"Consider the earth 14,000 years ago. CO2 levels were around 200 ppm and temperatures, at 6C below present values, were rising fast. Now consider 30,000 years ago. CO2 levels were also around 200 ppm and temperatures were also about 6C below current levels, yet at that time the earth was cooling. Exactly the same CO2 and temperature levels as 14,000 years ago, but the opposite direction of temperature change. CO2 was not the driver."
CO2 at 200ppm behaves the same way as CO2 at 200ppm. It does not care whether or not the jump from 180-200ppm came from a volcano, outgassing from oceans, or through forest fires. Asserting that it does is a special pleading that requires ad hoc additions and assumptions to explain past climactic variation.
I believe that is the cause because it's bleeding obvious, and so well accepted that it is part of the definition of seasons.
Again, your rhetoric failed. You were trying to compare a tautological definition to competing hypotheses with Occam's razor. The fact that you didn't express yourself well isn't my fault.
I know! And then to complete the analogy, you would have said "Well, we can't be certain. It was once the province of California and the borders have changed over time, and/and/and" Priceless!
Again, your comprehension here is lacking. I did not take your poorly phrased statement as a simple assertion of a tautological definition (since that was incongruous with the idea of comparing it to competing hypotheses, and I assumed that you *meant* what you said). To interpret my response to the poorly worded statement you made as if I understood that you were talking about a tautological definition is a mistake.
Would we notice the equivalent of 56,000 nuclear bombs/hour leaking from Mt. St. Helens?
You're drunk now, aren't you?:) I simply asserted that the back of the napkin equation regarding the energy coming from fission internal to the earth could affect climate by having a spatial temporal distribution other than perfectly even everywhere. How you get to 56,000 nuclear bombs an hour is a testament to whatever hallucinogen you're currently ingesting:)
As the temperature of a black body increases, the emission of infrared radiation back into space increases with the fourth power of its absolute temperature. This keeps the gain under 1.
You're still not making sense. You want to assert that the climate of the earth cannot have runaway cooling or warming because...you think it acts like a blackbody? Isn't the whole GHG argument that the earth does *not* behave the way we would calculate a perfect blackbody would act?
How can you conclude that CO2 is not the primary driver of the current warming without knowing the basics of climate science?
I do know the basics (and quite a few of the advanced features) of climate science, which is why I conclude that CO2 is not the primary driver of any warming in history. You seem to be missing some very basic understandings though.
Oh dear. I've confused you with a double negative.
I understand - you're not very good at being clear...let me restate for you:
"it still begs the question, what is the *relative* strength of CO2 to other forcings?"
"Yes, another good question. One to which there is a clear answer."
Okay, what is the clear answer? How, for example, do you compare the relative strength of CO2 to the specifics of cloud formation? Here are a few more thorough indications that the answer you believe is not the truth:
If the CO2 is released as a result of warming then it's a feedback. If it is released as the result of burning fossil fuels then it is not a feedback. Duh!
Again, you're making a special pleading that the *source* of CO2 will somehow determine its effect. This is clearly false. A molecule of CO2 does not know or care about its origin before it decides to absorb or radiate energy.
"So there it is: every Watt per meter squared of additional GHG forcing, during the last 50 years, has increased the global average surface air temperature by 0.09 C.
Spread the word: the Earth climate sensitivity is 0.090 C/W-m^-2."
This is just about the same ballpark as the geothermal average values we were talking about earlier.
My definition? This is not MY definition. This is THE definition. Yes, I stated something that was true by definition.
No, you stated, "I believe that the seasons are caused because the earth's axis is tilted with respect to it's orbit."
Your problem words here are "believe" and "caused" -> they have *nothing* to do with a tautological definition.
The point was meant to be rhetorical. It was meant to show that your understanding of Occam's razor leads you down these rabbet holes.
The rhetoric was flawed. Asserting that the precise statement of a tautological definition has *anything* to do with competing hypotheses as described by Occam's razor shows a great deal of misunderstanding on your part. You might have well said, "the State of California is called the State of California" - it would have been just as relevant to a rhetorical point regarding Occam's razor.
Do you understand your error now? Are you *trying* to understand where you failed to express yourself in a clear and rational way?
Go on. I'm interested in which physical law you will need to disregard first in order to show that this could happen.
We don't have to disregard any physical laws. Just take for example Mt. St. Helens -> over the past ten millennia, you could measure all of its activity, and put an average daily energy level on it. If that energy was indeed released evenly over ten millennia, the overall output would be the same, but the effect on climate would be significantly different. As it stands, we know that the energy is *not* released evenly, but in large spikes many orders of magnitude above the average daily output we could calculate.
I'm not sure how that follows. How does a blackbody model stop runaway warming or cooling, in the absence of significant negative feedbacks?
Yes, another good question. Not one to which there is no answer.
So, let's be clear - now you admit that we don't know the relative magnitude of CO2 forcing, even though you've been insisting that CO2 forcing is what explains 20th century warming. Can you make up your mind?
It's basic physics and frankly should be obvious.
Magically differing behavior of a gas in the atmosphere depending on the century is not basic physics at all. Here's basic physics - Take a sealed container of air and water, and observe the "greenhouse" effect of CO2 under a lamp which causes a temperature increase in the water. Posit that it is a feedback in this instance, which out gasses from the water as heat increases, slightly increasing the temperature of the water due to "back radiation", causing more out gassing until some sort of limit is reached. Now inject extra CO2 into that container. Explain how this extra CO2 is *any different* from the CO2 that was out gassed earlier.
But where it comes from does matter in terms of how it got there.
How it got there doesn't matter, it still behaves the same way.
Yes. That is the definition of summer. No matter how hot the winter, it will never become summer. To dispute this is ludicrous.
Well, with your definition expounded upon to mean nothing less than a tautology (rather than a discussion of specifically seasonal variations of a given magnitude), I wonder what you were trying to point out in the first place. The sensitivity of the climate to CO2 is *not* a tautology, in the way that "George Washington was named George Washington" is. Given your backpedaling, you were making a terribly poor argument when you said:
"I believe that the seasons are caused because the earth's axis is tilted with respect to it's orbit. "
What you now assert you really meant to say was:
"I believe that the definition of the word season is the tilt of the earth's axis with respect to it's orbit."
There was no "cause" in question at all, you were simply stating a definition.
Go ahead, Explain how 2 w/m^2 from CO2 is vanishingly insignificant but 0.075 is a likely driver of climate.
0.075 is simply an average without respect to actual temporal spatial differences. To think that 0.075, averaged say, over millennia, cannot make a difference if the actual effect comes in large spikes rather than an even flow, is to be willfully ignorant.
Oh, I see. 2 w/m^2 is not sufficient but 0.075 possibly is.
2 w/m^2 from CO2 is not variable in any great degree in space or time. Geothermal energy certainly is.
We know that the sensitivity (to all forcings) is large (but not ridiculously so- that's all you) because we can observe small forcings causing large changes throughout history.
That's a flat out lie. We know that sensitivity (to all forcings) is small, because we can observe negative feedback patterns that stop climate from irreversibly going to either super cold or super hot.
On *top* of that, if sensitivity to *all* forcings was large, it still begs the question, what is the *relative* strength of CO2 to other forcings. You're talking yourself in a circle.
