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Comments 108901 to 108950:

  1. 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.
  2. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    I'm concerned that this thread is rapidly approaching the danger zone.
  3. 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.
  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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?
  14. 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:
  15. 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.
  16. 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..."
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    These are more meta-discussion links, but I've found them useful when evaluating a number of skeptic arguments: Nizkor Project - Fallacies Don Lindsay - A List Of Fallacious Arguments
  20. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    ClimateWatcher, the "MT" (mid-troposphere) trends are misleading because their weighting function extends over both the troposphere, which is warming, and the stratosphere, which is cooling. The RSS lower troposphere trend and the various land/ocean trends are at about +1.6C/century for the past three decades. However, it's inappropriate to extrapolate this rate for the next nine decades. First, there's additional warming "in the pipeline" due to lags in the climate system. Second, the warming is projected to be nonlinear -- due to increasing population, GDP, and energy use on the one hand, and saturating CO2 sinks on the other.
  21. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    Thanks, John, for a nice set of references. On the assumptions that 1) too many people are still ill-informed or uninformed on the subject of climate disruption; and 2) lots of folks prefer to watch videos, rather than read something; :-) I have assembled links to several hours worth of video presentations on various aspects of the subject. These links are available at climate101.wordpress.com, presented in the form of a blog, although the "blog" is fairly static at this time. The objective is simply to have one reference URL that points to lots of video-based info for the basic introduction to climate science and climate concerns. As a resource, it doesn't do the up-to-the-minute thing, but I hope it will be useful for some - especially climate neophytes!
  22. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    There is an important article in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty about how the Russian energy companies are projecting their political power into Europe and "cultivating" politicians who will serve them. It is noted that Russia's LUKoil paid for the translation of Vaclav Klaus's book against climate science and Al Gore. Those Russian energy companies also own a lot of media, and they cooperate with their government's foreign policy. Here is the article, but I would say that this process of "cultivating" politicians is underway not only in Europe, but in the US. http://www.rferl.org/content/Czech_Mate_How_Russia_Is_Rebuilding_Influence_In_The_Former_Soviet_Bloc/2168090.html
  23. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    The biggest problem with the IPCC is the predictions: "Best estimate for a 'high scenario' is 4.0 °C" Since the MSU era, not even close. "Best estimate for a 'low scenario' is 1.8 °C" Close but no cigar. For all measures ( MSU-MT-RSS, MSU-MT-UAH, MSU-LT-RSS, MSU-LT-UAH, CRU Land/Ocean, GISS Land/Ocean, Hadley SST). In fact MSU-MT-RSS, and MSU-MT-UAH are below even the low end limit of 1.1C per century rate. When was the last time you heard that global warming was at a rate better than even the most optimistic scenario?
  24. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    Much better with graphics: I'll be even more interested in how 2010 would look like.
  25. Same Ordinary Fool at 03:05 AM on 28 September 2010
    The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    The four newspapers are: The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal.
  26. A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    #10:"I personally wouldn't expect Chernobyl to provide any evidence pro or con." I don't see how low energy alpha or beta radiation could go far enough to ionize any part of the atmosphere. To consider gamma radiation as a factor, you could look at Gamma ray bursts. In March 2003, a large GRB was detected: The burst poured out a thousand trillion, trillion times the gamma rays seen in a solar flare. When measured more than one hour after the burst, the afterglow was still about as bright as a 12th magnitude star. But its not clear at all if this radiation seeds clouds.
  27. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    Some of my favorite resources are: Science of Doom Climate Charts and Graphs (Kelly O'Day's site) Climate Change: An Analysis of Key Questions by Chris Colose The Clear Climate Code project Tamino's page of Climate Data Links AGW Observer, a fantastic compendium of peer-reviewed papers on climate change, by Ari Jokimäki And of course the IPCC AR4
  28. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Oops, I read 'human breathing CO2 emissions' in #33 and assumed you were comparing that fossil fuel emissions.
