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Comments 33301 to 33350:
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hank at 02:58 AM on 20 October 2014IPCC admits global warming has paused
Aside — you'll find many 'septic' sites posting a partial quote from Al Gore's 2007 Nobel acceptance speech (one way to identify that sort of misattribution and spin is to look for their copypaste repeats of the partial quote).
Here it is in context:
"Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is "falling off a cliff." One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years."
The US Navy research: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=maslowski+2007+arctic&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=2007&as_yhi=
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Hans11230 at 07:17 AM on 19 October 2014Breathing contributes to CO2 buildup
And of course I agree with what I have read somewhere that the extra 3 billion people are an extra sink of Carbon.
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wili at 06:34 AM on 19 October 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #42B
Have you included any articles about the drought in much of Brazil (and in Central and South America for that matter)? Sao Paulo, the largest city in SA, in particular is on the verge of running out of water and having to turn to much-lower-quality reserves. CA is not the only dry spot in the world.
Moderator Response:[JH] You can readily answer your question by inserting "South America" into the SkS search engine.
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Hans11230 at 06:17 AM on 19 October 2014Breathing contributes to CO2 buildup
I'm sorry to bring up this subject again, but I've only just been introduced to this platform. I have had no previous opportunity of discussing whether " Breathing contributes to CO2 buildup "?When we replace forests bij vegetable fields a lot less carbon is stored in vegetable fields than in forests. The forest canopy is higher and permanent while vegetables are also a seasonal crop.
The differrence in carbon storage has been burned and is introduced into the atmosphere. Therefore 7 billion people needing more crops than 4 billion people will subsequently have displaced carbon from storage in forests to the atmosphere. This is added to the GHG. Breathing will not further increase the amount of GHG as we have to keep growing crops to keep the cycle in balance.
So yes there should be more GHG and I think you can feel this in your bones. But its in facilitating our food that crops are a far less functional temporary carbon sink.
And breathing does NOT contribute to a buildup of CO2 as we will allways have to cultivate new crops to ensure a continual supply to enable future bre -
jja at 02:32 AM on 19 October 2014Why ice sheets will keep melting for centuries to come
Even the PETM took 10,000 years to advance to a hothouse state.
RCP 8.5 will create a hothouse earth within 200-300 years. -
Phil at 22:30 PM on 18 October 2014How did the UK grid respond to losing a few nuclear reactors?
For a brief time early this morning, Wind was the second largest contributor to the UK grid, and came within a whisker of being the largest
Time Coal Wind CCGT Nuclear 5.20am 5.87 5.578 5.316 4.343 6.20am 7.321 5.99 5.956 4.337
(figures in GW)
Obviously this is cherrypicking; demand at this time is at its lowest, and wind conditions appear to ideal for power generation at the moment. Nevertheless it does indicate that the UK grid can accomodate a substantial proportion of wind power. The interconnector to Holland was also fully importing, suggesting that mainland Europe also had an abundance of wind energy.
Data from www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
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Glenn Tamblyn at 15:55 PM on 18 October 2014CO2 effect is saturated
Jonathon
See my comments attached to your video.
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Jonathan Doolin at 14:06 PM on 18 October 2014CO2 effect is saturated
I put together A 20 Minute Video that attempts to explain some of my current thinking. I don't think I have any current questions...
KR, Thanks for the reference to Harries. But at $32 to read the article, or $199 to get a year's subscription to nature. I'm going to try to figure it out on the cheap.
Moderator Response:[DB] Try here.
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scaddenp at 11:42 AM on 18 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Most significant climate papers are published in journals that have a larger base than climate science and so have same process as all the other disciplines. I do hope you will further at the dispersions cast on scientists and peer review than just the misrepresentations by "skeptics". It is not often you get mass resignations of journal editors.
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Bob Loblaw at 10:56 AM on 18 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Ashton:
Yes, there have been some rather poor practises in peer review in climate science. In addition to the links provided by DSL, I suggest you take a look through this article chronicling Pal Review.
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mbryson at 10:55 AM on 18 October 2014Why ice sheets will keep melting for centuries to come
Riduna: I agree— when it comes to events like that, preparing for the more extreme scenario is wise, even if we think it's unlikely. It's called insurance, it makes sense when we can't afford a potential loss, and this case meets that description in spades.
