Well, the problem is that you've conflated good science with bad science there.
Good science - look for the falsifiable hypothesis.
Things that don't have a falsifiable hypothesis: -raw foodism -dinosaurs and cavemen living together -anti-vaccination groups -global warming alarmists
Things that do have a falsifiable hypothesis: -paleo diet (or more specifically, the carbohydrate hypothesis of disease)
If you want to be scientific, you need to have a both necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis, and then ruthlessly attempt to falsify it. When you fail, despite your best efforts, you're probably on the right track.
I think you're making a pretty big assumption that he presumes the answer.
It's fairly straightforward.
1) The raw data didn't fit the curve they had.
2) Adjusting by 83 years made the curve fit.
3) In order to argue that the raw data was somehow improperly dated, he rhetorically asked, "why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?"
The answer he presumes is "there is no reason for such a drastic increase", thus justifying the arbitrary adjustment to fit the curve.
I realize that ice cores can not show the details of CO2 fluctuations on scales of less than about a century. Where is you evidence that there have been drastic fluctuations in CO2 levels that just happen to average 280 ppm on those time scales?
" However, that air is sometimes contaminated by CO2 emissions from the crater of Mauna Loa. "
Local CO2 levels can be drastically changed by wind patterns and other dynamic atmospheric conditions. Given that ice cores can't show details of CO2 fluctuations on scales of less than about a century, how is it *possibly* rational to adjust something by 83 years in order to calibrate it?
Under normal conditions the left hand will warm up zero or hardly at all because of the human body's heat regulation mechanisms. I don't understand the point you are trying to make. Conduction of heat plays little role in the heat energy dynamics of the Earth.
The point I'm trying to make is that just like the human body has complex heat regulation mechanisms that belie its mostly water content, the global atmosphere has complex heat regulation mechanisms that belie it's simple chemical composition. Further, I'd argue that conduction of heat (if that's the proper terminology for the mixing of temperatures in the oceans), drives large natural variations such as ENSO/PDO/ADO.
Oeschger was just doing what a good scientist does, asking questions.
You misunderstand his question - it was *rhetorical* not scientific. He *presumes* the answer, he doesn't look for it.
A good scientist does not ask rhetorical questions (although a good teacher might).
The urban heat island effect has no effect on global warming.
I'm sure you can't possibly mean that. Human activity generates heat, and that heat will, all other things kept equal, warm the planet. It may be that those things that tend to increase average global temperature are minuscule, and possibly undetectable against the background of natural variation, but they *must* have some nonzero, positive effect.
That's why CO2 levels remained around 280 ppm during that period.
Adding CO2 to the atmosphere slows down the re-radiated infrared energy on it's way back out causing the Earth to get hotter. That's simple physics.
Here's another simple physics problem - you can place the end of an object in a pot of hot water, and measure the amount of time it takes for that heat to go from one end of the object, to the end that is not in the water.
Given a human is mostly just water, how long will it take for the left hand to warm up if you put the right hand in a pot of hot water? Now what happens when you test that simple physics guess:)
"why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?"
- Hans Oeschger in Environ Sci. & Pollut. Res. 2 (1) 1995, pp. 60-61.
Why not? I don't see that the physics don't fit.
Well, back of the napkin, if you take all the UHI, and all the CO2 humans have ever emitted, and compare it to all the CO2 that is naturally emitted, and any sort of baseline temperature from when humans didn't exist, we're a speck - a fraction of a fraction. Models which take that fraction of a fraction, and amplify it with speculative feedback effects fail to address the problem of "why didn't this amplification happen before during natural variation?"
We simply don't have enough human based joules to push the globe into a tipping point, *assuming* that these tipping points exist.
"Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget—the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let’s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes?"
Solar energy levels are *so* much greater than our energy use it's difficult to compare them.
I'm sorry, but I think that semantically doesn't make any sense. We're not just talking about literally, just "falling rain", we're really talking about "the amount of falling rain", and more importantly, *where* that rain lands.
If rainfall happens primarily over water, it will contribute to a general rise in sea level (moving water evaporated off of land into the oceans).
If rainfall happens primarily over land, it will contribute to a general fall in sea level (moving water evaporated off of the oceans onto the land).
As for what a "temporary drop in sea level" is, I'm afraid that's a bit too broad - *every* change in sea level is temporary. There has never been *permanent* change in sea level, because it's *always* changing. We can talk about rate of change, and whether or not rainfall rates over land/sea can change sea level by a certain amount over a certain time period, and put constraints perhaps on what those rates are, and maybe that's what you're intending.
You'll have to provide a lot more solid evidence to convince me it significantly affects what they are saying.
Well, I think the take away is this - ice core CO2 records which have been arbitrarily adjusted to match Mauna Kea CO2 readings may not be as representative of global CO2 averages. Just as with global average temperature, we don't really have a thermometer you can stick up in the air, with global average CO2, we don't really have a CO2-omometer we can stick up in the air and measure with.
While our proxies may be approximate, there are some pretty large error bars around them:)
Have you done a comprehensive review of the literature and confirmed that or is that just your supposition?
It's Hans Oeschger's statement, not mine - but as for the 83 year adjustment, I believe it's only asserted in a few papers (Friedli et al. 1986, Neftel et al. 1985), and others simply assume it as valid. Other than curve fitting, there simply is zero defense for it.
Why isn't it possible? If natural forcings would lead to cooling but it's still warming then you can say human contributions are responsible for more than 100% of the warming.
