Hmm, interesting. It wouldn't hurt to put in hydro-power at Bowman Dam. Every little bit helps. But it's only 6 megawatts. According the the Central Oregonian article Crook County currently uses about 40 megawatts not counting the Facebook center. The new power line they're planning to run from the Powell Butte Ponderosa substation would up the capacity going into Crook County to 120 megawatts.
I doubt the power from the Bowman Dam would be used for peaking. The water output has to be held pretty steady on that river so all they can do is turn the generators on or off, not the water. There are other dams around that can be used for peaking power. The one I'm most familiar with in that regard is Hells Canyon Dam on the Snake River. When I whitewater boat that river in the summer the water level often changes over 3 feet up and down over a 24 hour period. Crooked River is small enough you can wade across it in places in the summer both above and below the reservoir.
What two steep rivers? The Crooked River and Ochoco Creek? There's not enough water between the two of them to power the data center. Most of the hydro-power in the northwest comes from the dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers.
Prineville is a redneck place. I should know, I have cousins that grew up in the vicinity. The lumber mill shutting down and Les Schwab Tires moving their headquarters from Prineville to Bend doesn't help the unemployment situation. It's mainly a ranching and lumbering area that's off the main highway systems. Prineville is also the county seat of Crook County which helps make it larger than it would otherwise be.
I think that is a device for measuring atmospheric distortion. The can use the information to correct for it in the actual images the telescope is taking.
No, if they used long shutter times you would see streaks instead of points for the stars because the camera obviously wasn't moving. The occasional streaks you do see are mostly satellites.
Yes, I can see that. But sometimes I just get a bug about not allowing a climate change denier the last word. Sometimes I'll spend an hour or more researching my reply and it solidifies my understanding of the situation. No doubt in 20 years he'll still be coming up with alternative explanations for a world that continues to warm and become a bitter old man when the world doesn't conform to his expectations.
Stating that our current state of knowledge is insufficient to definitively assert that CO2 is the primary driver of climate changes is prideful?
It sounds like you think I'm saying the CO2 is the only driver of climate change. No, it isn't. Over the 4.5 billion year history of the Earth far more often than not it is not the driver of climate change. But it's also true that you always have to factor in the radiative forcing of CO2 in order to understand the temperature of the planet. So I would say, yes, every change in CO2 levels does precede related changes in temperature. But it takes several decades to a few centuries for the changes to fully manifest. As I said, mostly because of oceanic buffering, it takes 30-40 years for the atmosphere to catch up with the forcing so the temperature changes we're seeing now are about where we'd have ended up if we had stopped increasing the CO2 level in the 1970's-1980's. Even after the atmospheric temperature catches up there other feedbacks such as melting ice, sea level and ecosystems that take much longer to reach a new equilibrium.
I think that that promise of funding and financial security is a corrupting influence on results.
Scientists don't go into science to get rich. If they're that smart and want to get rich they get into finance and go to Wall Street. The money they get for grants does not line their pockets. It's spent on research, equipment, travel expenses, pay for subordinates, etc. They are paid salaries by the institutions that employ them. For PhD.'s it's usually in the $100,000 range which is a good living but it's not getting rich.
The "climategate" emails are much ado about nothing. How many things have you said in private emails that could be misinterpreted by someone with malicious intent? I'm afraid I not aware of any politics (other than internal politics) in the emails. As far as editorial influence, if you're talking about the remark of one scientist about doing whatever he could to keep a paper out of the IPCC report, the paper in fact was referenced in the latest IPCC report so he wasn't influential enough to keep it out. If you're talking about the Soon & Baliunas (2003) paper published in Climate Research the fact is that the paper had several major errors and should not have been published without major revisions. For instance it used precipitation proxies where it should have used temperature proxies and regional temperature changes were taken to be global changes. The publisher of the journal refused to allow the editorial staff to publish a retraction and appology and as a result most of the editors resigned. In the "climategate" emails the scientists were simply asking why they should submit papers to a journal that would publish such obviously flawed research. It wouldn't do any good for their reputation. The publisher of Climate Research later admitted that the S&B paper should not have been published.
My apologies, misread that - still, my point holds, as you note: "He also said they need more data for longer periods to improve the conclusions."
Well just about any scientist worth his salt would say that. Research is their life.;) But uncertainties (about clouds or anything else) just increases the magnitude of the error bars on their conclusions, they don't invalidate the conclusions. It's not an either/or thing that if they don't know everything then they know nothing. As in nearly all human endeavor we know more now than we knew last year and less than we will know next year.
Volcanoes
There may well be 3 million submarine volcanoes but what percent of them are active at any time? Here in Oregon I can see 4 volcanic peaks and a number of buttes on my way to work and in travels around the state I've seen hundreds of them. Not a one has erupted in my lifetime. Of course there's Mount St. Helens up in Washington that
Well, other than replacing some drives in the A1000 and the keyboard and mouse when the bathroom above our server room backed up (since fixed) we've never had any problems with it. We are running an old ERP (MK) system that we'll never upgrade so it works for us. Running Solaris 7 and Oracle 8i on it. We seldom put a serious load on it. In a few years we'll transfer to the ERP system our parent company runs which is Oracle Financials on some big Sun servers halfway across the country.
