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XPLAlN at 03:40 AM on 25 February 2011Monckton Myth #13: The Magical IPCC
RickG: “The 1990 report noted that it was not clear whether all the fluctuations indicated were truly global (p 202). How is that sloppy?” You may notice that note applies to a range of 3 different schematics for 3 different periods. It may bear some relevance to the other two but as for the schematic in question (7.1c) then you’d be spinning a line as it was clear that NONE of the fluctuations from that one were truly global! Seeing as you ask I’ll respond to the ‘sloppy’ bit: but first some context courtesy of the IPCC FAR: “The issues confronted with full rigour include history of the Earth’s changing climate. The result is the most authoritative and strongly supported statement on climate change that has ever been made by the scientific community.” So, on the subjective question of what constitutes ‘sloppy’ at the IPCC please bear in mind they set their own bar to the fullest rigour possible. To the question “how is that sloppy?” It’s sloppy because the schematic is labelled ‘global’ when it was actually, as the above article makes clear: “based on Lamb's approximation of the central England temperature. It was intended only as a schematic diagram, and known not to accurately reflect the global average temperature.” ...but it was still presented as a curve of ‘global temperature variations’. And I don’t care if it’s a schematic, or rock art. That’s just a red herring. In effect; ‘we knew all along that the data for Central England wasn’t great, and wasn’t representative of global or even NH. But it’s all we had so we used the curve anyway and downgraded it from a graph to a schematic to cover our arses’. I find this most unsatisfactory. What isn’t clear is: did the IPCC know that this schematic reconstruction was solely based on Central England or not? As (contributor to that section) Prof Jones himself says: “Many in the palaeoclimatic community have known that the IPCC graph was not representative of global conditions (even when it first appeared)...Greater amounts of documentary data (than available to Lamb in the early 1970s) were collected and used in the Climatic Research Unit in the 1980s.” This begs the question, why use Lamb as a basis to extrapolate a global picture or even reproduce his curve at all? Nor is it clear whether - in the absence of something global to give us - the authors of section 7 simply took a reconstruction of Central England and presented it to us as “global”, or maybe due to sloppy fact checking they used the schematic in good faith having lifted it from the UK DoE 1989 publication ‘Global Climate Change’. Either way I consider this to be sloppy. I certainly wouldn’t describe it as an ‘issue confronted with full rigour” even back in that huge vacuum of climatic knowledge that was 1990. -
MarkR at 03:21 AM on 25 February 2011Monckton Myth #14: Monckton's Hunt for the H-spot Leaves me Unsatisfied
I hope that I explained this in a clear and correct way; the 'hot spot' is quite a difficult concept and every article I've read has just talked about conserving the moist adiabat, which makes about as much sense to a non-specialist as when a professor of ancient languages starts babbling in Babylonian... If anyone picks out mistakes, let me know so I can correct them. I kept it shorter than I'd like to try and encourage people to read: I didn't properly cover 2 side points: 1) the 'hot spot' also encourages positive water vapour feedback because of Clausius-Clapeyron... but it is a signature of the lapse rate feedback and net modelled water feedback isn't too strongly dependent on that. Plus direct measurements suggest the WV longwave feedback is significant. 2) there could be more evaporation lower down and subsidence leading to it condensing lower down. In that case the lapse rate feedback (negative/cooling) is still weaker. -
Jeff T at 03:12 AM on 25 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
Lindzen mentions corrections to data in this essay at GWPF. In the third paragraph, he discusses the tropospheric warm spot and concludes that ground-level temperature measurements must be erroneously high. After calling for corrections to those data, he goes on in the same paragraph to accuse the "climate science community" of corruption for correcting data. Did he realize that he was accusing himself of corruption? -
Rob Honeycutt at 03:06 AM on 25 February 2011Meet The Denominator
Poptech said.... "Rob, I never made any claim otherwise that there were not thousands of papers on climate change. I was well aware of this. My argument continues and has always been that only a small fraction of these explicitly endorse "anthropogenic global warming"." Do most papers on evolution explicitly endorse evolution? No. That's because it's well established. Same with climate change. -
cbrock at 02:32 AM on 25 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
This is a very nice post. I agree with Johnny Vector that axis labels are needed. If possible, convert the y-axes of the first four figures to logarithmic coordinates to match the later figures (although it looks as if these plots came from RC). -
Daniel Bailey at 02:12 AM on 25 February 2011The Dai After Tomorrow