Well, it isn't possible because human activity cannot possibly be construed as overwhelming natural variation - the physics simply don't fit. And the idea that the world should have been *cooling* while coming out of a little ice age is well, an odd supposition at best.
But really, possible or not, it's not falsifiable. Asserting that the rise in temperature pre-1950 had a non-human cause, but magically, after 1950, we can blame humans not only for the rise, but for *more* than the rise is crazy. I mean, why not double down and assert that humans are now responsible for keeping the earth from becoming a snowball next year?
The paper you cite is models all the way down, so it's hard to keep a straight face while reading it, but I think it contradicts your point of view:
"Our estimate of greenhouse-gas-attributable warming is lower than that derived using only 1900–1999 observations. Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways."
also
"We therefore recommend caution in interpreting the scaled projections derived from this single model, since our uncertainty estimates account only for possible errors in the magnitude of the simulated responses to the forcings, and not for possible errors in the observations, in the forcings, or in the spatio-temporal pat- terns of response to those forcings."
What puzzles me is that you seem to be arguing against increased efficiency
Nope, I'm all for efficiency - but efficiency should be used to increase consumption, not decrease it. If I can afford the energy to run, say, a two bedroom house, as I increase efficiency, and lower my costs by 50%, I want to upsize to a four bedroom house (or its energy equivalent), for example. Use efficiency to increase prosperity.
One cannot simply say that because a wind turbine cannot be hooked directly into a persons home that person must burn fossil fuels.
I guess I'd put it another way - effectively, there is no restriction on where you can build a gas turbine generator, or coal power plant, or other petroleum based energy source. Windmills gotta be built where the wind is, and that simply isn't everywhere (or everywhen for that matter). While transmission lines can stretch hundreds of miles, even then you're not going to find sufficient windiness to support several hundred square miles of population.
claiming that wind power research doesn't deserve money because it hasn't already been researched.
I'm not really sure if we're doing all that much "wind power research" - we're throwing money at wind companies, to build windmills, that essentially have lower required design specs because the owners can expect generous subsidies. Throwing them these subsidies actually *retards* the need for research into improved efficiency.
If a windmill company could *only* be competitive with a sufficient amount of research advance, there would be incentive for that research. Putting our thumb on the scale has unintended consequences.
What sources and sinks would you find near an ice core drilled into 2 miles of ice in the middle of Antarctica or a mile of ice in the middle of Greenland?
I'd assume that regional variations in CO2 levels would abide by air circulation patterns. Up in the stratosphere, CO2 may be fairly evenly distributed, but I'd bet that CO2 variability can be carried by the wind (as is noted happens on Mauna Kea).
The scientists studying this are well aware of the points Jaworski raises and don't ignore the difficulties involved in their measurements.
Well, actually, they do ignore it:
"why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?"
They adjust their timeline because it doesn't fit their preconceived notion - their argument is from ignorance (we can't posit a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 in the middle of the 19th century, so we simply adjust the data until it fits with what we *think* should be happening).
If some other line of reasoning had come to the 83 year lag, other than curve fitting, I might be more apt to believe it...some laboratory experiment that showed it took 83 years for atmospheric gases to penetrate solid ice and then get trapped there....hmm...
If you look at the full Mauna Loa CO2 record there is an upward curve to to it. Current estimates for the BAU scenario show a CO2 level of 560 ppm in about 2070.
The upward curve is barely detectable - and even a 560ppm by 2070 instead of 2112 isn't all the big of a deal either.
The estimates I've seen lately mostly say that human contributions are responsible for more than 100% of the warming in the past several decades.
That's not remotely possible, but furthermore, like Obama's "jobs saved or created", it's not falsifiable:)
Rainfall never contributes to sea level because the sea is the source of nearly all of the water vapor anyway.
Wait, didn't you say earlier that the reason why we saw stalling or falling sea levels was because of record rain over land?
"Sea level has fallen the past couple of years mainly because the heavy rainfall around the world has put a lot of water on the land that takes time to drain back to the oceans"
I'm not sure how both of your statements are compatible.
Most of that water will return to the oceans within a few decades.
But isn't it also true that over the next few decades, we'll also have more rain over land? Heavy rainfall isn't a one-time occurrence, so until we have a reliable predictor of how heavy or light rainfall over land will be over the years, decades, centuries and millennia, it essentially represents a big fat unknown variable in regards to its contribution (by omission, as it were) to sea levels.
Actually, if anything, hundreds of thousands of years is probably a conservative estimate - it's more like millions of years, if ever.
Put another way, is there any evidence, that throughout the entire history of the planet, that all the land mass has ever been completely saturated? Even before the Late Eocene and the step-change global cooling we had due to new ocean circulation patterns, when the antarctic was tropical in climate, did we ever have a point in time where all rainfall on the planet contributed to sea level, not land moisture?
To think that this could happen in decades seems unfathomable...
"Given the Earth's surface area, that means the globally averaged annual precipitation is 990 millimetres (39 in), but over land it is only 715 millimetres (28.1 in)."
Even if we dramatically increased the average rainfall from 28.1 in, to say, 200 in. (x10), you still probably wouldn't saturate the planet's land mass (rainfall ranges from less than 0.1 in. to upwards of 900 in.).
The locations that ice cores are taken are all well away from any local sources and sinks.
I'm not sure if that's particularly true, but I'd be open to the idea.
My layman's understanding is that we observe gases trapped in ice cores to run through some formula or function to get what we believe is the atmospheric CO2 level that applies to when that gas was trapped (i.e., we don't measure ppm of CO2 in trapped ice core gas - I could be mistaken, but can't find relevant cites - interesting notes here: http://www.john-daly.com/zjiceco2.htm).