Menne et. al. uses unadjusted raw data. The differences in instruments you noted is one of the reasons temperature records are adjusted (normalized).
I would say that insisting that global warming can't be caused by CO2 is hubris. As I said, the radiative properties of CO2 are well known. We can measure the radiative emissions at the surface and on up to the top of the atmosphere and can see the signature of CO2 in how it changes as you go up. What is it that cancels out that effect?
Actually, that's *exactly* what most climate scientists... does. You start with the assumption that anthropogenic CO2 is the explanation for any unexplained warming. You then look for evidence to support that assumption. Any evidence found contrary to that assumption is discarded
Any scientist who operated that way could expect their scientific reputations to be destroyed once the truth was discovered. Do you really think the more than 95% of climate scientists who accept the consensus of CO2 causing global warming would risk that? It's not impossible that they are wrong but it's not credible to believe that all of them would be doing it dishonestly. I'm not sure what is not falsifiable about climate theory. It may not happen as fast as you like but certainly the passage of time will show whether they are right or wrong.
Less than a year's worth of data,...
March 2000 to February 2010 is 10 years of data. The satellite that collected the data was launched in December of 1999. Dessler didn't come to any conclusions about climate cycles, just that the net effect of clouds on the energy balance during that period appeared to be slightly positive. He also said they need more data for longer periods to improve the conclusions.
I'd say it's effectively infinite,...
Got any hard evidence to back that up? The transfer of heat between the surface of the ocean and the depths isn't very fast. It takes about 1600 years for water that sinks in the North Atlantic to surface again in the North Pacific. Most of the ocean where there isn't significant upwelling or sinking doesn't effectively transfer much heat vertically. The surface will warm faster and it will take time (a long time in human time scales at least) for the heat to spread out in the depths. As I said, the lag time on temperatures because of oceanic buffering is 30-40 years, after that it will take thousands of years for the increased temperatures to spread out to the full depth of the oceans.
I'm not sure why we would assume that only above ground volcanoes can affect climate...
Who is assuming anything? Volcanoes certainly can affect climate (Pinatubo) but there is no evidence of enough undersea volcanic activity to make a difference. I think you're assuming there is enough undersea activity to make a difference. Without some evidence that's just wishful thinking.
A 100% CO2 atmosphere... may indeed precipitate at higher altitudes.
No, below about 5.2 atmospheres of pressure liquid CO2 can't exist at any temperature. Dry ice sublimates directly to the gaseous phase. Maybe a little of it could precipitate out as frost in Antarctica when it's really cold but they've never found any layers of CO2 in the ice down there so it doesn't happen much and doesn't remove CO2 from the atmosphere for any length of time.
Granted, but supersaturation of CO2 in water happens:)
Yep, that's what makes soda pop fizzy. The only place that happens in nature is some volcanic springs. Lake Nyos in Cameroon killed 1700 people when the CO2 in it's depths was released.
The link to the paper comparing surfacestations.org well/poorly placed stations is here.
The extended warming in the 1700's coincides with the Sun coming out of the Maunder minimum as do other temperature changes coincide with levels of solar activity. That is not the case now, temperatures have been increasing despite solar activity not increasing.
So your null hypothesis is to assume that it's all magical, that we don't know enough to attribute the temperature change to anything? Scientists would beg to differ. The radiative properties of CO2 are well known. Certainly they get modified when they are mixed with other gases in a dynamic atmosphere but they don't go away. Scientists didn't decide that CO2 was the cause of global warming and then look for evidence to support that supposition. Instead they asked what are the factors that go into explaining the temperature on the surface of the Earth. They have found that after changes in insolation CO2 is the biggest factor. If you want to dispute that you have to come up with a better scientific argument than they have.
Clouds effects on global warming has been pretty intensely studied for the past decade. Dessler (2010) used cloud measurements over the whole planet from the CERES satellite from March 2000 to February 2010. He concludes that although a small negative feedback is possible cloud feedbacks are most likely positive. He also says a negative feedback from clouds strong enough to overcome the positive feedbacks is not supported by his observations. I wouldn't call that *completely* uncertain despite what Anthony Watts says.
If the ocean is absorbing heat from the atmosphere it's going to get warmer. The ocean is not an infinite heat sink. Warmer oceans mean warmer atmospheric temperatures. Because of the buffer effect of the oceans atmospheric temperatures lag what they would be relative to the radiative balance of the planet by 30-40 years but the atmosphere will catch up eventually.
You really ought to drop the undersea volcanoes argument. It is a hypothesis with no evidence to back it up. It makes it sound like your grasping at straws to support your position.
CO2 in the atmosphere is NOT limited by temperature. Ocean temperature does affect the absorption/out-gassing of CO2 but there is a balance between the ocean and atmosphere based on the partial pressure. No matter how high high the level of absorbed CO2 in the ocean if the partial pressure in the atmosphere is high enough the ocean will absorb more of it or if the partial pressure is low enough the ocean will out-gas it. There is no possibility of supersaturation of CO2 in the atmosphere under current conditions on the Earth. The atmosphere could be 100% CO2 and it still wouldn't precipitate out. The maximum percentage of H20 in the atmosphere is around 4% at the surface before it starts to precipitate out but as you go higher in the atmosphere that number gets smaller because of the colder temperatures. Above the troposphere there is more CO2 than water vapor in the atmosphere.
