The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating
Dr. David Evans
6 October 2010
[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second discussed air temperatures, the third discussed ocean temperatures, and the fourth discussed past temperatures.]
Click to download a pdf file containing the whole series
Notice How They Never Directly Compare Temperature With Human Emissions of CO2?
According to the man-made theory of global warming promoted by the western climate establishment, the recent global warming is due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, which are dominated by carbon dioxide (CO2).
So let’s compare the alleged cause (human emissions of CO2) with the alleged effect (temperature).
Human emissions of CO2 have been estimated from historical data for the period 1751 (before the industrial revolution) to 2007 for the major sources—coal, gas, and petroleum use, cement production, and gas flaring—by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center within the US Department of Energy. (The cumulative figures below extrapolate to 2010 using average annual emissions for the previous 14 years.)
These CO2 emissions figures aren’t perfect, principally because they omit some causes. The major omission is deforestation, but it is relatively minor:
- Deforestation is widely assumed to be about 20% of emissions in the last couple of decades, but recent calculations show it is more like 12% of emissions for 2008).
- Deforestation is counteracted to a large degree by reforestation, afforestation, and the growth of plants in the deforested areas. These new plants are consumers of CO2 from the air. Despite deforestation in places like the Amazon and southeast Asia, the total amount of plant growth on the planet increased by 6% over 1982 – 1999 (from NASA satellite observations, page 19 here).
- By 1500 Europe had cleared nearly all its forests, then switched to charcoal then coal for fuel. The world fossil-fuel emissions in 1751 were negligible on DOE figures—so the coal consumption in Europe and the deforestation it replaced were both small compared to today’s emission rates.
- Global deforestation sharply accelerated around 1852, roughly in parallel with fossil fuel use (fossil fuels make deforestation much faster). This suggests that deforestation might have been roughly proportional to fossil fuel use or availability.
No one knows what the net effect of deforestation, reforestation, afforestation, and any replacement plants are, even today, let alone in the distant past. It is not even clear what ought to count as a “forest emission due to humans”, especially when forest and agricultural products are accounted for. In any case, they don’t add more than few percent to the DOE emissions figures.
Figure 21: Comparison of temperature with human emissions of carbon dioxide. Human emissions were negligible before 1850, so how could they have caused the global warming from 1700 to 1850? Source: Temperature as per Figure 17, emissions see text....
…
The current global warming trend started before 1700, yet human CO2 emissions were negligible before 1850. So the theory that humans started the recent global warming is absurd and obviously wrong.
Have you ever seen a graph of human CO2 emissions versus temperature (the alleged cause and effect) anywhere in the media or from the climate establishment? Why not?
Why do the climate establishment and mainstream media instead show us graphs of atmospheric CO2 levels versus temperature? Isn’t this misdirection to disguise the almost complete non-correlation between our emissions and the temperature?
Perhaps human emissions of CO2 merely aggravated or extended the current global warming trend? Let’s zoom in on the era since 1850, when human emissions are significant:
Figure 22: Comparison of temperature with human emissions of carbon dioxide, over the period when the latter are significant. Source: As per Figure 21 (warning: the temperatures from 1850 to 1980 are suspect because they come from land-thermometers)....
…
Important admission. Leading member of the climate establishment, Dr. Phil Jones, again: the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998:
“are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other”.
The rates of warming during the warming periods are the same. We know theoretically that CO2 emissions must cause some warming, but that warming does not appear to be large enough to show up in a comparison with temperature.
Nearly all our emissions are quite recent—85% of all our emissions ever occurred after 1945, as post-WWII industrialization greatly accelerated emissions:
| Year | Percentage of All Human CO2 Emissions (to 2010) Emitted By That Year |
| 1850 | < 1% |
| 1910 | 5% |
| 1945 | 15% |
| 1963 | 25% |
| 1984 | 50% |
| 1998 | 75% |
| 2010 | 100% |
There has been no significant global warming since 1998 (as Figure 17 shows, and Dr Phil Jones agrees). Yet a quarter of our emissions have occurred since then. If our emissions cause global warming, how come the last 25% of our emissions, concentrated in just 12 years, have not caused further global warming?
————————————————-
Summary | PART I | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7 | PART 8 | PART 9 | PART 10 | PART 11
Full PDF versions for printing and emailing are available from the summary page.
Image from wikimedia: Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-1990-0509-018,_Umweltbelastung_in_Lauchhammer.jpg
Looks like it is not very scientific since they delete certain variables and assume others remain constant.
21
Actually, certain statistical tests of temperature time series have just been executed to probe CO2 level as a possible external explanatory variable. They always went out flat for CO2. E. g. see this one
http://economics.huji.ac.il/facultye/beenstock/Nature_Paper091209.pdf
They began the test series at a time when temperatures had similar trend with CO2. That gave the CO2 certain advantage as the beginning must have looked like if there were some initial temperature response to CO2 regardless it might be accidental. Nevertheless, even if the temperature increase had been affected by CO2 at the beginning (that isn’t excluded with the test) the system response would later remove a possible influence. The test proved significant independence the two variables – temperature and CO2.
If it was a normal economical or technical application no one would seek a physical relation between the variables as there is no statistical model that can justify it.
31
Just like the IPCC models use inflated values for the sensitivity of CO2, the models also exaggerate the residency time of the CO2 molecule. Susan Solomon (Co-chair of AR4 WG1) says the residency time of CO2 is 1000 years. In other words, a fire that Shakespeare built to keep himself warm is part of the problem today. Numerous peer reviewed studies indicate the residency time of CO2 is more like 5 years.
30
I’d be interested to see what the comparison is between actual levels of CO2 and temps, in both graphs.
20
My apologies to David but I think it’s worth repeating my comment on his previous item. Once again, this a simple and compelling illustration of his point. It’s simple in that it’s based on one temperature record (the oldest continual instrument based record in the world) and plainly shows how – at least in Central England – temperatures have been increasing, by fits and starts, since the late seventeenth century. But the important feature this time is that it shows CO2 emissions during that period. And they would appear to have little, if any, correlation with temperature increase.
31
I’m sure it’s been covered at some point but I have not seen it; a graph showing the increase in emissions as a factor of atmospheric CO2. Or is the total amount of CO2 increase since 1850 caused by humans? If, as has been pointed out by Athlete @ 3, CO2 residency is only 5 years then at least some of the rise in CO2 concentration must come from somewhere else. As the oceans have been warming they have been outgassing as well. It will be interesting to see if as they cool CO2 concentration falls and by how much.
20
Robin, Is it realistic to look for correllation of temperature against emissions.
Isn’t it rather the resultant increase in concentration (total concentration) of CO2 that (allegedly) drives temperature,
& shouldn’t that CO2 concentration be plotted on a log scale, against temperature ?
If that were to show no correlation, then your point would be demonstrated.
20
It’s pretty obvious from the first graph why Mann and co were trying to get rid of the pesky Medieval Warming Period.