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mbryson at 10:52 AM on 18 October 2014Why ice sheets will keep melting for centuries to come
Ranyl: Your first question is the one I logged on to ask. I can understand that the amount of ice makes a big difference, but the rate of warming now, as I understand it, is much higher than at the end of the last ice age. So an inference about likely rates of sea level rise in the future based just on the amount of ice seems to leave something important out.
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Bob Loblaw at 10:50 AM on 18 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Please take this as an entirely tongue-in-cheek look at publications and citations, but as soon as I read this thread I was reminded of the old chain-mail take on how to get tenure. I easily found the full text online at this location, with a bit of background info on its origin, but here it is for local fun. I particularly enjoy the third paper cited.
Dear Fellow Scientist:
This letter has been around the world at least seven times. It has been to many major conferences. Now it has come to you. It will bring you good fortune. This is true even if you don't believe it. But you must follow these instructions:
- Include in your next journal article the citations below;
- Remove the first citation from the list and add a citation to your journal article at the bottom;
- Make 10 copies and send them to colleagues.
Within one year, you will be cited up to 10,000 times! This will amaze your fellow faculty, assure your promotion and improve your sex life. In addition, you will bring joy to many colleagues. Do not break the reference loop, but send this letter on today.
Dr. H. received this letter and within a year after passing it on she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Prof. M. threw this letter away and was denied tenure. In Japan, Dr. I. received this letter and put it aside. His article for Trans. on nephrology was rejected. He found the letter and passed it on, and his article was published that year in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the Midwest, Prof. K. failed to pass on the letter, and in a budget cutback his entire department was eliminated. This could happen to you if you break the chain of citations.
1. Miller, J. (1992). Post-modern neo-cubism and the wave theory of light. Journal of Cognitive Artifacts, 8, 113-117.
2. Johnson, S. (1991). Micturition in the canid family: the irresistible pull of the hydrant. Physics Quarterly, 33, 203-220.
3. Anderson, R. (1990). Your place or mine?: an empirical comparison of two models of human mating behavior. Psychology Yesterday 12, 63-77.
4. David, E. (1994). Modern Approaches to Chaotic Heuristic Optimization: Means of Analyzing Non-Linear Intelligent Networks with Emergent Symbolic Structure. (doctoral dissertation, University of California at Santa Royale El Camino del Rey Mar Vista by-the-sea).
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Riduna at 10:25 AM on 18 October 2014Why ice sheets will keep melting for centuries to come
“When starting with double the modern ice volume or less, sea levels did not rise faster than 2m per century”
Not quite. Meltwater pulse 1A produced SLR of 200m in a thousand years some 14,000 years ago. What unprecedented AGW is now doing to climate and OHC indicates that average global sea level rise this century is going to be a lot more than current predictions of 1m by 2100.
Governments should be planning on SLR of at least 2-4m by 2100 rather than relying on conservative assessment such as this.
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Firgoose at 07:35 AM on 18 October 2014Why ice sheets will keep melting for centuries to come
I read that in The Conversation a while back and the comments are worth reading as well. Professor Rohling was very responsive.
The Read the original article link at the end of the article above has a digit missing from the conversation id, hence clicking it will lead you to discover more than you realised you needed to know about incontinence in young women. ;o)
Here's the actual conversation
Moderator Response:[JH] Link fixed. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
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DSL at 06:22 AM on 18 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Ashton: "I'm not sure what the peer review process really is in Climate Science, although some disquieting emails on peer review in Climate Science were brought to light a few years ago."
Yes, that's true Ashton. The Soon & Baliunas (2003) affair was fairly disquieting. The Wegman affair was as well. But perhaps it's these emails that you're referring to, addressed to the Met Office's Phil Jones.
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Ashton at 03:49 AM on 18 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
I'm not sure what the peer review process really is in Climate Science, although some disquieting emails on peer review in Climate Science were brought to light a few years ago. I suspect it probably is no different from the peer review pocess in my own area where I never found out who peer reviewd the papers I submitted. On publishing in open journals, which seem to be a lot less rigorous in their scrutiny of submitted papers, I write seem as I haven't submitted to such journals, it does add to the body of published work by an academic. Although this may not enhance his/her standing in their particular scientific community, it could be very advantageous in internal applications for promotion where a long list of publications can have a ssignificant positive impact on the university promotion committee
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ranyl at 02:15 AM on 18 October 2014Why ice sheets will keep melting for centuries to come
Thank you Eelco Rohling,
1m is reassuring as you say.
