by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Major uncertainty of estimates of carbon trapped in soil [link]
A Geological Perspective of the Greenland Ice Sheet [link]
Next generation climate models could learn, improve on the fly [link]
Large changes in sea ice triggered by small changes in Atlantic water temperature [link]
Understanding how sudden stratospheric warmings influence tropospheric conditions could lead to better weather forecasts on the ground and in space [link]
Temporal trends in human vulnerability to excessive heat [link]
Sea ice loss surpasses some effects of climate change. Polar amplification could counteract weather patterns shifting toward the poles [link]
Solar cyclic variability can modulate Arctic climate [link]
Ancient trees and climate models to understand past and future drought in Mongolia [link]
“Anticipated changes in flood frequency and magnitude due to enhanced greenhouse forcing are not generally evident at this time over large portions of the United States for several different measures of flood flows.” [link]
Warm Arctic episodes linked with increased frequency of extreme winter weather in the U.S. [link]
ENSO and IOD analysis on the occurrence of floods in Pakistan [link]
Episodic Reversal of Autumn Ice Advance Caused by Release of Ocean Heat in the Beaufort Sea [link]
Cooling Cloud Cycle Caused Global Warming Hiatus [link]
New paper looks at data record of flooding & rain from landfalling US tropical cyclones. “We do not detect statistically significant trends in the magnitude or frequency of TC floods.” [link] …
Tapio Schneider : “Earth System Modeling 2.0” [link] …
Implications of potential future grand solar minimum for ozone layer and climate [link]
The influence of the ocean circulation state on ocean carbon storage and CO2 drawdown potential in an Earth system model [link]
Ice age echoes affect present day sea level rise [link]
Anticipating future Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) 7 eruptions and their chilling impacts. [link] …
The stratospheric pathway for Arctic impacts on midlatitude climate [link]
Reduced Barents–Kara sea ice strengthened atmospheric blocking & warm-#Arctic cold-Siberia signal [link] …
Acre for acre, wetlands can be far more valuable for the climate than rainforests, but rarely receive the same attention or protections. [link]
Arctic sea ice extent is greater now than at any time during the Holocene except during the Little Ice Age. [link]
How does #Venus, a planet similar in size to the Earth, lose heat? This question is at the heart of a long-standing conundrum of how these two planets of similar make up became so starkly different.” [link]
Estimates of present and future flood risk in the conterminous United States [link]
Weakened surface ocean circulation coincides with precipitation during Little Ice Age and is consistent with little-to-no changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation [link]
What can decadal variability tell us about climate feedbacks and sensitivity? [link]
Climate models are burdened decades’ worth of neglected uncertainty. It’s time to treat uncertainty as a primary scientific challenge. [link]
Soil carbon sequestration from grazing that completely offsets the greenhouse gas cost of beef (in the finishing stage). [link]
Emergence from last glacial #climate reinforced by large CO2 out-gassing from breakdown in Southern Ocean stratification: [link]
Social science and policy
The Folly of ‘Magical Solutions’ for Targeting Carbon Emissions [link] …
Why climate polarization? Denialism?–no. Democrats! “Explanations focused on organized… skeptics and ideologically driven motivated reasoning are… insufficient. Instead, Americans may have formed their attitudes by using party elite cues.” [link]
What “revealed preference” tells us about how we really think about climate risk. [link]
Pielke Jr: Donald Trump isn’t waging war on science; he just doesn’t care. [link]
A common sense look at the social cost of carbon [link]
Geoengineer polar glaciers to slow sea level rise [link]
Future of Food series, which includes the environmental case for synthetic fertilizer, how farm intensification could help preserve pasture land, and green ways to harvest fish: [link]
Pielke Jr’s latest climate newsletter [link]
“High housing costs and rising commute times threatens to keep California from achieving its ambitious target of cutting emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.” [link]
Hot times in the Arctic op-ed by Cecilia Bitz [link]
Reversal of Increasing Tropical Ocean Hypoxia Trends with Sustained Climate Warming [link]
Incisive, thought-provoking piece on the politics and ethics of #geoengineering [link]
What makes humans — and nature — able to withstand adversity? The science of resilience: [link]
What drives continental US hurricane landfall damage on seasonal & longer timescales? New paper from Klotzbach and Pielke Jr [link]
“The Politics of Evidence”[link]
About science and scientists
Engagement should become more about consultation and democracy, and less about the marketing of science. [link]
Studying or seeking wisdom: on the resentment of experts [link]
“Smil has forced climate advocates to reckon with the vast inertia sustaining the modern world’s dependence on fossil fuels.” Meet Vaclav Smil, the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy [link]
‘White hat’ bias [link]
Universities Should Encourage Scientists to Speak Out about Public Issue [link]
The Rise of the New Bio-Citizen. They invent their own medical products that work better and cost less. [link]
First female Ph.D. in meteorology: Joanne Simpson’s oral history interview from 1989. [link] …
A deluge of papers in a scientific field does not lead to quick turnover of central ideas, but rather to the ossification of canon. [link] …
Kate Marvel: We need courage, not hope, to face climate change [link]
Epistemic insouciance consists in a casual lack of concern about whether one’s beliefs have any basis in reality or are adequately supported by th eavailable evidence. [link]
How to be rational about empirical success in ongoing science: The case of the quantum nose and its critics [link]
A set of very brave women harassed and assaulted at @Harvard‘s Gov dept have come forward as one. Their stories are shocking, and the university’s inaction even more so. [link]
Incivility at work: is queen bee syndrome getting worse? [link]
On the virtue-signaling, outrage & and excommunication that characterises of many contemporary issues [link] …
K-T and assorted clone diagrams of atmospheric power flux balances include a GHG up/down/”back” LWIR energy loop of about 330 W/m^2 which violates three basic laws of thermodynamics: 1) energy created out of thin air, 2) energy moving (i.e. heat) from cold to hot without added work, and 3) 100% efficiency, zero loss, perpetual looping.
One possible defense of this critique is that USCRN and SURFRAD data actually measure and thereby prove the existence of this up/down/”back” LWIR energy loop. Although in many instances the net 333 W/m^2 of up/down/”back” LWIR power flux loop exceeds by over twice the downwelling solar power flux, a rather obvious violation of conservation of energy.
And just why is that?
Per Apogee SI-100 series radiometer Owner’s Manual page 15. “Although the ε (emissivity) of a fully closed plant canopy can be 0.98-0.99, the lower ε of soils and other surfaces can result in substantial errors if ε effects are not accounted for.”
Emissivity, ε, is the ratio of the actual radiation from a surface and the maximum S-B BB radiation at the surface’s temperature. Consider an example from the K-T diagram: 63 W/m^2 / 396 W/m^2 = 0.16 = ε. In fact, 63 W/m^2 & 289 K & 0.16 together fit just fine in a GB version of the S-B equation. What no longer fits is the 330 W/m^2 GHG loop which vanishes back into the mathematical thin air from whence it came.
“Their staff is too long. They are digging in the wrong place.”
“There is no spoon.”
And
Up/down/”back” GHG radiation of RGHE theory simply:
Does
Not
Exist.
Which also explains why the scientific justification of RGHE is so contentious.
“Their staff is too long. They are digging in the wrong place.”
Back radiation is the wrong place. Whatever you want to call it, it exists. The argument is elsewhere.
Well, it’s wrong.
You addressed exactly ZERO of my critical points so go get some SCIENCE and try again.
I’ll just say one thing. Reradiation.
Back radiation.
“1)There is no origin for this flow. It appears out of thin air.”
Its general origin is, The sun shines. Some of it is reflected from the surface and some is absorbed. For everything absorbed in the very long run, there is an emission of longwave upwards. These longwave emissions can be captured and re-emitted by GHGs. Some are re-emitted to the surface where they are absorbed and likely are emitted. This seems like a delay of joules before they move from the atmosphere to space.
It seems to me that to cast doubt on back radiation is to cast doubt on the GHG properties of water vapor and CO2. Lab tests suggest they are GHGs. Physics is the same everywhere.
CO2 can be argued to not impact the atmosphere to a large extent. But not because it is not a GHG.
nickreality65: 1) energy created out of thin air, 2) energy moving (i.e. heat) from cold to hot without added work, and 3) 100% efficiency, zero loss, perpetual looping.
1 and 3 are obviously false: there is no claim of energy “created” — it all originates in sunlight. There is no zero loss, as energy is continuously radiated to space. You must mean something else.
2. The diagrams do not display net energy flow from cold to hot, they display the aggregate values of radiant energy flows from some parts to other parts of the system, and at some times of day compared to other times of day. You need to consider the stochastic nature of the absorption and emission of light.
I have never seen 1 and 3 asserted before. Where in the diagrams do you see them?
The K-T and similar balance diagrams show 333 or 330 W/m^2 upwelling LWIR from the surface.
1)There is no origin for this flow. It appears out of thin air.
And then 333/330 W/m^2 3) returns as down or “back” radiation w/ zero loss.
This “back” radiation returns from the troposphere which is cold, -40 to -60 C to the warm, 15 C, with 2) no work.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/2011jcli24.pdf
Figure 10
Plus every academic amateur and his cousin post variations.
nickreality65: The K-T and similar balance diagrams show 333 or 330 W/m^2 upwelling LWIR from the surface.
1)There is no origin for this flow.
Sunshine heats the Earth surface; that is something that you are denying?
This “back” radiation returns from the troposphere which is cold, -40 to -60 C to the warm, 15 C, with 2) no work.
Net energy flow is downward from the sun and upward from the surface; is that something that you are denying?
Back to: 3) 100% efficiency, zero loss, perpetual looping.
All energy is conserved; are you denying that?
What can decadal variability tell us about climate feedbacks and sensitivity?
It tells you that warming hiatuses are simply slowdowns, the globe does cool, and the odds are they are followed by strong springback warming events.
.2 ℃ per decade for the first two decades of the 21st century: now easily within reach.
Less than 0.15 per decade. That’s boring:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1950/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1950/trend
About as boring as sea level rise.
You would never fool yourself, would you? HadCrut4 is an improvement over HadCrappy3. One can say that.
GISTEMP rounds to 0.15 C per decade:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1950/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1950/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1950/trend
Fooling myself is finding 0.12 C per decade and saying less than 0.15 C per decade.
1. negative phase of the PDO, which masks GH warming 1950 to 1970
2. positive phase of the PDO, which boosts warming 1970 to 1998
3.negative phase of the PDO, which masks warming 1998 to 2013
those are complete
4. incomplete positive phase of the PDO, which boosts GH warming from 2013 to present.
Score on NV, negative 2 TDs; positive 1 TD and driving.
You’ve fooled yourself.
https://i.imgur.com/qEU1DBN.png
Ragnaar, when compared to CO2, it is effectively tracking 2.4 C per doubling (1 C per 100 ppm in this period). But clearly that is not enough of a transient rate for you.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:1950/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.25
Graphic SB:
https://i.imgur.com/PptRKQd.png
JCH:
I looked at the mid points of your trendlines above and visualized lines connecting them. I may have fooled myself again. We can’t be fooled again. Like I was when I picked the IPPC’s 1950 starting point.
.15 ℃ per decade is clearly ignoring the positive phase of natural variability. That’s just so IPCC of you, and it’s exactly what i’m saying climate skeptics do: they want to ignore the positive phase of NV, and they’re always praying for the negative phase. Because they always think it’s about to arrive.
Well, the negative phase of NV has already happened. It was the party that took place here called the pause. Remember the pause?
The warming hiatus was caused by a GMST drop between 2006 and 2013, which is clearly seen in the red GISS line. It was caused by the negative phase of the PDO, which is clearly seen in the green line to 2013. A spring-back warming is clearly seen in GISS line after the PDO shifted to a positive phase in 2013-2014. Phases of the PDO can last from less than 10 years to more than 30 years. so far, this one has lasted between 4 and 5 years.
.2 ℃ over the first two decades of the 21st century is the IPCC’s prediction. The did not predict .2 ℃ per decade since 1950 (when ACO2 was around 310ppm.) They predicted .2 ℃ per decade from 2001 to 2020. Their target is easily within reach. It will just require a dominance of positive ONI, doesn’t have to be El Niño, between now and the end of 2020. Two La Niña events have done nothing to lessen the chances. One El Niño pretty much cinches it.
https://i.imgur.com/PbkyYA5.png
JCH:
As Meatloaf said, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. Above you find 2 plus phases and 1 minus phase. So when we look in the rear view mirror, we are looking backwards in time and we have to decide do we stop at 2 phases or go to 3? 3 is either is excluded or included to the extent phase 1a which has not yet happened is excluded or included. A cooling phase in the hand is worth two warming phases that have not yet been fully realized.
The subject of the so IPCC of me. Recently a topic at WUWT. The problem with saying something about 1950 as the IPCC did, is skeptics will read it and think it meant something. As soon as we start to believe them, the rug is pulled out.
JCH: It tells you that warming hiatuses are simply slowdowns,
but
What can decadal variability tell us about climate feedbacks and sensitivity?
The major uncertainty of carbon trapped in soil was, I remember, something I asked Rob Ellison about after I read a massive tome on the subject. He wrote a good article carried here some years ago.
I wonder if it is time for him to update this in the light of new research?
tony
Tonyb
Tall grass prairie in northern great planes of USA holds massive amounts of underground carbon. I read a paper some years ago about the loss of that sequester due to replacement of prairie with monoculture wheat and corn.
So much we don’t know about sources and sinks, even temperatures and now sea level rise uncertainties within the margin of error of the measurements. Lots to do on observations \.
Scott
Scott
I often think that the ‘uncertainty’ monster is a pretty small beast compared to the ‘I don’t know’ monster
tonyb
A nice observation, Tony. But Mark Twain had a rejoinder. “Its not what you don’t know that kills you. Its what you know for sure that aint true.”
The dunno monster may be bigger, but the uncertainty monster is more dangerous.
Rud
Nice one.
Whilst one is Large and lumbering and the other is small and nimble with sharp teeth, both seem to be invisible to many observers.
Tonyb
My highest regards to a fellow climate researcher, albeit in different domains. You do history, I do ‘jury crossex’.
In the famous words of Donald Rumsfeld: “There are things we do not know we don’t know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.” (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld&ved=0ahUKEwii_sfP8ofaAhVY22MKHThoDBQQFgjCATAa&usg=AOvVaw2Y4vGRFHXfT7WFFI9_qCRJ)
Allan
Yes, indeed. But do we have the ‘Uncertainty monster’ AND the ‘Rumsfeld monster’ or have one all encompassing (and rather scientific sounding) ‘Rumsfeld factor’ or ‘Rumsfeld effect” ?
Vote now…
tonyb
Plains
Quote of the day:
“Knowing how much we don’t know is the first step,”
That was in relation to GIA in the Ice Age Echoes link, but it should be the baseline for all papers. Kudos.
David Middleton’s piece on the Greenland Ice sheet is a must read for those that haven’t. He is a praticing petroleum geophysicist/geologist. Knows his stuff. Puts an elegant kibosh on the Greenland tipping point meme.
Kate Marvel’s bleat shows everything that is wrong with warmunism.
Wow. White Hat Bias –
finally a label for: Mann serving ‘the cause’, for Wigley doing what’s Christian, and for Hansen’s Faustian bargains.
Still, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
For some of us, the errors advanced by those ‘saving the effin planet’ are obvious. Others are taken in by the emotion.
I have some too:
http://www.cfact.org/2018/03/22/ipcc-struggles-with-small-warming/
Prepare for a wave of 1.5 degree science and policy studies. The IPCC cutoff for consideration is May 15.
http://www.cfact.org/2018/03/13/two-co2-climate-change-myths/
with over 2000 comments and counting.
Well, I will have to prepare a number of counter cruise missles. Thanks for the heada up. Missile one, now ‘fired’ Shnellnhuber’s admission. Missile 2,greening, no SLR acceleration. Missile 3, falsified CMIP5 models. Will rethink the targeting system.
Regarding the upcoming IPCC 1.5 degree report, here is a goody:
“Emissions controls for 1.5C climate target to cost three times 2C: study”
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/03/23/emissions-cuts-1-5c-climate-target-cost-three-times-2c-study/
The damage difference between 1.5C and 2.0C, which is just 0.5 degrees, has to be very large to justify triple the cost.
re Vaclav Smil: “Smil says, humanity has experienced three major energy transitions and is now struggling to kick off a fourth”. That’s because this “fourth one” is an attempt to enforce an ideological change. Previous transitions were driven by the greater efficiency of the new fuel – the new fuel was better than the existing. Now we have a bunch of destructive idiots trying to make us transition to something worse than the existing. Simple economics is why they are struggling.
The solar paper is on the right track but they lack an understanding of flow fields. The Earth is a massively coupled, synchronous, spatio-temporal chaotic system. At a smaller scale it is exactly Tomas’ mountain river.
https://wordpress.com/post/watertechbyrie.com
“You can see spatio-temporal chaos if you look at a fast mountain river. There will be vortexes of different sizes at different places at different times. But if you observe patiently, you will notice that there are places where there almost always are vortexes and they almost always have similar sizes – these are the quasi standing waves of the spatio-temporal chaos governing the river. If you perturb the flow, many quasi standing waves may disappear. Or very few. It depends.” https://judithcurry.com/2011/02/10/spatio-temporal-chaos/
At the planetary scale – it is a fractal on a larger canvas.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/equirectangular
The flow of energy that maintains constant turbulence is from
the Sun. If the flow is perturbed – resonant chaotic oscillators – vortices in time and space – in the Earth system shift. Nonlinear coupling of solar UV to the Southern and Northern Annular Modes (SAM and NAM) in the Hale solar cycle of magnetic reversal seem to be a fundamental beat.
In the longer term the inevitability of a solar grand minimum sometime or other suggests the inevitability of greater meridional flows in atmosphere and oceans and thus a cooling NH, reduced AMOC and a cooler surface in the eastern Pacific. A ‘springback’ is by no means guaranteed.
There is a hint of caution. Ergodicity in Earth’s spatio-temporal chaotic system is an unanswered question.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/river-in-mountains.jpg
Robert I Ellison
I prefer the kinds of streams I can canoe on, not the one-and-done pictured. The whirls of the paddle left abaft, the only signs of recent passing. Man made turbulent flow.
https://www.rapidmedia.com/media/k2/items/cache/3d3b7d5d68132cc424920deb43e754bb_XL.jpg
Solar cyclic variability can modulate winter Arctic climate:
“Interestingly, that solar signal completely disappears if AO is included in the regression, indicating a pathway involving AO.”
The AO does involve the solar signal, but plasma strength and not sunspot number. In the 1970’s and 1980’s negative AO increased around the sunspot cycle maximums, as that’s where the solar wind was weaker in those cycles.
https://snag.gy/d2v3aJ.jpg
“Thus on average, the solar Min has a more negative NAM than solar Max and vice versa.” Solar cyclic variability can modulate winter Arctic climate, Indrani Roy
No it reverses when the solar wind profile is anti-phase with sunspot cycles, and then more negative NAM then occurs at sunspot maximum. Same pattern around the sunspot maxima of 1907 and 1917 as 1969 and 1979/80.
There are many reasons to restore soils, forests, woodlands and grasslands – and to reclaim deserts. Carbon sequestration usually tops the list but that is the least important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t83tjQT9Vk
Carbon sequestration in soils has major benefits in addition to offsetting anthropogenic emissions from fossil fuel combustion, land use conversion, soil cultivation, continuous grazing and cement manufacturing. Restoring soil carbon stores increases agronomic productivity and enhances global food security. Increasing the soil organic content enhances water holding capacity and creates a more drought tolerant agriculture – with less downstream flooding. There is a critical level of soil carbon that is essential to maximising the effectiveness of water and nutrient inputs. Global food security, especially for countries with fragile soils and harsh climate such as in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, cannot be achieved without improving soil quality through an increase in soil organic content. Wildlife flourishes on restored grazing land helping to halt biodiversity loss. Reversing soil carbon loss in agricultural soils is a new green revolution where conventional agriculture is hitting a productivity barrier with exhausted soils and increasingly expensive inputs.