I guess you're calling my invoking of the second law of thermodynamics a toy model. Yes, it doesn't explain all of the complexities. It's just the place to start from and you can't override it.
What solar predictions? I'm not aware of any theory that predicts what the Sun is going to do other than to keep doing what is has been. If you can believe in solar predictions you ought to be able to believe what climate scientists say as well.
If I live another 40 years I'll be on the verge of being one of those celebrated centenarians. Wish me luck.
I took a look at your graphs. They conveniently have the years for the minimum and maximum points flagged. They show about 10 degrees C rise in about 10,000 years which is about 1 C per thousand years. Right now the slope is more like 1 C in less than 200 years. That is considerably steeper.
All I can say about natural cycles is that they account for all known ones. There may be ones we don't know about yet but you can't just assume that they exist.
... and only have a localized subset of measuring stations, you have no idea as to whether or not your distribution of those measuring stations is giving you a false flag. Perhaps all of your measuring stations are biased towards being on land... when you add the SSTs is an assumption, not a given.
Do you really think scientists have ignored the issues you raise over station placement either through incompetence (not likely) or for political reasons (laughable IMO)? That would be one of the first things I looked at if I wanted to derive a global average temperature. Sea surface temperatures are not part of the atmospheric temperature record.
Yes, it is an assumption. Water vapor can both warm and cool the planet,...
No, water vapor is the gaseous form of water. I think you're conflating it with clouds. They have quite different properties. Water vapor only acts as a greenhouse gas retaining more heat. Clouds can cause cooling by reflecting sunlight back out of the atmosphere but they also capture heat energy coming off the Earth's surface. The net effect of clouds on the greenhouse effect is thought to be slightly positive although it's still an area of some uncertainty.
The UHI does not have as dramatic effect on temperature measurements as you think. A comparison of the stations that surfacestations.org considered poorly placed (mostly because of UHI issues) vs. ones they considered well placed actually found a slight cooling bias for the poorly placed stations. (I'll dig up the paper if you want.)
(ever wonder how something with a lower specific heat like the atmosphere can theoretically warm something with a specific heat orders of magnitude larger?).
No.
A difference in specific heat only affects the rate at which heat transfer can happen. This is the answer to your "... trace gas, in parts per million,..." comment and the following paragraph as well.. If there is a temperature difference there will always be heat transfer from the warmer to the colder (the second law of thermodynamics). It may not be very fast but it happens.
Sure we could. We could simply say that the temperature was driven by solar output, or particular water vapor configuration (either cooling or warming), and that CO2 was a lagging indicator, driven *by* temperature, but not *causing* it.
Atmospheric temperature is the synthesis of all of the factors that affect it. That includes solar energy input, the absorption and re-radiation of that energy by the surface (albedo), the forcing and/or feedback of the various greenhouse gases and clouds, aerosols (which can also affect albedo when they fall out of the atmosphere), the topology of the surface and probably a number of other things. The only case where CO2 does not affect the atmospheric temperature is if there's zero part per million of it in the atmosphere. It may be a feedback from warming temperatures or it may be a forcing when volcanoes or burning fossil fuels add it to the atmosphere but the level of CO2 in that atmosphere is always a factor in global temperatures. Water vapor is also a factor but it can never drive global temperatures. The amount of it in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature. If the atmosphere is saturated with water vapor it quickly precipitates out so the level is limited.
Actuarialy speaking I'm old enough it's 50-50 whether I'll be alive in 20 years. I don't expect to see any significant cooling trend for the rest of my life and I doubt you will either even if you survive to 2100.
Those "steep curves" still cover 10,000 years or more, not the few hundred of our current situation. Using a 30 year period tends to cancel out the natural variability of known short term cyclical phenomena which gives a clearer picture of the long term trend. You can't ignore the longer term natural variability cycles of course but by definition they don't change that fast.
One thing I'd like to say about global average temperature. The number you see are not the TRUE average global temperature. It would require the instantaneous integration of all temperatures throughout the atmosphere, the oceans and the land. An obviously impossible task. But if the temperatures you see published are derived in a consistent way then it does give a reasonable indication of how temperature is changing over time. That's what's important about the numbers, not the absolute value.
Assumptions? Bzzzt! Try again.
You don't think scientists have examined the validity of using discrete measuring stations? There are peer reviewed papers on the subject.
CO2 amplifying the global warming effect of water vapor is no assumption. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly controlled by the air temperature (and the availability of water to evaporate into the atmosphere). If CO2 causes any warming then it will increase the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold. Any increased water vapor in the atmosphere will increase the amount of greenhouse warming from it, a feedback effect. An in fact it's true that the 1 degree Fahrenheit warming of the past century has increased the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere by about 4%. That's a factor in some of the extreme precipitation events we've been seeing lately.
UHI - no assumption here either. The UHI effect is certainly not negligible in the locale it is occurring but scientists have examined the effect globally and it's effect on the temperature record and again, in peer reviewed papers have addressed the subject. The UHI effect has a negligible effect on global temperature.
Nothing is based on a single driver but it's not wrong to point out the major factors. Of course the Sun is the primary driver of climate but in the short term CO2 is the second most important factor in determining global temperature. You can't explain the temperature during any epoch of the Earth's existence without accounting for CO2.
