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michael sweet at 03:18 AM on 23 January 2015Matt Ridley wants to gamble the Earth’s future because he won’t learn from the past
Ryland,
It is interesting to hear that Mr. Asten has changed his claim to " the pause in warming from 2000 on". Last year the deniers claimed the pause started in 1998.
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T. Cossins at 03:17 AM on 23 January 2015Renewables can't provide baseload power
Laws of Physics does not prohibit fusion from occurring.
A real problem is that all money goes to gargantuan projects rather than to cheaper and more promising devices. -
Jim Pettit at 00:40 AM on 23 January 2015Matt Ridley wants to gamble the Earth’s future because he won’t learn from the past
@ryland
A couple of things:
1) The Australian is yet another Murdoch-owned rag.
2) The Australian is behind a paywall; no thinking person would ever pay good money to read something from a Murdoch-owned rag (see #1 above).
3) Professor Asten has a long track record of climate change denialism.
So: given that the article to which you've linked is a) in the Murdoch-owned Australian, b) was written by a fake "skeptic", and c) by your statement contains references to the non-existent "pause" (and likely many of the other debunked zombie Asten continues to use), my "critical comment" would be this:
The article has no credibility where climate science is concerned, and therefore has no value.
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ryland at 00:17 AM on 23 January 2015Matt Ridley wants to gamble the Earth’s future because he won’t learn from the past
There is a piece in The Australian of January 22 from Michael Asten Professor of Geophysics at Monash University in which he makes a number of points on global warming, the pause in warming from 2000 on and the statement that 2014 was the warmest year ever (http://tinyurl.com/o3yq2vf). It would be great to get some critical comments from SkS readers
Moderator Response:[Rob P] - Of course this is only one surface temperature data set, and monthly data at that, but where's the paws pause?
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DSL at 00:01 AM on 23 January 2015Renewables can't provide baseload power
Yeah, I been trying to bring my dad back to life so I can ask him a question about my car. It's not working so well, but I keep thinking about what Nelson Mandela said, and I'm going to keep trying.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 23:04 PM on 22 January 2015Renewables can't provide baseload power
Unless of course it is impossible because it's impossible.
Thats the problem with all that 'taking a positive attitude' stuff. It doesn't differentiate between those things that are amenable to being solved with just some 'positive attitude', and those things where the Laws of Physics say "screw your attitude, this is reality"
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T. Cossins at 22:12 PM on 22 January 2015Renewables can't provide baseload power
"It always seems impossible until it's done" - Nelson Mandela
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One Planet Only Forever at 14:27 PM on 22 January 2015Call to climate scientists: submit your quote for 97 Hours of Consensus 2015
kmoyd,
I would ask you to consider the economic arguments in an even more challenging way.
Delaying reduction of impacts will increase the future consequences. The ones benefiting in the current generation from the delay, from the increased trouble-making, are not going to be suffering the future consequences. So any comparison of anyone's present day lost opportunity to future costs to others is clearly a red-herring type of argument. It is fundamentally unacceptable for any generation to make things worse for a future generation, no matter how much richer the current generation thinks it could be.
The same reasoning can be used to argue that it is unacceptable for anyone in the current global generation to benefit in a way that is harmful to others rather than helping them to a sustainable better life.
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One Planet Only Forever at 13:22 PM on 22 January 2015Matt Ridley wants to gamble the Earth’s future because he won’t learn from the past
As billthefrog has pointed out the problem is not Ridley, it is News Corp and all of its fans.
News Corp does not even try to present a one-to-one 'discussion' of this issue (and certainly not a 97 to 3 discussion). Their media is flooded with attempts to discredit climate science. When they present anything from "the other side" it is planned and presented to to ensure it is surrounded by attacks and unjustifiable attempts to discredit the valid points mentioned.
The fact that so many people are willing to be faithful fans of such obviously crass irresponsible illigitimate unjustifiable behaviour is the problem. And that type of person is encouraged to develop their attitude by a socio-economic-politcal system that rewards and reveres those who are able to get away with illigitimate profitability and popularity.
