Well, my general point is that this cycle has been going on for quite some time. I have a hard time seeing how these ongoing cycles are going to change. They believe that these CO2 cycles are only interrupted by ice ages, correct?
The natural glacial-interglacial CO2 cycles are coupled to orbital variations, so that part of the cycle will keep going. However, we are currently greatly over-riding the natural CO2 cycle with our excess fossil fuel emissions. The natural glacial-to-interglacial transition is about 100 ppm, and we've already added another 100 ppm on top of that. Another 1000 ppm is quite possible without conscious effort to reduce fossil fuel emissions. Whether that will disrupt the long-term glacial cycle remains to be seen (but see here and Archer's new book The Long Thaw for a sobering discussion). However, it will most definitely disrupt natural CO2 fluctuations over the next few centuries.
We probably can't stop polar melting, but we can stop glacial advance if we had the motivation.
We probably can't stop polar melting, but we can slow and reduce it by quite a bit. This is especially important to avoid crossing the threshold for runaway melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which will add a lot more sea level rise and boreal warming.
If you're concerned about glacial advance, you should want to save our fossil fuels for later when we need them, instead of using them all up now when we don't.
If sea levels really are going to rise any significant amount, engineering projects could keep cities safe, and the waters at bay.
Up to a point, we could do it, but it would be very expensive considering the number of people and value of properties which are currently near the coast. With a potential multi-meter sea rise, you'd probably have to abandon a lot of the planet's current shoreline.
There are, of course, many other serious impacts of climate change besides sea level rise.
Also, if we completely stop using fossil fuels, this cycle will continue, because it is fueled by various factors including astrological forces and gas release from the planet.
That's true, but not really the point.
They have a lot of benefits nobody is talking about like being able to produce hydrogen fuels from non-fossil origins, and fresh water for agriculture. These benefits are a lot greater than the benefits I can see from renewables.
Any power source can do that (hydrogen separation, desalination, etc.), not just nuclear, unless you're referring to processes I haven't heard of.
You are absolutely right about the current rate for plant production. We're limited by the quantity of casing that Japan Steel can produce (currently enough for 4 plants per year). However, we can start producing them here in the US again if a government corporation would take over surplus steel production. Additionally various types of 4th gen plants can be manufactured in our auto-plants (if retooled).
I can't see us realistically producing power plants at the rate I described, especially given their costs and side effects, and the political climate. But a WWII-level effort might do it.
If fusion was properly funded the past 30 years as it should have been, I'm confident we'd have a commercially viable reactor by now.
I highly doubt that. In fact, I don't know if commercial fusion will ever be commercially viable.
About the costs: I thought nuclear was the 2nd cheapest power source next to natural gas for plant construction... how is solar cheaper?
New nuclear plants are actually rather expensive, and as you note, that's not even counting the fact that they're heavily subsidized. Take away the subsidies and they do even worse b
You ask the average Joe on the street about the whole thing and all they can tell you is CO2.
If they're talking about climate over the next century, then to first order, they'd be right: it's by far the largest sustained forcing.
And, unless you happened to miss Al Gore's (a politician I might remind you) propaganda piece which explicitly tried to highlight the CO2/temperature connection. He purposely put the graphs on different axes so people would infer CO2 lead temperature. If you see the two on the same graph, it's clear CO2 follows, not leads.
There's nothing wrong with putting them on separate axes. Many scientists plot separate quantities on separate axes. And Gore was correct to highlight the CO2-temperature link in the glacial-interglacial cycle, because CO2 does cause important glacial-interglacial temperature changes. Furthermore, the lag-lead story isn't as obvious as you claim, because you can clearly see deglaciations where CO2 leads; it's mostly the glaciations where it lags.
Really? I would agree with you on the orbital variation. That's a known quantity. But, what are the predictions for solar and cloud variation? What are the predictions for volcanic events that are known to cool global temperatures as much as a degree in a single year? We just don't know those things.
We can't predict them very well from physical first principles, but if they stay within historic bounds, they're not going to change the long term picture much. For example, even if the Sun dropped into a new Maunder Minimum, it might delay the overall warming by a few decades, but CO2 is still going to win out. And volcanic events have little long term influence on surface temperatures; they only show up for a few years, although the ocean imprint lasts longer.
It's not that hard to nail down human emissions. It's somewhat uncertain where human emissions eventually end up; we know the main players, but not the exact partitioning.
If we're uncertain about where they end up, how can we use those for modeling?
We know how much of them leave the atmosphere, so that's what's used in modeling. We also know within about 30% how much ends in each sink each year. Uncertainty in the partitioning does lead to uncertainty in how future carbon sinks might change. But that's a second-order effect compared to the amount of CO2 emissions themselves, which has already outstripped natural sinks and will do so by even more in the future.
I've heard some argue that the specific isotopes released by man have a different effect than the "natural" isotopes. If both that idea and your assertion are both true, I would expect some serious flaws in the models.
They don't have different effects as far as the greenhouse effect is concerned. They do have some effect as far as biological fractionation is concerned (i.e., how much of each isotope is taken up by biological organisms such as plants), but that's really small (like parts per thousand differences).
We may not push CO2 levels higher than what has been naturally observed, but that's not the point. Even climate changes as large as what has been naturally observed are a big deal, and we probably don't want to reproduce those changes (especially at a high rate).
The quantity nor the rate is statistically different from what has been observed.
That's a red herring. Yes, the climate has been warm before. No, we don't necessarily want to return to a Cretaceous climate within a few centuries. And the rate is extremely high compared to past variations. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum had similar rates, and was associated with mass extinctions. There are restarts of the thermohaline circulation which also had fast rates, especially regionally, but they were all coming out of a glacial climate into an interglacial, not adding more warming on top of an e
I don't really disagree with anything in your latest link (to UMich). But you should note that the paleoclimate data discussed there are still consistent with modern estimates of the climate sensitivity of CO2. The science does not support your position of a weak CO2 influence on climate; paleo and instrumental data as well as physical theory and modeling all agree on a climate sensitivity of 2-5 C (3 C is what's usually used in projections, so it could be about 50% larger or smaller than that).
I agree that we ought to be using oil only for petrochem manufacturing instead of just wasting it in combustion. However, it will take some time to make that transition.
Nuclear energy has its advantages, but it's not nearly a solution to climate change. At best, it's one component. To make a large dent in fossil fuel emissions in the first half of this century would require an infeasibly large rate of construction (like, one plant per week for decades). Eventually we can get there, but it would take long enough that large CO2 increases will still occur along with the resulting significant climate change. Also, it should be noted that breeder nuclear is still not truly renewable. Furthermore, it's more expensive than many renewables like solar. Finally, while I am pro-nuclear, it should still be acknowledged that there are serious unresolved issues with very large scale waste storage and, worse, nuclear proliferation. The latter is particularly important if we want developing countries to use non-fossil power sources, considering that many of them are not necessarily allies. Nuclear power providers haven't been even able to agree on a common, verified set of engineering standards and practices, which is one reason why the U.S. AEC under the Bush administration didn't end up giving out any new construction permits, despite desperately wanting to.
Fusion energy is not even on the table as anything useful this century. It takes a long time for new power sources to become widely deployed, particularly since new power plants don't replace existing plants until the latter are retired (50+ years). That means the sources relevant to this century need to start being deployed now or in the early decades of this century. Fusion may not even be prototype-ready in the first (or second!) half of this century, let alone deployed, let alone widely deployed.
I disagree that a shift to renewable energy is going to "doom humanity". It's not going to produce all our energy needs, but we can make a major shift towards it, coupled with energy efficiency initiatives.
Those are great references and support my argument that CO2 has an effect, but is certainly not THE cause.
Scientists do not claim that CO2 is "the" only cause of climate change. And please, spare me "but the media/political circus does". Even they don't claim that CO2 is the only thing ever to have affected climate.
Orbital, solar and cloud variation are much more impactful than CO2.
Not over the next few centuries, which is the whole point.
The natural CO2 cycle has quite a bit of interannual variability. That's why it's hard to nail down what the human factors are.
It's not that hard to nail down human emissions. It's somewhat uncertain where human emissions eventually end up; we know the main players, but not the exact partitioning.
And, given that the CO2 levels have been MUCH higher on the order of 1000's of percents prior to the existence of humans on the planet, it's hard to say that we are going to push things beyond what has been NATURALLY observed on Earth.
We may not push CO2 levels higher than what has been naturally observed, but that's not the point. Even climate changes as large as what has been naturally observed are a big deal, and we probably don't want to reproduce those changes (especially at a high rate).
Sure, there are plenty of hypothesi about the different types of carbon isotopes, but there are plenty of natural ways for those same isotopes to be released.
No, there isn't. That's the whole point. Between the C12/C13 ratios and C12/C14 ratios, you can eliminate the natural sources like biomass, dissolved carbon in the oceans, etc.
The only thing we are doing to release them is to burn things. That happens naturally all the time.
Burning biomass has a different isotopic signature than burning fossil fuels, unless the biomass is extremely old (like fossil biomass is). There is very little ancient biomass being burned other than fossil fuel, and we know where it is.
Nobody argues that? Oh, you said "seriously". That's not a scientific term.
Ok, let me be more blunt: anybody who argues that has been scientifically disproven.
It comes right down to modeling.
No, it doesn't. It's straight DATA. Models just happen to confirm it, which is no surprise given the amount of independent data which all indicate the same thing.