In order to assert that ice cores represent areas that have no local sources or sinks, I'd expect that the *exact* same trapped gas data (direct measurement, not calculated), would have to exist in *every* ice core we find. So, if you took, say, two ice cores, 50 ft apart, they should be identical, and if we took, say two ice cores, from opposite poles, they should be identical.
Vostok is generally taken as the gold standard (much as Mauna Kea is today), and it may very well be that it's not just a single ice core, but a cluster of them in Vostok they're talking about - but I'd love to see a graph of them compared to ice cores elsewhere.
Of course, the real problem, apparently, is that ice cores can't be directly compared to modern instrumental records from Mauna Kea, and have been subject to unfounded data manipulation:
"An ad hoc assumption, not supported by any factual evidence[3, 9], solved the problem: the average age of air was arbitrary decreed to be exactly 83 years younger than the ice in which it was trapped. The "corrected" ice data were then smoothly aligned with the Mauna Loa record (Figure 1 B) , and reproduced in countless publications as a famous "Siple curve". Only thirteen years later, in 1993, glaciologists attempted to prove experimentally the "age assumption"[10], but they failed[9]."
At the rate we are currently going we'll hit 590 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere well before 2100. The warming from doubling of CO2 is more likely to be around 3C when you take feedbacks into account.
For the 50 year record, we've probably added 70ppm (1960 - 2010). The trend looks linear, not exponential, so straight line it from there. Take today, 390, and add 100 years worth of CO2...say, 140 (round up to 150 if you want).
Now we're at 2112, and we've got a CO2 ppm of 540, tops.
Your jump from 280 - 390 (+40%, over a hundred or so years), caused a change in temp of about 0.8C. Going from 390 to 540ppm is about another 40% bump, so we can expect, probably another 0.8C. Asserting 3C has no basis in reality.
I don't get what you mean by "AFAIK, human CO2 emissions have only been asserted to by > 50% by even the most alarmist people".
I believe the IPCC stands by the thought that *most* of the temperature change is due to human CO2, but nobody has ever said *all* the temperature change is due to human CO2. I'll roughly define "most" as >50%. By that definition, if we've had 0.8C of temperature rise, and we're going to assume human responsibility for say, 50%+1 of it, that's only 0.4C of temperature rise that is "unnatural" and the other 0.4C of temperature rise that is "natural" (i.e., non CO2 based).
So, what this means is that the 0.8C observed increase during the 150 year period when we went from 280 - 390ppm has to be subdivided further - up to 0.4C of that was completely unrelated to CO2, and just part of natural cycles.
However, even if you assume that 100% of the temperature change was due to CO2, you can see by the math that it simply isn't alarming. +0.8C in 2112 isn't anything to worry about.
Heavy rainfall may continue but there is a limit to how much rainfall the land will absorb once it becomes saturated.
Fair enough. Got a quantification of that? How much rain can the landmasses of the world absorb? Not sure what the rough orders of magnitude would be, but I would imagine that the dates would be in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years and the error bars would be greater than observed natural variation.
Two years of sea level drop is pretty meaningless. If it continues for another 8 years then I'll take it more seriously.
Also fair. In 2020, we'll have another go at this:)
And there's no reason to expect that heavy rainfall will stop suddenly (especially if you assert that hotter means more humidity, and therefore more rain over land). It's one of those truly neat negative feedbacks:)
"Computer models of AGW show positive feedback from water vapor by incorrectly assuming that relative humidity remains constant with warming while specific humidity increases. The Miskolczi theory of a ‘saturated greenhouse effect’ instead predicts relative humidity will decrease to offset an increase in specific humidity, as has just been demonstrated by observations in this paper. The consequence of the Miskolczi theory is that additions of ‘greenhouse gases’ such as CO2 to the atmosphere will not lead to an increase in the ‘greenhouse effect’ or increase in global temperature."
Certainly it deserves more study, but these are very interesting results.
No, it's based on direct measurements of CO2 levels from ice cores.
With the assumption that the CO2 level in a single ice core represents the global average accurately. Given the regional and temporal variation of CO2 in the atmosphere, I'd argue this is unlikely to be very accurate.
So we've had about 0.8C of warming with a 40% increase in CO2.
Do so get to a doubling, we'll have say, another 50% increase from 390 to 590. Say, maybe that might even be another 1C...so on the outside (discounting any sort of non-CO2 effect of the 0.8C...AFAIK, human CO2 emissions have only been asserted to by > 50% by even the most alarmist people), we've got what, 1.8C of warming by the time we get to 590, which is anticipated...when?
Do you accept what he says as uncritically as you think I accept what what other climate scientists say because he agrees with your point of view?
No, I accept what he says because he's well sourced, and offers real analysis rather than hyperbole. Is there anything in specific you fault him for?
But the fact remains that for about 10,000 years, since the end of the last glaciation the level of CO2 remained at about 280 ppm.
That's not a fact, that's a supposition based on the accuracy of a proxy. CO2 levels vary *wildly* on the local scale, so much so that the official CO2 measurements at Mauna Kea have to throw out outlying data to avoid measuring local disturbances:
" The upslope air may have CO2 that has been lowered by plants removing CO2 through photosynthesis at lower elevations on the island, although the CO2 decrease arrives later than the change in wind direction, because the observatory is surrounded by miles of bare lava."
It's true that a doubling of CO2 would cause about 1C of warming from the CO2 alone but that ignores the feedbacks it produces.
