Plenty of copies
"Scientific Guide" To The Skeptics Handbook
I’m elated. Last night outside the Watts Up lecture at UWA here in Perth there were people handing out a so-called “Scientific Guide” to the Skeptics Handbook. Let’s put this in perspective, I wrote the Handbook two years ago, and it’s taken this long for those-who-want-to-scare-us to put together a specific printed response. I’m an unbacked, solo pro bono writer, and they needed no less than 5 professors, 2 associate professors, and 21 months, and THIS is the best they can do?
I’m also chuffed. The infamous Professorial fellow Stephan Lewandowsky spoke the night before in the same room as we spoke in (about the dangers of consensus) but maybe he’s finally read my multiple responses to the stone age reasoning he was using and the light bulb has gone off. Maybe he’s realized that the masses of engineers, geologists, lawyers, medical experts and people with just plain common sense out there are never going to be fooled by his old witchdoctor routine about the Gods of Science at the IPCC. I was informed by people who saw the presentation that for the first time he spoke without resorting to obvious errors of reasoning.
Handing out the Guide
Likewise the Scientific Guide makes a lot of whitewashy mistakes; still won’t show the graphs I show; confoundingly obscures the “fingerprint” that was presented by Santer and the CCSP, and makes baseless assertions, uses graphs with dodgy scales, assumes that positive feedback occurs and throws in a venetian blind strawman. Nonetheless, finally Professors are rising above Argument from authority and ad hominem attacks. The word “Denier” has disappeared.
Lewandowsky, Carmen Lawrence, et al, your apology for calling us names is accepted. We’re delighted that you are finally willing to try to discuss the evidence.
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is excellent news. For those of us without the backing of any major institution or company taking on the wall of money, as long as we have free speech it shows we can use satire as a scyth backed up with impeccable reasoning and empirical evidence and force our public officials to lift standards and stop bludgeoning us with blatantly obvious mistakes.
I’m happy at the way the Skeptics Handbook still holds up. Most of the critical response to it is to repeat the evidence that supports a direct effect of carbon, which (as I have said many times) can only give us about 1 small degree of warming, not 3 or 4 disastrous degrees. So the critics have stopped breaking laws of reason, but they haven’t quite got numerate yet.
I will do a full detailed response to it, of course, along with the other (un)SkepticalScience.com postings. But given that there are at least ten of them, and one of me, regrettably, I can’t do it all today.
PS: At the door last night I spoke to the people handing out the written reply to the Skeptics Handbook (a reply which doesn’t appear to have a named author, yet has the UWA logo on it). As usual, the conversation dissolved quickly into endless spiral of non-sequiteurs that don’t add up.
I joked that it was good to see Sherwood get a mention, I think his idea to use windshear instead of thermometers is entertaining and creative… the man in the middle scoffed, “havent you seen the three papers that came out last year?” I ask “which papers”. He says, you know, the three… I repeat: Which papers? Can you name them? He’s says “Yes”. Then reaches for his blackberry to sms for help. Ha, I laugh, so you haven’t even read them? He admonishes me for being rude. “What kind a response is that!?” The woman next to him seems utterly dumbfounded by me: “You just don’t get science do you? You don’t get it?” I’m thinking it’s not even worth asking her what she thinks science is… (give me the evidence). Then the pair are asking how many papers I can name. I laugh that counting papers is not how it works. They complain that it should be me naming papers and backing up my claims, and I point out that they’re the ones who want our money, they need some evidence. The man is incredulous, “but but! HALF* the solutions to the problem won’t cost anything, they’re free”. I say: Great, fantastic, so why don’t you go do them then? Cheap energy. The market will love it. So why the big scare? Who needs carbon trading…?
Ugh! He groans: they’re free if you include the costs of the damage.
Oh right, I’m thinking. That would be the damage due to “carbon”, and the catastrophic positive feedbacks that the IPCC can’t really name any convincing evidence for?
* Apparently it was “Half” the solutions, not all, so I corrected that post note. see Justin in comments… . It’s all based on assumptions in any case.
You need to have your progressive country sequester the carbon cartel in Eutopia. Lord Monkton calls them the bed wetters.
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“they needed no less than 5 professors, 2 associate professors, and 21 months”
Well, it could be that, being professionals with real jobs, the good professors took the time to actually make sure they had the correct information from within their busy schedules.
What is actually happening, Jo, is that the scientific community is fighting back with exactly the same mediums and techniques you are using. The deniosphere is getting a taste of its own medicine, in other words, and denialists like yourself don’t like it.
Bitter pill to swallow, huh. Plus, with science on their side, the actual scientists will eventually win this “debate.”
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Marion – Please read the comments and rules section. Use of the baseless insult “denier” will not be tolerated. Please refrain from baseless unprovable insults unless you wish to make it onto the moderation list.
Yoda the Mod
—
20
Jo,
If they want to discuss the evidence they are going to lose. It is worth noting that every major debate that has occurred has been won by the skeptics. You must really be getting to them, Jo, if they are willing to drop the term denialist and start discussing the science. The next step is to force them to follow the scientific method and divulge their raw data to see if their hypothesis can be falsified. Also, when are they going to separate the wheat from the chaff by getting rid of all the non peer reviewed literature (e.g. Africagate, himalayagate and gates ad nauseam) which have polluted and discredited the IPCC assessment reports , formerly known as the “gold standard”? Oh, how the mighty have fallen!
10
A very good presentation last night with good information from all speakers. One of the key points that keeps coming across and which was emphasised last night by all speakers is that the climate alarmists deliberately muddy the waters between ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’ and the impact of CO2. By doing this, the public assume that evidence of global warming or climate change (neither of which is denied by any sceptics I know), is support for the need to reduce CO2 emissions. This nexus needs to be broken for the community to make proper decisions about carbon emissions. Thanks for your efforts in this.
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Yes, actual science will win the day. Once the numbers are made pristine and the evaluations and interpretations are clearly exposed. Once the hyperbole, rhetoric and alarmism is dropped in favor of actual analysis and scientific “uncertainty” rather than committed consensus.
I, as someone that can be convinced by actual evidence and its interpretation, have yet to see ANYTHING that demonstrates at a 95% confidence limit (a typical if minimal requirement) that CO2 is anything more than a nice plant food that is helping and not hindering.
As we sink into the cool part of the global temperature cycle, I rejoice in the fact that none of the warmist “solutions” had time to be adopted so that they could not claim “efficacy” for their ridiculous and ineffective carbon control methods.
As a scientist, I am aghast at the lack of rigor in the current climate community where models are king and observations are relegated to “inconvenient truths”.
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Marion Bunny Squid:
July 1st, 2010 at 4:46 am
Actually, they have lost every debate that I am aware of (e.g. the one hosted by IQ2 in NYC, St. Andres Collge, Scotland and the recent one at Oxford)
It is incumbent upon the proponents of the AGW hypothesis to prove their theory is valid. Once falsified, it is time to go back to the blackboard. Jo and others have demonstrated that the hypothesis is discredited. Observational and empirical data trumps models every time. Hansen told us we were going to reach a tipping point that never happened. The models all failed to predict the current lack of warming. There is no proof of AGW. If it were real, the runaway greenhouse effect would have already occurred but it did not. There is no proof to support the hypothesis and it has been falsified. Care to offer empirical evidence or observational data to support the failed hypothesis? I await your learned response!
Another ad hominem attack. Well, if you cannot make an intelligent argument what else is there left to do? It is the ignorant and the desperate who resort to such tactics. I am sure that you are an exception to the rule, right?
10
Good news Ms Nova ,doubt their response will be translated to many languages. Keep up good work . As someone further up said 5 profs ,
2 as profs 2 yrs etc etc .
Amr Marzouk
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Marion Bunny Squid: @ #2:
Observed…
It does seem the alarmists are at last beginning to get their act together, having learned much of how to communicate, how to debate & how to reason from observing the skeptics.
The danger for them now, in abandoning the hysteria and opening themselves up to communication, is in having it dawn on them just where they went wrong.
From exposing themselves to this website and others like it, they are beginning to discover forgotten fundamentals of science & logic that many of them had never even heard of.
It’s a tediously slow process, but slowly they’re getting it.
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Great Milestone there Jo,
Can we please take a moment of Silence to contemplate the poor New Zealanders, who are now about to find the prices of just about everything climbing up today as a result of the ETS the New Zealand Public apparently wanted.
And yes, the prices are going up more than just due to the ETS as many of the middle men take the opportunity to add their premium to the great price gouge. The same would happen here.
Let’s take a moment to consider the working battlers over there who find more of their income getting stripped away from them for no proven reason. I’m sure more will be considering skipping the ditch today.
Let’s take a moment to consider the poor pensioners who will invariably be freezing due to their fears of the power bill during what is shaping up to be a bitterly cold winter.
Let’s take a moment to consider how absolutely insane it is that for the first time in History (that I know of) the People, through their own minority interests (with the help of proportional representation in Government) demanded the Government introduce a new tax on everything.
And lets thank our lucky stars that Australia still has a reasonably healthy middle class who to date has successfully fended off a proposed ETS over here.
Let’s also consider that without the volunteer work of people like Jo, and the many others, today Australia would probably be seeing the exact same situation happening today – possibly an even worse one.
Honestly, what government would turn down an opportunity to tax the people when the people are asking to be taxed? Insane, completely and utterly insane.
O/T – I wonder if Kevin Rudd will sue for unfair dismissal? I mean, it appears he never got any warnings..
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[snip ad hom ]
No? Well let me help you – these are two great places to start.
[snip – the usual vague references to 500 papers at once as if that has any meaning ]
[snip… MBS was already in moderation… now he’s back there. Throwing baseless insults, ad homs, no specific references, no real name. So no more comments –JN ]
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Jo, This is recognition indeed. Where might we possibly get our hands on a copy of this pamphlet, as you would appear to be the only one giving it any exposure, as yet? Solum ad oblectationem of course (to steal from the master of such phraseology).
“Scientific Guide” to The Skeptics Handbook
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Get Ready Australia,
Our First Environmental Refugees are on their way
Only, they’re not from Tuvalu, they’ll be trying to escape the ETS over there….
Would the last person leaving New Zealand please turn the lights off? – The ETS is making it too expensive to keep it on!
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Up until 2005, I was an AGW supporter and rather despondent at the future eventualities.
I came across the Vostok ice core values and after a long, hard look, started to wonder why CO2 followed rather than preceeded….the rest led me to “denialist” sites and the scales fell from my eyes and my mood improved as well.
As a trained scientist, I understand the pressures to publish and the cliquish nature of academia. The availability of climate study funding is impressive and alluring for any scientist as they all can fit some version of AGW into their approach to research.
Steve McIntyre is a tireless bastion of rebuttal and the refuting of AGW calumny. Dr. Hansen’s work and predictions stand on their own merit and as the data becomes ever more suspect, the machinations of Mann, Jones et al are all the more despicable.
Reading with an open mind allows for fresh ideas and better cognition.
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Marion @ #10:
Very helpfully advises…
LOL 🙂
Well I suppose that’s one word for it.
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Marion Bunny Squid
but its real I tell you it is, it is, please beleive my corrupt buddy sites really they are only trying to rip the world off. We just want millions to die from lack of cheap energy, while we grab your money to keep paying our grant’s
we havent found such a gravy train in years please dont stop it, how will I afford to put petrol in my car if I dont rip the world off.
Just ignore of flawed hypothisis (its not science because its been proved wrong)
Just ignore the data manipulation of raw temp data
just ignore placing temp stations in hot urban centres
just ignore us taking temp sites away from cold areas
just ignore that CO2 has a saturation point
just ignore that higher CO2 levels in the past havent created this run away effect
Just ignore that positive feedback fudge factor we came up with so our models worked
Just ignore that our models are hard wired to give the outcome we want
Just ignore that every time we have been caught out our error has been to the warm side
just ignore that we make things up (hocky stick etc)
Just ignore that we get our scientific data from magazene periodicals
Just ignore that the AGW warming conclusion is only claimed by a handful in the IPCC
Just ignore reality and hopefuly noone will notice
But but but real climate said so…..
Ha Ha Ha
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Typical -SNIPPED- commentary. None of this holds water, Scott, particularly once one actually deals with the material instead of reproducing dogmatic statements like the ones above. Go to the websites I provided; data, codes, research, and conclusions are all free and only a click away.
One might suggest that it is incumbent upon you to prove the scientists wrong – they’ve put their science out there, go deal with it.
By the way, how much money do the scientists each make?
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Marion – Please read the comments and rules section. Use of the baseless insult “denier” will not be tolerated. Please refrain from baseless unprovable insults unless you wish to make it onto the moderation list.
Yoda the Mod
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Yoda – you are being too nice. He still hasn’t apologized for his slurs in Feb. No more from anonymous MBS–JN
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@ Marion Bunny Squid:
July 1st, 2010 at 7:34 am Just ignore of flawed hypothisis (its not science because its been proved wrong)
Just ignore the data manipulation of raw temp data
just ignore placing temp stations in hot urban centres
just ignore us taking temp sites away from cold areas
just ignore that CO2 has a saturation point
just ignore that higher CO2 levels in the past havent created this run away effect
Just ignore that positive feedback fudge factor we came up with so our models worked
Just ignore that our models are hard wired to give the outcome we want
Just ignore that every time we have been caught out our error has been to the warm side
just ignore that we make things up (hocky stick etc)
Just ignore that we get our scientific data from magazene periodicals
Just ignore that the AGW warming conclusion is only claimed by a handful in the IPCC
Just ignore reality and hopefuly noone will notice
No you prove it….. thats what this site is about we are still awaiting evidence, can you provide some that holds water???
didnt think so
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Marion Bunny Squid,
When you throw in your lot with the likes of Dr. James Hansen you are joining forces with a man who has proposed nothing short of murder (execution of those who hold a viewpoint he disagrees with), who runs with another man who does the same. Is this where you want to be?
If so, good luck when they turn on you — and they will sooner or later!
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Poor Marion
must be sad not being able to back your claims up..
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A bit of a Leap Backwards here. Mann and co trying very hard with a last ditch effort to influence the Muir Review in the UK.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/6/30/a-late-submission-to-sir-muir.html
Read the comments as well.
10
There has to be a distinction clearly made in every one’s mind about first and second order(forcings) effects of the heating effect of c02. No one disputes the first order effect where we have achieved (without checking) around 90% already. Another 1000 ppm increase will do the rest. The second order effects are pure speculation and cannot be directly measured. So we get computers to make simulations to do the rest. The simulations are basically crap but it is where the IPCC stakes it’s claim. The IPCC and other get bogged down arguing about them. Thow in lost and manipulated data, errors etc and the public gets confused. I say, run tht models backward and see if they reproduce the last 100 years
of global climate. Do it both ways, start from 1910 and go forward, and go backwards from now.
Then the IPCC should make the code for their climate models public. This should speed up the debate.
10
Just ignore the data manipulation of raw temp data
10
Poor Scott,
All your evidence is provided in the links above. You simply don’t want to look at it or, more likely, are unable to decipher it. There is nothing wrong with being a layperson, Scott, I am a layperson who is not convinced that the scientists in question have done anything wrong – what is despicable is to have a potentially dangerous opinion but not spend the time actually investigating it.
For instance, you do realize that “the hockey stick” has been recreated by several scientists and that modeling is only one aspect of the empirical evidence scientists use, right?
Or that this is the hottest global decade on record?
Or that CO2 levels of the past are nowhere near what they are now in naturally occurring cycles?
Or that the very few magazine articles in the IPCC report only refer to things that would not need peer-reivew such as insurance rates or recent wildfires – that the rest of the material was written by scientists?
Or that scientists factor in urban heat island effects and these still do not outweigh the mass of other temp records?
Or better yet, Scott, why don’t you and Eddy and Jo go do some of your own research since you clearly know so much? Ever done original research? Or are you happy simply haunting the internet and making generalized comments about real scientists’ work?
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And this is just plain paranoia and hyperbole. Propaganda will only get one so far!!
Gotta run, folks, be back soon!
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Marion : @ #2:
Love this idea of science taking sides.
– Would that be the side of the concensus perhaps ?
– The side of Tax Payer funded Institutions ?
– The side of ‘reason’ ?
– The side of the polar bear ?
– The side of the little guy ?
Would that be science the philosophy, or science the institution ?
What these ‘scientist’ have to ask themselves is what side are they on ?
10
I repeat poor Marion
Must be sad when you have been proved wrong so many times. world falling apart for you
oh and yes I can tell your a layperson
10
Every complex problem has a solution that’s simple, neat and wrong.. 😉
10
Marion,
I would suggest you touch up on the events over the last year or so. You comments are showing that you are way out of date. Likewise the sources you’re referring to as gospel have very little credibility after climategate broke.
It looks to me like you made your decision based on what was available to you quite some time ago. Much more information is now available in order for you to make a better informed decision.
10
Marion Bunny Squid @23,
My but you do like to jump off into the deep end of the pool before looking to see if there’s any water in it.
Just a few of your sins of commission:
10
You Are
You’re
NOT
your!
Bunny! Tell me, what is the current status of the polar bear populations? Can you tell us how many different groups there are? How many of those are doing well? Which ones are not? And what is the state of the climate for each?
10
Get the feeling we are going to get a new Marion, cbp, etc every thread from here on in? Each one not quoting a single reference nor claim based on clear reasoning?
It seems the current thrust will be to introduce much noise to this site… much like the mindless drones that flock to G20 meetings to disrupt proceedings and destroy local businesses. This is a curious thing, because if science is on their side they should be able to defeat us easily with facts, laws, theories etc… call me crazy, even data.
But no, they seem to have to resort to the lowest possible means. That is very telling IMHO.
10
The only acceptable AGW argument, in terms of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations causing average earth temperature increases, is evidence that proves the feedbacks are positive. If in fact they are negative as some recent research indicates it is bye bye significant and runaway global warming.
(It doesn’t require anymore than a junior high school understanding of mathematics to know that the basic logarithmic relationship between the two entities (Fourier and Arrhenius – the latter thought industrial CO2 emissions would create a balmy heaven on earth) means that there is a law of diminishing returns operating because the gradient of that curve asymptotes to zero. One cannot but wonder if climatologists are au fait with the basic science and or mathematics).
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Marion Bunny Squid:
July 1st, 2010 at 7:51 am
Allow me to retort.
All the evidence you want can be found at junkscience.com and wattsupwiththat.com. You simply don’t want to look at it or, more likely, do not have the intellectual ability to understand it. There is nothing wrong with being a lay person but there is with being a troll. Squidly, I am a layperson with an IQ of 136 but anybody of average intelligence and a little common sense can see the AGW scam is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the human race. I am convinced that the perpetrators should stand trial for their crimes. The climategate emails have exposed them and now they are desperate. What is pathetic is that someone could reason so fallaciously and always fall back on ad hominems and appeals to authority. Your posts show that you have spent little or no time investigating the evidence because if you did you would realize just what a scam this whole AGW scheme is.
For instance, you do not realize that the hockey stick (MBH98) was a total fraud and even the IPCC has airbrushed it out of its fourth assessment report. It was totally demolished by Mcinityre and McKitrick and the Wegman report. Several other ‘scientist” relied on it along with Briffa’s Yamal Tree ring circus. One outlier tree skewed the data and an insufficient sample was used to commit fraud. Briffa refused to release his data but when the two Ms got their hands on it the fraud was exposed. When a proper sample was used it showed a slight decrease in temperatures. The house of tree rings has collapsed. The tree ring data that the CRU possessed showed a decline so they grafted temperature datanover it it on their chart using Mikes nature trick and committed more fraud. Modeling is not empirical evidence and not one model predicted the recent 15 year lack of warming and that the 1930’s were the warmest decade on record when CO2 levels were lower. Another nail in the AGW coffin. Or that COs levels are the lowest they have ever been in the last 600,000,000 years with the notable exception of the late Carboniferous in this naturally occurring cycle? Or that 40% of the IPCC’s latest assessment report is based on non peer reviewed literature and this has resulted in one climate scandal after another (e.g. himalayagate, amazongate, africagate, etc.)? Or that scientist homogenize their raw data to almost always show earlier temps as being cooler and recent temps as being warmer even though the adjustment to remove the UHIE should result in recent temps being adjusted LOWER, NOT HIGHER?!
And thank you Jo, Scott and all of the other intelligent and thoughtful posters who have obviously done a lot of research which is evidenced by your often profound and intelligent comments and insights. You, squidly, have obviously never done original research and suffer from herd mentality which is why you link to a propaganda front site like realclimate. And you should thank all the hard working people who help to provide the world with affordable energy so that the planet can prosper and you can afford to keep trolling and embarrassing yourself!
i
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Bulldust:
July 1st, 2010 at 8:47 am
I wonder when his “replacement” will be reporting for duty?
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The use of the UWA logo on the pamphlet that was being handed out astounded me also. I imagine the university probably has stringent rules regarding what publications may bear the logo and under what circumstances it is permissible. Given that there is very little associating Skeptical Science with UWA, it seems more than a tad odd that the logos appear side by side.
Their list of policies is here but I don’t have the time to trawl them right now:
http://www.universitypolicies.uwa.edu.au/search?method=allpoliciesbytitle
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Scott at 22 Ken Stewart is engaged in the first ever independent study of the complete High Quality Australian Site Network and has now reached Part 6 of his check up of the Australian temperature records; the rest can be found at http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/
his conclusion to date is
Progress report on the Australian High Quality Site Network:
Sites checked: 83 out of 100
Raw trend: +0.72 degrees C/ 100 years
High Quality trend: +0.96
Average difference: +0.24
Warming bias: 33.22%
Check out his site – it’s a real eye opener
10
A real example of MM climate change in Victoria, what a disgrace.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/a_few_men_make_victoria_much_warmer/
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Quadrant Online today has an interview with Anthony Watts http://www.quadrant.org.au/
by Tom Minchin
quoting the first 2 paras to wet your appetite:
Climate science depends utterly on the integrity of its measurements. In order to extrapolate and make forecasts, there can be no errors in the data. How reliable are the measurements climate scientists use? What happens if their measuring apparatus is altered by something as simple as a coat of paint that lifts the average recordings? Will anyone spot it? And if someone does, what happens if such a desired result matters more than getting the facts straight?
An expert on these questions, Anthony Watts, founder of the most widely visited climate site in the world, the US-based Watts Up With That, (47.3 million hits since the fall of 2007, compared with the leading alarmist site RealClimate’s 11.7 million since December 2004), is wrapping up his national tour at the moment and I spoke to him in Melbourne.
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Ross: @ 20
The list of signatory’s at the bottom of the document resembles the Who’s Who of Walt Disney’s Beagle Boys gang.
I hope I’m not showing my age here, and I’m not the only poster that remembers Scrooge McDucks, Arch Nemesis.
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Marion Bunny Squid:
July 1st, 2010 at 6:52 am
Squidly, Jo is quite capable of defending herself. That being said, I am in substantial agreement with Jo when it comes to the AGW scam. I am a guy who works in the oil patch and I don’t work for “big oil.” I am unaware of any observational data or empirical evidence to support the AGW hypothesis. A link to realclimate and Jim Hansen is not very impressive. Heck, why don’t you google “global warming scam” and do some research for us? Then, we can discuss Realclimate and Jimbo Hansen.
More ad hominems and you have written nothing of substance followed by another appeal to authority. Care to cite some scientific evidence or is cutting and pasting links to websites the best that you can do?
Well, you wrote that you were leaving. I am looking forward to the arrival of your replacement troll. Do you trolls volunteer or are you paid?
10
Marion, you’re obviously a little new to the realm of rational inquiry. So allow me to get a bit didactic…
According the rules of scientific methodology the proposers of a hypothesis, in this case the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis (AGW) must provide all the evidence for the hypothesis. Those skeptical of the hypothesis need do nothing but hurl interestingly relevant questions to the proposers of said hypothesis who then must defend their work. Sounds horribly unfair?
But it gets much much worse in the life of a hypothesis, because if the hypothesis is found to have “implications” that run counter to any part of the observed data then the whole hypothesis is found null and void and the proposers of said hypothesis must return to the lab to reconstruct a new hypothesis that fits the observed data better (rather than the other way around, mind you!). A hypothesis is only as strong as its weakest implication. In the case of the AGW hypothesis the skeptics have pointed out a number of instances where the AGW hypothesis fails miserably to predict accurately observed data. A hypothesis which fails to make useful and testable statements about its subject must be rejected, that is should one wish to remain in the realm of rational inquiry rather than to move into questions of faith, politics or miracles.
It is now incumbent upon the proposers of the AGW hypothesis to either repair or discard it altogether for something new. That’s the state of play in climatology right now. We understand that rabidly irrational or just plain uninformed pro-AGW supporters are working through the 7 stages of grief on this one. So we’ll try to be kind. But Marion, the vast majority of informed and rational observers have already moved on from blind faith in the IPCC “consensus” style of politicized science. Hopefully, with some study, not only of climatology but the rules of rational thought, you’ll get up to speed on this topic. I find that students that can not think logically about a single topic fail at others as well.
The standard method of scientific inquiry has driven science for, oh, about 300 years. It’s how our civilization developed the physics behind the microprocessors that power the computer that allows you to reveal your pre-Enlightenment nonsense to a vast virtual medium that could never have been created by the sort of reverse science you seem to imagine exists.
10
Yes, with that small, yet dedicated apostle of pamphleteers – there’s a man who obviously knows something for free when he sees it, and everything’s free that comes from the govt, eh?
Oh, and the poor squid woman Marion probably has enough suckers on her hands without you people encouraging her. 😉
10
@ Eddy
Thanks Eddy but I have nothing on you, Jo, Bulldust, Ba, CO2isnotevil, Speedy, Rereke, Richard S Courtney, etc (appologies to those I haven’t put down). I enjoy reading the real scientific work that has been done in this area. Nice clear concise facts, no fudge factors or fiddlers constants involved.
Thanks Val I have been following Ken Stewart’s work very interesting but not unexpected 🙂
10
Has it been peer reviewed? Has it been published in a credible journal?
Voodoo science – it deserves to be put in the dustbin.
10
As these so-called scientists are forced back to the scientific method. I predict that we will see a gradual but constant moving away from the doomsday scenario. To eventually be left with an interesting but somewhat archaic debate, on whether or not a human fingerprint can actually be detected in the climate, from amongst the background noise. If that fingerprint is it there will be so small and vague that the debate will be inconclusive, and as such excellent fodder for university Coffe shops for decades. Unless of course people become so sick of, and embarrassed by the whole mess that no one ever mentions it again.
10
As unpleasant as trolling may be, resorting to name-calling and ad-hominems are best avoided. There is no need, as the data is clear and useful. The more we disparage, the more tightly preconceived notions are held (Aesop’s fable of the wind and the sun, anyone?)
Eddy, even if you were paid by the CIA, if your data is accurate and your presentation unbiased, your personal preferences and affiliations mean little to me. When I see that Al Gore was working on a carbon trading scheme in 1991, I understand his motivations to create a carbon exchange. What a great source of revenue! Early in, early out and let the late-comers pay the bills.
That the climate scientists had to fudge data was unacceptable but that they connived and coerced to get it “peer-reviewed” is an insult to investigative science. Time for us to come to our senses, not be stampeded into anything rash and take care of business.
10
val majkus @ 36:
Looks like Ken Stewart has put in a lot of work there. I will have to sit down and digest that over the weekend. Is Anthony Watts is aware of the site?
10
In response to Marion Bunny Squid, post #10.
I DID look at Hansen’s papers, specifically THIS one:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1984/Hansen_etal_1.html
Click on the Download PDF at the bottom, and you’ll see where Hansen gets his figures.
He assumes a feedback of 1.6 for water vapor, 1.3 for clouds, and 1.1 for ice/albedo effects.
I think the feeback factors are overestimated, but take a look at equations
#10 and #12. Anyone who has taken high school algebra should be able to figure out that they’re obviously wrong.
for a muiltiplier of 1.6, lambda must be 0.375 for water vapor, since 1/(1-0.375) = 1.6.
likewise, lambda must be 0.231 for clouds and 0.091 for ice/albedo feedback, using Hansen’s figures.
Hansen plugged in 1/(1 -.375-.231-.091) and got a multiplier effect of 3.3 total times the original incrase of around 1 C.
Using Hansen’s equation, with 3 multiplier effects of 0.333… each, you get a multiplier effect of
1/(1 – .333… -.333…-.333…)= infinity.
Using 4 feedbacks with lambda of 0.333, each, you get a multiplier of 1/(-.333) = MINUS 3, so instead of an increase of 1 C, you plug in that -3 multiplier and get a DROP of 3 C – obviously the equation is flawed badly.