20
Can someone point me in the direction of a paper explaining how these global emmission figures are actually measured or calculated. I’ve seen lots of graphs but I still don’t understand how the on going global emmission figures are derived. There has been alot of investigation into the accuracy of the temperature measurement but what about the CO2 figures ? ( Afterall they are measured in ppm so there has to be just as much room for significant errors )
Or am I being stupid with this question ?
30
This recent series of articles is fascinating and certainly establishes a comprehensive review that many from the non-scientific community can easily understand (hopefully this includes politicians 🙂 ). My question for David is: what’s next?. Should we use this information in a co-ordinated way with the climate change “establishment” and political leaders. For example, have a PDF of the entire series would be useful to email to leader and “by my will” instruct them to read it and answer some specific questions. Thinking out loud. cheers
21
many thanx to jo and david, plus big mac, anthony and all the significant others who are keeping up the fight for the scientific method. what u do is invaluable.
however, when the mainstream media – print & broadcasting (not blogs) has not reported on Hal Lewis’s resignation letter, and Govt bodies are impervious to any and all facts which get in the way of the official narrative, we have a long struggle ahead:
10 Oct: CSIRO: We will need to adapt to rising sea levels
(Dr John Church) The way the world responds to climate change will become increasingly reliant on a sophisticated integrated atmosphere, ocean and ice observing network generating data on future climates and from which global and regional sea-level rise can be projected…
The 420-page book: Understanding Sea-level Rise and Variability, is the work of more than 90 scientists from 13 nations, led by Dr Church, Dr Philip Woodworth from the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory UK, Dr Thorkild Aarup from the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), and Dr Stan Wilson from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…
The book will be detailed this week at the Australia-New Zealand Climate Forum, being held in Hobart from October 13-15…
The book was initiated by the World Climate Research Programme and IOC shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but before cyclones Sidr and Nargis in 2007 and 2008. All claimed thousands of lives.
http://www.csiro.au/news/We-will-need-to-adapt-to-rising-sea-levels.html
video in body of article:
11 Oct: Guardian: Mark Sweney: Government’s £6m climate change ads cleared
Ofcom has cleared a controversial £6m government ad campaign on climate change, which featured images of the UK wracked by floods and drought, after more than 500 complaints that it was a form of political advertising that broke the broadcasting code…
The complainants to Ofcom argued that the TV ad, which featured a father telling his daughter a scary bedtime story based on the impact of climate change, broke broadcast rules banning political advertising.
According to the Communications Act, the government is allowed to run advertising of a public service nature, such as warnings about obesity or drink driving, but is not allowed to run political ads that aim to “influence public opinion on a matter of public controversy”.
However, the Communications Act does allow exceptions for advertisements which qualify as being of a “public service nature”, such as those promoting healthy eating, armed forces recruitment, tax self assessment and road safety.
Ofcom noted that there is “ongoing and polarised” debate on climate change but that there is a “broad level of consensus across the major political parties”….
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/11/government-climate-change-ad
21
Why is the myopic focus on carbon, the 6th element? What about hydrogen, the first? The deadliest?
The most potent greenhouse gases— much much worse than CO2—in abundance are water vapor and methane. The common element for both is hydrogen. CO2 only contains ONE carbon atom, but hydrogen oxide TWO hydrogen atoms and methane contains FOUR!!
I call for governments of the world to assess their hydrogen footprints. I will be trying to set up a trade in hydrogen offsets, for the world and for our children.
Also, we must consider RFPs (requests for proposals) and award grants to scientists to come up with hydrogen sequestration technologies. One can envision large refrigeration units to freeze out water vapor and bury the ice deep in the earth’s crust or to add to the North Polar ice. This would also save the thousands of drowning polar bears, one of which drowns every six seconds. Emissions standards must be set (it may already be too late) to limit the toxic hydrogen oxide and methane produced by auto exhausts. We should substitute hydrogen exhaust vehicles (HEVs) for cars containing wind sails and/or solar cells. Bicycles are no good—the rider emits vast increases in hydrogen, either water vapor or methane, via multiple egress apertures (EAs).
How many species must go extinct before we act??? How many Hindenburg tragedies must we yet endure? How many more, Mr. Speaker, how many more?
What is YOUR hydrogen footprint???
30
Thanks for your work David and Jo. It continues to give us soldiers material to take to the world in the hope of discouraging any action which could damage our economy and see the relatively poor even more worse off.
20
It seems like I’ve been here before. Theory says temperature must increase as CO2 increases. Co2 is steadily increasing but temperature is not.
How many different ways must the point be made before it sinks in?
10
Ross @9 check out Figure 7.3:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-7-3.html
There is also good information at the US Dept of Energy but the link is temporarily out of order; basically 1.5% of the total CO2 flux annually is staying in the atmosphere; human CO2, ACO2, is about 3.67% of the total flux; so to work out how much of that 1.5% is from human sources can be simply calculated by 1.5/100×3.67/100=0.000552. Put another way, after 1 year 1 CO2 molecule has a 1 in 1811.594203 chance of still being in the atmosphere; in the second year a 1 in 120772.9469 and so on.
10
Ross @ 9 and noting cohenite’s response @15.
I was thinking of asking the same question at the Anthony Watts talk in June, but decided to keep my mouth shut after realising that measurement of CO2 is a physical process of something which has volume and weight whereas measurement of temperature is a relative process of something defined by the different states of water. Although there would be errors associated with CO2 measurement (in modern times), I doubt they are as controversial as temperature measurement.
10
Notice how your kettle doesn’t come to boil the exact second electricity is applied?
Geez I can’t believe you guys think that a change in radiative force will reach a new global heat equilibrium immediately.
20
And there’s that cherry picked 1998 again. I thought Nova said she doesn’t do this?
10
Twinkler: The 75% point was reached in 1998. Am I not supposed to publish anything that refers to that year now? Should I have asked David to write 25%, 50%, 72%… just to avoid the “speak-no-evil” bogey year of 1998.
10
Why don’t “they directly compare global temperature with human emissions of CO2”? Well,they do,actually. What they don’t do is try to make the comparison as misleading and superficial as possible,because it has never been argued that CO2 is the only influence on GT,and there are a host of reasons why the correlation between the metrics looks the way it does.
Why,for instance,would you cobble global CO2 increase with time over Craig Loehle’s highly [cough]individual reconstruction of northern hemisphere temperature,with misleading scaling, if you weren’t trying to pull a very tired old visual fiddle.It’s complex,David,and there is no shortage of people pointing out that wiggle matching non-global weather noise with global CO2 increase is not the way in.
The public may not understand the science,but they do understand cheating.
10
Cohenite # 15 & Ian # 16. Thanks for that info.I’ll have read it up abit more later ( and hopefully Jo’s link works). But on a quick skim there seems to only 3 places globally where there is a “continuous” measurement.
10
Roy Hogue: #14
Are, but there is an explanation for this, apparently.
I was a minor attendee at a meeting on climate “stuff”, when this subject came up.
