Continuation of Unthreaded #14
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Climate Audit 
440 Comments
My thoughts on the latest Lockwood and Frolich paper, which has been discussed briefly here in the last few days – for reference, those who have not read can it find it here:
Click to access rspa20071880.pdf
Of particular note, the part where they use CLIMAX data for the cosmic ray flux is a red herring, as CLIMAX measures mainly lower energy cosmic ray flux (>3 GV) while the higher energy cosmic rays that correlate with low level clouds are best detected by Huancayo and Haleakala (>13 GV).
The reason for the different energies detected using similar instruments in different locations is that the geomagnetic field shields the Earth from lower energy cosmic rays far better nearer the geomagnetic equator (e.g. Huancayo and Haleakala) than it does at higher geomagnetic latitudes (e.g. CLIMAX).
The CLIMAX data is swamped by the lower energy cosmic rays which effectively masks the higher energy cosmic ray signal of interest – as an analogy, would anyone here try to pass off a study using IR data to try to discredit what is observed to be happening in the UV band?
You should also note that higher energy cosmic rays a claimed to effect lower level clouds, which is not even examined in the paper.
What ever way you look at it, they are comparing apples with oranges.
Varous readily available papers by Svensmark, and by Shaviv, make these points quite clearly, so the authors have no excuse for not knowing about it.
The other more curious thing the paper does is use a strange smoothing function of dubious heritage on the data which I’ve never encountered before, and it seems that neither has anyone else I’ve seen commenting on this paper so far.
The basic idea appears to be use multiple running means to identify nodal points in sunspot data, and then to use a cubic fit between points so identified as a divisor for a mean somehow determined at each data point, although it is not quite clear to me what they did from what they have written! They appear to have then applied this sunspot cycle length factor so obtained as a divisor of the (undefined) means of all the other data sets. If anyone can explain this more clearly to me, please do, as I really would like to understand what they did!
Here is a graph from the paper using this novel smoothing method:
Original Caption: “Figure 3. (Opposite.) Running means of the parameters shown in figure 1. (a) The sunspot number, R; (c) the open solar flux FS from the radial component of the interplanetary magnetic field; (d ) the Climax cosmic ray neutron counts C; (e) the total solar irradiance, TSI; and ( f ) the global mean surface air temperature anomaly DT. In each case, the blue to orange lines show running means over intervals TZ[9.00:0.25:13.00]. The red line gives averages over the interpolated solar cycle length L shown by the grey-shaded area in (b). The black dots in (b) show the cycle length derived from the node locations given by the vertical dashed lines in (a). In addition to showing the temperature anomaly from the GISS reconstruction (for which the mean DTZ0 for an interval centred on 1966), part ( f ) also shows that from the HadCRUT3 (Brohan et al. 2006) reconstruction (with mean DTZ0 for an interval centred on 1981: the different reference date giving an offset between the curves for clarity).”
Notice how the smoothing method offsets the high frequency peaks and troughs in the time dimension in all graphs, and that it seems to do so differently in every case?
It seems to me that any correlation in the data will be reduced by the smoothing method employed – I bet they would squeal if anyone tried to pull a stunt like this on data that actually supports AGW (assuming there is some) – this appears to me to be nearly as devious as the mannomatic hockey stick data miner for tree-rings!
Perhaps I’m wrong – could some of you who are better educated than I am in data handling techniques please have a good look at this to clarify things?
This is getting me frustrated over on RC. They will not post in the Greenland tread the fact that there has been no rising trend in sea levels for the last ten years. Then in the station siting thread they will not address the possible sample bias due to urbanization and poor siting of collection stations.
Now I don’t think everything I read here is correct either but at least people will post my questions.
I was wondering, does anyone know of a study to determine the UHI that used inspected stations to determine the quality of the samples collected? All the ones that I can find just takes station data without knowing the bias or lack of bias in the data. I ask this because the argument over on RC is that the station data proves there is no UHI and since there is no UHI we can see that the station data is good. To me this seems like a circler argument.
Thanks much.
We have to take into account also the increase in Interstellar Cosmic Rays (ICR) discovered by the spaceships Voyager I and II at the bow shock, where the Solar Wind (SW) collide with the Interstellar Wind and the energetic particles penetrate upstream into the Solar System through the waves formed by the SW and elude the magnetic turbulences that take place by the movement of the Solar System moving towards the Termination Shock (TS). It is a substantial anomaly that we had never detected before. The next is a quotation from one of my pages:
“The Intergalactic nucleons with a low Energy Density does not penetrate the Solar System, but are deviated by the magnetic turbulences (Bow Shock) that are formed in the encounter between the SW and the ICR; nevertheless, the slow particles with a High Energy Density (hot particles) overcome upstream the SW, they are cooled again, and then they reaccelerate until reaching supersonic speeds (400 km/s) which travel towards the Sun, that is, in the opposite direction toward which the SW is moving.
The ICR and the accelerated particles hit against the Earth’s Magnetic Field (EMF). The collision of those particles from the Bow Shock colliding in the EMF promotes the formation of clouds when they penetrate into the Earth’s troposphere. Incident particles upon the Earth’s surface -incoming from the ICR- increase the temperature of ground and oceans. The heat from the surface is transferred to the lower troposphere and it is warmed up. The intensity of the Intergalactic particles and the cosmic radiation that affect the Earth depends on the intensity of the SW. If the intensity of the SW is high then the incoming of ICR from the Bow Shock of the Solar System would be higher also. As the SW diminishes its speed, the ICR that overcame upstream the SW don’t lessen its speed; however, the particles of the ICR aren’t deviated, although they ingress without restraint to the Earth where they will communicate its energy to the molecules of the ground and the oceans, warming them up.”
I don’t see very logical the hypothesis that the particles of the CR that promote the formation of clouds are deviated by the SW because it has been observed that the SW accelerates the speed of the ICR particles, although overcoming upstream of the SW.
The following is purportedly the verbatim content of an email that Michael T. Eckhart, President of the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE) wrote to Competitive Enterprise Institutes Marlo Lewis on July 13, 2007:
“It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on.”
I have no reason to doubt its authenticity. This is how the environmental activists conduct and manage the debate on AGW.
Here, such letter would mean 3 or 4 possible charges – has Lewis denounced Eckhart to both a judge/sheriff and to Harvard community?
#2 Vernon, start at Roger Pielke’s site: http://climatesci.colorado.edu/ if you read through the posts there you will find plenty of discussion on the topic. He’s published a number of papers on the subject.
# 339 340 Unthreaded 14 Boris,
I don’t think that the atmosphere can possibly be considered a source of heat that did not originally come from the sun and in the lower atmosphere trapped radiation from the surface. The analogy of the blanket may not have been the best but the principal I wanted to demonstrate is that if you slow down the escape of heat whether it is by way of suppressing convection or conduction or trapping it s in the case of CO2 then the surface will cool more slowly giving the appearance of warming. All that is really happening is the heat is hanging around longer. Since the air is usually cooler than the surface it’s difficult for me to see how it’s actually going to warm the surface.
Hug’s experiment really is quite different from Angstrom and Koch’s since the former used a synthetic atmosphere and increased the CO2 in that and the latter used pure CO2 so
is plainly incorrect. I did say I considered it only a beginning and if we are to get a sound idea of the quantitative effects due CO2 real atmospheric observations are unlikely to provide it since it is virtually impossible to isolate it from all the other effects operating.
Someone says that NOAA’s data for June 2007 has been finally published, with a +0.55°C anomaly instead of +0.53°C of May; but going on the page of NCDC for June 2007 I found: “This page will be unavailable until the 16th – Thank you for your patience, – The National Climatic Data Center”.
Still no sign of MSU (both RSS and UAH) nor GISS data.
One way to manipulate data to your liking is how you resolve the differences between urban and rural stations. It is my understanding that the new USHCN database will eliminate the UHI adjustments that created some absurd changes in the NYC Central Park database. This adjustment lowered the annual mean temperatures in the 1960-1990 period some 5°F to 6.5°F from the actual (raw) observational data during this period, then relaxed the adjustment to allow the adjusted data to work back up to within 1.7° of the raw data by the end of the period.
So what are they going to do now with USHCN Version2 or GHCN Version3? One way to create the same kind of distortion…elevating the adjusted data from the raw data…is to use rural stations, supposedly unaffected by UHI effects, as the standard, and then adjusting the urban stations accordingly.
So what happens in a season like the current one? Normally, rural stations achieve their relatively low minima vice urban stations by experiencing more effective radiational cooling at night. This is most pronounced under clear skies and calm or nearly calm wind conditions. In such cases temperatures at shelter heights (approximately 1.5m) can be as much as 5°F or more cooler than at, say 10m. On windy or cloudy nights, the differences between 1.5m and 10m are sharply reduced and may be nearly zero.
The UK says that this past June’s temperatures were above normal! Most UK residents would probably state the opposite; that it was a miserable June with much cloudiness, wind, and cool daytime temperatures and with much above normal precipitation. So how did it get to be above normal? If one is using the rural stations as benchmarks, a June like this one has few, if any, good radiational cooling nights. Thus, the monthly minima would likely average above normal even with cooler airmasses. The daytime max temps would likely average below normal, but not to the extent that the minima are higher. Thus, the mean temps (Max+Min/2) come out above normal. Voila! It was a mild June.
Re #8 Check Unthreaded #14, posts 317 and 297, for the raw data and for a plot, which include June numbers.
Filippo, the UAH MSU tabular data for June has been available for over a week. You just have to look in the right place. The global anomaly for June is 0.22 degrees btw.
If you back up a directory level at the site, you can access the middle troposphere (http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2/uahncdc.mt)
and lower stratosphere data
(http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t4/uahncdc.ls)
as well.
# 339, # 340, # 7
I agree with Jan Pompe. I’d add that the CO2… no, no, no, the whole air… acts like a conveyor of the heat, not like a source of heat. The sources of heat are: The Sun -basically, the Intragalactic Pulses from the center of the Milky Way (almost no one has taken it seriously, except ESA), the tectonic activity, the volcanism and the underground thermal sources (fumes, geissers, etc.). Chemical reactions are a source of heat, as any transformation from one form of energy into another form; however, if we want it in numbers, the Sun is the source of the 99.9% of the energy in our Solar System.
# 9
Aurbo,
For example, the data collected from urban, suburban and rural stations yesterday at 18:00 UT:
Field 32.1 °C
Rural 34.9 °C
Urban 38.2 °C
Grass 41.8 °C
Sand 51.3 °C
Asphalt 64.4 °C
If we get and use averages from those measurements the results would be odd…
I’ve just been entertained by CNN’s “Exposed: the climate of fear” which is on Google Video. I don’t endorse it, but I did find it interesting.
Since Lockwood’s study is being presented as a “silver bullet” to kill off the Cosmic ray theory, was the Royal Society under an ethical obligation to show this “analysis” to Svensmark and to publish his response at the same time?
Ethics, schmethics.
#12 are earth’s internal nuclear reactions a source of heat ????
Re 17:
Yup, Radioactive decay is the explanation why the cooling calculations of Lord Kelvin were wrong.
By the way, terrestrial heatflow (0.1 W/m2) can be neglected in the atmospheric heat balance.
re 7:
I also looked at Hugs data, he observed only the 14-16 micron band
which translates to a fully saturated absorption at atmospheric scales.
#18 thank you.
# 17
Reid Simpson,
Yes, but its contribution to the atmospheric temperature is too low (0.0001 K). The surface absorbs about 0.02 W/m^-2 from the heat emitted by nuclear fission from underground. The massive source is the Sun, not the GHG, which act like conveyors of heat (GHG -like water vapor, CO2, Methane, SO2, etc.- absorb and emit heat.
The main deposit of heat in the atmosphere is water vapor (like latent heat). The carbon dioxide is not a rival to water vapor because the thermal conductivity coefficient of the water vapor is higher than the thermal conductivity coefficient of the carbon dioxide. Hence the heat of CO2 is transferred to water vapor. Our bodies are better thermal conductors than the CO2. On this matter, CO is a better thermal conductor of heat than CO2 (0.02525 W/m K of the CO vs. 0.016572 W/m K of the CO2). The mix of air has a thermal conductivity coefficient of 0.02624, while the saturated water vapor has a thermal conductivity coefficient of 0.0246 W/m K at 107 °C.
A good reference:
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/16/5/7/1
Re: #340 Unthreaded #14
John A wrote:
Greenhouse yes, blanket, not so much. Unless you have a fan in the room or are pumping air through ducts, convection in a closed room is not very strong compared to radiation. Radiative ceiling heat was quite common in the area where I live 20 to 30 years ago (electricity was very cheap then between TVA and Appalachian Power). Heat pumps have made substantial inroads since then. See also space blankets.
Nasif: thanks for the link. pretty much made sense except this: “The greenhouse effect is precisely the difference between the long-wave radiation that is emitted by the Earth’s surface and the upward thermal radiation that leaves the tropopause ….” At equilibrium (maybe before increases in atmospheric CO2), shouldn’t thermal energy in equal thermal energy out?
I keep reading about CO2 causing a rise in temperature. Is this a theory or is it backed up by good science? Is it an accepted truth or merely one way of dealing with the fact that the earth has warmed slightly?
This seems like a silly question but is it surely the ONLY question that needs to be answered at this moment in time?
re 25.
Paul you ask:
“I keep reading about CO2 causing a rise in temperature. Is this a theory or is it backed up by good science? ”
Everything in science is a theory; that is, an attempt to explain observations and/or predict observations.
With climate science we have these issues:
1. Do the “observations” actually show an increase in temperature? You will find this issue to be unsettled.
“observing” temperature and temperature “observations” are inextricably linked with Theory. Now, some
will argue that the observations can be trusted. Others will question the methodology and statistics.
Bottom line. NO observation is pristine; they all come entangled with theory. Believers accept the
observations; sceptics, are not so sure.
2. Second issue. Some accept the “observation” record, accept the record of warming, and so the issue becomes
a causal explaination or theory for this. Assuming the record is accurate and temperature has increased,
WHY has it increased? Explainations fall into 4 classes.
A. “natural variation” Shrugs…Not an explaination per se.
B. Green house gasses ( C02 and others) An explaination of sorts.
C. Influences ( solar, cosmic rays etc) outside human behavior. An explaination of sorts
D. A combination of A,B,and C.
So, First you can question the “observation”, then you can question the theory. Then you question
the projections of the theory.
Further you have the POLITICS of global warming. You can accept the observation, accept the theory,
and question the proscriptions for behavior modification.
So I look at it this way.
1. Question the observations of warming.
2. Question the theories to explain this
3. Question the projections
4. Question the Cure.
Folks have been at this for almost 20 years and they still can’t get the observation record
squared away.
PS. It should be this way with EVERY claim to knowledge, so it’s not just a climate issue thing
Is it an accepted truth or merely one way of dealing with the fact that the earth has warmed slightly?
This seems like a silly question but is it surely the ONLY question that needs to be answered at this moment in time?
I did a La Nina update in CA auditblog format, located here .
My guess is that the models finally have it right and we’re about to go into La Nina conditions over the next two months. We’ll see.
If we do go into La Nina then the satellite-derived lower troposphere temperatures will take a dip, possibly down to their long-term means.
#19 Hans
I think you are comparing apples with oranges. While I agree it would be interesting to see Hug’s, and, Hug and Barrett’s (I know you’ve seen the latter too) repeated with lower resolution wider band spectrograph the method and purpose of the experiments are quite different from the work done at EPA. The latter shows the spectral data for pure CO2 for different temperature, (for use in chemical analysis) and the former’s experiment investigated the effect of changing the concentration in a atmosphere like mix.
The first of the charts you provided suggest from what we can see even in the narrow band they tested that the spectrum sharpens when the CO2 is a small concentration in such a mix. The experiment by Hug and Barrett shows that more convincingly.
Dear Climate Audit
I have been corresponding with a climate change believer who happens to have a night time radio talk show in Sacramento.
I challenged his position and made the assertion that it is based more on the revenue from Flex Your Power ads (see flavor of ads here) which run every half hour on their station, then in any insite into the science of greenhouse gases.
He responded
I absolutely want to, but I know myself and my limitations. There is no way I could do justice to the topic.
However since he using his own experts as proxies, why shouldn’t I bring in a ringer?
Is anybody interested in debating the climate change on Northern California’s 50,000 watt blowtorch, KFBK radio?
RE 29 papertiger
Well that would be me. I live in Chico, and can make the drive easily. I also have lots of reference to bring to bear. Including backing and research of the former California State Climatologist.
I’ll be happy to help
Outstanding, Anthony. I will see to the arrangements and contact you on your site with details.
Thank you so much.
#26
Steven Mosher,
“Everything in science is a theory; that is, an attempt to explain observations and/or predict observations.”
An attempt to explain observations and/or predict observations is known like hypothesis. When the attempt to explain the observations is confirmed empirically or observationally , then it would be recognized like a theory. Nevertheless, whereas the hypotheses could be false or true unless they are systematically confirmed or refuted, the theories have been confirmed like factual being applicable to a determined time and in a determined place, so observationally as empirically. AGW is not a theory, but a hypothesis that would have to be submitted to a rigorous assessment. If it has prevailed until now it is not by its veracity, but because AGW is an “irrefutable hypothesis”. My last expression doesn’t mean that AGW is an absolute truth, but that it cannot be systematically verified.
That’s the reason by which the AGW mainstream has its basis on dogmatism and Media alarmism more than on evidence. If we apply the basic knowledge of Th-D the AGW hypothesis (which I prefer to identify like an idea), it would pulverize like a crumbly shortbread biscuit under my teeth because AGW hypothesis has ignored the empirical and theoretical knowledge accumulated along centuries.
The last case of dogmatism AGWism was the Lockwood “proof” on the idea that the warming of Earth is produced by the GHG, when all we know that the GHG are systems without generation of internal heat and that almost all the heat that they absorb, emit and store is energy generated internally in the core of the Sun.
BTW, I don’t remember from where I’ve read that the body generates heat by the content of CO2 in blood cells. It’s a lie. However, given that Dr. Steve McIntyre doesn’t want us to discuss physiology here in his nice blog, I only say that the heat generated by our bodies is produced by cell biochemical and electromagnetic processes like the proton motive force. If this message is out of the purpose of this blog, please erase it. Thank you.
Ice Jams Ob River:
Hyperbole, somewhat, but entertaining.
http://www.news.com.au/sundaytelegraph/story/0,,22069080-5001031,00.html
re 28:
IMHO Hug doesn’t prove anything because he uses ambient concentrations at short path length, and only in a limited waveband. Let’s wait for the O-C-O sattelite with some real earth measurements.
Re 35:
wish that was hyperbole! The UK’s Sunday Telegraph has a piece on the number of local government workers enegaged in global warming/climate change roles in the UK. For example:
“In the east London borough of Tower Hamlets, the capital’s poorest local authority and among the nation’s worst for recycling, 58 employees have job titles or job descriptions that contain “climate change” or “global warming”.
The population of TH is about 200,000, mostly poorly-paid ethnic minorities (1/3rd Bangladeshi for instance) for whom I’d imagine global warming is of little or no concern at all. God knows what that 58 do all day – dispersing propaganda mostly, I’d guess. In addition the average annual salary is an impressive ⡳0K ($60k).
Re #1 ( on Lockwood/Frolich) I also find the running means analysis mysterious. Does this kind of analysis maybe predate the FFT?
Long term effects aside, does anyone else find it bothersome there is no sign of the 1w/m^2 p-p TSI fluctuations? What happened to all those positive feedbacks, which, based on reported CO2 effects, should increase the cyclical signal to a degree or so?
#10 and #11: thanks!
#37: what is the recycling level in the UK? (e.g. here in North Italy cities – >150,000 people – have about 25-45% recycling; best towns and villages arrive at 70-90%; regional average should be from 30% to 50-60% – and I am lucky to live both in the best city and the best region).
re 32
Nasif you wrote:
I’m not sure we disgree that much. Hypothesis is probably the better word. But All hypothesis and theory remain
contingent. That is, hypothesis when tested get confirmed and/or disconfirmed. But Verification is never complete.
By that I mean a theory never reachesthe epistemic status of 2+2=4. As theories become accepted people just
stop trying to disconfirm them. As far as AGW goes, it seems confirmable in the abstract, but difficult in pratice.
More importantly its proponents refuse to recognize any disconfirming observations
#7, Jan:
Right on, man! Again, that is why the average temperatures in July are higher in very low humidity areas (deserts) than in humid areas, at the same elevation and latitude. ie, compare Dagett, CA with Atlanta, GA. Water vapor (and presumeably CO2) moderates temperature swings (through evaporation), so you don’t see as high daily maximums or minimums in humid areas as in deserts. The water vapor and CO2 STORE heat, but they don’t CREATE it. Only the Sun creates it. If more is stored as a result of higher solar radiation, the average temperature goes up. If the solar radiation stays constant, you can add all the GHGs you want to the air, but that will not have a very large effect on the average temperature. If it did, then the average temperature in Atlanta would HAVE to be higher than in Dagett. Of course, CO2
41, cont. Of course CO2 acts differently than water, since there is no evaporative cooling effect and it stays in the air. So it keeps a little more heat in the atmosphere. But there is so little of it, compared to water, that I doubt that it can exert much effect. The effect certainly is not what IPCC is claiming. If it does have an effect, then nighttime temperatures in the deserts should be increasing. I need to look into that….
# 36 Hans
I’m sorry if I seem overly pedantic but I don’t recall saying Hugs experiment proved anything. I do know I said that it suggested that in a mixture the that absorption band sharpened and the Hug Barrett experiment was more convincing. I do agree that the band they investigated was perhaps too narrow but given they were trying to get a handle on what the effects were on low concentration in a mixture I don’t think that path length is particularly relevant. It would need to be tested.
With respect to waiting for OCO satellite were going for apples and oranges again from the OCO mission statement:
It would thus seem that they will not be looking at the thermal radiation/absorption effects with respect to changing concentrations at all. If they were would it not be useful to have some rigorous empirically determined information that is isolated from all the other effects one might expect in the real atmosphere?
# 40
Steven Mosher,
And I agree with you. Theories are partially confirmed and are valid for a determined place and time, so that, theories change with new discoveries on that particular issue. For example, evolution is a theory because it has been observed; nonetheless, it continues being a theory because we have not an inclusive explanation on the mechanisms that could be driving the process. The process is real, like seeing stars in a clear night, but we have not observed the leaders behind the wall. Natural selection could be a function in the process hence it is an obvious acting force, but we don’t know the microscopic variables that allows the species to survive to floods, frosts, high temperatures, etc. Thus, the theory is subject to changes.
I’ve classified AGW like an “irrefutable hypothesis” precisely because it cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed or it is difficult to confirm it or refute it empirically, if not impossible; however, I’m seriously considering to classify AGW like a political idea, not a hypothesis because its proponents, as you’ve remarked, refuse to recognize any dissenting observations. It converts the “hypothesis” into a “dogmatic idea“.
#41 jae
I think it transfers it to surrounding gas molecules rather quickly thus warming the atmosphere water on the other hand i suspect hangs on to the latent heat of vaporisation, which is then not given up until it forms into droplets in clouds which takes a little longer and it’s higher in the troposphere and it might also be a considerable distance laterally from where it first took off from the surface.
Just a thought
re 43:
As a minimum I would expect from the OCO mission some downlooking spectra in the 10-14 micron band which can be compared with nimbus in the 70’s.
http://ceos.cnes.fr:8100/cdrom-00/ceos1/science/dg/dg20.htm
RE #29,30, & 31,
Please make a recording for those of us who are outside the range of the “blowtorch”.
How do we know that humans are putting all this extra CO2 into the atmosphere? How accurate are the estimates of howmuch CO2 is put into the atmosphere by human activity? How accurate are the rates for CO2 absorbtion by the sea, plants etc. If CO2 (ppm) have increased how do we know that is human induced and not a natural rise?
re 44. Nasif,
I think we are agreement. On it’s surface AGW looks like a confirmable/disconfirmable hypothesis/theory.
On its surface. in the words. “I predict the world will be 3C warmer in 100 years.” Looks like
“I predict water will boil at 100C”. They look the same, but functionaly, operationally, politicaly,
socially they are vastly different.
We have a saying in the US. “the check is in the mail” AGW, is ‘check in the mail’ science.
hence, I always try to focus on What things have to happen to make an AGWer GIVE UP belief.
They hang on to belief, like Job, which makes me think their belief is more emotional than rational.
And AGW takes on various aspects of religious beliefs.
#14 John
I enjoyed that. Beck seems to have a problem with Compact Flourescents, as do others. Enough to make a point that they are the “bane of his existence”.
I actually quite like them. Less power per lumens, don’t come on full bright, have to warm up. Saves me money on the electriical bill, and the light is actually quite nice.
I understand they have become politicised much like everything else, but as long as you get the non goofy looking ones that look like a normal bulb, I prefer them.
Oh yeah they don’t burn out near as often as standard bulbs, big problem in my house.
#9 aurbo July 14th, 2007 at 11:48 am,
(Tmax +Tmin)/2 is not the average temperature. For that you would need to integrate T*dt over 24 hours. Then divide that by the total time of integration to get the average temp. At minimum add the hourly readings and divide by 24.
