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2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #14

One Planet Only Forever at 08:04 AM on 9 April, 2025

This week’s news includes several items in the Climate Change Impacts category about the damaging impact of human-caused global warming and climate change on developed and developing global socioeconomic systems.

Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming

Global warming of more than 3°C this century may wipe 40% off the world’s economy, new analysis reveals

Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer,

Those articles provide a basis for continuing a discussion here that started on the recent SkS reposting of “Climate skeptics have new favorite graph; it shows the opposite of what they claim”. The comment discussion had evolved away from the topic of the OP. The discussion had shifted to matters related to the development of sustainable improvements for the total global population, now and into the very far future.

The three articles listed above prompted me to expand on my semi-conspiracy theory about the development of opposition to the efforts to increase awareness and improve understanding of how people can be less harmful and more helpful to Others. (see my comment @22 and nigelj’s reply @23 on that SkS reposting linked above)

Additional considerations related to this week’s News items are:

Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming:

Quote:

“The recent reports — from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance — show that Wall Street has determined the temperature goal is effectively dead and describe how top financial institutions plan to continue operating profitably as temperatures and damages soar.”

Related thoughts:

This suggests that some people who know better are not powerfully raising awareness and improving the understanding of the general population. They are trying to maximize their collective benefit in spite of knowing how harmful their lack of action to limit the global harm done will be. It is like the way that the 2008/9 global financial disaster turned out to be beneficial for many of them (very few of them faced a negative change of status relative to Others – many of them increased their status relative to Others). The least fortunate who got little benefit from the sub-prime mortgage scams suffered the most.

Global warming of more than 3°C this century may wipe 40% off the world’s economy, new analysis reveals

Quote:

“Any impacts from weather events elsewhere, such as how flooding in one country affects the food supply to another, are not incorporated into the models.

Our new research sought to fix this. After including the global repercussions of extreme weather into our models, the predicted harm to global GDP became far worse than previously thought – affecting the lives of people in every country on Earth.”

Related thoughts:

A group of people today have proudly watched a 10% hit happen to global economic activity in a matter of a few days. They think they will be the winners. Everyone will lose because of the unjustified tariff attacks. But the likes of Trump probably think they will suffer less harm that Others will. Some of them may even believe they will benefit from the inequitable unjustifiable actions (paying members of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Cult could have an unfair advantage if they heard about what the Trump Administration would actual do before it became public knowledge). These type of people would have even less concern about actions they benefit from causing 40% harm to the future economy Others have to live with.

Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer

Quote:

“The insurance sector is a canary in the coalmine when it comes to climate impacts,” said Janos Pasztor, former UN assistant secretary-general for climate change.

The argument set out by Thallinger in a LinkedIn post begins with the increasingly severe damage being caused by the climate crisis: “Heat and water destroy capital. Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time.”

“We are fast approaching temperature levels – 1.5C, 2C, 3C – where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many of these risks,” he said. ...

“This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry,” he said. “The economic value of entire regions – coastal, arid, wildfire-prone – will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice, rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like.”

Related thoughts:

All of the resistance to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals, not just resistance to efforts to limit the harm done by climate change impacts, is raising doubts about, and reducing the sustainability of, capitalism (and democracy – given the recent authoritarian ‘winning of unjustified popular beliefs and related abusive power’ in many democracies).

The following time-line of events is part of the basis for my semi-conspiracy theory about the reasons there is such a powerful resistance to learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others. (note that there are many similar things along the timeline ... since the beginning of recorded human history and more recently)

1913 – US 16th Amendment ratified allowing Congress to impose an Income Tax. (Still resisted by many wealthy and influential people who almost certainly know that their resistance is harmfully incorrect. Also resisted by people who are less aware or misunderstand things and have unjustified doubts about the benefits of an Income Tax because they are easily tempted to be misled that way)

1933 – 1938 – US New Deal series of reforms (Resisted - See above)

1948 – UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Resisted - See above)

1962 - Silent Spring first published (Resisted - See above)

1964 - US Surgeon General report regarding smoking (Resisted - See above)

1965 – UN Development Programme - evolved from UN programs that started in 1949 (Resisted - See above)

1972 - Stockholm Conference – identified many harmful developed human impacts (Resisted - See above)

1990 – IPCC first report (Resisted - See above)

2020 – COVID19 – (Influential people opposed to learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others found new ways to maximize their ability to benefit from being misleading)

Constantly improving global civilization is not a guarantee. It is very hard work to limit the harm done by people who resist learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others. They know better, but do not care about how harmful their actions and lack of actions are.

Greenhouse effect has been falsified

Bob Loblaw at 00:02 AM on 3 April, 2025

Reed Coray @ 194: "If ... my arguments are flat wrong and can be dismissed out of hand."

As Dikran points out explicitly, in #197: yes, your arguments are flat wrong.

As I pointed out in #190: "Reed Coray has utterly failed to explain the distinction between his undesirable 'trap heat' and his preferred 'warm the Earth's surface'."

Getting to definitions: heat = thermal energy. Average thermal energy is expressed by temperature. When thermal energy increases in an object, that object's temperature goes up - it "warms". When a system redistributes energy in a manner where some part of the system retains more thermal energy that before, it is perfectly reasonable to colloquially say "that part of the system has trapped heat".

...unless, as I pointed out in #188, "...you create such a strict literal meaning to the words 'trap heat' that is unjustified."

As for my closing paragraph in # 190, which begins with "Reed Coray's argument is a pig in a poke.": I obtained that list of roughly equivalent phrases from Wiktionary. In addition to providing the meanings of words, Wiktionary (or many other dictionaries) will also provide a list of synonyms or "see also" references. In other words, it provides some of the function of a thesaurus. It also lets you search for the meaning of common phrases, rather than just single words.

Try starting with its definition of "blow out of proportion". Follow the links under "Synonyms" and "See also". Then repeat with each of those listings to find additional similar phrases. You should be able to eventually find all the phrases I used at the end of #190.

Are all those phrases identical? No. Do they have identical meaning? No. As you read the definitions/origins/explanations, you will see that there are subtle differences.

...but any one of them can be considered a reasonable description of what you have been doing in in an attempt to tar all of climate science over some misguided idea that "trap heat" is physically impossible. You even go as far as saying (in #187) that use of 'trap heat' "...is designed to mislead others and is spread with the intent to manipulate truth and facts".

That's awfully thin ice you are skating on.

China will need 10,000GW of wind and solar by 2060

One Planet Only Forever at 06:30 AM on 29 March, 2025

wilddouglascounty,

Good questions.

I am a civil/structural engineer with an MBA. I have confidence in the use of models to analyze and evaluate plans. The same is done for engineered items and business opportunities. Today’s socioeconomic models are quite advanced. My university engineering education in the 1970s included a course on ‘Technology and Society’ where we used socioeconomic computer analysis models to investigate different approaches to socioeconomic development (using ‘state-of-the-art’ keyboards with dot-matrix printers as the interface devices).

My main question is: What specific monitoring will be performed to ensure that things happen as planned? When planning structures and business opportunities the model analysis is important. But it is more important to monitor, and enforce corrections as required, to ensure that the plan is being diligently and successfully turned into the desired reality. The article mentions the need for a ‘new legal system’. ‘New legal systems’ do not guarantee effective monitoring and correction (evading legal consequences is a proven ‘strategy for success’).

Indeed, it is challenging for Western socioeconomic political systems (systems based fundamentally on competition for profit and popularity with freedom of actions) to produce a collaboratively developed plan that is effectively monitored and corrected as required to ensure that ‘the desired result’ develops. It is especially difficult if the path to the desired result could be ‘less profitable or less popular’. But that monitoring and enforcement of compliance can also be hard to do in a socioeconomic system like the one in China that interacts with the world system (It is not an isolated stand-alone system).

The following additional questions came to mind as I read the article:

The plan is stated to be ‘net-zero’ before 2060. But the plan still has a significant amount of fossil fuel use in 2060. What is the plan to effectively neutralize the energy system emissions in 2060 (to be ‘net-zero’)? Note that CCS reduces ghg impacts, but does not make them zero. What are the plans for neutralizing ghg impacts of other activities in China like agriculture (also needed for China to be net-zero)?

A significant challenge for effectively limiting harm done by activities under the control of China’s leadership, or any other leadership group, is: Getting all of the most powerful and influential players to learn to be less harmful and more helpful to Others even if that 'learning' compromises their potential opportunity for benefit.

Do Americans really want urban sprawl?

Eric (skeptic) at 23:03 PM on 18 March, 2025

It is possible to make car-centric areas more walkable, however, Rodriguez said, offering his own community of Tysons, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., as proof.

Tysons Corner is ok Tysons Corner via Google Maps

Reston Town Center is more attractive IMO. Reston Town Center via Google Maps

Merrifield near where I used to live is another transit-oriented mixed development with less success. Merrifield

Transit hubs heading towards Rosslyn and DC get increasingly sterile. The problem in general is too much pavement. Wildlife consists of house sparrows, pigeons and periodic large flocks of starlings.

The pandemic changed things although transit is picking up again. I live in a subdivision with 5 acre lots. My nearest strip mall is about 12 miles away but it's fairly efficient to go just once a week. Work is 75 miles and I go once a week out of habit more than anything else.

It boils down to the basic human need of in-person social interaction. I know most of the neighborhood walkers and dog walkers and visit a few friends within 20 minutes. Monthly coin club meeting in person and HOA every other month. The rest is online or text and that's kind of inadequate. The reason for walkability is not because you have to but because you want to.

If you work from home here in Northern Virginia and want to be walkable but within driving distance for an occasonal commute you might choose Charlottesville or many other smaller towns away from the city.

Visualizing daily global temperatures

MA Rodger at 20:45 PM on 17 March, 2025

michael sweet @2,

Firstly, the methodology used to establish an anomaly base 1850-1900 is not entirely robust, given ERA5 methods only allows a full re-analysis back to 1979. Their re-analysis back to 1940 is probably reasonable but by the earlier period the different records (GISS [which they don't use], NOAA, BEST, HadCRUT) are starting to diverge. They use an annual cycle for 1850-1900 which adds an off-set to 1991-2020 daily anomalies of between +0.79°C and +0.97°C. A table of the calculated-&-smoothed monthly off-sets is provided HERE in the 'Reference periods and other time-related definitions' dropdown.

The annual off-set is given as 0.88°C (with an uncertainty range given as +0.72°C to +0.99°C). That makes the magic annual 1991-2020 threshold anomaly as +0.62°C. The running 12-month average has been above that level since the year ending Jan 2024 and well-above since March. So in terms of the threshold, that uncertainty becomes entirely academic rather quickly.

Secondly, the number of days with a +1.50°C 1850-1900 anomaly will be dependent on the size of the wobbles/noise within the daily temperatures. Adding the annual off-set cycle, the number of days shown by ClimatePulse in 2024 above the magic +1.49°C theshold was 276. So 90-ish days were recorded below the +1.50°C theshold. Your 'above +1.74°C' threshold shows 52 days above.

The monthly averages are perhaps a more meaningful measure and prior to the 2023 "bananas" event ERA5 gives 5 months above the +1.50°C theshold (Jan to Mar 2016, Jan to Feb 2020) and only one month below since July 2023 (tat month being July 2024).

Sabin 33 #17 - Does low-frequency noise from wind turbines cause 'wind turbine syndrome'?

David-acct at 21:38 PM on 28 February, 2025

Quite a few studies [snip]

provide much better context of wind turbine noise than the SK rebuttal article.

Much is made in the article of A/C's, refrigerators, etc producing higher noise levels, Two key points are omitted.

A/c's and refrigerators operate at only a fraction of the time of windturbines ie 24/7/365
Its both the decibel level and frequency that matters, not just the decibel level.

www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97107-8

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032122006852

Sabin 33 #15 - Does EM radiation from wind turbines pose a threat to human health?

David-acct at 11:02 AM on 16 February, 2025

Quite a few studies provide much better context of wind turbine noise than the SK rebuttal article.

[snip]

Much is made in the article of A/C's, refrigerators, etc producing higher noise levels, Two key points are omitted.

A/c's and refrigerators operate at only a fraction of the time of windturbines ie 24/7/365

newer fridges operate at 32-40 dbs.

windmills dbs are inaddition to other noises, so 40-40dbs for the windmill 24/7 plus the fridge, plus the ac with run 1/3 to 1/5 the time vs all the time.

Context is important so that you are confused.

Its both the decibel level and frequency that matters, not just the decibel level.

Incomplete and partial information will lead to erroneous assumptions and impresssions.

www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97107-8

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032122006852

todayshomeowner.com/eco-friendly/guides/how-loud-are-wind-turbines/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97107-8

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032122006852

https://todayshomeowner.com/eco-friendly/guides/how-loud-are-wind-turbines/

Antarctica is gaining ice

John Hartz at 08:19 AM on 13 February, 2025

Suggested supplemental reading:

Introductory text:
"Social media posts sharing a graphic comparing sea ice levels in the Antarctic on the same date 45 years apart misrepresent the data to suggest climate change is a hoax.

The graphic, opens new tab depicts two authentic maps of the continent from the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), one labelled as 'Sea Ice Extent, 24 Dec 1979' and the other 'Sea Ice Extent, 24 Dec 2024,' with white regions indicating sea ice.

'Antarctic sea ice extent is 17% higher today than it was in 1979. Ice doesn’t lie, but climate scientists do,' the text reads."

Verdict:
"Misleading. The posts cherry-pick specific dates that misrepresent Antarctic sea ice trends and ice dynamics that are influenced by multiple factors beyond global warming."

by Staff, Reuters Fact Check, Feb 11, 2025

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/cherry-picked-antarctic-ice-data-does-not-disprove-climate-change-2025-02-11/

Moving away from high-end emissions scenarios

MA Rodger at 00:02 AM on 25 January, 2025

To put some other numbers into this interchange.

Regarding rates of emissions:-
The Global Carbon Project give data for the various fossil fuel types going way back. Their budgets back to1959 also show numbers for Land Use Change emissions (as well as the ocean absorption and the land absorption).
The 1980 wobble in emissions resulted from the 1970s oil crisis driving efficiency measures but the high 1970s oil price led to over-production and what was called the "1980s oil glut" thus ending the wobble. I'm not so sure about talk in that link of a slow-down in economic growth also being a factor as use of gas and coal doesn't seem to have shown any signs of this oil-use wobble and continued apace (as this OurWorldInData graph shows). OurWorldInData FF use

Regarding atmospheric levels:-
The Land Use Change emissions are a significant part of global emissions and when added to FF emissions allow the calculation of the Atmospheric Fraction (Af) which is the annual ration (Atmospheric increase)/(Man-made emissions). This has remained pretty constant since the 1960s altough there is no underlying reason for it**.
The land-based absorption provides the lion's share of the wobbles in the Af with El Niño the primary wobble-driver.

(**If an emissions-free world had a single emissions event, the annual absorption in Year 1 would be about 3% and through following non-emissions years the annual absorption would slowly decrease to zero over a millenium. How much atmospheric CO2 then remained would depend on the size of the emission - so roughly 25% remaining if the emission event was 600Gt(C), this the very rough size of our cumulative emissions to date.)

Moving away from high-end emissions scenarios

Evan at 06:09 AM on 24 January, 2025

Nigelj@11

I also recall that during the 1990's the UK was making a large-scale shift from using coal to using natural gas in their "Dash for Gas". Also, France made a large-scale shift towards nuclear power in the 1980's and 1990's. Then Mt. Pinatubo blew in 1991, and from what I understand, the temporary cooling caused a drop in atmospheric CO2 concentrations due a variety of factors, such as increased uptake by cooler oceans. All of this was a temporary bump, and there were likely other factors that you pointed out, which together caused a temporary slowdown in the buildup of atmospheric CO2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_for_Gas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

Immediate and long-lasting effects of Mt. Pinatubo eruption

Moving away from high-end emissions scenarios

nigelj at 05:41 AM on 24 January, 2025

Evan @10

Your explanation for the apparent acceleration in the acceleration of CO2 levels recently looks right. Looks like its not a real acceleration.

