– regional is not global
– the temperature in your backyard does not represent the temperature of the earth
– short term is more strongly mixed with natural variation in climate variance influenced by oceanic cycles and other factors
– weather (short term variability) is not climate (30+ years)
We have had a debate in Denmark recently about the GISS adjustments where some have claimed that the GISS have been readjusting the decline in temperatures 1940-70 away. Unfortunately, it has spilled over into Anthony Watt´s infamous page:
“Mathews Graph 1976: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.3C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 1980: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.1C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 1987: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.05C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 2007: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.03C cooler than 1970’s”
I am sure that you will quickly realise that it is used to push average septic nonsense “temperatures today as warm as in 1958”. He has apparently arrived at the conclusions that the GISS have supposedly adjusted the temperature series around 1980, 1987 and 2007 from pictures in old magazines. We have tracked down the source of the Matthews 1976 NG graph – it is presenting a spuriously large 1940-70 decline due to some unfortunate splicing of two Russian datasets. However, I have not been able to figure out what has happened to the GISS graphs by looking in the old literature (E.g. the famous Hansen AGU 1988 paper does not much look like the 1987 image from the WUWT post), and you know all to well that the septics will jump at any compellingly looking picture.
So, could you point me to literature setting these claims straight? And could you provide a little further information about the different visual appearance of the GISS series for the different years, and if they be due to some large-scale corrections having taken place in the 1980ies?
I would be very happy for just a short answer.
Best regards,
Christoffer Bugge Harder
[Response: The references for GISTEMP provide most of these answers specifically, Hansen and Lebedeff 1987, Hansen et al 1999 and Hansen et al 2001. All are available directly from the GISS publications page. – gavin]
Ric Merrittsays
Understandably, everyone is sooooo tired of trolls (and worse) who give no complete name, eschew straightforward reasoned argument, and casually dismiss the best science, that they tend to jump on anything looking like opposition. However, since the topic doesn’t seem forbidden on this thread….
Most of us are OK with the possibility, or even good probability, that we are around peak oil now. Everybody knows there’s enough fossil carbon still in the ground to make climate risks even worse than they are today. The candidate replacement energy sources include many varieties of renewables, the ever-provocative nuclear stuff, and, for a while, frantically making liquid fuels from coal, with attendant climate effects. Nobody knows how fast we can scale up renewables, whether we can gain ground on the (still increasing!) population (absent the dreadful “solution” of a rapid population decrease), or whether we will start to lose ground, that is, see a drop in the average standard of living as we bumble through the attempts to cope. It is worth asking whether such a drop in standard of living (keep in mind, we’re already seeing enough of that to be big news on a decadal or century scale) will snowball into horrendous damage to civilization. You may hope not (so do I), and you may feel that we should keep raising the big issues and finding the best path to renewables as soon as we can, but we still don’t know how that stuff will scale up EVEN IF the politics and sociology of it all go better than heretofore.
Another thing nobody knows is how many humans can be supported on Earth using renewable energy sources, or even if that sustainable state includes a wealthy and high-technology civilization. Think you can electrify transportation and do without oil (and later coal) while supporting billions of wealthy folks? That would be great, but we haven’t done it yet. And it is *******NOT******* in the same category as garden-variety climate denialism to wonder whether that is possible. The energy flux from Sol is gargantuan, but dilute, and it is therefore harder, in some important sense, to get useful work out it. (I am not competent to quantify the thermodynamics.) What is the EROEI for your favorite renewable energy path, implemented without recourse to fossil fuels? OK, there’s lots to discuss, but if you are honest, your bottom-line answer is still “I’m not sure”, because there’s a whole aspirational civilization’s worth of unproven engineering in there, not to even mention the current state of population and politics. And that is the nub of Gilles’s point about peak oil affecting the whole economy so deeply that some scenarios about emissions may need to be thrown out.
The regulars here are quick to tell newbies to read up before they make fools of themselves. There is better discussion of these issues on The Oil Drum from time to time. I particularly recommend the links to well-written and literate essays by John Michael Greer. He doesn’t quantify the thermodynamics either, so I don’t necessarily swallow all of his favorite points without demur, but there’s no call to trivialize the discussion. One thing you will not find anywhere, I am confident, is a vast scientific consensus, backed by decades of painstaking research and reviewed by sober international bodies, showing with 90-99% confidence how to feed 7+ billion people well, with resources left over for Brahms and Dancing With the Stars, without using the black stuff from underground. Until you make that demonstration, humility is in order.
David B. Bensonsays
phil c (219) — The cloud experiment at CERN is unlikely to be definitive due to wall effects, according to Eli Rabett. By the way, his blog is listed on the sidebar.
Neal J. Kingsays
This week’s The Economist has a couple of articles on the global warming issue: Indeed, the cover story is: “Spin, science and climate change.”
Depressingly, even in this relatively high-brow paper, the skeptical commenters out-number the well-informed, even if the grammar is better than usual.
CMsays
Gilles, ccpo,
I owe both of you a reply from way back. But perhaps I owe it to the other readers here not to prolong the discussion of that particular claim I made about human aptitude to make engines work without oil vs. making rainforests work without rain. (ccpo, I take your point about the potential linkage between oil price and rainforest destruction.)
I did not mean to argue it would be easy to build enough renewables to replace a significant amount of fossil energy in a carbon-constrained economy, or that developing new energy sources is the only policy needed, or that technological fixes will allow unlimited growth or allow a growing world population to aspire to the wasteful lifestyles of rich countries. But the points you both bring up reinforce, in my mind, the need for an aggressive energy efficiency / renewable energy program, sooner rather than later. I’m baffled why Gilles apparently does not.
John E. Pearsonsays
Walter Manny said “Otherwise stated, neither you nor anyone else can predict the impact on the theory of things we don’t yet know. ”
This is sheer unmitigated nonsense. I predict that if and when we have a “theory of everything” that it will give a value for the Lande g-factor of about 2.0023193043617 to within about a part in a trillion. I wonder if there are any physicists who disagree with me.
gary thompsonsays
251.#236 gary thompson
In addition to CFU’s response, remember that:
– regional is not global
– the temperature in your backyard does not represent the temperature of the earth
– short term is more strongly mixed with natural variation in climate variance influenced by oceanic cycles and other factors
– weather (short term variability) is not climate (30+ years)
Thanks John for the response. i agree with most all you state above but my concern is with the third and fourth points- short term variation. i’ve heard that the general trend over several decades clearly shows global temperature anomalies of 0.5C to 1.0C over almost 40 years and one should not pay attention to the short term variation (weather). but then we have short term variations (noise) that have the same magnitude as the very critical variable that is so often quoted. if you have variation in a process of 1C (which is how much the US temperature anomaly dropped over the past few years) then how can you statistically quote trends in values less than the variation (0.5C to 1C)? And yes, the US is not the world but it is a fairly large land mass and as i stated above, it has more than its fair share of weather stations. the analysis and agw theory should still hold true. if agw proponents are allowed to use the north pole warming over the past decade (which also doesn’t equal the world) to validate agw theory then why can’t we use the US cooling over the past decade to invalidate the agw theory?
“””It is the leap from accepted CO2 warming science to predictions/projections (semantics) of 4-6C temperature rises due to feedbacks that I struggle with.””
______________________________________________________________________
Well, I would not be so worried about the IPCC including screwed up positive feedbacks with their high temp projection rises …almost no reliable source states that the IPCC has come close to modeling all the positive feedbacks fully…and still the IPCC projections show pretty high temp increases without them.
