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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

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Comments 53201 to 53250:

  1. Inuit Perspectives on Recent Climate Change
    Riccardo: Here's an extract from a report. Not about Labrador it's true, but I think it's interesting. 'The arctic seems to be warming up. Reports from fishermen and hunters, and explorers who sail the seas around Spitzbergen and the eastern Arctic, all point to radical changes in climatic conditions and hitherto unheard-of high temperatures in that part of the earth's surface.' Also, the report states: 'so little ice has never before been noted' and 'Many old landmarks are so changed as to be unrecognisable. Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now often moraines, accumulations of earth and stones.' These extracts are from a report submitted to the State Department, Washinton D.C. by the American Consul at Bergen, Norway. In 1922. The above comes from NOAA archives. As far as I'm concerned, these observations are good historical reasons for caution about the causes of climate change. Let me also give you a quote from the book 'Climate Change' by meteorologist William James Burroughs. On p106, he refers to the Central England Temperature record, and the sudden warming from the 1690s to the 1730s. 'In less than forty years the conditions went from the depths of the little ice age to something comparable to the warmest decades of the twentieth century. This balmy period came to a sudden halt with the extreme cold of 1740 and a return to colder conditions, especially in the winter half of the year. Thereafter, the next 150 years or so do not show a pronounced trend.' Articles such as the one by Caitlyn Baikie immediatley conjure up images which certainly lead many people to think that CO2 has to be the cause, and that these changes are anthropogenic. Given examples of climatic history such as those I've referred to, clearly there are other factors at work which are not understood. CO2 may or may not be playing a part in what is happening currently, but caution in attribution is surely necessary.
    Moderator Response: [DB] Please reformulate this and repost this comment on the "It's Not Us" thread, where it more properly belongs. This comment will be deleted in a bit after you've had a chance to see it.
  2. Climate time lag
    An analogy for forcings versus responses: Think of a system with an elephant in a cart with a long springy lever attached. Multiple hands are on the lever, pushing and pulling the end to various locations (climate forcings), while the cart with the elephant slowly moves in response (climate lag). Keep in mind that the elephant may shift back and forth on its own (ENSO, for example). Changes in TSI change how many hands are on the lever, where the end of it is - but not, at that moment, the position of the elephant. That position changes only with the time integral of the forcing. And as Sphaerica notes, the climate elephant is in motion, and even if we stopped moving the lever now it has quite a way to travel before the bend in the lever (the imbalance) gets straightened out.
  3. Climate time lag
    A note on time lags, lest people fall into the trap... Remember, a "time lag" is in reality a very simple model in your head to describe a simple aspect of the system, i.e. you don't see the final result right away. This is a simple model and nothing more. The reality of the system is far more complex. Part of the simple answer is "it takes a long time to heat up," but even that is an oversimplified model to make it easier for the human brain to digest. In reality, the system is also chaotic, so the imbalance is not constant in either space or time. The imbalance may be greater in different locations around the globe at different seasons (or even night and day). ENSO, Arctic ice melt and other events will influence the imbalance. An El Niño will reduce or temporarily reverse the imbalance, causing the planet to heat less quickly or even cool, because the warmer atmosphere will more efficiently radiate heat. A La Niña, while causing cooler temperature readings, will actually increase the imbalance. Arctic ice melt might increase the imbalance due to a lower albedo in summer, but it may also increase the time lag (slow warming) by allowing heat to radiate more efficiently in the fall and early winter (without a layer of ice covering the warmer waters beneath, allowing it to radiate more LR). Look at the RSS (space) and UAH (time) tropo temperatures to see how much the temperature of the troposphere varies, and therefore how much outward radiation variation. The bottom line is that this is a chaotic system which will see two steps forward, one step back, and so take a long time to accumulate the equilibrium energy. That's what's really so frightening. We are seeing disconcerting global changes (Arctic, Amazon, storms, etc.) on a small scale now, but we are only half-way to the warming to which we are already committed at 400 ppm. With a climate sensitivity of 3˚C per doubling, we are currently committed to 1.46˚C of warming, and we've only seen 0.6˚C to 0.8˚C. We don't know how long it will take, but we do know that what we see now isn't all of it. This is why I get so infuriated with denial arguments in the line of "it hasn't happened yet" (Atlantic hurricanes, heat waves, Arctic ice completely gone, etc.), because it's like driving 100 mph straight at a brick wall and screaming "I'm not dead yet!"
