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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 108751 to 108800:

  1. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Phillipe Chantreau #24 "Pulling out what has been stored in the crust for millions of years and injecting it in the cycle is different. That's a true net addition. " Which almost sounds like there should be more vegetation in the long run. As long as population increases, however this may not be true, but if stabilized or was to reduce, why not?
  2. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    Daniel Bailey #109 The normal dose of aspirin for a headache is usually one or two pills max. If that takes care of it, you are in luck, while for some, the headache remains...(sorry). The dose of course depends on your weight, but my point here is that there is a minimal dose that works, and taking more has no extra benefit. Such things do occur in nature, and I suspect that while CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas, the effect is relative to many factors and therefore its significance as well. For example, I can imagine a planet like the Earth (all things being exactly equal) with an atmosphere that has double or half the volume. I assume you would allow that those conditions, would influence the overall impact of a greenhouse gas. I am not espousing David Hume's philosophy (the king of skeptics), but I would recommend checking out what he had to say about causation, simply to temper anyone's sense of sureness in anything. Taking empiricism to the extreme, he would say that "effect" is only a human expectation projected onto "reality". All you can truely observe is a succession of ordered events. This to me sounds closer to "science" than I feel comfortable with, however, this thinking is logical, and supposedly truer to a "detatched" spirit.
  3. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    The assumption that the IPCC process is overly cautious is difficult to sustain given the multiplicity of reservations properly expressed in the primary scientific literature. Surely we shouldn't expect the IPCC to go down the alarmist path. I think examining four papers known to be consistently contrarian and finding that they are very likely to dismiss AGW is akin to taking a sampling of German newspapers between 1933 and 1945 and finding that they are twenty times more likely to carry anti-Semitic articles than their British equivalents in the same era. For my part, I'm more surprised by the relative lack of traction of contrarian arguments given the vast investment allegedly underpinning their emergence and propagation. For example, here in Australia we have the Treasury advice to the opposition (prepared in case they got into government) spelling out firmly the need to embrace a Carbon tax (contrary to their election platform). While the Treasury's arguments would have been essentially economic, such advice coming from an essentially conservative bunch of bureaucrats suggests a strong perception in favour of the AGW consensus.
  4. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    jyyh, I'm thinking that most of the comments are leading into material for an Intermediate level post. The obvious issue that using carbon cycle resources badly can cause damage is a step beyond the simple truth that the breathing of animals, including us, and plants photosynthesizing is a carbon neutral cycle. Once we move into deforestation or oxidising carbon by exposing and ploughing soils or burning dung instead of using it to replenish soil nutrients, we're beyond this central, simple, obvious point.
  5. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    John I'd be happy to. Given that my contribution would be limited to grammar only - or to Basic level essays for readability and comprehension issues. And I'd echo, shout or jump up and down to support the commendation of the Arctic Sea Ice blog. An absolute tour de force.
  6. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Could this carbon fuel issue be reformatted as "Using carbon cycle fuels produces ecological changes, using carbon sink fuels produces physico-chemical imbalance in nature, which produces ecological changes."?
  7. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    What are the chances that 2010 beats 2005 for the record? That should give some new life to warning people on global warming. People hang on records and big news items like a record year.
  8. We're coming out of the Little Ice Age
    "cruzn246, nobody claimed the Earth is in equilibrium. The sentences you quoted are expository. " Then naturally we should be heating or cooling. Right? Which one should we be doing now? "@cruzn246: I don't think you understand what equilibrium means in this context." Archie, explain it to me.
  9. We're coming out of the Little Ice Age
    cruzn246, nobody claimed the Earth is in equilibrium. The sentences you quoted are expository.
  10. We're coming out of the Little Ice Age
    @cruzn246: I don't think you understand what equilibrium means in this context.
  11. We're coming out of the Little Ice Age
    "A long-term increase in the Earth's average temperature is caused by a change in the planetary energy balance (incoming vs. outgoing energy), also known as a 'radiative forcing.' If the amounts of incoming and outgoing energy are equal, the planet is in equilibrium and its average temperature will not increase on average." I couldn't resist commenting on this. Are we in equilibrium? Is it possible to be in equilibrium? Think about it folks. Do we know exactly what output from the sun produces this state? I truly doubt we are ever in equilibrium. It's just such a hard thing to achieve in any system, much less an extremely complicated one like ours.
