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chriskoz at 19:25 PM on 6 September 2013Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication
We can only speculate what was the reason for this instance of peer review failure (vested interest or pal review or something else), we won't know.
We have to admit that peer review process, as climate science itself, is not bullet-proof. Mishaps as such will happen. We need to put it in perspective: how many climate science publications are beeing produced annualy? In tens of thousands. Peer review works resonably well in all those cases. Just this one case being an only notable failure in the entire process is not that bad.
And most important, the science will eventualy win when the failure case is exposed: Chris' resignation is just a start, the rebutals will follow and eventual correction will be forced, or the author will be disgraced.
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Doug Hutcheson at 17:44 PM on 6 September 2013Global Warming Includes Oceans Too - and Continues to Rise Fast
Another pearl of wisdom from Peter Sinclair. Even the 'Thanks' credits reflect a cross-section of scientific knowledge and probity.
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tcflood at 15:44 PM on 6 September 2013Greenhouse Effect Basics: Warm Earth, Cold Atmosphere
MThompson;
It just occurred to me that a good example might be to suppose that the GHG of concern were benzene. Let's suppose that the molecular vibration of interest were the C-H stretching mode at about 3000 cm-1. Let's say the earth somehow naturally emitted significant IR energy at that frequency. The benzene C-H stretch would be excited and that energy would be immediately transferred to the surrounding O2 and N2 thermal bath. Suppose that the ambient atmospheric temperature were about 40 C. The Boltzman distribution for that vibrational mode would be ~100 % v0 and 1 x 10^-6 % of v1. With no significant concentration of v1 at equlibrium, no emission of IR at 3000 cm-1 would be seen (say, back-radiation toward earth) from this system.
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tcflood at 15:00 PM on 6 September 2013Greenhouse Effect Basics: Warm Earth, Cold Atmosphere
MThompson at 95;
I don't know that this is all going to matter in understanding the greenhouse effect, but to get the clearest physical picture of what is going on, it is probably best to separate the two phenomena of (1) IR pumping of the CO2 bending mode which has the effect of heating the surrounding atmosphere and (2) the temperature-dependent equilibrium between the vibrational groundstate (v0) and the first excited state (v1) which leads to a steadystate concentration of v1 from which IR emission occurs.
In (1) photoexcitation forms a v1 CO2* in a single specific molecule which then has a lifetime of only picoseconds because it undergoes collisional energy transfer reforming v0 CO2 and distributing the energy into the local atmospheric vicinity. Photoexcitation can be thought of as only causing atmospheric warming.
In (2) the thermal pool of all the atmospheric gases has enough energy to cause, say, 4% of the total CO2 population to persist as a constant concentration of v1 excited state species in accordance with the Boltzmann equation. Now, spontaneous emission is a strictly first-order kinetic phenonenon so that the rate of emission depends on a constant times the concentration of the excited state. The rates at which individual molecular excited states are thermally produced or thermally quenched don't matter -- only the concentration matters for photon emission.
If you are able to view the system as having two independent processes in this way, it may be easier to understand.
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DSL at 12:47 PM on 6 September 2013Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication
Kramm had a run-in with SoD last year. See the comment stream.
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spoonieduck at 12:09 PM on 6 September 2013There is no consensus
Kkennett09,
I'm new here and I'm trying to get to the right subject--consensus. Anyway, you bring up tobacco in apparent reference to disease and propaganda. Yes, the tobacco industries desperately avoided getting saddled and hired the best--the absolute best--attorneys available to slip the noose. They failed because the statistics are so obvious. The chance of developing bronchogenic carcinoma [for one] is 10 times greater in smokers than in non-smokers.
(-snip-).
Moderator Response:[DB] Off-topic, sloganeering, inflammatory and ideology snipped.
Please note that posting comments here at SkS is a privilege, not a right. This privilege can be rescinded if the posting individual treats adherence to the Comments Policy as optional, rather than the mandatory condition of participating in this online forum.
Please take the time to review the policy and ensure future comments are in full compliance with it. Thanks for your understanding and compliance in this matter.
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Tom Curtis at 09:44 AM on 6 September 2013Trenberth on Tracking Earth’s energy: A key to climate variability and change
"How, in the assertions that CO2 radiates spontaneously at NTP, did the measurements eliminate the background radiation from the container? And, where can I look up tables of penetration depth of i/r in CO2 against temperature and pressure? Surely with so much invested in the subject, these should be standard engineer's tables."
