For decades – and I do mean decades – I’ve been saying that any environmentalist who is really serious about reducing fossil-fuel use and CO2 emission should be agitating to switch the power infrastructure to using nuclear plants for the baseload as fast as possible.
But when the facts change, I change my mind. I was wrong. There is new, direct, observational evidence that the most effective thing we could do to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere is pave over the tropical rainforests.
Don’t believe me? Look at this map of CO2 emissions by region. It’s brand-new data from NASA’s just-lofted Orbiting Carbon Observatory.
The official line on this is that the high carbon emission we’re seeing are produced by burning of biomass associated with the current Southern Hemisphere planting season. But there are two features of the data that make this rather obvious nonsense.
1. The tropical high-emission areas are much larger than the regions where slash-and-burn agriculture is practiced, and they’re the wrong shape – that is, not a core with a plume trailing in the direction of prevailing winds. The African one is especially problematic – if that was produced by biomass combustion it would extend north to the edge of the Sahel.
2. See that one dense area over northern China? That is totally in the wrong location to be associated with the rainforest biomes in the SW of the country, and it isn’t planting season there anyway. That can’t be burning biomass, it has to be Chinese industrial emissions or something else we don’t understand.
So the big Southern hemisphere emission areas are probably just plants normally exhaling CO2, and in the process dwarfing the CO2 emissions of all humans everywhere except northern China. Oops, how embarrassing for the religion of AGW.
It’s a delightful auxiliary pie in the face that several CO2 source areas more intense than the entire swathe of the developed world are located in the mid-Pacific Ocean.
Prediction: the tropical high-emission zones will not vanish with the end of spring planting. And the OCO is going to continue producing problems for the AGW religion until and unless the high priests get to ‘correct’ the data before anyone else sees it.
Huh.
I’d had the impression that, while plants do breathe out CO2 during their dark cycles, that which they absorb during the light cycle is greater over any reasonable period. Is it actually possible for large concentrations of plants to be large CO2 emitters? And if not, what are some other possibilities? Volcanoes? Rotting biomass?
At first, the thought of all the plants in the rainforests exhaling CO? struck me as bogus, as in every biology lesson I’ve ever had on plants, I recall being taught that plants run on photosynthesis, not respiration. However, with a quick search, I discovered that plants do indeed use respiration and emit CO?.
I suspect you’re going to have a bunch of warmists here and elsewhere howling that ESR is an idiot who doesn’t even know how plants work.
Am I a bad person that I hope such howling will be popcorn-worthy?
I see this thing doesn’t like unicode. That’s what I get for trying to format things to look nice.
http://www.aerostich.com/pave-the-planet-t-shirt.html
Mr Hunt: I suspect that that if we’d find the research somewhere we’d find that *certain* kinds of plants, or plants under certain conditions (for example new/fast growing) will consume more CO2 than they produce, but at a certain point they switch from net producers to either neutral or slight consumers.
Also RE: Africa, back in the early days of AGW it wasn’t CO2 that was the big, evil, scary gas, it was Methane. Until the Watermelons realized that the biggest producers of methane was (a) rotting biomass and (b) ants/termites in Africa (and northern Australia). It’s unlikely that Volcanos or rotting biomass will produce CO2 on this level, but I wonder how much CO2 ants, termites and other animals that live in those areas produce?
Thing is that Methane is several times more effective at holding heat (and let’s remember that *that* part of the warmist science is correct, it’s the computer models that end in boiling oceans, and in some of their hystorical reconstruction that are questionable).
Looks like it’s time to move the goal posts again–which they’ve already been doing. Now the story is coming out that the lack of warming over hte last 15 years is CO2 preventing another ice age.
I am more of a “How do we stop using 3,000 lb. vehicles to exchange 3 oz. CDs?” problem sort of guy.
HINT: It aint in “friction-free”, coal-burning, S3-streaming server farms.
Radical conservationism, I know. But I have to be me!
Excuse me. I meant, Blu-Ray DVDs.
Sorry I’m old.
Though one also must love the social compact of standing at the RedBox bread line – while the frozen precipitation falls – as functionally retarded people try to manage the disc dipenser’s UI, whilst holding up the foully besmirched shade screen, as unaware parking-lot traffic threatens to mow you over!
First things first: Nuclear power for baseload makes a lot of sense, as long as you can control for humanity. Second: Climate science is *hard* – anybody who claims AGW as dogma is as silly as the people who refuse to believe CO2 could be rising at all.
First: Eric, your conclusions would have been entirely correct, had your starting principle been correct. The problem is that the figure is not an emissions map – it is a CONCENTRATIONS map. Position, not velocity. It’s expected that the southern hemisphere have extra CO2 heading into the start of summer and the northern have less heading into the winter.
Second: Some of the commentators are also forgetting that, while plants photosynthesize according to how much sunlight they get, animals and factories respirate at a comparatively constant rate year round. Plants and zooplankton are always removing CO2, it’s just that during winter they remove slower than animals add, so CO2 accumulates.
Given these two factors, it entirely makes sense that the greatest concentrations of CO2 during oct-nov be in areas of high biomass in the south and high industry anywhere – the amazon, the congo, indonesia, and china.
In general, I’m wary of articles that only look at a single data point – it’s one month of an annual cycle, and it’s one that we’ve actually measured in the past. OCO2 is not the first satellite that we’ve sent to measure things – look at GOSAT, for example. If anything, the graphic is actually proof that scientific models are correct: I think one of the clearest explanations for what you’re seeing here is at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/11/141118-nasa-video-carbon-dioxide-global-warming-climate-environment/
Oops, I said proof. Sorry, that’s not what I meant.
“If anything, the graphic actually indicates that scientific models are on the right track”
Ok maybe it’s my partial colour blindness but when they say “above Northern Australia” do they actually mean above Indonesia? Or do people actually think that the islands north of the Australian mainland is actually part of Australia?
One of the questions that has been in the back of my mind for a while is “Is the bulk of the CO2 from industrialization or from the 7 billion humans and countless animals just exhaling it?” This *may* point to an answer, but I don’t know.
Basic biology: plants use CO_2 during photosynthesis to produce O_2. You fail biology forever… but, they do that only during the day, when there is light for photosynthesis. I wonder if you can get time-correlated data from Orbiting Carbon Observatory, to compare CO2 emission during local day and during local night.
> core with a plume trailing in the direction of prevailing winds.
But you see latitudinal band of high CO2 at around what it looks like “roaring fourties” – prevailing wind. How you can explain otherwise the band of higher level of CO_2 over ocean?
> So the big Southern hemisphere emission areas are probably just plants normally exhaling CO2
Why there is no high CO2 in equatorial Africe – the rainforest area? Eh?
>Why there is no high CO2 in equatorial Africe – the rainforest area? Eh?
Good question. I don’t know the answer.
“Is the bulk of the CO2 from industrialization or from the 7 billion humans and countless animals just exhaling it?”
We talk about animals and trees….I believe that the largest (by far) portion of the earth’s biota consists of bacteria. (Out of sight, out of mind.) Rotting biomass probably explains a lot of this.
>Rotting biomass probably explains a lot of this.
Here is a known thing: the error bar in the estimates of CO2 from biomass decay exceeds the entire amount of CO2 emission attributed to humans.
I have this vague memory that this was discussed during the Reagan Admin. Back then environmentalists had a big “save the rainforest” campaign, because, they said, “That’s where most of the world’s oxygen comes from.” Then the Reaganites came out and said, “That’s just during the day. At night they emit CO2.” (I think in both cases they were talking about what trees do.) We now know from satellite data that the story got mixed up. Yes, the rainforest canopy produces a lot of oxygen during the day, but most of it gets absorbed at night, presumably by the abundant animal life in those forests, and the abundant oxygen is replaced by CO2. It seems almost like a perfectly closed system. However, the idea that “most of the world’s oxygen” comes from there seems to be true, but not directly from the rainforest. Instead it comes from enormous plankton blooms that develop off the coasts of the rainforest region. The current theory (IIRC) is that they are nourished by phosphates that become airborne in Africa’s deserts, and rain down on the rainforest during the annual monsoon season. This also fertilizes the floor of the rainforest, which is nutrient-poor.
I would argue that the psychosis that underlies CAGW worship is unrelated to emergence of new scientific data, rational analysis, or the advancement of knowledge. Just as “global warming” morphed into the “climate change” meme when the temperature data failed to match predictions, there will likely be a new meme that emerges soon that incorporates this new twist.
Perhaps “climate racism” will suffice for this new meme, since it kills two birds with one stone.
David on 2014-12-27 at 03:43:14 said:
is as silly as the people who refuse to believe CO2 could be rising at all.
i have never seen anyone claim that CO2 concentrations are *not* rising. and, that would be a pretty stupid claim to make, any high schooler with a chemistry set could verify / falsify it.
hey, don’t let me get in your way though, that’s a mighty fine strawman you’re constructing. should make a nice flame when we light a match too it.
Lol, concentrations != emissions. Emissions can be carried away hundreds and even thousands of miles away. Really, ESR?
But don’t worry ESR, even if climate change is real, the rising sea levels will just cause some water to spill over the edge of the earth. Ocean levels won’t rise. That’s what the flat-earth society says, and let’s face it, climate change denialists are in the same league (when it comes to scientific rigor) nowadays.
I absolutely *hate* people who try to twist science to fit their beliefs. A libertarian (like ESR) preaching that climate change is not real, hence no central planning of energy production is needed (we can just produce our energy by building lots of small coal-powered plants) is no different than a creationist who denies evolution because his religion says so.
>(we can just produce our energy by building lots of small coal-powered plants)
Kindly cease projecting at me. Coal-fired power sucks; that’s why I’ve been advocating nuclear since the early 1970s.
concentrations != emissions.
Fine. But you need to explain why this pattern of concentrations does not confirm the “white people are destroying the planet” assertion.
kurkosdr on 2014-12-27 at 14:36:06 said:
Lol, concentrations != emissions. Emissions can be carried away hundreds and even thousands of miles away. Really, ESR?
Lol, and all those emissions got magically carried to and concentrated in the rainforests by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, amirite?
It looks to me, that much more serious role in CO2 harvesting plays fitoplancton in oceans. But it is decreasing because of temperature increase and less whales which mix waters and nurtures plancton with excrements.
I knew this post was going to be a flustercuck when I saw the link to WUWT, but I see David at 3:43 nailed the rebuttal (with one error, he wrote “zooplankton” when he meant “phytoplankton”). BTW, the mission team only finished calibrating the instruments on September 30:
http://oco2.jpl.nasa.gov/newsoco/
CO2 can be expected to be depleted over the oceans because they are a net sink and won’t equilibrate for at least 1000 years after excess emissions cease. As for the rest, the orange color appears to correspond to about 397-400 ppm, or right around the current Mauna Loa measurement:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
This suggests the Amazon rainforest didn’t do much of anything last October.
Now if you take the massive amount of biomass in the Amazon and throw most of its carbon into the atmosphere… you’ll see THAT signal for the next kiloyear.
Termites baby. Termites produce more CO2 than all the cars in the US.
OK then I guess the other comment is being identified as spam and/or malicious. It ain’t that important except as a comment that we want nukes because of the energy return on energy invested (EROEI or sometimes just EROI). Nukes have an EROI of about 75 which as hgh as we can get. So the more nuke you have the less of the rest of the world you have to disrupt
>Coal-fired power sucks; that’s why I’ve been advocating nuclear since the early 1970s.
What about radioactive waste? (Honest question; I’m not your enemy.)
>What about radioactive waste? (Honest question; I’m not your enemy.)
Christopher Smith called it right. High-level waste is useful for things like isotope batteries; low-level waste isn’t dangerous, often more of a chemical toxin than a radiological one.
If the waste is still radioactive, that means that there’s additional unextracted energy, and reprocessing is often both practical and cheaper than refining mined ores.
Jorge, what specifically do you mean by “radioactive waste”?
Do you mean lightly-contaminated gloves, gowns and other protective clothing?
Do you mean ion-exchange resins which have picked up some slight fission product contamination from reactor cooling water?
Or do you mean “spent” nuclear fuel?
I put “spent” in scare quotes because about 95% of the useful energy remains in light-water reactor fuel even after it’s too depleted to be used with a light-water moderator any more. You can extract about another 40% over the original 5% it by putting it through a reactor moderated by heavy water (so-called DUPIC, Direct Use of PWR fuel In CANDU), but it appears that the reactor design of Transatomic Power can squeeze out 96% of the available energy from that “spent” fuel, and fast-spectrum reactors can everything that isn’t lost in reprocessing.
The current US inventory of spent LWR fuel would be sufficient to start on the order of 500 GW of Transatomic reactors. That would eliminate most of the emissions from electric generation and the “radioactive waste” problem in one fell swoop. You’d be left with fission products which become less radio-toxic than raw uranium ore in about 500 years, and have plenty of worthwhile uses while they’re decaying away. If you’re willing to give me 5-10 kW(th) of Sr-90 heat source, I’ll take it; just package it to my specs.
> Here is a known thing: the error bar in the estimates of CO2 from biomass decay exceeds the entire amount of CO2 emission attributed to humans.
But the amount doesn’t matter, because all of that carbon came from the atmosphere within the lifetime of the organism whose biomass is decaying.
@kurkosdr: Part of the reason some of us are suspicious of the AGW proposals is that the people who are pushing for them aren’t backing the changes required to most effectively address the issue.
If the AGW proponents stood up and said that this is a really big issue, and as a result we need to build lots of nuclear power plants and pumped-storage facilities I’d think that they were actually serious. I can’t take anybody seriously if they look to start working on the problem with the engineering-wise most difficult 10% of the problem (as in, new, not-as-nice lightbulbs, minor changes in fuel efficiency) as opposed to the easiest and most straight-forward 50% of the problem through nuclear power.
@Jorge Dujan: Others have addressed some of the aspects of nuclear waste. Another is that per policy (both implicit and explicit), nuclear waste reprocessing isn’t allowed in the US. If that were to be done, much more of the useful energy could be extracted from the fuel, there would be less high-level waste left, and it would be safer.
>> If the AGW proponents stood up and said that this is a really big issue, and as a result we need to build lots of nuclear power plants and pumped-storage facilities I’d think that they were actually serious. <<
The actual climate scientists mostly ARE saying just this. Patrick Moore (co-founder of Greenpeace International) has been saying this for decades. James Lovelock (Gaia hypothesis), the same. Gwyneth Cravens too.
Now there's an open letter with 70-odd high-profile signatories to that effect:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/12/16/its-time-for-environmentalists-to-give-nuclear-a-fair-go/
What you have on the anti-nuclear side is "big Green", composed of a bunch of large organizations which get most of their funds from even larger donors. Who are those donors, and what strings do they attach to their funding? Given that they include the Rockefeller Foundation (founded on oil), it seems very unlikely that they're actually defending the earth instead of the Rockefeller family fortune doesn't it?
If this seems unlikely to you at first, consider that the Sierra Club was pushed from a ZPG position in defense of wild areas to complete neutrality on mass immigration by the demands of just one donor, David Gelbaum.
Jorge Dujan on 2014-12-27 at 18:00:33 said:
What about radioactive waste? (Honest question; I’m not your enemy.)
IF you want a serious long term solution
AND you’re not interested in dealing with reprocessing
THEN you would deeply bury whatever leftover stocks of contaminated / depleted materials into the subduction zone of one of the continental plates and allow them to ride the conveyor down into the magma.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction
the core of the Earth is full of dense metals and elements. heavy shit sinks, yo.
while some of the radioactives would likely be ejected in lava from one of the overlying Arc volcanos
a – it would be highly diluted after having been melted at thousands of degrees
b – the vast majority would be fixed and shielded in solidified lava
c – due to the extremely long lead times between the emplacement in a deep vault ( the deepest hole ever bored is some 40,000 ft / < 12.4 km at Kola ) and actual melting depth ( min 80 km ), most of the radioactives will have dissipated at that point anyways.
d – we’d all be dead by hundreds of thousands of years at that point anyways.
(e) dump glassified waste in the oceans. Let it leach out if it wants to. It will do it so slowly that it will not add significantly to the total radioactivity (K-40 and C-14 betas, ignoring everything from the uranium decay chain of which there are billions of tons of precursor isotopes left) in the oceans.
If it takes 500 years to get out, almost everything with half-lives of 30 years or less (including Sr-90 and Cs-137) will be effectively gone. What’s left is stuff like Tc-99, which is very “cool” by comparison. You’ll be able to measure the contribution because it’s easy to determine decay energies with high precision and pick out even scarce isotope signatures, but it just won’t be an issue for biology.
Baseline facts to remember:
– Respiration (production of CO2 by oxygen consuming life) happens 24/7
– Decomposition (production of CO2 by bacteria and fungi, etc.) happens 24/7
– Photosynthesis (consumption of CO2 & production of O2) happens during daylight
– ALL three of the above processes are mediated by temperature and moisture with production rates having ‘normal’ distributions related to some optimum of those values.
The high concentrations of CO2 in wet tropical landmasses was previously observed by a Japanese satellite with similar capabilities to the one described in the article.
All of this has already been thrashed by Murray Salby’s geochemical mass balance hypotheses. The recent accumulation of CO2 is a function of the results of annual changes in regional & global temperature and moisture rather than human production.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YrI03ts–9I
part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8L3skoSLIA
part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMiuv6f9hd4
Also, geochemical processes like bedrock decomposition & formation are ALSO mediated by temperature & moisture and may have significance in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
One thing is certain: the global human production of CO2 is less than 3% of the total CO2 produced. Natural production and sequestration are so huge that very small differences from year to year (resulting from temperature & moisture) are more than enough to account for the increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration.
IMO, nuclear fission energy is a poor fit for humans.
We think and plan for days to months, perhaps for a decade or two but nuclear waste, nuclear fission facilities, etc. are an issue/problem for thousands of years.
We are sloppy, accident prone, prone to violence, willing to settle for expedience, and emotional. The products and process of fission requires constancy, precision, forethought and prudence.
Ergo, shit happens like 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima just to name the most famous “accidents”.
Speaking of the oceans, a grad student, in the face of an explicit threat to his career, has discovered a fraud perhaps greater than Climategate in ocean acidification claims. It begins with the typical picking of a convenient starting point, ignoring the 70 prior years of data that destroy the claims.
Whoa, the science-denialist astroturfers are here in force all of a sudden!
BioBob’s assertion that human CO2 contributions are less than 3% of CO2 produced is a very carefully-crafted canard. It incorporates, among other things, the fallacy of ambiguity: it doesn’t distinguish between gross fluxes and net changes. I’ve never seen the name Murray Salby before, and I’m not about to waste an hour just to make a first pass at picking out the falsehoods and shifted goalposts, but a quick search finds that he is no longer associated with Maquarie University so no longer has the title “professor”.
Interesting discussion here. It does make me wonder one thing. Why do the AGW alarmists absolutely NEED to call anyone questioning the data and science “deniers”? It is a mandated requirement in their discourse now. Funny how name calling is the new required debating response and evidence is no longer necessary at all. If you have the evidence to prove people wrong use it. If you’re calling someone a name I’ll assume that your evidence is lacking.
>Interesting discussion here. It does make me wonder one thing. Why do the AGW alarmists absolutely NEED to call anyone questioning the data and science “deniers”? It is a mandated requirement in their discourse now
It’s a defensive maneuver. The CAGW computer models have utterly failed at predicting the behavior of the real atmosphere. They’ve failed the criterion of actual science, so they have to fall back on the tactics of religion.
Engineer-Poet, I don’t believe in CAGW…and a large part of that is because “climate science” isn’t. When “climate scientists” start acting like scientists, I’ll accord them the deference that such would deserve.
And as for “science deniers”: Why is it that many CAGW true believers oppose any use of GMO food, even though the science about them is unequivocal that they are safe and nutritious? What do you think about them?
This post was just Instalanched.
So why is the southern tip of Greenland a fountain of carbon emissions? Just a wag that it isn’t planting season in November…
Engineer-Poet on 2014-12-28 at 12:05:57 said:
1) “very carefully-crafted canard”
2) “not about to waste an hour”
3) “never seen the name Murray Salby”
———————
1) the fact is that ALL our data on carbon cycling are estimates because data collectors are busy “adjusting” the crap historical data but it is not hard to prove the human ‘effort’ is trivial from what we do have measured. So spare us your assertions without any sources at all. Even the data adjusters on Wikipedia like the stoat have no issue with the order of magnitude estimates that indicate human global carbon contributions are trivial compared to the totals.
2) Lazy is as lazy does. You know it all so you will not spend any effort at all to learn, eh ?
3) You can measure the importance of Murray Salby’s assertions by the primal screams from the [strike] AGM, Thermageddon, Climate Change, [/strike] Climate Disruption crowds as they got Salby fired from his Uni job without cause. Pretty hard to be a climate realist iconoclast embedded in the marxist Uni crowd members who, like you, use illogical appeals to authority instead of data. You never heard of him so how important can his ideas be ? Eh? That will work !!!
kurkosdr on 2014-12-27 at 14:36:06 said:
A libertarian (like ESR) preaching that climate change is not real, hence no central planning of energy production is needed . . .
That’s really the key isn’t it? Although many of the AGW cheerleaders are just useful fools the main impetus behind it is one of the primary wet dreams of the socialists: central economic planning by the wise. Virtually nothing that is produced today can be done without energy, electrical or otherwise. If our “best and brightest” get to control and ration energy production so as to ensure the greatest social good (as they see it) then they will absolutely control what is produced and by whom. Control of energy is control of any modern economy.
And as for concentration ! = production, that is true. But what does that do to certain assumptions underlying these models that predict the catastrophic warming of the earth? Consider a clear pane of glass that is speckled with drops of black paint. Adding more paint to the areas that are already covered by paint won’t affect the amount of light that is transmitted through the glass. How many of these wonderful models take account of the fact that carbon dioxide does not diffuse evenly in the atmosphere? I don’t know for a fact, but I suspect that none of them do.
Folks, there is an important difference between carbon standing crops and processing/production. Tropical systems process carbon quickly but tropical rain forest carbon standing crops are dwarfed by those of temperate forests and likewise for temperate versus tropical grasslands, etc. Tropical soils are very low in carbon content but temperate soils have very large carbon content, etc.
BioBob:
Why can’t we all just hold hands and sit around the [strike] AGM, Thermageddon, Climate Change, [/strike] Climate Disruption campfire and sing “We are the World”? You would question your betters in this field? You gotta lot of nerve, pal. It’s almost like you don’t know when the science is settled.
Tcobb,
I fear you are right and that leads to why they fight so hard against nuclear power.
Abundant, low carbon sources of power will allow industry and capitalism to flourish without interference from the government. But, if they can shut down coal plants without building nuclear plants to provide energy, then rationing will need to be done. Our betters would HAVE to control how we used this limited energy.
The want control and power more than they want their fellow man to succeed. Progressives/Marxists (same thing) are just evil fucking scumbags.
@ jmod46 on 2014-12-28 at 16:16:12
Yeh, poor poor pitiful me who has been an AGW skeptic since the 1970’s when C.A.S. Hall (one of my thesis advisors) noticed that atmospheric CO2 concentrations were increasing. Here we are nearly 50 years later and we STILL do not actually know why and are forced into wild-ass-guesses. That just gives me such a warm fuzzy feeling about the progress of “climate science” that still seems to put much of it’s effort into “adjusting” the crap historical data to fit it’s latest theories.
Jay Maynard on 2014-12-28 at 12:33:04 said: “the science about them is unequivocal that they are safe ”
That is not to say GMO crops do not have their problems. Nasty when pollen from GMO crops fertilize organic crops in the surrounding area and ruin their fear-inflated value. Also other issues like the long-term effects of “new” Bt etc. proteins produced by GMO crops are introduced into the food supply. Likely safe, but science is about proof, not assumptions, and “unequivocal” implies a certain level of proof that is still forthcoming. But I don’t worry about it much. Pass the GMO corn-chips please.
GMO crops are engineered to not be able to reduce. If they fertilize nearby crops, all of those crops are now infertile.
Proving a crop is safe is impossible, since it’s inherently proving a negative. There’s been a mountain of tests, and nobody’s ever found any problems at all with regard to food safety or anything else.
Of course, the leftists who protest GMOs – most of them the same ones screaming about how CAGW skeptics are anti-science – don’t worry about that. They just scare people.
> I’d had the impression that, while plants do breathe out CO2 during their dark cycles, that which they absorb during the light cycle is greater over any reasonable period. Is it actually possible for large concentrations of plants to be large CO2 emitters? And if not, what are some other possibilities? Volcanoes? Rotting biomass?
Think about the bulk chemistry behind this. A constant amount of biomass (i.e. being replaced by growing plants at more or less the same rate that it rots) is going to be carbon-neutral over long periods of time. What we’re seeing is the error bars in that. The only way that “paving the rainforests” is going to do anything good is as a one-time carbon sequestration as all the biomass (living or dead) in said rainforests is buried and prevented from rotting – if and only if it is done in a way that actually accomplishes that.
Indeed, no argument from me. The anti-GMO crowd is not pro-science either ! It was never about the science, always about sly innuendo.
Random832 on 2014-12-28 at 21:07:40
It was never about tropical rainforest sequestration since there is essentially none long term but instead notional about preventing rainforest CO2 production, which is massive. It was always an absurd notion designed as incitement.
BioBob, the point is that carbon produced from respiration or decomposition is already a part of the global carbon cycle. Human fossil fuel combustion introduces sequestered carbon from outside the carbon cycle back into the cycle, fucking up the long-term equilibrium the atmosphere has been in and introducing changes in climate that wouldn’t be there otherwise.
That the amount of carbon released by respiration and decomposition dwarfs the amount released in fossil fuel burning is immaterial if the effect of reintroducing sequestered carbon is great enough. This satellite data does nothing to discredit the agw hypothesis.
> It was never about tropical rainforest sequestration since there is essentially none long term but instead notional about preventing rainforest CO2 production, which is massive.
And my point is that there’s none of either long term, not if the size and density of the rainforests remains constant. There’s nowhere for all that supposedly extra carbon to come from. If you encased all the biomass in impermeable concrete (thus “paving” it) and prevented it from rotting (releasing its carbon into the atmosphere), that would be a form of sequestration. But you wouldn’t even get that if you just burned it all down.
Jeff Read on 2014-12-28 at 22:08:05 said: carbon produced from respiration or decomposition is already a part of the global carbon cycle
Not exactly, and you do not get it. Even Joni Mitchell got the important part with ‘we are billion year old carbon’. Most carbon on Earth is actually incorporated in bedrock and is naturally mobilized by plate tectonics and earth’s internal heat engine as is any fossil fuel not extracted by humans. More is mobilized by biological & geochemical action on bedrock and soils. The process works both ways with amounts also being sequestered in abyssal mud or sedimentary carbonate formation, etc.. You are simply setting your boundaries in an arbitrary manner. For all we know, the tiny amount of increased atmospheric CO2 observed is the result of minute changes in the speed of plate movements, increased bombardment of Earth by carbonaceous micro-comets, the result of subtle changes in geochemical processes or any other number of known unknowns or unknown unknowns. Salby concludes that the minute atmospheric CO2 changes coincide with annualized changes in temperature and moisture from year to year.
What fucking equilibrium ? No such thing, never was, never will be. Or do you think we are in a steady state universe ????? The rest of us live in a chaotic universe where the world changes all the time simply because some bug flaps it’s wings. “Round and round it goes and where it stops nobody knows…”
The trouble with AGW bullcrap is that it’s proponents have insufficient and poor quality data, ignore the big picture, and seemingly do know know what they do not know. They think global processes are simple to measure and simple in concept when nothing could be further from the truth. Only climate scientists refuse to use replicated random samples to gather empirical data and get away with it. The rest of scientists must gather their data in a more rigorous manner or be laughed out of the building. Some things are just beyond our grasp and knowing the details of weather and future geochemical states are some of them.
Random832 on 2014-12-28 at 22:37:44 said: not if the size and density of the rainforests remains constant.
If you pave the rainforests then they are gone as productive units and their contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere is gone. By definition, then, they are not constant, instead are simply GONE.
> If you pave the rainforests then they are gone as productive units and their contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere is gone. By definition, then, they are not constant, instead are simply GONE.
Yes, and you’ve either burned them (permanent, one-time release of CO2 into the atmosphere) or buried them (permanent, one-time sequestration of carbon into the ground).
I don’t know what “contribution” you think you’re talking about – none of this data shows any net, long-term contribution, and the idea that there is one is simply absurd as it requires creating carbon atoms from nothing.
Random832 on 2014-12-28 at 23:59:37 said: it requires creating carbon atoms from nothing.
sigh….you really need to put on your thinking cap. The carbon comes from all the usual places; atmospheric CO2, dissolved carbonic acid & carbonates resulting from geochemical and biological processes in soils and bedrocks. If the rain forest ecosystem does not remove those from the biosphere, then they stay immobilized or in the atmosphere until other processes mobilize them. Nobody would expect that eliminating the rain forest would permanently make those changes for all time. Eventually something else would happen.
