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BEST Study Finds Temperature Changes Explained by GHG Emissions and Volcanoes
riverat1 writes "The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature studies latest release finds that land surface temperature changes since 1750 are nearly completely explained by increases in greenhouse gases and large volcanic eruptions. They also said that including solar forcing did not significantly improve the fit. Unlike the other major temperature records BEST used nearly all available temperature records instead of just a representative sample. Yet to come is an analysis that includes ocean temperatures."
The summary makes it sound like volcanoes are the explanation for greenhouse gases, which is completely false. It doesn't say that at all. Actually, it's the opposite.
RTFA and you learn (as quoted from the .PDF supplied by the article): "According to a new Berkely Earth study released today, the average temperature of Earth's land has risen by 1.5 C over the past 250 years. The good match between the new temperature record and historical carbon dioxide records suggests that the most straightforward explanation for this warming is human greenhouse gas emissions." (Emphasis mine.)
The .PDF article explains that human CO2 contribution, volcanic activity, and ocean activity (e.g. Gulf Stream and El Nino) are the biggest contributors that are needed to match the graph of temperatures over time. But volcanoes follow the drops in temperature on the graph, not the rises in temperature. Contributions from solar activity exist but were determined to be negligible. They explain that CO2 doesn't prove to be responsible for the warming, but is by far the best contender. As stated by the scientific director, "To be considered seriously, any alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as does carbon dioxide." So denialists can't simply supply "common sense" alternatives: the alternatives must match the data at least as well (or better) than CO2.
The article shows a correlation between volcanoes and dips in climate. Also they attribute all climate rise to mostly CO2 and say that solar/urbanization/etc has not caused noticeable climate change. They attribute CO2 increase to both humans and volcanoes.
See correlation here: http://berkeleyearth.org/volcanoes/ The theory is that the recent (1956+) rise is mostly AGW.
If we just plug up the volcanos, everything will be fine!
Humans emit 100 times more CO2 than volcanoes. The ash clouds of volcanoes typically cause a temporary cooling.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
1. Temperarature rise for the last 250 years of 1.5 degree C is entirely because of increased CO2 emissions.
2. Vulcanic activity can seriously lower the earths temperature and affects the curve with downward spikes.
No other activity shows any significant colleration towards earth temperature. They have checked against solar flares and other activites and all they compared against has had no impact. CO2 rise looks to be the major cause behind it all.
Basically they are saying: Critics of AGW are wrong.
The data will be fully available on their webplacce form 30 july with abilities for visitors to test the data themselves and to toy with how the temperature rise has affected their local temperature.
Just saying it like it are.
Isnt this the group that was funded by the Koch brothers and hand picked with denialist?
Muller was rather more of a skeptic than a denialist.
I'm not aware of David and Charle's Koch specific opinions on the BEST results, but in the denialist blogosphere, Muller and BEST went from white knights to treacherous scum overnight. Compare Anthony Watt's comments before the announcements:
I have no certainty nor expectations in the results. Like them, I have no idea whether it will show more warming, about the same, no change, or cooling in the land surface temperature record they are analyzing ... I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results.
and after:
And still, he hasn’t published anything and his papers have not passed peer review, but the political apparatchik wants to showcase the incomplete and rushed, non quality controlled, error riddled BEST science as if it were factual enough to kill off “denialism” worldwide. That’s political desperation in my opinion.
The Berkeley Earth team is making these preliminary results public, together with the analysis programs and data set in order to invite additional scrutiny as part of the peer review process.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The point of this was that it wouldn't use complex models where they tweak to fit expectations. Instead it plots atmospheric CO2 against global temperature, specifically accounting for denier favorites like urban heat islands, volcanoes, poor station condition, data selection bias, and transparency. All the data is available at the site so anyone can run the numbers themselves. According to them, and by the looks of their graphs, it's a shockingly close match.
The conclusion is that the temperature rise is from human greenhouse emissions. As always, everyone is free to try to come up with more convincing evidence to the contrary.
Come on -- predict, and cast in concrete, the average tropospheric temperature from 2013 to 2018, with a low margin of error, and "lock it in".
The problem with that is that climate scientists don't even try to predict temperatures on such a short time scale since natural variability can completely override any long term climate signal over less than around 20 years.
