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Chris8616 at 03:46 AM on 3 June 2013Video: Lake El'gygytgyn, Pleistocene super-Interglacials and Arctic warmth
How much resolution does the new sediment record reveal? How fast?
And, if with 320 ppm all the ice melts, 350 doesn't seem legit.
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Andy Skuce at 02:22 AM on 3 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
William Haas: I should make the obvious point that The Consensus Project and the associated discussion is centered around a peer-reviewed article published in a mainstream scientific journal. Even if we adopted your narrow definition of what SkS should cover, TCP would still be be within that scope.
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DSL at 02:01 AM on 3 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
Wrong, William Haas. This site is about the communication of climate science to the general public. That task is essentially political (in the broad sense, not the crude RepDem, LibCon, RightLeft sense). Comments are expected to be supported with evidence, preferably that generated through the scientific process.
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Tom Dayton at 23:18 PM on 2 June 2013It's CFCs
Eli Rabett has commented on the "new" (i.e., recycled) 2013 Lu paper claiming CFCs are responsible for everything.
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R. Gates at 22:39 PM on 2 June 2013Video: Lake El'gygytgyn, Pleistocene super-Interglacials and Arctic warmth
chriskoz,
There are many factors which go into the unique nature of each interglacial, with the actual combinations of Milanokovitch forcings being one. The rising CO2 levels, which seem to be a positive feedback to the initial Milanokovitch forcing are a good gauge as to the overall temperature of the interglacial, but there are natural negative feedbacks, such as increased rock weathering and decreased dust in the atmosphere that act to remove CO2 from the atmosphere during interglacials. During the current interglacial, the explosive release of CO2, and other greenhouse gases by humans (a virtual human carbon volcano) has overwhelmed all natural feedbacks. On the current trajectory, certainly 450 or 500 ppm seems assured. Absent any massive geoengineering efforts to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, certainly a Pliocene-like, and even a Miocene-like climate in the coming centuries in which both Greenland and Antarctica are eventually ice free is likely. This rapid shift in climate would be not unlike the shift we saw during the PETM, with the related massive loss of species, of which we are already seeing.
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MA Rodger at 20:16 PM on 2 June 2013The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years?
(The previous graphs illustrating Where's Amo? should now also be visible.)
A selection of US States can also be used to create a temperature profile for a North-South band of the country. This is done here to create 4 more temperature records westward across the US. (Eg (1) Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama. (2) Minnesotat, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana. (3) Montana, Wyoming, Cloorado, New Mexico. (4) Washington, Oregon, Calafornia.) With one exception, the individual state data in each N-S band again provide similar temperature records (the exception being Montana which experiences a cold spell all of its own in the late 40s-early 50s). (The data all has the same E Coast 'de-trending' trend subtracted from them for sake of the comparison.)
The graph below is rather busy but still gives no indication of AMO affecting US temperatures. The 'saw-tooth' profile of the East coast actually amplifies beyond the Appalachians but disappears by the Rockies where, if you really want it to be there, the profile looks a bit like AMO. But, no, it is gone by the West Coast. So Where's Amo?
When the US average temperature anomaly is plotted, something a little like AMO starts to appear with a strong amplitude, stronger than AMO. However it still remains different enough not to be AMO, certainly not a temperature profile driven by AMO.
So Where is Amo?
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Dikran Marsupial at 20:01 PM on 2 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
William Haas, the TCP is a survey that tells us where the mainstram scientific position lies on the question of AGW, that is a question about science, not politics. Try reading up on the philosophy of science (e.g. Kuhn), you will find that the emergence of a concensus is essentially what defines a scientific paradigm
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chriskoz at 19:07 PM on 2 June 2013Video: Lake El'gygytgyn, Pleistocene super-Interglacials and Arctic warmth
Hmm, this stage 11 (420-400ka) ecxeptional warmth in the Arctic (+8 deg according to foraminifera resord) was accompanied by only 300-320ppm CO2. That means Arctic can be emxtremely sensitive. Admitedly, the Milankovic forcings (eccentricity and obliquity) must have been aligned accordingly.
So the question is now, how 400+ ppm today (realisticly 450+ ppm because politicians will not be pressing FF industries to cut emissions more than the agreed maximum target) would affect Arctic, given today's Milankovic alignment? I think 450ppm can easily overpower Milankovic forcings although I don't have numbers to show that. So, essentialy ice-free Greenland is likely in the longer, few-century term?
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William Haas at 18:58 PM on 2 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
This site is suppose to be about science and not politics. Consensus is a political argument and not a scientific one. Accordingly the consensus project should be deleted from this site.
Moderator Response:[JH] You are skating on the thin ice of sloganeering. Please cease and desist.
Also. please read and adhere to the SkS Comments Policy.
Posting comments on SkS is a privelege, not a right.
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KK Tung at 15:36 PM on 2 June 2013The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years? Part 2.
In reply to post 115 by Dikran Marsupial:I appreciated your willingness to invest the time to code up the Matlab code and run the case you constructed in your post 57. You continue to focus on the technical issues. I owe you a technical answer. As far as we can tell, there is nothing wrong with your code and the procedure. However, you neglected to report the error bars of the your result. Without that information, you cannot legitimately conclude that the MLR underestimated the true value. This is an area that is your expertise, I believe, and so my explanation below is only for those readers who are not familiar with statistics or uncertainties in parameter estimation: one is comparing two quantities, A and B. A is the true value and B is the estimate of A. Since there is uncertainty in the estimate, B is often given in the form of b+/-c, with b being the central value and c being two standard deviations that defines the 95% confidence level for the estimate B. B is said to contain the true value A with 95% confidence if A lies within the range b-c to b+c.
