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Comments 110551 to 110600:

  1. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    All the citations of Haigh are interesting... in that Haigh herself has said that it is disingenuous to claim that her work suggests recent warming has been caused by the Sun. Yes, the Sun has important impacts on climate. No, it isn't causing the recent warming.
  2. Roger A Pielke Sr at 00:30 AM on 10 September 2010
    Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    JMurphy - Our paper on siting quality issues with respect to multi-decadal surface temperature trends is nearly complete. On other climate metrics, such as sea ice, sea level, etc, they all support climate variability and longer term change. There clearly is a significant human influence (e.g. black carbon deposition on Arctic sea ice), but the natural variations remain incompletely understood (for example, we cannot skillfully predict more than a season at most into the future regional circulation features such as the NAO, the PDO and ENSO). The annual global average OHC is just one climate metric. Indeed, it tells us nothing about these regional atmospheric/ocean features (although the regional OHC data does). The annual global average OHC, however, is the most accurate way for us to diagnose the global annual average radiative imbalance, as I discussed in the paper Pielke Sr., R.A., 2003: Heat storage within the Earth system. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84, 331-335. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-247.pdf I also recommend interested readers of this weblog look at the paper Ellis et al. 1978: The annual variation in the global heat balance of the Earth. J. Climate. 83, 1958-1962. http://www.climatesci.org/publications/pdf/ellis%20et%20al%20JGR%201978.pdf Finally, Bill Cotton and I completed a book Cotton, W.R. and R.A. Pielke, 2007: Human impacts on weather and climate, Cambridge University Press, 330 pp.http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521600569 which I recommend if readers would like a more in depth perspective of our conclusions on climate science. I also recommend my son's book The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming (Basic Books) http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/04/climate-fix.html whose recommendations I agree completely with.
  3. actually thoughtful at 00:29 AM on 10 September 2010
    Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    RSVP: "Normally, oceans are seen to directly influence air temperatures and not the other way around." Thank you for that reminder - that is one point of data that shows our OHC accounting is probably not robust yet. If 90% of the world's heat content is in the ocean, and oceans affect air temp (and not the other way around) AND air temps are rising (which they are): Then OHC is rising - which is what folks like Trenberth seem to suspect. (I understand it is more complicated than that - RSVP's comment just turned on a lightbulb for me on thinking about the "missing" OHC.
  4. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    Ned: I think the migratory bird analogy is actually a very good one. I might take it further. Some birds get lost and end up in strange places. This probably means little in the scheme of things. When whole populations go off course, it probably means an awful lot. Which brings to mind John Cook's 'meme' of multiple converging lines of evidence one of which I think includes changing population distributions in various species. I'm going off topic but here, I have to confess to having a philosophical difficulty with the multiple converging lines of evidence notion - not because it lacks validity but because it's 'circumstantial' evidence. Of course, you can still get a jury to convict an offender if the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. However, circumstantial evidence of its nature demands more rigorous testing. This rather than a wish to 'deny' AWG prompts the 'sceptical' undertone of many of my comments. Of course, I'd rather not see the temperature go up 6 degrees C in 2100. However, my wishing that it wouldn't won't alter the outcome if we have indeed messed up our planet (and continue to do so). So I maintain a keen interest in the debate watching how it plays out. A very recent interesting twist in all this seems to be that the Chinese in their usual 'subtle' approach to matters economic have reportedly just ordered a clamp down on greenhouse emissions - a big short term worry for Australia which has for better or worse hitched its economic wagon to Chinese demand for our coal and iron. It's said that the Chinese use the same character to represent 'crisis' and 'opportunity.' And apparently, one Chinese curse goes, 'May you live in interesting times!'
  5. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    Could we not put this issue to bed by rephrasing the catchy, if contested statement: 'This means that global warming halted on this time period.' With a somewhat less pithy but probably more informative: 'Taken at face value the NODC data clearly show a lack of warming over the four years commencing 2004, however the short term nature of the trend, the uncertainty in the accuracy of the data and its inconsistency with numerous other lines of evidence mean that this has little to say about the wider science and story of anthropogenic climate change. However were the trend to continue for longer and the data shown to be an accurate reflection of the actual situation then it would be of great importance.'
    Response: Yes, but can you tweet that? :-)
  6. Roger A Pielke Sr at 00:01 AM on 10 September 2010
    Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    Ken Lambert - Thank you for your thoughtful comments. My statement below, however, is correct (and I agree with you that simultaneous measurements are optimal). As I wrote (and you reproduced) "Roger Pielke Sr wrote "There does not need to be years of record to obtain statistically significant measures of upper ocean heat content. This is the point of using heat. We just need time slices with sufficient spatial data. A trend is unnecessary." The concept of "time slices" is precisely what you have very clearly expressed; "To measure the global OHC content in Joules (call it J1) at time T1 is only meaningful if you then measure it again (J2) at time T2 (probably exactly 1 year later at 1200 hrs GMT). The difference J1-J2 would be the positive or negative OHC change in Joules/year. Heat energy (Joules) divided by time (1 second) has the same unit dimensions as a Watt which is the unit of power or energy flux (called 'forcing' by non-engineer climate scientists)." My only addition to your summary is that the statistical robustness would be improved by more frequent (say monthly slices) in order to resolve the annual global cycle of warming and cooling that is seen, for example, in Josh Willis's analysis in my Physics Today paper.
