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Comments 37401 to 37450:
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tonydunc at 02:01 AM on 29 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
I have been using this argument with opponents of ACC, and rarely get a coherent response. I also include the apparent ocean heating from Argo as another factor, and that if it was not for CO2 global temps should have fallen significantly with all these factors. so current high plateau global temps are actually strong support for ACC.
My positon is that if this is an ad hoc argument designed to shore up the fradulent alarmist cries of CAGW, then the fixes should be clunky and increasingly untenable. Much like epicycles were for the solar system.
I always acknowledge that it is possible that these are not factors, but I don't know enough about quantifying the effect, and can't read Gavin's paper (paywall).
At some point, unless these particular mitigating factors become stronger, the GHE will have to overwhelm then and global surface temps will increase and stay above current global temps. So what period of time from now would undermine current ACC theory?
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michael sweet at 00:51 AM on 29 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Ranyl,
Can you provide citations for your claims about the problems of manufacturing solar. Please cite peer reviewed material if possible.
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energydata at 00:45 AM on 29 March 2014Climate Models Show Remarkable Agreement with Recent Surface Warming
Current Locations of the Net Energy Gain by the Earth over the Past 40 Years (According to the IPCC AR5) http://j.mp/EarthEnergyAllocation
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folke_kelm at 20:31 PM on 28 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #13A
regarding ElNino development there is a very intresting discussion on the
Arctic Sea Ice Forum. http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php?topic=730.new;topicseen#new
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michael sweet at 20:16 PM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Terranova,
I agree with Scaddenp above. I would add that in the two places in the US that I have lived, Florida and California, two nuclear plants have recently shut down because of failed upgrade attempts and no new plants are planned. If it is not economic to repair an existing plant (with the generators, transmission lines and environmental studies already in place) how could you build a new one? There is extreme subsidation of nuclear (one Florida company was allowed to charge their customers $1.5 billion for planning on a new plant that never broke ground). Another Florida plant has severe problems from a recent upgrade. Can you provide evidence that nuclear is economic without government subsidy? In what country?
I do not want to comment again on nuclear because everyone has already made up their minds and it clogs up the threads.
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ranyl at 18:15 PM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Ranyl #3: So where I was not being truthful about solar and wind energy? I only suggested in passing that they are good from climate point of view (which they are) and didn't claim we only need to use those in the future. Neither did I claim that these two don't have any environmental problems.
Well I didn't say you wren't beign truthful in aspect just not taking full consideration.
PV is not good environmentally, they are toxic waste that can't be got rid of, use massive amount s of energy to make, produce lots of toxic waste in manufacturing and recycling due to treatments, release other very active GHG (NF3, HFC's used a cleanign agents) have significant impacts in large arrays (and to provide large amounts power really that have to be huge arrays) and so on and so on, so how are they good for the environment actually?
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Paul W at 17:30 PM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Ari, I agree with your concerns about natural gas and bioenergy. Neither are solutions yet are portrayed as such. I agree with you that energy spent on natural gas and bioenergy just consume a resouse and take time we dont have.
We do need to solve the energy produciton situation and dont have time to waste on non solutions that further harm the environment.
Haing said that to nuke/antinuke debate dose seem rather unavoidable at this point in history. I would completly love it if other solutions were at hand. It's been an interst now of mine for 30 years and the big rewnewables genaration don't seem to get near nukes for Gwatts instaled cost which is a bottom line.
Still your point is valid natural gas and biofuels are a way of keeping on putting CO2 in the air when we really do need to end that and move on to other energy sources.
Your point that food supply is now decrasing and we need that to not be caused by a false energy alternative like biofuels.
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Ari Jokimäki at 17:16 PM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Numerobis #1: Like I tried to explain in the article (and obviously failed), we though we had reduced emissions but didn't - this is "once", and in a worst case scenario biofuels (and natural gas) have much higher emissions than fossil fuels - this is "twice".
Ranyl #3: So where I was not being truthful about solar and wind energy? I only suggested in passing that they are good from climate point of view (which they are) and didn't claim we only need to use those in the future. Neither did I claim that these two don't have any environmental problems.
Paul W #4: This article was not meant to be overview of the whole energy production but just an effort to highlight couple of problems in our current mitigation efforts. I actually had nuclear power included in the article originally, but I decided to take it out because usually any mention of nuclear power leads to nuke/anti-nuke debate. Proof of this we have here: no comments on bioenergy or natural gas after your message, only comments on nuclear power. I wanted to highlight the situation with bioenergy and natural gas.
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Harry Twinotter at 16:35 PM on 28 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #13A
Even global warming deniers who agree the global average temperatures have increased during the 20th century will use the "hiatus" to dispute anthropogenic global warming ie the warming has occurred naturally and is not caused by greenhouse gases.
Putting aside the fact that deniers have not identified what the "natural" cause is, is it safe to say another fact that shows it is unlikely to be natural is the global average temperatures did not experience any cooling trend in the 15 years of the "hiatus"? It seems to me that in general the global average temperatures had as much chance of a cooling trend in those years instead of a warming trend.
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scaddenp at 14:24 PM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Further to that Terranova, would you invest in plant where your investment was liable for costs associated with malfunction in operation or in waste disposal? Should nuclear be allowed to pass such risk costs to goverment when other forms of power generation do not?
