Remember how all the news stories keep telling us the evidence is growing and getting stronger than ever “against the skeptics”?
David Stockwell has done a beautiful graph of the value of climate sensitivity estimates that of recent climate research that Steven McIntyre discussed in detail.
The trend looks pretty clear. Reality is gradually going to force itself on the erroneous models.
…
Indications are that around 20202030 climate sensitivity will hit zero. ;- )
The red line is ECS — Equilibrium climate sensitivity — which means after the party is all over in years to come, in the long run, this is how much the planet responds to a doubling of CO2.
The blue line is TCR — Transient Climate Response — is an estimate of what happens in the next 20 years. It’s a short term estimate.
Obviously the big question is: What happens when climate sensitivity goes negative?
Check out NicheModelling, Stockwell’s great blog, it deserves more attention.
h/t David, Lance, Ken
Is anyone else surprised that given the money spent and the effort expended on AGW we can still find illuminating perspectives like this one?
Perhaps with open minds a lot more illumination might happen.
210
The good news is no matter how the fiddle with the data the Equilibrium climate sensitivity (equilibrium sensitivity of temperature to a doubling of CO2, called ECS)) the overall trend is for ECS is decreasing. Poor alarmists, the more they work and fiddle and adjust the data the less CO2 appears to affect mean annual global temperature.
It must be frustrating to be riding a theoretical relationship designed to prove global warming from CO2 and see it continue to decrease over time as study after study is reported.
Progress toward the truth continues. A happy and pleasing circumstance.
232
Climate Chagrin: the melancholy of alarmists who are watching the theoretical estimates of ECS slowly slide into irrelevance.
71
I seem to recall uni maths of taking an integration of a mathematical function as it tends toward infinity….
Hours of fun with maths puns with this one….
50
If temperature goes negative along with sensitivity estimates I would think all the usual misanthropes will just shift gear , rename it climate disruption and start blaming the ( both probable and due ) end of the current interglacial on humanity . The suspicious part of My nature tells Me that this was the end game all along , to cripple western power grids with expensive , unreliable generators that are EXTREMELY vulnerable to cold , the more trusting part of My nature tells Me that , “Nah , They’re just irresponsible idiots “
400
–
We can excuse the lack of peer review, but surely the word “trending” should be in there somewhere.
121
Well yes….same approach with the “Cholesterol problem” – they had to keep regrouping and re-naming the official “villian” as one theory was disproved, they would change the definition to keep the zombie cholesterol myth alive…..I see strinking similarities.
100
Great chart David. I love the way it puts reality in your face. Now watch the faces turn away so as not to see it.
Lance P.
300
“The red line is ECS — Equilibrium climate sensitivity — which means after the party is all over in years to come, in the long run, this is how much the planet responds to a doubling of CO2.”.
One problem with this definition is the presumption that everything remains the same. Unfortunately values are derived from observations in a system where the ocean states go through about a 60 year cycle, somewhat out of phase with one another, an 11 (22?) years solar cycle that’s layered on top of century scale an multicetury scale solar changes. The values derived by Nick Lewis, Judy Curry and other based on climate observations will need to correct for these changes of state but no one really understands them.
140
Also the equilibrium time is approximately 200 years, so ECS is merely an academic value with no value watsoever for policymakers. But very useful for scaremongering.
100
The sun has an eleven year electromagnetic cycle, that raises or lowers the Earths’ ionosphere. This is well known to old-timer radio operators, because it made some frequencies more desirable than others.
But talking to a Solar Physicist, a few years ago, there are a significant number of other apparent cycles, of various wavelengths, with causes that are not that well understood.
All of our energy (with the possible exception of nuclear fission/fusion), ultimately derives from the sun. Energy drives the climate, so we can’t really understand how that works either.
All we can do, is try to second guess the immediate future from looking at the historical trends. But that is fiddling with the manifestation of climate variation, but without understanding its’ cause.
The chart demonstrates the practice of making “informed guesses” about the future climate, over time. The graph is trending towards zero. It is, and always has been a crock of fertilizer.
240
Even nuclear fission is caused by a Sun. Just not by this one. Billions of years ago a Supernova exploded and scattered the heavy elements formed in the collapse before the explosion. Some of them ended up in the cloud forming the proto solar system and hence on Earth.
All the heavy elements are truly “starstuff”. The gold in your wedding ring was made inside a star billions of years ago. Awesome!
81
I am sure that because negative feedbacks must dominate in inter-glacials, that the ECS will be less than 1 – so it won’t even be on that graph when it stops!!
However, using the same** sophisticated modelling technique as the climate modellers with their vast super-computers I estimate it will be below 1 in 2020.
**I put a ruler against screen and measured it.
161
**Detailed of methodology.
1. Show graph
2. Put ruler along trend
3. Stick finger where it gets to
4. Measure where this is.
5. (additional step for alarmists) … add a little bit.
261
My take on that is that the ECS line of best fit is biased upwards by the estimate of Olsen 2012.
If not for the outlier of Olsen 2012 the ECS would have crossed the TCR by about 2015 and be trending even further downward.
30
Step 6. Read Jo saying: “Indications are that around 2020 climate sensitivity will hit zero”. This “oh dear she’s made a mistake”.
Go back to graph and realise that it goes up by 5 year increments and that I’ve done a Mann.
HANGON!! I’m doing a Phil Jones.
I’m right – by 2020 it gets to 1, not zero (Did Jo mean no feedbacks!)
101
Ahh, Jo was only joking with that extrapolation, but since we’re talking numbers, yes, you’re right, it should read 2030, not 2020. Post corrected. Cheers!
205
Interesting! This is one of those non-linear scales. I’m tempted to suggest it should be an exponential decline, but perhaps a better plot would be to plot feedback.
Temperature = TCO2 . Gain
(Where TCO2 is the direct effect of CO2.)
Gain = 1/(1-B)
So Feedback (B) = 1 -(1/Gain)
If TCO2 = ~1C (Harde suggests lower)
ECS is ~ 2 in 2015 & ~3.5 in 2005 so the equivalent value of feedback was 0.71 in 2005 and 0.5 in 2015. At this rate feedback is declining by around 0.21 per decade. This now suggests feedback will be at zero in 24 years (temperature increase will never be zero).
If this trend were to continue one would expect the estimates of ECS to fall as follows:
2005 3.5C
2015 2.0C
2025 1.4C
2036 1.0C
2046 0.82C
2056 0.7C
30
“temperature increase will never be zero”
If you consider that CO2 has multiple effects not just warming then you quickly see that statement can be wrong. For example while CO2 warming is an exponential decay effect as CO2 increases other effects may be linear. Photosynthesis is endothermic so until the energy of heat that is taken by it is released again CO2 causes cooling. At the radiating frequencies of CO2 it has increased the effective surface area of the planet thus increasing the W/M^2 outgoing. There could also be unknown effects. So why can’t the warming be negative?
80
Plant endothermic photosynthesis requires 15MJ of energy (sunlight) for every kilogram of glucose that is produced:
sunlight + 6CO2(g) + H2O(l) = C6H12O6(aq) + 6O2(g)
Having considered this, then we need to consider what plants get up to at night?
They RESPIRE — an exothermic reaction and in addition…..
Question:
Does the settled climate ‘skience’ take into account the nocturnal chemistry and thermogenesis of the planetary biomass, that has grown 15% since the start of the 20th century (if I recall correctly)?
A fairly quick squizz around google largely confirms a deafening silence on the subject.
80
Not only that sliggy, there is doubt about what CO2 does, while it does absorb some small frequency ranges it also emits. More stratospheric CO2 means more emission and a cooler stratosphere, even the climate faithful agree with that, if convection isn’t somehow throttled the increase in temperature difference between the ground and stratosphere will increase the rate of cooling, reducing the difference (a classic negative feedback). The surface must cool between 0 and the cooling of the stratosphere. The climate bedwetters are betting that cO2 recycles more heat at the bottom warming the surface, in spite of the cooling stratosphere meaning that CO2 widens the gap between the surface and stratosphere even more.
This would be a unbounded positive feedback of the sort never found in nature. Not only that it seems nonsensical to me. That is, if I make the atmosphere more thermally conductive (by increasing the radiation that goes on) the atmoshere will become more insulating!
I think there is more than a chance that CO2 causes cooling. (Low confidence as yet in this idea as I’m still developing it). If I know mother nature, then the effect will probably balance, that is, since emission is isotropic, increased emission toward the ground will be balanced by the increased emission to space. And despite all its best efforts CO2 will have a nearly Nett zero effect.
