Continuation of the open thread. Please use these threads to bring up things that are creating ‘buzz’ rather than having news items get buried in comment threads on more specific topics. We’ll promote the best responses to the head post.
Knorr (2009): Case in point, Knorr (GRL, 2009) is a study about how much of the human emissions are staying the atmosphere (around 40%) and whether that is detectably changing over time. It does not undermine the fact that CO2 is rising. The confusion in the denialosphere is based on a misunderstanding between ‘airborne fraction of CO2 emissions’ (not changing very much) and ‘CO2 fraction in the air’ (changing very rapidly), led in no small part by a misleading headline (subsequently fixed) on the ScienceDaily news item Update: MT/AH point out the headline came from an AGU press release (Sigh…). SkepticalScience has a good discussion of the details including some other recent work by Le Quéré and colleagues.
Update: Some comments on the John Coleman/KUSI/Joe D’Aleo/E. M. Smith accusations about the temperature records. Their claim is apparently that coastal station absolute temperatures are being used to estimate the current absolute temperatures in mountain regions and that the anomalies there are warm because the coast is warmer than the mountain. This is simply wrong. What is actually done is that temperature anomalies are calculated locally from local baselines, and these anomalies can be interpolated over quite large distances. This is perfectly fine and checkable by looking at the pairwise correlations at the monthly stations between different stations (London-Paris or New York-Cleveland or LA-San Francisco). The second thread in their ‘accusation’ is that the agencies are deleting records, but this just underscores their lack of understanding of where the GHCN data set actually comes from. This is thoroughly discussed in Peterson and Vose (1997) which indicates where the data came from and which data streams give real time updates. The principle one is the CLIMAT updates of monthly mean temperature via the WMO network of reports. These are distributed by the Nat. Met. Services who have decided which stations they choose to produce monthly mean data for (and how it is calculated) and is absolutely nothing to do with NCDC or NASA.
Further Update: NCDC has a good description of their procedures now available, and Zeke Hausfather has a very good explanation of the real issues on the Yale Forum.
Thanks for the responses. I’ll take a look at the Meijer and Keeling comment.
The second DOI I mentioned resolves fine for me in dx.doi.org. Although bear in mind that the comma at the end is punctuation of my sentence, not part of the DOI ;-).
[Response: Indeed, google didn’t like it though (and I thought they had a link up to dx.doi.org). Anyway, that’s crap too. ;) – gavin]
Septic Matthew (896) — Yes, CO2 emissions growth has been approximately exponential up to now, see the graphs at the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center @ ORNL. So, approximately, expect linear forcing from atmospheric CO2 until something changes.
Has anybody got a reference linking the LIA, volcanism and Greenland and Antarctic ice core clues? Also sediment cores.
Seems to me the best way to tease out the degree of the influence of volcanism on climate might be this way.
> a reference
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?sourceid=Mozilla-search&q=LIA%2C+volcanism+and+Greenland+and+Antarctic+ice+core
Try putting author names into the search box at the top of the Realclimate page, to see if they’ve been discussed here.
1000 year model run with proxy based forcings
http://nzc.iap.ac.cn/ewea/images/stories/reference/2009/7/703_peng_qi.pdf
ought to be of some interest.
I notice that the RealCliamte editors have seen fit to edit my post #8 in this (closed) thread https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/
A cute “trick” but my original analogy is much closer to the reality of the situation.
Hope this wasn’t done on government time.
Re:904
Thanks Hank. I don’t think volcanic forcing goes anywhere more than maybe minus 1.5º C over about three years after an eruption in the last several hundred years. One paper recognizes only 26 significant eruptions between 1400 and 1950. The LIA could not have been caused by the Tambora eruption because temperature was declining before the event.
It may have aggravated cooling, but only for a few years, according to Fischer et al.
Little Ice Age In Northern Greenland Ice Cores
http://epic.awi.de/Publications/Fis1998c.pdf
Apparently the LIA was due to solar forcing experienced as the Maunder minimum.
