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2022 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #39

One Planet Only Forever at 06:59 AM on 2 October, 2022

Re: "How Do We Deal With the Polarization Around Climate Change? by Renee Cho, State of the Planet, Sep 23, 2022.

People like Peter Coleman (I also read his book "The Way Out"), appear to deliberately evade acknowledging the harmful realities of injustice and inequity developed and excused by the American Experiment's selfish competition for perceptions of superiority any way that can be gotten away with. They correctly identify that the GOP, with Gingrich as the poster boy, was the origin of the current political polarization. But then they fail to tag the leadership driving the GOP as the source of the problem. Polarization only requires one side to be denying the ‘evidence-based improving understanding of what is harmful, how to be more helpful and the requirement for significant changes of what has mistakenly become popular and profitable through marketplace failure, including political marketplace failure, to learn about, identify and limit harm done' (Note that Elon Musk claims that the marketplace will determine if Tesla's robot AI developments are ethical - a BBC article "Tesla boss Elon Musk presents humanoid robot Optimus" includes the following "Mr Musk contended that shareholders would determine if the publicly traded company was socially responsible.").

Political promotion of beliefs that are contrary to the best, and constantly improving, understanding based on all of the related evidence can undeniably create very challenging polarization, especially when the learning requires changes of perception regarding what is harmful and, as a result, changes perceptions of who deserves to be considered to be superior.

That evasion of understanding of the harmful selfishness developed in systems like the USA experiment in "the greatness of unfettered freedom" leads researchers to believe things like the following: "Research has found that people usually have one of two basic motives: preventive—those desirous of preventing harm; or promotive—those aimed at fostering tolerance or harmony."

Either of those two attitudes can be claimed to be a person's motivation when 'harmful selfishness and a related resistance to learning to be less harmful and more helpful' is more likely the motivation:

Personal loss of status or loss of opportunity for higher status by externally forced corrections of beliefs and improved understanding and related restrictions on harmful actions can be considered to be "harming people who would lose if they cannot maintain harmfully incorrect beliefs and are less able to benefit from being more harmful". It can be considered to be even more harmful if the people who benefited from past harm done have to lose some status by being required to help those who were harmed.

A person wanting to benefit from being harmful can believe they are right to demand compromises of understanding of what is harmful in order to "foster harmony and tolerance". That is like claiming that all beliefs are equally valid and therefore harmful beliefs have to be excused and accepted to show tolerance for, and have harmony with, people who oppose learning about a diversity of important evidence-based matters (learning to change a developed belief or lack of awareness and make amends for related harmful results on a diversity of evidence-based matters like the compendium of understanding regarding the Sustainable Development Goals.

There is little doubt that unjustified resistance to learning, excused by selfishness, is powerfully motivating the polarization on issues related to Climate Science.

There's no empirical evidence

Tom Dayton at 10:24 AM on 26 January, 2021

gzzm2013, here are explanations of greenhouse effect causality:

Benestad at RealClimate

Augmentation of that by And Then There's Physics...

by Chris Colese

Tamino

Earth versus Mars

Falsifiability

Erskine, Demystifying Global Warming

Closer to level of a six year old

Free online book, downloadable, by Schmittner

There is no consensus

Eclectic at 20:18 PM on 9 October, 2019

CThompson ,

insight is not your strong suit, apparently. Your claim of familiarity with carbon isotopes etcetera, is not congruous with your dismissal of mainstream physics & biology.

Just as (by analogy) someone who claims familiarity with mathematics . . . yet who alleges that 2+2=3 . . . is someone who is a tad less expert than he supposes.

But perhaps, CThompson, you can achieve some credibility by staying on topic. [Short musical interlude here, while orchestra plays Pride of Erin B . . . and readers wait for you to also mention Galileo, as well.] You have been repeatedly asked to say something substantive about the scientific consensus, to back your "beliefs". But you have produced nothing, so far.

A good start would be, if you can name a list of some credible scientists who have produced some evidence that the mainstream science is seriously incorrect. (And you must show what that evidence is ~ not just handwave at something unspecified.) If at all possible, please list a sufficiency of names to demonstrate that these alleged contrarians exist in numbers way beyond 1% of climate scientists. Would 20% "climate-skeptical" genuine climate scientists be achievable for you? Otherwise, surely your consensus claim falls flat on its face.

Hint: don't bother to use the delusional citizen-scientist crackpots, such as Lord Monckton, Dr Tim Ball, or (the late) John Coleman . . . 'cos they ain't no scientists !

And bear in mind, that the evidence is even more important than the exact percentage of contrarians. And that is where the contrarian scientists make a double Fail ~ their numbers are shrinking and their hypotheses [cosmic rays; 100-year oceanic cycles; Lindzen's "Iris" ; etcetera] have failed the reality test.

CThompson, the consensus exists because the evidence is clear.

I can see that you believe what you want to believe ~ and I was never under the illusion that you would be convinced by anything factual.

BTW, CThompson, you can educate me on one point ~ what is the meaning of the word "symmantic" which you use so often e.g. the "symmantic gymnastics" you mention in your last paragraph of #841 . The OED failed to list the word. Is it a new term for the latest display trick by that amazing young gymnast Ms Simone Biles ?

Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated

Philippe Chantreau at 08:17 AM on 30 June, 2019

The "please do tell" condescending tone is quite typical. The selection of research that they think support their position but turns out somewhat different if you actually look into it, even more so. There is a pretty good literature on MIS 11, and the paper I linked below has a great bibiliography with links. It's not nearly as simple as your denier would have you believe.

MIS 11 is interesting for a number of reasons. Astronomical forcings were quite similar to those of the present; however, the interglacial lasted a long time and saw the collapse of the Southern Greenland ice sheet. The regime of galcial/interglacials definitely changed afterward and the cycles that have dominated until our interglacial are different. There is strong support for the trigger/feedback idea put forth by Hansen in the literature on the subject of glacial/interglacial.

Kleinen et al (2014) has produced successful reconstitutions of MIS11 using intermediate complexity and general circulation models. The high sea levels are owed to the loss of the ice sheet, and that is not at all an automatic feature; however, there were some possible large regional variations. They also mention the existence of quite variable climate regimes over short periods of time.

From their discussion section: "numerous colder oscillations (up to 2 °C below the present) appear in the reconstruction, suggesting some climate instability during this long interglacial interval."

Furthermore, some regions experienced only mildly different climate than modern pre-industrial, even though they were located in the Northern hemisphere (where the astronomical forcing was acting). They cite la Cote, in the Western French Alps: "Coleoptera- and pollen-based climate reconstructions suggest conditions similar to present or even slightly warmer during the interglacial optimum, up to 18 °C in July compared to the modern value of 16.4 °C. However, pollen-derived mean January temperatures did not exceed the modern value (−0.7 °C) by more than ca. 1 °C, with the exception of one pollen spectrum (Field et al., 2000)."

This leads to a much more nuanced interpretation. There is evidence that MIS11 is a good fit for modern time comparisons as they pertain to astronomical configuration. However, The fact that temperatures were slowly going down for thousands of years before modern times points to a marked difference between MIS 11 and present.

Kleinen et al:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618213009622

Greenland is gaining ice

MA Rodger at 05:56 AM on 8 March, 2019

The silly fellow Molsen managed not to link to his two DMI said 'thises', so here are the links to the two 'thises' I assume were intended. They are both CarbonBrief posts of the date stated by guest authors Dr Ruth Mottram, Dr Peter Langen and Dr Martin Stendel from DMI.

The first 'this' (16/10/17) actually says of the 2017 melt year "This year, thanks partly to Nicole’s snow and partly to the relatively low amounts of melt in the summer, we estimate the total mass budget to be close to zero and possibly even positive." The "main culprit" was thus named as the snowfall brought to Greenland by Hurricane Nicole in October 2016.

The second 'this' (27/10/18) declines to be drawn on the 2017/18 total mass balance, deferring to GRACE-FO which was expected to be soon up-&-running in Oct 2018 although at time of writing GRACE-FO output data (rather than data collection) is yet to show itself.

So no sign of pronouncements that Greenland ice sheet "likely grew" throughthese years. Then perhaps there are other 16/10/17 & 27/10/18 Greenland news posts that do pronounce on Total Mass Balance, Or is Molsen misinterpreting Surface Mass Balance data?

From the eMail Bag: CO2 in the air and oceans

RedBaron at 17:53 PM on 14 December, 2016

Jeffrey,

Yes decaying organic matter yields CO2 (and/or CH4 in anaerobic conditions). This is well described by the Roth C mathematical model used by most climate scientists. Only a tiny % of that carbon actually gets sequestered long term in the soil. The rest eventually returns to the atmosphere. I want to emphasize that this model is well developed and I have no problem with it at all in describing the fate of carbon that follows this biological pathway.

Where the difference lies is that it does not describe the newly discovered Liquid Carbon biological Pathway at all. This carbon is not easily decayed. Once that carbon reaches the humic polymer stage, it tightly bonds to the soil mineral substrate and becomes an intrinsic part of the soil matrix. But not only that, it actually stabilizes the soil too.

Remember, these two pathways are fundamentally different. Catabolic pathways like described by the Roth C model break down molecules and produce energy. Anabolic pathways like the LCP synthesize molecules and require energy. That's the primary reason for reducing or eliminating herbicides and other biocides. The energy comes from increased photosynthesis and through the LCP (anabolic pathway) stable soil structure is built. Entirely the opposite of the decay of organic material on the surface. Keep in mind, this is so completely the opposite of what was thought prior to the discovery of Glomalin in 1996, that most soil science textbooks still claim that mollic epipedons are primarily formed by decaying dead roots. And they had no explanation at all why this should happen under grasslands rather than forests which contain more biomass. Keep in mind all this is still contentious. Even this paper published as recently as 2011 and stating the current models are flawed, still describes as "unknown" the reason why. I can't stress enough how exciting this new breakthrough is for both agriculture and climate science.

Now you make a good point questioning the time it can remain sequestered. Once those humic polymers tightly bind to the soil forming a mollic epipedon, this will last into geological time frames unless disturbed. However, we certainly know how to release it if needed. ;)

Was Broecker really the first to use the term Global Warming?

Ari Jokimäki at 17:07 PM on 1 October, 2015

That 1890 case sensitive hit is "The Sanitarian" by Agrippa Nelson Bell. It contains the search phrase only once, and it is this:

"Cholera in Persia, 60. Civic Cleanliness, Coleman, 3. Climate, Change of, 356. Clothing in its Relations to Hygiene, Hibberd, 139. Cocaine Poisoning, Ammonia in, 87. Codeine, 380. Coffin Nails, 147. Colds, Acute and How to Treat them, 382."

This is one bad aspect of Google searches, the exact phrase search matches also those phrases that have punctuation marks in them.

2015 SkS Weekly Digest #27

John Hartz at 23:41 PM on 7 July, 2015

Macoles:

You have a point. I will be more judicious when selecting future Toons of the Week.

2015 SkS Weekly Digest #27

John Hartz at 23:35 PM on 7 July, 2015

I accidentally deleted the following comment. My apologies to macoles.

macoles at 14:46 PM on 7 July 2015

Am I the only one here who thinks the toon of the week above is 0% climate science 100% unhelpfully divisive?

Yes conservatives can get some dreadful things through the supreme court (poster of the week above for example), but whether we like it or not getting them on board is a big part of the solution. Gay marriage only just passed 5-4 because one normally conservative judge was able to be convinced.

Lampooning conservative bad liberal good on a respectible site like this only plays into the hands of those who think climate change is some ideological hoax.

Renewables can't provide baseload power

SuperPosition at 11:04 AM on 26 June, 2015

[RH] Can we assume your reference to "denialists" is not in reference to those who deny AGW? Your meaning is not exactly clear in this comment.

I'm sorry Rob I don't know what the current colective noun for AGW deniers is, but yes.

It is a sort of stubborn ignorance and pseudo science where belief and consparacy theories trumps rational thought. Do we only see this in AGW denial? No.

Rob, you and I have discussed this at length and you already know my thoughts on the lobbyists from WWF, GreenPeace, FoE,Sierra Club, green Party (all 70 of them internationally and the 55 Green MEPs in the European parliament being against CCS and/or Nuclear.

If SkS is prepared to fight pseudoscience and misguided belief whenn it affects the future of the planet then how can it not attack the irrationalism and anti-science of the other argument as well?

par exemplar

The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all
George Monbiot::❝ I began to see the extent of the problem after a debate last week with Helen Caldicott. Dr Caldicott is the world's foremost anti-nuclear campaigner. She has received 21 honorary degrees and scores of awards, and was nominated for a Nobel peace prize. Like other greens, I was in awe of her. In the debate she made some striking statements about the dangers of radiation. So I did what anyone faced with questionable scientific claims should do: I asked for the sources. Caldicott's response has profoundly shaken me.... ❞ - read on

New Series: Science Communicators – Why We Love Communicating Science

Dcrickett at 09:07 AM on 4 March, 2015

Jim Hansen… altho he has done a pretty decent job on his own.
Nicole Hernandez Hammer

I wish I could name a few from the conservative side!

Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman prefers conspiracies to climate science

Stranger8170 at 12:25 PM on 6 November, 2014

As a constant Skeptical Science lurker I’ve only made a couple of posts since the inception of this blog. I’ve read a lot on the subject at other venues as well.

Over the years that I’ve been paying attention I’ve come to realize that the science in support of the theory of AGW is being researched by Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Every prestigious scientific society along with every prestigious peer reviewed journal say that man is the main driver of climate change.
From my reading of the issue over the past 15 years or so it seems that those researchers and fake experts who are “skeptical” all seem to have one thing in common. They’re all Republican libertarian types which makes it seem evident that their political ideology rises to a much higher level than the science. Perhaps there is an exception that proves the rule but I’m not aware of it. John Coleman and those in leage with him might contemplate that when you believe the world is all wrong and that your all right that perhaps some interspection should be undertaken.
It’s just a nonscientist’s opinion.

Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman prefers conspiracies to climate science

CBDunkerson at 23:06 PM on 5 November, 2014

nigelj, note that Coleman is a "weather person" only in the sense that he made a career out of reading the weather on radio and then television. Before that he was a radio DJ for a bandstand show. He's a professional communicator / entertainer. He has no background in meteorology or any other science.

Thus, while he may have biases which make him not want to understand the science, it is also possible that he just doesn't have the academic background to "comprehend graphs and trends".

Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman prefers conspiracies to climate science

nigelj at 07:39 AM on 5 November, 2014

The article makes valid points. Of course it is worth noting not all sceptical arguments are poor arguments. However Colemans argument on arctic ice is just plain wrong and is unintelligent. Now he is obviously an intelligent fellow, so why makes such a stupid argument?

Well possibly even though he is intelligent, he literally can’t comprehend graphs and trends. Some people are like this, although you wonder how a weather person could be like this and still function.

Or Coleman hates the climate change consensus, so he is prepared to say outrageous things. I wouldn't know what his hatred is, maybe it is professional jealousy, or he has a libertarian ideology. I must admit I’m mystified by people like Coleman. Maybe someone has an explanation.

Republican politicians aren't climate scientists or responsible leaders

mancan18 at 09:46 AM on 30 October, 2014

I am not sure whether an argument about the semantics of whether CO2 is a pollutant or not actually serves any purpose, and is just more of "the science is not settled", "CO2 is a harmless gas" and "CO2 is fertilizer " type arguments that skeptics are so fond of.

Whether CO2 is a pollutant or not is an argument for lawyers. We know more of it will warm the planet and that it can kill you if there is too much of it. The Lake Nyos disaster in Cameroon in the 1980s certainly shows that CO2 can be deadly, when several thousand people and many cows were killed by the CO2 bubble that was released from the bottom of the lake.

In relation to 19th century visionaries building sewers in our cities, the reduction of the number of people dying from colera would have had a far greater economic impact for the better on our modern industrial society, which far outweighed the cost of building them, than just leaving conditions as they were by not building them. The same is true for alleviating CO2 emissions.