70
I thought I read that TCR was 70 years??
10
TCR is different for everybody, it is supposedly governed by the half life of CO2 residence in the atmosphere. I say for example that since half of all emission is taken up by the biosphere in a year, the half life of CO2 is only 1 year, and any step change in CO2 only takes 5 years to propagate through (the climate pipeline is only 5 years long)
60
TCR is the immediate, rather than lagged response to forcing. In ECS (equilibrium clime sensitivity) runs, the CO2 may be doubled immediately and then the model run to see how the modeled system responds. This gives estimates of lag time (how long it takes the system to reach equilibrium with the doubled CO2) and the amplitude of change. In TCR runs, typically CO2 grows by 1% per year, and the results are measured “in real time.” Thus, TCR is alwys lower than ECR, and is often expressed as the response “at the time of doubling” rather than the lagged response at equilibrium.
10
In any case it seems clear that the world is not going to fry and the models, if they are getting better, are showing us exactly that.
Unfortunately climate change is now embedded so firmly in poplar culture that “carbon footprint”, “green” and other such things have been showing up in our TV and movies. And I don’t mean those productions that were intended to push climate change. I mean strictly entertainment stuff that even 10 years ago would not have had any reason to work such a thing into a story, even casually.
And this is what we must overcome — if w can. The momentum is building in spite of failure of all the dire predictions until the unsupported statement that the thing is there, becomes the thing itself.
150
Correct. You can tell its driven by culture now. There is no science backing it up. It is now, (according to its promoters), a “social” or “moral” issue…That could explain why the Pope has jumped on board this train. (Now they’re really reaching! From bread sizes, to wars, to the Pope?)
Regular Jane/Joe Public don’t care no more. (Cost of living, housing, Govt spending more wisely, etc is a priority to them.)
Speaking of culture, I remember in late 2011, National Geographic Channel (on Foxtel), were totally hammering out Climate Change rhetoric as part of their “2012 end of the world” nonsense.
…It eventually caused me to no longer watch that channel. Nothing more than computer generated graphic floods, politicised scientists who threw their 2 cents in, etc. Just hysteria that hasn’t played out. (Especially with the 2012 nonsense…When time ticked over past 2012, the fever pitched hysteria died very abruptly!)
Nowadays, I watch “Discovery Science”…A subset of the Discovery Channel where they look at how things are made and why, etc. (Regular Discovery Channel is just crap. Reality shows instead of documentaries! I can never clear my mind of that image of Bear Grylls drinking his own urine in the Kimberlies!)
On the other hand, that movie Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) had the theme of Global Warming as the basis for the bad guys.
In fact, the late Tom Clancy did a fictional novel (Rainbox Six), where the bad guys were radical eco-terrorists. They had a public mask of owning a biotechnology firm, lived a privileged lifestyle with political connections…But they secretly manufactured a bioweapon with plans to cut down the human population! (Of course, they would be vaccinated themselves!). It was supposed to be deployed in the Sydney Olympic games. They were stopped and the eco-folks fled to Brazil when they were found out. Eventually, Rainbow Six caught up with them, killed their security team, destroyed their facility and supplies, got the survivors to strip naked, and told them to “reconnect with nature”. (Basically left them to die.)
When you think about it, you can two-prong this eco-infected culture.
(1) Facts => Keep pointing out the hypocritical behaviour and the nonsensical connections they try to make. (One must highlight the names of authors, so people learn who they are, every time they publish another report or news article. The public needs to know it is the same authors, news outlets, think-tanks, eco-organisations, etc pushing this over and over again.)
(2) Entertainment => More stories/novels/movies of eco-folks justifying their actions in order to “save the planet”. Raising the point of who are they to presume they know what is best for the rest of us. (While they live the privileged lifestyle!)
80
2GB Radio: Tim Flannery – Green-ache (Parody song)
=> http://www.2gb.com/article/tim-flannery-%E2%80%93-green-ache
20
Past 2020 the projection will be below 0. After spending 1billion dollars a day, waisting treasure, untold deaths of the energy poor, killing millions of birds and bats so some of the species are now verge of extinction (some again), degrading landscapes with rusting windmills if not now they will in less than 15 years, introducing huge amounts of rare earth minerals that would have to be eventually disposed off, scaring a whole generation of kids and all they come up with is some 1 deg warming that was happening anyway?
Blood boils, these people are still alive, their names are on the graph. I demand their trials for crimes against humanity now!
321
The way I see it, both ECS & TCR converge high on Jo’s left hand brow (Her brow is 10cm from the 2010 grid line and with 5cm per 5 years, this makes 2020)
However projecting Jo’s brow along the horizontal I find I am just below the graph. The last shown vertical is “2”, so the next down is “1” and not zero.
However as the direct impact of CO2 is usually taken as about 1C, this “1” represents a system where feedbacks are zero.
100
Gee no papers in 2014.
18
They needed a spike in numbers for 2015?
40
Simple. Turn the graph upside down. It’s the science of climate science after all.
241
Ahh ! The climate “science” approved Tiljander technique .
40
Really good information and it makes for a excellent graphic. I just wish it had zero as the baseline instead of 1. I know opinions vary on this topic, but with the axis at zero it would still be very effective and above reproach. http://datadrivenjournalism.net/resources/must_zero_be_included_on_scales_of_graphs
60
They have put the baseline at 1.0 because it is heresy of the highest order to contemplate the possibility of NEGATIVE feedback (i.e. dampening rather than amplification).
For what its worth, I think that the ECS will turn out to be 0.5 (as postulated by David Evans in The Skeptics Case)
30
Is there any point in even going to the meeting in Paris to introduce some form of “carbon” tax when, according to the models, the AGW theory will be over game, set and match by 2020?
However, listening to ABC lateline yesterday we had two retired Admirals talking about the strategic implications of the settled science of climate change! Though today the ABC is in serious strife over its credibility with the last Q&A programme.
130
Do you mean Dead Parrot talks?
Haven’t you heard? Global warming is only resting!
https://youtu.be/4vuW6tQ0218
110
By 2020 a zero climate sensitivity.
That’s an interesting prediction. Few, very very few climate scientists will know or admit, but there are no real compelling physical/theoretical arguments why climate sensitivity actually does exist and is a fundamental property of climate itself. CS is a construct – dating back to the late 1970s when definitely no complex 3D numerical climate models existed to ‘confirm’ this – and CS is only ‘valid’ under a number of assumptions (radiative equilibrium, climate system behaves and responds as “a whole”). Until now numerical climate models have behaved as if CS does exist, but that may change with ever increasing model complexity. It is not inconceivable that at some point the conclusion may become that the whole CS concept simply is incorrect or inadequate for describing the behaviour of the climate system as a whole.
2020, we’ll see.
90
Just so there is no doubt, I winked there, and
2020is 2030.I’d rather work out the real climate sensitivity that extrapolate something as unreliable as
peer reviewed publications.
141
Jo, fundamentally these ECS’s are responding to the pause, so that the longer the pause continues, the lower these estimates are forced. So, there is a rational reason for believing the ECS estimates will come down quickly so long as the pause continues or we get cooling.
We all agree the estimates are heading downward with the best current best estimate of ECS now dropping below 2C.
You’ve also made the excellent point that the linear trend cannot possibly carry on anywhere near as far as 2030 – but we are just poking fun at the IPCC for their silly long term projections!
But because it is dropping in response to the pause, we can have a rational guess at where it’s heading.
Using a simple linear trend of ECS it will be 1C in 2020. Based on the linear trend of gain, the ECS for this gain will be 1.7C in 2020.
With all the recent estimates bar one being below 2.5C, it’s reasonable to predict that almost all will be below 2C sometime not long after 2020.
80
This is relativly easy to do Jo, on the scientists own numbers. There are two sanity (boundary tests) checks I used on this problem
This is one
Best estimate is that global warming due to GHGs add 10 degrees of the 33 degrees between theoretical earth average temperature
We also know that the outgoing CO2 stopband is 85% opaque as shown by the spectral analysis of the earth from space.
So we can formulate a functional relationship between GH warming and CO2 opacity from that.
10/85 = 0.117 deg per percent opacity
A doubling of CO2 presumably halves the gap between 85 and 100 percent opacity. Ie opacity increases by 7.5 % to 92.5%.
