This is a successor thread to unthreaded comments on Road Map (retrievable here).
Continued here.
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Climate Audit 
512 Comments
Someone here was asking about the temperature spike that occurred around 1976. Here is one explanation:
Does “Polar Motion” affect the temperatures in the Arctic?
Thanks
Speaking of ‘Polar’. Everynight the local TV news has a blurb on the melting Artic icecap and the coming
extinction of polar bears. A google of the phrase ‘polar bear’ returns links to 538 recent article about
the subject and that the US government is considering placing the polar bear on the endangered species list.
Is there a thread in this blog about the ‘shrinking’ polar ice cap?
Bob
I do not recall a thread on this Blog about it.
If this can help of the 13 (heard)? of bears 11 have increase in numbers and the other 2 are stable.They are not in danger or going extinct. Dr. Mitchell Taylor
Re #1: jae, where *do* you find this stuff? Didn’t you notice that the article is four years old? Whither that cold water now? For that matter, what cold water? Reference for that, and for the scientists who were supposedly tracking it four years ago?
Re #2: If you’re talking about precession, yes, but on a very long time-scale
Re #3: See here for extensive information on the Arctic ice.
Re #4: The United States Fish and Wildlife Service only places a species on the candidate list if they are convinced that the species is endangered. They are very conservative about taking that step since the process is quite expensive.
re 1 and 5
NIWA scientists have recently identified a long-lasting “shift” in New Zealand’s climate that occurred around 1977 (Salinger and Mullan, 1999). The shift was characterised by more persistent westerlies on to central New Zealand since 1977, resulting in the west and south of the South Island being about 10% wetter and 5 % cloudier with more damaging floods. The north and east of the North Island have on average been 10% drier and 5% sunnier, compared to 1951-76 data. This changepoint of 1977 coincided with an eastward movement in the longitude of the South Pacific Convergence Zone, and more frequent El Nino events in the recent record.
This shift is probably due mainly to a Pacific-wide natural fluctuation that is being called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO, Mantua et al., 1997), which exhibits phase reversals about once every 20-30 years. The influence of the PDO is well-known in the North Pacific, and has recently also been noted in Australian rainfall ( Power et al., 1998). Scientists from Pacific Island countries attending a workshop in Auckland in November 2001 put out a press release suggesting the PDO underwent another phase reversal in 1998.
Mantua, N.J.; Hare, S.R.; Zhang, Y.; Wallace, J.M.; Francis, R.C. (1997). A Pacific interdecadal climate oscillation with impacts on salmon production. Bulletin of the Amererican Meteorological Society 78: 1069–1079.
Folland, C.; Salinger, M.J.; Rayner, N. (1997). A comparison of annual South Pacific island and ocean surface temperatures. Weather and Climate 17: 23–41.
Power, S.; Tseitkin, F.; Torok, S.; Lavery, B.; Dahni, R.; McAvaney, B. (1998). Australian temperature, Australian rainfall and the Southern Oscillation, 1910–1992: coherent variability and recent changes. Australian Meteorological Magazine 47: 85–101.
Salinger, M. J.; Basher, R.E.; Fitzharris, B.B.; Hay, J.E.; Jones, P.D.; MacVeigh, J.P.; Schmidely-Leleu, I. (1995). Climate trends in the Southwest Pacific. International Journal of Climatology 15: 285–302.
Regarding Polar Bears, the IUCN lists (warning, big PDF file) 19 sub-populations, with the observed or predicted trend counts being
Data deficient, 7 sub-populations, 59% of total bears
Declining, 5, 5%
Increasing, 2, 10%
Stable, 5, 27%
Of the bears that do we have data for, in other words, 12% are declining, and 88% are stable or increasing. The F&G is under pressure from lawsuits from environmental groups to list the bears, and Pres. Bush has said that he will do the study. However, it is clearly for political reasons, as there is no evidence that the population as a whole is in danger. The IUCN also says that, both historically and currently, the main threat to polar bears remains over-hunting.
This is not a reason for listing the bears. It is a reason to change the hunting regulations.
w.
Dr. Taylor’s comments on polar bears and a map of the area.
RE:the articles on the USFWS and the polar bears. All that has happened is that the FWS has recieved a petition for listing, and has decided that it has enough merit to bear a formal study by the agency. It would be unusual, indeeed, unprecedented if the agency decided to list the species based on the expected impacts of climate change rather than immediate concerns about the populations dropping below a genetically viable level. Most likely they will release their own report in a few years (after spending considerable $$ on a study and literature review) and conclude that the bears do not merit formal protection at this time. The environmental groups will sue and the whole process will go on for a decade or more – at which time we might actually understand more.
In the meantime, the state of Alaska will respond to the agencies’ decision to formally study listing by placing the polar bear on their list of species of special concern (or whatever their equivelant is) and make darned sure the populations do not shrink. The last thing any state natural resorces agency wants is to see a wide-ranging species like the polar bear get listed – that is a recipie for decades of headaches, red tape, and constrained management options for all sorts of projects.
The 2006 El Nino continues to fade . the latest plot of SST anomaly is here . Double-click on the colored area and look at the lower chart (SST anomaly). the area of +1C is shrinking and +2C appears to be gone.
Also, the wind anomaly (shown by the arrows) in the western area is easterly, which is consistent with development of a La Nina, if the wind persists.
There’s evidence that the Northern Hemisphere finally is seeing warming from this El Nino. I expect December to be a very warm month. If I can get the NOAA anomaly plotter to work, I’ll post some maps.
RE: The polar bears. Read a few more articles. Holy cow – it looks like the feds cut a deal. You want ato see a war on science? We’ve got one right here.
December may have been warm in Vermont, where I grew up, but it has been unusually cold and snowy in the little Utah valley where I now live. We have had more snow in the valley this November and December than in winter (I’m talking the whole winter) that I have been here (though this is only my fourth). In addition we have had snow cover continuouslll for the whole month of December – people I talk to haven’t seen that since the ’80s. I’ll be interested to see what the global charts look like, David. From what I have picked up here and there it seems western Europe has been warm, siberia cold, and Australia has been all over the map in terms of temperatures.
The W.N.Amer cold anomaly appears to be fading. By January temps may be back to normal or warmer. What about Siberia? Same thing?
Bender
Its still freezing here in Cali. Maybe we can finish our discussion here. Can you please explain your thoughts on the ice core and Co2 data from the geologic record that does not support AGW theory?
Also, can you please explain why you think the earth is a greenhouse? You may try looking up the discussion we had with Lee and or steve bloom about whether or not the earth was a closed system for some insite. Also, greenhouses don’t have oceans, multilayered atmospheres, sediment transport processes to name a few, nor do they undergo plate tectonic motions. Just a few things to get you started.
Seems like all the winter weather is out west. Here in Boston we have not had any snow, and December
is likley to be the warmest December for Boston in a long time, though today is pretty cold, only
about 33 F at noon.
Moved:
# 2006-12-29 @ 2:12:26 pm
Jack
Amazing the quicksand that someone can step into when they try to engage determined skeptics in a reasonable discussion.
Two points: responding to Dane’s #42:
“… please find me one article showing proof of a link between Co2 concentrations in earths atmosphere and earths temperature?
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) is the best natural analogue to the current climate situation of increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases during an a basically stable climate regime. Research will show you that the system responded as basic physics indicated that it should.
And responding to this:
“Think of the refusal to accept AGW and its imagined future catastrophes as a correct application of the precautionary principle. Since the science is so uncertain it would be foolish to make large social and economic changes just because some subset of the scientific community believes deep in its heart that disaster looms a century from now.”
“Since the science is so uncertain” is an erroneous impression you get from hanging around global-warming skeptics and deniers too long. While there are uncertainties (as in any science), the science of global warming is not uncertain. The fact that so many intelligent individuals can actually believe it is constitutes the main reason that climate scientists are so frustrated with the ability of funded skeptical soapbox pundits to mislead the public.
# 2006-12-29 @ 3:12:41 pm
Dane
Jack,
Do you have alink to a paper on the PETM? I would like to read it. Although I don’t believe the earths climate is ever really stable, especially when your trying to look at a climate signal from 55 million years ago. I know the resolution is not good enough to be able to say what you say above, but I would like to see the paper to decide for myself.
On the 2nd point. I am consulting geologist with an MS in Environmental Geology who works on both environmental and geotechnical projects. I am an environmentalist, ocean person, and I have no agenda nor do I have any funding to try and mislead anyone. If you read this site more you may well see who is misleading who, and why some of us are so skepticle.
Dane, you want folks to assume geological expertise on your part and yet it seems you know very little climate history (e.g. the PETM). As well, you say you think the ice cores somehow show a mismatch between CO2 levels and the glacial cycles. I think you need to do some reading on that point as well. You know where to find Google Scholar.
another co2 chart
Steve Bloom says:
I think you are mistaken SteveB. Seems to me the geologist is being polite and giving Jack and chance to correct his thinking about knowing such things so certainly. Geologists are pretty polite and down to earth from my experience. So that’s my interpretation. Bias and other things you feel would give you your impression.
I think you are addressing the wrong person here for that comment Jack.
Steve B,
I know much about climate history as my BS thesis was about the Malinkavitch cycles. The PETM occurred 55 million years ago, and the dating resolution over that much time is about +or- a million years. I was pointing that out to Jack, as well the fact that we have no real idea what the climate did over short time scales going that far back, all we get are datapoints in time, with poor quality resolution in the dating.
Are you telling me Co2 increases come before temp increases in the Ice cores? You need to search the archives here since this site is where I first saw that fact discussed. Good thing your not a scientist, jeeez.
Personally, I think all the AGW stuff is a waste of time, especially since just 2 years ago 230,000 people were killed by a tsunami off the coast of SE Asia. More money and research needs to be conducted on tsunami hazards and risk for the coastal USA, and the rest of the Pacific rim/any nation with a coastline. Nobody wants to fund those studies, I wonder why? maybe because we can’t blame humanity for it?
In the Chicago land area we started out the meteorological winter abnormally cold and are now experiencing abnormally warm weather. We are all hoping that it keeps our Bears out of early hibernation this year/season.
Seriously though, extreme weather seems a fitting term to describe this recent phenomena and, since I have no valid theory to explain it, I must attribute it, by consensus, to AGW. A gradual temperature increase of say a degree every 50 years or so does not seem particularly threatening – like moving from northern IL to central IL. On the other hand, extreme weather, whatever direction it takes can scare the begibbers out of you. AGW = extreme weather — yeah that’s the ticket — out of denial.
Oh and, by the way, you lukewarm AGWers out there, and you know who you are, should not entertain any smugness about smaller AGW temperature increases. Let me remind you that Delta T = 0.6 degrees C = the 2005 hurricane season and Katrina. Need I say more.
Re #13
“Our” discussion finished quite a while ago, after I got bored of you stuffing words in my mouth so that you would have something to refute. Why don’t you carry on a monologue on the topic, since that’s what you really want?
Ask Steve M for a “Dane on Greenhouse Theory” post. That’ll keep the noise down if nothing else.
Here out West it has certainly not been a warm December.
Yesterday I took off for a ski day, driving to a location about 150 miles inland from here and of course at a higher elevation. Still, even given the location, it was very cold, in the teens. Normally, on a sunny day like it was, I would have expected it to be around 30 F at that location. No “warmest December ever” or “warmest December in N years” records here out West. Far from it.
Ken,
Cold weather is an anomaly.
For bender:
Then from these two comments you called Dane twisted.
You still haven’t answered the questions or commented with what you think and neither did Ms Judy. I’d like to say more but I AM polite. What IS YOUR PROBLEM? I was really insulted by your last exchange with me as well. All the captalist machine stuff. You are bullying a commenter. You post here everyday all day long.
Why does Dane think the ice cores have been “shot down”? Because only one thing can begin a warming and only that one thing must cause all subsequent warming? Apologies if this logical absurdity is not applicable here.
This seems to be a real bone of contention among some of the denizens of the Climate Audit Town.
Re #18, Dane, you say:
I would have assumed that during the writing of your thesis, you would at least have learned to spell “Milankovitch” correctly … one error in the name would be a typo, two would be grave inattention, but three errors in spelling the subject of your thesis? …
Also, your question “can you please explain why you think the earth is a greenhouse?” is too poorly posed to answer. The term “greenhouse effect” is widely used, despite the fact that we all know that the “greenhouse effect” does not work in any way like a greenhouse works. Is there a “greenhouse effect” regarding the earth? Yes. Is the earth a greenhouse like we use to grow flowers? No, it lacks windows.
HTH,
w.
It looks like December in Europe, western Russia and much of North America was quite warm while eastern Russia, China and many ocean areas were cool. I’ve never paid much attention to the lower latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere (Sahara, tropics, India), but it looks like this year they have cooled.
I expect December temperature anomaly to be an upwards spike, the first spike of the 2006 El Nino.
Today, portions of Siberia are -61F while Barrow, Alaska (north coast) is at -33F, which is over 20F below normal. England and Moscow, on the other hand, look almost balmy.
Willis,
Sorry for the spelling errors, it was 10 years ago, I have health problems that effect certain brain functions and my work days may be limited. I figure the CA crowd will understand the gist of my writings.
Point was I have experience in paleoclimate studies, especially “Milankovitch” wobbles.
Here “Is there a “greenhouse effect” regarding the earth? Yes. Is the earth a greenhouse like we use to grow flowers? No, it lacks windows.”,
not funny and I disagree with the premise that the earth has much if any greenhouse effect at all, especially regarding Co2. I realize I may be wrong, methane is one gas that may be problematic, but not Co2. I humbly disagree with you Willis.
Boris,
Further research into earth history studies might be a good idea. I am referring to the data suggesting that the Co2 increases in the cores lagged behind Temp increases. That appears to me to be a big problem for the AGW group.
Dane, sorry to hear about the problems, and best wishes for your work days.
Regarding the lack of a greenhouse effect, what is your explanation for the fact that the earth is much warmer than it would be if there were no greenhouse effect? What is it that is warming the earth?
w.
Willis,
I guess the confusion is with defintions. I am simply referring to Co2 being the driving force behind AGW and the so called “Greenhouse Effect”. Sorry for the confusion. I am fully aware how atmospheric gasses trap heat in order to warm the earth.
I took a graduate class back in 1998 about climate change, taught by a very liberal geology Proff. One of our texts was the 1995 IPCC report. Anyway when asked if we would talk about anthropogenic Co2 causing “global warming”, he refused, saying there was not enough data to even talk about it, and it was all political. To date I have seen nothing to change my mind.
I hope that clears things up? Or am I still just ignorant?
Rocks, Re #23
No, it’s from his continual twisting of my words that I called him twisted. But if you think that is too strong, I recant.
That Dane puts words in my mouth so that he can have something to refute so that he can hold a monologue.
Insulted? Maybe you forget: I also said “I like Rocks”. Which I do.
All that stuff? I made one tiny comment. My point, in case you missed it, was that universities are sources of wealth, not tax-sucking monolithic ivory towers, which is where that discussion seemed to be going.
Maybe some commenters need bullying?
I try to be entertaining. If it’s too much, I’ll scale it back. It’s the holidays. For once I have some free time. Apologies to CA readers for the volume. The irony is that Dane wants it to go on and on.
Rocks, next time you feel the need to recapitulate someone else’s argument, try getting both sides of it.
Dane, it sounds like you are saying in #30 that the earth IS a greenhouse. Please correct me if I’m just stuffing words in your mouth to make your POV seem more extreme than it is. (It’s a common bullying tactic used by people who don’t have command of the facts.) Last post.
Dane, I don’t think that this is a very constructive discussion. Additional CO2 will cause additional warming. Estimating the amount of warming depends on infrared radiation and on water vapor feedbacks etc. etc. Doug Hoyt thinks that the amount of warming from 2xCO2 is rather low; most climate scientists think that it will be about 1.5-4.5 deg C. It’s an important question. I cannot comment on whether this scientific area is done better or worse than Michael Mann’s hockey stick. However based on the lack of care with the hockey stick, one feels that an independent look at one or more climate models is long overdue.
The topic is important, but unless you’re prepared to contribute with information on the infrared budgets or the feedbacks, I don’t see much purpose to your present jousting.
I think there’s plenty of observational evidence to show that this isn’t necessarily as cut and dried as most would think. Sure, CO2 increases in the laboratory test tube cause warming, but there are many more ways for CO2 to act and re-act in a real living atmosphere. In fact, we see a global surface temperature cooling trend between 1940 and 1975, a time when CO2 was increasing, and we have had very high levels of CO2 in the past (up to 4000ppm) when the Earth was in the midst of a severe ice age. So, it seems apparent that something ELSE is going on as well as the changes in the infrared absorption budget and how it all balances out as far as global temps are concerned is anyone’s guess.
I wonder how vertical diffusion is factored in ,in the upper atmosphere above the homopause molecular or microscales diferrential can occur.Although there are still upper atmosphere differntials depndent on the dominant gas say nitrogen on earth.Co2 on mars or Hydrogen on Jupiter ,there should be some change of spectra on TOA measurement in an increasing co2 “box”
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994JGR….9914609B
TEST
Is LaTex working?
Bender I am sorry we are butting heads.
You also began your talk with me saying that the war on science was real-not universities are a source of wealth, but saying people were angry about funding. I don’t believe that the ‘war” is real. Other people showed in the posts that with actual data- searching money and funding statistics that is not what is going on too.
I understand how people giving Al Gore a standing O might feel that way, but they are wrong! There are always reasons for things-but the reasons we can think of might be wrong. Maybe there are just too many people becoming scientists? It’s not a calling anymore, it’s a competitive job. Thats’ what I think is going on. I know in my field of Graphic Arts, I was always a artistic kid, and I was on the cutting edge of computer graphics when I got into the business. I was young and I taught my art director who was old school how to use a computer and this computer had a black and white screen. Nowadays everybody can do graphics on computers and if you go searching for work, you can sometimes be up against 20-30 people or even way more than that, going for the same job.
SteveM :
What Dane said in the other thread too I think is important:
“I quote (Dr. Curry) “The physics of relating atmospheric composition and radiative transfer is very well understood”.
Dane says: I know this. My point is that those physics are for a model, not the real working earth, which you must agree is far more complex than any model humans have yet developed.
Dane quotes Dr. Curry again “You can’t make major changes to the atmospheric greenhouse gases and expect climate to remain unchanged”
then he says: Actually you can if those gases aren’t as important as you think they are on a real working planet. Again you assume the earth is a greenhouse, I don’t.
You think there is a real risk in the next century or two from GHG, I don’t. I look at all the data and think people who live in areas that may be affected by future warming will have time to adapt (which will create jobs), and that the risk is exaggerated greatly by both acedemia and especially the mainstream media.It is literally in the news EVERY DAY! article, news peices on local TV, TV shows, jokes, sitcoms etc, the propoganda is endless and the reality is we don’t even know if its happening, then we don’t even know if it will be a bad thing. Again, picture the Littte Ice Age, did Co2 conc. drop? Or during the Medieval Warm period did Co2 increase?
end of quote.
I think like me, he was trying to hear a heavy player in this thing admit to what we don’t know, which is alot. Didn’t happen.
then another commenter:
Jeff Weffer says:
December 29th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Here are the estimates of the CO2 content of the atmosphere over the past 500 million years.
We are at the historic low in the history of the planet in terms of CO2. Over the eons, plants and geological processes have taken the CO2 out of the atmosphere and buried it. Where do you think all that coal and oil came from in the first place.
The climate does not seem to have varied much over time with these changes in C02 levels at all. For example, 580 million years ago, the last snowball earth took place in which the entire planet froze over. CO2 levels at the time? – 5000 ppm or 13 times higher than today.
link for wiki image
end of quote.
They have a point. And see the chart I linked to. That’s why AGW theorists are so hard on geologists and they never answer these questions or give these questions a serious thought-they revert back to the model of a greenhouse. I believe Dr. Curry even said that green house theory was practically elevated from that to a “physical law” Is that true?
Sorry SteveM! I’ll shut up now.
This article on the breakup of the a 41 sq mile ice shelf on Ellesmere Island was released yesterday by the AP. They painted a picture of the beginning of the end. However, they left out any mention of 600 sq km breaking off the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in 1960.
Current sea surface temperature anomaly plot is given here .
The coolness in the eastern Pacific, with warmth in the western mid-latitude Pacific, is a signature of the so-named “cool phase” PDO. It comes and goes in recent years, whereas pre-1976 it was more persistent.
The thing to watch is whether the coolness between California and Hawaii persists. Subtropical coolness tends to strengthen the surface winds flowing westward, which tend to cool the tropical waters directly and tend to keep the Warm Pool pushed westward ( = more La Nina, less El Nino).
There are papers which suggest that, if the cool phase / stronger winds persist, then shallow upwelling will increase along the equator, which cools the equatorial waters, cooling them even more. It takes persistence for upwelling to increase, and there is a time lag, so persistence is key.
Headed out for a weekend trip, see you all later. Happy 2007!
Re #37
Thank you for making my ultimate point, rocks: if you want to engage the heavies, you can’t just spit at them. They are under no obligation to answer any questions. There’s a reason why Dane doesn’t get the answers he says he’s looking for.
Steve M, Bender, et al,
I am simply saying I believe that the small amounts of warming observed (fractions of a degree C) are from natural climate oscilations. When I took a Global Change Course in grad school, the GHG’s were assumed to represent a very small amount ( I don’t exactly recall the exact % but Co2 was less than 1% of the total contribution to earths climate if I remember correctly) of the total climate picture. The 1995 IPCC report was one of our texts. I found the report interesting but flawed.
Based on what nanny-govt sucks posted above, and the reasons I have already mentioned and Rocks has mentioned, IMHO this small amount of warming is natural, and humans are not yet contributing to any GW. I am not saying we may never, but based on the earths previous Co2 concentrations and its varied climate history, natural variability can explain the entire HS debate just fine, if its even real.
I am not trying to put words in anyones mouth or cause trouble here. I do wonder why so many AGW people appear to be hostile to the geological perspective? My greenhouse questions were an attempt to understand exactly where bender and Dr curry were coming from in regards to the models verse the reality of the planet.
I am done. Sorry Steve for being so boring and unproductive.
Bender, there’s no war on science and you never said that was correct. Instead you play the touchy feeling and understand those who adored Al’s speech-even though that is wrong on so many levels. That’s why it is complicated. Thats why I tried to show another perspective. If I couldn’t figure out what you meant until now I am sorry. If thats make you angry, you are probably angry all the time. You’ve said before, no question is a stupid one to me. I have lost respect for you. You can crunch numbers, but your view of the world isn’t any better than mine.
Here’s what I know. I know that scientists are waging a war on Co2 based on political ideolgy. I think that reason is sinister. You are no heavy hitter in geology because you do at times ask questions about it. You are hostile to Dane on some other level-nothing to do with this topic at all. Dr. Curry said only credible scientists are the ones who believe that CO2 from humans drives planet’s climate right now. She started it. That’s more propaganda. SteveM deleted rebuttals to her statement.
I think Acadamia lives in a bubble world, and many have hardly any life experience. They get it from reading. There is where they learn to be rude and feel to “heavy” and higher then anyone not in bubble world.
Scientists who are in a frenzy about GW should stop trying to find out “why” in this issue and consentrate on the “how” if the planet is even warming. They should also get a bigger perspective of the earth’s age. In a million year span, the temperture of the earth could have fluctuated up and down 1C or more a thousand times. Michael Crichton is right about the State Of Fear.
Re: #42 Sheesh. MrWelikerocks is Dane, and I was so angry I forgot to change the name around back to Welikerocks. Sheesh. He’s posted here before under that name. Even to you bender in the thread about BristleCone pines and gave you advice.
He’s never able to post here alot-because of being in the field and usually posts at work as Dane. The holiday is making that different he’s home and here. If you all think this is a deception, it’s not. Both of us read the board together. He’s never really interestd in participating. I haven’t mentioned my husband in any of these posts except to convey a different kind of scientist then I am seeing passing out these papers on GW, and he has not helped me with my thoughts here, and he hasn’t helped me in any of these debates I have been having with you bender. I have stuck up for him when he’s been pounded on here.
I think that this issue has gotton both of us really angry.
That made Dane post from work directly to Dr. Curry’s insult to certain scientists. I wasn’t with him, and we both had our own things to say. Dane does have a brain injury from the army (retired disabled), and he has had a seizure in March. He is already a disabled vet for injuries to his spinal cord.
Welikerocks is out of the closet and sort of mad. LOL At least now you won’t be confused.
I have to disagree on the “war on science”. There is such a war, but not by the Bush administration or any other government, but by the general forces of ignorance, laziness, and superstition. This has been going on since the founding of scientific thought and will continue indefinately. One defense against these forces is places like this where reasoned, informed debate can occur and people can learn. Let’s keep that in mind and be civil people, please.
Since the technical hurricane threads seem to moving along productively at the moment, I am posting on this topic here. CA has the potential to be useful in moving climate science forward. But this requires the active participation of scientific experts that are publishing papers on the revelant topic. Once someone like me appears on CA, they are first welcomed by the principals. Then the silly and distracting attacks come, stereotyping the scientist and trying to provoke them into saying something inflammatory, asking irrelevant questions, complaining about our alleged influence on policy issues that we have no involvment in, etc. And in the midst of this, a few of the principals are trying to engage the scientist in a serious conversation. And then the scientist gives up and moves on. Each time i come here, i spend too much time trying to establish that I am not an alarmist, I think that good statistics is important, i freely admit uncertaintites, I am not involved in prescriptive policy adovocacy or trying to raise your taxes, etc. Then the trolls move in and I give up. Steve M I think has been successful at least for now in moving such discussion to the unthreaded site.
To provide some substance to this post, i reproduce a paragraph from my BAMS article:
“Some of the most relevant scientific debate on this topic is not being undertaken at meetings sponsored by the relevant professional societies and government agencies, but rather in the media and via blogs, and only slowly in the professional scientific journals. After reading “The World is Flat” (Friedman, 2005), we were prompted to reflect on how broadly the new technologies are influencing the scientific process on topics of high relevance. As the media debate proceeded, and certainly in the process of researching the material for this paper, we made extensive use of online media articles, blogs, the Wikipedia, and other websites. As pointed out by Friedman, the challenge is how to think about the new technologies and the associated changes that have irreversibly changed the intellectual commons and manage it to maximum effect. The new scientific process will eventually sort itself out among the new technologies, the need for the scientific review process, and the need for information by the public and policy makers. However, during this sorting out period (which may end up being a period of continual evolution as new technologies emerge), the use of science to inform policy, particularly on issues of high relevance, will almost certainly become confused by the decentralization of scientific authority previously vested in scientists that have published on the subject in refereed journals. While this decentralization provides a better guarantee that the best possible information and analysis is out there somewhere, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the best information and analysis in this new environment, providing more fodder for the politicization of science.”
I am very much in favor of exploring new methods for moving science along in a more rigorous and rapid way, and of providing more timely and relevant information for policy makers. The blogosphere has much potential in this regard, and CA has the potential to make an important contribution to climate science on the topic of statistical rigor and uncertainty. Realizing this full potential is a challenge, since this new medium moves us into uncharted territory particularly from the scientists’ perspective. Scientists will feel rewarded by interactions in the blogosphere if they learn something and they are not expected to engage in “blood sport” surrounding all of the political issues associated with AGW. Many scientists are happy to communicate with the public and feel an obligation to do so. The blogosphere is better than talking to a reporter, your words are made public rather than the reporters version (still smarting from “brain fossilization.”) Appeal to motive attacks and false or unfounded or trival accusations of scientific misconduct attack a scientist’s integrity and are fighting words, and should be totally avoided.
So if it is really your intent on this site to promote better science (rather than to generically trash AGW), some collective thought to how best to use this site to promote better science would be valuable. I hope this post will start such a constructive dialogue on this issue.
Re #20
All the weather variability being discussed is middle latitude, but that is not surprising since this is the zone where the Rossby Waves in the circumpolar vortex dominate and generally determine the weather pattern. In addition, this blog has generally focussed on the poor use and understanding of statistics and statistical analysis. To illustrate, there was a brief comment likely not understood by any of the climate scientists, essentially noting the difference between discrete and continuous numbers in data and the inappropriate use of certain statistical techniques depending on which was being used. Krumbein discussed the problem of the assumption that all numbers are the same in sedimentary petrology back in the 1960s.
On a wider perspective, climate science use of statistics has gradually evolved from simple use of averages to trend analysis, the latter essentially beginning with the cooling trend of the 1970s and Hubert Lamb’s seminal volume “Climate Past, Present and Future.” It is clear, as the present conditions indicate, that variability is very important especially in the middle latitudes. Here, where most weather stations are located, a shift from a zonal pattern to a meridional one can result in a similar average, but with very different weather beng experienced. I also have difficulty with this extrapolation of middle latitude data dominating the global statistics and perception.
The record of shifts from zonal to meridional and changes in the number of longwaves in the circumpolar vortex are evident in any long term analysis of midlatitude weather and essential to any basic understanding. It is interesting and informative to look at the weather patterns during periods of temperature transition such as the 14th century when the MWP was ending and the LIA commencing. We found similar unusual weather patterns when in the workshop on the climate patterns resulting from the eruption of Tambora in 1815 and the subsequent ‘year with no summer’ in 1816 we found extreme meridional flow. For example, western Europe had extreme cold but eastern Europe and western Russia had exceptional warmth. The same occurrred in North America except there the east was exceptionally cold and the west exceptionally warm. Incidentally, the pattern shifts on approximately a 4 to 6 week cycle as the waves migrate from west to east. I recommend farmers use a 5 week average to anticipate the general weather they can expect and use for planning.
Unfortunately most are not familiar with the full nature of the generalization that is climatology, including specialists from other areas that have latterly become climatologists.
In Canada we have an official Senior Climotologist with Environment Canada who has a BA in Geography and yet consistently has media attention when it is obvious from his comments he doesn’t know what he is talking about.
The advertised debate between Alan Thorpe of the Natural Environment Research Council and a team (sport unspecified) of scientists is lurching along at the NERC blog site.
Monckton has fired his first broadside: (Friday, 29 December 2006 – 13:31:36 (post 89))
Taxpayers’ money should not be used for propaganda exercises of this kind. There are perhaps no scientists who doubt that we have increased the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere; and that some warming has occurred and will occur as a result. However, there is no consensus on a) the relative contributions of natural and anthropogenic warming; b) the consequences of the warming; c) the appropriate remedial measures; or d) whether any remedial measures will make a sufficient difference. The supposed “consensus” does not even agree with itself. The UN said six years ago that sea level might rise three feet to 2100. Its forthcoming report will cut that high-end projection to just 17 inches, and the UN’s best estimate now accords with that of those whom you excoriate as “sceptics” – that sea level is not likely to rise all that much faster in the next century than it did in the past century. The main reason why I began investigating the so-called “science” of climate change is the dishonesty of the IPCC in failing to apologize for the defective “hockey-stick” graph that attempted to abolish the mediaeval warm period so as to make current warming look more alarming than it is. Even the US National Academy of Sciences condemned the graph as having a validation skill not significantly different from zero – and zero means useless. Also, the journal “Science”, having printed a bad head-count paper falsely stating that none of 928 recent papers on “global climate change” disagreed with the “consensus”, failed to print a correction when it was pointed out that the conclusion was simply false, in that nearly three times as many of the papers explicitly doubted or rejected the “consensus” as explicitly supported it; and only one-third of the papers implicitly supported it. We resent the use of taxpayers’ money to fund websites such as this, which announce as fact a conclusion which science itself has not reached.
