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ranyl at 18:58 PM on 19 March 2015So what did-in the dinosaurs? A murder mystery…
" It’s weapons of death include a violent blast that destroys everything for thousands of miles around the impact, a heat flash from the blast that incinerates everything in a similar radius, followed by a near-global rain of red-hot ejecta that turns the sky into a broiler (“grill” if you are outside the US) inflicting fatal burns and igniting a global conflagration. The blast, centered in shallow ocean, generates a colossal tsunami across the juvenile Atlantic and the shock wave triggers earthquakes and tsunamis around the world far more violent than the 2011 magnitude 9 Tōhuku earthquake in Japan. Finally, the great quantity of dust and incinerated debris flung into the upper atmosphere blocks out the sun, turning the world dark and the climate frigid for years."
From main article Watchdog, not sure what your point that Howardlee hasn' taddressed really.
Yes a big impact makes a lot of waves, just not enough apparently to wipe out life all over the earth, that takes a global cultprit, according the evidence presented and mulled over by those who drawn the conclusions Howardlee presents.
That an impact of that size didn't induce the full mass extinction makes CO2 warming and acidification just more worrying really.
Although despite that, if a comet was again coming our way everybody would pull together to try and do something about if ways could be found. Yet when it comes to the greater threat posed by what we are doing, most people turn a blind eye, under the premise that an acclerated mass extinction won't happen really, the threat isn't that great, it won't happen to me or will take place in a far away place.
Every year we pump out enough CO2 to be equivalent of approximately 3 mega volcanoes erupting.
But the affects are too subtle as yet for most human's contemplation and threat reaction to be induced as we human's really only react to comet like threats, as we can identify the danger as an immediate impact and that is clearly life threatening.
Anyway the scale of change required to actually become a sustainable, non toxic, biodiversity enhancing global soceity is too great it seems and the majority of solutions are still toxicity producing, biodiversity impacting and totally none sustainable (e.g. larges scale dams, wind turbines, PV panels, Batteries, industrial scale biomass production) and don't address the issues of massive over exploitation of resources, population expansion, waste creation and inasive alien species.
We'd have more chance if a comet was going hit us!
Does anyone out there actually think transformational change is possible if that meant sacrificing the car, plane and mobile phone?
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alby at 18:47 PM on 19 March 2015Fossil fuels are way more expensive than you think
Social cost of goods or technologies is well known: economist call it externality. The problem is that is a type of indirect cost. It's really hard to change it in a direct cost (with a taxation or with law in order to avoid pollution). And this not only because population has to accept this change, but also because in a global market if only one nation (even if the first economic power one like USA) will support strongly (partially, with investment both on fossil both on revewable is not so effective) this change the other competitors (China, Brasil, Russia etc etc) will take commercial advantages avoiding (or simply delaying) this pollution tax.
Regarding Nuccitelli graph I hope that 2014 will not be an isolated year but the beginning of a new trend of decoupling. Looking through data there are also 1980-81 and 1992 with GDP increase (around 2%) and decreease of CO2 emission while durimng 1994 and 1998 a GDP increase at more or less 3% was done with a small CO2 increase (around 0,5%).
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BBHY at 17:46 PM on 19 March 2015Fossil fuels are way more expensive than you think
I like that studies of this sort help make people aware of the hidden costs of the fossil fuels we use. I wonder how much more would be added by including the cost of oil spills?
Then again, in a way the added cost is misleading. When parts of Antarctica melt from too much CO2 in the atmosphere, no amount of money can put that ice back. When a beautiful beach is submerged by rising seas it can't be replaced with a stack of $100 bills.
I think a lot of people don't realize that the effects of global warming as almost completely irreversible. When we limited sulfer pollution, the acid rains stopped and the forests and streams recovered. When we stopped emitting CFCs the whole hole in the ozone begain to shrink.
The changes to the climate caused by humans are not like that. They are pretty much permanent, unless you consider time scales greater than 1000 years.
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stephine at 17:17 PM on 19 March 2015Skeptical Science now an Android app
Apart from mobile games, there are plenty of useful apps available for everyday use. For example, Google itself releases new Android apps from time to time. One of the latest ones is Google reader, which allows the user to browse and read RSS feeds and news items from the different sites that are subscribed to using Google Reader from the web. best android apps
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Tom Curtis at 16:44 PM on 19 March 2015There is no consensus
wakeup @666, thankyou for opening my eyes. I had not realized the theory that the Earth is not flat was in so much difficulty. However, following your methods, I noted that there is virtually zero endorsement of the proposition that the Earth is a sphere (or oblate spheroid) in scientific papers. It follows, from your impeccable reasoning, that >>99% of scientists do not accept that the Earth is either a sphere or an oblate speroid and that, by inference they consider the theory that the Earth is flat to be at least as viable.