The 21st century is, as Captain Jack Harkness said, “when everything changes”.
RIE,
In simpler words, carbon is a major plant nutrient, a fertilizer when added to soil.
The response time and uptake depends strongly on the chemical form of the added carbon, just like any other example like ferrous or ferric iron on Hawaiian pineapples.
However, every carrot that you pull out to send to market takes past fertilizers with it. Nitrogen is able to be added in situ in the soil via biologic paths. Most others like potassium and phosphorus, have to be trucked in. Carbon is a bit of both, some added by biology, some by truck. Long term, if you do not add, your yield becomes uneconomic.
The key point I keep making is that carbon in soil does not build up naturally to high amounts like 10%+ in most soils. There are rare exceptions. If soils are untouched, total organic carbon gets to a couple of percent by weight, or less as you approach desert conditions. If soil is to be a larger global store, carbon has to be added continuously because it is taken away continuously above a certain level, either by cropping or by further biology that tends to break down C compounds to produce CO2, unwanted these days, and other C compounds.
As with say potash, there is a cost to create the (concentrated) carbon fertilizer, to ship and apply it and to measure and manage it. There is an optional cost of increased levels of other fertilizers and water to maximise new C addition yields.
It might not be payable to increase soil C by mining and trucking coal. You would be on the wrong end of an ideologic game. It only starts to become payable if you can take that C from coal and relocate it in desired crops. It does not happen automatically, it has to be managed and assisted over reasonable time scales, at an extreme by synthetic conversion of the coal to compounds more soluble and available.
As with any new cost, a benefit:cost analysis is good practise. Rather than just push the idea that more C in soil is an overall good (which I have never disputed) would it not be better to show benefit:cost analysis results with strong figures for best scenarios? Because not all paths to higher soil C are blindly good. Geoff.
Carbon dioxide is a gas that is taken in through leaves and chemically reduced using solar energy to produce carbohydrates. In living soils some of these sugars feed fungi in a symbiotic relationship. Fungi and other soil organisms living in a very diverse ecosystem create organic acids that break down parent material into elements available to plants. This can supply micronutrients for healthy plants and healthy plant continues. You do still need macronutrients in intensive agriculture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKz1EGG6e3w&t=28s
Plants have a genotype adaptation to high carbon dioxide levels in the reduction of the density and size of plant stomata. This allows plants to take in the carbon it needs and reduce the water loss from stomata. Water quite often is the limiting resource for terrestrial plants.
Maintaining soil organic carbon is done with a suite of practices that are in fact still evolving. The focus must be on what works for farmers not on some ideological purity.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fes3.96
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgmssrVInP0
Beyond farms there is an immensely inspiring objective of large scale ecological restoration.
What does it cost?
http://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/PublishingImages/auction%20results%20december%202017/Cumulative%20auction%20results%20December%202017.png
It is cheap for such broad ranging environmental conservation.
https://www.clc.org.au/images/sized/files/news/170502-Burning-Trip-Karlantjipa-(161)-700×378.jpg
https://www.clc.org.au/articles/cat/fire-management/
It is PC as well.
More?
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1438361666280091
And if we are going to geoengineer – water management is critical.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/880213825428214
Here’s a couple of good ol’ boys.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/882208415228755
Robert I Ellison
After watching the YouTube, several thoughts occurred to me:
Trampling the cover crop into the soil by the cattle herd: no till needed.
T-shirt: Don’t Farm Naked. Keep the soil covered, always.
Price of corn without chemicals.
The States are the test lab for innovation; and, the family farm is the inspiration of such change.
Rural electrification initiated after the dust bowl years in the 1930’s, its legacy allows more work per person, ie, fewer workers to produce more.
However, the astonishing take-home message: The solution to carbon sequestration lies in the “fly-over” states; the way farmers farm. Because coastal-elites are sequestered apart from the solution, and, they didn’t think of it, government regulation becomes the default policy. The carbon catastrophe meme stems from the churning of one idea amongst a large body of isolates.
I definitely wouldn’t mix naked farming with rams.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BbGuVmahN5C/?hl=en&taken-by=the.naked.farmer
Robert I Ellison
How far we have come, from Tomas Milanovic’s 2011 post on Spacial-Temoral Chaos: https://judithcurry.com/2011/02/10/spatio-temporal-chaos/ to now Warren NSW, population 2,732 (2016 census), a tin roofed town a day’s drive NNW of Sydney; with a 24 hour diner, single vehicle fire station, wooden Anglican Church and a Tourist Information sign. Who is the greeter? the man in the brimmed Hat? giving another view of the children’s book: The Man In The Yellow Hat. Got to see what he is up to.
“What can decadal variability tell us about climate feedbacks and sensitivity?”
It can tell us that the tail wags the dog if we say that warming drove the decline in tropical cloud cover. You can’t have a positive feedback for nine years that suddenly turns into a pause for the following twelve years when the postulated source of the warming is still rising. The rational null hypothesis is that the decline in cloud cover drove the warming, up to the point that the cloud cover ceased declining, leading to the pause.
Of course you can. You just experienced exactly that.
It’s a negative feedback, just like the AMO warming, and they happened from exactly the same time, along with changes in the vertical distribution of atmospheric water vapour.
More on the Judge Alsup court case in California.
“The Climate Is Changing For Climate Skeptics:
As climate litigation heats up, a judge’s climate science tutorial puts the fossil fuel industry in an awkward position with the science deniers it once funded.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-change-trial-california_us_5ab53d0ce4b054d118e2a0d9
The amicus brief from Heartland doesn’t help, because that is the denialist position that the defendant fossil fuel industries have been running away from.
With COP21 in Paris in late 2015 – the world has definitively chosen to access whatever energy resource is needed to facilitate growth and development. COP21 locked in an increase in energy emissions of 3.7 billion metric tons by 2030. If you are looking for ‘solutions’ to emissions it will have to come from elsewhere.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/figure_1-energy-demand.png
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/hele-e1521933968819.jpg
Cr@p science and cr@p policy.
A “pragmatic strategy centers on efforts to accelerate energy innovation, build resilience to extreme weather, and pursue no regrets pollution reduction measures — three efforts that each have their own diverse justifications independent of their benefits for climate mitigation and adaptation.” https://thebreakthrough.org/archive/climate_pragmatism_innovation
Do you not have laws on frivolous litigation?
You sound like you want them to work harder to reduce emissions, and so do I, but it is dictated by the economics of supporting and using advancing technology too.
“More than one billion people globally lack access to electricity, and billions more still burn wood and dung for their basic energy needs.” https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/our-high-energy-planet
If you have a better and cheaper energy option – I’m all ears. In the meantime there is black carbon mitigation and soil and ecosystem restoration – along with multiple sector and gases technology strategies – with benefits that transcend energy emission fixation. It is a far cry from the cr@p science and cr@p policy of the climate rabble.
The poorest third of the global population accounts for 10% of emissions and would be exempt from limitations as they need to develop more. The richest third account for two thirds of global emissions. The ball is in their court, and they can be effective enough without the help of the undeveloped countries.
“It is no coincidence that the increase of economic liberty over the past decades has coincided with a massive reduction in worldwide poverty, disease, and hunger. The link between economic freedom and development is clear and strong. People in economically free societies live longer. They have better health. They are able to be better stewards of the environment, and they push forward the frontiers of human achievement in science and technology through greater innovation.” https://www.heritage.org/index/book/chapter-2
The climate rabble are fixated on the blame game. The west is seen as too rich and too profligate. But development is dependent on the health of global economic centers. You don’t maintain health by undermining the viability of reliable and cost competitive energy access. Both environments and innovation suffers with the wrong kind of market management.
If you want to help the developing world – open up your markets instead of further closing them. The US report card reads could do a lot better.
https://www.heritage.org/index/country/unitedstates
You say the west is seen as too rich and profligate. Interesting view. In what world is that? Anyway your concern for the poor looks genuine on its face, and maybe their environmental conditions matter to you too.
Well that confirms that Jimmy doesn’t live in our world.
You’re using false narratives. Not good.
Jimmy has a very flexible progressive narrative.
I give you factual and numerical arguments, and you drag your prejudices into it for no apparent reason, other than being unable to counter the facts, and wanting to change the subject. Who thinks the west is “too rich and profligate”? The east? The poor countries? The scientists? The greens? The pinkos? Your prejudices are showing. Improve your arguments.
You give us cr@p science, cr@p policy and disingenuous progressive climate activist games. In this case pretending ignorance of a core progressive agenda. The urban doofus hipster 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.
Dateline 3 February 2015 – The Top UN Climate Change Official is optimistic that a new international treaty will be adopted at Paris Climate Change conference at the end of the year. However, the official, Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of UNFCCC, warns that the fight against climate change is a process and that the necessary transformation of the world economy will not be decided at one conference or in one agreement.
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history”, Ms Figueres stated at a press conference in Brussels.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change, be it COP 15, 21, 40 – you choose the number. It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.” UNRIC
Finding examples of this mooted economic and societal transformation is far from difficult.
https://thischangeseverything.org/book/
https://theconversation.com/limits-to-growth-policies-to-steer-the-economy-away-from-disaster-57721
Yet we have to waste time on Jimmy’s progressively flexible narratives.
RIE, surprisingly to you, I agree it will be difficult, and if you search back I have always said it would be. The technology required is not here yet, unless you count nuclear. It will take decades, but the R&D needs to be encouraged by governments because the reward outweighs the alternative consequences, and I think you see that much at least. Successful industries will get a big pay-off. Energy is the next big tech revolution.
Another comment another game.
Full circle. I will close the loop.
https://www.kqed.org/science/1921475/live-blog-federal-judge-oversees-climate-change-tutorial
From the trivial to the disingenuous back to the trivial again? You need a bigger circle or you risk disappearing up your own…
The lawsuit is a frivolous waste of everyone’s time and effort. They are arguing over at most 60mm sea level rise over the next couple of decades. Shall we pay the oil companies more for a warmer, more hospitable climate, longer growing season and a greening planet? It’s a grandstanding game aimed squarely at American Republicans. Just the sort of game you love but not of course of any significance in our world.
I don’t know how the case will go, but the news is that oil companies have long since distanced themselves from the likes of Monckton and Heartland-supported scientists because they see that promoting denial of the consensus is what got them into this litigation mess in the first place. Now they came in admitting to the idea that the science has been known even to them since 2000, but then said possibly back to the 50’s and Arrhenius a century ago when pushed by the judge. That puts them on a slippery slope. An interesting turn.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/download-1-e1521569960774.png
The simple physics of radiative photon scattering is evident – but climate is a lot more complex and dynamic.
2.4 C per doubling for the last 60 years.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:1950/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.25
You do know I never look at your graph?
…and that is fine. It’s just the last 60 years of data showing that CO2 fits it better than your straight line, no surprise.
We have seen it a million times Jimmy. It is not remotely science. There are a number of factors in there lumped under natural variability – including a drought spike at the end of the record. Do a correlation if you don’t believe it.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/cowtan-1944.png
If we assume that natural variability is a plus and minus wobble on a rising trend – then the rate of anthropogenic warming is manageable within the context of a practical multi-sector and multi-gas mitigation strategy – including sequestration in soils and ecosystems.
“The new framework now emerging will succeed to the degree to which it prioritizes agreements that promise near-term economic, geopolitical, and environmental benefits to political economies around the world, while simultaneously reducing climate forcings, developing clean and affordable energy technologies, and improving societal resilience to climate impacts. This new approach recognizes that continually deadlocked international negotiations and failed domestic policy proposals bring no climate benefit at all. It accepts that only sustained effort to build momentum through politically feasible forms of action will lead to accelerated decarbonization.” https://thebreakthrough.org/archive/climate_pragmatism_innovation
But it ain’t remotely purely periodic. And I just don’t give a rat’s arse about climate as such anymore. Or perhaps at all ever. There is some fascinating Earth science in there occasionally – which is what I have focused on for decades. But as always the rational policy response to any of this is to build prosperous and resilient communities in vibrant landscapes. The latter is the bête noire of the contemporary progressive mindset.
That quote looked dated, and when I checked, it was from 2011(!). News to you perhaps.
Is that the best you can do Jimmy? Paris embodies the new approach.
https://jelpblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/28/from-kyoto-to-paris/
They seem OK with the bottom-up and incremental Paris approach. So am I.
Happy you are happy Jimmy – but it does embody a ‘new approach’ you just said was dated. Make up your mind.
2011 was well before Paris, so your first article was not describing that. Paris represented a big change from top-down to bottom-up thinking, and that is what got it passed.
“The old climate framework failed because it would have imposed substantial costs associated with climate mitigation policies on developed nations today in exchange for climate benefits far off in the future — benefits whose attributes, magnitude, timing, and distribution are not knowable with certainty. Since they risked slowing economic growth in many emerging economies, efforts to extend the Kyoto-style UNFCCC framework to developing nations predictably deadlocked as well.”
So defining a problem with an approach that the UNFCCC ditched in favor of a completely voluntary system in order to reach some sort of agreement doesn’t count? “The new framework now emerging will succeed to the degree to which it prioritizes agreements that promise near-term economic, geopolitical, and environmental benefits to political economies around the world…” Another comment – another game with words.
I agree. Paris is better than Kyoto.
I think Paris is almost a complete nonsense. The only real progress was on soils.
OK, then.
Paris is distinguished only by its irrelevance.
You posted a pro-Paris piece, but after a few iterations decided you were against it after all.
No Jimmy – I posted a link on the ‘new framework’ emerging in 2011 – that you disparaged because it was “dated”. Then I posted a link saying this was the very framework adopted in Paris after decades of failure. I didn’t say I give a rat’s arse about the progressive circus that is COP.
What’s the point in posting an article from over six years ago predicting a new framework when we are already two years past its implementation?
Oh for God’s sake. The point was about climate pragmatism – something that is alien to you apparently.
JimD,
Save your wailing grief about the plight of poor countries and cries for others for free help.
Remember that every nation or such gathering of like people has not been limited by nature.
Countries have had the same opportunities to prosper.
Some won, some lost, but the opportunities remain.
If Nations want to do better, they need to work harder.
Tough but true.
I feel no guilt about this realism. Geoff.
Geoff, don’t bother yourself with poor populations. Luckily we have the UNDP and UNEP who do care about these things so that you don’t have to.
Like I said – cr@p progressive new world order policy.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2015/06/08/the-new-un-sustainable-development-goals-are-they-suffering-from-relevance-deprivation-2/
Jim D: Geoff, don’t bother yourself with poor populations. Luckily we have the UNDP and UNEP who do care about these things so that you don’t have to.
You can’t be serious. Can you?
MM, maybe you are implying that the UN doesn’t care enough either? How about churches, charities and foundations? Do they care enough? Not sure where you’re coming from on this, or is it just snark and you align with Geoff.
Geoff
If Nations want to do better, they need to work harder.
If someone started making dishwashers in Haiti, who would import them? With what tariffs? Trump’s USA? The EU? China or Japan?
Yes hard work is correlated with prosperity. But correlation is not causation. Historical differences in prosperity have a way of becoming structurally entrenched. A sad irony is that aid perpetuates this economic polarisation further. China has the right approach for Africa – just trade, pure and simple. Not endless patronising hand-outs creating dependency and perpetuating colonial influence.
Britain is trying to leave the EU in order to have freedom to give more of the world’s marginalised countries a chance to trade. But needless to say the EU together with Britain’s economic elite are fighting against this and want elitism and fortress mentality on every scale to continue.
The proposed 17 UN sustainable development goals (SDG) are intended to subsume the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and extend UN ambitions to sustainable development. The SDG has 169 aspirational and largely immeasurable targets. It grows like Topsy. The SDG rhetoric of economic central planning – based as it is on the discredited Agenda 21.
In contrast the Copenhagen Consensus Center has 19 smart targets that would triple or quadruple the value of development aid to 2030. The 19 targets arrived at by Nobel Prize winning economists show how to best spend $2.5 trillion in development aid that the world will spend over the next 15 years. “In a world of limited resources, we can’t do everything, so which goals should we prioritize? The Copenhagen Consensus Center provides information on which targets will do the most social good (measured in dollars, but also incorporating e.g. welfare, health and environmental protection), relative to their costs.” Copenhagen Consensus Aid can provide targeted investment to improve human circumstances only if it is not wasted chasing too many low value objectives. The reality– however – is that only economic development can provide the resources to see substantial social and environmental progress. Progress on social resilience and environments happens organically as nations become more prosperous. Prosperity is linked to economic freedom.
The global economy is worth about $100 trillion a year. To put aid and philanthropy into perspective – the total is 0.025% of the global economy. If spent on Copenhagen Consensus smart development goals such expenditure can generate a benefit to cost ratio of more than 15. If spent on the UN Sustainable Development Goals you may as well piss it up against a wall. Either way – it is nowhere near the major path to universal prosperity. Some 3.5 billion people make less than $2 a day. Changing that can only be done by doubling and tripling global production – and doing it as quickly as possible. Optimal economic growth is essential and that requires an understanding and implementation of explicit principles for effective economic governance of free markets.
The UN SDG are a wish list of photo ops for progressives pursuing a progressive agenda that is inimical real progress.
“After years of build-up, world leaders at the U.N. Friday set some of the most important priorities for the next 15 years, the sustainable development goals. At stake is about $2.5 trillion in development aid. Unfortunately, because of politicking and a desire to please everyone, this massive budget will likely achieve less good than it could.
The presidents and prime ministers agreed to replace the eight goals and 18 targets of the Millennium Development Goals with an impossibly long list of 17 goals and 169 targets. The chief problem with this new laundry list of targets is that trying to prioritize 169 things looks very similar to prioritizing nothing.” http://time.com/4052109/un-sustainable-development-goals/
Phil
Glad that you see the broader agenda as regards trade.
Personally I would favour moves to turn the commonwealth into a more organised trading entity.
It has some economic powerhouses together with numerous smaller countries who would greatly benefit from freer and more accessible markets and ability to source knowledge and install infrastructure.
The Total GDP of the commonwealth is actually greater than the EU and the commonwealth countries are growing faster than that moribund organisation, the EU.
A chance to be seized if the others are interested.
tonyb
RIE, despite your constant sneering (or is it Lomborg’s) at the UN, you may be interested in their progress report on the SDG. Bottom line: they can quantify a lot of significant progress, but acceleration is needed.
http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2017/07/pace-of-progress-must-accelerate-to-achieve-the-sdgs-finds-latest-un-progress-report/
Progress on goals that can’t be measured and don’t have much benefit to show for it?
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/post-2015_presentation_3.pdf
Well they measured them and presented them in that report. That’s how it works.
You mean they have an aspiration to measure low benefit and ill-defined goals?
Like reducing global poverty more than 50% since 1999?
The UN has never reduced poverty. The UN is an impediment.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/economic-freedom.jpg
You seem to be trying very hard to prove something, but what it is, no one knows.
Two things Jimmy.
1. Economic freedom is the basis for poverty alleviation.
2. Every word from you is a silly little progressive game.
OK, then.
The UN is distinguished only by its irrelevance.
Yet, we have Paris.
Like I said – Paris is distinguished only by its irrelevance.
Not to the countries taking part.
They signed up to do what the hell they want – I don’t know how it can get more irrelevant.
There is peer pressure, reporting back every five years with new goals. It’s not as easy as you think to do this because they signed up to real targets which requires real changes from the status quo in all those countries. Far from irrelevant from their perspective, perhaps from yours.
Peer review? That’s hilarious.
Reducing emissions is easy. We have been doing it for years. We exceeded our 8% increase of the Kyoto target by 8%. Still got that in our back pocket. We don’t especially care as long as it doesn’t put the economy at a disadvantage.
“Australia’s 2030 target is achievable with Direct Action. Australia is meeting our 2020 target through Direct Action policies that reduce emissions, increase energy productivity and improve the health of soils and the environment. These policies will also enable us to meet our 2030 target.