For those readers living in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, there's an interesting new study just published in PNAS: Drought variability in the Pacific Northwest from a 6,000-yr lake sediment record Nelson & Abbott 2011 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1009194108 (Abstract, full paper is paywalled) Lake bed sediment core analysis reveals that the climate of the Pacific Northwest fluctuated more or less evenly between wet and dry periods for thousands of years. Droughts tended to be lengthier, with 25 percent of dry periods during the past 6,000 years persisting for 30 years (with a maximum of 75 years duration). Wet periods tended to be shorter with only 19 percent lasting more than 30 years (with a maximum of 64 years duration). The most recent 1,000 years has seen these periods become longer, shifting less frequently, and ushering in more extreme conditions. The wet cycle stretching from the 1940s to approximately 2000 was the dampest in 350 years (the only wetter cycle in the 6,000 year record began around 1650). Lead researcher Mark Abbott, a Pitt professor of geology and planetary science, said those unusually wet years coincide with the period when western U.S. states developed water-use policies."Western states happened to build dams and water systems during a period that was unusually wet compared to the past 6,000 years," he said. "Now the cycle has changed and is trending drier, which is actually normal. It will shift back to wet eventually, but probably not to the extremes seen during most of the 20th century."
Duration of dry and wet cycles by percentage over 6,000-year period. Another finding: the Castor Lake core matched the Palmer Index reconstructed with tree-ring data and expanded on it by 4,500 years, suggesting that lake beds are better records of long-term climate change. Finally, the change in cycle regularity found by Nelson & Abbott 2011 correlates with documented activity of El Niño/La Niña. When the those patterns became more intense, wet and dry cycles in the Pacific Northwest became more erratic and lasted longer. Fill up those canteens now. The Yooper -
rocco at 01:48 AM on 25 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
MarkR: Just FYI, Spencer and Christy aren't the ones who fixed it. -
2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
Fred Staples - "“Higher is Colder”, KR,337 is not “part of the greenhouse effect”. It is the only plausible way of explaining how increasing atmospheric absorption and emission can increase the surface temperature." Quite frankly, no. It's part of the story, but certainly not the entire thing. You might find the simple Excel models I posted here and here of interest. The first is a simple iterative single-layer atmosphere model (no convection/evaporation), so the numbers won't be accurate. But it starts with the surface of the Earth emitting exactly what it receives from the sun (240 W/m^2). Some of that energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, which radiates half of it upwards and half downwards. The end result (illustrative, if not numerically accurate due to model limitations) is that 240 W/m^2 come in, 240 go out, and the surface is emitting 267 W/m^2. A greenhouse gas atmosphere raises the temperature of the surface. The second is a more accurate radiative effect only zero dimensional model, which surprisingly (on my part) gets with 3% of real values. This uses the effective emissivity of the Earth, which drops as greenhouse gases rise (more re-emitted to the ground, also higher effective emission altitudes - both effects). Given an emissivity of .612 (as measured for Earth by satellites), 240 W/m^2 comes in, 240 W/m^2 goes out, and the surface is emitting at about 392 W/m^2 - just as expected. Radiative balances and emissivity decreases caused by GHG's drive surface temperatures to measured values. I'm not interested in convective greenhouses, with or without rock salt - those are red herrings in this discussion of radiative greenhouse effects. As to back radiation - the total energy received by the ground is the sum of solar and back radiation - both impinge on the ground. Arguing that the ground doesn't receive energy from back-radiation is the violation of conservation of energy, and hence the thermodynamic no-no. -
2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
damorbel - I begin to see some of your issues, and quite frankly shudder to consider where to even begin. First - Do you think thermal emission is monochromatic? It's not! It covers a broad band of photon energies, due to a large number of possible electron band transitions of different levels. Second - Absorptivity describes the spectral efficiency of absorbing a photon at any particular energy/wavelength. It turns out to be equal to emissivity when the object is at thermal equilibrium. The ground, for example, has about a 95% probability of absorbing a photon at 6 micron wavelength. The thing is, photons do not carry ID cards - a 6 micron photon may be coming from a superheated plasma or a cold atmosphere - there's still a 95% probability of the ground absorbing it, and hence receiving energy from it. The recipient of a photon cannot know and does not care what the source of the photon is. But that photon still adds to the energy of the receiving object. So your statement "The temperatures are the same because the energies of the photons from both sources are the same" is incorrect. The sun provides a bunch of photons at various energies, the atmosphere emits (downward) a smaller bunch of photons at various lower energies, and these sum up to the total energy received by the ground. Which then emits it's own photons of thermal radiation. The heat flow, the net/summed power, is from sun -> ground -> atmosphere -> space, but even a cold atmosphere adds a tiny bit of energy to the warmer ground. If you cannot understand these basics, well, I can't help you, and I can't see spending my time banging my head on the wall. -