Actually you're right - it obviously doesn't create 1C of warming because negative feedbacks have kept it to about 0.8C. If these negative feedbacks didn't exist, we should have seen much more warming over the past 100 years...and we haven't.
Okay, so let's test our hypothesis here again - flow increases when things are colder (since we get more snow, which creates more pressure, which causes flow). Flow increases when things are warmer (because when ice melts into water, it gets slippery, and things slide more).
So how do we know one flow increase from another?
Sea level was rising at about 3 mm/year in the 2000's. In 1900 it was rising around 1 mm/year.
And it looks like sea level rise, like many things, fluctuate. In this case, although apparently we're in the hottest years ever recorded, sea level rise has fallen off. In fact, over the past few years, dramatically more:
Disingenous argument is disingenuous; there have been far more records set per year, per year.
Cite.
But the simple truth is that energy is absorbed and reradiated, especially UV, and especially by water vapor.
And there, perhaps, we agree. Water vapor is the key here, and our understanding of it is infantile. The models suggest a positive feedback, while observation suggests a negative one (see Lindzen's latest).
The crops in the country where I live that I consume failed.
Okay, good start, crops in the country where you live that you consume failed in the past hundred years. Can you cite any earlier 100 year period where no crops failed? Do you have *any* data at all on agricultural output over say, the past 500 years you'd like to compare? (Hint: agriculture *loves* high CO2)
That's a false assumption. Thinking that without humans CO2 levels are somehow in perfect equilibrium is untenable.
The fact of the matter is that the CO2 cycle in the atmosphere is dynamic, going in and out of equilibrium on both local, regional and global levels. The system responds to these disruptions of equilibrium with various negative feedbacks, at various time intervals. There's the time it takes for CO2 to be absorbed by oceans, the time it takes for CO2 to be absorbed by plants, the time it takes for plants to be eaten by animals, and for them to release CO2 - it's a dynamic, not static situation.
CO2 does not care if it has spent millions of years in calcium carbonate from before being dissolved in water, and outgassed as temperatures rise. CO2 does not care if it has just come out of a human exhaling, or a tree burning. The idea of a "carbon cycle" with any sort of equilibrium (much less without negative feedbacks to dampen changes in either direction) is...wanting.
"Assume for a minute that we accept the GRACE numbers. The first problem is Antarctica contains a lot of ice : 30 × 10^6 km. At 100 km per year, it will take 300,000 years to melt."
"I overlaid the Antarctica summer temperature map on the GRACE “melt” map, below. As you can see, GRACE is showing ice loss in places that stay incredibly cold, all year round."
If you look at his map, you can see that it isn't showing flow patterns at all - it's a gravitational dip (unless you wanted to assert that a topographical map would show surface bump there shrinking in height to "flow"). And don't forget, flow increases when we have *more* ice:)
As for the second cite:
"In essence, what we have here is a new satellite using new tools to take measurements. The data recovered is analyzed using guesses and inferences. Their analysis is presented with a margin of error as large as the amount of ice they say is melting from Antarctica. The loss is is less than 1% of the normal annual melt."
I don't think we're talking about questioning the GRACE results, we're questioning the interpretation of them.
the latest scientific projections I've seen are for 1-2 meters (3-6 feet) of SLR in 2100, most of it after 2050.
Given that we had 20cm of sea level rise in the past 100 years, I'd bet we're in for another 20cm for the next hundred, if we don't hit a Maunder minimum type event. So, 8 inches, tops.
A plant is just as happy to absorb a CO2 molecule from your breath, as it is from the burning of petroleum (biogenic, or abiogenic).
An ocean is just as happy to absorb a CO2 molecule from a butterfly's breath, as it is from the burning of petroleum.
A light ray is just as happy to be absorbed by a CO2 molecule from a burnt tree, as it is from the burning of petroleum.
CO2 has no memory.
The pertinent question is this - are there negative feedbacks within our biosphere that deal with both pulses of additional CO2 (as compared to say, the year before), as well as a dearth of CO2 (as compared to say, the year before). The answer is, yes. We don't have a system that runs away in either direction.
Yes. We have seen record highs and lows and winds and rains (and lacks of all these things) this year.
We will always see record highs and lows every year, given the size of the planet.
Can you name a year when we *didn't* have record highs and lows? If we *did* have just one year without record highs and lows, would that falsify your belief?
Not relevant, because we also don't have any evidence that the weather is going to be more orderly and predictable as a result of what we're doing.
So...we don't have any evidence that weather is going to more orderly and predictable in a warmer world, and we don't have any evidence that weather is going to be more orderly and predictable in a colder world...yet we've got to undertake dramatic steps to try and cool the world down *right now* ZOMG!?
Yeah, that doesn't seem to fit.
If we add more energy to the system, even if the system radiates the increase it will still do work while it is within the system.
So energy that is reflected via albedo happens to do work to the system? Yeah, that doesn't make sense either.
Are you trying to say that any increase in radiation must have driven all the way to the surface before traveling back out to outer space?
Record highs and lows in temperature and rainfall causing crop failures worldwide. Record rainfall causing landslides. Record lack of rainfall causing drought.
And before the 20th century, we never had record highs or lows in temperature, or rainfall? We never had crop failures in the 1800s? Landslides? Drought?
I'm sorry, if you want to assert that the past 0.8C of temp increase over 100 years did something *bad*, you're going to have to do more than just say "something bad happened in the last 100 years". Of *course* something bad happened in the last 100 years. Something bad happens *every day*. What evidence do you have that there is any causality between the 0.8C in the past 100 years?
