Arguments
Recent Comments
Prev 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 Next
Comments 99551 to 99600:
-
boba10960 at 22:50 PM on 15 January 2011Global Warming and Cold Winters
Very helpful post! But I'm confused about one thing. Under "Global Pressure creates Arctic Corridor", isn't upward flowing air over a warm ocean a low pressure regime, rather than a high pressure regime? -
Ken Lambert at 22:24 PM on 15 January 2011The Queensland floods
Albatross #73 Not so fast Albatros. I was a little sloppy in conceding AGW might have had a hand in this extreme event. I should have said GW might have had a hand, although even Tom Curtis has added above that Aboriginal history confirms that event 2011 + 2.5m could be more like the limit of natural flood variation in the Brisbane area. You know the rule in this wide brown land; the flood relief claim is going in just after the last drought relief cheque has been received. -
Esop at 22:17 PM on 15 January 2011Global Warming and Cold Winters
A most excellent post! The graphics make the topic understandable for most lay people as well. -
Ken Lambert at 22:09 PM on 15 January 2011The Queensland floods
Tom Curtis #74 After a morning of cleaning up debris - I really should not be doing this either Albatros. Tom - good points. I defer to your detailed knowledge of the capacity of Wivenhoe in the lead up to this event. There is some discussion in today's papers about whether Wivenhoe should have been run down to a lower level given warnings in October of the the very well developed La Nina and the high probability of a lot more rain through the summer with higher than normal cyclone activity. Of course coming out of a major drought - it would have been a tough decision to run Wivenhoe below its 100% level given that it was down to 15% only 18 months before. While the general points about the limits of natural variability (2.5m higher than 2011) you concede - the huge volumes released from Wivenhoe at peak (56% of capacity by your numbers) do point to better micro management of the future levels. For example - timing of the releases to arrive in Brisbane city at low tide was a major factor in the peak levels reached and the number of houses and businesses inundated. With a high to low tide cycle of roughly 6 hours - being able to hold back releases for 6 hours at a critical point could make a large difference to the peak downstream. We were lucky that a 2.6m tide was not happening on the 12th and 13th of January. This is a utilitarian argument of course - those just below Wivenhoe might suffer more for the greater good of the major population centre in Brisbane. Maybe this points to running Wivenhoe with an extra 6 hours of peak 2011 discharge capacity in reserve (14-15%) so 'full' is no longer 100% but 85%. Or indeed if feasible - to raise the dam wall and increase capacity. Your final point is a bit of a stretch: "On the assumption of AGW we should find it less surprising, both because we expect such floods to occur more frequently, and because we expect them to occur with more normal (ie, non-cyclonic) rain conditions. Of course, AGW is not an assumption but a well evidenced theory with no coherent challengers." Firstly, the difference between a cyclone which weakens into one, and low which develops into a strong rain depression can be very little. Wanda in 1974 came in at Maroochydore headed SW and sat in the Brisbane catchment as a slow moving rain depression - not unlike this week's event. No serious 'skeptic' argues that the planet has not warmed in the last 100 years. There are 'coherent challengers' to the proposition that the temperature rise observed (0.7-0.8degC) is mainly man made, and what its future trajectory might be.Moderator Response: [Daniel Bailey] See my response to you at comment 78 below and respond to its criticisms on the appropriate threads. Thanks! -
Mila at 20:42 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
#16 I have had a quick look into ulrichsweb.com: International Journal of Geosciences ISSN: 2156-8359 Start Year: 2010 Frequency: Quarterly Editor(s): Shuanggen Jin (Editor-in-Chief) Price: Free (effective 2010) Editor homepage: http://www.geosensings.com/ Most cited paper in WOS : Micro-plate tectonics and kinematics in Northeast Asia inferred from a dense set of GPS observations EARTH AND PLANETARY SCIENCE LETTERS Volume: 257 Issue: 3-4 Pages: 486-496 Published: MAY 30 2007 11 citations the first 10 papers in WOS by citation number has GPS in the title -
SNRatio at 20:28 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
I don't think there is much use in going after Monckton. Rather, he should be pressed to present his credentials as a "skeptic". If you are not willing to assume that the negation of your hypothesis might be true, you are not a skeptic, you are a denialist. I fail to see one single case where Monckton qualifies as a skeptic. But I haven't followed him that much. He should be pressed to make public statements on issues like the following, and if he doesn't want to, that should be used for cutting him off. And of course, the 1. What would you accept as evidence for ocean warming? Parameters, single or in combination, critical values. 2. What rate of warming will you be able to detect using your methodology, or the methodologies of your trusted sources? 3. Why don't you more thoroughly consider the evidence contradicting your hypotheses? 4. Are you willing to acknowledge that mainstream science might be correct in some or all of the matters where you disagree with it? -
jpvs at 19:42 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