Several peer reviewed studies suggest that the IPCC projections might be *underestimating* the temperature increases for the next 100 years in some scenarios due to underestimated/not-included positive feedbacks.
Our children and grandchildren could be in for a very nasty surprise based on conservative IPCC projections:
______________________________________________________________________
“The consensus view of climate scientists, as represented by the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report, is that the enhanced greenhouse effect likely will lead to global average surface warming by 2100 of between 1.4° and 5.8°C, and global sea level rise of between 9 and 88 centimeters. This assumes the climate sensitivity is in the range 1.5°–4.5°C for an equilibrium doubling of preindustrial carbon dioxide concentrations, and the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) range of emissions scenarios [IPCC, 2000.
However, recent developments suggest that this dated IPCC view might underestimate the upper end of the range of possibilities and shift the probabilities toward an increasing risk of greater warmings and sea level rises by 2100.”
“Permafrost melting is widespread. Observations show rapid melting of permafrost
[Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, 2004; Nelson, 2003], which is expected to increase
[Lawrence and Slater, 2005].”
“Biomass feedbacks are kicking in. Observations of soil and vegetation acting as
sources rather than sinks of greenhouse gases [Bellamy et al., 2005; Raupach et al.,
2006] suggest an earlier than expected [Friedlingstein et al., 2001; Matthews et al.,
2005] positive feedback in the terrestrial carbon cycle [Gruber et al., 2004; Scheffer
et al., 2006].”
“Circulation changes in mid to high latitudes. The northern and southern annular
modes have become more positive, with increasing sea level pressures in midlatitudes,
poleward movement of the midlatitude westerlies, and a strengthening of the
major ocean gyres [Gillett et al., 2003; Marshall, 2003; Cai, 2006; Cai et al., 2005]. This is due to a combination of the enhanced greenhouse effect and reductions in stratospheric
ozone, has significant effects on surface climatology [Carril et al., 2005; Fyfe, 2003;
Fyfe and Saenko, 2006], and may be underpredicted in climate models [Gillett, 2005].”
“The above lines of evidence, while not definitive and in some cases controversial,
suggest that the balance of evidence may be swinging toward a more extreme outcome.
While some of the observations may be due merely to natural fluctuations, their conjunction and in some cases… positive feedbacks are causes for concern. They suggest that critical levels of global warming may occur at even lower greenhouse gas concentrations and/or anthropogenic emissions than was considered justified in the IPCC [2001] report.”
Pittock, 2006, EOS, TRANSACTIONS AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006EO340006.shtml http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/pittock.pdf
______________________________________________________________________
“The estimated feedback effect might be conservative,
as higher temperatures are also likely to promote concentrations
of methane [Woodwell et al., 1998; Petit et al.,
1999] and N2O [Leuenberger and Siegenthaler, 1992].
Although, these relationships have received somewhat less
attention, the synergy implies that the overall positive effect of warming on greenhouse gases is substantially larger than would be inferred from the feedback on CO2 alone.”
Scheffer et al. 2006, Geophysical Research Letters http://climatechange.pbworks.com/f/Positive+feedback+between+global+warming+and+CO2+-+Scheffer+Cox+2005.pdf
________________________________________________________________________
Models using current feedback effects and sensitivity underestimate the warming of the Pliocene (they underestimate the warming).
“Taking these lines of evidence together, we estimate that the response of the Earth system to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations is 30–50|[percent]| greater than the response based on those fast-adjusting components of the climate system that are used traditionally to estimate climate sensitivity.”
Lunt Haywood, Schmidt et al, 2009 Nature Geoscience http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n1/abs/ngeo706.html
————————————————————————————————————
“Assuming a nominal ‘Charney’ climate sensitivity of 3 ◦C
equilibrium global warming for doubled CO2, BAU scenarios
yield a global warming at least of the order of 3 ◦C by the
end of this century. However, the Charney sensitivity is
the equilibrium (long-term) global response when only fast
feedback processes (changes of sea ice, clouds, water vapor
and aerosols in response to climate change) are included
(Hansen et al 2007). Actual global warming would be larger
as slow feedbacks come into play. Slow feedbacks include
increased vegetation at high latitudes, ice sheet shrinkage, and
terrestrial and marine greenhouse gas emissions in response to
global warming.” Hansen, 2007, Environmental Research Letters
________________________________________________________________________
“The first GCM climate change projections to include dynamic vegetation and an interactive carbon cycle produced a very significant amplification of global warming over the 21st century. Under the IS92a business as usual emissions scenario CO2 concentrations reached about 980ppmv by 2100, which is about 280ppmv higher than when these feedbacks were ignored.”
“Figure 1c shows that climate change also has a
negative impact on carbon storage in vegetation,
resulting in a reduction of global biomass from
the middle of the 21st century onwards.”
”
”Conclusion. Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change. Our synthesis of present knowledge suggests that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under anthropogenic climate change.”
“The strong reduction of rainfall predicted by the UKMO-HadCM3 model suggests a very high future risk of extensive forest fires and a climate more accessible for highway construction and commercialized farming in large parts of the western equatorial Amazon. The predicted long dry season in the eastern equatorial Amazon could change forest to savanna.”
________________________________________________________________________
“The relative constancy of the climate over the past 10,000 years
is exceptional in view of the large variability found in
reconstructions of almost all periods before.” Dakos, 2008, PNAS. http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14308.full.pdf+html
satellite reveal that although most of the models climatological sea ice area is within 20 percent of the observational climatology, the Arctic sea ice is currently disappearing faster than the ensemble mean and faster than indicated by the range of ensemble members. From 1953-2005, a combination of satellite and in situ observations indicate the September sea ice has… Stroeve, J C et al, (2006), Arctic Climate Change: Are Current Climate Models too Conservative?, Eos Trans. AGU,
87(52), Fall Meet. Suppl., Abstract http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/SFgate/SFgate?&listenv=table&multiple=1&range=1&directget=1&application=fm06&database=%2Fdata%2Fepubs%2Fwais%2Findexes%2Ffm06%2Ffm06&maxhits=200&=“U33A-0013”
_________________________________________________________________________
Not to beat a dead horse into the ground, but arguably the top NOAA CO2 expert told me privately when I was at the place I was, that he is quite worried about the Earth’s temp increases exceeding the IPCC maximum temperature increase in 100 years due to possible future *nonincluded* IPCC feedbacks. It does not make you sleep very well at night.________________________________________________________________________
> Gary Thompson
You’re asking a fairly basic question in statistics — is it fair to say you haven’t taken a 101 statistics class?
There’s a procedure for this that’s quite general — take any set of data, look at how much it varies and how you take measurements, and from that figure out how many measurements over what period of time you need to say with good confidence that a trend exists.
See Robert Grumbine’s explanation, aimed at high school level students, which is about what any of us were when we took an intro statistics class; here:
If you follow his directions, walk through the material, do it for yourself, you’ll grasp the idea.
Many people who haven’t done that will tell you it’s too hard, or can’t be believed, or couldn’t possibly be right.
Your choice, do it for yourself, or decide who you can trust about it.
Phil Scaddensays
258. Gary you cant validate AGW with 10 year’s warming. But AGW IS a global model. It is predicting the global heat balance, not the local one. The heat transfer systems that make up the weather are way too complex to making short term, regional predictions. The number of guages in US means you can good spatial control on the temperature variation but so what? Stick to 30 years – you cant invalidate on shorter times. Do you really, truly, think we are not warming on climate scales despite GISS, sealevel, global glacial volume and MSU satellite trends?
if agw proponents are allowed to use the north pole warming over the past decade (which also doesn’t equal the world) to validate agw theory then why can’t we use the US cooling over the past decade to invalidate the agw theory?