One way to beat such trouble-makers is to continue to increase the understanding of what is going on and ensure that all people in positions of significant responsibility and influence have no excuse to not understand it. That may enable people in the near future to compile and present solid cases of 'Evidence of a lack of the required mental capability to lead responsibly' as justification for the legal removal of such people from their illigitimately obtained positions of responsibility.
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John Cook at 13:15 PM on 22 January 2015Call to climate scientists: submit your quote for 97 Hours of Consensus 2015
kmoyd, great comment! There are a couple of answers:
Firstly, climate denial exists in a quantum state. That means many denialists might be admitting one day that humans are contributing to global warming, but you'll find the next day they are back to claiming global warming stopped in 1998. There are many stages of denial and denialists can be observed to subscribing to any number of these stages, even if they're mutually inconsistent.
Secondly, upon your suggestion of asking the scientists to focus on a specific topic, I confess the words "cat herd" immediately came to mind :-) Scientists tend to be an independent, strong-minded bunch (after all, they are the original genuine skeptics). Directing scientists in a particular direction may prove as difficult as herding cats.
However, I think what you will find in this next iteration of 97 Hours, there'll be a much greater diversity of focus in the quotes. In the first 97 Hours, we hunted for quotes ourselves and we tended to restrict ourselves to quotes endorsing the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming. That imposed a certain uniformity on the set of 97 quotes.
This time, scientists are submitting the quotes themselves. So, as a cat herd is wont to do, I'm already seeing a lot more diversity in the focus of the quotes. Scientists tend to be talking more from their own particular area of expertise.
And I'm getting some pretty whacky suggestions on how they'd like to be drawn, which sounds like a lot of fun. One scientist (who featured in the first 97 Hours) asked if he could be drawn bungee jumping. It shouldn't be too hard for people well-versed in the climate issue to figure out who that might be.
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Tom Curtis at 12:43 PM on 22 January 2015Renewables can't provide baseload power
Rob Honeycutt @115, I guess it is "theoretically possible" for a sufficiently lose definition of theory, but the specific proposal found in the video linked by Tracy Cossin's has not had the physics actually worked out in theory.
That contrasts with two other proposed fusion reactors, one of which may even be converted into a functional design within 15 years. If it is, at the economic replacement rate of power stations, that means that design would solve the problem of CO2 emissions from stationary electricity generation within 50 to 65 years (or 35 to 40 years too late). And the "if" remains very large at this stage, given that they have not even built a prototype at this stage, and expect to take 10 years to do so.
I continue to hope that fusion will play a very large part in humanities future energy budget; but that is a prospect for the end of this century, if that. Even then, it will not replace the need for largescale renewable energy because with continued economic growth, even waste heat becomes a problem for climate, and only renewable energy sources avoid the waste heat problem.
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scaddenp at 12:36 PM on 22 January 2015The Antarctic ice sheet is a sleeping giant, beginning to stir
KD - all that water piled onto antarctica, depresses the crust below it. Remove and it the crust rebounds (slowly). It also acts (like a land mass) on the water around it (not below it). Melt it and that mass is then spread thinly over ocean instead of concentrated in one place. The effects of that are mentioned in the paper and the calculations described in Bamber 2009. Are you challenging the Bamber maths?
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Tom Curtis at 12:34 PM on 22 January 2015The Antarctic ice sheet is a sleeping giant, beginning to stir
KD @13, they way you phrase your comment suggests there is some confusion about what is being claimed. In addition to the total gravitational attraction from the Earth, regions of local mass density exert a gravitational force on nearby bodies. This was first measured in relationship to mountains by Pierre Bouguer and Charles Marie de La Condamine in 1738. Equivalent techniques are the basis of the GRACE mission, which measures mass anomalies.
So, it does not make any difference to the Earth's total gravitational field whether ice is piled up 2 km deep in Greenland or spread millimeters deep across the entire surface of the Ocean. However, it makes a very large difference to the lateral gravitational attraction of the ocean towards Greenland. Enough, of all of the ice currently on Greenland is involved, to make a difference of several meters in the local sea level around Greenland (but not appreciably to global sea level). Further, if the ice is melted from Greenland it does not spread evenly over the Ocean surface, even ignoring gravitational effects. Rather, it tends to preferentially pile up near the equator due to the centripetal force. That in turn creates a smaller mass anomally which results in an increased sea level at the equator due to lateral gravitational attraction.
Overall, the effects are complex to calculate, but they are real. They have actually been observed, as shown in the third figure in my post @10. And the theory behind the effect is as old as Newton, who was the first to propose that mountains would divert plumb bobs from the vertical by a slight amount.
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Rob Honeycutt at 12:25 PM on 22 January 2015Renewables can't provide baseload power
So, in other words... It's not even a theoretical possibility yet.
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Bob Loblaw at 12:08 PM on 22 January 2015It's not us
In addition to MA Rodger's point that the change in TSI needs to be divided by 4 to account for the disk vs. sphere question, you also have to multiply the value by 0.7 to account for the fact that the earth's albedo averages about 30%. It's the change in absorbed solar that needs to be compared to the greenhouse forcings, not the change in received solar.
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The Antarctic ice sheet is a sleeping giant, beginning to stir
I personally don't believe that the ice covering Antartica is exerting a significant gravitational force on the water below it, or that this has any impact on the current sea levels at the moment. I agree with the previous comment by sgbotsford - the ice has the same mass regardless of whether it is ice or water - because water has a consistent density. We only really worry about density changes when we consider gases, because of the PV=nRT equation, where pressure and temperature are involved with volume and mols/grams of a molecule.Therefore, the 'reduction' in the gravitational force exerted by the ice on the ocean as it melts isn't very plausible when we think about ocean levels rising. I think there's a confusion between the displacement of fluids when discussing sea levels rising. Also, the paper cited by Mouginot, Rignot and Scheuchl, 2014 in the one mentioned here brings up an interesting point regarding the dynamic movements of ice sheets and how the intial, rapid change in the retreat may have been caused by longitudinal stresses exerted on the ice as basal melting proceeded (which is a natural process when we discuss ice sheets). As the basal melting proceeded, the stress continued to be amplified and a domino-like effect was the end result, where the ice sheet was forced to undergo rapid retreat in a relaively short amount of time. This could explain the period of stabilization that resulted after the rapid change in retreat. They do not really place an emphasis on anthropogenic factors and their closing remarks state that the causes are still largely uknown for the pattern.
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shoyemore at 08:38 AM on 22 January 2015Matt Ridley wants to gamble the Earth’s future because he won’t learn from the past
Ridley's record as CEO of a failed bank (Northern Rock) should be a Health Warning - apparently he ignored warnings of reckless lending. Now he was re-invented himself as a commentator on climate science, as far as I can see with the help of Tory influence on the BBC and the media.
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Tom Curtis at 08:34 AM on 22 January 2015Renewables can't provide baseload power
Tracy Cossins @112, the "inventor" of "aneutronic fusion" also thinks the same technology can be turned into a Faster Than Light drive. This does not speak well for his grasp of reality. As he has yet to build a prototype of his reactor, given that apparent disconnect from reality, I'll believe it when I see it.
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Rob Honeycutt at 07:51 AM on 22 January 2015Renewables can't provide baseload power
Tracy @112... This one doesn't look like it's even out of the concept phase yet. You're probably talking something that might come online in 40 years.
We needs big solutions on deck in the next 15 years.
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T. Cossins at 06:36 AM on 22 January 2015Renewables can't provide baseload power
A better option for baseload power is the aneutronic fusion, because it is clean and dense, no large land area, no intermittence due to climate conditions, no neutron emissions, virtually no radioactive waste, the most environmentally friendly energy source than ever. http://youtu.be/u8n7j5k-_G8
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ubrew12 at 05:57 AM on 22 January 2015Matt Ridley wants to gamble the Earth’s future because he won’t learn from the past
billthefrog@3: Yes, I get it. But once again, in what alternate reality is someone who has written extensively on Genetics the 'go to guy' for a Climate prediction? Renaissance Man? Or guy with waaay too much time on his hands? We report, you decide.
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billthefrog at 04:34 AM on 22 January 2015Matt Ridley wants to gamble the Earth’s future because he won’t learn from the past
@ubrew12
The Times (of London) is wholly owned by News Corp: in other words, it is part of the Rupert Murdoch fiefdom. Matt Ridley is an attractive proposition to them as a commentator on climate change for a variety of reasons...
a) He is part of the titled aristocracy and therefore, in the minds of some, his views carry more weight
b) He is an advisor to the Global Warming Policy Foundation
c) He is a lot more than a mere Fourth Estate hack. He has written extensively on science matters and his scientific credentials are vastly more impressive than mine. See either his wiki entry, or his entry on deSmogBlog. (NB The letters FRSL do not stand for Fellow of the Royal Society (of London), the most prestigious science body in the UK. That would just be FRS. The letter "L" at the end turns it into Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.)
I hope that helps explain why the Times is eager and willing to provide a platform for Ridley's views. (Which I am sure are not in any way influenced by the fortuitous location of any coal fields - see the link provided by Lionel in #1)
Cheers Bill F
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ubrew12 at 03:51 AM on 22 January 2015Matt Ridley wants to gamble the Earth’s future because he won’t learn from the past
Ridley: "I no longer think [Global Warming]... is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future." This is a prediction of future climate. If this guy doesn't have a PhD in Climatology why is the London Times broadcasting his prediction as if he did? The problem isn't Ridley. The problem is the London Times. The media are complicit in public complacency toward this topic. The Times today has to bypass hundreds of perfectly qualified Scientists to find one science journalist to give it the prediction it wants to hear. Who would buy it if it disserved its readership similarly in the area of economic or business prediction? But we are now well within the 'Age of Consequences' on this topic: Climate predictions are, in fact, now economic predictions. The Times is already disserving its readership about tomorrows economy.
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Lionel A at 02:37 AM on 22 January 2015Matt Ridley wants to gamble the Earth’s future because he won’t learn from the past
Matt Ridley opposes immediate aggressive efforts to cut global carbon pollution.
Of course he does, he will see a drop in income:
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Jim Hunt at 01:55 AM on 22 January 2015Global warming made 2014 a record hot year – in animated graphics
I'm somewhat surprised to see it hasn't appeared here as yet, in what seems like the obvious place. However I've now added my two cents to the two cents Rob Honeycutt added to Tamino's two cents in my deconstruction of David Rose's report on recent global temperature news:
http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2015/01/was-2014-really-the-warmest-year-in-modern-record/#BullChannel
Here's Rob's animation of Tamino's charts.
Bull markets in global surface temperature certainly look to be far more predictable than they are in stocks and shares. -
One Planet Only Forever at 01:13 AM on 22 January 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #3
wili,
As a further clarification, I was a little sloppy when I referred to significant negative SOI values as 'low'.
The SOI is the pressure diffence between Darwin and Tahiti. So a significant negative value is a 'large pressure difference' between the locations.
The categories of SOI are presented here and are more correctly:
- near neutral (positive or negative values less than 8) likely to result in neutral Nina 3.4 conditions.
- Positive (stronger than 8) likely to develop trade winds supportive of La Nina conditions
- Negative (stronger than 8) likely to develop trade winds supportive of El Nino conditions
Thanks for the reference indicating that a TS as the reason for the current SOI value. It is possble that a storm system could create temporary SOI values that only apper as if they would support El Nino. A steadier set of negative daily values resulting in a 30 day average SOI of -10 is probably more supportive of El Nino than short spurts of very significant negative values with long periods between them that produce a 30 day average of -10.
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MA Rodger at 21:15 PM on 21 January 2015It's not us
One number I forgot to tap in @86; AR5 A.II gives an average solar forcing over solar cycle 23 (1996-2007) of 0.045W/m2.
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MA Rodger at 21:02 PM on 21 January 2015It's not us
dvaytw @85.
Regarding Trenberth's ERB from CERES, it does suffer massively from calibration issues. Its decadal value is more an inference relying on OHC data than a result in itself. IPCC AR5 Chapter 2 Section 2.3.1 is saying the net satellite measurements are 'calibrated' +/-2 W/m2, which is rather a lot. There is also quite big trend calibration issue (tenths of W/m2 per decade) for which a reference doesn't immediately spring into hand.
What we importantly do have with ERB measurements is sight of the general wobbles which are valuable checks on GCM results. This also allows gaps to be filled in that allow demonstration that some of the crackpot wobblology theories (Staduim Waves etc) are nonsense and cannot be happening due to what we know of ERB. That sort of answers some of your second question @82 and is a bit of background to a graphic of mine that shows ERB less smoothed than normal (here - usually two clicks to 'download your attachment'). Unsmoothed it can be seen how any trend in ERB has yet to emerge from the wobbles.
Your TSI graph comes from Lean(2000) (Data here @ NCDC). More recent assessments of historical of TSI (see graph from CU here) do not yield such a large rise since the seventeenth century. And also, ΔTSI has to be divided by 4 to be equivilant to climate forcing as TSI is measured over the disc and forcing over the sphere. Perhaps one thing to remember with this TSI calibration here is that TSI is a component of the ERB measurement and its 'calibration' has been revised by quite a bit recently, usually downwards, much to the annoyance of denialists.
Positive forcing is now above 3W/M2 (AR5 table A.II 1.2 gives positive forcing of +3.4 W/m2 for 1750-2011and it is rising at about 0.04 W/m2 pa). But there are also less-well defined negative forcings yielding a net anthropogenic forcing of ~+2.3W/m2 for 1750-2011 according to AR5 A.II.
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dvaytw at 17:54 PM on 21 January 2015It's not us
@82, 83 and 84
I think I understand the importance of Trenberth's satellite data now; it lies not in the amount of increase since the satellites went up (as this was very recent), but in that it matches predictions made with OHC data. Have I got that right?
I also have a question about Evans 2006: he states there that Greenhouse radiation has increased by about 3 W/m2 since pre-industrial times, and a denier pointed out that this matches pretty much exactly the increase in TSI since that time:
I realize there are plenty of reasons we know it's not the sun and have pointed them out to him, but am wondering if there is any comment to be made about this correlation.
PS the discussion is happening in the comments here, if anyone's interested: -
chriskoz at 17:54 PM on 21 January 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #3
The toon is a repeat from 5 Oct 2014 and rightly so, because it's a very good one, as testified buy comments therein.
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Rob Honeycutt at 14:40 PM on 21 January 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #3
Michael Whittemore @3... Hm. I'd be more inclined to say that there are a number of studies that have proposed solutions to Trenberth's questions about "missing heat." But I'm not sure I'd say that it's been found, per se.
The amount of heat being trapped by the atmosphere is a function of both models and measurements of outgoing radiation. The "missing heat" is more of an accounting question of exactly where the heat is moving around within the climate system.
Nothing (to my knowledge) has changed relative to expectations of warming trends, since those calculations are just a function of the physics involved.
As the Talking Heads said, it's...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was... -
wili at 14:12 PM on 21 January 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #3
Here are 'Lord M Vader's' views, from Arcti Sea Ice blog:
TS 7 have now formed north of Tahiti and should quickly intensify to a cat 2 hurricane in a day or so, perhaps even reaching major hurricane satus before weakening occurs. should be able to push down the daily SOI index really low.. But of course it depends on how low the SLP will be when the cyclone is at its closest by tomorrow or by thursday.. Given this situation we should see some really low SOI values the next 2-3 days, perhaps it could bottom out at -50, -60 or even as low as -70...http://www.usno.navy.mil/JTWC/
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wili at 14:07 PM on 21 January 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #3
Thanks for that broader perspective, OPOF.
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One Planet Only Forever at 12:01 PM on 21 January 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #3
wili,
The preliminary SOI values (here) do indeed show that as of January 20 the 30 day average SOI is just at -8. However, the value may only be momentarily that low. The current 30 day averages include a few very low values in late December (that is when a set of 6 days below -8 occurred). The values for these dates and earlier are in the table I linked in my earlier post. As soon as the 30 day average moves past that set of lows (by January 24), the daily SOI values will need to be significantly below -8 to keep the 30 day average below -8.
The very long lull between the end of December set of low SOI values and this very recent set of very low values is probably why the Nina 3.4 has noticeably dropped even though the 30 day SOI averages have remained negative (the lowest 30 day value being about -5.3 even though most of the daily values were much higher).