Apparently the correlation is masked by a “variable time lag differential”. When asked to explain what the variation was, the speaker informed us that is was due to the phases of the moon and the time of year.
At that point I was forced to have a fit of coughing to hide my snort of disgust and disbelief.
The “degree of correlation” is based on the tides and the zodiac? Gimme a break!
10
Twinkler wrote at post #18:
Awww,does it bother you that it has not been that hot since? A EL – NINO year too.
LOL
Here is a revealing showing that virtually all the warming since 1979 was in one year.That year was….. 1998.A step warming similar to 1977.The up coming LA-NINA might create a step cooling and end the 30 warming trend.
CHART
10
Ian Hill:
October 12th, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Ross @ 9 and noting cohenite’s response @15.
I am still wondering about this (click here) when you apply this (click here) to the “1940s blip” (click here).
10
I find it really irritating to read about charts every other week as evidence or counter-claim wrt AGW against a backdrop of a previous post – or even the next post, banging on about how bad the raw temperature data actually is (especially prior to 1980).
I’d REALLY like to see and hear more about the raw data, the apparent random post ‘adjustments’ ( urban heat, rural or otherwise), so that the honest scientists can value-add. The decline in number of stations, the exlcusions, the manipulations, the lcoations and sitings, etc. are in such a poor scientific state. Without the true data sets, all sorts of interpretations are (fasely) made in good faith.
Its particularly irriritatting when BOM and CSIRO appear to have their hands so bloodied in this all this and for many recording stations to have been affected (Darwin, etc).
10
Tired, old, discredited, yada yada yada.
Global atmospheric temperatures go up and down for a variety of reasons, one of which is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
So when temperatures have gone up or down in the past, it could have been the sun, or the earth’s orientation, or the position of the continents, or the amount of dust between the earth and the sun, or the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere; or that the balance of heat between the oceans, ice and the atmosphere was temporarily out of whack. Or it could have been changes in the amount of CO2 or water vapour or methane in the atmosphere.
No sane climate scientist ignores past changes and their reasons. All they say is that present changes seem to be best explained by the increase in the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that continuing increases are likely to lead to a warmer planet. They may be wrong, but not for any of the inane reasons in the article above.
30
Not really – I see it as an obvious weakness on the behalf of the denialist but hey, they have to take what they can get.
The El Nino of 1998 was much larger than 2010. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.E.lrg.gif
For Nova to claim hey, “everythings ok because since hitting a record high in 1998 there has been no statistical warming” is simply ridiculous. The planet has still warmed since then http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/trend . The statistical significance is rarely reached in any 12 year period of surface temps, so why should we expect it to now?
The longer term it has risen considerably with statistical significance.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/trend
But hey if you like cherry pickers that rely on smaller periods in order to fool themselves into thinking the planet isn’t warming – go right ahead.
10
Because it’s a really dumb thing to do for several reasons.
– Surface Temp itself is just a spherical slice of the 3 dimensional heat. As the heat moves about the surface temps fluctuates.
– There are many things that affect heat (like Aerosols, Solar Activity), not just CO2 levels.
– The existing CO2 is part of the energy budget, why would you exclude it? Why?
– CO2 creates an additional radiative effect that will continue to warm the planet for years, not just in the year it was released.
10
TWinkler: @ 27
no one has denied that it has warmed since 1850 – in fact if you read the article it has been warming for longer than that – man has been seriously contributing Co2 since the 50s so what caused the warming prior to the 50s?
simple question – I await your answer.
10
The problem is guys, that CO2 is always charted as an “emission”, rather than an observed level. Check out this chart (I wish the IMAGE button would work):
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/engelbeen4-6.jpg
It’s used in this article – excellent reading:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/historic-variations-in-co2-measurements
You’ll find that historic CO2 levels have usually been around 300ppm since measurements were first made in the 1800’s. However, a global average is difficult to work out if only sampling at Mauna Loa, as CO2 is never perfectly mixed and is reduced at the poles:
http://www-airs.jpl.nasa.gov/images/AIRS_CO2_July2003_550x396.jpg
That’s at an altitude of 8km but as CO2 is 1.5x the weight of air, most would be near the surface, especially in low wind conditions. Can we get that IMAGE button working Jo pretty please..?
10
Well that’s the funny thing, you don’t have to go far to find many people denying the warming is happening at all. 😉
They flip backwards and forwards between “it’s not warming” to “it’s warming but it’s natural”.
No climate scientist says the planet isn’t capable of causing warming or cooling on its own.
For that particular timeframe it’s believed to be a rise in solar activity and lower volcanic activity.
I emphasise again what others have said; CO2 is not the only cause of changes to our climate.
10
Shelley @ 28:
Many papers abound regarding the life of CO2 in atmosphere. Seeing that it weighs 1.5x that of air, you’d expect most of it to be near the surface, ready to be taken up by plants, which is why it’s easily absorbed within 10 years. You see Shelley, CO2 has a logarithmic effect in atmosphere as well, meaning the more you add the less effect it has as there’s only so much energy around it can absorb:
http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/graphs/log-co2/log-graph-lindzen-choi-web.gif
Which is why in the Jurassic which had some 10x today’s CO2, life clearly thrived and delicate aragonite corals evolved in non-acid oceans, proof of which are those pesky undissolved fossils taking up space in our museums, and not a single runaway greenhouse – ever.
Using the IPCC’s bloated figures, to forestall just 1C of warming, we would need to shut down ALL industry. No planes, cars, trains, factories or campfires for 30 YEARS!! (real figures blow that out to 200!) Back to the stone age and shivering in your cave, nature couldn’t give a damn what Man’s policies are (according to many interviews) and will continue on her merry way being influenced by the Sun, Milankovich Cycles, Moon orbital cycles, ocean oscillations, currents, continental drift, volcanoes and clouds.
Nature spews out some 640Bn tons of CO2 annually, and man’s contribution is just 30Bn, making just 3-5% of 0.038% of total CO2, which works out to be just 0.0009% of the atmosphere, which is fully recyclable by the way. Just how much extra heating do you expect out of this?
The EPA just estimated that their current plan of regulating CO2 as a “dangerous pollutant” will cool the earth by somewhere around three hundredths of a degree by 2030. Those are the estimates of the proponents of the plans, opponents say less. Still afraid of the carbon atom? I suggest you be more afraid of those that wish to regulate every area of your life and have you pay dearly for the privilege.
10
Twinkler: The 75% point was reached in 1998. Am I not supposed to publish anything that refers to that year now? Should I have asked David to write 25%, 50%, 72%… just to avoid the “speak-no-evil” bogey year of 1998.
I’m quite happy that you/David use 75% @ 1998.
That you think the last 25% of CO2 should have had an immediate effect on temps, and that you think that short term surface temps are a good measure of the energy balance is where you get a BIG fail.
Get some help
10
TWinkler
Except for hockey stick Mann and his motley crew..
