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nigelj at 06:48 AM on 4 May 2017Evidence Squared #10: Debunking William Happer's carbon cycle myth
I think both analogies in the posts above are good. I think almost anything can become a pollutant, dependent on circumstances and quantities, etc. We currently have a big problem with cow urine introducing excessive nitrates into rivers, and in this instance its dependent on quantities.
But it might be better to say CO2 is a pollutant dependent on circumstances. When we exhale CO2 it becomes part of the natural carbon cycle, so doesn't raise atmospheric concentrations, where burning fossil fuels does increase concentrations,so it's reasonable to call it a pollutant if it originates with fossil fuels.
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John Hartz at 06:28 AM on 4 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
macquigg @25: You ask:
Will more research be helpful in predicting local climates?
I am by no means an expert on this matter, but, based on what I know about GCMs, they probably will never be refined to the point they can produce a forecast of what the climate of Benson, Arizona will be in the year 2100 under a given scenario of input variables. Some of the GCMs can currently produce forecasts for mult-state regions such as the Southeast US. Assuming that an adequate stream of funding is avaialble to do so, I suspect that some GCMs will be refined to make forecasts for smaller areas such as states.
A couple of follow-up questions for you:
What is the current population of Benson?
What is Benson's source of potable water?
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Evan at 06:26 AM on 4 May 2017SkS Analogy 2 - Ferrari Without Gas
For those brave souls who have made it this far down the comment list, one more comment. Yes, the analogy may be interpreted as crude and does not hold up under all considerations of the actual greenhouse effects. The purpose was to draw attention to the fact that it takes more than just CO2 to cause warming. It also takes infrared radiation. If we try to draw too much from an analogy it can become confusing, and the purpose of these analogies is not to educate the well-educated commenters, but to educate people who may be new to the science of global warming.
That said, I am always open to modifying and improving these analogies, so thanks all for the many constructive comments. I will consider them all and will consider how we can improve this analogy and make it more effective.
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macquigg at 05:46 AM on 4 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
John@23, Daniel@24: Arizona as a whole is getting warmer, and Tucson is part of the region that is impacted by the drought we've seen for the last few years. Tucson gets its water from the Colorado River, and will be the first city to be cut off if the water levels fall a little further. The climate in Benson is much different. We have no problem with water, but if I understand climate science correctly, that could all change with a small shift in the jet stream, which could happen with the predicted global warming. My point in using Benson as an example is not to argue that global warming is good for Benson, but rather that the problem lies in the uncertainty, even with local climates that seem to be moving in good direction.
Will more research be helpful in predicting local climates? Or is this more like the floating balls in the river - no chance of ever predicting which ball will end up where.
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Daniel Bailey at 02:58 AM on 4 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
The state of Arizona as a whole has had significantly warmer summers:
Perceptions certainly do not overrule reality.
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John Hartz at 02:37 AM on 4 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
macquigg #20: You wrote:
I live in Benson Arizona, and it looks like the hot summers are getting a little cooler.
You could easily verify whether your impression is correct or not by analyzing the temperature records for Benson and/or nearby Tuscon.
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macquigg at 01:12 AM on 4 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
Tom @21, I was not aware of Stephens' prior writings on this topic, but if his first two op-eds in the NY Times (April 28 and May 1) are what he currently thinks, it looks like his position has changed. He now seems very reasonable: "The climate is an intensely complex system. Seemingly tiny differences in terms of inputs can make dramatic differences in terms of results. We should be humble about what we can know a year into the future, never mind a century, and we should be refining our assumptions continuously. That calls for more investment in science, not less."
A fair criticsim, which appears in the comments to the April 28 column, is that he is not treating the uncertainty with enough urgency. One of the commenters gave a perfect analogy: We would not get on a plane if technical experts told us there was a 10 to 20% chance of disaster. Let's work on refining that estimate and getting better models that will help us know the specifics of what is likely to happen.
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BILLHURLEY13951 at 00:31 AM on 4 May 2017Evidence Squared #10: Debunking William Happer's carbon cycle myth
I think the analogy is easier than that. Water, like CO2, is natural and life-giving. But too much and you drown.
Not only do degrees/percentages play a part in the Climate Change issue, but in all environmental issues as well.
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Tom Curtis at 22:14 PM on 3 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
macquigg @20, I think you are being all together too generous to Bret Stephens. As recently as 2010 he was writing:
"So global warming is dead, nailed into its coffin one devastating disclosure, defection and re-evaluation at a time. Which means that pretty soon we're going to need another apocalyptic scare to take its place."
and reffering to environmentalists as making "quasi-totalitarian demands".
In 2011 he was writing:
"Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate."
In 2015 he referred to global warming as:
"The hysteria generated by an imperceptible temperature rise of 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880—as if the trend is bound to continue forever, or is not a product of natural variation, or cannot be mitigated except by drastic policy interventions."