(Tmax + Tmin)/2 is just the average of two numbers. It will be skewed by the day/night ratio.
re 48:
and pop, there it is again…
The AGW hypothesis currently suggest that we are undergoing warming right now. There these graphs depicting sharp upturns in global temperature that have been published. So I thought I would do a little private study of my own.
I thought about looking at weather station data but as can be seen there is significant doubt whether those measurements are rigorous enough. So I accessed published satellite data to perform some quick checks. I felt sure a warming signal would be detectable in the troposphere somewhere.
Whilst researching the various sources I came across a a paper entitled “Temperature Trends in the Lower Troposhere” (US Climate Change Science Program) http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-execsum.pdf
To my dismay I find the following statement in the Executive Summary –
“Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of humaninduced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies.”
Can this be true? It appears that because satellite and radiosonde results don’t reflect the measured surface temperature data and GCM model output then it is acceptable to create adjustments so that the differences go away. None of the arguments I saw in the publication provided a rigorous scientific basis for justifying the corrections it appeared to be sheer force of argument or rhetoric. This is the first time I have seen calibration resolved debate. This looks completely at odds with normal scientific research and seems to dwarf discussions of ‘subjective bias’ that were popular at the time I was working on my PhD.
In any case, my initial analysis of MSU data published by NOAA (RSS Monthly MSU AMSU Anomalies – Land) is not showing any significant global trends, upward or downward, over the last 7 to 10 year either statistically or by eyeball. This may indicate that the surface temperature measurements are questionable. I am unable to comment on the models as they are usually built once the theory is established and not to reinforce hypothesis – otherwise there is the danger of an ‘understanding built on belief’ which is another way of defining a religion.
Is there any reliable satellite data being published or is everything being corrected?
Sorry Hans that went over my head. Explain? Given the wish to properly audit the temperature I would have thought that even small errors on these estimations (I assume they can only be estimations) would be important?
For what it’s worth I believe AGW is built on sand, and the sand seems to move often. My father siad to me “never assume anything”.
re 55:
http://home.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/sink.htm
You may find people who question the manmade rise of CO2, I don’t.
Re 55, good original observations. I believe it supports my theory that the atmosphere is CO2 deficient. Can anyone provide references to growth rates of tundra or biomass in Russian forests?
Defficient?
Sorry, Deficient?
#53: ” Can this be true? It appears that because satellite and radiosonde results don’t reflect the measured surface temperature data and GCM model output then it is acceptable to create adjustments so that the differences go away.”
Certainly adjustments have been made. They were probably made in good faith.
The adjustments were based upon the idea that the satellites sensors themselves were heated by the sun – apparently this had not been factored in before. Also satellite orbits drift so other adjustments were made to for that.
Both ideas seem reasonable to me, but good meals depend on how foods are prepared not upon how good the recipe is.
There have been papers on radiosonde adjustments too. At least one correction was made by assuming the satellite data was correct. Sounds circular but probably wasn’t.
Google ‘satellite data adjustments’ and ‘radiosonde data adjustments’. In both cases the top article is useful.
#53: ” Can this be true? It appears that because satellite and radiosonde results don’t reflect the measured surface temperature data and GCM model output then it is acceptable to create adjustments so that the differences go away.”
Certainly adjustments have been made. They were probably made in good faith.
The adjustments were based upon the idea that the satellites sensors themselves were heated by the sun – apparently this had not been factored in before. Also satellite orbits drift so other adjustments were made to for that.
Both ideas seem reasonable to me, but good meals depend on how foods are prepared not upon how good the recipe is.
There have been papers on radiosonde adjustments too. At least one correction was made by assuming the satellite data was correct. Sounds circular but probably wasn’t.
Google ‘satellite data adjustments’ and ‘radiosonde data adjustments’. In both cases the top article is useful.
Hi David, just read your article, interesting. BTW Australia just experienced it’s coldest June since 1950. Is that CO2? Mind you that’s unadjusted, so people might have to be reminded that it wasn’t as cold as they think it is…………!
# 55
Hans Erren,
Sorry, Hans, but it’s an assumption and you know it is just an assumption… For example, has somebody calculated the CO2 released by the oceans, the decaying organic matter, the insects’ breathing, the protozoan, etc.? Just think, if the most important volume of atmospheric Oxygen is being produced by phytoplankton, wouldn’t it be valid also that the main part of carbon dioxide is produced by both phytoplankton and zooplankton? Particularly now, when the populations of those producing and consuming tiny beasts are growing up by the effect of the increase in the incident Solar Irradiance upon oceans.
# 43 Hans
I had thought that was what you were thinking, which is why I added the remark about laboratory produced data to work with. There will only be two data points in time that can be compared what do you expect we will be able to determine from that. How will we be able to isolate CO2 only effects from effects from changes in water vapour which has some overlap and other aerosols and with what degree of certainty.
# 62
oops that #43 should be #46
Can someone please point me in the direction of an explanation for using (h+l)/2 as a metric for temperature (or heat)? Other than the fact that “it is all we have,” I mean. I can make a case for using the high, or the low (not as good), but i cannot fathom a valid reason for the average of the two. tia.
re 65.
ahhhh it’s always been done that way… and we are not measurng temperature we are measuring
anomalies.
( psst.. sarcasm)
The first time I saw this tmax+tmin/2 thing I was puzzled as well. I thought they would have integrated
temp over the day.. anyway..
Take 8 points in the day when temperature is taken.
6am 9am 12 3pm 6pm 9pm 12 3am temperatures are:
9 12 14 18 14 12 11 10 = 100 divided by 8 = 12.5
Take the high (18) the low (9) = 27 divided by 2 = 13.5
Which is the best average?
#65 66 67
I believe statisticians have another name for (h+l)/2 – ‘median’ perhaps.
if we insist on taking multiple points, then some sort of integral approximation would seem most appropriate. if only two points are available, then determine which is most functional for what you are trying to determine and run with that. if it is available, i would love to read about why the median of the daily high and low temperature is appropriate for determining global warming. tia.
if we insist on taking multiple points, then some sort of integral approximation would seem most appropriate. if only two points are available, then determine which is most functional for what you are trying to determine and run with that. if it is available, i would love to read about why the median of the daily high and low temperature is appropriate for determining global warming.
Re 58, yes, the atmosphere is CO2-deficient. Just think about it from the perspective of plants, which first came along terrestrially in the Devonian when atmospheric CO2 was 4,000 ppm. In fact you can still find plants that date from the Devonian – Psilotum nudum. Plants stop photosynthesising below 180 ppm. Apparently the Earth got close to that level in the recent glacials. If plants could do original research, they would be thinking,”We’re all gonna die!”. So for plants, human evolution came along just in time. Right at the moment, the biosphere is sucking down CO2 like a drowning man getting back to the surface. Hans Erren’s work might point us to where equilibrium might be. That is why I am interested in tundra, which can form raised bogs. Higher CO2 at a constant temperature will cause the forests to march back towards the poles, but that carbon is recycled in hundreds of years. Raised bogs in a cold climate could sequester carbon for far longer.
#68 Jan,
Uh wouldn’t that assume a Gaussian distribution or some other “nice curve” as opposed to Poisson distribution? Except that there is no way the high and low can be part of a Gaussian distribution. The only thing similar about the populations the high and low come from is that they are both temperatures. Well there is the date too. I guess that should be enough.
However if we are going to do it that way what are the odds that an average of the high valued sample and the low valued sample represents the mean?
#71 M. Simon,
I understand median as the middle value regardless of distribution and since temperature has infinite variability, ignoring quantisation, the middle value would be midpoint between the two.
Any statisticians about?
# 65
Reid Simpson,
In statistics h+l/2 is known as “median of bivariate (two variations or two proportions) data”. If you have two points or two proportions with minimum/maximum depth, like in this case, you can obtain the halfway by adding minimum to maximum and dividing the result by 2. The number obtained will not be the average of temperatures, but the point where the minimum point begins/starts and the maximum point begins/starts.
For example, we obtained a minimum T at 10:00 UT and it was 283 K. Latter, we obtained a maximum T at 22:00 UT of 298 K. The halfway point would be at 16:00 UT and its depth could be 290.5 K. Thus, 290.5 K is the median of bivariate data. Hence we can presume that at 16:00 UT the temperature was 290.5 K, although it couldn’t be true.
There are many more complex formulas to obtain the accurate halfspace or the median of multivariate data but I think my English is not so good as to write here on that issue.
As Steven Mosher has suggested, its value resides only on electrifying to the audience (or to the readers). It is very useful in computation.
I told you about my English 😦 … Where I wrote “begins/starts” it must say “starts/ends“
Now, assume that the Ts at 16:00 UT is 300 K. The percentile would be Ts/Tmed. In the example, it would be 300 K/290.5 K = 1.03. Thus, 1.03 would be the deviation from the standard.
If we have multiple data, for example 273 283 293 303 313 323 333 (seven values, an odd number of values), then the median would be 303 because we are leaving three numbers below and three numbers above. The sum of those values is 2121, divide 2121 by seven and the result is 303. However, if we have 273 283 293 303 313 323 333 343 (eight values, an even number), then the median would be a number between the middle values; in this case, a number between 303 and 313. And the number is… 308. The sum of the eight values is 2464, divided by eight is 308.
re 63:
No it isn’t an assumption, it is measured, there is a CO2 gradient from land to ocean and from north to south, proving that the source is on land and in the northern hemispere. The ocean CO2 content is increasing and the biosphere is greening. Please show me some measurements where the non anthropogenic CO2 might come from.
#68
Mid-range
#70
Apparently not, see for exampleKrenzer et al (1975).
A paper in Science a couple of weeks ago suggested that the largest CO2 sink in recent years is in the tropics, not in high latitudes.
#77
CO2 is being pumped through a worm-hole from a parallel universe.
Re#80:
According to IPCC “consensus science” the “wormhole” did exist before 1910:
Also:
“Zhou et al. (2001) used satellite measurements to demonstrate how vegetative activity increased by slightly over 8% and 12% between 1981 and 1999 in North America and Eurasia, respectively”
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V5/N45/EDIT.jsp
“The most intense greening of the globe was observed in high northern latitudes, portions of the tropics, southeastern North America and eastern China.”
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V8/N45/B1.jsp
“Piao et al. set the stage for their study by noting that “enhanced terrestrial vegetation growth in the middle and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere over the past two decades has been well documented.”
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V10/N11/B1.jsp
“… report by Fan et al. (1998)… calculate that between the latitudes of 15 and 51°N, the North American land mass is yearly sequestering, in the words of Science news writer Jocelyn Kaiser (1998), “a whopping 1.7 petagrams of carbon a year – enough to suck up every ton of carbon discharged annually by fossil fuel burning in Canada and the United States”
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V1/N5/EDIT.jsp
So, where lavishing vegetation gets it carbon? Mining our precious oil reserves?
Re#77, Hans:
Assume Jaworowsky is right (and plenty of stomata, sediment, and stalagmite data), and ice core CO2 proxies have downward bias. Makes life much easier for everybody, including IPCC and Kristen the Magnificent.
CO2 concentrations over 19 century were in reality fluctuating around 300+ ppm. From 1950-s increased combustion of fossil fuels began to increase CO2 atmospheric concentrations. As of today, from 7 GtC emitted 3-4 GtC are sequestered by vegetation, due to increased CO2 aerial fertilization effect. Nasif’s question of sources of increased atmospheric CO2 is answered. Late 19 century – early 20 century warming is happily attributed to solar/PDO/whatever reasons. IPCC could happily model run-away antropogenic GHG effects from 1950 onward. Critics still can point out to 1950-1977 cooling and 1995-present hesitation. Solar connection proponents still waiting for 2000-2030 cooling. In any case, Kyoto agreement has successfully prevented Gaia meltdown.
Peace on Earth…
You may find people who question the manmade rise of CO2, I don’t.
Re:56, Archibald:
Searching for “tundra” in CO2science.org returns 34 matches, for “Russia” 64 matches, including this one:
“…the rates of expansion of larch onto tundra “for sparse, open, and normal stands were estimated at 3, 9, and 11 m per year, respectively.”
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V10/N4/B2.jsp
BTW, my all-time favorite from Idso’s is this:
“…mean daytime reduction of approximately 110 ppm (from approximately 395 ppm to about 285 ppm) in the greenhouse-air CO2 concentration … led to a 28% decrease in cucumber fruit yield”
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V10/N25/EDIT.jsp
Re 80, I hate to do this, but I am quoting Wikipedia,”Carbon dioxide gas must be introduced into greenhouses to maintain plant growth, as even in vented greenhouses the concentration of carbon dioxide can fall during daylight hours to as low as 200 ppm, at which level photosynthesis is significantly reduced.” The paper you quoted used the term compensation, but did not say what compensation meant. Perhpas it means the level at which the plants are on the verge of dying. I think I will hold to 180 ppm.
Re 85, yes that is a good one. Right now we are getting 39% more cucumbers relative to a pre-industrial climate.
Thanks to all who contributed. I understand the value on the median for statistical computations (although given the typical daily temperature distribution, i am not sure that it is anywhere near normal). Let me rephrase my question. Why is the median of the daily high and low temperatures more appropriate for determining global warming than the high temperature alone? tia.
#86
There is a great difference between the CO2 concentration necessary to get economically viable growth rates for crops in greenhouses and that where photosynthesis is balanced by respiration (the compensation point). It is only at the second, much lower value, that growth stops.
Consider this, during the LGM vegetation still grew on tropical mountains despite the low partial pressure of CO2 (there was a switch to C4 grasslands, which use water more efficiently).
I am at the point of being lost for words.
Given the recent posts (now purged) by bigcitylib on this thread here on CA, we now have Comments 453 and 456 over on RC.
The purposes of the focus of such comments are beyond my comprehension.
Re #88
RichardT,
What is your point? Is 180 ppm good for vegetation? Not some species, or water efficient species. You imply in your postings that 180 ppm is A-OK. So is it or no?
#90
My point is that David Archibald’s assertion that “Plants stop photosynthesising below 180 ppm” is simply wrong.
Re #91,
RichardT,
And what is right? Please tell me what percentage of species begin to stop at 200 ppm, 190 ppm, 180 ppm, 170 ppm, etc. Proving one counterpoint does not support an argument. So is it your contention that all vegetation on the planet can survive and thrive at 180 ppm? Why do I have to ask this again? Have you followed the context here?
# 81
Richard… Eh? 😮 Wormhole? I didn’t mention wormholes in my # 77.
# 78
Hans, you wrote:
You see? It’s an assumption.
Re 91, it could very well be that I am wrong about photosynthesising per se. Please indulge me to use more words to mean that the poor things need at least 180 ppm to grow, to put out shoots and roots, to set seed and all those good things that plants rightfully assume they can do when they are borne into this world. It seems that your Krenzer reference was running a Nazi-type gas chamber in which found the level of CO2 that killed half the population of plants in the chamber. I do something similar in my cancer research.
RE 89.
Ya Dan it suprises me how some of those guys go off theorizing about ” who really writes” Ponder
without the least bit of evidence… err wait it doesn’t suprise me.
re 93:
No it’s not:
Oceans? no the oceanic co2 is increasing
biomass? no the biomass is increasing
volcanos? negligable with 1% of human emissions
Please show me some measurements where the non anthropogenic CO2 might come from
RE 89.
I put Kristen’s text into Gender Genie. Female author.
Plants Physiology… Dr. McIntyre doesn’t like us talking about physiology. The optimum density of CO2 for photosyntesis is around 500 ppmv. Plants find difficult to absorb CO2 at densities of CO2 lower than 200 ppmv because the stomatal mechanism is electrochemical, or electrodynamic. The activation of the enzyme “rubisco” needs of high densities of CO2. When the density of CO2 falls below the rubisco Km needed for fixing the CO2, the photosynthesis is slowed or stopped and the photorespiration increases. C4 plants have resolved the problem because they transport the CO2 from mesophyll cells and the CO2 concentration in the cells (bundle sheath cells) is higher than the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. However, if the atmospheric CO2 decreases below 200 ppmv, then the CO2 into the cells is consumed and the plant will open stomata to acquire more CO2 from the environment, misplaces or lose water and the plant dies.
Dan,
The purpose of such statements is to cast doubts on the person of anyone who dares to question the AGW orthodoxy.
# 96
Hans,
If we have not real data about other powerful sources of CO2 -other than anthropogenic CO2 sources- demonstrates that what some people say about the contribution of humans to the increase of atmospheric CO2 is an assumption.
For anyone interested in Auditing the polar ice extent data, I have found a great website which produces real-time visible satellite images from the AQUA/MODIS polar orbiting satellites.
The visible satellite images are the best of course because they have not been subject to software reprocessing by the warmers. And the visible images only work for the north pole in our summer since it is 24 hour darkness in the winter.
Here is the 4 km resolution sat image from 9:30 am ET this morning. You can zoom into 2 km, 1 km, 500M and 250 M resolution. You can click the “prev” and “next” button on the side panel to scroll through all the images in the polar orbit. The satellites move very fast in their orbit with new image boxes every 5 min to 10 min. So, it is easy to scroll back and forth, zoom in and out to check out the ice conditions in any particular polar area within the last 24 hours. The curvature of the earth makes some images look a little funny but it is easy to eye up after you get used to it.
I have already noticed that the ice conditions in western side on the Arctic Ocean have been understated by the polar ice monitoring sites like the NOAA and the Cryosphere Today.
9:30 am ET Baffin Island-centred visible image at 4 km resolution.
Home page for the real-time satellite images.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/2007196/
Re a whole load of postings on photosynthesis and CO2.
As a plant physiologist, this is one part of this thread that I feel competant to comment on…
Photosynthesis can occur at levels well below 180ppm. What is important is whether or not there is net carbon dioxide uptake. All things been equal this is determined by the plant’s CO2 compensation point- that is the leaf internal CO2 concentration (Ci) at which CO2 uptake by photosynthesis is exactly balanced by CO2 output from respiration. If Ci exceeds the CO2 compensation point then you have nett photosynthesis.
Ci varies according to photosyntheic mechanism
C3 plants Ci is about 50ppm
C4 plants Ci is
Re #101 John, thanks for the link. I’ve been looking for a site like that. If you come across a site which explains the sea ice extent estimation methodology in detail, please post.
Re #89 Wait til real Real Climate realizes that “Kristen” is the Swedish word for “Exxon”, that “Byrnes” pronounced rapidly becomes “Beezlebulb” and the website actually comes from a crash site near Roswell. I think gavin and company are zeroing onto something big.
Re #102, Don Keiller
Don, the blog software has a problem with “less than” signs – it thinks they are the start of an html tag, and throws away all subsequent text.
Try using the four characters & l t ; (without the spaces).
Number Watch 7 13 07
Thanks fFreddy- here is the rest;
C4 plants Ci is less than 10ppm.
C4 photosynthesis, which incorporates a light-driven CO2 pump to increase [CO2] at the level of RUBISCO, has evolved, independently, on at least 20 occasions. One of the principal drivers of this evoloution is low [CO2]- a la ice-age.
What is clear, however, which ever way you look at it is that increasing [CO2] promotes photosynthesis and water use efficiency in both C3 and C4 plants- a whole load of refs support this. Check out http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/subject/c/c4plantphoto.jsp
(no affiliation)
Unbelievable:
If this prog’ed cold front / polar cyclone mid week is a precursor rather than an outlier (e.g. a precursor of the seaonal climatic shift south of the Pacific High) then 2007 will go down here on the W. Coast as a year with almost no climatic summer. NWS were disbelieving this as of Friday, but it just won’t go away. This should be interesting.
Re #51 and subsequent posts on the topic of max+min/2:
#57 is quite right in that (max+min)/2 does not constitute an average temperature, but that is the way daily temperature averages have been determined for more than a century.
Average’ is a common misnomer for mean (or median) temperatures when referring to most temperature records. Mean is a more appropriate word when defined as the midpoint between extremes which is exactly what is being recorded.
Until the introduction of MMTS and ASOS, temperature observations from standard Stevenson shelters and similar thermoscreens were done with two thermometers. One was a mercurcy-in-glass thermometer with a restriction above the bulb used to record maximum temperatures (the restriction keeps the mercury from retreating into the bulb after the max is reached).
The minimum temperatures were usually taken with a liquid-in-glass thermometer with a metal index in the tube which is driven down by the surface tension under the meniscus, but is left in place when the temperature rises so that it remains at the level of the lowest temperature reached. The current temperature was taken as the level of the liquid in the minimum thermometer at the time of observation (frequently done only once a day!).
The max thermometer is reset by rapidly rotating the mercury thermometer which drives the mercury past the restriction above the bulb by centrifugal force until the reading approximates the reading on the minimum thermometer’s current reading.
The minimum thermometer is reset with the use of a magnet which moves the metal index back up to the current level.
Incidentally, both thermometers are placed in a nearly horizontal position with a slight only necessary requirement is consistency of the individual record in all of its aspects…instrumentation, location competence of observers, etc. What you are looking for is a trend. The accuracy of an individual instrument is almost irrelevant. Analysis among a regional or global array of such measurements must be done on an site by site basis with adjustments made subsequent to recording the raw observations. The mischief that can bslope increasing the height of the top end of the thermometer. Both instruments are on a swivel which allows the thermometer to be rotated to a vertical position for making the observation.
I’m sorry for having to go into all this detail, but I’m amazed at how many people…including meteorologists…have never taken a real temperature observation.
Mean temperatures represent the daily temperature record simply because that’s all you’ve got…daily recordings of max and min. Notwithstanding, they still beat dentrochronolgy by a whole lot.
As for the real question, the relevance of these historic temperature records to AGW, this should not be done by altering the data first as exemplified by the absurd USHCN Version1 and GHCN Version2 records for NYC Central Park. If you haven’t looked at this, it’s available in a prior CA post and a brief description can be found at the icecap.us internet site. The two so-called high quality ‘adjusted’ datasets have the annual mean temperatures for a single site…NYC Central Park…differing by more that 8°F for every year between 1960 and 1990!
RE#89, 103
I probably have a post somewhere on CA predicting Kristen would be accused of being a big oil sock puppet. I might have even listed RC as the place where it would appear.
Re my prior post, #108:
Replace the butchered long 8th paragraph with the much shorter following:
Incidentally, both thermometers are placed in a nearly horizontal position with a slight slope increasing toward the top end of the thermometers. Both instruments are on a swivel which allows the thermometer to be rotated to a vertical position for making the observation.
Then replace the last paragrapgh as follows:
As for the real question, the relevance of these historic temperature records to AGW, the only necessary requirement is consistency of the individual record in all of its aspects…instrumentation, location competence of observers, etc. What you are looking for is a trend. The accuracy of an individual instrument is almost irrelevant. Analysis among a regional or global array of such measurements must be done on an site by site basis with adjustments made subsequent to recording the raw observations. The mischief that can be done by altering the data first is exemplified by the absurd USHCN Version1 and GHCN Version2 records for NYC Central Park. If you haven’t looked at this, it’s available in a prior CA post and a brief description can be found at the icecap.us internet site.
SAT
I am always dismayed at the comments of people who respond to arguments about AGW with “Well we should just cut our carbon emissions” as if it is no big deal, something we could easily do. Whereas I’ve always felt that this was a massive, complex undertaking, with all sorts of problems and costs.
Here’s an interesting report from UK
From
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/
RE: #111 – In Europe, they would need to get the Eastern members of the EU to drastically cut back on use of coal for power generation. They would also need to convince the now-many people who have gotten used to the Euro version of suburbia and motorway / autoroute centric living to move back into the (expensive) central cities.
In North America and Australia, we would need to essentially knock down 80% of existing developments and simultanously add on urban densepack. We’d need to treble train systems, both urban and intercity. Many areas would also need to curtail coil fired power plants.
And as for the developing world …. they would somehow need to miraculously transform themselves from what they now are, into something like France.
Good luck with all that …..
Don Keiller,
Give me five, Don! You should make clear that you’re talking about the internal density of CO2, not about the minimal atmospheric CO2 needs of the plants.
C4 plants respond better to lower atmospheric densities of CO2 because they have evolved with the proper biochemical mechanisms that keep their internal density of CO2 in a quasi-stable state. However, if we diminish the density of the environmental CO2 to 10 ppmv… Well, we would run without a single living plant cell on the planet.
The problem is that the mechanism that urges the plant to take CO2 from the atmosphere is an electrodynamic-electrochemical process.
111: The whole ethanol bandwagon is one of the stupidest programs ever promulgated. Besides driving food costs up, it requires nearly as much FOSSIL FUEL energy to produce the ethanol as is obtained by burning the ethanol. What a joke!
Wow!!! Take a look on these links… There must be something wrong… Who’s right and who’s wrong??? Put special attention to 2005 and 2006:
http://www.atmos.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
Wow!!! Take a look on these links… There must be something wrong… Who’s right and who’s wrong??? Put special attention to 2005 and 2006:
http://www.atmos.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2
http://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/
#116
I may be missing your point, but the data from noaa are anomalies from the 1901-2000 mean. The satellite data obviously arn’t centred over the same period.
#115 and #116
From the readme on the UAH site (note, updated readme, July 12 2007)
That’s effective July 13, 1999. No other mention of “base period” on the page. It was really easy to find this, btw. Most (all?) web sites that post graphical comparisons correct for this obvious problem.
