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michael sweet at 03:11 AM on 18 December 2023Climate Adam: The tough reality of Carbon Capture & Storage
It seems to me that to find the bottom line for carbon capture used to keep fossil fuel production going in the future all you have to do is look at the production facilities that the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the oil majors have built or planned. As I understand it, they combined have about one large facility world wide. They recover CO2 from their refinery operations and pump that back into the ground to recover more oil, but that is not carbon capture and storage.
If the fossil fuel produceers were serious about carbon capture there would be many facilities planned or under constrution. These facilities take 5 years or more to build, and longer to plan and permit. The lack of proposed facilities indicates that this is the last gasp of the oil producers hoping everyone will look at the squirrel instead of installing solar and wind.
The only realistic solution is to build out wind and solar as fast as possible. If all fossil fuel subsidies were transferred to building renewable energy we would finish the system in a decade.
China alone will install over 300 gigawatts of renewable energy this year. If the entire world put in as much effort as China we would be in a much better place. The fossil plants China is building will be obsolete before they are commissioned.
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Pierre-Ernest at 20:46 PM on 17 December 2023At a glance - Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
As this is your first post, Skeptical Science respectfully reminds you to please follow our comments policy. Thank You!
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BaerbelW at 19:44 PM on 17 December 2023It's methane
Please note: a new basic version of this rebuttal was published on December 17, 2023 which includes an "at a glance“ section at the top. To learn more about these updates and how you can help with evaluating their effectiveness, please check out the accompanying blog post @ https://sks.to/at-a-glance
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nigelj at 10:53 AM on 17 December 2023Climate Adam: The tough reality of Carbon Capture & Storage
OPOF @4
Thank's for correcting the math. I think I know what happened. I scribbled some numbers and calcs. for different scenarious on a piece of paper and came back to it later, and transposed the wrong number into the computer. The main thing is the total is 925,000 DACs, or even more using the assumptions in your copy and paste.
We clearly need some sort of way of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere. But the thing I was trying to get across about the DAC industrial plant option is that 925,000 DAC's would clearly require a vast quantity of materials and energy, and over a 30 year span if its function is just to offset certain emissions. These plants are not small. Photo of worlds largest existing instillation here.
For comparison purposes the world currently has 600,000 bridges and about 24,000 coal fired power stations built over our entire history. The issue is whether the world has enough materials and spare energy for something like 925,000 DACS, - especially if they are all built over about 30 years. Remember we are also building renewable energy at the same time.
Known reserves of concentrated deposits key minerals are only expected to last another century or two at current rates of use. There are enough apparently to build out a renewable energy grid, (Jacobson) but add in 925,000 DAC's and its another matter entirely. I'm not a minerals depletion pessimist and we will probably discover new reserves, but it intuitively looks like we might not have enough materials to do everything.
The other options you list for extracting CO2 from the air ( biomass, soil sinks, enhanced rock weathering, marine storage, etc ) look interesting an dpotentially useful, and intuitively look less materials and energy intensive given natural processes do some of the work. But they are very land intensive. DAC does have the advantage that its a rapid extraction, and less land intensive and CO2 storage is permanent or close enough.
I might try and find or calculate some comparisons of materials and energy required if I have time.
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One Planet Only Forever at 08:44 AM on 17 December 2023Climate Adam: The tough reality of Carbon Capture & Storage
nigelj,
While reading the report I mention in my comment @3, I came back to re-read your comment.
There is indeed a concern about the scale of required DAC's. But the math appears to be:
- currently 37 Gte of emissions
- 20% assumed to be impractical to stop is 7.4 Gt, not 4,625 Gte
- Number of 8 kte DAC plants is 925,000 (as you correctly indicated)
The report I refer to @3 indicates a higher possible range of required Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) in the following quote:
Thus far, estimates of how much CDR might be needed range from almost none up to more than 300 gigatonnes (Gt) cumulatively by 2050, or over 1,200 Gt cumulatively by 2100 [Citation10] – that is, up to about 10–15 GtCO2/year starting immediately, contingent on simultaneous rapid emissions mitigation, to meet 1.5° or 2 °C targets. Such estimates are purely mathematical, balancing positive with negative emissions: in theory, CDR could be used to counteract any emission (currently about 60 GtCO2e/year [Citation5]). As such, CDR requirements will be higher for less rapid and/or lower levels of emissions mitigation. To date, binding requirements for decarbonization that clearly articulate which emissions should be mitigated and which remain residual emissions to be addressed via CDR [Citation12] are rare, and CDR remains voluntary, contributing to a lack of clarity on necessary scope, scale, pace, and degree of resource competition.
Also note that the author's CDR includes many actions, not just mechanical DAC, as described in this quote:
Here, we define CDR to mean intentional, additional actions taken to capture CO2 from the atmosphere (either directly or via intermediaries like biomass or the ocean) and permanently store it such that the CO2 will not return to the atmosphere on time scales that at least match the lifespan of its impacts on the atmosphere and ocean [Citation5]. Commonly proposed approaches that are potentially capable of delivering CDR include (but are not limited to) direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS); biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS);Footnote1 direct ocean carbon capture and storage (DOCCS); enhanced rock weathering (ERW); forestry; and soil carbon management. Some storage mechanisms, particularly those that rely on biological sinks like forests and soils, are not permanent in the sense of matching the lifespan of CO2’s impacts. As such, we distinguish between CDR-capable interventions (e.g. an afforestation project) and actual CDR, which might entail consistent rehabilitation or replacement for projects where CO2 is stored for less than geologic time (and which necessarily imposes greater administrative burden for strategies requiring relatively short replacement intervals).
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One Planet Only Forever at 11:11 AM on 16 December 2023CO2 limits will harm the economy
PollutionMonster,
I agree that Jason Stanley's book, How Fascism Works, is recommended reading.
I recommended How Fascism Works, along with Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny, in a comment I made in 2021 on a different SkS item, "The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews". My comment there is @17 (linked here). Note that Bob Loblaw makes an additional excellent recommendation, for "The Authoritarians", on that comment string.
We are indeed in "Strange Daze" (Days misspelled intentionally) full of examples of trouble-makers succeeding in "Strange Ways". Maintain your focus on learning to be less harmful to others. And help others, including trying to help them learn to be less harmfully misled (admittedly you will encounter some Almost Lost Causes - People very deep into the delusions and fantasy beliefs of misinformation and disinformation).
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PollutionMonster at 08:59 AM on 16 December 2023CO2 limits will harm the economy
One Planet Only Forever @121
I am still reading your post and sources. I recommend a book by Jason Stanley. How fascism works explains how the Merchants of doubt borrow fascist strategies to spread disinformation and fearmonger. Combine this with the communist technique of the fire-hose of falsehoods and no wonder they are such a formidable adversary.
I also heard on NPR that we need to "phase out fossil fuels anything else is a distraction." From arguing with deniers a carbon tax is a snake pit argument like AGW deaths with too many ways to be derailed. Thank you for talking to me. :)
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One Planet Only Forever at 03:16 AM on 16 December 2023Climate Adam: The tough reality of Carbon Capture & Storage
The top item (the first Open Access Notable) in the Skeptical Science New Research for Week #50 2023 appears to be a comprehensive presentation of understanding related to and aligned with my comment @2.
I have only read the introduction of The distortionary effects of unconstrained for-profit carbon dioxide removal and the need for early governance intervention, Grubert & Talati, Carbon Management.
After I have read the full item I will make any further comments about how Carbon Dioxide Removal will hopefully be managed/governed to limit harm done to the future of humanity on Skeptical Science New Research for Week #50 2023 (based on reading the Intorduction, I expect to learn a lot and may have nothing more to add).
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MA Rodger at 18:48 PM on 15 December 2023Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Is it healthy to pander to crazy sock-puppet nonsense by discussing 'what-if' ideas when the sock-puppet is wedded to a 'surely it is' idea?
The idea that the existing GHE can be attributed to 50% water vapour, 25% cloud and this forced by 25% CO2 which thus attributes cloud as a warming agent does overlook the full impact of cloud on planetray albedo and which could be used to calculate cloud as a cooling agent.
The sock-puppet @176 suggests a cloudless Earth would see albedo drop from 30% to 15%, the latter being roughly the Moon's effective albedo which would suggest the Moon woud have an average temperature of 267K. However the measured temperature of the Moon averages at 201K and this because the Moon rotation is so slow that it sheds massive amounts of energy during its day with Moon equatorial temperatures reaching 390K.
Of course, the Earth spins fast enough to prevent such a large duirnal range and if there had never been CO2 to form a GHE, there would never have been oceans to slow it down from its 4 hour day back when the Earth-Moon began.
But unlike the Moon, there is a lot of water on Earth and the albedo of ice is high. That is reduced by the dust which would cover the ice on a GHE-free Earth but albedo would remain high, and perhaps higher than today. De Vrese et al (2021) suggests the albedo of 'meteoric ice' is 65% which, if the Earth's albedo, would indicate a 250K Earth and a GHE of 38K.
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Rob Honeycutt at 00:54 AM on 15 December 2023Greenhouse effect has been falsified
CTS @176... "The often-quoted 255K black body temperature of the earth is wrong..."
That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
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Eclectic at 17:46 PM on 14 December 2023Greenhouse effect has been falsified
CTS @176 :
an iceball Earth (at 255K or 271K) has how many clouds?
Have you really thought this through . . . and published?
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ClimateTruthSeeker at 16:43 PM on 14 December 2023Greenhouse effect has been falsified
The often-quoted 255K black body temperature of the earth is wrong and the 33K GHE is overstated. This is due to the albedo being too high in the calculation which is meant to show what the temperature would be if the earth had no atmosphere at all.
However, the calculation falsely uses the albedo when an atmosphere exists, completely ignoring the fact that if there is no atmosphere, there are no clouds. Using a conservative estimate that 50% of albedo is attributed to clouds, this decreases the albedo from 0.3 to 0.15 resulting in a black body temperature of approximately 268K, reducing the GHE to 20K.
However, there would be further impacts on ice and water, and a more realistic albedo when there is no atmosphere at all is 10%, as others have postulated. This leads to a black body temperature of approximately 271K (-2.15C) and a theorized GHE effect of 17K, just over half of what was previously estimated.
Moderator Response:[BL] Return of another sock puppet.
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One Planet Only Forever at 15:21 PM on 14 December 2023Climate Adam: The tough reality of Carbon Capture & Storage
Excellent point Nigel.
I would add that the lack of reduction of climate change impacts by the portion of the global population that benefit most from the harm being done has made 'Carbon capture from the atmosphere and locking it away' an essential action to bring the level of impact back down to 1.5 C.
The people today who have benefited most from the damage done to date owe the future of humanity a significant number of DAC facilities being built and beginning operation in the near future, no matter how expensive that is.
Excessive levels of impact, far beyond 1.5 C, are now almost certain. The accounting of credit for actions to limit the harm done during the curtailing of human caused climate change impacts, during the transition away from unsustainable developed activity, needs to exclude any 'credit' from DAC facilities (or extra trees planted). Those CO2 removal actions need to be understood to be a 'debt penalty owed' in addition to the Loss and Damages penalties owed.
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nigelj at 12:31 PM on 14 December 2023Climate Adam: The tough reality of Carbon Capture & Storage
Informative video as always. Its true that fitting CO2 capture technology to coal fired power stations isn't compelling because it just prolongs our reliance on coal fired power and the technology is plagued with problems. DAC (direct air capture) that removes CO2 directly form the air sounds helpful in dealing with areas of the economy that are hard to decarbonise. Or would it? Consider the maths:
We emit about 37 giga tons of CO2 globally each year.