In any case, nobody knows what would happen long term if we paved the rain forest but I suspect the largest change would be global atmospheric oxygen concentration would fall. Seeing as how the CO2 comprises only .04% of the atmosphere, not much would change there in all likelihood since it has never been much of a consideration (from my point of view) except as a limiting factor raw material for plant photosynthesis.
kurkosdr says “A libertarian (like ESR) preaching that climate change is not real, hence no central planning of energy production is needed (we can just produce our energy by building lots of small coal-powered plants) is no different than a creationist who denies evolution because his religion says so.”
Your claim that central planning works better than distributed planning is creationist economics. You have no evidence for your thesis; you have only faith.
> sigh….you really need to put on your thinking cap. The carbon comes from all the usual places; atmospheric CO2
That is MY ENTIRE POINT. The fact that the carbon in the plants / rotting biomass is of recent atmospheric origin means that it can’t have any long-term impact. There’s no compound interest for carbon – nothing more is put back in to the atmosphere than was taken out during the biomass’s lifetime.
>but I suspect the largest change would be global atmospheric oxygen concentration would fall.
And that do you think those oxygen atoms are going to be instead of atmospheric oxygen?
(It would be nice if there were a five minute grace period to re-edit posts. Seeing a post go up focuses the mind on all the typos that one doesn’t notice while proofreading)
>but I suspect the largest change would be global atmospheric oxygen concentration would fall.
And what do you think those oxygen atoms are going to be instead of atmospheric oxygen?
@Garrett:
per policy (both implicit and explicit), nuclear waste reprocessing isn’t allowed in the US.
This actually isn’t quite true any more. The Carter administration banned reprocessing, but the Bush administration lifted the ban. However, the Obama administration appears to have backed off from actually doing any commercial reprocessing.
@BioBob:
nuclear waste, nuclear fission facilities, etc. are an issue/problem for thousands of years.
Not if you reprocess it. As others have pointed out, most of what is called “nuclear waste” is actually unburnt fuel, and reprocessing allows you to burn it. Most of the rest has other uses, as has also been pointed out. The only major nuclear-using country that can’t seem to get this is, alas, the US.
shit happens like 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima
And even with those taken into account, nuclear power has caused several orders of magnitude fewer deaths per unit of energy produced than other major energy sources. So if nuclear power is a “poor fit” for humans, the others are an even worse fit.
Don’t coal plants release more radioactivity (to say nothing of any other measure of pollution) into the environment than was ever actually released at Three Mile Island?
>Don’t coal plants release more radioactivity (to say nothing of any other measure of pollution) into the environment than was ever actually released at Three Mile Island?
Yes, they do. If coal plants had to meet the (absurdly stringent) radiation-emission standards for nuclear reactors, they’d be shut down.
Peter Donis on 2014-12-29 at 11:45:29 said: Not if you reprocess it.
It’s not especially about deaths, contamination, and all that BS, although each obviously is a concern; it’s about the money. Nukes just cost too much when you don’t hide all the nasty parts under the rug. MUCH MUCH more than the fossil fuel alternatives.
And how well is that reprocessing working for us now ? In October 1976, President Gerald Ford to issue a Presidential directive to indefinitely suspend the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium in the U.S. On 7 April 1977, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of commercial reactor spent nuclear fuel. In March 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reversed its policy and signed a contract …….”11 years after the government awarded a construction contract, the cost of the project has soared to nearly $5 billion. The vast concrete and steel structure is a half-finished hulk” ….Blah blah blah ….
The short story is that the US has ZERO reprocessing facilities for commercial nuke waste so many thousands of fuel rods sit at reactor sites cooling their heels, waiting for some yahoo to make a bad and expensive mistake.
Reprocessing would reduce the quantity of waste but not eliminate the problems. The reality is that unless the government subsidizes the process and underwrites the liability issues, nobody in their right mind would take a chance on nuke waste. Further, there isn’t a government in the world that does not turn everything it touches into shit, so we have that going for us. 60 years after the manhattan project, contaminated waste sites still litter the US landscape despite mucho billions in superfund expenditures.
All nuke fanbois have great hopes and slick talking points but reality smacks you in the face like a wet fish. Give it up. Find some kinda process that deals with human behavioral & economic realities and has minor consequences and expenses from those mistakes. We humans have limitations and we should make our plans keeping those limitations in mind.
Fission energy right now is a poor fit for humans. Fix that and we will be set free; I would love to have a fail-safe nuke power plant in my pocket, keeping me warm, well fed, rich, and wise.
Random832 on 2014-12-29 at 14:51:09 said:
Don’t coal plants release more radioactivity (to say nothing of any other measure of pollution) into the environment than was ever actually released at Three Mile Island?
——————
Not really. US coal plants capture flyash, so most of the normal background radioactivity is sequestered in the ash piles. Flying, living in granite and other high radiocuclide bedrock areas or eating bananas has higher radioactivity consequences for people. Did you think earth was a radioactive free zone ?
>Not really. US coal plants capture flyash, so most of the normal background radioactivity is sequestered in the ash piles. Flying, living in granite and other high radiocuclide bedrock areas or eating bananas has higher radioactivity consequences for people.
All true, but it’s still the case that the EPA would almost certainly count the fly ash radioactivity as a problem if … uh, I’m going to shut up now. Don’t want to give the Obama administration ideas.
here you go…everything you wanted to know about radioactivity exposure in the real world in one chart:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
esr on 2014-12-29 at 15:18:24 said:
All true, but it’s still the case that the EPA would almost certainly count the fly ash radioactivity as a problem
——————-
Coal ash IS a problem and most economists sweep that remediation cost under the rug. The EPA already has regs up the wazoo for coal ash, adding to the problems of dealing with it.
Like I said, there isn’t a problem and there isn’t a government that does not turn everything it touches into crap.
Here is a nice number I found for natural gas use in the home:
old time Natural gas in home 9 mrem/year = 90 ?Sv
Fracked natural gas can be much higher
http://theenergycollective.com/david-lewis/47970/shale-gas-some-it-hot
Do we need to discuss this more ? Living causes dying. Everything we do causes something ‘bad’ for something else. So we all need to be super-strict Buddhist and kill ourselves right ? so we don’t step on ants and worms…..
On those lines, anyone with any thoughts on the high beta fusion reactor?
If Skunk Works has it right we’re looking at about a decade before zero-emission, zero-nasty-stuff power generation. I don’t know about the science of it (though I’m sure Skunk Works wouldn’t just make shit up); I’m looking forward to it because we can tell both coal and nuclear fission to eat a bowl of dicks. \o/ Add that to cheap solar and better battery tech and the future looks pretty good, whether you believe in AGW or not.
>If Skunk Works has it right we’re looking at about a decade before zero-emission, zero-nasty-stuff power generation.
Uh huh. But here’s betting “environmentalists” will try to get it outlawed, because it would otherwise have political consequences they find unacceptable.
@BioBob
I suggest that you read this: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
@lewis:
I’d like to think that we could look forward to fusion someday. I’ve been hearing about it for a long time, though, and it is a very difficult technical problem. The main obstacle is trying to overcome the electrostatic force, which keeps nuclei apart. It’s a lot easier to shoot particles into them, especially with an element that’s already unstable.
As for solar, I’m not optimistic. Just at first glance, the solar tech of today doesn’t appear to power stuff better than it did about 30 years ago, though battery technology has improved.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/10/when-political-correctness-collides-with-itself.php
esr,
> Uh huh. But here’s betting “environmentalists” will try to get it outlawed, because it would otherwise have political consequences they find unacceptable
Some environmentalists I’ve read are this way; nasty people who would jump on any cause that gives them control over other people. Plenty I’ve *known* are not, from discussion with them; they are genuinely concerned about what we’re doing to our planet with CO2 and don’t think leaving nasty wastes around that will cause our descendents millenia down the line to curse us is a very good idea. The second category of folks will be happy to see a problem solved.
As for the first category, eh, run the fuckers over in our giant fusion-powered pick up trucks! :D
Mark Miller,
> I’ve been hearing about it for a long time, though, and it is a very difficult technical problem.
You name problems, but Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works claims to have solved them. Are they wrong?
> http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/10/when-political-correctness-collides-with-itself.php
And I can show you a kid flapping his arms around in imitation of a bird and be like “ha ha flying is a stupid idea”. Honesty requires that you confront the best advocates of a cause.
@BioBob:
Nukes just cost too much when you don’t hide all the nasty parts under the rug. MUCH MUCH more than the fossil fuel alternatives.
One could argue that the fossil fuel alternatives are allowed to hide nasty parts under the rug as well. But I think a better argument is that the main driver of cost for nuclear power is the cost of plant construction, which is largely driven by lawsuits brought by anti-nuclear activists. As a result, very little effort has been put into making nuclear plants cheaper to build, whereas a lot of effort has gone into that for fossil fuel plants.
The short story is that the US has ZERO reprocessing facilities for commercial nuke waste
Yes, because the US government has made a huge mess of this issue. That’s an argument for fixing the US government (for example, by following the example of other countries that have been reprocessing for decades), not an argument for avoiding nuclear power.
BioBob on 2014-12-28 at 07:54:07 said:
> Ergo, shit happens like 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima just to name the most famous “accidents”.
Some of those plants were designed when drum brakes were the best thing going, seat belts were optional and people thought that the safest place for a child was in her mothers arms. Oh, and those cars were “used up” at 45 or 50k miles.
Just like we’ve got better car designs (in every way, except maybe aesthetics) we have *far* better fission reactor designs. Helium Cooled Pebble Bed and Liquid Sodium cooled designs use physics to fail safely, they’re modular design means that failure doesn’t take the whole site down, and that they can be cheaper to build and deploy.
Mr. Donis:
There has been considerable effort into making nuclear power safer, cleaner and cheaper.
@William O. B’Livion:
There has been considerable effort into making nuclear power safer, cleaner and cheaper.
I completely agree that these newer designs are much better, and I would love to see them get built and run. However, that hasn’t happened yet, so all the numbers people throw around to show how costly nuclear power is are based on the construction costs of old designs.
Also, I’m skeptical that anti-nuclear activists will suddenly shut up if someone attempts to build a commercial reactor based on the new designs, since they were never actually responsive to the technical facts in the first place.
@William O. B’Livion:
I should also add that the new designs you refer to are recent; it has taken decades for nuclear power to get to a point that seems to have been reached considerably more quickly with fossil fuels.
FooQuuxman on 2014-12-29 at 16:14:56 said:
Thanks but the ‘book’ appears to be a superficial overview with some voodoo economics of what I have already read about extensively for the past decades (data from all sides pro-anti-agnostic). It all boils down to costs for the utility, the government (your taxes), the future. Until the full costs including those that account for human failings become less than the alternatives, nuke power will languish. Mostly the link ignores much of the actual costs – add in the annual budget for the DOE, nuke superfund EPA expenditures, etc. divided by the number of reactors & sites and we and call it good (= immediate death blow).
Since I don’t believe AGW BS has any significance, there is no pressing need to avoid the warming non-issue and fossil fuels are cheaper in any case. IMO, should humans persist on earth, we will employ every recoverable joule of fossil fuel before we seek more exotic solutions simply because they will be cheaper in total expenditures.
In the long run, plate tectonics will consume any fossil fuels we do not, so it hardly matters. Carbon will continue to cycle regardless of what we do and we are an insignificant cog in the universe’s clockwork.
@Lewis:
Re. LM Skunk Works working on fusion
I’m waiting for them to demonstrate that they’ve overcome the difficulties. I don’t care about claims. They are not wrong, because there is nothing yet to criticize, but there isn’t anything worth calling “right,” either.
Re. the “solar demo”
The point I was making is that this failed demo was indicative of the technology that’s now available. It worked as much as it did due to improvement in battery technology, but no perceptible improvement in solar technology. The solar array the guy used was not really there to power the blower, as it was nowhere close to the wattage the blower needed (keep in mind this is only a fan!). The only reason the display worked at all was the batteries the guy used, which he claimed he charged up overnight using wind power.
It’s unlikely that what the guy did would’ve worked at all 30 years ago, because rechargeable battery technology would not have provided the power needed, or if it did, it would’ve expended its power in a very short amount of time. To give a bit of a benchmark, back in that era, people who used cell phones used to need to carry a rechargeable battery with them the size of a *suitcase*! What was being used here required a lot more power than a cell phone.
I have no problem trying out new nuke designs in theory. Go ahead and build them if you can. But make sure to design them so that WHEN the operators disappear the plants will be safe for all eternity.
Show me a human civilization that has survived intact without revolution or devolution for more than a few hundred years (a thousand at best ??) and show me a reactor that does not produce extremely hazardous ionizing radiation radionuclides that do not persist for longer than those few hundred years and then you have a plan. Cover the landscape with them so that everything is cheap and easy. But the social systems humans create with continue to fail because that is our nature, our affliction; we are only human and not god.
Peter Donis on 2014-12-29 at 17:08:06 said:
William O. B’Livion on 2014-12-29 at 17:12:14 said:
You both can rationalize and equivocate all you like but none of that changes the current realities. You must either change the realities or live within the current laws of economics. Since the country appears to be headed down the drain, I can only wish you good luck and godspeed. We certainly would benefit from cheap energy and innovation.
@BioBob:
make sure to design them so that WHEN the operators disappear the plants will be safe for all eternity.
This is a completely unreasonable requirement which we do not impose on any other energy source. As for meeting a reasonable requirement, apparently you missed the part about how other countries have been reprocessing for decades. Nuclear waste is a solved problem, for any reasonable value of “solved”.
As for the political part, your response basically appears to be that the US is unfixable, so why bother? First, since, as noted, other countries have figured out how to make nuclear power cost-effective, there is a way to do it; and second, the status quo doesn’t strike me as a very good situation either–not because of AGW (I agree with you that that’s not enough of a concern to make fossil fuels unviable) but because of the geopolitical implications of continuing to depend on oil from the Middle East.
@esr
> “environmentalists” will try to get it outlawed, because it would otherwise have political consequences they find unacceptable.
Something I find interesting — nuclear power is probably one of the most regulated industries in the world. As a consequence, nuclear power actually increases government control over power generation, whereas building lots of windmills all over the place means power generations is distributed into lots of small individual areas. Irrespective of which works, you would have thought the “suck everything up to Washington” lobby would be much more in favor of the former over the latter.
Oh, and in regards to the nuclear waste thing, I find it utterly baffling. Why is it worse to collect all the waste from all over the country and bury it safely in a mountain in Nevada that nobody ever goes near because it is in the middle of a useless wasteland, rather that the alternative from other power sources, namely puking all your waste into the atmosphere?
Peter Donis on 2014-12-29 at 18:11:35 said: a completely unreasonable requirement
————–
why is that ? because you don’t like it ? Who pays the bill ?
It’s a requirement because actions without forethought have consequences. When a coal plant turns into a pile of construction debris, so what. When a reactor site turns into a pile of long term ionizing radiation that spreads over the landscape, big difference, and long term negative outcomes. If you don’t think it matters you can volunteer for the continuing cleanup at Fukushima – they are looking for volunteer workers since there is a shortage.
It’s a conceptual requirement because most nuke fanbois hide longterm consequences. So one needs to build them in to begin with since you refuse to do it by default in an effort nuke plants more “pretty”. Think of it as sitting in the corner after poor behavior.
I doubt there is a single country in the world that has made nuke plants cost effective. They have instead made them politically expedient. Big difference.
@ Peter Donis on 2014-12-29 at 17:23:52 said:
> I should also add that the new designs you refer to are recent; it has taken decades
> for nuclear power to get to a point that seems to have been reached considerably
> more quickly with fossil fuels.
The Germans were experimenting with Helium cooled pebble reactors in the 80s. South Africa and China in the 90s and 2000s. LMFRs also have a long history.
I’m more of a fan of the pebble bed, because it seems easier to clean up.
Jessica Boxer on 2014-12-29 at 18:13:25 said: Why is it worse to collect all the waste from all over the country and bury it safely in a mountain
===============
erm, because we don’t, like, actually have one operating, but we already spent the money on them anyway ? Kinda like all those decommissioned reprocessing plants ? So we get to pay lots for nothing !! What a great deal !!!
(I’ve been working my way down the discussion thread, writing and digging up references as I go. I’ve got a bunch of stuff backed up. Reply-storm follows.)
>> Why do the AGW alarmists absolutely NEED to call anyone questioning the data and science “deniers”? <<
Why do you absolutely NEED to apply the pejorative "alarmist" to anyone who takes seriously the policy implications of the science? Especially when the "questioning" is almost always taken from a list of long-debunked talking points, and is traceable to organizations with a history of denial of facts about things like second-hand smoke?
(aside: I REALLY hate that HTML tags are stripped here. Can I even use special characters? e=hν A=πr²)
>> Engineer-Poet, I don’t believe in CAGW <> a large part of that is because “climate science” isn’t. <<
Jay, you're a mighty clever guy with costume gear and soldering irons (the debut of your Tron outfit was really something, I think I have pics somewhere) but if I'm in no position to claim the science is bunk, you're in a much worse one.
Let me list 3 predictions of the climate modelers that have come true:
1. The poles have warmed substantially. We see this both in direct temperature measurements and in proxies such as the dates of first freeze and spring thaw. Over the same interval the tropics (where much more of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor instead of non-condensible gases) have warmed much less, exactly in line with the models.
2. The stratosphere has cooled. If increased solar radiation (which has been proven not to exist by satellite measurements of the solar constant) was responsible for the observed warming, the stratosphere would warm too. It's doing the opposite. This is precisely what the models predict from a concentration of upwelling IR in the "window" where GHGs cannot intercept it.
3. Atmospheric circulation has been altered. One of the predictions of the polar warming was that the circumpolar circulation would be weakened and other forces would increase their effects on weather patterns. One predicted detail was that storm systems would go north around the Rockies, then south again across N. America. This is exactly what happened last winter, routing rain north of California, bringing rain to Alaska's north slope in February and bitter cold across the eastern USA and Canada. In 2012 the cold hit Europe. This year it's unseasonably warm in Michigan and looks to get cold in Europe again.
But that's not the best reason to take a second look at the science. The best is the ever-shifting claims of the so-called "skeptics", like Murray Salby. The original claim was that the carbon emissions pumping up the Keeling curve weren't from humans, but volcanoes. This was known to be false in the scientific community both from direct measurements and because the ratio of 13-C to 12-C was wrong (volcanic carbon has more 13-C than organic carbon, which includes fossil fuels, and the atmospheric ratio of 13-C to 12-C has been going down), but it took years for that claim to be debunked in the public mind. BioBob's summary of Salby's thesis (which I'm not going to take an hour to go through) implies that the carbon is organic (from what source, of what size, depleted how fast?), which is an about-face from the original "skeptic" thesis.
How can they go completely against their original claims and not trigger your BS detector?
And last is BioBob's sniping at nuclear energy ("a poor fit for humans"). Had it not been for hysterical anti-nuclearism, including the NRC's charter (which demanded infinite safety from nuclear energy while ignoring much larger threats from non-nuclear power), the USA would have had a mostly de-carbonized electric grid by about 1990. Our issues with greenhouse gases would have been met with a shrug: "Okay, convert more stuff to electric power and we'll re-start some other technologies for things like industrial process heat. No big deal." Our energy supply on hand would have been measured in centuries. Instead we have a push to shale gas, which may only last a couple of decades.
Ask yourself: who benefits from scarcity and constant flux?
I am shocked and dismayed to read this from someone I respect:
>> The CAGW computer models have utterly failed at predicting the behavior of the real atmosphere. They’ve failed the criterion of actual science, so they have to fall back on the tactics of religion. <<
Go to this link and scroll down to footnote 4. Pay close attention to the two graphs, one marked "With GHGs" and the other "Without GHGs":
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-are-wrong/
It is obvious that the current climate models reproduce the observed temperature trends with good accuracy… and the same models with GHG changes taken out diverge wildly from observation. It is the "skeptics" who have failed the criteria of actual science.
When you find yourself uncritically affirming a claim that you had every chance to know was false when you made it (that review is going on 3 years old, the data on which it is based are even older), you need to re-examine the premises and especially any association you have with the people who pushed them at you. When you use language like "they have to fall back on the tactics of religion" when the "skeptics" are some of the same people pushing creationism into biology textbooks, your epistemology has gone completely off the rails.
> (that review is going on 3 years old, the data on which it is based are even older),
Apparently you missed the part where over the last six months measures GAT has fallen out of the 95% confidence range for the IPCC model sheaf. There are many other fatal problems with AGW theory, but the divergence between theory and actual observation is now large enough to be undeniable and stand for the rest.
You’ve been had. Wake up.
@BioBob:
why is that ?
Because we don’t impose requirements anywhere near that stringent on any other energy source. With all other energy sources, we accept a reasonable level of risk and reasonable engineering solutions to mitigate that risk. With nuclear energy, even though, as I’ve already mentioned (apparently you missed that too), it causes several orders of magnitude fewer deaths per unit of energy generated than any other major energy source, we insist on a level of risk much, much lower than what we accept for any other major energy source. That is unreasonable.
actions without forethought have consequences.
Yep, they sure do. That’s why orders of magnitude more people have died, due to non-nuclear energy sources, than would have died if we’d generated that energy using nuclear reactors.
When a coal plant turns into a pile of construction debris, so what.
Unless you’re one of the workers who died mining the coal, or died due to respiratory disease after breathing the ash.
When a reactor site turns into a pile of long term ionizing radiation that spreads over the landscape, big difference, and long term negative outcomes.
Negative compared to an idealized world where we could generate energy with zero risk, sure. Negative compared to the impact of other major energy sources, not so much. “Radiation” is not a magic evil spell; it’s just something that can cause harm. Other things can cause harm too, and, once again, orders of magnitude more harm has been caused by non-nuclear energy sources than has been caused by nuclear energy. That includes TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
most nuke fanbois hide longterm consequences.
So do proponents of non-nuclear energy sources, apparently, since we go on using them even though they cause orders of magnitude more deaths per unit of energy generated. Those human failings that you mentioned apply to all energy sources, not just nuclear.
@William O. B’Livion:
The Germans were experimenting with Helium cooled pebble reactors in the 80s. South Africa and China in the 90s and 2000s. LMFRs also have a long history.
You’re right, I misspoke. I should have said that attempts at commercial use of these designs is recent. (Mostly, anyway: it looks like there was one German attempt at a full scale pebble bed power station in the 1980’s, but it was shut down; and there have been a few liquid metal power stations prior to the recent efforts.)
>> 1) the fact is that ALL our data on carbon cycling are estimates because data collectors are busy “adjusting” the crap historical data but it is not hard to prove the human ‘effort’ is trivial from what we do have measured. <> Lazy is as lazy does. You know it all so you will not spend any effort at all to learn, eh ? <> You can measure the importance of Murray Salby’s assertions by the primal screams <<
You mean, like the primal screams that came from the gun-rights community after Michael Bellesiles published "Arming America"… full of claims that turned out to be fraudulent, and wound up with Bellesiles resigning from Emory?
How about the firing of Ward Churchill? Was that due to "primal screams", or did academic fraud have anything to do with it?
Just based on what you've said about Salby I'm sure he was guilty of the same sort of misconduct. Yes, this is a heuristic, not a detailed examination of evidence. Other people appear to have done that examination already, and I feel no need to repeat it.
Large parts of that previous comment got deleted somehow, including the link to the EIA. Don’t ask me what created the italics, I didn’t know you could even get italics here.
Here’s a repeat, with the quoting convention changed to hopefully avoid the same thing happening again:
## 1) the fact is that ALL our data on carbon cycling are estimates because data collectors are busy “adjusting” the crap historical data but it is not hard to prove the human ‘effort’ is trivial from what we do have measured. ##
That is a very interesting self-contradiction, Bob: all the data are estimates and “crap”, but you KNOW the human contribution is “trivial”. But with “crap” data, how could you know that?
If I want to know how much coal was mined in the USA in any particular year since 1949, all I have to do is go here:
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.cfm?t=ptb0702
It’s not hard to find figures for heating value, carbon content and so forth for representative samples of various coals, so from those figures you can readily calculate both the energy and CO2 yield from that year’s production with an error bar of a few percent. Most other countries publish similar data, which are compiled in a number of places around the web.
What we know from this published data is that human CO2 emissions are much larger than the observed year-on-year increase in atmospheric CO2, and much of the added CO2 is going into the oceans. In other words, what you wrote is a lie.
## Lazy is as lazy does. You know it all so you will not spend any effort at all to learn, eh ? ##
I don’t waste time reading claims by those who claim they’ve been abducted by aliens, poisoned by chemtrails, or that HAARP was a sinister weather-control scheme. Life is too short. If you’d linked to a peer-reviewed paper I’d look at that, but not an hour-long video. I have my own takedown of an Amory Lovins video that I’ve been working at off and on for months without getting it good enough IMO to publish, and the video is only about 7 minutes long. Lovins is a master of goalpost-shifting and fallacious reasoning. I don’t have the time to take on Salby as well.
## You can measure the importance of Murray Salby’s assertions by the primal screams ##
You mean, like the primal screams that came from the gun-rights community after Michael Bellesiles published “Arming America”… full of claims that turned out to be fraudulent, and wound up with Bellesiles resigning from Emory?
How about the firing of Ward Churchill? Was that due to “primal screams”, or did academic fraud have anything to do with it?
Just based on what you’ve said about Salby I’m sure he was guilty of the same sort of misconduct. Yes, this is a heuristic, not a detailed examination of evidence. Other people appear to have done that examination already, and I feel no need to repeat it.
If you’re after change in CO2, see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/05/the-revenge-of-the-climate-reparations/ instead.
They show Brazil as 2nd in carbon sequestration, after Argentina. Australia and Canada are 3rd and 4th. (In short: it’s a little closer to what conventional wisdom has, but there are still plenty of unexpected details.)
Given that that page shows one year’s CO2 flux rather than average CO2 over about 40 days, I’m inclined to give it more weight–at least till NASA has closer to a year’s worth of data.
As far as plants, rainforests, and CO2 go:
Every living thing relies on respiration; if it lives in an aerobic environment, it oxidizes carbon compounds for energy. Plants and phytoplankton happen to also store energy in the form of carbon compounds via photosynthesis, but they live: some of that carbon is used up for life processes. The rest is stored or used for mass. If a plant is growing, it is storing more carbon than it burns.
However, nothing is immortal, and the remains generally are used as an energy source by insects, herbivores, saprophytes, bacteria, and so on. The more life there is, the more of the biomass gets turned into CO2; tropical rainforests have more consumers than anywhere else, so they lose the most carbon back to the atmosphere.
If you want to deplete CO2 long-term, you have to store biomass: in other words, long-lasting wood/paper/natural fiber/straw products or burying the biomass in the bottom of a mine/landfill. Short-term, you can plant new forests in areas that have little stored biomass.
If you bury biomass, you will usually not stop life from processing it: you only prevent it from getting oxygen, which means that methane is produced instead. If you pave over the rainforest, it will quickly start producing methane, and that will rupture the paving to escape and cause worse problems.
So no, paving the rainforest will not solve CO2 emissions. Cutting it down for lumber and burying the slash (non-usable wood) in Antarctica might.
Engineer-Poet,
I use the term AGW alarmists, because I believe that some warming is happening, but I do not believe that it has been proven that it will be catastrophic, or that it will turn out to have non-mitigatable effects.
Again, if we really are doomed unless we take action, then why isn’t a nuclear plant being built in my state (and most other states for that matter)?
If the only solution to global warming is that I have to vote for, like, and come to fully accept socialism/communism then you can take that fucking solution and go to hell. We tried that shit in the 20th century to try and solve problems that were believed to be far easier to solve than AGW is claimed to be and all that happened was they piled up the bodies.
I have realized that I’m totally ok with solving AGW through engineering and technology, but if I’m required to yeild my freedoms to fucking communist thought and action to fix global warming, I’ll definitely take my chances and place my bet on the idea that they are lying.
Yes, I’d rather the world burn then be saved at the expense of becoming a socialist hellhole.
## Apparently you missed the part where over the last six months measures GAT has fallen out of the 95% confidence range for the IPCC model sheaf. ##
Documentation?
In case you missed it, the essential prediction of the climate models isn’t the short-term average surface temperature but the net energy flux. A change in e.g. heat flow into the deep oceans could reduce surface temperatures in the short term while the net heat flux would actually produce more warming due to less heat loss to space. One of the things we do know is that the trade winds have been much stronger of late than the historical average, and one of the effects is to drive the flow of ocean water both across and vertically. This appears to be the root cause behind the large accumulation of very warm water in the western Pacific near the Philippines, which in turn allowed the massive growth of the two recent super-typhoons.