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Watchdog at 14:22 PM on 19 March 2015So what did-in the dinosaurs? A murder mystery…
howardlee @39 - Yes. Thank you. Returning to the topic of quantifying the impact effects and "region" size of Chicxulub I refer to a paper in _Meteoritics and Planetary Science_, "Earth Impact Effects Program: A Web-based computer program for calculating the regional environmental consequences of a meteoroid impact on Earth", by Collins, Meloth and Marcus, which includes various physical results from 3 sizes of impactors; one the size of Chicxulub. I note that its thermal energy alone estimated at a radius of 1,800 miles from its point of impact is 10 times the level which would cause 1st degree skin burns. My Point? I think we can agree that the 'regional' area of destruction wrought by Chicxulub covered a rather vast region; perhaps continentalish.
http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/effects.pdf -
wakeup at 14:12 PM on 19 March 2015There is no consensus
Tristan: Thanks for responding. At issue is whether or not global warming is human-caused. If the goal was to find out if a significant majority of scientists publishing in the field support the theory, it's unusual, to say the least, to discard 66% of the subject papers because they "made no statement of attribution" and treat the 34% who do as 100% to reach the conclusion that 97% validate the theory of human causation.
That would be fine if the 97% is declared for what it is: the percentage of the 34% of experts who have reached a conclusion, as it is (if you know to look for it) in the Science Project logo above. Unfortunately it is used daily to convince the public that 97% of climate change scientists agree that gw is human-caused, which, in my view, is not demonstrated by this survey.
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scaddenp at 14:05 PM on 19 March 2015Crowdfunding Support for Science: The Dark Snow Project
Tracking it back to the original figure you get caption of:
"Monthly mass anomalies (in Gigatonnes, Gt) for the Greenland ice sheet since April 2002 estimated from GRACE measurements. The anomalies are expressed as departures from the 2002-2014 mean value for each month. For reference, orange asterisks denote June values (or May for those years when June is missing)."
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TonyW at 13:35 PM on 19 March 2015Crowdfunding Support for Science: The Dark Snow Project
Quick question. What is that "Greenland Ice Mass Loss" graph actually showing? I'm a bit confused by the positive and negative numbers on the y-axis.
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Tom Curtis at 09:57 AM on 19 March 2015It's the sun
Leto @1139, temperature shows a level of autocorrelation across years. Because of that, clustering of high SD years is not unexpected. If follows that "just chance" cannot be excluded as an explanation for the cluster of high SD years. And even though it is more probable than not that it is not just chance, I certainly cannot claim that just chance is less probable than any or all of the other alternative explanations.
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Leto at 09:23 AM on 19 March 2015It's the sun
Thanks Tom and Glenn... Tom's list of "error years" (1938, 1943, 1944, 1963) do not appear to be randomly distributed - if we plotted a rolling 2-year or 5-year average of absolute (or squared) model-data mismatch, I suspect there would be a peak in the 1938-1944 period that stuck out well above the rest of the plot (more than 2 SD), so I was hoping there would be better explanations than "it's chance".
Clearly, there are several potential explanations and it seems more than likely that the data around that time is itself suspect (particularly given the association with WW2 and the change in coverage). That makes the performance of the model even more impressive.
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arationofreason at 09:09 AM on 19 March 2015There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature
Linear 'fit' to the last 38 years of ocean data yields 0.3 watts/m^2. Essentially the same as the Livitus et al results. This is ~93% of global warming power with a decent average time. Note this is only about 1/10 of the global warming power claimed by IPCC to reach 3C in a century.
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Tom Curtis at 08:15 AM on 19 March 2015There is no consensus
michael sweet @664, in Cook et al, self raters were not given an "inconclusive" option. Rather they were given a neutral option, without the possibility of distinguishing between "neutral because inconclusive" and "neutral because relevant issues were not addressed". The distinction is important because the former, but not the later, should be included in the denominator in determining the proportion of endorsements.
In the abstract rating section of the paper, a subsample of neutral papers were given a secondary rating to distinguish between "neutral because inconclusive" and "neutral because not addressed". Only 0.1% of neutral papers fell into the former category. Assuming that a similar proportion of papers self rated as neutral were "neutral because inconclusive", then 96.7% of self rated papers that had an opinion on the topic would have been self rated as endorsing AGW. That compares to the 97.2% found in the actual paper without the option of distinguishing reasons for the neutral rating.