Hitran is the equivalent of the engineering toolbox for CO2 emission and absorption in the IR spectrum. The 15 micron emission spectrum of CO2 was measured by Gordon and McCubbin (1965). The instrument used is described in McCubbin, Lowenthal and Gordon (1965).
That (-snip-) does not know of the science gives no information at all as to whether or not the science exists.
Moderator Response:[DB] Inflammatory snipped.
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Rob Honeycutt at 09:36 AM on 6 September 2013Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication
I'm really fascinated by this. It strikes me as strange that someone, like Akasofu, whom I gather has the capacity to do substantial, original research, would think that it's okay to not do similar work related to climate change?
Surely he understands this paper was not truly up to snuff. What would be his motivation?
Could there be an element that he doesn't want to push any deeper into the material because it might actually challenge the conclusions he prefers to believe?
Could he be knowingly publishing bad research counter to AGW for ideological reasons?
People like Pat Michaels and the Idso's, I think I get those guys. For them climate denial is a lucrative gig. They are, essentially, working for the FF industry and will present conclusions the industry needs. Their pay depends on producing contradictory claims, accurate or not.
It's these second tier researchers who don't seem (as far as I know) derive any direct income from the FF industry that I don't get.
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davidnewell at 09:27 AM on 6 September 2013Toward Improved Discussions of Methane & Climate
This is the last thing Shakhova says in the video:
"strictly speaking, we do not like what we see there. Absolutely do not like."
==============
This thread should be at least a partial relief to her, as it is to me, since it was obvious that she was deeply and personally concerned about the issue. Besides, she's really pretty.
So at least we have a possibility of having a Planet for more than another 25 years or so.
Whew!
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MThompson at 08:38 AM on 6 September 2013Greenhouse Effect Basics: Warm Earth, Cold Atmosphere
tcflood at 94,
Thanks very much. My percentages were for the energy of all gas molecules that had enough energy to excite CO2, but your steady-state 4% number is more direct and to-the-point.
Now to continue developing my mental image, the photons from the earth's surface blackbody radiation in the range of 13-18 microns (770 to 560 cm-1) are pumping the CO2->CO2* transition. The CO2* relax in one of two ways: by colliding with other atmospheric gas molecules and thus raise their kinetic energy, or the CO2* relax by releasing photons in the range of 13-18 microns. Is this a good visualization?
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Steve Bloom at 08:21 AM on 6 September 2013Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication
I see that the Editor-in-Chief (Nicole Molders) is a colleague of Akasofu's at UAF and given the timing of her arrival there I suspect may have been hired by him. She has co-authored a number of papers with Kramm (possibly also hired by Akasofu?), who himself has a bit of a reputation.
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K.a.r.S.t.e.N at 06:15 AM on 6 September 2013The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry
MA Rodger, for BC I am currently relying on Skeie et al. 2011a, while it is the companion Skeie et al. 2011b paper for all other aerosol species. The latter also provides some interesting forcing estimates, though I'd rather treat them with caution ;-)
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Chris Brierley at 05:34 AM on 6 September 2013Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication
@Albatross and @StBarnabas - thank you for the support.
@Ferran R. Vilar - I've fixed the links now. Sorry about that.
@VictorVenema - It's interesting that similar things have happened before with the publisher. I wasn't aware of any of that previous history. I wonder if I would have come across those instances if I'd spent more time looking into the publisher's reputation at the outset. I would point out though that publishers are at the mercy of their journals' editors - so they may sometimes by unwitting victims. Publishers don't (and shouldn't) make editorial decisions. Their main input is to select the editors in the first place. Although consulting with me or others members of the board earlier could have prevented this farce. I've not been involved with enough other publishers enough to known how much blame should be placed at MDPI for this, but it looks like this isn't an isolated incident from your comment.
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Leland Palmer at 05:17 AM on 6 September 2013Toward Improved Discussions of Methane & Climate
It appears that some methane hydrate deposits are associated with high salt brine deposits- and those hydrates may be much, much less stable than the majority of hydrate deposits.
When methane hydrate crystals form, these crystals exclude salt and other impurities from their crystal structure, in the well known "purification by crystalization" process.
This apparently leads to high salt concentrations in some deposits, which allows those deposits to be at the triple point of the system- in which liquid, methane gas, and solid hydrate co-exist.