At the core is the $2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund and its Safeguard Mechanism. This is complemented by the Renewable Energy Target, energy efficiency improvements, phasing out very potent synthetic greenhouse gases, and direct support for investment in low emissions technologies and practices.”
The renewables target won’t be renewed – and we will be building some new HELE coal plants.
Peer pressure. See if Australia just gives up on all that in five years and goes back to coal. Could that trigger tariffs on their exports to compliant countries? These are the questions.
If you had a freakin’ clue it would be lonely. We will meet Paris commitments while exporting coal to Asia and India – and gas everywhere. And build a couple of new HELE coal plants to replace some aging energy infrastructure.
We could always trade with the US – being exempt from steel and aluminium tariffs. Thanks Donny.
OK, so Paris is relevant after all, even in Australia.
Only for someone whose sole interest playing silly little word games.
They build an agreement based on voluntary commitments that result in a 8% increase in energy emissions by 2030 – and then spend all their time bleating about how it is insufficient to limit temperature rise to 1.5K. Nothing shows the moral and intellectual vacuum at the heart of the progressive climate rabble more than this.
And like I said upfront. With COP21 in Paris in late 2015 – the world has definitively chosen to access whatever energy resource is needed to facilitate growth and development. COP21 locked in an increase in energy emissions of 3.7 billion metric tons by 2030.
You’re welcome I’m sure.
…and the skeptics said it would collapse the global economy. Now they’re complaining it doesn’t go far enough.
Huh?
tonyb, my sense of Brexit voters was that these people would not welcome certain Commonwealth people to work in the UK any more than the Europeans they want to kick out. That was not what they voted for. Prior to the EU, Britain had a large immigration from Commonwealth countries, and some locals have never been happy about that. So that would have to be a factor in your scheme of things. It could not replace the EU as a source of cheap skilled labor.
JimD
It’s an unfortunate fact that while some Brexit voters wanted unfettered global engagement, others just wanted foreigners out.
Rob,
Why do you engage with the dufus?
Somebody needs to tell Judge Alsup to do something about the feckless clown politicians who put together useless international non-binding agreements. I almost feel sorry for the alarmists.
“Remember Paris? It was not even two years ago that the celebrated climate accords were signed — defining two degrees of global warming as a must-meet target and rallying all the world’s nations to meet it — and the returns are already dispiritingly grim.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/the-paris-climate-accords-are-starting-to-look-like-fantasy.html
“Paris is very quickly starting to look like Kyoto.”
As expected the objectives and the pledges of the Paris Accords have been ignored. From New York Magazine:
http://amp.nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/the-paris-climate-accords-are-starting-to-look-like-fantasy.html
Would like to see this article in the Policy edition of JC’s week in review
Countries signed up to Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) – and of course this is now too little too late to meet the arbitrary 2K target and we need a new world order. Go figure. The 8% increase in energy emissions by 2030 was known in 2015. Did thy miss it then or is this just another disingenuous ploy?
Interesting that the skeptics are now criticizing the UN for not being effective enough. It is a little early to be able to judge this slowdown of emission growth rates. First you need to bend the growth rate down, then bend emissions down. This won’t happen tomorrow. Some skeptics say fossil fuels won’t last to 2100 even at the current emission rate, so there is motivation from that direction too because those prices will skyrocket as the easy resources are used up. Renewables are the future and the UN sees that.
First you need the technology. And renewables by and large ain’t it. And no I didn’t say the UN was ineffective but that they are utterly useless and irrelevant. Can’t you see the difference? It’s about the economy stupid.
If you don’t have renewables, and you run out of fossil fuels, then it’s worse than we thought. What’s your solution? Actually decades of more technological progress will be the solution.
It is always worse than you thought Jimmy. Tell us something we don’t know.
What you don’t know is that technology always advances faster than you expect.
The solution is nukes, yimmy. But you huffpo left loon luddites are afraid of that technology.
Now he’ll say that you agree with him when really you would have to be soft in the head. The solution is not technology – technology is easy – the solution is the creative destruction of capitalism that will sweep away obsolete systems overnight. Jimmy hates capitalism.
donnie, yes, that is a solution. What would you say the problem is that nukes solve?
Some mainstream scientists agree, but I think physicists tend to be biased that way anyway. They are a different constituency from greens for sure.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/03/nuclear-power-paves-the-only-viable-path-forward-on-climate-change
Jim D: MM, maybe you are implying that the UN doesn’t care enough either?
Not that they do not care, but that they are not sufficient, if global warming is bad, and if it is not.
Global warming isn’t a problem.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1182638705185723
Global warming nutbags are less a problem more a hindrance.
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1182638705185723
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1182638705185723
Something happening to my link.
We are talking about your problem, yimmy. You are convinced the planet is going to be toast, if we don’t stop using fossil fuels. Remember, now? Nukes is your solution. Instead of wishing for miraculous technological advances in your solar and wind toys, go with what you know works. Nukes. But your silly lot are too scared of that technology. Pathetic.
Jim D: the science deniers it once funded.”
HuffPo — really? That isn’t even news, but a daydream.
It is the same article as the NYT. There are a few others too. Most of the oil companies didn’t provide answers to the judge’s homework questions, so they got an assignment to report on the one that Chevron provided. Not sure if the judge even looked at the efforts from Heartland and Monckton.
Jim D: I give you factual and numerical arguments,
Not in this thread. In this thread you gave us a HuffPo insult.
Maybe you prefer these articles, or search for alsup+climate in your search engine for plenty more. Not sure why Judith didn’t include any.
“In a court hearing in San Francisco, oil companies publicly backed the science of climate change”
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/22/17151532/climate-tutorial-san-francisco-oakland-lawsuits-judge-alsup-chevron-exxon
or this one
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/san-francisco-court-room-climate-science-gets-its-day-docket
Maybe… they should do an “Atlas Shrugged” and turn the gas pumps off.
Jim D: “In a court hearing in San Francisco, oil companies publicly backed the science of climate change”
When have they not backed science?
That the judge dismissed the case is a fact. That the judge cited the complete lack of evidence of any conspiracy to suppress science is a fact. That this dismissal causes new problems for the oil companies is an opinion. That the oil company financed science “deniers” is an insult.
There is a motion to dismiss the case. There has been no ruling on it.
Their claim is that they have backed science since 2000. Before that, not so much, as they can’t deny that were funding political groups that opposed any science pointing at warning signs of increasing emissions despite already have had that in internal reports back to the 80’s. Exxon arguably didn’t change their attitude to science until some time after 2006 when Tillerson took over from the rather denialistic Raymond. Before that, they were hardcore opposed to the scientific reports.
Yimmy, do you use fossil fuels?
matthewrmarler,
“That the judge dismissed the case is a fact. “
No, it’s a lie.
When I read that Judge Alsup submitted a list of questions to the parties I was encouraged that some science was going to be debated and the issues would get a good thrashing out in court. But then I read the questions. The media lauded the approach as using a tutorial in the courtroom to answer the global warming questions. What tutorial would that be, The Dick and Jane Reader?
What a disappointment. Just typical binary, 3rd grade level inquiries into the debate. No nuance. No specifics on observational evidence. No discussion of impacts or theories of dynamics at play at the poles or causes of sea level rise, or any number of issues that are at the heart of the issues between scientists, including levels of uncertainty.
But the usual dumbdown tribe like Huffington Post, Vox and Mother Jones, I’m sure loved it.
As I have said here many times, a lawyer working for an oil company, to the best of his ability, is going to stop his company from ever having any direct, or easily detected indirect, involvement with climate skepticism as it’s basically low-quality fruitcake nonsense.
I actually don’t think the plaintiffs can win this case, but the noteworthy thing is that the oil companies support the IPCC conclusions, and they don’t have to deny it to win cases like this. It comes down to, yes, fossil fuels cause warming, but no the oil companies were not liable for damage even if they knew there would be some. What action could they have taken but to withdraw from the market, which seems to be an unrealistic expectation. Perhaps I missed something, but it doesn’t seem right to blame them for damage. There are other cases related to misleading shareholders and politicians where things can be pursued, but this is not it. If there is damage in the future, it may be linked to the negligence of politicians to mitigate against it when there were warnings, but that is a very different case.
Nick Stokes: No, it’s a lie.
I am mistaken and JCH appears to be correct: the official ruling has not been issued. All we have are reports.
Federal Judge Dismissed Claim Of A Conspiracy To Suppress Global Warming Science
A federal judge overseeing a lawsuit dismissed a core section plaintiffs brought in the case — oil companies conspired to cover up global warming science.
… The cities’ suits against oil companies, however, do not show an industry conspiracy to suppress climate science from the public, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said, according to journalists who attended the hearing.
I apologize.
“I apologize.”
Indeed there was misleading information around, from sources that need careful reading and scrutiny. Many people made that mistake.
“All we have are reports.”
WUWT has now posted a transcript here. The reports seem much exaggerated.
Jim D | March 26, 2018 at 8:57 pm |
“I actually don’t think the plaintiffs can win this case,”
If the oil companies back the IPCC view then seeing it took so long to arrive at a conclusion of very likely 2008??
The oil companies could not possibly have known earlier more than the experts so cannot be guilty.
Great defense.
Win by an own goal.
I think the oil companies get off because of the technicality that they are not involved in policy. Oil could have been banned or heavily regulated and taxed, like cigarettes. It wasn’t, and that wasn’t their fault. Litigation is an area where politicians will have more problems in the future than fossil fuel companies. Those companies only indirectly get into trouble by funding politics to influence it against the science that could have prevented damage. It’s a subtle but important distinction, that the problems will stem from poor policies and those responsible for them, not from just selling fossil fuels.
NIck Stokes: The reports seem much exaggerated.
On pp 197-188 the judge says that a submission by the plaintiff led him to expect a document showing that defendants had some secret knowledge, but the evidence was that defendants had only the publicly available IPCC reports. Plaintiff’s attorney was invited to respond, but did not dispute the judge’s interpretation.
“Exaggeration” might be the correct word here, but the judge’s comment still seems important.
mrm: 197-188
Would you believe 187-188?
mrm,
“the judge’s comment still seems important.”
What happened was that Boutrous, for Chevron, objected to para 67 in the Oakland submission. This described a meeting in 1996, saying
“In February 1996, an internal GCC presentation stated that a doubling of carbon dioxide levels over pre-industrial concentrations would occur by 2100 and cause “an average rate of warming [that] would probably be greater than any seen in the past 10,000 years.” The presentation noted “potentially irreversible” impacts that could include “significant loss of life.””
Now that seems to be true. Boutrous argued that it gives a wrong impression, in that the presentation was just summarising the IPCC report, and did not represent any kind of secret knowledge by Chevron. The judge agreed. This seems to be part of the normal to and fro where lawyers try to get the facts in some sort of order. Nothing is dismissed, except maybe para 67. The judge then said to Oakland
“If you want to respond, I’ll let you respond. But I don’t know if that had as much to do with today, but if he wanted to respond okay.”
Oakland didn’t respond. Now if it was an important comment, he should have active sought, rather than discouraging, a response from Oakland. And Oakland would have responded.
In the context of paragraph 66, paragraph 67 makes sense. Oakland lawyer was wise to defer on discussing it as it did not belong in a hearing that was a tutorial on climate science.
When the case begins, the Oakland lawyer should be able to clear it up for the judge.
We must shut down the fossil fuel industry to save the poor people. We must pray that this lawsuit will do it. And that is your sermon from huffpo, for today. Thank you for your attention. And bless you all, if you stop being morally and intellectually inferior deniers.
DM – don’t forget the children – poor people and children! (Also, puppies!)
Jim D:
Topic de jour, The word denialist:
A person who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.
‘the small minority of very vocal climate change denialists’
A low bar in that if 55% of science people support A, the B position is denialist. As views change over time, the denialist description can swap from B to A.
The minority is more than vocal. They are very vocal. Refusing to admit the truth. I don’t want to throw in with the lot that cares about that.
AFAIK this is first entry at Wikipedia on denialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Denialism&oldid=85329644
2 links: The Guardian and Exxonsecrets.
Yes, Darwin and Galileo started as denialists by that definition. Are the current crop Darwins and Galileos? I think not. More in the flat-earther category.
The Peter Principle would seem to be more relevant. Climate bloggers babble up to their level of incompetence. A low bar for the climate alarmist rabble generally.
Looks like Judge Alsup is getting some eye-opening info in the big climate case. Here is a little something that huffpo won’t report:
http://freebeacon.com/issues/climate-change-trial-starts-rough-footing-environmentalists/
_________________
During the tutorial, the judge pointed to several inaccuracies in the data and materials provided by the plaintiffs, sometimes to the embarrassment of climate change activists.
Alsup also castigated the plaintiff’s claims of a “smoking gun” document that would prove the conspiracy claims true. The plaintiffs pointed to a report that the companies had in their possession as proof they knew about the nefarious effects of climate change in 1995.
The “smoking gun” document in question proved to be a regurgitated summary of a 1995 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At the time of its release, the report was subject to significant scrutiny by many in the scientific community because it was riddled with huge uncertainties.
“There was a conspiratorial document within the defendants about how they knew good and well that global warming was right around the corner,” Alsup said. “Well, it turned out it wasn’t quite that. What it was, was a slide show that somebody had gone to the IPCC and was reporting on what the IPCC had reported, and that was it. Nothing more.”
The judge pointed out that since the report was widely and readily available, proving a conspiracy claim would be difficult.
“So they were on notice of what in IPCC said from that document, but it’s hard to say that they were secretly aware,” he said. “By that point they knew. Everybody knew everything in the IPCC.”
__________________
Sorry, yimmy.
As I said, I don’t think the plaintiffs have a case here. You can’t blame oil companies for selling their product when it was legal at the time. What you can blame them for is influencing policymakers with wrong information who then go on to make negligent policies, which is not what this trial was about.
The stratospheric pathway for Arctic impacts on midlatitude climate:
“Recent evidence from both observations and model simulations suggests that an Arctic sea ice reduction tends to cause a negative Arctic Oscillation (AO) phase with severe winter weather in the Northern Hemisphere…
These results are highly consistent with observations that following a low summertime sea ice cover in the Arctic, the wintertime AO tends to be in its negative phase”
The AO was positive during 2007-08 and 2016-17 winters (DJF):
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/monthly.ao.index.b50.current.ascii.table
I am surprised that they have not looked at the noise level and noted negative deviations in sea ice extent lagging the negative AO episodes by around 5-10 days. Solar variability strongly effects the AO at less than weekly scales, but without knowing that, the only alternative explanations are various tail wags the dog theories about what else in the climate system could make the AO go negative, when rising CO2 should apparently be making it more positive. Trying to work out what drives what without a solar forcing frame of reference for the AO must drive people crazy.
RE: “Next-Generation Climate Models Could Learn, Improve on the Fly”
https://eos.org/research-spotlights/next-generation-climate-models-could-learn-improve-on-the-fly
VS:
https://www.hpcwire.com/2018/03/19/deep-learning-at-15-pflops-enables-training-for-extreme-weather-identification-at-scale/
I’m not sure if these two stories are talking about the same computational systems but if you are waiting for A.I. climate models it’s already here.
“Deep Learning at 15 PFlops Enables Training for Extreme Weather Identification at Scale:
“The Cori supercomputer has given climate scientists the ability to use machine learning to identify extreme weather events in huge climate simulation datasets. Predictive accuracies ranging from 89.4% to as high as 99.1% show that trained deep learning neural networks (DNNs) can identify weather fronts, tropical cyclones, and long narrow air flows that transport water vapor from the tropics called atmospheric rivers. As with image recognition, Michael Wehner (senior staff scientist, LBNL) noted they found the machine learning output outperforms humans…”
Here is a link to video where Dr. Prabhat & Dr. Wehner take a deep dive into the software and hardware architecture and it’s applications to climate models, nuclear research and genetics.
https://software.intel.com/en-us/events/hpc-devcon/2017/keynote?multiplayer=5646473936001
So if a major world power (like China) decided to use the world’s most powerful supercomputers (93 Petaflops/Sunway TaihuLight) and their considerable expertise in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to build a high resolution climate model that could accurately predict regional climates 10-30 years into the future I bet they could control the fate of billions of people and possibly the world’s economy.
When you look at the just passed US budget you will notice there are ZERO cuts in almost all the advanced scientific research programs. It seems to me that congress looked at what China is doing in the fields of AI and computer design and told the White House it couldn’t cut the funding. That seems to include climate models too.
In a few years I think they will couple a climate AI system to a biosphere AI system and we will be surprised to find out how few options we we have to change the outcome.
jacksmith4tx: a high resolution climate model that could accurately predict regional climates 10-30 years into the future I bet they could control the fate of billions of people and possibly the world’s economy.
Do the deep learning algorithms reveal how to change the future course of the system? In my scattered readings, they do well at prediction, but hide the relationships of inputs to outputs, so you can not tell whether changing something (CO2 for example) that is correlated with something else that is predictive (temperature, for example) will have any particular effect. The most important causal variable may have little weight if it is correlated with other inputs.
Where do you think the future of A.I. is headed?
Isn’t it more of a question of when and not if. The Chinese are dead serious about dominating two fields of science; A.I. and genetic engineering before the rest of the world.
jacksmith4tx: Where do you think the future of A.I. is headed?
I do not know.
“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.” http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751
There are perhaps some real world knowledge deficits to be resolved first – including developing a math for spatio-temporal chaos. “Deep Thought” it ain’t.
Take data from the past and project the same thing forward, what has happened is more likely again than something that has not happened before. We had a Roman warm period, we had a cold period after, we had the Medieval warm period, we had the Little Ice Age after that. We are warm again now because we are supposed to be and after a few hundred warm years, it will get cold into another Little Ice Age.
Natural climate cycles are normal, natural, necessary and unstoppable. We must adapt as it changes, we cannot control it. Especially we cannot control it by tweaking a trace gas a tiny bit.
Chicken Little is always around, scaring us so we will agree to dumb stuff that makes Chicken Little’s friends really rich. Al Gore has not fixed anything, but he did get really rich by scaring people.
Sea Level Rise
A reconciled estimate of 20th century global mean sea level rise
tide gauges:
1.1 mm/yr for the 20th century.
Tide gauges for 1993 to 2012 – 3.1mm/yr, which is in close agreement with the satellites.
It simply is no longer correct to claim rates of SLR in the first half of the 29th century are comparable to SLR rates seen today.
oh well, 20th…
JCH 3.4 Nino Index -0.68.
Crazy world.
Look beneath:
https://i.imgur.com/3iziH6j.png
Bunkum. Itbis easy to select a set of tide gauges to match sat alt. Just find recent subsidence like in Louisiana or Bangkok. It is also easy to select a set that doesn’t. See my previous guest post here on SLR, Acceleration, and Closure for a simple fact and logic counter to that paper and your comment.
Or, to restate my comment to Judith’s recent long part 5 on SLR, “In sum, the warmunists have attributed to AGW that which has not yet been detected.”
They adjust for VLM. See what? Seriously, see what?
Professor Curry used figures and results from both of these science teams.
Re, “Ancient trees and climate models to understand past and future drought in Mongolia [link]”
And, Hannibal crossed the Alps and his army sacked Rome… 2,000 years ago, the glaciers had gone — replaced by forests — and, as the work of Christian Schlüchter brought into focus, the same thing happened 4,000 years ago… and, 10,000 years ago.
JC. Thank you for posting this. Very interesting.