I was curious why there was a flattening in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 growth around 1980 - 2000. This coincides with a slowing in the rate of CO2 emissions growth over the same period, and a global flattening off in oil production from 1980 - 2000 approx. ( See links below). I recall this was the time period when smaller cars became popular so presumably the net result from flattening oil production was a slower rate of emissions growth.

Im not sure why oil production slowed over that 1980 - 2000 period, but it followed the OPEC oil crisis of the late 1970s which caused a temporary drop in oil production, and one source talked about a decline in output from the big existing oil fields in Saudi Arabia. But after the 2000s global oil production was back to business as usual, presumably as the OPEC oil embargo had ended, and new oil field discoveries were made, and there was Americas oil fracking boom.

www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/

ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country

Moving away from high-end emissions scenarios

Evan at 22:32 PM on 23 January, 2025

RickyO@9,

The CO2 graphs at the link you provide provide a possible explanation to the apparent acceleration of atmospheric CO2 concentration suggested by my plot of the data. The NOAA graph of global increase by decade (see below) shows that in the 1990's, the rate of increase decreased a small amount from that in the 1980's. Further, the increase from the 1960's to the 1970's was about 0.5 ppm, almost the same as what it was from the 2000's to the 2010's. Therefore, perhaps it is the decrease in the 1990's that affects my plot and suggests an apparent increase in the rate thereafter. Although I've seen this NOAA data before, thanks for bringing it to our attention again.

Lan, X., Tans, P. and K.W. Thoning: Trends in globally-averaged CO2 determined from NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory measurements. Version Monday, 06-Jan-2025 10:06:16 MST https://doi.org/10.15138/9N0H-ZH07

Moving away from high-end emissions scenarios

Evan at 09:14 AM on 21 January, 2025

The article states,

"... growth in CO2 emissions slowed notably over the past decade ..."

When I plot atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 1970 to 2005 using 10-year moving averages, it shows an upward accelerating curve. When I plot the 10-year averages for 2010, 2015, and 2020 (which includes the data for 2025) the data points sit above the extrapolation of the 1970-2005 curve.

If "... growth in CO2 emissions slowed notably over the past decade ...", why is the Keeling curve currently accelerating upwards as fast or faster than it has since the 1970's?

Keeling curve showing upward accelerating since the 1970's

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025

One Planet Only Forever at 08:36 AM on 12 January, 2025

There is a follow-up report from NPR for the item I linked in my comment @15.

NPR – Special Series - Untangling Disinformation: “Meta built a global fact-checking operation. Will it survive?” by Huo Jingnan, Shannon Bond, includes the following quote that is related to the evidence that David-acct repeatedly claimed that efforts to raise awareness about, and limit the harm done by, misinformation are ‘censorship’.

In a video announcing the change, Zuckerberg said fact checking contributed to "censorship" on Meta's platforms and that fact checkers were too "politically biased." Fact checkers point out it is the company, not them, that decides how to police posts on Facebook and Instagram.

"I'm just a simple European but…the United States seems to be the only country in the world where adding information is seen as censorship," said Maarten Schenk, Lead Stories chief operating officer and co-founder.

"Far from censoring, fact-checkers add context," said Laura Zommer, co-founder and CEO of Factchequeado, a nonprofit, Spanish-language fact-checking site that is not part of Meta's program. "We never advocate for removing content. We want citizens to have better information so they can make their own decisions," she added.

Note: The other items presented in the NPR – Special Series - Untangling Disinformation are very informative.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025

David-acct at 09:56 AM on 9 January, 2025

In reply to Nigj, One planet and Bob - The topic of this thread is misinformation.

First I will acknowledge a typo in my original comment - The raw data is from Florida and Ohio not Texas and Ohio.

With that correction, This thread has turned out to be a classic example of how easy it is to get fooled by misinformation. Especially when the misinformation fits the person's biases.

Its not difficult to perform a basic level of due diligence from the raw data provided in the supplemental table

per capita death rates from the raw data:

Florida
65-74 age group Dem 4.4453%, Republican 4.1073%
75-84 age group - dem 11.1003% Rep 10.9481%
85+ age group - dem 26.9213% Rep 29.2353%
25-64 age group - dem 0.9532% rep 0.97043%

Ohio
65-74 age group Dem 5.985%, Republican 5.1432%
75-84 age group - dem 15.5005% Rep 14.3840%
85+ age group - dem 39.6232% Rep 40.1578%
25-64 age group - dem 1.2696% rep 1.0879%

In addition to the raw data conflicting with the conclusion, there are other glaring problems that should have been easily recognizable by anyone with basic scientific knowledge.

a) Its well known that computing excess deaths is subject the wide variability based on the methodology used.
b) its well known that using a short base period is problematic, A 5 year base period has well known problems. The professional literature calls for a minimum 10 year base period. This study uses a 4 year base period.
C) Its simply implausible that deaths by party affiliation is sufficiently accurate for either the base period or for the covid period, therefore any conclusion on excess deaths by party should be suspect.

All three of those issues, along with the raw data that conflicts the conclusion should have raised massive red flags, yet large segments of the population got fooled by misinformation.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025

Bob Loblaw at 08:09 AM on 8 January, 2025

One further bit of "due diligence" (for now).

David-acct said in comment 2 (emphasis added),

"Per capita death rates for Democrats exceeded per capita death rates for republics [Republicans?] in all categories in both states except for the 85+ age group in Ohio and Texas."

He cited eTable 1 in Wallace et al (2023).

The three column titles in eTable 1 are Florida, Ohio, and Total.

For Florida, ages 25-64, the death counts per capita (Panel B, Mortality data, divided by panel A, Voter age distribution) are:

Democratic 0.009532 (0.9532%)

Republican 0.009704 (0.9704%)

I am not a geographer (oh, wait, actually I am...), but I don't think that Florida and Texas are the same state. Mark one for attention to detail.

...and it looks like the per capita death rate for Republicans aged 25-64 is a smidge higher than for Democrats. Of course, if you round it off to one significant figure 0.009532 and 0.009704 both round to 0.01 (1%). David-acct (or the secondary sources he is using) may want to try argue that the difference is not significant, but it is misinformation to claim that the Democrats number exceeded the Republicans number for that age category in Florida.

Climate news to watch in 2025

Evan at 07:35 AM on 7 January, 2025

nigelj, there is another way to look at this. Not based on temperature, but looking at what atmospheric CO2 concentrations are doing. It is no secret that CO2 concentrations have been accelerating upwards since David Keeling started measurements in the late 1950's. Accelerating is the term his son, Ralph Keeling, uses to describe the trend.

But CO2 may be more than accelerating upwards. If you take 10 year moving averages of CO2 from 1970 to 2005, it forms a smooth, upward curve depicting the upward acceleration. If you then use that curve to extrapolate forward to see where we should end up if the upward acceleration continued, what actually happens is that the concentrations for 2010, 2015, and 2020 lay above that already upward-accelerating curve!

Keeling curve depicting perhaps more than upward acceleration

This despite the Great Recession, the Covid Pandemic, and the recent, rapid growth of renewables and EVs. People focus on the rapid growth of renewable energy and the increasing deployment of EVs, but neglect to notice that fossil-fuel use continues to increase. Plus other second-order effects likely driven by environmental feedbacks.

Bob's reference is likely far more authoritative than my comments, but the graph I provide hints (there is too little data in the CO2 record to prove that CO2 is accelerating upwards) that the third derivative of CO2 concentration could be positive. CO2 would then not just be accelerating upwards, but the acceleration rate would be increasing.

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

Bob Loblaw at 00:44 AM on 6 January, 2025

Thanks for that update, Charlie Brown.

I quick search over at PubPeer finds this short page with a few comments, including the retraction notice:

The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels

One Planet Only Forever at 06:17 AM on 4 January, 2025

Eric (skeptic) @5,

Regarding your point that “Some cost per metric ton of CO2 seems appropriate.” There are many other ‘externalities’ to be considered in order for EROI evaluations to not result in unsustainable harmful developments. But I will limit my response to carbon pricing and include points regarding the 1970s.

The appropriate carbon pricing value depends on the circumstances being evaluated. An example evaluation is provided in the Queen’s Gazette’s: The Conversation - “Carbon pricing alone is not enough to meet Paris Agreement targets”: By Sean Cleary, Queen's University, and Neal Willcott, Queen's University, December 20, 2023. It includes the following:

“We found that while carbon pricing on its own could limit global warming to 2.4 C, the global price would have to rise dramatically and rapidly to accomplish this. The price would have to start at $223.31 per tonne in 2023 and increase to $435.55 per tonne by 2045.

“While such an abrupt global policy change is unlikely, the price would not need to be so high if it was accompanied by other measures, including regulations that provide clarity and stability regarding green investments, clean technology subsidies and financing mechanisms (such as those facilitating transition investing by companies).”

Note that the above pricing is in Canadian dollars. And the evaluation’s methodology would result in an even higher pricing, and/or more significant other measures, being needed to achieve a 1.5 C limit. For comparison, the IPCC evaluation indicates (based on Google’s current AI summary) that the carbon price required to limit the harm to 1.5 C is US$170 (~ CAN$230) by 2030 and US$430 (~ CAN$590) by 2050.

However, it is important to understand that a correction of what has developed is required. And earlier and more significant ‘effective harm limiting action’ reduces the required magnitude of future corrective actions. So, an appropriate carbon price for starting the correction in the 1970’s would be lower. However, it could be argued that in the 1970’s there was an understandable possibility of limiting the harm done to be below 1.0 C. And achieving a lower level of future harm would require higher pricing. And most important is understanding that to properly develop sustainable improvements the developed actions, and corrective actions, need to be effectively harmless. A related essential understanding is that reducing undeserved (obtained in ways that are harmful) perceptions of superiority or advancement is ‘not harmful’. That objective understanding would require even higher pricing and more significant ‘other measures’, even in the 1970s.

The real challenge is getting people to appreciate that what has been developed is massively harmful and undeniably unsustainable (proven by the Stockholm University: Stockholm Resiliency Centre’s evaluation of Planetary Boundaries - linked here). In many cases the developed perceptions of superiority are massively undeserved. And the magnitude and required rate of the required corrections of developed perceptions of superiority and advancement increases as the required corrections are delayed by successful misinformation campaigns promoting misunderstandings and limiting awareness.

The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels

Bob Loblaw at 00:37 AM on 3 January, 2025

Eric:

The technology has certainly changed since 1979, and in 1979 the economics may not have been all that favourable, but I'm not sure I would call that decision "virtue signalling". In the early development stages of any technology, there is often a "sell it at a loss" strategy to get the market going (and growing), with expectations that the technology and economics will both improve over time.

Even GM, with the Chevrolet Bolt, apparently expected to lose money on production in the first few years. According to this Wikipedia page (information not confirmed by GM), they expected to lose $8-9K per vehicle at the start, and only expected to reach profitability in 2025. (Feel free to speculate why they stopped production, or why they started production on a money-losing proposition).

...and Tesla did not make profit until 2020 (and didn't turn a profit, excluding Bitcoin and regulatory credits, until June 2021). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Finances). That's 15 years of losing money. Does Elon Musk strike you as someone that is into "virtue signalling"?

Stop emissions, stop warming: A climate reality check

nigelj at 05:49 AM on 25 December, 2024

rkolph@8

You said: "Virtually no serious scientists think that global warming is an existential threat. "

Some well qualified scientists do think climate change is an existential threat to humanity:

phys.org/news/2023-10-life-earth-existential-threat-climate.html

www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2023/10/24/we-are-afraid-scientists-issue-new-warning-as-world-enters-uncharted-climate-territory/

You said "Mainstream researchers anticipate global warming contributing perhaps a quarter percent to the excess death rate by mid-century and costing us 2.5% of GDP by 2100, making global warming less serious than many other world problems that have received far less attention."

Note that no researchers are named. You invariably find its the economist William Nordhaus. Just look up his wikipedia entry and read the expert criticisms of his DICE eoconomic model of climate change, near the end of the article. His assumptions are often unrealistic and he leaves out entire aspects of climate change like sea level rise.

One thing. He assumes quite high levels of economic growth in the future will offset climate problems. However economic growth has slowed relentlessly in developed countries since the 1970s until presently, with every sign developing countries will follow that trend later this century, and we live in a world of finite resources, with many fast being depleted and we have many countries with aging demographics and market saturation. This suggests future global economic growth will be low.

And thats before you consider the negative impacts of climate change on economic growth. Some experts calculate it will be considerably more than Nordhaus assumes:

"The largest impact of climate change is that it could wipe off up to 18% of GDP off the worldwide economy by 2050 if global temperatures rise by 3.2°C, the Swiss Re Institute warns."

www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/impact-climate-change-global-gdp/

18% is huge and would severely impact the world. And this is still based on middle range warming estimates, and assumes critical tipping points won't be crossed.

Fact brief - Are we heading into an 'ice age'?

nigelj at 05:04 AM on 23 December, 2024

The Time magazine cover from 1977 featuring a photo of a penguin with the headline, “How To Survive The Coming Ice Age” was a fake:

apnews.com/article/fact-check-time-magazine-global-climate-fabricated-cover-944714514495

In the 1970s a small number of scientists thought there might be a flat or cooling trend in coming decades but the majority of published research around the 1940s - 1970s predicted there would be a global warming trend in coming decades (which there was)

skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

I actually did a couple of papers in physical geography at university back in the early 1980s. One of the textbooks was Atmosphere ,Weather and Climate by Barry and Chorley, a 1971 edition, and the chapter on climate change did not say the scientific community was predicting a coming cooling trend or ice age. It said global temperatures had been flat from the 1940s to 1970, and it was uncertain what would happen in the coming decades. I still have this textbook.

Fact brief - Are we heading into an 'ice age'?

AdriantheHistorian at 02:01 AM on 23 December, 2024

Skeptical Science asks that you review the comments policy. Thank you.

[snip]

The New Ice Age was Promoted and a 'Fact' back in the 1970's to get President Nixion to Create the EPA. Enviromental Protection Agency.

https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=a708972a8ba8ce15990b406eec8dd8eeef261a471c38752311e038ee709c5666JmltdHM9MTczNDgyNTYwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=1c8ee8b9-4b23-6ade-3488-fbd14a996bb8&u=a1L2ltYWdlcy9zZWFyY2g_cT1waWN0dXJlcytzaG93aW5nK3RpbWUrbWFnYXppbmUrY292ZXJzK3dpdGgrdGhlK25ldytpY2UrYWdlJnFwdnQ9cGljdHVyZXMrc2hvd2luZyt0aW1lK21hZ2F6aW5lK2NvdmVycyt3aXRoK3RoZStuZXcraWNlK2FnZSZGT1JNPUlHUkU&ntb=1

Fact brief - Are we heading into an 'ice age'?

AdriantheHistorian at 01:32 AM on 23 December, 2024

Skeptical Science asks that you review the comments policy. Thank you.

[snip]

TODAY!......... Climate Shift. ..??.. DID the “NEW ICE AGE”, Climate Fanatics of the 1970’s CAUSE the so-called, “Climate Shift” Crises of Today?
(Scientists say sprinkling diamond dust into the sky could offset almost all of climate change so far — but it'll cost $175 trillion)
Story by Sascha Pare 12-19-2024

Sprinkling diamond dust into the atmosphere could offset almost all the warming caused by humans since the industrial revolution and "buy us some time" with climate change, scientists say.