And finished, the article by writing:
"Here’s a climate prediction for the year 2115: Liberals will still be organizing campaigns against yet another mooted social or environmental crisis. Temperatures will be about the same."
On that evidence he has consistently considered global warming to be based on hyped and fabricated studies, with what actual warming exists being due to natural variation, a view he is sufficiently confident in as to predict effectively no temperature change over the coming century.
Three record annual temperatures in a row have made that view untenable for anybody who wants to pretend they are a serious commentator; but I have no doubt he was not convinced by the science (which has not changed over the two years) and hence that come the next La Nina he will revert back to what is essentially AGW denialism.
Further, it is plain from the articles that he is very happy to insult those pressing for action on AGW, and indeed insult working climate scientists who take no role in the policy debate as well. Given the liberality with which he insults, he would be a precious petal indeed if he took offense at the comments here.
In short, I think the evidence shows you are wrong in thinking Stephens is open to persuasion on any terms. He is prepared to run up and down the levels of denial as suits the circumstance, but nothing will persuade him that AGW represents a serious threat that merits any policy response.
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macquigg at 21:45 PM on 3 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
JH@8, glenn@10, macquigg@13, digby@17, glenn@19
I'm happy to see there is at least some agreement after my clarification, and I appreciate Digby's suggestion of using a different analogy, a person with a 4 degree fever. I think that analogy is too remote from climate science to be persuasive, however.
Analogy #1 Speed Kills was excellent, because it emphasizes the orders of magnitude increase in climate rate of change we are facing. I like my turbulent river analogy because I think it will work with people who are skeptics, like Stephens. It is not intended for people who are deniers, or completely ignorant of science and won't appreciate the computational difficulties in trying to predict local climate.
I know what won't work with Stephens, and that is this article and some of the comments. He will see these as name-calling, speculation over his evil motives, argument over insignificant details, and exaggeration of the certainty of "alarmist" predictions. If we want to engage with people like Stephens, and I think that is a worthy endeavor, we need to start from common ground. He accepts that the climate is warming and that it is the result of man-made CO2. That puts a huge distance between him and the idiots we see in political power and in the news. He just doesn't accept that the results of warming will be as bad as most climate scientists believe.
We need an analogy that will make sense to people who accept the basic science, but are still skeptical of the coming disaster. We cannot just say that any climate change is bad. I live in Benson Arizona, and it looks like the hot summers are getting a little cooler. I undersand that trend could reverse, however, and it is the uncertainty that has me worried.
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HK at 19:10 PM on 3 May 2017Industrial-era ocean heat uptake has doubled since 1997
ConcernedCitizen:
Quote from Rob Honeycutts link in #7, from the first paragraph under the heading Sea-Air Heat Exchange:"Solar heating of the ocean on a global average is 168 watts per square meter."
This means that if direct solar heating was the oceans' only heat source, they couldn't lose any more heat than this to the atmosphere/space without cooling. Assuming an emissivity of 0.95, this gives a maximum surface temperature of 236 K (-37oC) in order to radiate 168 watts/m2. If heat loss by conduction/convection and evaporation was included, the heat loss by radiation and thus the surface temperature had to be even lower than this.
So, regardless of the details of what happens in the skin layer, the turbulent mixing and so on, this should once and for all end any claim that the oceans can't be heated by IR radiation from the atmosphere.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 17:17 PM on 3 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
Thanks for the clarification macquigg.
Yes predicting more local climate is harder but one aspect of climate change, globally, that I think is under-appreciated, is that possibly all local climates will change. Each may not look like a bad change although many will be.
But any change is still bad to some degree since it is a disruption. Our agriculture, infrastructure, design of our houses, medical services, many things, are built around the local climate. Potentially everything will need to change. -
nigelj at 12:17 PM on 3 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
Charles S @16, yes I hear you, and quite true. Two or three years is too short to draw conclusions about the basic underlying global warming trend.
However its such a sharp increase, with nothing else like it in the graph above, so it makes me suspicios that something has fundamentally changed. Time will tell.
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Digby Scorgie at 11:51 AM on 3 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
macquigg @13
It also took me a long time to realize the significance of small changes in average global temperatures, but this was looking at it from a different perspective. From what I read initially I could distill the essence as follows:
Two degrees please; four degrees and you're dead.
This was likening the temperature change to someone with a fever — but I didn't know why the analogy was apt. Then I discovered that a drop of five degrees would put us back in an Ice Age. Later still I discovered that an increase of just two or three degrees would put us back over three million years on a rather different planet from the one we prefer today.
In other words, it doesn't take much of a change either way to result in drastic changes to the planet. (My degrees are all Celsius, by the way.)
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Doug_C at 10:28 AM on 3 May 2017Climate contrarians want to endanger the EPA endangerment finding
Multiple lines of evidence supporting human forced climate change through the emissions of billions of tons of carbon dioxide while at the same time multiple lines of evidence of how the campaign to deny this is is almost entirely fabricated by the fossil fuel sector in its own interests.