Julian Morris, march 2018, CLIMATE CHANGE, CATASTROPHE, REGULATION AND THE SOCIAL COST OF CARBON
https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/climate_change_social_cost_carbon.pdf
The cost of climate policies, and the global climate change industry, is substantial and is in addition to the economic impact of reduced global warming. Insurance Journal (2015) https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2015/07/30/377086.htm says: “The $1.5 trillion global ‘climate change industry’ grew at between 17 and 24 percent annually from 2005-2008, slowing to between 4 and 6 percent following the recession with the exception of 2011’s inexplicable 15 percent growth, according to Climate Change Business Journal” (Climate Change Business Journal, 2015 http://www.ebiusa.com/climate-change-industry-research-reports/38-report-4000 ). $1.5 trillion was about 2% of world GDP in 2013. Lomborg (2015) https://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/HHRG-114-SY-WState-BLomborg-20151201.pdf written Testimony to the US House of Representatives, Committee on Science, Space and Technology, says “the only peer-reviewed estimate shows that the climate impact of all Paris promises 2016-2030 will reduce global temperatures by just 0.05C in 2100; if they continue to 2100 they would reduce temperatures by 0.17C”. And, using the “the best available climate economic model ensembles from the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, the Asia Modeling Exercise and the EU/EPA CLIMACAP-LAMP project” the most likely cost would be $1.85 trillion per year in 2030. This is about 2% of projected world GDP in 2030 (in 2010 US$).
Polices aimed at reducing emissions are slowing global economic growth for no benefit.
Policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and international agreements to reduce emissions, such as the UNFCCC Paris Agreement are not justified on an economically rational basis.
I agree with you!
The biggest issue is not that they cost way to much for no gain, the biggest issue is that they do much harm.
Agre!!
If Society Can’t Trust Science, What Can They Trust? Climate Alarmist is Playing San Francisco Judge as a Complete Fool
Dr. Myles Allen must think that the San Francisco Judge is a complete fool. I just finished a post refuting many of his claims, but one example needed to be singled out. In his presentation, Dr. Myles Allen replaced the poster child Mt. Kilimanjaro, which was exposed as a fraud in the Climategate emails, with … Continue reading
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/climate-alarmist-is-playing-san-francisco-judge-as-a-complete-fool/
Here is a California judge who was not fooled.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/fracknation/a-bloody-nose-for-global-warming-alarmists/1737130993018427/
Great, history of deceit isn’t helping the alarmists.
Water, newly trapped in soil, plant, and animal matter is what we are also missing.
Is there a blueprint for skeptic recovery?
A sort of these are the things we need to have happen to convince people that there is no CAGW?
What 4 things do we need to hold up and say this is proof?
A fall in global temps would have to be one.Arctic sea ice volume and extent another, both for at least 4 years.
Can this happen in the next 8 years, all the time I would be happy to engage in.
CO2 seems to be steadily upward.
Temperature measurement is vexatious but the thermometers themselves do not “lie”
Extent ought to be easier to measure with more satellites.
its simple. Understand what AGW is.
1. GHGss warm the planet they do not cool it
2. C02 is a ghg
3. More c02 and you get more warming.
The question is how Much and over what time period,
So, if you had no volcanoes and c02 continues to increase
and other ghgs stay roughly the same or increase, then
at about 15-20 years of no addition warming we start to look at things
that can explain why we dont se the warming we expected, maybe it the data, maybe its unknown negative forcings, maybe is a lower ECS.
But it still in the Range of uncertainty.
After 30 years of no warming the mystery will deepen and top ends of the ECS are ruled out. After 60 years you’d have a crisis of belief
In contrast if temperatures increased at .2c per decade as predicted no skeptic would change their mind. there can be NO crisis of belief for skeptics because they dont have a climate theory. They have questions and objections.. no science has all the answers. So they can just go on doubting forever, because they are not doing science, they are doing debate, largely philosophical skepticism
This claim: “1. GHGss warm the planet they do not cool it” is far too vague to be true as stated. In particular, increasing a GHG need not warm the planet. Whether it does or not in any specific case is an empirical question.
In the case of increasing CO2 it appears not to have warmed the planet. See my http://www.cfact.org/2018/01/02/no-co2-warming-for-the-last-40-years/.
“In contrast if temperatures increased at .2c per decade as predicted no skeptic would change their mind.”
Temperatures have failed to increase at 2C/century, how many gullibles have changed their minds?
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/2017_NCDC30_TRENDS_COMPARISONS.png
To be fair, the thirty year trend through 2017 is at 1.8C/decade, which is close, but that’s still the AR4 Low Scenario.
And that’s validation of skepticism. Global warming is real, but of:
* exaggerated extent
* exaggerated impacts ( actual climate change), and
* exaggerated effects on humans and environments
The land has been warming at 3 C per century for the last few decades, but I don’t think the skeptics have noticed this because they don’t seem to talk about it anywhere. This should be a prime metric in the debate.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/best/mean:120/mean:240/derivative/scale:1200/from:1900/plot/crutem4vgl/mean:120/mean:240/derivative/scale:1200/from:1900
Nobody has changed their mind because the .2 ℃ per decade prediction covers 2001 thru 2020. GISS is at .192 ℃ per decade for 2001 thru present.
2020 is in the future.
And, the pause made fools out of a lot of smart people. It’s funny.
Natural variability adds to AGW and counters it on 20 to 30 years scales in the instrumental record. Can we untangle natural variation from anthropogenic? Only over a long enough period – several centuries ideally – and by assuming that natural variability is white noise that sums to zero.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/download-1-e1521569960774.png
Even latter day warming seems largely natural. Related to low level cloud change largely in the Pacific (Wong et al 2006, Clements et al 2009) – likely involving open and closed cell cloud formation in Rayleigh–Bénard convection in a fluid (the atmospher) heated from below (Koren et al 2017). That and a drought spike right at the end – less latent and more sensible heat flux at the surface (Pielke 2004). The latter explains much of the land/ocean divergence with increased terrestrial aridity since around 1980.
It is not white noise and doesn’t sum to zero over any timeframe. It seems driven by solar modulated meridional flows originating at both poles. With a cooling Sun this century resulting in an AMOC slow down, NH cooling with enhanced blocking patterns and a cooling eastern Pacific surface – with more low level cloud.
It makes no difference at all to practical response to the multi-dimensional aspirations of our collective humanity. But they need catastrophe narratives to implement magical solutions that inevitably involve central planning and the progressive agenda.
It’s stunning what warmists get away with without any real proof. AGW is still just a theory which may be spot on or may grossly overestimate warming or, for that matter, may grossly underestimate warming. We just don’t really know. (and arrogant hand waving is not a substitute for knowing)…
“3. More c02 and you get more warming.”
Well not always. Apparently more CO2 and the stratosphere actually cools. More CO2 over Antarctica and Antarctica cools.
I assume ‘basic physics’ (thermodynamics) is your rationale for writing this. I’d be interested to find out what a thermodynamics expert would have to say about NASA’s or Trenberth’s energy flow diagrams of Earth. Especially the flow of heat across the surface-atmosphere boundary. Does upwelling IR radiation from the surface actually dwarf heat transfer through evaporation, when 70% of the Earth is covered in water? And why is heat transfer via conduction/molecular collision not even considered in these diagrams?
willb, two answers. First, what is labeled as thermals in the K-T diagram is actually the heat flux from the surface to the atmosphere that starts by conduction and becomes convection by thermals. Second, yes, but when you consider the net upward minus downward radiation at the surface it is comparable with evaporation.
Jim D, two comments on your answers:
1. All heat transfer mechanisms operating across the surface-atmosphere boundary combine to generate thermals, including IR radiation. It’s misleading to then explicitly show upward and downward LWIR at the Earth’s surface and not show the corresponding values for conductive heat transfer.
2. From everyday experience (for instance comparing water temperature to sand temperature at the beach) I would expect that the amount of heat energy transferred from the ocean to the atmosphere via evaporation would be many times the amount transferred via IR radiation. That’s one reason I would be interested in what a thermodynamics expert might have to say.
Steven Mosher | March 25, 2018 at 10:41 am
its simple. Understand what AGW is.
1. “GHG’s warm the planet they do not cool it”
Generally true, but depends on the other properties of the GHG and the atmosphere composition. [See DW below] It is possible for the other properties of a GHG to outweigh it’s putative GHG effect eg a gas with a higher albedo than water vapour in which case it could easily cool the atmosphere just not by as much as it would if it had no GHG effect.
2. “C02 is a ghg” Yes.
3. “More c02 and you get more warming.”
Assumptions do us all in. This is a big assumption.
Straight text book, no feedbacks you are right and the warming rate is pretty insignificant.
Brainfade and imagined feedbacks x3 as great, some concern.
But put the scientific cap on feedbacks x3 less and nothing to worry about.
And, yes, all feedbacks are at the moment assumptions and true science says assumptions should go equally each way.
–
Hence
“The question is how Much and over what time period,”
Yes.
A question however implies some doubt being need to sort out. Where is your doubt
You have time and time again shown that you do not believe this is a question, merely a fact, that dangerous warming must occur.
Question,
what four facts would make you become skeptical?
Arctic ice?
No
Dropping global temps?
In the presence of increasing CO2?
How many years would it take to convince you?
5 10 50
or I would never be convinced because “More c02 and you get more warming.” even if it never happens in real life.
angech March 26, 2018 1:23am
…assumptions should go equally each way.
One could argue that assumptions should lean in favor of low climate sensitivity based on the ice ages. If we’re charitable, we’d assign a third of the warming from glacial to interglacial as being due to GHGs. And if we’re still all the more charitable we’d assign a third of greenhouse warming to CO2. We could then (charitably) conclude that ECS is no more than 1°C. If it turns out that CO2’s share of the pie is smaller than what we’ve charitably assigned to it, then feedbacks would be negative. (which would be a reasonable and, yes, charitable assumption to make)…
willb01: 2. From everyday experience (for instance comparing water temperature to sand temperature at the beach) I would expect that the amount of heat energy transferred from the ocean to the atmosphere via evaporation would be many times the amount transferred via IR radiation. That’s one reason I would be interested in what a thermodynamics expert might have to say.
willb01, Jim D, and anyone else following this: as far as I have been able to read, there have been very few attempts to study the effects that a changing surface temperature (or change in downwelling LWIR) would have on the non-radiative transfer of energy from the earth surface to the atmosphere. A review by O’Gorman et al showed that a 1C increase of Earth surface temperature was projected to increase the rainfall rate (hence the rate of the hydrological cycle represented in the Trenberth and Stephens flow diagrams) by 3%-6%, the higher values from empirical studies, the lower values from GCMs. Romps et al calculated that a 1C increase in surface temp over about half of the US would increase the power of a certain process (described by them in some detail) by 11% with a large range of uncertaintly. With some hypotheses based on those results, I calculated that an increase of 4W/m^2 of DWLWIR was too little to raise the mean Earth surface temperature more than 1C; I presented the calculations here, at WUWT, and at RealClimate. I would be glad if someone could refer me to other work on the changes in non-radiative transfer to expected from globa surface warming.
matthewmarler:
Thanks for the response. The lack of investigation into non-radiative energy transfer at the surface seems odd to me since this type of heat transfer would tend to counter downwelling LWIR. I assume quantifying the effect of downwelling LWIR is important to the AGW hypothesis.
I’m sorry I can’t help with Earth’s surface references. I don’t know how applicable it is but I did spend a number of years studying electronic component heat sink design. With these devices, heat transfer to the atmosphere is accomplished mainly through non-radiative means. I don’t know why this wouldn’t be applicable to the Earth’s surface as well. Here is one heat sink reference.
willb, conduction is short-range and provides the energy at the base of the thermals so that is the part represented by thermals on the K-T diagram. The upward IR is much longer range and absorbed at a variety of depths and some goes to space too, and this is also on the diagram. That doesn’t help the thermals.
In the end what matters is not at the surface but how to get more energy radiated to space to compensate for the insulating effect of added CO2 that reduces the output to space. The way that happens is through warming of the surface and the troposphere. This is the way adding insulation works. It gets warmer under it even if the heat source stays the same because more insulator maintains a larger temperature gradient between the surface and top of the atmosphere.
Jim D: In the end what matters is not at the surface but how to get more energy radiated to space to compensate for the insulating effect of added CO2 that reduces the output to space.
That is not sufficient. Anything that carries heat from the surface to the mid-upper troposphere increases the net heat transfer from surface throughout atmosphere to space. Changes in heat transfer at the surface certainly affect the warming induced by increased atmospheric CO2.
MM, what you are describing is accounted for in the lapse rate feedback which is negative feedback that would show up first in the tropics where the biggest latent heating changes occur in response to surface warming appearing as the upper tropospheric hot spot. The strength of this is tied to increasing moisture over the tropical oceans. In the current transient climate, the land is warming twice as fast as the oceans, so this part of the effect is suppressed until we see more warming of the tropical oceans.
Jim D, so in your opinion if there were a thin vacuum gap between the bottom of the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth, there would be no thermals? Really? I find that hard to believe.
Of course you are correct that conduction across the surface-atmosphere boundary is short-range. But IR radiation emanating from the surface is also relatively short-range. It is soon captured by GHGs and converted to heat energy. Both of these heat transfer pathways contribute to local thermodynamic equilibrium close to the surface, both contribute to convective thermals and both contribute to IR radiation via GHGs.
As to what matters in the end, you clearly have your opinion. But your opinion depends to a large extent on the science and I’m concerned with the science. The K-T diagram is part of that science and it’s all over the internet. If there is a problem with it, then in my opinion I think it should be fixed.
willb, put it this way. All the conducted heat goes into the first millimeter or so, while hardly any of the radiation is absorbed in that layer because it is absorbed over many kilometers. So, yes, in terms of per volume heating, conduction is dominant in the layer next to the surface, which is why the diagram is right. It is a case of 17 W/m2 heating a millimeter versus 374 W/m2 with heating spread over several km.
Jim D: MM, what you are describing is accounted for in the lapse rate feedback which is negative feedback that would show up first in the tropics where the biggest latent heating changes occur in response to surface warming appearing as the upper tropospheric hot spot.
Calculations of the change in the lapse rate depend on the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, which is an equilibrium result, in the strict sense of “equilibrium”; that is explained in Pierrehumbert’s book “Principles of Planetary Climate”. Since energy transfer is not an equilibrium process, and is constantly varying in rate, it is necessarily inaccurate,, but to an unknown degree. As summarized in O’Gorman et al and Romps et al, the change in energy flow rate due to the hydrological cycle is supralinear with surface temperature, so the surface warming caused by an additional 4 W/m^2 is bounded lower than most of the calculations of ECS and TCS.
You are claiming that O’Gorman et al (and the references that they cite) and Romps et al are wrong. Maybe so, but your argument is inadequate to the case.
Jim D, I can see you are not willing to accept that surface radiation can in any way contribute to thermals. Fine. Let’s just agree to disagree. That’s not really my main point anyway. I’m more concerned with the accuracy of the evapo-transpiration heat flux shown in the K-T diagram and also with the lack of any values for conductive heat transfer across the surface-atmosphere boundary.
“…which is why the diagram is right.”
Unless you are an expert in thermodynamics with a pretty good knowledge of materials properties, you can’t simply look at the K-T diagram and make an assessment on its accuracy as to surface fluxes. Also your assertion that you know what the creators of that diagram intended for conductive heat flux isn’t convincing. If they had a good number to plug in, I think they would have put it in the diagram. I think it’s more likely that they didn’t have a good number and at the time they considered it to be unimportant anyway, so they just left it out.
willb01 – just curious, have you read Trenberth’s initial paper (I think he was a coauthor,) and at least some of the papers he cites?
JCH – If you’re referring to the paper “Earth’s Annual Global Mean Energy Budget” by Kiehl and Trenberth, yes I have read it. I believe this paper is the origin of what’s referred to as the K-T diagram. It’s very focussed on radiative energy transfer, as are many of the papers the authors cite. The paper uses estimates of non-radiative surface sensible heat flux from other sources and I’m trusting that the authors know what they are doing when they classify these estimates as heat flux from thermals and not conductive heat transfer from the surface.
The authors are careful to explain that they are not providing definitive results and that there are problems and uncertainties with some of the values they present. The paper appears to be providing a snapshot of the Earth’s current, existing energy budget and the caveats in the paper seem to preclude using it as part of a methodology to predict climate sensitivity.
willb, as I mentioned the extent to which radiation contributes to the lowest mm is minuscule, while all the conducted energy goes there, so the origin of the thermals is conducted energy from the surface, not radiated energy, and that is why the diagram doesn’t distinguish between thermals and conduced heat. A better term for both, used within meteorology, is the sensible heat flux, a well defined and easy to estimate quantity. It is the non-radiative part of the energy lost by the surface. While the emitted radiation from the surface is always positive, the sensible heat flux is proportional to the difference between the air and ground temperatures and so switches signs at night, like conduction does, a completely independent process from radiation. The sensible heat flux is the part labeled, perhaps colloquially, as thermals.
Evapotransipration has to balance rainfall globally over long periods, and so the global average rainfall, which is well known constrains this value quite tightly.
Jim D, to equate heat flux due to thermals with that of surface conduction, you have to show two things:
1) All the heat energy in thermals comes from surface conduction.
2) All the heat energy from surface conduction goes into generating thermals.
You have already made an argument explaining why you think the first is true. What’s your argument for 2)? Some pathways I can think of where conductive heat might be getting ‘sidetracked’ away from thermals are:
– Thermalizing GHGs leading to LWIR emissions
– Maintaining the atmosphere’s adiabatic lapse rate
willb, it is the thermals that maintain the lapse rate in the atmosphere, but also note that thermals in the diagram is not thermals all day and night. The term represents the net non-radiative transfer of heat from the surface to the atmosphere, and conduction is the only mechanism for that. Once the energy gets to the atmosphere, it is either physically transported (convection) or radiatively transferred adding to that radiatively transferred from the ground. The radiative transfer from one level to another in the atmosphere is not included as it self cancels. The diagram only includes transports across the surface and TOA boundaries. Budgets at these boundaries and within the atmosphere are closed.
Water evaporates from surfaces – both marine and terrestrial – leaving a cooler surface behind and energy bound up in a liquid to gas phase change. Energy leaves surfaces as either latent or sensible heat. Latent heat flux varies with soil moisture. Sensible heat – at 2m – is the result of translation, vibrations and bending of air molecules colliding with other molecules. It is the result of radiation and conduction. Sensible heat is measured as temperature. With lower soil moisture there are higher surface temps.
Jim D, two final questions:
1) if the heat flux labelled ‘thermals’ in the K-T diagram (17 W/m2) were truly the full extent of conductive heat transfer at the surface, then why, on cloudless days, does the mid-day temperature of sidewalks, roads and deserts not approach 120C (i.e. the mid-day temperature on the moon)? Surface temperatures on Earth have never exceeded 60C as far as I know.
2) Why would the K-T diagram be showing the net value for conductive heat transfer at the surface but not do the same for LWIR radiative energy transfer? LWIR is instead separated into upwelling and downwelling radiation.
willb, don’t forget that the radiative loss from the surface goes as temperature to the fourth power. This is a major and very efficient source of heat loss as it gets hotter and it puts a limit on how hot it can get.
On the second point, conductive transfer is the same process in both directions and both directions can’t act at once. On the other hand, for LW, the up and down components are independent and both act all the time.
“…radiative loss from the surface goes as temperature to the fourth power. This is a major and very efficient source of heat loss as it gets hotter and it puts a limit on how hot it can get.”
And yet the limit for a cloudless day on Earth is 60C (in the desert), and for a day on the moon is 120C. This suggests that 17W/m2 may not be the whole story for surface conduction.
willb, it shows that the sensible heat flux, that starts as conduction from the ground to the air, can help prevent the surface from heating so much in response to the maximum heating rate from the sun. Locally the sensible heat flux can reach hundreds of W/m2, while 17 W/m2 is a global average. This mechanism is not available on the Moon because there is no air to conduct to meaning also no thermals to carry the heat away.
Jim D, I don’t think 100s of W/m2 is going to do it if surface conduction also has to counter downwelling IR from GHGs at 60C.
willb, the downwelling IR is from the atmosphere. If it is dry, it will be nowhere near 60 C worth, and now you have switched completely from the global average to extreme cases. Get back to the original question. The thermal part originates as conduction from the ground to the air. The radiative part doesn’t. That’s the difference in the K-T diagram.