David, I can’t help but think that your standard of evidence for ghosts is lower than your standard of evidence for anthropogenic global warming.
In response to “Septic” Matthew I wrote in 895:When I said that your thread is mind-numbing I was refering to your game. And it is mind numbing because it distracts — it gets in the way because it forces people to belabor the obvious rather than move forward and both learn and teach more. It dumbs down the conversation and even thought itself.
Doug Bostrom responded in 899:
Agreed — and it is often that way — not just with him but others, here and elsewhere.
Back in 895 I’d written:
I didn’t realize it at the time, but SecularAnimist had actually called him on this as recently as 863.
He quoted Matthew’s 861:
… then SecularAnimist stated in 863:
… and it was only a few posts before that that Ray Ladbury had asked in 857:
I wrote in 895:
He was fairly obvious about his hostility while playing stupid in 860, stating:
“Ogre” and “troll” are more or less synonyms, and an internet troll’s purpose and intent is to disrupt conversation in a newsgroup, email list or blog.
Please see:
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/troll
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/ogre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogre
I obliquely refered to his hostility and tactics back in 864:
Among the Brits a two-finger salute means essentially the same thing as one finger in the US. Didn’t expect him to know that necessarily (as I suspect given his “tar heel” reference he may be from North Carolina or at least the South) but I figured that those among us with some exposure to those on the other side of the pond would.
Likewise, he made it clear that he knew that “tar heel” has positive associations in 860:
… and so it did among the Confederates:
Hank Roberts called him on this in 865:
… but then Matthew played stupid in 880
Thinly-masked hostility and feigned stupidity to disrupt and dumb down the conversation.
Doug Bostrom continued in 899:
I know that the contributors have complained about this. I myself find it exhausting.
Doug Bostrom continued in 899:
Doesn’t have to be.
I think we can expect some hostility on the part of those who have been the victims of disinformation. But even then there comes a point at which they become victim of their own ideological opposition to science. And there comes a point soon after that where we may have to say that the person is beyond help. But Matthew falls into an altogether different category. At least the victims of disinformation don’t pretend to be stupid. Matthew does. He deliberately repeats what he knows to be disinformation, and he appears to take misplaced pride in this.
If we can learn to distinguish between those who are simply seeking information, those who are somewhat hostile victims of disinformation and people like “Septic Matthew,” we should be able to come up with strategies for dealing with this sort of thing and change things for the better.
David Wright, you should watch the list of inline responses in the right sidebar, that’s not a new change. So if you can’t smell it and see it, it can’t hurt you?
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluor/shoe.htm
895, Timothy Chase Matthew, I have argued with Young Earth Creationists who go out of their way to play stupid. They try to get the science types to explain to them in one syllable terms each and every step, each and every detail — and then explain it to them again in two weeks. Its not that they don’t want to learn. Its their way of pulling one over on the science types and thereby proving to themselves how much brighter they are than the science types by getting the science types to believe that the creationists are less bright than they actually are and thereby getting those science types to waste their time explaining the obvious.
There are some hypotheses about why warming has been reduced these past 10 year, and whether the counter-acting forcing will last.
Dai
“A cute “trick” but my original analogy is much closer to the reality of the situation.
Hope this wasn’t done on government time.”
Why? What value do you think you’d get out of the fifteen seconds that would take?
It’s just a way to whine that you can defend with “I wasn’t whining about my silly analogy being dumped, I was whining about my taxes being wasted”.
PS are you using time at work to post here?
David Wright wrote in 906:
ABC’s Wright latest to mislead on stolen climate emails
December 10, 2009 6:16 am ET filed under Research
…
Media Matters: David Wright
http://mediamatters.org/search/tag/david_wright
S Matthew: There are some hypotheses about why warming has been reduced these past 10 years.