Why is the final quotation mark in the HTML tag included in the link when viewed in the preview pane? It’s not in the text. If the link doesn’t work, that may be why.
Re#111, the so-called unintended consequences are actually part of the plan, so to speak…the artificially inflated petrol prices will mean some folks will have to cut-back on petrol usage. And when the costs to staples rise because of increase petrol prices and more agricultural goods going to biofuels, people will have to lessen their discretionary spending – which often means by-passing vacation trips.
One can go back to Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance” and his proposed huge gas taxes to see what the real driver behind reducing fuel consumption is: jack up the prices.
# 117 and # 118
RichardT, Dewitt Pain,
Yes, I’ve solved the problem between the “bad satellite” and the “good satellite” and plotted from UC data (medians).
Jim from NOAA must be careful when releasing these datea to the public spheres because people could think that the Global Warming is only an invention, or that it is not a real issue.
BTW, I’m more confident in 15 than in 16 because 16 seems to have been “touched”.
Re 106, “One of the principal drivers of this evolution is low [CO2]- a la ice-age.” Don, I would be grateful if you could quote a paper or two that investigated this. This is contrary to AGW theology, which holds that we are ruining the planet by adding an unnatural level of CO2. Instead the plants were gasping for breath as CO2 levels fell below what there were used to.
GLOBAL WARMING IN SYDNEY _ WEATHER ALERTSydney woke up this morning to 3.7 degrees. Coldest temperature since 1986.
Discrepancies… Which one is wrong?
NOAA “bad satellite”:
1998 1 0.5427 2005 1 0.6009 1.11
1998 2 0.8179 2005 2 0.4471 -0.55
1998 3 0.5806 2005 3 0.6688 1.152
1998 4 0.6969 2005 4 0.6765 -0.971
1998 5 0.6160 2005 5 0.6079 0.987
1998 6 0.5947 2005 6 0.6464 1.09
1998 7 0.6690 2005 7 0.6181 -0.924
1998 8 0.6448 2005 8 0.5525 -0.86
1998 9 0.4783 2005 9 0.6392 1.34
1998 10 0.4260 2005 10 0.6127 1.44
1998 11 0.3500 2005 11 0.6622 1.892
1998 12 0.5092 2005 12 0.5383 1.06
NOAA “good satellite”:
1998 1 0.542 2005 1 0.443 -0.82
1998 2 0.686 2005 2 0.321 -0.47
1998 3 0.488 2005 3 0.299 -0.613
1998 4 0.786 2005 4 0.426 -0.542
1998 5 0.662 2005 5 0.237 -0.358
1998 6 0.588 2005 6 0.261 -0.588
1998 7 0.526 2005 7 0.336 -0.64
1998 8 0.523 2005 8 0.171 -0.327
1998 9 0.475 2005 9 0.356 -0.75
1998 10 0.424 2005 10 0.405 -0.96
1998 11 0.177 2005 11 0.391 2.21
1998 12 0.512 2005 12 0.293 -0.572
Bet for the best!
RE #123 Nasif, I’m having trouble following the discussion. What are the “bad satellite” and “good satellite”? Thanks.
Here are the global one day and seven day temperature anomalies.
Note that the choice of map projections makes the polar regions unrealistically large (Greenland is not bigger than Australia or India, for instance).
Looks like Australia and South America can’t shake the chill.
Re: #124
For a start, see the UAH readme linked in comment #118 above. The satellites used to take MSU readings are replaced at intervals. They need to have a replacement in orbit before the old one fails for cross calibration. Normally, they would average the data from the two satellites during the overlap period. Unfortunately, the latest(?) #16 seems to have a problem and UAH is only using data from #15. Thus ‘good’ and ‘bad’. One of the errors UAH made was to throw out the data from #15 instead of #16. That was the subject of the December, 2006 update of the readme.
RE #126 Thanks, DeWitt.
# 125
David,
The problem is that there are two conflicting reports of the STT anomalies released by NOAA and UAH for the public access (both # 15 and # 16 are yet in the Web). If we plot from # 16 (bad satellite), there wouldn’t be a warming but a scorching STT anomaly; though, if we plot from # 15 (good satellite) there wouldn’t be a warming but a chilling trend. That’s the reason by which most authors plotted from medians, including myself. However, is it a suitable way to solve the divergences? For being direct, I am not too happy of doing that approach, but I thought at that point that there wasn’t another technique for doing it. Once I got the “good satellite” data, I had to amend all my graphs. I’d like to know if we can split the secret code for knowing why the “bad satellite” data continue being published in the Web.
Dear David Smith,
I don’t wish to generate a conflagration. Nonetheless, if both records are kept published in the Web, it could lead the public to think that GW is a biiig lie… 😉
Re 3128 Ah, got it, thanks! I couldn’t quite grasp the direction of the concern.
By the way, a few weeks ago I plotted the trend in the difference between surface (average of GSS and NCDC) and satellite (lower troposphere, average of RSS and UAH) anomalies over the last 25+ years, which is here . (Ignore the absolute value of the y-axis, it is meaningless.)
Overall, on less-than-decadal timescales, the agreement (surface vs satellite) is reasonably good.
More interesting is what appears when I inverse the plot ( here ) . This plot has a modest relationship with ENSO (see here ). Makes sense, in that sudden changes in ENSO (the 1998 La Nina, for instance) kicked a lot of heat into the troposphere which took a while, if then, for the surface record to reflect.
Richard (#117) once there was a “legend” that satellite data mean value should be added by about 0.3°C, that is to say the difference between ground stations average 1979-1998, and satellite average. By this way, many months would have seen satellite data fitting with ground stations one.
But this is not correct at all:
a) we are measuring different things: satellite measure all the troposphere layer, while ground stations just their little area a few meters over the ground;
b) we have different instruments, we cannot compare them without a reasonable uncertainty (never understood why in climate science errors seem to be both so little and so little important…);
c) definetely, they show different trends whatever is the mean value (the zero line) between 1979 and 2006, between 1979 and 1995 or 1998, between 1998 and 2006 or between 2002 and 2006, and this is overall true between measurements from the same agency (e.g. NOAA ground measurement show trends significantly different from MSU ones, while HadCRU is more near to MSU).
Re#113 , sorry if I didn’t make it clear that Ci referred to the leaf’s internal CO2 concentration, not atmospheric- which would have to be higher for CO2 to diffuse into the leaf.
10ppm is the CO2 compensation point of C4 plants, determined experimentally. And yes life would certainly struggle if atmospheric CO2 got anywhere near this.
A bit puzzled as to your statement “The problem is that the mechanism that urges the plant to take CO2 from the atmosphere is an electrodynamic-electrochemical process.”
What is the problem? Yes it takes more energy for a C4 plant to “fix” CO2 than a C3 (5ATP/CO2, as opposed to 3ATP/CO2).
see this for quick explanation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation
re#121 “One of the principal drivers of this evolution is low [CO2]- a la ice-age.”
C4 photosynthesis is a recent evolutionary event see
http://4e.plantphys.net/article.php?ch=9&id=392
for details.
Re # 50 sidvicious
Compact fluorescent lamps have several unpublicised drawbacks. One major one is that the normal mode of failure is by blowing their printed circuit board, a source of flame in an enclosed space. Another is that there are 4-10 mg of mercury metal in each lamp, what to do with blown lamps? Another is that they can distort the power factor and lead to electricity consumption much greater than claimed for a given light output. And they sould NEVER be used with dimmers that were designed for tungsten lamps. Finally, they can sometimes replace tungsten or halogen lamps in ceiling spots and confined spaces, but the risk of fire is high. See Rod Elliott’s article at
http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm
Geoff.
Re 132, thanks Don, that is a very useful reference. It seems that the reason that CO2 levels didn’t fall below 180 ppm during the glacials is because plants couldn’t grow below 180 ppm. The terrestrial biosphere must have shrunk dramatically. Bear in mind that the Earth’s original atmosphere was 200,000 ppm CO2, terrestrial plants evolved at 4,000 ppm C02, and the recent glaciations took CO2 down to 4.5% of that figure. P.S. I am a botanist too, but not a very good one.
Re#135 you are absolotely correct. What alot of people don’t know is that oxygen releasing photosynthesis evolved long before oxygen consuming respiration. It therfore evolved in an oxygen free environment with very high (200,000ppm) CO2. Over geologic time atmospheric CO2 concentrations have decreased, but only in the last 10 million years have they fallen below the critical 1000ppm CO2 concentration. At this point oxygen starts to compete with CO2 for RUBISCO’s active site. This results in a process called “photorespiration” in which CO2 (and energy) are lost from the leaf. C4 photosynthesis has evolved to counteract this problem, which is particularly manifest at high temperatures (due to the differing solubilty response to temperature of CO2 and O2 in water), by ensuring that CO2 levels at RUBISCO are kept high enough (1000ppm) to minimise competition from O2.
Raising CO2 levels has a number of benefits for plants, particularly C3 plants which do not have CO2 concentrating mechanisms.
1) it reduces photorespiration in C3 plants, improving net photosynthesis,
2) improves their photosynthetic response at high temperatures,
3) raises their light saturation point by relaxing substrate limitation by CO2
4) increases water use efficiency by allowing effective CO2 uptake with decreased stomatal opening.
#134
There are several papers that examine the impact of lower CO2 on vegetation at the LGM, for example Bennett and Willis (2000). Since the ocean was a far larger sink for CO2 in the LGM, the response of plankton (both photosynthetic and carbonate producing) will be more important.
I have a historical question regarding the rise in CO2 from the 1800s up to, say 1930. This is a moderately steeply rising curve. But it does not seem possible that during this time period, the population, coupled with the possible amounts of coal and other fossil fuels, could have supported an atmopheric CO2 increase such as the typical graph shows.
1. There were not that many people.
2. Vehicles were rare.
3. Per capita energy use was low and a large part of that was wood.
So is it well proven that this increase was from man’s fossil fuel use? Alternately, if it is not well proven, what weak or moderate evidence is there that this was the case?
#137
Land use changes were an important source of CO2 during this period.
Re#137, also note that widespread glacier retreat began in the 1800s long before significant fossil fuel use occurred, too.
RE#130,
Generally differing by 0.3-0.5 deg C is “reasonably good?”
Seems to me the vertical scale labels on your inverse graph should be different.
RE my #137, responses 138, 139
Land use change is sensible, glacier retreats are well known.
But it is alleged that man’s CO2 contribution began to impact the atmosphere with the beginning of the industrial revolution, yada yada yada. Can this actually be substantiated? That is essentially my question. So I am looking for a reference to how many tons of coal burned, etc, during the 1800s, or any other way that it may be possible to actually substantiate this assertion.
Dumb question follows: Has anyone proved this out?
133: Geoff: thanks for that link. We are at the point where we are trading one problem with another one that may be even worse. This is happening in many areas concerning “environmentalism,” in general. For example, the “solution” for controlling hazardous air pollutants is generally incineration, which uses vast quantities of natural gas and emits NOx, which exacerbates ozone problems (trading one toxin for another).
#133 GS
Thanks for the link on CFLs. As a UK resident I, like many, have been swollowing some of the propaganda associated with ‘environmentally friendly’ lights. Aftre reading the contents of the link you supplied I think I may well replace some of the CFLs I’m using with plain old incandescent lights instead.
NO.
#139: 0.3-0.5K on 287-288K is a very good agreement because it is a very little error, about 0.1-0.2%. The matter is, how this little variation is important to us, and how we can measure Earth’s temperature so precisely 🙂
#139/144
The mean offset between the surface and satellite based temperatures is because anomalies are calculated from different normal periods. This was discussed above #117/118 above.
2007, (almost) a year without a summer? (at least, for the Pacific Coast):
FXUS66 KMTR 171704
AFDMTR
AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SAN FRANCISCO CA
1004 AM PDT TUE JUL 17 2007
.DISCUSSION…HAVE UPDATED THE FORECAST AND GRIDS TO INCREASE RAIN
CHANCES FOR TONIGHT AND WEDNESDAY MORNING.
SATL IMAGERY INDC A STRONG COLD FRONT OFF THE COAST MOVING ONSHORE
IN NORTHERN CA AT THIS TIME. ON SATL IMAGERY IT LOOKS MORE LIKE LATE
FALL THAN MID SUMMER. WATER VAPOR IMAGERY SHOWS A STRONG TROUGH
ALONG 130 W. A VERY STRONG VORT MAX IS ROTATING TO THE BASE OF THE
TROUGH NEAR 36/134. LOOKING AT THE MODELS…THEY DO NOT HAVE A GOOD
HANDLE ON THIS FEATURE. AMSU TPW INDC MORE THAN 1.5 TPW OFF THE
COAST…AN ALMOST UNHEARD OF NUMBER FOR SUMMER. THE GFS IS ALSO INDC
GREATER THAN 1.5 TPW TONIGHT AND WEDNESDAY MORNING. SSMI RR IMAGERY
INDC 0.1/HR NEAR 35/130…WEST OF MONTEREY BAY.
MODELS ARE INDC STRONG VORTICITY ADVECTION TONIGHT AND WED MORNING
ASSOCIATED WITH THE FRONT. THEREFORE…HAVE INCREASED POPS TO
LIKELY IN THE NORTH BAY…WITH CHANCE/SLIGHT CHANCE POPS DOWN TO
SAN JOSE. THERE DOES NOT APPEAR TO BE MUCH IN THE WAY OF INSTABILITY
IN THE MODEL SOUNDINGS OR CROSS SECTIONS. THEREFORE…HAVE LEFT OUT
THUNDER IN THE FORECAST.
======================
This is either a once-in-a-lifetime outlier, or, the start of something completely different. Also, yet another severe indictment of the AGW bias in not only GCMs but also weather models. The reason models don’t have a handle on this feature is they assume that GW makes the Pacific High bigger than it really is, and they assume a quasi monotonic poleward shift of climate zones. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!
Plants really only take in CO2 when they’re growing if I remember correctly.
Base period for the GHCN ERSST is 1961-1990 as far as I can tell.
1. What is the temperature of the planet? Closest guess is around 14 C.
2. Is that important? No.
3. What is important? Measured change from average over time by location.
4. How accurate and valid are the measurements? We don’t know, plus it changes over time: Current investigation reveals the answer could be “Not Very”.
5. So is the Earth warming? We don’t know, but probably.
6. How much has it warmed? The trend is +.7 C since 1880 according to the measurements, although the bulk of that could be the devices used in the past to take the measurements, along with the location of the devices and other factors at that location.
7. Why is it warming? If it actually is, it seems to be that food production on large scales, cities made of concrete and asphalt replacing natural land, deforestation, the burning of fossil fuels, and the number of humans and domesticated animals for food production may have done something to the equilibrium of the climate system.
8. Could the warming for now be normal for now? Yes, but we don’t know, considering so many of the variables in the equation have changed over time and the complexity of the system and its interrelationships.
9. If it’s not normal, what is it? Many think it’s mostly increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere driving the warming, but we don’t know, considering so many of the variables in the equation have changed over time and the complexity of the system and its interrelationships.
10. Is there more CO2? Yes.
11. Are we creating CO2? Yes.
12. Does the CO2 we create cause the warming? It seems likely creating CO2 causes more in the atmosphere which causes warming, but there is no proof of this relationship and the system is a circular one anyway, so the answer is basically immaterial.
13. Could it be something else? Yes, although no other hypothesis is overwhelmingly taken to be the main reason, at least not in public statements by large organizations; however it is known and accepted that various other factors are involved rather than just CO2, the debate is over what and how much.
14. Is the warming dangerous? Some claim the effects will be a problem and there are various estimates of what those problems might be under different possible states of climate.
15. Should we do something? We should develop alternative fuels, increase current efficiency, and reduce pollution.
16. Shouldn’t we be doing those things anyway? Well duh.
What’s wrong with this picture?:
RE: #148 – What you wrote! Well put!
Re #149
This time last year was virtually the same amount of ice area, approximately 6M km^2. Yet the difference from the anomaly was roughly -1.05 Mkm^2, whereas the anomaly this year reads -1.8 Mkm^2. Alert Steve Bloom, he loves to point out climatalogical metrics that are in error.
Thanks Steve S!
#133 CFLs
If you don’t have any dimmers you don’t have any concerns. Incandescent bulbs cause fires when lamps fall over due to their higher temperature. CFLs from a decent manufacturer (Philips, Osram, GE) are fine.
The power factor issue is misunderstood.
http://www.iaeel.org/iaeel/newsl/1995/trefyra1995/LiTech_a_3_4_95.html
About 20% of power is used by a CFL, but the infrastructure has to provide a higher current. Even taking this into account the CFL still uses much much less generating capacity than an incandescent and lasts much longer.
“Which”, the biggest UK consumer magazine did a review of incandescents two months ago, but have had to delay their review of CFLs till September because not enough bulbs had failed the on-off tests in time.
CFLs can be recycled in the UK apparently. If one of the 20-odd bulbs in my house ever actually fails I’ll look into it.
Re #149
Explaining my prior post in another way: the beginning and end tail of the anomaly curve must differ by the difference in the tails of the area curve plus the difference in the mean value for those same dates. If the 1979 – 2000 mean value for July 16 is 7 Mkm^2 one would expect the mean value for July 17 to be very close to 7 Mkm^2. Thus with a July 17, 2006, measure of 6 Mkm^2 the anomaly value shows appropriately as roughly -1 Mkm^2. Jump ahead a year. The area value for July 16, 2007, reads around 6 Mkm^2 so one would expect the anomaly value to be in the close neighborhood of -1 Mkm^2. It clearly isn’t. So either there is a tremendous amount of variance in the 1979 – 2000 mean or the is an error in the plotting/calculation of the anomaly.
Re #153
Steve Milesworthy,
I must be buying my CCFL bulbs from a different source than you, but given the geographic and geopolitical disparity it is no surprise! The fluorescent bulbs I’ve gotten from Costco in Alaska have a failure rate very comparable to the incandescents. My anectodal observation is that they don’t even last as long as incandescents. Cost and quality of construction no doubt play a role but I wouldn’t assume that all CCFL bulbs being marketed today have the same degree of longevity that you enjoy the benfit of experiencing.
It is also great to hear that they can be recycled where you live. The question I would ask is ARE they being recycled? I dodn’t expect you to know, but I would expect you to wonder if we are trading one environmental problem for another.
148: Do you want to add:
17: Would cooling be better than warming? No, because famine would likely result, similar to what happened after the Roman Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.
#153 SM
Thanks for your link on PFs for CFLs. I’m not aware that CFLs can be recycled in the UK. Do you have a link to support this? Hopefully you are correct as I don’t think putting them in with the normal landfill waste given the 5mg of mercury they contain is a good idea. Banning incandescent lights in favour of CFLs is madness until such time as this issue (recycling) and the issue of Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) are sorted out. To quote an often used phrase in the UK, as per usual, the EU ‘couldn’t organise the proverbial piss-up in a brewery’.
#155 EW
It must be those very cold temperatures that you experience in Alaska all year round compared to the record CET temperatures which our UK Met Office in the UK are used to announcing here in the UK each month? You see there are some upsides to global warming. You get greater longevity from your ‘environmentally friendly’ CFLs.
Hmm, prolonged sunspot minimum, cool SSTs. Maybe the cosmic rays are doing their thing.
To #149 – Steve Sadlov – What’s wrong with this picture?
It is not accurate, that’s what.
The western Arctic from the Barents Sea to Eastern Siberia Sea has way more ice in it than the NOAA and the Cryosphere Today are measuring.
Here is the AQUA/MODIS visible satellite image of the region from today and (although there is some cloud cover, other images are cloud free), there is considerably more sea ice in the area …
… than shown/measured by the NOAA (which has forced the Cryosphere Today to use their re-processed data.)
You’d think they would check to see if their other satellites were giving away the facts before they keep trying this “the poles are going to melt” deception. (I don’t blame the Cryosphere – they were faithfully showing the raw data before someone in the NOAA forced them to show the reprocessed data.)
#153,157,158
The web site here
“Taking the above totals into consideration, mercury emissions by a CFL lamp from electricity consumption over its lifetime is about 2.4mg of mercury. Emissions from an incandescent light bulb is about 10mg. Therefore a CFL bulb emits 76% less mercury over the same time period. However, mercury stored in CFL bulbs is perfectly safe unless the glass is in someway damaged, in which case the bulbs can then emit mercury vapour. If the mercury from a CFL was to escape it would total 6.4mg, a 36% reduction on emissions from an incandescent.”
This claim is based of course on the claimed energy savings from the use of CFLs which in turn is heavily based on the claimed longevity figures for CFLs compared with incandescents. Incandescents don’t contain mercury but because they are less energy efficient, the power station (assumed to be coal fired of course)that provides the power they consume emits mercury into the atmosphere so the claimed net difference is a 36% over reduction – sorry but that’s utter bollocks especially if you live in France!. Everything I’ve read so far (with the exception of Steve Milesworthy long lived CFLs) on people’s anecdotal experiences of CFLs would seem to contradict the manufacturers claims so I’m sorry but once again I have to reject these, what to me looks like environmental propaganda claims on the BBC’s Action Network web site.
Also, thus far I can’t find any details for CFL recycling schemes in the UK with the possible exception of IKEA. Sadly I’d rather not increase my carbon footprint by having to drive to my nearest IKEA store so that I can safely dispose of my ‘envorinmentally friendly’ CFL light bulbs thanks.
RE: #160 and previous related …. exactly. In addition to those sources you’ve posted I also cross check with the Anchorage NWS Ice Desk. They put what you’ve posted together with real observations from boats, shore and planes. Nothing beats real world observations.
Reality:
http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/ice.php?img=ice
A minor but important note regarding today, July 17. Generally speaking, in the Arctic, July 17 is the day with the highest mean temperature. Plus or minus innate variation, mean temperatures for successive days will now decline for the rest of the calendar year, in the Arctic. The sea ice will somewhat lag this, since there are still many hours of sunlight (albeit at the low sun angle characteristic of high latitudes). Storminess and wind patterns also form a lag factor. All of that said, sometime during the next 30 to 60 days, the annual minimum will be reached, and sea ice will once again advance.
The fine print on CFL’s normally discloses the basis for the advertised life (4 hrs/day seems most common). I have experienced about a 20% failure rate with CFL’s, but those that make it last a long time. Smaller wattages seem to hold up better. Always on last longer than cycled on/off. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the energy consumption is near what is advertised.
# 148, # 150
NOPE! # 148 is a collection of sophisms (false syllogisms).
The NOAA temperatures for June 2007 are in. Global land Jan to June = warmest on record. June SH Land = 12th warmest, which is surprising. I expected colder. Seems Antarctica was record warm in June.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/jun/global.html#Temp
Sorry, I’ve to leave now to the field, but I’ll come back later with a proper explanation about # 148.
#165, #167 I’m very interested in your comments about what you think it wrong with it. I should have mentioned ealier that I posted it because I was interested in opinions about it.
It’s supposed to be as simple and neutral as possible. It is a summary of generalizations. Or a generalization of a summary. Everyone can claim a lot of things, try to explain the entire system all at once, make guesses on a number of things, and state possibilites (or dominent hypothesis/theory) as fact, or start arguing about cherrypicking, biases, and the like. I could have made it simpler.
What do we know? It’s a short list:
1. Measurements show a combined global mean trend of +.7 C trend since 1880.
2. We have put x amount of CO2 into the atmosphere since 1880 and/or consumed y amount of energy since 1880.
3. Measurements show about a 100 ppmv gain in CO2 levels in ice and/or air since 1880 (actually more like 1832 but the difference is not great from ’32 to ’80)
#145: it is not correct as I wrote in #131; simply:
a) why there should be an average temperature gap if satellites show the same temperatures (with differences of hundredths of degree) of ground measurements during the 1998 Nino event, but not previously nor after?
b) compare trends; if there is just a gap, only absolute temps should be different, not trends; since trends are often different, they should have also different averages.
#166: indeed Antarctica had a very warm May-June bimester, after several months below the normal temperatures; anyway, between late June and July, temperatures went down, mostly on normal or below levels.
#168
The problem as I see it is that we can not know how much the atmospheric CO2 load would have changed even with no increase in our input of CO2 from fossil fuel burning.
If you look at the entire amount of carbon “processed” by all the plants and the oceans in the world, what we are adding might amount to only a “pinch” of the total. How much CO2 would a 2 degree rise in a specific area of the ocean release into the atmosphere? How much would a 0.5 degree rise globally release? How much is taken up by erosion and biomass growth? How much released from decay of biomass, fires, and volcanic activity (particularly undersea volcanic activity that might go largely unnoticed and unmonitored as far as CO2 venting is concerned)? We might be adding what amounts to a few cups into a lake during a rainstorm. Someone dumps a couple of cups of water in and notes that the level rose an inch and concludes that they caused the rise while ignoring the larger picture.
We might be able to measure what we are adding but I don’t think we can measure what percentage that is of the total system or how that system would have reacted to simple changes in solar output changes since 1800. It could be that CO2 levels might be pretty much exactly where they are now had Edison and Ford never been born.
#156: Jae, not really, I wrote that to summarize (generalize) the simplest answers to common points of disagreement without going into details or specifics like what might happen if it were cooling. Basicially one sentence answers with no detail or reasoning. I think getting into the hypothesis or theory level clouds the issues too much.