Jim D, use whatever value you want for downwelling IR. Use the value in the K-T diagram. Hundreds of W/m2 of surface conduction is not going to be able to keep surface temperature below 60C. As for using extreme cases, the temperature I used for the moon occurs regularly. The temperature I chose for the Earth admittedly is extreme, but lower temperatures do occur regularly and even higher values of conductive heat flux would be needed to maintain a lower temperature.
I’m only saying that 17 W/m2 looks low as a total average value for conductive heat transfer at the surface when you consider what’s happening on the moon and what’s happening in the desert. A good model should be able to predict and explain things that happen in the real-world. Didn’t you just make this comment?:
“Discounting evidence is wrong. You only end up misleading yourself.”
willb, you say you think 17 W/m2 looks low, but you don’t account for 70% of the surface being oceans, plus there’s a lot of cold areas, plus there’s night that all bring the average down. The surface flux requires the ground to be warmer or colder than the surface air. On average, these temperatures are not that different, so it is low. The clue to the ocean dominance is that the latent heat flux is much higher. Again, this is a global average and you are just confusing yourself thinking about deserts at noon. Those are not representative of more than a few percent of the surface area. Deserts also get really cold at night reversing the flux.
angech and Mosher,
Temperature change is irrelevant to policy. What is relevant is the impacts. It seems the impacts of global warming are beneficial or negligible up to around 4C warming relative to 1900. Therefore, any policies that reduce GHG emissions will do harm, not good.
Peter, Sloppy Steve doesn’t care. He’s only interested in pulling the wool over people’s eyes and manipulating them into thinking that skepticism isn’t really skepticism. If no science has all the answers, as he says, then it’s called pseudoscience. An increase of .2C per decade as predicted neither verifies nor falsifies anything…
Yep. I agree.
Some of those who believe global warming is dangerous will remain in their igloo for life, denying the relevant facts that GW is beneficial.
I see it more as a zero sum game.
Warming in some spots will be good, in others bad.
The ends of the spectrum on our earth is that there are large swathes which will benefit from warming even up to 8 degrees and others that will survive if we go down by 8 degrees.
The range of temperature in a single day is often more than this yet the life exposed to such changes take it in it’s stride.
Mosher just not want the sea coming up to his door.
Or hurricanes to naturally occur and naturally destroy some coastal areas.
Why, I do not know.
Overall, warming is beneficial for the global economy. 87% of world GDP is produced in countries with population centroids at higher latitudes than 30 degrees. Latitudes above about 22 degrees benefit, and those below 22 degrees cop only a small temperature change and small impact.
This June will be the 30th anniversary of James Hansen’s testimony before Congress. The NYTimes covered that at the time and noted that Hansen predicted temps would rise by as much as 9 degrees F by 2050 and sea level by as much as four feet under business as usual scenarios.
Take a screenshot of the article because it’s a safe bet that the Times will celebrate that anniversary in two months by claiming his projections were very good.
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html
He also said the oceans would evaporate if we don’t stop the evilness of burning fossil fuels – which of course was extreme scaremongering and set the whole BS advocacy off on its journey of doing the damage it’s been doing to the global economy for the past 35 years or so.
Every generation has their super sized seers of the future. Here, in 1931, they were worried about the Poles melting and the catastrophic SLR that could result. Today’s prescient professionals seem like slackers compared to what they were worried about in the Depression. Not that they didn’t have more immediate worries at the time.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2016-05-27-18-42-16_shadow.png
Up to 9 F is actually 3 to 9F, and up to 4′ is actually 1 to 4′. He’s looking spot on.
Per Nick Stokes:
https://i.imgur.com/rfpfb6i.png
He’s looking spot on
(LMAO)…
The people of Sydney feel deprived. With all that thermosteric stuff going around and predictions of 150 feet SLR, they want a little of the action themselves. To reprise one of Peggy Lee’s hits “Is That All There Is?”
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/680-140_meantrend.png
JCH: Up to 9 F is actually 3 to 9F, and up to 4′ is actually 1 to 4′. He’s looking spot on.
He’d have been closer to “spot” on if he had given much greater emphasis to the low ends of the ranges. Even those were higher than what followed his sharing of his scenario.
A single tide gauge is beyond, way way beyond, meaningless.
A range is a range. The grapes are sour. Good.
http://assets.climatecentral.org/images/uploads/gallery/2016StateOfClimate_SLR_en_title_lg_web.jpg
JCH: A range is a range.
but it is not a spot.
JCH
No, it’s not meaningless. Let me tell you why. I know that you know I’m capable of producing dozens of similar graphs across the globe that tell the same story. No acceleration. In every case there is no explanation for the absence of an acceleration. No evidence of vertical land motion. No other reason that the graphs over decades depict no acceleration.
In the aggregate this fact is devastating to your argument.
Peter Lang March 26, 2018 6:00pm
Peter, I’m skeptical that green advocacy has done any damage to the economy over the past few decades. Even if we assume that it has been a drag on the economy, central banks compensate for that by being less of a drag on the economy themselves (by keeping interest rates lower than they otherwise would be). In fact, it could be argued that green advocacy is a net gain on the whole. Any time that you add sources of energy to the economy, it drives down the price of energy in existing markets. It should be noted that the less than 5% share of green energy is roughly the equivalent of the share lost to oil markets after the Iranian revolution in 1979. (it was panic buying that drove up the cost of oil back then) These days the energy sector is far more diverse, thanks in no small part to the push for green energy, natural gas in particular. We currently have an economy that’s in great shape. Here in the states the unemployment rate hovers at 4.1%, the second lowest that it has been since Nixon was president. Inflation is low standing at 2.2%, thanks in no small part to low energy prices on the whole. With a new dovish federal reserve chairman installed just last month, we could be poised for an economic boom not seen since post WW2. i think that what everybody needs to realise is that the key to economic success going forward into the future is a strong energy market. (and there’s no reason why green energy & energy efficiency shouldn’t be a part of that mix)…
afonzarelli,
Your comment is the sort of economic argument you get from taxi driver your travelling with or the guy standing next to you in the pub. It’s compete nonsense. Read about the broken window pane and the rest in Economics in One Lesson
http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/contents.html
Ceresco, there was an interesting piece over at Jo Nova’s that claimed that since the Australian continent is relatively stable, it’s more representative of what’s really going on with SLR…
He’s looking spot on
There you have it. JCH is on record as believing ECS is 4.2, a “spot on” estimate.
Good luck with that.
ECS is probably between 1.7C and 2.0C according to Nic Lewis, based on empirical evidence.
Peter, yours is the static analysis that keeps people from seeing the big picture on economics. Take a moment to ingest what I’ve said and learn something. Federal Reserve monetary policy is designed to be a drag on the economy. That’s what the fed is doing as we speak, slowing down the trump economy because in their estimation it’s growing too fast. (they’re raising interest rates) So they can manipulate the system to accommodate any situation. Green energy a drag? Then we can compensate by keeping interest rates low. Secondly, do you actually deny that more of a product on the market drives prices lower?! And that more energy equals cheaper energy? (seriously?) Peter, please don’t link me to some economics guru and then say read it. Contest my points mano a mano. Tell me specifically where you think I’m going wrong (as is, yours amounts to a bunch of clueless and arrogant handwaving)…
The big picture is that global warming is beneficial, not detrimental, overall for all impact sectors the world.
No, it’s not meaningless. Let me tell you why. I know that you know I’m capable of producing dozens of similar graphs across the globe that tell the same story. No acceleration. In every case there is no explanation for the absence of an acceleration. No evidence of vertical land motion. No other reason that the graphs over decades depict no acceleration.
In the aggregate this fact is devastating to your argument.
Nonsense.
The tide gauges over the satellite era have show higher sea level rise than the satellites do. Professor Curry included two of them, rater prominently, in her article: Hay 2015 and Dangendorf 2017.
https://i.imgur.com/Iu21ESp.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/430-091_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/9410170_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/130-001_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/190-091_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/8724580_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/120-012_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/870-011_meantrend.png
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/plots/620-061_meantrend.png
I don’t really care about the low rate of SLR rise in these locations.
But, where is the acceleration?
There you have it. JCH is on record as believing ECS is 4.2, a “spot on” estimate.
I believe Chevron, and soon all the other oil companies named in the lawsuit, are in full agreement with the IPCC on the ECS range. My family is in the oil business, so how could I disagree with the big boys with all their resident physicists?
The data at PSMSL is from Simon Holgate, pre-approved skeptic source. The data at PSMSL has not been corrected for VLM.
The Clivar document I cited uses the latest science to correct for VLM. Tides and Currents uses the PSMSL data for all non-coastal tide gauges on the NOAA site.
Your your contention those uncorrected graphs of a tiny number of gauges that cover their entire existence, not the satellite era, means something is simply ridiculous.
https://i.imgur.com/xOfrJj8.png
You believe in a range? How convenient. Do you believe that lawsuit should be expanded to include the environmental groups that lied about nuclear in the 1970s, guaranteeing the world 40 more years of burning coal?
ECS is probably between 1.7C and 2.0C according to Nic Lewis, based on empirical evidence. … – Peter Lang
Did anybody report that to Judge Alsup? See if you can get the oil companies to use it.
ECS is γ – tell that to the judge.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/unstable-ebm-fig-2-jpg1.jpg
Actually ECS is γ’ as it takes 10 years for the oceans to heat up. Surprised it isn’t faster given eddy diffusion and buoyant convection.
Hot times in the Arctic op-ed by Cecilia Bitz
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/opinion/temperature-climate-students.html
They wrote: A warmer Arctic also means that Greenland’s land mass sheds its vast blanket of ice faster, currently at about 70 trillion gallons of water per year, which contributes to rising sea levels.
If they studied history and ice core data, they would know that a warmer, thawed, ocean is necessary to provide moisture for snowfall that replenishes the ice on Greenland. The ice on Greenland only depletes in cold times when the oceans are more frozen and it is not snowing enough.
The warm phase of the climate cycles is normal, natural, necessary and unstoppable.
They have no clue to what causes natural climate variability. Right now, this year, we have a record warm Arctic and we are having the record snowstorms that result from this.
“Recent boreal winters have exhibited a large-scale seesaw temperature pattern characterized by an unusually warm Arctic and cold continents. Whether there is any physical link between Arctic variability and Northern Hemisphere (NH) extreme weather is an active area of research. Using a recently developed index of severe winter weather, we show that the
occurrence of severe winter weather in the United States is significantly related to anomalies in pan-Arctic geopotential heights and temperatures. As the Arctic transitions from a relatively cold state to a warmer one, the frequency of severe winter weather in mid-latitudes increases through the transition. However, this relationship is strongest in the eastern US and
mixed to even opposite along the western US. We also show that during mid-winter to latewinter of recent decades, when the Arctic warming trend is greatest and extends into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, severe winter weather—including both cold spells and heavy snows—became more frequent in the eastern United States.”
I have just started following this site.
https://www.aer.com/science-research/climate-weather/arctic-oscillation/
“A deluge of papers in a scientific field…”
“A deluge of papers in a scientific field does not lead to quick turnover of central ideas, but rather to the ossification of canon.”
The canons of the IPCC. Anyone know how the Bible was made?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea
“Epistemic insouciance consists in a casual lack of concern about whether one’s beliefs have any basis in reality or are adequately supported by th eavailable evidence.”
This fellow misses the point completely.
People do not hate experts just for something to do.
They hate the given set of experts who are a) corrupted, b) bought off, c) arrogant twits, and d) wrong time and time again.
The majority of disgust for experts in the west today is simply due to the fact that those experts are tale spinners for the Oligarchs, telling the little people lie after lie about how the greed of the 1% won’t affect the little people. These elites represent those who pay them, not the truth .
Elites are the modern day hypocritical Pharisee.
We need a new set of elites who don’t come from the schools of the Oligarchs. We have nothing against elites, per se.
For Judith and other stadium wave advocates. Awesome plot below from Willis showing that most of what we are experiencing today in the Arctic is not amplified global warming. My hunch is that it is coupled natural variability in downwelling and latitudinal import of heat. Downwelling in one hemisphere is high while the other hemisphere is low. Import of heat follows downwelling.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/ceres-decadal-temperature-trends-20171.png?w=635&h=613
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/24/where-the-warmth-is/
Chylek made similar observations about the whole 20th century, which show oscillations from one pole to the other. Paragraph [16] of that paper covers references to the seesaw observed during the last ice age in ice cores.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2010GL042793
If my hunch is correct, this could effect the relative warming rate of each hemisphere, which was an important factor in constraining aerosol forcing.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/ceres-decadal-temperature-trends-20171.png?w=635&h=613
“1. The climate is always changing; changes like those of the past half-century
are common in the geologic record, driven by powerful natural phenomena
2. Human influences on the climate are a small (1%) perturbation to natural
energy flows
3. It is not possible to tell how much of the modest recent warming can be
ascribed to human influences
4. There have been no detrimental changes observed in the most salient
climate variables and today’s projections of future changes are highly uncertain.”
Happer, Koonin and Lindzen
Climate is ultimately so complex and dynamic that only the very simplest of conclusions are possible. Happer, Koonin and Lindzen in their presentation to Judge Alsup’s court start with the simplest of summary points. All of which are demonstrably so.
Opposed is a science driven mad by apocalyptic visions that are then proselytized by acolytes with absolute faith but so little grasp of how science should be done. The scientific naivety of the climate alarmist rabble routinely exceeds that of the most recalcitrant skeptic. I just had a quick look at Shindell et all 2018. It is grossly simplistic babble appearing in a leading journal. Symptomatic of the madness that some contemporary science has descended into. Other science has a tight rope to walk. How to encompass dynamism and complexity without undermining climate memes and progressive political aspirations.
“Accelerating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reductions, including as a sub-stitute for negative emissions, hence reduces long-term risks but requires dramatic near-term societal transformations2.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0108-y
There is here a conflation of the peculiar foibles of climate alarmists – the obsession with CO2 to the exclusion of all else, the assumption of high risk from a modest temperature rise and – above all – the adoption of autocratic aspirations to transform economies and societies. These are would be ubermensch albeit with decidedly clayish feet.
We can apparently save 150 million lives a year by dispensing with fossil fueled transport and coal electricity generation – deaths from their co-emitted pollutants and not warming btw. And although the Pielke article linked above is dated – this is a magical solution of unicorn proportions. At its core there is likely a conviction that we have exceeded the limits to growth by several planets and that unless the global population is reduced very soon to several hundred million elite at most – all is lost.
But the most incredible thing is that energy and transport emissions are a mere 39% of the total. The bottom line here is that technology is simply not available to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. I have a turbo diesel Suzuki Vitara in which I can get nearly 800km from 40L of fuel – but that’s just me being lazy. Electric cars can be amazing performers. There are nuclear designs that are a game changer. This is not to be encouraged as cheap and abundant energy will increase resource usage and doom by any other name. No – the only solution is to kill most people quickly and humanely.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/medium/public/2016-05/global_emissions_sector_2015.png
We are as well eliminating 99.9% of co-emitted pollutants from transport and electricity production using off the shelf technology. But there are many sources of black and organic carbon and we can save 4 million lives a year with modern energy sources. Can’t have that. Even very simple technologies help with this much neglected global warmer.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/stove.png
– 50% Less Wood Consumed Time and Cash Savings
– 95% Smoke Reduction Improved Health
– Nearly Eliminates Black Carbon Protects Climate
– Generates Electricity Charges Phones & LED Lights
Reversing land use emissions is not difficult – it is an immense job that the can only be done from the stakeholder up. But the US for instance is already a net sink with accelerating sequestration. It is not a matter of planting trees – that is just simple minded nonsense. It is a matter of the most modern farming techniques and restoring woodland and grassland and reclaiming deserts. That this can be done cheaply, at huge scales and with immense ancillary benefits has been demonstrated.
Emissions from other sectors and of other gases require other – incremental – innovations in technology that are in fact well in hand. Much of it has to do with economic efficiency and global competitiveness – very little with AGW.
Whatever side you are on – fossil fuel emissions are an accident of history that will soon enough be history. And at the rate of warming in the instrumental record – presuming that the natural warming of the 20th century is not lost in the 21st – we will never reach 2K warming. If that mattered in the least. In a world starved of energy – I keep asking the question. What would be a practical, rational and humane alternative to the path we are on? The answer seems to be a cacophony of apocalypse in the service of an aspiration to rule as a technical and moral elite. Something more risible – if irritating – than dangerous.
JimD,
“It’s not as easy as you think to do this because they signed up to real targets which requires real changes from the status quo in all those countries.”
Your naivete is as charming (in a child-like sense) as it is silly.
You want to deny governments are even trying to modernize energy systems to be much less carbon-dependent decades from now, so be it. Perhaps you are just not paying attention enough.
I’m paying attention enough to know carbon emissions continue to rise… confirmed by rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The “commitments” under the Paris agreement are not working, nor will they. People who are serious about reducing GHG emissions need to reformulate. A loud public push for nuclear power by the climate alarmed would indicate some acceptance of reality. I am not going to hold my breath.
Natural gas turns out to be a good enough stop-gap without resorting to nuclear but some leading scientists like Hansen have been calling for an increase in nuclear power, and that is fine by me too. You gave Paris two years before now declaring failure which looks rather hasty given the continued growth rate of renewable energy and the steady decline of coal. How about the internal combustion engine becoming old-fashioned in a few decades? Lot’s of these trends have already started, and need to be accelerated before fossil fuels become inevitably too costly later in the century. Much to consider rather than just dismiss.
According to OECD data, as of 2015 renewables (including hydro power) represented about 13% of total primary energy production (https://data.oecd.org/energy/renewable-energy.htm#indicator-char). Assuming continued growth at the pace of recent years, we might guess a bit under 14% today. It is important to note that total primary energy production is rising FASTER than renewables, so CO2 emissions form fossil fuels continues to rise, not fall. All increases in renewables only slow the rate of increase in CO2 emissions, not reduce the CO2 emissions.
Politically correct renewables (solar, wind, waves, biofuels, etc) represent only ~30% of all renewables, (http://www.ren21.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/GSR_2016_Full_Report_REN21.pdf) so about 4.2% of total primary energy production. Nuclear power production is about twice that of hydroelectric. The “green” motivated phasing out of existing nuclear power production (see Caleefornia, Germany, and Japan) will only further increase CO2 emissions; madness rules in the world of greens.
Yes, I don’t know why Germany and Japan don’t want to go that way. Even France plans to phase out nuclear in favor of renewables. Energy storage is a key need to allow the renewable growth to continue into the primary production method. That is only a matter of time and meanwhile we have natural gas and nuclear. The long-promised fusion is still not progressing fast, otherwise that would be a contender too. Stabilizing the climate requires about a 50% reduction to today’s rate of emissions and that remains a realistic and desirable goal.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/mean:24/derivative/plot/hadsst3sh/from:1958/scale:0.25/offset:0.1
Except for the fact that rate of emissions has little or nothing to do with the atmospheric growth rate. (you and stevie both can ignore this at your own peril)…
fonzie, you are pretending you don’t understand why CO2 levels increase faster in warm years than in cold years. In El Nino years the earth can absorb less of our emissions than in La Nina years, but warm or cold, the mean keeps rising. That’s emissions doing that.
Jimmie D(ear), you are pretending you don’t understand that the trend features match as well as those variability features do. (the whole process is governed by temperature) This is not the same as saying the rise is natural. All it says is that the rise, be it anthropogenic or even natural, is governed by temperature and not emissions. How many more decades of this temperature relationship do you need before you (and yes fitz, too) recognize it?*
*engelbeen himself has admitted that if temps go down (and stay down) with the growth rate following suit that he’s ready to conceed the point. (but the rest of us don’t have to wait for ol’ ferdi to come to his senses… ☺)
There are two components: emissions, net increase, and natural, net reduction. The natural component is about half the emissions increase and is temperature dependent while the emissions part isn’t. The net change therefore is temperature dependent, increasing faster in warm years where the natural reduction is less efficient. Not sure if you will understand this at all, but it seems simple to me.
