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chriskoz at 18:52 PM on 23 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #12B
No news on the big event this week: the IPCC WGII meeting in Yokohama JP?
According to the current schedule, the Core Writing Team are already there and should be approving their AR5 as soon as Tuesday.
Is there any pre-release/summary available or do we need to wait until the official release at the end of week? -
Klaus Flemløse at 06:45 AM on 23 March 2014Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming
My analysis of the number of tropical storms only covers the period 1970-2012. This is the weak point, as far as I do not have data going back further. Therefore, I do not know if the development is caused by natural variations or if it is a result of the global warming. However the development is in line with the expectation from the global warming.
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Sapient Fridge at 06:21 AM on 23 March 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 7
A very well told explanation! Fascinating.
Can someone create a single page with a summary and links to the whole story so it can be linked to and referenced easily, rather than linking to the 7 pieces as is required now?
Moderator Response:[BL] I'll look at doing that. I have to make some simple programming changes, first, but when they're done I'll create it and add links to the separate parts to the "Table of Contents" that links to all 7 parts.
[BL] Try this: A Hack By Any Other Name — Index. I'll add links to it to all 7 posts, and fill out the timeline... eventually. It's a bit of a chore, but I'll get there.
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Daniel Bailey at 01:03 AM on 23 March 2014Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming
That is such a collossal disconnect in logic that words fail me...
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UncleBucket at 22:56 PM on 22 March 2014Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming
A new denialist argument that I'm seeing more and more is that because the USA experienced fewer hurricanes in 2013 than in some previous years, global warming has stopped or is disproven!
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slcochran at 08:16 AM on 22 March 2014The Myth Debunking One-Pager
Michael Whittemore is correct. If you start with your opponent's frame, no matter how you want to precondition it, you reinforce it. To avoid doing so, state your position, and then you can point out what an ass the other side is (or words to that effect). A very good read on this phenomenon is George Lakoff's book, "Don't Think of an Elephant."
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adrian smits at 07:08 AM on 22 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
Actually the latest peer reviewed evidence out of Sweden December 2013 seems to indicate that the little ice age was far more wide spread than preveliously thought.
Moderator Response:[TD] Please provide a real citation rather than just a country and a month.
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gws at 04:39 AM on 22 March 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 7
Bob, you did it! I "project" your series is going to become the most read SkS posts in a "long time" (sorry, read too much J. Curry stuff). You missed your profession as a science writer ... Hat tip!
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adrian smits at 04:08 AM on 22 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
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?
Moderator Response:[TD] See the rebuttal to the myth "We're Coming Out of the Little Ice Age." Just one of the flaws in that myth is that the Little Ice Age was not global.
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Rob Honeycutt at 02:43 AM on 22 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis... I don't want to pile on here but would just like to offer one suggestion.
When a scientist gets his hackles up over some published finding, usually the response is to test the results him/herself. This is something you can easily do yourself. You don't need to review 12,000 papers. Honestly, Cook et al was way overkill in regards to what is statistically necessary to establish the point.
There are two easy ways to do this. Here on the SkS site, you can rate abstracts yourself! If for some reason you don't trust the system that SkS has set up, that's fine. Just go to google scholar and start pulling up papers. Set up your own spreadsheet to check the results.
You can get a rational statistical sampling with a couple hundred papers. That might take a few hours to process. But then you know for yourself with data created by someone you trust. You!
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Composer99 at 02:23 AM on 22 March 2014There is no consensus
I'm kind of curious if anyone can show that the mainstream medical science position on gastric ulcers prior to Warren & Marshall's work was anything like as well-supported by evidence or as well-endorsed by the practicing researchers of the time as the scientific consensus of global warming is today.
The interview with Marshall that michael sweet linked to suggests such is not the case, which is likely another reason why the case of Helicobacter is a poor choice in attacking the scientific consensus on global warming.
Another relevant passage from the interview:
One of the things that happened with me is that I was interested in computers, even in 1980 with e-mail, but it was really teletypes in those days. Our library had just got a line to the National Library of Medicine. So I came in and started doing literature searches, because I was interested in computers and it was fun for me. But I started trying to track these bacteria. And I found various, very widespread, dispersed references to things in the stomach, which seemed to be related to the bacteria, going back nearly 100 years. So that we could then develop a hypothesis that these bacteria were causing some problem in the stomach, and maybe that was leading to ulcers. And then, instead of having to do 20 years of research checking out all those different angles, the research was done, but it was never connected up. And so, with the literature searching, as it became available, we were able to pick out the research that was already there and put together this coherent pattern, which linked bacteria and ulcers. It didn't happen overnight. We actually thought about it for two years before we were reasonably confident. It was really quite a few years before we were absolutely water-tight.