Rockses,
Assert what you like about the ‘war on science’. I’m TELLING you that climate scientists feel as though they’re under siege. Dismiss that perception if you like. But do NOT shoot the messenger.
Bender is too prickly–needs to learn to ignore posts that irritate.
Climate scientists feel under siege? When they’re receiving record funding, news coverage, political deference, and the future for them is so bright? Maybe they’re prickly too.
The only “war on science” is being conducted by political correctness. You’ll find a lot of that over at realclimate.org. When one narrow interpretation of the data attains predominance and tries to stamp out all other interpretations–that’s a war on science, friends.
Dr. Curry,
If you did not want to talk about politics and policy perhaps you should not have provided links to Rick Piltz’s site multiple times and encouraged people to go there. Given the strident advocacy of AGW on that site you should have known that people here would engage you on the subject. The same goes on the “war on science”. Perhaps we can all learn to avoid incindeary subjects in the future which just serve to side-track the discussion and stick to the science?
A bit of advice (and a needed reminder to me) to anyone attempting to make a point in a forum such as this one and avoiding any one-on-one or two-on-one personality clashes: make your remarks to air whenever possible. If there is an interest in what you are saying you will get a response and most times without getting overwhelmed by personality involvement. No interest in a post usually means no response. Or perhaps a response will be non-engaging simply to correct an obvious error – like Malinkavitch/Milankovitch and Hunter/Hudson/Holland, but lack of response does not indicate agreement with the point being made.
Perhaps discussions of climate are somewhat unique because of the policy advocacies that have been interjected from all sides of the issue. I personally think (John A’s statement on the matter notwithstanding) that it is important to at least attempt to separate the policy advocacy content from the science content — with of course the attendant problem that that line is subjectively drawn. I think that attempt by itself can, however, keep some of the emotion out of the scientific discussions.
Having said that I now refer to my comment #20 in this thread that I posted in hope of starting a discussion on why a gradual temperature increase by itself, without producing extreme and adverse climate conditions, as in extremely bad as opposed to a little bad, neutral, good and extremely good, should be considered threatening with the proviso that the trend does not continue unabated forever. While I considered it a clever lead in, the response said otherwise and once again demonstrates the humbling nature of the free market of judgments that a blog such as this one provides.
I have been puzzling over this matter for some time and I keep looking at my own state of IL, with which I have more familiarity, as a reference point for potential climate change (temperature). I can figuratively walk from north to south from city to city to get a feel for increased temperature change assuming I or my progeny stay in the area and contrarily walk north into WI to determine the direction/distances needed to maintain a constant temperature for my residence. This simple minded approach provides nothing threatening to my psyche. If other people make the same mental calculations I can see where they might not be reacting adversely to the predictions of future warming and that would include those who are not as skeptical about the lack of the uncertainties connected with these predictions as I and some of my fellow skeptics are (feedback issues kill any certainty that I have going low or high with these predictions).
All this tends to make me think that to move people to a more reactive climate policy, the extremely adverse effects of temperature change and/or concomitant effects must be demonstrated and that doing so becomes a much more difficult and complicated task than simply and abstractly showing temperature and precipitation changes that already are sufficiently complex to tax our best computer systems (ignoring the unknown uncertainties for the moment). Mann and the HS notwithstanding, the known “localized” and contrasting effects (or at least correlations with) of the LIA versus the MWP on civilization do not make the adverse sale any easier to make.
I suspect that Bender is correct in his assessment of climate scientists, in general, feeling under siege. If Dr. Curry’s posts here can be taken as typical of climate scientists, her view into this situation would be in accord with Bender’s claim. Dr. Curry ranks herself at the middle of the list of some prominent climate scientists discussed here at CA on the strength of their writings and comments on the portion of the A in AGW.
I get the distinct feeling that many of these scientist’s reactions is a result of a sincere feeling/judgment on their parts that AGW is proven and potentially very threatening to civilization and that the policy changes to mitigate it need to come quickly. Their frustrations come from feeling that it is not the quality of their arguments that is failing this process but the irrational actions of skeptics, the media on occasion and politics, as in the current administration. I personally think that the resistance actually is much more with voters who do not see any need for sacrifice on their part for future generations. To me this is a global attitude that makes action (or inaction) speak louder than words. I give the reaction to the huge unfunded liabilities of SS and government health care as evidence to this along with the EU community’s lots of talk about AGW mitigation, but with little results (or sacrifice) to show for it.
By the way I think that government involvement with science is a two edged sword and I would not classify an administration, whose policies happened to coincide with a scientific “consensus”, that allowed that community free reign any less political than one that stifled information from a scientific community with which they disagreed. Politics and their tactics are most often not rational and it is naàÆà⮶e to think it will be otherwise.
While I do not, many people in the US believe in some form or level of intelligent design and that does not bother me all that much as long as those views cannot be imposed on me by government and that view would continue with the issues of cloned, irradiated and genetically modified food that I want an option to consume. I do not want the government to outlaw the use of stem cell research, while at the same time understanding the general and specific arguments against taxpayer funding for it.
#45
You know, the AGW supporters do the same. Just look at How to talk with a climate sceptic, where M&M is mentioned:
For myself, I will confess immediately that the technical issues are over my head, I don’t know PCA from R^2 from a hole in the ground. But I think the most critical point to remember, if you are researching this in the context of determining the validity of AGW theory, is that this row is about a single study that was published 8 years ago. This is starting to be ancient history. If you feel it is tainted (as I prefer to just assume, because as I said I do not want to put the required effort into unraveling it all for myself) then simply discard it.
Now, that’s really an argument.
My own impression is that some “visiting” scientists prefer to scuffle with less knowledgeable people on peripheral issues rather than to engage in more serious statistical discussion, where they are typically less competent than the people here. Any “visitor” that wants to avoid peripheral discussions can easily do so. Others make themselves at home.
Steve,
I disagree. I am not a statistician, and therefore have little to say on the subject. I did take a few stats classes as an undergrad, and again as a grad student, so I am able to follow the discussions with some understanding. That said my intent was not to “scuffle” with anyone. It was simply to get an idea where they are coming from in the context of models verse real geologic data. I am surprised at your tone. My only solution is to say come visit us one day, have a few beers, see a few graphs, and ralax.
Remember, I only started the last peripheril discusion based on what I felt was an insulting comment. Now I almost feel like Lee, Geeeez.
Re #38: JP, you need to read these articles more carefully. Quoting:
‘The ice shelf was one of six major shelves remaining in Canada’s Arctic. They are packed with ancient ice that is more than 3,000 years old. They float on the sea but are connected to land.
‘Some scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and that climate change was a major element.
‘”It is consistent with climate change,” Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906. “We aren’t able to connect all of the dots … but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role.”‘
So they weren’t exactly covering up the historical context.
Re#55
Dane’s comments as a professional geologist fits in with the feedback I have been getting from Australian professional geologists – that AGW is essentially baloney not based in geological or scientific fact. (I add I am editor of the Australian Institute of Geoscience News, or AIG News which is unfortunate acronym because AIG also represents Answers in Genesis, so I can’t use this acronym anymore).
Intriguingly there is division among Australian geoscientists – academics taking the AGW position while industry types working at the coal-face the sceptical position. This seems to be linked to whether one belongs to the Geological Society of Australia, essentially academia, AusIMM or AIG.
I recently got some feedback from some of the mining industry heavies that AGW is now a widely held belief and that maintaining a sceptical position is politically not a useful thing to do anymore. This is a disturbing development because it implies that the madness of crowds must take precedence over science. Even more disturbing is surreptitious implementation of carbon trading schemes and other policies based on AGW.
Professional geologists who dare speak out against AGW are invariably demonised as working for either Big oil or coal, or if not, are not considered “credible” scientists.
It seems we will be living in interesting times for quite some time I think.
Re #54: While scientists are human beings and have a range of responses (John Hunter, e.g., was not one to shrink from any kind of argument), a phenomenon I’ve seen very frequently here is climate scientists being challenged on the basics of their field. Recently, e.g., Isaac Held departed under such circumstances. Of course you (Steve M.) know that many scientists read here and never comment. If you could do something to squelch the know-nothings at an early stage you might start to get more participation. At the same time it might become less justifiable to describe this blog as “denialist central.”
re# 57,
Louis,
Do you have an insider view of attitudes towards professors Bob Carter and Ian Plimer? Both are high profile Australian geoscientists who are outspoken AGW sceptics.
Thanks.
#56
Steve Bloom,
The text you posted is pure propoganda. 30 years is such a small time span its laughable. The entire article is almost useless.
Steve Bloom,
Is 3,000 years old ice ANCIENT? LOL
Louis,
Thank You.
Re #60/1: Dane, with comments like these you make it unnecessary for other to stereotype you. If you want to prove me wrong, try actually discussing the substance od what’s happened to those ice shelves.
#51 Ken, my response to your #20 was supposed to have a smiley at the end.
I am sorry, I meant it as a joke . Dumb joke I know-as in warming is supposed to be the only thing going on-so cold temps of any kind is just a freak of nature. I was interested in what you said. Sorry!
So it’s cold here right now. In the 30’s at night and in the morning. Record breaking since the 1930’s. I’d rather be warm. I had a tele-marketer ask me how I enjoyed the “Southern California weather” this holiday. I said I was freezing because we keep the heat off at night and the house hadn’t warmed up yet. She said “Huh?” She was from the mid-west and had a whole different visual in her head of palm trees and warm beaches-and our current temps are not in the news I guess.
And to the air: the basics and basis of climatology owes its origins and most of it’s data banks to the field of geology and geologists. Without geology, climatologist would not even know the climate had changed or could change on earth and they’d just be weatherpeople. Proxies come from the earth, not from the sky and not magically out of a computer. Respect that.
(Pssst #55 “I am surprised at your tone” I think my husband Dane read SteveM’s comment wrong. please overlook it SteveM I think he read it with a pair of “on-the-defense” glasses on.
Steve, did you even look at the paper I linked to?
#58. Steve B, I see no reason to believe that Isaac Held had any intention of making anything other than a royal wave here. He had no intention of engaging on any issue. I attempted to engage him on a couple of points, which he ignored. He’s under no obligation to participate here, but please stop this nonsense that somehow he was driven off.
I don’t get the impression that climate scientists are much interested in statistical issues. Otherwise why would the MITRIE project get someone like Juckes to spearhead that project? Their final article was a fiasco. But it was a fiasco because of how it was written, not because of climateaudit. It seems to me that the objective of people like Juckes is simply to get articles into the literature and onto his c.v. rather than to understand whether there are any substantive issues. This blog gave him an opportunity for serious discussion of his paper. Did he take advantage of this opportunity? Obviously not. He made supercilious and then temperamental comments, then withdrew. I can’t imagine that any unbiased readers got a good impression of him.
Dr Held was definitely not chased off. He was treated royally and his feedback, however limited, was educational and much appreciated. I suspect he’ll be back when GCMs make it to the fore.
#28 said:
Thanks for the advice, but I was asking more of a general logic question. That is, can CO2 not be a warming feedback in the past and a forcing now? The idea that the ice cores have “shot down” the theory misrepresents the theory. No one argues that CO2 is the major driver of climate in every age of history.
For the record I do not agree with Bloom’s idea of “squelching the know-nothings” – in part because I’m not sure what a know-nothing is. Everyone here knows something. I appreciate the rockses POV, even if I don’t always agree. As many have pointed out: CA may be somewhat noisy, but at least it’s democratic.
#38. That’s interesting about the ICe Shelf. I’ll try to remember to start a thread on this.
re: #69,
Bloom’s squelching is the typical trollish well-poisoning he uses. Yes, some of the people here are sometimes not correct, but less so than many of the AGW partisans who stop by.
Reading at another place, I came accross this snippet from a Ferdinand Englebeen post
Has the data re-materialised, and if so where could I find it?
#re 59
DaleC – oh that is a hard one – I get the feeling that few industry geologists give a fig about AGW having dismissed it on first principles, so I have not heard too many opinions about Carter or Plimer (who I know personally and who taught me in undergrad study at UNSW)from this sector of geoscience. The academic sector I cannot speak for though I sense from one or two letters I got this year, that AIG News editorial policy was a bit biassed.
Industry geologists tend not to frat too much with the academics who seem to live in a world of their own. We tend to lump the academics and geophyscists into one basket – too pre-occupied with mathematical modelling and not enough physical measurement and field work.
If you are familiar with the BBC political series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, we would regard both Carter’s and Plimer’s public positions on AGW “Courageous” given the tribal nature of geoscience.
I should point out one event this year when I was excoriated by an AIG Member in Tasmania for a short op-ed, “climate nonescience”. Once I pointed out to this member that the underlying issue was mathematical manipulation of intensive variables etc, and what one can, and cannot do, resulted in a complete about face. Unfortunately few in the physical sciences actually understand this crucial issue but those of us in the mining industry are acutely aware of it. Alot of the mathematical procedures of climate data etc are affected by it, but I really don’t want to get into a detailed discussion on this thread on that topic right now since, or in the near future since we have a persistent mineral commodities boom right now in Oz.
But what we think about the position of Carter and Plimer? As one colleague told me 6 weeks ago in the field, 100% of the industry geologists support our anti-AGW argument. As for Academia, I have no idea but I suspect they wish we were put our in some remote mining camp outpost were communication is limited to carrier pigeons and camel mail.
Re#69
Bender,
you are being disingenuous – a “know-nothing” is a climate sceptic :-). As for Steve Bloom, ( and this is more a reflection of my laziness than anything else) but who the blooming hell is he?
JohnA posted a comment on Warwick Hughes’ blog earlier this year on Steve Bloom that I just read, (yeah, yeah, I am slow in going through the in-tray) but apart from the perjorative of a troll and a frequent contributor to noise here, what is Bloom? Climate scientist? Or lay-preacher…….
MarkR, I’ve never seen temperature data from the Law Dome. The CO2 data is here, but a diligent search doesn’t reveal any temperature data. If you have $33.01 to spend, however, there’s an article here that discusses the subject.
w.
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Louis Hissink says:
December 31st, 2006 at 3:57 am
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re#247
Willis,
Trenberth said that? (Your last sentence).
No one accepts hypotheses except in the limited sense that a hyopthesis is reasonable and thus testable. In what context did Trenberth write that?
My criticism of AGW is based on what geophysical property is being measured.
Climate might also be considered a totally subjective interpretation. I recall reading the initial reports of the Spanish sailing around the bottom of South America, Tierra Del Fuego etc, where humans where observed living there stark naked in, according to the Spanish accounts, chilly temperatures.
Cold climate for the Spanish, normal for the Tierra del Fuegans (apologies for spelling).
If climate is a subjective measurement of our physical condition, then it is not capable of being analysed scientically.
249
chrisl says:
December 31st, 2006 at 4:00 am
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Climate science would seem to be a lot of circumstantial evidence thrashing around for a theory
We have 150 years of incomplete data which the rock people consider a snapshot in time
Meanwhile Mr Bloom thinks that a 4 year old paper is ancient history!
And now the carbon-trading vultures are circling
250
Willis Eschenbach says:
December 31st, 2006 at 4:48 am
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Louis, thanks for your post. You say:
re#247
Willis,
Trenberth said that? (Your last sentence).
No one accepts hypotheses except in the limited sense that a hyopthesis is reasonable and thus testable. In what context did Trenberth write that?
See post 245 in this thread for the quote in context and a link to the source.
w.
2006-12-31 @ 6:12:46 am
TAC
#247 Willis: Thanks for setting forth the statistical and data problems so clearly.Slightly OT: I realize we have been considering trends (possibly connected to SST) and uncertainty in the historical dataset. However, a second question involves the future: Will there be more destructive hurricanes if the globe warms?Even making the most favorable assumptions about the data and employing nothing more than linear models, it is not easy to get reliable projections because of the extreme extrapolation. The IPCC TAR projects a 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C rise in global temperature (and presumably SST). Your figure in #194 shows a historical range of SST of about 1 degree C, suggesting a standard deviation of SST of perhaps 0.25 degrees C. So we are extrapolating on the order of 10 sigma outside the calibration data. Given that the uncertainty increases roughly as the square of the extrapolation distance (and inversely wrt sqrt(N)), is it possible to say anything at all, based only on statistics, about hurricane arrival rates under IPCC warming projections?
253
Willis Eschenbach says:
December 31st, 2006 at 8:04 am
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TAC, you ask an interesting question:
The IPCC TAR projects a 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C rise in global temperature (and presumably SST). Your figure in #194 shows a historical range of SST of about 1 degree C, suggesting a standard deviation of SST of perhaps 0.25 degrees C. So we are extrapolating on the order of 10 sigma outside the calibration data. Given that the uncertainty increases roughly as the square of the extrapolation distance (and inversely wrt sqrt(N)), is it possible to say anything at all, based only on statistics, about hurricane arrival rates under IPCC warming projections?
The central problem here is the same one – lack of error estimates. We have no estimates of how accurate the models are. We have no estimates of error propagation through the models. We have no V&V or SQA on the models. Forget the unknown errors, we have no idea of how even the known errors in the models affect the outcomes.
For example, in “Present-Day Atmospheric Simulations Using GISS ModelE: Comparison to In Situ, Satellite, and Reanalysis Data” (warning: 2.2 Mb PDF), the GISS NASA modelers (James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt et al.) say:
Occasionally, divergence along a particular direction might lead to temporarily negative gridbox masses. These exotic circumstances happen rather infrequently in the troposphere but are common in stratospheric polar regions experiencing strong accelerations from parameterized gravity waves and/or Rayleigh friction. Therefore, we limit the advection globally to prevent more than half the mass of any box being depleted in any one advection step.
It is “common” in their GISSE model (which is one of the best ones) to end up with “negative masses”, so they limit the advection globally to half the mass? … what error results from that procedure? Given that the parameterized gravity waves lead to those physically impossible results, what other errors are created by that process? We don’t know. At a minimum it must screw up the conservation of energy … but since the GISS Model E doesn’t conserve energy, it’s not clear what that does either.
(Actually, it does conserve energy … at the end of every time cycle, it takes all the global excess or shortage of energy and distributes it evenly around the globe, without even checking how much out of balance the calculation is … I mean, who’d want to check that?)
So to answer your question, at present the IPCC models are no better than reading chicken entrails for forecasting future changes in the climate. In short, currently we can say nothing based on statistics, or even based on wishful thinking, about hurricane arrival rates in the future.
w.
254
welikerocks says:
December 31st, 2006 at 8:29 am
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#249:
J.Curry
I have argued that the greenhouse warming argument is the best available explanation for the increase in global hurricane intensity and the increase in total number of North Atlantic tropical cyclones (the magnitude of the increase associated with the greenhouse warming is the main issue of contention, rather than the existence of the increase).
Dane-
Firts of all, with only 150 yrs of data, you really can’t say one thing about natural variability. All you can say anything about is the variability within the dataset you have, which is very small relative to the amount of time since the end of the last Ice Age, and hence the assumed warming of SST’s. Proxies for temperature are good tools, but not exact measuring devices.
J.Curry-
Dane, climate varies on many time scales, associated with external forcing and natural internal variability. AGW is one of many causes of climate variability.
Willis
What we can say is that if there are correlations between SST and hurricane numbers, they must be pretty weak. Why? Because we can’t find them. Yes, there’s flawed data … but even with flawed data, a strong signal rises above the noise. This is the dirty little secret of climate science, the data is so poor “¢’¬? the datasets are so short, and the signal we are looking for is so small, that we can’t say much about the climate at all.
Dane:
And last, please admit you hurricane data is sparse at best in intensity, distribution, and numbers over the past 150 years. You must realize you are looking at a snapshot of time as far as the real earth goes, geologically speaking. To think you can make policy based on the weak evidence you have is scary, to the point of extremism. Do I think we should continue to study the issue? Of course, it should remain well funded, if for nothing else than to gain the knowledge of how the earth works
John S:
The data are so noisy and the power of our tests sufficiently low (at least those tests so far used) that the assumption of H0 determines the outcome. When you have assumptions determining the result it is not really empirical science – faith may be too pejorative a word for some in this context
J.Curry:
scientists are generally tired of being marginalized by an elected leadership that doesn’t seem to want to listen…
J Curry:
Steve M, thanks for trying to keep the noise down..
Louis Hissink says:
December 31st, 2006 at 4:13 am
re #49Roger,
Has anyone worked out how hurricanes, (cyclones etc) form physically?
Nobody in particular says:
December 31st, 2006 at 3:51 am
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Lets see … we have Triton (satellite of Neptune)undergoing significant warming. Mars reportedly “coming out of an ice age”. Warming on Jupiter. Warming on Earth … gosh, what could it possibly be that is common to all these places? Oh, I know, the increase in CO2 from the wife’s SUV emissions must be causing CO2 to spew out across the entire solar system causing warming everywhere all the way out to Neptune! Oh, seems I forgot Pluto … it seems to be warming too.
Al had better get busy, we have an entire solar system to save!
Cycle 24 is looking to some as being possibly the strongest recorded (should be peaking at around 2018) and early indications of cycle 25 are showing signs it could be one of the weakest ever recorded. So my prediction is … more solar system warming until about 2020 or so and then significant cooling if predictions for cycle 25 hold true.
SUVs or no SUVs.
Re: #58
Steve B, I read your comment in #58 a second time after seeing the replies to it, since I took it the first — and second — time as a compliment to CA and Steve M. Scientists being engaged in the field of their expertise and not, or at least not as a main thrust, on their politics or their stands on AGW, sounds like a lofty goal of a blog such as this one.
I believe I captured Isaac Held’s departing comment here in a recent post and it referred to his wanting to comment in the near future at CA in more detail on the use of parameters and fluxes in modern climate models. There was certainly nothing there to indicate any frustration, ala Dr. Curry’s several exits. I personally think that sometimes the scientists, and more so the more prominent the scientist, hesitate to comment or continue to comment at blogs such as this one for fear of getting caught up in the mode of the quick exchanges and state something in haste that in comparison to the more typical scientist manner was not well thought through and then becomes a matter of public record. With other scientists, who have experience and confidence in engaging the public, this is not a significant issue. A Ken Fritsch and, for that matter, I would guess a Steve Bloom have little professional standing at stake when they comment here.
Those scientists coming from an academic background I would suspect would be gratified to receive questions well thought through and not so well thought through that would in certain ways emulate a particularly attentive and engaged classroom.
P.S. The preview shows this response in bold. If this is to be the mode now, how does one show emphasis?
Willis, thanks for the response. I agree with your points, and I’m puzzled about why these problems are not taken more seriously.
p.s. That “sqrt(N)” in my comment should have been just “N” %-(
Ken,
Steve left a stray tag in the text which had no closure and therefore would have gone on and on.
Ken, one issue is that a climate researcher say working on hurricanes, is then expected here to defend the entire AGW portfolio from the paleoclimate record, melting ice caps, etc. Many scientists do not want to stray from their topic of personal interest, and may not feel comfortable doing so publicly. Contrary to the stereotype of “warmer”, most climate researchers don’t give alot of thought to the details of attribution of climate change since that is not something they personally investigate, they accept the IPCC on this since they see no reason not to, and focus their personal research on various aspects of uncertainty of in how the atmosphere works, or how the ocean works, or whatever. Unless a scientist feels there is something to learn here, there will be little motivation to spend time here. While scientists should expect to have to defend their research against criticisms from skeptics, many do not see the point of doing this in an environment like this where most of the posters are anonymous. Further, if a scientist isn’t used to this environment, there are alot of inflammatory words flying around that can make them feel that their integrity is being attacked, so why bother to spend time here. In trying to convince peter webster to post here, he was initially very turned off by a posting about atmospheric science being infantile. I’ve had to work on filtering the wheat from the chaff here and develop a “spam” filter as I get to “know” the various posters. So I’m making the effort, I’m intrigued by the possibilities here, but i can certainly see why most scientists avoid this.
New catastrophe next year!
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2116873.ece
Andrew Revkin has a long piece in today’s NYT (here), “Middle Stance Emerges in Debate Over Climate”. It begins:
RPJ is quoted, the blogs are mentioned, uncertainty is discussed, and doubts about the hurricane/AGW link are presented. Take a look…
re #73,
Louis, thanks for the insight –
Along with ‘Courageous’, we should perhaps also recall Sir Humphrey’s definition of ‘Sound’ as a person who can always be counted upon to make the desired finding, regardless of the evidence.
#80
A climate researcher working on hurricanes is a specialist studying one vey small aspect of a massive system. I have always blieved it is the onus of the specialist to show how and where their very small piece of the puzzle fits. If they don’t know the context or relevance then their work is essentially meaningless and very prone to error. The oral defense of my thesis took almost 6 hours as I was asked about the entire subject of climatology and the context for my piece of the puzzle (historcal reconstruction). As I have said frequently climatology is a generalism but almost all researchers are specialists most of who have come from other disciplines and do not have the training in climate or even physics of the atmosphere (meteorology) to know the relevance or irrelevance of their work. It is not dissimilar to the problems faced by dendroclimatologists when they start using statistics without understanding or guidance as Wegman noted. Of course, we have seen this hasn’t prevented many specialists holding up their piece of the puzzle as the most important one that should be funded above all others. Sadly, they are smart enough to know the risks of exposing their work and some surprisingly express it as P.D.Jones did to Warwick Hughes when he wrote, “All you want to do is find fault…” Sorry Phil and others, but that is the way of science and the world, stand up in the cocoanut shy and they will throw at you.
Here’s some interesting math for you.
The additional CO2 we have added to the atmosphere is equivalent to 0.01%
That means the atmosphere is 99.99% the same as it was in 1880.
Maybe some of the other gases we have added have changed the mix by a further 0.01%
Life would never have got started on the planet if the climate was that sensitive to small changes in the atmosphere since we know there has been significant changes in the mix of the atmosphere over time and the climate has been fairly stable given those large changes.
The models must be wrong and there must be some other overriding factor (such as water vapour) which is the dominant factor affecting climate.
#85 Aren’t there periods in the geological record when CO2 concentration in the atmoshere was lower then today and most of the ice melted on the planet too-when sea level high stands were found to be meters above today’s? I think my husband mentioned this to me, as something that is never brought up- when this started to be a debate here. I could be wrong.
Also, anyone ever read a paper like this? :
New evidence for imminent change in global temperature patterns
Ernest C. Njau
Physics Department, University of Dar es Salaam, PO Box 35063, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Received 30 June 1999; accepted 16 August 1999. Available online 2 December 1999.
Abstract
A previous publication by the author predicted that global temperature patterns will switch from the sinusoidal (amplitude-modulation) state into which it has been since 1944 into a node–antinode (amplitude-modulation) state somewhere over the 1997–2012 period. Here we present record-backed evidence which shows that the state change just mentioned is apparently in the process of starting up. By its very nature, this imminent (node–antinode) state is expected to make global temperature vary significantly above and below a common mean which itself may be approximately constant or may at certain times undergo relatively slow drifts. Furthermore we present a historical example in which records of temperature-sensitive indicators show that at least some regional temperature patterns have at least once switched from the sinusoidal (amplitude-modulation) state to the node–antinode state under global climate conditions that were fairly similar to those of the present. Finally we propose possible physical causes of the latter historical switch from sinusoidal state to node–antinode state.
link
Of course I have no idea what this means exactly or if it’s valid-but google is my friend. 🙂 I thought the dates mentioned in the abstract were interesting, as well as the publication date. I thought perhaps somebody else might think so too.The link to the publication is not working in the preview-crossing fingers and you have to pay to see the whole paper…
Tim Ball says:
January 1st, 2007 at 8:59 am
edit
Years ago (1973) Bronowski did a wonderful segment in his Ascent of Man series about how our view of the world and the universe changes with our ability to measure, which in turn is determined by technlogical advances.
#72 I don’t know if this helps but here’s two papers re ice core data that mention the lags:
Ice Core Records of Atmospheric CO2 Around the Last Three Glacial Terminations
Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and
Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III
Re Revkin’s article and the middle ground, i would say that >90% of climate researchers are in this camp. There are of course a few very vocal ones that are not
Re: #89 Dr Curry:
Thomas Barnett gives some insightful economic global perspective to Revkin’s article on his blog Perhaps the middle ground will find it’s voice and speak to the extremes. Let’s hope using some valid science and statistical analysis in defineing this middle ground.
I posted a version of this request on the Road Map thread just before it was “converted”, so sorry for the duplication.
Can anybody point point me to any known predictions made by a GCM and subsequent measurments of predictive accuracy? I’m not looking here for either “hindcasting” or holdout / validation sets, but actual forecasts made on date X for some date after X with subsequent measurments of accuracy (something like an empirical skill measurment).
Thanks in advance
Re: #82
Thanks for the link, but I took very little away from that article other than very general statements from an array of scientists. Actually without more detail and facts articles such as this one tend in my view to increase a discerning reader’s estimation of the uncertainty involved. The intent of the article apparently was to indicate that a middle ground is vocally emerging from scientists in the field without ever detailing what that middle ground is or how varied we might expect it to be.
The busy person could, I suppose, depend on the NYT and/or the IPCC to guide them through these issues but it so much more fun and intellectually challenging to look for and at the facts for oneself and attempt to arrive at conclusions, albeit perhaps temporary ones, that it surprises me how many people depend rather unquestioning on the institutional pre-digestion process.
Re: #80
They really are not required to engage at any level other than their own expertise, but I would suspect (and hope) that modern day scientists have bigger picture issues to discuss.
I have seen some rather intellectual and informative conversations carried out at web sites that sometimes otherwise can be, let us say, a bit rambunctious. Much depends on the participating parties. I doubt that scientists are any different, as a group, than any other collective of people, with some of them having personalities, experiences and dispositions more suitable for internet exchanges. But, I think, like most grandpas and grandmas, many will eventually being making the transition and for the betterment of all involved.
#92 Ken, I think I agree with your comments. However, what surprised me here was that Revkin’s previous NYT pieces had been drifting toward “The Science is Settled” position. IMHO, given the context, this piece indicates a shift in perspective.
First, Happy New Year to everyone!
Re:#80
Dr. Curry, thank you for providing an insider’s view of some of the barriers that keep more climate researchers from participating in the discussion here. I appreciate the scientific contributions you have brought to the discussions here, and would like to see them continue! Generalizing your observation, unless a person “feels there is something to learn here, there will be little motivation to spend time here.” I think the growth of CA is an indication that there IS something to learn here, even for professional climate researchers, and I hope that more will take the opportunity to investigate it personally rather than avoid it based on often-inaccurate third-party characterizations.
In reading your post, it seems that most of the obstacles you list are fairly easily overcome by a policy of “selective inattention” (which you hint at). While such a policy would be considered rude in typical face-to-face conversation, it seems appropriate and effective for blogs. An “opt-in” approach, replying only to posts of interest/merit, both saves time and shouldn’t cause any undue offense. As for being asked to defend the entire AGW portfolio, there’s no harm in stating that one isn’t an expert in all the topics covered by the IPCC. 🙂
I returned a few hours ago from a visit to the New Orleans area, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina sixteen months ago. Most of my time was spent with owners of small businesses, medical professionals, etc, who make up a key part of an economy. Here’s how the local economic players I spoke with see things:
* The New Orleans area has permanently lost about 25% of its population (200,000 to 300,000). People who are still gone after sixteen months have moved on and are not coming back.
* The areas which received heavy flooding have, at most, 10% occupancy. Restoration/recovery has given way to demolition on most streets. Expect many former neighborhoods to become mostly grassy fields. The desolation and destruction is a very strange and unnerving sight.
* The flooded areas have severe damage to underground utilities, due to the weight of the water causing the soft soil to reshape. Very large amounts of money are required to restore simple things like drainage, but there is no tax base to arrange that. Large areas of the city still do not have landline telephones or cable.
* Many local medical professionals (doctors, dentists, nurses, etc) have left.
* The tourist areas (French Quarter, Garden District) are physically OK but have below-normal numbers of tourists. Well-known restaurants are facing bankruptcy.
* Small business owners are fighters and survivors but optimism among them is hard to find. The general sense is that the bottom has not yet been reached.
Open question:
Does anyone know of a review (if not an audit) of the journal article discussed here. The authors evidently found a strong correlation between different proxies for “the Dark Ages Cold Period (~400-800 AD), Medieval Warm Period (~800-1200 AD), Little Ice Age (~1500-1800 AD), and Current Warm Period.”
It looks to me like an interesting bit of work and would like to know if others think so too.
Re #97: Ron, bear in mind that the Idsos run a propaganda site funded by the coal industry. The reason they don’t link to the original abstracts or (where available) open-access papers is because the papers typically don’t support the conclusions the Idsos want to draw. You can use Google Scholar to find the abstracts and papers (which I’ve done for you in this instance).
In this instance, the Idsos conclude their discussion by saying: “Thus, and once again, we have additional evidence for solar forcing of climate at decadal and multi-decadal time scales, as well as for the millennial-scale oscillation of climate that likely has been responsible for the 20th-century warming of the globe that led to the demise of the Little Ice Age and ushered in the Current Warm Period.”
Based on the abstract, the paper appears to support no such conclusion. There is an open-access paper available that appears to be a slight development of the same work, and it too does not support the Idsos’ conclusion; i.e., it finds evidence for solar forcing, but makes no claim whatsoever regarding 20th century warming.
While we’re on the subject, I noticed this statement in the linked abstract: “The delta13C of foraminifera depends on the photosynthetic activity of the symbiontic algae living on the shells, strictly related to the illumination of the sea-surface.” The related paper makes a similar statement up front, but then a little into the text says “(b)etween the factors influencing tree- and forams-d13C, there are light intensity, temperature, precipitation, etc. For the forams-d13C, changes in sea-surface illumination seem to be the most effective direct forcing.” Regardless of the strength of the statement, there seems to be no cited authority for it, and I don’t recall seeing any similar assertion (in particular discounting temperature in favor of insolation) in other foram papers.
The Idso’s also favorably discuss Khilyuk and Chilingar, which is reason #39 why that site is worthless.
Re #85: Jeff, continuing to repeat that point doesn’t make it any more true (although water vapor does indeed play a key role). As Judy Curry has noted, basic greenhouse physics is practically a physical law. I would also point out to you that skeptics like Lindzen and Michaels make no argument about it. I would suggest that you devote some hours to reading The Discovery of Global Warming. I’m sure you won’t agree with everything there, but at least you’ll understand why greenhouse physics is not in question.
Re 97 Alternatively you could also use the views of Experts in the area.
Overall relation between the solar variability and terrestrial effects is well established and has been widely explored by empirical/statistical methods, and qualitative mechanisms have been suggested. However, in order to understand the real causes responsible for these relations, the scientific community needs quantitative physical models applicable on different temporal and spatial scales. Some steps in this direction have been performed, within the CAWSES framework, by our group. The main direction of the work was to take a step from statistical/empirical regressions to physics-based numerical models allowing for not only qualitative but also quantitative studies of the solar-terrestrial effects. The following results have been obtained by the group in
the framework of CAWSES.
Long-term reconstructions of solar activity:
Using a physics-based model, our group has participated in quantitative reconstruction of the level of solar activity on the millennial and multi-millennial time scales from cosmogenic isotope data In particular, it has been shown that the contemporary high level of solar activity is a rare episode indicating the unusually high activity after the 1930’s. These data provide a solid basis for quantitative studies of very long-term relations between the solar variability and terrestrial environment. A possible signature of very strong solar energetic particle events has been also studied for the last centuries .
Assessment of Evidence for the Solar Influence on Climate
M. Lockwood, Co-Chair
L. Gray, Co-Chair
J. Beer,
L. Hood
K. Labitzke
J. Lean
A. Mangini.
R. Narasimha
G. North
P. Stott
G. Thuillier
I. Usoskin
H. Weng
W. White
Cawses newsletter sept 2006
#97,98 — Ron, bear in mind that Steve Bloom presents an extremist propaganda slant that financially benefits environmental groups, for one of which he is a self-admitted officer (see item 9).
Your conflict of interest illogic marinates the goose as well as it does the gander, Steve B.
Here, by the way, is the conclusion from the open access Mem S. A. It 2005 paper linked in #98, there said to not support the Idso’s comment: “Two 1800-years long d13C time series, one recording the environmental conditions of the sea surface and the other one recording those of the atmosphere, have revealed a common centennial oscillatory component of climate variability, together with ~200, ~300 and ~500 y waves and a long-term trend which describes the major climate features of the last two millennia, the MWP and the LIA. Moreover, the agreement between the 100-y components and the Gleissberg cycle suggests a solar forcing on the Earth’s climate at centennial scale.”
Here’s the conclusion from their restricted access 2005 Advances in Space Research paper: “In two 1800-years long d13C time series, one recording the environmental conditions of the sea surface and the other one recording those of the atmosphere, we have conï⪧?rmed the presence of a centennial oscillatory component, that is well revealed by two independent methods of spectral analysis. This result supports the evidence for a climatic variability of global character. The good agreement between this centennial cycle and the amplitude modulation of the sunspot number series suggests a solar forcing on the terrestrial climate at centennial scale.”
They both and each seem pretty supportive of the Idso’s observation of a link between climate variation and centennial-scale excursions in solar output that, ipso facto, is a “likely” player in recent climate change.
Re #101: Experts who pointedly draw no conclusions about climate impact, I see. The source document is here, BTW (do try to provide the link next time, Maks).
Re #103: Don’t take words out the Idsos’ mouth, Pat. They didn’t say anything near so weak as “‘likely’ player”; rather, they said it “likely has been responsible” for the current warming. Nobody disagrees that insolation changes have been and remain a climate forcing. The wishful claim that it has been the dominant factor in the current warming is a different story.
#104 — Steve B., even you have to agree that all the warming between 1850-1945 must have been due to natural climate drivers. That temperature change is about 0.4 degree. The net change between 1945 and now is about 0.4 degree, i.e., of the same order and of about the same rate. There really isn’t anything about the current trend that implicates excess atmospheric CO2 except tendentious interpretations.
I wrote ‘likely player‘ as a re-cast of Idsos’ words because of the syntactical evolution of my wording, not to down-play what they claimed. Let’s put their words back into their mouth: There is evidence that solar output variations produce “… the millennial-scale oscillation of climate that likely has been responsible for the 20th-century warming of the globe that led to the demise of the Little Ice Age and ushered in the Current Warm Period.”
To be precise, they didn’t write that solar variation “has been responsible for the current warming (your words)”. They wrote that it was responsible for the global emergence from the LIA and entry into the CWP. As I see it, your position would be that the CWP is warmer than it otherwise would be if not for A-CO2, and not that we should still be in an extended LIA. That being true, you have no gripe with the Idsos’ analysis. And my “likely player” more accurately represents what the Idsos intended than your “likely has been responsible” for the current warming.”
On the other hand, if you’re of the opinion that human activity bumped Earth climate out of the LIA over 1850-1900, you’re a party of one in that group.
#20
NOAA has 2007 for N. America either normal or above normal for
temperatures. The deep South during the early Summer months being the
only large area forecasted to be below normal. El Nino is blamed for most
of it. The Independent expects global temps worldwide to be at record levels.
The UK Met office, where they got thier forecasts, blame AGW coupled with ENSO
to be the culprits.
The Brits may be going out on a limb. It would take a lot to beat out 1998. The 2006
ENSO event appears to have already hit its peak, and most of the N. Hemisphere’s warming
should manifest itself early on. I don’t know what the outlook for East Asia is, but
it has been very cold there 2 years and counting. Also, The Pacific SSTs appear
quite cool compared with previous years. The large heat engine of the West PAC
may not be there this year. In any event, it should be interesting to see if
the Brits will be correct.
bender, did you watch the Fiesta Bowl (Boise State- Oklahoma) tonight? About the best ending sequences of any football game I’ve ever seen. I tuned in at the end, not planning to watch, but it had an amazing ending that I couldn’t stop watching. BTW when I saw a recent thread start with “Florida was clobbered…”, I assumed that it was something to do with next week’s game, but it as merely about hurricanes.
Re #105: Pat, I think you tripped over the Idsos’ bad grammar. But I have to say I’m amazed to hear that they think something besides solar is responsible for late 20th century warming? Please don’t tell jae about that; it’ll break his heart. 🙂 Also, recall that my original objection to the Idsos’ characterization was their assertion that the paper(s) had found a solar effect on the 20th Century. Your quotes didn’t seem to address that issue. As well, it remains that the Idsos’ assumption of a magnitude of solar forcing sufficient to have played a meaningful role in the climate of the last few centuries is not supported by the papers.
Regarding the LIA and its causes, it sounds like you are unfamiliar with Bill Ruddiman’s work.
How about another interesting math lesson for you.
Let’s take the average estimate for the temperature rise for a doubling of CO2 – 3C for a 300 ppm increase in CO2.
Now let’s go back in history to the time when the CO2 content of the atmosphere was 1% – about 700 million years ago. The CO2 content of the atmosphere was as high as 80% in the early earth.
The ppm of 1% is 10,000 ppm or 33 times higher than today. Taking the estimate of an increase of 3C for 300 ppm increase in CO2, we see that the average temperature of the earth 700 million years ago was 114C – or in other words, the oceans would have evapourated and we would have no life on earth.
So, the simple math indicates that the physical law is wrong.
re: #109 Jeff,
Please don’t say things like that! You’ll just make yourself look foolish. The point is that the increase of 3 deg c is for a (i.e. each) doubling of CO2, not for a 300ppm increase. And 33 times is roughly 5 doublings. So the increase would be about 15 degrees. But there are a couple of caveats which have to be pointed out in any case. This log-linear increase in temperature is only an approximation based on most absorption lines being saturated and just minor lines increasing. Whether this still holds at 32 times the concentration would need to be examined. The second point is that when you go that far back in time, the average insolation is lower than it is today. Thus the concentration of CO2 it would take to equate to present temperatures can be larger, even assuming the positive water feedbacks necessary to get a 3 deg temperature for a doubling is correct; which I don’t agree with.
RE: #38 – And significantly, the event occured 18 months ago (summer of 2005) which had a greater than normal melt back of sea ice in the Canadian Arctic. That on the heels of Summer 2004, another warmish one, and that on the heels of the “year without a Summer” (in the Arctic) of 2003. Might have been some quite strong pressure differentials in the ice of the shelf based on all that.
RE: #81 – Fitting of a tabloid – right up there with “UFO attacks imminent! Baby born with two heads! Blair divorce brewing!”
Re: #64
I took it as that without a smiley. I seldom use a smiley. For example, I would not expect that a smiley would be needed to keep certain Florida Gators here from being insulted if I suggested that they take Rex Grossman back as an eighth or ninth year red-shirted senior for some needed seasoning.
With the new virtual server, John A has been able to modify the search settings so that the directories http://www.climateaudit.org/data and http://www.climateaudit.org/scripts are now searchable
To Dane, aka the Rockses:
First, I apologize for combining two responses and only addressing to you. The second was a more general comment intended for another recipient — I was rushed.
And apologies for being so late; I hope you find this posting, I only just found the new thread today.
PETM references:
General consumption:
Ocean Burps and Climate Change
Links to one journal article at the end.
Still GC:
Wikipedia:
Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
Five links at the bottom of this one.
Critical PDF (appears to be a preprint):
Eocene Hyperthermal Event Offers
Insight Into Greenhouse Warming
The references at the bottom of the last one are a good start for journal articles; the final one from Zachos about rapid acidification of the oceans is worth a look.
RE 96: David Smith
Interesting obsrvs. Trying to keep permanent residents out of those flood-prone areas seems proper IMO — realizing the medicine is hard to take. Plant Live oaks & Bald cypresses & make the areas extensions of the N.O. City Park?
Jack,
Thanks, The links are intersting. did you notice Gavin Schmidt was one of the authors? Also, did you notice the margin of error for the dating techniques appears to be about 100,000 years? Seems that makes the event not at all similar to whats going on now. Interesting stuff to think about though.
Here is one for everyone to ponder. 125,000 years ago almost all the ice melted and Co2 concentrations in the atmosphere were lower than today. If Co2 is such a powerful GHG, how did that occur, all by itself, with no human influence? I have 6 papers on the event, 3 from the equator and 3 from southern oregon. I am sure the event can be easily googled.
Hmmm, it is possible that “rural” temperature measurements also suffer from the UHi.
One last thing, during the 125,000 yrs ago sea level highstand, sea level was about 6 meters higher than it is today, so much of the ice we see today was not locked up in glaciers.
Re #117: Dane, there have been literally dozens of interglacials (during none of which did nearly all the ice melt; East Antarctica seems to be rather persistent during the present glacial cycles). The magnitude and persistence has varied in accordance with insolation changes driven by Milankovitch cycles. It is also known that CO2 plays a substantial role as a *feedback* to the Milankovitch cycles. Now we are adding a large quantity of CO2 to the atmosphere in the midst of an interglacial; i.e., making it into a *forcing*. Should we expect nothing to change?
Regarding the PETM, I’m curious as to what conclusions you think ought to be drawn from it.
Steve, you need to research the 125,000 yr ago Sea Level High Stand, you do not know what you are saying. In grad school I was taught ALL the ice melted, now with coring it appears in some places not all the ice melted, but definetly MOST of it melted in order to raise sea levels 6 meters world wide.
So it was not at all the same as the other interglacials, but possibly closer to what we might be in for today, all simply due to earths wobbles. No Co2 needed for the planet to warm up warmer than today.
I think the PETM was likley an anomolous event that most likley occurred over tens of thousands of years. Thats what the graph reads to me.
Dane,
I did notice Gavin Schmidt was one of the authors. He’s certainly not the only person to have studied the PETM, and his participation in said research doesn’t diminish any of the findings.
As I stated before, the analogy is this: an increase in greenhouse gases (methane, which oxidized to CO2) during a climate setting in which not much else was appreciably changing [as far as can be determined from the available data]. The data indicates a climate response of significant warming. I believe that’s what you asked for when you requested of Bender:
Bender please find me one article showing proof of a link between Co2 concentrations in earths atmosphere and earths temperature? No models please, real data. The ice cores have all been shot down, what else do you have?
The PETM is the closest natural analog (which does not mean it matches the current circumstances exactly, that would be ludicrous!) to the current addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Because it was a natural event, the methane release to the atmosphere may have indeed happened over a few thousand years. The key is that the increasing GHG concentrations were sustained by the process sufficiently for a recordable climate response in the oxygen isotope data, which indicates the global temperature.
And the temperature went UP — way, way up.
Indeed, we should probably also be a bit thankful that the projected increases in atmospheric CO2 from fossil fuels don’t approach what happened during the PETM.
Jack,
The temp went up some, according to the proxy data. What we don’t know was what else was happening during all that time. There is a lot of time that is being ignored in that study, in fact it didn’t even list the dating methods used nor the margin of error, just a graph making it appear the events all happened simultaneously. I find that slightly suspicious, but hey its climate science so anything is possible. I am also curious as to what the orbital parameters were back then, since last I looked we only had sparse data in that area going back about 10 million years, probobly better today, but good resolution is impossible. The Gavin Schmidt crowd simply jumps on the AGW bandwagon its leading to use that as an anology for GHG warming, when there are other likley explanations for the temp increases noted.
I am not doubting the GHG physics that occur in a controlled lab experiment. I doubt them when applied to the earth. A body we still know so little about. To think we fully understand all the physics going on with a complex adaptive system like the earth.
#118
That’a an oldie. I wonder if any new research has been done since Dark Side of the Moon was released?
125: Oldie? Is that a problem? I wonder when Einstein’s last paper was published?
Hi Jack, I think you aren’t getting the point. CO2 concentrations are low now compared to differnet times in the geological record (do you understand how big the geological record is?) Also CO2 concentrations have been higher. Climate events happened. And in some cases the C02 rise followed behind a rise in temps. Also cooling events happened, and in some cases CO2 concentration was as high or stayed high even when the planet was very cold. Dane is saying that maybe CO2 isn’t that important or influencial all the time to the temperature. Other things can make up for it. And I believe if you look back through what he said, he says methane is probably is a culprit.
I also posted links for ice core papers showing the lag in history of CO2 behind temp rises.
“oxygen isotope data, which indicates the global temperature.” Oxygen isotope data was developed to find sea level histories too. It maybe good at indicating global temps-but they don’t record exact temps. The ratio between light and heavy isotopes is used to to represent “temp” and this ratio is based on how much water is on this planet. Cold or Hot planet is same as: Water locked up in Ice-Cold or lots of Water and less ice-Hot.
These are some old worn out points of contention in the debate.
The problem Jack, with Bloom and you, and “New papers are better” Boris, is that you give the rest of us the impression that you do not understand how big the earth’s age is and how many times the climate can change for long periods, short periods etc. Our human existance in that record in comparison can be described as just a tiny sliver of one sheet , at the end, of a whole toilet paper roll.
re 111:
So it might be true that “unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role?”
126:
You’re right, I remember when the big E. published last and physics ended.
Re #127: rocks, you exhibit a peculiar kind of arrogance. For example in #121 your significant other said: “In grad school I was taught ALL the ice melted, now with coring it appears in some places not all the ice melted, but definitely MOST of it melted in order to raise sea levels 6 meters world wide.” Doubtless you considered his response to be more grist for the mill of your view of the state of my knowledge. I don’t blame your husband for misremembering some figure from grad achool; I do blame him for not knowing that he should check his facts. His misstatement (and your support of it) indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the larger scientific picture. Please take the time to actually learn something about this stuff.
Just the ice sheet facts: Nearly 70 meters of sea level rise would result from complete melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.
I hope you never have to go to the hospital, but if you do, I hope you request 2007 treatments rather than 1973 treatments.
Steve B,
You can’t even cite your own sources correctly. They say 61 meters of sea level rise, but hey, whats another 10 meters more or less. I am quoting papers from 10 years ago, so more recent advances may have been made. I did notice those estimates were based on climate models, not geologic data as the estimates I was taught were based on. You still need to go research the 125,000 sea level highstand. You clearly do not understand that at all, nor its implications.
I also recall a paper from 2000 that estimated almost all the ice melted 4 seperate times in the last 500,000 years, but don’t recall the exact source. Those estimates are based on real data, not climate models. That story never made it past the internet science sections, surprise surprise.
RE: #130 – I’ll send you out on those sheets to help speed up the melting. Maybe a roaring bonfire or two. You could bring blow torches and some IR lamps as well. Before you died of old age, it might be intersting to see how much of a dent you could make. In all seriousness, do you have any idea how much energy would be required to melt those continental glaciers, and how long it would actually take? Do you have even the slightest inkling?
Re #s 38/111/128: Apparently last year’s break-up was more like the end than the beginning of the end. For details see here and here. Note that somehow the original single Ellesmere ice shelf (the Ayles and Ward Hunt ice shelves were remnants) seems to have survived the Medieval Warm Period only to fall victim to 20th century warming.
So, boris, am I too assume then that the late 1950’s paper describing the earths magnetic field is too old and should no longer be used? Or maybe Plate Tectonics, since that theory cam out about 40 years ago, must be too old and therefore no good?
Sometimes I will take old over new, for example the browning M2 50 caliber machine gun technology is over 100 years old, but I’ll take it over a brand new AK-47 or M60 or any other machine gun on the battlefield anytime. Newer does not equal better. Ma Duce Rocks my world.
I hope to have the older treatments because if they’ve lasted that long, it means that they have been not simply through the cursory and error-prone peer review, but realworld testing by multiple independent investigators looking for flaws, side-effects and statistical anomalies. Hundreds or thousands of patients have been before me, so the treatment I receive can be accurately quantified for efficacy and risk.
You like your treatment to be new because someone waved through a paper at a journal? Good luck.
Newton is still referenced quite a bit, despite the age of his writings. And one of the AGW crowds all-time favorites, Arrhenius. And so on. BTW, Einstein’s last paper was in 1956.
Neither paper makes such a claim. So before you start spamming the comment threads again with yet another hit-and-run barrage of papers you haven’t read, perhaps you’d like to go back to this comment and answer it? And then we can move forward in your education.
Re #132: Dane, all of that is wrong, wrong, wrong. It is not possible that tou could have been taught any such thing in grad school unless your professor was just making it up. And regarding my source, slow down long enough to read *the whole thing*: The 61 m1ter figure is Antarctic only.
Oh yeah, and I’m sure there really was a 2000 paper along the lines you describe. *snork* Please stop embarrassing yourself.
Re #131
The bias against older papers that have not been refuted is quite common among those who don’t like going to real libraries out of laziness.
Steve, I could go into my garage and find the papers, cite them, and make a list for you, but your not worth it. Go back to looking into the 125,000 yr sea level highstand, look at Co2 concetrations and come back here and tell me it was caused by Co2. You can’t.
I am not afraid to embarress myself. I am a disabled combat veteran, something you will never have the honor of being. If I am wrong I will admit it, don’t tell me what my teacher taught, he is an expert in his field and all over the internet. Look up Dr. Harvey Kelsy and sea level estimates, there is plenty there to read.
Sometimes I get depressed knowing I risked my life and lost the ability in my limbs for people like steve bloom, what a waste of good O2.
I am being polite here because I like and respect Steve M, otherwise bloom I would eat you for lunch and give the bones to my dog.
Steve Bloom first that’s wikipedia. Do you own a geology book?
From the USGS:
“Sea levels during several previous interglacials were about 3 to as much as 20 meters higher than current sea level. The evidence comes from two different but complementary types of studies. One line of evidence is provided by old shoreline features. Wave-cut terraces and beach deposits from regions as separate as the Caribbean and the North Slope of Alaska suggest higher sea levels during past interglacial times. A second line of evidence comes from sediments cored from below the existing Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. The fossils and chemical signals in the sediment cores indicate that both major ice sheets were greatly reduced from their current size or even completely melted one or more times in the recent geologic past. The precise timing and details of past sea-level history are still being debated, but there is clear evidence for past sea levels significantly higher than current sea level.”
Re #132, 139,
At slide 41 of
Click to access Gerhard_Climate_Change.pdf
Lee Gerhard says
“Glaciation occurs when sufficient heat is present at the poles to create an open polar ocean, a source of snow to create glaciers. This occurs when continents divert heat from the equator to the poles.
(Ewing and Donn, 1958)”
I have read similar statements in other places. Since there have been four glaciations over the last 500,000 years, Dane’s statement has some support.
JohnA,
The Meuller et al 2003 paper says in paragraph 2 of the introduction, “Since then, the remnant ice shelfs, including the ~3,000 year old Ward Hunt Ice Shelf (Crary, 1960), have remained relatively stable.”
The Vincent et al 2001 paper says, in paragraph 3 of the introduction “The original extent and age of Ellesmere Ice Shelf are also subjects of conjecture, although on the basis of driftwood analysis, it appears that ice shelfs along this section of the coastline began to develop during a period of cooling in the mid-Holocene about 4000 years ago (Evans and England 1992). Given that the ice shelves owe their origin to sustained low temperatures, they are also likely to be sensitive indicators of a return to warmer temperatures.”
So no, those papers don’t specifically make that claim about the entire Ellesmere Ice Shelf – although the Vincent paper does call it “ancient.” However, if it is ~3000 year old as cited in the Meuller paper, Ward Hunt Ice Shelf did survive the MWP, and it has now broken up.
So past sea levels were 3 – 20 meters higher than today.
Greenland and Antarctica contain enough ice to raise sea levels by ~70 meters if melted.
Isotope and coring studies imply that all or nearly all ice was melted.
There is a major disconnect somewhere between these three statements. Where did that other 50 meters of water go?
Re #143
Slide 55 is interesting:
Have to look into that one.
Re #145
That’s where #143 is interesting. How much H20 could be transferred from polar ice caps to alpine glaciers? Glaciers can be a lot thicker than the 50m depth difference you seek to account for.
re 145
T
answer rebound http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isostatic_rebound
Thinking of Sadlov’s continual reports this fall, one wonders if the anomalous atmospheric circulation that led to the cold & snowy Siberian and western North American Oct-Nov-Dec anomaly has anything to do with melting polar ice. (As hinted at in #143.)
Despite lacking in a few climate science areas (see my post about CO2 levels of the past and increasing temperatures) I believe that the ice of Antarctica and Greenland has not melted in any of the last interglacials.
In fact, Antarctica has been frozen over for 35 to 40 million years and Greenland has been frozen over for about 15 million years. These continents froze over as continental drift moved them close enough to the poles.
Other than a few very rare occasions, the poles have been always been frozen over in the history of the earth. For one, the poles have always had 6 months of darkness followed by 6 months of sunlight with the sun just above the horizon providing very little heat if any at all. This is more like a real physical law to me than the CO2 theories. The glaciers expand farther and are more persistent on land, for example, than on the sea as well.
It has always been very cold at the poles and there has always been ice there.
#148 was obviously a cross-post with #147. Interesting coincidence that we converged on similar thoughts there.
re 147 – if the isotope work says there is no ice, then it shouldn’t matter whether the ice is at the poles or in the mountains.
50 meters of ocean depth is a LOT of ice – equivalent to 1/2 or 2/3 of all the ice in antarctica and greenland. Its hard to imagine a mechanism that melts off those ice caps completely, but SIMULTANEOUSLY (to maintain ocean elevations) piles that much ice in temperate mountains.
P says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 4:10 pm
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#34,36
Storm seeding and the like remind me of the Laws of Unintended Consequences. Recently a British Nobel Laureate recommended depositing thousands of tons of sulfuric aeresols into the stratsophere. His goal of course is to “force cool” the lower tropesphere. His assumption is that a cooler planet is more benign than a warmer one. I suppose the average person who worries about AGW figures that a cooling climate just entails cold winters and the occaisonal cool summers. Besides, what will happen to the ski resorts if all the moutain glaciers melt?
Anybody who studied European History from the 14th through 19th Centuries realized that the amount of weather induced human suffering during this time was considerable. The famine of 1319 (the worst in European History) was caused by massive rainfalls during the Spring and Summers of 1318. The North Atlantic Oscillation was doing summersaults, going from high to low mode sometimes in a 10 month period. Many of the Atlantic Tropical Cyclones were caught up of the strong southwesterlies, and went from warm core to cold core cyclones before slamming into Western Europe. The US Eastern Seaboard expirenced a severe draught (the worst in 700 years if you beleive the proxies) during the coldest years of the LIA. Great Britain also had several severe draughts during the 16th and 17th centuries. The Great London Fire of 1666 occured during a year where it didn’t rain for 7 straight months, and where surface temperatures climbed into the low 100s. This was followed by a European winter so cold that the oak trees in the English Midlands split open.
I certainly hope that the scientists who are considering such drastic measures to cool our atmosphere realize what they are asking for.
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bender says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 4:26 pm
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Maybe this is all to do with the AMO as Judith Curry is now proposing, but again I think that the authors should try to work these things out before rather than after publishing.
Publish or perish.
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Mark T says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 4:30 pm
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Besides, what will happen to the ski resorts if all the moutain glaciers melt?
Most of the Colorado/Utah resorts don’t even depend upon glaciers in the first place, maybe this is different in Europe?
In fact, GW (whether A or otherwise) does not seem to be having any impact on our snow seasons.
Mark
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rincevent says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 4:39 pm
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I certainly hope that the scientists who are considering such drastic measures to cool our atmosphere realize what they are asking for.
JP,
You must talk about Paul Crutzen, who received a Nobel prize for discovering the ozone depletion. He must be desperate his 80’s scare child is now forgotten by the media which have switched the hysteria over to GW, so he proposes a grand geo-engineering scheme.
(sorry for then OT)
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Mark T says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:10 pm
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In fact, GW (whether A or otherwise) does not seem to be having any impact on our snow seasons.
I should have said “negative impact on our snow seasons.” We’re experiencing run of the mill climate oscillations, which is resulting in earlier snow (Colorado Springs is setting records), but earlier warming in the spring. All things considered, this is good for skiers since we get good snow before the tourists show up in droves (spring break in late February). Of course, if it keeps up, I’ll need a sled team to make it into work before spring gets here… 😉
Mark
After thinking more on the subject I have to admit my memory might be wrong on whether or not all the ice melted, It may have been Dr. Kelsey was referring to Alpine glaciers where we had been on field trips, or more likley he was referring to just if Greenland ice melted as shown here
The point was it was warmer than today, sea levels were signifacantly higher, and it happened multiple times. Co2 was apparently not a factor. The 125,000 year high stand was the event we spent time on. I am getting old.
Re #144: This is correct. The paleo work (Crary, 1960; carbon dating of trapped driftwood) was done after much of the original ice shelf had disappeared, so the abstract overstated things slightly. It remains that the parts that were dated and are now disappearing had managed to survive the Medieval Warm Period.
Re #152: The USGS reference says that the *West* Antarctic ice sheet melted during those 20 meter interglacial rises. That would have left the *East* Antarctic ice sheet (which is where that 50 meters of “missing” ice resides) largely intact.
bender #107
re 153
Temperatures here in western Quebec typically fall to -35C in the winter. We have oaks here. None of them split open.
Re #143: DaleC, that Ewing and Donn hypothesis is an old (and now discarded) idea that sought to explain the glacial cycles without Milankovitch cycles. Try googling it.
Re #156: Oh, see, now that’s trolling! 🙂
A short note on high-latitude temperatures
Ice cores from Canadian glaciers have been indicating anomalous temperatures on several-thousand-year time scales. Note in the graphic below that the data appears to end in 1950 – the last 5 years or so are not on that graph.
Over the last few years we have lost, and appear to be continuing to lose, many-thousand-year ice shelves in both the arctic and the antarctic.
I think the idea that nothing unusual is going on, at least for high latitudes in the context of the last several thousand years, is becoming less tenable.
http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/climate/global_e.php
Re #150: Jeff, if you do a little research you’ll find that permanent ice at the poles is actually something of a rarity during the Phanerozoic, and that the present glaciation situation is very unusual or perhaps even unique during that time.
Re the Ewing and Donn ice age hypothesis, see here.
Re #156, #107
#159 notwithstanding …
That win by Boise State was just incredible. That fake – right arm throwing NOT, left arm flicking ball up behind the back – for the 2pt convert to win was the best I’ve ever seen. The OU defense was shocked. What a gutsy call. It was the topic of conversation at work today. Best game I’ve ever seen.
I am still trying to figure out what to write to Ken Fritsch on the recent poor performance by Rex & the Bears. I am at a loss for words. “It won’t happen again?” I don’t think 2/12 is how he would have finished the game had he been allowed to continue. Still, that was truly ugly.
Re #157: I faintly recall (from my cold-climate childhood) such things happening during sharp and severe freezes following warm spells, but I think similar effects were much more common as a result of ice storms.
#163. I agree. By itself, it would have been a special play, but to come after the seeming meltdown by Boise State at the end of the game – the meltdown felt just like Arizona-Chicago; the Boise St recovery when they pulled a perfect flea-flicker on 4th and 18 from the 50 with 17 seconds left, and a shot-put halfback pass on 4th and 2 in overtime. Best sequence I’ve ever seen. Followed by a marriage proposal on-air. Too much.
Now wouldn’t it have been something if the OU player who got the interception had run it to the 1 and then intentionally gone out of bounds. So that they could run out the clock and kick a field goal with no time on the clock.
Re #165: Yeah, well, I’d like to have seen them manage that with the opposing side’s band on the field.
Re #165
Good point. Hadn’t thought of that. Stoops is probably kicking himself.
Re #162
That link might refute the Ewing & Donn hypothesis, but that was not the question. The issue was glacial oscillations. Milankovitch forcings, ignored by Ewing & Donn, may provide the trigger for a periodic shift between attracting states (although even that is debatable), but in the historical record CO2 behaves as a responder (rising after temperture), not a driver (rising before temperature).
Some have argued that past behavior is not necessarily indicative of future behavior, that CO2 could switch roles from a feedback to a forcing. This makes logical sense to me, dynamically. But that’s not enough. The real question is what’s the empirical proof that that’s what’s happening? How is the sensitivity of CO2 as a forcing estimated? How precise is that estimate? I’m not convinced (yet) by IPCC’s models.
Finally, once you burn up all your fossil fuels, what’s to prevent CO2 from dropping and then climate switching to a cool state the next time Milankovitch cycles around? What do you really gain from an anti-hydrocarbon agenda? Eight years worth of political power? (Sorry, that last remark was unnecessary. But you see what I mean, don’t you?)
Let’s find that missing 50 metres of sea level rise! To start with, ice shrinks as it melts, so take off 10%. Next the West Antarctic ice sheet is 12% of the total Antarctic ice mass, and this sheet extends in parts to 2,500 metres below sea level. So take off another 10%. The rest can be explained by isostatic rebound. Since the ice sheet over southern Norway melted 9,600 years ago, the rebound has been as much as 800 metres. This amounts to 8.3 cm/year. See this: http://www.sgu.se/hotell/progeo/news/4_2000/index.html
If all the ice in Antarctica melted, Antarctica would pop up like a cork. The world’s oceans would actually get deeper. If this is a difficult concept to handle, play in your bath and think of Euripedes, or was it Archimedes? To do a proper job in calculating sealevel rise due to proportions of Antarctic ice melting, you would have to take out the floating ice shelves and all the ice that is currently below sea level. For the Eastern Antarctice ice sheet, a warmer climate would mean an increased rate of mass increase and faster ice streams until equilibrium was reached.
Re #169: But it’s ever so much more fun to just pretend we found it, isn’t it? You assume, e.g., that whoever came up with those numbers was such an idiot that they forgot to account for the density change? Be serious.
Re #168: Good question. Obviously I can’t comprehend in detail the work done by clinate scientists, but part of the answer is that what I can understand generally seems to hold together. That said, the critical issue of sensitivity is a bit trickier. My short answer is that it’s not possible to explain the behavior of climate over the past 60 million years without invoking a substantial role for CO2. I can boil it down to four basic observations: 1) The PETM, which is impossible to explain without substantial CO2 sensitivity, 2) the apparent correlation between higher CO2 levels following the PETM and the general state of the climate, noting in particular that CO2 levels needed to drop below a certain point in order for the Pleistocene glaciations to commence, 3) the Milankovitch cycles that control the glaciations don’t themselves change insolation enough to account for the cycles, and something with persistence in the atmosphere (i.e., not water vapor) seems to be the only candidate for that role, and 4) looking at the whole Phanerozoic, we are in a rare and possibly unique cold snap that does not look all that stable; i.e., something relatively subtle could pop us out of it and back into something like the Oligocene.
Re #80
That’s an interesting perspective that may explain past complaints by Dr. Curry on this blog as well as her premature exits.
However, if I, as a layperson, find reasons to mistrust the conclusions of an institution that chose to feature prominently the Hockey Stick on its last pronouncement, I think that, if anything, a scientist should be even more careful when taking IPCC theories as a given for their research.
This is especially true when we consider that some of the IPCC key conclusions (e.g. climate sensitivity), not to speak about their “projections’, are admittedly subject to large uncertainties.
It’s far from being the case, but if I were conducting specialized climate research, I think that I would try to substitute AGW, wherever possible, by the much more robust GW. My conclusions would gain in confidence and it would help in avoiding the politicization of my work, which is something Dr. Curry also said she disliked.
This “new” article Aug 17, 2006 here Study Breaks Ice On Ancient Arctic Thaw, I will quote:
” substantial sensitivity” sounds a bit mis-leading in light of ” enormous magnitude of carbon” but that’s just me 😉
Hey bender 🙂 Just wanna say sorry we got so snippy with each other, your POV is important to me .
Cheers!
#172, That was well said.
Ah, Mr Bloom, self-confessed factotum of the Sierra Club, that is the whole point of this site. My experience is that experts are often wrong. You do have to check everthing for yourself. I was surprised when I did the raw calculation and found that 27.5 million cubic kilometres of ice would result in a sea level rise of 70 metres. But you dig deeper and things are going to be that bad. So the experts putting out the 70 metre figure are more than a little disingenuous. I don’t think they were idiots, because they knew they were lying.
137:
You’ve now compared your UHI paper from 1973 with Newton and Einstein. There should eb some kind of award for this.
135:
More faulty comparisons. Please show some evidence that this UHI paper is that infliuential, or even that the results have been replicated.
140:
Ironic, considering jae linked to the Idso’s regurgitation of this UHI paper. Doubt he’s read it. It’s pretty hard to find.
Boris, I could argue that since the Hockey Stick was published and maybe since certain people want or would prefer “Eight years worth of political power” like bender mused -all other POVs and research in this issue (whether old papers or new) have been “deemed” unworthy and squelched, ridiculed and censored over and over by The Team and puesdo scientists of the media and their followers -which is unreasonable since the Hockey Stick has been looked over fairly well and you know what happened with that, and a social network does exist to support a possible squelching. These things we talk about here, all of them- are not fully understood by all means. Your continued verbal harrassment of anybody’s thoughts out side this “Team Box” plus those against any sources coming from out of the “Team Box”-plus your feelings about life in general- is getting really old. You don’t even agree with anybody in the “we just don’t know” discussions. That’s not what this site is for. You seem to want to stop any independant thought. Can you explain that?
Brooks Hurd says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 1:14 pm
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Re: 9
Steve,
Every post on the linked RC thread seems to be from the cheering choir.
For example:
REAL CLIMATE is a Godsend, and not only because it is a source of the ammunition we all need to counter the propaganda churned out by special interests’ hired guns bent on confusing the public and preventing rational government action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
I know of no other source where I can find important aspects of global climate change science summarized and explained authoritativly and simply, or interpretations of the significance of the avalanche of new findings currently appearing in the scientific literature.
Since we know that RC redacts and censors posts, it is interesting that they allow all the sycophants’ posts to appear. Do their egos really need such constant reassurance?
14
Dave Dardinger says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 1:26 pm
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re: #13
explained authoritativly
This is the heart of the RC method. They give the official answers, the readers hear and give back worship.
15
Steve Sadlov says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 1:53 pm
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RE: #14 – The “court scientists” of the ecoradical elites.
16
Steve Bloom says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 4:16 pm
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Re #5: “Orbital parameters in the early Holocene gave a different latitudinal and season distribution of insolation, but no real difference in the global total, so temperature anomalies should largely cancel, unless there are global changes in e.g albedo or greenhouse gases.” My understanding is that differences in this distribution (in both latitude and timing) are key to the changes. After all, annual total insolation does not chnage significantly over such periods of time.
Re #s 13/4/5: Self-cancelling criticism.
17
Dave Dardinger says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 4:19 pm
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Steve B,
I wish we could get you to self-cancel. You’re getting really annoying.
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bender says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:45 pm
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Stupid question. Where did the polar bears disappear to during the Holocene Optimum?
19
Steve Bloom says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 11:42 pm
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Re #17: Dave, you chimed in without thinking. You were in such a hurry to agree with Brooks that you failed to notice that the post in question was one of the very first on RC. So all *four* (count “em) of the comments were expressing happiness at the new site (and even then only the quoted one engaged in what might be called gushing)? Imagine that. If you want to snark at the quality of the comments over there, pick a more current post.
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Steve Bloom says:
January 2nd, 2007 at 11:57 pm
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Re #18: If the transition was slow enough and the warming did not affect all of the habitat simultaneously, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that they would be able to survive without acquiring a genetic marker indicating a population “bottleneck” (which I assume they must not have since none has been reported). Also, even with a more uniform warming, the geography looks as if it would allow a small but entirely viable population to survive around the northern tip of Greenland even after all the existing habitat had disappeared. All speculation, BTW.
21
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 3rd, 2007 at 1:32 am
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Bloom, at about the time of the first posts you noted on RC, I also noted all the gushing. Way back then. Imagine that.
So I tried to post a scientific question … oops … it was censored, imagine that.
So I tried to post a comment saying something like “Why do you post people saying what a great site you have, and you don’t post scientific questions?”
Censored …
Defend them all you want, Steve, we know what goes on over there, and your support for them is tragicomic. Daves post, despite being out of time, was exactly on point.
w.
22
Steve Bloom says:
January 3rd, 2007 at 4:21 am
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Re #21: They absolutely do censor loaded or overly argumentative comments, even if posed as questions. Bear in mind that most of a majority of those guys are professors with many years in the field, and so perhaps are not as tolerant as they might be of such comments as others might be. Of course provocative questions about the HS are going to get censored more, and that probably goes double for people like you who are known to have a certain perspective. Quite in contrast to this blog, RC never claimed to have anything like an open debate format. I’ve been censored more than once, BTW (for excessive debating).
RE: #149 – That certainly merits further investigation. My own curiousity is around something David Smith has been looking into, namely, long wavelength, multi ocean oscillations coupled to / affecting Hadley Cell circulation modulation. The PDO hints at some of this – David was wondering about an even larger scale mechanism, involving the “dipole antenna” of the Equatorial West Pacific Warm Pool and the NE Indian Ocean. I think he’s onto something.
Over the next week or so we’ll be getting reports on the December, 2006 global temperature. These are satellite, GISS, Hadley, balloon, etc. I’ve been expecting us to see a global temperature kick, due to the moderate El Nino that has been underway.
Well, the first December temperature is in. This is from the NCEP website and I believe it mainly covers land stations, with a Northern Hemisphere bias. It is not adjusted for uncovered areas and, of course, likely has biases which analysts will try to remove during reanalysis. it is simply a flash-report, but it proves to be reasonably representative.
What does the flash-report show? Well, December was indeed a warm month but not dramatically so. The Northern Hemisphere was warm but the Southern hemisphere cooled, largely offsetting the El Nino heat kick. My guess is that December 2006 will be the third-warmest.
The significant thing for me is that, by now, I expect the El Nino global temperature-kick to be visible, but it is not readily apparent.
What I’m beginning to wonder is if the heat kick has indeed begun but it accompanied by background cooling, for some natural reason, such that the cooling is mostly offsetting the El Nino effect. If that is true, and that’s a big if, then it will be interesting to see what happens in 2007 as El Nino rapidly fades and is possibly replaced by La Nina. That could result in a modestly-declining global temperature for some period.
It is too early to even speculate if this is happening, as we need more data, especially the higher-quality types. Rather, this is just something to watch. I’ll post as the official numbers arrive for December and the following months.
RE #179 There are some interesting papers out there that have been off-the-radar-screen which suggest something like that. I’ll post on them in a few weeks. What they seem to suggest is that a portion (amount unknown) of the post-1976 ocean warming could been due to natural ocean behavior.
re: Steve Bloom #19 moved here:
I was just as happy when I thought these messages were Gone with the Wind, but since I hadn’t seen this one I’ll reply. The point is that I didn’t have to “think” since I’ve experienced exactly what was being demonstrated. We get an occasional lauditory post here, and of course we’re thankful to Steve M providing a place where there can be real science discussions, but not because he’s “authoritative”, but merely because he’s open and approachable.
RE 157: Stan Palmer says:
Stan, I distinctly heard wood cracking (along w/nails popping out of my wooden deck) in a mostly-oak forest during moderate winds & -15F in Jan 1994. Perhaps the sap properties are different in the more northern genotype trees.
rocks,
With grand conspiracy theories such as yours, you should be publiushing in Nexus along with Lord Monckton. So the hockey team is hiding the true UHI information from everyone? Is that your stance on everything that doesn’t go your way–the hockey team “fixed” it? How scientific of you!
What the heck do you know about my feelings on life in general? Please keep such creepy comments to yourself. As for independent thought, you call digging up third party summaries of 34 year old articles independent thought? Or is it the part where you ascribe them absolute truth and then claim a huge conspiracy theory that is the independent thought? Please help. I’m confused.
Bender, here’s our dilemma. The Bears cannot probably win without the good Rex showing up for three straight games. But they cannot win without him. The performance of the defense is down and the Bears will need to score points to win. Griese is not the answer as we found in the second half. We need the ever improving running attack to take early pressure off Grossman and allow him to regain a measure of much needed confidence. (Does Lovie Smith have a web site?) What I do not want to see is for the Bears to employ a play to not lose approach and bore the heck out of us while we inevitably lose.
Long live BSU and playing to win. I went to bed (or at least had the game off) and so I was not certain what Steve M was talking about. I also get the early edition of the Chicago Tribune and it had also gone to bed before the BSU/OU game, so I did not know what I had missed until I saw the replays on TV and, of course, a day late and dollar short accounting in today’s Trib. You would not script it that way as it would be just too unbelievable.
Boris, after this I am just going to “gaze” at your comments unless they change tone.
For a start a Google scholar search on Oke’s paper brought over a hundred citings and a general search upon the author’s name brought up many many more because he’s written more papers. So your opinion is misleading. You can also find the original online I believe to read to your hearts desire. I can’t speak of if it as a good paper or not, but neither can you. You’ve based your opinion of the paper because the C02 site discusses it. I haven’t linked anything from that site. You ignore these papers too. Something we all can agree on for a start most times is “we don’t know” yet you assert new papers must know if they talk about AGW only, and old ones are all not good because there isn’t AGW constantly mentioned. Your opinions give clues to how you may view life in general. I can’t help noticing them, I am sorry if you think it is creepy. I am sure I give off clues too.
RE: “So the hockey team is hiding the true UHI information from everyone?”
Time for me to smash another ad hom bit of sillyness. No one is suggesting such a thing.
First, let’s dispense with the term “UHI” – an unfortunate oversimplification. Let us use instead a term such as “near surface anthropogenic impacts on temperature measurements.” Such impacts will be found whereever Man has:
– Settled the land
– Modified vegetation
– Deployed electrification and other point sources of energy flux
– Built roads and structures
– Brought grazing and other non native animals
Etc.
Based on this superior operational definition, we now recognize an error term which roughly is a function of the spherical surface integral calculated at a point across the population density function. The error term will become more and more precisly understood as we develop more sophisticated density functions which look at densities of population, specific land modifying activities, agriculture, pastoralism, irrigation, grading, pavement, current density conveyed by electrical grids, thermal dissipation from local combustive sources and apparatus, etc.
Thesis – as we do not yet have a viable density function identified against which to integrate, we cannot currently know in any exact manner what the near surface anthropogenic error term’s effect is on any given surface measurement let alone on other tropospheric measurements. Conceptually, given our understanding of physics, what we can say is that at any point on the surface of the earth, the anthropogenic near surface error term will have some effect. Also, conceptually, we can state that, with the exceptions of significant roadless areas with near zero human population density, that both urban and so called “rural” measurement stations are impacted more substantially by this error term, than measurements taken somehow in near zero population areas. Therefore, if one attempts to “correct for UHI” by “normalizing against rural readings” one would be “normalizing” against readings which are themselves in error, their error having typically a positive sign. Herein lies the problem with surface temperature measurements, and possibly, other tropopheric temperature measurements. I know of no reliable procedure to “correct” against this error term, those attempted thus far are not defensible given the realities of physics.
Re #175: So much of climate science is beyond us amateurs, but this little piece isn’t. Post your numbers and let’s have at it. Do you have a source for the “official” calculation?
Re #187: Yep, they’re still snowed under in Oslo.
Replying to the Rockses en masse:
Do I need to list all of the references here for you, too? Are you going to read them or just continue to disparage a two-page summary paper as not having enough information? There are 15 references. I daresay that they have the information you think is lacking. Some of them can be found on the Web, some can’t. I admire you for being a DAV but that’s not an excuse that allows you to say “if it’s not there it must not exist”.
Is that really necessary?
The proxy data covers several thousand years. If orbital cyclicity is relevant, the cycles would be apparent.
I did not see any other alternate explanations for the PETM temperature increase described.
Whether or not you will be able to admit it, this is a real-world, natural analog to GHG warming. The PETM is the natural experiment that skeptics seek. Interesting that when it is stated clearly to them, they come up with ways to evade its implications. Such a reaction is a way of dealing with a scenario that sets up a strong cognitive dissonance.
Quote from the article: “Fifteen years of study have revealed the
PETM as a case study of the broad impacts
of massive carbon cycle perturbation during
a time of globally warm climate. Continued
study promises not only to guide an understanding
of global change mechanisms during
the PETM, but also to illustrate modes of
connectivity among the Earth’s systems and
patterns of change that may characterize the
Earth’s future.
Yes, I do.
It should. And it will also accentuate the rising temperature as a positive feedback.
And if you’ll read the paper, you’ll discover that methane is a greenhouse gas, too! The PETM appears to have been triggered by a methane release and sustained by CO2 in the atmosphere (CO2 was derived from oxidiation of methane).
This is a reiteration of a tired argument that is understood by the climate science community — and by me, too.
Oxygen isotope data is a temperature proxy because there is a tempeature-related fractionation of oxygen in the atmosphere between water vapor and liquid water. Wikipedia summary: “A warmer water temperature means that the molecules require less energy to vaporize, as they already have more energy. A cooler water temperature means that the water requires more energy to vaporize. As a heavier, O-18 water molecule requires more energy than an O-16 water molecule to depart from the liquid state, cooler water releases vapor that is higher in O-16 content. Cooler air precipitates more O-18 than warmer air. Cooler water therefore collects more O-18 relative to O-16 than does warmer water.”
Yes, I’ve seen them before.
I have no idea how you get that impression when the full name of the PETM is the “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum”. Do you think I misplaced a couple of orders of magnitude and I somehow think it happened 55,000 years ago rather than 55 million?
You might be surprised at how much I know about climate cycles. Want to talk about D-O events? Heinrich layers? The Ordovician glaciation? The mid-Cretaceous tectonically-driven anoxic cycles? Pick your favorite.
And remember that the PETM was a major increase in global temperatures caused by a major increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Whatever c caused the increase in atmospheric GHGs, the effect was a clear, obvious, and large global temperature increase. If you are willing to do the necessary intellectual “lifting” required to fully understand the event, you will not be able to evade this salient fact.
RE: #189 – How about trying to come up with one or more the density functions? Even a back of the envelope integral or two might be useful. If not you, then some PhD candidate in Math will probably run with it and publish a peer reviewed paper. Maybe it’s already being worked on over at Colorado State.
David Smith speculated in #180:
There was a report of cooling SSTs in the period 2002-2005 (hyped a bit by the skeptical realm, too, and mentioned in some CA threads)
Recent cooling of the upper ocean
I know its anathema to quote RealClimate here, but in the related article, they say:
“Some of the changes are clearly due to ocean circulation changes – an increased advection of warm water from the sub-tropical Atlantic to the North for instance, but the biggest contribution are the changes seen in the sub-tropical South Pacific.”
As you note, the SH is staying cool. This may be why; and this may be why the moderate El Nino has not pushed 2006 to a record. 2007 could be a cool year if there’s a La Nina; as you probably know, they don’t always follow El Ninos.
RE: #192 – If the PDO flips to a negative phase (increasingly likely with passing time) then the next 20 – 30 years could be downright interesting in terms of both weather and climate actualities, as well as the AGW debate. And if there are even higher order oscillations than the PDO that we don’t fully understand yet, and one of those flips, then things would probably be interesting^2.
A summary of the PETM study includes this:
Now, let’s assume that CO2 caused the warming. I don’t know what “massive amounts of CO2” means, but we are talking only 5 degrees here. How do I put this in perspective with present day CO2 levels and a doubling thereof? I don’t think this study tells us very much.
Also, this PETM study is another example of a possibly spurious “cause-effect” relationship. Who knows whether other factors (Solar?) were not also affecting climate at that time.
#190 Hi Jack,
I am confused-but that is not unusual! Are you saying the CO2 that humans contribute into the atmosphere for the last 150 years or so (my grandmother is 103 for my perspective) is the same as or equal to what happened in the PETM? MrRocks/Dane is doing field work not near a computer. But he said “I think the PETM was likley an anomolous event that most likley occurred over tens of thousands of years. Thats what the graph reads to me” And you say “I have no idea how you get that impression” – 1,000s of years of Co2-( blamed on humans) has not occurred-maybe there’s the disconnect -also the resolution of the data as it goes father back in time thing mentioned from earlier comments…but whatever! 🙂
BTW I can’t say completely disagree with some of what you said exactly and you are just repeating some of what we’ve said already too. I am sure Dane will look at your comment in a reasonable way and talk about when he can. Also, Dane is still also interested in a more recent event in earth history at 125,000 years ago. He asked if anyone mentioned that yet.
I am AFK for a few. Cheers!
Upthread, someone attempted to make fun of earlier facts I had shared regarding the wintry fall experienced in Norway.
Here is a photo from late fall 2006 in Norway:
Norway, Dec 7, 2006
#195 Thanks jae-I am less confused-or more! 😉
re 194 – jae, jae, jae
That l,ink goes to an article posted on freerepublic, which says this:
“The PETM is a stunning example of carbon dioxide-induced global warming and stands in contrast to critics who argue that the Earth’s temperature is insensitive to increases in carbon dioxide,” said Pagani. “Not only did the Earth warm by at least 9F (5C), but it did so during a time when Earth’s average temperature was already 9F warmer than today.”
However, what has not been clear is how much carbon was responsible for the temperature increase and where it came from. Scientists have speculated that it might have come from massive fires from burning coal and other ancient plant material, or from ‘burps’ of methane from the continental shelves that rapidly became atmospheric carbon dioxide.
“According to this work, if the PETM was caused by the burning of plant material then climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide is more than 4.5F (2.5C) per carbon dioxide doubling. And if methane was the culprit, then Earth’s climate must be extremely sensitive to carbon dioxide – increasing, over 10F (5.6C) per carbon dioxide doubling,” noted Pagani.
This finding contradicts the position held by many climate-change skeptics that the Earth’s climate is resilient to such carbon dioxide emissions and suggests that Earth’s temperature will rise substantially with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations that are expected to double around mid-century.
“The last time carbon was emitted to the atmosphere on the scale of what we are doing today, there were winners and losers,” remarked Ken Caldeira, a co-author from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology. “There was ecological devastation, but new species rose from the ashes. Our work provides even more incentive to develop the clean energy sources that can provide for economic growth and development without risking the natural world that is our endowment.”
Other authors on the paper include David Archer in the Department of Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, and James C. Zachos in the Earth Sciences Department, University of California, Santa Cruz. Citation: Science: (December 8, 2006).
#197
The latest snow report shows that Myrdal has less than half the expected for this time of year. It may look wintery at 800m, but you shouldn’t have to go that high to find snow.
#197
Be careful, they say its been very warm out there lately.
Re #190: “Our human existance in that record in comparison can be described as just a tiny sliver of one sheet, at the end, of a whole toilet paper roll.” Now that’s downright poetic.
Jack, you make an excellent point that the PETM leads to cognitive dissonance for the science denialists (i.e., those who say that GHGs couldn’t possibly have such an effect). It’s a little tough for some of the solar/cosmic ray skeptics as well since now they’ll have to admit that current warming might just be due largely to anthropogenic CO2. The low-sensitivity skeptics are a somewhat different story, but I suspect that further work on the Arctic cores will make holding onto their beliefs increasingly difficult as well. I’m afraid it’s just one more brick in the wall for the conspiracy denialists, though.
Meanwhile, CO has been buried under some of the worst snow in several decades… 10′ mounds of snow pileup abound in the Springs, and I can only imagine Denver is worse since they got twice as much in the last two blizzards. Eastern CO is hopeless, with 4 feet or so just from the last storm. And it is only 2 weeks into winter! 🙂
Mark
199, Lee: what is your point here? First, we don’t know how much CO2 was released. Second, we don’t know if it had anything to do with warming, since something else could have caused the warming. Maybe I’m missing something here; help me understand how this study adds to our understanding of the effects of CO2.
187:
Before you hurt yourself typing, you might want to check out the post I was responding to, which, surprisngly, suggests such a thing.
186:
You’re skipping from UHI to AGW.
And there’s a difference between honest scepticism and strawgrasping.
Re #200: Thanks for looking that up, Richard. I had been just about to comment as to what a pathetic amount of snow that was for southern Norway at that time of year.
Re #203: Mark, of course snow (or the lack thereof) anywhere at any particular time is just weather. The point of my remark was to tweak Steve S. for quickly leaping to conclusions about weather based on insufficient information, a habit he unfortunately extends into other arenas. In this case, he had seen some satellite weather map that led him to conclude (in a comment over at RC) that all of Norway was having a rough early winter. All Rasmus had to do was look out the window to know that was wrong. You may well ask why anyone should care, but IMHO the problem is that to the extent he gets any response it ends up wasting other people’s time.
No kidding Steve B. I know this as does Steve S. The subtle point is that weather complimenting AGW theory is “evidence of the influence of mankind on the environment” such as the rather weak season in the Alps, but any contrary to AGW theory is “just weather.” It is, bluntly, hypocritical.
Mark
SB:
I hope you keep that in mind also in the future. As a goodwill gesture for you (happy new year!), here’s a link to Norwegian
met office declearing that December 2006 was the warmest ever (i.e. back to 1900) in Norway:
http://met.no/aktuelt/nyhetsarkiv/2007/01januar/desember_2006.html
It was also one of the rainest. This is why you can see from Richard’s link #200 that the high-altitude (and very northern) parts of Norway have snow levels much over (some around 300% near Tromsàƒ normal whereas all the costline has none (although normally they have some).
For Jae, #194:
The short Eos article estimates between 1500-4500 gigatons.
I recommend reading it. It’s short and summary-descriptive.
http://www.purdue.edu/eas/ireh/pdf/PETM_EOS.pdf
Given the following quote…
Don’t you think you’re reaching a bit? Nobody is trying to argue that CO2 doesn’t have any effect on the environment. Simple physics tells us that. To leap straight to “due largely to anthropogenic CO2” is really, truly, funny, although not out of the norm for even you.
Mark
Re: Jae in #204
No other process can be posited from the available data indicating anything other than a GHG-forced temperature increase during the PETM. Since warming is the basic climate effect expected from increasing atmospheric GHGs, this study tells us that when it happens (increasing atmospheric GHGs), global temperature rises. Unequivocally. The amount of rise is somewhat proportional to the amount of GHG added to the atmosphere, and the effects will be determined ultimately by the climate state.
Welikerocks in #196:
The amount of C (methane, CO2) released to the atmosphere over 1,000s of years during the PETM is considerably larger than the current fossil fuel driven increase. That’s one reason I referred to a “gratefulness” that humans can’t put that much into the atmosphere. The time-scales and magnitudes are different.
But the PETM clearly represents a situation in which GHGs were increasing and the global temperature reacted by rising — as is expected from physics, predicted by models, and indicated by observations as also occurring now. As Steve Bloom noted in response to my posting, skeptics who claim that increasing atmospheric GHGs won’t cause any warming have to address the PETM “demonstration” that they do.
Jack: I don’t think anyone here is saying there is NO increase in T due to GHGs. Bender did a survey, and I think the result is avg. 0.2 degrees. In 211, shouldn’t you say that there are no other KNOWN reasons for the T increase. Also, I would be interested your views on my post no. 175 on the Monckton thread and to 186 on that thread. The physics seems to show that Bender’s survey here is pretty accurate.
I agree with jae as well in that nobody is claiming there is _no_ increases due to GHGs. Steve Bloom, however, leaped straight to “this is irrefutable evidence that GHGs are causing our current warming!” His hand-waving aside, increases are logarithmic in nature AND, the “current state” during the PETM was apparently already 9C warmer. Such increases were likely huge on top of other mitigating factors.
Mark
Steve Bloom You say:
” Now that’s downright poetic.”
My toilet paper thing? I didn’t create it. Teachers use it. They take all the students learning about the earth outside on the football field and roll out the whole roll to illustrate the magnitude of earth age and time. Guess you were sick that day.
Here’s an excercise for you SteveB, what if all this were true and all souls now believe in AGW… You are now King of the World.
Santa brought me a new car, that’s better on the earth then the one was. My husband is out actually cleaning up the earth as I type to you and a few minutes ago just bought plants. What did you do with your day?
I have a reason to comment and read CA, because I want to know exactly what’s going on, because it’s too political and my kids hear things from adults that are half truths. Some of what they hear makes them feel their own future is only grim and ugly. And there is no King so I can protest and question. Also my husband’s experience working at the EPA was really eye opening to many things. And the Hockey Team..sheesh.
I will echo jae because Lee’s comment contains this sentence:
So, we all agree on that?
The (crude) NCEP December surface temperature for the Northern Hemisphere temperate zones (30N to 90N is shown here . Basically a record-warm month for the North, thanks to the El Nino heat kick.
The NCEP December surface temperature for the Southern Hemisphere temperate zones (30S to 90S) is shown here . Not record cold, but on the cool side.
The December tropical surface temperature (30N to 30S) is shown here .
The odd thing is the lack (so far) of an El Nino heat kick in the tropics.
about the PETM that is…LOL
Oh, in 214 I should have said “such CO2 increases,” adding the CO2 to remove the ambiguity.
Mark
RE #216 These mostly reflect land stations, I believe.
I won’t deny that in much of Europe (and, for that matter, in the NE USA) December has been warm. But I will not back down in stating that Scandanavia, Norway in particular, had early snow coverage. October and November were quite cold there. In December, the oversized Azores ridge responsible for the European drought in the fall, expanded to include parts of Norway. That #@$#$#@ ridge is the root cause of Euros screaming the sky is falling.
Steve Sadlov or anyone? This might be a weird thing to ask.
Were the seasons necessarily always during the same “months” going back in human history when we decided all that? I’ve been noticing a change in So Ca weather for a few years now but not in the pattern of winter, spring, summer, fall and not so much in temps either (except this cold!)-all the “seasons” are experienced , just the timing of them feels off since I was a kid. I’ve lived here all my life. Hope that makes sense.
Re #192
Jack,
Where did you get that idea? Projecting perhaps?
You will even find a front page link to RC on the left column. Curious conclusion you’ve reached in opposite to my observations, and I expect most here.
Regards,
Earle
#192
I read the initial copy of the Lyman and Johnson report last summer, and I remember it
did come as quite a shock. About 10-15 years of stored ocean heat was lost between 2003
and 2005. The report never conclusively explained why this occured; the authors said it
was just a blip on the continued AGW road.
Same here welikerocks. Seasons seem to be earlier than one would expect. All of them.
Mark
Re 202 Can you tell us what the precurser(flip-flop)mechanism for the PETM was?
Jack: I would also be interested in your reaction to Fig. 5 in this paper. Note the complete lack of correlation between CO2 and temp. during the last 700,000 years.
Re:222
And, Real Climate does not return the curtsey. There are no links to Climate Audit on the Real Climate front page I can find. Wonder why?
RE: Seasons – what I’ll write here applies to the upper 30s and lower 40s N latitude, near the Pacific Coast – if there is any one obvious change it would have to be the seeming lengthening of winter. What I recall is that when I was a kid, we’d get a lot more Spring warmth than we do these days. It would not be continuous warmth, but nonetheless, the warm spells would be truly warm, over 80 deg F, and they would reliabily start by the end of March. That has become very rare – last year we got none, and the rains (and cool temperatures) lasted until Mid June. Fall onset seems to have gotten earlier although claiming that seems a bit more of a stretch. Winter / rainy / snowy season onset is just as variable as it ever was (typical of most places in the Western US) and hits any time from early astronomical fall to early astronomical winter, so no change with that. A final change to mention is, summers do not seem to include the multiple, lengthy warm spells that affected all but the immediate fog belt, which I remember from the old days. We’d get into a regular pattern, where it would alternate between the string of hot days pattern and the cooling onshore push. The past few years, the onshore push has seemed to be much more in control much further inland over longer periods of time. The most remarkable thing about last summer’s heat wave was how it was bracketed by cool and downright yucky so called summer weather. Troughyness was squarely to blame. In fact, I think that is a good way to sum it up, an increase in troughyness on the mid West Coast of the US since the 1980s.
I wouldn’t call it a “complete lack of correlation” jae, i’d say more like a weak correlation and the effects linger long after the temperature subsides. I.e., perhaps temp is the cause? 🙂
Mark
Well, the AGW fanatics who post here (and at competing sites) will be relieved to read that due to some pending increases in work load forming a perfect storm with a slew of home projects, I am going to drop off into mostly a lurker mode this year. I just want to give kudos to Steve M, John A and all the rest of you for making this a great place to virtually hang out. There is some really constructive discussion going on here. I have sadly not had the time to do any real research or crack the books, hence some of my shoot from the hip (and often erroneous) posts. But hopefully I’ve been able to at least incite some discussion (or annoyance?). I’ll anxiously await the next IPCC TAR and the disection of it. Keep up the good work and best wishes for 2007!
Steve S. Good luck, and at least please say hi once in awhile. As one who also can’t get too deeply involved, I appreciated your hip-shooting.
Too bad Steve S. I’m in a similar boat, btw. Teaching a class I’m not convinced I’m qualified to teach along with full (or near full) workload on my dissertation is eating me alive. Well, I’m teaching if they get enough enrollees. 2 so far, hehe.
Mark
Steve S,
..and troughyness since the 1980s…yep, my birthday was always sunny in highschool now it’s June Gloom.
Good tidings to you and yours SteveS especially if it’s re-do the kitchen and bath on the list! We did that last year [ugh ugh and double ugh]
What will welikerocks do without your “got your back”- posts? 🙂
Cheers and thank you.
Mark T, thanks for your #224 as well. I am glad I am not alone in noticing.
Don’t work too hard and good luck on your dissertation-remember to step back and think about nothing for a few minutes or more each day! Cheers!
Hehe, thanks, but it is difficult since PhD and work are highly correlated. 😉
There are other methods for solving that problem, however.
Mark
#199, Lee
A quick look at the absorptivity of methane shows that it has a peak at 7 um in the region where the H2O absorptivity is not maxed out. The consequence of adding lots of methane to the atmosphere will be to trap extra LWIR radiation at 7 um. The effect won’t be the weak logarithmic effect of adding CO2 because the region is unsaturated. It is also powerful because it is close to the 10 um peak of the blackbody spectrum at 15 C (288K).
Methane degrades by reacting with the oxygen in the atmosphere via the reaction
CH4 + 2 O2 — > CO2 + 2 H2O
so it does add CO2 to the atmosphere. But remember that the CO2 line at 15 um is nearly saturated and the extra radiation trapping is only logarithmic with an increase in concentration. But notice that the reaction also adds two water molecules for every CO2 molecule. This has two effects. First, the H2O and CO2 compete at 15 um since they have overlapping molecular absorption lines there with the result that the extra radiation trapping per molecule is less than if a single specie were being added to the air. Second, H2O also has an absorption edge at 8 um which will be enhanced and also result in radiation trapping. It will be even more powerful than the methane heating because it’s closer to the blackbody peak.
I don’t have access to the Science paper so I don’t know how the authors address these issues. But I would say that it’s a lot more complicated than the quote above and certainly nothing so simple as CO2 done it all by its wonesome wittle self.
78
Steve Sadlov says:
January 3rd, 2007 at 5:32 pm
edit
It is highly disturbing to witness a climate scientist revealing a belief that there is some sort of “statistical gotcha” bogeymen somehow in contrast with some sort of “honest science” or even “nice science.” One person’s “statistical gotcha” is my standard quality control element / peer review gate. Sad state we are in these days, with arm waving and computer shananigans substituting for real science. We knew it would come to this when the Neojacobins sufficiently inflitrated science. Well, on that note, I will slink back into lurker mode due to more pressing concerns. Good day all.
Judith Curry says:
January 3rd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
edit
Bender, you raise a key issue. I described how science works. We don’t wan’t science to stop working because the public freaked out about katrina. There is no fear of H/W making it into IPCC4, the closing for papers to be accepted was over a year ago. I have no idea with IPCC4 says about hurricanes, i suspect not much (we’ll see).
I have been reading a very interesting book called the china study, which is about nutrition/pharmaco/medical science (and the politics). Some interesting analogies and contrasts with the hurricane-AGW issue. In contrast to climate, this field has statistically significant correlations all over the place, but they are lacking mechanistic explanations. Experimental design is difficult owing to confounding factors (in climate we are stuck with the one “experiment” we have). The political issues/battles are much fiercer than AGW/energy stuff. But the point I am getting to in a roundabout way is that reading this prompted an interesting analogy. People hear about smoking, MacDonalds, etc. being really bad for their health, but many people ignore this. However, when they hear that a food additive or pesticide has been identified that is carcinogenic, this becomes an unacceptable risk and people are up in arms demanding that the additive be removed. This response is irrational, since heart disease is a much bigger health problem than cancer. But people have this (relatively) irrational response about carcinogens in the food supply as a huge threat to their health. Katrina triggered a public response about AGW-enhanced hurricanes as being an unacceptable risk, focusing public attention on AGW in ways that 3C, sea level rise, polar bears, etc didn’t. So hurricanes are the equivalent of red dye#2 in terms of the public perception of unacceptable risk. Its largely an emotional rather than a rational response.
The katrina generated fear should be blamed mostly on the advocacy groups and the media. the reporters were calling us, we weren’t calling them. Scientists conducting the primary research (i.e. authors of papers with the word hurricane or TC in them) have not been alarmist, although a few other climate researchers arguably have on this topic. So lets reduce the heat on the scientists conducting the primary research. Climateaudit can help move the research forward more rapidly through constructive critiques rather than shooting the scientific messengers.
We probably shouldn’t diverge too much on this topic on this thread (Steve M’s call)
81
bender says:
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:18 pm
edit
Interesting analogy. Compared to a quick heart attack, cancer is ugly to watch develop … just as Katrina was. So I understand how emotion can trigger a disproportionate (some would say irrational, I would say chemorational) judgement as to what kind of risks are acceptable. But can we really afford to let our emotions run policy, without rational checks and balances? That can get awfully expensive.
82
Tim Ball says:
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:47 pm
edit
The search for oscillations in other oceans has gone on for some time. The “discovery’ of El Nino was only new in the modern sense. The Inca planted their potato crops based on high mountain observations of the Pleiades. They also informed the Spanish about the currents when they sailed into the South Pacific. Drake captured a Spanish Ship in 1579 to “obtain; the services of the navigator for his (Morera) information about these currents. Drake learned about the conditions that year and sailed well out into the Pacific in order to get back to northern North America without struggling against tides and winds along the South and Central American coasts.
An article in “Climate Since A.D. 1500″Ⱡtitled “The historical record of El Nino events” by Quinn and Neal, provides a very good idea of the number of events and their variability. With El Nino you must remember that what began as the Walker Circulation gradually evolved into ENSO only relatively recently. The real focus and public attention (too often the criteria) came when the 1983 El Nino moved further north than previously experienced and directly affected southern California.
The search for oscillations in other ocean basins is complicated by the geography and ocean circulation’s. The size and openness of the Pacific make the oscillation more clealy defined for strength and pattern. There are gyres in each ocean basin but they are smaller and much more influenced by land/water patterns. Consider the difficulty of explaining the climate, especially droughts, and controlling mechanisms of Northeast Brazil. The Indian Ocean has similar geographic factors, including latitude that reduce or alter the circulation. In the South Atlantic off the Namib desert I recall reviewing a paper years ago about a bird species that had collapsed and was considered in jeopardy. It turned out the bird population later jumped dramatically as the ocean currents changed. It appears the population fluctuates in turn with changing environmental conditions in association with oscillations in offshore currents.
I also wonder to what extent these oscillations are not detected or only hinted at because of the paucity of data in vast areas of the world.
83
Margo says:
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:24 pm
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In a the rather long comment numbered 80, Judy Curry closes with:
We probably shouldn’t diverge too much on this topic on this thread (Steve M’s call)
Quite true. Because this is true, Judy, might not want to introduce the topic of food poisoning, dedicate an enormous amount of prose to that topic, and then advice people to stay on topic.
The topic is: Hurricanes and tropical storms, and clear transitions in detection efficiency that happened on and around 1945-1950, when regular air reconnaissance was initiated.
Has anyone other than you, Judy, strayed off topic to delve into the whole “food poisoning” issue?
Re #236: Bear in mind that CO2 is vastly more persistent in the atmosphere than CH4 or H2O. Also, IIRC there is an amplification of the effects of both water and methane if they get into the stratosphere.
Paul, you say in #236,
The logarithmic relationship is not a consequence of the saturation of the band, but the underlying physics of gases and the atmosphere. See the Beer-Lamber law …
w.
Transferred:
Steve Bloom says:
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:27 pm
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Re #72: Or just pick a fight the way Ken did in #62. Heck, I wasn’t even involved in this discussion.
re: #239 Willis,
I’m not sure you’re quite correct there. Here’s the derivation from your link:
The point is that if you read this carefully, it seems that they’re assuming no saturation. But we know a number of wavelengths CO2 are saturated, i.e. in their terminology, opaque areas overlap. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to take optics in college, so my knowledge of just how such things work is sketchy, so I may be overlooking something, but the basic equation is,
A = aLC where C is the concentration and thus the absorbance A is proportional to the concentration. So if you double the concentration, the absorbance should also double. This clearly shows, IMHO, that it only applies at low concentarations. Another way of looking at it is to notice that alpha (a) the molar absorbance, can’t be a constant when some frequencies are nearly saturated while others are at a relatively low level of saturation.
Finally , we know that what we’re talking about in the global warming game can’t be the Beers-Lambert law thingee as what we see is that in the ranges of concentration we’re dealing with , a doubling of concentration result in a linear change in temperature, which would imply that working backwards we’d eventually have an infinite amount of delta T because of say, CO2. I.e. T(CO2) = delta T (1/2) + delta T (1/4)… + delta T (1/2^n) = n*Delta T (1/2) with no limit on n.
#239, Willis,
We’re both right. Every atomic and molecular line has a width, usually well described by a Lorentzian line shape. The absorption coefficient is highest at the center of the line and drops in the wings. Once there are enough gas molecules in a fixed-length column, effectively all the photons at the line center will be absorbed over a short distance and adding more gas won’t matter, it’s already black at that wavelength. Since the absorption coefficient is smaller in the wings of the line, off-center wavelengths will not be completely absorbed over the same column length. Adding more molecules will then increase extinction in the wings.
#238, Steve B,
So you do agree that it’s more complicated than just CO2 heating of the atmosphere.
Regarding the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere: the effect is also going to depend on how fast the methane is injected.
Jae, re: #226
Link doesn’t work. But I’m not really interested in the temp-leads-CO2 argument, as that’s been addressed with regard to Pleistocene warm-cold intervals.
243: Link works for me.
Our friend Phil Jones is predicting that 2007 will be the warmnest year EVER!!!!
Link
Steve B, Jack, or Lee,
Are any of you going to address the 125,000 yr interglacial sea level highstand? Its being conveiniently ignored, and since it is more recent than the PETM, we have better data on it with better dating, so you should be able to easily look into it and give us your thoughts.
245: Yeah, it MAY be warmer. But it MAY be cooler. Those jokers.
In fact, I’m betting on cooler, due to the lateness of Sunspot Cycle 24.
Re #245 Odd odd thing about the Jones forecast is that the El Nino is fading fast (report here ). Double-click on the colored graphs and look at the lower graph. The anomaly area has shrunk a lot, particularly in the western region. Also, the arrows indicate anomalous easterly winds, which are La Nina-like.
So far, the global temperature impact of this El Nino has been minimal. Maybe Jones is expecting a delayed effect.
For fun, I’m going to make a 2007 global temperature forecast once the end-of-year numbers are in.
re 346:
Dane,
During the last glacial, sea levels were 80 – 120 meters lower than present. During the last interglacial 125000 ybp, sea levels at their peak reached to between 2-8 meters higher than now, more likely toward the upper end of that range. This number is not trivial to estimate, given that much of the earth’s coastal boundary is tectonically active.
This implies that the peak temperatures in the last interglacial – more precisely, the temperatures integrated over some time, determining melt – were warmer, either globally or locally in ways that increased melt, than present. Present meaning 20th century temperatures.
But current sea level is also not wildly different – a few percent of the sea level excursion through glacial interglacial cycles – than 125000 ybp. Depending on the ‘scaling’ of sea level to temperature, this implies that integrated peak temps in the last interglacial were warmer than integrated peak temperatures through the 20th century – but not a lot warmer relative to glacial – interglacial temperature differences. Yes, there is a bit of hand waving in this, but there isn’t a good scaling of sea level to temperatures as of yet, so a qualitative argument is what we’ve got.
The high-latitude ice cores also indicate that peak temps in the last interglacial a bit higher – but not much, perhaps 0.5 – 1C C or so and not for long – than 20th century temps. This is quantitative, and is consistent with the argument above.
All of this implies that a moderate warming, 0.5-1C above integrated 20th century temps, will be sufficient to raise sea levels to those of the 125000 ybp highstand. That is, to some 2 – 8 meters higher than present, probably toward the upper end of that.
So it looks like 2006 was an above average year for total number of tropical cyclones (about 100 compared to average in the low 80s) and for cat 4-5 tropical cyclones (19 compared to average of 17).
And this with a very low activity north Atlantic.
Re #245:
The thing that cracks me up about all the reports I’ve heard on this British forecast is that people are using a prediction as evidence.
The ultimate in cherry picking proxies?
Note late cherry blossoms indicating cold springs in the 11-14 Centuries. Not much of a Medieval Warm Period here?
Has anybody seen this series updated?
Jae, re: #226.
It works now. Considering that the last 700,000 years is the Pleistocene, and the Pleistocene is the period of cold and warm intervals (glacial/interglacials), and that these are indicated to be correlated with Milankovitch forcing and driven by CO2 positive feedback, your statement does not make sense.
To Jae and Mark T, #213 and #214:
Dane requested of Bender a real-world “demonstration” (not a model, not a lab bench experiment) that increasing GHGs in the atmosphere cause the climate to warm. The PETM is what he asked for.
Regarding only a 0.2 C increase from doubled CO2? That seems way off; the IPCC is going to report increased certainty that the lower-bound of estimates for 2100 will be reached, and I don’t think that’s even for a full doubling.
To Jae and Mark T, #213 and #214:
Dane requested of Bender a real-world “demonstration” (not a model, not a lab bench experiment) that increasing GHGs in the atmosphere cause the climate to warm. The PETM is what he asked for.
Regarding only a 0.2 C increase from doubled CO2? That seems way off; the IPCC is going to report increased certainty that the lower-bound of estimates for 2100 will be reached, and I don’t think that’s even for a full doubling.
Finally, Jae, which Monckton thread?
The PETM is not proof for high climate sensitivity according to Nir Shaviv
http://www.sciencebits.com/OnClimateSensitivity
Dane,
#1, it happened (a cold event during a warm interval).
#2, Adams, Maslin, and Thomas (1999) associate it with an ocean circulation shift, and indicate it lasted about 400 years
#3, I don’t think anyone is claiming that atmospheric CO2 is the only factor that can affect climate. I strongly hold that significant changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations will affect climate.
Richard T:
A small sample, but it appears that the last few years cherry blossoms have appeared in Kyoto considerably earlier than the dates recorded in that paper: http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2011_when.html
Avg: March 31
2006:March 27
2005:April 2
The Arakawa paper shows and avg. of April 12 for the last few centuries. Now the Arakawa paper is not certain what stage of blossoming was reffered to in the papers. The recent record I found is for first blossoms (Kaika). If the Governor’s or Emperor’s party was held during full bloom (Manakai) a week should be added to the recent dates to make them equivalent.
I’m in the skeptic camp, but this paper seems to point to “unprecedented warmth” for the current period.
259: Kyoto may not be representative of the Earth.
Jack: please consider that the fact that CO2 levels were high during the PETM does not prove any cause-effect relationship. Read some of the threads here on spurious statistical relationships.
Which has nothing to do with my comment to Steve Bloom in #214. Steve Bloom seems to think that proof of GHGs impacting climate on a very large scale, such as the PETM seems to show, is automatic evidence that our current warming trend, as slight as it has been, is entirely caused by anthropogenic causes. He leaped immediately from a to z without consideration of any of the steps of proof required in between (in typical Bloom fashion). Confounding factors, feedbacks, etc., not to mention the completely different existing state of the climate of then vs. now are lost on one such as him.
Mark
re 241 242
To Jae, #261.
Feel free to propose another cause and demonstrate its applicability during the time period.
To Mark T, #262.
What the PETM demonstrates is that an increase in atmospheric GHG concentrations induces a global temperature increase. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are currently rising. What does the standard interpretation of the PETM cause-and-effect scenario inform us should happen now as a result of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations?
Sure there could be other causes of the current temperature increase other than increasing CO2. There could be other explanations for the PETM temperature increase, too. But it’s necessary to completely refute the leading theoretical explanation first, right? Just suggesting there could be other causes does not constitute refutation.
To Hans, #257:
Shaviv doesn’t explicitly mention the PETM.
No kidding. How many times in one thread do I have to say I understand that before you stop repeating yourself?
It tells us that a HUGE leap in CO2 during already MUCH warmer conditions has drastic effects. There is hardly one parallel between conditions then (much warmer, large and sudden increase in CO2) and now (much cooler, ever so slowly increasing CO2).
Mark
RE 260
Yes, we all know that, there is also the urban heat island effect, ocean circulation, etc to consider. It is just a data point. Also, one would have to look a little more into how long after Kaika the festival (hanami) is held. I couldn’t find any better dates online. Again, just a data point to be thrown in with all the others and reconsidered at intervals as other information comes along. However, I tentatively score this one for the warmers.
Maybe what you have (on top of all the other mechanisms) is a relaxation oscillation with CO2-vegetation: ice cold earth lacks tree cover to absorb CO2 burst. Atmos temp rises quickly, forest cover expands slowly poleward, temperatures cool as CO2 slowly gets taken back up and (+) feedbacks slaide back cool phase. In which case PETM might be only a crude modern-day analog: qualitatively similar, but quantitatively dissimilar. i.e. During PETM you might see huge, but transient temp-CO2 sensitivity. During modern era you might get a truer measure of equilibrium CO2 sensitivity because you’re not saturating the system with a sudden, unabsorbable CO2 burst.
That might help explain why the Milankovitch forcings do not lead to sinusoidal oscillations but rather those sharply assymetric cycles. (Always wondered about that one.)
Just a thought.
257, Hans: That’s a terrific paper, but it doesn’t include Idso’s 8 natural experiments. Those experiments show an even lower sensitivity–on the order of 0.1 degree/Watt/m^2.
To Mark T., #266.
Glad you get it.
I also get (and you can scan upwards to confirm) that the PETM and now are not the same conditions. There is a question of different climate sensitivities then and now, obviously. One of the current concerns is that we are indeed in a cooler climate now; thus, there could be more noticeable feedbacks as the climate warms (particularly in the cryosphere), compared to a period when a warmer climate got warmer.
The PETM added 4.5 trillion tons of carbon, according to this source. It would take us 300 years at a “business as usual” pace to add this much. Let’s see, 5 degrees/300 years = 0.017 degrees per year. So we would have 1.7 degrees warming in 100 years. But some of the AGW folks say we will have more than 5 degrees for a mere doubling of CO2. This doesn’t compute….
Thanks Jack.
I wasn’t intending to be snotty or anything, but you kept bringing up a point (two, actually) that I happen to agree with. It is a rare day I agree with Bloom, however. 😉
Mark
#259
Thanks Nordic. The recent mean for cherry blossoming in Kyoto is more than two week earlier than in previous centuries. The 2006 flowering occurred as early as any in the record. This is impressive evidence for change – which I would like to see calibrated into temperature. Apparently, the Japanese met office records the cherry data, but it’s not on their English site – anybody here read Japanese?
While of course #260, Kyoto does not represent the planet, this record does support the hypothesis that the Medieval warm period was a regional rather than global event.
Jae, #271:
As discussed previously, the climate system was not the same, so making a simplistic linear comparison of then to now is unlikely to be informative. The PETM provides some information about climate sensitivity to atmospheric GHGs, but you can’t use it for a highly quantitative analysis. Also note that you used the upper bound for the amount of carbon released; the minimum was 3x less, not that this is much more useful.
Re: sea level 125,000 years ago
NASA GISS SCIENCE BREIFS
yeah it was cold, but it got warm real fast. Why?
274, Jack: I have a lot more confidence in the calculations based on the physics and empirical data, such as linked by Hans Erren (257) than “sensitivities” based on the PETM or the GCMs.
Current concern? The potential for (+) feedbacks to accelerate warming when the planet is cool is not news. Just as the potential for (+) feedbacks to accelerate cooling when the planet is warm is not news. It’s not like these (+) feedbacks are one-way switches. And it’s not like they have arisen from human intervention. If, like snow albedo, these feedbacks are transient, then once the switches are tripped, they’re tripped. They don’t lead to a runaway feedback. No more than tripping a light switch leads to ever-increasing brightness of light. Those switches have gone on and off before without the climate system going off the rails. These feedbacks may be a “concern” in the short-run in terms of adding to baseline GHG warming, but let’s not double-count our positive effects here! Let’s not get confused about the amount of warming directly attributable to GHGs and the amount of warming indirectly attributable to GHGs tripping a (+) feedback switch. They’re different things. That matters when you are trying to estimate a sensitivity coefficient.
In the urge to alarmism warmers seem to neglect important details like this. I’m not trying lump Jack in with this group. This is more a general comment about the nonlinear arithmetic of alarmism. (Apologies, Jack, for using your post as an example.)
And let’s not forget: the fate of the entire planet is not determined by transient or short-run climate responses. The fate of a number of species, perhaps. But let’s maintain some perspective. Logging is a far bigger threat to owls than warming is to bears.
Why can’t it be a weird wobble in the orbit-plus a bunch of other reactions? (The pull of gravity from the other planets also affects the location of the Earth in its orbit.) The seasons do come earlier every year on a minute scale because of a wobble, but there are other wobbles we may not know about-because we are standing on Earth. I posted a link about the seasons in another threaded thread. here is the link equinox
Re #257 Hans, would you mind posting that figure WITH the caption?
Re:125,000 continued
Wiki says :
“Milankovitch cycle, probably led to greater seasonal temperature variations in the Northern Hemisphere, although global annual means temperatures were probably similar to those of the Holocene. The Eemian climate is believed to have been about as stable as, but probably warmer than that of, the Holocene (see ice core). The warmest peak of the Eemian was around 125,000 years ago, when forests reached as far north as North Cape (which is now tundra) in northern Norway well above the Arctic Circle at 71°10″ⰲ1″Ⲏ, 25°47″ⰴ0″ⲅ. Hardwood trees like hazel and oak grew as far north as Oulu, Finland. Sea levels at that time were 5-8 meters higher than they are now, possibly indicating greater deglaciation than today (mostly from partial melting of the ice sheet of Greenland).(Aber 2004) Scandinavia was an island due to the inundation of vast areas of northern Europe and the West Siberian Plain.
At the peak of the Eemian, the northern hemisphere winters were generally warmer and wetter than now, though some areas were actually slightly cooler than today. Trees grew as far north as southern Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago instead of only as far north as Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec, and the prairie-forest boundary in the Great Plains of the United States lay further west “¢’¬? near Lubbock, Texas, instead of near Dallas, Texas, where the boundary now exists. The era quickly cooled to conditions cooler and drier than the present, and by 114,000 years ago, a glacial era had returned.”
But there is no CO2 or Temp on the chart of the ice core on that page?? It is from Vostek.
sorry here’s the link to wiki: link
re 265, 257, 279,
No, but he does mention the cooling since the eocene explicitly.
figure 2 from http://www.sciencebits.com/OnClimateSensitivity with caption:
re: 280 But there is no CO2 or Temp on the chart of the ice core on that page??
I found it. Answer: “Plotted using the IDL language by W. M. Connolley”
sorry didn’t mean to spam!
re:259, 260 etc, cherry blossoms:
being earlier than the average date is not evidence of change. being beyond the known range might be a bit more compelling. i didn’t notice any range of known dates in the link.
besides, there already is other evidence of change. there is poor evidence for “A”GW, however.
RE 282 Here is some smilar conclusions from Rusov et al.They use some interesting methodology of Gilmores catastrophe theory to fold polar and thermic states.
The energy-balance model of global climate, which is taking into account a nontrivial role of solar and galactic protons, is presented. The model is described by the equation of fold catastrophe relative to increment of temperature, where the variation of a solar insolation and cosmic rays are control parameters. It is shown that the bifurcation equation of the model describes one of two stable states of the climate system. The solution of this equation exhibits the property of the determined bistable behavior of climate at the global level and the possibility of appearance of the determined chaos of “the weathers” at the local levels.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0506208
Re #272: Mark, your gratuitous unpleasantness leads me to wonder whether you’re old enough to drink. Please do take that both ways.
Jack, you wrote:
It is a mistake to think that the PETM demonstrates much beyond the fact that in a world already ~5°C warmer than today, a huge release of methane from the deep sea poisoned the ocean, and that a huge increase (much larger than all estimated fossil fuel reserves) of methane and co2 warmed the planet. We don’t understand why this happened, and the numbers on it are very poorly constrained.
Considering how poorly we understand the modern climate, our understanding of the constraints, feedbacks, drivers, and quasi-stable states of the climate 55 million years ago is in its infancy. At present, there is no “leading theoretical explanation” of the PETM, as the quote above observes.
w.
Lee says:
January 4th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
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re 77 – Sadlov.
So a couple days ago I pointed out that Dr. Curry was misquoted in a way that misrepresented what she was saying, and that some people had attacked her based on the misrepresentation. I twice was censored by SteveM for “picking a fight,’ and my substantive point about he misrepresentation was removed. Twice.
And yet Sadlov routinely casts bombs like this, to apparent approval.
And SteveM wonders why I think he is as much propagandist as analyst.
85
Ron Cram says:
January 4th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
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re: 84
Lee,
Based on the way you completely mischaracterized Monckton, I find it hard to believe that SteveM found it necessary to edit a “substantive point” raised by you. If Dr. Curry thinks she was misquoted, she is welcome to say so.
Like Sadlov, I found her comment about “statistical gotcha” pretty surprising. I wonder how the IRS would respond to such a charge when they catch someone underreporting their income.
86
Lee says:
January 4th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
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Cram, I stand by everything I’ve said about Monckton.
87
Ron Cram says:
January 4th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
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Lee,
Continuing to stand by your mischaracterizations does you no credit. If you still think you are right, go back to the Monckton thread and defend your comments.
You are absolutely free to disagree with Monckton’s conclusions, but you are not free to mischaracterize his statements. Of course, the best and final solution to this issue is the one I suggested before – invite Monckton here to debate him… that is, if SteveM is willing to host it.
Somehow this got posted to another thread while (it appears0 SteveM was consolidating my posts on this topic. – I’m putting it here too. SteveM, feel free to delete it from the “Two Curious Hurri8can Graphs” thread.
—
Cram, I have defended my statements several times here, to more people than just you.
His original article is laced with errors – those have been widely exposed, and widely excused by people here who hold others to much higher standards. His analysis of climate sensitivity makes extreme (and frankly absurd) simplifying assumptions, and based on those, he tells people who don’t do so that they have overturned basic physical laws because they get different answers. He overgeneralized – repeatedly – in ways that allow him to shift between specific and general arguments as suits him. I honestly wouldnt think him worth any more of my time and thought, if he didn’t keep getting cited by people whose standards seem wildly different for him than for the “warmers.’
BTW, this is not ignoring him because he chalenges me. I frankly don’t give a damn if I change anyone’s mind here – I’m not here to do that. I’m here to have my ideas challenged – I do so by reading, and by pushing and prodding with what I think I know to see what challenges it gets. Sometimes I do get real challenge here, and I learn somethig and have to examine what I think I know, and I have changed what I thought I knew as a result, on a couple of things.
I read Monckton’s stuff – and found it absurd to the point of considering it a waste of time, because it was propaganda rather than analysis, and did not contain any intelligent challenge – and not much intelligence at all, full stop – to what I think I know.
re 287
Look at the isotopes for the period,such as irridium,and he3
Here’s topical new research about the transition out of the other major glacial period of the Phanerozoic. CO2 played a role then, too, it seems. The abstract:
“CO2-Forced Climate and Vegetation Instability During Late Paleozoic Deglaciation
“The late Paleozoic deglaciation is the vegetated Earth’s only recorded icehouse-to-greenhouse transition, yet the climate dynamics remain enigmatic. By using the stable isotopic compositions of soil-formed minerals, fossil-plant matter, and shallow-water brachiopods, we estimated atmospheric partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2) and tropical marine surface temperatures during this climate transition. Comparison to southern Gondwanan glacial records documents covariance between inferred shifts in pCO2, temperature, and ice volume consistent with greenhouse gas forcing of climate. Major restructuring of paleotropical flora in western Euramerica occurred in step with climate and pCO2 shifts, illustrating the biotic impact associated with past CO2-forced turnover to a permanent ice-free world.”
Also in this week’s Science, it seems that many fish have a problem with warmer water. The abstract:
“Climate Change Affects Marine Fishes Through the Oxygen Limitation of Thermal Tolerance”
“A cause-and-effect understanding of climate influences on ecosystems requires evaluation of thermal limits of member species and of their ability to cope with changing temperatures. Laboratory data available for marine fish and invertebrates from various climatic regions led to the hypothesis that, as a unifying principle, a mismatch between the demand for oxygen and the capacity of oxygen supply to tissues is the first mechanism to restrict whole-animal tolerance to thermal extremes. We show in the eelpout, Zoarces viviparus, a bioindicator fish species for environmental monitoring from North and Baltic Seas (Helcom), that thermally limited oxygen delivery closely matches environmental temperatures beyond which growth performance and abundance decrease. Decrements in aerobic performance in warming seas will thus be the first process to cause extinction or relocation to cooler waters.”
more information on the 120,000 year record [is it not worthy?] LOL
From a Science Mag editorial
A central feature of this long baseline is this: At no time in at least the past 10 million years has the atmospheric concentration of CO2 exceeded the present value of 380 ppmv. At this time in the Miocene, there were no major ice sheets in Greenland, sea level was several meters higher than today’s (envision a very skinny Florida), and temperatures were several degrees higher. A more recent point of reference, and the subject of two papers in this issue, is the Eemian: the previous interglacial, about 130,000 to 120,000 years ago. This was a warm climate, comparable to our Holocene, during which sea levels were several meters higher than today’s, even though CO2 concentrations remained much lower than today’s postindustrial level.