Jim, my reply instantaneously disappeared. In short, trend features match just as well as variability features. (emissions don’t do that)…
Afonzarelli
I met up with Ferdinand engelbeen some Years ago in England and we attended a climate conference together in southampton given by DrStewart who presented climate wars on channel four.
Although he was surrounded by his fans we both gave him a hard time in the questions .
Ferdinand is actually a considerable sceptic. Although he believes much of co2 is caused by man he is doubtful as to it’s effect on temperatures. This attitude was partly cemented by his visit to Greenland where he observed Viking artefacts
Tonyb
Yes, Tony, i’m well acquainted with Ferdinand’s views. i’ve found his exchanges with Bart to be among the most fascinating exchanges on these comment pages. While i’m not entirely in agreement with either him nor Bart (granted i don’t account for much), they are both treasure troves of insight. People don’t have to be right for us to learn from them. BTW, was it you who did the 2010ish essay on the chemical co2 measurements? Beck was quite a live wire and the comment page on that piece was also quite extraordinary. He didn’t pull any punches and one wonders what more in the way of contributions he would be making (were he still with us today)…
Afonzarelli
Yes, that was me. There was a really good exchange of views because as you know Ferdinand took a dim view of Becks work.
I exchanged some information with Ernst around that time and often wonder what the major piece of work he was putting together at that time would say. He sent me some fascinating snippets from it but it never saw the light of day.
I had intended to visit Ernst that summer on my way to Verona and was shocked to learn of his death.
Tonyb
Jim, regardless, it’s all temperature dependent whether its the short term variability or the long term trend. (if temps were consistently down where they were 50 years ago, the growth rate would be just 1 ppm/year) With the exception of pinatubo, it has never been otherwise. If the future is anything like the past six decades, then that’s what we’ll continue to see. That’s what the data is telling us…
The emissions are not temperature dependent and are by far the biggest term. The temperature wiggles average out to nature canceling about half the emissions over the long term. If you find a way to cool the earth, great, but it is only getting warmer because of the emissions dominance.
af,
I agree. I think FE is mostly right, but my gut says that ice cores miss decadal variability. Natural CO2 concentration is probably 20’ish ppm rather than 11 ppm as he suggests.
I think that CO2 slowly released from ocean could also be captured by plants on land, then released and taken up again by the ocean, not making it into Antarctic bubbles. Many other possible filters in ice cores.
Jim, that’s all fine and dandy, but you still don’t get your change in the carbon growth rate without a corresponding change in temperature, period (.) Been that way for sixty years since the inception of MLO, both in the short term and, yes, in the longer term trends. (as i said earlier,
ignore this at your own peril)…
The source is independent of the temperature, and only the sink depends on it. This is not that difficult to follow but you’re making a meal of it. As the temperature warms in response, nature contributes to the source, but only at about 10-15% of the emissions, so nature does provide a positive feedback, which I think is what you are trying to get at.
When carbon emissions leveled off 2014 to 2016 one set of skeptics were crowing that no government action was needed and now a 2% increase in 2017 brings out another set that crows Paris, which was signed on April 16, 2016 and goes into effect in 2020, is not working.
Paris could have zero impact on 2017 emissions. LMAO.
Paris will have just about zero effect on emissions after 2020 as well. The Paris agreement is a joke, so I am LMAO too.
Countries signed up to Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) – and of course this is now too little too late to meet the arbitrary 2K target and we need a new world order. Go figure. The 8% increase in energy emissions by 2030 was known in 2015. Reality is that the most they can hope for is a slowdown in the rate of increase in energy emissions. And indeed in the growth rate of coal use,
“Global coal production is projected to increase from 9 billion short tons in 2012 to 10 billion short tons in 2040. Most of the projected growth in world coal production occurs in India, China, and Australia.
Coal remains a vital fuel for world’s electricity markets and is expected to continue to dominate energy markets in developing Asia.”
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/egee102/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.egee102/files/images/Lesson_02/figure_es6.png
“According to Adani’s media release, all major statutory clearances have been obtained for the project which was expected to be operational by May 2022, supplying power to the Bangladesh Power Development Board for a net capacity of 1,496 MW for 25 years.” https://www.themorningbulletin.com.au/news/adani-wants-cqs-coal-to-lift-millions-out-of-pover/3371530/
The headline from this mornings local paper in my neck of the woods. It’s a great place to mine coal. Flat dry country with good access to deep water ports and Asian markets. There are hundreds of super and ultra critical plants planned in Asia – and even in Australia – all strictly in accord with the Paris agreement. Even then the climate rabble have been at it with frivolous litigation after frivolous litigation – all lost of course but liberally funded by a US think tank with links to Hilary Clinton. Hilary can p*ss off an’ all.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/hele-e1522119088802.jpg
They were horrified at Science o’ Doom when I dropped this graphic from the ASEAN Center for Energy. We are not a member of ASEAN but we did host last weeks meeting. Any excuse for a party.
Jimmy just asked again what my idea was. I keep telling him my big new idea is coal fired electricity. How can I convince him we are serious? This is the world we want for everyone.
https://thebreakthrough.org/images/main_image/HEP_main.png
“More than one billion people globally lack access to electricity, and billions more still burn wood and dung for their basic energy needs.” It is just not good enough. https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/our-high-energy-planet
And we are getting better and cheaper at it. High Efficiency Low Emission (HELE) designs throw in 99.9% pollutant reduction for free.
http://www.minerals.org.au/file_upload/images/coal/coal21/coal21_img3.jpg
We are at the 700°C ultra-supercritical full scale deployment phase.
“We found that positive intensities of the Arctic Oscillation (AO) in the summer were associated with warmer temperatures, improved growing conditions for vegetation, and better body condition of caribou. Over this same period, the body condition of female caribou was positively related to fecundity. We further identified that population trajectories of caribou herds followed the direction of the AO: herds increased under positive AO intensity, and decreased under negative AO intensity.” Mallory et al 2018
This caught my eye. A positive AO has a lower surface pressure at high latitudes and the atmospheric see saw swings north with warmer air. One of a complex interplay of planetary waves and geopotential that drives so much of NH climate.
Regarding self learning, self correcting GCMs, what does that do for reproducibility?
Week in review – science edition.
I am not going to say I am going to do anything ridiculous but the March 2018 global temps are due soon JCH.
as well as the announcement that La Nina has not ended.
Watch this space. 0.06 C drop in Spencer’s models and GISS.
So much for the first one:
As for UAH, who cares?
GISS looks like lots of heat between now and April 1st.
Here is the Southern Oscillation Index:http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
Here are the seasurface temperature anomalies:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/#tabs=Sea-surface
Although the 30-day Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) has bounced back into the La Niña range, this is a result of transient tropical systems, including tropical cyclones Marcus and Nora, and does not reflect the broader climate state. …
Maybe, or maybe they are reading too much into a very recent fluctuation.
angech: March 2018 global temps are due soon JCH.
as well as the announcement that La Nina has not ended.
Watch this space. 0.06 C drop in Spencer’s models and GISS.
OK, we’ll be watching this space! Who exactly is going to make that “announcement”?
North Atlantic has suddenly dropped. Maybe the stadium wave has started! Global has arrived! Yippee!
But probably not.
“The stadium wave is a term that refers to a hypothesis of multidecadal climate variability describing climate behavior as a network of synchronized ocean, ice, and atmospheric indices, through which a signal propagates sequentially in an ordered lead-lag relationship – hence, the allusive term, “stadium wave”.
The fundamental view upon which the stadium-wave hypothesis is built is that over long timescales, “parts” of a system organize into a network of interacting sub-systems resulting in collective behavior. Intra-network interactions yield positive and negative feedbacks, together generating an oscillatory behavior.” http://www.wyattonearth.net/
The stadium wave never stopped – although what JCH imagines it is is anyone’s guess. ENSO is of course a part of this globally coupled, spatio-temporal chaotic flow field. A chaotic oscillator with global effects -including on the global energy budget and on surface temperature. The former with low level cloud feedback in the tropical Pacific. Tropospheric temperatures follow on changes in upwelling in the eastern Pacific.
http://images.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/TLT_v40/plots/RSS_TS_channel_TLT_Global_Land_And_Sea_v04_0.short.png
So where will ENSO go this year? It is at -0.73 in the MEI index for January/February. I think that La Nina is poised to intensify over the rest of the 2018.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/comp.png
More upwelling is the result of spun up flow in the Peruvian Current. This occurs when the Southern Annular Mode (otherwise known as the Antarctic Oscillation – AAO) turns negative and pushes the band of westerly winds further north to fetch up against the South American Coast. Intensified winds and current in the western arm of the South Pacific Gyre swing east at the equator pushing warm surface water towards the western pacific that allows cold and nutrient rich abyssal water to surface. The contrast between cold water in the east and warm water in the west intensified easterly winds and currents. Ultimately currents hit a coastline and submerge in a Rossby wave. That is where we are now. It seems one of the instabilities that ultimately trigger an El Nino.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/wrap-up/archive/20180327.sub_surface_anom.png
The potential for an El Nino depends first of all on the state of SAM and thus the speed of the Peruvian Current, on ‘recharge’ in the western Pacific and on some combination of instabilities in Rossby waves or the Madden-Julian Oscillation or reversal of the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation or perhaps some other chaotic oscillator in the globally coupled stadium wave.
SAM is tending negative – as indeed can be seen in SH weather conditions. Early snow in Australia’s south for instance.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/aao/aao_index.html
Recharge as seen in water levels in the western Pacific is modest still.
https://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/Science/datasources/ssha/
The rest is up to the Dragon Kings of wind and storm. But as I said – I think we are poised form an intensified La Nina this year.
Much more interesting In the much longer term is that I think we are poised – if solar activity continues to decline – for more negative SAM and centennial scale increase in La Nina intensity and frequency. It has happened before. El Nino intensity and frequency peaked in the 20th century.
Wonder what will happen if I do this?
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1628917103891212
Are fb and wp not friends anymore?
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1628917103891212
Did I stuff it up?
https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/posts/1628917103891212
NOAA says we are still in a weak La Niña , JCH.
A few reports out saying it has crueled any chance of a record warm year this year as well.
MM that would be the Australian BOM saying they got it wrong.
NOAA has no problems as it is officially still La Niña by their admittedly weak definition.
BOM should never have called one in the first place as it did not meet a reasonable definition of an overall below -0.5 C level for 5 months when they did.
They seem to have been sucked in by NOAA declaring it after 3 months.
Then they tried to claim it had gone when it was higher than the original starting point.
Weird stuff.
Due to the continued 3.4 low levels they will have to admit they got it wrong if and when it stays under -0.5 into March.
I will post it for you if/when it occurs.
I resent the imputation that we need to follow NOA. We can stuff it up with the best of them. The current BOM ENSO outlook is disappointing.
Robert
As regards the Stadium wave I think this was an effect that was broadly known and examined half a century ago
See bottom of page 215
http://images.library.wisc.edu/WI/EFacs/transactions/WT1975/reference/wi.wt1975.rrring.pdf
tonyb
I am not surprised – Hurst and Kolmogorov invented climate dynamics in the 1950’s. Interesting take on climate history.
By the BOM criteria, the La Niña ended in February. The GISS March anomaly will be higher than February’s. It’s dying, right on schedule.
ENSO has a schedule.
“El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the most important coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon to cause global climate variability on interannual time scales. Here we attempt to monitor ENSO by basing the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) on the six main observed variables over the tropical Pacific. These six variables are: sea-level pressure (P), zonal (U) and meridional (V) components of the surface wind, sea surface temperature (S), surface air temperature (A), and total cloudiness fraction of the sky (C). These observations have been collected and published in ICOADS for many years. The MEI is computed separately for each of twelve sliding bi-monthly seasons (Dec/Jan, Jan/Feb,…, Nov/Dec).” https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
There are many things that define ENSO – sea surface temperature in the central Pacific is just one. The MEI considers six factors. The Australian BOM does an informal multi-factorial analysis. The latter allows in an AGW bias – as glaringly seen in the latest outlook. It seems that a little warming from an EL Nino is better than no warming at all.
The MEI was at -0.73 in Jan/Feb. 2017/18 is compared on a graph with a few other years above – and at the NOAA site. What Claus Wolter calls a short lived EL Nino in 16/17 – more an El Nino Modoki to add another factor – is compared to other years. Where ENSO jumps next depends on antecedant conditions across the Pacific. ENSO doesn’t have a schedule.
JCH takes an unseemly and frankly tediously repetitive delight in predicting El Nino – well failing that neutral conditions in the Pacific. Even if he is eventually right he is still lamentably wrong.
Lol. I do not predict ENSO. You recently said you expect the La Niña to extend. That is an ENSO prediction.
BOM declared the end of the La Niña in February. Not me, them.
Stay tuned, CFAN’s ENSO forecast is coming late next week
It’s bad enough that there’s no recognition that temperature indices do not form any physical network through which a signal can propagate. When that is followed, however, by the claim that “Ultimately currents hit a coastline and submerge in a Rossby wave,” one finds the delusional misconception of someone wholly unequipped to comprehend actual geophysical dynamics. The domination of discussion allowed here by such rank aphysical drivel is a deep blot upon the scientific credibility of this site.
Gee, john, would you care to elaborate on your nasty ad hom? (hate to leave you stewing there in righteous indignation)…
My attack is not upon a person, per se, but upon wholly aphysical drivel. Elaboration of the substantive basis of that attack comes readily with physical comprehension of inertial wave dynamics via beta-plane analysis (q.v.) . Do some homework!
john321s |” It’s bad enough that there’s no recognition that temperature indices do not form any physical network through which a signal can propagate.”
To afonzarelli | Might be best to let this go through to the keeper.
The indices are those of ocean and atmosphere circulation – and not temperature series. Rossby and Kelvin waves are shorthand for some things that happen in the real – rather than the hopelessly abstracted – world.
https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/en/applications/ocean/large-scale-circulation/rossby-kelvin-waves.html
John321s: It’s bad enough that there’s no recognition that temperature indices do not form any physical network through which a signal can propagate
Clearly, the language could have been improved. The temperature indices are measurements upon the physical network.
Whose language Matthew? He has not the slightest clue and pretends that his comments are not meant as personal insults.
The quote comes from Marcia Wyatt – who is a beautiful mind.
“The stadium wave is a term that refers to a hypothesis of multidecadal climate variability describing climate behavior as a network of synchronized ocean, ice, and atmospheric indices, through which a signal propagates sequentially in an ordered lead-lag relationship – hence, the allusive term, “stadium wave”.” http://www.wyattonearth.net/wyattonearthhomepage.html
How does John’s abject confusion arise from this?
Robert I Ellison: network of synchronized ocean, ice, and atmospheric indices,
It is not a network of indices; the wave occurs in a network of processes of which the indices are measurements.
Do you think “network of indices” makes sense? It isn’t that big a deal, but the language can be improved.
So just maybe the stadium wave did not cause the warming hiatus, adjust maybe what’s up next is a whole bunch more spring-back warming
The stadium wave has already come and gone. What it looked like was a small NV assisted slowdown in warming to be followed by a vigorous, NV assisted warming, which indicates ECS is fairly high:
https://i.imgur.com/qEU1DBN.png
It’s precisely in the “hopelessly abstracted” world of beta-plane analysis that Rossby found the basis for the expected existence of the planetary waves that bear his name. They are the product of conservation of potential vorticity on a rotating planet, with the Coriolis force acting to restore equilibrium. The restoring force for Kelvin waves, on the other hand, is gravity, and they travel in the opposite direction. Neither remotely represents any product of currents hitting a coastline and submerging, as is inanely claimed here.
By dismissing fundamental dynamical grounding in favor of fanciful verbal descriptions–endlessly regurgitated–the self-styled guru of Climate Etc. shows the world that he stands bereft of the ability to comprehend serious science.
The math involves indices of ocean and atmosphere quasi standing waves in Earths flow field. The reality is a swirling. heaving, spinning ocean and atmosphere and the math attempts to extract a vaguely observed pattern in the network of indices. Some of these intuitions about patterns go back more than a century. And they all make sense on a spinning planet with a variable solar energy heating.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/earth-null.jpg
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=mean_sea_level_pressure/equirectangular
This is an almost real time supercomputer visualization of surface winds and pressure. Visit the site and see the dynamic. There is a band of circumpolar winds in the Southern Hemisphere with low pressure cells spinning off. There is low pressure in the western Pacific in the canonical La Nina pattern. The is an anomalous – but spectacular low in the north-west Pacific. A few scattered lows across the north. Air flows between high and low pressure regions – and spins up with Coriolis forces. A driver for great shifts of air mass in both hemispheres is surface pressure at the poles with the Southern and Northern Annular Modes (SAM and NAM). Winds spin up gyres in all the world’s oceans.
Heat from the Sun is dissipated – entropy is maximized at equilibrium. At some flow of energy through the Earth system vortices – quasi-standing waves spatially and temporally – form and they have some emergent order in size, number and distribution. It is precisely like Tomas’ mountain stream. If the flow is perturbed a little we may find that the turbulent patterns shift again to a new emergent state. The stadium wave – a cascading of tremendous energy through powerful sub-systems – is not something that starts and stops.
I am puzzled by a couple of things however. Clearly the hiatus could persist though to 2030 – and the lack of warming would cause average surface temperature to further diverge from models. That would seem the gist of Wyatt and Curry’s comments as quoted above I am unclear why. And then there is springback – lmfao.
Clearly the warming hiatus is roadkill. It cannot come back to life. It is simply too dead. The SW theory is AMO based. They are waiting for the cool phase of the AMO, and waiting for the AMO is like waiting for the WW2 cargo planes. It ain’t coming. The Eastern Pacific, along with the La Niña tongue, makes the wiggles in the ever upward trend of the 21st-century GMST, just as it did in the 20th century.
angech’s prediction of March cooling is what is called a prayer, and the devil has answered it. The numbers for the last week are hot:
https://i.imgur.com/TjKQQKY.png
“Clearly the warming hiatus is roadkill. It cannot come back to life. It is simply too dead. ”
I hope you’re right, but I don’t think we should count on it.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/nao_fig_4-e1520191198670.jpg
This great atmospheric see saw is modulated by solar UV changes. A cooling Sun this century would result in widespread cooling across higher latitudes. It spins up gyres in the Atlantic and Pacific – the AMO and PDO are secondary feedbacks. The big changes in sea surface temperature in the north-east Pacific are initiated by upwelling. There is an equivalent mechanism in the southern hemisphere that drives La Nina upwelling. It has happened before. El Nino frequency and intensity peaked in the 20th century.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/nao_fig_4-e1520191198670.jpg
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00003.1
… whoops… https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.jpg
The La Niña croaking:
https://i.imgur.com/AQ67BVc.png
March going out like a lion: hot as heck.
Lecture me! Lol.
The latest MEI (Jan/Feb) is -0.73, It is show on a comparison of 2017/18 to other years with short lived El Niño conditions that is above somewhere. The system remains in a canonical La Nina state – with low pressure in the western pacific and high in the east. This screen grab from https://earth.nullschool.net/ is less than 24hrs old.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/earth-null.jpg
The resultant baroclinic eddies result in winds that drive Rossby waves across the Pacific – creating patterns of geopotential of the ENSO phenomenon. Currently low surface pressure in the western Pacific and high in the east. Warm ocean surface water is mounded in the western Pacific giving higher sea surface levels in the west and lower in the east. This is the recharge phase on ENSO.
https://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/images/latestdata/ssh/2018/SSHA_20180331_010000.png
At scales of days to weeks there is turbulence induced by the Madden-Julian oscillation, the recent solar equinox, changes in the polar modes, etc. We can’t get down to that detail as yet – and over-interpreting 7 day changes in ENSO is really just waving your d!ck around and p!ss!ng in a hurricane. As yet will be 50 years and still waiting next year.