  12. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Thanks for noticing Daniel :-) Philippe @ 24: Actually, Greece was deforested long before the Common Era - they used heaps of timber for their triremes. Similarly, large swathes of Croatia were deforested by the Venetians who needed the wood to build the piles upon which much of their city rests today. In short, even biomass ain't carbon neutral especially if we use it at a rate greater than it can be replaced. Why else did we turn to coal (coal mining is a challenging and dangerous enterprise even today)?
  13. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    I think this is relevant. "Climate Scientists Defend IPCC Peer Review as Most Rigorous in History" by Stacy Feldman - Feb 26th, 2010 at Solve Climate.com * "Nicholls, a professor at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, said the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment report was subjected to several rigorous tiers of review. The study cites over 10,000 papers from the scientific literature, "most of which have already been through the peer-review process to get into the scientific literature." * "The report went through four separate reviews and received 90,000 comments from 2,500 reviewers, all of which are publicly available, along with the responses of the authors, Nicholls said." As J Bowers @14 comment implies, any political bias is more likely toward watering down the report to satisfy economic and political interests. You still hear skeptics asking why they changed the name to climate change, from global warming. Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was named as such, over 20 years ago.
  14. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Daniel Bailey (# 28), Let's disagree without being disagreeable. I certainly have no reason to cast aspersions on your character. Before TV degraded our debating skills, folks like Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde gained fame by creating pithy sayings like the one that started this argument. Mark Twain could be abrasive (to use scaddenp's term) as illustrated by the following: "In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards."
  15. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    archiesteel, (#30), All of these guys are smarter than I am so they have my respect even if I disagree with them.
  16. We're heading into an ice age
    The link for the Tamino post in the Further Reading section is broken. The correct link location is: http://web.archive.org/web/20080501114257/http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/10/13/solar-cycle-24/ The Yooper
  17. Philippe Chantreau at 14:07 PM on 27 September 2010
    Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Chriscanaris, I disagree. As long as humans were leaving alone the stores of fossil carbon, they were carbon neutral. No matter how the carbon cycle was affected by fire, domestic animals or anything else, the total store was still limited to the what was available from atmosphere and biomass. You can transfer some from here to there, change the relative importance of some reservoirs and sinks, create new sinks and means of emissions from reservoirs, but there is no net addition to the cycle. Pulling out what has been stored in the crust for millions of years and injecting it in the cycle is different. That's a true net addition.
  18. Hockey stick is broken
    scaddenp, (From "Lies, Damn Lies & the IPCC) My problem with MBH 08 & 09 plus the hundreds of subsequent papers and commentaries including those by my ex-colleagues such as Gabby Hegerl or distinguished statisticians such as Tamino is their ignorance of the historical record. The first test of any paleo-climate reconstruction should be whether it portrays past climate in a plausible way. Any set of proxies that disagrees with history should immediately be discarded. Specifically, I mean that at least the following warm periods should be seen: Minoan, Roman (2), Medieval and Modern. Cold periods should include: Dark Ages and Little Ice Age. For proxies that go back into pre-history, one would expect to see the Younger Dryas. While we don't have a true historic record of this there is a good archaeological record of the Clovis people. You should be honest enough to recognize that MBH et seq. fail this test in dismal fashion, yet there are some proxies that portray the historical and even pre-historical (Younger Dryas) temperatures quite well. You don't have to believe they are correct but at least admit that they pass the initial acid test of being consistent with history and archeology. The proxies I find credible are ice cores. As the historical record in the southern hemisphere is thin, one can only check a tiny part of the Antarctic ice core record against history. It is quite a different story in the northern hemisphere where we have the Greenland ice cores. Here is a "ftp" link to Richard Alley's (2000) ice core data for central Greenland: I downloaded this file and prepared a number of plots over different time periods. This is quite time consuming so you can get the same information from the following site and learn about the Eisenhower administration at the same time: http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553 Your comments will be appreciated as I plan to visit NOAA in Asheville, North Carolina in mid October to discuss this and related issues.
    Moderator Response: [RH] Embedded link.