7.5 × 0.117 gives 0.882 degrees per doubling. But this analysis also shows the problem of saturation, the next doubling can only increase opacity from 92.5 to 96.25%, the logarithmic fuction breaks down because the outwelling energy is limited. The climate science view is that the energy blocking capability of CO2 is constant and doesn’t saturate, as it doubles, that is each doubling increases opacity linearly (opacity can exceed 100%). They suggest the spectral lines will widen, I say that would ONLY happen if the atmosphere got more dense. Mars has 10 times Earths CO2 density but has narrower spectral lines.
Anyway, this means that based on the most basic warming data there is – the doubling after next would be 3.75 x 0.117 a CS of 0.43, after that 0.22 and after that 0.11. The average CS of the next 4 doublings is 0.5.
The earth warming from blackbody theoretical is about the most basic data we have and this warming rate includes ALL feedbacks. On IPCC estimates @ 3.3 deg per doubling they suggest warming of 13.2 degrees over the next 4 doublings meaning that they are attributing more warming to 14% opacity change in the future than the 85 percent opacity change so far has actually caused.
It’s clear what this analysis shows: the models disagree with the facts by a factor of between 2 and 12. The sanity check fails, the IPCC numbers do not represent a reasonable projection of this system, this system IS reaching saturation and it has CS of less than 1.
80
The last time I did the calculation , Mars had 25 times the Co2 mass over every square meter compared to Earth.
AFAIK, line broadening depends on total pressure not partial pressure of CO2 so a little extra CO2 on Earth won’t cause significant line broadening.
40
Has modeled klimate ‘skience’ ever been settled….just briefly, just once?
Put another way. When an uncertain conceptual ‘metric’ is used around invalid models and usefully feeds the fear and the funding, it’s all nicely settled. When it is shown as intellectually inadequate and scientifically redundant, dump it like a hot potato and segue away to the challenging strains of ‘Live Another Day‘.
They betray themselves at every turn.
71
If it does exist then it is not a simple scalar value, it’s at least logarithmic with temperature and probably a rather complex function of time, temperature and humidity.
For example we know that over ocean (70% of the surface) that if the temperature goes above about 33 degrees the humidity will almost certainly rise to the dew point. Clouds form and reflect light away, leading to cooling such that temperatures over water rarely exceed 33 degrees. This mechanism is a saturation situation, and it even overshoots unity so that the climate sensitivity of a thunderstorm is not just zero, like saturation of an amplifier would be, it’s negative.
Climate sensitivity is NOT a simple number, this is probably critical error number 2 right after the assumption that radiation in must equal radiation out.
50
When I think Cb’s of the ITCZ I am seeing a giant convection driven vacuum cleaner that shunts heat from the surface into the high atmosphere with a lapse rate far exceeding ambient. As you appreciate, Cb’s are relatively short lived highly energetic, extremely cooling events. Their albedo role seems small when compared with their convective mechanism. On the other hand, the chronic 10/10 stratocumulus that covers the British Isles for so much of the time and is believed to be responsible for the British temperament as much as it is for the temperature would have a significant albedo role?
40
David,
Are the years on the abscissa AD or BC?
50
A few years ago it was reported on one of the blogs that once TCR gets down to about 1 C per doubling of CO2 from the pre-industrial levels generally taken as 280 ppm, then the climate sensitivity cannot be distinguished from background noise in the climate system.
Pre -industrial levels of CO2 are regarded as around 280 ppm although paleo fossil plant leave stomata, the plant leave stomata sizes and numbers, the openings on the under side of plant leaves through which CO2 is taken in and O2 and water vapour created during the photo synthesis process are expelled, changes with CO2 increases or decreases which in paleo fossil leaves indicate pre-industrial levels of CO2 were around 320 to 335 ppm.
The lower figure of 280 ppm of course makes the apparent increase in CO2 over the last century, due of course to human burning of fossil fuels according to the alarmists , appear to have a much greater apparent impact than any increase from 320 ppm of supposedly anthropogenily created CO2 from fossil fuels.
At a claimed starting point of 285 ppm of pre-industrial CO2 concentration it also increases the apparent TCR, the short Term Climate Response, the climate sensitivity with the larger apparent but perhaps quite fallacious increase in CO2 concentrations to 398 ppm over the same time period.
————————-
The greatest scientific scandal of our times
[quoted ]
The notion of low pre-industrial CO2 atmospheric level, based on such poor knowledge, became a widely accepted Holy Grail of climate warming models. The modelers ignored the evidence from direct measurements of CO2 in atmospheric air indicating that in 19th century its average concentration was 335 ppmv[11] (Figure 2). In Figure 2 encircled values show a biased selection of data used to demonstrate that in 19th century atmosphere the CO2 level was 292 ppmv[12]. A study of stomatal frequency in fossil leaves from Holocene lake deposits in Denmark, showing that 9400 years ago CO2 atmospheric level was 333 ppmv, and 9600 years ago 348 ppmv, falsify the concept of stabilized and low CO2 air concentration until the advent of industrial revolution [13].
[ more ]
——
[ Graph with circled Callender selected CO2 values]
Fig 2; The mean values of atmospheric CO2 measurements from Europe, North America and Peru, between 1800 and 1955.
The encircled values between 1860 and 1900 were arbitrary selected by Callender [ 12 ] for estimation of 292 ppmv as the average 19th century CO2 concentration.
Slocum [ 11 ] demonstrated that without such selection these data average 335 ppmv.
160
A full bibliography of all the papers cited would help, especially when one does battle with those who accept AGW/CAGW uncritically.
I followed the links listed, but no concise bibliography was forthcoming. It might also help to separate the two regressions (same scale, different graphs) for clarity. Present the above graph, then separate the two data sets to emphasize the fact that both are trending towards the noise level.
Thanks,
Mark H.
60
… and have the baseline at zero !
20
When the negative feedback is trending,
Showing graph lines drop down and start bending,
As the heat won’t increase,
And may even decrease,
While the CO2 rises unending.
181
Of course we could be measuring the CO2 sensitivity to temperature, not temperature sensitivity to a CO2, but even that is low.
The core idea of Man made Global Warming is that CO2 and CO2 alone causes warming where physical chemistry tells us that warming produces CO2. The first is a theory. The second is fact. It is only Green politicians who interpret very poorly correlated increases in CO2 and temperature as sufficient evidence to attack democratic countries and build 220,000 useless windmills. The whole crazy idea is collapsing for lack of that one item which the communist Greens never had, any evidence.
192
Meh … so CO2 causes warming … or warming causes CO2 … who cares, they both happen, I am bored with this … what is Taylor doing, today … ?
51
The English cricketer?
50
Taylor Swift! Duh.
50
Who?
50
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n6/full/ngeo1836.html
+2.0 (17 scientists, 14 of them IPCC Lead Authors)
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-012-1375-3?LI=true
+2.0
http://folk.uio.no/gunnarmy/paper/aldrin_env_2012.pdf
+2.0
http://www.klimatupplysningen.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Bengtsson-Tellus.pdf
+2.0
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380014000404
+1.99
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-013-1770-4
+1.98 (median)
http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2003/23/c023p001.pdf
+1.9
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/785/2013/esdd-4-785-2013.html
+1.8
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/doc/publications/Chylek-Lohmann-GRL2008-comment.pdf
+1.8
http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/5/139/2014/esd-5-139-2014.html
+1.8
http://file.scirp.org/Html/24283.html
+1.7
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-014-2342-y
+1.64
http://www.princeton.edu/~gkv/papers/Padilla_etal11.pdf
+1.6 (TCR)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011GL050226/abstract
+1.55 (TCR)
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00473.1
+1.6
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/pdf/EARTH_1890.pdf
+1.5
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.3706.pdf
+1.35
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/5/529/2014/esdd-5-529-2014.html
+1.3
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13143-014-0011-z
+1.3
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/8/4923/2012/cpd-8-4923-2012.pdf
+1.1
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/published_E&E%20douglass_christy.pdf
+1.1
http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/k76363u651167q65/
+0.96
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/25/2013/esdd-4-25-2013.html
+0.67
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
+0.67
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Spencer-and-Braswell-08.pdf
+0.67
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Spencer_Misdiagnos_11.pdf
+0.62
http://www.scipublish.com/journals/ACC/papers/846
+0.60
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612001617
+0.53
http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/3678681q807n8236/fulltext.pdf?page=1
+0.51
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/doc/publications/Chylek-et-al-JGR2007-climate-sens.pdf
+0.50
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01592922
+0.50
http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr/10//c010p069.pdf
+0.40
http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCapacity.pdf
+0.39
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0450%281979%29018%3C0822%3AQCTPIO%3E2.0.CO%3B2
+0.30
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2006GL026355/abstract
+0.29
http://www.klimatupplysningen.se/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/paltridgearkingpook.pdf
+0.26
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/DK_reply_PLA_2012.pdf
+0.21
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412008001232
+0.02
http://atlatszo.hu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/article.pdf
+0.00
Thanks Ken! – Jo
320
Thanks and I am astounded at the list!
For interested I make the average ECS 1.06C
But if we take the average of the feedback and not temperature, the average feedback is -0.45 which equates to an ECS of 0.7C
100
Love the last paper! Clear established science with real observational data but the conclusion is damning of AGW, regardless of the reason for the CO2 increase.
“It is amazing that the global warming community and GCM modelers could debate CO2 greenhouse effect based AGW issues for decades without having the slightest knowledge about the true IR atmospheric absorption and the related physical laws. According to the simple-minded or ‘classic’ view of the greenhouse effect the global average greenhouse temperature change may be estimated by
the direct application of the Beer-Lambert law moderated by some local or regional scale weather phenomenon. This is not true. “
100
Agree that the importance of the last paper is its rebuttal of the physical basis for the global warming theory which is endorsed by IPPC (and the Pope among others):
The Greenhouse Effect and the Infrared Radiative Structure of the Earth’s Atmosphere
http://atlatszo.hu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/article.pdf
Needless to say – there is no mentioning of this paper in the contribution from Working Group I (On the scientific basis) to the fifth assessment report by IPCC.
81
was it reveiwed by cook?
31
What was that reply supposed to mean?
20
Is this list just made up? It’s not very reassuring when by chance the first link I clicked turned out to have an ECS of 1.5 and NOT the 0.53 stated in the list.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612001617
They give a response to forcing of 0.41 K / [W/m^2] or as they say 0.41 K W^-1 m^2.
Multiply 0.41 K W^-1 m^2 by the 3.7 W m^-2 for the estimated forcing of a CO2 doubling and that’s 1.517 degrees.
The 2nd link I clicked basically at random was this one:
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/5/529/2014/esdd-5-529-2014.html
In the list this is said to have an ECS of 1.3, but the paper quite plainly says it estimates a TCR of 1.3, so the ECS will be higher. According to Otto et al, ECS can be estimated as 130% of TCR, so that’s 1.3*1.3 = 1.7 degrees.
Do we need to test any further? And that was a “star quality” comment? Now we know why peer review doesn’t work, you’ve all just participated in a dysfunctional example of it.
It’s at least valuable as list of references to check.
40
“It’s at least valuable as list of references to check.”
Thank you for your polite and warranted reprimand. We should be more diligent.
30
As I said above these ECS’s are dropping because of the pause.
To explain that, if the ECS is solely based on a short period of warming post “global cooling” and now being continuously scaled down because of the pause, then we would expect that the scale of warming would be given roughly as follows:
If there q years of warming at rate A (c/yr) + y years of pause (at no warming), the rate of warming is roughly given by Aq/(q + y)
The ECS has just about halved in 15 years. This suggests that the contribution of the pause is equal in value to the original data. So, a way to model this would be
ECS = 4 x 15/(15 + y) (y being the number of years since millennium).
This now suggests the ECS will fall to 1.7C by 2020 (if pause continues) and 1.5C by 2025.
40
Oops … there’s a constant of translation from rate of warming to long term ECS value … but it doesn’t actually affect the final conclusion.
20
My ECS range is about 0.3 to 2.0 C, with a central estimate of about 1.1 C. I arrive at that value for 4 predominant reasons:
a) a direct, no-feedback doubling of CO2 yields ~1.2 C of warming (this is widely accepted by scientists);
—–
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/044.htm
“If the amount of carbon dioxide were doubled instantaneously, with everything else remaining the same, the outgoing infrared radiation would be reduced by about 4 Wm-2. In other words, the radiative forcing corresponding to a doubling of the CO2 concentration would be 4 Wm-2. To counteract this imbalance, the temperature of the surface-troposphere system would have to increase by 1.2°C (with an accuracy of ±10%), in the absence of other changes.”
—–
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~davidc/ATMS211/articles_optional/Hansen81_CO2_Impact.pdf
“The increase of equilibrium surface temperature for doubled atmospheric CO2 is ∼1.2 C. This case is of special interest because it is the purely radiative-convective result, with no feedback effects.”
—–
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2009Q1/111/Readings/Lorius1990_ice-core.pdf
“The radiative forcing resulting from doubled atmospheric CO2 would increase the surface and tropospheric temperature by 1.2°C if there were no feedbacks in the climate system.”
—–
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=967
“If there were no feedbacks in the Earth’s climate system, physics tells us climate sensitivity would be 1.2°C for a doubling of CO2.”
—–
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL025540/pdf
“An increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration from 275 to 550 ppm is expected to increase radiative forcing by about 4 W m2, which would lead to a direct warming of 1.2°C in the absence of feedbacks or other responses of the climate system [IPCC, 2001]”
—–
http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2009/04/recent-lower-global-temperatures/
“By itself, doubling atmospheric CO2 would increase global temperatures by about 1.2 degrees C. Even most of the scientists skeptical of the severity of climate change agree on this basic point.”
—–
b) to get from 1.2 C to the catastrophic 3.0 or 4.0 C or 5.0 C of warming that CAGW proponents believe to be true wholly relies on the theoretical concept of runaway positive feedback cycling with water vapor/clouds within the greenhouse effect, and direct observations have not shown that feedbacks with water vapor, and especially with clouds, are always positive, but they may be negative; and water vapor levels have not shown any obvious increasing trends in recent decades, but have instead been stable;
[And besides, why didn’t this runaway positive cycling occur at 270 ppm, or for the 100s of years during the Little Ice Age, to warm it up? If runaway water vapor/clouds positive feedbacks occur at 500 ppm, why wouldn’t this cycling have occurred at 270 ppm? What are the physics that explain this assumptive “kick-in” point at a certain CO2 ppm level?]
c) because, as even the IPCC acknowledges, CO2 radiative forcing of climate is calculated logarithmically, not linearly, meaning that the more CO2 buildup we get (doubling, tripling, quadrupling the airborne fraction), the less and less power it has to warm the planet; for example, the IPCC indicates that doubling CO2 from 300 ppm to 600 ppm yields the same amount of radiative forcing (4 W/m2) as doubling from 4,800 ppm to 9,600 ppm (again, 4 W/m2);
d) since 1940, with 90 ppm of CO2 buildup, the global surface climate has warmed by just 0.4 C (HadCRUT), and sea surface temperatures have warmed by just 0.3 C since 1940. In the last 18 years, with nearly 40 ppm of CO2 buildup, the planet has warmed by less than 0.1 C (according to the IPCC AR5). From 1940 to 1976, with 30 ppm of CO2 buildup, the planet *cooled* by -0.2 C. These recent trends from the last 100 years do not suggest a high climate sensitivity to CO2 buildup. The geological record also doesn’t suggest a high climate sensitivity to CO2 buildup. For example, during the late Ordovician, much of the Earth was covered in thick ice sheets (multiple glacial cycles) while CO2 levels were in the 4,000 ppm to 5,000 ppm range. Also, for the last 10,000 years, CO2 levels have risen from ~255 ppm to 400 ppm…and yet ocean heat content is still about 2.0 C cooler than it was 10,000 years ago (Rosenthal et al, 2013). That’s a long-term (10,000 years) non-correlation.
70
The 1.2C figures comes from … guess who? … Hansen. It is based on the 1998 HITRAN database of spectral lines (if I remember rightly).
Hermann Harde repeated the exercise using the much more detailed line structure in the 2007 database (which for some reason none of the academics use) and came to a figure some 30% lower.
80
Just two small technical corrections. TCR, transient climate response, is defined as 1%year CO2 increase to a doubling (takes ~70 years), and the temperature change expected at that point. The difference to ECS is mainly from ocean thermal mass lag.
The energy budget approach (lewis and Curry 2014, Lewis 2015) is at present insensitive to the ‘pause’. It is slightly sensitive to the overall time frame (start 1880, start ~1950). There are a number of other simpler methods for approximating ECS. They all point to Guy Callendar’s 1938 estimate of ECS~ 1.7 being about right. Which for the Bode feedback model and Lindzens Planck grey earth 1.2 for CO2 alone, gives sum of feedbacks f~0.25 versus canonical IPCC 0.65, of which 0.5 is water vapor alone.
