Climate Audit

fFreddy

Does anyone know what has happened to Anthony Watts’ site ? It seems to have been down for a few days.

Bruce

CO2 Did not cause the end of the last ice age.

Carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, a new study in Science suggests, contrary to past inferences from ice core records.
“There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change,” said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, slated for advance online publication Sept. 27 in Science Express.

“You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages.”

Deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2, the study found. The finding suggests the rise in greenhouse gas was likely a result of warming and may have accelerated the meltdown – but was not its main cause.

Nasif Nahle

Steve McIntyre,

Please, consider the next links and tell me if they’re useful for your objective. All of them were googled:

http://physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-174215.html

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/2/1/014001/erl7_1_014001.html

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2006Q1/211/Week3revisedX6.pdf

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7087/full/nature04679.html

Thank you!

Scott-in-WA

Nasif, to your knowledge, has experimental research been conducted to determine the actual emissive behavior of C02 as it resides in the atmosphere?

If such research has not previously been conducted, how would it be performed, and with which tools and techniques?

Steve McIntyre

#9. The issue is not finding other estimates to dispute Schwartz. Schwartz is at least an attempt to derive a sensitivity and I’m thinking about posting on it. But Schwartz is not an exposition of mainstream theory. Now the fact that Schwartz does not cite any study deriving 2.5 deg C is at least a form of evidence that a comparable study doesn’t exist. Some of the statistical criticisms of Schwartz BTW seem fair enough to me – the only problem that I have is that the criticisms apply equally to IPCC and are totally inconsistent with Mann’s prior work.

Nasif, please don’t send me references to something that is simply posted on the internet saying what Modtran output is. I know what Modtran output is and that is only one small facet of the problem. Also I’m not interested in something on the internet; I’m interested in a proper peer-reviewed exposition. Also please at least try to read the article – I’m not interested in one more report of a range of model outputs. I know what the model outputs are. I’m looking for a detailed exposition and argument – something that’s as detailed or more detailed as Schwartz and that Gavin Schmidt would agree with.

Mark T

It is my opinion, Steve, that your open question regarding the theoretical foundation of the CO2 sensitivity is itself the “audit” you desire. That none seems to exist is very damning considering this is an assumption in nearly every alarmist propaganda piece. Step 1: prove assumptions. Oops, can’t.

Mark

Paul G M

Completely off-thread but fun.

This article appeared in today’s FT magazine in what is supposed to be a “science section”

“As if the prospect of

tempestuous climate change and rising sea levels were no bad enough, global warming is also likely to trigger geological changes in the earth’s crust – leading to more volcanic activity and earthquakes.

Bill McGuire, head of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College London, gives this dire warning on the basis of a link between geological activity and global warming in prehistoric times. Two effects stimulate movements in the crust as ice sheets retreat. Dormant volcanoes and quiescent fault zones become more active as the weight of overlying ice decreases. Recent seismic activity in south-west Alaska may be due to the unloading as the region’s glaciers retreat.

At the same time, rising sea levels increase the geological loading around the continental margins. McGuire’s research suggests that even a relatively small sea level rise would trigger a detectable increase in geological activity, as the extra weight of water squeezes liquid magma up and out of the crust.”

Benfield is a leading reinsurance broker and this is the kind of advice they might be giving to insurance companies.

Regards

Paul

Dennis Wingo

Hey Steve

What about in the negative? I would be more than happy to scan the appropriate pages from the graduate textbook, “The Quantum Theory of Light” by Loudon, page 81-90.

There are two crucial equations that govern how the partial pressure of CO2 and any increases or decreases, effect absorption and emission of radiation. send an email to me at wingod at earthlink.net and I will scan them and send them to you.

The most interesting thing to me is that both of the crucial equations (collision or pressure broadening, and doppler broadening) are temperature dependent to the square root power, making them a feedback and not a forcing mechanism.

The explanation on realclimate.org is just wrong.

Dennis Wingo

Full Reference

Loudon, Rodney, The Quantum Theory of Light, Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford ox2 6dp, 1978, ISBN 0 19 851130 2, page 81-90

I also have a fairly extensive library that incorporates many of the studies of the atmosphere done by the USAF from the 1940s to 60s concerning the infrared band as these studies were done in order to characterize the atmosphere to improve the design of infrared heat seeking missiles. I even have a very nice book on CO2 measurements from China from 1939 where very detailed spectrographic measurements were made.

I obtained these books in a sale from the US Army in the late 90s, when a contractor left town. The Redstone Science & Information Center has a really nice collection still there today.

Larry

Guys, I think the question about 2.5C is rhetorical. I think Steve’s pretty well determined that there’s zip, zero, nada out there in the way of rigorous, from-the-ground-up peer-reviewed literature that produces that number.

Think of it more as an open wager offer to the 2.5 club.

Larry

As far as calculating climate sensitivity goes, the IPCC definition of climate sensitivity is the gross effect; i.e. including feedback. That means that to truly build it up from the ground, you not only have to do all of the greenhouse physics (which Shaviv and others have done, and I suspect that even Hansen isn’t too far off the mark), but you have to have a good model for feedback. AFAIK, there is no good model of feedback, though Hansen would disagree. It kind of depends on what you mean by “good”.

The other approach, used by Schwartz, it to make empirical inferences. That, necessarily, will include feedback. If we’re ever going to settle this issue, I believe that something else, that corroborates the Schwartz outcome empirically, is going to be necessary.

Even then, Hansen implies that feedback is variable (i.e. “tipping points”), and thus CS is variable. That’s a whole other issue, but if you believe in tipping points, you have to believe that feedback (and CS) increase with temperature.

We’re not going to settle this one any time soon.

Murray Duffin

You have probably seen this http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/What_Watt.html , but it’s still the best thing I havev seen on 2xCO2 forcing. Murray

Steve McIntyre

#24, 23. HOw many times do I have so say this – I’ve seen the “skeptic” arguments; my interest is in mainstream arguments. Please do not post the “skeptic” links as though they are a mainstream exposition. I don’t want power point presentations on the internet either as a reference. They have their place, but I want the best quality exposition. Something that is at least as detailed as Raamanathan in the 1970s.

#22. I know what the definitions say; I’m asking for a good expositions. I’m not looking to “settle” things; I’m looking for a proper exposition. And I don’t want to chit-chat with people about their opinions on this until there are good reference materials.

Steve McIntyre

#27. Again I do not want “skeptic” articles cited on this topic. I know that literature. I do not want to discuss Gerlich on this site. I am not interested in expositions why the effect is impossible – it isn’t. Can people simply STOP posting “skeptic” references on this. This site is devoted to auditing and verification of articles being relied on by IPCC for policy purposes. The skeptic literature is not relied on, so I’m not interested in hosting discussions of it. Period.

Dave Dardinger

While I’m not sure what Steve M’s ultimate goal is, here’s what it’s leading to, IMO. He’s very careful to pick areas he can be sure of, unlike too many here. But precisely because of this, he can’t be attacked directly, and this is what leads to obsfucation and ad hom attacks on the part of his opponents. This is where he draws his power from, not ‘moral’righteousness but factual integrity. A lot of skeptics are generally right, but their tendency to accept, even if only provisionally, arguments which can ultimately be shown to be invalid. It’s aggraviting at times that Steve won’t allow some sorts of discussion, but ultimately it’s the only way he has to be sure he’s not embroiled in a damaging situation.

Frankly I was surprised he allowed the TOBS discussion to go on since I was pretty sure I’d seen explainations of it which showed something of the sort was necessary, but it has turned out pretty well as people were able to show by direct ‘experiment’ that a TOBS correction is necessary and I think most everyone here is now up to speed on how it works. Which isn’t to say that the particular TOBS corrections which have been made are correct, but they can’t be dismissed out of hand.

Getting back to my main point, I think Steve is creating a new sort of science strategy. Instead of formal publication (including peer review) followed by discussion in the wider community, we could have informal publication followed by community discussion followed by formal ratification of a concensus (or at least a concensus by a particular community) position.

Right now the old-school proposition is that once we have the formal publication, a position is fixed and can only be attacked by a new publication. However if it can be shown that there are typically flaws in a published position, then it may be eventually decided it’s preferable to throw a tentative position open to analysis and only later make a revised position settled science. At first the sort of thing we’re seeing discussed in this thread may be what we get, but ultimately I suspect things will be rather different.

I think that the easy of comment and of storage of intermediate results will cause there to be tiered analysis and several iterations of the prime article followed by final publication of the whole thing. Thus at tier 1 there may be comments by colleagues who have published in the same field. Tier 2 might be scientists in a similar field, etc. Down in tier 10 we could have teenage girls (sorry Kristin)commenting on the colors used in the graphics and the scientific equilivent of the fellow who used to go around holding the John 3:16 sign at ball games. The point is that nobody could be accused of not being able to get in a word (except perhaps telemarketers… I suppose there’d have to be some sort of limits).

Frankly I think this sort of future-science would be superior to the present situation.

DocMartyn

A slightly expanded version of the New Science report on the cause of the end of the last Ice-Age

Science Magazine: Carbon Dioxide Did Not End The Last Ice Age

Posted by Paul, at 04:50 PM

Published Online September 27, 2007
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1143791

Southern Hemisphere and Deep-Sea Warming Led Deglacial Atmospheric CO2 Rise and Tropical Warming

Lowell Stott 1*, Axel Timmermann 2, Robert Thunell 3

1 Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
2 IPRC, SOEST, University of Hawaii, 2525 Correa Road, HI 96822, USA.
3 Department of Geological Sciences, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA.

Establishing what caused Earth’s largest climatic changes in the past requires a precise knowledge of both the forcing and the regional responses. Here we establish the chronology of high and low latitude climate change at the last glacial termination by 14C dating benthic and planktonic foraminiferal stable isotope and Mg/Ca records from a marine core collected in the western tropical Pacific. Deep sea temperatures warmed by ~2C between 19 and 17 ka B.P. (thousand years before present), leading the rise in atmospheric CO2 and tropical surface ocean warming by ~1000 years. The cause of this deglacial deep water warming does not lie within the tropics, nor can its early onset between 19-17 ka B.P. be attributed to CO2 forcing. Increasing austral spring insolation combined with sea-ice albedo feedbacks appear to be key factors responsible for this warming.

Extract:

Deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before atmospheric CO2, ruling out the greenhouse gas as driver of meltdown, says study in Science. Carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, a new study in Science suggests, contrary to past inferences from ice core records. “There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change,” said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, slated for advance online publication Sept. 27 in Science Express. “You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages.”

Deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2, the study found.

The finding suggests the rise in greenhouse gas was likely a result of warming and may have accelerated the meltdown – but was not its main cause. The study does not question the fact that CO2 plays a key role in climate. I don’t want anyone to leave thinking that this is evidence that CO2 doesn’t affect climate,” Stott cautioned. “It does, but the important point is that CO2 is not the beginning and end of climate change.” While an increase in atmospheric CO2 and the end of the ice ages occurred at roughly the same time, scientists have debated whether CO2 caused the warming or was released later by an already warming sea. The best estimate from other studies of when CO2 began to rise is no earlier than 18,000 years ago. Yet this study shows that the deep sea, which reflects oceanic temperature trends, started warming about 19,000 years ago.

“What this means is that a lot of energy went into the ocean long before the rise in atmospheric CO2,” Stott said.

But where did this energy come from” Evidence pointed southward. Water’s salinity and temperature are properties that can be used to trace its origin – and the warming deep water appeared to come from the Antarctic Ocean, the scientists wrote. This water then was transported northward over 1,000 years via well-known deep-sea currents, a conclusion supported by carbon-dating evidence. In addition, the researchers noted that deep-sea temperature increases coincided with the retreat of Antarctic sea ice, both occurring 19,000 years ago, before the northern hemisphere’s ice retreat began.
Finally, Stott and colleagues found a correlation between melting Antarctic sea ice and increased springtime solar radiation over Antarctica, suggesting this might be the energy source. As the sun pumped in heat, the warming accelerated because of sea-ice albedo feedbacks, in which retreating ice exposes ocean water that reflects less light and absorbs more heat, much like a dark T-shirt on a hot day.

“The climate dynamic is much more complex than simply saying that CO2 rises and the temperature warms,” Stott said. The complexities “have to be understood in order to appreciate how the climate system has changed in the past and how it will change in the future.”
————————————————————————————————–

The lag between temperature and CO2 is about 1000 years, as opposed the 800 years from the Vostock ice core series.

John F. Pittman

#222 I would disagree with

A lot of skeptics are generally right, but their tendency to accept, even if only provisionally, arguments which can ultimately be shown to be invalid.

Click to access 07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf

In what way is this argument valid?

tendency to accept, even if only provisionally, arguments which can ultimately be shown to be invalid

That Steve has shown (Steve, I know that this is not exactly what MM said) that the AGW (per Mann) is flawed (refuse to say it is A, since I dont know), by your 222 post, means those who oppose it are flawed? Here we have one of the most prestigious statisticians (Wegman) pointing out that AGW (I know, I know that it is much more complicated compared to such simple statements by myself and Dave Dardinger) by way of Mann (until recently, the most prestidigous AGW proponent) claiming recent temperatures to be the greatest in 10K years, is most decidedly incorrect. What is this tendency that you, Dave, allude to? The tendancy to want to be correct?

Can you provide examples to support the following statement you made??

It’s aggraviting at times that Steve won’t allow some sorts of discussion, but ultimately it’s the only way he has to be sure he’s not embroiled in a damaging situation.

I count 6 straw man arguments here, but I am an engineer, so sometimes I just approximate (actually, I am conservative, there are actually 10 assumed conditions in this statment by my count).

You said:

Getting back to my main point, I think Steve is creating a new sort of science strategy. Instead of formal publication (including peer review) followed by discussion in the wider community, we could have informal publication followed by community discussion followed by formal ratification of a concensus (or at least a concensus by a particular community) position.

If this is what it takes to have an honest discussion rather than the “computer ate my homework” (in more than several threads on this blog), then I am all for it. We have seen in http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2105 that there is not a new strategy by Steve at all, just an old, old request to be treated honestly and openly.

You said:

Right now the old-school proposition is that once we have the formal publication, a position is fixed and can only be attacked by a new publication. However if it can be shown that there are typically flaws in a published position, then it may be eventually decided it’s preferable to throw a tentative position open to analysis and only later make a revised position settled science. At first the sort of thing we’re seeing discussed in this thread may be what we get, but ultimately I suspect things will be rather different.

BTW consensus is a stacked deck…read Rule 10 of IPCC.http://www.ipcc.ch/about/procd.htm

But ultimately I ask #222 does it matter if truth is written on a blog, in a book, in a peer-reveiwed article, in a Congressional hearing? If it is the truth, is it not the truth? If Steve has come up with a way that the public does not have to wait (especially since I can tell you that I have been invited Fw:

Climate Registry Presentation

to a stakeholder’s meeting for CO2, and the AGW proponents are not awaiting placidly as your comment suggests (or do we get rejected because we wait patiently, as you suggest, while the politicians make plans and then present fait accompli), why should we wait?) The persons wanting to charge $100/ton CO2 ( my company pays about $40/ton for hazardous waste..CO2 is known to be a FERTILIZER by tomatoe growers and potheads…go figure)http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2007/08/dingells_energy_plan_would_hik.html

An invatation to the CO2 dance:
Fw: Climate Registry Presentation
Renee Baecker
Division of Air Planning, Development & Outreach
Bureau of Air Quality
Phone: (803) 898-4132
Fax: (803) 898-4487

E-mail: baeckerr@dhec.sc.gov

Perhaps you have some excellent suggestions that I should take to this meeting??? A few, just ok, suggestions would be welcome!

John F. Pittman

#30 DocMartyn This suggests that Schwartz http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/08/stephen-schwartz-brookhaven-climate.html may be closer to the actual numbers than other models/studies predict…Yes?? He assumed that CO2 sensitivity for short term was about 3 to 5 years.

The lag between temperature and CO2 is about 1000 years, as opposed the 800 years from the Vostock ice core series

Obviously, if the long term is 1000 years, a short term assumption of about 3 to 5 years is not so bad. I think 1000/3 = 333 or about 2×10^2 (66% typical distribution assumption) to 1 is not bad even for geologists and paleoclimatologists.

John F. Pittman

#228 What is the differnce of scoring points than stating the truth? You said

Sorry about that sentence you quoted first. I’d meant to add another clause, but got ahead of myself and didn’t finish it. It should be:

A lot of skeptics are generally right, but their tendency to accept, even if only provisionally, arguments which can ultimately be shown to be invalid make them easy targets for those more interested in scoring points than in the truth.

As for the Wegman report, insofar as I can follow it well, I think it’s 100% correct. But I’m not sure what you’re getting at, so I’ll let it pass.

Was it acnowkledged, (did) Wegman report actually, trash Mann, Briffa, divergence with foxtails(??)

House Committee on Energy and Commerce Testimony July 27, 2006

The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) debate is not about a paradigm shift or even about a basic theory. No one is arguing that CO2 does not absorb IR or that burning fossil fuel does not add CO2 to the atmosphere. In essence the AGW debate is about whether increasing CO2 by a few hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere will have catastrophic consequences on global climate. AGW proponents claim scientific certainty that it will and cite as proof a 0.6 degree C increase in average global temperature over the past century, a putative increase in extreme weather events and predictions of ongoing future warming based on computer models of global climate. Skeptics find significant uncertainty in the amount, causes and consequences of any warming and in the accuracy of the models. They point to major doubts regarding the amount and cause of recent warming, past extremes that equal or exceed recent ones, benefits of CO2 enrichment plus numerous simplifications, guesses and omissions in the models as well as wide discrepancies between them.

August 07, 2006
Why We Argue Over AGW: Walter Starck

READ THIS

3 Sylvain says:

September 24th, 2007 at 11:27 am
I’m starting to be very affraid of how climate science will be viewed in the future. The flagrant disregard of the scientific method, plus the bullying is sure to be used one day to teach the dark ages of science.

4 Don Keiller says:

September 24th, 2007 at 11:47 am
This is unbelievable. I have sometimes been on the receiving end of critical questions from reviewers and sometimes have been a critical reviewer myself. In either case specific criticisms require specific and informative answers. As Steve notes Juckes’ replies fall into neither category. In this case a reputable journal would not publish, or send to a third reviewer.
But as Steve has often said: “Hey this is Climate Science!”

P.S. you didn’t really believe that Mann and his cronies would agree, forgive, or forget what Steve did to their precious Hockey stick. This is the start of their (proxy) fightback.

Dave Dardinger

re: #230 John P,

I’m sure you have some point in this message, but the confused b-quotes make it impossible for me to figure out what’s what.

David

#31: If Steve McIntyre allows the site to read like a political site or a “skeptic” wacky fringe site, then people will not take the site or its auditing seriously. The name of the site is “Climate Audit,” which is in itself a very short mission statement. That said:

#32: Shouldn’t it be a breach of ethics for a scientist to be an activist? How is this different than a reporter being an activist? It just seems like a conflict of interest.

Geoff Sherrington

Steve,

I heard you plea for a mainstream article some time back and I have not found one. I keep looking as I follow related topics, but I cannot report success. This could well be amongst the most critical subjects that you audit. CA readers would do a big service by finding the paper you seek.

rafa

Try

1.- An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity
Journal of Climate
Article: pp. 3117–3121
M. Gregorya, R. J. Stoufferb, S. C. B. Raperc, P. A. Stottd, and N. A. Raynerd

2.-Ramaswamy, V., and Coauthors, 2001: Radiative forcing of climate
change. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, J. T.
Houghton et al., Eds., Cambridge University Press, 349–416.

best

John F. Pittman

LOL, I didn’t realize I had messed up the block quotes. Thanks, it confused me, too! My point was two fold. 1. The Wegman report caused (or should have caused) a major revision in the accepted thinking about our ability to compare the present warming trend with past warming trends. Yet, we find that many who express similar concerns after Wegman run into some difficulty. 2. It appears that AGW crowd are trying to score points more so than trying to relate the truth.

David Smith

It looks like Antarctic sea ice extent indeed set a record ( link to graph ) this month, according to Cryosphere Today. CT had previously announce a new record but later they reported their algorithm was slightly in error and it was not a record after all.

This new Southern Hemisphere record is, of course, a candidate for similar revision.

Dan White

Re #43

Is this a measure of the ice extent only over the ocean, or the total surface
area of Antarctic ice? Either way I guess it says the same thing, but if it is
only a measure of ice over the water, then it makes me wonder what percentage of
the total that the famous Ross ice shelf makes up? It can’t be much if it pretty
much disappeared, yet the total ice extent is greater now (or is the Ross ice back now?).
Also, does thickness of the ice affect what conclusions you might otherwise make by
a measure of surface area alone??? Interesting info!

David Smith

Re #52 It’s a measure of sea ice, not land ice. The Cryosphere Today website is here . Also, I wrote “extent” but CT actually estimates ice area, which is not quite the same as extent.

Here’s an interesting map ( link ). It reports anomalously warm air temperature over Antarctica and much of the nearby ocean over the last six months, according to NOAA. The last six months have been the “freeze” season, so the reported warm temperatures don’t seem to go with the record ice. I imagine it’s a complicated situation, with variables such as ocean currents and wind patterns playing a role, but the report of high temperatures isn’t what’s normally associated with growth in ice coverage.

aurbo

Re#54:

Anomalously warm temperatures during the winter season on Anarctica are still more than cold enough to acrete ice. In fact, if the above normal temps are accompanied by above normal moisture, this would also add to precipitation possiblities (snow) in this normally desert environment. Also, the increase and decrease in sea ice is more a function of SSTs than air temps.