[This is Funny as the ''Climate Craze'' back in the 1970's was the New Ice Age..... Yes ''they'' said that Pollution (partials) were being thrown up into the upper atmosphere and causing the suns light to be reflected back into space., This was causing a New Ice Age to destroy the Earth.
Note; To STOP this New Ice Age, the USA went 'seriously' into protecting the 'Environment' way back in the 1970's with President Nixon signing the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) into law.
Today the USA only produces as much steel as it did in 1950, this is as an example of those EPA efforts.
High Gas Prices?.. EPA will Not allow a New Oil refinery to be built in America.
Etc. Etc.
And this is also a major reason for the loss of Millions of very good paying jobs, I might add. 'clean', comes with a very steep 'price'.]

Continued.
New research indicates that shooting 5.5 million tons (5 million metric tons) of diamond dust into the stratosphere every year could cool the planet by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) thanks to the gems' reflective properties. This extent of cooling would go a long way to limiting global warming that began in the second half of the 19th century and now amounts to about 2.45 F (1.36 C), according to NASA.
The research contributes to a field of geoengineering that's looking for ways to fight climate change by reducing the amount of energy reaching Earth from the sun.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/scientists-say-sprinkling-diamond-dust-into-the-sky-could-offset-almost-all-of-climate-change-so-far-but-it-ll-cost-175-trillion/ar-AA1w6MuP?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=2dfb5c2f1669448799854ec819ce98bf&ei=43

Stop emissions, stop warming: A climate reality check

nigelj at 05:54 AM on 20 December, 2024

AdriantheHistorian said: "Today the USA only produces as much steel as it did in 1950, this is as an example of those EPA efforts."

Not necessarilly. This is from "History of the iron and steel industry in the United States" on Wikipedia: "US production of iron and steel peaked in 1973, when the US industry produced a combined total of 229 million metric tons of iron and steel. But US iron and steel production dropped drastically during the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s. From a combined iron and steel production of 203 million tons in 1979, US output fell almost in half, to 107 million tons in 1982. Some steel companies declared bankruptcy, and many permanently closed steelmaking plants. By 1989, US combined iron and steel production recovered to 142 million tons, a much lower level than in the 1960s and 1970s. The causes of the sudden decline are disputed. Among the many causes alleged have been: dumping of foreign imports below cost, high labor costs, poor management, unfavorable tax policies, and costs of environmental controls."

It seems most likely that the EPA contributed to a relatively small part of the stagnation in steel production if anything. I think is a price worth paying to look after the environment and have clean air and water and so forth. It's a values issue.

Stop emissions, stop warming: A climate reality check

AdriantheHistorian at 01:36 AM on 20 December, 2024

Skeptical Science asks that you review the comments policy. Thank you.

[snip]

TODAY!......... Climate Shift. ..??.. DID the Climate Fanatics of the 1970’s CAUSE the Climate Crises of Today?
Funny as the ''Climate Craze'' back in the 1970's was the New Ice Age..... Yes ''they'' said that Pollution (partials) were being thrown up into the upper atmosphere and causing the suns light to be reflected back into space., This was causing a New Ice Age to destroy the earth.

(Scientists say sprinkling diamond dust into the sky could offset almost all of climate change so far — but it'll cost $175 trillion)
Story by Sascha Pare 12-19-2024

Today those same people (Rainmakers) are selling yet another climate ''Crises''.

Note; To STOP this New Ice Age, the USA went 'seriously' into protecting the 'Environment' way back in the 1970's with President Nixon signing the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) into law.
Today the USA only produces as much steel as it did in 1950, this is as an example of those EPA efforts.
High Gas Prices?.. EPA will Not allow a New Oil refinery to be built in America.
And this is also a major reason for the loss of Millions of very good paying jobs, I might add. 'clean', comes with a very steep 'price'.
Even IF the ‘Clean’ is ONLY here and all that pollution was just Moved to China, along with all the Jobs.
Good thing we don’t use the same Air as the Chinese. Otherwise it would ALL have been a waste of time and Money.

TODAY!......... Climate Shift. ..??.. DID the Climate Fanatics of the 1070 CAUSE the Climate Crises of Today?
(Scientists say sprinkling diamond dust into the sky could offset almost all of climate change so far — but it'll cost $175 trillion)
Story by Sascha Pare 12-19-2024

Sprinkling diamond dust into the atmosphere could offset almost all the warming caused by humans since the industrial revolution and "buy us some time" with climate change, scientists say.
New research indicates that shooting 5.5 million tons (5 million metric tons) of diamond dust into the stratosphere every year could cool the planet by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) thanks to the gems' reflective properties. This extent of cooling would go a long way to limiting global warming that began in the second half of the 19th century and now amounts to about 2.45 F (1.36 C), according to NASA.
The research contributes to a field of geoengineering that's looking for ways to fight climate change by reducing the amount of energy reaching Earth from the sun.

CO2 effect is saturated

michael sweet at 23:06 PM on 4 December, 2024

this works for me.

https://escholarship.org/content/qt3428v1r6/qt3428v1r6_noSplash_b5903aebfe105b4071103e11197138f8.pdf

Moderator: when i tried to hyperlink the link it didn't work, sorry

CO2 effect is saturated

michael sweet at 23:02 PM on 4 December, 2024

callitasitis: a free copy of the paper is located here. Google Scholar located this copy in about 30 seconds.

2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #48

AdriantheHistorian at 23:44 PM on 2 December, 2024

As this is your first post, Skeptical Science respectfully reminds you to please follow our comments policy. Thank You!

Funny as the ''Climate Craze'' back in the 1970's was the New Ice Age..... Yes ''they'' said that Pollution (partials) were being thrown up into the upper atmosphere and causing the suns light to be reflected back into space., This was causing a New Ice Age to destroy the earth.
Today those same people (Rainmakers) are selling yet another climate ''Crises''.

CO2 effect is saturated

MA Rodger at 16:23 PM on 1 December, 2024

Bob Loblaw @797,
Commenter CallItAsItIs @800 continues to demonstrate a schoolyard approach to this subject which is not appropriate to its scientific nature. If "one could probably show" something then why shouldn't 'one'. Oh, this is because "typesetting equations tends to be a long, grueling task" for him and "most likely" these equations would then be subject to rebuttal "over statements I did not make or that you misunderstood." I think I'd prefer "the dog ate my homework!!"

While the commenter CallItAsItIs appears a lost cause and too far up his own nonsense to see any of his multivarious misconceptions, it would be correct here to ask him to explain his comment @796 and show where exactly it is within Schwarzschild's equation there is "an exponential term that vanishes at high altitudes" and demonstrate from that how it is this would obtain "the exact same result (he has) been claiming through all the ridicule."

CO2 effect is saturated

CallItAsItIs at 14:04 PM on 1 December, 2024

Bob Loblaw @797

Yes, I see the light. You simply cannot conceive of the idea that adding CO2 changes the temperature at which the atmosphere reaches "thermal equilibrium".

Wrong! Whether adding CO₂ changes the equilibrium temperature remains to be seen. I should note, however, that with the absorption strength of CO₂ on the 15 micron band, one could probably show that band saturation occurs over a pretty wide temperature range.

Do the actual math. Your handwaving achieves nothing other than making you look like a fool.

I have already done the math but am not posting it here. Typesetting equations tends to be a long, grueling task for me and not worth the effort in view of the fact that you and your AGW comrades would most likely discredit it over statements I did not make or that you misunderstood. Attend my Fear no Carbon lectures if you want to learn something more about the mathematics of this band saturation effect.

CO2 effect is saturated

Bob Loblaw at 06:40 AM on 28 November, 2024

Congratulations, CallItAsItIs. You actually have some sort of access to a textbook that covers "radiometery", and you know how to look in an index.

I am familiar with Petty's book, although It is not one that I have on my personal bookshelves.

I'll see your Petty, and raise you a Wallace and Hobbs, "Atmospheric Science, an Introductory Survey" (Beer's Law discussed on pages 296-297), a Pierrehumbert "Principles of Planetary Climate" (Beer's Law discussed in chapters 4 and 5), a Liou "An Introduction to Atmospheric Radiation" (which has 6 sections listed in the index for the Beer-Bouguer-Lambert law), and an Oke "Boundary Layer Climates" (also multiple references in the index).

All of those four books are ones that I do have on my personal bookshelf.

And if you want to see what else I know about Beer's Law, you can read this post:

https://skepticalscience.com/from-email-bag-beer-lambert.html

Yes, Beer's Law applies to individual wavelengths/frequencies. I challenge you to find a single reference that supports your argument that "conservation of energy must hold for each frequency independently of the others."

You see, Beer's Law says nothing at all as to what happens to energy that is absorbed when photons disappear within the volume of air it includes. As far as Beer's Law is concerned, the energy simply disappears along with the photon. To apply "conservation of energy" principles, you need to include where that energy goes - which you repeatedly fail to do.

CO2 effect is saturated

Bob Loblaw at 00:32 AM on 28 November, 2024

CallitItAsItIs @ 765 (where he responds to my request for his definition of "sources of energy"):

You are in no position to tell other people to "learn some physics". Let's start with one of your statements:

...we are trying to determine the warming of the atmosphere due to GHGs tapping energy from the terrestrial IR radiation rising from the surface. This means that the upwelling terrestrial IR radiation is the source.

Once again, you are wrong. Let's look at Trenberth's diagram again:

Trenberth energy diagram

You clearly have no idea what this diagram shows. I will point specifically to two arrows in the middle of the diagram, originating at the surface. The ones labelled "Thermals" and "Evapotranspiration". Those are flows of energy from the surface ("source") to the atmosphere (sink, if you like). IR radiation (labelled "Surface radiation") is to the right, and it is not the only transfer of energy from the surface to the atmosphere.

You continue with:

The sun also is a source of energy since it puts out IR radiation which is absorbed by the GHGs and converted into thermal energy in the same manner as the terrestrial IR radiation.

Once again, you ignore anything other than IR radiation. A lot of the sun's direct warming of the atmosphere comes from absorbing non-IR radiation - visible light, and UV radiation. In fact, the main reason that the stratosphere is much warmer than the troposphere is because of UV absorption by ozone. The atmosphere is not completely transparent to visible or UV radiation.

Then you state (with respect to surface heating):

The down-welling terrestrail radiation from the atmosphere is another a source, but a much weaker one.

Look at the Trenberth diagram again. Solar radiation absorbed by the surface is 161 W/m². (On the left side.) If you look on the right side, you see that "Back Radiation" (IR from the atmosphere to the surface) is 333 W/m². I challenge you to find one reputable source that says 333 is "much weaker" than 161.

..and if you look closely at the IR radiation flows between the surface and the atmosphere (on the right of the diagram), you will see that the net exchange is only +23 W/m² - the atmosphere only absorbs 356 W/m² of the 396 W/m² coming off the surface, but sends 333 W/m² back to the surface. Contrast that with the 97 W/m² (17+80) transferred from the surface to the atmosphere by thermals and evapotranspiration, and add in the 78 W/m² of solar radiation absorbed directly by the atmosphere (in the middle of the diagram) and you get a total of 175 W/m² of energy added to the atmosphere from sources that are not surface emission of IR radiation.

And then in your closing paragraph, you state (emphasis added):

Since the contributions to the total upwelling EMR at different frequencies involve different photons, conservation of energy must hold for each frequency independently of the others.

And this is probably the root cause of your confusion. No, conservation of energy is not something that must hold for each frequency independent of others.

Once CO2 (or any other material) absorbs a photon, the energy gets transformed into another form (thermal/kinetic, chemical, etc.) and the CO2 is free to do whatever it wants to (restricted by physics and chemistry, of course) with that energy. It can emit it as radiation in any frequency of the many it is capable of absorbing or emitting. It can keep it as kinetic (thermal) energy. It can dump it off as kinetic energy to other molecules it collides with as it bounces around in the sky.

The energy contained within the CO2 molecule has no memory of where it came from. Absorption of radiation, kinetic transfer from colliding with other molecules, etc. It's all just energy once it is stored in the molecular structure of the CO2.

Energy conservation only applies to the system as a whole. Your version of "physics" is bordering on crackpot territory.

20 fact briefs published in collaboration with Gigafact!

prove we are smart at 07:44 AM on 14 November, 2024

What the heck, thought I'd do the quiz even knowing I would know that stuff now. Well, I got number 15 wrong and am so glad I did!

I was eventually led back to here- skepticalscience.com/argument.php?p=1&t=162&&a=297 you can learn so much from the informed comments. By the time I read the first 25 comments of that decade old post I had my information- In fact a link from number 25 commenter led me here- www.amazon.com/The-Alchemy-Air-Scientific-Discovery/dp/0307351793 ( looks like a good read)

Surprising facts and scientific knowledge, gotta luv Skeptical Science.

Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?

Bob Loblaw at 06:37 AM on 11 November, 2024

Jess Scarlett @ 6:

You're going to have to put together a much stronger argument than that if you want to convince anyone that there isn't a strong expert consensus on human-caused global warming.

For starters, is your lead question ("Have you looked into all the climate scientists gagged...") a rhetorical gambit, or are you actually asking a serious question? Are you trying to imply that the studies that have looked at the scientific literature missed a few "gagged scientists", or many, or all? Are you trying to imply that this "gagging" has been so thorough that none of their opinions have every made it into print? Or that the few that have made it into print would be a much greater number "but gagging"?

The OP here links to the full SkS rebuttal on the topic. Here is the link to the basic tab of that rebuttal, but note that there are also advanced and intermediate tabs to read. The basic rebuttal links to the various papers that have been done on the subject, and those papers give details on just what sort of searches they did to obtain the list of papers that were evaluated. Feel free to look them over and come back with an argument as to why those searches will have missed the opinions of the "gagged scientists" you seem to think exist in large numbers.

...but before you start trying to make an argument that the review system won't let opposing opinions get published, I suggest that you read this SkS article on "pal review" that shows just where bad reviewing practices exist in the climate science literature. (Hint: it's the "gagged scientists" that have historically abused the peer review system.)

But let's entertain your argument that there are a whole bunch of 'gagged scientists" that can't get published, or have chosen to remain silent out of fear. You said "...all the climate scientists gagged..." That seems to imply a large number. I'll begin with a recollection of discussing climate science with someone at a conference about 30 years ago. He made the claim that lots of scientists had reversed their opinion from global cooling in the 1970s to warming in the 1990s. (This is debunked on this post at SkS.)

I challenged him by saying "name one".

He prattled on about there being lots.

Again, I said "name one".

He kept prattling on.

I repeated "name one".

I held my hand up about head high and started dropped it down to chest height, waist height, and below, saying "this is your credibility dropping".

He still didn't give a name. He never did.

So that is my challenge to you: you claim that there are scientists at CSIRO and NASA that have been gagged because they disagree with the scientific consensus. Name One. And provide some sort of link to a reliable source of information supporting that position.

Second: in the advanced tab of the full rebuttal, under "The Self-Ratings", the Original Cook et al study obtained ratings of over 2100 papers from 1200 scientists, and 97.2% of those ratings agreed with the consensus. In the following paragraph, it states that the authors' review of over 4000 abstracts indicated a 97.1% agreement with the consensus.

My second challenge is for you to do some elementary arithmetic (I won't call it math), and tell me how many papers do you think those "gagged scientists" failed to publish, and how would the 97% number have changed if they had succeeded in publishing those papers.

I'll give you a hint. You'd have to find nearly 2100 papers or 4000 abstracts to get it to drop to a 50% consensus.

Good luck finding that many papers.

...and before you try to link to PopTech's list of papers, please read "Meet the Denominator".

Please provide us with backup of your claim.