31
The big “megasauris in the dunny” is the ice-age cycle. During this temperature changed by around 8C for less than a doubling of CO2. Because no one** has been able to explain this massive temperature change, they invoked the idea of massive positive feedbacks to explain how a relatively small change in CO2 can lead to a massive change in temperature.
Based on the ice-age cycle if all the warming were caused by CO2 (which it isn’t) then ECS is around 10C!!
But this is the fundamental historical reason for large ECS’s.
However, the ice-age age cycle also shows that during the interglacial period, that there are massive negative feedbacks present, because each warming period stops rapidly after which very little upward change occurs. This is only possible in a system where there are massive negative feedbacks preventing further warming. So, it is almost certain that we have negative feedbacks dominating so ECS will be less than 1C***
**(I’ve made an attempt http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2015/02/17/the-caterpillar-theory-of-tectonic-plate-movement-its-just-simple-physics/)
***1C (1.2 according to Hansen & 1998 HITRAN data, 30% less according to harde using 2007 HITRAN data)
90
Yeah, nah.
Since 1990 it has not been increasing at 1% per year, or it would be over 450ppm already.
It takes any quantity 70 years to double if it increases at 1%/year.
If pCO2 (400ppmv) were to increase at 1%/yr from this year onwards, it would reach 800ppmv by 2085, and reach 285*2=570ppmv in 36 years, or 2051.
So for once you can say the outlook is “75% better than Jo previously thought”.
20
Why isn’t it patently obvious already that climate sensitivity (to CO2) is and always has been ZERO. This is more than amply demonstrated by the recent hiatus – rising CO2 yet flat temperatures.
223
A climate sensitivity to CO2 of zero would stop the grant gravy train. They can’t have that now can they?
120
What an insane assertion.
012
On the one hand I agree with your conclusion, but I had to downvote anyway because you made no attempt to substantiate your ad-hominem with some clearer explanation of the issue.
Allow me to fill the gap.
Whatever effect increases in CO2 have they are additional to whatever else the climate is doing due to the multitude of other factors which affect it. The recent flatlining in world temperatures while CO2 skyrockets is sufficient to establish CO2 was not the main driver of temperature increase over the last 30 years. The longer the Halt In Warming persists the less warming there is that can be attributed to CO2. However this does not tell us that the effect of CO2 is zero. If a natural ozone-induced or ocean current induced cycle of internal variability was going to send temperatures down at this time anyhow, then theoretically it would have been colder by now without the additional CO2. There is currently no empirical evidence establishing finally the net effect of CO2 on temperature, just a bunch of estimates which have been trending down since research began.
That is why, as you so concisely put it, the belief “climate sensitivity (to CO2) is and always has been ZERO is more than amply demonstrated by the recent hiatus” is “an insane assertion”.
If the net warming effect of CO2 increase is zero, it must be demonstrated by more careful analysis that separates other natural confounding factors. Some people claim to have experiments which establish that answer under simplified circumstances, the rest of us are taking somebody’s word for it.
60
Craig Thomas did not make a conclusion. He made an assertion, and a rather rude one!
I have made an experiment of the type you refer to. It is simplistic in its execution but profound in what it was trying to achieve. I did not show any affect from back radiation with a reflector (ie 100%). CO2 greenhouse effect must be much less.
http://www.galileomovement.com.au/docs/2012-10-31_AnExperimentToDemonstrateThePlausibilityOfTheGreenHouseGasEffect.pdf
For a more theoretical argument see Dr Pierre Latour explain why Dr Roy Spencer has got it Ass about.
http://www.principia-scientific.org/no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still.html
ps You have to examine the equations!
12
Moderator,
Please explain why this comment got moderated.
10
Ok, all cleared by 9:08pm, but why did it get moderated?
00
I’d guess it’s the “A double-S”, which is even more impolite in connection with Mr Spencer.
Also, you even admit in that document that you don’t know if the plastic bottle was a material that blocks IR. That’s critical.
You don’t need to know that material’s opacity if you put the foil on the inside of the bottle, but then you might need two bottles and just swap the black can between them.
When the choice is between “the foil wasn’t reflecting IR back onto the can” or “The blackbody physics that engineers use every week of the year is false”, I’m probably going to go with the first option.
30
Thanks for reading my experiment.
I
I think I have worked out how to do that now using a modified thermos bottle. I will advise when I have something further.
The problem is to differentiate between emissivity of the foil and reflected radiation.
10
Andrew, you *still* don’t understand the term “ad hominem”.
Suggesting that sensitivity is zero is quite clearly an insane proposition. Nothing “ad hominem” in pointing that out.
03
Actually, Craig, you don’t understand the meaning of “insane“. An assertion by itself cannot be insane, only a person can be insane for believing an assertion (or taking an action) which is either illogical or contradicted by knowledge already in their possession. Every example in the dictionary definition of insane is a statement about a person enacting a belief, none of them are statements about a proposition in some abstract, disembodied, purely conceptual space. So when you said it was “an insane assertion”, those words mean you believed the person who made it is insane. That’s an ad-hominem statement or a personal attack. If that was not what you meant then you should be more careful with wording.
Your second mistake is assuming any appearance of the phrase ad hominem is a contraction of Argumentum ad Hominem, but it is not.
An ad-hominem statement is any remark made about a person, that’s its literal meaning and its dictionary definition. That is a broader definition than the Argumentum Ad-Hominem Fallacy, which presumably you are referring to, in which a proposition is supported based on characteristics of a person not logically connected to the proposition. As further guidance please note the 2nd answer in the Q&A section on FallacyFiles.
I repeated your ad-hominem statement, but it was not an Argumentum Ad-hominem Fallacy because I first provided a counter-argument to the assertion which then supports the charge of insanity.
(Sorry Ilma but logic is logic.)
20
Interesting how the “urgency and cost of essential mitigation” is inversely proportional to the estimates of climate sensitivity.
Does this mean that if the hiatus comes to an end and temperatures start rising again, the warmists will shut the fudge up?
50
If the warmist’s goal posts get any closer they’ll have to use the Hadron Collider to get at least something through.
Oh and own goals don’t count but don’t tell them that. 😉
61
It sorta faded away from the edges inward. In the end, there was nothing left but the Cheshire cat’s grin fading away and with a final pop, it was gone …
Pointman
121
So it is, Pointman. As already noted here, climate sensitivity is essentially a correlation measure. The graph can be easily simulated with a computer program. Take a long list of two measurements, does not matter what, but let them have a zero correlation overall. Compute correlations in windows of a small width. As soon as the correlation exceeds a certain alarm value, stop the procedure. From the start of that window, let the program compute correlations time and again whereas the width of the window increases. Plot the the values together with the last window value, and let the program also print a random name from a list with author names. Send the result to Jonova.
00
I wonder when we can expect to see this chart in the main stream media? Please send it to your favourite politicians.
Just imagine this chart being on a big street sign outside the Paris-Le Bourget site for COP21 – the science is (un)settled.
100
Last Tango In Paris?
80
** chuckle **
20
An encouraging thing that has been happening is some in the climate fraterity are starting to accept the natural forcings. So the UK Met Office found a couple years back that when they included the AMO their model projection for temperature was flat out to 2018. We’re now a couple of years into that projection and the peak that we were supposed to go through never happened…which shows they are still over-estimating.
Including the 60 year cycle almost halves equilibrium climate sensitivity since it caused about 40% of the temperature rise in the IPCC model training period (1906-2005).
The second thing is the solar forcing which NASA GSFC accepted (note: not GISS). The solar indirect forcing was likewise responsible for about 40% of the temperature rise 1906-2005 as we reached the solar grand maximum in that year.
So far no one outside of the sceptical side have made the obvious connection that 1 and 1 make 2: that if you lower ECS by 40% due to the ocean cycles then you should also lower ECS another 40% because of the Sun. That takes ECS down from 2.5 C/doubling to 0.5 C/doubling (which is close to my estimate derived from 250 years of HadCET – since I use both the solar forcing and the ocean cycle components).
So where we are going to is an ECS around 0.5 C/doubling. Unfortunately that is fatal for the funding of these various government scientists, climate hanger-oners and political activists. I expect it will take a while for it to finally fall apart.
100
Which interestingly is broadly consistent with my estimate from rise over blackbody and CO2 saturation of 0.88 and falling.