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michael sweet at 06:07 AM on 19 March 2015There is no consensus
mav1234,
Read the advanced or intermediate tabs of the OP. All the studies allow the papers to be rated inconclusive. Cook had 7 ratings. Many of the papers were rated inconclusive.
Where did you get the idea that inconclusive was not a choice?? If you believe the "skeptic" blogs you will never understand the issues. Their primary purpose is to put out disinformation.
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mav1234 at 05:00 AM on 19 March 2015There is no consensus
Hello all,
Is anyone aware of a similar study in which authors were allowed to rate their studies as "inconclusive"? Given that this study asked authors to rate studies without the option to mark as inconclusive, I was just curious.
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howardlee at 00:59 AM on 19 March 2015So what did-in the dinosaurs? A murder mystery…
Watchdog @38 I assume you are referring to Ohno et al 2014. That's a paper looking at the nature of the aerosols generated by an impact. In the article you will see I reference newer research on the volumes of material and mechanisms of acidification showing that ocean chemistry rules out the impact as a feasible cause of the ocean acidification.
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DSL at 00:48 AM on 19 March 2015There is no consensus
The case is actually stronger, if I recall correctly. The 3% of publications addressing the human contribution are not actually comprehensive. If we were to include only studies that determine the contributions of the full range of natural and anthro forcings, feedbacks, and oscillations, the number would not be 97%. It would be 100%.
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CBDunkerson at 23:35 PM on 18 March 2015There is no consensus
wakeup, let's consider some different scenarios;
- If you look at all climate papers which stated causes of GW then ~97% said GW is mostly human caused.
- If you look at all climate papers then ~33% said GW is mostly human caused.
- If you look at all scientific papers then less than 1% said GW is mostly human caused.
- If you look at all papers on any subject (e.g. economics, philosophy, knitting) then near 0% said GW is mostly human caused.
- If you look at all written communication throughout human history then near 0% stated a position on any given single topic.
People who are not trying to kill their own capacity for rational thought should be able to see that looking at anything other than the percentage amongst those who actually addressed the issue (i.e. 97%) is meaningless. The only reason to favor a percentage including some pool of data which doesn't even address the subject is to deliberately delude oneself.
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There is no consensus
wakeup - When you write a paper, you don't waste time rediscovering gravity, or that the sky is blue, or Archimedes Principle. You spend your time on new work and how that relates to previous hypotheses. The more accepted something is as a background fact the less you will see it explicitly discussed in a paper. It would therefore be reasonable to include the 2/3 of papers not bothering to mention GW causes as agreeing with the consensus - not doing so is a conservative choice minimizing actual agreements.
If, on the other hand, your work disagrees with the consensus, with accepted background material, you're going to mention that and state why, whether you consider that background material to your work or central to the paper. Meaning that we should expect a higher percentage of attribution in minority papers on climate, a higher percentage of implicit or explicit claims of dominant natural causes in 'skeptic' papers, an overrepresentation of dissention.
And yet even with that potential overrepresentation, papers arguing against AGW still come in at less than 3% of the papers mentioning causes of climate change.
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MA Rodger at 20:36 PM on 18 March 2015There is no consensus
wakeup @657.
You say:-
"Many non-scientists are bewildered by the volume of conflicting information on this subject, by fuzzy numbers and apparently authoritative statements that amount to gobbledegook when subjected to rigorous analysis. Anyone?"
The volume of 'conflicting information' and the 'fuzzy numbers' may be less easy to get you to identify, but please do give your examples of 'apparently authoritative statements that amount to gobbledegook'. It is difficult for anyone to begin to address your question without knowing what you're on about.
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Tristan at 18:46 PM on 18 March 2015There is no consensus
"while the remainding two-thirds made no finding as to cause."
That's not quite accurate. Itd be accurate to say that those two-thirds made no statement of attribution in the abstract. That's not surprising, most climate science does not involve quantifying attribution.
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wakeup at 17:22 PM on 18 March 2015There is no consensus
Advance apologies if this question has been asked and answered many times. I just discovered the site while searching for the source of the oft-quoted 97% consensus and was disconcerted to read that the consensus refers to 97% of the 33% of authors who stated a position on human-caused warming, while the remainding two-thirds made no finding as to cause. The reality, then, is that twice as many climate researchers do not agree that gw is human-caused, do not know, or are unwilling to take a position. I read one comment here that seemed to say that the 66% didn't need to state an opinion because it is so obviously human-caused - the "everyone knows" argument. This wouldn't be acceptable in a courtroom or a school science project so I hope it is not the case.
Many non-scientists are bewildered by the volume of conflicting information on this subject, by fuzzy numbers and apparently authoritative statements that amount to gobbledegook when subjected to rigorous analysis. Anyone?
