Following on from blackbody discussions, here is Christopher Monckton’s simple account of how we know the IPCC is exaggerating climate sensitivity. This comes from page 12 of Moncktons: Regulation without reason (on the Canadian coal regulations.)
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Guest Post: Christopher Monckton
Are the IPCC’s global-warming projections proving accurate?
IPCC (2007, scenario A2) expects 3.4 C° manmade global warming to 2100. The calculations so far in this paper have assumed that the IPCC is right. Environment Canada does not ask any questions about the IPCC’s global-warming projections. Officials should have made some allowance for IPCC overshoot.
Since 1750, whence IPCC dates our influence on climate, a recent study (Blasing, 2011) shows 3 W m–2 of forcing from our greenhouse-gas emissions, less –1 W m–2 from non-GHG influences (IPCC, 2007). Global temperature had risen by 0.5 C° from 1750-1983 (Hansen, 1984), with a further 0.3 C° since (HadCRUt3, 2011). Of this 0.8 C° warming, 50 to 100% may be manmade. Thus, the 261-year transient climate sensitivity parameter is (0.4 to 0.8)/(3 – 1) = 0.2 to 0.4 C° W–1 m2. Multiplying by the forcing at CO2 doubling, i.e. 5.35 ln 2 (Myhre et al., 2001, cited by IPCC, 2001, 2007), gives transient sensitivity of 0.75 to 1.5 C° by 2100, when CO2 concentration will have doubled. Dividing this value by 0.7, the fraction of all forcings attributable to CO2, allows for non-CO2 forcings. Expected warming would thus be 1.1 to 2.1 C° to 2100, 32 to 62% of IPCC’s central estimate.
Since 1850, the year when the first global-temperature record was kept, the most rapid rate of warming sustained for more than a decade was 0.17 C°/decade (HadCRUt3, 2011). Assume that, after no warming in the 2000s, this maximum supra-decadal warming rate were to become the average rate for the next nine decades. Warming would be 1.5 C° by 2100, 44% of IPCC’s central estimate.
Since 1950, when Man first began emitting enough CO2 to influence the climate, 0.72 C° of warming has occurred (HadCRUt3, 2011). This rate, extrapolated from the past 61 years to the next 90, gives 1.1 C° of warming by 2100. Assuming 20 to 40% acceleration in the warming rate to allow for rising CO2 concentrations net of the logarithmic diminution in the CO2 forcing gives 1.3 to 1.5 C° warming to 2100.
Averaging the results obtained from data over three recent periods by distinct methods gives 1.3 to 1.7 C° warming by 2100 – 40 to 50% of the IPCC’s estimate.
A theoretical checksum: In Kiehl & Trenberth (1997), total forcing from H2O, CO2, CH4, O3, and N2O is given as 125 W m–2 in clear skies and 86 in cloud, or ~101 W m–2 overall. Holding insolation and albedo constant, the difference between surface temperatures with and without these GHGs is 288 – 255 = 33 C°. Ignoring minor forcings, climate sensitivity of the whole atmosphere is (5.35 ln 2)(33/101) = 1.2 C°, which, divided by 0.7 to allow for non-CO2 forcings, gives total warming at CO2 doubling by 2100 of 1.7 C°, or 50% of IPCC’s central estimate, more than halving the cost-effectiveness of the regulations.
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Disclaimer: Views expressed in a guest post are those of the author.
Please correct me if I’m wrong. I understand global temperature is an average of different places which are averages of local max-min temperatures.
Surely there should be averages for the effects of greenhouse gases. In the day time ALL available bands are shielding the surface from incoming radiation. At night only bands lower than 5 microns will “see” out going radiation from the surface. The energy difference between incoming day light radiation and out going night time radiation must be quite high, clouds permitting.
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looks like agw is really happening in Australia hahah LOL coldest summer ever
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That’s because the “heat” is “hidden” in the deep ocean. It’s also causing “hidden sea level rise” and hidden coral damage, hidden acidification, and hidden species extinction among a few.
What is visible is nonsense taxes, corrupt co2 “markets”, ego maniacal grandstanding, profiteering, higher food prices and higher fuel prices.
That is cold man, very cold.
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Not to mention all the global warming hidden deeply in all the snow drifts that have just piled up in central US due to Climate Change. Watch out! It will be released when all the snow melts and will cause … gasp … actual flowing water. How will we ever survive?
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You could try shipping it to the Himalayas to compensate for all those melted glaciers that purportedly will cause over 1 billion, that’s billion with a ‘b’, people to go into water deficit, Lionell.
There’s always an up side!
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Allen, those glaciers aren’t melting:
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/12/19/Central-Asian-glaciers-resist-warming/UPI-20681324339923/#ixzz1h6kMFVtI
(thanks Pat @ http://joannenova.com.au/2011/12/the-ipcc-exaggerate-monckton-calculates-how-much/#comment-870419 )
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If a glacier melts you get water to drink. They would be in far more trouble if they do not melt. A melted glacier is a river.
If you do take some water there make sure you heat it first they need warmth! That way less people will be dying from the cold:
News stories from “The Himalayan Times“.
The cold wave death toll in northern India has risen to 39
Dalit leader Sardar dies of hypothermia
Biting cold today claimed 11 more lives
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Er, it was a joke, Joyce.
Perhaps the sarcasm was a tad too heavy!
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Joyce who?
(now that’s a joke) 🙂
I was pretty sure you meant it as a joke but I thought I should cover it to prevent John B accidentally giving you a thumbs up.
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Oooops Ya got me!
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“The origin of the saying ‘It’s a joke Joyce’ is the legendary In Melbourne Tonight of the 1960’s where a regular comedy skit The Wilsons had Graham ‘King’ Kennedy playing George and Tivoli veteran Val Jellay playing wife Joyce bickering at the kitchen table, with Joyce never getting the meaning of sarcastic humour.”
As a catch phrase, it still retains some currency, particularly among us old folks!
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Sort of like, “The front fell off”?
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Are you kidding? Two weeks of summer, and the last month tracking pretty close to the long term mean. And that in a La Nina year which would normally be expected to be cooler.
Your fridge is not an accurate measure of the global climate.
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Are YOU being intentionally difficult? What part of LOL don’t you get? Did you just discover the internet?
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I’m very very old. LOL means “Lots of Love”.
Actually perhaps it would be interesting to see what everyone else thinks the comedic point was.
Was it sarcasm, irony, wit, an in-joke, a misdirection, was it perhaps reflexive, self-depracative?
I expect no reply, but I genuinely think that it’s one of those quips which derives its humour from some basic misunderstandings.
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Name me just one thing that is, “an accurate measure of global climate”.
If you can’t answer that question, then Cassandra’s fridge is as good a proxy as any other.
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Actually its long term power consumption would be.