10
Scott:
July 1st, 2010 at 9:41 am
Actually, Scott, I have been impressed by you and the others you mentioned. I have also been impressed and moved by the likes of Roy Hogue, Lionell Griifth, Rereke Whaakaro, Bull Dust and a host of others. Rattling off the names of all the intelligent and witty people who post here is analogous to an actor trying to remember everybody he needs to acknowledge when he is receiving an Academy Award.
Also, I want to thank the people who have had my back when I wasn’t here to defend myself. Thank you.
10
I just read Eddy’s post and as usual he makes some good point. However, I don’t think that it’s helpful to view rabidly pro-AGW posters as “trolls,” no matter how disrespectful their attitude. For the most part these are just lost souls who were never given the skill set to think rationally or for themselves. They represent failures of our education system, yet they are not irredeemable. They’re human beings, just like us, searching for meaning in the world. Often they are very sensitive and caring human beings who have great empathy for our natural environment. Sometimes they are also very frightened too, by the fear campaigns that most environmental causes degenerate into. Children as young as 8 are presenting with severe anxiety issues caused by the use of apocalyptic fear in the promotion of AGW socio-economic policy. Children who literally believe that the world will come to an end during their lifetimes.
Hatred is also a powerful tool in the hands of the irrational. The term “denier” borrowed from the concept of Holocaust denial among neo-fascist groups is designed to dehumanize the rationally skeptical POV, in exactly the same way that the yellow star was designed to segregate and shame Jews in Hitler’s Germany. Skeptics are the “other”, the “deniers” upon whom any level of abuse or deceit is morally justified. Just how hate and black listing came to be a device in a scientific debate is evidence that, in fact, to the AGW supporters this is no scientific debate at all, but one about socio-economic and cultural politics. At some deeper level the AGW gestalt can never be defeated by rational scientific inquiry, because that’s not what it’s ultimately about. Science was always simply a tool, now that it is broken, it will be discarded and the gestalt will roll on in new guises. In such a climate of misinformation and brutality we must be prepared to rationally and calmly confront members of the general public who present some rather unhinged passions about “science” and climate.
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Marion Bunny Squid: #16
In my time, I have been a professional computer modeller, I am comfortable with Assembler, Fortran, PL/1, APL, and C programming languages. I can also understand Ada, although I would not claim to be able to write it. I studied applied maths (or numerical methods as it was then called) so I can figure out most algorithms.
So, would you care to include the code used for the climate models to the above list of free give-aways? And can you also add the raw data to the list? I presume that when you offer “data”, you mean the error-adjusted data, but the raw data would also be interesting in terms of error distribution analysis.
I ask this because it has been some time since I played with this stuff, and would love to opportunity to reapply my experience and bring my knowledge of current modelling techniques up to date.
10
I agree with you Jo, if our friends the academics are willing to argue from the data then we have won a victory. Not quite the final victory but a victory for sure.
Not least that the ultimate data, the satellite temperature series (which most people on both sides seem to accept as the best series), shows no warming since the 1998 El Nino. This is getting perilously (for AGW proponents) close to Phil Jones’ statistically significant 15-odd year period.
I also think David Archibald’s anomaly-solar cycle length correlations are going to be very hard to counter by AGW people – and looking at the detail I can see additional variance due to the PDO cycle which explains some of the outer points (eg the SC14 point which comprised the 1913 solar driven cooling offset by the PDO cycle upswing). In short, the globe is going to cool, and this will be really hard for AGW academics to explain away with Phil Jones own words beating on them.
Data has this really annoying habit of embarassing people who try to ignore it.
10
@wes george:
July 1st, 2010 at 10:19 am
Thank you. I have very much enjoyed reading your posts today. I am trying to be nice and avoid using the term troll but it is difficult. These are not just “rabidly pro AGW posters.” This is part of a coordinated campaign that Joseph Goebbles would be proud of. They operate in teams. When one leaves another soon follows and sometimes their shifts overlap. They are obviously taking their marching orders from someone. Is this part of the scientific empires attempt to strike back? Do you believe they are sincere individuals or the Leninesque “useful idiots” of the AGW cabal?
10
I cannot view the document they apparently handed out.
Frankly, these two look to me like they ran out of copies of the Socialist Worker’s Daily to distribute so they started to hand out copies of these “rebuttals” instead
[It’s rather unfair of me to judge books by their cover, isn’t it. But they look like a couple of Trotskyites to me, sorry]
10
I had another quick look at the UWA site and tried to find policies on the use of the logo in publications, but to no avail as yet. Unfortunately I gave my copy of the pamphlet to another attendee who politely asked for it, thinking that I would find a copy online at Skeptical Science, but it does not appear to be on their web site.
Given that neither UWA nor Skeptical Science has the pamphlet on their sites, but it bears both their logos, you really start to wonder.
BTW this is the closest thing I could find to a statement regarding public documents representing UWA:
http://www.hr.uwa.edu.au/hr/publications/public_comment
I wonder if Lewandowsky and friends make statements on climate science from the position of representing themselves or the UWA… if the former, no worries, but if the latter, then they are bringing the UWA into disrepute.
10
Brian G Valentine:
They were very timid, perhaps fearful of expected wrath from the skeptics. Given their complete inability to hold up one end of a conversation with Jo I would say they were just stooges sent in to distribute the pamphlets. Sadly most warmists have trouble holding up one side of a debate with being able to copy and paste off Real Climate or Skeptical Science.
No one was rude to them, and I accepted a pamphlet saying “Thanks, I need a good laugh.”
10
Marion Bunny Squid @24,
Have it your way for now. But if they get their way they’ll soon enough have no more use for you than they’ll have for any of the rest of us. So don’t say you were never warned.
10
Hi Bulldust; how’s your horse; yes Ken Stewart’s site was mentioned in a post on WUWT yesterday I think (it’s the article on freezing temperatures in Aust)
10
Eddy,
I think the pro-AGW posters are very sincere, if scientifically illiterate people.
For those of us who have followed the climate debate for years or even decades. It’s easy to forget that the literature on the topic is both vast and arcane to your average citizen who knows only about AGW from the biased imagery on the ABC — Calving glaciers, polar bears adrift on chunk ice, cooling towers belching steam and the prophecy that we will someday suffer for the modern lifestyles we are so fortunate to live today — that’s all most people know. They innocently trust the media and our public officials to process the science for them. So when Penny Wong or Bob Brown cynically announce that the oceans will rise up to destroy our beaches and harbours within our life times people get scared. Scared people are irrational people.
So it doesn’t matter if pro-AGW posters are sincere or rude, misinformed or literally organized trolls. It’s all good. The more trolls the merrier, because they strengthen the debate here, rather than weaken it. Heck, not even the certified AGW-scientists are willing to debate AGW publicly because they know they’ll lose. Trolls will fair rather poorly here and the uncommitted reader is welcome to decide for his/herself who has the stronger argument. In fact, if no trolls show up, I’m thinking of become one just to keep you blokes at the top of your game! 😉
10
Eddy Aruda: #53
Sorry, my friend, but I can’t agree. Whoever is organising this thinks they are clever, but they are amateurs.
Believe me, if they were good, you wouldn’t notice without doing some serious semantic analysis on the prose.
If they are using a PR company to orchestrate a campaign, they deserve to get their money back because it is doing damage to their cause rather than enhancing it.
10
Bulldust @ 56
Agree – the AGW stooges don’t know too much. If you look at the SkepticalScience site, it appears to be no more than a very very trite attempt to defend the various holes in the AGW argument. It looks like it is intended for use by the scientifically illiterate. I wonder if it is manufactured by the same PR company that writes the “Desmog Blog”?
Near my work there’s a guy from Greenpeace button holing people on the street for subscriptions. He walks the other way when he sees me coming these days…
Sadly, for them, it’s not about science, it’s about FAITH. And if there’s any deniers in the discussion, it’s them.
Cheers,
Speedy
10
wes george: #50
The “technical” term used in my part of the world, is “possum in the headlights”. 🙂
10
wes george @ 59
I notice that when the AGW visitors start arguing with the likes of yourself, Eddy, “anyone named Mark”, Humbug, Jamama, Richard et al, all they do is demonstrate the brittle nature of the AGW argument. It is essentially it is a battle of wits against an unarmed opponent.
I try to be courteous to our guests, as one should.
But the bottom line is that scientific theories are like balloons – one prick and they’re busted. The AGW balloon has plenty of holes and this site has plenty of … knowledgable people.
Cheers,
Speedy
10
Speedy: #61
Be nice to them.
There were two women standing on a corner. The older woman was obviously showing the younger the ropes and decided to let her have a go, just as I crossed the road.
The young lady approached me, all smiles, with her clipboard with the Greenpeace logo clutched to her chest.
But, I was in a hurry, so I said, “Greenpeace! You have just got to be joking”, in my best John McEnroe style.
The poor woman’s face crumpled and she burst into tears.
I felt awful all day – still do, when I think about it. She was doing what she thought, or had been told, was right. She was on the side of right, and I was rude.
Be nice to them, they just don’t really understand what is going on, and they are just being used.
10
When they encountered Jo Anne, did they know they were in the presence of the individual who wrote the book that inspired the manifesto they distributed?
They most certainly would hear some rather surly remarks form me, such as:
“I wasn’t aware that Josef Stalin was a global warmer too”
“That’s a rather unusual looking watermelon beheld in the hands on the cover of this”
“The people who gave you this to distribute didn’t call you ‘useful idiots’ to your faces, did they?”
“Do you support the use of Green Power in gulags? Do you think your anti Global Warming campaign would be more effective if Australia was a gulag? Did you know that North Korea was one of the few countries to exceed Kyoto targets last year?”
10
Rereke,
I love it!
Is there an implication in there that the possum gets run down by the vehicle behind the headlights?
10
What is interesting is that this recruitment (Greens) must be quite similar to the two young folks you often see out on Murray Street in Perth, in front of the Scientology Church. Oddly they never seek to engage me in conversation even though I walk past them at least once every week or so with the shopping (I live in East Perth, in an apartment, no car, no garden, walk to work etc… very green).
Perhaps it is that I am a rather large individual, perhaps it is the determined look on my face… I am not sure. But they never approach me. I wish they would, because it would be entertaining. I’d have a few choice words for them regarding their celebrity cult and crackpot ways.
10
Roy/Rereke,
So one opossum says to the other opossum:
“Awww, check it out – Two Moons“
10
Rereke
Don’t get me wrong. I argue against the AGW case, not against the AGW person.
We must always try to respect the individual, even when their argument is illogical, ill-informed and unscientific. But that doesn’t mean we have to ignore the errors in their argument or give them a manifesto to implement the wrongs.
Universal tolerance and respect is a high ideal, and if I sometimes (often) fail to achieve it, then I take a deep breath and try again…
Cheers,
Speedy
10
What the hell?
These people ought to be made to understand that what they advocate will demolish the already poor
They get told from me, in no uncertain terms- they ought to be ashamed of themselves for that green crap
10
I woke up (in NZ) disillusioned and close to recanting my skeptical viewpoint. What awaited me? A frost. Evidently the ETS has started to work already. We are cooling already. Pity I can’t afford to heat my house.
10
MadJak,
Two moons indeed! I nearly fell off my chair laughing.
10
Brian
But it’s not the people – it’s their ignorance that’s the problem. The tricky bit is excising the ignorance without demolishing the individual.
Any advice on this welcome.
Cheers,
Speedy
10
10 reasons why AGW is problematic:
1 Previous levels of CO2 were much higher than today and correlated with temperatures higher, the same and lower than today.
2 Movements of CO2 do not correlate with movements in temperature; during the 20thC from 1940-1976 CO2 increased but temperatures dropped; the same from 1998. See Lansner:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2,Temperaturesandiceages-f.pdf
3 Climate sensitivity of 2XCO2 = 3C has not been verified by the 40% increase in CO2 and temperature increase of only 0.7C since 1900. Of that 0.7C increase solar influence has been 0.1-0.4C [TAR] and natural variation at least 0.3C.
4 The mechanism by which CO2 causes heating has never been adequately explained; see:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0904/0904.2767.pdf
http://biocab.org/Total_Emisivity_CO2.html
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/15567030701568727
5 The optical depth, which is as good a measure of the ‘greenhouse’ effect as any has not increased in 60 years of measurement.
6 Outgoing TOA IR has declined [Lindzen and Choi]
7 Increased SW flux at the surface during the crucial period of AGW warming from 1983-2001 increased [see Pinker et al]
8 Clouds are a negative feedback
9 Water vapour has not increased as required by AGW theory [see Paltridge, Soloman and many others]
10 Miskolczi has a new paper which provides further empirical evidence for his first paper’s thesis that internal variation of greenhouse components such as CO2 and WV will not increase the greenhouse effect. Miskolczi has never been rebutted by a peer reviewed paper.
10
I searched yesterday to find an online copy of the Scientific “Guide” but couldn’t. My only copy is scribbled (by me) all over. If anyone has an unmarked copy can you email me? I’d love photo’s of the pages so I can post it.
As for the dissenting comments, please be polite – most Greens are good people. Though anonymous commenters who use “denier” deserve no respect and unless they apologize, will be put into moderation indefinitely.
M B S is most likely the same commenter who used many anonymous versions of that name before. Cowards who throw stones don’t get to post for long here. Obviously they destroy the conversation.
I don’t know that there are teams of AGW fans striking blogs, though after the Pitman post in Feb we got many emails that all tracked back to UNSW – that was definitely not a coincidence, though may not have been coordinated.
Some of the nastier commenters are just bullies who are attracted to the AGW “cause” because it gives them a good excuse and plenty of encouragement to be bullies – they can pretend to help the planet while they denigrate people. By keeping the serial bullies off the blog I rarely have to moderate.
10
Anthroprogenic CO2 reductions are difficult to justify. Natural sources of CO2 contribute about 20 times more than all burning of minerals/oil.
And the largest source is the oceans. Dissolved CO2. If I recall my Chemistry 110 from 1977 correctly, it moves out of the liquid water into the air largely dependent upon the water’s temperature and the partial pressure of CO2 in the air above the surface of the water.
So any reduction in anthroprogenic CO2 emissions would notionally increase the natural emissions from the oceans in order to balance the pressure.
Nett effect: No reduction in atmospheric CO2.
The biggest caveat is, I think, the assumption that CO2 is well mixed throughout the atmosphere. Which is far from valid outside of “popular” climate models and a chemistry lab.
10
Ah Jo, the inversion of reality you demonstrate is truly breathtaking. I wonder why your husband felt it necessary to photograph me, too? Couldn’t possibly be ad hominem, could it? (Even the caption is wrong: I only had four in my hand!)
[The tiny nameless photos are mere decoration. Sorry to pop that bubble.]
Let me introduce myself: I’m the guy in the photo, and the one you had a ‘conversation’ with. Though, of course, not the selectively edited one you suggest here.
[I didn’t suggest the person in the photo was the same as the unnamed commentator. Indeed I didn’t realize they, you apparently, are the same? I seriously don’t remember faces well. Don’t take that the wrong way. I was told you said it was ok to take photos on the night? If you’ve changed your mind, I can remove them, or name you in them, whatever, just ask.]
1. Your Handbook is well known, but so egregiously painful in its scientific inadequacy that, to date, no-one had mustered the stamina to wade through it providing rebuttal.
[I’m sure it’s egregiously painful for you to read. Likewise, you’ll find my rebuttal painful probably too. Sorry about that. –JN]
However, given the Circus was in town, a few people (largely via SkepticalScience) got together to quickly draw up an actual-science-based explanation of the falsity of your four main talking points. Those scientists from a range of disciplines listed under Acknowledgements did not author but simply reviewed the work for accuracy. None of us involved get paid for doing any of that work, nor for handing it out, and it is done ‘pro bono’ in our spare time.
[Shucks. This pro bono blogger is touched…]
What’s more, no-one on Monday was paid for their appearances, nor charged admission at the door as you did.
[I believe those Monday speakers have paid jobs though, unlike all the skeptics. No government departments seem to want to help scientists who disagree with government policy speak up. –JN]
2. You, as usual, flatly misrepresent what Prof Lewandowsky spoke of: namely, the perils of ignoring scientific consensus.
[ Yes. That’s exactly what he said. That’s my point.–JN]
That consensus as articulated by the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed science going back 150 years to Fourier. That consensus as expressly endorsed by every major scientific body in the world, such as the AAAS, the Royal Society, and every developed country’s national scientific academy, including Australia. And on and on. No point listing them because you simply ignore it.
[Yes. There is no point using argument from authority here. We want evidence, not opinions, even if they are Gods of science to some, we are unimpressed. Faith in a “consensus” is religious talk, not science.]
3. All graphs in the Guide are taken from the respective journal articles. They obscure nothing and I challenge you to back up your claims of misrepresentation with specifics.
[Will do.]
4. What you seem manifestly unable to understand is this: i) enhanced warming of the tropical troposphere is a function of increasing atmospheric and surface temperatures, generated by any forcing mechanism (eg, solar output, albedo changes, as well as GHGs) — as lower tropospheric temperatures increase, the moist adibiatic lapse rate decreases. ii) that effect is NOT a signature of the enhanced greenhouse effect per se; it will happen under that forcing but is not a fingerprint. iii) what is a fingerprint of the increased GHGs is a warming troposphere in concert with a cooling stratosphere until a new equilibrium is eventually reached — for the reason that more outgoing longwave radiation absorbed by the troposphere results in less of it being transmitted to the stratosphere, which in turn cools down. iv) the radiosonde data did indeed fail to show this signature for some time, however, corrections and enhanced processing of that dataset have occurred in recent years, and — surprise surprise — tropical tropospheric warming is indeed found to be robust. (Conspiracy! I can hear you shouting…) v) moreover, you can see the signature from the satellite observations of net radiative flux: same shortwave coming in but less longwave coming out = planetary energy imbalance.
[Justin. Sigh. I’ve already dealt with all these points elsewhere and repeatedly. I’m quoting the IPCC and CCSP and Hansen 1984. So you admit the hot spot was missing (but the IPCC didn’t make that clear in AR4 did they?) how dishonest. It doesn’t change our argument that all forms of warming in theory-but-not-in-practise cause the hot spot. The greenhouse signature is more than the hot spot. And in any case, trumping all else, the models are therefore wrong on ALL causes of warming. Not something to brag about. Also the outgoing radiation bands of CO2 don’t tell us about the feedbacks. Plus you don’t seem to realize that it’s GHG emissions which cool the stratosphere.]
5. The paleoclimatic record makes abundantly clear that climate sensitivity cannot possibly be less than 2 oC.
[Got any papers there? …]
6. I am delighted, Jo, to present the three papers that destroy your argument. For the record, I was attempting to get a webpage up on my phone so I could read them to you, not to ‘call for help’. As I pointed out to you at the time, when one reads the scientific literature, one tends not to be able to keep every author and paper name available for instant recall — there’s rather a lot of them you see. You are being disingenuous at best when you suggest that it was I that expected you to list papers off the top of your head — you explicitly tried to deflect my raising these three papers by suggesting that I was misinformed (lying perhaps?) because I couldn’t give you their citations instantly. You said that you knew all the papers you cited.
[Thanks for finally coming up with the names of these papers. I don’t suppose you can explain how these “destroy” anything in particular. I’m not seeing it when I read them. I’ll explain more in a post. You think I tried to “deflect” you discussing …what? … three unnamed papers? ]
Haimberger, Leopold, Christina Tavolato, and Stefan Sperka. 2008. Toward Elimination of the Warm Bias in Historic Radiosonde Temperature Records—Some New Results from a Comprehensive Intercomparison of Upper-Air Data. Journal of Climate 21, no. 18: 4587-4606. doi:10.1175/2008JCLI1929.1.
Lanzante, John R, and Melissa Free. 2008. Comparison of Radiosonde and GCM Vertical Temperature Trend Profiles: Effects of Dataset Choice and Data Homogenization*. Journal of Climate 21, no. 20: 5417-5435. doi:10.1175/2008JCLI2287.1.
Sherwood, Steven C, Cathryn L Meyer, Robert J Allen, and Holly A Titchner. 2008. Robust Tropospheric Warming Revealed by Iteratively Homogenized Radiosonde Data. Journal of Climate 21, no. 20: 5336-5352. doi:10.1175/2008JCLI2320.1.
Two seminal 2009 papers that I did suggest to you without ‘calling for help’ examine the vexed question of avoiding >2 oC temp rise:
Allen, Myles R., David J. Frame, Chris Huntingford, Chris D. Jones, Jason A. Lowe, Malte Meinshausen, and Nicolai Meinshausen. 2009. Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne. Nature 458, no. 7242 (April 30): 1163-1166. doi:10.1038/nature08019.
Meinshausen, Malte, Nicolai Meinshausen, William Hare, Sarah C. B. Raper, Katja Frieler, Reto Knutti, David J. Frame, and Myles R. Allen. 2009. Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C. Nature 458, no. 7242 (April 30): 1158-1162. doi:10.1038/nature08017.
7. I ask you to retract your untruthful claim that I said an ETS was free — I did not and your placing that in quotes is fabrication. I said that up to 50% of reductions can be made at negative cost (that should have been qualified to energy emissions though), which is based on the well known work of McKinsey on abatement cost curves. To whit:
Lewis, Adam, and Stephan Görner. 2008. An Australian Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction. McKinsey & Company, Australia.
[Since I didn’t name you in the post, it’s not much of a “quote” but I’ve changed it to 50% anyway. It doesn’t make much difference. All cost curves assume the IPCC is right, which assume the models are right, which assume there is positive feedback. I can’t see any point in discussing the end of that chain of “ifs”.]
8. Further to that, why is it that as soon as you are challenged on scientific claims you suddenly jump to saying, if memory serves, that ‘we’ just want to take all your money (you say it again above)? We were talking about greenhouse effect fingerprinting, but when challenged on the two papers above, you leap over to the failure of an ETS, actually claiming that it’s lack of implementation somehow, magically, demonstrates that the science is invalid. Pure sophistry.
[Your “challenge” amounted to papers you didn’t describe or name remember. You guys are the ones asking for our money, therefore you needed to provide evidence to back up your claims. This is inane.]
9. The negative external costs of fossil fuels in general and coal in particular are well documented through life cycle analysis (eg, the ExternE project http://www.externe.info/). And I explicitly pointed out to you those costs other than CO2 in the form of local air pollution, deaths from mining, and so on. Once again you neglect to mention that, choosing to misrepresent what I actually said.
[These are entirely different issues. Worthy, maybe, but not connected. Public policy isn’t made simpler when people conflate things. Let each one stand on it’s own evidence.]
10. The scientific literature — which the IPCC merely reviews — is replete with overwhelming evidence of the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Your ideological opposition to any restraint on laissez faire libertarian capitalism in the form of regulations that constrain GHG emissions makes you fundamentally unable and unwilling to accept it. No amount of you making specious claims, misunderstanding and misrepresenting that science, changes that unwelcome reality.
[ I object to AGW on scientific grounds first and foremost (havent you read the Skeptics Handbook?)]
For the record, because I expect I’ll be challenged on it and/or told I don’t know what I’m talking about: I am a PhD student at Murdoch university in climate change mitigation policy, examining aerosol cooling effects fossil fuel emissions. I actually have some minor qualifications in the topic, though of course I do not claim to have original knowledge: a BSc, a BAppSc in Energy, and an MSc in Renewable Energy Policy (focussed on climate change science and emissions abatement).
[Good on you for being a real person. Thanks. That’s much better than anonymous commenters. But I don’t ask for, nor am impressed much by qualifications.]
10
Of course CO2 is stratified in the atmosphere – the barometric formula and the fact that wind speeds are far smaller than molecular speeds at temperatures throughout the troposphere (~ sound speed) are proof enough of that.
I think I’ll take my new symbol to represent aggravating global warmers to be a squid instead of a watermelon
10
That’s completely absurd, you’re clueless, dude.
Absolutely clueless.
10
Bernde @ 76
Thanks for your post – informative as always. Again, you are close to the mark and what you say is true. If we took CO2 out of the air, more would come out of the oceans to replace it.(There is 50 tonnes of CO2 in the ocean for every tonne of CO2 in the atmosphere – there’s plenty of CO2 in the oceans to comprehensively overwhelm anything we feeble humans can put out.)
But the biggest factor is that the solubility of CO2 in water DECREASES as temperature increases. The upshot is that if CO2 makes the climate hotter and a hotter climate causes the oceans to warm and therefore emit more CO2 – We’d be STUFFED!
In control terms, there are 2 variables in positive feedback – an inherently unstable condition and very very very unlikely to have persisted for about 4.5 billion years without going out of control! (i.e. a runaway greenhouse)
The bottom line. Either CO2 has minimal impact on the climate OR there are other negative feedbacks that balance its effect.
In either case, a runaway greenhouse DID not, HAS not and WILL not happen!
Cheers,
Speedy
10
@Brian G Valentine,
Perfect inversion. Just saying something is absurd is meaningless. Here’s just one example discussing the paleoclimate derived climate sensitivity: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI3865.1
If CO2 didn’t have these effects, the planet would be far colder than the ~33 oC above black body level it is now, and we may well never have crawled out of the snowball earth in distant past.
10
Exactly. If you don’t hold a person’s respect you can’t make a reasoned argument with them. Some on the political right have done this with AGW using the term communist to describe both members of the Greens and other AGW proponents. Any lefty that hears the word communist disengages from the conversation immediately. In the same way an AGW sceptic disengages at the term denier.
Shouting down members of Greenpeace on the street is like laughing in the face of cult members. They are, in a way, victims of a twisted logic that places them in the center of the universe. They believe their life coincides with a crux point in time for humanity, that they have an opportunity to lead us blind, pathetic souls to salvation. That their time is the most important time in the history of humanity.
This, of course, comes from angst. Not having a proper perspective of one’s place in the world. Members of movements like AGW, like any cult, seek out these groups to assuage them of their angst about their place in the world. Remember, these are people who have been unable to find meaning in their lives, hence they need to be ‘informed’ as to what that meaning is. Feel they were born for great things but don’t know what exactly.
Now. Men who cannot find purpose in small deeds will never do great things.
So, the charismatic types bring those “seekers” into the fold, give them the vision statement and a list of small tasks to perform. What you encounter on the street is a victim of misdirection, carrying out a small task for the cause. Being rude to them reinforces the belief that they are indeed special and the outreach they are doing is furthering the cause for your own salvation. It is their time and place in the world after all.
My strategy response to Greenpeace and every other outreaching, belief-based organisation is the same. I inform them that I have found my own meaning in life and that I’m happy to let the world work itself out. The response is always the same, you can see the pitiful expression on their faces. “Poor, blind sheep”, they think. But that statement of owning my destiny niggles. It can be a catalyst down the road to the unraveling of their flawed worldview.
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RE post 60
Rereke, we have to talk. How best could we do that?
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Justin, for the record, CO2 follows temperature increases because of the solubility in sea water, there is no way to distinguish the effect of any “greenhouse” gas from any other, and the so-called “greenhouse” effect is a myth that is based on the diurnal temperature difference effects of water vapour throughout the atmosphere, present as the result of evaporation, and moved in the atmosphere by convection.
That’s the way it is, Justin, I don’t expect to convince you of anything, I bother to respond to the myth because belief in it has a terrible propensity to harm people
Otherwise you’re entitled to believe any idiotic thing you care to and I couldn’t care less
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@Brian G,
Absolutely correct, any changes in surface ocean temperatures effect the solubility of CO2 — higher temps increase outgassing to the atmosphere. Which is the key positive feedback effect that explains the paleoclimatic record.
If you knew anything about radiative physics you might be able to understand that this is a radiative forcing, in that it produces a transient reduction in outgoing longwave radiation (CO2 absorbs infrared, as Tyndall showed in the lab in 1859). That makes the stratosphere cool while the perturbation persists. What’s more, as multiple observation techniques demonstrate, nighttime temperatures increase more precisely for this very reason (invalidating your diurnal quip). Once energy balance is restored through increasing surface and tropospheric temperatures, longwave emittance to space returns to equilibrium through the higher temperature.
Energy balance. It’s basic atmospheric physics. The greenhouse effect of CO2 and other trace gases makes the planet habitable for most of life on earth. That’s the way it is, Brian. You can believe any idiotic thing in the face of abundant and irrefutable evidence that your ideology directs you to; and while I dearly wish I couldn’t care less, the fate of human civilisation and many species of life behoves me to do so.
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The presence of CO2 in the atmosphere makes life possible because of photosynthesis and the “greenhouse” effect doesn’t require my 1xE+06th refutation
I feel bad for youth of today, embarked on a crusade to hang themselves because of a fairy tale
Good God, the only comparable stupidity I can think of throughout the course of human history is the conviction of the need for human sacrifice to the gods of agriculture
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@Brian G,
Right, so, ad homs is it?