Very good. So why do you think we’re trying to get government to see the REAL causes you’ve just mentioned?
BTW, some people say that it’s cooling are probably talking about the last 10 years:
http://www.iceagenow.com/Temps_falling_CO2_rising.jpg
10
Where does Mann says CO2 only is responsible?
Because CO2 emissions, as one of the components to causing warming on this planet and more noticebly now that in the 50’s, should be limited.
Have a read of the posts above, some of the warm posts have already answered why it’s stupid to expect a direct correlation.
10
Oh, and why do you cut your graph off at 2008? Not a cherry picker are you?
10
Twinkler:
Couldn’t find the latest one. Good enough example anyway.
You missed something:
http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/graphs/log-co2/log-graph-lindzen-choi-web.gif
Don’t forget:
http://taylorempireairways.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/noaa_gisp2_icecore_anim_hi-def3.gif
10
This seems to fit this thread.
“The Question
I was pondering a problem I’ve pondered before. How much wood sucks all the CO2 out of the air in a given area of surface? And how long does it take a given type of plant to do that?
This isn’t a trivial question. If the forests and swamps of the world can “suck the air dry” of CO2 in a year or so, then what does it matter if we add a bunch? Further, if plants can suck the air to a limit of their growth ability in a year or three, then the air WILL BE AT THAT LIMIT sans human action of burning old stored carbon. (Since plants have been around for a few years…) That would imply that historic low CO2 levels were not “optimal” but rather were just “plant starvation levels”…
So we have an interesting question: Can plants suck the CO2 out of the air in any reasonably fast way?”
Read the rest at
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/got-wood/
Off thread but interesting too while you’re there
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/its-all-about-the-kimchi/
10
“Twinkler”, the latest (SNIPPED out the personal attack) CTS
10
Another Ian@38: It would be both interesting and scary if plants could remove all the CO2 from the atmosphere in a year. If that were to happen, we would be on our way to a new ice age very quickly. Apparently the weathering of rocks does remove CO2 from the atmosphere over geological time scales.
In the short term, if you look at the CO2 level, it seems as though the earth inhales CO2 in the northern summer, and exhales it in the northern winter – probably because most of the worlds vegetation is in the northern hemisphere, and it sucks up CO2 when growing during spring and summer. However each year it doesn’t inhale quite enough CO2, so that the amount in the atmosphere is steadily rising – which may well mean that plants aren’t starving…..
10
mandarine@39: you are just being rude.
10
I think I’ll [snip] ED
10
Twinkler @ 35:
More noticeably now than in the 50’s..??? With what authority and absolute evidence do you come to this conclusion? How is it more noticeable? FACTUALLY, the planet was in a cooling trend in the 50’s, which reversed around 1975 – just when the AMO shifted to a warm state:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/SixtyYearCycle.htm
See.. if I’m right, you believe CO2’s impact in the atmosphere to be linear. If it were, we would have had a runaway greenhouse shortly after we developed an atmosphere, since CO2 was some 20x higher than today in the Carboniferous, which was all sequestered away as coal, which we’re now returning to the atmosphere. However, what’s been dissolved in rocks over millennia will stay there. So we’ll never get at those levels again, unfortunately.
If you argue that the Sun was cooler back then, it’s irrelevant. ANY heating will cause CO2 to flow from the oceans, causing (in your linear model) more heat, more CO2, more heat.. Runaway greenhouse every time. The only reason this hasn’t happened is due to CO2’s logarithmic function.
Besides, explain why Mars’ polar caps have been shrinking.. Must have something to do with those pesky astronauts driving SUV’s..
10
For the AGW theory to be true, the kettle would have to start boiling before the electricity was switched on. So far that’s never happened with my kettle.
The green line in Fig 21 is the electricity (supposedly) and the black line is the kettle, OK. So the black line starts rising first (well before world industrialization) and the green line rises only some hundreds of years after that.
10
I suppose one of them Twinkler because I’ve investigated the adjustments made to the temperature record and as David has pointed out the temperature record is sus.
no they don’t – we are just unsure of how much warming there actually ghas been.
– in fact if you read the article it has been warming for longer than that – man has been seriously contributing Co2 since the 50s so what caused the warming prior to the 50s?
yes – but it’s an minor player in the game and all this demand to cut our CO2 output will make no difference at all!! If we all stopped outputing CO2 tomorrow there would be NO difference yet there’s a whole group of loonies who what to Tax us in the hope it will change something – it won’t!
I class you in the group of Loonies.
10
The FUTILITY of Man-made Climate Control by limiting CO2 emissions
Just running the numbers: watch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy0_SNSM8kg
On average world temperature is ~+15 deg C. This is sustained by the atmospheric Greenhouse Effect ~33 deg C. Without the Greenhouse Effect the planet would be un-inhabitable at ~-18 deg C. The Biosphere and Mankind need the Greenhouse Effect.
Just running the numbers by translating the agents causing the Greenhouse Effect into degrees centigrade:
• Greenhouse Effect = ~33.00 deg C
• Water Vapour accounts for about 95% of the Greenhouse Effect = ~ 31.35 deg C
• Other Greenhouse Gases GHGs account for 5% = ~1.65 deg C
• CO2 is 75% of the effect of all accounting for the enhanced effects of Methane, Nitrous Oxide and other GHGs = ~1.24 deg C
• Most CO2 in the atmosphere is natural, more than ~93%
• Man-made CO2 is less than 7% of total atmospheric CO2 = ~0.087 deg C
• the UK contribution to CO2 is 2% equals = 1.74 thousandths deg C
• the USA contribution to CO2 is ~20% equals = 17.6 thousandths deg C
So closing all the carbon economies of the Whole World could only ever achieve a virtually undetectable less than ~-0.09 deg C. How can the Green movement and their supporting politicians think that their remedial actions and draconian taxes are able to limit warming to only + 2.00 deg C?
So the probability is that any current global warming is not man-made and in any case such warming could be not be influenced by any remedial action taken by mankind however drastic.
As this is so, the prospect should be greeted with Unmitigated Joy:
• concern over CO2 as a man-made pollutant can be discounted.
• it is not necessary to damage the world’s economy to no purpose.
• if warming were happening, it would lead to a more benign and healthy climate for all mankind.
• any extra CO2 is already increasing the fertility and reducing water needs of all plant life and thus enhancing world food production.
• a warmer climate, within natural variation, would provide a future of greater opportunity and prosperity for human development. This has been well proven in the past and would now especially benefit the third world.
Nonetheless, this is not to say that the world should not be seeking more efficient ways of generating its energy, conserving its energy use and stopping damaging its environments. And there is a real need to wean the world off the continued use of fossil fuels simply on the grounds of:
• security of supply
• increasing scarcity
• rising costs
• their use as the feedstock for industry rather than simply burning them.
The French long-term energy strategy with its massive commitment to nuclear power is impressive, (85% of electricity generation). Even if one is concerned about CO2, Nuclear Energy pays off, French CO2 emissions / head are the lowest in the developed world.