In my post 114 commenting on your post 57, I mentioned that your artificially constructed case of an AMO that is 40% the same as the anthropogenic response is problematic because you have created a problem of collinearity between the two regressors In your multiple linear regression (MLR). The degree of collinearity matters because its effect shows up in the MLR result in the size of the error bars in the parameter estimates that MLR produces.Since you did not provide them, we have recreated your code and reran it to produce the error bars. Your MLR model is:
Observation=b(1)*one+b(2)*anthro+b(3)*natural+b(4)*AMOd+ noise.The b's are the elements in your vector beta. From one simulation we get b(1)=0.1364+/-0.0154, b(2)=0.6241+/-0.9336, b(3)=0.2155+/-2.1516 and b(4)=1.4451+/-3.3582. Note that these error bars are often larger than their central values. Ignoring b(1), which is the regression coefficient for the constant offset, the other b's are the estimates for anthro, natural and AMO, respectively. The true values for them, 1,1 and 0 are within the error bars of the estimate by MLR. So could should not have concluded that they are different.
Since you used a random noise model in your model, each simulation will be somewhat different from the other and from the one set of values that you reported in post 57. We repeated the simulation 10,000 times with different realizations of noise. We can report that 95% of the time the 95% confidence level includes the true value.In conclusion, the MLR is giving you the correct estimate of the true value of anthropogenic response within the 95% confidence level range. Such a range is large in your case because of the serious collinearity of the model you constructed. In the MLR analysis of the real observation the degree of collinearity is much smaller, hence our error bars are much smaller, and so our MLR analysis gave useful results while your artificially constructed case did not yield useful results.
I will also try to reply to Dumb Scientist's post in a day or two. The problem of collinearity in his case is even more severe.
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Peeve at 12:46 PM on 2 June 2013Will Tropical Forests Remain Carbon Sinks?
I am assuming that the amount of rainforest in these models are kept constant and the quality of rainforest remains at today's level.
Tuening rainforest to pasture (or non proud soils due to nutrient depletion or production of laterite soils) will reduce the abilitottoman continue as a carbon sink.
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grindupBaker at 10:41 AM on 2 June 2013Global warming is here to stay, whichever way you look at it
Me@39corrections/clarifications. UK NPL table sea water 3985J/Kg/K so 5.58*10**24J to heat oceans 1C. My ocean heat content 1.61<*10>**27J is hugely incorrect because water is ice at <273K and 3985J/Kg/K will not apply at 0-273K. Re Dr. Trenberth and/or Dr. Randall lectures re land ~6.5m deep at ~50% ocean specific heat capacity - I don't recall whether sea bed is included, probably not, complex because it's not warmed by sun. Geothermal heat flux stated as average entering oceans 0.097 +-0.004 Wm**-2 by M. Hofmann & M. A. Morales Maqueda "Geothermal Heat Flux and its Influence on the Oceanic Abyssal Circulation and Radiocarbon Distribution"
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Tom Curtis at 08:14 AM on 2 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
RomanM @64:
1) "Is this argument based on some sort of technicality?"
You can call it a technicality if you like, but the post above says that:
"Some blogs advanced a related logical fallacy by claiming that this shows 'an increase in uncertainty.'" (My emphasis)
The bolded phrase is a direct quote from Watts' gloss on your blog. In contrast, the word "uncertainty" appears only twice on your blogpost, once in quoting Watts' title in a trackback, and again in quoting Watts in the same trackback. Your blogpost makes a technical point about a (purportedly) superior methods for calculating the trends calculated in Cook et al. Watts puts a gloss on that by presenting a "reason" for the trends. It is the latter that is criticized above, not the former.
Curiously, although you have been invited to comment on Watts "reason", you have not done so - either here, nor at WUWT (although at WUWT you did take the time to misrepresent a PR campaign as a source funding for scientific research).
2) Thankyou for calculating the GLM trends for endorsement and rejection of AGW as a percentage of papers taking a position. For readers who missed them, I think they need highlighting:
"Endorse (from Endorse + Reject): Mean annual change in percentage points over the period of the study = 0.26, p-value = 0.0159
Endorse (from Endorse + No Position): Mean annual change in percentage points over the period of the study = -0.56, p-value = 0.009"I note that the figures are statistically significant.
I further note that:
- If there was an increase in uncertainty about AGW, there would be an increase of rejection papers relative to endorsement papers. Therefore these statistics clearly falsify Watts explanation of the trends you calculated in your blogpost.
- If the increase in endorsement papers relative to rejection papers were due to scientists chasing funding, then there would be an increase in endorsement papers relative to neutral papers as well. (Afterall, if your funding is premised on your getting the "right results", there is no point in leaving people in doubt as to whether or not you got the "right result".) Ergo the total figures refute your explanation as well.
Further, despite your claim that the figures are not robust, the 97% figure (or close to it) turns up in study after study of this sort. The claim of a lack of robustness is hardly credible. What is more, the mere fact that noposition percentage can be boosted or reduced by variations in publications in non-related fields, or by the simple increase in papers that take AGW as read, shows that it is the percentage of endorsement or rejection papers among papers taking a position that is germane. Your argument to the contrary is simply not credible.