Can’t handle a bit of science I take it? Hmmm, perhaps you don’t know what a black body actually is? Let me explain: if the planet was just a solid lump of stuff, and as basic (and I do mean basic) physics demands that energy is conserved — first law of thermodynamics — incoming solar energy must equal outgoing thermal energy at equilibrium. 350 Wm^-2 comes in (minus albedo), 350 Wm^-2 gotta go out. That gives a global mean temp on the surface of about – 15 oC. Which is rather cold. The presence of an absorbing, layered atmosphere — and the GHGs within it — absorb and reradiate thermal longwave radiation from the surface in all directions, including back to the ground. Which absorbs it. Which makes it hotter. Which means more energy is re-radiated. And so on until it all works itself out and the net result is emission of longwave from the top of the atmosphere of — wait for it — that same 350 Wm^-2. But the surface mean temp is now about + 18 oC, which is liveable for plant and animal species in most parts of the world.
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Justin Wood:
July 1st, 2010 at 1:49 pm
A bald face lie. Jeremy Jacquot of Desmogblog tried and failed Rober Schaeffer crashed and burned in his attempt, too. As did several others. Googling “Joannes skeptic handbook debunked ” produced 20,500 results.
Science isn’t done by consensus. If the hypothesis is so solid why are the scientists who champion it loathe to make their raw data available. Thats the whole point!
Another claim and surprise, surprise no evidence cited to support your claim! Also, if there was a planetary imbalance the world would warm but surprise, surprise it hasn’t for fifteen years.
The geological record shows no relationship between temperatures and CO2.
.
No, it is not. Cite it. Are you talking about the 60% that is actually peer reviewed or are you talking about WWF articles and press releases?
The numbers of people who have died because of fossil fuels is nil compared to the benefits of the modern life we enjoy because of hydrocarbons. Your green low carbon utopia will kill more people then have been killed in all of the wars ever fought in the history of the world combined.
Avoid the ad hominems andd stick to the science!
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Justin that reasoning is dopey.
There is about an 8 Kelvin degree difference between a calculated temperature of radiant exchange of the Earth with the sun and the actual diurnal temperature average because of water vapour in the atmosphere that was put there by evaporation.
Like it or not.
Peace, Justin, and as long as I can fight your particular brand of ignorance I will. Everybody needs a justification for their existence, good night
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@ Eddy,
Thank you kindly for demonstrating in no uncertain detail the wonders of the Dunning-Krugger Effect.
Sorry mate, science is indeed done by consensus; you should try talking to some scientists. You probably have yourself mixed up with experimental science, where hypotheses are tested against falsifiable experiments. Problem is, the earth-atmosphere system is, well, a system. And in that case — observational science — it works on the preponderance of evidence. Try looking at the AAAS explanations of this perhaps.
I’m genuinely amazed that you are so foolish to challenge to me on the scientific evidence for radiosondes when I expressly provided them in the very same post! Again:
Haimberger, Leopold, Christina Tavolato, and Stefan Sperka. 2008. Toward Elimination of the Warm Bias in Historic Radiosonde Temperature Records—Some New Results from a Comprehensive Intercomparison of Upper-Air Data. Journal of Climate 21, no. 18: 4587-4606. doi:10.1175/2008JCLI1929.1.
Lanzante, John R, and Melissa Free. 2008. Comparison of Radiosonde and GCM Vertical Temperature Trend Profiles: Effects of Dataset Choice and Data Homogenization*. Journal of Climate 21, no. 20: 5417-5435. doi:10.1175/2008JCLI2287.1.
Sherwood, Steven C, Cathryn L Meyer, Robert J Allen, and Holly A Titchner. 2008. Robust Tropospheric Warming Revealed by Iteratively Homogenized Radiosonde Data. Journal of Climate 21, no. 20: 5336-5352. doi:10.1175/2008JCLI2320.1.
Cite what? The tens of thousands of articles that make up the evidence?? What, all of them right here?? How about you start with the References section of AR4 WG I? Just incredible.
On fossil fuels I cited a well-known, international research effort on external costs through life cycle analysis. You just waved your hand and said it was wrong, without — as you loudly demanded I do — citing a thing. Cognitive dissonance in your head must be deafening. Do you know how many people die globally just from coal mining each year? How about the 150,000 annually from local air pollution just in the US?
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@Brian G,
Why don’t you go pick up an undergrad atmospheric science textbook, read it for a while, and maybe you’ll get it. I can suggest Sturman and Tapper, 2005, The Weather and Climate of Australia and New Zealand. Chapter 2 on radiative processes.
Honestly, to continually claim that the greenhouse effect doesn’t even exist is totally ridiculous, even for a denier (of the enhanced greenhouse effect).
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Warmists leave a bad taste in my mouth, yuck.
[Is that ad hominem? No, it’s just a description of the effects of my allergy to warmists.]
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Jo, your description of the “hand-out” people reminds me of some Greenpeace spear-carriers in the main street of Mt Gambier on Monday. They were truly awful, in the sense of not knowing anything of the philosophy of science. It took less than two minutes to have them floundering, but I was encouraged by the (attractive!) young lady who did take seriously some reading suggestions I gave her. Once more, the AGW propaganda merchants rely on the scientific illiteracy of the general population to peddle their rubbish. But it was sad to see the young folk being abused by their Greenpeace controllers.
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hope this nicholson cartoon on julia gillard, god and global warming opens for u – VERY FUNNY:
http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/cartoon_7095.html
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Justin Wood:
July 1st, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Another ridiculous claim. The air is cleaner in Seattle than in Los Angeles but the death rate from lung cancer is statistically the same. I am not a scientist but Ross Mckitrick is a pretty solid statistician. The same statistical BS that is used in the US is used in Canada. See http://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/malthus-with-a-computer/
You mean how the consensus believed that ulcers were caused by stress ? The consensus was debunked and we know it is h. pylori that causes ulcers. Some of the top climatologists in the world have stated that global warming is bunk. There is no consensus. You cite scientific organizations that support the consensus but when the rank and file are asked they often have a different take. A Canadian survey of scientists released on March 6, 2008 offered even more evidence that the alleged ‘consensus’ is non-existent. A canvass of more than 51,000 scientists with the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta (APEGGA) found 68% of them disagree with the statement that ‘the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled.'” According to the survey, only 26% of scientists attributed global warming to “human activity like burning fossil fuels.” APEGGA’s executive director Neil Windsor said, “We’re not surprised at all. There is no clear consensus of scientists that we know of.” See http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=1d688937-54b7-48f4-a4be-d6979dada5df&k=65311
The IPCC was a political organization that was formed to promote a theory. The summary for policy makers was in fact the summary by policy makers. Anything that the politicians did not want in the report was edited out. It is not about the science, it is about the money. The number of scandals that have broken out is hard to keep count of and you still think the science is solid? You never answered my question, if the science is so settled then why won’t the scientists release their raw data to see if it can be falsified?
I still have to see anyone on your side of the isle explain how it was warmer several times during the current interglacial and yet CO2 levels were lower. So maybe you can help me there.
i do not claim to be a scientist but I know an elitist when I meet one. Unfortunately for you, there are several scientists who frequent this cite and I will leave the physics to them. Regarding your citations I apologize for missing them.
You remind me of a guy who is a real warrior when he is in his car. He thinks he is a tough guy until he gets stuck in traffic or at a light. Then, when the guy he flipped off walks up to his window he defecates in his pants. You throw the ad hominems around like you are a tough guy. I have a feeling that if we were having this conversation in person you would be the guy defecating in your pants!
Given your version of the encounter and Jo’s, I am sure Jo is telling the truth.
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Justin is, I would wager, a perfect example of the Deltoid syndrone; a little education goes a long way; still it is good of him to drop by; let’s look at some of the agnotological snippets he has put forward to validate AGW:
4 The THS; this was dealt with at great length on the John Cook thread at this site which Justin is no doubt aware of; as Justin attempts to show the science [sic] of the THS is not complex in theory; the THS is really a function of water vapor feedback, not a first order forcing. You don’t see it in MODTRAN as implemented on line because a surface temperature offset entered in MODTRAN only affects the temperature up through 10 km and it’s constant. You get the THS only if the lapse rate decreases as temperature goes up because the moist lapse rate gets lower as specific humidity goes up (higher energy content/kg). A decreasing lapse rate is actually a negative feedback, but the increased radiation from increased water vapor is supposed to more than make up for that.
Say the lapse rate is 6.5 K/km and the surface temperature is 300 K. Then the temperature at 10 km would be 235 K (300-6.5*10). Now let’s raise the surface temperature by 10 K and lower the lapse rate to 6 K/km. Now the surface temperature is 310 K and the temperature at 10 km is 250 K (310-6*10). So the surface has warmed by 10 K and the 10 km temperature has gone up by 15 K. That’s the source, but with smaller numbers, of the THS.
The problem for Justin is 2-fold; firstly, a THS does depend on a temperature signature; Fig 9.1 of AR4 makes this plain; and this temperature signature is distinct to ghg’s; that is unequivocal; and that temperature signature is not there. The second problem is more convoluted and depends on there being more atmospheric water vapor [SH] at particular levels and for that increased SH to have a +ve feedback to temperature. Initially, despite all the Santer and Soden modeling, it is problematic that SH is increasing at all or where it should be [see Soloman and Paltridge]; secondly, does increased SH have a positive feedback; increased SH should increase the latent heat of the atmosphere but this paper says otherwise:
http://landshape.org/enm/new-miskolczi-manuscript/
Justin, if you want a full copy of the paper you should ask David. Now, let’s look at Stratospheric cooling, the other half of the THS;
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#msu_amsu_time_series
If you look specifically at TLS and TLT you will first note the following for TLS:
1978-1982 average flat
1982 El Chicon large volcao and following 2 years of spike up
1984-1991 drop to lower level than 1978-1982 and average flat
1991 Mt. Pinatube large volcano and 2+ years of spike up
1994-2010 drop to lower level than 1978-1982 and average flat
Now note for TLT:
1978-1997 up and down for several reasons, but average level
1998 very large ENSO
1999-2010 up and down for several reasons but average higher than 1978-1997 and essentially not varying in average. Most recent year high due to ENSO, but drop expected to follow from LaNino. Questionable where it will go from there.
The point of all of this information is that even though CO2 had a steady and large increase over this entire period, nothing that happened seems to be related to the CO2. The TLS has been essentially constant since 1994, and this period included the largest increase in TLT. In fact, essentially all of the increase in TLT occurred after 1998. This may help Justin understand the point even more clearly:
http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Stratosphere1278-1204.gif
I’ll look at Justin’s point 5, which beggars belief, in another post.
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Dear Eddy,
If I didn’t know better I’d be inclined to think that parting shot of yours was something of a threat, what with the violent metaphor and all? I assure you I don’t walk away; why else would I be doing this now? I did have this conversation in person. I have before and I will again. I don’t back down.
Very briefly, because there’s really no point in pursuing this further, with your teflon shield of any and all empirical evidence.
On air pollution: look it up. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=annual+deaths+from+air+pollution+in+the+united+states
On ‘surveys’ of climate scientists: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107 and http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Epdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf — showing that 97% of publishing climatologists accept the consensus view.
The ‘scandals’ come out in inverse proportion to the robustness of the evidence: deniers shriek and stamp their feet louder the more the evidence builds against their ideology. All of them have been shown to be nonsense in any case — even ‘Climategate’, which I saw one of your 9/11 Truther comrades spruiking at the door — with the exception of the mistaken 2035 claim in AR4 WG II, though of course not WG I (where it was in much more detail and absent the flawed paper).
On the raw data… This nonsense still? I mean, really? http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/ If the UK Met won’t release part of their dataset for commercial reasons, that’s the UK government’s fault.
Several times warmer? What are you on about man? If you mean the MWP that was a NH phenomenon and was not as warm as the late 20th century in any case. What’s more, climatic response to any GHG forcing is not immediate, it takes 20-30 years. And have you not heard of aerosol cooling offsetting part of the positive GHG forcing (http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap2-3/final-report/)? Oceanic warming continues apace, where > 75% of the energy goes, a strong proxy for net planetary energy imbalance:
Lyman, John M., Simon A. Good, Viktor V. Gouretski, Masayoshi Ishii, Gregory C. Johnson, Matthew D. Palmer, Doug M. Smith, and Josh K. Willis. 2010. Robust warming of the global upper ocean. Nature 465, no. 7296 (May 20): 334-337. doi:10.1038/nature09043.
von Schuckmann, K., F. Gaillard, and P. Y Le Traon. 2009. Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003-2008. J. Geophys. Res. 10.
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Well, it’s been fun all.
Last comment (probably) — some of that pesky evidence on climate sensitivity…
Annan, J. D., J. C. Hargreaves, R. Ohgaito, A. Abe-Ouchi, and S. Emori. 2005. Efficiently constraining climate sensitivity with ensembles of paleoclimate simulations. SOLA 1, no. 0: 181–184.
Covey, Curt, Lisa Cirbus Sloan, and Martin I. Hoffert. 1996. Paleoclimate data constraints on climate sensitivity: The paleocalibration method. Climatic Change 32, no. 2 (February 1): 165-184. doi:10.1007/BF00143708.
Knutti, R., G. A Meehl, M. R Allen, and D. A Stainforth. 2006. Constraining climate sensitivity from the seasonal cycle in surface temperature. Journal of Climate 19: 4224–4233.
Schneider von Deimling, T., H. Held, A. Ganopolski, and S. Rahmstorf. 2006. Climate sensitivity estimated from ensemble simulations of glacial climate. Climate Dynamics 27, no. 2: 149–163.
[All of these are model simulations from models that assume net positive feedback. eg Covey 1996, Knutti 2005 –JN]
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poor Justin,
they must hand out doctorates in kellogs boxes now. pity you wasted your money.
slam dunked again..
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@Binny “Unless of course people become so sick of, and embarrassed by the whole mess that no one ever mentions it again.” This of course is the most likely outcome. And that would be fine, except that it will leave a swathe of futile, growth-inhibiting legislation on the world’s statute books. Repeal will not be possible, because nobody in a position to do so will want to own up to having believed it in the first place.
And this is the real reason Mann, Jones et al need hounding to the grave – the discrediting of CAGW needs to be loud and ineluctable. It needs a bang, not a whimper.
OK, the other reason is for the fun of seeing third-rate blowhards, who’ve been dishing it out to their betters for two decades, twist on the gibbet.
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Citing nature and real climate what about Al Baby and Dcaprio you missed a couple.
The MWP happened in a glass bowl in an area 6 inches wide in the northen hemisphere. funny thats the same distance between the ears.
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Justin, you a veritable walking collection of cliches and shibboleths; ha! The Schuckmann paper and Treberth’s missing heat; congratulations on relaying the discovery. I was going to reply to your point 5 in your base post at 77 but I have already done that at comments 208 and 209 here;
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/06/how-john-cook-unskeptically-believes-in-a-hotspot-that-thermometers-cant-find/#comments
Your comment about OHC and Schuckmann is much more egregious and needs to be put back in tis crypt. I also covered this at the above link and I repeat it here; the official OHC data shows a decline since the ARGO epiphany;
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index.html
The ’surge’ in OHC immediately following the ARGO transition is obviously a measurement error:
http://landshape.org/enm/possible-error-in-ohc/#more-3180
The argument now coming from the AGW side of the fence is that abyssmal ocean heating is continuing apace despite top 700 metre cooling; for instance see the Johnson et al paper and note the concessions to limited data and mesurement techniques:
http://oceans.pmel.noaa.gov/Pdf/gcj_3f.pdf
However the new paper by von Schuckmann showing rapid increase in OHC below 2000 metres from 2003 to 2008 has been the talking point; there appear to be 2 main problems with the Schuckmann paper; firstly, how heat gets to the abysmmal depths without leaving a heating signature in the upper ocean which as NASA and various papers including by Willis and Levitus show is cooling; there may however be an answer to this question in the above paper by Johnson et al, which provides a mechanism for abyssal heating by non-ubiquitous deep convection currents.
However, the second problem is more profound; Cazaneve and Ablain have written 2 recent papers about steric sea level rise, which has a declining rate since 2003; The Cazaneve paper calculates steric sea level rise (thermal plus salinity) from 2003 to 2008 from Altimetry minus mass balance (two different ways) as 0.31mm/year, and independently calculates the value by thermal expansion from ARGO data as 0.37mm/year. This uses 0-900m ARGO data. It concludes:-
“The steric sea level estimated from the difference between altimetric (total) sea level and ocean mass displays increase over 2003–2006 and decrease since 2006. On average over the 5 year period (2003–2008), the steric contribution has been small (on the order of 0.3+/−0.15 mm/yr), confirming recent Argo results (this study and Willis et al., 2008).”
The point here is you can’t have rapid OHC increase as found by Schuckmann with a decline in steric sea level rise.
The other issue with a rise in the EEB is that it requires a decline in TOA outgoing LW radiation; that is by no means what is happening with the Lindzen and Choi paper showing an increase in outgoing LW; the fact is Trenberth and honest leading pro-AGW scientists have not got a clue where the extra heat from AGW is going; the problem is it is the models which are claiming this extra heat not the reality
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Justin,
You cut and pasted this statement “the radiosonde data did indeed fail to show this signature for some time, however, corrections and enhanced processing of that dataset have occurred in recent years, and — surprise surprise — tropical tropospheric warming is indeed found to be robust.”
Can you expalin in more detail what you (in your own words not another cut and paste) mean by “corrections” and “enhanced processing”.
TIA
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Justin is the prize that keeps giving: he says: “On ’surveys’ of climate scientists: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107 and http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Epdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf — showing that 97% of publishing climatologists accept the consensus view.”
For a rational response to the irrational;
http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/29/agreeing-to-agree
Consensus in science is such a dumb idea. Far be it for me to go the ad hom but does anyone know the correct wording; is it clever fools and educated idiots or the other way round?
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Justin Wood:
July 1st, 2010 at 3:49 pm
But Jo asserts:
More ad hominems and then google scholar? Is that the best you can do? How pathetic!
Lets kill two birds with one stone. first, here is a paper which talks about the MWP in Antarctica http://www.co2science.org/subject/m/summaries/mwpantarctica.php For several hundred papers see: http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
Speaking of peer reviewed, oneof my favorite quotes from the climategate emails:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Here is an enlightening article http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=8926a1d3-f43f-4f8b-811d-0a0daa3e1012&k=39580 The argus buoy system shows no increase in ocean heat, so where did it go? I know, lets ask professor Trenberth!
On Oct 14, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Kevin Trenberth wrote:
Hi Tom
How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where
energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not
close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is
happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as
we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
Kevin
Hows that response to Cohenite coming along? Don’t say I did not warn you, tough guy! 😉
I believe Jo and by the looks of your picture I would say my analogy of the kind of person you are is correct.
Yep, I can see you sitting in your car now. Better check your underwear!
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@wes george – I am not a scientist, and you do a great job of explaining the fundamentals of the scientific method as it can understood by any layman, although I doubt if the squid is paying much attention. IMO, however, you missed the greatest commandment disobeyed by the Hockey Team:
Thou Shalt Not Neglect the Null Hypothesis!
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@ Cohenite
Shalom bro! I am glad I am on your side!
Well, it is getting late and I am staring to make too many typos.
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[snip. please. let’s not do ad homs? ]
It is very sad to note that so called thinking individuals can be so BRAINWASHED and can lose their own ability to reason for themselves.
My condolences to you “Justin Wood”.
You have my pity and my sympathy.
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ED,
RE post 105 i have used this line of attack in the past on an extremely well fortified alarmist site, the response was that the CO2science site is (insert insulting name here) therefore relinquishing them from any requirement to respond to the myriad of studies listed there. I am waiting with interest to see Justins response.
By the way Ed you did not answer my question is it merely coincedence that you look very much like our Foreign Minister Steven Smith or is there something you are not telling us?
Cheers
Crakar
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Roy Hogue: #66
Every time.
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crakar24:
July 1st, 2010 at 4:43 pm
My attorney has advised me not to answer that question. 🙂
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@ crackar24
ROFLMAO! I just googled the guys picture.There is a “slight” resemblance.
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Judging by the one thumb down at my post at 105 and cohenite’s post at 102 I believe Justin is still here but is too afraid to comment. Is he changing his underwear or on his blackberry texting for help?
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@crakar24,
Cut and paste? Nonsense. I wrote it on the fly. Read the papers; you won’t believe anything I say anyway.
@cohenite,
Not going into OHC here as I freely admit I’m no expert. Although there is the fact that the NOAA data is before the von Shuckmann Argo updates…
Lindzen & Choi is a strange choice of evidence given it’s comprehensive drubbing:
Trenberth, K. E, J. T Fasullo, C. O’Dell, and T. Wong. 2010. Relationships between tropical sea surface temperature and top-of-atmosphere radiation. Geophys. Res. Lett 37.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/01/first-published-response-to-lindzen-and-choi/
As for consensus in science, well I suppose you — unnamed amateur — must of course know better than all them… scientists:
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/1204climate_statement.shtml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/06/climate-science-open-letter
@Eddy,
I explained, twice now, what happened with the three papers. They’re right there in the post above. How you can equate that to me walking away is quite beyond me.
Google Scholar is a freely available database where most are paid subscriptions. What on earth do you find objectionable about that, FFS? I also note you simply dropped the air pollution thing and (bait and) switched back to, dripping with irony, ad homs about my supposed ad homs.
How very good of you to misinterpret Trenberth’s on-the-record discussion of the still extant paucity of short term observational data. I’m sadly aware this will make no difference, but you have totally misapprehended the meaning. Read it perhaps?
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final2.pdf
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Understanding-Trenberths-travesty.html
Lastly, Eddy, your infantile desire to insult me based on a tortured road rage metaphor merely underscores the quality of your ‘logic’.
—
I do so love how so many of you sink to attacking my university — if puerile smears about ‘paying for a degree’ are the best you can come up with…
But you win. I can’t possibly hope to use evidence, logic, and rationality to make a case when these things are simply discarded the moment you don’t like the outcome. I’ll take my Kellogs degrees and be gone.
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@Eddy,
PS – I have not and will not touch a single one of those vote buttons.
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@ Justin
Actually we are still waiting for you to use some “evidence, logic, and rationality”
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@Scott,
I’ve given a large number of article citations and direct links to scientific literature. See, that’s what people who engage with actual reality mean by evidence.
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The mentality of these green communists reminds me of muslim/islamic TERRORISTS.
Both have been Radicalized.
Ministry of Justice lists eco-activists alongside terrorists:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/26/ministry-justice-environmental-campaigners-terrorism
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@Justin you also cited the Guardian
good one
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A few humans make Victoria much warmer:-
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/a_few_men_make_victoria_much_warmer/
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Between Bernd and Anthony Watts I’ve now got enough to make a pdf file copy of the “Guide”. Thanks to them both!
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@Scott,
I cited the Guardian article reproducing the letter from 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences. Obviously, and no surprise, you didn’t read it.
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@ Justin
About those hundreds of peer reviewed papers showing that the MWP was not limited to the NH?
Oh, and the missing heat?
For a guy working on his doctorate your encounter with cohenite looks more like super man’s encounter with kryptonite !
I warned you tough guy!
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@ Justin
Newsflash: The ais and the water have gotten cleaner over the last few decades. Smog in Los Angeles has dropped 50%. Your green gloom and doom BS isn’t cutting it. You say your leaving? Adios, tough guy!
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Justin; hit and run tactics are regrettable; you have hung out your shingle[s] and then mostly cut and pasted without any anaylsis; and mostly you are plain wrong; you say: “Although there is the fact that the NOAA data is before the von Shuckmann Argo updates…”; that is nonsense; the NOAA OHC data is updated continually as their graph shows;
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index.html
von Schuckmann’s paper is a 2009 effort using data ending in 2008.
As for refuting your [and mine] betters, Lindzen and Choi by linking to cat alley, Real Climate, if you had bothered to read the comments at 51-59 you would have seen that the Trenberth claims are refuted by H Tuuri:
“Chris, I have now analyzed the monthly tropical (20 S – 20 N) data at http://earth-www.larc.nasa.gov/erbeweb/Edition3_Rev1/
I imported the data to a free statistics program called OpenStat. Since I was not able to find a numeric table of the Reynolds and Smith OISST v2 product, I ‘digitized’ by hand the graph on page 8 of http://science.larc.nasa.gov/ceres/STM/2009-11/22_Wong_1109.pdf
I used OpenStat to compute moving averages over 12 months (I used option ANALYSES -> Autocorrelation in OpenStat). With shorter moving averages, the NET flux graph contains too much noise, though the delta-SST graph is smooth also with shorter moving averages.
I analyzed the 1986-1990 sequence of El Nino/La Nina, as well as the 1997-1999 massive El Nino.
1) For the 1986-1990 event, the variation in the 12 month moving average of the NET flux is from 345 W/m^2 to 347 W/m^2. The variation of the 12 month moving average of delta-SST is -0.18 K to 0.16 K. We get:
delta-NET flux / delta-SST = 2 W/m^2 per 0.34 K = 6 W/m^2 per K.
2) For the 1997-1999 event, the 12 month moving average of the NET flux at the start of 1997 is 344 W/m^2. It rises to a local maximum of 345 W/m^2, and later spikes at 346 W/m^2. That is, even the 12 month smoothed Net flux is not smooth at all, but has a double maximum. The 12 month moving average of delta-SST rises from -0.03 K to +0.22 K. We get:
delta-NET flux / delta-SST = 1 W/m^2 OR 2 W/m^2 (depending on which of the double maxima we choose)
per 0.25 K = 4 W/m^2 OR 8 W/m^2 per K.
Conclusion: we get results that agree with Lindzen and Choi in LC09. We had to use a very long moving average of 12 months to smooth the NET flux enough for our graphical analysis.
I used OpenStat to compute also the regression between delta-SST and the transfer of heat from the Tropics to higher latitudes. The correlation coefficient is -0.005 and the slope is -0.32. That is, there is essentially no correlation. An El Nino event in the Tropics does not cause the transfer of heat to increase. That is, the extra heat from El Nino is handled locally in the Tropics.
I will next do further research on the NET flux from 60 S to 60 N, and its correlation to HadCRUT3 monthly global temperature anomalies.
I will check if I can repeat the results of Forster and Gregory:http://homepages.see.leeds.ac.uk/~earpmf/papers/ForsterandGregory2006.pdf
The data and the programs that I used are available by email from me, if someone wants to repeat my calculations.”
Since L+C are now preparing an up-date of their 2009 study, we’ll have to wait to see what the outcome is.
At least the critique by Trenberth et al. that “the apparent relationship is reduced to zero if one chooses to displace the endpoints selected in LC09 by a month or less” appears to be wrong.
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Shocking UN Document Divulges Climate Cult Brainwashing:-
http://www.prisonplanet.com/shocking-un-document-divulges-climate-cult-brainwashing.html
Global Warming as Religion and not Science:-
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/religion.htm
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Wow Justin, are you really that silly? With all your “research” and “qualifications”, how was it you missed this:
Please tell me o’ educated one, after watching this which way is the climate going to swing? I tremble in anticipation of your glorious reply.. 😉
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@cohenite,
I believe the NOAA data uses the Levitus analysis method? Look I admit this is outside my immediate field, so I can’t usefully debate it. I don’t know the details of NOAA vs any other revisions to Argo data, other than that they’ve been occurring in the last 6-9 months. von Schuckmann explicitly acknowledges the plateu in heat uptake 2004-07, but the bigger question of longer term (decadal and above) trends is far from resolved.
Is H Turri published in the literature? All I can see is statements on a comment thread. I don’t see why RC isn’t acceptable to you as a source, but in any case I first cited the published journal article. And here’s another pointing out that L&C ‘erroneously’ assumed the tropics was an isolated system: Murphy, Daniel M. 2010. Constraining climate sensitivity with linear fits to outgoing radiation. Geophysical Research Letters 37 (May 6): 5 PP. doi:201010.1029/2010GL042911.
I take issue with your saying I’m cutting and pasting. I’ve done no such thing (unless you mean citations?!) — what are you suggesting I’m copying from?
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@Olaf,
Climategate? Good grief. Are you seriously not aware that two investigations (on top of the UEA internal review) have found it essentially baseless? Summarised at WP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy#Reports
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Sounds like a “Skeptics Handbook guide to “A Scientific Guide to the ‘Skeptics Handbook’” will be in the offing then,
No doubt the skeptic Science site will then have to respond with a
“A Scientific Guide to the Skeptics Handbook guide to “A Scientific Guide to the ‘Skeptics Handbook'”
You should be flattered that they have taken up your brilliant idea of publishing an easy to produce booklet.