However what scale and rate of heating forcing was that reacting to?
And does the current unprecendented rate of warming mean things might more quickly?
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Dikran Marsupial at 00:56 AM on 18 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
CBDunkerson, I don't think that is necessarily the case, there are comparatively few skeptics, so even if they all cite every paper each of them writes, that is still a relatively small number of citations for any given paper, compared to the available citations available from the research community in general. A basic newtork analysis would expose their gaming of the system, so there would be little to gain from it.
However, I was more thinking of acedemia in general rather than climate science in particular. If academics no longer have an incentive to write papers that nobody cites (i.e. that everybody ignores), there will be no profit in running a predatory open access journal.
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CBDunkerson at 21:44 PM on 17 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Dikran wrote: "One possible solution to this problem is to make promotions etc. for researchers contingent on the citation of their papers rather than merely the existence of the papers themselves."
Unfortunately, I doubt that would work for very long. Given the established willingness of 'skeptics' to game the system, changing the details of the sytem will just mean a brief period of clarity until they adjust by changing their gaming strategy. In this case... if citations are the determinant it seems inevitable that groups of 'skeptics' would get together and cite each other's papers en masse. Even legitimate scientists might be tempted to cite a friend's tangentially related work just to 'help them out'.
Unless some 'ungameable' benchmark can be established, switching the benchmarks only serves to make an even bigger mess in the long run as each standard is deliberately corrupted in turn.
An alternate approach is to play 'whack-a-mole' with each effort to undermine the current standards. In this case, if we take the problem to be publication of dubious research in journals with low standards, a solution might be to establish a means of identifying such journals and excluding them from consideration. No doubt this would lead to cries of 'bias' and 'censorship', but the reality is that various forms of publication (blogs, vanity press, un 'reviewed' papers, et cetera) are already excluded. This would just move the line slightly from including 'anything even ostensibly reviewed' to 'anything reviewed in a remotely competent manner'.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 20:34 PM on 17 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
"Everything else is colored blooming nonsense."
You've gotta love a slap down with style...
More broadly, one day the psychologists are going to be able to mine the history of fringe climate denial to nail down the specific brain centers where Dunning Kruger originates.
......SORRY. Totally OT. But this totally cracked me up. From the WP article on the DK Effect:
"The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, as lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras"
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Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Ashton - The Lindzen and Choi paper was discussed on this thread. Nothing new from the previous 3-4 papers on the same topic, no addressing of the multiple rebuttals and previously demonstrated errors.
The Harde papers references of Lindzen et al 2001, Spencer and Braswell 2011, Salby 2012, Ludecke 2011, etc, are rather blatant examples of relying on wholly debunked works without referencing any of the later and contradicting literature.
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Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
A response from Dr. G. Kramm (who is well published in climate studies) on the earlier EIKE thread promoting Harde states (again, my apologies for auto-translated German) with respect to Hardes paper:
[Notes that Harde hasn't cited relevant works]... The rivers of sensible and latent warmth allowed to be calculated only according to local temperature and humidity distributions. Everything else is colored blooming nonsense.
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Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Hermann Harde has commented regarding his paper on the EIKE website (German climate denial lobbying group), which has been promoting his paper. My German is quite poor, so I'm relying on Google Translate for this - I expect fluent readers to have more clear information. Some notes and statements from that comment:
- Harde is retired, writing on climate in his spare time.
- "...but generally about the greenhouse effect. It is almost nonsense, of a self-heating mechanism or Perpetuum Mobile to talk..." -this is Gerlich & Tscheuschner level nonsense, and in fact a term straight from G&T; the greenhouse effect is not invalidated by thermodynamics.
- "That the CO2 concentration increases delayed (by Prof. M. Salby about 9 months) due to heating caused mainly by increased solar activity, no one disputes in this county. This has only effect that so climate sensitivity is additionally influence as a feedback or gain to the solar sensitivity." - No, it's not the sun, CO2 increases over the last century are _not_ due to the warming ocean, as oceanic concentrations are rising too, and Salby's nonsense is demonstrably just that.
- "...GCMs turns out here so great that all were not able one and all and to indicate the climate evolution of the last 17 years and also for the near future..." - Ah, the inevitable 'hiatus' comment...
- "Limitations to this, it is only at a underlying thermally induced cloud feedback in the superimposed oscillations and can change the feedback coefficients." - The only feedback in his model appears to be a fixed cloud scaling with temperature. I cannot find any reference to water vapor or specific humidity.
- "Circulation and exchange between different zones I do not treat as a global ECS and no climate sensitivities of individual zones are considered here." - A _very_ simple model.
His starting point is rather worse than I had expected, loaded with climate denial myths. And while his radiative model is quite complex (228 layers - as I understand it line by line radiative code converges asymptotically after about 40 layers), his climate model and it's response to CO2 changes is clearly inadequate to the task.
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ajki at 15:25 PM on 16 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
When I read the name "Harde" I had the bad feeling that another G&T embarassment might show up. To my relief the Rabett states: "Harde's stuff is of a much higher quality than the G&T joke."
But it may well not be much higher, either. The citation base seems to be grounded on known outliers (Lindzen, Spencer...), even Vahrenholts "Kalte Sonne" gets cited. How low can you possibly go? And then this brave retired man gets his applause from web sites like EIKE or "science skeptical" (a kind of german SkS travesty). Like G&T it is one of those 450+ "papers" that EIKE uses to show the real true truth that everything from the Alarmistas is wrong and fabricated (and they never turn down anything from that ongrowing list, even if so debunked and burned that the authors themselves do not mention it anymore).
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Joel_Huberman at 15:15 PM on 16 October 2014Ocean Warming has been Greatly Underestimated
A fascinating article. Thanks, Rob. You've persuaded me that it will be worth my while to read Durack et al. in detail. I hope others, who are more knowledgeable, will comment on the fascinating/frightening implications that jja (@1) sees in the results of Durack et al.
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Rob Honeycutt at 13:22 PM on 16 October 2014Scientist in focus – Arctic adventurer Will Steger
wili... It's just from conversations I've picked up from reliable people. And the fact that I am hesitant to assign intent (to exclude) when there's no particular reason to believe it's there.
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wili at 12:00 PM on 16 October 2014Scientist in focus – Arctic adventurer Will Steger
"too much being read into what actually happened"
That can certainly happen. Do you have any basis for the claim, besides the interesting points you've already shared?
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Bob Loblaw at 11:56 AM on 16 October 2014CO2 effect is saturated
Jonathan:
What KR and Glenn said. Scattering and absorption/re-emission are different beasts.
Wikipedia actually has an article on Rayleigh Scattering, which in the atmosphere is the scattering caused by the air molecules themselves. Ditto for Mie Scattering, which in the atmosphere is caused by all the particulate matter. In fog, also add reflection (including internal - i.e., inside the water droplets). And in all cases, expect multiple scattering - light that is scattered many times, sometimes to the point where you can't tell up from down (white-out in a blizzard).
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Bob Loblaw at 11:48 AM on 16 October 2014CO2 effect is saturated
Glenn @ 308:
A good catch. I had realized that figure 7.3 in that source was not covering the peak absorption wavelengths - hence my reference to figure 7.2 where the right side shows much greater absorption.
Other references I had on hand gave absorption coefficients with units such as kg/m2. When using Beer's Law, you must be careful of units, and typically simple distance (e.g., metres) isn't one you'll see because distance isn't a measurement of the amount of gas - you need density, pressure, etc. to get the full picture. I wasn't about to try to figure it out late at night, and missed the context of figure 7.1. I had also looked at table 7.1 in that document, which gives several possible units for path length, including "cm" and "cm atm". I don't think either one of them is intended to be simple linear distance.
It is possible to measure gas amount in length units, but the length isn't ordinary distance. Take ozone for example, where a Dobson Unit (a common measure of total column ozone) represents a thickness of ozone of 10 µm, when compressed to standard tempeature and pressure. The WIkipedia page also calls that a "milli-atmo-centimeter", so I'm going to guess that the "cm atm" unit in table 7.1 is a similar measure. Thus, just because an absorption coefficient has units of length doesn't mean the path length is really distance or height.
The data from figure 7.1 does definitely appear to represent a physical path in the free atmosphere of 1 metre, though. They refer to 100 and 1000 mb as the pressure, and "typical CO2 concentration".
The PDF file I linked to appears to be just one lecture in a course on atmospheric radiation, and the course syllabus is available here. It looks like it has a lot of interesting material.
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Rob Honeycutt at 11:42 AM on 16 October 2014Scientist in focus – Arctic adventurer Will Steger
wili... I get the sense there is too much being read into what actually happened.
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wili at 10:56 AM on 16 October 2014Scientist in focus – Arctic adventurer Will Steger
Thanks for the insights and links. As far as I've seen, no one is questioning their actual published data in any severe way, so it seems they should be heard. I have not heard of any scientists excluded for their scientific reticence about extrapolating negative info, so I think it is a bad precedence for peopl who err slightly on the other side. I would say the former (reticence), all in all, is ultimately more...problematic.
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Rob Honeycutt at 08:32 AM on 16 October 2014Scientist in focus – Arctic adventurer Will Steger
wili... I saw a little bit about this and it sounded like they were not actually excluded but the RS just couldn't reschedule on demand to accomodate them. Apparently it was a session where only about 18 or so people were invited, so they were not the only people who weren't invited.
On the methane bomb... There seem to be a lot of good scientists who are skeptical of this idea. Richard Alley, I believe is one who states something along the lines of, maybe, but probably not anytime soon. I've seen others state that magintudes are insufficient to compete with CO2.
Peter Sinclair just recently posted a couple of interviews related to this issue.
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scaddenp at 08:05 AM on 16 October 2014Scientist in focus – Arctic adventurer Will Steger
Wili - the issue I think, is not with Shakhova's science and observational contributions, but more with somewhat alarmist extrapolations from them.
I notice that David Archer responded to you on this very issue here. Modelling doesnt support a methane monster.
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wili at 07:24 AM on 16 October 2014Scientist in focus – Arctic adventurer Will Steger
(That is, of course, not to take anything away from Will Steger! I admire him greatly, have heard him speak and am pleased to live in the same metropolis as both he and John Abraham do.)
I just realized that I didn't link that correctly--some people never learn :-/
I'll try again: Ignoring the Arctic Methane Monster: Royal Society Goes Dark on Arctic Observational Science -
wili at 07:13 AM on 16 October 2014Scientist in focus – Arctic adventurer Will Steger
I would count any scientist who works in such extreme conditions to also be an 'explorer.' Last year a ship of scientist was in danger in a storm in the Arctic. They were saved, but many who went to save them perished.
Two such brave explorer/scientists are Igor Semiletov and Natalia Shakhova. They just returned from another long and dangerous voyage studying this critical region only to find that, in spite of being the two scientists with the longest history of working in the area, they were excluded from a session at the Royal Academy on just this topic.
Does anyone know what is going on here?
http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/ignoring-the-arctic-methane-monster-royal-society-goes-dark-on-arctic-observational-science/
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jja at 06:55 AM on 16 October 2014Ocean Warming has been Greatly Underestimated
In addition, a higher GHG forcing and stronger aerosol effect would reveal anthropogenic impacts on 1910-1975 warming trends as well as lend increased weight to Ruddiman et. al (2011) http://www.whoi.edu/pclift/Ruddiman.pdf
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scaddenp at 05:57 AM on 16 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
"It is to an authors advantage to send their work to a journal that is likely to give them a hard time,"
Yes. In many areas of science (especially where there is real controversy rather than manufactured) , each paper published is a shot fired in a war. It is common around here to suggest as a reviewer the person that will hate the paper most. Such a person is much more likely to put the time and effort into giving the paper an exhaustive review. This results in a much better paper than one that has only had prefunctory review from busy colleagues, even if it delays publication.
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Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
There are a couple of references to earlier versions of Prof. Harde's work on Rabett Run, here and in the comments here.
The gist of it seems to be that Harde used some quite good molecular data for radiative calculations in a very simplistic climate model without feedbacks (or for that matter oceans) - and that seems to be the case with the current publication.
