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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 108651 to 108700:

  1. Hockey stick is broken
    I am also still interested what paper you think Tamino mounted an inappropriate defense.
  2. Hockey stick is broken
    GC - This thread started elsewhere with the claim you didnt like Tamino because he supported papers that were in conflict with the historical record. The papers you objected to only cover the last 1000 years. I am not selling history short (as rest of comment indicates), only that objections to those particular papers are for events of last 1000 years. If you have other papers that you think imply conflict with the historical record, then name them. Your comments so far ignore my objection to this. Further you claim that Mann inferred global climate from only Yamal tree rings. Also not true - the paper used a variety of proxies from many location; that was what was new. The first multi-proxy reconstruction. I am not clear whether you are agreeing that climate science view of YD in concordance with history (no problem then) or not.
  3. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    BP, that's all more or less totally irrelevant to anything in this discussion. You've suggested that a "Principle of Maximum Entropy" means the climate must have "strong negative feedbacks" that would presumably prevent anthropogenic climate change. That claim is incompatible with the numerous episodes of climate change that have occurred during the past couple of million years. I take it that your new comment means that the previous one is no longer operational ...
  4. Hockey stick is broken
    skywatcher (#42), You are right to be wary about applying measurements from a small area to the entire globe, so get your blinkers off and acknowledge that is exactly what Mann tried to do. He took measurements on spruce trees from a few sites all in high latitudes and tried to draw conclusions relating to the entire planet. Take a look at the Yamal peninsula studies that came down to a few carefully selected trees. I won't send you the links as that might offend "apeescape".
  5. Hockey stick is broken
    apeescape (#43), What is this "link dump" thing? Scaddenp asked for data so I sent a NOAA ftp link. Then I try to help by sending a reference that has pre-digested the data into a series of charts. I will read your links; perhaps you will be kind enough to read mine unless you are afraid of being confused by facts.
  6. Hockey stick is broken
    scaddenp (#44), Starting at the end, the Younger Dryas is relevant because it is another example of Alley's ice cores being in synch with history/archeology. You are selling history short if you think it only goes back 1,000 years. There is no merit in multi-proxy studies if most of the proxies are junk science. Mann's tree rings should have been thrown out the minute they failed to model the warm and cold periods over the last 1,000 years.
  7. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    Berényi Péter short wavenlegth does that because they are more similar in size to the droplets (hundreds of nm). At long wavengths you loose the dependence on size. The vertical distribution of clouds does matter, but it's another story. Water vapour concentration rapidly falls with altitude anyway.
  8. Philippe Chantreau at 08:17 AM on 28 September 2010
    The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    Chriscanaris "For my part, I'm more surprised by the relative lack of traction of contrarian arguments..." It is not surprising at all that they are almost absent from the litterature, considering that these arguments' grounding in reality ranges from tenuous to non existent. They do, however, enjoy a traction in the media that is out of proportion with their validity.
  9. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    BP - "even with the present insolation & CO2" care to back that up please? It doesnt match the opinion I heard from Tom Crowley on the subject and with CO2 heading to pliocene levels, it doesnt match paleoclimate indication. Why did we enter the ice age cycle in first place? Milankovitch cycles still happened in Miocene/pliocene. The total solar output has been steadily (if slowly) increasing? Changes in the atmosphere due to steady low of CO2 is best bet. A reset to pliocene means all bets are off. However, somewhat beside the point for humanity for the next 10,000 years.
  10. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    #117 Riccardo at 06:22 AM on 28 September, 2010 Absorption coefficient depends on the total water column, not on the size of the particles It is not so. It may not depend on size of droplets and ice crystals much (SW absorption does), but plain water vapor distribution is also very uneven as it depends on history of individual air parcels, not just local parameters. The distribution is uneven both along lateral and vertical directions and as temperature is not uniform either, outgoing radiation depends on the fine details of it, not only the column integrated value.
  11. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    "As I indicated, if you use 1975 as your start point (25 years, a nice round number) then you get trends that are higher than the low estimate." Very well, since 1975 (35 years), Least squares fit, nearest tenth degree per century: 1.7 CRU 1.8 GISS We may note that: 1. the CRU indicates a century warming rate below the best estimate for the most optimistic scenario 2. the GISS indicates a century warming rate right at the best estimate for the most optimistic scenario 3. both rates indicate DEceleration from the 1975 to present period to the 1979 to present period.
