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New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century
jamie writes with this snippet from the UK's Independent:
"The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. ... [The study] found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available. On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010."
How do they know if the CO2 is from fossil fuels or from natural sources, is there actually a test for this?
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
For those to lazy to multiply, that's a 10.8 degree Fahrenheit increase in the mean global temperature.
Sounds pretty alarming.
jdb2
I sort of believe in climate change, but at this point in time, a day after we all got to learn that the top-institute for climate-change knowingly and willingly changed the numbers, lied... I can not take this serious. First I want to know how much has been fabricated and lied. After that, I might support this type of research again, but only after all the liars are banned from 'research'.
IF the forecast temperature rise is 6C per century, then it is .6C per decade
Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Try reading that again: "adding in the real temps [...] to hide the decline."
So, it is some kind of proxy for measuring the historical temperatures (in this case, tree rings), and this proxy data, for some completely different reason (pollution affecting the tree growth, for example??), shows a decline in the last couple of decades.
The real temperatures (ie, the ones that are actaully measured, like with a thermometer) show an increase, so use the real measurements for the final 20 years of the data.
There would be more of a problem if this wasn't disclosed somewhere. But even then, it is an argument about how the proxy data is presented. The real temperature data doesn't show a decline.
Response from the RealClimate website, here (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/#more-1853):
This will indeed cause certain people to "wonder". Especially people who do not have the faculties to properly understand the idiomatic uses of the English language, and people who are willing to take words and phrases of out of context, as well as people who are willing to formulate their opinions without considering the actual analysis and instead relying on secondhand hysteria generated by others who are also not willing to consider the actual analysis.
So it goes.
-Laxitive
It's even better - the source cited in the story above is the CRU (funny how "University of East Anglia" started being the source when everyone found out that CRU was more than a bit corrupt) - the same people who just got busted with all of that leaked data and incriminating emails just this week.
So they apparently decided to double down on their predictions, instead of trying to pretend nothing happened - but hiding the provenance.
Anyone want to bet the lead author on the paper wasn't the lead author last week, and got "promoted" when the real researchers' names were tainted?
Only those who read one sentence, and never bother to read anything else. Some of the data from a previous paper was found to be faulty, and a method of adjusting to show a longer term trend based on several data source was required. Not only is this not unheard of, it is a routine technique in studies where some data cannot be duplicated -- such as a temperature reading.
Speaking of warping science to conform to a belief, why is it that so many people are so eager to believe global warming skeptics? Methinks it is because they do not want to believe that something as innocent as driving a car could be a problem.
Palm trees and 8
Not that suspicious in itself - I've often used the word "trick" to refer to a clever shortcut with no deception whatsoever. A quick search of my email shows several uses of it in this way.
I don't know enough about this to say whether there's anything dubious or not, but that quote by itself doesn't say much.
'Climate models predict disaster' is not news. Climate model always predict disaster.
'1999 climate model validated by 10 years of actual data'. *That* would be news.
The politicization of climate data will prove to be a disaster in the long run. Everyone has an axe to grind.
Here's a link to some NASA data about temperature:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
Do we believe NASA when they say 2008 was the coolest since 2000? Is that just a tooth in the saw? Which trend to you believe? The one that shows temperatures generally increasing since 1880? Are the relatively flat temperatures between 1950 and 1980 an anomaly? Is it really correct to even assume the overall trend is anthropogenic? Or do we need to do some fancy footwork to make the data fit the hypothesis?
What we don't have is good, healthy debate.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
It is not only the estimates of temperature increase that are rising, but so are the uncertainties. We know very little about how the feedback cycles work once the temperature changes so many degrees, and we know next to nothing about how they work when faced with such quick changes. We do not know how much methane hydrate there is stored on the ocean floor, but we do know there is a lot of it and that an eruption of it 55 million years ago was at least in part responsible for a 6 degree C rise in global temperatures. It is also thought that the biggest mass extinction event ever was caused by massive volcanism and methane hydrate release. There is plenty of evidence that large parts of the ocean can and have previously become anoxic during climate changes. This is really bad news not only for everything that lives in the ocean, but also for us since a large part of our food supply comes from the ocean.