3) I did not ask you to discuss your particular theory, but the theory advanced in the post above, and that advanced by Watts. I find it odd that despite the fact that you appear to disagree with Watts when he claims the trends in the data are explained by increased uncertainty, you have now twice declined to state your disagreement publicly when asked to do so. Further, you posted on Watts thread without feeling it necessary to correct his error. I have noted the reticence in "climate auditors" to correct even the most outragious errors by Watts and his ilk before.
4) Given the fact that you cannot defend your position in detail on this site, I will not pursue this matter beyond rebutting the specific argument you did make. I note, however, that others have responded more than adequately IMO.
Turning to the specific point you made, the time frame of the funding exceeds that of a typical funding grant and the time taken to publish papers. That being the case, if the funding had started up in 1998, we would expect a ramp up of papers over five years, followed by a plateau. Instead we see an accelerating rise in the number of climate change papers.
Further, you claim in defence of your argument that, "Add in new sources at various intervals and the rate goes up dramatically." Your only evidence of these "new sources" being added in, however, is the increase in papers which makes your conjecture entirely circular. Without that conjecture, the evidence shows that researching global warming shows that more and more researchers are trying to divide up a constant pie; making climate related research a field researchers guided by money would avoid.
Finally, your claim is not that increased funding explains the increase in research; but that the (assumed) increased funding explains the increasing proportion of endorsement papers. That is only an explanation if the funding is premised on certain results, or the researchers are shaping their results to gain funding. Both charges are clearly libellous. As your intention in making the charge is clearly to denigrate climate scientists, you should not pretend otherwise. The pretence is cowardice, pure and simple.
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ralbin at 08:11 AM on 2 June 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #22B
Parker is a very fine scholar and an acknowledged expert on 17th century Europe. For those who don't want to read the whole book, a good summary was published by Parker as a long article in the prestigious American Historical Review a couple of years ago. This book is essentially a followup to a longstanding historical discussion of the "17th century crisis," which followed the realization some decades ago of parallelisms between social, political, and demographic crises in Europe and China. Parker ably summarizes a large volume of historical research on this topic and links it to the nadir of the Little Ice Age. This is a theme that other scholars have discussed but he makes an effort to produce a truly global analysis. As a demonstration of climate fluctuation impacts on a pretty well documented period of human history, this is a very good book and a really sobering reminder that changes of smaller magnitude than predicted for the next century under business as usual scenarios can have a profound impact.
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KR at 07:07 AM on 2 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
While the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project are advocacy organizations (i.e., like all advocacy groups, consider sources and data carefully), their 2007 report on political pressure regarding climate science is very interesting.
They conducted in depth interviews and document examinations (GAP) and surveyed federal climate scientists (UCS, 1,600 queried, 279 replies), arriving at similar conclusions:
Asked to quantify the number of incidents of interference of all types, 150 scientists (58 percent) said they had personally experienced one or more such incidents within the past five years, for a total of at least 435 incidents of political interference.
This interference increased with direct involvement in climate science, with more than 3/4 of active climate researchers reporting incidents, 1/4 of those having 6+ incidents over the last five years.
There were also complaints about inadequate funding, poor morale, and blocking of press releases that "..highlight research into the causes and consequences of global warming."
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RomanM's assertions about a pro-AGW research bias don't seem to hold in the US.
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grindupBaker at 06:23 AM on 2 June 2013Global warming is here to stay, whichever way you look at it
noelfuller @5 "anyone actually genearted a graph of global heat content" if you mean "global heat content anomaly" then 97.5% yes. NOAA "has" a graph of 97.5% global heat content anomaly (I've seen Dr. Trenberth present it also) and it's called the ocean heat content anomaly. The other 2.325% is the ecosystem fresh water (air=0.09%, land to 6.5m deep=0.085%). I've no spare time to search internet for most ecosystem fresh water mass & any information on its heat increase. If you Googlify "great lakes global warming" that's a start. "the LLO study found that summer surface water temperatures on Lake Superior have increased approximately 4.5°F (2.5°C) during the period 1979–2006". It'll need some time from you and others to find >80% of the fresh water mass & temperature anomaly data for a high enough quality assessment. I assume you'll accept 99.5% of global heat content as "all" global heat content (assuming you actually mean the anomaly) given that the final 0.5% of global heat content is only ~42 months of present 0.85wm**-2 warming if final balanced AST is +2.0C (7 yrs if it's +4.0C and so on). Either add your fresh water heat gains to NOAA graph if you can find >=80% of the fresh water data or, if time-stressed like me, simply divide NOAA global heat content graph by 0.975 and you've got global heat content within +/-~1%.
With paper scrap & calculator I have oceans weigh 1.40*10**21 kg so to heat 1K takes 5.82*10**24J and temperature is 277K so heat content is 1.61**27J. Some Wiki entry says oceans weigh 40 times as much as all fresh water so global heat content is 1.65**27J give or take a few trillion nuclear bombs worth. The preceding guesstimate is if you actually do mean the current ecosystem heat content. I expect that's why climate scientists use "anomaly" and only deal with the changes.