60
My estimate for ECS is 0.7 C/doubling based on the CET. I did the model in 2010 and it has fitted the data in 2012 and 2013 pretty well. I haven’t checked 2014 yet due to slackness. 🙂
60
I’ll paste the same link I gave at Tallbloke’s as nothing has fundamentally changed in this black-box model since January. http://i.imgur.com/jOLMXcP.gif
I got ~ 0.6° per CO2 doubling but that’s not an objectively optimised result. In this model run I had deliberately fixed the Svensmark effect to a nice round modest number just to see what that would imply for the remaining factors. That’s hypothetical as I don’t have any papers to tell me how to convert the heliospheric magnetic field strength into a radiant forcing. There’s also no feedback from CO2 at all, as SST does not alter cloud cover in this model when in the real world it must do from the evaporative increase.
All the heat that leaves the surface by convection is added to the ocean’s radiance to form the total OLR at TOA, which turns out to be in the right sort of ballpark but is 3W/m^2 too high and the trend isn’t steep enough. (ie the world is radiatively cooling faster than my model predicts even though my model matches surface temperature, so some kind of vertical energy redistribution is occurring that this simple 2-layer model cannot represent, let alone simulate).
This is nowhere near an accurate model of the climate but it does help to get one thinking about the sheer complexity of the real thing. It also means a decrease is forecast, but we’ll see about that in about 6 years.
Meh, it’s all fun and games until the revolution begins.
70
My first look of the graphic is the temperature trace is HadCRUT3 not 4. Heh. You can immediately see the cycle in HadCRUT3 which they’ve been trying to disappear in the homogenously homogenisedly adjusted HadCRUT4.
Then secondly your analysis is from 1880 or so, not from 1906. 1880 was the peak of the 60 year cycle and 1906 the trough. So your analysis Andrew goes from peak to peak to peak – exactly as it should. The IPCC goes from trough to peak, thereby including about 0.3 C of an artefact. It is a tell that they start almost exactly at the bottom of the cycle and stop at the top of the following cycle. Curious.
30
Which is pretty close to the result from Idso’s 8 natural experiments.
50
Why am I not surprised at David Stockwell’s chopping a century off of the history of climate sensitivity estimates ?
20
Mnestheus
How far back should you go? How about long before Arrhenius got excited by the world wide heatwaves of 1896, back past 1883.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/124795324
00
The analysis of radiative forcing began with Fourier’s 1827 Memoire Sur Les Temperatures Du Globe Terrestre,
Within a generation, instruments were designed and built to measure it : in what amounts to a very conservative Victorian enterprise
[Still being devious, in using a spoof site I see. Richard – I am not inclined to publish this one either] Fly
[True Fly, we’ll take what we can get. We like Fourier in this house. Few people on the planet have spent as much time studying his work as David Evans. – Jo]
00
The graphs could represent the trajectory of a couple of crashing aircraft with the torrent of manic, panicked, hyperventilated drivel coming out in the MSM ahead of the Paris Festival of Kool Ade mirroring that of their crew or should I say their “Team” members.
60
I’m sorry but I can’t find the reference. Arrhenius was supposed to have revised his estimate down to about 0.4°C once Angstrom (jnr) pointed out to him the problem with his model. That should probably be on the plot.
40
In this blog discussion we are treating the climate sensitivity of CO2 as a universal number that is applicable over the whole planet.
The reality is that the CS of CO2 without feedbacks of any sort is around 1.2 C for a doubling of pre industrial CO2. [ One of our experts here will correct me if I have that CO2 feedback number wrong ]
All other numbers outside of that number are feedbacks influenced and derived from the still unknown interlinks between all the greenhouse gases such as CO2, water vapour, aerosols and etc.
The realisation is emerging that Climate sensitivity is highly variable in that it is heavily influenced by Latitudinal effects such as water vapour, solar infeeds, infrared and UV effects .
As well it is becoming apparent that Climate Sensitivity in any one region is quite variable on a seasonal and weather influenced basis.
Professor emeritus Roger Pielke Snr has quite a lot to say on that subject;
Further Analysis Of Radiative Forcing
&
Relative Roles of CO2 and Water Vapor in Radiative Forcing
.
Judith Curry in her Climate Etc post in 2010 ; CO2 no-feedback sensitivity has this to say ;
[quoted ]
One of the nicest analyses I’ve seen that explains the latitudinal variations of CO2 forcing is given by Pielke Sr (see also this additional post), which provides total, troposphere, and surface forcing for tropical and subarctic summer, winter. The impacts of doubling CO2 are seen to vary strongly with latitude and season, owing the blocking effects by clouds and water vapor on the CO2 forcing. For example, the surface forcing is much larger in the subarctic winter than in the tropics, since the subarctic winter air is very dry and clouds are thin, and hence CO2 plays a bigger role.
Calculating the global CO2 forcing taking into account the geographical and seasonal variations has been done by Myhre and Stordahl 1997 (anyone locate a free online copy of this?) and also Soden and Held. To account for the variations in clouds, humidity and temperature, Myhre and Stordahl took the approach of using temperature and water vapor from the ECMWF analyses, climatological ozone data, and ISCCP cloud data; if I were designing this experiment, I would have made the same choices. The Myhre and Stordahl calculations are dated owing to deficiencies in the band model, and their line-by-line model was almost certainly not treating the far infrared correctly.
Note, Myhre and Stordahl found a 12.7% difference between CO2 radiative forcing with clouds versus clear sky. Radiative forcing with clouds (and aerosols) is a more complicated problem with greater uncertainties. But the calculations made by Stephens and Woods cited at Pielke Sr’s site are probably definitive in terms of radiative transfer in a cloudy atmosphere.
[ / ]
50
What have clouds got to do with CO2 radiative forcing?
Willis Essenbach shows that clouds (and the water cycle) have a cooling effect.
Not forcing. Negative feedback.
21
Reminds me of S J Gould’s essay on the shrinking Hershey Bar, which predicted it would be the zero length Hershey bar eventually.
30
23 June: CarbonBrief: Robert McSweeney: Solar minimum could bring cold winters to Europe and US, but would not hold off climate change
A new study says even if the Sun’s activity did drop off for a while, it wouldn’t have much impact on rising global temperatures. But it could mean a higher chance of a chilly winter in Europe and the US, the researchers say…
The researchers used a climate model to run two scenarios where solar activity declines to a grand minimum. They then compared the results with a control scenario where the Sun continues on its regular cycle…
This wouldn’t make much of a dent in global temperature increases that could well exceed four degrees by the end of the century under RCP8.5, says lead author Sarah Ineson, a climate scientist at the UK Met Office…
With only small impacts on global climate, the study shows that a drop in the Sun’s strength shouldn’t delay action on climate change, says Prof Joanna Haigh, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, who wasn’t involved in the study…
Prof Jerry Meehl, from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, who also wasn’t involved, agrees…
Ineson, S. et al. (2015) Regional climate impacts of a possible future grand solar minimum. Nature Communications, doi:10.1038/ncomms8535
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/06/solar-minimum-could-bring-cold-winters-to-europe-and-us/
01
What would be good is the graph displayed the year in which the term “the science is settled” was first used, so we can see how ‘settled’ it really was..
But the looks of the graph, the science is still settling… 😉
70
Models, Model, Models!
Being male even at 77 years old, I will still take those with nice curves and with the right numbers to validate those curves than ever bother with those unvalidated “models” from the alarmist branch of climate science.
Which might be translated as ; We mightn’t be able to alter that natural “chilly winter” weather but we can sure play merry hell with those “man made” temperature data numbers to keep the “global temperatures” rising.
61
This is a good sign. They are starting to get a better understanding of the processes and to put some more realistic assumptions into the models?
Nevertheless they still have a way to go to reach Dr John Nicol’s physics-based conclusion that extra CO2 will have negligible effect. Time for the modellers to get out there and do some real physics or is that too sensible?
50
Via Drudge:
> Weak sun could offset some global warming in Europe and US – study (guardian)
“Global warming in northern Europe and the eastern US could be partially offset in future winters because of the sun entering a weaker cycle similar to the one which enabled frost fairs to take place on the river Thames in the 17th and 18th century, according to new research.
> BRITAIN could face colder than average winters with a plunge in solar activity threatening a new “little ice age” in the next few decades (express.co.uk)
“The latest study, published in Nature Communications, found reduced solar activity will lead to an overall cooling of the Earth of 0.1C.
A much bigger cooling effect is expected for Britain, northern Europe and North America where thermometers could drop by 0.8C.”
60
Thanx handjive, excellent contrast.
20
What happens when climate sensitivity goes negative?