Tell me: if the atmospheric and oceanic scientists explain where the missing heat went, and this does not change the basics of the climate models, will you retract your claim that climate science is essentially a fraud?
## You’ve been had. Wake up. ##
I don’t think so. I think you have. Are you willing to examine the evidence to determine which of us is right? Or do you take Anthony Watts as your oracle?
>Documentation?
http://judithcurry.com/2014/03/04/causes-and-implications-of-the-pause/
Money quote: “The most recent climate model simulations used in the AR5 indicate that the warming stagnation since 1998 is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level.”
>Are you willing to examine the evidence to determine which of us is right?
I’ve been examining the evidence since I read the original bristlecone-pine paleoclimate studies in the 1970s. I never forgot that ring width isn’t a temperature proxy but a joint temperature-rainfall proxy; thus, my BS detectors went off early in the history of the CAGW error cascade.
In 2008, during the grand solar minimum, I correctly predicted that GAT would follow insolation down rather than than CO2 levels up. The subsequent crash wiped out the entire “warming signal” since 1750. This gives me a better predictive record than the IPCC.
Engineer-Poet on 2014-12-30 at 00:55:47 said: blah blah blah
The poles warm and the poles cool. The ice extents increase and the ice extents decrease. Glaciers come and glaciers go. But AGW is always bullshit.
Thanks, but no thanks, no need for me to recapitulate my prior responses to 40 years of lies coming from the other AGW bullshitters. Give it up. You have lost the war to refute reality. I am no hurry to wave goodbye. Eventually you will get tired of holding your finger in the dike of your reality and let the deluge convince you. Reality sux for you, so sorry (Not).
## Although many of the AGW cheerleaders are just useful fools the main impetus behind it is one of the primary wet dreams of the socialists: central economic planning by the wise. ##
Those planners would not be the climate scientists. They would be the big donors behind the “charitable” foundations which finance all the major “environmental” organizations. Almost to a one, they are all “pro-renewables” (which the Google engineers tasked with analyzing the prospects determined could not replace fossil fuels) and anti-nuclear (which has proven an able replacement for fossil fuels in electric generation everywhere it’s been allowed).
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
Rod Adams of Atomic Insights has done a bunch of digging into the financing of the work which “determined” that any and all radiation was dangerous, and found the fingerprints of the Rockefeller foundation all over it. Oil money. Fossil fuel money. They saw fission as a danger to their core interests, and tried to neuter it.
http://atomicinsights.com/shaping-public-perceptions-radiation-risk/
## Control of energy is control of any modern economy. ##
This is precisely why so many groups are dead-set against fission power. Once you’ve put a load of fuel into a nuclear plant, it needs nothing for 18 months or more. If you had to, you could pay for people to carry fuel to it on bicycles. Neither pipelines nor rails are needed to keep it going. All they can do is tax or regulate it out of business, which is what was just done in Vermont yesterday. The doubling of some electric rates in New England show just what the stakes are.
The OP is trolling, or complete ignorance. This time, I do not know which one it is.
The CO2 balance of the rainforest has been known since it has been thought over. Over time, standing rainforest biomass will incorporate as much CO2 as it respirates.
Also the myopic interpretations of air temperature predictions (no oceans?), the ignorance about even basic thermodynamics and the utter miscomprehension of climate models by a mathematician (of all people!) strongly suggest to me a person who simply cannot face reality.
Oh, and about nuclear energy. Calculate the total amount of energy that can be extracted by current nuclear technology.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/
“If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet’s economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.”
Given that nuclear power only produces only 10% of the world’s electricity. That would mean nuclear power can only deliver 20 years of the world’s electricity. And electricity makes up only 4% of total energy use. So, the current uranium resources could only deliver 1 year of the world’s electricity. Even if we could extract 100 times as much nuclear fuel out of the earth, it would only last a century. And the costs would be horrible.
Now, I know, there are so many potential sources of nuclear fuel for breeder plants. These are all experimental technologies. They are more expensive and less understood than solar energy. And they are still under development and cannot be installed now.
So, we have two “experimental” options. One, costly, dangerous and delivering huge amounts of long lasting dangerous waste. The other using silicon, cheaper and already in use. Why go for the cheap? To spite the liberal greens, of course. And you cannot make nuclear bombs with solar panels.
For the calculations:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2779#comment-287562
idunham on 2014-12-30 at 01:14:42 said: Given that that page shows one year’s CO2 flux rather than average CO2 over about 40 days, I’m inclined to give it more weight–at least till NASA has closer to a year’s worth of data.
——————
there is less satellite detailed/reliable data there than you appear to think and the devil is in the details (note the reference’s source resolution and the word “estimated”, always something to consider in these days of modeled data employed as if it were actual field measurements and massaged to fit the narrative):
http://global.jaxa.jp/press/2012/12/20121205_ibuki_e.html
“…flux values were estimated from the global distribution of CO2 concentration retrieved from GOSAT observational data and ground-based CO2 monitoring data.”
——— secondly ——
The point way back up top was that if tropical forests are NET CO2 exporters globally as indicated on the source sat chart, then eliminating them (paving) would decrease global CO2 production. That would result in lower atmospheric concentrations because humans are apparently NOT the major source of CO2 that the tropical forests were / are.
In any case, assume it was never anything but a joke.
Winter on 2014-12-30 at 02:54:20 said: The CO2 balance of the rainforest has been known since it has been thought over. Over time, standing rainforest biomass will incorporate as much CO2 as it respirates
—————–
Fabulous ! It’s all settled science then is it, Winter? Only problem is there is ZERO actual data, only thoughts.
But now we have some and it shows there could be a net export of CO2. Shazam !!!
@BioBob
“> Over time, standing rainforest biomass will incorporate as much CO2 as it respirates
Fabulous ! It’s all settled science then is it, Winter? Only problem is there is ZERO actual data, only thoughts. ”
I would think the principle of “conservation of mass” in chemistry has been validated by now? Or do you know of a new principle which allows standing forests to create new carbon from other elements?
Btw, this is the type of ignorance I was referring. This is high school chemistry stuff. It was developed by Lavoisier and Dalton before the French Revolution.
Yes, we did try government solutions to ecological problems in the 20th century. We banned DDT, and now bird eggshells are no longer thinning. We banned CFCs and the ozone layer thinning has stopped and has shown signs of reversing. Massive failures, those!
Government intervention may not be the best solution to an environmental crisis in the fullness of time, but it provides a workable solution now while the free market figures out how to price the externalities and provide the needed remedies and incentives.
@esr
“The subsequent crash wiped out the entire “warming signal” since 1750. This gives me a better predictive record than the IPCC.”
2014 will be the hottest year on record:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/10340/20141114/summer-2014-saw-warmest-ocean-temperatures-ever-recorded.htm
But if you stoop low enough to claim the rainforests are a major cause of atmospheric CO2 increases, I doubt I should attribute any credibility to you on this matter. It does not even really matter whether you missed out on the elementary chemistry/physics class or are just trolling.
>2014 will be the hottest year on record:
Which is completely irrelevant to the truth status of the central CAGW claim, that human CO2 emissions arew responsible via a CO2/H2O feedback loop. That’s the part that’s bullshit.
Over the timescale of centuries to millennia, the amount of carbon available to biology remains more or less constant. The carbon you see being respirated in that graph is part of a dynamic equilibrium; the effect of that carbon on recent CO2 increases is negligible. What can’t be ignored — what’s central to the whole question — is if previously sequestered carbon is introduced into the atmosphere. By oh, I don’t know — mining or drilling it out of the ground and burning it so it escapes as CO2.
You can pick apart this or that data set all you want, but even you would be hard-pressed to dispute the very sound chemistry and quantum physics that underpins the whole AGW hypothesis. Niels Bohr identified CO2 as a particularly effective greenhouse gas back in the 1950s and hypothesized that fossil fuel combustion would eventually lead to an increase in Earth’s temperature. With fourteen of the fifteen warmest years on record being in the 21st century, it is folly — or trolling — to say that he and the other physicists and climatologists who have studied the phenomenon are wrong.
>With fourteen of the fifteen warmest years on record being in the 21st century, it is folly — or trolling — to say that he and the other physicists and climatologists who have studied the phenomenon are wrong.
But they are, observably, wrong. The CAGW models have failed in their own terms. The atmosphere has not behaved as they predicted. Evidence drives out authority.
@esr
“That’s the part that’s bullshit.”
If I have to chose between on the one hand, scientists working hard at getting to the heart of it, collecting data from deep paleontological times to other planets, covering the weather and the whole current planet in between.
And, on the other hand, you, who writes the above piece stating that rainforests are a major cause of the increase in atmospheric CO2. I chose for the scientists. Especially as they do find all the signs and confirmations anyone ever would need. And, seriously, the CO2/H2O feedback loop is not that difficult, is it? You should be able to grasp the exponential nature of atmospheric water content versus temperature?
As an aside, did you really not get the point of forest release of CO2, or is this an attempt of trolling?
Here are some simple explanations of the role of water vapor in warming:
Climate myths: CO2 isn’t the most important greenhouse gas
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11652-climate-myths-co2-isnt-the-most-important-greenhouse-gas.html
Global warming – What role does water vapor really play?
http://knowledge.allianz.com/environment/climate_change/?626/global-warming-what-role-does-water-vapor-really-play
“Those planners would not be the climate scientists. They would be the big donors behind the “charitable” foundations which finance all the major “environmental” organizations.”
And why, exactly, do you think said charitable foundations have bought and paid for the “climate science” community?
@esr
“The CAGW models have failed in their own terms. The atmosphere has not behaved as they predicted. Evidence drives out authority.”
What you say is simply insane. The question is not: “predict the temperature to within 1 decimal”. The question is: “Are we changing the climate?”
This is not some USA courtroom drama where good acting and grandstanding in front of the Jury makes you win a case. Where the rules of the court are more important than establishing the truth as good as is possible. This is about the earth and the future of humanity. This is about the lives of billions of people.
Everything science has been able to unearth is yelling that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere is changing climate. All your grandstanding has not supplied a single “fact” that has not been chewed over by climate scientists and shown to be wanting.
And the world is still hotter than it has ever been since temperature records have started.
>What you say is simply insane. The question is not: “predict the temperature to within 1 decimal”. The question is: “Are we changing the climate?”
And the answer is: “The computer simulations in which humans are assumed to be changing the climate via CO2 emissions fail to predict the measured behavior of the atmosphere.” The failure is large, it is consistent, and it is long-standing.
Those who ignore or wish away this failure cannot claim to be doing science.
@Jay Maynard
“And why, exactly, do you think said charitable foundations have bought and paid for the “climate science” community?”
Because they care about the future? Or isn’t that the same reason money is heaped upon climate “skeptics”?
You won’t accuse climate “skeptics” donors of trying to change science for purely selfish reasons, won’t you?
@Winter on 2014-12-30 at 07:25:06
>What you say is simply insane. The question is not: “predict the temperature to within 1 decimal”. The question is: “Are we changing the climate?”
I guess we all sorta knew in advance that you weren’t going to bother understanding the paper he linked. Thanks for proving us right.
“And the world is still hotter than it has ever been since temperature records have started.”
We don’t know that. The records have been fudged, and the ones who admit to the fudging refuse to disclose either their methods or their raw data. That’s a large part of why I refuse to call “climate science” science.
It never fails. Scratch a prominent climate “skeptic” and you will find a carefully orchestrated PR campaign funded by oil companies.
What you won’t find much of is science or data.
@kn
“I guess we all sorta knew in advance that you weren’t going to bother understanding the paper he linked.”
How does seasonal variation in CO2 emissions from standing vegetation lead to the conclusion that we can reduce CO2 emission by paving the rainforests?
Standing vegetation is a net sink of CO2 only as far as it loses carbon to the soil. That is not a point in the tropics, where all carbon is recycled. We already know for a century or so that rainforests will have a cycle of net production and sequestering of carbon. The only thing changed is close to what our host suggests: The forests are cleared, releasing huge amounts of CO2.
This is not new science, I learned about this thirty years ago.
An honest question:
Do you all really not understand that standing vegetation cannot be a long term net producer of CO2?
I thought I did not understand the OP and the comments well. I was afraid I was missing something. But I start to doubt that.
Btw, the release due to clearance of land has already been incorporated in all the models. Obviously, changes of land use are difficult to predict. But they are man made.
@winter>@kn
hey, I’m just lurking here.
(you meant kjj)
Winter, you should know by now that what passes for basic physics and chemistry instruction in the American education system is nowhere near Dutch standards.
Unfortunately the American defiance of authority all too often extends to believing that one’s own ignorance is just as good as another’s knowledge.
@kn
I am very sorry. I mixed names up.
(I was actually puzzled about your response, but the holidays are eating at my brain)
Uhm, Jeff, you do know that ExxonMobil, to take one example, contributes piles of cash to CAGW research?
Sure, there’s self-interest on both sides of the equation. What CAGW true believers never acknowledge is that the mountains of cash going to the warmist side from governments are just as corrupting as they accuse the money going to skeptical research as being.
@Jay
“What CAGW true believers never acknowledge is that the mountains of cash going to the warmist side from governments are just as corrupting as they accuse the money going to skeptical research as being.”
Prove it.
One side has data and all the scientists. The other side has no data nor scientists. Actually, I read comments from Ignorants (skeptics is too much to say) here that do not even understand the bare fundamentals of science.
The skeptical side is pure propaganda and conspiracy theories.
Even the main original “skeptic” Lomborg admits that AGW is real, but we should lay back and think of England (I paraphrase).
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-says-that-the-un-climate-panel-s-latest-report-tells-a-story-that-politicians-would-prefer-to-ignore
@Jeff Read:
We banned DDT, and now bird eggshells are no longer thinning.
And millions of people in Africa died of malaria. But maybe that doesn’t count as an “ecological” problem?
Poet-Engineer: “It is obvious that the current climate models reproduce the observed temperature trends with good accuracy… and the same models with GHG changes taken out diverge wildly from observation.”
Question: Did you ever take a class or do you have experience with computer-based modeling? If so, have you never heard the warning about “over-fitting” a model to your data? It gives you EXACTLY the above effect, where “current models” fit trends with “good accuracy”. The question isn’t about current models.
Do the models from 10 years or 20 years ago fit the current trends “with good accuracy?” No. When they do, I will pay attention to them. If today’s model fits the trends over the next decade, I’ll pay attention. So far (and I’ve been watching this since the late ’80’s) that has not happened with a level of reliability above flipping a coin.
Put simply, modeling is HARD and you cannot reliably model highly complex systems over long time lines. It’s taken almost 70 years to move computerized weather prediction from “will it rain tomorrow” to “will rain next weekend.” It seems incredulous to me, as somebody who has a basic understanding of the problem space on the CS side things, that we can magically predict with ANY accuracy beyond the Farmer’s Almanac what will happen in the next decade, much less the next century, and yet that’s exactly what we are making policy decisions on.
And back to my original point, we aren’t making policy on “current models” as you put it, we are making policy based on models that were created 10-20 years ago, ones that predicted a continued linear (or worse) increase in temperature that we now know has not occurred for almost two decades.
Your logic here is flawed due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how models work, and you’re not alone in this.
@esr
“The computer simulations in which humans are assumed to be changing the climate via CO2 emissions fail to predict the measured behavior of the atmosphere.”
Nope. The fact that you do not even want to acknowledge the contribution of the oceans is telling. This has always been a big unknown (as was clearly stated in all science papers).
The problems were always is predicting the heat flow within the biosphere, as was cloud behavior. That has been acknowledged from the start. Forcing the IPCC to come up with accurate predictions of air temperature was ill advised. As the climatologists have always said.
And, obviously, solar weather forecasts (insolation) are still immature. But things get better.
And the heat flows have uncertainties that you cannot even put a number on. What the skeptics have to provide is evidence that there is not extra heat that flows. Which will be difficult because these heat flows are found.
>The fact that you do not even want to acknowledge the contribution of the oceans is telling.
I see you didn’t read the paper. Like kjj, I’m not surprised.
@Don
“And back to my original point, we aren’t making policy on “current models” as you put it, we are making policy based on models that were created 10-20 years ago, ones that predicted a continued linear (or worse) increase in temperature that we now know has not occurred for almost two decades.”
Not true.
Policies are based on long term expectations. That is, air (and sea) temperatures rising by ~0.5-2 degrees C in the current century. That leads to expectations of sea levels and rain fall. Nothing we see leads us to change these expectations. On the contrary, we seem to be on track for a 2 C rise in temperature. Which is most definitely bad. But we could overshoot even that.
It is only the “skeptics” that grasp at random straws of over-detailed forecasts. And we are having the hottest year ever recorded.
winter> “If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet’s economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.”
This is another version of the peak oil fallacy. One would assume that you’ve noticed there’s a bit of a glut of oil on the market today. I promise you, just as Texas has produced much of that glut, we could do the same to Uranium. It’s just not worth mining in the current political environment.
Jay claims: “The records have been fudged, and the ones who admit to the fudging refuse to disclose either their methods or their raw data.”
Quite incorrect. Have fun playing with the data, Jay:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-data/land-based-datasets/global-historical-climatology-network-ghcn
Jeff Read,
Be careful about spiking the ball on DDT. That ban has kill hundreds of millions of Africans, mostly children, over the last 44 years. I have a hard time calling that a “success”.
Climate behavior is extremely complex and dynamic. Climate modeling science is in its infancy and is not a mature, reliable prediction tool at present. And it may not become one in our lifetime, and may never achieve the status of accuracy and fidelity to reality.
At its root, the CAGW movement is a human psychological phenomenon. It is an experiment in memetic manipulation for political ends. Using sophisticated tools of mass communication, repetition, focused messaging, and social feedback reinforcement, it is possible to persuade a large (and voting) cohort of the population to behave as a herd (especially if the herd believes there is an external threat on the perimeter).
There is no place in the herd for a reasoning, rational individualist.
Jay Maynard> And why, exactly, do you think said charitable foundations have bought and paid for the “climate science” community?
Jay, you’re not allowed to ask such questions! Back to work, you peasant! :)
winter> And the world is still hotter than it has ever been since temperature records have started.
So, if I start measuring the hours of sunlight per day in August, does that justify panic in October?
That’s a ridiculous line of reasoning.
@Winter:
> “2014 will be the hottest year on record”
Browsing the NOAA link you provide as support for this, I can see that the temperature anomaly for 2014 (January-November) is listed as “+0.68 +/- 0.10 C” (on the same link you provided, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/, if you scroll down about 4/5ths of the page).
If we then compare years using the tools at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_ocean/ytd/11/1880-2014, we find there are 10 other years that fall within that error range (but the error range for this historical data is not listed). Most critically, it exceeds the next contender, 2010, by only 0.01 C (the limit of accuracy given in the data).
Therefore, in order for 2014 to accurately be “the hottest year on record”, we must postulate two things:
(A) The temperature average for 2014 will not be reduced by including the month of December, or by later corrections (i.e. removing invalid / adding missing temperatures).
(B) The total error between 2014 and 2010’s records is less than 0.01 C, or 10 times the accuracy given for just 2014 to date.
(A) I will happily postulate “for the sake of argument”—or more accurately, not arguing; (B) I will not. Pray tell, what methods will allow us to compare data within 1/10th the error range of the original data and obtain consistent, valid results?
@Don
“So, if I start measuring the hours of sunlight per day in August, does that justify panic in October?”
We started measuring over a century (and more) ago. Gives some confidence as “climate” is usually defined as the 25 year average.
Still, ignorance about science is no evidence for the absense of scientific knowledge. That very often seems to be the argument here.
@Alex K
That is my prediction. But it will take some time before all numbers are in.
By the way, you select the winner by ignoring the error bars. Whether the difference will be statistically significant is a completely different matter. The last decade is overall the hottest on record.
@Don
“Jay, you’re not allowed to ask such questions! Back to work, you peasant! :)”
Pray, what do these charities get out of “destroying the economy”?
What devious scheme are they persuing to destroy the livelyhood of mankind?
Oh, and the insects were already becoming resistant to DDT, when the ban was introduced in the West (not in Africa). Only birds and mammals were dying of it.
Winter> Even the main original “skeptic” Lomborg admits that AGW is real, but we should lay back and think of England (I paraphrase).
And he’s right. Nobody seriously thinks that the temp isn’t increasing, and nobody seriously thinks that CO2 isn’t causing at least part of that (maybe even a large part of that). What many of us have tried to say for decades is that the cost (in money and lives) to stop is far, FAR greater than the cost to mitigate it.
Even ignoring all the evidence of malfeasance, and I agree with Eric that there’s boat loads, it comes down to one of two options: mitigation or prevention.
Since we know, without doubt based on the geologic history of the Earth that A) the “Venus” scenario is off-the table (we’ve had WAY more CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere than today, and no “Venus” event), B) in general warmer weather is better for life in general, and C) anthropologically, warm weather is good for humans because it opens more arable land to production (e.g. the “MWP” in the Northern Hemisphere), then it seems likely that adding a few degrees to the thermometer would on average been a good thing. The downside is displaced islanders/lowlanders is partially off-set by the fact that there will be new land available for resettlement. And the costs of getting to the a neutral CO2 economy would be hundreds of trillions of dollars (in today’s money), and billions of lives lost that could have otherwise been saved.
Lomborg’s right.
Winter> Pray, what do these charities get out of “destroying the economy”?
Holy crap, dude! Seriously? You think the Koch Brothers are the only people on the planet the support charities the benefit themselves?
Now you’re just being laughably gullible.
Winter> Oh, and the insects were already becoming resistant to DDT, when the ban was introduced in the West (not in Africa). Only birds and mammals were dying of it.
True, but DDT had largely done it’s job in the West too, and the restriction on it’s use would have made sense. What doesn’t make sense is that western countries used their influence to force poor African countries to ban it BEFORE they saw the same benefits, namely effectively wiping out malaria and a host of other insect-born diseases.
Don, your information on Lomborg is obsolete…
Climate ‘sceptic’ Bjørn Lomborg now believes global warming is one of world’s greatest threats
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/7972383/Climate-sceptic-Bjorn-Lomborg-now-believes-global-warming-is-one-of-worlds-greatest-threats.html
Winter> We started measuring over a century (and more) ago. Gives some confidence as “climate” is usually defined as the 25 year average.
It’s really convenient to be able set you time scales to match your data, that’s why I picked one quarter of a year for my thought experiment. DOES THAT MAKE IT VALID? No, of course not. If we define “climate” to include 10,000 years, then we are WAY warmer than the average, and that warming trend would be huge if we increased it to 50,000 years (including the last ice age).
Over the last billion or so years, we are definitely MUCH warmer than the average, but it logically makes more since to worry about going back toward the average (the ice age) than the present (the interglacial – well, technically a pause in the current ice age).
Just because you (or somebody else) picked some convenient time period to study doesn’t really mean anything, and certainly doesn’t mean that a surprising answer is a reason to panic and attempt to destroy the lives and livelihoods of billions of people. And it doesn’t bestow upon that magical numerical quantity of time the mantel of “science.”
pwatwo,
Thanks for that, but as the first comment on that page points out, he didn’t in fact change is mind. The $100B/yr world-wide budget is a number he’s used for a decade or so as the cost to mitigate and accommodate the changes cause by AGW. Nothing’s changed as far as I can tell from this.
Hell, the US spends more than that on the UN, and gets far less for our money than we would working to mitigate AGW events (since some of those events would happen whether AGW was real or not, e.g. droughts, massive storms, flooding, etc.). If we defunded the UN and put $100B toward AGW mitigation, I’d call that a win! :)
Don, is a timescale of one billion years really relevant? Why not back up to ~4.5 billion years and note that we’re much much colder now – hundreds of degrees colder.
CO2 is at a concentration not observed for at least 800,000 years, likely much longer, and far higher than we have ever experienced as a species. That’s important.
The US doesn’t give more than $100 billion annually to the UN, Don. FY 2010 was about $8 billion.
> And he’s right. Nobody seriously thinks that the temp isn’t increasing, and nobody seriously thinks that CO2 isn’t causing at least part of that (maybe even a large part of that).
Then why do people here in this discussion today persist in attacking the temperature data? You’re free to concede that the real dispute is on what should be done about it rather than the facts themselves if you like, but you don’t speak for everyone here.
> If we define “climate” to include 10,000 years, then we are WAY warmer than the average, and that warming trend would be huge if we increased it to 50,000 years (including the last ice age).
25 years isn’t selected for convenience to support a desired conclusion, it’s selected to be the shortest reasonable time scale not dominated by known short-term cycles (such as seasonal variation) or randomness.
Put simply: If you go to a shorter timescale, you’re no longer talking about the climate, but the weather. There is no “higher-order” concept (i.e. to climate as climate is to weather) that makes it worthwhile to select a longer timescale to average in.
@Don
“) anthropologically, warm weather is good for humans because it opens more arable land to production (e.g. the “MWP” in the Northern Hemisphere), then it seems likely that adding a few degrees to the thermometer would on average been a good thing.”
It get a strong impression that you did not think this through (why am I not surprised?).
Areable land does not increase, it shifts polewards. This is not a good thing. Keywords are “growing season” and “angle of irradiation”. Add to this changes in precipitation. Not Good (TM).
@Don:
Over the last billion or so years, we are definitely MUCH warmer than the average
I think you mean “million” here, not “billion”, since ice ages have been prevalent for the last couple of million years. Earth’s climate today is quite a bit colder than the average over the last billion years.
Winter, there’s also the issue of the soil quality. Too far poleward, and we end up with very poor soil, hardly adequate for serious agricultural production. Plus, I don’t think the Russians would appreciate the Chinese moving more northward.
“Apparently you missed the part where over the last six months measures GAT has fallen out of the 95% confidence range for the IPCC model sheaf.”
According to whom? A reference to the analysis, please.
Peter Donis> I think you mean “million” here, not “billion”, since ice ages have been prevalent for the last couple of million years.
“When the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, did we quit the?!”… “Forget it, he’s on a roll.” – Animal House
You’re right, I should reread that :).
pwatwo> According to whom? A reference to the analysis, please.
He provided the link. Read Dr. Curry’s post.
Winter> Areable land does not increase, it shifts polewards.
Huh? The land shifts polewards? Or the temperate zones shift polewards? One of those two creates more arable land by putting more land into zones warm enough for crops and human habitations (as happened during the MWP, when much of Iceland was arable, as opposed to the tiny spit of it that can support crops and livestock today). I’d be REALLY interested in your argument about how melting glaciers and longer growing seasons over more land are “Not Good (TM)”.
@Don
“I’d be REALLY interested in your argument about how melting glaciers and longer growing seasons over more land are “Not Good (TM)”.”
Obviously temperate zones move polewards, ie, the area that you can grow crops on. Note that the desert zones are moving polewards too. Witness present day Southern Europe.
And poleward you have definitely SHORTER growing seasons (its about length of day). Moreover, we are not talking about Western Europe, but the world. Iceland might start growing wheat and wine (unlikely), but that will not compensate for the loss of France and the Ukraine when it gets too hot and dry there.
In total, crop yields are expected to fall.
There are papers written about this.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/w5183e/w5183e0b.htm
And here is a book:
http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/pr21.pdf
Random832> 25 years isn’t selected for convenience to support a desired conclusion, it’s selected to be the shortest reasonable time scale not dominated by known short-term cycles….
First, thanks for that, that’s certainly a more satisfying and educational answer than, “Because that’s what the scientists chose!” (I’ve seen answers like at least half a dozen times to similar “why 25 years” questions in the past, so I’m really glad to see somebody put forward a meaningful answer to such a simple question).
My problem with that answer, is those last 4 words in the quote. It constrains the qualification to “known” cycles, and “short-term cycles”. It discounts the possibility of events we DON’T know about (or that weren’t considered at the time the length was proposed), and it discounts the option that a long-term cycle may have short-term effects (e.g. polar precession, orbital changes, etc. might have changes that happen “suddenly”, on a scale of say 100 years).
I’d be interest to hear, if you know, why it is safe to assume that these have no effect that would be noticeable in a 25 year time scale and therefore can be safely ignored, or that even more recent events, like the “Little Iceage” or the MWP may not be occurring at this very moment.
>>How does seasonal variation in CO2 emissions from standing vegetation lead to the conclusion that we can reduce CO2 emission by paving the rainforests?
When I read that title, and the article, I assumed that esr had his tongue so far into his cheek that I’m a bit surprised that he didn’t rupture his face.
I read it as saying that with the possible exception of china, that industrial nations are producing a small fraction of the co2 that the rain forests are.
On the other hand, as has been mentioned in a number of posts, I would have expected the rain forests to be carbon neutral, perhaps with wide seasonal swings. Little of the carbon tied up in them will be long term sequestered, almost all of it will have a fairly short half life from plant growth to plant rot and back to methane and co2. So I, and most likely esr, am not putting a lot of credence in that map.
On the gripping hand, it certainly doesn’t show what the greens would have liked it to show.