However in the light of the state of the current solar cycle, it seems that there is a real prospect of damaging cooling occurring in the near future for several decades. And as power stations face closure the lights may well go out in the winter 2016 if not before.
All because CO2 based Catastrophic Man-made Global Warming has become a state sponsored religion.
And now after “Splattergate” thanks to the 10:10 organisation everyone now knows exactly how they think.
Splattergate is classic NOBLE CAUSE CORRUPTION. It is probably the most egregious piece of publicity ever produced in the Man-made Global Warming cause. This short film shows doubting schoolchildren being blown up and having their entrails spread over their classmates because they may have been less than enthusiastic about the CAUSE.
So any misrepresentation is valid in the Cause and any opposition however cogent or well qualified is routinely denigrated, publically ridiculed and as we now see literally terminated.
10
No
It is obvious that CO2 is following something annually. CO2 peaks in April or May
just after the peak in global sea surface temps.
10
Athlete (3):
1000 years? I think we should be worried, not only about Shakespeare’s hearth, but also about the fires from buildings burnt by marauding Danes fifty years before the Norman conquest.
10
Siliggy @ 24
Sorry, I just cannot work out what you are getting at. Could you please explain what you mean in a sentence or two?
10
Not related to this topic, but thought your readers would like this article…A bit of parody of what passes as ‘scientific journalism’ these days…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1
10
To be honest?… all this talk of CO2, Carbon emmissions etc etc doesn’t matter a damn really. You see the world consumes the equivilent of approx 226 miliions barrels of oil per day in Coal, Natural Gas and Oil.
At the moment, the planet produces the equivilient of 6 millions barrels of Oil from Renewables.
Now we’re in the process of wrecking economies, through subsidies, false markets, market interference etc, to produce 2.65% of the worlds energy needs via renewables.
How much of a train wreck will the planet’s economy be to be able to reduce CO2 emmissions to anywhere near measurable, let alone influencing the climate?
10
The same usual problems, Jo, I’m sorry to say. You are displaying an extraordinarily poor grasp of statistical methods and scientific reasoning.
[Says you? Your comprehension skills are shocking. I didn’t write this article. Notice? You can address your questions to David, tho since he has Stats quals from Stanford, you need to think of some real questions, not just these mock ups. –JN]
First, your golden use of a quote by Phil Jones (with gravitas):
… “are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other”.
But according to you, Phil Jones and the CRU are unreliable, so isn’t that quote unreliable? How do you evaluate reliability of Phil Jones quotes?
[Go on, find me a study that shows he’s wrong, dig up the email where he boasts about tricking us all by hiding a statistically significant warming… ]
Then you mix up the MWP with global average temperatures in your figure 21 with your annotation “global air temperature”. There is no evidence whatsoever that the MWP was global in extent, so you’re mixing up regional temperatures with globally averaged temperatures.
[And you anonymous-chicken, are denying hundreds of peer reviewed studies and 6000 boreholes all over the globe. –JN]
Then, using your dodgy plot for globally averaged temperatures, you somehow try to lead readers to the conclusion that the warming is not caused by CO2 by superimposing the rise in CO2 concentration (fig 21). But scientists are not claiming that CO2 is causing GW from such simple-minded arguments! You are essentially constructing a strawman by insinuating that that is the essential reasoning. It’s not. The reasoning for the link between GHGs and GW comes from Global Circulation Models (GCMs).
I love your point:
“Deforestation is counteracted to a large degree by reforestation, afforestation, and the growth of plants” followed next point by “By 1500 Europe had cleared nearly all its forests”, and you claim that forest clearing is essentially carbon neutral, or “counteracted”. Well, the carbon density is not restored. You claim that the total amount of plant growth on earth increased between 1982 and 1999, but you are being dodgy here: you don’t clarify exactly what “amount” means. The only quantity (or amount) that matters is total plant biomass, and I am sure that this has not increased, as the Amazon rainforest (and many other forests) are the smallest they have been in a very long time.
[I’d leave the expert terrestrial carbon modeler to answer that, but I’ve got bad news for you — it was indeed global biomass that increased, Nemani 2003.–JN]
You say that there is an “almost complete non-correlation” between the trend of CO2 and the warming trend. But they are both increasing over long-term averaged timescales, so that is indeed a correlation. Anyone can see this. A non-correlation would be if the long-term averaged trends were in opposite directions (+ and -), or we were looking at certain short (statistically meaningless) time intervals.
In figure 22 you’ve superimposed the CO2 plot with the globally averaged temp plot over the 20th century. There is no way of knowing the causes of the temperature fluctuations and trends in the temp plot by examining the plot. Even by putting the CO2 plot alongside it there is no way of inferring that the CO2 is even causing the temperature trend. That bit of reasoning comes from other lines of evidence.
[Good G-d! You’re right. Yes, yes, absolutely, just putting CO2 on a graph of temperature doesn’t prove causation. Please write to the IPCC and tell them to stop doing it, OK? And tell them to stop the Argument from Ignorance with the models too. ]
You are guilty of the fallacy of egocentric oversimplification, Jo. Do you honestly believe that your reasoning is valid?
You say:
“There has been no significant global warming since 1998 (as Figure 17 shows, and Dr Phil Jones agrees”
What Phil Jones actually said, at that time when he was asked, was that the dataset collected over the time interval between 1998 and then was statistically insignificant, given that the time interval was too short. He said that the temperature trend had “not quite reached the 95% confidence level” of 0.13 deg C per decade.
[If you have lower standards of statistical significance than the rest of the world, that’s your problem. OK? — JN]
Then you say:
“If our emissions cause global warming, how come the last 25% of our emissions, concentrated in just 12 years, have not caused further global warming?”
First, global warming temperature trends are measured over at least three decades, and second, the climate system has inertia, so it takes time for the system to respond to perturbations.
[Sure, and radiative imbalances work at the speed of light, only no one can find that missing 12 years of heat. Not in the air, the ground, or the ocean. Bummer eh? — JN]
Jo, there is so little valid scientific reasoning in your post from someone with scientific training (a biology undergrad degree), that it seems your purpose is not scientific: your aim is simply to whip your scientifically-illiterate politically-attuned acolytes into a fervour.
[And yours is… oh anonymous dot?
]
20
Twinkler
Sounds like someone having a pee
10
There’s no significant correlation between CO2 emissions and global temperature, so forget it. You want a significant correlation proving AGW causation beyond doubt? Try this.
10
Sliggy@47, I suspect you are correct about the annual variation of CO2. Thanks for setting me straight.
10
Oh dear.
Not one thing you’ve raised hasn’t been raised before by others. We’re not your servants so don’t be so damned lazy and read the blog.
If, after that, you still feel inclined to believe a bunch of rent-seekers on the public purse who falsify and hide data, then be our guest and buzz off. And stop exhaling CO2!