For these deposits, methane gas is much more mobile, and can apparently migrate upward through the hydrate deposit as a gas, according to authors including Peter Flemmings and his student Xiaoli Liu :
DYNAMICS OF SHALLOW MARINE GAS HYDRATE AND FREE GAS SYSTEMS
(2) Massive release of methane from gas hydrate depends on its proximity to the three-phase boundary. Where methane flux is high, there is a three-phase zone from the base of the hydrate stability zone to the seafloor. The three-phase zone increases the amount of hydrates located at the three-phase boundary; thus it can rapidly respond to environmental changes. Hydrate dissociation within the three-phase zone is regulated by changes in salinity required for three-phase equilibrium with temperature. The dissociated free gas can be released to the ocean via the three phase zone, even though hydrates do not completely dissociate during a small warming event. We estimate that a 4°C increase in seafloor temperature can release 70% of methane stored in the hydrate system that is initially at three-phase equilibrium, providing a mechanism for rapid methane release.
Such high salt methane deposits may be fairly common, according to authors including Maria Torres and Miriam Kastner:
OCCURRENCE OF HIGH SALINITY FLUIDS ASSOCIATED WITH MASSIVE NEAR-SEAFLOOR GAS HYDRATE DEPOSITS
CONCLUSIONS
Massive gas hydrate and chloride brines in near- seafloor sediments along continental margins are not at all uncommon, and may represent a significant carbon reservoir, which is susceptible to oceanographic perturbations....Preliminary estimates suggest that there is approximately 125 x 10-3 Gt of carbon trapped in the Ulleung Basin brine patches. If we assume that there are 200-500 such locations sites worldwide, this will represent a ~25 to 62.5 Gt carbon, which is 0.25 to 12% of the total carbon thought to be sequestered in gas hydrate deposits globally.
The existence of these deposits may be the answer to the disconnect between the geological evidence of past methane catastrophes and our current lack of understanding of how these mass extinction events occurred.
These high salt deposits could provide a bridge between orbital or anthropogenic forcing and massive methane release from the oceanic methane hydrates. Along with permafrost decay and shallow permafrost bound hydrates, these high salt hydrates could be the answer to how massive methane releases could occasionally be triggered by relatively minor triggering events.
Global methane hydrate inventories are probably very high, due to a series of recent ice ages. We are providing an exceptionally rapid and systematic triggering event by our global greenhouse emissions. The situation seems ideal, to me, for the generation of a methane catastrophe- perhaps the biggest one ever.
Why hasn't a biosphere ending methane catastrophe occurred before? The End Permian was a close call, perhaps, with upwards of 90 percent of species exterminated. And the sun is hotter now, by a couple of percent, than it was during the End Permian.
Maybe a biosphere ending runaway greenhouse hasn't happened before, just by luck.
If a low level or greater runaway had happened before, we would not be around to discuss it.
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old sage at 04:59 AM on 6 September 2013Trenberth on Tracking Earth’s energy: A key to climate variability and change
I've stood back a bit to let my critics reflect on what I have said - and recant where appropriate!
First, (-snip-).Moderator Response:[DB] "I do not believe the waste heat theory has been refuted"
Then take that portion of the discussion here:
It's Waste Heat
Be sure to read the ENTIRE discussion thread first.
"Surely with so much invested in the subject, these should be standard engineer's tables"
Please cease with arguments from personal incredulity.
The remainder of your comment was snipped due to its inapprpriateness for this thread. Feel free to repost those pertinent bits on the It's Waste Heat above.
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franklefkin at 04:57 AM on 6 September 20132013 Arctic Sea Ice Extent Prediction
I know it is still early in September, but it looks like we have a winner with Kevin @ 5,000,000 km2.
The only question left, is will the final tally fall within his +/- range of 100,000 km2.
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Paul R Price at 04:54 AM on 6 September 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #36A
Regarding "A carbon tax that America could live with", it is worh pointing to Kevin Anderson's recent post Why Carbon Prices Can't Deliver the 2º Target. I would like to see some more discussion of Anderson's thinking in SkS or is it already here somewhere?
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MA Rodger at 03:35 AM on 6 September 2013The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry
K.a.r.S.t.e.N @21.
Nonetheless, thank you for the comment. It prompted me to mix "black carbon" into a renewed bit of searching & quickly arrived at Bond et al 2007 "Historical emissions of black and organic carbon aerosol from energy-related combustion, 1850–2000." They wade through the various coal uses & historical energy intensities. They find falling global BC emissions from coal use after 1925 but very little deviation from a constant rate of increase from all sources.
And they work through their estimation methods so I can have a bit of fun seeing if I can sort out some sort of smog factor.
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Ferran P. Vilar at 01:09 AM on 6 September 2013Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication
"Page not found" when clicking on "Katsman & van Oldenborgh (2011)" and "correction". Thank you for correcting!
Moderator Response:[DB] The links worked for me just now.
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Rob Honeycutt at 22:44 PM on 5 September 2013Models are unreliable
cruzn... I think you'll actually find that people here are willing to entertain contrarian ideas, but you have to be able to substantiate your position far better than you're currently doing.
Just because you think something is obvious does not make you automatically correct. As the moderator is saying, you must back your claims with actual science and research.
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dvaytw at 21:55 PM on 5 September 2013It's El Niño
PS - is there a way to set the thread so I get an email notification when there's a response?
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K.a.r.S.t.e.N at 21:50 PM on 5 September 2013The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry
MA Rogder @18: I don't have much to add to Toms comment. Black Carbon emissons seems to have risen a bit faster at that time while sulfate emissions stalled temporarily. Anthropogenic aerosol forcing hence not negative. But unless current emission inventories change dramatically, forcing contributions from anthropogenic aerosols are marginal between 1920-1940. Some propose land use changes as a more potent driver. I think that's also only a tiny part of the story. Another minor contribution may arise from a temperature station coverage bias (less robust SH data).
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0^0 at 20:34 PM on 5 September 2013The 97% consensus on human-caused global warming is a robust result
It looks like the Legates paper is part of an ongoing "discussion" on the pages of that journal....There has been a recent article by Bedford & Cook
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11191-013-9608-3
and I trust the "discussion" continues in this journal -- and perhaps elsewhere as well http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/451/2013/esdd-4-451-2013.html
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michael sweet at 19:59 PM on 5 September 2013The 97% consensus on human-caused global warming is a robust result
The article OO referred to is in an education journal, not a climate or science journal. I ma a teacher and read those journals occasionally. The standard to get a paper in is very low. Does anyone have expewrience with this particular journal?
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Tom Curtis at 17:01 PM on 5 September 2013The 97% consensus on human-caused global warming is a robust result
0^0 @1, I ran some calculations on the detailed results as released on this site. They show that to obtain a 0.3% "consensus rating", Legates et al had to only count papers rated 1, and then also exclude any papers categorized as "impacts" and "mitigation".
The first step not only excludes every paper that endorses the consensus without explicitly quantifying the contribution of humans, or only implicitly endorses the consensus - it actually counts them and neutral (rating 4) papers as disendorsing the consensus. That follows because they are not rejecting the 32.6% of all abstracts rated as endorsing the consensus in Cook et al, but the 97.1% "among abstracts with AGW position". So, either it is a deliberate strawman by quantifying something they know to belong to a different category (% among all abstracts) or they are tacitly asserting that all abstracts have a position on AGW, and that overwhelmingly that position is a refusal to endorse AGW. Curiously they are willing to assert this without any sign that they themselves have rated the abstracts. They are insisting that their a priori rating is better than Cook et al's empirical rating.
Excluding "impacts" and "mitigation" papers is even more dubious. First, it confuses "endorses" with "is evidence of". A paper about marigolds could "endorse" AGW by simply noting that they think AGW is true. That is not evidence of AGW, and nobody pretends otherwise. It merely indicates the opinion of the authors about AGW (ie, they think it is true). And, of course, Cook et al is not trying to measure the level of evidence, but the distribution of opinions. In fact, it is one of the main arguments of the pseudo-skeptics that a consensus is not evidence, but here they ignore that distinction and pretend that Cook et al by trying to measure consensus is actually trying to measure evidence, the only basis on which excluding "mitigation" papers would be relevant.
It is worse than that, however, for a large portion of "impacts" papers are about the climatological impacts of increasing CO2 levels. They make findings about such things as the likely temperature increase from a doubling of CO2, or from historical and projected CO2 emissions. These are exactly the sort of papers that do provide evidence about whether or not anthropogenic emissions have caused >50% of recent temperature increases. Yet Legates et al want to exclude them as irrelevant (while counting them among "abstracts with [an] AGW position".