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scaddenp at 14:16 PM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Terranova, I would have thought a working definition of economic would be "able to attract investors wanting to build one who have a reasonable confidence in making money from their investment". Is there any private investor-built nukes without government guarantees anywhere? For naysayers, well say Morningstar or Peter Bradford, or how about Cooper 2013?
That said, I would very much welcome government investment in new breeds of reactor, particularly Thorium or IFR and completely accept that development of such advanced technologies wont happen without government support.
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mercpl at 12:23 PM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Jim Hansen loves nuclear power anyway. that's enough for me.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2014/20140310_ChinaOpEd.pdf
There's a thread over at Arctic Sea Ice Forums discussing it right now.
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Terranova at 11:43 AM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Sweet, can you defend your statement about non economic?
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Albatross at 11:32 AM on 28 March 2014Cherry picked and misrepresented climate science undermines FiveThirtyEight brand
John Abraham has an article today in the Huffington post that also deals with Pielke Jnr's misrepresentations and attempts to obfuscate and confuse.
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michael sweet at 11:14 AM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Paul,
Where I live in Florida no-one in the government cares what environmentalists think. Nuclear was given enormous subsidies and has failed because it is not economic. Nuclear is too expensive to build in the USA.
With the problems in Japan (which the Nuclear industry is not paying to fix, it comes from taxpayers) I would be very hesitant to put reactors in the third world. They would be sure to have severe problems. I don't think that will become an issue because nuclear is uneconomic.
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Composer99 at 10:42 AM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
Paul W:
Out of curiosity, what is the source for your assertion that "People have moved back in to the exclusion area and are having good lives."
A Kyiv Post article from 2012 reports:
In the so-called Exclusion (18.5 mile radius) Zone around the Shelter, most of the so-called samosely (self-settlers, i.e. returned evacuees) are dying out. In 2007, there remained 314 scattered throughout 11 villages, with an average age of 63. In 1986 there were an estimated 1,200. Ten villages were bulldozed in the zone and others are in a state of decay. The 1986 disaster has destroyed settlements and patterns of life that date back to medieval times. Of those moved from the Exclusion Zone, only 3% were employed in 2003 (though some had retired by then).
Do you have more recent information describing an influx of people?
The article suggests that the Chernobyl situation is in fact nowhere near as rosy as you portray. Do you have any sources describing a dramatic turnaround?
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scaddenp at 10:29 AM on 28 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #13A
Poster, this is essentially the same remark that you made in December. If you wish to discuss this, how about going to one of the relevant threads? Search for "hiatus".
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bill4344 at 10:22 AM on 28 March 2014Breathing contributes to CO2 buildup
Ah, Haber and Bosch, the two most influential people you've never heard of!
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Paul W at 10:04 AM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
A good article in what it covers. It's what it avoids is the issue. The sustainable energy source that is not mentioned is nuclear. We need to stop the use of coal ASAP and move to reduce our CO2 level to below 350 ppm. With this I agree completely.
Advanced nuclear can do that in a short period of time at least in the third world. Yet much of the environmental movement thinks that nuclear has cooties and must be opposed.
The feeling attached to nuclear are understandably strong given the history of the bomb but the mass cancers after Chernobyl have not happened. People have moved back in to the exclusion area and are having good lives. Nuclear cooties appear not to be as leathal as claimed.
The denial of nuclear science from the anti nukes is similar to the denial of climate science of the climate deniers.
The use of mass produced nuclear bateries as the heat source for existing coal fired power stations makes them a rapid coal replacer.
Since the fuel is already processed in the form of depleated uranium and bomb grade plutonium further energy use in production is minimal. Since the technology is ready for regulatory approval it's the cooties factor that is the main impediment.
It's a shame the civilisation can be ended because of cooties!
I agree with the author that many renewables while good as an energy source don't easily translate to the scale need to replace coal inside of the 10 years needed where as nuclear batteries could get quite close to that.
The near extinction of the orangutan and environmental damage just is not worth the the bio-deisel produced.
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ranyl at 09:34 AM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
"Examples of such energy production methods are wind power and solar power. These two are clearly good options."
Quite a statement.
Firstly for clarity to survive climate change humanity needs to stop using all fossil fuels asap so contrasting wind an dsolar to coal is thus just an abstract issue now. And to get 350ppm we have to remove approximately 100ppm worth of CO2 from the atmosphere, we have to re-remove what the sinks will release as CO2 concentrations fall.
So we have no carbon budget at all, all we have is a carbon gamble and all renewable cost carbon to set up of which is carbon that will need removing again from the atmosphere.
Secondly solar PV has serious issues with associated toxic waste (that is very toxic and a severe issue in the made in China ones) to in thre process to make them , in themselves and in the processes needed to recycle the,, including rare earth metals, heat up to 2000C and cleaning agents like trinitrofloride that do get released all eventually which are 17000 x potent GHG's. And what will happen to the soil beneath fields of solar panels (lose soil carbon due to no acute growth carbon load?) and in lsarge arrays they mimic water causing insects and birds to gather by them, and disturbing them during migration etc, and lowering chances of success, basically they disturb ecosystems functioning when we need them to be fully repaired from our destruction.