dana1981 and jonothansf13, I'm trying to find out what the Int Journal of Geosciences and particularly its publisher SCIRP really is. It is quite strange. The domain name www.scirp.org is in the hands of a chinese company well-know for spreading spam. It has a PO Box in the US in Irvine Californa, but so far no real address could be traced. So far, I can't help thinking that SCIRP is a fake publisher, may be instrumental to the denial machinery: flawed articles in one of the SCIRP-journals pop-up every once in a while in the skeptical scene in Europe. I have contacted the editor of IJG to ask some questions about the publisher, the editor himself, the journal, the peer review process and the quality of the articles. I'll keep you posted. -
mjp at 19:31 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
so where do we go to make personal attacks on Monckton then? you spoil all the fun :) seriously, being on the back foot responding to this horribly incorrect gentleman and others of his ilk is the very worst approach if we can set up a body as significant as the IPCC to present the scientific case to the world's political leaders then surely we can set up a marketing and political arm to present to the media and to actively denigrate these professional snake oil salesmen not your job, i know. but there is an awfully naieve game being played here. sometimes you just have to wack people on the nose. hard. as often as necessary. -
phylae at 18:15 PM on 15 January 2011Models are unreliable
I see a lot of parallels between the modelling discussed in this article and the technical analysis used by some stock traders. Of course there are many differences, but at the heart of it, both types of modelers are trying to use intelligent analysis of past data to predict/project the future. I highly recommend the book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street) for a very approachable explanation of some of the techniques that modelers use. The author's arguments that it is impossible to "beat" the stock market through this analysis isn't relevant to weather modeling. However, I think he does a good job of addressing the question of identifying success based on past data. -
Albatross at 16:44 PM on 15 January 2011Northern hemisphere warming rates: More than you may have heard
Sphaerica and Daniel, That is an awesome graph, much better than mine @26. I see that it has a problem though-- they are soon going to have to change the colour shading because the warm end of the spectrum is becoming saturated.Moderator Response: [Daniel Bailey] They can always paint it black... -
dana1981 at 15:19 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
jonathansf13 #8 - the International Journal of Geosciences (IJG) definitely seems very sketchy. It's the same journal that published the horridly flawed Soares paper claiming that CO2 increases are currently following temperature increases (we're working on an article on that one as well). And the group which publishes IJG (and many other journals) seems to have a sketchy habit of re-publishing papers which had been published long ago in other journals, without telling the authors. It's very strange. -
muoncounter at 14:38 PM on 15 January 2011Northern hemisphere warming rates: More than you may have heard
DKoD was on this 2 years ago, with some nice displays showing NH warming. -
archiesteel at 14:02 PM on 15 January 2011Oceans are cooling
Is BP still trying to argue that oceans aren't heating up because they were shown to heat up too much? Some people really do sound like broken records... -
muoncounter at 13:56 PM on 15 January 2011Increasing CO2 has little to no effect
#37: I was surprised to find a way around the paywall. Nice that he also mentions that molecules like N2 are transparent to IR 'in earthlike conditions'. Perhaps some of our deniers are actually speaking about conditions on Titan? -
Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
ClimateWatcher - You might want to take a look at the latest numbers for Argo data and OHC. -
Marcus at 13:48 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
Matthew, I'm not sure but it might represent heat lost to the atmosphere in the lead-up to the El Nino of 1998. That's just a guess though! -
muoncounter at 13:47 PM on 15 January 2011Oceans are cooling
#26: Stake through the debate or the debaters? Is it just me or does it look like that graph needs a quadratic fit: kind of flattish from '55-'75, then Bang Zoom Straight to the moon! -
Marcus at 13:44 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
The difference from 1910-1945 though, ClimateWatcher, is that there was a substantive rise in sunspot numbers (&, we assume, total solar irradiance), from 1979-2010 though, we've seen a fall in Sunspot Numbers/TSI, yet still we've got oceans warming almost as fast as they were in 1910-1945. Just FYI. -
Matthew at 13:43 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
Why did the rate of warming within the oceans decrease between 1993 and 2004. Sure it is going up, but from 2004-2008 on that graph posted above shows this...Why? -
Daniel Bailey at 13:40 PM on 15 January 2011Oceans are cooling
@ KR (25) You really know how to put a stake through the heart of a dead debate. ;) The devil's advocate in me can hear the cries now: "They've hidden the decline!" The Yooper -
jonathansf13 at 13:40 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
I read the Knox and Douglass paper last week, and the first thing I noticed was that it was submitted on July 28, revised August 10, and accepted August 30. This could not have been a peer reviewed paper, the process was far to quick. I don't know what the standards of the International Journal of Geosciences is, I have never attempted to publish there, but they can't be too strict about scientific integrity. -
Increasing CO2 has little to no effect
muoncounter - I was just reading that article this afternoon, wanted to put in a link, but couldn't find a publicly accessible version! Thanks for putting it in. Excellent paper. I especially appreciated Figure 2d, showing the interleaving of CO2 and H2O spectral lines. -
Daniel Bailey at 13:34 PM on 15 January 2011Northern hemisphere warming rates: More than you may have heard
Tom Yulsman pioneered it here.