‘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’. Edward Lorenz, 1969
I said that I think – based on insights that have emerged over the past few years – that the system is poised for La Nina conditions to emerge more strongly. That this is uncertain seems hardly worth stating. The more interesting question is when the system will shift into a new state? I am looking for an ENSO dragon-king.
“These dragon-kings reveal the existence of mechanisms of self-organization that are not apparent otherwise from the distribution of their smaller siblings… We emphasize the importance of understanding dragon-kings as being often associated with a neighborhood of what can be called equivalently a phase transition, a bifurcation, a catastrophe (in the sense of René Thom), or a tipping point. The presence of a phase transition is crucial to learn how to diagnose in advance the symptoms associated with a coming dragon-king.” Didier Sornette, 2009
Can we see the hint of dragon-kings – large fluctuations between La Niño and El Niño states in 1976/77 and at the turn of the 21st century. We would need many more samples to be statistically confident.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ts.gif
A shift is due any time now – give or take a decade or two. Where it will be to is at the whim of the four Dragon Kings – east, west, south and north – of the oceans. Over millennia there is extreme variability. Past behavior is the El Niño intensity and frequency peaked in the 20th century in a 1000 year high. If past behavior is any guide – we should see coming centuries of enhanced La Niña and a very big spike in El Niño in about a 1000 years.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/moys-2002-2.png
Moy et al (2002) present the record of sedimentation shown above which is strongly influenced by ENSO variability. It is based on the presence of greater and less red sediment in a core from Laguna Pallcacocha in the southern Ecuadorian Andeslake . More sedimentation is associated with El Niño. It has continuous high resolution coverage over 12,000 years. It shows periods of high and low ENSO activity alternating with a period of about 2,000 years. There was a shift from La Niña dominance to El Niño dominance that was identified by Tsonis 2009 as a chaotic bifurcation – and is associated with the drying of the Sahel. There is a period around 3,500 years ago of high ENSO activity associated with the demise of the Minoan civilisation (Tsonis et al, 2010). Red intensity was in excess of 200 – by contrast red intensity following the 88/99 El Niño was 99. It shows ENSO variability considerably in excess of that seen in the modern period.
There is an athropogenic worm though in this chaotic apple. It involves a question without answer. Dare we risk catapulting climate to new and unknowable states? Any resolution of that question would be best defined as an argument from ignorance.
“Using the Lorenz model and varying the strength of the forcing, it can also be shown that the number and spatial patterns of regimes remain the same, but their frequency of occurrence is changed (figure 6). This is essentially what Charney & Shukla [14] had surmised, at least for the tropical atmosphere, where El Nino, in particular, affects regimes of tropical weather, and indeed mid-latitude weather, especially over the western USA. On the other hand, it is possible that for larger forcings, the number and pattern of regimes can change. An important question is whether anthropogenic climate change due to increasing greenhouse gases constitutes a strong enough forcing to lead to a population of new regimes.” http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751
Here’s some more from Christopher Moy here
https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2118279707_C_M_Moy
That led me to a brand new Mar 2018 paper on the ENSO Holocene transition and aridity on the Banni grasslands in western India. I’m all a tingle to read it.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959683618761540
I am far from intending to lecture JCH – but he would be wiser to refrain from from such confidence loaded colloquial language on such ephemeral evidence. Even from such as the BOM. I have talked to them by the way. They are all called Bruce funnily enough. They all think JCH is a drongo. But if he is going to laugh like a loon all the time – let’s give him something to laugh at.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959683618761540
Although this might be funnier.
“angech: March 2018 global temps are due soon JCH.
as well as the announcement that La Nina has not ended.
Watch this space. 0.06 C drop in Spencer’s models and GISS.
angech’s prediction of March cooling is what is called a prayer, and the devil has answered it. The numbers for the last week are hot:”
Thank you for the graphs JCH.
As said you are ahead of the curve in keeping up.
You may be safe with GISS.
UAH on the other hand tends to move the other way rather than in tandem.
“As for UAH, who cares?”
Ignore data as you wish.
State of the Climate Report Reveals 23-Year Temperature Pause in the Stratosphere
“London 27 March 2018: A new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) counters media hype over recent warm global temperatures, showing that almost all of the sudden increase in temperatures in the last couple of years was caused by a record strong natural El Nino phenomenon rather than global warming.
The report’s author, Emeritus Professor Ole Humlum of the University of Oslo, also reveals that the atmosphere is still not behaving the way most climatologists say it should.
According to Professor Humlum, “It is clear that temperatures in the troposphere are continuing to diverge from surface temperatures. In other words, they are warming more slowly than global warming theory says they should. The contrast with theory is even more marked in the stratosphere, where temperatures have barely changed for 23 years. We still have much to learn about the climate.” ”
https://www.thegwpf.org/state-of-the-climate-report-reveals-23-year-temperature-pause-in-the-stratosphere/
How much better off could the world have been now if not for the CAGW alarmists scare mongering and the anti-nuclear protest movement’s rejection of nuclear power and denial of its enormous benefits.
1. Effectively unlimited fuel – sufficient to power the world for many tens of thousands of years with fission alone, then there’s fusion.
2. Supplies Reliable power and provides energy security for all countries. Fuel sufficient to generate all a country’s energy for many years can be stored in a small volume – in warehouses or underground excavations. This means all countries could have energy security and not have to worry about trade being disrupted in times of conflict (trade wars or military).
What could have been if not for the anti-nuclear protest movement’s disruption of progress since the late 1960s:
1. Cost of power around 10% of what it is now (substantially less if the pre-disruption learning rates and the accelerating deployment rate had continued to 2015)
2. up to 9.5 million deaths and 174 Gt CO2 emissions by nuclear power replacing fossil fuels for electricity generation
http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169/htm
See notes in Appendix B, especially V, IX and XII, and Section 3.6 ‘Policy Implications“
Cirrection:
“2. up to 9.5 million deaths and 174 Gt CO2 emissions could have been AVOIDED by nuclear power replacing fossil fuels for electricity generation”
Peter
So are you going to do a correction to your “cirrection”?
tonyb
Peter Lang | March 27, 2018 at 6:28 pm | Reply
“How much better off could the world have been now if not for the CAGW alarmists scare mongering and the anti-nuclear protest movement’s rejection of nuclear power and denial of its enormous benefits.”
Better off to run the “experiments” now when it does not matter so much, Peter, than later when it could.
Although it is hard to see we sometimes need a splash of opposite views in the face to wake us up to the real facts.
Yes there is unintended damage in CAGW and its explosion but the conflict also helps to sharpen arguing skills, mindsets and outcomes.
I am happy with solar power, wind and wave power, electric cars etc. Just I can see they are not very practical, yet, for the average person and the average country.
If we had just stayed with what works all these other avenues might not have been so abundantly investigated. Not to mention the advances in doing more with what we have in fossil fuels.
Nuclear has an obvious and expanding place but there are both dangers and limitations as well as the extreme good potential it has.
angech
Until electric cars can make the leap from second car to always used first car they will struggle to make headway.
That includes price, good range in all conditions, easy and quick filling, reliability in all weathers.
tonyb
angech,
What do you see as the dangers and limitations of nuclear versus solar and wind?
Please compare the deaths per TWh of wind, solar and nuclear.
Please provide figures on how much of the world energy could be supplied by wind solar and at what cost per unit energy supplied. State the equivalent figures for nuclear.
What is the unintended consequences of CAGW compared with the unintended consequences of the cost of the climate industry and climate policies? (see my comments upthread quoting the $1.5 billion/a cost of the climate industry and cost of Paris Agreement is about 2% of GDP for no benefit, or more likely negative benefit given that global warming is beneficial, not damaging.
Now you’re encroaching on my other specialist subject Tony!
FYI we recently secured some inward investment from Westminster into
sunny/soggy SW England:http://www.V2G-EVSE.com/2018/03/22/standards-based-v2x-charging-station-technology/
Whoops! My “humourous” attempt at “strikethrough” didn’t work very well :(
Try:
http://www.V2G-EVSE.com/2018/03/22/standards-based-v2x-charging-station-technology/
in combination with:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/flood-warnings/ea#?tab=floodWarningsDetail
Echoes of 2014?
https://www.instagram.com/p/BhEupquBokh/
The River Parrett in Somerset has burst its banks.
The problem is that everyone uses fossil fuels one way or another. Trying to smear the people who gave us what we want is the apogee of hypocrisy. Not one of you whiners about fossil fuels have stopped using them. You should voluntarily turn yourselves in for a fail term – that is if you can find one that doesn’t use fossil fuels. Me? I got no problem with fossil fuels. They built the USA and that MY country!
jim2
well said
Fossil fuels have made human civilisation comfortable for the first time in its history and has brought wealth, health and convenience that previous generations could only have dreamt about
Too many people are looking merely at one side of the balance sheet.
tonyb
I try not to get hung up on technology. How about a 400hp version of this – electric motor in each wheel, small battery pack, a couple of Israeli linear generators and a small liquid fuel tank?
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/ev2.jpg
https://www.proteanelectric.com/
Regarding the link to his recent article in The Guardian, Roger Pielke Jr. shouldn’t be too concerned about what the Republicans are, or not, doing in their on-again, off-again war against science.
A blue wave mid-term election cycle is coming in November, 2018, one which will give the Democrats solid majorities in both houses of Congress.
The 2018 election will pave the way for another blue wave election in November, 2020, one which will remove Donald Trump from office and which will hand the Democrats a powerful mandate for resuming the science policies and the environmental policies then in place at the conclusion of the Obama administration.
In late January 2021, once they are back in complete control, the Democrats will move swiftly to reverse every decision Donald Trump and his appointees made while they were in office.
It’s also likely that anyone and everyone in the federal government who played any prominent role in pushing Trump’s agenda will be quickly and ruthlessly purged.
By the end of 2022, every change Donald Trump and his people made in the federal government’s economic, trade, science, and environmental policies will have been completely erased.
The big question remains, how far are the Democrats willing to go in reducing America’s carbon emissions?
Technology alone can’t get the job done. It is impossible to reach President Obama’s goal of an 80% reduction in America’s carbon emissions by 2050 without putting a stiff price on carbon and without imposing strictly-enforced mandatory energy conservation measures on all energy consuming activities — private, commercial, and government alike.
Those mandatory energy conservation measures must include what amounts to a carbon fuel rationing scheme imposed in gradually escalating phases over a period of a decade or more.
Are the Democrats willing to take the kind of political heat that goes with doing all which realistically must be done in achieving their carbon reduction target — an 80% reduction by 2050?
Four years from now, at the conclusion of the 2022 mid-term election cycle, we will have a definitive answer to that question.
BB, don’t Bogart that joint, my friend (pass it over to me)…
afonzarelli, was 1968’s Easy Rider a bellweather indicator of where America was headed after the 1960’s; or was it instead nothing more than a passing phenomenon which had no lasting cultural or political significance?
BB, ironically i live in the french quarter, but must admit that i never saw anything of intrinsic value in the film. My guess is that it represented the hippy life style, a thing that has mostly remained a relic of the 60s. So, i’d say that it was just a passing phenomenon. Why do you ask? And what has that to do with your original comment (which i thought somewhat dopey, hence my allusion)?
afonzarelli, it was you who first made an allusion to a 1960’s counterculture film, rather than offering a useful counterpoint to one person’s perspective concerning a current topical issue. And so you got a response in kind.
Beta, you don’t need a useful counterpoint, you need to stop smokin’ that wacky tobacky. You’ve got the next two elections all figured out as though you own a crystal ball! Your dopey comment merited the reply that it received. (so don’t go ’round blaming others for your own raw stupidity)…
“Are the Democrats willing to take the kind of political heat that goes with doing all which realistically must be done in achieving their carbon reduction target — an 80% reduction by 2050?”
You don’t have to wait four years, you already have the answer. The only reductions in GHG emissions that happened under Obama’s watch came from increased production of natural gas in the US. The last time the Democrats had complete ownership of both houses of congress and the white house they decided climate warming-change wasn’t interesting and jacked up health care instead.
US oil production grew by almost five million barrels a day under Obama’s watch (not quite doubling). By the 2020 election, the US will be producing at least 3 million barrels a day more of oil than it was the day Trump was elected.
The Democrats are not going to run on a platform to kill a half-billion-dollar a day industry. They aren’t going to do it if they are elected. They don’t have to, folks like you will always believe that Obama (whose ‘action” on emissions was to make pledges the next president would have to meet) is better on climate change than Trump.
While they held power, the Democrats gave only lip service to greatly reducing America’s carbon emissions. They didn’t match their words with the kind of strong federal action needed to get the job done.
For example, the Clean Power Plan really didn’t do much more than encourage a trend that was already operative in the power markets, that of replacing baseload coal and nuclear with a combination of natural gas plus just enough wind and solar to satisfy state-mandated RET’s.
What if the Democrats are back in full control of the federal government in 2021, but they refuse to enact a stiff price on carbon and they reject a mandatory carbon fuel rationing scheme? Or alternatively, what if the predictions of a blue wave in November are mistaken and the Republicans remain in control of the federal government’s energy and environmental policies?
For both outcomes, taking effective action on reducing America’s carbon emissions will remain within the provenance of state and local governments to decide; including any state and regional anti-carbon compacts those state and local governments may decide to participate in.
In any case, without direct federal intervention in the form of enacting a stiff price on carbon and enforcing a universally-applied scheme of mandatory energy conservation measures, there is no prospect whatsoever of achieving an 80% reduction in America’s carbon emissions by 2050.
“All universities care about are the fees paid by students and the cheap labour they provide (TAs and RAs). This is the opposite of efficiency: no factory would mindlessly churn out goods that no one wants.”
https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/mar/23/they-called-my-university-a-phd-factory-now-i-understand-why
My oldest is at plus 1.5 years of his PhD program at a University I frequently praise with reference to the family finances. It’s possible the non-STEM fields show more of a problem as portrayed at the article.
Academia is changing as the world changes. There is uncertainty, and uncertainty plus debt.
Why greenhouse gases heat the ocean – RC 2006
The Response of the Ocean Thermal Skin Layer to Variations in Incident Infrared Radiation
JCH, what about conductive heat transfer? i never hear anything about that. The atmosphere is sitting on top of the ocean 24/7, so wouldn’t we expect that to cause ocean warming regardless? (what am i not getting here?)…
The atmosphere is, in general, cooler than the upper layer of the ocean.
https://i.imgur.com/xHWVOU7.png
So, now this has to be explained:
https://i.imgur.com/kvc7lpd.png
So the usual explanation is, it’s against my politics/religion, so Minnett is wrong. There are also Minnett skeptics on the AGW side.
Levitus 2012
Just .09C 0-2000m increase from 1955 to 2010.
Not exactly the kind of increase to melt those marine terminating glaciers in West Antarctica and Greenland.
The establishment needs to go back to the drawing boards and rethink the major influences on contributions to SLR from those locations. There have been major discoveries of geothermal activity in the last 5 years indicating more heat affecting the basal dynamics of the those grounded glaciers than previously thought. Also, in Greenland they have found geothermal sources affecting the waters interfacing some of the glaciers. Since the Antarctic Peninsula has cooled in the last decade they might want to rethink the hypothesis that atmospheric warming was causing the increase in meltwater there.
Eventually, they will catch up to reality. For some, it might be a bitter pill to swallow to admit that other things could be at work besides AGW.
One big question remaining from the discovery, which scientists detailed in their study: Are the volcanoes still active?
“If one of these volcanoes were to erupt it could further destabilize west Antarctica’s ice sheets,” co-author Robert Bingham, a glacial expert, told the Guardian, resulting in melted ice that could raise sea levels.
It sort of like VLM. This was waived in front of people as though it was a huge problem, and the implication was the the tide gauges prove the altimetry is wrong.
So multiple people have improved the numbers on VLM, and those numbers have been used to calculate the rate of SLR per the tide gauges during the satellite era, and they affirm the satellites.
Hay 15 used a different approach, same answer.
So who has a bitter pill to swallow? Lol.
If AGW thins the ice sheet, then it’s possible volcanic activity will increase. If that happens, the ice sheet could be subject to dynamic collapse. If dynamic collapse happens, well, that is what James Hansen was speculating could happen based on the past history of the Antarctic ice sheets and sea level. Where is there a bitter pill? Only that some day somebody’s Grandchildren will be attending Miami’s James E. Hansen Elementary somewhere on a hill that is a long way from current Miami.
You’re getting confused. My comment addressed only the glaciers and the land water interface, not the ice sheets. Confusion is transitory. It should pass.
The atmosphere is, in general, cooler than the upper layer of the ocean.
JCH, i’ve heard that. (in fact, Willis won’t let anybody forget that… ☺) But that doesn’t mean that the 2nd law doesn’t still apply. If the atmosphere gets warmer above the ocean, then that would mean less heat conducting out of the ocean. So, a combination of say solar and a relatively warmer atmosphere from co2 could do the trick. (without a warmer atmosphere from co2 the ocean could, in abstract theory, be cooling)…
Energy flows – it flows on net from warm to cold. And entropy – as I read recently – is a dimensionless measure of uncertainty. (Demetris Koutsoyiannis, 2017, http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/getfile/1724/1/documents/2017EWRA_PantaRhei.pdf )
http://images.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tlt_v40/medium/global/MSU_AMSU_Channel_tlt_Trend_Map_v04_0_1979_2017.730_450.png
This is a sort of planetary glow from from oxygen excitation. The sun warms land, air and oceans – and the planet emits more energy with with a negative (-3.2W/m2/K) Planck response. The flow of energy starts with electromagnetic radiation – through latent and diffused heat – and back to electromagnetic radiation at space. The system tends to equilibrium at maximum entropy. The planet is losing all the energy it gains.
Clouds are invisible at microwave frequencies – but they do of course modulate energy flow in both SW and IR. The Arctic has warmed more strongly but there a suggestion over longer timescales of a bi-modal polar behavior.
The question that is unresolved is the cause of warming. What is the mix of the anthropogenic and natural components? And no the IPCC hasn’t got it right.
very nice presentation, thx
Robert
The purpose of “dissipative structures” (as Prigogine called them) is the export of entropy.
Here’s a nice article about turbulent mixing:
https://authors.library.caltech.edu/284/1/DIMarfm.pdf
Jensen et al 2018 show the hightened nonlinear sensitively of north polar sea ice and Greenland ice during the last glacial period (including the DO excursions) to small variations in the transport of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0802.1
This underlines the importance of the nonlinear instability in the AMOC arising from the salinity-downwelling positive feedback which it possesses. Cold water formation and downwelling in the Norwegian sea drives the gulf stream – reactive flow of Carribean warm and – critically – saline water across the Atlantic to north west Europe. This gulf stream water has high salinity, and this makes the cold water formed in the Norwegian sea even more dense than would result from its temperature alone. So this cold and saline water sinks all the way to the Atlantic floor and is one of the principal drivers of the global thermo haline circulation (THC). This “deep water formation” at the Norwegian sea in turn speeds up the gulf stream – something has to replace all that sinking cold super-salty water. Thus the positive feedback.
Where you have a positive feedback in an open dissipative far-from-equilibrium system you have the conditions for nonlinear oscillation. This is directly analogous to the ENSO in the Pacific, the positive feedback of the Bjerknes mechanism (cold upwelling strengthens trade winds strengthening cold upwelling etc.) giving rise to the ENSO nonlinear oscillator, although the AMOC operates over much longer – century and millenial – timescales than ENSO (year to decadal).
So a basic oceanographic feature comparing the NH with the SH in the palaeo record is more fluctuation and instability in the NH (such as the numerous DO events during the last glacial period) and more stable, gradual changes in the SH. The nonlinear instability of the AMOC is the root of this.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/what-a-real-debate-looks-like-in-climate-science/512444/
Now that there is a new sheriff in the White House, rebel scientists like James E. Hansen can take on the oil companies and their IPCC consensus regime.
JCH: The most attention-getting of this work: a paper last year by James Hansen and 18 other scientists that argued the AMOC’s collapse could threaten global civilization this century.