And wind has large carbon inputs, and does disturb birds and bats populations (a real issue in North America) If misplaced, and sound causes biodiversity issues in oceans and they warm and dry the land and cause excess evaporation over oceans, all of which mean they definitely have quite significant environmental impacts, and I'm not anti wind just realize that their utilization is actually very limited and we have actually no carbon to gamble with to be safe anyway.
Therefore to say wind and solar are without environmental issues is fool hardy and misleading and will mean that once again mankind will produce in excess in our craze for more power and cause more harm than good, remember again I say we need to not being using any fossil fuels asap , 5-10years to no fossil use?
Then there is all the carbon upfront that adaptation measures needed will cost.
So we have no carbon to spend on them and they have real and very significant impacts on an environment we need to repair, nowhere near as much as fossil fuels for sure.
That s not saying no wind or solar it is saying be truthful about them and accept they very limited and we have no carbon to spend on them anyway really, just a very risky gamble (we left it too late for luxuries, (sacrifice for the greater good is the new game and fortunately that brings people together and feels good apparently if we take it on) and therefore most appropriate thing to do is to power down as much as possible immediately and get away with as few additional carbon, other GHG and toxic waste issues as possible, in this case less is more, but accepting power down is difficult so I'm sure on the whole we'll just turn a blind eye again to known environmental impacts and the reality of the carbon situation and overexploit renewables again in what would best be called mal adaptation.
So to be clear I feel we need to be off fossil fuels asap, however we also need to judicious with power use and get this down as much as possible so we get away with as few new technologies as possible and as just less carbon emissions to install them and less environmental impacts to an environment on the point of biodiversity crises in any case, when it comes to energy using less is the greatest more. -
Poster9662 at 08:56 AM on 28 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #13A
I think the comment is that there has been no statistically significant increase in global warming since 1998 (actually I think some say since 1997 and others claim since 1995)
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Tom Curtis at 07:01 AM on 28 March 2014Breathing contributes to CO2 buildup
dwdeclare @22, it becomes clear from the broader context that Lovelock is in fact talking about (primarilly) fossil fuel emissions in the production of food rather than mistakenly considering respiration as a form of net emissions. Because those fossil fuel emissions are for the most part normal industrial emissions, they can for the most part be eliminated by the same processes used to eliminate emissions from the rest of industrial civilization, and Lovelock's pessimism is largely unwarranted.
There are a couple of subtleties involved, however, one of which you draw attention to. Methane has a far higher forcing per unit carbon than does CO2. Therefore, the emission of methane by cows in the form of burps and farts represents a transformation of CO2 into methane, and a net short term increase in radiative forcing. Short term because after about 15 years (from memory), the methane in tha atmosphere has transformed back to CO2. The same applies to methane released from swamps (natural) or rice fields (anthropogenic).
The second subtley is far more important. Most fertilizer used in modern agriculture is produced from methane plus components in the atmosphere. The essential step is the Haber-Bosch process:
N2 + 3 H2 → 2 NH3 (ΔH = −92.4 kJ·mol−1)
The hydrogen is produced through one of several processes from methane, of which the two step process may be considered representative:
CH4 + H2O ⇌ CO + 3 H2
CO + H2O ⇌ CO2 + H2
Combining these reactions, we see that for each 8 nitrogen atoms in fertilizer, 3 methane atoms are used in its production, and 3 CO2 molecules released to the atmosphere. By mass, that means that for each 28 Kg of Nitrogen produced in fertilizer, 9 Kg of carbon is consumed as methane, or released to the atmosphere as CO2 in addition to that emitted in producing the energy to drive these reactions.
How significant this is can be seen from wikipedia:
"The Haber process now produces 500 million short tons (454 million tonnes) of nitrogen fertilizer per year, mostly in the form of anhydrous ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea. 3–5% of the world's natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process (~1–2% of the world's annual energy supply). In combination with pesticides, these fertilizers have quadrupled the productivity of agricultural land:
"With average crop yields remaining at the 1900 level the crop harvest in the year 2000 would have required nearly four times more land and the cultivated area would have claimed nearly half of all ice-free continents, rather than under 15% of the total land area that is required today."
Due to its dramatic impact on the human ability to grow food, the Haber process served as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to today's 7 billion. According to Howarth (2008), nearly 80% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process. Since nitrogen use efficiency is typically less than 50%, our heavy use of industrial nitrogen fixation is severely disruptive to our biological habitat."(My emphasis)
As a rule of thumb, if 80% of nitrogen in human tissue originates from the Haber-Bosch process, then without that process the sustainable population will drop by 80%.
Clearly the hydrogen in the Haber Bosch process could be collected by catalyctic processing of water. That would need to be made significantly more economicly efficient, however, to compete with current methods of production. One of the reasons we should rapidly convert electricity production to carbon neutral methods is just to allow more time before we need to modify the industrial manufacture of fertilizer, both in terms of emissions, and in terms of the availability of methane.
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scaddenp at 06:20 AM on 28 March 2014Breathing contributes to CO2 buildup
dwdeclare - the issue with cow burps etc is methane - a potent GHG that would not normally be produced if grass were not eaten by a ruminant. Eventually methane oxidizes to CO2 but while present in the atmosphere it contributes strongly to the greenhouse effect. You will see that greenhouse gas inventories are expressed in terms of CO2e (CO2 equivalents) rather than CO2 though the accounting for methane in this method has some issues. Methane from ruminants is increasing only because the number of ruminants has been increased by intensive farming practices.