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michael sweet at 06:04 AM on 2 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
The hypothesis that climate research funds have pro-AGW strings attached includes the premise that during the George Bush administration there were pro-AGW strings attached to funding. James Hansen widely documented that the Bush administration attempted to gag climate scientists who had pro-AGW information. This directly contradicts and falsifies the hypothesis that funding is based on supporting the science of AGW.
At one time I saw a post online asking skeptical scientists to document funding problems they had due to being skeptical of AGW. The only case of funding being cut was documented by James Hansen who had funding cut because he was pro AGW. Can RomanM document cases of skeptics losing funding because of their climate position, or is he just making this up? It is easy to slander climate scientists with baseless claims of bias.
In reality, scientists like Lindzen and Spencer have trouble obtaining funding because they have a long history of being wrong and their proposals have no merit. Who would you want to be a graduate student for: a scientist like Hansen who has a long history of making important discoveries or a scienitst like Lindzen who has a long history of being wrong? Who would you give a grant to? I would work for and fund Hansen, since he has used his past grants wisely and has interesting new proposals. We see that Lindzen has no grad students and few scientists want to work with him. This is because his ideas have no merit to informed graduate students and scientists.
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william5331 at 06:00 AM on 2 June 20132013 SkS News Bulletin #14: Alberta Tar Sands and Keystone XL Pipeline
Perhaps they should stop refining tar sands, ship them to roading companies, add a little gravel heat it up and pave roads with the stuff. Long term sequestration and a useful purpose for tar sands. I wonder what the relative economics would look like.
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gws at 05:56 AM on 2 June 2013Skeptical Science Study Finds 97% Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming in the Peer-Reviewed Literature
Is there a list somewhere of the papers that ended up in the 3% category?
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grindupBaker at 05:36 AM on 2 June 2013Global warming is here to stay, whichever way you look at it
Nick Palmer #37 I have quibbles (not disagreement). "at least temporarily" I see no logical reason for it to be "temporarily" but understand it takes a full book to define what "temporarily" means for this. Tiny puffs of heat go in and out, they only seem large to us because air=0.09%, land to 6.5m deep=0.085% of ecosystem heat. My logical reasoning with no education on topic is if AST must rise, as example, +2.8C to balance radiation then ocean must rise +2.8C. Does anyone know a reason why it would significantly differ ? That's long-term, decades, centuries...millenia on a "diminishing returns" curve where it takes up last smidgin of heat at a decelerating rate after centuries (thus, mine is hypothetical/approximate because the TOA balance is unlikely to be entirely steady this long). Meantime, ocean will occasionally accelerate a previously-slowed "global warming" (due to AST getting close to the balance point) by taking some heat down, reducing AST and thus increasing radiative imbalance. "temporarily" as I infer you mean it is that some increased puffs of ocean outbound heat might well happen over the coming decades, the ocean being fluid and with increasing energy content, which seems logical. Long-term it all goes into the oceans (ummm, and freshwater 2.5%).
In "From that perspective, the pathological sceptics are right that the pause was not really predicted" suggest you might add "in short-term AST increase" after "pause" because "global warming" has not paused. You initiated surface temperature trends as the topic in the prior paragraph but I think the repetition is important, not pedantic, because most of the audience has limited knowledge (a euphemism) and a significant minority is a teeny tad mischievious regarding the "quotes" of others.
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John Hartz at 03:46 AM on 2 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
RomanM's postulates that increased funding for climate science research will distort the objectivity of the scientists receiving the funds.
The implicit assumption embedded in this argument is the false belief that there are pro-AGW strings attached to the funding.
I challengte RomanM and his denier brethren to provide hard evidence that such strings exist. If they cannot, their belief is nothing more than another imaginary conspiracy theory.
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KR at 03:38 AM on 2 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
RomanM and others - Refreshing a page on this site will resubmit a comment; a known limitation/bug on this site. It's certainly happened to me on occasion.
If I correctly recall previous mentions of this issue, it's a known bug that just hasn't reached the top of the webmaster list yet...
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RomanM at 03:27 AM on 2 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
I refreshed the page to check for further comments and somehow, my comment seems to have reappeared in its original format.
I do not intend to post here again.
Moderator Response:[Dikran Marsupial] As KR says, it is a known bug feature of the site, I've deleted the duplicate.
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RomanM at 02:26 AM on 2 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
@Tom Curtis #53
[moderation complaint snipped] However, I will first address the points in your comment.
1) The blog post referenced in the article above was not yours, but that by Anthony Watts...
Is this argument based on some sort of technicality? The WUWT post paraphrased the title of my CA post, showed a graph created by me from that post and provided a link to my post, and it has nothing to do with my work? Possibly the fact that my name was misspelled caused some confusion.
"The number of papers endorsing AGW is falling, while the number of papers with no position is increasing. Looks like an increase in uncertainty to me."
That sentiment was not attributed to you, and is unwarrented by your results. Ergo the article above does not criticize (or even take notice of) your blogpost.Do you wish to endorse Watts' understanding of the implications of your blogpost?
It may have mischaracterized my position slightly. Replace the word "number" by the word "percentage". The glm procedure applied to these two groups gives the results:
Endorse: Mean annual change in percentage points over the period of the study = -0.44, p-value = 0.0402
No Position: Mean annual change in percentage points over the period of the study = 0.60, p-value = 0.0041Both of these were characterized in the paper as showing no demonstrable trend.