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Glenn Tamblyn at 11:35 AM on 18 March 2015It's the sun
Leto @1136
Further to Tom's comment, this paper is interesting
Particularly fig 11b.
Significant step changes in the percentage of SST measurements from US ships with a significant rise during the war and a sharp drop in Aug 1945. The paper is using the older HadSST2 dataset for SST's. The more recent version has some correction for this but perhaps ot completely.
Moderator Response:[RH] Shortened link.
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Tom Curtis at 09:07 AM on 18 March 2015It's the sun
Leto @1136, 1944 (-3.27 SD), 1938 (-2.81 SD), 1943 (-2.45 SD) and 1963 (-2.02 SD) are the only years with greater than two standard deviations below the mean error between model and observed temperatures. We would expect values exceeding SD of 3.29 from the mean, assuming a normal distribution, just 0.1%. Ergo, with 131 observations, we expect to see such a value 12.3% of the time. So, while the observation is unusual, it is far from clear that the model has come "unstuck" in 1943.
There is, however, a better than even chance that there is a problem with the 1944 values, and given the closeness in time, possibly also those of 1938 and particularly 1943. Curiously two of those years are at the height of WW2, and one immediately preceeds it. This raises several issues.
First, there were large, and unevenly distributed changes in shipborne traffic in WW2. Specifically, there was a large reduction in shipborne traffic outside of military convoys in the Pacific. In the Atlantic traffic from the US to Brittain and back diverted substantially north or south of normal routes to sale near airbases that provided aircover against submarines. There is a very real possibility that these factors have distorted WW2 SST records. There are also likely to have been disruptions of land records at the same time.
Second, there was a very rapid change in the proportion of SST records taken from engine manifolds rather than by buckets in WW2, with an abrupt change back immediately after. It is not certain the correction for these factors is entirely accurate, with again the possibility of WW2 SSTs being too hot.
Third, one area that certainly saw a marked loss of traffic was the NINO3 to 4 region of the Pacific. That means ENSO records of the period are likely to be unreliable resulting in a potential erroneious ENSO correction.
Fourth, WW2 saw extensive production black carbon and oil slicks, both of which may have markedly reduced albedo. It is not clear that this has been picked up in the forcing records. If they have not been, it may be the case that the WW2 records underplay the forcing in that era.
I suspect the larger errors in the model in and near WW2 are due to some combination of these five factors (chance plus the four potential sources of error). Of the four potential sources of error, two represent potential errors in the temperature record, and two potential errors in the model. Given all of this, it is not clear that there is a problem, and if there is it is not clear that the problem is in the model. It is also possible that some other factor in what was an unusual period (to say the least) was involved.
Given all of this, my inclination is to not give too much weight to errors in the WW2 period. Where I a scientist looking at the temperature record, or the forcing or ENSO history, I would be looking at that period in detail to try and resolve the issue, but the error is not so large that it would trouble me if I could not.
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Tom Curtis at 08:35 AM on 18 March 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #11B
ryland @18, nuclear and fusion are simply off topic in this thread as none of the news articles above discuss them. There is, however, extensive discussion of both options on other SkS threads.
Moderator Response:[PS] Serious discussion of nuclear is probably better conducted at http://bravenewclimate.com/.
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Tom Curtis at 08:24 AM on 18 March 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #11B
ryland @18, the lifetime energy costs of producing solar cells is a very limited look at EROEI. Done properly, that should be a whole of project investment, including in the comparison the costs of refining the steel, manufacturing the pipe, and building oil refineries etc for comparison, not to mention the energy cost of refining and transport. It should also include the energy cost of the transmission infrastructure. By picking only on the cost of PV cells, you appear to assume that oil goes from the well to our use without any energy cost. Because many of these costs vary by project, the overall cost can only be assessed project by project.
As it happens, assessments of relative EROEI of fossil fuels and solar are quite varied. Never-the-less, the EROEI of PV solar in Germany is greater than 1. Ergo, even in Germany solar could provide all energy needed for industrial purposes, including the manufacture of new PV cells. Given that, and given the size of the total energy resource base from solar, a pure solar powered civilization is feasible, even at current technologies. As it happens, however, the EROEI of fossil fuels is declining with time, while that of solar is improving.
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Tom Curtis at 08:12 AM on 18 March 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #11B
Wol @17, apology accepted.
From 15:
"One might as well argue that all the energy involved in laying down the deposits of the various elements that are used to make PV panels - moving tectonic plates, weathering, sedimentation and the like, should be included in PVs energy budget."