Sea surface temperatures are but a small part of the oceans which have an average depth of nearly 10,000 feet. That's a lot of area for heat to get lost in. Did you know that the top 10 feet of the oceans hold as much heat as all of the atmosphere?
The last ice age (glaciation) ended about 10,000 years ago (and started ending about 25,000 years ago). If you look at temperatures since then there was what they call the holocene optimum about 8,000 years ago and temperatures have been declining slowly since then. If climate scientists are right (and I see no reason to doubt them) we will have increasing temperatures for the foreseeable future.
O3 in the stratosphere in the ozone layer is created mostly by UV radiation causing an O2 molecule to split into 2 free oxygen atoms which then each link up with another O2 molecule to form O3.
The 2010 Atlantic hurricane season was the 3rd most active on record and I heard on the new today that they're predicting another active one this year.
Pedantically speaking it's not the R-12 (or other CFC's) that cause the ozone to break down. What happens is UV radiation breaks down the R-12 freeing the chlorine atoms which catalyzes the breakdown of ozone.
The difference between the North Polar region and the South Polar region is that the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land and covered by ice and Antarctica is land surrounded by ocean with ice sheets built up on it. It's considerably colder in Antarctica. The two regions are not really very comparable when you get into details. The Wikipedia article on ozone depletion has an explanation about the cause of the ozone hole. The northern hemisphere atmosphere and southern hemisphere atmosphere are somewhat separated but not completely which only affects how long it takes for full mixing to occur.
Asking questions like that just shows how poorly you understand the issue in the first place. Climate scientists would never even try to make that kind of prediction. That's more in the realm of weather prediction. What a climate scientist will say is "If things continue as they have been going with no significant changes to solar output or major volcanic eruptions or other unexpected influence then in 2050 the average temperature taken as a 30 year mean will be 1 degree warmer than it is today because of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, primarily CO2". If you ask questions like yours to climate scientists they'll just laugh at you.
There has been plenty of debate over the years in scientific circles over climate science and the current consensus is the result of that debate. I'm not sure what non-scientists in general could constructively add to it. Now if you're talking about the debate over what we should do about global warming then that's a political issue that everyone is welcome to but to have that debate the denier side first has to admit that there is a problem that needs addressing. There's no point in trying to debate someone who won't admit the problem in the first place.
That's a pretty bold assumption (that natural variability cycles zero out in 30 years). I'd point to recurring ice ages on the order of magnitude of tens of thousands of years as a trivial refutation of that idea.
Natural variability in this context refers to things like the 11 year solar cycle (actually 22 year), the El Nino/La Nina Cycles, and things like the PDO and AMO. The glaciation/deglaciation cycles of the ice age are natural variability due mostly to Milankovitch cycles which operate on scales of thousands of years and can be ignored for the purposes of this discussion.
Well, neither is 92%. Or 91%. Or heck, even 51% is better than even odds, right? This is the problem with non-falsifiable hypotheses and "science by statistics" - we're talking about percentages based on hundreds upon hundreds of assumptions laid upon each other. All due credit to Mr. Fermi, I've got no reason to believe that science by statistics is going to nail down actual causality.
Pray tell, what are some of these hundreds upon hundreds of assumptions? As far as defining exactly what the current climate is, it is the statistical accumulation of daily weather observations. You can't get away from statistics in climate science.
I'll see you in five years, my friend:)
Huh?! There has not been cooling for the last 15 years, just warming that is slightly short of the statistical significance test. How will you feel in 5 years when a new record for the warmest year is set (probably in 2012)?
Let me say again, there has been no lack of warming, especially when you take into account the total energy in the whole system. That includes the atmosphere, the oceans, the land surface and the cryosphere (ice). Humanity will survive but I'll bet that half of Florida will be underwater by 2200. Unfortunately neither of us will live to see that. None of the things in your list are directly caused by global warming (except maybe high temperatures) but there is a piece of global warming in them that modifies their effects (although it's tenuous at best for earthquakes, tsunami's and volcanoes).
What will you be saying in 2020 if this decade turns out to be another "hottest decade in the temperature record"?
I have read the quote a number of times and even used it to respond to people who claim Phil Jones says it's not warming. Did you even read it. He's saying that 15 years is too short a time to make a definitive statement about that. Climatologists often work with 30 year periods, long enough for the natural variability cycles to zero out.
The 95% confidence level is a rather arbitrary number. I think it's probably a good number but there's nothing that makes it the absolute gold standard. It simply means there is a 5% or less chance that the phenomenon being observed is not significant. And I read somewhere that the significance level that Phil Jones did calculate for that period was 93%. That's not significantly below 95% in my book.
And if you use the GISS temperature record rather than the CRU record the warming in that period is significant statistically speaking.
And in another post you asked how is current climate theory falsifiable. I would say at least 20 years of cooling despite rising CO2 levels who be pretty good falsification with the caveat that there isn't a major volcanic eruption or some significant drop in solar output in that time period.
Slashdot Mirror
You got that right.
(Native Oregonian who has lived in Bend before it got crazy.)