  12. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    #115 Ned at 02:08 AM on 28 September, 2010 Obviously the climate has changed radically in the past. Yes, it did. However, the ice albedo feedback is really a strong positive one, you don't need rocket science to see this. If ice cover reached 30° latitude somehow (and there are hints it could during the next glacial cycle), Earth would enter a "permanent" icehouse state ("snowball Earth") even with the present insolation & CO2. As sea ice extent grows tremendously, evaporation diminishes and the so called "arctic window" (IR wavelengths above the 14 μm CO2 absorption line) opens up. With decreased SW absorption and increased LW outbound losses, the cold state is stabilized beyond repair for tens of million years. Due to the present configuration of continents the climate system is a bistable one with a considerable hysteresis between the two possible (cold vs. warm) states. As you can see during the last several million years the amplitude of glacial cycle keeps increasing while its frequency is decreasing, which is a sure sign of a would-be phase change in chaotic systems. As long as sea ice extent does not grow too large, the process is self-limiting, because as soon as elevation of ice sheet surfaces above continental masses become too high, they cease to be effective radiators, for while their surface temperature is very low, potential temperature of air masses above them is still relatively high. It means as air is cooled above the surface and descends along the slope (so called katabatic wind) it is heated adiabatically, along a 3 km high slope by as much as 30°C (because this air is very dry). It means on the plateau radiative losses relative to sea level temperature of the air parcel are 40-50% lower. On the other hand if even the sea surface at mid latitudes freezes over, radiative losses are not limited this way while most of the incoming short wave radiation is reflected back to space. The extreme cold coming out of the Antarctic region during southern winter (like the recent cold spell above South America) is generated this way, above floating ice, not the elevated ice sheet. Come the next glaciation, sea ice can easily extend to the tropics, as it has happened several times in the deep past. It would be a true disaster for both humanity and nature. During the present epoch ice albedo effect is asymmetric. The extent of low lying snow covered surface is limited and it can only decrease so much, while it has considerably more room to increase. Insolation on lower latitudes is also higher on average, so it has a more pronounced effect should it get reflected. Still, anything that decreases snow albedo (like soot pollution) has an immediate warming effect right at the surface, even if the sky is covered by low clouds. Clean snow is a special stuff. It is white in the visible portion of the spectrum, but pitch "black" in IR (hence an effective radiator at low temperatures due to Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation). Winter snow cover on the vast low lying continental areas of the Northern Hemisphere can act the same way. As soon as anthropogenic soot pollution gets limited, the multidecadal growing trend of NH December/January snow cover would extend well into springtime, bringing severe cooling into the region.
  13. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    muoncounter #38: "Why are we talking about breathing as a CO2 source?" Sometimes it isn't enough to simply disprove a 'skeptic' argument with one line of reasoning. If you show it is ludicrous five different ways, stamp it into the ground, set it on fire, and bury it in the mud then maybe they'll consider that it isn't ABSOLUTE proof of the rightness of their opinion. Another fun fact... the UPPER estimate of CO2 emissions from volcanoes is about 300 million tons per year. Which is only 1/10th the emissions from humans breathing each year... which is itself only 1/10th the emissions from human industry each year.
  14. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    ClimateWatcher - That's the entire point of this topic. Asymmetric societal forcings and media representation tend to dumb down the science.
  15. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    "assessment of new scientific findings to show that the climatological consensus is insufficiently pessimistic." I'm not sure that pessimism ( or optimism for that matter ) are at all part of the scientific method.
  16. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    ClimateWatcher quotes the IPCC: A temperature rise of about 0.2 °C per decade is projected for the next two decades for all SRES scenarios. That "about 0.2 °C per decade" is a rough approximation of the middle of the distribution of model runs through 2020, not the "Best estimate of the low scenario as of September 2010". Please stop posting misleading claims about the IPCC projections. Again, here is the actual comparison of observations to the range of model projections:
  17. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    @ClimateWatcher: also, you should stop using the MT values since the IPCC predictions do not deal with that area of the atmosphere.