  19. We're heading into an ice age
    I have been thinking about this topic for a bit and I am somewhat curious as to where the assertions that the "These two factors, orbit and tilt, are weak and are not acting within the same timescale – they are out of phase by about 10,000 years. This means that their combined effect would probably be too weak to trigger an ice age. You have to go back 430,000 years to find an interglacial with similar conditions, and this interglacial lasted about 30,000 years" comes from. From my understanding of Ruddimans work we were heading into an ice age until anthropogenic influences kicked in. Ruddiman in his real climate post seems to defend this assertion well... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/12/early-anthropocene-hyppothesis/
  20. Philippe Chantreau at 13:55 PM on 27 September 2010
    A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    Dana, thanks for mentioning in your review that the main problem about the GCR hypothesis is particle growth. That physical part of it has no solution to date. I do not believe that any significant effect on cloud nucleation exists from GCR at all. No correlation has been demonstrated to the necessary level of confidence.
  21. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    @gc: "Tamino is to CAGW folks as McIntyre is to skeptics." I don't think this is a fair analogy to make. I also don't understand why you mention BP in the same sentence as Tamino.
  22. A detailed look at Hansen's 1988 projections
    @angusmac: "Do you mean model sensitivity and radiative forcing are the erroneous components?" No, the climate sensitivity *and* the CO2 emmissions are the erroneous components in Scenario C. "Model sensitivity at 4.8 °C for 2xCO2 is the same for all scenarios. Therefore, I would be pleased if you would explain the other "erroneous" component in Scenario C that cancels out the error to give the correct real-world results." Sure, I'll repeat it once more, even though it's been explained many times in this thread. The other erroneous component in Scenario C is CO2 emmissions.
  23. Hockey stick is broken
    GC - you claim Tamino supports papers that deny the historical record. I assume this has something to do with MBH? Can you be more specific please? I assume you think MBH denies history. Do you also assume that all those other papers in Paleoclimate chapter of AR4 using different methods and proxies, published since M&M are also "denying the historical record"?
  24. Billions of Blow Dryers: Some Missing Heat Returns to Haunt Us
    Daniel: Yes, I know that the nature study is from 2008. The current study uses models and salinity as temp proxies. The Wegener study used thermomiters. I think the temp results need to be examined again in about 5 years to see if they are consistent.
  25. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    scaddenp (#26), Absolutely no question that Tamino and Berenyi Peter are way above my pay grade (even though I studied statistics under J.C.P. Miller). John Cook (#19) suggested the following thread for the discussion of MBH 08 & 09: http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm Hope to see you there shortly!
  26. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Re: gallopingcamel (27)
    "How dare you suggest that it is uncivil to mention a person's name when discussing technical issues?"
     OK, now you've completely lost me. My point solely was that to link a person's name with the quote represented by the title of this post was being uncivil. PERIOD. Hey, disagree all you want. We're disagreeing right now. You don't see me casting character aspersions on you just because you're reading more into my comment than what was actually in it. If you can't disagree and be civil at the same time, that's where I draw the line. Is that your position, GC, that you reserve the right to be uncivil when discussing technical issues? Than you don't have the good character I thought you had. And that's a sad thing. The Yooper
  27. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    Thanks adelady! Maybe you could proof my articles for me before I post them?!
  28. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Daniel Bailey (#23), When people publish papers they must expect criticism. How dare you suggest that it is uncivil to mention a person's name when discussing technical issues? Newton's "Laws of Motion" and Einstein's "General Relativity" were widely criticized in contrast with the non-scientific world where the name "Lord Vol**mort" must not be spoken.
  29. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Tamino is certainly abrasive but I value his expertise (especially when it crosses over into my time series problems). However, I wonder what "denying the historical record" papers you mean? Perhaps you could comment on an appropriate thread?
  30. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    GC - my apologies. I had misunderstood your reference (read everything but the article title) and was too quick on the trigger. I will try to take your advice :-) and lighten up.
  31. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    archiesteel (#21), Tamino is to CAGW folks as McIntyre is to skeptics. No doubt they are good at what they do but one needs to recognize that they both operate with blinkers on. My doubts about Tamino are based on his support for papers that deny the historical record. If "Climate Science" chooses to ignore history you can't expect anyone to take it seriously no matter how clever your statisticians may be. John Cook has already noted that these arguments belong on another thread so I will leave it at that.