(Parenthetically, Marshall goes on at some length about how he likely could have made more progress advancing the hypothesis if he himself had been more diplomatic.)
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Composer99 at 01:54 AM on 22 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis:
With respect to your desire for information regarding the severity of global warming impacts, etc. - read the IPCC Assessment Reports. That is their purpose.
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michael sweet at 01:50 AM on 22 March 2014There is no consensus
Prosensus:
Here is how Barry Marshall described his first presentation of his hypothesis about H. pilori in 1986:
"Barry Marshall: Well, I was fairly confident at that stage, and I was sticking my neck out.
I knew there'd be a lot of Americans there. And we were then challenging for the America's Cup. And so, in fact, I got up and I really threw down the gauntlet. My first slide was a photo of Perth in Western Australia, lovely river and sea, and a yacht. And I said, "This is Perth, Western Australia, and this is the yacht that's going to win the America's Cup in 19..." I think it was '86 or '87. And everybody, "Ahh!" You know, paper balls were being thrown at me. And then I went on to present the new bacteria. I wasn't totally alone though, because I had connected up with the head bacteriologist in England who was interested in that species or that type of bacteria. I'd visited with him for a couple of days before the conference and he had kind of given me a little more confidence than usual, and backed me up on it. As he introduced me, he said, "Well, this is Barry Marshall. He's got this wonderful, interesting new bacteria." So although people were skeptical, and they all went home with the aim of trying to prove me wrong, that's how science moves forward. Someone has a hypothesis and you say, "Okay, if I can prove it wrong, I can publish a paper saying he's wrong." Gradually, over the next few years, one by one, these people trying to prove me wrong fell by the wayside and actually converted over to my side, and became experts in their own right, in helicobacter." source
Doesn't seem to me like "castigation and excoriation." He received the Warren Alpert Prize in 1994, only 8 years later, from the Australian Medical Association. Sounds more like the data was fairly checked and accepted, as you would expect for any new claim. Can you provide a cite to support your wild claim that Marshall was not treated fairly??? It would mean more if you can support your wild claims.
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Jubble at 00:10 AM on 22 March 2014The Myth Debunking One-Pager
I very much agree with @BC, in general and with regards the example. I would be happy to volunteer to help reword if a team effort is required, although I'd need to use the science presented to help do the job rather than my own knowledge, which is not as rounded as other posters here.
On a related note, I have come to realise that a lot of the information provided by e.g. Watts is or appears very detailed, and is not completely dealt with by rebuttals. At a higher level of detail, logic says to me that the Watts arguments must be flawed, but the information to debunk them completely is not immediately apparent. A good example is the one presented by @BC above.
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Dikran Marsupial at 23:18 PM on 21 March 2014There is no consensus
Prosensus, you need to look at the bigger picture. Galileos are extremely rare, but crackpots are extremely common. Marshalls and Warrens are a bit less rare, but they are still way outnumbered by scientists that make bit claims that go against the scientific mainstream in their fields, but who are simply mistaken (e.g. Wakefield, Essenhigh, Salby etc.). The existence of people like Marshall and Warren illustrates that the existence of a consensus is not absolute proof of anything, but it also doesn't mean that consensus is not good evidence of something being true. You need to look at the relative frequencies of the consensus being correct and it being incorrect. Sadly the cases where the consensus is correct (e.g. Salby) tend not to go unreported.
Nobody is "hiding behind consensus" (frankly that is just the sort of rhetoric we could all do without). The value of the consensus is demonstrated by the fact that the skeptic scientists keep going on about the lack of consenus, which led to papers like TCP. Science generally isn't concerned with consensus as the scientists are able to form an informed opinion on the topic for themselves. The same is not true of the general public, who don't have the scientific background to do this on every topic, which is one of the reasons we have scientific bodies such as the Royal Society, the Royal Statistical Society, the IPCC etc, which show where the mainstream scientific position lies in a way that can be appreciated by the general public.