I think the article should perhaps also mention that there is another way to track the source of the increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere - carbon isotopes. Fossil fuels have no C14. C13 ratios are also different for different sources.
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dwdeclare at 06:06 AM on 28 March 2014Breathing contributes to CO2 buildup
@Dikran Marsupial Here is the entire paragraph:
It is surprising that politicians could have been so unwise as to agree on policies many decades ahead. Perhaps there were voices from scientists who warned of the absurdity of such planning, but if so they do not seem to have been heard. Even if we cut emissions by 60 per cent to 12 gigatons a year it wouldn’t be enough. I have mentioned several times before that breathing is a potent source of carbon dioxide, but did you know that the exhalations of breath and other gaseous emissions by the nearly 7 billion people on Earth, their pets and their livestock are responsible for 23 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions? If you add on the fossil fuel burnt in the total activity of growing, gathering, selling and serving food, all of this adds up to about half of all carbon dioxide emissions. Think of farm machinery, the transport of food from the farms and the transport of fertilizer, pesticides and the fuel used in their manufacture; the road building and maintenance; supermarket operation and the packaging industry; to say nothing of the energy used in cooking, refrigerating and serving food. As if this were not enough, think of how farmland fails to serve Gaia as the forests it replaced did. If, just by living with our pets and livestock, we are responsible for nearly half the emissions of carbon dioxide, I do not see how the 60 per cent reduction can be achieved without a great loss of life. Like it or not, we are the problem – and as a part of the Earth system, not as something separate from and above it. When world leaders ask us to follow them to the inviting green pastures ahead they should first check that it really is grass on solid ground and not moss covering a quagmire.
Let me also ask, if respiration is carbon neutral why would cow burps and farts add to the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere? Please don't for a moment think I'm trying to dispute the veracity of anthropogenic climate change being largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels. I'm just asking because I'm curious.
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Dikran Marsupial at 03:49 AM on 28 March 2014Breathing contributes to CO2 buildup
@dwdwclare If Lovelock is going to take exhalations as contributing to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions then you would need to consider the food we eat as being carbon uptake. Respiration is carbon neutral, the carbon in the food we eat originally came from the atmosphere, so when we breathe it out again, we are just returning it to the atmosphere and it has no net effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.
Taking carbon out of the lithosphere and putting it into the atmosphere does however affect atmospheric CO2 concentrations (and indeed increases the total amount of CO2 circulating through the carbon cycle).
It could be that Lovelock is making a subtle point that requires greater context to be apparent.
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Gingerbaker at 02:38 AM on 28 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #13A
"13 of 14 warmest years on record occurred in 21st century"
This is surely impossible, as I have it on good authority that there has been no global warming since 1998. ;) How can a denialist meme survive such a throbbing kick to the shins from reality? It boggles.
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The Big Picture (2010 version)
Have updated the Norwegian translation!
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dwdeclare at 01:59 AM on 28 March 2014Breathing contributes to CO2 buildup
So is James Lovelock wrong when he says in his book The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009):
I have mentioned several times before that breathing is a potent source of carbon dioxide, but did you know that the exhalations of breath and other gaseous emissions by the nearly 7 billion people on Earth, their pets and their livestock are responsible for 23 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions?
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John Hartz at 01:50 AM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
By coincidence, the following article was posted on the Carbon Brief blog yesterday
Carbon briefing: changing views on biofuels reflected in forthcoming climate report by Robin Webster.
The lead paragraphs of Webster's post:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s new report, due to be launched next week, is likely to give a new and updated perspective on biofuels - reflecting a flood of research on their impact on natural systems in past years.
The UN-created body launched its last major report back in 2007. At that time, the idea of using plant based crops as a replacement for fossil fuels was largely viewed as an effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector.
But soon after, studies began emerging in the scientific literature that challenged this idea. They suggested biofuels could damage the environment, drive up food prices, or even increase greenhouse gas emissions.
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numerobis at 01:35 AM on 28 March 2014Honey, I mitigated climate change
This conclusion of the article seems very fuzzy. Biofuels may not be any improvement over fossil fuels — US corn ethanol in particular appears to barely stretch oil reserves at all, never mind land use considerations. But how are biofuels "twice as bad" ?
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chriskoz at 17:21 PM on 27 March 2014The Carbon Bubble - Unburnable Fossil Fuels - Seminar and Discussion
Regarding "FF companies to redeploy their expertise in new projects", the only example Andy has given is the CCS by the oil companies in the exploited porous rock reservoirs.
That's very unconvincing example. Especially in light ofof this article:
Sequestering carbon nature's way
(the cartoon therein gives thousand words on the subject)
I would like to see something better, that would make a real difference on AGW, unline imaginary stories for what the technology does not exist yet. For example drilling expertise in construction of geothermals. Better than CCS by far, and realistic and truly changing the face of the company involved. That's the kind of FF company tranformation I'd like to see happeing...