  4. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    From what I've read the biggest hurdle to nuclear power is cost, as well as uninsurability. I don't know anything about the micro plants Kevin mentions - perhaps the could solve the latter problem, and then the former would be the big question. Bernard @10 - not sure exactly what you mean by 'buy time', but it sounds like you're effectively talking about a low discount rate, in which case I would think the JH12 paper would at least partially address your concerns.
  5. 93% of Fox News climate change coverage misleading
    Mighty Drunken: What would you say about the increasing numbers of cases where company directors or managers are being charged with criminal fraud, or shareholders are filing class action lawsuits (and winning) because companies were not managed in the best interests of the shareholders? A Google search will bring up tons of stuff. This one (picked semi-randomly) seems to cover the idea reasonably well: the relevant term seems to be "shareholder derivative action". Managers do have legal obligations to the shareholders.
  6. New research from last week 39/2012
    Briefly mentioned above, but possibly of interest to SkS readers: "Did the Arctic ice recover? Demographics of true and false climate facts" (just published online by Weather, Climate, and Society). http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/WCAS-D-12-00008.1 Abstract: Beliefs about climate change divide the U.S. public along party lines more distinctly than hot social issues. Research finds that better educated or informed respondents are more likely to align with their parties on climate change. This information-elite polarization resembles a process of biased assimilation first described in psychological experiments. In nonexperimental settings, college graduates could be prone to biased assimilation if they more effectively acquire information that supports their beliefs. Recent national and statewide survey data show response patterns consistent with biased assimilation (and biased guessing) contributing to the correlation observed between climate beliefs and knowledge. The survey knowledge questions involve key, uncontroversial observations such as whether the area of late-summer Arctic sea ice has declined, increased, or declined and then recovered to what it was 30 years ago. Correct answers are predicted by education, and some wrong answers (e.g., more ice) have predictors that suggest lack of knowledge. Other wrong answers (e.g., ice recovered) are predicted by political and belief factors instead. Response patterns suggest causality in both directions: science information affecting climate beliefs, but also beliefs affecting the assimilation of science information.
  7. Climate time lag
    Yes, it is important to keep the forcing and the response distinct. The forcing takes effect immediately. The response starts immediately, too. The time lag is related to how long it takes for the response to restore equilibrium - i.e., how long it takes for the response to counteract the forcing. Take the volcanic eruption example: immediate changes to radiation, which upset the local energy balance of the earth-atmosphere system. Over time, as the aerosols spread and the radiative imbalance alters temperature, there is a relatively rapid drop in temperature. Over time, as the system responds (aerosols are removed), the system slowly returns to the pre-eruption radiative conditions and temperatures return to normal. For a more permanent disruption (e,g, IR changes due to increasing CO2) the radiative change is immediate, so temperature begins to change almost immediately, but the restoration to radiative equilibrium takes time, so there is a lag until temperatures stabilize again. (Temperatures go up, to increase IR emission.) In this case "time lag" is because the temperature rises slowly, due to the amount of land and ocean that needs to be heated. If it were just the atmosphere, a few months would do. The ocean mixed layer takes years to decades. The deep ocean takes centuries. "Time lag" does not mean "nothing happens for a while", it means "things keep changing for a while". Most of the "skeptic" arguments that use "time lag" seem to rely on a physically-impossible variation of "nothing happens for a while". Trying to claim that current warming is the result of some (any) arbitrary past solar change is just wishful thinking. You don't get to say "I'll wish away this warming by pretending that it is caused by any past solar increase I can find in the record". Such "time lags" usually disappear from the "explanation" as soon as the "skeptic" needs to explain a temperature change that actually matches a solar change at the same point in time. If you see someone talking about time lags that mysteriously come and go (or change in duration) depending on whether they are "needed"or not, then chances are that the "time lag" doesn't have any physics behind it - just rhetoric.