Warming has not been reduced in the past ten years:
First decade of 21st century warmest on record
re: 913. Indeed, let’s hope David Wright’s continuing to spout misleading/far out of context information re: global warming despite being shown to be wrong wasn’t done while being paid by ABC.
Re:911
“There are some hypotheses about why warming has been reduced these past 10 year, and whether the counter-acting forcing will last.”
And they’ve all been gone over here ad nauseum.
Tim Jones, you say “apparently” — you mean “it appears to me” the sun caused the Maunder. But it’s not apparent that it’s so simple from the research in the record, and it’s been studied exhaustively. Eyeballing charts leads to simple conclusions; looking at the research complicates them.
Try this:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/stalking-the-elusive-solar-cycletemperature-connection/ and the followup posts.
> ABC’s Wright latest to mislead
Wow — same person, or just a coincidence of names?
Jim Galasyn wrote 914:
Tim Jones wrote 916:
Indiana, let it go.
(Please see: 895, 909)
PS
I will let you in on something a little later… Or you can email me at timothy chase AT g mail dot com (no sp.s) if you have difficulty waiting.
Re: 917
Thanks Hank. You wrote,
“…you mean “it appears to me” the sun caused the Maunder.”
Not exactly, but that too. I tried to copy excerpts from the pdf I cited but couldn’t in a way I could paste into a message. The paper also suggests such a meaning, as I read it. Thus “apparently” referrs to the paper, though I admit ambiguity.
To wit:
The Conclusion reads in part: “Although the causes for LIA climate variations are not unambiguously known, our data point to a substantial solar influence which has to be reevaluated when longer time series from the northern Greenland ice sheet are available. Volcanic aerosols in the stratosphere, however, are unlikely to have a Holocene climate effect on the century and millenium (sic) time scale.”
Therefore the paper suggests solar influences as a substantial cause of the LIA.
I suspect the AO and the Gulf Stream are also of such a nature
as volcanic forcing, ie transient on long time scales, so I didn’t go into all the other possible contributing factors. I could easily be wrong. The LIA could easily be a coincidence of a group of cascading negative forcing factors. But the length of the Maunder Minimum fits the time scale.
This could be an interesting thread where much research was pulled together. I’m not sure sure how redundant this might be
in this forum.
My original intent was to examine volcanic forcing as it realistically occurs in the context of global cooling. So far,
from what I’ve read, such a forcing has a minimal effect on
climate trends. If this morphs into what caused the LIA so be it.
The conversation would be a lot more edifying than most of the current bs regarding trolling denialist palookas and their appellations.
Seen this in the Guardian? Experts say methane emissions from the Arctic have risen by almost one-third in just five years, and that sharply rising temperatures are to blame. Doesn’t look good, although it’s still a rather short time series. http://bit.ly/ArcticCH4
Kees van der Leun says: 14 January 2010 at 3:10 PM
Here’s a link to the article.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/14/arctic-permafrost-methane
For me, the real takeaway are the comments on our paltry remote sensing inventory:
“Palmer said: “Our study reinforces the idea that satellites can pinpoint changes in the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from a particular place on earth. This opens the door to quantifying greenhouse gas emissions made from a variety of natural and man-made sources.”
Palmer said it was a “disgrace” that so few satellites were launched to monitor levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. He said it was unclear whether the team would be able to continue the methane monitoring in future. The pair of satellites used to analyse water, known as Grace, are already over their expected mission life time, while a European version launched last year, called Goce, is scheduled to fly for less than two years.”
Also in the Guardian, investors controlling some $13 trillion in assets gather to demand that Copenhagen swiftly followed up, or be replaced with something more concrete and more effective:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/14/business-low-carbon-economy
Looks as though they’re not paying very much attention to the recently unveiled conspiracy directed against Steve McIntyre, as discovered by Steve McIntyre.
914, Jim Galasyn: Warming has not been reduced in the past ten years:
No cooling has occurred, but the rate of warming has declined, according to denialists, sceptics, and even a few warmers.