Discussing the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere is a similar to maintaining chlorine levels in a swimming pool. The pump puts it in and it evaporates out. If the pump does not keep up to the evaporation rate then there will be too little chlorine, algae will grow and you can't swim in the pool. If the pump puts in too much then you won't have algae but you still won't be able swim in the pool because you will get burnt and possibly die. The same analogy can be applied to fertilizers and land use. To little, you get weeds, a little more and you get a greater yield, too much and plants die. CO2 in the atmosphere is the same. Too little and we freeze. Too much and we will all be living in the tropics and people in poor countries will die.

What is a safe level? Well the IPCC and climate scientists have already indicated what they think is safe. Pity the skeptics never give a figure that can be put under scientific scrutiny. Arguing about whether CO2 is a pollutant or not is a waste of time and just pandering to another skeptic/denier distraction.

Animals and plants can adapt

jetfuel at 23:49 PM on 23 May, 2014

From clarification in #36, A global warming of 2 deg C is a low range optimistic value and > 4 deg C of global warming by 2100 is a high range estimate. >4 is ~1 deg per 20 years. We are 14 years into the 21st century. What is the global temp increase from 2000 till now?

We are not on track 14 years into the 21st century. I question that the Earth's crust, atmosphere, and oceans as a heat sink could allow that much change in 100 years. I tried to see the annual fluctuation in Lake superior water temps but they only record surface temps, when avg depth is 183.2 meters.

Adapting has so far been to .7F in 60 years from 1942 to 2012. What animal, plant or human can't adapt to: NOAA sea level trends: Naples Fla shows 2.4 mm/yr; Daytona shows 2.32 mm/yr. A house in Jupiter, Fla at 14.5 feet above sea level is also 4419 mm above sea level. The recent trend along Fla coast will bring sea water to the Jupiter Fla house doorstep in 1841 years, assuming no changes in continental plate rise or fall over 1841 years. Sounding so many alarms and raising electric rates 50% in 6 years to fight this seems a bit overdone.

It's cooling

jetfuel at 11:51 AM on 12 May, 2014

TC, in #235, The trendline looks OK. .0447M km2 per year shown as straightline decline of maximums and so an 11.675 M increase in one seasonal swing 2012-13 is 261 times the .0447M/yr decreasing trend. I added in sept 2013 and sept 2014 since they are now on the books and could draw a last 11 year trend line with a positive slope for maximums.

How I get 11.675M for sept 2012 to Mar 2013: Was this ever exceeded before?

Past and Future CO2

Rob Painting at 14:57 PM on 6 May, 2014

Attached is a list of replies to some of the above questions by Dr Foster.

Thanks all for your comments on our contribution. I will try here to answer a few of your questions here.

#2. Stephen Baines – How should I best reference this?

We are writing this up for a publication but as with most academics I have a lot of competition for my time (i.e. teaching vs. research) and this will have to wait till the summer. In the meantime just reference the descent into the icehouse website where this originally appeared (www.descentintotheicehouse.org.uk).

#3. gindupBaker – asked about the resolution of the records. Certainly short intervals could exhibit more variability than is shown in the plots. Mostly though we are reconstructing averages of relatively long periods of time with the techniques used – e.g. thousands of years. The 7 W/m2 you are referring to includes the forcing from changes in albedo related to the waxing and waning of the ice sheets. The CO2 (and solar forcing) we calculate here is entirely consistent with Hansen’s calculations.

#5. Rob Honeycutt – This is a really interesting observation and something I had also thought about. Glenn Tamblyn’s comment #7 I hope answers your question though.

#6. macoles – has anyone got a handle on how long it would take to reach that equilibrium?

The slowest parts of the climate system are the continental ice sheets. These respond very slowly to forcing and will take something like 1000 years to reach equilibrium (though no one can put an exact figure on this), more if we are looking at melting all the continental ice on the planet, but that sort of order. This implies of course that if even if we stop CO2 emissions tomorrow, we are in for a long period of climate change as the Earth system readjusts to the new forcing. There was a Skeptical Science post about some of our other work that relates to this that you may be interested in (https://www.skepticalscience.com/Carbon-Dioxide-the-Dominant-Control-on-Global-Temperature-and-Sea-Level-Over-the-Last-40-Million-Years.html)

#10. Chriskov – your “hump” is portrayed inaccurately on fig.1. if you look at the more detailed Cenozoic reconstruction e.g. here.

Chriskov you have to be careful with what you accept as a reconstruction of CO2 here. What we plotted and compiled are the latest published proxy estimates of CO2 based on several tried and test techniques (albeit each with its own particular group of weaknesses and limitations). What you have plotted is a simple transformation of the benthic foraminiferal oxygen isotope compilation of Jim Zachos (performed by Jim Hansen). Benthic foram d18O is a proxy of deep water temperature AND ice volume but NOT CO2. It is therefore very dangerous to use this to calculate CO2 as you are directly linking cause (CO2 change) with effect (ice volume and deep sea temperature change). Furthermore, the relationship between global temperature and deep sea temperature is not straightforward, nor is the way in which you deconvolve d18O into a temperature and ice volume record. For instance, to make the plot you show one has to firstly remove the ice component of the d18O (which is difficult without a 65 million year record of sea-level), then assume a constant relationship between deep sea temperature and global temperature, and then assume a climate sensitivity to radiative forcing (and assume it’s only CO2 change that is doing the forcing). This approach has its uses but our research is focused on using the geological past to try to independently estimate parameters like climate sensitivity from the geological record (e.g. see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7426/full/nature11574.html). For this you obviously need independent estimates of CO2 and climate change.

The record aside, the reason for elevated CO2 in the Early Cenozoic (which is evident in our record but maybe obscured partially by the log-scale) is, as Chriskoz notes, most likely due to enhanced outgassing as the Tethys ocean was subducted below the Asian continent (that culminated with the Indian-Asian continent collision).

#12. Glenn Tamblyn – That CO2 weathering thermostat surely is a really useful thing to have around…

We couldn’t agree more. Though of course, as with all things in science, it’s not necessarily a done deal that silicate weathering is responsible. Lots more work to be done!

97% consensus on human-caused global warming has been disproven

John Hartz at 07:54 AM on 25 March, 2014

Phronesis:

To guide the What We Know initiative, AAAS convened a group of prominent experts in climate science.

Mario Molina (Chair), U of California, San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography

James McCarthy (Co-chair), Harvard University

Diana Wall (Co-chair), Colorado State University

Richard Alley, Pennsylvania State University

Kim Cobb, Georgia Institute of Technology

Julia Cole, University of Arizona

Sarah Das, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Noah Diffenbaugh, Stanford University

Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Howard Frumkin, University of Washington

Katharine Hayhoe, Texas Tech University

Camille Parmesan, U of Texas, Austin and University of Plymouth, UK

Marshall Shepherd, U of Georgia

New Study Suggests Future Global Warming at the Higher End of Estimates: 4°C Possible by 2100

Bob Lacatena at 14:55 PM on 11 January, 2014

Macoles, 24,

Your understanding is incorrect. The "natural carbon cycle" is just that, a cycle, not a reservoir. About half of human emissions go into the ocean, causing acidification which may turn out to be as or more dangerous than climate change. A big chunk goes into the atmosphere. Most of the rest goes into expanded vegetation.

It can't and doesn't just disappear. It took nature hundreds of millions of years to bury it in the ground. That won't happen easily, or quickly. There are some mechanisms by which carbon will be deposited in the deep oceans, but that will happen very slowly.

worse yet, we can't even count on it continuing to go into either the ocean or vegetation. As the ocean warms, it's capacity to absorb CO2 is reduced. Eventually, if it warms enough, it may release some of that absorbed CO2 -- a positive feedback. The same goes for vegetation. While for a while, it may show more growth due to mildly warmer temperatures, increased precipitation, and higher CO2 levels, that's hardly a permanent trajectory. Eventually, expansion of the deserts and droughts, especially if it happens too quickly, will reverse some or much of that growth (worst case would be, for example, the transition of major parts of the Amazon to savanna). The subsequent release of carbon is yet another positive feedback.

If we reduce emissions, there is no reason to think one particular sink (atmosphere, ocean, vegetation) to absorb more than another, and as the planet will continue to warm until it reaches a new equilibrium temperature, any of those positive feedbacks listed above could still come into play.

Interestingly, even if we found a magical, technological way to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, the ocean would still replace some of it, and those positive feedbacks might still kick in. It's a very dangerous game that we're playing... Carbon Roulette.

New Study Suggests Future Global Warming at the Higher End of Estimates: 4°C Possible by 2100

Tom Dayton at 10:58 AM on 11 January, 2014

macoles, there is one estimate of consequences of cutting back CO2 emissions summarized on RealClimate.

Secretary of State Kerry and Senator Boxer Remark on the IPCC Report

william5331 at 05:28 AM on 30 September, 2013

And yet, with a stroke of the pen, the politicians could have a profound effect on the problem. Simply put in Hansen's Tax and Dividend. The economics will take care of the rest. What is so hard for them to understand here. Wasn't Kerry a member of the GOP before Obama hired him. Perhaps he should go and talk with his former colegues.

Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication

Steve Bloom at 08:21 AM on 6 September, 2013

I see that the Editor-in-Chief (Nicole Molders) is a colleague of Akasofu's at UAF and given the timing of her arrival there I suspect may have been hired by him. She has co-authored a number of papers with Kramm (possibly also hired by Akasofu?), who himself has a bit of a reputation.

It's not bad

John Hartz at 07:55 AM on 4 August, 2013

@Ray Coleman #352

You blithely assert,

Intermittent Heatwave 'costs' in terms of mortality are insignificant compared to the 'benefit' of a warmer continental US.

Please provide documentation to support your statement.

Update on BC’s Effective and Popular Carbon Tax

John Hartz at 00:47 AM on 1 August, 2013

Another article about the new study cited in the OP :

'Sky didn't fall' after British Columbia lowered income tax, dropped fuel use with carbon tax by Coleen Jose, ClimateWire, E&E Publishing, July 30, 2013

Nils-Axel Mörner is Wrong About Sea Level Rise

Klaus Flemløse at 22:51 PM on 30 June, 2013

Here is the latest sea level from the area around Maldives according to Colerado University. The sea level rise is around 3 mm pr.year using a simpel linear regression.

The anthropogenic global warming rate: Is it steady for the last 100 years? Part 2.

K.a.r.S.t.e.N at 00:04 AM on 18 May, 2013

KK Tung @10:

I am referring to forcing from tropospheric (anthropogenic) and stratospheric (volcanic) aerosols likewise. They have an impact on both, the AMOC and the AMO. Sure, the response of the AMOC to external forcing is slower and hence harder to identify, but neither AMOC nor AMO are independent of it. I agree that the AMO is influenced by the AMOC (how can it not). The exact linkage is still under debate. However, I strongly disagree with your reply to Kevin C in post 8 and your notion that a volcanic impact on the AMO is unlikely. Let me try to convince you.

In your paper, you wrote: “The 20-y small dip in temperature near 1810 coincides with the solar Dalton Minimum, but is probably caused by a negative excursion of the AMO. The rising AMO cycle in the first half of the 19th century produced a warming, despite the eruption of Tambora (1815), the largest in the past four centuries.”

The problem is that we have a strong volcanic eruption in 1809 (unknown tropical eruption; see Cole-Dai et al. 2009 or Arfeuille et al. 2013), followed by the 1815 Tambora eruption (strongest eruption in the last centuries). Hence I have no doubt whatsoever as to what the reason of the negative AMO excursion is. It’s entirely attributable to these two strong eruptions. The surface air temperature over the Atlantic-Arctic boundary in your Fig.3C perfectly matches the timing of these eruptions. If we go on to the 1830s, we see the next dip which perfectly matches with the Babuyan Claro eruption (1831) and the next very strong eruption at Cosiguina in 1835. The dip around 1860 is stronger than one would expect from the amplitude of the corresponding eruption recorded in 1861, only to have a clear signal for the Krakatau eruption in 1883 again. Note that the exact magnitude of the volcanic forcing differs between different estimates. I plotted the older dust veil index (DVI) and the newer ice core index (ICI) from Crowley and Unterman 2012 for the time period 1750-2000 in order to illustrate my point.

Moreover, I consider it very likely that volcanic eruptions do have a measurable effect also on the AMOC. Gleckler et al. 2006 and Stenchikov et al. 2009 demonstrate that a persistent deep ocean signal emerges after strong volcanic eruptions. Therefore, most of the time the climate system is not in an equilibrium state as it takes several centuries to get rid of any remaining signal from volcanic eruptions. As soon as there is a lull in volcanic activity, the climate system warms in order to restore equilibrium. I don’t know how strong this warming signal is, but it definitely plays a role in post-volcanic periods such as that between 1910-1940. I agree with Tom Curtis (post 40), that this period saw some additional warming in the North Atlantic region due to increasing black carbon forcing (while anthropogenic sulfate forcing was barely rising during that very time). The external forcing impact on the AMOC is also widely discussed in the literature, with numerous suggestions as to what mechanisms could be at play. I would like to point at a very recent paper by Menary et al. 2013 or another one by Iwi et al. 2012. It goes without saying that undoubtedly internal AMOC variability exists undoubtedly. The review paper by Kuhlbrodt et al. 2007 gave a good overview.

Similar to what Kevin C did (see post 21), I recently developed my own two-box EBM model which accounts for volcanic eruptions at two time-scales: A fast surface temperature response which more or less coincides with the stratospheric AOD evolution, and a slow response which accounts for the deep-ocean signal as shown for the Tambora and the Pinatubo eruptions in Stenchikov et al. 2009. In addition, instead of using the GISS forcing (which I personally consider not very accurate regarding the tropospheric aerosol forcing) I used the forcing time series for sulfate and black carbon aerosols presented in Skeie et al. 2011. The resulting forcing function (nudged towards NH conditions) for the 1750-2010 period looks like this (I can provide more details upon request):

Not only are the volcanic spikes easy to identify, but also becomes their long-term effect noticeable. I am not claiming that this is the real volcanic fingerprint which we find in the observations, but it indicates where we might have to look for a forced disturbance in the thermohaline circulation, may it be the AMOC or ENSO/PDO. Let’s compare the forcing function with the NH instrumental observations and reconstructions:

Note that the temperature response in Europe as represented by the Berkeley Best data and Baur temperature series (both are comparable with the AMO temperature trends) is not always in phase with the rest of the NH. In fact, there is reason to think that the NAO response to volcanic eruptions is preferably positive. Fischer et al. 2007 have a good discussion on that. Assuming that the NAO and the AMO mutually influence each other, stochastic multi-annual or decadal variations as a result are all but surprising. Even in the absence of NAO-like atmospheric variability, Deser et al. 2010 brilliantly illustrate how white noise from pure random atmospheric heat flux variations turns into (oceanic) red noise. The time scale of the resulting SST fluctuations depends on the ocean mixed-layer height. It is interesting to note that the mixed-layer depth of the North Atlantic is comparably high, particularly in winter, which can easily explain the high standard deviation of its SSTs. The same is true for large portions of the North Pacific.

This brings me to DelSole et al. 2011, which you cited in your response. Likewise, they identified these very regions as most variable. However, I can’t see how the “projection” of the observed temperatures onto this pattern removes the problem of unreliable model forcing. As can be seen from my best-guess forcing assumption for the NH (which includes aerosol indirect effects, which most models omit altogether), the real forcing has likely been considerably more variable than assumed in your analysis as well as in their analysis (which is based in the forcings of the models used). This can also be illustrated by looking at the NH/SH inter-hemispheric temperature trend. Not only does it differ considerably, but also is the NH instrumental record strongly correlated with the anthropogenic sulfur emissions, which is almost certainly not a mystic coincidence.

Many other issues regarding the robustness of your results have been raised in the discussion already. I agree with Tom Curtis (post 11/15) on the magnitude of the AMO signal in the NH temperature variance, which I believe your method terribly deflates, as well as on the consistency and significance of the oscillation in the data (post 15/20), which I believe you have not demonstrated. Conservation of energy is another is another big problem (see e.g. KR in post 14) which you have so far failed to address properly.