The best record for atmospheric CO2 is ice cores, but those don't go back very far. There are geologic records that can go back further, but there are plenty of questions about there accuracy vs ice cores.
That's true, but is irrelevant to the point that current CO2 increases are due almost entirely to humans.
Urban heat centers wouldn't explain all of the "global" warming. However, if you take a look at where the temperature data is being gathered, you will find that a significant majority of the data comes from measurements made in areas that have experienced development over time. If you start with a thermometer in the forest and then cut down the forest and build a city around it, then you're data from that same station is going to show that the average temperature is increasing.
Rural stations also show the trend. So do satellites, which have a global view. So do ocean temperature measurements; if it was just an artifact of urban measurements, the oceans wouldn't be warming. So does Arctic ice melt, glacier melt, biome shifts, and so on. The warming is real.
The models are based on the data and the data isn't there to model accurately enough to make predictions.
The data is there accurately enough to make useful predictions. Those predictions have wide error bars, but we can rule out many outcomes (like less than 1 C warming this century)
Says, pretty much everything ever published on the subject. Says the satellite record (both of them). Says the ocean temperature record. Says all the indirect effects of warming (ice melt, biome shifts, etc.)
You've got to have some pretty enormous cognitive blinders on to think that the warming is just a data artifact from the surface stations.
Someone who thinks that UHI is about cities shouldn't be discussing this.
The UHI is about cities; that's what the "U" stands for, after all. Cities are where you get most of the siting issues. But the previous poster wasn't even talking about site bias; he/she seemed to be claiming that the warming is real, but is due to the albedo effect of urban development and other land use changes.
Heres a thought.. go to surfacestations.org
Been there, done that. They sure got quiet when they found out that the well-sited stations produced pretty much the same temperature trends as the (gasp) adjusted data.
We got no fucking idea the effects of UHI, of CO2, or even the amount of warming (if any.) We still have no clue as to the significant effects of clouds (which still cannot be modeled), cosmic rays, solar variance, sunspots, the magnetosphere, and so on..
We certainly do, but you appear to be immune to evidence.
All the while we are being sold a plan by the IPCC to heavily regulate industry,
The IPCC doesn't have any policy plans. They report on other people's policy plans.
when there are other alternatives that they havent even fucking bothered to look into, such as geoengineering.
Plenty of people are looking into geoengineering. Right now it doesn't look like a very safe alternative, but it's a hot research area.
it takes a group of highly skeptical volunteers to actualy figure out that almost the entire thing is bullshit...
They didn't "figure out" any such thing. If anything, they falsified their own hypothesis (that siting issues severely contaminate the surface record).
and STILL nobody is doing anything about it.
NOAA is putting together the CRN if, for some reason, you're still worried about the surface record.
Beck (2007) Figure 5: First Reconstruction of Trends in CO2 Atmospheric concentration based on actual measurement
I was right. You are a crackpot. Even a halfway intelligent skeptic knows better than to cite Beck or Jaworowski. You don't see, say, Steve McIntyre embarrassing himself like that.
Let me clue you in: Beck's whole "reconstruction" is based on hopelessly flawed and unrepresentative flask samples from a period before anybody learned how to do a controlled experiment. First, those measurements are based on surface fluxes. There are HUGE spatial and temporal variations in surface fluxes based on proximity to e.g. urban sources, vegetative sinks, and atmospheric turbulence in the boundary layer. Furthermore, early practitioners had almost no quality control in place to ensure against sample contamination. There's a reason why Keeling is famous in this area: he spent the 1950s through 1970s carefully demonstrating how flawed previous methods of measurement are. Beck's graph shows ridiculously huge fluctuations in global CO2 which, if they actually existed, would represent physically impossible changes in terrestrial and ocean sinks: the global biosphere and ocean mixed layer literally cannot exchange CO2 that quickly. You'd have to do something like burn down half the planetary biomass in a decade or two.
I wonder why you think that a graph by a random schoolteacher untrained and unpublished in the scientific literature overturns all other work in the field. (P.S. "Energy and Environment" is not a scientific journal, it's a vanity journal and dumping ground for crackpots.) I mean come on, have a little less credulity here. You're supposed to be a "skeptic", right? Then why do you uncritically accept any heterodox claim, no matter how absurd? Simply because you like to feel they're "sticking it to the man"? Or they agree with your political philosophy?
I did not read your article. If you will copy and paste the relevant part or present it for me in a free manner, I will be happy to review it.
That would violate copyright. You can try going to a university library. They will surely have it; Science is one of the top two scientific journals in the world, and pretty much every university subscribes to it.
As you cited an article saying that we are going to experience a longer interglacial (you know, the one I can't even read the abstract on), I'm going to shoot you one that says the opposite.
And, once again, you fail to cite anything from the scientific literature. You do realize the difference between a peer reviewed scientific publication a top scientific journal and a random web essay, don't you? I also note that your article is almost 10 years older than the work which re-evaluated the Milankovitch cycles and found that they favor a long interglacial.
It appears that you get your entire knowledge of climate science from skeptic web sites. Hell, the ice age article you cite is from an all-around crackpot site attacking quantum theory, relativity, biology, etc. Imagine my surprise.
The Beer-Lambert law has not been repealed, but it also explicitly ignores the very phenomenon we are discussing.
Adding the emissions factor (see my earlier reply) does not change the underlying issue: more CO2 will NOT increase the absorption by CO2.
This is wrong. Certainly the atmosphere re-radiates IR, but it also radiates in wavelengths which can be absorbed by other CO2 molecules, when its temperature is similar to the absorption band of CO2. This occurs in the lower layers of the atmosphere.
Sure there are...but exploiting and using those reserves will also take centuries.
No. We're already exploiting coal and can easily ramp up global production.
It's highly unlikely that you will ever jump in the driver's seat of your coal-burning buggy to drive on down to the pub.
Coal is used for ELECTRICITY, in case you didn't notice. (It can also be converted to liquid form for transportation, but this requires energy. If coal liquifaction is economical relative to electric vehicles, you'll continue to see internal combustion; otherwise, you'll get a fleet of coal-driven electric vehicles.) And, in case you didn't notice, lots of people use electricity, and lots more want to.
Transportation is the biggest use of FOSSIL FUELS
Electricity generation represents about half of fossil fuel emissions in the U.S., and it's even larger in many developing countries where the demand for a universal electricity grid outweighs the demand for more automobiles.
Future Electric cars are likely to be fueled with electricity produced from renewable sources, natural gas, and nuclear power rather than coal.
Not likely without strong economic incentives to reduce fossil fuel use. Over the lifecycle of a power plant, coal is WAY cheaper than most of the alternatives, including all renewables and nuclear power, and that's going to remain true for the foreseeable future barring explicit economic disincentives for fossil fuel use. There's a reason why China is going all-out building coal plants.
That may change with sufficiently numerous and large breakthroughs in alternative energy, but it's not going to change quickly. Nothing is even in research phase now that can beat coal in cost-effectiveness, let alone developed, let alone widely installable over the next few decades. (Remember too that it's not cost effective to simply replace existing coal plants; you want them to live out their natural lifetime, which can be 50+ years. So whatever coal plants you're building while waiting for your technological silver bullet are going to hang around for quite some time.)
Coal will continue to be used but will not cause any massive runup in atmosperic CO2 that you allude to with your 900ppm by 2100 nonsense.
You're even more out of touch with economic/energy use projections than you are with climate projections. It is not at all hard to exceed 560 ppm this century. Most projections predict that. The fossil fuel emission problem isn't just going to "solve itself" anytime soon. I'm not saying that 560 ppm is impossible or even unlikely, just that it will probably require some additional mitigation effort to limit ourselves to 2xCO2.
We don't need OCO to attribute warming to humans. OCO would have improved our understanding of and ability to predict the terrestrial and ocean carbon sinks. This is important to determine how severe global warming may become in the future (since it modifies the amount of CO2 which remains in the atmosphere). Still, to first order the fact remains that regardless of changes in sinks, we still ought to be doing more mitigation than we are.
The CO2 causing warming myth is nothing but media and political hype...
Given your statements below, I don't think your knowledge of this subject warrants such bold assertions.
Looking at the data, it's clear to see that CO2 increase follows, not leads, an increase in temperature.
In the glacial-interglacial cycle, this is true, but it's also not a surprise; it's a prediction of Milankovitch theory, which existed before any lags or leads were ever measured in the data. It also does not imply that CO2 has no effect on temperature.
If there is causation (thus far only some correlation has been established), then the rise in CO2 is caused by the increase in temperature, not the other way around.
It's both. According to the Milankovitch theory, orbital variations cause shifts in temperature. These temperature shifts cause changes in the carbon cycle, which alters CO2 levels. The altered CO2 levels in turn amplify the original orbital temperature change.
If you leave the CO2 feedback part of that process out, then you can't explain the amplitude of the glacial-interglacial cycles anymore, and it's unclear whether you can even, say, trigger a glaciation without the contribution of CO2 drawdown.
For those that support the CO2 driving the increase, I've yet to see how the climate models explain how the temperature 450 million years ago was colder than it has ever been in the last half billion years, but the CO2 levels were 10 times what we have today.
And for those arguing that human activity is driving the increase, why does the rate of increase vary so greatly (particularly looking at the significant decrease in rate during 1991-1993) despite the consistent growth of human CO2 producing activities.