Oh, and did any of your crops fail, or did you experience drought and landslide *personally* in the past 100 years?
Yeah, 'cause the best person to talk to about cancer treatment is your dentist.
No, the best person to talk about cancer treatment is the guy who has the highest treatment success rate. If that's my dentist, I go to him. I don't look at his job title to decide his qualifications, I look at his performance to decide his qualifications.
"“97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.
This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers – in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout."
75 out of 10,257 earth scientists. I wonder what those 75 had as performance on any sort of quantifiable predictions of either CO2, global average temperature, or any sort of regional weather:)
A mature discussion would separate the scientific question from the policy question.
Okay - on the science AGW is dishonest because it doesn't start off with a falsifiable hypothesis statement that isn't just "AGW is falsified if humans don't exist" - the statement must contain those features both necessary and sufficient to show that there is no other alternative.
And for the policy question, we have no reason to believe we can force 2 billion chinese people to do what we want them to do, so any sort of mitigation strategy is dead on arrival.
Slashdot Mirror
...and see *if* they work.
In terms of medical science, that means double-blind placebo controlled studies.
Sadly, our tests of these pseudo-scientific medical practices has shown them to come up short:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/04/sham_acupuncture_is_better_than_true_acu.php
Well, the problem is that you've conflated good science with bad science there.
Good science - look for the falsifiable hypothesis.
Things that don't have a falsifiable hypothesis:
-raw foodism
-dinosaurs and cavemen living together
-anti-vaccination groups
-global warming alarmists
Things that do have a falsifiable hypothesis:
-paleo diet (or more specifically, the carbohydrate hypothesis of disease)
If you want to be scientific, you need to have a both necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis, and then ruthlessly attempt to falsify it. When you fail, despite your best efforts, you're probably on the right track.
It's fairly straightforward.
1) The raw data didn't fit the curve they had.
2) Adjusting by 83 years made the curve fit.
3) In order to argue that the raw data was somehow improperly dated, he rhetorically asked, "why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?"
The answer he presumes is "there is no reason for such a drastic increase", thus justifying the arbitrary adjustment to fit the curve.
My evidence is the Mauna Loa data that is rejected in the data rejection step: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
" However, that air is sometimes contaminated by CO2 emissions from the crater of Mauna Loa. "
Local CO2 levels can be drastically changed by wind patterns and other dynamic atmospheric conditions. Given that ice cores can't show details of CO2 fluctuations on scales of less than about a century, how is it *possibly* rational to adjust something by 83 years in order to calibrate it?
The point I'm trying to make is that just like the human body has complex heat regulation mechanisms that belie its mostly water content, the global atmosphere has complex heat regulation mechanisms that belie it's simple chemical composition. Further, I'd argue that conduction of heat (if that's the proper terminology for the mixing of temperatures in the oceans), drives large natural variations such as ENSO/PDO/ADO.
You misunderstand his question - it was *rhetorical* not scientific. He *presumes* the answer, he doesn't look for it.
A good scientist does not ask rhetorical questions (although a good teacher might).
I'm sure you can't possibly mean that. Human activity generates heat, and that heat will, all other things kept equal, warm the planet. It may be that those things that tend to increase average global temperature are minuscule, and possibly undetectable against the background of natural variation, but they *must* have some nonzero, positive effect.
That's proxy data, not real data. And further, it simply cannot be taken as a proxy with a high sample rate - http://robertkernodle.hubpages.com/hub/ICE-Core-CO2-Records-Ancient-Atmospheres-Or-Geophysical-Artifacts
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/01/antarctic-ice-cores-the-sample-rate-problem/
Here's another simple physics problem - you can place the end of an object in a pot of hot water, and measure the amount of time it takes for that heat to go from one end of the object, to the end that is not in the water.
Given a human is mostly just water, how long will it take for the left hand to warm up if you put the right hand in a pot of hot water? Now what happens when you test that simple physics guess :)
Sorry, the quote I was referring to:
"why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?"
- Hans Oeschger in Environ Sci. & Pollut. Res. 2 (1) 1995, pp. 60-61.
Well, back of the napkin, if you take all the UHI, and all the CO2 humans have ever emitted, and compare it to all the CO2 that is naturally emitted, and any sort of baseline temperature from when humans didn't exist, we're a speck - a fraction of a fraction. Models which take that fraction of a fraction, and amplify it with speculative feedback effects fail to address the problem of "why didn't this amplification happen before during natural variation?"
We simply don't have enough human based joules to push the globe into a tipping point, *assuming* that these tipping points exist.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
"Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget—the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let’s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes?"
Solar energy levels are *so* much greater than our energy use it's difficult to compare them.
Anyway, that's the back of the napkin physics :)
I'm sorry, but I think that semantically doesn't make any sense. We're not just talking about literally, just "falling rain", we're really talking about "the amount of falling rain", and more importantly, *where* that rain lands.
If rainfall happens primarily over water, it will contribute to a general rise in sea level (moving water evaporated off of land into the oceans).
If rainfall happens primarily over land, it will contribute to a general fall in sea level (moving water evaporated off of the oceans onto the land).
As for what a "temporary drop in sea level" is, I'm afraid that's a bit too broad - *every* change in sea level is temporary. There has never been *permanent* change in sea level, because it's *always* changing. We can talk about rate of change, and whether or not rainfall rates over land/sea can change sea level by a certain amount over a certain time period, and put constraints perhaps on what those rates are, and maybe that's what you're intending.