  29. Hockey stick is broken
    Not to mention Mann et al. (2008) do use ice cores. If ice cores perform so much better (different) than other proxies, I would assume they would mention it. Also, link dump! Gavin's response to MW2010. Martin Tingley's response to MW2010. McIntyre's response to Mann2008. Reply to McIntyre by Mann
  30. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    There is some support for the idea that if people are given ownership of a natural resource they will be less inclined to exploit it unsustainably. I'm not sure how this is supposed to give us comfort when talking about climate change. There's no way to give everybody "ownership" of the atmosphere or the climate. The closest approach to this is marketizing emissions, as in "cap and trade". This approach has worked pretty well for dealing with acid rain. In the US, I do not see a large groundswell of support in favor of "cap and trade" or carbon taxes, or other market-based approaches to emissions reduction. In the absence of such a market-based approach, emissions reductions in the US will probably be driven by regulation, as we now see happening with the EPA. This is, IMHO, a decidedly more inefficient and undesirable approach to reducing emissions. I'm reluctant to contribute to the politicization of threads here on Skeptical Science, so I'm not going to ascribe blame for this shortsightedness. The other problem with RSVP's suggestion that "ownership of the environment" will solve our problems is that, in this case, the benefits of burning fossil fuels occur now while the climate impacts are spread out over future generations. It's hard enough figuring out how to give everyone alive today "ownership" of the climate, without even considering how to extend that "ownership" to people in 2050 or 2100!
  31. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    Like Skeptical Science, The DeSmog Blog is another “go to” website dedicated to setting the record straight about what scientists are telling us about climate change. “Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science” is the DeSmog Blog's motto. To access the DeSmog Blog, go to: http://www.desmogblog.com/
  32. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    Obviously the climate has changed radically in the past. The glacial/interglacial cycle is almost entirely driven by Milankovich geometry, which doesn't actually change the mean insolation at all, just its spatial/seasonal distribution. Yet changes to this spatial/seasonal distribution of insolation are sufficient to increase or decrease the global mean temperature by something like 8 degrees C. In other words, the real world doesn't have these "strong negative feedbacks" that BP speculates about. Temperature, precipitation, and circulation can and do change dramatically in response to radiative forcings. Our civilization arose during a time (the Holocene) when conditions have been relatively stable. Relatively minor changes in climate (the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age) were sufficient to have large impacts on societies that experienced them. The probable outcome of projected 21st century carbon emissions would be a much larger forcing than anything we've experienced since the last deglaciation. The "Principle of Maximum Entropy" didn't prevent the Earth's climate from changing in the past, so I see no reason to assume that it will do so in the future.
  33. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    Speaking of David Koch… If you have not already checked out: “Is Nova Catering to Its Anti-Science Sugar Daddy?” I highly recommend that you do so. To access it, go to: http://www.fair.org/blog/2010/09/08/is-nova-catering-to-its-anti-science-sugar-daddy/ BTW: Is NOVA broadcast in Australia and the UK?
  34. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    @RSVP: why do you assume conservatives own most of the environment? That seems like an overly broad statement. First, you have to define "conservative" - considering that the US is to the right when compared to the rest of the world. Next, you have to define how one can own the environment. Owning a piece of land doesn't mean you own the environment, as many environmental phenomena travel across territories. I think it's safer to refrain from making such sweeping generalization, as they rarely turn out to be accurate.
  35. Hockey stick is broken
    Quite why *should* an hemispheric or a global temperature record detail all known regional or local climate variations? Ignorance of the historical record is a significant accusation, I wonder if you can back that up with any more than the suggestion that global temperature series should record local fluctuations? Historical observations of Medieval or Roman (clue in the name) warmth come from small portions of the world (dominantly Europe). If most of the rest of the world showed little temperature change or a change of opposite sign, then the impact of even large local changes recorded in the historical record will be outweighed by the record (not stored in written history, but faithfully recorded by proxies) from the rest of the world. Or are you assuming, incorrectly, that all climate fluctuations must always occur worldwide and be globally synchronous?
  36. We're coming out of the Little Ice Age
    @cruzn246: "Archie, explain it to me." Why should I? You'll only ignore what I say and/or change the subject yet again. You've proved time and time again you're not interested in learning. Here's a hint for you, though: equilibrium is not a "hard thing to achieve" in a system, it's what a system naturally tends to. Also, a thermal equilibrium isn't necessarily livable. Venus is in a thermal equilibrium (i.e. it's temperature is stable), but it's the closest thing we have to Hell.