Human emissions don't vary smoothly, nor does the terrestrial carbon sink, which has quite a bit of interannual variability due to climatic effects on, e.g., photosynthesis and heterotrophic respiration. Just as a guess, I'd look first at the collapse of the Soviet Union (assuming there is a significant slowdown during those years, which I haven't checked).
As for human activity driving the observed increase, that's been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Nobody seriously argues that part of the story anymore; there are about six independent lines of evidence, including historic emissions data, measurements of cumulative ocean carbon and air-sea CO2 fluxes, measurements of terrestrial CO2 fluxes, modeling of said fluxes, shifts in carbon isotope ratios in air and sea, and changes in the CO2/O2 ratio of the atmosphere.
However, it seems that deforestation along with ever expanding cities with concrete and asphalt that absorb and radiate heat make an even better explanation than CO2,
Urban heat islands don't explain the warming. CIties are a small fraction of the Earth's surface and the amount of heat they radiate, even if you take into account subsidiary albedo changes, isn't big enough to account for the warming. Land use change is a good idea in principle (e.g., due to surface albedo changes, alterations in evapotranspiration, etc.), because it's more widespread. But it still falls well short in magnitude: in some locations it has a substantial effect on local temperatures, but simply doesn't explain the global amount or spatial distribution of surface warming.
OCO and GOSAT were complementary. OCO would have produced really high-res "slices" every 16 days, whereas GOSAT gives wider continuous regions of coverage, with a greater repeat frequency (3 days), but at lower spatial resolution. Both would have measured the same quantity, total column CO2.
I'm not sure what OCO's capabilities regarding ocean sinks were, but I'm somewhat skeptical that it could have detected a permafrost tipping point before it is too late to do anything about it, and probably it wouldn't have detected anything useful about permafrost during its mission lifetime. Permafrost doesn't start acting up until runaway thawing already commences. To warn against that, what we really need are many more soil measurements of the permafrost active layer in various locations, to see how much soil carbon is at what temperature. You can't detect that from space.
1) A rising CO2 concentration will cause an increase in the average global temperature. 2) The average global temperature has increased. 3) Therefore, the rising CO2 concentration caused an increase in the global average temperature.
No. It's not. The initial reasoning is:
1) A rising CO2 will cause an increase in average global temperature with a specific rate, timing, and magnitude. 2) An increase in average global temperature with that rate, timing, and magnitude is observed. 3) Therefore, the temperature evidence supports CO2 increase as a cause. (Other causes which make the same prediction would also be supported by this observation.)
You then add:
4) Competing theories, such as changes in total solar irradiance, do not predict the observed change. 5) Therefore, these theories are weakened relative to the alternatives, and any remaining consistent theories, such as CO2, are relatively strengthened.
You then add:
6) CO2 increase makes other predictions about climate, such as stratospheric cooling, top-down warming of the oceans, etc. 7) These effects are observed. 8) Competing hypotheses do not predict all these other observations either. 9) See 5.
And so on. Now, we can discuss the individual lines of evidence involved in this reasoning (such as your citation of Scafetta and West as "proving" it's all solar), but your ridiculous strawman is just that: a strawman.
No, it isn't false, it's simple physics. Absorption of electromagnetic 'light' radiation passing through a medium is described by the Beer-Lambert equation
You want the Schwarzschild equation, not Beer-Lambert, which ignores emission. Beer-Lambert works well for shortwave absorption, because the atmosphere doesn't radiate in shortwave, but doesn't fully capture what's going on in the longwave. Upwelling IR is modified by neighboring layers of GHGs, as long as they're warm enough.
Molecules absorb infrared radiation based on their vibrational modes and do not care if there are nearby molecules of a 'similar temperature.'
I said that molecules RADIATE infrared based on their temperature, and that CO2 molecules absorb infrared in wavelengths which correspond to a particular (range of) temperature. As I said, if you're in the high cool atmosphere, then the difference between the radiating temperature's wavelengths and the absorption window is large, and the IR largely escapes. But when the radiating temperature is near the absorption window for the gas, as is the case in the lower atmosphere, then CO2 molecules do absorb and re-radiate between neighbors.
You apparently believe that CO2 production from fossil fuel combustion is about to explode or something.
Emissions under business-as-usual are expected to increase quite a bit over the 21st century, yes.
Therefore, you must also believe that there's some new huge deposit of fossil fuels that is going to be exploited soon.
There are centuries worth of unexploited coal to be used for power by both the developed and developing world.
The reality is that fossil fuel use is likely to be flat to declining for the forseeable future due to the increasing scarcity and cost of developing new fossil fuel resources. It takes the discovery of enormous new petroleum reserves just to maintain our current production rate of these.
How many times do I have to tell you, there are fossil fuels other than petroleum? And business-as-usual projections already INCLUDE peak oil.
Based on current fossil fuel use and the measured atmospheric CO2 changes, it will take approximately 100 years for the atmospheric CO2 concentration to reach 2x the pre-industrial value or 580 ppm.
Once again, fossil fuel emissions is expected to increase throughout most if not all of this century under most BAU emissions scenarios. It's possible they will decrease and we'll be limited to 2x preindustrial; it's possible that they won't and we'll get 3x or more under high emission scenarios. (Or if carbon sinks weaken.) 2x is the most optimistic case absent additional mitigation efforts.
The effect of this increase on global temperature would be an increase of approximately 1.2C
This is wrong, for reasons I already explained.
The sun's output has declined in the last two years so if you want to worry about something, worry about that.
Two years of decline in solar output does not exactly compare to a century's worth of greenhouse forcing.
So, to use your inductive science model, my hypothesis is that washing my car will cause it to rain. I washed the car yesterday and...guess what...it rained. Hypothesis proved.
Are you really this dumb?
You don't prove hypotheses, you support or contradict them by evidence. In your strawman example, you don't have a real prediction (I could equally well claim that washing my car will prevent it from raining; you are lacking a mechanism), and you haven't considered any alternate hypothesis for rain.
EVERY scientific theory amasses support by (a) making predictions which are supported by observations, and (b) demonstrating that alternate hypotheses are not supported by observations. It is completely absurd to claim that passing an experimental test is "circular reasoning". It is evidence for a theory. It may be evidence for another theory too, but that doesn't make the first theory circular.
You also falsely claim that it is assumed "that the only cause of such a temperature would be the CO2 effect".
Fuzzy thinking. The atmosphere is a 'reservoir' for CO2 to which CO2 is constantly being added and removed. If more is added than is removed, the concentration increases. If less is added than is removed, the concentration decreases. If you look at the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measured at Mauna Loa since 1958, it rises and falls during the year in a regular cycle apparently related to photosynthetic activity. The long-term average concentration has shown a slight increase from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to a current value of 387 ppm as the average value for January. The increase is probably due to the increased combustion of fossil fuels, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere as a byproduct of combustion.
All of this is generally true, but then you jump to:
Your statement above is pure nonsense as it is impossible to "put a bunch of excess CO2 into the air" due to the sheer global scale that such an effort would require.
The increase of atmospheric CO2 from ~280 to 388 ppm is precisely "the bunch of excess CO2 into the air" I'm referring to. The point is that with CO2's long residence time, an imbalance between source and sink leads to a long-term shift in concentration (until the CO2 can finally be removed), whereas with water vapor's short residence time, the imbalance is quickly neutralized (unless something happens to change the source-sink relationship, like an external increase in global temperature).
I pointed this out in another response, but I just want to emphasize that OCO would have measured the column average CO2, not the whole vertical profile. You could potentially think about clever spectral analysis algorithms to tease out some of the rough vertical structure, but it wasn't designed to do that.
OCO would have been very useful, but please don't exaggerate the loss ("the human race has suffered a serious setback").
It's true that we only get hundreds of flux measurements from ground sensors. But OCO wouldn't give full planetary coverage, just narrow 10-km slices, so you've got a big interpolation problem anyway: high data density where you have measurements but large gaps in between. Plus, it only gives total air column concentration, where for analysis of carbon sinks we really want to know surface fluxes (which ground measurements can give us). Thus, with OCO you have a big inversion problem to solve: from column concentrations and a model of atmospheric transport (wind blows CO2 around), work out what the surface sources and sinks were. OCO would certainly have helped us, but if there are big changes in carbon sinks, surface sensors could probably pick them up too.
Unfortunately OCO would only give total column measurements of CO2, so it can't figure out directly how much CO2 is in different layers of the atmosphere. For that, you need an atmospheric transport model.
Pointing to temperature change as evidence of a CO2 effect is circular reasoning
It is not circular reasoning. It's how inductive science works. "Hypothesis X predicts we will observe effect Y. Alternate hypotheses W predict different effects Z. We observe Y, but not Z. This observation is evidence in favor of hypothesis X, and does not support alternate hypotheses W."
Water does not have a 'short' atmospheric residency.
Water molecules do have a short atmospheric residency.
It is ALWAYS present in the atmosphere.
That does not contradict the preceding statement.
Both water and carbon dioxide are constantly cycling in and out of the atmosphere, including from your body. That has absolutely nothing to do with the alleged effect of a longterm change in their average atmospheric concentration on the global climate unless you're trying to build a strawman.
Yes, it does have to do with the long term accumulation of gases. CO2 remains in the atmosphere for much longer than water vapor does. If you put a bunch of excess water vapor into the air, it quickly precipitates back out and concentrations return to normal. If you put a bunch of excess CO2 into the air, it hangs around for centuries before being scrubbed out. That's one reason why it's accumulating so fast, and will affect the climate for so long. (The other reason is because we're just emitting so much of it.)
