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Study Links Pacific Coastal Warming To Changing Winds
tranquilidad writes: In a paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two authors ascribe the majority of northeast pacific coastal warming to natural atmospheric circulation and not to anthropogenic forcing. In AP's reporting, Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist with the Carnegie Institution for Science, says the paper's authors, "...have not established the causes of these atmospheric pressure variations. Thus, claims that the observed temperature increases are due primarily to 'natural' processes are suspect and premature, at best." The paper's authors, on the other hand, state, "...clearly, there are other factors stronger than the greenhouse forcing that is affecting...temperatures," and that there is a "surprising degree to which the winds can explain all the wiggles in the temperature curve."
If you don't think excess greenhouse gasses, (CO2, tc) are cause an increase in trapped energy, then you are an idiot. This is proven science.
anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) is a fact.
In fact, it's so simply even you could devise a test.
1) Visible light strikes the earth Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes
2) Visible light has nothing for CO2 to absorb, so it pass right on through. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes
3) When visible light strike an object, IR is generated. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes
4) Green house gasses, such as CO2, absorb energy(heat) from IR. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes
5) Humans produce more CO2(and other green house gasses) then can be absorbed through the cycle. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes
Each one of those has been tested, a lot. You notice deniers don't actual address the facts of AGW? Don't have a test that shows those facts to be false?
So now you have to answer:
Why do you think trapping more energy(heat) in the lower atmosphere does not impact the climate?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The winds are just moving the heat around a bit.
"Moving heat around a bit" has a tremendous impact on global climate. This is why ENSO in the south Pacific is so important: by moving heat around it changes global circulation patterns, which changes the overall energy balance of the Earth. This is why the simple achievement of getting reasonable agreement that anthropogenic CO2 is adding about 1.6 W/m^2 to the Earth's heat budget is such a huge scientific achievement, and while that conclusion is still subject to significant uncertainty: because adding heat changes the winds and currents which themselves influence the radiative balance. There are even (very unlikely) models in which adding sufficient heat causes global cooling due to increased transport of energy to the poles, where it radiates back into space more efficiently.
Climate is a non-linear, strongly coupled system. Treating it as if one could draw simple conclusions dismisses the complexity and difficulty of climate modelling. It also results in underestimating the uncertainties in models.
Any competent computational physicist (me, for example, but other people a lot smarter than me as well: http://online.wsj.com/articles...) will tell you that climate models are far less certain than their public, political proponents are claiming. This does not mean that "global warming is a hoax" or any such Denialist gibberish. It means that models are uncertain, and we should not get bowled over when they are subject to correction, even significant correction.
In the meantime, we can do some pretty universally agreeable things, like shift income and corporate taxes toward carbon taxes. After all, income and corporate taxes apply to something that is basically good--making butt-loads of money--while carbon taxes apply to something basically bad: burning irreplaceable fossil fuels and dumping garbage into the atmosphere. I guess anti-capitalist crusaders might oppose carbon taxes, but I can't think of any other reason to do so. If anyone is really in favour of keeping income and corporate taxes high, do feel free to make your case, though.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"The greenhouse effect is demonstrable in a test tube, therefore it is the primary factor directly controlling the temperature of Earth."
I think the line is more, from our knowledge of optics, discovered using experiments in labs, we know the optical properties of CO2. We would expect that increasing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would therefore increase the global mean surface temperature.
Observations confirm this.
The proportion that the global mean surface temperature change is attributable to AGW is known from a very wide range of evidence.
We know from first principles that the greenhouse effect will cause warming, and we can compare that to the other things that change the radiative forcing on the surface of the planet and find that the greenhouse effect is the largest one.
We observe the effect of changing radiative forcing from volcanoes, and calibrate out understanding of how much changes in radiative forcing affect temperature.
We look at the distribution of the warming in time and space: We see a warming that is occurring mostly in winter and at night, showing the current warming to be a slowing of heat loss to space, not an increase in solar energy in. We can reach the same conclusion by observing the cooling of the stratosphere. We see greatly enhanced warming at the poles, and see the predicted feedbacks to greenhouse warming.
Climate models, too are an important tool for understanding and attribution of climate change, and these also provide evidence that the current warming is anthropogenic.
And even if you don't believe any physics whatsoever, and just throw all the observables into a neural net and get it to try to reproduce the global mean surface temperature by any functions of those variables, you still get that the current warming is primarily due to enhanced greenhouse effect.
Real scientists don't make such simplistic and unjustified steps in their logic.
Agreed. And they don't. Why are you making the simplistic and unjustified step of claiming that they do?
Except for the prediction part, which is pretty bad.
Stott el al, back in 2000 performed a high profile attribution study using models. I remember the paper, because its the one in which I realized that AGW was a real thing that needed responding to.
You'll notice from figure 1, that they let one of the models run on into the future. The warming trend has been bang on the nose, and there is even a couple of decades of hiatus in that model's run. (Starting a bit later than the observed one, and ending about 2020, but demonstrating that events such as the current one are reproduced by models of even that time. (Being an early paper from HadCM3).
Do you have an example of a paper that demonstrates this poor prediction from climate science?