  8. Mighty Drunken at 23:49 PM on 2 October 2012
    93% of Fox News climate change coverage misleading
    YubeDude #6 wrote, "Legally he is required to manage in such a way that best ensures profit for the shareholder. " OK maybe I am being too literal but there are no laws that directors etc. should ensure profit for shareholders. It is most probably the aim of the company, nothing more. Certainly not something that should trump law, and in my opinion, ethics.
  9. Climate time lag
    Falkenherz - Regarding time lags, please keep in mind that while thermal inertial means the climate takes time to respond to an energy imbalance (warming until that imbalance is cancelled out), there is no such time lag in the imbalance, the forcing itself. Volcanic activity drops insolation via aerosols, and that imbalance change takes only a few months, for example. Solar changes are a changes in the energy imbalance, and therefore occur quickly - changing the rate of climate change. There is no proposed mechanism for solar imbalances to be "banked away" long enough for them to still apply decades later. The "climate lag" discussed in this thread is a response lag, not a forcing lag. I suspect that is where the confusion has arisen.
  10. Climate time lag
    Riccardo, I admit I got sidetracked with this whole linking exercise and those poor water vapour claims. I can now summarize what I gained from the discussion here on TSI and climate lag: I came here because of what I read in the Washington Times. I was answered that the TSI curve shown there is not correct, because it is widely accepted fact that the TSI did not increase since the 60s, and that TSI shown there was definitely not from the BEST project. I then asked as a follow-up about possible lags of a long-term rising TSI (which I found also verified on another website which I quoted) and this could be a reason why we still see today a rising temperature. The answer I received is that there are no known physical processes for that, and TSI definitely stopped to increase in the 1960s, and maybe already in the 1940s no further rise of global temperature associated with TSI was possible past the 1960s (this was mainly the essay about the Granger causality). I pointed out that this article here talks about a climate induced lag of 25 to 50 years, and if I count from 1960 to 2010, we have 50 years of lag passed and we should be now very curious of what is going to happen the next decades. I also pointed out that increased CO2 should have some added lag effect on top of this, but eventually temperature has to follow TSI, as the arctic ice cores also show. The answer was that this was mere speculation. I still find this answer is somehow limited, as I did not really receive an answer but a counter question that I should somehow proof the "scientific validity" of my speculation, which I of course cannot (I would not be asking if I could). We can leave it at that, if you like, and I will research now a bit more on water vapour effects in the low and/or higher atmosphere.
  11. 2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #3
    With regards to the Great Barrier Reef, I came across a story on the Weather Network site about the deterioration of the reef.
  12. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    Tony - I've seen some extremely low estimates of U-235 availability, but not credible ones. Uranium is generally not a well-explored mineral. (Note: I'm a qualified geologist) In any case, several of the problems you mention - waste management, uranium availability and to some extent reactor life are down to the relatively poor technology choice used so far; once through cycles in PWR designs. Designs along the lines of the IFR and others use all the fuel (and the long lived waste), so reducing fuel requirements and waste. I agree that storing large numbers of fuel rods on-site is not a great idea. However, people protest moving them, and protest reprocessing them.. what's going to happen? I would go on about cost and safety issues, but the question is, would you accept anything I said?
  13. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    Tony: Many 4th gen nuclear reactor designs work on un-enriched uranium, low enriched uranium, thorium, nuclear waste or some combination of the above. They extract many times more energy from the same amount of ore (whether newly mined or from existing material). They also generate less and lower level waste. Facilities such as Onkalo are probably sufficient for the management of the waste. I agree that current safety regimes are shortsighted and inadequate. It does not follow that safety regimes must necessarily be so. I think the technology is probably viable. I suspect that the political, economic and sociological hurdles between them are insurmountable.