"The day we stop questioning consensus is the day science dies." this is a nice soundbite, but nothing more. If by "we" you mean the general public then the statement if obviously incorrect, science can operate perfectly well without external questioning. If "we" meant the scientists, *they* are not very interested in following the consensus, the cutting edge is where advances are made, so "questioning the consensus" is their day job.
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MA Rodger at 23:03 PM on 21 March 2014There is no consensus
Prosensus @585.
Do you not think your own analogy is itself pretty rubbish.
Firstly Marshall & Warren developed they hypothesis in 1982. Twenty-three years later they had been awarded the Nobel prize for Medicine. Of the contrarian work in climatology, I see no candidate whatever worthy of any sort of award or commendation. And how long have these numpties been at it?
Secondly, while Marshall & Warren fought against a consensus, that concensus was not itself wrong as people do get ulcers and stomach cancer because of stress. What the concensus was missing was that there was a microbial cause also acting. It was because 50% of humanity are infected with that microbe and the vast majority do not suffer ulcers that gave Marshall & Warren such an up-hill battle.
You appear to be arguing that humanity should ignore science because there are always questions for science to answer. Such an argument is nonsense.
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The Myth Debunking One-Pager
The Skeptical Science section "Most Used Climate Myths" seems to have some pretty strong versions of the myth being addressed, not weak, flu shot versions. Should these be changed in the light of this one pager when updates are made? All's fair ...
As an example the "Are surface temperatures reliable" myth contains the statement - "In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source." (Watts 2009)" This part of the myth wasn't addressed in the response as far as I could see. Nor does it seem that relevant to the important issues being discussed. But it does add weight to the myth with impressive stats.
Anyway I don't want to be critical of the fantastic work done here and the huge committment put into it. So please regard this as a constructive criticism.
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Prosensus at 22:12 PM on 21 March 2014There is no consensus
@scaddenp - Unfortunately, your analogy isn't a good one. 30 years ago the consensus scientific opinion in the medical community was that stomach ulcers were caused by lifestyle and stress factors. Two "cranks", Drs. Barry Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren, postulated that bacterium H. pylori was the culprit. What was the initial reaction in the medical establishment? Castigation and excoriation. This lasted for years until both doctors were eventually exonerated by the community and went on to win the Nobel prize in medicine! Egg, meet face!
The bottom line here is that consensus, in and of itself, means little in terms of correctness and accuracy. It is a weak framing of the issue because it is a defensive mechanism that allows scientists to take comfort from a "safety in numbers" approach. Invoking the "consensus shield" is anathema to science, to which healthy questioning is the lifeblood of discovery.
The approach of directly debunking skeptic claims through evidenciary proof is much more effective than hiding behind consensus. I think the AGW community does itself a disservice by touting consensus as loudly and as often as it does. It detracts from the better tactic of taking the issues head-on, case by case.
The day we stop questioning consensus is the day science dies.
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CBDunkerson at 21:05 PM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis #1: "...you start by citing a [Oreskes] study that produce a 75% consensus level"
Phronesis #4: "We have no idea what the Oreskes study did."
So you've gone from claiming that the Oreskes study did something it provably did not, to claiming that we just can't know... even though you originally claimed we did know.
*plonk*
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michael sweet at 20:09 PM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis,
Here I linked two very recent reports (both less than one month old) from the National Academy of Science (and the Royal Society of England) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science that state clearly what they think about AGW. Both of these reports state clearly that AGW is likely to be extremely severe and that strong actions need to be taken immediately. For your convienence I have linked them again below. These reports state exactly what you claim above you need to make decisions.
What is your issue with these clearly worded reports from the top science organizations in the USA and England? All other Academies of Science in the World agree with these three organizations. The problem is that you have not bothered to try to find out what scientists clearly say.
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johncl at 18:59 PM on 21 March 2014Climate skeptic claims prebunked by Keeling
You can actually read global CO2 levels in a busy city as well since on windy days the CO2 concentration would move towards the global mean. I saw a very nice graph somewhere showing this by plotting wind speed and read CO2 levels where you could clearly see the measurements approaching the global mean.
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Tom Curtis at 17:13 PM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis @4 & 5, it is more than a little hypocritical to not respond to one issue on the basis of limited time "one thing at a time", and then to yourself introduce additional side topics. It strongly suggests your intention is a gish gallop, where you introduce topics that are rhetorically convenient, but plead time constraints to avoid having to answer on issues where you have been shown to have been both hypocritical (leaving out relevant information, while complaining about what you consider to have been relevant information having been left out) and to misrepresent the study you quote.