4 Hiroshima bombs worth of heat per second

One Planet Only Forever at 06:55 AM on 11 October, 2024

MA Roger @54,

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I now appreciate that the ‘reason’ or attribution for the EEI rate appearing to have increased from 4 bombs to 9 bombs (or higher) is still not fully understood.

The annual CO2 level increase now appears to be about 40% higher than the average from 1980 to 2010 (see below). That does not appear to reasonably explain the more than doubling of the EEI in a way that is reasonably consistent with the expectation that no significant warming will occur after human impacts on GHG levels are effectively ‘net-zero’.

Could it be that the magnitude of annual GHG increase is significantly exceeding the rate of annual EEI to achieve the new balanced state? That would mean that there is a growing amount of ‘yet to be realized’ global warming. However, if the wind-down of GHG impacts is able to be slow enough, the reduction happens sooner and a more significant reduction happens earlier, then that excess warming could be realized by the time that human impacts become effectively net-zero. That would be seen by the EEI not declining at the time that the rate of CO2 increase begins to significantly decline.

Based on NOAA (see here) the approximate 10 year average annual increases of CO2 levels were as follows:

0.8 ppm - in the 60s (1960 to 1970)
1.3 ppm - 70s
1.6 ppm - 80s
1.5 ppm - 90s
1.9 ppm – 2000s
2.4 ppm - 2010s

Average annual increase from 1980 to 2010 = 1.7 ppm

Average of 2010 to 2020 = 2.4 (with 2018 at 2.4 and 2019 at 2.5), an increase of about 40% compared to the period used to calculate the 4 bomb per second rate.

Are climate models overestimating warming?

MA Rodger at 02:08 AM on 20 August, 2024

ubrew12 @3,

The models do certainly calculate soil moisture and account for surface albedo. I don't know how accurately this is done. Presumably, if it were done badly enough to affect the modelling generally, such a failing would be quickly corrected.

You ask this because you wonder whether the 'Dust Bowl' could be the reason for these Corn Belt states having seen such low warming rates 1973-2022. Perhaps they began the period with warming already in place.

The GISTEMP web site easily allows such ideas to be tested. Over the full 1880-2022 period of data, the same low warming trend is still seen across the eastern USA thro' summer months on a global map. It is actually there all year and strongest in Autumn,weakest in Winter & Spring. So using this region to be representative of AGW, it is simply a dishonest cherry-pick (which is what 'Derwood Turnip' is doing). And as a region testing the climate models, as shown in the global map above in the OP, it is again a dishonest cherry-pick (which is what Roy Spencer is doing), although Montana/North Dakota would give a more dramatic result, indeed the most dramatic result.

Are climate models overestimating warming?

ubrew12 at 21:58 PM on 19 August, 2024

This article includes a graph of the worlds 1970-2023 prediction anomaly. This is pure speculation, but the anomaly in question may not be simply 'unforced variability'. We know that in the 30 years before 1970, the Corn Belt was recovering from the 'Dust Bowl': non-evaporative fallow land was being replaced by irrigated crops. Post 1970 this trend would have continued, as better agricultural practices filled the summer Corn Belt with evapotranspirating crops: a form of human agency the climate models may not include as a boundary condition. If so, then such a overprediction anomaly may also be found in other cropland areas, like in Ukraine.

An opposite effect might be expected in places where evapotranspirating jungle was, post 1970, being cut down and replaced with relatively inefficient ranchlands, soybeans, and palm oil plantations: Brazil and Borneo. Hence, they show up colored blue in that graph.

I'm just speculating. Do the climate models account for this kind of human agency, land-use change, as a boundary condition?

A major milestone: Global climate pollution may have just peaked

Bob Loblaw at 04:54 AM on 24 July, 2024

Joel:

The figure mentions OurWorldInData.org. They have a large collection of charts of CO2 and greenhouse gas information on this web page.

One of the charts (second row, right side, in the view I have) is for "Annual greenhouse gas emissions by world region". It looks like the total for that chart matches the values in the figure in this post, so I expect the figure here is using the same data (just not by region).

If you dig down into the information for that chart at OurWorldInData, it gives the following reference:

Jones, Matthew W., Glen P. Peters, Thomas Gasser, Robbie M. Andrew, Clemens Schwingshackl, Johannes Gütschow, Richard A. Houghton, Pierre Friedlingstein, Julia Pongratz, and Corinne Le Quéré. “National Contributions to Climate Change Due to Historical Emissions of Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Nitrous Oxide”. Scientific Data. Zenodo, March 19, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10839859.

That paper describes the data as "emissions CO2, CH4 and N2O from fossil and land use sources during 1851-2021."

If you follow the link to that paper, it then points to yet another paper that gives a more complete description: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-023-02041-1. The abstract of that paper starts with:

Anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) have made significant contributions to global warming since the pre-industrial period and are therefore targeted in international climate policy.

From that information, it seems pretty clear that forest fires, peat, etc. are not included.

The figure here provides enough information that your question can be answered with a little effort tracking down sources.

2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #29

Cleanair27 at 04:25 AM on 23 July, 2024

As nigelj points out, the proper term is 'dismantle', not Heritage's humorously incompetent and unintentionally ironic use of 'deconstruct'. This calls to mind Jacques Derrida's post-modernist deconstruction project, hardly what Heritage would want to be associated with.

I don't entirely agree with nigelj's critique, rooted in standard welfare economics. There is no free market, and market failures are common and widespread, so different concepts are better for justifying regulation. For a different perspective on the history, troubles, and potential of the American administrative state, and why the Heritage wrecking ball is seriously foolish, consider this: The Fourth Branch

What’s next after Supreme Court curbs regulatory power: More focus on laws’ wording, less on their goals

One Planet Only Forever at 08:00 AM on 18 July, 2024

My comments about the harmful learning/change resistant hard-liners (religious, racist, sexist, greedy rich, and more types) taking over the US right-wing, including the SC control evident in the Chevron deference judgement, is well summarized in this new NPR article:

RNC represents culmination of a decades-old movement in the Republican Party

The article also aligns with the understanding that ruining democracy and ending the related freedoms, particularly the freedom from unjust persecution, for caring thoughtful responsible people is often a slow process (I mentioned this was presented in the book “How Democracies Die” in my comment @62 and earlier comments). It also supports the understanding that the institution of the Republican Party failed to protect US democracy by allowing the hard-line social conservatives to taking over the party. And it presents the case that the take-over of the Republican Party was a significant source of the divisiveness in current day USA.

The following are a few quotes from the article:

They feared changing values around sex, civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights.
They believed the establishment was too moderate, too accommodating.
They dismissed the machinery of government and the media as controlled by a liberal elite.
They were known as “the New Right,” and 50 years ago they won a victory in the Republican Party.
It is the heirs of that political movement who have gathered at this year’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. As the party pushes to dramatically reshape government and roll back changing cultural mores, nominating a candidate who has disregarded fundamental elements of American democracy, it may feel like a sudden and extreme pivot in American politics. But this surge to the far-right stems from seeds planted a half-century ago.
...
1974: Kanawha County, West Virginia
... They were appalled by mentions of sex, inclusions of profanity, exploration of non-Christian creation myths, and readings from Malcolm X.
The protests grew violent. Bombs exploded at elementary schools (Horan later went to prison for his involvement). Snipers fired at school buses. The Ku Klux Klan joined a rally at the state capitol in Charleston.
Meanwhile, outside activists arrived to aid the protesters, as well. They came from a variety of mostly new organizations: the Conservative Caucus, Citizens for Decency Through Law, the Populist Forum, and one called the Heritage Foundation.

The Heritage Foundation is undeniably the harmful buddying up of the fossil fuel interests with the social conservative interests (almost all in conflict with learning to b e less harmful and more helpful to others)

It is important to understand that the powerful fossil fuel interests had been significantly influencing US leadership judgment before the social conservatives pursued the capture (hostile take-over stuff) of the Republican Party in the 1970s. The harmful wealthy fossil fuellers willingly buddy up with harmful social conservatives because:

It costs callous wealthy fossil fuellers very little to support the unreasonable misunderstanding-based leadership judgments and actions desired by the social conservatives.

And the social conservatives are obviously happy to support any interest group that will support their interests no matter how unreasonable they are and how much misunderstanding is required to support them.

The union of unreasonable misunderstanding fuelled people have captured control of the SC for the foreseeable future (no mechanism to change the SC other than a SC justice ‘retiring’ when Democrats control the Senate and Presidency, or a SC justice being successfully impeached and convicted by the House and Senate).

Some final quotes from the NPR article:

1974: Boston, Massachusetts
A bottle shattered. Eggs splattered and rocks hammered against the window of a school bus filled with children. Parents had violently risen up against a plan to desegregate schools, which involved sending children sometimes across town by bus.
As riots engulfed the city, once again outside activists from a variety of new groups arrived to help the protesters.
The next year, 1975, featured a remarkable convergence. Hundreds of anti-busing protesters from Boston and anti-textbook protesters from West Virginia joined together in a march on Washington, D.C.
Two separate, regional uprisings against social change became one.
...
The outside groups who aided the protests, along with a host of others like them, would earn the moniker “the New Right.”
...
1976: North Carolina
It was embarrassing how badly Ronald Reagan was losing.
... Reagan pledged to transform the GOP, shift it rightward, into a “party of bold colors, no pale pastels.”
In other words, Reagan was the candidate of the New Right.
... He lost the first five primaries to Ford, in increasingly emphatic fashion. His top aides prepared to withdraw.
... Sen. Jesse Helms and his political strategist Tom Ellis, took charge of Reagan’s campaign in their state. They reshaped his message, emphasizing a nationalist appeal featuring the Panama Canal.
Reagan adopted a new slogan: “Make America Number One Again.”
...
This week, amid bipartisan calls to ratchet down political rhetoric after the assassination attempt against Trump, Republican delegates in Milwaukee approved the party’s latest platform. While it removes explicit opposition to abortion, the social backlash and apocalyptic rhetoric that decades ago typified the New Right infuses the document, from its call to “deport millions of illegal Migrants who Joe Biden has deliberately encouraged to invade our Country” to its focus on banning textbooks “pushing critical race theory.”
The New Right did not fully succeed 50 years ago when it sought to “organize discontent,” with “its eye on the presidency,” and the goal of taking “control of the culture.” But its values and heirs to its movement drive today’s Republican Party.

And the New Right Republican Party also supports environmental and fossil fuel interests that conflict with learning to be less harmful and more helpful.

I recommend reading the full NPR article and the many other presentations of the long slow deliberate attack on democracy and its 'freedoms for all reasonable responsible people' by the collective of unreasonable hard-liners who win by promoting harmful misunderstanding to excuse unjust beliefs and related unjust judgments. They harmfully mislead because they can get away with it.

What’s next after Supreme Court curbs regulatory power: More focus on laws’ wording, less on their goals

TWFA at 09:22 AM on 11 July, 2024

Nigel, you can appeal to higher courts, but if they are all required to defer to the unelected and permanently entranched regulators it has obviously been a wasted effort prior to Loper overturning Chevron. As to how many, it is probably far to many to count, because not only do they write the regulations but periodically reach back and reinterpret and usually expand their scope, for example the ex-post-facto inclusion CO2 into the Clean Air Act of 1970 as a pollutant caused cases to go to the Supreme Court where in a split decision it was decided in 2007 that the EPA "could" regulate CO2 but would still be subject to lawsuits, thus leaving the final decision with the courts and not the regulators.

There are almost 100,000 pages in something like 250 volumes of the Code Of Federal Regulations, all written by unseen and unaccountable people, revolving doors of experts who regularly pierce the semipermeable membrane between government and private sector, first feverishly promulgating regulations and then moving to the private sector to make a living helping others either fighting or complying with them.

The regulatory world is a living being with a whole economy and ecosystem of its own, like the mysteries of the human brain or the global ecosystem, nobody can claim they know everything that is going on, least of all the public at large, yet those regulations affect virtually every aspect of life.

Of red flags and warning signs in comments on social media

nigelj at 08:54 AM on 16 June, 2024

Interesting that TWFA quotes Paul Ehrlich as an example of a clever contrarian. Perhaps TWFA doesnt realise Ehrlichs predictions of mass famine by the 1970s due to over population, have clearly been proven spectacularly wrong. And it is unlikely there would be mass famine in the future, given fertility rates have fallen so much (fortunately).

Sure sometimes contrarians are proven right but putting your faith in them is very risky - especially the climate contrarians who have been debunked over and over again.

Of red flags and warning signs in comments on social media

michael sweet at 01:32 AM on 16 June, 2024

TWFA:

Have you noticed that there is a record heat dome over the USA today? Or that south Florida had record floods yesterday? Why would we wait 20 years to decide to take action when the climate has already dramatically changed exactly as the 97% of scientists predicted?

The longer we wait to take action the worse the damage will be.

Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil energy today and will save trillions of dollars.

Of red flags and warning signs in comments on social media

Bob Loblaw at 01:31 AM on 16 June, 2024

TWFA @ 4:

Oh, my. What red flags does your comment trigger?

Questions the 97% consensus. Suggests waiting a couple of decades to see what happens. Claims action will take "hundreds of trillions". As the OP says, "wording typical for the 'discourses of climate delay'".

Uses phrases "conclusions are correct and infallible" and "your perfection of science and purity of motive" [emphasis added], which attempts to make the consensus look like it is an absolute claim (even though the OP says "the facts are at least more than settled enough to base our decisions on". [again, emphasis added].

Says "...convinced the right people..." and "...your theory of climate control..." [emphasis added], showing conspiratorial thinking (in group, out group).

Says "...that anything said in question or to the contrary is "disinformation"...", in spite of the fact that the OP uses phrases such as "...in most likelihood be wrong or misleading...", "...might also be an indication...", "...It doesn't necessarily mean that everything written is wrong, but it nonetheless serves as a warning flag...", and "...might need to be read with a suitably large grain of salt."

All in one short paragraph. An impressive feat, to pack so many warning signals into such a short comment. Were you intending to provide us with an example of the type of comment that is probably safe to ignore? Or maybe you're just doing a Poe? Or maybe you are just so self-unaware that you don't see this in yourself?

Of red flags and warning signs in comments on social media

TWFA at 00:18 AM on 16 June, 2024

I don't know why you worry about all this chatter if you know your science and conclusions are correct and infallible, that anything said in question or to the contrary is "disinformation". You've already convinced the right people of your perfection of science and purity of motive and they are going to make everybody else spend hundreds of trillions testing your theory of climate control, so stop worrying about it, in a couple decades we'll see if the 97% were right or some Copernicus or Ehrlich among the 3% hawking "disinformation" was instead.

On Hens, Eggs, Temperature and CO2

Bob Loblaw at 04:24 AM on 4 June, 2024

As MAR points out in comment 9, Koutsoyiannis et al ignore ENSO as a possible factor in their analysis.

Is ENSO a factor in global temperatures? Yes. Tamino has had several blog posts on the matter, where he has covered the results of a paper he co-authored in 2011, with updates. The original paper (Foster and Rahmstorf, 2011) looked at the evolution of temperatures from 1979-2010, and determined that much of the short-term variation is explained by ENSO and volcanic activity. After accounting for ENSO and volcanic activity, a much clearer warming signal is evident.

Tamino recently updated this analysis, with modified methodology and covering a longer time span (1950-2023). This method turns this:

Tamino raw

to this:

Tamino adjusted

Now remember: Koutsoyiannis et al used differenced/detrended data in their analysis, which means that they have removed any long-term trend and fitted their analysis to short-term variations. If you remove the short-term effects due to ENSO, Koutsoyiannis et al will have a temperature signal with a lot less variation. That means they have a lot less ΔT to "cause" CO2 changes. Their physics-free "causality" gets stretched even thinner (if this is possible with an analysis that is already broken).