The change is that now we are releasing hundreds of thousands of tons of fossilized CO2. Before we were not. Previously CO2 was a feedback, and now it is both a driver and a feedback.
That's circular reasoning, and a special pleading. I'll assert to you that CO2 doesn't care *where* it came from before it has a physical effect on temperature. Whether or not it came from volcanic activity, or meteor impact, or even biological processes, it should not behave any differently than when it comes from a human burning coal for energy.
Of course rising temperatures do not implicate the cause.
You didn't read the dictionary did you? Seasons are that change in climate which is attributed to tilt relative to orbit.
You're again putting up a strawman that I don't propose. Your original quote was "Summer happens in the hemisphere tilted towards the Sun." The implication was that "summer temperatures *always* happen in the hemisphere tilted towards the Sun". The counter indication was the 1816 Year Without Summer.
Seasons are specific magnitudes of change in climate, at certain latitudes, due to the combination of the tilt of the planet, as well as the heat propagation properties of the earth's climate system, including atmospheric and oceanic, and the occasional large scale volcanic eruption as demonstrated in 1816.
Argue against what I'm proposing, not your strawman.
This is the line of reasoning that led you to invoke the following hilarity: "it could very well be the motion of energy from the core of the earth towards the surface, and therefore the oceans, and therefore the air."
Why is that somehow hilarious? Do you really think the temperature of the earth's atmosphere would be the same if the actual ground, from crust to core, was a mild 72F?
"When we compute the total amount of energy generated by 232Th, 238U, and 40K, we find that the total, global, energy production is 3.8x1013 Watts, or 38,000,000,000,000 Watts, or 38 trillion Watts!...Although 38 trillion Watts is a lot of energy, when we spread it out over the entire surface of the Earth, the average global heat flow is only about 0.075 Watts/meter2."
Now don't get me wrong,.075 watts/m^2 isn't a huge amount, but it is a real factor, and it could have dramatic variation from time to time (the internal core of the earth creates heat through fission, but that doesn't guarantee an even amount of radiation through to the crust at any single point in time). At the very least it is plausible, and not particularly hilarious.
Why not attribute the warming to something that we know causes warming in the range that we are observing instead of attributing it to something that could not possibly do so?
Because you have no idea that anthropogenic CO2 causes the warming in the range that we observe. You make assumption upon assumption of how a fractional part of CO2 in the atmosphere will affect positive feedbacks in the atmosphere, and hyper attribute warming, instead of actually looking for more understanding of the effect of CO2. The question is, why assume that the global climate system has a ridiculously large sensitivity to CO2, simply because we have not identified other natural mechanisms that could account for it?
You have created a convoluted mess in your head in order to come to the conclusion that CO2 cannot have more than a vanishingly small effect on temperature.
I refer you to the ice cores which show CO2 levels lagging, rather than leading temperature changes, as a reasonable line of evidence indicating that whatever vanishingly small effect of CO2 may exist, it is regularly overwhelmed in the historical record by temperature changes driven by natural factors, and we can continue to expect the same kind of behavior in the future. CO2 does not magically change its behavior in the 20th century.
No, but I presume that you do.
So let me understand clearly - you're willing to concede that an upwards march of temperature over a period of anywhere from 30-100 years, does not necessarily mean that its origin must be anthropogenic CO2, and does not necessarily mean that such an upward trend would cause harm to humanity or the biosphere?
Atmosphere and oceans are not necessary or even relevant. Without them, there would still be seasons.
I suggest you reconsider your rather extreme and strange position. The current seasonal differentials in temperate and arctic climate would be *vastly* different without an atmosphere or ocean.
Perhaps you're confusing the idea of having *any* sort of seasonality with having the observed modern seasonality? Again, I refer you to the Late Eocene when Antarctica was distinctly temperate, and when our current temperate regions were pretty much equivalent to our current tropical regions.
Instead it recommends the hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions.
Listen to yourself for a moment - the hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions about climate variation is the one that assumes that observed variations are natural. Assuming that CO2 is driving modern climate variation (whereas in the ice core record, it actually lags significantly), is a new assumption.
You have created a convoluted mess in your head in order to come to the conclusion that CO2 cannot affect temperature.
On the contrary, I believe it can affect temperature, but I believe that it is a vanishingly small effect overwhelmed by other natural forces. Your strawman here fails to illustrate my position.
You are so committed to the conclusion that you cannot even accept that temperatures have risen over the last 30 years.
On the contrary, I believe we have had both periods of warming and cooling over the past 30 years, and that through careful selection of endpoints, you can show any trend you want. You seem to have a real problem with understanding that.
Furthermore, you continue to avoid the critical questions - any warming trend could be natural and unrelated to human activity of any sort, and any warming trend could be beneficial to humanity and the biosphere. You seem to believe that simply identifying a warming trend, over any given point in time, automatically means that I must accept that humans are the primary cause, and that the effect will be a "bad thing". Yes, the rooster crows and the sun come out at the same time, but that doesn't mean the rooster moved the sun, or that killing the rooster is going to end daytime as we know it. "The sky is falling" is a common refrain for apocalyptic preachers that seems to have been taken up in the guise of climate science.
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.
I'll suggest this experiment - take an enclosed indoor swimming pool with an equilibrium state of the water at 72F and the air at 72F. Increase the air conditioning to 120F, and leave it there for an hour. Turn off the air conditioning. Questions to ask: 1) how much did the pool warm during that hour of 120F? 2) how long does it take for that warming to dissipate?
I find it more reasonable to imagine that a 30 year buffer in the oceans is more related to direct solar influences on the ocean, rather than mediation through the atmosphere. If anything, it seems likely that the atmosphere only moderates it via albedo, rather than by heat transfer (given the incredibly small amount of heat the atmosphere carries compared to the oceans).
Scientists don't go into science to get rich.
That may be well and true, but that doesn't mean that they aren't incentivized to provide results that will continue the outside financial support of their research. It's not only rich people that are incented by money (and in fact, one might argue that poor people are *more* incented by it).
The "climategate" emails are much ado about nothing.
Have you read them? Have you read the HARRY_README.TXT? The Climategate emails, and the data that accompanied them, were a scathing indictment of the honesty and transparency of a group of scientists who were not interested in competing on equal ground with competing hypotheses.
But uncertainties (about clouds or anything else) just increases the magnitude of the error bars on their conclusions, they don't invalidate the conclusions.
An increase in magnitude of error bars on conclusions makes a conclusion much harder to assert. If I say the temperature may increase 1C over the next hundred years, +/- 10C, certainly my conclusion will not be falsified by any stretch of the imagination, but is it a *useful* conclusion? The fact that error bars in this case may be orders of magnitude greater than the trend we're supposed to be identifying makes these kinds of "conclusions" particularly unuseful.
So I'm skeptical that even 1% of those 3 million submarine volcanoes has erupted in the past 50 years.
That's fine, but still, 30,000 volcanoes erupting in the past 50 years is going to have an impact on the heat content of the ocean. There's no reason to dismiss that as negligible.
And if you think the heat energy that volcanoes release is part of the cause of global warming it's negligible compared to the energy from the Sun every day. I doubt volcanic energy is even close to 1% of solar energy.
I can definitely agree with the comparison of the sun to volcanic energy, but I think where I disagree is the comparison of the forcing of CO2 to volcanic energy.
I've never heard of any solar scientist who said they could predict the cycles of the Sun beyond the current one.