Mhaze

If anyone can identify a clear exposition of how 2xCO2 leads to 2.5 deg C, please do so.

Another way to look at this which may be more useful would be to enumerate mainstream articles that indicate how 2xCO2 leads to any temperature increase, and note where in that list there may be conspicuous gaps.

Is there a big gap in published literature in the 2-3C range? How about 1.5 – 2.0C? How about 1.0 – 1.5C? Etc.

This approach would have the advantage of showing the breadth of work in the area, the methods and reasonings leading to the conclusions, and the lack of conclusions relating to the 2.5C question. Apparently asking for the published articles asserting a 2.5C increase produces nothing….

Scott-in-WA

#46

I find these papers to be interesting reading. However, as an engineer who has written engineering feasibility studies for various government and private-sector organizations, I am used to seeing a progression of logic starting at Point A and traveling to Point B, with appropriate side trips only as necessary to illuminate those details which have to be illuminated to directly support the logic, and to make the logic “whole”, so to speak, to the target audience.

When the engineering feasibility analysis is covering something such as a proposed uranium mining operation or a proposed nuclear waste treatment/disposal plant, the process of creating the feasibility analysis is relatively straightforward, even if the details are highly voluminous and must be aggregated and simplified withiin the discussion in order for the main points to be understandable to the target audience, many of whom are not engineers. The detail which supports the discussion must be readily available to those who need to examine it, and the discussion must also point out any issues that exist with the supporting information.

In other words, I suspect that these two references don’t fit the bill as a Point A to Point B explanation of how 2xC02 leads to 2.5 degrees C. (Assuming that is what Steve M actually wants.)

In reading these two papers, I am also intrigued by the extent to which estimates and assumptions are built upon other estimates and other assumptions which are in turn built upon other further estimates and other further assumptions.

In the world of engineering, we are allowed to do this to some extent. But there also has to be hard data from real-world experience — field experiments, field testing, previous experience with similar processes or process equipment — to directly support the assumptions which underly the estimates, especially those which have the greatest impact on the technical and economic feasibility of the project.

In that vein, I make this observation: One, among several, of the crucial “reality check” forms of information needed to support 2xC02 yields 2.5C is the actual spectral absoption/emissivity behavior of GHG’s as they reside in the atmosphere, which implies (in my mind) that these properties must be measured directly in their native environment.

In other words, I pick a cubic meter of the atmosphere, I go directly to that cubic meter of atmosphere, I determine the composition of the gases within it, and I perform testing of some kind on that very same cubic meter of atmosphere to determine what its spectral performance behavior actually is. I repeat this testing in as many locations within the atmosphere as I deem necessary to adequately support my data quality objectives, which have been formulated knowing that at some point, the data I gather will be supporting various types of scientific and technical analysis.

Has the kind of field testing and field observation work needed to directly measure the actual spectral absoption/emissivity behavior of GHG’s as they reside in the atmosphere been conducted? If so, can anyone point me to reports which discuss the results of these field observations and which describes how they were conducted?

John V.

#59:
The bug with Excel 2007 is a display bug. The calculations are fine.
Numbers that are *extremely* close to 65535 or 65536 display as 100000. The underlying value is correct, but Excel displays it incorrectly.

Of the 9.214*10^18 possible floating point numbers in Excel, this bug affects 12.

More here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx

Leon Palmer

Hi Steve,

Here’s a rather dated reference, but is this the kind of thing you’re looking for? I’m trying to come up with the right keywords for a search on the

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html

abstract search site. Found this one from 1982

Authors: Cess, R. D.
Affiliation: AA(State Univ. of New York, Stony Brook.)
Publication: In NASA. Langley Research Center Earth Radiation Science Seminars p 28-44 (SEE N82-33320 23-93)
Publication Date: 08/1982
Category: Space Radiation
Origin: STI
NASA/STI Keywords: ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION, CARBON DIOXIDE CONCENTRATION, CLIMATE, EARTH SURFACE, PLANETARY TEMPERATURE, ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY, CLIMATE CHANGE, CLOUD COVER, EARTH RADIATION BUDGET EXPERIMENT, LONG TERM EFFECTS, SOLAR RADIATION, TEMPERATURE EFFECTS
Bibliographic Code: 1982eras.nasa…28C
Abstract As a consequence of fossil fuel burning, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased from 314 ppm in 1958, when detailed measurements of this quantity began, to a present value of 335 ppm; and it is estimated that during the next century, the CO2 concentration will double relative to its assumed preindustrial value of 290 ppm. Since CO2 is an infrared-active gas, increases in its atmospheric concentration would lead to a larger infrared opacity for the atmospheric which, by normal logic, would result in a warmer Earth. A number of modeling endeavors suggest a 2 to 4 C increase in global mean surface temperature with doubling of the CO2 concentration. But such estimates of CO2-induced warming are highly uncertain because of a lack of knowledge of climate feedback mechanisms. Interactive influences upon the solar and infrared opacities of the Earth-atmosphere system can either amplify or damp a climate-forcing mechanism such as increasing CO2. Climate feedback mechanisms discussed include climate sensitivity, cloudiness-radiation feedback, climate change predictions, and interactive atmospheric chemistry.

Bob Koss

I don’t use Excel at all. Came across the item and just figured with all the spreadsheet users around here someone might appreciate a headsup. I here Vista is so bad, complaints have caused MS to extend the time period for selling XP. 🙂

Dennis Wingo

In other words, I pick a cubic meter of the atmosphere, I go directly to that cubic meter of atmosphere, I determine the composition of the gases within it, and I perform testing of some kind on that very same cubic meter of atmosphere to determine what its spectral performance behavior actually is. I repeat this testing in as many locations within the atmosphere as I deem necessary to adequately support my data quality objectives, which have been formulated knowing that at some point, the data I gather will be supporting various types of scientific and technical analysis.

Has the kind of field testing and field observation work needed to directly measure the actual spectral absoption/emissivity behavior of GHG’s as they reside in the atmosphere been conducted? If so, can anyone point me to reports which discuss the results of these field observations and which describes how they were conducted?

Scott # 60

There was an extensive set of studies done in the 50’s by the USAF to characterize the troposphere and lower stratosphere for all major IR absorbing gasses. This was the foundation of the work to develop the Sidewinder and other IR seeking air to air and surface to air missiles. That is why, if you look back through the data, that you will see 35,000 feet as a measurement altitude. That is the altitude that the B-29’s flew that carried the spectrographs that did the measuring. I have some of this data that I got through a library purchase from Thiokol.

Second, if you follow the reference that I made in #18 here, you will find the equations that cover the fundamental quantum mechanics of absorption and emission of gasses covering the ultraviolet to mid IR bands. As far back as the 50’s, equipment was sensitive enough, and selective enough, to discern all of the individual absorption and emission spectra for CO2, H20, N2O, CH4, and O3, which covers 99.5% of all IR absorption.

M. Simon

Kenneth Fritsch says:
September 30th, 2007 at 8:32 am,

It is always a matter of signal to noise. Take searching the ‘net. You can make a general search and get a million hits. You can narrow the search and get 5. As you narrow the search your chances of missing something important increases. OTOH no one has time to look through a million items to make sure nothing important is missed.

The same goes for blog comments.

On my blog I get so few comments – 5 to 10 a day on average – that letting anyone say anything is not a problem. If I started getting hundreds I’d probably put a little effort in guiding the conversation.

paminator

Someone a few days ago was wondering who was paying the bills for realclimate.org bandwidth. The whois information for the url registration is as follows:

Domain ID:D105219760-LROR
Domain Name:REALCLIMATE.ORG
Created On:19-Nov-2004 16:39:03 UTC
Last Updated On:30-Oct-2005 21:10:46 UTC
Expiration Date:19-Nov-2007 16:39:03 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R39-LROR)
Status:OK
Registrant ID:B133AE74B8066012
Registrant Name:Betsy Ensley
Registrant Organization:Environmental Media Services
Registrant Street1:1320 18th St, NW
Registrant Street2:5th Floor
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Washington
Registrant State/Province:DC
Registrant Postal Code:20036
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.2024636670

I smell a smelly smell of something that smells smelly.

David Smith

Here is an interesting website that shows the current status of the Antarctic “ozone hole”. The graphs don’t automatically update – you have to click on them to get the latest version.

Larry

72, 75, I’m not going to wax political, but go to wikipedia, look up EMS, and follow some links. They’re about 2 degrees of separation from the Hungarian buzillionaire of political orientation that I won’t mention who’s been funding all kinds of other activity that I won’t mention.

DeWitt Payne

As far as radiation transfer models in GCM’s here’s a quote from Petty, Grant W., A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation, Second Edition (paperback), 2006, p143.

One of the chief concerns of the climate scientists today is that, by adding carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” that are transparent to shortwave radiation but strongly absorb longwave radiation, humankind is inexorably increasing the value of alw and thereby shifting the radiative equilibrium of the globe to warmer temperatures.

Of course, a far more elaborate computer model of the earth and atmosphere, one that incorporates fluid motions, cloud and water vapor feedbacks and other complex processes is required in order to study this problem in any detail. The most sophisticated such models are called general circulation models (GCMs) and are the best tools we have today for understanding climate and climate change. Even now, however, a fully comprehensive treatment of radiation and other physical processes remains too complex a problem for the most powerful computers to tackle for the entire atmosphere at once. GCMs therefore continue to rely on grossly simplified representations of some of these processes, with the attendant risk of error in the models’ predictions. Finding ways to improve the accuracy of radiative and other physical parameterizations within the constraints of the available computing power is a major focus of current research in atmospheric science.

alw is the absorptivity of the atmosphere for thermal IR in a simple, single layer atmosphere model.

At least this explains how the models can get radiative transfer wrong. It’s just not possible to do line-by-line radiation calculations for every grid box and every time increment. It’s not even possible, apparently, to use moderate bandwith code like MODTRAN.

Larry

72, 77, if EMS wants to fund a site that’s out-of-the-closet alarmist, that’s fine. I don’t think that anyone finds it unusual or suspicious that the Greenpeace website takes alarmist advocacy positions. We all know who they are, and what they’re about.

What I object to is the way they are a stealth alarmist site masquerading as a scientific site. I challenge anyone to find anything on the main page or under any of the tabs that identifies realclimate as a site that supports one side of a controversial issue. They pretend that they are an objective science site, representing the scientific consensus. That’s dishonest and deceitful.

steven mosher

RE 72.

That doesnt say who pays for the bandwidth that is merely the registrant.
Have you got their IP? find the server location.

Larry

81, I think the point is that it’s not being paid Jim H. or Gavin, or any of the other ops, or they would have registered it in their name. In fact, it’s probable that the sequence was more like EMS decided to set this up, and contacted the GISS crew for the operational side. Again, it’s not that there’s anything inherently sleazy about that in itself, but to then pretend to be a science site is sleazy.

If any of the “jester” sites were registered to Exxonmobil or some coal association, you know it would be considered a scandal of major proportions, and would be used to claim that the sites are intrinsically compromised.

PaddikJ

Back to basics with an ignorant question, if I may: Where does this 2xCO2 = +2.5DC come from? I wish I’d kept a log for the last 18 months or so – my rather vague recollection is that current estimates of climate sensitivity range from about +1.5DC to +5DC for doubled CO2.

Someone did assert over at Climate Science – in August, I think – that 2xC02 = 4w/m2 was completely non-controversial. Has that ever been examined here at CA?

It would be really handy if a knowledgeable someone were to graph guesses of CO2 climate sens. from, say, 1970 to the present.

Leon Palmer

re 86

the 4 w/m2 comes from realclimate.org

“Climate sensitivity
Filed under:
Glossary
— gavin @ 11:11 AM – ()
“Climate sensitivity is a measure of the equilibrium global surface air temperature change for a particular forcing. It is usually given as a °C change per W/m2 forcing. A standard experiment to determine this value in a climate model is to look at the doubled CO2 climate, and so equivalently, the climate sensitivity is sometimes given as the warming for doubled CO2 (i.e. from 280 ppm to 560 ppm). The forcing from doubled CO2 is around 4 W/m2 and so a sensitivity of 3°C for a doubling, is equivalent to a sensitivity of 0.75 °C/W/m2. “

aurbo

RE #74:

Another site for real-time ozone hole graphs that I use regularly is here.

An irony regarding this feature is that at the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Protocol there was considerable self-congratulatory rhetoric as to how their quick action to ban CFCs saved the planet from unrestrained UV damage by solving and correcting the ozone hole problem. The trouble is that nobody mentioned that the largest recorded “ozone hole” on record was last year…2006!.

Louis Hissink

Steve,

I just reran one of the added features on the Swindle DVD I just received in which Richard Lindzen stated that calculating the sensitivity is somewhat simple – holding everything constant and just doubling CO2 results in 1 Kelvin increase in temperature.

He then stated that climate models estimate it from 1.5 to 5 with the most conservative (?) being 2.5 Kelvin. (The code to simulate climate to compute sensitivity is another thing and maybe beyond CA for the moment and a good reason why there is so little published data on the computation – who is going to release the code for a climate simulation so the critics can peer it)!

So maybe Andre or someone could workout just what Lindzen based his 2xCO2 ==> 1 Kelvin on, or, maybe someone here who knows him can ask him 🙂

M. Simon

Any one read about how the billionaire behind some of the Fenton stuff shut down a gold mining operation in Europe as environmentally unsound? Said billionaire is an investor in other gold mining ventures elsewhere.

Since Mr. McIntyre is into mining I thought it might be of some interest.

Environmentalism for fun and profit.

PaddikJ

Re: 88;

Climate sensitivity is a measure of the equilibrium global surface air temperature change for a particular forcing. It is usually given as a °C change per W/m2 forcing. A standard experiment to determine this value in a climate model is to look at the doubled CO2 climate, and so equivalently, the climate sensitivity is sometimes given as the warming for doubled CO2 (i.e. from 280 ppm to 560 ppm). The forcing from doubled CO2 is around 4 W/m2 and so a sensitivity of 3°C for a doubling, is equivalent to a sensitivity of 0.75 °C/W/m2.

Did a “Real Scientist” really write that dizzy-making bit of circular reasoning? I reallly must visit RC more often.

Leon Palmer

re 96

It’s in the glossary on realclimate.org so it’s an accepted definition and not subject to debate…

Nasif Nahle

# 86, # 88

PaddikJ, Leon Palmer,

A climate sensitivity of 4 W/m^2 would give a change of temperature of 7.4 °C. Is it another flawed magnitude?

MarkW

I seem to recall from my high school chemistry, that chemical reactions speed up as temperatures go up. Doubling for every 10C sticks in my mind.

As the atmosphere warms, wouldn’t methane break down into CO2 and water that much faster?

Leon Palmer

Re 99

The words about glossary are Gavin’s, I tracked back to this from his “Plus ca change….” blog, following his links to this quote, and his asserting it was in a realclimate.org glossary term … where that glossary is, I haven’t a clue.

I have yet to find on realclimate or elsewhere an experimental determination of the value, it seems to drop out of the GCM code, and then there’s some attempt to match it against historical data, which is scanty at best (see the “Plus ca change blog on realclimate.org).

But I am continuing to research.

Bob Koss

Leon Palmer,

This seems to be the RC glossary. link

Stephen Richards

Gunnar

“Is it possible to derive that from first principles”.

In my estimation, yes, but it is complicated. Basic physics initially, Calorific value of fuel, viscocity of engine oil and then friction, efficiency of exhaustion of burned gases, tyre pressure, road friction, break binding, bearing friction, etc. Complicated and usually done empirically as at Daytona or formula 1. Empirical measurement would then bring us full circle to Hansen adjustments, NOAA instruments etc

Stephen Richards

Gunnar

I have to say that it would be a waste of some brillant, incisive work if Steve ends up with “I knew they had fiddled the stats” and that after several years of work. There is huge potential in the blog already. I simply do not have the expertise or the brain power for that matter, to do anything significant but there are plenty of respondants here who have.

Gunnar

>> some brillant, incisive work if Steve ends up with “I knew they had fiddled the stats”

I agree that Steve is smart, and there are many smart people here. However, I don’t agree that it’s correct to belittle the stated goal. It’s like my kids saying “I don’t like baseball, because it’s stupid and pointless, just hitting a ball and running around”. I tell them, “all sports are stupid if analyzed from that point of view”. Similarly, Steve has expertise, and he uses it to audit some claims that no one else is willing to audit. It gives him something useful to do, and the value of this effort is hard to quantify, but it would seem to be quite high. Of course, a lot more could be done, but maybe it’s better to concentrate on one thing, and do it well.

Steve McIntyre

#112. The questions – what am I trying to do in climate science? and what I am I trying to accomplish with the blog”? are different questions and I’m not sure that I know the answer to either one.

In terms of making a definable academic contribution, my best bet would undoubtedly be to focus on the proxies and the properties of multivariate methods, and to finish off the many leads in this area. That would lead in a very different direction than actually trying to understand whether doubled CO2 is a problem or not.

While people may complain that I’m not finishing things as academic articles, the blog acts as a diary for my thoughts. I’ve always kept in the back of my mind that the blog entries will serve as good notes to shape more formal submissions to journals. To some extent, they are like seminar presentations.

In practical terms, there is a very large audience at the blog now, and I’m reluctant to dissipate that audience for articles in an academic journal that will be read by not very many people. HAving said that, I realize that journals are an important form of communication; I rely on them and recognize their importance; so while I may express dissatisfaction in particular cases about how they handle things, this in no way means that I deprecate their importance or suggest that blogs displace them.

However people should also recognize that I’ve been placed in a very unusual situation where the criticism of my journal articles has come almost entirely from blog postings, primarily realclimate, but you know the others. Wahl and Ammann 2007 (published about a month ago) is the first journal response of the MAnnians; Juckes will be another. Climate scientists who have arrived at opinions that our criticism doesn’t “matter” have done so not on the basis of published journal articles, but on the basis of blog and internet postings.

SteveSadlov

RE: #72, 75. 76, etc. It’s old news. They are a front for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Is anyone surprised? Nothing surprises me any more.

jae

117: Yeah, I went hunting in So.OR this weekend and waded through 6 inches of snow at about 5,500 ft. elevation. It was only 10 F at sunrise Saturday morning. I would estimate that we are at least 3 weeks earlier into this kind of cold weather.

jae

69: Amen!

Andy L

It seems that most of the expositions of CO2 sensitivity are derived from GCM & AOCGCM experiments. This is unappealing to me (and probably to many here); like trying to derive the period of a pendulum from a computer-based mechanical simulation.

An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity (Journal of Climate, M. Gregorya, et. al.), cited above (#46), seems to give a fairly clear exposition with detailed enumeration of assumptions. It appears that the paper considers models only as a mechanism for producing reasonable bounds and sanity checking.

Looking at articles citing this one, I mostly see ensemble studies, rather than direct improvements in the assumptions or estimates.

Follow the Money

“where is it all leading”

Omaha.

The victory of the scientific method over post-normal science.

Disneyworld.

Most likely, a period of quiescence until a few years into the upcoming cooling cycle when climate science begins to proffer increasingly alarmist forecasts about the cooling coupled with pleas for increased funding. Enron/S&L/JunkBond/Carbon Trading alumni will invent a way to monetize something that might have something to do with a part of the cooling and hire Al Gore to con the Europeans into a trading scheme — selling it to Americans will be difficult as they are more savvy about scams bearing the fingerprint of their own culture.

Then when warming returns…

Larry

124 –

selling it to Americans will be difficult as they are more savvy about scams bearing the fingerprint of their own culture.

Ahem. The biggest manipulator in this whole game is Hungarian. Just watch. He’s going to win big if the US gets saddled with carbon caps.

Having said that, I have noticed the peculiarity of a global movement that is strongest in Europe being driven primarily by a small clique of scientist/activists at the US space agency, and most actively opposed by Canadians. There is a little more going on here than meets the eye.

jae

As some of you know, I am intrigued by the fact that the average July temperatures in the desert Southwest (Dagget, CA, Phoenix, AZ, Tucson, AZ, etc.) are about 3 degrees C hotter than they are in the humid Southeast at similar latitudes and altitudes (Miami, Atlanta, etc.). If there is such a thing as a positive water vapor feedback, then why is it not hotter in the soggy Southeast? I think I have finally figured out the interactions between insolation and humidity.

I analyzed 30-year average July and December data for insolation, temperature, and absolute humidity at 143 locations in the US, including Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Guam from this source.

In HOT months, temperature depends upon both the amount of solar insolation that reaches the surface AND the amount of water vapor in the air. However, there is really no true water vapor “feedback,” since the solar insolation is either absorbed by water vapor or by the surface. In other words, a given average daily temperature, say 25 C, can be reached either through high solar insolation (Phoenix) at the surface with minimal water vapor OR through minimal solar insolation and high humidity (Atlanta). It is the combination of solar insolation and humidity that is important. This can be shown by comparing the following plots shown in the first Workbook here:

A fairly weak correlation (R2 = 0..12) is observed between average July insolation vs. temperature (See Fig. 1).

A better, but fairly weak correlation (R2 = 0.37) is observed between average July absolute humidity and temperature (See Figure 2). (If the very hot Southwest locations, Daggett, CA, Phoenix, AZ, and Las Vegas, NV are omitted the correlation increases to 0.47).

A fairly high correlation R = 0.62) is observed between the product of average insolation and absolute humidity and temperature (See Figure 3). If the 3 very hot Southwest locations are omitted, the correlation improves to 0.72).