On Hens, Eggs, Temperature and CO2

Bob Loblaw at 00:42 AM on 4 June, 2024

David @ 6:

Yes, the point you make about how glacial cycles show CO2 and T variations that would imply a huge temperature increase is needed over the last century to cause the observed rise in CO2 is discussed in the PubPeer comments on the earlier paper.

The earlier paper used the UAH temperature record that only covers very recent times (since 1979). The new paper also looks at temperature data starting in 1948 - but temperature data from re-analysis, not actual observations.

If their statistical technique is robust, then they should come up with the same result from the glacial/interglacial cycles of temperature and CO2...

...but their methodology is devoted to looking at the short-term variation, not the long-term trends. Our knowledge from the glacial/interglacial periods has much lower time resolution. Different time scale, difference processes, different feedbacks, different causes. That does not fit with their narrative of "The One True Cause".

A purely statistical method like Koutsoyiannis et al cannot identify "cause" when the system has multiple paths and feedbacks operating at different time scales.

The science isn't settled

TWFA at 13:36 PM on 9 May, 2024

Of course I looked at Fig. 1... the ebb point in curve is at 1750, clearly rising by 1800 and well on the way by 1850.

I just want to know why, if we are the ones causing all this, that it began long before we were emitting measurable amounts of CO2, which was around 1890. Do I need to show you a chart of sea levels vs emissions?

Time series of sea level anomalies (blue) Jevrejeva et al. (2014).
Million tons of carbon emitted from burning fossil fuels from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC 2014)

The science isn't settled

TWFA at 11:59 AM on 9 May, 2024

Come on, 2 buckets a day is 730 a year, and now you're bitching that it's a thousand a year instead, like that changes anything, it's all within an order of magnitude of my first 365 estimate, why didn't you just go right to 100,000 a century for greater effect?

The point is we KNOW such methods work and have been effective, not just on the coast, but improved insulation, hydroponics and gee, maybe agriculture will come back in thenorthern climes.

The Venetians have been dealing with rising water since the 5th century, on the other hand we only have an alleged 97% certainty that by adjusting the atmospheric content of CO2 up or down by a fiftieth of a percent from the four tenths of a percent it is now that we can control the temperature of the entire planet and avoid having to buldoze all that sand.

Besides, according to the Jevregeva data in '08 and refined in '14 the sea levels stopped receding and began to rise in 1750, when James Watt was twelve years old and over a century before our emissions were even measurable, see Fig. 1
Jevrejeva '08

The science isn't settled

TWFA at 03:52 AM on 9 May, 2024

I still get hung up on the plane example, not sure anybody is framing it correctly.
If you consider the plane to be built upon an aeronautical theory of AGW and is predicted with 97% certainty by those who designed it to be airworthy and get you to your destination, which would be surviving changes in the climate by preventing them altogether using a human controlled CO2 thermostat to control the temperature of the verses planet... verses choosing an alternative, far more pedestrian and proved means of transportation to climate survival that has worked for thousands of years, namely innovation, adaption and migration, which would you choose?

For example, a five gallon bucket of sand tossed upon your acre of oceanfront property every day will keep up with 8" of sea level rise over the next century.

Simon Clark: The climate lies you'll hear this year

Bob Loblaw at 00:19 AM on 1 May, 2024

Martin:

To see an example of the sort of "tricks" used by NoTricksZone, you can read this pair of old posts on the 1970s global cooling myth:

https://skepticalscience.com/70s-cooling-myth-tricks-part-I.html

https://skepticalscience.com/70s-cooling-myth-tricks-part-II.html

Climate Adam: Is Global Warming Speeding Up?

MA Rodger at 17:19 PM on 12 April, 2024

ubrew12,

Tamino subsequently posted an OP titled 'Accelerations' which features this NOAA adjusted data (the last two graphics) showing a pair of break-points in the rate of warming, 1976 & 2013, with the pre-2013 rate being quoted as +0.165ºC/decade and the post-2013 rate measuring a rather dramatic +0.4ºC/decade. But that said, there will be very big 'error bars' on that last value. Additionally Tamino's adjustments did result in 2023 temperature being increased (by +0.02ºC) which, given the cause of the "absolutely gobsmackingly bananas" 2023 temperatures remain unresolved, may be very wrong.

Gigafact and Skeptical Science collaborate to create fact briefs

Joel_Huberman at 08:16 AM on 8 April, 2024

I suspect the % of climate scientists agreeing that global warming is real and human-caused is now, in 2024, much closer to 100% than when the 97% measurement was made.

Welcome to Skeptical Science

cookclimate at 09:28 AM on 4 April, 2024

CO2 does not cause Earth’s climate change.

It is estimated that it will cost $62 trillion to eliminate fossil fuels, but eliminating fossil fuels will be a complete waste of our tax and corporate dollars, because it will not stop the warming. You can’t stop Mother Nature.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) frequently shows that temperature correlates with CO2 for the last 1,000 years as proof that CO2 is causing the warming. But if you extend that to the last 800,000 years, the temperature and CO2 lines do not correlate or fit (Figure 14 in Supplemental Data). If the lines don’t fit, then you must acquit CO2. CO2 is not guilty of causing climate change. CO2 does not control Earth’s temperature. The IPCC has not demonstrated any scientific evidence that CO2 controls Earth’s temperature (they only have unproven theories).

The facts:
• Earth is currently warming (it is still below the normal peak temperature).
• CO2 is increasing (it is above the normal CO2 peak).
• Earth’s current warming is being caused by a 1,470-year astronomical cycle.

The 1,470-year astronomical cycle warms the Earth for a couple of hundred years and melts ice sheets primarily in Greenland and the Arctic. It has repeated every 1,470-years for at least the last 50,000 years. It is normal that it would be happening again. It accelerates Earth’s rotation, stopping length of day increases (Figure 9). It warms the Earth. Based on historical data, the current warming should peak near the year 2060 and then it should start to cool.

For more information, see A 1,470-Year Astronomical Cycle and Its Effect on Earth’s Climate,

DOI: 10.33140/JMSRO.06.06.01

and Supplemental Data,
www.researchgate.net/publication/379431497_Supplemental_Data_for_A_1470-Year_Astronomical_Cycle_and_Its_Effect_on_Earth's_Climate#fullTextFileContent

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

Eclectic at 08:59 AM on 4 April, 2024

Jimsteele @97 / 98 :-

John Mason is quite correct, in that the SkS website is open to all-comers. And so, unsurprisingly, as you gaze around the threads, you will occasionally see comments by climate crackpots who have delusional unscientific fixations and who are impervious to reason and scientific facts ~ whereas, at the WUWT website, those sorts of commenters come in droves. (Indeed, they are the 95% majority there.)

But at SkS , you need to comply with the very reasonable rules of posting ~ and you should provide rational fact-based discussion, not pseudo-science & repetitive ranting.

Jimsteele, you have some serious work to do, to reconcile your self-contradictory statements.

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

jimsteele24224 at 13:43 PM on 3 April, 2024

ocean heat flux

Eclectic, First the skin surface dynamics are essential. The skin surface is the only layer from which heat can leave the ocean.

Second It is your narrative that grossly incomplete! You make a totally unsubstantiated assertion that without CO2 the oceans would freeze. You totally ignore solar heating. However the heat flux into the ocean primarily happens due to tropical solar heating in the eastern oceans, where La Nina like conditions reduce cloud cover and increase solar heating. The ocean sub surface can trap heat but the skin surface cannot.

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

jimsteele24224 at 06:07 AM on 3 April, 2024

A Netherlands journalist, Maarten Keulemans, tried to denigrate Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth in about 50 tweets using much of the same arguments posted to here on SkepticalScience. I successfully debunked all of his arguments in 16 tweets (originally I intended 20) listed below, and so I was just honored with being interviewed for a Dutch TV segment regards how the Climate the Movie promotes vital scientific debate. Too often alarmists try to suppress debate with weak arguments or denigrating the opposition as deniers. However I doubt alarmists can refute any of my arguments, but I will gladly entertain your arguments.

1 Denigrating the Climate Reconstruction graph by Ljungqvist https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1771929435366940908…

2 Keulemans' Medieval Warm Period lie https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1771933673488789868…

3 Contamination of Instrumental by Urbanization https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1771939656504062260…

4 The Best USA temperature Statistic! https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1771947116631580724…

5 Ocean Warming Facts https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1771957182407536940…

6 US Heat Waves https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1771963700951527487…

7 It is the Sun Stupid! https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1771977013576024282…

8 Alarmists know better than Nobel Prize Winners ! https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1771987039631921454…

9 Wildfires: Liar Liar Keulemans' Pants on Fire https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1772000151596572844…

10 The Dangers of CO2 Sequestration and CO2 Starvation https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1772016867265380795

11 Models Running Hot! Keulemans Disgraceful attack on the most honest Dr John Christy! https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1772081300884852829…

12 Keulemans’ Blustering Hurricane Fears
https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1772319957042479298

13. Dishonestly Defining Natural Climate Factors
https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1773395443864736058

14. Denying Antarctica’s Lack of Warming
https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1773473481637957758

15. Misinformation on CO2’s Role in Warming Interglacials during our Ice Age.
https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1773777313924297210

16. Science journalists vs grifting propagandists – Antarctica
https://twitter.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1774428539858907444

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

One Planet Only Forever at 02:21 AM on 2 April, 2024

Two Dog @55,

I offer the following as an example of the incorrectness of your beliefs, and your apparent resistance to learning:

A combination of understood natural factors explain the 'blip' of warm global average surface temperatures in the early 1940s. That warm blip, along with the other aspects shared by others, especially nigelj, for your potential learning benefit, is a significant part of the total understanding of why there 'appeared to be no warming from 1940 to 1970 in spite of CO2 levels increasing'.

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

nigelj at 04:48 AM on 1 April, 2024

Two Dog @41

"Finally, on the "cherry picking" of the 50s, 60s and 70s. I think its a fair point to pick 30 years out of 150 in this case. Indeed, the argument above is, as I understand it, that the main and dominant factor in the current warming is human GHG emissions. For that theory to hold, in any period where GHG emissions are increasing year on year, then only a few years "blip" in warming must presumably call the theory into question? (unless we can find another new and temporary factor like air pollution)"

The reason the temperature record has "blips" and is not a smooth line is because the trend is shaped by a combination of natural and human factors that have different effects. However the overall trend since the 1970s is warming. The known natural cycles and infuences can explain the short term blips of a couple of years or so, (eg el ninos) but not the 50 year overall warming trend since the 1970s. Sure there may be some undiscovered natural cycle that expalins the warming, but its very unlikely with chances of something like one in a million. And it would require falsifying the greenhouse effect which nobody has been able to do. Want to gamble the planets future on all that?

The flat period of temperatures around 1940- 1977, (or as OPOF points out it was really a period of reduced warming) coincides with the cooling effect of industrial aerosols during the period as CB points out. This is the period when acid rain emerged as a problem until these aerosols were filtered out in the 1980s.

However the flat period mid last century also coincided with a cool phase of the PDO cycle (an ocean cycle), a preponderance of weak el ninos, and flat solar activity after 1950 and a higher than normal level of volcanic activity. Literally all the natural factors were in a flat or cooling phase. In addition atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were not as high as presently, so it was easier for the other factors to suppress anthropogenic warming.

So for me this is all an adequate explanation of why temperatures were subdued in the middle of last century. Just my two cents worth. Not a scientist but I've followed the issues for years.

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

Bob Loblaw at 04:38 AM on 1 April, 2024

It's also worth noting that the trend values OPOF is providing from the SkS Trend Calculator use 2σ ranges for the uncertainties.

...and if you look closely, none of the trends OPOF mentions are significantly different from 0. So, the "cooling from 1940 to 1970" is really "no significant warming [or cooling] from 1940 to 1970". To argue "cooling", you need to

ignore the statistical significance of the linear fit

choose your starting point carefully.

In comment 41, Two Dog makes the point "...then only a few years "blip" in warming must presumably call the theory into question? ". That depends on "the theory" being that CO2 is the only factor causing warming on an annual or several-year basis. As we've been pointing out, this is not "the theory" that climate science is working with.

Two Dog is making the classical logic failure that is discussed in the SkS Escalator.

The Escalator

In fact, Two Dog is also arguing with himself. On the one hand, he is arguing that climate science can't possibly know all factors that might be affecting global temperature, no matter how many factors they have already considered in the relevant scientific literature. And then on the other hand, he is criticizing climate science because any blip in temperature that is not explained solely using CO2 as the only factor "...must presumably call the theory into question?". The two positions he argues are mutually contradictory.

Unfortunately this is a common thing in "skeptical" arguments against well-supported climate science - mutually-contradictory (and often impossible) positions on the subject. It's like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland:

I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

One Planet Only Forever at 02:54 AM on 1 April, 2024

Regarding my comment @46,

Using the Start date of 1940 and End date of 1970 in the SkS temperature trend calculator does evaluate 30 years of data, 1940 through 1969. The period of 1940 to 1970, including 1970, is 31 years.

But that difference does not make a big difference.

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

One Planet Only Forever at 02:46 AM on 1 April, 2024

Note regarding my comments @39 and @45,

In the SkS Temperature Trend calculator the evaluation of 30 years of data from 1940 through to, and including, 1970 is actually done using the End date 1971.

Note the following trends for full 30 year periods:

1940 to 1971 is -0.037 +-0.057 C/decade

1942 to 1973 is -0.018 +-0.055 C/decade

1943 to 1974 is -0.001 +-0.057 C/decade

1944 to 1975 is +0.003 +-0.056 C/decade

1945 to 1976 is +0.018 +-0.054 C/decade

1946 to 1977 is +0.022 +-0.053 C/decade

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

One Planet Only Forever at 02:26 AM on 1 April, 2024

Two Dog @41,

Regarding your persistent belief in the mystery of the 30 years from 1940 to 1970 I will add the following to my attempt to help you with my comment @39.

The SkS Temperature Trend Calculator (link here - again) shows that the temperature trend from 1940 to 1970 was: GISTEMPv4 Trend: -0.043 +-0.052 C/decade. A little bit of investigation of that 30 year period exposes the following facts:

trend for 1941 to 1970 was -0.038 +-0.063 C/decade

trend for 1942 to 1970 was -0.026 +-0.066 C/decade

trend for 1943 to 1970 was -0.021 +-0.070 C/decade

trend for 1944 to 1970 was -0.013 +-0.074 C/decade

trend for 1945 to 1970 was +0.009 +-0.075 C/decade

trend for 1946 to 1970 was +0.025 +-0.078 C/decade

trend for 1947 to 1970 was +0.026 +-0.083 C/decade

trend for 1948 to 1970 was +0.032 +-0.090 C/decade

So, within that 30 year data set there appears to be a ‘mysterious or questionable’ trend of the temperature trends. The claim of cooling since 1940 becomes a claim of warming since 1945. What’s up with that?.

Note the following trends for 30 year periods:

1944 to 1974 is +0.006 +-0.060 C/decade

1945 to 1975 is +0.019 +-0.057 C/decade

1946 to 1976 is +0.029 +-0.055 C/decade

Based on your most recent comment, a better question for you to investigate appears to be: What is preventing you from improving your understanding of this issue?

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

One Planet Only Forever at 13:21 PM on 29 March, 2024

Two Dog @32,

Bob Loblaw has provided a good response to your question about the lack of warming from 1940 to 1970. And Eclectic has posed good questions for you.

I have something to add that may help you better understand things.