  14. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    Andrew (7), Kevin (8) and Sceptical (9) Nuclear power as currently deployed has at least three quite serious problems: First, we simply do not have enough U235 resources. Nuclear proponents are generally unaware of this problem and cannot show where the resources are. A good place to start would be the Red Book. Second, as demonstrated by the Fukushima incident, there is no solution to waste storage. That is why all the spent fuel rods were still stored at that site. Third, nuclear power is the most expensive form of power despite by some measures being the most heavily subsidized. This is even excluding waste storage costs which cannot be priced because no solution exists. And it certainly excludes the cost of dealing with a Chernobyl or a Fukushima. Consider the Crystal River, Saint Lucie and Turkey Point nuclear power plant sites in Florida. These will be inundated with rising sea levels and corrosive salt water assuming only 5 meters of sea level rise (5 meters is locked in and at the low end of eventual sea level rise). They are all in the paths of future hurricanes and all store their spent fuel nuclear waste on site, as was the case at Fukushima. Crystal River has been shut down for the last couple of years because of serious cracks in the containment vessel but the utility wants to restart it and extend its life beyond the design life of 40 years. The other two sites have already been extended to 60 years. See http://brleader.com/?p=9529 and my other articles for references. At any rate, if you can show me where the U235 is going to come from, how to safely store the spent fuel and how to get the price down so it is competitive with other energy sources without involving even more government subsidy, you have my attention. Then we need to discuss safety and security. Best Tony
  15. Sapient Fridge at 22:05 PM on 2 October 2012
    The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    Sceptical Wombat, the problem with nuclear is not just political. If you work out how much uranium is in proven reserves and calculate how long it would last if the whole world switched to nuclear for electricity generation it works out at only about 12 years! Breeder reactors (inc thorium) are a possibility but my understanding is that they only breed fuel very slowly and are currently uneconomic. More research needed maybe, but currently nuclear doesn't fly on the scale needed.
  16. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    Perhaps I'm missing something, but I see nothing in the SCC model that accounts for the fact that money cannot buy time, no matter how well the discounting cards fall. On (or in) the other hand the time cards are relentlessly falling one after the other, incurring not only costs but debts unpayable in any currency used in the human economy. Seriously, what discount rate would be required to patch up a world where temperatures are 4-6 degrees over Pre-Industrial mean, where ocean acidity is 7.8 or less, where there is no useful quantity of liquid (or other) fossil fuel, and where more than 20% of species are living with extinction debt?
  17. Sceptical Wombat at 20:33 PM on 2 October 2012
    The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    Andrew I think you will find that both wind and solar are dispatchable. This only requires that output can be guaranteed for a period of about 15 minutes. Forecasting local weather for that time is not difficult. A better statement would be that they are not dependable. Obviously solar does not work at night or when there is cloud cover and wind doesn't work when there is no wind - or too much wind. In the short term that problem can be, and is, managed by some combination of gas and hydro. Coal is not much use for this because it is difficult to ramp it up quickly. Obviously in the medium term we need to move away from gas. The alternatives are nuclear, tidal, geothermal or storage methods (eg solar thermal, pumped hydro). Realistically there are two problems with nuclear. Nuclear power plants are uninsurable - no insurance company will accept the risks of another Fukishima (there may be no deaths but the economic costs of the exclusion zone and the closed fisheries must be enormous). The other problem is that no one wants a nuclear power station next door. Just look at the resistance that new wind farms face and consider what the resistance to a nuclear power station would be (particularly in a post Fukishima world). Nuclear will only get off the ground if a "courageous" government decides to make it happen. However I agree with you it is unfortunate that most left wingers have a Pavlovian opposition the nuclear and most right wingers have a similar opposition to doing anything about global warming - so nuclear gets left out in the cold.
  18. Climate time lag
    Falkenherz it would be helpfull, more constructive and less time consuming if you stop pointing us to (several) unspecified comments and claims in german. Ask a question (in the appropriate thread) about something you read and you may open a usefull discussion.
  19. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    Solutions are messy, because rather than a scientific question they are a technological, sociological, economic, and political question. Any solution which is unacceptable in any of these domains is not going to work. Technologically, I'm excited about 4th gen micro nuclear (rather than giant 3rd gen plants), but the real question is not what is possible - it is what is acceptable to the public.
  20. Climate time lag
    gws, the comment number only appeared because it was the current one when i copied the website; acutally, that on is one of the most unfounded commenters from over there. But look a bit for Dietze, Ebel, NicoBaecker, Innerhofer, Kramm, Hader, Mayer... they seem to put a bit more effort into their comments. In the beginning I wasn't even sure if they are sceptics or realists, but they all seem to be sceptics with some very specific arguments (and some very specific fallacies)...