It's all about the sulfur. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-do-volcanoes-affect-w&page=2
Ok, maybe not all.. there's those large parasols women were using in the 1880's that did a little.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
And human industry also emits significantly more SO2 than volcanoes; you don't get a Pinatubo every decade, and China alone emits two Pinatubos of SO2 annually.
Uh-huh, big whoop. We've had heaps of models that fit the historical data - that's the easy part. It's all there, you can tweak your model as you like until it fits the historicals just right. The value of a model isn't in how well it fits the historical data, but how well it predicts future data.
So crank a prediction or two out of this puppy and get back to us in a decade.
They don't have to wait for a decade, they can just crop out the last decade of data and ask the model minus 10 years of data to predict it. Since they already have the answer, they'll know if it fits.
The is routinely done with large timescale models like the atmosphere and the ocean.
Seriously, this study is saying exactly the opposite - the sun has no effect, it's all CO2, and that CO2 comes from human activity and volcanic activity.
It does, but there's still a huge problem with natural gas. The reason it hasn't passed yet, is the expansion of what was previously called unconventional gas - natural gas extracted by fracking. While the groundwater issues related to fracking has gained much attention, and are serious enough, what's worse in the long run is that a lot of the gas from such operations escapes directly into the atmosphere. Since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and fracking is itself energy-intensive (we spend a lot of natural gas to get at a little more natural gas), some studies have estimated it as on level with coal for the climate.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
We already do something like this: IPCC projections. We do investigate previous projections to see how they worked / what they got wrong. Its a large part of what we do as scientists.
And you can do it too: the early models are still available (eg I think the EdGCM model is based on the early GISS model); these days you can run what used to take a supercomputer on your PC and repeat the runs.
But as climate scientists we're not in the business of playing "I told you so" with denialists. The 64 billion dollar question is : what will happen? we need to adapt and react to climate change, and knowing exactly whats happening is important: shrinking the error bars on those model runs translates to billions of dolllars of taxpayers money that needs / doesn't need to be spent : e.g. knowing the lengths of droughts, how much water needs to be stored. the scale of sea level rise, etc. This is why the climate models are important.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
Exactly. Look at global temperature for the last 250 years plotted with CO2+volcanos and a simple fit:
http://berkeleyearth.org/images/annual-with-forcing-small.png
There's almost no modelling there, it's just plotting two sets of measurements together.
If you think CO2 is not the cause, you need to find two things: another warming effect that fits the data at least as well as CO2 (and it has to be a huge warming effect that no one's noticed before), plus an equally large cooling effect to cancel out all the heat that we know the CO2 will have added to the atmosphere. This is possible, of course, but not very likely.
Please cite a source on this. I would love to see if this is truly fact. My own research into the matter suggests not, but I am willing to be wrong. Where are you getting the figure "100 times more"? It is quite interesting that your number works out so exactly to 100.
P.S. @Moderators - "Informative". Really?
If you were any more obtuse, I'd be able to use you as a decent approximation for pi.
https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=human+production+co2+volcano&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest
First 5 links all agree with a number on the order of 100 time greater, I stopped bothering to look after that.
the sun has no effect
Ever wonder why it's so hot in Australia right now? Not only is it summer there, but Earth's orbit is at perihelion, closest to the sun on January 3. In 20,000 years or so, the northern hemisphere will be summer at perihelion. That's why the south pole is colder than the north pole; it's farther away from the sun in winter than the north pole is in its winter.
There are other cycles, such as the wobble of the Earth's axis.
Of course, there is the 100,000 year problem and other problems. "Various explanations for this discrepancy have been proposed, including frequency modulation[12] or various feedbacks (from carbon dioxide, cosmic rays, or from ice sheet dynamics)."
The carbon feedback is what we're seeing now; the sun's affects only change on huge, slow time scales (except the seasons and axis wobble, of course).
Everything I know about it is from wikipedia; I'm no expert. You should read the wiki articles, they're very informative.
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I think you missed the point. The Koch brothers are typically anti-AGW in their funding. So this study that was in part funded by people who disagree with its conclusion should in fact be biased "the other way." Yet it is not. It could be that facts are difficult to find a bias in...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin