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

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Comments 95201 to 95250:

  1. Meet The Denominator
    Poptech... Again, you're looking for exacting methods where they have little impact on the results. You're saying that if I can't come up with an exact error rate for each year then the whole exercise is meaningless and that's completely absurd. You're quibbling tiny quantities. Based on the sample I did I got 6%. I don't care, call it 50% if you like, that will only change your number to 1% without even addressing the errors in your figures. You lose on all counts.
  2. Meet The Denominator
    PT: "Let me know when you get an actual number." Why? It won't make any difference to you. "I have refuted this some time ago" No, you have not refuted anything. What you have done is state ad nauseum that you have 'rebutted' this or rejected that as 'subjective,' using your own definitions for your own purposes. You cannot provide a single science based argument that could ever counter the likes of SoD, Rabbett, RealClimate, Trenberth, et al. who are the debunkers of your precious 'skeptics' in agwobserver's list. All you can do is repeatedly deny. It's boring and it needs to stop. "Idso and Lindzen have published more papers on the climate than most of them." So what? Here is a nice rundown on Lindzen; on Idso's group here. "That is because E&E is not indexed by them." How do you know that? If E&E is such a valuable paper, why isn't it indexed? And what's all this about 'validating' Rob's numbers? Who gave you the authority to 'validate' anything? If you don't accept what Rob has said, state your opinion as such. Lose the 'validation' concept. Give it up, PT. You've had a run. Time to move on.
  3. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    Phila... I happen to like nitpicky. Fixed.
  4. Meet The Denominator
    "You cannot claim robustness for something you did not sample." Yes you can. By your logic you could all polling data would be unacceptable. You don't have to have an exact number in order to infer a result.
  5. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    Grammatical mistake in the first sentence: understand Spulling mistake in the second paragraph: warm faster 'that' the rest. Also, it's "jibe," not "jive." Nitpicky, I know, but that typo has always bugged me, since the words basically mean opposite things.
  6. Meet The Denominator
    Poptech... Your programmed responses are very tiring. Deflect as you may try, you know I'm right.
  7. The Dai After Tomorrow
    Just a thought to Daniel Bailey. When talking about a thread getting off topic the article is a good case in point. I have no idea what is going to be discussed until the last sentence of the third paragraph. I suppose that if the title of the first section was "Coexistence of Drought and Flood" a reader would have been clued in from the beginning kind of like peer reviewed papers tend to do. I thought BP brought up a good point in comparing what was predicted with what has happened in the past. The computer models just charged on into the far distant future with no correlation to actual future events. To bad the models weren't run backwards to correlate with the past. I found it interesting that India seemed to go unaffected while China was hard hit with drought. Just what makes India resistant to this effect of climate change?
  8. Meet The Denominator
    "Cato Journal" I'm sorry but I can't help but laugh every time I read those words.
  9. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    Rob: Better to say 'Arctic amplification' than 'polar' for the current context, as the South seems to respond dramatically differently. Serreze et al 2009 is a key paper describing what's happening in the Arctic. As the climate warms, the summer melt season lengthens and intensifies, leading to less sea ice at summer’s end. Summertime absorption of solar energy in open water areas increases the sensible heat content of the ocean. Ice formation in autumn and winter, important for insulating the warm ocean from the cooling atmosphere, is delayed. This promotes enhanced upward heat fluxes, seen as strong warming at the surface and in the lower troposphere. This vertical structure of temperature change is enhanced by strong low-level stability which inhibits vertical mixing. Peter Hogarth did an excellent post on this as well.
  10. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    RW1... No, it's not. Polar amplification just mean that. Global warming is amplified at the poles. Nothing more nothing less.
  11. Meet The Denominator
    Poptech... Yes I certainly can. In fact, it's more likely to work in your favor, bub. I also went back and looked at very early years with few papers and the number of erroneous results is higher. So, I'm sampling a year that has a higher error rate than more recent years. Just get used to it. Your list accounts for a very very tiny fraction of the scientific work on climate change and there are approximately 400 papers a week coming out on this topic these days.
  12. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    The issue at hand ultimately is what effect polar amplification may or may not have on global average temperatures, is it not?
  13. Meet The Denominator
    pbjamm... Poptech has a rule about carrying a conversation over to his blog from another blog. But of course he is allowed to carry that conversation over here. Hence, we have 619 comments here and he has one there. Go figure.
  14. Deep ocean warming solves the sea level puzzle
    It might be worth pinging Roger Pielke Sr. on the subject of this post. RPSr made a series of comments on this site last summer, where he claimed that ocean heat content measurements weren't supporting the planetary heating rate expected by AGW. He hinted revisions to OHC and SLR measurements would support his view. With this paper it now appears the planetary energy budget is closing, If RPSr is consistent with his previous comments, he should now reverse his position, and agree that the planetary energy budget supports AGW.
  15. CO2 is not a pollutant
    In his attempts to hijack yet another thread, BP once again assures as of the hackneyed old "CO2 is plant food" meme-even showing us pictures of soybeans grown in otherwise ideal conditions to back him up. Of course, what he is not aware of is a little thing called "acclimation"-which effectively means that C3 plants, if exposed to high CO2 levels for sufficient time will start to lose the initial benefits they gained from the excess CO2-because they reduce the amount of enzyme that processes the CO2 (as production of enzyme is an energy dependent process). This of course means that the Rubisco pathway will just become saturated sooner-bringing the plant back to its "default" growth rate. Also, BP's post ignores the damage to plant growth caused by heat stress, accelerated aging, & damage from flooding & drought-all of which are proving to be the side-effects of increased CO2 emissions.
    Moderator Response: [Daniel Bailey] The comment Marcus refers to is by Berényi Péter and is located here.
  16. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    RW1... Again, you are conflating global temperature with polar amplification.
  17. The Dai After Tomorrow
    Nigel, I know it can be frustrating, but please don't give up-that's just handing victory to deniers like BP. That's exactly *why* they hijack sites like this. Don't worry, though, we have excellent moderators who will ensure that all future OT posts get deleted, as they deserve!
  18. Meet The Denominator
    muoncounter@611 If only you had found and posted this 10 pages ago! I wonder if we shall now have to endure a few pages of Poptech criticizing the your list. Perhaps a rebuttal at his blog.
  19. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    If it's only about 0.2 W/m^2 - that's only about 2% of the difference needed, or only about 0.03 degrees C of warming.
  20. Meet The Denominator
    Moderator... Feel free to delete my response as well.
  21. Meet The Denominator
    Poptech... I sampled a year that had fewer than 1000 results. I very much took this into account. The sampling is clearly robust. You can't poke holes all you want, Poptech, statistically the results are no different.
  22. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    Rob Honeycutt (RE: 29), "Rather that beating around the bush I suggest you just give us the point you're wanting to make." My point is this: +16.6 W/m^2 is needed at the surface for a 3 C rise. 2xCO2 only gives you about +6 W/m^2 (assuming all the additional absorbed energy affects the surface). What percentage of the additional 10 W/m^2 will come from 'polar amplification' from ice melting?
  23. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    **Case in point** Not point in case... It's getting late and I have the flu. blah.
  24. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    muoncounter, From Flanner thread article: "i.e. for each degree of global warming, the loss of snow and ice means that another 0.25 W of sunlight is absorbed per square metre of the Northern Hemisphere. Globally, and in the long run it’s expected to be 0.2 because there’s less snow in the south and you eventually run out of summer snow to melt." So about 0.2-0.25 W/m^2 per 1 degree of global warming?
  25. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    RW1... I do not know the actual W/m2 without doing some research. But what I would suggest is that we know very clearly that there will be an increase in the Arctic when there is less ice. Correct? What I challenge you to do is not conflate the global change in albedo to the change of albedo in the Arctic. That would be an act of searching for a way to falsely downplay the effect. Be sure to also read Peter Offenhartz post at #4 so you understand that albedo is not the only mechanism behind polar amplification. Rather that beating around the bush I suggest you just give us the point you're wanting to make. Everyone here is open to hearing all perspectives. Point in case, Peter Offenhartz taught me something new I didn't know.
  26. Meet The Denominator
    Yooper, Nah, there are 53136 authors at the front of the line.
  27. Meet The Denominator
    Game, set & match to the muoncounter. All hail! The Yooper
  28. Meet The Denominator
    I keep trying to walk away from this thread, but it keeps going round and round with the same inevitable result as this NASCAR event. But until the crash occurs, here are some interesting numbers: Over at Ari Jokimaki's agwobserver, there is a list of 103 global warming topics. Each topic links to a list of papers (and they're all from real journals). Pulling 5 topics at random, they average 20 papers per topic, so Ari has indexed easily over 2000 papers -- an enormous achievement. As if this wasn't enough, he also has a list of 48 skeptic papers that have been thoroughly debunked -- some, multiple times. But the one that will put this NASCAR into the pits for good is the Thomson-Reuters sciencewatch.com November 2009 Climate Change database: The baseline time span for this database is (publication years) 1999-June 30, 2009 from the third bimonthly update (a 10-year + 6-month period). The resulting database contained 27,989 (10 years) and 11,428 (2 years) papers; 53,136 authors; 176 nations; 2,494 journals; and 10,801 institutions. I believe that was 27989 papers by 53136 authors (and that is a year old). The database allows sorting by author. The top 10 on the leaderboard are: Penuelas J 66, Chapin FS 57, Tol RSJ 57, Thuiller W 48, Allen MR 48, Chowin SL 47, Stott PA 46, Peterson AT 45, Giorgi F 44, Smith P 44. A cursory check of these names show these are mainly supporters of the A in AGW (which doesn't stand for 'alarm'). Seitz, Singer, Svensmark, Shaviv, McIntyre, Idso, Lindzen, Spencer et al. need not apply. It is also sortable by institution. The 10 most prolific are: Chinese Acad Sci 867, NOAA 420, Univ Colorado 414, Columbia Univ 412, USGS 387, USDA 368, UCBerkeley 363, NCAR 362, NASA 332, Max Planck Society 356. Surprised to see the CAS at the top of the pack, I found they are signatories to the Joint Science Academies Statement on Climate Change, which leaves little doubt about their position. The others are all recognizable names with well-known positions. The Marshall Institute does not make the list of top 20 institutions. Names that do not appear among the top 20 journals: E & E, Cato Institute, Iron & Steel, Waste Management, etc; nor do there seem to be any loosely defined 'policy' journals. See the thread on Compendium Maps for a prior reference to this database and some additional information.
  29. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    thankyou moderator ok how about oh bugger!! the quote i heard in a interview on abc radio was that the greenhouse gas from the expected permafrost release will be the equivalent of the GHG releases from the USA at their current level for the next 80 years
    Moderator Response: [Daniel Bailey] One other thing about the permafrost release paper is that the authors used the most conservative estimates based upon the IPCC medium emissions scenario. Note that actual emissions are following the high-emissions scenario, so the outlook taint as optimistic as portrayed in the linked paper you kindly provide.
  30. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    That's what I'm trying to quantify - potential polar amplification. Without knowing the actual quantification of the polar albedo, how do you know it's of any real significance? How many W/m^2 of additional post albedo solar power are we going to get into the system from Artic melting? Without knowing how many W/m^2 are currently being reflected away, how can you know?
    Moderator Response: [muoncounter] See the Flanner thread linked above.
  31. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    RW1... Again, we're talking about polar amplification, not the entire planet. Do you have a comment relative to the article?
  32. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    That's what I'm trying to quantify. How many W/m^2 of the roughly 102 W/m^2 total albedo comes from the Artic?
  33. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    RW1: Surely you know the issue is not Arctic albedo as a percentage of the whole, the issue is added forcing due to the decreased Arctic albedo. See the Flanner thread for that discussion.
  34. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    RW1... I don't believe that is relevant to the article. I'm talking about polar amplification, not global temperature.
  35. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    HumanityRules @ 16... I believe there is still considerable debate on that very point. See this lecture by Dr Barber.
  36. Monckton Myth #13: The Magical IPCC
    I know this is slightly OT, but if you would like an excellent discussion of Monckton's Myths (with more to come), go right now to Potholer54 on Youtube (also currently available on Crock of the Week). The guy who prepares these little gems (Peter Hatfield) is a retired(?) journalist who was a regular correspondent for New Scientist. His material deserves a much wider audience.
  37. Meet The Denominator
    Poptech... "Whether a paper was peer-reviewed is not subjective..." The issue is less about whether the papers are peer reviewed and more about whether they challenge AGW. The question of peer review comes from your extensive use of E&E which most working scientists consider to be the backwater of science. Kind of the last place you go when you can't get your paper published. "I have no intentions of publishing a paper on the list. " Where is that confidence you exude? Does it disappear when you believe that people will actually put your list under scrutiny? "If you were giving me the benefit of the doubt then you would not have linked to Greenfyre's nonsense" It's perfectly reasonable to point people to the challenges to you work, whether you agree with them or not. "But I am not just here for your comments but also to correct those from other posters." You realize, though, the more you post the more people respond. Right?
  38. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    Rob Honeycutt, What percentage of the average global albedo is the Artic?