Hmm, interesting. It wouldn't hurt to put in hydro-power at Bowman Dam. Every little bit helps. But it's only 6 megawatts. According the the Central Oregonian article Crook County currently uses about 40 megawatts not counting the Facebook center. The new power line they're planning to run from the Powell Butte Ponderosa substation would up the capacity going into Crook County to 120 megawatts.
I doubt the power from the Bowman Dam would be used for peaking. The water output has to be held pretty steady on that river so all they can do is turn the generators on or off, not the water. There are other dams around that can be used for peaking power. The one I'm most familiar with in that regard is Hells Canyon Dam on the Snake River. When I whitewater boat that river in the summer the water level often changes over 3 feet up and down over a 24 hour period. Crooked River is small enough you can wade across it in places in the summer both above and below the reservoir.
What two steep rivers? The Crooked River and Ochoco Creek? There's not enough water between the two of them to power the data center. Most of the hydro-power in the northwest comes from the dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers.
Prineville is a redneck place. I should know, I have cousins that grew up in the vicinity. The lumber mill shutting down and Les Schwab Tires moving their headquarters from Prineville to Bend doesn't help the unemployment situation. It's mainly a ranching and lumbering area that's off the main highway systems. Prineville is also the county seat of Crook County which helps make it larger than it would otherwise be.
I think that is a device for measuring atmospheric distortion. The can use the information to correct for it in the actual images the telescope is taking.
No, if they used long shutter times you would see streaks instead of points for the stars because the camera obviously wasn't moving. The occasional streaks you do see are mostly satellites.
:)
Yes, I can see that. But sometimes I just get a bug about not allowing a climate change denier the last word. Sometimes I'll spend an hour or more researching my reply and it solidifies my understanding of the situation. No doubt in 20 years he'll still be coming up with alternative explanations for a world that continues to warm and become a bitter old man when the world doesn't conform to his expectations.
Stating that our current state of knowledge is insufficient to definitively assert that CO2 is the primary driver of climate changes is prideful?
It sounds like you think I'm saying the CO2 is the only driver of climate change. No, it isn't. Over the 4.5 billion year history of the Earth far more often than not it is not the driver of climate change. But it's also true that you always have to factor in the radiative forcing of CO2 in order to understand the temperature of the planet. So I would say, yes, every change in CO2 levels does precede related changes in temperature. But it takes several decades to a few centuries for the changes to fully manifest. As I said, mostly because of oceanic buffering, it takes 30-40 years for the atmosphere to catch up with the forcing so the temperature changes we're seeing now are about where we'd have ended up if we had stopped increasing the CO2 level in the 1970's-1980's. Even after the atmospheric temperature catches up there other feedbacks such as melting ice, sea level and ecosystems that take much longer to reach a new equilibrium.
I think that that promise of funding and financial security is a corrupting influence on results.
Scientists don't go into science to get rich. If they're that smart and want to get rich they get into finance and go to Wall Street. The money they get for grants does not line their pockets. It's spent on research, equipment, travel expenses, pay for subordinates, etc. They are paid salaries by the institutions that employ them. For PhD.'s it's usually in the $100,000 range which is a good living but it's not getting rich.
The "climategate" emails are much ado about nothing. How many things have you said in private emails that could be misinterpreted by someone with malicious intent? I'm afraid I not aware of any politics (other than internal politics) in the emails. As far as editorial influence, if you're talking about the remark of one scientist about doing whatever he could to keep a paper out of the IPCC report, the paper in fact was referenced in the latest IPCC report so he wasn't influential enough to keep it out. If you're talking about the Soon & Baliunas (2003) paper published in Climate Research the fact is that the paper had several major errors and should not have been published without major revisions. For instance it used precipitation proxies where it should have used temperature proxies and regional temperature changes were taken to be global changes. The publisher of the journal refused to allow the editorial staff to publish a retraction and appology and as a result most of the editors resigned. In the "climategate" emails the scientists were simply asking why they should submit papers to a journal that would publish such obviously flawed research. It wouldn't do any good for their reputation. The publisher of Climate Research later admitted that the S&B paper should not have been published.
My apologies, misread that - still, my point holds, as you note: "He also said they need more data for longer periods to improve the conclusions."
Well just about any scientist worth his salt would say that. Research is their life. ;) But uncertainties (about clouds or anything else) just increases the magnitude of the error bars on their conclusions, they don't invalidate the conclusions. It's not an either/or thing that if they don't know everything then they know nothing. As in nearly all human endeavor we know more now than we knew last year and less than we will know next year.
Volcanoes
There may well be 3 million submarine volcanoes but what percent of them are active at any time? Here in Oregon I can see 4 volcanic peaks and a number of buttes on my way to work and in travels around the state I've seen hundreds of them. Not a one has erupted in my lifetime. Of course there's Mount St. Helens up in Washington that
Well, other than replacing some drives in the A1000 and the keyboard and mouse when the bathroom above our server room backed up (since fixed) we've never had any problems with it. We are running an old ERP (MK) system that we'll never upgrade so it works for us. Running Solaris 7 and Oracle 8i on it. We seldom put a serious load on it. In a few years we'll transfer to the ERP system our parent company runs which is Oracle Financials on some big Sun servers halfway across the country.
Actually the hardware support contract for our 10 year old E450 and A1000 dropped slightly this year. No changes in coverage.
