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2040 Responses to "The Bore Hole"
tomsays
Terry:
In the real world, no sane investor would ever risk any significant amount on any project that relies on the premise of AGW. Just way too much uncertainty. That only happens in the in the unreal world of the Government,! The US federal Gov’t is based on the paradigm that ” we’ ( people who pay relatively litte taxes) are going to take more money from “them” ( wealthy taxpayers ) to fix something. If it doesn’t work, who’s on the hook? And the response to failure is almost universal. “We” need MORE MONEY from “them”.
I do not accept the premises on which this analysis is based. The primary causes of global warming are in a progressive state of disequilibrium between the cooling effect of melting ice reserves and the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Since ice reserves are steadily disappearing, it seems to me that no matter what we do now, a runaway global warming looms in the future when ice reserves reach a critical level no longer able to counter the warming due to the present levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Bryan Ssays
Ray,
The back of the envelope figues are OK, but your economics are attrocious. IMHO, your post has less to do with physics, and much more to do with political economy.
May I suggest that you take a brisk autumn walk over to the economics department at the Univerisity of Chicago and ask them to grade your writeup. After you do, come back and give us a report.
In the meantime, may I commend to you 2009 Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom’s books.
Igsays
Stefan Rahmstorf recently wrote a piece for ABC ENVIRONMENT to make us (non-science people) aware of the alarming fall in the level of sea ice in the artic this year, comparable to the low levels in 2007. Cohenite has posted this in response:
“Arctic sea ice was much less in the immediate geologic past:
The Arctic temperature has been falling since 2005 and according to all the Arctic ice measurements Arctic ice has been well above 2007 levels for most of 2011 and according to NORSEX is still above 2007 levels in both area and extent:
Rahmstorf has form in being hysterical about the AGW hysteria; perhaps one of his many measured critics can be given a right of reply. I would suggest Dr David Stockwell”.
I don’t have the ability to analyse whether what he’s saying has any merit. Would anyone care to give a rebuttal to that response.
u.k.(us)says
“The contrast between the conversations in this meeting and what passes for serious issues in the media and blogosphere was very clear.”
==============
There is no lack of skeptics willing to converse.
There is a lack of those willing to converse with them.
With that said, I and my comment are ready to be sent into the ether.
Why upset science after it has been declared “settled”,and funding has been secured.
Meme Minesays
Help! Exxon has a gun to my head as I type?
CO2 climate crisis believers:Your “education” you speak of is now called the Internet, an open sewer of untreated information that can be used to educate one’s self such we former believers do or use as a search engine for one’s established opinions such as you remaining climate blame believers do. We see right through you because its obvious you want this misery to be true. You need this misery of climate change to be true because you need something to believe in and trust and like bible thumpers you sanctify the pureness of science. What could go wrong? For decades and decades it was all of science that denied the dangers of the pesticides they gave us. So act like real progressives and be real liberals who challenge, doubt and question all authority. Especially a pop culture of politics authority that is condemning billions of children to a CO2 death. This was progressivism’s Iraq War of lies. Green neocons!You want this misery to be true despite millions of scientists warning us of the worst crisis imaginable, climate crisis, that just sit on their thrones and not ACT like its’ a crisis. Are they on Oprah or CNN?You want this misery to be true despite your hero Obama not even mentioning the “crisis” in his state of the union address.You want this misery to be true despite countless thousands of consensus scientists who sat on their hands while Obama and the rest of the world walk away from climate change and CO2 mitigation.You want this misery to be true as you fear monger with childish glee knowing full well that real planet lovers would rejoice at the obvious exaggeration of “crisis”.So what is wrong with dropping the CO2 factor entirely from the environmental equation and practice responsible stewardship instead of taxing the air via corporate CO2 markets?
timg56says
#154 Jim Bullis,
It is not hard to understand why raypierre might think that coal will have run out by 2100. He seems to believe that the planet will be unable to sustain agriculture by that time. The ability to believe in one science fiction story (and as someone who has been reading SF since probably before raypierre was born, I recognize it when I see it) has a pretty decent correlation in the ability to believe in another.
timg56says
re eric response to comment #6 balazs,
Eric,
In bouncing back and forth between the pro and sceptic blogs I’ve found it not unusual for the commentors to snip at one another. But the more I spend time here at Real Climate, the more I note the moderators doing the snipping as well. The difference in tone between say Dr Curry on her blog and what I see here is very noticable. Balazs raises a very good point – yet you knock him for not being constructive enough.
I tend to think Balazs analogy to be rather decent – at least to a point. Your insurance analogy is ok, except you are not making the complete connection. Wanting tax payers and consumers to pay more for carbon mitigation, reduction or replacement policies is akin to asking the insured to take out additional premiums for rare diseases or potential accidents they have extremely low odds of experiencing. Should I pay a 10%, 15% or higher premium to protect me from getting mangled by a charging elephant? How about paying more to protect me from space debris falling on my head? Like a warming climate, both elephants and space debris are real. The question is – are they something I should worry about? You say that the problem is climate researchers and modelers are poor communicators. You may have a point in the sense that – as far as I am concerned – they have done a poor job communicating actual risk and impact. To date almost all of the information has been in a form more suitable to diaster movie plot lines than real evidence one can make reasoned decisions on.
Have you seen the latest ad with the guy on his cell phone trashing global warming and then suddenly catching fire and burning up? Based on that, I’d say yes, someone has a communications problem.
Dan H.says
Richard,
I agree that dialogue between scientists in public forums will help a great deal. One of the problems is that several blogs sites screen comments, thus eliminating much of the dialogue.
It would be nice if someone started a website which was truly neutral, i.e. was not moderated by an individual (or group) which promoted either side of the AGW debate.
ldavidcookesays
RE:63
Hey Pete,
This goes back to the argument between Drs. Emmanuel/Curry and Drs. Landsea/Wang. Do warmer SSTs result in more intense storms?
In short, I will suggest no. The higher SSTs simply spread out on the surface increasing extra-tropical or cold core storms. In addition, the wealth of energy being sufficient, with a potentially increased lapse rate at the higher latitudes, should push the season window much wider. Meaning though you may have a 5 month window in the tropics, you may need to consider expanding it to accomodate the increased area with sufficient temperatures to drive a cyclonic event in the upper latitudes, (being driven by the northward migration of equtorial warmth).
As we discussed earlier wrt Arctic sea ice and a warming Pole, create the correct conditions and the weather potential will follow, (wrt cut-off anti-cyclones, so why not cold core cyclones?). Dr. Wang’s most recent paper even suggests a decrease in tropical events due to a combination of increased aerosols and tropical shear. This then may correct for the TS “window” expansion and simply re-locate where the cyclones occur (above the 25th parallel).
(From #38 in the Times Atlas Greenland thread) Ray Ladbury says:
11 Nov 2011 at 11:23 AM
Ira Glickstein, Might I suggest, respectfully, that we take this over to the open thread (labeled “Unforced Variations”). It would not distract from the subject there.
Here I am per your invitation, Ray. Please identify the open issues we might discuss.
Here is one I would like to put to bed. Given that CO2 levels continue their rapid, nearly linear rise of the past several decades, why has the centerline of the error bounds of the temperature record flattened out over the past decade and a half?
I think (and Eric seemed to agree partly in one of his Responses to me in the Times Atlas thread) that something else has partially or completely cancelled out the effect of additional CO2 over the last 15 years or so.
I agree that, all else being equal, additional CO2 will raise mean temperatures according to whatever its sensitivity might be (either 2-4.5ºC per doubling according to IPCC estimates or 0.5-1ºC according to other estimates). I think we all agree that CO2 sensitivity is positive with respect to temperatures and that 10 or 15 years is not long enough to reduce the temperature error bounds to within “statistical significance” (less than a 1 in 20 chance we are wrong.)
So, given the above, what might that something else be? It is either something humans have been doing differently over the past century and a half, such as increasing Earth’s albedo by some land use changes, or more dust in the air, or the white roof on Energy Sec. Chu’s house, etc., -OR- it is something beyond our control and influence, such as decadal ocean cycles or Svensmark’s theory that reduced magnetic activity from the current very low Sunspot cycle #24 has allowed more cosmic rays to get through and that increases cloud formation, or some other natural cycle or variation, -OR- a combination of human and natural.
If we agree so far (and if we do not, please let me know where I’ve gone astray), what can we conclude from the temperature data we have? Well, if CO2 sensitivity was, say 4.5ºC, rather than, say 0.5ºC, that something else would have to be nine times stronger. I take that as evidence that does not prove, but does favor lower CO2 sensitivity estimates.
What say you?
Abirsays
Great! It should be game over then politicos and hacks would stop trying to impose more taxes on us in the name of ensuring a stable climate.
ziff housesays
Apparently climate scientists like flying around the world creating co2, like the rich there is no leadership by example. The ‘solutions’ to AGW are always schemes to accumulate wealth for the wealthy.
Norm Hullsays
Dan H 106 and Pete Dunkleburg 107 are absolutely correct. If you have the contention that warming makes statistically rare events likely, then you must have a bad model.
If mean is increasing and probability is modeled correctly, than sigma must follow relative to the mean, otherwise you have built a rather poor mathematical model. I assume Hansen’s 3 sigma events were based from a descent model and didn’t use for example the 1850 mean to calculate standard deviation.