Lets assume we use direct air capture to extract 20% of this each year, so 4,625 giga tons, because about 20% of the economy is really hard to decarbonise.
There are about 20 DAC facilities operating globally. The largest existing DAC facility extracts 8,000 tons CO2 each year. And this plant is large and complex and energy intensive.
This means you would need 925,000 DAC plants!!!!!I feel the number speaks for itself. Yes you would not necessarily rely just on DAC but even so it would be a collosal challenge.
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One Planet Only Forever at 04:12 AM on 14 December 2023A New 66 Million-Year History of Carbon Dioxide Offers Little Comfort for Today
MA Roger,
Thank you for pointing to alternative approaches to global warming scenario development. And thank you for pointing out those justified concerns about how the limited scope and method of presentation of an evaluation can be misleading.
In all honesty, I conceptually created the 3 situations to try to make the point that how we get to a global warming impact temperature value at 2100 and what is done after 2100 makes a difference. I hoped to present the understanding that there are a variety of ways of achieving a value of 2100 warming impact, with an ‘important differentiating consideration’ being what happens beyond 2100. And I simply chose to call the three created example situations ‘scenarios’.
I chose 1.7 C in an attempt to be brief but clear that I am not referring to any of the formally presented scenarios. I am pessimistic that the 2100 warming impact level of SSP1-1.9 is likely to be achieved. But I am hopeful that something better than SSP1-2.9 can be achieved. The important point is that there are many ways to conceptualize getting to the same 2100 impact result. And the variety of ways of getting that 2100 result, including what happens after 2100, are not ‘equivalent levels of harm reduction’.
I will add that my MBA included Organizational Behaviour and Design where I learned that it is incorrect to believe that a specific set of policy or operational rule changes can be certain to produce a desired ‘objective change’ (I believe this is part of the reason for the range of results for each IPCC scenario). New policies and rules may result in changes, or they may not, or they produce unanticipated changes.
When there is a need to change the collective behaviour of the members of any organization, including the organization of all of global humanity, a diversity of hoped to be helpful policy and rule changes can be conceptualized. And some of those changes would be based on improved understanding developed in the very hard to investigate fields of social, political, and economic behaviours where irrational behaviours can, and do, significantly occur. Irrational behaviour, including resistance to learning to be less harmful and more helpful to others, can especially occur due to the potential to benefit unjustifiably, especially from from secrecy (people less aware than they could be) or the popularity of misunderstanding (abusing the powerful science of marketing).
Therefore, when pursuing an objective correction of unsustainable or harmful developed behaviours by changes of policy or rules it is important to diligently monitor the changes that actually occur and revise the policy and rule changes as required to increase the chances of achieving the desired correction of collective behaviours. (hopefully accomplished by each COP session).
I have to add that when I got my MBA education in the 1980s it was rather rare to have the MBA program include ‘social and psychological’ considerations. Most MBA programs of the time, particularly the most prestigious programs, were focused exclusively on ‘maximizing making money matters most’, like Economics, Accounting, Finance, Efficiency of Operations and Material supply, Marketing, and Legalities related to financial activities and contracts.
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MA Rodger at 19:46 PM on 13 December 2023A New 66 Million-Year History of Carbon Dioxide Offers Little Comfort for Today
One Planet Only Forever @3,
Where do you source your "set of scenarios with equal 2100 temperature values of 1.7 C" ?
I do note the use of IAMs to create scenarios & MAGICC to calculate the climatic outcomes does provide a route to developing such scenarios with a lot less effort than the SSP -> GCM approach. And I also note the rather worrying way such scenarios are presented simply as % cuts by 2050 along with a temperature rise. This is worrying as the cuts required over shorter and longer timescales are airbrushed away, this often along with the substitution of CO2 emissions timings for CO2(equivalent) emissions which can be very significant (as per AR6 WGIII Fig3.6 below).
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nigelj at 05:38 AM on 13 December 2023A New 66 Million-Year History of Carbon Dioxide Offers Little Comfort for Today
The information on earth system sensitivity of 5 - 8 degrees C is very sobering. There are many accounts of what a 6 degree world is like easily googled and its very inhospitable for humans and other species. Because ESS develops on long time frames we might adapt to some extent, but that doesn't really make it any less inhospitable.
This is one authors depiction of a 6 degree world based on available research. The description is based on such a world developing over the next couple of centuries and a failure to curb emissions, but even if it takes thousands of years as a result of ESS, many of the outcomes would be similar.
"Special coverage is given to the positive feedback mechanisms that could dramatically accelerate climate change. The book explains how the release of methane hydrate and the release of methane from melting permafrost could unleash a major extinction event. Carbon cycle feedbacks, the demise of coral, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and extreme desertification are also described, with five or six degrees of warming potentially leading to the complete uninhabitability of the tropics and subtropics, as well as extreme water and food shortages, possibly leading to mass migration of billions of people."
The IPCC seems to have focused most attention on warming and sea level rise rates by 2100. We have projections of around 3 degrees C of warming and worst case about 5 degrees, and SLR around 1 metre with a worst case 2 metres. The details on longer term trends several centuries into the future, or millenia into the future like earth system sensitivity, are buried away in their reports or not given much attention.
The IPCC have a chart buried in their reports showing a worst case of about 10 degrees C by about 2300 if equilibrium climate sensitivity turns out to be high and we just go on burning fossil fuels. Likewise by 2300 SLR could be well over 2 metres. This may be somewhat attenuated by the impacts of renewable energy already reducing projected coal use, but it would still be a big number and theres a lot of SLR already baked in even if we stop warming right now.
I wonder if this focus on year 2100 is a deliberate psychological strategy to focus on our immediate future. If they focused on the longer term trends there might be a risk that people would say why worry that won't effect me or my children.