The contortion of reasoning involved in their claim is, as you can see, beyond belief.
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0^0 at 16:18 PM on 5 September 2013The 97% consensus on human-caused global warming is a robust result
Oops.. Sorry about the text snippet in the end due to poor proof reading.. Yes, that paper is now widely celebrated in WUWT and other places...
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0^0 at 16:15 PM on 5 September 2013The 97% consensus on human-caused global warming is a robust result
Appears there is a new paper http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9 by the team David R. Legates, Willie Soon, William M. Briggs and Christopher Monckton of Brenchley "Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change" claiming that the consensus is at 0.3% level.
Unfortunately that is hidden behind paywalls so I have not been able to read the details. However, it seems like they must be using some sematic "tricks" to reach their conclusions as self rating of the authors should be proof enough to clarify any doubts.
celebrated in WUWT etc challenging the consensus paper
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Albatross at 14:38 PM on 5 September 2013Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication
Dr. Brierley,
Thank you for sharing. It is a pity that it had to come to this, but you made a principled and very courageous decision. In my opinion, you also made the correct decision.
All of the best.
Albatross
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DSL at 12:39 PM on 5 September 2013It's the sun
Cruzn, that's a really wierd argument. You're implying that solar is responsible for the fifty year trend, yet the 11-year cycle is not well-represented in the GMST trend. For a forcing to be that dominant, one would expect the trend of that forcing to be writ large in the long-term trend. It's not. The long-term trend is rather steady in its advance. Surely you're not arguing from the long-term solar trend--clearly flat or falling since 1960. We just had the deepest 11-year cycle minimum in the instrumental period (trough bottomed out through 2009-2010). That trough spent a year below the minima of previous cycles. The 12-month period between mid 2009 and mid 2010 was the warmest 12-month period in the instrumental record.
If you were truly basing your theory on solid evidence, you'd have absolutely no need or motivation for the bitter tone and reluctance to share your math. Your past history smells like troll. Is that the extent of your contribution?
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davidnewell at 12:27 PM on 5 September 2013The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry
One Planet Only Forever @ 14.
Thank you for that summary explanation. Very thoughtful.
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cruzn246 at 11:08 AM on 5 September 2013Models are unreliable
(-snip-).
Moderator Response:[DB] Please comport yourself with this site's Comments Policy. In it you will note under the Sloganeering section that if you wish to differ with established science, you will need to bring reputable evidence to support that chosen differing. Mere assertion, as has been your wont, fails to rise to that burden of proof.
Sloganeering snipped.
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Roger D at 10:51 AM on 5 September 2013Models are unreliable
cruzn246:
"Tell me why it has essentially stopped warming just when the solar torch let up?"
See the SkS climate myth #2 "it's the sun". The first graph does not support your statement above. Also, what do you mean, specifically in @628 when you say "it has stopped warming". Specifically what do you mean when you say "it".
Finally, I think it is a strech to imply that the modelers and those that utilize them to aid in understanding climate change "think they have it all figured out". However, you sound like that. And in my opinon have much less of a leg to stand on in your assertions.
Moderator Response:[DB] Please note that cruzn246 has an extensive history of sloganeering and trolling in this venue.
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Rob Honeycutt at 10:44 AM on 5 September 2013Models are unreliable
cruzn... Please look again at the chart I linked to before. It clearly shows that there is a low LOSU (level of scientific understanding) related to solar. But that doesn't mean it could be absolutely anything. Still the likely range solar forcing is a fraction of GHG forcing, which has a high LOSU.
You do realize, of course, we have satellites which are measuring solar variation, and you were even quoting radiative forcing figures, data that comes from those satellites.
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Rob Honeycutt at 10:15 AM on 5 September 2013It's the sun
cruzn246... Yes, you are clearly wrong on this one. My suggestion would be for you to read all three levels of the scientific response to the myth you're presenting. The relative forcing you're presenting is small compared to GHG forcing.
Moderator Response:[DB] Please note that cruzn246 has an extensive history of sloganeering and trolling in this venue.
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Rob Honeycutt at 10:05 AM on 5 September 2013Models are unreliable
The image from the link above:
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Rob Honeycutt at 10:03 AM on 5 September 2013Models are unreliable
cruzn246... What you say might be interesting if it were based on any facts.
Do you think for even two seconds that the many thousands of scientists who work on climate issues have not considered the relative forcing of solar vs GHG's?