  18. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    From 2000-2006, the population of China increased about 3% (eyeballed from the graph here). During that same period, China's CO2 emissions from fossil fuels more than doubled (see xls files here). Why are we talking about breathing as a CO2 source?
  19. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    @Ned: thanks for the precise figures. I confess I was eyeballing (Wood for Trees should update their tool to provide numerical values on a mouseover...) @ClimateWatcher The trend since January 1979 is indeed slightly under the low scenario estimate (by 0.2C, or 11%), but that estimate is not based on that time period. It is based on data sets (such as GISS and HadCRUT) that go further back, and thus provide a better statistical basis to establish trends. As I indicated, if you use 1975 as your start point (25 years, a nice round number) then you get trends that are higher than the low estimate. Cherry-picking to make a point isn't the right way to test theories.
  20. Same Ordinary Fool at 06:59 AM on 28 September 2010
    The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    This is one of those papers that is best read backwards. Look at the results first to better understand what is being argued. The paper itself: http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/3/0/9/1/9/pages309195/p309195-1.php The Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge argument uses an empirical assessment of new scientific findings to show that the climatological consensus is insufficiently pessimistic. The empirical assessment by the four newspapers (despite a bias in general articles and editorials) is that new scientific findings are 'worse than expected'.
  21. Hockey stick is broken
    GC - your initial accusation is that MBH and later reconstructions supported by Tamino etc do not honour the historical record so for starters that should limit you to the considerations of the last 1000 years, NH only, as earlier climate events are outside the scope of the papers supposed ignorance of history. Fig 6.10 in AR4 WG1 has summary figure of the various reconstruction, and Box 6.4, Fig 1 shows the individual temperature proxies for different parts of NH. And what do these show? Well for starters, where is the mismatch with history? The proxy records for sites in the area of historical records match what you can infer about temperatures in the pre-thermometer age. That things like the "medieval warm period" occurred at different times in different places is established from the historical records for Greenland, Europe, Russia and China. The NH reconstruction do indeed show a LIA which may be global (you would expect it to be from what we know of forcing at the time). I find no evidence of a problem here though I do certainly accept that MBH, being the first attempt at a multi-proxy reconstruction, needed improved methodologically and has been. I dont think its substantial conclusions has changed much with later reconstructions. Perhaps you could also point out which defense of a paper by Tamino you find so objectionable. Looking back further for evidence that climate science and history are in opposition also produces a blank. Was it warm in the Bronze age? Almost certainly warmer than now is what the climate science says (see WGA 6.5.1.3 for papers). Solar production proxies globally and orbital forcing for NH point to an expectation of warmer temperatures which is borne out in historical and paleoclimatic record. There is evidence of warming similar to now in SH as well. Just as well we dont have that solar forcing now on top of our CO2 concentrations. Younger Dryas - I am not sure why you brought this up as for life of me I can see why you think there is a conflict with "historical record" - perhaps you could explain? I cant see that archeological record is much easier to interpret than the paleoclimate one and boy does it have fun with YD. Be aware that YD is area where techniques are being refined, better time calibration is coming and so watch for new papers in next couple of years. Also note that events like YD are features of glacial terminations and thankfully we lack evidence that interglacial periods are prone to such rapid climate shifts. Time for a quick reset of the respect-o-meter perhaps in face of all that data?
  22. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    In some sense, breathing removes carbon! A typical human contains ~18% by mass C, or about 13 kg for a 70 kg person. So since my birth, I have been recycling tons of carbon (for no net change), but also sequestering about 13 kg of C. If I wasn't there to eat those plants, they would more quickly have rotted and returned the CO2 to the atmosphere. As long as I am breathing, I will continue to sequester my share of C. When I stop breathing, that C will be returned to the atmosphere. The more people, the more C is sequestered in our collective bodies! (6 billion people) * (0.06 tons/person) --> about 0.1 billion tons of sequestered C. Basically, any net global increase in biomass will sequester C (for example, the annual variations in CO2 as the plants in the N Hemisphere grow during the spring and summer). Since I personally am 80 kg of biomass, I am sequestering my share of carbon for ~70 years. (Of course this is a bit simplistic. If people were not around, then other animals would increase to take advantage of the food supplies, and those animals would sequester the C in a similar manner. And people have cut down forests around the world, returning that sequestered C more quickly. I suspect this effect greatly outweighs the increase in human sequestered C. And both of these are presumably greatly outweighed by the burning of fossil fuels over the last century.)