It appears that it is the combination of insolation that reaches the surface and humidity that is important, relative to temperature. It does not seem to make a difference, as far as ambient temperature is concerned, if the insolation (heat) is absorbed by the surface OR by water vapor; and water vapor does not enhance this storage. In fact, the hot Southwest locations mentioned above store much more heat in July than the moist locations, and therefore, screw the correlations up.

In COLD months, however, temperature appears to be related very closely to only the amount of water vapor present:

The correlation between average December insolation and temperature is rather poor ( R2 = 0.38). See Figure 4.

However, the correlation between average December absolute humidity and temperature is very high (R2 = 0.96). See Figure 5.

The correlation between the product of insolation and humidity and temperature is also very high (R2 = 0.93), but the inclusion of insolation does not help the correlation.

Notice also, that, whereas the relationships in July are linear, the relationships are strongly curvilinear in December. So, we see no interaction between insolation and humidity in the winter months, only a relationship that shows that humidity is a function of temperature (DUH).

Another way to demonstrate these effects is to compare selected “dry” and “wet” locations that are at similar elevations and latitudes (so that solar insolation is constant). This is done in the second spreadsheet, where I have compared 13 paired locations. In most cases, the “dry” location has a higher average July temperature. In the Southeast, however, humidity becomes as important as solar insolation, and the trend is actually reversed. However, if both humidity and insolation are combined, a correlation coefficient of 0.38 is achieved. This improves to 0.81, if the Southwest locations, Daggett, CA and Phoenix, AZ are excluded. These comparisons again show that both the surface and the water vapor can retain heat equally well.

Of course, in Guam and Puerto Rico, nothing changes much…

There is no water vapor “feedback,” IMHO.

Byron

Follow the Money says:
October 1st, 2007 at 4:56 pm

I’ve never read anything that Soros (I assume you mean him, not Sandor) is involved with carbon markets. The matters are much bigger than he, for example the British Government is banking on new exchanges under their control.

The money is there. Google SOROS HANSEN the google SOROS BRAZIL and you will see 720K going into propaganda and 1B going into sugar cane/ethanol investments while pulling strings on the US traffic laws.
Naturally he’s not the only one.

aurbo

Re #128

The problem with this analysis is that insolation isn’t the only source of heat at a given surface location. Other considerations include advection and convection. In the case of advection, the classic explanation for hot deserts in the lee of mountain ranges is based on the difference between adiabatic cooling on the upslope side of the range and adiabatic heating on the downside. If the source of the airmass was originally moist, the rate of cooling with a rising parcel of air is about 10 degs C per km until saturation is reached and then drops to between 4 and 9 degs C per km as condensing water in the rising parcel adds its latent heat to partially offset the dry adiabatic cooling The saturated adiabatic lapse rate varies with the mixing ratio which is temperature dependent…higher for warmer saturated air and lower with colder saturated air. Much of this moisture is lost through condensation and precipitation on the upslope side so that when the air descends on the lee side of the mountain, the process is purely dry adiabatic as no change in moisture occurs within the air parcel. Thus the air temperature rises more on the way down than it cooled on the way up. When the air parcel reaches the same level on the lee side that it started at on the upslope side it is considerably warmer than it was where it started. No insolation is necessarally involved in this process. However, the dry airmass does promote clear skies and hence increased insolation which allows more radiant energy to reach and heat the ground and elevate the surface air temperatures by conduction and the lowest levels in the atmosphere by convection.

So higher desert temperatures have a lot to do with where the airmass originated and the effect of an intervening mountain range.

jae

134, Aurbo: Thanks, but I think all these factors are subsumed in the analysis. I’m not just talking about deserts, but about the total “umbrella” effects throughout the USA. Why do you dwell on the deserts?

Pat Keating

#128
It is my understanding (based on a piece by the leading physicist Freeman Dyson) that even the deserts have enough water-vapor in the atmosphere above to give plenty of greenhouse effect. According to him, you have to go to the poles to find air dry enough for CO2 to be a more-important GHG.

Question: Has anyone established the level (concentration x distance) at which IR absorption is essentially complete?

Larry

136, That’s like asking how high you go before there’s no more atmosphere. It’s doesn’t work that way. It’s logarithmic. It tapers off forever, but never reaches completion.

That, and the fact that reemission happens, so even if a photon is captured, it’s not always forever.

paul

Australia to get hotter!!!!!!!!!!

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MICHELE MOSSOP/AFR
HOT FUTURE: A report on Australia’s future climate has estimated that some inland areas could be up to 5 degrees hotter by the end of the century.

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Australians are facing a barren future, with predictions of rising temperatures, less rainfall and more frequent droughts, according to a report released today.

Sydney could face an annual temperature rise of up to 4.3 degrees by 2070, and a tripling of the number of days a year when the thermometer soars above 35 degrees, if global greenhouse gas emissions are not cut steeply, the report said.

Melbourne faces temperature rises of up to 3.8 degrees by 2070 and the number of days over 35 degrees may rise from 9 to 25 days.

The most detailed and up-to-date predictions on how climate change will affect Australia, released today by CSIRO and the bureau of meteorology, also provide a grim outlook for the nation’s water supplies, which are already under severe stress.

More droughts, fires, and severe weather events, and less rain and snow across the country are on the horizon, according to the report.

Its findings, released at the Greenhouse 2007 conference in Sydney this morning, include projections of up to 20 per cent more drought months over most of Australia by 2030.

By 2070 this could rise to 40 per cent more drought months in eastern Australia and 80 per cent more in south western Australia.

The report also spells out the impact that human activity has already had on Australia’s climate.

A warming of 0.9 degrees since 1950 and an increase in hot nights have been mostly due to greenhouse gas emissions, it concludes.

These higher temperatures have “exacerbated” the effects of drought and led to a decline in snow cover, including a 40 per cent reduction in snow depth in Spring in the Snowy Mountains in the past 45 years.

Weather patterns and ocean currents have changed, reducing rainfall to south-west Australia and leading to a warming of waters off the east coast of Tasmania that is occurring at triple the global rate of ocean warming.

“The message is that global warming is real, humans are very likely to be causing it and that it is very likely that there will be changes in the global climate system in the centuries to come larger than those seen in the recent past,” the report says.

It is based on conclusions of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released earlier this year, and climate research conducted on the Australian region since the last CSIRO projections were released in 2001.

Co-ordinator of the CSIRO’s climate change science programme, Paul Holper, said improvements in computer modelling of climate meant the new projections were more accurate than the last ones, which warned national temperatures could rise as much as 6 degrees by 2070.

“Over the past five or six years we have learnt so much more about the atmosphere and the oceans, and our ability to use super computers to simulate climate has improved immensely,” he told ABC Radio.

Nationally, temperatures will rise by about 1 degree by 2030, and rainfall will decline by up to 5 per cent, according to the report.

The impact of human activity beyond that will depend on how quickly greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, with worst-case scenarios including a 5-degree warming and a 30 per cent reduction in annual rainfall by 2070.

If carbon dioxide levels can be stabilised at 550 parts per million, however, the temperature rise in Australia could be kept to about 1.8 degrees by 2070, and rainfall decline to about 7.5 per cent.

Hans Erren

Where is the “Hansen in France” thread gone?

Clothcap

I don’t know if this is useful but this landmark article seems to be at the base of the recent information maze on co2 forcing.
Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications

Click to access hansen_imbalance.pdf

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/308/5727/1431
http://www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 308 3 JUNE 2005
(Published under research articles)

We investigate Earth_s energy balance via computations with the current global climate model of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The model and its simulated climatology have been documented (8), as has its response to a wide variety of climate forcing mechanisms (9). The climate model_s equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 is 2.7-C (È2/3-C per W/m2) (10).

A good fit of observed and modeled temperatures (Fig. 1) also could be attained with smaller forcing and larger climate sensitivity, or with the converse. If climate sensitivity were higher (and forcings smaller), the rate of ocean heat storage and warming ‘‘in the pipeline’’ or ‘‘committed’’ would be greater, e.g., models with a sensitivity of 4.2- to 4.5-C for doubled CO2 yield È1-C ‘‘committed’’ global warming (3, 4). Conversely, smaller sensitivity and larger forcing yield lesser committed warming and ocean heat storage.

Smoke & mirrors. Hard to pin down. Good luck with the quest.
Clothcap

Tom Vonk

Steve McIntyre I know the answer on your original question .
It is called quantum thermodynamics .
However it has a rather fatal drawback – it doesn’t exist .
Why ?

Statistical thermodynamics proceeds from classical mechanics and classical definitions of pressure and temperature as being emerging parameters of a big amount of randomly moving particles .
As for (semi)classical radiation theory it is actually quite simple – rule 1 everything is black body , rule 2 everything is in the Planck law (derived from Bose Einstein statistics) .
Of an important note and one that is often forgotten is that a black body is necessarily isothermal – if it is not isothermal , then it is not a black body .
Specifically the Earth or any planet for that matter are not a black bodies .

Now your question must be reformulated to be more precise .
What you ask is “Given a variation of radiative properties (emissivity , absorptivity) of a real gaz submitted to a given radiation what would be the variation of its temperature ?”

Can the classical thermodynamics answer this question ?
Clearly no because the considered gaz is neither a black body nor in equilibrium .

As neither Einstein Bose statistics nor consequently the Planck’s law work , you have to construct the absorption/emission law for a specific non black body FLUID case .
However this must necessarily be a quantum mechanical theory as you need to know how a given matter distribution interacts with a given electromagnetical field .
It turns out to be a question of staggering complexity even in the simplest cases where no feedbacks and movements take place .

What does all that boil down to ?
That the indeed ONLY possible answer is “It is so because the computer model says so .”
You may like it or not but you have to live with it – that’s the only answer you will get .
Excuse me but I find it a very naive idea that there would be some “mainstream” physics and some “renegade” physics .
Actually we all work with the same Navier Stokes , Schrödinger , Boltzmann etc .
Of course there are differences among physicists – for instance a Gavin has not the brains to understand a tenth of what a Lubos Motl understands but they both use the same physics .

Therefore what distinguishes strongly is only the stance to computerized numerical simulation .
Some believe that computer produce meaningful results and you might call that stance “mainstream” and some believe that they don’t and you might call them “sceptics” .
During the years I have read and written about climate physics , I have found that there is only one relevant question and that is “Can numerical simulations converge to real physical solutions and if yes , under what conditions ?”
There are regrettably few people who are dedicated to such questions that are of paramount importance – Dan Hughes is one of them and his blog is one of the most relevant to the whole climate debate (question of climate sensibility included) .

W Robichaud

100 million for 4 years?
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAlerts/2007/2007092625668.html

Pat Keating

138, that’s why I said “essentially”. Let me be more precise:
Has anyone established the level (concentration x distance) at which IR absorption by water vapor has removed 99% of the IR over the band where the earth’s surface is emitting?

jae

132, 136, 142: I guess I shouldn’t have mentioned deserts at all in my post at 128. The relationships that I show hold for all locations EXCEPT the deserts, very probably due to the factors that Aurbo explained. My point is that part of the solar insolation at a given location goes into heating the surface and part of it goes into evaporating moisture. If there is a lot of moisture (Southeast), more goes into evaporating moisture and less goes into heating the surface. The observed temperature is a measure of the solar energy that has been absorbed by both the water vapor (through evaporation and through radiation) and the heating of the surface by that fraction of the solar insolation that did not go into producing the water vapor. Therefore, the temperature at a given location is quite closely related to the product of the insolation and the absolute humidity. Also, at a given latitude and altitude, the temperature is generally higher when there is less water vapor in the air, presumeably due to the convective effects Aurbo explained. Hope this makes sense.

Gunnar

>> that’s why I said “essentially”.

The engineer and scientist were told that each step they took must be half of the previous step. When they got across the room, they would get 10 million dollars and a beautiful girl to spend it with.

The scientist decided it was impossible and gave up. The engineer got close enough to kiss the girl, decided that he was “essentially” across the room, and lived happily ever after.

SteveSadlov

RE: #132 – While there are no absolutes, what you described tends to be more true in the true mid latitude arid climates north of about 40N, some of the intermountaine areas closer to the continental divide, as well as the high plains just east of the Rockies. Here in the SW, the main big thing is the Pacific High. It does two things for our weather. Firstly, during the summer months, when it is at its highest latitude, it shunts the jet stream to the north, and simply prevents mid latitude rain bearing weather from reaching the area. For example, even San Francisco, located directly on the coast, at 38N latitude, gets a mere 20 in / year (comparable with locations in Nebraska and the Texas Panhandle). Southward from there, other coastal locations get drier and drier – Monterey – 17 in / year, Santa Maria – 15 in / year, LA – 14 in / year, SD – 9 in / year. None of these are in any sort of rain shaddow. Climatologically, we see this effect in other places such as NW Africa, SW Africa, the area between the Atcama and central Chile, etc.

The other impact of the Pacific High is that its extent and stability, combined with the general NWly flow in its NE quadrant, results in net annual synoptic subsidence. No mountains required.

Now, of course, superimposed on all this, is indeed the courduroy of SWestern topography. So, as a result, as opposed to a rather monotonous arid landscape for hundreds of miles in every direction, we do have some upland “islands” of more humid country and lowland extremes of aridity in the valleys, especially the ones inland.

Larry

156, as Gavin described it in his “one-dimensional cartoon”, that’s correct. But he admits that it’s imperfect, although he seems to imply that it’s close.

In reality, you have radiation and convection competing up to a certain point, and then more-or-less pure radiation the rest of the way out. And they don’t have a very good handle on the sizes and shapes and numbers and locations of the convective cells.

That’s the simple radiation problem (a.k.a. “basic physics”) that you need to calculate the pre-feedback CS.

So count me among those who don’t believe that this is tractable. The real question is, how close are their 3-dimensional cartoons (a.k.a. computer models)?

Gunnar

>> 155, no, because the scientist was a climate scientist, and just walked across the room, and said that it’s close enough for climate science.

LOL. Just ignored the rules, and figured the ends justified the means, eh?

Gunnar

#160, #4, I would change to “transport large amounts of heat”

Based on a link I previously provided,

I would add #5) The real stratospheric lapse rate is not like the exaggerated one in the text book. The temp inversion is quite mild. With the daytime surface heating acting like a whip being jerked back and forth, there is no problem with heat transport out to space.

Sam Urbinto

Being surrounded on 3 sides by the bay and only a few miles wide will do that to you.

Gunnar

>> 3) In convective clouds, the role of electrostatic discharge

SteveS, can you elaborate on this?

MarkW

#160,

Even smaller convective systems can make it easier for heat to escape.
Even small storms can reach heights of 15,000 to 20,000 feet.

At 20,000 feet, you are above something like 1/4th to 1/3rd of the atmosphere.
Now assuming that the GHGs are evenly distributed (not exactly, but not far from it) being abot 1/4th the atmosphere puts the heat above 1/4th of the GHGs.

SteveSadlov

RE: #164 – The additional complication for SF (as well as a number of other microclimates I’ll mention below) is the fact that it is in a so called “fog gap” – a place in and on either side of a low spot in the coast range (in this case, the Golden Gate-Carquinez Straits gap), that allows for thermally induced onshore pressure gradients during the hot season. As a result, you get some pretty good winds pushing the stratus and cooled (by the upwelling) marine air inland where such gaps exist. Some other similar spots along the coast, which likely are not on the list of stations, are places like a section of coast between Bodega Bay and Point Reyes, an area in between Half Moon Bay and Pescadero, an area of desolate dunes between Pismo Beach and Santa Maria, and, Jalama Beach.

SteveSadlov

RE: #167 – ionization is a different type of energy dissipation than overt warming.

SteveSadlov

In much the same way that an ever increasing understanding of the energetics of the earth has led to greater and greater understanding of Earth dynamics and plate tectonics, a better understand of the energetics of the atmosphere will likely lead to much better GCMs.

theduke

Steve, #176: Do you think it would help if we told her that the winter rains in Southern California in 04-05 were the most plentiful in over a hundred years?

Naaaa. Not likely.

Gunnar

>> growing world wide drought

That anyone could believe this is more evidence that we’ve entered the age of anti-science

>> so hot that water that evaporates will not cool sufficiently to rain

Yea, that’s it, the upper troposphere (-40) has heated up to the point where water won’t condense. Wow, this kind of lack of critical thinking is scary.

>> falling water levels in the Great Lakes

Or maybe there’s a simpler reason.

tetris

World-wide drought?
We have 60% more rainwater [3000 Imp gallons] in our cisterns than same time last year. Temps in the Pacific NW have been well below the norm since last fall. Contrary to all GCMs, the UK, western France, Northern Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia had one of wettest and coldest summers on record. The drought in Australia broke earlier this year, and on it goes.
But of course, why wouldn’t RC post the fears of an ill-informed individual when it serves their message?

jae

Hmm, thinking more about the December Humidity vs. Temperature plot referred to in 128. It appears that virtually all the solar energy is transferred to water vapor when it is cold, thus explaining the nearly perfect correlation between absolute humidity and temperature in December.

SteveSadlov

jae – Just a note, all those coastal places mentioned are north of 40 deg north. Totally different regime than south of 40. Pacific High has much less impact north of 40. Also, as I mentioned, SF (and the various podunk places I listed) are at fog gaps. But the overarching message is, Pacific High equals North American version of Sahara (albeit modulated by varied topography and orographic miracles, making our Sahara more verdent). The vast arid zones east of semi persistent oceanic highs between 25 and 37 latitude have subsidence dominated synoptics, leading to compressive heating and very dry, high pressure air. The lack of RH leads to higher insolation, less energy devoted to evaporation and transporation, fewer overall low-mid and large convective clouds and therefore higher summertime temps than comparable humid subtropical latitudes.

jae

184: Thanks for that link. This statement from it fits the milieu here well:

When the response of the climate system to the solar
cycle is apparent in the troposphere and ocean, but not
in the global surface temperature, one can only wonder
about the quality of the surface temperature record.

Robert in Calgary

Re: 184

I thought the Lockwood paper was “smelly” as soon as I saw the over the top cheerleading for it.

I love their wry observation on the quality of surface temperatures.

Sam Urbinto

It’s the magnetic field weakening and cosmic rays having more effect. The deep oceans are drawing off too much of the heat from the core, and the dynamo is slowing as the rock becomes more solid.

We must start heating the oceans more to save the planet.

Follow the Money

Steve asks:

If anyone can identify a clear exposition of how 2xCO2 leads to 2.5 deg C, please do so.

I believe I have an answer: because IPCC AR1 1990 (“Scientific Assessment) says so. From chapter 5 “Equilibrium Climate Change” p. 139,

The evidence from modeling studies, from observations and from sensitivity analyses indicate that the sensitivity of global mean surface temperature to doubling CO2 is unlikely to lie outside the range 1.5 to 4.5C. There is no compelling evidence to suggest in what part of this range the correct value is most likely to lie. There is no particular virtue in choosing the middle of the range, and both the sensitivity analysis and the observational evidence neglecting factors other than the greenhouse effect, indicate that a value in the lower part of the range may be more likely. Most scientists declined to give a single number, but for the purpose of illustraing the IPCC Scenarios, a value of 2.5C is considered the “best guess” in the light of current knowledge. [orig. bold]

“Observations” is reading thermometers. In the paragraph previous adjusting model sensitivities of expected warming with later observations is “fraught with uncertainty.”

In chapter 2 is table 2.2, p. 52 “Expressions used to derive radiative forcing for past trends and future scenarios of greenhouse gas concentrations.” Eight trace gasses are listed. For CO2 the “Radiative Forcing Approximation Giving deltaF In Wm-2” is “deltaF=6.31n (C/Co[o is subscript]) where C is CO2 om ppmv for C The actual relationships between forcing and concentration derived from models can be used to develop simple expressions (e.g., Wigley, 1987; Hansen et al 1988) which are then more easily used for a large number of calculations. Such simple expressions are used in this Section. The values adopted and their sources are given in Table 2.2. Values derived from Hansen et al. have been multiplied by 3.35 (Lacis, personal communication) to convert forcing as a temperature change to forcing as a change in net flux at the tropopause after allowing for stratospheric temperature change. These expressions should be considered as global mean forcings; they implicitly include the radiative effects of global mean cloud cover.

As far as I can tell the only lab analysis (and I might be wrong about this one) in AR1 of forcing agents, that is, analyzing the gasses without inculding historical climate assumptions, feed backs and guesswork is a chart on p. 53 comparing the relative forcing of CO2 to other GHGs. The text says “Further information on the available spectroscopic data is given by Husson (1990).” In References the Husson paper is described “..(To be published)”

I write the above here to 1. answer Steve’s question, 2. suggest that many of the questions encountered at this website in the nature of “why do they say that in AR3” may be answered by resort to AR1 – which is not available on line as far as I can tell.

Larry

Sadly I suspect the powers that be here are well aware of that, #150, and the “clear exposition” posture taken recently is just a way to frame the debate in a manner that avoids people making the obvious inference that Hansen and co could actually still be right in big picture terms regardless of what they may or may not have got up to with data from Siberia or Wellington, New Zealand and with Mann’s hockey stick etc.

Hopefully, since this is the unthreaded thread, I won’t get snipped for this, but what you’re saying is logically untenable. That is exactly the same intellectual contortion that Dan Rather got canned for. You can’t say the data is all wrong but the conclusion is right. There’s a word for that, but it I use it, I’ll definitely get snipped. But the word isn’t logic.

Larry

Oh, really?

John M.

Climate is a complex question, Larry. What Mann et al have tried to demonstrate with their analysis of the historical climate record is that the atmospheric CO2 concentration is the only major factor in determining global mean temperature and that other factors like solar irradiance only play a minor role. Even if those other factors have been more significant in the past than the hockey stick would suggest, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 in the modern era could still lead to major problems over the next century or so.

