Here’s an example of SciComm Pollution — an article that leaves the world slightly less enlightened than they would have been had it not existed. It’s also proof that the media blackout works so well that even theoretically educated people like, say, an archaeologist, are unaware of basic uncontroversial scientific truths. Here’s Michael Berry, in the Salt Lake Tribune, having trouble reasoning, missing the point, being fully a decade out of date, and acting unwittingly as a public relations agent for a giant bureaucracy.
He tries to claim Senator Orrin Hatch and The Skeptics Handbook are wrong on the Vostok ice cores.
“He (Hatch) then misinterprets the 420,000 years of glacial and interglacial stages to indicate that temperature is the forcing factor for rises in CO2, reversing the actual causal mechanism.”
Here, Berry gets it 100% wrong. Temperature is the forcing factor, and even the IPCC agrees. Senator Hatch is referring to the way carbon rises and falls after temperatures in ice core records. Berry implies that Hatch “misinterprets” two lines that clearly rise and fall with an obvious lag. Instead it’s Berry who misinterprets the graph. Carbon can’t control temperature from 800 years in the future.
Little does Berry realize that the oceans store a vast 38,000 Gt of carbon, fifty times as much as the atmosphere, and that basic laws of solubility mean that when the oceans warm, they release carbon; when oceans cool, they absorb it back. Thus a temperature rise is causal, and it takes hundreds of years to fully unleash or absorb the carbon, probably because it also takes hundreds of years to turn over the deepest darkest corners of the deep blue sea.
I don’t know the actual source of Hatch’s argument, but the model he ascribes to is identical to that proffered in Joanne Nova’s Skeptic’s Handbook , a well-debunked publication aimed at a right-wing audience. The Hatch-Nova argument implies that IPCC scientists were unaware of the Vostok data. However, a reading of the 2007 IPPC Synthesis Report shows they did incorporate the data in their considerations and these data gave strong support to their conclusions.
If Berry had done ten minutes of research…
If Berry had done ten minutes of research, he would have found out that the data from the Vostok Ice Cores repeatedly and definitively shows that carbon follows temperature, and doesn’t lead it, and that it’s been known for 10 years. It’s been analyzed many different ways, and all of them conclude that the lag is hundreds of years. Hundreds, and sometimes thousands. I’m guessing Berry just read one of the debunkings of the Skeptics Handbook, and hasn’t actually read the Handbook or my rebuttal. As usual, those who like to attack it don’t want to show you the graphs they attack, where it would be obvious that they speak global gibberish.
See all the graphs on this page.
Berry implies there’s some model I use, but all I’ve done is graph the two lines from the original data. You don’t need tricky maths to figure out that temperature rises first. Naked eyes work just fine when the data is displayed in enough detail.
Here are some of the scientific papers supporting this:
- Petit et all 1999 — analysed 420,000 years of Vostok, and found that as the world cools into an ice age, the delay before carbon begins to fall is several thousand years.
- Fischer et al 1999 — described a lag of 600 plus or minus 400 years as the world warms up from an ice age.
- Monnin et al 2001 – looked at Dome Concordia (also in Antarctica) and found a delay on the recent rise out of the last major ice age to be 800 ± 600 years
- Mudelsee (2001) – Over the full 420,000 year Vostok history Co2 variations lag temperature by 1,300 ± 1000 years.
- Caillon et al 2003 analysed the Vostok data and found a lag (where CO2 rises after temperature) of 800 ± 200 years.
The extraordinary media blackout: don’t mention the ice core lag
Instead the vast gap in news coverage can’t be repaired now, six years after the fact. As people find out what they weren’t told, there can be no hiding that the media has censored our news.
If the media had bothered reporting the news as it came out, from 1999-2003 — that temperature strongly drives carbon, and not the reverse — this non-controversial, well established, scientific point, would not catch people like Berry completely by surprise. Commentators would have some idea that the IPCC-spun-versions are not as robust as they appear. Instead the vast gap in news coverage can’t be repaired now, six years after the fact. As people find out what they weren’t told, there can be no hiding that the media has censored our news.
The IPCC broadcasts that there is “amplification”, but whether it’s important or significant is unsubstantiated speculation.
Even the IPCC admit that temperature drives carbon in the ice cores. They argue that once the carbon is unleashed, it provides feedback to amplify the temperature rise. At one stage alarmist scientists offered analysis to suggest there really was amplification, but closer examination showed they had a signal analysis error and had mistaken aliasing for an amplification signal. The same analysis, done properly, pretty much rules out any significant amplification.
In the ice cores, temperatures rises first and falls first. If there was strong amplification, Earth would have headed into a runaway boiling heat-ball millions of years ago.
- See Palisad for the most informative detailed graphics on what the Vostok and Dome Ice cores mean and why they strongly mathematically suggest CO2 follows temperatures and has little effect on them.This is what you need to see to understand “feedback” or the postulated “amplification”.
Sloppy writing: sloppy thinking
Notice too, there’s the usual sloppy writing: the Handbook is apparently…”aimed at a right-wing audience” (as if that is something bad, and as if there is any way he could know who it’s aimed at, since he is not in my head, and I’ve never said anything like that). The Handbook is aimed at anyone who can read and doesn’t have a religious belief in the enhanced greenhouse effect — about 90% of the population.
Note to Berry: If you know of a single significant flaw or inaccuracy in the Skeptics Handbook, email me here and I’ll issue a correction publicly. The Handbook has been out for 12 months, it’s been read by at least one Professor of Climate Modelling (who would rather I didn’t publish his critiscm, presumably because it’s so inadequate). Desmog and Deltoid tried and failed to find any logical or factual errors, and neither will publish any of the graphs I use. Real Climate has pointedly remained silent. Do you suppose they would have let anyone get away with a mistake if they could find one?
I wish people would write more carefully. Every person that puts up information on the web that is unresearched, not thought through, or out of date, is just issuing more science communication pollution. A bit more mess for the few unpaid people like me to clean up. They pick poor sources to read, then propagate the unreason.
I would have politely emailed him off line, but can’t find any comments box or email address (let me know if anyone finds one, I’m sure the they’ll be keen to get the info right eh, and make that apology to the good Senator?)
UPDATE: A Michael Berry has responded below at #12. It may be the Michael Berry, but it’s not confirmed.
[…] neither will publish any of the graphs I use. Real Climate has pointedly remained silent…" A spot of science-communication pollution « JoNova __________________ ………… …just some thoughts from a nomadic plebeian Bio – […]
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Please, Jo, don’t allow your self to be drawn into the Orwellian trap of allowing your language to be changed by the alarmists’ debating tactics. Do not say “carbon” when referring to “carbon dioxide”. This relabelling of everyone and everything is insidious, and we must fight it.
Keep up the good work!
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theoldhogger,
The change in language is more Orwellian than you suspect. Humans are carbon based life forms. The AWG gang hate being human and anything that relates to being human, hence their antipathy for carbon produced by human action and especially when it is in human form.
That being said, I agree, we must choose the language of discourse. If we allow the opposition to choose the words of discussion, they will equivocate in mid argumentation and declare themselves the good and we the evil.
For evidence see the alternation from panic about global cooling, global warming, and climate change. The interesting thing is that any climate change can be charged to the *climate-change* panic. There is no evidence possible to go against it and every thing supports it. The blank out pea under the cup is that ANY change is presumed to be man caused and is therefor evil. The exact same change caused by nature is and unadulterated good. They have work to have it both ways by using shape shifter words.
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Not for an instant. Gavin isn’t the “look the other way” sort of fellow. He’s rarely “accidentally” silent, though he sometimes makes skeptic blog appearances under pseudonym.
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If you believe “co2isnotevil” George, the deepest darkest corners of the deep blue sea are barely above zero decrees C at all times, regardless of atmospheric conditions. His logic is pretty solid: you have ice on the poles and the ice melt goes straight down to the bottom of the ocean.