However warming of for example 3 degrees by 2100 and one metre or so of SLR doesnt sound very scary to some people, while numbers like 5- 8 degrees longer term and SLR of 10 - 20 metres are obviously intuitively far more scary and certainly get my attention. Clearly we do need a focus on year 2100, for obvious reasons, because its in our lifetimes and adaptation would be very costly, but I wonder if a bit more attention on longer term time frames would have really shown people the huge scale of change we are facing.
Moderator Response:[RH] Shortened link
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ubrew12 at 05:02 AM on 13 December 2023At a glance - Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
Ian Plimer: "If Senator Wong were really serious about her science she would stop breathing..." Not unless Senator Wong is eating 'Coal-Coal-Puffs' for breakfast, Professor 'I'm-Really-Serious-About-My-Science'.
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One Planet Only Forever at 03:40 AM on 13 December 2023A New 66 Million-Year History of Carbon Dioxide Offers Little Comfort for Today
Evan @2,
Agreed that the popularity of those ‘beliefs’ are a serious problem.
Those types of beliefs get some support from statements like the one included in this press release: “The giant caveat: Earth system sensitivity describes climate changes over hundreds of thousands of years, not the decades and centuries that are immediately relevant to humans.”
That correct statement regarding the developed highly influential, but undeniably harmful, attitude and restricted consideration of many people should always be paired with a clear statement of the unacceptability of any person in leadership, or of high status, thinking that way.
As an example, the likely global average surface temperature in 2100 may seem like a decent measurement point given the increased uncertainty of modelling into the future. But it is understandably not an appropriate measure of success. Here are a set of scenarios with equal 2100 temperature values of 1.7 C (not the desired 1.5 C, but maybe considered to be well below 2.0 C):
- Human rates of impacts that would increase temperature are ended without temperature impacts exceeding 1.7 C. And sustainable measures are being increasingly implemented that will reverse previous impacts. The future temperature is not expected to increase above 1.7 C and will actually be reduced beyond 2100, including confidence that there will not be increasing surface temperature due to long term potential warming feed-backs.
- Human impacts peaked above 2.0 C before 2100 and have been reversed and removed back down with efforts to further reduce impacts being curtailed. Less certainty that there will be no feedback warming after 2100. Part of that uncertainty regarding future warming is uncertainty about the long term impacts of the peak temperature value and duration of the higher temperatures.
- Human impacts have been been successfully limited so that the total warming by 2100 is 1.7 C. But impacts are continuing to increase after 2100.
Those 3 scenarios are not ‘equally successful’ at sustainably improving the future for humanity. Only the first one could be considered to be ‘real success’. The others are just perceptions of ‘equal success’.
Note that adaptations to the impacts of climate change are 'not improvements of the future' They are attempts to maintain developed ways of living. And repair of climate change damage is also 'attempts to maintain developed stuff'. That leads to the understanding that developed perceptions of poverty reduction and perceptions of living better than a basic decent life are unsustainable if they rely on harmful unsustainable actions like the use of fossil fuels (even abated use of fossil fuels is unsustainable).
The challenge is being clear about what developed perceptions do not deserve to be maintained as the developed harming of the future of humanity is corrected.
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Evan at 01:07 AM on 13 December 2023A New 66 Million-Year History of Carbon Dioxide Offers Little Comfort for Today
Some say that current CO2 emissions have no effect on future warming (global warming, climate change deniers).
Some say that past CO2 emissions have no effect on future warming (no-warming in the pipeline climate modelers).
This study suggests that maybe we are not in as much control of the environment as these other two groups of people would like to think.
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MA Rodger at 19:54 PM on 12 December 20232023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44
Dessler's post does rather hedge its bets by suggesting it might be "due to natural variability persisting over an extended period" which will at some point come to an end (so as per the 2007-12 slowdown but in reverse). But he also points to the recent deep La Niña which may be amplifying the impact of the less-than-massive El Niño.
The ENSO indices do show the build-up to present weak El Niño conditions were unusually preceded by strong La Niña cinditions which had been, if anything, strengthening through the period rather than, as is usual, weakening as El Niño conditions approach. (The MEI perhaps shows this situation best.) Yet the big 1997-98 El Niño also strengthened quite suddenly and showed nothing like this 2023 bananas situation.
The bananas (sudden appearance of an additional +0.2ºC in the global average temperatures) won't be some sudden forcing as there is no sign of anything (or things) approaching the required force. That means we have a natural wobble.
But is that wobble reversing something that has been shielding the impacts of AGW and so it won't reverse? Or is going to abate in coming months/years? Dessler looks to the climate models as suggesting it is the latter. But the question is still an open one!!
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scaddenp at 14:35 PM on 12 December 20232023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44
My 2c. Very roughly, Ocean heat content increases in La Nina, decreases in El Nino (transfer heat to atmosphere). 3 La nina's in a row means more than usual heat in ocean (look at the marine heat waves). I'd say with transition to El Nino, more than usual heat is coming out of ocean to atmosphere, so higher than the value calculated from regression. It would imply that other triple La Nina's should have had above average impact on temp during following El Nino too. If I had time, I would check. On other hand, if it was that clear cut, I am sure Dessler would spotted it.
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michael sweet at 11:31 AM on 12 December 20232023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44
This is the correct link to the climate brink
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michael sweet at 11:28 AM on 12 December 20232023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44
Just Dean,
Andrew Dessler, a renowned climate scientist, has a post on Climate Brink about this years heat. He discusses the items we have covered. He thinks it is not the volcano. Climate change, El Nino and aerosols are not enough to explain the extreme heat this year. He seems to suggest random shifts in climate for most of the heat. He expects it will be explained in a few years.
The Climate Brief is always informed and easy to read.
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One Planet Only Forever at 08:47 AM on 12 December 2023A New 66 Million-Year History of Carbon Dioxide Offers Little Comfort for Today
This study is an important improvement of understanding. But previous leadership actions fighting against limiting the harm being done to the future of humanity is not excused by this improved understanding only now becoming available.