As always the near term is more 'wait and see' than 'sure to be'.
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Michael Whittemore at 10:54 AM on 21 January 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #3
I have a question if that’s ok. In light of all the resent studies that have found missing heat, has there been a gathering of the data to show how much heat is actually building up on the Earth and how this compares to the expected warming from anthropogenic climate change. Thanks.
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wili at 05:54 AM on 21 January 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #3
Thanks for your continual attention to the on-again-off-again El Nino situation. SOI 30-day average now below -8 so no longer neutral, iirc, but pointing toward El Nino. Daily value about -40.
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MA Rodger at 03:54 AM on 21 January 2015It's not us
scaddenp @83.
The papers under discussion are Trenberth et al 2013 & Hansen et al 2003, both of which calculate the ERB from back in the 19th century having modelled the climate to fit temperature records. T(2013) figure 1 and H(2003) figure 1c are graphs of this, the latter being figure 9 of the 'advanced' post here but which is mis-referenced.
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kmoyd at 02:59 AM on 21 January 2015Call to climate scientists: submit your quote for 97 Hours of Consensus 2015
Many of the deniers are changing their position to: yes the globe is warming and humans are contributing to the warming, but the consequences are not so great that extreme action has to be taken now. Some also claim that taking action will destroy the economy.
is there any possibility of asking the submitters to focus on the effects already happening, but with specifics; e.g., the increased wandering of the jet stream being caused by a decreased temperature difference between the Artic and more southern water.
Also, could it be opened to others, such as economists, who can deal with the impacts of not taking action and of mitigations/adaptation.
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wili at 02:49 AM on 21 January 2015Global warming made 2014 a record hot year – in animated graphics
Tamino just added his two cents to the hottest-year discussion: https://tamino.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/its-the-trend-stupid-3/
“It’s the Trend, Stupid”
” The reaction of the “pausemaniacs” to the record hottest year has mostly been protest. Breakin’ some temperature record just don’t mean a gosh-darn thing worth payin’ no attention to. It only broke the record by a little bit. And besides, it ain’t the individual years, record hot or not, that count, it’s the pause that counts — a record hottest year don’t end the pause!
Methinks they do protest too much. Perhaps they fear that a record year really does threaten their beloved “pause.” But that’s not the real threat at all, it’s the fact that the data have followed the global-warming-continues-without-slowing-down pattern just about as closely as one could have expected, because all the while they’ve been bellowing about the pause that never was.
But the record year does do this: it makes it harder to sell the whole “pause” idea…”
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billthefrog at 20:48 PM on 20 January 2015Global warming made 2014 a record hot year – in animated graphics
Oops! Typo alert - never work with very big (or very small) numbers when tired.
In #28, the overall concentration of CFCs + HCFCs should have read "2 parts per billion" not per trillion. These numbers were taken from the Trace Gas section of the Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Centre (CDIAC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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billthefrog at 19:44 PM on 20 January 2015Global warming made 2014 a record hot year – in animated graphics
@ Moderator(s)
Apologies for my Post #28
Whilst I was writing the above response to the appropriately named Madkatz, you obviously were doing much the same thing. When I had finished - at around half past midnight - I hit the Submit button and then went to bed. Had I waited until this morning, I would have seen the action you had taken and would not have bothered writing #28.
Cheers Bill F
Moderator Response:[DB] Madkatz has opted out of participating further at SkS.
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One Planet Only Forever at 15:56 PM on 20 January 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #3
The dip in the Nino 3.4 value over the past month may be connected to the lack of a strong SOI (-8 or lower) over the past month.
The daily SOI values (here) show that since day 358 of 2014 the SOI has been above the -8 value considered a threshhold to help push the Tropical Pacific surface waters into an El Nino conditions. So it is no surprise that the Nino 3.4 average has been declining.
However, since January 16, the SOI daily values show another strong negative surge. Mind you, there was also a strong negative surge of the SOI daily values at the end of December.
Accurately predicting region specific near-term changes is definitely more challenging than understanding the likely long term global changes. That seems to be easily twisted into claims that the understanding of what is going on must be wrong about the future if it can't predict the near-term.