Well, I think the take away is this - ice core CO2 records which have been arbitrarily adjusted to match Mauna Kea CO2 readings may not be as representative of global CO2 averages. Just as with global average temperature, we don't really have a thermometer you can stick up in the air, with global average CO2, we don't really have a CO2-omometer we can stick up in the air and measure with.
While our proxies may be approximate, there are some pretty large error bars around them :)
It's Hans Oeschger's statement, not mine - but as for the 83 year adjustment, I believe it's only asserted in a few papers (Friedli et al. 1986, Neftel et al. 1985), and others simply assume it as valid. Other than curve fitting, there simply is zero defense for it.
Well, it isn't possible because human activity cannot possibly be construed as overwhelming natural variation - the physics simply don't fit. And the idea that the world should have been *cooling* while coming out of a little ice age is well, an odd supposition at best.
But really, possible or not, it's not falsifiable. Asserting that the rise in temperature pre-1950 had a non-human cause, but magically, after 1950, we can blame humans not only for the rise, but for *more* than the rise is crazy. I mean, why not double down and assert that humans are now responsible for keeping the earth from becoming a snowball next year?
The paper you cite is models all the way down, so it's hard to keep a straight face while reading it, but I think it contradicts your point of view:
"Our estimate of greenhouse-gas-attributable warming is lower than that derived using only 1900–1999 observations. Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways."
also
"We therefore recommend caution in interpreting the scaled projections derived from this single model, since our uncertainty estimates account only for possible errors in the magnitude of the simulated responses to the forcings, and not for possible errors in the observations, in the forcings, or in the spatio-temporal pat- terns of response to those forcings."
Nope, I'm all for efficiency - but efficiency should be used to increase consumption, not decrease it. If I can afford the energy to run, say, a two bedroom house, as I increase efficiency, and lower my costs by 50%, I want to upsize to a four bedroom house (or its energy equivalent), for example. Use efficiency to increase prosperity.
I guess I'd put it another way - effectively, there is no restriction on where you can build a gas turbine generator, or coal power plant, or other petroleum based energy source. Windmills gotta be built where the wind is, and that simply isn't everywhere (or everywhen for that matter). While transmission lines can stretch hundreds of miles, even then you're not going to find sufficient windiness to support several hundred square miles of population.
I'm not really sure if we're doing all that much "wind power research" - we're throwing money at wind companies, to build windmills, that essentially have lower required design specs because the owners can expect generous subsidies. Throwing them these subsidies actually *retards* the need for research into improved efficiency.
If a windmill company could *only* be competitive with a sufficient amount of research advance, there would be incentive for that research. Putting our thumb on the scale has unintended consequences.
I'd assume that regional variations in CO2 levels would abide by air circulation patterns. Up in the stratosphere, CO2 may be fairly evenly distributed, but I'd bet that CO2 variability can be carried by the wind (as is noted happens on Mauna Kea).
Well, actually, they do ignore it:
"why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?"
They adjust their timeline because it doesn't fit their preconceived notion - their argument is from ignorance (we can't posit a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 in the middle of the 19th century, so we simply adjust the data until it fits with what we *think* should be happening).
If some other line of reasoning had come to the 83 year lag, other than curve fitting, I might be more apt to believe it...some laboratory experiment that showed it took 83 years for atmospheric gases to penetrate solid ice and then get trapped there....hmm...
The upward curve is barely detectable - and even a 560ppm by 2070 instead of 2112 isn't all the big of a deal either.
That's not remotely possible, but furthermore, like Obama's "jobs saved or created", it's not falsifiable :)
Wait, didn't you say earlier that the reason why we saw stalling or falling sea levels was because of record rain over land?
"Sea level has fallen the past couple of years mainly because the heavy rainfall around the world has put a lot of water on the land that takes time to drain back to the oceans"
I'm not sure how both of your statements are compatible.
But isn't it also true that over the next few decades, we'll also have more rain over land? Heavy rainfall isn't a one-time occurrence, so until we have a reliable predictor of how heavy or light rainfall over land will be over the years, decades, centuries and millennia, it essentially represents a big fat unknown variable in regards to its contribution (by omission, as it were) to sea levels.
Actually, if anything, hundreds of thousands of years is probably a conservative estimate - it's more like millions of years, if ever.
Put another way, is there any evidence, that throughout the entire history of the planet, that all the land mass has ever been completely saturated? Even before the Late Eocene and the step-change global cooling we had due to new ocean circulation patterns, when the antarctic was tropical in climate, did we ever have a point in time where all rainfall on the planet contributed to sea level, not land moisture?
To think that this could happen in decades seems unfathomable...
"Given the Earth's surface area, that means the globally averaged annual precipitation is 990 millimetres (39 in), but over land it is only 715 millimetres (28.1 in)."
Even if we dramatically increased the average rainfall from 28.1 in, to say, 200 in. (x10), you still probably wouldn't saturate the planet's land mass (rainfall ranges from less than 0.1 in. to upwards of 900 in.).
I'm not sure if that's particularly true, but I'd be open to the idea.
My layman's understanding is that we observe gases trapped in ice cores to run through some formula or function to get what we believe is the atmospheric CO2 level that applies to when that gas was trapped (i.e., we don't measure ppm of CO2 in trapped ice core gas - I could be mistaken, but can't find relevant cites - interesting notes here: http://www.john-daly.com/zjiceco2.htm).
In order to assert that ice cores represent areas that have no local sources or sinks, I'd expect that the *exact* same trapped gas data (direct measurement, not calculated), would have to exist in *every* ice core we find. So, if you took, say, two ice cores, 50 ft apart, they should be identical, and if we took, say two ice cores, from opposite poles, they should be identical.