[Response: Follow the discussion please. That’s what Pete asked his question about.–Jim]
Now stephan has said in this group of responses that they will be publishing a large test case of temperatures using their model for mean temperature. It uses a SSA non-linear trend line. I am very interested to see if this trend line and the other assumptions about variability hold true.
Belief that we are confused at a higher level can not be sustained in countries such as USA and UK where leading scientists accept or endorse the notion that it is possible to convert 33.7 kWhr of heat into 33.7 kWhr of electricity.
Alan Millarsays
150 Chris R says:
17 Nov 2011 at 2:03 PM
Norm Hull,
“The 1930s are irrelevant. We’re talking about the recent warming, the global mean of which is attributable to human activity, i.e. post 1975 – the start of the recent linear trend. Studying the 20th century may well reveal skewing in different directions. However the recent warming trend is atypical of the global temperature behaviour in the 20th century. The 1930s warming was primarily a far-northern pattern probably related to the AMO, an outcome of internal ocean/atmosphere variability.!
It is stuff like this that really makes me shake my head!
The fact is that global temperatures rose at the same rate from 1910-1945 as they did 1970-2000. (If you were to be pedantic they rose ever so slightly higher actually)
However, this post still says 1970 to 2000 is atypical. Why?
The earlier period was only minimally influenced by CO2. levels actually fell 9ppm between 1935 and 1945.
Ohh, we are told comparitively low volcanic activity, which is true.
However what does this mean? Why don’t they say comparitively low sulphate aerosol emissions, which is how volcanos (and man)cool the planet? Because it isn’t true that’s why!
Sulphate aerosols rose dramatically from 1900 to 1940, not surprising given the pace of industrialisation at the time.
Ohh, we are told increasing Solar RF, true again. However, solar activity continued to increase into the 1950s and plateaud at a higher level than the earlier period. More solar energy was put into the Earths climate system during 1970-2000 than 1910-1940.
There seems a desperation to isolate the late 20th century warming as something completely unique and unprecedented.
In another post someone quoted a scientist saying that the current warming is at least 10 times anything experienced in the last 20,000 years!!
Ehh…….what!
Yet noone said anything!
I don’t know what cherry picked period in the 20th century this scientist was talking about but whatever it was he was assuring us that know other century ot of the last 200 had ever increased by as much as 0.2c!!!
The proxies he was using must be actually better thermometers than actual thermometers methinks!
A few commenters have asked where I got my lower limit for CO2 sensitivity (0.5ºC to 1ºC) and the related issue of the treatment of cloud feedback in mainstream climate models.
Here is a .pdf of a 2009 paper by Lindzen and Choi that appeared in GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L16705, doi:10.1029/2009GL039628, 200.
Richard Lindzen, is an American atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Based on Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) data, he and Choi conclude that “…ERBE data appear to demonstrate a climate sensitivity of about 0.5ºC which is easily distinguished from sensitivities given by models.”
An easier to read source for the possibility that CO2 sensitivity has been over-estimated due to how the mainstream models treat cloud feedback is Dr. Roy Spenser’s blog.
You all may read the paper and the blog and agree or not. I do not have sufficient expertise to judge.
Happy reading!
SirChargesays
This study may show that temperatures in Moscow have increased in the last 120 years. In 1890, when the temperature record from this study began, Moscow was a city made up mostly of peasant huts and dirt roads. The modern Moscow is a city of concrete and asphalt. You folks can argue all you want that UHI does not matter on a global scale, but within a city it is undeniable. You would expect that as the UHI has increased, anomalies would reflect this reality. Secondly, global temperatures have increased since 1976, however, this is not necessarily attributable to anthropogenic forces as this coincides with a change in the PDO and this increase ended when the PDO went more negative. Thirdly, the mixture of a year with a strong El nino and a change in the arctic oscillation also would have had an extremely significant effect on temperatures in Moscow.
You cannot take the temperatures of any given city and claim that they are evidence of global anthropogenic forces. The climates of given regions are often extremely diverse.
billsays
Re #30 Karen
Similar version can be found in a report titled “Multivariate Regression — Techniques and Tools” by H. Hyotyniemi, Helsinki Univ. of Tech. 2001.
“Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything.” –unknown
The author remarks that a good book must have obscure quotes and he provides a few more. My favorite:
“Statistics in the hands of an engineer are like a lamppost to a drunk — they provide more support than illumination.” — B. Sangster
Whoever he or she may be and I’m sure this applies to more than just engineers!
Dan H.says
With regards to the warming trend, the US trend is essentially the same as the global trend, i.e. 0.59C/century. The US did experience much higher temperatures in the 1930s than the rest of the globe, resulting in a 5-yr mean lower today than the mid 30s. Many of the “plethora” of new highs occurred in cities which do not have records dating back 50 years or more (there were exceptions like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.). If you check neighboring cities, some had record highs 5F higher in 1934 or 1936. While many states experienced the warmest July on record, the highest temperatures did not surpass those of prior years. The average was higher, but the extremes were not. In Russia, Moscow did surpass its record high of 1936 by 1.5C last year.
Using statistics to determine that these extreme events occur once every hundred or thousand years is what is incorrect in this analysis. The US alone has experienced three years of greater high temperatures than recently recorded (1934, 1936, and 1954). During these years, weather conditions persist which allow temperatures to soar. The length of these weather conditions will determine records (Russia, 2010 and U.S., 1936), and not statistical analysis.
You are correct Kevin in that I agree that the climate is warming, but that extremes are not increasing.
Timothy,
I agree that droughts would have the greatest effect on food supply. Although I do not necessarily agree that drought is increasing. A recent drought monitor shows only Texas and the surrounding areas in extreme drought. Other areas which were under extreme droughts have received relief in recent years.
“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.
IOW, the IPCC now admits that man is not the driver of climate therefore AGW is nothing to get excited about.
Earlir IPCC report The revised AMO index (Trenberth and Shea, 2006) indicates that North Atlantic SSTs have recently been about 0.3°C warmer than during 1970 to 1990, emphasizing the role of the AMO in suppressing tropical storm activity during that period. The AMO is likely to be a driver of multi-decadal variations in Sahel droughts, precipitation in the Caribbean, summer climate of both North America and Europe, sea ice concentration in the Greenland Sea and sea level pressure over the southern USA, the North Atlantic and southern Europe;(Trenberth and Shea, 2006). Walter and Graf (2002) identified a non-stationary relationship between the NAO and the AMO.
During the negative phase of the AMO, the North Atlantic SST is strongly correlated with the NAO index. In contrast, the NAO index is only weakly correlated with the North Atlantic SST during the AMO positive phase.
In this report I couldn’t find a single reference to the AMO or the NAO.
Has the IPCC abandoned idea that the natural oscillations have any role?
It appears to me that the understanding North Atlantic Oscillations with which the above events were previously associated, and now apparently discarded, is incomplete.
I did detailed analysis of the AMO-NAO relationship and found number of important elements either not known (hopefully not ignored) by the IPCC contributors.
The results via my web-page: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/theAMO.htm
most important result can be found on the page 10.
DPsays
During the Eemian the feared melting of undersea methane did not occur. does this man the threat is exagerated?
Ira Glickstein @254. For myself, I couldn’t be less interested in your link to e-mails. It has taken days and far too many iterations to expose the comments you previously presented on this thread as being riven with unsubstantiated contention, nonsense and ill-defined polemics. And strangely, you don’t exhibit the slightest concern by such characterisation. [Emphasis added]
William Cowper (late 1700’s): “A moral, sensible, and well-bred man, Will not affront me, and no other can.” And, I appreciate RC posting and responding to my skeptic comments.
… Indeed, you now have a website Response accusing you of “conspiratorial fantasies” …
Comment by MARodger — 20 Nov 2011 @ 8:29 PM
No conspiracy, no fantasy, just a climate system and temperature data collection system so complex that honest, competent scientists and data analysts can only approximate the truth to a given level of uncertainty.
1) CO2 sensitivity may be 2ºC or 4.5ºC (according to the IPCC and not my skeptic sources), more than a factor of two.
2) The US temperature record is uncertain due to TOBS corrections (Gavin’s Response). OK, I understand that Time of OBServation is an issue. GISS has had the 1998 US temperature data in hand since 1999, and has adjusted the anomaly from the initial 0.918ºC up by over 0.3ºC in several steps from 1999 to 2007 (Sato email). Since that date 1998 has gone up further and is now 0.4ºC over the value published by GISS in 1999.
3) I can understand that 1934 data would be uncertain, but 1998 is relatively recent and from stations that are mostly still operational, yet it seems to have analytic “wriggle room” of 0.4ºC.
4) What was it about TOBS or other issues with the 1998 US data that became known between 1999 and 2001 (+0.281ºC)? Between 2001 and now (+0.121ºC)? If estimated warming since the late 1800’s is about 0.8ºC, and TOBS corrections of 1998 data between 1999 and now is over 0.4ºC, there seems to be an uncertainty factor of two.
Charles C Wallissays
You guys can attribute anything to anything……….Hot=Cold Wet=Dry it’s quite amazing………. By the By — how ’bout them new Thanksgiving e-mails from all you lying bitchez???????????