Now, if you raise the temperature of the planet, you shift the evaporation-precipitation balance, so that more water can stay in the air at one time on average. That water is a greenhouse gas and adds to the original warming (whatever the source). This is how the water vapor feedback on climate works. Conversely, if you don't change the temperature of the planet, then excess water vapor into the air won't accumulate and change the overall long term average; it will just rain out because you haven't change the evap-precip balance. That's why water vapor is not a forcing by itself.
It seems impossible to have any reasoned discussion about carbon dioxide.
You're not contributing to the reasoned discussion here.
Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to 365 ppm today and that increase is NOT having a significant effect on climate.
A large amount of science disagrees with you. (And by the way, it's more like 388 ppm today.)
There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band.
This is false, and is directly contradicted by the line-by-line radiative transfer codes which calculate this absorption (e.g., MODTRAN), as well as actual spectral measurements of increasing IR saturation in the CO2 bands (e.g., here).
In particular, this response to another poster is also false: "The re-radiated infra-red radiation would mostly be outside of those spectra and would either radiate out into space or radiate into the earth. Your conceptual model about radiation bouncing around between CO2 molecules in the atmosphere does not agree with the physics of absorption." Molecules radiate infrared according to their temperature. If they absorb IR from molecules of a similar temperature, then the re-radiated IR will be in the same band as the absorbed IR. Since nearby molecules are generally of a similar temperature, "radiation bouncing around among CO2 molecules" does happen. That is, in fact, what leads to the exponential temperature-forcing relationship you mention: partial absorption by nearby molecules radiating in similar bands as they absorb. Which, again, is verified by actually calculating the radiative transfer. There is a vertical thermal gradient, so eventually the high cold layers are passing most of what makes it out of the warm lower layers, but by that time some more of the outgoing IR has already been re-reradiated back to the surface.
The best estimate is that a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from the pre-industrial value (290 to 580 ppm) would increase global temperatures by 1.2C.
(Pre-industrial is usually taken to be 280 ppm.)
Yes, the forcing/concentration relationship is logarithmic due to partial saturation of the absorption bands, and yes, CO2 doubling leads to an unamplified ~1.2 C of warming by itself. However, the net feedbacks in the climate system are positive, according to theory, instrumental observations, and paleo data regarding the climate sensitivity. That increases the climate sensitivity from 1.2 C to somewhere between 2-4.5 C.
Based on our current CO2 output it will take us another 100 years to reach 580 ppm, by which time we will have probably exhausted our fossil fuels anyway, if we believe the gloomy forecasts about petroleum reserves.
Ha! Not even. "Current CO2 output" isn't going to stay the same; it's been continually increasing. Under high emissions scenarios we could pass 800-900 ppm this century. Don't forget that petroleum is not the only source of fossil fuels: coal is far more abundant. Power plants use fossil fuels too, more than the transportation sector. And if we really want to go digging in the sands and shales, there's probably several thousand ppm worth in there, although it would take a few centuries to exhaust all that.
So...if carbon dioxide is not changing our climate, what is? Look to the Sun.
Solar irradiance trends and cosmic ray trends disagree profoundly with the modern warming period, as I'm sure has been pointed
In regards to Global Warming, I think we need to look at the ocean floor. Some seashells contain carbon records that are quite contradictory to the ice core measurements Gore hyped up.
Sign of a climate crackpot: he brings Al Gore into the discussion as if he's relevant to the science.
But go ahead, please explain what ocean cores are inconsistent with the ice core record of the glacial-interglacial cycles. (Also explain why ocean cores are more reliable than ice cores, considering that ice cores actually store trapped atmospheric gas.)
There are astronomical functions that researchers are blowing off. The Earth's axis shift (precession), the earth's elliptical degree of orbit, and the sun's position in galactic space all play roles in the climate cycle.
Researchers aren't blowing off orbital factors. The Milankovitch cycles are far too slow to act appreciably on century timescales. As for the Sun's position in galactic space, you're probably referring to the hypothesis of varying cosmic ray flux, except cosmic ray flux hasn't been varying recently.
Also, isn't the human contribution to CO2 only a small fraction of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses?
Yes, but a few-degree contribution to a 30-degree natural greenhouse effect is still climatically significant.
The article clearly states that the scientist can only find 40% of the carbon in the atmosphere that they were expecting.
That's not true. It says that only 40% of our emissions remain in the atmosphere, and the land and oceans take up the rest. Scientists knew that, and they also know the rough partitioning: about 25% go in to the land and 25% into the water. (The article clearly states that about half of the remaining 60%, or 30%, goes into the oceans.) But there's still uncertainty in the total sink; the land sink might be a little bit larger than that, or the ocean sink smaller. That's one of the questions OCO is supposed to help address. It's also supposed to help nail down which parts of the land the carbon ends up in.
Add the lack of sunspots in this cycle and it seems that we are actually headed for a freeze.
Only if you ignore the greenhouse effect, and also assume that solar activity is going to drop into a new Maunder Minimum, and even a new Maunder Minimum would be likely warmer than the "Little Ice Age" because the whole planet is already warmer.
P.S. You still never answered my question: why did you repeatedly claim that the IPCC doesn't study natural causes, when you've never even read the IPCC report?
You should look at the Fourth report. It's the most recent.
The IPCC does not fund, direct, or control climate research. That's done by individual national funding agencies such as the U.S. National Science Foundation. The IPCC has absolutely no executive authority; it is an advisory organization only. It was created to produce reports for decision-makers (i.e., politicians) which summarize state of the science, so that policymakers can evaluate the risks, uncertainties, and level of scientific understanding concerning the extent to which humans may influence the climate. For the most part, it conducts no research of its own. (Upon occasion, it commissions panels of researchers to generate some types of raw data. For example, has asked researchers to compile a public archive of climate model projections which it uses to produce figures, and it also commissioned economists to produce the SRES emissions scenarios it uses.) The IPCC also does not make its own policy recommendations, and is in fact forbidden from doing so. (That doesn't forbid individual members from making their own recommendations, as long as they're not claiming they represent an official IPCC position.) It does summarize existing policy recommendations published by economists, public policy researchers, etc.
P.S.: Typical Slashdot paranoia. Note how you assume that there IS a bias, and you just don't know what it is. Contrary to popular belief, government organizations like the National Science Foundation do not have some huge conspiratorial bias on climate change any more than they do on, say, quantum molecular optics.
Please cite the evidence that the IPCC doesn't look at natural changes. You're the one that made the original claim. You've never supported that claim with any evidence based on the contents of the IPCC report. The only thing you've come up with is the IPCC charter, which clearly does not state that the IPCC is required to ignore natural changes. You're too lazy to read that report, and then you attempt to shift the burden of proof to me. You're still pathetic, as well as completely dishonest.
You continue to INSIST that the IPCC doesn't look at natural changes, when natural climate change is PLAINLY discussed in their assessment reports, and I already gave you several examples. You're simply LYING about what the IPCC does. Why do you INSIST that they don't look at natural changes, when you've clearly never even READ the report? How can you possibly make any HONEST claims about what the IPCC does or does not do without having even looking at the contents of their report?
Before you say anything else, answer me that question. I want to know why you keep making bold claims about the contents of a report you've never read, and you keep dodging that question. Your answer should be the first sentence of your reply to me.
As I mentioned, the IPCC have a prominent figure where they estimate how much of the last century's climate is due to natural vs. human causes. This is right in the Summary for Policymakers, the most basic document you should have read before shooting your mouth off about what the IPCC does and does not do. You can also look at, for example, the whole chapter 9 on attributing climate change (that means "deciding whether it's human or natural"; the appendix also discusses how the Stott natural/human modeling studies in the SPM were conducted), also chapter 6 on past natural changes and how they compare to present changes. Other discussion is scattered throughout the report, e.g., in chapter 2 comparing natural (e.g. solar) radiative forcings to human forcings.
I'm sure you'll apply the No True Scotsman fallacy and claim that none of this is "real" looking at non-human causes.
How pathetic. First you condemn the IPCC for not looking at natural causes. Then when I pointed out that they do look at natural causes, you condemned them for looking at natural causes! Now you're back to a slightly modified version of your original error, claiming they don't devote attention to natural causes. Which, guess what, ends with a condemnation of the IPCC. It's pretty clear that no matter what the facts are, your conclusion is going to be "the IPCC sucks". Did your favorite blog tell you the IPCC must be hated, or something? It's obvious that this bias isn't coming from actual knowledge of what's in the report or what the IPCC does.
As I've explained to you twice already, a central part of understanding whether humans may be influencing the climate is to look at how the climate changes naturally, so you can say what's natural and what isn't. Which is, in fact, what was done by the scientific community, whose conclusions on this matter were summarized by the IPCC.
Throughout this whole sad little exchange you have consmistently ignored the actual issue, which is the scientific evidence for and against natural causes of modern climate change. If you've got a reasoned, evidence-supported argument for why the scientific research in this area is in error, or that there are major errors in how the IPCC has summarized the results of this research, spit it out. Otherwise, stop wasting my time. Hint: this will probably require reading the IPCC report which, given your original claims about them ignoring natural causes, you evidently haven't done.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, my general point is that this cycle has been going on for quite some time. I have a hard time seeing how these ongoing cycles are going to change. They believe that these CO2 cycles are only interrupted by ice ages, correct?