Larry

Pssst! Don’t look now, but I think a guy named Steve McIntyre broke Mann’s hockey stick…

captdallas2

ref 199 That is another red flag for me. Solar influence was lost due to CO2 forcing? Northern Europe had a 1.5 to 3 degree temperature rise from ’87 to ’90 following an unusually high and short solar cycle during a reduce average hurricane cycle. A lag in the NAO does not seem unthinkable in that situation to me. Then I just fish for a living.

M. Simon

John M. says:
October 2nd, 2007 at 7:25 pm

Climate is a complex question, Larry. What Mann et al have tried to demonstrate with their analysis of the historical climate record is that the atmospheric CO2 concentration is the only major factor in determining global mean temperature and that other factors like solar irradiance only play a minor role. Even if those other factors have been more significant in the past than the hockey stick would suggest, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 in the modern era could still lead to major problems over the next century or so.

Kudzu will totally take over.

John M.

This question is now so polarized and people have become so tribalistic over this issue that some posters have obviously immediately assumed that I must see Mann as being correct for having posted the above comments. I didn’t need this website to know that something was strange about Mann’s analysis. As a child in the 1970s back when an imminent new ice age was sometimes being mentioned as a possibility on the television, I could see skating ponds built during the LIA in the countryside around the village where I grew up that could hardly ever be used as it seldom ever got cold enough for the water to freeze sufficiently to safely use them. The severe winter of 1978 being a memorable exceptions. I could also see field patterns for cropland dating back to the MWP and Roman times at altitudes where there was only sheep pasture in the modern era. Dramatic historical natural climate changes were obvious in other words and everybody knew about it. Scientists were already seriously concerned about global warming by the late 80s and early 90s before Mann published his paper and Hansen started playing around with the historical temperature record. Showing they are possibly up to mischief in terms of the scientific method doesn’t change much in the big scheme of things in other words.

MarkW

World wide drought, where did all the water go.

I think it all fell on England this year.

Larry

204, That’s all true, but just because I can’t prove that there aren’t 100 invisible Klingons on my roof getting ready to attack me doesn’t mean that I should be concerned. This is basic philosophy/law school stuff that I think too many techy types miss.

Tom Vonk

#151

Has anyone established the level (concentration x distance) at which IR absorption by water vapor has removed 99% of the IR over the band where the earth’s surface is emitting?

My first reaction was to say that radiation transmission was investigated because it is actually easy and it has also been done with different gases .
You take an infrared transparent cylinder with variable length and feed it with a gas of variable composition .
You illuminate the front end with infrared and you measure what comes out on the rear end .

But my first reaction was irrelevant to the problem we have in mind here – radiation behaviour of the real atmosphere .
Indeed in the experiment described above both the convection and the change of state (if applicable) are suppressed .
That’s why the gas in the cylinder heats too much what modifies both its absorptivity and emissivity .
It is not at all that way in the atmosphere where convection heat transfer largely prevails in the low atmosphere , the quantum effects of infrared photon absorption/emission prevail in the high atmosphere and both compete in the middle .
So no , to my knowledge nobody did that for the real atmosphere and I doubt that it is feasible experimentaly .

Of course you can make a computer model and get the answer of the model .
But that wouldn’t be precisely an experimental value , would it ?

Nasif Nahle

# 211

Pat Keating,

That’s the problem, Pat. As I’ve said “There are many things that you couldn’t find in the internet, for example the values of the emissivity-absorptivity of water vapor and other minor GHG.”

However, we can get them from books, for example Heat Transfer by Pitts and Sissom (pp. 309-311), Thermodynamics by Engel and Reid (pp. 2-10), Heat Transmission by Hoyt Hottel (pp. 153-160), etc.

jae

213: Outstanding post. Great summary of the 2.5 C question, and good way to approach resolution. Now, if we could get someone with lotsa cash to fund such a study. Probably not Al Gore or George Sorros, though…

jae

Kudzu will totally take over.

LOL. Yes, this could be the real danger of 2 x CO2!

Nasif Nahle

The whole thing is plain. Calculate the Pp of OCO at this moment, take a temperature of 500 R and go to the graphs from Hottel. At 1 atm of total pressure and a partial pressure of OCO, the emissivity of OCO is 0.00092.

Nasif Nahle

Dear Steve McIntyre et al.,

I’m sorry for my last posts. I know it was a mistake. Erase them if you wish, I’ll understand.

Nasif Nahle

The value 2.5 °C per 2CO2 has been obtained by multiplying the alpha value given by Arrhenius (5.35 W/m^2) by 2.5, that is 13.375 W/m^2. By applying the “new” alpha value to the derived formula,

delta T = alpha (Ln 2 ppmv CO2)/4 (sigma) (Tbb)^3, the result will be:

delta T = 13.375 W/m^2 (0.693) / 3.76 W/m^2*K = 9.269 (W/m^2)/3.76 (W/m^2) K = 2.47 K.

Rounding the cipher, 2.5 °C.

Twisted values: alpha and Tbb.

Nasif Nahle

Do you wish a delta T of 7 °C for a doubling of CO2? Multiply alpha by 7, 5.35 W/m^2 x 7 = 37.45 W/m^2 Then make a confusing formula like alpha = e/Ro (Cp) Fo that will provide you with the desired magnitude for alpha. Remember that Fo can be changed as you wish.

Gunnar

>> 225, let’s be a little clearer about that.

Larry, I somewhat agree with #228, but that not’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. There are two levels of abstraction:

1) scientific laws, like F=ma or V=IR.

and

2) the performance of a certain complex audio amplifier, or the MPG that my particular car gets, or the sensitivity of Earth-atmos-2007 to a change in SI, or the sensitivity of Earth-atmos-2007 to a change in C02.

I’m saying that these are two completely different levels of abstraction. In #1, we can usually derive the relationship from other known relationships, and this gives us confidence that the equation is true.

In #2, the relationship in question is associated with the details of the particular system. The relationship is not derivable from other general scientific first principles. We can only test it.

Gunnar

And how do they do to get MPG? They measure it.

We have 100+ years of temperature and C02 measurements (no proxies).

Why isn’t someone running the numbers to plot dT/dC02?

DeWitt Payne

Re: #221

Nasif, scan the page you refer to and upload it to photobucket or some other service and post the image here or at UKweatherworld. Look closely at the chart and see if it says just PCO2 or PCO2L. I’m betting on the second.

Otherwise, anyone who wants to can use the links provided in #219 and discover the truth. I don’t want to waste any more bandwidth than I have already by posting the actual graph here to prove my point.

UK John

One thing I have never quite understood, is that of all the products of combustion the consensus is that CO2 is the one that causes global warming/climate change.

What about all the Giga tonnes of H2O that is sent into the atmosphere by combustion, isn’t this a greenhouse gas? or doesn’t it have some effect, even a negative shielding effect such as aircraft quatrails have.

Steve Sadlov

RE: #81 – Let’s posit that AGW is indeed real. Let’s posit that somehow, after all the ringing works itself out of the system, the 2X CO2 leads to 2.5 Deg C or better. Is it right to conclude that warmer temperatures are only a cost and not a benefit? Especially when viewed over, say, 500 or 1000 years’ time? I have to say I’m with Lomborg on this one. Until someone presents me with conclusive evidence that AGW is net cost negative (not a model, but real evidence) then I will withhold judgment regarding whether or not AGW would really cost anything, over the long term.

Nasif Nahle

DeWitt Payne,

See the tiny numbers above each line? It’s PpCO2

David

I propose that a new science is needed: One that studies the origins, data, tables, naming conventions, and algorithms used by the elusive climatus scientisticus (particularly the alarmisticus variety).

Elsie

David says:
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:31 pm

I propose that a new science is needed: One that studies the origins, data, tables, naming conventions, and algorithms used by the elusive climatus scientisticus (particularly the alarmisticus variety).

Sounds like Meta-Science to me. I’ve previously asked for guidance if I should apply to Columbia or to Oxford to obtain an advanced degree in same as it appears to the cutting edge discipline.

Nasif Nahle

DeWitt Payne,

You wrote:

“You ignore path length.”

I think you’re a bit confused with the term PgasL. P is the partial pressure of the hemispherical gas system with radius L. You can make the conversion of Partial pressure in atm-ft to atm-m. The results found by Hottel are the effective emissivity of OCO. From those values we can compute for the total emittancy of OCO.

Why not try the algorithm with your ciphers? 😉

DougM

Steve Sadlov could you provide me with some links to material that proposes global warming is necessary to end the current interglacial period. Thanks.

Gunnar

>> The logarithmic form is derived from quantum statistics. Arrhenius’ law is an integration of the Beer-Lambert law.

Beer-Lambert: an empirical relationship that relates the absorption of light to the properties of the material through which the light is traveling.

How can you integrate A = (alpha)lc and get temperature? Beers law seems to having nothing to do with temperature. Even if did, it could not possibly reflect the state variable Temp-earth-surface, which is subject to the thermodynamics of the particular system in question. From where in Beers law does C02-std come from?

>> Because, among other things, there are time dynamics.

So? me thinks thou dost protest too much. That’s not a valid objection.

>> Go ahead and plot it. See what you end up with. No matter what you end up with, it won’t mean anything.

You haven’t come close to making that case.

>> That’s why this needs to be decomposed into it’s elements, as much as possible. The overall net effect won’t tell you diddly about what’s causing what.

Yes, we’ll need to check for correlations with various possible factors, starting with C02, Solar, etc.

DeWitt Payne

Nasif,

I posted before you clarified that your emittance was measured at the center of the hemisphere rather than at the surface, but the same logic applies. Double the radius or double the pressure, the result is the same, emittance increases. Btw, I said that there were 10 metric tons of air/m2 (101,300 Pa /9.8 m sec-2) not 18,000 tons on your head.

Willis Eschenbach

YA GOTTA LOVE NATURE MAGAZINE …

They just published a letter from Neville Nicholls in the August issue, lauding Sawyer’s “remarkable prediction” in 1972 of global warming. Nicholls said in part:

He [Sawyer] concluded that the 25% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide predicted to occur by 2000 corresponded to an increase of 0.6°C in world temperature.

and finishes by saying

Despite huge efforts, and advances in the science, the scientific consensus on the amount of global warming expected from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations has changed little from that in Sawyer’s time.

I wrote back a letter to Nature, saying in its entirety:

SIR—Your letter from Neville Nicholls (Nature, Vol. 44:30, p992, Aug. 2007) concerning Sawyer’s 1972 prediction of temperature rise to the end of the century omits a critical fact. Sawyer’s prediction was for a rise in CO2 of 25% by the end of the century. Had that happened, his prediction would have been quite good. In fact, however, rather than the CO2 level increasing by 25% as Sawyer predicted, the Mauna Loa data shows a rise of only 13% from 1972 to 2000. As a result, Sawyer’s prediction was not very accurate.

Nature has just responded to the letter, saying:

Thank you for your letter which I regret we cannot offer to publish.

Perhaps you would like to discuss the details directly with Dr Nicholls, whose letter is more concerned with the temperature rise predicted by Sawyer (0.6 degrees) which in fact agreed with the observed figure for the prediction period (0.5 degrees).

TRANSLATION: He got the right answer (even though he used an incorrect prediction of CO2 growth and thus his formula must have been incorrect), so we don’t want to talk about it …

The new version of science stumbles toward Bethlehem to be born, and despite my efforts to protest, I fear that all I can do is sit on the sidelines and laugh … beats crying, I guess.

w.

Frank H. Scammell

I was reading Junk Science, when this caught my eye( How Hot IS It?). [Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News posed the question to Watts and to Prof. Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York. Schmidt has said this summer’s correction of the GISS’ previously published U.S. temperature averages for 2000-2006—lowering them by 0.15 Celsius—is insignificant. He told us adjustments are necessary in identifying long-term climate trends, because “we need information for as long back as possible] It would seem that most every thing is “insignificant”. Just what is significant ? only the model outputs substituted for real data ? I don’t understand, and suspect that is what is expected of me. Only the high priests !

Larry

247, That parallels the Hansen scenarios. He got the right answer with the wrong scenario. And he doesn’t think that particular detail matters.

brian

It would be interesting to see CA do an analysis of costs for the various schemes thrown about by policymakers…that kind of analysis seems to me to be right up CA’s alley.

Steve: I try to avoid discussions of policy as there are many other venues where you can do that.

captdallas2

Ref 245, That comment just ruined it for me! I had a picture of a 12 foot radius Nasif head on a five foot frame. Just curious, wouldn’t the impact of the emissivity decrease significantly with increased altitude? There are a bunch of spheres interacting after all.

captdallas2

ref 254, H2O has a different set of rules it follows. If the smoke stack discharges in to cold enough air the H20 condenses. Jets leave contrails (condensed water vapor) at fairly high altitude. The contrail persist for a fairly long period. So jets increase the albedo (negative forcing) while surface evaporation depends on the ambient temperature as to what if any forcing it may have.

Water vapor is the climate change wild card. Because of its latent heat, it can transport bunches of energy. The warmer the air the more water vapor available to transport heat. If there is a thunderstorm, most of the heat is transferred to the higher atmosphere then radiated into space. If there is no storm, the clouds provide a nice blanket to hold the heat in. Natures little buffer system that deserts don’t enjoy.

Kahlessa

Bjorn Lomborg is going to be on Book TV (CSpan-2) this weekend.

In “Cool It,” Bjorn Lomborg argues that global warming is not a catastrophe but a problem. Mr. Lomborg provides scenarios and solutions to problems associated with global warming. He also discusses some of the issues he views as more of an immediate problem, like malaria, AIDS, and clean water supplies.

captdallas2

273 The buffer tends to reduce temperature extremes. Where I live in the Florida Keys the diurnal variation is rarely over 20 degrees F. It can be pretty humid here.

DeWitt Payne

Re: #265

Just curious, wouldn’t the impact of the emissivity decrease significantly with increased altitude? There are a bunch of spheres interacting after all.

Yes. There’s not much contribution to emission from CO2 above the tropopause, about 15 km. You can see this because the emission temperature of the band is about 220K. If you go high enough in the stratosphere where it starts warming again, you see an emission spike from the 15 micrometer line from CO2 in the stratosphere (no collisional broadening at that altitude) in the middle of the broad (relatively speaking) band emission from colder lower altitude. Ozone does the same thing at about 10 micrometers. Looking up from the surface, most CO2 emission comes from quite close, less than 100 m. There’s a really nice example of this posted by Hans E. at UKweatherworld in the Hans, Nasif debate thread in the Climate and Earth Sciences forum. It’s a spectrum taken in Alaska looking up during a temperature inversion (temperature increases with altitude). The CO2 emission clearly comes from a lower, colder altitude than the rest of the emission. Hans even included the temperature trace from a sounding taken at the same time. See the link in 219

I didn’t mean to carry on about this, but Nasif’s emissivity number has been quite a puzzle for me. I’ve now solved it to my satisfaction, if not his. I’m like Steve M. in that regard. Puzzles fascinate me. We’re just not necessarily fascinated by the same types of puzzle.

Nasif Nahle

# 265

captdallas2,

I had a picture of a 12 foot radius Nasif head on a five foot frame.

Hah! 😉

Just curious, wouldn’t the impact of the emissivity decrease significantly with increased altitude? There are a bunch of spheres interacting after all.

You’re right, Dallas. The emissivity responds to many factors like density, temperature, adiabatic lost of energy, gravity, geometry of the system, etc. For example, the sphere immediately above ground could acquire a temperature 2-5 degrees higher than the temperature at 1.5 m above ground.

Nasif Nahle

# 254

DeWitt Payne,

Now let’s increase the radius L to 2 meters. The volume increases by 8 and the area increases by 4.

The partial pressure depends on the concentration of the gas, one could go up and up and up, but if the concentration of the gas decreases with altitude instead of increasing, the partial pressure would also decrease and so the emissivity would do. As long as the concentration of OCO is the same at any volume and altitude, let’s say for the troposphere below 6.21 mi of altitude, the emissivity of the gas will not increase.

captdallas2

ref 281, water vapor tends to increase the Tmin so it can increase temperature in the case of the global warming deal. The heat stored in water vapor has more of a stablilizing effect on temperatures by limiting or buffering the temperatures to a range dependent on the relative humidity (specific humidity in some lexicons).

While mass stores energy, (asphalt,rocks and such) water has a specific heat of fusion and vaporization that increases its ability to transport heat energy (and release heat). Other ambient gases have similar properties, but the temperatures of and latent heat of phase changes are much less significant at the standard operating temperatures and pressures in our atmosphere.

Water vapor can also be positively or negatively forcing, (a fine buffer property). Were it not for the unique properties of water vapor, determining the climate’s sensitivity to GHGs would be a cake walk. Water vapor is the climate change wild card. As temperatures warm, the air can hold more water vapor meaning more heat can be transported away from the surface of the earth or retained near the surface depending on local psychrometrics(sp)(how water vapor responds to conditions locally, it is charted based on temperature and pressure).

Due to increases in water vapor in the atmosphere caused by warming, more storms are possible. Each storm reduces surface heat through increased albedo(cloud cover) and convection (anvil head thunder clouds). The impact of increased storm formation on global temperature is somewhat confirmed by the 1940 to 1960 cooling period. That happened to be a period of higher tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic basin.

So water vapor is the predominate green house gas, it just is multi-tasking.

Steve McIntyre

#281. It’s not that the policy issues are unimportant – they are important. It’s just that I want to keep a focus on scientific issues. There are lots of venues to discuss politics.

Gunnar and Nasif, I’ve asked that people not discuss thermodynamics, your own theories of radiation etc.

Tom Vonk

# 273

>> Beer-Lambert is most certainly derivable from quantum statistics.
Never said it wasn’t

You should have because it isn’t .
Beer Lambert has nothing to do with quantum mechanics – it is only a way to say that “the more molecules there is , the more the radiation gets absorbed if it has a suitable frequency” .
It takes 2 lines to derive it . 3 if one feels generous .
However it has validity limits , one important being that the incident radiation must be monochromatic (the efficient cross section of the molecule that figures as a constant in Beer Lambert is function of the photon’s frequency ) .
There are still people using Beer Lambert in the transmission of a black body radiation what is of course a non sense .
Another obvious limitation is that the radiation has to be at equilibrium with the matter .
As the real atmosphere doesn’t fulfill those conditions , Beer Lambert is of a limited use to understand what happens .

DeWitt Payne # 274

Statements like “Most CO2 emissions come from X” are confusing if not specified very carefully .
For CO2 or any other gaz at high density and pressure so low altitudes the collisional terms are dominating and the gaz can be broadly described by Planck’s law .
At low densities and pressures so high altitudes the radiative (quantum) terms are dominating and the gaz can’t be described by the Planck’s law .
So if one asks about “origin of emissions” then the answer is different for overall infrared emission (translation+vibration+rotation) and for specific infrared emission (f.ex the vibrational bands like 4 or 15 µ) .
As the low atmosphere radiates more or less “black body” like , there is a lot of infrared over a big range of frequencies while the high atmosphere radiates almost only in the vibrationnal bands .

For those seriously interested in the radiation transfer , I’d suggest the following reference .
Of course there is no warranty that once this model is coupled to convection , latent heat transfer etc , it makes a relevant description of a real atmosphere .
But as far as pure radiation (steady state & no movement) is concerned and so far I can judge , the basic physics is right .

jae

Milloy just won’t leave poor Gore alone.

MarkW

#279,

Short wave droppings???

Can you use clorox to clean those up?

John Baltutis

Interesting article with attributions to Anthony Watts and http://www.surfacestations.org: “>How Hot IS It?

Sam Urbinto

So did anyone ever figure out if it’s .00096 or .1? Or that it matters anyway?

tetris, #206. I would say there is no conclusive and verifiable evidence that there actually is some sort of real, ongoing and extreme change in the stated dependent variable in the first place, not just a lack of proven causal relationship to the stated independent variable.

But what if? If we take it for granted there is both a change in the temp and a causal relationship mainly from the CO2, then we have to show that the metric of “land surface temperatures” itself has any meaning. And even if “the mean global anomaly” in the sampled average measured temperatures was a specific thing to look at, you still have to show that the trendd will continue, and that 1 or 2 C is actually going to result. Then you have to travel a bit further and prove 1 or 2 C is harmful. Now you can start figuring out what to do about it. And then how to pay for it. Then all we have to do is implement it.

But back to reality. Looking at some of Willis’ charts, and other information here and elsewhere, it doesn’t appear CO2 is even a major component (conveniently ignoring the other GHG and how they interact with water vapor and the oceans and the sun and the clouds and the wind and… And all with each other) in the first place. If that is the case, what effect it has is really meaningless in and of itself.

Steve Sadlov

As a skier, I relish this, but otherwise I actually find this to be quite disturbing:

Gunnar

from ‘2006 and CRN1-2’, MrPete says >> I’ve seen statements alluding to even satellite measures being calibrated off the surface station measures.

Yes, IR instrumentation needs to be calibrated in various ways. One of these is calibration with reliable surface based measurements. This does not require a large number of surface based measurements. Perhaps only a few over each major type of surface, oceans, land, etc. Therefore, the errors associated with the lower-48 focused surface networks are not translated to the satellite.

The satellite data, unlike CRN1-2, is not subject to a 98% chance of missing the important data. That’s if we are generous and say that CRN1-2 represents 2%. It actually only represents the immediate areas around the 16 stations. A tiny, tiny fraction of the earth’s surface.