Basically, we are getting into a territory where all bets are off, and it is not good news for humanity. I am linking to wikipedia since that is good place to start to read up on this stuff and find links to the actual research.
Yes, in the past, the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lagged behind temperature increases. But that does not mean that an increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide cannot cause an increase in temperatures now. After all, digging up billions of tons of fossil fuels and burning them is not something that has happened in the past. And we know it's not an increase in solar output causing the warming we've observed.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What makes him think that since the measurement method is unreliable for the last 20 years, it is reliable for the rest of the time period hundreds of years back? It throws his entire theory out of the window. He is doing specious reasoning by cherry picking the results that fit his theory better.
What we don't have is good, healthy debate.
If anything, that's the real black eye that the recent data swipe reveals. The emails between AGW scientists specifically mention bullying publications into not accepting/publishing papers that don't support AGW, and subsequently use the lack of published, peer-reviewed articles against those scientists whose conclusions differ from their own.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
>>Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
Yes, as we all know from Al Gore's memorable definition of what a "non-linear system" is: "It's a fancy way they have of saying that the changes are not all just gradual. Some of them come suddenly in big jumps."
I used to work doing modeling of both ocean seawater and other things (like heart cells or full cardiac cycles) which attempted to accurately simulate whatever ODE or whatever it was we were simulating. These models were incredibly sensitive to the various constants used, and what the starting assumptions were. They'd fly off into incoherent-land if these values were not very precise, or if the constants didn't match each other. The only way we could calibrate or test our simulation was by, say, pulling out a rabbit's heart, wiring it up, flooding it with some solution, and having the severed heart beat for us when driven by impulses at different frequencies and amplitude. Testing and experimentation is the only way to truly know something, as Feynman said. If we just relied on the models without doing followup experimentation with them, we'd have gotten wildly inaccurate results.
Climatology, on the other hand, is "science-y", but not really science. It wants to be science, it really does - and goes through the window dressings of having peer reviewed journals and conferences and all of that - but ultimately it is not science. There is no experimentation involved (or if you will, there is one large experiment running all the time), and there is no control for the experiment. Forgive me if I do not allow your models to substitute for actual experimentation, for the reasons listed above.
As one of my professors once said, never listen to anyone who claims to be really accurate over the sample data set. It's real easy to be accurate on a sample data set. Hell, you can always just spit back out the original numbers if you want - for my neural net spam filter, we could have just returned the classifications of each email and claimed 100% accuracy, for example. If you don't think that climate researchers actually make bullshit claims like this, check out the wikipedia page on global climate modeling, and look at, say, this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GCM_temp_anomalies_3_2000.jpg There's charts like that everywhere on wikipedia, showing how accurate the climate models are, even back in 1930, decades before the models were created.
What is important is the accuracy going forward into new data, and as they do, they've found numerous glaring problems with the predictive ability of climate models (such as rainfall changes being 25% of what is expected). (For some fun laughs, read predictions of what life would be like in 2010 written 10, 20 or 30 years ago.)
The simple fact of the matter is, I don't believe any (self-described) scientist who claims he knows how much temperature will move in the next 100 years, unless he says it will range somewhere between absolute zero and the temperature of the sun.
And if it sounds like I'm picking on climate "scientists", well, I am, but I had a number of friends who worked in the field at SIO, and they're generally smart and nice guys, and think there's a serious problem. Their problem lies in claiming more knowledge than they actually know. (Again, this is not how actual science works.) And it's not like other fields have looked enviously at the tremendous success of real scientific fields, like physics, over the last hundred years. Psychology, sociology, hell even scientology and philosophy have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves. (Nearly every modern philosopher since Wittgenstein calls themselves an analytic philosopher, which was a movement to directly make philosophy more "scientific" and less heads-in-the-cloudsy.)