Predicts both cycle 24 and 25. You'll note that their prediction for 24 is terribly off from reality, if you compare it to their current predictions.
Regarding your "corollary" we know far more about the properties of CO2 than we do about what drives the Sun's cycles. I don't think the two are comparable. CO2 is far easier to study.
So, to be clear, your position is that the axial tilt of the earth is *sufficient* for the creation of the observed magnitude of seasonal differentiations of winter, summer, spring and fall outside of the equatorial zone, and there are *no other necessary factors*? Really?
Will you concede that it also requires an atmosphere? Will you concede that it requires ocean currents to redistribute heat? Or are you literally hanging your hat on the axial tilt, with all other factors to be ignored?
I'm not sure if you fully understand what you're disagreeing with.
Sure, if you agree that an axial tilt is *necessary* for our four seasons outside of the equatorial zone, but not *sufficient*, then I think we're on the same page.
I guess it's a good thing we have the oceans otherwise we wouldn't have seasons.
I'm not sure if that follows. A world without large seasonal variations may in fact be more hospitable to life and humanity (note the Late Eocene where the Antarctic was temperate, instead of freezing). Now as for geo-engineering currents to remove a necessary component of heat transfer to limit seasonal variation, I'm not sure if I'd support that, *however*, in any case, blindly asserting that seasonality is a "good thing" doesn't seem to be particularly scientific or well thought out.
What certainly is a "good thing" is realizing the impact of and investigating the role of ocean currents and regional temperature variations, so that we can hopefully improve our ability to predict regional weather events on longer time scales than we currently can. Had we simply stopped and simply accepted that only the axial tilt is required to explain regional variations, we'd never reduce our level of ignorance.
The problem I think you're having here is an inability to understand that this particular cherry picking sword cuts both ways -> you could restate your sentence as "if you pick a sufficiently short period (20 years) and choose a warm year for your end point, then you can show a warming trend". Remember, I'm the one here asserting that over any given point in time we should expect natural warming and natural cooling cycles, and if one cherrypicks, in either direction, you can get results consistent with that. Asserting that we should only expect an artificial warming cycle requires means that there are a whole bunch of cherries which are not consistent with that.
Of course, the point still holds that the existence of a trend (of magnitude and rate we can easily find in pre-industrial times), does not necessarily implicate anthropogenic CO2, nor does it require that temperature increases be catastrophic to humanity or the biosphere.
Well, I'll refer you again to the Late Eocene, where as the references I gave you indicated, temperature differentials between the equator and poles weren't nearly as dramatic as they are today. The hypothesis is that this lack of significant seasonality compared to modern day times is due to changes in ocean currents, rather than a change in the tilt of the planet. So perhaps a good way of putting it is that an axial tilt is *necessary* for our four seasons outside of the equatorial zone, but not *sufficient*.
As for ENSO and El Nino, you're making a poor analogy - it's like you're asking if CO2 is solely, primarily, or not necessarily the dominant factor in CO2 based warming. It's a tautology, not a question of comparing one factor to another, like comparing El Nino to say, sunspots or irrigation practices or volcanic activity.
Now, if you were to ask me if the ENSO is solely, primarily, or not necessarily the dominant factor in terms of temperature and precipitation in Southern California, *that* would be more apropos. As it is, I believe that it represents a very large factor, if not a dominant one, in that particular region, although not necessarily California wide. Of course, El Ninos vary in intensity, but I take it as a fairly well established given that pacific ocean water temperatures have a significant effect on California weather.
As for haunting, I'll be very amused if in 20 years, slashdot is still around, and temperatures have fallen dramatically despite increasing CO2:) I'll be sure to remind you of your current beliefs then:)
Wow... I didn't see that coming. You really don't believe that the seasons are attributed to the tilt?
I believe the tilt plays a part, but I don't believe that the tilt is the only factor, nor necessarily the dominant factor at any abritrary point in time. The evidence of a globe with less temperature differential between the poles and the equator in the distant past, without a large difference in the axial tilt of the plant, gives us evidence for this postulation.
Now, let's play science for a moment by your rules, and blindly accept that seasons are caused by axial tilt, with no other variables being particularly relevant, and any unknown variables not worth looking at. Satisfied with our explanation, why bother to examine periods of time which may refute our belief? Why even consider expanding upon our scientific knowledge, if we already know that the answer *must* be as we imagine.
On the other hand, let's play science by the rules of ruthless skepticism. The axial tilt may be a decent rule of thumb, but we push at it. We search for refutations, for instances of periods of time when there were no seasons, even though there *was* axial tilt. This leads us to research into global ocean currents, and heat transfer mechanisms, and amazing new discoveries about factors we may never have considered as important before. Now, in retrospect, it certainly seems obvious that the delay of energy transfer from one place to another on earth is incredibly important (certainly, if all the solar energy that hit the earth was instantaneously distributed evenly across the globe, we wouldn't have night and day temperature differences, much less seasonal ones).
By the same token, we can differentiate our approach to discerning the effect of CO2 on climate. You seem to be very convinced that CO2 drives climate, and that any unknowns at this point are irrelevant, and unnecessary to explore further. I, on the other hand, refuse to end the investigation, and demand an accounting beyond simply "we can't explain it better than how we explain it with CO2". Which approach encourages more learning? Which approach considers the case closed and the important data already in hand?
Understanding that there are limits to our knowledge is not an abdication of further exploration, which I seem to think you perceive from my argument. On the other hand, insisting that our knowledge is complete enough at this point, and that "the science is settled", is exactly the kind of meme that ends scientific inquiry, and stymies the scientific process.
Make no mistake, my skepticism isn't any sort of ruse, or any sort of backdoor "intelligent design" strategy -> I am not asserting that there is no more knowledge to be gained, and that we should abandon all hope in the face of chaotic and unpredictable systems...on the contrary, I believe the chaotic and unpredictable nature of climate means that there is a nearly unlimited world of scientific discovery still available to us.
I'm not sure what you're trying to show with your linear trend from arbitrary points. The whole cherry picker's guide I referenced illustrated quite clearly that your trend can be nearly anything if you're careful with your end points.
That being said, the fact that temperatures rose from 1979 - 2011 does not necessarily require that anyone accept that this temperature rise was due to anthropogenic CO2, nor that this temperature rise was a bad thing for humanity or the biosphere, nor that this temperature rise is something we should expect to continue in the indefinite future. It is perfectly plausible that the 1979-2011 period you referenced was completely within the bounds of natural variability, without any special requirement for a particularly CO2-sensitive climate, and that we are as likely as not to enter periods of cooling and warming in the future that are similar in rate and magnitude.
You claim that Occam's razor dictates that the easiest answer is always right, and of course the easiest answer is "We don't know". Thank God scientists don't share your understanding of Occam's razor or we would know nothing at all.
You're misunderstanding the application of Occam's razor, and more particularly, how we could possibly apply it to chaotic systems. In order to understand the PDO and ENSO, we don't simply measure things, and then attribute all of our observations of ignorance to those two phenomena. We ruthlessly filter, challenge and try to falsify our assertions. Your interpretation of Occam's razor is "if I have a hypothesis, and nobody else does, it automatically must be true because it's simpler than the alternative that we don't know". This is a faulty interpretation.