As important as near-term regional predictions are for many things like agriculture planning, emergency planning, and ocean transporation planning it may be prudent to try to avoid discussion of near-term predictions when discussing climate change. Explaining the importance of actual measured occurances like 2014 being the new Hottest Year even though it was not boosted by El Nino is helpful. Speculating too much about 2015 may not be helpful.
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John Cook at 10:32 AM on 20 January 2015Call to climate scientists: submit your quote for 97 Hours of Consensus 2015
Greg, that is actually what we found in our 2013 study - there has been an overwhelming consensus in peer-reviewed climate papers since the early 1990s, and it's getting stronger. So by 2013, it has grown to about 98%. The 97.1% figure we quote is the average over the 21 year period.
Naomi Oreskes might accuse me of erring on the side of least drama by emphasising 97.1% rather than 98%. But then, it's hard to imagine the reaction to our consensus study containing any more drama! :-)
Jack, the communication of the 97% consensus is to address the fact that the public think there is a 50:50 debate (although there's some evidence that public perception is now higher than that). So just the mere communication of that single number - 97% agreement - is a significant and powerful statement. That single number implicitly communicates what you're talking about - there is no longer a debate about human-caused global warming. There is a great deal of social science evidence demonstrating just how powerful consensus is as a simple, effective means of communicating the realities of climate change.
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billthefrog at 10:29 AM on 20 January 2015Global warming made 2014 a record hot year – in animated graphics
@Madkatz,
"Manmade CO2 is just 4% of the total CO2, in the atmosphere which is only .04% of the total gas in the atmosphere..."
On the tentative assumption that you merely have an unfortunate communication style, rather than simply being a troll, shall we try one or two little thought experiments?
1) Instead of jumping straight into atmospheric physics, why don't we kick off with some simple plumbing? Imagine that one has a 200 litre open-topped reservoir that starts off approximately half full. If there is a daily inflow of 100 litres, and that is matched by an equivalent extraction rate, the reservoir would remain about half full. Agreed?
Now, if some unrelated pipework develops a leak and drips an additional 4 litres per day (i.e. an additional 4%) into said reservoir, what happens after about 25 days? It should be obvious that about 4 litres per day will end up overflowing. Agreed?
Now, since the leak only accounts for (approximately) 4% of the new input rate of 104 litres/day, it is indeed true that only about 0.16 litre/day comes from the leak. But here's the $64,000 question: ask yourself "what mysterious agency prompted the other 3.84 litres to start overflowing at the same time"? It had been extracted quite naturally in the past without any problem, so what has changed?
2) It is probably a reasonable assumption that you would not care to be afflicted by severe sunburn or melanoma. The agency in the atmosphere which quietly goes about protecting you is stratospheric ozone (O3). The mean concentration of ozone across the globe is in the order of 600 parts per billion - as compared to our current CO2 levels of around 400 ppm and counting.
You may be aware of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) were finger printed as being responsible for the infamous Ozone Hole, and have been (and are still being) progressively phased out. (You could look at the 1995 Nobel Chemistry Prize citation.)
The total atmospheric concentration of CFCs and HCFCs is currently somewhere in the region of 2 parts per trillion, but that was enough to wreak havoc come spring time in the Antarctic. To put this in some perspective, approximately every 8 hours, the amount of extra CO2 added to the atmosphere is roughly equal to the total concentration of CFCs and HCFCs that has built up since their introduction about 85 years ago.
Getting really cheerful, the botulinum toxin has a median lethal dose (LD-50) at a concentration of somewhere just over 1 nanogram per kilogram of body weight. That's just over one part in a trillion! Were you to ingest such a dosage, you'd have a 50-50 chance of shuffling off this mortal coil.
Just because you appear to have trouble comprehending the fact that a small concentration does NOT perforce correspond to a small effect, doesn't make it any less real.
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Jim Eager at 10:22 AM on 20 January 2015Global warming made 2014 a record hot year – in animated graphics
Sorry I didn't see madkatz' reply, but judging from the in-line moderator response from RH and TD and DSL's reply, it sounds like he pretty much proved my point. Repeating long-debunked assertions and selective half-truths based on a poor understanding of the science is not making a scientific argument.
Moderator Response:[RH] Yup. You got it.