Of course, the surface layer of the ocean can indeed warm and cool.
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Tel, it’s my understanding that the conveyor belts of the oceanic currents slowly turn over even that deep water. It may well be 0 degrees. But if it takes years to rise to the top it has time to warm up a bit. Thus it can come to the top and reach a new CO2 equilibrium point with the atmosphere. If the air has changed composition since the last time that water was on the surface, or the surface is a different temperature, it will release or absorb CO2.
It’s in the order of 1000 years
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Hello Joanne,
Perhaps this is the same Michael Berry who works for the U.S. Department of the Interior – Upper Colorado Region out of Salt Lake City.
http://www.usbr.gov/cultural/crmstaff.html
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Thanks for your work Don. (I’ve copied it but thought I should not keep the address up there in case it’s not the right one.)
An offline emailler tells me there is an official Salt Lake Tribune contact page. Thanks Rod. Lets use that. If we still hear nothing I’ll follow up Don’s lead…
Salt Lake Tribune Contact
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Great Job Joanne! Senator Hatch just proves that most of the Senators in Congress “do not” read the bills nor the research..Of course, that takes time…It doesn’t take much time to “increase taxes” on People! Politicians think, “No, we just tax Corporations”. I say, “Do you really think Corporations are going to eat this tax”? Nope, the “Stockholders” say pass it on to the “Consumer”. So it goes! America is already in deep trouble with the “Devaluated Dollar”. China is “Gobbling” up Gold as if it’s candy..because the “Free World” has helped them to do so.. If both Bills in Congress are passed…I really don’t want to comment on that, for now..
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Joanne
Should that be How Berry…….
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That line was a bit ambiguous. So I’ve made it clearer. Thanks for pointing it out Alan.
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Joanne,
Nice little club you have built. I take it you didn’t understand my critique of the Hatch letter. That’s OK. You and Rush Limbaugh have your audiences to maintain. You’re much better looking than Rush. May you succeed in replacing him.
Mike
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Shucks Michael,
Apology accepted.
The compliments were really unnecessary. Rush!
That’s very sweet of you,
Joanne
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Joanne Nova – “If Berry had done ten minutes of research, he would have found out that the data from the Vostok Ice Cores repeatedly and definitively shows that carbon follows temperature, and doesn’t lead it, and that it’s been known for 10 years.
How sad for you then that this was predicted well before.
In a 1990 paper – The ice-core record: climate sensitivity and future greenhouse warming by Claude Lorius (co-authored by James Hansen):
This was published over a decade before ice core records were accurate enough to confirm a CO2 lag.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1990/1990_Lorius_etal.pdf
“Changes in the CO2 and CH4 content have played a significant part in the glacial-interglacial climate changes by amplifying, together with the growth and decay of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, the relatively weak orbital forcing”
In a nutshell, if you push on the climate system with a non-CO2 input then the climate system’s orbit changes and CO2 and the other
feedbacks follow. If you push on the climate system with CO2, it must necessarily lead, the orbit changes and the other feedbacks follow.
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Damien McCormick @ 14: If you push on the climate system with CO2, it must necessarily lead, the orbit changes and the other feedbacks follow.
There are three problems with that. First, the temperature and CO2 level are incommensurate – have different units of measure. Second, one cannot tell the phase relationship between two incommensurate variables without looking at multiple cycles of their co-variation. The third problem, and this one is the biggie, human caused increase in CO2 levels have had far less than one full cycle.
It follows that, even if there is a co-variation between temperature and CO2 level, there is insufficient data to determine lead OR lag. Interestingly, without considering lead or lag, there is a very poor co-variation observed between the two variates during the time AGW is said to be operative. ie. the CO2 level has been increasing at a more or less constant rate for a decade and the temperature has not. In fact, the temperature appears to be dropping.
You can say CO2 is driving the temperature but the data is insufficient to prove it is likely to be happening let alone proving that it is. On the other hand, the data does exist that proves that temperature drives CO2 level that spans many tens of thousands of years BECAUSE there are several cycles of evidence.
Like the old QC poster says: “In God we trust, all others must bring data.” However, I am an atheist so I don’t even trust God. He too must bring data and stand in line for it to be analyzed.
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Joanne Nova – Here are some of the scientific papers supporting this: Caillon et al 2003 analysed the Vostok data and found a lag (where CO2 rises after temperature) of 800 ± 200 years.
Lol, did you as actually READ Caillon et al 2003 Joanne? You don’t want to be hung by your own references, do you?
“The sequence of events is in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its Greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the intitial orbital forcing.” – Hmmm, we’re have we heard that before. Lorius et al 1990?
“Finally, the situation at Termination III differs from the recent Anthropgenic CO2 increase.” — Got that Joanne?
“We should distinguish between internal influences (such as deglacial CO2 increase) and external influences (such as Anthropogenic CO2 increase) on the climate system” — Got that Joanne?
“Although the recent CO2 increase has clearly been imposed first, as a result of anthropogenic activities, it naturally takes, at Termination III, some time for CO2 to outgas from the ocean once it starts to react to a climate change that is first felt in the
atmosphere.” — hence the lag you see in the ice cores predicted by Hansen and Lorius 1990. Undertsand Joanne?
“The sequence of events during this Termination is fully consistent with CO2 participating in the latter 4200 years of the warming. The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing, which is then further amplified by fast atmospheric feedbacks (39) that are also at work for the presentday and future climate.”
So what all this means in laymens terms is – If you push on the climate system with a non-CO2 input then the climate system’s orbit changes and CO2 and the other feedbacks follow. If you push on the climate system with CO2, it must necessarily lead, the orbit changes and the other feedbacks follow.
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Damien #16
I will freely admit I didn’t a read Caillon carefully beyond the summary just under the author’s names, but the summary says:
“The analysis of air bubbles from ice cores has yielded a precise record of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, but the timing of changes in these gases with respect to temperature is not accurately known because of uncertainty in the gas age–ice age difference. We have measured the isotopic composition of argon in air bubbles in the Vostok core during Termination III (±240,000 years before the present). This record most likely reflects the temperature and accumulation change, although the mechanism remains unclear. The sequence of events during Termination III suggests that the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 and 200 years and preceded the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation.”
That seems reasonably clear to me. The last paragraph you quote seems to be a theory (escape route) to show CO2 may react differently under other circumstances, i.e if it is “anthropogenic CO2” — whatever that is. I always thought CO2 was CO2, but then I was working nights during my chemistry and physics classes so I may have dozed off at the wrong time.
Any reading other than that leads to the conclusion that Caillon doesn’t even know how to summarize his own research. Got it?
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Lionells Failed Damage Control – You can say CO2 is driving the temperature but the data is insufficient to prove it is
Do you have a comprehension problem reading the referenced papers Lionell?
CO2 can either lead or lag depending on what is doing the initial driving. But in either case – whether the source of the CO2 is from outgassing by the oceans during orbital forcing or whether the source is direct anthropogenic CO2 release – increasing CO2 will increase temperatures.
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Hot Rod – That seems reasonably clear to me.
Wonderful, so you understand the general pattern of interglacials – a rise in temperature from the glacial period (through increased solar insolation from changing orbital characteristics), followed by an overshoot of sustainable temperatures caused by outgassing of CO2 from the oceans, and then a gradual noisy decline in global temperaturess until the next ice age is triggered again by natural cycles in the earth’s orbital/rotational characteristics.
Like today, CO2 was in the driver seat during the overshoot at the end of each glacial cycle, and the claim that warming preceeds CO2 level rise in the ice cores is EXACTLY WHAT SCIENCE EXPECTS to see (as you can read in the referenced papers here).
And so you now understand that the belief that this somehow invalidates the fact that higher levels of CO2 causes warming, is nothing more than pathetic Childish ignorance.