RE Doug Bostrom
A travesty, even.
I’d like to see a Real Climate article about the current state of ice sheet modelling and an opinion on the study that just occurred in Proceedings of the Royal Society A. The article is available at this link:
http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/01/13/rspa.2009.0434.full.pdf+html
In the article, they claim that their simple models and recent observations indicate that Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers in Antarctica have already passed their tipping points, and are going to lose substantial amounts of mass before restablilizing sometime in the future. This would lead to about a half meter of sea level rise from West Antarctica alone. They also state that their model underestimates the problem.
What do other ice sheet models say?
Timothy, lulz!
“PS are you using time at work to post here?”
No, but if I were, do you think that would justify it?
“Why? What value do you think you’d get out of the fifteen seconds that would take?”
Negative value most likely, so in retrospect, I’m glad he wasted the 15 seconds.
Thanks, I feel better.
Anyone care to comment on this? Or refer me to a past post that addresses this canard?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/14/more-on-john-colemans-special-tonight-kusi-press-release-says-nasa-improperly-manipulated-data/#more-15263
[Response: What a load of tripe. We should give prizes for the biggest number of factual errors, logical errors and complete non sequitors that readers can find. Just in the first segment, they get the provenance of the ice cores wrong (Antarctica, not the Arctic), the grant Monckton and D’Aleo PhDs they have not earned, they insinuate strongly that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas (despite this being known since the 19th Century), they steal video from the Great Global Warming Swindle, they still can’t seem to get their heads around the fact that temperature can cause the carbon cycle to change at the same time that CO2 causes warming because it’s a greenhouse gas, and… someone else can continue – I haven’t got the stomach for it. – gavin]
Is Antarctica melting, or not?
http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/40923
Roger Greenway
January 14, 2010
(excerpt)
“NASA notes that one new paper states there has been less surface melting recently than in past years, and has been cited as “proof” that there’s no global warming. Other evidence that the amount of sea ice around Antarctica seems to be increasing slightly is being used in the same way. But both of these data points are misleading. Gravity data collected from space using NASA’s Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002.”
Tim Jones says: 15 January 2010 at 12:07 AM
GRACE is hard (impossible?) to fool, it’s been used successfully to measure many things other than Antarctic ice. So unless there’s something specially strange about Antarctica, I’d say gravimetric data from GRACE rules them all. A steady 100km2/yr is too much to be a lake drainage feature, too, which I’m sure is the first joker doubters will pull from their bottomless deck.
Johnhayte says: 14 January 2010 at 8:34 PM
Not about science, but then John Coleman never was about science himself. Here’s the very first thing Coleman published about global warming:
“Global Warming: It is a SCAM.”
This was before he did any research. Now, what a coincidence, he guessed right? Uh-huh.
Here’s a full workup on TV weathermen and their performance art, in the Columbia Journalism Review:
http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/hot_air.php?page=all
Actually it’s not quite that simple. There’s an ongoing glacial isostatic adjustment of the solid Earth due to the reduction in Antarctic ice cover at the end of the last ice age. This motion is hard to measure precisely (GPS does something like 0.5 mm/yr at best geocentrically) and even harder to model precisely. This is currently the biggest limiting factor in deriving mass changes from GRACE in areas thus affected.
…and yes, we would need a GRACE follow-up. GOCE is no substitute as it does the static geopotential only — although with much better spatial resolution. But GRACE is the thing for monitoring changes over time. It has been a wild success.
…a wild success:
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/grace-images-20051220.html
http://bgi.cnes.fr:8110/geoid-variations/variable/v1/archives_films/GRGS.film.geoid.d20.RL01.gif
Matthew says:
“No cooling has occurred, but the rate of warming has declined, according to denialists, sceptics, and even a few warmers.”
Nope, because the time of selection to show such a decline is not long enough to prove it.