The 2007 Supreme Court decision that should be forcing the EPA to strictly regulate human emissions of carbon dioxide got it right. The continued effort to overturn it is a clumsily put together attempt to deny reality that is all about keeping the fossil fuel sector alive as long as possible no matter the consequences.
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Tom Curtis at 09:38 AM on 3 May 2017Evidence Squared #10: Debunking William Happer's carbon cycle myth
Bill Happer say's in the first video (1:12):
"There's this myth that's developed around carbon dioxide - that it's a pollutant - but you and I both exhale carbon dioxide with every breath. Each of us emits about 2 pounds of carbon dioxide a day, so are we polluting the planet?"
The obvious rebutal to that myth is to serve Happer with a nice large glass of urine, with some faeces floating in it. Each of us, of course, emits a significant quantity of urine and faeces every day (or at least we should). Further, both urine and faeces are fertilizers. I mention that because in the original broadcast, Happer goes on to mention that CO2 is "greening the planet". The analogy between urine and faeces, and CO2, in this argument, is therefore precise. We all still consider water with a quantity of urine and/or faeces in it polluted. We wouldn't want to swim in it, let alone drink it. Ergo, the reasons for thinking CO2 is not a pollutant given by Happer have literally no bearing on the case.
Indeed, if you break it down, Happer's argument is an appeal to ignorance. Only by being ignorant can the argument appear to make sense. For somebody supposed to be a science advisor to the President, that is shameful. For somebody science advisor to President Trump, what else would we expect?
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Charles S at 08:37 AM on 3 May 2017New study: global warming keeps on keeping on
Oddly, this article ends up failing to answer one of the questions it sets out at the beginning, even though the paper it describes does answer that question. The answer to the question "[W]hat the chances are that global warming has sped up [in the last 3 years]?" is "pretty low", or rather:
No recent (post-1980) change-point was found in any of the five data sets, with three change points suitably capturing the climate signal, suggesting that the recent hot years are a continuation of the existing trend, augmented by noise. The 2016 value seems visually extreme, but does not yet provide statistical evidence for a trend change. Of course, future temperature development might provide evidence that an acceleration indeed happened around 2014, but the data up until now do not.
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Charles S at 08:07 AM on 3 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
nigelj: I think you are mistaken about interpreting the spike in the last 3 years as an increase in rate. Just as the 'hiatus' didn't tell us anything meaningful, there is as yet no sign that the last 3 years are anything other than an El Niño driven spike (indeed, the paper referenced in "Climate keeps on keeping on", (Rahmstorf, 2017) a few posts before this one, demonstrates that).
The increase in rate is inferred (and predicted) from the more than geometric increase in CO2 production predicted in RCP8.5, as discussed in the Skeptical Science article I linked to. A steady rate of doubling of CO2 drives a linear temperature increase, but if the time between CO2 doubling decreases over time, then the temperature increase will be more than linear.
joe: I think you are mistaking the amount of warming over the last century, which NASA lists, with the current estimated linear rate of warming per century. Cahill et al, 2015 confirmed that the rate of global warming changed in ~1970 (as is obvious from just looking at any plot of global average temperature over the last 135 years), so the rate from 1970 onward is the relavent rate, not the rate from 1916- 2016. Under RCP8.5, we aren't going back to the rates from 1916-1970 any time soon. That 1970-present rate is ~1.7C/century. -
John Hartz at 07:35 AM on 3 May 2017Climate contrarians want to endanger the EPA endangerment finding
Paul D: Conventional wisdom is that Us Den Jim Inhofe (R-OK) will retire in 2020 when his current term expires. Scott Pruitt reportedly covets that Senate seat. Pruitt is therefore unlikely to serve as EPA Administrator for four years.
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nigelj at 06:41 AM on 3 May 2017Climate contrarians want to endanger the EPA endangerment finding
As you say the hotspot is not proof for or against human caused global warming, however I remembered reading this article on phys.org that the hotspot had actually been found:
phys.org/news/2015-05-climate-scientists-elusive-tropospheric-hot.html
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nigelj at 06:12 AM on 3 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
Joe @12
"Accelerating ? Yes if you include the el nino 2016 spike."
The trend is accelerating. We are almost certainly looking at three very hot years in a row from 2015 - 2017. This at least strongly suggests an acceleration is more than simply the effects of one el nino year. This is just obvious, I dont know how you cant see this.
"2015 was remarkable even in the context of the ongoing El Niño,” said GISS Director Gavin Schmidt. “Last year’s temperatures had an assist from El Niño, but it is the cumulative effect of the long-term trend that has resulted in the record warming that we are seeing.”
"Back to my original question - That projected rate of warming is 4x-5x the current rate of warming [in rcp8.5]. Is that even reasonable?"