  23. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    "if anything, global climate disruption may prove to be significantly worse than has been suggested in scientific consensus estimates to date..." That is completely contradicted by the IPCC. The IPCC AR4: 1. "Low scenario" refers to B1, the most optimistic scenario family." 2. "Best estimate for a 'low scenario' is 1.8 °C" ( per century ) 3. 1979 through Aug 2010 least squares fit ( deg C per century to the nearest tenth): 1.0 RSS MT 0.5 UAH MT 1.6 RSS LT 1.4 UAH LT 1.6 CRU 1.7 GISS 1.4 Hadley SST All temperature trends are below the 1.8 best estimate for the "most optimistic scenario" Where else has anyone read that global warming is less than even the most optimistic scenario?
    Moderator Response: You are simultaneously posting virtually identical comments in another thread (The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC). Please try to avoid starting duplicate versions of the same discussion in multiple threads.
  24. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    Berényi - You seem to be claiming that the distribution of water vapor will change to increase IR radiation, providing a strong negative feedback. As has been pointed out, modelled and empirical evidence indicates that the actual climate sensitivity is ~3°C for a doubling of CO2 or an equivalent radiological forcing. That indicates that your negative feedback does not exist, certainly not at the level you seem to be suggesting. As Riccardo points out, atmospheric absorption/emission in these IR bands depends on the integrated total water column. Finally - it seems to me that increased inhomogeneity (which would be required to emit more IR) represents a local increase of order. A global higher IR emission won't have any influence on local order - global IR is an emergent phenomena, the sum of local events. The mechanisms are important; your increased inhomogeneity means lower local entropy, and is not a natural direction for the system to move in.
  25. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Ned, The IPCC also said this: "A temperature rise of about 0.2 °C per decade is projected for the next two decades for all SRES scenarios." Some may contend that internal variability makes two decades too brief a period to predict for. And clearly, the briefer the period, the more the starting time matters to the trend. But that is not my prediction, but rather the words of the IPCC. And analyzing the results of predictions is how we test theories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report#Model-based_projections_for_the_future
  26. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    archiesteel, Fortunately for us, all of the above trends are completely below the range of the IPCC 'high end scenario': "Best estimate for a "high scenario"[10] is 4.0 °C with a likely range of 2.4 to 6.4 °C" Most of the above trends are IN the range for the 'low scenario': "Best estimate for a "low scenario"[9] is 1.8 °C with a likely range of 1.1 to 2.9 °C" But ALL the measurements are below the 'Best Estimate' of the 'low scenario', which the IPCC describes as the "most optimistic". Hence, my point that warming IS taking place, but at a rate LOWER than even the "most optimistic" per the IPCC. The middle troposphere measurements, which are modeled to contain the "hot spot", and warm at a rate higher than the surface, do in fact exhibit a trend which is completely OUT of range for the SURFACE as modeled by the IPCC "low scenario". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report#Model-based_projections_for_the_future
  27. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    Berényi Péter what you describe is a feedback mechanism, not a cycle. As for "the same level of atmospheric moisture can give a wide range of IR opacities depending on its distribution", in the wavelength range of interest it's not so. Absorption coefficient depends on the total water column, not on the size of the particles. Scattering, which in general depends on particle size, is irrelevant given the longer wavelength of the EM wave with respect to particle size.
  28. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    ClimateWatcher writes: All less than the IPCC best estimate. Or, actually, right in the middle of the IPCC projected range for 2010.
  29. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Right with you: 1979 through Aug 2010 least squares fit ( deg C per century to the nearest tenth): RSS MT 1.0 UAH MT 0.5 RSS LT 1.6 UAH LT 1.4 CRU 1.6 GISS 1.7 Had SST 1.4 All less than the IPCC best estimate. MT, where warming is modeled to be maximal, below the significance limit.