Jim
>When I read that title, and the article, I assumed that esr had his tongue so far into his cheek that I’m a bit surprised that he didn’t rupture his face. [..,] So I, and most likely esr, am not putting a lot of credence in that map.
Putting a lot of credence in that map is pretty dimwitted if you know how it was actually made. The spatial grain of the data is much lower than the map implies; many of the shapes are artifacts extrapolated from column readings by a prevailing-winds model.
@Don
25 years as the averaging time was chosen a long time ago. Why? Because it was a convenient window to collect data over.
But I would be very surprised if you were able to say anything about this time window that has not been discussed to death in the scientific literature.
Winter> Obviously temperate zones move polewards, ie, the area that you can grow crops on. Note that the desert zones are moving polewards too. Witness present day Southern Europe.
Winter, please revisit your Earth Science books from school. Deserts are more a function of geography and weather patterns than climatic zone. And weather pattern changes (creating deserts) can and have happened in human history, and are well known and documented, that clearly had absolutely nothing to do with CO2 changes (e.g. the desertification of the Nile Valley which circa bc5000 was a lush, jungle-like environment IIRC). Similarly, deserts can come and go based on changes in weather patterns.
One more question: If the rain quits falling on France and Ukraine, where will it fall? Perhaps Egypt and the Middle East? Maybe Iceland? That’s an unknown, for both of us, but it doesn’t seem reasonable to think it will simply stop in one spot and NOT start in another. I’ve often thought of “desertification” as the biggest, and most obviously fear-mongering claim by the AGW alarmists, and a big part of the reason I look at everything else they say with a VERY high degree of skepticism.
And at the end of the day, deserts are really not so bad, if you have energy and the wealth it creates. But they suck if you’re poor.
pwatwo> The US doesn’t give more than $100 billion annually to the UN, Don. FY 2010 was about $8 billion.
Yeah, there’s an $8b line item, but I recall reading when you include everything we do with the UN (military support, program support, etc.), that number comes closer to $100b. The $8b is just the annual direct payments.
Even so, I’d consider it money well spent, or at least better spent :).
“On the gripping hand, it certainly doesn’t show what the greens would have liked it to show.”
I’m not sure what you think they were expecting.
>I’m not sure what you think [the greens] were expecting.
For their political objectives to be met, first-world industrial emissions had to dominate.
Don:
“Yeah, there’s an $8b line item, but I recall reading when you include everything we do with the UN (military support, program support, etc.), that number comes closer to $100b. ”
That ~$8 billion I came up with is from
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/316577/how-much-does-un-cost-us-brett-d-schaefer
I doubt the NR has an agenda to make that figure seem 10X too small.
Can you “recall” where you read that “$100+ billion” figure?
Yes, I’ve read Curry’s analysis. Not terribly impressed.
Examine these:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/a-pause-or-not-a-pause-that-is-the-question
There’s also the issue that ocean heat content shows no “pause”:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content2000m.png
Given that most of the heating goes into the oceans…
>There’s also the issue that ocean heat content shows no “pause”:
Raw data, please, from over the entire life of the experiment, or it didn’t happen.
The first data published from the Argus buoys didn’t fit the CAGW narrative; there was surprise at this. Then there was talk of correcting it for errors. Then, suddenly, the published data fit the CAGW line, and has since.
You will excuse me for finding this dubious.
Rather than debate the minutiae of CAGW, a more interesting question is . . .
Why have so many people been drawn into this religion?
Is it just mental weakness that has made them susceptible to the memetic infection?
Why do they fancy themselves as experts in climate science and jump at the opportunity to defend the “true belief” of an Armageddon future?
What evolutionary outcome is selected for with this type of behavior?
If our species becomes a universal memetic herd, are we more robust or less?
TomA, a more interesting study might be why some people reject scientific evidence – on evolution, GMOs, the climate system, etc.
The overwhelming majority of belief isn’t based on scientific evidence, it’s based on appeals to authority–how many people are even literate enough to read the primary papers? They just trust whatever they’ve been told by whoever’s supposed to be dispensing truth. Even a large portion of what’s called “scientific evidence” consists of badly-defined, badly-controlled, and badly-executed studies (see virtually all of nutrition).
I, for example, believe that the Big Bang model fairly accurately describes the early evolution of the universe–and I’ve personally solved the DEs for the hydrogen atom, calculated spectral lines, and observed them in a spectrometer. I still have to take most of the large-scale extrapolations of cosmology on faith, and this is an area I have specific training in.
Your question in nearly all cases reduces to the question of why certain people (“scientists”, priests, whoever) are more believable than others. Scientists’ claim to trustworthiness is that they make the processes and data with which they arrive at conclusions public for anyone to examine and critique. Whenever anyone refuses to adhere to that protocol, the warrant for trust evaporates.
I agree that trust is critical and openness is a key element of that. GMOs are a bit of a special case because there are intellectual property concerns. Is there something about climate science that you feel isn’t open enough, because that’s what I detect is your real argument.
Oh, the problems with climatology are well-known and legion, such as refusals to release primary data sets because they would be, quote, “misinterpreted”. But that’s just one area I strongly object to. Nutrition, most of what’s called “social science”; in fact, nearly all disciplines that have major ties to government policy go pseudoscientific in a hurry. (Eugenics, Lysenkoism…) “Climate science” is just particularly egregious in its loud demands to be Taken Seriously and Done Something About while simultaneously refusing to release either data or methods.
I think your information is very much out of date.
See
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-data/land-based-datasets/global-historical-climatology-network-ghcn
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp
and the Clear Climate Code project:
http://clearclimatecode.org
For starters.
esr, I find your conspiratorial insinuation dubious.
You’re free to get the data yourself.
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/Argo_data_and.html
>esr, I find your conspiratorial insinuation dubious.
Conspiracy? No. Error cascade, almost certainly yes.
“Almost certainly” means you have evidence. Or it should. Do you?
>“Almost certainly” means you have evidence. Or it should. Do you?
Just that I remember (1) the early report of a scientist on the project saying “no average temperature rise – that’s surprising”, followed by (2) a report that they were “correcting” the data for a supposed systematic bias that I forget the details of but remember thinking was physically dubious when I read about it.
This is exactly what it looks like when well-intentioned people argue themselves into conformance with an error cascade. There must be 48 chromosomes, $EMINENT_BIOLOGIST said so, therefore I will correct the appearance of merely 46 chromosomes in front of my eyes.
Rather paltry evidence – a vaguely-remembered comment.
>Rather paltry evidence – a vaguely-remembered comment
It drew my attention because I had rather expected to find the Argo team fully sucked into the error cascade before they had published any data at all.
Believe whatever you like. The data is available. If you can prove that it was manipulated, for whatever reason, you’ll be a legend.
He used to have the post dissecting the source code with hard-coded fudge factors permalinked from the front page; not sure where it went. The objections to what amounted to hard-coding the entire fitted curve into the analysis program to be added to the dataset were something along the lines of “but you just don’t understand climate science”.
Your comment is too incomplete and ill-defined to be of much use, Christopher. The source code for what?
I don’t think you’re a concern troll, but the first hit for “fudge factor” on Google for this blog was the post in question.
@ TomA
I think that there are (at least) three big factors…
(1) Scientists and important people all over are talking about how terrible and catastrophic it will be if we don’t “save the planet” [such a fantastic amount of bullshit packed into three words]. There are a lot of gun-nut-wannabes that think that they’d make out swell if society collapsed. There are also many retarded lefties and greens that think a collapse would be good for the environment [I think people that believe this should volunteer to be composted or shut up].
(2) People that have heard of CO2 get the message…
[they don’t; they work by preventing convection]. So people go…
Hey! That’is pretty neat. I actually understand what they are talking about! You can see that it is true!
(3) Many young people, SJWs and misguided fools (with much overlap) love reasons to believe that society is evil and totally corrupt and should be destroyed; AGW fits this mindset nicely.
They all believe because they want to believe.
Hey Eric, great catch on noticing that the CO2 plume is too far south for the ” burning biomass” hypothesis. Those of us who fly airplanes in Africa for a living are well aware of the burning biomass: we have to deal with its visible by-products (haze and smoke) so we know when and where it occurs. It occurs in the north while the rains are in the south (December) and vice-versa in June. The plume shown is in entirely the wrong latitude for its date, and couldn’t be caused by biomass burning. BTW, I grew up with a Malvern PA address, my dad had Speedi-King laundry and car wash at Frazer.
Actually, (3) should say … love reasons to believe that society is evil and totally corrupt and should be destroyed in its current form.
@ TomA
“Why have so many people been drawn into this religion?”
It is a religion like nuclear bombs are a religion: The observable evidence is compelling.
You know, you investigate physics, it leads to understanding of natural processes, you make theories that explain and predict those processes, you predict the outcomes of interventions, and you find your predictions validated.
Worked with nuclear bombs, the weather, and climate change.
But I know where the pain is situated. Absolutely not in the science, but in the outcome: Climate problems cannot be solved by free market forces. Climate problems really require international coordination of state action. You rather have humanity exterminated than admit this.
@Christopher Smith
“Oh, the problems with climatology are well-known and legion, such as refusals to release primary data sets because they would be, quote, “misinterpreted”.”
Now that you got the primary data. Did you change your opinion? Or was this complaint just another straw man?
That is, I think no amount of data and science will ever convince you that there can be global problems that need coordinated global action. Problems that cannot be solved by Free Markets or the US alone.
Because I see very strong parallels between creationists “complaints” against evolution and Libertarian “complaints” against climate science. It is all about putting some idea, be it religion or Libertarianism, above empirical reality. Science cannot be amended to assure the outcomes desired by any religion or ideology without it stops being science.
Not that the “skeptics” here display any understanding of the underlying physics. I am still baffled by the way people here interpreted the CO2 emissions of tropical forests. A voice in my mind keeps saying “This cannot be true”. But I have to go by the empirical evidence and accept it.
>I am still baffled by the way people here interpreted the CO2 emissions of tropical forests.
When you notice that you are confused, you should check your assumptions. Especially since you are not very good at it, and need the practice.
*head explodes*
The weather is predicted only a few days in advance, using percentage chances, and frequently has significant surprises. To say that any of the climate-change predictions (that is, testable claims about the future) have been validated is bullshit at best and, more likely, dishonest. Even the vague handwavy “extreme weather” pronouncements have been so flatly squashed that anything they might reasonably have meant has clearly not come to pass.
@Christopher Smith
“The weather is predicted only a few days in advance, using percentage chances, and frequently has significant surprises.”
Welcome to the real world. Uncertainty is the only certainty.
@Christopher Smith
“To say that any of the climate-change predictions (that is, testable claims about the future) have been validated is bullshit at best and, more likely, dishonest.”
They predicted in the 1980s, that the earth would warm up (I know, I gave a presentation about it in the early 1980s). And that happened in the 1990s. They predicted in the 1990s that the earth would warm up further, and that happened in the 2000s (atmosphere+oceans). The 1990s were the warmest decade ever recorded, the 2000s topped that. They predicted glaciers and ice would melt, and that happened. They predicted the poles would warm up more than the equator, and that happened. The models work with data from the past and it works on Mars and Venus.
Just as weather forecasts are not about next year or the exact temperature at the exact location, the climate forecasts are scenarios of average effects based on possible economic developments. Your complaints are those of someone who denies that the weather can be predicted because you cannot predict the exact temperature to the degree of next summer.
@esr
“So the big Southern hemisphere emission areas are probably just plants normally exhaling CO2, and in the process dwarfing the CO2 emissions of all humans everywhere except northern China. Oops, how embarrassing for the religion of AGW.”
Then explain this. After rereading it many times, this says (even in context) that plant emission dwarfs the CO2 emission of all humans etc. And you say it is not seasonal, but systemic. This does not make biological sense. Where does that carbon come from?
I really cannot make any sense of this.
>Where does that carbon come from?
Here’s a hint, oh poor befuddled creature: plants behave differently depending on whether or not there’s a big light in the sky.
Yes. Yes, I am laughing at you.
That’s just it — he went in assuming that most commenters here were rational people with a basic understanding of chemistry and physics, and came away with very different conclusions indeed.
The computer models may have failed to make the down-to-the-degree predictions you’re looking for, but the hypothesis is sound because it has enormous predictive power. The hypothesis is that fossil fuel burning leads to more atmospheric CO2, which induces a hotter planet. The atmospheric data show record levels of CO2 — up to 400 ppm now — and the temperature data show the hottest global mean temperatures since we started keeping track, perhaps hotter than the earth has been in millennia.
Game, set, match — AGW is real. As long as you insist otherwise it is not a baseless insult to call you a science denier. It is simply a statement of fact.
http://johnosullivan.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/new-satellite-data-contradicts-carbon-dioxide-climate-theory/ . . .
///… New Satellite Data Contradicts Carbon Dioxide Climate Theory
Industrialized nations emit far less carbon dioxide than the Third World, according to latest evidence from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Global warming alarmism is turned on its head and the supposed role of carbon dioxide in climate change may be wrong, if the latest evidence from Japan’s scientists is to be believed . . . ///
NASA OCO satellite Confirms JAXA IBUKI satellite.
Now aint that damn funny ? that the insects and microbes might produce more CO2 than the forests they live in can absorb …
So instead of the Rain forests supporting life elsewhere, the photosynthesis elsewhere is needed to support the tropical forest Biomes that operate at a deficit. What a kick in the pants eh ?
NASA OCO Satelite opens a can of intense butt-hurt on the hoaxers . .
Im with Eric ,,,, , , Pave the tropical Rain Forests or we are all gonna Die !!!
Should we use Nukes ? ,,, no ,,, damn we need to use cement !
. . . .Pave the Rain Forests ! . . .
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/oco2-global-2014.jpg . . .
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/29/three-scenarios-for-the-future-of-nasas-orbiting-carbon-observatory/ . . .
The Mountain and Polar tree lines confirm how warm it was … and confirm the ice cores…
The ice cores confirm how warm it was ,,, Recorded history of civilization show how warm it was …
Medieval warmer than the Modern,,, Roman warmer than the Medieval,,,,
Minoan warmer than the Roman
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png . . .
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0147e2d17582970b-pi . . .
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c017d41a96489970c-pi . . .
Two views of the AMO
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/mann14_1_amo_noaa_kaplansst2.pnghttps://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ustorprobs.png . . ,
Again showing the warm periods of the above mentioned Australian, (and elsewhere)
heat wave tailing the 1850’s – 1900 peak,,,
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/11/extreme-heat-in-1896-panic-stricken-people-fled-the-outback-on-special-trains-as-hundreds-die/ . . .
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/07/charles-sturts-time-so-hot-that-thermometers-exploded-was-australias-hottest-day-in-1828-53-9c/ . . .
, then ~1905-1920’s cold, .1930’s-1960’s warmth ,,
Then the 1970’s ice age scare period,,
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/1970s-ice-age-scare/ . . .
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013_02_01_archive.html ..
And the peak of the current CAGW global warming hoax period . . . .
(Sea level rates line up with the AMO )
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/sea-level/sea-level-australia-new-zealand-rate-change-watson.gif . . .
And therein is the base fraud of the climate hoaxers, their failed attempt to erase these warm periods from history …
Without this fraud, they cant claim the modern warming period is abnormal
In fact,, shown by irrefutable data,,,, that it is inferior to the warming periods that came before. The physics people knew this anyway, CO2 is a log curve and we are in the flat
of the curve.
Mountain tree lines
///… “And to make this point perfectly clear, Kullman repeats that “the pine tree line (and summer temperature) was consistently higher than present … during the Roman and Medieval periods, c. 1900 and 1000 cal years BP.”” …///
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V16/N50/EDIT.php . . .
The polar tree line is similar to the line on mountains, the elevation where trees stop growing, except instead of being an elevation, it is a location. the northernmost point in a given region in which trees will grow..
from http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/06/manns-tree-ring-proxy-train-wreck/
///… What is worse, in my opinion, is that Mann and Briffa can’t even claim they weren’t warned. As early as 1998, the very Russian Scientists who Briffa hired to collect the tree ring samples, tried to alert Briffa that the samples didn’t show what they wanted them to show. The difference is, the Russians weren’t measuring tree ring width, their favoured metric was the polar timberline – the northernmost edge of the great Arctic forests. …///
( related http://climateaudit.org/2014/12/04/sheep-mountain-update/ . . .)
This hoax is busted
For extra humor points , , , the Mockery that the OCO and JAXA IBUKI satellites male of the CO2 Model from NASA Goddard , , , ,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/18/who-needs-an-orbiting-carbon-observatory-when-you-can-model-of-carbon-dioxide/ . . .
Except that as CO2 emissions have continued to rise, the earth has quit warming. Blows a hole in that argument, that does.
@Jay Maynard
“Except that as CO2 emissions have continued to rise, the earth has quit warming. Blows a hole in that argument, that does.”
Nope, the oceans are taking up the heat for now. Was all in the news in 2014. One of the links I gave above:
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/10340/20141114/summer-2014-saw-warmest-ocean-temperatures-ever-recorded.htm
And we are seeing now that 2014 will be the hottest year on record. So, the ocean heat transport seems to be saturating
Nice to see how the “skeptics” (=deniers) were arguing the hot years in the 1990s were statistical flukes, just ordinary weather noise. And now they requiring that every year must be warmer than the previous.
> [they don’t; they work by preventing convection]
They also do that, but greenhouse glass is opaque to far infrared (which is a tiny fraction of incoming solar energy but the bulk of outgoing radiated heat).
pwatwo> Can you “recall” where you read that “$100+ billion” figure?
No, I can’t, so please allow me to retract it. Thanks.
pwatwo,
A couple years ago there was some excitement around the idea that ocean readings data from the British Royal Navy from captain’s logs were being digitized and correlated to increase the ocean temp record back to the 18th century. Do you happen to know a graph (like the last one in your reply of RE: Dr. Curry) that includes that data? I can’t find anything that goes back that far on Google, so I was wondering if you knew if any fruit had come from that effort.
Thanks.
@Christopher, that code snippet was from an old CRU analysis of paleodata, IIRC, part of the 2009 theft of emails. How that applies to GAT analysis, climate models, the Argo floats, or anything else, isn’t apparent to me.
@Don, I’ve heard of those efforts; this is a report on one such:
ftp://ftp.wmo.int/Documents/PublicWeb/amp/mmop/documents/JCOMM-TR/J-TR-10-CLIMAR-99/Presentations/session_01/01.2_Elms.pdf
And those data are incorporated into
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/mohmat/
@Raymond, how do you explain the Keeling Curve?
>@Raymond, how do you explain the Keeling Curve?
I don’t have any single explanation of it I’m committed to. Some of the increase is probably anthropogenic, but there is evidence in the fossil record of much larger swings, lagging GAT changes rather than leading it, that cannot have been anthropogenic.
@Winter (talking to someone else):
“Now that you got the primary data. Did you change your opinion?”
Actually, my opinion was formed by looking at primary data. Let me walk you through my journey: looking at the official temperatures held by NOAA.
Start with one of their summary pages—July 2012, supposedly the hottest summer on record. Scroll down just a whisper to the “Highlights” and look at the first bullet point. Make a note of the temperatures listed: when I load this page, it shows temperatures of 77.6 (2012) and 77.4 (1936). Then drop all the way to the bottom and let’s check the date on this information: it should show both the original date of publication and date of retrieval.
Second, follow either link in that first “Highlights” paragraph (they both point to the same data series)–this is where we look at NOAA’s actual data. If you click the “Value” heading twice to sort the data with the largest temperatures on the top, the first two years listed will be 2012 and 1936. This is what we would expect from the previous page, but a closer at the temperatures listed will show that neither one matches the values given on the prior page.
Now, given that the bottom of the summary page states it was first published online in August 2012 (and presumably never updated), I can think of several reasons the temperature for that year might need to be revised: reporting delays being foremost. However, there are scant few reasons I can imagine preventing the 1936 temperature values on both pages from matching—and, frankly, all of them would impeach either the competence or honesty of the NOAA. (Worse, this impeaches every other climate data set which pulls from the NOAA’s records… which would be all of the “global” surface temperature sets like HadCRUT.)
After looking at some of the primary data, what’s your opinion—are the climatologists at the NOAA incompetent or dishonest?
@esr
“Here’s a hint, oh poor befuddled creature: plants behave differently depending on whether or not there’s a big light in the sky.”
And that will simply result in a net CO2 emission of ZERO, when averaged over time. There are day and seasonal variations, but the net effect of plant life in the tropics on CO2 emissions is ZERO. Unless the amount of plants in- or decreases.
At higher latitudes, carbon is lost in the ground. However, the increasing temperatures of the last decades have sped up decay and released permafrost.
Which is to say that standing tropical rain forest has a ZERO contribution to CO2 emission when averaged over years.
>Which is to say that standing tropical rain forest has a ZERO contribution to CO2 emission when averaged over years.
OK. Now let’s see if you can manage not to stop thinking at a conclusion that makes you comfortable.
The least hypothesis from the map is that day-night variation in CO2 flux completely swamps daytime anthropogenic emissions. You have demonstrated some knowledge of signal discrimination theory. What generally happens when you try to measure a secular effect much, much smaller than the mean amplitude of short-period noise in the system?
“Start with one of their summary pages—July 2012, supposedly the hottest summer on record. ”
Are you looking at the USA data? That is ridiculous! The relevant data are the global ones.
@esr, the Keeling Curve is based on the CO2 readings taken in Hawaii. It clearly shows the seasonal cycle in CO2 (primarily from photosynthesis) and the underlying trend caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The geologic record isn’t germane to it.
>and the underlying trend caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
You don’t get to assume your conclusions around here.
Over the timescales of centuries to millennia — hundreds of thousands of cycles of the Daystar — the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is more or less constant. Meaning that the large amounts of carbon respiration you see on the map are just one part of a dynamic equilibrium that remains stable over those time scales (absent a particularly arrogant and profligate clade of ape burning hydrocarbons they found in the ground).
To imply, as you do, that this CO2 respiration is an ongoing process not counterbalanced by other CO2-capturing processes, adding carbon to the atmosphere the way that human fossil fuel combustion does, requires an account of where the extra carbon is coming from. An account which you have failed to provide.
So we, who have looked into and believe the science, are laughing at you. This is one of your most flagrant intellectual blunders yet.
>Over the timescales of centuries to millennia — hundreds of thousands of cycles of the Daystar — the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is more or less constant.
Um. No. The geological record is quite clear about there being large long-period variations in atmospheric CO2 on the Myear scale. See for example the data from the Vostok ice cores. These exhibit rough periodicity that nobody is sure of an explanation for, but the leading candidate is Milankovich cycles.
It’s all very well to “believe the science”, but you need to get your elementary facts straight before that means anything.
@esr “What generally happens when you try to measure a secular effect much, much smaller than the mean amplitude of short-period noise in the system?”
We know how to do that. That’s how we can figure out (for example) that it’s warmer in summer than winter despite the possibility that the day-to-day (or even on a given day) the temperature change can be much larger than the summer -> winter difference.
Winter’s emotional attachment to CAGW is understandable. If the planet warms and the oceans rise, then the Netherlands will become (at least partially) submerged. Even if this is a remote probability, it behooves them to persuade the rest of the world to pay for some risk mitigation.
However, rather than rely on memetic manipulation for this task, I think it would be more honorable to take direct measures. China is clearly the biggest source of anthropogenic combustion-based carbon emissions. You’re free to invade anytime you wish. If you succeed, problem solved. If you fail, then at least the bitching will decline somewhat.
@esr
“The least hypothesis from the map is that day-night variation in CO2 flux completely swamps daytime anthropogenic emissions. You have demonstrated some knowledge of signal discrimination theory. What generally happens when you try to measure a secular effect much, much smaller than the mean amplitude of short-period noise in the system?”
You really do not get it. REALLY.
This has absolutely nothing to do with signal detection theory or any other atmospheric measurements.
We know that the average contribution is ZERO, because we know that vegetation cycles atmospheric CO2. Averaged over long time spans (~year), the difference between the CO2 amount absorbed and emitted by plant life is exactly equal to the carbon difference in biomass plus the amount lost to the soil.
Tropical rain forests are roughly stationary in biomass (there might be some loss) and all detritus decays to CO2. As there is no loss to the soil and the biomass is stable, mass conservation requires that the net emissions of the rain forests must be ZERO.
If it is not, we are losing a lot of biomass.
>You really do not get it. REALLY.
No, I get it. You have hared off into irrelevance because it makes you comfortable. I hoped for better, but wasn’t really expecting it.
@esr, analysis of the carbon isotopes in the CO2 shows that the trend is from the burning of fossil fuels.
Skepticism is fine, rejection of established scientific fact is silly.
>@esr, analysis of the carbon isotopes in the CO2 shows that the trend is from the burning of fossil fuels.
To be fair, I used to consider this established scientific fact myself. Then I read Murray Salby’s analysis of confounders in that data and now consider the question open.
But it wouldn’t actually bother me if the conventional belief turned out to be 100% correct, because I consider the fatal flaw in CAGW theory to be elsewhere, specifically in the unsubstantiated belief that CO2/H20 feedback coupling is a real phenomenon that produces high climate sensitivity.
Extra humor points , , ,
The Mockery that both the OCO and JAXA IBUKI satellites make,,,, of the hockey team CO2 Model from NASA Goddard , , , ,
What the computer models predicted that OCO would find:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/18/who-needs-an-orbiting-carbon-observatory-when-you-can-model-of-carbon-dioxide/
Now what OCO ACTUALLY MEASURED.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/oco2-global-2014.jpg . . .
All the utter BS about CO2. Look at the modeled CO2. Look at the measured CO2. The difference tells you all you need to know about hockey team climate modelling
@Raymond, NASA GISS’ climate model and “hockey team” are two different things.
You’d be more persuasive if you’d use a reference other than WUWT. It’s to climate science what Jenny McCarthy is to medicine.
Salby has some glaring holes in his hypothesis. About 55% of emissions are being absorbed by the oceans (30%) and plants (25%) and he wants to argue something other than fossil fuel burning is emitting GT of CO2 each year by attributing the rise to “a naturally-caused component”!
Murry has already shown that by measuring 13C:12C ratios, all the extra CO2 in the air came from plant sources. And it’s not as if the number of plants on earth have decreased hugely and sent all their carbon into the air. On the contrary, plants are absorbing more CO2 not less.
And where does Murry think that all the carbon disappeared to from burning billions of tons of sequestered ancient plant material?
There’s a lot of material on water vapor feedback; what’s so “fatal” about all of it? Remember that ECS cannot be as low as Lindzen and a few others claim; if so, then the climate system is so highly damped that it cannot have Ice Ages and ice-free periods, which contradicts the geologic record.
>Murry has already shown that by measuring 13C:12C ratios, all the extra CO2 in the air came from plant sources.
Exactly. Not leaving a lot of room for fossil fuels to be the culprit. But, as I said, that interpretation could be totally wrong without mattering much.
>There’s a lot of material on water vapor feedback; what’s so “fatal” about all of it?
Several things, beginning with the fact that atmosphere temperature profiles still do not show the signature predicted by the models with strong CO2/H20 feedback coupling, despite the alarmists’ best efforts to torture it out of the data. My favorite guess is they got the sign of the effect from cloud cover wrong (increased albedo dominates heat-trapping), but that’s not an explanation I’m very attached to. There are more exotic hypotheses that might be true.
>Remember that ECS cannot be as low as Lindzen and a few others claim; if so, then the climate system is so highly damped that it cannot have Ice Ages and ice-free periods, which contradicts the geologic record.
Can’t really argue with that. But ECS can’t be as high as the alarmists want, either; the data just won’t support it. (And the IPCC knows this; their assessments of ECS are, grudgingly, falling.)
So, what is the data telling us? The climate system is not highly damped, though it must exhibit significant homeostasis or humans wouldn’t be here to debate the point. What I think I see is a chaotic wander through a region of the state space bounded by (1) the range of very large drivers like astrodynamics and secular variations in solar activity, and (b) quite robust homeostatic effects.
Inside that box you don’t get much of anywhere, predictively, by trying to claim “CO2 is driving GAT” or “GAT is driving CO2” (though I think the ice cores provide more evidence for the latter). That’s why the IPCC models are failing so badly.
> The least hypothesis from the map is that day-night variation in CO2 flux completely swamps daytime anthropogenic emissions.
I can believe that. Or, for that matter, that seasonal variation swamps both of them (or that it goes day-night, then seasonal, then fossil fuel burning) – the probem is that even if they are large there’s no reason to assume that these short-term cyclical components aren’t balanced and therefore irrelevant: any net change in atmospheric CO2 has to be matched by an opposite net change in terrestrial solid/liquid carbon compounds (i.e. biomass and fossil fuels), and you’ve produced no evidence of a significant drop in that [whether from burning fossil fuel or from deforestation] that can’t be attributed to humans.
It really doesn’t matter how large the cyclical component is, and I don’t understand why you think it does.
Ummm, fossil fuels are plant sources of CO2. Just fossilized plants.