  21. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    Hi, I have some minor problems with this.. First, a direct comparison of Solar or Wind power with Coal is not appropriate, as far as I can see. Neither solar or wind power are dispatchable (Solar thermal possibly, if not in the UK where I live). This means that once a certain grid penetration is achieved, grid balancing becomes an issue. And however that balancing is performed, it imposed additional costs, especially under the paradigm of matching generation to demand. As far as developing countries go.. I would argue that a grid is appropriate and overall much, much cheaper than a decentralized model, if we are comparing like with like. And that the insistence that every stage of a project return a profit is something of an artificial stumbling block. The problem for much of the developing world may be as much one of governance - building a grid requires a certain amount of political stability. Decentralized telecoms infrastructure is one thing. Running refrigeration, cooking and A/C quite another. And (and this is a particular concern as a UK resident), building gas plants instead of coal may sound better.. but ultimately, that gas plant has an expected life of 40 to 60 years. Building that plant pretty much locks in a big chunk of CO2 emissions over future decades. It is probably worth undertaking the exercise of determining what amount of emissions is already 'locked in' in this manner (i.e. expected annual emissions per fossil plant, multiplied by expected lifetime of that plant, for all existing plants) before we even think about building more. Finally (sorry about the rant).. the elephant in the room is nuclear power, which can replace coal on pretty much a 1 to 1 basis, with vastly lower CO2 emissions. If you are serious about minimizing emissions, then disregarding this does not make a great deal of sense..
  22. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    erratum: ρt = ρ(Ct) = δ + α(Ct)[dCt/dt]/Ct (8) • Ct is the consumption at time t • ρ(Ct ) is the consumption rate of interest
  23. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    Discount rates. It took me almost a year to understand how they work, and I still have a lot of questions. I found this paper: Intergenerational Equity, Social Discount Rates and Global Warming A key quote : "are consumption rates of interest inevitably positive? (...) standard models are inadequate for obtaining insights into social discount rates when production and consumption activities involve externalities that filter into the distant future through the accumulation of some "public bad". Since global warming is a prime example of such externalities, we will use it as a backdrop for our discussion. (…)Assume that the economy is otherwise laissez faire. If global warming is expected to lead to declines in (weighted) global consumption over some extended period in the distant future, then from expression (8): ρt = ρ(Ct) = δ + α(Ct)[dCt/dt]/Ct (8) • Ct 0 is the elasticity of marginal utility we would conclude that, over this same extended period, consumption rates of interest could well be negative. For example, if : • δ = .01 per year • global consumption would be expected to decline at 2 percent a year for a period beginning 30 years from now if emissions of greenhouse gases were to continue at their laissez faire rates. • α (Ct) = 2.5 in expression The consumption rate of interest would be -0.04 (minus 4%) per year from year 30 until the end of the period in question”. I googled the keywords “discount rate” and “Ramsey rule”(the equation above). I found this book: Pricing the future: The economics of discounting and sustainable development (Christian Gollier, Toulouse School of Economics) Avaivable here That derives a similar expression to the equation 8) above and make a long discussion on the relationship between discount rate and economic growth. The conclusion is that if there is economic decline (as surely will happen if we get a monster warming of more than 3ºC) the discount rate can hit zero and even go negative. What do you think?
    Moderator Response: [d_b] Link fixed per request.
  24. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    adelady - Excellent point. We've seen that already in regards to communication systems - 3rd world phone systems are only really taking off with cell phones, which don't require the infrastructure that wired telephony does. But with the decentralized model (widely separated towers, solar chargers for phones), huge penetration has been seen for a decentralized, minimal investment model. Small investments with an incremental payoff are much easier to do than those requiring a large up-front investment before any profit can be seen. I think that is a worthwhile lesson for implementing non-carbon energy production - anyone involved with renewable energy implementation should take note.