The other answer is “an absolute truck load of observations painstakingly critiqued and recorded”
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Yes, the heat is hiding. A resent research cruise with a submersible has found what they believe to be the location of what is being called the Hadley Heat Hidey Hole. It is located, surprisingly, only about a mile off the coast of the Mexican resort, Cabo San Lucas. Scientists are now flocking to Cabo to have a look with all expenses paid trips being remitted by various research grants funded by the Tides Foundation and Al Gore who is said to have discovered this himself.
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Reply: 🙂 Jo
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And I’m reading this now courtesy of another 43.5mm of AGW permanent drought!
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Persisting down, is it?
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RW,
Yes. Around 485mm since half past November and I can’t recall so much rain and so little run-off
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IPCC exaggerate? Shurely shome mishtake?
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I’m afraid Lord Monckton just hasn’t got a clue about blackbodies.
The blackbody radiation formula was derived from considerations of cavity radiation.
A blackbody will absorb all radiation falling on it.
This is clearly not the case for Earth.
It will also produce a continuous spectrum as explained by Planck, and obeys the Stephan Boltzmann equation based on its temperature.
What Monckton is talking about is a gray body which is another hypothetical entity which follows the Stephan Boltzmann Equation but reduced by a constant value for each wavelength.
Again this does not describe the Earth.
The shorter solar wavelengths are more likely to be reflected and the longer solar wavelengths to be absorbed.
Indeed it is this variation of albedo with wavelength that is used by the believers of the greenhouse theory to justify their claim of a 33K greenhouse effect.
Joseph Postma has written three papers on the greenhouse effect and deals with all the mistakes that monckton makes.
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Bryan,
in this article the Monck is simply playing a game where he points out that even assuming a basis for the IPCC’s BS that they haven’t done their sums correctly!!!!
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Bryan, please, you are confusing people. They don’t know if you are a troll or not. You must give some clue, like “The warmists are wrong, but Monckton’s debunk is too”, and then everybody knows whether to give you thumbs up or down.
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Comment on “The Spatial Extent of 20th-Century Warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 years.
Abstract
Osborn and Briffa (Reports, 10 February 2006, p. 841) identified anomalous periods of warmth or cold in the Northern Hemisphere that were synchronous across 14 temperature-sensitive proxies. However, their finding that the spatial extent of 20th-century warming is exceptional ignores the effect of proxy screening on the corresponding significance levels. After appropriate correction, the significance of the 20th-century warming anomaly disappears.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/316/5833/1844.1.full
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Cassandra@2
Well, the powers that be are trying to spin 2011 as Perth’s hottest year ever – http://tiny.cc/do91g
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A couple of interesting discussions on other sites. Dr Roy Spencer wrote a paper in support of the greenhouse gas theory: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
Dr Pierre Latour refuted the calculations: http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still
The argument by Latour shoots a huge hole in the entire global warming argument. It appears as though Monkton needs to reassess the need for math and blackbody calculations as well. In short, Latour affirms that there is NO greenhouse effect in the atmosphere and he show the calculations to prove it. But what would chemical engineers know anyway? They aren’t climatologists in the IPCC.
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How many millions of times are “skeptics” going to “prove” that there is no greenhouse effect? If someone would just do it properly once, then it wouldn’t have to be done again, would it?
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(Spoken like someone who has never tried to construct a theoretical proof or compare theory to reality.)
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Well John, theoretical proofs never really establish anything about the real world — it takes actual data to do that.
Here is a paper (peer-reviewed, of course!) on a 14 year study of downwelling infrared radiation in the central US. They found that it decreased over that period, roughly correlated with average cloudiness. If there was a signal from increasing CO2, it wasn’t detectable.
Current Climate “science” is not really interested in measuring the effect of CO2 — and given that this paper showed null CO2 effect, I don’t expect we will see attempts to repeat it over wider geographical areas. I mean, suppose they discovered that CO2 had too small an effect to measure (as this study did)? What would happen to all their grants and their careers?
No, better to stick with the theoretical calculations that can be tweaked to give you the answers you need (to maintain funding).
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Rats, a pay wall.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all. There’s a number of areas in Australia which I’d expect to show some form of seasonal reductions in downwelling IR associated with increasing cloudiness. Expectation otherwise is just based on the confusionista assertion that global warming is everywhere-all-the-time warming.
So why would the second author of this paper have put his name to it if your assertion had any merit?
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Jiminy, you can probably access this paper from your local library.
If you read the abstract, you note that they aren’t talking about a seasonal variation — the study went for 14 years.
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As to why a scientist associated with NOAA would co-author a paper that found no detectable GH effect from increasing CO2 — not everyone at NOAA (or NCAR, NASA, etc) is a warmista.
This guy studies severe storms, so is probably into taking data, running models to explore the physics, and generally trying to actually understand things.
I had a friend who modeled thunderstorms at NCAR for a number of years. He may have accepted the standard AGW speil, but that was probably because he didn’t examine it too closely and didn’t want to make waves. One of his results was that thunderstorms dump so much heat to space that increasing thunderstorm activity world-wide by 3% would completely counter the (IPCC exaggerated) effects of doubling CO2.
Do thunderstorms increase with rising temperatures? It is thought so, but the exact mechanism can’t be accurately modeled, so this is one of those “adjustable” parameters that modelers use to match their models to the recent data. Since the data is highly “adjusted” and doesn’t accurately represent reality anymore, they end up modeling a virtual reality.
(Now if only they would go live there, the rest of us could breath a sigh of relief.)
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Hi BobC
Interesting comment : “One of his results was that thunderstorms dump so much heat to space that increasing thunderstorm activity world-wide by 3% would completely counter the (IPCC exaggerated) effects of doubling CO2.”
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BobC,
I guess you’re correct. They were talking about a 14 year study where effects were divided on a seasonal basis. My usage suggests a study of seasonal variation. A bit different.
And of course not all scientists at anywhere much are warmanistae. In fact, if you mean by warmanista someone intent on world domination by some amazing conspiracy then I suggest to you the number of warmanistae converges on a very small number indeed. Biology on the other hand votes with its feet, its wings and its fins and its saplings. Queensland bass off the coast of Tasmania.
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John, I don’t believe anyone believes there is no greenhouse effect. What I think has happened here is that the impact of CO2 has been exaggerated in the case of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The one primary issue that we can very readily see is the comparison of the early 20th century warming period with the late 20th century warming period:
We see two periods separated by 20 years with nearly identical rates and duration of rise. We are supposed to believe that the first period is completely natural and that the second period is completely anthropogenic. Furthermore, the models used by the IPCC so absolutely zero skill in explaining any of the changes in temperatures over the 20th century except for one 30 year period where the rate of temperatures happens to coincide with the rate of CO2 rise but we are supposed to ignore the complete lack of the same models to show the early 20th century rise and periods of cooling.