Finally, let me show you what happens if we extend the forcing time series back in time and keep comparing it with paleo-reconstructions. With a low-pass filter it looks like this:

From a NH point of view, the AMO plays a minor role as far as the temperature evolution is concerned. Not to mention global temperatures. The AMOC is important on longer time scales, typically in response to slow changes in external forcing. On shorter time-scales, AMOC changes can have strong regional impacts. The AMOC shutdown in the context of the 8.2ka event as the prime example for its response to strong fresh water pulses.

WMO Annual Climate Statement Confirms 2012 as Among Top Ten Warmest Years

LarryM at 00:48 AM on 6 May, 2013

macoles - There are several ways to define El Nino/La Nina/Neutral, so no exact definition. The WMO press release didn't specify their definition, but for the above animated graph see the associated caption and links by clicking on it, or go directly to the explanation in this article. In summary, the average of 3 common ENSO indices was calculated for each year, and the bottom, middle, and top one-thirds were used as the 3 categories.

Why SkS withdrew from the Bloggies

Tom Curtis at 11:09 AM on 6 March, 2013

1) Eclectikus makes a variety of claims about Richard Feynman's views on pseudo-science, but does not quote a source for those claims. Google searching, I have found two discussions of pseudoscience by Feynman available on the net. The first, and more substantive, only refers to pseudoscience in the introductory comment which was not part of the actual lecture. In the lecture itself, he only refers to "cargo cult science", a term which is definitely pejorative. Clearly Feynman considers "cargo cult science" and "pseudoscience" to be the same thing.

The distinction between cargo cult science and real science turns out to be a kind of scientific integrity. Feynman describes it as follows:

"... It is interesting, therefore, to bring [the distinction between cargo cult science and real science] out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another."
(Quoted from here.)

Let's be very direct about this. A cherry picker does not "... give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution". Somebody who does not calculate the predictions of their theory does not "... give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution". Somebody whose account of the science contradicts itself does not "... give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution".

Therefore, by Feynman's definition there is no doubt that the Coleman article is "cargo cult science", ie, pseudoscience.

Eclecticus can disagree with that assessment if he likes, but he cannot honestly do so while quoting Feynman as his authority. If he disagrees, he owes us his own definition of "pseudoscience", and he needs to justify it with rational argument - something he appears unprepared to do.

It should be noted that one person falling below this ideal does not make a discipline pseudoscience. Science is a self correcting communal activity. Individual scientists are human, and like most humans tend to protect favoured theories from criticism to some extent. But the scientific community as a whole, particularly the scientist's peers in the discipline will not be so slack. In this respect, climate science is clearly scientific; whereas the AGW "skeptical" movement is astonishingly reticent in criticizing even the most absurd ideas, provided they would make taking action against global warming, if true. The political effect of those theories clearly outways, in their minds, any commitment to scientific integrity. That, and perhaps, a fear that if they are too open in exposing the fallacies of their fellow travellors, their fellow travellors might return the favour.

2) It was well said by some ancient sage, and recorded in the Tanakh that,

"Of making many books there is no end".

That was said while books where still written by hand on parchment. You can imagine that sage's distress if confronted with the internet.

The point is that, even if we confine ourselves to scientific papers (for example), there is far more material produced than any one person could hope to read, let alone analyse and understand. To cope with modern flood of information, we need spam filters.

As noted, this applies even in science. That is the purpose of peer review, which is supposed to weed out papers that are obviously poorly supported or simply wrong. Peer review does not pretend, and cannot hope, to eliminate all errors from scientific papers. But it does aim to ensure that any errors that make it through to publication are either subtle, ie, not easy to find, or interesting, ie, to show that they are errors you need to learn something new.

A good science blog should also be a spam filter. It should weed out the pseudoscience, and the misleadingly presented. It should present only posts which are reasonable summaries of the science, which are interesting, and encourage people to learn critical thinking rather than gullibility.

By this standard Skeptical Science is a good science blog.

By this standard, WUWT is the antithesis of a good science blog. It does not weed out the bad articles, such as that by Coleman. It certainly does not encourage critical thinking, but instead teaches gullibility. The same can be said of all four remaining short listed nominees for the best science award at the blogees.

Regardless of what definition Eclectikus contrives to maintain his belief that WUWT is a good science blog, the fact remains that as a spam filter to filter out bad science and bad reasoning, WUWT fails abysmally. Indeed, it works more to filter out good science and good reasoning rather than the reverse.

Why SkS withdrew from the Bloggies

Bob Lacatena at 01:43 AM on 6 March, 2013

Eclectikus,

...to tag WUWT as psudoscience for a single article seems at least inflated

Tom explicitly said (emphasis mine):

Clearly then, by any reasonable measure, Coleman's article is pseudo-science. As it is not unusually bad for the diet served up at WUWT, it is reasonable to classify WUWT as a pseudo-science site.

Why SkS withdrew from the Bloggies

Eclectikus at 01:31 AM on 6 March, 2013

After reading the Popper's criticism by Martin Gardner, a very good reading by the way, I was thinking that one thinker is so great as great are their critics. Internet let us to find out many thoughtful criticisms of each and every one philosopher across the history. Again, is this bad? Quite the contrary, it is the essence of knowledge, and I don't see that you may convince me otherwise in something as clearly self-evident.

Tom Curtis #77. I can´t say that Coleman's article is pseudoscience, I might say it is biased, absolutely wrong, even that is more an opinion article. But to tag WUWT as psudoscience for a single article seems at least inflated. In Feynman's sense, theories that are unable to explain empirical values, and in this sense (and only in this sense) Climatology could be tagged as pseudoscientific. Coleman's article is nothing, not even pseudoscience, is just a critics to a particular data interpretation.

I'm aware of many achievements of Climatology lately, but that does not stop me from seeing their weaknesses and the long way still remaining to talk face to face to other areas as meteorology, geophysics, astrophysics. In the mean time, in all honesty I think all contributions by outlandish they may seem, should be welcomed: Science itself (the scientific method) be responsible for filtering waste. Always has been so.

I have a great respect for Curry. Doing what she does is not easy, it would have been really easy for her consorting with the IPCC while keeping the criticism in silence. I think that you'll have to recognize, that the easy posture, which has support (and therefore money) is that oscillating in phase with the IPCC, not in the absolutely opposite phase.

Needless to say that I also respect John Cook and his work, and am a regular reader of SkS, The Science of Doom... Am I schizophrenic? I don't think so, just I like comparison the one vision with others, to access all views and the underlying sources. I would think that my position is not uncommon and that many people do the same.

Why SkS withdrew from the Bloggies

DSL at 01:07 AM on 6 March, 2013

To further what Leto said, which I completely agree with, it should also be recognized that many of the people who lurk at WUWT and its analogues do not have the training to tell the difference between results that have been produced with shoddy (Eschenbach, Watts) or fraudulent (Coleman) methodology and those that have been produced by rigorous scientific method (inc. peer review). There are undoubtedly a handful who have, through constant contact, learned enough to sort of tell the difference, but they're now so invested in Tony's message that it's all but impossible to use reason and evidence to pry open the door to the mind.

And Eclectikus, you may call my earlier chain of reasoning ridiculous, but I didn't post it with the expectation that you would accept the responsibility. I posted it because I wanted to see the basis of your doubt. My hypothesis is that your doubt is politically motivated and has nothing to do with the science. Nothing you've said to this point has falsified that hypothesis. Your 17 years as a "geophysicist" (a rather broad category) is apparently not relevant.

Why SkS withdrew from the Bloggies

Leto at 23:00 PM on 5 March, 2013

Eclectikus@43 wrote: "To say that blogs as WUWT, and many other in the same wave are pseudoscience crap, says nothing about these blogs and a lot about the people claiming that."

With this thread in mind, I had a quick look at WUWT, and immediately met the article Tom Curtis address @77. Thanks Tom pointing out some of the many errors in Coleman's article. I know you were spoiled for choice. It was a shoddy article from start to finish.

Eclectikus, may I suggest you have it backwards. To not notice that WUWT is full of pseudoscience crap takes a particular cognitive bias, or a surprising amount of scientific illiteracy, such that if someone told me they were impressed with WUWT it would immediately tell me a lot about that person - and nothing much about WUWT.

For scientists like Curry to allow themselves to be associated with WUWT, or to speak favourably of WUWT - to not run a mile from WUWT - tells me they are possibly more interested in propaganda than science, or perhaps more interested in the fame that comes from being a dissenter.

In these discussions, I often see traces of the romantic idea that the scientific consensus is wrong and a few brave voices resist the peer pressure... The history of science is full of examples of the consensus being wrong, and a genius bringing in the new paradigm, so it is a tempting notion. Especially because denialism is a soothing idea, telling us all is well, allowing us not to make any sacrifices. Unfortunately, a quick read of the WUWT site punctures the romantic idea of brave dissent immediately. The Coleman article is inconsistent, illogical, filled with half-truths, straw men and cherry picking. Worse, those faults are so obvious that the WUWT editors must know they are publishing rubbish. Note that WUWT is not wrong because it is a dissenting voice; it is wrong because it is transparently riddled with errors.

To award WUWT a science blog award when it promotes the antithesis of scientific thinking is farcical.

Why SkS withdrew from the Bloggies

Tom Curtis at 13:10 PM on 5 March, 2013

Eclectikus, I draw your attention to the recent post of an article by John Coleman on WUWT. It begins by calling the attention drawn to the fact that July 2012, and the twelve months ending in July 2012 were the hottest ever. To rebut that, he draws attention to "skeptical" studies purportedly showing a recent cooling trend in US temperatures. The problem is, in order to show the cooling trend, Coleman has to cherry pick the start year, and exclude 2012 from the analysis. If you include 2012, the trend is 0.824 C per century, ie, greater than the trend from the start of the data (0.713 C per century) which even Coleman acknowledges as showing warming.

Now, even by Feynman's inadequate definition, if you want to practise science rather than pseudo-science, you have to keep proper score of the successes and failures of your theory. Cherry picking data to avoid unpleasant consequences is not keeping proper score. Ergo, Coleman's article is an example fo pseudo-science.

My chief concern with Coleman's article if found later, where he says:

"I don’t doubt that there has been a general slow increase in atmosphere temperatures. You must understand this is a natural warming trend, a natural result of the continuing interglacial period that began with the melting of the great ice sheets 12,000 years ago. This warming trend has nothing to do with mankind’s use of fossil fuels."

and again:

"For now, however, forty years is too short-term to be hugely significant. What is does show, for now, the satellite data shows a rather steady, gradual increase in global temperatures in line with the long-term increase over the last 12,000 years. It does not support the dramatic increases predicted by the global warming advocates models."

Prior to this, he had spent some time ridiculing our knowledge of the temperature record (based on false claims), so you have to wonder how he knows what "... the long-term increase over the last 12,000 years" is. Leave that aside, however.

The key point is that the centenial trend in CONtiguous United States (CONUS) temperatures was 0.713 C per century; or 85.56 C per 12 thousand years. If that is "in line with the long-term increase over the last 12,000 years", then the means surface temperature of the CONUS 12 thousand years ago was around -74 C.

The trend from UAH over the lifetime of the satellite record is 1.39 +/- 0.73 C per century, or 166.8 +/- 87.6 C per 12 thousand years. So, if that trend is in line with the warming over the last 12,000 years, then 12,000 years ago the GMST was somewhere between -64 and -239 C.

Clearly claims that these trends are "inline" with the warming over the last 12,000 years are absurdly false. Most importantly, however, to make them (and to publish them) Coleman (Watts) must not even have bothered checking. It is crucial to science and neglected by pseudoscience, that you draw out the empirical consequences of your theories. Doing so is the sin qua non of science.

Clearly then, by any reasonable measure, Coleman's article is pseudo-science. As it is not unusually bad for the diet served up at WUWT, it is reasonable to classify WUWT as a pseudo-science site.

Given the OP, so much is on topic, but you wish to switch the discussion to Pielke Snr, Judith Curry and Roy Spencer. The problem is that all three have endorsed Watts 's site in various ways. If they are endorsing pseudo-science, what they are doing in their blogs in not science. Indeed, Judith Curry as explicitly argued in favour of cherry picking, and all three have cherry picked in the past.

Curry, in particular, has been so divorced from science as to argue:

"Is the first decade+ of the 21st century the warmest in the past 100 years (as per Peter Gleick’s argument)? Yes, but the very small positive trend is not consistent with the expectation of 0.2C/decade provided by the IPCC AR4. In terms of anticipating temperature change in the coming decades, the AGW dominated prediction of 0.2C/decade does not seem like a good bet, particularly with the prospect of reduced solar radiation."
(My emphasis)

Of course, the small twenty first century trend of 0.69 +/- 0.171 C/decade (Gistemp, from Jan 2000) is precisely consistent with a trend of 0.2 C/decade because it is included in the error bars. Even if the expected trend was outside the error bars, the data would be consistent with the trend provided only that it was outside the error bars no more than 1 in 20 years on average. That is the meaning of statistical significance.

Curry has joined a long line of falsely self named "skeptics" who argue that:

1) The temperature trend is statistically indistinguishable from zero {if you cherry pick a short enough time period}

2) {The temperature trend is statistically indistinguishable from the IPCC prediction}; Therefore

3) The temperature trend falsifies (or is inconsistent with) the IPCC prediction.

Of course, the truths in curly brackets are passed over without mention when the argument is made.

Being polite, this is not keeping track of successes and failures of their theories. That brings us back to Feynman's comments again, and it follows that from Feynman's definition, Curry and Pielke Snr, and often Roy Spencer do not practise science on their blogs, but pseudo-science.

Climate of Doubt Strategy #1: Deny the Consensus

vrooomie at 23:13 PM on 30 October, 2012

danielbacon@13, Anthony watts has kindly compiled a list, which should go a ways towards adressing your requests.

Andrew Montford (Author of The Hockey Stick Illusion)
Richard Lindzen (Alfred P. Sloan professor of Meteorology, MIT)
Marc Morano (Climate Depot)
John Coleman (Founder of the Weather Channel, now at KUSI-TV)
Chris Horner (Senior Fellow, Center for Energy and Environment, CEI)
Steve McIntyre (editor of ClimateAudit.org)
Dr. Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph)
John Christy (Alabama State climatologist, co author of UAH dataset)
Joe D’Aleo (WeatherBell)
Joe Bastardi (Weatherbell)
Senator Jim Inhofe
Bob Tisdale (author of Who Turned on The Heat?)
Dr. Ryan Maue (Weatherbell)
Dr. Sebastian Lüning (co-author of Die Kalt Sonne)
Harold Ambler (Author of Don’t Sell Your Coat)
Donna LaFramboise (Author of The Delinquent Teenager)
Pat Michaels (former State climatologist of Virgina, fellow of the Cato institute)
Pete Garcia (Producer of the movie The Boy Who Cried Warming)
Christopher Monckton (SPPI)

*All* have been debunked/addressed here on SkS in the helpful links on the home page.

Record Arctic Sea Ice Melt to Levels Unseen in Millennia

GillianB at 12:00 PM on 5 September, 2012

Sorry... links fixed here, please feel free to delete the first one.

Alert to false balance, I was pleasantly surprised by a Sydney Morning Herald article by journalist Nicole Hashem. She found a way to avoid false balance while still providing an alternative view in this article about Tim Flannery and a Climate Commission public forum. You'll need to read the article to see who she used for balance, I won't spoil the moment.

Sydney Morning Herald

I liked it so much, I blogged it here.

Global Warming - A Health Warning

EliRabett at 22:18 PM on 24 August, 2012

Try B. P. E. Clapeyron, “Mémoire sur la puissance motrice de la chaleur,” in Journal de l’École polytechnique, 14 (1834), 153–190.

If you have an open container of VOCs they evaporate exponentially faster when it is warmer. The original reference Eli gave IS refereed BTW and has many citations about the role VOCs play in forming ozone near the surface.