Science 24 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5768, p. 1673
DOI: 10.1126/science.1127485
Prev | Table of Contents | Next
Editorial
Ice and History
Donald Kennedy and Brooks Hanson
Don’t know which is the most relevant thread, so I post here:
Click to access misuses.pdf
(http://w3g.gkss.de/staff/storch/recent.htm)
Is the pre-whitening method Storch introduces (p. 17) used widely in climatic trend analyses?
Steve B., thanks for the pointer to the new study on the CO2 and temperature during the Phanerozoic.
I went and got the paper. There’s good news, and two pieces of interesting news.
The good news, actually excellent news, is that all of the data is in the Supplementary Online Materials. If only other authors would do that, it would avoid huge problems.
Interesting result #1 is this. There is a decent correlation between CO2 and temperature, r^2 = 0.39, p = 0.03. However, the correlation is worse with log(CO2), r^2 = 0.36, than with linear … which means that whatever the CO2 was doing, it was not radiation/greenhouse based, or the logarithmic correlation would be stronger than the linear correlation.
Interesting result #2 is this. The CO2 change leads the temperature change. First time I’ve seen that, but that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the CO2 leads the temperature change by about 2,250,000 years … now I know there’s lag times and all, but two and a quarter million years? The resolution in the CO2 data is about 0.25 million years, and in the temperature data about 1.3 million years, so it’s not an artifact. That’s where the correlation peaks, at r^2=0.55 for the linear correlation and r^2 = 0.50 for the log correlation … go figure.
So whatever was happening back then … it doesn’t seem to be greenhouse related as they claim.
w.
RichardT: RE Sakura
Actually, I think the most likely interpretation would put the date change at 4-10 days earlier. Remember that the Japanese Met Office forecast is for first bloom, not full bloom when the parties were most likely held.
As for your conclusion that this shows that the medeival warm period was a regional, not global event – I don’t follow you at all.
Again, this is interesting stuff, especially to a forester like myself, but not something to derive grand conclusioins. Other proxies are likely better, but this one is a lot of fun.
The fact that a big release of methane and CO2 could make a climate warmer than today’s even warmer is a very significant aspect of the PETM. The PETM is a natural demonstration that the “basics” of greenhouse gas – forced climate warming actually work as science indicates they should. Beyond that, things were different 55 million years ago.
welikerocks:
That’s totally reasonable; sea levels are dependent on ice volume in the cryosphere. Wasn’t the original question about how there could be a cold period during a high-CO2 warm interval (in this case the Eemian)? One explanation appeared to be an ocean circulation shift.
I think the question was that it was warmer back 125,000 yrs ago even though Co2 concentrations were lower. According to AGW theory, Co2 levels should have played some role if global climate is that sensitive to Co2 forcing, they obviously didn’t.
Jack, This sentance “Beyond that, things were different 55 million years ago.” doesn’t seem to answer the question of the earths climate sensitivity to Co2. That is the point of much of this blog.
Steve B,
I am not a fisheries person, but even I know water temp has a huge impact on what type of fish you will get. All the local fisherman where I went to school understood this. I even had a Proff move to Alaska because he said thats where all the Salmon went.
re: 289
Lee,
I was not referring to your disagreements with Monckton over the science. As I stated, you are free to disagree with him and state your views. My issue is the way you mischaracterized his propositions as building a straw man. This was clearly indefensible as you never tried to defend it, yet you say you continue to stand by everything you have said about Monckton. This is not the way to build credibility with people on this site.
Monckton had laid out a series of propositions firmly held by warmers. He also gave his judgments of the propositions being true, false, likely or unlikely. I thought it would be interesting to see the views of others. Rather than stating your views, you attacked Monckton for building a straw man. (In one proposition Monckton used “insignificant” when “small” or “minor” would have been more accurate. However, poor word selection is hardly building a straw man.) I would have been interested to hear your views on each of the propositions. Rather than be a party to the discussion, your goal was to obfuscate in a way that was completely unfair to Monckton.
You say you want a debate but all you want is to throw sand in people’s eyes. This is the end of this topic for me.
Cram,
I read at least one response (yours?) calling everything I said about Monckton’s list ‘building a straw man.’ That was not what I said, and I didn’t bother to respond to that obviously incorrect claim.
What I did say was that SOME FEW of the comments in his list were aimed at straw men. I said it referring TO THE SPECIFIC POINT I WAS ADDRESSING, not the entire list. I said why I considered THAT POINT to involve a straw man. I had different criticisms of other points. Ignoring a blanket attack on something I didnt say is NOT a failure to defend what I did say.
BTW, my criticism of Monckton on the generalized claims would not be ameliorated if he has said ‘small’ or ‘minor.’ My point was that he extended a possibly true specific statement, if he had limited it, into a completely false general statement – and many here have defended the general statement, so my interpretation seems to have been shared by many who defend him, and be defensible.
Here is an irrufutable statement. The parts of the NH affected by the Gulf Stream and its various eddies are experiencing an unusually mild winter. The other parts of the NH are experiencing a normal to colder than normal, quite snowy, winter. A picture (see above) is worth 1000 words.
(This was inspired by yet another FT agitprop story today, this one implying that all of Russia was experiencing a warmer than normal winter, when in fact, only the westernmost sliver of Russia is having such an experience.)
Steve — it is the entire NH which is experiencing a mild winter. Check out this for an interesting report. Even the Central CA coast had a warm Dec while the rest of CA was normal.
RE: #305 – I’m sorry, but you are wrong. Overall, the NH beyond the area I described, is having a normal to cold winter, with lots of snow. Do not split hairs here about a few coastal counties in California, that is highly disingenous. Did you view the image? It does not lie. To have that sort of snow coverage at this point in the year, you need normal to colder than normal conditions in the places which are covered. Also, monitoring of even the highly suspect surface record during winter (and if you wish to split hairs, late fall) thus far, in all the area outside the “Gulf Stream area of impact” confirms my statement. Do you deny the reality experinced *in general, a few coastal counties notwithstanding* in North America west of 100 W longitude, and in the Eastern 2/3 of Eurasia, since October?
The wunderground link is a great example of the “all AGW all the time” meme in action. They show a 3 week anomaly readout, which captured one warm week in Eurasia and one warm week in western NA, and make it seem like the entire Fall and Early Winter is warm. Why not show the anomaly from Oct 1 to present? You know why ….
The warm weather is the result of El Nino and the jet stream being farther north than usual, not AGW.
This is the problem with the media, everything today is always becuase of AGW. Any strange weather event is AGW. Oy vey.
The Unspoken Truth About Surface Temperature Measurements:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
has anybody here read this?
“The Elusive Absolute Surface Air Temperature (SAT)
Q. What exactly do we mean by SAT ?
A. I doubt that there is a general agreement how to answer this question. Even at the same location, the temperature near the ground may be very different from the temperature 5 ft above the ground and different again from 10 ft or 50 ft above the ground. Particularly in the presence of vegetation (say in a rain forest), the temperature above the vegetation may be very different from the temperature below the top of the vegetation. A reasonable suggestion might be to use the average temperature of the first 50 ft of air either above ground or above the top of the vegetation. To measure SAT we have to agree on what it is and, as far as I know, no such standard has been suggested or generally adopted. Even if the 50 ft standard were adopted, I cannot imagine that a weather station would build a 50 ft stack of thermometers to be able to find the true SAT at its location.”
no need for auditing here!
RE: #308 – and furthermore, the El Nino effect seems to be quite limited to the US east of about 100 or 95 W longitude, and Europe. Here out West, we’ve never really gotten into what I (as a 40 plus year out West kind of guy) would deem “typical El Nino conditions.” It’s been more like a La Nina for us, with cold and wet conditions north of about 36 or 37 N latitude, and general droughtyness south of that. And meanwhile, in the eastern 2/3 of Eurasia, they incurred both an early onset of snow coverage, as well as weather that, while punctuated with a few warmish weeks, has been boringly normal, and in some places quite cold. It is somewhat similar to last year, in that the interior, and South Asia, have had deadly cold. It is different from last year in that the immediate coastal areas such as Easternmost China, and Japan, have (thankfully for them) not experienced again the terrible conditions of Jan 2006.
AGW always has to be mentioned…haha. This is from Weather.com
Meteorologists say the warm spell is due to a combination of factors: El Nino, a cyclical warming trend now under way in the Pacific Ocean, can lead to milder weather, particularly in the Northeast; and the jet stream, the high-altitude air current that works like a barricade to hold back warm Southern air, is running much farther north than usual over the East Coast.
The weather is prone to short-term fluctuations, and forecasters said the mild winter does not necessarily mean global warming is upon us. In fact, the Plains have been hit by back-to-back blizzards in the past two weeks.
“No cause for alarm. Enjoy it while you have it,” said Mike Halpert, head of forecast operations at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.
RE: #311 – You’ve raised a good point, indirectly. It would be a mistake for people in the Southeastern quadrant of North America, the immediate coast of East Asia, and Europe, to assume that their benign late fall and early winter will necessarily continue. With the meridioality of the mid latitude jet right now, a little shift could bring a swift and bitter end to their “false spring!”
Replies to Dane #299, #300
CO2 concentrations during the Eemian and previous warm intervals were as high as the normal upper bound seen in the ice core records. (270-280 ppm). The Eemian does not appear to have been as temperature-stable as the Holocene; this is a good figure:
http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/climatechange/figure_1.jpg
that shows that the Eemian (and previous warm intervals) were more sharply “peaked” than the Holocenic quasi-stability. Why? That’s beyond me to explain. But it does indicate climate system complexity and underlying dissimilarities between the previous warm intervals and this one.
But it wasn’t the point of your question to Bender, which was the context in which I raised the example of the PETM. As a reminder, you wrote:
And the ice cores also show the linkage, given awareness of how CO2 in the atmosphere will respond and augment either a cooling or warming trend.
Final note, RE: the 3 week cherry picking of the surface record. In Eastern Eurasia, their one warmish week was in early December, in the Western US is was the week before Christmas in the Far West and the week before that in the Rockies (as Denver folk so painfully know from the whammy of what immediately followed).
As long as we’re discussing essentially irrelevant isolated records and events –
2006 was an above average year for tropical cyclones, with right at 100 worldwide compared to average in the low 80s, and above average for intense storms, with 19 cat 4-5, compared to 17 average. This in spite of low activity in the N Atlantic.
2006 also included a new co-record holder for the lowest pressure southern hemisphere observed TC – Monica, which hit the north coast of Australia, shared with Zoe in 2002 – at 868.5 by one estimate. This is estimated, so uncertain, but this was a very strong storm, certainly the strongest ever observed in the southern hemisphere, and it forms in late April, after the end of the typical Australia cyclone season.
2006 also saw the longest ever observed duration of an intense storm – Ioke, which remained Cat 4-5 for 33 consecutive 6 hour reports, and 36 reports total.
RE: #315 – TCwise, from a purely qualitative point of view informed by a few short term quantitative assessments, 2006 was an interesting and very active year in the Pacific. Although somewhat unusual as well. What was unusual, at least for me personally, was the near lack of any storm tracks up Baja until quite late in the season. As a result, at my location, we had precisely zero feeder band shower events (such years have occured before, but they are few and far between, normally we get at least one such event). The main tracks were NW, then WNW then straight West. Ioke started as a Central American / Mexican storm, then was redesignated a typhoon at the date line. It was in many ways the archtype for all unusually long lived storms this season. The other remarkable thing to me, was how many of the storms tracked into the South China coast. Sure they get some every year, but this year they were a magnet. I was on scene there for two of them. Talk about gloom. I thought I’d start growing mildew on my skin. The other notable thing was how the late storms which made it all the way across ended up directly spiking the Bering Sea / Gulf of Alaska storm machine, especially pertinent to the PNW during early fall (including Alaska’s Pacific Coast). That was the premonition of the huge snow accumalations there now in the usual snowy places. Since I am a huricane geek, (I know, funny thing to be one on the West Coast) it was a great year from my own selfish perspective. 😉
Jack, The Ice cores do NOT show the linkage, look at your figures again, there is like an 800 yr lag of Co2 increase AFTER temp increase.
Benders example is interesting, but not definitive. At least for the PETM they have some data. 55 my is a freaking LONG time ago, I am not sure of the dating technique used for the studies shown since I couldn’t find it, but it may be problematic if your trying to show direct connections between Co2 atmospheric conc and mean global temps. The margins of error for the dating techniques get quite large the farther back in time you go, so a 100,000 yr resolution that far back must have used a method I am not aware of. It could be they have so much dating and stratigraphic data that they get better precision that one otherwise could with only one set of data, I don’t know as the papers didn’t say (I took a grad course on geologic dating techniques). It is worth cogitating over though.
Jack,
I might be able to explain this “that shows that the Eemian (and previous warm intervals) were more sharply “peaked” than the Holocenic quasi-stability. Why? That’s beyond me to explain. But it does indicate climate system complexity and underlying dissimilarities between the previous warm intervals and this one.”
The sharper “peaks” on the ice core graph relative to the Holocene may very well simply be an artifact of dating precision. Obviously, the more recent the data, the smoother the graphs when it comes to geology and dating. Also things like potential ice melt and compression of the ice may also play a role.
Dane:
First regarding #318, take a look at this figure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Epica_do18_plot.png
which shows the oxygen isotope record plotted against depth and time. The peak interglacial temps are still somewhat “spiky”. The depth plot nicely shows that if though the Eemian peak temperature is higher than now, the “stable” period of the Eemian had temperatures pretty similar to now. If the 125,000 year highstand refers to the peak temperature period of the highstand, then I don’t know how to explain why it was warmer (as I said before).
Regarding both that and CO2/temperature lags, here are a couple of references:
http://www.physics.arizona.edu/~restrepo/myweb/downloads/gig_part2.pdf (entitled “A possible sequence of events for the generalized glacial-interglacial cycle”)
and
http://lgmacweb.env.uea.ac.uk/green_ocean/publications/Kohfeldetal2005.pdf
(entitled “Role of Marine Biology in Glacial-Interglacial CO2 Cycles”)
and
http://sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5501/112
(entitled “Atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the last glacial termination”)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/01/consensus-as-the-new-heresy/
Posts 98, 117 and 118 (plus one more en queue awaiting censor approval).
All AGW, all the time ….. (for those wondering where I copped that phrase, some people have been known to joke about Fox News “All War on Terror, All the Time” …) …. 😉
To summarize the papers inadequately (and there are others, it’s a rich field):
The increase and decrease in CO2 seen in the ice cores for cold and warm intervals results from a pretty complex interplay of ocean chemistry, ocean biology, and ocean circulation. One of the key elements is ocean circulation and sea ice advance or retreat. These are associated with (obviously) climate/temperature. If the feedbacks are operating as indicated, then the increasing CO2 (and methane — I was surprised in reviewing these how much importance is ascribed to methane) must drive a temperature increase which clearly would affect ocean temperatures, circulation, etc. What’s not clear, and I think what’s still critical in the whole discussion of the effect of CO2 on climate, is how much the increasing CO2 is driven by ocean chemistry and how much by circulation/temperature and related cryospheric effects.
It’s clear (to the regret of the scientific advocates of anthropogenic global warming) that there is not a clear cause-effect relationship between CO2 and temperature in the ice core record. The relationship has to be explained with a certain layer of scientific complexity on top. Because it’s not clear, it serves as a useful point for skeptical discussion (you’re not doing that, are you Dane?) because the skeptical side can say “see, it doesn’t work the way they said it does”, when in fact the scientists probably never said it worked that way, and they have to explain why a simplified concept isn’t really so simple in the real world.
Hey Dane, one more. I accidentally discovered this in my reference search. It contained a nice pithy summary (as good as anything I could find).
http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/documents/January252006-SurfaceTemp.CO2andMethaneFinal_000.pdf
“During the past, at the scale of glacial-interglacial
cycles, CO2 increases have been
activated by orbital forcing of the climate system but have thereafter, played a major role
in strongly amplifying, together with the collapse of the northern ice sheets, the
amplitude of the climate warming. The temperature response of these past CO2 changes
appears to remain the same over time, whatever the conditions of the climate change are.
It therefore, gives the research community more confidence in the CO2-temperatue
proportionality observed during the past, when making projections of future global
warming.”
Has anyone seen this story yet?
There’s no link to the actual study, so who know’s what they actually did. Might be some interesting discussion on the proxy data if someone gets a hold of it…
Ok, trying again with the link…
Global Warming
From 380 ppm to 2000 ppm by the end of the century? Who on earth is predicting that much?
Mark
Re 323, 324, 325:
Abstract
CO2-Forced Climate and Vegetation Instability During Late Paleozoic Deglaciation
Isabel P. Montañez, Neil J. Tabor, Deb Niemeier, William A. DiMichele, Tracy D. Frank, Christopher R. Fielding, John L. Isbell, Lauren P. Birgenheier, and Michael C. Rygel
Science 5 January 2007: 87-91
Jonathan, you say:
Yes, that’s the study we were discussing above.
w.
The use of “cataclysmic” post hoc phenomena to boundary events only suggest cataclysmic causal precurser mechanisms.The use of Permian Triassic environmental phenomena or PETM phenomena only reinforces the boundary issues.A significant precurser event(s)
eg http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1141
The readings of a radiological clock once it is “switched on” (ideally in the absence of failures of “flow” in their individual time), do not correspond in any way to peripeteias of development of the paleoecosystem to which it appeared to be originally bound. So, a radiological clock, which “is built in” the products of a volcanic eruption, do not further respond to the subsequent deposition of terrigenous and carbonaceous strata, nor to post-depositional uplift or erosion, etc. Readings of a radiological clock fix the time of their “triggering” “¢’¬? and nothing more. Thus, it allows us to answer only one question (not of any interest to physics) “¢’¬? when this concrete event in the history of a given local paleoecosystem took place. The radiological clock does not provide for any information on the duration of alterations in the state of the clock-containing paleoecosystem following this event, which result from its cyclic-irreversible development. Moreover, from readings of a radiological clock it is impossible even to determine the endurance of the quasistable state of the system that caused their “starting up”. Therefore, a radiological clock cannot be used for the calculation of either the speed or duration of processes in an event bound by a given concrete paleoecosystem. And this is the key difference between a radiological clock and the clock used by physicists for registration of temporal parameters of phenomena.
A good analysis of issues is here
http://www.chronos.msu.ru/EREPORTS/simakov_geochronology.htm
Jack: If you are really interested in forcing by CO2, you should read the link at 282. There is a lot of information there on temperature sensitivity to forcing by CO2 (or anything else), and it is based on physics and empirical data that we know a lot about. Please let me know why you think the sensitivity calculations in that link are not important and do not prove that AGW is not a serious threat.
We sure don’t know much about what was going on 55 MILLION years ago, IMO. As I said before, it would take us 300 years to release as much carbon as was supposedly released in the PETM, and we would still only have a 5 degree increase.
FYI: whether natural variability or AGW, the “big one” is yet to come as per Max Mayfield
Hurricane Center Chief Issues Final Warning
By Carol J. Williams
The Los Angeles Times
Wednesday 03 January 2007
A departing Max Mayfield is convinced that the Southeast is inviting disaster.
Miami – Frustrated with people and politicians who refuse to listen or learn, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield ends his 34-year government career today in search of a new platform for getting out his unwelcome message: Hurricane Katrina was nothing compared with the big one yet to come.
Mayfield, 58, leaves his high-profile job with the National Weather Service more convinced than ever that U.S. residents of the Southeast are risking unprecedented tragedy by continuing to build vulnerable homes in the tropical storm zone and failing to plan escape routes.
He pointed to southern Florida’s 7 million coastal residents.
“We’re eventually going to get a strong enough storm in a densely populated area to have a major disaster,” he said. “I know people don’t want to hear this, and I’m generally a very positive person, but we’re setting ourselves up for this major disaster.”
More than 1,300 deaths across the Gulf Coast were attributed to Hurricane Katrina, the worst human toll from a weather event in the United States since the 1920s.
But Mayfield warns that 10 times as many fatalities could occur in what he sees as an inevitable strike by a huge storm during the current highly active hurricane cycle, which is expected to last another 10 to 20 years.
His apocalyptic vision of thousands dead and millions homeless is a different side of the persona he established as head of the hurricane center.
Mayfield attained national celebrity status during the tempestuous 2004 and 2005 seasons, appearing on network television with hourly updates as hurricanes Charley, Ivan, Frances and Wilma bore down on the Caribbean and the Southeast. His calm demeanor and avuncular sincerity endeared him to millions of TV viewers seeking survival guidance.
And he argues that his dire predictions don’t have to become reality.
The technology exists to build high-rise buildings capable of withstanding hurricane-force winds and tropical storm surge more powerful than those experienced in the last few years. Much of Hong Kong’s architecture has been built to survive typhoons, and hotels and apartments built in Kobe, Japan, after a 1995 earthquake devastated the city are touted as indestructible, he said.
What is lacking in the United States is the political will to make and impose hard decisions on building codes and land use in the face of resistance from the influential building industry and a public still willing to gamble that the big one will never hit, he said.
“It’s good for the tax base” to allow developers to put up buildings on the coastline, Mayfield said in explaining politicians’ reluctance to deter housing projects that expose residents to storm risks.
“I don’t want the builders to get mad at me,” he said, “but the building industry strongly opposes improvement in building codes.”
Consumers also have yet to demand sturdier construction, Mayfield added. A builder gets a better return on investment in upgraded carpet and appliances than for safety features above and beyond most states’ minimal requirements, he said.
As a senior civil servant, Mayfield was prohibited from making job inquiries in the private sector while still in the government’s employ. But he said on Tuesday, his last day in office, that he hoped to launch a second career as a consultant in emergency planning and disaster response. He has particular interest in a potential public-private initiative to mine natural disaster scenes for their educational value.
He envisions a natural disaster assessment service like the National Transportation Safety Board, which probes the causes and consequences of aviation and other transport accidents.
“If the NTSB finds some structural problem is the cause of an air crash, you would never see that plane continue to be built with the same problems,” he said.
With natural disasters, though, the same mistakes that put lives at risk are repeated year after year in unsafe construction and inadequate planning, he said.
Mayfield said he also was pondering collaboration with advocates of tougher building standards and land use rules.
“It’s not just about the forecasting. Whatever I do, I want to help change the outcome,” he said, conceding frustration with persistent public disregard of federal and local government campaigns to boost hurricane awareness and preparation.
Even after the devastating hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, he said, fewer than 50% of those living in storm-prone areas have a hurricane evacuation plan.
While he has been critical of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, he warns against depending on the federal government after natural disasters. He was dismayed to see federal agencies handing out water and ice in South Florida after Hurricane Wilma hit in October 2005, when stores were open and tap water was usable.
“You don’t want the federal government to be your first-responders,” he said. “The government can’t do everything for people and it shouldn’t, or else you create a culture of dependence.”
Mayfield praises the Florida state government for its well-oiled disaster-response program and steps toward improving building safety, in contrast with other states along the Gulf of Mexico that he says still have no statewide building standards.
Though Mayfield’s name and face recognition are the envy of some presidential hopefuls, he laughs out loud at the notion of running for office.
“Oh, good gosh, no! That is just not my thing,” he says.
At the hurricane center on the Florida International University campus, Mayfield will be succeeded by Bill Proenza, the National Weather Service’s director for the Southern region. Home to 77 million, the region has “the most active and severe weather in the world,” according to the weather service’s parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Proenza, 62, began his meteorological career at the Miami office as an intern in 1963. As director of 50 regional offices and 1,000 employees in the Southern region for the last eight years, he has long experience collaborating with the hurricane center staff on forecasts and tracking.
“That’s why I don’t have any problem walking out the door,” said Mayfield, declaring himself fearful that the mild 2006 hurricane season left those in the storm zone ever more complacent.
#327,
My bad, I must have missed that section somehow. I will go back and read. Thanks for pointing out that section. I will go back and re-read.
Are there any plotting packages in R that will permit me to create phase diagrams? Thanks!
#330. Judith, have you read any of the Travis McGee novels by John D Mac Donald dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. One of the recurrent sub-themes was the bribing of municipal politicians in Florida by developers to get variances to build in unsafe areas. McGee’s friend, Meyer, warned in the background of the pending “big one”. So the concern (a valid one) has been around for a while.
Margo, “r-project” is a good google delimiter for searching for R packages.
Re #332
Margo, if you can imagine it, R can do it. Good luck.
Thanks Steve. I think the delimiter is what I need. (Without it, I just get papers in phys. rev. letters etc.!)
#333 Steve, thanks for reminding me of this, yes i have read the travis mcgee novels many years ago. Development in florida got a big boost after 1979 Hurricane Frederic (clobbered AL/MS mostly), but this was the first storm that received federal disaster relief
#337
Federal disaster relief following hurricanes goes back to the 19th century (here). Perhaps you are referring to something more specific?
These discussions usually start and end at this point. A lot that is not yet understood and uncertainty in interpreting the data that cuts in all directions — cherry picking your favorites notwithstanding.
Re: #330
Unfortunately that is not the message that one hears from the main stream media or politicians. On the other hand, inflexible one-size-fits-all land use restrictions will not promote the best utilizations of these areas either. Riskier developments that can be managed by the property owners obtaining sufficient insurance coverage or willingness to go unprotected but without the promises of damage subsidies by government would work better.
These politically based issues will, in my estimation, be much larger factors in the potential future damage than knowing the incremental increase in tropical storm activity and intensity, if any, can be measurably attributed to AGW — but will be no where near as much fun to discuss.
#312
Steve,
NOAA forceasters in the mid Great Lakes have been trying to push through a polar front for the last 3 weeks. Thier 12-15 day forecasts since mid December have called for drastic cooling. Yet, every forecast cycle this pushed back 2-3 days. Now, they are calling for mid January temps to fall from the low 40s to the high teens for highs, and the upper 20s to the single digits for lows. The models are trying to push the jet drastically southward, but the blocking high over the Eastern Atlantic (which has caused above average temps for Europe) is very stubborn. Since late Autumn we could be seeing one of those classic Atlantic Blocks that cause everything to stop for several weeks.
An image tag test for Steve:
Re #322 (and prior): This recent Real Climate post (including all the discussion and links) seems to cover all the current bases with respect to paleoclimate prior to the Holocene.
For Larry Hulden: Malaria returns to Italy, along with some other diseases.
(A few minutes ago I posted a link to an RC thread on deep paleoclimate, which now seems to have vanished.)
Re #337 An acquaintance of mine paid $300 in 2004 for storm insurance on his Florida condo. As of 2005 he pays almost $11,000 a year. That will do wonders to change mindsets and practices.
Re #341 The current January 16 North American weather forecast is here . Pattern shift. Cold in the US west and central, snow down to Houston, warm in the southeast.
Jack, what you are saying is we don’t really know what is going on, despite jae’s physics examples. That is the gist of my skeptisism. Some geologic data may suport AGW, a majority of the other data does not. Time is a problem in that we can’t seperate or figure out how much time has occurred throughout some of the data in question.
I remain a skeptic. I have little faith in computer models, as I follow the weather daily and they are wrong as often as they are right. When projecting that type of data forward in time , the probobility of errors increase since the paleo-data is less and less reliable in most cases. So many assumptions, nature being so chaotic, I find the entire argument for AGW a scam.
Sorry Jack, that was me posting above, I forgot to change my wifes name.
#345,
It’s a wonder the government hasn’t stepped in and claimed that insurance companies were making “obscene” profits at the expense of homeowners, and ordered them to reduce rates.
Oh the joys and wonder of governmental bureaucracy.
The American Institute of Physics has an interesting piece called “Chaos in the Atmosphere” about how global warming was discovered. It is a very interesting look at the history of climate science. You can find it here.
Steve Sadlov”¢’¬?I just listened to a news report on NPR in the Science section of Yahoo News “Is mild winter a sign of climate change?” Robert Hendsen reports that the Sea Ice for December is the lowest on record. Would you care to comment on this? Thanks.
Does anyone know if the data in Fig 1 of Curry, Webster, Holland “Mixing politics and Science…” BAMS Aug. 2006 is smoothed?
Or, can anyone tell me where I might find hurricane number counts for “all basins”?
Margo-
Here:
http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/index.html
Steve probably has it in a formatted file here somewhere I’d bet.
#352. MArgo, I’m unaware of any archived count by hurricane specialists. The following script will generate hurricane counts from my collation of unisys data:
I’ll post up the table of counts if you have any trouble with this. The same scripts can be modified trivially to yield cat4 counts.
RE #351
The December, 2006 Arctic sea ice extent shows that December, 2006 was the lowest since 1980 and continues the general downward trend in ice extent.
My understanding is that Arctic ice varies not only because of temperature but also because of winds. So, over a short term, there may also be variation due to wind patterns. My impression is that this is currently the case.
The Arctic Oscillation is an index that seems to correlate with Arctic winds and ice extent. When the index is high, the winds tend to reduce ice coverage. When the index is low, the winds tend to increase ice coverage.
On the referenced page, the chart to check is the first one, the one with the red lines. What it shows is that the index has been quite high for the last six or so weeks, which favors reduced ice extent. The red lines are the predictions for the next several weeks, from computer models. They show a tendency to return to a normal index value. So, the ice extent will likely not be as negative later this winter.
An interesting summary of some research is given here . It discusses the relationship between winds and ice extent.
It’s a complex subject, as they all are. I think that Judith Curry is one of the experts on Arctic ice and she may have some thoughts to share. or maybe not!
You’ll hear about warmth in New York and London on CNN abd BBC, so for balance here’s a report from Punjab .
#352, Margo
I extracted some all basin data from Steve’s data
1949 76
1950 78
1951 75
1952 82
1953 72
1954 73
1955 79
1956 94
1957 74
1958 95
1959 95
1960 82
1961 104
1962 97
1963 110
1964 120
1965 112
1966 118
1967 109
1968 106
1969 92
1970 106
1971 113
1972 100
1973 101
1974 105
1975 102
1976 88
1977 73
1978 93
1979 81
1980 89
1981 88
1982 89
1983 81
1984 97
1985 98
1986 89
1987 88
1988 78
1989 98
1990 96
1991 83
1992 105
1993 88
1994 101
1995 88
1996 112
1997 101
1998 100
1999 90
2000 101
2001 92
2002 87
2003 91
2004 97
2005 96
2006 97
Thanks Paul!
I read that the Dvorak published a paper in 1984 describing how to extend the Dvorak technique to determine hurricane intensity at night. Does anyone know when this technique was actually implemented in sattellites? (I’d assume the paper wasn’t published and “poof” the next day, all sattelites were using it.)
Thanks in advance.
Re #359 Here’s a link .
Dvorak has changed over time, which introduces yet more variability into the historical record.
#357. You can’t use these totals for time series analysis because of problems with the NIO and SH data. Look at my poists on this from OCtober.
Thanks both David and Steve!
Margo,
You have to be careful with a lot of that basin data. This is what I’ve found with the data I have.
S Indian 1945-2003. 1704 storms. Only 848 have wind readings. No wind before 1956
N Indian 1945-2003. 612 storms. Only 151 have wind readings. No wind before 1972
W Pacific 1945-2003. 1725 storms. Only 1657 have wind readings.
E Pacific 1949-2005. 794 storms. All have wind readings. 4 erroneous pressure readings.
Atlantic 1851-2005. 1353 storms. All have wind readings.
All storms with wind readings. By category.
