence of glacial
and nonglacial climates. The following sections
explain how.”
https://www.ucar.edu/communications/gcip/m10histclimvar/m10pdfc1.pdf
Oh yes, Peter,
Nature’s long record,
who can gainsay it… …
I just did a physics tutoring session and needed a explanation on extrapolating data outside the known range and assuming linearity. And why common sense isn’t. Suppose you lived somewhere the temperature never went below zero degrees C nor above 100 degrees . You would assume water just got colder. Seeing it go solid as the climate cooled would require a lot of icon building and sacrifices to cope with. And offers a great opportunity for some sales guy who figures out a way to control and exploit it to create a new religion around solid water. Steam would be easier.
How many people know that wind and water energy vary with the cube of velocity? Why intermittency is so crippling of already weak and diffuse wind and tidal power, and a sack of lead jumbo at 100mph floats away at 180mph Rotate! Most people have no idea of the basics, or that extrapolation AKA forecasts and models beyond known empirical situations are very unreliable. So this pointless debate between ignorant belief and real science has some uses in teaching the basics. I explain why there is no such thing as a science consensus to all my students. “That’s a guess”, etc.
.
Similarly, why do people assume that a GMST increase of >2C is dangerous?
Tol (2013), Figure 3 (bottom panel) shows GMST increase >4C would be beneficial if energy consumption is excluded.
Tol (2013) http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-012-0613-3#page-1
(Free) Tol (2011) Working Paper (same figure 3) http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/climate_change.pdf
I suggested here https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/29/the-threat-of-climate-change/#comment-836115
that the energy consumption line on Tol’s Figure 3 may be overstating the energy consumption increase.
UCAR Climate Variations in Earth History Figure 9 seems to suggest the climate models’ projections of temperature variations from tropics to poles are not consistent with the empirical evidence:
https://www.ucar.edu/communications/gcip/m10histclimvar/images/m10fig9.gif
Source: https://www.ucar.edu/communications/gcip/m10histclimvar/m10overview.html
This seems to be consistent with Scotese (2016) Figure 12:
This is very significant. It may indicate the IAMs are mistakenly suggesting global warming is harmful. To understand, read this comment: https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/29/the-threat-of-climate-change/#comment-836115
ScienceDaily https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170306091927.htm
Date: March 6, 2017
Source: Université de Genève
Baresel et al. 2017. Nature Article: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep43630
Timing of global regression and microbial bloom linked with the Permian-Triassic boundary mass extinction: implications for driving mechanisms
Abstract
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep43630