I think I know some objections that folks may have, but perhaps they also sense that they are weak, so they don’t voice it. People might be thinking: it’s such a different data set, it’s a) already geographically averaged, and b) it doesn’t go back a 100 years, so we can’t make any arguments about whether 98 was hotter than 38, or vice versa. In short, the objection is that we shouldn’t connect two apparently disparate data sets. To this, I say, there is no problem connecting data from different types of instrumentation because:

1) Even the surface data is from different types of measuring devices, since the thermometers from 1900 are not what is used in 2007.

2) It’s done all the time, for example, graphs of C02 are created, connecting ice core C02 proxy data (average spacing of like 1400 years) with a minute by minute IR C02 measurement. There is even a geographic difference, ice cores from Antartica connected to Hawaii C02 measurement.

3) It’s done all the time, for example, temperature reconstructions from various proxies are connected to thermometer data. Recall the hockey stick? Even in the counter hockey stick, no one said “it’s invalid, because the data measurement systems are dissimilar”.

Therefore, I can see no logical reason not to take the best surface based data one can find, up to 1979, and attach the satellite data post 79.

Andrey Levin says>> If we want to have accurate historic temperature data for a period longer that 28 years

I think I’ve answered this invalid objection above.

Andrey Levin says>> two data sets are highly correlated.

Well, of course, they are highly correlated, they are trying to measure the same thing. That’s really not saying much. They do not yield the same conclusions however. The surface data set shows temperatures rising since 1998, and the satellite data shows falling temperatures. The point is that it borders on the insane to keep trying to analyze the surface system, when a better one is available. It’s like struggling for years to keep an old jalopy working, and then you get a brand new mercedes benz. Yet, out of some old demented habit, you still struggle to fix the old car. And not just for a hobby. You need to get your family somewhere important, and you say “I’ll get the old car fixed, and then we can go”.

The claim is that we’re in the blade part of a hockey stick. In that case, satellite data should show that.

re>> So we have an initial graph which almost completely leaves out a region

Aaron, look at the whole graphic. It leaves out a whole lot more than that.

Nasif Nahle

# 292

Sam Urbinto,

Yes, I agree except for the importance of the figure 0.00092 vs. 0.1-0.2. If you take the real value, obtained by experimentation (0.00092) the change of temperature caused by the current density of CO2 is only 0.1 K. However, if you take the flawed ciphers, let’s say 0.1, the change of temperature caused by the current density of CO2 would be implausible, some 6.64 K. Sam, 0.1-0.2 are the ciphers used by many authors on AGW, and many dare to use figures near to bb emissivity, for example 0.6-0.9. The latter figures were used to predict a change of temperature near to 13 K in the 90s.

Gunnar

Sam, I’m a little confused, but I think we agree.

Lower 48 is 2% of earth’s surface. There is a buoy system that measures air temperatures in the ocean regions. Not many, but they are there.

I agree with you that we should include ocean temperatures as well. The atmosphere is a small part. One can see that when you look at an image of earth from space. The atmos is such a thin layer. The reality backs up the perception: only .378% of the ocean mass.

Your #4 is an excellent point.

John M.

What the science can do at this stage is form the basis for the prediction that there is going to be a temperature rise of between 1 and 5 degrees over the next century or so. Unfortunately, it can’t be used to predict for sure where within that range the future is going to lie but given the magnitude of the possible problems that could unfold many/most scientists and politicians feel that is sufficient to strongly recommend that GHG emissions are cut back drastically to minimize the risk of it being in the higher range. That’s the approximate state of play right now, anyway.

Anna Lang

RE: #295

Today The Weather Channel reported that Fairbanks, Alaska recorded its first snowfall of the season on October 3, 2007. Viewers were told this was the latest date for first snow in the past ten years. But, after a pause for a breath, the reporter noted this was not the latest date ever recorded for the first snowfall in Fairbanks. That was October 10, 1934.

DougM

jae, the link to your data source in 128 is not working. Also I cannot find your work on esnips.

Willis Eschenbach

Tetris, you say:

The first economic AGW/ACC fall-out calculations are in: [by UofCh and other groups]. Based on proposed cap and trade and other carbon tax schemes before the US Congress at present, by 2015 the cost to the US economy will be around US$3,000 per capita. This equates to an over US$1 trillion loss to the US economy p.a. going forward, with negative consequences compounding over time [think of this as compounded interest but negative..].

Do you have a citation for this estimate?

w.

M. Simon

Why the arctic is melting for laymen:

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2007/10/wind-power.html

The referenced paper:

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL031138.shtml

Sorry if this is OT but all the threads I could find on the subject were many months ago. It is possible I missed a more recent one.

Hoi Polloi

From the Graudian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/05/climatechange

Climate change disaster is upon us, warns UN

· Emergency relief chief calls for swift action
· 12 out of 13 ‘flash’ appeals in 2007 related to weather

A record number of floods, droughts and storms around the world this year amount to a climate change “mega disaster”, the United Nation’s emergency relief coordinator, Sir John Holmes, has warned.

Sir John, a British diplomat who is also known as the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said dire predictions about the impact of global warming on humanity were already coming true.

“We are seeing the effects of climate change. Any year can be a freak but the pattern looks pretty clear to be honest. That’s why we’re trying … to say, of course you’ve got to deal with mitigation of emissions, but this is here and now, this is with us already,” he said.

As a measure of the worsening situation, Ocha, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – part of the UN secretariat that employs Sir John – has issued 13 emergency “flash” appeals so far this year. The number is three more than in 2005, which held the previous record.

Two years ago only half the international disasters dealt with by Ocha had anything to do with the climate; this year all but one of the 13 emergency appeals is climate-related. “And 2007 is not finished. We will certainly have more by the end of the year, I fear,” added Sir John, who is in charge of channelling international relief efforts to disaster areas.

More appeals were likely in the coming weeks, as floods hit west Africa. “All these events on their own didn’t have massive death tolls, but if you add all these little disasters together you get a mega disaster,” he said.

The only one of this year’s emergency appeals not connected to the climate was an earthquake in Peru, in August. The others arose after an unprecedented string of catastrophic floods across much of Africa, south Asia and North Korea, and followed severe drought in southern Africa, Nicaragua’s category-five hurricane, and extreme climate conditions in Bolivia, which brought both drought and floods.

The Ocha appeals represent the tip of an iceberg since they are launched only with the agreement of the affected country. India was badly affected by floods that hit the rest of the Asian region in July. But unlike its neighbour, Pakistan, India did not call on the UN for help.

Ocha believes that 66 million people were made homeless or were otherwise affected across south Asia. The lives of several million more people were turned upside down across Africa. Sudan, Mozambique, Madagascar, Zambia and Uganda experienced disastrous floods, and Swaziland and Lesotho declared emergencies because of severe drought that reduced harvests by half.

The latest appeal from Ocha was launched yesterday, to try to raise emergency relief funds for Ghana, where more than 400,000 people are reported to be homeless as a result of flooding. Appeals may also be started for Togo and Burkina Faso.

“The flooding in Africa just now is the worst anyone can remember,” Sir John said, expressing frustration at how little media attention in the west was being devoted to what he terms creeping climatic catastrophe.

Flooding is likely to be common for a warming planet, and climate change has a double effect – causing an increase in the frequency of storms, while higher atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide curb the ability of plants to draw groundwater.

A climate-change summit is to be held in Bali in December, with the aim of agreeing the principles of a new international treaty to replace Kyoto, the accord that expires in 2012. But the talks face determined US opposition to mandatory emissions targets, and most climate negotiators doubt a real breakthrough can be achieved before the Bush government leaves office in 2009.

Sir John argues that whatever is done on greenhouse gas emissions, money has to be spent now on mitigating the impact that climate change is already having. “You can’t actually stop disasters happening but you can do a lot to reduce their impact and reduce people’s vulnerability to them by making sure people don’t live on the coast or river plains, and that roads are raised and dams are in reasonable shape.”

According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is leading research on the issue, global warming will disrupt and potentially devastate the lives of billions of people.

And, just as global warming starts to make itself felt, there are signs that “donor fatigue” has set in. Of about $338m (£166m) requested for Ocha’s 13 flash appeals this year, only $114m has so far come from donors.

Keep the hysteria coming and the funds will never dry up…

M. Simon

Flooding is likely to be common for a warming planet, and climate change has a double effect – causing an increase in the frequency of storms, while higher atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide curb the ability of plants to draw groundwater.

I’m told that if you cut or burn down the plants it is very difficult for them to draw ground water.

Also note that any change in equilibrium can cause an increase in storms as the system works to establish a new equilibrium. At least according to Roy Spenser on the cooling side and IPCC for heating.

Scott-in-WA

Larry # 215 Scott, we talked about this on another thread a few weeks ago, and also suggested that the reports should be signed by someone with a license, just because they have something to lose. I would think it would be appropriate for the UN or the US or EU government to go to a major international environmental consulting firm such as CH2M Hill, and have them prepare the report, and have it stamped by the principals preparing the report, and the engineer of record. They, in turn, could commission the scientific research.

My vision for the GHG-GWM Engineering Feasibility Analysis is that it adopts the paradigm of an engineering study as a means of efficiently exploring the scientific issues, doing so in a way which organizes the knowledge using a concise, well structured, and logical approach, with all relevant issues and information directly or indirectly available for consideration by all parties to the report.

But the EFA, once it was written, would have no outside legal or civil standing. It’s value as a document would be enabled strictly through the quality of its analysis and through the rigor, transparency, and validity of the processes used to produce it.

Recognize as well that a key underlying objective of the report is to demonstrate some practical means of producing 2.5C warming employing 2xC02 within real-world constraints; or, if the report determines this is not a likely possibility, to explain in logical detail why this isn’t practical.

The process of producing the EFA report would be structured in such a way that if AGW skeptics want to make use of the report in highlighting their scientific issues, they must do so within the context of trying their honest best to prove 2xC02 does in fact yield 2.5C warming.

Larry # 215 Such a company would be biased (after all, they are environmental consultants), but they would have liability hanging over their heads. And besides, they do have lots of experience preparing these kinds of reports. You would at least have something readable when you’re all done, and wouldn’t have to muddle through all of this Hansenesque goopityglop like we do now.

The topic of AGW is too politically charged for any single private company or any single public organization to take on formal responsibility—or formally-assigned civil and legal accountability—for performing this kind of analysis.
My vision for this report is that the set of paradigms now known as Open Source Science (OSSci) and Open Source Engineering (OSEng) would be used to produce the report, much in the same way the Open Source Software paradigm works today to produce valuable, versatile, and high quality software tools such as Linux and R.

My proposed plan for the EFA calls for it to be managed by a volunteer Chief Engineer with assistance from a volunteer Chief Scientist. The project’s policies, procedures, and stated scope of work are determined and monitored by an EFA Project Steering Committee, also composed of volunteers.

Who would make a good Chief Engineer? I don’t have an obvious candidate in mind right now, but someone from academia, from government, or from private industry with both technical and engineering management credentials would be necessary.

As for Chief Scientist, I think Dr. Freeman Dyson would be the perfect role model, and probably the perfect choice.

The EFA Project Steering Committee is composed of the Chief Engineer (who is also Project Manager), the Chief Scientist (who is also the Assistant Project Manager), three representatives from the engineering community, and three representatives from the scientific community.

As a practical matter, everyone who works on the EFA project is a volunteer, although nothing would prevent private sector, public sector or academic organizations from encouraging and even subsidizing their own staff while they worked on the project.

On a related topic, let’s recognize that Steve’s ClimateAudit blog has become—even if he didn’t intend it that way—an example of rudimentary but real-world Open Source Science in operation. As long as Steve chooses to keep this blog in operation, this is the direction it will head, even if he doesn’t necessarily want it to.

steven mosher

Here is chart that sucks less.

Craig Loehle

It seems to me that the discussions of derivation of CO2 forcing from first principles is missing the problem of boundary conditions. Let’s consider a pool table. If the table were perfectly flat and the balls perfectly round and you could hit them dead on, you could calculate the angles exactly to hit the ball and never miss. But you can’t. The imperfections in the table, ball and your shot mean that sometimes you miss. These imperfections are the boundary conditions that are often unknown. When we go the atmosphere, the bc completely overwhelm the physics. There is the problem of turbulent mixing of uprising air and horizontal wind, which occurs at all scales and is computationally intractable (solutions diverge almost immediately even if you think you have a detailed gridding). Same with ocean currents, activity on all scales. The physics of heat transfer (advection, convection, light scattering, etc) is taking place at the molecule scale up to big thunderhead and storm cells. All of these things must be approximated by grid scale representations. When you put all this together, you get a model that you could say works ok (or maybe you don’t think so), but you no longer have first principles physics in any sense of the word. This is why we can’t say that the output should be automatically trusted. So, how do we test it? We run the model and compare the output to…..something. But to create that something we also need to aggregate the data, make assumptions about solar activity, land use, initial conditions, etc etc (ie. create boundary conditions estimates). Some people think this was done well, some not. Two layers of simplification, plenty of wiggle room for disagreement. AGW supporters smooth over this by insisting they are right and should be trusted.

steven mosher

RE 320. Despite this planes fly. Turbulence is the work of the devil. It cannot be
ignored. It cannot be calculated in it’s devilish detail. Still, planes fly.

steven mosher

What my charts imply. As Tamino argues the Atmosphere ( actualy the land temp record) is going to
be a first responder to the terror of C02. So, it changes on a 5yr time scale. The Ocean,
he argues ( rightly I suspect) has a longer time constant ( more heat capacity).

He draws two charts showing the difference in Temp betwen a system with a short time constant
and a longer time constant. The air heats faster than water. YUP! so you have two time
constants. Now, what the history of anomalies show is that the rate of change in T ON LAND
exceeds the Rate of change of T in water. Duh.

But, look what happens when the ocen catches up. It overshoots ( momentum) and the ocean continues to
warm at its current rate, while the land starts to cool(why?). And then, the land starts to warm more rapidily
than the water. As the ocean catches up in the future….

Clayton B.

324,325,

Perhaps what Steven Mosher was trying to describe is…

as soon as the ocean temperature almost catches up the air temperature has already begun it’s downward trend and now it appears to have overshot.

Mark T.

as soon as the ocean temperature almost catches up the air temperature has already begun it’s downward trend and now it appears to have overshot.

Which would imply lag, and not a surprise for a longer time-constant.

Mark

Pat Keating

324

the ocean continues to
warm at its current rate, while the land starts to cool(why?)

Perhaps the higher ocean temperature is now producing more cloud (and solar reflection) and precipitation (and latent-heat cooling of the land).

steven mosher

RE 328. Yes, looked like a lag overshoot.

Sam Urbinto

Nasif #298: My point that if indeed, as the evidence seems to show, CO2 is not a major factor, it doesn’t matter what the answer is. As far as I know, both you and DeWitt are correct, but you’re not talking about the same thing the same way. The only thing I know is that CO2 (as measured in the air at Mauna Loa) is about +33% since 1880, and increased temps globally as a sampled mean anomaly of land and sea over the same time is +.7 C or so (if I take that as a percentage of ~14C, about 5%), but there are many other factors at play here. So it doesn’t matter if the temp change due to CO2 would be + 10 K or 0 K or -10 K in the absence of other factors. (Even if there’s a correlation, and even if the anomaly is a meaningful number.) (I am tempted to use “if it was” more so than “if it is”…)

Gunnar #300: Yes, I think we agree also. I’m just saying that there’s more than one way to describe a great number of things, some things need to be further detailed to make sure everyone knows what the subject is and what we’re talking about. 2% of the Earth and 6% of the Earth are both correct, but they need to be qualified. “Of the surface” and “of the surface’s land area” give those numbers meaning. Other than that, they’re just two numbers.

John M. #302: The basis for that 1-5 C rise in the next century is not “science”. It’s a blend of science, guesses and fiction.

Included are anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), hydrochlorofluorocarbons
(HCFCs), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the aerosol precursor and the chemically active gases sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs). Emissions are provided aggregated into four world regions and global totals. In the new scenarios no feedback effect of future climate change on emissions from biosphere and energy has been assumed.

Future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the product of very complex dynamic systems, determined by driving forces such as demographic development, socio-economic development,and technological change. Their future evolution is highly uncertain. Scenarios are alternative images of how the future might unfold and are an appropriate tool with which to analyse how driving forces may influence future emission outcomes and to assess the associated uncertainties. They assist in climate change analysis, including climate modeling and the assessment of impacts, adaptation, and mitigation. The possibility that any single emissions path will occur as described in scenarios is highly uncertain.

Any scenario necessarily includes subjective elements and is open to various interpretations. Preferences for the scenarios presented here vary among users. No judgment is offered in this Report as to the preference for any of the scenarios and they are not assigned probabilities of occurrence, neither must they be interpreted as policy recommendations.

Each storyline represents different demographic, social, economic, technological, and environmental
developments, which may be viewed positively by some people and negatively by others.

The scenarios are based on an extensive assessment of driving forces and emissions in the scenario literature, alternative modeling approaches, and an “open process”…

Nasif Nahle

Oceans are liquid water, and then the situation is grim there because liquids and solids have very tiny changes of density, so delta U depends almost completely from T, not from V.

Nasif Nahle

# 320

Craig Loehle,

I agree. I have been talking on the microstates that are difficult to know through our present measurement techniques and methodologies. Some weeks ago Allan Ames introduced me to the world of the non recognizable energies captured by bulbs of thermometers that really leave much on which we can think and investigate.

Paul Linsay

#339,

Why not? The satellite temperature record shows the same kind of step around 1998-2000. Nonlinear systems do that you know.

Gunnar

>> Temperature is proportional to energy.

And heat transfer is proportional to the delta T between the two elements.

>> The only thing I know is that CO2 (as measured in the air at Mauna Loa) is about +33% since 1880

That can’t be the only thing you know, since it’s not true. 315 in 1959, 380 in 2007, that’s 20% since 1959. Prior to that, the average was about 330.

>> It overshoots ( momentum) and the ocean continues to warm at its current rate, while the land starts to cool(why?). And then, the land starts to warm more rapidily than the water.

The land and ocean are not the only components in the system (crust, ocean, atmos, sun). The ocean is not one component (surface, deep, different oceans, polar, equatorial). I think Pat is right in #330, but I also think that what appears as inertia is really inertia. Intense solar activity heats the equatorial waters, and heats it deeply. Solar activity wanes, causing land cooling. However, the water heated at the equator takes a while to spread globally (water has inertia), making it appear like it’s still warming, when it’s actually an artifact of how we’re measuring it (surface only).

John Lang

The Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) satellite temps for September are out.

As expected with the strenthening La Nina, lower troposhere temps are down 0.101C in September from August – anomaly of +0.123C from the 1979 to 2007 average but down 0.778C from the 1998 El Nino peak.

http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#msu_amsu_time_series

http://www.remss.com/pub/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_0.txt

SteveSadlov

RE: #345 – look at JohnV’s charts with and without the shift I proposed.

Nasif Nahle

Snip… Hey! We’re disobeying the rules here… I’ll stop posting on CO2.

Sam Urbinto

Well, almost doubled.

Sam Urbinto

Sure, that GWS (Goes Without Saying)

🙂

Gunnar

>> so I’ll accept 1880-1958 ice as a fair indicator

Except that we have actual measurements from 1810 to 1959. Not sure if you just didn’t know that, or you are of the opinion that a questionable proxy, sampled about 16 times between 1810 and 1959, is more accurate than 90,000 accurate measurements.

Sam Urbinto

I was not aware there was anything but the Law Dome figures from 1832 to Mauna Loa starting in 1959. I can only go on the fact they match up pretty well when they overlap.

20 year smoothed 1832 to 1978 (yearly) and 75 year smoothed 1010 to 1975 (5 years) ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/law/law_co2.txt

Andrey Levin

Re:349, Sam Urbinto:

This exactly kind of estimation I was trying to point out for a long time. But let’s move two steps further.

About 20% increase in carbon from 1940 to present (BTW, it was calculated that 80% of antropogenic carbon was emitted since 1940).

Temperature increase between two peaks of positive PDO of 1940s and 1990s: 0.4 C max (you can not measure it in % of Celsius). It is smaller if estimate it using balloon and satellite data, and for continental US it is close to zero. Any way, lets take 0.4 C. Almost half of it is attributed to other greenhouse gases (by Hansen, for example).

In sum, max of 0.2 C temperature increase could be attributed to 20% increase in atmospheric carbon. Throw in logariphmic nature of greenhouse effect, and we are quite close to Idso’s empirical estimations of 0.4 C per carbon doubling.

Too primitive to be true?

Pat Keating

Re 358
How about this: The temperature swings for recent glaciation/deglaciation events are about 12C. Let’s take W = water-vapor level now. Take the water vapor level at full ice-age as very roughly 25% of W. Thus W is roughly equivalent to 16C. If CO2 has 5% of the effect of current water-vapor, then it accounts for about 0.8C. Doubling from current levels would cause another 0.8C, a little less doubling from earlier levels.

jae

362: I’m not surprised. I’ve looked far and wide, also.

SteveSadlov

Sorry, I don’t recall which thread this came up on. Someone had been looking for papers and other sources regarding radically counterintuitive outcomes of worst case AGW effects. Whoever it was might find this to be of interest:

Click to access Shrinkage_of_the_North_Polar_Ice_Cap_and_Pole.pdf

I personally would not rule out something like this under even a moderate AGW effects scenario. Disclaimer – I am not saying that Art Bell / Whitley Strieber / Day After Tomorrow are plausible, but, a much longer term increase in continential glaciation in the NH cannot be ruled out either.