For instance, let's apply our understandings to the seasons. I believe that the seasons are caused because the earth's axis is tilted with respect to it's orbit. Summer happens in the hemisphere tilted towards the Sun.
So by that token, would you explain the Year Without a Summer in 1816 as a change in the tilt of the earth's axis?
By your hypothesis, you would've predicted that 1816 would have had a normal summer. As it turned out, an unknown factor entered the equation, and modified the results. Attributing the unknown factor instead to your original hypothesis would have required a special pleading for a anomalous change in the tilt of the earth's axis.
Here, the evidence shows that without significant ocean currents, heat distribution throughout the world would be more even, leading to less notable seasons, despite the earth's axial tilt.
With respect to whether or not the temperature has been rising, you are alone in thinking that it has not. Every temperature reconstruction shows the same trend.
Wrong again. Look carefully at the global temperature trend graph here:
1) The reason we over sample is so that errors in trends will cancel each other out. Watts has found that this strategy is working.
Agreed, however I still hold that the increased uncertainty discovered by Watts is important to understand the trend.
2) You are the only one who ever suggested that there should be a statistically significant trend over any timescale no matter how small. This idea is ludicrous.
I believe you're misunderstanding me - I merely suggest that there *could* be a statistically significant trend over any timescale. As for small timescales with statistically significant trends, I'll simply offer the temperature difference over your house from 9am to 12 midnight.
Spencer is referring to climate sensitivity, not to the known forcing of CO2. That is, given that the world will warm by about 1C for a doubling of CO2, how much more should we expect from feedbacks? Spencer does not dispute the known forcing of CO2.
I don't think anyone disputes the "known forcing of CO2" as measured in a laboratory - the question is, is this significant when in the real world, and we have the possibility of both more *and less* due to competing feedbacks. More pointedly, the question being posed to the layperson is, "will this be a bad thing?"
I would argue the following - the expectation of more warming due to positive feedbacks with additional CO2 is grossly overstated, and l
"Despite the recent spate of deadly extreme weather events – such as the 2003 European heat wave and the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons in the USA – aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events are generally lower today than they used to be.
Globally, mortality and mortality rates have declined by 95 percent or more since the 1920s. The largest improvements came from declines in mortality due to droughts and floods, which apparently were responsible for 93 percent of all deaths caused by extreme events during the 20th Century. For windstorms, which, at 6 percent, contributed most of the remaining fatalities, mortality rates are also lower today but there are no clear trends for mortality. Cumulatively, the declines more than compensated for increases due to the 2003 heat wave."
I have shown you a graph that shows the number of natural disasters accelerating, while the number of earthquakes is not.
Let's be specific. Your reference showed no trend with earthquakes, and trends with floods and cyclones. I'm assuming "cyclones" here is a synonym for "tornadoes", or close enough so that we can treat them the same.
In their "all disasters" category, they lumped together:
The reference primarily focused on the "floods, cyclones, earthquakes" as their evidence (since obviously volcanic eruption and other of the "all disasters" don't have a primary direct mechanism based on average atmospheric temperature.
I've shown you data that contradicts their assertions on cyclones, leaving them only floods. Flood reporting increase is trivially explained by an exponential increase in population growth in areas subject to flooding. They even mention this in the text: "This is particularly true as the strongest population growth is located in coastal areas (with greater exposure to fl oods, cyclones and tidal waves)."
So, upon closer inspection of the data, I've refuted the increased cyclonic activity, and come up with a viable alternate explanation for the reported flood increase.
Now that you have better information, are you willing to consider that unlike the prediction of CAGW, we have seen no trend in climactic disasters based on average temperature increase?
Maybe we need to be more specific about what trend you're asserting. I'll argue that tornadoes are a pretty good example of an "extreme weather event". If there is a trend in tornadoes going one way, and a trend in floods going another way, and no trends in earthquakes, our calculus, *even if we assume that the difference is due to average global atmospheric temperature*, needs to be modified per type of extreme weather event.
I'm fully open to the idea that average global temperature changes may create differing trends in different types of extreme weather events. I'm not going to take on faith that we know that this will be an overall bad thing for a warmer world (or an overall good thing for a colder world). Simply asserting blindly that there are *only* more natural disasters in a warmer world, with no measurable benefits or compensations, is a fairly complex assertion.
You do not need to go through those convolutions to determine whether there has been polar amplification. We can just take direct measurements.
There are specific values for polar amplification that are predicted by the AGW hypothesis. Simply because polar amplification *exists at all*, does not mean that it matches the prediction by the AGW hypothesis.
"To create the polar amplification profile illustrated in the above figures in the GCMs, there had to be a doubling of CO2 or a 2% increase in solar irradiance. Neither happened in the last 3 to 4 decades, so what created the polar amplification profile? Real Climate provides the answer. El Nino events."
Then you have failed to account for why natural disasters are rising faster than earthquakes.
Why do you keep invoking mysterious forces that are not necessary to explain any known phenomenon?
Why do you insist that any known phenomenon can simply be explained in toto by CO2 levels, without wondering what other influences are out there? Just because we can choose to explain average global temperature levels with CO2, does not mean that our explanation is *correct*.
It could just as easily be unicorns
And isn't that the problem? If you have a set of theories that do not provide any sort of falsification (unicorns or CO2 driven climate change), you're not doing science.
You think that we know the effects of CO2 by measuring CO2 and measuring temperature and attributing any correlation to CO2. You are wrong.
"So, climate modelers simply assume that there are no natural long-term changes in clouds, water vapor, etc. But they do not realize that in the process they will necessarily come to the conclusion that the climate system is very sensitive (feedbacks are positive). As a result, they program climate models so that they are sensitive enough to produce the warming in the last 50 years with increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. They then point to this as ‘proof’ that the CO2 caused the warming, but this is simply reasoning in a circle."
Ever heard of Occam's razor? You keep trying to invoke unknown forces that are not necessary to explain any known phenomenon.
I do understand Occam's razor, and I think given the two choices, "average global temperature changes are primarily driven by CO2" and "average global temperature changes are primarily caused by a complex array of natural forces we have not yet entirely identified", the simpler one is the "natural forces" hypothesis. In order to believe that climate change is primarily driven by CO2, we must buy into a large number of special pleadings to explain both past and present climate changes that were lagged by CO2 levels. By admitting our ignorance of "natural forces", we arrive at the simpler explanation, even if it is not as intellectually satisfying.
There are other cycles that dwarf CO2 such as ENSO but are dwarfed by these "seasons". But none of these cycles will drive a trend. The trend is driven by CO2.
I think you need to be more specific. I think what you're *trying* to say is that none of the identified cycles will drive a trend on a period that is exactly the same as it's cycle length. Take your simple sine wave, and if you choose end points carefully, you can generate whatever trend you want.
Now, to assume that a period like say, 30 years, is sufficient
I would say that insisting that global warming can't be caused by CO2 is hubris.
Interesting. Stating that our current state of knowledge is insufficient to definitively assert that CO2 is the primary driver of climate changes is prideful? Or perhaps I wasn't clear -> I'm not insisting that global warming absolutely cannot be caused by changes in CO2 levels, I'm expressing doubt that the proposition is true. I could be convinced, if every change in CO2 levels, both contemporary and historical, preceded a similar change in temperature. As far as the data shows at this point, this burden of proof has not been met, so I express what I would consider well founded skepticism.