Nasif:
Maybe those questions should just have been answered “Yes” “No” and “Maybe”.
Or just stated what we know:
1. The anomaly measurements might to be suspect as to validity and accuracy but they do show a warming trend of about .7 C. The maximum change above average as a number was +.51 in 2005 and
the maximum change below average as a number was -.46 in 1909. (GHCN-ERSST)
2. The measured amount of CO2 is getting higher faster, and is at approximatly 385 ppmv (+50 since around 1980).
3. Modern technology creates CO2 and other things that affect climate.
4. There are more people and more cities than in the past.
5. We are using a lot more energy.
6. Land use has changed considerably in other areas, forests, farmland, and so on.
Some of that may be arguable, but is any of that factually incorrect or illogical?
Questions remain on these, in that none of them are really “provable” now, and maybe never :
1. Is a +.7 trend bad or good or nuetral.
2. Will the trend continue.
3. That CO2 et al lead temp more than being led by temp. (If creating energy is warming and the CO2 simply a byproduct that (along with water vapor et al) is conveniently holding the heat.)
4. What exactly would be happening if not for aersols.
5. What role clouds play exactly is keeping things stable (if we consider things stable in the first place).
6. What the climate would be like now if the Earth still looked like it did and had the same energy budget it did in 1880 — would we be better or worse off.
7. What are the {insert something} going to do in the future and what does what it is doing now mean? (glaciers, clouds, albedo, co2 levels, o3 levels, whatever)
Does any of that have a definitive answer? I don’t think so.
When you go into #148 could you please also state a few “facts” and a few “????” as you understand them in a sentence or so each?
I’m trying to put a good summary together without going into determinations on specifics or what if’s.
Re: # 133
Additionally, there are these:
Light bulbs and Eco-Fascism and Light Bulb Lunacy.
#170 Good point. I am aware of things like that, certainly, and I’m removing such distractions from the issue. The problem is (as I see it) there isn’t an answer to it. Is measuring ocean temperatures and/or CO2 levels better than air and ocean temps and air CO2 levels? How much CO2 is too much? How much warmth (or cold) is too much? What bearing does the global mean have upon the issue? What do we do about it?
As I said in the earlier writings, rather, is we only really know two things, what the reported anomaly is/anomalies are for ocean and water measurements (and yes I am conveniently leaving out other things such as measurements of tree rings, sattellites, glacier advancement/retreat, ocean CO2 concentrations, etc etc etc) and what the measured rise in ice/air has been for CO2 (I am again leaving out a bunch of other things we know about also, as being a distraction)
A third, we do also know more or less, but I don’t think we can quantify to any degree of accuracy: We’ve created some amount of CO2 and we’ve used some amount of energy (but not what is a cause, an effect, a coincidence or a corrolary; yet more details with no answer and rather immaterial except for the fact it’s some amount and what it seems to be doing).
The point is the argument revolves basicially around one premise, regardless of the details, so I’m phrasing “what we know” in the terms of the premise (I think that’s what I’m doing at least).
This is what I think the premise is:
Human released CO2 has caused atmospheric CO2 levels to rise. Higher atmospheric CO2 levels has caused an increase in the Earth’s temperature. This is a bad thing. We have to reduce CO2 output so as to reduce warming and put us back where we were as to temperature in 1880.
If that is the actual premise, perhaps we can work backwards to prove not just the individual parts of that, but also prove the logic behind the statement in the order it’s phrased.
Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding global warming and the discussion is some other string of statements on cause/effect.
Or the premise is something like. I should have said. I think I got too specific with it.
Human released CO2 has caused atmospheric CO2 levels to rise. Higher atmospheric CO2 levels has caused an increase in the Earth’s temperature. This is a bad thing and will get worse. We have to reduce CO2 output and remove more CO2 because the warming is a bad. We can reduce CO2 output & levels and affect the temperature. Doing so has a cost/benefit ratio that makes it intelligent to do so.
Something like that.
Then we can work on the pieces, most each of which is a huge complex issue on its own, before we can show any kind of causality (or logical prgression) to prove it. It often looks to be attempted at trying to solve it all at once.
I think the reason this subject is so contentious is that there are too many “no answers” and too many guesses. And too many assumptions that it’s clear we should all agree with the other people in the discussion, when it should be clear we don’t.
KevinUK
CFLs are covered by the WEEE directive, which comes in this year I think? This hopefully means recycling facilities should become widely available by the time my first CFL blows…
#172
That Steve Milloy from junk science seems awfully scared of a minuscule amount of mercury from a broken bulb. Imagine how terrified he’d be if he found out that a radiatively active gas such as CO2 had increased by 30%.
Milesworthy: Yes, I’m really, really worried about the putative temperature increase of 0.7 degrees, some of which is probably caused by the radiatively active gas. And, assuming linearity, which we know is not the case (it is logarithmic), we could even reach 2.3 degrees at 100 percent increase of the terrible gas. Hmmm, where is all that positive water vapor feedback, anyway?
RE: #175 – WEEE/RoHS drove California to ban refuse disposal of dry cell batteries last year. But no facilities were provided for convenient recovery. Most people still throw away their depleted batteries in the rubbish bin. Moral of the story – don’t assume WEEE/RoHS automatically means your refuse disposal firm will pick up your restricted/controlled item in a recycling bin, or that your local store will have a bin for them. I’ve been very close to this whole WEEE/RoHS debacle from the early days. Here’s a good experiment to help prove why it’s a debacle. Take a printed circuit assembly and throw it onto the ground at some random location in the forest. Observe the tin lead solder joints and other “hazardous” substances. Observe to 100 years. What do you think you will find after 100 years?
Damn you, Global Warming, Damn you!!!
Picture Caption:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/07/17/1184559788744.html
Re 148, please pay attention to 135. Plants evolved expecting 1,000 ppm atmospheric CO2. Plant growth came to a standstill in the glacial periods because they don’t grow below 180 ppm CO2. If you could make one small change to improve life on this planet, it would be to take atmospheric CO2 back to above 1,000 ppm. All of us who consume are contributing to that noble goal, and it therefore follows that the more we consume, the nobler we become. If you want to wear a hair shirt and get into self-flagellation, self-realisation that you want to discuss theology and not science will make you happier with your lot.
RE: #178 – December 29, 2006, I had a similar experience at Kirkwood (East of SF, south of Tahoe). They had a wind hold until almost lunch time, but the excellent powder and uncrowded conditions the rest of the day made up for it. If only we’d had more storm systems, it would have been an epic season due to the cold temps. Oh well, here’s hoping for the 2007 – 2008 season up here in the NH …. LOL! You powder hounds down under, I hate ye! Green with envy! 😉
#175
Steven, it’s not just Steve Milloy who is scared of mercury. The EU has banned thermometers which use mercury.
Actually, the mercury problem of CFLs is more pernicious than you think. Even small amounts of mercury from thousands of discarded CFLs in a landfill actually have far greater potential for harm than thermometers, since if incandescents are banned, every household will be using multiple CFLs and discarding one or several per year.
Guess, it just goes to show that environment is a bit more complicated than you would think. Especially given the tendency for it to attract every self-opinionated know nothing and windbag seeking a platform for their stupidity. (And I’m not only thinking Al “Rock Star” Gore here).
RE: #179 – The Naked Ape is hardwired to create thousands upon thousands of Edens. Sure, there are temporary exceptions, due to greed and poorly developed societies, but they don’t last. The grand theme, the long, long journey, is one of greening, one of husbandry, one of cultivation, one of stewardship. We really are hard wired for this. Look at where we came from. It’s not a surprise we are the way we are.
re: 135
Don you should know by now that there are no benefits to increased CO2 levels. Many man-hours as well as a large sum of money have been spent trying to discredit, or at least minimize the impact of those four points you listed. The latest can be found here:
Click to access confronting-climate-change-in-the-u-s-northeast.pdf
and here:
Click to access Our-Changing-Climate-final.pdf
#142 Kevin et. al.,
CFLs also act as negative resistances (as voltage goes up current goes down) which is a destabilizing factor.
We have been using them for 10 years or more. I like the warm white ones.
You do save on air conditioning.
BTW I have yet to have one start a fire. Also note: if the dire warnings were any way representative you would see more consumer reaction.
Still, if you like incandescents it is fine with me. Dimming incandescents is nice. It does put some very shoddy wave forms on the line which causes power factor problems. Not very big ones though.
Re 183, Barry please explain how you can discredit scientific facts. Facts that are found in any botany textbook? Oh, I see. You were poking fun at the stupendous waste of resources of the forest team and the water team in putting that northeast US climate change document together.
#183
Barry,
So you post links to propaganda pieces from the CC industry and left wing fronts like UCS as “discrediting” those points.
Here’s a clue – hysteria is not the same as argument. Extreme claims about people dying from hot weather and the coming of plague etc etc may seem really compelling to you, but to those who want to engage with facts rather than speculative fiction it is just sounds like the same old propaganda repeated ad nausem because the AGW movement doesn’t have any real arguments.
But hey, critical thinking isn’t perhaps high on your list of priorities.
re #185
Actually I was. There was supposed to be a fair amount of sarcasm associated with my remark to Don. Evidently it did not come across that way.
Just wanted to comment on the Mercury in incandescent bulbs issue.
Most of the coal which is used to generate electricity also contains Mercury.
The lower electricity requirements of incandescent bulbs more than makes up for the Mercury they contain in terms of overall Mercury levels entering the environment. So, the EPA, DOE wtc. have endorsed them despite the Mercury content.
Don’t break the bulbs in your house or garbage can however.
In terms of longevity, the candescent bulbs could easily be made to last for dozens of years but the manufacturers long ago decided ther was no money to made in the longevity business.
As a consequence, most of the incandescent bulbs are now manufactured to burn out much faster than the earliest versions of the bulbs so your $10 investment is likely to buy you two or three years rather than five to ten claimed.
Just wanted to comment on the Mercury in incandescent bulbs issue.
Most of the coal which is used to generate electricity also contains Mercury.
The lower electricity requirements of incandescent bulbs more than makes up for the Mercury they contain in terms of the overall Mercury levels entering the environment. So, the EPA, DOE etc. have endorsed them despite the Mercury content.
Don’t break the bulbs in your house or garbage can however.
In terms of longevity, the candescent bulbs could easily be made to last for dozens of years but the manufacturers long ago decided there was no money to made in the “longevity” business.
As a consequence, most of the incandescent bulbs are now manufactured to burn out much faster than the earliest versions of the bulbs so your $10 investment is likely to buy you two or three years rather than five to ten claimed.
oops.
# 148 and etc.
I promised that when returning I would give an explanation about the sophisms from Sam Urbinto’s message. Here we go:
“1. What is the temperature of the planet? Closest guess is around 14 C.”
False Statement. That’s not the temperature of the planet. That’s a median from all the temperatures at all locations along one year.
2. Is that important? No.
Impenetrable answer. For whom it is not important?
3. What is important? Measured change from average over time by location.
False Conclusion. If “planet’s temperature” is not important, then the change from “average” wouldn’t be important either because the change from “average” derives from the “planet’s temperature”. If we don’t take into account the “planet’s temperature”, then we couldn’t know the “change for average”.
4. How accurate and valid are the measurements? We don’t know, plus it changes over time: Current investigation reveals the answer could be “Not Very”.
False Premise. If we don’t know how accurate and valid the measurements are, we wouldn’t know that it “changes over time”.
5. So is the Earth warming? We don’t know, but probably.
False Premise. If we don’t know, then we cannot know if it is plausible or implausible.
6. How much has it warmed? The trend is +.7 C since 1880 according to the measurements, although the bulk of that could be the devices used in the past to take the measurements, along with the location of the devices and other factors at that location.
False Syllogism. You say “The trend is…” however, the # 4 and # 5 had discarded our knowledge about that “change”.
7. Why is it warming? If it actually is, it seems to be that food production on large scales, cities made of concrete and asphalt replacing natural land, deforestation, the burning of fossil fuels, and the number of humans and domesticated animals for food production may have done something to the equilibrium of the climate system.
Improper Question. Can you answer a “why” in sciences?
8. Could the warming for now be normal for now? Yes, but we don’t know, considering so many of the variables in the equation have changed over time and the complexity of the system and its interrelationships.
False Syllogism. If you have answered “Yes”, you cannot say “but we don’t know”. Besides, the answer is confusing because those variables change with or without humans. Those changes are known like “Ecological Succession” and are natural, cyclical, etc.
9. If it’s not normal, what is it? Many think it’s mostly increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere driving the warming, but we don’t know, considering so many of the variables in the equation have changed over time and the complexity of the system and its interrelationships.
False Answer. If “we” don’t know whether is normal, then “we” couldn’t know if it is not normal. Again, the answer is confusing because it insists on “we don’t know”; nonetheless, those “many” only “think”, but their idea could be false.
10. Is there more CO2? Yes.
False Conclusion. It lacks a point of reference to affirm that “there is more CO2”.
11. Are we creating CO2? Yes.
False Knowledge. We’re not “creating” a single fermion, boson, atom, molecule of CO2. We’re not “creating” matter.
12. Does the CO2 we create cause the warming? It seems likely creating CO2 causes more in the atmosphere which causes warming, but there is no proof of this relationship and the system is a circular one anyway, so the answer is basically immaterial.
Again, if you start from a false premise it would be hard that the rest of the answer be true. We don’t “create” CO2. What warms the Earth and the whole Solar System is … contradicting a little to Lockwood… the SUN.
13. Could it be something else? Yes, although no other hypothesis is overwhelmingly taken to be the main reason, at least not in public statements by large organizations; however it is known and accepted that various other factors are involved rather than just CO2, the debate is over what and how much.
False and Dogmatic Premise. The phrases “overwhelmingly taken” and “large organizations” are religiously and politically correct, but scientifically incorrect.
False Conclusion. “The debate is over”. Have you read this blog?
14. Is the warming dangerous? Some claim the effects will be a problem and there are various estimates of what those problems might be under different possible states of climate.
Confusing “claim”. Given that the premises and assertions from 1-10 established that “we don’t know”, then the “estimates” are merely ideas.
15. Should we do something? We should develop alternative fuels, increase current efficiency, and reduce pollution.
Improper Question and False answer. “Should we” can be answered with “yes” or “not”. Hence the above questions-answers denoted that “we don’t know”, the answer to this question MUST be “we don’t know”.
16. Shouldn’t we be doing those things anyway? Well duh.
Confusing Question. “Shouldn’t…” The logical answer is “No”. If we ask with a negation, we could expect an answer with a negation. Besides, if the points 1-15 determined that “We don’t know”, the answer to this question MUST be, “We don’t know”.
re: 186
I am in agreement with you. My post to Don was a failed attempt at sarcasm. I would like to direct you to Unthreaded #7, post #22 to see my thoughts on research which attempts to discredit the benefits Don posted.
Sorry for the confusion.
Beware of false syllogisms and tangles. It’s not science.
# 179, # 182 and similars,
Have you harvested melons and corn in December under normal conditions in the Northern Hemisphere? The heat is more beneficial for the life that the cold, biologically speaking. If it were not thus, what we would need the greenhouses for? There are plants that can grow in winter, but there are not plants that can live without CO2. Mmmh… I think that “green” is merely an autograph; it seems that actually the “greens” do not love the “green” living things.
# 192
Dear Barry, thanks by the promotion to my # 22. 😉
There we go again… Conflicting binnacles of NOAA and UAH. I think Mr. James must resign from NOAA, he’s getting old.
Re #189, John Lang
So if 80% of your electricity is generated by nuclear stations, as in France, then the mercury argument for CFLs goes away ?
Re: #188
I’m a bit confused. Didn’t the mercury originate in the environment? And wasn’t it extracted, refined, whatever, depleting the environment, and put into the bulbs? If so, then why can’t it go back from whence it came, restoring the natural balance? Ditto, with the carbon and its oxides. All these arguments imply that we’re creating something that didn’t exist in or on this planet out of nothing and thereby causing ruination.
#179
Please, David Archibald, provide one citation to support this statement:
There are hundred of papers on LGM vegetation patterns, do any support your conjecture that growth came to a standstill?
There is good evidence that the reduced CO2 concentration in the LGM, together with temperature and P/E changes, affected vegetation – but it still grew.
Alternatively, look at the whole plant compensation point – the minimum atmospheric CO2 level required for sustained growth (eg Campbell et al. 2005). Yes, growth is slower at low CO2 concentration, but Nicotiana can complete its life cycle at 100μmol/mol.
Re#197
Apartment I live in has electrical heating, so for most of the year there is no reason to save electricity on lighting ‘€” whatever amount I save switching lights off or installing CFL, is compensated by electrical heaters keeping temperature according to thermostat setting. I do not have AC, and do not use lighting at summer too much ‘€” there is enough daylight. Late in the evening TV and computer screen provide most of the lighting. And yes, most of electricity I use is generated by hydro.
CFL lighting is used around very widely ‘€” in commercial buildings, parkade, halls and corridors of building I live ‘€” exactly where it is financially sound. Blanket prohibition of incandescent bulbs is just silly.
Reminds me of one environmentalist nutcase (quite popular with media), who claimed big energy savings when he (in NE winter!) dried closing indoor on clothesline instead of using drier.
Any way, progress in white LEDs (“emitters”) is so fast, that I am pretty sure that in 5-7 years both incandescent and CFL bulbs will be in legacy and niche use only.
re #183 Barry B. Many thanks for pointing out my complete ignorance of plant physiology. I’m just going to have to tell my tutors at Cambridge University that all they taught me was wrong!
#175,
Considering the fact that mercury vapor can kill you, while CO2 vapor has virtually no affect whatsoever, except to make plants grow better.
It’s not surprising that Malloy is concerned about mercury but not CO2.
re#193 richardT please note that I did not say, or imply, that plant growth came to a standstill in glacial periods.
The point I have been making is that current atmospheric CO2 concentrations are sub-optimal for most plant species. Lowering it further (as happened in Ice ages) would further remove photosynthesis from optimum.
Check out the A/Ci curve at http://www.nrri.umn.edu/ecophys/photosynthesis.html
Here’s a graph of US state temperature records. 66% of the highs and 50% of the lows were set by 1937. I kind of expected the percentages to be reversed if temperatures have been increasing.
I got the data from here if anyone is interested. http://www.usatoday.com/weather/wheat7.htm
They give their source as NCDC.
To tell all the truth about satellite-ground station temperature gap: satellite measurements agree very good with direct measurement of sea waters around the globe; what makes the difference, is land stations, which have a very larger temperature increase in the last 30 years than anything measured by satellites since 1979 (and continue to increase despite a slight decrease of sea temperatures in the last 5 years).
NOAA says “2nd Warmest year ever”
Release
I thought this year was trending a bit cooler.
Re #205 Here are the various rankings for January-June:
GISS land: warmest
Global ocean: 6’th warmest
Lower troposphere (RSS): 7’th warmest
Lower troposphere: 4’th warmest
US land: 18’th warmest
I think the outlier is GISS land. HADCRUT3 should be issued soon and it’ll be interesting to see how their land number looks.
In any case the trend is lower, with the land peak having been in January.
JoeB,
That was before the “proper” adjustments were applied.
Re #205
Second warmest year. I really marvel at how skillful organizations are becoming at the propaganda.
Notice how second warmest year keeps the emphasis on the how hot it is. And it distracts from the fact that there is no warming trend. Which is important because given all the headlines about carbon emissions, it just HAS to be getting hotter and hotter. It couldn’t just stay around the same temperature – that would be crazy.
And as for adjustments – I have a feeling that efforts like surfacestations.org and the scrutiny by Steve M and all the other good people here is putting a lot of pressure on the Team, at least as far as them falling back on the tried and “true” (lol) method of “adjusting” their way out of a problem…
Humans can survive on 800-1200 calories per day.
# 205
And nature world and UAH says “It’s quite normal”.
NOAA touched-by-James records:
2007 1 0.8330
2007 2 0.6224
2007 3 0.6040
2007 4 0.6608
2007 5 0.5261
2007 6 0.5504
UAH non-touched-records:
2007 1 0.537
2007 2 0.399
2007 3 0.376
2007 4 0.236
2007 5 0.189
2007 6 0.212
Who’s right who’s wrong?
Not to mention that CFLs are fluorescent, which is a somewhat unnatural lighting for home use. Fluorescent lights give me a headache due to the flicker, and using one anywhere near a computer screen makes it worse.
Mark
Here, in Monterey, we have had the coldest year since 1970. The Summer temperatures used to be from 35-45 °C. This year, the maximum temperature has been only 32.4 °C. Warming or cooling? Well… Here and in most of the world, it’s cooling.
# 211
Mark T.,
Yes, besides eye cataracts, pterygium and pinguecula caused by the light of fluorescent bulbs.
Down here in the SH, it continues to be very cold.
Victoria has its coldest day for 9 years. Roads closed and accidents due to icy roads.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/07/17/1184559789294.html
I did not know that.
Of course, incandescents “flicker,” too, but since their light is derived from a heated element, which never shuts completely off, the effect is not very noticeable. I’ve heard you can actually see this effect in the 50 Hz world of Europe, however. I can’t imagine what a fluorescent bulb would be like over there. I suppose the interference with a computer screen is less noticeable since the typical solution is to simply turn up the refresh rate to increase the beat frequency.
Mark
And for those who like a little irony….
About 2 weeks ago, a lone idiot staged a protest at a ceremony where the PM was, this guy pulled off his shirt and had the words “There is no snow” written on his chest.
Obviously doesn’t get out much or else the Gorean Reality Distortion Field is still effect.
Maybe the message should have been “There are no braincells”.
Reports that he suffered frostbite could not be confirmed. :o)
RE: #204 – MCF plots like this have great utility. Most growth curves are assymptotic to some fundamental limit value. When you see behavior that departs from that expectation, you ask the question “what changed during the time of the uptick?” In this case, it is a testament to the warm 1930s. Facts, facts and more facts. Facts don’t lie!
RE: #206 – their bogus value includes the adder of anthropogenic energy dissipation and land use changes.
#215
GMF
NOAA gave short shrift to frigid weather Down Under.Just a short phrase that some cooling in isolated locales, but the general trend is the globe is frying. Remember, 2007 is suppose to be the warmest year in History. If the the raw data will not support it, the adjusted data will. Can’t wait for the Team’s 2008 predictions.
#217: yesterday a Briton swimmed in the Arctic waters to protest against AGW. He told us that it is due to GW the fact that there is enough water to swim in the area of the North Pole now, where instead should be a solid ice pack and not water spots among ice blocks: probably he is then blaming Global Warming for summer to exist, and for the summer melting that prevent us from being in a glacial era…
It would be better if he had read it before:
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
looking at the picture taken on 18th May 1987 at the North Pole (and not 2 months later) and to it:
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.”
President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817″
#220: but until now, Hansen is still honest.
We have very good news from the GISS: June confirms the downward trend (while for the NOAA it was a couple of hundreths of degree warmer than May) and goes slightly below 0.50°C; now 2007, first semester, +0.63°C, 2005 and 1998 +0.62°C (but the warmest year in its first semester should have been 2002) and it is very likely that 1998 will become warmer than 2007 by this month of July, while 2005 should be warmer, if not by summer, by next autumn (no warm forcings expected, at the contrary Nina might happen).
Click to access 2007+2005+1998.pdf
RE: #221 – Presently, there is no open water anywhere within 500 miles of the North Pole. Maybe he swam in a melt pond on top of the ice? If so, that is out and out fraud. Melt ponds are a fact of life when the sun is up 24 hours a day.
An illustrative image of a melt pond. No doubt, anyone swimming anywhere near the North Pole at this time is swimming in a melt pond, not the ocean:
http://nsidc.org/cgi-bin/words/word.pl?melt%20ponds
Currently the closest 80% sea ice to the NP (mostly floes, a few open areas) is hundreds of miles South of the pole. In some past years, there has been opening at the Pole. I think in 2000 it might have briefly opened at the August minimum.
August 2000, North Pole was open enough to allow ice breakers to get there:
Pretty rare event.
Based on the work that Anthony and his troops have done plus the “Temperature Record for the Week” series on CO2science.org, I’m not sure there has even been a temperature increase in the past 20-30 years. So far, I have accepted the idea that temperatures have gone up, but now I’m not so sure….
It would be interesting to see if the weather stations used for Idso’s temperature records are up to snuff.
#223: it is…
Re 222
While looking at the graph you reference I came accross this which shows the northern and southern hemispheres
The fact that the two values diverge in the 1980’s should be telling them there is something wrong with the data. Of course the answer will be to correct the southern hemisphere.
RE: #228 – S.H. data – “adjust” it to add in all the bogus UHI and localized greenhouse and particle reradiation adders typical of NH developed areas. There, fixed! 😉
#2 Vernon
Vernon here’s one on Canadian sea levels for the last 10 yrs.
http://marginalizedactiondinosaur.net/?p=648
Many Canadian ports are finding the level is dropping according to fisheries and Oceans Canada.
If anyone knows US port values especially poor Florida I would like to know.
Or If I’m reading the information wrong.
#230: the level of Mediterranean Sea is dropping as well, despite doom predictions of under-water Venice – of course, while in the world sea levels are rising because of thermal expansion of water due to hotter seas, here they are dropping because the hotter sea increase evaporation – and no one matters that 1,000 years ago Mediterranean sea level was at least 0.5-1m (1ft10″-3ft4″) higher than nowadays.