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Phronesis at 14:55 PM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
And is it true that the raters in Cook et al were not independent? I saw it here: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means/
Rater independence is crucial in a study based on rater data.
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chriskoz at 14:52 PM on 21 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
And don't forget about Chralie Keeling who set ground for many of Sawyer's ideas in 1960s:
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Phronesis at 14:49 PM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Hi guys. One thing at a time. We have no idea what the Oreskes study did. There is no methods section in the paper. The paper is only a page long, and the part that actually deals with the study is only 126 words long.
We're told that papers that were classified as explicitly endorsing, evaluating impacts, or mitigation proposals were lumped together as endorsing the consensus. That's all we know. Note that the fact that a paper evaluates impacts does not imply endorsement or might report small impacts. We just don't know. We can't do anything with a paper when we don't know how it was done.
We also can't be converting 75% to 100% based on a paper that includes unspecified implicit criteria for inclusion into that bucket. Your logic is sound except for the implicit part. I'm not going to infer unanimity via an implicit classification scheme, much less a complete unknown classification scheme. Is this controversial?
Also, maybe your logic isn't sound after all. Let's linger on the fact that these figures are converted into "75% of climate scientist agree", or as you would have it, "100% of climate scientists agree".
How did we get there? Papers. And we ignored papers -- and scientists -- who expressed no position (by the completely unknown filtering and coding protocol Oreskes used). The sample was much smaller than Cook -- I'm not sure why. There would technical papers, heads-down so to speak, that would address narrow issues -- not really at the level of abstraction of human caused climate change, which is pretty high level. Am I correct in assuming there'd be all manner papers related to climate mechanism that would not ever have occasion to use the relevant phrases? We don't know anything about what those scientists think. We only know about the set that were included and rated by methods we have not been apprised of.
That makes me even more reluctant to say anything definite, certainly not that 100% of climate scientist think x, y, or z.
Let me know if I've missed supplemental materials on Oreskes. I didn't see anything.
Lastly for now -- we need detailed questions, nuanced views. Endorsement of the proposition that humans impact the climate or contribute to warming or are the primary cause of warming is not useful. Not if we want to do something with this knowledge, like pass laws and so forth. We need severities, probability and confidence, scientists' views on the likely roles of different forcings and feedbacks, interpretations of the pause in mean global surface temps, estimates of consequences and benefits of warming, etc. Obviously a 1 F warming by 2100 probably doesn't justify major increases in the costs of energy, for most people. I know the lower bound of IPCC 5 is higher than that, but I'd like to know what scientists think. I'd also like to see studies they have the opportunity to just express their judgments in their own words.
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Michael Whittemore at 14:39 PM on 21 March 2014The Myth Debunking One-Pager
I find it best to start explaining the science and infer how people could mistake some section of the data but push home the facts that shows what the data is actually saying. Only then do i mention the myth and how they hide the true facts. My point is it might be best to not start with the myth but to give the information first to let them debunk the myth themselves
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Tom Curtis at 10:26 AM on 21 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis seems to have a problem with things not mentioned, but is carefull not to mention a few things himself. I'll come to that, but first lets look at Doran and Zimmerman (2009). Phronesis dismisses that as a survey of just 75 people, but that is false. It was a survey of 3,146 scientists. Among those scientists, overall 82% answered yes to question 2:
"Do you think human activity is a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?"
That question is closest to the proposition tested by Cook et al (2013). That low figure is because most scientists asked were not specialists in the relevant field, and consequently had little more knowledge on the topic than any non-scientist. Of the small portion of the those surveyed who were specialists in climate science, and actively publishing in the field so that they had up to date information, 97.4% agreed with question 2. There were only 77 of those, but they were part of a much larger sample.
Turning now to Farnsworth and Lichter (2012), we find that it is a survey of scientists, 50% of whom were members of the AMS, and 50% of whom were members of the AGU, and all of whom were listed in the American Men and Women of Science. Their 489 respondents are therefore comparable to Doran and Zimmerman's 3,146 respondents, not to the 77 publishing specialists in climatology. Further (the relevant fact Phronesis did not reveal), only 41% of those 489 actively research in any aspect of global climate science.