We will all freeze, it will be blamed on CO2, and the
WarmistsClimate Changists will tell us that they predicted it all along.71
Let me quote Richard Feynman:
“We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong–and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.”
Well yes, perhaps physicists have cured that disease. But that Climate Scientists suffer from it is evident from the chart.
The quote above is also the answer to Cowtan’s acknowledgement that adjusted figures are a tenth of a degree higher than unadjusted figures. “Why would scientists do that?” he asks. “Diseased scientific process”, answers Feynman.
60
Leo, you don’t really seem to know much about ECS.
The reason the range covered by the estimates for ECS is mainly shrinking from the high values is because that’s where the most uncertainty is.
As for your Feynman anecdote, it seems that what he is describing is some people’s irrational rejection of numbers/facts that don’t fit in to a pre-conceived idea.
You have to ask yourself – who is enormously keen on throwing out all estimates of high ECS values without offering any valid scientific reason for doing so???
115
Perhaps you can answer this, Craig Thomas.
It is widely agreed by scientists (IPCC, NASA, etc.) that, without feedbacks with water vapor/cloud, doubling CO2 levels from 280 ppm to 560 ppm amounts to a radiative forcing change of ~4 W/m-2, and thus a temperature change of ~1.2 C.
The only way we can get from 1.2 C to the high ECS values of 3.0 C and up is to have strongly positive feedbacks with water vapor and cloud. The problem with that is, water vapor levels have not shown any discernible increasing trends in the last few decades despite the warming. Not only that, but water vapor levels are largely determined by solar factors—they’re high year-round in the tropics, low year-round at the poles, and seasonally high or low depending on winter/summer at the margins in between. A tiny change of 1.0 C in the last 150 years is not going to significantly affect water vapor levels. As for clouds, it’s quite well established that the longwave forcing of increased clouds is easily superseded by the shortwave, meaning that more clouds actually lead to negative feedbacks, or cooling, not warming.
So please provide a detailed answer as to why you think climate sensitivity should be high, and not low.
121
Craig, you responded to me with 4 paragraphs. Let me take them in order:
1) Leo, you don’t really seem to know much about ECS.
If anything I said was wrong, don’t waste time calling me ignorant, tell me what I got wrong.
2)The reason the range covered by the estimates for ECS is mainly shrinking from the high values is because that’s where the most uncertainty is.
That’s not a rational statement. Your conclusion and your given reason are not connected. It’s perfectly possible in principle for reducing uncertainty to result in higher sensitivity estimates.
The article is not about the range shrinking, it’s about the value shrinking over time.
3)As for your Feynman anecdote, it seems that what he is describing is some people’s irrational rejection of numbers/facts that don’t fit in to a pre-conceived idea.
No, that’s not what he’s talking about. At least, he doesn’t describe it as irrational. It’s perfectly reasonable to search for mistakes you might have made when you get results you don’t expect. But that reasonable practice can lead to pathological science, as it did with the charge on the electron, and I judge, also did with estimated Climate Sensitivity and with choices for what measurements were to be adjusted by homogenisation.
You can find the whole article here: http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html
4) You have to ask yourself – who is enormously keen on throwing out all estimates of high ECS values without offering any valid scientific reason for doing so???
No I don’t. The only thing I need ask is “Is it true?”
And in the “Is it true?” field, you really should prove that there is anybody who meets your description, preferably by quoting their own words.
The issue is never who wants what, or what ulterior motive they might have, or how they might gain from it. Your wife might have a lot to gain in terms of domestic harmony from saying she loves you- but that does not prove that she doesn’t love you.
If I used your yardstick, I’d end up as crazy as the eco-loons who accuse me of being in the pay of coal when I point out their claims are factually false. That accusation says more troubling things about their character than it does about mine.
As for your assertion to the effect of “(The people you know about but chose not to name) who are enormously keen on throwing out all estimates of high ECS values without offering any valid scientific reason for doing so???” – can you name the well known IPCC figure who admitted the ‘long tail of high ECS estimates never had any physical basis’?
And do you agree that certainly does amount to a valid scientific reason for throwing them out? And do you further agree that the declining sensitivity estimates in the peer reviewed literature supports the idea that he is correct?
20
Curry’s “long tail” extends to 9.5 degrees, based on one subset of measurements that she used.
No physical basis? Why not tell Curry that.
04
You seem to have Lewis/Curry’s 1.64 calculation for *effective* climate sensitivity mixed up with the ECS estimates.
It’s also worth noting that Lewis/Curry’s calculation of *effective* climate sensitivity gives a maximum value of 9.5 if using a baseline starting in the 1930s.
You wouldn’t want to be *downplaying* the uncertainty, would you…?
211
I have to admit, I don’t know any difference between Effective Climate Sensitivity and Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity. Would you outline the difference please? Including appropriate citations if not unreasonably inconvenient.
20
It’s perfectly simple: Curry is modelling the observations, not a theoretical equilibrium state.
Apples. Oranges.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/345.htm
01
23 June: NZ Herald: Belinda Feek: -20 in Canterbury: Country’s big chill
New Zealand has nearly shuddered itself to the MetService’s record books after Mackenzie Country plummeted to -20 degrees overnight…
Mr Glassey said the bone-chilling -20 degrees recorded at Pukaki was close to the country’s coldest ever recorded of -25.6 in Ranfurly in 1903.
“So that’s very cold.”…
http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11469596
22 June: UK Independent: Jon Stone: Britain has twice as many taxpayer-funded electric car charging points as it actually has electric cars
The Government and local councils have splashed millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash on building thousands of electric car charging points that barely anyone uses.
Ministers confirmed that public money had been used to construct a network of of 57,567 publicly-funded charging points as of the end of the lastfinancial year.
The figure is roughly double the number electric cars actually registered for use on the road in Britain – around 24,500 as of December 2014, according to the Office for Low Emission Vehicles…
In 2013 the Government unveiled a £37m grant package to build the charging stations, with cash strapped local councils forking out even more money to install the points.
The grant was part of a £400m commitment towards encouraging the take-up of similar cars…
“If you were to charge a car in 12 minutes for a range of 500 km, for example, you’re probably using up electricity required to power 1,000 houses,” Yoshikazu Tanaka, a top Toyota engineer, told the Reuters news agency in April.
“That totally goes against the need to stabilise electricity use on the grid.”…
Electric cars are also only as green as the energy grid they charge from – and most of the UK’s electricity is generated from fossil fuels…
The massive spend on the unused charging network comes despite huge cuts to the Department for Transport…
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/britain-has-twice-as-many-taxpayerfunded-electric-car-charging-points-as-it-actually-has-electric-cars-10336652.html
01
“issue of the day” at 3 hrs in or 54 minutes from the end:
Download: 23rd June 2015: Tony Delroy’s Nightlife
http://www.abc.net.au/nightlife/
ABC bias!
SUMMARY:
Delroy: Govt’s post 2020 carbon emissions target to be announced – suggestions it could be stronger than expected; Pope Francis – changes needed to combat the warming;
Lancet, medical experts, how CC could affect health, suggests phase out coal.
Paris – G7 decarbonise global economy. is it time to decarbonise our world? Pope said he was influenced by Philippines super typhoon. extreme events. even in australia we are already seeing mosquito-borne diseases like ross river fever moving further south each year which is interesting twist.
lowy institute poll suggests australian public want action taken. fairfax political editor at the age, peter hartcher, writes the rightwing faction of the liberal party is not too keen.
lowy reports third successive rise in people saying GW is a serious problem. presented with 7 different possible sources of energy, solar energy is by far the highest ranked option 43% expect it to be our primary energy source for electricity in ten years.
first caller: teacher thinks population is too much & Pope should have included it. instead, we’re trying to cure illnesses and we have all these extra people to look after. Delroy mentions China one-child policy; caller jumps in: China, really! people’s obsession with the male has done a terrible. terrible bias to that society. caller says she is 74 & they want her to retire because they want cheaper teachers. experts in solar have all gone to silicon valley & china. under howard. not sure about under gillard & rudd.
Delroy: breakthroughs at UNSW with batteries. it’s starting to happen now. caller – go solar. Delroy – solar easier to store than ever, so solar should be it. we’ve been told it can’t do baseload, but we’re getting closer to it.
ironically, plays The Beatles “Here Comes the Sun”. caller: build desal plants everywhere.
21
Pat
I can’t imagine how you suffered long enough to find that.
I’ve pretty much given up on their ABC.