SteveSadlov

RE: #364 – Record low CO2 concentration in the atmosphere may have preceded the Great Permian Extinction, during which 95% of all species may have gone extinct. We are dangerously near that previous low point in CO2. And here we are arguing about 2 X CO2. Are we barking up the wrong tree? The question needs to be asked. Perhaps humans’ role in nature is to liberate CO2 to prevent another extinction. Liberating CO2 would give a higher margin to the oxygen supply becuase it would spike living plant biomass. If we interfere with true nature, we may shoot ourselves in the foot. It’s like that movie, Premonition. You try to hard to “fix” the future and you end up screwing it up.

John Lang

Further to my post above #344 regarding the RSS satellite temperature measurements, I note that the southern hemisphere temperature anomaly has actually gone negative versus the average.

The September 2007 lower atmosphere temperature is actually about the same as the September 1979 measurement for the southern hemisphere.

I guess this is consistent with the record southern hemisphere sea ice extent this year and the significant La Nina event which has developed.

What it is not consistent with, however, is the global warming model. 28 years of no warming in the lower atmosphere (northern (+0.27C) and southern hemisphere (+0.04C)) points to a cyclical climate rather than a CO2 driven one or at least a very low 2XCO2 sensitivity one.

MJW

A minor quibble, perhaps, but I have a problem with the cubic fit in comment 319. Using a cubic forces the the slope to increase (i.e., the warming to accelerate) at the end of the time period. Looking at the non-smoothed data, I see a slight deceleration. I also notice the interpolating polynomial doesn’t go as low as it seems to me it should in the 1970’s. I attribute this to the mismatch at the end of the graph, which pulls down the cubic at the end, and therefore pulls up the point of inflection.

tetris

Re: 308
Willis
Am not anywhere close to my files/library at present and will not be for the next few days, so can not give you exact refs. My apologies.
From memory, check Laffer, et. al [Dep of Econ, UofCh for starters] who published an article in the last couple of weeks.

tetris

Re: 302
John W
My comment to your post above was, by all evidence, not to the liking of our host [it vapourized]. Somewhat simplified, please provide the scientific underpinnings for your assumptions/conclusions in #302.

Nasif Nahle

# 367

SteveSadlov,

In the Permian Period, during the Paleozoic Era, the concentration of CD was higher than 5000 ppmv. Through the Permian period the plant species diverged and the animals diversified as never before. Dinosaurs flourished and were the predominant order, greater than other orders of vertebrates. Coniferous plants appeared in the Permian Period.

As Steve Sadlov has said, at the late part of the Permian Period the major extinction of animals occurred. Species from protozoa to dinosaurs disappeared from the planet. There are many hypothesis trying to explain the mass extinction; for example, a Chicxulub meteorite impact that would take the Earth out from its orbit, a climate change (neither SUVs nor industries, nor humans there), a raged volcanism, a glaciation, Pangaea, etc. The evidence points at glaciation like the most plausible explanation, although volcanologists could argue that the glaciation occurred due to an exaggerated volcanism. No way, Milankovich made its happy hour and the Earth altered her rotational axis … Wow! Someone will say that there was no glaciation because in Italy, on the ground where he is settling his feet there are no signals of glaciations.

From the early Triassic to the middle Cretaceous, the CD concentrations were similar to current concentrations. From the end of cretaceous to the beginning of Miocene, Carbon Dioxide increased to ca. 2050 ppmv.

It is possible that the density of CD increases normally to 1050 ppmv to 2500 ppmv in the next 50 million years. I’m tempted to argue about an imbalance that would drive the Earth to another Ice Age. The CO2 would make us all happy, like our ancestors were in the Pleistocene, until another Ice Age comes to make the bad thing.

2050 ppmv of CD would maintain a change of temperature of 2.5 K, nothing out of this world. As many of you have pointed out, WV would buffer the changes of temperature. More WV in the atmosphere, more cloudiness, less energy hitting upon the surface of the Earth, etc., etc.

theduke

The post I copied in #377 was #18 on this thread:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/my-model-used-for-deception/#comment-57559

M. Simon

steven mosher says:
October 5th, 2007 at 9:45 am,

I do believe you have the time constants wrong. Air should be minutes or hours. Ocean/land should be years. Deep ocean/land millennia.

Roy Spencer says the ocean/land short time constant is around 5 years.

It is the capacitor soakage problem with much longer TCs.

Buddenbrook

Hello everyone. The site is so popular, that I cannot keep track of what is posted, so apologies if this has been discussed already.

James Hansen’s Presentation to policy makers October 3rd 2007: http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/gustavus_3oct07.pdf

Opinions?

Hasse@Norway

Being a layman, I’ve got a layman question her 😉

Does anyone know if deserts has increased/decrease in size from 1940s to the 1970s. And/or the increase/decrease in size of deserts from the 70s up until present? The reason I wonder, is that I remember reading in a popular scientific magazine som 5 years ago. That the deserts in Sahara had stopped expanding and in many places was starting to retreat. If say, the desert edges in southern Sahara was becoming more and more vegitated, that would contradict the idea that a warmer world would be a desert, just about everywhere.

Anyway tropical forests are found around the equator and there are deserts north and south of the equator, but these are desided by high-low preasure systems and not by the amount of energy they are resciving. So I don’t get the idea that if the world get warmer everything will become a desert. You can’t have high preasure systems everywhere??

steven mosher

RE 380.

Yes. I know. Been there done that.

In 320 craig said

“These imperfections are the boundary conditions that are often unknown. When we go the atmosphere, the bc completely overwhelm the physics. There is the problem of turbulent mixing of uprising air and horizontal wind, which occurs at all scales and is computationally intractable (solutions diverge almost immediately even if you think you have a detailed gridding). ”

My rejoinder was, Yes, but planes still fly even though the problem of turbulance is mathematically
insoluable.

Which of course brings of the questions of control and stability

Larry

384, I will say one thing: Hansen’s engineering solutions have all of the mathematical rigor of his statistics.

I mean, jeez, doesn’t he even do back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude calculations [picks jaw up off the floor…].

theduke

EW, #383, re 377:

As a non-scientist, I’ll take your word for it. I posted it because I thought the way it was handled was typical of RC. The poster made a specific request for a paper that wasn’t part of IPCC documentation, and his request was ignored.

Nasif Nahle

Nasif Nahle says: October 5th, 2007 at 10:32 pm

Theduke,

Many spaghetti carts, but not a single word on algorithms.

Yeah! They usually don’t publish scientific posts against their ideas and don’t answer questionings straightly. It’s like a religious site.

steven mosher

RE 391.

Chapter 10 has over 4 pages of bibliography. I Was going to post all the pages to RC and ask
which paper?

Nasif Nahle

# 395

Steven Mosher,

Good idea! I’d like to see how they’ll shuffle all those references. Hah!

Nasif Nahle

Nasif Nahle says: October 6th, 2007 at 11:44 am

As a biologist I wouldn’t trust on grass paleocommunities to deduce the climate change or the concentration of atmospheric CD 7-9 million years ago, but instead I’d count on isotopes (Be, O, D, etc.) and calcium carbonates (foraminifera, mollusks, coral skeletons, thorn, stains of iron, etc.).

Nasif Nahle

# 400

Who could say that Recent has abnormal concentration of CD or that some 450 thousand years the concentration of CD was normal? What’s wrong with temperatures and CD concentration today? Who can assume that Recent CD concentration and Temperature are abnormal, unusual, atypical, or anomalous? Nothing is wrong with Recent CD concentration and our change of T. To say that 7-9 mya the CD and the T was anomalous and that they were normal some 500 thousand years ago it’s a terrorist lie.

DeWitt Payne

Nasif,

Would you please give me a link to where you or someone else rigorously defines Fo as you use it. I haven’t been able to find it on biocab.org. Is it a flux? If so, of what?

Andrey Levin

Re:385, Hasse:

Take a look here:

http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/subject/d/desertification.jsp

Generally, worst case scenario most likely would be “Jurassic park”, not “Water world”, “Day after tomorrow” or “Resident Evil: Extinction”.

steven mosher

RE 405.

I figure if all the carbon sequestered during the carboniferous era gets released back into the
atmosphere where it came from we are merely returning nature to its natural state.
Only Specieists would argue to maintain this mamalian anomaly.

Andrey Levin

Re#407, Steven Mosher:

I surely do not want Earth atmosphere to return to “natural” state it was before “oxygen catastrophe”.

One could argue about what is “natural state”, but there is one interesting twist. Only handful of plants (about 5% of total plant biomass) developed biochemistry to compensate for low concentration of CO2 in atmosphere – C4 plants. Remaining 95% are C3 or CAM photosynthesis plants, and suffer from unusually low on geological scale CO2 content in atmosphere. So little bit of additional CO2 would help (wouldn’t hurt?).

I do not think, thought, that our civilization is capable to increase CO2 atmospheric concentration on long scale. It is very unlikely that in 100 years we will rely on fossil fuels (mostly coal) for our energy needs. And there are quite powerful long-term buffering mechanisms, such as described here:

http://folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/esef4.htm

BTW, sugarcane, corn, sorgum, amaranth, switchgrass – plants constituting “holy grail” of biofuel production, are all C4 plants.

Nasif Nahle

# 407 # 409

I don’t think either that humans can cause an increase of CD up to 0.4% (about 3900 ppmv) from burning the totality of fossil fuels. Buffers are multiple and diversified, and include microorganisms, (for example mixotrophic microorganisms, microorganisms that fabricate shells, etc.), which are considered most efficient on sequestering CD than terrestrial photosynthetic plants. What I’m trying to say is that even when the concentration of atmospheric CD was 3900 ppmv, we cannot assure, from the viewpoint of Paleobiology, that it would be abnormal, unnatural, atypical, anomalous, etc., given that during the Devonian Period -and other epochs after the Carboniferous- the concentrations of CD were even higher than 3900 ppmv. What we cannot say is that doubling CD would be fatal for our civilization or for the living world because life “begun” under concentrations of CD and temperatures higher than on the current period. It is clear that “the atmospheric CD concentration rises after temperature rises” (quote from the reference provided by Andrey Levin).

Hasse@Norway

Re: 405 Andrey Levin.

Thanks a lot! The view within media and hence the general public in Norway is that a warmer world would mean deserts increasing, But I can’t see the link between a warmer world with more water vapor in the atmosphere and bigger deserts. I can imagine maybe southern europe beeing dryer, but I don’t se how that should affect the areas around the equator.

I propaganda in Norway is that the poor countries will be affected the most, but I guess Jens Stoltenberg(norwegian PM) has looked at the where is waldo Africa tread on CA 😉

Jan Pompe

414 Dewitt

. For example, UV in the stratosphere can split water into H and O atoms.

it makes sense to me but do you have a reference for this? (I will get back to UKweather when I have more time)

Mhaze

http://Www.coyoteblog.com site is down.

Jan Pompe

#416
Thank you Nasif.

Follow the Money

I should add about 1AR – it is the source of the 2.5C/doubling CO2 “truism”, but not the 1.5 – 4.5C range. That is sourced in just one spot in the report to “(U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 1979; Bolin, et al., 1986)”

Bolin, et al. can be found online here: link- SCOPE 29 – The Greenhouse Effect, Climatic Change, and Ecosystems

steven mosher

RE 409. Nothing is unatural in a materialistic universe. No state is preferable to any other state.
It is what it is.

DeWitt Payne

Re: #418

Are you sure your inventory of burnable carbon is complete?

No. That was based on a quick internet survey. If anyone can come up with a better estimate, I’ll revise my calculation. But the comment on methane clathrates said the estimate may be high and I did include the oxygen necessary to convert the four hydrogen atoms in methane to water. Any hydrocarbon will also consume extra oxygen on combustion, but in the total non-carbonate reservoir, methane clathrates dominated, approximately 2/3 of the total carbon before effectively doubling for the hydrogen content.

Nasif Nahle

# 426

Larry,

Perhaps it is methane clathrate hydrate? It can be found at oceanic sediments at more than 450 m depth and continental soils at 800 m depth.

DeWitt Payne

I used this source for the total carbon other than carbonate. I may have left out vegetation and soil carbon from my calculation. It still adds up to less than 10% of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Note that the carbon in all fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) is only about 1/3 the value quoted for methane clathrates and is only about twice the amount in soil and vegetation.

Andrey Levin

Re#428

“Nothing is unatural in a materialistic universe. No state is preferable to any other state.
It is what it is.”

True. That’s why we can alter the nature around us as we are pleased. Say, boost plants productivity, or preserve wildlife biodiversity. For our utility or enjoyment.

Here lies difference between Environment Protection and Environmentalism. Former is based on anthropocentric value’ scale. Later is functioning on behalf of Mother Gaia.

Nasif Nahle

# 418

Pochas,

BTW, the bond in H2 is a very strongest bond. The dissociation energy for a molecule of hydrogen is 4.52 eV.

SteveSadlov

Good to see some thought going into recovery mechanisms in the event that CO2 gets driven down too low and the biosphere starts to die. Whether in response to policy driven extreme sequestration scenarios or unstoppable long term CO2 decrease, doing recovery may buy us some time to allow colonization of other planets in other systems.

Nasif Nahle

# 434

Matter is not constant, but energy (E=mC^2). Two protons stuck together have less mass than two single separate protons. The most abundant element in the universe is Hydrogen, followed by Helium. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe. IMHO, I don’t think the universe is filled with photosynthetic organisms.

SteveSadlov

RE: #438 – During the 80s, look at how much heavy industry got shut in the Midlands and North. That would certainly increase the insolation in much of the UK. Also the knock on effect of less radiation fog.

UK John

RE: #439

Thanks Steve, the report does mention the decrease in industrial pollution as a likely reason for the quite substantial (up to 40%) increase in Sunshine hours, but fails to take the next (to me) obvious leap of it also explaining the increase in Mean Temp of 0.7 deg C. Subjectively the population of UK know we get more sunshine and less fog than we used to, but it is never explained to them what this might mean for Temperature.

Have I got it wrong? surely if its sunnier in UK, it just cannot help being warmer ?

DeWitt Payne

Re: #423

H2 and CO outgassing from volcanoes appears [152] to be more than sufficient to overwhelm the production of O2 from H2O photolysis followed by hydrogen escape.

An oxygen molecule doesn’t know where it comes from. In the absence of water photolysis, those same oxidation reactions would have overwhelmed the production of oxygen by photosynthesis. Water photolysis has clearly made a significant contribution to the the current state of the atmosphere.

I’m still waiting for a source for an order of magnitude larger estimate of reduced carbon produced by photosynthesis than what I found. Otherwise, the logical (to me) conclusion is that there are additional non-photosynthetic sources of oxygen.

jae

440, SS:

Weather (sort of) not climate …. if there were any doubts about the apparent early onset of climatic autumn on the Western US coast north of about 37, there are no longer. Our climatic autum (normally, dry, still and warm during the first half, and rainy with rapid cooling in the second half) really did start at the end of July. We are now over 2 months into it and the weather matches that perfectly in many respects. The only odd thing is that the temperature is just a wee bit higher than it would be in late Nov, only because of the higher Sun angle than late November. Synoptics are late Nov / early Dec normals …. now!

That is certainly the case in Southwest Oregon. I’ve never had my heating system on this early prior to this year.

Nasif Nahle

# 446

David Archibald,

Please, don’t take this note as a criticism on your paper. 20% of CO2 corresponds to 224117.65 ppmv. I’d like to know how you related this to that (NS). I’d like to know it. If you agree, drop me a message to my personal E-mail address which you can take from BioCab website.

Andrey Levin

From:

http://newparty.co.uk/articles/inaccuracies-gore.html

(pending verification, IMO):

British court has determined that Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” contains at least eleven material falsehoods:
• The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
• The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
• The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
• The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
• The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
• The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
• The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
• The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.
• The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.
• The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
• The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

Steve Milesworthy

#452 Gaudenz Mischol
I was being ironic. For the reasons given, you can’t attribute recent UK climate change to reductions in industrial activity leading to extra sunniness.

TAC

Today’s NYT has an interesting piece by John Tierney, “Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus.”

MarkW

Your kidding. You mean the NYT is admitting that it is possible for a “consensus of scientists” to be wrong?

CO2Breath

I’ve found local CO2 concentrations as high as 45,000 ppm in the (very) near vicinity of the front of my head. YMMV.

Carl Smith

You will find the full transcript of the Tim Flannery interview that aired on Lateline on ABC TV 8th Oct here:
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s2054168.htm

– and you will find links to the video that went to air on the RHS of the page if you wish to watch it.

In brief, he was spreading alarm by claiming that the atmospheric ‘CO2 equivalent’ passed the ‘dangerous climate change’ threshold in 2005, citing the upcoming IPCC report to be released in Nov. as his source, and that drastic action is required immediately to minimise the damage.

jae

The COURTS have decided Gore is wrong on 11 counts, LOL. It seems odd that the courts would get so far into the science.

UK John

#451

Ah well, thanks Steve Milesworthy, so a sunny day is not warmer than a cloudy one, (all other things being equal) this really is groundbreaking science.

A few “ironic” UK Met office “records” for you that all made the AGW headlines, April 07 was the warmest and sunniest April on record, July 06 was the warmest and sunniest month on record, and 2003 was the warmest year on record and I hope that by now you can work out that 2003 was also the sunniest year on record.

All from the UK met office website.

Larry

463, right down to the minute details.

Larry

460, the problem with using a CO2 equivelent is that the math doesn’t work. You can’t just add concentrations when the effect is logarithmic. You have to keep track of the gases separately, because a doubling of one gas doesn’t have the same effect as a doubling of another.

They’re trying to be clever, but they’re ending up with something that’s just plain wrong and calculationally useless.

Steve Milesworthy

#466 Larry
If you calculate the forcing of x increase in CO2, y increase of N2O, z increase of CH4 (and so on for the other 60 or so GH gases) you can then related it to the amount of CO2 you’d have needed for the same forcing in absence of increases in the other gases. The figures aren’t added.

#462 UK John
I don’t doubt that sunny days aren’t usually warmer days. But the fact is that even wet miserable days are now warmer than wet miserable days were 30-odd years ago, and sunny days are warmer now than sunny days were 30-odd years ago. I think you are a long way off attributing current warming to a reduction in manufacturing.

Larry

468, the general form of the climate sensitivity relationship is DT = a*ln(C/C0). The parameter a is different for different materials. You can calculate the net effect by keeping track of the effect seperately (ignoring band overlap), but you can’t relate the a value for one gas to the a value for another, and then treat them as one gas. Try it. It doesn’t work. In Einstein’s words, it’s “simpler than possible”.

UK John

#468 Steve Milesworthy

I never said anything about industrial decline, the UK Met office in the report I quote says there is evidence for extra sunshine being caused by less industrial pollution, and quotes various research that indicates this.

I just say that looking at the Met office report there has been a gradual increasing trend in sunshine hours since 1929 and a matching upward trend in Temperature, the graphs in the report almost match exactly, have a look at fig 3 and fig 15. So my contention is quite simply , its got warmer because its got sunnier, not exactly rocket science eh!

I must admit to being a skeptic, because of things like this, but mainly that climate change has all happened before without any human influence, so I think we should look for a natural explanation then look for a human induced reason, but it is our nature to want to believe we affect the climate, this is who we are, every human civilisation has thought like this we are no different.

KevinUK

#461 jae

Thanks for that link. Now where do I sign up for this ‘New Party’?

KevinUK

Nasif Nahle

I’m beginning to think that I’m being ignored here. I have asked several times for the conceptual definition of the parameter “a” at DT = a (Ln C/Cs) and nobody has told me what it is… Oh! Perhaps I don’t exist? Or… Perhaps “a” doesn’t exist?

Sam Urbinto

A quick read of some of the simple explanations tells me while you can say x amount of NH4 does the same thing as y amount of CO2 (or H2O or O3 or whatever) the facts are that when you start putting them all together, their effect is different put together. I like simple explanations. 😀

Well mixed forcing estimate: http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/222.htm

If 10 N20 does the same thing as 3000 CO2, putting them together is not the same as 20 N20 or 6000 CO2, then you have to take the other gases into account. That doesn’t even begin to consider things like clouds and amount of sunlight, pollutants, etc.

Direct GWP: http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/248.htm

I forget if we ever cleared this up totally.
NO2, Nitric Oxide (Nitrogen dioxide)- Growth enhancing hemodilator
N2O, Nitrous oxide – Laughing gas with about 300 times the power (taking time into account) of CO2

As far as sunlight, you can get plenty and not much warming, say winter in the NH for example. 🙂 Or at the pole facing the sun…

Chas

#438 UKJohn thanks for the link to the pdf. I was looking at the relationship between sunshine hours and monthly av temperatures [at ONE UK site] the other night, at first glance it seems that there is quite a good relationship in the summer months eg july august r2~.4/.5 which becomes pretty weak (r2 .05/.02) in the winter months with generally a negative slope (clear nights?). These ‘bright sunshine hours’ seem have increased by about 25% since their low in the mid/late 1960’s -I am not quite sure,yet, what the ‘hours’ are ie whether they represent Campbell-Stokes hours or what. But Ive also just noticed that the metoffice now has some station data on its site that includes ss hours and that Armagh has some data too, to play with.
It would be interesting to know:

1]Whether the US or anywhere else has experienced an increase in ‘bright’ sunshine hours.
2]If such increase has been foretold by the climate models?

Chas

Chas

Further to #481 the UK metoffice historic station data page is here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/index.html

steven mosher

Did Gore win a No Bell peace prize?

I thought he was up for the Art Bell science prize?

Philip_B

Re: #420

You have the answer to where the 2.5C and range of 1.5 to 4.5C sensitivity comes from. These are the value ranges required to make the GCM models work.