As an engineer with an MBA I am focused on developing sustainable improvements by learning to limit harm done and protect others from harm. I appreciate that my developed perspective is currently not the developed norm. However, for humanity to have a lasting improving future on this amazing planet, the pursuit of learning to be less harmful and more helpful to others needs to become the dominant governing understanding.
Being a civil/structural engineer, the changes of climate conditions affecting the performance of structures and surface water run-off systems has been my immediate concern. And having an MBA has helped me understand that the pursuit of profit can develop many damaging results, including powerful resistance to correcting developed behaviour. Focusing on obtaining monetary reward, or other perceptions of status, can tempt people to compromise the pursuit of limiting harm done. And it can cause people to make up excuses for benefiting from harm done.
The following quote from the press release highlights a major issue that should concern everyone: “The giant caveat: Earth system sensitivity describes climate changes over hundreds of thousands of years, not the decades and centuries that are immediately relevant to humans.”
Saying that the distant future of humanity on this ‘potentially only amazing planet humans can survive and thrive on’ is not ‘immediately relevant to humans’ is a very dangerous thing to do even if that belief is ‘more the norm these days’. It excuses the developed callous lack of concern for ‘Others and the future’ that currently significantly compromises ‘human considerations’. It excuses the ‘discounting of future climate change impacts’ to justify being more harmful today than is ‘necessary for people to live basic decent lives’.
It is important to understand that the engineering application of science requires the pursuit of significant confidence that harmful results will not occur (a very low probability of harmful results). That is what keeps bridges and buildings standing and planes in the air. That is very different from a scientific reluctance to state the potential that harm is being done until there is significant confidence regarding the specifics of the harm.
A responsible engineer discovering that something is potentially harmful should immediately act to protect against the potential harm until there is confidence allowing them to ensure the safety of the item of concern. The continuation of the ability to live as a sustainable part of the ecosystem of this amazing planet needs to be the governing human consideration. How rich or successful some people are perceived to be is rather irrelevant.
I understandably extend my ‘engineering concerns’ to the improvement of the distant future of humanity (developing sustainable improvements), even if that is to the detriment of created ‘perceptions of advancement at this immediate moment in time’. Doing something that is considered to be ‘beneficial today’ but may be significantly harmful in the distant future is unacceptable, especially if the benefits of the harmful activity cannot continue to be enjoyed in the future.
Fossil fuel use is a doubly unacceptable activity. It produces accumulating harmful results, now and into the future. And it cannot continue to be benefited from in the future that it harms. Any ethical argument for ‘the benefits of fossil fuel use’ is understandably limited to very narrow applications like ‘temporary actions that exclusively improve the life circumstances of people who suffer less than basic decent lives’.
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One Planet Only Forever at 08:20 AM on 11 December 2023CO2 limits will harm the economy
PollutionMonster @120
I appreciate your concerns. Thanks for the link to the ccdh Toxic Ten.
I was unaware of the evaluation and identification of the Toxic Ten regarding climate change. It is indeed a helpful compilation and sharing of information. However, the results of the investigation are no surprise. The problem is much more than the success of the likes of the Toxic Ten.
Increasing the number of people who are determined to ‘learn to be less harmful and more helpful to others’ is a key to correcting the developed systemic socioeconomic-political problems and the diversity of resulting developed problems.
Keeping the Toxic Ten from being popular and profitable is helpful. But it is unlikely to solve the fundamental problem of ‘the success of efforts against learning to be more helpful and less harmful to others’. How and why the Toxic Ten, and other efforts against ethical learning, succeed is more of a concern.
A way of understanding the Toxic Ten ‘success’ is presented by Alan MacLeod in Propaganda in the Information Age, Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group), 2019. It is a social media era update of Edward S. Herman’s Propaganda Model that Herman presented (with Noam Chomsky) in Manufacturing Consent, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988 updated 2002 (a movie of the same name was made in 1992).
A significant point of the Propaganda Model is that developed socioeconomic-political systems can be systemically biased to develop and promote misinformation and disinformation to defend and excuse unjustified ‘successful powerful interests’.
In 2000 Herman stated the following update “Although the new technologies have great potential for democratic communication, there is little reason to expect the Internet to serve democratic ends if it is left to the market.”
An example of the free-marketplace failure Herman referred to is new in the news. Members of X have voted to allow proven massive-dis-informer Alex Jones to be eligible to post again on what used to be Twitter (the version of the social media platform that justifiably kicked Jones off of its communication platform). The harmful disinformation actors now thriving on X voted to allow one of their worst examples to ‘Shine Fine Again’ ... because more freedom is argued to always be better. (PS Alex Jones making money through X could help him pay court settlements. But that is no justification for increasing his Freedom to ‘almost certainly try to profit more from disinformation’).
I agree with the need to cripple the ability of ‘bad actors’ to proliferate harmful misunderstandings through social media and other means. However, I am also aware that the ‘bad actors’ include everyone involved in the recent US Court actions (an example article is NBC News item “Supreme Court blocks restrictions on Biden administration efforts to get platforms to remove social media posts”), including some members of the US Supreme Court, fighting against government efforts to limit the harm done through social media ... arguing that efforts to limit the harm done are harmful, often based on arguments of the glory of Freedom (especially Freedom from the responsibility to ethically learn to be less harmful and more helpful to Others).
Similar arguments have been made, including the opening line of the Myth “CO2 limits will harm the economy”. That is arguing that ‘harm is done by efforts to limit the harm done by fossil fuel use’. A significant ‘harm done’ would be the loss of undeserved perceptions of superior status by people who benefited most from the harm done so far.
Merchants of Doubt defending undeserved developed perceptions of status are an expected product of a socioeconomic-political system that lacks ethical self-governing or external governing of the competition for impressions of status, especially in a marketplace of ideas and actions driven to ‘over-protect freedoms’ to the detriment of ‘fundamental ethical responsibility to learn to be less harmful and more helpful to Others’.