  25. PBS False Balance Hour - What's Up With That?
    I suspect that fear of being seen as politically partizan on the subject of AGW may be a big factor. An article in today's Sydney Morning Herald spoke of 50.7 percent of coral on the Great Barrier Reef being lost over the past 27 years, according to a study by the Australian Institute of Marine Science. The article mentioned the causes being fertilizer and pesticde runoff as well as the crown of thorns starfish. No mention is made of climate change. Out of curiosity I went to the AIMS website and read what they had to say. According to AIMS there were three causes and not just two. As well as agricultural runoff and crown of thorns starfish was coral bleaching. The article cites AGW as the primary cause of the bleaching due to rising water temperature. It would seem that even when reporting directly from scientific sources some media will simply omit any mention of AGW.
  26. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    Good point from adelady on moving from a standing start w/decentralized systems. A lot of habits in developed countries w/regard to energy are hangovers from a time when our options were more limited. As well, not leaning on a grid helps to promote more intelligent consumption. Analogy is deployment of cellular telephone systems, which in many developing nations have made the emergence of anachronistic dense copper or other hard networks superfluous, unlikely ever to be capitalized.
  27. 93% of Fox News climate change coverage misleading
    Fox what did you say. Oh!!! News. No kidding. When did they start dispensing news.
  28. The Economic Damage of Climate Denial
    "cheap" fossil fuel energy is key to the development of poorer nations. How is using a system of centralising physical generation of power and requiring extensive grid infrastructure in poor nations a "key" to their development? I'd suggest that one of the reasons why many countries haven't developed along this path is exactly this, rather than the fuel costs of a centralised power station. Surely one of the greatest advantages of non-hydro renewables is that they can start small at the local level and gradually scale up through regional arrangements long, long before a centralised system could possibly distribute power to remoter regions. And do it for much smaller cost. One reason to not extend a grid all the way to remoter towns and villages is that the infrastructure costs can't be recouped because poorer communities can't afford to pay enough to make it economic.
  29. Philippe Chantreau at 09:25 AM on 2 October 2012
    93% of Fox News climate change coverage misleading
    Rpauli at 10. As our friend Smith would say, they are very good at staying "on message" which seemed to be a virtue in his value system...
  30. 2012 SkS Weekly Digest #39
    If you want to actually run a one-dimensional (vertical) radiative transfer model to see how it behaves, MODTRAN is available on-line.
  31. 93% of Fox News climate change coverage misleading
    I haven't seen any real change since James took over from Rupert. That would be for the reason that Murdoch the Younger hasn't taken over from Murdoch the Elder. As of just now young Murdoch is a "minister without portfolio" in the Murdoch Empire, is wandering in the desert, has been since his memory became significantly impaired while attempting to recollect his involvement in the NoW/NI organized crime coverup.
  32. 93% of Fox News climate change coverage misleading
    93% wrong doesn't even rise to the level of an inept propaganda machine. Since every opinion manipulator knows, one must first establish trust by offering a certain amount of truth. When that audience is drawn in, only then does the skilled propagandist brandish their swill. Fox doesn't even rise to that level - maybe we should be thankful that they are so bad at it.
  33. 2012 SkS Weekly Digest #39
    heijdensejan - I would suggest looking at the How do we know more CO2 is causing warming thread for a discussion on this. The best reference I could give you would be to Myhre 1998: he ran the radiative code for air columns at several different locations (Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, tropical), based on the HITRAN spectral data, and came up with: dF = 5.35 ln(C/Co) W/m^2 as the fit to the relationship between CO2 increase and forcings. That kind of radiative estimation is essentially a numeric integration of the spectral response from surface to space of the specified atmosphere - lots of number crunching, but fairly straightforward if you have good spectra. From the 3.7 W/m^2 that produces for a doubling of CO2, and the Stefan-Boltzmann relationship, given an observed Earth emissivity to space of 0.612 in the infrared (which matches current temperatures and incoming energy), the surface of the Earth must warm by 1.1°C to radiate an extra 3.7 W/m^2 in balance. The actual effect is that the IR emissivity to space decreases, rather than input energy increasing, but for a first-pass estimate there's no significant difference in the numbers.
  34. 2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #3
    In addition to RealClimate's links to data and models, see Tamino's Climate Data Linksat Open Mind.
  35. 2012 SkS Weekly Digest #39
    What I would like to see explained is the following (or a link to a good blog post) How did anybody calculate that a doubling of CO2 results in a forcing of 3.7 W/m2 and a 1.1C temperature increase without any feedbacks. Maybe there is a SkS post somewhere but somehow I have never found it....