Menne et. al. uses unadjusted raw data. The differences in instruments you noted is one of the reasons temperature records are adjusted (normalized).
I would say that insisting that global warming can't be caused by CO2 is hubris. As I said, the radiative properties of CO2 are well known. We can measure the radiative emissions at the surface and on up to the top of the atmosphere and can see the signature of CO2 in how it changes as you go up. What is it that cancels out that effect?
Actually, that's *exactly* what most climate scientists ... does. You start with the assumption that anthropogenic CO2 is the explanation for any unexplained warming. You then look for evidence to support that assumption. Any evidence found contrary to that assumption is discarded
Any scientist who operated that way could expect their scientific reputations to be destroyed once the truth was discovered. Do you really think the more than 95% of climate scientists who accept the consensus of CO2 causing global warming would risk that? It's not impossible that they are wrong but it's not credible to believe that all of them would be doing it dishonestly. I'm not sure what is not falsifiable about climate theory. It may not happen as fast as you like but certainly the passage of time will show whether they are right or wrong.
Less than a year's worth of data, ...
March 2000 to February 2010 is 10 years of data. The satellite that collected the data was launched in December of 1999. Dessler didn't come to any conclusions about climate cycles, just that the net effect of clouds on the energy balance during that period appeared to be slightly positive. He also said they need more data for longer periods to improve the conclusions.
I'd say it's effectively infinite, ...
Got any hard evidence to back that up? The transfer of heat between the surface of the ocean and the depths isn't very fast. It takes about 1600 years for water that sinks in the North Atlantic to surface again in the North Pacific. Most of the ocean where there isn't significant upwelling or sinking doesn't effectively transfer much heat vertically. The surface will warm faster and it will take time (a long time in human time scales at least) for the heat to spread out in the depths. As I said, the lag time on temperatures because of oceanic buffering is 30-40 years, after that it will take thousands of years for the increased temperatures to spread out to the full depth of the oceans.
I'm not sure why we would assume that only above ground volcanoes can affect climate ...
Who is assuming anything? Volcanoes certainly can affect climate (Pinatubo) but there is no evidence of enough undersea volcanic activity to make a difference. I think you're assuming there is enough undersea activity to make a difference. Without some evidence that's just wishful thinking.
A 100% CO2 atmosphere ... may indeed precipitate at higher altitudes.
No, below about 5.2 atmospheres of pressure liquid CO2 can't exist at any temperature. Dry ice sublimates directly to the gaseous phase. Maybe a little of it could precipitate out as frost in Antarctica when it's really cold but they've never found any layers of CO2 in the ice down there so it doesn't happen much and doesn't remove CO2 from the atmosphere for any length of time.
Granted, but supersaturation of CO2 in water happens :)
Yep, that's what makes soda pop fizzy. The only place that happens in nature is some volcanic springs. Lake Nyos in Cameroon killed 1700 people when the CO2 in it's depths was released.
Neither of your solar prediction links makes any
The link to the paper comparing surfacestations.org well/poorly placed stations is here.
The extended warming in the 1700's coincides with the Sun coming out of the Maunder minimum as do other temperature changes coincide with levels of solar activity. That is not the case now, temperatures have been increasing despite solar activity not increasing.
So your null hypothesis is to assume that it's all magical, that we don't know enough to attribute the temperature change to anything? Scientists would beg to differ. The radiative properties of CO2 are well known. Certainly they get modified when they are mixed with other gases in a dynamic atmosphere but they don't go away. Scientists didn't decide that CO2 was the cause of global warming and then look for evidence to support that supposition. Instead they asked what are the factors that go into explaining the temperature on the surface of the Earth. They have found that after changes in insolation CO2 is the biggest factor. If you want to dispute that you have to come up with a better scientific argument than they have.
Clouds effects on global warming has been pretty intensely studied for the past decade. Dessler (2010) used cloud measurements over the whole planet from the CERES satellite from March 2000 to February 2010. He concludes that although a small negative feedback is possible cloud feedbacks are most likely positive. He also says a negative feedback from clouds strong enough to overcome the positive feedbacks is not supported by his observations. I wouldn't call that *completely* uncertain despite what Anthony Watts says.
If the ocean is absorbing heat from the atmosphere it's going to get warmer. The ocean is not an infinite heat sink. Warmer oceans mean warmer atmospheric temperatures. Because of the buffer effect of the oceans atmospheric temperatures lag what they would be relative to the radiative balance of the planet by 30-40 years but the atmosphere will catch up eventually.
You really ought to drop the undersea volcanoes argument. It is a hypothesis with no evidence to back it up. It makes it sound like your grasping at straws to support your position.
CO2 in the atmosphere is NOT limited by temperature. Ocean temperature does affect the absorption/out-gassing of CO2 but there is a balance between the ocean and atmosphere based on the partial pressure. No matter how high high the level of absorbed CO2 in the ocean if the partial pressure in the atmosphere is high enough the ocean will absorb more of it or if the partial pressure is low enough the ocean will out-gas it. There is no possibility of supersaturation of CO2 in the atmosphere under current conditions on the Earth. The atmosphere could be 100% CO2 and it still wouldn't precipitate out. The maximum percentage of H20 in the atmosphere is around 4% at the surface before it starts to precipitate out but as you go higher in the atmosphere that number gets smaller because of the colder temperatures. Above the troposphere there is more CO2 than water vapor in the atmosphere.