This is an age-old problem. Protecting unjustified perceptions of superiority relative to Others has always included arguing for unjustifiable ways of obtaining and maintaining perceptions of status - including any argument that attempts to increase or prolong the ability of 'already fortunate people' to benefit more from fossil fuel use.
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BaerbelW at 20:36 PM on 10 December 2023CO2 increase is natural, not human-caused
Please note: a new basic level version of this rebuttal was published on December 10, 2023. It includes an "at a glance“ section at the top. To learn more about these updates and how you can help with evaluating their effectiveness, please check out the accompanying blog post @ https://sks.to/at-a-glance
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Doug Bostrom at 10:54 AM on 10 December 2023Skeptical Science New Research for Week #49 2023
Michael: This is unlikely to affect anyone living but bodes very bad for 1000 years from now.
I like to imagine we'll do better with the next 5,000 years of attempted civilization than we've done with the past 5,000 years. From that perspective it's concerning.
More basically: don't trash borrowed things. Somebody else is in line.
Technical note: I sure like the "structured abstract" approach in Science. The article itself is obfuscated but the payload "for the rest of us" gets through. We only have to take it on faith that it's faithful to the actual item. :-)
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nigelj at 04:35 AM on 10 December 2023Skeptical Science New Research for Week #49 2023
MS Sweet. Good information to know.
"I note that Dr. Hansen has long held an Earth System Sensitivity of 6 C. The IPCC consensus has been 3C"
The IPCC number is "equilibrium climate sensitivity", a different thing from earth system sensativity as below. Making it hard to compare the two numbers.
"By definition, equilibrium climate sensitivity does not include feedbacks that take millennia to emerge, such as long-term changes in Earth's albedo because of changes in ice sheets and vegetation. It includes the slow response of the deep oceans' warming, which also takes millennia, and so ECS fails to reflect the actual future warming that would occur if CO2 is stabilized at double pre-industrial values.[38] Earth system sensitivity (ESS) incorporates the effects of these slower feedback loops, such as the change in Earth's albedo from the melting of large continental ice sheets, which covered much of the Northern Hemisphere during the Last Glacial Maximum and still cover Greenland and Antarctica)...."
(Climate sensitivity, wikipedia)
We will probably never know any of these numbers for sure because you can't put the planet in the laboratory. (Although I think paleo studies like the one you posted have a lot of credibility - because they are based on real world conditions). But IMHO that uncertainty is not necessarily a crucial problem. Current rates of warming are bad and are having very visible effects, and huge implicatrion in the short to medium term, and so whatever the level of climate sensitivity using whatever definition, we clearly have a huge problem.
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michael sweet at 01:16 AM on 10 December 2023Skeptical Science New Research for Week #49 2023
This MSN article, Which is apparently a press release from the Columbia Climate school describes a paper in Science. The paper is a collaboration of many scientists summarizing knowledge of CO2 concentrations for the past 65 million years. The MSN article is easy to read. Since it is a press release it would be a good OP here at SkS. I have not yet read the paper.
Unfortunately, they conclude that Earth system sensitivity, the climate response when all slow feedbacks respond, is 5-8 C. The processes involved can take a long time to equilibrate (as much as thousands of years). Still, it is a very grim conclusion. I note that Dr. Hansen has long held an Earth System Sensitivity of 6 C. The IPCC consensus has been 3C. This is unlikely to affect anyone living but bodes very bad for 1000 years from now. The question of how long the slow processes take to equilibrate is left unanswered.
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PollutionMonster at 16:15 PM on 8 December 2023CO2 limits will harm the economy
One Planet Only Forever @118
I bought and read the book 9.9% you mentioned. I am still fact checking and checking the references. What is distrubing about the book is the power of a few, magnified minority to influence both media and poltics with their vast wealth and power.
If I understand correctly, via dark money denier think tanks and lobbyists can have a massive impact discretly. Kind of a scary thought when disinformation campaigns magnified minority combined with politics can have major impacts, whether it be the Merchants of Doubt for Tobbaco, Disinformation Dozen anti-vaxx, and now the Toxic Ten for climate change.
Have you read about the ccdh Toxic Ten?
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John Mason at 01:40 AM on 8 December 2023At a glance - Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
@#7 Eclectic,
Just how important Eunice Foote's work was came to light relatively recently. I've not seen any evidence she corresponded with Tyndall. So far as I am aware the findings occurred independently of one another.
We revised The History of Climate Science here at SkS, to highlight her contribution, a few years ago after Katharine Hayhoe brought it to my atttention. -
One Planet Only Forever at 07:41 AM on 7 December 2023Most people don’t realize how much progress we’ve made on climate change
There is reason to continue to be skeptical regarding the rate of progress on the undeniable need for corrections of many ‘harmful popular profitable developments’ to limit the harm done to future generations by ‘most fortunate people’ today.
Things are undeniable worse today than they should have been. The following quote describes actions that caused less correction to occur than could have and should have happened.
“After years of inaction despite constant warnings from climate scientists, hopes had been high for a breakthrough in climate agreements in 2009, leading up to the U.N. summit — known as COP15 — in Copenhagen.
But just a few weeks before that event began, a hacker broke into a server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and released a tranche of climate scientists’ stolen emails. Though there was no indication of wrongdoing in those emails, some phrases taken out of context, combined with the then-unusual nature of the public release of private email correspondence derailed the Copenhagen summit, which was ultimately widely considered a failure.
Climate science denial and policy obstruction thrived in the ensuing years (after the theft of East Anglia emails and misleading promotion of them prior to COP . That was exemplified by an incident in which then-Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the floor of the Senate in February 2015, because he apparently believed that winter snow proved that global warming was a hoax. (it doesn't)”
Inhofe was likely promoting a misleading marketing scam. And the ‘liking to benefit from making things as bad as can be gotten away with’ crowd is still at it today.