  7. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    Gpwayne - I must completely agree with this post on equivocation, and your followup comment here. Dr. Pielke - Your statements certainty are simply unsupportable in light of the data quality. If you make statements as as strong as "...global warming halted on this time period" based upon 5 years of data, you are cherry-picking, and I'm disappointed to see such behavior coming from an accomplished scientist such as yourself. The ARGO data is an excellent measure, but it is not perfect in spatial coverage, in temporal noise, or most certainly in analysis. 5 years is too short a time period to make unqualified statements from that data stream. If your snapshot is noisy, you need to take multiple snapshots before drawing conclusions. Following some of the other comments on this thread, I've also seen your rather unqualified statements based upon short time series regarding sea level rise, ice levels, and surface temperatures. While I'm hesitant to guess at motivations, it certainly appears from these incidents that you are (repeatedly) willing to use a statistically unsupportable cherry-picked data subset to score rhetorical points against efforts to mitigate human-caused global warming. You seem to have done some interesting work on ground cover and it's climate implications, and I'll continue to read those along with other sources. But, Dr. Pielke, I'm afraid I cannot trust your conclusions to be unbiased, or even solidly based upon your data. And I'm very sorry to have to say so.
  8. Is climate science settled? Especially the important parts?
    RSVP, this is what I mean about not living in a world of certainties. For climate modelers to be able to do what you suggest, they’d have to exactly quantify the various feedbacks and time-lags at each stage of the process. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that from science. However, the IPCC does model the range of possible temperature rises for a range of possible emissions scenarios (the scenarios having been defined in a previous report). See this page from the Summary for Policymakers. Under the best-case B1 scenario, global temperatures are projected to rise 1.1-2.9°C. In the worst-case A1FI scenario, the temperature rise is 2.4-6.4°C. The large error bars are because of lingering uncertainties to do with cloud feedbacks and so on. The same table also includes numbers for sea level rise as well, but bear in mind these do not take into account the contribution from ice sheets. More recent models which do include ice sheets predict around one to two metres of sea level rise over the next century. Projecting future climate change is probably the most uncertain aspect of climate science. But I would still argue that these uncertainties shouldn’t be used to justify inaction. The prognosis might well be better than we currently think, but it is equally likely to be worse than we think.
  9. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    HR #70 and #74 Well stated HR. Albatros is stretching a very weak argument to breaking point. Of course Argo is vastly better than what preceeded it in terms of coverage and accuracy - but it still is sparse in large areas of ocean and I would suggest as I already have in an earler post #17 on this thread that the 'gold standard' for OHC measurement would be a system of tethered buoys which measured the same 'tile' of ocean all the time T1, T2, T3 etc. ie: "How close the drifting Argo come to the 'ideal' is hard to determine. For sure, strong currents will tend to coagulate drifting buoys so that the same 'tile' of ocean might might not be measured at time T2 as was measured at T1. Two or more buoys might enter a tile of ocean and leave none where a prior measurement was taken." Although I support Dr Pielke's general conclusions about the lack of OHC increase since 2003-4 which is 6-7 years - and therefore its direct relationship to a 'lack' of warming imbalance by CO2GHG forcings, Dr Pielke certainly has made a confusing statement here as restated by Tom Dayton at #54: 54.Tom Dayton at 09:40 AM on 9 September, 2010 Roger Pielke Sr wrote "There does not need to be years of record to obtain statistically significant measures of upper ocean heat content. This is the point of using heat. We just need time slices with sufficient spatial data. A trend is unnecessary." This is wrong unless the "time slices" are over several years. To measure a global change in OHC you need a global snapshot at time T1 to set a baseline and then snapshots at times T2, T3 etc to measure the change from T1. I think that Dr Pielke might be confusing the total energy with the rate of energy accumulation. To measure the global OHC content in Joules (call it J1) at time T1 is only meaningful if you then measure it again (J2) at time T2 (probably exactly 1 year later at 1200 hrs GMT). The difference J1-J2 would be the positive or negative OHC change in Joules/year. Heat energy (Joules) divided by time (1 second) has the same unit dimensions as a Watt which is the unit of power or energy flux (called 'forcing' by non-engineer climate scientists). As we can easily calculate, a 'forcing' of 1.0W/sq.m of the Earth's surface equates to about 160E20Joules/year of heat energy gain or loss to the planet. Dr Pielke should clarify this point and perhaps comment on my suggested 'ideal' gold standard OHC measurement system of globally tethered buoys all reporting at the same time. (Post #17)
  10. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    gpwayne wrote : "unqualified claims that global warming has not been occurring on the basis of contested ocean temperatures alone are highly misleading, and the certainty of the statement is both inappropriate and unscientific." To me, that seems to be the biggest criticism of Dr Pielke Sr and I think he has quite a history of cherry-picking short periods with regard to other metrics. For example : "Sea level has actually flattened since 2006" "Their has been no statistically significant warming of the upper ocean since 2003." With regard to Arctic sea ice : "Since 2008, the anomalies have actually decreased." These can all be seen on Dr Pielke Sr's blog (from the middle of last year). There is also this from 2008 : The focusing on global warming as the reason for any hurricane (or making it more likely to occur or become more intense) ignores that natural variations are not only more important than indicated by the AP news story, but also that the human influence involves a diverse range of first-order climate forcings, including, but not limited global warming [which, of course, has not occurred since at least mid-2004!]. Again at his blog. There is also interesting information from the talk that Dr Pielke Sr gave last year to a gathering under the auspices of the George Marshall Institute, including : Lower Troposphere The warmest time period was during the big El Niño in 1998, but if you look at the period from, say, 2001 to the present, if anything it is slightly falling. It is certainly not rising. But you notice that since about 1995, if you put a linear plot since then, there has basically been no further cooling of the stratosphere. [ARCTIC ICE LEVEL] has recovered, so it is higher than it was this time last year, for example. Antarctica, for the last number of years, actually has been increasing in its sea ice cov-erage. There are some that are trying to suggest that this is also consistent with a warming planet and a warming Antarctica. I find that concept hard to grasp. The problem is that the climate hasn’t been warming over the last number of years. There certainly are changes over time which again shows that climate is variable and we can’t just talk about one single metric like the global average temperature, for example. Anthony Watts has written a very influential and carefully put-together report, Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?, which came out of a Heartland Insti-tute meeting, held a few months ago. What Anthony Watts has done (and we are working on a paper with him on this for publication soon) is document how many sites are well located and how many are poorly located Any further information on that paper ?