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Damien McCormick @ 18: Lionell’s Failed Damage Control
The extended and sufficiently resolved in time evidence shows CO2 levels lag temperature. Effect follows from cause. Hence, increasing CO2 CANNOT be the cause of rising temperature. QED! End of AGW (Climate Change) panic.
You could cite tens of thousands of papers that say otherwise but that would mean nothing. They are in contradiction to the laws of causality and of evidence. References are not evidence. Papers are not evidence. Pronouncements of auspicious bodies with countless honorable authorities is not evidence. Assertion by everyone on earth is not evidence. Pile such things as deeply as you wish. You will not have shown the evidence that increasing the level of CO2 increases temperature.
I have shown that you cannot determine a lead-lag relationship between two incommensurate variables without observing more than one full cycle of the relationship. Hence, ANY attempt to deduce a causal relationship between increasing CO2 (as the cause) and global temperature (the effect) since the little ice age is not and cannot be valid. We are dealing here with only part of the first half of a cycle. Substantially less than the multiple cycle requirement to establish that the rise in CO2 leads the rise in global temperature. Hence, your hypothesis of CO2 the cause and temperature the effect is unsupported.
Mumbling that some way exists that increasing CO2 increases global temperature is inadmissible. You must show the mechanism to do it in great detail and you must show that it is operative in the specific instance. You have not done this largely because you cannot.
Now it is interesting that when you go beyond the AGW sacred time boundaries, the evidence is quite contrary to the AGW (climate Change) sacred assertions. CO2 level lags global temperature. Current temperatures and rates of increase/decrease are quite ordinary. Ditto for all the other catastrophic effects of *GLOBAL WARMING* are quite ordinary in full context. All of this is repeatedly shown on this blog site and countless other sources. It is totally and absolutely irrelevant that you don’t approve of the sources. Dropping context doesn’t work either. Drop context all you wish, it still exists and is highly relevant. We must judge current climate in context of the full history of the climate on earth and not just a highly distorted view (see the various hockey stick charts) the past few hundred years.
Now for some basic science.
A co-relation is neither evidence for or proof of cause and effect. Even if a causal connection exists it does not show the direction of cause and effect. A co-relation of one leading and another lagging is also not proof of cause. They could be effects of a common causal chain with differing lag factors. If a causal connection exists, it shows the leading factor is involved with the cause or may be the cause of the lagging factor. It does not prove which.
To show a direct causal connection one must show the lead-lag relationship between the factors. One must also show the mechanism behind that cause and effect relationship. However, the causal connection is still not proved. You still need to show that the specific mechanism is specifically at work producing the lead-lag relationship. We have shown it for our position. You have not even begun to show it for your position. Your position is unsupported and unsupportable.
Either stand and deliver or listen and learn.
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Poor confused Lionell – The extended and sufficiently resolved in time evidence shows CO2 levels lag temperature.
Hence, increasing CO2 CANNOT be the cause of rising temperature. blah blah blah … contradiction to the laws of causality and of evidence … blah blah blah …
Poor confused Lionell is determined to make himself look silly.
Am I going to have to spoon feed him like a baby?
I guess so.
Behold. Glacial to Interglacial for Dummies.
Now of course, this is very brief and simplified for the benefit of poor confused Lionell, but you should get the general drift. For more detail, read the referenced papers in this thread.
Step 1 – Glacial – earth in ice age, e.g. Seattle, New York amognst many other NH places under ice sheets …
Step 2 – Orbital charachteristics slowly change increasing solar insolation in the NH.
Step 3 – This change in solar insolation at the earth’s surface cause the temperature to rise from the glacial state in which much of the atmospheric CO2 has been absorbed into the ocean.
Step 4 – As the ice melts, more ocean is exposed, increasing the rate of melt and raising ocean temperatures slowly as a result of the influx of glacial meltwater into the ocean.
Step 5 – At some point that melt water decreases in volume and the ocean begins to warm reasonably rapidly.
Step 6 – Because of the rising temperature of the ocean the CO2 stored within, begins to outgas, causing more IR to be trapped and enhancing the rate of warming even more.
Step 7 – The warming of the ocean overshoots the temperature that is sustainable and as CO2 levels decline – absorbed by plantlife, the surface temperature of the earth begins it’s decline from overshoot back to a level that will eventually trigger the next glacial cycle.
So as you can see, poor confused Lionell. The ice core record – records these events very clearly. Melting causing a release of Carbon from the Ocean – after a delay of several hundred years while the ocean warms – followed by an overshoot and a slow decline in surfact temps.
Your claim of contradiction to the laws of causality are just pathetically ignorant and just parade a lack of understanding of climate change events.
To help alleviate your confusion, you could think of our current scenario this way. We have just began a warming process from step 6, except the source of CO2 is from fossil fuels instead of the ocean. But in either case, more CO2 leads to wamer temperatures.
I hope you understand now, poor confused Lionell, how laughable your – temps lead CO2 – argument is.
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Damien McCormick @ 21,
All you have done is agree with me that temperature leads the level of CO2 up to step 6. In Step 6, you have specified a mechanism of how CO2 increases temperature. You have not shown that said mechanism is at work and sufficient to cause the magnitude of effects you say it causes. Step 7 is a projection of Step 6. Its correctness depends, in part, upon Step 6 being correct AND also depends upon there being no other drivers in the system to cause the climate oscillation between ice world and warm world.
I can name four major drivers other than man’s exhaling CO2: the sun, the earth’s orbit about the sun, the solar system’s orbit about the galaxy, and cosmic rays modulated by the other three. All of which can be shown to have a far more profound effect upon climate than an almost insignificant amount of CO2. You have a lot more work to do before your argument holds any degree of substantiation (pun intended).
In the final analysis, the observation that CO2 level lags temperature over more than one ice-warm-ice cycle is evidence of the direction of causality. Everything else that relates to CO2 is nothing but interactions with the other drivers and modulates only the edges.
Even if you can’t understand the lead-lag argument about the direction of causality, CO2 cannot be the cause of temperature no matter what kind of unsubstantiated fantastical argument you contrive. Heat is the ONLY cause of temperature. CO2 is not heat. If it absorbs or loses heat, its simply equilibrating with its environment. The heat must come from somewhere else. Oh lets see, maybe the SUN or, to a lessor degree, the atomic reactions within the core of the earth. I suggest looking at how those sources of heat energy interact with the climate system rather than blaming it all on what is slightly over a trace gas in our atmosphere.
It is clear that you make light of the law of contradiction and law of causality. You apparently think they are irrelevant to climate events. That is very inconvenient for you because finding a contradiction is our primary way to discover error. You therefore cannot discover errors in your thinking. Knowing that a cause creates effect in that time sequence protects you from confusing causes and effects. This further protects you from error. Why is it such a challenge to you that you might find an error in your thinking?
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Here’s the 2 Minute summary for readers who don’t have time to waste reading mocking comments from those who are too delusional or dishonest to admit when they’re wrong.
1. Michael Berry has made no reasonable attempt to defend himself. He publicly declared Hatch and I are wrong but we have peer reviewed articles to back us. He has nothing to suggest the contrary. Ergo my conclusion that it is uncontroversial and definitively known that temp rises before CO2 is correct. If he had high ethical standards, he would retract his erroneous claims and apologize.
2. Note the rude teenage condescending mocking from Damien McCormick – this is a classic example of the bullying in the debate. We talk evidence, they blubber and throw insults.
3. Note Damien tries to quote peer reviewed articles, but the quotes he provides are just wallpaper. They don’t show Hatch or I are wrong. Though they are usually good examples of how the peer review process is corrupted. For example, there is no evidence in the Caillon paper that supports the amplification, referred to in vague PR spun terms below below:
So the Caillon paper doesn’t disagree with an idea someone has. A wish-washy conclusion if ever there was one. There is simply no evidence for or against the idea of amplification in the ice cores, hence the notion remains a speculative theory.
One can only ponder that they were encouraged to include this baseless speculation as a form of necessary caveat in order to be published. There is nothing in the paper that supports this, yet they felt, or were forced to put this line in. (My emphasis added in the quotes to show the weasel words that betray just how meaningless they are).