Climate sensitivity is low
I believe the "atmospheric window" issue is tied (again) to George White - he believes the window of IR going straight to space is >90 W/m^2, whereas Trenberth estimates 40 W/m^2, and asserts that all greenhouse gas effects operate by narrowing that window. He seems to neglect lapse rate and GHG concentration effects raising the altitude (and dropping the temperature) of emission, and in addition argues that the 90 W/m^2 represents a limiting band on GHG effects. RW1 - The models operate by calculating upwards and downwards emissions from all levels of the atmosphere, and the 3.7 W/m^2 represents all the effects: band broadening due to higher GHG concentrations, band deepening due to higher effective altitudes of emission to space, higher reemission to the ground, etc. So the answer to your question is partially, although not readily picked out of the other effects. -
Fred Staples at 00:09 AM on 25 February 20112nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
“Higher is Colder”, KR,337 is not “part of the greenhouse effect”. It is the only plausible way of explaining how increasing atmospheric absorption and emission can increase the surface temperature. Incidentally, it is a mechanism which G and T did not discuss, although it was current from 1900 onwards. Think about an atmosphere without a lapse rate – an isothermal atmosphere where higher is not colder. Add greenhouse gasses, increase absorption, and you suggest that the atmospheric temperature will increase. What would happen if it did? Apply the Stefan-Bolzmann equation to the radiation to space, and energy emission will also increase (proportional to the fourth power of the atmospheric temperature). But the incoming energy, from the sun, will not change. So the atmospheric temperature will fall back to its original value. My simple model, is designed to make the same point. With a lapse rate, you can suggest that the effective emission level moves up to a colder region, reducing energy emission. All the temperatures must then increase to restore the balance. The only snag with that argument is that the evidence from the last 30 years shows that it does not happen to any detectable extent. Neither G and T (nor I) claim that AGW contradicts the second law. It is just that some of the sillier explanations of AGW do. Most of them confuse heat and energy, which is where entropy comes in. The silliest explanation, which you can still find in modern text-books, (Houghton for example) is the original greenhouse radiative effect. Consider a greenhouse made of non-absorbing material, such as rock salt. It will absorb heat from the sun, the interior will heat up, and, with convective cooling eliminated, the internal temperature will be higher than the surroundings (G and T’s car interiors, for example). The greenhouse will radiate W watts per square meter, proportional to the fourth power of its temperature. Now replace the rock salt cover with glass, which absorbs infra-red radiation. Half of the outgoing radiation will return to the interior, which, so the story goes, will heat up until it radiates 2W. The original W will then be radiated to the atmosphere, and W will be returned to the interior. The ratio of the glass interior temperature to the rock salt interior temperature will be the fourth root of 2, or 1.19. An increase of 19% of the rock-salt interior absolute temperature, or about 60 degrees C. Does that argument sound familiar? You will find it in part 1 of the Rabett paper to which SOD contributed. It is, of course, nonsense. Back radiation from the cooler glass cannot heat the warmer interior. It would breach the second law if it did. To check this R W Woods built two greenhouses – one rock salt, one glass – so that their convective warming would be identical. Any back-radiative effect would heat the glass green-house preferentially. Their temperatures were the same. -
Tom Curtis at 23:59 PM on 24 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
HR @108, in Hegerl 2007 on table 2, he lists "... the best-guess scaling factor for the model’s fingerprint", ie, the factor by which either forcing or sensitivity must be multiplied by to best reproduce the reconstruction. For his reconstruction, for solar forcings, that factor is 0.5, which means, on the basis of that reconstruction, either climate sensitivity to solar forcings are half those of CO2 and aerosols, or that the solar forcings are around half of those reconstructed at the time of his paper. As it happens, new evidence favours the later conclusion. Hence your previously stated concern that the new evidence on solar forcings might require climate scientists to adopt unphyscical climate sensitivities to explain the past is unwarranted. Hegerl used the forcing reconstuctions from Crowley 2000, which yields a difference between maximum and minimum net solar forcing of 0.6 w/m^2. Halving that sits very comfortably with Gray et al 2010. Having said that, my initial caveat still stands. Neither techiques for reconstructing past forcings or past temperatures are sufficiently exact to tightly constrain climate sensitivity - hence the large error bars in calculatons of sensitivity from data over the last millenium:
This is one reason to prefer sensitivity calculations based on the last glacial maximum, where the much larger changes in forcings and temperatures restrict the potential error.