It is just preposterous. Ridiculous. It isn’t about what anyone “believes”, it is about the fact that their entire hypothesis rides on hiding what climate has done in the past and attempting to make us believe that in this case correlation is causation. They would be laughed out of an undergraduate lab.
Their climate models are simply pure, unadulterated, crap.
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/part-2-do-observations-and-climate-models-confirm-or-contradict-the-hypothesis-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/
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An image didn’t appear in my comment above, here’s the link to it:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/figure-19.png
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crosspatch: “John, I don’t believe anyone believes there is no greenhouse effect.”
Incorrect. There are at least 35 leading climate researchers with peer-reviewed publications proving there is no greenhouse gas effect: http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/
Former NASA and DuPont engineer, and expert on thermodynamics, Dr.Pierre Latour is engaged in ongoing private discussions with leading skeptic climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer addressing the failure of satellite instruments to detect any such GHE (it just doesn’t exist in reality). Read more here:
http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/189-greenhouse-gas-theory-trashed-as-dissenters-build-compelling-case
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I went to Santa Cruz California and told them that in the summertime I saw the sea level rising for about 4 hours while I was there. During this time, the number of people swimming in the water was increasing. Surely these people getting in to the ocean were causing the sea to rise and the sea level sensitivity must be much greater than we thought.
That evening I went back and noticed that the sea had gone back down again and that there was nobody swimming. That verifies my hypothesis.
You can show this by taking a glass of whiskey and dropping two ice cubes in. You will notice that the level of the whiskey rises. That proves my theory. The only question is the sensitivity of the ocean to people swimming in it. As I noticed about a 1 foot rise in sea level with what I reckon to be about 200 people in the water, it would appear that the ocean sensitivity would be 1/200 of a foot per person overall varying, of course, by the size of the person.
I suggest that starting immediately obese people should not be allowed in the ocean as that might result in coastal flooding and severe damage to the environment.
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Crosspatch – Do you think that increased occurrence of obesity could exacerbate this problem?
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Why, absolutely. In fact, with the current annual increase in the average waistline, we could have New York City under water by, what, next Thursday! And note that in the springtime when the weather turns nice and all the students head for Spring Break in Florida we see the sea levels rise to the highest point of the year.
All of this, of course, validating the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Sea Level Rise (ASLR) which could, if left unchecked become CASLR and if the Samoans (those guys are HUGE) aren’t kept out of the water, Super Catastrophic Anthropogenic Sea Level Rise (or supercatastropicexpialidocious as it is referred to in the vernacular of the environmentally aware).
The Precautionary Principle says that we can ignore the scientific uncertainty of our sensitivity calculations and any natural variability and are compelled to act. It just so happens that I have now established a company that will produce sea level rise mitigating swimwear that should be immediately mandated by law. We can charge a beach tax and use that tax to subsidize the swimwear to reduce its cost from the current $537.89 per set to a more affordable $516.73. This should result in fewer people entering the ocean keeping our sea levels at a sustainable level and making me, my children, and my friends filthy rich.
We must do this immediately. Think of the poor little ducklings!
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Ah Hah! The Samoan are now denied their human right to bathe in the ocean as a consequence of obese people swimming in the ocean in the developed Western World causing ASLR … they will need to be compensated. Will the beach tax be enough? We need an obesity tax as well and a fat cap and trading scam, eh scheme, to manage things.
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Well, yes, that is all considered part of our Sustainable Development program under Agenda 21 of the Alviso Agreement. What we will do is build high density affordable swimming pools along a rail corridor and then set zoning requirements that make it impossibly expensive for most people to live anywhere within 10 miles of the beach. That way only the very rich will be able to afford beach houses and we can generate a lot of tax revenue from them. That should provide for Samoa’s pound of flesh.
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Crosspatch, I have discovered even more alarming changes to the oceans. I was lucky enough to be at Rottnest Island last week, and duly went for a swim. Both myself and another swimmer of the same vintage discovered that while 20 years ago we would sink when we fully exhaled, this was no longer true. While it is an admittedly small sample, there is really only one conclusion that can be drawn – the ocean is getting a lot saltier – hence our greater bouyancy.
It is somewhat surprising that all the government instruments monitoring the ocean have not detected the increase in salinity, but its pretty safe to say that this is yet another monumental cover up, and other rather implausible explanations will duly be trotted out by the apparatchiks of big government.
I fully expect to be on the receiving end of very personal attacks from governments trying to hide the incline. Indeed, some have already accused me of being fat – talk about an ad hominem attack! Why can’t they just focus on the science?
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Salinity varies. I believe you will find that salinity around Australia and the Indian Ocean will vary considerably with El Nino / La Nina cycles. During a La Nina cycle as we have now, a “warm pool” builds in the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Warmer water is generally saltier water (with the notable exception of water from brine rejection in sea ice, which is very cold ( can be less than 0C and can be all the way down to 0F !) and very salty and falls straight to the bottom of the ocean.
During the Little Ice Age, for example, salinity rose in the area around the Dry Tortugas in the Caribbean because of a reduction in ocean circulation (sort of like a persistent el nino condition in the Atlantic) and the sea temperatures actually increased there. North America likely saw an extremely active period of tropical storms during that period.
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Also, you might have put on some body fat since the last time you swam there. Body fat floats.
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Ha ha, you called me fat! That’s an ad hominem attack…
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People’s bodies change as they age. Having a bit more body fat than one had when their younger isn’t unusual for most people.
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Oh, and I verified that result with a second glass of whiskey and several of my friends did as well.
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One thing that is never taken into proper account in my opinion is the difference between land and water. When the middle of the Pacific Ocean is facing the Sun, there is very little land getting sunlight at any significant angle.
The temperature the surface of the Pacific Ocean doesn’t vary much between day and night. If you try to heat the surface up, more evaporates and brings the temperature right back down again. You don’t get increase in surface temperature to change the amount of LWIR radiated. Secondly this evaporated water vapor ends up at altitude condensing into a cloud. When it does that, the surface heat has been effectively transported to altitude and released well above most of Earth’s carbon dioxide. Clouds that include ice crystals at very high altitude release even more heat at even higher altitude above the atmospheric CO2. So the mistake is that the LWIR that reaches the surface does not get re-radiated from that surface. It gets re-radiated from much higher altitude from where it originally landed.
The LWIR radiated from the surface of most of the ocean is going to be about the same at noon as it is at midnight because the surface temperature really isn’t going to change. What will change is the amount of evaporation taking place. That evaporation represents the transport of energy to altitude, in most cases.
The system is so complex and can change so much from one week to the next that it is going to be nearly impossible for them to model. And just when they think they’ve got it right, there will be some major circulation change come along that completely breaks their model. Modelling a La Nina year and an El Nino year would, I believe, require completely separate models, not simply changes in variables in the same model.