#191 Nasif, some of your answers are rather pedantic and argumentative, and it seems you’re picking and choosing which questions you want to apply to other questions and which stand alone. And I don’t think you realize the point of why I am performing this experiment in generalization. But here’s some explanations in reply to your comments on the points.
1. Isn’t a median of all temperatures in all locations “The Planet”? I think you know what was meant. I should have qualified it as “a year” though. “The guesstimated global average of temperatures for a year on Earth.” (You know, the planet we’re on.) It would seem that since it’s not specified, you could pick and choose which ones, such as they are.
2. It’s not important, to anyone, because it’s meaningless. I’ve seen numbers from 12-16 C, there’s no accuracy. And it changes year to year. Plus it’s not locally significant. If you walk outside and it’s -10 (or +30) who cares if the supposed yearly average temperature is 13.4C, wherever that number was guessed up from. A person may think it’s important, but the number itself isn’t, it’s made up, and especially given that for #3:
3. 1 and 2 talk about temperature. This question is about anomalies. It doesn’t matter what the temperature is, just the change “from normal”. Different subject than above. Is measured change from average important? If anything is, it’s that. (Notice I didn’t answer the question I just asked.)
4. We know it changes over time because the degree of accuracy and margin of error of the measurement instruments has changed since 1880 (and often the location itself changes and we know that too). What we don’t know is how accurate the microsites are, but so far it seems accurate enough for at least an indication and for showing that for #5:
5. it’s probable that the Earth is on average getting warmer (especially given the satellites and oceans backing up the surface readings). I should have said “don’t know for sure” although the “but probably” implies that. Although in reality, that is a bad question, because am I talking about surface records, the ocean temperature, the inside of the planet, or some mix?
6. I qualified “The trend” with “according to the measurements”. (And then I again called into question the overall accuracy of the readings.) However, given that glass (+/- 0.5C) versus digital thermometers (less) are less than .7 C different, there’s still .2 which answers why #5 is “probable” and not just “possible” (Since I never apply a percentage to what I say, that could be 51-99%.) You can argue that there’s not a 51% chance that it’s warming .2 C or more, but there’s a 100% chance that “according to the measurements” there is a +.7 trend, regardless of 4&5 (the trend and its accuracy are not the same subject).
7. Yes, you can answer why. “Why did this dynamite just explode?” “Why did this copper stick to this iron in this solution?” “Why is this glass tube glowing?” And as far as the answer, it certainly “seems” that the things I listed “may have done” something to the climate system’s equilibrium. See how that works? It can mean anything the reader wants it to. In any case, certainly the scientists that wrote for the IPCC think that burning fossil fuels and land use change have affected the climate. (I would think that’s pretty obvious and not require links to 100,000 peer reviewed articles on the subject, that burning fuel and building cities and cutting down trees en masse, releasing soot into the atmosphere and other things “changes the climate” How could it not “change” it? Nice and vague, so must be true, since it can mean anything.) It seems it may have.
8. That makes no sense. Of course it could be normal, just like it could be not normal. The answer is yes to either. However, we don’t know which is true. And I mentioned that the variables change and the system (climate system) is complex and interrelated. Although in reality, the answer to the question is “some of both”. Rather a meaningless unqualified and obvious answer, since we don’t know the mixture. But we do know there is some mixture, from somewhere between 0/100% and 100/0%. Yay!
9. Along with 8, this is a question within a question. It’s either normal or it’s not (or it’s some of both) If we postulate that the “bulk” of the warming is “not normal” we then can come up with answers if that was the case. It’s called a scenario. We create a situation; treat it as if it’s true for the sake of developing answers to the situation in case it is true. Since obviously many think it’s warming, I make the claim “Many think it’s mostly increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere” which many do. (I think if you are writing here you know this to be true, and I don’t have to name names, right?) Then I answer with the same thing as 8, it’s a complex interrelated system and we “don’t know (for sure)”. So 8&9 are actually the same question with the same answer.
10. No it’s not, a false conclusion, and there is a point of reference. Both the measurements at Law Dome and Mauna Loa show it has risen, as do ocean concentrations.
11. Word games. One example, we create it by burning gasoline in our cars. If you want to be specific, we take petroleum distillates and combust them, converting the energy into propulsion by means of controlled explosions in a piston chamber, byproducts of which include CO2. If we didn’t burn it, it wouldn’t be there, so we create it. “To cause to exist; bring into being.” “To give rise to; produce”
12. It’s not a false premise, see 11. Since we do create it ( regardless if the CO2 measured in 10 what we’ve created or not) (proof: step 1, burn fuel, step 2, measure CO2 coming out of car) it’s not a false premise. It “seems” likely (although that means it might not be true since it only seems that way, and again, what percent is “likely” as I’m using it, I never say) I then say there’s no proof, it’s a feedback loop, so it doesn’t matter. I should have just said “We don’t know but it doesn’t matter anyway.” Or “maybe, maybe not”. I wrote that answer to cover any situation. “It seems likely” What does that mean? Anything I or you want it to.
13. Could it be something else? Of course it “could be”. Notice the implication in the “public statements” about “no other hypothesis … overwhelmingly …” So that means private statements might be the opposite. And other hypotheses are accepted at least by some. Notice the implication in “large organizations” meaning small organizations might be the opposite. I’m saying we only know what the IPCC etc are telling us publicly. Not what they think privately or what small organizations are saying publicly. Another wonderful non-answer that seems illogical but certainly is not. Do large organizations say this is the major hypothesis? Yes. You read more into it.
You’re misunderstanding the last half of the sentence. I didn’t say the “debate is over”, I said “the debate is over what and how much” (about what’, not finished with’) or in other words with 12, the other half of this “could be mostly CO2 could be mostly something else” question: “The debate is about what factors other than CO2 might be causing the warming, and how much those factors are part of the equation if any.” Anyone that thinks that’s settled is crazy. 🙂 It’s like 8&9: it’s a complex interrelated system and we “don’t know (for sure)”.
14. Given that we probably are warming by at least .2 C globally, or even just for the sake of this question, let’s have a scenario (or if it actually has) where we agree that it’s warmed .2 C. Then the question becomes if it’s dangerous. Heck, even if it’s not warming, we can answer the question as “Would such warming be dangerous?” So let’s answer the question. “Is .2 C or more of warming on a globally average scale dangerous?”
Do some claim the effects will be a problem? Yes. Are there various estimates (scenarios) about this? Yes. You do realize I don’t answer the question, I just say some people think it is dangerous. I didn’t say if I’m one of them or not, or if it’s dangerous or not. (Assuming it’s there, which we know there is some debate about.)
15. Even if we don’t know we can still ask, and we can still answer, any question. I don’t need an answer to question 10 or 3 or a question not on here to ask “Should we do something.” Notice I didn’t say what we should do something about, you just assumed I meant GW, AGW, CC, whatever. Should we do something?” Yes, we should do something. What should we do? We should develop alternative fuels, increase current efficiency (with fuel usage and anything else inefficient, you’ll notice I didn’t specify make what more efficient), and reduce pollution. I didn’t say why, and I never said the list was complete or inclusive, either. Do you disagree we shouldn’t do those three things?
16. “Shouldn’t we be don’t those things anyway” might seem to imply I was talking about global warming, but I wasn’t. The question was if we should be doing those three things. Duh, of course we should, the why is not important. I could have been talking about protecting the environment, giving us replacements for fuel that will run out, keeping more money in people’s pockets by having them drive more efficient car, reducing dependence on foreign oil, AGW, or any other reason. In any way you slice it, we should be doing things like that, referring to question 15, which again, doesn’t specifically say I’m talking about any particular subject.
RSS-MSU data show +0.14°C anomaly for June, from +0.09°C for May.
So we have now for June:
– NCDC: +0.55°C (+0.53°C in May);
– GISS: +0.48/+0.49°C (+0.51°C);
– UAH-MSU: +0.22°C (+0.19°C);
– RSS-MSU: +0.14°C (+0.14°C).
Does anyone know HadCRU global temperature anomalies for May and June? (not the CET)
#231 I always figured we had a long time to worry.
As the sea level in the Uk allowed the tower of London to be inhabited in the middle ages warm Period.
If it’s not as warm as then,…
Fear mongers always say london will be one of the first to go.
Doesn’t the IPCC say 15-17 inches, hard to scare school children like that though.
There’s a lot of evidence that it isn’t.
#231 Filippo Turturici do you have a link to the Mediterranian values? I always love stuff I can link to.
Partially true.
Problem is, when you’re putting mercury in landfills where leachate to drinking water is an issue, or emitting it from from smokestacks, that’s not truly “from whence it came,” such as being sequestered in coal deposits where nobody could be exposed.
And not all mercury compounds are equal in effect and toxicity. As an extreme example, look at dimethyl mercury, where just a few drops placed on the skin can cause death.
Re #233
Filippo Turturici,
Did you intend to post the RSS-MSU as below?
RSS-MSU: +0.14°C (+0.09°C).
Thanks,
Earle
# 232
Sam Urbinto,
Your pretty long explanation has given some points on my analysis. You’re last explanation is plagued of conjectures and false statements, like the warming of 0.7 °C since 1880. Couldn’t we say that it is the cooling trend since 7200 BP?
Yes, sometimes I’m pedantic, and it goes well with me; however, my analysis is not argumentative compared with your looong last explanation.
BTW, you are confounding the “whys” and the “hows”.
#230
Post-glacial rebound is probably important at several of your stations.
Hi there. I’m a virgin blogger; this really is my first time, please be gentle with me. You can tell I’m keen on puns; I live not far from Pershore, which has become mildly infamous through replacing Malvern as an official site for the Central England Temperature record.
Anyway, my choice of name is relevant, as I want to discuss betting. Whilst I don’t hold with the thesis that bets are bound to converge to predictions better than forecasting, like the noose they do concentrate the mind wonderfully. So to put pressure on those of my friends and family who are in the CO2 sect, I have formulated the following bet; I’d appreciate your advice on whether it has flaws which would make it unwise of me to issue!
*****
The University of East Anglia “hadcrutv3” figures, at
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/, and widely quoted in global warming literature, give the global temperature “anomaly” as 0.444 (2004), 0.475 (2005), 0.422 (2006) degrees Celsius, a mean of 0.447C.
The IPCC 4th Assessment projects a median rise of 3.0C over the next 100 years, or 0.3C per decade. Thus the IPCC sect should expect the anomaly in the 3 years 2014 to 2016 to be 0.447 + 0.3 = 0.747C.
I bet ⡲00 at 2 to 1 on, that the measured mean for 2014 to 2016, will be less than 0.747C (so I win ⡱00 if I am correct).
******
Notes:
a. Some global warming bets apparently span 100 years – I’m not prepared to wait that long!
b. Currently my subjective probability for being right is somewhat greater than 2 to 1, but it’s not 100 to 1 and my aim is to make some money with a bet which should be attractive to both an IPCC adherent and to me.
c. The “hadcrutv3” figures might be unreliable, and can I be sure they will not introduce more thermometers in urban heat islands (I generally choose to trust British institutions until evidence convinces me otherwise).
d. A big El Nino might come along in those 3 years and help to push the temperature over my 0.747 threshold.
e. If David Archibald’s posting is anything to go by, and a weak solar cycle 24 drives the climate downward, my money should be fairly safe.
f. This bet >is
Re #239
See,
The ‘less than’ symbol is interpreted by the blog software as initating an HTML tag. If you wish to display it in your text you need to use &_l_t_; (without underscores) as I will attempt here: < .
If we plot the polynomial interpolation to the variability (anomalies) of the tropospheric temperatures, the last years wouldn’t show a tendency to warming, but to a stable variation between the parameters of the Holocene Epoch.
#228
Nonsense. Why should the ocean-dominated southern hemisphere warm in lock-step with the land-dominated northern hemisphere?
Re: #238
What about the observations in 231? In the Mediterranean?
#243
The much of the Mediterranean is tectonically active. The Roman pillars at Pozzuoli are the classic example of evidence of isostatic sealevel change, first described by Charles Lyell in the 1830s.
Re 199, I don’t have to provide a citation, all I have to do is read the abstract of yours, which says “Most seedlings grown at 150’€‰Î¼mol’€‰mol’ˆ’1 and 30/25°C also failed to grow beyond the small seedling size by day 19.” 150 micro mol is not far off the 180 ppm CO2 of the glacials. The rest of the abstract says that the plants eventually grew up. But if a seed germinates and then spends three weeks in relative stasis, I take that as saying that plants stopped growing. In the real world, a seedling that doesn’t get on with it stands a far greater chance of predation, being washed away etc. Thankyou for trawling through the net to find a citation that supports my case.
On the Lockwood paper, I contacted a practicing solar physicist for his view of solar activity in the last 20 years. This is what he wrote:
“There are not many solar parameters that go back all the way to 1880.
Of course, there are 2 parameters and they DO differ in evolution over the last decades: The Wolfnumber and the aa-index.
The 30-year smoothed aa-index continued to increase even after 1980, while R levelled of and started a prudent decrease.
Additional evidence for the increase of the aa-index is the evolution of the number of protonflares (see my webiste). Contrary to the much weaker sunspotmaximum, there have been so many protonflares during SC23 that I have started to suspect measurements during SC21 were wrong! This tends to support a link with energetic particles. Note the connection only goes for protonflares, not the X-ray flares.”
So, protonflares and aa Index up. Svensmark’s theory holds. At best Lockwood was very casual, at worst he set out to lie.
re 244:
No, the Roman pillars at Pozzuoli are the classic example of evidence of neotectonic land change, first described by Charles Lyell in the 1830s.
RE: #239 – No way I will bet, but here is a(n) (im)modest proposal. Give me a cut of your winnings in return for me shopping around your bet on forums where AGW fanatics congregate. As P.T Barnum said ….. LOL! 🙂 🙂 🙂
I’m still trying to figure out why we have only a (questionable) temperature increase of 0.7 C, associated with a rise in CO2 levels of 35%. Considering IPCC’s putative water vapor feedback, shouldn’t we have seen a larger increase by now?
#237 What it did from 8000-7000 bp is rather a different subject. (Another different subject is why anyone should care what it did ten thousand years ago.)
A lot of the questions are “what if” which assumes the reader will understand it’s a thinking exercise rather than a statement of fact. Maybe you weren’t argumentative, but you frequently seemed nitpicky, purposly or mistakenly misinterpreting things, or disagreeing with a premise rather than an answer based upon that premise (what if’s)
Short answers to claims of illogic and the like.
1. Not a false statement, “the temperature of the planet” is the same as “the median from all the temperatures at all locations along one year”. The median guess is about 14C
2. What’s so impenatrable about it? It’s not important. The “Why” is another issue, one I didn’t go into. (The way you answered this one seemed to show you knew what I meant in #1) (The ‘why’ is that it’s a guess, that goes from 13-16 or whatever.)
3. It might be false if temperature and anomalies were the same thing, but they are not.
4. Not a false premise, more a badly worded answer.
“We don’t know how exact the surface temperature readings are for each station (and thus how accurate or valid the surface anomalies are, since they are derived from that stations). But we do have a general idea of how accurate they are over time, at least from the standpoint of the instruments if nothing else. Plus we have proxy, SST, and Sat readings to compare to.”
Something like that.
5. Not a false premise. “We don’t know” doesn’t mean “we have no idea”. See #4 Also, if I “don’t know” what time it is, and the sun is out, I can surely determine if it’s plausible that it’s midnight without knowing what time it is at all. Rather obfuscatory and untrue we can’t “not know” and “not determine plausibility” at the same time.
6. That the GHCN-ERSST chart from Jan 1880 – Dec 2006 is +.6 C and is not anything that can be debated. It goes from around -.2 to +.4 is a fact. That it’s based on measurements is a fact. That the trend is what it is has nothing to do with the quality of the measurements or if the trend is correct. That’s another issue.
However, since we have other measuerements than the surface, 3, 4 and 5 tend to show warming, and even if they didn’t, they certainly don’t disprove the trend. We should stick to one subject at a time.
7. “Why is it warming” isn’t a scientific question necessarily (and in this case is not). It’s a list of possible causes. Perfectly fine question. Wonderful answer. “If it’s warming, it looks like these things may have done something to the climate system.” It’s not clear to me why you interpreted it as a scientific question.
Notice how we don’t get any idea what’s really being said there? If it’s warming (maybe it’s not) it looks like (but maybe it doesn’t look like) ‘these things’ (list of stuff that may or may not be germaine) may have (or may not have) done something (but not what thing) to the climate system (which I don’t define). Does that Remind you of how any organizations write?
8. Yes, it could be normal. But we don’t know. I can say both, because it could be normal and we don’t know for sure if it is. (Actually, I think that’s more a false dilemma in that answer, because it could be (and probably is) some of both, but we can’t prove any of it.) Why are they mutually exclusive?
9. It’s a non answer. I didn’t say what it could be, or what I thought it was, I told you what others claim it could be, without commenting on the claims. If they are correct or not isn’t part of the answer. Are you saying it couldn’t be mostly from more CO2? I’d like to see you disprove that one! Or prove it for that matter…
10. Fact is there’s more CO2. (Qualification for you, according to ice and air measurements since 1832) Are you saying the measurements are all wrong? I agree “Yes” is a simple answer, but like in #2, if you want “why” answered, that’s another question, one I didn’t go into. It’s not a false conclusion at all, since it’s true. Just because I didn’t put in all the information you expected doesn’t invalidate it.
11. Pretty much ditto 10. In common usage, created. (Qualification for you, not ‘created’ as you interpreted it, but as in “it wasn’t there before and it is now” created)
12. Because of 11 (say “things we do result in CO2 coming out from a conversion process” if you don’t like the word ‘created’ I used in 11) I’d say you’re perhaps begging the question. In any case, “Does the CO2 resulting from the conversion process cause the warming” seems likely, has no proof that what seems to be true is actually true, is in a circular system where the answer could be “both”, and is immaterial as to the answer.
13. Do the public statements of large organizations overwhelmingly support that one hypothesis while knowing and accepting other factors are involved? Is there a debate on what other factors and to what extent? I’m unsure what your issue is with that as stand-alone statements. Are you disagreeing about the public statements and who makes them? I don’t remember anything in there that claimed the phrases were scientific, seems a red herring on your part. And as I explained, I never said “The debate is over.”
14. I do presuppose some warming, but the question is about the danger. So as a ‘what if it’s warming, is it dangerous’ thing. The answer is a non answer, except that some say it is and make guesses about how much based upon different scenarios. Are you saying that doesn’t happen?
15. Yeah, that’s pretty leading. I suppose I could have included world peace, elimination of starvation, more safety against terrorism, reduction in nuclear proliferation. Here’s a more clear version on its own: “Regardless of any other factors, should we be doing things like protecting the environment and developing alternative fuels, no matter the subject?”
16. What’s so confusing? Should we not be working on alternative fuels, increases in efficiency, reduced polution, world peace, elimination of starvation, more safety against terrorism, reduction in nuclear proliferation? (It’s a rhetorical question, of course we should, e.g. “duh”) But if we re-write 15 as above we don’t really need it.
Now 🙂 Am I a denialist or a fanatic?
The Northwest Passage at present:
Click to access currentcolor.pdf
Not very passable.
David Smith, re the graph you provided in Unthreaded #14 67, please provide the data sources as I would like to recreate it myself. Your graph seemed to end in 2004. Is that correct? I am thinking that the solar flare activity in 2003/04 caused the rise at the end of your graph.
#249 Haven’t we gone through this before? Global Warming Potential or GWP. The response of the climate is not linear to forcings. Ocean heat storage is just one of many contentious issues relating to GWP. We are talking about century to millenial timescales here. Ocean turnover, from the cold depths to the warm surface is on the order of 3000 years. I am not an AGW fanatic. But to continue to embrace old chestnuts of the non-thinking political skeptics is to discredit honest criticsm.
Re: #235
Thanks for responding. Can you explain how it got into the coal, which by most accounts is petrified wood, in the first place if not absorbed from the water and surrounding soils while the trees were growing?
As for dimethylmercury, AFAIK, it doesn’t occur naturally and I realize that the dose makes the poison.
# 250
Take it easy, Sam. I’m not accusing you of being “denialist” or “fanatic”. I criticized your aphorisms because they could stun the readers with so many sophisms. My critique is correct, Sam, because you used many, many “don’t knows” and many “buts” (i.g. I don’t know, but I know and I should even when I don’t know the final effects of what I’m going to do); However, that’s not a crime, although it could be confusing.
For example, I’ve read from your # 250, “(Qualification for you, not created’ as you interpreted it, but as in “it wasn’t there before and it is now” created)”. We created or we transformed? We created or we produced? Wasn’t there before, if plants had taken it from the environment to produce food, structures, etc. and after those plants died and their matter was “transformed” by geological processes into fossil fuels?
For your number of 0.7 °C since 1880, is it an anomaly or is it normal? Paleobiology teaches that it is quite normal because we are in the Holocene Epoch and in the Holocene Epoch the fluctuations of the tropospheric temperatures are expected to be from -3 to 3 °C, which are normal for this Epoch.
Again, if you begin a syllogism with a “we don’t know” and you have to conclude on the same issue, you must answer with another “we don’t know”. For example, if I say “How many apples are on the table?”; then, I accept, “I don’t know”; after that I ask, “How many apples can each of us pick up from the table, if we are 10 people and we want to distribute those apples equitably?” My answer must be “I don’t know”. However, if I’m talking about apples but hide them awhile and change my syllogism to strawberries and I conclude my reasoning with apples, my conclusion would be biased. For example, if I don’t know if higher levels of CO2 are “dangerous” for living beings, I cannot affirm that it’s “good” to reduce the levels of CO2.
There are many questions that you assume with “we don’t know” when we DO KNOW them; for example, the thermal attributes of CO2, which don’t match with the presupposed characteristics that could make the CO2 to cause a “global warming”.
Please, tell me what a “denialist” is and what a “fanatic” is, so I can answer properly your last question.
Steve McIntyre and managers of this blog,
Sorry by the example on apples.
RE 3252 Hello, David A. No problem. The Excel spreadsheet, with the data I used and the chart, can be found at Esnips here . (Note that this spreadsheet also contains other data unrelated to the chart that can be ignored.)
ACE is from the National Hurricane Center, with a table of values found here .
Tropical SST is from the NCEP reanalysis program, located here , for the box defined by 18N, 6N, 20W and 60W. I used the reanalysis program due to convenience – you may have other SST programs that go further back in time.
Near-Spain SST is defined by 35N, 45N, 15W and 30W.
The data table extends through 2006 but, due to double-smoothing, the final value that appears is for 2004.
Any questions or clarification needed, please post!
Re #257 The NCEP/NCAR reanalysis is accessed here (first button).
#255 Nah, I didn’t say you were accusing me of anything. Just a poor joke. I’m fine, how are you?
Things can be discussed in various of ways. But in general, either we are talking about the same thing, with a common level of understanding, or we are discussing different things, where we’re probably not understanding. Debate versus Communication? I don’t know.
Those were not logical fallacies, mostly, I don’t think. Because what I meant (and why I meant it) was not really what you interpreted it as — that was all I was saying the last time. At least in my opinion. 😀
Take this example. If I say “it’s warming” what do I mean exactly? If I say “Maybe it’s not warming, or maybe it is, but here’s why it might be warming.” or “Others explain it this way.” That doesn’t mean I must needs be have a deep-seated feeling (or any feeling at all) about such matters; just because I mention it, do I feel strongly? I would say “no”.
A certain level of detail is confusing, especially when discussing matters of opinion versus fact. Not being specific is confusing also. Walking the line between “Vague” and “Confusing” is difficult, unless you know who you’re talking to and what they’re thinking.
But arguing about what “creating” means is not very helpful. That’s why I said create also means “to cause to come into being,” “produce” etc. Certainly, burning gasoline produces things such as CO2? I didn’t mean “create” as in “out of nothing”. Transform might be a better word. But can we agree that if you take something that is not CH4 in the first place, do something to it, and then if you have CH4 you are “creating” methane??
CO2 ‘holds’ heat (or at least infrared in certain frequencies). It might be acting as a ‘battery’ right now. Or maybe not. I’d think if you were in a 5392 message response blog post, you’d still not have anyone agree on most any point of the discussion that they didn’t start agreeing with in the first place. A good place to start might be the properties of carbon dioxide and its role at various levels of the atmosphere, and its interaction with water vapor! Or not. 🙂
The +/-x is an anomaly off some norm for some location. Example, if we measure +12C every day for a year but Feb 12th where it’s +11C, it’s a -1C anomaly that day, or a yearly anomaly of about -3 millidegrees. If 200 KM away it’s measured -4 C every day, but on Feb 12th where it’s -5C; still a -1C anomaly and the same fraction for the year. The fact it’s usually +12 one place and -4 another doesn’t matter; it’s what’s not the temp but the change from “usual” in that place where it’s measured.
+.6 is the current calculated anomaly trend from a gathering of measurements from a base period (1961-1990 from what I understand) for a certain data set. It says nothing about what the “normal” temperature of the planet is, just that when you gather all the measurements from all the locations, it’s that total higher, “recently”, from all the places. As measured and calculated! 🙂 Nobody knows if +1C is better or worse than -1C. There is only that if the change from current of +.5ish C anomaly (or the +.6ish or whatever trend) will get worse, and if that’s bad, and what to do about it.