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energydata at 15:07 PM on 27 March 2014The Carbon Bubble - Unburnable Fossil Fuels - Seminar and Discussion
What If We Burn All the Fossil Fuel Reserves? Simple Arithmetic Using the IPCC AR5 http://j.mp/FF_RR_CO2
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Paul.H at 09:34 AM on 27 March 2014Cherry picked and misrepresented climate science undermines FiveThirtyEight brand
Are Silver's views on agw public knowledge? Though I guess given the way he covered it in 2 books & the hiring of Pielke it's not to difficult to imagine which way he falls...
For someone who seems to be all about the hard data, analysis, facts and all that good stuff it's certianly a very interesting tack for him to take, maybe a staff member of a certain well respected science driven climate change site could interview him to see what's what?
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Dikran Marsupial at 05:09 AM on 27 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
Adrian Smits wrote "According to J S Sawyer the warming He estimated was a natural rebound from the little ice age so what was so ground breaking about His work?"
Except that isn't actually what he said. What he said was "Against this background [a change of 2C between the medieval optimum and the LIA and a rise in GMST of 0.6C between 1880 and 1940] a change of 0.6C by the end of the century will not be easy to distinguish from natural fluctuations and is certainly not a cause for concern".
It is a coincidence that the warming from 1880 to 1940 is about 0.6C (I suspect his data is now rather dated) and the warming from a 25% increase in CO2 by the end of the century is also about 0.6C. There is a difference in talking about past warming (1880-1940) and a prediction of future warming (that resulting from a 25% increase in atmospheric CO2) and you appear to be confusing the two, and hence missing the importance of what Sawyer actually wrote.
Sawyer also didn't say anything about a "rebound" from the LIA, just that it had warmed since the LIA, without implying any active mechanism.I'd agree that 0.6C warming is no great cause for concern, if it stopped there I wouldn't be concerned either!
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Dikran Marsupial at 04:13 AM on 27 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
merlin5x5 @ 6 You are making a classic error in interpreting a statistical hypothesis test. A lack of a statistically significant trend does not mean that there has been no warming, but essentially just that there hasn't been enough warming for us to rule out the possibility that there has been no warming.
To demonstrate this, imagine I have a two headed coin, and I flip it four times and get a head each time (oddly enough). If you perform the standard test for the bias of a coin, you will find that the p-value (1/2)^4 is greater than the critical level (0.05 by tradition), so the evidence of bias is not statistically significant. Does that mean the coin is unbiased? Of course not, it has a head on both sides, it couldn't be more biased! All it means is that based solely on the observations, we cannot rule out the possibility that the coin is unbiased.
If this sounds counterintuitive, then yes, I would agree that it is, but that is the way that traditional frequentist hypothesis testing works (largely as a result of using a definition of probability that doesn't allow you to attach a numeric probability to the truth of a particular hypothesis - unlike the Bayesian framework).
Of course climate skeptic blogs tend to ignore this stats 101 issue.
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Bob Lacatena at 03:21 AM on 27 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
Adrian @5...
The paper itself is available here. You don't need to read it, but if you skip around and peruse it, you'll get a good feel for the actual nature and intent of the paper. You'll also see that there is nothing remotely like what is being claimed. The paper is all about the fascinating science of estimating past (as in 10,000 years ago) climate from stalagmites.
To give everyone some feel for the paper's contents, here is one paragraph from the Conclusions:
Stalagmites can record environmental and climate changes through variations in their growth rate and stable isotope composition, and can therefore provide valuable terrestrial proxy archives. In the Okshola cave near Fauske (northern Norway) stalagmite formation began at about 10.4 ka, soon after the valley was deglaciated. Past monitoring of the cave and surface has revealed stable modern conditions with uniform drip rates, relative humidity and temperature. Stable isotope records from two stalagmites provide time-series spanning from c. 10 380 yr to AD 1997; a banded, multi-coloured stalagmite (Oks82) was formed between 10 380 yr and 5050 yr, whereas a pristine, white stalagmite (FM3) covers the period from ∼7500 yr to the present. The δ18Oc, δ13Cc, and growth rate records are interpreted as showing i) a negative correlation between cave/surface temperature and δ18Oc, ii) a positive correlation between wetness and δ13Cc,and iii) a positive correlation between cave/surface temperature and growth rate. The data from Okshola show that the Holocene was characterised by high-variability climate in the early part, low-variability climate in the middle part, and high-variability and shifts between two distinct modes in the late part.
Here is the only mention, in the entire paper, of the MCA and the LIA are from the section titled Stable oxygen isotope patterns for the last 1000 years. Read it carefully and critically, and most importantly from the point of view of the author, not from the perspective of a climate change dismissive looking to find evidence of something that probably isn't there:
The δ18Oc pattern (inset, Fig. 3d) largely mirrors the conventional understanding of the climate development for the last millennium; warm – cold – warm. Firstly, the depleted isotope values (1000–400 yr) can be attributed to ameliorated climate conditions during the Mediaeval Warm Period (MWP) or Mediaeval Climate Anomaly (MCA) (e.g. Crowley and Lowery, 2000; Broecker, 2001, Trouet et al., 2009). Secondly, the interval of enriched isotope values (400–70 yr) coincides with the historically documented climate deterioration associated with the Little Ice Age (LIA) (e.g. Bradley and Jones, 1993; Mann et al., 1998; Nesje and Dahl, 2003). Thirdly, the most recent depleted values (last ∼70 yr) correspond with the warming following the LIA.