  30. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    I'm concerned that this thread is rapidly approaching the danger zone. The ice is pretty thin, but I think doug_bostrom @17 makes an excellent point about what's "practical." Getting back to the topic of the post, "scientific certainty" arguments are obviously not practical, because we're obviously going to have a very long wait before we achieve "scientific certainty" on this question or any other. I fail to see anything "practical" in postponing the possibility of taking action until some imaginary future arrives. The fact that some "skeptics" also supported the invasion of Iraq, or abstinence education, explains why some of us are irked by their demands for scientific certainty, as does the fact that these demands never seem to extend to "alarmist" theories on the effects of climate legislation. But really, all of that's a distraction. Politics aside, it's logically incoherent to demand scientific certainty before action, and to assume that uncertainty about AGW means it'll be much better than we expect, rather than much worse. As such, these stances are inherently impractical. Arguing over politics obscures that point, IMO.
  31. Urban Heat Islands: serious problem or holiday destination for skeptics?
    Ned, I am not familiar with this type of data analysis. I wondered if you could remove the UHI "bias" by choosing countries that have had negative population growth and doing an analysis on them. I checked on Wikipedia and most of eastern Europe, including Russia and Poland, and Japan have had negative population growth for many years. If you showed their warming was the same as areas with increasing population (or the global average) would that show that the UHI effect BP claims was not true? It might be possible to lose population in one area and gain it elsewhere and have an effect, but that would be an extraordinary set of circumstances. Greenland has had population decline and we know how fast it has been cooling there. I thought it was ironic that Poland had negative population growth and BP is from there.
  32. Billions of Blow Dryers: Some Missing Heat Returns to Haunt Us
    Camburn, When I read the linked paper they say on page 7 that they use thermometers to measure the temperature, not models and salinity. Can you say where you find them to suggest otherwise? They state they use only high quality temperature data from direct measurements made at least twice in the same location. Possibly the Wegener study used models?
  33. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    Why is it assumed that conservatives would not be concerned with the environment when they basically own it and have a lot more time to enjoy it?
    The short answer is that AGW, along with much of the environmental degradation we see in the world, is a tragedy of the commons.
  34. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    I'm concerned that this thread is rapidly approaching the danger zone.
  35. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Since there seems to be a bit of confusion on this point, some trends (Jan 1979-Aug 2010): GISSTEMP land/ocean: 1.65 C/century RSS lower troposphere: 1.63 C/century UAH lower troposphere: 1.39 C/century I just went back to the original sources, re-downloaded the data, and checked this. NOAA-NCDC and HADCRUT are also in the 1.6 C/century range.
  36. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    Conservatives are "practical," liberals are "idealists?" Here's a short checklist, see how "conservatives" perform in terms of letting the ideal infect the real: - Chlorofluorocarbons - Tetraethyl lead - Abstinence education - Tobacco policy Just to keep things on topic: - Carbon emissions mitigation
  37. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    @ClimateWatcher: "I use January, 1979 to start. The data set starts with December, 1978, but starting with January makes annual comparisons easier." One month does not significantly change the trend, so it really does seem as if your calculations are incorrect. I'll venture so far as to say that, since you clearly have a wrong idea of the current warming trend, the rest of your arguments are tainted by this mistake and need to be adjusted accordingly. In other words, you have failed to adequately challenge the current science, i.e. that the current warming trend is in the range estimated by the IPCC.
  38. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    Phila, further to your remarks what we also have enjoyed here (U.S.) versus the Russian Tsarist/PseudoCommmunist/Oligarchy continuum is a system of law favorable to successfully addressing disparities in political power. The rule of law is something many self-professed conservatives here in the United States despise in terms of its outcomes, oddly enough. "Those faceless bureaucrats and their environmental takings," etc.
  39. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    ClimateWatcher, it's simply a fact that the IPCC temperature projections aren't linear over the period 1990-2100. As shown in Rahmstorf 2007, recent temperatures are well within the IPCC model predictions. Here's an updated version of Rahmstorf's graph, showing the comparison between observed and projected temperatures: Observed data are from RSS lower troposphere and GISSTEMP land/ocean (monthly, and 5-year LOESS smoothed). Gray envelope shows IPCC model projections, from Rahmstorf.