2) Your blogpost seems very incomplete to me. Although it carefully analyzes the trends in papers for reject, endorse, and noposition, it does not analyze the relative trend of endorse to reject. By my calculation, a simple linear regression shows that endorsements are increasing at a rate of 0.34% a year as a percentage of papers that take a position (ie, papers excluding noposition papers) from an already high base (91.7% average over the first five years). I would be very interested to see your GLM trend and statistical significance for that statistic. I am also curious as to why you did not caclulate it in your original post, given that it is the most germaine statistic given your thesis and the headline result of Cook et al.
I didn't bother calculating them because the "germane" 97% statistic is ill-conceived. If you have 97 people in the Endorse group, 3 people in the Reject group and 0 in the No Position group, you get a 97% "Consensus". If you have 97 people in the Endorse group, 3 people in the Reject group and 1000000 in the No Position group, you still get a 97% "Consensus".This statistic would not be particularly robust by either statistical or common sense standards and could produce radically different results for just slightly different data sets.
However as a favour to you (and the authors), I have calculated what you have requested and one more for "completeness"
Endorse (from Endorse + Reject): Mean annual change in percentage points over the period of the study = 0.26, p-value = 0.0159
Endorse (from Endorse + No Position): Mean annual change in percentage points over the period of the study = -0.56, p-value = 0.0093) As an aside, it is clear that the increasing percentage of endorsement papers as a percentage of papers with a position completely refutes Watts' hypothesis as to why the percentage of neutral papers is increasing. Indeed, that fact shows that John Cook and Dana were entirely justified to claim above that:
"However, if uncertainty over the cause of global warming were increasing, we would expect to see the percentage of papers rejecting or minimizing human-caused global warming increasing. On the contrary, rejection studies are becoming less common as well. That scientists feel the issue is settled science actually suggests there is more certainty about the causes of global warming."
Do you disagree?
I have given what I consider to be a very plausible reason for why the percentage of "rejection" studies would well go down under increasing research funding , but it is apparently "off-topic ideology."
4) Your cited source on funding shows a near constant level of funding over the years 1998 -2009, a period over which self rated papers increased nine-fold. If your theory that it is desire for funding that drives climate science had any merit, a slowly increasing level of funding would be expected to be matched by a slowly increasing level of research. As a result, it appears to me that in addition to being libellous, your theory has no merit. The best that can be said for it is that it is a terribly convenient theory for people who find themselves rejecting the scientific consensus for ideological reasons.
Your argument is clearly wrong. Ask yourself how many of these approximately 12000 papers did NOT have any research funding. If as you say, the number of papers increased nine-fold during this period where did the nine times as much funding come from? Your argument that slowly increasing the funding will slowly increase the numbers is also wrong. Grants are often multiyear and various delays in writing and publication push some the papers into later time periods. Furthermore, I only referenced a single source of funding. Add in new sources at various intervals and the rate goes up dramatically.
From ny own personal experiences in academia, funding is extremely important to researchers. If the money becomes available, people willl apply for that money and papers will be written - some good, some not so good. How you get the idea that indicating the importance of acquiring research funding is "libellous" I can only wonder...
Moderator Response:[Dikran Marsupial] Moderation complaint snipped. Moderation complaints are by definition off-topic. Normally posts containing moderation complaints are simply deleted as off-topic. On this occasion I have edited the post instead, however this is an unnecessary burden on the moderators, and next time the moderator is unlikely to be so lenient. Please familiarise yourself with the comments policy.
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John Hartz at 01:20 AM on 2 June 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #22B
The author of the article, The Inevitable Climate Change catastrophe is Geoffrey Parker, a professor of history at Ohio State University. He is the author, most recently, of Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013). His article appears to be a very brief summary of his book. More to the point, Parker is a historian, not a climate scientist.
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Composer99 at 00:16 AM on 2 June 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #22B
On the other hand, the article has this well-phrased (one might say Sphinxesque, if one were a fan of Mystery Men) gem:
In short, we can pay to prepare now or we can prepare to pay much more later.
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Composer99 at 23:42 PM on 1 June 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #22B
I'm under the impression that most megafauna were killed by humans: they had, after all, survived several episodes of glaciation-deglaciation up to that point.
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Nick Palmer at 22:51 PM on 1 June 2013Global warming is here to stay, whichever way you look at it
noelfuller @comment 5 touches upon an important point. Anyone out there fighting in the trenches of the denialosphere, and the comment sections of newspapers etc, knows that the "it hasn't warmed for 15/16/17 years" meme is very powerful these days.
Recently, it has been clear to those who look at the whole picture, that much of the net energy from the radiative imbalance is, at least temporarily, being sequestered in the deeper ocean. But this is a relatively recent explanation and the denialosphere and media commentators tend to dismiss it as being a form of hand waving. As we are honored to have Dr. Trenberth here, perhaps we can get a definitive "admission" from the horse's mouth? Would it be fair to say, Dr. Trenberth, that the predicted trend in mean surface/atmospheric temperature was represented in the original IPCC literature as being expected to be somewhat more linear than it has proved? As you suggest in your post, there is a relatively recent (and presumably unexpected in the literature) change in ocean sequestering due, as you say, to:
"a particular change in winds, especially in the Pacific Ocean where the subtropical trade winds have become noticeably stronger, changing ocean currents and providing a mechanism for heat to be carried down into the ocean"
It seems very likely that the 15 to 20 year old science, that the denialosphere hark back to "prove" that the current pause in global surface/atmosphere temperature trends was not predicted by the science, did not explicitly predict this new ocean mechanism would act as such a temporary atmospheric heat sink.