The thing is that global warming is a ‘global’ phenomenon, not confined to a single region, whether it be the arctic or continental USA. The earth as a whole is showing a warming trend. Parts of the earth may cool, parts may warm – when you sum all the changes it’s clear that the net effect is that the earth is warming.
The arctic might be referred to simply to show that parts of the earth are warming quite a lot, in response to another saying the USA hasn’t warmed (if it hasn’t). You could just as easily point to Australia to show warming of a land mass. Or point to the warming of the oceans to show their warming. And I expect there are parts of the world outside the USA that will from time to time have lower than average temperature. But it’s the overall change that is relevant because this shows how much energy is retained vs how much is incoming, and is because of the increase in greenhouse gases, particularly CO2.
The overall warming trend won’t apply equally across the entire world all at the same time because of winds and currents and the way the oceans absorb heat vs land etc.
Gilles says:
21 March 2010 at 4:28 PM
“Gilles@158 “Call me up the first time you see a hydrogen car on the street, I offer you a beer”
Obviously you didn’t attend the Vanvouver/Whistler Olympics, buses take many cars out of the loop [and those are not the “first”] …. I think you owe septic Matthew a beer.”
Of course I know that hydrogen vehicles exist. The beer is for the first time that you see a private hydrogen car on a normal street :).
Remember, context is key. US is not global, you need to average the temps around the world to get a global average. US is as you noted, regional. It’s the planet that matters most in the context of ‘global’ warming.
America is not that huge actually. Russia is huge, Africa is huge. But that is a misnomer also. It’s not about how huge a land mass is. It’s about the temperature of the planet and what is reasonably expected with AGW.
The simple reason as to why you can’t use the US temperature to invalidate Anthropogenic Global Warming is because the ‘globe’ is warming. It’s not about just the US, or any other region.
[play around with the year and month parameters to see the global picture and how much it can vary regionally, but notice overall that lately, there is a lot more red than blue on average.]
The AGW models predicted that the Arctic would warm faster than the rest of the planet and now the observations show that is happening. This is at least a good indicator that the models may be doing a pretty good job but there are other types of confirmation that increase the robustness of the assessment.
I’m not a statistician, and others here in RC can answer such questions better than I. But from a general view:
– we have prediction,
– we have quantitative amounts of GHG’s
– we have predicted increases in radiative forcing
– we have reasonable assessment of increases in radiative forcing
– we have temperature rise observed in accord with predictions based on the quantitative analysis and modeled predictions
– we have relatively decent modeling of how much cooler the earth should be without industrial GHG’s
– we know that we are past peak forcing in the Milankovitch cycles and we should be very slowly cooling, but in fact are warming
From my perspective, we don’t know a lot of things about what changes will occur or how bad it might get in specific time periods, from a climatic perspective, but that is not what is most important when it comes to human systems. Human infrastructure and agricultural capacity are critical and we do know that systems are expected to generally shift. Very quickly on a geological time scale. Prediction is slowly improving on how much and when, but the shift will cause egregious expenses that will put pressure on the monetary economy and productive capacity.
My current assessment indicates relatively large scale economic pressures within 7 to 15 years. That will beat out sea level rise in problem magnitude before wall street and Miami go under water. I predict we will see serious pressures on the resource capacity and monetary systems within that time frame, worsening of course as time goes on. The longer we wait on meaningful action, the more expensive it gets. Expense can be measured monetarily and also in resource capacity. That translates to human lives. That includes quality of life, standard of living, sustainability, and increasingly, survivability on ever increasing scales.
We are risking the global economy for the sake of profit that can not be attained in the long run (decades). Any reasoned qualitative assessment indicates that on a business as usual approach all corporations fail and all monetary profits are lost, eventually (within decades, increasing in severity of impact as we move deeper into the warming trend). The CSIS report, when combined with the BAU MIT analysis, that all geopolitical borders fail by around 2080 on this course.
Of course then you might say I’m being alarmist. To say there will be no United States by 2080 to 2100 sounds ridiculous. But I’m not saying this, this is the combined assessment of geopolitics based on the resource issues, based on the climate path predictions assigned to probabilities and ranges and the mean values. So, though these are merely potentials, they are potentials that can be achieved simply by doing nothing different (BAU).
Where is the profit in delay of meaningful climate policy? If we delay enough there is not profit, there is only system failure on many levels in many economies. The magnitude of inertia we allow will dictate potentials. Delay should not be an option. But in reality delay is an option, and we have been delaying action far too long.
This is why the climate petition is so critically important. We really do need a ‘Fee & Dividend’ approach and we need it immediately, in order to lessen the impacts and create a less worse future.
I recommend you sign the petition, and help educate your friends as to the importance of rapid and meaningful action.
If I recall properly, the price spike may have been due to deregulation of the controlling parameters during the Bush administration. It was not a supply/demand influence event as far as I can tell. I my opinion, if true, it was truly a sad statement about our leadership.
PO is not an area I am knowledgeable on other than a few reports I have read such as the Princeton report that came out around 2005(?). I think the key to PO is knowing the water pumping numbers and that is not information that is revealed publicly by the oil companies. I can only hope we have not yet hit it, but we may have. This will put further strains on our ability to transition to renewable sustainable, but it will also add further impetus to transition rapidly, so all I can say is I don’t know how it will play out.
quite helpful. I see the key technical problem in cloud radiation understanding and description. The measurement and theory improvements hoped for and needed since TAR still haven’t happened. Progress is very slow.
Regional weather forecasts have the same sort of problems with clouds…
Gillessays
“But the points you both bring up reinforce, in my mind, the need for an aggressive energy efficiency / renewable energy program, sooner rather than later. I’m baffled why Gilles apparently does not.”
Seriously, how can you think that I could be against improving energy efficiency ? why the hell could anyone be against that, in any case ? I already said that even if CO2 hadn’t IR absorption lines, this would be mandatory in any case. And it is rather obvious that economy would ALWAYS benefit from improving energy efficiency. Actually the modern economy has never stopped improving efficiency – it cared more or less about it, following the price of energy of course, but on average it has always improved it.
On the very long term, we’ll all use only renewables (again.. ! ). That’s a certitude. So I don’t see why our grand grand children wouldn’t do exactly the same as our grand grand parents : improving their use as well as they can. There is no point that they WILL do it. Why not ?
So this is not the point. What is the point ? the point is only (I stress : ONLY) : an infinite growth being physically impossible, there is an asymptotic upper limit to the “useful” energy consumption per capita you can achieve with any energy system (by “useful” I mean that can be transformed into some valuable thing, barring any waste of energy). It seems that this point has been more or less reached since the 80’s (the energy consumption per capita has more or less plateaued since this date, its growth has only been parallel to demographic growth), around 1,5 tep/cap/yr. Of course this allows still some progress , for instance the development of computers and internet. But I think it is fair to say that the world has not become much richer/cap since this time – there has been progress, but the number of poor people is still very large and doesn’t seem really to improve. In any case, the world has less changed from 1980 to 2010 than from 1950 to 1980 – meaning that the average growth rate has decreased after the “30 glorious years” (essentially due to Green Revolution).
Now the use or renewables would probably have its own plateau. So the question is : how will the asymptotic value of the consumption/capita based only on renewable energy compare with that of fossil fuels ?
I don’t know, of course, and I think nobody can claim he knows. I have just a very general thought. Well there are only 3 possibilities : it could be much lower, much larger, or approximately the same.