May serve…. or MAY not… so what?
So it’s “consistent” with CO2 “participating”. Knock us down with that definitive cloud of nothingness.
Which is not what we were talking about but helps the skeptical case anyway. Co2 has gone off the scale of the last 500,000 years, yet temperatures haven’t. Thanks for contributing another piece of evidence that CO2 doesn’t make as much difference as Unskeptical Scientists claim it does. Radiative absorption happens at the speed of light, yet we see nothing much, just theories of why there is a mythical delay. We should already have seen more warming than we have if CO2 is as powerful as some claim.
Sure CO2 is a forcing as well as a feedback, we don’t disagree, but you still offer no evidence that it’s a major forcing.
Once again, not only have the nails been hammered into the coffin of Damiens-ability-to-reason but it’s been cremated, the eulogy read and the wake long gone. If only he had a few manners to redeem some value from his contributions.
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AGW tunnel vision causes many to believe that the ‘amplification’ seen in the ice cores is caused by CO2. In fact, it’s caused by reduced albedo caused by melting ice. Less ice means less reflected energy and more solar energy entering the system. This amplification effect is at it’s largest during the transition between ice ages and interglacials, which is exactly what the ice cores are telling us. At minimum ice (during interglacials) and maximum ice (during glacial epochs), it gets a lot harder to melt more ice or make more ice and the effect of this feedback is minimized.
BTW, melting ice produces cold water and doesn’t warm the oceans, it actually cools them. The average ocean temperature at the surface (where melted ice ends up), even at the depths of an ice age, is significantly above 0C.
I also don’t think that there is much, if any, upwelling from the deep ocean to the surface. The temperature profile of the ocean is driven by density. Other than a massive underwater volcano, it’s pretty hard to overcome the density profile. There’s a small flux of rising water caused by deep ocean heating, either by vents or just by internal heat reaching the ocean bottom. This heats water which rises, which is then replenished by cold water sinking at the poles. There’s also a small heating effect from above, as the thermocline, while acting as a layer of insulation between deep ocean cold and warm surface waters is not a perfect insulator. BTW, if you look at the temperature profile of the ocean, the inflection points which define the thermocline clearly indicates that the thermocline acts as a layer of insulation. Consider what the temperature profile through an insulated wall separating the cold outside (deep ocean) from a warm inside (warm surface waters) looks like. Where are the inflection points in the temperature gradient between the inside and the outside?
George
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http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1990/1990_Lorius_etal.pdf
Emphasis is mine, highlighting the most obvious point that the longest time constant Lorius expected was a century, and shorter time constants also seemed plausible. This was not a prediction of an 800 year time lag.
A more subtle point is that phase lag and the overall system settling time are related, but not in a direct way. In particular, if you have a positive feedback loop with a low-pass-filter in the forward pass and a low pass filter in the feedback pass then the variables in the feedback loop can lead or lag each other depending on the relative sizes of the time constants in the forward and feedback path. When such a system is deriving significant overall system gain from the positive feedback, the overall system time constant will be substantially longer than either of the component time constants.
This is all standard, very well established cybernetics. Do the Laplace analysis yourself, it’s a second year Engineering textbook exercise.
Translating this to physical units, the theory that ocean outgassing couples with greenhouse effect to cause significant gain in overall system sensitivity also implies that the phase shift between CO2 and temperature will be small compared with the time constant of the overall system response. The actual measured data shows that the lag is indeed large compared with the time constant of overall system response and larger than the biggest guess of Lorius by almost an order of magnitude.
By the way, Lorius understood the implication that the overall system time constant was not indicative of lead or lag in the individual component functions:
Again, the emphasis is mine, demonstrating an expectation that component time constants would be much more rapid than overall system response time constants.
Finally, I’ll also point out that the phase lag of the ice core is highly non-linear and the lag is much longer on the downward side of the cycle (sometimes several thousand years) implying long and slow emission of CO2 as the earth cools. The most likely candidate being the large lush green forests that grew during the warm period now slowly dying and rotting as their world turns cold and bitter.
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Two simple concepts seem to be forgotten so easily it is stupefying:
– Heat transfer to melt ice in the Arctic ocean could only be between water and ice, not air and ice
– CO2 is less soluble in warm water than cold
Ideas that appear to violate either of these are nothing more than sophistry concocted to make AGW possible.
The worst examples of casuistry are always provided by arguments constructed to make desired outcomes possible
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Tel,
Did you look at the analysis in my Testing AGW article? You may see the Laplace analysis underneath the simpler explanation I presented. The measured climate response to seasonally periodic solar energy is the classic response of an RC circuit. In the long term, the climate is not necessarily time invariant, but in the short term it is and a Laplace analysis works quite well.
The top level energy balance is given by, Pi = Po + Pe, where Pi is the power entering the system, Po is the power leaving the system and Pe is the energy being stored/released by the earth’s thermal mass. Rewriting, we get,
Pi = Po + dE/dt
where E is the energy stored in the system. Po is a function of surface and cloud temperatures, which themselves are functions of E, giving the form,
Pi = f(E) + dE/dt
Which is the type of simple differential equations that Laplace transforms work best for.
George
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George, can you post a URL?
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Tel,
http://www.palisad/com/co2/eb/eb.html
George
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Brian Valentine,
“– Heat transfer to melt ice in the Arctic ocean could only be between water and ice, not air and ice
– CO2 is less soluble in warm water than cold”
1) much of the ice was blown out of the arctic circle to melt so this point is not strong.
2) CO2 solubility in water ALSO depends on the partial pressure of the gas in the air. A chemist I know claims that this more than balances the potential release from rising temps.
Anyone out there able to do the computations showing the interactions of rising temp and rising partial pressure of CO2 which are probably opposite?? That is, we were adding CO2, temps were going up, ocean should be adding CO2, at what point does the partial pressure slow or prevent more release due to rising temp, if at all.
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Damien,
I would have liked to respond to you, but, Lionell has already changed your nappy for you and you are still crying.
I couldn’t do as well!!
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1. Yeah, ice was wind blown to the Berent’s Sea, but it didn’t just melt because the “atmosphere got warm.” The ice COULDN’T melt unless the Arctic Sea was warm enough, even if the atm got up to 5 degC. (That’s not going to happen.) Suffice to say that the “ice didn’t melt away” from global warming because it couldn’t have.
2. Solubility of CO2 in water depends on CO2 tension in the atmosphere, yes, augmented by the alkalinity of the ocean (dissolution of CO2 is followed by reaction to carbonate). Suffice to say the apperance of more CO2 in the atm followed the emergence from the LIA by about 500-800 years. That is the time to diffuse through the ocean.
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I have no desire to enter this food fight (politics masquerading as science). Just a note to JoNova that all IPCC conclusions and the published reviews supporting them are, of course, substantially peer-reviewed. The IPCC constitutes the “A-Team” of climate scientists. Wanabees need not apply.
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Michael Berry:
“I have no desire to enter this food fight (politics masquerading as science). Just a note to JoNova that all IPCC conclusions and the published reviews supporting them are, of course, substantially peer-reviewed. The IPCC constitutes the “A-Team” of climate scientists. Wanabees need not apply.”
Michael ! Is this true! That all IPCC conclusions are substantially peer reviewed. Oh my god I had nooooo idea. Well this just changes everything doesn’t it?!!!
You might be surprised that you are not the first to throw that bit of food around here. If you think that science is a question of who has the most votes or the most letters after their name then my friend, you don’t know squat about it.
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Michael Berry,
Have you read the comments for the WG 1 and 3 online??
I would also offer that they are available only because people like Steve McIntyre were very persistent against those you think so highly of who did NOT want them open in spite of their claim to be open!!!
If you haven’t read them, only became available this month I believe, you really should before coming to conclusions as to the identity of the A Team.