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Tom Curtis at 09:39 AM on 5 September 2013The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry
MA Rodger @18, the biggest change in the early twentieth century would have been from coal fired to oil fired boilers in shipping.
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cruzn246 at 09:13 AM on 5 September 2013Models are unreliable
The thing about the models that is screwing it up now is the divergence with solar and CO2, which had always been closely linked. No the solar is backing off, and the mistaken notion that a high solar level isn't enough (it is), an ever incresing one being needed (false), is showing the pundits they hooked their cart to the wrong horse. The solar has been and still is the driver. All those folks who put CO2 in charge are just waiting for the trend to go up again. Good luck folks. When the solar activity returns to warming levels it will go up again. Til then you are out of luck. The math of the models is flawed and the flaw is showing. It did great when solar and CO2 were in lockstep (the past), but picked the wrong driver and is now showing the error big time.
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cruzn246 at 08:08 AM on 5 September 2013It's the sun
Ho hum. Call me wrong. I really thought the ocean cycles would have to flip to get the cooling thing going, but it seems the solar backing down is doing it all on it's own. I said it once and I'll say it again. When the solar output drops below 1365.7, and it has, the warming stops. If it drops into area below 1365 get ready for major cooling. It looks to be going there.
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StBarnabas at 07:37 AM on 5 September 2013Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication
Chris
I am a professor in Physics and Electrical Engineering in Northumbria and have been heavily involved in MSc programmes (for a time programme director postgraduate) and your dissertation/project criteria are similar to ours and indeed are I suspect very similar to most good universities in the UK and Ireland.
We have an 80%+ category (the externs complain about us not using a full range of marks) for work of sufficient quality it is publishable in a reputable international journal and indeed provide the option for the best students to write a paper rather than a dissertation.
I am an astroparticle physicist by training and know how difficult real science is. I have great regard for my climate change colleagues and am bewildered by why scientists trained in other fields think they know the subject and can possibly use reputation to get amaturish work published.
I have not published in the area of climate science but was periferally involved with the Sloan and Wolfendale rebuttal of "causal link between cosmic rays and cloud cover" (T Sloan and A W Wolfendale 2008 Environ. Res. Lett. 3 024001). Shame Sir Arnold Wolfendale, (former astronomer royal) is now in his 80's as he is a grat science commnicaor and a passionate believer in truth, but is slowing sown a lot. Anyway I digreess.
Congratulations on a principled decision. Like most working academics I regularly peer review papers in my area and with the upcomin REF have soft pressure put on me to become a member of an editorial board (though these days if it not in Q1 of Thomson Reuter's Web of knowledge not considered best quality)
You have made the right decision
Sean
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tcflood at 07:07 AM on 5 September 2013Greenhouse Effect Basics: Warm Earth, Cold Atmosphere
MThompson at 93;
The rate of emission of IR photons from the excited bending mode of CO2* in the atmosphere is a property of the bulk steady-state concentration of that state regardless of the lifetime of the state for any single molecule. By my calculation using the Boltzmann equation, at 80 F about 4% of the CO2 molecules are excited in the bending mode. The rate of spontaneous emission from the sample depends on that number.
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william5331 at 06:42 AM on 5 September 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #36A
Convincing the American people to go with a carbon tax (first article) would be painfully easy. Convincing the antidiluvian senate and congress would be another thing all together. Simply put in the second half of Hansen's solution and give the dividend. The side benefits (besides reducing carbon emissions) would be great. So many American families are on the bones of their backsides. They would immedeately put every cent they received back into the economy just to put food on the table. Taxes to the government at all levels. What is so hard to undersand about this.
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MA Rodger at 05:38 AM on 5 September 2013The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry
K.a.r.S.t.e.N@17.
My ten peneth down the wishing well on early 20th century forcings is to wonder how quickly electric power was adopted during those decades. We have good data for how much coal was burnt but I have been unable to find information on the proportion burnt in power stations as opposed to factory boilers and domestic grates. Any significant drop in coal use in boilers and grates would have made a big difference to pollution even if coal use in power stations was increasing and resulting in greater total coal use - my hypothesis being that power stations burn more consistently and more cleanly. Unfortunately quantitive data on the rise of the power station has so far eluded me.
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Yvan Dutil at 05:07 AM on 5 September 2013Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication
Well I have published in Sustainability (a MDPI journal). The reviewer were good. But I did trust the editorial staff because I knew many of them by reputation.