To what “temperature profiles” are you referring?
What do you mean by “astrodynamics”? Milankovich cycles? Those aren’t operant on decadal timescales. Variations in solar activity are very small, and there has been a pronounced divergence between incoming solar and surface air temperature. The other problems with the “it’s all the sun” hypothesis is that it cannot explain ocean acidification nor stratospheric cooling, nor any of the many other markers of increased-CO2-driven changes in the climate system that have been observed.
CO2 is the key GHG; H2O is merely a feedback, not a forcing. Considerations of the radiative balance of the earth with an atmosphere containing no GHGs illustrates that quite well, plus the fact that H2O condenses out and ceases being a factor in radiative balance at only 0C.
>Ummm, fossil fuels are plant sources of CO2. Just fossilized plants.
Yup. But don’t quibble; when Salby speaks of plant sources he isn’t using the word “plant” that way. His argument that the statistics of the variation preclude the recent jump being mainly anthropogenic is pretty strong. It actually surprised me; I had been willing to accept the conventional account on this score.
>What do you mean by “astrodynamics”? Milankovich cycles? Those aren’t operant on decadal timescales
Indeed they are not, but I think they do a better job of generatively explaining GAT and CO2 wanders in the geological record (e.g. what we see in the Vostok samples) than anything else.
>CO2 is the key GHG; H2O is merely a feedback, not a forcing.
Correct, but without the feedback you don’t get the high ECS estimates that are driving the rest of the bad science and toxic politics.
And “many other markers of increased-CO2-driven changes in the climate system” turn out to be dubious when examined closely. I used to buy the ocean-acidification hype too, until I found out how vanishingly little of it is based on actual data and how much is speculative modeling. Just recently it turns out one major alarmist study arbitrarily threw out 70 years of observational data on pH. I think we can guess why.
You should read some of the critiques of Salby’s hypothesis, like the ones I just posted. It’s got major problems.
A geologic timescale isn’t of importance to the next few decades and centuries, so the explanatory power of astrodynamics isn’t relevant at all. Best to just ignore them.
Please examine
http://quantpalaeo.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/not-phraud-but-phoolishness/
Winter said
“Given that nuclear power only produces only 10% of the world’s electricity. That would mean nuclear power can only deliver 20 years of the world’s electricity. And electricity makes up only 4% of total energy use. So, the current uranium resources could only deliver 1 year of the world’s electricity. Even if we could extract 100 times as much nuclear fuel out of the earth, it would only last a century. And the costs would be horrible.”
This fails on several fronts.
1) As noted by others, earlier. The light water reactor designs we are currently saddled with leave some 90-95% of the extractable energy stuck in the ‘spent’ fuel we then store, at great expense, rather that reprocess. Simply reprocessing the ‘spent’ fuel will return us to the point of having a couple of centuries of uranium in *current* stocks or proven reserves. Never mind finding more.
2) Uranium is a fine fuel for the aforementioned LW ‘fast’ reactors, but other designs, such as the LFTR design can utilize the much more common Thorium as a fuel, (as well as using the current Uranium ‘spent’ fuel after suitable reprocessing) and the design extracts far more energy from the fuel than the LW reactors, since it’s a slow rather than fast neutron design. Thorium is about 10x as common in the earths crust as uranium, and would, with the right designs, give as another few centuries at current power generation rates.
So no, we aren’t limited to about 2 decades of nuclear power if we were to generate all our electricity from it. We are at about 40 decades, until we might need to find some more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY is a lovely 5 min video about LFTR designs and their advantage over the heavy and light water reactors.
But CO2 make the rainforests grow!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2891432/Carbon-dioxide-emissions-help-tropical-rainforests-grow-faster-Study-shows-trees-absorb-greenhouse-gas-expected.html
Kinda silly that scientists are shocked since greenhouses generally have CO2 pumped into them to boost growth. Gardeners have known this for a long time. 700 – 1200 ppm seems to work best!
http://www.novabiomatique.com/hydroponics-systems/plant-555-gardening-with-co2-explained.cfm
Jim Richardson> So no, we aren’t limited to about 2 decades of nuclear power if we were to generate all our electricity from it. We are at about 40 decades, until we might need to find some more.
And there’s more, tons and tons and tons more. I did a project for an uranium mining operation in Kleberg County, TX, and got to know the geologist (who hired me) very well. When he talked about the formation they were mining (using a dissolved salt extraction), he said that same formation was, at various depths and thicknesses, all over Texas and much of the southwestern US. They did Kleberg because it was relatively remote (thank you King Ranch!), Texas was a mining-friendly State, the depth was fairly shallow (I don’t recall the depths in the tables I was working with at this point, sorry) and still relatively close (about 45 minutes) from a major city (Corpus).
Their mining operation was amazingly simple, just suck up water from the water table, filter it through an RO system, heat and ionize it, send it down one of about a dozen injection wells, then pump it up a central well (plus a little extra ground water to prevent leakage), run it through a second RO unit, take the clean water and either reuse it or mix the minerals from the first RO run back in (required by EPA), and put it back into the water table where you found it. Cleaning the filters on the second RO unit created a concentrate that included several ounces of Uranium salts, which was sent to a uranium processing facility.
Most of what they produced was use in nuclear weapons development, and when the whole Star Wars thing shut down, so did the mine.
It was a cool fist gig though :).
I think it is long since apparent that, for some, global warming is their religion.
That is why they throw around the term denier, which of course calls to mind holocaust deniers.
What tips me off that the whole thing is BS is the Malthusian nature of it. This kind of mindset that says the whole is going to hell, we’re running out of resources, the globe is warming, the sky is falling.
I think those who frequent this blog will remember the kinds of predictions that were made in the 1970s by people like Paul Erlich that could not have been more wrong.
I would argue that there may be a real problem embodied in the CAGW issue, but it is internal to our species and does not involve the Earth’s atmosphere.
In the concerted effort to employ global-scale memetics in service to ideological indoctrination, there may be an unintended consequence of great concern. Specifically, rational common sense and clarity are being discouraged and replaced by pseudoscience-driven herd hysteria. We live in affluent times, so these detriments are not immediately hazardous, but that could change quickly if a super-tyrant emerges and commandeers the herd.
What’s the general take on these?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-AXBbuDxRY
Arrhenius’ work in 1896:
http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
Guy Callendar in 1938:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.49706427503/abstract
Winter,
I don’t understand why you seem to care so much. The OP is the typical libertarian crank magnet, look at the collection of classical (and sometimes mutually incompatible) opinions espoused here. Outlawed DDT is killing children, temperature stopped rising, it continues rising but this is good (alternatively insignificant), communistic cabals of ‘gaiaists’ pursue the destruction of humankind, academic scientists bath in the money that powerful political forces shower them with. Most commentators seem to leave when they finally stumble on a claim that raises their feeling of cognitive dissonance over a threshold level. I come here for the comedy (and to remind myself that libertarians are not harmless). But why do you take all that abuse from people whose ideologies and egos makes them completely unable to understand things that might make a dent in either one. You know thats true, and you also know exactly how they react to statements like these. Why, I really want to know!
I love cognitive dissonance, i would swim in it if i could, how else will you ever learn anything.
Physics is basic stuff, and it does not bother me that many things, the understanding threof, may be forever beyond our grasp.
The leftist psychosis don’t bother me much, its their efforts to encode their blood drenched psychosis into law i have a problem with.
The mountain and polar tree lines prove the CAGW hoax is bunk, its all the evidence required, their very existence is mutually exclusive with the CAGW hoax.
Mutual exclusivity is logic the left will never accept, they are about political power, its the power that is the objective, their causes are only tools, and its not the tools that matter to them.
@Raymond, what about stalagmites and lake sediments and the other proxies that have “hockey sticks”? What about ocean acidification and stratospheric cooling and ecosystem responses and all the other indicators of manmade climate change?
Do you believe everything rests on MBH ’98? Why?
>all the other indicators of manmade climate change?
You still don’t get to assume your conclusion. There are a lot of chaotic natural drivers of climate out there. You can’t just wave your hands and say “manmade”, you have to demonstrate a causal linkage.
CAGW proponents have bet everything on CO2/H2O positive feedback greenhousing as the link, but that theory was always dependent on untested assumptions and the atmosphere is simply not behaving as though it’s true. This should have been crystal clear as long ago as the grand solar minimum 2008 when GAT followed insolation downwards (as I predicted) rather than CO2 levels upwards (as the IPCC models predicted). Now GAT is falling further away from the bottom edge of the prediction range from the IPCC model sheaf every week.
@ Karen Elliot
Welcome to A&D. Please don’t be mislead, this board is a Potter’s stew of diverse ideas and discussion. You are encouraged to join in with reasoned argument and supporting information.
And please don’t assume that Winter is being maligned here. Just the contrary is true. Winter is part of the A&D family; and though we may argue, but there is a bond of respect and affection also.
Please feel free to step into the ring.
@esr, it’s unfortunate you haven’t read the scientific literature on “D&A” (detection and attribution). The climate science community has done significant work on the problem.
There’s much more to AGW than GAT.
>There’s much more to AGW than GAT.
Uh huh. Here’s a free clue: when the main predictive check of your theory fails, “Look! A squirrel!” is not a confidence-inspiring answer.
@esr, if you knew well how climate models worked, how the CMIP5 process worked, and how observational analyses and comparisons with model output worked, you wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss climate models as junk.
>@esr, if you knew well how climate models worked, how the CMIP5 process worked, and how observational analyses and comparisons with model output worked, you wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss climate models as junk.
In fact, I have a very detailed grasp how scientific modeling is supposed to work. That is how I can tell the CAGW models are shot through with bad assumptions and methodological flaws.
Making predictions that fail to match reality when fed historical data, and making predictions that fail to match reality as time moves forward, must be a definition of “to work” with which I am unfamiliar.
@Jay, the same comment applies to you.
All right, enlighten me. In what possible sense is a model whose output fails to match reality when fed real-world inputs “working”? Unless, of course, you mean it in the sense of providing justification for “green energy” boondoggles and wealth transfers and destruction of entire economic systems, that is…
@Jay, read, as a start, Edwards’ “A Vast Machine”. Or, you can go back to Richardson’s ideas and work in the 1920s. There’s too much wrong in your claims to be corrected here without hours and hours of my time, which isn’t worthwhile to me.
@esr, it’s not clear to me that you do understand climate modeling, how climate models work, how CMIP5 was designed and implemented, and how to compare model output and observations.
I recommend you read Edwards’ book too.
Ponder this for a bit – let’s assume a perfect climate model – all phenomena at whatever spatial or temporal scale we choose is modeled perfectly. No science errors, no software errors. Let’s also assume it’s fast and can provide output at any scale.
Now, how do you suppose we feed this thing the observations it needs of the earth’s climate state at some time in the past? How do we know what the salinity in the ocean 100 km NE of Hawaii at 500m depth was at (say) 1 July 1950 0 GMT? What about the precise incoming solar, all wavelengths, at the same instant? Atmospheric composition? State of the land surface precise to microns?
Now, let’s say we want to predict future climate – how do we tell this model what the future state of the sun will be? We need a complete and perfect model of the sun, too, then.
When rejectionists say “match reality”, what does that mean, *exactly*?
I reject the epithet “rejectionist”, if you’re tying to apply it to me. I reject only those things which any reasoning man should reject, religion masquerading using the trappings of science without actually following its tenets among them.
If getting a model right is as problematical as you claim, then why are we staking the destruction of economies on their results?
By “match reality”, I mean “makes predictions that do not grossly contradict observed results”. A model that says temperatures will rise by two degrees C when fed actual data that resulted in an actual rise of far less than that is useless as a prediction tool and its results should not be depended on when making critical decisions.
But instead, the warmists seize on the models, despite their utter failure to predict reality as through it is reality that is flawed and we should depend on the models to decide the course of nations. They want to destroy our entire economic system based on the models’ outputs. We should be demanding much more scientific rigor to justify such drastic measures.
@Jay, I reject the epithet “warmist”. You’re afraid of the policy possibilities to address manmade climate change, but instead of talking about those, you’re attacking the science. That’s putting the cart before the horse.
I understand where you’re coming from, so the real question is why I’m bothering to expend any time or energy on a dismissive who will never be persuaded by any amount of rigorously factual information and is content to stick with his opinions instead.
@ pwatwo
If you are as knowledgeable as you claim, then you are aware that there are numerous climate models under development and that they have been evolving for many decades now. This process is ongoing and there are new twists and turns occurring every year. Some steps forward and some steps back, as problems and inconsistencies arise. The science is not mature, and the fidelity of the models is not demonstrated to any significant degree. At best, gross approximations of climate behavior are beginning to take shape.
And given that climate is measured in large increments of time, it may be decades before we have a sense of modeling accuracy, if at all. The doom and gloom hysteria is pure politics, not science.
@TomA “the fidelity of the models is not demonstrated to any significant degree” isn’t quite correct. See
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf
Can I throw my hat in the ring, with on word?
Methane.
How can a thread of 266 comments be possible without a single mention of methane? Like it or not, it is much more ‘warming’ than CO2, and when it breaks down in the stratosphere to water and carbon dioxide, that presumably helps keep us warm at night!
More on the silly ocean acidification “fraud” claims…
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2015/01/know-your-data-ocean-acidification-again.html
@esr, you were very very very quick with your claim “I used to buy the ocean-acidification hype too, until I found out how vanishingly little of it is based on actual data and how much is speculative modeling. Just recently it turns out one major alarmist study arbitrarily threw out 70 years of observational data on pH. I think we can guess why.”
Is your insinuation valid? I don’t think so.
@pwatwo on 2015-01-01 at 17:41:55 said:
> @TomA “the fidelity of the models is not demonstrated to any significant degree” isn’t quite correct. See
> http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf
You cannot use the bible to prove the bible.
@ pwatwo
Perhaps you read your own citation. It reinforces my comment rather well.
Also, I assume you are aware that there are other critiques of this report as well.
@Karen Elliot
“Winter,
I don’t understand why you seem to care so much.”
There are readers that might still be persuaded. Personally, I do not believe in the echo-chamber myth. Everyone will bump into new viewpoints when surfing the internet. Still, it does no harm to try to expose casual readers to reason.
I also want to understand how they reason. See it as a participating way to study the mind of the Libertarian. For instance, it took me some time to understand the truth behind what pwatwo writes above:
I am fascinated by the way these people can make themselves believe a state-free society could actually work. And if it is so great, why it has never been realized (outside complete backwaters like medieval Iceland).
And really, it baffles me that intelligent people are unable to see the basic flaw in the OP about where all this supposedly extra CO2 is coming from.
@Karen Elliot
“But why do you take all that abuse from people whose ideologies and egos makes them completely unable to understand things that might make a dent in either one.”
These are only words. I am not overly sensitive to verbal abuse. And most people here are nice and decent. People I could easily sit down with for a cup of coffee (I do not like beer).
@esr
“His argument that the statistics of the variation preclude the recent jump being mainly anthropogenic is pretty strong. It actually surprised me; I had been willing to accept the conventional account on this score.”
I could calculate the stuff for you here, it is easy, but others have done so. Here are the numbers:
In 1750, there was 2,185 Gt CO2 in the atmosphere. Since then, humans burned fossil fuels to account for 1,447.90 Gt CO2. Nearly 1,000 Gt of this added CO2 is still in the atmosphere.
So, humans have indeed burned enough fossil fuel to easily account for the rise in CO2 levels. All these calculations is back by isotope data and drill cores in everything from antarctic ice to lake beds. Why people even attempt to deny the human cause of the current rise in CO2 is a puzzle. But it is, again, baffling why there are still people who believe that.
http://www.carbonvisuals.com/work/do-the-math-supporting-a-350-dot-org-tour
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11638-climate-myths-human-co2-emissions-are-too-tiny-to-matter.html
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/faq.html#Q7
The only hypothesis I can reach is that libertarianism is an idée fixe, akin to Christian fundamentalism; since almost anyone who says that human fossil fuel burning has caused CO2 to rise and with it, Earth’s temperature also advocates government regulation to curtail CO2 emissions (primarily because government regulation of environmentally hazardous substances is a time-tested solution and it works), anyone who believes the AGW hypothesis must be treated with Deep Suspicion and lumped in with feminists, postmodern philosophers, Ward Churchill, Bill Ayers, Obama, and all the other Soviet apparatchiks still conspiring to take away “muh freedoms”.
Well, Jeff, you got it exactly right. Any CAGW true believer must indeed “be treated with Deep Suspicion and lumped in with feminists, postmodern philosophers, Ward Churchill, Bill Ayers, Obama, and all the other Soviet apparatchiks still conspiring to take away “muh freedoms”.”
The reason is simple. It’s far more than “government regulation of environmentally hazardous substances”. It’s government regulation of entire economies, since that’s the only way to control energy usage.
We’ve been there and done that, and got the gulags and the mass graves.
Anyone who wants that is simply, unreservedly evil, and must be fought to our dying breaths.
Want to get us on your side? Find another answer than wrecking economies.
@JEff Read
“since almost anyone who says that human fossil fuel burning has caused CO2 to rise and with it, Earth’s temperature also advocates government regulation to curtail CO2 emissions …, anyone who believes the AGW hypothesis must be treated with Deep Suspicion…”
Probably the best explanation. However, I would think they would try to come up with a Libertarian solution. Lomborg has shown the way by emphasizing local adaption to the consequences as the only solution. That would be a much more convincing strategy.
Neil Stephenson said in an interview with Nature:
That will be true for some of the financiers and lobbyists, but I think a majority of the rank and file of the deniers is simply unable (or unwilling) to grasp the science.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-15/many-republicans-privately-support-action-on-climate.html
@Jay Maynard
“The reason is simple. It’s far more than “government regulation of environmentally hazardous substances”. It’s government regulation of entire economies, since that’s the only way to control energy usage. We’ve been there and done that, and got the gulags and the mass graves.”
You do not have to prove Jeff right in your own words.
Anyhow, all three of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao were fond of murdering anyone who suggested to regulate environmental hazardous substances. And there is absolutely no connection between attempts to save the environment and “the gulags and the mass graves”.
On the contrary, the worse the environmental policies, the worse the human rights are. It is you who are in the same AGW camp as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China. The top of any list of countries with the highest freedom and the least rate of governmental murders are in the camp of trying to curb AGW.
“there is absolutely no connection between attempts to save the environment and “the gulags and the mass graves”.”
Sure there is. Or are you saying we don’t need central planning and control of economies to stop CAGW? if so, you’re a lone voice in the wilderness.
“I think a majority of the rank and file of the deniers is simply unable (or unwilling) to grasp the science.”
I’ll “grasp the science” when it’s not joined at the hip with the leftist wet dream of government control of economies, and when it actually is done by scientists who behave like scientists.
Also, Stephenson does his argument a disservice when he lumps opposition to warmism with opposition to the teaching of evolution. The two are NOT synonymous, and linking the two only gives me a reason to discount your words completely.l
@Jay Maynard
“Sure there is. Or are you saying we don’t need central planning and control of economies to stop CAGW? if so, you’re a lone voice in the wilderness.”
Nope, the only thing needed is pricing of the externalities of burning fossil fuel. The same type of international law that is used to curb dumping poison in the air, rivers and oceans.
How people reduce carbon emissions is their own problem they can solve in any way they see fit. As long as it is not dumped in the atmosphere to destroy the livelihoods of others. Absolutely nothing in there requires mass murdering civilians. Just as an international ban on slavery and mercury dumping did not result in Gulags.
@Jay Maynard
“I’ll “grasp the science” when it’s not joined at the hip with the leftist wet dream of government control of economies, and when it actually is done by scientists who behave like scientists.”
You are also proving Neil Stephenson right. You are denying the science because you cannot cope with the consequences. Just as Stephenson said.
@Jay Maynard
“The two are NOT synonymous, and linking the two only gives me a reason to discount your words completely.”
Actually, these are completely parallel attempts to deny the value of the scientific process because the outcomes are deemed unbearable. They also use the same strategies.
In creationism, the idea that there is a truth that will trump the interpretation of the bible cannot be tolerated. In AGW deniers, it is the idea that there is a problem that cannot be solved without state intervention that cannot be tolerated.
Btw, I think the Libertarians can be faulted for their lack of imagination. It must be relatively straightforward to come up with a state-free solution to the AGW problem. As well by local adaptation as by incorporating fossil fuel externalities in prices. Even including compensation for those who hold fossil fuel reserves.
No, Winter, I’m denying the “science” is actually science because the “scientists’ don’t behave like scientists. Instead, they behave like priests of a cult, stamping out any disagreement instead of accepting it and addressing it head-on, as scientists do.
That the only solutions presented are thoroughly leftist – and “pricing of the externalities” is inherently leftist, since it cannot be assessed except by government fiat – merely underscores that the science has been perverted to a particular end, instead of going where the facts lead.
Will you at least recognize that there are plenty of us, most certainly myself included, who do not hold creationist views and yet do not believe in the CAGW cult?
If not, then you can go straight to hell, and there is no further reason to engage you.
@Jay
“Will you at least recognize that there are plenty of us, most certainly myself included, who do not hold creationist views and yet do not believe in the CAGW cult?”
I really never did say you were a creationist. As far as I know, these two sets of people, creationists and Libertarians, have no overlap and are mortal enemies. Still, both groups use the same strategies to attack science. From the perspectives of the scientists, it is utterly immaterial whether they are accused of fraud and deception (or at least incredibly stupidity) because they trip up religious or ideological feelings.
And I do not claim that you willfully lie about your believes. Just that your ideology prevents you from accepting the science behind the AGW. If you simply say “liar” when an unwelcome fact surfaces, you cannot be helped. Because, a scientist can never prove that he saw something. And if you refuse to repeat her measurements while still denying these measurements, then the discussion must stop.
I can’t speak for Winter, but I certainly agree with this.
What Stephenson was trying to say is not that AGW deniers and creationists are the same people, but that AGW denialism is like creationism, in that there are mountains of evidence to support the scientifically accepted theory, but the deniers refuse to believe what the plain evidence tells them — and sometimes make up endless reams of pseudoscience to explain the observables — because they’re afraid of the dire implications for what they do believe (the supremacy of the free market for AGW deniers, the Bible for creationists).
Jay, the USA Democrats are far to the right of even the center-right party of any democratic European state. As for you, I’m pretty certain you would decry as the second coming of Stalin, policies that would curl any right-thinking Brit’s hair with their red-in-tooth-and-claw Thatcherism. You are not trustworthy — at all — in assessing whether a given policy is “leftist”.
Jeff, I’ll tell you the same thing I tell Peter da Silva when he raises the same objection: I, at least, am discussing American politics, and its relation to the world political scale is of exactly no use or relevance to me.
If you want Eurosocialism, you know where to find it.
“both groups use the same strategies to attack science”
I do not attack science. I attack the CAGW cult precisely because it uses the trappings of science without being science.
@Jeff
“As for you, I’m pretty certain you would decry as the second coming of Stalin, policies that would curl any right-thinking Brit’s hair with their red-in-tooth-and-claw Thatcherism. You are not trustworthy — at all — in assessing whether a given policy is “leftist”.”
Indeed. It is very difficult to find people in (continental) Europe who even want to take Jay Maynards political position serious. When I try to explain Libertarian political ideas with unsuspected compatriots, they think I am pulling their leg. Only people who know USA politics will believe me. The rest simply thinks people have played a joke on me.
@Jay
“I attack the CAGW cult precisely because it uses the trappings of science without being science.”
I am very sorry to say so. But you have written comments here that make me doubt very much that you even master the basics of the science involved (the OP is a case in point, it flouts basic biology and chemistry). Moreover, from your comments I have become convinced that you do not understand how real science is performed.
But I would be happy if you proved me wrong.
@pwatwo
“See
> http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf”
I got curious and I did take a look and I don’t see where it’s saying what you’d like it to say as opposed to the skeptics point of view. For 90% of the time, the executive summary trumpets how models can predict the past. What I thought it would say is “here is how our models managed to predict the future multiple times”, but actually the final paragraph admits rather honestly “In general, there is no direct means of translating quantitative measures of past performance
into confident statements about fidelity of future climate projections. ” .
The foundation of real science is in publication of data, reproduction of results, and addressing criticisms honestly, fairly, and openly.
“Climate scientists” hide their data, don’t let others try to reproduce their results, and suppress criticism.
This is fundamental to the scientific method, and anyone – like the “climate science” community – who does not follow it does not deserve to be granted the honorable title “scientist”.
@Jay
“The foundation of real science is in publication of data, reproduction of results, and addressing criticisms honestly, fairly, and openly.”
So, why don’t the deniers do this? The climate scientists have opened up all data and all code. See the numerous links above.
You have an interesting definition of “all”. Many of the most important primary datasets were destroyed (at particularly convenient times, apparently right after official requests for them were made), and requests for both code and data have been flatly rejected by “researchers”, leading to FOIA lawsuits that were rejected because the courts said there’s no need for scientists to share their data or methods.
@Jay: ““Climate scientists” hide their data, don’t let others try to reproduce their results, and suppress criticism.”
Entirely incorrect. Your belief was never true and dates from 2009 in any case. It’s obsolete.
@Christopher Smith, same comment as applies to Jay. What you claim is entirely false. No data or datasets were “destroyed” – none. You’re thinking of McIntyre’s harassment of CRU’s Phil Jones, which was baseless and idiotic. I’ve provided links to some of the data that was supposedly “destroyed” or kept “hidden”; how can that be if what you believe is true?
@Christopher Smith
“leading to FOIA lawsuits that were rejected because the courts said there’s no need for scientists to share their data or methods.”
The idea that scientific data are the property of those who created them has been long held. It is part of the “property is sacred” and “intellectual property is even more sacred” mantra.
This has been destroyed in the recent decade. Now, you will not get your results published if you do not share your raw data in most (and the best) journals.
Now that you have visited all these links, are you publicly retracting your accusations of fraud?
Winter on 2015-01-02 at 09:59:47 said: “your ideology prevents you from accepting the science behind the AGW.”
—————————-
this thread is still going ?
Winter, you assume that there IS proper science behind AGW. I KNOW that there is not because I was a scientist involved in collecting some of that data. Lots of assumptions all the way around.
I You assume there is reliable data
The fallacies [concepts to understand = instrument observation limit, central limit theorem, variance vs sample size — do your homework and understand these]:
a) how can one discern the purported warming of point 8 degree C over the last century when one is only able to discriminate to the nearest 1 degree C at best for liquid in glass thermometers employed before the digital age ?
b) AGW proponents aggregate single grab samples taken over time as if they were replicates to assert the advantages of the central limit theorem (hereafter CLT) but ignore the requirements of that theorem like random sampling and sample independence. I won’t go into detail here but if/when you do, you will be very disappointed in the AGW scientists process & assumptions (NONE of the requirements of the CLT are met)
c) the AGW ‘scientists’ base their conclusions on surface station data drawn from ONE observation per day for MAX temp and one for MIN temp for the vast majority of samples over the vast majority of the sampling period. ANY honest scientist will tell you that the variance of a sample size of 1 is infinity and typically designated anecdotal data or a grab sample not usable for statistical analysis. But then they have a nerve to go ahead and use statistical analysis anyway.
II You assume there is scientific honesty and rigor in dealing with the process.
The whole climategate informs us that there is active dishonesty and the evidence like HARRYREADME.TXT informs us there is absolutely no rigorous collection, storage and analysis of the data. It’s Potemkin villages all the way down. Likewise, the antics of Mann’s hide the decline, hockey stick chart, etc demonstrate the intent to deceive.
I could go on for pages but like Potemkin villages, behind the facade of science there is too often NO science, only deception.
Homework
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_uncertainty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variance
Good morning Winter & Jeff Read.
It appears that the tools of memetic manipulation are well on display this morning.
Assert that you speak for others. Check
Big lie (we own the science and you don’t). Check
Everyone’s on our side (you evil outlier). Check
Climate modeling is accurate because. Check
The sky is falling, so we’re justified in controlling the world. Check
And the covert agenda, either join the herd or be exiled to the gulag (or worse).
It’s not climate change that you hate, it’s non cooperative individualists.
@BioBob, you’ve got the standard rejectionist memes down pat. They’re wrong.
You should look into the BEST project. Are you familiar with it?
http://www.berkeleyearth.org
What happens if one uses proxies other than tree rings to look at past temperatures? Does the “hockey stick” go away?
“What happens if one uses proxies other than tree rings to look at past temperatures? Does the “hockey stick” go away?”
We don’t know. Michael Mann is one of the worst for refusing to disclose his data and methods. He has repeatedly gone to court to keep them private. Personally, I’m hoping that the court in his lawsuit against Mark Steyn forces disclosure.
Until then, we’re left with the sole piece of code available, found in the Climategate record. That code – which Eric used to have on this very site – produces hockey sticks no matter what data it is fed.