As far as your analogy. If I don’t know how many apples there are, but I can clearly see there are enough for anyone standing around, I don’t need to know the number, just the general idea. If I need to divide them equally, I have to count the number of people and the number of apples. But what if I’m trying to decide if there are enough apples total in the world to give everyone in the world 20 each? I’d think that clearly there is an answer, and clearly we’ll never know what it is.
Likewise, if I don’t ‘know’ it’s warming, I can assume it is, and take that premise to a conclusion. Just like I can assume the ground measurements are fantastic, or great, or okay, or horrible, or worthless, and take those to a conclusion. It doesn’t mean any of my scenarios are correct or incorrect as a premise. “What if” I have a flat tire doesn’t mean I will, but I can still plan for it.
If I “don’t know” that today is Sunday, I don’t have to say “Today is not Sunday”. Why can’t we say “We don’t know that 385 ppmv CO2 is dangerous.” and then have to conclude “Since we don’t know if it’s dangerous or not, it’s not.” ? What are your chances a 1999 Ford truck will break your leg while on an airplane?
Something along the lines of a denialist argues that we “know” it isn’t warming and a fanatic argues we “know” that it is warming.
It’s more complicated than that, I’m sure. I’d hope somebody here can explain that better than I can right now.
Re #133
I don’t discount those issues at all, I understand them and accept them. As to the issues, not sure about the board going being a fire risk, as the gas in the bulb is inert and not flammable. I understand themercury issue, I don’t fear mercury as others do, and as for thousand dollar clean ups I avoid that by not asking the federal or Local EPA what to do when I brake a bulb. I clean it up and move on, not that I’ve broken one yet. Disposal is a different issue, I’ll leave it to the greenies to cry over it.
Re#54
Mercury is classified as PBT (persistent bioaccumulative toxin), together with other nasty staff as Sr90 or PCB. In environment mercury tends to be washed down into water bodies, where it is converted by anaerobic microorganisms into metil- and dimetil- mercury, and accumulates into sediments. Plants accumulate it, and fish eating plants accumulates it further, and in muscle tissue of carnivores fish concentration of metilmercury could be higher than in water up to 2 million times (according to some article I’ve read). Being bioaccumulative, once consumed it accumulates in human body, and with other sources such as airborne mercury and teeth cavity filling, at the old age increased concentration of metilmercury in human tissue increases probability to cause health troubles. It easily goes through brain-blood and placenta barriers, and can seriously damage the most vulnerable ‘€” brain of the fetus.
There is no safe limit of mercury in the environment. The less is better, especially considering that currently we live twice longer than centuries ago and have plenty of time and possibilities to accumulate the stuff. Antropogenic sources of mercury in our bodies are estimated to be in order of 50% (highly depends on diet, proximity to volcano or coal fired power plant).
Does anyone know of an online version of
Tyree, Corey A.; Hellion, Virginie M.; Alexandrova, Olga A.; Allen, Jonathan O. Foam droplets generated from natural and artificial seawaters ?
I can read the abstract and I’m tempted to jump up and down gibbering Look! Look! but I’ll hang on until I’ve read the whole thing. They mention variation with natural organic matter but don’t say that they’ve tried it with added Tide or bunker oil. I hope they do. It’ll be a simple calculation once they’ve got the results for oil-spill and surfactant-contaminated water: use Latham and Salter’s paper on droplet production to save doing the sums, match the loss of SSA to low level stratocumulus reduction and hence to the albedo drop, use the Kreigesmarine effect to calibrate and… Nobel’s your uncle.
I’d advise avoiding the Folland correction by recalibrating the NA SST with lighthouse data, which, I have just realised, can also give some indication of the pollution effect if you choose your lighthouses carefully — those like the one on Tenerife which is affected by the town’s effluent and others which aren’t — but I digress. See http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=226
Yes, I know, I’m a swivelly-eyed looney, but the CO2 sensitivity is obviously off, the sun cycle has just been holed below the waterline and cosmic rays look dodgy. The ocean surface pollution theory of global warming may well be the last man standing.
I hope they invite me to the ceremony.
JF
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Re # 148 Sam
Would not your essay read essentially the same if we replaced the demon CO2 with “water vapour”?
Re # 153 Steve
In a couple of years when CFLs are failing in millions all over the world, what will you do with the mercury?
#254,
The mercury is in the ground water. When it passes through the coal, it is filtered out.
Same thing happens with uranium.
I’ve read that there is more nuclear energy in an average ton of coal, then there is chemical energy.
#246 David Archibald
That’s a pretty outrageous allegation about Lockwood given that Svensmark’s correlations, and the CLOUD experiment information are based on neutron counts.
Re # 254 John Baltius
Various organic forms of mercury formed in estuarine ocean sediments near Minimata, Japan, near industrial sites. I recall one of these was monomethyl mercury.
In any event, mercury exposure standards vary from country to country. A hazardous rating applies in some countries to the content of mercury vapour from just one typical broken CFL enclosed in a cubic metre of air. This is too close for my comfort to a broken CFL in a small room, especially if children are present. The effect is probably cumulative to a degree as mercury has a long residence time in the body. In 1969 I measured mercury in the hair of my laboratory employees and it correlated with the years they had worked in laboratories (but causation was not investigated). Thus, one broken CFL more or less adds to the effect of a second broken CFL. The poison is NOT just in the dose, it is also in the chemical form of the mercury.
Mercury in coal. When coal is burned, many elements and compunds in the residue are concentrated by large factors. Also, organic carbon undergoing ancient processes of coal formation probably had the capacity to scavenge mercury, which is always partly present as a mobile vapour able to move thorough geological formations and stop if fixed by particular chemicals. Among these are common minerals such as pyrite, iron sulphide, which is seldom absent from coal. Dirty coal can be pretty dirty.
#265 Geoff
US power plants emit more mercury per year than is contained in over 20 billion CFLs, so I’m not too worried.
#238
I’m sure it is, I didn’t put it in that post [I looked back to check] but I have in others. Plus when I say it could be caused by something else its to leave me a safety switch. Because i think the people who are certain are fools.
However how often have we heard a deluge is coming? Hence why if anyone hears the numbers from Florida I’m interested, no glaciers and the high risk. I’ve only found the Canadian ones. I have been emailed that Halifax is slowly being submerged via continental drift. Not sure Halifax or Saint John had a glacier? Churchill definitely.
How can you tell when you are measuring the sea level can you tell if the sea level is moving or the land. The concept boggles me.
Here is an off-thread draft letter to Australia’s national newspaper, which is meant to challenge logic. Point 1 is, if AGW people believe their science, they should stop using fossil fuel derivatives just as fast as people dropped asbestos. Point 2 is, the asbestos companies paid very big sums for hurting people. Is that not what the AGW team are saying fossil fuel companies are doing? Hurting people? Quote follows:
Asbestos was mined by companies and was used to save thousands of lives in firefighting and thermal insulation. It became a public enemy when some forms were found to cause cancer. The mining companies have agreed to huge public compensation. It was said that asbestos companies knew of dangers decades before acting.
Fossil fuels were exploited by mining companies and widely adopted as a public good. Burning fossil fuels has become a public enemy act because of its alleged harm to the global climate. The fuel companies knew of the greenhouse effect 20 years ago but have not acted on it to any significant degree and the majors have agreed that remediation is belatedly needed.
The fossil fuel companies have not agreed on any massive compensation to the public. Instead, they want to raise the fossil fuel cost to the public.
Where is there a logical difference between the cases of asbestos and fossil fuels?
It is said to be carbon credits. Big Oil and Big Coal are talking mabmy-pamby about “carbon emissions trading” which allows business as usual, a higher price to the public and a token donation to some form of energy generation that does not emit C02. What form of generation, its global scale and by when is unclear.
The overall effect of this type of carbon trading is that fossil fuel companies will still burn as much fuel, just as much CO2 will go into the air, but it might possibly increase as China, India, Africa at last get electricity grids, mainly powered by coal and oil.
Excuse me while I slip into my V8 and go buy some smokes and grog, passing several ads bright all night from spotlights, imploring me be buy a more powerful car.
Geoff Sherrington, Australia
re 269
In the 1970s, there was a major environmental scare about methyl mercury from coal burning, hydro-electric dams — practically everything. It came just before the new ice age scare. There were constant news items about dimethyl mercury, Minimata disease and how we were all going to be poisoned by the water we drank. The new media were even showing film of people with cerebral palsy and claiming that this was Minimata disease. Time magazine even had a stry about some Buddhist monks holding a ceremony to curse the chemical factories in Minimata.
As I recall from the 1970s, there was the famous prediction on Nova of environmental collapse by 1975 (currently called a tipping point), a new ice age coming within decades (Canadian public television had a documentary on the collapse of agriculture and mass starvation because of it) and the famous mercury scare. Of course, we are much more sophisticated now. We wouldn’t get caught up in a mass panic like those
Re # 272 Stan,
If you were a chemist you would realise that the availability of a chemical to enter the body also comes into the danger equation. The scanario of an outdoor slag heap of coal residue without people close by is enormously different to that of release of mercury vapour in a small room with people inside. Do a google and check your country’s MODERN health assessment of hazard levels of mercury vapour in confined spaces, then report back for a score out of 10.
Some of the contributors to this thread on other topics are getting close to dogma and away from science. See 254. You need to check your assumptions about the nuclear energy versus the combustion energy in a coal heap. If you really wanted a WOW factor, you could include fusion energy as well, but it would mean little. Having said that, there are some isolated studies in mineral poor countries looking at extracting fissile material from coal ash, but the same does not apply to all coal ash. Not in this century anyhow.
#253
But that’s not what the experts are saying. Thier frame of reference is now measured in years and decades, and not centuries.
#247
Hans Erren, what the difference between isostatic and neotectonic land movements with respect to sea level change?
#270
Isostatic and other land movements can be detected with a GPS.
OT, Steve Mc., I won’t be at CJ’s in COS this Friday. I’ll be down in Pueblo for a tournament. My regular team will be there, however.
Mark
Movements of a fraction of an inch per decade can be detected with a GPS?
JOHN A – Your urgent attention is required. Spambots are starting to make it through. It could really cause issues soon if not addressed! Thanks!
Not that I’m aware of. At least, not with the publicly available data stream. There is an encrypted data stream that is only usable by government agencies, as I recall, but even that doesn’t have fractions of an inch resolution. Perhaps by integrating over longer periods of time such resolution can be obtained, but I don’t know enough to really say.
I’ve got a GPS book on the shelf, but I don’t have a lot of time to investigate. If I get some time, I’ll look into it. I need to learn GPS anyway since, eventually, the system I’m designing will use it.
Mark
re 274:
Pozzuoli moved due to volume changes in the Vesuvius magma chamber:
The temple was build on land in roman times
The temple it sank halfway so the mollusk could leave their marks
the temple was uplifted rapidly be cause the marks only occur in a narrow band.
Hence the movement is nearly entirely neotectonic and not isostatic (which btw has more to do with movements
in the direct neighbourhood of the former icecap in northern europe, and not the mediterranean).
http://calbears.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_4_108/ai_54574597
So isostatic movement is caused by the relaxation of a load, neotectonic movement can have all sort of causess (eg continental drift and volcanism), both are absolute land movement and need to be subtracted to get eustatic sea level movement.
253, S. Hales: Maybe so, but that’s not what the GCMs and the IPCC are saying….
269:
So, let’s add MORE to the environment, eh?
Mr. Milesworthy: I’ll wager that if you break ONE CFL in your home, you will be exposed to more Hg than you will from coal-fired power plants.
Quite honestly, I’ve been using CFLs for a couple of years now and never had any problems with them.
You can get ones that looks like bulbs too that have warmer light. I dont think any of the CFLs I have have ever even burned out, they last a long time.
272: LOL. Remember, the scare tactics are the only thing keeping the communist environmental action groups well-funded. AGW is a perfect cause for them.
#277/279
Google gps and isostatic to find numerous studies using this gps to track small land movements. The error is reduced by integrating many measurements.
#284
Joe B
I have replaced several. True they generally don’t burn out but they do deteriorate gradually and eventually stop working.
#281 Jae
Yes it is what the GCMs and the IPCC are saying. Your point in #249 is similar to the one Lindzen makes.
#282/3 Jae
What is it with CFLs? Buy them if you want to. If you break one and you’re overly paranoid about your health, follow EPA rules which are to air the room and leave it for 15 minutes. When it blows, many years from now, try and recycle it. You’ll get more mercury (and the nasty methyl-mercury) if you eat fish. But if you prefer wasting time and money on incandescents then buy them.
You can improve the accuracy of GPS’s by averaging over time, but not that much. Not anywhere near fractions of an inch, even if you averaged for a year.
288, No, that is not what IPCC and the GCMs are saying. They predict a relatively constant rise in temperature, not some century to 3,000 year lag due to the oceans. BTW, there has been no increase, constant or otherwise, for almost 9 years…None of the models show a “plateau” this long.
re 284, 287-
I have been using CFL’s since 2001. Initially I wanted to save money on electricity, try out these new gizmos that friends of mine had a hand in developing, and reduce the thermal load in the house during the summer. I have had 3 or 4 start randomly flickering after about 2 years of daily use. I had one catch on fire due to a faulty electronics ballast. Fortunately I was in the room at the time and extinguished the fire before it spread.
Overall, the CFL’s I have installed have resulted in lower energy use, poorer light quality AND higher overall cost. Pretty much a disappointment for me. But, entirely consistent with every other proposed fix to the AGW ‘problem.’
Time to head over to home depot and see if they have any of the new 2500 lumen LED’s. They are almost as energy efficient as CFL’s, and I heard the price may come down to $500 each.
#290
The models predict that there is an extra 0.5C to come over a few decades if we stopped emissions completely today – so that’s about 1.2C for a 30% increase in CO2 levels. It wasn’t your original point, but check Chapter 10 Page 763, which show time series from individual models. Steady or falling temperatures over a few years would be quite consistent with many of them.
#291
I think the lesson I’m learning is that some american stores supply their customers with cheap, substandard bulb. So I should stop touting the merits of our superior English lightbulbs 🙂
(yes I know they’re all probably made in china these days).
One of my pet peeves is light bulbs. The major manufacturers have screwed the public badly by making very short-life incandescent bulbs. Because of their short life, I waste energy by using 130 volt bulbs, rather than the standard 120 V. It is far cheaper to pay the extra energy cost than to pay for a new bulb every 900-1,000 hours. Most industrial and commercial establishments use 130 V bulbs for the same reason. Thus, one easy way to save energy and cut CO2 emissions is to require the manufacturers to produce long-life bulbs (they should not cost significantly more than short life bulbs that they are now making). In my experience the 130 V bulbs last about as long as the CFRs.
Re #248: you may have seen that #240 re my #239 warned about missing text following a “less than” sign. The text should have said “this bet is open only to friends and family”. Anyway, you didn’t want to bet so that’s fine.
I would still be interested to know whether any of you think it’s a reasonable wager to make. Possibly most of you here think that bet would be fine at 100 to 1 on…
Cheers, co2rich.
Monterey… Cooling of 8 degrees with respect to the historical temperature. Temperature is now 24 °C. The median for this month is 32 °C!
Whether Hansen is or has been truthful, the press release on records is not truthful because it refers to those records like “global records” and it’s not true. The global mean is not 0.7 for 2007 and I won’t trust NOAA until James had resigned. I think that he will resign until he is seated on the chair of the vice-president.
292:
LOL. “A few years,” eh? Not 8 or 9 years, though! The model predictions are junk science. How many years of flat or decreasing temperatures will it take to convince an AGW extremist that CO2 ain’t that bad. In fact, if the UHI effects and all the adjustment cheating is taken out of the temperature record, it might show that we have been in a cooling mode since 1998 (more in line with the solar forcings). Where’s the predicted rate of sea level rise? Where’s the melting of Antartica? Face it, none of IPCCs “predictions” are materializing. Personally, I am much more concerned with falling temperatures than rising ones, and I’m not alone. This whole AGW thing is likely another frenzy in a long line of environmentalist/Gaia/communist-driven scares that started with the DDT fiasco. But this one is so much more threatening to our economies and therefore deserves much more scrutiny. There certainly is not enough hard evidence of a problem yet to warrant mitigation (the marketplace will continue to drive energy efficiency, and no AGW scare is needed for that). Moreover, unless China and India agree to all this nonsense, it cannot possibly make any difference. It’s all CRAZY.
#264 Yes, we could use water vapor or methane or CFCs etc in place. Methane is closest as to how “bad” it is, but I doubt we’d get anyone much to start worrying about water! Maybe if everyone was driving hydrogen cars and expelling vapor and the humity started climing, that would change… 🙂
But yeah of course the water vapor holds the heat kinda sorta like a battery too and at times absorbs IR a bit.
#289
Hmmm, what if you switch to carrier phase observables, and apply some double-differencing methods? That might get you down to mm-level.
Didn’t Kevin Trenberth basically admit that the models are nonsense?
RE 291.
I went the CFL route a while back. What a bust. every single one of them died from infant
mortality. My sense was the power supply of the house was not exactly clean. That was bourne out
by some simple tests. If you want to go the CFL route, check your power quality first. I burned
up a half a dozen of these things before figuring out the issue.
I always wondered what possible use it would be to find the coordinates of a 16 digit grid square (1 mm) Seems this is it!
Some of the things that have always bugged me about the current climate alarmism and I’ve never really gotten a good answer on. Maybe some here have some answers.
1. What exactly do the AGW proponents think is the “ideal” climate for earth. And what is that ideal based on? What’s ideal for someone in Texas might not be ideal for someone living on the Steppes of Siberia, or in Greenland. Who gets to make the decision about the “ideal climate” and subjugate those who live in less ideal climes to continue the fate of their existence?
2. Assuming you could pick a climate that was ideal, how would you keep it that way? If the sun dims some or a major volcanic eruption occurs, or some other unknown natural variability occurs, how will you increase solar radiation or trap the heat that is here so as to keep the climate warm enough. If the sun increases solar radiation, or too much GHG are put into the atmosphere trapping too much heat, how will you cool down the earth?
3. How much money are you willing to spend to accomplish your goal of a “stable and ideal” climate? Assuming you could in fact achieve such stability, is it worth it regardless of any other circumstances that may arise out of such control? What factors would not make it a worthwhile endeavor? Who gets to decide when such factors outweigh or don’t outweigh such a climate stabilization?
To the last two questions in #148, of course we should be researching and developing alternative energy sources. That only makes sense, and may have the added benefits of a potential reduction in pollution. But of course, CO2, despite the protestations of some states, is not a pollutant. OTOH, refining oil can produce some extremely hazardous substances, like Benzene, Toulene, etc. Personally, I’m waiting on a Mr. Fusion home energy reactor like Doc Brown’s time machine used.
jae says:
One of my pet peeves is light bulbs. The major manufacturers have screwed the public badly by making very short-life incandescent bulbs. Because of their short life, I waste energy by using 130 volt bulbs, rather than the standard 120 V. It is far cheaper to pay the extra energy cost than to pay for a new bulb every 900-1,000 hours.
You have said it but I wish to make it clear.
For a given light bulb, life is something like one over voltage to the fourth or fifth power. Light output goes up with the second power of voltage.
The original Edison bulbs lasted 100 hours. 1,000 hours was considered a big improvement.
In the home bulb replacement is considered a no cost activity. If so you want to have lights that are more efficient – more output for a given electrical in, shorter life.
I just looked at wiki and here is what they say:
* Light output is approximately proportional to V3.4
* Power consumption is approximately proportional to V1.6
* Lifetime is approximately inversely proportional to V16
* Color temperature is approximately proportional to V0.42
So lifetime is severely reduced by small increases in voltage while output goes up way more slowly. Of course the inverse is true. A small decrease in light output will give large gains in life.
Trade offs. Less light, more electricity, longer life. Or more light, less electricity, shorter life.
BTW if mercury is really a problem fluorescent fixtures have been around a long time. All those tubes. All that mercury. We are doomed.
Evidently the <sup> tag is not supported in comments.
* Light output is approximately proportional to V^3.4
* Power consumption is approximately proportional to V^1.6
* Lifetime is approximately inversely proportional to V^16
* Color temperature is approximately proportional to V^0.42
Re:242
Indeed. It isn’t warming up in lockstep. It’s cooling.
The wiki is interesting once you get past the polemics.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_bulb
Re: 279
GPS performance data declassified more than a decade ago indicated accuracies of less than 1 cm3.
Well I’ll be damned… kinematic differential GPS is pretty accurate. Not sure what the recent developments are, however, as the page I was looking at was posted in 2001. It does take a loooong time to integrate, days, but that’s not too bad for survey work.
Mark
#302 Jonathan:
Re #148, the question was a rhetorical one. But thank you. Here’s an answer to your questions.
1. The ideal climate is the one we have now. This warming will cause the glaciers to recede, the oceans warm – rise – flood in conjunction, coral reefs and other eco-senstive flora and fauna to die, animals to lose their habitat, etc, with changes accelerating as GDP increases, CO2 output as a result of that climbs, until such time as Antartica totally melts. Then the entire world will be under water, with no landmass at all except the tops of the highest mountains, which will be warm enough by then to live on and grow food on. Then if anyone’s still alive, they’ll die as the oceans start releasing the heat back over hundreds of years. So it must be stopped, and now.
2. We would keep it that way by reducing CO2 output to near nil, sequestering the bulk of what’s here, and chemically treating the oceans. Further, solar panels would be built in space to selectivly block sunlight, as well as providing the power needed to reduce CO2 output and perform the sequestering while doing so. Any other needs for power would come from wind, hydrogen, and cold fusion. Forced sterilization and the termination of undesirables would be used to limit the number of humans creating CO2 until these technologies are fully developed and until such time as the climate is stabilized back at the levels of the 1950-1980 time frame.
3. Any amount of money is worth it, every single penny of world GDP. We would be in charge of the institutions controlling the money and the organization of everything to do the above, as well as in charge of the central planning and governments needed to do so, because we are the ones who know not only what the problem is, but how to fix it.
Hope that answers your questions.
On the GPS I can give you a short answer, since I am studying something on them…
With a single GPS device it is impossible even to determine a single meter, being the error range for civilian uses at least 30m (elevated to 100m in event of USA in war).
But you can do something to greatly improve this: you can measure with different GPS devices the same place in the same time, then greatly reducing the error range by calculating on all these different measures (be carefull: we need different instruments that measure the same phenomenon in the same place at the same time; only computing, we could never reduce any error – despite what someone at IPCC, NOAA, GISS or Hadley seem to think). There are also ad hoc GPS nets for geophysical and geological measurements of this kind, with errors not more than a few centimeters.
For the Mediterranean Sea: it is surprising, but it seems (on an average) that not only sea level is slightly decreasing, but also that mean temperature is slightly decreasing as the same:
Click to access paper_838_delriovera.pdf
# 309
I’m sure I’ve read it somewhere… Yes, I think I remember… Apocalypses or perhaps Daniel’s prophecies?
#148
Yes, I think it is.
The planet is currently too cold and dry. Just look at the Earths’ ice caps North and South, and vast deserts across it’s mid-section. It wasn’t always this way, and plants give evidence that they evolved to fit a much warmer wetter (and CO2 enriched) environment.
I think the overall health of the planet has been failing for the past few thousand (tens, hundreds of thounsands) years and it is warming and additional CO2 that will help to rescue it and the life that thrives on it.
Sam (#309) who/what wrote such things?
Nasif (#311) I think it is a mixture from Genesis Flood to Nazist eugenethics perhaps…
The DrudgeReport has linked to an Al Gore ACW alarm story, appearing in the Aspen Times. (He’s been speaking theres.) But the locals may be reconsidering their options.
Now, Aspen recently elected a new mayor who is wildly environmentally conscious.
For instance, Ireland vowed to not drive to any campaign event, a pledge he kept. And a small fire hearth downtown that serves as a popular gathering spot will now be extinguished to combat global warming.
But in a side-bar “Quick Poll,” asking “What should Aspen do about global warming?” 52% of the more than 500 responses agrees with the impertinent answer, “Kick out all the Texans!”
Does this indicate a change of heart among these prominent rich people? Who knows, given the huge potential impact of DrudgeReport readership upon the results. But maybe the locals are reconsidering their political commitment to extremist environmental consciousness?
#311, #313: Take a look at Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” from 1729 http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/modest.html
#245
Shame you didn’t read the rest of the paper – you’d have found it interesting.
# 315
The climate change is insufficient to cause extinction directly but may do so indirectly by altering the abundance of suitable habitat patches for particular species. In addition, species that were uncommon before such a shift may become dominant afterward as an epiphenomenon of local threshold effects and regional metapopulation dynamics that have nothing to do with “global warming” at lock species associations into a limited number of alternative states once abundance rise a little above critical levels. This is a natural phenomenon that has occurred on Earth since the beginnings of life and has nothing to do with CO2 atmospheric densities.
#307,
That accuracy is only available to the military. For civilian units, the error is on the order of a couple of meters.