Of course, if you are comparing the IPCC regulars to the TV A Team…
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Sorry Ray. You didn’t follow the thread.I was referencing Joanne’s criticism of me based on the fact that she cites peer-reviewed articles. No, I do not believe in explanation by reference to authority. That’s why I read the evidence and come to my own conclusions. However I will note that the positions expressed by most contributors to this web site are inconsistent with well established scientific opinion. Hence my reference to right-wing politics. Let this particular juvenile food fight come to a well-deserved end.
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So Michael Berry, we shouldn’t think, just follow the authorized line. Unlike you, some of us have an education in the physical sciences and meteorology and what is being promulgated doesn’t meet any common sense test.
Yes this is politics but based on science. If the AGW debate was confined to a few second and third rate puerile academics slinging bullshit at each other in “scientific” publications or within the confines of academia I doubt anybody would care. Unfortunately politicians have got aboard the issue and are about to make decisions that could result in the end of our technological civilization.
Try to imagine far future archaeologists discussing the end of our civilization: “they beat themselves into a frenzy over a dubious conjecture and starved in the midst of plenty because they tried to ban fire”
Well Michael, this blog is about “carrying the fire” (to use the title of another Michael’s book) and shining it’s light into the dark recesses of the minds of those who would use this issue to further their nasty authoritarian tendencies.
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Michael,
If you wish to have a discussion limited to the science, I would be happy to oblige you. Lets set the parameters. First, I will concede that CO2 is a GHG, that man is putting CO2 into the atmosphere and that the effect of incremental CO2 on the surface temperatures is finite. Second, the IPCC AR4 doesn’t claim that the effect of incremental CO2 is catastrophic, only that the effect of doubling it is somewhere between 1.5 and 4C with a low likelihood (not zero) of being less than 1.5C. It’s the Executive Summary for (by) Policymakers that paints the gloom and doom picture, which by the way, is prepared in a way that ignores the caveats in the AR. Third, if you have a point to make, don’t refer to some ‘peer reviewed’ paper. Having looked at many such papers, and in each and every case identifying at least one serious flaw that peer review should have caught, my faith in the peer review process as it relates to climate science is non existent. Instead, use your own words to express the concept you think the paper states so that a) you understand it yourself and b) others reading this forum don’t have to go through multiple levels of indirection to understand your point.
Lets start with the question that nobody who believes that AGW is the cause of catastrophic climate change seems to be able to answer. The consensus forcing from doubling CO2 is 3.7 W/^2. My HITRAN based simulations tell me it’s 3.6 W/^2, so I won’t quibble about this point. Of this extra 3.7 W/m^2 absorbed by the atmosphere, half is radiated up into space and half is directed back to the surface. For a surface temperature of 288K, Stefan-Botzmann tells us that the surface energy is 390.1 W/m^2. If the surface temperature is increased by 3C (the nominal IPCC claim), the new surface energy becomes 406.62 W/m^2, for an increase of 16.5 W/m^2.
What possible physical mechanism can amplify the 1.85 W/m^2 directed back to the surface as the result of doubling CO2 into the 16.5 W/m^2 required to affect a 3C increase in the surface temperature?
BTW, I posed this question and a few others on realclimate,org, which never got past Gavin, who has since banned me from posting because I ask questions that are too hard to answer. You should take notice that asking hard questions will not get you booted from this forum.
George
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Michael Berry – However I will note that the positions expressed by most contributors to this web site are inconsistent with well established scientific opinion.
All other positions expressed are now snuffed out via a new political based voting gadget.
On the other hand, it allows you to immediatly find the best posts by sorting by “dislike” count descending. Lol.
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Michael Berry: 36
Perhaps I made that mistake because your statement does not go to the heart of her criticism. You have no basis for claiming that rising temperatures do not precede rising CO2. The data does not bear you out and anyone with or without a PhD can see that. You don’t need any A-team! You may want to bone up on what the IPCC says currently; even they don’t claim that temperature lags CO2 concentration. Even true believers like you don’t make that claim anymore.
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Damien,
You hit the nail on the head with ‘scientific opinion’. This is different from scientific facts. Opinion doesn’t matter when it comes to science. What matters are tests of predictions, correspondence to first principles, experimental repeatability, unbiased logic and the accumulation of knowledge. At one time, the Earth is flat, the Earth is the center of the Universe, the Milky Way is the only galaxy, the Universe is a few thousamd years old, mankind spontaneously arose by magic and everything was comprised of air, earth, fire and water were all scientific opinions.
George
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Michael Berry,
Here’s the process to examine the ice core data in order to determine which came first, the CO2 or the temperature.
Step 1) Since CO2 samples are much farther apart than temperature samples, the temperature samples need to be aggregated into averages that coincide with the CO2 samples. Otherwise, the short term variabilty in temperature will introduce noise in the results. You can review the Nyquist theorem to understand why. This is the source of the aliasing issues Joanne mentioned in the article.
Step 2) For each resulting sample, determine the direction that CO2 and temperatures are changing.
Step 3) Construct a correlation function between changes in temperature at time T and CO2 concentration changes at time T + DT, for DT values from -20K years to +20K years. For each CO2 sample at T+DT and temperature sample at T, add one to the correlation function of CO2 and temperature are changing in the same direction and subtract one if they are changing in the opposite direction.
Step 4) Determine the value of DT, closest to zero. where the correlation function is at it’s maximum. If DT is positive, then CO2 depends on temperature. If DT is negative, temperature depends on CO2. The value of DT is the average lead or lag between the 2 variables. When you do this for either the Vostok cores, DomeC cores or any others, DT will always be positive and on the order of a few hundred years. If you do the same for CH4 and temperature, CH4 will lag temperature by a few hundred years more.
Step 5) (optional) Perform the correlation independently for rising temperatures and for falling temperatures in order to extract individual values of DT for rising temperatures and for falling temperatures. When you do this, the lag between rising temperatures and rising CO2 levels will be shorter than the lag between falling temperatures and falling CO2 levels.
This is a very simple and easily repeatable test that even a novice programmer could do. For the programming impaired, you could probably even do this as a spreadsheet. I presume that you already have the data.
George
10
Notice how people who can’t think create their own internal inconsistencies as fast as they can type.
Here Berry claims he’s right because the IPCC is an authority:
Then he claims I can’t use peer reviewed evidence because that is an argument from authority.
Then he tells us he thinks for himself.
Note to Berry: It’s good that you realize argument from authority is fallacious, but you need to figure out what evidence is. You are looking at the wrong kind. You analyze the opinions of the A-Team and ignore the results in the papers.
You are the one Arguing from Authority.
On Vostok, you ignored your own A-Team in any case. They agree with me. You are all on your own out there claiming that temperature is not a forcing of carbon.
I would argue that the IPCC is not just A rated, it’s Triple A rated “evidence”. – Just like the repackaged mortgage securities that helped bring down the US economy and burn through life savings. It’s pumped up fluff and half truths. Dangerous PR.
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co2isevil: Here’s the process to examine the ice core data in order to determine which came first, the CO2 or the temperature.
Meaningless. What came first is not important. Orbital forcing kicked off a slow transition from glacial to interglacial periods, which warm the oceans to the point where they give up there CO2 (hence a lag) which then further enhances warming and causes and overshoot in sustainable temperatures.
The point is, CO2 causes warming whether it is released by warming oceans, by plate tectonics and volcanism, by humans burning fossil fuels, or whatever other means.
Push on the climate system with a non-CO2 input then the climate system’s orbit changes and CO2 and the other feedbacks follow. Push on the climate system with CO2, it must necessarily lead, the orbit changes and the other feedbacks follow.
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At long last after about 10^7 words, we have a confession from Damien that what he says is not important. I shall demonstrate:
Damien McCormick (Daemon)@44 made the following comment: “Meaningless. What came first is not important.”