Do you really think the more than 95% of climate scientists [uic.edu] who accept the consensus of CO2 causing global warming would risk that?
Yes. I think that that promise of funding and financial security is a corrupting influence on results. I believe that prima facie evidence for this can be easily found in the Climategate emails, which showed a cabal of climate scientists defending their turf not with data or argument, but with politics and editorial influence.
Furthermore, I would look closer at that 95% assertion:
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."
The transfer of heat between the surface of the ocean and the depths isn't very fast.
True, which makes for variability based on a situation based 1600 years ago rather than variability based on the past 150 years. Now, you might make the case that there is heat we've pumped out for the past 150 years that is now entering the ocean system, and in 1600 years from now it'll come home to roost, but it sounds like you've got a significant time buffer there.
Perhaps you're also trying to make the case that besides being a slow transfer, it is also an insignificant transfer? That is to say, are you asserting that not only does it take 1600 years for currents to well up and affect the surface, but that the effect after 1600 years is negligible?
I'd point out again the gulf stream warming England, and ask the question if we should believe that it is england's warm atmosphere that causes the water to be warm, rather than the other way around.
there is no evidence of enough undersea volcanic activity to make a difference.
"A major part of Earth’s volcanism happens at the so-called mid-ocean ridges and, therefore, completely undetected on the seafloor. There, the continental plates drift apart; liquid magma intrudes into the gap and constantly forms new seafloor through countless volcanic eruptions. Accompanied by smaller earthquakes, which go unregistered on land, lava flows onto the seafloor. These unspectacular eruptions usually last for only a few days or weeks."
"The true extent to which the ocean bed is dotted with volcanoes has been revealed by researchers who have counted 201,055 underwater cones. This is over 10 times more than have been found before.
The team estimates that in total there could be about 3 million submarine volcanoes
Slashdot Mirror
Another conundrum for the CO2 is responsible for all theory:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/21/co2-does-not-drive-glacial-cycles/
"Consider the earth 14,000 years ago. CO2 levels were around 200 ppm and temperatures, at 6C below present values, were rising fast. Now consider 30,000 years ago. CO2 levels were also around 200 ppm and temperatures were also about 6C below current levels, yet at that time the earth was cooling. Exactly the same CO2 and temperature levels as 14,000 years ago, but the opposite direction of temperature change. CO2 was not the driver."
CO2 at 200ppm behaves the same way as CO2 at 200ppm. It does not care whether or not the jump from 180-200ppm came from a volcano, outgassing from oceans, or through forest fires. Asserting that it does is a special pleading that requires ad hoc additions and assumptions to explain past climactic variation.
More useful literature on CO2 climate forcing: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.0581.pdf
Again, your rhetoric failed. You were trying to compare a tautological definition to competing hypotheses with Occam's razor. The fact that you didn't express yourself well isn't my fault.
Again, your comprehension here is lacking. I did not take your poorly phrased statement as a simple assertion of a tautological definition (since that was incongruous with the idea of comparing it to competing hypotheses, and I assumed that you *meant* what you said). To interpret my response to the poorly worded statement you made as if I understood that you were talking about a tautological definition is a mistake.
You're drunk now, aren't you? :) I simply asserted that the back of the napkin equation regarding the energy coming from fission internal to the earth could affect climate by having a spatial temporal distribution other than perfectly even everywhere. How you get to 56,000 nuclear bombs an hour is a testament to whatever hallucinogen you're currently ingesting :)
You're still not making sense. You want to assert that the climate of the earth cannot have runaway cooling or warming because...you think it acts like a blackbody? Isn't the whole GHG argument that the earth does *not* behave the way we would calculate a perfect blackbody would act?
I do know the basics (and quite a few of the advanced features) of climate science, which is why I conclude that CO2 is not the primary driver of any warming in history. You seem to be missing some very basic understandings though.
I understand - you're not very good at being clear...let me restate for you:
"it still begs the question, what is the *relative* strength of CO2 to other forcings?"
"Yes, another good question. One to which there is a clear answer."
Okay, what is the clear answer? How, for example, do you compare the relative strength of CO2 to the specifics of cloud formation? Here are a few more thorough indications that the answer you believe is not the truth:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/02/earth-itself-is-telling-us-there’s-nothing-to-worry-about-in-doubled-or-even-quadrupled-atmospheric-co2/
http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/satellite-and-climate-model-evidence/
Again, you're making a special pleading that the *source* of CO2 will somehow determine its effect. This is clearly false. A molecule of CO2 does not know or care about its origin before it decides to absorb or radiate energy.
IRT climate sensitivity on GHG:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/02/earth-itself-is-telling-us-there’s-nothing-to-worry-about-in-doubled-or-even-quadrupled-atmospheric-co2/
"So there it is: every Watt per meter squared of additional GHG forcing, during the last 50 years, has increased the global average surface air temperature by 0.09 C.
Spread the word: the Earth climate sensitivity is 0.090 C/W-m^-2."
This is just about the same ballpark as the geothermal average values we were talking about earlier.
Here's a great Occam's razor post that might help you understand your error:
http://jeffreyellis.org/blog/?p=44
No, you stated, "I believe that the seasons are caused because the earth's axis is tilted with respect to it's orbit."
Your problem words here are "believe" and "caused" -> they have *nothing* to do with a tautological definition.
The rhetoric was flawed. Asserting that the precise statement of a tautological definition has *anything* to do with competing hypotheses as described by Occam's razor shows a great deal of misunderstanding on your part. You might have well said, "the State of California is called the State of California" - it would have been just as relevant to a rhetorical point regarding Occam's razor.
Do you understand your error now? Are you *trying* to understand where you failed to express yourself in a clear and rational way?
We don't have to disregard any physical laws. Just take for example Mt. St. Helens -> over the past ten millennia, you could measure all of its activity, and put an average daily energy level on it. If that energy was indeed released evenly over ten millennia, the overall output would be the same, but the effect on climate would be significantly different. As it stands, we know that the energy is *not* released evenly, but in large spikes many orders of magnitude above the average daily output we could calculate.
I'm not sure how that follows. How does a blackbody model stop runaway warming or cooling, in the absence of significant negative feedbacks?
So, let's be clear - now you admit that we don't know the relative magnitude of CO2 forcing, even though you've been insisting that CO2 forcing is what explains 20th century warming. Can you make up your mind?
Magically differing behavior of a gas in the atmosphere depending on the century is not basic physics at all. Here's basic physics - Take a sealed container of air and water, and observe the "greenhouse" effect of CO2 under a lamp which causes a temperature increase in the water. Posit that it is a feedback in this instance, which out gasses from the water as heat increases, slightly increasing the temperature of the water due to "back radiation", causing more out gassing until some sort of limit is reached. Now inject extra CO2 into that container. Explain how this extra CO2 is *any different* from the CO2 that was out gassed earlier.
How it got there doesn't matter, it still behaves the same way.
Well, with your definition expounded upon to mean nothing less than a tautology (rather than a discussion of specifically seasonal variations of a given magnitude), I wonder what you were trying to point out in the first place. The sensitivity of the climate to CO2 is *not* a tautology, in the way that "George Washington was named George Washington" is. Given your backpedaling, you were making a terribly poor argument when you said:
"I believe that the seasons are caused because the earth's axis is tilted with respect to it's orbit. "
What you now assert you really meant to say was:
"I believe that the definition of the word season is the tilt of the earth's axis with respect to it's orbit."