The change in δ18Oc around ∼AD 1500–1725 amounts to a relative enrichment of 0.6–0.8‰. Because the greater effect on fractionation of meteoric precipitation (e.g. +0.59‰/˚C, Rozanski et al., 1993), and the opposing direction of fractionation during calcite precipitation (−0.24‰/˚C, O’Neil et al., 1969), an enrichment in the order of 0.6–0.8‰ could in theory translate to a ∼+2˚C warming (if δ18Oc is dominated by the isotopic composition of meteoric precipitation). This contradicts all other observations of the climate transition into the LIA. The observed trend is taken as confirmation of a net negative relationship between δ18Oc and surface/cave temperature, echoing previous studies of Holocene stalagmites from Norway (Lauritzen and Lundberg, 1999; Linge et al., 2001, 2009). However, this interpretation invokes the need for a selective or amplifying mechanism responsible for enhancing the apparent dominance of T cave on the direction of change in δ18Oc. This has previously been suggested to be through discrimination of isotopically light winter water during cooler phases because of surface runoff during snowmelt (Linge, 1999; Sundqvist et al., 2007a; Linge et al., 2009).
and later:
All records covering (parts of) the last 1000 years (Fig. 5) appear to display a depletion-enrichment-depletion pattern (cf. inset Fig. 3d) commonly interpreted as reflecting the conventional view on climate development for the last millennium, i.e. the MCA, LIA, to present climate transition. Despite the pattern similarities, the timings of change in the individual records are asynchronous, but then most age models are of low-resolution in this interval. Moreover, the observed δ18Oc-trend for the last c. 1000 years (inset, Fig. 3d) is commonly taken as a confirmation of a negative relationship between δ18Oc and surface/cave temperature (e.g. Lauritzen and Lundberg, 1999; Linge et al., 2001, 2009). In addition, the amplitude of change in this interval suggests that the apparent dominance of T cave on the direction of change in δ18Oc must be attributed a selective or amplifying mechanism, such as discrimination of isotopically light winter water through surface runoff during snowmelt during cooler phases (Linge, 1999, 2009; Sundqvist et al., 2007a).
The bottom line: be very, very wary of what you read of other people — particularly climate change dismissive websites — claiming of actual, published, peer-reviewed papers. They very rarely say anything near what the climate change dismissives claim they say.
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Rob Honeycutt at 01:57 AM on 27 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
adrian smits @5... Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe you must be referring to this web page here. The full quote that you post is also found there.
What you would find if you pushed just a little further are a few interesting elements to this story. First, the graph presented on that page do not come from the paper that is being quoted. The paper doesn't specifically compare N. Sweden temperature to N. Hemisphere temps. They've pulled a trick on you by adjusting the two Y-axis scales to fit the message they want to deliver to you. Note the left axis applies to Korallgrotten series of oxygen isotope readings and the left side applies to NH temperature.
The graph originates from this website called CO2 Science, which is funded by the the fossil fuel industry and run by Dr Craig Idso. The CO2 Science site has gone through and reinterpreted peer reviewed research, added their own made up graphs, that generally do not agree with the actual findings of the actual research. And if you don't believe me, just pick one paper on their site, email the lead author and ask them if they agree with CO2 Science's interpretation. I've done this and in each case the scientists do not agree with the re-interpretations of their research.
The actual paper this is derived from is: Sundqvist et al 2010. Stable isotopes in a stalagmite from NW Sweden document environmental changes over the past 4000 years.
This research is limited to speliotherm data for Northern Sweden.
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CBDunkerson at 21:00 PM on 26 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
Merlin5by5, while your argument about carbon isotopes is off-topic and mostly incoherent (i.e. nothing you said addresses the fact that fossil fuels, and thus power plant emissions, have different isotope signatures than growing plants), you can find an explanation of carbon isotopes (and various other proofs that humans are responsible for rising CO2 levels) here.
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Tom Curtis at 19:39 PM on 26 March 2014Cherry picked and misrepresented climate science undermines FiveThirtyEight brand
A slight error in my post @12. Regression against coastal temperatures suggests normalized hurricane damages will be approximately 4 times greater, not 3 times as claimed in that post.
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Tom Curtis at 19:30 PM on 26 March 2014Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated
Gary Marsh @37, your initial premise is that there has been a reduction in plant mass. That is shown to be false by the IPCC data. If you now want to alter your premise by detailing water content of different sorts of plant mass, you need to actually provide detailed information on the relative water contents of different forms of plants, plus the relative growth or loss of those different plants. You may then get an argument up that supports some measurable impact on sea level rise, (though I doubt it). But if you don't do that legwork, you have nothing to discuss. Your theory becomes "If all these complex and unmeasured factors come out just right, then changes in the biosphere are increasing sea level through loss of water." To which is is sufficient to respond, "If they come out wrong, then you have the opposite, or no, effect". The later is far more probably sight unseen than the former.
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Gary Marsh at 19:22 PM on 26 March 2014Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated
Tom Curtis - It appears that the information you've provided from the IPCC is refferring to Carbon and CO2. The scenario I proposed for consideration concerns the direct transfer of H2O/water, it being a quicker and more direct contributer to sea level rise when it is released via deforestation, tropical and otherwise. I appreciate there are an enourmouse amount of variables to be considered when attempting to quantify the water holding capacity of the myriad types of forest, especially when factoring in attendent animal life from microble to mammal, the subterranian trunk and canopy and micro atmospherical climate which will hold significant quantities of water when forested and much less when deforested! add all these factors together and there will be a net movement of WATER. Although related this is a different process from the movement of Carbon, certainly it would appear to have a much more immediate effect. So again I ask if anyone can show me the data or studies if they even exist.