It's just a step to the leftright... The Yooper -
Oceans are cooling
gpwayne - There's an updated chart of Argo and XBT data at the Argo data center through 2009, including the latest updates to XBT corrections. Well worth looking at.
-
muoncounter at 13:27 PM on 15 January 2011Increasing CO2 has little to no effect
New summary paper Infrared radiation and planetary temperature in Physics Today. Covers the basic physics, addresses the 'saturation fallacy', compares absorption of CO2 and H2O and ties in AIRS data. Adding more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere makes higher, more tenuous, formerly transparent portions of the atmosphere opaque to IR and thus increases the difference between ground temperature and the radiating temperature. The result, once the system has come to equilibrium, is surface warming. -
barry1487 at 12:56 PM on 15 January 2011Climate Change: The 40 Year Delay Between Cause and Effect
A skeptical friend points out that the average temperature of the near-surface atmosphere is cooler than the average temperature of the sea surface (link). His question is: how can the atmosphere warm the oceans if the surface of the oceans are, on average, warmer than the atmosphere? I figure the answer is 'circulation' - and that much of the heat transfer from atmosphere to ocean would occur at night and in warm regions. It's not been easy verifying these details on the net. General overviews, like the post heading this thread, are quite common. I believe my skeptic friend's deficit comes from 2-dimensional thinking. -
JMurphy at 12:23 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
There is also a rebuttal to Monckton's attempt at a rebuttal : Mike Steketee's response to Christopher Monckton How much longer can Monckton continue to make merry with the truth ? He obviously has no shame. -
Kooiti Masuda at 12:20 PM on 15 January 2011What is the Potential of Wind Power?
Even though I understand from the title that the subject is technological, I first thought "Global wind power has doubled over the 3 years" referred to the natural climate system and that it could not happen. In a minute I realized what part of wind power it meant. Certainly there is much wind power as a natural thing at high altitude, but it is not wind power as energy resource (as anonandon expects) yet, until we find some safe and reliable means to transmit it to the point of demand. I think that local energy storage (temporal aggregation) is crucial for utilization of wind power near the ground. Connecting together (spatial aggregation) does not guarantee stable supply. And the storage must be low-cost with respect to resources. Sometimes pumping water may work, but probably the main way will be something chemical, perhaps some kind of fuel cells. I think we should look for storage materials more conveniently stored than hydrogen. As for the issue of co-generation of electricity and heat from fuel, there is a trade off between efficiency in generating electricity and opportunity in supplying heat. Counting electricity and heat which have different utility in quantities of energy tends to favor co-generation, but if we think about exergy (energy potentially convertible to work), combination of high-efficiency heat engine and on-demand heat pump may be better. -
adelady at 12:12 PM on 15 January 2011Climate Change: The 40 Year Delay Between Cause and Effect
barry, water may be a poor conductor of heat, but there is always some conduction. I'm sure someone has shown that one can warm water by having warm air at its surface (while keeping the bulk of the water beneath the surface insulated from any other source of heat). It may be slow and inefficient, but there is no reason why water cannot be warmed - to some extent - by a warmer gas at its surface. When we're talking about such a huge surface area, that amounts to a lot of heat over months and years. Remembering that there's also direct (even if inefficient) heating by radiation. Once you add in convection by ocean currents, there's plenty of scope for heating to affect the whole of the ocean. -
dmyerson at 12:10 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
So is the Knox and Douglass paper just cherry-picking data? Did they justify their choice of data sets? -
Alden Griffith at 12:10 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
Nice post, John. I need to catch up with some more posts of my own... -
Tenney Naumer at 12:01 PM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
John, great post! n.b. the Purkey and Johnson link doesn't seem to be working. -
r.pauli at 11:54 AM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
Of course we will not attack Lord Monkton personally. Monkton is certainly permitted to follow any hobby that he desires. And his public speech is often engaging. On this issue - and many others - I notice a few members of Congress often will mistake pompous bufoonery - for valid science. But that is strictly a criticism of Congress. -
Rob Painting at 11:51 AM on 15 January 2011Northern hemisphere warming rates: More than you may have heard
Sphaerica @ 38 - That really is a great graphic, Gareth Renowden over at Hot-Topic highlighted it a while back. Says it all doesn't it?. -