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Johnny Vector at 23:55 PM on 24 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
I realize this is the advanced version, but please put some axis labels on the first four images. I assume the horizontal axis is latitude and the vertical axis is pressure in millibars, and that the word "Temperature (°C)" at the top refers to the color scale at the bottom. Thanks. -
MarkR at 23:45 PM on 24 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
Spencer and Christy made a genuine mistake and found out how to fix it, then fixed it. Nothing inherently wrong in that. That's proper science and a good thing. It should be a cautionary tale for everyone though. Going through the 'hot spot' controversy a bit and the physics (latent heat transfer & change in the moist adiabat) looks a lot more solid than the direct temperature measurements, which we know have serious problems at that altitude. I'm convinced that the most reasonable explanation is measurement error, in some combination of surface overestimate and upper atmosphere underestimate. Most probably dominated by upper atmosphere underestimate. -
macwithoutfries at 23:01 PM on 24 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
Maybe the best debunking to the Lindzen smear is to remind him of the 'observational data' from his buddies Spencer and Christy (which insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong) - for instance discussed here! -
damorbel at 21:26 PM on 24 February 20112nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
Re 348 & 349 Thank you for your contributions, they enable me to appreciate how you calculate your results. But all that you write makes it increasingly clear that the idea that the upper atmosphere (UA) can raise the surface temperature simply doesn't work. Let us imagine for a moment that the surface and the upper atmosphere are at the same temperature. In this situation both surface and the UA are emitting photons with the same energy, that is a consequence of your formula SQRT(SQRT(B5/(Surface_E*5.6704*10^-8)))-273.15-4. The temperatures are the same because the energies of the photons from both sources are the same; there would be thermal equilibrium i.e. no energy transfer and no temperature change. In reality the UA is colder than the surface and your formula shows that the energy of its photons is lower than those of the surface, so the consequence is that energy is transferred to the UA (accordind to the 2nd Law of thermodynamics) where it is further radiated into deep space. Perhaps you find this difficult to accept but if the UA contained no GHGs at all it would not have a different temperature (apart from the stratosphere - which is warmed by O2 absorbing ultraviolet from the Sun) because heat is transferred in the atmosphere mainly by fluid flow e.g. convection. Below the stratosphere the temperature profile is largely determined by two factors, the temperature of the surface and the compression of the air due to gravity. -
kdkd at 21:17 PM on 24 February 2011Meet The Denominator
Poptech #729 Thanks for the fascinating insight into the psychology of climate change denial; where group think (assertion that poor quality evidence is good quality evidence) is not group think, and logical exposition of quality empirical evidence of climate change is group think. Welcome back to 1984! My work here is done :) -
Dikran Marsupial at 20:45 PM on 24 February 2011Models are unreliable
Chemist1 It would help if you actually read posts before responding to them. Here I explained that a model is only unreliable if the observations lie outside the stated uncertainty of the prediction, and you have ignored this point and are back here again saying the models are unreliable because the error bars are broad. If a projection has broad error bars, so broad that they swamp the variation in the ensemble mean, it means the models are telling you they don't know what is going to happen. If you ask someone if the planet is going to warm and they say "I think it may warm, but I don't really know, it could warm by 4 degrees, but it could cool by 1 degree, but the most likely result is that it will warm by 2 degrees", then if the planet cools by 0.5 degrees, their prediction wasn't unreliable, it wasn't even wrong, because they told you what happened was within the stated confidence of the projection. Large uncertainty does not imply unreliability. In fact it means that models are more likely to be reliable as the model projections cover a wider range of possibilities. If you ignore the stated uncertainty of the projections, that is your error, not a shortcoming of the models. As it happens, the error bars on projections for large time and spatial scales are not broad compared to the variation in the ensemble mean. See e.g. IPCC report chapter on attribution. If you don't take on board points that are made, or at least counter them, don't be surprised if contributors stop responding to your posts. -
HumanityRules at 20:24 PM on 24 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