@BioBob
“Winter, you assume that there IS proper science behind AGW. I KNOW that there is not because I was a scientist involved in collecting some of that data. Lots of assumptions all the way around.”
So, point out the false data? The data are all available. I also linked to the calculations of past emission versus current CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It fits.
@Jay, Mann is doing a very poor job of keeping the data hidden or secret.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets/climate-reconstruction
Have fun digging in.
The damage from Steyn’s lawsuit will fall entirely on his side.
It’s not Steyn’s lawsuit, it’s Mann’s. Mann sued Steyn after the latter compared the Penn State “investigation” of Mann’s work with the Penn State coverup of the Sandusky scandal.
And never mind that the lawsuit itself is a SLAPP, designed to silence critics. Why has Mann repeatedly gone to court to keep his data and code secret? If Steyn loses, but forces disclosure, we as a whole will have won.
@Jay, neither Mann’s code nor his data are secret. Sheesh.
But, like I said yesterday, your opinions are unswayed by the facts. Stay in your comfortable bubble. Enjoy.
So Mann didn’t go to court to fight a FOIA request for his code and data from the University of Virginia?
For a good overview of the Mann scandal and Penn State whitewash, see http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/09/18/climategate-star-michael-mann-courts-legal-disaster/ .
@Jay, I’ll leave you with this…
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
Gases do not spread through the atmosphere in “plumes” like solid particulates such as smoke and volcanic ash do.
>1. The tropical high-emission areas are much larger than the regions where slash-and-burn agriculture is practiced, and they’re the wrong shape – that is, not a core with a plume trailing in the direction of prevailing winds.
Since gases spread via random motion, aka diffusion, and since the RMS speed of random molecular motion of gases is several orders of magnitude greater than any wind up to and including cat 5 hurricanes, your expectation of seeing “plumes” following the winds is misinformed, as is the inference you made from that faulty premise.
>Since gases spread via random motion, aka diffusion, and since the RMS speed of random molecular motion of gases is several orders of magnitude greater than any wind up to and including cat 5 hurricanes, your expectation of seeing “plumes” following the winds is misinformed, as is the inference you made from that faulty premise.
This argument seems at least superficially plausible to me. But it collides with something I know from a different source, which is that if you take time series of CO2 measurements across the U.S. you find that air leaving the U.S. in the direction of prevailing winds is lower in CO2 than air entering the U.S.; that is, the U.S. is a net CO2 sink.
If diffusion of CO2 really overwhelms air-mass motion, I have trouble seeing how this kind of disequilibrium is possible.
>Since gases spread via random motion, aka diffusion, and since the RMS speed of random molecular motion of gases is several orders of magnitude greater than any wind up to and including cat 5 hurricanes, your expectation of seeing “plumes” following the winds is misinformed, as is the inference you made from that faulty premise.
If the air in which said gas is diffusing, is moving, then surely the diffusion, which is random(ish) will move in the direction of the air movement?
> Until then, we’re left with the sole piece of code available, found in the Climategate record. That code – which Eric used to have on this very site – produces hockey sticks no matter what data it is fed.
This is obviously false – it certainly doesn’t produce a hockey stick if fed its own opposite.
If fed flat data it produces a shape that you assert is a hockey stick, but no comment was made of this shape’s magnitude vs that of the actual “hockey stick”.
@esr
This whole OP is numerology. It is clear you have no idea what processes these numbers represent. You are building a castle in the clouds based on nothing but a snapshot of numbers.
As Jeff Read already wrote, this post is on track to become a poster case for the AGW camp to show how befuddled the thinking of the deniers is.
> This argument seems at least superficially plausible to me. But it collides with something I know from a different source, which is that if you take time series of CO2 measurements across the U.S. you find that air leaving the U.S. in the direction of prevailing winds is lower in CO2 than air entering the U.S.; that is, the U.S. is a net CO2 sink.
That also seems plausible, that the effect of wind could be detected, but my point is that it would require *much* higher resolution than a glance at a map.
When I try to explain Libertarian political ideas with unsuspected compatriots, they think I am pulling their leg.
How do you know it isn’t because you simply misrepresent Libertarian political ideas? You certainly don’t seem to understand them from your writings here… Or perhaps your compatriots don’t value others’ individual freedom as a means to securing their own?
@Paul Brinkley
I do not know whether the confusion is caused by my misrepresentation of Libertarianism. There simply are no models I can use. It is almost impossible to find anyone who tried to do that in Dutch.
Even trying to explain the Libertarian anti-state position gets hopelessly confused with the extreme left wing anarchism that was in vogue during the 1970s.
Now that is a good question – what is the best, easy-to-read libertarian classic that Winter might be able to find in Dutch, to give him a fair understanding of what it’s all about? Preferably public-domain and easy to obtain?
Me, I’d nominate Frederic Bastiat’s The Law (1850). It opens and ends with God, but it’s easy to ignore that part and it lays out the case for limited government pretty simply — limited, that is, to its legitimate functions, which is the only sense in which most libertarians I know are “anti-government.” It’s also a quick read, at least in English it is (and I imagine more so in the original French). English edition is free online here. German edition is free online here. Does anyone know if he made it into Dutch, or have a better suggestion?
@ Rodney McKay – “Since gases spread via random motion, aka diffusion, and since the RMS speed of random molecular motion of gases is several orders of magnitude greater than any wind”
I don’t know if there are many engineers on this blog, but allow me to clarify this topic.
Micro-scale Brownian motion of gas molecules is not the same as macro-scale diffusion in a large unconfined gas volume. In addition, gas properties and fugacity can result in a wide variation of net gas motion, but plume motion and macro diffusion are of similar range. This is well known and demonstrated in the modeling of hazardous vapor cloud releases in the petroleum and chemical processing industries.
## >Documentation?
http://judithcurry.com/2014/03/04/causes-and-implications-of-the-pause/
Money quote: “The most recent climate model simulations used in the AR5 indicate that the warming stagnation since 1998 is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level.” ##
I’ve been digging through that over the past few days, finding differences between claims that I haven’t had a chance to pin down as to sources. Definitely expect more on this from me later. BTW, RealClimate isn’t silent on Judith Curry and her claims, and they’re definitely more expert than either you or I. If you haven’t read their take on her stuff, you’re only listening to one side.
But since you’re claiming that this is a propaganda war, you ought to give some thought to the proposition that the fossil-fuel interests have been fighting it longer and harder (because they certainly have more money than the real competition they have, which would be the nuclear industry and little else; in the words of RFK Jr, “the plants that we’re building, the wind plants and the solar plants, are gas plants”). These few pages of “Merchants of Doubt” might shed some revealing light on the issue (I just read them over dinner myself):
https://books.google.com/books?id=CrtoNFTuPwwC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA204#v=onepage&f=false
One more comment and I must disappear into research again.
## Oh, and about nuclear energy. Calculate the total amount of energy that can be extracted by current nuclear technology.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/
“If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet’s economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.” ##
SciAm was never an honest broker on matters political even in the 80’s, and it has gone badly downhill since its purchase by a German publisher. To sum up a great deal of data in a few bullet points:
* The economic supply of uranium is strongly dependent on price. LEU fuel costs about 0.7¢/kWh, and only a small part of that is the cost of uranium. Doubling the price of uranium would not change the price of LEU fuel much, but would increase the size of the economic source by a very large factor.
* There is a ceiling price for land-based uranium mines when capture from seawater becomes cheaper. The oceans contain several billion tons of uranium, and rivers add another 32,000 tons or so every year.
* At some price point for uranium, fast-spectrum breeder reactors become more economic than reactors running on either LEU or natural uranium.
* Thorium is a fertile material for the production of U-233. Even light-water reactors can be net breeders of thorium to fissile uranium. The terrestrial abundance of Th is 3-4x as great as U, and it is currently an unwanted component of rare earth ores.
I started digging into the greenie complaints about high levels of radon in natural gas from the Marcellus shale. Radon is the decay daughter of radium, which is part of the decay chains of… uranium and thorium (though the thorium-derived isotope is too short-lived to get from well to customer). Briefly, high levels of radon in the gas mean the shale is full of uranium. This uranium could be extracted by in-situ leaching.
Given that 1 Curie of radium requires 1 Curie of U or Th to supply it, that allows a calculation of the amount of actinide in the shale. But I doubt that that is all that relevant to this discussion any more, so I’m going to search down other avenues of inquiry.
And now back into radio silence until I have something solid.
“..macro-scale diffusion in a large unconfined gas volume. In addition..”
That still doesn’t explain how it ‘prevents’ a plume, if you have a prevailing wind of X m/s in one direction, then in order for there to be no definable plume, the “macro-scale diffusion in a large unconfined gas volume” must exceed X by orders of magnitude. If you fart in a room, there’s a plume, if you fart in the wind, the plume heads downwind.
Gas diffusion is extremely slow. Distance goes as SQRT(T). What you probalbly mean is convective mixing.
Anyhow, before concluding that the scientists are all fraudulent morons, you could try to get the physics right.
@EngineerPoet
We need at least 100 times more nuclear fuel to validate a switch away from fossil fuels. All you showed were experimental an theoretical expansions that are even more expensive than what we have (where risks and decommissioning costs have been externalized to the tax payers).
So, why is nuclear energy a better option than solar energy that is already available, has no upper limit and is only becoming cheaper?
Nuclear energy doesn’t go away when the sun goes down or when the weather turns bad.
@Jay Maynard
You can indeed burn nuclear fuels day and night, until it is gone. And its gone in a few years. All nuclear fuel replacements are more expensive and often experimental at best.
I think you are too pesdimistic about the weather conditions in deserts. But the night are indeed sunless. That can be solved with storage. Big hydro power storage plant are entirely feasible. I doubt whether the capital costs are bigger than for breeder plants. Especially as solar energy comes with long distance HVDC networks so it will be rather easy to run them past suitable geography.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Oh, and if we all drive electrical cars, the owners can sell power from their batteries at night. That alone could cover most of night time demands.
@ Jim Richardson
As you have pointed out, plumes are driven by prevailing winds and other meteorological conditions. Diffusion and plume movement occur simultaneously. Models can be used to estimate plume dynamics, but it’s just an estimate. Nevertheless, if you have a toxic vapor cloud release from a railcar accident heading toward a nearby town, you will use this information to implement downwind evacuations.
@ Winter – “Gas diffusion is extremely slow.”
Depends on the gas and ambient conditions. A hydrogen leak diffuses rapidly and immediately forms an explosive mixture in the atmosphere. If you stand around smoking a cigarette waiting for it to diffuse, you very likely won’t be returning your genes to the gene pool any longer.
Uhm, if we drive electric cars and sell the batteries’ power at night, what will power the car during the day?
@Winter:
its gone in a few years. All nuclear fuel replacements are more expensive and often experimental at best.
If “experimental” means “has been used in commercial reactors generating power” (which all of the “replacements” other than thorium have), then I suppose you’re right. But it seems like a strange use of the word.
As for “gone in a few years”, it always amazes me how people who claim to know about physics don’t understand that a kilogram of nuclear fission fuel releases a hundred thousand times (five orders of magnitude) more energy when burned than a kilogram of chemical fuel. That alone should be enough for you to realize that claims that nuclear fuels will be “gone in a few years” are highly dubious.
In fact, what the research that those dubious claims are based on actually says is that nuclear fission fuels would run out on a time scale of years or decades if (a) we used nuclear fission for all of the world’s electricity, (b) we only used a once-through fuel cycle with no breeders, and (c) fuel prices stayed the same.
However, even if we accept (a), (b) would be stupid–breeders have already been used to produce commercial electricity, and reprocessing was only outlawed in the US because of misplaced concerns about proliferation–and anyway (b) really depends on (c)–as those same researchers will tell you. For example, the well-known report written by a team headed by MIT’s John Deutsch, which is widely quoted by anti-nuclear activists as saying that breeders are “uneconomical”, actually only says they’re uneconomical at current fuel costs; if fuel costs rise, the report specifically recommends switching to breeders. But fuel costs are obviously going to rise; as current fuel reserves are drawn down, the price will go up, and as the price goes up, it becomes economical to get uranium from other sources.
Furthermore, since, unlike with fossil fuel plants, the cost of fuel is only a small proportion of the operating cost of a nuclear plant (because of those five orders of magnitude), fuel costs could rise by a factor of 10 without raising operating costs much, and at a fuel cost 10 times higher, it’s economical to mine uranium from seawater, which gives us enough for millions of years.
(b) we only used a once-through fuel cycle with no breeders
I meant to add, “and without reprocessing spent fuel”.
@Peter Donis
“As for “gone in a few years”, it always amazes me how people who claim to know about physics don’t understand that a kilogram of nuclear fission fuel releases a hundred thousand times (five orders of magnitude) more energy when burned than a kilogram of chemical fuel.”
Are you suggesting there are that many kilograms of Uranium235?
I used the numbers fron the nuclear power industry and they say something different.
The aim is to replace all energy sources, not only current electricity.
“If “experimental” means “has been used in commercial reactors generating power” (which all of the “replacements” other than thorium have),’
I was not aware that nuclear fuels from seawater were already used comercially?
“Breeders”
I grew up not far from Kalkar Germany, where they build a fast breeder. It showed these breeders were horribly uneconomical (hence Kalkar was never powered up). They also become glowing radioactive over time. The same is true for spend nuclear fuel rod reprocessing plants in Le Havre and Windscale. These were expensive and dumped large amounts of nuclear waste in sea. The decomissioning costs of these reprocessing plants are so high that no one dares to close them.
And all this effort just so we do not have to use solar energy? Which becomes cheaper every year and never ends.
I still see no counterargument to the original numbers. The current practices of nuclear powee generation could not power the world for a single year. Current available technology will not extend that to a hundred years. The rest is much more expensive and complex.
Solar is here now and is only becoming cheaper. So why bother with nuclear power?
Solar energy is a boondoggle. How much of the deserts would you have to cover to supply enough energy to run everything, especially since you have to have enough collection capacity to not only power the world during the day but also build up a reserve in your pie-in-the-sky storage facilities to cover you not only for the next night, but also the next several days at a minimum in case the weather turns to suck? (Hint: sandstorms.)
Or will you use focused collection plants like the Ivanpah plant in the southwest US that not only is a major hazard to wildlife and air navigation, but also is not meeting its capacity plans and so isasking for yet more hundreds of millions in government bailouts?
Solar power is useful, but it’s not the be-all and end-all energy source. We need an all of the above energy policy. Fortunately, watermelons (you know, green on the outside, red on the inside) aren’t dictating the US’s energy policy, no matter how badly Barack Obama wants to change that.
@Jay Maynard
I have written out the calculations several times on this blog. You even commented on them:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2779#comment-287562
In total, 1.5 times the surface area of Germany (gross area) in the Sahara would be needed to supply a billion people with the energy needed for a German style industry & population use and more.
It is a lot, but spread out over the Sahara, it is not that much. And as you mostly need sand and energy to produce solar panels, that is available locally.
254 km x 254 km. Maybe even less when spread-spectrum PVs with 40% efficiency become widespread.
These calculations have been done. Winter linked them many, many times in the past. Buuuut, since you dismissed him entirely as a “commie”…
Nobody said the world’s solar panels all had to be built in one place.
And energy storage for solar and wind is also largely a solved problem. With coordinated effort, the big nuclear plant in the sky can be harnessed MUCH more cost-effectively than any plant we can build here on the ground. And it’s safer too.
The only reason we don’t is politics. Translation: money.
@Winter:
Are you suggesting there are that many kilograms of Uranium235?
Uranium is a few parts per million by mass of the Earth’s crust. U-235 is not the only fissionable isotope (if you use breeders, all U isotopes are useful), but even if we assume it is, U-235 is a little less than one percent of natural uranium, so let’s say there are ten parts per billion by mass of U-235 in the Earth’s crust. The mass of the Earth’s crust is, conservatively, a percent or so of the mass of the Earth, so call it 10^22 kilograms. You do the math.
As for cost, solar energy is getting “cheaper” (much of that is actually subsidies, not cost reductions, but let that pass) because technology is improving. Yet when we talk about improving nuclear technology, somehow that is going to make nuclear more expensive? I don’t get it.
I actually have no issue with solar power except the obvious one: it doesn’t work when it’s cloudy or at night. But that’s a big issue. Unless and until we have energy storage technology capable of bridging that gap, solar simply will not work as a baseload power source. That’s not to say we shouldn’t use it; it’s to say it can’t be our only source. So viewing the situation as a competition between solar and nuclear seems to me to be a bad idea: we should be pursuing both.
Batteries. Flywheels. Hydroelectric power storage. Molten salt. Power storage is a solved problem. We just need the initiative to apply the engineering we have at scale. As for cloudy days, those are rare in the desert; we can use HVDC transmission lines to get the power from the Sahara or Mojave to local distribution centers with very little loss.
There is NO reason not to start converting the world’s energy infrastructure to solar, NOW. Except for the usual, political ones and the entrenched players refusing to give up their dirty energy cash cows.
How many times must we repeat the same points over and over and over?
@Jeff Read:
Power storage is a solved problem. We just need the initiative to apply the engineering we have at scale.
Translation: power storage is a solved problem, except for the part that hasn’t been solved.
Once again: I’m not saying we shouldn’t be pursuing these things; I’m saying we shouldn’t be pursuing only these things.
“There is NO reason not to start converting the world’s energy infrastructure to solar, NOW. Except for the usual, political ones and the entrenched players refusing to give up their dirty energy cash cows.”
Get back to me when I can get an electric vehicle that will meet my mission requirements.
Or an electric airplane that will perform as all as a piston-powered gasoline/Jet A-diesel single.
> …plume motion and macro diffusion are of similar range. This is well known and demonstrated in the modeling of hazardous vapor cloud releases in the petroleum and chemical processing industries.
“Similar” is not “identical,” pollutants are most often particulates and aerosols rather than gases, and pollution dispersion models focus on the lower troposphere (“ground level” appears frequently in the literature). At the scale of an observation from orbit, the signal from “prevailing winds” is lost in the noise of random molecular motion — perhaps not undetectable with sophisticated numerical techniques, but certainly lost enough that we should not fully trust our naive intuition that we can spot it with the naked eye on a 5-color graph, which is the salient point to this discussion.
@ Rodney McKay – “pollutants are most often particulates and aerosols rather than gases”
Some previous comments not posted, so not sure if this will be allowed.
Actually, most EPA regulated atmospheric pollutants are gases. The main criteria pollutants included nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone, and now carbon dioxide. Same is true for the HAPs.
Also, plume dispersion can be observed from orbit. See volcanic eruptions, for example.
It will be a phased conversion. The low-hanging fruit will be addressed first — coal- and oil-fired power plants. For transport applications that do not readily convert to electric, we can replace fossil fuels with cleaner-burning synfuels that are produced with solar energy as an interim solution while we work on improving the efficiency of motors and batteries.
This change won’t happen overnight. It’s a Big Science project — like the space race. But the sooner we get started the better: the fate of the planet is literally hanging in the balance. In fact the best time to start is 20 or 30 years ago.
Sorry everybody, late to the discussion, but is there even a feasible hypothesis of biogenic oil production, which lies at the heart of the whole issue? I.e. why and how got so much biomass buried so deep, what drives that process? Coal is without question biogenic, but oil is not such a clear-cut a case. Is this a one-way process, biomass gets buried and the carbon trapped until humans drill it out, so can we assume there was a point far back in time when all that trapped carbon was part of the carbon cycle? How hot was the the Earth back then? Is it possible that if we extract it and burn it into the athmosphere, it will will just create a new carbon-cycle equilibrium – basically, CO2 concentrations “fertilizing” the athmosphere so we get more and bigger plants and then it is the usual cycle again?
” We banned DDT, and now bird eggshells are no longer thinning.”
“Many experiments on caged-birds demonstrate that DDT and its metabolites (DDD and DDE) do not cause serious egg shell thinning, even at levels many hundreds of times greater than wild birds would ever accumulate.”
http://junkscience.com/1999/07/26/100-things-you-should-know-about-ddt/#ref6
With plenty of references.
@Winter
>It must be relatively straightforward to come up with a state-free solution to the AGW problem.
Essentially the only state-free solutions to ANY _coordination_ _problem_ are 1) voluntary cooperation 2) private property 3) random violence.
1) Tends to happen emotionally – from hysterical war-monging and nationalist propaganda to disaster panics or compassionate outburts, like fundraising campaings for the needy. No such thing was ever properly global. I cannot see any emotion, most likely a warming-panic type emotion, uniting the whole planet. Libertarian resistance is dwarfed by the much more serious _nationalist_ resistance of Russia, China etc.
2) Private property is a decent solution, the root of all civilization, but it only works if the thing in question is “propertiable”. That is not a word, but needs to be. By “propertiable” I mean something that can be “fenced in”, with clear borders whose violation is easily proven at a court of law. This is one of the hardest problems in civilization-building. It is so hard that even modern property rights are driven by the ancient and greatly outdated idea that land is what matters most, that piece of dirt forms the basis of property. It is horribly outdated, it is a relic from the age when most money came from agriculture but still alive simply because it is the easiest thing to clearly determine and prove.
3) …
> plume dispersion can be observed from orbit. See volcanic eruptions, for example
Volcanic ash is an example I used in my first comment, as the source of our naive intuition about plumes. Ash and smoke plumes, and by definition all visible plumes, are composed of small solid particles, not gases.
Pollution diffusion models incorporate both diffusion (random molecular motion) and advection (prevailing winds) terms because both can be relevant. That is not in question. The point is that we cannot trust our naive intuitions (in this case, the intuition that gases must move exactly the same as visible, solid particulates such as smoke and ash) so much that we dismiss valid scientific findings when a glance at a map shows us something unexpected. Science is about testing our intuitions skeptically and empirically, not taking our evolved intuitions at face value.
And many other experiments show just the opposite. Wikipedia has plenty of citations and even a mechanism of action; and leaving aside eggshells, it is known that DDT is a persistent organochlorine pesticide which doesn’t break down, is readily fat soluble (so bioaccumulates in the fat of animals all along the food chain), and is — wait for it — an endocrine disruptor, linked to for example genital disfigurement and feminized development of male Florida alligators.
There is plenty enough to recommend the stringent regulation of widespread agricultural spraying of DDT, if not its outright ban. In places where malaria is a problem, DDT is approved for use as a vector control measure (for example spraying indoors to control mosquitoes). So this business of “environmentalists are taking away effective malaria control with the DDT ban” is the bunk that needs to be debunked here.
“In places where malaria is a problem, DDT is approved for use as a vector control measure (for example spraying indoors to control mosquitoes). So this business of “environmentalists are taking away effective malaria control with the DDT ban” is the bunk that needs to be debunked here.”
Uhm, the second statement does not follow from the first unless the approved uses of DDT are effective in controlling malaria-bearing mosquitoes.
linked to for example genital disfigurement and feminized development of male Florida alligators.
Sunday, January 4th 2015: The day Jeff Read used the word “feminized” seriously.
Break out the champagne!
> The African one is especially problematic – if that was produced by biomass combustion it would extend north to the edge of the Sahel.
Unfortunately, no, that observation also does not overturn the science. That is just the plant life around the equator being non-seasonal, which you can plainly see all around the Earth around the same latitudes, not only in the Sahel.
> …unless the approved uses of DDT are effective in controlling malaria-bearing mosquitoes.
What, all by themselves? There are other malaria-control measures available. Some of them aren’t toxic. In malaria outbreak regions, there are more causes than lack of DDT, such as lack of mosquito nets and excessive habitats and breeding grounds for mosquitos, notably in stockpiled used tires waiting for export or recently imported. The other fellow already acknowledged that there are times and places for DDT. Why not meet halfway, and agree that toxins should not be used when there are effective alternatives?
@Don
> B) in general warmer weather is better for life in general
Generally I am with you, but this made me shudder. What is better for life in general tends to be worse for high-quality human life. Compare life in Denmark with life in Congo. Not the economics or politics, just the natural aspect. It seems that really fertile life in general in Congo is trying hard to kill humans or make human lives miserable, while the comparatively life-hostile environment – grass, wheat, cows and not much else – environment of Denmark makes it a great place for humans to thrive and build decent civilizations.
So, please don’t use this specific argument. Life in the tropics isn’t pleasant nor safe at all, humans need to struggle against all that life-in-general.
Romantic views aside – we in the moderate climates may have forgotten that nature is an enemy, but they down in the tropics didn’t. More life-in-general just means more things to fight. The boring places where not much grows and lives, and therefore humans can make more or less sure only those things live whose life is easily reconcilable with human civilization, work better for us.
Having spent most of my life in Austria and Hungary, I enjoyed the privilege of basically nothing in nature trying to kill me. No poisonous snakes, no scorpions, no bears or lions or wolves etc. This is why not having too much life-in-general is a feature, not a bug.
The image that you linked to is a map of CO2 concentration. It doesn’t tell us anything about how that CO2 got there: it could be from vehicles, fires, factories, farm animals, and, yes, even vegetation. Depending upon the season and environmental conditions, vegetation (such as the Amazon rain forest) can act as either a source or sink.
For once, I find this argument against AGW somewhat persuasive.
But, even more than writing about AGW pro-vs-con, I’d like to see you write about why science has failed us on this subject. The scientific method is supposed to /prevent/ religious thinking.
>But, even more than writing about AGW pro-vs-con, I’d like to see you write about why science has failed us on this subject.
Error cascade: A definition and examples.
@Shawn
“The scientific method is supposed to /prevent/ religious thinking.”
And so it did. The fact that various ideological and interest groups outside science cannot live with the findings is not something science could solve.
> And so it did.
That’s not true. At the level of the entire human race, the scientific method has failed to present the result that you and Eric Raymond believe is the correct one.
You can sit alone and say “la la la la science disproves AGW” but most of the scientific community is ignoring you.
This is the question I’m trying to raise to Eric’s attention: How is the scientific method any different from a popularity contest? (And in the case of AGW, a popularity contest your side has resoundingly lost.)
An thought-provoking read, one that I do remember from 2010. Pretty good until this part at the end:
A typical STEM error! “Science” doesn’t happen until a human being does a test and interprets the evidence. Mother Nature/God doesn’t have a vote.
Sometimes two people look at the same evidence and see different conclusions.
Science most certainly does work by consensus, and that is why I compared it to a popularity contest.
“Sometimes two people look at the same evidence and see different conclusions…. Science most certainly does work by consensus, and that is why I compared it to a popularity contest.”
To see the way in which this argument is wrong, it may help best to see how it is likely seen by the other side. To rephrase it: “…for example, if we see an apple fall from a tree, a lead pellet fall from my hand, and rocks falling even after we throw them upward, we can still insist that something other than a force toward the center of the earth is at work, if only we can get enough men of learning to sign a petition.”
@Shawn
Sorry, but I am convinced science presented all the evidence any reasonable person would need to decide AGW is real. So I think humans are causing a change in climate.
@esr
The OP shows you really have no idea about the science behind CO2 rises in the atmosphere. This makes me even more convinced that your “error cascade” is in your own reasoning. You simply have shown you do not understand enough of the science behind climate change to be able to evaluate whether there would be an error cascade.
If one person sees an apple fall to the ground, while another person sees it fly up into the sky, science has a problem.
Obviously a real apple is too simple an example for anyone sane to disagree about. (See also: the definition of the word “fact”.)
But here we have a case where Eric Raymond and Winter see the apple (AGW) falling in completely different directions. Science does not clearly tell us what to do to resolve this case. Something is missing from the philosophy.
(In an earlier post I previously mistook Winter’s position as agreeing with Eric’s.)
>Science does not clearly tell us what to do to resolve this case. Something is missing from the philosophy.
No, all you have to do is notice that Winter’s side has failed to predict the behavior of the real atmosphere, the one that exists outside their computer simulations. The smoking gun is that GAT is outside the 95% confidence range of the IPCC model sheaf. No amount of talk or tapdancing can make that reality go away.
Has anyone predicted the behavior of the real atmosphere?
>Has anyone predicted the behavior of the real atmosphere?
I have.
In early 2008 at the beginning of the grand solar minimum, I predicted that GAT would follow insolation down rather than CO2 levels up. The theory behind this prediction was that at the ppm levels of CO2 in the real atmosphere, variations in insolation easily swamp the effects of the last century’s changes in CO2 level.
That prediction was correct. The plunge in GAT wiped out the entire global-warming signal since 1750.
This is how you do science. You make a prediction based on a generative theory of the phenomenon, then confirm or disconform the theory based on observation. Much less complicated than the bizarre numerological voodoo the IPCC engages in (the technical term is “overfitting”). Much more effective.
This is why I just laugh when true-believers like Winter accuse me of not knowing the science. Wake me up when they actually predict the behavior of the real atmosphere rather than issuing a blizzard of the-dog-ate-my-homework excuses for their continuing failure.
But I do note your answer to my apple challenge is something like: get better evidence.
An impressive data point. I’m of course inclined to take it seriously based on your ethics and on your proven abilities in other areas.