Bob Lacatena at 11:40 AM on 15 January 2011Northern hemisphere warming rates: More than you may have heard
I realize now that I should have mirrored the graph horizontally... right now, the months read right to left (i.e. January is on the right, December on the left). -
Bob Lacatena at 11:37 AM on 15 January 2011Northern hemisphere warming rates: More than you may have heard
This image is global, not NH, but it's my personal favorite for conveying the warming seen in the past century, by year and month, with the most dramatic change starting around 1980. In that period you can easily see the trend for greater warming in the winter and spring, Pinatubo, El Ninos, and more. It's also annotated for volcanic eruptions, solar minima and maxima, El Ninos and La Ninas (click the link to get to the larger image to see the annotations clearly, or go to the gistemp page itself). It's a slight modification of the GISS image from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Tvs.year+month.lrg.gif at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/ (near the bottom of the page). [I just spliced the three separate segments together, and rotated it to fit neatly in a narrow column.] Click this link or the image to see a larger copy.
-
ClimateWatcher at 11:24 AM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
Through 1979, sea SURFACE temperatures do exhibit a solid warming trend ( I get 1.36K per century rate from the Hadley numbers ). That isn't the highest rate for a thirty plus year period, however. From 1910 through 1945, the SST warming was at a rate of 1.7 K per century. Climate watching is, unfortunately, a multi-lifetime pursuit. -
MattJ at 11:11 AM on 15 January 2011Monckton Myth #1: Cooling oceans
The analysis in this article concerning why Monckton's claim amounts to mere disinformation is good. But (and you knew there was a 'but' coming, didn't you?) it is still not very readable for the general public; I am not sure just who its target audience really is. Does this audience include anyone with actual influence over climate policy? So one of Monckton's many false claims is refuted. How many more to go? How do we avoid playing a losing game of catchup, one where we correctly and scientifically refute each one of his false claims, but only too late, after he has persuaded a politically significant population (e.g. the Republican Party in the US) to shut their ears to us? It is already too late to avoid disaster; soon it will be too late to avoid catastrophe. -
dhogaza at 11:07 AM on 15 January 2011Northern hemisphere warming rates: More than you may have heard
Albatross, I was surprised they said "most", too. I looked to see if it was safe to say "northern hemisphere meteorological winter", saw that bit in wikipedia, and qualified my statement as a result. From others: "Forecaster Ian Michael Waite said: ‘We expect January to be colder than average – there’s no way we’re moving out of this mini ice age any time soon.’ Whoever that Ian Michael Waite is (couldn't find anything about him from his supposed home on NetWeather) but he seems to have provided the all-important quote that the so-called skeptics and deniers can latch on to. But has he spoken too soon ?" London certainly isn't experiencing a continued "mini-ice age" this first half of January, unless "more or less normal temps" qualifies. -
Bob Lacatena at 10:54 AM on 15 January 2011Seawater Equilibria
Dr. Franzen, I was late coming back to check, but I just saw your replies and calculations in 74 and 80, in reference to my fear expressed in 72. Thank you very much!!! -
Albatross at 10:50 AM on 15 January 2011Northern hemisphere warming rates: More than you may have heard
Dhogaza @35, We are in agreement, on all fronts :) Just a small comms breakdown. I am surprised that the Wikipedia article says "most locations". As far as I know, all the major climate centres around the world (NOAA/NCDC, Hadley etc.) consider DJF to be the boreal winter. -
barry1487 at 10:50 AM on 15 January 2011Climate Change: The 40 Year Delay Between Cause and Effect
Question: The surface of the oceans is on average warmer than the near-surface air temperature. How can atmospheric heat warm the oceans? (My guess is that circulation patterns from diurnal and latitudinal changes sea heat exchange from air to oceans under certain conditions, but I still wonder how the oceans are heating when, generally, the air is warmer than the water) -
dhogaza at 10:41 AM on 15 January 2011Northern hemisphere warming rates: More than you may have heard
"In meteorology and climate, regardless of where one lives in the N. Hemisphere, the boreal meteorological winter is officially DJF." So claims being made here and elsewhere that Europe, or even portions of Europe, are experiencing their coldest winter on record, or coldest winter in 327 years are simply ludicrous." Wikipedia only says "most locations in the Northern Hemisphere". I said NA and Eurasia because I know it to be true for those two continents, and of course all the screaming of record cold centers around the eastern US and northern Europe. "So claims being made here and elsewhere that Europe, or even portions of Europe, are experiencing their coldest winter on record, or coldest winter in 327 years are simply ludicrous." Certainly true, such claims are bull, and I'm well aware that we're only about 1/2 way through meteorological winter. And where I live in NA, it's not been a cold winter at all. -