58 Tom Curtis "In fact, Hegerl produces the most coherent results, ie, with climate sensitivity of solar and GHG forcings being the same, if solar forcings are half that of the estimates which he used. With solar forcings only 1/4 of that which he used, the sensitivity of GHG and solar forcings will still be very close, within limits of error." Sorry Tom but I can't see in Hegerl were he says you need to 1/2 the forcing to get a good match. Are you sure you have this the right way around, not multiply by 2 (to 4)? The Foukal Nature Review that I referenced in #54 says "We also considered the case where the forcing by the dark and bright magnetic components was modified by adding a lowfrequency component69, amplifying the solar forcing range by 3 to 4 over this time period. In this case (red curve), the model cooling trend is closer to the reconstructed palaeotemperature trend." Foukal et al 2006 Nature Review And that is what I've been reading in the rest of the literature as well. "Although the most straightforward mechanism of the sun– climate connection is the direct heating of the earth by solar radiation [total solar irradiance (TSI)], it is unlikely that the entire solar influence on climate can be attributed simply to variations in the TSI (2–4)." Yamaguchi et al 2010 PNAS And from another review on the solar irradiance changes from MM to present based on multiple sources "These estimates for century-scale TSI changes of ~1.3-1.6 Wm-2 correspond to a change in mean global radiative forcing of only 0.16-0.28 Wm-2" Gray and many other 2010 The concensus seems to be changes in luminosity/TSI while often synchronous with temperature change are too small to suggest the direct energy changes are driving climate change. I don't know how Hegerl found that the magnitude of TSI changes were too high as you suggest. Anyway to bring this back to climate sensitivity. All these papers seem to agree there is no known mechanism by which solar can affect climate change on the scale we are looking at here. It does beg the question how you would calculate climate sensitivity on that basis. -
Albatross at 18:26 PM on 24 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
Robert @106, "I haven't seen any comprehensive reconstruction of net forcing over the past millennia, so it would seem to be a non-sequitur to state that the Idso's are necessarily arguing for a high climate sensitivity in arguing for a warm MWP." Actually Hegerl (2006) looked into this. Estimates of the forcing data (solar, aerosol, GHGs etc.) are shown going back to 1000 AD, see Fig. 2. Mann et al. (2009) looked into the possible role of internal climate variability over the last 1500 years. -
Riduna at 18:14 PM on 24 February 2011Carbon Cycle Feedbacks
Andy S draws attention to the fact that as temperatures rise greenhouse gas emissions from sinks where they are now trapped will also rise. He notes that these include CO2 emissions from warming soil and tree destruction, now occurring, to which might be added the oceans as surface temperature rises in the future. More damaging are CH4 emissions, now becoming increasingly evident, caused by the thawing of clathrates and permafrost allowing embedded organic material to resume decaying. Hansen has warned that these emissions could result in runaway global warming and for good reason when one considers that I litre of solid clathrate yields ~165 litres of CH4. Millions of tones of methane clathrates are thought to lie beneath Arctic offshore sediments. They have started melting. Given the threat of these emissions, one is forced to ask why the need to limit average global temperature to no more than 2C above preindustrial temperature by 2100 is measured in terms of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and not in terms of CO2-e? It is all very well to assert that the cooling effect of aerosols off-sets the effect of other warming greenhouse gas emissions but how can that be true when emissions of the kind described above are increasing? By ignoring their effect are we not underestimating the magnitude and rate of future global warming? -
RobertS at 17:44 PM on 24 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
"The NIPCC report is claiming that the IPCC sensitivity range is too high by a factor of 10, but the Idso Prudent Path document, by claiming that the MWP was as hot or hotter than today, is arguing that the IPCC sensitivity range is too low. " I don't quite understand this argument; I haven't seen any comprehensive reconstruction of net forcing over the past millennia, so it would seem to be a non-sequitur to state that the Idso's are necessarily arguing for a high climate sensitivity in arguing for a warm MWP. A MWP comparable in temperature to today is virtually impossible given the slew of millennial temperature reconstructions showing otherwise, and there is little indication of any dramatic changes in TSI or volcanic activity that could lead to such a warm MWP, but I'm not sure the latter proposition contradicts Idso's concurrent argument that CS is low. -