Enjoy your reading assignment.

Mann Fights Back Against Denialist Abuse

JohnMashey at 15:48 PM on 27 July, 2012

And do not forget Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars (NAS. He jumped on this one as well, with Culture of evasion. Then, a week later, it was reposted at NAS.

Last year Wood tried false association against {climate science, Mann} last year, with a reply by me and Rob Coleman.

'How does CHE support open discussion and still maintain civility? Is the blog section an open free-for-all where people may write anything at all, or should it be moderated?

People should be free to express their opinions, but not all opinions are equal, especially about science. Is it acceptable in CHE to state as fact that cigarettes cause no disease? ...
Is there a dividing line between legitimate academic controversy and libel? If so, where is that line and who draws it? Academic controversy is not characterized by use of Nazi labels or exhortations that scientists be physically harmed. It is not characterized by baseless, wacky conspiracy theories about worldwide plots by mainstream science. Academic discussions involve data, facts, and justifiable, soundly crafted theories.'

Hence, issues were raised with CHE, but they didn't get the message or this message.

By the way Richard Mellon Scaife is one of the main funders of:

CEI
GMI (George Marshall Institute)
NAS
CFACT (often involving Viscount Monckton)
Commonwealth Foundation (Pennsylvania) - which among other things ran attack ads against Mann in Penn State student newspaper

See CCC, pp.93-94: ExxonMobil, Scaife, L&H Bradley ... EM F has since dropped out.
I didn't know about NAS then, but Scaife & Bradley have been the prime funders for years.

CEI and GMI were the 2 main thinktanks in recruiting McIntyre and McKitrick and managing the attack on the hockey stick, and setting up the Wegman Report.
See

Ian Plimer Pens Aussie Geologist Gish Gallop #2 of the Week

dissembly at 13:08 PM on 3 July, 2012

@dana1981

I take exception to this: "the Australian government (primarily their Labor Party) passed Clean Energy Bill 2011, which implemented a national carbon pricing system (starting as a tax, then becoming an emissions trading system). This was a major achievement for Australia, but one which political conservatives tended to oppose".

In fact, opposition to the carbon pricing scheme is not limited to political conservatives, and, according to surveys, includes the majority of people in Australia.

Polls I have seen have shown that up to 80% of Australians believe that AGW is a real issue, yet as many as 75% are opposed to the carbon tax. (And despite rumours to the contrary, Australians are not necessarily politically conservative when it gets down to the polling details: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2012/06/11/what-australians-believe/ ).

So I think it is factually incorrect to present opposition to the carbon tax as something associated with political conservatism (or AGW denial) - that is certainly not the case in Australia. The Liberal Party's position on the carbon tax is seen as a populist move, even though most people polled disagree with their AGW-denialist stance.

I also disagree with the description of the carbon tax as "a major achievement for Australia", and I say this as someone who fully agrees with the science on global warming, and sits far to the left on the political spectrum.

This is actually a point of contention among the environmentalist movement in Australia. In my own experience, the carbon tax has made the Greens (and environmental issues) quite unpopular, where previously they were seen as having a moral high ground. It has alienated people who agreed with us on AGW, because it is seen as a measure in which average people will be made to pay for a problem created by big business. A conservative government in the next election is a near-certainty at this stage, and the carbon tax is one of the policy decisions that has contributed to this near-certainty.

macoles wrote: "The only plausible criticism of the CEF package is that low incomes earners will be overcompensated via the "Household assistance measures", and that could be seen as vote buying.""

In fact, there are more people in tricky economic circumstances in Australia than is commonly reported, as cost of living increases have been eating away at us for some time. There's a lot of doubt that the carbon tax's compensation packages will actually compensate for all the increases, much of which will be difficult to track (as businesses fold their cost increases into the prices that they pass on to consumers).

Perhaps more importantly, Treasury figures have shown that the carbon tax and cap & trade program is only expected to reduce emissions by something like 2% by 2050 - the reason that higher figures are often quoted is that they include "reductions" from the purchasing of carbon offsets from overseas. This is an especially fraught issue; in some cases businesses will be "purchasing" things such as 'a promise not to log an area of forest that (supposedly) otherwise would have been logged'. One could write essays on the problems with cap & trade (and many already have, so I'll stop myself there).

Another consideration is the role of economic recession - already in full swing overseas, and definitely en route to Australia (via recent drops in Chinese manufacturing/infrastructure, which partly relies on Australian mining exports; and via the high Australian dollar that has already caused substantial job losses in manufacturing, retail and tourism; a lot of people are already 'underemployed', if not unemployed). Carbon pricing is an incentive scheme to reduce unnecessary production, but recession already raises the price of production and pares things down to a bare minimum (even below the bare minimum, as unemployment & poverty rise). The 1990s economic crash in Eastern Europe did more for carbon emissions than any carbon price has.

The alternatives I would propose involve nationalisation of energy production & active development of alternatives (rather than using a market incentive system), which I'm sure I don't need to go into (and it'd take me OT anyway).

So I question the characterisation of opposition to carbon pricing as a hallmark of political conservatism, and the description of it as a step forward for those of us who know that AGW is a problem and want to do something about it. Both implications are factually incorrect.

Nil Illegitimi Carborundum

macoles at 00:23 AM on 1 July, 2012

I applaud your evidence based conviction Dr Jones. May it shield you from the fear and ignorance of those who seek to dissuade you.

Mark Coles, Western Australia

Modelling the Apocalypse

ranyl at 10:17 AM on 6 June, 2012

Please excuse my rushed post Tom, and I did not ascert that loss of the Arctic sea ice would entirely mimic the Laurentide Ice sheet loss in anyway, just pointing out it is a large area of sea that is changing colour in the summer when it does get a reasonable amount of insolation on average in the present day of ~180w/m2/pa compared to ~300w/m2/pa for the Laurentide Ice sheet and Laurentide Ice sheet was larger than the summer average summer extent of the sea ice at ~12million km2 compared to 7million km2 (before 2000), therefore clearly less than ice sheet. However the ice sheet would have taken eons to melt whereas the arctic sea ice seems to be melting very quickly especially in the important summer months and in the summer months the insolation in the arctic latitudes is higher than the lower latitudes of the Laurentide ice sheet, at ~500 w/m2/pmonth, compared to 480w/m2/pmonth...http://aom.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/srmonlat.cgi, therefore my pint was not that the alebdo effect was the same as the Laurentide ice sheet more that it is quick and I suspect it is significant due to its size.

In the Lowe paper the headline detail was that the rate of fall of PCO2 was 0.2ppm per yer, so a whole magnitude less than your ascertation of 2ppm, and this was mainly due to carbon modelling they used including a climate-CO2 positive feedback factor. The majority of this feedback is derived from tropical feedbacks as demonstrated by Roeckner et al(1), and is due to temperature change and water stresses in tropics, however these are very mild for low emissions scenarios and represent a fall in the size of the annual sink not a trnasformation of the sink to a source as has occured in the tropics already. These models by Roeckner also shows however that boreal continue to an ever increasing sink yet it is already been shown the Canadian boreal forest is source, due to forest fires and infestations both factors which are not included in these carbon models and not in Archers paper either. And neither models included permafrost release of CO2 as this has only occurred realistically since 2010. Also Note Lowe didn't include any other GHG for the graph above and they started the simulation from temperature and GHG records in 2000, and thus no heat stored in the ocean for the 2012 no emissions scenario yet both the 2050(so 50years of additional heating) and the 2100 run do and both scenarios continue to warm after the emissions stop.

Now is it me or is the heating in the pipeline due to lagged the expression of the eenrgy imbalance to surface temeprature expression a myth, as far as I have read the earth is meant to warm to about 1.4C above pre-industrial according Hansen etc whatever we do, due the warming in the system yet these models are showing no additional heating at all.

(1)Historical and future anthropogenic emission pathways
derived from coupled climate–carbon cycle simulations
Erich Roeckner · M. A. Giorgetta · T. Crueger ·
M. Esch · Julia Pongratz, Climatic Change (2011) 105:91–108
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q50mp5004654654k/

I would also suggest you reas the European Nitrogen Assessment on the Nitrogen fertilization effects and ozone interactions with methane, it all seems reasonable, well considered and well investigated.

You say that the factors I mentioned as not being included in the carbon models are, yet this is not the case, for although they may include the effect of a warming ocean on its ability to absorb CO2 they don't account for the scale of changes being observed and nor do make the Southern ocean a source due ot increasing westerlis as has also been observed, and the changes in North Atlantic and never mimicked by the models, further more the FACE traisl show nutrient deprviation effects and water stress factors that are greater than predicted and they show a cessation of the CO2 fertilization effects after 5-10years whereas the modles keep on increaseing this unless water stress intervenes, and although the models do indeed mimc some eco-systems shifts due to changing climate none of them include eco-systems and biodiversity losses due to oceanic dead zones, pollution, waste, over exploitation, eco-system destabilisation, invasive alien species, and eco-system effects on CO2 sequestration may well be more profound than cliamtic effects,"At the study site, local disturbances appeared to exert an impact on the observed carbon sequestration, whereas climatic factors made moderate contributions." (2).

2. Detection and attribution of global change and disturbance impacts on a tower observed ecosystem carbon budget: a critical appraisal
Akihiko Ito, Environ. Res. Lett. 7 (2012) 014013 (6pp)
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/1/014013

Then you say that many of the papers I quoted previously were about climate sensitivity, and you say this is off topic, well I disagee aswe seem to be talking about whether we agree that a temprature flatline is realistic with a total cessation of CO2 emissions. I say this is not realistic and the main reason for the lack of warming is due to an overactive draw of CO2 casuing an exagerated cooling influence...and of course there will be further warming due to the other GHG's and sudden loss of aersols that would occur, the heating already in the pipeline and the continued albedo effects, so the assumption for me is incorrect and leads to a false hope.

Also the CS is critical, and Hasen and Sato CS is for CO2 alone, they are very clear that the albedo effects during the alst several glacials is as strong and they only make the last glacial 4.5C coler and the early Pliocene 2C warmer, whereas many others make the last glacial 6C cooler and the Pliocene 3-5oC warmer, and remember again CO2 was 350ppm then...although Hansen does agree that the arctic sea ice melt shoudln't make a huge difference as it is small, despite its size and influence on th ewhole cliamtic system, which so seems to pumping heat into the arctic at faster rates than anticipated.

Considering the ppm have risen from 280ppm to 393ppm for ~1/2 Trillion tonnes I presume that another 1/2 trillion tonnes (1 trillion in all) will get us to ~500ppm and you are sayign you feel safe with as all emissions will stop at that point and the overshoot scenario fuesl by carbon drawdown will keep us below 20C, yet all th recent models in the papers previously quoted make 2C inevitable and by 2050 for this size of scale of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Now I could go on and mention the greater of effects of droughts on the carbon cycle than anticipated, the increases in soil respiration in Autumn, and the recent paper by Shakun (3), where the primary driver for temperature rise is CO2, and alebdo has a surprisingly mainly regional effect, and despite CO2 plateauing at 12000BP the temperature rises a further 1C, as a by the by they have a CO2 rise of 0.44 (180-260ppm) of a doubling and a temperature rise of 3.5C, or a CS for CO2 if the ice albedo is considered a feedback (and small as they suggest) of 7.9C, or a CS of ~4C if split 50/50 into CO2 and ice as Hansen and Sato do.

Anyway bottom line for me is that 350ppm if the Pliocnee data is right means a shift in climate that is at best risky and means 1.8-3C warming by 2100 unless you use Hansens Pliocene values when we get 1.6C (but this level of warming in temr sof climatic shfits etc is the same as the 1.8-3C above in real terms), is only just safeish considering the events that are already occuring (Missippi Floods, French Floods, Pakistan, Amazon Drought, Queensland floods, Texas Drought, and so on and so on)..

So for me we are already well over our carbon budget and our eco-systems are feelinjg the strain, so I call not only for 350ppm as a definitive target but also a realisation of what that actually means, I using the MagicC model to get to 350ppm will take a mircale of zero emissions by 2017 and large carbon sequestration after that to increase the 0.2ppm/pa to 0.5ppm/pa, counter the CO2 influxes from permafrost melt, wetland increase, etc.

And finally in the study by Archer, they pulsed the CO2 into the atmosphere so 50% shoudl have been withdrawn almost immeadiately to keep with the reality we know and therefore to ascertain how slow CO2 will be drawndown once it is at a certain ppm, you have to go to the 50% point(1year) and then see the rate of decline and doing that it takes about 400year to fall to 50% so much slower than the graphic suggests.

Therefore it is up to you if you feel reassured with putting another 1/2 Trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere at this point to have a 50/50 chance of missing 2C, like 1.9C is safe!, However I don't and there are many calling for 350ppm amd I agree with them.

(3)http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/shakun-et-al.pdf

Hansen and Sato Estimate Climate Sensitivity from Earth's History

Kevin C at 20:08 PM on 23 May, 2012

Thanks Macoles, I hadn't picked up on the significance of that point. That goes a long way to addressing my question.

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

les at 23:06 PM on 8 May, 2012

hummm... all a bit confusing. Much other stuff from Cole seems to have the same, or similar, origins. e.g. 30 Cole.

Shouldn't there be a moderation policy that posts with substantial cut-and-paste from other sites, without links / attribution, should be deleted?

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

skywatcher at 13:01 PM on 8 May, 2012

Speaking of dodgy blogs, I wonder which of the many skeptic blogs Cole is parroting, when he repeats the exact sentence

"The paper finds that the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) has increased since the end of the Little Ice Age (around 1850) by up to 6 times more than assumed by the IPCC."

. A quick Google search gives quite a few, including but not just: icecap, jo nova, hockeyschtick (and SkS's recent Comments page too of course!). This phrase misrepresents and magnifies the actual Solanki paper's conclusions, ingnoring the uncertainties. Now I don't mind debating sun and climate with real people, but Cole, if you're going to demonstrate the least bit of understanding of the literature, you could at least use your own words, not somebody else's?

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

skywatcher at 10:35 AM on 8 May, 2012

Cole's carefully-selected list of papers is a lovely example of cherry-picking to give yourself a confirmation bias. What is missing from the long list of papers showing correlations between various aspects of the Sun's activity and century-millennial scale climate change is a mechanism by which this might work.

[and it should be added that the idea that variations in solar output are connected with small changes in climate over the past few millennia is hardly a new one - you'll find detailed discussions in the IPCC AR4 report along with estimates of the magnitude of the forcing, for example in Section 2.7.1.]

Which leaves us with a bunch of unknowns, if we are to believe Cole, or those who wish to see a GCR-climate connection:

1: First of all, we need to find a mechanism by which GCR's affect climate - so far proposed and observed nechanisms (e.g. Kirkby) are orders of magnitude too small.

2: We have to explain why palaeoclimate variations do not appear to show very large responses to big solar/GCR variations - a notable example is the Laschamp Anomaly (See this excellent Richard Alley video (after about 40 minutes in).

Just before Alley talks about Laschamp, he has this good line:

...when you really take this apart you find that when the Sun changes it does seem to show up in the temperature record. It is very reassuring to know that if you change the Sun, the temperature knows this."

Again, this is not new stuff, sun being a little connected to climate! It's just not as big a player as some would wish.

3: Perhaps most importantly, we have to have an explanation for why a large change in the concentration of powerfully radiatively active gases like CO2 (we've known the since the 19th Century) are not influencing climate, as physics expects them to do. And quite what is producing the observations (e.g. good articles here, or here) of decreased outgoing longwave radiation at GHG-specific wavelengths, and a corresponding increase in downward longwave radiation, also at GHG-specific wavelengths.

4: If you think the physics works OK, you then need an explanation for a hitherto unknown cooling mechanism, perfectly correlated with warming forced from CO2, which is conveniently masking the CO2-driven warming signal, and allows GCRs (whatever their mechanism of operation may be) to modulate climate.

When you need multiple unknowns to explain something for which we already have a strong, straightforward observed mechanism, supported by physical and experimental data, you're really grasping at straws.

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

muoncounter at 09:54 AM on 8 May, 2012

Cole#42:

I've certainly not been 'waving' Agee around (I mentioned it once before you dragged it back into the discussion after a lag of 5 months). It really doesn't matter whether you accept thier results or not, as there are a number of other references, which up to now you've ignored. But now you summarily dismiss them all as "innefectual" [sic] without any specifics. These papers do not rely on cloud cover measurements alone - and BTW, your claim that it cannot be reliably measured is unsubstantiated.

But now your case seems to be made on references from 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002. Let's look at a few (your links above):

Kniveton and Todd (published ??): Using neutron data from only Huancayo, Peru (latitude 12 S), they discuss precipitation over oceans between 40S and 80S. Odd.

Parker 1999 - (obtained from the blog CO2science? You've quoted their 'review' extensively). No mention of the fact that sunspot cycles have been getting weaker since 1958 - as temperatures continue increasing.

Carslaw 2002: This paper appears to have no firm conclusions.

It has been proposed that Earth's climate could be affected by changes in cloudiness caused by variations in the intensity of galactic cosmic rays ... Sounds like the same equivocal language you've objected to in Agee.

Solanki 2001: This paper is about sunspots and the Maunder and has nothing to do with cosmic rays.

...it was recently discovered that the average strength of this interplanetary field has doubled in the past 100 years.

One has to wonder how this was measured over a 100 year interval. Odd that actual measurements show the sun's magnetic field strength decreasing sharply.

Face facts: the strongest thing you've got is the CLOUD experiment's preliminary results. Yet you dismissed this ("Kirkby is just a small example"). And until there is an accepted mechanism for these nano-sized cloud nuclei to form actual clouds before they disappear, that's an experimental result lacking a viable explanation. And this thread is about CERN's results, not about 10 year old correlation studies.

However, it seems you cannot continue a discussion without resorting to accusation and innuendo ("You guys seem to be grasping at straws"). That is unacceptable (and no, we're not). You've already been advised (twice on this thread) that you must abide by the Comments Policy. Failing that, your behavior thus far has been worthy of this thread's title.

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

muoncounter at 13:03 PM on 7 May, 2012

Cole#40: "I'm not simply declaring Agees results as 'meaningless'."

Sorry, what I must have misunderstood is your #30: "So the results of said paper are spurious at best."

If you've read anything beyond the abstract of Agee's quite comprehensive review of the current literature, you wouldn't be throwing 'spurious' around:

It is clearly evident that the positive trend in previous solar cycles and lower troposphere cloudiness has not continued for the cycle 23-24 QP, which adds to the controversy of the GCR-CCN hypothesis. Not only has the GCR count received a record high level during the cycle 23-24 QP, but the lower troposphere global cloudiness has dropped to a record low level, further challenging the validity of the hypothesis.

I suggest you study the remaining references in this post that question the cosmic ray-climate connection. Then there's Love 2011, as noted here and Laken 2011:

We find no evidence that widespread variations in cloud cover at any tropospheric level are significantly associated with changes in the TSI, GCR or UV flux, and further conclude that TSI or UV changes occurring during reductions in the GCR flux are not masking a solar-cloud response.

"As for your Realclimate post, how would you like it if I started relying on blog-science?"

That 'blog-science' was written by Dr. Jeff Pierce, who has published on cloud nucleation mechanisms. Refer also to Pierce and Adams 2009:

In our simulations, changes in CCN from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.

"the direct correlation between CRF and T over the Holocene that clearly doesn't exist with CO2"

Talk about an 'own goal.' Please show us the cosmic ray flux data - not any of those suspicious 'proxies' - for the Holocene. Then refer to numerous articles here showing the excellent correlations between CO2 and temperature.

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

KR at 10:21 AM on 7 May, 2012

skywatcher, Cole - And don't forget:

(d) A bad paper is published, recognized as such by the majority in the field, and essentially ignored (not cited) by anyone who isn't following the same bad logic.

For example: the Gerlich and Tscheuschner paper claiming the 2nd law of thermodynamics (truly silly, now disavowed even by folks such as Fred Singer) was well on its way to that fate when repeated trumpeting by 'skeptics' led to published rebuttals.

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

skywatcher at 09:54 AM on 7 May, 2012

You've got to love how arguments from authority operate in one direction in the skeptic universe. Suddely because a skeptic's paper is successfully published by the RAS, it is deemed to be flawless, having clearly undergone thorough and utterly rigorous peer-review by experts in the relevant field(s). Yet nearly every relevant climate expert on the planet, and certainly every relevant scientific organisation, agrees that anthropogenic CO2 is causing most of the current rapid warming. Many thousands of papers have been published with this view, all peer-reviewed. Why the disconnect for the 'skeptics'?

Bad papers get published. Lets ignore for a moment that the RAS are probably not the greatest repository of scientific expertise on climate, and mention a few other papers. One (McLean et al 2009) was published in GRL even though the authors removed the long-term trend then argued that the short-term variation was causing the long-term trend. Another paper confused degrees with radians at a crucial point. Yet another paper (Spencer and Braswell IIRC) managed to examine a bunch of models and leave out the model runs that demonstrated their hypothesis was critically flawed.

So Cole, quite apart from muoncounter's excellent points, which of the following statements do you agree with:

(a) There is no such thing as a 'bad' paper and everything that is peer-reviewed is clearly good science. Peer-reviewers are always flawless in their work.

(b) Some bad papers get published. These bad papers are either ignored, or subseqiuent responses are published that demonstrate the critical flaws in the reasoning of the author(s). Peer reviewers are human, and despite doing an excellent task in filtering out the very worst papers, occasionally give a pass to a poor paper. This most often happens when the journal's expertise is not ideally matched to the subject matter. [An example of a response is Foster et al 2010, the response to McLean et al 2009]

(c) The RAS has never, ever, published a paper subsequently discovered to have been flawed in some way.

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

muoncounter at 09:26 AM on 7 May, 2012

Cole#35: You can summarily declare Agee's results 'meaningless' if you like, despite publication in the Journal of the AMetSoc. Perhaps not as prestigious as the Monthly Notices of the RAS, but that really proves nothing. But look at the references in the post: Calgovic, Erlykin x3, Lockwood x2, Pierce... all with negative re-evaluations of the so-called 'looks pretty good' correlation between CR flux and temperatures. Lakin (more than paper) had similar results. Your objection to Agee ("we can't really detect changes in GCC") makes it clear how weak the whole GCR->cloud story really is. We just came through a 50 year high in GCR flux (2009): Where are the clouds?

As for the supposedly 'glove-fitting microphysics,' Pierce took that apart at RealClimate. Perhaps you'd be better off with the 'does not fit' defense.

Your jump from Kirkby's "... question of whether, and to what extent," to "Clearly, carbon dioxide is not the all-important dominating factor... " in one sentence is stunning. Kirkby's language is the same style as the 'possible disconnect' you found objectionable in Agee.

We've gone from GCR->clouds to supernovae->GCR->cooling->mass extinctions. Of course, you've missed the fact that the peak SN frequency on Svensmark's graph is some 50 Myrs before the PTr extinction. You've also ignored what should be the primary objection to the supernova idea: they're not necessarily the source of GCRs. And then there's Montenegro et al 2011, showing that the PTr extinction coincided with increased ocean anoxia and that decreased ccean pH "brought about by the increase in atmospheric CO2 is biologically significant.". Supernovae doing that, too?

"you guys deliberately misrepresent papers... "

That kind of language usually gets your comments deleted. Please try to come up with more than 'that statement is ludicrous' -- and have a look at the Comments Policy.

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

Tom Curtis at 12:18 PM on 6 May, 2012

Cole @30, the core of Svensmark's new paper is the correlation he has shown between biodiversity:

and his estimate of rates of near by super novas:

You can't see the correlation between the two charts? Neither can I. The reason is that Svensmark purports to show a correlation between marine invertebrate biodiversity and his estimated supernova rate. He just assumes, or simply fails to mention, that marine invertebrate biodiversity is a good proxy for biodiversity in general. It is not. It is not even a good proxy for marine biodiversity after the great radiation of fish in the Devonian.

So we have this puzzle, why is marine invertebrate biodiversity strongly effected by supernova rates, while all other forms of biodiversity are not? The most likely cause for the apparent correlation is no cause, ie, pure coincidence. This is particularly the case as Svensmark does not even show a correlation with marine invertebrate biodiversity, but only with marine invertebrate biodiversity as normalized for sea level.

There is an unusually large change in sea level coincident with with the Permian/Triassic boundary associated with the formation, and then break-up of Pangea. The associated change in sea level is sufficiently large that Svensmark's untested normalization formula is unlikely to properly compensate for the effects of changes in sea level on marine invertebrate biodiversity.

That means the correlation Svensmark is trumpeting is almost certainly nothing more than the coincidence of the estimated period of peak local supernova rate with the formation of Pangea. This is particularly the case as the correlation his asserts is poor outside the large excursion at the Permian/Triassic boundary.

Unless, of course, Svensmark has stunning new evidence that Galactic Cosmic Rays cause continental drift.

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

muoncounter at 11:48 AM on 6 May, 2012

Cole,
Your #30 seem to be referring to the latest from Svensmark. Already noted here.

Any guesses as why he's the sole author of this?

Agee's result is a clear swing-and-a-miss for Svensmark. The rallying cry 'do more research' is a valid one -- especially as the existing research hasn't done what was claimed.

2012 SkS Weekly Digest #16

Pete Dunkelberg at 07:38 AM on 23 April, 2012

Happy Earth Day? Earth Day means nothing if We Don’t Limit Carbon Emissions.

2012 SkS Weekly Digest #15

Lionel A at 20:48 PM on 16 April, 2012

One problem I note that could fit the issue of the week is that on blogs protagonists on both sides can end up talking past each other. For example I can cite Skeptical Science only to have it thrown back in my face with accusations of SKS being a PR site, which charge of course is totally out of order. I will then be pointed at the likes of WUWT, which I don't bother visiting on the grounds of not wishing to up Watt's hit count.

A typical case arouse with a protagonist Cole at Concordiensis .

It looks like I could have misinterpreted the context in this search on Cole here at SKs , not having seen the original exchanges with Cole here. Despite that it looks like Cole has done a 'Monckton Manoeuvre' and flounced off, possibly because of the evidence for, even though I could not see examples of, his 'carpet bombing' of topics here.

On ecocide E O Wilson produces a fine assessment of the problems in his 'The Future of Life' (Wilson's earlier 'The Diversity of Life' provides more context) and Richard Pearson provides other interesting perspectives in his 'Driven to Extinction'.

The parlous state of the biosphere and the lack of realisation of how much we are in debt to it for services provided is something that appears to be much under represented in discussion right now.

Denialgate - Internal Heartland Documents Expose Climate Denial Funding Network

logicman at 20:55 PM on 15 February, 2012

macoles #50

I agree that whistleblowing is lawful.

The laws of the US, UK and many other common law jurisdictions specify that the unveiling of wrongdoing is in the public interest.
The US statute law on whistleblowing can be traced back to the civil war when unscrupulous merchants sold bad powder to the Union army.
There is a vast body of case law in common law jurisdictions which permits governments to recover any losses suffered by 'the people' as a result of false claims which have caused the people financial losses.
In the US a whistleblower is guaranteed 15 - 25 percent of funds recovered plus legitimate costs.
A procedure at law known as qui tam permits any citizen to sue on behalf of the government. It is a suit by an informer on behalf of the government claiming that a wrong has been committed against the people according to a specified statute.

There can be no argument of wrongdoing against any person who acts within the law, provided only that the Nuremberg principle does not apply.
The Nuremberg principle specifies that obedience to law is no defence against a breach of the fundamental human rights recognised by all civilised nations.

The Heartland whistleblower acted lawfully, q.e.d. - and I would add: ethically.

Climate change policy: Oil's tipping point has passed

JP40 at 13:40 PM on 15 February, 2012

Getting off coal and oil electricity is what I meant.
The main issue with efficiency is efficiently transfering the high-energy protons to electric current. Of course, if less than 1 percent of the money that goes into Tritium-Deuterium fusion, those issues would be solved much quicker than with only 1 colege professor and 5 graduate student working on them. Here is a link to a page you might want to read. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/536/1

Still Going Down the Up Escalator

Tom Curtis at 18:20 PM on 3 February, 2012

macoles @7, the apparent "eleven year cycle" is largely coincidental. For example, the peak of the last solar cycle was around 2000, and coincided with the very low (by 21st century standards) temperatures in the years immediately following the 1998 El Nino. While the solar cycle does have an effect, the El Nino Southern Oscillation is far more important in determining year to year variability, as can be seen in the following graph, originally from NASA:

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

muoncounter at 16:33 PM on 28 December, 2011

Cole#26: "confirmed the statistically significant influence of CR intensity decrease on the state of the atmosphere."

Except Agee et al 2011 unconfirmed that:

It is concluded that the observational results presented, showing several years of disconnect between GCRs and lower troposphere global cloudiness, add additional concern to the cosmic ray-cloud connection hypothesis. In fact, this has been done in the most dramatic way with the measurement of record high levels of GCRs during the deep, extended quiet period of cycle 23-24, which is accompanied by record low levels of lower troposphere global cloudiness.

So I guess CR 'intensity' alters the state of the climate (whatever that means) in a statistically significant way, if you ignore the years where it doesn't.

Can you say 'robust results'?

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

Daniel Bailey at 15:17 PM on 28 December, 2011

FYI, Cole has a history of carpet-bombing threads here at SkS with misunderstood, off-topic or fake-skeptic links.

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

Philippe Chantreau at 15:06 PM on 28 December, 2011

Cole, thank you for providing once again confirmation that a certain crowd going by the motto "anything but CO2" will recycle any an all debunked arguments ad infinitum. Your interpretation of the Dragic et al paper is mistaken. This paper was first cited 3 and a half months ago ny Muoncounter, who knows about these things, as his handle indicates.

I'll cite Muon's previous assessment on this, which comes straight from looking at the numbers in the Dragic paper:

"The authors have a dataset running 41 years (1954-95); there are a grand total of 35 7% FDs in that period. If this is what is causing clouds to form, there isn't even 1 cosmic ray induced cloudy episode per year!"

If one cloud event per year can modulate climate, what kind of effect would even a minute change in radiative forcing that operates 24/7 have? This is not even betting on the wrong horse, it's simply beating a dead one.

The Dragic paper is indeed tragic news for GCRs/climate advocates.

See this post, dating back to 3 and a half monts ago:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/cern-cosmic-rays-basic.html#62404

Is there a case against human caused global warming in the peer-reviewed literature? Part 1

Jim Powell at 22:45 PM on 3 November, 2011

Mikeh--I will check that.
Macoles--Excellent point.
Heijdensejan--will check.
Barry--will check.
Thanks to all.

Please keep the comments and suggestions coming.

2010 - 2011: Earth's most extreme weather since 1816?

Norman at 15:42 PM on 9 July, 2011

Albatross @ 307

Breaking down your post so each individual post does not get too long.

Me:
"A decreasing temperature gradient (AGW theory conclusion that poles warm faster than equator) will decrease the strength of the jet stream (which is linked to severe storms), reduce steepness of lapse rate."

"On the first at count we all agree, but I am not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that the environmental lapse rate will decrease with AGW. Regardless, Trapp et al and other researchers' work would have taken any such reduction in the environmental lapse rate in their calculations of CAPE. So you are arguing another strawman there..."

From my post at 305:
"In addition to the seasonal effects directly
caused by changes in solar radiation, there is also
an important effect that is caused by the lag in
heating and cooling of the atmosphere as a whole.
The result is a predominance of cool air over
warming land in the spring, and warm air over
cooling surfaces in the fall. Thus, the steepest
lapse rates frequently occur during the spring,
whereas the strongest inversions occur during fall
and early winter."

Logic I use, if the steepest lapse rates frequently occur during spring (reason being the air was cooled during the winter months and then rapidly warming air from the increased solar insolation in the south brings this warm air into the region that still has colder air above, buoyancy). Then they are not so frequent in the summer. Something must be changing. The upper layers of atmpsphere are warming as well as the lower by convection and storms. The colder air aloft (accumulated during winter) is being turned over and the steep lapse rate is decreasing, the air is not as buoyant and will not produce near the number of severe storms as in the spring...even though the air has much more energy and water vapor.

Some evidence of this I have been working on.

Severe Tornado graph.

Sinde you work in the field, am I correct is stating that severe tornadoes are a valid proxy for determining relative number of severe storms? Only the most severe thunderstorms are capable of producing strong tornadoes. These storms usually have very strong winds, heavy rain and hail and are likely to cause property damage in areas where no tornado touches down.

I just picked a few so it is not a full scientific study but I also have limited time. I try to do the best I can in the time I have available.

1974 was big tornado year.

GISS map March 1974.

The big tornado outbreak took place in early april. Relative to a normal temperature gradient (all white) this graph shows a stronger than normal temp gradient and it is oriented so the warm air is in the south (moisture fuel) and the coler air in the North.

GISS April 1974.

Still a strong temperature gradient and very warm ocean water.

I certainly do understand your point that the production of a storm cannot come under some sweeping generalization. Storm formation is a complex beast as I learned in reading about CAPE here.

CAPE article.

Air can be a very complex structure. It can form layers where a parcel will be buoyant and then other layers where this is not the case. Also some layers can be wet or dry and wind direction can vary. So what drives an individual storm can be quite complex. But overall patterns do exist which favor storm formation. My contention is that a strong temperature gradient is an important factor (but it has to have the correct orientation. It the north is warm and south is cooler, opposite gradient, it seems to suppress storm frequency).

GISS April 2011.

Large tempertature gradient in this graph. Very warm gulf. My understanding is that the warm southern air moves up North when a low pressure system moves across the country (counterclockwise spin pulls this air north and pulls the colder northern air behind it). It also pulls the cold northern air down over the southern regions. The sun rapidly warms the ground and the warm moist air will rise rapidly in this cooler air (very steep lapse rate) powerful updrafts, hail, tornadoes and strong winds with heavy rain.

1987 was a very low year for tornadoes. What was the pattern this season?

GISS 1987 graph in March.

Warm over the whole US with cooler air to the south (opposite gradient).

GISS 1987 graph of April.

There is some colder air far north but the warmer air is all the way into Canada and there is still the opposite gradient (cool air south and warmer air north)

GISS May 1987.

GISS June 1987.

2010 - 2011: Earth's most extreme weather since 1816?

Dikran Marsupial at 17:01 PM on 3 July, 2011

Eric Extreme events already have a good statistical definition, namely the return period, for instance an event might have a return period of 100 years, in laymans terms, a "once in a hundred year event". This definition has the advantage of automatically taking into account the skewness of the distribution.

The small number of events does not pose a serious problem in estimating changes (trends) in return times. There is a branch of statistics called "extreme value theory" that has been developed to address exactly these kinds of problems. If you have a statistical background, there is a very good book on this by Stuart Coles (google that name to find tutorial articles).

2010 - 2011: Earth's most extreme weather since 1816?

Dikran Marsupial at 00:01 AM on 2 July, 2011

Eric@193 "Can we really call a period of record rainfall an extreme event when it occurs in the monsoon season in an area which typically experiences heavy rainfall?"

Yes. If the rainfall was an extreme event in the context of a monsoon season at that location, then it is an extreme event regardless of the season as the maximal rainfall ocurrs in the monsoon.

If an event is a one in a hundred year event, and extreme rainfall only happens in monsoons and there is one monsoon a year, then an "once in 100 monsoon" event is very likely also a "once in 100 year" event and vice versa.

If the extreme rainfall ocurred outside the monsoon season, it would be extremly extreme ;o)

Eliminating areas that have extreme rainfall is a neat way of simplyfying statistical analysis of extreme rainfall! ;o)

The penultimate paragraph is getting into multiple hypothesis test territory, for which there are standard methods. Of course there will be extreme rainfall happening somewhere every year. The question is has the propensity for extreme rainfall changed (i.e. have the return periods shortened).

There is a branch of statistics called "extreme value theory". You can bet that climatologists and statisticians that have worked with climatologists will be familiar with this (there is a very good book by Stuart Coles sitting on my bookshelf), will have applied it, and understand the caveats well.

Phil Jones - Warming Since 1995 is now Statistically Significant

MoreCarbonOK at 20:18 PM on 15 June, 2011

MoreCarbonOK@macoles

I know my stats and I know my method is right.
Just average monthly temps as recorded / versus time.
Every month of the year at a weather station treated as a new test.
Example: look at the results from Brisbane:
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/no-global-warming-in-brisbane-australia

Just doing the linear regression in EXCEL
it calculates the trendlines automatically....(In the old days we had to sit with a calculator!!)
the slope you get (temp versus time) is the average increase noted over time.

there are no errors. This is it. It is as easy as pie. If you don't understand it how I got those results you must study Stats 104.

I see you also don't know why the southern hemisphere shows no warming. Quite a difference
(see 2nd table from my pool table, mean average temp.)

No global warming as a result of an increase in green house gases, in any case.

http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming

Carter Confusion #2: Green Jobs

The Skeptical Chymist at 23:24 PM on 24 May, 2011

Macoles @ 11

I see what you are saying there but I disagree with part of your conclusion. The Álvarez "study" is trying to argue that investment in renewables causes net job losses, but as you point out the investment in the Navarre region helped lead to lower unemployment. So this does help rebut Álvarez claims.

Carter Confusion #2: Green Jobs

dana1981 at 12:35 PM on 24 May, 2011

macoles - fair enough, the same thought occurred to me. But I thought it was an example worth mentioning nonetheless.

It's the sun

JMurphy at 09:23 AM on 17 May, 2011

Cole, your linked paper starts :

The variable Sun is the most likely candidate for natural forcing of past climate change on time scales of 50 to 1000 years.

And ends :

We note that our conclusions can not be tested on the basis of the last 30 years of solar observations because, according to the proxy data, the Sun was in a maximum plato state in its longterm evolution. All recently published reconstructions agree well during the satellite observational period and diverge only in the past. This implies that observational data do not allow to select and favor one of the proposed reconstructions. Therefore, until new evidence become available we are in a situation that diﬀerent approaches and hypothesis yield diﬀerent solar forcing values. Our result allows the climate community to evaluate the full range of present uncertainty in solar forcing.

Can you explain in your own words (i.e. not from WUWT) what you get from that paper ?

It's the sun

Stephen Baines at 08:47 AM on 17 May, 2011

Cole, Dana's right. I'm not sure you read that paper. In fig 4 there no net change in solar forcing since 1950.

And why is the 30 year lag relevant? And what justification for 30 year lag other than " the oceans are vast and deep" do you have?

It's the sun

dana1981 at 07:58 AM on 17 May, 2011

Cole -

"This paper shows the Models underestimate solar forcing by up to six times."

It does no such thing. The paper suggests that other TSI reconstructions underestimate the amplitude of TSI changes in the past. It has very little to do with climate models, and in fact specifically notes that their TSI estimates over recent decades, during which we have good measurements, are no different than previous TSI reconstructions.

Newcomers, Start Here

dana1981 at 06:48 AM on 17 May, 2011

Cole, you seem to believe "if I read it on the interwebs and want it to be true, then it must be true."

Smoking, cancer and global warming

MattJ at 16:39 PM on 23 February, 2011

I think I get the point the author is trying to make, and yes, it is an important point, but I think he is making it unreasonably difficult for himself to make this point when he says, "Not Humphrey Bogart, not “King” Cole, not the guy down the street. No one definitely ever died from smoking."

Please, please think of a better way to put this.

Smoking, cancer and climate change

Jonathan Bagley at 03:39 AM on 11 February, 2011

A point of information. The are several known risk factors for cancer of the oesophagus including heavy alcohol consumption, heartburn (acid reflux), poor diet and others. Bogart was a very heavy drinker and there is a fair chance he would have contracted it even had he not smoked. Your claim,

"Humphrey Bogart and most of the other victims would not have died their painful death if they hadn’t smoked."

is not valid in Bogart's case.

You are on much safer ground with lung cancer, although Nat "King" Cole died in his thirties, which is very unusual, even for a smoker.

http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/oesophagus/

Smoking, cancer and climate change

Alexandre at 16:37 PM on 10 February, 2011

I do not agree with the sentence "They all died prematurely because of tobacco".

If we cannot link each single event with a cause, how can we say that every single one was caused by it?

Statistically, it's clear that tobacco causes cancer and GW causes more extreme weather events. But as suggested in the text, Nat King Cole could be one of those rare cases of lung cancer that are not related to smoking.

Or am I missing something?

The 2010 Amazon Drought

Stephen Leahy at 11:04 AM on 9 February, 2011

WRT to CC, I like the phrase: "we may even see new ‘flavours’ of ENSO emerge as we move into the future” --Julia Cole, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona.

Not So Cool Predictions

caerbannog at 07:08 AM on 4 January, 2011

A lot of the names above (and more) are in this table: http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/skeptic_authors_table.html

Every "skeptic" list that I've ever seen has been padded with cranks and incompetent hacks. The above list is no exception.

A couple of quick examples:

John Coleman? He's with KUSI here in San Diego, and he's cartoonishly clueless. I've seen him in action on TV several times. His current knowledge of climate-science wouldn't get him a passing grade in a middle-school science class.

Timothy Ball? A complete, over the top, tinfoil-hat crank. Strong words, admittedly, but fully supported by the evidence. See this link for some of that evidence: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/31141

Excerpts

Scientific Reaction To Velikovsky Symptomatic Of Climate Science Debacle
By Dr. Tim Ball Thursday, December 16, 2010
.....
Science Is The Ability To Predict

In the end Velikovsky succeeded because he passed the ultimate test of science; the ability to predict. More important, they were in contradiction to prevailing views. He made many and apparently none are incorrect to date. The interesting one was the temperature of Venus, which was almost double what the textbooks said. The same textbooks that incorrectly use Venus as an example of runaway CO2 induced Greenhouse Effect.

Failure of the University President to approve a conference on Velikovsky was symptomatic of the dogmatic, closed minds that pervade modern science. The few scientists involved with the AGW debacle deliberately exploited and practiced that condition. Their actions indicate they saw this as a battle, but it was against the truth and as Aeschylus said, “In war, truth is the first casualty.”

Climategate: Hiding the Decline?

yocta at 10:13 AM on 23 November, 2010

RE# 24 Albatros and others:

I would hate you guys to give up. I don't have enough time to contribute much to SS but I always make time to read through the comments. So whilst trying to appeal directly to contrarians might seem to be in vain, it is the casual fence sitters that your comments will reach out too.

Time and time again by reading through the comments one can easily deduce that the 'skeptics' are not in the business of trying to educate the reader. It is one thing to cry out and disagree with data, methods or 3 or 4 lines of an email but another thing to give evidence based reasons. The best comments on this site always link to peer reviewed papers or other relevant information (Something the skeptics can't seem to do).

Don't let the mariner shoot you down!

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;

How significance tests are misused in climate science

Daniel Bailey at 11:22 AM on 13 November, 2010

Re: macoles (11) "The travesty, of course, is that we cannot account for the number of pirates empirically measured via apprehension or by sinking of their crafts vs that predicted by Disney movies. Latest measurements of the briny deep suggest some may have fled to Davy Jones' Locker" says the study lead auteur Calypso Cousteau.
Yo-ho, yo-ho, indeed.

The Yo-ho-Yooper

Blog review of scientific coherence

Mythago at 20:33 PM on 29 September, 2010

To add to what Dave Horton said about all the bits of 'Findings' its almost like an archaeologist who discovers a shard of pottery in one dig which looks similar to a shard in another dig. Put all the shards from one dig together (when they have been found) and you may construct the major part of a pot. Do the same in the second dig and you may well not only have the major parts of a pot but the proof that it is from the same tribal culture that existed at the first dig site, proving that they migrated and occupied a large area (subject of course to the relevant distance between the two dig sites).
Now what has this got to do with Dave's posting?
Its that all the evidence is on its own not proof of anything until it is put together to form a coherent image, situation, process or fact or a million other possible constructs that could be produced or proven from these associations.
So science is right. Coherent arguments devoid of contradictions are the only really conclusive path that we can walk down. As for the conclusive nature of the non-contradictory science? Well that all depends on these incontrovertible 'Theories' which people still think are mere 'Ideas' instead of 'Proof' of a particular process......like gravity.

'In the end even the dust will settle to the bottom of the jar and a clearer understanding will become apparent to all'. Kev Coleman.aka 'Mythago' September 2010.

A detailed look at Hansen's 1988 projections

Berényi Péter at 00:16 AM on 23 September, 2010

Posted by dana1981 on Monday, 20 September, 2010 at 11:38 AM
Had Hansen used a climate model with a climate sensitivity of approximate 3.4°C for 2xCO₂ (at least in the short-term, it's likely larger in the long-term due to slow-acting feedbacks), he would have projected the ensuing rate of global surface temperature change accurately. Not only that, but he projected the spatial distribution of the warming with a high level of accuracy.

OK, let's have a closer look. Hansen 1988 has also predicted the decadal mean temperature change for scenario B as a function of pressure and latitude.

Now, since then we have got some actual data about this temperature trend distribution. The Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office has a near real-time updated dataset called HadAT (globally gridded radiosonde temperature anomalies from 1958 to present).

Linear trends in zonal mean temperature (K/decade) in HadAT2 1979-2009. 1000 hPa data are from HadCRUT2v subsampled to the time-varying HadAT2 500hPa availability

The image above is explained in this publication:

Internal report for DEFRA, pp. 11
HadAT: An update to 2005 and development of the dataset website
Coleman, H. and Thorne, P.W.

As you can clearly see, predicted and observed zonal trends have nothing to do with each other: neither high, nor low level of accuracy can be detected. Particular attention should be payed to the cooling trend in the tropical mid-troposphere (-0.5°C/century) and the severe cooling between 65S and 70S along the entire air column (down to -5°C/century). These features are absolutely lacking in Hansen's prediction, therefore the take-home message should be "Hansen's 22 year old prediction is falsified".

We can talk about if anthropogenic global warming theory were wrong on which the model was based or it was a flawed implementation, but there is no question about Hansen's failure.

BTW, the tropical upper tropospheric cold spot observed and documented in HadAT2 is inconsistent with surface warming according to even the most recent computational climate models. So neither Hansen nor his followers can get the sign of change right in some particularly important regions. Taking into account this wider failure, we can safely bet "climate models and the anthropogenic global warming theory are wrong", quite independent of Hansen's 1988 blunder.

How much did aerosols contribute to mid-20th century cooling?

dana1981 at 14:25 PM on 16 September, 2010

macoles - greater warming at night than day is on my list of anthropogenic global warming fingerprints, though the particular study I referenced only went back to 1951.

Why I care about climate change

gallopingcamel at 13:18 PM on 12 August, 2010

macoles (#129),
I think you have it backwards. Science progresses by a series of testable hypotheses. I gave some examples in #128 of ways that Einstein's hypotheses have been tested. Although these tests appear to support the concept of general relativity, Einstein was well aware that such experiments do not prove him right, whereas a single experiment can prove him wrong.

The climate scientists who preach Catastrophic Global Warming lack Albert's humility and act as though their fuzzy hypotheses have been proven beyond all shadow of doubt. Yet the predictive power of their theories is so weak that they cannot even explain past climates. Don't try to pretend that this nonsense is somehow comparable with the hard sciences which strive for 3 sigma or better precision.

Scientists pushing CAGW are strongly supported by governments around the world. The danger is that this powerful political support may turn out to be Lysenkoism mutated into a much more virulent form.

Scientific consensus is worthless, especially when it is authoritarian and lacking in accountability or transparency. Oops! The ghost of Urban VIII just mooned me.