It is not clear how those 200 scientists compare to Doran and Zimmerman's classification. For Doran and Zimmerman, and active publisher must have published at least 50% "... of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change". That is, by a reasonable measure, at least 50% of their research must be on the topic. In contrast, the 200 scientists from Farnsworth and Lichter need only have actively researched on any aspect of climate science, ie, greater than 0% and need not have brought the research to publication. Nor need they be specialists in climatology. They are probably best equated with Doran and Zimmerman's active publishers. For the other 289, however, the closest category would be Doran and Zimmerman's non-publishers/non-climatologists.
From all of Farnsworth and Lichter's respondents, 84% responded yes to the question:
"In your opinion, is humanly induced global warming now occuring?"
Assuming Farnsworth and Lichter's non-researchers resonded at the same rate as Doran and Zimmerman's non-publishers/non-climatologists (ie,76.6% affirmative), that represents 221 affirmative responses. That leaves only 190 affirmative responses to come from Farnsworth and Lichter's researchers, meaning that 95% of them responded affirmatively.
Given the low bar on expertise set by Farnsworth and Lichter, and the strong correlation between expertise and current topic knowledge and acceptance of AGW found by Doran and Zimmerman, that 95% is surprisingly high. It shows, however, that the results of Farnsworth and Lichter is entirely consistent with those of Doran and Zimmerman, and also of Cook et al, (2013).
Phronesis may rightly reject the assumption that Farnsworth and Lichter's non-researchers affirmed AGW at the same rate as Doran and Zimmerman's as speculative. The implication of that, however, is that no comparison can reasonably be made between their results and those of Doran and Zimmerman because they do not survey groups with the same demographics. Farnsworth and Lichter would then provide information about general scientific acceptance, but not specifically about acceptance by those with specialist knowledge in the field.
Finally, Phronesis misrepresents the results of Farnworth and Lichter on expected outcomes. The question put, and results were:
"Overall, if present climate trends continue, do you regard the likely effects of global climate change in the next 50 to 100 years as:
Trivial to Catastrophic
1–3 (NET) 13
4–7 (NET) 44
8–10 (NET) 41
Don’t Know 2
Mean 6.6 "Thus, less than half (but only just less than half) think the results of current climate trends will be catastrophic, or near catastrophic. Slightly more, but still less than half think the results will be moderate, while only 13% think the results will be trivial or near trivial.
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TBH at 09:40 AM on 21 March 2014Temp record is unreliable
Siting is irrelevant, the trend line on consistent data collection the only matter of importance.
The evidence is un upward movement in temerature.
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TBH at 09:32 AM on 21 March 2014Climate's changed before
We can't argue about all the evidence shows change is occurring.
To sugest human intervention in total is not playing a role, the degree an arguement only. The human intervention, in the last 100 years must be recognised.
The speed of change being the only unknown factor, and on evidence accelaerating.
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TBH at 09:11 AM on 21 March 2014Antarctica is gaining ice
Found the article of value in terms of understanding.
The statistic seem obvious, towards,100 Giga tons of Land Ice melt, per annum, will result in 0.2mm in sea level rise, p.a. rough maths and a benchmark.
The trend line in round numbers, seem supported, by scientific evidence.
The overal position of Antartic Ice increasing correct, but peridic in nature, the desalination of the area, and lowers water tempratures, will increase freezing, perhaps minor, but will affect tidal range globally, on an annual basis.
The objective of the article that focuses on land mass ice, being the more significant component, and Sea Ice being an anual effect stated, but not quantified, as the absolute measure being the more important element.
The overall effect being higher sea levels and a slighly greater tidal range, prediction.
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Tom Curtis at 08:54 AM on 21 March 2014Medieval Warm Period was warmer
Just assume Myles is correct of a moment. That is, assume the MWP was warmer than it currently is, and that it caused series of one hundred year droughts in the SW of the USA. It would follow that as the world continues to warm with AGW, we can expect the start of such a series of megadroughts in the SW of the USA. That should make Myles want to do all he can to avoid ongoing warming. Is that right Myles?
In fact, we already see the signs of the in the SW of the USA. From the site to which Myles linked we have this graph:
Attentive readers will notice that the drought extent in 2002 extended 80% of the area, far more than the at most 60% seen in the MWP. I understand there have been worse droughts in the area since then. Using SW US drought as a proxy for global temperature, we therefore must conclude that it is already warmer than at any time during the MWP. And expected to get warmer so that we can expect worse droughts still.