dana1981 at 17:10 PM on 24 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
Marcus don't you know? Whichever data set shows the least warming at any given time is the good one! -
dana1981 at 17:09 PM on 24 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
Tom, thanks. Not tired, just doing too many things at once! Yes, I meant that if the original hickey stick were correct and the MWP weren't particularly hot, that would be good news. -
muoncounter at 16:07 PM on 24 February 2011Climate sensitivity is low
scaddenp - Yeah, I thought that was a peculiar phrase, which seems to add an unnecessary layer of complication. All I did was point to the link, as it seemed (in #105) that he couldn't find it. How he chooses to interpret this particular 3.7 W/m^2 is up to him, although both KR and you have made it very clear. -
kdkd at 16:00 PM on 24 February 2011Meet The Denominator
Poptech #727 The only people who take your inconsequential list seriously are you and your group think enthralled friends. The rest of us can see that it's seriously lacking on many many levels. End of story, and hopefully the end of this thread :) -
TOP at 15:22 PM on 24 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
Glad to see a discussion of SST effect on GW. -
iskepticaluser at 15:13 PM on 24 February 2011Carbon Cycle Feedbacks
Your comments re the photo of Yoho National Park (that the dead trees on the mountain slopes illustrate bark-beetle damage) contradict the wikipedia info for the photo. Poor choice of photos, however doesn't negate the point about warmer winters and the exploding range of this insect: see this RealClimate post for example. -
scaddenp at 15:09 PM on 24 February 2011Climate sensitivity is low
muon - the issue is does "reduction in the atmospheric window" mean the same thing to RW1 as I think it means. You can say yes, but I suspect that RW1 then has corollary from that shows a very different understanding. -
Daniel Bailey at 14:38 PM on 24 February 2011Carbon Cycle Feedbacks
The actual GHG values from gases released from melting permafrost are almost a lock to be worse than projected. Schaefer et al 2011 presumes (for purposes of ready calculation, I believe) 100% of emissions to be in the form of CO2, while in actuality much will be in the form of CH4 (methane). Should this stand up to further scrutiny & be confirmed by subsequent studies, this means an effective CO2 doubling from permafrost melt alone by 2200. In addition, Schaefer et al 2011 do not consider methane hydrate releases, which are currently underway in the East Siberian Arctic Sea. Needless to say, no current model begins to take this all into consideration. The edge nears. The Yooper -
muoncounter at 14:25 PM on 24 February 2011Climate sensitivity is low
Rahmstorf 2008, linked in the Advanced version of this post, gives 3.7 W/m^2 as an undisputed figure for CO2 forcing. Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 (which amounts to a forcing of 3.7 W/m2) would result in 1°C global warming, which is easy to calculate and is undisputed. ... consensus holds that a doubling of CO2 causes a radiative forcing of 3.7 W/m2, which in equilibrium would cause 3°C±1.5°C of global warming. -
RW1 at 14:06 PM on 24 February 2011Climate sensitivity is low
My goodness, the answer is yes or no. You are claiming the 3.7 W/m^2 does NOT represent the reduction in the atmospheric window, right? (This is what I'm assuming you're saying). I do not find this information in the stuff you've referenced, and I've continued to search online to no avail. What we are talking about here represents a fairly simple thing. I sent an email to one of the links from the source you referenced to inquire: SpectralCalc.com Hopefully they will respond. -
scaddenp at 13:57 PM on 24 February 2011Climate sensitivity is low
Sigh. The Science of Doom takes you through text book. Is that documentation enough? The problem seems to be that you are looking for a statement that doesnt exist because it would make no sense. The way real physics is done is bears little relationship to way you are trying to approach it. We are trying desperately to show why that is. As far as I can see you either: a/ study the physics b/ see that since model matches measurement so model must be right. I am guess that are ignoring the textbook, SoD, papers, because they dont relate to George White's "logic" and you search in vain for an analogous treatment. However, this is the right way to do it. I'm beyond my power to help you further. -
muoncounter at 13:23 PM on 24 February 2011Models are unreliable
Chemist1, Your second linked abstract "Computer models are powerful tools ... " provides no actual scientific criticism of models. Their interplay helps to weed out model errors, identify robust features, understand the climate system, and build confidence in the models, but is no guard against flaws in the underlying physics. This is merely a caveat; the author suggests that models could have 'flawed' physics. Do you automatically assume that because an author says something could happen, it necessarily does? A far more robust criticism would be 'here is a model study with flawed physics.' I assume you did not use this because you have no such example at hand? -