Why I care about climate change

gallopingcamel at 16:30 PM on 11 August, 2010

Some great posts! Here are a few comments:
macoles (#123 & #124),
The irony was unintended. For me the establishment/consensus is often wrong whether it be based on religion or science. It is in my nature to question authority whether it is based on church, ideology or science.

muoncounter (#125),
Like you, I care about the teaching of science in K-12 as well as college level. In my state, there are 370 high schools but less than 40 teachers with physics degrees teaching science. The quality of science text books is critical when so few teachers have an adequate background in the subject. I hope you will want to support John Hubisz in his efforts to improve science text books:
http://www.science-house.org/middleschool/

doug_bostrom (#126)
In Newton's day they used to talk about "Laws" but modern physicists understand that they are always wrong even though their theories often have great predictive power. The perihelion of Mercury does precess as Einstein predicted, GPS systems need relativistic corrections and the energy released from nuclear reactions appears to follow the E=mc2 relationship. In spite of all this success, Einstein understood the limitations of his theories better than the folks at Conservapedia.

muoncounter (#127),
Loved the cartoon (how did I miss it?). At least one more pane needed for evolution vs. creationism.

Why I care about climate change

gallopingcamel at 01:30 AM on 10 August, 2010

macoles (#118),
This thread was about John's rationale for "Caring About Climate Change". While my rationale is quite different I often agree with John when it comes to mitigation. For example, I reject the unscientific position of Lisa Jackson at the EPA who claims that CO2 is a pollutant. Nonetheless, I am in favor of reducing CO2 emissions drastically.

One can hardly disagree with the observation that the most populous nations are playing "catch up" with the USA and Europe. One of the consequences is rapidly rising CO2 emissions.

Von Storch is a realist when he points out that the CO2 concentrations are going to rise for the foreseeable future. Even if the developed world were prepared to commit economic suicide by abandoning its transportation and energy assets, how likely is it that China and India would change their plans?

Why I care about climate change

kdkd at 18:33 PM on 5 August, 2010

macoles: actually as a lapsed discordian I embrace extremism :)

Why I care about climate change

RSVP at 20:16 PM on 4 August, 2010

macoles #18
"I choose to be an Atheist, not because of my understanding of science, but because I believe God is unnecessary"

Is there a reason you capitalize the word atheist?

This question aside, for most people belief in a deity is tantamount to having a sense of purpose, one that transcends our survival instinct. Perhaps the inability of science to explain this is proof enough for most.

What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?

chris1204 at 17:37 PM on 22 July, 2010

Well, since doctors keep coming up in the discussion (ScruffyDan @ 31 & HR @ 36) and John Cook, let me give you some real life examples.

In my field (apart from medication and ECT), we have psychotherapies of which the current favourite is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT is actually quite a useful adjunct in helping manage milder forms of depression and anxiety. However, being a therapy which can be done from a manual, there is no end of research purporting to show the benefits of CBT. The evidence base seems most impressive. CBT outcomes are usually compared to outcomes on patients on a 'waiting list' or receiving 'supportive psychotherapy' (talking about your problems to a sympathetic listener).

When you look at the actual studies, all too many rely on a several week trial demonstrating some improvement (eg, in the form of lowered scores on a psychometric test). However, in the real world of office and hospital based psychiatry dealing with patients with severe chronic conditions, CBT may have limited application.

One research unit on anxiety disorders in a city which shall remain unnamed run by a professor who shall remain equally nameless and genderless has published very impressive outcomes for CBT therapies. Interestingly, s/he claims that s/he can achieve these results without medication. When I first entered private practice, I had a number of challenging patients with severe anxiety disorder whom I referred to the unit hoping they7 would receive more expert treatment. Inevitably, the patients were sent back to me with a polite note stating that they needed medication and hence were not suitable for the treatments on offer. No wonder they were (and remain) so successful - they took only the easiest of patients.

Much the same happens in drug trials which often run over a six (maybe twelve) week period in which Drug A is compared with Drug B (where Drug B is a well-established treatment). Often dosage are fixed so as to achieve a standardised treatment. Patients selected are often 'pure' populations bearing little resemblance to the patients in the real world who often have multiple comorbid conditions. Outcomes again are often based on changes in scores on psychometric testing. The study will be published if the person pushing drug A manages to obtain a statistically significant improvement in psychometric scores over Drug B.

Of course, in real life psychiatry, you end up treating many patients for months often varying drug dosages and combining drugs and spending a great deal of time trying to help them make sense of their predicament (which is what you often have to do in general medicine which is largely about the management of chronic disease). Moreover, in real life, a 50% reduction in a patient's score on a psychometric test may sound impressive - however, it often does not represent functional recovery (which is the most relevant metric).

Clinicians (as opposed to researchers) are all too aware of the frail evidence base of much medical practice but do the best they can to apply the research data. Our learned colleges spend a great deal of time putting out practice guidelines which are sometimes helpful and sometimes seem quite removed from the realities we encounter in our offices and in hospitals.

To my shame, I have to undermine your confidence in the medical profession any further by dwelling on unspeakably corrupt behaviour by inter alia academics with very impressive research profiles who act us guns for hire for insurance companies. These are the same people who publish studies and act as peer reviewers towards whom mere clinicians such as myself ostensibly look to for guidance.

What horrifies me about the behaviour of the latter is that they cause needless suffering to injured parties caught up in an adversarial system (and add substantially to the ultimate cost of insurance claims by blocking common sense resolutions). Moreover, the same doctors tend to dominate the medicolegal sections of their various colleges - ie, the poachers are the gamekeepers.

In an earlier post on 21/07/10, someone remarked that you didn't need to have peer reviewers who were moral giants to pick out junk science. However, having seen so many moral pygmies in positions of influence in my profession, I struggle to overcome cynicism about the world of science and academia.

Do I still trust my own doctors? Well, actually, yes I do - they've helped me enormously through some challenging health issues. I would add that i have very high expectations of the colleagues to whom I* entrust my health. Do I still read my professional journals? Of course though sometimes with a jaundiced eye when I see an obvious disconnect between research findings and the realities I encounter in day-to-day clinical practice.

To come back on topic, do i accept AWG as likely to be a major challenge for us as a society? Yes - though I believe there's some uncertainty around the scale of the positive feedbacks. I was far more sceptical a couple of years ago. John's obvious sincerity and commitment to very courteous moderation giving a voice to disparate views has played a major role in this process.

However, I wince when the medical profession is cited as a model for trusting climate science. I've seen too much of the dark side.

What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?

chris1204 at 12:27 PM on 22 July, 2010

John: When it comes to complex science, whether it be climate science or heart surgery or how a plane manages to stay up in the air, we defer to the experts who do this stuff for a living. Why? Because they know every nook and cranny of their area of expertise.

Having seen the appalling standards of care tolerated in some areas of medical practice in Australia and having heard a few things about the safety culture of a well known Australian airline from an engineer ostracised by its management, I'm rather choosy about who I'd go to see about a medical problem and who I'd fly with.

I'm not saying the 97% have got it all wrong or even that they haven't got all or most of it right. Like the rest of us, I can't go through the many thousands of peer reviewed papers (many of which contain scientific arguments that are way beyond my ken). But I do feel that focusing on majoritarian views actually distracts us from the excellent and stimulating science that so often appears on this site.

I guess my problem stems in part from my work as a psychiatrist which includes a substantial slab of forensic or medicolegal reporting. Consequently, I've had an unusually high degree of exposure to systemic dysfunction in many of the institutions in which we normally trust (and which I have to trust when dealing with them in every day life because I have no choice - I would otherwise find myself reduced to a paranoid mess).

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

Willis Eschenbach at 13:07 PM on 3 July, 2010

doug_bostrom at 01:16 AM on 3 July, 2010

Willis, you may repeat yourself often enough to create some statistics of your own...

I take all of that as meaning that you have no peer reviewed evidence to support the IPCC claim regarding the Amazon. You seem to think that what is at issue is what I say. It is not. It is what the IPCC says. However, let me answer your questions. You say:

You said When the IPCC relies, as it has done far too often, on WWF and Greenpeace propaganda pieces, and newspaper articles, and the like... and when asked to back up that remark with statistics more fully describing "far too often" you rejoin with remarks by Pachauri, not an analysis of the IPCC's actual work product, suggesting you have little more than an impression to offer.

and JMurphy says:

"Pachauri said repeatedly that the IPCC was based 100% on peer reviewed science. As a result, one is too many ... and the Amazon claim is certainly one."

Well, since you love to demand citations (especially in front of an adoring crowd at WUWT), perhaps you could do so here and give links to Pachauri's 'repeated' claims ?

Then, give the stats which show the "far too often" IPCC reliance on "propaganda pieces", etc - as you have already been asked.

Pacharui's claims are important, as they have shaped the high regard in which the IPCC is (in my opinion wrongly) held. And the IPCC has relied on non-peer-reviewed claims far too often, as I said. So hang on, this is only a partial list, but it is long.

Regarding Pachauri's repeated claim about how it was all 100% peer reviewed science, we have (emphasis mine):

"People can have confidence in the IPCC's conclusions…Given that it is all on the basis of peer-reviewed literature." - Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chairman, June 2008

and

"The IPCC doesn't do any research itself. We only develop our assessments on the basis of peer-reviewed literature." - Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chairman, June 2007

and

"This is based on peer-reviewed literature. That’s the manner in which the IPCC functions. We don’t pick up a newspaper article and, based on that, come up with our findings." - Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chairman, June 2008

and

As IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri recently stated: 'IPCC relies entirely on peer reviewed literature in carrying out its assessment...'" - US Environmental Protection Agency, December 2009 (bottom of PDF's page 7)

and

"When asked if the discussion paper could be taken into consideration...[Pachauri] said, 'IPCC studies only peer-review science. Let someone publish the data in a decent credible publication. I am sure IPCC would then accept it, otherwise we can just throw it into the dustbin.'" - Times of India, November 2009

Regarding the IPCC relying on non-peer-reviewed sources, there are far, far too many for me to list. Let me pick a few. We could start with the very claim we are discussing here, which was based on a WWF paper (non peer-reviewed), which in turn relied on another non peer-reviewed document. Then we have an IPCC citation to my favorite peer reviewed journal:

Gwynne, P., 1975: The cooling world. Newsweek, April 28, 64.

With respect to climate change in Ontario, the IPCC used the noted journals "Leisure" and "Event Management":

Jones, B. and D. Scott, 2007: Implications of climate change to Ontario’s provincial parks. Leisure, (in press)

Jones, B., D. Scott and H. Abi Khaled, 2006: Implications of climate change for outdoor event planning: a case study of three special events in Canada’s National Capital region. Event Management, 10, 63-76

With respect to the IPCC's erroneous claims on African agriculture, they were based on

Agoumi, A., 2003: Vulnerability of North African countries to climatic changes: adaptation and implementation strategies for climatic change. Developing Perspectives on Climate Change: Issues and Analysis from Developing Countries and Countries with Economies in Transition. IISD/Climate Change Knowledge Network, 14 pp.

Again, not peer reviewed. The IPCC claims on Canadian wildfires were based on a couple of newspapers and a tourism publication:

Associated Press, 2002: Rough year for rafters. September 3, 2002.

Butler, A., 2002: Tourism burned: visits to parks down drastically, even away from flames. Rocky Mountain News. July 15, 2002.

BC Stats, 2003: Tourism Sector Monitor – November 2003, British Columbia Ministry of Management Services, Victoria, 11 pp.

Want more? Well, of course we have the claim about the Himalayan glacier melt, famously built on a scientist's mis-represented comment to a newspaper. Or we could look at the use of the non peer-reviewed Master's thesis in the IPCC:

Shibru, M., 2001: Pastoralism and cattle marketing: a case study of the Borana of southern Ethiopia, Unpublished Masters Thesis, Egerton University.

Wahab, H.M., 2005: The impact of geographical information system on environmental development, unpublished MSc Thesis, Faculty of Agriculture, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, 148 pp.

Gray, K.N., 1999: The impacts of drought on Yakima Valley irrigated agriculture and Seattle municipal and industrial water supply. Masters Thesis, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, 102 pp.

Schwörer, D.A., 1997: Bergführer und Klimaänderung: eine Untersuchung im Berninagebiet über mögliche Auswirkungen einer Klimaänderung auf den Bergführerberuf (Mountain guides and climate change: an inquiry into possible effects of climatic change on the mountain guide trade in the Bernina region, Switzerland). Diplomarbeit der philosophisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Bern.

That's from just one Working Group. Or, if you would prefer non peer-reviewed PhD theses, we have:

Crooks, S., 2004: Solar Influence On Climate. PhD Thesis, University of Oxford.

Foster, S.S., 2004: Reconstruction of Solar Irradiance Variations for use in Studies of Global Climate Change: Application of Recent SOHO Observations with Historic Data from the Greenwich Observatory. PhD Thesis, University of Southampton, Faculty of Science, Southampton, 231 p.

Oram, D.E., 1999: Trends of Long-Lived Anthropogenic Halocarbons in the Southern Hemisphere and Model Calculations of Global Emissions. PhD Thesis, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 249 pp.

Eyer, M., 2004: Highly Resolved δ13C Measurements on CO2 in Air from Antarctic Ice Cores. PhD Thesis, University of Bern, 113 pp.

Foster, S., 2004: Reconstruction of Solar Irradiance Variations for Use in Studies of Global Climate Change: Application of Recent SOHO Observations with Historic Data from the Greenwich Observatory. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.

Driesschaert, E., 2005: Climate Change over the Next Millennia Using LOVECLIM, a New Earth System Model Including Polar Ice Sheets. PhD Thesis, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 214 pp, http://edoc.bib.ucl.ac.be:81/ETD-db/collection/available/BelnUcetd-10172005-185914/

Harder, M., 1996: Dynamik, Rauhigkeit und Alter des Meereises in der Arktis. PhD Thesis, Alfred-Wegener-Institut für Polar und Meeresforschung, Bremerhaven, Germany, 124 pp

Jiang, Y.D., 2005: The Northward Shift of Climatic Belts in China during the Last 50 Years, and the Possible Future Changes. PhD Thesis, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, China Academy of Science, Beijing, 137 pp.

Somot, S., 2005: Modélisation Climatique du Bassin Méditerranéen: Variabilité et Scénarios de Changement Climatique. PhD Thesis, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France, 333 pp.

Vérant, S., 2004: Etude des Dépressions sur l’Europe de l’Ouest : Climat Actuel et Changement Climatique. PhD thesis

... and that's just the PhD theses from Working Group 1 ...

Regarding the use of non peer-reviewed documents from Greenpeace, we have:

Aringhoff, R., C. Aubrey, G. Brakmann, and S. Teske, 2003: Solar thermal power 2020, Greenpeace International/European Solar Thermal Power Industry Association, Netherlands

ESTIA, 2004: Exploiting the heat from the sun to combat climate change. European Solar Thermal Industry Association and Greenpeace, Solar Thermal Power 2020, UK

Greenpeace, 2004: http://www.greenpeace.org.ar/cop10ing/SolarGeneration.pdf accessed 05/06/07

Greenpeace, 2006: Solar generation. K. McDonald (ed.), Greenpeace International, Amsterdam

GWEC, 2006: Global wind energy outlook. Global Wind Energy Council, Bruxelles and Greenpeace, Amsterdam, September, 56 pp., accessed 05/06/07

Hoegh-Guldberg, O., H. Hoegh-Guldberg, H. Cesar and A. Timmerman, 2000: Pacific in peril: biological, economic and social impacts of climate change on Pacific coral reefs. Greenpeace, 72 pp.

Lazarus, M., L. Greber, J. Hall, C. Bartels, S. Bernow, E. Hansen, P. Raskin, and D. Von Hippel, 1993: Towards a fossil free energy future: the next energy transition. Stockholm Environment Institute, Boston Center, Boston. Greenpeace International, Amsterdam.

Wind Force 12, 2005: Global Wind Energy Council and Greenpeace, http://www.gwec.net/index.php?id=8, accessed 03/07/07

And regarding non peer-reviewed documents from the WWF, the IPCC used:

Allianz and World Wildlife Fund, 2006: Climate change and the financial sector: an agenda for action, 59 pp.