Moderator Response:(Rob P) - You were provided with peer-reviewed literature in your comment @ 27, however you have not bothered to read any of it, or make any attempt to understand it.
There has been a net growth in total biomass of land-plants over the recent decade, hence the uptake of carbon and water by plants has likewise grown.
You are now in slogan-chanting territory and any further repetition of this meme, without any supporting evidence, will be deleted
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Tom Curtis at 19:20 PM on 26 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
Merlin5by5 @6:
"... the exact period (1995-2010), that the IPCC admitted showed NO statistical warming"
1) First, is it possible for statistics to warm? I did not think so, and so do not think it is worthy of comment (or meaningful to say). You apparently disagree. So, over that interval, did your calculus warm or cool? What about your geometry?
Perhaps, just possibly, what you really meant to say was that "the warming trend from 1995-2010 was not statistically significant". That is not the same as "not warming". Every statistically significant warming trend can be decomposed into smaller parts, none of which have a statistically significant warming trend. That carries no implication as to whether or not the overall trend was a warming trend or not. Restating "the warming trend from 1995-2010 was not statistically significant" as "there was no statistically significant warming" merely attempts to gloss over that fact - to bamboozle people into thinking there was no warming trend when there was one.
2) The IPCC made no specific claim about the period 1995-2010. Rather, they discussed (Box TS3) the period 1998-2012. Further, they made no specific claims about the statistical significance of the trend in that period, merely noting:
"The observed GMST has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years . Depending on the observational data set, the GMST trend over 1998–2012 is estimated to be around one third to one half of the trend over 1951–2012. For example, in HadCRUT4 the trend is 0.04°C per decade over 1998–2012, compared to 0.11°C per decade over 1951–2012. The reduction in observed GMST trend is most marked in NH winter."
So, when you claim 1995-2010 is "the exact period ... the IPCC admited showed NO statistical warming", you merely cram two falsehoods into one sentence (among all the other falsehoods).
3) Further, by sliding the the start period forward, you attempt to conceal that the actual start period of the period or reduced trend is 1998, year of record breaking heat due to a near record breaking El Nino. That is, you conceal the fact that the interval is cherry picked. You also create further falsehood, because the interval from Jan 1995-Dec 2010 does show statistically significant warming. Using HadCRUT4, the warming is 0.142 +/- 0.132 C per decade.
So, thirteen words, and three blatant falsehoods. That's a fairly impressive score. The rest of the rant appears to keep up that same ratio. So, perhaps instead of asking us what would be honest, you can start your "skepticism" by being truthfull. Of course, that simple step would end your fake skepticism as well.
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Merlin5by5 at 19:20 PM on 26 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
By the way, Moderator, this web sites attempt to claim ISOTOPES isotopes points to human combustion, and not natural processes is incredibly ignorant of ACTUAL actual power production facilities. They have been low oxygen, high heat soak, cyclone furnaces since at least the 1950s. They produce a different mix of carbon and oxygen isotopes.
The point is it burns to carbon on one side, and FEO2, iron rust, burning carbon into a proto-diamond sand, and oxygen to black iron/atomic O2, in nano-particle size and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by at least an order of magnitude, so it's not anything like what your (sic) Science predicts. Did you even look at how modern furnaces work?
Moderator Response:[JH] The use of "all caps" (except for acronyms) is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy. Please read the Comments Policy and adhere to it.
[DB] All subsequent discussions of isotopes by you should take place on this thread, AFTER reading it.
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Tom Curtis at 18:35 PM on 26 March 2014Cherry picked and misrepresented climate science undermines FiveThirtyEight brand
I have been playing around with Pielke's figures, and found several interesting facts.
The first is that Pielke's normalization procedure is relative to the year to which you normalize the data. Comparing the data normalized relative to 2005 with that normalized relative to 2010, we find that the rank of different years between 1900 and 2005 according to how damaging they are changes for 69 of 106 years (65%). Twenty-one of those years had less than 0.05 billion dollars damage normalized to 2005, and consequently had rank changes as the result of the change of one or two low valued years having a change in rounding due to the increased values in 2010. Restricting consideration to those years with more than 5 billion dollars damage normalized relative to 2005, we still have 18 out of 55 years (33%) changing rank. Indeed, three out of the top 40 years normalized relative to 2005 drop out of the top 40 normalized relative to 2010. The highest ranked year in 2005 that changes rank is 1944, which drops from rank 6 to rank 7. The largest change if rank in the top 40 years normalized relative to 2005 is 1970, which rises from rank 34 to rank 27 (7 levels). All this suggest that the concept of "most damaging year for US Hurricanes" is a very fluid concept, as defined by Pielke.