The natural glacial-interglacial CO2 cycles are coupled to orbital variations, so that part of the cycle will keep going. However, we are currently greatly over-riding the natural CO2 cycle with our excess fossil fuel emissions. The natural glacial-to-interglacial transition is about 100 ppm, and we've already added another 100 ppm on top of that. Another 1000 ppm is quite possible without conscious effort to reduce fossil fuel emissions. Whether that will disrupt the long-term glacial cycle remains to be seen (but see here and Archer's new book The Long Thaw for a sobering discussion). However, it will most definitely disrupt natural CO2 fluctuations over the next few centuries.
We probably can't stop polar melting, but we can stop glacial advance if we had the motivation.
We probably can't stop polar melting, but we can slow and reduce it by quite a bit. This is especially important to avoid crossing the threshold for runaway melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which will add a lot more sea level rise and boreal warming.
If you're concerned about glacial advance, you should want to save our fossil fuels for later when we need them, instead of using them all up now when we don't.
If sea levels really are going to rise any significant amount, engineering projects could keep cities safe, and the waters at bay.
Up to a point, we could do it, but it would be very expensive considering the number of people and value of properties which are currently near the coast. With a potential multi-meter sea rise, you'd probably have to abandon a lot of the planet's current shoreline.
There are, of course, many other serious impacts of climate change besides sea level rise.
Also, if we completely stop using fossil fuels, this cycle will continue, because it is fueled by various factors including astrological forces and gas release from the planet.
That's true, but not really the point.
They have a lot of benefits nobody is talking about like being able to produce hydrogen fuels from non-fossil origins, and fresh water for agriculture. These benefits are a lot greater than the benefits I can see from renewables.
Any power source can do that (hydrogen separation, desalination, etc.), not just nuclear, unless you're referring to processes I haven't heard of.
You are absolutely right about the current rate for plant production. We're limited by the quantity of casing that Japan Steel can produce (currently enough for 4 plants per year). However, we can start producing them here in the US again if a government corporation would take over surplus steel production. Additionally various types of 4th gen plants can be manufactured in our auto-plants (if retooled).
I can't see us realistically producing power plants at the rate I described, especially given their costs and side effects, and the political climate. But a WWII-level effort might do it.
If fusion was properly funded the past 30 years as it should have been, I'm confident we'd have a commercially viable reactor by now.
I highly doubt that. In fact, I don't know if commercial fusion will ever be commercially viable.
About the costs: I thought nuclear was the 2nd cheapest power source next to natural gas for plant construction... how is solar cheaper?
New nuclear plants are actually rather expensive, and as you note, that's not even counting the fact that they're heavily subsidized. Take away the subsidies and they do even worse b
You ask the average Joe on the street about the whole thing and all they can tell you is CO2.
If they're talking about climate over the next century, then to first order, they'd be right: it's by far the largest sustained forcing.
And, unless you happened to miss Al Gore's (a politician I might remind you) propaganda piece which explicitly tried to highlight the CO2/temperature connection. He purposely put the graphs on different axes so people would infer CO2 lead temperature. If you see the two on the same graph, it's clear CO2 follows, not leads.
There's nothing wrong with putting them on separate axes. Many scientists plot separate quantities on separate axes. And Gore was correct to highlight the CO2-temperature link in the glacial-interglacial cycle, because CO2 does cause important glacial-interglacial temperature changes. Furthermore, the lag-lead story isn't as obvious as you claim, because you can clearly see deglaciations where CO2 leads; it's mostly the glaciations where it lags.
Really? I would agree with you on the orbital variation. That's a known quantity. But, what are the predictions for solar and cloud variation? What are the predictions for volcanic events that are known to cool global temperatures as much as a degree in a single year? We just don't know those things.
We can't predict them very well from physical first principles, but if they stay within historic bounds, they're not going to change the long term picture much. For example, even if the Sun dropped into a new Maunder Minimum, it might delay the overall warming by a few decades, but CO2 is still going to win out. And volcanic events have little long term influence on surface temperatures; they only show up for a few years, although the ocean imprint lasts longer.
It's not that hard to nail down human emissions. It's somewhat uncertain where human emissions eventually end up; we know the main players, but not the exact partitioning.
If we're uncertain about where they end up, how can we use those for modeling?
We know how much of them leave the atmosphere, so that's what's used in modeling. We also know within about 30% how much ends in each sink each year. Uncertainty in the partitioning does lead to uncertainty in how future carbon sinks might change. But that's a second-order effect compared to the amount of CO2 emissions themselves, which has already outstripped natural sinks and will do so by even more in the future.
I've heard some argue that the specific isotopes released by man have a different effect than the "natural" isotopes. If both that idea and your assertion are both true, I would expect some serious flaws in the models.
They don't have different effects as far as the greenhouse effect is concerned. They do have some effect as far as biological fractionation is concerned (i.e., how much of each isotope is taken up by biological organisms such as plants), but that's really small (like parts per thousand differences).
We may not push CO2 levels higher than what has been naturally observed, but that's not the point. Even climate changes as large as what has been naturally observed are a big deal, and we probably don't want to reproduce those changes (especially at a high rate).
The quantity nor the rate is statistically different from what has been observed.
That's a red herring. Yes, the climate has been warm before. No, we don't necessarily want to return to a Cretaceous climate within a few centuries. And the rate is extremely high compared to past variations. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum had similar rates, and was associated with mass extinctions. There are restarts of the thermohaline circulation which also had fast rates, especially regionally, but they were all coming out of a glacial climate into an interglacial, not adding more warming on top of an e
I don't really disagree with anything in your latest link (to UMich). But you should note that the paleoclimate data discussed there are still consistent with modern estimates of the climate sensitivity of CO2. The science does not support your position of a weak CO2 influence on climate; paleo and instrumental data as well as physical theory and modeling all agree on a climate sensitivity of 2-5 C (3 C is what's usually used in projections, so it could be about 50% larger or smaller than that).
I agree that we ought to be using oil only for petrochem manufacturing instead of just wasting it in combustion. However, it will take some time to make that transition.
Nuclear energy has its advantages, but it's not nearly a solution to climate change. At best, it's one component. To make a large dent in fossil fuel emissions in the first half of this century would require an infeasibly large rate of construction (like, one plant per week for decades). Eventually we can get there, but it would take long enough that large CO2 increases will still occur along with the resulting significant climate change. Also, it should be noted that breeder nuclear is still not truly renewable. Furthermore, it's more expensive than many renewables like solar. Finally, while I am pro-nuclear, it should still be acknowledged that there are serious unresolved issues with very large scale waste storage and, worse, nuclear proliferation. The latter is particularly important if we want developing countries to use non-fossil power sources, considering that many of them are not necessarily allies. Nuclear power providers haven't been even able to agree on a common, verified set of engineering standards and practices, which is one reason why the U.S. AEC under the Bush administration didn't end up giving out any new construction permits, despite desperately wanting to.
Fusion energy is not even on the table as anything useful this century. It takes a long time for new power sources to become widely deployed, particularly since new power plants don't replace existing plants until the latter are retired (50+ years). That means the sources relevant to this century need to start being deployed now or in the early decades of this century. Fusion may not even be prototype-ready in the first (or second!) half of this century, let alone deployed, let alone widely deployed.
I disagree that a shift to renewable energy is going to "doom humanity". It's not going to produce all our energy needs, but we can make a major shift towards it, coupled with energy efficiency initiatives.
Those are great references and support my argument that CO2 has an effect, but is certainly not THE cause.
Scientists do not claim that CO2 is "the" only cause of climate change. And please, spare me "but the media/political circus does". Even they don't claim that CO2 is the only thing ever to have affected climate.
Orbital, solar and cloud variation are much more impactful than CO2.
Not over the next few centuries, which is the whole point.
The natural CO2 cycle has quite a bit of interannual variability. That's why it's hard to nail down what the human factors are.
It's not that hard to nail down human emissions. It's somewhat uncertain where human emissions eventually end up; we know the main players, but not the exact partitioning.
And, given that the CO2 levels have been MUCH higher on the order of 1000's of percents prior to the existence of humans on the planet, it's hard to say that we are going to push things beyond what has been NATURALLY observed on Earth.
We may not push CO2 levels higher than what has been naturally observed, but that's not the point. Even climate changes as large as what has been naturally observed are a big deal, and we probably don't want to reproduce those changes (especially at a high rate).
Sure, there are plenty of hypothesi about the different types of carbon isotopes, but there are plenty of natural ways for those same isotopes to be released.
No, there isn't. That's the whole point. Between the C12/C13 ratios and C12/C14 ratios, you can eliminate the natural sources like biomass, dissolved carbon in the oceans, etc.
The only thing we are doing to release them is to burn things. That happens naturally all the time.
Burning biomass has a different isotopic signature than burning fossil fuels, unless the biomass is extremely old (like fossil biomass is). There is very little ancient biomass being burned other than fossil fuel, and we know where it is.
Nobody argues that? Oh, you said "seriously". That's not a scientific term.
Ok, let me be more blunt: anybody who argues that has been scientifically disproven.
It comes right down to modeling.
No, it doesn't. It's straight DATA. Models just happen to confirm it, which is no surprise given the amount of independent data which all indicate the same thing.
The best record for atmospheric CO2 is ice cores, but those don't go back very far. There are geologic records that can go back further, but there are plenty of questions about there accuracy vs ice cores.