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@cohenite,
Further to that, this more recent paper attempts to resolve some of these issues with a large synthesis effort; Trenberth (well, sorry…) has commentary on it also.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7296/abs/nature09043.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7296/full/465304a.html
The main point being that the NOAA dataset showing reduced upper ocean heat uptake is not the whole story.
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Justin, the issue of OHC is crucial to the AGW paradigm because GMST simply isn’t doing what it is supposed to be doing according to IPCC definitions of climate sensitivity;
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-5.html
According to Box 10.2 2XCO2 = 3.26C; since 1900 atmospheric CO2 has increased 40%; temperature should have increased by ~ 1.3C; at best it has increased by 0.7C; of that 0.7C solar has contributed 0.1-0.4C [TAR] and natural variation ~0.3C. Unless those extra joules are being stored in the ocean there is no AGW; OHC is the best measure of this and this is why Trenberth is so worried about the ‘missing’ heat. I have referred you to the Ablain and Cazeneve papers showing no steric increase in sea level; if the OHC is rising as von Shuckmann says then there should be a steric sea level rise; there isn’t. The idea of a pipeline or lag or delay before the effect of the extra heating from CO2 increase is manifest is entirely dependent on the ocean being the missing sink or reservoir. This is not a difficult concept.
As for H Tuuri; you linked to the RC thread allegedly ‘dealing with’ Lindzen; Tuuri’s comment was on that thread and it disproves Trenberth’s point about Lindzen. BTW, Tuuri is like you, a student.
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Eddy Aruda @ 112:
As a resident of the inner city of Perth Steven Smith is actually my representative member in the Federal Government. Seems like a decent enough sort, stays in the background, and seems to be a strategist in the Labor Party.
With the way the mood is against Labor in Western Australia, his seat will be closer to marginal in the next election, but I don’t know if there is a good candidate running against him.
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@cohenite,
The much more recent papers I’ve just cited clearly show that the OHC issue is being worked through and does not entirely tarry with direct satellite observations of net energy flux. Steric sea level also relates to oceanic circulation to levels below 700m (von Schuckmann tentatively suggests this may be part of the reason for discrepancies), which occurs on longer time scales. What else can I say?
Importantly though, you’re ignoring the role of anthropogenic aerosols, which have a negative radiative forcing of up to 30% (subject to still significant uncertainty). See CCSP link above. Moreover, climate sensitivity is for the equilibrium, not transient, response and cannot be directly applied here anyway. That is, the lags inherent in the system mean that the increased CO2 concentrations have yet to be adjusted to. Which is why there remains a disequilibrium in TOA energy flux.
And… even if OHC had flattened out, how are you explaining the previous and obvious rise, given you apparently reject the role of GHGs?
Anyone can say anything in a comment thread. You and I know that. 🙂 For Turri to be meaningful s/he has to get it published in a peer-reviewed journal. Until and unless that occurs, it’s just supposition.
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FrankS: @ #130:
‘love it, but hopefully it should all bo over long before that.
You did mean easy to understand didn’t you Frank ?
…which is Jo’s particular forte, and perhaps the most valuable lesson these obfuscators have learned, since ceasing to drown out the skeptics with their mindless chants. It’s only themselves they were deluding.
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Justin Wood: # various
Kudos to Justin. You are making a good fist of it IMHO.
It’s very well to cite paper after paper, but this is not valuable unless we understand the conclusions of the cited papers.
You cited some papers regards the “hot spot”. This hot spot, due to surface warming, is supposed to be 2 to 3 times that of the surface trend. The IPCC, NOAA and NASA published similar charts showing this enhanced warming over the tropics.
The papers you cited (the 2 that I have in my possession) try to reconcile the radiosonde data with that of satellites by using various adjustments and/or corrections.
Due to my lack of knowledge about these adjustments, I have no comment to make regarding their validity. I’m happy to accept them.
However, none of the papers you cite show a warming of the troposphere by 2 to 3 times that of the surface. e.g. from the Haimberger paper..
This from the Sherwood paper….
In other words, the paper improves on previous efforts, but nothing definitive. We’re progressing, step by step.
Here is another statement from Sherwood…
Again, nothing definitive.
I also have papers from Begtsson et al and Titchner et al who reach similar conclusions.
None of them can say “they have found the hot spot.” But as more research is undertaken, I’m sure we’ll get closer to the truth.
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Mark D: #83
Email me [will forward this] ED
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Justin, 134; the Lyman et al paper you link to concerning OHC has a history which is explained here:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/11/apologies-to-josh-willis-correcting-ocean-cooling-part-3/
The 2 papers by Lyman, Willis and Johnson are, in chronological order:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027033.shtml
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/gcj_3o.pdf
As you can see this issue is “being worked through”, to use your words, in the usual heating fashion; as it is with all surface record data; that is what makes people sceptical; the adjustments are always warmer.
I am aware of the difference between transient and equilibrium sensitivity but unless the heat is being stored somehwere that distinction becomes worthless; as for lags in the system, your mate Trenberth estimates them as being in the order of months:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/2000JD000298.pdf
and this graph is instructive:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1994/to:2010/scale:0.1/mean:10/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1994/to:2010/scale:0.1/mean:10/plot/uah/from:1994/to:2010/scale:0.1/mean:10
You ask; “how are you explaining the previous and obvious rise”; I put that same question to David Stockwell and here is his answer;
http://landshape.org/enm/possible-error-in-ohc/#more-3180
What is left is a distinctive ENSO pattern.
Retrain as an engineer Justin; we need more of them.
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Justin, 134; I’ll make this a 2-parter as my links are bothering Jo’s screening; the Lyman et al paper you link to concerning OHC has a history which is explained here:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/11/apologies-to-josh-willis-correcting-ocean-cooling-part-3/
The 2 papers by Lyman, Willis and Johnson are, in chronological order:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027033.shtml
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/gcj_3o.pdf
As you can see this issue is “being worked through”, to use your words, in the usual heating fashion; as it is with all surface record data; that is what makes people sceptical; the adjustments are always warmer.
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Justin, 134, part 2; I am aware of the difference between transient and equilibrium sensitivity but unless the heat is being stored somehwere that distinction becomes worthless; as for lags in the system, your mate Trenberth estimates them as being in the order of months:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/2000JD000298.pdf
and this graph is instructive:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1994/to:2010/scale:0.1/mean:10/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1994/to:2010/scale:0.1/mean:10/plot/uah/from:1994/to:2010/scale:0.1/mean:10
You ask; “how are you explaining the previous and obvious rise”; I put that same question to David Stockwell and here is his answer;
http://landshape.org/enm/possible-error-in-ohc/#more-3180
What is left is a distinctive ENSO pattern.
Retrain as an engineer Justin; we need more of them.
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@Justin Wood
I suggest you go back and comment on Neville Numbat’s Facebook page where you really seem to belong or start your own blog. Citing papers here or any skeptic site does not prove anything. Most of these have already been discussed in detail by scientists with far more experience or knowledge than any inexperienced student and found to be lacking, and downright tripe in some cases. Try debating with facts and data, and others (more knowledgeable than me) will probably welcome debate with you, but name calling (denier) will get you thrown out. Anyone can cite papers and do, but unless you can show that you understand the science, you will be ignored and or ridiculed. Remember that sites like realclimate don’t allow any opposing points of view, or debate, so are not worth bothering with.
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Justin @114,
Typical response from my request you have plenty of huff and bluff but not much else. I will give you a second chance to respond but first let me give you a dummies guide to radio sondes (RS).
Firstly a RS measures pressure, temp and humidity (PTU) it also has a GPS which measures height above sea level and LAT and LON coordinates. This data is telemetered to a base station on the ground.
When the RS is manufactured it is tested to ensure it can measure the PTU accurately if there is any slight error a calibration file is produced for any offsets.
When the RS is being prepared for launch the calibration offsets are loaded into the ground station and the RS is once again tested to a known PTU to ensure it is operational.
Once the balloon is launch with the RS attached the RS will telemeter the data to the ground station which gathers the data and then produces an output file in either MATLAB, TEXT, XL etc.
Just for completeness the more helium you put into the balloon the lower the burst height but faster the ascent.
So now back to my question, in your words what “corrections” or “enhanced processing” is needed to be done. Also what is the justification for said things?
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Cohenite @ 139
Agree. There isn’t much future for someone with PhD in Global Warming once that gravy train has run its course, eh? Learn a bit of objective science and then become an engineer? Yes. Power Engineering perhaps.
Cheers,
Speedy.
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Justin @ 129:
The internal review was a whitewash as they’re protecting their own reputations. A panel selected by The Royal Society (headed by Prince Charles, one of the biggest eugenecists) will naturally find no fault as their interests are the same as those scientists.
I noticed you didn’t even address (or possibly watch) the video I so handily provided. Either you can’t understand simple charts or are afraid of empirical evidence. You’re wearing some huge blinkers there. Here it is again in case you somehow didn’t see the link earlier:
Try and whitewash that evidence.
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Global warming is the attack on capitalism that Communism couldn’t bring!
Global Warming as Mass Neurosis”:-
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3860
10
WWF etc – Environmental Movement Steeped in Eugenics and Land-Consolidation Agendas?:-
http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/060807_enviro_eugenics.html
Club of rome’s world government ,climate change and depopulation:-
http://freemanireland.ning.com/forum/topics/club-of-romes-world-government
Depopulation program – quotes from club of rome:-
http://www.truthmovementaustralia.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2948#p24376
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How Lord Oxburgh of Persil washed the Climategate team whiter than white:-
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100044687/how-lord-oxburgh-of-persil-washed-the-climategate-team-whiter-than-white-pt-2/
Climate Research News » Russell ‘Climategate’ Inquiry Will be a ‘Whitewash’ Unless Overhauled:-
http://climateresearchnews.com/2010/02/russell-climategate-inquiry-panel-will-be-a-whitewash-unless-overhauled/
The IPCC’s whitewash ‘review’ is the AGW camp’s biggest mistake yet:-
http://truth11.com/2010/03/23/climategate-the-ipcc%E2%80%99s-whitewash-%E2%80%98review%E2%80%99-is-the-agw-camp%E2%80%99s-biggest-mistake-yet/
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I don’t know if anybody else noticed this, but in his very first comment @ 77 Justin wrote:
That is a long time building a consensus, and as a student I studied Fourier, and I don’t recollect reading anything that mentioned his consenting agreement regarding climate change or global warming.
But, what I do remember, very well, was his process of analysis for complex waveforms.
Fourier showed that any pure complex waveform could be decomposed into a series of sinusoidal waveforms plus a constant value. Thus any pure complex waveform could be represented mathematically by a set of trigonometrical functions.
Now I don’t know how the climate models work. I haven’t seen them. But based on what Justin said earlier, I bet that Fourier analysis is the basis for the climate models. They are taking empirical methods, plotting them, assuming that they are a pure complex waveform and trying to find the underlying sinusoidal functions and the constant.
Armed with a whole bunch of sine waves, and the knowledge that nature works in a cyclic fashion, they can start to match frequencies to identify which does what to whom and when and where, if you follow me. Once you have all that sussed out, you can try a few back-casting runs to get your confidence up, and then wade in to using the models for forecasting.
Mind you, this is all supposition on my part – a little mental exercise, if you like.
But, if I am right, then they are wrong.
Because in Electronic Engineering, in the real world, there is no such thing as a “pure” complex waveform, or even “pure” simple waveforms for that matter. There is always random noise (interference in terms of radio signals). So if you have noisy complex waveforms, Fourier analysis will still work, but it will try to resolve the noise as further waveforms, and will therefore take considerably longer, and identify considerably more sinusoidal functions at the end.
So how do you sort out the real cyclic events from the bogus cyclic events caused by noise? Well, one way is to do multiple trials, using different series of measurements, and then look for sinusoidal waveforms that appear in the majority of trials, But this too is fraught with problems, because it only highlights the dominant functions. The occurrence of less dominant functions still disappears into the noise.
Also, Lower frequency waveforms tend to become less dominant, or even invisible within the timeframes we are talking about. For example, we have been taking measurements for 150 years, say. Will we notice a 50 year cycle? Possibly. Will we notice a 100 year cycle? Possibly not. Will we notice a 200 year cycle? Almost certainly not.
And that is the rub. “Weather is not Climate”, we are told, but Climate is not short term either. Some cycles will literally have frequencies measured in millennia, but they still have a contribution to make to the composite waveform – they will still influence the pattern of climate – today, we just can’t detect them with the limited data available.
If the evidence cannot completely explain the observations, is it still evidence?
I would be interested in receiving comments.
My knowledge is quite old now, and things may have moved on, and I might be totally wrong, and all of this may not be a revelation at all, to anybody but me.
And if that is so, then that is life.
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Oops, I should have said, “… they are taking empirical observations …”, not “… they are taking empirical methods …”
It is late, and I have had a long day …
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Rereke @ 147:
Fourier Transforms and mathematics were also used in the Mandelbrot (fractal) craze in the early ’90’s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fourier-related_transforms
I remember studying and using them in my early Commodore Amiga assembly programming. Essentially making art from what would appear to be chaos. However, the climate is simply chaos, and using Fourier mathematics in climate models would, as you describe, just cloud the waveforms you’re trying to clarify.
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Rereke, you may find this interesting:
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/~bhatt/CJC/Parkeretal_2007.pdf
And this:
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V10/N3/C1.php
One of the issues of the AGW debate is seperating what are supposed to be oscillating or trend stationary natural factors from the unnatural, anthropogenic trend factors. You will be familiar with the McLean et al paper which detrended the temp data and showed that stationary, natural factors dominated the oscillating aspect of temperature. AGW advocates like the Foster et al comment on the McLean paper misunderstood that point, which is a crucial one since one part of the AGW argument is that an AGW signal is infiltrating natural processes; AGW authors like Vecchi and Meehl have written how macro climate factors like El Nino and the Walker circulation are now determined by or have an AGW signal.
Breaking up the causal factors is done by various methods such as PCA, EOF and EMD; this last method is examined by David Stockwell in a series of posts, if you are up to it; David’s posts are not for the faint-hearted!
http://landshape.org/enm/emd-and-natural-variation/#more-3201
David also looks at climate ‘reasonance’, where long cycles can work with or against shorter and medium term cycles:
http://landshape.org/enm/celestial-origins-of-climate-oscillations/#disqus_thread
Of course what people like Justin don’t seem to understand is that much of climate is stochastic.
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You see, 😉 look how good rabidly irrational AGW-supporter Justin Wood has been for the forward motion of the debate! Of course most of his babble-speak was non sequitur digression down blind alleys designed to side track the debate away from the real elephants in the room. But it’s all good in the end, because we can study the rhetorical techniques of deceit that the AGW faithful will descend to, not only with us but with themselves. Justin is absolutely sincere and utterly lacking in conscious self-awareness. A fascinating case study in denial. I mean that in the proper psychological sense of the word, not as a dehumanizing slur. More importantly, he doesn’t give a crap about scientific integrity. He’s a true believer in a faith-based belief system.
Seriously? This is a clue to where Justin is coming from. It’s a very dark place. It’s not about real science at all for Justin. Even when wildly blatant ethical violations of the scientific method on a shameful scale are exposed in paleoclimatological studies critical to the foundation of the AGW hypothesis, Justin defends the indefensible. This single line implodes Justin’s credibility on any topic that requires critical, rational judgement of evidence. Why? Because the Climategate emails reveal a systemic subversion of scientific method in order to manipulate data to fit the hypothesis. Data paid for by taxes and therefore owned by the public was manipulated, hidden and/or destroyed to fit up the AGW hypothesis. The investigations were the worst sort of whitewash jobs imaginable. See Climate Audit for the sordid details.
This tops Marion’s claim that it’s up to the skeptics to “prove” the AGW hypothesis is false as the most scientifically illiterate comment yet on this thread. I think Michael Crichton best sums up exactly where Justin Woods is coming from, and it ain’t science folks:
http://afterall.net/quotes/490996
So Justin where are those reproducible results? What? Phil Jones deleted them? Damn. Well, I guess we should just trust you to reorganize the entire world’s economy and with it the billions of human lives that depend on it. Because that is all you are asking us — To Have Faith.
Sorry, I was never good at faith.
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Jo,
There is cheap energy technology available and it is not nuclear.
The current technology of power generation was designed for BULK harvest of energy and NOT efficiency.
A corrupted system from top to bottom will ignore and suppress this until the economies are in total ruins.
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Short-term responses of the climate system to “global” perturbation are more pronounced in the northern hemisphere (NH) than the southern hemisphere (SH).
That can be largely attributed to the substantial difference in the ratio of land/water area in the respective hemispheres. Water responds rapidly and “efficiently” to thermal perturbation, providing horizontal heat transport via currents; vertical heat transport by evaporation and condensation, storage via overturning currents and by radiation directly to space. The more subtle effects relate to to things like how the changing temperature and air pressure alter sea levels; in even the short term. Subtle effects but with notable consequences.
Oceans provide more substantial damping in the SH primarily because of the volume of water and the radiating surface area.
The recent episodes of observed “global warming” are “near-invisible” in the SH, despite the SH getting more summer sun in orbit. The SH is demonstrably able to efficiently dispose of the “excess heat”. As we’ve seen recently, the SH is also the refrigerator that cools the waters which circulate from and to the NH.
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@cohenite #131
I have asked this question before – can you or anyone else point me to where this failed prediction (and any others, failed or otherwise) are plotted, alongside the instrumental record? Surely this has been done?
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Tom, 155; not sure I know what prediction you mean? If you mean the IPCC predicted temperature compared with actual temperature, there was a good graph on this site here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/04/global-warming-a-classic-case-of-alarmism/
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James Wood from post # 77:
Did you actually read the relevant section in the 2007 IPCC report that does NOT agree with you?
There they made it clear that the “hot spot” should show up when considering greenhouse gases.All other possibilities did not.They even posted a set of modeled charts to show the projections.
Continuing quoting James:
You mean that you did not need those magic wind speed measurements to make the “hot spot” appear?
But alas you make a statement,but not back it up with a credible source.Not only that you fail to show that it reasonably match up with the 2007 IPPC report derived “hot spot” claim,that seems to happen only when considering GHG’S.
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@cohenite – thanks, I’m now embarrassed as I did see it. And it is exactly what I have in mind, except:
The IPCC prediction is, is it not, itself a synthesis of a collection of “independent” (!) predictions – if you like, a graphical representation of the much-vaunted “consensus”? If so I would be interested to see them all! And for good measure, throw in the global cooling predictions of the 70s (right now, in Sydney, in the coldest spell in half a century, I’m tempted to believe them). And for even better measure, see what sceptics like Piers Corbyn, however brief their timescale, have forecast.
Like I say, I’m not a scientist, and I may be adrift here – I’d appreciate your comments.
10
Graphical depiction of both cooling and warming predictions may be tough but here is an article on both:
http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/FireandIce.pdf
A good site for graphs of model predictions is here:
http://www.c3headlines.com/climate-model-chartsgraphs.html
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@cohenite – thanks, I’ll have a look.
Have you seen this:
http://sc25.com/index.php?id=203
The method is way over my head, but perhaps not yours?
10
All power to Justin Wood who has persevered, providing scientific evidence and backing up his statements with references to peer-reviewed literature. [snip please!]
10
Oh goody a new troll just showed up.
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Justin Wood #77
Justin I see you are nearing the end of your studies and are about to venture into the big wide world.
I feel a sense of forboding for you. It’s a big ugly world out there and I’m afraid having read all of your posts, you are not quite ready to be weaned off of your parents/government subsidies just yet.
Please permit this old codger to provide you with some advice.
When you start earning your keep, there are some things you need to be aware of, especially in your field of climate science. Another website put it best way back in 2005. (A long time for your age bracket).
In my next post I’ll advise you about how to put this into practice. Pssst, wink wink, maybe an Australian of the year award and a few 90 million dollar subsidies will come your way. Flannery told me so.
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OK, how to put the above into practice. (the above from this link by the way)
In order to receive research grants, as my first post states, you need to talk things up. A little alarm goes a long way. But how to do that? No point telling Siberian farmers their temperatures are going to go up 1 or 2 degrees, they’d love it. So here is the tried and trusted formulae from a great Australian, the late John L Daly (from 10 years ago when you were a mere pup)
Here is what I’d do. Our mates across the ditch in New Zealand are right into this AGW scam. I’d go over there and tell them Global Warming will mean SNAKES and poisonous SPIDERS are VERY LIKELY to colonise New Zealand. They hate creepy crawlies there. Would have to be worth at least 10yrs of grants.
Hey, good luck to you in your upcoming adult life.
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Baa Humbug
Seriously, what will Justin do when the AGW story goes the way of Y2K? His degree has a serious use-by date unless the story gets institutionalised into law. If it doesn’t he’s got a career in flipping burgers. If I were in his shoes, I’d be pretty keen on sledging Anthony Watts, Jo Nova and this site as well.
However, most of us haven’t read the flyer he was handing out and we may yet be convinced of the wisdom of his argument. Let’s await publication of the flyer, together with an explanation as to why the University of WA had it’s logo on it.
Cheers,
Speedy
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Well, I’ll be buggered. Who is the Justin guy anyway?
He is, of course, wasting his time here, as am I.
When it comes down to it, the dominant inhabitants of this blog don’t believe anything “our” experts say. Indeed, they don’t think they are expert (and even if they are, the have bad motives). So really, Justin can cite all the scientific papers he likes, because, being written by the bad guys (evil, money grasping enemies of capitalism), you can’t believe a word of them!
It is of course also worth noting that us naive brainwashed greenie scum also ignore evidence which we don’t like, and will refuse to acknowledge your experts expertise (Monckton, Plimer, Carter, even that dude who used to work for big tobacco etc).
So we will get nowhere, and indeed just become more vocal in barracking for our sides. Which is not as noble as searching for the actual truth, but is a lot easier, and can be done with almost no skill at all.
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The notoriously greedy, arrogant, and stupid Al Groper is evidently not out of the woods yet as far as his problems with the law in Oregon, USA go
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The funny thing about skepticalscience.com is that it censors skeptics.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
I would have thought that censoring expressions of skepticism on a skeptical science blog would be the last thing to happen, not the first.
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John Brookes: #165
July 2nd, 2010 at 1:03 am
Awww don’t be like that John. Here, look, I’ll give you a very timely and fitting reason why we are sceptical of science(scientists)
You would be familiar with the Ocean Conveyor Belt? That’s the one that has been in vogue for 50 years now. the one sometimes used to scare people about a freezing Europe.
It’s also the one incorporated by the coupled GCM’s (Global Circulation Models) which help project future climate.
READ HERE how this phenomena has now been cast into the dustbin.
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Mac:
July 2nd, 2010 at 1:19 am
That has not been my experience Mac. I recently posted there and was treated quite well.
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‘even that dude who used to work for big tobacco’~ j brooks
Mr. brooks, would that be Al Gore Jr or Sr? http://www.realchange.org/gore.htm
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alfonso:
July 1st, 2010 at 11:53 pm
I agree with you Alfonso. (What’s with the self snip?)
[wasn’t a self snip it was a rant that didn’t meet with standards here and you probably wouldn’t agree with] ED
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Baa Humbug:
July 2nd, 2010 at 1:27 am
Mac:
July 2nd, 2010 at 1:19 am
“The funny thing about skepticalscience.com is that it censors skeptics.”
“That has not been my experience Mac. I recently posted there and was treated quite well.”
I simply made a reference to this actual link saying that Jo would provide a response and it was immediately censored.
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@ Alfonso and JohnBrooks
Welcome!
John whined:
It is illogical to waste your time. You may want to take a courses on time management. Perhaps you could then find contentment.
Yes, he can cite all the papers he wants. Unfortunately, he came on to this site with a condescending elitist attitude and posted some untruths that were addressed and refuted by some of our erudite posters. He sure loves to hurl the ad hominems.
Greenie scum? You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself! You do not need to acknowledge our “experts” but you may try and post something intelligent that would contribute to adressing the topic of this thread. Oh, you may want to cease with the ad hominems.
It is sad when a human being sets such low goals for himself and then fails to accomplish them. (Sigh 🙁
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The Moderator snipped a large paragraph of namecalling and ad homonyms in attacking US here and skeptics elsewhere.
That is why I replied to him with this:
“Oh goody a new troll just showed up.”
John has failed totally to back up his claimed “hot spot” is real and measured.AS he post at # 77.
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Well, there’s no law that says you need to be greenie scum or to ignore evidence you don’t like
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It’s all well and good to provide references, etc.
But it is also important to demonstrate that one understands the limits of knowledge about the phenomena – in terms of measuable data and plausible mechanisms. It is important to investigate all plausible mechanisms; and/or to take on board the research of others into those mechanisms.
When I have to “invent” a solution to a physical “problem”, it’s not good enough to simply grasp the first idea and to run with that. An Engineer first establishes that the “problem” is a real one; and one that can be fixed by technical measures. Well, they’re supposed to do it!
Science is best served in a similar manner. Any observations must be verifiable and not be some “figment”; a product of the observation or a product of too much imagination, bias or prejudice. It is at this stage of preliminary examination that the climate catastrophe is exposed as pseudo-science.
One doesn’t have to expend any further resources trying to devise a technical fix for such “problems”. Any attempt at providing a technical fix is expensive, wastes lots of resources, creates unnecessary pollution and provides nothing positive but a cash-flow and enrichment for those who seek to exploit the situation; deliberately or otherwise.
There is no technical solution to such problems. The problems persist and those who believe that yet another gadget can fix the problem and/or convince (foolish) others that that is the case will continue to reap the rewards.
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Again a simple reference to this site is immediately censored at skepticalscience.com.
It seems scientific skepticism is not too healthly skepticalscience.com.
Are they feeling the heat over there?
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After a friend posted a link to a site on how to calculate a meaningless number
I recommended a more energy-efficient method:
His first response started:
and then followed up with:
I understand his position perfectly; on his way to Melbourne to set up a new super-computer.
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Wow I leave you guys alone for a few hours and now look what you’ve DONE!
Justin Wood @ various,
Welcome, I sense your palpable fear of the end of humanity due to little old carbon dioxide. I am sorry that you started out in life when propagandist masters were spouting how man was ruining everything. I think the phenomenon is called brainwashing and from your intense posts I’d have to say they did a good job.
I won’t approach you with more science because you obviously know it all already. I do have a straightforward question though:
Why are there very qualified scientists out there (even better than Justin Wood) that do NOT yet subscribe to what you are saying? I don’t want to sound glib but it strikes me that if it all were so simple, any scientist would readily be admitting it.
Then lastly, could you list the science specialties you are not expert in? Could you also list the climate factors that you believe are still not yet well understood? (only fair so we can spend our time focusing those as the chink in your armor).
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I regret that I have reached the point of a Tourette syndrome – like response whenever I read such nonsense and have an uncontrollable urge to blurt obscenities about it.
Listening to Al Gore has the same effect on me and I have no explanation
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Mac:
July 2nd, 2010 at 2:01 am
Maybe they don’t like Big Macs? 🙂
Eddy me old mate. Those niceness pills are working a treat. Any side effects?
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Justin @ 87
Wait a second. Explain for the really dumb, like me, this conservation of energy. 350 W/m^2 comes into the atmosphere and 350 W/m^2 is re-radiated, but along the way it increases the temperature of the black body from -15C to something liveable and the atmosphere as well. But the whole lot that comes in goes out. Surely there must be some loss of energy?
Otherwise I shouldn’t be worried about the rising cost of fuel or electricity due to the ETS. I can fill my car and drive forever.
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I would like to point out a more detailed response to the “Skeptics Handbook”, namely Climate Skeptics Arguments and their Scientific Background – via the Swiss Academy of Sciences.
I believe this represents the most current information on measurement unreliability, the Urban Heat Island effect, satellite data, effects of CO2, etc. I highly recommend this to everyone discussing these topics.
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Justin, forgive me for not being around much at the moment. I’ve added a few thoughts inline in #77. It just seems easier than quoting and commenting here. I really do like that you are using your real name. Thank you. I respect that.
KR: I see an ad hom coming from the Swiss Academy… another Sorcery unit eh? Bring out the voo-doo dolls and stick pins in them.
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I love this little film it puts the CO2/atmosphere relationship in perspective.
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The link didn’t come through. Here it is again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=wYLmLW4k4aI&playnext_from=TL&videos=TN4dx87s3i0
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Joanne @184 – ???
Ad hom? Sorcery? Voodoo dolls? I’m at a complete loss as to where you’re pulling these from.