His result of 0.6 ˚C/CO2 doubling is therefore only comparable to the generally computed 1.1 ˚C of direct CO2 forcing (prior to feedbacks), as per Myhre et al. 1998. By comparison, Myhre used multiple atmospheric profiles with differing cloud levels, and compared three different radiative models for their estimates, which have held up in the literature quite well. I believe that Harde's very limited (and crude) model is responsible for the difference.
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Dikran Marsupial at 00:37 AM on 16 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
I used to teach a postgraduate course (an afternoon) on how to review a paper, and I usually started by discussing why we publish and what the author gains from peer review (so you understand the aim of reviewing). The main purpose of publishing is so that other people working in our field will read ours ideas, test them, and if they work will use them in their own research. The thing that the author gains from peer review ought to be rigorous criticism that prevents publication of a paper that would be damaging to our research reputation (perhaps because it is wrong, or doesn't support the argument sufficiently well with observational or experimental) and if it is publishable make it a better paper that is more likely to be cited by other researchers who find it useful.
It is to an authors advantage to send their work to a journal that is likely to give them a hard time, as it is the criticism provided by peer review that maximises their chances of having an impact and being cited. If you think you have something that shows a whole research field is wrong, you ought to send it to the top journal, and if they don't accept it then perhaps it is because your idea isn't as good as you think it is and you need to work to refute their criticisms.The important thing in science though is not the source of the argument, but its validity. As others have suggested above, Prof. Harde's method is not actually very advanced, and has a number of obvious flaws.
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Ashton at 00:15 AM on 16 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Thanks for the discussion which is not overly supportive of Professor Harde. From the summaries of the list of reviewers from Tom Curtis I have to agree with Dikran Marsupial that the review panel may lack experience. I also have to agree that Dr Harde might have selected a more apposite and auspicious journal to which to submit his paper. Of course I can't know that he didn't.
I frequently disagree with posters here but on this occasion it is plain that the discussion of the paper here is in an entirely different and better, class from that I have read elsewhere
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Tom Curtis at 23:50 PM on 15 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Dikran @11, here are the members of the Editorial board registered with google scholar.
Chandra Shekhar Prasad Ojha cited 1126 times
water resources, evironmental engineering
Mohammad Hadi Dehghani cited 282 times
Environmental Health, Solid Waste Management, Air Pollution
Mrinmoy Majumder cited 70 times
watershed management, climate change, hydro power, nature based algorithm
Panagiotis T. Nastos cited 1382 times
Climatic Change, Human Biometeorology, Outdoor Thermal Comfort, Urban Microclimate, Atmospheric Pollution
T.N.Singh cited 1729 times
Rock Mechanics, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering Geology, Mining
That makes an avearge of 917.8 citations per editorial board member.
I don't have much perspective on that, but (for example) Kevin Trenberth has 39953 citations, Judith Curry has 12073, and John Church has 9905. It appears then, that they are on the lower end of a respectable citation results. However, the connection between their output and the journal's subject matter seems a little stretched in most cases.
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Dikran Marsupial at 22:29 PM on 15 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Tom, the h-5 index of the journal would indeed be a useful metric if it were available, however in its absence you can look at the h-indices of the editorial board. If the editorial board are not experienced leading researchers, it is likely to be a recipe for errors in the peer review process (c.f. Pattern Recognition in Physics)
It isn't immediately clear to me why a truncated icosahedron would be more mathematically tractable than a sphere!
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Tom Curtis at 22:21 PM on 15 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Glenn Tamblyn @9, simple is not the word for it.
The model treats the Earth as truncated icosahedron, ie, a regular solid with 24 faces. It divides the world into three isothermal climate zones. It appears to treat all gases as absorbing and emitting at 11 km altitude (with temperature determined by lapse rate), thereby elevating the influence of water vapour by about 6 km above its natural level and (due to overlaps) greatly reducing the impact of CO2 relative to real values.
Not so much a simple climate model, therefore, but a parody of a climate model. Even with this, Harde still needs to use a solar forcing greater than 230% above the upper bound of the 90% confidence interval for solar forcing from 1751 as given by the IPCC.
Finally, he eschews any effort to hindcast 20th century temperatures, limiting his empirical validation to the ability to predict the gross values for TOA and surface, upward and downward LW and SW fluxes. He makes not effort to retrodict individual sources of fluxes as determined by observation, or course, for doing so would massively invalidate the model (which is radically inconsistent with the results of LBL radiation models, and hence with the related observations).