This recent NPR item “Oil firms are out in force at the climate talks. Here's how to decode their language” (linked here) exposes that those who resist harm reduction efforts rely on science, the science of misleading marketing. See the NPR item “U.N. climate talks head says "no science" backs ending fossil fuels. That's incorrect" (Linked here) which includes the following: “...al-Jaber responds to Robinson's suggestion with this incorrect statement: "I respect the science, and there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5 [degrees Celsius]." That is my basis for stating that the beneficiaries of being more harmful ‘love the science ... of misleading marketing’.
As presented in the first NPR item the Oil (and gas) firms have developed misleading marketing abuses of the following terms (watch out for how they are abused):
- Low carbon and Lower carbon (no admission of the need to meet the Paris objective)
- Unabated fossil fuels (abated gets a free pass even if it isn’t a significant abatement)
- Net-zero (relies on the magic of actions that suck carbon out, or relies on the harm of their actions, providing fossil fuels that ‘other harmful people burn’, being perceived to be net-zero)
- Reliable. Affordable and ‘secure’ energy (questionable claims made using these terms – all dismissive of harm done.
The worst claims are the one about reducing perceptions of poverty - without mentioning that is accomplished via unsustainable and harmful actions – which means that no real reduction of poverty has occurred, just fleeting impressions that things have improved.
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Paul Pukite at 07:31 AM on 7 December 2023At a glance - Evidence for global warming
You may be skeptical of the claims, but they're out there and after 5 years no-one has tried to refute, debunk, or falsify the claims. I submitted a presentation to next spring's US CliVar Workshop which they're calling "Confronting Earth System Model Trends with Observations: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly".
Comparing historical trends in Earth system models with observations to identify and understand where models are performing well and poorly to focus the community on where more work is needed to ensure credible projections moving forward. What are we getting right? What are we getting wrong and why? What have we not yet paid enough attention to and where might surprises lie?
Objectives
For over 40 years, and through several rounds of IPCC reports, the climate science community has made projections of climate change under specific emissions scenarios. While assessments of the fidelity of Earth System Model simulations over the historical period have been performed for basic variables such as near surface air temperature, internal variability and a relatively small signal in a short observational record has made a comprehensive assessment challenging.My submitted abstract addresses the internal variability part. I don't know yet whether it was accepted for presentation, but I'm confident that it won't be wasting anyone's time.
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One Planet Only Forever at 06:48 AM on 7 December 2023At a glance - Evidence for global warming
Regarding the discussion of ENSO patterns, modelling and forecasting.
The SkS Argument/Myth item "Global warming and the El Niño Southern Oscillation" that John Mason @31 suggested as a more appropriate thread has some potentially very relevant points made in the latest comments starting with comment 198 (from 2019).
Another location of potentially helpful information is the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's "Climate Driver Update" website (linked here). The "Pacific Ocean" tab (linked here) presents a broad range of forecasts for the NINO3.4 SST from multiple forecasters. There is approximately a 1.0 degrees C range of forecasts for January 2024.
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Eclectic at 05:43 AM on 7 December 2023At a glance - Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
Eunice Foote certainly deserves to be more notable. History is often unfair, in its "colloquial" form.
bf@4 : Thanks for those thoughts.
I was intrigued that you had described the color box as dark orange tab ~ rather than the dark red tab which I had automatically pictured.
As you say, it is a devilish job to design even a simple black&white "form" for people to fill out correctly (without danger of misinterpretations).
Then we get to the devilish question of colors themselves ~ and how they are perceived (even at different illumination levels) by the "mainstream" viewers, versus the various so-called "anomalous" genetic subgroups that make up each & every population (and are exhibited differently in males/females). Fortunately, these different color perceptions are usually not of great importance . . . although camouflage-designers and traffic-light-designers would disagree on that. [You may have idly wondered why the green "GO" traffic light has a faint tinge of blue.]
And then there is the psychological component, where humans may mentally perceive the color that they expect to see (in a certain object or context).
And nowadays we have the problem of designing eye-catching layouts for a target population of people who are busy and/or distractable ~ and who are viewing on screens (usually without standard color calibration) of widely-differing sizes . . . sizes down to even a few inches, quite commonly.
But enough of this off-topic verbiage from me. The small groups of volunteers managing the SkepticalScience website have a wickedly big load on their shoulders, in all sorts of ways.
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nigelj at 05:04 AM on 7 December 2023At a glance - Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
"By the end of that century, Eunice Foote and John Tyndall had proved him quite correct through their experiments with various gases..."
Exactly so. It might be good to include a brief statement about how the experiments worked (with canisters of CO2 exposed to a radiant heat source and measurements taken?). I say this because this is really the crucial foundation of things, along with observations of the planets climates and deducations from that.
In order to make sense of the whole complicated issue as a non expert, I have always done this. It seems to we know for a fact from laboratory experiments that CO2 is a greenhouse gas because it (simplifying) absorbs heat while oxygen and nitrogen etc,etc do not. Therefore if you add even very, very small quantities of CO2 to the atmosphere, even one single molecule, it must absorb heat and thus have at least some warming effect on the atmosphere, and the issue is entirely about how much CO2 is added to the atmosphere, and what warming effect results in total. This is simple logic.
Arrhenius did some calculations in the 1890s I dont fully understand but they seem robust as they made accurate predictions about warming in the 20th century. While I generally dont like assumptions, it seems safe to assume our current climate calculations are more sophisticated. So I see no need to be scepetical any longer about the greenhouse effect, and the proclamations in the climate myth box that the greenhouse effect contradicts so called physical laws is just ignorance or made up nonsense.
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wilddouglascounty at 03:29 AM on 7 December 2023At a glance - Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
Thanks for inserting Eunice Foote as the lead person finding out the role of greenhouse gases, three years before John Tyndall. In fact Tyndall most likely read Foote's article about it before doing his own experiments, and has gotten all of the credit up until recently. There's an excellent chapter about this in the book All We Can Save edi. by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson.