Vostok is generally taken as the gold standard (much as Mauna Kea is today), and it may very well be that it's not just a single ice core, but a cluster of them in Vostok they're talking about - but I'd love to see a graph of them compared to ice cores elsewhere.
Of course, the real problem, apparently, is that ice cores can't be directly compared to modern instrumental records from Mauna Kea, and have been subject to unfounded data manipulation:
"An ad hoc assumption, not supported by any factual evidence[3, 9], solved the problem: the average age of air was arbitrary decreed to be exactly 83 years younger than the ice in which it was trapped. The "corrected" ice data were then smoothly aligned with the Mauna Loa record (Figure 1 B) , and reproduced in countless publications as a famous "Siple curve". Only thirteen years later, in 1993, glaciologists attempted to prove experimentally the "age assumption"[10], but they failed[9]."
Well, let's take a look at the data: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
For the 50 year record, we've probably added 70ppm (1960 - 2010). The trend looks linear, not exponential, so straight line it from there. Take today, 390, and add 100 years worth of CO2...say, 140 (round up to 150 if you want).
Now we're at 2112, and we've got a CO2 ppm of 540, tops.
Your jump from 280 - 390 (+40%, over a hundred or so years), caused a change in temp of about 0.8C. Going from 390 to 540ppm is about another 40% bump, so we can expect, probably another 0.8C. Asserting 3C has no basis in reality.
I believe the IPCC stands by the thought that *most* of the temperature change is due to human CO2, but nobody has ever said *all* the temperature change is due to human CO2. I'll roughly define "most" as >50%. By that definition, if we've had 0.8C of temperature rise, and we're going to assume human responsibility for say, 50%+1 of it, that's only 0.4C of temperature rise that is "unnatural" and the other 0.4C of temperature rise that is "natural" (i.e., non CO2 based).
So, what this means is that the 0.8C observed increase during the 150 year period when we went from 280 - 390ppm has to be subdivided further - up to 0.4C of that was completely unrelated to CO2, and just part of natural cycles.
However, even if you assume that 100% of the temperature change was due to CO2, you can see by the math that it simply isn't alarming. +0.8C in 2112 isn't anything to worry about.
Fair enough. Got a quantification of that? How much rain can the landmasses of the world absorb? Not sure what the rough orders of magnitude would be, but I would imagine that the dates would be in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years and the error bars would be greater than observed natural variation.
Also fair. In 2020, we'll have another go at this :)
And there's no reason to expect that heavy rainfall will stop suddenly (especially if you assert that hotter means more humidity, and therefore more rain over land). It's one of those truly neat negative feedbacks :)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/08/support-for-the-saturated-greenhouse-effect-leaves-the-likelihood-of-agw-tipping-points-in-the-cold/
"Computer models of AGW show positive feedback from water vapor by incorrectly assuming that relative humidity remains constant with warming while specific humidity increases. The Miskolczi theory of a ‘saturated greenhouse effect’ instead predicts relative humidity will decrease to offset an increase in specific humidity, as has just been demonstrated by observations in this paper. The consequence of the Miskolczi theory is that additions of ‘greenhouse gases’ such as CO2 to the atmosphere will not lead to an increase in the ‘greenhouse effect’ or increase in global temperature."
Certainly it deserves more study, but these are very interesting results.
With the assumption that the CO2 level in a single ice core represents the global average accurately. Given the regional and temporal variation of CO2 in the atmosphere, I'd argue this is unlikely to be very accurate.
Do so get to a doubling, we'll have say, another 50% increase from 390 to 590. Say, maybe that might even be another 1C...so on the outside (discounting any sort of non-CO2 effect of the 0.8C...AFAIK, human CO2 emissions have only been asserted to by > 50% by even the most alarmist people), we've got what, 1.8C of warming by the time we get to 590, which is anticipated...when?
No, I accept what he says because he's well sourced, and offers real analysis rather than hyperbole. Is there anything in specific you fault him for?
That's not a fact, that's a supposition based on the accuracy of a proxy. CO2 levels vary *wildly* on the local scale, so much so that the official CO2 measurements at Mauna Kea have to throw out outlying data to avoid measuring local disturbances:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
" The upslope air may have CO2 that has been lowered by plants removing CO2 through photosynthesis at lower elevations on the island, although the CO2 decrease arrives later than the change in wind direction, because the observatory is surrounded by miles of bare lava."
Actually you're right - it obviously doesn't create 1C of warming because negative feedbacks have kept it to about 0.8C. If these negative feedbacks didn't exist, we should have seen much more warming over the past 100 years...and we haven't.
Again, Lindzen: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf
Okay, so let's test our hypothesis here again - flow increases when things are colder (since we get more snow, which creates more pressure, which causes flow). Flow increases when things are warmer (because when ice melts into water, it gets slippery, and things slide more).
So how do we know one flow increase from another?
http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/01/short-term-sea-level-rise-slows-by-20/
And it looks like sea level rise, like many things, fluctuate. In this case, although apparently we're in the hottest years ever recorded, sea level rise has fallen off. In fact, over the past few years, dramatically more:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
So, I'll argue that, short term cycles aside, we can expect, at most, 8 inches of sea level rise from 2000 - 2100.
As for Maunder minimums and slowing global warming, I'll wait for the data to come in rather than depend on already falsified models :)
Cite.
And there, perhaps, we agree. Water vapor is the key here, and our understanding of it is infantile. The models suggest a positive feedback, while observation suggests a negative one (see Lindzen's latest).