Basin, TD, TS, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, total
Atlantic, 0, 29, 532, 310, 222, 163, 97, 1353
E Pacific, 0, 379, 192, 62, 63, 86, 12, 794
W Pacific, 124, 516, 299, 171, 176, 221, 150, 1657
N Indian, 10, 94, 24, 8, 7, 6, 2, 151
S Indian, 74, 391, 151, 66, 78, 75, 13, 848
total, 208, 1409, 1198, 617, 546, 551, 274, 4803
Re #355: So that makes seven or eight record low months for 2006, a year which seems to have broken every meaningful record except for minimum summer extent (due to a cold snap in August/September). Can the whole year be blamed on the AO? In any case this new record low continues the clear long-term downward trend and is consistent with the recent projection of an ice-free summer minimum by 2040.
Test only, to see if Tex works …
w.
Grrrr …. tex still not working. John A, could you put this at the top of your list, what’s a statistics blog without LaTex?
Many thanks,
w.
In today’s news, it seems that global warming may be slated to receive even more attention from Congress than had been thought. That’s good news in and of itself, but establishing such a focused climate change special committee would be a neat way of solving the John Dingell problem, although the news from the Detroit car show seems to be that the auto lobby is going to be much less of a problem than had appeared likely. Of course the current model mix remain pretty much crap in terms of efficiency, but at least GM seems to have decided it might be better to go green than bankrupt.
May be old news but fwiw…
Tree growth
#368
I read the very same info in a paper of Czech dendrochronologists few years old. They even didn’t try to link tree rings of broadleaved trees with temperature – only with precipitations. Seemed to be a well-known thing.
Paper is online here
Jae, #282:
Jae, thanks for the offer, but that level of investigation is not my area of interest or expertise. I’m primarily interested in ocean/atmosphere interactions and feedback on biological systems.
Dane, #347:
I find your skepticism unusual, given your apparent strong understanding of geology. One of the tasks of science is to discover that underlying order in a seemingly chaotic world. I’ve learned enough and studied enough to be able to judge effectively when scientists are fairly certain they’ve figured something out, even if the remaining uncertainties still delight them. In the case of AGW, they’ve got the basics figured out — and my awareness of their knowledge concerns me greatly.
RE: #341 – There is a classic Siberia Express brewing in the North Pacific / over Alaska. It is supposed to be progressive. Back East folks – heads up!
RE: #351 and 355 – NSIDC is an enviro / AGW hysteric biased source. This is better:
If someone included the obvious data collection glitch I can see how they might conclude that NH December sea ice extent was the lowest ever. However, in reality, the anomaly is well within historic norms, and is again heading for a possible zero crossing. It’s been flirting with zero since July. Nothing to see here, move along.
We’re staring at the 4th blizzard of the season this weekend as well. I still have several feet in my yard.
Mark
371, Jack: You say:
Then in 372, you say:
Now, I reallly do not understand where you are coming from. You talk about the basics in the second quote, and refuse to look at them in the first quote. The level of investigation HAS to begin (and end) with physical explanations (the basics). I’m not saying that all the physics has been worked out, but the link I provided offers some pretty compelling evidence that AGW effects cannot be anywhere near as “horrible” as the extremists are saying. And your statements indicate to me that your interests are way beyond “ocean/atmosphere interactions and feedback on biological systems,” since you appear to believe the extremists (e.g.,” my awareness of their knowledge concerns me greatly.” I can provide other links that also show a rather low temperature sensitivity factor for forcing by CO2.
re: #372 Jack,
Many things in this world are truly chaotic, not just seemingly so. However you have to know exactly what is meant by chaos in this sense. Generally it’s a function of just how low a level you can measure at which determines what sort of chaos you’re looking at, but even at the lowest level, and regardless of whether you’re talking Quantum or Newtonian physics, chaotic patterns will be quite normal. In some cases you can simplify things by lumping, for instance in classical thermodynamics, but in doing so you give up forever the chance to deal with the “underlying order” which, in fact, isn’t all that orderly.
Jae, #376
I don’t refuse to look at them. You’re trying to utilize the site to promote your viewpoint. My level of expertise in this area would make such an effort a waste of time.
Because climate sensitivity is such an important topic, and because of your clear predilections, I understand why you would find this information “compelling”. I, on the other hand, prefer to let the experts work it out. If it’s truly scientifically compelling, it will have an impact.
Your statement equates climate science experts with extremists, an indicator of your predilections/bias. I don’t view climate scientists who express scientific support for the “basic” scientific interpretation of AGW as extremist. And I don’t really want to engage in interpretations of semantics.
I have no doubt you could, but I’m not someone that they would have an effect on. I appreciate your zeal, but this is not the time or the place. I will continue to check in on CA, and as the occasion arises I’ll make a comment.
OK, Jack, now I understand you. You believe.
Jack,
The case for AGW would more than likley fail in a court of law. The data I collect must be able to stand up in court, or our clients loose money and we loose business.
I currently see nothing to worry about except some who may want to say they can “Control” the weather, or that “humans” are controlling the weather, now that is scary.
The climate will change, always has, always will. Its like saying “Stop Plate Tectonics” becasue you don’t like earthquakes or volcanoes erupting, or don’t want your view to change. Its kind of rediculous.
One of jae’s links takes you to the history of and the latest science on how increased CO2 raises temperatures. It certainly doesn’t leave one with the impression that the science is nailed yet.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Radmath.htm
Jeff: I certainly don’t mean to imply that the “science is nailed.” However, it looks to me there are some ways to look at temperature sensitivity that appear much more “solid” and realisitic than GCMs. Also, I am just a chemist, not a physicist, so there may be more “holes” in this stuff than I realize. I would be very interested in seeing a critique of Shaviv’s way of approaching the issue (also Idso’s).
I think what Jeff was trying to say is that the science is not nailed down yet, i.e. the article leaves you with the impression that there is a lot of room for improvement, which there seems to be.
Mark
#378
Have you had a lobotomy or something?
Re #374: Steve S., that’s just plain trolling. Even aside from your characterization of the National Snow and Ice Data Center as part of some conspiracy, the UIUC link you provided doesn’t support your point. Even though it’s just showing the last year, if you compare the starting and ending points it becomes clear that current areal extent is about half a million km^2 less than it was a year ago. And of course the current anomaly is climbing toward the 1979-2000 average (which includes summer levels); it being January, we would be surprised if it was doing anything else. I can’t find a monthly comparison on the UIUC site, but I think this additional graphic is more than sufficient to close the case. Notice any long-term trend there?
Of course the link that Jeff provided only covers developments up until 1980 or so. You might try this for information about what has been done in the last 25 years or so.
RE: #385 – In truth, 2004 and 2005 were relatively poor years in terms of NH sea ice coverage. During the winter of 2005 – 2006, there was recovery in areas besides the NE Atlantic, Barents Sea and Kara Sea. Thus far this (Oct 1 – Sept 30) ice year, most basins have tracked boringly close to 1979 – 2000 norms. As I already mentioned, after hitting ~ -1M Km^2 at the end of June, the anomaly has repeatedly flirted with zero. That type of sawtooth like behavior has the earmark of repeated wind driven compressive events, with subsequent relaxations toward normal. The near stabilization of the anomaly since late 2005 is a very interesting thing and warrants further focussed study.
Here’s a great paper for some motivated PhD candidate – do what could more or less be termed a gage R & R on sea ice measurements spanning from 1979 to present.
Re #382: Regarding a critique of Shaviv, read through this Real Climate post, including the comments and the various links.
Regarding the Idso “natural experiment” argument, a refutation was published twenty years ago (no public copy that I can find, unfortunately) and it doesn’t appear that any climate scientist has seen a need for anything further. From the History of Global Warming:
“In 1980 a scientist at the U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory in Arizona, Sherwood Idso, joined the attack on the models. In articles and letters to several journals, he asserted that he could determine how sensitive the climate was to additional gases by applying elementary radiation equations to some basic natural “experiments.” One could look at the difference in temperature between an airless Earth and a planet with an atmosphere, or the difference between Arctic and tropical regions. Since these differences were only a few tens of degrees, he computed that the smaller perturbation that came from doubling CO2 must cause only a negligible change, a tenth of a degree or so.(26)
“Stephen Schneider and other modelers counterattacked. They showed that Idso, Newell, and Dopplick were misusing the equations “¢’¬? indeed their conclusions were “simply based upon various violations of the first law of thermodynamics.” Refusing to admit error, Idso got into a long technical controversy with modelers, which on occasion descended into personal attacks.(27) It was the sort of conflict that an outsider might find arcane, almost trivial. But to a scientist, raising doubts about whether you were making scientific sense or nonsense aroused the deepest feelings of personal value and integrity.
“(…)
“A variety of other criticisms were voiced. The most prominent came from Sherwood Idso. In 1986 he calculated that for the known increase of CO2 since the start of the century, models should predict something like 3°C of warming, which was far more than what had been observed. Idso insisted that something must be badly wrong with the models’ sensitivity, that is, their response to changes in conditions.(77) Other scientists gave little heed to the claim. It was only an extension of a long and sometimes bitter controversy in which they had debated Idso’s arguments and rejected them as shamefully oversimplified.”
So this debate has been over for a very long time.
Re #387: Steve S., asserting that the anomalies have “flirted with zero” since October 1 is just continued fibbing, or perhaps it’s just that you don’t understand how to read these graphics. October and November were record low months, too. See for yourself.
Re #389: Apparently custom settings can’t be saved. Go here instead and set up the three months (or any desired comparison of monthly extent).
The December global temperature anomaly, per satellite, is here .
What’s odd is that we have yet to see a global impact from the moderate El Nino. The NH shows some heat-kick but that has been offset by cooler weather in the SH.
Speaking of the El Nino, it is fading fast.
#361, thought they looked weird, especially pre-1980.
How come you cut off the quote at this point. Why didn’t you continue with the rest of article which then says.
“Setting Idso’s criticisms aside, there undeniably remained points where the models stood on shaky foundations. Researchers who studied clouds, the transfer of radiation through the atmosphere and other physical features warned that more work was needed before the fundamental physics of GCMs would be entirely sound. …”
These models still depend on the physics assumptions built into them for CO2 developed in the late 1970s and the mid-1900s. The other article I linked to showed that the physics is not solid.
I especially like the rest of the article (the last part) where they checked their CO2 climate models against past climates, like the Holocene Optimum (no change in CO2 – increase in temps) and the ice ages (temp increases lead CO2 by thousands of years)
“The computer numbers got an independent check. Other scientists were studying past climates clear back to the ice ages, lining up temperature changes with changes in greenhouse gases and other influences such as aerosols blown into the atmosphere from volcanoes. By 2006 they had arrived at fairly good numbers, which agreed well with what the computers calaculated. When experts were pinned down to be specific, they might say there was scarcely one chance in twenty that the doubling of CO2 (what was expected to come before the end of the century) would warm the planet less than 1.5°C. The upper limit was harder to fix, since doubled CO2 would push the atmosphere into a state not seen for tens of millions of years, but a rise greater than 6°C seemed equally unlikely. The most likely number for climate sensitivity was 3°C.(107)
Well, I asked for it and I got it! But I’m not sure I believe it. I found another critique on Shaviv and Veizer’s work. But then, Shaviv and Veizer don’t agree with it. Such is science, I guess.
RE: #375 and 389 – I’m pretty good at reading charts, graphs and plots since I do that sort of thing routinely in my day job. The chart to read at the link from #375 is the bottom one, which shows the actual anomaly vs the mean 1979 – 2000 value. Here are the rough values, by month, for the sake of brevity I’ve only included beginning of month readings – the plot line obviously wiggles both above and below these values by one or a couple of tenths of millions (hundreds of thousands) of Km^2:
Jul 01 06: -1.0 M Km^2
Aug 01 06: -0.9 M Km^2
Sep 01 06: -0.3 M Km^2
Oct 01 06: -0.8 M Km^2
Nov 01 06: -0.2 M Km^2
Dec 01 06: -0.7 M Km^2
Jan 01 07: -0.3 M Km^2
re: 393
Jeff,
I got to this thread late. Is this article available online? Can you provide a link to it? I would love to read this article.
Re #396: It’s a book, Ron.
Steve B, for fun, how about you and I having a wager on the sea ice extent for the upcoming two months (January, February)?
I wager that the 2007 average sea ice extent anomaly for January + February will be less than the 2006 anomaly for those months.
My inclination is to think that the current ice extent is about the same as last year’s and that the AO will swing negative soon, allowing the ice to spread out, at least to last year’s extent.
That was my point about winds and ice extent: over the short term, wind makes a difference. It does not mean that wind has caused the long-term decline (it hasn’t, temperature has).
The person who does not win will be silent about sea ice for six months. That will be a treat to readers of CA, as neither of us (well, at least I) really don’t know much about the subject.
Game?
SteveM and all- there are new papers up for discussion at Climate of the Past, some regarding the Holocene and one related to orbital forcing too (if I read it right) -just a FYI
Speaking of which…
jae, I am jumping in the helio club with you. Just some thoughts here:
It’s in the 80’s today, and tonight down in the 40’s F. 40’s is somewhat cold for here even at night, and it has gone down into the 30’s for the past several weeks too. (Not in the national news so much but that’s a record since the 1930’s I saw for the day I was looking at (Huntington Beach, CA) It’s supposed to do this again with a forcast for rain coming in a few days. The Sun just feels hot on my skin when it is out and no clouds are out. I could have had a full tan if I stayed outside today. I don’t know if it’s because I am older and my skin is sensitive but I’ve been and still am a sun nut-and it sure feels hotter then I remember on my skin (brighter to my eyes too- didn’t have to wear sunglasses all the time until I was way into my twenties, now everybody does. It wasn’t like that when I was younger. Movie stars wore sunglasses. ) Hope this all makes sense. Are we not at a peak in the Milankovitch cycles? Doesn’t the “greenhouse effect” hold heat in, even at night?
Another brilliant image from one of my favorite satellite derived image sites ….
Do note that in the Southern half of Asia (with the exception of the far western area, from Iran west) it is now the dry season – in some areas they literally get no more than one inch of liquid equivalent from November until the Summer monsoon kicks in. If the Southern half got more fronts, the coverage would be even greater, all but SE China, SE Asia, the subcontinent and low lands of the fertile crescent.
What a forbidding part of the world. I can see why in his day, Genghis Khan, and in the present day, the Kurds, are so tough.
The really, really cold air has moved to the other side of the north pole. Much like most of last winter, eastern Siberia is in the deep freeze, with a large area around -50C. Ever try to start a car at -50C?
http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/25248.html
Rocks: if the cosmic ray hypothesis has any bearing, there should generally be MORE cloudiness now (worldwide), since we are at a low point in the Solar Cycle (less solar wind, less protection). Thus, I am forecasting a cooler 2007 (I know–how silly for a chemist with very little knowledge of climatology to be “forecasting” the weather :)). But heck, I bet on football games, and I’m not very knowledgable there either (Saints). Maybe CO2 will make up for the increased cosmic rays!
RE: #401 – got block heater? No? Bummer ‘n stuff …. 🙂
Here comes the Siberia Express.
My own guess is, this will likely be a bit less dramatic than either the two serious ones we got here last Feb and March, and certainly less dramatic than the amazing events of Dec 20 – 24 1998 and Dec 18 – Jan 3 1990/91. But still, it could always throw a last minute curve or inside slider, resulting in a surprise sea level snow event. Versus last year, when, even though there was not an El Nino, it acted like there was during the first half of January, only switching into Siberia Express mode fully during February (mid Feb in fact), this year, it’s a classic La Nina-esque alternation of ridging and very northerly storms and cold lows – the Express has been knocking on our door since Christmas. I realize that this is a very regional perspective. But it is interesting nonetheless. Especially vis a vis the orthodox understanding of “what is expected” based on the ENSO indices. Things are no longer “making sense” based on that orthodoxy. There will be new breakthroughs soon, I reckon.
#403,
Steve, here in Canada (Montreal, but I guess most northeastern America) it’s exceptionnally warm. No snow at all, very rare for January. We reached 10C last Saturday. It certainly looks like El Nino here. Just goes to show: the heat is not created out of nothing, it just moves around. The last El Nino in 1998 was not as warm, but it gave us the infamous ice storm.
#401 I lived for a short while just north of Quebec city in january 1994. Every morning was about –40C. The car would start (even without block heater), but you could just feel the pistons painfully working their way through the viscous oil. Not to mention that the seats were hard as a rock!
As for cosmic rays, 2006 was a record year for precipitation, FWIW.
Interesting presentation today from NOAA on the current El Nino, located here . It’s not the easiest reading but does try to present data in colorful, down-to-earth ways. Worth a 10-minute view.
re 395,
Sadlov, posting single terminal values in a times esries is grossly deficient as a way of observing changes.
Fact is, all those values are not only below the average, they are below the trend for the declining sea ice.
#402 jae, the clouds are making a show, but they blow over my house fast and get stuck in the mountains. We’ve had rain about one day a week. Last weekend Mount Wilson, where all the radio stations have antennas, was hit hard by a storm-very windy and all the stations were having trouble and going off the air,and that doesn’t happen hardly ever. And rain is on the way here again.
#403 And according to SteveS, Brrrrrrr!!
Here are some casual observations about temperatures and sunspot minimums in Billings Montana. Many of our top 10 coldest days have occurred during sunspot minimum years. They also tend to happen in years where the sunspots are in the single digits.
1914 9.6 #8 -36
1923 5.8 #7 -38
1933 5.7 #5 -40
1954 4.4 -70 Rodgers Pass Coldest recorded temp in Montana.
1996 8.6 # 9 -35
1996 was the only year that we have had single digit sunspot numbers since 1954.
Congrats, bender! Gators rule.
409: Thx. LSU not bad either. Best in 2007.
Bender,
Your Gators played well. The Buckeyes did not seem able to put anything together except for the first kick return and one runing play into the endzone. 😦
welikerocks and JP
After reading this paper, I decided to check to see if we had any an local cooling.
PREDICTION OF EXPECTED GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE BY FORECASTING OF GALACTIC COSMIC RAY INTENSITY TIME VARIATION IN NEAR FUTURE BASED ON SOLAR MAGNETIC FIELD DATA
A.V. Belov 1, L.I. Dorman1,2, R.T. Gushchina1, V.N. Obridko1, B.D. Shelting1, and V.G. Yanke1
Here is what I found at some Sierra stations run by the local Air Quality Management District. Some cooling had started in 2003, when the sunspots were down to about 60 and continuing to slide toward 10. By 2004 the cooling was more pronounced. The AQM will not have the 2006 summary until April. But, I checked and Grass Valley was 0.6 cooler in 2006 than 2005. The trend continues.
Re #385
S. Bloom: while it’s true that, according to the NSIDC, October and November ’06 registered “record” lows for NH sea ice anomaly, S. Sadlov’s assertion that the anomaly has been flirting with the zero line in the last months is equally true. In fact, during the record low October it actually crossed the line and for some days the anomaly was positive http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg . That is to say, during parts of a record low month there were times when the sea ice extent was in fact above average.
Your “long-term trend” link http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.jpg does show that the NH sea ice extent has been declining since 1978, which is consistent with the warming we all know that region has experienced since the 70s (and there may be other factors in play as well). But, as usual in climate/AGW debate, you do realize that we’re talking about an extremely short period of time (27 years of recorded satellite data) to infer any firm conclusions, don’t you? From the best available data we know that the Arctic was warmer than now in the 30s-40s. What would the NH sea ice extent look like then?
As for your NSIDC link showing the October and November record low anomalies in the NH, have you realized that, at the same time, October and November registered record high sea ice anomalies in the southern hemisphere? If you haven’t, check it out: http://nsidc.org/cgi-bin/wist/wist_nt.pl You may want to argue that Antarctica’s gain in ice sheet mass is explained by higher precipitation due to warmer surrounding oceans, and thus consistent with AGW, but an increase in Antarctic sea-ice extent is totally at odds with that hypothesis and very difficult to reconcile with any significant AGW, for that matter.
Re #401
Jeff: if you really want to look at frigid Siberian conditions, never forget Ojmjakon in the northeastern plateau: -60C yesterday at 5am, -57 as we speak, but apparently increasing clouds will bring it to the balmy -40s in the following days: http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/24688.html
For anyone who has an abstract for a paper, burning a hole in their pocket:
Mikel, what you have pointed out is a clear case of quoting out of context by others. I.e., the _whole_ picture is much different than a small sub-sample.
Mark
It is incredible how such a huge consensus can be so wrong.
It would appear to this viewer that to be beaten so badly Ohio State would have to be an inferior team on any day to the Florida Gators. I saw three of the top Midwest teams in Ohio State, Michigan and Notre Dame not only get beat but totally dominated by their opponents in bowl games. The BCS rating system would appear to have a glaring flaw. There is nothing like some out-of-sample results to get a better view of the relative strengths of teams.
Let us see, Florida U has the reigning football and basketball champions. How good is the baseball team?
Re: 412
Russ,
The local station monitored by Weather Underground near San Luis Obispo also shows cooling since 2003.
Here are the averages:
2001: 14.5
2002: 14.4
2003: 15.3
2004: 14.9
2005: 14.6
2006: 14.3
Full disclosure: The station was down from mid August through the last week of December, 2004. It is unlikely that these data would have altered the 2004 average temperature enough to bring it above the 15.3 C average temperature for 2003. Based on the location, I would classify this station location as borderline rural since it is in the same valley as San Luis Obispo.
For some odd reason, the link following this sentence does not appear in the preview.
Link
Re: 415
Mark T,
Small sub samples are used by people on both sides of the AGW issue.
There is no question that what is called our “global climate” is composed of numerous small sub samples which are averaged, arranged into grid boxes, and then re-averaged. The result is called our global average temperature. The selection of what goes into each grid box is important, since the stations used in the grid box average should truly reflect the nature of the entire grid box, rather than only a portion of the land in the grid box.
In regard to public support for Kyoto, this may be interesting. The National Post has today published an article by Benny Peiser whom they identify as a researcher at John Moores University in the UK. The article is entitled “Kyoto Sinks Europe.”. Of particular interest is his description of the shallowness of support for Kyoto in Europe when faced with challenges to the standard of living. A pertinent portion is:
A similar finding was recently reported in Quebec. Quebec is overwhelming in favor of Kyoto. However a recent poll of Quebeckers showed that5 65% of them would not change their air conditioning habits etc to achieve Kyoto targets.
It seems that Kyoto is one of those things that everyone is willing have others make great sacrifices to achieve.
This is all too typical of all socialist and environmental movements.
RE: #419 and 420 – I have been conducting a little experiment. I think it is very informative regarding what it would realistically look like to reduce CO2 emissions to some level such as, pulling one out of my …. hat …. say, 1990. So the deal is, my local energy provider, Pacific Gas and Electric, is running a program where if I reduce my natural gas consumption by 10% during this month and next, they’ll factor a 20% rebate into my March or April bill (depending on the meter reading window, I have no idea what it is since I am never home when they read it). So, I am quite literally shivering in the dark (well, at least bundled up to avoid the shivering part). The reason for the dark is the already outrageous electricity rates we pay. Here is the Green future, in reality. It definitely means greater personal sacrifice and a less comfortable life. I’m a pretty tough dude, so I know I can do this indefinitely. But most people? … hah! No way. Not going to work …. unless they are coerced into it by force.
Steve S,
I totally agree. As an ex combat infantryman I too am a pretty tough guy when I need to be, and Mrs welikerocks can attest to my miserly ways with energy. No way the average citizen will go through what is needed to reduce emmissions unless they are caught by the short hairs. Good point you make.
Tougher still in regions where mass transportation is not readily available as it is in big metropolitan areas.
We’re shivering, too, but I don’t mind the cold (exceedingly cold as of late in CO).
Mark
Some maps comparing the March 2006 Siberia Express with what appears to be evolving this week:
Charts (See Jan 9 2007 Blog entry)
That one last March, with much more moisture available then we have this week, reminded me of being at or just above the snow – rain boundary of a noreaster during past business trips back East.
Dane and rocks, watch out for waterspouts!
RE: #406 – What part of “for the sake of brevity” was unclear? I was sort of hoping that anyone interested in the anomaly would actually go look at the chart to see all its wiggles. The numbers I posted were a sampling. Was I not clear?
#425 yes! I saw one last year or before last (I cant remember) way offshore near the horizon but I remember it was grey skies and cold , and I didn’t know what it was (looked like a plane trail/chem trail? or a skinny cloud.. lol) until a couple more were reported nearer to the shore later on TV. I wish they’d warn us about these things on the news! Some of these coastal cites have had tornados too. Long Beach is one of them I think.
re water spouts:
I found pictures of the water spouts off Southern California (2004 was the year, in April) here that’s exactly what I saw too.
Attention Geologists! Very interesting article in the NY Times today about predicting
the movement of the continents far into the future and what the world will look like.
Article
It appears that the IPCC TAR Summary for Policymakers is no longer available at the IPCC website. The full scientific / economic sections appear to still be available, it’s just the summary for policymakers that I can’t find.
Why could that be ?
RE: #429 – Not bad for the NYT. Of course, to be a bit of a stickler (and a past correspondant with Dr. Atwater) I’d reckon that the harsh realities of spherical geometery will make the main locus of transform faulting motion move a bit more to the northeast, initially further propagating the Hayward – Rogers Creek fault system into being the main fault, then eventually creating an even newer system even further north east. As a result, the triple junction up off of Eureka where the San Andreas Fault System, the Cascadia Trench and Gorda Rise (East Pacific Rise remnent) currently meet will continue to slide northward up the coast, eventually consuming the Gorda Plate and the Gorda Rise. Then it will be straight up transform faulting off of what is now the Far Northern Cal, Oregon and Washington coasts. So rather than LA being brought closer to SF, it will be SF being brought up toward Seattle (then eventually mashed into Alaska and turned into massive mountains, and then, and then …. 😉
Re #413: Mikel, did you notice that 2006 is the first recorded year where the anomaly never got above the 1979-2000 average? Looking at the whole tape probably tells the tale better than anything else. 2005 had the record September low, but it’s clear that 2006 is the record low in pretty much every other regard. As you point out, it is still just a single year, but the 27-year trend is very much of interest given the recent model projection of an ice-free summer Arctic just 34 years from now. Regarding the Antarctic, I suspect you’re quite aware of why the sea ice trends there are both different and far less significant climatologically. If you think the statistically insignificant Antarctic trend is hard to reconcile with AGW, you need to spend some time familiarizing yourself with the literature on the subject (although for a good lay explanation see here and here. Then maybe you can explain it to Mark T.
Regarding the significance of past periods that may have had less Arctic sea ice, bear in mind that as with many aspects of AGW we wouldn’t be nearly so concerned if we could expect temperatures to level off at current levels.
Re: 417
Brooks,
I have been tabluating the temperatures at Remote Automated Weather Stations that are operated by the BLM and Forest Service. Most are located in high potential fire areas in remote locations, which should shield them from UHI impacts.
The average temps for years noted at the Arroyo Grande RAWS, the closest station I could find for SLO.
2006 – 58.6 F
2005 – 59.0 F
2004 – 59.0 F
2003 – 60.4 F
2002 – 72.9 F
2001 – 58.4 F
Looks like some cooling from 2003, not sure why 2001 was lower than 2006. I would check earlier years, but the record is missing too many months.
RE: #432 – 1995 was a most interesting year. It would be interesting if we could send the specific methods used for this back in time to know what the extent values were like prior to 1979. Especially prior to 1976. It would also be greatly interesting to understand what happened with extent during the period 1930 – 1940.
Re #430: It’s still there. This is the one for the scientific report; since each of the four reports (the three working groups plus the synthesis) has its own SPM there is no overall SPM link on the main page that shows all the IPCC publications.
RE: #433 – Arroyo Grande is actually a fairly rapidly growing small town in transition from agriculture to retiree hub (lots of them from LA in particular). That 72.9F reading is highly suspect being the AG is in the fog belt.
“being the” s/b “being that”
Ooops. Looking at the RAWS site linked, I can see that the name threw me for a loop. That station is not located at the town of Arroyo Grande but at a feature by that name, just to the NE of SLO, near US-101 (e.g. the Cuesta Grade).
#435
Thanks, my mistake. I was looking for this for a high school student I know indirectly, who needs to do a report on GW. She’ll be happy to get it.
Looks like at least one oil company is on board with California’s GHG reduction plans. I think it is foolish for people to assume that the oil companies are going to put up a big fight to thwart CO2 reductions. They will remain the big players in energy, no matter how we get it. They certainly have enough money to invest in different technologies.
YOU are critical of MY statistical knowledge while spouting off about statistical trends? There’s a good joke.
Mark
Re: 433
Russ,
I agree that the Arroyo Grande record has quite a few missing months.
The Carrizo Plains’ station, further to the east, is much more complete. It has the added advantage of being truly rural. I do not have time right now to download and calculate the annual averages, but I will as soon as I complete the task at hand.
Re #432
No Steve B, that’s incorrect. As I said, the anomaly became positive precisely in October. Also 1995 was probably a more remarkable year than 2006, both in persistence and intensity of the negative anomaly. Just have a second look at the graph you provided yourself. Although I think that the full-scaled graph here may depict better the sort of “alarming” changes we’re talking about. In the middle of a warming trend, the Arctic sea ice keeps oscillating nicely in perfect lockstep with the seasons. You do get to see a downward tendency but still a huge distance away from a sea-ice free Arctic summer. Contrary to popular believe, the minimum sea ice extent was recorded in 1999, not 2005, and we’ve never gone below the 5 million km2 mark again. Looking at the summer minima in that graph, do you really believe that the Arctic will be ice-free 34 years from now?? As usual, you’d have to rely in an accelerated and amplified response only to be found in the models.
Are you saying that an increase of the SH sea ice extent, small though it may be, is consistent with a global warming of dangerous proportions? Why would the southernmost part of the world fail to warm at all in such a scenario? More to the point of my post, the AGW scientists try to explain the mass gain measured in the Antarctic ice sheet as a consequence of increased precipitation due to warmer waters surrounding it. How can the waters be getting warmer and freezing more intensely at the same time?
Mark T: I don’t know why, but Steve Bloom wants you to learn what the conclusion of the two NSIDC links he provided is. In their own words:
“Scientists theorize that the gradual reduction in sea ice results from a combination of shifting atmospheric winds that naturally break up ice cover, as well as higher temperatures, which may be linked to the greenhouse effect.” (Of course they’re talking about the Arctic, there’s no reduction to theorize about in the Antarctic).
Brooks,
Here is the Big Sur Station. Looking at the photos and metadata, looks like station is in a big field near a Forest Service facility of about five cabins.
2006 – 57.2
2005 – 57.7
2004 – 57.7
2003 – 58.6
These were the only years with complete data. Some cooling evident.
Without the capacity to admit error, no learning will ever occur. With that in mind, I have honored my non-bet bet with Bender on OSU-FLA by dropping a 20 into the tip jar. We were massacred, slaughtered, destroyed, creamed, walloped, thrashed….but I understate.
Who were those guys???????????
Brooks
Here are the Carrizon CA temps, relatively flat except for 99.
94 61.4
95 61.9
96 62.4
97 63.2
98 62.3
99 59.1
00 61.3
01 62.1
02 62.9
03 62.3
04 62.9
05 62.3
06 62.2
Re: 445
Howard, you are correct.
I watched the game with another OSU alum in stunned silence.
Re: 446
Thanks.
There is certainly no sharp uptick like P D Jones’ graphics show for this period.
The missing station data at AG and Big Sur are pretty typical of many of the land based stations. The GISS data has plenty of examples of this.
OSU should try playing SEC for a year maybe. Just a thought.
Pac-10 man, Pac-10.
From
Gag me with a spoon!