Austin, G., A. Williams, G. Morris, R. Spalding-Feche, and R. Worthington, 2003: Employment potential of renewable energy in South Africa. Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Denmark, November, 104 pp.

Baker, T., 2005: Vulnerability Assessment of the North-East Atlantic Shelf Marine Ecoregion to Climate Change, Workshop Project Report, WWF, Godalming, Surrey, 79 pp.

Coleman, T., O. Hoegh-Guldberg, D. Karoly, I. Lowe, T. McMichael, C.D. Mitchell, G.I. Pearman, P. Scaife and J. Reynolds, 2004: Climate Change: Solutions for Australia. Australian Climate Group, 35 pp.

Dlugolecki, A. and S. Lafeld, 2005: Climate change – agenda for action: the financial sector’s perspective. Allianz Group and WWF, Munich

Fritsche, U.R., K. Hünecke, A. Hermann, F. Schulze, and K. Wiegmann, 2006: Sustainability standards for bioenergy. Öko-Institut e.V., Darmstadt, WWF Germany, Frankfurt am Main, November

Giannakopoulos, C., M. Bindi, M. Moriondo, P. LeSager and T. Tin, 2005: Climate Change Impacts in the Mediterranean Resulting from a 2oC Global Temperature Rise. WWF report, Gland Switzerland.

Hansen, L.J., J.L. Biringer and J.R. Hoffmann, 2003: Buying Time: A User’s Manual for Building Resistance and Resilience to Climate Change in Natural Systems. WWF Climate Change Program, Berlin, 246 pp.

Lechtenbohmer, S., V. Grimm, D. Mitze, S. Thomas, M. Wissner, 2005: Target 2020: Policies and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the EU. WWF European Policy Office, Wuppertal

Malcolm, J.R., C. Liu, L. Miller, T. Allnut and L. Hansen, Eds., 2002a: Habitats at Risk: Global Warming and Species Loss in Globally Significant Terrestrial Ecosystems. WWF World Wide Fund for Nature, Gland, 40 pp.

Rowell, A. and P.F. Moore, 2000: Global Review of Forest Fires. WWF/IUCN, Gland, Switzerland, 66 pp.

WWF, 2004: Deforestation threatens the cradle of reef diversity. World Wide Fund for Nature, 2 December 2004.

WWF, 2004: Living Planet Report 2004. WWF- World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund), Gland, Switzerland, 44 pp.

WWF (World Wildlife Fund), 2005: An overview of glaciers, glacier retreat, and subsequent impacts in Nepal, India and China. World Wildlife Fund, Nepal Programme, 79 pp.

Zarsky, L. and K. Gallagher, 2003: Searching for the Holy Grail? Making FDI Work for Sustainable Development. Analytical Paper, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Switzerland

I could go on and on, but that will suffice for now. Finally, you have asked for the exact statistics on the use of non-peer reviewed studies in the IPCC report. They are here.

What causes the tropospheric hot spot?

Peter Hogarth at 08:12 AM on 29 June, 2010

One of the issues at the heart of the matter is the trend differences between UAH and RSS satellite temperature estimates for the tropical lower and mid troposphere, both based on the MSU (microwave soundings) raw data from various satellites.

Santer 2008 uses data from 1979 to 2000, Bengtsson 2009 uses a similar methodology with (Ocean only) satellite data updated to 2008, and I have updated the satellite trend values to current, with the latest UAH LT5.3 data. All trend value are degrees C per decade.

Santers analysis of the satellite trends and surface temperature and Radiosonde trends to 2000 pointed to a much reduced discrepancy between observations and model outputs than found previously (see figure below). He also suggests where models may be lacking.

Bengtsson 2009 follows on from this but uses the later lower trend values. Based on these and a modeling/statistical approach, the probability of the satellite temperature trends being due to natural causes is given as 27% for the UAH measurements and 2.5% for the RSS measurements. Maybe reasonable odds, but not “robust” yet except perhaps in the case of the RSS trend.

Bengtsson also argues that the UAH values are closer to observed SST, but conversely Santer 2008 suggests the RSS values are closer to other global temperature series, and other interpretations of the MSU raw data. This relatively small RSS/UAH difference weighs heavily.

Bengtsson concludes “Observed and re-analyzed lapse rate trends are all positive and for the period 1979-2008 well outside the range of natural variability”, but in terms of temperature trends, “The present 30-years of tropospheric temperature observations are still insufficient to identify robust trends as the internal variability of realistic climate models is larger than the observed trends”

Has the situation changed since 2008/2009?

A little. The UAH/RSS divergence has reduced with the latest revisions and data, the RSS trend values are slightly lower but the revised UAH tropical trend values have increased (I should mention UAH global trends did not change with the update) so that they are higher than in Santers original analysis. As the trends have continued (ie troposheric temperatures have continued to rise) we would expect that the updated 2010 data will push further towards (rather than away from) any statistically robust result.

The following image is from Santer 2008 and summarises the story of the models and measurements as at 2008 quite nicely.

If you view the JoNova post linked in the article you will see a related but older chart from Santer 2005, which supports the idea of significant divergence despite Jo citing the later 2008 paper in which Santer argues otherwise. Likewise her second figure should be updated in line with more recent work, as science has moved on.

I also have serious concerns about the one later reference which Jo uses (Paltridge 2009) to support a view that tropospheric relative humidity is falling. This is at odds with the conclusions of the bulk of recent papers I have read, and Paltridge himself states “It is accepted that radiosonde-derived humidity data must be treated with great caution” the data is single source (NCEP) re-analysis.

As well as Sherwood 2010a listed earlier, and evidence from Sherwood 2010b, he has also completed a recent review of independent work examining tropospheric water vapour using multiple data sets from several types of sensor Sherwood 2010c which adds a more thoroughly referenced and wide perspective on Tropospheric water vapour:

“Thus, all primary data sets support the conclusion that water vapor mixing ratios in the troposphere are increasing at roughly the rate expected from the Clausius-Clapeyron equation. Although a few analyses have found otherwise, these relied on secondary data sets that are less suitable for quantifying trends”.

What causes the tropospheric hot spot?

Peter Hogarth at 00:05 AM on 28 June, 2010

To add further information to Johns explanation, there is also another paper on this topic by Santer 2008, and a highly accessible fact sheet that goes with it. Santer also covers some aspects of this debate (and others) in his May 2010 Testimony for House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. He concludes that the discrepancy between modeling and observations has largely been resolved.

The expanding nature of our knowledge of both natural climate change processes in the tropics and of the complexity of effects of anthropogenic forcing and warming on these processes is further illustrated in Sherwood 2010 on the effects of tropospheric humidity changes and polewards shifts of atmospheric zones; Seidel 2007 on observed and modeled widening of the tropical belt, and in Chou 2010 on observed and modeled weakening of the tropical atmospheric circulation. All of these and many more strands of emerging evidence add to the robust global climate trends which are already generally accepted and appear consistent with global warming associated with a major CO2 forcing component.

Are we too stupid?

chris at 04:22 AM on 7 April, 2010

Jacob, I'm not dismissing game theory and certainly not dismissing experiments (which I spend much of my life doing!). I'm pointing out that one doesn't need game theory to address the problems that require collective solutions. To give an example, whether or not game theory is studied by political scientists, the fact remains that (with reference to the collective effort to address CFC ozone desruction, for example):

(i) scientific analysis demonstrated that stratospheric ozone was subject to catalytic destruction by man made chlorofluorocarbons.

(ii) scientific analysis informed understanding of the consequences of stratospheric ozone depletion.

(iii) following the US Natl. Acad. Sci. report of 1976, and via the subsequent Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol (and aided no doubt by the discovery/invention of non-damaging CFC-alternatives), colective agreements amongst the main CFC-producing countries were made to freeze, and then reduce, CFC production and release.

I don't really see that game theory had much of an impact on that process.

I don't think this is a big issue, and it's not really worth arguing over, but I do think one needs to be careful not to lose the bigger picture by focussing on game theories, however interesting (and potentially applicable to other human interactions). The real issue IMO in relation to the politics and policy of collective solutions is education and reliable dissemination of the science.

On libertarianism..... it's apparent that those forms of libertarianism (especially prevalent in the US) that eschew all forms of government intervention, and/or that consider self-interest the ultimate driver of an ideal society, find it difficult (tending to impossible!) to accommodate the sorts of collective solutions to problems that are required for addressing protection of the most all-pervading elements of "the commons" (i.e. the oceans and especially the atmosphere).

Again one doesn't need "game theory" to argue that. As I said, I'm speaking of the "more robust" forms of libertarianism as indicated in the paragraph just above. In my understanding, there are forms of libertarianism that embrace collective solutions on a small scale....perhaps we need such a libertarian to let us know whether the extension of this to collective efforts on the national and inter-national scale required to address global warming (say) can be accommodated within a libertarian philosophy!

CO2 is not a pollutant

Tom Dayton at 10:14 AM on 29 March, 2010

This comment is my response to a question by gallopingcamel on another thread. This topic is off-topic for that thread, so I'm responding in this thread.

The Duke FACE experiment (Free-Air CO2 Enrichment) of artificially fertilizing trees with CO2 is an important one. Its results are consistent with other experiments on other plants: Plants' growth is limited by whichever nutrient or other condition is in shortest supply or detrimentally high supply, or by inherent physiological limits. A plant whose growth is limited by water supply isn't going to grow more if you give it more CO2, or more sunlight, or more soil nutrients. If initially the CO2 supply is the limiting factor, then giving the plant CO2 will let it grow faster only until some other factor that was sufficient for the previous growth rate becomes the bottleneck for the higher growth rate. Farmers and gardeners know this, which is why they don't waste money by giving plants too much of any one thing. Even greenhouses whose air is spiked with CO2 don't have 100% CO2 atmospheres.

"Detrimental conditions" include temperatures that are too high. Even if a plant has sufficient other nutrients and conditions to allow it to take advantage of extra CO2 to grow more, if that CO2 is accompanied by higher temperature, the temperature can slow growth. The net growth then will depend on the balance of the enhancement from CO2 and the detriment from temperature.

But even if you keep all the nutrients and conditions in synch, there are inherent physiologic limits to growth rate. All plants in the world today have evolved for, or been bred for, approximately the current CO2 levels. There was no survival advantage of being able to use more CO2 than was available.

Not all plants respond the same to increased CO2 levels. For example, the Aspen FACE experiment (different from the Duke pine tree FACE experiment) found that "aspen grow much faster in response to elevated carbon dioxide, [but] similar effects have not been observed in other trees species, notably oak and pine."

And aspen in moist soil take advantage of additional CO2 by growing faster, but aspen in dry soil do not. In contrast, loblolly pines react oppositely: They grow more with extra CO2 only during dry years, not during normal or wet years.

The bottom line is that

"Forests will continue to be important to soak up anthropogenic carbon dioxide," says [the aspen FACE experiment's] Waller. "But we can't conclude that aspen forests are going to soak up excess carbon dioxide. This is going to plateau."

"Aspens are already doing their best to mitigate our inputs," agrees Cole. "The existing trees are going to max out in a couple of decades."

The Duke pine FACE experiment's Schlesinger said:

Based on available evidence from the Duke experiment, “I’d be surprised if the forests of the world will take up more than one-third of the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions in the year 2050, which is what our experiment simulates,” he predicted.

More information on biologic carbon sequestration, with a number of links to even more info, can be found on an EPA page. Wikipedia has a broader page.

The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism

chris1204 at 15:31 PM on 17 March, 2010

I confess I found the paper a touch simplistic in that it fails to recognise the complexities of human responses to unpalatable realities.

In fairness, much of what the paper describes I encounter daily in my work as a medicolegal specialist reading reports by colleagues who act as 'guns for hire.' The motivation here is all too easy to discern.

I would point out further that in this particular arena my professional body has been singularly unsuccessful in policing the activities of rogue experts. In this setting, the 'peer review' process has failed dismally.

However, when it comes to an issue like AGW, many who take sides in the debates have overtly nothing personally to gain or lose. However, the sheer fervour with which the two sides advance their positions does sometimes leave me shaking my head (which is not to deny the importance of the issue). I feel for some people the issue taps into deep seated needs for a belief system in a world which has discarded spirituality.

Equally, there are those on both sides of the divide who seem driven by a need to be noticed. In taking their strident stance, they fill a relational void in their lives.

The latter two mechanisms can be seen in a range of fields of human endeavour - not merely the 'warmist/denialist' arena.

The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate

JonMoseley at 13:40 PM on 16 February, 2010

macoles demonstrates the D-K effect of global warming proponents in post 7, stating: "Thankfully it is not necessary to do this, as one can visually see that the localised Mauna Loa data matches well with the more contemporary global data that has been available since 1980,"

Again, more circular reasoning. If you can measure CO2 around the world, why are you relying on only one spot on the Earth as a data set? If you cannot

The heart and soul of science is the Scientific Method. This separates REAL scientists from alchemists, shamans, and witch doctors.

The Scientific Method depends upon REPEATABLE experiments, repeated by UNBIASED observers, in MULTIPLE LOCATIONS under VARYING CONDITIONS.

How many principles of the revered Scientific Method are violated by this global warming myth?

It is a fundamental principle of real science that any measurement or observation or experiment MUST be performed under varying conditions at different locations by different people, all of whom are unbiased.

Even if you imagine that there are no factors influencing the measurements, you cannot possibly know that for certain. Thus it is a fundamental requirement for genuine science that NO measurement can ever be valid if taken in only one location.

The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate

Doug Bostrom at 10:06 AM on 16 February, 2010

David Horton at 08:59 AM on 16 February, 2010

Cook not Cole, Cook not Cole....

Where did I get "Cole", anyway?

Thanks!

The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate

David Horton at 08:59 AM on 16 February, 2010

#42 Doug Bostrom write out 100 times "It is John Cook not John Cole".

Haven't you done this before?

The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate

Doug Bostrom at 07:39 AM on 16 February, 2010

rmbraun123

I think you're looking for a response directly from John Cole, but with regard to your observation about the preponderance of arguments it is necessarily a tautology.

When one sums up the various lines of scientific inquiry relevant to climate change, there is an overwhelming trend in the direction of support for the basic hypothesis. Researchers attacking this problem from numerous directions are ineluctably lead to the same place because of realities they encounter. Discussions and articles here will necessarily reflect this fact, lacking as we do much of anything in the way of robust arguments against the basic hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change.

The role of stratospheric water vapor in global warming

chris at 08:55 AM on 2 February, 2010

I haven't read Solomon et al so I'm not going to make any specific comments.

However at face value the paper (as paraphrased here) seems to be yet another reason to be concerned about the massive release of greenhouse gases. Right now there seems to be a number of contributions "piling up" that should be causing significant cooling:

(i) 2003-2009 the sun has dropped to the bottom of the solar cycle (this should contribute around -0.1 oC of to the surface temperature over this period).

(ii) 1980's to present: a slow (and rather small) negaitve trend in solar output (-0.05 oC?)

(iii) Since around 1998; apparently the oceans have switched regimes to one with a cooling influence on the surface temperature (negative phase of the PDO). This might contribute around -0.1 oC relative to the long term ocean regime trend (which is zero).

(iv) Stratospheric water vapour effect (see top article) which according to Solomon has reduced warming in the period 2000-2009 by 25% (so around -0.05 oC say).

And yet 2009 was tied for the second warmest year on record. So if all of these contributions are real (and we are at least pretty confident about the solar cycle contribution)....they have been unable, colectively, to outweigh the warming contribution from enhanced greenhouse forcing...

Temp record is unreliable

Tom Dayton at 06:21 AM on 18 January, 2010

Gavin Schmidt has a brief response to the Smith & Coleman bizarre claims that the "real" temperature stations' data have been replaced by averages of unrepresentative stations' data, and that data have been destroyed. Gavin's response is to Leanan's comment #9 on 17 January 2010 in the comments on the RealClimate post 2009 Temperatures by Jim Hansen.

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