Mike G at 10:22 AM on 15 January 2011Coral: life's a bleach... and then you die
AS @ 51 No, that graph is NOT what De'ath et al's data show. It took a bit of hunting to figure out where that graph even came from, but eventually I found it here: More Coral Reef Shenanigans It's a perfect example of why you should RTFP and understand what the authors actually did before you declare them wrong. Apparently, what the creator of that image did was use the raw data from only the NEW sample sites, which were only a small subset of the total number of samples used by De'ath et al. The majority of the of the data were from Lough's previous samples which included hundreds of corals. The assertion that there were only 9 samples in the early 2000s is false. At the end of the study period in 2005, there were still 21 corals in the sample and 77 for the previous year. At the peak, there were ~300 corals in the sample, not the ~60 shown in the graph. Not only is the creator of the graph not using most of the data De'ath did, they also didn't correct for distance from shore and sea surface temperature. As Lough and Barnes (2000) found in the paper you cited, skeletal density increases with distance across the shelf and calcification increases with SST (which co-varies with latitude). Failure to correct for these variables introduces a spatial bias as corals from different parts of the reef enter the record- e.g. years with more corals from the North would increase the average calcification rate and make it look like calcification was increasing over time, even in the absence of any real temporal trend. -
The Physical Chemistry of Carbon Dioxide Absorption
co2isnotevil - I would recommend you read Petty 2006; there is a summary of some of the more important spectral data here in The greenhouse effect and 2nd law of thermodynamics, intermediate. -
Paul D at 09:14 AM on 15 January 2011What is the Potential of Wind Power?
Re Ericmair@26 Haven't seen that one before. Reminds me of the hydraulic power systems in London that pre-dated electric grids. There were massive steam engines that were connected to massive hydraulic accumulators, those were connected to a network of pipes that fed factories, providing power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hydraulic_Power_Company I guess the Gravity Power thing is an accumulator, the exception being that it would drive a generator?? -
co2isnotevil at 09:11 AM on 15 January 2011The Physical Chemistry of Carbon Dioxide Absorption
Regarding my criticism of the GWPPT presentation, it was at the request of rfranzen and I spent at least an hour of my valuable time pouring through it to see what he was doing wrong. Upon review, as I said, the math seemed OK. In fact, it's virtually the same math I've used. The problem was the data going in to the analysis. Much better data is available now and will produce far superior results, just probably not the expected results. -
co2isnotevil at 09:03 AM on 15 January 2011The Physical Chemistry of Carbon Dioxide Absorption
This is directly related to Hfranzen's post. He claims the same same exact thing that I do which is that half of what is absorbed by the atmosphere by GHG's is radiated out into space. Look at the GWPPT presentation he references. If this is the case, which I believe it is, the same thing applies. Why is it so hard to admit that the clear sky atmosphere radiates power into space? Look at the Trenberth paper. He claims that the atmosphere radiates 169 W/m^2. His number is so much higher because he assumes a much narrower transparent window. Examining the emission spectrum of the Earth, the emission lines of the GHG's in the atmosphere are mostly dark, so the only place in the spectrum where this power can be emitted is in the transparent window. KR can't answer this, so how about hfranzen? What is the origin of this power? He must be able to answer this to explain his own work. -
The Physical Chemistry of Carbon Dioxide Absorption
hfranzen - For my part, I wish to thank you for putting in the not-inconsiderable work on your guest post, and for presenting the information for people who do not have your physical chemistry background. -
Eric (skeptic) at 08:49 AM on 15 January 2011What is the Potential of Wind Power?
If I could ask just one favor, it would be nice to not just throw around empty rhetoric about how bad wind is or responses that there is a conspiracy against wind power. Also please don't turn this into another debate over nuclear power. My view is a great deal of the criticism over wind can be answered with solutions at small and large scales. Both scales can be optimized with a smart grid. Here's just one article about various alternatives http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_challenge_for_green_energy_how_to_store_excess_electricity/2170/
Prev 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 Next