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Rob Honeycutt at 07:56 AM on 21 March 2014Medieval Warm Period was warmer
Myles... Just to clarify, the MWP is generally believed to be a heterogeneous event, meaning it didn't happen globally and at the same time. We know that there have been periods of local warmth that exceeded global average temperature today.
What you don't find is evidence that the global temperature during the middle ages was warmer than global temperature today.
This is a very common trick pulled by fake skeptics. They will point you to a regional event during the middle ages, call it the MWP, and then compare it to global average temperature today.
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Medieval Warm Period was warmer
Myles - You've pointed to some data on the American West, which is a region representing less than 2% of the globe. Regional variations are weather, not climate, and if you examine the global data the Medieval Warm Period was just not as warm as the world is today.
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Daniel Bailey at 04:12 AM on 21 March 2014Medieval Warm Period was warmer
Myles, the existence of megadroughts in the past does not disprove the human-causational component of the modern warming period nor does it offer support for the denier meme "the Medieval Warm Period was warmer".
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Myles at 03:13 AM on 21 March 2014Medieval Warm Period was warmer
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/medieval.shtml
THE MEDIEVAL MEGADROUGHTS WERE LONGER THAN ANY RECENT DROUGHTS THOUGH. HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THIS.?
Moderator Response:[JH] The use of all-caps is strictly prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy. Please read the Policy and adhere to it.
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Composer99 at 02:27 AM on 21 March 2014The Myth Debunking One-Pager
Great work!
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michael sweet at 02:05 AM on 21 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #12A
Here is the correct link for the Pielke report.
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michael sweet at 02:03 AM on 21 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #12A
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has put out a new report. It has some very strong language for scientists. The National Academy of Sciences (USA) and the Royal Society (UK) had a similar report a couple of weeks ago. Maybe scientists have gotten tired of the deniers getting all the news headlines.
Hopefully the mainstream media will pick up on these reports. Unfortunately, Nate Silver's new website chose Roger Pielke Jr. to write about climate for them. His first post was reviewed at Think Progress. It is Pielke's typical cherry picking to claim damages have not increased.
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MA Rodger at 00:55 AM on 21 March 2014Does the global warming 'pause' mean what you think it means?
Tom Curtis @27.
I concur with your numbers. In my haste to be done @26, I failed to convert from disc to sphere so my energy flux was 4x too big.
I would note that, while this does correct the arithmetic @25, there is still a fallacy within the logic. Solar energy can be considered in equilibrium prior to AGW. Today's imbalance is not with the solar energy (although with a warming climate, the solar imbalance could be considered now negative). What is heating the ocean is the increase in LW back radiation, a flux about twice the size of the solar flux. Thus it would be more correct to say that the oceans are actually retaining 0.16% of ocean's back radiation.
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Tom Curtis at 00:41 AM on 21 March 2014Climate's changed before
JCMac1 and Dikran Marsupial, you will probably find this article on the thermal regulation of dinosaurs interesting. It reviews the evidence that dinosaurs maintained fairly stable core body temperatures, but did so not by maintaining a high metabolism (as do birds and mammals), but by the use waste heat from normal muscular action to warm the body, coupled with various tricks to prevent the two rapid loss of heat. Importantly, heat production by that means is one quarter to one tenth of that in animals with high metabolic rates. Therefore dinosaurs needed to dispose of only a quarter or less of the heat of a similarly sized mammal.
High temperatures are only a potential problem to humans because they restrict the rate at which heat can be disposed of. If only a quarter of the heat needs to be disposed of, a similarly sized animal can safely live with much higher external temperatures.
Further, feathers are (from memory) a feature of small dinosaurs only. There are large dinosaurs among the branch that developed feathers, but no evidence that they retained feathers into adulthood. Even at high temperatures, for animals of low body mass to retain stable internal temperatures without high metabolisms, they need substantial insulation. Hence feathers.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 23:53 PM on 20 March 2014Global warming not slowing - it's speeding up
Micawber
A smal correction. Although around 93% of heat is going into the oceans, that does not mean the remaining 7% is warming the air. The 7% is split between melting ice, warming the ground and warming the air, in roughly equal proportions. So air warming is only about 2-2.5% of the total heat.