The link I noted in @183 is a discussion of various skeptic arguments and the science around them, not an attack on you, or upon your pamphlet. You are (sorry about this) not mentioned at all…
It does, however, clearly discuss a number of items you pointed out in your pamphlet, and is therefore quite relevant to the thread; you (and other readers) can decide if you agree with their conclusions or not.
However, peremptorily labeling a link an ad hominem attack is no substitute for reading it.
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Well, I read the link and I pronounce (and dismiss) 93+ % of the content contained therein as “nonsense.”
Now what. Care to discuss my evaluation? Write to [Brian I have removed this to minimize spam to you] and I won’t waste space and other people’s time here.
If you write then please identify yourself completely. I don’t waste time with or write letters to the anonymous
[If you really want your e-mail put back then ask again] ED.
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Well Brian, that’s certainly your perogative; to dismiss content as not meaningful. As long as you’ve looked into the evidence for the claims – that’s all anyone could ask. Read someone’s work, look at their evidence, examine their methods and statistics, consider related work, and see if they have presented solid conclusions – or not.
I’ve certainly done that for Joanne’s pamphlet, although I do wish she provided some references to data (i.e. measurements, papers, research, etc.) relevant to the topics in the pamphlet.
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Baa @162, 163,
Wonderful advice!
It didn’t take me very long as I went through life to realize that you can’t sell something to someone who doesn’t need it. Since that realization I’ve never fallen for a snake oil salesman again, including the IPCC and the UN.
But really, what’s a degree in climate change mitigation policy worth? Only a good laugh! I could find him a useful job if he had degrees in computer science or engineering — but climate change mitigation policy? Our universities have sunk so low I can’t imagine them getting out of their hole again.
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Grant @182
350 W/m^2 average energy arrives from the sun, at daylight frequencies (from the toasty plasma surface of the sun), and to which the atmosphere is like an open window; a lot comes in (~168 to the surface, if I recall correctly).
The earth radiates this as infra-red, since dirt/water aren’t hot enough to radiate at daylight frequencies (thank goodness; I would need much better shoes). However, the atmosphere (in particular the greenhouse gases, or GHG’s) absorb/emit IR, so about half gets bounced back down. In IR the atmosphere is like a pile of thick wool blankets, not an open window. IR just doesn’t go through it as easily as daylight does – it’s an insulator.
The energy has to leave, eventually – which means that the top of the atmosphere has to be warm enough to radiate away everything it receives. It can’t do that until the earth is at a temperature where the top of the atmosphere is hot enough to dump all the incoming energy. The GHG’s slow the loss of energy, not create it – but that means it sticks around longer, so more energy is here at to warm us at any particular moment.
This is _just_ like wearing a thick coat in the winter – you’re warmer than the coat, the coat is warmer than the snow – and you’re definitely a lot warmer than you would have been without the coat. And more GHG’s are akin to a thicker coat – you stay warmer than you would be with just a windbreaker or a T-shirt, even burning the same number of calories.
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Baa Humbug:
July 2nd, 2010 at 3:47 am
URGE TO KILL WANING, WANING!!! 😉
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There there Eddy we told you you’d feel so much better, now hows about some nice Elton John tunes for your Ipod?
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KR @ 191
So it isn’t the coat that is keeping me warm. It is insulating me as I burn calories. If I burn enough calories I will eventually shut down (leading to a zero carbon footprint). Unless I want that to happen I have to replenish the energy that is burned.
I still don’t see that it is necessary that the same amount of energy that enters the atmosphere leaves it. Energy can be transformed to one form or another – it might be absorbed in heating the ocean or it might be absorbed/stored through an increase in biomass. Maybe eventually it leaves, but it doesn’t have to be the same day month or epoch it arrived.
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“alfonso” == communist troll.
This is not name calling but a FACTUAL STATEMENT………
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Brian in reply to your post # 188,
I have to agree with you.It is a misleading and dishonest presentation.
I am sooo tired of these people who are still harping on the satellite drift errors (discovered and corrected years ago) and so fourth.Thus they are not reliable enough.Therefore lets stick to the contaminated unreliable (well documented to be that way) ground based temperatures as more reliable.
They also still support one of the most debunked science papers in history.The “hockey stick” paper was only for the … giggle northern hemisphere and largely based on bristlecone tree ring data.A tree species that lives in a climate that is found in only about 1% of the northern hemisphere.
I wish would they realize that CO2 is weak IR absorber and let it go as that.
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Grant @194
Yep, the coat isn’t heating you, it’s just slowing the loss of your own heat (calories) to the outside world. And in the case of the Earth, the ‘calories’ are the sunlight that blows right through the atmosphere.
You’re absolutely right about the forms of energy too, Grant, it doesn’t have to be the same amount entering or leaving at any one time. However, if enough time goes by, and enough energy collects in some form or another, the oceans would boil, or we would be completely covered in kudzu, or something like that…
That’s actually one of the things that shows up a lot in the science paper’s I’ve seen – ocean heat accumulating, some forest/shrub growth, particularly in northern latitudes, etc. Still, there’s only so much room for trees between the interstates.
There’s actually a measured imbalance at the top of the atmosphere right now, as seen by a couple of satellites – more energy going into the atmosphere from the sun than coming out. I believe that’s why a lot of the predictions/models (for what it’s worth, depending on your opinion of models) seem to show that even if we didn’t emit any more carbon whatsoever the temperature would still rise for a while – it takes time for a system as large as the earth to reach equilibrium.
Over the long term I think things will balance out.
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KR @ 197
An imbalance in the energy budget though does not necessitate that the planet is warmer. If the energy is being stored as sugars in plant life then it may in fact be cooling. You could be more verdant growth of temperate zone plants. And that stored energy may take years to cycle.
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don’t know if this has been mentioned but over at http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/06/30/china%e2%80%99s-2000-year-temperature-history/#more-436
there is an article titled China’s 2,000 Year Temperature History
first and last paras:
We constantly hear that the warmest years on record have all occurred in the most recent decades, and of course, we are led to believe this must be a result of the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. In most places, we have approximately 100 years of reliable temperature records, and we wonder if the warmth of the most recent decades is unusual, part of some cyclical behavior of the climate system, or a warm-up on the heels of a cold period at the beginning of the record. A recent article in Geophysical Research Letters has an intriguing title suggesting a 2,000 year temperature record now exists for China – we definitely wanted to see these results of this one.
We get the message – the recent warming in at least several regions in China has likely been exceeded in the past millennium or two, the rate of recent warming was not unusual, and the observed warming of the 20th century comes after an exceptionally cold period in the 1800s.
Declaring that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have pushed modern temperature beyond their historical counterparts disregards the lessons of 2,000 years of Chinese temperatures.
look forward to comments from temperature enthusiasts
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Grant @198
Good point – I expect that’s where some of the energy is going. I’d love to see more plant life as a result.
‘Tho the two satellite data sets and the ground record all show the same trends, all three going up. I think there’s still argument over the ocean temp data; as to whether the last 5-6 years are realistic/properly corrected or not, so I won’t consider that. Arctic ice is decreasing; looks like we’ll actually have a NorthWest Passage eventually, glaciers are retreating pretty fast – I think at least some of the energy is ending up as heat.
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@KR 191
Thank you for the interesting analogy of the greenhouse effect.
You wrote:
I certainly agree with you that a coat keeps a person warm on a cold winter day. However, the coat is a physical barrier to convection. The atmosphere actually modulates convection. Without the effect of “greenhouse gases” the earth’s atmosphere temperature would be approximately -18 °C (0 °F, 255 K). Thanks to greenhouse gases, the earth’s temperature is raised a comfortable ~33 °C (59 °F). Also, the planets atmosphere is not cooled by radiation alone. Atmospheric motion removes a lot of the heat from the atmosphere. If the atmosphere were static the temperature would be about about 350 K (77 °C)! For a good link please see http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
Although many proponents place great weight on the efficacy of GCMs, they are based on some rather major false assumptions. Although I have been aware of the fact that the theory underlying our understanding of the ocean conveyor belt has been disproven years ago and was based on the equivalent of a scientific urban myth, it has recently made the news again See http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/ocean-conveyor-belt-dismissed. Another major false assumption is something that NASA has known for over forty years, the blackbody approximations used by GCM modelers were bogus. See http://climaterealists.com/?id=5783 Also, the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere is approximately half of what modelers input into their simulations. The assumptions used by the GCM modelers are wrong which is why the models have never accurately forecast future climate.
Since the laws of Physics do not change the Earth would have already experienced a positive feedback loop and life as we know it could not exist. Richard Lindzen believes that the Earth has an infrared iris. See http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/adinfriris.pdf . Over any period of time, the amount of energy from the sun that enters the Earth system is the same as the amount of radiant energy reflected and emitted back into the vacuum of space (Harrison et al. 1993).
The Earth is a chaotic nonlinear system. If you miss just one variable or are incorrect in calculating its effect then the forecast will be wrong. The technology does not yet exist to accurately forecast future climate. Perhaps we will progress to that point someday. Until then, I will discount any paper or research based upon GCMs. Observational data and empirical evidence have a basis in reality, climate models do not. I have yet to see one proponent of the AGW theory cite empirical evidence and data that holds up under scrutiny.
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In equilibrium with WHAT, you fool, the system obviously never reaches a “steady state” with 12 hours of sunlight on and off half the globe
Bogus reasoning = dumbbell pronouncements, we see this all the time with the pseudo science of global warming
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Mark D.:
July 2nd, 2010 at 6:50 am
“He’s got electric boots, a mohair suit and a bogus discredited, theoryeee
Hansen, Hansen and the rest…”
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Here’s another fact: Alfonso is NOT ALONE on this web page
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Brian G Valentine:
July 2nd, 2010 at 8:03 am
Brian, I become a little wiser after reading one of your posts. I sympathize with you and I understand why you’re angry and frustrated. I wish I could give you some of my happy pills as they work wonders (see my post #192) but Baa Humbug already asked for them! 😉
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Here it’s posted at last :-
““Scientific Guide” to the Skeptics Handbook”
Nice presentation, it has tobe said. Still rather humourless, for engaging with the general populace ‘though. The content, I leave to the those of you more adept, at evaluating such stuff.
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full details of the report:
1 July: Nature Mag: Jeff Tollefson: Penn State clears Michael Mann again; legal battle continues in Virginia
In a 4 June report that was released on Thursday, a separate committee made up of Penn State faculty unanimously concluded that there is “no substance” to the accusations of research misconduct against Mann. In a 19-page document goes into little detail about Mann’s practices, the committee breaks that question into its component parts, looking at his behavior in proposing, conducting and reporting research.
On the first question, the committee cites Mann’s success in applying for grant money and leading research, saying such success “would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards” for proposing research.
On the question of research conduct, the committee found that Mann has identified the source of all data and wherever possible made the data publicly available; similarly, the committee found that although Mann was initially reluctant to release computer code and initial calculations, Mann switched to a simpler programming language in 2000 and has since been releasing all codes and “intermediate data.” If anything, the committee found that his behavior in this arena has exceeded evolving scientific standards. More broadly, the committee noted that Mann’s work has been independently verified by other scientists using publicly available data and has earned him honors within the field. …
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/07/penn_state_clears_michael_mann_1.html
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Eddy @ 201
I have to agree with you on part of that – convection and latent heat (evaporation/rainfall) move a LOT of heat around in the atmosphere. But once you get to the great thermos bottle of space, radiation is all you have for energy exchange.
The more GHG’s you have, the higher in the atmosphere you have to go before they’re thin enough (low enough pressure) to let that radiation out. Given the lapse rate (warmer the lower you go in the atmosphere, ~6.5 degrees C/kilometer in the troposphere) that alone means that ground level has to be warmer to keep the higher radiating level warm enough to dump the energy.
Positive/negative feedback loops are something else entirely. If you have a 50% positive feedback, a 1 degree temperature change will induce an extra 0.5 degrees (say through extra water vapor). That 0.5 temperature change will induce an extra 0.25 degrees through the same feedback. That will induce 0.125 degrees, and so on and so on.
You can actually try this in Excel (I did, it’s really rather fun!): Start with the 1 degree, have each following row equal the previous row * the feedback, and sum the column after 15-20 rows. This works out to a geometric series of the form [ Forcing / (1 – Feedback) ], which in this case is [ 1 / (1 – 0.5) ] or a total of 2 degrees. It damps out.
Positive feedback doesn’t run away unless the feedback is >= 1, negative will oscillate if the feedback is <= -1.
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I see Kenskingdom is up on WUWT now:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/01/the-victorian-warmed-period/
Enjoy!
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Brian @ 202 – Please; long term equilibrium. I’ll try not to be silly if you won’t.
Much as winter reaches a long term equilibrium of average monthly temperature rather colder than summer, despite those 12 hour variations you noted due to the sun.
Climate is long term (what happens next year this season, average temperatures/rainfall/etc.). Weather is what happens over the next few days.
Heading out for my own happy pills, or at least a beer for the long weekend. Enjoy, folks.
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KR:
July 2nd, 2010 at 7:55 am
I beg to differ. Neither the Arctic or Antarctic ice is decreasing. Seehttp://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/28/sea-ice-news-11/ Some glaciers are retreating and some are not. There has been some warming (0.7 degrees) after the planet exited the little ice age circa 1850. The glaciers come and go as the earth warms and cools. During the medieval warm period the glaciers retreated further than where they are now. In fact, they are finding evidence of mediecal civilization as they do recede.
Actually, the satellite data (UAH and RSS) shows no statistical warming in the last fifteen years. Phil Jones of the CRU has admitted the recent warming trend that began in 1975 is not at all different than two other planetary warming phases since 1850; there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and; it is possible the Medieval Warm Period was indeed a global phenomenon thereby making the temperatures seen in the latter part of the 20th century by no means unprecedented.
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/02/16/climategater-jones-stunning-global-warming-revelations-ignored#ixzz0sTNX2cjk
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Definition: A system is at EQUILIBRIUM if the system can be isolated from its surroundings (no heat or mass exchange) and no change in state variables that define the system are observed over time
Definition: The system is at STEADY STATE if the state variables are time independent but the assumption of “isolation” cannot be dropped
Definition: A system is at a “pseudo-steady” state if there is an appropriate time average (the SAME time average of all the state variables) that is constant in time
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KR:
July 2nd, 2010 at 8:31 am
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I hope you enjoy your beer!
I
Positive feedbacks are rare in nature. Could you please elaborate as I am unaware of any empirical data that lends credence to a positive feedback in the atmosphere? I understand that the earth would be a lot colder without the “greenhouse effect.” However, the earth reradiates the IR into space or we would all fry. The oceans are not warming so i cannot see where the heat is “hiding.”
also, in addition to the movement of air reducing temperatures there are other factors, the most important one being cloud cover. I realize that there are other factors that effect climate over long periods of time (e.g. milaqnkovitch cycled, continental alignment, etc.) I cannot see how a positive feedback could exist as the earth would have already experienced the runaway greenhouse effect.
Enjoy your holiday!
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Eddy @ 211
I think you’re reading a very different set of data than I have:
March 2010 presentation on ice extent, thickness (NPS, IOPAS, NASA JPL, GSFC, for a “State of the Arctic” meeting)
Continuing ice thinning
Thinning and volume loss of the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover: 2003–2008
And on the temperature records:
NASA GISS temperatures
CRU records
Satellite temp. measurements
I’ll readily admit I don’t know for certain what the temperatures were during the MWP, although we don’t know from those records what was happening outside Europe – was that global (like now) or regional? I’ve seen lots of people arguing it was purely regional.
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typo alert at # 211 mediecal should be medieval. and the link was http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/28/sea-ice-news-11/
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bishop hill has pdf of the entire penn state report on Mann:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/storage/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf
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Eddy @ 213 – last bit before I head out.
The simplest positive feedback I know of is water vapor (which is to say I can come up with an explanation!) – if the oceans/ground heat up, the partial pressure of water (different temperature) goes up, total humidity goes up. Water is a stronger GHG than CO2 (I forget where methane falls along those lines – I’ll stick to chicken instead of cow meat in the meantime 🙂 ). With more water vapor, more IR is retained, more warming.
And yep, there’s a lot of different feedbacks – positive, negative, who the @@@ knows. I saw an article on those a while back:
An Assessment of Climate Feedbacks in Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere Models
Feel free to take that with a grain or three of salt as you like, particularly in regards to the magnitude of the feedbacks, but it at least lists clouds, water vapor, surface albedo etc. Total feedback will be the sum of all the positives and negatives, whatever values they may have. That seems to be a major part of the climate research going on now – trying to determine the sign and size of the feedbacks.
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Gerhard Kramm had a nice description of climate “feedbacks”:
“Multiplication of zero by a very large number is still zero”
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KR:
July 2nd, 2010 at 8:57 am
Thanks again and I hope that I am not keeping you from your beer. If you are ever in Santa Rosa, California stop at the Russian River Brewing Company on 4th Street. You will not be disappointed!
I do not trust the CRU (the dog ate my raw data) and NASA GISS data is, in my opinion, fraudulently altered to provide a bias in favor of recent warming. Your link appears to be obsolete for the satellite data as it ends in 2005. I am not accusing you of employing an end point fallacy. In fact, you are someone I can respectfully disagree with. Here is a recent graph for the last twelve years http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__VkzVMn3cHA/S2Si9CzxUcI/AAAAAAAAAIM/M3zEYq59KAI/s1600-h/12+year+Sat+%2B+HadCRU.bmp For a link that provides hundreds of links to papers that show that the MWP was warmer and global see http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php Also, here is another link regarding antarctic ice I thought you may find interesting http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/29/amazing-grace/
The ice in the Arctic did thin in some of the recent years due o changes in ocean currents and wind patterns. It had nothing to do with ocean or surface temperatures. For an interesting take on the current ice situation see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/06/wuwt-arctic-sea-ice-news-8/
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I wouldn’t get so angry, Ed, if the folks espousing their nonsense weren’t using their nonsense to CHANGE LAWS and REGULATE
This is the source of my anger. It’s the source of a lot of people’s anger.
They try to “neutralize” it (compared with imposing a state religion, for example) by calling it “science”
I have a lot of obscene descriptions for it in my vocabulary, and “science” isn’t included in any of these
10
Brian G Valentine:
July 2nd, 2010 at 9:26 am
I concur with your opinion, Brian. The AGW scheme is a trojan horse. The real aim is to seize power and have us all worship at the altar of Gaia. Although many greens are sincere they are deluded and misguided. Their leaders are evil misanthropes who view the lower echelons as expendable useful idiots. Fortunately, the human instinct for financial survival will probably kick in before it is too late.
Yes, I am an optimist.
10
I’ve had a look at the reply to the Skeptical H/book linked to at item 207; with Gulberg listed as one of the primary authors it is as bad as I have come to expect from his efforts [he made a fool of himself at the Brisbane Anthony Watts talk]. In order the book notes the following;
1 Moist adiabatic rate is changing; it is but in a way which contradicts AGW theory; see Soloman:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1182488
2 The Stratosphere is cooling; I have answered this bit of chicanery at comment 96 above.
3 OLR is decreasing; I have responed to this at comment 125 above. The h/book links to a 2001 Harries paper to justify its claim that OLR is declining; that paper is critiqued here:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_agw_smoking_gun.html
Harries has written some follow up papers ‘confirming’ his 2001 findings that OLR is decreasing; they have been critiqued here:
http://landshape.org/enm/interpretation-bias/
4 The H/book says that Watt’s surface station experiment where land based temperature data has been found to be corrupted by siting defects is wrong; the H/book does not list a reference for this but obviously the Menne paper is implied; Watts has replied to the Menne paper at many locations, this is as good as any; it should also be remembered that Watts and Pielke Sr have a Peer reviewed response to the Menne paper shennanigans in print:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/rumours-of-my-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerated/
I would really like any pro-AGW commentator to step up and try and defend what the Menne paper has done because I would enjoy knocking their legs from under them; the Menne paper is without justification and is particularly egregious.
5 2010 is the hottest year ever. No it is not; Jeff id has some fun with this:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/452/#more-9191
The other point about the 2010 claim is that the decadal rate of increase with GISS [as the base temp record for AGW and the only indice showing a post 1998 increasing trend] shows a declining rate of increase in temp compared with the rate of increase in the 80’s and 90’s.
I’ll continue with this rather typical ‘proof’ of AGW in another post. I must say, however, that Jo and her team could response to this nonsense quite easily.
10
@ KR
I should have written positive feedback loop instead of positive feedback.
10
Put my email address back in. Your email is an open door Ms Moderator and so is mine
——————-
Brian, I didn’t hide your email. That was a volunteer moderator, and they did ask you to confirm you wanted it there. They probably didn’t realize you’ve already done this before on this blog, it was a long while ago. –JN
How’s this:
“Now what. Care to discuss my evaluation? Write to bgvalentine AT verizon.net and I won’t waste space and other people’s time here.
If you write then please identify yourself completely. I don’t waste time with or write letters to the anonymous”
10
Welcome KR! 😉 I’ve enjoyed your thoughtful comments.
Let’s help KR out. The MWP was convincingly global in scope. Must see link below:
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html
There is a reason why the supporters of the AGW hypothesis diss the Medieval Warming Period. In fact, they hate all past climate variation which expands the parameters for naturally occurring fluctuation.
The MWP was warmer or as warm as today, yet it occurred at pre-industrial CO2 levels. Therefore, this warming period can not be explained by the AGW hypothesis. In fact, the only warm period in the history of the planet that the AGW hypothesis is designed to explain is the most recent one. It’s like seeing a white horse with black stripes at the zoo and proposing that it was anthropogenically produced with a brush and paint, then upon being informed that millions of these white and black striped equines roam freely in Africa still insisting that the one in the zoo is obviously man-made because, well, people with access to black paint exist….
The AGW hypothesis does make one very important prediction about past holocene climate change. That is that warming is driven by CO2. Furthermore, today’s “anomalous” temperatures CAN NOT occur naturally without atmospheric CO2 levels being around 385 ppm. The MWP is an inconvenient truth.
That’s why Michael Mann created the bogus hockey stick reconstruction of the last 2,000 years of climate showing no significant past climate change. Mann, being a real, if unethical, scientist, understood that if the MWP and the LIA were allowed into the paleoclimate record then the whole catastrophic global warming meme was rendered bunk and that the AGW hypothesis itself generated an “implication” which did not correspond to the observed evidence. And what do real scientists call a hypothesis that fails to usefully predict observed data? Mann literally attempted to fit up the data to the hypothesis rather than the other way around!
What the MWP and the LIA reveal is that the parameters both in amplitude and in speed for natural climate change are significantly greater than the level of climate change observed since 1900. Therefore, there is no need for a one off hypothesis which can only explain the latest bout of warming, because modern warming is well within the bounds of historically normal warming.
Of course, all AGW-supporters must deny (there’s that word again) that this is the case, although the raw observation data is uncontested. That’s why the AGW crowd constantly calls every other heat wave “unprecedented” and the 2002 drought in Australia was the worst in “millennia.” Everything about the modern climate has to be a superlative in relation to the recent paleoclimatic record in order to put the “catastrophic” and “anthropogenic” on the global warming.
Again, KR, study these graphs. Is modern warming really unprecedented? And if not, then why is it catastrophic or unnatural?
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html
10
I understand your point about “dupes” Ed but my sympathy for it has run out.
Our friends, the New Zealanders, are getting trashed because of the crap imposed by a bone-headed cabal.
It makes me ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY and I’ll howl without remorse or sympathy for dupes
10
@ Brian G. Valentine #226
I understand, Brian. Believe me, I understand! I know you will not go gently into that goodnight, and neither will I.
10
wes george:
July 2nd, 2010 at 9:54 am
Another excellent post. Whenever I confront an AGW proponent with the inconvenient truth about the MWP. I am usually told that it was just a regional event. Once I overcome that feeble argument I am told that there were other “things” but they won’t tell me what theres “things’ are. Absent other forcings, what else could it be but CO@ if the AGW theory is correct.
Check back soon!
10
Continuing with the reply to the Skeptical H/Book;
6 The H/book’s 3rd human fingerprint is nights warming faster than days. In fact this is exactly what you would expect from UHI:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/26/shocker-abc-says-uhi-making-cities-hotter/#more-21075
The IPCC is confused by this as their discussion about Diurnal Temperature Range [DTR] trends shows:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-3-2.html
From an Australian perspective a complete analysis of DTR has been undertaken by Jonathan Lowe who looks at the min/max temp dichotomy:
http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com/2009/04/analysis-of-australian-temperature-part.html
In short for Gulberg and co to claim any discrepancy between rates of change of min and max temp as evidence of AGW is very shonky indeed.
7 The H/Book keeps its most pernicious argument for AGW until last where it regurgitates the old shibboleth that extra CO2 will act like extra blankets or venetian blinds to increase blockage of IR. This is the anti-saturation argument which basically argues that there is no limit to extra heating from extra CO2. This is problematic and contradicts the IPCC’s own AR4 which states that for each doubling of CO2 temperature will increase ~ 1.2C; by this formula one can see that extra CO2 [by the IPCC’s own criteria] will have a declining effect on temp which is readily shown by this example:
280ppm to 560ppm = 1.2c rise
(on average each 100 ppm results in a .4 C rise)
560ppm to 1120 ppm = 1.2c rise
(on average each 100 ppm results in a .2 C rise)
1120 ppm to 2240 ppm = 1.2c rise.
(on average each 100 ppm results in a .1C rise)
Depicted graphically it looks like this:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0115707ce438970b-pi
And this decline has been verified by none other than leading AGW spruiker, Stephen Schneider:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/173/3992/138
The only issue is whether this declining effect is best described as a logarithmic decling one; Steve Short concludes this:
“The relationship between pCO2 and any dependent variable is a decaying exponential, not a logarithmic curve. So, for example, if y is the % of Radiation Remaining and C is the CO2 Concentration, then the curve is y = e^-kC, where k is a positive constant.
All empirical scientists know very well that this equation is a physical necessity to make any sort of filter work logically and correctly. I know this from my catchment model fits to flow recessions (and yes I do measure the Nash-Sutcliffe). I am positive Jan too knows this from his process control circuits.
For example, Radiative Forcing (RF) is the amount of radiation absorbed, not remaining, that is, not the amount transmitted forward. So the normalized RF = 1 – y = 1 – e^-kC. The fact that the equation can be turned around to C = -ln(y)/k is immaterial.
IPCC makes the reasonable approximation that the temperature and radiative forcing are proportional, ΔTs = λRF, where λ, is the climate sensitivity parameter refer AR4, Para 2.2, p. 133. So ΔTs = λ(1 – e^-kC), and Ts = To + λ(1 – e^-kC).
Doubling the pCO2 concentration squares the proportion of radiation absorbed, y. However, temperature change does not follow a logarithmic curve, but instead is the complement of a decaying exponential.
Since the logarithmic curve and this complement function are convex in the same sense (“convex down”), sure the logarithmic curve can make a pretty good fit to most any (discrete) region but in extremis it extrapolates to impossible results (far too hot).
For an increasing independent variable, the complement of the exponential has a horizontal asymptote, while the logarithm has none. On the contrary, the flawed IPCC model goes to infinity.
This in effect means that worse than no saturation, CO2 (and H2O) are each ‘capable’ (according to IPCC) of exceeding their own share of the LW IR band! The Beer-Lambert Law by definition correctly expresses saturation in each and every IR band.”
In short the H/Book is a travesty and has no valid argument in support of AGW.
10
KR @183,
I do hope you’ll try again. The Swiss Academy of Sciences paper would do better as a piece of cheese (not real good humor but the analogy is spot on). I started off laughing at the first page where they listed some really ridiculous reasons why skeptics don’t believe the global warming scam.
I’m sure you can do better if you try. Perhaps you can find a research paper that will explain why not a single prediction from the AGW camp has ever come true. I’d like to see that, provided of course that it’s based on actual empirical evidence, say because the predictions were based on altered data and un validated computer models and they actually admitted it to the author. Surely someone must have done that.
10
I think the most damming evidence is the fact that every time the AGW camp is found out to have manipulated data, built bogus models, written fraudulent science papers, referenced magazine articles, or simply transposed digits (2035 for glacier melt) they have been to the warm side!! As more and more of the actual data comes in to compare against, they have over guess-t-mated everything.
Not one of their errors has been found to be underestimating the problem!! from a statistical viewpoint this shows a process out of control, indicating a bias!!
You can rabbit on all you like about your AGW theories, but this highlights a systematic bias in the AGW science.
10
Incidently, I think the two taxes (RSPT and CPRS) have effectively come together now:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/gillard-slashes-mining-super-profits-tax-rate-to-30pc-to-end-war-with-resources-giants/story-e6frgczf-1225886962498
Anyone else notice how the negotiations ended up with just the fossil fuels and iron ore being taxed? The big four remaining under the old RSPT framework are :
Coal, Oil, gas and iron ore.