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I’m not a scientist, but I took a little time to read the Spencer/Latour discussion. (How much I understood -not much – is a different matter.) Latour made some references to convection and conduction, but in the atmospheric context, deferred to Spencer’s experience. He concentrated on successfully challenging Spencer’s assertions as they related to IR.
Everything I’ve read about ocean heat content agrees with your statements crosspatch.
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As far as I know, there just isn’t much diurnal variation in ocean surface temperatures. There might be in very shallow areas, particularly where the sand might be dark and act as a solar collector, but that is, overall, a very small portion of the ocean.
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What about when all those people go skinny dipping at night after doing your experiment, hmmmmm????
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There’s a tax for that, too.
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Really skinny people absorb water … they should be compensated for this.
” … he was so thin the level of water dropped rather than rising in the tub … “
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Look.
If evaporation of the oceans was capable of removing all of the diurnal radiation heat of a body of water then your swimming pool would remain at the temperature it was filled at as would the sea shores remain cold. But it’s palpably not so.
This idea is testable. So test it.
As to whether the climate models take this into account correctly – this too is at least in principle, detectable. Some of the CMIP3 models are available to download and at least some models will run on a PC. The capabilities of models are experimentally verifiable, and the source code is available. The modelling community is not a closed shop; it is an active group of people. The only thing is, in order to have an informed opinion, you need to do the work – but there’s many people to help you get started.
If you’ve ever attended modelling conferences, the climate modellers are always there in the hurly-burly. The 19th MODSIM for example was last week in Perth (the city some call the canary of climate change).
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You are forgetting the SUN!
It warms up the waters to a couple hundred meters deep.
That is why it never gets that cold on and near the surface of the ocean.
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Not really. It isn’t so much the sun as it is circulation. Water temperature in Bermuda, for example, doesn’t usually get below 60F. But something interesting has happened recently. Look at the average sea surface temperatures for Bermuda in January:
2000 66.8F
2001 66.1F
2002 66.8F
2003 64.6F
2004 65.7F
2005 65.3F
2006 66.4
2007 66.0
2008 66.3
2009 65.4
2010 61.6
2011 62.1
But it looks like Jan 2012 will be back up to normal if the December water temperatures are any indication.
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19 Dec: UPI: Central Asian glaciers resist warming
The mountains in and around the Himalayas are so high, unlike in the Andes, the Alps or the Rockies, that even in summer temperatures remain below freezing and most of the glaciers don’t melt away at all, Richard Armstrong, a geographer at Colorado University’s National Snow and Ice Centre, told Inter Press Service.
“It doesn’t make much difference if it gets a little warmer up there because it’s still far below zero,” he said.
In a study of a part of what is called High Asia, researchers found 96 percent of the water that flows down the mountains of Nepal into nine local river basins comes from snow and rain, and only 4 percent from summer glacier melt…
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/12/19/Central-Asian-glaciers-resist-warming/UPI-20681324339923/#ixzz1h6kMFVtI
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/12/19/Central-Asian-glaciers-resist-warming/UPI-20681324339923/
19 Dec: UK Telegraph: Jonathan Pearlman: Cold Australian summer sees swimwear profits plummet
Australia’s coldest summer in decades has dampened the mood for Christmas shopping and led to plummeting profits for swimwear and clothing stores
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/8965155/Cold-Australian-summer-sees-swimwear-profits-plummet.html
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@ Cassandra @ #2
Although Jo says it is ridiculous to think that a tax can lower the temperature,look at the facts. In November the carbon dioxide tax passes the Senate and in December NSW has the coldest December in 51 years. See its working already. Once it comes into operation it will probably start the next Ice Age. All praise to our Great Wise Leader. [
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Yawn. School kid stuff. Assumes linear relationship between CO2 concentration and atmospheric forcing… that assumption needs evidence.
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I believe he did use the word logarithmic at one point.
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Whether Monckton is right or someone proves or disproves this or that analysis in the future is immaterial if you BELIEVE in CAGW.
Remember it’s all about the increase in co2 emissions that the BELIEVERS are supposed to be concerned about.
In the 20 years from 1990 to 2009 the OECD countries increased emissions from 11.6 billion tonnes PA to 12.6 billion tonnes pa, while China and other non OECD countries emissions soared from 10 billion tonnes pa to 17.7 billion tonnes pa.
The mitigation of CAGW by the OECD countries is a hoax and fraud. Australia’s claim that we are “tackling CC” or “taking action on CC” ( numerous idiots from Swan, Gillard, Brown, Wong, Combet, Garrett Flannery, Steffen, etc) is hysterical and only believed by some here and elsewhere who must be delusional numbskulls who can’t even understand simple primary school maths.
If one group only increases emissions by 1 billion tonnes pa and the the other group increases emissions by 7 billion tonnes pa in that 20 year period they are obviously flogging a dead horse.
This is the quality of idiot and argument we have been reduced to with the Gillard govt’s co2 tax.
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=90&pid=44&aid=8&cid=CG6,CG5,&syid=1990&eyid=2009&unit=MMTCD
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Exactly right.
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Agree – and all these numbers come from estimations – no actual sample data exists to prove how much actually gets emitted. Now we have the IBUKI satellite surveys there is finally a check on all this estimated BS. The favourite tactic of the AGW group is to challenge evidence – this is where their evidence fails all the time.
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After all the arguments the hard COLD fact remains. It ain’t happening. No offense to Monkton but the IPCC has been barking up an empty tree for so long I wonder why they fail to see that there’s nothing to eat up there. Even the stupidest hound dog in the world would have quit by now.
Oh! A female dog’s up there you say? Well that explains it all then. It’s a hormone problem.
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E.M Smith (chiefio) has a posting at his site today that I think is worth a click. It is in regard to CO2 and the fact that it is likely that the 280ppm figure currently bandied about is likely a product of rectal extraction and not based on any real science. There is compelling evidence of significant natural variation of CO2 levels that is kept hushed.
This issue has been raised before but he makes mention of the similarity of the intention of creating this “flat” history of no variation in CO2 until it suddenly bolts up from out of nowhere and is going to cook us all alive. In fact, using plant stoma analysis of various conifer needles over history, we see significant variations in atmospheric CO2 content. The response of plant stoma counts to changing levels of CO2 is quite well known and can be easily duplicated in the laboratory. Just as they suppressed/mangled temperature reconstructions to show a long period of little natural variability of temperature and then tacked on an instrument record at the end, they have done exactly the same thing with CO2 measurements by using ice cores and then tacking on an instrument record from a measuring device that sits on top of an active (though currently dormant) volcano.
So without further ado:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/co2-past-and-problems/
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Proxies tend to be low-pass filters. They average over a substantially longer time than what it takes to make an actual measurement.
Plant stomata don’t adjust their size to ambient conditions on a weekly basis.