Well I doubt that it could be much larger, for the reason I already mentioned. If renewable energies were much more productive than fossil fuels, why wouldn’t they have already replaced them? If it is more expensive and less convenient, they would probably sustain only a lower consumption.
Now we have the choice between “much lower” and “approximately the same”. Here I ask : why should two very different sources of energy converge towards “approximately the same” standard of living? after all, that’s a strange idea. The use of fossil fuels instead of “traditional” renewable energies has increased by a factor of 10 the use per capita and by 100 the total energy use. There is no reason that giving them up would leave the system untouched. That’s not a natural expectation if the whole energy system is totally modified. So at least I think that the standard of living will sensitively decrease. Now remember that the consequences of GW have been estimated by N. Stern around 20 % of GDP, which is considered as unbearable. I don’t know if it is realistic or not, but I simply ask : why do you expect that the total replacement (on the long term , it WILL be total) of fossil fuels by energies that are more expensive, less convenient, and cannot even been produced at this price without fossil fuels, won’t cause a similar change in the economy ? I can’t find any reasonable argument for that – apart from that we would LIKE that it can do it.
Gillessays
“In addition to CFU’s response, remember that:
– regional is not global
– the temperature in your backyard does not represent the temperature of the earth
– short term is more strongly mixed with natural variation in climate variance influenced by oceanic cycles and other factors
– weather (short term variability) is not climate (30+ years)”
of course, but you should also remember that everybody :
* is only sensitive to regional temperature and doesn’t have any idea of the global one if he doesn’t read GISS home page.
* live in his backyard and not “on the earth” as a whole.
* is much more sensitive to short term weather and doesn’t have a clear remembering of how it was 30 years ago – and doesn’t really care. For the supposed incapability of mankind to adapt to changes at a 30 years scale, well,look at the recent history, and remember that 30 years is just close to an average working time in your life, meaning that after this time you’re just replaced by young people who have no idea of how you were living 30 years ago – and care very little about it.
JiminMplssays
#250 – ccpo
What does the Bloom Box – or any of the comments – have to do with hydrogen?
There was one mention of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Amory Lovin is my hero. He not only gets the vision right (distributed micropower, conservation/efficiency ethic, transition to hydrogen, holistic vehicle design, etc) the RMI Hypercar concept is the realization of that vision. Bright Car will be launching a first generation (gas/electric hybrid) Hypercar in 2012. Hydrogen fuel cell powered versions will be in volume production by the end of the decade – as will vehicles from Honda, BMW and others. It’s not science fiction – it’s industrial innovation at its finest.
Completely Fed Upsays
“but then we have short term variations (noise) that have the same magnitude as the very critical variable that is so often quoted.”
And noise doesn’t accumulate, whereas a bias trend does.
“if you have variation in a process of 1C (which is how much the US temperature anomaly dropped over the past few years) then how can you statistically quote trends in values less than the variation (0.5C to 1C)?”
Because the noise doesn’t accumulate, whereas the bias does.
Just remember: noise doesn’t accumulate. Bias does.
RE: 122 JiminMpls says:
19 March 2010 at 11:18 PM
“The supply of oil isn’t as limited as you seem to think. Cheap oil, yes, but recoverable oil, no.
… At a $100/bbl, it would be economically recoverable. As prices go up, so will the supply. ”
This isn’t necessarily so. If it takes more energy to extract the oil than the oil provides it won’t be worth doing no matter what the price. If the energy returned is less than the energy invested you have a negative ERoEI.
cm (256): the points you both bring up reinforce, in my mind, the need for an aggressive energy efficiency / renewable energy program, sooner rather than later. I’m baffled why Gilles apparently does not.
BPL: Because he’s a political conservative who works for the fossil fuel industry, as he originally admitted before later denying it.
gray thompson (258): if agw proponents are allowed to use the north pole warming over the past decade (which also doesn’t equal the world) to validate agw theory then why can’t we use the US cooling over the past decade to invalidate the agw theory?
BPL: Polar amplification A) was predicted by AGW theory long before it was observed, and B) can be demonstrated by analyzing the temperature field over the entire globe. It’s a statement about the latitudinal gradient of mean global annual surface temperature.
simon abingdonsays
#270 Completely Fed Up
“the noise doesn’t accumulate, whereas the bias does”. Really? That sounds to me like a surprisingly uncompromising assertion.
Is not “the noise” simply what’s happening in the background that we haven’t yet analysed or understood? Wouldn’t we expect such “noise” to come and go unpredictably since we haven’t yet accounted for its origins?
Completely Fed Upsays
““the noise doesn’t accumulate, whereas the bias does”. Really? That sounds to me like a surprisingly uncompromising assertion.”
Why?
Do you think that if the average of a real series is 3.5 but the random variation around it means it varies anywhere between 1 and 6, that you will inevitably see the dice rolls accumulate to higher and higher values?
“Is not “the noise” simply what’s happening in the background that we haven’t yet analysed or understood?”
Yes, but it is, as far as climate signal is concerned, it is noise.
Check up on UDMA and its use of the frequency domain to discern signal (from the connecting mobile phone) from noise (both other mobile phones and genuine out-of-system noise from other things “happening in the background that we haven’t analysed or understood”).
Completely Fed Upsays
Tim Jones #271, you’re both right. He is right and you’re right because there’s a limit where energy out has to be a net positive, therefore a limit to the increase Jim is talking about.
Ray Ladburysays
Gilles says:
“of course, but you should also remember that everybody:
* is only sensitive to regional temperature and doesn’t have any idea of the global one if he doesn’t read GISS home page.”
Well, actually, no. Ever hear of the global economy? Brazilian orange farmers are watching the frost reports for Florida. La Nina and El Nino influence the price and availability of seafood. Flooding in the US midwest can raise flour prices around the globe, causing food riots in Asia and Africa. And what is more, our ability to feed 6.6 billion people is dependent on the global economy.
“* live in his backyard and not “on the earth” as a whole.”
And remember that ENSO can determine whether it’s a nice spring day or whether your backyard is under six inches of water.
* is much more sensitive to short term weather and doesn’t have a clear remembering of how it was 30 years ago – and doesn’t really care.”
You clearly don’t talk to old people much. They do remember what the weather was like in their youth and they know it’s different now.
CMsays
Gilles
#267:
OK, you favor energy efficiency. Sorry. But what is your beef with renewables, given that sooner or later we’ll depend on them anyway? Are you just concerned to dispel the wishful thinking of naive Greens and prepare us mentally for the economic decline you think is to come? Or are you arguing that a transition to renewables will be bad for us, and therefore our best course of action is to postpone the inevitable for as long as possible?
#240:
Thanks for putting numbers on your assertions regarding the relationship between fossil fuel use and GDP. Could you also explain some of your assumptions?
I’m looking at the IEA statistics publication “CO2 emissions from fuel combustion: Highlights” (2009 edition, http://www.iea.org/co2highlights/) which has a table for CO2 emissions / GDP in exchange-rate terms.
It gives the CO2/GDP of the world economy in 2007 as 0.73 kg CO2 per dollar GDP, hence, in your terms, closer to 1.5 tons CO2 per $2,000 than to 1 ton as you stated. You may be using a different source.
> Specifically, I don’t think this will change a lot,
What’s a lot? Over the period 1971-2007, the world economy became 33% less carbon intensive. The OECD countries cut their CO2/GDP by 50%.
> Let’s say to be conservative that it could be improved up
> to 1tCO2/3000 $,
Why should we assume no further gains are possible? Is that an arbitrary figure? If not, could you show your reasoning?
> but not faster than a rate of about 1% /yr in the best case
>(I’m not even sure this is possible).