I don't think reasonable is a term we generally apply to science. It's more a term applied to political policies or human behaviour. We don't ask whether quantum physics is a reasonable theory.
This is more a case of whether the science is valid on the basis of maths and physics. I have no reason to doubt the projections. You have to prove the projections wrong in specific and impeccable detail, not just make rhetorical style assertions.
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HK at 05:48 AM on 3 May 2017Industrial-era ocean heat uptake has doubled since 1997
ConcernedCitizen:
If shortwave radiation directly from the sun was the oceans’ only heat source, most of the ocean surface would freeze over. Please explain why this doesn’t happen! -
Rob Honeycutt at 05:23 AM on 3 May 2017SkS Team - Marching for Science around the globe
Paul... I'd ding her on her choice of using a stencil. Notoriously unreadable typeface that one, stencil. But the sign, otherwise, is pretty clever.
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Tom Curtis at 05:12 AM on 3 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
joe @12, the IPCC AR5 projects warming of 2.0 +/- 0.4 C from the 1986-2005 average to the 2046-2065 average, and 3.7 +/- 0.7 C from the 1986-2005 average to the 2081-2100 average. That represents a warming rate of the 20 year average of 0.333 +/- 0.067 C/decade averaged from 1986-2005 to 2046-2065, and of 0.486 +/- 0.121 C/decade averaged from 2046-2065 to 2081-2100. For comparison, the trend from 1996-current is 0.189 +/- 0.089 C/decade (Berkeley Earth LOTI), ie, 56.8% of the average for the first trend period, and 39.9% of the projected trend for the later period. That is, the IPCC AR5 projects warming that is to 1.76 to 2.57 times the current warming rate. In other words, you overstate the increase in the warming rate by a factor or 2.
I notice you object to using the current warming trend due to the existence of "the el nino 2016 spike", but you don't object to the inclusion of the 2011/2012 La Nina at the end of the series (which was larger than the 2016 El Nino), nor in the inclusion of the 1997/98 El Nino at the start of the series. That smacks of special pleading to me. You only want included those features which reduce the measured current trend, but want excluded any that will increase it.
You also claim that the "...2017 temp trends [are] reverting to pre el nino levels...", but the 1996- End 2016 trend is 0.183 +/- 0.089 C/decade, ie, less than the trend incorporating the first few months of 2017. That should be no surprise given that the average of the first three months of 2017 was warmer than the annual average of 2016, and that without El Nino conditions (although El Nino conditions are a 50% chance of reforming later this year).
You should note that the 1996-current trend in UAH 6.0 is also warmer than the trend from 1996 to end 2016, contrary to your direct claim.
In any event, the issue you raise is, can temerature trends increase to match those of RCP 8.5 at the end of the century, ie, by nearly a factor of 2.6. Given that radiative forcing increases by nearly a factor of 4 in RCP 8.5 over the same period, I do not see how that is a problem.
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Paul D at 05:01 AM on 3 May 2017Climate contrarians want to endanger the EPA endangerment finding
Hmm.
Maybe US legislation should insist that the head of the EPA should have a Science degree minimum (Political Science being a fake science degree).
The fact that Pruitt was appointed at all to the EPA whilst hundreds of other presidential appoinments remain empty, just sums up how much Trump et al hates the whole concept of the environment. -
macquigg at 05:00 AM on 3 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
Glenn @10: I'm using "climate" to mean local climate, not some global average. I'm not referring to weather at all.
JH @8: I'm offering an analogy, not an assertion needing proof, like the analogies I've seen in other parts of this forum. It is intended to help explain our worries to skeptics like Bret Stephens, who may have the same misconception I had until about a year ago, that the benefits of warming in Northern states would offset the warming in states that are already too hot. I was never a denier of science, just not paying enough attention to worry about "global warming". Al Gore's argument didn't satisfy my skepticism.
The change for me came when I realized that the problem was not the average warming, but the unpredictable change to local climates, hot or cold, wet or dry, that we should expect from a small amount of warming.
Consider the alternative, a world where our models were perfect, and we could predict local climates ten or twenty years out. In that case, it might be possible to plan on moving my company from Arizona to Wisconsin. We could even have social programs to help poor people make the move.
I'm sorry that my analogy didn't help. It makes a lot of sense to me.
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Paul D at 04:55 AM on 3 May 2017SkS Team - Marching for Science around the globe
Ahhh, that would make sense Rob.
Difficult to make out whether that is an h or an r!
Maybe a better critique is the choice of colour for that word!
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Rob Honeycutt at 04:29 AM on 3 May 2017SkS Team - Marching for Science around the globe
Paul D... Maybe you need to zoom in a little or get new glasses. The sign says "proton" not "photon."
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Paul D at 04:15 AM on 3 May 2017SkS Team - Marching for Science around the globe
Being a bit pedantic but in the Sarah in Michigan montage, she is carrying a placard that shows an illustration of an atom but the text talks about a photon.