Note also that your modification is not taken on board by MOST denialists and MOST (self-assigned) skeptics.
tim: “My original intent was to examine volcanic forcing as it realistically occurs in the context of global cooling.”
So why did your original comment include the unrealistic of a 10-Pinatubo eruption for 10 years?
For Tim Jones, from a quick search on LIA causes, this is recent:
“… The coldest temperatures of the Little Ice Age are observed over the interval 1400 to 1700 C.E., with greatest cooling over the extratropical Northern Hemisphere continents. The patterns of temperature change imply dynamical responses of climate to natural radiative forcing changes involving El Niño and the North Atlantic Oscillation–Arctic Oscillation.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;326/5957/1256
Sunspot counts in early years may be low because haze from distant volcanos reduced what could be seen, an effect that the observers didn’t know about; I’ve seen this suggested in a number of papers; here’s one I hadn’t found before:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1990QJRAS..31..109S
> What a load of tripe.
Bingo, anyone?
“There’s an ongoing glacial isostatic adjustment of the solid Earth due to the reduction in Antarctic ice cover at the end of the last ice age.”
Since wales has gone 200ft (60,000mm) since the last time it was covered with Ice (12,000 years), it would be assumed that the change is 5mm and that was when removing 1500m (uh, dunno, that’s all the wiki page on it has: how thick the continental ice was at peak), that would be about 0.003 mm/m/year, the 9m per year antarctic thinning would be 0.03mm a year change from isostatic rebound.
Not a big error added.
And the change has to be compared with the nine meters loss that is the maximum change in ice thickness in Antarctica in a year seen.
I don’t know if my BotE calculation is right, hence I put the workings there.
Hank and Gavin’s inline of #928:
Yes, it’s so bad it’s not even wrong, but amazingly, even though I’ve never known micro-Watts to be right about anything, it doesn’t diminish his following or authority. It’s the Faux-News effect on steroids…or maybe that’s laxatives. I can only conclude that it is futile to try and refute anything on WUWT, as the denizens do not live in the same Universe as the rest of us…and yet they still vote.
Looks like another Monckton wave propagating through the blogosphere; the “recent cooling” meme seems to be resurgent.
Martin Vermeer says: 15 January 2010 at 2:28 AM
“Actually it’s not quite that simple. There’s an ongoing glacial isostatic adjustment of the solid Earth due to the reduction in Antarctic ice cover…”
GRACE measures gravitational anomalies, not surface altitude, so unless I’m missing something data from GRACE is an indicator of Antarctic mass, not topography. Failing loss of liquid water or rock, the loss of mass in Antarctica would pretty much come down to ice.
Jim Galasyn says: 15 January 2010 at 10:35 AM
“…the “recent cooling” meme seems to be resurgent.”
Didn’t Hank Roberts assign “rebunked” as the official term for zombie concepts called forth from the grave?
Ray Ladbury: “I can only conclude that it is futile to try and refute anything on WUWT, as the denizens do not live in the same Universe as the rest of us…and yet they still vote.”
If you’re interested in how widespread this is, some of the clips from The Young Turks (a progressive internet news broadcaster) show how this is widespread among the republican talking-heads and, supposedly, the people who watch them.
Tactics and the gigantic self-deception (or ability to avoid looking at yourself) needed to believe some of the talking heads required by Fox watchers are very much in evidence there on such diverse topics as
Healthcare reform
Bank bailouts
Terrorism and responses
Doug, I wonder if these waves of rebunked topics are self-excited or responses to external drivers. It seems like the blogosphere is an excitable medium in which zombie topics can re-appear spontaneously and trigger self-amplifying waves with very long decay constants bouncing around the closed system.
Completely Fed Up says:
15 January 2010 at 10:25 AM
Since wales has gone 200ft (60,000mm) since the last time it was covered with Ice (12,000 years), it would be assumed that the change is 5mm and that was when removing 1500m (uh, dunno, that’s all the wiki page on it has: how thick the continental ice was at peak), that would be about 0.003 mm/m/year, the 9m per year antarctic thinning would be 0.03mm a year change from isostatic rebound.