Staceysays
You guys are very quiet at the moment but don’t worry it is obvious that your remarks in the newly released emails have been taken out of context.
Now what type of person normally says their words have been taken out of context?
Of course someone who is completely honest like for instance politicians.
The middle game was Climategate 1 which your mates managed to help you out with we are now into the end game and unfortunately you have no credible pieces on the board.
Three cheers for the “cause”.
SBsays
Lot more emails still behind password protection waiting to be released. Anything you guys want to get off your chest while you still can, emails you guys thought you had managed to delete?
lolsays
Comrades,
The important thing is to weather the storm and quash these terroristic rumors! The profane herd largely do not pay attention to primary sources such as these. We just issue our standard denials, and most will never hear of this. (As if their opinions matter anyway!)
Onwards to revolution, and a global totalitarian utopia!
François GMsays
PS May I reiterate my wish for a peer-reviewed reference supporting the claim that climate models (I would settle for a single one) are wrong, as Gavin Schmidt and Phil Jones have stated ?
[Response: See below. But if you want reviewed literature on model imperfections start with the IPCC AR4 WG1 Ch 8. – gavin]
Mike Lewissays
One more thing. Did any of you watch the Al Gore marathon? Did you see the “experiment” he did with CO2 in a closed glass container? Did you see the temperature go up? Did you know that his results could not be duplicated? That is, he lied to try to prove a point. That’s just part of the science to which I refer that has been falsified. I doubt that any of you will believe me but I had to say it. I harbor no ill will towards any one – I just have a different opinion of what the science is saying.
Edwardiosays
202Ray Ladbury,
Putting aside our mutual disrespect and regarding the “proper use of scientific [climate] models.
Who decides the validity of climate models and what is to be gleaned from them?
Because from my denialist’s ignorant assessment the gleaning of insights can be no more than what the validity and reliability of the models allows.
Never mind the WUWT chaps, plenty of your enlightened Team members have expressed low confidence in the reliability of the climate models. The emails also show significant concern being expressed.
So where is this “ideal world” that justifies gleaning insight for policy making from models that are of such low reliability and high uncertainty?
DERR UFOsays
One would hope the climate researchers will improve their skills about the true facts about this ever changing world and make it known when they err. The Real Climate Website has improved over years and it serves its users well…We can only hope those who receive grant money or a yearly salary tell us only the true facts about the weather and use the phrase ” we don’t know… ” when they are in doubt over the substantive issues surrounding global warming or cooling.
Bruce Frykmansays
RE: “European heat wave in 2003, Moscow heat wave in 2010 etc.) shows some promise, and is indicating that the odds of such extremes are shifting in predictable ways – but this is still cutting edge science. – gavin]”
What does this “cutting edge” science have to say about the heat waves of the 1930s and the extremes of 1934?
How about the absolute disaster the climate played in the defeat of the Spanish Armada – “cutting edge” science must have lots of great theories on the damage climate has already done to the cause of the Spanish Crown.
By the way, just how does a scientist quantify all this. Is one hurricane worth two droughts, or 1/2 a bitter winter. What is the basic unit of scariness?
Bruce Frykmansays
RE: “[Response: Now you are just being silly. Trenberth actually said it was a travesty that we didn’t have good enough monitoring of the Earth’s radiation budget to know where the energy is going (and coming) on decadal time scales. And that is a shame – surely even you would welcome more accurate observations? – gavin]”
Cutting through the pea soup thick jargon, what Gavin is saying here is that its a shame they cant measure the earth’s temperature. I have been saying this myself for over a decade. I’m glad Gavin is finally on board with me. The fact that they can’t measure the Earth’s temperature in no way should discourage us from accepting theories that it simply must be ascending even if we cant see it or sense it. Newton’s theories would similarly be just as pretty even if gravity did not exist wouldn’t they?
[Response: Of course LW radiation depends on temperature, how is that the issue? But the point was about the logarithmic nature of the forcing from CO2 – this has everything to do with pressure broadening, line widths, absorption bands, overlaps etc. and nothing specifically to do what you think the temperature in Antarctica is or should be. – gavin]
From my reading of Arrhenius’ on carbonic acid paper, the ln relationship is based on the estimated temperature of the radiant layer. He starts with 255K and mentions 246K as a secondary radiant layer. Neither temperature is applicable in the Antarctic.
Based on Arrhenius’ ln relationship, his final table indicates that latitude 25 N would have the highest impact of a change in CO2 from 0.67K to 1.5K, “If carbonic acid decreases to 0.67 or increases to 1.5 times it present quantity.” That range, assuming the “present quantity was 280ppm, would be, 188ppm to 420ppm, resulting in a change at lat 24.5 N of -3.2 to +3.6, which with current concentrations of ~390ppm seems to not be all that accurate.
Reading the paper, there appears to be a number of approximations that may have contributed to this minor discrepancy. The average temperature on the moon at 100K, the estimated impact of the atmospheric effect being 200K seem to be of some significance.
I am sure that the models use more accurate estimates than Arrhenius’, I just don’t recall seeing a formula that includes the correct physical relationships that appear to be required. As such, I am curious why reference to the Arrhenius paper criticized by Angstrom is so common. Angstrom just mentioned that at surface temperatures and pressures that CO2 was near saturation which would impact Arrhenius’ equation.
Correcting for temperatures appears to more closely match observations in the tropics and the Antarctic. Plus the greater warming in the Arctic region tends to agree with Arrhenius’ temperature assumptions. possibly, because he lived near the Arctic circle.
I believe Ray Pierrehumbert was a bit mystified by what circulation could produce the Russian heat wave, which really should not be that great a mystery in my opinion.
Perhaps I am missing some literature that better explains how the ln relationship is corrected in the models for regional conditions?
teeheemansays
What a “cold” site – a lot of defensive PR, little science and bad humor.
Question – why do more and more scientists leave the AGW camp each passing month? I thought the science was settled.
Another question – why have the AGW poll numbers tanked vs. a few years back? Clearly a majority of people are now skeptical of the AGW “science.”
Looks to me like you folks aren’t very good at either science or PR.
I just looked at Compete.com and it looks like your US traffic (i.e. unique visitors) is down about 50% in Oct 2011 from Oct 2010.
Man the lifeboats! If Real Climate had a publicly traded stock it would be a great short.
u.k.(us)says
tamino says:
22 Nov 2011 at 7:03 PM
“I’m tempted to laugh — but the health, safety, even survival of the next generation is at stake. They’ll know who it was who sealed their fate.”
===========
You seem to delight in this outcome.
Yet, infer an action has changed “fate”.
Why things are not performing as expected is the reason for the skepticism. Over looking small things is not that uncommon. One degree surface temperature increase would change TOA Emissivity from 0.609 to ~0.602. :)
Happy Holidays
Steve Oregonsays
312 Ray says:
We don’t need the models to be right because we have observations showing they are right?
What a whopper. And you call this a place for science education?
Dude, yes plenty of people have really thought this out. And YES the models are as wrong as your pile of attributions.
What’s even worse is your confused conclusions that the green policies amount to “stamping on the brakes to avoid catastrophe”.
Is that what California’s lunacy is doing? Not hardly. They are stamping on their economy without avoiding anything.
Or how about here in Oregon.
Would you care to apply some of your profound wisdom to the fabricated Oregon’s Ocean Dead Zones whopper?
This is a prime example of your weakness.
It should be an easy task for the RC Team.
David Wrightsays
“The problem here is that your view of the situation is so binary. It is either a catastrophe or negligible. The only solution is reducing carbon emissions to zero immediately. But neither of these things are true. There is a whole range of impacts that range for the minor to the very serious, and there is no-one who doesn’t recognise that reducing emissions is a long-term proposition. Please stop arguing against strawmen. – gavin]”
I am fairly certain that we will not suddenly quit using fossil fuel. As long as they are the most efficent fuel we will continue their use.
In my opinion, we will become more efficient, given hockey stick curve of new technology coming out. That efficiency will reduce our use of energy. More folks will work at home. There will be less need to travel. Aircraft and automobiles will be much more fuel efficient. I expect that we will have autopilot on the interstates before too long (maybe 20 years??), and that it will eliminate the waste of traffic jams. These innovative technologies will be driven by competition and the market, not through taxation or because we fear some catastrophe.
I strongly believe that our children and grandchildren will inherit a much better world.
Lewis Guignardsays
RE: #48 Ray Ladbury.
The idea of stabilizing the climate by controlling CO2 is absurd in itself. Long before man was a factor CO2 was changing concentrations and the climate was changing, not necessarily in concert with each other. What would we do to offset/control the influence of the various cycles of the sun and the orbits of the earth? Certainly there are alternative sources of energy, my point is the ability to transport them. Battery packs for trucks and farm vehicles is a cute idea (re prokarotes search for electric tractors) which is only cute. The battery packs currently available would weigh too much to be of pragmatic use. Better would be a system to liquify hydrogen as a fuel, the storage of which is also problematic at this point.
The problem is not climate, which is constantly changing, but man’s perception and limited knowledge and his constantly recurring belief that changes are due to something he has or hasn’t done. Again – this current belief that we are doing something to change the climate and so must change our behavior is no different than the beliefs which led to virgin sacrifices for droughts etc.