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At a glance - Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
Eclectic @3 - I've never encountered the Ishihara Color Chart, but never had any known issues with color vision, and never had problems with the old tests where the number in a field of colored dots would be hidden to people with this or that form of colorblindness.
But the first time I had to pay attention to viewability issues was decades ago when the company I was working at needed to design a standard form for customers to fill out and mail back. The goal was OCR and the people working that process first suggested a very very light blue drop-out for the form, and I reminded them the senior citizens filling the forms out don't have the same vision as the twenty-somethings putting the thing together. We went with the highest-contrast, dark red drop-out ink for the form design instead.
But yesterday I was struck by the fact that I read the "What the science says" and the line in the green box, but my eyes then went immediately to the "The greenhouse effect has been falsified" at the start of the orange box, without noting the much smaller "climate myth" in the tab. This on a laptop, by the way, and I've got fairly decent vision.
I've been looking at this site for a long time and this is the first time I realized the readability might need a change to better manage the reader's flow. Perhaps putting "Climate Myth" at the same size font as the "What the science says...", only have it on white background in the dark orange as font color. Lots of online text these days in different publications will feature text with different background shades just as decoration, so the shift from green to orange may no longer be enough of a cue.
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michael sweet at 23:20 PM on 6 December 2023At a glance - Evidence for global warming
Paul Pukite:
So a monograph that I cannot access and a paper with 21 citations. Not very impressive. How well did the group that published the paper predict in advance the last 5 years of La Ninas and the current El Nino? I am always skeptical of claims that tidal forces can cause changes in weather a year later.
It appears to me that the general description that ENSO is random and not predictable in advance is correct. Your claims at post 34 do not hold up to close inspection. You are welcome to believe anything you like.
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michael sweet at 22:48 PM on 6 December 2023At a glance - Evidence for global warming
Daniel,
I have seen similar graphs before. The slopes of the lines are very similar.
In your graphic the graphed line for the La Nina data is obviously incorrect. It has a different slope and runs through the middle of the bars when it should be at the top of the bars. The data is fine. Hopefully the person who maintains the graph will notice when they add the data for 2023 and correct it.
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Eclectic at 18:01 PM on 6 December 2023At a glance - Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
bf @1 :- A technical question for you:
Do your eyes rate as "mainstream" on the Ishihara Color Chart ?
and
Do the various screens you use get calibrated for color gamut ?
You are certainly quite right that many people nowadays are using very small screens, though high-resolution (e.g. latest iPhones).
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John Mason at 17:05 PM on 6 December 2023At a glance - Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
re - #1 - thanks for the feedback. Always useful to read people's thoughts about design/accessibility.
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At a glance - Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
A formatting suggestion if you don't want people to mistake the myth for the debunking - don't use a teeny-tiny white font in a dark orange tab to label the "Climate myth..."
Those important words are missed "at a glance" by many who don't have eyes that quickly read the smallest line on the eye doctor's exam chart, and including the myth (and its tiny label) INSIDE the frame of a box clearly labeled "What the Science Says" in a large, green font makes being misled even easier.
Separate and label "MYTH HERE" clearly.
Regards,
B Fagan
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Paul Pukite at 11:59 AM on 6 December 2023At a glance - Evidence for global warming
"I note that your post at 34 contains several completely unsupported assertions."
No problem. Concerning the points that ENSO is not chaotic, not random, and not driven by wind, there are a couple of citations I can point to. The most comprehensive is a monograph that I co-authored titled Mathematical Geoenergy (Wiley/AGU, 2018, chapter 12: Wave Energy) . Another coincidental finding was reported Lin & Qian "Switch Between El Nino and La Nina is Caused by Subsurface Ocean Waves Likely Driven by Lunar Tidal Forcing" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49678-w
These of course havee nothing to do with climate change, as according to the definitions at this site, ENSO is apparently not considered climate change, but as climate variability.
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Daniel Bailey at 10:53 AM on 6 December 2023At a glance - Evidence for global warming
@michael sweet @38
The graphic uses the GISS temperature data, color-coded by ENSO phase, updated through the end of 2021. When the full-year data for 2023 comes out, it should get updated then. The slopes will change somewhat as the background phase states change, but the underlying exogenous driver is still human activities. As a result, ocean heat content rates are accelerating (from Li et al 2023, Figure 1), further warming all ENSO phases over time:
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michael sweet at 10:25 AM on 6 December 2023At a glance - Evidence for global warming
Paul Pukite:
When we discuss new science at SkS we like the contributors to post links to suppoort their positions. I note that your post at 34 contains several completely unsupported assertions. Perhaps you could present some data and links to papers to support your claims. I really do not care what someone who incorrectly labels their graphs thinks.
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michael sweet at 10:22 AM on 6 December 2023At a glance - Evidence for global warming
Hi Daniel,
I like yor graphic. It appears to my eyecrometer that the line for the La Nina years has too low a slope for the data points. Did you arrange the graph or did you copy it somwhere? If the La Nina line is corrected the slope of all three lines is about the same. We would expect the slope to be the same if the El Nino oscellation was not affecting the underlying AGW.
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One Planet Only Forever at 09:01 AM on 6 December 2023At a glance - Evidence for global warming
Daniel Bailey,
John Mason @31 pointed to the SkS Argument/Myth item "Global warming and the El Niño Southern Oscillation".
That does appear to be a good location for the discussion in question to be continued.
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Daniel Bailey at 06:20 AM on 6 December 2023At a glance - Evidence for global warming
Yes, this is getting off-topic. Risking pushing the envelope, all ENSO phases are clearly warming, due to the underlying and overburdening human forcing of climate becoming increasingly pervasive. Perhaps a better thread can be suggested for such (but not here).