Bob
That was from http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/46318
Bob
Re #450: Bob, I have a large cat litter “spoon” that should be just right. 🙂
Just received:
Dear CRYOLIST-subscribers,
The mass balance data for the year 2005 from about 80 glaciers worldwide,
including the statistics and figures of the 30 reference glaciers in 9
mountain ranges with continuous series for the years 1980-2005 are now
available on the website of World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS):
http://www.wgms.ch
The average mass balance of the reference mountain glaciers around the
world continues to decrease, with tentative figures indicating a further
thickness reduction of 0.7 m and 0.6 m during 2004 and 2005, respectively.
This continues the trend in accelerated ice loss during the past two and a
half decades and brings the total loss since 1980 at about 9.6 m.
Our work relies on the cooperation and help of many scientists and
observers throughout the world. We highly appreciate their contribution in
collaboration with our national correspondents, who are collecting the
data in their country for submission to WGMS.
Sincerely yours,
Michael Zemp, on behalf of the WGMS team
—
Michael Zemp, Dr. sc. nat.
email: mzemp@geo.unizh.ch
phone: +41 44 635 51 39
World Glacier Monitoring Service
Department of Geography
University of Zurich
Winterthurerstrasse 190
8057 Zurich
SWITZERLAND
wgms@geo.unizh.ch
http://www.wgms.ch
Special for jae:
Open Mind has taken to deconstructing the weekly co2science.org “Not much global warming here!” posts purporting to show that a given location in the U.S. is actually experiencing cooling. (Look in the right bar for the first two posts of the series.) So far the Idsos look kinda like frauds.
But now the really big news (also from Open Mind):
‘By the way “¢’¬? the opening line for their “Temperature Record of the Week” page used to say, “To bolster our claim that There Has Been No Net Global Warming Over the Past 70 Years.” Now it says “To bolster our claim that There Has Been Little Net Global Warming Over the Past 70 Years.” It’s such a “little” change.’
I am shocked, shocked I tell you.
Hi S. Bloom, I’m happy that you’ve opted for not answering the questions I posed in #443. I feared that you may retort with some other “sub sample” or convenient quote. That sort of discussion usually goes on forever.
Basically the thing here is that you are a believer and I am a skeptic. Not having any particular theory to defend, I honestly believe that I have a more balanced view of the “whole picture” than yours.
However, I think that you are a knowledgeable person and I’d be interested in knowing how an adherent to the catastrophic AGW theory explains another interesting aspect of the “polar amplification” issue.
As explained by Patrick Michaels (in an old debate with James Hansen, I believe), the effects of the CO2 increase should be much more noticeable in the driest areas of the world. As the atmosphere over these areas (both poles, especially in winter) are pretty much devoid of the main GHG water vapour, an increase in any other GHG should have a much more pronounced effect than elsewhere. This would be the basic mechanism of the polar amplification effect. However, while we seem to be observing this phenomenon over the Arctic, it is not present over the Antarctic. Temperatures there are not increasing more than in the rest of the world at all. In fact, they seem to be decreasing.
I did try to have this contradiction explained to me over at RC but well, I don’t want to be rude and describe what your scientist friends there did with my query.
Would you kindly care to explain this apparent inconsistency of the AGW theory to me?
(I know that stratospheric ozone is supposed to have a cooling effect but if that’s part of the explanation, a reference to some quantitative analysis would be in order, as CO2 is widely accepted to be the main GHG forcing, much more so than strat. ozone).
Thanks.
#454
If I am not mistaken, I believe the Southern Hemisphere, taken as a whole, either remained unchanged temp wise, or has cooled since 1998. Your post about the Antartic seems to jive for the entire SH.
Re #454 Raw data for Antarctic stations is here . This data has not gone through Dr. Jones’ black box.
I have a hard time seeing any upward trend.
RE #456 Let me try that link again, here .
I fi doesn’t work, then the link to GISS data on CA’s front page can be used.
LOL, “Open Mind” attacks Idso’s for only showing part of the data, then they turn around and define “modern global warming era” as 1975 to present and do the same thing Idso’s did (why aren’t the 30s and 40s included in the “modern global warming era.” I agree that selecting only recent records is poor science, but it looks like both sites are guilty.
Re: 453
I forgot to mention that, if nothing else, at least the Idsos use publicly available data and perform no undisclosed and / or undocumented manipulation of that data. But again, any such practices would potentially rise to the level of fraud and would, I’m sure, be strongly (and very rightly) condemned by you.
Regards;
Ken
Cherry picking is what Open Mind is pointing to here and that would appear not to be confined to the Idsos in the world of climate science. The Idsos appear to cherry pick as a counter measure to the others cherry picking and to any thinking person it obvious what they are doing. If they were doing it to deceive they are not doing a very good job of it. The point to carry away from this excercise is that global warming has not been uniform over all localities.
Others from the Team, some of the tropical storm counters and some climate scientists in general have not been particularly careful in using proper sensitivity tests in order to avoid intentional or unintentional cherry picking as a number of the threads at CA would indicate.
Re: #454
I would have second Mikel’s request of Steve B for further explanations of the underlying science — in this case the polar extent of sea ice.
Steve B, you have remarked previously that the statistical expertise posted at this board may concentrate too much on that aspect of climate science and not concentrate sufficiently on the science itself and additionally indicated that the science is where you can contribute if encouraged. I would encourage that contribution with the proviso that I do not really learn much about or from your scientific knowledge when you hand off to links without a more complete summarized explanation from you on how they support your contention. Sometimes I am confused by what it is you actually contending.
The two links that you provided on the sea ice extent in the two polar regions were easy to read and informative, but it was not apparent how they answered the observation by Mikel with regards to Antarctic sea ice versus Arctic sea ice. The extent of growth of the ice differs in these polar regions as the links explained, but the fact that the Antarctic appears to be increasing, albeit less than the Artic is decreasing and not at a rate that can be considered statistically significant, while the Artic is decreasing, remains.
Please explain what it was you are contending and how the evidence from the links supports that contention.
Your second link did say the following:
Your first link puts the sea ice extent in some perspective (as others continue to point out here) with the following:
Yesterady NOAA reported 2006 was “the warmmmmmmmest year (since NOAA began it’s official records)”
In the press release, there were some interesting caveats. Looks like they Jonesified the data.
Has anyone seen this:
Global And NZ Temperatures Are Cooling, Not Warming
Figures just released by the U.S. National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) show that mean global temperature for 2006 was 0.24 deg C cooler than it was in 1998.
I went to the NSSTC site and cannot find a press release or a link to the data. However the original article on junkscience.com had a link to the data.
463 vs 464: wonder which is correct?
Re #464: Bear in mind that it is indeed junk science to try to read significance into the “cooling trend” in between each new record high year.
Re #465: U.S. v. global, jae.
458 – jae. Bullpucky.
He first shows the entire record, and shows that there is a positive trend through the entire record. Lety mer repeat that – he shows the entire record, and shows an upward trend through the entire record. THIS is what the Idsos ahve been criticized for – showing only part of the record isolated from the entire data set, and he does NOT do that. Teh Idsos do, as a matter of routine practice.
He then points out that the details show flat temps for the early part of the record, and a relatively steep upward turn over the last few decades. He then STATES EXPLICITLY that he is isolating that latter part to determine the slope of the subset of the data. He is doing a secondary analysis to determine the slope of an interesting part of that data – AFTER showing the entire record.
The Idsos have built their site around cherry picking – a few weeks back I looked at their count of papers that they say support a warmer WMP. I pointed out here at CA that the very first paper I looked at was a dendro study that showed two very short ~ 30 year peaks of temps comparable to 20th century averages, with one of those peaks in only one of the presented analyses a few hundredths of a degree higher than 20th century for perhaps a decade- but with the rest of the entire hundreds of years of the MWP showing substantially COLDER than 20th century temps – and that the Idsos classified that as supporting a warmer MWP based on that one peak in one analysis. They in included this paper in their count of warmer-MWP papers adn in their historgram of amounts that papers say the MWP was warmer than present temps.
Now THAT is some impressive cherry picking.
FYI ( link )
The North American pattern is about to change but it’s too early to predict the extent of the change.
Some computer models are hinting at a chance of snow well south into California/Arizona lowlands but I find that hard to believe.
Lee:
1. The point I was making is that “Open Mind’s” striking uptick in temperatures during the “modern warming period” pretty well disappears if the time period starts in 1900 (or even 1930). Did CO2 emissions suddenly jump in 1975? I don’t think so. “Open Mind” engaged in exactly the same type of exaggeration that the Idsos did.
2. As you should know from my previous posts, I don’t think tree ring studies are very useful for temperature reconstructions, so I don’t put much weight on the study you keep harping about. Tell me what’s wrong with the dozens of other studies, as well as all the info. Steve M has included here showing a strong MWP.
Oh, and Lee, we still need to get the temperatures up in Greenland to get the rest of the Viking farms out of the permafrost.
RE 468
“Long-range forecasting expert Bastardi points out that it’s too early to say with certainty that the change in the weather pattern will be long-lasting or produce heavy amounts of snow. However, he believes that if the weather pattern reaches its full potential, the dramatic change from warmth to cold could result in “one of the top-five coldest 30-day stretches in the past half century.”
This would lead to some good conversation!
We’re already prepared for this, Dave, not that it’s been warm or dry here anyway (except today, which is really nice). Yet another blizzard on top of the 3 we’ve already had. I’m targeting 10′ of snow for the year (hehe, not that I can forecast even my own schedule past tomorrow). We’ve surpassed 4′ at my house, maybe 5′ or so. Hard to say for sure.
Mark
jae, they look at THE ENTIRE RECORD and see a positive slope and that there is a change in the shape of the graph in the mid 70-s. They then look at the period after that change, to analyze its slope. He SHOWS THE ENTIRE RECORD, and explicitly states what he are doing and why he is selecting that period, and that they are selecting a unique period. Analyzing subsets of a record is ok as long as one states that one is doing so, and what the limitations of that analysis are. He first shows that the entire record shows a positive change in temps, and then says that most of it is attributable to this one period, and then looks at that period. And he explains at each step what he is doing and why. This kind of transparency seems foreign to the Idsos.
re 470 – Really, jae? Monckton saying it does not make it true – perhaps the opposite, in fact. Greenland has a thriving agricultural economy, cited of necessity on the locations of the forming viking farms – because that is where the farmable land is.
Karl Christenson’s sheep farm at Tasiussaq is on the site of a Viking farm settled a thousand years earlier
http://www.greenlandexpedition.com/1975sta007archaeology.htm
—-
The viking ruins at Hvalsey
–
Brattahlid, the former home of feared Viking leader, Eric The Red.
http://www.sulair.com/greenland.htm
—
“… the economic life of this area is also very different from the rest of Greenland, with sheep farming and agriculture playing an important part. If you take a boat trip along the fjords you will see isolated sheep farms, some of which have paths and rough roads leading to them, while for others the only contact with the outside world is by boat or radio transmitter.
The sheep are rounded up in September, and some 20,000 lambs are taken on flat-bottomed boats to the slaughterhouse in Narsaq, one of the three sizeable large towns in South Greenland. ”
http://www.greenland-guide.gl/reg-south.htm
RE: #463 – Sorry, forgot to include, US only. Not a global mean.
But, Lee, how about the REST of the farms–the ones still in permafrost?
RE: #468 – the set up is another Siberia Express (e.g. jet from Siberia, over the hump (Chukchi Sea) then straight down south via the McKenzie, Yukon, Fraser valleys then straight down the I-5 corridor. Looks to be a bit more cold but with less moisture than the one we got early March 2006. That one indeed took the snow level down to sea level for a couple hours in Northern California and close to it down south. This new one would definitely take it down there, if only there were enough moisture, especially on Friday and Saturday. But alas, a drier pattern, with the jet somewhat further east than in Mar 06, so chance of snow is far less than it was in last year’s event.
Where, jae? Show them to me.
Remember taht many of the viking sites were only summer outposts, pasturing livestock on summer green growth.
Annual lamb production is 20k. They are bringing in barley harvests. And the models imply that S Greenland should be one of the slowest-warming high N latitude places given AGW.
Lee: Come on, I’m just pulling your chain. Maybe some more are under ice and you can’t see them yet. Who knows?
re 480? and maybe martians are doing, it, jae. Who knows?
The claim about viking farms and permafrost is made repeatedly and seriously. You just made it. Are you admitting that Greenland viking farm sites are now warm enough to be productive farmland, and that the ‘frozen farms’ argument is incorrect?
I am not a sheep farmer, but do have s t-shirt from New Zealand. The T-shirt says something about 70,000,000 sheep and only 100,000 people. So I am not sure if the 20,000 sheep being brought to slaughter in Greenland is a very big number. Seems kinda small when compared to New Zealand.
Just a thought
482 – Dane,
Sure – so what?
That arable parts of Greenland are now and were for the vikings VERY small – almost entirely a few scattered sites along two large fiords. The Norse settlements maxed out at something under 400 farms and something around 3000 people total. We know that the Norse did not farm enough to survive on – seal hunting was a critical part of their food economy, for example. We know that there is currently productive and successful agriculture going on at those sites.
What on earth is New Zealand sheep production supposed to tell us about the relevant issues?
AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION
FXUS66 KMTR 101740
AFDMTR
AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SAN FRANCISCO CA
940 AM PST WED JAN 10 2007
UPDATED AVIATION…
.DISCUSSION…COLD FRONT IS MOVING ACROSS THE DISTRICT AT THIS
TIME…WITH YESTERDAYS WARM TEMPS JUST BECOMING A MEMORY. UPPER LOW
IS SPINNING OVER VANCOUVER ISLAND THIS MORNING…AND IS PROGGED TO
DROP DUE SOUTH OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS…WITH THE LOW CENTER
OVER RENO BY 12Z FRIDAY. LITTLE MOISTURE WILL BE ASSOCIATED WITH
THIS SYSTEM…EVEN WITH THE GOOD DYNAMICS AND INSTABILITY.
THEREFORE…THE SLIGHT CHANCE POPS LOOK OKAY.
THE BIG STORY WILL BE THE COLD TEMPS. THE MAIN EFFECT OF THE COLD
FRONT MOVING ACROSS TODAY WILL BE THE ONSHORE FLOW LEADING TO COOLER
TEMPS. A SECONDARY COLD FRONT WILL MOVE ACROSS THE DISTRICT USHERING
THE ARCTIC AIRMASS INTO THE DISTRICT THURSDAY. IF THERE ARE ANY
SHOWERS THURSDAY NIGHT…IT WOULD BE IN THE FORM OF SNOW…WITH A
FEW FLAKES POSSIBLY MAKING IT TO SEA LEVEL.
====================================================================
This is possibly going to perturb things sufficiently over North America to break down the persistent benign pattern back East. Beyond that, we’ll see. My own wager – Europe will experience January in two parts, the first part benign and the second part brutal. February will continue the pattern there. Here out West, we may be led to believe we are in a full on dry La Nina (meaning, continued wet and cold in the north with precip shortage south of 40N, with alternating cold snaps and mildness).
483 lee said:
“We know that the Norse did not farm enough to survive on – seal hunting was a critical part of their food economy, for example.”
with all due respect,lee, i think you play quite loosely with what we “know”, and what we “think we know”…
how, EXACTLY, do you know seal hunting was a CRITICAL part of the greenland food economy, rather than just a part? do you KNOW the reason for seal hunting was PRIMARILY for the meat? do you “know” it was not for skins? or seal oil for trade? and the meat just a useful by-product?
Steve, #484:
I checked the JPL surface topography images. So far this is “stepwise” El Nino. There was a wave in September (dissipating by the end of September) and a stronger wave in November; the most recent image (December 17) shows this dissipating. No La Nina conditions yet. The big question: will there be another warm wave or was that it?
RE: #486 – Sometimes my shorthand does not convey the entire meaning. What I was alluding to was how the actual weather charcteristics to date, since late Summer, have been similar to those of past La Ninas I’ve experienced. I agree that ENSO wise, there is no La Nina and there has been an El Nino of the sort you have described. (An aside: There are actually two La Nina modes I’ve witnessed. In one mode, the Pacific NW is cold and wet, while most of California experiences near drought or drought conditions, with teperature alternating between mild and quite cold. In the other mode, the cold and wet conditions envelop the entire West Coast.) What I am proposing is, that even though ENSO says either weak El Nino or neutral, the weather will say “(Dry / Mode 1) La Nina.” I am willing to make that wager.
One final wager then I’m back to lurking …. a memorable nor’easter in New England prior to the end of the month.
Lee,
I brought up New Zealand as a comparison, that is all. No ulterior motives. The 20,000 sheep # just seemed kind of small, thats all.
485 – DaveB,
From archeological analysis we know that Norse in Greenland ate a lot of harbor and harp seal. From isotopic analysis of remains, we know that somewhere between 50% and 80% of their meat was of marine origin. They didnt fish and did not eat fish – so this was mostly seal meat. Adn they ahd a pr9imarily meat-based food economy kitchen gardens adn pasture was the basis fo the farms.
We also know that marine meat was not favored – we know this based on socioeconomic stratification of consumption patterns, and IIRC from some contemporary records. And yet, marine meat still constituted between 50% and 75% of their meat consumption overall.
They may have derived other economic benefits from those hunts, but that meat was a very large part, possibly a majority, of their food economy.
Re: #490
I think you have to be careful in getting the sequences correct here in the diets of the Norse since it started during the MWP and ended in the LIA as indicated in this narrative below:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/flash/vikings_script.html
Ken
One amazing and consistent difference between greenland and iceland, is that the greenlanders ate NO fish. None at all. The Norse in general, and the icelanders, ate fish throughout their history.
The greenlanders hunted from very early on. At the wealthier farms, seal consumption was dramatically lower, but they did eat seal from early on – this is reflected both in middens and in skeletal isotope analysis. Middens at less advantageously situated farms reflect higher seal consumption even early in the colony.
ocean-derived food increased heavily in later years, almost certainly reflecting a reducing production from farming as it got colder (and foggier/icier?). This does not mean that seal wasnt important overall to the colony earlier than that.
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/03/greenland-used-to-be-green.html
That number is lower than I remember, but lets accept it. 20% is substantial by itself. We know there was disparity across socioeconomic status, so it would have been substantially higher at less well off farms, and therefore proportionately more important to expansion of the colony. 1/5 of all food is a very large amount.
I don’t want to jump to early conclusions but it very much looks like Bloom doesn’t have any explanation for the lack of polar amplification in Antarctica, in spite of the increasing CO2 and minimum amount of WV there (or for the warming Antarctic waters that nonetheless freeze more than before).
In fact, I asked out of genuine curiosity. Lack of warming in Antarctica is not the strongest argument against alarming AGW in my view. Perhaps Pat Michael’s explanation of the polar amplification mechanism was wrong and I would have liked to learn. But I’ll have to remain in the dark. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect now that the lack of warming in Antarctica may be another big hole in AGW theory.
There seems to be a pattern here though. In the “Gore gored’ thread I tried to have Lee explain to me how Lindzen was wrong in the more fundamental climate sensitivity issue but all he did was get confused himself with the transient climate response concept and then quit the discussion.
How do these AGW enthusiast expect to convince open-minded skeptics like me? How can they be so sure about their beliefs when, as soon as you challenge them with some difficult issue, they just ignore it and “move on’? (From my experience, it’s the very same attitude that senior scientist at RC adopt, BTW).
In the meantime, climate change propaganda in the European media is reaching unbelievable levels of paroxysm. We’ve witnessed the anti-nuclear movement or the CFC scare, with supermarkets removing CFC-based spray cans because nobody would buy them. But this is totally unprecedented. They’re making people really panic for their future and their children.
Fact: Sheep farming and agriculture employ about 100 families in lush South Greenland.
Greenland.com
That’s with communication devices, modern boats, roads, electricity, heat, etc. You can’t compare that to the original Viking settlements with hundreds of farms and thousands of people with none of those things.
Fact:
Re 493, the high priest of sustainability is being quoted against the trolls from the Sierra Club. This is a precious moment. And they quiver, and recant.
We’re doomed ( link ).
Two-thirds of Earth’s population dead within five years due to global warming. Wow.
Our Only Hope is if all the Category-17 hurricanes raging in the Arctic are able to centrifuge the methane and concentrate it in their 700km-thick eyewalls.
RE: #498 – People make stupid statements that AGW is more likely to inflict massive casualties than geopolitical causes. That is utterly naive. It’s almost as if, the vast majority of AGW alarmists are afraid to look at the things that are the actual greatest risks.
#498
From the doom article
The article mentions historical cycles, but doesn’t say, how once freed methane has been removed and the Earth cooled again.
Does anyone know where there’s a url for the John Hodgman hurricane sketch on the Daily Show? It’s gone form youtube and not at Comedy CEntral.
#498-499
East Asia has been notably cold for at least the last 6 or 7 seasons. There were plenty of places in Mongolia and eastern Siberia that remained just above freezing through most of the summer.Normally, even in the Tundra Belt summer temps still get into the 50s and 60s for a few weeks. The Siberian Express that Steve Sadlov’s been speaking of recently began building momenteum as far back as last October. They’ve been below 0 deg F for months now. I keep hearing about the thawing Tundra, but can’t picture the ground thawing out when the free air temp is -25F many months of the year.
490…lee, the question i asked, though, was “how, EXACTLY, do we “know” that the consumed seal meat was not a by-product of seal hunting for skins and oil, just as the inuit use seals? i am pointing out an assumption you are making which may or may not be true.
The Greening Of Stephen Harper
As an example of the Conservatives’ dramatic about-face on climate change, Harris points to Bob Mills, who chairs the Commons Committee on Environmental and Sustainable Development. Before the last election, the Red Deer MP was his party’s environment critic in opposition.
In 2002, Mills delivered an 11-hour climate science-based filibuster speech in opposition to the Kyoto agreement. He also complained in the bitterest terms that the Liberal government generally blocked testimony from scientists who challenged the green orthodoxies about global warming. “To just hear one side of an issue is certainly not what I think a committee should do and it’s not in good conscience that we can do that,” Mills declaimed.
In government, his tune has changed. From late October through early December, his environment committee heard expert testimony concerning a proposed private member’s bill which would force the federal government to define how it will meet Canada’s international commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and then to actually implement these plans. “Mills has been even more ruthless than the Liberals about preventing skeptical scientists from appearing,” Harris comments. “Only those scientists who support the human-caused warming hypothesis were invited to testify, even though Mills is well aware of the highly qualified Canadian climate experts on the other side.”
http://tinyurl.com/yal4wg
Meanwhile back in the real world, my friend who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada called me and reports minus 23 C (wind chills makes it -33) and blizzard conditions..the shed fell down in the back yard, everyone has parts of everyone’s yard in their yard, and he’s trying to stay warm. (He gets around in a wheel chair) Worst blizzard in 18 yrs they say for his neck of the woods.
I’ve been wondering why the globe has not noticeably warmed during the current El Nino. Part of the answer may lie here .
This is a plot of Oct-Dec sea surface temperture in the heart of the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. Fall 2006 has seen a cooling. Several tenths of a degree may not seem like much, but the heat release from tropical waters drops greatly as SST drops.
Ken, whether ‘byproduct’ or primary reason for the hunt, seal meat still constituted 20% (or more) of food intake even during the best years of the colony. This means that all other sources, including ag and terrestrial hunting, accounted for 80% or less of their total food supply – at best.
During the best years, removing the seal hunt would have removed 1/5 or more of their food economy – that looks pretty critical to me.
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rocks, what on earth makes yo think that farming conditions were appreciably diffferent from that for the vikings?
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Archibald –
etbj nee.
Follow the Money says:
January 11th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
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Thanks for the great link! What the heck happened on about May 15 in the Beaufort Sea? Did the person taking an ice core sample fall through the ice?? 😉
This article appeared yesterday in Seattle. I swear I didn’t read it before my comments above!
Hot air in D.C. hinders global-warming fight
Despite repeated warnings from noted committees made up of respected scientists, many of our political leaders in Washington, D.C., still question the reality of human-induced global warming. They cite a small cadre of climate skeptics who support their view, ignoring the overwhelming majority of scientists who actually do climate research.
Consensus, consensus.
Among scientists, the debate about greenhouse warming is all but over.
Consensus again!
It is true that a few of our colleagues remain skeptical, but they are but a tiny fraction of climate scientists.
Did I remember to mention consensus?
This is one of the rare occasions on which the scientific community speaks with near unanimity and with a strong sense of urgency.
Consensus yet again, coupled with “tipping point”-type urgency, a talking point to railroad through carbon trading statutes on the quick with lilttle examination.
Reducing fossil-fuel consumption also serves to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and to help American businesses compete in a world economy in which oil and other natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive.
Funny how this good pursuit has become subborned to the primacy of “global warming”.
In the absence of leadership at the national level, governors and mayors are taking steps to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
True, Bush has been terrible and has let the carbon trading interests usurp the national conversation about our “addiction to oil.”
4
Follow the Money says:
January 11th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
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Here comes the carbon fraud,
Link to Climate bill sets stage for debate
WASHINGTON – Potential presidential rivals John McCain and Barack Obama are joining with newly independent Sen. Joe Lieberman on a plan they say would reduce global-warming gases by one-third over the next four decades.
Their bill, being announced Friday, is intended to cut the heat-trapping emissions by 2 percent a year through mid-century. It is sure to produce a contentious debate on climate control in the new Democratic-run Congress and draw strong opposition from the White House and industry.
Sens. McCain, R-Ariz., Obama, D-Ill., and Lieberman, I-Conn., are calling for mandatory caps on greenhouse emissions for power plants, industry and oil refineries….
To keep costs in check, businesses could buy emissions “credits” from other companies that have exceeded their reduction targets and could use other methods to avoid the most costly cutbacks, according to a draft of the bill obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.
Environmental Defense Welcomes Strengthened Lieberman-McCain Global Warming Bill -Link
“”The plan also sets up a market to trade emissions allowances, allowing the needed reductions to be achieved in the most efficient way possible.””
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Bad, bad news. George Bush has done nothing in the aims of energy independence and reducing all pollution, targeting our vehicles. This has let the Carbon traders usurp the issue and tag on their parasitical, Kyoto-like, credit trading system – an unverifiable system built for fraud. All the goals of energy independence and cleaner air have been and are valid without the peculiar focus on carbon, a focus that serves only one financial interest – carbon credit trading. Additionally the focus on power plants and credits take attention off the USA’s big problem – oil for our vehicles.
507, You should get a job for a Greenland real-estate company. Come on down to Greenland! Farming, sunny skies, easy life! LOL How about some sources for your info? The Vikings wrote things down.
“The very warm climate during the MWP allowed this great migration to flourish. Drift ice posed the greatest hazard to sailors but reports of drift ice in old records do not appear until the thirteenth century (Bryson, 1977.) The warmer climate would also result in a greater harvest in Iceland than would be experienced today so the land must have looked more inviting in the past than it does today.”
“The Greenland Vikings lived mostly on dairy produce and meat, primarily from cows. The vegetable diet of Greenlanders included berries, edible grasses, and seaweed, but these were inadequate even during the best harvests. During the MWP, Greenland’s climate was so cold that cattle breeding and dairy farming could only be carried on in the sheltered fiords. The growing season in Greenland even then was very short. Frost typically occurred in August and the fiords froze in October. Before the year 1300, ships regularly sailed from Norway and other European countries to Greenland bringing with them timber, iron, corn, salt, and other needed items. Trade was by barter. Greenlanders offered butter, cheese, wool, and their frieze cloths, which were greatly sought after in Europe, as well as white and blue fox furs, polar bear skins, walrus and narwhal tusks, and walrus skins. In fact, two Greenland items in particular were prized by Europeans: white bears and the white falcon. These items were given as royal gifts. For instance, the King of Norway-Denmark sent a number of Greenland falcons as a gift to the King of Portugal, and received in return the gift of a cargo of wine (Stefansson, 1966.) Because of the shortage of adequate vegetables and cereal grains, and a shortage of timber to make ships, the trade link to Iceland and Europe was vital (Hermann, 1954.)
Also, btw- my daughter and I owned two horses when she was growing up, so I know how hard it is to keep animals healthy, warm, fed and clean even in the best of times. The Vikings didn’t have a vet to call either. That’s why I think conditions must have warmer then they are now-because as I posted before the modern farms have the benefit of modern tools, road, communication, and power-and it is still not “easy” raising livestock there:
Nord Vet Med. 1984 Mar-Apr;36(3-4):65-76. Related Articles, Links
Sheep farming in Greenland. Its history, managemental practices and disease problems.
Rose CH, Nansen P, Jorgensen RJ, Jacobs DE.
The economy of the Greenlandic sheep industry has always operated on a thin edge, the balance being determined by long-term changes in climate and year-to-year weather fluctuations. During the last decades sheep farming has been intensified in many areas, and more rational management systems have been introduced under the guidance of agricultural and veterinary consultants. Improvements include winter feeding, strategic breeding and lambing practices and disease control programmes. Successful efforts are being made to prevent the recurrence of previous dramatic declines in the sheep population and to diminish losses of growing lambs grazing the extensive rangelands. However, the overall disease situation and the effect of environmental stresses on the breeding stock and growing lambs in this unique, subarctic region are far from being fully explored.
El Nino continues to decline (see colored plot ), but there’s some indication it may make a slight comeback in the next several weeks, only to fade again.
This last-gasp would be due to something called the MJO ( Madden-Julian Oscillation ) which is an upper-atmosphere phenomena. The MJO slowly travels around the globe near the equator, enhancing thunderstorms when it is nearby. It is currently traveling into the El Nino part of the globe and may affect rain and surface winds for several weeks, breathing final life into El Nino.
We will see!
Cool weather in the US West, snow flurries to Southern California hills, from Accuweather:
“Extreme Cali Cold Endangers Citrus
Friday, January 12, 2007
If you read my (Accuweather) column yesterday, a lot of what is contained in today’s report is a repeat, but with some new information for all.
The coldest air in some time is marching south from the Northwest and will spread across California tonight through Saturday. An upper-level storm moving into northern California Thursday evening will press south to near Yosemite by Friday morning, then to near Vegas by Friday evening. As stated yesterday, this storm is fairly moisture-starved, although it can bring snowflakes to some unusual places. It is very possible that a few snowflakes are seen along the valley floor in the Central Valley late Thursday night and early Friday. Snow showers are likely in the Southern California mountains Friday down to 1,500 to 2,000 feet. A shower will occur in portions of the low elevations of Southern California as well. It is very possible a snow shower occurs in the upper deserts too.
However, the bigger story is the cold. From the coastal inland valleys of central California to the entire Central Valley and San Joaquin Valley, a hard freeze will occur Friday night and Saturday night with record, or near-record, cold in many places. The coldest spots, even the coastal valleys, will drop to near 20 both nights, with a few places dipping into the upper teens.
The coldest weather in Southern California will chill the region Saturday night, when many valley locations drop to, and below, freezing, with the colder valleys also having a hard freeze with temperatures below 28. The Coachella Valley, the farm-rich area of the lower deserts, is also likely to have a hard freeze Saturday night, with lows between 20 and 24.
There is great concern for the citrus industry from central to Southern California with this cold wave. There are reports that the orange crop in the San Joaquin Valley may be able to take the colder weather better than other crops, because earlier cold snaps have thickened the skins and increased the sugar content. The biggest concern that some growers have passed on to me is for the younger orange trees being damaged. The most vulnerable citrus is the lemon crop. This is due to the lower sugar content they have.
As I stated yesterday, if you have pets that usually spend their nights out-of-doors, please take them inside during this cold wave. If you are in an area that will be experiencing temperatures well below freezing, take precautions against freezing of exposed water pipes.”
Sweden leads the world in CO2 reduction (LOL)!
EU sets a limit to global temperature change: no more than 2°C
http://ec.europa.eu/news/energy/070110_1_en.htm