What we are doing wrong, if anything, is building in flood plains – whether coastal or inland. We know storms and floods occur yet build there and then say we should control the weather so the floods won’t occur or the sea levels won’t change?
Actually it is typical human arrogance to believe these things – that man is so important and influencial that by his actions or inactions the climate and weather changes.
I again ask: Will we control the climate and make it the ideal of the 1980’s. What assurances are there of this – guarantees no less?
Lewis Guignardsays
Re: # 48 Ray Ladbury.
I again ask, what assurances are there that the proposals to control climate will actually worked as touted?
Further, the electric tractors prokaryotes recommended are quaint but not useful in the world of actual work.
Salamanosays
@434.
I agree with you that the output of climate scientists that reject the consensus model (or disagree about parts of it) is much smaller (you said “pathetic”) than the much larger group of people that agree with the consensus model.
However, there are other avenues of model-based, statistic-based, projection-based pursuits– including ones that are used to define and drive critical elements of policy or budget, that still allow diametrically opposed mutually exclusive publications and perspectives, without being forced to resort to ‘grey-literature’ or dealing with ‘unhelpful’ attempts to change the peer-review process internally.
Consider economics and medicine (it’s been said before). The Keynesians and Austrians have been going at it forever, and both are allowed to co-exist at the peer-reviewed high IF level despite utter disagreements each camp has with eachother’s work, model assumptions, and everything else. The same exists in medicine.
It’s quite clear to me that the allowed publication of more, rather than less, will be much more helpful than the attempts (that these emails clarify) to reduce that daylight. Do the results of publication A disagree with the results of publications B-F? So what? (As you know) it gets sorted out in responses, citations, and in time will become completely irrelevant as time progresses. The Steig and O’Donnell debacle as well as the recent paper on Moscow Warming vs. Pielke, Jr.’s are two examples of peer-review / IPCC catastrophes that were/weren’t narrowly avoided (if one or the other were not to see the light of day as being ‘on the table’). No doubt there are others that did not make it, for ‘unhelpful’ reasons. Heck, even Spencer and Dressler should be allowed to make all their statements without having to worry about whether or not a reviewer wants to reject their arguments because it flies in the face of what either they themselves have published or assume in their methodology. Does this mean closer to ‘anything’ (rather than farther) can be said/published? Yes, but it seems to me that comments, responses, and further research works.
So (whenever we’re on the topic), the question is how to reform the system to permit more publications with diametrically opposed counter-majority model assumptions, methodologies, and conclusions (but yet repeatable, verifiable experiments/modeling that lead to those conclusions) to ascend out of the grey-literature and through the peer-review. I understand journals have a desire to evaluate and ensure whatever they put out is going to be highly cited and referenced, and therefore they may shy away from something they fear may not get the job done (which is their right), but there are or should be regulations in place to see that this pseudo-capitalistic pursuit doesn’t overtake the system.
Because to me, getting an exhonerative slap-on-the-wrist like a ‘unhelpful’ label implies that the way forward for scientists currently might equally be (a) reform, or (b) finding better ways to not get in trouble while essentially doing the same exact things as before.
I hope it’s the former, but so far, there hasn’t been much to see yet, since AR5 has elected to postpone and set aside various recommendations (ironically out of things like fairness and respect).
I suggest that allowing these sorts of improvements to exist would end up resulting in the same thing we have now: a paucity of thinly cited climate papers by a minority of scientists disagreeing with a large body of work by an even larger group of agreeing scientists… but it will have the added effect of taking away a key source of ammo that these emails (as with the other batch) clearly illuminate.
simonsays
You want reduced carbon emissions, economic reality will provide them, austerity in Europe and the UK, coming soon to a country near you.
You want reduced carbon emissions, peak oil is here, the cheap free flowing, sweet, light energy source that built or this is falling behind with required demand. 150…200…250+ those days are coming, demand destruction also means emission destruction.
You want to build new alt energy infrastructure, sure, but the cheap free flowing stuff is gone, we have to work hard for it now, under the ocean, ice caps, shale..you get my drift.
As you divert oil to build this new infrastructure, other industries will die, hell the world is already broke mostly. Emission trading for the plebs so we consume less and they can try at least.
The coincidence that peak oil arrives at about the same time as AGW panic is astonishing, truly.
Want to know the answer to peak oil/resources, Iraq, libya, Iran(caspian sea), syria, afgan. There it is folks, happening right in front of your eyes, I guess its easy to disregard reality, is it not :)
I am astonished at how easily seemingly highly intelligent people can be distracted.
How can you even defend SOME of these emails? Why would you? What is science?
John Doddssays
OK so just how does more CO2 cause more warming? The Arrhenius 1896 paper proves that every night when you add more CO2 the temperature goes DOWN, contrary to Arrhenius & IPCC conclusions.
So could it be that if you add more energy photon in the greenhouse effect you get more warming, & reduce the number you get cooling? I think that is what happens every day. In which case you have to control how much energy comes in to cause the greenhouse warming.
Because there is an excess of the GHG water vapor and an excess of CO2 there is more than enough to combine with the number of energy photons coming in. Could this be why whenever more water vapor GHGs are added when it rains, that the temprature does absolutely nothing? SO controlling CO2 does absolutely nothing to the temperature. The warming is controlled by the energy coming in, which is why the paper “Gravity causes Climate cahange” in http://www.scribd.com, dictates how much and when we get cyclical 60 year warming cycles.
What a waste of research time.
Hi Gavin, why did you edit out my question? If you could explain what was wrong with what I asked that would be appreciated. I’m interested to know how one can be judged to be operating in ‘rogue editor’ or ‘own judgement’ mode. This seems to be quite fundamental to understanding the concept of ‘collective self-reflection’ which seems to be important in understanding the context of the climategate 2.0 emails.
Salamanosays
@ 559, 560
The emails released from CRU (the overall subject matter of the thread) details many occasions in scientists “critique”, “denigrate”, (pick a word) each other’s work in addition to that of contrarians. These emails imply that most climate scientists are a very thick-skinned bunch, unless it comes to the words of outsiders (much like a family rallies around each other even as they needle as well).
Gavin’s main complaint (as I read it) was that these otherwise ignorable papers can not be ignored, because of how they get picked up in the media or bandied about by the blogosphere. Countless hours of time are spend re-hashing the science, de-bunking the papers, and getting back on track– the time would be better spent furthering the research. Sometimes, as Gavin alludes, such response is demanded of them in a way that makes it involuntary.
My response to this may be manyfold:
1. It has been well pointed out that the policy options that the science can speak to are highly politicized, so it’s already a given that an inordinate amount of skepticism of the science can arise from any number of worthy and unworthy motivations. We’re also talking about a lot of serious consequences that need to be mitigated through some serious actions that affect a lot of people (for example, the uneducated 20-year career coal-miner with a good job and no transferable skills in an impoverished area). It is easy for some folks to latch on to the possibility that their livelihood (vilified through no fault of their own) may be salvageable while at the same time not costing the environment as much– unfounded as it may be to just about every scientist. Unfortunately, because of the highly sensitive (and political) reality that exists– this type of care must still be given, even if it’s rehashed.
2. The community of scientists that exists with more-or-less agreeable views on the current climate understanding is rather large, and the contrarian group small, so it should not have to fall to the same four-six people to respond to every paper.
3. Given a general human fallibility, it should not also fall to a small number of people to be the final arbiter of what is “crap” that should forever be left off the stage, and what deserves publication despite being flawed. The climate emails have underscored the publication of papers that any number of people have held a number of transient opinions on– and that fact alone merits more works being published rather than less.
4. That contrarian papers, or even ones that do not lock-step advocate for similar policy or carry similar future climate projections, that they “muddy the waters” is going to be true. Some of this is because there’s a lot of research, modelings, assumptions, and whatever else going on, and some of it is because there are some in the field who want above-all-else to hold-fast to certain specific policy outcomes as the hill to die on. The latter is closer to an activist stance that, if permitted to dominate, would have denied publication of many papers in recent memory that should have gone to press and should be in the literature today despite contentions among scientists (I cited examples a few hundred posts ago– we’re not talking just about magical incoherence) :)
5. Allowing this stuff to be in peer-review removes a key criticism (the whole ‘gate-keeping’ thing) so that it can no longer be pointed to as a stifling of competition or academic censorship, or whatever else. The draw-backs come in the form of wasted time and annoyance, but the continued reps in re-demonstrating the strength of the science will just continue to work over time… but the failure to address and move beyond critics’ main contentions behind the warts of the IPCC and peer-review has simply given more ammunition that allows eager bystanders something to reach for to continue to dismiss the strength of the science without even having to engage it.
I apologize for the wall-of-text. I’m prepared for the snip ;)
NEEDTOUNDERSTANDsays
Help us, some of us normal people need some idea of the time when trouble will insue. What date say within 100 to 500 years will the AGW be something of real day to day problems for our childrens/children x some number of generations. Please help us with just an estimate.
Thanks
Vlastasays
So , you are trying to tell me , that warming world will see less cyclones ?
See the 2 above posts . First you have to tell it to Al Gore , cause he is saying opposite .