  32. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    It's good to see that you're willing to call voluntary-head-in-the-sand for what it is. You cannot have a rational debate with those who use irrational logic. By taking them seriously, we inadvertently reinforce their validity (just as how Monckton's "expertise" is based on climate scientists willingness to hold public debates with him and as Jo Nova demonstrated in a post on the 23rd of Aug, “they have finally acknowledged that… they need to call us skeptics. (They can hardly pit expertise against “deniers” eh?)”) Scepticism is based on a compelling argument - to which some conclusion can eventually be reached. Denial merely rants the same nonsense regardless of how many times it is addressed.
  33. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    During the melt season, Neven's Arctic Sea Ice blog is unsurpassed. And no deniers, um, skeptics, er, irrational posters ..., OK, "non-positive" contributors in the bunch. The Yooper
  34. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Re: gallopingcamel (20) Just because people have differing opinions doesn't mean that they cannot be civil while discussing those differences. My experience, on this blog and on the two you cite, is that discourse is pretty well-behaved until someone barges-in in full drive-by fashion, comments something to the effect of "You're all wrong and are idiots for even thinking you're right" and then the brouhaha begins. The mistake most run afoul of, that I see happen most often, is those commenters that mistake a science-based forum for a debate forum (minus the science to back it up). They typically don't have a good fundamental understanding of critical thinking and the scientific method, let alone are up to speed on the core studies in the field/thread in question. As archiesteel (21) points out well, my main objection to your post at (5) is your linkage of the quote directly to a specific person. The title of this post uses the quote you reference, yes, but doesn't name anyone in specific; that's the difference. Making it personal. We can have a science-based discourse, disagree in toto, and still keep it civil and not make it personal. But we have to choose to do it that way. The Yooper
  35. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Chris #21. The non carbon neutral effects of burning wood, dung, charcoal and other biomass are secondary. Mainly in deforestation. Using carbon cycle fuels rather than carbon sink fuels could have been managed, or managed better. If carbon cycle fuels had been treated as a crop - with replanting or coppicing or similar processes - we could have maintained some balance. Especially if we'd started out that way and developed and extended those practices with population increase. The underlying problem is that we've been wasteful, profligate even, with every kind of substance we could use as fuel. Even coppicing was used principally as a way of getting desired form for building materials rather than as a way of maintaining fuel stocks.
  36. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    Grammar nazi alert! It's rational the adjective, not rationale the noun.
  37. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Re: chriscanaris (21) Actually, I did notice. :) A worthy, thought-provoking read is Ruddiman's Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Ruddiman contends that human induced climate change began as a result of the advent of agriculture thousands of years ago and resulted in warmer temperatures that could have possibly averted another ice age. A nice graphic for visualization of the ensuing "Golden Age" is: We'll have to update this graphic around 2030 or 2040, when we hit that IPCC 2-3 degrees C with the legend "Agriculture ends" and an arrow pointing to the date. :( The Yooper
  38. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Roger A. Wehage @ 13 Actually, we've been burning biomass for tens of thousands of years and fossil fuel for about 200. My point was that we've been a non carbon neutral species almost since our arrival on the planet. Indeed, as best as I can tell, we are the only non carbon neutral species. More to the point, much of what we build and consume (aside from food) is not carbon neutral and, failing a major technological revolution, never will be. Even producing the technology required for renewable energy is not a carbon neutral exercise. I was merely pointing out that it makes little difference whether cattle bred for meat and dairy or free ranging ruminants that do not form part of our food chain roam the world. I feel a certain wry amusement having been labelled a 'sceptic' that folk don't notice when I'm agreeing with an AGW proposition :-)
  39. Positive feedback means runaway warming
    10, nealjking In the introductory paragraph (Advanced version) you say "Climatologists must also take into account "second-order" effects which amplify the initial estimate of the warming. It is not easy to calculate these effects, but the general consensus is that, overall, they magnify the temperature increase by about a factor of 3." This seems to be a reference to fast feedbacks, the ones that increase the warming due to an increase in radiative forcing of 1 W/m2 from about 0.3 C to about 0.8-1.0 C. The remainder of the article appears to describe a carbon-cycle feedback: CO2 affects temperature; temperature affects CO2. Forgive me if I have misunderstood, but if I haven't, don't you think it is a little confusing to conflate the two?