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DSL at 09:07 AM on 20 January 2015Global warming made 2014 a record hot year – in animated graphics
By the way, "faith" is the distance between evidence and reality. Everyone has faith. There's no other option, unless you can show me absolute truth. A fool is someone whose faith outdistances their evidence. I'll take science over your common sense. The two aren't mutually exclusive, but trusting to common sense alone without continually challenging it is a sure bet for looking like a fool from time to time.
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DSL at 09:02 AM on 20 January 2015Global warming made 2014 a record hot year – in animated graphics
madkatz, if you want to be taken seriously, you should probably come to an understanding of the physics involved. Roughly 98% of the atmosphere is transparent to thermal infrared radiation. What's left--H2O, CO2, CH4, etc.--manages to keep the planet about 33C warmer than it would be without those "trace" gases.
You might also want to look at the PETM event to understand what can happen when the surface temperature of the planet increases .00417C per decade over 12,000 years. Keep in mind we're warming at about 30x-40x the rate of PETM warming.
Also, human-sourced CO2 comprises about 40% of the current 400ppm in the atmosphere. Using the total C cycling through the system each year is misleading, since the system was near long-term equilibrium before human emissions and land use changes began in earnest. What matters is how much change is occurring in the atmosphere as a result of disturbing that equilibrium.
Moderator Response:[RH] If madkatz returns for more please move individual discussions to relevant threads. Thx.
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madkatz at 08:27 AM on 20 January 2015Global warming made 2014 a record hot year – in animated graphics
Jim Eager:
Manmade CO2 is just 4% of the total CO2, in the atmosphere which is only .04% of the total gas in the atmosphere. This little amount is going to bring on a climate catastrophe?!
Common sense should tell you otherwise
Yes, you have to have faith to believe this.
Any global warming is probably coming from sunspot activity.
Also don't forget we have been coming out af an ice age for the past
5000+ years. (Snip)
Moderator Response:[RH] Gish gallop deleted. You need to go back and read all the relevant sections of this site and place your comments in the proper sections. We have no tolerance for these sorts of baseless assumptions. Everyone here is open to honest discussion on any climate related issue, but you're going to have to up your game (significantly) in order to retain your posting privileges.
[TD] There are several posts that directly address your assertions. On each of the following, after you read the "Basic" tabbed pane, read the "Intermediate" and "Advanced" tabbed panes, when those exist.
Human activity has caused 100% of the rise of the atmospheric level of CO2 in the past many decades. Please read the rebuttal to the myth "Human CO2 Is a Tiny % of CO2 Emissions." For more about the mass balance evidence see "The Independence of Global Warming on Residence Time of CO2." See also "New Study by Skeptical Science Author Finds 100% of Atmospheric CO2 Rise Is Man-Made."
The CO2 (totaled across all sources) level as a percent of all the gases in the atmosphere is no more relevant than is computing the CO2 mass as a percent of the mass of all the sandwiches ever made. That's because the vast majority of gases in the atmosphere do not absorb the infrared radiation that the Earth radiates. The gases that do absorb that IR are called greenhouse gases. What matters is the percentage by which greenhouse gases have increased, and how fast. See "How Do We Know More CO2 Is Causing Warming?"
Regarding sunspots: See the counterargument to the myth "It's the Sun."
As RH told you, any comments on those topics must be put on those threads, not here where they are off topic.
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scaddenp at 06:09 AM on 20 January 2015It's not us
dvaytw - I am struggling a little to follow you. Can you please be more precise about which paper you mean where you find Trenberth and Hansen discussing TOA energy balance at times prior to the satellite era? In Trenberth et al 2013, there is discussion of how difficult this is given the uncertainity in OHC measurements prior to Argo.
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jack chirnside at 05:31 AM on 20 January 2015Call to climate scientists: submit your quote for 97 Hours of Consensus 2015
The concept of a "Climate Change Debate" allows the doubters too much wriggle room. The reality is that there is no longer a debate about anthropogenic climate change. We should become more aggressive in our stance. We should insist on discussing the "fact" of CC. The small element of doubt has been exploited by those in denial of CC. The result is that the public are genuinely confused.
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