There was no "cause" in question at all, you were simply stating a definition.
0.075 is simply an average without respect to actual temporal spatial differences. To think that 0.075, averaged say, over millennia, cannot make a difference if the actual effect comes in large spikes rather than an even flow, is to be willfully ignorant.
2 w/m^2 from CO2 is not variable in any great degree in space or time. Geothermal energy certainly is.
That's a flat out lie. We know that sensitivity (to all forcings) is small, because we can observe negative feedback patterns that stop climate from irreversibly going to either super cold or super hot.
On *top* of that, if sensitivity to *all* forcings was large, it still begs the question, what is the *relative* strength of CO2 to other forcings. You're talking yourself in a circle.
That's circular reasoning, and a special pleading. I'll assert to you that CO2 doesn't care *where* it came from before it has a physical effect on temperature. Whether or not it came from volcanic activity, or meteor impact, or even biological processes, it should not behave any differently than when it comes from a human burning coal for energy.
Then what would?
You're again putting up a strawman that I don't propose. Your original quote was "Summer happens in the hemisphere tilted towards the Sun." The implication was that "summer temperatures *always* happen in the hemisphere tilted towards the Sun". The counter indication was the 1816 Year Without Summer.
Seasons are specific magnitudes of change in climate, at certain latitudes, due to the combination of the tilt of the planet, as well as the heat propagation properties of the earth's climate system, including atmospheric and oceanic, and the occasional large scale volcanic eruption as demonstrated in 1816.
Argue against what I'm proposing, not your strawman.
Why is that somehow hilarious? Do you really think the temperature of the earth's atmosphere would be the same if the actual ground, from crust to core, was a mild 72F?
"When we compute the total amount of energy generated by 232Th, 238U, and 40K, we find that the total, global, energy production is 3.8x1013 Watts, or 38,000,000,000,000 Watts, or 38 trillion Watts! ...Although 38 trillion Watts is a lot of energy, when we spread it out over the entire surface of the Earth, the average global heat flow is only about 0.075 Watts/meter2."
Now don't get me wrong, .075 watts/m^2 isn't a huge amount, but it is a real factor, and it could have dramatic variation from time to time (the internal core of the earth creates heat through fission, but that doesn't guarantee an even amount of radiation through to the crust at any single point in time). At the very least it is plausible, and not particularly hilarious.
Because you have no idea that anthropogenic CO2 causes the warming in the range that we observe. You make assumption upon assumption of how a fractional part of CO2 in the atmosphere will affect positive feedbacks in the atmosphere, and hyper attribute warming, instead of actually looking for more understanding of the effect of CO2. The question is, why assume that the global climate system has a ridiculously large sensitivity to CO2, simply because we have not identified other natural mechanisms that could account for it?
I refer you to the ice cores which show CO2 levels lagging, rather than leading temperature changes, as a reasonable line of evidence indicating that whatever vanishingly small effect of CO2 may exist, it is regularly overwhelmed in the historical record by temperature changes driven by natural factors, and we can continue to expect the same kind of behavior in the future. CO2 does not magically change its behavior in the 20th century.
So let me understand clearly - you're willing to concede that an upwards march of temperature over a period of anywhere from 30-100 years, does not necessarily mean that its origin must be anthropogenic CO2, and does not necessarily mean that such an upward trend would cause harm to humanity or the biosphere?
I suggest you reconsider your rather extreme and strange position. The current seasonal differentials in temperate and arctic climate would be *vastly* different without an atmosphere or ocean.
Perhaps you're confusing the idea of having *any* sort of seasonality with having the observed modern seasonality? Again, I refer you to the Late Eocene when Antarctica was distinctly temperate, and when our current temperate regions were pretty much equivalent to our current tropical regions.
Listen to yourself for a moment - the hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions about climate variation is the one that assumes that observed variations are natural. Assuming that CO2 is driving modern climate variation (whereas in the ice core record, it actually lags significantly), is a new assumption.
On the contrary, I believe it can affect temperature, but I believe that it is a vanishingly small effect overwhelmed by other natural forces. Your strawman here fails to illustrate my position.
On the contrary, I believe we have had both periods of warming and cooling over the past 30 years, and that through careful selection of endpoints, you can show any trend you want. You seem to have a real problem with understanding that.
Furthermore, you continue to avoid the critical questions - any warming trend could be natural and unrelated to human activity of any sort, and any warming trend could be beneficial to humanity and the biosphere. You seem to believe that simply identifying a warming trend, over any given point in time, automatically means that I must accept that humans are the primary cause, and that the effect will be a "bad thing". Yes, the rooster crows and the sun come out at the same time, but that doesn't mean the rooster moved the sun, or that killing the rooster is going to end daytime as we know it. "The sky is falling" is a common refrain for apocalyptic preachers that seems to have been taken up in the guise of climate science.
Occam's razor indeed :)
I'll suggest this experiment - take an enclosed indoor swimming pool with an equilibrium state of the water at 72F and the air at 72F. Increase the air conditioning to 120F, and leave it there for an hour. Turn off the air conditioning. Questions to ask: 1) how much did the pool warm during that hour of 120F? 2) how long does it take for that warming to dissipate?
I find it more reasonable to imagine that a 30 year buffer in the oceans is more related to direct solar influences on the ocean, rather than mediation through the atmosphere. If anything, it seems likely that the atmosphere only moderates it via albedo, rather than by heat transfer (given the incredibly small amount of heat the atmosphere carries compared to the oceans).
That may be well and true, but that doesn't mean that they aren't incentivized to provide results that will continue the outside financial support of their research. It's not only rich people that are incented by money (and in fact, one might argue that poor people are *more* incented by it).
Have you read them? Have you read the HARRY_README.TXT? The Climategate emails, and the data that accompanied them, were a scathing indictment of the honesty and transparency of a group of scientists who were not interested in competing on equal ground with competing hypotheses.
An increase in magnitude of error bars on conclusions makes a conclusion much harder to assert. If I say the temperature may increase 1C over the next hundred years, +/- 10C, certainly my conclusion will not be falsified by any stretch of the imagination, but is it a *useful* conclusion? The fact that error bars in this case may be orders of magnitude greater than the trend we're supposed to be identifying makes these kinds of "conclusions" particularly unuseful.
That's fine, but still, 30,000 volcanoes erupting in the past 50 years is going to have an impact on the heat content of the ocean. There's no reason to dismiss that as negligible.
I can definitely agree with the comparison of the sun to volcanic energy, but I think where I disagree is the comparison of the forcing of CO2 to volcanic energy.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10may_longrange/
Predicts both cycle 24 and 25. You'll note that their prediction for 24 is terribly off from reality, if you compare it to their current predictions.
I'd agree that in a laborat
So, to be clear, your position is that the axial tilt of the earth is *sufficient* for the creation of the observed magnitude of seasonal differentiations of winter, summer, spring and fall outside of the equatorial zone, and there are *no other necessary factors*? Really?
Will you concede that it also requires an atmosphere? Will you concede that it requires ocean currents to redistribute heat? Or are you literally hanging your hat on the axial tilt, with all other factors to be ignored?
I'm not sure if you fully understand what you're disagreeing with.
Sure, if you agree that an axial tilt is *necessary* for our four seasons outside of the equatorial zone, but not *sufficient*, then I think we're on the same page.