  11. A detailed look at climate sensitivity
    Re: Eric ("skeptic") @ 24
    "BTW, proving that humidity has gone up on average means nothing. The distribution of water vapor is the only thing that causes or doesn't cause global warming. If water vapor is evenly distributed then there is global warming, if not, global cooling. There is a large natural range encompassing both cases and a lot in the middle."
     You are in error. 1. As my earlier link clearly shows, global humidity anomalies have increased since 1970 (by about 4%, the equivalent volume of Lake Erie of the Great Lakes). As humidity levels in the air normalize within nine days (excess precipitates out while evaporation "refills the tanks"), in order for the air to hold increased moisture over time it must have warmed. Multiple global datasets show this warming. Look it up. 2. The GHG effects of CO2 work their stuff in the upper troposphere, above the major concentrations of water vapor in the lower troposphere. Water vapor acts as a feedback to the warming impetus caused by rising levels of CO2 concentrations (forcings). This is all basic stuff (the physics of greenhouse gases are very well understood). Look it up (keywords: back radiation). Ample resources for education on both points exist on Skeptical Science. And on many other reputable websites. Pour the coppers of your pockets into your mind and your mind will fill your pockets with gold: Real Climate: Start Here The Discovery of Global Warming Richard Alley's talk: CO2 is the biggest control knob The Yooper
  12. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    chriscanaris writes: The preceding paragraph is also important: [...] Agreed. I think this ties in with my two questions above. In the paragraph you quote, Lean is making the case for what I identify as "question 1". In other words, "Yes, the sun plays an important role in climate, and there are a lot of things that climate models won't be able to get right without accounting for that!" chriscanaris continues with the disclaimer: This does not, repeat not, mean, 'Great, lets burn more coal folks!' Understood, and appreciated.
  13. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    chriscanaris, your "macroeconomic / microeconomic" analogy is probably a good one but for some reason I'm not quite getting it. I think we need to be careful to differentiate among various possible questions. (1) Does solar variation have any significant effects on climate? A lot of the material in both Haigh 2007 and Lean 2010 (both of which are fairly long review articles) is about demonstrating the influence of solar variations on aspects of the climate system. And they both convincingly document those influences. If you're a climate modeler, you want to understand those effects. If you're trying to evaluate changes in the climate system among periods when the sun has been more vs less active, you want to understand those effects. (2) Does solar variation "explain away" the multidecadal observed warming trend (say 1975-present)? The question addressed in this thread here at SkS (and in Raypierre's "nails in the coffin" quote) is different, and I think more directly focused on the concerns of skeptics vis-a-vis climate change. The answer to this question appears to be pretty clearly "No, solar variation doesn't explain the underlying warming trend over the past three or four decades". The warming has now continued across multiple solar cycles. Insofar as there is a long-term trend outside of those cycles, we'd expect the sun to be promoting slight cooling rather than warming in recent decades. For a different analogy, consider some kind of migratory animal, like a sandhill crane or something that's heading south for the winter (it's that time of year here in the northern hemisphere...) There is an underlying impetus to keep heading south as winter approaches. But superimposed on that southward migration, the bird moves around its local vicinity in search of food, places to roost for the night, its fellow cranes, etc. So you can't understand the actual movement of this bird without considering the factors that cause the crane to go a little bit east today, and a bit southwest tomorrow, and then north the following day. But those factors (the bird's immediate needs) don't explain why after a period of a month or two it's hundreds or thousands of km south of where it started. OK, maybe your macro/micro economics analogy is better. But at least I think this is a more useful "bird" analogy than BP's dropping some kind of bird out of the leaning tower of Pisa!
  14. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    The preceding paragraph is also important: 'Dismissal of Sun–climate associations was, until recently, de rigueur because climate models were not been able to replicate them. But the increasingly extensive, broadly self-consistent empirical evidence accruing in multiple high-fidelity datasets of present and past climate, combined with new appreciation of the complex mechanisms, now precludes this. Climate models are instead challenged to reproduce this comprehensive empirical evidence.' This does not, repeat not, mean, 'Great, lets burn more coal folks!'