It takes a minute to mechanically sample CO2 – and then some more minutes in the lab to test it chemically for CO2 content. Shooting a LASER into the sky and measuring CO2 content in that “tube” takes a fraction of a second; but then days to adjust until it fits the Keeling curve. 😉
The re-analysis of historical CO2 measurements by Ernst-Georg Beck destroyed the myth that pre-industrial levels of CO2 were quite low. The Keeling curve’s extrapolation back into pre-industrial times (pre-1959) was falsified. The re-re-analysis took into account the criticisms that arose about the samples not being well-mixed; selecting from the tens of thousands of measurements only those which were well-mixed due to ambient conditions of experimental design.
Until we understand almost exactly how the proxies average CO2 responses, we cannot compare or splice those proxy-derived values with those from direct measurement of CO2.
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“Plant stomata don’t adjust their size to ambient conditions on a weekly basis.”
No, but on things like needles of conifer trees, I can see exactly what the CO2 level was in the air when that needle grew. I can get an annual measurement of CO2 that is more accurate than the readings one can get from ice cores. I can look at a very old needle and tell what the situation was when it formed.
I wasn’t meaning to replace modern monitoring with stoma counts, I meant to say we can go back in the record and use stoma counts as a proxy for CO2 levels in the past.
It’s already been done in a few places and the results are surprising. Apparently numbers around 300-350ppm have been quite common in the past but have also been quite variable over short periods of time, as I expect Mauna Loa to show us quite soon.
Mauna Loa is a BAD place to measure CO2 because there is a lot of natural CO2 release nearby that must constantly be adjusted for. I don’t trust the output of that station because if CO2 drops, they can simply jigger the adjustment and allow some of the locally generated CO2 to be counted. In other words, the location has excess CO2 that must be removed each month. A better location would be Mt Washington, NH or even Pikes Peak. Mauna Loa seems to me like a location designed for record corruption.
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“We will fight them on the beaches. We will never surrender!”
Or more to the point, we’ll fight them on the temperature record. We’ll fight them on the CO2 record. We’ll fight them on the greenhouse effect. We’ll fight them on climate sensitivity (if we lose on the existence of the greenhouse effect). We will fight them on the economics.
And if we lose any of those fights, we’ll just wait a bit, and then trot out the old arguments anyway.
Back to CO2 and Mauna Loa. I’m pretty sure there are other places in the world which measure CO2 levels. I remember seeing a scientist interviewed about one based south of Australia (ok, it may have been Tasmania, which is technically part of Australia…). I particularly remember him saying that if you saw a ship on the horizon, you would see an increase in the CO2 level. I presume of course that he was lying, and that there is much more doubt about actual CO2 levels 😉
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Well, what is interesting to me are the patterns of behavior. It is quite clear that the LIA, for example, was a global event. A read of Little Ice Ages: Ancient & Modern, Jean M. Grove will show extensive coverage of that fact from ice cores, sediment cores, pollen surveys, speleothems, etc. etc. etc. that the event was global. The impact of it varied by location, but the event can be seen.
The point is that Mann et al. fabricated this notion of a very long and stable climate history until modern time. That is simply not the case. Climate has never been stable for very long, maybe a couple of hundred years at best in the past 2000 years. They even attempt to suppress the early 20th century warming (1910-1940)by starting the instrument record in the “hockey stick” graph AFTER that period. That warming was of nearly exactly the same rate and duration as the late 20th century warming.
I believe what we have here is a case where they have done exactly the same thing with CO2 and there are several papers (peer reviewed) to back that conclusion up. CO2 has seen significant variation. They create this notion of a long flat handle of a hockey stick with CO2, just as the created that illusion with temperature.
From the link I gave:
Furthermore:
So they do EXACTLY the same thing with the CO2 record that Mann et al. did with the temperature record. They take proxy data, smooth it, adjust it, make it nice a flat, and then tack an instrument record onto the end of it.
The impact of all of this is to remove context. You can not see today’s variation in context with past variation because they are attempting to convince you that there IS no such variation. That is, I believe, false.
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And here is a picture of the CO2 “hockey stick”
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/figspm1.png
The observation record is tacked on in 1950, it appears. It completely misses the early 20th century warm period. We do not have the proper context in which to say today’s CO2 rate of rise is or is not anything unusual.
We know, for example, that the US can experience extreme droughts at times. We also know that prior to people showing up there, there were wild fires. What would be the CO2 release from nearly the entire state of Nebraska on fire or practically the entire Appalachian forest or at least a good portion of it? We have wildfires today that consume thousands of acres and we fight them and eventually get them put out, but imagine a prairie with grass 6 feet tall for hundreds of miles in all directions burning.
Europe is full of accounts of “dry fog” and dimmed sun. I believe it is plausible that many of these accounts could have been created by massive fires in North America. It is known that fires were often started by people in North America and they may be more common than is apparent by the conventional wisdom.
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~alcoze/for398/class/pristinemyth.html
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O/T but http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/20/greg-laden-caves-makes-nice-with-tallbloke/#more-53413
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Like I say val, there’s a lesson in this for those of us considering litigation; the guys running AGW seem to be flat-track bullies. The government may be a different proposition.
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Good, but I see no hint of an apology in that … he needs to come out and publish a straight up apology on his blog in a prominent place, like a big heading banner, and leave it there for 6 weeks. He needs to grovel a bit and then donate a sizeable sum to a sceptic-AGW charity … nothing like a little fiscal adjustment to cement the humility.
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I think it’s terrific that the good lord uses IPCCs own numbers to show that their…errrr…numbers are wrong.
However, until the day arrives when it is announced definitively that climates sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric concentration of CO2 is ZERO, all the numbers are wrong.
First they need to clarify which climates sensitivity.
i.e. Desert climate where Ts reach 50C daytime and 0C nighttime?
The polar climate sensitivity where Ts go below -50C and hardly any moisture in the air?
Or maybe it’s for tropical climates where clouds water vapour and natural aerosols abound.
If they’ve averaged all of that to arrive at an ‘average global’ climate, first they need to point to those areas/regions of the globe that have that ‘average’ climate.
Here is an analogy to explain the above;
When ‘measuring’ nature, averaging cause or causes will not necessarily mean consequence (s) are also average.
In trying to find an answer to something which doesn’t exist, whatever answer you get will be wrong.
Doubling tripling or quadrupling CO2 concentration of the atmosphere will not make a difference to temperatures that can be measured.
However, if you were to double Nitrogen and increase pressure to 1.5 atms, you might need to turn up the thermostat on your airconditioners.
One day, somebody will realise the basic, and work out very quickly by how much GHGs reduce the energy content of the Earth Atmosphere System. Now that figure might be close enough to accurate.
I hear it’s around 342Wm2
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I don’t get it Baa. Jo thinks that climate sensitivity is ~1 degree C for a doubling of CO2. Do you disagree?
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What’s the matter John, no comprehende?