Only if you also include the energy involved in processing animal and vegetable matter to oil or gas (which involves sedimentation, massive burial to quite deep depths where a combination of pressure and geothermal energy make the transformation). Further, for an apples to apples comparison, pushing that far back, you would have to quantify the energy involved in forming and moving into exploitable veins, the minerals used in manufactoring oil and gas refineries, pipelines, tankers etc. I don't know how to quantify all these additional factors, but the net balance certainly won't make our equation show fossil fuels as more efficient than solar, and in fact is likely to make the comparison less favourable for fossil fuels.
Further, including these factors only detracts from the simple point I was making. Specifically, fossil fuels are a very energy inefficient way to store energy but are only viewed favourably because the energy in storing them is largely already expended. Put another way, standard energy efficiency comparisons cherry pick an irrelevant comparison while neglecting far more imporant issues of sustainability. The comparison is irrelevant because the denominator for the energy efficiency equation for solar is so large (considering total resource) that even ridiculously low energy efficiencies provide more than enough energy.
Finally, for completeness, there are two relevant comparisons. The first is a gateway comparison only. Is the energy returned greater than energy used in gathering the energy (technically, Energy Returned on Energy Invested or EROEI). If not, the resource cannot be a primary energy resource for society. Solar comfortably meets this margin for most projects south of the Artic Circle, and wind does better. Second, what is the relative levalized cost of the two energy sources including all externalities. Solar and Wind comfortably win this comparison as well (though they loose it if you exclude fossil fuel externalities).
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william5331 at 05:30 AM on 18 March 2015Climate change in the Arctic is messing with our weather
Despite the reduction of the arctic ice, there is still an awful lot of it reflecting EM radiation back into space. Even now we see the jet stream weakening and wobbling, presumably due to the slower rotation of the Polar Hadley cell. The PHC is powered in the same way the air coming out of an open fridge is. The air radiates heat into space, the air gets heavy, flows downward and south as it hits the ground. What happens when the Arctic is open water for, say, all of August and half of September. Will this not reverse the Polar Hadley cell and suck climate zones northward. This effect should also be seen in the fall as the land rapidly cools off but the huge store of heat in the ocean is warming the air above it. It would likely be extended as freezing starts and Latent Heat is released. Interesting that if this happens it will be just as the grain crops of the Northern Hemisphere are ripening.
http://mtkass.blogspot.co.nz/2008/07/arctic-melting-no-problem.html
Moderator Response:[JH] Link activated.
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Watchdog at 04:21 AM on 18 March 2015So what did-in the dinosaurs? A murder mystery…
The causes of the deaths of living organisms wrought by the Chicxulub Impact and the Deccan Traps Emissions are clearly manifold. Here's another for instance: A paper published in Nature GeoScience by 12 scientists "Production of sulphate-rich vapour during the Chicxulub impact and implications for ocean acidification " indicates that huge amounts of Sulphur Trioxide were formed by the impact which in turn formed into Sulfuric Acid.. resulting in intense global acid rain, which for starters, is the major culprit in eliminating most of the planktonic foraminifera populations in the oceans.
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ranyl at 23:41 PM on 17 March 2015So what did-in the dinosaurs? A murder mystery…
"According to figures I have seen, the Chicxulub bolide was estimated to have a mass of about 23/4 trillion tonnes and was shifting at about 20 km/sec (straight down). That equates to a kinetic energy conversion of about 5.5x1023 joules, and therefore suggests that the energy release was roughly equivalent to about 130 million megatonnes TNT"
I'll take your words for it BtF.
Really illustates just how lethal a large CO2 injection is.
Mind you CO2 releases is the mechanism with the long rep for mass extinctions and near mass exticntions.
And we've put 2billion Hirosh bombes worth since 1998 alone and lots of sulphur and aerosols, just like ahuge volcanic offgasing just we;'ve done it really really quickly in comparison to the past events.
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swampfoxh at 22:06 PM on 17 March 2015So what did-in the dinosaurs? A murder mystery…
I'm going to need a bigger recycle bin to handle the obsolete lecture notes I use in my climate change classes. I just put forth the bolide theory in last week's session. I have learned to warn the students that change is inevitable in the realm of good science, so an abiding speculation is a valuable asset.
Thanks to the efforts at explaining the Deccan Traps events alongside the bolide impact and thanks for y'alls voluminous comments.
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Watchdog at 22:01 PM on 17 March 2015So what did-in the dinosaurs? A murder mystery…
@ ubrew12 - Perhaps if a group of geophysicists were given access to a military ballistics testing facility, the Questions surrounding the Chiculub->Earth->Deccan Traps Connection? could be settled once and for all.