  15. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    Judith Lean has another recent paper on this subject: Lean 2010, Cycles and trends in solar irradiance and climate, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1: 111–122. The one-sentence quote that captures its point: Although solar irradiance cycles impart only modest global mean surface temperature changes (of ∼0.1°C), they are nevertheless sufficient to alter climate ‘trends’ on decadal time scales and must therefore be understood and quantified for more reliable near-term climate forecasts and rapid detection of the anthropogenic component to aid global change policy making. In other words, looking forward, at decadal time scales the solar cycle will tend to produce an oscillation in global temperatures that is superimposed on the underlying anthropogenic warming trend. Over the course of each solar cycle, this will alternately amplify the underlying anthropogenic warming trend for a few years, then retard it for a few years.
  16. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    gpwayne @ 77 - I concur, all I've seen so far are smoke bombs.
  17. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    HR @ 74 "The poorest data, as expressed in AchutaRao et al. 2007, can be found in the pre-ARGO data yet you maintain your strongest critisism for the data quality in the ARGO period." HR, the ARGO network is not without it's problems either, pressure sensors are failing in a number of floats: Two micro-leak defects leave some 25-35% of the Argo floats deployed between 11/2005 and 7/2009 vulnerable to errors in reported pressure and possible eventual failure Seems to be typical teething problems with new technology.
  18. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    However, Ned, I do think we ought to go back to Haigh's 2007 paper where she argues inter alia: 'Thus a better estimate of radiative forcing to solar irradiance changes should incorporate the effects of the influence of variations in UV on stratospheric temperature and composition (as first noted by Haigh, 1994).' This seems to be one divergence between dana1981 and Haigh who further writes: 'Recently an atmosphere-ocean GCM with fully coupled stratospheric chemistry has been run (despite huge computational demands) to simulate the effects of changes in solar irradiance between the Maunder Minimum and the present (Shindell et al., 2006). As in the previous studies the results show a weakened Hadley circulation when the Sun is more active, and they also suggest an impact on the hydrological cycle with greater tropical precipitation. Furthermore, they provide additional evidence that coupling with stratospheric chemistry enhances the solar signal near the surface.' Moreover: 'There is some observational evidence that variations in the strength of the polar vortex in the upper stratosphere may subsequently influence surface climate. A study of polar temperature trends by Thompson et al. (2005) suggests a downward influence, and modelling experiments by Gillett and Thompson (2003) demonstrate that depletion of stratospheric ozone over the south pole can affect the troposphere after about one month. Neither of these studies is specifically concerned with a solar influence but the accumulating evidence suggests that any factor influencing the strength of the polar stratospheric jet may be able to influence surface climate, at least at high latitudes.' I don't want to turn this into a quote mining exercise. To be perfectly honest, evaluating the claims and reconciling the seeming divergence between two thorough looking summaries of the literature, ie, dana1981 and Haigh (2007) is beyond me. But I'd be interested in hearing what others think on this score. As best as I can tell, Haigh seems to be saying that the sun keeps doing things to climate (or 'weather' if you prefer) at, to use an analogy from another discipline, the 'microeconomic' level while the papers cited in dana's response to omnologos seem to make a 'macroeconomic' assessment. I guess the question then is, is it valid to brush aside the microeconomic perspective or does this risk detracting substantially from our the macroeconomic perspective? Bear in mind that earlier posts have alluded to numerous sensitive feedbacks that go way beyond CO2 rises as causes for concern (eg, CH4 clathrate release and the like).
  19. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    regarding the response to #13 So the Advanced Version contains fewer references than the Intermediate one? Go figure!
    Response: I guess my intermediate version is a broadbrush approach - just listing just about every paper on the topic with a single quote, while the advanced version picks a few papers to go into more indepth analysis. Then the basic version is the cliff notes version :-)
  20. Climate and chaos
    As far as I can tell, BP's contributions to this thread consist of the following: * A lot of fish died in Bolivia. * Something unclear about a "birdie" dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa. The point of the first comment seems to be that the fish might have died because it was cold, and if it was cold in Bolivia recently then global warming isn't occurring. Or something like that. I have no idea what the point of the second comment is. Perhaps it's an attempt to illustrate the subject matter of this thread (chaos) by randomly posting irrelevant remarks and seeing where the discussion goes?
  21. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    Ned @ 11 Fair point :-)
  22. Climate and chaos
    By birdie do you mean something to do with golf? A model for predicting ball location based mostly variation of angle of strike and force? Okay, so there is wind and bounce too but this doesnt seem either difficult nor to involve an dynamical system theory either. Of course the theory wont help you get one...