Why not? With a 33% reduction (1971-2007) I make the rate out to be 1.1% a year, so on past experience, it’s possible. Why should we not expect a 1%/yr reduction in CO2/GDP to continue, in the absence of radical new policies to cap emissions? Why would this be the upper bound on what’s possible?
> it [GDP/CO2?] has a finite upper bound,
Possibly. But what are the real considerations that define this upper bound?
—–
PS. Just for the record: I think your English is better than that of some native speakers who comment here, and that jokes stereotyping national drinking habits get old fast.
To clarify, I’m not just referring to Australia because it’s where I live. It’s also because it’s the 96% the size of contiguous USA (and 79% of the size of all the USA incl Alaska and Hawaii). So the increase in temperature of 0.7C (1.3F) since 1960 in Australia overall (and in some parts up to 2C (3.6F) in the same period), adds more to global warming than the lesser warming of the contiguous USA of 0.4F since 1960. (I didn’t check Alaska, but I understand it’s warming faster than the contiguous USA.)
#280 correction to my previous post – that should read USA has a trend of 0.4F per decade increase since 1960, not an actual rise of 0.4F since 1960. My mistake.
So despite the last couple of years when the annual mean has been average for the period 1960 to 2009, contiguous USA is warming at least as fast if not faster than Australia! (I wasn’t comparing apples with apples, mixing trends and annual means.)
simon abingdonsays
#276 Completely Fed Up
simon abingdon: “Is not “the noise” simply what’s happening in the background that we haven’t yet analysed or understood?”
Completely Fed Up: “Yes, but it is, as far as climate signal is concerned, it is noise.”
So how can you make any meaningful statement at all about such “noise” and why should it have anything to do with dice rolls or mobile phones? On what grounds can you be sure that it might not accumulate, at least over millenial timescales?
Rod Bsays
Neal King (255), I was quite impressed with the summary description of the situation in The Economist that you referenced, especially the second one. Though I didn’t read and make judgements on the comments.
Rod Bsays
Ray L (278), I’m old (chronologically ;-) ) and don’t recall material differences from the weather of my youth…
Completely Fed Upsays
“So how can you make any meaningful statement at all about such “noise””
It’s called “statistics”.
“and why should it have anything to do with dice rolls or mobile phones?”
Because with dice rolls, your deterministic view that associates variations about the mean would have the variations in dice rolls be the result of mitroscopic changes in the forces enacted upon the dice deterministically, where the randomness that is the “dice roll” is a result of processes “happening in the background that we haven’t analysed or understood”.
And as far as your UMTS phone is concerned, the effects of out-of-system noise and other-caller noise are noise that must be discounted before you can get the signal you are attempting to detect: your phone call.
Completely Fed Upsays
PS: “On what grounds can you be sure that it might not accumulate, at least over millenial timescales?”
On what grounds do you assume that something you admit you don’t know about and aren’t measuring will accumulate, at least over millenial timescales?
For me (or, rather, climate models), the reason why not is that the processes are not sources of millenial-scale climate forces.
So what do you have?
Completely Fed Upsays
CM: “OK, you favor energy efficiency. Sorry. But what is your beef with renewables, given that sooner or later we’ll depend on them anyway?”
And how does moving to renewables stop you being more efficient with energy? Does he think that they are the wrong sort of electrons?
Simon, do you recall the other times your question has been answered?
I’ve seen you post the same doubt and uncertainty repeatedly. Examples:
RealClimate – Comments on FAQ on climate models
I may be too pessimistic, but the problem with regional temps is that the background noise, … Comment by simon abingdon — 11 November 2008 @ 1:28 PM
RealClimate – Comments on The CRU hack
Comment by simon abingdon — 21 November 2009 @ 2:43 PM … There are outliers, background noise, maybe data just plain wrong.
Statistics 101 is the answer to this confusion. Once you’ve passed a beginning statistics course, the doubt and fear are much less because you have an idea of how science and math help us understand this stuff.
John Petersays
Sou @262
Seems to me you’re standing a very slippery slope when you parcel out different temperatures and then average over regions. You don’t do that for CO2, you say that’s uniform. Same with the radiation energy balance.
BTW, you have lots and lots of company whereas I’m pretty much alone ;-)
“Journalism” strikes again… slightly OT, except it’s another example of the press twisting a valid scientific study to say something it doesn’t…
The Fox News headline:
Winds, Not Warming, Leading to Arctic Ice Melt
The Fox News opening sentence:
Strong arctic winds rather [sic] the effects of global warming can explain the dramatic loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean, explains a new scientific paper.
The Fox News admission, quoting the lead scientist in the study, doesn’t come until the 7th (next to last) paragraph:
“the combined effect of winter and summer wind forcing accounts for 50 percent of the variance of the change in September Arctic sea ice extent from one year to the next, and it also explains roughly 1/3 of the downward linear trend” of ice over the past 31 years.”
At the same time, none of this even stops to consider that if this is caused by a change in wind patterns, then are those changes anomalies in themselves or a result of warmer temperatures? And would the winds have had that same effect without the addition of anomalous warming? That is, would the winds have had anywhere near that degree of effect if that volume of ice had not also broken up, due to heat, to free it?
A good journalist would have asked those questions of the lead scientist.
It looks like the paper isn’t published yet, though, so it’s hard to say what’s actually in it.
Neal J. Kingsays
simon abdington, #282:
“Noise” is, by definition, a part of the signal that doesn’t add up to anything. If instead it adds up, it becomes part of a trend.
Example: Every month you put $100 into your bank account. Every month you spend about $50 from that bank account – not exactly $50, some months it’s $40, some months it’s $60, $55, etc. You get the idea.
– If on the average, you spend $50, then on the average you will be contributing a net $50/month. That’s the main part of the trend.
– On top of that, if you watch long enough, you will notice that the bank account grows at a rate slightly larger than $50/month, because you’re earning something like 1% on the amount in the account. That’s also part of the trend.
What’s the noise? The noise is the difference between the actual spending each month and the average, which was $50. The noise will fluctuate between -$10 and $10. And it will average to 0.
That’s why “noise” doesn’t accumulate.
A more interesting question: How do you know something is a noise signal and not a trend signal? It comes down to knowing what the source of the noise is. If you can pin the blame on a source that is unrelated to what you are trying to find out (e.g.: climate change CANNOT be related to diurnal variations, because the timescales are inappropriate), the magnitude is actually not important. If you can’t prove a specific cause, you can’t say that some UNKNOWN cause is impossible – but you can make an effort to rule out anything interesting.
A proposal that “This variation is not noise, but is actually a signal from an unknown source with unknown behavior” is not likely to win many converts, if there are plausible alternative explanations.
I should add to my post that with meaningful effective climate policy we may be able have/achieve a ‘relatively’ sustainable and functional future.
The case scenarios derived from the security perspectives are looking at potentials and when combined with BAU don’t look very good. I still believe that we can mitigate substantially with meaningful action. It’s just that we are not doing that.
Overview of security/economic perspectives:
DOD QDR Report, Feb. 2010: “Assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.”
The Center for Strategic International Studies analysis outlined needs in their 2007 report regarding climate change establishing there is a general consensus that multilateral cooperation is key to solution development.
In March 2007 the U.S. Army War College analyzed the security perspective of military mitigation, adaptation and preparation for climate change. They “climate change-related security problems likely would require multi-agency cooperation, especially for domestic emergency management, and typically multinational action.”
In April 2007, the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) issued a report which addressed the concerns of the national security community. “The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide, and the growth of terrorism.” The report warns of contribution to state failure, interstate conflicts, and other security problems.