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Leto at 18:13 PM on 17 March 2015It's the sun
Tom @1134 (or others), do you have any idea why the otherwise excellent model-data match for the Cowtan model comes a little unstuck around 1940?
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ubrew12 at 13:53 PM on 17 March 2015So what did-in the dinosaurs? A murder mystery…
billthefrog@19 said: "Chicxalub could have had percussions... at the hot spot" Yup. As I said, as non-scientist, I feel free to speculate. I was just speculating that maybe, given a molten core of a certain diameter, the shock of Chicxalub could have attenuated in solid matter, most probably, JUST outside that core diameter, and focused itself on a ring on the planetary opposite, of diameter commensurate with the diameter of that molten core. But, no, likelihood that the two events are related remains extremely low. Having said that, Dashiell Hammett would certainly have made that relation.
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wili at 12:52 PM on 17 March 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #11B
"the only player on the pitch bereft of hair"
btf, thankd for that literally lol moment (much needed right now). I think we've all had similar experiences but mostly don't want to admit them even to ourselves.
Meanwhile, what's freaking me out at the moment is another Mauna Loa reading over 403 ppm (March 15).(Does anyone else notice these things, or do I live alone in my horror at watching the world coming apart at the seams?)
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John Hartz at 09:31 AM on 17 March 2015It's the sun
Moderation Comment
All: Please do not respond to any future posts by Dan Pangburn until a moderator has had a chance to review them for compliance with the SkS Comments Policy.
Thank you.
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Tom Curtis at 09:28 AM on 17 March 2015It's the sun
Here is the default Cowtan model including ENSO:
It has an R squared of 0.932, superior to that obtained by Pangburn. I also uses just three parameters, compared to the five used by Pangburn to obtain his fit. In other words, it is a superior model by every measure. Yet Pangburn says of the theory underlying this model that it does not fit the observations.
For comparison, here is Pangburn's own presentation of his model matched against HadCRUT4 and the 95% confidence intervals of Loehle and McCulloch 2008 (a paper fraught with its own problems, but Pangburn's chosen empirical measure):
You will notice that in 1625, the retrodicted temperature by his method is 0.5 C above the upper confidence bound of his chosen paleo-reconstruction. Granted, he has another graph later chosen for its lower sunspot numbers in the 17th century in which his retrodicted temperatures only exceed the 95% value by a small amount (and drop below the lower value later on). Use of that graph, however, constitutes a cherry pick. It follows that Pangburn's model (unlike the IPCC models) has been falsified - and he knows it. You know that he knows it because he truncates the graph so that you cannot see just how far his model falls below the lower bound.
Even with the cherry picked sunspot data, the 17th century trend in Pangburn's model is of opposite sign to the data for a century. Contrast Pangburn's evidentiary standard for his own model, which accepts this discrepancy without qualm, to his standard for the IPCC models - which he claims are falsified by a reduced but same sign trend for 15 years.
And this just glances at the evidentiary contradictions in the empirical results of Pangburn's model. (If you want more, and a laugh, check out his predicted temperature for 2014.) It pays no attention to his assumption of constant outgoing energy over time, his ignoring of the relative strengths of forcings, his insistence that CO2 has no effective greenhouse effect contrary to very direct data - all of which fall into the category of simply unphysical mistakes.
Why is Panburn trying to insult our intelligence so with his hypocrisy?
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rkrolph at 08:51 AM on 17 March 2015It's the sun
Dan,
"mislead the gullible public"
Because someone believes what the vast majority of climate experts believe makes them gullible? If the scientific understanding changed and some other mechanism (non-human) is determined by science to be the cause of global warming then I would believe that. Would that still be gullible? But I don't see how you can call the public gullible for believing what the experts are saying.
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Leto at 08:37 AM on 17 March 2015It's the sun
edit:
Many of those processes have been discussed extensively on this site, and before making pronouncements that you know better than others you should show evidence of having at least done the basic reading that would let you enter the conversation at anything but newbie level.
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Leto at 08:32 AM on 17 March 2015It's the sun
Dan,
You greatly underestimate the complexity of the issues.
If you want to take the flattish trend in global surface temperatures since 2001 as proof that the IPCC are mistaken, first you have to demonstrate that you understand what the experts in the field say about fluctuations in those surface temperatures. No-one (except you and other deniers) is claiming that there should be a tight one-to-one correlation between CO2 and global surface temperature over the scale of a few years, because of all the various processes that shuffle heat around. Many of those processes have been discussed exetensively on this site, and before making pronouncements that you know better than others you show evidence of having at least done the basic reading that would let you enter the conversation at anything but newbie level.