I know that if I had to cite this article as evidence in an a discussion, I would have lost the argument.
Dikran @8, the article is published in an open access journal whose first edition was May, 2014 and which unsurprisingly does not appear in the Google h-5 index. It does not appear on lists of predatory publishers yet, but given the publication of the Harde paper, that must surely be only a matter of time.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 21:19 PM on 15 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Ashton
From the abstract of the Harde paper - 'The model describes the atmosphere and the ground as two layers acting simultaneously as absorbers and Planck radiators, and it includes additional heat transfer between these layers due to convection and evaporation'
Sounds like a very simple version of a climate model. No mention of the different layers in the atmosphere which you need to try and get clouds and radiative transfer right. And no mention of the oceans. If it doesn't model the oceans any conclusions are likely to be wrong.
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Dikran Marsupial at 20:57 PM on 15 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Ashton, open access journals are a good thing, unless they are predatory open access journals, and I doubt you will find anybody that fails to make that distinction. The real problem is journals with inadequate peer review processes. A good way of distinuishing between good journals and bad is to look at the Google Scholar profiles of those on the editorial board and see whether they are eminent and experienced scientists whos own work is well regarded (and therefore widely cited).
One possible solution to this problem is to make promotions etc. for researchers contingent on the citation of their papers rather than merely the existence of the papers themselves. Arguably there isn't much point in writing papers that nobody will cite. There then would no longer be the pressure for academic to publish, just a pressure to perform good work that will be valued by their research community.
I think if Prof. Harde had any real confidence in his work he would have sent it to a good journal that climatologists actually read.
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Ashton at 19:58 PM on 15 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
Sorry that should be the L&C paper. Apologies for a very careless error
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Ashton at 19:56 PM on 15 October 2014Dinner with global warming contrarians, disaster for dessert
jja@1. An even more recent paper by Hermann Harde supports the lower estimate of climate sensitivity reported by Lewis and Curry. The paper in the Open Journal of Atmospheric and Climate Change is at http://www.scipublish.com/journals/ACC/recent and perhaps the significance of it and the L&K paper might be discused here.
I am aware that Open Journals are regarded by some as the spawn of the devil but perhaps the recent support by the Guardian may, in time, alter that view.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 17:54 PM on 15 October 2014The long hot tail of global warming - new thinking on the Eocene greenhouse climate
fairoakien
In addition to Howards points, there is fundamental observation of what is happening today that says AGW isn't natural variability. The warming of the oceans. If all we were looking at was warming of the atmosphere then certainly natural variability might be considered. But the warming of the oceans precludes this.
Heat build-up in the oceans is proceeding at a rate of around 250-300 trillion watts. If that heat were all going into the atmosphere then air temperatures - what we think of as climate - would be rising at around 15 deg C per decade.
And the rate of heat accumulation in the oceans says something very basic. It isn't coming from anywhere here on Earth. The largest heat source on the planet is geothermal heat. And geologists have been able to estimate the total rate of geothermal heat flowing out of the planet. 44.2 trillion watts. Simply too small to supply the energy we are seeing added to the oceans.
So the only conclusion that is possible is that this extra heat is coming from somewhere off the Earth.
In contrast the flow of heat from the Sun and then being radiated out to space by the Earth is around 120,000 trillion watts. Even a tiny disturbance in these two flows can easily supply all the heat we are observing. But the heat flow from the Sun hasn't increased - we have been monitoring the Sun for around 40 years now. If anything the energy flow from the Sun has declined ever so slightly.
Which leaves the heat flowing out from the planet as the source. If something is restricting that flow then the heating can easily be explained. And the something that modulates that flow is the Greenhouse Effect.
Key to this however is that this isn't natural variability! That can't explain what we are seeing.
So when skeptics suggest that natural variability is the explanation, they aren't looking at all the evidence.
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Jonathan Doolin at 16:03 PM on 15 October 2014CO2 effect is saturated
Thank you Glenn @313
I needed to understand what fog is, so I could understand why CO2 is not fog.
I guess that fog is made of tiny little balls of water, that have reflective surfaces.
I did not realize that Carbon Dioxide only absorbs and emits, but does not reflect.This is a very helpful answer.
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