The problem those days is that some «open access» journals tend to accept anything. But, MDPI is far from beeign the worst case.
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K.a.r.S.t.e.N at 04:34 AM on 5 September 2013Study offers clues on 20th century global warming wobbles
Tom, there was an interesting paper published earlier this year by Daniel Murphy, argueing that the recent redistribution of anthropogenic aerosols towards the equator didn't change the overall forcing picture much (under the assumption that the aerosol loading and composition remains constant). Locally things do change, but globally there is surprisingly little change. Seems to be consistent with another paper just published by Xie et al., showing that spatial patterns of GHG and aerosol response are similar, despite the heterogeneous aerosol forcing pattern.
While it might be a valid assumption for most purposes, that doesn't mean that it is safe to assume that their global effect will be the same regardless of where emitted. I absolutely agree with you here. Aerosols in formerly pristine regions have a considerable stronger effect, and indeed, the NH forcing should be very sensitive to the North Atlantic (and perhaps even ENSO), while this might not be such serious an issue elsewhere.
Re my first comment (#2), it might be worth adding Fig. 15 from Shindell et al. 2013, showing how strong an effect the indirect aerosol effect (mainly cloud albedo effect) has over the oceans (at least in the model world ;-)):
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K.a.r.S.t.e.N at 04:10 AM on 5 September 2013The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry
Kevin, for the "forcing function" in my 2-box EBM I used a quick land response (1 year) and a slow ocean response (60 years) ONLY for volcanic eruptions. The latter combines the fast and the slow ocean response in that the exponential decay is faster. Essentially, I merely tried to fit the Stenchikov et al. 2009 (S09) model results as good as I possibly can. You may check what I exactly did: Pinatubo S09 vs Pinatubo EBM, and Tambora S09 vs Tambora EBM. That would be my test! It's hard to come by more of these data. So this would certainly be the starting point if one were to dig deeper.
Apart from volcanes, solar variability and aerosol forcing is unlikely to be "delayed", while I accommodated the WMGHG response using OHC data (which isn't perfectly accurate, but only an issue in the last 50 years or so). It does reproduce the principal climate variability in a quite convincing fashion, which - after all - was the whole purpose of this exercise for me. However, it is by no means robust with regard to the ultimate climate sensitivity (though mainstream numbers do the job quite well), since I was trying to get the NH response right (due to the limited number of reliable global paleo-reconstructions).
You are right, the slow response won't have a measurable effect on TCR. It merely controls ECS in the long run (which is one reason why I consider all these supposedly observation-based ECS estimates useless). So yes, TCR might be lower. BUT, it is only lower because part of the initially forced temperature response is now treated as stochastic internal variability (mainly PDO). What is commonly believed to be purely chaotic is in fact partly driven by former external forcing. What is changing as a results of this, is the ratio between TCR and ECS. TCR might be lower, but ECS remains entirely unaffected. So I am not sure there is much that can be done here. For example, there is simply no way to reproduce the strong SST increase post-Novarupta (1912) until 1940. In the simplest case, it is just the immediate recovery from Krakatoa, Santa Maria and Novarupta, which went on uninterrupted with its climax during the strong 1942 El Nino (supported by early GHG forcing).
Another potential "solution" to the volcano-puzzle: As we are lacking precise knowledge of the strength of some volcanic eruptions, we might have to revise the volcanic forcing estimates (despite some recent more sophisticated attempts to fill the gaps). Novarupta is one such example, an eruption which might have led to much more intense NH cooling. At least, it causes the strongest bias in the CMIP5-GISS comparison (corrected for ENSO following FR11).
Re solar response: I'm not sure in how far this has to do with a delayed volcanic response? I might have missed sth here. The solar UV response has implications for the (north) polar region in the NH winter. Via considerably changing solar fluxes in the UV range, the coupling between polar stratosphere and troposphere is "facilitated" under low solar activity conditions (due to changing stratospheric heating rates IIRC) which in turn increases the chance for polar vortex splitting and subsequent cooling in Eurasia. The net effect is a slightly amplified cooling. We saw many of these events in recent years, with 2012 being a particularly drastic example. As you surely know, it might as well be a response to the shrinking Arctic sea ice. Hard to know, but there is some evidence for the solar link. Models with a so-called high-top stratosphere reproduce the observed patterns nicely (Adam Scaife and Sarah Ineson have good publications on that issue).