  39. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    hi guys, first post http://climateprogress.org/2011/02/17/nsidc-thawing-permafrost-will-turn-from-carbon-sink-to-source-in mid-2020s-releasing-100-billion-tons-of-carbon-by-2100/
    Moderator Response: Welcome! In future please provide context for links, or your comment will be deleted. For this one, please post an additional comment with context such as a question.
  40. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    @17 HGP: 1) Grapes are not a tropical fruit, they are a temperate climate fruit. They were grown as far north as Yorkshire in the Medieval Warm Period, and in Southern England in roman times, but never in Scotland. They are now grown in Yorkshire once more, and indeed are now grown in Sweden commercially outside of greenhouses, which has never happened before. One essential difference between now and the past is the relative cost of transport. High costs of transport during Roman and medieval times made it sensible to grow grapes to the limit of their cultivation. That is why grape growing survived in Southern England right through the LIA, but died early in the 20th century. However, even though transport is now cheap, growing grapes is sufficiently easy to make local commercial grape growing even in Yorkshire. 2) During the summer months, the Earth receives more energy from the sun at the poles than at the equator. This is because the poles have 24 hour sunlight, even though the sunlight is much weaker because of the high latitude. The essential difference between ice and water in this context is that ice reflects approximately 90% of incoming sunlight, while water absorbs approximately 90% of incoming sunlight. In the summer months, that vast change in albedo, which coupled with the high summer insolation will make a significant change to overall global temperatures. That is quite apart from any ecological concerns about several species of seal and fish which are entirely dependent on sea ice for birthing (seals) or food (fish), or an even larger number of species including polar bears that are primarily dependent on sea ice. 3) Sea levels are currently rising faster than is predicted by the models. This does not make sea levels a matter of significant concern for the next 50 odd years, but after that sea levels will have risen high enough to impose significant adaption costs. You obviously draw your information primarily from denier sites (either directly or indirectly). You should avoid that. They lie to you. They lie frequently, and with breath taking bravado. It is impossible to form a rational opinion based on deliberate falsehoods, so if you want to learn about global warming, avoid denier sites like the plague. At the very least, never believe anything you read on one of those sites until you have confirmed it on at least to genuine science sites like Skeptical Science and Real Climate.
  41. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    HR @16: 1) There may have been ice free summers in the Holocene Climactic Optimum, but there certainly have been none since then. In view of the very large difference in Milankovitch forcing between now and then, that is no reason to suppose the current decline in arctic summer sea ice is natural. 2) Arctic sea ice will melt for any warming, but warmings due to increased insolation or reduced cloud cover will have a strongest primary effect at the tropics. The net effect should be that the primary warming at the tropics and the secondary warming in the arctic should be of similar magnitude. In contrast, warming due to a strengthened greenhouse effect has a stronger effect at high latitudes than at the equator, which are then reinforced by the arctic amplification, resulting in much higher arctic warming than that seen in the tropics. It is the later we in fact observe, not the former. Changes due to orbital mechanics have a different pattern, with net incoming energy remaining essentially unchanged, but with large variations of insolation at high latitudes. Consequently polar amplification can reinforce an effect which preferentially warms NH summers. However, we know from astronomical observation that we are currently approaching a minimum in NH summer insolation. Hence, if that were the only influence, we would expect the arctic amplification to be increasing a reduction in summer temperatures, not an increase. Pretending that because High summer insolation coupled with polar amplification has lead to an ice free arctic summers in the past, that therefore our rapid approach to ice free arctic when we have low summer insolation is because of natural causes is disenginuous at best.
  42. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    I am seriously trying to follow you guys without physics a subject I always wanted to learn but could not grasp, I am left with basic logic and observation. Can someone please explain the importance of why losing ice is and seems (to me) to be a bit of scaremongering. From what I can see and knowledge of history, like everything else on this planet it goes in cycles. One minute we are hot another cold. One minute theres ice and the next there is not. I can remember as a child rivers (salt) freezing over in southern England that you could walk on. We also know that the arctic regions were once fertile and that Mammoths were frozen in situ as they grazed these areas. In Roman times grapes tropically grown fruit was being farmed in Scotland and CO2 level were supposedly higher then than now as well as temperatures higher than now. Also why are sea levels not rising as high and as fast as some models predict with the big melt? Now I have tried to find out how true this is but supposedly oil companies as they pump the oil out of the ground is floated up by injecting sea water. If true how many millions of gallons of sea water is used, which is lost forever if the case is provable?