#312 The reason “14 C” is not important, is because it doesn’t really mean anything. I spent a lot of time looking for what the average was, and I found it. 13.4 14 14.3 13.2 15 12.5 – a bunch of numbers. It’s a guesstimate at best (ie a SWAG) and has no resolution or margin of error. There is no real hard data I could find backing it up. It’s just to give an idea.
That’s why all the “global average” is reported as a departure from average from a lot of little places, in total, rather than a number +/-; we just get the +/- because it’s the only thing that means something. Or that might mean something, depending on your view.
As far as if it’s too cold, or too warm, or just right? Maybe.
#310,
How does multiple GPS units improve your accuracy? All of your units are receiving the same signal from the same satellites.
For civilian use, the satellites add a random error to the the time stamp sent from each satellite. If you hold the GPS absolutely still, and average the results of the calculations from a large number of signals, you are supposed to be able to improve your accuracy.
I’ve heard of farmers using two GPS’s. They have a surveyor accurately locate a site, then place the GPS on that spot (and altitude). Since the exact location of the first GPS is known, you can compare the output of the GPS against this known, and calculate the difference. The delta is then transmitted to the mobile unit. By applying the same delta to the output of the mobile unit, you will know where it is to the limits of your GPS system.
#314 Here is another story filed under CNN’s “Planet In Peril” section:
Climate change action: Too little, too late?
#317 Just keep saying that until Antartica melts and you’re living on top of the Alps….
No, seriously, maybe this will explain things better than the actual pamphlet text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_modest_proposal
314, FWIW, I have a relative in Carbondale (near Aspen)who supports the AGW theory, but who now dislikes Gore, because of his hypocracy and moronic extremist assertions. Anyone who can claim that we have only 10 years before catastrophe just cannot have his head screwed on correctly.
# 315
There is not “ideal” climate except for the climate throughout the Devonian Epoch, when the biodiversity and the abundance of individuals from each species were at their high levels. After, in the Carboniferous Period, there was a glacial period and the abundance of species began to decline. Most of the species do not survive the cold, among them all the plants and exothermic organisms. However, most of the species survives perfectly to warming fluctuations up to 10 °C.
Re: 318
Pls note the “declassified” in my comment. It is my understanding that for classified applications accuracies are now in the mm3 range. With the civilian D-GPS on my boat in the Pacific NW I routinely get 10-12ft [3-3.5m].
Alas, I guess Gore HAS to press hard on this. He’s been working on it for 30 years and it is his last chance to “be somebody.”
Re: 318
I should add that the 10-12ft is in the horizontal plane. Accuracies in the “cube” are a function of how many overhead satellites your unit is tracking.
# 323
Hah! I’d like to know what your partner will say when he knows that James is Al Gore’s godfather. 🙂
#319 Another way of showing why “14 C” is not important is to ask “what the temperature should be.” I ask that question often when someone says we need to reverse global warming. Reverse it to what point? The temperature of 1927, 1893, 1742?
°280 Hans Erren, a minor point: the magma chamber in Pozzuoli is not that of Vesuvius but of a complex volcanic apparatus named Campi Flegrei
#309,
I’m not always quick on catching sarcasm but I assume your answers were meant that way.
I realize your original question was rhetorical, but those who advocate doing something, anything, about the supposed imminent demise of humans (see Al Gore and his 10 years to save the planet) have said time and again that action must be taken now. My questions to them are in fact legitimate and as far as I know, have never been answered anywhere. Perhaps your responses wheren’t that far from the truth, which may be exactly why they only advocate taking action, but never specify any details as to what exactly they would do and why, at and what cost.
#320: unfortunately I now have to go, and I know I should post a better file to explain because I cannot stay here and my English is not perfect; but, you can use a net of GPS, each GPS works with trilateration (?) of satellite signals, and as well the net can trilaterate (?) among the GPSs increasing accuracy; and, if you know the exact position of GPSs, you can arrive at centimeter precision by a differential GPS system.
#322: of course, Swift is still famous for his sathyrical papers and novels 🙂
BTW, I note that the recent posts thing in the sidebar isn’t working (at least on my computer. Nor are the ads in the same sidebar. I hope the recent posts come back soon. The make it much easier to keep up with the site.
#296 Jae
If you check the reference in #292 (in the FAR WG1 report, I forgot to say) you will see that, yes, the model results do often show cooling periods lasting many years. So rather than that tirade about models being unreliable, please accept that your original comment, that models predict more warming than that observed, was incorrect.
I think this bears repeating again, and it kinda got lost a little. I wish we could edit….. But it does give me a chance to expound upon it.
People live in places like Fairbanks Alaska, where the range goes from -54 to +37 C in a year. A 91 C range in one single city! Yes, it does hapen to be one of the places with the widest ranges of the US, but even if you check something like the range in Phoenix AZ or even Miami FL or LA CA, graphing .7 C on a 1 C scale (as we often see) rather skews the issue. It’s not very realistic.
What does “Global Warming” look like with the center line as 14 C and a chart range of Fairbanks. Heck, just go 0 C to 28 C with 14 C in the center. Does that give any perspective to this issue?
Think about it another way. If one year it goes from -50 to +35 and the next it’s -49 and +36. Excuse me? OMG, 1 C in a year!!!!!! What shall we do. 🙂 Beats the heck out of .6 in 126 years. (Maybe in reality, it’s not .6, let’s take that for granted that it’s the correct number)
But back to – 54 to +37. Is that ideal? Do you think people living in Fairbanks worry about “the average is 14 C on the planet” (or 12 or 16 or whatever) or that it means anything?
(I really very much doubt they’re too concerned about not even 1 C of “warming” in over a century, either.)
And some people wonder why others ignore their hand waving about disasterous climate change.
On the other hand, think of the plankton!!!!
re #334, Sam-
Yep, there are huge temperature variations every year. Plotting the actual temperature in one minute increments for each location gives you a very fuzzy graph, with some locations having peak to peak variations of more than 100 C over a year and more than 20 C over a day!
Now, the claim is that we can somehow statistically process this noisy signal to generate a smooth line that shows a slowly drifting DC offset of less than 0.02 degrees per year over decade times, while at the same time changing measurement location conditions and test equipment. Then the claim is that thousands of data sets from locations all over the world can be somehow cleverly combined to extract that same DC offset drifting over time. Anyone with electronics experience will realize the difficulty of believing that the extracted DC offset is correct. In fact, when looking at such barely detectable trends in very noisy data, I think McKitrick has a point about questioning how the data is processed, showing that it is very easy to get offset drifts in either direction.
re a few posts on GPS:
You have to have the decryption for the P(Y) signal to get the really fine resolution (P is the actual signal, Y is the encryption). I have no idea who has access to that, though I’m sure just about any US government agency would qualify in some way or another (which is who would be likely to be concerned about a spot of land moving 1 cm over the course of a year). At the very least, they’d probably have access to chipsets that solve the problem.
Mark
#320
It’s called Real Time Kinematic (RTK). For Agriculture it is not necessary for the position of the RTK base to be surveyed by a surveyor. When RTK is used for surveying purposes, it is indeed necessary for the base stations known location to be exact.
RTK is probably not the best choice for measuring land movements because the base is also located on land and if that land is moving also, you have an inaccurate measurement.
Rather, GPS post-processing with multiple receivers is probably how they get the accuracy down to the centimeter scale.
jae says:
Anyone who makes stuff up and posts it as fact…
Unless, you know, you have a quote of Gore saying 10 years to catastrophe.
Waiting…
335: Uh, Mr. Milesworthy, would you please define “many years” for me. I have not yet reviewed the plots again, but as I remember, “many years” in those plots is about 5. I’m talking 8-9, here, Steve. I don’t know how anyone with any scientific sense could defend those GCMs. The problems with them have been exposed by the modelers themselves! You are definitely a true believer, but IMHO, not a true scientist.
340: I hate to answer the resident troll, but I can’t help myself. You don’t get it, do you Boring. When one claims that we have only ten years to act, OR ELSE, that is essentially predicting catastrophe, because fact is, we WILL NOT AND CANNOT DO ANYTHING TO MATTER IN TEN YEARS, REGARDLESS OF GORE’S PONTIFICATING. Even if we enacted some law tomorrow, it would not affect CO2 emissions in any significant way within ten years (or we would all be bankrupt, including you, unless you are some kind of mega-trust baby). And do you seriously believe that China and India will comply with some limit in TEN YEARS? Have you ever followed the time line for implemention of a major environmental law? I didn’t think so. In fact, when Joe Blow realizes that this is gonna hit his wallet big time, the US Congress will melt on the issue and will not take any meaningful action (the blogs and talk radio are changing the political scene, in case you haven’t noticed). It will all be rhetoric and political maneuvering. Hell, we can’t even protect our borders in ten years!
#340
Gore: human species in a race for its life
Waiting on you to acknowledge this or more likely, you’ll claim he was mis-quoted, or taken out of context, or some other such bs.
Gee, better pack a bag or something, didn’t realise it was that bad.
See ya……….
# 340 and #343
Does that mean that Earth will be closer to the Sun as Venus is, or perhaps that the Earth will receive 2687.6 W/m^2 of energy incoming from the Sun?
Assume that the anthropogenic CO2 is the culprit, wasn’t it in the atmosphere some 300 million years ago? Didn’t life emerge when the density of CO2 was above 100000 ppm? Perhaps the photosynthetic organisms do not take CO2 to fabricate food, DNA, RNA, lipids, proteins, carbohydrates, etc.? Wow! Apocalypses now… Hah!
# 340 and # 343
CO2 is not the culprit… I can demonstrate it scientifically, although Dr. McIntyre does not wish that we post on thermodynamics.
re 330:
You are correct it’s a different magma chamber.
map of vesuvius and Flegrean Fields
http://www.lindahall.org/events_exhib/exhibit/exhibits/vulcan/fields.shtml
detailed map of the Flegrean Fields
http://www.mediator.qub.ac.uk/ms/onlinepracticals/Naples/Slides/Bradyseism/Slides/PhlegreanFields.htm
Are the very rich in Aspen really receptive to Brother AL Gore’s dire message?
Digging a bit deeper into the survey data, I get split results. On June 4 of this year, Aspen Times asked what they should do asbout the community fire hearth:
Should the city of Aspen’s fire hearth continue to burn?
Yes, it is a social gathering spot that adds to the ambiance of downtown. 146 votes. (37.92 %)
No, it wastes energy and sends the wrong message about global warming. 104 votes. (27.01 %)
Only if it can be powered by renewable energy. 135 votes. (35.06 %)
Total votes: 385
So, 38% say keep it, while only somewhat fewer say “only if it can be powered by renewablde energy.” Perhaps the Vice Presisdent ought to spend more time in Aspen than he already does?
Re 279 and related Satellite Altimetry, goestasy, etc.
Satellite altimetry accuracy and precision are two different parts of the concept of error. One would not expect to measure geostasy by satellite altimetry. Here is a quote from a scientist at Australia’s Burueau of meteorology, mixing accuracy with precision, in which I asked (with all the shifting around of land and sea), where was there a fixed datum point for calibration? BoM qoute:
How was the datum shown? – Without seeing the particular plot you mean I
can’t say. But normal practice for a plot showing the trend of sealevel
is to set the zero as being what sea level was in some reference epoch,
1992-1999 was used for a while. It doesn’t matter.
keeping satellites on track – there I meant in the horizontal plane, ie
steering the satellite to overfly the same ground tracks. This only
needs to be within a few km, since the footprint of the sounding is many
km anyway.
Noise floor: 100mm is the noise level for 1Hz observations (which are
averages of the original 20Hz observations).Each ‘snapshot’ of global
sea level takes 10 days to sample. That’s 864000*(sea fraction of
planet)= about 600,000. This does not reduce the noise as much as you
might hope because some of the sources of error have large covariance
scales. (End of quote)
The BoM work on a past century long increase in sea level height of 100 mm. How you can neasure a change in a rough surface of 1 mm a year from a satellite is beyond me. For one thing, satellite orbits are disturbed by sea level rises and falls F=G1*G2/d^2. I thought.
Equation Correction
F = G*M1*M2/d^2. How the brain gets rusty 1n 50 years!
Mark T:
That encryption is to prevent spoofing, and unauthorized users cannot obtain code phases from P(Y). However, as per my previous message, carrier phase is more important in mm-level positioning. And there are well known techniques to obtain carrier phase measurement without knowledge of the Y-code. I have a feeling that obtaining that secret code is quite difficult for non-military users. But as spoofing is not really an issue in surveying etc. applications, I believe they don’t even want that code..
tetris,
You have me confused. First you claim that civilian units can get accuracies in the MM range, then you note that your personal unit gets accuracies in the 3M range. (Which is about what I posted as the civilian accuracy)
tetris,
Declassified just means that we are allowed to know what the military units are capable of. It doesn’t mean that civilian units are allowed to acheive the same accuracy.
Nashif,
Triangulating can’t work. Each GPS unit receives the same signals from the same satelliltes. So each GPS unit has the exact same random error built into it’s results. So there’s no way averaging the exact same error will decrease that error. As I said before. Averaging multiple reads will decrease the error, but you only need one unit to do that.
oops
that was to filipo, not nashif. I can’t wait until we have post number again.
Boris,
As you were told yesterday, the Gore quote was in Drudge yesterday, the article can be found in his recent headlines section.
The quote was from the Aspen Daily News.
Not that mere facts will cause you to alter your position.
Only a small fraction of the Earth’s carbon is in organic molecules suitable for combustion.
So there’s no way we can put all, or even nearly all of the Earth’s carbon into the atmosphere.
And to think that Dr. Curry was recently praising Gore for his attention to the science.
UC,
Knowing when the signal arrives is only half the battle. You also have to know when the signal was sent. That’s why you need the decryption. The time stamp is built into the signal packet. The civilian portion with the built in random error is not encrypted, the military time stamp is encrypted.
The satellites are in fixed orbits, so you know where they are at any given time. By measuring the time difference between when the signal was sent and when your GPS unit received that signal you can figure out how far away from the satellite you are. Doing this with three different satellites allows you to plot a position on the earth.
As Geoff noted, changes in gravity below the satellite will cause positional changes in the satellite.
Does the distance that the signal travels through the atmosphere matter? The signal travels a teeny bit slower in the atmosphere compared to a vacuum. When the satellite is close to the horizon it will travel through a lot more atmosphere than when it is directly overhead. I guess the units can be programmed to compensate for this. Once you know where you are and where the satellite is, you can estimate the time delay due to atmosphere, then re-run the calculations with this added refinement.
So what are you waiting for Nasif? Write up your proof that “CO2 is not the culprit”, submit it to Nature, then sit back and wait for your Nobel prize.
# 360
I don’t need a Nobel Prize; I work honestly. Besides the methods are published everywhere, scientific magazines, books, blogs, etc. It would be plagiarism. It’s only a matter of reading and reading well and applying the algorithms without preconceived idea$$$.
The typical obfuscation associated with climate science is spreading to the carbon credit game. Even the Demos are concerned!
# 362
Jae,
I see… Gulp! AGW is a business. AGWists erased the Medieval Global Warming, put Venus at the same distance from the Sun than Earth and… They have turned off the Sun! Help!!!
#345 Don’t forget, besides moving us closer to the sun, we’d need to change our rotation period and direction, orbital pattern, and axial tilt; doing that should also make the moon go away. Oh and change our clouds from water to sulfuric acid, remove the oceans, oxygen, and water vapor, and get rid of all the biomass. That should also stop that pesky carbon cycle. That should do it, since the oceans being gone should also change our plate tectonics to give us more vocanoes and earthquakes. Oh, right, and remove our dynamo from the core to remove our magnetic field.
A lot of things to do before the the thirteenth B’ak’tun completes.
It’s abnormally chilly here in Southern Oregon. We need Albert A. Gore to come down and blow some of his hot air on us.
Re 292
I think that you’re wrong on several accounts with that statement.
First, you’re correlating all past and future increase in global temperature to CO2, which not even the most ardent warmers do. Certainly the IPCC doesn’t. In fact, almost half of that warming took place before CO2 increases could play any significant role, at the beginning of the 20th century, so start subtracting from your figures.
Second, the idea of the committed warming due to the energy imbalance has been around for quite a few years but it’s not faring very well, in my view. A) It requires the oceans to keep warming, which they seem to have stopped doing, according to the latest measurements. B) Last estimates, from Gavin and friends in 2005, proposed that we were doomed to a 0.5 C warming only because of said energy imbalance, to be realized in the next 20-30 years and to be added to the warming we were going to produce by increased GHG emissions. Well, that translates to a decadal trend of ~0.2 C only for the energy imbalance part or the putative warming. To this trend figure one should add whatever we’re going to add through our current and future emissions. With all the shortcomings of the surface temperature records we’re seeing on this website, they are unable to observe a trend higher than 0.17 C/decade. The satellite records show 0.14 C/decade and falling. It’s just not happening, sorry.
Third, as Lindzen reasons, if we take into account both the logarithmic effect of additional CO2 forcing and the rest of the GHG increases (other than CO2), we have already experienced a GHG forcing equivalent to ⼠of a CO2 doubling. Temperature rise so far? 0.7 C, apparently, and a good part of it before the GHG increases were at play.
Re 156
I don’t think that assertion is historically correct. In Europe the barbaric invasions did create havoc, especially in the west, but there’s no documented climate-related world famine that I’m aware of at the beginning of our era. As for the LIA, it saw the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. IOW, the beginning of the end of the chronic famine that has plagued humanity for millennia.
In any case, I’m pretty sure we’d do fine if another cooling period arrived, just as if the warming lasted longer. During the cool mid 20th century nothing less than the “Green Revolution” took place, increasing the supply of food by unprecedented amounts.
#360, 361 Why would they give a nobel prize for that anyway? Hey, are you guys going to start an argument about who’s the better biologist, Deltoid style? 😀
Without getting into thermodynamics… if I understand Nasif correctly, the reason it can’t be CO2 is that the delta T equivalent is only .01 C for a mass of 614 milligrams of CO2 in the troposphere; that it would take about 1600 ppmv of CO2 to actually give us a .6 variation. OTOH, our 698 WM2 of solar irradiance would account for about .5 C of variance. Or that a .185 K per 3.72 MW2 increase in solar radiation would give us .7 variability.
#361
This is your chance to save the world, so don’t to be so modest. Its only plagiarism if you don’t acknowledge your sources.
#359
(non-climatic issues ahead, but I’ll try to make an awkward transition 🙂 )
Yes, it partly comes along the navigation message + one part from code phase.
SA was set to zero in May 2000:
http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/gps/selective_availability.htm
Today, remaining issue is AS, anti-spoofing. In practice, it prevents us to obtain code-phase from the other transmitted frequency. But again, it doesn’t matter, mm-level is still possible (see previous posts )
Relevant info is transmitted in the navigation message, continuously updated Keplerian orbital parameters.
Four different satellites, receiver clock is not that good (well, in most cases )
Yes, ionosphere matters, troposphere matters, former is dispersive, latter easier to model. These (like temperature) are spatially correlated, so other receiver in known location helps. Now, what was the question again? 🙂
I’ve done some related consulting work, but now I’m about to switch to new field. Climate science, no worries with liability, infringements, warranties and all those dangerous legal terms I need to face now.. 😉
#337 It seems obvious to question the trend since 1880, especially given fact that the quality and accuracy of instruments has changed from then to now , and then when one thinks of what we’re measuring and how, and how we are combining it into this meta number that tells us what the Earth is doing from data points that cover a very tiny fraction of its surface.
Notice that this does not call into question the actual measurements, simply what you said, that they are of a detailed resolution, there are many of them, and they’ve been subjected to calculations of various sorts. Even if they actual measurements are valid and accurate, we don’t know if the resolution is correct at which it’s being reported, or if they’re being combined correctly. Let’s just say all of that’s true (even though it probably isn’t) it probably doesn’t matter either way.
Again, all you have to do is graph the anomalies with 14C in the center (or 13 or 15 or whatever) on a scale plus or minus the center to see that even if the derived anomalies are as accurate as can be, it probably doesn’t really matter. 0-28 C with the anomaly at the 14C center on a +/-14C graph is entertaining and as we’ve seen, 0-28 isn’t particularly “a place” where the yearly variability is very much.
Another interesting graph is plotting the anomalies since 1880 on a graph plotting CO2 concentrations from 1832 on their scale (basically 260-390) Overlay the anomalies line onto ~270 but so it doesn’t cover a graph line or the CO2 line, and look at the CO2 285-385 line compared to the anomalies line. You get this huge rise on one, and a little tiny rise in the other you can hardly see (depending on the size of your graph, I’m looking at one that’s about 3″ tall and 7″ long.)
# 368
RichardT,
The world doesn’t need a saviour… Hah! It’s silly to think on it. Save the world of what?
BTW, You can read my articles from http://www.biocab.org
Sorry if this may appears elsewhere on CA…
At http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=122 a CNN(?) Climate program is replayed — comments on HS (oddly missing in FAR) among many other AGW discussions — AIT critique occurs about 21:45 and HS discussion occurs at 24:45.
I renew my request that http://www.icecap.us/ be linked at left in Weblogs and Resources.
#366 Mikel
This is what the models predict, so the statement is correct. Check the WG1 SPM. The point was made in answer to the suggestion that the model results were inconsistent with the headline predictions and observed warming.
And why doesn’t everybody who listens to Lindzen make that statement go and calculate log(1.3)/log(2)! The answer is 0.38, not 0.75.
#372
Oh dear. A mistake in the first line – “The Holocene Epoch includes the last 10.000 years of the Quaternary Period.” Never mind, that’s only about 15% out, so its more accurate than the remainder of your calculations. Your assertion that the early Holocene was globally 6°C warmer is without foundation – very few places were this much warmer – the early Holocene anomaly was nowhere near 12x the modern anomaly.
I can see why you don’t want to publish – peer review would shred it.
RE 366
Here’s just one reference:
you can read the rest here:
I think your confusing cause and effect. The Barbarians came because of the famines and breakdowns in society making it worse.
The Green Revolution was due to science with new crops and farming methods. It had nothing to do with temperature per se.
Sorry messed up the reference
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html
# 376
I can see why you believe in AGW… For this period and since 1000000 (1 million) years the fluctuations in the tropsopheric temperatures are 6 °C or 6 K. That counts from -3 to 3 °C or K, if you prefer. I had a course of Paleobiology; but, if you don’t, please read it from Broecker, Wallace S. Was the Medieval Warm Period Global? Science. 23 February 2001. Vol. 291. No. 5508, pp. 1497 ‘€” 1499.
Regarding what you say it’s a mistake… Holocene Epoch is included into the Cuaternary Period… What’s wrong with that? 😛
Re 375
Hi Steve,
While it’s true that some model predicts 0.5 C warming due to the earth’s energy imbalance, the rest of your statement is incorrect for the reasons I gave.
As for your interpretation of Lindzen’s argument, if I were an RC contributor, I would reprimand you for using the “the same old, tired arguments” but I’m not. In fact, I always appreciate a civilized discussion. So here we go again:
1) It’s not only CO2 that has increased during the 20th century but other greenhouse gases as well: CH4, N2O, CFCs,…The IPCC estimates this GHGs increase to have produced a forcing of 2.3 Watt/m2, whereas a doubling of CO2 would be 3.8 Watt/m2.
2) Further increases in CO2 (and other GHGs) should continue having a logarithmic effect on the total GHG forcing.
Lindzen thus estimates that the total GHG forcing we have experienced is equivalent to 75% of the forcing of 2xCO2. And the observed T increase has only been 0.7 C, a good part of which the IPCC itself assigns to natural factors at the beginning of the 20th century. End of the story.
# 376
RichardT,
More to read this weekend:
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Lewis, M. W. The Flight from Science and Reason-Radical Environmental Philosophy and the Assault on Reason. Editors: Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt and Martin W. Lewis. 1996. New York, NY.
Petit, J.R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D., Barkov, N.I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., Bender, M., Chappellaz, J., Davis, M., Delaygue, G., Delmotte, M., Kotlyakov, V.M., Legrand, M., Lipenkov, V.Y., Lorius, C., Pepin, L., Ritz, C., Saltzman, E., and Stievenard, M. 1999. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399: 429-436.
Sykes, Bryan. 2001. The Seven Daughters of Eve. W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. London, UK.
He!
372, Nasif. I cannot access your graph here.
Re 377
Precisely my point.
Harvest failures were much more likely in a cooling world than in a warming one, I’ll give you that. But nowadays that’s not a very relevant factor.
A question for all the bloggers in this site:
How is it that when AGWists have lost the thread they resource to attack and try to minimize the knowledge from others arguing that the alluded person has not (corrupted) “peer reviews”? Does it mean that the work of scientists with no “peer reviews” is wrong? That’s silly… We know that almost all the current scientific magazines follow the (flawed) mainstream of AGW.
# 382
Jae, let me ask what’s the problem.
AGW hits Australia’s famous surfing area on the Gold Coast as recorded below at the official Gold Coast website (it is winter, after all, down under):
Gold Coast shivers to record cold
20Jul07
IT’S official we’re all ice cubes. Well, not quite but the Gold Coast has recorded its lowest temperature since records began at Coolangatta.
While Coolangatta dipped to just below zero this morning, Maroochydore plunged to -1 degree celsius as the Queensland tourist strips shivered, a weather bureau spokesman said.