I think most here realise that a long pause in surface temperature trends is in no way a good thing, but to the general public it looks like a) a good thing and b) that climate science got it rather wrong. Both of these sentiments are heavily exploited by the propagandists.
So, to sum up, I think the time is ripe for those climate scientists with a higher media profile, andt the climate science communication websites, to state that Earth has not behaved quite as most would have expected from reading the IPCC literature 20 years ago. From that perspective, the pathological sceptics are right that the pause was not really predicted. As they use that to jump to the unwarrented conclusion that, because the evidence now shows that the 20 year old science was incomplete, they can discount all the science. From a human perspective, the uncertainties and assumptions in the climate models, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns, if they exist, could go either way. To publicly counter the "16 year pause", so a sceptical public accepts the science again, it needs to be said that the unexpected has stepped in to complicate the outlook and the full ramifications and the concomitant risk analysis of this needs to be out there in the public arena so the public can judge whether they feel lucky or not...
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perseus at 19:54 PM on 1 June 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #22B
Re The inevitable climate catastrophe
About 13,000 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere experienced an episode of cooling (probably after a comet collided with the earth) that wiped out most species there.
Doesn't sound very likely, does he mean wiped out most megafauna? I presume this is the Quaternary extinction event he is referring to? I think the causes behind this extinction and the precise timeline are more contested than is suggested here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event#Climate_change_hypothesis
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gpwayne at 17:35 PM on 1 June 2013Global warming is here to stay, whichever way you look at it
Some comments here refer to nomenclature problems - Heat, Warming, Surface temps and so on - and I've had to adapt my own punter-level commenting to address this.
I now discuss climate change in terms of 'energy'. I have found it easier to discuss the potential of climate change in public discourse if I make clear that the climate is a system of energy imbalances continuously trying to achieve equilibrium, and that if there's more energy available to the climate, then all aspects of it (extreme weather, ice melting and the energy required for phase changes, cold snaps, precipitation, fires, floods, sea-level rise, general instability) must be affected, since the extra energy is indiscriminate.
I do think we need to develop our vocabulary, and trust in the intelligence of the public. Global warming is a misnomer that we spend a lot of time qualifying, and with the greatest respect to Trenberth, I'm not sure 'heating' is a better synonym (even though it is, of course, quite accurate).
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8TM at 16:02 PM on 1 June 2013It hasn't warmed since 1998
Thank-you and sorry for the misplacement (also the all-caps.) I note Lu made the claim in the quoted interview that there has been no warming since 2002.
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8TM at 14:41 PM on 1 June 2013It hasn't warmed since 1998
Could someone please respond to the peer-reviewed paper published yesterday in the International Journal of Modern Physics B by professor Qing-Bin Lu of the University of Waterloo, COSMIC-RAY-DRIVEN REACTION AND GREENHOUSE EFFECT OF HALOGENATED MOLECULES: CULPRITS FOR ATMOSPHERIC OZONE DEPLETION AND GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE?
"Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed to global warming. But we have observed data going back to the Industrial Revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong,” said Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, biology and chemistry in Waterloo’s Faculty of Science. “In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming.”
"Most conventional theories expect that global temperatures will continue to increase as CO2 levels continue to rise, as they have done since 1850. What’s striking is that since 2002, global temperatures have actually declined – matching a decline in CFCs in the atmosphere,” Professor Lu said. “My calculations of CFC greenhouse effect show that there was global warming by about 0.6 °C from 1950 to 2002, but the earth has actually cooled since 2002. The cooling trend is set to continue for the next 50-70 years as the amount of CFCs in the atmosphere continues to decline.”
Quoted from Waterloo News, May 2013Moderator Response:[DB] Refuted here:
This is off-topic; please return the conversation to the topic of this thread.
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grindupBaker at 13:48 PM on 1 June 2013Global warming is here to stay, whichever way you look at it
Agnostic #34. I'm with you. now my quibble for all, not singling you out. In my opinion the phrase "global warming" S.B. used to mean an increase in ecosystem heat content and reserved for that. To do otherwise will fuel confusion in lay persons. There are other good descriptive phrases for the various surface & atmosphere aspects, and so on. I understand that science disciplines & professions will have internal colloquialisms. I understand that surface & atmosphere has special importance for the flora & fauna that live there (not the deep fishies). Emission of ocean heat cannot possibly contribute to accelerated global warming. In fact, it would temporarily reduce global warming by reducing the radiative imbalance. I understand that should the oceans warm from present ~4.0 to ~7.0 or whatever eventually, it would not be an acceptable situation for the land flora & fauna if oceans jettison some heat into space via our atmosphere, but that does not change what "global warming" is.
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citizenschallenge at 11:31 AM on 1 June 2013Skeptical Science Study Finds 97% Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming in the Peer-Reviewed Literature
James Taylor was pretty harsh on you SkS folks and this study in his latest Forbes article,
so I decided to examine it paragraph by paragraph and to offer many links to authoritiative sources countering the Heartland Institute spokesmen's crazy making via the once respectable Forbes magazine.