I don’t know if my BotE calculation is right, hence I put the workings there.
Current isostatic rebound measured in Scandinavia by GPS is ~1 cm/yr
Jim Galasyn says: 15 January 2010 at 11:53 AM
“I wonder if these waves of rebunked topics are self-excited or responses to external drivers. It seems like the blogosphere is an excitable medium in which zombie topics can re-appear spontaneously and trigger self-amplifying waves with very long decay constants bouncing around the closed system.”
I’m sure it’s tractable for scientific inquiry, and I have no doubt that some of today’s children will be cranking out PhD work based on this very thing. There’s a plethora of social science related data sloshing around in our networks; just yesterday I read an article about USGS tapping into Twitter streams to help with collecting human perception data for temblors.
So, in conclusion we know that even twits can help push forward our horizon of knowledge.
“Current isostatic rebound measured in Scandinavia by GPS is ~1 cm/yr”
OK, though from post 940, it’s not all that relevant.
Still a lot less than 9m change in depth seen.
Re: 935 Hank Roberts says:
“Sunspot counts in early years may be low because haze from distant volcanos reduced what could be seen, an effect that the observers didn’t know about; I’ve seen this suggested in a number of papers; here’s one I hadn’t found before:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1990QJRAS..31..109S ”
Seems to me the paper ascribes spurious sunspots to volcanic activity more than it ascribes a suspected subtraction of sunspots due to aerosol veiling, if the latter at all.
questions:
Is there a correlation between sunspot (or lack of) observations and either tropospheric haze or stratospheric aerosol optical veiling events due to volcanic activity during the period of
the Maunder Minimum?
Is there a correlation between low power optical and high power observations of sunspots during the Tambora (1815) and Krackatoa (1883) eruptions where aerosol veiling can be shown to obscure the perception of sunspots with low power
telescopic observations?
Re:945 Doug Bostrom says:
15 January 2010 at 12:32 PM
Jim Galasyn says: 15 January 2010 at 11:53 AM
“I wonder if these waves of rebunked topics are self-excited or responses to external drivers. It seems like the blogosphere is an excitable medium in which zombie topics can re-appear spontaneously and trigger self-amplifying waves with very long decay constants bouncing around the closed system.”
I see it as an effort by the fossil fuel lobby to keep the subject alive in order to win more adherents and thus more negative pressure on progressive moves to advance climate change legislation.
Tim Jones says:15 January 2010 at 2:00 PM
“I see it as an effort by the fossil fuel lobby to keep the subject alive in order to win more adherents and thus more negative pressure on progressive moves to advance climate change legislation.”
To whatever the extent the doubt community is driven by fossil fuel interests, we should see an upsurge in public policy vandalism activity in the coming months, here in the U.S. at least.
Watch the denialagogues get apoplectic over this…
‘No basis’ for excluding climate impacts from NEPA reviews — CEQ
http://www.eenews.net/Greenwire/2010/01/15/1/ (subscription)
Noelle Straub, E&E reporter
(01/15/2010)
“The White House Council on Environmental Quality has found “no basis” for excluding greenhouse gas emissions from National Environmental Policy Act reviews.”
“Responding to inquiries from Republican lawmakers, CEQ Chairwoman Nancy Sutley said NEPA “cannot be used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions” and that the Obama administration remains committed to energy and climate legislation to address those broader issues.”
“Nonetheless, NEPA compels Federal agencies to consider environmental effects before undertaking significant actions or policies,” Sutley wrote in a letter to the lawmakers late last month. “CEQ sees no basis for excluding greenhouse gas emissions from that consideration.”
[…]
Click here to read Sutley’s letter.
http://www.eenews.net/features/documents/2010/01/15/document_gw_02.pdf