Also a photon has no electric charge, so is neutral.
LOL
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michael sweet at 03:12 AM on 3 May 2017Industrial-era ocean heat uptake has doubled since 1997
Concerned Citizen,
Sunlight heats the ocean. There for the ocean is hotter than the overlying atmosphere. According to the laws of Physics, heat is transferred from the warm ocean to the colder atmpshere.
When the atmosphere is warmed from AGW, heat flows more slowly out of the ocean. Since the inflow of heat from the sun is the same and heat is leaving the ocean slower, the ocean heats up. Slow circulation patterns transfer the heat through the entire ocean. It takes hundreds of years to reach equilibrium.
Scientists have measured an increase in temperature through the entire ocean. It is harder to measure in the deep ocean because of the small change so far and the difficulty of accurately measuring the temperature in the deep ocean.
If you do not understand the basics it will be impossible for you to convince anyone here that your argument is correct. There are references to all these facts at SkS. Use the search function.
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Rob Honeycutt at 01:00 AM on 3 May 2017Industrial-era ocean heat uptake has doubled since 1997
ConcernedCitizen... Here's some good entry level college course materials on ocean-atmosphere coupling showing you're incorrect.
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/lectures/o_atm.html
And to claim that TCS and ECS are the same is, well, it's pretty much the height of hubris.
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HK at 00:44 AM on 3 May 2017SkS Analogy 2 - Ferrari Without Gas
gnmw #14, in your last paragraph you say:
"…and most heat loss from the surface is by sensible heat and latent heat transport."According to NASAs energy budget chart, 79% of the heat loss from the surface is actually by radiation, but most of that is absorbed by the atmosphere. Convection/advection and latent heat is then responsible for most of the heat transport within the atmosphere. Maybe you were referring to net heat loss defined as surface radiation minus back radiation? In that case, sensible heat and latent heat account for about 1.8 more surface heat loss than radiation does.
Regarding the blanket analogy, I would say the outside of the blanket corresponds to the average altitude of heat loss to space (about 5 km), while your skin is the Earths surface. The average temperature (-18°C) at that altitude is sufficient for the heat loss there to balance the 240 w/m² of incoming radiation from the sun. The lapse rate then sets the temperature difference between that altitude and the surface.
If the amount of greenhouse gases increased enough to raise the heat loss altitude from 5 to 6 km, the surface temperature would increase by about 6.5°C if the lapse rate and the Earth’s albedo remained unchanged. In reality, both would decrease somewhat and produce a negative and positive feedback to the initial warming, respectively.
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ConcernedCitizen at 23:39 PM on 2 May 2017Industrial-era ocean heat uptake has doubled since 1997
Regardless of heat ocean heat retention triggered by IR, the heat retained comes from SW. IR can only decrease the skin gradient and cause the ocean to retain SW energy. IR energy does not penetrate, and can not conduct along a positive gradient to depths.
Thus the oceans can not absorb IR energy and can not delay the effect IR has on the atmosphere, thus the supposed ‘ocean heat uptake’ as an excuse for poor CO2 response is not valid. TCR and ECS are one and the same and they are low.
Moderator Response:[JH] Please do not post the same comment on multiple threads. Your duplicate posts have been deleted.
[PS] And please take the time to review (again) the comments policy on this site. In particular the need to provide reference/data for assertions. Just because you havent understood something does not make it wrong. Furthermore, in bringing up (again) your misunderstandings again ocean heating, it would seem you have not bothered to look at material offered for your guidance here. People here can help if you wish to understand. Wilful ignorance is apparently incurable.
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joe - at 22:31 PM on 2 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
Charles
joe: current rate of warming is 1.7 C/century, but that rate is accelerating because the rate of release of CO2 is accelerating (and will continue to do so in the RCP8.5 scenario.
Charles - 1.7C ? Nasa Shows the current warming rate 1.7f which is .9444c per century. Accelerating ? Yes if you include the el nino 2016 spike. The ncep cfsr global cfv2, HadSSt3 , UAH satellite for global lower atmosphere, the met office, all show 2017 temp trends reverting to pre el nino levels. So where is the acceleration?
Back to my original question - That projected rate of warming is 4x-5x the current rate of warming [in rcp8.5]. Is that even reasonable?
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gnmw at 20:23 PM on 2 May 2017SkS Analogy 2 - Ferrari Without Gas
vatmark @3
All Evan's analogy is saying is that it takes a combination of two things to get a result.
It takes both water and dirt to make mud. It takes both bread and a filling to make a sandwich. It takes water and light (along with other things) for a houseplant to grow. It takes both gasoline and an engine (along with other things, e.g. wheels) for car motion to happen. It takes longwave energy leaving the surface of a planet, along with gases in the atmosphere that absorb and re-emit much of that energy, for the greenhouse effect to happen.