  37. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    When someone starts to ask questions, I point to the The Discovery of Global Warming for background. Skeptical Science for depth. If I get the "I'm skeptical", I ask if they understand what that word means, and why the term denier came into use. I then point to Robert Carroll's Site and to Skeptics in general Cheers!
  38. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    BP, assuming that adjustments in radiative pathways from Earth must be made in order for the planet to continue shedding energy in a way that does not ultimately result in a significant increase in surface temperature, will those changes be invisible to us? Energy is conserved and if systems must adjust themselves to dispose of energy in ways other than a previously more efficient particular IR distribution while leaving surface temperatures largely unaffectdd, how will these adjustments manifest themselves?
  39. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    Posted by dana1981 on Friday, 24 September, 2010 at 09:19 AM And those who argue it's just a natural cycle" can never seem to identify exactly which natural cycle can explain the current warming, nor can they explain how our understanding of the fundamental climate physics is wrong. Well, heat capacity of oceans is enormous. If all ocean circulation stopped it would take about five millennia to heat them up by 1°C for the geothermal heat flux through oceanic crust. It also implies if there was a long term 0.8 W/m2 radiative imbalance at TOA (Top of Atmosphere) indeed as it is assumed by some based on model calculations (and neither contradicted nor confirmed by measurements), average ocean temperature would go up by 0.13°C in a century (provided 80% of the excess heat is absorbed by the ocean). That's negligible. Therefore the atmosphere can only warm up by 2-4.5°C on a century scale if a substantial imbalance develops in distribution of heat between hydrosphere and atmosphere. If for any reason a major redistribution of this excess energy occurs during this period, average atmospheric temperature change becomes absolutely indeterminate. This occasional redistribution is what's provided by so called natural cycles. It can also be explained easily how your understanding of the fundamental climate physics is wrong. If overall IR opacity of the atmosphere is increased while everything else is kept constant, surface temperature should go up indeed, that much is true. However, if you keep adding IR opacity to the system, entropy production is decreasing. As the climate system has a huge number of degrees of freedom and it is very far from thermodynamic equilibrium (but has a steady flow of energy going through it), it tends to reconfigure itself to maximize entropy production. In order to do that, it has to both reconfigure circulation patterns and decrease overall IR opacity by making water vapor distribution a bit more uneven on all scales. But on this level the exact mechanisms are not important, the system has enough degrees of freedom to achieve maximum entropy production somehow under any circumstances. And while it is possible to keep overall IR opacity constant by redistributing some GHGs, it will always be one of the major avenues leading to this kind state. Anyway, with the radiation flux output kept constant the lower the radiation temperature gets the higher radiation entropy becomes. Therefore the MEP tends to keep temperature as low as possible (it serves as a strong "negative feedback"). That's fundamental physics (providing a genuine big picture as well).
  40. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    The bigest criticism of the IPCC reports that has been substantiated is that it grossly underestimates sea level rise. The estimates in the next report will have to be at least doubled, if not quadrupled. The errors were systematic and all drove the estimate down. People like RSVP and Chris need to point to a specific error in the IPCC report that they can criticize. This underestimation is exactly what the article is describing.
  41. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    muoncounter - As CBDunkerson put it, we're emitting enough CO2 to raise atmospheric levels by 4ppm/year; we're seeing ~2ppm/year increases, which indicates that half is being absorbed by natural sinks, such as ocean acidification. There's actually a series of invited posts on WUWT by Ferdinand Engelbeen regarding the human causes of CO2 increases, the most relevant to this discussion being Part 1 - showing that the CO2 increase is due to our actions. Parts 2, 3, and 4 are also interesting. I'm going to have to compliment Anthony Watts for supporting such a clear series of posts that disagree with some of his base arguments!
  42. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    muoncounter #34, I believe that 30 Gtons is emissions... not atmospheric content. We emit 30 Gtons... more than half of that goes into plants and the oceans in short order... leaving about 13 Gtons additional CO2 in the atmosphere each year.