Doug
20
I found two NASA images that clearly show what matters with regard to Earth’s thermostat:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/Images/land_ocean_ice_cloud_2048.jpg
http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/57000/57730/land_ocean_ice_2048.jpg
When oceans turn white they reflect most of the incident solar insolation. When oceans are dark blue most of the solar insolation is absorbed.
When the water in the skies turns to mist a significant portion of the incident solar insolation is reflected by the atmosphere. When the water in the atmosphere is clear vapour most of the incident energy arrives at the surface.
CO2 would need to be decreasing cloud cover to cause an increase in temperature. The measured cloud cover indicates no correlation with CO2 given its up and down nature despite CO2 rising steadily:
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/climanal1.html
In fact optical thickness increased throughout the noughties while CO2 also increased.
41
The conversion/controversy concerning climate sensitivity is going to change when the earth abruptly cools. There is now observational evidence that the cooling has started and that the mechanism that was inhibiting the cooling is starting to abate.
The magnitude and rapidity of the cooling is going to be a big surprise. What is currently happening to the sun is the explanation for cyclic climate change and cyclic abrupt climate change in the paleo record. (i.e. the physical reason for the abrupt start and termination of the interglacial periods.)
As we are all now aware the planet resists forcing changes in climate by increasing or decreasing the amount of cloud cover/cloud duration/cloud properties in the tropic region (negative feedback) rather than amplifying forcing changes (positive feedback). Observations that support negative feedback rather than positive feedback are 18 years without warming, no tropical tropospheric hot spot, and the fact that the earth’s climate does not ring/oscillate when there is very large forcing change such as a super volcano eruption.
One of the logical reasons to appeal for positive feedback in response to a forcing change in climate is if there is negative feedback then there would need to be a massive forcing function to cause the observed abrupt and very, very large climate change in the paleo record. As it is a physical fact supported by observations and analysis that planet resists forcing changes (negative feedback) then there must be an unknown very, very large forcing function. P.S. It is the sun.
Roughly 75% of the warming in the last 150 years was due to solar cycle changes. As many are aware the solar cycle has been interrupted. The explanation of why there has been a delay of roughly 15 years for the unset of cooling is interesting and as will be the other climate change observational surprises. The physics of what is currently happening to the sun (why the sun and stars are different than the standard stellar model) is directly related to the physical why quasars do not exhibit time dilation, what is causing the non velocity redshift of quasar spectrum. The physical reason as to why there is a delay of 15 years in the onset of cooling and why solar changes cause massive and abrupt changes to the geomagnetic field (why there are burn marks on the planet when correlating in time with the abrupt changes to the geomagnetic field) is due to the physics of what happens when massive objects collapse.
Comment:
If and when there is in your face unequivocal observation evidence of cooling I will start a serial Cole notes explanation of what to expect next and the fundamental physics related to what is happening. Truly amazing. Astonishing impact on stellar theory, cosmology theory (universe is eternal rather than 13.7 billion years old), and fundamental physics in addition to the practical issues and climate war issues concerning/responding to abrupt cooling of the earth. We truly are living in interesting times!
As everyone is aware, as the universe is expanding astronomically distant objects are rapidly moving away from us. Quasar spectrum should exhibit time dilation if they are astronomically distant and hence moving rapidly away from us. It is an observational fact that Quasar spectrum does not exhibit time dilation which is a paradox.
http://phys.org/news190027752.html
http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Red-Redshifts-Cosmology-Academic/dp/0968368905/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top?ie=UTF8
40
Haha! Brilliant!
00
Haha! Brilliant!
00
FarmerDoug2 –
i didn’t listen to it on air. i just heard the first caller after the news headlines, & then scanned the podcast quickly this morning. it amazes me how gullible ABC staff are when it comes to CAGW. they simply won’t ask questions, think it through, check facts & figures, etc. and their listeners feel so above the rest of the population, yet they couldn’t be more ignorant on the topic.
as for academia! the following is written by:
Richard G Wilkinson is a British researcher in social inequalities in health and the social determinants of health. He is emeritus professor of public health at the University of Nottingham and co-author, with Kate Pickett, of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
Kate Pickett is professor of epidemiology at the University of York, and a National Institute for Health Research Career scientist. She co-founded the Equality Trust, a non-profit organisation seeking to explain the benefits of a more equal society, and is the co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better)
24 June: Guardian: Climate change is killing us. We must use the law to fight it
The ‘Claim the Sky’ campaign aims to save lives by protecting the atmosphere as a global asset, with governments taking legal action against those who pollute it
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
And last year the World Health Organisation estimated that the number of deaths from just the additional burden of disease and heatwaves would be 250,000 a year between 2030 and 2050.
If such figures are right, and the annual human cost of climate change is already around 100 times greater than that of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, the inaction of our governments looks bizarre. Estimates suggest that current national pledges to reduce carbon emissions by 2020, submitted in preparation for the UN’s climate change conference in Paris in December, will delay the arrival of more dangerous climate change by only two years – from 2036 to 2038…
Another promising strategy has been proposed by Professor Robert Costanza and Dr Ida Kubiszewski, both ecological economists at the Australian National University in Canberra. They argue that one way of gaining leverage in this situation would be to create an Earth Atmospheric Trust. Given that the atmosphere is a community asset which serves all of us, we need to use the public trust doctrine (outlined by Mary Wood in her book Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age) to assert ownership through a public trust. The public trust doctrine exists in many countries with legal systems derived from Roman law and has been used to protect common natural resources such as water sources, shorelines and wildlife for public benefit…
Legal action for damages would have to start with the 90 fossil fuel companies that are estimated to be responsible for two-thirds of all carbon emissions…
***Based on average estimates, damages might be set at $125 per ton of carbon. Proceeds should be used to fund the transition to renewable energy sources…
You can support it (‘Claim the Sky’ campaign ) by signing up on Avaaz…
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/24/climate-change-law-fight-claim-the-sky
02
pat, your regurgitating bs cannot be good for your health or hygiene.
11
CAGW gets sillier & sillier:
VIDEO: 24 June: CNET: Anthony Domanico: Thumbs-up: Bill Nye explains climate change with emoji
Can a complicated issue like climate change be explained using nothing but emoji? Bill Nye thinks so.
The video is Nye’s third in GE’s Emoji Science campaign. He’s previously used the symbols to explain “Star Wars”-style holograms and the theory of evolution…
http://www.cnet.com/au/news/thumbs-up-bill-nye-explains-climate-change-with-emoji/
00
Who needs Bill Nye to explain things Queen Victoria’s science advisor demonstrated to be obvious ?
[Still being devious, in using a spoof site I see. Richard – I am not inclined to publish this] Fly
(He shows no interest in making a comment about Jo’s presentation) CTS
[A cmon, he is good comic relief. This simplistic idea that one concept in spectroscopy runs the climate and that all the feedbacks, the watervapor, the most powerful GHG are irrelevant…. Jo]
11
I’m not surprised by this.
Almost everything shrinks when it gets colder.
Notable exceptions are arrogance and hubris.
30
Lewis must be a heavyweight; he tilts that end of the scale down.
==============
10
The other response coefficient, namely the response of the increase in atmospheric CO2 as a proportion of CO2 emissions, is also falling over time.
It would be interesting to see that graph.
10
Jo Nova – Great work and just about all the comments here understand and add to your posting. I know the work of Dr. J. Marvin Herndon has been completely dismissed since he first published in 1992, but his concept of the GeoReactor is quite compelling and explains a host of observations. Stellar ignition (fission igniting fusion), cycles of terrestrial warming and cooling, the geomagnetic field, planetary rotation, expansion tectonics ( including the presence of Berylium), the formation of all simple life-giving molecules — CO2 most certainly. The extra heat and miniscule uptick in CO2 comes from below.
10
I don’t know anything about that, but am curious to know what we do know about the magma ball underfoot….
30
Jo,
Read the stuff linked to on Herndon. Verrrry “interesting” is the best way to describe it.
10
Jo Nova – More on The GeoReactor and the work of Dr. J. Marvin Herndon. His complete summary is published in “Current Science”, Feb. 2014. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/transdyne-corporations-j-marvin-herndon-presents-fundamental-theory-of-planetary-formation-in-new-indivisible-planetary-science-paradigm-243674091.html
00
Once again reality supports the skeptical point of view.
20
Bill Gray pulls the ECS plug. 0.3 +/- 0.1.
There is no upper troposphere w.v. feedback; it’s all rained out and squoze dry by the time it gets there.
http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf
00