  23. A detailed look at climate sensitivity
    scaddenp (#11): my mantra is "all climate is local". There is no such thing as "messing an average" since the average is a function of all the locals. The satellite shot I showed may indicate some local uneven distribution of water vapor (at least in N. America and adjacent Atlantic right now), but that unevenness is NOT balanced by some evenness somewhere else to produce an average. If there is more unevenness elsewhere then the world is cooling, period. Tomorrow it might even out and we will have global warming. What happens is entirely up to the local weather. Your appeal to models falls flat. Computation of the effects of Pinatubo for example are very crude. The aerosols affected weather differently as they spread, not just an oversimplified reduction in solar radiation as is performed in the model. The weather response to Pinatubo also included the fact that we were in El Nino beforehand, also poorly modeled in the GCM. Once the GCM's can replicate (not predict obviously since that requires unknowable initial conditions) the frequency and magnitude of climate features like El Nino, then they will be believable for modeling the response to Pinatubo. BTW, proving that humidity has gone up on average means nothing. The distribution of water vapor is the only thing that causes or doesn't cause global warming. If water vapor is evenly distributed then there is global warming, if not, global cooling. There is a large natural range encompassing both cases and a lot in the middle.
  24. Berényi Péter at 19:49 PM on 9 September 2010
    Climate and chaos
    #24 Ned at 00:53 AM on 9 September, 2010 Its behavior can be ascribed to obvious physical processes I wonder if anyone were capable to implement a computational birdie model based on those obvious physical processes that could predict the trajectory of birdies dropped. Or even say anything meaningful on the statistical population of such trajectories.
  25. The surprising result when you compare bad weather stations to good stations
    chriscanaris, keep in mind that you're looking at the result of averaging large numbers of stations. Intuitively, one might guess that individual poorly sited stations would have larger variance in their trends (some with too much warming due to new pavement nearby, others with too much cooling due to the growth of trees, and of course many others might be poorly sited but nonetheless have no particular bias to their trends in either direction). To some extent, all of this will cancel out in the process of aggregating to the nationwide scale. In any case, I find this juxtaposition (from your comment) a bit odd: Scientists have nothing to lose if they present real data limiting adjustments only to what needs adjusting to ensure we're comparing apples with apples. I would feel far more comfortable with data showing wider divergence between well and poorly sited stations. Well, the Menne paper does just present real data comparing apples to apples. They just divided the set of stations into two groups, those classified as well-sited and those classified as poorly-sited, and then compared the average trends for both groups. There were no differences in how the two groups were handled or "adjusted". But it sounds like you still have some predetermined outcome that you want to see. Unless there's a divergence between the two mean trends, you won't feel comfortable. This does sound like a "lose-lose" proposition for Menne.
  26. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    Well, that's quite enough obfuscation for one thread. Let's get back to basics here and recall what all this was about - prior to attempts to change the subject. This is what Dr. Pielke Sr claimed: “Global warming, as diagnosed by upper ocean heat content has not been occurring since 2004”. I made the following observations: • one metric alone (ocean heat, however measured) cannot be indicative of the state of an entire climate system. • significance attributed to a four year period is specious because it’s too short a period from which to draw any kind of conclusion, especially when there is considerable uncertainty within the scientific community about the validity of the data, the methods of gathering it, and the analysis applied to it. • unqualified claims that global warming has not been occurring on the basis of contested ocean temperatures alone are highly misleading, and the certainty of the statement is both inappropriate and unscientific. While I appreciate Dr. Pielke engaging with us, I find there has been a concerted effort to change the subject, to deflect criticism, and a failure to answer what I believe are robust and clearly stated criticisms. Sophistry will not change my view, nor will hyperbole or obfuscation. My criticisms therefore stand as written, and I reject the rather circuitous attempts to defend statements that owe more to climate change skepticism than they do scientific research. I believe that clear bias is displayed in such incautious statements, and - most importantly - they present opportunities for less principled actors to distort, delay and pervert government, civil, media and legislative measures to address what is potentially the most serious problem mankind has ever faced. Dr. Pielke - I find you are handing live ammunition to the enemies of science e.g.the ones calling for climate change advocates to be flogged and books to be burned. Please be more circumspect about the inevitable politicisation of what you say. It's not what you say, it's the way you say it, right?
  27. A detailed look at climate sensitivity
    Hi, cruzn246. I agree that it was probably warmer than today at the peak of the previous interglacial; my point was just that we don't necessarily know exactly how much warmer because Antarctic ice cores aren't necessarily giving us the global mean temperature -- temperatures in the Southern Ocean are probably weighed more heavily. As for the distribution of plant communities, the biosphere had thousands of years to adjust to warming temperatures at the time. Right now we're raising CO2 and temperatures on a decadal-to-century time scale. It takes a while for things to come into equilibrium (which won't actually happen until after we stop increasing CO2 concentration).
  28. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    I shall read with keen interest the links put in the response to #6. In the meanwhile, my original point has now been reinforced. This blog entry's text needs to be edited and the more up-to-date works added to it.
    Response: We have 3 different rebuttals to the "It's the sun" argument. This blog post is the Advanced version. All the papers posted in that earlier response come from the Intermediate version which features a fairly extensive list of peer-reviewed papers on the solar influence on climate. The Basic version hits the subject in a very brief, simple manner. Something for everyone.
  29. The surprising result when you compare bad weather stations to good stations
    chriscanaris @63: "What puzzles me..." Indeed..it puzzles you, me, Menne, Jim Meador and (I suspect) also John Cook and a great number of people. Alas, not everybody is as interested in the science.
  30. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    Argus, you're right that spectral reflectance varies as a function of incidence angle. In the analysis presented in this thread, the author simplifies this with the assumption of an overall average albedo of 0.3, or an absorptance of 0.7 (that's where the "0.7" comes from in the equation dF = 0.7 * d(TSI)/4 way up at the top). That's probably good enough for a nonspatial model like this. If you want to look at the energy balance of a particular point on the Earth's surface over time, then you're absolutely correct -- you might have to take into account variance in reflectance as a function of solar elevation angle.