The second interesting fact is a consequence of the first. It turns out that normalized relative to 2010, the trend in normalized damages is 70% greater than that trend normalized relative to 2005. Part of that is a consequence simply of inflated values for 2010 relative to 2005, but even allowing for that, the trend remains 48.8% higher. Pielke tells us ad nauseum that the trend in normalized hurricane damage is not statistically significant, but that trend over the same interval (1900-2005) can change by 50%, and potentially more just by changing the year of normalization. Given this variability, it is dubious that Pielke's trend calculation is even meaningfull.
Out of interest, I regressed Pielke's normalized data agains the SST for the South East coastal waters of the USA. (HadSST3: 100-70 West, 15-40 North. Data retrieved from the KNMI explorer.) Regressing normalized damages relative to 2010 over the period 1900-2010, I found that for every 1 C increase in coastal SST, annual normalized damages increased by 10.9 Billion dollars on average. That is the third interesting fact. This value changes with interval examined, and with year of normalization. However, over the interval 1900-2005, the increased damage per degree C was 11.5 Billion normalized relative to 2005, and 12.5 Billion normalized relative to 2010. Thus, while this measure is not ideal, it is far more robust than the simple annual trend examined by Pielke. Based on that, with BAU and Pielke's normalizations, we can expect normalized damages from Hurricanes to approximately triple in the US. That is, even after we allow for changing populations, increased wealth and inflation, Hurricane damages will still be about three times more expensive under global warming.
None of the above means I think Pielke's normalization proceedure is adequate. It is not. Some of the reasons why not are given in the OP. But even if we allow Pielke his normalization, his desired conclusion only follows if you allow him to present his evidence in a very special way. Look at it more closely, and you see all he has is playing cards.
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Merlin5by5 at 18:00 PM on 26 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
Your arguments seem to ignore and date from, the exact period (1995-2010), that the IPCC admitted showed NO no statistical warming. At first there was a claim that it was a PAUSE pause, but historical data from NON non-City based observation posts, have noted NO no pause, but a continuation of no statistical warming. Global Oceans haven't risen, European land has risen, and Indian land is sinking beneath the asian land mass. The same processes have been going on for Millions of years. We haven't just ignored negative feedback processes, we have pointedly tried to debunk them, and AVOIDED avoided any attempt to quantify their effects. You can hardly blame the US government for being skeptical.
(-snip-)
Moderator Response:[JH] The use of "all caps" (except for acronyms) is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy. Please read the Comments Policy and adhere to it.
[DB] Intimations of impropriety snipped.
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chriskoz at 17:11 PM on 26 March 2014Cherry picked and misrepresented climate science undermines FiveThirtyEight brand
Tony@2,
What point are you trying to make?
Ignoring your bad practice of linking to your own blog here, without any comment or clarification (which is against SkS comment policy), I'm trying to read & understand your blog article. However don't see how Silver's misaplication of Bayesian stats as described therein is relevant to this article which is about Pielke Jr's post at FiveThirtyEight. Please explain, otherwise I rest my case that your comment is OT trolling.
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dana1981 at 06:05 AM on 26 March 2014Cherry picked and misrepresented climate science undermines FiveThirtyEight brand
P.T. @6 - this is off topic but Curry/Lindzen/Christy aren't on the APS climate statement review panel. That's a myth created by confused denialist blogs. They were part of a 6-person 'expert' panel (also including Santer and Held and one other maintream climate scientist whose name I forget) who gave presentations to the APS panel in January. That's the extent of their influence.
Back on topic, Pielke wrote to the Guardian (where a condensed version of this post is published) complaining that he had been misrepresented, etc. However, none of his complaints were accurate - they either ignored the supporting evidence provided in the post, or were bait and switch attempts. The post has been determined to be factually accurate and will remain as-is.
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Albatross at 03:50 AM on 26 March 2014Cherry picked and misrepresented climate science undermines FiveThirtyEight brand
Thanks KR,
That is a good post at RC and I'm happy that they are dealing with some of the common fallacies used by fake skpetics like Pielke Jnr.
As I mentioned to Kevin Trenberth the other day-- "We are poking the climate system with a stick and physics dictates that it will get increasingly annonyed".
Another analogy for a trick that is used by fake skeptics is folks like Pielke Jnr. want us all to keep looking in the rear-view mirror while we accelerate towards a preventable disaster (e.g., a brick wall).
There were more problems with Pielke's 538 opinion pieces that we did not cover here because of space limitations. I'll add some more if I can find the time. -
Maggnum at 03:48 AM on 26 March 2014Climate Science Legal Defense Fund Needs Your Help!
And deductible in Canada?
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Cherry picked and misrepresented climate science undermines FiveThirtyEight brand
RealClimate has an exceedingly relevant post by Stefan Rahmstorf, The most common fallacy in discussing extreme weather events, discussing how obfuscators like Pielke Jr. present absence of evidence (due to rare and random events and insufficient statistics) as evidence of absence, a subtle but clear logical fallacy.
As one example presented, Emanual 2005 notes statistically significant increases in the power of Atlantic hurricanes - followed by Pielke arguing that there was no such increase in US land-falling hurricanes. Emanuel wrote and confirmed that: “While we can already detect trends in data for global hurricane activity considering the whole life of each storm, we estimate that it would take at least another 50 years to detect any long-term trend in U.S. landfalling hurricane statistics, so powerful is the role of chance in these numbers.”
Pielke has a long record of cherry-picking the noisiest data possible and trying to argue that nothing is happening - when the full data is quite clear.
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