SRNE2 at 12:37 PM on 24 February 2011Meet The Denominator
This is the 2nd time I write this. I scrapped my 1st post since I didn't want to partake in this insanity. I changed my mind. This needs to end. You are arguing with a professional troll that has spellbound you for years. And by pro I mean he is definitely hired by vested interests to do this. He has A+ skills. I don't want to rain on your parade, but this shill is wasting everyone's time. So, can we please just ignore him? No matter how "fun" these threads may appear, there are more pressing issues to address. Let's face it, we have been pwned.Moderator Response: (Daniel Bailey) While I deeply sympathize with your frustrations, please realize that you are not alone in enduring the train wreck this thread has become. All reading this would be well advised to not add fuel to the fire. -
Ron Crouch at 12:32 PM on 24 February 2011Carbon Cycle Feedbacks
Speaking of permafrost. NOAA Hot on Methane’s Trail A new study led by Kevin Schaefer, Ph.D., and a team of scientists from NOAA-funded Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the NOAA Earth System Research Lab now predicts a 29 to 59 percent decrease in permafrost by 2200. Published in the journal Tellus B, the study estimates a large release of carbon – in the form of carbon dioxide and methane – from thawing permafrost over the next century, though much is still unknown about how these emissions will accelerate climate warming. Scientific climate projections do not currently account for carbon emissions from permafrost, but the study concludes that the effect is “strong enough to warrant inclusion in all projections of future climate.” It will certainly be interesting to see how much the inclusion of methane in future projections will change the range of outcomes. -
Ron Crouch at 12:14 PM on 24 February 2011Carbon Cycle Feedbacks
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It held true in the past and it holds even truer today. -
Bibliovermis at 12:08 PM on 24 February 2011Meet The Denominator
Poptech (#710), The 97% figure comes from the Doran 2009 study as discussed on the argument #3 thread There is no consensus.97.5% of climatologists who actively publish research on climate change responded yes to "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?"
Please respond to this point on that thread. -
Philippe Chantreau at 11:55 AM on 24 February 2011Meet The Denominator
PT post # 720. I don't doubt that this is the perception you get from reading E&E on a regular basis. In any case it is a sweeping accusation against all scientists, formulated with words that you have declared yourself as leading only to subjective statements. Your accusation must be substantiated with objective criteria, otherwise, even by your own stanadrds, it is null and void. You're demonstrating again and again that you're arguing for the sake of argument and that reality has no bearing whatsoever on said argument. It has come to a point that's beyond grotesque. -
Bern at 11:51 AM on 24 February 2011Carbon Cycle Feedbacks
David Horton @ #1 - paradoxically, I've heard that some areas are substantially increasing their logging rates because they know the pine beetle is going to kill most of the trees in the next few decades, and they want to harvest the timber before it gets ruined. Yet again, though, as this article points out, it seems wherever there is uncertainty, the deniers assume without question that the error is on the high side, and the actual value is at the bottom end of the uncertainty range. We're gonna be in one heck of a pickle if the actual values turn out to be at the top end of the range. Well, if nothing else, at least the unrest across the arab world may help promote alternatives to fossil oil. It's going to be a painful process to get through, though (and has already been painful for the folks in those countries, with more pain to come as their oil-dependent economies start to falter - I saw a report [free reg req'd, I think] this morning that an analyst has given a 25% chance for revolution in Saudi Arabia, which holds 20% of world reserves) -
RW1 at 11:49 AM on 24 February 2011Climate sensitivity is low
scaddenp, I'm not finding the information and/or documentation I'm looking for to verify the claims made by you and KR. You are saying the 3.7 W/m^2 increase is not the reduction in the atmospheric window? -
Philippe Chantreau at 11:48 AM on 24 February 2011Meet The Denominator