Some of the things you point out (greenhouse gases in a car' exhaust, car's engine radiating heat, gasoline being the source of that heat) are certainly true, but aren't relevant to his analogy.
As to the actual greenhouse effect, you say one thing I think isn't true: "decreasing emission from the atmosphere". At equilibrium, the total radiation energy leaving the Earth and its atmosphere is equal to the total radiation energy entering.
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Charles S at 18:54 PM on 2 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
ño
Michael Sweet: you can contact the New York Times public editor at: public@nytimes.com
joe: current rate of warming is 1.7 C/century, but that rate is accelerating because the rate of release of CO2 is accelerating (and will continue to do so in the RCP8.5 scenario.
Glenn: That really is impressive that macquigg's ridiculously inaccurate penultimate paragraph then led accidentally into their reasonably accurate last paragraph. The ball is going to go down the river, however the turbulence may bounce it up and down along the way. -
Glenn Tamblyn at 17:54 PM on 2 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
macquigg
In addition to the moderation comment from JH, consider your last paragraph because it is instructive:
"The problem of predicting climate change based on known global warming and imperfect modeling of the earth's surface, atmosphere, and oceans is much like trying to calculate the course of one floating ball as it runs through the turbulence down the river."
Climate prediction. The floating ball will go down the river and end up miles away.Weather prediction. We aren't sure where the ball will go in the next 30 seconds due to turbulence.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 17:42 PM on 2 May 2017Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
LinkeLau.
Broadly yes. In a cooler world, due to less CO2, water vapor levels will drop, adding to the cooling. Where it stops depends broadly on two things. If nothing else has changed then on returning CO2 levels to where they were in the past, pre-industrial levels for example, we would expect climate to return to that pre-industrial state.
If... the reflectivity of the Earth hasn't changed. The Earth only absorbs around 70% of the sunlight that strikes it, the rest is reflected. Sunlight is relected by clouds, snow & ice mainly and to a much lesser extent by the land and ocean surface.
If the reversal of CO2 levels happens quickly enough, before the coverage of ice particularly can change, then we would go back to a past climate. However if the reversal is slow and the ice cover has contracted, then the earth would still be somewhat warmer because it is absorbing more sunlight and a full return would require enough time for the ice to expand again. -
LinkeLau at 15:49 PM on 2 May 2017Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
If water vapor is just an "amplifier" and co2 (within the current climate system) is the most important driver of current global warming does this also implicate that temperatures will go down in the future if we succeed in lowering atmospheric co2-levels? And will water vapor then also act as an 'amplifier' in lowering the temperature and if so, were will the cooling in that case stop?
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Doug_C at 14:23 PM on 2 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
This fellow is so disigenuous, there's only one reason for climate change denial and that's to protect the interests of the people who gain the greatest benefit from the continued burning of billions of tons a year of fossil fuels.
And the "uncertainty" we're facing with climate change is how fast we bring on a catastrophe that if allowed to go far enough has the potential to wipe out most life on Earth as was detailed in the study that found we are entering the same scale of global climate forcing as events like the Permian extinction.
People like this are effectively advocting for a game of global Russian Roulette with a gun with all six chambers loaded. Nothing they say or do will change the horror of massive releases of methane ices in coming decades which as an too real possibility. And that's just one aspect of the unfolding disaster, how to even quantify the loss of the Great Barrier Reef system alone?
The only reason that commentators like this have a platform at all is the huge amount of resources that have been dedicated for decades to create the illusion of real doubt on the presense and almost certain catastrophic consequences of human forced climate change.
We live in a world where the Canadian city most closely connected with the tar sands bitumen projects mostly burned up due to an April heat wave in a region that can see -20 C at the time of year. I've lived near there, if people don't get that North Central Alberta baking in the early spring is a sign of looming disaster then I'm not sure what will make them wake up.
Having someone posing as an authority on this subject when he is in fact the end point of a very long and expensive campaign to defraud the genuine science is itself fraud. We should be able to take legal action against people who wilfully place us all in jeopardy this way. If not to protect people then what is the point of the law?
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gnmw at 12:14 PM on 2 May 2017SkS Analogy 2 - Ferrari Without Gas
vatmark@12
An analogy is just a comparison in which some aspects of situation A correspond in some ways to some aspects of situation B.
You're constructing a different analogy between a Ferrari and the greenhouse effect than the one Evan had in mind, i.e. using a different set of correspondences.
I kind of like his analogy, but I think it's actually pretty crude, i.e. it doesn't hold up well under close examination:
concentration of greenhouse gases size of car engine
infrared radiation emitted by Earth's surface gasoline
warming due to greenhouse effect What? Speed of car? Distance a car can travel?
The speed of a car doesn't depend on the amount of gas; as long as you've got one gallon (one quart? one cup?) the Ferrari can go top speed, albeit briefly.