Read my 2nd paragraph
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So to quote Phil (the duke), “So you are one of those nutters?”
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Sorry to go woefully off topic, but every now and then you read something quite remarkable, and I thought I should share it. As some of you probably know, I am a regular reader of John Mauldin’s economic commentary and he often has posts or guest posts on different subjects, albeit with an investment focus.
I wish to share this particular piece because it exemplifies all that is right with some fields of science, despite the dismal state of the politicised field of climate science.
Enough build up… here is a wonderful piece describing some of the amazing cancer-related research that will affect lives in the near future (think 5-year or less time horizon):
http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/john_mauldins_outside_the_box/archive/2011/12/20/catastrophic-success.aspx
If this does not inspire, then I cannot help you further 🙂
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It inspires me to buy shares in snake oil.
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I believe that at this point the IPCC AR4 has been discredited by so many people in so many ways that nobody really takes it seriously anymore. I mean, unless it is somehow key to your job function or you just “believe”. There is no long period of stable climate that has suddenly gone haywire, there probably is no long period of stable CO2, we know their models have no skill in showing 20th century climate except for one 30 year period of it, they can’t get radiative forcing right, they can’t get albedo right, they can’t get CO2 sensitivity of the overall climate system right.
I sincerely believe that they also knew they were making all of this up, too. I think they honestly believed starting in 1979 when they began this plot that it was likely they were going to see 30 years of warming and would be able to leverage that to implement a lot of their world governance agenda. They thought they had plenty of time but they also knew that time was limited and if they didn’t get it done by sometime around 2005 or so (1975+30 years), the jig would be up.
These people can’t possibly be that incompetent in so many different areas. They simply HAD to know. A simple Fourier analysis on the temperature records would have shown them very strong natural cyclical patterns that for some reason they neglected to include in their models.
Take your model, reduce your CO2 sensitivity by at least half add the 60 year cyclical bias that by solar cycle length.
Look at this graph:
http://www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com/images/sunspot-lenght-temp-trend.gif
Scary, huh?
(and I haven’t checked that site out, I simply found the graph on a web search as it was the sort of graph I was looking for)
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Its the ice age! Its the ice age!
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——————————————————————————–
You sound like Stephen Schneider, back in 1970. He maintained then that humanity was causing the impending ice age by our (you’ll never guess) — industrial emissions — which, naturally, needed to be severely curtailed through massive increases in government power (apparently, the universal solution).
We’re not surprised that you attempt to ridicule people who look at data to see what it may be trying to tell us (unlike your heros, the Climate “Scientists”, who try to get data to say what they want).
It would be nice though (and maybe crucial) to know what the ice core data from the last 400,000 years is trying to tell us.
There are (at least) three interesting things about this record:
1) Every interglacial in the last 400,000 years got at least 2 deg C warmer than the current temperature.
2) The current interglacial has lasted much longer than any of the previous four.
3) Ice ages last 10-20 times as long as the interglacials.
I wouldn’t mind the money spent on “climate science” if there was some effort to understand these things. (And please: Milankovitch cycles don’t explain this record — there are some correlations with the longer changes — with timing and causality problems — that are interesting. There is no explanation for the shorter-term variations.)
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We aren’t too far away from the ice age. They come on pretty fast, too, it isn’t like we are going to get a lot of notice. We will probably slip into glacial conditions within a decade or two. We aren’t going to get any time to adapt to a gradual change. When one sets in, Canada will probably be unfit for food production within 5-10 years. No more wheat from Canada for the next 100,000 years or so. Same with most of Russia. It will set in pretty quickly.
The Little Ice Age set in within less than 5 years.
It isn’t a gradual process.
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It has been cooling for around 4,000 years now.
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Well, yeah, bit most of the cooling has come in the past 2000.
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Yhe IPCC has got so much of the basic science wrong [‘back radiation’ is an elementary mistake no professional engineer would make, the aerosol optical physics is wrong so the 2nd AIE is the real AGW/GW, real present GHG warming is ~9K].
So, real GHG warming cannot be more than ~15% of the IPCC’s central claim assuming it is rght about thermalisation. however, because the IR optical physics needs tweaking, ;ittle thermalisation, self absorption near IR band saturation, present incremental CO2 climate sensitivity is probably slightly negative.
These people have really cocked up the science, e.g. imagining that the increase in ‘back radiation’ when you have higher water vapour is anything other than increased IR optical impedance as the photons head out to space. Those of a scientific bent should restudy he Law of Equipartition of Energy.
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Ok, take for example the LWIR emission from ocean vs land. The LWIR emission from the surface of the ocean is going to be generally constant from water of the same temperature day and night, 24×7. Land is a different story. Look at the LWIR emitted in the US from a desert location (most of the US West between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada) at 1hr past sunset and again at one hour to sunrise. The readings will be MUCH different. Also, the frequency of the emission changes according to temperature so as the temperature drops, so does the frequency and it eventually passes out of the band that CO2 captures. So CO2 might capture some heat for a portion of the night but eventually the wavelength moves beyond the CO2 range and the LWIR penetrates into space. CO2 only captures LWIR at wavelength emitted at very specific temperatures. If the radiation is at a different wavelength, CO2 has no impact at all.
Ocean doesn’t cool but again you need to look at the amount of radiation that is emitted withing the range that interacts with CO2. In this case CO2 only effectively acts as a greenhouse gas over some portion of the ocean where the wavelength of the emissions are correct.
CO2 has pretty narrow absorption bands compared to greenhouse gases such as H2O or CH4.
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In other words, what is the sea surface temperature 10 miles off the coast of Hawaii at noon and at midnight. My guess is that they will be the same.
Also, the hemispheres have different land/water ratios. Boreal summer has a completely different energy capture/dissipation ratio than Austral summer does. There is an inherent asymmetry here. That might actually be the reason for El Nino / La Nina events … balancing out of this asymmetry of heat energy.
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I do believe that the models used by the IPCC take this into account. That is, they have a grid which includes land and sea areas, and treats each appropriately.
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Maybe they do, but from their results over time, they have completely failed to accurately model the climate system except for one small period of time. The models are currently diverging from the observations at an increasing rate:
The models work for the period 1975 to 2000 and that is it. They no longer track with climate nor did they track with climate before 1975.
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/do-climate-models-confirm-or-contradict-the-hypothesis-of-anthropogenic-global-warming-part-1/
The models are pure bunk AND the models for AR5 are going to have even HIGHER CO2 sensitivity which means they will diverge even FASTER from observations! They are getting dumber the longer they work on this!
Here from Lucia’s site you see the divergence starting at about 2000 and increasing:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CherriesAppliesOranges.png
And I believe you are about to see observations begin about a 30 year trend downward so the models will be wrong not only in magnitude but also in sign.
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You are assuming that all the IR absorbed by CO2 is thermalised. Is it?