You are basically attacking a straw man - and not even an interesting or novel straw man, as this is an issue on which hundreds of articles have already been written, and to which you have added no new understanding.
BTW, I had a look at your blog site, and found it full of similar simplistic musings. The most blatant was a graph in which CO2 and temperature were plotted on the same graph, but with the scales adjusted to make the CO2 curve steep and the temperature curve flat. This is the so-called "World Climate Widget", the use of which is a clear marker of someone who is not interested in the truth, but in mathturbation. This graph has been discussed is several places online, including here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/12/the-most-popular-deceptive-climate-graph/
Any claims you had of knowing beter than the world experts on this topic are completely undermined by your use of such cheap parlour tricks.
Leto.
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Dan Pangburn at 08:01 AM on 17 March 2015It's the sun
OK, apparently you don't grasp or at least don't believe what I have done.
Paraphrasing Richard Feynman: Regardless of how many experts believe it or how many organizations concur, if it doesn’t agree with observation, it’s wrong.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), some politicians and many others mislead the gullible public by stubbornly continuing to proclaim that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is a primary cause of global warming.
Measurements demonstrate that they are wrong.
CO2 increase from 1800 to 2001 was 89.5 ppmv (parts per million by volume). The atmospheric carbon dioxide level has now (through December, 2014) increased since 2001 by 28.47 ppmv (an amount equal to 31.8% of the increase that took place from 1800 to 2001) (1800, 281.6 ppmv; 2001, 371.13 ppmv; December, 2014, 399.60 ppmv).
The average global temperature trend since 2001 is flat (average of the 5 reporting agencies http://endofgw.blogspot.com/). Graphs through 2014 have been added. Current measurements are well within the range of random uncertainty with respect to the trend.
That is the observation. No amount of spin can rationalize that the temperature increase to 2001 was caused by a CO2 increase of 89.5 ppmv but that 28.47 ppmv additional CO2 increase did not cause an increase in the average global temperature trend after 2001.
What do you predict for 2020?
Moderator Response:[PS] Please carefully read the Comments Policy. Compliance is not optional. Note in particular accusations of fraud, and sloganneering. Repeating long debunked myths without offering evidence and demonstrations that you have not even read the science let alone understood do not progress any argument. You would do well to read the IPCC report before making strawman claims about what is and is not predicted.
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Watchdog at 06:22 AM on 17 March 2015So what did-in the dinosaurs? A murder mystery…
@ billthefrog .. Yes. 130,000,000 MegaTons is equivalent to 9 Billion Hiroshima A-Bombs (@ 15 kilotons apiece); nothing to sneeze at.
Plate Tectonics of 65MYA place the Deccan Traps on the opposite point of the Globe from Yucatan! Exact Aging of the Chronology of the Deccan Traps and Chicxulub remains IMO a subject of some science disagreement - such as indicated by extensive Geochronological research on Deccan Trap Aging from Kanchan Pande in Journal of Earth System Science. ALSO, during that rough time, as one might anticipate from either Asteroidal and/or Volcanic Ejecta/Emissions into the Atmosphere, Earth's Temperature dropped by as much as 8°C - resulting in a lowering of the oceans by c.40 meters - a definite sign of glaciation//global freezing - all resulting in decreased habitable land, rainfall, vegetation, and death from all the above. -
billthefrog at 05:48 AM on 17 March 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #11B
Wol #17
"Having looked it up I see it refers to..."
I know that feeling all too well.
A year or so after leaving Glasgow Univ, I was down in England watching the highlights on TV of a game of football. (That's football - as in played mainly using one's feet.) The commentator, perhaps in a misguided attempt to introduce some polysyllabic terminology into a rather drab encounter, referred to one of the players as "the ubiquitous Andy Lochhead".
As I was later to discover, the context was that the player had, after an initial stable period of 8-9 years at Burnley, changed clubs every 2 or 3 years. Unfortunately, the word "ubiquitous" was one with which I was totally unfamiliar. What, on reflection, I should have done at this point, was to have cracked open the old Oxford English Dictionary.
Instead, I refused to admit to myself that some bloody football commentator had just used a word I didn't know. So, the challenge was to work out what he could have meant, using only the information available.
After some rumination, the (false) Eureka moment arrived. The only distinguishing characteristic possessed by Andy L seemed to be that he was the only player on the pitch bereft of hair.