In the October 2006 review on the Economics of Climate Change, economist Nicholas Stern: near-term costs of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG’s) would cost 1% of global GDP, major delay would result in substantially higher aggregate costs with estimates reaching 20% of the worlds GDP.
Therefore the onus of responsibility is upon all those who do understand to help others learn the contexts involved regarding well reasoned expectations for ramifications in the global economy. Especially how it impacts our lives with expected trending inflation rates.
#260 – > Gary Thompson
You’re asking a fairly basic question in statistics — is it fair to say you haven’t taken a 101 statistics class?
Comment by Hank Roberts — 22 March 2010 @ 9:34 PM
When you take the US temperature anomaly yearly averages for the past 30 years and put them on a run chart and then test for trends and oscillations you get a p-value for trends of 0.28 and a p-value for oscillations of 0.72. and if you want to be at 95% significance, then both of these suggest accepting the null hypothesis which states that the data has a random sequence. and using this data which has a standard deviation of 0.494C and running a 2-sample t-test to determine the sample size required to discern a shift in the mean of 0.25C would require a sample size of 103 (years).
Ray Ladburysays
Simon Abingdon–I hesitate to respond given your past sophistry. However, we know how the “noise” of climate behaves because of 1)conservation of energy, and 2)paleoclimatic studies.
We know most of the sources of such noise–factors from ENSO to volcanism, etc. They tend to oscillate quasi-periodically. For a long-term trend to emergy there must be a long-term driver.
Okay, last OT post on this… Ogi et al is a good paper for a non-scientist to read (IMHO). Well written, restricted to the topic at hand, and seemingly pretty solid. They looked for a statistical correlation between winds and SIE and found a good one. End of story (or rather, the end of the next chapter in the story). I look forward to the next piece to which they allude:
It would also be of interest to make a more direct comparison between the wind fields examined in this study and the two-dimensional field of satellite-derived ice-area flux examined in the study of Kwok [2009].
I seem to remember some graphs from previous years pitting various model’s minimum SIE predictions for a year against each other and the actual, like a horse race. It will be interesting to see how much better predictions become with this new variable factored in… if people can also accurately predict the 925-hPa wind field.
Back on topic, however… glad to see it’s only the media at fault for spinning this. The scientists did science, and answered the journalists’ questions with science answers.
But the points you both bring up reinforce, in my mind, the need for an aggressive energy efficiency / renewable energy program, sooner rather than later. I’m baffled why Gilles apparently does not.
Comment by CM — 22 March 2010 @ 6:34 PM
Speaking for myself, we are agreed. My point has been to broaden the scope of vision required. There are many solutions that deal well with all aspects of the problems we face, but some actually make things worse when all factors are considered (corn-based ethanol). Those are what we need to avoid, and can only do so if we consider all major criteria: climate, energy, economics.
Cheers
Completely Fed Upsays
“You don’t do that for CO2, you say that’s uniform. Same with the radiation energy balance.”
#236 gary thompson
In addition to CFU’s response, remember that:
– regional is not global
– the temperature in your backyard does not represent the temperature of the earth
– short term is more strongly mixed with natural variation in climate variance influenced by oceanic cycles and other factors
– weather (short term variability) is not climate (30+ years)
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/weather-v.-climate
—
Join the fight for ‘Fee & Dividend’
Our best chance for a better future
Understand the dangers of Cap and Trade
http://www.climatelobby.com/fee-and-dividend/
Sign the Petition!
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We have had a debate in Denmark recently about the GISS adjustments where some have claimed that the GISS have been readjusting the decline in temperatures 1940-70 away. Unfortunately, it has spilled over into Anthony Watt´s infamous page:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/18/weather-balloon-data-backs-up-missing-decline-found-in-old-magazine/
“Mathews Graph 1976: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.3C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 1980: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.1C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 1987: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.05C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 2007: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.03C cooler than 1970’s”
I am sure that you will quickly realise that it is used to push average septic nonsense “temperatures today as warm as in 1958”. He has apparently arrived at the conclusions that the GISS have supposedly adjusted the temperature series around 1980, 1987 and 2007 from pictures in old magazines. We have tracked down the source of the Matthews 1976 NG graph – it is presenting a spuriously large 1940-70 decline due to some unfortunate splicing of two Russian datasets. However, I have not been able to figure out what has happened to the GISS graphs by looking in the old literature (E.g. the famous Hansen AGU 1988 paper does not much look like the 1987 image from the WUWT post), and you know all to well that the septics will jump at any compellingly looking picture.
So, could you point me to literature setting these claims straight? And could you provide a little further information about the different visual appearance of the GISS series for the different years, and if they be due to some large-scale corrections having taken place in the 1980ies?
I would be very happy for just a short answer.
Best regards,
Christoffer Bugge Harder
[Response: The references for GISTEMP provide most of these answers specifically, Hansen and Lebedeff 1987, Hansen et al 1999 and Hansen et al 2001. All are available directly from the GISS publications page. – gavin]
Understandably, everyone is sooooo tired of trolls (and worse) who give no complete name, eschew straightforward reasoned argument, and casually dismiss the best science, that they tend to jump on anything looking like opposition. However, since the topic doesn’t seem forbidden on this thread….
Most of us are OK with the possibility, or even good probability, that we are around peak oil now. Everybody knows there’s enough fossil carbon still in the ground to make climate risks even worse than they are today. The candidate replacement energy sources include many varieties of renewables, the ever-provocative nuclear stuff, and, for a while, frantically making liquid fuels from coal, with attendant climate effects. Nobody knows how fast we can scale up renewables, whether we can gain ground on the (still increasing!) population (absent the dreadful “solution” of a rapid population decrease), or whether we will start to lose ground, that is, see a drop in the average standard of living as we bumble through the attempts to cope. It is worth asking whether such a drop in standard of living (keep in mind, we’re already seeing enough of that to be big news on a decadal or century scale) will snowball into horrendous damage to civilization. You may hope not (so do I), and you may feel that we should keep raising the big issues and finding the best path to renewables as soon as we can, but we still don’t know how that stuff will scale up EVEN IF the politics and sociology of it all go better than heretofore.
Another thing nobody knows is how many humans can be supported on Earth using renewable energy sources, or even if that sustainable state includes a wealthy and high-technology civilization. Think you can electrify transportation and do without oil (and later coal) while supporting billions of wealthy folks? That would be great, but we haven’t done it yet. And it is *******NOT******* in the same category as garden-variety climate denialism to wonder whether that is possible. The energy flux from Sol is gargantuan, but dilute, and it is therefore harder, in some important sense, to get useful work out it. (I am not competent to quantify the thermodynamics.) What is the EROEI for your favorite renewable energy path, implemented without recourse to fossil fuels? OK, there’s lots to discuss, but if you are honest, your bottom-line answer is still “I’m not sure”, because there’s a whole aspirational civilization’s worth of unproven engineering in there, not to even mention the current state of population and politics. And that is the nub of Gilles’s point about peak oil affecting the whole economy so deeply that some scenarios about emissions may need to be thrown out.
The regulars here are quick to tell newbies to read up before they make fools of themselves. There is better discussion of these issues on The Oil Drum from time to time. I particularly recommend the links to well-written and literate essays by John Michael Greer. He doesn’t quantify the thermodynamics either, so I don’t necessarily swallow all of his favorite points without demur, but there’s no call to trivialize the discussion. One thing you will not find anywhere, I am confident, is a vast scientific consensus, backed by decades of painstaking research and reviewed by sober international bodies, showing with 90-99% confidence how to feed 7+ billion people well, with resources left over for Brahms and Dancing With the Stars, without using the black stuff from underground. Until you make that demonstration, humility is in order.
phil c (219) — The cloud experiment at CERN is unlikely to be definitive due to wall effects, according to Eli Rabett. By the way, his blog is listed on the sidebar.