The Law of Equipartition of Energy seems to have been overlooked by climate science which apparently assumes 100% thermalisation. At room temperature about 5% of CO2 molecules are thermally excited so as to be able to emit an IR photon. When another photon is absorbed by an unexcited molecule, the slight disturbance of the statistics is almost immediately countered by an extra emission in a random direction.
So, until proven otherwise, we have to assume no thermalisation, just an increase of the optical path length of IR photons as they go from Earth’s surface to space. The only absorption then conversion to heat will be at second phases: water droplets, bare aerosols. Climate science has really been cocked up by the people who run it.
It needs restructuring by competent scientists from the basics upwards.
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Also note that the absorption of CO2 is a curve, that means as the temperature varies, the wavelength of the IR varies and so does the absorption of CO2. It captures more energy at the peak of its absorption bands than it does to either side of it. One can not say that CO2 captures X watts of heat. One must say that CO2 captures X watts at certain wavelengths then drops off to either side of those wavelengths.
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Like Monckton’s last post, his calculations appear incorrect to me. He speculates and misrepresents the IPCC’s own arguments. It is true that the Earth has warmed by about 0.8C since 1850 but according to the IPCC’s own equations the anthropogenic contribution to the temperature is in fact much more, but we just haven’t experienced it yet because there is a time-lag between radiative forcing (RF) and temperature. This is often referred to as “slow-feedbacks”. These slow feedbacks come about because the downward radiation is absorbed differentially by land and water. I believe the phenomenon is known as “Ocean Thermal Inertia” in scientific circles. According to the IPCC anthropogenic CO2-emissons and the resultant feedbacks have in fact contributed enough RF to increase the global mean surface temperature by about 1.4C. The only reason we have not seen this rise is due to the aforementioned slow-feedbacks. Therefore Monckton’s methodology of taking the 0.8C and attributing it to anthropogenic causes is flawed on that basis. Furthermore he also divides the resultant anthropogenic contribution by 2100 by 0.7 apparently to take into account the “non-CO2 forgings”. Surely this is ludicrous because we do not know how the climate-system will behave by 2100. We don’t know what the non-CO2 forcings will be. It is an unsubstantiated postulate.
Here is how I went about calculating climate-sensitivity with the IPCC’s own figures and formula. I present the following step-by-step argument:
1) The IPCC have two equations for calculating CO2’s effect on the climate. The first equation (often referred to as the non-feedback equation) is expressed as: RF(/W/sq.m) = Ln(C1/C0)x5.35. Where RF stands for ‘Radiative Forcing’, C0 is the initial CO2 concentration, C1 is the final CO2 concentration, In is the ‘natural logarithm of’ and W/sq.m stands for ‘watts per square metre’. If you do the calculation, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from 280ppmv (the assumed pre-industrial baseline) to 560ppmv produces 3.7W/sq.m. See Wikipedia’s page on ‘Radative Forcing’ for more information.
2) According to Trenberth in his 2008: Earth’s Global Energy Budget the total atmospheric greenhouse back-radiation from all sources amounts to 333W/sq.m. Because the Earth’s blackbody radiation temperature is 255K and its actual surface temperature is 288K it is suggested that the temperature difference of 33K between the two is due to the atmospheric greenhouse back-radiation from all sources. This implies that the atmospheric greenhouse back-radiation of 333W/sq.m from all sources (as calculated by Trenberth) is sufficient to increase the global mean surface temperature of the Earth by 33C above its black-body temperature of -18C. Hence this gives us a linear relationship between ΔT and ΔRF of 0.1C per 1W/sq.m (i.e. 33/333). Therefore the RF of 3.7W/sq.m produced by a doubling of CO2 by 2100 is sufficient to increase the global mean surface temperature by 0.37C.
3) The above calculation assumes that the relationship between ΔT and ΔRF is linearly proportional, which it isn’t. The Stefan-Boltzmann law governs the relationship between radiation and temperature and the law deems that the absolute temperature of a body will increase according to the 4th-root of radiation that is warming it. When the Stefan-Boltzmann law is taken into account the effect is to reduce the size of the possible human component to about 0.31C. However we do not need to bother with this small adjustment and can simply conclude that the total anthropogenic global warming on a doubling of CO2 must be no more than 0.37C.
4) Although, that is due to the CO2 increase of 280ppmv. We have already experienced 110ppmv (39%), leaving 170ppmv (61%). Hence we must reduce ΔT to 0.23C (i.e. 61%/0.37C).
5) We must now take into account the hypothesised positive feedbacks. The IPCC have another equation for this. Again, the equation may not be correct, but like before, we shall accept it for argument’s sake. The equation is: ΔT = λxRF. See Wikipedia’s page on ‘Radiative Forcing’. Where ΔT is the resultant temperature increase, λ is the climate sensitivity parameter and RF is the amount of radiative forcing. This equation takes the amount of RF produced by CO2 and then multiples it by the climate sensitivity parameter (according to Wikipedia a typical value is about 0.8). However before we can go any further we must first convert our temperature increase of 0.23C to RF. According to the Stefan-Boltzmann law a temperature increment of 0.23C on a baseline temperature of 288K produces a RF increment of 1.25W/sq.m. Hence we get a total feedback-inclusive temperature increase of: ΔT = 0.8×1.25Wsq.m = 1C. Clearly this figure is significantly less than the IPCC’s figure of 3C. Therefore its alarming claims are not backed up by its purported “climate science” at all.
Rich Evans,
I’ve copy-and-pasted some of the stuff above from my (embarrassingly pathetic) blog.
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Chip, there are probably a few errors in your analysis. Lets just take one which doesn’t actually change your result much. You say:
4) Although, that is due to the CO2 increase of 280ppmv. We have already experienced 110ppmv (39%), leaving 170ppmv (61%). Hence we must reduce ΔT to 0.23C (i.e. 61%/0.37C).
The response to CO2 is logarithmic, so the increase of CO2 from 280 to (280+110) is a factor of 1.39 (a 39% increase, as you rightly say). But to get from (280 + 110) to 560 (i.e. doubling 280) is a factor of 1.44 (a 44% increase). So we should have had just under half of the 0.37 degree rise already, with just over half still to come.
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The 33k present GHG warming is 3.7 times too high. it’s easy to prove. The IPCC thought experiment is to remove all GHGs from the atmosphere this moving the -18°C composite emitter temperature in the upper atmosphere to coincide with the Earth’s surface. They then claim +15°C – [-18°C] = 33K GHG warming.
They have conveniently forgotten that if you take out the water there are no clouds or ice fields. So albedo falls from 0.3 to 0.07. Redo the radiation calculation and you get 0°C. However, this is too low because the aerosols still exist in the atmosphere. Do another iteration and you get ~+6°C, giving ~9K GHG warming.