Second , if the world is warming , first oceans would have get warmer to transfer the heat to atmosphere , but they are cooling .
So you are right there there will be less cyclones , but then the Earth cant warm can it ?
I think you guys are getting bogged up like centuries ago , when scientists thought the Earth is centre of the universe and with more discoveries more lines were added , untill they found , that global warming can not cause more snow .
Its simple it rains when its warm , and it snows when its cold .
Terry:
In the real world, no sane investor would ever risk any significant amount on any project that relies on the premise of AGW. Just way too much uncertainty. That only happens in the in the unreal world of the Government,! The US federal Gov’t is based on the paradigm that ” we’ ( people who pay relatively litte taxes) are going to take more money from “them” ( wealthy taxpayers ) to fix something. If it doesn’t work, who’s on the hook? And the response to failure is almost universal. “We” need MORE MONEY from “them”.
I do not accept the premises on which this analysis is based. The primary causes of global warming are in a progressive state of disequilibrium between the cooling effect of melting ice reserves and the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Since ice reserves are steadily disappearing, it seems to me that no matter what we do now, a runaway global warming looms in the future when ice reserves reach a critical level no longer able to counter the warming due to the present levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Ray,
The back of the envelope figues are OK, but your economics are attrocious. IMHO, your post has less to do with physics, and much more to do with political economy.
May I suggest that you take a brisk autumn walk over to the economics department at the Univerisity of Chicago and ask them to grade your writeup. After you do, come back and give us a report.
In the meantime, may I commend to you 2009 Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom’s books.
Stefan Rahmstorf recently wrote a piece for ABC ENVIRONMENT to make us (non-science people) aware of the alarming fall in the level of sea ice in the artic this year, comparable to the low levels in 2007. Cohenite has posted this in response:
“Arctic sea ice was much less in the immediate geologic past:
http://bprc.osu.edu/geo/publications/mckay_etal_CJES_08.pdf
The Arctic was warming quicker in the 1930’s:
http://www.lanl.gov/source/orgs/ees/ees14/pdfs/09Chlylek.pdf
The Arctic temperature has been falling since 2005 and according to all the Arctic ice measurements Arctic ice has been well above 2007 levels for most of 2011 and according to NORSEX is still above 2007 levels in both area and extent:
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
Rahmstorf has form in being hysterical about the AGW hysteria; perhaps one of his many measured critics can be given a right of reply. I would suggest Dr David Stockwell”.
I don’t have the ability to analyse whether what he’s saying has any merit. Would anyone care to give a rebuttal to that response.
“The contrast between the conversations in this meeting and what passes for serious issues in the media and blogosphere was very clear.”
==============
There is no lack of skeptics willing to converse.
There is a lack of those willing to converse with them.
With that said, I and my comment are ready to be sent into the ether.
Why upset science after it has been declared “settled”,and funding has been secured.
Help! Exxon has a gun to my head as I type?
CO2 climate crisis believers:Your “education” you speak of is now called the Internet, an open sewer of untreated information that can be used to educate one’s self such we former believers do or use as a search engine for one’s established opinions such as you remaining climate blame believers do. We see right through you because its obvious you want this misery to be true. You need this misery of climate change to be true because you need something to believe in and trust and like bible thumpers you sanctify the pureness of science. What could go wrong? For decades and decades it was all of science that denied the dangers of the pesticides they gave us. So act like real progressives and be real liberals who challenge, doubt and question all authority. Especially a pop culture of politics authority that is condemning billions of children to a CO2 death. This was progressivism’s Iraq War of lies. Green neocons!You want this misery to be true despite millions of scientists warning us of the worst crisis imaginable, climate crisis, that just sit on their thrones and not ACT like its’ a crisis. Are they on Oprah or CNN?You want this misery to be true despite your hero Obama not even mentioning the “crisis” in his state of the union address.You want this misery to be true despite countless thousands of consensus scientists who sat on their hands while Obama and the rest of the world walk away from climate change and CO2 mitigation.You want this misery to be true as you fear monger with childish glee knowing full well that real planet lovers would rejoice at the obvious exaggeration of “crisis”.So what is wrong with dropping the CO2 factor entirely from the environmental equation and practice responsible stewardship instead of taxing the air via corporate CO2 markets?
#154 Jim Bullis,
It is not hard to understand why raypierre might think that coal will have run out by 2100. He seems to believe that the planet will be unable to sustain agriculture by that time. The ability to believe in one science fiction story (and as someone who has been reading SF since probably before raypierre was born, I recognize it when I see it) has a pretty decent correlation in the ability to believe in another.
re eric response to comment #6 balazs,
Eric,
In bouncing back and forth between the pro and sceptic blogs I’ve found it not unusual for the commentors to snip at one another. But the more I spend time here at Real Climate, the more I note the moderators doing the snipping as well. The difference in tone between say Dr Curry on her blog and what I see here is very noticable. Balazs raises a very good point – yet you knock him for not being constructive enough.
I tend to think Balazs analogy to be rather decent – at least to a point. Your insurance analogy is ok, except you are not making the complete connection. Wanting tax payers and consumers to pay more for carbon mitigation, reduction or replacement policies is akin to asking the insured to take out additional premiums for rare diseases or potential accidents they have extremely low odds of experiencing. Should I pay a 10%, 15% or higher premium to protect me from getting mangled by a charging elephant? How about paying more to protect me from space debris falling on my head? Like a warming climate, both elephants and space debris are real. The question is – are they something I should worry about? You say that the problem is climate researchers and modelers are poor communicators. You may have a point in the sense that – as far as I am concerned – they have done a poor job communicating actual risk and impact. To date almost all of the information has been in a form more suitable to diaster movie plot lines than real evidence one can make reasoned decisions on.
Have you seen the latest ad with the guy on his cell phone trashing global warming and then suddenly catching fire and burning up? Based on that, I’d say yes, someone has a communications problem.
Richard,
I agree that dialogue between scientists in public forums will help a great deal. One of the problems is that several blogs sites screen comments, thus eliminating much of the dialogue.
It would be nice if someone started a website which was truly neutral, i.e. was not moderated by an individual (or group) which promoted either side of the AGW debate.
RE:63
Hey Pete,
This goes back to the argument between Drs. Emmanuel/Curry and Drs. Landsea/Wang. Do warmer SSTs result in more intense storms?
In short, I will suggest no. The higher SSTs simply spread out on the surface increasing extra-tropical or cold core storms. In addition, the wealth of energy being sufficient, with a potentially increased lapse rate at the higher latitudes, should push the season window much wider. Meaning though you may have a 5 month window in the tropics, you may need to consider expanding it to accomodate the increased area with sufficient temperatures to drive a cyclonic event in the upper latitudes, (being driven by the northward migration of equtorial warmth).
As we discussed earlier wrt Arctic sea ice and a warming Pole, create the correct conditions and the weather potential will follow, (wrt cut-off anti-cyclones, so why not cold core cyclones?). Dr. Wang’s most recent paper even suggests a decrease in tropical events due to a combination of increased aerosols and tropical shear. This then may correct for the TS “window” expansion and simply re-locate where the cyclones occur (above the 25th parallel).
Cheers!
Dave Cooke
Here I am per your invitation, Ray. Please identify the open issues we might discuss.
Here is one I would like to put to bed. Given that CO2 levels continue their rapid, nearly linear rise of the past several decades, why has the centerline of the error bounds of the temperature record flattened out over the past decade and a half?
I think (and Eric seemed to agree partly in one of his Responses to me in the Times Atlas thread) that something else has partially or completely cancelled out the effect of additional CO2 over the last 15 years or so.
I agree that, all else being equal, additional CO2 will raise mean temperatures according to whatever its sensitivity might be (either 2-4.5ºC per doubling according to IPCC estimates or 0.5-1ºC according to other estimates). I think we all agree that CO2 sensitivity is positive with respect to temperatures and that 10 or 15 years is not long enough to reduce the temperature error bounds to within “statistical significance” (less than a 1 in 20 chance we are wrong.)
So, given the above, what might that something else be? It is either something humans have been doing differently over the past century and a half, such as increasing Earth’s albedo by some land use changes, or more dust in the air, or the white roof on Energy Sec. Chu’s house, etc., -OR- it is something beyond our control and influence, such as decadal ocean cycles or Svensmark’s theory that reduced magnetic activity from the current very low Sunspot cycle #24 has allowed more cosmic rays to get through and that increases cloud formation, or some other natural cycle or variation, -OR- a combination of human and natural.
If we agree so far (and if we do not, please let me know where I’ve gone astray), what can we conclude from the temperature data we have? Well, if CO2 sensitivity was, say 4.5ºC, rather than, say 0.5ºC, that something else would have to be nine times stronger. I take that as evidence that does not prove, but does favor lower CO2 sensitivity estimates.
What say you?
Great! It should be game over then politicos and hacks would stop trying to impose more taxes on us in the name of ensuring a stable climate.
Apparently climate scientists like flying around the world creating co2, like the rich there is no leadership by example. The ‘solutions’ to AGW are always schemes to accumulate wealth for the wealthy.
Dan H 106 and Pete Dunkleburg 107 are absolutely correct. If you have the contention that warming makes statistically rare events likely, then you must have a bad model.