So this is effectively a direct carbon tax with iron ore smokescreen. Very clever politics to be honest.
Just thought this would lend some perspective.
10
Whilst I have no doubt that Joanne can refute this paper may I suggest that for Joanne to fully refute this paper she must gather together an equal list of qualified scientists to write the reply with her.
10
wes george @ 225
Excellent post! In summary – climate has changed a lot more and a lot faster in the past, and it did so without any input from mankind. There’s no reason the recent warming (which appears to have stopped) would be any different. Hence people like Mann, Jones, Santer, Briffa all trying to over-write the historical temperature record.
Mark Twain once said
It seems to me that the AGW advocates haven’t got the basics right but still persist on giving us very impressive, very “precise” climate models to demonstrate their opinions. These models are only as accurate as the assumptions that are fed into them. So we have a situation where the water vapour feedback is used as a parameter. Fantastic – except that the sign in the front of the number could well be negative, not positive! (See KR’s comments above at 219 – the numbers are definitely not definite!)
Sam NC, Spencer Tracey? You still out there? Here’s a simple question – still waiting for a satisfactory answer from you. It’s a simple question.
Spencer – I did get your reply thanks but it just confirmed my suspicion that the AGW theory is seriously and fundamentally flawed.
Cheers,
Speedy.
10
Bulldust@232,
But, But but they were saying the CPRS wasn’t about being a tax at all. They said it was all going to be fed back into helping people reduce their carbon footprint.
Yeah, bollocks. It was just a tax grab by a government that couldn’t balance a chequebook.
10
Sorry for the typos at 228. I haven’t even had a beer, yet!
10
Scott @ 231, I have for years thought the same thing about the “effects of AGW” where EVERY prediction is dire. You’d think that if science was not biased there would be some effect that actually would be a benefit to the flora and fauna (maybe even mankind). Instead all is bad…..
Sounds not like science but instead, like propaganda.
00
BTW, has anybody heard from J.L. Krueger?
00
Read this and weep!
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_live_green_before_you_vote_it/
They (the barking mad, moon-screaming Greens) want to shut down all coal fired power stations.
00
Mark@239,
Maybe we should do a swap.
Move all Greens over to New Zealand (most power generated from Dams over there, so they should be happy). All non green voters over here.
Would that be a pretty good swap?
00
yup – we’d win all the sport and they’d win all the basket weaving.
00
Cohenite @ 229
An excellent post – definitely worth bookmarking. Thanks.
Speedy
00
Ed @228,
You would think that when they (as in the deniers) are told that Manns hockey stick failed to reproduce the thermometer temps after about 1960 therefore casting doubt on the accuracy of the entire data set, they would have second thoughts.
You would think that when they (as in the deniers) are told that Mann attempted to hide this decline by grafting the thermometer data onto his tree ring data post 1960 they would have third thoughts.
And yet we still see the same people defending what can only be described as fraud. If Mann cannot reproduce the entire data set from his proxy method then his methodology is flawed and as such so are his results but still they believe.
@ Brian, i share your pain if these half baked dimwits honestly beleived in their cause then i suggest they start acting like it. They can start by going back to the horse and cart, burning candles rather than light bulbs, walking, walking everywhere, stop buying any product that requires refrigeration. They can also begin disconnecting themselves from modern life by not using their mobile phones, laptops and start using solar panel driven ovens to cook with……whats that? You find this all a little too inconvenient? Well best you shut up and get back in your box then.
Cheers
00
Madjak @ 240
Interesting prospect. However I like living here still. I think we should move the Greens to that large island between NZ and Easter Island. You know the one I mean – not the Chathams – the one that is coloured in blue on the maps. They can live out their days there.
00
Agree
00
MadJak:
Sounds good. Could be too easy for them though. A lot of evil “carbon” infrastructure they would have access to.
00
SUBJECT: Stop Labor’s Marine Park Lockout!!!
Join The Campaign To Stop The Creation Of More Marine Parks In NSW.
More Marine Parks Mean More Imported Contaminated Seafood From Filthy Countries Like China.
Here Is The Petition To Sign………..
http://www.stopmarinelockout.com.au/petition-signatures
00
Thank you Speedy; I think Jo should formally respond to the Guldberg critique of her Skeptics H/Book; the summaries at 223 and 230 show that the Guldberg effort has little going for it.
00
Grant @244,
I spent a bit of time in NZ building the CDMA mobile phone network back in 2000/2001 and i travelled all through most of the Nth and Sth Islands, it was may/june so it was starting to get cold but according to my TNZ friend it was still warm.
Anyway to cut a long story short i thought i new what cold was until i went to Invercagil, it was there that i thought i saw my first ice berg but my TNZ friend told me it was called Swan Island. Do you think it would be possible to put all the Greenies there? as i doubt it would ever get warm enough to for them to bother anyone.
Just a thought.
00
Grant,
Just move them out to Taranaki. I’d love to watch them try and stay warm around a solar powered candle through a Taranaki winter.
For those not in the know. Taranaki gets so cold and is so wet that more than a few days without Rain and the farmers start talking about the drought (seriously).
00
Meet New Zealand’s ETS: costly, corrupted and useless…………
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/meet_new_zealands_ets_costly_corrupted_and_useless/P60/
00
Live Green before you vote it:-
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_live_green_before_you_vote_it/
00
I wonder if global warming contributed somehow to Al Gore’s sickening behaviour?
Here’s the theory: climate change contributes to rising temperatures and dropping water levels, which in turn leads to lower catch volume and smaller fish, which pushes some Lake Naivasha fishermen in Nairobi’s Rift Valley to cast their nets into the world of Crime. Naivasha police say that most of their recent arrests for kidnapping, rape, robbery, carjackings and other crimes have been of fishermen, up to ten a week.
00
Crakar @ 249
An iceberg. Sound suggestion. Plenty of fresh water and more to it than what appears above the waterline.
00
KR #183:
The document is clearly published by Swiss Re; a re-insurer like Munich Re. Which set out to make lots of money making on insuring insurers against losses. In this case to cover for an imaginary risk. Which must be one of the best things for which to collect insurance.
They are very much into supporting the notion of climate catastrophe. They’ve employed shining knights of climate catastrophe communication ProClim (which is a part of the Swiss Academy but not the Academy). Their membership of a Science Academy is puzzling because they are clearly a media, marketing and lobbyist establishment.
I’ve had a quick look at the document (with the Swiss Re paw-print on the front page) and looked at their canned answers for insurance salesmen to counter the sceptics.
00
The quality of whitewash in the UK must be dropping.A few cracks are appearing in one of their recent paint jobs.
http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/01/oxburgh-and-the-jones-admission/#more-11331
NB. The comment by Judith Curry ( she’ll be convert yet !!)
00
Very sorry, but I don’t view Judith Curry as a potential “ally” or “convert.”
As soon as somebody accuses her of “backsliding” or “sympathizing with deniers” her immediate reaction is to bad mouth sceptics, and I can back up that claim
00
cohenite: #229
July 2nd, 2010 at 10:41 am
Isn’t that an interesting exercise cohenite? (doubling CO2)
It would be equally interesting to go backwards wouldn’t it? i.e. start from say 400ppm and keep halving until we get to the first molecule of CO2
00
crakar24:
July 2nd, 2010 at 12:12 pm
You stated more than once, “You would think”. You and I may think and so do the regulars who post here but that is not true of the green elect. They do not need to think because all of the dots have already been connected for them by the “authorities.” It is irrational thought that leads to the flight of the lemmings right of the cliff of deductive reasoning.
Youth has always been impressionable but most now seem to skip the rebellious stage and that is sad. By questioning the received wisdom they would be able to creatively assert their own identity. Now, many fall prey to conformity and bow to a false green messiah. They have sacrificed independent thought for the comforting embrace of the acceptance of a cult.
00
Brian @ @57. My tongue was firmly in my cheek with that comment.
But I do respect the fact that she is prepared to step out of the pack and speak her own mind.
00
Baa Humbug; this graph shows, according to radiative processes underpining the greenhouse effect, the temperature effect of reducing amounts of CO2:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0115707ce438970b-pi
Bear in mind that the greenhouse temperature is ~33C; the contribution of CO2 to that 33C is a moot point; Lindzen reckons that CO2 and CH4 contribution to the greenhouse effect is < 2% or o.066C; see page 2 here:
http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/153_Regulation.pdf
00
Laugh Riot: 190-year climate ‘tipping point’ issued — Despite fact that UN began 10-Year ‘Climate Tipping Point’ in 1989!
A brief history of Climate Change Tipping Points
http://www.prisonplanet.com/laugh-riot-190-year-climate-tipping-point-issued-despite-fact-that-un-began-10-year-climate-tipping-point-in-1989.html
00
http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/01/oxburgh-and-the-jones-admission/#more-11331
Steve McI guts Oxburgh. Seems it was “never about the science”.
00
Just received this from ScepticalScience.com
Guest post by Annie Young
The Watts climate tour appeared in Perth on Tuesday evening. They garnered a turnout in the vicinity of 110 people. The majority were middle-aged and elderly. Three of us stood outside offering ‘The Scientific Guide to the Skeptics’ Handbook’, an excellent booklet addressing the grievous scientific misunderstandings in Jo Nova’s ‘Skeptics’ Handbook’. Almost everyone accepted one, however a couple returned theirs when they realised they had been duped with the real science.
Upon her arrival, Jo Nova asked to see the booklet. She muttered something about the lunacy of measuring temperature with wind shear. A fellow booklet distributor mentioned three recent articles which explained the notion but instead of discussing the contents of these papers in a spirit of scientific curiosity, she diverted from the real issue by challenging him to name the authors.
When questioned about further reading she may have done on other topics, she reverted to stating the authors of one paper she had read. It is thus hard to take her seriously when she says she is looking for evidence. “Show me the science,” was also her refrain six months ago at another climate science event. This seems to indicate that she has no interest, or perhaps no ability, to do her own research. The suggestion that it is her responsibility to keep up with the science, not ours to ensure that she does, appeared to make no impression on her. Her response to several enquiries during our discussion about whether she understands the science, was silence.
She accused those of us following evidence-based science of wanting ‘our money’. Apparently, in her mind, those who pay attention to the science are aligned against the denialists to fleece the world of money for their nefarious activities dealing with climate change for the benefit of current and future generations.
Bob Carter also came out to have a word. He disparaged the scientists who were acknowledged for their comments on the ‘Scientific Guide’ dismissing them as “not even climate scientists.” Those whom he dismissed include seven professors, associate professors and a Fellow of the Royal Society, some of whom have published in Science and Nature, and all of whom are acknowledged experts in their fields which include statistical modelling of weather and climate data, paleoclimatology and the effects of ocean acidification on coral reefs.
Although I didn’t venture inside, a preliminary report from someone who did, bemoaned the fact that he had lost 45 minutes of his life watching Watts’ slide show of thermometers which give the same data as his so-called well-positioned thermometers and the satellites.
In this age of open and swift global communication, it is easy to examine technology and strategies in place around the world to reduce carbon emissions whilst building the economy and providing jobs. As was shown the preceding evening, when the real science was presented, Germany is a case in point. With far fewer sunlight hours and less coastline than us, they have used a variety of renewable energy sources including solar and wave to reduce carbon emissions by 28% whilst increasing GDP by 32% in real terms and creating more than 300,000 clean-energy jobs. Australia is extraordinarily well positioned to follow suit.
One has to wonder why Nova, Carter, Watts and their ilk oppose such action, especially as it also addresses other pollution about which they claim to be concerned.
any comments;sorry I can’t post them to the website so far as I know
________________________________________
00
Mark @ 263
If the Scientific Review was “ever about the science” then WTF WAS it about!!!
Perhaps it was more about the PERCEPTION of the Science? It is rare to see the public treated with such open contempt.
Cheers,
Speedy
00
Jo must be getting under the skin of a few people ( ie. her message is gaining traction) given Annie Young’s comments.
Her comments on renewables in Germany need checking. I’m all for econonmic forms of renewable energy. But there are numerous expensive failures in Europe. Wind farms might work in some places but that doesn’t mean they are economic in any place with abit of wind.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/7823681/Does-money-grow-in-wind-farms.html
Look at what Germany is doing to keep some of their farms in the above article.
Then we have this stupid situation in the UK.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/7840035/Firms-paid-to-shut-down-wind-farms-when-the-wind-is-blowing.html
00
Those poor, poor people. Having to stand outside in the cold while the world ignores them. Later, one of them literate enough manages to write the above article (@264) proving that fact. They try to remain upbeat at this point in their indoctrination by simply saying things like “a couple returned theirs when they realised they had been duped with the real science” and “She accused those of us following evidence-based science” as if it could possibly mean something now and in the future. Apparently, one gallant individual did manage to navigate his way inside, however was severely nonplussed by his narrow and sceptical mind. I’m surprised he found his way back out.
When things are this dreary for eco-mentalists, you could almost feel sorry for them – almost. It seems they actually like to feel this way about the planet and its inhabitants – you know – those bad, BAD humans!
00
Val thanks for cross-posting that piece. I see their handbook for the handbook is now up on their website:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/A-Scientific-Guide-to-the-Skeptics-Handbook.html
It’s sad if that’s the best commentary they could muster three days after the event. And yes, clearly if one wants to measure temperatures one should look to wind sheer, not thermometers… those folks are, shall we be polite? … credulous…
BTW the web site is skeptical with a “k” not a “c”… not sure what the sceptical web site is all about but I wasn’t going to linger with dubious looking popups.
00
PS> Has anyone tried posting at Skeptical Science? I assume they moderate much like Real Climate because a quick scan of the site shows no dissenting views.
00
Bulldust; the only thing I thought is that the tone is very condescending and the author had no questions that she mentions on the night about the science; I would not spend time on it but posted it for interest to you and other readers; a different perspective of the same event – I was sorry not to see Anthony Watts when he was here but from everything I’ve seen and read he and his supporters were well received – I’ve heard that Ken Stewart met him but don’t know about Warwick Hughes
00
Bulldust: #269
July 2nd, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Yeah I have, and they do allow skeptical comments. Not like RC though I haven’t posted too many times at RC
I was reading thru one of the old threads at SKeptic, it was full of sceptical views
00
Speedy:
Maybe about the “spin”.
Funny thing, in a way I really hope that they keep this crap up. At some point the climb down will come and it will be all the more humiliating for the lot of them.
Their names will all be known and they will go down in history with the likes of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. The nazis were no different, they had this notion of “German” science. We are going through the current malaise of “concensus” science.
What was that that old Chinese curse about living and interesting times?
00
Thanks for that link Bulldust @ 268..
In their “Scientific Guide to the Skeptics Handbook” they proudly proclaim:
Note how they dubiously don’t mention the actual figures of CO2 Man (30Bn T) and Nature (640Bn T.. this is my last observed figure – correct if wrong), making Man’s contribution just 3%. They also purposely mislead the reader by not dividing up their 40% figure into Man and Nature equivalents. Fraud – already.. and these are their first few words titled “Human Fingerprint”!
Now for the end of their world:
Their proud doomsday “hype-othesis” crashes and burns right there, including everything following it (they should have realised to stop writing at this point), since a “positive feedback” such as this leads to what they cleverly avoided calling a “runaway greenhouse”, which has never happened in Earth’s history and yet we exist to debate this now moot point, especially since CO2 was some 10-15x higher only 100Mya.
They also show a graphic from Sherwood et al 2008, which purportedly shows a tropospheric hot spot. Not mentioning exactly which paper this refers to, I managed to find sherwood-allen-ngeo-2008.pdf, which clearly states:
However, their “Scientific Guide” states:
Now really! How can removing heat from temp measurements find even hotter temps? Notably, they didn’t even mention the models Sherwood et al are very confident with, considering Sherwood’s own “findings are inconsistent with the trends derived from radiosonde temperature datasets”!!
Then shortly after in their article, they lie:
Then:
..only up until near saturation at 400ppm, where 5000ppm in the past had little effect due to CO2’s logarithmic function, including the inability to make any animals drowsy.. 😉 their positive-feedback loop doesn’t explain how the feedback loop stops to include cooling, and neither do they.
Then they piffle on about less heat escaping into space where they conveniently fail to mention Lindzen and Choi, and the ERB Satellite that proves otherwise. They’re still happy to back up their claims by stating:
..which they typically avoid naming, and typically avoid explaining how cooling can occur with positive feedback loops and less outgoing radiation (not possible), and how we’ve never had a runaway greenhouse ever, no fabled “tipping point”, and how those pesky un-dissolved fossils of corals and shellfish from high CO2 Jurassic era keep popping up in our museums..!
Then a global temp graph from – you guessed it – NASA GISS (looks heavily “adjusted”) which conveniently leaves out anything before 1880! Then some alarmist (and completely wrong) propaganda regarding ice sheets, glaciers and penguins melting. Some more fanciful yada – yada, including their closing:
The only thing “scientific” of this “guide” is the fantastic process that managed to blow the ink onto the paper!
I could continue, but I suspect Jo would have fun with that teensy project herself. Thanks to all you Climate Realists, sanity may one day again prevail.
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Olaf Koenders:
Terrific post.
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#264 Val, speaking of proud German high seas clean energy flotilla, didn’t the entire Greater Australian wave generating fleet disappear under Kembla Bay a handful of days after Admiral Sir Peter Batts-Garret bid it God speed – in a gutsy demonstration that we can do a Scapa Flow just as well as any man?
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Hmm? I wonder whether the frenzied activity from the cult of CAGW of late has anything to do with Prof Cees de Jager ( Astronomer , solar expert and former head of Utrecht University Observatory) and His colleague`s suggestions that We may be going into another grand minimum of not less than a century duration.
Given that Prof de Jager`s (and others) work correlates global temperature rise and fall rather well with solar activity , e.g. cause first , effect a while later(including temperature drops that occurr just after major volcanic events , etc), surely some of the Carbonari climate researchers must be aware that the Sun itself may be just about to piss in their collective pockets by taking a rather long snooze* and they are getting a little skittish .
After all , having your warming gravy train snap-frozen to the tracks would be just a little embarrasing and worse , frozen gravy is impossible to guzzle .
* ( Long snooze by our standards , “just closing my eyes for moment” by the Sun`s)
P.S. Eddy Aruda , Cohenite and others , nice job on the visiting trolls/warmist faithful , You made them look like men who`d arrived at dawn to duel with swords not only to find they were armed with a banana
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Waylander:
The good prof. would not be the first to state that. I think that for obvious reasons, most of humanity would hope that he was wrong and that temps. would stabilixe. Now that would be the best possible outcome; “warming” and “climate change” would both be shown to be crocks.
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The media continue to take seriously and, provide free publicity for, people who call themselves “consumer advocates” or “environmentalists”, even though there are no qualifications required for these roles – all it takes is a big mouth, a big ego, a disdain for inconvenient facts and an ignorance of economics.
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All part and parcel of the “age of concensus” I’m afraid Olaf.
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Jo – how could you? I was just settling nicely into my policy of calling myself a denier at any plausible opportunity, occasionally extending it by a few redundant syllables to “denialistician” to make our American cousins feel at home, rendering it “deniar” at the Guardian for similar reasons – you know, generally having fun, and here you go forbidding it!
When the Scots wanted to signal their contempt for the inhabitants of Northumberland for their loyalty to whichever Hanoverian George presently occupied the throne, they yelled “Geordie!” at them. Today Geordies cherish the name. Are we deniers to be denied (oh, the irony!) our St Crispin’s Day moment, just to break a warmist butterfly on a sceptical wheel?
For the record, here are some of the things I deny:
1. That anyone has presented convincing evidence that rising CO2 levels pose any kind of threat to the planet.
2. That claims to the contrary have survived proper peer review;
3. That computer models purporting to support claims to the contrary have demonstrable skill;
4. That “climate science”, as such, has in recent decades been conducted according to the principles of the Scientific Method – I deny in particular that its practitioners have shown any real understanding of the null hypothesis;
5. That a case exists to devote any more public money to climate change “response” than to the problem of hip displasia in overbred labradors.
I’m sure I’ll think of more, but in the meantime, Jo, can I have my denier license back? After all, there are plenty of other reasons to quarantine the squid and its cohort – give us our freedom, I say!
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KR wonders how I could know that the Swizz Academy was heading into Voo-doo science without reading their article. I misread their title – “Climate Skeptics Arguments and their Scientific Background”. – and presumed (incorrectly) that they were talking about the background of the scientists. My apologies to the Swiss Academy – they do rise above the ad hom – which is good.
They do however resort to repeating the usual half-truths, they whitewash the serious flaws and wrap it all up in a certainty that no one can justify with empirical evidence. The models capture water vapor feedback well? No mention of the tropospheric “discrepancy” – only that someone modeled the air after a volcano for a few years and got it right, which is apparently just as good as modeling the whole atmosphere for 4 decades.
Cohenite. Thanks for for your o-so-well informed thoughts. I shall add yours to my collection, some very nice links there too.
But Janama, why would I need any profs? I quote the IPCC and Hansen, and peer reviewed papers, I let them speak for me. If you read them closely they give quite a lot away…
I think the Skeptics Handbook looks all the more powerful now that so many have tried to reply, and it’s been so surprisingly weak. And yes, of course, I will do a proper response all in one post so people can understand exactly why their complaints don’t wash.
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The worst is the disdain for the POOR, which is why I become so irascible about “environmentalists.”
The people promoting”environmentalism” are typically well-off whites who have no clue or couldn’t care less about the consequences of their demands will have on those who cannot AFFORD what they demand.
We see this repeatedly in Africa – World Bank and Euro bureaucrats prevent development because of their elitism and unsubstantiated “beliefs.”
Look at the photo of the two handing out “rebuttals” to “scepticism.” Do those two look like they have to suffer much to survive?
Nada – their moms and pops probably handed them everything they wanted so they could waste their lives in their “idealism” and handing out literature on street corners.
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Tom FP: Since you don’t use denier as an insult and claim that we deny evidence, there’s no problem. It is, after all, a part of the English language. There is a good argument that we could take on their name-calling term “own it” and mock them with it. But for the most part, I don’t think that works yet (only at the right place and time).
The reason I insist that commenters don’t use “denier” against sceptics is that 1/ it’s linguistically incorrect, and 2/it’s so disrespectful and inflammatory it guarantees there can be no meaningful discussion on the site. Figure it out, if they falsely “know” in their own heads that a group denies evidence, they are hardly likely to listen to anything a denier would say. It becomes an impossible hurdle for them to treat anything offered by a “denier” seriously.
If people are going to call me a denier they need to explain what evidence I deny, which of course, they can’t. The third reason is that people who use the word denier as a put-down invariably turn out to be unable to contribute much that’s useful. Their arrogance gets in the way.
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Brian, Justin is at least willing to come here and discuss things. He was willing to rise above his apathy and do something he thinks is useful… I’m sure he would be mortified if he thought that what he was doing might contribute to deaths of children in africa. Let’s not get into the “looks” of anyone. (We aren’t starving too much either).
Though I do agree with you that many greens are impervious to evidence about the consequences of their favourite well intentioned projects. But bear in mind, some greenies grow up, and there are good people under that banner. I was once.
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Brian and Eddy @226, 227,
I have to confess that I didn’t realize the depth of the infiltration into society by these doom and gloom pushers until I read that we were plagued by a student finishing his degree in climate change mitigation nonsense. This explains for me why there is no hope of changing their minds. They’ve staked their future on it, true or not.
I hope it doesn’t come to the point you hint at Eddy, where we have to go down fighting. I’m not going to like that but if it comes to it, I’ll do it.
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Joanne #281:
KR incorrectly identified the source.
It’s not something from the Swiss Academy. It’s from Swiss Re, the re-insurance company who “contracted” the ProClim lobby group that claims to be “a part of” the Swiss Academy. Maybe their sewage outlet 🙂
See my posting #255 for more details.
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Jo – OK I’ve got my tongue back out of my cheek now. And on reflection I do only use it (“denier”, of myself) in discussions where an earlier poster has used it disparagingly. It’s my little bit of Tai Chi. And I try to make clear just what I am denying – or at least what I am NOT denying! I have noticed, though, that I get little backchat from the “cheer-reviewers”, nor many thumbs downs, either, whereas they jump all over my fellow sceptics like rabid terriers, and the thread goes the usual path down the gurgler to ad hominem abuse, usually initiated by the CAGW “tribe”. Maybe they’re just ignoring me, but who knows? Maybe I really have robbed them of a snap reply, and maybe their search for one provoked a little thought about what I had written.
So here’s a thought, while we’re trying to work out how better to “communicate” with people we disagree with. Communicating with people better, particularly via the internet, doesn’t necessarily mean talking to them. Talk can be as good at perpetuating disagreement as resolving it. CAGW believers who encounter cogent evidence of its weakness have good social reasons for keeping their doubts to themselves. Nobody relishes falling out, over a single issue, with a whole group of people with whom he agrees on nine others. But I’ll guarantee you a lot of silent sceptics read what you write, waiting for the day when general laughter breaks out, and it’s safe to speak their minds. We need to do all we can to hasten that day.
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Thank you for your correction, Jo Anne, although I admit to a difference in what I perceive and you evidently perceive in people who come along and condescend to whom they view as the “unenlightened” about “things the experts have concluded as fundamental truths.”
As if people here haven’t heard their arguments twenty or thirty years ago! I for one have, so have many others.
Misguided idealism is nonetheless misguided – look at the Hitlerjungen and the Communist youth of the Stalin era. I’m afraid I can’t take a sympathetic approach to people who have the capability to reflect on the consequences of what they want in light of what others need to survive at all
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Brian, I added your email back in at #224. I didn’t take it out BTW.
Yes, the smug arrogance is the attitude I most detest.
TomFP: Yes, satirical humour is exactly what I had in mind, and when you “own” the insult it takes all the fun out of it for those who name-call. After all they were hoping you’d feel less sure of yourself, less confident.
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Oooops. Links fixed from above.
This ‘evidence’ quiz will go out of date.
Go to the Bureau of Meterology website and find out if the ACT had colder than average minimum temperatures last month: Here
Wait a minute… are you sure?!?: Look here in a new window or tab.
Hmmmm and for a bonus question, what about Sydney for the week ending June 29?:
Warmer…
Or cooler
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Lance you are just being difficult. Why should two maps with the same product code have the same information? I can’t believe you’d be so demanding of your hard working government workers. You have no idea how hard it is to copy one map to another html page. 🙂
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There’s a consolation in knowing that his eventual employment will probably be in an unrelated field.
I can imagine a conversation that goes something like this:
“What did you get your degree in?”
“Global warming alarmism.”
“What did you do your thesis on?”
“A ‘scientific’ refutation of Joanne Nova’s handbook for ‘skeptics.'”
“Did you believe her handbook had merit?”
“No, it was nothing more than a collection of denialist sentiments. It had no scientific basis whatsoever.”
“Then why did you bother to refute it?”
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@cohenite,,,
July 1st, 2010 at 12:39 pm
10 reasons why AGW is problematic:
1 Previous levels of CO2 were much higher than today and correlated with temperatures higher, the same and lower than today.
2 Movements of CO2 do not correlate with movements in temperature; during the 20thC from 1940-1976 CO2 increased but temperatures dropped; the same from 1998. See Lansner:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2,Temperaturesandiceages-f.pdf
3 Climate sensitivity of 2XCO2 = 3C has not been verified by the 40% increase in CO2 and temperature increase of only 0.7C since 1900. Of that 0.7C increase solar influence has been 0.1-0.4C [TAR] and natural variation at least 0.3C.
4 The mechanism by which CO2 causes heating has never been adequately explained; see:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0904/0904.2767.pdf
http://biocab.org/Total_Emisivity_CO2.html
The link to biocab.org/Total_Emisivity_CO2.html doesn’t work because of the grammatical error on the name of the page, i.e. “Emisivity”, which should be read “Emissivity”; however, you can read the whole article at:
http://biocab.org/ECO2.pdf
I apologize by the problem.
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Too much to choose from; so, I just pick a few of the better ones.
“If they want to discuss the evidence they are going to lose. It is worth noting that every major debate that has occurred has been won by the skeptics.”
Public debates in front of an audience that has a limited understanding of the science, sure, we’ll loose them every time. The debate about the basics of the science that took place among people who understand the science was won by the warmers decades, perhaps a century, ago. Lindzen seems to be the best holdout and even he agrees it will get warmer, just not by much. I’m curious though, if the earth is as strongly self-regulating as Lindzen claims, how does he explain the wide swing of temps in the interglacial cycles where the triggering forcing was much less than than even he admits a doubling of CO2 will have?