I guess you're calling my invoking of the second law of thermodynamics a toy model. Yes, it doesn't explain all of the complexities. It's just the place to start from and you can't override it.
What solar predictions? I'm not aware of any theory that predicts what the Sun is going to do other than to keep doing what is has been. If you can believe in solar predictions you ought to be able to believe what climate scientists say as well.
If I live another 40 years I'll be on the verge of being one of those celebrated centenarians. Wish me luck.
I took a look at your graphs. They conveniently have the years for the minimum and maximum points flagged. They show about 10 degrees C rise in about 10,000 years which is about 1 C per thousand years. Right now the slope is more like 1 C in less than 200 years. That is considerably steeper.
All I can say about natural cycles is that they account for all known ones. There may be ones we don't know about yet but you can't just assume that they exist.
Do you really think scientists have ignored the issues you raise over station placement either through incompetence (not likely) or for political reasons (laughable IMO)? That would be one of the first things I looked at if I wanted to derive a global average temperature. Sea surface temperatures are not part of the atmospheric temperature record.
Yes, it is an assumption. Water vapor can both warm and cool the planet,...
No, water vapor is the gaseous form of water. I think you're conflating it with clouds. They have quite different properties. Water vapor only acts as a greenhouse gas retaining more heat. Clouds can cause cooling by reflecting sunlight back out of the atmosphere but they also capture heat energy coming off the Earth's surface. The net effect of clouds on the greenhouse effect is thought to be slightly positive although it's still an area of some uncertainty.
The UHI does not have as dramatic effect on temperature measurements as you think. A comparison of the stations that surfacestations.org considered poorly placed (mostly because of UHI issues) vs. ones they considered well placed actually found a slight cooling bias for the poorly placed stations. (I'll dig up the paper if you want.)
(ever wonder how something with a lower specific heat like the atmosphere can theoretically warm something with a specific heat orders of magnitude larger?).
No.
A difference in specific heat only affects the rate at which heat transfer can happen. This is the answer to your "... trace gas, in parts per million, ..." comment and the following paragraph as well.. If there is a temperature difference there will always be heat transfer from the warmer to the colder (the second law of thermodynamics). It may not be very fast but it happens.
Sure we could. We could simply say that the temperature was driven by solar output, or particular water vapor configuration (either cooling or warming), and that CO2 was a lagging indicator, driven *by* temperature, but not *causing* it.
Atmospheric temperature is the synthesis of all of the factors that affect it. That includes solar energy input, the absorption and re-radiation of that energy by the surface (albedo), the forcing and/or feedback of the various greenhouse gases and clouds, aerosols (which can also affect albedo when they fall out of the atmosphere), the topology of the surface and probably a number of other things. The only case where CO2 does not affect the atmospheric temperature is if there's zero part per million of it in the atmosphere. It may be a feedback from warming temperatures or it may be a forcing when volcanoes or burning fossil fuels add it to the atmosphere but the level of CO2 in that atmosphere is always a factor in global temperatures. Water vapor is also a factor but it can never drive global temperatures. The amount of it in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature. If the atmosphere is saturated with water vapor it quickly precipitates out so the level is limited.
Actuarialy speaking I'm old enough it's 50-50 whether I'll be alive in 20 years. I don't expect to see any significant cooling trend for the rest of my life and I doubt you will either even if you survive to 2100.
Those "steep curves" still cover 10,000 years or more, not the few hundred of our current situation. Using a 30 year period tends to cancel out the natural variability of known short term cyclical phenomena which gives a clearer picture of the long term trend. You can't ignore the longer term natural variability cycles of course but by definition they don't change that fast.
One thing I'd like to say about global average temperature. The number you see are not the TRUE average global temperature. It would require the instantaneous integration of all temperatures throughout the atmosphere, the oceans and the land. An obviously impossible task. But if the temperatures you see published are derived in a consistent way then it does give a reasonable indication of how temperature is changing over time. That's what's important about the numbers, not the absolute value.
Assumptions? Bzzzt! Try again.
You don't think scientists have examined the validity of using discrete measuring stations? There are peer reviewed papers on the subject.
CO2 amplifying the global warming effect of water vapor is no assumption. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly controlled by the air temperature (and the availability of water to evaporate into the atmosphere). If CO2 causes any warming then it will increase the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold. Any increased water vapor in the atmosphere will increase the amount of greenhouse warming from it, a feedback effect. An in fact it's true that the 1 degree Fahrenheit warming of the past century has increased the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere by about 4%. That's a factor in some of the extreme precipitation events we've been seeing lately.
UHI - no assumption here either. The UHI effect is certainly not negligible in the locale it is occurring but scientists have examined the effect globally and it's effect on the temperature record and again, in peer reviewed papers have addressed the subject. The UHI effect has a negligible effect on global temperature.
Nothing is based on a single driver but it's not wrong to point out the major factors. Of course the Sun is the primary driver of climate but in the short term CO2 is the second most important factor in determining global temperature. You can't explain the temperature during any epoch of the Earth's existence without accounting for CO2.