  43. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    Rob, "If the Arctic Sea is covered with ice in the summer - as it has been dating back perhaps thousands, to millions of years - the incoming sunlight is mostly reflected back to space without adding any heat to the Earth. But, as ice melts back, as is happening today, the summer sun is absorbed by the darker open sea exposed by the disappearing ice." This couplet of sentances seems to allow for mis-interpretation. The wording seems to suggest that todays conditions represent a departure from conditions that have persisted for thousands or millions of years. This of course is not true. Evidence exists for possible ice free summers on thousands of years time scale. 11 Tom Curtis Just for completedness, amplification isn't a feature specific to the greenhouse effect. It occurs in the history of the arctic during warming phases attributed to other forcings. For general interest there are two extensive science reviews here and here from a long list of eminent authors. My guess this would be the concensus view heading for AR5.
  44. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    ... and very few people realise an important fact about Antarctica: it has an avergage elevation of 2,286 m. As a consequence, it is naturally colder than the Arctic, by about 20°C (calculated from the lapse rate), and so most Antarctic ice will be very slow to melt to a significant extent. Glaciers sliding into the ocean faster because of melting near the coast is another matter.
  45. Models are unreliable
    Jue1234, see in the RealClimate post "FAQ on Climate Models," the "Questions" section, "What is the difference between a physics-based model and a statistical model?", "Are climate models just a fit to the trend in global temperature data?", and "What is tuning?" A relevant quote from those: "Thus statistical fits to the observed data are included in the climate model formulation, but these are only used for process-level parameterisations, not for trends in time." Part II of that post then provides more details on parameterizations, including specifics on clouds.
  46. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    Albatross, there was a model in sight. It was just simple enough to be implemented by pen and paper. This is one of the biggest confusions about models, which are in fact just mathematical equations which are worked through to find out what they actually predict. As some deniers rightly claim, models are not evidence. But they are the predictions of physical theory. As it happens, no plausible physical theory using only natural forcings predicts the warming in the late 20th century, nor the greater warming in the arctic, nor the decrease in the difference between day and night temperatures, nor the cooling stratosphere combined with a warming troposphere. All plausible physical theories including natural and anthropogenic forcings predict these. In this circumstance, rational people prefer the theories that actually predict what is actually happening. Deniers just obfusticate.
  47. The Dai After Tomorrow
    I like this site. I have read these posts hoping to see if there is valid evidence to support an incresing frequency of droughts. Instead some character called Berenyi Peter highjacks the entire thread, trying to nitpick an article title that is simply in effect a summary and suffers what all summaries inevitably do it generalises, because its a summary or title! He then waffles on about preparing for natual disasters, well off topic, gives me a headache with his constant itallics, and make claims about cost mitigation and precautionary principles without a shred of proof, but plenty of straw man arguments. I give up I cant be bothered Im off elswhere..
    Moderator Response: [DB] As Marcus points out immediately below, thread hijacking, as attempted by BP on this thread, will not be allowed to succeed. Debate and even disagreement is encouraged, as long as they comply with the Comments Policy. If needed, more extreme methods exist to deal with repeated violations of the Comments Policy. For a more in-depth discussion of the science of droughts in a warming world, I encourage you, and everyone, to read the paper which is the subject of this blog post. Bring any questions about it here and someone will attempt to answer them for you. Thanks for caring enough to make a comment of your own.
  48. Meet The Denominator
    "I am here in this post to correct misinformation about the list." Interesting because the whole premise of the article was not to challenge the list at all. I said repeatedly that I was giving you the benefit of the doubt. I merely was attempting to put the number into a broader context relative to the full body of science on climate change.
  49. Models are unreliable
    Jue1234 - You might find the Hansen's 1988 prediction page a useful answer. His predictions are holding fairly well through now. His initial climate sensitivity number was a bit too high - but adjusting for the better sensitivity estimates and actual emissions shows the model (simple as it was) still holds up. Models are not just based on hindcasting - that's a required check, but the assumptions going into the models are based on physics, not just mathematical modeling of previous behavior.
  50. A Swift Kick in the Ice
    Tom @12, But Tom, the models, those hopeless models!! I jest, that was a very interesting post, and not a model in sight, probably not even in his wildest imagination...just hard physics. Very cool. And despite what Lindzen thinks, as shown by Ari's recent post on ocean levels (which I highly recommend) and the two recent seminal nature papers on extreme events, models can be incredibly useful tools.

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