“I beg to differ. Neither the Arctic or Antarctic ice is decreasing. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/28/sea-ice-news-11/ Some glaciers are retreating and some are not. ”
Really? Because one of the posts I read on WUWT talked about how the current Arctic ice was _only_ 1.5 std deviations below the downward sloping trend line he had calculated. Why did he use a downward sloping line for the average?
Some glaciers are growing; they are outnumbered by the ones in decline by at least an order of magnitude or two.
“The worst is the disdain for the POOR, which is why I become so irascible about “environmentalists.” ”
Uhh, actually, the people hardest hit by climate change will be the poor. Consider the expansion of the Sahel, the disappearance of Lake Chad, or the prospect of all of Bangladesh under water. You sound like Michael Crichton, great SF author, lousy science writer.
“The second order effects are pure speculation and cannot be directly measured.”
Well, if you look up some paleohistory studies and observe the history of the earth, that should give you a decent perspective of measured secondary, tertiary, etc. effects in total.
“All the evidence you want can be found at junkscience.com and wattsupwiththat.com.”
Yeah right, because it’s harder to make up stuff than it is to craft something that passes peer review. If Watt’s work contained valid arguments, the journals would be clambering to be the first to publish the paradigm shifting breakthrough. Evidently, they are not.
“If it were real, the runaway greenhouse effect would have already occurred but it did not. ”
Please look up Stefan-Boltzmann. You’ll find a 4th power in the energy emitted equation. CO2 and other GHGs operate on a log curve. That guarantees that there will be no ‘runaway’. An equilibrium will always be reached, albeit at a different temperature.
“8 Clouds are a negative feedback
9 Water vapour has not increased as required by AGW theory [see Paltridge, Soloman and many others]”
Hmm, couple of thoughts. Where would any extra clouds come from if there is no increase in water vapor? The sea and air are warmer; what would prevent the known laws regarding evaporation from working?
“The funny thing about skepticalscience.com is that it censors skeptics.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
I would have thought that censoring expressions of skepticism on a skeptical science blog would be the last thing to happen, not the first.”
That’s odd, because I’ve had long debates with skeptics on that same site.
“In my time, I have been a professional computer modeller, I am comfortable with Assembler, Fortran, PL/1, APL, and C programming languages. I can also understand Ada, although I would not claim to be able to write it. I studied applied maths (or numerical methods as it was then called) so I can figure out most algorithms.”
I’m also comfortable with a variety of languages. If you look just a little, you’ll find the algorithms you are asking for. They are almost all written in Fortran; it’s efficient at matrix math.
“Again, you are close to the mark and what you say is true. If we took CO2 out of the air, more would come out of the oceans to replace it.”
Well, sort of. The converse is also true; when we put more CO2 into the air, the ocean absorbs part of it. That’s why ocean acidification is climate changes nasty brother. However, please look up the equations for the solubility of CO2 in water, compare that with the Stefan-Boltzmann, and as I mentioned above, you’ll see there is no ‘runaway’. That doesn’t mean that the temperature and precip patterns won’t change.
“Previous levels of CO2 were much higher than today and correlated with temperatures higher, the same and lower than today.”
What are you talking about, the snowball earth phase? That would be when CO2 forcing finally overcame albedo forcing. Everyone knows that CO2 isn’t the only factor that affects climate, it just happens to be the only thing that is changing now enough to account for the observed changes, using the laws of physics as we understand them.
Oh, and the paper can be found here; took about 10 seconds of searching.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/ScientificGuideSkepticsA5.pdf
BTW Jo, you are aware that zero degrees C is still pretty warm in Kelvin (0 C = 273 K), and Kelvin is what matters in any formula pertinent to physics?
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Thanks Nasif; how’s the debate with De Witt going; I read some exchanges you had with him back in 2007 at weatherworld, basically on the same topic of backradiation.
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ChrisG at 295; your thoughts and comments are ill thought and confused: you say this:
““8 Clouds are a negative feedback
9 Water vapour has not increased as required by AGW theory [see Paltridge, Soloman and many others]”
Hmm, couple of thoughts. Where would any extra clouds come from if there is no increase in water vapor? The sea and air are warmer; what would prevent the known laws regarding evaporation from working?”
From 1975 until the early 2000’s evaporation did decrease, see:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL031166.shtml
During this period, the acme of AGW, in another study Pinker et al found that from 1983-2001, on average there was an increase in SW reaching the surface at a rate of 0.16W/m2; Pinker concluded that a lack of clouds caused this; measurement of cloud cover during this period confirms this; it should be noted that extra SW is sufficient in itself to explain ALL warming during that period. Since about 2001 onwards cloud cover has increased again.
Secondly clouds have a different affect depending on whether they are low/medium or high clouds; Clouds represent a natural forcing all on their own, with low level clouds reflecting incoming SW radiation and higher clouds generally acting to absorb and re-radiate outgoing LW energy radiated from the surface [the IRIS effect noted by Lindzen and confirmed by NASA]. The net impact of clouds is estimated to be one of strong cooling of our planet. Ramanathan and Inamdar estimated net cooling of 48 W/m^2 from low clouds and net warming of 30 W/m^2 from high clouds, for a net cooling impact from clouds of 18 W/m^2 (or somewhat more than 10 times the total estimated forcing from all GHGs since 1750, according to IPCC). This difference between high and low clouds and their combined forcing [which is the difference between the incoming radiation they reflect and the outgoing radiation they block] has been confirmed by many studies; this is typical and informative:
http://stm.arm.gov/2008/presentations/0310/7_Dupont.pdf
Both the Paltridge and Soloman studies have found water vapor levels and location in the atmosphere consistent with evaporative and cloud formation levels. There is no inconsistency there.
Finally you say: “CO2 and other GHGs operate on a log curve. That guarantees that there will be no ‘runaway’. An equilibrium will always be reached, albeit at a different temperature”. This is quite incorrect, see my comment at 230. The concept of runaway has always been part of AGW scare-mongering.
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Chris G: #294
July 3rd, 2010 at 9:16 am
Chris you were giving it a good go until you tripped and shot yourself in the foot at the very last sentence.
Overnight it’s been a relatively chilly 8 Degrees Celcius here in Brisbane, sunny Queensland. Oh wait!! my mistake, it was a balmy 281 Kelvin. Why was I and all the other Brisbane residents wearing jumpers and coats and complaining about the week long cold. Silly us, we could have been wearing shorts and T-Shirts and going to the beach, afterall, it was a pretty warm 281 Kelvin.
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Yes I wonder if it would require all 12 department branches, fitted out buildings, Vehicles, high level decision making and international travel.
http://www.bom.gov.au/inside/org_structure.shtml
Mark do you know what the current % number for the chance of past climate change is?
“likelihood and nature of past and future climate change”
I don’t see a “DR Who” on the list.
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Cohenite,
So, evaporation did increase, and Plinker detected a lack of clouds. Pray tell how evaporation increased, did not form clouds, and yet water vapor did not increase. What happened to the H2O?
Are you saying that the Stefan-Boltzmann law is incorrect?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
Or that the effect of CO2 operates on a faster accelerating curve than T^4?
It does not. I’ve even read skeptic arguments (incorrect) that AGW can’t happen because the effect is on a log curve.
Please try to realize that a function operating on an curve where the acceleration accelerates (positive second derivative) will always catch up with a function operating on a curve with a decreasing acceleration (negative second derivative). If you can’t understand that, it is you who are confused. If you think that the scientists contributing to the IPCC aren’t aware of these relationships, or that they have ever stated otherwise, you’ve been deluded.
There are different definitions of runaway. I stick the the most extreme definition of true runaway; however, there are many who simply mean that, in the complexities of the feedbacks of the system, a new equilibrium will be reached that is out of proportion with the original forcing. The commenters above use it in the same way that I am when they say that it has never happened, therefore it won’t. True enough, the earth will never go nova, but that doesn’t mean we won’t go to increase the earth’s absolute temperature by 1% if we double one of the major GHGs.
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ChrisG; read what I said; which is that evaporation DECREASED from 1975- ~2001.
StephanBoltzmann has nothing to do with CO2; SB’s law deals with blackbody radiation: The energy radiated by a blackbody radiator per second per unit area is proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature and is given by;
P/A=KT4j/m2s where K is the Boltzmann constant; the formula is adjusted for less ideal radiators which is everything else other than cavities. The radiation distribution is determined by the temperature of the emitting surface and the peak of the frequency distribution by Wien’s law.
The problem for AGW is that CO2 is not ‘surface’; so even though backradiation from atmospheric CO2 is the backbone of AGW and is supposedly measured at being dominant in the 15um wavelength, that wavelength is dominated by water emission which is most definitely a surface as either vapor or a cloud.
What you are confusing with SB’s law is Beer-lambert law as I referred to at comment 230, especially this part; read it carefully because the difference between log and exponential is crucial:
“For an increasing independent variable, the complement of the exponential has a horizontal asymptote, while the logarithm has none. On the contrary, the flawed IPCC model goes to infinity.”
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With 35 years of computing experience, it’s nice to be reminded that one can still press the wrong button. Which I expertly did a few minutes ago,throwing away an article that I’ve been composing for over an hour – in between feedings of the washing machine.
P Gosselin has done a translation of the summary and conclusions of a report to the German government on its energy policies. The report concludes that “prevention” of climate change by CO2 reduction is way more expensive than simple adaptation to the assumed climate catastrophe.
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Bernd; that will teach you not to mix washing and blogging:-) The German study you link to concludes what Lomborg concluded in his book “Cool It”; namely that, even if AGW were happening, adaptation to it would be far cheaper and beneficial than trying to prevent it; Lomborg charts the relative costs at Fig 11 on page 41; doing nothing would have costs of 1 trillion and benefits of 2 trillion; trying to restrict temperature increase to 1.5C would cost 84 trillion and have benfits of 10 trillion; those benefits would mainly go to speculators like Gore.
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Cohenite,
OK, I read you wrong. It makes no difference. Unless you are prepared to argue with the laws of physics, when the temperature of the air and water goes up, other factors being equal, evaporation will increase. The paper you site mentions “41 Australian sites” and “mostly due to decreasing wind speed”. Hmm, regional wind speed, I’d be a bit hesitant to apply that globally or to areas over the ocean.
Part of what we are talking about is SW radiation being absorbed by the earth and re-emitted as LW; S-B has a lot to do with that. CO2 has a thick absorption band that overlaps with the fat part of LW spectrum the earth emits. Earth emits on a S-B curve; CO2 absorbs according to the log how much there is. That is how S-B relates. Please don’t assume that others don’t know this.
Yeah, I kind of already knew ‘..that CO2 is not ’surface’; so, does everyone else. If you think that is new to someone, well, I don’t know what to tell you.
“…water emission which is most definitely a surface as either vapor or a cloud.”
No, sorry, water vapor is a gas, which is most definitely not a black body and also has no surface. Clouds are made up of either liquid or solid particles, most liquids and solid behave approximately as black bodies. Though, clouds are more interesting from a refractory perspective than a thermal radiation one.
“…wavelength is dominated by water emission…”
Two things: a) Just because water and CO2 spectra overlap,
http://www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/forcing/images/image7.gif
doesn’t mean that CO2 has no effect. That would be require imagining that CO2 molecules stand back and let H2O molecules have all the photons. b) Water vapor precipitates out of the atmosphere as the air gets colder; air temperature decreases with altitude though the troposphere. There is a heck of a lot more water in the air near the surface than there is at high altitudes. I’ve never heard of any CO2 snow, on earth, at least not in recent history. Consequently, CO2 stays pretty well mixed relative to water vapor.
Baa Humbug,
Well, if you understood the first thing about PV=nRT, Stefan-Boltzmann, or any number of other physical laws, you’d be less apt to say things which embarrass yourself. Or, you could just notice that I was having a quip at Jo for her title, “Sherwood 2008: Where you can find a hot spot at zero degrees” which either doesn’t recognize that 0 Celsius is on a human scale with little importance, or that the paper is talking about differences in temperature, in which case “at X degrees” means nothing.
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Oops, that would be, Earth emits on a Planck curve. Still, it’s about black body radiation.
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Chris G, a black body is a solid. Please explain how a gas differs from a solid and Why SB is or is not the same?
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OK, let’s take a look at Cohenite’s #229 post, the aspect of saturation.
Near the surface, is CO2 ‘saturated’ with respect to the amount of radiation it can absorb? Maybe so. Is it saturated near the reaches of space where there is perhaps 1 molecule per cubic centimeter? No, you might even say that it is too thin to matter. That pretty much means that there is a region in between the surface and the edge of space where it matters how much there is. Adding more CO2 means that the region between already-saturated and too-thin-too-matter raises in altitude. Raising the altitude of this region where a little more makes a difference can be thought of as adding to the insulation that the atmosphere provides to the surface.
There is no upper limit to this as far as planetary bodies are concerned.
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Chris G @ 306
Is there some peer reviewed proof of what you just said?
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Eddy has stated that he “enjoys” having people like Chris G stumble and vomit on this site so that he he has some “intellectual punching bag exercise” (or something similar to that).
Actually, I derive no such “enjoyment” from it
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Mark D,
Not just a solid.
http://www.astronomynotes.com/light/s4.htm
“Any solid, liquid and dense (thick) gas at a temperature above absolute zero will produce a thermal spectrum. A thermal spectrum is the simplest type of spectrum because its shape depends on only the temperature.”
See also Wien and Planck for the distribution curve.
Gases (non-dense) only absorb and emit within bands specific to the chemical.
Google “gas absorption spectrum”. The amount of energy is dependent on the temperature, but the wavelengths are not.
With black bodies, the amount of energy and the wavelength distribution change with temperature.
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Mark, thanks for the interest, but please, this in textbook material.
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Chris is the earth a black body radiator to space or is it a gaseous (non dense) body to space?
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Hi Brian,
Did you feel like making a correction to something in particular? I’ll listen.
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OK Mark, what do you think? Is the surface of the earth solid or liquid, or gas? Is the atmosphere a primarily gas, or a solid or liquid?
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I did not ask you what the surface is, I asked you a very specific question and at the moment you are the expert.
So what is it?
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Not on this web page.
Write to me bgvalentine@verizon.net and I’ll demolish everything you’ve got goofed up (which is a lot)
Identify yourself if you write to me
You’re a punk, and you know little.
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“Have you stopped beating your wife?” is also a very specific question, with no single good answer. What is your point?
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Whoa, Brian, thanks for showing your colors. No thanks.
00
I think you have shown your own more flagrantly than I have.
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ChrisG at 304 & 307; water has a permanent dipole moment, CO2 does not; that means water will preferentially absorb IR in the overlapping wavelengths; here are the absorbing wavelengths of the various gases:
http://www.nov55.com/atmo.html
Water is not saturated at the 15um wavelength which is the CO2 dominant absorbing wavelength while CO2 is. The fact that CO2 is allegedly more evenly distributed than water [it is problematic that CO2 is an evenly mixed gas] is irrelevant because any amount of water will dominate CO2.
You raise 2 issues; firstly, you repeat the AGW mantra that increasing CO2 will raise the characteristic emission layer where CO2 can emit to space instead of collisional transfer of energy which occurs in the thicker, lower parts of the atmosphere; this is simply not happening as can be measured by either a cooler stratsophere or a declining OLR rate; neither are happening.
The second issue you raise and which is the backbone of AGW is backradiation; this is based on the K&T cartoon:
http://www.atmos.uiuc.edu/colloquia/080430.htm
K&T show a huge amount of backradiation of 323W/m2; the bulk of this is in the 15um wavelength; is it from water or CO2? This is instructive: Measurements of the Radiative Surface Forcing of Climate, W.J.F. Evans & E. Puckrin, American Meteorological Society, 18th Conference on Climate Variability and Change (2006). From Evans and Puckrin we see in tables 3a and 3b);
Winter
H20 94 to 125 W m-2
CO2 31 to 35 W m-2
Summer
H20 178 to 256 W m-2
CO2 10.5 W m-2
Not only did the relative CO2 contribution drop in Summer, but the back radiation value decreased from about 30 Winter to about 10 W/m2 Summer.
How do these Evans and Puckrin (2006) values compare with and confirm the energy estimates in K&T?
The back radiation shown in the K&T chart is 323 W/m2.
Data from Evans and Puckrin suggests that CO2 accounts for at most 10% of K&T, and in Summer, CO2 is only about 3% of the K&T back radiation.
To get close to the K&T back radiation values, there apparently needs to be a LOT of water in the atmosphere; CO2 would only be relevant if there were no water.
Your last line at 307 is rubbish.
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My point is quite simple YOU CANNOT ANSWER MY SIMPLE QUESTION.
[snip]
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Well, yes, I’m willing to risk getting something wrong in public and let people correct me where they can. Can you say the same?
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Mark, you might as well yell at sh*t not to stink.
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B.V. Your point is made (accurately)
PS my sh&* doesn’t stink. That must make a complication?
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“…cooler stratsophere or a declining OLR rate; neither are happening.”
Actually, the stratosphere is cooling. Pick a few articles.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=stratospheric+cooling&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
I don’t have a readily available citing for OLR, but I’ve heard it has decreased. Considering the amount of heat content increasing in the ocean, there would have to be some rather large source of that heat if it isn’t the sun’s energy being retained more. Let’s leave that in contention.
Rubbish? Well, are you saying that an atmosphere thicker with LW absorbing gasses won’t insulate a planet’s surface more than a thinner one? Mars versus Venus anyone? Where do you think the upper limit is? If you imagine that the atmosphere is of uniform density from surface to edge of space, then saturation can happen, but it’s not, obviously.
Let’s talk about this:
“…water has a permanent dipole moment, CO2 does not; that means water will preferentially absorb IR in the overlapping wavelengths…”
I’m imagining a photon traveling along. It encounters a molecule. The molecule either has the right state to absorb it or not. I don’t see the photon altering its path so that it hits an H2O molecule instead of a CO2 one. If I’m missing something, I’d be glad to see some reference material.
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Cohenite, another great post, Thank you!
I suspect our Chris is busy texting his handlers to provide an answer…..
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Thanks for the complement there Mark. I’m all by me onesies here. If you think someone can only do this with help, well, that’s a compliment.
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…..
So I’m imagining a photon and I am looking to escape so I work my out through all that terrible .04% of the atmosphere which is C02 never mind the 99.96% other stuff.
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Mark, please, go look up Cohenite’s link on absorption spectra.
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The word you’re trying to use is spelled compliment Mr [snip]
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Cohenite,
Let’s go back to this
“…complement of the exponential has a horizontal asymptote”
You are implying an upper limit to a greenhouse effect. Where is this limit?
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ChrisG at 325, I’m beginning to think your most active quality is your imagination. I gave you a reference for backradiation; if water dominates backradiation it must be because water absorbs more IR than CO2. Your comment about dipole moments shows you have no understanding of the absorptive/emissive properties of the relevant gases. I have given you a reference for the stratosphere not cooling; I have described at other posts here about the misconception that OHC is increasing [see comment 102]. Venus is the last refuge of AGW agiprop I’m afraid;
http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2008/12/james-hansens-agu-presentation-venus.html
The point about Venus is that despite countless papers and blog discussions of a high calibre the issue of whether Venus’s abnormal temperature, given its proximity to the sun, is a result of greenhouse or the atmospheric pressure is unresolved; 3 thought experiments; 1 replace all of Venus’s atmosphere with inert gases; would the temperature increase, decrease, stay the same. 2 Venus’s atmosphere is ~96% CO2; would the temperature increase if it were 100%? 3 What caused the sun to ignite; ghg’s or pressure?
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Brian,
Ooh, man, I misspelled a word. Forget everything I said, it must be all nonsense because I misspelled a word. Grow up.
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“You are implying an upper limit to a greenhouse effect. Where is this limit?”
http://met.hu/doc/idojaras/vol111001_01.pdf
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“Your comment about dipole moments shows you have no understanding of the absorptive/emissive properties of the relevant gases.”
OK, maybe I don’t. Please explain in detail how a photon would bypass one molecule in order to get to another.
While you are at it, please go back and rebuild your arguments which you have based on facts which I have shown to be incorrect. I didn’t respond to your new entry of backradiation because I’m getting tired of having you make up another line of attack rather than attempt to counter my arguments to your previous one.
Exactly what value do you think this horizontal asymptote of yours has?
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Cohenite,
Looked at your link. I noticed it appears to be a counter to “Runaway greenhouse theories…”. I believe we’ve been over this before; no one who knows anything about it says that we are in any danger of entering a runaway effect in the sense that I think they mean.
If you think they mean something else, please by specific.
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“While you are at it, please go back and rebuild your arguments which you have based on facts which I have shown to be incorrect”
I missed that; it must have been while I was genuflecting to the avatar of the AGW gods who was honouring us with his presence.
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There’s a story about a few monks huddled around a fire during the “dark ages”. They were discussing the number of teeth a mule has. The conversation encompassed the theological, the philosophical and possibly even the metaphysical.
A young monk, listening to all this, opined that as there was a mule tethered nearby, why not just open its mouth and count the teeth? The rest of the monks looked at each other, looked at him and then roundly castigated him for making such a ludicrous and simplistic suggestion.
Therein, my fundamental problem with AGW. They can’t make a case based on the most fundamental empirical data so they seek refuge in arcane and abstruse minutia in order to try to obfuscate.
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You said:
From 1975 until the early 2000’s evaporation did decrease, see:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL031166.shtml
I said:
…when the temperature of the air and water goes up, other factors being equal, evaporation will increase. The paper you site mentions “41 Australian sites” and “mostly due to decreasing wind speed”.
You cited a study limited to 41 sites in Australia which attributed the lessening of pan evaporation to less wind when claiming that there had been less evaporation globally. I challenged this by saying that air and sea temperatures have gone up globally; you did not refute that or the idea that under warmer temperatures, evaporation and, necessarily, water vapor increases.
Part of your belief system apparently relies on water vapor having a surface. You did not respond when I corrected that.
You claimed that the stratosphere is not cooling, and did not respond after I pointed out that it is.
You’ve claimed that there is a horizontal asymptote to the greenhouse effect. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that it is a log function with no asymptote. Further, I’ve asked what this value is and why the greenhouse effect should not continue to increase as the thickness of the GHGs increase. You haven’t answered.
You’ve claimed that IR will have a preference for H2O to the exclusion of CO2. I’ve asked how this works and given some logic as to why I don’t think it’s so. You’ve not given any explanation.
Thanks, I detect the sarcasm, but I feel undeserving nonetheless.
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Let me leave you with a parting thought experiment.
Imagine some abstract, featureless planet with a thin atmosphere composed only of CO2, which absorbs/emits within the radiative spectrum of the surface. Pick some temperature X as its equilibrium temperature. Now, double the amount of atmosphere. Is the new temperature higher, lower, or the same? I maintain that it is higher. Now double it again; I maintain that its temperature is higher still. Keep doubling the CO2; at what point is the new equilibrium temperature not higher than the last? Never, is the answer.
If you like you can now imagine that there are lots of other complexities to the planet. Are there any complexities that can alter the radiative properties of CO2? No. Is there any other way for energy to leave the planet other than radiation? No. So, why does anyone think that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will not change the temperature of the planet.
You might say, “But we aren’t doubling the atmosphere of earth.” That’s true; we are not. However, we are increasing the amount of CO2.
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Have you got a paper which analyses evaporation for the period? If you google the authors of the paper I linked to you will find many other papers and citations.
Part of my “belief system” is, as I described at item 320 with a reference to premier climate scientists, that if backradiation is dominated by water than it must preferentially dominate absorption. Explain how it could be otherwise? As to water vapor not being a surface for purposes of determining radiative emissions; what happens to water if heated? What happens to CO2 if heated?
You have not shown that the Stratosphere is cooling whereas I have provided evidence to the contrary.
You say: “You’ve claimed that there is a horizontal asymptote to the greenhouse effect”; no I say that the alleged heating affect of CO2 has a horizontal asymptote and I directed you to Beers law because as I explained at comment 230 the IPCC use of the logarithmic expression leads to runnaway whereas a decaying exponential correctly represents Beers law;
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/co2_modtrans_img1.png
The graph is based on IPCC forcings for CO2 increase; this graph shows CO2’s contribution to the total greenhouse effect;
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/co2_modtrans_img2.png
And this graph shows IPCC’s estimate of the temp effect of extra CO2;
http://theresilientearth.com/files/images/GHG_concentration_stabilization_levels-ipcc.png
Miskolczi bases his conclusions for a greenhouse operating at maximum [that is an asymptote at maximum] extent; do you have a peer reviewed rebuttal?
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Yes there are other ways energy can leave the planet. There are also ways that energy can be stored without increasing temperature.
Some of these were discussed in the comments here
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Please name one Siliggy. I’ll guess you are talking in part about convection. Convection happens within the atmosphere up to the tropopause. Since convection only occurs within a fluid, and there is no fluid in space; convection does not transport energy off the earth. If you think that the scientists who study the atmosphere aren’t aware of and already accounting for convection, well, nevermind. If you aren’t talking about convection, please explain what you are talking about.
Cohenite,
“…what happens to water if heated? What happens to CO2 if heated?”
In what state is the water, liquid, solid, or gas?
In what state is the CO2?
I gave you a list of links, nearly all revolve around the presence of stratospheric cooling.
““You’ve claimed that there is a horizontal asymptote to the greenhouse effect”; no I say that the alleged heating affect of CO2 has a horizontal asymptote”
The heating effect of CO2 is a greenhouse effect. Please explain the difference.
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“There are also ways that energy can be stored without increasing temperature.”
Since we are observing increasing temperatures, in what way are these other ways relevant?
00
Can the planet radiate more without increasing temperature?
Well, not without a very tiny increase in temperature. “Horizontal” convection provides ample opportunity for the radiative power to inrease by transporting the energy just a little further away from the tropics. That’s basic thermodynamics.
And Prof. Lindzen said it a decade ago … it’s also basic meteorology.
So the winters in the temperate climates won’t have winters that aren’t as cold and those in the sub-arctic can shed another layer of clothing during their brief summer. Saves on heating energy and reduces CO2 emisssions. A negative feedback. 🙂
Meanwhile, we could use some of that warming here in the Perth (Western Australia) metro. area. The Ag Research station in Wanneroo says that it’s a tropical 273.0K (or -0.1 degrees C) outdoors. (live data) Minima have been below freezing for most of the past week.
The station in South Perth recorded minima 3 to 5 degrees C warmer than Wanneroo.
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Where do these unwelcome visitors come from?
We should ignore them!
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Cohenite,
BTW,
“The law states that there is a logarithmic dependence between the transmission (or transmissivity), T, of light through a substance and the product of the absorption coefficient of the substance, α, and the distance the light travels through the material (i.e. the path length), ℓ. ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer%E2%80%93Lambert_law
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Yes there are other ways energy can leave the planet.
You were provided with a link.
If we need to spoon feed you this will be a long and slow process. “name One”
Will one be enough to wake you up? There are many! Here comes just one.
First do you understand how a three phase induction motor works? There is no electrical connection to the rotating armature. Energy is transfered to the armature by the flow and change in rotating magnetic fields.
Energy is transfered from the ocean flow magnetic changes to the earths magnetic tail without the energy ever taking the form of radiant heat. The tail extends way out away from us into space. Energy is transfered from the tail to the solar wind etc. Sometimes the tail breaks and large sections will just float away.
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2001/07/25_wind.html
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast25jan_1/
http://ion.le.ac.uk/education/magnetosphere.html
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Hi Siliggy,
Too hard to type in one word naming your supposed energy transfer means?
OK, how much energy is flows in from the sun?
About 174 x 10^15 watts.
About 3 x 10^12 watts is lost through gravitational tides. That’s less than 0.002 times one percent of the energy received and lost through short and long wave radiation; please forgive the approximation.
How much is lost through the magnetic tail, and is this amount significant compared to the average 340 W/m that earth receives from the sun, and either reflects or re-radiates?
Do we have any idea how much, if at all this amount has changed in the last century or so?
In what way does the magnetic tail affect the radiative properties of CO2?
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Over at EUReferendum, Dr Richard North has managed to get the WWF Director of Communications (Climate Change Program), Nick Sundt, to state what their definition of the scientific method is:
I translate this to mean, “We start by choosing an arbitrary position and then if somebody complains about the details, we change that position to address their concerns, and in the meantime we look for further evidence to improve our estimates, until we finally reach another arbitrary position to which everybody who is interested can either agree, or give up in disgust”.
And this dear friends, is how the new scientific consensus happens.