So, for many years afterwards, I laboured under the delusion that "ubiquitous" was some form of polite euphemism for baldness. It was only when I happened to say to one of chums something along the lines of "... you seem to be getting a little ubiquitous these days ...", that the horrible truth finally dawned.
cheers bill f
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2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #11B
In the words of J. Wellington Wimpy: "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." We should work on what we have available now to reduce our emissions (renewables), and if we have fusion further down the road that would be just ducky. But we can't depend on a technological Deus ex machina to save us, and we can't just go further down the CO2 hole without paying for it later.
Fusion power has been projected to be available 20-25 years out for half a century - and it remains 20-25 years out. I'm not holding my breath.
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knaugle at 05:43 AM on 17 March 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #11
May want to fix the typo in the 1st line "Antractic"?
Then delete my post if you want.
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It's the sun
Dan Pangborn - I would suggest reading Lean and Rind 2008, who performed multiple regression on temperature data since ~1889, and who conclude:
None of the natural processes can account for the overall warming trend in global surface temperatures. In the 100 years from 1905 to 2005, the temperature trends produce by all three natural influences are at least an order of magnitude smaller than the observed surface temperature trend reported by IPCC [2007]. 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... [Emphasis added]
They certainly found multiple linear regression both possible and useful, as did Foster and Rahmstorf 2010. If your regresssion neglects multiple factors that physics indicates are significant, your model doesn't describe reality. If you're not including the outgoing energy to space, which scales linearly with effective IR emissivity (which changes with GHG concentrations) and by T4, then you aren't accounting for energy conservation. And if your results indicate that CO2 las little or no effect in complete defiance of radiative physics, that should be a huge red flag regarding your analysis.
Quite frankly, I don't see much of use in your analysis. You might try some hold-out tests (derive your model from perhaps the first half or the second half of the temperature data, and using those computed coefficients see how well you can follow the other half) to see just how dependent your fit is on the initial data presented. I suspect you won't be happy with the results.
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michael sweet at 05:23 AM on 17 March 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #11B
Ryland,
For my entire life fusion researchers have said they would be commercial in 20 years. I can remember reports from 45 years ago and they are no closer now than they were then. It is better to emphasize technologies that currently work and use fusion when (if) it becomes available.
Fission is always a controversial topic. Some people feel strongly that it is successful and others that it is unsuccessful. Discussions are usually long and do not change anyone's minds.
Since SkS is really dedicated to discussing the science of climate change these solutions are tangential to the basic point of the site. They can be discussed at length at other sites.
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Rob Honeycutt at 05:04 AM on 17 March 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #11B
...development of trial nuclear fusion power stations is underway and it is hoped the technology will be commercially viable before 2050.
I would say the challenge comes with the unpredictability of when the technology will be commercially viable. And even then, how long after that it takes to bring full scale power plants online.There are an awful lot of unknowns in that package. We all have high hopes for that technology for sure, but it would be a huge mistake to toss too many eggs into that particular basket.
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billthefrog at 04:04 AM on 17 March 2015So what did-in the dinosaurs? A murder mystery…
@ watchdog
Just to put some numbers to it...
A one megatonne TNT energy release equates to about 4.2x1015 joules.
According to figures I have seen, the Chicxulub bolide was estimated to have a mass of about 23/4 trillion tonnes and was shifting at about 20 km/sec (straight down). That equates to a kinetic energy conversion of about 5.5x1023 joules, and therefore suggests that the energy release was roughly equivalent to about 130 million megatonnes TNT.
So it would probably have made for quite a good barbeque.
As the legendary Tzar Bomba only (?) had a yield somewhere around 50 megatonnes, that's why Novaya Zemlya still exists.
cheers bill f
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Dan Pangburn at 03:19 AM on 17 March 2015It's the sun
KR - The correlation equation initially included CO2 and T^4 considerations but they made no significant improvement in the coefficient of determination (R^2). The correlation with measurements is obviously not linear. Multiple linear regression on the period since 1700 is misleading.
Effectively there are only two free variables in the equation that gives R^2 = 0.9049. C is set to 0 so it has no influence and D simply compensates for the arbitrary reference temperature for the measured temperature anomalies.
The equation was derived using the first law of thermodynamics as described in Ref. 2 in the linked paper.
As shown in Table 1 of the linked paper, R^2 is quite insensitive to the 'break-even' number. 34 gives the highest R^2 1895-2012 and credible estimate back to the depths of the LIA.
The equation allows prediction of temperature trends using data up to any date. The predicted temperature anomaly trend in 2013 calculated using data to 1990 and actual sunspot numbers through 2013 is within 0.012 K of the trend calculated using data through 2013. The predictions depend on sunspot predictions which are not available past 2020
I have made public exactly what I did and the results of doing it including prediction. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Moderator Response:[JH] You are now skating on the thin ice of excessive repition which is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy.
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