  40. Billions of Blow Dryers: Some Missing Heat Returns to Haunt Us
    Re: Camburn (36) You do realize that the Nature article is from 2008, right? In any case, the study cited as the focus of this post is from 2010, so it seems likely to have more current information. Which shows the deep waters (referenced in the Nature piece) to be statistically significantly warming, not cooling. The Yooper
  41. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    The point is this though-the Oceans are extremely CO2 absorbent (at normal temperatures at any rate)-not only are they able to soak up most of the *normal* CO2 in the Carbon Cycle, they are also able to soak up about 40% of the CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels (which, by its very nature, is no longer part of the natural carbon cycle). So not only is breathing *not* ever going to be a contributor to global warming, but even having an above average CO2 footprint for our digestive activities is not going to be a problem either. Our problems stem *entirely* from the ever increasing amounts of fossil fuels we burn over the whole of our lives. That'll cause us major problems, quite soon, even if there was no such thing as Global Warming!
  42. A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    Dana says "In addition to these multiple lines of empirical evidence which contradict the GCR warming theory, the galactic cosmic ray theory cannot easily explain a number of observed fingerprints of the increased greenhouse effect, such as the cooling of the upper atmosphere" Unrelated to the whole cosmic ray hypothesis, the types of radiation are more variable through the solar cycle than TSI, most notably UV. This in itself could most certainly cause upper atmosphere cooling. Through its effect on ozone production and obviously heating o the stratosphere, is primarily through uv absorption by O3. This in itself could most certainly have an effect on the jet stream, and the pressure systems in the troposphere.... there is a lot to be learnt as far as solar effects on climate go. http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/rind_03/
  43. Billions of Blow Dryers: Some Missing Heat Returns to Haunt Us
    And the waters are cooling as well it seems? http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080430/full/453015c.html
  44. A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    #6: "Quite obviously we're not currently experiencing cooling" Yes, all the GCR cooling thus far has definitely been underwhelming.
  45. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    A USEIA report I noted in the Basic version, showing an increase in US population with a concurrent drop in CO2 emissions during 2009, would tend to stick a fork in the notion that breathing contributes to CO2 buildup.
  46. A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    muoncounter - note that increased GCR flux would mean increased cloudcover, increased albedo, and global cooling, if the GCR theory were correct. Quite obviously we're not currently experiencing cooling, as 2010 has been a very hot year. I may update the article to include some of that information though. I recalled reading the NASA reports but couldn't remember where to find them. Thanks for that.
  47. A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    The GCR-cloud seeding link isn't so obvious: A few comments on the CERN CLOUD experiment here and here. Note two key NASA reports during the last solar minimum: Cosmic rays hit space age high Solar wind loses power The Pierre Auger GCR observatory has as yet unpublished indications of increased frequency of GCR events as the solar magnetic field wound down. All point towards ideal conditions for GCR-induced cloud formation and the cooling that is supposed to accompany it. Annual reports from the US of that so-called cooling: Based on data from January through December [2009], the average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 53.1 degrees F (11.7 degrees C), which is 0.3 degrees F (0.2 degrees C) above the 20th Century average Based on data through the end of 2008, the contiguous U.S. experienced a nationally averaged temperature that was the coolest in more than ten years. The average temperature of 53.0°F (11.7°C) was 0.2°F (0.1°C) above the 20th century (1901-2000) mean. Conclusion? A definite maybe. This particular piece of science isn't settled.
  48. A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    For once I have to agree with your conclusions. Galactic Cosmic Rays do appear to have an effect on cloud formation but it is not the dominant effect that Svensmark, Friis-Christensen and Shariv might wish for. However, the correlation between "Cosmic Ray Intensity" and "Sunspot Number" shown in your Figure 2 is striking. Likewise, Figure 4 that shows the imperfect correlation between "Cloud Formation" and "Cosmic Ray" variation. Personally, I don't buy the idea that GCRs have a major impact on climate but these are interesting correlations that need to be better understood.
  49. We're coming out of the Little Ice Age
    Re: Akasofu Kevin Trenberth offers up some perspective on Akasofu. Speaks for itself. The Yooper
  50. Hockey stick is broken
    Re: Bodo (38) AFAIK, the missing posts are a result of a dispute between Wordpress and Tamino over content. At one point, one of the two parties pulled all past content. All posts prior to March or so of this year are gone from Tamino's Wordpress blog. Some of the missing content is still accessible, as I note. The Yooper

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