In experimental science, this is not uncommon. Using different methods of analyzing the same subject is, in other words, using (relatively) independent methods to analyze that subject. Using multiple independent methods and combining their results is a good thing, because it avoids experimental error and potential systemic biases that exist in every observational setup.
That said, I don't want to get into an actual discussion about the actual paper in question because I have not read the relevant hacked personal e-mails with their full context and interpreted their significance (and I likely won't have time in the near future given the pressures of day to day life). I am not particularly inclined to start implying conclusions and accusations based off of an incomplete and shoddy reading of a few out-of-context paragraphs. I am neither willing to vouch for or defend, or attack a particular piece of research until I am reasonably well informed about how that research was conducted.
There seem to be many people, however, who are willing to do exactly that.
-Laxitive
Why do people use the term Global Warming. It is a misleading term that does not properly identify what is happening to our planet. The fact is that the atmosphere is variable and will continue to fluctuate in terms of average temperature.
:)
The real problem we are facing is rising sea TEMPERATURES. Here's just one technical article that studies the effects of rising sea temperatures on phytoplankton on Australia's coastline: http://www.int-res.com/articles/feature/m394p001.pdf If you search the http://www.int-res.com/ site you'll find a lot more really technical research articles that are great reads if you like this stuff
Rising sea temperatures mess up the sea currents and make fish search out better habitats (or die), perhaps because of the rising temperature itself, or maybe because their food supply is damaged (due to phytoplankton dieoff). If something doesn't change soon, we are in danger of losing vast populations in the ocean. This will have huge repercussions on our global food supply.
In the end, it doesn't matter if we are the ones causing it, or the sun is. Who cares. It is a complex system, and you can prove, through science, that carbon emissions directly affect sea temperatures. Maybe it's miniscule. Maybe it's not, but we have to do something or we are in severe danger of entirely losing our oceans.
Imagine if the seafood industry went belly up. It would cause a worldwide depression the likes of which we have not seen or dreamed of, especially for areas that depend heavily on the ocean for their nation's food supply.
AT THE VERY LEAST, if we are not going to reduce carbon emissions or whatever we can to reduce the effect on oceans, we need to have an actionable plan for what to do once the oceans die. Because it will happen if this trend continues. Having a plan doesn't mean it's going to be used, but we need to be able to continue functioning as a species if it does!
Though a bit uglier than usual, that type of behavior is fairly prevalent in the scientific community. Articles in "unpopular" topics have always tended to get sidelined (reviewers can reject papers simply on the premise that they're not on a topic a journal would wish to publish, for example), and it's easy to see how this can progress to choosing a side in a scientific debate.
Though a model more in-line with arXiv might mitigate this, I think it represents a fundamental flaw in the currently-used system of peer review: it's essentially a binary threshold. Either your paper is accepted and you have a voice in the scientific community, or it's rejected and you have none. Something along the lines of a Slashdot or Digg-style moderation may work much better: other researchers can mod you down all they wish and send it to the last page of a query, but they can't actually make your work disappear. And since the ranking is relative to other relevant papers, unpopular topics and positions would not be penalized relative to each other using such a system.
You could even generate confidence intervals for the rankings based on the number of reviews. Right now a decision on a paper is based on 2 or 3 reviews at most, and it would be difficult for a more open system not to exceed this.
It sounds like you are suggesting that global warming is a matter of opinion. Why would people on the left want there to be global warming? If there were any compelling arguments against global warming I would celebrate (you would probably call me a leftie -- I am European).
It is also interesting that in almost all of the world, this issue doesn't have the political dimension it seems to have in the USA. Parties are discussing how to deal with global warming. The right wing generally wants do to slightly less, the left and greens more. But they all agree that this is a reality we need to do something about.
Or it might be because it already hit the front page on Friday:
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/11/20/1747257
This isn't a case of correlating multiple measurement techniques that suggest the same thing. In fact, it was quite the opposite: the authors stitched together data that showed what they wanted it to show and threw out the rest.