I'm not sure if that follows. A world without large seasonal variations may in fact be more hospitable to life and humanity (note the Late Eocene where the Antarctic was temperate, instead of freezing). Now as for geo-engineering currents to remove a necessary component of heat transfer to limit seasonal variation, I'm not sure if I'd support that, *however*, in any case, blindly asserting that seasonality is a "good thing" doesn't seem to be particularly scientific or well thought out.
What certainly is a "good thing" is realizing the impact of and investigating the role of ocean currents and regional temperature variations, so that we can hopefully improve our ability to predict regional weather events on longer time scales than we currently can. Had we simply stopped and simply accepted that only the axial tilt is required to explain regional variations, we'd never reduce our level of ignorance.
The problem I think you're having here is an inability to understand that this particular cherry picking sword cuts both ways -> you could restate your sentence as "if you pick a sufficiently short period (20 years) and choose a warm year for your end point, then you can show a warming trend". Remember, I'm the one here asserting that over any given point in time we should expect natural warming and natural cooling cycles, and if one cherrypicks, in either direction, you can get results consistent with that. Asserting that we should only expect an artificial warming cycle requires means that there are a whole bunch of cherries which are not consistent with that.
Of course, the point still holds that the existence of a trend (of magnitude and rate we can easily find in pre-industrial times), does not necessarily implicate anthropogenic CO2, nor does it require that temperature increases be catastrophic to humanity or the biosphere.
Well, I'll refer you again to the Late Eocene, where as the references I gave you indicated, temperature differentials between the equator and poles weren't nearly as dramatic as they are today. The hypothesis is that this lack of significant seasonality compared to modern day times is due to changes in ocean currents, rather than a change in the tilt of the planet. So perhaps a good way of putting it is that an axial tilt is *necessary* for our four seasons outside of the equatorial zone, but not *sufficient*.
As for ENSO and El Nino, you're making a poor analogy - it's like you're asking if CO2 is solely, primarily, or not necessarily the dominant factor in CO2 based warming. It's a tautology, not a question of comparing one factor to another, like comparing El Nino to say, sunspots or irrigation practices or volcanic activity.
Now, if you were to ask me if the ENSO is solely, primarily, or not necessarily the dominant factor in terms of temperature and precipitation in Southern California, *that* would be more apropos. As it is, I believe that it represents a very large factor, if not a dominant one, in that particular region, although not necessarily California wide. Of course, El Ninos vary in intensity, but I take it as a fairly well established given that pacific ocean water temperatures have a significant effect on California weather.
As for haunting, I'll be very amused if in 20 years, slashdot is still around, and temperatures have fallen dramatically despite increasing CO2 :) I'll be sure to remind you of your current beliefs then :)
I believe the tilt plays a part, but I don't believe that the tilt is the only factor, nor necessarily the dominant factor at any abritrary point in time. The evidence of a globe with less temperature differential between the poles and the equator in the distant past, without a large difference in the axial tilt of the plant, gives us evidence for this postulation.
Now, let's play science for a moment by your rules, and blindly accept that seasons are caused by axial tilt, with no other variables being particularly relevant, and any unknown variables not worth looking at. Satisfied with our explanation, why bother to examine periods of time which may refute our belief? Why even consider expanding upon our scientific knowledge, if we already know that the answer *must* be as we imagine.
On the other hand, let's play science by the rules of ruthless skepticism. The axial tilt may be a decent rule of thumb, but we push at it. We search for refutations, for instances of periods of time when there were no seasons, even though there *was* axial tilt. This leads us to research into global ocean currents, and heat transfer mechanisms, and amazing new discoveries about factors we may never have considered as important before. Now, in retrospect, it certainly seems obvious that the delay of energy transfer from one place to another on earth is incredibly important (certainly, if all the solar energy that hit the earth was instantaneously distributed evenly across the globe, we wouldn't have night and day temperature differences, much less seasonal ones).
By the same token, we can differentiate our approach to discerning the effect of CO2 on climate. You seem to be very convinced that CO2 drives climate, and that any unknowns at this point are irrelevant, and unnecessary to explore further. I, on the other hand, refuse to end the investigation, and demand an accounting beyond simply "we can't explain it better than how we explain it with CO2". Which approach encourages more learning? Which approach considers the case closed and the important data already in hand?
Understanding that there are limits to our knowledge is not an abdication of further exploration, which I seem to think you perceive from my argument. On the other hand, insisting that our knowledge is complete enough at this point, and that "the science is settled", is exactly the kind of meme that ends scientific inquiry, and stymies the scientific process.
Make no mistake, my skepticism isn't any sort of ruse, or any sort of backdoor "intelligent design" strategy -> I am not asserting that there is no more knowledge to be gained, and that we should abandon all hope in the face of chaotic and unpredictable systems...on the contrary, I believe the chaotic and unpredictable nature of climate means that there is a nearly unlimited world of scientific discovery still available to us.
I'm not sure what you're trying to show with your linear trend from arbitrary points. The whole cherry picker's guide I referenced illustrated quite clearly that your trend can be nearly anything if you're careful with your end points.
That being said, the fact that temperatures rose from 1979 - 2011 does not necessarily require that anyone accept that this temperature rise was due to anthropogenic CO2, nor that this temperature rise was a bad thing for humanity or the biosphere, nor that this temperature rise is something we should expect to continue in the indefinite future. It is perfectly plausible that the 1979-2011 period you referenced was completely within the bounds of natural variability, without any special requirement for a particularly CO2-sensitive climate, and that we are as likely as not to enter periods of cooling and warming in the future that are similar in rate and magnitude.
You're misunderstanding the application of Occam's razor, and more particularly, how we could possibly apply it to chaotic systems. In order to understand the PDO and ENSO, we don't simply measure things, and then attribute all of our observations of ignorance to those two phenomena. We ruthlessly filter, challenge and try to falsify our assertions. Your interpretation of Occam's razor is "if I have a hypothesis, and nobody else does, it automatically must be true because it's simpler than the alternative that we don't know". This is a faulty interpretation.
So by that token, would you explain the Year Without a Summer in 1816 as a change in the tilt of the earth's axis?
By your hypothesis, you would've predicted that 1816 would have had a normal summer. As it turned out, an unknown factor entered the equation, and modified the results. Attributing the unknown factor instead to your original hypothesis would have required a special pleading for a anomalous change in the tilt of the earth's axis.
Here's another interesting note:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/26/evidence-that-early-antarctic-circumpolar-current-development-affected-global-climate/
Here, the evidence shows that without significant ocean currents, heat distribution throughout the world would be more even, leading to less notable seasons, despite the earth's axial tilt.
Wrong again. Look carefully at the global temperature trend graph here:
http://www.masterresource.org/2009/10/a-cherry-pickers-guide-to-temperature-trends/
Agreed, however I still hold that the increased uncertainty discovered by Watts is important to understand the trend.
I believe you're misunderstanding me - I merely suggest that there *could* be a statistically significant trend over any timescale. As for small timescales with statistically significant trends, I'll simply offer the temperature difference over your house from 9am to 12 midnight.
I don't think anyone disputes the "known forcing of CO2" as measured in a laboratory - the question is, is this significant when in the real world, and we have the possibility of both more *and less* due to competing feedbacks. More pointedly, the question being posed to the layperson is, "will this be a bad thing?"