  31. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    Hi, chriscanaris. Erlykin 2009 find that solar irradiance (and cosmic ray flux, for that matter) could explain at most 14% of the warming since 1956. It's an upper bound, not a best estimate. They don't attempt to come up with an actual estimate of the magnitude of warming attributable to TSI or CRF, just that for the period 1956-present it has to be less than 14% of the observed warming. You also want to keep in mind the difference in time periods. As noted above, some of the papers do find non-negligible values for the influence of solar irradiance on temperatures prior to the 1970s. But they pretty much all are in agreement that it's essentially zero since then.
  32. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    Thank you Ned, for a quick and clear answer! My thoughts concern the fact that most of earth's surface is ocean, and that a water surface has a varying reflectance (or reflectivity), which is depending on the angle of incidence. For an angle of 60 degrees the reflectivity is still less than 0.1, but for 80 it's almost 0.4 (then rising up towards 1.0). This means that not all of the incoming light (and infrared, etc?) is absorbed, which is what 'divided by 4' is presupposing. Actually a reflectivity of 0.0 is assumed for all angles of incidence. Maybe the constant should be around 4.5 instead? Or even 5?
  33. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    ◦Erlykin 2009: 14% ◦Lockwood 2008: -1.3% +/- -0.7 to -1.9% That's a a huge spread of variability if you stop to think about it. Do we understand insolation quite as well as we think we do? 14% -> less than zero in a system acknowledged to have multiple sensitive feedbacks is an awful lot of variability with major implications for climate models and mitigation strategies.
  34. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    Argus, TSI is measured in a plane perpendicular to the earth-sun axis. In this plane, the area of illumination is a circle with area (pi r^2). However, when incident on the earth it is distributed over the spherical surface area of the earth, with area (4 pi r^2).
  35. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    What exactly is meant by the following: "... divided by 4 to account for spherical geometry" (in the second paragraph)? Can somebody explain this to me? I have higher education in math and physics, so I should be able to understand an explanation - it's just that I need a clue to where the 'universal constant of 4' comes from.
  36. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    Not sure what the replies above are about. For example, Raypierre's non-peer-reviewed comments surely can't be put on the same level as peer-reviewed work? Let's go back to my points. The omission of Haigh's 2007 paper is even more glaring given that the first section of the blog mentions works of 2002, 2004 and 2005, plus AR4. Here's some other work of hers around that timeframe, again not referred to by the blog entry above: Gray, L.J., J.D. Haigh, and R.G. Harrison, 2005: Review of the Influences of Solar Changes on the Earth’s Climate. Hadley Centre Technical Note No. 62, Met Office Haigh, J.D., 2003: The effects of solar variability on the Earth’s climate. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London Ser. A, 361, 95–111. Furthermore, Haigh (2007)'s conclusions are pretty clear. And she already deals with the objection "there is NO trend over the last 30 years in any of the known solar factors that might influence climate" by writing in her abstract: "it is difficult to explain how the apparent response to the Sun, seen in many climate records, can be brought about by these rather small changes in radiation" Here's also some quotes from AR4-WG1-Chapter2: "empirical results since the TAR have strengthened the evidence for solar forcing of climate change by identifying detectable tropospheric changes associated with solar variability, including during the solar cycle" "It is now well established from both empirical and model studies that solar cycle changes in UV radiation alter middle atmospheric ozone concentrations...solar forcing appears to induce a significant lower stratospheric response (Hood, 2003), which may have a dynamical origin caused by changes in temperature affecting planetary wave propagation, but it is not currently reproduced by models" ===== So in 2007 there was some work to do...this is what science at the time said, and this is exactly what the IPCC reported. Does anybody know of any peer-reviewed work on the overall topic of the sun's influence on global warming, updating AR4 and Haigh (2007), either confirming or refuting her statements? ======== Say, can't we even agree on taking AR4 as reference? The impression is that we're back in "more royalist than the king" territory...published science is telling us "we don't know enough", yet the blog post boldly states "we know it isn't the sun". Hardly what is expected from a website where science should be in command.
    Response: Some peer-reviewed research since the IPCC 2007 report:
    • Erlykin 2009: "We deduce that the maximum recent increase in the mean surface temperature of the Earth which can be ascribed to solar activity is 14% of the observed global warming."
    • Benestad 2009: "Our analysis shows that the most likely contribution from solar forcing a global warming is 7 ± 1% for the 20th century and is negligible for warming since 1980."
    • Lockwood 2008: "It is shown that the contribution of solar variability to the temperature trend since 1987 is small and downward; the best estimate is -1.3% and the 2? confidence level sets the uncertainty range of -0.7 to -1.9%."
    • Lean 2008: "According to this analysis, solar forcing contributed negligible long-term warming in the past 25 years and 10% of the warming in the past 100 years..."
    • Lockwood 2008: "The conclusions of our previous paper, that solar forcing has declined over the past 20 years while surface air temperatures have continued to rise, are shown to apply for the full range of potential time constants for the climate response to the variations in the solar forcings."