Okay, good start, crops in the country where you live that you consume failed in the past hundred years. Can you cite any earlier 100 year period where no crops failed? Do you have *any* data at all on agricultural output over say, the past 500 years you'd like to compare? (Hint: agriculture *loves* high CO2)
That's a false assumption. Thinking that without humans CO2 levels are somehow in perfect equilibrium is untenable.
The fact of the matter is that the CO2 cycle in the atmosphere is dynamic, going in and out of equilibrium on both local, regional and global levels. The system responds to these disruptions of equilibrium with various negative feedbacks, at various time intervals. There's the time it takes for CO2 to be absorbed by oceans, the time it takes for CO2 to be absorbed by plants, the time it takes for plants to be eaten by animals, and for them to release CO2 - it's a dynamic, not static situation.
And when it comes right down to it, CO2, while its theoretical impact for doubling is 1C, is mostly outweighed by negative feedbacks. Lindzen had another wonderful presentation on it recently: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf
CO2 does not care if it has spent millions of years in calcium carbonate from before being dissolved in water, and outgassed as temperatures rise. CO2 does not care if it has just come out of a human exhaling, or a tree burning. The idea of a "carbon cycle" with any sort of equilibrium (much less without negative feedbacks to dampen changes in either direction) is...wanting.
From the first cite:
"Assume for a minute that we accept the GRACE numbers. The first problem is Antarctica contains a lot of ice : 30 × 10^6 km. At 100 km per year, it will take 300,000 years to melt."
"I overlaid the Antarctica summer temperature map on the GRACE “melt” map, below. As you can see, GRACE is showing ice loss in places that stay incredibly cold, all year round."
If you look at his map, you can see that it isn't showing flow patterns at all - it's a gravitational dip (unless you wanted to assert that a topographical map would show surface bump there shrinking in height to "flow"). And don't forget, flow increases when we have *more* ice :)
As for the second cite:
"In essence, what we have here is a new satellite using new tools to take measurements. The data recovered is analyzed using guesses and inferences. Their analysis is presented with a margin of error as large as the amount of ice they say is melting from Antarctica. The loss is is less than 1% of the normal annual melt."
I don't think we're talking about questioning the GRACE results, we're questioning the interpretation of them.
Given that we had 20cm of sea level rise in the past 100 years, I'd bet we're in for another 20cm for the next hundred, if we don't hit a Maunder minimum type event. So, 8 inches, tops.
Carbon dioxide doesn't care where it comes from.
A plant is just as happy to absorb a CO2 molecule from your breath, as it is from the burning of petroleum (biogenic, or abiogenic).
An ocean is just as happy to absorb a CO2 molecule from a butterfly's breath, as it is from the burning of petroleum.
A light ray is just as happy to be absorbed by a CO2 molecule from a burnt tree, as it is from the burning of petroleum.
CO2 has no memory.
The pertinent question is this - are there negative feedbacks within our biosphere that deal with both pulses of additional CO2 (as compared to say, the year before), as well as a dearth of CO2 (as compared to say, the year before). The answer is, yes. We don't have a system that runs away in either direction.
Well, they took the SMB from the model and claim it aligns with empirical measurements:
"The modeled SMB is in good agreement with ±750 in-situ SMB measurements (R = 0.88), without a need for post calibration."
But hey, if you want to throw all models out, I'm good with that too!
Steven Goddard gives short shrift to GRACE:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/29/amazing-grace/
So does Tom Fuller:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/06/grace-under-fire/
Should the measure of productivity be how many students they teach weighted by how much the students actually learn?
Academics should be teaching. They can do their writing on their own time during sabbaticals.
We will always see record highs and lows every year, given the size of the planet.
Can you name a year when we *didn't* have record highs and lows? If we *did* have just one year without record highs and lows, would that falsify your belief?
So...we don't have any evidence that weather is going to more orderly and predictable in a warmer world, and we don't have any evidence that weather is going to be more orderly and predictable in a colder world...yet we've got to undertake dramatic steps to try and cool the world down *right now* ZOMG!?
Yeah, that doesn't seem to fit.
So energy that is reflected via albedo happens to do work to the system? Yeah, that doesn't make sense either.
Are you trying to say that any increase in radiation must have driven all the way to the surface before traveling back out to outer space?
And before the 20th century, we never had record highs or lows in temperature, or rainfall? We never had crop failures in the 1800s? Landslides? Drought?
I'm sorry, if you want to assert that the past 0.8C of temp increase over 100 years did something *bad*, you're going to have to do more than just say "something bad happened in the last 100 years". Of *course* something bad happened in the last 100 years. Something bad happens *every day*. What evidence do you have that there is any causality between the 0.8C in the past 100 years?
Oh, and did any of your crops fail, or did you experience drought and landslide *personally* in the past 100 years?
No, the best person to talk about cancer treatment is the guy who has the highest treatment success rate. If that's my dentist, I go to him. I don't look at his job title to decide his qualifications, I look at his performance to decide his qualifications.
"“97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.
This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers – in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout."
75 out of 10,257 earth scientists. I wonder what those 75 had as performance on any sort of quantifiable predictions of either CO2, global average temperature, or any sort of regional weather :)
Okay - on the science AGW is dishonest because it doesn't start off with a falsifiable hypothesis statement that isn't just "AGW is falsified if humans don't exist" - the statement must contain those features both necessary and sufficient to show that there is no other alternative.
And for the policy question, we have no reason to believe we can force 2 billion chinese people to do what we want them to do, so any sort of mitigation strategy is dead on arrival.
There, separated :)