If mean is increasing and probability is modeled correctly, than sigma must follow relative to the mean, otherwise you have built a rather poor mathematical model. I assume Hansen’s 3 sigma events were based from a descent model and didn’t use for example the 1850 mean to calculate standard deviation.
[Response: Follow the discussion please. That’s what Pete asked his question about.–Jim]
Now stephan has said in this group of responses that they will be publishing a large test case of temperatures using their model for mean temperature. It uses a SSA non-linear trend line. I am very interested to see if this trend line and the other assumptions about variability hold true.
Belief that we are confused at a higher level can not be sustained in countries such as USA and UK where leading scientists accept or endorse the notion that it is possible to convert 33.7 kWhr of heat into 33.7 kWhr of electricity.
150 Chris R says:
17 Nov 2011 at 2:03 PM
Norm Hull,
“The 1930s are irrelevant. We’re talking about the recent warming, the global mean of which is attributable to human activity, i.e. post 1975 – the start of the recent linear trend. Studying the 20th century may well reveal skewing in different directions. However the recent warming trend is atypical of the global temperature behaviour in the 20th century. The 1930s warming was primarily a far-northern pattern probably related to the AMO, an outcome of internal ocean/atmosphere variability.!
It is stuff like this that really makes me shake my head!
The fact is that global temperatures rose at the same rate from 1910-1945 as they did 1970-2000. (If you were to be pedantic they rose ever so slightly higher actually)
However, this post still says 1970 to 2000 is atypical. Why?
The earlier period was only minimally influenced by CO2. levels actually fell 9ppm between 1935 and 1945.
Ohh, we are told comparitively low volcanic activity, which is true.
However what does this mean? Why don’t they say comparitively low sulphate aerosol emissions, which is how volcanos (and man)cool the planet? Because it isn’t true that’s why!
Sulphate aerosols rose dramatically from 1900 to 1940, not surprising given the pace of industrialisation at the time.
Ohh, we are told increasing Solar RF, true again. However, solar activity continued to increase into the 1950s and plateaud at a higher level than the earlier period. More solar energy was put into the Earths climate system during 1970-2000 than 1910-1940.
There seems a desperation to isolate the late 20th century warming as something completely unique and unprecedented.
In another post someone quoted a scientist saying that the current warming is at least 10 times anything experienced in the last 20,000 years!!
Ehh…….what!
Yet noone said anything!
I don’t know what cherry picked period in the 20th century this scientist was talking about but whatever it was he was assuring us that know other century ot of the last 200 had ever increased by as much as 0.2c!!!
The proxies he was using must be actually better thermometers than actual thermometers methinks!
Alan
A few commenters have asked where I got my lower limit for CO2 sensitivity (0.5ºC to 1ºC) and the related issue of the treatment of cloud feedback in mainstream climate models.
Here is a .pdf of a 2009 paper by Lindzen and Choi that appeared in GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L16705, doi:10.1029/2009GL039628, 200.
Richard Lindzen, is an American atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Based on Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) data, he and Choi conclude that “…ERBE data appear to demonstrate a climate sensitivity of about 0.5ºC which is easily distinguished from sensitivities given by models.”
An easier to read source for the possibility that CO2 sensitivity has been over-estimated due to how the mainstream models treat cloud feedback is Dr. Roy Spenser’s blog.
You all may read the paper and the blog and agree or not. I do not have sufficient expertise to judge.
Happy reading!
This study may show that temperatures in Moscow have increased in the last 120 years. In 1890, when the temperature record from this study began, Moscow was a city made up mostly of peasant huts and dirt roads. The modern Moscow is a city of concrete and asphalt. You folks can argue all you want that UHI does not matter on a global scale, but within a city it is undeniable. You would expect that as the UHI has increased, anomalies would reflect this reality. Secondly, global temperatures have increased since 1976, however, this is not necessarily attributable to anthropogenic forces as this coincides with a change in the PDO and this increase ended when the PDO went more negative. Thirdly, the mixture of a year with a strong El nino and a change in the arctic oscillation also would have had an extremely significant effect on temperatures in Moscow.
You cannot take the temperatures of any given city and claim that they are evidence of global anthropogenic forces. The climates of given regions are often extremely diverse.
Re #30 Karen
Similar version can be found in a report titled “Multivariate Regression — Techniques and Tools” by H. Hyotyniemi, Helsinki Univ. of Tech. 2001.
“Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything.” –unknown
The author remarks that a good book must have obscure quotes and he provides a few more. My favorite:
“Statistics in the hands of an engineer are like a lamppost to a drunk — they provide more support than illumination.” — B. Sangster
Whoever he or she may be and I’m sure this applies to more than just engineers!
With regards to the warming trend, the US trend is essentially the same as the global trend, i.e. 0.59C/century. The US did experience much higher temperatures in the 1930s than the rest of the globe, resulting in a 5-yr mean lower today than the mid 30s. Many of the “plethora” of new highs occurred in cities which do not have records dating back 50 years or more (there were exceptions like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.). If you check neighboring cities, some had record highs 5F higher in 1934 or 1936. While many states experienced the warmest July on record, the highest temperatures did not surpass those of prior years. The average was higher, but the extremes were not. In Russia, Moscow did surpass its record high of 1936 by 1.5C last year.
Using statistics to determine that these extreme events occur once every hundred or thousand years is what is incorrect in this analysis. The US alone has experienced three years of greater high temperatures than recently recorded (1934, 1936, and 1954). During these years, weather conditions persist which allow temperatures to soar. The length of these weather conditions will determine records (Russia, 2010 and U.S., 1936), and not statistical analysis.
You are correct Kevin in that I agree that the climate is warming, but that extremes are not increasing.
Timothy,
I agree that droughts would have the greatest effect on food supply. Although I do not necessarily agree that drought is increasing. A recent drought monitor shows only Texas and the surrounding areas in extreme drought. Other areas which were under extreme droughts have received relief in recent years.
http://www.apcc21.net/en/services/apcc-operational-3-month-mme-prediction/state-of-our-climate/global-extreme-drought-flood-monitoring/
“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.
IOW, the IPCC now admits that man is not the driver of climate therefore AGW is nothing to get excited about.
Earlir IPCC report
The revised AMO index (Trenberth and Shea, 2006) indicates that North Atlantic SSTs have recently been about 0.3°C warmer than during 1970 to 1990, emphasizing the role of the AMO in suppressing tropical storm activity during that period. The AMO is likely to be a driver of multi-decadal variations in Sahel droughts, precipitation in the Caribbean, summer climate of both North America and Europe, sea ice concentration in the Greenland Sea and sea level pressure over the southern USA, the North Atlantic and southern Europe;(Trenberth and Shea, 2006). Walter and Graf (2002) identified a non-stationary relationship between the NAO and the AMO.
During the negative phase of the AMO, the North Atlantic SST is strongly correlated with the NAO index. In contrast, the NAO index is only weakly correlated with the North Atlantic SST during the AMO positive phase.
In this report I couldn’t find a single reference to the AMO or the NAO.
Has the IPCC abandoned idea that the natural oscillations have any role?
It appears to me that the understanding North Atlantic Oscillations with which the above events were previously associated, and now apparently discarded, is incomplete.
I did detailed analysis of the AMO-NAO relationship and found number of important elements either not known (hopefully not ignored) by the IPCC contributors.
The results via my web-page: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/theAMO.htm
most important result can be found on the page 10.
During the Eemian the feared melting of undersea methane did not occur. does this man the threat is exagerated?
From MARodger #257
William Cowper (late 1700’s): “A moral, sensible, and well-bred man, Will not affront me, and no other can.” And, I appreciate RC posting and responding to my skeptic comments.
No conspiracy, no fantasy, just a climate system and temperature data collection system so complex that honest, competent scientists and data analysts can only approximate the truth to a given level of uncertainty.
1) CO2 sensitivity may be 2ºC or 4.5ºC (according to the IPCC and not my skeptic sources), more than a factor of two.
2) The US temperature record is uncertain due to TOBS corrections (Gavin’s Response). OK, I understand that Time of OBServation is an issue. GISS has had the 1998 US temperature data in hand since 1999, and has adjusted the anomaly from the initial 0.918ºC up by over 0.3ºC in several steps from 1999 to 2007 (Sato email). Since that date 1998 has gone up further and is now 0.4ºC over the value published by GISS in 1999.
3) I can understand that 1934 data would be uncertain, but 1998 is relatively recent and from stations that are mostly still operational, yet it seems to have analytic “wriggle room” of 0.4ºC.
4) What was it about TOBS or other issues with the 1998 US data that became known between 1999 and 2001 (+0.281ºC)? Between 2001 and now (+0.121ºC)? If estimated warming since the late 1800’s is about 0.8ºC, and TOBS corrections of 1998 data between 1999 and now is over 0.4ºC, there seems to be an uncertainty factor of two.
You guys can attribute anything to anything……….Hot=Cold Wet=Dry it’s quite amazing………. By the By — how ’bout them new Thanksgiving e-mails from all you lying bitchez???????????
You guys are very quiet at the moment but don’t worry it is obvious that your remarks in the newly released emails have been taken out of context.
Now what type of person normally says their words have been taken out of context?