Also, because the 2nd AIE is positive, at the very least there is no cloud albedo effect cooling [44% of 1.6W/m^2 claimed AGW in AR4] so the 3K median IPCC CO2 climate sensitivity cannot be more than 0.56x3x9/33 = 0.46K.
In reality, because the IR physics has been cocked up,I expect present CO2 incremental climate sensitivity to be slightly negative with recent warming being mostly natural – solar, biofeedback induced Arctic melting now freezing.
‘Climate Science’ is an oxymoron: these people have fouled up amazingly.
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That should read: “Therefore Monckton’s methodology of taking the 0.8C and attributing it to anthropogenic causes and deriving climate sensitivity from it is flawed on that basis”.
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Ah – the “missing heat” of Trenberth’s Travesty.
First it was supposed to be in the tropical troposphere, but actual measurement showed it wasn’t.
So then we were assured it was in the Arctic regions, but the Russians poured cold water on that.
Next we were told it was down the other end, heating up Antarctica, but that just turned out to be woefully bad statistics.
Now we have the “thermal inertia of the oceans” theory which postulates (without any evidence) that all Trenberth’s “missing heat” of CAGW has somehow been transmogrified (by means unknown) down into the ocean depths (where we conveniently can’t measure it) and from whence it will return in 40 years time to bite us all on the bum with a vengeance.
You know guys, there is a much simpler explanation which goes like this:
The “missing heat” from CAGW can’t be “found” for the simple reason that CAGW is a load of crock and there simply ISN’T any “missing heat” to be found in the first place.
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The missing heat, ~0.7 W/m^2, is a combination of the end of the Arctic melting [the iron in the old ice has been used up so phytoplankton blooms are thinner], the saturation of man-made aerosol induced cloud albedo reduction from Asian aerosols, the same physics, and solar cooling.
I don’t know the exact proportion these effects. But it proves beyond any doubt that the IPCC claim of high-feedback CO2-AGW is a crock of ****. But they knew that in 1997 when it was shown that CO2 lagged T at the end of ice ages. They could have come clean but instead, they decided to create fake hockey-sticks to keep this new Lysenkoism alive.
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AHaa the “Bite yer AGW Bum” theory – sounds like a great slogan!
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The answer, of course, is that most of the global temperature change over the past 150 years is due to natural climate cycles, which have been a feature of the Earth’s history for the past several hundred million years.
The subject of climate is conveniently forgotten (it is a heresy with the CAGW cult) by those who try and model our planet’s climate.
Not surprisingly, the one group of science professionals, which is almost universally sceptic, are the geologists; these are people who actually understand climate cycles (caveat: please exclude geologists working for government, they have their thoughts decided for them).
Vampires require blood to live, likewise ‘climate scientists’ require massive grants/generous salaries from the public purse to live. Both have the ability to suck the life out of you and I. Thankfully, vampires do not exist, unfortunately the same cannot be said for ‘climate scientists’.
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“The response to CO2 is logarithmic, so the increase of CO2 from 280 to (280+110) is a factor of 1.39 (a 39% increase, as you rightly say). But to get from (280 + 110) to 560 (i.e. doubling 280) is a factor of 1.44 (a 44% increase). So we should have had just under half of the 0.37 degree rise already, with just over half still to come”.
Thanks for pointing that out. Although over the small range of temperatures we are dealing with I think it makes little difference. The atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased by 110ppmv from 280ppmv to 390ppmv. Therefore the IPCC’s equation gives us: Ln(390/280)x5.35 = 1.772W/sq.m to date. That leaves 1.928W/sq.m. So we have already experienced about 48% of the expected RF from a doubling of CO2. The linear relationship between deltaRF and deltaT deduced from Trenberth’s calculations above thus gives us 0.19C as opposed to 0.23C. If we take the logarithmic effect into account it’s actually less.
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Take care: most of the recent warming has been natural and is now reversing: N. Atlantic OHC: http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/figure-101.png
What will happen is all that extra OHC from the 1990s [regional warming as cloud albedo in the northern hemisphere fell] will be given up as the Earth cools to the 2030s which will probably be the coldest decade in 2 centuries.
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PS The Project Earthshine data show that albedo decreased from 1985 to 2003 then it rose.
I’m strongly suggesting this albedo change is linked to the Arctic melting via a biofeedback process.
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This is the part when we all curse the smart arse government in power of the last 4 years for destroying Australia’s cheap power system and leaving us high cost and low reliability power just when we need the opposite for our future large aging population.
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Praise be to CHIP for explaining Trenberth’s non-existent “missing heat”.
Now enlighten us, oh Mighty CHIP, on epicycles.
Or maybe phrenology.
Okay. How about phlogiston?
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@memoryvault
I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about here. Are you being sarcastic? I’ve simply used the IPCC’s own equations and figures from Trenberth to show how the IPCC have overestimated climate-sensitivity. I didn’t come here to discuss phrenology or phlogiston, so I don’t know why you would want me to explain them for you. Are you feeling alright?
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Can any one help me in understanding how a GHG can heat an absorbing body above it’s equilibrium black-body radiation temperature [with respect to the energy flux]?
I’m still struggling with this one. If the absorbing body was already hotter, then I can see how it might slow it’s rate of cooling, but my understanding of the first law makes it difficult to see how it could make it hotter. Or do the nasty details lie in the calculation of the hypothetical ‘average temperature’ which appears to pay little regard to the [area adjusted] fourth-power of the absolute temperature?
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michael hart:
The earth absorbs mostly in the visible, but radiates mostly in the IR. GH gases only affect the outgoing IR.
Think of the earth like a toaster, rather than as a blackbody – if you put a blanket over a toaster it will get hotter, because you are putting resistance in the outgoing energy path (heat), but not effecting the incoming energy (electricity for the toaster, visible radiation for the earth).
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@ Crosspatch.
Cite Jean Grove all you like, the more the better in my opinion. But if you do so in these terms it is disingenuous not to observe that she never for one minute doubted the significance of the greenhouse effect, nor did she doubt the positive evidence for anthropogenic global warming that accumulated after the first edition of her book was published in 1988 and before her death in 2001, when she was preparing her posthumously published 2nd edition.
The point is that for many scientists and climate historians it’s not all about hockey sticks. The making of a consensus does not require the abandonment of intellectual rigour. Jean was quite happy to keep on with her investigations of climate history in the late holocene while the field she had been working in since the 1950s transformed around her in the last years of her life. But although scepticism remained a positive virtue in her work, as it is for most serious scholars, she was not obdurate, and she did not confuse scepticism with cynicism, or dissent with repudiation. The differences between the 1988 and 2004 editions of her work reflect her assimilation of new data.
For an account of the limits of scientific uncertainty in climate studies that accords with her position (it was written by her husband and long-term collaborator), read this:
http://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/portal/rielcano_eng/Content?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/elcano/elcano_in/zonas_in/dt25-2010
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