But that is a character judgement. I’m not personally familiar enough with climate science to fully understand the evidence you are describing, much less validate or debunk it.
Science is a decision-making philosophy. Decision-making is a human, mental activity.
I note your point about predictive power, but what do you do after you say “eureka”, when someone comes along and says “that doesn’t prove anything, you just got lucky with a coincidence/your evidence is inconclusive”?
It would be nice if everyone was smart enough and educated enough to understand your evidence, but I’m wondering how to persuade unbelievers about complicated conclusions they likely won’t understand in detail.
>I note your point about predictive power, but what do you do after you say “eureka”, when someone comes along and says “that doesn’t prove anything, you just got lucky with a coincidence/your evidence is inconclusive”?
One thing anyone can do is check to see if the someone applies the same critical standards to the side he is aligned with.
This is why the incompetence of the IPCC models is devastating to the AGW case. The IPCC has failed its own standard of evidence; we don’t even have to get into the issues about fudged data, refusal to comply with FOIA requests, or the problems with the physical assumptions of the models.
(Is reputation the only way?)
> One thing anyone can do is check to see if the someone applies the same critical standards to the side he is aligned with.
There’s a fine point I was half missing. When I’ve heard you talk about their bad models, I kept thinking, who cares, nobody cares about weather models because they aren’t very good long-term due to the butterfly effect. But you are saying they care.
They care about what their crap models are saying because they have poor decision-making standards, and that is a reputational red flag.
>They care about what their crap models are saying because they have poor decision-making standards, and that is a reputational red flag.
Right. Another red flag is that rather than fess up to the implications, they change the subject. “The missing heat is vanishing into the oceans!” they cry, hoping you won’t notice that the models didn’t predict that and even if it’s true the models are are still falsified.
So what we have going now is frantic spinning. All the talk of “hidden heat”, ENSO, Atlantic Wave, El Ninos and such is semantically equivalent to “Look! A squirrel!”
As Winter has recently conceded, climate characteristics are estimated using long duration time increments (25 year averaging intervals or longer). Given this, a reasonable (i.e. statistically useful) appraisal of model accuracy will likely require at least a century of data, analysis, and evaluation. In addition, given the vast spacial dimensions of the oceans and atmosphere, the data pool is still very sparse and suspect. And we are still a very long way from knowing if we even have a comprehensive understanding of all the major elements of climate interaction. As an example, cloud behavior is still a poorly understood factor with major chaotic implications.
It is astondingly arrogant to assert that climate science is mature and accurate.
> I have.
>
> In early 2008 at the beginning of the grand solar minimum, I predicted that GAT would follow
> insolation down rather than CO2 levels up. The theory behind this prediction was that at the
> ppm levels of CO2 in the real atmosphere, variations in insolation easily swamp the effects of
> the last century’s changes in CO2 level.
>
> That prediction was correct. The plunge in GAT wiped out the entire global-warming signal
> since 1750.
I can’t reconcile this story with the actual data from that period. Wasn’t the solar cycle already at its minimum in early 2008? So isn’t the 2008 plunge better explained by that year’s La Niña event?
And what do you mean with the comparison to 1750? 2008 was a cold year for the 2000’s, but in any other decade during the instrumental period it would have been warm. 1750 was in the middle of the little ice age.
As far as the OP goes, it’s worth comparing the observatory results to NASA’s modelling. The CO2’s where you’d expect it to be given the time of year.
>I can’t reconcile this story with the actual data from that period. Wasn’t the solar cycle already at its minimum in early 2008? So isn’t the 2008 plunge better explained by that year’s La Niña event?
I made the prediction on the General Technics list on 20 March 2008. Here’s the actual text:
I misremembered slightly. I offered the bet well into the grand minimum, not before it started.
On 19 August I followed up:
A year later nobody even tried to argue that I hadn’t predicted correctly.
>And what do you mean with the comparison to 1750?
I mean that at the coolest point of the grand solar minimum measured GAT had crashed to levels not seen since the Little Ice Age. I didn’t think this would last, since it was so obviously related to solar variation and I expected the Sun to climb out of its trough.
Which datasets were you using? The usual ones don’t show that particular story:
e.g. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod/from:2008/to:2009/offset:-1365/scale:4/plot/gistemp/from:2008/to:2009
But given the expected lags in greenhouse response and the magnitude of high frequency variations I wouldn’t expect any prediction over that sort of time frame to have statistical skill anyway.
I find this claim to be quite extraordinary. 2008 was warm relative to the 20th century, and we don’t have GAT measurements going back to 1750.
>Which datasets were you using?
I don’t have the pointer any more, but it was probably Roy Spencer’s overlay of HADCRUT with the satellite troposphere measurements.
>2008 was warm relative to the 20th century, and we don’t have GAT measurements going back to 1750.
No. But we have the warmists’ own historical climate reconstructions.
On 6 March 2014 I followed up with this:
To my complete un-surprise, none of the AGW partisans took that bet either. A shame – I would have enjoyed taking their money.
(Sorry, formatting glitches above)
But the HadCRUT and UAH records are available at the same link, and they don’t have temperature following insolation during that time period either.
The reconstructions show 1750 to be colder than the 20th century though, and the instrumental record shows the 20th century (except the big El Niño in 98) to be colder than 2008.
Maybe you had your reasons for thinking you got that prediction right, but I’m not seeing any data that backs it up. At any rate, the relationship doesn’t hold up over longer periods.
>But the HadCRUT and UAH records are available at the same link, and they don’t have temperature following insolation during that time period either.
Damn. Now I’m going to have to dig. I remember what the graph looked like – and I remember that it shut the alarmists on that list right the fuck up. I’ll poke around on Roy Spencer’s website.
>At any rate, the relationship doesn’t hold up over longer periods
We don’t get solar minima that deep very often, and the resolution of the measurements is poor. It doesn’t surprise me that the relationship is invisible (or at least deniable) until insolation wanders out of the normal band. And about the relationship not holding up, you really think the timing of the Little Ice Age with respect to the Maunder Minimum was mere coincidence?
I don’t think anyone’s saying that solar output doesn’t have an effect on temperature. And the Maunder minimum is long and deep enough that you can see the influence. But on any given timescale you have to look at the effect of all the relevant variables simultaneously – solar output, greenhouse concentrations, ENSO fluctuations etc.
Give or take a few volcanoes, temperature has tracked solar output pretty closely, right up to the time (late 20th century) when increasing greenhouse concentrations made CO2 a relevant factor.
>right up to the time (late 20th century) increasing greenhouse concentrations made CO2 a relevant factor.
I don’t think it’s established that CO2 is relevant enough.
Yes, yes, I know all about the physics of greenhousing. Mild, direct CO2 greenhousing I buy; it’s the wacky nonlinear coupling to H2O greenhousing I don’t believe in. The models in which that drives high climate sensitivity are the ones that are failing more grossly by the month.
Here’s another prediction: if you take a GCM and zero out that coupling, it will track measured GAT more closely than anything in the IPCC model sheaf.
I don’t think you can legitimately zero out that coupling though. More water vapour in warmer air is a fairly basic consequence of the kinetic theory of gases — it’s harder for a gas to condense if its molecules are moving faster. What’s wacky about that?
>What’s wacky about that?
For one thing, it ignores second-order effects that may be homeostatic, like increased cloud albedo.
My big problem with the GCMs is that they invent coupling constants for these processes that aren’t physically justified, then over-fit to very noisy, sparse, and sometimes outright corrupted data. They might as well be casting oracle bones; even if they got a decent predictive match it would be coincidence.
It’s not like you have to choose between including first and second order effects though. Why would you not allow water vapour to increase with temperature, given that basic high-school physics tells you that that’s what happens?
>It’s not like you have to choose between including first and second order effects though. Why would you not allow water vapour to increase with temperature, given that basic high-school physics tells you that that’s what happens?
It’s one thing to know, qualitatively, that such an effect can occur. It’s another thing entirely to pull a coupling constant out of your ass, without measurement or physical justification. There are way too many numbers in the GCMs that like that, essentially arbitrary bugger factors.
Note that when I predict better fit from zeroing out that coupling, I’m not actually denying in principle that such coupling ever occurs, merely that its effects are negligible in comparison with other features of the GCM or checked by emergent negative feedback. Indeed, the measured data are forcing the IPCC itself to this conclusion – or so I think we can reasonably deduce from the way their ECS estimates keep dropping.
I don’t buy the whole overfitting thing. There aren’t enough degrees of freedom to fit the models to the late 20th century warming without including anthropogenic carbon emissions, so I don’t see that adding one more thing is going to suddenly tip them into overfitting,
I don’t think water vapour is one of those parametrised processes in a full scale GCM anyway though. It’s not like the evaporation and condensation of water is a particularly mysterious phenomenon.
I know that you have to parametrise water vapour in simpler models: but in this case they’re adjusting the humidity downwards to take into account drying due to circulation. But I’d be very surprised if a GCM got something as basic as water vapour feedback wrong.
>There aren’t enough degrees of freedom to fit the models to the late 20th century warming without including anthropogenic carbon emissions,
So what? Nobody serious is disputing either the existence or the approximate volume of those emissions. It’s not at that step that the major error enters. It’s at the step from anthropogenic emissions to high ECS via CO2/H20 coupling that I believe the models go wrong, and therefore predict a GAT trend much, much higher than the measured data.
That’s why I predict that zeroing that coupling will give a better fit to measurements. Certainly something in the GCMs is producing lousy predictions that are way too high; that is no longer really disputable. Do you have an alternate candidate?
The failings of climate models have been greatly exaggerated (if you made a bet with Hansen in the 80’s you would have lost). The basic prediction — temperature increase — has held up.
If you look at the areas where the models are weak (e.g. early to mid 20th C, tropical Pacific), incorrect water vapour feedback doesn’t seem like a plausible candidate. Since we’re speculating, I’d guess that the most likely culprit is insufficient spatial resolution to reproduce ENSO.
>The basic prediction — temperature increase — has held up.
The CRU itself is on record as admitting this is not true. GAT has been statistically flat for over a decade now. And has, I remind you, fallen out of the 95% model confidence range.
But let’s suppose this weren’t true. How would you propose to tease out the anthropogenic component? We know there natural drivers like Milankovich cycles. Until you have a detailed and generative theory that is better than handwaving about ENSO and actually predicts observed behavior to with 95% confidence, you wouldn’t have a prayer of estimating the relative weights.
@esr
“How would you propose to tease out the anthropogenic component? We know there natural drivers like Milankovich cycles.”
You do not seem to read the information given to you. It has been pointed out several times to you that the Milankovich cycles are irrelevant on decade time scales. Also, they have been included in climate models as these are also used for (paleo)historic modeling.
@esr
“GAT has been statistically flat for over a decade now.”
The increase in global average temperature over the last few decades has no precedent in historical temperature records. 2014 is the hottest year ever recorded. So, if there are non-anthropogenic causes for the increase in heat, they are larger than have been experienced in the last two centuries, and they are very well hidden. This is about a lot of heat gone unseen. Show me the data. Where can we measure it?
Oh, and the “missing” heat was found. Ocean water has been measured to increase in temperature. The “missing” heat is simply transported by the oceans. That has been known since last summer. I even posted links to the relevant papers back then. A link to a newspaper article has been linked above.
Your criticism of the H2O feedback has never addressed the calculations and measurements on which it is based. It is just hand-waving. It does sound like grasping at straws.
@esr
“Until you have a detailed and generative theory that is better than handwaving about ENSO and actually predicts observed behavior to with 95% confidence, you wouldn’t have a prayer of estimating the relative weights.”
That is a straw man. Not being able to predict future global temperatures down to the decimal is unrelated to the question whether our CO2 emissions will heat up the climate. Just as our inability to predict the precise air temperature in your street on 1 August is unrelated to the question of whether it will be warmer than on 1 January (reverse if you live on the Southern Hemisphere).
>That is a straw man.
Winter, shut up while adults are talking. Your ignorance is wearying.
@esr
“Winter, shut up while adults are talking. Your ignorance is wearying.”
Hm, that is not exactly a reply addressing the substance of my message.
And regarding ignorance, you should do something about the OP. Your treatment of forest CO2 emissions is setting an example of ignorance in climate research that will be hard to beat. I can see people bookmarking it for when they have to show how misdirected AGW deniers are.
Oh… i was reading something on Dr Roy Spencer’s site about that.
Not in the last 36 years it ain’t. That would be 1998.
“Not being able to predict future global temperatures down to the decimal is unrelated to the question whether our CO2 emissions will heat up the climate.”
Nobody’s saying that. However, what Eric is saying (and that I agree with) is that the entire basis of the CAGW cult is the models that predict runaway warming – and those models are BUSTED. They don’t even predict the present, never mind the future. If the entire basis for the cult is a series of elaborate lies, why should we believe anything the cult has to say about the future, never mind acceding to its demands about what to do about it?!
Heh. From Dr. Spencer’s post linked above:
“Compared to seasonal norms, the coldest annual average temperature on Earth throughout 2014 was just south of Wilmar, Minnesota. The average 2014 temperature there was –1.27 C (about 2.29 degrees F) colder than normal.”
I should note here that that spot is just over 100 miles from where I live.
@JonCB
“Oh… i was reading something on Dr Roy Spencer’s site about that.”
Nature begs to differ:
2014 was the hottest year on record
http://www.nature.com/news/2014-was-the-hottest-year-on-record-1.16674
Also gives a lot of rebukes for other myths embraced here.
@Jay Maynard
“However, what Eric is saying (and that I agree with) is that the entire basis of the CAGW cult is the models that predict runaway warming – and those models are BUSTED.”
Sorry but this is close to bad faith deception, or maybe it simply is bad faith deception.
Nowhere in the IPCC reports or the scientific literature is the idea promoted that we are on track for runaway warming. You and many others here are claiming a choice of: there is no global warming, or if there is, it is not caused by an increase in CO2 levels, or if it is, this is not caused by humans.
The whole “runaway global warming” is not part of earth climate science and most certainly not part of the IPCC predictions.
Winter, go read Dr. Spencer’s article. He cites to his source, the temperature studies at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, the most widely accepted set of temperature data out there. He even links to the files.
You left out a fourth tenet: that even if the globe is warming, the results will not be the catastrophe that the warmists are claiming. That’s why it’s CAGW: the C is for catastrophic.
Nevertheless, there is solid argument for all four cases. The Earth’s temperature is simply not climbing in the face of CO2 increases; the models that claim to show that CO2 increases drive GAT are thoroughly busted; there are many other causes for temperature rise besides human activity; and, historically, warmer temperatures lead to greater prosperity, not catastrophe.
As for runaway warming, what else would you call the doomsday predictions that we will reach a tipping point beyond which the rise in temperatures cannot be controlled? This is a central belief of the CAGW cult.
But on any given timescale you have to look at the effect of all the relevant variables simultaneously – solar output, greenhouse concentrations, ENSO fluctuations etc.
All too true, maybe we should inform the climate scientists.
@Jay Maynard
“Nevertheless, there is solid argument for all four cases.”
For all four there is solid science that they AGW is real and getting costly. Links are scattered around this threat. There is nothing countering this science here nor elsewhere. All the same level of ignorance as the OP misanalysis of the CO2 data,
@esr, “That prediction was correct. The plunge in GAT wiped out the entire global-warming signal since 1750.”
No, it did not. This is from Berkeley Earth, land-only.
http://static.berkeleyearth.org/img/decadal-comparison-small.png
@Jay, “there are many other causes for temperature rise besides human activity”
On decadal timescales? Examples?
pwatow: Consider the Medieval Warm Period, as one example. Or are you one of the artists who just ignores that in the hope that it will go away?
…damn autocorrect…
pwatwo: Consider the Medieval Warm Period, as one example. Or are you one of the warmists who just ignores that in the hope that it will go away?
> No, all you have to do is notice that Winter’s side has failed to predict the behavior of the real atmosphere…
Whereas your side has not even made the attempt.
> The smoking gun is that GAT is outside the 95% confidence range of the IPCC model sheaf.
Barely, and only recently, and still the best model available.
> No amount of talk or tapdancing can make that reality go away.
@Jay, the MWP was not a global *and* synchronous phenomenon.
There’s also the logical flaw in the “it’s all natural” argument; analogously, that lightning can cause fires does not mean there’s no such thing as arson.
If the rejectionists can come up with a theory that better explains the observations than anthropogenic-CO2-driven climate change, that would quite an accomplishment. So far, they’re batting .000.
It’s the Sportsball 2014 Grand Final. The sport scientists make their predictions:
Scientists: Home Team will win, by 10–12 points.
Armed and Dangerous: Meh, your models are nonsense, Away Team will win.
The game is played, Home Team wins by 8 points.
Scientists: Our models worked, but they need to be improved.
Armed and Dangerous: We were right! Your models are completely busted! The score was outside your 95% prediction interval! Away Team won!
They can beg to differ all they like. The data says they’re wrong. They quote the same average temperature (+0.27deg) that Dr Spencer gets which is colder than 1998.
Now what i think JMA(nature’s source, since nature is just a tabloid) ACTUALLY said was 2014 was the hottest “El Nino neutral” year . This is probably a valid statement but then people aren’t SAYING that, they’re saying “oh 2014 is the hottest year” which is false.
@JonCB: UAH is a satellite record, you’re looking at the lower troposphere temperatures. 2014 didn’t beat that record.
2014 is the hottest year on record for surface temperature, which is surprising because you usually need an El Niño event to do that.
“> No, all you have to do is notice that Winter’s side has failed to predict the behavior of the real atmosphere…
Whereas your side has not even made the attempt.”
Not required. The burden of proof lies with the CAGW side.
Or, to put it in simpler terms, I don’t have to eat a shit sandwich to know it’s bad.
“@Jay, the MWP was not a global *and* synchronous phenomenon.”
Bzzt, wrong. See this study out of China. (Via Power Line.)
Comparing every year to 1998 is disingenuous and silly. Suppose 2014 turns out not to have been quite as warm as 1998 when all the numbers are crunched. There still have not been any below average years for three decades. And there certainly should be some events below average in the absence of a trend, or even in the presence of a weak trend.
There hasn’t even been one month since 1985 that wasn’t warmer than average!
All of the ten warmest years on record have occurred between 1998 and now.
The year 2013 ties with 2003 as the fourth warmest year globally since records began in 1880.
esr: No, all you have to do is notice that Winter’s side has failed to predict the behavior of the real atmosphere…
me: Whereas your side has not even made the attempt.”
Jay Maynard: Not required. The burden of proof lies with the CAGW side.
We’re not in court son. In science, everybody who wishes to advance a hypothesis must provide evidence in the form of a testable model that makes predictions. It isn’t the fault of “the warmists” as you like to call them, that you lot haven’t bothered. What’s your excuse? Is the programming too hard for you?
I don’t have to advance my own model to point out that the existing models, on which all the “science” is based, are completely busted.
In science, admitting you have no answer is better than contending you do when it’s demonstrably broken.
@Jay: Do you not see the irony of trying to demonstrate a global synchronous MWP by showing us a study of temperatures in just one place?
The argument against the global synchronous MWP was that it was a regional thing in Europe. Now, when it’s shown to have been in Asia at the same time, you object?
Re “demonstrably broken,” just under 95% is still pretty good, and until somebody can do better this will just have to do. Fact is, the best model we have is the best model we have. As to the opinion, whether a model with slightly less than 95% confidence is adequate to make public policy until we have a better model, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Moving on…
“Winter, go read Dr. Spencer’s article. He cites to his source, the temperature studies at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, the most widely accepted set of temperature data out there. He even links to the files.”
Can you explain what is objectively better about Roy Spencer’s data than other sources?
> The argument against the global synchronous MWP was that it was a regional thing in Europe. Now, when it’s shown to have been in Asia at the same time, you object?
That’s not the argument. Mann’s reconstruction for example shows warmth in the MWP in the North Pacific, South Atlantic, North America, Europe, and East Asia, but with colder Equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans. That’s widespread warming, but it’s not enough to match the global warmth we’ve seen this decade.
“Can you explain what is objectively better about Roy Spencer’s data than other sources?”
Ask the warmists who cite the UAH data as authoritative.
@Jay, since both UAH and RSS use the same satellite data, how come they’re different from each other, and, Spencer says that RSS suffers from “spurious cooling”?
Note that RSS is a favorite of AGW rejectionists.
PS – I’m dubious of any study involving Willie Soon, since his past efforts in climate have been shown to be, to put in kindly, chock-full of errors, and, he has admitted to taking considerable sums from the fossil-fuel industry. Besides, that’s one place.
Jay, if you can’t do the math just say so. There’s no shame in admitting your limits, only in denying them.
@pwatwo:
If you measure 14C:12C ratios you find that the extra CO2 has to come from below ground sources protected from cosmic rays.
So putting the two ratios together, it has to be fossil fuel burning.
Compare the linked map with google earth. The Mato Grosso is largely ag and Katanga is ag/mining. Serious rainforest is to the north.
One more point:
The variations on this map are trivial compared to historical data. 2014 was the year when 400ppm was registered at Mauna Kea. The scale on the linked map registers 387 to 402.5 ppm with much of the world’s land surface appearing to be in at least the mid-390s. This is up from ~378 ppm in 2004 and a pre-industrial value of ~280 ppm. Pre-IR there was a lot more forest – both rain and temperate – then now. If the source of all this co2 has plant origins, why wasn’t pre-IR levels higher?
“2014 will be the hottest year on record”
That’s just because it’s hot now, compared to when records began. But not necessarily compared to medieval times.
About the rain forest, I was taught in school that the rain forest is the lungs of the planet. But now it seems obvious that the animals in the rain forest eat the plants and exhale CO2. It’s a cycle. The rain forest is just the lungs of the rain forest. Plants just temporarily store carbon.
It seems likely high concentration of CO2 in an area is at least partly explained by a high *turnover* of CO2. If there are more plants and more animals, then the rate of exchange of carbon between them will be higher and there will be more in the pipe connecting them (the air).
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/envirophilo/cookpalmer.pdf . . .
You can add New Zealand to the MWP . . .
“The New Zealand temperature reconstruction supports the global occurrence of the MWP.”
That paper shows that the “hockey team” have been actively looking for and measuring the MWP, rather than trying to hide it as some people claim.
Quote from that paper:
The current warming is more uniform, so on average it’s warmer now than it was in the MWP.
Pumpkin
Much amusing .. . . . and there is more to it than you can become aware
in less than a few weeks, it wasn’t you i was hoping would step in it tho . . .
Might take you a while , , , , ( warning, reality contains a straw man)
http://climateaudit.org/2014/12/04/sheep-mountain-update/ . . .
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/06/manns-tree-ring-proxy-train-wreck/ . . .
Sea level rise before , during, after, Little Ice Ages and Multiple Warm periods . . Depending on Era of construction Roman Harbors are dry and the water has receded away from them, others are under water.
Its not a simple matter to determine which is due to sea level change, and which is due to subsidence or uplift, places with long term geological stability are quite rare.
Its this rare geological stability that makes Australia a good place for sea level measurements in combination with their long term record reaching back 100 years
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/sea-level/sea-level-australia-new-zealand-rate-change-watson.gif . . .
This graph goes back to the 1880s. showing warming and rising seas
continuing out of the last Little Ice Age http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png . . .
(Sea level change rates line up with the AMO )
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/sea-level/sea-level-australia-new-zealand-rate-change-watson.gif . . .
Two views of the AMO
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/mann14_1_amo_noaa_kaplansst2.png . .
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ustorprobs.png . .
The 70s trough … ” .70s ice age scare period”
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/1970s-ice-age-scare/ . . .
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013_02_01_archive.html . . .
The 98 Peak . . . . ” Peak of global warming hoax period”
Over the AMO hump, what will they call the slide to the next trough ?
The Al Gore Man-bear-pig minimum ? (south park)
Too bad we dont have a graph of “puckerd prune faced warming hoaxer groupies”
///… Ancient Forest Thaws From Melting Glacial Tomb
http://www.livescience.com/39819-ancient-forest-thaws.html . . .
Sep 20, 2013 – A retreating glacier in Alaska has revealed an ancient forest of what … …///
///… An ancient forest has thawed from under a melting glacier in Alaska and is now exposed to the world for the first time in more than 1,000 years. …///
It tells me,,, that just as of now,, are we exposing Roman Warm period trees that was growing there before it got cold and the glacier swallowed them up….
Too many Romans driving SUVs ?
And then they implemented captn trade….
And thats caused the fall of the Roman empire ,,,
Hey its as likely as the hoaxers load of malarkey eh ?
http://www.weather.com/science/environment/news/melting-glacier-exposes-frozen-forest-20130924
Frankly i dont see whats so complicated,, its the warming hoaxers that push forward all of those complexity engined improbability drive Rube Goldberg obfuscations.
@Raymond, since lightning can cause fires, there’s no such thing as arson. Right?
pwatwo
Nor is fire proof of arson,,
No sign yet that it will be as warm as it was during the Minoan, Roman, and Medieval Warm Periods. The Minoan and Roman and Medieval Renaissance were warmer than today . .
Warm periods where Forests occupied areas now covered in glacier ice , , ,
3 ice core views … its been warmer in the past between periodic cold periods.
Medieval warmer than the Modern
Roman warmer than the Medieval
Minoan warmer than the Roman
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png . .
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0147e2d17582970b-pi . . .
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c017d41a96489970c-pi . . .
And therein is the base fraud of the climate hoaxers, their failed attempt to erase these warm periods from history … the handle on the hockey stick is a fraud, and we know the blade is also a fraud (hide the decline)
http://climateaudit.org/2014/12/04/sheep-mountain-update/ . . .
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/06/manns-tree-ring-proxy-train-wreck/ . . .
///… The new information shows dramatic failure of the Sheep Mountain chronology as an out-of-sample temperature proxy, as it has a dramatic divergence from NH temperature since 1980, the end of the Mann et al (and many other) reconstructions. While the issue is very severe for the Mann reconstructions, it affects numerous other reconstructions, including PAGES2K.” …///
You know how many hoaxer papers are now proven toilet paper ?
A single Yamil tree, decentered pca, upside down proxies, data splicing without instrumental drift controls ,, what have they got left ? Nothing , they can make No claim.
But it not going to stop them dragging their dead hoax across the square.
Here is their theme songs ( get your own copy )
file:///home/data1/mp3/Oingo_Boingo/Oingo_Boingo_-_Dead_Mans_Party.mp3
file:///home/data1/mp3/Oingo_Boingo/Oingo_Boingo-Weird_Science.mp3
For those of you with a physics bent , , , a conversation showing how the CAGW Hoaxers got in early trouble because they never consulted physicists competent in CO2 radiation effects. (and never consulted a statistician about their statistics)
http://www.sealevel.info/Happer_UNC_2014-09-08/Another_question.html . . .
Now they are trapped, locked in embrace with an embarrassing falsehood, the entire CO2 radiative model is a fallacy. Its a log curve,, we are well into the flat, the failed models assume linear, and positive feedback where the physical reality is sum negative (hi-cloud albedo effect).
Just another example of many, where they are left with their asses hanging out with basic infantile errors and some flawed assumptions with less reliability than wild ass random guesses.
This warmth is nothing unusual., the models are falsified, let the chips fall where they may . . (Entire physics presentation available http://www.sealevel.info/Happer_UNC_2014-09-08/ . . )
Perhaps Caesar, during the Roman warm period, should have convened his own IPCC so Cicero could wax romantic about the “damaged” Glaciers.
Would have been just as effective as the information immune chumps whining today. . . .
When the cold climate change came and drove the Romans back south from Hadrian’s wall ,, and the climate dislocated populations south after them ,,, at least Ciseros Roman IPCC could announce he had saved the Glaciers !
@Raymond that’s a pretty impressive Gish Gallop you’ve given us there.
I see you’ve posted a lot of links to the GISP2 ice core record. That’s a pretty common contrarian meme, so if you don’t know why it’s wrong then you’re probably not an honest participant in the debate.
(The most recent point on that record is 1855, so not exactly “you are here”, unless anyone is in fact reading this from 1855 Greenland.)
Pumpkin,, bah,, your hand waving attempting to show that something i posted attempted to say what i never said.
Besides, anyone with an IQ above a turnip knows that your not going to get much about recent climate from ice cores,, that we might eke out any overlap at all with our instrumental record, would be quite a feat imo , , ,
Intellectual honesty please, and the manic desperation of a drowning man, is no excuse.
@Raymond you said
And then posted a bunch of links to misleading plots of the GISP2 core.
If I’ve misinterpreted what you said, then I suggest that you may need to work on your written communication skills.
http://www.principia-scientific.org/review-the-deliberate-corruption-of-climate-science-by-dr-tim-ballreview-the-deliberate-corruption-of-climate-science-by-dr-tim-ball.html . . .
I point this out, with my commentary below, because i think many of the physics minded might find it amusing . . .
///… Are you certain you cant describe it as compressed gas ?