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Dikran Marsupial at 23:52 PM on 20 March 2014Climate's changed before
JCMac1 I don't have my dinosaur books with me today, but I'll try and address some of the points you make:
Firstly dinosaurs adapted to various climates, but they did so over the course of tends of thousands to millions of years. It is the rate of climate change that is the problem rather than just the final temperature reached.
Most dinosaurs, like most modern reptiles are unable ti directly regulate their body temperature (which is one of the reasons that the require so much less food endergy than us mammals - so there is an evolutionary advantage to this). If heat were a serious problem, dinosaurs would not have evolved to be very large as this increases the volume to surface area ratio, which in turn makes gaining or loosing heat more difficult.
The bony plates on e.g. stegosaurus were for cooling, ..., and heating. This is fairly well known. Apparently the bony plates could be flattened in the morning to raise body to operating temperature after loosing heat overnight, but could also be made vertical and pointed away from the sun, inwhich case they could be used to cool body temperatre.
I am no aware of any suggestion that dinosar feathers were filled with liquid rather than air (or indeed that birds do this either), or how this would really help with cooling.I think it is quite likely that the feathere were for insulation, rather that cooling, helping to keep the body temperature approximately constant, rather than specifically for cooling.
Life can certainly survive a return to the sort of temperatures seen in the Cretaceous. The same is unlikely to be true of human civilisation as it exists today. There are simply too many of us for us to be able to adapt to that sort of change in our agricultural environment. I'm sure that we as a species would also survive, although there would be great hardship and loss of life along the way (mostly due to starvation). I personally don't think that makes it a case of "well that's alright then".More seriously, the "skeptics" have invented the concept of CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) simply because the know that they can't defend the argument that there is no AGW, so a shift of the goalposts is required. AGW doesn't need to be catastrophic for it to be worthwile taking steps to mitigate against in in order to maximise the quality of life for the current generation and for the next.
The problem with the air-conditioner feather theory seems to me that the feathers themselves would insulate the skin from the area at the surface of the feathers that were actually evaporating the water. It is also not clear why this would be any better than simply sweating through the skin. Why don't birds, such as ostriches do this?
Birds will continue to fly, should temperatures reach Cretaceous levels once more, this is demonstrated by the fact that there were flying birds in the cretaceous.
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Manwichstick at 23:12 PM on 20 March 2014Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: J.S. Sawyer in 1972
Excellent !!
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CBDunkerson at 21:33 PM on 20 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Phronesis, the 2004 Oreskes study found 75% of papers explicitly or implicitly supporting the consensus, 25% taking no position, and 0% contradicting the consensus. Thus, amongst papers expressing any view that study found 100% support for the consensus. Your claim that it found only "a 75% consensus level" is a logic error on your part. If you count papers which don't address the issue at all you could bring in hundreds of thousands of papers on quantum physics, stellar cartography, economics, sociiology, et cetera and claim that since none of these take any position on global warming there is less than 1% support for it... or any other subject you want to dismiss via blatantly flawed logic.
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Phronesis at 20:17 PM on 20 March 201497% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven
Guys this is really bad. It would be better if you just focused on the facts.
This does not do anything to address the issue: "Thus it's perhaps not surprising that Cook et al. (2013) and its 97% consensus result have been the subject of extensive denial among the usual climate contrarian suspects. After all, the fossil fuel industry, right-wing think tanks, and climate contrarians have been engaged in a disinformation campaign regarding the expert climate consensus for over two decades. For example, Western Fuels Association conducted a half-million dollar campaign in 1991 designed to ‘reposition global warming as theory (not fact).’"
And under "The 97% Consensus Is a Robust Result", you start by citing a study that produce a 75% consensus level -- but you don't tell us that. You cite that study without even revealing the figure, which does not support the claim in your headline. Also, it was a study of abstracts, not scientists, so it's unclear why you think we can mix the two.
The other 97% finding you cite is based on 77 people, which you don't mention.
There is no survey of scientists that gives us 97%. The Cook study was about papers, and you make no mention that most of the papers included in the consensus were coded by human raters as implicitly endorsing AGW. Nor do you mention the substantial disagreement between the raters, or the fact that the disagreed upon observations were still included in the results.
Since the debate is mostly about severity and confidence levels, studies that use broad or ambiguous litmus tests of simple agreement with human caused warming are not very useful. Actual surveys are better, especially if they ask more useful, finer grained questions, like this: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/climate-change/structure-scientific-opinion-climate-change/#
Try to find your 97% there. Severe outcomes are endorsed by less than half of the sample.