Virtually everyone admits that temperatures have increased substantially over the last ~100 years. The entire point of these reconstructions is to demonstrate that this rise is unprecedented over the past ~2K years and follows a certain pattern. If the same methods on the same species of tree in the same area in the same study not only fail to accurately replicate the thermometer record over the last several decades but also actually diverge substantially, this calls into question the entire pursuit.
In other words, if your methodology suggests that it couldn't have been warmer from 0 BC to 1900 because tree rings were not statistically larger, but the rings actually fail to increase as predicted in recent history when we know it has warmed, then this strongly indicates that we also cannot rely on warmer past temperatures to be accurately reflected in increased tree ring size either. Of course you can speculate that pollution may be playing a role, but it is still just speculation and there are better documented conclusions one could draw from this, e.g., that tree rings do not correlate linearly with temperature, that changes in moisture content, sunshine, CO2, etc play an equally large role, etc.
Good non-politicized science should: pick a methodology; show how it correlates with the actual thermometer record; then document it clearly for better or worse over the entire course, i.e., actually show the divergence (and make the data and methods available for all for review). These so-called "scientists" actually went to the other extreme by trying to hide the divergence and present a view that was not supported by their actual research. Many of these same scientists have gone further still by refusing reasonable requests for the raw data and further information on their methods.
This is politicized "science" at its very worst.
Some emails were leaked on Friday from the climate research unit at the university of East Anglia. In about 150 megabytes of text, it turned out that in one of the emails, one of the researchers used the word 'trick' to describe some unspecified method of statistical analysis he had used on some dataset, and mentioned that it would 'hide the decline'. Everyone immediately saw that obviously this trick was dishonest and the decline in question was a real decline in temperatures, and it means that the entire field of climate science has been perpetrating a decades-long hoax on the world, and Al Gore should be tried for treason. Because you don't need any kind of context to know exactly what the word 'trick' refers to and what 'decline' is being hidden and why; your pre-existing political beliefs tell you all you should need to know.
That's why articles about climate change can expect to be tagged with such things for quite some time into the future.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Well, you can. Fossil fuel has (nearly) no C14, as C14 is generated in the atmosphere and decays quickly. Fossil fuel has very little C13, as biological processes in most plants prefer C12 to C13, and fossil fuels are created from previous animal (i.e. recycled plant) and plant matter. Yes, the total carbon flux is much bigger than the human contribution, but we can measure isotope ratios very precisely. This was predicted and measured quite a while before global warming became a significant concern, as it also puts C14 ages off if not corrected for. See Suess effect, named after the chemist who described this in the 1950s.
Stephan
Allow me to extensively quote John Cook (http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-do-the-hacked-CRU-emails-tell-us.html), as he is closer to the topic than I am.
What do the suggestive "tricks" and "hiding the decline" mean? Is this evidence of a nefarious climate conspiracy? "Mike's Nature trick" refers to the paper Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries (Mann 1998 http://www.elmhurst.edu/~richs/EC/FYS/Mannetal.OriginalPaper.pdf), published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann. The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.
The "decline" refers to the "divergence problem". This is where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed as early as 1998, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692171/pdf/43XA8LK6PCMVMH9H_353_65.pdf). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 ( http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/4/741/2008/cpd-4-741-2008.pdf ) which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature.
In the skeptic blogosphere, there is a disproportionate preoccupation with one small aspect of climate science - proxy record reconstructions of past climate (or even worse, ad hominem attacks on the scientists who perform these proxy reconstructions). This serves to distract from the physical realities currently being observed. Humans are raising CO2 levels ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm ). We're observing an enhanced greenhouse effect ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm ). The planet is still accumulating heat ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm ). What are the consequences of our climate's energy imbalance? Sea levels rise is accelerating ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/sea-level-rise.htm ). Greenland ice loss is accelerating ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-cooling-gaining-ice.htm ). Arctic ice loss is accelerating ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/Arctic-sea-ice-melt-natural-or-man-made.htm ). Globally, glacier ice loss is accelerating ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/himalayan-glaciers-growing.htm ). Antarctic ice loss is accelerating ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm ).