Of course someone who is completely honest like for instance politicians.
The middle game was Climategate 1 which your mates managed to help you out with we are now into the end game and unfortunately you have no credible pieces on the board.
Three cheers for the “cause”.
Lot more emails still behind password protection waiting to be released. Anything you guys want to get off your chest while you still can, emails you guys thought you had managed to delete?
Comrades,
The important thing is to weather the storm and quash these terroristic rumors! The profane herd largely do not pay attention to primary sources such as these. We just issue our standard denials, and most will never hear of this. (As if their opinions matter anyway!)
Onwards to revolution, and a global totalitarian utopia!
PS May I reiterate my wish for a peer-reviewed reference supporting the claim that climate models (I would settle for a single one) are wrong, as Gavin Schmidt and Phil Jones have stated ?
[Response: See below. But if you want reviewed literature on model imperfections start with the IPCC AR4 WG1 Ch 8. – gavin]
One more thing. Did any of you watch the Al Gore marathon? Did you see the “experiment” he did with CO2 in a closed glass container? Did you see the temperature go up? Did you know that his results could not be duplicated? That is, he lied to try to prove a point. That’s just part of the science to which I refer that has been falsified. I doubt that any of you will believe me but I had to say it. I harbor no ill will towards any one – I just have a different opinion of what the science is saying.
202Ray Ladbury,
Putting aside our mutual disrespect and regarding the “proper use of scientific [climate] models.
Who decides the validity of climate models and what is to be gleaned from them?
Because from my denialist’s ignorant assessment the gleaning of insights can be no more than what the validity and reliability of the models allows.
Never mind the WUWT chaps, plenty of your enlightened Team members have expressed low confidence in the reliability of the climate models. The emails also show significant concern being expressed.
So where is this “ideal world” that justifies gleaning insight for policy making from models that are of such low reliability and high uncertainty?
One would hope the climate researchers will improve their skills about the true facts about this ever changing world and make it known when they err. The Real Climate Website has improved over years and it serves its users well…We can only hope those who receive grant money or a yearly salary tell us only the true facts about the weather and use the phrase ” we don’t know… ” when they are in doubt over the substantive issues surrounding global warming or cooling.
RE: “European heat wave in 2003, Moscow heat wave in 2010 etc.) shows some promise, and is indicating that the odds of such extremes are shifting in predictable ways – but this is still cutting edge science. – gavin]”
What does this “cutting edge” science have to say about the heat waves of the 1930s and the extremes of 1934?
How about the absolute disaster the climate played in the defeat of the Spanish Armada – “cutting edge” science must have lots of great theories on the damage climate has already done to the cause of the Spanish Crown.
By the way, just how does a scientist quantify all this. Is one hurricane worth two droughts, or 1/2 a bitter winter. What is the basic unit of scariness?
RE: “[Response: Now you are just being silly. Trenberth actually said it was a travesty that we didn’t have good enough monitoring of the Earth’s radiation budget to know where the energy is going (and coming) on decadal time scales. And that is a shame – surely even you would welcome more accurate observations? – gavin]”
Cutting through the pea soup thick jargon, what Gavin is saying here is that its a shame they cant measure the earth’s temperature. I have been saying this myself for over a decade. I’m glad Gavin is finally on board with me. The fact that they can’t measure the Earth’s temperature in no way should discourage us from accepting theories that it simply must be ascending even if we cant see it or sense it. Newton’s theories would similarly be just as pretty even if gravity did not exist wouldn’t they?
[Response: Of course LW radiation depends on temperature, how is that the issue? But the point was about the logarithmic nature of the forcing from CO2 – this has everything to do with pressure broadening, line widths, absorption bands, overlaps etc. and nothing specifically to do what you think the temperature in Antarctica is or should be. – gavin]
From my reading of Arrhenius’ on carbonic acid paper, the ln relationship is based on the estimated temperature of the radiant layer. He starts with 255K and mentions 246K as a secondary radiant layer. Neither temperature is applicable in the Antarctic.
Based on Arrhenius’ ln relationship, his final table indicates that latitude 25 N would have the highest impact of a change in CO2 from 0.67K to 1.5K, “If carbonic acid decreases to 0.67 or increases to 1.5 times it present quantity.” That range, assuming the “present quantity was 280ppm, would be, 188ppm to 420ppm, resulting in a change at lat 24.5 N of -3.2 to +3.6, which with current concentrations of ~390ppm seems to not be all that accurate.
Reading the paper, there appears to be a number of approximations that may have contributed to this minor discrepancy. The average temperature on the moon at 100K, the estimated impact of the atmospheric effect being 200K seem to be of some significance.
I am sure that the models use more accurate estimates than Arrhenius’, I just don’t recall seeing a formula that includes the correct physical relationships that appear to be required. As such, I am curious why reference to the Arrhenius paper criticized by Angstrom is so common. Angstrom just mentioned that at surface temperatures and pressures that CO2 was near saturation which would impact Arrhenius’ equation.
Correcting for temperatures appears to more closely match observations in the tropics and the Antarctic. Plus the greater warming in the Arctic region tends to agree with Arrhenius’ temperature assumptions. possibly, because he lived near the Arctic circle.
I believe Ray Pierrehumbert was a bit mystified by what circulation could produce the Russian heat wave, which really should not be that great a mystery in my opinion.
Perhaps I am missing some literature that better explains how the ln relationship is corrected in the models for regional conditions?
What a “cold” site – a lot of defensive PR, little science and bad humor.
Question – why do more and more scientists leave the AGW camp each passing month? I thought the science was settled.
Another question – why have the AGW poll numbers tanked vs. a few years back? Clearly a majority of people are now skeptical of the AGW “science.”
Looks to me like you folks aren’t very good at either science or PR.
I just looked at Compete.com and it looks like your US traffic (i.e. unique visitors) is down about 50% in Oct 2011 from Oct 2010.
Man the lifeboats! If Real Climate had a publicly traded stock it would be a great short.
tamino says:
22 Nov 2011 at 7:03 PM
“I’m tempted to laugh — but the health, safety, even survival of the next generation is at stake. They’ll know who it was who sealed their fate.”
===========
You seem to delight in this outcome.
Yet, infer an action has changed “fate”.
Not bad, it took nearly 5 hours to borehole that last one on Arrhenius.
I have a post on http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2011/11/radiantion-versus-conductivity.html which appears to be a reasonable mechanism to explain part of the SH NH forcing issues.
Why things are not performing as expected is the reason for the skepticism. Over looking small things is not that uncommon. One degree surface temperature increase would change TOA Emissivity from 0.609 to ~0.602. :)
Happy Holidays
312 Ray says:
We don’t need the models to be right because we have observations showing they are right?
What a whopper. And you call this a place for science education?
Dude, yes plenty of people have really thought this out. And YES the models are as wrong as your pile of attributions.
What’s even worse is your confused conclusions that the green policies amount to “stamping on the brakes to avoid catastrophe”.
Is that what California’s lunacy is doing? Not hardly. They are stamping on their economy without avoiding anything.
Or how about here in Oregon.
Would you care to apply some of your profound wisdom to the fabricated Oregon’s Ocean Dead Zones whopper?
This is a prime example of your weakness.
It should be an easy task for the RC Team.
“The problem here is that your view of the situation is so binary. It is either a catastrophe or negligible. The only solution is reducing carbon emissions to zero immediately. But neither of these things are true. There is a whole range of impacts that range for the minor to the very serious, and there is no-one who doesn’t recognise that reducing emissions is a long-term proposition. Please stop arguing against strawmen. – gavin]”
I am fairly certain that we will not suddenly quit using fossil fuel. As long as they are the most efficent fuel we will continue their use.
In my opinion, we will become more efficient, given hockey stick curve of new technology coming out. That efficiency will reduce our use of energy. More folks will work at home. There will be less need to travel. Aircraft and automobiles will be much more fuel efficient. I expect that we will have autopilot on the interstates before too long (maybe 20 years??), and that it will eliminate the waste of traffic jams. These innovative technologies will be driven by competition and the market, not through taxation or because we fear some catastrophe.
I strongly believe that our children and grandchildren will inherit a much better world.
RE: #48 Ray Ladbury.
The idea of stabilizing the climate by controlling CO2 is absurd in itself. Long before man was a factor CO2 was changing concentrations and the climate was changing, not necessarily in concert with each other. What would we do to offset/control the influence of the various cycles of the sun and the orbits of the earth? Certainly there are alternative sources of energy, my point is the ability to transport them. Battery packs for trucks and farm vehicles is a cute idea (re prokarotes search for electric tractors) which is only cute. The battery packs currently available would weigh too much to be of pragmatic use. Better would be a system to liquify hydrogen as a fuel, the storage of which is also problematic at this point.
The problem is not climate, which is constantly changing, but man’s perception and limited knowledge and his constantly recurring belief that changes are due to something he has or hasn’t done. Again – this current belief that we are doing something to change the climate and so must change our behavior is no different than the beliefs which led to virgin sacrifices for droughts etc.
What we are doing wrong, if anything, is building in flood plains – whether coastal or inland. We know storms and floods occur yet build there and then say we should control the weather so the floods won’t occur or the sea levels won’t change?