That's true, but is irrelevant to the point that current CO2 increases are due almost entirely to humans.
Urban heat centers wouldn't explain all of the "global" warming. However, if you take a look at where the temperature data is being gathered, you will find that a significant majority of the data comes from measurements made in areas that have experienced development over time. If you start with a thermometer in the forest and then cut down the forest and build a city around it, then you're data from that same station is going to show that the average temperature is increasing.
Rural stations also show the trend. So do satellites, which have a global view. So do ocean temperature measurements; if it was just an artifact of urban measurements, the oceans wouldn't be warming. So does Arctic ice melt, glacier melt, biome shifts, and so on. The warming is real.
The models are based on the data and the data isn't there to model accurately enough to make predictions.
The data is there accurately enough to make useful predictions. Those predictions have wide error bars, but we can rule out many outcomes (like less than 1 C warming this century)
Says who?
Says, pretty much everything ever published on the subject. Says the satellite record (both of them). Says the ocean temperature record. Says all the indirect effects of warming (ice melt, biome shifts, etc.)
You've got to have some pretty enormous cognitive blinders on to think that the warming is just a data artifact from the surface stations.
Someone who thinks that UHI is about cities shouldn't be discussing this.
The UHI is about cities; that's what the "U" stands for, after all. Cities are where you get most of the siting issues. But the previous poster wasn't even talking about site bias; he/she seemed to be claiming that the warming is real, but is due to the albedo effect of urban development and other land use changes.
Heres a thought.. go to surfacestations.org
Been there, done that. They sure got quiet when they found out that the well-sited stations produced pretty much the same temperature trends as the (gasp) adjusted data.
We got no fucking idea the effects of UHI, of CO2, or even the amount of warming (if any.) We still have no clue as to the significant effects of clouds (which still cannot be modeled), cosmic rays, solar variance, sunspots, the magnetosphere, and so on..
We certainly do, but you appear to be immune to evidence.
All the while we are being sold a plan by the IPCC to heavily regulate industry,
The IPCC doesn't have any policy plans. They report on other people's policy plans.
when there are other alternatives that they havent even fucking bothered to look into, such as geoengineering.
Plenty of people are looking into geoengineering. Right now it doesn't look like a very safe alternative, but it's a hot research area.
it takes a group of highly skeptical volunteers to actualy figure out that almost the entire thing is bullshit...
They didn't "figure out" any such thing. If anything, they falsified their own hypothesis (that siting issues severely contaminate the surface record).
and STILL nobody is doing anything about it.
NOAA is putting together the CRN if, for some reason, you're still worried about the surface record.
You KNOW all about global warming, right?
More than you, evidently.
Beck (2007) Figure 5: First Reconstruction of Trends in CO2 Atmospheric concentration based on actual measurement
I was right. You are a crackpot. Even a halfway intelligent skeptic knows better than to cite Beck or Jaworowski. You don't see, say, Steve McIntyre embarrassing himself like that.
Let me clue you in: Beck's whole "reconstruction" is based on hopelessly flawed and unrepresentative flask samples from a period before anybody learned how to do a controlled experiment. First, those measurements are based on surface fluxes. There are HUGE spatial and temporal variations in surface fluxes based on proximity to e.g. urban sources, vegetative sinks, and atmospheric turbulence in the boundary layer. Furthermore, early practitioners had almost no quality control in place to ensure against sample contamination. There's a reason why Keeling is famous in this area: he spent the 1950s through 1970s carefully demonstrating how flawed previous methods of measurement are. Beck's graph shows ridiculously huge fluctuations in global CO2 which, if they actually existed, would represent physically impossible changes in terrestrial and ocean sinks: the global biosphere and ocean mixed layer literally cannot exchange CO2 that quickly. You'd have to do something like burn down half the planetary biomass in a decade or two.
I wonder why you think that a graph by a random schoolteacher untrained and unpublished in the scientific literature overturns all other work in the field. (P.S. "Energy and Environment" is not a scientific journal, it's a vanity journal and dumping ground for crackpots.) I mean come on, have a little less credulity here. You're supposed to be a "skeptic", right? Then why do you uncritically accept any heterodox claim, no matter how absurd? Simply because you like to feel they're "sticking it to the man"? Or they agree with your political philosophy?
I did not read your article. If you will copy and paste the relevant part or present it for me in a free manner, I will be happy to review it.
That would violate copyright. You can try going to a university library. They will surely have it; Science is one of the top two scientific journals in the world, and pretty much every university subscribes to it.
As you cited an article saying that we are going to experience a longer interglacial (you know, the one I can't even read the abstract on), I'm going to shoot you one that says the opposite.
And, once again, you fail to cite anything from the scientific literature. You do realize the difference between a peer reviewed scientific publication a top scientific journal and a random web essay, don't you? I also note that your article is almost 10 years older than the work which re-evaluated the Milankovitch cycles and found that they favor a long interglacial.
It appears that you get your entire knowledge of climate science from skeptic web sites. Hell, the ice age article you cite is from an all-around crackpot site attacking quantum theory, relativity, biology, etc. Imagine my surprise.
The Beer-Lambert 'Law' has not been repealed.
The Beer-Lambert law has not been repealed, but it also explicitly ignores the very phenomenon we are discussing.
Adding the emissions factor (see my earlier reply) does not change the underlying issue: more CO2 will NOT increase the absorption by CO2.
This is wrong. Certainly the atmosphere re-radiates IR, but it also radiates in wavelengths which can be absorbed by other CO2 molecules, when its temperature is similar to the absorption band of CO2. This occurs in the lower layers of the atmosphere.
Sure there are...but exploiting and using those reserves will also take centuries.
No. We're already exploiting coal and can easily ramp up global production.
It's highly unlikely that you will ever jump in the driver's seat of your coal-burning buggy to drive on down to the pub.
Coal is used for ELECTRICITY, in case you didn't notice. (It can also be converted to liquid form for transportation, but this requires energy. If coal liquifaction is economical relative to electric vehicles, you'll continue to see internal combustion; otherwise, you'll get a fleet of coal-driven electric vehicles.) And, in case you didn't notice, lots of people use electricity, and lots more want to.
Transportation is the biggest use of FOSSIL FUELS
Electricity generation represents about half of fossil fuel emissions in the U.S., and it's even larger in many developing countries where the demand for a universal electricity grid outweighs the demand for more automobiles.
Future Electric cars are likely to be fueled with electricity produced from renewable sources, natural gas, and nuclear power rather than coal.
Not likely without strong economic incentives to reduce fossil fuel use. Over the lifecycle of a power plant, coal is WAY cheaper than most of the alternatives, including all renewables and nuclear power, and that's going to remain true for the foreseeable future barring explicit economic disincentives for fossil fuel use. There's a reason why China is going all-out building coal plants.
That may change with sufficiently numerous and large breakthroughs in alternative energy, but it's not going to change quickly. Nothing is even in research phase now that can beat coal in cost-effectiveness, let alone developed, let alone widely installable over the next few decades. (Remember too that it's not cost effective to simply replace existing coal plants; you want them to live out their natural lifetime, which can be 50+ years. So whatever coal plants you're building while waiting for your technological silver bullet are going to hang around for quite some time.)
Coal will continue to be used but will not cause any massive runup in atmosperic CO2 that you allude to with your 900ppm by 2100 nonsense.
You're even more out of touch with economic/energy use projections than you are with climate projections. It is not at all hard to exceed 560 ppm this century. Most projections predict that. The fossil fuel emission problem isn't just going to "solve itself" anytime soon. I'm not saying that 560 ppm is impossible or even unlikely, just that it will probably require some additional mitigation effort to limit ourselves to 2xCO2.
We don't need OCO to attribute warming to humans. OCO would have improved our understanding of and ability to predict the terrestrial and ocean carbon sinks. This is important to determine how severe global warming may become in the future (since it modifies the amount of CO2 which remains in the atmosphere). Still, to first order the fact remains that regardless of changes in sinks, we still ought to be doing more mitigation than we are.
That should be more like 100*388/280 %.
The CO2 causing warming myth is nothing but media and political hype...
Given your statements below, I don't think your knowledge of this subject warrants such bold assertions.
Looking at the data, it's clear to see that CO2 increase follows, not leads, an increase in temperature.
In the glacial-interglacial cycle, this is true, but it's also not a surprise; it's a prediction of Milankovitch theory, which existed before any lags or leads were ever measured in the data. It also does not imply that CO2 has no effect on temperature.
If there is causation (thus far only some correlation has been established), then the rise in CO2 is caused by the increase in temperature, not the other way around.
It's both. According to the Milankovitch theory, orbital variations cause shifts in temperature. These temperature shifts cause changes in the carbon cycle, which alters CO2 levels. The altered CO2 levels in turn amplify the original orbital temperature change.
If you leave the CO2 feedback part of that process out, then you can't explain the amplitude of the glacial-interglacial cycles anymore, and it's unclear whether you can even, say, trigger a glaciation without the contribution of CO2 drawdown.
For those that support the CO2 driving the increase, I've yet to see how the climate models explain how the temperature 450 million years ago was colder than it has ever been in the last half billion years, but the CO2 levels were 10 times what we have today.
You could start here, here, or here.
And for those arguing that human activity is driving the increase, why does the rate of increase vary so greatly (particularly looking at the significant decrease in rate during 1991-1993) despite the consistent growth of human CO2 producing activities.