Friday, May 31, 2013
James Taylor Caught Doctoring the '97-Percent Consensus' Claims
whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com/2013/05/james-taylor-caught-doctoring-97.html
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DMCarey at 11:04 AM on 1 June 2013It's CFCs
His newest paper is making the rounds quickly today it seems. Many thanks John, this argument certainly helped the debunking process
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DMCarey at 10:52 AM on 1 June 2013It's cosmic rays
Tom,
Thanks for the quick reply! The answer is much appreciated.
uWaterloo is my alma mater, making it kind of disappointing to realize there is a professor there continuing to assert claims when faced with evidence that it's incorrect
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Tom Curtis at 10:43 AM on 1 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
RomanM:
1) The blog post referenced in the article above was not yours, but that by Anthony Watts, how explicitly states:
"The number of papers endorsing AGW is falling, while the number of papers with no position is increasing. Looks like an increase in uncertainty to me."
That sentiment was not attributed to you, and is unwarrented by your results. Ergo the article above does not criticize (or even take notice of) your blogpost.
Do you wish to endorse Watts' understanding of the implications of your blogpost?
2) Your blogpost seems very incomplete to me. Although it carefully analyzes the trends in papers for reject, endorse, and noposition, it does not analyze the relative trend of endorse to reject. By my calculation, a simple linear regression shows that endorsements are increasing at a rate of 0.34% a year as a percentage of papers that take a position (ie, papers excluding noposition papers) from an already high base (91.7% average over the first five years). I would be very interested to see your GLM trend and statistical significance for that statistic. I am also curious as to why you did not caclulate it in your original post, given that it is the most germaine statistic given your thesis and the headline result of Cook et al.
3) As an aside, it is clear that the increasing percentage of endorsement papers as a percentage of papers with a position completely refutes Watts' hypothesis as to why the percentage of neutral papers is increasing. Indeed, that fact shows that John Cook and Dana were entirely justified to claim above that:
"However, if uncertainty over the cause of global warming were increasing, we would expect to see the percentage of papers rejecting or minimizing human-caused global warming increasing. On the contrary, rejection studies are becoming less common as well. That scientists feel the issue is settled science actually suggests there is more certainty about the causes of global warming."
Do you disagree?
4) Your cited source on funding shows a near constant level of funding over the years 1998 -2009, a period over which self rated papers increased nine-fold. If your theory that it is desire for funding that drives climate science had any merit, a slowly increasing level of funding would be expected to be matched by a slowly increasing level of research. As a result, it appears to me that in addition to being libellous, your theory has no merit. The best that can be said for it is that it is a terribly convenient theory for people who find themselves rejecting the scientific consensus for ideological reasons.
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Riduna at 09:50 AM on 1 June 2013Global warming is here to stay, whichever way you look at it
Three areas which merit close monitoring are: Increased solar activity, Reduced aerosol pollution and, Emission of ocean heat. The take-home message from this article is that all three will occur and contribute to accelerated global warming in the future. The latter will, as Dr Tenberth points out, have “consequences”.
Could those consequences be to speed-up loss of land based ice, including permafrost, increasing the rate of average sea level rise and carbon emissions from the Arctic?
The result? Who can say but a rise in average global temperature of 2ºC above the pre-industrial and of 1 metre in average sea level within the next 50 years seems possible. But not to worry. I am assured we can readily adapt to such outcomes.
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KR at 08:36 AM on 1 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
RomanM - The self-ratings, as stated in the FAQ, were "...conducted under the promise of confidentiality for all participants". I suspect you are out of luck in terms of obtaining raw data there.
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Cook et al stated (repeatedly) that they used a simple linear regression on their data, and their analysis appears to be consistent with those statements. You have stated your opinion that they should have used different statistics - but invalidates nothing stated in Cook et al. You have a difference of opinion.
That is because, reading your post, I found that your differences of opinion regarding appropriate statistical complexity made absolutely no difference with respect to the Cook et al conclusion:
The number of papers rejecting AGW is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.
And none of your statistical differences justify the rather obnoxious and ideological language you used - language that (to me) indicates you are approaching the topic with a pre-formed opinion:
Yet another propaganda essay masquerading as a scientific paper has been published .... The latest entry, Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature, written by a team of activist bloggers led by John Cook of the antithetically named Skeptical Science blog, attempts to further the meme of a 97% consensus of scientific support for a faltering Global Warming movement...the weak data gathering / data interpretation methodology and the truly incredible spin-one’s-head- around algorithm for generating a value of “97” which conveniently ignores a large proportion of the data.
Those statements are certainly not supported by the rest of your post. At all.
My best guess at your overall conclusion came from the line "...the Endorse group showing a decrease of almost 9 percentage points over the 20 year period." If I was wrong, if a claim of increasing uncertainty was not your point, I'm really at loss as to what it might be. Particularly since you have drawn no conclusions nor made any point regarding the 97% you seem so very upset about in your introductory paragraph.
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You feel Cook et al should have used more complex statistical treatments - fine. But that wouldn't change the papers conclusions in any way. 97% is still the percentage of papers expressing an opinion that endorse the consensus on AGW.
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John Hartz at 08:32 AM on 1 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
RomanM:
Your initital post had an edge to it and I am just trying to understand where you are coming from. When you speak in broad generalities, you can expect to be questioned by SkS readers and authors. You appear to resent the fact that the federal government has funded climate science research. Is that because you fundamentally disagree with the findings of scientists and scientific bodies that mankind's activites do affect the Earth's climate system?