  40. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    doug_bostrom "But perhaps "conservative" is another term akin to "skeptic," where original meaning has lost all relationship with our parlance..." Another way to look at it is that conservative is another term for "practical" and liberal "idealist". Since liberals have few opportunities to exert power, they are seen to mess things up less, but given the chance as chriscanaris points out, they do an even worse job. Just a theory of course. There is still hope, I hope.
  41. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    #114 doug_bostrom at 01:30 AM on 28 September, 2010 how will these adjustments manifest themselves? Atmospheric distribution of moisture is pretty fractal-like along a scale of many orders of magnitude from global down to micron sized droplets. Opacity for electromagnetic radiation depends not only on average moisture contents of air, but also on finer details of its distribution. While MEP does not give any direct answer to the question what kind of atmospheric state maximizes entropy production, it strongly suggests the lowest possible average temperature provided there are ways to maintain radiative energy balance other than increasing temperature. Therefore since the same level of atmospheric moisture can give a wide range of IR opacities depending on its distribution, I guess it is enough to adjust its fractal dimension slightly. Not even large scale rearrangement of flows is required, so no radical climate change is expected for moderate increase in well mixed IR opacity. It is not easy to measure these properties, but there is a literature about it well worth studying, for example: WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH, VOL. 35, NO. 6, PAGES 1853­1867, JUNE 1999 Multifractal modeling of anomalous scaling laws in rainfall Roberto Deidda, Roberto Benzi & Franco Siccardi WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH, VOL. 32. No 9. PAGES 2825-2839, SEPTEMBER 1996 A deterministic geometric representation of temporal raifall: Results for a storm in Boston Carlos E. Puente and Nelson Obregón It is also impossible to include these effects properly in gridded models (due to their multi-scale behavior), but one can always try to use other representations (like Puente 1996). If we accept the science is very far from being settled, a wealth of exciting directions open up immediately. It is really hard to understand why one would stick to a worn-out paradigm.
  42. A detailed look at Hansen's 1988 projections
    @angusmac: "It is simply that it matches the actual forcings correctly?" No, it isn't. You're trying to find meaning in coincidence, and I'm beginning to wonder where this is really heading to. Are you repeating this fallacious hypothesis over and over again in order to later claim that temperatures are going to level off, as Scenario C suggests? In any case, you've been repeatedly shown why you were wrong, and making unlikely hypotheses isn't going to change that fact. As for me, I've said I needed to say on the subject.
  43. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    chriscanaris Witness by contrast the environmental catastrophe still dogging vast tracts of the former Soviet bloc and its rustbelt industries where no one 'owned' anything and thus felt no sense of responsibility for the world around them. I'd never dream of defending the USSR's environmental practices, but projecting your own assumptions about the value of private ownership onto their society is ahistorical and unreasonable. The statement that people in the USSR "felt no sense of responsibility for the world around them" is an astonishing claim--astonishing mostly because it's so casual. I'd love to know what hard evidence or research it's based on. Anyway, the problem isn't owning or not owning land; the problem is scientifically and ethically comprehending one's place within a larger system. And as adelady notes, the failure to reach that understanding has been pretty universal. I know it's fashionable in libertarian circles to claim that lack of private ownership ruined the USSR's environment--especially among the crowd that argues for selling off our national parks to the highest bidder--but the larger problems, IMO, were ignorance, arrogance, nationalism, quasi-worship of industry, greed, paranoia, and an economic orthodoxy that encouraged magical thinking. (The usual, in other words.) Also: one thing we had, and the USSR didn't, was an environmental movement going back over 100 years (cf. David Stradling's Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951). Perhaps that had some bearing on our respective outcomes, too.
  44. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    ClimateWatcher #37: "Further, it is not founded to speak of saturated CO2 sinks, when the oceans can and will absorb all available CO2" Can and will... but isn't currently. One of the early arguments against AGW by actual skeptics was that the total volume of the oceans would be able to absorb any amount of CO2 which humans released and thus we could not cause an increase in the atmospheric CO2 level. This was found to be false because the RATE at which we are releasing CO2 is greater than the rate at which the oceans can DISTRIBUTE CO2 throughout their volume. Thus, it is totally accurate to speak of sinks becoming saturated... in the short term. If the ocean surface waters were not saturated with CO2 we would not be seeing the increasing atmospheric values we have been. Sure, it will be a different story several thousand years from now... but that's not exactly relevant.