Actually it is typical human arrogance to believe these things – that man is so important and influencial that by his actions or inactions the climate and weather changes.
I again ask: Will we control the climate and make it the ideal of the 1980’s. What assurances are there of this – guarantees no less?
Re: # 48 Ray Ladbury.
I again ask, what assurances are there that the proposals to control climate will actually worked as touted?
Further, the electric tractors prokaryotes recommended are quaint but not useful in the world of actual work.
@434.
I agree with you that the output of climate scientists that reject the consensus model (or disagree about parts of it) is much smaller (you said “pathetic”) than the much larger group of people that agree with the consensus model.
However, there are other avenues of model-based, statistic-based, projection-based pursuits– including ones that are used to define and drive critical elements of policy or budget, that still allow diametrically opposed mutually exclusive publications and perspectives, without being forced to resort to ‘grey-literature’ or dealing with ‘unhelpful’ attempts to change the peer-review process internally.
Consider economics and medicine (it’s been said before). The Keynesians and Austrians have been going at it forever, and both are allowed to co-exist at the peer-reviewed high IF level despite utter disagreements each camp has with eachother’s work, model assumptions, and everything else. The same exists in medicine.
It’s quite clear to me that the allowed publication of more, rather than less, will be much more helpful than the attempts (that these emails clarify) to reduce that daylight. Do the results of publication A disagree with the results of publications B-F? So what? (As you know) it gets sorted out in responses, citations, and in time will become completely irrelevant as time progresses. The Steig and O’Donnell debacle as well as the recent paper on Moscow Warming vs. Pielke, Jr.’s are two examples of peer-review / IPCC catastrophes that were/weren’t narrowly avoided (if one or the other were not to see the light of day as being ‘on the table’). No doubt there are others that did not make it, for ‘unhelpful’ reasons. Heck, even Spencer and Dressler should be allowed to make all their statements without having to worry about whether or not a reviewer wants to reject their arguments because it flies in the face of what either they themselves have published or assume in their methodology. Does this mean closer to ‘anything’ (rather than farther) can be said/published? Yes, but it seems to me that comments, responses, and further research works.
So (whenever we’re on the topic), the question is how to reform the system to permit more publications with diametrically opposed counter-majority model assumptions, methodologies, and conclusions (but yet repeatable, verifiable experiments/modeling that lead to those conclusions) to ascend out of the grey-literature and through the peer-review. I understand journals have a desire to evaluate and ensure whatever they put out is going to be highly cited and referenced, and therefore they may shy away from something they fear may not get the job done (which is their right), but there are or should be regulations in place to see that this pseudo-capitalistic pursuit doesn’t overtake the system.
Because to me, getting an exhonerative slap-on-the-wrist like a ‘unhelpful’ label implies that the way forward for scientists currently might equally be (a) reform, or (b) finding better ways to not get in trouble while essentially doing the same exact things as before.
I hope it’s the former, but so far, there hasn’t been much to see yet, since AR5 has elected to postpone and set aside various recommendations (ironically out of things like fairness and respect).
I suggest that allowing these sorts of improvements to exist would end up resulting in the same thing we have now: a paucity of thinly cited climate papers by a minority of scientists disagreeing with a large body of work by an even larger group of agreeing scientists… but it will have the added effect of taking away a key source of ammo that these emails (as with the other batch) clearly illuminate.
You want reduced carbon emissions, economic reality will provide them, austerity in Europe and the UK, coming soon to a country near you.
You want reduced carbon emissions, peak oil is here, the cheap free flowing, sweet, light energy source that built or this is falling behind with required demand. 150…200…250+ those days are coming, demand destruction also means emission destruction.
You want to build new alt energy infrastructure, sure, but the cheap free flowing stuff is gone, we have to work hard for it now, under the ocean, ice caps, shale..you get my drift.
As you divert oil to build this new infrastructure, other industries will die, hell the world is already broke mostly. Emission trading for the plebs so we consume less and they can try at least.
The coincidence that peak oil arrives at about the same time as AGW panic is astonishing, truly.
Want to know the answer to peak oil/resources, Iraq, libya, Iran(caspian sea), syria, afgan. There it is folks, happening right in front of your eyes, I guess its easy to disregard reality, is it not :)
I am astonished at how easily seemingly highly intelligent people can be distracted.
How can you even defend SOME of these emails? Why would you? What is science?
OK so just how does more CO2 cause more warming? The Arrhenius 1896 paper proves that every night when you add more CO2 the temperature goes DOWN, contrary to Arrhenius & IPCC conclusions.
So could it be that if you add more energy photon in the greenhouse effect you get more warming, & reduce the number you get cooling? I think that is what happens every day. In which case you have to control how much energy comes in to cause the greenhouse warming.
Because there is an excess of the GHG water vapor and an excess of CO2 there is more than enough to combine with the number of energy photons coming in. Could this be why whenever more water vapor GHGs are added when it rains, that the temprature does absolutely nothing? SO controlling CO2 does absolutely nothing to the temperature. The warming is controlled by the energy coming in, which is why the paper “Gravity causes Climate cahange” in http://www.scribd.com, dictates how much and when we get cyclical 60 year warming cycles.
What a waste of research time.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/25/seven-eminent-physicists-that-are-skeptical-of-agw/
Hi Gavin, why did you edit out my question? If you could explain what was wrong with what I asked that would be appreciated. I’m interested to know how one can be judged to be operating in ‘rogue editor’ or ‘own judgement’ mode. This seems to be quite fundamental to understanding the concept of ‘collective self-reflection’ which seems to be important in understanding the context of the climategate 2.0 emails.
@ 559, 560
The emails released from CRU (the overall subject matter of the thread) details many occasions in scientists “critique”, “denigrate”, (pick a word) each other’s work in addition to that of contrarians. These emails imply that most climate scientists are a very thick-skinned bunch, unless it comes to the words of outsiders (much like a family rallies around each other even as they needle as well).
Gavin’s main complaint (as I read it) was that these otherwise ignorable papers can not be ignored, because of how they get picked up in the media or bandied about by the blogosphere. Countless hours of time are spend re-hashing the science, de-bunking the papers, and getting back on track– the time would be better spent furthering the research. Sometimes, as Gavin alludes, such response is demanded of them in a way that makes it involuntary.
My response to this may be manyfold:
1. It has been well pointed out that the policy options that the science can speak to are highly politicized, so it’s already a given that an inordinate amount of skepticism of the science can arise from any number of worthy and unworthy motivations. We’re also talking about a lot of serious consequences that need to be mitigated through some serious actions that affect a lot of people (for example, the uneducated 20-year career coal-miner with a good job and no transferable skills in an impoverished area). It is easy for some folks to latch on to the possibility that their livelihood (vilified through no fault of their own) may be salvageable while at the same time not costing the environment as much– unfounded as it may be to just about every scientist. Unfortunately, because of the highly sensitive (and political) reality that exists– this type of care must still be given, even if it’s rehashed.
2. The community of scientists that exists with more-or-less agreeable views on the current climate understanding is rather large, and the contrarian group small, so it should not have to fall to the same four-six people to respond to every paper.
3. Given a general human fallibility, it should not also fall to a small number of people to be the final arbiter of what is “crap” that should forever be left off the stage, and what deserves publication despite being flawed. The climate emails have underscored the publication of papers that any number of people have held a number of transient opinions on– and that fact alone merits more works being published rather than less.
4. That contrarian papers, or even ones that do not lock-step advocate for similar policy or carry similar future climate projections, that they “muddy the waters” is going to be true. Some of this is because there’s a lot of research, modelings, assumptions, and whatever else going on, and some of it is because there are some in the field who want above-all-else to hold-fast to certain specific policy outcomes as the hill to die on. The latter is closer to an activist stance that, if permitted to dominate, would have denied publication of many papers in recent memory that should have gone to press and should be in the literature today despite contentions among scientists (I cited examples a few hundred posts ago– we’re not talking just about magical incoherence) :)
5. Allowing this stuff to be in peer-review removes a key criticism (the whole ‘gate-keeping’ thing) so that it can no longer be pointed to as a stifling of competition or academic censorship, or whatever else. The draw-backs come in the form of wasted time and annoyance, but the continued reps in re-demonstrating the strength of the science will just continue to work over time… but the failure to address and move beyond critics’ main contentions behind the warts of the IPCC and peer-review has simply given more ammunition that allows eager bystanders something to reach for to continue to dismiss the strength of the science without even having to engage it.
I apologize for the wall-of-text. I’m prepared for the snip ;)
Help us, some of us normal people need some idea of the time when trouble will insue. What date say within 100 to 500 years will the AGW be something of real day to day problems for our childrens/children x some number of generations. Please help us with just an estimate.
Thanks
So , you are trying to tell me , that warming world will see less cyclones ?
See the 2 above posts . First you have to tell it to Al Gore , cause he is saying opposite .
Second , if the world is warming , first oceans would have get warmer to transfer the heat to atmosphere , but they are cooling .
So you are right there there will be less cyclones , but then the Earth cant warm can it ?
I think you guys are getting bogged up like centuries ago , when scientists thought the Earth is centre of the universe and with more discoveries more lines were added , untill they found , that global warming can not cause more snow .
Its simple it rains when its warm , and it snows when its cold .