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RomanM at 07:40 AM on 1 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
@John Hartz #56
Exorbitant? It's only from one source and it is not peanuts. Was this type of money even available before 1990 or is it new funding attracting people from physics, geology, biology, etc. to the new pickings? Was it well spent? Not particularly, given the overall contribution to the picture of the world at this point. However, this is not a central issue to the points in my initial post.
@KR #57
The data set you pointed to was not particullarly helpful.
It was indeed "a bit late in getting posted" so I had not seen it. However, have you looked at any of it yourself? If you recall, the analysis that I did was on the self-ratings of the authors. You might notice that that information is not included in the 2 megabytes of data found there.
The information should have been given in tables in the Supplementary document which had very little numeric content.
What specific "objections" are you talking about. My points referred to the self-rated by authors papers which clearly would have been done using the paper rather than asking themselves what was said in the abstract. And I don't recalling saying anything about "uncertainty".
The analysis issues are still there... but I don't have time to discuss them now.
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scaddenp at 07:35 AM on 1 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
Usual implications over climate science funding is that its just climate scientists trying to line their own pockets. (maybe this tells a lot about the way the accusers think). However, when you look at what climate science money is spent on, it mostly instrumentation - especially satellites. Scientists draw their usual, modest salaries.
As to government priorities - if predictions showed a catastrophic asteroid impact likely in 2050, wouldn't you expect governments to fund research into checking this was correct and investigating methods to avoid collision? If anything, governments are underfunding science and instead subsidizing fossil fuels. How does that make sense?
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Mal Adapted at 07:31 AM on 1 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
RomanM,
Supplementing John Hartz's comment "According to Table 3 of the CBO report, the annual federal budget for climate science programs averaged roughly $2 billion (in 2009 dollars) over the twelve year period 1998 thru 2009", I'll point out that according to table 3, more than half of that $2G/yrwent to NASA. The text of the report states that
NASA's efforts have been dominated by the design, development, and procurement of satellites engaged in the observation of the planet and its atmosphere and the analysis of the data that those satellites collect.
The data collected by those satellites is available to all researchers, whether they support the consensus or not. What a gravy train for skeptics!
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Bob Tisdale at 07:29 AM on 1 June 2013Global warming is here to stay, whichever way you look at it
Tom Dayton at 6 writes: “But frustratingly, the article undermines its own point by having the diagram labeled ‘Global Mean Temperature’ instead of ‘Global Surface Atmospheric Temperature.’ Likewise, the paragraph after the diagram does not specify ‘surface atmospheric.’ Will you change those, please?”
Tom, I didn’t find a response to your concerns on this thread, so allow me. The dataset Kevin Trenberth is using in his illustration is the NCDC’s monthly global surface (land and ocean combined into an anomaly) temperature anomaly index (degrees C). Refer to the overview here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php
It is made up of sea surface temperature and land surface air temperature data, with most of it (about 70%) being sea surface temperature data. Therefore, Kevin Trenberth cannot call it “surface atmospheric” temperature.
Regards.
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Andy Skuce at 07:17 AM on 1 June 20132013 SkS News Bulletin #14: Alberta Tar Sands and Keystone XL Pipeline
Breaking news:
Although it is technically possible for the Canadian Federal Government to push this through, it is unlikely due to the extent of public opposition in BC, the strong position now taken by the recently elected centre-right provincial government and, not least, the firm stance taken by First Nations. There is no precedent for a large infrastructure project to be imposed on a Canadian Province against its will. (In many ways, Canadian provinces have more power than US states or even EU countries.)
Over to you, President Obama...
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KR at 06:42 AM on 1 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
RomanM - My apologies, but I had missed that particular link to your blog post among the many in the 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial overview.
Your objections were met in the paper itself and the FAQ - percentages of denial in climate science have remained in the <5% level, mentions of AGW in abstracts have decreased over time since it is not controversial. Abstracts are small - when I write an abstract I devote that limited space to new information and issues, not wasting it on background matters settled decades ago. Your argument claiming increasing uncertainty is simply absurd.
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John Hartz at 06:37 AM on 1 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
RomanM:
Thank you for the link to the Congressional Budget Office report, Federal Climate Change Programs: Funding History and Policy Issues published in March 2010.
According to Table 3 of the CBO report, the annual federal budget for climate science programs averaged roughly $2 billion (in 2009 dollars) over the twelve year period 1998 thru 2009.
Do you believe that this level of funding was exorbitant?
Do you believe that the money was well spent?
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RomanM at 06:29 AM on 1 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
@KR #54
I posted on this thread because the work that I did was referenced in the head post. Do you expect that if I am to reply to that referencing, I need to wander around the site looking for a "better place"?
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Tom Dayton at 06:22 AM on 1 June 2013It's cosmic rays
DMCarey, as I was trying to answer that same question, I discovered other commenters in other threads here at Skeptical Science already had answered. (What a team!)
This is merely Lu recycling the same claims he has been making for years. His claims have been proven wrong repeatedly. RealClimate has a short critique with a link to a peer-reviewed critique.
And see the It's CFCs entry here at Skeptical Science.
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KR at 06:15 AM on 1 June 2013The 5 characteristics of global warming consensus denial
RomanM - I have replied to you on the relevant thread.
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