The SkS Temperature Trend Calculator (link here) can be used to see that the temperature trend for the data set from 1940 to 1970 was indeed negative (GISTEMPv4 Trend: -0.043 +-0.052 C/decade). However, within that time period:

trend for 1945 to 1965 was positive (+0.017 +-0.108 C/decade)

trend for 1950 to 1960 was more positive (+0.126 +-0.302 C/decade)

What’s up with positive trends within a negative trend? You may notice that the 2sigma values are significantly higher for the shorter data sets. The 2 sigma for 1940 to 1970 is also quite high. So look at longer data sets.

trend for 1935 to 1975 is -0.003 +-0.040 C/decade

trend for 1925 to 1985 is +0.048 +-0.024 C/decade

Factors other than CO2 appear to be the cause of the negative trend for the 1940 to 1970 data set. But within that data set the trend of the temperature was still positive. What’s up with that? A significant part of the explanation is apparent in the Temperature Trend Calculator image for the longer data sets.

The temperatures from 1940 to 1947 can be seen to be unusually high. That set of unusually high temperatures needs to be explained, not the apparent lack of warming through the next 30 years compared to that ‘high set of values' (just like the ‘appearance of cooling for a period of time after 1998’ is explained by the explanation for the unusually high temperature in 1998 - also see the SkS myth/argument “Did global warming stop in 1998, 1995, 2002, 2007, 2010?” which could have included 1944)

I am sure if you put in some effort you could find a reliable source (perhaps you could find such information on this SkS website) that would effectively explain why the 1940 to 1947 set of years were unusually warm (warning: there is an explanation - nothing mysterious or magical happened - warming influence of increased CO2 still happened)

Climate - the Movie: a hot mess of (c)old myths!

Two Dog at 04:55 AM on 29 March, 2024

"One Planet Only Forever" - I get the point about "having some merit" but couldn't the "deniers" make the same case? i.e. that there are uncertainties in the man-made climate change narrative. One uncertainty that confuses me is why was there no global warming from about 1940-1970? Presumably CO2 was increasing over that period.

John Mason - not sure I understand the point. Over history there has been many cooling and warming factors that are observed by the temperature record but largely unexplained. How do we know this current warming is not, at least in part, one such warming period?

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #12 2024

Paul Pukite at 07:41 AM on 22 March, 2024

NigelJ mentioned "extreme marine heatwaves"

Heatwave spikes in the each of the major ocean basin indices — Pacific (Nino 3.4), Atlantic (AMO), and Indian (IOD). These are additive in terms of a global anomaly.

NINO34

It's a natural cycle

Paul Pukite at 06:55 AM on 22 March, 2024

For the context of this thread, the important observation will be whether the anomalous global temperature rise of 2023 will recede back to "normal" levels. If that's the case, it will be categorized as a natural cycle.

So far it appears that there are simultaneous spikes in the temperature of 3 different ocean indices ENSO (Pacific), AMO (Atlantic), IOD (Indian). The last time that happened was in 1878, the year known for a super El Nino. Can see the 2 spikes in AMO for 1878 and 2023 in the following chart.

AMO spikes

That holds interest to me in Minnesota in that this year's ice-out date for Lake Minnetonka almost broke the record for earliest date (in 1878 it occurred March 11, this year March 13)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/03/12/lake-minnetonka-ice-out/72941498007/

The U.S. has never produced more energy than it does today

Paul Pukite at 10:18 AM on 21 March, 2024

Energy use is outside the deep expertise of climate followers. Most don't appreciate that even though USA is the largest extractor of crude oil in the world, they still need a large fraction of imported oil. The USA only extracts <13 million barrels/day of crude oil from it's territory, yet the USA consumes 20 million/day of finished product. Compare that to a USA wheat crop where we harvest much more than we consume.

USA crude oil import export

Note that the above is crude oil only, and other liquid fuels make up the amount to reach 20 million.

CO2 is just a trace gas

Bob Loblaw at 06:13 AM on 2 March, 2024

In addition to what OPOF says about ozone, it should be noted that ozone in the stratosphere is an important absorber of UV radiation as well. Not that absorption of UV radiation in the stratosphere causes any noticeable heating. Oh, wait. It does.

Atmospheric temperature profile

As for the errors in using % or ppm as a measure of CO2 quantities, I'll beat my own drum and point to this blog post from a couple of years ago.

The promise of passive house design

AussiejB at 08:32 AM on 21 February, 2024

I studied Archecture and while I did not finish my studies the house I desigened for my first house followed the principles of this article.

The second house built on the secondary dune on a beach north of Cairns in tropical Far North Queensland, Australia did not need airconditioning.

Flow through ventilation from the sea breezes cooled the house and the ceiling area.

Large over hanging roof lines ment that no thermal heat was absorbed by the house.

If I could do this in the early 1970's, we can do much better in the 20's, especially with the building materials available now with thermal insulation to mitigate heat gain in the tropics and subtropics or heat loss in cooler latitudes.

Good article I must add.

Other planets are warming

One Planet Only Forever at 13:52 PM on 7 February, 2024

I recommend a minor update to the first sentence of last paragraph of "Further Details".

"For lots of useful information about Pluto and the other dwarf planets, NASA has a useful resource on its website, including a link to Pluto: Facts."

And some interesting Pluto: Facts are quoted below:

Pluto's 248-year-long, oval-shaped orbit can take it as far as 49.3 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, and as close as 30 AU. (One AU is the mean distance between Earth and the Sun: about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.)

From 1979 to 1999, Pluto was near perihelion, when it is closest to the Sun. During this time, Pluto was actually closer to the Sun than Neptune.

When Pluto is close to the Sun, its surface ices sublimate (changing directly from solid to gas) and rise to temporarily form a thin atmosphere.

So, maybe Pluto would appear to warm rapidly during that orbit event ... but that would explain things in ways that climate science deniers, and the related delayers of harm reduction, would resist learning from.

2023's unexpected and unexplained warming

Daniel Bailey at 07:24 AM on 17 January, 2024

cctpp85, one answer is that it's the difference between theory-based calculations (reanalysis products) and direct observations.

Parker 2016 - Reanalyses and Observations: What’s the Difference?

Atmospheric Reanalysis: Overview & Comparison Tables

At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?

Just Dean at 09:44 AM on 11 January, 2024

I think this is where data from paleoclimatology can help as well. Three recent studies have looked at the earth's temperature vs CO2 during the Cenozoic period, Rae et al., Honisch et al., and Tierney et al. . Each of those show that the temperature of ancient earth continues to rise as CO2 increases. As I understand it the first two are based solely on proxy data while the Tierney effort includes modeling to try and correlate the data geographically and temporally.

All of these are concerned with earth system sensitivities that include both short term climate responses plus slower feedback processes that can take millenia, e.g. growth and melting of continental ice sheets. Both Rae and Honisch include reference lines for 8 C / doubling of CO2. In both cases, almost all the data lie below those reference lines suggesting that 8 C / doubling is an upper bound or estimate of earth's equilibrium between temperature and CO2. Also notice that there quite is a bit of spread in the data.

In contrast, when Tierney et al. include modeling they get a much better correlation of T and CO2. They find that their data is best correlated with 8.2 C / doubling, r = 0.97. Again, this represents an equilibrium that can take millenia to achieve but does to my way of thinking represent "nature's equilibrium" between T and CO2.

In these comparisons, the researchers define changes in temperature relative to preindustrial conditions, CO2 = 280 ppm. For Tierney's correlation then on geological timescale, the temperature would increase by 8.2 C at 560 ppm. At our present value of 420 ppm there would be 3.7 C of apparent warming potential above our 1.1 C increase already achieved as of 2022, i.e., global warming in the pipeline if you will.

Bottom line, based on paleoclimatological data, there is no apparent saturation level of CO2.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #26 2023

MA Rodger at 21:14 PM on 2 January, 2024

Just Dean @11,

I would not agree that the Holocene paper Osman et al (2021) co-authored by Tierney is the sole reason behind what has become the “Holocene temperature conundrum.” Other studies also found an absence of a Holocene Thermal Maximum, eg Kaufman et al (2020) or Bova et al (2021), or a very weak one, eg Kaufman & Broadman (2023), or regional differences, eg Cartapanis et al (2022).

Chen et al (2023) [ABSTRACT] characterises it as a model-proxy thing with these methods needing to sharpen their game if the conundrum is to be resolved.

CO2 limits will harm the economy

One Planet Only Forever at 11:11 AM on 16 December, 2023

PollutionMonster,

I agree that Jason Stanley's book, How Fascism Works, is recommended reading.

I recommended How Fascism Works, along with Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny, in a comment I made in 2021 on a different SkS item, "The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann - our reviews". My comment there is @17 (linked here). Note that Bob Loblaw makes an additional excellent recommendation, for "The Authoritarians", on that comment string.

We are indeed in "Strange Daze" (Days misspelled intentionally) full of examples of trouble-makers succeeding in "Strange Ways". Maintain your focus on learning to be less harmful to others. And help others, including trying to help them learn to be less harmfully misled (admittedly you will encounter some Almost Lost Causes - People very deep into the delusions and fantasy beliefs of misinformation and disinformation).

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44

MA Rodger at 19:54 PM on 12 December, 2023

Dessler's post does rather hedge its bets by suggesting it might be "due to natural variability persisting over an extended period" which will at some point come to an end (so as per the 2007-12 slowdown but in reverse). But he also points to the recent deep La Niña which may be amplifying the impact of the less-than-massive El Niño.

The ENSO indices do show the build-up to present weak El Niño conditions were unusually preceded by strong La Niña cinditions which had been, if anything, strengthening through the period rather than, as is usual, weakening as El Niño conditions approach. (The MEI perhaps shows this situation best.) Yet the big 1997-98 El Niño also strengthened quite suddenly and showed nothing like this 2023 bananas situation.

MEI el nino profiles

The bananas (sudden appearance of an additional +0.2ºC in the global average temperatures) won't be some sudden forcing as there is no sign of anything (or things) approaching the required force. That means we have a natural wobble.

But is that wobble reversing something that has been shielding the impacts of AGW and so it won't reverse? Or is going to abate in coming months/years? Dessler looks to the climate models as suggesting it is the latter. But the question is still an open one!!

Most people don’t realize how much progress we’ve made on climate change

One Planet Only Forever at 07:41 AM on 7 December, 2023

There is reason to continue to be skeptical regarding the rate of progress on the undeniable need for corrections of many ‘harmful popular profitable developments’ to limit the harm done to future generations by ‘most fortunate people’ today.

Things are undeniable worse today than they should have been. The following quote describes actions that caused less correction to occur than could have and should have happened.

“After years of inaction despite constant warnings from climate scientists, hopes had been high for a breakthrough in climate agreements in 2009, leading up to the U.N. summit — known as COP15 — in Copenhagen.

But just a few weeks before that event began, a hacker broke into a server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and released a tranche of climate scientists’ stolen emails. Though there was no indication of wrongdoing in those emails, some phrases taken out of context, combined with the then-unusual nature of the public release of private email correspondence derailed the Copenhagen summit, which was ultimately widely considered a failure.

Climate science denial and policy obstruction thrived in the ensuing years (after the theft of East Anglia emails and misleading promotion of them prior to COP . That was exemplified by an incident in which then-Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the floor of the Senate in February 2015, because he apparently believed that winter snow proved that global warming was a hoax. (it doesn't)”

Inhofe was likely promoting a misleading marketing scam. And the ‘liking to benefit from making things as bad as can be gotten away with’ crowd is still at it today.

This recent NPR item “Oil firms are out in force at the climate talks. Here's how to decode their language” (linked here) exposes that those who resist harm reduction efforts rely on science, the science of misleading marketing. See the NPR item “U.N. climate talks head says "no science" backs ending fossil fuels. That's incorrect" (Linked here) which includes the following: “...al-Jaber responds to Robinson's suggestion with this incorrect statement: "I respect the science, and there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5 [degrees Celsius]." That is my basis for stating that the beneficiaries of being more harmful ‘love the science ... of misleading marketing’.

As presented in the first NPR item the Oil (and gas) firms have developed misleading marketing abuses of the following terms (watch out for how they are abused):

Low carbon and Lower carbon (no admission of the need to meet the Paris objective)

Unabated fossil fuels (abated gets a free pass even if it isn’t a significant abatement)

Net-zero (relies on the magic of actions that suck carbon out, or relies on the harm of their actions, providing fossil fuels that ‘other harmful people burn’, being perceived to be net-zero)

Reliable. Affordable and ‘secure’ energy (questionable claims made using these terms – all dismissive of harm done.

The worst claims are the one about reducing perceptions of poverty - without mentioning that is accomplished via unsustainable and harmful actions – which means that no real reduction of poverty has occurred, just fleeting impressions that things have improved.

At a glance - Evidence for global warming

Daniel Bailey at 06:20 AM on 6 December, 2023

Yes, this is getting off-topic. Risking pushing the envelope, all ENSO phases are clearly warming, due to the underlying and overburdening human forcing of climate becoming increasingly pervasive. Perhaps a better thread can be suggested for such (but not here).

At a glance - Evidence for global warming

One Planet Only Forever at 14:11 PM on 3 December, 2023

Paul Pukite @23,

I will continue to pursue the points I raised regarding your comment @2.

I am confident that nigelj’s comment about similar trends was regarding ‘a trend like the global average surface temperature data - warming rather than cooling with more significant warming occurring after 1950 than prior to 1950’.

Your comment @2, and later comments except for your latest @23 (sort of), appear to insist that it is not possible to have confidence regarding a warming trend in the NINO 3.4 region (the middle of the equatorial Pacific).

Your comment @2 starts with:

"All these show a similar warming trend." [nigelj’s point]
Not the middle of the equatorial Pacific. (your response)

As my comments should indicate, I learned from and accepted nigelj’s finding of an explanation about the current models indicating a larger amount of warming in the equatorial Pacific (especially the east part) than the actual observations. However, as I commented, that does not alter the incorrectness of your comment @2. But you do appear to have finally accepted your incorrectness (sort of) by ‘seeing’ a warming trend in the NINO 3.4 SST data.

However, I am still confident that it is incorrect to declare that having confidence that ‘the NINO 3.4 SST historical data indicates warming similar to the global average surface temperature data’ requires an accurate explanation for the trend being lower than the current global climate models for that region and it requires that understood influence to be removed from the SST values.

The data is what it is regardless of the mechanisms producing it. Large variations of the temperature data simply requires a longer duration of the data set to have confidence that there is a warming trend. And a lower trend rate will also require a longer data set to establish confidence.

The NOAA presentation of the centered 30-year base periods (linked here) that I provided a link to in my comment @16 helpfully presents the trend of the SST NINO3.4 data set in spite of significant variations in the data values. Each 30-year period contains a substantial variety of the variation. Comparing the 5 year steps for the data starting in 1936 shows that there is indeed a recent trend (more significant after 1950 than before 1950 – consistent with the NINO3.4 chart you included in your comment @23). The 1966 to 1995 values, and all the more recent ones, are clearly warmer than the earlier ones. However, it also shows that the ENSO perturbations in the data are large enough to make the warming trend hard to be confident of, even appearing to potentially be a cooling trend in a shorter data set. The 1981 to 2010 results are not clearly warmer, and may even be cooler, than 1976 to 2005.

Global average surface temperature data evaluations using the SkS Temperature Trend Calculator (linked here) can also provide an example supporting my confidence that the ‘noise’ of ENSO variations do not need to be removed to be able to have confidence regarding a trend.