Human emissions don't vary smoothly, nor does the terrestrial carbon sink, which has quite a bit of interannual variability due to climatic effects on, e.g., photosynthesis and heterotrophic respiration. Just as a guess, I'd look first at the collapse of the Soviet Union (assuming there is a significant slowdown during those years, which I haven't checked).
As for human activity driving the observed increase, that's been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Nobody seriously argues that part of the story anymore; there are about six independent lines of evidence, including historic emissions data, measurements of cumulative ocean carbon and air-sea CO2 fluxes, measurements of terrestrial CO2 fluxes, modeling of said fluxes, shifts in carbon isotope ratios in air and sea, and changes in the CO2/O2 ratio of the atmosphere.
However, it seems that deforestation along with ever expanding cities with concrete and asphalt that absorb and radiate heat make an even better explanation than CO2,
Urban heat islands don't explain the warming. CIties are a small fraction of the Earth's surface and the amount of heat they radiate, even if you take into account subsidiary albedo changes, isn't big enough to account for the warming. Land use change is a good idea in principle (e.g., due to surface albedo changes, alterations in evapotranspiration, etc.), because it's more widespread. But it still falls well short in magnitude: in some locations it has a substantial effect on local temperatures, but simply doesn't explain the global amount or spatial distribution of surface warming.
OCO and GOSAT were complementary. OCO would have produced really high-res "slices" every 16 days, whereas GOSAT gives wider continuous regions of coverage, with a greater repeat frequency (3 days), but at lower spatial resolution. Both would have measured the same quantity, total column CO2.
I'm not sure what OCO's capabilities regarding ocean sinks were, but I'm somewhat skeptical that it could have detected a permafrost tipping point before it is too late to do anything about it, and probably it wouldn't have detected anything useful about permafrost during its mission lifetime. Permafrost doesn't start acting up until runaway thawing already commences. To warn against that, what we really need are many more soil measurements of the permafrost active layer in various locations, to see how much soil carbon is at what temperature. You can't detect that from space.
Your thought process on this seems to be:
1) A rising CO2 concentration will cause an increase in the average global temperature.
2) The average global temperature has increased.
3) Therefore, the rising CO2 concentration caused an increase in the global average temperature.
No. It's not. The initial reasoning is:
1) A rising CO2 will cause an increase in average global temperature with a specific rate, timing, and magnitude.
2) An increase in average global temperature with that rate, timing, and magnitude is observed.
3) Therefore, the temperature evidence supports CO2 increase as a cause. (Other causes which make the same prediction would also be supported by this observation.)
You then add:
4) Competing theories, such as changes in total solar irradiance, do not predict the observed change.
5) Therefore, these theories are weakened relative to the alternatives, and any remaining consistent theories, such as CO2, are relatively strengthened.
You then add:
6) CO2 increase makes other predictions about climate, such as stratospheric cooling, top-down warming of the oceans, etc.
7) These effects are observed.
8) Competing hypotheses do not predict all these other observations either.
9) See 5.
And so on. Now, we can discuss the individual lines of evidence involved in this reasoning (such as your citation of Scafetta and West as "proving" it's all solar), but your ridiculous strawman is just that: a strawman.
No, it isn't false, it's simple physics. Absorption of electromagnetic 'light' radiation passing through a medium is described by the Beer-Lambert equation
You want the Schwarzschild equation, not Beer-Lambert, which ignores emission. Beer-Lambert works well for shortwave absorption, because the atmosphere doesn't radiate in shortwave, but doesn't fully capture what's going on in the longwave. Upwelling IR is modified by neighboring layers of GHGs, as long as they're warm enough.
Molecules absorb infrared radiation based on their vibrational modes and do not care if there are nearby molecules of a 'similar temperature.'
I said that molecules RADIATE infrared based on their temperature, and that CO2 molecules absorb infrared in wavelengths which correspond to a particular (range of) temperature. As I said, if you're in the high cool atmosphere, then the difference between the radiating temperature's wavelengths and the absorption window is large, and the IR largely escapes. But when the radiating temperature is near the absorption window for the gas, as is the case in the lower atmosphere, then CO2 molecules do absorb and re-radiate between neighbors.
You apparently believe that CO2 production from fossil fuel combustion is about to explode or something.
Emissions under business-as-usual are expected to increase quite a bit over the 21st century, yes.
Therefore, you must also believe that there's some new huge deposit of fossil fuels that is going to be exploited soon.
There are centuries worth of unexploited coal to be used for power by both the developed and developing world.
The reality is that fossil fuel use is likely to be flat to declining for the forseeable future due to the increasing scarcity and cost of developing new fossil fuel resources. It takes the discovery of enormous new petroleum reserves just to maintain our current production rate of these.
How many times do I have to tell you, there are fossil fuels other than petroleum? And business-as-usual projections already INCLUDE peak oil.
Based on current fossil fuel use and the measured atmospheric CO2 changes, it will take approximately 100 years for the atmospheric CO2 concentration to reach 2x the pre-industrial value or 580 ppm.
Once again, fossil fuel emissions is expected to increase throughout most if not all of this century under most BAU emissions scenarios. It's possible they will decrease and we'll be limited to 2x preindustrial; it's possible that they won't and we'll get 3x or more under high emission scenarios. (Or if carbon sinks weaken.) 2x is the most optimistic case absent additional mitigation efforts.
The effect of this increase on global temperature would be an increase of approximately 1.2C
This is wrong, for reasons I already explained.
The sun's output has declined in the last two years so if you want to worry about something, worry about that.
Two years of decline in solar output does not exactly compare to a century's worth of greenhouse forcing.
So, to use your inductive science model, my hypothesis is that washing my car will cause it to rain. I washed the car yesterday and...guess what...it rained. Hypothesis proved.
Are you really this dumb?
You don't prove hypotheses, you support or contradict them by evidence. In your strawman example, you don't have a real prediction (I could equally well claim that washing my car will prevent it from raining; you are lacking a mechanism), and you haven't considered any alternate hypothesis for rain.
EVERY scientific theory amasses support by (a) making predictions which are supported by observations, and (b) demonstrating that alternate hypotheses are not supported by observations. It is completely absurd to claim that passing an experimental test is "circular reasoning". It is evidence for a theory. It may be evidence for another theory too, but that doesn't make the first theory circular.
You also falsely claim that it is assumed "that the only cause of such a temperature would be the CO2 effect".
Fuzzy thinking. The atmosphere is a 'reservoir' for CO2 to which CO2 is constantly being added and removed. If more is added than is removed, the concentration increases. If less is added than is removed, the concentration decreases. If you look at the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration measured at Mauna Loa since 1958, it rises and falls during the year in a regular cycle apparently related to photosynthetic activity. The long-term average concentration has shown a slight increase from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to a current value of 387 ppm as the average value for January. The increase is probably due to the increased combustion of fossil fuels, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere as a byproduct of combustion.
All of this is generally true, but then you jump to:
Your statement above is pure nonsense as it is impossible to "put a bunch of excess CO2 into the air" due to the sheer global scale that such an effort would require.
The increase of atmospheric CO2 from ~280 to 388 ppm is precisely "the bunch of excess CO2 into the air" I'm referring to. The point is that with CO2's long residence time, an imbalance between source and sink leads to a long-term shift in concentration (until the CO2 can finally be removed), whereas with water vapor's short residence time, the imbalance is quickly neutralized (unless something happens to change the source-sink relationship, like an external increase in global temperature).
I pointed this out in another response, but I just want to emphasize that OCO would have measured the column average CO2, not the whole vertical profile. You could potentially think about clever spectral analysis algorithms to tease out some of the rough vertical structure, but it wasn't designed to do that.
OCO would have been very useful, but please don't exaggerate the loss ("the human race has suffered a serious setback").
It's true that we only get hundreds of flux measurements from ground sensors. But OCO wouldn't give full planetary coverage, just narrow 10-km slices, so you've got a big interpolation problem anyway: high data density where you have measurements but large gaps in between. Plus, it only gives total air column concentration, where for analysis of carbon sinks we really want to know surface fluxes (which ground measurements can give us). Thus, with OCO you have a big inversion problem to solve: from column concentrations and a model of atmospheric transport (wind blows CO2 around), work out what the surface sources and sinks were. OCO would certainly have helped us, but if there are big changes in carbon sinks, surface sensors could probably pick them up too.
Unfortunately OCO would only give total column measurements of CO2, so it can't figure out directly how much CO2 is in different layers of the atmosphere. For that, you need an atmospheric transport model.
Pointing to temperature change as evidence of a CO2 effect is circular reasoning
It is not circular reasoning. It's how inductive science works. "Hypothesis X predicts we will observe effect Y. Alternate hypotheses W predict different effects Z. We observe Y, but not Z. This observation is evidence in favor of hypothesis X, and does not support alternate hypotheses W."
Water does not have a 'short' atmospheric residency.
Water molecules do have a short atmospheric residency.
It is ALWAYS present in the atmosphere.
That does not contradict the preceding statement.
Both water and carbon dioxide are constantly cycling in and out of the atmosphere, including from your body. That has absolutely nothing to do with the alleged effect of a longterm change in their average atmospheric concentration on the global climate unless you're trying to build a strawman.