"My argument continues and has always been that only a small fraction of these explicitly endorse "anthropogenic global warming". But you have failed to demonstrate that by the standards you define yourself. By your own standards, it's entirely subjective. You can't even begin to prove it. "Credentialed scientist"? That is exactly the kind of thing you were arguing against, earlier, at some point. You've been doing this all along this thread, strongly defending against a semantic issue only to use it when it suited your argument. Just like you tried to argue that quality is subjective and then turned around to say that one could not objectively claim to be qualified as a reviewer from having a track record of numerous "mediocre papers". That is obviously a concept that you failed to objectively define. Nonsense on top of more nonsense. This is by far the most accurate assessment of your ramblings: "he's invested in the process of argumentation itself." You have nothing of substance to say other than "I have a list." That is so laughably limited as to be irrelevant to anyone who can think. -
Marcus at 11:27 AM on 24 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
Robert Way. The thing I love was how the Hadley Climate Research Unit was the focus of the ludicrous "Climate-gate" beat-up, yet now all the "skeptics" are pointing to HadCRU temperature data as better than anyone else's-apparently because it shows a shallower warming trend than GISS or RSS. Boy the own goals from the Denialists are coming in thick & fast! -
Tom Curtis at 11:05 AM on 24 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
Invicta @65, Dana @ 67, from the article: "When you combine the temperature record over the past millennium with climate forcings, you get a most likely climate sensitivity value close to 3°C, consistent with the IPCC climate sensitivity range of 2°C to 4.5°C. So if the temperature swings were actually larger than in the reconstructions used by Hegerl and other studies on millennial climate sensitivity, it means the climate sensitivity is actually higher than the IPCC has concluded." So, Invicta, the thread is saying that if the MWP were warmer than the reconstructions (and hence 1990's temperatures), that is a bad sign for the future because it indicates a high climate sensitivity. A hotter MWP, and a colder LIA would both indicate forecasts for future temperatures are underestimates. It does not argue that current temperatures being actually higher than the MWP is a bad thing for our future. That is in fact bad, but only because current forecasts with the current best estimate of climate sensitivity are grim enough. I have to assume that Dana was very tired when he responded to you, for his response contradicts the article. -
David Horton at 10:42 AM on 24 February 2011Carbon Cycle Feedbacks
Oh, and before any arrive, some interesting material coming to light eg http://climateprogress.org/2011/02/20/denier-bots-live-why-are-online-comments-sections-over-run-by-the-anti-science-pro-pollution-crowd/ and http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/02/government-and-big-business-gaming.html about the existence of highly sophisticated "denier bot" operations, able to swamp any climate change threads with denier diversions, while appearing to be genuine individuals with unique IPs, backgrounds, internet histories. I'm sure all of us have had our suspicions from time to time! -
scaddenp at 10:21 AM on 24 February 2011Models are unreliable
"Dikran the range of uncertainty is so wide that it makes long term projections or predictions unreliable." That would be unsupported opinion, at odds with models reliability to date. What's your idea of "short term"? At decadal level, models are hopeless. At longer scales they do exceedingly well. Cutting to the chase - how much accurate prediction by models can you take before you change your mind? -
Paul D at 09:53 AM on 24 February 2011Smoking, cancer and global warming
rhjames: "If someone says that doubling CO@ might result in a 1 degC increase, then I'll accept that as consistent with known science. Anything beyond that is just guess work at this stage." Logically your comment is in error. Your own logic would imply that the 1 degree increase is guess work, because you know that there are feedbacks that would alter the forcings. You are defying your own logic by accepting what you call known science. -
Paul D at 09:46 AM on 24 February 2011Smoking, cancer and global warming
rhjames: "only computer models and theory which are still based on very limited understanding of many contributing factors." I suspect very much that the details of all the processes, down to the quantum level are not well understood when it comes to understanding why smoking kills. Your assumptions are bull. -
Paul D at 09:41 AM on 24 February 2011Smoking, cancer and global warming
rhjames: "What I found is that over the past century, there has been increased precipitation in some areas, and decreases in others." erm, both imply change, compared to the past! One wouldn't expect the same patterns in every location, that would be silly. -
Albatross at 09:38 AM on 24 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
HR @100, As shown by muoncounter in their post @40, MBH98 is not shown in Fig. 6-10b in AR4, MBH99 is. We have been over this, MBH98 is discussed in AR4 but only because of the controversy surrounding it. Really, you guys have nothing and it is showing.
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