By the way, when I am using the Potsdam forcing in your toy model, I noticed that the volcanic temperature response seems to have an offset. Don't know whether this is just a graphic issue. If not, it may introduce an unintended error when it comes to the computation of the correlation coefficient.
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rockytom at 03:53 AM on 5 September 2013The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry
There is still Earth's basic energy imbalance of +0.58 W/m2calculated by Hansen and his teams during the last decade. Warming will continue apace no matter where it goes (deep ocean, atmosphere, etc.) until the system reaches equilibrium again, if ever. If I'm missing something, please let me know.
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VictorVenema at 02:31 AM on 5 September 2013Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication
(Can a moderator remove the first version of my comment with all the link errors)
I was afraid this would happen, but am surprised it happened that fast.
Some time ago, I came across the article A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change by Alan Carlin.
This paper should never have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It is a collection of weird figures taken off of climate ostrich blogs.
Furthermore Mr. Carlin (a well-known climate "sceptic") was guest editor of the special issue in which his paper was published in record time. Thus I asked the published IJERPH how they handle such cases. How they make sure that the reviews are independent and a reviewer can be sure that his anonymity is kept. And I asked who selected Alan Carlin to be guest editor?
I got no real answer from the managing editor Dr. Ophelia Han, just empty words about their great peer-review. I found this very unsatisfactory and made a note never to publish with MDPI.
The publisher has more issues.
The second scandal is another erroneous climate paper in the journal Remote Sensing by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell, which led to resignation of the editor.
Furthermore, A paper in the journal Life solving the puzzle of the origin and evolution of cellular life in the universe led several editors to resign, but not to its retraction. That such a paper can be published is unbelievable. I do encourage people to read this article, it is great fun.
I can only conclude that I will never risk my reputation by publishing in a MDPI journal and that I will advice my colleagues not to publish anything in the new journal Climate.
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Kevin C at 20:41 PM on 4 September 2013The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry
K.a.r.S.t.e.N: That is very interesting indeed, thanks for the explanation.
One of my biggest problems with the short volcanic response is that it demands a TCR which is much lower than the rest of the temperature record requires. However, a very slow response would address that in part (although some of the response would then fall out of the TCR window and contribute only to ECS). But a more complex interaction between volcanoes and ENSO (on which there is certainly plenty of literature) or even ENSO and PDO (on which there is some) would change the picture a lot.
Can you suggest any tests we could do to look at this? Allowing a separate volcanic response still seems worth a try, but I wonder if there is anything else.
Also, do you have any views on the solar response, which has a strong interaction with the delayed volcanic response on the satellite era? My other correspondent has noted recent work on UV which may affect the scale of the solar response.
However if we allow all the terms to vary separately I am still convinced that the problem suffers from overfitting, so I'm looking for any constraints I can use.
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One Planet Only Forever at 13:27 PM on 4 September 2013The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry
Replying to davidnewell @ 12.
The best explanation I have developed so far for the "significant lack of concern about potential future consequences" is that some people allow their personal desire for more profit, pleasure, comfort or convenience to trump concerns about what might happen to other people in the future. The real problem in this case is that the ones benefiting most aren’t expecting to be the ones suffering the consequences.
As tragic as that sounds it seems to be the best explanation for the ease with which the delayers have been able to maintain support for their efforts to "do nothing that would spare the future from negative consequences".
There are even people arguing things as absurd as "the total lost benefit of today's most fortunate reducing their creation of future problems is greater than the problem being created". To add insult to the injury of that absurd evaluation they over-state the lost benefit and under-state the future costs by only caring about the costs to the most fortunate and then reduce those costs because they would happen in the future.
The creation of a sustainable better future for all life on our one and only planet should be the first requirement of the acceptability of any action. That, however, is not the motivation in societies that are immersed in the mass-consumption market with its pursuers of maximum short-term benefit.
That may not ease your frustration, but it may explain why so many people seem unwilling to actually understand the details and significance of this issue (the inconvenient truths). More details, presented effectively, make it more difficult for them to believe what they would prefer to believe. However, it is very challenging to "make someone believe something that requires them to give up their potential benefit just to help someone else”. It is difficult to make the case when “responsibility to create a better future for all” is not part of our culture. We can’t even convince people to focus exclusively on driving when they are driving even though they are putting themselves personally at risk when they allow themselves to be distracted from that important responsibility.
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