Re #481 Jonathan Lowe at Gust of Hot Air has many analyses that show increasing Australian temps result from increased daytime warming.

Larry

Nasif….It’s an empirical constant. And it’s in degrees C (since the log is dimensionless). And it’s not guaranteed to produce 2.5.

Philip_B

why is a doubling assumption necessary for these models?

The assumption in the GCMs is that the climate has a sensitivity to increasing COO levels. The sensitivity may comprise a direct COO effect and feedbacks, but the result is the same. I can’t speak to the internals of any particular model or how the CO2 sensitivity is implemented in the models. I was just highlighting that the IPCC itself says the 2.5C sensitivity and range comes from the models. I’d suggest that sensitivities below the lower range value result in nothing to worry about scenarios. While those above the upper range value spiral (in the models) into runaway warming (or cooling) too quickly to do anything about it. ‘There is nothing to worry about’ and ‘there is nothing we can do’, weren’t on the IPCC’s policy agenda, hence the sensitivity range.

I don’t think the models have assumptions about doubling or any other level of COO, although certain scenarios (model runs) may/do. The significance of doubling is that it provides sufficient time for suitably catastrophic effects and for mitigations to have some impact.

Sam Urbinto

I think already showed how to get 2.5 C for a doubling. (Or any other meaningless capricious arbitrary number of some idea of a unified global mean for something for that matter).

1) Pick a time period of X rise in CO2 (aka “Carbon Dioxide, Oxygen Carbon Oxygen, OCO, COO, et al”) (What year what that paper?)
2) Postulate a lag of Y years from that rise due to oceans and pollution and UHI and etc
3) Go get the trend from something like GHCN-ERSST or HadCRUT2v for Y years away for Z years from that which fits X
4) Take your pick of
a) Find a friendly journal with some buddies to peer review your paper full of equations that are under virulent opinion-based debates, put into terms of un-intelligable circular language, that’s ill-defined, and pubish it under closed doors after it’s too late to change it or effectivly oppose it
b) Develop a model that results in the answer you want from your inputs, making assumptions that can neither be proven nor disproven by any objective standard
c) Adjust results, refusing to give out the code that gets you the results you want, changing things as you go along with no audit trail, over 3-10 steps that are not clearly defined anywhere in any level of detail, on sites you control
d) Point to the melting icebergs and sea ice, satellite readings, polar bears dying, species migration and ice-albedo cloud cover warm sea cold sea CO2 absorbtion GHG forcings. Water-vapor is not a feedback as validation of your findings, but you don’t understand the subject, it all supports my contentions I’m right you’re an idiot. Yes, I just answered all your questions. Bye.
e) Repeat after the rest: We’re the United Nations, and we are neutral, just RTFR/Letter/Study/Report/Essay/Op-Ed and don’t listen to them they are biased and not only in the pay of the oil companies, politically motivated, wrong, stupid and all of the above.

But hey, it’s Climate Science.

Andrey Levin

Re#496

Call it beef, ham, or pork, but St. Albert made 100 million after he left the office:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3281925

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22663

Last week he has presentation of updated version of his “truth” in my Vancouver, and snipped 1500 tickets for 500 dollars each.

Mark T.

Nasif….It’s an empirical constant. And it’s in degrees C (since the log is dimensionless). And it’s not guaranteed to produce 2.5.

Somehow I get the feeling the value for a is “whatever it takes to get the answer in the back of the book.”

Mark

Larry

Nasif, Mark, and everyone else, empirical constants in semi-theoretical formulae (such as the Arrhenius equation) are common in physical chemistry. It’s not phony handwaving, it’s the only way to grapple certain types of problems for the time being. Go study up on p-chem, and you’ll see that that’s the way it’s done for the time being. The only alternative is models, where they’re making slow but steady progress.

These relationships aren’t rigorous, they’re just a somewhat more intelligent way of fitting data than something totally blind, like a polynomial.

Nasif Nahle

# 500

Larry,

Models are based on those formulas, so we can deduce that models are as right or as wrong as those parameters are. The parameter “a” or alpha takes ad arbitrium values as author’s wills. I don’t think there are not other ways for obtaining real values from observational and empirical researches. For example, if we wish to know the load of heat transferred from A to B we can make use of well know formulas that have been tested as reliable formalizations. There are trustworthy formulas for conduction, convection and radiation. Why to make our works using idealized formulas and parameters? For example, the parameter “a” changes as I change my socks and the assigned units not always are °C. Many authors use W/m^2 like the units for “a”, and many others do not use any units. Let’s examine the called “Arrhenius’ Formula”:

Delta T = a (Ln[2 CO2 /CO2 standard]) / 4 (sigma) (Tsta) ^3

With units:

K = W/m^2 (Ln[2 (ppmv)/(ppmv)] / 4 (W/m^2*K^4) (K^3)

If we assign °C or K to “a”, we would get something wrong:

K = K (Ln [2 (ppmv) / (ppmv)] / 4 (W/m^2*K^4) (K^3)

Delta T = W/m^2?

Larry

Gunnar, I think you get the idea. Nasif, I don’t think you quite do. You can make a long list of approximations to get the form of the equation, and still use empiricism to get the values of the constants. You end up lumping a lot of ignorance into the constants, but since there is some theoretical basis for saying that the nature of the relationship is logarithmic, that’s better than saying that temperature is proportional to concentration, or that it’s a quadratic. It’s not rigorous, though. It’s simply the best that they knew how to do in closed analytical form in the 20th century.

One growing area of physical chemistry right now is modeling molecular dynamics, which promises to give is really good tools for predicting chemical phenomena, which we couldn’t do before. But the atmosphere is yet another can of worms. There’s more than just molecular dynamics going on there.

Gunnar

Yes, Larry, thanks to your #499, I’m a lot clearer about this.

Nasif, I’m not saying that I necessarily agree with the form of the Arrhenius equation, but I don’t think it’s valid to argue that the mere presence of an empirical constant is a sign of “phony handwaving”. For example, Newtons law of gravitation has a big ole constant that I believe was determined empirically. I guess one could say that it’s a “semi-theoretical formulae”.

Mark T.

Nasif, Mark, and everyone else, empirical constants in semi-theoretical formulae (such as the Arrhenius equation) are common in physical chemistry. It’s not phony handwaving, it’s the only way to grapple certain types of problems for the time being.

I realize this, and agree with you. However, what I was getting at was more an implication that “tweaking” in the models to arrive at the value for a is more likely how it was derived than an empirical solution. The empirical solution would imply extensive testing to determine a, but given that the correlation between CO2 and temperature is, shall we say, weak at best (indeed, sometimes it is an inverse relationship), such testing is not really feasible.

Mark

Nasif Nahle

# 505, # 506, # 508

Mark T, Larry, Gunnar,

My last assumption would be that they are acting on ignorance, as Larry and Gunnar think; however, why they defend their ignorance piling more falsehood on the same background? For example, they have declared 2007 has had an unusual number of hurricanes; they say 2007 has been as warm as 1998; they say that mosquitoes don’t live in cold regions; they dismiss the recovery of the Antarctic ice cape; they say that the errors from surface stations are negligible; etc. I don’t only lump on ignorance about constants, but of lies. As I said before, it’s not a matter of ignorance, but of pseudoscience.

Larry

Gunnar and Nasif – I think that what’s bothering you is the fact that if you start out with something with empirically adjustable constants, that it can be abused. No doubt about it. An AGW proponent, can, with a completely straight face, plot temperature rise v.s. CO2 rise, and then arrive at a climate sensitivity number. The problem isn’t with the equation, the problem is with the built-in assumption, that it’s CO2 that’s (in part, or totally) causing the temperature rise. It’s not that it’s illegitimate to try to find a way to fit data to the constant, it’s that it’s illegitimate to attribute it arbitrarily (in part or totally) to CO2 without a good reason. And the attribution that they did in the IPCC reports is pretty weak.

Gunnar

>> acting on ignorance, as Larry and Gunnar think

No, I agree with you that they have an emotionally driven agenda.

>> but given that the correlation between CO2 and temperature is, shall we say, weak at best (indeed, sometimes it is an inverse relationship), such testing is not really feasible.

No, it’s feasible, it just means that the proposed equation is invalid, as was pointed out 100 years ago.

Stephen Richards

I’m notg sure if I have remembered exactly the points I make here but here goes. I work for some years on the accelerated ageing and therefore reliability of semiconductors. I was testing and analysing for a mean time to failure(MTTF) of 25 years. One of my analytical techniques was the use of Arrhenius’ equation(s). The data, from the accelerated ageing process, were plugged into the equation and the results plotted. The slope(s) of the graph gave the energy of the failure mechanism(s) but not the cause and not the mechanism, but I coud determine from these the MMTF. 2 different slopes, 2 different mechanisms. I have to say that it sounds a bit like climate analysis. What I could never do when reporting to my client was to take leaps of faith beyond the almost indefinite results. Confidence levels were vital and their derivations. The ‘constant of proportionality ‘ was ignored.
Hope I’m not repeating you

Stephen

Chas

Re #515 UKJohn,thanks. I hadn’t realised that some of the Campbell-Stokes hours weren’t the real thing – I suppose now that meteorologists have restyled themselves as climatologists there is no-one about who is willing to go outside to change the cards.
Regarding ‘other places’ and sunshine, there is an interesting paper on the Armagh records that shows a declining sunshine-hours trend (and an interesting temperature history!):
http://www.arm.ac.uk/preprints/2007/494.doc

Mark T.

No, it’s feasible, it just means that the proposed equation is invalid, as was pointed out 100 years ago.

The infeasibility I was referring to is that there is no way to empirically tinker with the atmosphere, holding all other variables constant, to determine some direct relationship. Clearly the relationship indicates non-linearities, otherwise we’d _always_ see a rise in temp with rising CO2, which is not the case.

Mark

jae

510, 511, 513: Related article.

DeWitt Payne

Re: #501

Nasif,

The constant a does have the units W/m^2. The equation is for empirically determining the forcing at the tropopause, not the change in temperature. Then you have to use a climate sensitivity factor or model to convert the forcing to a delta T.

David Smith

In case this hasnt been posted ( link )

paul

From an Australian blog site:

I was born in Feb 1955 in the middle of the worst flood in 150 years in our region. The previous worst flood in 150 years was in 1948. By the time I turned 12 we were in the middle of the worst drought in 150 years in our region since 1934. By the time I turned 18 we had snow falling in our coastal city, unheard-of in history since 1959. When I was 19 we suffered the first cyclone in history since 1938, which sent a large ship aground and trashed half the city (previous unheard-of cyclones wrecked about 112 ships over 100 years according to maritime records). In 1989 we had a deadly earthquake, the first in history since 1926, and 1886 before that.

Climate does weird things all the time. People need to get used to it, especially if they live past the age of 20.

VG

Seems that a significant blow to the Al Gore An Inconvenient Truth: Most major networks are reporting the errors in the film as determined by a British court see BBC film
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7037671.stm
This could lead to a significant reversal? Especially when people start delving into the data!

Filippo Turturici

#531: Paul, I knew about 11 errors: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/10/09/court-identifies-eleven-inaccuracies-al-gore-s-inconvenient-truth
Another error could be top10 warmest years of USA, but this was discovered after the film was made.

py

#533: I wonder whom the scientific expert that represented the government was?

jae

529, Chas: Yes you are correct. The solar energy received by the surface goes into evaporating water, as long as sufficient water is available. That is why the correlation between December temperature and absolute humidity is nearly perfect–there is always enough water available in December at all 134 locations. However, in July little water is available in the West, especially in the desert Southwest (where there is very little vegetation to interfere with absorption by the surface). In those areas the energy just heats up the surface. Evidently, this type of heating produces higher average temperatures than in those areas where there is adequate water. This could be due to cloud formation, or to the heat of vaporization or to increased convection caused by the lighter water molecules. Or all the above. If I include arbitrary “weighting factors” to account for surface dryness and absorbtivity, I can improve the correlation greatly. I will show that at some point.

Gunnar

>> Evidently, this type of heating produces higher average temperatures than in those areas where there is adequate water

Jae, isn’t the most obvious reason the phenomena itself? That is, if the energy went into evaporating water, it is not available for heating, thus lower temperatures?

steven mosher

Gunnar. If the Russians try to protect or claim copyrights on Tree ring data they will run smack
into Feist.

Facts are considered synonymous to “ideas” or “discoveries” under this law and are not copyrightable. By extension, a compilation of uncopyrightable facts is also uncopyrightable. However, § 103 of the Copyright Act allows for the protection of “compilations,” provided there is an “creative” or “original” act involved in such a compilation, such as in the selection (deciding which things to include or exclude), and arrangement (how they are shown and in what order). The protection is limited only to the selection and arrangement, not to the facts themselves, which may be freely copied.

The Supreme Court decision in Feist v. Rural further made clear the requirements that a compilation be original in its composition, in denying protection to telephone “white pages”. The Feist court rejected what was known as the “sweat of the brow” doctrine, in ruling that no matter how much work was necessary to create a compilation, a non-selective collection of facts ordered in a non-creative way is not subject to copyright protection.

Steve Mc: No more discussion of copyright please, which are IMO remote from any of the issues raised in this thread. I l;et this one pass only because it made reference to a decision. Gunnar, if you cannot control yourself and the urge to reply is uncontrollable, do so on Unthreaded, but I’d prefer to terminate this discussion of copyright and tree ring data.

steven mosher

Tree rings and ringing Phones.

A tree ring series is a compilation of facts. A collection site. A tree species. and a
compilation of facts ordered in a standard fashion. ( early wood, late wood,, etc )

the supreme court on copyrighting facts and compilations of facts.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_340.htm

steven mosher

Here Gunnar. The money quote:

[20] This Court has long recognized that the fact-expression dichotomy limits severely the scope of protection in fact-based works. More than a century ago, the Court observed: “The very object of publishing a book on science or the useful arts is to communicate to the world the useful knowledge which it contains. But this object would be frustrated if the knowledge could not be used without incurring the guilt of piracy of the book.” Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99, 103 (1880). We reiterated this point in Harper & Row:

“No author may copyright facts or ideas. The copyright is limited to those aspects of the work — termed ‘expression’ — that display the stamp of the author’s originality.

“Copyright does not prevent subsequent users from copying from a prior author’s work those constituent elements that are not original — for example . . . facts, or materials in the public domain — as long as such use does not unfairly appropriate the author’s original contributions.” 471 U.S., at 547-548 (citation omitted).

[21] This, then, resolves the doctrinal tension: Copyright treats facts and factual compilations in a wholly consistent manner. Facts, whether alone or as part of a compilation, are not original and therefore may not be copyrighted. A factual compilation is eligible for copyright if it features an original selection or arrangement of facts, but the copyright is limited to [p*351] the particular selection or arrangement. In no event may copyright extend to the facts themselves.

There is nothing Original in the selection of tree ring data. One trusts they used accepted scientific
principles in selecting the actual trees. There is nothing Orginal is the data collected. It’s tree
ring science. Nothig Original in the order of presentation. Tree species, date, early wood thickness,
late wood thickness.

Larry

Hey. Both of you guys. Put down the IP discussion, or I’ll go off on a tangent about how MoveOn is suing anyone spoofing their trademarked logo.

jae

technically all Newtonian physics is wrong

Isn’t it correct under certain circumstances?

Webbo

Gunnar,

Your error is that you keep refering to databases without understanding the differences between a protected database and an unprotected database.

Arguably the strongest international copyright is that defined by the Berne Convention. As you are refering to automatic copyrights I pressume this is the one you are refering to.

A database under this protection requires creativity in the selection and arrangement, and cannot be covered if it is complete. I would assume the tree ring data is specificaly intended to be complete.

Unless you are aware of any Russian legislature that extends these rights to cover complete data, it is not covered under Berne. It would be a surprise if you were able to find such legislature as the Russians initialy refused to sigh up to Berne as they believed it benefited richer western nations that were “data exporters”, and they therefore initialy rejected the notion of extensive automatic copyrights.

Incidently there is an EU directive which does cover complete databases as long as there has been substantial investment in the compilation of the data. Moberg (as a member of the EU I pressume) would be covered by this if he owned the data. But even this directive has the following limitation (if adopted by the member state);

“extraction for the purposes of illustration for teaching or scientific research, as long as the source is indicated and to the extent justified by the non-commercial purpose to be achieved”

So even this most dracoian of copyright legislature specificaly provides for scientific use.

Gunnar

Steve M, please note that I’m giving it a rest, but others aren’t.

>> “extraction for the purposes of illustration for teaching or scientific research

Right, that’s item C, which I’ve clearly pointed out is “fair use”. Publication is not fair use. The tree ring data is certainly not “complete”. Originator citizenship is irrelevant, only the location of the publication. The web makes this last point somewhat moot/murky. To illustrate further, the text of US laws are public domain, but the printer has copyrighted the page numbers. I think folks in this thread would be surprised at how low the threshold for “originality” is. Enough said!

Webbo

My understanding is that the data is restricted by policy not by law.

Anything contrary to AGW is restricted by default isn’t it?

It shouldn’t be the case in science but this all went far beyond science years ago.

Steve McIntyre

test

Follow the Money

“”Well, at least 11 errors, all very important, enough to demolish the entire documentary (above all CO2 vs. temperature historical graph),””

The ice core graph was a complete lie. It was posed to show Co2 increase causes temp increase. The only reason I think they used it is because of the visual power of a hockey stick graph.

Now technically, if one looks closely, Gore says in the film the relationship is “complex” or “complicated.” This is standard warmer rhetoric when faced contrary facts, pose their side as clear, contrary findings “complicated.” INdeed, this makes Gore’s use of the graph even more insidious because he can’t claim ignorance of the meaing of the graph. He used it for his visual power, and gave is a 180 degree spin.

UK John

#537 jae # 529 Chas

One of the UK / European recent weather events that AGW Environ”mental” gang ( not Climate Scientists) always point to to indicate CO2 global warming is the summer of 2003.

The attached study I think supports what you are saying, and also shows almost unbroken clear sky conditions as the cause of this hot, sunny and dry summer. (I enjoyed it, while it was here, the previous one like it was in 1976!)

Click to access heatwave2003_reading_incfigs.pdf

Peter C

An interesting article regarding a U.K. judgement and supporting legislation that officially classifies Gore’s Inconvenient Truth as political propaganda.

For the film to be lawfully shown in school, the court ruled, government must describe the film as a political work that promotes only one side of the argument. The court further ruled that the government must advise teachers who present the film without making its political nature plain that they may be in breach of Section 406 of the Education Act and guilty of political indoctrination. Eleven inaccuracies needed to be specifically drawn to the attention of schoolchildren.

Sam Urbinto

§ 103 of the U.S. Copyright Act wouldn’t apply in Russia (data collected and first published in a journal) or the U.K. (second journal)

Berne’s for EU as was mentioned. I’m behind on my politics, I didn’t know they let Russia into the EU… 🙂

Scientific Research includes journals I’d think.

I think a court case on this would last a very long time.

All meaningless. We don’t know if the data itself is ownable (I would assume Russian law would apply; it was gathered in Russia, by Russians, one would assume. Does anyone know who exactly did the field work, and who gathered and compiled the data? Are we just assuming the authors of the first paper did? I think we are. The work itself could have been done by one set of people, investigated/measuered by another set, transcribed by another, etc.

If it is ownable, we don’t know who it is owns it; we just assume it’s the authors of the paper.

Anyone?

What we do know is that the person providing the data, the lead author of Moberg et al. 2002, has stated:

I made the Indigirka available to you. My interpretation is that you (or anyone else) are allowed to do both A, B and C (as you define them in your last email).

A) using the data in a larger composite even if the composite does not show the Indigirka data separately.
B) showing a graphic of the data;
C) discussing the impact of inclusion or exclusion of the data in a larger composite

Is there anyone with any proof that he actually isn’t the “owner” of the data? (If anyone at all owns it, which hasn’t been proven either.)

Sam Urbinto

ELI is running for the ICE

Seemingly so is Tamino.

I wonder; raise your hands for a vote.[snip]

Sam Urbinto

1. I don’t think it would be any different than what’s on the roof now, except we could cut fuel usage if it’s replacing energy and usage stays the same.

2. I don’t think you can really mess up with flows by putting a blade at some altitude in the way, no matter how many there are.

Question back: What would it do to the Earth’s carbon cycle et al to have all the cars driving around expelling water vapor instead of CO2, other GH and non-GH gasses, and pollutants?

tetris

Re: 570 and 569
I believe there is a Danish study [late 2005 or early 2006] on the effects of very large wind turbines. One of the findings was that these very tall mills had the effect of mixing the layer of air immediately above ground level with the one above. I unfortunately do not have any better refs.

steven mosher

re 569. I expect this kind of question on RC. They are currently discussing cow farts, birth control
and Solar Power.

tetris

Re: 570
SamU
Your question re the carbon cycle and water vapour is a very pertinent and interesting one. In my previous incarnation I served as the CEO of a nanotechnology company that had very cool technology enabling the use of photonic/solar energy to produce hydrogen from water and store it chemically/non-pressurized. This is crucial because hydrogen is not a primary energy source but a carrier like electricity [this is readily overlooked even by those working in that sector] and unless it can be produced and stored efficiently it is meaningless as an “alternative” energy source.
One argument underpinning the project was that unless you can efficiently produce hydrogen from a non-hydrocarbon source, efficiently using a renewable energy source to do so, not only are you not doing much in terms of “mitigating” the carbon cycle because you’re producing CO2 as a by-product, but you’re also producing new water vapour at the fuel cell’s exhaust. Only if you use water as your primary source of hydrogen and reycle that water vapour through a closed loop system are you not emitting new water vapour. It is an issue that many in the hydrogen energy community to this day do not want to discuss, because it opens the door to the really difficult question: what is the environmental impact of the water vapour produced by the fuel cell in current designs? If water vapour/clouds are indeed negative forcers as argued by Spencer, Svensmark and others, what are the implications of adopting current generation hydrogen fuels on a large scale?