(-snip-).
Moderator Response:[DB] Tone-trolling snipped.
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JCMac1 at 14:10 PM on 20 March 2014Climate's changed before
Here's a theoretical stab in the dark about a biological fingerprint that has adapted to a hotter climate in the past. Dinosaurs. Not sure if this view or even topic has been circulated but I thought I'd share it here considering people are trying to rely on the past to understand our present situation.
Searched the net to no avail on the subject of dinosaurs and their cooling systems but this doesn't mean it's not out there. Looking over some graphs it was interesting to note that during the times of the dinosaurs it was much hotter on average than it is today. So I asked myself how dinosaurs kept cool to survive and arrived at some intersesting theories that I havn't seen around yet.
1. Were the vascular bony structures protruding from some dinosaurs originally meant for cooling the dinosaur?
2. Were dinosaur feathers originally filled with liquid instead of air?
3. Were feathers on dinosaurs originally meant to act as air-conditioners to cool the dinosaurs instead of flight?
The reason these questions are on my mind right now is that some people think we can survive dinosaur age global temperatures because life existed during these temperatures. My real questions are how did life at the time adapt to those temperatures?Think about this, dry cotton insulates but wet cotton cools a person faster than if they didn't have it on to begin with. What if feathers are the same way? What if when they're hollow with air they maintain heat and help flight for today's climate. But during hotter times they could have been filled with liquid switching them to air conditioning units instead of flying and insulating units.
Not sure if this is true or even possible but it's really, really bugging me because I can imagine it as a truth and this points to the fact that not even birds will survive going back to those temperatures without them losing their ability to fly.
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StBarnabas at 06:26 AM on 20 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #12A
Many thanks again for this excellent weekley roundup. Of particular interest to me (a veteran MATLAB user of abour 30 years) and never having time to learn 'r' is Michael E Mann's article "Why Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036". The code is in MATLAB - so if there are other users out there direct data and code links are repasted here (hope the mods are OK with this)
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/supplements/EBMProjections/Data/
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/supplements/EBMProjections/MatlabCode/
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localis at 02:31 AM on 20 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #12A
CBD - I agree that those bent on denial no matter what will deny everything no matter how farcical their arguments become. My point with the Keeling Curve is that amongst the deniers I personally have encountered none of them even knew what it is and what it represents (mainly because they have no real interest in climate change and prefer to believe anything that doesn't make them feel they have to compromise their life-style). At least it is the one piece of easily available evidence that can force them to start thinking about the real mechanics of the issue. They might then even be able to make a sensible judgement on the relevance of cow farts!
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Tom Curtis at 01:14 AM on 20 March 2014Does the global warming 'pause' mean what you think it means?
Bruce Williams, MA Rodger:
Wikipedia gives the blast yield of Little Boy as 67 x 10^12 Joules
It also gives the surface of the Earth as having an area of 510 x 10^12 m^2
TOA insolatin is 1366 W/m^2 in a plane perpendicular to the suns rays, or 341.5 W/m^2 averaged over the Earths surface. Allowing for albedo, that reduces to 239 W/m^2. That yields a total of 121890 * 10^12 Joules per second (ie, 1.1289 * 10^17 Watts) incoming energy ignoring reflected Short Wave Radiation (SWR) over the Earth's, or the equivalent of 1819.25 Little Boy explosions. From that, we determine that the average 4 Little Boy explosions per second absorbed by the Earth (ie, incoming energy less reflected SWR minus Outgoing Longwave Radiation) is 0.22% of incoming energy less reflected SWR. That is 0.31% of energy falling on the oceans, but that figure is not particularly meaningfull as the Oceans absorb 90 plus percent of total energy absorbed. A little more meaningfull is the fact that the oceans absorb 0.28-0.3% of energy falling on the oceans.
That energy is absorbed, however, over the full depth of the ocean. It may transit the surface, but that does not mean it is stored at the surface. Therefore SST and OHC are not exactly coupled, and OHC can continue to rise when SST are steady or even falling.
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rocketeer at 00:58 AM on 20 March 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #12A
It's cow farts! (Yeah, I know, that's methane but they will throw out any argument on the theory that somebody must be ignorant enough to believe it.)
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