I would argue the following - the expectation of more warming due to positive feedbacks with additional CO2 is grossly overstated, and l
Regarding the 20 year temperature trend, and the various global datasets:
http://www.masterresource.org/2009/10/a-cherry-pickers-guide-to-temperature-trends/
More interesting notes on the topic:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/07/05/going-down-death-rates-due-to-extreme-weather-events/
"Despite the recent spate of deadly extreme weather events – such as the 2003 European heat wave and the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons in the USA – aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events are generally lower today than they used to be.
Globally, mortality and mortality rates have declined by 95 percent or more since the 1920s. The largest improvements came from declines in mortality due to droughts and floods, which apparently were responsible for 93 percent of all deaths caused by extreme events during the 20th Century. For windstorms, which, at 6 percent, contributed most of the remaining fatalities, mortality rates are also lower today but there are no clear trends for mortality. Cumulatively, the declines more than compensated for increases due to the 2003 heat wave."
Also see:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/19/devastating-non-trends-in-us-climate/
Let's be specific. Your reference showed no trend with earthquakes, and trends with floods and cyclones. I'm assuming "cyclones" here is a synonym for "tornadoes", or close enough so that we can treat them the same.
In their "all disasters" category, they lumped together:
drought, earthquake, extreme temperature, famine, flood, insect infestation, slides, volcanic eruption, wave/surge, wild fires, and windstorm.
The reference primarily focused on the "floods, cyclones, earthquakes" as their evidence (since obviously volcanic eruption and other of the "all disasters" don't have a primary direct mechanism based on average atmospheric temperature.
I've shown you data that contradicts their assertions on cyclones, leaving them only floods. Flood reporting increase is trivially explained by an exponential increase in population growth in areas subject to flooding. They even mention this in the text: "This is particularly true as the strongest population growth is located in coastal areas (with greater exposure to fl oods, cyclones and tidal waves)."
So, upon closer inspection of the data, I've refuted the increased cyclonic activity, and come up with a viable alternate explanation for the reported flood increase.
Now that you have better information, are you willing to consider that unlike the prediction of CAGW, we have seen no trend in climactic disasters based on average temperature increase?
Tornadoes are now not a natural disaster?
Maybe we need to be more specific about what trend you're asserting. I'll argue that tornadoes are a pretty good example of an "extreme weather event". If there is a trend in tornadoes going one way, and a trend in floods going another way, and no trends in earthquakes, our calculus, *even if we assume that the difference is due to average global atmospheric temperature*, needs to be modified per type of extreme weather event.
I'm fully open to the idea that average global temperature changes may create differing trends in different types of extreme weather events. I'm not going to take on faith that we know that this will be an overall bad thing for a warmer world (or an overall good thing for a colder world). Simply asserting blindly that there are *only* more natural disasters in a warmer world, with no measurable benefits or compensations, is a fairly complex assertion.
There are specific values for polar amplification that are predicted by the AGW hypothesis. Simply because polar amplification *exists at all*, does not mean that it matches the prediction by the AGW hypothesis.
"To create the polar amplification profile illustrated in the above figures in the GCMs, there had to be a doubling of CO2 or a 2% increase in solar irradiance. Neither happened in the last 3 to 4 decades, so what created the polar amplification profile? Real Climate provides the answer. El Nino events."
I don't accept that as proven.
See: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/05/the-tornado-pacific-decadal-oscillation-connection/
Why do you insist that any known phenomenon can simply be explained in toto by CO2 levels, without wondering what other influences are out there? Just because we can choose to explain average global temperature levels with CO2, does not mean that our explanation is *correct*.
And isn't that the problem? If you have a set of theories that do not provide any sort of falsification (unicorns or CO2 driven climate change), you're not doing science.
No, you are wrong.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/07/how-do-climate-models-work/
"So, climate modelers simply assume that there are no natural long-term changes in clouds, water vapor, etc. But they do not realize that in the process they will necessarily come to the conclusion that the climate system is very sensitive (feedbacks are positive). As a result, they program climate models so that they are sensitive enough to produce the warming in the last 50 years with increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. They then point to this as ‘proof’ that the CO2 caused the warming, but this is simply reasoning in a circle."
I do understand Occam's razor, and I think given the two choices, "average global temperature changes are primarily driven by CO2" and "average global temperature changes are primarily caused by a complex array of natural forces we have not yet entirely identified", the simpler one is the "natural forces" hypothesis. In order to believe that climate change is primarily driven by CO2, we must buy into a large number of special pleadings to explain both past and present climate changes that were lagged by CO2 levels. By admitting our ignorance of "natural forces", we arrive at the simpler explanation, even if it is not as intellectually satisfying.
I think you need to be more specific. I think what you're *trying* to say is that none of the identified cycles will drive a trend on a period that is exactly the same as it's cycle length. Take your simple sine wave, and if you choose end points carefully, you can generate whatever trend you want.
Now, to assume that a period like say, 30 years, is sufficient
Interesting. Stating that our current state of knowledge is insufficient to definitively assert that CO2 is the primary driver of climate changes is prideful? Or perhaps I wasn't clear -> I'm not insisting that global warming absolutely cannot be caused by changes in CO2 levels, I'm expressing doubt that the proposition is true. I could be convinced, if every change in CO2 levels, both contemporary and historical, preceded a similar change in temperature. As far as the data shows at this point, this burden of proof has not been met, so I express what I would consider well founded skepticism.
Yes. I think that that promise of funding and financial security is a corrupting influence on results. I believe that prima facie evidence for this can be easily found in the Climategate emails, which showed a cabal of climate scientists defending their turf not with data or argument, but with politics and editorial influence.
Furthermore, I would look closer at that 95% assertion:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/25/where-consensus-fails/
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."
True, which makes for variability based on a situation based 1600 years ago rather than variability based on the past 150 years. Now, you might make the case that there is heat we've pumped out for the past 150 years that is now entering the ocean system, and in 1600 years from now it'll come home to roost, but it sounds like you've got a significant time buffer there.
Perhaps you're also trying to make the case that besides being a slow transfer, it is also an insignificant transfer? That is to say, are you asserting that not only does it take 1600 years for currents to well up and affect the surface, but that the effect after 1600 years is negligible?
I'd point out again the gulf stream warming England, and ask the question if we should believe that it is england's warm atmosphere that causes the water to be warm, rather than the other way around.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/19/undersea-volcanic-eruption-in-tonga/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/25/surprise-explosive-volcanic-eruption-under-the-arctic-ice-found/
"A major part of Earth’s volcanism happens at the so-called mid-ocean ridges and, therefore, completely undetected on the seafloor. There, the continental plates drift apart; liquid magma intrudes into the gap and constantly forms new seafloor through countless volcanic eruptions. Accompanied by smaller earthquakes, which go unregistered on land, lava flows onto the seafloor. These unspectacular eruptions usually last for only a few days or weeks."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12218
"The true extent to which the ocean bed is dotted with volcanoes has been revealed by researchers who have counted 201,055 underwater cones. This is over 10 times more than have been found before.
The team estimates that in total there could be about 3 million submarine volcanoes
Also, here's another critique of the temperature record used by the NCDC:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/26/a-new-paper-comparing-ncdc-rural-and-urban-us-surface-temperature-data/
Some very interesting graphs there.