Hasse@Norway

I’ve just got a few quick questions. Can anyone please give me the weight of the atmosphere and the weight of the oceans. How far into water can IR penetrate IR in general, and IR from the wavelenghts of CO2 in particular?

Larry

576, it’s not as if we aren’t already putting lots of water vapor into the air with various industrial processes. Have you ever looked at a paper mill on a misty day? The discharge literally makes clouds. I’m not prepared to consider the possibility that this makes clouds that otherwise would have formed, though. It’s simply too little to worry about. And don’t forget, the hydrocarbon burning engines are currently putting a lot of water vapor out. It’s not as if we would be doing anything that we’re not already doing to a great extent.

And then when the weather dries out, it’s all gone. Believe me, if it had even the slightest chance of being a problem, someone would have identified it and be making a good living going ape over it now.

theduke

Steven, #575: You may be missing the point of 569. His point, if I read him correctly is that widespread use of solar panels could conceivably contribute to higher temperatures (or temperature readings, if you prefer) in habited areas.

The issue of roofing materials is one that needs to be explored in relation to UHI. When I was just out of college in the late 60s I worked for a roofer (an ex-con, but that’s another story) who replaced roofs and did new work in developments. In those developments at the time, nearly every home was roofed with asphalt-based roofing materials. Every older home that had its roof replaced was usually replacing a cedar roof with a new asphalt roof. I can tell you from experience that asphalt roofs radiate far more heat than cedar roofs.

Asphalt-based roofing became the standard rooofing material during the several building booms that occurred after World War II.

Cedar roofing and clay tile roofing do not absorb and radiate heat nearly as much as does aphalt roofing.

(I’m having trouble typing this since the website or the server is moving about 1/10th as fast as I can type at the moment. Very annoying.)

The effect of this switch in roofing materials is a topic that might weigh signifigantly on UHI calculations since the 1960s, when the post-war building boom began in earnest.

Andrey Levin

Re#… something is going wrong with numbers.

Theduke:

The issue of dark roofs and paved surfaces in general was also researched at the dawn of GW scare. It was conveniently forgotten, because, say, cup-and-trade system is much more profitable way to “mitigate” Climate Change for AGW clergy.

In a nutshell, about 2% of surface of continental US is “paved surface” – roofs, parking lots, factories, shopping malls, roads, etc. For comparison agricultural land is about 25%. By far the biggest portion of paved surface is roads. It was calculated, that simple addition of crushed glass to asphalt (so called glassphalt) will increase reflectivity of road surface, and compensate completely for AGW.

Another way to cool the planet is to add sulfur components to jet fuel. During intercontinental flight, regular commercial plane will switch to sulfur-rich fuel, and resulted sulfur aerosols in contrail will serve as nuclei to cloud formation, which in turn will “cool the Earth”.

Couple of schemes were developed to draw down atmospheric CO2. DOE once calculated that cultivation of some species of shrubs with very deep roots in part of Argentinean pampas will sequester deep underground same amount of carbon as it is emitted in whole N. America.

The champion of such geoengineering exercises is ocean fertilization by iron and phosphorous. As John Martin, who conducted full scale experiments on ocean fertilization once said: “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I’ll create an ice age”.

Fortunately, such “mitigation” measures are not of interest to AGW bandwagon.

John Baltutis

Re: 565
Neil Fisher writes:

Well, OK – if lift is generated by pressure differentials created by the shape of the wing, then how does a plane fly upside-down?

Lift is not a result of pressure differentials created by wing shape. That’s a common, but erroneously held misconception. Lift is proportional to the amount of air diverted down times the vertical velocity of that air. See A Physical Description of Flight. When upside down, the same effect occurs, albeit with a substantially different angle of attack to maintain the same condition as when right-side up, such as level flight.

UC

Here,

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/

Andrey Levin

I got perfect nominee for next Noble Peace Prize. Take a minute to read how this multiple time US presidency candidate describes Dynamite Al:

“…Albert Gore is preeminent among the politicians who have seized on this new corporate prerequisite for investment as an avenue for career advancement. He has best defined the role of politicians deemed attractive by corporations that appreciate the dangers and opportunities of environmentalism in politics. Corporations now reward politicians who can deliver environmental votes and opinion without seriously deterring their goals with burdensome environmental constraints. Albert Gore is the politician who has best understood that his ability to attract and deliver the environmental constituency would make him attractive to corporate backers… As a broker of environmental voters on corporate terms, Gore is the prototype for the bankable, Green corporate politician.”

http://debatethis.org/gore/enviro/naderopenletter.html#globalwarming

Andrey Levin

Blogger’s response around the world:

“Good grief, there will be no shutting him up now”

“Recount, anyone?”

“I wonder if he’ll fly to pick it up in a private jet? $100 anyone?”

TonyN

I think that Al Gore is in pretty good company. Here

py

finally, this award must put the theory that climate change is a human induced activity driven by CO2 emissions beyond all reasonable doubt. The probability has clearly risen from 95% to 99% certainty. 😉

TonyN

Al Gore’s Nobel prize will probably get far more publicity than the High Court ruling on AIT, but will that matter in the long run?

When NAS and Wegman savaged the Hockey Stick most of the press coverage was ambivalent about their findings and it looked as though Mann had been vindicated. Now there doesn’t seem to anyone who is prepared to risk citing MBH and paleoclimatology has gone out of fashion; hardly a mention in AR4 SPM. Those who are really involved in the debate over AGW, on both, sides were not mislead and they recognize that Mann was not vindicated.

The court ruling has attrackted little media coverage in the UK but the Noble award will get plenty. Doubtless the ‘Green Machine’ will do all they can to publicize their champion’s new honor, but how much of that coverage will also mention the nine exaggerations in AIT bringing this story to a wider audience? The fuss about a Noble Prize award will pass quickly, but a judge’s ruling persists, just like the NAS and Wegman findings.

Perhaps controversy over the Noble Committee’s decision will, in time, do more to damage Gore’s reputation than enhance it. What is certain is that nine of the environmental activist’s favorite scare stories have been discredited. It will take time for them to find new ones and it will now be very risky to mention melting ice caps, imminent catastrophic sea level rise or drowning polar bears from now on.

Does anyone have a link to the clip of Roger Higman of Friends of the Earth wringing his hands and squirming in his seat as Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman repeatedly asks why his organization supported AIT when they must have known that the scientific evidence was being exaggerated? A taste of things to come perhaps?

PS. The BBC RAdio 4 1pm news has just used this story as its lead focusing on the AIT controversy angle.

Gerald Machnee

What Peace? I will eat light today, in case I &^%$%&*(!!

Gunnar

#578,

Hasse, The mass of Earth’s atmosphere is 5.3 x 10^18 kg, only .378% of the oceans.

>> that’s the nail in the coffin for Nobel Prize’s credibility

What, giving the “peace” prize to a nazi terrorist didn’t do it for you? Like Steve Viddal said, a day to truly be embarrased to be norwegian. What has Gore done for Peace? You know, he promised to run for President if he got the peace prize.

Pat Keating

586

Lift is not a result of pressure differentials created by wing shape. That’s a common, but erroneously held misconception. Lift is proportional to the amount of air diverted down times the vertical velocity of that air.

Wrong. Wrong. Right.

Lift IS the result of the pressure differences between upper surface and lower surface — that conception is not erroneous.

The last sentence is correct only because conservation of momentum, a fundamental law of physics, requires it. The amount of air diverted down depends on the pressure differential, and is the result of it, not the cause of lift. (kind of like COO and T).

Buddenbrook

Gore getting the peace prize is just sickening. Kid you not, his so called “CO2-footprint” must be one of the largest on the entire planet. His documentary was full of inaccuracies (and even deliberate mispresentations). Even if you were a hysterical alarmist I don’t see how you can justify this. Thousands of people risk their lives to get aid to people in warzones, or raise against oppression in dictatorships risking their own lives. Why can’t the Nobel committee show some balls and give it e.g. to Chinese democracy activists. But no… none of that, let’s give it to a westerner living the luxyry life, wholly contrary to what he preaches, who has put together some anecdotes about climate alarmism (which any half-qualified investigative journalist could gather in 1-2 days). What has he done really? What sacrifice has he made? Where is the courage, unique vision or any such thing he has shown?

Just unbeliveable. Kissinger and Arafat mark III.

Larry

For the record, the reason why the Goracle was awarded the peace prize is the idea that war is caused by climate change (i.e. the Sahel). So in addition to the fact that Gore actually didn’t do anything, and the fact that he’s peddling junk science, they’ve also bought into junk social science. The idea that climate change causes genocide is absurd and obscene, but good enough for the same committee who awarded a peace prize to a terrorist for killing civilians.

Hoi Polloi

Gore plans to donate his half of the $1.5 million prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection,

Only the half? I presume he needs the other half to pay his energy bills…

Sam Urbinto

“(this was a consensus view, so it must be right)”

Yes, but is it peer-reviewed?

Gunnar

Sam, wow, you converted me. I was certainly assuming that the standard explanation was correct, as pointed out by Larry. It just goes to show how the conventional wisdom is often incorrect. What was the link?

Webbo

Any flat object passed through air (or water etc.) at an angle will recieve an angular force towards the direction of the tilt. In the absence of gravity a 90 degrees wing angle has equalibrium and would fly straight. At say 80 degrees the air in the area below the wing is condensed and forces the wing upwards. The opposite is true for the air above the wing. This is why flat winged aircraft can fly upside down as long as the power is sufficient. Commercial aircraft dont have the power to achieve this kind of flight hence they “cheat” by varying the suface area. This has the side effect of reducing the power needed for lift.

The distance air travelled over the wing is a misnomer. This arguably (I say arguably because it may have no effect at all) only helps lift, it doesn’t cause it. And at higher speeds this has a negative drag effect and is therefore not used supersonically.

The angle of the tilt is predominantly what gives lift.

Webbo

Talking about QM…

Does anyone know where the energy of freezing water comes from? As water loses heat/energy and reaches 0 degrees it expands to form ice. This effect is strong enough to split steel or rock.

I’ve yet to hear a satisfactory explanation.

This seems a prime candidate for possible QM on a macroscopic scale to me.

Webbo

If all a wing does is deflect air, why do you need a wing? Just tilt the engine downward, and you get the exact same effect.

Spot on! And that’s exactly how a Harrier takes off. Massive amount of power needed though. It becomes more efficient as it moves forward.

But in flight, look out the window next time you fly, the flaps retract into the wing, and the only vertical force is due to the control surfaces.

And you may also notice the angle of the wing. If control surfaces were the only vertical force then how come you don’t see any commercial planes with the wing pointing down or straight? And how then do you explain the vertical lift of supersonic flat-winged aircraft?

Nasif Nahle

Yes, Sam, hurling and bouncing untiringly on quilted air layers 🙂

Larry

We have an interesting juxtaposition of American democrat Nobel peace prize winners:

Carter: “There is no genocide in Darfur”

Gore “Global warming causes genocide in Darfur”

Do you suppose that anyone in the media is going to notice that, and try to get them to reconcile their differences?

Michael Jankowski

Good lord! Karen dies, but her remnants have become TD 15 and could turn out to be named (Noel).

Steve Viddal

#613, Gunnar

It is not the taxpayer’s money. They come from Alfred Nobel’s will. He left a substantial amount of money to the creation of 5 prizes in his name. They were for achievements in Literature, Medicine/Physiology, Physics, Chemistry and finally the Peace Prize. The first are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. For some reason the swede Alfred Nobel entrusted the Norwegians with awarding and handing out the Peace Prize. An honour that we failed spectacularly today.
Although, there’s been a long downward trend with Arafat, Menchu and Maatahai

Larry

Steve, I think all of these airplane wing comments (sorry, I think I inadvertantly started it), are making the blog look bad. I’d snip them all if I were you.

Steve: I agree. It’s annoying and rude for people to get into stuff like this.

Craig Loehle

To try to save the airplane thing. There is no way to design an airplane from first principles of physics because it is too complicated JUST LIKE THE CLIMATE SYSTEM. The reason airplanes fly is that 1) they experiment with wing shapes in wind tunnels and 2) you can constantly adjust the controls as you fly (there is a real-time feedback control system) so it doesn’t have to be perfect. Neither of these conditions applies to the climate models.

DeWitt Payne

Webbo

The heat of fusion of water comes from the formation of hydrogen bonds between the water molecules. The hydrogen atoms in one molecule interact with the oxygen atom in another water molecule. Above the freezing point the average kinetic energy is high enough that large scale structures cannot form. IIRC, the normal structure of water has consists of an average of about 6 water molecules bound together by hydrogen bonds. Water expands as it freezes (maximum water density is about 4 C) because the crystalline structure of ice packs water molecules together less efficiently than in the liquid form. The high heat of vaporization of water comes from breaking the remaining hydrogen bonds.

Gunnar

>> but that doesn’t mean his model was falsified

Oh, you have empirical data that supports the Arrhenius model? I remember that when I suggested we have one these brilliant statisticians compare T & C02, you said it would mean nothing.

>> Or are you talking about his kinetic rate law

No, that’s been validated by SM

Hans Erren

re 630:

Oh, you have empirical data that supports the Arrhenius model? I remember that when I suggested we have one these brilliant statisticians compare T & C02, you said it would mean nothing.

Nir Shaviv has. :p

tetris

SteveM
Well done, no doubt.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with Anthony Watts comment in #51.

Even if the new data turns out to be the final nail[s] in the coffin of the HT’s scientific credibility, the Gore obscenity of today will have uber-politicized the AGW/ACC story line for a long time forward. The Financial Times of London, an opiniom maker in the business community if ever there was one, writes that the Gore/IPCC Nobel prize has in one fell swoop shifted public opinion and whatever was left in terms of “debate” around AGW/ACC firmly into the realm of politics/policy and the “urgency to do something about the problem”.
The mainstream media paid absolutely no attention to the seminal UK High Court ruling earlier this week to the effect that Gore’s movie is scientifically substantially incorrect and amounts to political propaganda. No, instead, two days later the man gets to share the Nobel Peace Prize!
Sorry to be the proverbial guy with the bucket of cold water, but auditing only has a purpose if its findings can be applied to ensure meaningful negative consequences for those who are found out. I think Anthony’s take on what the HT will do next is spot on.

Basil Copeland

re #51 and #102

Not to get off-topic, since I have no desire to say any more than what I’m about to say, the reputation of the Nobel Prize is not what it used to be. The way one pundit put it today, “I think he makes a fitting addition to the pantheon of Nobel Peace Prize holders.” That was said, I’m sure, as a snark.

So, let this site stay on task, doing what it is doing. If Gore is wrong, time and truth will win out.

David Archibald

Re 629, I don’t have a reference for the greenhouse numbers, which are actually 30 degrees C with 95% of that from water and 5% from CO2. Thus CO2 is good for 3 degrees C. Any bit of basic searching will find it for you, for example Dr Dewpoint. Richard Lindzen comes up with a very similar sensitivity to my own. His is 0.6 degrees for doubling without clouds and 0.2 degrees with clouds. He is about as eminent a climatologist as you could hope for. For supporting evidence on the climate sensitivity, why not read the paper quoted? Idso’s 1998 paper is hosted on Warwick Hughes’ blog at: http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/idso98.htm

The important thing about Idso’s paper is that it is based on the real world. You have to prove Idso wrong for climate sensitivity to not be 0.1 degrees per watt. Of course that level means that AGW is not a problem.

Geoff Sherrington

Scientific fakery?

Have just seen TIME magazine for 01 Oct 2007. The front cover has a photo that is digitally manipulated and so a fake. Different countries might have different covers. This is Australia. The caption is “A 5-to-6 tonne piece of melting ice on the shore of Igloolik Island, Foxe Basin, Nunavut, Canada”. The fakery is so, so amateur.

How far into society can fakery go before someone in authority calls for a stop?

TIME also notes “… for the first time in recorded history, the Northwest passage was ice-free all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic”. Is this correct? See post 41 at

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2095

Image is at

Can’t get the links to work. Geoff.

Geoff Sherrington

Correction to 640.

Post is 81, not 41.

Thank you MrPete for # 641. There might be a semantic difference between “free of ice” and “able to be navigated”.

I looked at the TIME website. There are faint words under the offer to buy the image saying that the flags were indeed added digitally. But these words are not on the printed cover.

Gunnar

#632, Shaviv is great, but I believe that’s climate sensitivity to energy. Besides, I said “empirical data that supports”. None in that article. Of course, we do have that data, we just haven’t compared it to the model.

Btw, my ancestor, Ragnar Olavsen published a paper back in 1038 that relates:

DeltaEnemyCasualties = alpha * (BonFiresInEnemyCamp + VikingsOnHand * (1 – e ^ DaysSinceFullMoon ))

He may have been wrong about the constant alpha, but no one has come up with anything better in terms of the form of the relationship, so it has not been falsified.

Nasif Nahle

I have a better solution for alpha alpha = # of rats on the enemy camp. BTW Arrhenius constant alpha, and the whole algorithm, was rebated by Knut Ångström, but the scientific Media allowed Arrhenius to defend his case, while Ångström was not allowed to answer the defense of Arrhenius. Something similar at present days?

SteveSadlov

RE: #647 – I was prompted to look up the particulars …. Gjoa (Admunsen’s boat) was actually sent back to Oslo in the 70s (I must have confused it with something more recent). In any case, it is no longer there at Golden Gate Park – one less illegal “play area” for kids to get hurt, one less place for homeless to illegally camp! Sadly, the boat was not sent to the Viking Ship Museum where it would have been beautifully displayed along with the best, but instead, went on outdoord display at the Norwegian Maritime Museum. If I would have known that on my last trip to Oslo, I would have gone there to check it out … oh well!

RE: #648 – I won’t write much on that, at the risk of being snipped, but yes, there is a definite possibility of an element of overseas interference …. cannot be ruled out.

David Smith

Among the 2007 weather head-scratchers is the behavior of the Southern Hemisphere ‘ozone hole’.

The current hole area plot is here . The black dots are the to-date estimates for 2007 while the white line is the median for the 1990s. 2007 looks pretty normal relative to the 1990s and to the record years (colored lines).

And the ozone minimum value ( here ) looks rather normal.

Now the year is not over and there’s a lot of interannual variation so this is simply a snapshot, not a trend. But, it does go into the “might something be up?” file.

Larry

650,

What a blow the award must be to the IPCC, self-proclaimed home of scientific rigour, to now be lumped in with Reverend Al and his Travelling Snake Oil Road Show and Climate Terror Machine.

Interesting point that I haden’t considered.

Nasif Nahle

# 653

Captdallas,

Here Houston… The 5.35 W/m^2 constant must to be deduced from experimentation, not from curve fitting. You’re right, its confusing because the CO2 equivalent is not 275 ppm (5 ppm less than the assumed “standard”), when we know it is 350 ppmv (from OSHAM standards). If we get the constant alpha (5.35 W/m^2) from observed and empirical values of emissivity, geometry, L, energy emitted, energy intercepted, etc., we obtain a value of 0.423 W/m^2. This is very important because the IPCC is handling the constants for fitting in the magnitude of 2CO2 = 2.5 °C.

Perhaps Dr. McIntyre will have soon the peer reviewed paper he’s looking for. Keep waiting… Roger…

Aileni Noyle

Sorry about that – go look at the Guardian.

jimDK

Nasif,
“BTW Arrhenius constant alpha, and the whole algorithm, was rebated by Knut Ångström, but the scientific Media allowed Arrhenius to defend his case, while Ångström was not allowed to answer the defense of Arrhenius. Something similar at present days?”

Do you have a reference for Angstrom defending his work? Everything i’ve seen says he was wrong.

thankyou, jim

Larry

655, you may want to add carbon cycle to the list for completeness (not that there’s any chance of getting all of that accomplished in 3 lifetimes). Also, the IPCC list of forcings is ripe for an audit. And this is just the WG1 stuff. You could also make that list about 5 times as long by adding WG2 and WG3 (consequences, economics, and remedies) to the list. Then we’d need about 10 lifetimes.

Larry

FWIW, I think this thread is getting a bit long in the tooth. It’s almost impossible to comment without a text editor.

AK

I hope the search is still on for peer-reviewed papers estimating 2.5 degrees for 2xCO2…

In the book 3D Radiative Transfer in Cloudy Atmospheres by Marshak and Davis (Eds.) on page 10 there is a chart of estimated effects from “a well-known British climate model to an imposed doubling of CO2 with feedbacks added one by one“.

It shows about 0.8 degrees for no feedbacks, 1.8 for water vapor feedback, 2.5 for ice albedo, and ranges from 2 to perhaps 5.5 after cloud effects. It claims to be adapted from “Senior and Mitchell(1993)”.

I can’t get the full PDF to load in Mozilla, but from the abstract:

The global warming produced with the four models then ranges from 5.4° with a relative humidity scheme to 1.9°C with interactive cloud water and radiative properties. Improving the treatment of ice cloud based on observations increases the model’s sensitivity slightly to 2.1°C. Using an energy balance model, it is estimated that the climate sensitivity using the relative humidity scheme along with the negative feedback from cloud radiative properties would be 2.8°C. Thus, 2.8°–2.1°C appears to be a better estimate of the range of equilibrium response to a doubling Of C02.

Hope this helps.

Steve McIntyre

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2200 continues this