11
Graham@54: Good point. Global temperatures correspond well with the number of pirates in the world. The number of pirates in the world corresponds well with the number of people in the world. There are too many people to live comfortably and sustainably on this world. I would welcome any sensible attempts to reduce our population. One of the most successful ways of reducing population is to educate women and let them into the workforce. Then they’ve got something to do other than have kids.
So, believe it or not, in the long term pushing for equal rights and opportunities for women is probably the best thing we can do for the planet.
10
Re. John Brookes @ 57
The best way to lower birth rates is by elevating living standards through low cost energy.
10
Wow, the Catastrafarians are out in force at the moment. I think Oh dear just hit the wrong button.
No Pressure.
10
Another interesting paper re CO2. Basically saying no one knows what is going on.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/12/peer-reviewed-study-co2-warming-effect-cut-by-65-climate-sensitivity-impossible-to-accurately-determine/
10
Outstanding post Ed @ 46, however:
Noting that greenies have locked away vast amounts of resources through mining restriction in as many areas as possible.. 😉
10
Ian Hill:
October 12th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Sorry if that post (24) was incomprehensible. The stuff from Dr Jarl Ahlbeck shows that if the 280ppm pre industrial figure is correct then the sea temps have an effect “proportional to the difference X – 280″(on a non bio world). If the 280 figure is not correct then the effect could be much larger. You will note that the global temps in Jo’s fig 22 above show a 1940’s peak. Note also “(warning: the temperatures from 1850 to 1980 are suspect because they come from land-thermometers).” This peak could have been higher. From Ernst-Georg Beck’s “Atmospheric CO2 background level 1826 – 1960”, a CO2 peak that seems to be during and just after the “1940’s blip” can be seen. Note also the higher pre industrial levels.
Add that all up and the sea surface temps seem to play a big role in the atmospheric CO2 levels.
The consensus CO2 history does not make sense because the 1940’s does not correlate well with temps. This is worse if the late 30’s and early 40’s were warmer.
Compare the CO2 growth
July 2008 – July 2009; 387.74 less 386.38 = 1.36ppm
to
July 2009 – July 2010; 390.10 less 387.74 = 2.36ppm
2008 had cooler SST’s than 2009.
2010 started with high SST’s and they have fallen below 2008 and are still falling. The next few months should make the truth and the future much more obvious.
So the low solar activity means the “I am still wondering” part of post 24 extends to wondering if the SST will fall enough to make the CO2 growth go negative. If that were to happen then the positive feedbacks if they exist could drive it down faster and further just like Ernst-Georg Beck’s chart during the 1940’s.
10
So get a better plan.
I suggest you start looking at a wider range of climate senstivity estimates. Denialists seem intent on focus only on the low ones that Lindzen produces, but there are numerous other studies that suggest the value could be much higher.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/detailed-look-at-climate-sensitivity.html
You may also be unaware of the serious problems in Lindzen’s work.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/01/lindzen-and-choi-unraveled/
[OH OH there is that darn DENIALIST word tsk tsk tsk. Go ahead make my day] ED
20
Hi – thanks for showing us your true colours.
I’m not a member of any group. Even happy to have nuclear as an energy option.
http://bravenewclimate.com/
(He has been snipped out,but try not to keep using the word Denialist without cause in your comments) CTS
20
By the simple fact that the concentration is higher. A higher concentration produces a higher warming effect. You may quabble about the amount, but you cannot dispute that it will produce a great amount.
Oh I see, we’re back to saying that the warming is happening and that it’s natural. Hard to keep up sometimes.
Funny that your website “evidence” seems to neglect any consideration of aerosols. Do they really think the volcanic eruptions have no effect over the climate at all?
No your assumption is wrong. I think (we’ll honestly I take my cues from the climatolgists) that the effect is logarithmic. That’s why climate sensitivity is described as the effect per doubling of CO2.
Yeah I know but thanks for the effort anyway. Various studies come up with different ranges for climate sensitivity (the effect of doubling CO2 usually stated from a pre-industrial value of 280) and that value is most likely to be around 3 degrees. This is how much the climate would increase after coming to a new equlibrium with short-term feedback effects factored in.
If you are wishing to claim the overly simplistic “the Sun is the cause”, then we should see warming on all planets. Do you have evidence for that? Realistically, it’s not that simple a question because of the wide variety in atmospheres and orbital paths/tilts.
20
That depends on how you wish the analogy to work. That’s the problem with analogies, you can spend more time arguing about the analogy rather than the problem. I can’t understand what approach you’re taking with the analogy and although it may be quite valid, we may be at different understanding about what part of the analogy represent what AGW piece.
So let me rephrase my words without the analogy.
The increase in CO2 causes an increase in the radiative force. This force will continue to have a warming effect for many years to come because CO2 is a long lasting gas. This force adds heat to the energy budget, every minute of every day for many years it will continue to add heat. Even emmisions were ceased the temperature will continue to go up for years afterwards because it takes many years before the CO2 is abosrbed by nature.
That’s one of the reason why a direct comparision of man-made emissions and surface temperatures is pointless without considering all other variables.
10
Thank you Siliggy @62. That prompted me to copy all the CO2 data from March 1959 into a spreadsheet and see for myself. Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
Here is the monthly CO2 data if anyone’s looking for it.
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_mm_mlo.txt
If CO2 starts to decrease that will throw a spanner in the works, but I’m not sure for which side!
10
Ian Hill@67: If CO2 starts to decrease, that would surely be good news to both sides? The fanatical AGW proponents could stop worrying about warming causing the end of civilisation, and the salt-of-the-earth skeptics could rejoice at not having to abandon fossil fuels (and, of course, the consequent end of civilisation). Win-win.
10
Twinkler in 66,
Sorry but your theory falls apart even before it begins.
You said “The increase in CO2 causes an increase in the radiative force. This force will continue to have a warming effect for many years to come because CO2 is a long lasting gas. This force adds heat to the energy budget, every minute of every day for many years it will continue to add heat. Even emmisions were ceased the temperature will continue to go up for years afterwards because it takes many years before the CO2 is abosrbed by nature.”
To paraphrase, “even if emissions were to cease today the atmosphere would continue to warm because the CO2 will linger in the atmosphere for many years to come”
Reality, So we stop emissions today but the planet will still warm for many years, this warming will cause the oceans to outgase even more CO2 which of course will linger for many years causing more warming.
Please explain how your theory does not end in a climate runaway akin to the china syndrome. Seriously i want to debate you in ameaningful way on this point.
Cheers
Crakar
10
William Connolley is back at work…
See the discussion at wikipedia, around HAL LEWIS….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Harold_Lewis
10
Olaf Koenders@28
So you say, yet the atmospheric level of CO2 is increasing.
That is part of the climate sensitivity equation.
Lindzen has a lot of problems calculating sensitivity. http://www.skepticalscience.com/Lindzen-Choi-2009-low-climate-sensitivity.htm
Many other people calculate it to be much higher. http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced.htm
It bears repeating, CO2 is not the only driver of temperatures. Have a good read.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/CO2-has-been-higher-in-the-past.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/High-CO2-in-the-past-Part-2.html
Now who’s being alarmist. There are already plenty of ways to produce energy via renewables or nuclear without having to “SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING”.