  45. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    archiesteel, I use January, 1979 to start. The data set starts with December, 1978, but starting with January makes annual comparisons easier. There is nothing special about the MSU era, but it does provide the best comparison among all the available data sets. I did not notice a slope value on the WoodForTrees site. Is it there but I am missing it?
  46. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Ned, It is correct that the MSU channels do overlap: However, reflect that: 1. the amount of overlap (with the strat.) is small 2. The co-located RAOB data tend to confirm the MSU data and 3. the lower stratosphere has not been cooling for the last fifteen years: I do not find it appropriate to speak of acceleration in trends when the all but the most extreme IPCC scenario is modeled to have DEcelerating temperature increases: This is to be expected with the logarithmic decrease in forcing modeled by the IPCC. Further, it is not founded to speak of saturated CO2 sinks, when the oceans can and will absorb all available CO2 and when anthropogenic forces are excluded, CO2 is in IMbalance with the oceans:
  47. A detailed look at Hansen's 1988 projections
    Archiesteel#125, have you ever thought of an alternative scenario that the reason why Scenario C matches the temperature record so well is not coincidence or serendipity? It is simply that it matches the actual forcings correctly? This would mean that we have not accounted for all of the forcings from actual emissions in the 1988 scenarios and that some mechanism would be required to bring the forcings in Scenario B down to near-zero after 2000. Fortunately, Hansen 2000 gives us a clue for a possible explanation for the reduced warming post-2000 and thus a mechanism for reducing the forcings that would otherwise be caused by Scenario B (see Figure 3). Figure 3: A scenario for additional climate forcings between 2000 and 2050. Reduction of black carbon moves the aerosol forcing to lower values (Hansen et al, 2000) The 1988 scenarios only consider CO2, CH4, N2O, CFC11 and CF12. However, it is evident from Figure 3 that the largest anthropogenic climate forcing (due to CO2) could be cancelled out by negative forcings from CH4 and aerosols. Perhaps this is the reason why Scenario C gives good results? If we plugged the negative forcings from Figure 3 into Scenario B it would result in similar forcings to Scenario C. Consequently, Scenario B would be able to simulate the post-2000 temperature flattening that is so well modelled by Scenario C.
  48. A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    I took the Chernobyl discussion straight out of Sloan and Wolfendale (linked in the article). "We estimate that the increase in ionization from this [Chernobyl] radioactivity relative to that produced by CR is a factor of ~15 in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl (50-52.5◦ N, 30-32.5◦ E) and a factor ~3 in the fallout region..."
  49. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    RSVP: Why is it assumed that conservatives would not be concerned with the environment when they basically own it and have a lot more time to enjoy it? I think people assume that conservatives tend not to be concerned with the environment because that's the impression that their real-world actions convey (e.g., hostility to environmental regulation; hostility to the ESA; hostility to the concept of public lands; a tendency not only to oppose climate action, but also to deny warming; and so forth). It's not clear to me why an imaginary paradox should trump decades of clear evidence. If you have a cornucopian or eschatological outlook, and little interest in or understanding of environmental science, then there's not necessarily any contradiction between "enjoying" the environment and despoiling it; it's simply a matter of denying that you're despoiling it, or that it matters. Faced with your alleged paradox, the conservatives of my acquaintance would simply a) deny that pollution and exploitation are occurring; b) deny that pollution and exploitation have negative effects; c) deny that pollution and exploitation have lasting negative effects; d) deny that the negative effects of pollution and exploitation outweigh the economic benefits of growth; e) call me a communist; or f) all of the above.
  50. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    @ClimateWatcher: I don't know about you, but looking at RSS and UAH trends I get 1.8C/century and 1.5C/century, respectively. I think your calculations might be wrong. For a time frame similar to available RSS and UAH data, we get 2.2C/century for HADCRUT and GISS.

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