  37. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    Dr Pielke "There does not need to be years of record to obtain statistically significant measures of upper ocean heat content. This is the point of using heat. We just need time slices with sufficient spatial data." In principle this might be right, but do you really believe the data is accurate enough quarter on quarter to provide a 3 month earth heat balance ? Given the noise in the data this seems so obviously wrong it's positively alarming coming from a reputable scientist. You repeat several times that the spacial coverage is what matters, but the noise in the data from the spacial coverage seems to show that it cannot be relied on at a snapshot level. Please comment
  38. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    73.Albatross I don't really want to reply to these sorts of comments because they really are going nowhere...... but I can't help it. "It is sad for me to see a reputable and respected scientists tarnish his reputation and diverge from acceptable scientific protocol in this manner." Really, enough of the morality tales! Stick to the science.
  39. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    72.Albatross You seem to make the point I highlight in #71. The poorest data, as expressed in AchutaRao et al. 2007, can be found in the pre-ARGO data yet you maintain your strongest critisism for the data quality in the ARGO period. I think you are taking AchutaRao et al critism of the early poor data set and piling that all on teh ARGO data. I thought Josh Willis on Roger's website did a good job of defending the present ARGO data set and believes there are unlikely to be many large scale corrections. It's funny that you then go on to say how models and data agree over the long term and how you have confidence in the long term trend. "OHC data are sufficiently accurate to state with high confidence (and statistical significance) that the long-term change in OHC is positive" How do you have confidence in a very, very, very poor early data set when you seem to have little to no confidence in the later, global data set. That makes no sense to me. What specifically about the ARGO data don't you like? And what specifically about the early data gives you the confidence in the long term trend?
  40. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    Roger A Pielke Sr #40 "The EOS article is introduced to document that we have identified a wide range of human climate forcings, beyond the radiative forcing of CO2. The IPCC is too conservative at presenting these other forcings. These are in addition to the human caused CO2 forcing." You might want to check the thread at this same website that goes into human waste heat, and I support your concern for possible biologically harmful effects of changes in the atmosphere's composition. That said, I read the article twice, and nowhere found an explanation as to how the additional amounts of anthropogenic CO2 could be warming the ocean to this degree, and how exactly this accomplished, (i.e., direct radiative forcing?, convection? etc.) Normally, oceans are seen to directly influence air temperatures and not the other way around.
  41. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    HR @68, "Rather than mince words please state clearly exactly what Dr Pielke has said about OHC that is untrue?" Please read the thread. With respect HR, if the answer to that question is not blindingly obvious to you by now you have not being paying close attention. You also say that "Pick apart that reasoning rather than repeatly calling into question his integrity?" Again, you have not being paying attention. For the record, Pielke Snr insisted that people read the EOS article, and that led to the CATO letter. Regardless, Dr. Pielke has only himself to blame for people calling his actions and statements into question. HR, you don't understand, there is no vendetta here, and I am not alone in being frustrated by his cavalier use of words concerning OHC, for example. I own his text book on mesoscale modeling and have cited his work. I respect his work on land-atmosphere interactions, he has clearly made some valuable contributions in that field. BUT, that does not mean I have to agree with him when he elects to publicly make highly misleading statements on climate science, or support him standing idly by when others distort his proclamations even further. It is sad for me to see a reputable and respected scientists tarnish his reputation and diverge from acceptable scientific protocol in this manner. You are of course free to uncritically agree with him on his misleading claims about OHC, sea level and Arctic ice......
  42. What do you get when you put a climate scientist and 52 skeptics in a room?
    My comment mentioning John Daly was deleted so I will not be making any more comments on this blog for a while in protest. Probably most of you will think of that as something to be welcomed, so enjoy! My condolences to Stephen Schneider's family and friends.
    Moderator Response: Note the Comments Policy, which specifically asks you not to post off-topic comments. Discussion of the CRU emails belongs in What do the hacked CRU emails tell us?.
