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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."
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.
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.
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