Yes, it does have to do with the long term accumulation of gases. CO2 remains in the atmosphere for much longer than water vapor does. If you put a bunch of excess water vapor into the air, it quickly precipitates back out and concentrations return to normal. If you put a bunch of excess CO2 into the air, it hangs around for centuries before being scrubbed out. That's one reason why it's accumulating so fast, and will affect the climate for so long. (The other reason is because we're just emitting so much of it.)
Now, if you raise the temperature of the planet, you shift the evaporation-precipitation balance, so that more water can stay in the air at one time on average. That water is a greenhouse gas and adds to the original warming (whatever the source). This is how the water vapor feedback on climate works. Conversely, if you don't change the temperature of the planet, then excess water vapor into the air won't accumulate and change the overall long term average; it will just rain out because you haven't change the evap-precip balance. That's why water vapor is not a forcing by itself.
It seems impossible to have any reasoned discussion about carbon dioxide.
You're not contributing to the reasoned discussion here.
Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to 365 ppm today and that increase is NOT having a significant effect on climate.
A large amount of science disagrees with you. (And by the way, it's more like 388 ppm today.)
There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band.
This is false, and is directly contradicted by the line-by-line radiative transfer codes which calculate this absorption (e.g., MODTRAN), as well as actual spectral measurements of increasing IR saturation in the CO2 bands (e.g., here).
In particular, this response to another poster is also false: "The re-radiated infra-red radiation would mostly be outside of those spectra and would either radiate out into space or radiate into the earth. Your conceptual model about radiation bouncing around between CO2 molecules in the atmosphere does not agree with the physics of absorption." Molecules radiate infrared according to their temperature. If they absorb IR from molecules of a similar temperature, then the re-radiated IR will be in the same band as the absorbed IR. Since nearby molecules are generally of a similar temperature, "radiation bouncing around among CO2 molecules" does happen. That is, in fact, what leads to the exponential temperature-forcing relationship you mention: partial absorption by nearby molecules radiating in similar bands as they absorb. Which, again, is verified by actually calculating the radiative transfer. There is a vertical thermal gradient, so eventually the high cold layers are passing most of what makes it out of the warm lower layers, but by that time some more of the outgoing IR has already been re-reradiated back to the surface.
The best estimate is that a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from the pre-industrial value (290 to 580 ppm) would increase global temperatures by 1.2C.
(Pre-industrial is usually taken to be 280 ppm.)
Yes, the forcing/concentration relationship is logarithmic due to partial saturation of the absorption bands, and yes, CO2 doubling leads to an unamplified ~1.2 C of warming by itself. However, the net feedbacks in the climate system are positive, according to theory, instrumental observations, and paleo data regarding the climate sensitivity. That increases the climate sensitivity from 1.2 C to somewhere between 2-4.5 C.
Based on our current CO2 output it will take us another 100 years to reach 580 ppm, by which time we will have probably exhausted our fossil fuels anyway, if we believe the gloomy forecasts about petroleum reserves.
Ha! Not even. "Current CO2 output" isn't going to stay the same; it's been continually increasing. Under high emissions scenarios we could pass 800-900 ppm this century. Don't forget that petroleum is not the only source of fossil fuels: coal is far more abundant. Power plants use fossil fuels too, more than the transportation sector. And if we really want to go digging in the sands and shales, there's probably several thousand ppm worth in there, although it would take a few centuries to exhaust all that.
So...if carbon dioxide is not changing our climate, what is? Look to the Sun.
Solar irradiance trends and cosmic ray trends disagree profoundly with the modern warming period, as I'm sure has been pointed
In regards to Global Warming, I think we need to look at the ocean floor. Some seashells contain carbon records that are quite contradictory to the ice core measurements Gore hyped up.
Sign of a climate crackpot: he brings Al Gore into the discussion as if he's relevant to the science.
But go ahead, please explain what ocean cores are inconsistent with the ice core record of the glacial-interglacial cycles. (Also explain why ocean cores are more reliable than ice cores, considering that ice cores actually store trapped atmospheric gas.)
There are astronomical functions that researchers are blowing off. The Earth's axis shift (precession), the earth's elliptical degree of orbit, and the sun's position in galactic space all play roles in the climate cycle.
Researchers aren't blowing off orbital factors. The Milankovitch cycles are far too slow to act appreciably on century timescales. As for the Sun's position in galactic space, you're probably referring to the hypothesis of varying cosmic ray flux, except cosmic ray flux hasn't been varying recently.
Also, isn't the human contribution to CO2 only a small fraction of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses?
Yes, but a few-degree contribution to a 30-degree natural greenhouse effect is still climatically significant.
We're overdue for an ice age anyway.
Probably not.
The article clearly states that the scientist can only find 40% of the carbon in the atmosphere that they were expecting.
That's not true. It says that only 40% of our emissions remain in the atmosphere, and the land and oceans take up the rest. Scientists knew that, and they also know the rough partitioning: about 25% go in to the land and 25% into the water. (The article clearly states that about half of the remaining 60%, or 30%, goes into the oceans.) But there's still uncertainty in the total sink; the land sink might be a little bit larger than that, or the ocean sink smaller. That's one of the questions OCO is supposed to help address. It's also supposed to help nail down which parts of the land the carbon ends up in.
Add the lack of sunspots in this cycle and it seems that we are actually headed for a freeze.
Only if you ignore the greenhouse effect, and also assume that solar activity is going to drop into a new Maunder Minimum, and even a new Maunder Minimum would be likely warmer than the "Little Ice Age" because the whole planet is already warmer.
P.S. You still never answered my question: why did you repeatedly claim that the IPCC doesn't study natural causes, when you've never even read the IPCC report?
You should look at the Fourth report. It's the most recent.
The IPCC does not fund, direct, or control climate research. That's done by individual national funding agencies such as the U.S. National Science Foundation. The IPCC has absolutely no executive authority; it is an advisory organization only. It was created to produce reports for decision-makers (i.e., politicians) which summarize state of the science, so that policymakers can evaluate the risks, uncertainties, and level of scientific understanding concerning the extent to which humans may influence the climate. For the most part, it conducts no research of its own. (Upon occasion, it commissions panels of researchers to generate some types of raw data. For example, has asked researchers to compile a public archive of climate model projections which it uses to produce figures, and it also commissioned economists to produce the SRES emissions scenarios it uses.) The IPCC also does not make its own policy recommendations, and is in fact forbidden from doing so. (That doesn't forbid individual members from making their own recommendations, as long as they're not claiming they represent an official IPCC position.) It does summarize existing policy recommendations published by economists, public policy researchers, etc.
P.S.: Typical Slashdot paranoia. Note how you assume that there IS a bias, and you just don't know what it is. Contrary to popular belief, government organizations like the National Science Foundation do not have some huge conspiratorial bias on climate change any more than they do on, say, quantum molecular optics.
Please cite the evidence that the IPCC doesn't look at natural changes. You're the one that made the original claim. You've never supported that claim with any evidence based on the contents of the IPCC report. The only thing you've come up with is the IPCC charter, which clearly does not state that the IPCC is required to ignore natural changes. You're too lazy to read that report, and then you attempt to shift the burden of proof to me. You're still pathetic, as well as completely dishonest.
You continue to INSIST that the IPCC doesn't look at natural changes, when natural climate change is PLAINLY discussed in their assessment reports, and I already gave you several examples. You're simply LYING about what the IPCC does. Why do you INSIST that they don't look at natural changes, when you've clearly never even READ the report? How can you possibly make any HONEST claims about what the IPCC does or does not do without having even looking at the contents of their report?
Before you say anything else, answer me that question. I want to know why you keep making bold claims about the contents of a report you've never read, and you keep dodging that question. Your answer should be the first sentence of your reply to me.
As I mentioned, the IPCC have a prominent figure where they estimate how much of the last century's climate is due to natural vs. human causes. This is right in the Summary for Policymakers, the most basic document you should have read before shooting your mouth off about what the IPCC does and does not do. You can also look at, for example, the whole chapter 9 on attributing climate change (that means "deciding whether it's human or natural"; the appendix also discusses how the Stott natural/human modeling studies in the SPM were conducted), also chapter 6 on past natural changes and how they compare to present changes. Other discussion is scattered throughout the report, e.g., in chapter 2 comparing natural (e.g. solar) radiative forcings to human forcings.
I'm sure you'll apply the No True Scotsman fallacy and claim that none of this is "real" looking at non-human causes.
How pathetic. First you condemn the IPCC for not looking at natural causes. Then when I pointed out that they do look at natural causes, you condemned them for looking at natural causes! Now you're back to a slightly modified version of your original error, claiming they don't devote attention to natural causes. Which, guess what, ends with a condemnation of the IPCC. It's pretty clear that no matter what the facts are, your conclusion is going to be "the IPCC sucks". Did your favorite blog tell you the IPCC must be hated, or something? It's obvious that this bias isn't coming from actual knowledge of what's in the report or what the IPCC does.
As I've explained to you twice already, a central part of understanding whether humans may be influencing the climate is to look at how the climate changes naturally, so you can say what's natural and what isn't. Which is, in fact, what was done by the scientific community, whose conclusions on this matter were summarized by the IPCC.
Throughout this whole sad little exchange you have consmistently ignored the actual issue, which is the scientific evidence for and against natural causes of modern climate change. If you've got a reasoned, evidence-supported argument for why the scientific research in this area is in error, or that there are major errors in how the IPCC has summarized the results of this research, spit it out. Otherwise, stop wasting my time. Hint: this will probably require reading the IPCC report which, given your original claims about them ignoring natural causes, you evidently haven't done.