This week’s The Economist has a couple of articles on the global warming issue: Indeed, the cover story is: “Spin, science and climate change.”
Somebody should take a good look at these:
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15720419&source=most_commented
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15719298
Depressingly, even in this relatively high-brow paper, the skeptical commenters out-number the well-informed, even if the grammar is better than usual.
Gilles, ccpo,
I owe both of you a reply from way back. But perhaps I owe it to the other readers here not to prolong the discussion of that particular claim I made about human aptitude to make engines work without oil vs. making rainforests work without rain. (ccpo, I take your point about the potential linkage between oil price and rainforest destruction.)
I did not mean to argue it would be easy to build enough renewables to replace a significant amount of fossil energy in a carbon-constrained economy, or that developing new energy sources is the only policy needed, or that technological fixes will allow unlimited growth or allow a growing world population to aspire to the wasteful lifestyles of rich countries. But the points you both bring up reinforce, in my mind, the need for an aggressive energy efficiency / renewable energy program, sooner rather than later. I’m baffled why Gilles apparently does not.
Walter Manny said “Otherwise stated, neither you nor anyone else can predict the impact on the theory of things we don’t yet know. ”
This is sheer unmitigated nonsense. I predict that if and when we have a “theory of everything” that it will give a value for the Lande g-factor of about 2.0023193043617 to within about a part in a trillion. I wonder if there are any physicists who disagree with me.
251.#236 gary thompson
In addition to CFU’s response, remember that:
– regional is not global
– the temperature in your backyard does not represent the temperature of the earth
– short term is more strongly mixed with natural variation in climate variance influenced by oceanic cycles and other factors
– weather (short term variability) is not climate (30+ years)
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/weather-v.-climate
Comment by John P. Reisman (OSS Foundation) — 22 March 2010 @ 12:11 PM
Thanks John for the response. i agree with most all you state above but my concern is with the third and fourth points- short term variation. i’ve heard that the general trend over several decades clearly shows global temperature anomalies of 0.5C to 1.0C over almost 40 years and one should not pay attention to the short term variation (weather). but then we have short term variations (noise) that have the same magnitude as the very critical variable that is so often quoted. if you have variation in a process of 1C (which is how much the US temperature anomaly dropped over the past few years) then how can you statistically quote trends in values less than the variation (0.5C to 1C)? And yes, the US is not the world but it is a fairly large land mass and as i stated above, it has more than its fair share of weather stations. the analysis and agw theory should still hold true. if agw proponents are allowed to use the north pole warming over the past decade (which also doesn’t equal the world) to validate agw theory then why can’t we use the US cooling over the past decade to invalidate the agw theory?
Bulldust says:
19 March 2010 at 10:36 PM
“””It is the leap from accepted CO2 warming science to predictions/projections (semantics) of 4-6C temperature rises due to feedbacks that I struggle with.””
______________________________________________________________________
Well, I would not be so worried about the IPCC including screwed up positive feedbacks with their high temp projection rises …almost no reliable source states that the IPCC has come close to modeling all the positive feedbacks fully…and still the IPCC projections show pretty high temp increases without them.
Several peer reviewed studies suggest that the IPCC projections might be *underestimating* the temperature increases for the next 100 years in some scenarios due to underestimated/not-included positive feedbacks.
Our children and grandchildren could be in for a very nasty surprise based on conservative IPCC projections:
______________________________________________________________________
“The consensus view of climate scientists, as represented by the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report, is that the enhanced greenhouse effect likely will lead to global average surface warming by 2100 of between 1.4° and 5.8°C, and global sea level rise of between 9 and 88 centimeters. This assumes the climate sensitivity is in the range 1.5°–4.5°C for an equilibrium doubling of preindustrial carbon dioxide concentrations, and the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) range of emissions scenarios [IPCC, 2000.
However, recent developments suggest that this dated IPCC view might underestimate the upper end of the range of possibilities and shift the probabilities toward an increasing risk of greater warmings and sea level rises by 2100.”
“Permafrost melting is widespread. Observations show rapid melting of permafrost
[Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, 2004; Nelson, 2003], which is expected to increase
[Lawrence and Slater, 2005].”
“Biomass feedbacks are kicking in. Observations of soil and vegetation acting as
sources rather than sinks of greenhouse gases [Bellamy et al., 2005; Raupach et al.,
2006] suggest an earlier than expected [Friedlingstein et al., 2001; Matthews et al.,
2005] positive feedback in the terrestrial carbon cycle [Gruber et al., 2004; Scheffer
et al., 2006].”
“Circulation changes in mid to high latitudes. The northern and southern annular
modes have become more positive, with increasing sea level pressures in midlatitudes,
poleward movement of the midlatitude westerlies, and a strengthening of the
major ocean gyres [Gillett et al., 2003; Marshall, 2003; Cai, 2006; Cai et al., 2005]. This is due to a combination of the enhanced greenhouse effect and reductions in stratospheric
ozone, has significant effects on surface climatology [Carril et al., 2005; Fyfe, 2003;
Fyfe and Saenko, 2006], and may be underpredicted in climate models [Gillett, 2005].”
“The above lines of evidence, while not definitive and in some cases controversial,
suggest that the balance of evidence may be swinging toward a more extreme outcome.
While some of the observations may be due merely to natural fluctuations, their conjunction and in some cases… positive feedbacks are causes for concern. They suggest that critical levels of global warming may occur at even lower greenhouse gas concentrations and/or anthropogenic emissions than was considered justified in the IPCC [2001] report.”
Pittock, 2006, EOS, TRANSACTIONS AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006EO340006.shtml
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/pittock.pdf
______________________________________________________________________
“The estimated feedback effect might be conservative,
as higher temperatures are also likely to promote concentrations
of methane [Woodwell et al., 1998; Petit et al.,
1999] and N2O [Leuenberger and Siegenthaler, 1992].
Although, these relationships have received somewhat less
attention, the synergy implies that the overall positive effect of warming on greenhouse gases is substantially larger than would be inferred from the feedback on CO2 alone.”
Scheffer et al. 2006, Geophysical Research Letters
http://climatechange.pbworks.com/f/Positive+feedback+between+global+warming+and+CO2+-+Scheffer+Cox+2005.pdf
________________________________________________________________________
Models using current feedback effects and sensitivity underestimate the warming of the Pliocene (they underestimate the warming).
“Taking these lines of evidence together, we estimate that the response of the Earth system to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations is 30–50|[percent]| greater than the response based on those fast-adjusting components of the climate system that are used traditionally to estimate climate sensitivity.”
Lunt Haywood, Schmidt et al, 2009 Nature Geoscience
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n1/abs/ngeo706.html
————————————————————————————————————
“Assuming a nominal ‘Charney’ climate sensitivity of 3 ◦C
equilibrium global warming for doubled CO2, BAU scenarios
yield a global warming at least of the order of 3 ◦C by the
end of this century. However, the Charney sensitivity is
the equilibrium (long-term) global response when only fast
feedback processes (changes of sea ice, clouds, water vapor
and aerosols in response to climate change) are included
(Hansen et al 2007). Actual global warming would be larger
as slow feedbacks come into play. Slow feedbacks include
increased vegetation at high latitudes, ice sheet shrinkage, and
terrestrial and marine greenhouse gas emissions in response to
global warming.” Hansen, 2007, Environmental Research Letters
________________________________________________________________________
“The first GCM climate change projections to include dynamic vegetation and an interactive carbon cycle produced a very significant amplification of global warming over the 21st century. Under the IS92a business as usual emissions scenario CO2 concentrations reached about 980ppmv by 2100, which is about 280ppmv higher than when these feedbacks were ignored.”