As I indicated in my comment @17, using the GISTEMPv4 dataset in the SkS Temperature Trend Calculator (linked here) the trend of the data after 1950 is 0.152+-0.018 C / decade (high confidence of a warming trend). I add the following set of shorter recent time periods and the resulting trend and level of confidence (2 sigma value compared to trend value):

Years Trend +- 2 sigma
2016 to 2023 = -0.148 +- 0.513
2015 to 2023 = -0.066 +- 0.428
2014 to 2023 = +0.074 +- 0.379
2013 to 2023 = +0.180 +- 0.331
2012 to 2023 = +0.244 +- 0.289
2011 to 2023 = +0.284 +- 0.249
2010 to 2023 = +0.262 +- 0.220
2005 to 2023 = +0.229 +- 0.129

The longer the time period is the more confidence there is in the evaluated trend. Admittedly the global average surface temperature variation in the evaluations is only about 2 degrees C. So a longer time period would be expected to be required for the NINO SST values because they have larger variation of temperature and a smaller trend. But confidence regarding the trend can still be established without a detailed understanding of the mechanisms at play. And I am confident that the authors of 2012 report you (mis)quoted in your comment @2 had reason to be confident with their evaluation and reporting (repeating part of the quote I had included in my comment @4)

“...While centennial trends are not assessed here, we note that using a reduced period results in more consistent linear trends in SSTs over the 61-year record (Fig. 1), which are significantly positive throughout the tropical Pacific Ocean.”

What the authors of the paper observed and explained, was that the pre-1950 data was not as reliable as the post-1950 data. And since the main interest is ‘warming similar’ to the global average surface temperature which has more significant warming since 1950 than before 1950, the earlier SST values are not that important.

At a glance - Evidence for global warming

nigelj at 05:09 AM on 3 December, 2023

OPOF & M Sweet. You guys sound correct in your technical analysis and correct that the equatorial part of the pacific ocean is warming (and I also thought the graphs posted by PP showed a slight warming after 1970). But the warming in a narrow band along the equator is at a significantly slower rate than the pacific ocean as a whole (roughly 0.2 compared to 0.6 in the maps in link I posted). The map posted by MS is a bit too large scale to pick up this level of detail and difference.

This basic pattern is important, and the explanation seems quite good. I think that is the main point.

At a glance - Evidence for global warming

nigelj at 05:44 AM on 2 December, 2023

I don't think PP is a denialist. Have seen his comments at RC. We sometimes just get on edge and jump to the conclusion that anyone who says "flat trend" is a denialist because its a common denialist talking point.

We know the oceans as a whole have warmed considerably since the 1980s. But then you do have a few areas with cooling like the cold blob in the nothern atlantic.

I'm eyeballing Paul Pukete's graphs of the equatorial pacific and at best I can only see a very slight warming trend from around 1970 - 2022. I mean it does look flat or near flat, so I looked for an explanation and this is interesting. I have highlighted the main pargraphs only:. It seems to be consistent with what PP is saying.

Part of the Pacific Ocean Is Not Warming as Expected. Why? BY KEVIN KRAJICK |JUNE 24, 2019

State-of-the-art climate models predict that as a result of human-induced climate change, the surface of the Pacific Ocean should be warming — some parts more, some less, but all warming nonetheless. Indeed, most regions are acting as expected, with one key exception: what scientists call the equatorial cold tongue. This is a strip of relatively cool water stretching along the equator from Peru into the western Pacific, across quarter of the earth’s circumference. It is produced by equatorial trade winds that blow from east to west, piling up warm surface water in the west Pacific, and also pushing surface water away from the equator itself. This makes way for colder waters to well up from the depths, creating the cold tongue.

Climate models of global warming — computerized simulations of what various parts of the earth are expected to do in reaction to rising greenhouse gases — say that the equatorial cold tongue, along with other regions, should have started warming decades ago, and should still be warming now. But the cold tongue has remained stubbornly cold.
Why are the state-of-the-art climate models out of line with what we are seeing?

Well, they’ve been out of line for decades. This is not a new problem. In this paper, we think we’ve finally found out the reason why. Through multiple model generations, climate models have simulated cold tongues that are too cold and which extend too far west. There is also spuriously warm water immediately to the south of the model cold tongues, instead of cool waters that extend all the way to the cold coastal upwelling regions west of Peru and Chile. These over-developed cold tongues in the models lead to equatorial environments that have too high relative humidity and too low wind speeds. These make the sea surface temperature very sensitive to rising greenhouse gases. Hence the model cold tongues warm a lot over the past decades. In the real world, the sensitivity is lower and, in fact, some of heat added by rising greenhouse gases is offset by the upwelling of cool water from below. Thus the real-world cold tongue warms less than the waters over the tropical west Pacific or off the equator to the north and south. This pattern of sea-surface temperature change then causes the trade winds to strengthen, which lifts the cold subsurface water upward, further cooling the cold tongue.

news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/06/24/pacific-ocean-cold-tongue/

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44

MA Rodger at 10:04 AM on 11 November, 2023

Just Dean @22,

My apologies for misreading your comment @20.

The climatology community do not generally spend their time awaiting monthly global temperature anomalies and (as in the kerfuffle with the so-called 'hiatus' a decade back) tend to react to issues after they have arisen; and then not very fluently. So in that regard Jason Box is an oddity.

Concerning the contribution of El Niño to 2023 global temperatures, it is true that there were stronger La Niña conditions in mid-2022 than there was in mid-1996 and particularly in mid-2014. Thus the change from a cooling La Niña would perhaps suggest more resulting warming in 2023. But the flip side of that is the La Niña conditions so far in 2023 being far weaker than 1997 & 2016 suggesting less resulting warming. (Note the 2009-10 El Niño also began from strong La Niña conditions in 2008.) The net effect for 2023 should then perhaps be 1997 or 2015-like. But they are not.

Thus I would suggest there is ample evidence from the global temperature record to indicate something with perhaps even more warming impact on global temperatures than the coming La Niña.

If the temperature rise (using ERA5 with assumed Nov/Dec 2023 anomalies as per @21) the global temperature rise through the first year and then the additional second year rise run as follows:-
1996-97 ... +0.12ºC ... ... 1997-98 ... +0.19ºC
2008-09 ... +0.13ºC ... ... 2009-10 ... +0.10ºC
2014-15 ... +0.15ºC ... ... 2015-16 ... +0.18ºC
2022-23 ... +0.30ºC ... ... 2023-24 ... +???ºC

Perhaps it would be worth setting out the same data for was the most powerful El Niño of recent decades. This was overwhelmed by the El Chichón eruption of April 1982 which resulted in a cooling in 1982:-
1981-82 ... -0.20ºC ... ... 1982-83 ... +0.19ºC

So perhaps the Jan 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption and its water vapour is acting as a booster for 2023. (I mentioned satellite data @21 supporting this contention. See th 6 min video from Andrew Dessler here. It's now 3 months old.)

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44

Just Dean at 23:36 PM on 10 November, 2023

MA Rodger,

If you read my previous comment closely, you will see that I understand we are in the first year of an El Nino event. I am indeed comparing 2023 to 2015 or 1997.

If you look at the global temperature series referenced in Zeke's July 26 CarbonBrief article, you will saw-tooth like structures for both the 1998 and 2016 El Nino events. The total temperature excursion over the two years was about 0.3 C, with each year adding about 0.15 C. I realize that 2023 is extraordinary and might be closer to a jump of 0.2 or 0.25 C but we need to see how this year and 2024 play out. To quote Zeke from his 10/31 post on The Climate Brink, "It remains to be seen if we will see more exceptional warmth in the latter part of this year and early next as the El Nino event peaks or if this El Nino is behaving differently – potentially contributing more warming early on due to the rapid transition out of unusually persistent La Nina conditions – than we’ve seen in past events."

We are observers in an unfortunate global warming experiment. We will need wait to see how it unfolds. To my earlier point to Michael, Zeke is trying his best to interpret this in real time, and allowing us to look over his shoulder, basically giving updates on a weekly or biweekly basis. I am not aware of any other climate scientist that is sharing insight that frequently. Between Zeke, Mann and Hansen, I find Zeke to be the most moderate, consistent and coolheaded. Yes, I'm a fan.

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44

MA Rodger at 20:48 PM on 10 November, 2023

Just Dean @20.

It is not correct to make a comparison of 2023 with El Niño years 1998 & 2016. We are in the first year of a 2023/24 El Niño and the earlier ones were 1997/98 and 2015/16. 2023 is not the El Niño year in which the temperatures jump.

(Using ERA5 numbers), if we assume the October anomalies coutinue for Nov/Dec, 2023 would show a record year averaging +0.16ºC above all previous years. 1998 & 2016 saw similar +0.15ºC & +0.18ºC respectively. But 2023 is not another 1998 or 2016. We would have to wait for 2024 to make a comparison with previous El Niño years. And the coming El Niño is not looking anything like 1998 or 2016. It is forecast to be "moderate El Niño event", so more like 2010.

That is why 2023 is being described as "Staggering. Unnerving. Mind-Boggling. Absolutely gobsmackingly bananas." The big question, which is yet to be answered, is 'Why?'

2023 temps drivers

You'll be familiar with this graphic if you follow Jason Box. It well-explains the temperature rise 2014-2023 but it does not show anything that would explain the "staggering, unnerving, mind-boggling & absolutely gobsmackingly bananas" temperatures we've seen over the last five months.

(If you want to see how bananas, have a play on the UoMaine Climate Reanalyser and compare 2023 with previous years, then blank off 2016-23 and repeat for 'pre-El Niño' 2015. And again for 1997.)

My suggestion as to 'Why?' is that the Jan 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption which was exceptionally large and being sub-ocean blew large amounts of both SO2 and H2O into the stratosphere. These two would cancel each other out so the rather chilly 2022/23 winter (globally) with the SO2 marginally more powerful. But that SO2 has dropped out now and the remaining H2O is still there providing us the bananas. If this is the situation (& there is satellite data showing SO2 dropping out quicker than the H2O), the bananas do thankfully have a shelf-life.

SkS Analogy 26 - Earth's Beating Hearts

Bob Loblaw at 11:19 AM on 10 November, 2023

groovimus @2:

Congratulations. Your second post at SkS, and you've provided two incredibly bad arguments in a single paragraph.

First, you're making an "argument from incredulity" I can't believe that people are still making "I can't believe" types of arguments these days. [See how that works?]

Second, you're making an "it's only a trace" argument. Usually people that are making an "it's only a trace" argument are doing it with respect to CO2 concentrations. At least we should give you some points for originality - for making it about the mass of humans vs. the mass of the earth - but you're still only scoring 2-3 points out of 100. If you were really creative, you'd go onto the CO2 is a trace gas thread and tell us how the mass of CO2 is sooo small in comparison to the mass of the earth, instead of the usual comparison with the mass of the atmosphere alone. It would still be a completely bogus argument, but boy oh boy could you really throw around some huge ratios!

Also, you never did go back to follow up your first SkS comment, where you completely failed to provide any argument why anyone should listen to John F Clauser (the subject of the post you were supposed to be commenting on). All you had there was ad hominem rants and insults.

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44

MA Rodger at 21:23 PM on 8 November, 2023

This Hansen et al (2023) paper was pre-published back in January and did result in a bit of discussion here at SkS. And there was supposed to be a second paper specifically on SLR.

Hansen et al rattle through a pile of stuff, some of which I would agree has merit and some which I find difficult to accept, some very difficult. The high ECS is one of the very difficult ones. (Perhaps the point that the big part of the difference between high ECS values and the IPCC's most likely value ECS=3ºC, [something the IPCC tend not to identify preferring a range of values as in AR6 Fig1.16]: the difference is due to warming that follows the forcing by a century or more. That time-lag is one of the reasons the ECS estimates are not better nailed down and still has its 'fat tail' . It also would give mankind a fighting chance of dodging it.)

SLR is certainly a big subject of concern. It is a long-term problem, multi-century. The equilibrium position for a +1.5ºC is perhaps 3m and the threat of setting Greenland into unstoppable meltdown at higher levels of warming would triple that. I do tend to get irked by the SLR by 2100 being the sole subject of discussion.

Of course, predictions of that 2100 SLR being massive (5m) is one of Hansen's foibles. The worry is, I think, specific to Antarctica and it is a genuine worry. But to achieve 5m by 2100 would need massive numbers of icebergs bobbing around in the southern oceans and result in global cooling. And there is also the awkward point for climatologists that increased snowfall over Greenland/Antarctica could provide a significant reversal of SLR.

The final issue raised by Hansen et al (2023) is the impact of the reduction of aerosols from our falling SO2 emissions. Quantifying the impact of SO2 emissions is not entirely global a thing, so emissions in, say, China may induce more cooling than, say, Europe. But that said, global SO2 emissions data I identify tends to be way out-of-date. The most recent is this one from a Green Peace publication. This shows the reduction in SO2 is well in hand over the last decade. And the CERES data showing EEI does show a drop in albedo (yellow trace in the 2nd graphic) through that period. My own view of these CERES numbers is that they include a lot of bog-standard AGW-feedback-at-work.

SO2 emissions 2005-19

CERES TOA fluxes

There is also the last 5 months of crazy global temperatures (so post-dating Hansen et al's pre-publication). I don't see these as being sign of things to come. I'd suggest it is casued by the January 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption which threw both SO2 and H2O into the stratosphere, the cooling SO2 dropping out leaving the warming H2O to do its thing before eventually it too dropping out.

And the in-the-pipeline thing. Climatology is/has-been saying we need to halve CO2 emissions b 2030, and following the point of net zero in mid century we enter a century-plus of net-negative CO2 emissions. That would see all emissions 2008 to year-of-net-zero removed by human hand and stored away safely. So that is on top of the natural draw-down of CO2 into the oceans. And if we don't do that, it will not be from ignorance of the situation.

New report has terrific news for the climate

One Planet Only Forever at 03:06 AM on 22 October, 2023

Fred Torssander,

In addition to the helpful responses by MA Rogers and nigelj, I offer another perspective regarding the question you ask @3:

How can we know that government action, external governing of the socioeconomic-political marketplace rather than simply allowing marketplace game players the freedom to believe and do whatever they want, has resulted in reduced harm?

This can be particularly challenging if pursuers of benefit from harmful actions deliberately develop and disseminate disinformation and misinformation.

How much less harmful are things today, or will things be in the future, due to policy actions? A more important question not asked by people asking that question is: How much more harmful are things due to a lack of development and implementation of effective harm reduction actions – especially the lack of effective limitations on the ‘freedom to benefit from developing and disseminating disinformation and misinformation’?”

A good example of this problem is NPR’s recent, well researched and presented (and long and detailed), reporting (in parallel with efforts by the regarding the efforts to cast doubt on the science regarding harm done by gas stoves “How gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations”.

Essentially, the understanding is that "...industry-backed reports confused consumers and muddied the science that regulators relied on about the potential dangers of cooking with gas, according to an investigation by NPR and documents uncovered in a new report from the Climate Investigations Center (CIC), a research and watchdog group." And that can happen regarding climate change impact reduction efforts.

The section of the NPR reporting “How Gas Utilities followed the tobacco strategy” presents ways that science can be harmfully biased by the pursuit of money (the American Gas Association – AGA – referred to its pursuit of popular support for gas use in homes as “Operation Attack”). As mentioned in the article “the AGA was hiring researchers who previously accepted research funding from tobacco companies”.

A particularly enlightening part of the NPR article is

“Ralph Mitchell of Battelle Laboratories conducted work for the tobacco industry and had sought funding for research from Philip Morris in 1964 and the Cigar Research Council in 1972. Mitchell and colleagues at Battelle and the Ohio State University reexamined earlier studies that concluded there were health problems linked to use of gas stoves. Using an alternative, and in some cases controversial, analysis technique, Mitchell's team found "no significant difference in reported respiratory illness between the members of households cooking with gas and those cooking with electricity."

None of the authors of the 1974 Battelle paper are alive today to answer questions about their work.

"The research in question occurred nearly 50 years ago, and it would be inappropriate to speculate on the researchers' methods or conclusions," said Benjamin Johnson, spokesman for Ohio State, in an email to NPR. A Battelle spokesman offered a similar statement and wrote that the organization "conducts research that conforms to the strictest standards of integrity."”