Compress gas with a compressor it gets hot, this heat isnt due to friction …
Let the gas in the tank cool, and it will come out starved for heat, fast air tools get cold when you use them … this change in temp is solely a function of its pressure
In other words, take a cube of air, compress it, its measurable temp increases, take the same cube and expand it 2x in volume above ambient, its measurable temp decreases.
All 3 states of compression contains the same amount of energy as heat, only the density has changed. Perhaps this explains your gravitationally created temp gradient more easily.
Notice i ignore any notion of kinetic or potential et al that has anything to do with it ….
All things being equal, there will be a temp gradient in an air column due to gravitational compression, the gas at the bottom compressed by the mass of the gas above it, and if the heat content by weight was identical top to bottom,, there would be an increasing temp as your measurement point went to the bottom.
So a gas giant even with less energy as heat, contained per unit of weight, could have a far greater measured temp at sufficiently higher gas pressures.
He is correct this can explain Venus, where ground level pressures are such that a compressed gas cylinder would float before it reached the ground if it was not crushed.
And it can explain the Gas giants like Uranus Quite a simple concept really
if you had a perfectly insulated and IR reflective airbag and filled it with air at ambient temp on top of a mountain,, , , and you drove down the mountain with it . . its temp would increase with the air pressure and theoretically match the higher temp at the base of the mountain once it arrived there.
Theres your temp gradient. …///
///…Two recent papers, one is in Earth-Science Reviews and the
other is in Chinese Science Bulletin, have studied key chemical contents
in micro-drilled giant clams shells and coral samples to demonstrate
that in the South China Sea the warm period of the Middle Ages was
warmer than the present. …///
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825214002232 . . .
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11434-014-0317-3 . . .
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/05/hottest-year-ever-giant-clam-reveals-middle-ages-were-warmer-than-today/
. . .
@Pumpkin, Raymond isn’t worth your time. He’s off in flat earth territory…
“Raymond isn’t worth your time. He’s off in flat earth territory…”
And so yet another warmist refuses to engage with skeptics armed with facts.
@Jay: Raymond (Moyer, not esr) isn’t actually engaging though. He’s just spamming a whole bunch of links and shows no interest in discussing them.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/15/on-migrating-moose-and-migrating-temperature-trends/ . . .
Heh more temp data fraudulence, manufacturing warming non contained in raw data…
Humor
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/14/climate-risk-map-mainly-countries-hostile-to-the-usa/ . .
///… All of this poses an obvious question – if we accept the map at face value, why should we care about climate change? …///
@Jay, Raymond has stuff, but they aren’t facts.
You’re another lost cause.
At the same time I found this thread, I happened to be reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar, from which I remind its author of the following observation about the difference between debugging proprietary and open source software.
It’s obvious that nobody participating in this discussion is contributing code to any climate models, so the most significant role any of you might attain is debugger, if you put in a lot more effort to offer constructive, substantive feedback. It is not valid to look down from 30,000 feet, observe something contrary to your intuition, and on that basis alone declare the entire project a failure as the presumptuous OP has done.
As a coder, would you thank a tester for the feedback “it’s broke, you suck!” or would you dismiss them out of hand for such useless, juvenile behavior?
You’re acting like script kiddies, the lot of you, starting with esr.
>You’re acting like script kiddies, the lot of you, starting with esr.
Nope. The worst bugs aren’t in the code, but the underlying physics. Even perfect code (which the models certainly are not) gives wrong answers when it’s based on wrong assumptions.
@esr, have you read Edwards’ “A Vast Machine” yet?
Perhaps Washington’s “Introduction To Three-dimensional Climate Modeling”?
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-To-Three-dimensional-Climate-Modeling/dp/1891389351
Where it comes to modeling the pseudo-scientific bullshit the hoax is built on, good chance the models are quite adequate.
esr: “The worst bugs aren’t in the code, but the underlying physics.”
In either this thread or the one about the “error cascade” I noticed you disagree with the magnitude of the water vapor feedback. (And that by itself would make a big difference if it was wrong, but unfortunately, it isn’t.) So far that is all I know about what you believe that at least 97% of professional climate scientists have all gotten wrong about the underlying physics. Anything else?
“97% of professional climate scientists”
Blogger Threatened for Exposing 97% “Consensus” Fraud
http://www.thenewamerican.com/…/18300-climategate-3-0-university-threaten...
May 20, 2014 – Climategate 3.0: Blogger Threatened for Exposing 97% "Consensus" Fraud. In what is nearly a replay of the Climategate e-mail …
New Paper: The 97% ‘Consensus’ And Its Critics | The …
http://www.thegwpf.org › … › Press Releases
Global Warming Policy Foundation
Sep 8, 2014 – Claims of 97% consensus on global warming depend on research described as fraudulent and biased.
Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring ’97-Percent …
http://www.forbes.com/…/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-9...
May 30, 2013 – After taking a closer look at the paper, investigative journalists report the authors’ claims of a 97-pecent
Blog: Debunking the 97% ‘consensus’ on global warming
http://www.americanthinker.com/…/debunking_the_97_con...
Feb 4, 2014 – Debunking the 97% ‘consensus’ on global warming … or another, a fraud is being committed
New paper: Fraud, Bias & Public Relations – The 97 …
wattsupwiththat.com/…/new-paper-fraud-bias-publi…
Sep 8, 2014 – Claims of 97% consensus on global warming depend on research described as fraudulent
Yep, @Raymond is a good denier parrot. Speaking of bullshit…
>Yep, @Raymond is a good denier parrot. Speaking of bullshit…
I see a lot of well-supported factual claims from peer-reviewed science in his comments. That’s not bullshit.
Denying that the IPCC climate models have failed to pass the predictive test, that’s bullshit.
@Rodney, “It’s obvious that nobody participating in this discussion is contributing code to any climate models,”
Not quite true.
“As a coder, would you thank a tester for the feedback “it’s broke, you suck!” or would you dismiss them out of hand for such useless, juvenile behavior?”
That “it’s broke, you suck!” is a lousy bug report in no way invalidates the fact that it is indeed broken. That’s all that is required. The burden of proof lies with those advancing the models, not those questioning them. I am not required to produce a better model, only to observe that the existing ones do not meet their own success criteria. (And to answer the criticism upthread: No, I don’t have the math to produce a better model. I don’t have to.)
And a discussion Raymond didn’t cite, from David Friedman (who has been known to comment here): http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/a-climate-falsehood-you-can-check-for.html
Predictive tests for models aren’t a pass-fail thing, where the models are either perfect or they’re useless. So the question is which predictive tests have models done well against and which tests indicate shortcomings?
There’s a lot of focus at the moment on whether the models have matched the particular short term variations of the last decade. But GCMs aren’t designed to predict things like the exact timing of the Southern oscillation.
Over the time scales that they’re expected to work on, climate modellers have in fact successfully predicted the modern warming.
>Over the time scales that they’re expected to work on, climate modellers have in fact successfully predicted the modern warming.
Bullshit. This is an attempt to sidestep from a falsifiable test – which has failed – to an unfalsifiable one. If climate models cannot predict on a timescale that can be checked, they are worthless. Non-science.
Kevin Trenberth admitted privately as long ago as 2009 that the inability of AGW theory to account for the lack of surface-temperature warming was “a travesty”. More recently Judith Curry told the APS that the IPCC models can no longer be reconciled with the data history to within 2% confidence.
Feynman again: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
Heh what a load of crap.
You wont find an honest broker among the hoaxers, because discovery isnt the
goal . . . all that leftist redistribution crap is,, all the way back to Maurice Strong in Rio.
Hey,, let us know when it gets warm enough for those Roman period forests swallowed by glaciers return to growing conditions of the trees found in the Glacier ice.
And the polar tree-lines across Siberia advance to the Medieval Roman Or Minoan extents.
And the Mountain tree-lines advance to the same . . .
Ohh and those tree-lines don’t advance overnight,, only sustained long term warmer climate
advanced them to their Medieval Roman Or Minoan extents.
Which of course,, confirm the ice cores , , , ,
You got nothing ., and your hoax is busted . . .
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-14/russia-to-shift-ukraine-gas-transit-to-turkey-as-eu-cries-foul.html . . .
Eastern and south central Europe has just had its gas supply from Russia suddenly chopped off, there is currently no gas flow from Russia through Ukraine, but supply continues via North Stream into Germany.
They have a bit of a slightly warmer weather patch in E and SE Europe but it’s going to get interesting as the cold snaps return, as many countries are already saying they have either run out of reserves completely, or will within a couple of days. Multiple countries have reported zero gas flow at present.
Turk Stream, and Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller officially putting Europe on notice “all gas to Europe will now go through Turkey” , , , “now it is up to them to put in place the necessary infrastructure starting from the Turkish-Greek border.”
If Europe wants gas, they have to deal with Turkey and Greece
Gee, looks like Europe better get to drilling those frack wells eh ?
Hardly unfalsifiable. Hansen’s predictions from the 80’s for example have been around long enough to be proven skilful.
Both your examples focus on variations during a shorter timescale. Since everyone agrees the models are unsuitable for short term prediction, what’s the point in endlessly discussing short term prediction?
>Hansen’s predictions from the 80’s for example have been around long enough to be proven skilful.
Bullshit. Hansen thought the West Side Drive in NYC would be halfway to underwater by now. It would require more than a 10-foot sea-level rise before 2040 for his 1988 prediction to come true; meanwhile, actual sea-level rise has not budged off the postglacial trend produced by isostatic rebound, which is about three orders of magnitude too low for that. Yeah, real skillful.
And just this morning, Power Line shredded the claim that 2014 is the hottest year on record…
@esr: Why do you think Hansen’s speculation in an interview is more relevant than his actual climate model predictions made in the peer-reviewed literature.
[Well done though for not getting the time frame on the interview wrong.]
@Jay: Why would you believe a source that uses the label “Modern warm period” for 1855 data?
>@esr: Why do you think Hansen’s speculation in an interview is more relevant than his actual climate model predictions made in the peer-reviewed literature.
Those are busted too. The GAT trendline is well below even Hansen’s Case A.
Pumpkin: All right, what would *you* call the period after the end of the Little Ice Age?
@esr: Bullshit. If you bet against Hansen with your solar model back when he made those predictions, he would have won. You’re still committing the fallacy of the excluded middle — in between “perfect” and “useless” there is a continuum of predictive skill. And Hansen’s model was closer to the former.
@Jay: Are you missing the point? They’re trying to pass off 1855 central Greenland as modern temperatures. That’s dishonest.
Which is it? Either you get multidecadal periods of time to deal with, in which case 1855 Greenland is relevant to the modern era, or else you exclude that and have to deal with the stoppage of global warming over the last 20 years or so. You can’t have that both ways.
@esr “Kevin Trenberth admitted privately as long ago as 2009 that the inability of AGW theory to account for the lack of surface-temperature warming was “a travesty”.
You’re wrong. He wasn’t talking about AGW at all, he was bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have good enough observational systems to track the flows of energy through the climate system.
At least get your snark factually correct.
>You’re wrong. He wasn’t talking about AGW at all, he was bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have good enough observational systems to track the flows of energy through the climate system.
And this is not taking about AGW how? If you don’t have a theory of energy flow that is both generative and predictive, you have no business trying to make forward predictions at all. Any that you do attempt are pure numerological voodoo that can come out right only by accident. The distinction you’re claiming is illusory.
The usual “skeptics” aren’t reading a single one of the references I’ve posted, nor do they go to the primary sources for material – hard-right blogs and op-ed pieces are not primary sources.
It’s unfortunate that the rationality libertarians (and the like-minded individuals who populate this place) pride themselves on has been abandoned in regards to this subject.
>t’s unfortunate that the rationality libertarians (and the like-minded individuals who populate this place) pride themselves on has been abandoned in regards to this subject.
“Rationality libertarians” predicted the IPCC models would fail. You did not. Rationality wins.
On this one issue, the “hard-right blogs” are doing better science than the establishment. This surprises and dismays me, and represents an unforgivably massive failure of the establishment.
@Jay, why is a specific location, the data from which ends 160 years ago, relevant to the globe as a whole?
That PowerLine article is nonsense. The CO2 concentration in that one chart never gets above 285 ppm, but current measures show us at 400 ppm.
@esr, re: Raymond: “I see a lot of well-supported factual claims from peer-reviewed science in his comments.”
Wrong. The usual rejectionist blogs (JoNova, GWPF, WUWT, Goddard (!), ClimateAudit, *ad naseum*) are not “peer-reviewed science”.
They’re crap.
But you’re not answering the criticisms of the various takedowns df the 97% crap, are you, pwatwo? Like, for example, David Friedman’s? His math and arguments are right there on his blog, and he even links to the original author’s reply and his takedown of that.
@Jay, the 97% is a sideshow. It’s not foundational to the underlying science of manmade climate change.
If it’s a sideshow, why do warmists harp on it so much?
@Jay: Powerline claims that
They present, as evidence, a graph of central Greenland temperatures that ends in 1855. Note the word “now”, the year “2014”, the phrase “we are living during”. No one here was alive in 1855. That’s 160 years ago.
I’m not suggesting we exclude 1855 Greenland from the discussion. I’m saying that 1855 != 2014 and Powerline are dishonest for implying otherwise.
>I’m not suggesting we exclude 1855 Greenland from the discussion. I’m saying that 1855 != 2014 and Powerline are dishonest for implying otherwise.
I would agree with you if patching in the measured post-1855 GAT increase falsified the claims made on the basis of the graph. Since they don’t (that is, the present would still be cool compared to earlier periods on the graph and CO2 is uncorrelated), PowerLine had nothing to gain from dishonesty and we are probably looking at someone’s technical error.
>I would agree with you if patching in the measured post-1855 GAT increase falsified the claims made on the basis of the graph.
Patching in the increase since 1855 would put the present temperature between the medieval and Roman warm periods. The graph would tell a much different story.
>Patching in the increase since 1855 would put the present temperature between the medieval and Roman warm periods. The graph would tell a much different story.
No. The Minoan and Roman periods would still have been remarkably warmer than now and – most tellingly – the correlation with CO2 levels would still be absent.
Typical Cultural Marxist Saul Alinsky
blogs are not peer reviewed papers, ice core proxies are not the current instrumental record etc.
,,, i think good terms for that intellectual dishonesty offered as argument is furious hand-waving or what one would call bullshit.
And it changes nothing, the Mountain and polar tree lines, and Roman dated Forest trees coming out of Glaciers confirm as paleo climate proxies that the warmer periods shown in the ice cores are genuine. we see the same in the south china sea, New Zealand etc.
The fanciful claims and doomsday predictions made by the hoaxers have all been falsified.
and we have hard evidence of lies and data manipulation to boot,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/06/manns-tree-ring-proxy-train-wreck/ . . .
http://climateaudit.org/2014/12/04/sheep-mountain-update/ . . .
///… The new information shows dramatic failure of the Sheep Mountain chronology as an out-of-sample temperature proxy, as it has a dramatic divergence from NH temperature since 1980, the end of the Mann et al (and many other) reconstructions. While the issue is very severe for the Mann reconstructions, it affects numerous other reconstructions, including PAGES2K.” …///
The last thing they had was the models ,, but they are models of pseudo science fiction.
The hoax is busted,,, truth will out,,,,, and the public will be demanding heads . . .
Public wrath,, I am predicting no small amount of public wrath.
You have a very low bar for “remarkable”. And modern temperatures being cooler than a handful of periods is a much different claim from today being cooler than 90% of the graph.
The CO2 concentration curve was flat over that period, so it’s not surprising that it doesn’t correlate with anything. It’s not flat now, which is why it’s relevant now.
“which is why it’s relevant now.”
Because some proven wrong physicist ignoring climate hoaxers say it is ?
@esr, you erred. Again.
Trenberth’s comment is in relation to this paper:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final2.pdf
He’s talking about the lack of sufficient observational systems to track energy. Apart from manmade climate change theory.
If you’d read instead of shoot from the lip…
@esr:
“Rationality libertarians” predicted the IPCC models would fail. You did not. Rationality wins.”
They aren’t the “IPCC models”, they’re climate models that have participated in the IPCC assessments, and, they haven’t failed. If you had an inkling of how climate models work (again, Edwards is a good start) you wouldn’t make such ignorant comments.
“On this one issue, the “hard-right blogs” are doing better science than the establishment. This surprises and dismays me, and represents an unforgivably massive failure of the establishment.”
They’re not “doing better science”, they’re comforting to your ideology. That’s about it.
>They’re not “doing better science”, they’re comforting to your ideology.
They’re doing better science because they’re doing what scientists ought to do: abandon a theory when it fails to match experimental data.
You, on the other hand, are exactly like a cargo cultist – all that fervent belief that if you just have faith and emulate the superficial features of “science” long enough, the warming will return.
@esr… Again, if you knew the theory, accurately, and climate models, correctly, you wouldn’t make such asinine comments.
Remember what I said about the perfect climate model a week or so ago?
The warming never stopped. Examine Foster and Rahmstorf (2011):
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022
Abstract: We analyze five prominent time series of global temperature (over land and ocean) for their common time interval since 1979: three surface temperature records (from NASA/GISS, NOAA/NCDC and HadCRU) and two lower-troposphere (LT) temperature records based on satellite microwave sensors (from RSS and UAH). All five series show consistent global warming trends ranging from 0.014 to 0.018 K yr?1. When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability), the global warming signal becomes even more evident as noise is reduced. Lower-troposphere temperature responds more strongly to El Niño/southern oscillation and to volcanic forcing than surface temperature data. The adjusted data show warming at very similar rates to the unadjusted data, with smaller probable errors, and the warming rate is steady over the whole time interval. In all adjusted series, the two hottest years are 2009 and 2010.
Science is incremental, it doesn’t work by naive falsification.
When theory doesn’t match observations, you quantify the discrepancy and find new hypotheses to explain the difference.
It’s not enough to handwave that the models aren’t perfect and therefore they’re busted and worthless. Can your “the models are busted” hypothesis explain the medium-term predictive skill of Hansen’s model?
>Can your “the models are busted” hypothesis explain the medium-term predictive skill of Hansen’s model?
The, um, nonexistent predictive skill? East Side Drive is in no danger. Get back to me when sea levels go up by … oh, I’ll be generous and say five feet.
@Pumpkin, if esr had been around before Einstein’s upgrade of Newton, he would have proclaimed Newton “busted” and “crap” because of the precession of Mercury.
“Hansen’s model”
NASA’s Hansen to Obama: Use Global Warming to Redistribute Wealth
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/01/01/nasas-hansen-obama-use-global-warming-redistribute-wealth . . .
Ahh yes .. absolute proven liar radical leftist Hansen, the same deranged nutter behind the 70s ice age scare . . .
Btw … BEST is garbage, their result is due to data splicing without instrumental drift controls.
@Raymond, is your name actually “Anthony Watts”?
What are you paid to spread disinformation, or, do you give it away for free?
Who’s doing cargo cult science now? You talk a lot about comparing predictions to data, but when it actually comes to doing it you’d rather ignore the quantitative science and talk about some speculation that hasn’t even had enough time to be tested.
@Jay Maynard
“And just this morning, Power Line shredded the claim that 2014 is the hottest year on record…”
Still in denial, are you?
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/january/nasa-determines-2014-warmest-year-in-modern-record/
There are nice visualizations avilable about the global warming. Should be clear for those who dare to look.
But we know since Galileo that people will refuse to look because it cannot exist.
And, obviously, the catchall defense will be that all these scientists are either frauds or delusional.
“quantitative science and talk about some speculation that hasn’t even had enough time to be tested.”
Mighty big words for a chumped hoaxer groupie that can overlook Roman forests coming out of glacier ice, and Mountain and polar tree lines that prove todays warmth is nothing special,.
Evidence for that from Alaska across Siberia to mountains in Europe and to the South China sea, and New Zealand…. Confirming the ice cores , , , and proving the hoaxers to be bald face liars, cargo cult hoaxer groupies . .
We uncovered with the help of climate gate the fraud and dishonesty of the hockey stick, proxies upside down, a single yamil tree, decentered PCA, corruption and Maoist purging passed off as peer review.
https://www.google.com/search?q=climate+proxies+upside+down . . .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6738111/Climategate-reveals-the-most-influential-tree-in-the-world.html . . .
And now the entire method is entirely irrefutably proven to be bogus and every paper
corrupted by it is soiled toilet paper.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/06/manns-tree-ring-proxy-train-wreck/ . . .
http://climateaudit.org/2014/12/04/sheep-mountain-update/ . . .
///… The new information shows dramatic failure of the Sheep Mountain chronology as an out-of-sample temperature proxy, as it has a dramatic divergence from NH temperature since 1980, the end of the Mann et al (and many other) reconstructions. While the issue is very severe for the Mann reconstructions, it affects numerous other reconstructions, including PAGES2K.” …///
You have nothing ,,, notta zilch . . .
Your lame ass leftist radical Hansen used the trough of the PDO/AMO to create the 70s ice age scare period and ramp back up to create the modern warming hoax period.
//… The 70s trough … ” .70s ice age scare period”
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/1970s-ice-age-scare/ . . .
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013_02_01_archive.html . . .
The 98 Peak . . . . ” Peak of global warming hoax period”
Over the AMO hump, what will they call the slide to the next trough ?
The Al Gore Man-bear-pig minimum ? (south park)
Two views of the AMO
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/mann14_1_amo_noaa_kaplansst2.png . .
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ustorprobs.png . .
(Sea level rates line up with the AMO )
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/sea-level/sea-level-australia-new-zealand-rate-change-watson.gif
And what ya got ,,, busted ass pseudo science models based on a thermodynamics violating radiative fallacy . . http://www.sealevel.info/Happer_UNC_2014-09-08/ . . .
You haven got jack , , , ,
>Mighty big words for a chumped hoaxer groupie
He’s just conforming to the first rule of junk-science advocacy: when a failed prediction is pointed out, change the subject.
You’re the one who changed the subject from Hansen’s successful GCM predictions to his untested sea level predictions. Twice, in fact, as though it were a learned habit to deflect from an inconvenient fact.
Which failed prediction are you pointing out?
>Which failed prediction are you pointing out?
All of them. The East River Drive is in not even in half-danger of drowning, and GAT trend is way below even the lower bound of Hansen’s least severe case A. Not a single one of his quantitative predictions for 2015 is still valid. As Raymond says, Hansen’s got nothing except pounding the table.
>The East River Drive is in not even in half-danger of drowning
This prediction’s still in the future, so it hasn’t failed yet. You understand that it’s based on ice shelf collapse right? So it’s irrelevant that thermal expansion’s not on track. I personally hope it does fail, but since (a) it hasn’t failed yet and (b) it’s not a prediction from his GCM it’s basically a red herring. Bringing it up in a discussion of Hansen’s GCM predictions is just “conforming to the first rule of junk-science advocacy”.
>GAT trend is way below even the lower bound of Hansen’s least severe case A.
This suggests to me that you haven’t even bothered to look at Hansen’s predictions. If you had, you’d have seen that Scenario C, not Scenario A is the least severe, and rather than being “way below”, temperatures track Scenario C quite closely.
And you’re still making the mistake of equating “not perfect” with “completely useless”. Even though Scenario B (the most realistic) overestimates warming, the prediction still has predictive skill (in the formal scientific sense) when compared to reference predictions like “temperature will follow solar changes”.
///… Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears. … “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” …///
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/18/dr-james-hansens-growing-financial-scandal-now-over-a-million-dollars-of-outside-income/ . . .
Global Warming Hoaxer James Hansen Denounced as Fraud by Former Boss
///… Of all the cheap frauds pushing the global warming hoax, NASA’s profiteering James Hansen is the most shameless, second only to Al Gore himself. Hansen has repeatedly been caught passing phony data. Despite granting 1,400 on-the-job (and on our dime) interviews, Hansen claims to have been muzzled by the Bush Administration. At the same time, he demands prison sentences for those who question the hoax. …///
“During the past few years, however, it has become clear that 387 ppm (CO2) is already in the dangerous range.” . . . . “The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal fired power plants are factories of death.”
Former NASA senior scientist Dr John Theon described his association with Hansen:
“As Chief of several of NASA Headquarters’ programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research.”
Theon commented on the unreliability of computer models used by Hansen and GISS to simulate the climate system:
“My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it.”
http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=1a5e6e32-802a-23ad-40ed-ecd53cd3d320 . . .
///… For the past 30 years, NASA climate scientists under the leadership of Dr. Hansen have demonstrated nearly complete incompetence in forecasting, and they have tampered with data to try to hide their mispredictions. …///
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/22/a-little-known-but-failed-20-year-old-climate-change-prediction-by-dr-james-hansen/ . . .
changes which Dr. Hansen made to the historical US temperature record after the year 1999. He cooled the 1930s, and warmed the 1980s and 1990s. The year 1998 went from being more than half a degree cooler than 1934, to warmer than 1934.
Hansen’s recent temperature data tampering is not limited to the US. He has done the same thing all over the planet. Below is one recent example in Iceland, where he dramatically cooled the first half of the century, and warmed the present. He appears to be trying to erase evidence that there was a very warm period in much of the Arctic around 1940.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/spectacularly-poor-climate-science-at-nasa/ . . .
Astronaut and physicist Walter Cunningham expressed his concerns about how some climate scientists have been operating at NASA:
“In the last twenty years, I have watched the high standards of science being violated by a few influential climate scientists, including some at NASA, while special interest opportunists have abused our public trust.”
“Many of NASA’s retirees have grown increasingly concerned that GISS, a NASA organization located in a midtown Manhattan office building, was allowing its science to be politicized, compromising their credibility. Our concern, beyond damage to the NASA’s exemplary reputation, was damage to their current or former scientists and employees, and even compromising the reputation of science itself.”
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2013/08/james-hansen-s-many-and-varied-furphies/ . . .
Ya would be interesting is you had anything from that blathering leftist radical proven liar idiot that don’t embarrass himself.
It really is quite shocking they consider a discredited leftist radical idiot Like Hansen . . . . heh.
Normals would be embarrassed to even bring up his name except as an object of ridicule.
How far in the fever swamp leftist bubble reality exclusion shield would one need to be ?
James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic – Says Hansen ‘Embarrassed NASA’, ‘Was Never Muzzled’, & Models ‘Useless’
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/27/james-hansens-former-nasa-supervisor-declares-himself-a-skeptic-says-hansen-embarrassed-nasa-was-never-muzzled/ . . .
http://www.sott.net/article/174269-James-Hansens-Former-NASA-Supervisor-Declares-Himself-a-Skeptic-Says-Hansen-Embarrassed-NASA . . .
///… Hansen ‘is a political activist who spreads fear’ . . . . Award-winning NASA Astronaut and Physicist Walter Cunningham of NASA’s Apollo 7 also recently chastised Hansen. “Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him,” Cunningham wrote in an essay in the July/August 2008 issue of Launch Magazine. “NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science,” …///
Former Boss Rebukes NASA Global Warming Alarmist Hansen
….. Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2009/01/28/former-boss-rebukes-nasa-global-warming-alarmist-hansen-agw-skeptic . . .
A = Business as usual
B = Reduced CO2 Growth
C is the Hansen “CO2 emissions zero impact by 2000”
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01630503884e970d-550wi
Man are you too idiotic to see what you just did ?
Well unless you agree that Hansen’s graph shows todays CO2 as zero impact
Then we agree.
Winter, it was NASA’s claim that the Power Line article shredded…but of course, you didn’t read it, so you wouldn’t know.
Larger example of the annotated leftist idiot Hansen Climate model graph.
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01630503884e970d-800wi
A = Business as usual
B = Reduced CO2 Growth
C = CO2 emissions reduced to zero impact by 2000?
esr >GAT trend is way below even the lower bound of Hansen’s least severe case A.
Pumpkin@ ///… This suggests to me that you haven’t even bothered to look at Hansen’s predictions. If you had, you’d have seen that Scenario C, not Scenario A is the least severe, and rather than being “way below”, temperatures track Scenario C quite closely.
And you’re still making the mistake of equating “not perfect” with “completely useless”. Even though Scenario B (the most realistic) overestimates warming, the prediction still has predictive skill (in the formal scientific sense) when compared to reference predictions like “temperature will follow solar changes”….///
Ya know,, that is a rather intellectually dishonest attempt to refute/Answer ,, what is now Clearly Erics proven fact, , , It shows exactly what he said . . . .
And “temperatures track Scenario C quite closely” is a clear view of total failure.
Well unless you agree that todays plot shown to match the Hansen “reduced to zero impact” is evidence (using the hoaxer parrot standards of evidence) that todays CO2 has “zero impact”.
Hey ,, dont look at us ,, we are not the ones so desperate,,, as to defend that leftist radical “embarrassment to NASA” Hansen idiot and his bogus garbage.
@Raymond, My question remains. Are you paid or do you give it away?
You’re a whole bunch of denier spamtrolling. Your stuff isn’t even current – rehashes of long-ago-debunked nonsense.