Translation: The determination of the direction of cause and effect is not important. This implies cause and effect as such is unimportant. At the same time, he is clearly implying that by man burning carbon based fuels and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, he is “pushing” the climate system of the earth into a “new orbit”. From the duck principle, he is saying man is CAUSING the push. But, according to his statement, determination of cause and effect is not important so the fact of the “push” is unimportant. By his own words and standards, we can conclude the sum total of his words is not important.
I am shocked but I find I finally agree with Damien on something.
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Daemon,
One small problem with your logic is that if you look at the data, it’s the CO2 that overshoots, not temperature.
George
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That’s right Damien if the data seems to conflict with your theory then you just walk over to the theory and put in an extra nostril there, maybe a gill slit here and what the hell, two heads are better than one, give it an extra head somewhere tucked behind a shoulder blade. After a decade of mad scientist changes it is hardly recognizable as the same theory you started out with.
I Know, I know it’s not pretty and you wouldn’t want your sister dating it, but it’s your theory that sorta kinda works, at least until you have to hang another doodad off of it to explain away another inconvenient hunk of data.
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Daemon, Joanne has (politely) discredited your “science” seven times in a fortnight and there’s no reason for more people to do it needlessly and repetitively.
All I can suggest is to go and solicit voluntary contributions for publication and dissemination as well as scientific review of your “Le Guide de Forcer par l’anhydride carbonique dans l’Atmosphere,”
– as Joanne has done in a parallel manner with her Handbook, and come back to show us, and you will have earned a bit more credibility than you have earned up until this point
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Re Lionell #45
The climate system has many inputs, some major and some minor.
There are 100 knobs on a box that can alter the temperature of the interior. Some are very sensitive and some not so. Some control the sensitivity of other knobs, and others just control the interior heat directly. Some open little windows to let some of the heat out and others make them open less wide, or not at all.
But Lionell insists that because heating can be caused by turning knob 87, that it is therefore not possible to cause further heating by turning knob 15, or that because a cooling can be caused by turning knob 30, that it is therefore not possible to cause heating by turning knob 60.
Thinking people know better.
10
George – One small problem with your logic is that if you look at the data, it’s the CO2 that overshoots, not temperature.
They both overshoot. The thermal inerta of the ocean provides the major cause of CO2 production overshoot, and sea ice undershoot. The temperature profile of a typical interglacial is a rapid rise followed by an overshoot, a fall, followed by a slow chaotic decline over 10,000 to 20,000 years and then a rapid decline back to an ice age.
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Sting Ray – That’s right Damien if the data seems to conflict with your theory then you just walk over to the theory and put in an extra nostril there,
What on earth are you jabbering about? Slow Sunday is it? Lol.
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Brian Valentine.
One word – Sycophant.
10
Oh by the way, in this interglacial, the peak was 12,000 years ago (excluding todays temperatures), followed by a slow decline over those 12,000 years, now punctuated by the rapid rise in less than 100 years to a temperatures nearly exceeding the interglacial maximum, and which are projected to surpass that maximum by several degrees and reach highs that are twice as high as any historical rise in temperatures relative to the coldest temperatures in any recorded ice age.
Sobering stuff.
Roll on Decmeber and Copenhagen!
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Daemon:
One word – action
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Damien McCormick : 51
It’s for sure a slow Sunday when I have time to play games with you and your malicious, miraculous CO2 molecules. Regardless of your characterization that I am jabbering on as you say I don’t think my point was so heavily concealed that others don’t get it. Talking any sense to you has done exactly nothing so I jabber at you, so get used to it. Look at it this way it’s a nice break for you from playing with your 100 knobs.
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Brian: One word – action
So you’re finally going to ask her out on a date?
10
Sting Ray and Brian are obviously baiting me in an attempt to get me banned again.
The unfortunate thing is that it will probably work.
So I’ll take a few days off now ok? Lol.
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Damien, 100 knobs on the black box. We can only get partial measurements for about 80% of the knobs. Some of the knobs not only open airvents but they alter other knobs, and we can’t predict which of these other knobs move and in what direction. Worse, there could be other knobs that are hidden on the far side of the box. We don’t even know what they might be called, yet Unskeptical Scientists argue that because “we’ve ruled out a select group of knobs”, and can make a guess (unbacked by evidence) at the feedbacks of knob on knobs – therefore knob 15 is doing all the heating of “unknown causes”.
Thinking people know that’s argument from ignorance.
More preposterously, more arrogantly, and with more willful stupidity (if that’s possible) we should transform our economies on that basis, force millions of people to live, work, and eat according to the rules of selfish-stone-age-thinkers, and ensure that parasitic financial players suck a fortune of wealth the masses of people who produce the food, the fuel and the essentials of life.
You may offer yourself up as a willing slave to the financial aristocracy and mindless bureaucrats but you can’t expect rest of us to follow your faulty reasoning into voluntary servitude.
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Daemon,
Where do you get your data? Here is the DomeC temperature data, which was processed at a much finer resolution than the Vostok data. Other than the additional fine detail, it matches Vostok relatively well.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/domec_15k.gif
You may notice a spike about 100 years ago, but the last temperature in the ice core was lower. The dotted line represents the most recent temperature recorded in the DomeC record. The spike seems to be the initial recovery from the little ice age. The trend you are referring to is not in the data. There was a dip about 8K years ago which recovered about 5K years ago and it has been relatively constant since. This dip has to do with the shift in perihelion. If you look at a wider view, the current interglacial (on the left of the plot) is more than 2C cooler than the last few.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/domec.gif
Tell me, why is it that the temperature is still much cooler than it was 110K years ago when CO2 levels were more than 100ppm lower than today?
George
10
Daemon,
OK, your black box with 100 knobs might work that way. You still have to show the real world has 100 knobs that work the way you say they work. Saying “its possible” is not sufficient. You must show the details of the mechanism, that the conditions are such that the mechanism could function, AND that the mechanism is acutally working in the given circumstance.
This gives you at least a 100 by 100 matrix of interactions to explain AND show that they are acutally in effect. If there are second order effects, this means you have at least a 100 x 100 x 100 matrix of iterations to explain AND show that they are actually in effect. ALL you have shown by ALL of your words is that you BELIEVE increasing CO2 level increases global temperature. That makes your attempt a 10 parts per million attempt. From that, you conclude the sky is falling and that someone should be placed in charge of the earth’s economy to shut down man’s use of carbon based energy. I require a bit more direct physical evidence than your earnest belief about a 10 parts per million explanation that is still to be proved.
As I agreed with you, you have nothing important to say.
10
Today is the official viewing day of Not Evil Just Wrong!
I’m inviting several neighbours to view the DVD with me.
I’m going to tell our guests that an English global warming blogger named Damien McCormick watched Not Evil Just Wrong and became a global warming sceptic because Daemon couldn’t bear the thought of the consequesnces of his misguided beilefs in AGW.
Sorry for this bit of theatre, Daemon – that’s the price of your rude remarks
10
Lionell – OK, your black box with 100 knobs might work that way. You still have to show the real world has 100 knobs that work the way you say they work. Saying “its possible” is not sufficient. You must show the details of the mechanism, that the conditions are such that the mechanism could function, AND that the mechanism is acutally working in the given circumstance.
Sure. Read the numerous papers that discuss glacial/interglacial cycles. e.g. Lorius et all 1990, Caillon et al 2003, etc …
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JoNova,
I’ve got to discontinue this nonsense of trying to communicate with you. Your various positions are ridiculous and easily refuted by any cognizant reader of the literature. Don’t know what your axe to grind is, but I simply no longer care. I suppose I wish you well with your loyal followers. Pardon me if I don’t join that group. For the final time; bye.