Is this the long-rumored science-based “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming”? Or is it just another “beyond science” exaggeration?
Haven’t you been paying attention? Abrupt climate change!
Yes Hansen was referring to the same thing. It’s not a one-off event but a regular occurrence. The AMOC is unstable and oscillates intermittently. Salinity driven excursions of the gulf stream are terminated by Greenland meltwater cutting off downwelling and deep water formation. That’s the theory at least.
As a member of the establishment said in an article about the collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet “It could come soon. Or it could take several millennia.”
Nothing like a little wiggle room.
This model of abrupt climate change caused by an AMOC collapse flopped here at CargoCult Etc. Not enough catastrophe:
https://i.imgur.com/5bT4KIK.png
JCH: Haven’t you been paying attention? Abrupt climate change!
That did not answer my question. Does this mean that “CAGW” is in fact well-defined by climate scientists? Or does the phrase “could threaten global civilization this century” mean that no “catastrophe” is supported by the scientific research?
Which version of “abrupt” is this — 10 times as rapid as the upcoming recurrent Ice Age?
Given the large number of caveats, it’s not difficult to imagine it could be, maybe even might be.
Stay tuned, Hansen’s SLR scenario gets a cameo in Part V of my series on sea level rise, should be posted within a few days
JCH: It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable,
That might be, may be, happening already in Europe without much climate change. It looks less likely in China and South Korea.
JCH: It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable,
Imaginary being the operative word when jumping to conclusions,
That hasn’t stopped such controversial claims being made. A decade ago, the United Nations went as far as to state that climate warming and desertification were one of the causes of the Darfur conflict in Sudan, which started in 2003 and led to the deaths of up to half a million people over five years of revolt. That daring claim, based on sketchy information, met with harsh criticism and outright disbelief from researchers familiar with the region. But it also triggered growing interest in climate–conflict research.
Results so far are largely ambiguous and have been frequently questioned by political scientists, economists, social scientists and climate experts, on various grounds. This week, a systematic review of the literature highlights one problem: efforts to find links between climate and social conflict are hampered by a severe sampling bias, including a statistically and politically dubious focus on mainly African countries formerly under British colonial rule.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01875-9
Now that there is a new sheriff in the White House, rebel scientists like James E. Hansen can take on the oil companies and their IPCC consensus regime.
Hansen realized that the models were indicating a reduced thermal gradient.
The problem is, reduced thermal gradients mean reduced kinetic energy, and presumably, less extreme weather.
So Hansen conjured up a way to increase thermal gradients instead.
Trouble is, this contradicts his one time collaborator, Manabe. It also contradicts the premise of Francis.
So, who’s wrong?
Most climate models? or Hansen? or who? and why?
I arrive via Judith’s Twitter feed. Top right of this page at the moment:
https://twitter.com/GreatWhiteCon/status/980510008277458945
Perhaps somebody here would be good enough to explain the “Another loss for the alarmists” comment to me?
Climate changes like this without anthro forcing are not allowed in alarmist AGW. These findings thus undermine the human attribution claims.
Large abrupt unforced changes sound chaotic, which requires strong nonlinear negative feedbacks. That would be very interesting. Do you consider it?
This is so alarming. I’m scared this could happen any day now.
“Another loss for the alarmists”
Another nail in the coffin. We don’t want the alarmists to get back out, and need lots of driven nails. We’re not sure you are dead but you are in a wooden box and burying you with a not secured lid might not do the job.
It’s not enough to win, we must say you lost. Half the fun is winning, and the other is telling you that you lost. We don’t have parades for the loser of the Super Bowl, do we?
We’ve got oceans of water, wind, currents, geography, clouds and what else? Ice melts when it gets sufficiently warmer. Is there more to it than that?
Gunpowder or poisonous gas might help. But are 50% alive in the multiverse and the other 50% still here? Is that good enough?
As you may have already surmised, I’m with JCH on this one.
Another loss for the “skeptics” seems to me to be a more appropriate response.
YMMV of course!
Jim – clearly photons, other than abruptly changing the climate, are insensitive to ice and no ice and ACO2.
“Since “panta rhei” was pronounced by Heraclitus, hydrology and the objects it studies, such as rivers and lakes, have offered grounds to observe and understand change and flux. Change occurs on all time scales, from minute to geological, but our limited senses and life span, as well as the short time window of instrumental observations, restrict our perception to the most apparent daily to yearly variations. As a result, our typical modelling practices assume that natural changes are just a short-term “noise” superimposed on the daily and annual cycles in a scene that is static and invariant in the long run. According to this perception, only an exceptional and extraordinary forcing can produce a long-term change.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02626667.2013.804626
Internal variability is white noise and sums to zero has been a pervasive meme for a long time. This followed from a long period of complete neglect of internal variability. It dies hard – but as a paradigm it ultimately goes the way of any dinosaur.
My education level article “Two CO2 myths” over at CFACT has cleared 3000 comments and counting:
http://www.cfact.org/2018/03/13/two-co2-climate-change-myths/
But is it an eddy resolving model? A suggestion is that heat flow to Nordic seas across the Greenland-Scotland Ridge pulses and triggers ice rafting.
https://media.springernature.com/m685/nature-static/assets/v1/image-assets/nature07302-f1.2.jpg
“The sensitivity of sea ice to the temperature of inflowing Atlantic water across the Greenland-Scotland Ridge is investigated using an eddy-resolving configuration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model with idealized topography. During the last glacial period, when climate on Greenland is known to have been extremely unstable, sea ice is thought to have covered the Nordic Seas. The dramatic excursions in climate during this period, seen as large abrupt warming events on Greenland and known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events (DO events), are proposed to have been caused by a rapid retreat of Nordic Seas sea ice. Here, we show that a full sea-ice cover and Arctic-like stratification can exist in the Nordic Seas given a sufficiently cold Atlantic inflow and corresponding low transport of heat across the Greenland-Scotland Ridge. Once sea ice is established, continued sea-ice formation and melt efficiently freshens the surface ocean and makes the deeper layers more saline. This creates a strong salinity stratification in the Nordic Seas, similar to today’s Arctic Ocean, with a cold fresh surface layer protecting the overlying sea ice from the warm Atlantic water below. There is a non-linear response in Nordic Seas sea ice to Atlantic water temperature with simulated large abrupt changes in sea ice given small changes in inflowing temperature. This suggests that the DO events were more likely to have occurred during periods of reduced warm Atlantic water inflow to the Nordic Seas.”
I am far from understanding this – it seems fascinating and there are a whole lot of other questions raised in an area relatively unexplored by me. Millennial scale shifts in AMOC and ice rafting? Are there smaller Holocene perturbations? How do current conditions compare?
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/278/5341/1257.full
The paper can be accessed from a site here – https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scientific-articles-free-sci-hub/ – I find unpaywall as a Chrome extension useful. One of the sci-hub links – e.g. http://tree.sci-hub.la/ – will give you a legal ‘early online release’ version. Paste in the doi and search.
It helps to give a link p- https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0802.1
There may be a glitch at the science.mag site. If you Google – A Pervasive Millennial-Scale Cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and Glacial Climates – it will give you a paper by Bond et al 1997.
Bond et al 1997 is real old fashioned science. There talk about shifts at 1470 +/- 500 year ‘cycles’.
https://d2ufo47lrtsv5s.cloudfront.net/content/sci/278/5341/1257/F8.medium.gif
“We know too little thus far to identify the origin of the 1470-year cycle. Its constant pacing across major stage boundaries, especially the last glacial termination, almost certainly rules out any origin linked to ice sheet oscillations. Rather, the close correlation of shifts in ocean surface circulation with changes in atmospheric circulation above Greenland is consistent with a coupled ocean-atmosphere process. Coupled ocean-atmosphere modes of variability on decadal scales have been inferred from observational records in the North Atlantic (37), but those records are too short to assess longer, millennial-scale phenomena. Millennial-scale climate cycles may arise from harmonics and combination tones of the orbital periodicities, but cycles currently thought to fall within those bands are longer than the cycle we have identified (38). Forcing of millennial-scale climate variability by changes in solar output has also been suggested, but that mechanism is highly controversial, and no evidence has been found of a solar cycle in the range of 1400 to 1500 years (39).
In any case, if we are correct that the 1470-year climate cycle is a pervasive component of Earth’s climate system, it must be present in previous glacial-interglacial intervals. If that turns out to be true, the cycle may well be the pacemaker of rapid climate change.” Bond et al 1997
The pacemaker involves those solar UV linked surface pressure driven shifts in atmospheric mass between the poles and sub-polar regions in a combination of factors that seem roughly periodic – +/- 500 years – including a changing resonant response as ocean levels change and ice sheets expand or contract.
Robert
Now you’re channelling Javier.
But I’m not convinced by the solar explanation for everything.
It’s more likely internal chaotic-nonlinear oscillation, possibly (weakly) periodically forced by solar or other astrophysical influences.
As you yourself often say.
And humans have influenced the 20-21st centuries to some extent.
I have a horror of cycles – even if it were the Sun and orbits – changes there is more in the nature of excursions (Jack Eddy). The only reason it resembles vaguely purely periodic is because of the huge mass of the Sun. And excursions – even with CO2 – are classically sensitively dependent on small (Lorenzian) forcing in the oceans and atmosphere.
It seems less a passive dissipator of energy from the Sun – that changes with activity and solar system orbits – but vigorously tends to maximum entropy at energy equilibrium at top of atmosphere. .
A spatio-temporal reconstruction of sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic during Dansgaard-Oeschger events 5-8
The interaction between sea ice and salinity‐dominated ocean circulation: implications for halocline stability and rapid changes of sea ice cover
On this being a loss for alarmists, that may be a bit of a false alarm.
So models are conceptually wrong – with the lack of an ice signal? The second quoted article looks to have a lovely little mathematical model.
But best to start at the start.
“Changes in the sea ice cover of the Nordic Seas have been proposed to play a key role for the dramatic temperature excursions associated with the Dansgaard–Oeschger events during the last glacial.”
She has three papers; her thesis. The one that made twitter is her last one.
“Universities Should Encourage Scientists to Speak Out about Public Issue”
No. Universities should encourage scientists to speak out about scientific issues. And editors of Scientific American should write about science not global warming propaganda like this shameful article
https://i0.wp.com/beyondthespin.weebly.com/uploads/7/6/4/6/7646862/5934253_orig.jpg
JCH wins again.
Darn.
“The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for March, 2018 was +0.24 deg. C, up a little from the February value of +0.20 deg. C: “
The Moyhu NCEP/NCAR analysis index was also up by 0.046°C
Are we seriously reduced to worrying about 4 hundredths of a degree?
Robert, shush, they might hear you.
It is an extremely significant rise in the context of proof of something or other.
Poor at losing a month at a time; poor at losing a year at a time; poor at losing a season at a time; poor at losing a year at a time; poor at losing a decade at a time; poor multidecadal losers. Then the world improves.
Extrapolate SLR of 3mm/yr until 2050? Sign of a poor loser.
1900 to 1990 – 1.1 mm/yr
1993 – ~2.0 mm/yr
1993 to present – 3.3 mm/yr
20-year rate – 3.8 mm/yr:
https://i.imgur.com/9sY0Wyf.png
15-year rate – 3.62 mm/yr:
https://i.imgur.com/AXPNU0J.png
10-year rate – 4.29 mm/yr:
https://i.imgur.com/0QOhxYj.png
5-year rate – 4.73 mm/yr:
https://i.imgur.com/3RWCx28.png
The El Niño ended almost two years ago. Since then there have been two La Niña events.
What JCH doesn’t know is that the values for the ‘lost months’ are statistically the same. I don’t believe I even have to say this.
“A vigorous spectrum of interdecadal internal variability presents numerous challenges to our current understanding of the climate. First, it suggests that climate models in general still have difficulty reproducing the magnitude and spatiotemporal patterns of internal variability necessary to capture the observed character of the 20th century climate trajectory.” http://www.pnas.org/content/106/38/16120
One month’s temperature reveals nothing of any significance. But where they are reduced to counting on natural variability to end the hiatus – their game is lost long ago.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/download-1-e1522782102362.png
JCH
” The El Niño ended almost two years ago. Since then there have been two La Niña events.”
Not true as you know and using BOM as that seems to be your La Nina choice at the moment.
I know you look at the charts.
I know you have insight when not fixated on proving points or arguing with Robert.
Would you care to discuss your real view of the last 3-4 years or tell me why my version of events is so wrong?
–
We had an El Nino event. It had 2 false starts as I recall where numerous pundits called it but it did not eventuate and then settled in for over a year.
When it fell a La Nina was expected to follow and called out by all the pundits including BOM.
Yet if you look at their website you will not find an actual La Nina mentioned, only hints to La Nina conditions for a few months.
The trap then closed and conditions reverted to a near El Nino. I recall comments from you as this unexpected turn continued.
This also reverted and BOM called a La Nina developing again in the last few months which they then said had ended.
While you make statements to great noise about El Nino ending you make no comment about the persistence of quite long near El Nino conditions in this last 2 years.
Similarly to say 2 La Nina’s in 2 years is gilding the truth of the temperature records considerably.
According to BOM, the one you chose to use, remember, there has only been one recorded and both sets of La Nina conditions[ not events] were weakish in nature].
You make a lot of noise about a weeks worth of recent rise.
Regardless of whether it goes up or down I note that you did not and could not predict this, only comment on it after it had happened.
In other words all show.
El Nino/La Nina is desperately hard to predict. There are some clues in the currents at depth and the wind conditions but as the last week just showed they can give a general intermediate idea but not a correct idea of the trend short or long term. The Chiefio has explained why the trends we recognize suggest La Nina conditions are more likely than not at the moment but as he also says we do not have answers to which way the chaos will turn the trend in the next few months.
Feel free to give a prediction of the next 1, 2 and 3 months if you dare.
You have about 50% chance of being wrong, the same as I have when I confidently predict the exact opposite.
Hang tight. I’ve completed my ENSO forecast, waiting for one more piece of information, will publish my forecast on Fri Apr 6. We have a new approach for breaching the predictability barrier, i look forward to everyone’s comments.
NOAA has a definition for La Nina and publishes an ENSO history. There have been two of them. Good grief. Also, in their published history, 50 years, there has not been an example of three back-to-back La Niña events. NOAA sent scientists up Mt. Suribachi with my father and his leathernecks. Right into hot lead.
BOM does their own thing. Other countries do as well. So what?
It will be interesting. So far, I believe all forecasting has been for a resumption of neutral conditions by the end of May. ONI for the latest period was just posted -0.8, so it has been at or below -0.8 for four consecutive periods, and at or below -0.5 for 5 periods, making it officially the 2nd La Niña in a row. In the published NOAA record of ENSO events, there have never been three La Niña events in a row, but that does not there couldn’t be. But hoping, praying, and betting on a threepeat is pretty far out.
NOAA PDO is down, but the PDO, whatever it actually is, is obviously vigorously fighting off global cooling, which is the hallmark of its new regime.
“Warm (red) and cold (blue) periods based on a threshold of +/- 0.5oC for the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) [3 month running mean of ERSST.v5 SST anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region (5oN-5oS, 120o-170oW)], based on centered 30-year base periods updated every 5 years.” http://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ONI_v5.php
So what did actually happen in 2016/17?
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2017/anomnight.2.2.2017.gif
http://la.climatologie.free.fr/enso/La-Nina-modoki1.jpg
The relatively recently observed Modoki patterns are not easily integrated into traditional ENSO indices – but it is quite obviously there. It resulted for instance in extreme flooding in both California and Queensland.
“Why do I believe that the MEI is better for monitoring ENSO than the SOI or various SST indices? In brief, the MEI integrates more information than other indices, it reflects
he nature of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system better than either component, and it is less vulnerable to occasional data glitches in the monthly update cycles. Now, if you are
interested in ENSO impacts in a very specific part of the world, I would suggest that you obtain other ENSO indices as well and establish which one best fits your needs. For instance, in Australia, Darwin sea level pressure and/or the SOI may be more appropriate than the MEI. My claim here is that the MEI does a better job than other indices for the overall monitoring of the ENSO phenomenon, including, for instance, world-wide correlations with surface temperatures and rainfall.” https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/table.html
In terms of the MEI there was a relatively large El Nino centered on 2015, followed by an exceedingly modest La Nina, a short lived El Nino and the current still modest La Nina.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ts.gif
ENSO is a discharge/recharge oscillation. Recharge is insufficient for a strong El Nino to emerge.
“Looking at the nearest 12 rankings (+6/-6) in this season, and excluding the two cases that showed a three-month rise of 0.4 or more, we end up with the following ten ‘analogues’: 1950, 51, 62, 63, 67, 68, 97, 99, 01, and 09 (three of these were flagged as an analogue last month: 63, 68, and 09). Subsequently, five of these analogues transitioned to El Niño conditions at some point during the same calendar year (within two months in 1997 compared to nine months in 1968, while 1951, 63, and 09 fall in between). In contrast, four years (1950, 62, 67, and 99) remained more or less in their La Niña state through the remainder of the year, and only 2001 eased into an ENSO-neutral state. Not much to glean from historical analogues, except that ENSO-neutral is least likely later this year.” Claus Wolter
Given antecedent conditions – including the AAO – the emergence of a La Nina seems much more likely to me.
Meanwhile in the Arctic, and especially for angech, provisional PIOMAS phigures published:
http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2018/04/facts-about-the-arctic-in-april-2018/
http://greatwhitecon.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/PIOMAS-volume-20180331-768×576.png
All eyes are still on the Bering and Chukchi Seas.
Thanks Jim.
You put up some sensible stuff and I was waiting to see this one.
Second lowest but hopefully beaming back up to normal [I know you might wish to disagree].
I am hoping all that extra albedo from the snow will cool the Arctic down and lead to a slower melt season and thicker ice.
Even though the ice melt is determined by a myriad of factors including Vortices, cyclones and temperature of the inflowing sea currents which is totally independent of the sea surface temperatures.
Very appreciated.
Now off to debate JCH.
More hoping and praying. What’s next? Seances? Ouija boards? Surely there’s a book called “The Physics of Spoon Bending”.
If it had gone down 0.06 it would have been a catastrophe
No, it would still be just another example of how incredibly weak the cooling influence of La Niña is when the PDO is not going along with the flow.
UAH sukkz; RSS has been repaired, and this is La Niña March. Lol. Let’s have more of La Niña. Pray for this little weakling to last longer.
https://i.imgur.com/6YXc9or.png
I’m a glutton for punishment. Would somebody please come and lecture me about the La Niña lag. I wanna hear more about it.
I think I can see this at the end of the RSS record.
http://images.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/TLT_v40/plots/RSS_TS_channel_TLT_Global_Land_And_Sea_v04_0.short.png
Scott Morrison warns of high costs of new coal
Australia’s Treasurer, Scott Morrison says the days of cheap coal-fired power are over, warning electricity from new High Efficiency Low Emissions coal plants costs twice as much as power from generators built in past.
In a reality check to Coalition backbenchers who want the government to pay for a $4 billion HELE coal plant, the Treasurer said “there is a difference between old coal and new coal”.
“Old coal bids into the energy grid at around about $30 per megawatt hour wholesale up to $40,” Mr Morrison told the AFR’s Banking and Wealth Summit.
“A new HELE plant, five, six or seven years down the track, it is estimated it would be bidding at around $70 or $80.
“So it is false to think that a new coal fired power station will generate electricity at the same price as old coal fired power stations for the obvious reason that the asset has already been written off.
This is not news.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/finkel-lcoe.jpg
Michael Shellenberger:
“Nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania generate 30 percent more electricity than all the solar in the United States, and yet the groups demanding they be shut down say they are concerned about climate change.
In my new piece I document how EDF, NRDC, and Sierra Club are working with the American Petroleum Institute to kill our largest source of clean energy while lobbying for subsidies for solar that are 20 to 93 times more expensive than the ones given to nuclear.
”
http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/4/4/zero-dark-nuclear