  43. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    #33: "total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is growing by ~13 billion tons per year." USEIA says 30 Gtons per year for the global total -- and that was 2008.
  44. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    RSVP - I suspect your aspirin analogy about CO2 would be more appropriate on the "Is the CO2 effect saturated". The numbers, however, don't support a saturation effect. Really really off topic - Hume's "Problem of Causation", while a fascinating philosophical exercise, is essentially an overuse of reductionism based upon the observer - a fun topic at parties, especially after a few drinks [ :) ], but not really a relevant view of the world we understand through the view of actual physics, chemistry, and quantum mechanical interactions. We actually do understand the cause-effect relationships with greenhouse gases - it's a challenge to the skeptical viewpoint to simultaneously (a) show some other cause for the various measurements (temp rise, ice melt, seasonal advance) and (b) demonstrate why CO2 increases do not follow what we know of physics, and hence cause the warming.
  45. Urban Heat Islands: serious problem or holiday destination for skeptics?
    Ned: Fair enough, temporal autocorrelation isn't an issue with this data. It's been a long day, and this stuff is out of my comfort zone. Hey, if we're extra generous and give BP the upper limit of the confidence limit on R2 (0.16) then we're still well within one standard deviation of estimated climate sensitivity. I guess we can expect that retraction any minute now :)
  46. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    RSVP, the Koch brothers are a fact, not an assumption. One sample of many and where are the progressive analogues to the Koch brothers? But perhaps "conservative" is another term akin to "skeptic," where original meaning has lost all relationship with our parlance. As to prosperity and environmentally-sound behavior, a clean environment does not equate axiomatically with an intact ecology, unless one considers homo sapiens as a force of nature. Think of Belgium. We don't like 'em, but this thread of comments may turn out to be ineluctably political in tone.
  47. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    BTW, various estimates I've been able to find put human breathing CO2 emissions at ~3 billion tons per year... while the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is growing by ~13 billion tons per year. Thus, even ignoring that all of the carbon we breathe into the atmosphere comes from plants (or animals that themselves got it from plants) which in turn took that carbon OUT of the atmosphere... the total amount from human breathing is much lower than the rate that atmospheric CO2 is growing.
  48. Urban Heat Islands: serious problem or holiday destination for skeptics?
    kdkd, I can easily understand the spatial dependence in the decadal temperature trends and population density data. Where does temporal autocorrelation come in? I'm guessing you mean that the trend estimates for individual stations would have larger uncertainty than would be expected without correction for autocorrelation in the monthly data. But how does that work in this analysis, which is just considering each station's trend as one datum? Of course, this is all basically a tempest in a teapot, since even if one granted all BP's assumptions and waved away all the problems with the analysis, you'd end up with UHI explaining something like 10% to 12% of the observed warming. Now, I think there's basically no value to BP's analysis for reasons discussed above, and I'd further suggest that the actual magnitude of UHI is probably rather less than this 10-12% ... but let's play along here. So, if 88% to 90% of the observed warming is real, and Hansen's model would fit the observed warming with a climate sensitivity of 3.4C, then the "real" climate sensitivity should be right around 3.0C ... which handily enough just happens to be the exact value for the best estimate of climate sensitivity from the IPCC AR4 Summary for Policymakers. Nifty, huh?
  49. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Henry #31: "What is the difference?" Plants which are eaten or die and decompose on the surface return their carbon to the atmosphere... from which it is then re-absorbed by new growth. Plants which get buried and slowly turn into fossil fuel sequester that carbon away from the atmosphere... until we dig it up and burn it. One is an ongoing natural cycle with essentially balanced amounts of carbon going into and out of the atmosphere. The other is a human intervention which is putting more carbon into the atmosphere faster than natural processes can absorb it... and thus causing the atmospheric CO2 level to increase.
  50. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    Re: RSVP (110) Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I will check out David Hume when I get a chance (all I know is the reference to him from the Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch back in the '70's...about him outconsuming Hegerle in alcohol). ;) If I understand your pain reliever analogy correctly (and please do correct me if I'm interpreting what you said incorrectly), you have reservations about "extra" CO2 being added to the carbon cycle having any significant negative impact. Would that be a fair interpretation?

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