10
Damien,
Lorius et all (one of the et all’s was Hansen), completely ignores the effects of ice modulated albedo, which fits the data far better. It was also about the time that this paper was written that the true temporal relationship between CO2 and temperature was starting to be understood (Idso 1989), but there was no reference to this in the paper. Indeed, the paper assumes that the CO2 changes and temperature changes were concurrent. The paper mentions that the pre-feedback effect of doubling CO2 is 1.6C, while it’s actually about half that, since the Stefan-Boltzmann analysis used in the paper assumes that all of the incremental energy absorbed by the atmosphere is re-radiated back to the surface. The paper claims unspecified ‘feedbacks’ amplify this. The only feedback that amplifies change between interglacials is decreased ice, decreasing the albedo, which is driven by solar variability caused by perihelion effects shifting through the seasons, whose effective forcing differential is many 10’s of W/^2 which dwarfs the couple of watts of extra GHG absorption from CO2 and CH4.
The Callion paper used Ar isotopes to refine the timing between CO2 and temperature and concluded that CO2 lagged temperature by 800 +/- 200 years. Quoting from the paper, “… confirms that CO2 is not the forcing that initially drives the climatic system during a deglaciation”. The paper goes on to make claims that CO2 is still responsible by making a bunch of unconvincing and speculative assumptions.
George
10
Good Bye, Michael Berry, so long, farewell, we’ll miss you.
Don’t forget to tell your friends at Greenpeace what stupid parisites and losers they are, won’t you?
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Re 63,
Cowardice justified with self righteous indignation is a common response from someone whose core beliefs are being threatened by the truth.
George
10
Damien still says nothing important. He can’t show even one of the 100 knobs much less all of them with their mechanism and proof that they are at work. His response is his typical blah…blah…blah…. Then he refers to a list of papers that say exactly the same blah…blah…blah…. No surprise here.
10
George – Lorius et all (one of the et all’s was Hansen), completely ignores the effects of ice modulated albedo, which fits the data far better.
Maybe you published a paper on it. Can I read it?
George – It was also about the time that this paper was written that the true temporal relationship between CO2 and temperature was starting to be understood (Idso 1989), but there was no reference to this in the paper.
My apologies. But I’m still 9 years ahead of the Skeptics Handbook which IIRC implies the temporal relationship in the ice cores started to be understood in 1999?
George – Indeed, the paper assumes that the CO2 changes and temperature changes were concurrent.
No, it implies temperature leads through orbital forcing, and then is later amplified by CO2, amongst other GHGs.
“Changes in the CO2 and CH4 content have played a significant part in the glacial-interglacial climate changes by amplifying, together with the growth and decay of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, the relatively weak orbital forcing”
So the driver of the temperature changes (in the glacial/interglacial cycles) is orbital changes as proposed by Milankovich.
George – The only feedback that amplifies change between interglacials is decreased ice, decreasing the albedo,
1. decreased ice = less ice reflection = warming
2. decreased ice = more exposed dark soil = warming
3. decreased ice = more exposed dark water = warming oceans
4. warming oceans = CO2 outgassing = more IR absorbed = further warming
warming 1 through 4 = increased moisture content of the atmosphere = further warming
and so on …
Hence the big spike that is seen punctuating the start of each interglacial.
George – The Callion paper used Ar isotopes to refine the timing between CO2 and temperature and concluded that CO2 lagged temperature by 800 +/- 200 years
Which is exactly what Science expects.
George – The paper goes on to make claims that CO2 is still responsible
Responsible for amplifying the temperature from the initial increase in temperature through increased solar insolation, yes.
George – by making a bunch of unconvincing and speculative assumptions.
Such as?
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Brian – Don’t forget to tell your friends at Greenpeace what stupid parisites and losers they are, won’t you?
I am hurt and offended by this comment.
10
George – Cowardice justified with self righteous indignation is a common response from someone whose core beliefs are being threatened by the truth.
The truth is average global temperatures have risen by about 0.74’C since Industrilisation.
Absolute zero is -273.15’C lower than 0’C, so the scale of the temperature change is about .74/300 or about 0.24% of the temperature.
But you find it hard to believe that a 0.014% change in concentration of CO2 pigment in the air causes a 0.24% change in temperture.
Thinking people know better.
10
Brian – Today is the official viewing day of Not Evil Just Wrong!
Yes Al Gore could well be – Wrong! It appears he may have underestimated the amount of warming that will actually occur over the next 100 years.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33011378/
WASHINGTON – Earth’s temperature is likely to jump six degrees between now and the end of the century even if every country cuts greenhouse gas emissions as proposed, according to a United Nations update.
[….]
Global warming is speeding up, especially in the Arctic, and that means that some top-level science projections from 2007 are already out of date and overly optimistic. Corell, who headed an assessment of warming in the Arctic, said global warming “is accelerating in ways that we are not anticipating.”
[…]
“As sobering as this report is, it is not the worst case scenario,” said U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, co-author of the bill that passed the U.S. House. “That would be if the world does nothing and allows heat-trapping pollution to continue to spew unchecked into the atmosphere.”
10
Lionell – He can’t show even one of the 100 knobs much less all of them with their mechanism and proof that they are at work.
Their mechanism and proof that they are at work have been known for several decades.
What is your excuse for complaining as if it were not known, that which has been known with increasing precision for so very, very long?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/attribution-of-20th-century-climate-change-to-cosub2sub/
10
Well I am sad to hear that you are offended by remarks about Greenpeace, Daemon.
And here I thought that I was being polite – thinking the term “mass murderers” was a bit strong for them.
Which is what their ambitions sum up to, and now I suppose you have even lower esteem for me.
If that’s possible.
[SURPRISE the readers of this column and REFRAIN from hurling offal in Joanne’s direction, won’t you.]
10
George – Tell me, why is it that the temperature is still much cooler than it was 110K years ago when CO2 levels were more than 100ppm lower than today?
That what scares me. It shows what can happen when there is a momentum in the climate system such as what is seen at the start of an interglacial. Your conclusion is premature. There is still warming in the pipeline to be realised for our current level of CO2 due to the Inertia of the climate System.
10
That was just a joke. Nothing you say can offend me Brian!
Well, there is one thing …
10
If evidence to dispell AGW surfaces, such as ice core analysis, well then just invent some sophistry to eliminate it.
A relative of mine, unfortunately suffering from paranoid delusions, will interpret everything said to them as insidious criticism.
“It’s a nice day,” will somehow be interpreted as mocking them.
A very sad condition, and it is very sad to see such a dementia so widespread amidst the population
10
We should plot a hockey stick graph of the estimates, rising at an ever increasing rate from implausible to unbelievable and heading right up there into “laugh until you cry” territory. Does anyone want to run a gentleman’s wager on how long before we see an official estimate of 8 degrees warming for the 21st century?
10
Can you suggest a laboratory experiment that demonstrates the principle of “temperature momentum”? That is to say, a system that continues heating for some time after the input power source is removed?
Maybe we could build one…
10
Tel,
Apparently Damien has found a way to get around the Three Laws of Thermodynamics plus one.
His black box with the 100 knobs rules the climate. One of the knobs is labeled “temperature momentum”. So when he turns that knob up to 11, even though one removes the energy input into the system, the temperature will keep on rising. Interestingly, if this were in fact the case, one could extract free energy from the system and use it to do something more useful than make wind.
Now, if you and I look at the system and our instruments fail to show any energy input AND they show the temperature is still increasing, we suspect one of two things: our instruments are wrong or we have missed measuring a source of energy that is continuing to add energy to the system. We know this by the Three Laws of Thermodynamics plus the zeroth one that states heat flows from hot to cold. Unfortunately for us that we don’t have his magical black box with its 100 knobs that control everything about the climate. As a consequence, we cannot violate the Laws of Thermodynamics nor can we get energy from the system for free.
This is one more demonstration that Damien thinks the law of casualty and the law of contradiction are not important. By ignoring them, he can make anything he wants to happen any way he wants simply by asserting that it works that way. Then, at the same time, he is more than willing to claim he is simply following the basic laws of physics.
In the final analysis, Damien still has nothing important to say. Hey, Damien, I am simply agreeing with you on this point. You really don’t have anything important to say exactly because of the reason stated above.