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ChrisG; look up the difference between exponential decay [increasing form] and the logarithmic model; hint: the logarithmic form increases WITHOUT bound to the right; Beers law says that this witout bound becomes asymptotic; the IPCC misuses Beers law to support runaway condition; the differences are shown in the 3 graphs at 341; a good article on Beers law application to radiative processes in the atmosphere is here:
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/Hammer2007.pdf
You also might want to think about the fact that the general Beer-Lambert law is usually written as:
A = a x b x c
where A is the measured absorbance, a is a wavelength-dependent absorptivity coefficient, b is the path length, and c is the analyte concentration.
so as c decreases b increases. What this means is…well why don’t you tell me what it means?
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cohenite,
Asymptotic has gone in one ear and out the other. You might as well be debating a rock.
Can we please start ignoring these people at some point? They’re using up (in this thread alone) 350 posts with nothing useful gained from it.
Chris G., what increasing temperature are we observing, where and by how much? Your whole argument collapses because it ain’t happening. Give it up and go home.
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Hello Chris G
“gravitational tides” is two words that describe something else (a sub component of the bigger picture).
Gravitational tides are only a part of the movement of the sea which inturn is only a part of the changes in the planets magnetic field. However that part and your approximation with it are very unsettled science.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6493481.ece
How about “and either reflects or re-radiates” or stores in nonthermal forms or looses other ways?
You get that number 340 by dividing the very inconstant 1360 by four. That too is a mistake. The distance from pole to pole is shorter than the diameter at the equator so the amount of the solar irradiance received would be less than 1/4 of the inconstant number. likewise the re radiation area is larger than 3/4. Then the heated part of the planet rotates so the spectrum that is radiated from it changes as the dark side cools.
No doubt it changes with the solar cycles and forms yet another part of the untabulated effects of the sun.
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Roy, 352, I guess you’re right; I engage because it gives me an opportunity to refine my thoughts and forces me to do a bit of research. I must say I’ve given up trying to convince guys like ChrisG because I think there is an emotional investment by them in this issue and its very hard for them to mentally shift because of that emotion. The psychology is disturbing. The other thing is the occasional viewers need to get both sides of the story; I was debating at Jennifer Marahosy’s and a couple of ‘lurkers’ noted that they understood the point I was making; for too long, especially in the MSM, only one side of the debate, the chicken-little, the sky is falling, side has been given airspace.
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cohenite
Great work, keep it up I for one am learning a hell of a lot from you, thanks.
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Chris G: Mars has about 30 times the mass of CO2 over each square meter of surface as Earth does.
Care to tell us how much this increases Mars’s surface temperature? AGW proponents don’t seem to want to talk about Mars when this pointed out. I’ve had answers which point out the greater total mass of gas at the surface of the Earth and other such distractions when I’ve asked this in other places.
Your move.
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Very little emphasis on measurement.
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Siliggy:
July 3rd, 2010 at 8:06 pm
“….There are also ways that energy can be stored without increasing temperature.”
Who is observing increasing temperatures?
The warmest temperature here was in 1998:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
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cohenite, allen mcmahon,
I will readily admit that someone should answer the nonsense assertions. And I learn something from some of those answers as well as you do, Allen. But I also see the same basic things repeated, first to one, then to the next… I just think that at some point we need to say, “enough is enough,” and start ignoring a persistent pusher of bad science (or no science at all). Explain why they’re wrong and put a challenge back at them about it. But if there’s no movement toward change of mind or acceptance that our view is legitimate, then at some point cut them off.
Roy
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Roy, Cohenite,
Please look in the mirror when you talk about emotional investments and lack of movement in the face of information. A psychology term called ‘projection’ comes to mind. My investment is merely that new information about interactions in the physical world has to be consistent with basic physics. If you want to talk about psychology, I can do that as well. Let’s start with the term ‘denial’. The basics are here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial
Denial has its roots in fear, often fear of change. Hmmm.
For instance, according to Beer-Lambert, which you can see at the wiki page or find in a textbook, energy that is transmitted through an atmosphere is described by an equation that involves e to the power of an integration. So, I’ll just remind you that e and the natural log go hand and hand and leave it to you to figure out where your math went wrong.
Roy, quit trying to deny direct measurements of temperature. If you don’t like land based thermometers, look at ocean temps, if you don’t like them look at one of the satellites, if you don’t like the first one you find, look at another. They all show an upward trend since the measurements were started. The thermometers that Watts don’t like show an upward trend; so do the ones that he does like.
Mike,
“Chris G: Mars has about 30 times the mass of CO2 over each square meter of surface as Earth does.
Care to tell us how much this increases Mars’s surface temperature? ”
Care to tell me how it matters, or in what way it refutes the idea that adding more of a compound that affects LW radiation affects the transmission of that radiation?
” Do we have any idea how much, if at all this amount has changed in the last century or so?
No doubt it changes with the solar cycles and forms yet another part of the untabulated effects of the sun.”
OK, how much? Since you haven’t answered, I’ll presume for now that you don’t know. So, what you are saying is that we should believe that the changes we are seeing are the result of unknown changes in a force that has an unknown base level rather than changes in CO2 which we know are happening and which even Cohenite agrees have some effect, even if he is confused into thinking they reach some asymptote.
Oh, and Siliggy, you should be aware that the magnetic field you are talking about lies on the same electromagnetic radiation spectrum as the LW and SW radiation that dominates the earths energy flux. It’s still a form of radiation. Besides, the particles caught in the field come in already in a high energy state, they don’t get their energy from the earth.
So, Roy, sounds like you’d rather ignore anyone who conflicts with your world view. I thought what was wanted was a more open debate.
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@Cohenite…
You’re welcome! I think DeWitt Payne applied in secret his own numbers and found that the algorithm correctly points to a very, very low emissivity of the carbon dioxide (0.0017 and no more, using the correct magnitudes), therefore, he gave up.
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@Chris…
I can answer the questions you did to Mike using correct basic physics. May I answer your questions to Mike?
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Chris G,
Exactly where, since when and by how much have temperatures been measured to be increasing? Then tell me who did the measuring and how it was done.
I put this to you once before but you want to sidestep the hard part, do you not?
So put up or shut up! No links and no evasion; you made the statement so you need to back it up. If temperatures are still increasing the burden of proof is YOURS.
Anything else you have to say is a meaningless diversion and I will not bite.
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Chris G.
Never apply the terms denial, denier, denialist, etc. to me again. I promise you that from you they are high praise and I will wear those names with pride.
You have so far been the quintessential man in an empty suit. Try actually answering questions for a change.
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Sure, I’ll look at the temperature in Sydney, which is my home. 2008 was the coldest winter for 10 years, and 2010 has so far measured both the biggest single day of rainfall across the state and the coldest Sydney temp since records began. While 2009 was indeed a mild winter, that’s because it rained all the time — the sky was never clear all winter.
http://www.climatechange.gov.au/about/accountability/annual-reports/annual-report-0809/report-on-performance/02-output.aspx
That was the prediction — warmer, drier winters, while precisely the opposite has happened. If this CO2 theory can’t deliver workable predictions, then what’s the good of it?
Like Darwin? Where the entire upward trend consisted of adjustments. Trouble is, now that the AGW supporters have demonstrated their lack of integrity by getting caught out jigging the peer review process, and deleting data points, and showing a graph on one data while pretending it is different data… people get a bit suspicious when they see these “adjustments” turning up. Especially when no one in the world has been able to explain exactly how the adjustments got there.
Don’t bother linking to “Real Climate” here, I’ve read their explanation: “we try very hard with our homogenization”, that’s great I’m sure they do try hard, but I demand actual traceability of those particular adjustments, not generic hand waving.
Anyhow, lets not even bother about discussing any minor upward trends, the IPCC predicted a very major and steady increase of a least 0.2 degrees C per decade. An increase of this size should be visible all over the place. It’s been a decade, so where is the 0.2 degrees? Next decade we should see 0.4 degrees… do you really expect it is going to happen?
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Amplitude modulation adds energy. The power in the sidebands caused by the field changes on the planet did not come from the sun. The analogy is that of an AM radio transmitter. The carrier power comes from the RF supply which in this case is the sun. The Modulation power comes from the Audio modulation section which in this case is the planet.
Yes that energy is radiation in the form ‘electomagnetic’if and only if it departs from the tail as EMR and does now flow back in. At that stage however it has already left the planet.
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Alan McIntire #48:
I read your post about combining climate feedbacks, and downloaded Hansen et al’s 1984 paper and read the relevant part. My immediate thought was that you were right, and somehow a basic algebraic error had slipped through. Since feedbacks are at the heart of all computer models of the climate, this would indeed be an arrow through the warmists hearts.
As you said:
But I felt a little more work was needed, so I sat down and tried to understand the concept of feedbacks. It took a while (I’m not as smart as I used to be), but in the end I got the idea.
Say you add 4 W/m^2 to solar insolation. Warmists do this by doubling CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. This will increase the temperature of the atmosphere by a little bit. But this increase in atmospheric temperature will cause more water vapour in the atmosphere, which will further increase the temperature, which will in turn add more water vapour etc etc. For the sake of the argument, don’t worry about whether the concentration of water vapour actually increases, or whether there are other positive or negative feedbacks, all I’m doing here is investigating the effect of positive feedbacks, not positing what they are, how big they are etc etc. That is another argument.
So lets say that our 4 W/m^2 increase in insolation increases the temperature by 1 degree, which is sufficient to increase water vapour levels so that an extra 2 W/m^2 is trapped. But that 2 W/m^2 will cause an extra 1/2 degree temperature increase, which will cause an extra 1 W/m^2 of energy to be trapped, which will cause 1/4 of a degree temperature increase. Those of you familiar with Zeno’s paradox will realise that you will end up with a temperature increase of 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16….. = 2 degrees.
Note that everything in the previous paragraph relies on linear approximations to temperature and insolation. Since we are talking about a temperature change of 2 degrees, and the temperature is around 300 degrees (Kelvin, of course), the linear approximation is fine. The same with insolation – since the base rate is ~400 W/m^2, then changes of the order of 10 W/m^2 may be safely treated with a linear approximation. The same will be true of the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere as a function of temperature – as long as the temperature increase is small, the increase in water vapour will be linear, and the feedback will be constant.
Anyway, what if the feedbacks were different? What if an increase in temperature of 1 degree (via our 4 W/m^2 extra insolation)caused a feedback which trapped an extra 4 W/m^2 heat in the atmosphere? Then following the same logic as above you will get a temperature increase of 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1…… = infinity! Of course this won’t happen, because now all the linear approximations won’t hold true. The fact that power is proportional to T^4 comes in. Once all the water is in the atmosphere, that feedback stops working (a bit extreme, I know!).
To return to Alan, who said that all you need to do is combine 3 feedbacks, each giving a gain of 1/3 to get an infinite feedback – well that is precisely the case I’ve just given, a case in which (using linear approximations) you would get an infinite feedback. Just like when you have a microphone in front of a speaker, and you get that horrible feedback squeal (and again, thanks to non-linearity, the sound doesn’t just get louder and louder until the building collapses, but just moves a long way to a different equilibrium point).
Certainly we know that the feedbacks in the climate system are not constant. For example, as we warm, the extent of sea and land ice diminishes, and we absorb more solar energy. This is a positive feedback. However it can’t continue forever, because once all the ice is gone, this feedback won’t be there. Before the ice ages started, there was a prolonged period where there was no ice on earth, and I guess Hansen and the other alarmists are worried that we might actually have enough feedbacks in the system to push us into that quasi-stable state again.
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#367
So what about the erroneous algebra? You’ve spent quite some time explaining stuff that most of us here already know but didn’t address the problem.
This reminds me of the CO2 residence time where someone claimed the time constants of 3 removal mechanisms were about 10 years, 50 years and 150 years and claimed that overall it was 210 years(numbers aren’t exact but you get the picture). The correct answer with those numbers is less than 5 years.
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Sorry to waste your time Mike!
Its just that it was new to me, and obviously new to Alan McIntyre, so I thought others might be interested. I like putting together the pieces of a puzzle, and enjoy the moment of clarity when it emerges from the fog of misunderstanding.
I guess I left the punchline off – the algebra is not erroneous, at some point you do get infinite feedback.
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John Brookes:
July 5th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Just like when you have a microphone in front of a speaker, and you get that horrible feedback squeal (and again, thanks to non-linearity, the sound doesn’t just get louder and louder until the building collapses, but just moves a long way to a different equilibrium point).
A positive feedback gain of more than one and limiting nonlinearity is the recipe for an oscillator. The sound you hear from the PA microphone did not ever reach an equilibrium. If it did the sound would stop. What you hear is the speaker slam hard positive then hard negative then hard positive again and again. No human intervention was required to start that oscillation just the high enough positive feedback. So the planet would burst into thermal oscillation if the feedback gain was more than one without CO2 being added to trigger it.
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How much bigger will albedo positive feedback make this i wonder?
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot_hires.png
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From post # 368:
This CHART should help a lot.
Note that they are ALL “peer reviewed” published science papers.
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Cohenite,
“A = a x b x c
where A is the measured absorbance, a is a wavelength-dependent absorptivity coefficient, b is the path length, and c is the analyte concentration.
so as c decreases b increases. What this means is…well why don’t you tell me what it means?”
Well, let’s see. If b is the path length, the depth of the atmosphere, and c is the concentration, of CO2 let’s suppose, it means you think that if we were to decrease the CO2 to the atmosphere, the depth of the atmosphere would increase. Conversely, I suppose it also means that you think that the increasing concentration of CO2 will cause the earth to loose atmosphere.
I would counter with the proposal that it means that as the concentration of CO2 increases, the depth of the atmosphere does not change appreciably, but that A, the absorbance, increases.
Roy, the data is readily available; as I’m sure you know. You appear to be trying to say that because the measured slopes from one institution or data set differ slightly from another, even though they are all positive, that the true slope is zero. You’ve asked me not to provide links; so, I guess I won’t.
I see that the general discussion has returned to the area of feedbacks. We’ve been over this before. It appears to me that you guys are denying the logarithmic nature of Beer-Lambert, which you can look up in a textbook if you like (Don’t take my word for it, or cohenite’s for that matter.), and the 4th power exponential nature of Stefan-Boltzmann.
Siliggy has picked up a media report on a hypothesis about earth’s magnetic field that includes the phrases, “If proven…”, “Ryskin emphasises that such suggestions need much more research…”, “…controversial new research..”, and used that as the foundation for an argument about how the earth loses an unquantified amount of energy and how the unquantified energy has changed in an unquantified way. I thought you guys were skeptics.
Let’s go back to psychology for a moment.
I’ve been asked to take the argument offline by Valentine, and countered that I’m willing to take my chances here. Valentine’s response has been limited to saying that I know little and calling me a punk and Mr Douche Bag.
I corrected a factual error by Mark D, and when he failed to lure me into a trap of making a statement too simple to be accurate. After that failure, he could only respond by telling me to “F*CK *FF, idiot”.
I’ve pointed out a number of factual and logical errors by cohenite, which all seem to have been ignored.
As rewards for our efforts, readers on this site have given Valentine, Mark, and Cohenite marks as:
488 positive 62 negative
While I have collected:
10 positive 113 negative
Into this context, it is suggested that it is my psychology that is disturbing. Hmmm.
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I SO wish there was a way to vote more than once…. I’d have a field day with Chris G’s psychology.
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Chris G.
I disagree — in spades! The relevant data is not available. No reliable data says what you claim. And I’m only the last of quite a number who say it to you. In your shoes I would be searching for a good explanation instead of diversion with denial and psychology.
And once again you dodge your responsibility as the one who asserts otherwise to make a clear concise explanation.
This is why you don’t get a good reception on sites like this one. You fail the easiest of tests. So forget it.
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ChrisG @ 360 & 373 [and John Brookes @ 367]; you both seem concerned about feedbacks and the capacity of the system to act on the introduction of extra CO2 to produce positive feedback and create a runaway or rapidly escalating situation; there are 2 parts to this; the first is the capacity of extra CO2 to absorb extra long wave radiation [IR], predominantly at the 15um wavelength, coming from the surface of the Earth; this is subject to Beers law which you guys seem to be misunderstanding; the IPCC/AGW scenario with extra CO2 is that each layer of extra CO2 acts like a blanket or barrier to the passage of IR and in that way both adds to the Earth’s energy imbalance as more energy is ‘trapped’ while insolation continues in and also raises the level of the atmosphere. I’ve dealt with the raising of the atmosphere and its attendant, alleged stratosphere cooling elsewhere – this simply is NOT happening – but let’s look at the blanket analogy.
To analyse the ‘blanket’ situation, and I am indebted to Mike Hammer, an Australian spectrologist and engineer, imagine we treat the entire gas column as stack of 1 absorbance layers. As a first order approximation, assume that each layer absorbs all the energy it receives from above or below and maintains itself in thermal equilibrium by emitting an equal amount of energy, half towards the surface and half away from the surface [which it doesn’t for reasons I describe at comment 113 here: http://joannenova.com.au/2010/07/sherwood-2008-where-you-can-find-a-hot-spot-at-zero-degrees/#comments%5D. A very simplistic first approximation would be to say if the absorbance of the gas column is N then the gas absorbs 1- 10-N per unit of the incident energy and 50% of this is returned to the earth’s surface giving an effective energy retention of
Energy retained = 0.5*(1-10-N). (1)
That may be correct when N is very small (<<1) but is grossly in error for higher absorbances because it ignores repeated re-absorption and re-emission of energy within the gas column.
To apply Beers law to a many layered or 'blanketed' column we have to deal with this reabsorption and reemission; so as the absorbance of the gas column rises, repeated absorption and re-emission becomes very significant. In this context we must again remember that the same emissivity covers both absorption and emission so that emitted energy will be predominantly at the absorption wavelengths thus facilitating repeated absorption and re-emission. By the time the atmospheric absorbance has reached 1, 90% of the energy at the absorption wavelengths is being absorbed which also means that much of the energy emitted by the atmosphere will be re-absorbed within the atmosphere, possibly going through several absorption re-emission cycles within the atmosphere. Diagrammatically the process looks like this:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/hammer-fig-33.gif
Where
E1 is the total energy absorbed by layer 1
E2 is the total energy absorbed by layer
En is the total energy absorbed by layer n
EN is the total energy absorbed by layer N
Equations (2) to (5) are obtained by summing energy into each layer.
Substituting (2) into (3) gives E2 = 2 * E3 / 3 (6)
Rewriting (4) with n=3 and then
Substituting (6) into it gives E3 = 3 * E4 / 4 (7)
In general for the nth layer En = n/(n+1) * En+1 (8)
Replacing n by n-1 in (8) gives En-1 = (n-1)/n * En (9)
Since equn (9) holds for any n we can replace n by N to get
From (9) EN-1 = N-1/N * EN
Substituting into (5) gives EN = (N-1)/2N * EN +1
And rearranging EN = 2N/(N+1) (10)
If we expand (8) as a series we get;
En = n/n+1 * En+1
= n/n+1 * n+1/n+2 * En+2
= (n/n+1) * (n+1/n+2) * (n+2/n+3) *…* (N-1/N) * EN
Cancelling common terms gives En = n/N * EN (11)
Substituting for EN from equn (10) gives
En = 2n/(N+1)
The energy radiated away to space is 0.5 * E1 = 1/(N+1) (12)
The energy returned to the earths surface is 0.5* EN = N/(N+1) (13)
So, what does all this mean for extra CO2? Graphically it is shown thus:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/fig-6b.gif
The capacity of extra CO2 declines to an asymptote situation whereby at ~ 100ppm there is no further capacity, in effective terms, to absorb further IR; if it is helpful it can be depicted thus:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/heating_effect_of_co2.png
This is not uncontroversial because even IPCC theology concedes that extra CO2 has limited heating and depends on +ve feedback; the conclusion we must make about CO2's role in producing the greenhouse temperature 0f 33C above what the Earth's temperature without a greenhouse atmosphere would be, is that CO2's contribution is somewhere between <1C – <6C.
I'll deal with feedbacks in another post.
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Roy,
OK here, have a look at the data.
http://woodfortrees.org/
This guy collected the data and made it accessible as is. What keeps anyone else from doing the same?
Cohenite,
“alleged stratosphere cooling elsewhere – this simply is NOT happening”
You keep saying that, but it still isn’t true.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v429/n6987/full/nature02524.html
“…the instrument partly records stratospheric temperatures whose large cooling trend…”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1999/1999GL010487.shtml
“The observed cooling of the lower stratosphere over the last two decades…”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v382/n6592/abs/382616a0.html
“OBSERVATIONS of air temperatures in the lower stratosphere from 1979 to 1990 reveal a cooling trend…”
http://www.haowomen.info/cgi/content/abstract/311/5764/1138
“Observations reveal that the substantial cooling of the global lower stratosphere over 1979–2003…”
Come on, these were the first few links from the list I gave you earlier. I thought I was one ignoring the evidence.
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Chris G:
You don’t get it, do you? The G20 meeting failed to make anything but the most “lip service” pronouncements about your magnificent obsesion.
European governments are now falling over themselves to dump this toxic green sludge of an idea because they realise their people have woken up to it. Even the UK has announced cuts to departmental programs which were sacred cows before.
Get over it and redirect your academic endeavors towards getting a real job in a real, wealth producing industry.
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Chris G. @ 373 you said:
You DID NOT correct a factual error you refused to answer and instead said:
Which is a complete evasion, rude adhom and rather strange comment. Now you want to take some kind of credit for that???
I think a thin line suggestion that I beat my wife deserves the F*ck off Idiot reply.
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Mark,
What? You don’t recognize that question as the classic logical fallacy, loaded question example? Here, let me explain
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/loadques.html
Your question asked me to pick which of two primary characteristics the earth has; answering either one would have been wrong. Sorry if you thought the old classic was a reference to anything personal about you.
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Here is perhaps a better explanation.
http://barnson.org/node/618
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Was there anyone here who did not recognise that I was merely pointing out that Mark was presenting a false dichotomy?
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“Get over it and redirect your academic endeavors towards getting a real job in a real, wealth producing industry.”
That’s a curious statement. What makes you think I’m an academic or don’t already have a real, wealth producing job? Why would that matter to you? Would you be more inclined to listen to an old, rich person than to a poor, young student?
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ChrisG @378; I take it that you have ceased disputing that extra CO2 is subject to a logarithmic/exponential decline as I explain above and elsewhere and is not prone to an ever increasing climate effect as measured by temp?
In reply to your assertions about stratospheric cooling; I refer you to comment 96 above; those AMSU temps are up to date satellite measurements; they are not the product of models and assumptions. Your papers;
The Fu paper is flawed and this was noted by Spencer and Christy as described here;
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2004/05/04/assault-from-above/
There have been attempts to vindicate Fu but the modeling he does is flawed because Fu didn’t find a way to subtract the effect of one layer [ie troposphere and stratosphere] from another. There is no way to do so using the satellite channels he used. If there were a way, it would give a near zero weight for the unwanted layer. This is actually what Spencer and Christy were attempting in their paper, using different channels.
What Fu did is calculate a purely statistical adjustment with no physical basis. The overlap between T_2 and T_4 is largely immaterial. Suppose instead, T_2 was the unweighted average from 100 to 1000 hPa and T_4 was the unweighted average from 30 to 100 hPa. There’s every reason to expect that a linear regression would produce similar results, even though there’s no overlap between these hypothetical T_2 and T_4 channels. Considering that the actual T_2 weighting function has a significant contributions from 200 to 300 hPa and from 850 to 1000 hPa, while the T_4 weighting function has little contribution from the first region and none from the second, the hypothetical case is not far removed from the actual case. No one can seriously contend that there is some combination of T_2 and T_4 that will remove the contributions to T_850-300 from these two regions.
The Foster paper about increases in stratospheric water levels being responsible for cooling is problematic, dated and contradicted by Soloman’s paper showing a decrease in water at that level. The Randell paper is badly dated; and I’m sorry I don’t trust anything authored by Santer.
Look at the final graph at 96; the Stratosphere temperature has varied due to volcanic activity but there is NO cooling as predicted by AGW.
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BTW, Mark D, you did start by saying that black bodies were solids, which is not correct. Leaving your statement alone would have left a gap for all the IR emitted by the oceans and lakes.
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Cohenite,
Can you read? I’ve always said that an increase in CO2 has a logarithmic effect. It was you who argued with that.
What? Now you want to argue about attribution of a cooling trend that “simply is NOT happening”?
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Well Chris, I wouldn’t have the brass nerve to try to push off hadcru data on anyone here. And that from a web site no one here would try to use as an authority either. If you want to do it I can’t stop you but I wash my hands of you.
Have fun with your game!
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ChrisG; “I’ve always said that an increase in CO2 has a logarithmic effect”: yes and you are wrong because as I have shown an increase in CO2 is bounded and cannot produce a runaway; an exponential decaying in an increasing form is shown by y=C(1-e-kt),k>0; a logarithmic form by y=a+blnx; the difference is that the exponential is asymptotic to an upper limit; the logarithmic is not.
Give me evidence that AGW through increases in CO2 can continue without an upper bound.
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@Chris…
Please, read this: http://www.biocab.org/Second_Law_of_Thermodynamics.pdf
It’s a large post, so I decided not to post it here.
I will answer any questions you have on this topic. Thanks.
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I doubt if there will be any questions Nasif, ChrisG is not here to learn.
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Chris G at various:
Well, if you post like a student…
Then again, if you were a good student you would have been doing some study on what is going on. The people of the world are shouting to their politicians that they won’t have a bar of this voodoo AGW rubbish. It shoudl not be dignified with the word “science” in any context.
Just have the good grace to consider that others don’t want to follow you into this financial abyss. By the way, I would rather spend time with a rich old person. They have a real wealth of real life experience and I might find out how to be self sufficient rather than a dead weight on taxpayers.
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Speaking of learning, let’s review.
Cohenite has taught you, amongst other things, that:
1) Water vapor, which is a gas, has a surface.
2) Photons will go out of their way to avoid CO2 molecules in preference to H2O, as opposed to just randomly intercepting whatever molecules are in their path.
3) There can be more clouds without more water vapor. If there isn’t more water vapor, what are the more clouds made from?
and, finally,
4) That, if you don’t know what you are doing, you can “prove” that Beer-Lambert will give you a fixed asymptotic value expressed in parts per million, when Beer-Lambert relies on an absorption coefficient, and that coefficient is dependent on the density of the gas. Density is parts per volume. If you don’t know the difference between parts per million and parts per volume, please audit a first year chemistry class. PPM tells you _nothing_ about density. If you know the ideal gas law, the pressure and temperature of the gas, and the PPM, you can make an accurate enough estimate of the density. But, pressure and temperature vary with altitude, and I see no mention of the ideal gas law, pressure, or altitude in cohenite’s posts.
As one commenter put it, you guys are “learning a hell of a lot” from cohenite. Unfortunately, most of it is wrong.
BTW Mark, by a student’s standards, I am a rich, old person. But, you are at least partially right; it is the people of the world like you who are influencing the politicians. They apparently don’t know any more about science than the people here who think cohenite knows what he is talking about.
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ChrisG:
We have had a series of anonymous trolls here who have attacked individuals as a method to deflect attention away from consideration of empirical data pertaining to assessment of the AGW hypothesis.
Ms Nova and I have each been subject to these attacks. One of the trolls overstepped the mark and reached a crescendo of his smears and defamations of me by posting a libel. At that point I contacted my lawyer and – on his advice – I demanded the name and address of the troll so I could obtain redress in a Court of Law. But the troll refused to provide the needed information so he/she/it/they was banned from this blog.
Your postings here suggest that you are the latest in this series of trolls who have been operating as a relay team, and that you are targetting Cohenite.
So,
(a) to ensure that you are not the latest in the relay team,
or
(b) to ensure that proper redress is possible if/when you overstep the mark,
please provide your true name and address before you again post anything about Cohenite.
Richard
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Chris G:
You didn’t read that interview with Christy, did you? Pity, you would have realised that a true scientist has a sense of humility when confronted with the grandeur of nature. Quite the opposite of your ilk.
Until you stop pretending that you know everything about the climate you will never convince anyone that you know anything at all. Hubris is your only strong suite.
You’ve had a pretty good run here, your “know-it-all” manner has not won any converts because you are merely the latest in a series of trolls with remarkably similar modus operandi.
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Mark @ 394
If you were me you’d be saying the same thing…..
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[…] of WA where, at least, after humiliating them repeatedly, Professorial fellow Lewandowsky is finally trying to talk evidence and restrain himself from repeated ad hominems, fallacious arguments from authority, and baseless […]
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[…] of WA where, at least, after humiliating them repeatedly, Professorial fellow Lewandowsky is finally trying to talk evidence and restrain himself from repeated ad hominems, fallacious arguments from authority, and baseless […]
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