The distance a car can go depends on how much fuel is in the tank, but it's approximately *inversely* related to the size of the engine. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong?)
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gnmw at 11:39 AM on 2 May 2017SkS Analogy 2 - Ferrari Without Gas
vatmark@13
The blanket is the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere & the body is the earth's surface*.
Suppose my skin temperature is 80 F, the air and walls of my bedroom are at 60 F, the lower surface of the blanket is at 75 F and the upper surface of the blanket is at 65 F. The blanket *has* absorbed some heat— if it weren't for my body, the blanket would be at 60 F.
Likewise the atmosphere and clouds absorb some heat. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#cite_note-energy_budget-7
and especially the NASA chart they give at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#/media/File:The-NASA-Earth%27s-Energy-Budget-Poster-Radiant-Energy-System-satellite-infrared-radiation-fluxes.jpg
*(I'm no expert. Maybe, more technically, the body is 'a "surface" in the mid-troposphere'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
"The atmosphere near the surface is largely opaque to thermal radiation (with important exceptions for "window" bands), and most heat loss from the surface is by sensible heat and latent heat transport. Radiative energy losses become increasingly important higher in the atmosphere, largely because of the decreasing concentration of water vapor, an important greenhouse gas. It is more realistic to think of the greenhouse effect as applying to a "surface" in the mid-troposphere, which is effectively coupled to the surface by a lapse rate."
Moderator Response:[PS] Fixed links. Please learn how to do this yourself with link button in the comment editor.
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John Hartz at 11:05 AM on 2 May 2017SkS Team - Marching for Science around the globe
Baerbel: Wowser! You rock!
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Tom Curtis at 07:10 AM on 2 May 2017Humidity is falling
vatmark @40:
"When SST increase evaporation, the SST will decrease from evaporation. If the cause of increase in SST is increasing temperature of air, evaporation is driven by increasing kinetic energy of water molecules where the energy is coming from air molecules. Which means that the kinetic and thermal energy in air molecules will drop as a result of water having a much larger heat capacity than air. Water increase less in temperature than air from the same amount of energy absorbed."
Your scenario assumes a situation in which the air immediately above the water, along with the water, form an isolated system. Where the air is continuously warmed, your assumptions do not apply, and both air and sea will continue to warm with a continuously increasing evaporation. In other words, your assumptions are falsified in the case of warming due to a change in radiative forcing.
Even in the isolated system, the net cooling of air and water will be very small. For the ocean, it will be so small as to not be measurable except at the skin layer. That is simply because the heat capacity of the ocean is enormous, hence the evaporative cooling of the ocean will be miniscule. And (in the closed system), the air cannot cool to a lower temperature than that of the ocean.
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Tom Curtis at 06:51 AM on 2 May 2017Humidity is falling
vatmark @41:
The actual IPCC definition of "radiative forcing" was:
"Radiative forcing Radiative forcing is the change in the net, down-ward minus upward, radiative flux (expressed in W m–2) at the tropopause or top of atmosphere due to a change in an external driver of climate change, such as, for example, a change in the concentration of carbon diox-ide or the output of the Sun. Sometimes internal drivers are still treated as forcings even though they result from the alteration in climate, for example aerosol or greenhouse gas changes in paleoclimates. The traditional radia-tive forcing is computed with all tropospheric properties held fixed at their unperturbed values, and after allowing for stratospheric temperatures, if perturbed, to readjust to radiative-dynamical equilibrium. Radiative forcing is called instantaneous if no change in stratospheric temperature is accounted for. The radiative forcing once rapid adjustments are accounted for is termed the effective radiative forcing. For the purposes of this report, radiative forcing is further defined as the change relative to the year 1750 and, unless otherwise noted, refers to a global and annual average value. Radiative forcing is not to be confused with cloud radiative forcing, which describes an unrelated measure of the impact of clouds on the radiative flux at the top of the atmosphere."
(Emphasis added)
It is very clear that the definition given is the same as mine, which is no surprise given that I based mine on the IPCCs. The phrase you take out of context clearly applies to the report only, and is not part of the specific definition. Rather, it is a convention adopted for convenience in the report. Given that convention, if you use a different base date you should state as much, or make it very clear in context. Alternatively, you can discuss the radiative forcing for a given change in atmospheric concentration of CO2, etc. Again, if you do so, you should state as much, or make it clear from context. But a convention adopted for a report does not thereby become an essential part of the definition.
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Daniel Bailey at 02:13 AM on 2 May 2017Global warming theory isn't falsifiable
In addition to the mod's response to you, the unlamented PanicBusiness was one of many fake-accounts run by the same individual in an attempt to spam this venue. Those who have genuine interest in expanding their understanding of the science in question would have no need to resort to such subterfuge.
But then, you already knew that.