It is challenging to ‘conclusively prove the harm reduction of a policy action’. The only ‘certain way to eliminate doubt about the benefits of harm reduction actions’ is to have a parallel planet where the only difference is the action in question with monitoring for a long enough period of time to be highly confident of the ‘measurable differences’. Without that ‘impossible proof’ any suggested harm reduction action is open to the ‘raising of doubt about its merits’. Of course, there is also an inability to be certain about the benefits of actions that are potentially harmful ... but the potential perception of personal benefit can tragically over-power the ability to learn to be less harmful and more helpful.

An obvious problem is the ways that disinformation and misinformation efforts can unjustifiably raise questions about the effectiveness of ‘likely very effective harm reduction actions’, especially when ‘perceived benefits’ have to be given up to reduce the damage being done, or when being less harmful requires more effort or is more expensive.

2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory

Eclectic at 14:46 PM on 28 September, 2023

Sorry, Likeitwarm @1597 . . . but the Miskolczi "paper" proves no such thing. His "constant infrared optical depth" ideas are junk science.

Rob Honeycutt is pointing you in the right direction. Look inside yourself and ask why you choose to cherrypick these disproven ideas originating from a few - a very small handful - of "contrarian scientists". That is the question for you . . . if you are brave enough to face yourself in the mirror.

Let me hasten to add : AFAIK the good Dr Miskolczi may well be a nice guy and kind to children & animals. And AFAIK, lawyers would not consider him legally insane . . . but he is delusional about this area of climate physics.

Sadly, Likeitwarm, there's a small number of scientists who are simply delusional. It's a quirk of their personality, a crazy streak. But that is no reason for you to be sucked in by them.

2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory

Likeitwarm at 04:38 AM on 28 September, 2023

Sysop, Thank you for allowing this conversation with scaddenp and myself to continue.

1562 scaddenp
You said "What I am asking is whether you can remember what switched you into looking for sites like CO2Science or temperature.global? Was it just disbelief about trace gases or were there other considerations?"

I've been thinking about an answer for you.
I started looking into "global warming" back in the mid 2000s, 25 years ago,
I think with this site https://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html.
Many other places and books since then.
I find a lot, 1000s or more, of scientists that disagree with AGW.
One is Nasif Nahle who has calculated the emissivity of CO2 at less than .003 and and says that it doesn't absorb or emit much if any IR. You can see his calculations at https://jennifermarohasy.com/2011/03/total-emissivity-of-the-earth-and-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/
Then there is the Club Of Rome, a bunch of rich elitists that think they know best for the rest of us. Back in 1968-1974 they decided they needed a scare tactic to get people to reduce births, thus reducing the population of the earth and the resources used by them. They settled on AGW because CO2 is emitted when fossil fuels are burned. Reduce the available energy and you will reduce the birth rate.
The U.N. IPCC was not charged with finding out what makes the climate change but rather how to pin it on human causes. See https://shalemag.com/manmade-global-warming-the-story-the-reality/ and https://principia-scientific.com/the-club-of-rome-and-rise-of-predictive-modelling-mafia/
UN’s Top Climate Official: Goal Is To ‘Intentionally Transform the Economic Development Model’
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
You see, the goal was not to save us all from overheating the planet or acidifying the oceans. The goal was to scare everyone into giving up cheap fossil fuels.
I don't know what the goal of you and your colleagues at Skeptical Science is but I do know you can create logic and equations to describe anything, so I remain skeptical of your site.
Now you know where I'm coming from. See www.ourwoods.org.
Cheers

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #38

nigelj at 16:56 PM on 25 September, 2023

Just Dean

Regarding Hannah Ritchies video. I read the main points that she made in her video. Her points were basically that infant mortality is much lower than 300 years ago, poverty has come down, we have made some progess with wind and solar power, coal fired power is declining, and levels of deforestation have generally stopped and environmental pollution in America has fallen (despite economic growth). All worthy points to make and a good counter to the doom and gloom.

Other writers have put a positive spin on human progress such as Seven Pinker in Enlightenment Now and Michael Shermer in The Moral Arc and IMO both books make good points.

However economic growth has a good and bad side. The good side is obvious, but the article did point out the bad side. I don't agree with all the points it made, but economic growth has been a prime contributer of deforestation and its a bit naive to think it can continue indefinitely without causing more deforestation. There is also depletion of the worlds fisheries. Economic growth is also generally accepted to be one of the prime causes of mineral resource depletion (along with population growth) that is on track to leave future generations short of basic materials. Economic growth has been one prime cause of pollution in the development phase of many societies. While its possible to have economic growth and keep pollution at moderate levels as America shows, a necessary condition is a strong rule of law absent in many countries and America ( and other developed countries) is not exactly free of all pollution.

It therefore looks like it would be very difficult and perhaps impossible to have indefinite economic growth based around resource extraction and processing and also have a sustainable environment, and also maintain ever expanding wealth. It is also hard to see how such economic growth would be maintained indefinitely if we are using up finite resources. So it looks like economic growth may fall naturally over time all other things being equal. Economic growth rates have been falling in developed countries since the 1970s anyway.

Japan has had relatively minimal economic growth over the last 30 years but has maintained a good standard of living. So once countries reach a certain level of wealth it looks like we could have zero or near zero economic growth and maintain a good standard of living.

However the commentary seemed to call for a more rapid and deliberately planned end to economic growth. This might face difficulties because our entire financial system is based on debt finance reliant on at least some economic growth to pay off the debt. If economic growth was abruptly switched off for good banks would not be able to make loans.

Any governmnet brave enough to have a policy of zero economic growth (easily achieved through monetary policy) might find the entire business sector waging war against them along with a large part of the population. A zero growth world would probably require large modifications to how capitalism operates and this should be possible but doesn't look like it would be rapidly achieved. It seems more likely to me that economic growth will slow and stop of its own accord due to emerging resource scarcity, demographic changes, etc,etc.

Its very hard and slow turning large ships around.

It's cosmic rays

MA Rodger at 21:33 PM on 22 September, 2023

sailingfree @120/121,
The H. Svensmark input into AGW science has been in general seen as entirely overblown unless you are in denial about AGW when the idea that the sun plays a much bigger role than the climatology shows is usually seen as supportive of their denialism.

Svensmark first published a cosmic ray climate effect back in 1997 demonstrating a remarkable fit between cosmic rays and global cloud cover. The fit proved to be spurious while experiment has demonstrated the causal link between cosmic rays and cloud formation to be very very weak. Undeterred by these setbacks, Svensmark has since been examining the detail of the cosmic ray/cloudiness relationship in an attempt to show there was a climatic effect after all.

Part of this analysis by Svensmark homed-in on Forbush Decreases, a phenomenon identified back in the mid-1900s and today catalogued at an average rate of over 100 events per year. A relationship bewteen these Forbush Decreases and changes in cloud had been observed back in the 1990s.

Svenmark first published on this phenomenon back in 2009. They used the most energetic Forbush Decreases (just 26 over 21 years) to produce a correlation between peak cloudiness and the Forbush Decrease strength (Fig 2- not entirely convincingly) and plotting the averages of cosmic ray evolution and average cloudiness evolution for the five most energetic Forbush Decrease events (Fig 1) although the reason for showing the averaging of these five alone is not evident to me in this paper.

Svensmark et al (2021) which you ask about is simply Svensmark et al (2009) but using a correlation with the CERES radiation data. The CERES data restricts analysis to post-2000 events and now only the 13 most energetic events are analysed for the correlation (fig 2) with event evolutions averaged from (again) the five strongest events (fig 1), this apparently because there is too much "dominant meteorological noise" if more events are included, although I'm not sure that squares up with the effect being climactically significant.

Of course, with the sun less active since SunSpotCycle 23, and thus presumably the cosmic rays increasing cloudiness which cools the climate, this would suggest that Svensmark's work would be implying amplification of the role of AGW rather than a diminution which denialists hope for. But such understanding may be a bit too involved for denialists to grasp.

At a glance - Does cold weather disprove global warming?

scaddenp at 11:51 AM on 13 September, 2023

Just to address the point, consider another cold country with frozen seas about it - Sweden. According to this -

"In the 1970s, three quarters of Swedish homes were heated with oil boilers. Today, electric-powered heat pumps have all but replaced oil in single-family homes (most multi-family homes rely on district heating). That has driven greenhouse gas emissions from oil heating of buildings down 95 per cent since 1990, according to the Swedish Energy Agency"

The difference is Sweden's willingness to act. A carbon tax in 1990 and revised building codes certainly helping. The very common district heating schemes also use waste heat and wood waste as well as GSHP.

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

michael sweet at 03:21 AM on 10 September, 2023

The Guardian had an article about Powis et al 2023. This paper shows that heat waves hot enough to kill humans will spread to many locations with 2C of warming. They use a lower wet bulb temperature of 31.5C where previous studies of extreme heat used 35C wet bulb . Recent studies have found the 31.5C wet bulb temperature is fatal without fans or AC.

I have not seen a similar article that discusses when agriculturatal animals like cattle and goats will begin to be killed by heat. Obviously it will be impossible to air condition pastures. If the heat cannot be withstood by animals even occasionally, it will be very difficult to keep animals in those areas. Imagine if they could not raise cattle in Texas for the entire summer!! At 2C warming large areas of the world are too hot for humans (and presumably agricultural animals) (sorry, I could not copy the diagrams showing where the heat would be too hot for humans)

Does anyone have a link for the threat of extreme heat to agricultural animals?

John F. Clauser: the latest climate science-denying physicist

nigelj at 06:10 AM on 9 September, 2023

Eclectic

"In comparison, Simon Michaux [referred to briefly in a different SkS thread, recently] does know what path we should be taking towards a wind-turbine & solar-panel powered economy . . . but says we cannot reach that goal, owing to inevitability of materials supply shortfalls. (We can't get there from here.)"

IMO Michaux is taking a very doomy, pessimistic approach to the materials issue. The crowd who wrote the limits to growth in around the 1970s were the same and proclaimed the world would run out of key metals like lead, zinc etc,etc, by the 1990s and of course that never happened. Lets explore why.

Now firstly obviously materials are a finite resource. Some of the elements are quite rare and so scattered in the crust they cant be extraced economically. Even the concentrated mineral despots of those elements are not common in the earths crust. So we have a problem and are at risk of running out of some things longer term.

But Michaux takes a particularly doomy view of the situation. He looks at known current high grade / medium grade reserves and says red alert we are running out. But he is basing his warnings on known reserves of good grade ore depoits. He makes insufficient allowance for our ingenuity in extracting low grade deposits, making new discoveries, mining the sea bed, extracting minerals from sea water (there are trillions of tons), high levels of recycling. And its highly likely we will get better at doing these things and in energy efficient ways.

Im not talking techno hype where anything is possible and we will conquer all problems. Im just taking the view that its very likely we will find ways of finding more materials.

If we do run into severe shortages of materials we will have to reduce our energy use. Michaux concerns do not seem a good enough reason to give up on renewables completely, and he doesnt provide an alternative if we did do that.

It's cooling

CORK at 04:27 AM on 5 September, 2023

Climate's changed beforeWhat bothers me in the "Escalator" is the time scale. From 1970 to 2022 the temperatures rise, yes.

But this is not incompatible with a cooling at geological time scales. We may be in a rising part of the curve which will go down and over several 1000s of years the average will show a cooling trend.

The scale of time can be used and the curves can defend both arguments. Therefore the "escalator" is of no use.

The only pure fact in all the climate change saga is that humans are producing greenhouse gasses.

From that fact a whole theory of climate has been built. It is very difficult to say things like that without being insulted today.

2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #34

nigelj at 06:59 AM on 28 August, 2023

The retracted study made questionable claims that food production hasn't been affected by climate change. I came across this commentary recently, following a discussion on another website that suggests food production is already being negatively impacted by climate change:

Climate change is affecting crop yields and reducing global food supplies
Published: July 9, 2019 11.22pm NZST

Farmers are used to dealing with weather, but climate change is making it harder by altering temperature and rainfall patterns, as in this year’s unusually cool and wet spring in the central U.S. In a recently published study, I worked with other scientists to see whether climate change was measurably affecting crop productivity and global food security.
To analyze these questions, a team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment spent four years collecting information on crop productivity from around the world. We focused on the top 10 global crops that provide the bulk of consumable food calories: Maize (corn), rice, wheat, soybeans, oil palm, sugarcane, barley, rapeseed (canola), cassava and sorghum. Roughly 83 percent of consumable food calories come from just these 10 sources. Other than cassava and oil palm, all are important U.S. crops.

We found that climate change has affected yields in many places. Not all of the changes are negative: Some crop yields have increased in some locations. Overall, however, climate change is reducing global production of staples such as rice and wheat. And when we translated crop yields into consumable calories – the actual food on people’s plates – we found that climate change is already shrinking food supplies, particularly in food-insecure developing countries.......

theconversation.com/climate-change-is-affecting-crop-yields-and-reducing-global-food-supplies-118897

I wonder if Sky news have published the fact that the paper was retracted?

Ice age predicted in the 70s

Bob Loblaw at 07:17 AM on 19 August, 2023

MA Rodger @ 138:

Yes, this discussion is wandering off the blog post's topic. There is no way to determine Don Williamson's motives unless he explains them, but it appears that he is trying to do two things:

Take Oreskes' paper out of context to make it look like the 1970s "cooling" story was an indicator of a huge shift in climate science [it wasn't] - I presume to discredit climatology as a science [he hasn't].

Bootstrap the idea that "they don't know what they are talking about - they'll just make stuff up" by using the hiatus as an indicator that warming isn't linked to CO2 increases [he's wrong] and we might flip back into decades or centuries of cooling even if we burn every last bit of fossil fuels [we won't].

I have an off-topic challenge to Don that he has not yet responded to (review one example of the many "hiatus" papers he insinuates support him). I need to let him respond, if he is willing or able.

If the off-topic sound bites continue without responding to that challenge, I will probably need to bow out of the conversation and take on a moderator role.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

MA Rodger at 00:33 AM on 19 August, 2023

Don Williamson @133 & others,
Discussion of the early 21st century SAT/SST record is hardily on-topic for this comment thread. The handful of years showing a reduced rate of warming surface tempertures did not lead to a reversal of warming but to an increased rate of warming, so any linkage to 1970's ideas of a coming ice age is entirely absent, despite an attempted linkage @108 up-thread. (And for the record, the take-away from the SciAm article referenced @133 is the ascribed response fro 'researchers' to all the 'hiatus' nonsense:-

"Picking a period of a decade or so where one part of the Earth's climate system fails to warm and using it to discredit all of climate science is a fallacious argument, and one driven by those with an agenda to discredit climate scientists."

Don Williamson, you have up-thread referenced Oreskes in the discussion of the 1970's idea of a coming ice age and insist there is some missing argument that gives continuing credibility to this 1970's idea (which are also ideas of earlier times according to Oreskes. "Throughout most of the history of science, geologists and geophysicists believed that Earth history was characterized by progressive, steady, cooling.") Do note the referenced pre-print conference paper does not constitute proof of a 'missing argument'. And were one sought, perhaps Oreskes (2007) 'The scientific consensus on climate change: How do we know we're not wrong?' can provide it.

Ice age predicted in the 70s

Bob Loblaw at 00:01 AM on 19 August, 2023

As a further part of the challenge to Don:

You have referred to "the hiatus". I will repeat the graphic of the Escalator:

The Escalator

Since the topic of the OP here is "cooling in the 1970s", and The Escalator shows seven periods of "no warming", please be specific as to which of those seven periods represents "the hiatus" you are talking about. Or a different period, if you have found an eighth.

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