“It’s so unusual getting temperatures near zero with the ocean being so close,” he said.
Elsewhere in the south-east, temperatures did not quite reach the record lows of yesterday, when Brisbane Airport fell below zero for the first time since records began.
However, while it “officially’ ranked as the Gold Coast’s lowest temperature many residents further inland reported slightly warmer conditions this morning.
Yesterday Robina, Mudgeeraba and many other suburbs were hit by frost, forcing some motorists to scrape ice from their windscreens before heading to work, while those in the Hinterland recorded significantly lower temperatures.
One Canungra resident claimed the temperature at his home had dropped to -7C.
Mudgeeraba resident Norm Forrest rose at 6am and had to scrape ice from his vehicle.
Temperatures at the Springbrook Observatory and O’Reilly’s Resort dropped to 1C
Brisbane’s temperature fell to just under five degrees overnight, while the airport was again chilly at 1.8 degrees.
The Darling Downs, in the state’s south-west, was again the coldest region, with Applethorpe recording -6.6 degrees, Warwick -6 degrees and Dalby -5.8 degrees.
The frosty morning temperatures were not confined to the south, however, with Rockhampton, in central Queensland, falling to 3.1 degrees, almost 10 degrees below the average.
The bureau predicts warmer temperatures on the weekend due to strengthening south-easterly winds.
Sorry, for # 386, I should have credited the website with the links below:
http://www.goldcoast.com.au/
http://www.goldcoast.com.au/article/2007/07/20/796_gold-coast-top-story.html
#376 #379 etc I wasn’t seriously suggesting we start a “My econonomic theory is correct, you are not a real economist, because you said y” argument!!
Jae,
Sorry, the graph will be published again in a few minutes, but it has been adjusted to the last hour “adjustments” by NOAA. I had to amend that graph because the data from NOAA “changed” in the last year. I was not sure to have computed the number of solar flares class X erroneously because I counted them from the reports that I receive every day. Nevertheless, trying to be 100% truthful with the readers, I had to modify the graph because the current reports are different from those that I computed in 2005. A similar thing occurred with the graphs on TT since 1978 to date because the binnacle of NOAA changed abruptly. However, in the last case we have other sources so we can see who’s right and who’s wrong.
The question must now be asked, did climatic summer end on the US Pacific Coast, north of 37 deg N Latitude, on July 10th? Objectively, we are now completing our 10th straight day of early to mid fall weather. There are additional mid latitude cyclonic systems currently prog’d to follow tracks within their error bars of repeating the path of the cold front we had a few days ago. Additional cut off lows like the one which affected us on the 10th and 11th cannot be ruled out either. The key will be, whether or not things return to a “normal” summer pattern over the next two weeks. If they don’t, it will be quite hard for the storm door to close, once the Pacific High starts to move even further south in August. If it indeed turns out that climatic summer ended on July 10th, that would constitute an all-recorded-history record for the earliest onset of climatic fall, here.
Steve Sadlov, what’s your location now?
How can Cyrosphere Today be so far in error? They show hundreds of miles of ice free sea north of Alaska, but here is reality:
http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/ice.php?img=ice
RE: #393 – Upper 30s North, US Pacific Coast.
Steve Sadlov,
Could you be so kind as to give me the link to Cryosphere? Thank you!
Cryosphere Today:
(Home page – simply cut out the arctic.jpg)
I used to think this was a good site, but then they started adjusting …..
RE: #392 – By the way, last year, climatic summer ended in August here. The fog went away, and we got dry cold fronts, which ushered in typical early fall weather. Problem last year was, it took us until mid December to get our late fall weather – 3 weeks late. Hence, our shortage of moisture, at present. Hopefully we get another early onset of climatic autumn, but the rainy version.
Steve… The difference is enormous! Have you seen their plot on Bering Sea Ice? The Bering Sea would be absolutely free of ice!
#399 Doggone, Time to invest in the Northwest Passage Transglobal Artic Shipping Company (NoPeTrAShCo). With IPCC predictions, THE time to invest is now, beat the Rush. (Note to investors, SEC requires us to inform potential investors that IPCC, data adjusters, and climate modellers have been correct -15 of 30 likelihoods (predictions, unless you want to hold said IPCC, data adjusters, and climate modellers accountable for their work, then please veiw definitions on IPCC rules and procedures (note that by rule 10 concensus is the overriding methodology for all likelihoods)…audits are not done nor are they appreciated, see rule 10).
# 400
John F. Pittman,
It’s not true… Read # 392 to # 399. Anyway, I cannot invest in trivialities, so far.
BTW what’s the meaning of “doggone” in Hebrew or in Spanish? Thank you.
Question; does anyone know, and care to share:
1. How many grid squares are there? (It seems 288 15 x 15 degree squares, or 2592 5 x 5)
2. How many show warming and how many show cooling?
3. What is the ratio of warming versus cooling grids compared to the number of stations in each square.
4. How many of each are mostly water versus mostly land? (70% ish?)
As far as I can tell, each degree of lat or long is 69 miles or less, and so each 1 degree square is at most 69 square miles. That puts a 2 by 2 square at 138 square miles and each 5 by 5 square at 345 square miles, maximum. However, the issue is that by the time you get to +/- 45 degrees north or south, it’s something like 49 miles per degree. Not sure how far by the time you get to 90 degrees +/- N/S at the poles. Around the poles, each square is far less of a size in area than it is at the equator.
So from looking at it, each quadrant has 72 squares (12 by 6) so that would be a total of 288 15 by 15 degree lines for all four quadrants, or 2592 5 by 5 lines. But since the degree squares grow smaller in actual area as they converge upon the poles, and since many are comprised mostly or only of water, it makes it difficult to see what’s going on.
Anyone with some simple answers as to the numbers (how many squares, the size of each in some sort of chart)….. Certainly, if this is being measured, there’s some source with the info on the specifics.
Nasif, doggone is like dagnabit!, dang!, damn! An idiom. En espanol, es mas que, um, uh. Mas que ‘!si!’ o ‘!ah!’ o ‘!es tiempo para!’
# 403
Thank you, Sam!
Re: 353 and 354
Mark,
No confusion. I know what “declassified” means: based on best available examples, it is the least sensitive performance limits a government agency is willing to let us in on. Pls re-read my original comment and you will note that I did NOT suggest in any way that civilian units have the mm3 accuracies that units in classified applications now appear to have.
RE: #399 – Clearly, whatever method is being used only reports old ice and new ice above approx 6/10ths. I understand they take raw data from remote sensing satellites then apply some sort of “process” to it to get the images. Either the satellite data, the processing or both, are in error.
Steve, here is the 4 km resolution visible satellite image of the Beaufort Sea from a few hours ago.
I have to say there is less ice now than in previous years but it nowhere near what the Cryosphere Today is showing. The ice seems to be quite broken up and the NOAA, Cryosphere Today must be using a new algorithm that counts out broken ice.
“CO2 is not the culprit… I can demonstrate it scientifically,”… But the proof won’t fit in the margins of this blog.
RE: 397
Steve, send a little of that fall weather our way. We have now gone over 6 weeks with normal to above normal temps & no wetting rain (snowpack was low as well) and the fires are getting scary. I was on a fire two weeks ago that kicked our butts all day & ended up as the largest in Utah history. What was frightening about that fire and the others we are having is that the weather hasn’t been all that bad – RH has been low, but we have yet to have a lightning bust combined with frontal passage producing high sustained winds (we always get a few days like that). When that happens I am afraid we will be burning up houses California-style.
Minor website issue-
I get lots of “a” with carat on top, euro symbol, and little trademark symbol. should be html of course-include text to bold, under line or such-
-but what is it?
no problem with other websites.
A blog posting about the problems that can occur when source code is not made available, from a theoretical ecologist.
Sam,
RE #401
A 5×5 grid box centered 2.5 degrees from the pole is roughly 4% the size of one centered 2.5 degrees from the equator. 50% of the surface area of the globe is between 30N and 30S of the equator.
Here’s a link to a calculator if you wish to check out some values. Latitude values should be kept less than 90. (89.99 is ok)
Spherical Calculator
Trivia. One nautical mile is equal to 1/360th of the circumference of the earth. About equal to 115% of a statute mile.
D’oh! Time to go to bed.
Above should say one degree of latitude is equal to 60 nautical miles.
If one nautical mile is 1/360th the circumference of the Earth then the Earth is 360 miles around (roughly).
It is actually supposed to be 1/60th of a degree.
Small correction to #380 to incorporate IPCC AR4 figures:
Total radiative forcing due to long-lived GHGs: 2.63 W/m2.
Radiative forcing due to 2xCO2: 3.8 W/m2
2.63 / 3.8 = 0.69.
Re: #411-13
The international standard definition is: 1 nautical mile = 1852 metres exactly.
I have a question that has me troubled. With the continued delay of the 24th cycle,what happens if the 24th doesn’t come all through the winter.
It will be colder but don’t we still need the same factors as always to have increased snow ? Or is some type of blizzard guaranteed because of the weather pattern displacement ?
I see the TSI is continuing to drop steady from the 8,00 year high,the last part of the 20th centuary.
#380 Mikel
A useful explanation of the Lindzen calculation. But he is still wrong.
Forcings are given relative to the year 1750. Net forcing in 1900 was about 0.5W therefore net change in GHG forcings through 20th Century is 1.8W – about half (with most happinging in the latter part of the century). If it is assumed “inbuilt” warming is actually 1.1 (and I don’t find your comments against that convincing) that implies about 2.2C for 2xCO2. If we took the 1906-2005 temperature change of 0.74C would suggest more than 2.2C. Of course we need to subtract a bit for the sun, but we also need to add a bit for aerosols. He shouldn’t be so dogmatic about just the GHGs.
You keep mentioning the logarithmic issue, but I already know that, and it is catered for by models.
Re#417, Steve Mile’s
OK with your estimations.
Take a courage to make falsifiable prediction of global temperatures over 5 years due to looming CO2 emissions. And do not urge to take into account PDO, ENSO, aerosols, solar connection or alike, because you do not account for it in your 20s century warming attribution.
#307
Tetris weren’t they off when measuring Mount everest?
Besides I don’t know if fisheries and oceans {my original source}is using them they don’t say.
Wonder If Al Gore is when he fear mongers re Florida,…
Re: 411, 413, 415
1nm = 1/60th degree along a meridian = 1 minute of arc = 1852m = 6080ft. The British Admiralty adopted the rule of thumb that 1nm = 6000ft. By extension: 1 “cable” = 600ft; 1 “chain” = 60ft; 1 “fathom” = 6ft, terms used at sea to this day in the languages of seafaring nations.
Calling Mr. Milesworthy…I’m still waiting for your definition of “many years.” I wanna see results from a GCM that show an 8-9 year hiatus on the steady march to Dante’s Inferno.
Further flooding and record low maxima in the UK today. Many places not getting above 11/12c in the peak of the summer. THis July is running around 4c cooler than last year. Weather of course..
A random thought — anyone whose paycheck depends on research on GW should think about what happens if the developed nations pass a carbon tax. My guess is that GW research budgets will reduced, on the argument that there is no more to study — we have dealt with the probem. After the 1969 moon walk the NASA budget declined by half over the next few years. So, GW researchers, this may be as good as it gets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget#Annual_budget_breakdown_through_the_years_1958-2007
Jae,
Very thanks for make me notice that that graph on that page had been erased. The problem was fixed yesterday. You can read the page when you have a chance.
By the way, NOAA forgot to “adjust” the numbers of M-class solar flares. For the period of November 1997 to December 1998, the number of X-class solar flares was changed from 87 to 38, 2.29 times lower.
If you get the polynomial interpolation for the tropospheric temperatures from NOAA for the period 1978 -2007 and compare it with the polynomial interpolation of the UAH data… guess what… The NOAA data is higher than UAH data by….. Yes! 2.29 times, except for those that they couldn’t “adjust”, for example, 1987 and 1998.
Hey, Jae! Wait seated and peaceful for the answer of Mr. Milesworthy; I think he will take some time for giving an answer to you because he would be analyzing your question with James and Alexander, or… perhaps in Wikipedia?
Re: 391 and 422
A two day bubble of hot air [32 Celsius in Vancouver July 10-12] aside, the trend for the Canadian Pacific NW coast remains the same as it has been since Nov-Dec 2006: precipitation way up [our water collection tanks are nearly full vs. 50%] and temps are far below norm [yesterday 15C and today 16C both vs. 26C norm. Fruit and vegetable crops are badly hit. Expected low tonight for the NW part of the province: 3C….!! This is very imply autumn weather and we aren’t supposed to see La Nina in all her splendour until later this year.
Re 417
Steve: thanks for understanding that your interpretation of Lindzen’s argument was not correct. Perhaps your opinion on the people who listen to this evil man has improved a little? How about just reading yourself what he actually says: http://www.timbro.se/pdf/060505_r_lindzen.pdf ?
As for your new line of argumentation, there’s a lot to say about your figures but first you need to appreciate that Lindzen is contrasting the alleged high sensitivity to double CO2 to factual observations. For that he uses the scarcely controversial radiative properties of trace GHGs (high level of understanding, in IPCC language) and its measured increase during the past century.
Of course, now that you understand what he’s on about, you can opt to obscure his reasoning with the masking effects of alleged forcings, the understanding of which is admittedly “low” or “very low”. But what’s the real use of a -0.5 +/- 0.4 W/m2 forcing estimate with a “low level of understanding”, such as the one the IPCC uses for sulphate aerosols?
In any case, bear in mind that we have a very high percentage of the 2xCO2-equivalent forcing already accomplished (50% would be your own figure) but only a fraction of the 0.7 C increase directly attributable to it. With all “in-built” warmings and “masking effects” we’re still short by a factor of 4 to 10 for the canonical 3 C figure. I can’t see that happening, honestly.
BTW, if you explain to me how sulphate aerosols (the crux of the issue, IMO) managed to cool the southern hemisphere in the mid 20th century or are failing to cool China nowadays, I may start taking the AGW scare more seriously.
Elite criticism and popular acclaim has greeted the The Great Global Warming Swindle before. In a response the recent airing of on ABC (Australia), Martin Durkin opines on the five reasons why ACW is coming apart, exacerbating the shreek.
Regarding one of our favorite topics here, Durkin says this about the matter:
Then there’s the precious “hockey stick”. This was the famous graph that purported to show global temperature flat-lining for 1000 years, then rising during the 19th and 20th centuries. It magicked away the Medieval warm period and made the recent warming look alarming, instead of just part of the general toing and froing of the Earth’s climate.
But then researchers took the computer program that produced the hockey stick graph and fed it random data. Bingo, out popped hockey stick shapes every time. (See the report by Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Virginia and others.)
In a humiliating climb down, the IPCC has had to drop the hockey stick from its reports, though it can still be seen in Gore’s movie.
Overall, THIS is a gratifying read for CA regulars.
Nasif,
do yu have any opinons on the smoothing “technique” applied in the Lockwood and Frolich paper.
I found it rather odd. Perhaps SteveM will weigh in
# 429
Steven Mosher,
The graphs from Lockwood and Frölish are flawed:
1. The method that they used to smooth the lines was applied only to maxima of R (sunspot number), dismissing the TSI. This practice hides the TSI minimum values, which for this issue are more important than the maxima. For example, if the minimum of TSI in 1975 was 1365.5 W/m^2, it would contrast dramatically with the minimum of TSI of 1998 that was 1366 W/m^2 (0.033% higher). That would make the Sun in 1975 “colder” than in 1998. However, if we compare minimum values with maximum values, then the Sun would be frankly “warmer” in 1998 (when the energy output was 1366 W/m^2) than in 1975 (when the energy output was 1366.1111 W/m^2). Today (21/07/07), the global TSI was 1367.6744 W/m^2); hence, we see that we must not smooth maxima values through movable trends because we would be hiding the minima values, which are more important because the baseline of the “cooler” or lower nuclear activity of the Sun are higher everyday. The coolest period of the Sun happened during the Maunder Minimum when the TSI was 1363.5 W/m^2. The coolest period of the Sun from 1985 (an interesting blotch is that in 1985 the TSI was 1365.6506 W/m^2 and in 2000 was 1366.6744) to date occurred in 1996 when the TSI was 1365.6211 W/m^2.
2. The graph of tropospheric temperatures is Hansen’s twisted graph. Many of us for many times have demonstrated that it does not match with reality.
3. Lockwood and Frölish dismissed entirely the original works of Judith Lean (an AGWist) published in 2001, which mysteriously disappeared from NOAA site. However, you can review the data at NASA:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/lean2000_irradiance.txt
The spam filter is blocking Nasif’s messages – I’m posting this on his behalf.
# 429
Steven Mosher,
The graphs from Lockwood and FràÆàish are flawed:
1. The method that they used to smooth the lines was
applied only to maxima of R (sunspot number),
dismissing the TSI. This practice hides the TSI minimum
values, which for this issue are more important than
the maxima. For example, if the minimum of TSI in 1975
was 1365.5 W/m^2, it would contrast dramatically with
the minimum of TSI of 1998 that was 1366 W/m^2 (0.033%
higher). That would make the Sun in 1975 “colder” than
in 1998. However, if we compare minimum values with
maximum values, then the Sun would be frankly “warmer”
in 1998 (when the energy output was 1366 W/m^2) than in
1975 (when the energy output was 1366.1111 W/m^2).
Today (21/07/07), the global TSI was 1367.6744 W/m^2);
hence, we see that we must not smooth maxima values
through movable trends because we would be hiding the
minima values, which are more important because the
baseline of the “cooler” or lower nuclear activity of
the Sun are higher everyday. The coolest period of the
Sun happened during the Maunder Minimum when the TSI
was 1363.5 W/m^2. The coolest period of the Sun from
1985 (an interesting blotch is that in 1985 the TSI was
1365.6506 W/m^2 and in 2000 was 1366.6744) to date
occurred in 1996 when the TSI was 1365.6211 W/m^2.
2. The graph of tropospheric temperatures is Hansen’s
twisted graph. Many of us for many times have
demonstrated that it does not match with reality.
3. Lockwood and FràÆàish dismissed entirely the original
works of Judith Lean (an AGWist) published in 2001,
which mysteriously disappeared from NOAA site. However,
you can review the data at NASA:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/lean2000_irradiance.txt
Re #416, we are still two years off solar minimum. So far, Solar Cycle 23 is 11.1 years long. Solar Cycle 4, which preceded the Dalton Minimum, was 13.6 years long.
Might I please be permitted to get back to satellites? There are two reasons.
First, it is stated that sea temperatures are rising and the laws of physics dictate that they will expand if more than a few deg C. to start with. It is claimed that satellites can measure the expansion, but since they have been operating for say 20 years, then there is a limited launching pad for the data. Second, it is said that the sea temperature can be measured from satellites; and that sea warming confirms land warming.
We don’t make satellites here in Australia, so I’m relying on USA, French, Russian etc authority.
Satallite altimetry. I have seen that the exact centre of the globe is to be used as a datum point by some researchers, but that its position is known to only a few mm. Assuming this correct for this argument, the height of a satellite above this datum depends on the proximity of gravity anomalies that perturb the orbit, as well as on the model used for the shape of the earth, which we all know is not a perfect sphere. So, the distance from satellite to surface depends on where it is for more reasons than mere altitude. If it is over the sea, where there is no visual way to establish ground truth, one has to assume that the satellite signal is pointing directly at the point being measured, with practically no latitude for angular displacement, because millimetre per year differences are being sought. It has to be normal to the surface (unless other methods like multisatellite triangulation are used). I don’t know if they are.
What worries me is that we are accumulating a record of satellite measurements to which corrections have to be applied, smoothing and autocorrelation examimed – – you guessed it, the same problems that plague historic temperature measurements. Are we going to get a satellite hockey stick graph too?
Satellite Temperatures. We already have two different sets of satellite data that do not match for temperature. In fact, they are so apart that they are useless. One is flat for the last few years (nasa.giss, from memory) and the other rises. Do they differ because of wrong engineering design or because the “data corrections” are not understood well enough? Some AGW people here say that the bad satellite data were not properly spliced from one observation period to another and that not enough was subtracted from the raw data for the cooling of the ionosphere or troposphere or some sphere whose name I forget. I want to forget it because I want satellites to give me three condensed answers:
(a) what is the actual accuracy with which the height of land and water can be measured relative to the centre of the earth?
(b) what is the actual global temperature change recorded by a relaible satellite, all b/s aside, over the past 10-20 years, for sea, land and ice?
(c) what has been the variability of any of sunshine emitted before it hit the earth, preferably expressed as UV, Vis and short and long IR?
Question (a) has some personal interest because I long knew Prof S. Warren Carey (“Sam”) who was an early adopter of continental drift before it was accepted by the mainstram, and who went on to hypothesise that the earth was expanding naturally in any case.
Is succinct help possible from the formidable assemblage of Climate Audit brain power? No guesses, now, just firm statements of data.
Nir Shaviv: Why is Lockwood and Fröhlich meaningless? c/- Reference Frame:
here
I wonder if any of the experts would have the time to answer a question on this UK blog?
http://burningourmoney.blogspot.com/
Title: Slightly OT- Global Warming
This is quite a popular blog & any reponse would be seen by a good number of people over here Thanks Ian
It’s happened again. Snow in Santiago, Chile http://img.emol.elmercurio.com/2007/07/21/File_2007721182012.jpg
This used to be a once in a 20 years event or so, but this winter it’s happening for the second time and there’s a new very cold front forecast for Monday/Tuesday. Last week all-time record minimum temperatures were recorded across the country.
I’d hate to sound like the typical warmer, but with all the record winter weather reports coming from all over the southern hemisphere it’s getting increasingly difficult to believe that this is just “weather”.
And the NH is not showing much warming either right now. Western Europe is surely experiencing a miserable summer, just as parts of the US. In the meantime, GISS would have us believe that 2007 is being the hottest year on record… Perhaps Hansen was somewhat right in that we have 10 years or so left (to see that something noteworthy is really up:-).
Looks like it’s about time again for an new unthreaded post. At the rate we’re going, perhaps you should just change them to “Unthreaded: Week of July 22-8, 2007”.
#417
You should be able to find this forcing at the tropics at the mid tropespheric levels first. Has anyone been able to confirm this. From what I can see from GISS data, it is very easy to link most of the warming since 1995 to a synching of both a AMO optimum and a positive PDO.
#427 Mikel
Lindzen has had many years to craft his arguments, and the misdirections are therefore difficult to pin down. Arguments about 2xCO2 sensitivity are utterly irrelevant when discussing models since models are run in hindcast with approximately correct levels of GHGs and do 21st Century projections with GHGs specified by the IPCC emissions scenarios (ie. not fixed to 2xCO2). So we’re back to the argument as to whether the models reflect reality in hindcast. And contrary to what was said earlier, they do.
However, by the time you’ve recovered from this 2xCO2 misdirection (which completely ignores the delay in the system which you happen not to like), he hits you with “the hindcasts were fiddled by unreasonable assumptions about the effect of aerosols and TSI levels” accusation, followed up quickly by “aerosols are far to complex for humans”, “who knows what natural variability can do”. Now that you are thoroughly softened up he finishes you off with a hard poke in the eye by introducing the Iris theory.
All this neatly bypasses the fact that the physical arguments for an equivalent 2xCO2 warming of 1C or so without feedbacks are strong, arguments about the uncertainties of aerosol forcings are irrelevant with respect to this, and the Iris theory in the doldrums.
#421 Jae, #425 Nasif
Nasif, I’m particularly offended by your response – (and who are James and Alexander?) I have already given a citation for my answer in #292 and #335 – IPCC FAR, page 763 (Chapter 10).
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html
The A2 graph in the top left shows that a number of models have long periods (10 years or more) of cooling or steady temperatures superimposed on a warming trend. It’s a bit of a spaghetti graph, but it is easy to pick out some lines with these features. So I’m glad you made me look at this more carefully – I can keep my faith in the physical understanding of CO2 even if temperatures remain constant for another 5-6 years (since warming has slowed since 2001, not 1998), though I wouldn’t bet money on that happening.
There are no new comments on this unthreaded 15 since nearly 16 hours ago. Whats going on? Site looks messy too.
Mikel, in #427 you say:
I have the same problem with aerosols you have, Mikel.Here is the GISS computer model estimate of the results of tropospheric aerosol forcing:
The GISS result shows the greatest cooling effect in Europe (30-60°N, 30E-60W, blue rectangle above). The greatest warming effect, on the other hand, is in North Africa (0-30°N, 30E-60W, red rectangle above).
Europe shows cooling of zero up to -7 W/m2 forcing, while North Africa shows warming of zero up to +7 W/m2.
We would expect this huge difference in forcing (up to three times a doubling of CO2) to be reflected in the temperature records of the two areas, with Europe warming less than North Africa. But HadCRUT3 records show no such thing, the warming in both areas (1880-2000) is 0.05°/decade.
Other areas reveal the same thing. GISS says the area in China (30-40N, 120-130E, green rectangle above) had a cooling from tropospheric aerosols of -6 to -7 W/m2, way more cooling than North Africa or Europe as a whole – but it warmed more than either one, 0.08°/decade.
In other words, it’s just computer games with no relationship to reality. The claims of aerosol cooling/warming are not supported by the data.
w.