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macquigg at 01:01 AM on 2 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
We need a better way to explain to the public the dangers of a small increase in global temperature. Here is an analogy everyone can understand:
Climate Change Analogy: Why is global warming so bad? Can't we just migrate to cooler areas over the next few decades? If some areas get too warm for comfort, won't there be some cold areas that get a little more comfortable?
The problem with this argument is, of course, that a small change in average temperature can have large, sudden, and seemingly random effects on local climates. Yes, it all averages to just a few degrees warming, but that is little consolation to the millions of people living in California, Arizona, and much of the Southwest, if the result is a near-permanent drought, or the millions who may face flood levels not seen in hundreds of years. Even if we could move big cities over a period of twenty years, climate changes could reverse just as we are completing the planned move.
Here is an analogy to help understand the problem of climate change. Model the Earth's climate as a one-mile section of river with lots of rocks and white-water rapids. At the top of this river run we are going to dump 100 ping-pong balls, each with number, and each number relating to one problem, like "temperature rises 10 degrees C", or "rainfall drops to 1000-year low". At the bottom of this river section, we will pick a point and let it represent an area of the planet we are worried about, maybe Southern California. We will place a fishing net there and capture the first ball into the net. If you repeat this experiment hundreds of times, the problems will average out to just a small amount of warming, but in the real world, the experiment will run only once.
The problem of predicting climate change based on known global warming and imperfect modeling of the earth's surface, atmosphere, and oceans is much like trying to calculate the course of one floating ball as it runs through the turbulence down the river.
Moderator Response:[JH] Please provide documentation to support the sweeping assertion you included in your concluding paragraph.
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joe - at 23:03 PM on 1 May 2017NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
In the red ‘burn lots of fossil fuels’ (RCP8.5) scenario, we’ll see a further 3.0–5.5°C warming between now and 2100.
That projected rate of warming is 4x-5x the current rate of warming. Is that even reasonable.
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scaddenp at 13:07 PM on 1 May 2017Increasing CO2 has little to no effect
""Isn´t that an example of doing radiation physics backways?"
I suspect you may be getting confused by the technical definitions here.
The simple definition is:
"The rate of energy change per unit area of the globe as measured at the top of the atmosphere"
It is used as way to put the various sources of radiative change (GHG, aerosols, albedo, change in solar insolation) onto an equal footing (more or less). Dont confuse the way in how the change in a particular forcing is actually measured with how it is recalculated to express it as a change in TOA radiative forcing.
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Tom Curtis at 12:26 PM on 1 May 2017Increasing CO2 has little to no effect
vatmark @311:
1)
"This seems very odd to me. You use a formula for radiation, not based on fundamental physics?"
The radiation models used to calculate radiative forcing are based on fundamental physics (ie, basic physical laws). The actual radiative forcing, however, depends on things like extent and type of cloud cover, type of ground cover, surface temperature, etc. These conditions cannot be directly calculated from fuandamental physics, but must be observed. It follows that the radiative forcing also cannot be directly calculated from fundamental physics.
2)
"And the changes in Outgoing Long Wave Radiation is corrected for radiation in the stratosphere, after you adjust the stratosphere in what way?"
Given a change in atmospheric concentration of a greenhouse gas, or of incoming insolation, the stratosphere will establish effective thermal equilibrium very quickly. As a result it is convenient to define radiative forcing with the stratospheric adjustment. You can do it differently. The Instantaneious Radiative Forcing is calculated without a stratospheric adjustment, for example. However, the values cited in the IPCC are for the adjusted Radiative Forcing.
The stratospheric adjustment would be made by adjusting the stratospheric temperature by successive approximation until energy into the stratosphere equals energy out of the stratosphere, and the various levels of the stratosphere are in local thermodynamic equilibrium. As noted above, I have seen an explicit technique for doing this, but do not currently remember it.
3)
"Isn´t that an example of doing radiation physics backways? To me it seems like you use the effect as a cause if you start at the last point where radiation leaves the climate system."
You appear to be confused. A change in radiative forcing can as easilly be due to a change in insolation (your forwards effect) as from a change in green hous gas concentration. The radiative forcing is used because the tropopause is an easilly defined and measured energy boundary. As such, it must satisfy the definition of conservation of energy - ie, that if more energy goes in than out, energy must be stored in some form within the boundary. Given that the energy levels involved are not sufficient for large scale energy to matter conversion, the energy will be stored as heat, and consequently will result in an increase in temperature. It is that fact that makes it possible to calculate the effects of changes in GHG concentration by using the concept of "radiative forcing".
I will note that GCMs and radiative transfer models do not use "radiative forcing" to calculate the consequences of changed GHG concentrations, or solar irradiance. They follow all the energy transfers in a step by step process as described in the preceding post. It is only when we do not have access to GCMs (or in specific contexts radiative transfer models), or we want to calculate approximate results without waiting for the several days or weeks of a GCM run that we make use of radiative forcing.
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