10
Tel: 77
“We should plot a hockey stick graph of the estimates, rising at an ever increasing rate from implausible to unbelievable and heading right up there into “laugh until you cry” territory. Does anyone want to run a gentleman’s wager on how long before we see an official estimate of 8 degrees warming for the 21st century?”
I’ll bet you ten USD you will see 8 degree estimate before second half of 2010, purely for political not scientific reasons of course. Anybody else?
10
Of course I can’t tell you what ten USD will buy you by second half of 2010. Its considered a snow cone asset by most of my friends.
10
Damien,
The 10 year lag in the understanding of the temporal relationship between CO2 and temperature, was the lag between the original analysis that pointed this out and the AGW communities acceptance of the concept. This test was originally performed shortly after the ice core data first showed up. It was summarily dismissed, ostensibly because of uncertainty in the correlation between the CO2 timeline and the temperature timeline. It really wasn’t until the Callion paper, which predates Gore’s movie by 3 years, that the unavoidable truth had to be accepted. Considering that the centerpiece of the Gore movie was the correspondence between CO2 and temperature and this was never brought up should tell you something.
The problem with your analysis of how less ice causes more warming by releasing more CO2 is that the magnitude of this effect is very small and dampens out quickly. In order to satisfy your hypothesis, the warming caused by X ppm of incremental CO2 must release 9X more CO2 over a couple of centuries in order to further increase temperatures by the required amount.
You also neglect the effects of evolutionary biology. Biology is driven by 3 raw materials, sunlight, H2O and CO2. During ice ages, H2O and sunlight are both reduced. Biology produces CO2 and CH4 by decomposition, and this, not ocean outgassing, is responsible for the delayed response. Ocean outgassing changes occurs coincident with temperature changes. As temperature increases, biology is CO2 limited and it takes a while for biomass to increase to a high enough level to supply the needed CO2 by it’s decomposition. The original source of the CO2 is natural (i.e. volcanoes, etc.) and biology keeps it circulating in the system, increasing the steady state concentration, increasing biomass, further increasing CO2. When temperatures fall, biology becomes energy limited and excess CO2 remains in the atmosphere. This is why the lag between falling temperatures and falling CO2 levels is larger than the lag between increasing temperatures and increasing CO2.
You also miss a key concept, which is that energy, not temperature, is linearly accumulative. If takes a 16 fold increase in energy to increase temperature by a factor of 2, which is clearly stated by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. I find it hard to believe that a 1% increase in surface power (about 5 watts/m^2) is caused by 0.6 W/m^2 of additional energy directed back at the surface from increased CO2 levels. Something that you fail to get is that gain is not free. Your stereo amplifier has gain, but in less the amplifier is plugged in, the speakers will not make a noise. You also way overestimate the climate system gain. The power gain of the system is not the factor of 9 you seem to believe, but only about 1.7. Look at this link if you want to understand what gain is and how it relates to the climate sensitivity.
http://www.palisad.com/eb/eb.html
Others have commented on various violations of the Laws of Thermodynamics your hypothesis requires, so I won’t rehash them, other than to say it sounds like the kind of junk science promoted on pseudo science lists that claim ‘free energy’.
George
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Hi all,
This is the 3’rd letter to the editor, of 5 that I’ve sent about climate change, that’s been published during the last 3 years. It’s the last letter in the list. As a side note, this newspaper has one of the most far left leaning editorial boards in the country. This letter was in response to their editorial gushing about Apple leaving the US COC for ‘ethical’ climate change related reasons.
http://www.mercurynews.com/letters/ci_13587439
George
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Lionell, putting 100 knobs on a box is very easy… just send the TV news crew round to Copenhagen.
I wouldn’t expect you to believe in temperature momentum, but if Damien shows me how to build a machine that demonstrates this principle then I have some of Telsa’s lost research papers hidden in a disused railway tunnel. I’m hoping to extend the concept a bit further and build a temperature resonator.
With that under my belt, I’m gonna need a reliable supplier of sharks with laser beams.
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Tel,
If we work it right, we might even be able to turn your temperature resonator into a temperature laser. That way we can generate an intense heat beam rivaling the sun using only a match as a source.
Darn, the Three Laws of Thermodynamics says we can’t do it. I guess we will have to rely on Damien to show us the way. Its sure to happen real soon now.
PS: In the software industry “real soon now” is a euphemism for the end of a project that is long on promises and short on delivery. Its approximately equivalent to “when hell freezes over” except it takes longer.
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There’s a lot of hot air coming from those who think they can circumvent the Laws of Thermodynamics. Maybe we can tap into that.
George
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Or could it simply be that your assumptions of “climate inertia” are just wrong? Warming in the pipeline? Please elaborate. Does this not fly in the face of the law of conservation of energy? (the energy is either here already or not) there is no “Pipeline” Or do we have a new, as yet undisclosed, branch of science; Thermo-Alchemy? (trademark protected)
By the way, who came up with Co2 “forcing”? Co2 cannot force anything. It is not and cannot be a prime mover.
And why are you scared?
Lastly, have you considered the “large equation” possibility that if your doomsday scenario is correct, the best solution is to let it run it’s course! Trying to solve the problem by limiting the global populations’ use of carbon is at best feeble and will only prolong the pain. Much better to let the population of humanoids decline rapidly and drastically by doing nothing at all. (Actually promoting excessive carbon consumption would even be better yet)
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Long time reader, first time poster.
Jo – keep up the good work – this site is a wonderful resource and debating ground.
Michael Berry – congratulations. True to the guide ‘Politics for Dummmies’, you managed to make a handful of sweeping statements without once addressing the issue at hand. If you can’t argue the facts, argue the people, eh? Wonderful.
Hats off to all the people on here who devote their time, unpaid, to educating the brainwashed masses. Keep it up.
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Hey there.. I’m not a journalist, climatologist, clairvoyant or other “specially unqualified” person (I’m just a humble physical chemist, lol) but I’ve got a significant flaw in the skeptics handbook for you. It’s this bit, in section 4 where it says “The natural greenhouse effect is real, and it does keep us warm”
Your point about absorbtion and saturation would be valid IF the greenhouse effect was a genuine physical phenomenon. It isn’t… It’s a huge fallacy based on incorrect application of physical laws. I suggest you read the ref below, and revise accordingly (or, if you prefer, maybe explain why you accept the “natural” greenhouse effect instead – as a scientist I’m prepared to be wrong as long as I learn things)
Falsification Of
The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects
Within The Frame Of Physics
(Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner)
International Journal of Modern Physics B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275–364 , DOI No: 10.1142/S021797920904984X
Otherwise, good site, good info. I like your style 😉
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Or, actually ignore what I said^^
It’s a facinating read, but now I look again, flawed 🙁
Some very, very valid points but some dodgy thermodynamics. I got too busy checking the maths to notice the error at first, but I just re-read it. oops 😉
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Andy, I will offer a layperson’s explanation: There is plenty of evidence that an atmosphere is an insulator or “greenhouse” blanket over the surface of any planet or moon. Warm blooded animals all benefit from this effect. see these:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/17/the-steel-greenhouse/
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
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agreed absolutely. You can take the two posts by me above as an example of the dangers of getting too bogged in detail to realize the premise is ludicrous. (something of a common problem on both sides, really)
My only excuse is I read it after a sleepless night to distract myself from toothache 🙁 A quick re-read later and duh… what are they saying? lol.
Thing is, I ended up reading Gerlich and Tscheuschner as reference material to the harry_readme file from CRU.. (esp the extrapolation of NST and DTR from Tmin and Tmax) In the respect of understanding the complexities of climate modelling and the underlying physical laws and equations it is quite useful.
Another thing that I find odd is that Chaos theory came partly from observations (by Lorenz) that his very simple weather models gave some very unexpected and random results, yet now climatology has been fixed and is non chaotic and accurate…
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