Funny how a small percentage when added year after year can result in a 39% increase.
The preindustrial figure of 280ppm is now at 390ppm. You’re attempt to make the numbers look small and meaningless has failed.
Who put them in charge?
10
Rereke @22,
Was it October and a full moon around Halloween by any chance? Some goblins have got to be in there somewhere…
10
John Brookes #57 – Wrong. The number of pirates peaked 2 centuries ago and has declined since then. The number of people has not. Also:
If you are honest about it, you can always start with that with which you control.
10
crakar24 @ 69
As Olaf Koenders @ 32 says, “CO2 has a logarithmic effect in atmosphere as well, meaning the more you add the less effect it has as there’s only so much energy around it can absorb”.
Yes, more CO2 in the atmosphere leads to more warming which leads to more CO2 being outgassed, which leads to more warming etc; but each iteration of CO2 release is having less of an increase in the warming.
There are other feedback effects too which complicate matters. A read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change summarises some of those.
There is a large amount of uncertainty about feedbacks and hence the runaway effect, and if/when it might occur is also uncertain.
Which leads to the question, what’s a safe level of CO2, and what’s a safe level of warming?
Place your bets. 😉
10
PhilJourdan#73
Evidence please Phil! In fact the pirate quantum has been steadily diminishing and with it, a corresponding increase in global warming. However, as we all know, that warming petered out this century thanks to Somalian pirates pitching in to save the planet.
Apparently there are some deluded fools around still digging for a correlation between global warming and GHG emissions. Well, it’s official. There ain’t no signal. In their study published in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, investigators Quiring and Sherman analysed 150 years of temperature records. They concluded that “it will take a long time” before any effect of GHG emissions on global temperature can be identified against the background noise of “natural climate variability”. They ask
“Do we charge ahead with international agreements and policies, or do we do nothing?
Do we save money for our grandchildren’s future or do we try to save the climate, not knowing if our efforts will have any effect?”
More frankly,
Do we proceed to gut our grandchildren’s economy with a price/tax on carbon (dioxide) in the forlorn hope that there may be a flicker of life in the AGW carcass?
10
I feel sorry for the natural cycle deniers, AKA the warm-earthers.
Denial is a long and lonely road, and the toll is heavy—the price: one’s soul…
10
Twinkler in 74,
I dont bother reading wiki links got anything else?
You are correct when you say CO2 has a log effect, so what you are saying is the CO2 we have now will cause warming for many years to come but any additional CO2 emissions from said warming will have little or no effect based on this log function, is this correct? If so can you point me in the direction of a study which describes this log function and at what level it kicks in? (not wiki)
I got the impression you believe we are at this point now therefore logic dictates there is no reason to stop emissions now because these emissions will not generate any more warming due to the log effect and there is nothing (aside from reducing the 390ppm we have now) we can do about any future warming.
Once again you are correct when you say there is large amount of uncertainty in regards to feedbacks, however this information does not stop you from making predictions of future warming, for example what if the feedbacks are negative?
What is the safe level of CO2? For human life it is around 8000ppm.
10
crakar24 @ 77
That’s funny. You believe Jo the blogger, but if it’s on wiki, with references, you won’t read it.
I can’t accept you were sincere when you said “Seriously i want to debate you in ameaningful way on this point.”.
The word I used was “less” but I think you’re getting the hang of it.
I’m not your research assistant and I’ve no idea what website you will or wont read. Go find it yourself.
Bear in mind, the log function of CO2 is generally agreed upon by warmists and non-warmists alike.
Not at all. More emmissions will create more warming. The log effect effect simply means that you need to keep doubling the CO2 level to create the same amount of warming. For example, from 280 to 560 will add +3 degrees, from 560 to 1120 will add another +3 degrees.
The less we emit, the more likely we are to avoid tipping points which might push us into much higher warming.
That’d be great. Not much support for that idea yet.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced.htm
Perhaps if we didn’t depend on the rest of the Earth’s ecosystem, nor care about sea level rise or the extinction of most of the life on this planet then you might be right.
10
Hi Jo (responses to #52):
First, thank you for going to the trouble of responding to my post. I do appreciate it.
You say about an email by Phil Jones:
If he was tricking us all, why would he comment his code as such? The word “trick” in the mathematical sciences has a different meaning to mainstream use; an occasionally-heard quote in mathematical circles is: “a method is a trick that is used more than once.”
That is the crux of the meaning of the word “trick” in this context: it is a clever way of solving a problem.
It turns out that six independent commissions into the “ClimateGate” emails carefully investigated that particular email, and all of them concluded that that “trick” Phil Jones used was not fraudulent.
You haven’t addressed why you have endorsed an article that uses a quote by Phil Jones to bolster a scientific claim, if you believe he’s a scientific con-man. It’s almost like seeing a climate scientist using a Lord Monckton quote to give weight to a scientific assertion. (Well, it’s an inverse situation, but my point stands – your self-consistency falls apart as a result).
You say, in response to my assertion that the MWP was unlikely to be caused by a global forcing:
Jo, Which hundreds of peer-reviewed studies have shown that the MWP was due to a global forcing?
There is no way of knowing that the MWP was global in extent without having synchronised measurements from many different locations. Phenomena due to internal climate variability can oscillate, so although one region of the earth may be warm, another region is cold. The global average temperatures are relatively unaffected by such oscillatory behaviour. Unless you have data that measures the temperature at many different locations at the same time with excellent precision, one cannot conclude that the MWP was due to a global forcing. What most likely occurred was that the MWP was a localised oscillatory phenomenon that may have swung back and forth between the hemispheres. The data that’s available simply does not have the time or spatial resolution to show that MWP was due to a global forcing.
Soon’s 2003 papers claiming that the MWP was global in extent made the mistake of not assessing proxy data for actual sensitivity to past temperature variability. For them a global “warm anomaly” was displayed by any region that was either “warm” or “wet” or “dry” relative to “twentieth century conditions”. Such criteria could be used to define any period of climate as “warm” or “cold”, and are therefore meaningless for describing global average temperature changes.
And McShane and Wyner’s statistical methods (http://joannenova.com.au/2010/08/zombie-hockey-stick-dies-again/) show no MWP. You laud their paper, but you seem to ignore this fundamental feature. Again there is an issue of self-consistency in your views.
And on the topic of anonymity, why don’t you publish the donations that you receive for running this website? Your readers and I would be very interested to see who your donors are and who they work for, and how much they donate. For all your railing against scientists and the funding they receive, their funding arrangements are usually transparent. You seem to foster the view among your rusted-on audience that you’re scientifically honest (and that scientists who receive government funding are not honest), so why not publish these details to show us all how scientifically honest you really are?