  36. 2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #3
    DSL - A data link page might be nice here. In the meantime, you can look at the RealClimate Data Sources page, which links to a great many data sources - raw, homogenized, paleo, code for climate models, data analysis, and links to other collections of climate data.
  37. 2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #3
    A passing idea, and I didn't know where to post: it might be nice to have an article on raw data. There are several complaints/myths that target raw data -- can't get it, it was lost, adjustments/smoothing is a sign of fraud, etc. The post could include a link library for obtaining raw data and code -- temp data, solar, ice, etc. -- and a link library pointing to the various SkS and external posts addressing the issues.
  38. Climate time lag
    Falkenherz Well, that comment lacks all logic, as I expected ... "Dr.Paul" uses no physical argument whatsoever but only logical fallacies, particularly the "argument from authority" ("I said it is so, why don't you want to learn!"). Avoid addressing his ad hominems, just ask questions about science. Some facts to consider / questions to ask: - If warming drove CO2 out of the ocean, why does ocean pH keep dropping? Ask him if he understands and could explain the ocean water CO2 equilibrium (read the "OA not OK" paper on SkS). - ask him to explain why water vapour cools (the atmosphere) seeing that latent heat of evaporation is taking from the surface during evapotranspiratin, and redeposited into the atmosphere during condensation (this is found in most geography textbooks and ALL meteorology textbooks; are meteorologists all dumb?) - ask him if he recognizes the temperature-CO2 correlation during the glaciations and during recent times, if he understands that CO2 is not the only driver of climate, and if he understands the terms forcing and feedback (sorry, do not know the German terms, but you can probably check on Rahmsdorf's blog) - ask if he understands the difference between correlation and causation You see, these are all very trivial things. I am sorry but I will not go there myself, as I do not want to waste my time with somebody who is so obviously delusional. EIKE is far from what you called "serious" before, and I hope you recognize that too. The name is a typical PR strategy used to impress ... good sounding, but empty. -
  39. TomPainInTheAsk at 00:26 AM on 2 October 2012
    2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #3
    Appearing in Yahoo News / Green today: * Amsterdam goes green with electric scooter taxis (Reuters) * UK plan to merge Antarctic, ocean research stirs science (Reuters) * Can the World Save Lives and Combat Climate Change? (Scientific American) * Candidates Mum on Climate Change (Scientific American) This is at least a doubling of “Green” articles usually posted on Yahoo News.
  40. 2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #3
    And here is the graphic: World Climate
  41. 2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #3
    Stefan Rahmstorf in his blog Klima Lounge dissects Watts' „world climate widget“ as the skeptics most popular-trick-graphic, and a reader programmed a scalable graph showing temperature, CO2 and Solar cycles. I thinks thats a grand idea, only the graphic could be a bit more flashy (of course it is the underlying science that matters, but I think many uniformed will go by looks rather than content). Any chance for teaming up and creating a nice infographic?
    Moderator Response: Fixed link to the good climate widget.
  42. Andrew Mclaren at 22:17 PM on 1 October 2012
    93% of Fox News climate change coverage misleading
    I read a Rolling Stone article about FOX News CEO Roger Aimes last year, and it would seem that he is the one most aggressively pushing the anti-science bias re: climate change there. Aimes is of course a long-standing fixture in the far right politics of the US, first emerging as Richard Nixon's campaign manager in 1968. The RS article suggested that James Murdoch has basically persuaded his old man of the soundness of prevailing science, the elder Murdoch was even quoted as saying "Roger [Aimes] is nuts" on that score. Despite which climate science and sensible policies informed by it are a continuing casualty of what looks like an ongoing power struggle at News Corp.
  43. Dikran Marsupial at 21:55 PM on 1 October 2012
    Climate time lag
    Falkenherz, I wasn't just mirroring the question back to you, it is the key question. If some one suggests some climate phenoemenon, such as a lag, ask them for a physically plausible mechanism that can explain the strength of effect as well as the correlation. If they refuse to do so, it is an indication that they are trolling. Be a skeptic, if there isn't a plausible physical explanation, don't pay much attention to the hypothesis.