Sea surface temperatures are but a small part of the oceans which have an average depth of nearly 10,000 feet. That's a lot of area for heat to get lost in. Did you know that the top 10 feet of the oceans hold as much heat as all of the atmosphere?
The last ice age (glaciation) ended about 10,000 years ago (and started ending about 25,000 years ago). If you look at temperatures since then there was what they call the holocene optimum about 8,000 years ago and temperatures have been declining slowly since then. If climate scientists are right (and I see no reason to doubt them) we will have increasing temperatures for the foreseeable future.
O3 in the stratosphere in the ozone layer is created mostly by UV radiation causing an O2 molecule to split into 2 free oxygen atoms which then each link up with another O2 molecule to form O3.
Don't forget the sunscreen. I sure as hell wouldn't want to get a sunburn there.
I'd love to see you provide cites to Phil Jones saying any of the things you attribute to him. You can't find them.
The 2010 Atlantic hurricane season was the 3rd most active on record and I heard on the new today that they're predicting another active one this year.
Pedantically speaking it's not the R-12 (or other CFC's) that cause the ozone to break down. What happens is UV radiation breaks down the R-12 freeing the chlorine atoms which catalyzes the breakdown of ozone.
The difference between the North Polar region and the South Polar region is that the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land and covered by ice and Antarctica is land surrounded by ocean with ice sheets built up on it. It's considerably colder in Antarctica. The two regions are not really very comparable when you get into details. The Wikipedia article on ozone depletion has an explanation about the cause of the ozone hole. The northern hemisphere atmosphere and southern hemisphere atmosphere are somewhat separated but not completely which only affects how long it takes for full mixing to occur.
Asking questions like that just shows how poorly you understand the issue in the first place. Climate scientists would never even try to make that kind of prediction. That's more in the realm of weather prediction. What a climate scientist will say is "If things continue as they have been going with no significant changes to solar output or major volcanic eruptions or other unexpected influence then in 2050 the average temperature taken as a 30 year mean will be 1 degree warmer than it is today because of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, primarily CO2". If you ask questions like yours to climate scientists they'll just laugh at you.
There has been plenty of debate over the years in scientific circles over climate science and the current consensus is the result of that debate. I'm not sure what non-scientists in general could constructively add to it. Now if you're talking about the debate over what we should do about global warming then that's a political issue that everyone is welcome to but to have that debate the denier side first has to admit that there is a problem that needs addressing. There's no point in trying to debate someone who won't admit the problem in the first place.
Lindzen may have credentials but his track record doesn't inspire much confidence in his opinion.
The warming trend has continued uninterrupted since the 1970's so over 30 years of warming. That's long enough for a significant trend.
That's a pretty bold assumption (that natural variability cycles zero out in 30 years). I'd point to recurring ice ages on the order of magnitude of tens of thousands of years as a trivial refutation of that idea.
Natural variability in this context refers to things like the 11 year solar cycle (actually 22 year), the El Nino/La Nina Cycles, and things like the PDO and AMO. The glaciation/deglaciation cycles of the ice age are natural variability due mostly to Milankovitch cycles which operate on scales of thousands of years and can be ignored for the purposes of this discussion.
Well, neither is 92%. Or 91%. Or heck, even 51% is better than even odds, right? This is the problem with non-falsifiable hypotheses and "science by statistics" - we're talking about percentages based on hundreds upon hundreds of assumptions laid upon each other. All due credit to Mr. Fermi, I've got no reason to believe that science by statistics is going to nail down actual causality.
Pray tell, what are some of these hundreds upon hundreds of assumptions? As far as defining exactly what the current climate is, it is the statistical accumulation of daily weather observations. You can't get away from statistics in climate science.
I'll see you in five years, my friend :)
Huh?! There has not been cooling for the last 15 years, just warming that is slightly short of the statistical significance test. How will you feel in 5 years when a new record for the warmest year is set (probably in 2012)?
Let me say again, there has been no lack of warming, especially when you take into account the total energy in the whole system. That includes the atmosphere, the oceans, the land surface and the cryosphere (ice). Humanity will survive but I'll bet that half of Florida will be underwater by 2200. Unfortunately neither of us will live to see that. None of the things in your list are directly caused by global warming (except maybe high temperatures) but there is a piece of global warming in them that modifies their effects (although it's tenuous at best for earthquakes, tsunami's and volcanoes).
What will you be saying in 2020 if this decade turns out to be another "hottest decade in the temperature record"?
I have read the quote a number of times and even used it to respond to people who claim Phil Jones says it's not warming. Did you even read it. He's saying that 15 years is too short a time to make a definitive statement about that. Climatologists often work with 30 year periods, long enough for the natural variability cycles to zero out.
The 95% confidence level is a rather arbitrary number. I think it's probably a good number but there's nothing that makes it the absolute gold standard. It simply means there is a 5% or less chance that the phenomenon being observed is not significant. And I read somewhere that the significance level that Phil Jones did calculate for that period was 93%. That's not significantly below 95% in my book.
And if you use the GISS temperature record rather than the CRU record the warming in that period is significant statistically speaking.
And in another post you asked how is current climate theory falsifiable. I would say at least 20 years of cooling despite rising CO2 levels who be pretty good falsification with the caveat that there isn't a major volcanic eruption or some significant drop in solar output in that time period.