You claim that global plant biomass has increased between 1982 and 1999, saying:
Ok. Nemani et al are claiming that global terrestrial net primary production has increased. How does this necessarily imply that global plant biomass has increased?
For your readers who don’t believe that any climate change has occurred in recent decades, here’s the introductory passage from the paper you quote:
“Between 1980 and 2000, Earth experienced dramatic environmental changes (1). It had two of the warmest decades in the instrumental record (1980s and 1990s), had three intense and persistent El Niño events (1982 to 1983, 1987 to 1988, and 1997 to 1998), and saw noteworthy changes in tropical cloudiness (2) and monsoon dynamics (3). Meanwhile, atmospheric CO2 levels increased by 9% [337 to 369 parts per million (ppm)] and human population increased by 37% (4.45 x 109 to 6.08 x 109). Changes in terrestrial net primary production (NPP) integrate these and other climatic, ecological, geochemical, and human influences on the biosphere.”
(Climate-Driven Increases in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 1982 to 1999
Ramakrishna R. Nemani, Charles D. Keeling, Hirofumi Hashimoto, William M. Jolly, Stephen C. Piper, Compton J. Tucker, Ranga B. Myneni, and Steven W. Running (6 June 2003)
Science 300 (5625), 1560. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1082750])
The problem is that although plants may be more productive due to more CO2, warmer temps and increased rainfall in certain regions, those plants shed leaves, branches and roots, and all that biomass is released back to the atmosphere as CO2 and CH4. So I don’t think one can claim that global plant biomass must have increased just because NPP increased; I think you are over-reaching here.
I argue that the link between CO2 and global warming is not found by superimposing the two time-series. You say:
Where is the evidence that the IPCC have ever claimed that CO2 causes GW by simply superimposing the two plots? What climate scientist has ever asserted that GHGs are causing climate change by using this obviously poor reasoning? It’s a misunderstanding that continually circulates in the “climate skeptic” blogosphere, that scientists claim that GHGs are causing GW simply because there is some correlation between the two time-series.
The link between GHGs and the warming in recent decades has been demonstrated countless times using the models that you deride. When simulations are run using only natural forcings, the probability of the GW trend since the 1950s being observed in the simulations is less than 5%. The GCMs show there is a very high probability that the warming trend is due to AGHGs, as they successfully reproduce the observed GW temp trends when the AGHG forcing is included in the models.
Why do you deride the models, Jo? Why do you think the GCMs useless? How are the IPCC using an “argument from ignorance” fallacy “with the models”?
Your next two responses illustrate your lack of understanding of GW/climate change. In the first, you respond to my correction of your misquote of Phil Jones. You say:
hmmm.
Climate change is observed by looking at average global temperature trends over several decades, typically 30 years.
Here is what Phil Jones was asked, and his response:
“Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm)
As Phil says here, the reason the trend that he measures (+0.12 deg C per decade) is statistically insignificant is because the time interval over which it has been measured is too short.
You have no way of knowing that “there has been no significant global warming since 1998”, because the time period you use is too short to be statistically significant at the 95% level. You are the one who seems satisfied with lower levels of statistical significance than the rest of us.
And again, your use of a Phil Jones quote damages your self-consistency.
When I claim that the climate system has inertia, you say:
Again you are making a statistical fallacy, Jo. A twelve year period is too short for making claims about global warming trends with a high-level of confidence (>95%).
You say “radiative imbalances work at the speed of light.”
Really? Does convection work at the speed of light? Does a pot of cold water boil instantly when you turn up the heat?
The oceans take a long time to heat up (or cool down) when forcings change. The CO2 you mention has caused a lack of thermal equilibrium, so the upper atmosphere of earth will continue to receive more IR radiation than it emits until the oceans, ice terrains and other systems have adjusted their temperatures in response to the relevant forcing.
When I claim that your intentions seem political rather than scientific, you say:
Perhaps to address the nonsense in your entry?
10
oh dear @ 79
Why did Professor John Overpeck say in an email to David Deming in 1995 “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”?
As soon as I read that about six months ago I instantly became a sceptic for life. That’s all it took, one act of fraudulent behaviour. Sooner or later the population at large will “get it” and the game will well and truly be up.
Donations to Jo are none of your business. If you must know I gave a modest donation and I don’t work for anyone.
10
To back up your statement? You went into more detail than I, but that was my point.
Indeed, the recent increase in pirating by the Somalis corresponds very closely with the leveling off of global warming, and so the relationship cannot be ignorned. I am sure phil Jones and Dr. Mann can create the nesessary “Hockey stick” showing a much closer and alarming relationship, and how in order to survive, the world must take up Pirating.
10
@81
Looks like pirate talk will become common if you’re correct.
Expect lots of “Arr matey” or similar. 🙂
10
oh dear @79,
Six independent commissions you say. Independent from what? The truth? Good judgment? Or were they devoid of both? These were people who would defend Phil Jones no matter what. It’s the whole context that gives the word it’s meaning, not just the word itself.
Please stop trying to play us all for fools!
10
oh dear again,
I’ve been laughing at your arguments for some time. So I thought you’d like to know how ridiculous some of them really are.
Funny thing though — short periods have been more than acceptable to make the claim that human activity is going to (literally) fry the planet. But there are just a “few” problems: inconsistencies; data manipulation and then conveniently losing the original data so no one can reconstruct what CRU did; IPCC admission of violating their own standards for including material in their reports; a few assorted lies; and more. How do you expect to have any credibility?
If Phil Jones stood right in front of me and swore that he’d put his shoes on that morning I would look down and check before I’d believe him. The man was literally cheating his way through life and feared no comeuppance would ever befall him. When the fan started flinging the evidence against him in all directions and he was suspended he didn’t know what hit him. He became depressed, considered suicide. There’s only one way you can read this — he thought he was doing the right thing, what was expected of him. And the six whitewash investigations tell me I have to believe he’s probably right. Proving the point was more important than the truth, than honesty, more important even than personal and professional integrity.
You do yourself no credit by pushing the work of provably dishonest people.
10
Roy:
You and others here would probably be aware of the televised BBC debate earlier this year.
Douglass Keenan got up and ever so publicly accused Phil Jones of scientific fraud. He was given an opportunity to retract but refused to do so.
Seems the only thing dear ol’ Phil can do is sue. Yet, he doesn’t. Wonder why not?
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I would be very interested to see the statistical calculation that demonstrates the level of confidence that can be obtained from a given period. Which distribution function are you using by the way?
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My apologies for being 2 weeks behind the times BUT John Nicol answered this question in 2008. His conclusion…extra CO2 does not drive warming,climate change or whatever you want to call it. PLEASE can those of us with the appropriate knowledge (eg. interaction of infrared radiation and CO2 at the molecular level) test Nicol’s analysis! The right answer could just save the Oz economy…and a few others as well.
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[…] ‘Part 5: CO2 Emissions Versus Temperature’ http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/is-the-western-climate-establishment-corrupt-part-5-co2-emissions-v… […]
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