  44. 93% of Fox News climate change coverage misleading
    The Murdoch empire's Australian mouthpiece, The Australian, has been a welcome home for climate "skeptics" articles. The Australian pushes so many barrows, that I've stopped reading it. And they typically only run one side of an argument, which is deeply unsatisfying. Still, maybe they are just trying to be controversial, because it sells newspapers. The recent restructure of News is supposedly designed to stop the cross subsidisation of newspapers that has been around for ages. The Australian has supposedly never made a profit. It will be interesting to see what effect the restructure has.
  45. Climate time lag
    Damn, IanC, Riccardo... I made you google-translate-read the wrong article... here is the latest mindtwisting argumentaire from EIKE about water vapour.: http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/climategate-anzeige/anthropogener-treibhauseffekt-zu-schwach-fuer-klimakatastrophe/#comment_192 In short: No positive forcing from watervapour. Higher surface temp leads to higher vapourising circulation because of a higher "vapourpressure" (?) and more possible vapour in the atmosphere. This leads to a increased negative forcing of ~6,3W/m2 and that cancels out the positive forcing of Co2 after it caused a raise of 1 Degree. I asked over there already, what about higher GHG effect of water vapour after a raise of 1 Degree because of CO2, but I did not get an answer. So lets leave it at that. I came to this article here asking about possible long term physical processes (lag) in the atmosphere because of a long term increase of TSI since the 18th century. Dikran Marsupial mirrored the question back to me. The latest suspect, brought fourth by an alleged Professor on that infamous website: Albedo variations. Are there any links here about this?
  46. Climate time lag
    IanC, Riccardo and I said, don't read it... ;) Problem about EIKE is, that the call themselves an "european institute", and this classification does not seem to be legally protected. That's why I think posting there, pointing out logical fallacies in those articles which actually try to show some scientific arguments, is important. Most of that work, they already do by themselves, as there are at least four lines of sceptics who collode with each other. :D It is also a challenge for me as a non-scientist, to unveil pseudoscientific blabla with simple logic. And when I fail, I come here. :) gws, thanks for the link to the presentation, very clear, very helpful! And some subtle support at EIKE would not harm. You should be able to recognize my other nick there (hopefully).
  47. TomPainInTheAsk at 16:30 PM on 1 October 2012
    2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #3
    This just in from Yahoo News: If there's one thing the Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates seem to agree on, it's this: avoid the subject of climate change. Mitt Romney would rather joke about President Obama's grandiose promise to heal the planet back in 2008. And Barack Obama would rather talk about jobs saved or created in Ohio, Florida and other swing states. Never mind that this summer saw a record-breaking meltdown of Arctic sea ice, presaging rising sea levels and more extremely weird weather. Or that the U.S. is locked in a historic drought during what will most likely be the warmest year on record for this nation. Or that concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere continue to tick up inexorably. We are basically guaranteeing an even warmer future and much more acidic oceans. We thank the two presidential candidates for presenting their views on climate change in response to Scientific American's survey this year. However, neither laid out any kind of policy plan for how to deal with global warming. Let's break the code of silence. Maybe it's time for a moderator or audience member to directly ask a climate policy question during the October debates? Maybe? —David Biello
  48. TomPainInTheAsk at 16:07 PM on 1 October 2012
    93% of Fox News climate change coverage misleading
    YubeDude: Concur. I haven't seen any real change since James took over from Rupert. "Stupid is as stupid does." Forrest Gump. The proof is in the pudding.
  49. 93% of Fox News climate change coverage misleading
    I think that for James Murdoch it his fiduciary responsibility to adhere to the denialist party line. The News Corp viewer/reader demographics skew toward climate denial and maintaining viewership which in turn generates the highest amount of ad revenue; that is his main priority. Reality and corporate citizenry pale in comparison to next quarters dividends. Legally he is required to manage in such a way that best ensures profit for the shareholder.
  50. Sea Level Isn't Level: Ocean Siphoning, Levered Continents and the Holocene Sea Level Highstand
    tonydunc - There is a Nils-Axel Mörner thread where his ideas are discussed. Essentially, he's completely, absolutely, wrong, contradicted by all of the data. He might be a better source of information on dowsing, another topic near and dear to him.

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