When you read through the many global warming skeptic arguments ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php ), a pattern emerges. Each skeptic argument misleads by focusing on one small piece of the puzzle while ignoring the broader picture. To focus on a few suggestive emails while ignoring the wealth of empirical evidence for
And no greedy people in the fossil fuel industry? There's boatloads more money there, so that's where any thinking greedy person would go.
And almost everyone who says "but it's been hotter before" miss this crucial point. Thank you.
The one I find convincing is the melting of the ice. It's a crude kind of measure, lacking in detail, but any explanation that doesn't account for that is obviously unacceptable.
The North-West passage is currently open to ice-breakers, and it is projected to be open to normal passenger liners soon. This doesn't give me many data points, but the ones it give are irrefutable.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's a lot more than that. You can see people conspiring to delete data which might impugn their conclusion, and they're trying to do it before they can be hit by a freedom of information request. Criminal conspiracy to hide publicly-funded data by destroying it, hmmmm? Prosecutors in the UK should definitely be hitting these folks with an order not to destroy any data nor to delete any emails, and then they should be seeking a copy of the emails directly from the site.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
If an African nation is permitted emission levels of ~zero (because they aren't emitting anything right now) while a Western nation is permitted to emit say 20% less than what they emitted in 1990, which one will win in the global economy? If the rich Western countries can't afford to use green technology, how can a poor African nation afford them?
Africa doesn't get to industrialize while polluting like mad bastards would be much better. Ditto for China.
China isn't polluting, compared to Europe or USA. Its per capita emissions are 1/4 of those of the US. When the US has cut its emissions in half it can start talks with the rest of the world.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Those who bear false witness and say the mean world temperature is not rising have one more fact that they seem unable to explain to account for:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/22/east-antarctic-ice-sheet-nasa
If is not getting warmer, why is ice melting everywhere at accelerated rates and bringing local temperatures in various places temporarily down with it?
How come the world temprature has dropped half a degree since 2000?
It hasn't.
It is highly questionable whether this "pause" is even real. It does show up to some extent (no cooling, but reduced 10-year warming trend) in the Hadley Center data, but it does not show in the GISS data, see Figure 1. There, the past ten 10-year trends (i.e. 1990-1999, 1991-2000 and so on) have all been between 0.17 and 0.34 C per decade, close to or above the expected anthropogenic trend, with the most recent one (1999-2008) equal to 0.19 C per decade - just as predicted by IPCC as response to anthropogenic forcing.*
According to the GISS data (which takes the polar temperatures into consideration) the decadal trend over 1998-2009 is +0.19C! In light of the fact that the largest increases in temperatures have been observed at the poles, can you understand how a methodology which ignores polar temperatures might not give an accurate global picture of warming?
More importantly do you understand why your question, were it even true, is largely meaningless? If you don't yet understand that comparing the temperatures over a very few of the hottest decades on record (the 1990s and 2000s) has no significant bearing over a record stretching back a century and a half, I suggest you compare the last two decades to the 1890s and 1900s.
And how are world leaders likely to respond if the temperature drops during the 2010s?
Sadly the science tells us that is extrememly unlikely happen. But even if it did, world leaders should respond by accepting the advice of those who understand the statistical significance of any observed falls in trends as against the entire instrumental record. Perhaps you should work at gaining some such understanding yourself?
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
This is not experimental science. Experimental science involves performing an *experiment* with varying initial parameters, measuring the results and then arriving at a correlation.
In this specific case, we are talking about measuring tree rings in Yamal - this is purely an *observational* science as the scientist isn't actually performing any experiment but just documenting observed trends.
When you are observing trends, it is disingenuous, to include readings from a completely different set of subjects in a study which does not reference them so that the results tie into a specified hypothesis.
This is deliberate mangling of data to serve an agenda. Let us not grace this by calling it a science - and especially not an experimental science