  43. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    Dr. Pielke, Read what I wrote again. I never said that you signed the CATO letter/petition, I asked @51 "did you not openly support this petition from CATO?". Watts proclaimed for all to see (as I showed) that you did support the open letter in which they made misleading statements about the global SAT as I showed above. It sounds like you need to take the matter up with Watts. And of course the warming in the 20th century was not a "steady increase", that point only underscores a reality that climate scientists have known for a very long time-- yet it seems to be an attempt by CATO and others to downplay the observed warming. Anyhow to address you points: "i) whether the global annual average upper ocean heat content should be adopted as the primary metric of global warming," OHC is one metric, an important metric, but it should not be viewed in isolation or over short time windows. We need to consider metrics from the cryosphere, oceans and atmosphere when assessing the impact of the planetary energy imbalance. "ii) what is the observational accuracy of this data," There are clearly data issues--see Eli Rabett's comment above to cite just one example (also see AchutaRao et al. 2007, PNAS). I understand that scientists are hard at work addressing those issues, and I have no doubt that with time they will largely remedy them. I would not be surprised if the OHC data undergo several more adjustments in the future. That is exactly why one should not be declaring with authority that global warming has not been occurring since 2004. Especially given that some OHC data which go down to 2000 m indicate that since 2004 the oceans have been accumulating heat in through that column. Not to mention the absurdity of using a ridiculously short time window (in a noisy signal) to make sweeping generalizations. It is also striking that you seem indifferent to the fact that some people with agendas have used your proclamation to "spin" the science. and "iii) if the data are sufficiently accurate, how does the accumulation of heat in Joules compare with the models since 2004 when the data became sufficiently robust for this purpose." This sentence is confusing, you begin suggesting that the data may not be sufficiently accurate, and then say they became sufficiently robust after 2004. I would caution against making comparisons between AOGCM output and OHC over a short window (or for any metric for that matter) as you have done. Right now, it appears that the OHC data are sufficiently accurate to state with high confidence (and statistical significance) that the long-term change in OHC is positive (e.g., AchutaRao et al. 2007), but that the exact rate of increase (or net heat accumulation) over that time is less certain, and that is especially true for changes over the short term. As shown by Schmidt in December 2009, the AOGCMS have done a good jobin predicting the observed global SAT record between 1980 and late 2009. Note that they look at almost 30-years of data, not less than 5 years to arrive at that conclusion. They go even further back to 1955 for the OHC comparison. One could argue that the AOGCMs would not have been able to consistently accurately predict the observed SAT record had there had huge issues with the global OHC. A question from me to you if I may. Where do you expect global 0-2000m OHC to be 20 years form now (circa 2030)? Higher than current, the same or lower? And let us assume that there is no huge equatorial volcanic eruption at that time or in the year or two preceding it. And for what it is worth, I believe that ARGO is a valuable scientific tool, especially once they work out the data issues-- even unraveling the problems is affording the scientists valuable insight into the workings of the ocean.
  44. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    69.EliRabett I included 2000-2003 to show where teh data was coming from. All I can offer you is this period was the time of expansion of the system (at about 800 buoys/year). But real world explanations about trends on graphs always interest me so yep I'd also be interested in how that jump is explained. There is a curious thing going on with some individuals where the best data set, the full ARGO system from 2003 to 2009, comes in for greater critisism than the long term trend in OHC. The long term data is derived from measurement systems probably many orders of magnitude poorer in terms of spatial and temporal coverage. There is a nice little tale on the ARGO website which while not directly related to OHC does give you a flavour of why we should be glad we have the ARGO system. "Lack of sustained observations of the atmosphere, oceans and land have hindered the development and validation of climate models. An example comes from a recent analysis which concluded that the currents transporting heat northwards in the Atlantic and influencing western European climate had weakened by 30% in the past decade. This result had to be based on just five research measurements spread over 40 years. Was this change part of a trend that might lead to a major change in the Atlantic circulation, or due to natural variability that will reverse in the future, or is it an artifact of the limited observations?" Go to http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/index.html to check their emphasis.
  45. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    askaquestion, a long trend is needed for being reasonably certain about atmospheric temperatures not just because of the atmosphere's interaction with oceans, but because of all manner of other sources of variation in the measurements. The measurements are only samples of the population whose "true" value is sought. Such "noise" masking the "signal" being sought (the "true" value--the population value) besets all measurement--all measurement, in every domain, not just climate. The comment by EliRabett highlights the presence of noise in the ocean temperature data. See also the comments by Albatross and me.
  46. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    Assume Eli accepts Roger and Humanity's (see comment 1) argument. What happened between 2000 and 2004 when the ocean temperature jumped about 5 x 10^22 J, which is an absolutely crazy amount, esp given that every other measure (surface T, MSU, etc) was pretty well behaved? Either there is something rotten with the measurements, or weird stuff is happening in Captn Neptune's locker. Cocked hat, Pielke's argument meet.
  47. Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    63.Albatross You're search for truth might be admirable but is going to be thwarted by the imperfect state of climate science. That is if your willing to be as honest about other data sets as you are about this one. Rather than mince words please state clearly exactly what Dr Pielke has said about OHC that is untrue? Actually don't, that's taking us nowhere. Dr pielke has given reasons behind why he has made his statements. Pick apart that reasoning rather than repeatly calling into question his integrity?
  48. How we know the sun isn't causing global warming
    I just realized that my estimated range of solar forcing at 0.1 to 0.35 W m-2 is very close to the IPCC range. That's pretty cool, and a bit of a relief since I didn't think to check it after doing the calculation.
  49. What do you get when you put a climate scientist and 52 skeptics in a room?
    They should have a program like this every week , but just focus on one maybe two questions . That way you can go into more detail and clear up any points that are unclear . I also thought that their questions can be answered by a quick searh of the web and a little bit of reading , I thought that most where not really convinced by Mr Schneiders replys even thou they where good and clear to me . A half hour program called Climate Question of The Week would be good you might need a denier on as well for balance but . Oh would also love to see Monckton front 52 climate experts and answer random questions lol .
  50. Roger A Pielke Sr at 13:26 PM on 9 September 2010
    Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don't beat around the bush, Roger
    Albatros - With respect to your comment #52 the statements "This means that global warming halted on this time period" and "this clearly shows the lack of substantial warming since 2004" are equivalent. We are going in circles on this discussion. There is sufficient text here for readers to make up their own minds on the main issues of i) whether the global annual average upper ocean heat content should be adopted as the primary metric of global warming, ii) what is the observational accuracy of this data, and iii) if the data are sufficiently accurate, how does the accumulation of heat in Joules compare with the models since 2004 when the data became sufficiently robust for this purpose.

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