“Figure 1c shows that climate change also has a
negative impact on carbon storage in vegetation,
resulting in a reduction of global biomass from
the middle of the 21st century onwards.”
”
”Conclusion. Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change. Our synthesis of present knowledge suggests that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under anthropogenic climate change.”
“Amazon forest feedback…”
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14308.full
___________________________________________________________________
“The strong reduction of rainfall predicted by the UKMO-HadCM3 model suggests a very high future risk of extensive forest fires and a climate more accessible for highway construction and commercialized farming in large parts of the western equatorial Amazon. The predicted long dry season in the eastern equatorial Amazon could change forest to savanna.”
http://climate.eas.gatech.edu/dickinson/publications/Li-jgr2006-rainfall.pdf
________________________________________________________________________
“The relative constancy of the climate over the past 10,000 years
is exceptional in view of the large variability found in
reconstructions of almost all periods before.” Dakos, 2008, PNAS.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14308.full.pdf+html
satellite reveal that although most of the models climatological sea ice area is within 20 percent of the observational climatology, the Arctic sea ice is currently disappearing faster than the ensemble mean and faster than indicated by the range of ensemble members. From 1953-2005, a combination of satellite and in situ observations indicate the September sea ice has… Stroeve, J C et al, (2006), Arctic Climate Change: Are Current Climate Models too Conservative?, Eos Trans. AGU,
87(52), Fall Meet. Suppl., Abstract http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/SFgate/SFgate?&listenv=table&multiple=1&range=1&directget=1&application=fm06&database=%2Fdata%2Fepubs%2Fwais%2Findexes%2Ffm06%2Ffm06&maxhits=200&=“U33A-0013”
_________________________________________________________________________
Not to beat a dead horse into the ground, but arguably the top NOAA CO2 expert told me privately when I was at the place I was, that he is quite worried about the Earth’s temp increases exceeding the IPCC maximum temperature increase in 100 years due to possible future *nonincluded* IPCC feedbacks. It does not make you sleep very well at night.________________________________________________________________________
> Gary Thompson
You’re asking a fairly basic question in statistics — is it fair to say you haven’t taken a 101 statistics class?
There’s a procedure for this that’s quite general — take any set of data, look at how much it varies and how you take measurements, and from that figure out how many measurements over what period of time you need to say with good confidence that a trend exists.
See Robert Grumbine’s explanation, aimed at high school level students, which is about what any of us were when we took an intro statistics class; here:
http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-is-climate-2.html
http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2009/01/results-on-deciding-trends.html
If you follow his directions, walk through the material, do it for yourself, you’ll grasp the idea.
Many people who haven’t done that will tell you it’s too hard, or can’t be believed, or couldn’t possibly be right.
Your choice, do it for yourself, or decide who you can trust about it.
258. Gary you cant validate AGW with 10 year’s warming. But AGW IS a global model. It is predicting the global heat balance, not the local one. The heat transfer systems that make up the weather are way too complex to making short term, regional predictions. The number of guages in US means you can good spatial control on the temperature variation but so what? Stick to 30 years – you cant invalidate on shorter times. Do you really, truly, think we are not warming on climate scales despite GISS, sealevel, global glacial volume and MSU satellite trends?
#258 gary thompson 22 March 2010 at 8:57 PM
The thing is that global warming is a ‘global’ phenomenon, not confined to a single region, whether it be the arctic or continental USA. The earth as a whole is showing a warming trend. Parts of the earth may cool, parts may warm – when you sum all the changes it’s clear that the net effect is that the earth is warming.
The arctic might be referred to simply to show that parts of the earth are warming quite a lot, in response to another saying the USA hasn’t warmed (if it hasn’t). You could just as easily point to Australia to show warming of a land mass. Or point to the warming of the oceans to show their warming. And I expect there are parts of the world outside the USA that will from time to time have lower than average temperature. But it’s the overall change that is relevant because this shows how much energy is retained vs how much is incoming, and is because of the increase in greenhouse gases, particularly CO2.
The overall warming trend won’t apply equally across the entire world all at the same time because of winds and currents and the way the oceans absorb heat vs land etc.
Gilles says:
21 March 2010 at 4:28 PM
“Gilles@158 “Call me up the first time you see a hydrogen car on the street, I offer you a beer”
Obviously you didn’t attend the Vanvouver/Whistler Olympics, buses take many cars out of the loop [and those are not the “first”] …. I think you owe septic Matthew a beer.”
Of course I know that hydrogen vehicles exist. The beer is for the first time that you see a private hydrogen car on a normal street :).
Try here for a list of customers in Southern Cal:
http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/driver-photos.aspx
#258 gary thompson
Remember, context is key. US is not global, you need to average the temps around the world to get a global average. US is as you noted, regional. It’s the planet that matters most in the context of ‘global’ warming.
Take a look at Gistemp
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
land/ocean
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
You can take a look at US temp there too
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.lrg.gif
America is not that huge actually. Russia is huge, Africa is huge. But that is a misnomer also. It’s not about how huge a land mass is. It’s about the temperature of the planet and what is reasonably expected with AGW.
The simple reason as to why you can’t use the US temperature to invalidate Anthropogenic Global Warming is because the ‘globe’ is warming. It’s not about just the US, or any other region.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/get-file.php?report=global&file=map-blended-mntp&year=2010&month=2&ext=gif
[play around with the year and month parameters to see the global picture and how much it can vary regionally, but notice overall that lately, there is a lot more red than blue on average.]
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/arctic-polar-amplification-effect/arctic-polar-amplification-effect/image/image_view_fullscreen
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/summary-docs/leading-edge/2010/2010-jan-the-leading-edge
The AGW models predicted that the Arctic would warm faster than the rest of the planet and now the observations show that is happening. This is at least a good indicator that the models may be doing a pretty good job but there are other types of confirmation that increase the robustness of the assessment.
I’m not a statistician, and others here in RC can answer such questions better than I. But from a general view:
– we have prediction,
– we have quantitative amounts of GHG’s
– we have predicted increases in radiative forcing
– we have reasonable assessment of increases in radiative forcing
– we have temperature rise observed in accord with predictions based on the quantitative analysis and modeled predictions
– we have relatively decent modeling of how much cooler the earth should be without industrial GHG’s
– we know that we are past peak forcing in the Milankovitch cycles and we should be very slowly cooling, but in fact are warming
From my perspective, we don’t know a lot of things about what changes will occur or how bad it might get in specific time periods, from a climatic perspective, but that is not what is most important when it comes to human systems. Human infrastructure and agricultural capacity are critical and we do know that systems are expected to generally shift. Very quickly on a geological time scale. Prediction is slowly improving on how much and when, but the shift will cause egregious expenses that will put pressure on the monetary economy and productive capacity.
My current assessment indicates relatively large scale economic pressures within 7 to 15 years. That will beat out sea level rise in problem magnitude before wall street and Miami go under water. I predict we will see serious pressures on the resource capacity and monetary systems within that time frame, worsening of course as time goes on. The longer we wait on meaningful action, the more expensive it gets. Expense can be measured monetarily and also in resource capacity. That translates to human lives. That includes quality of life, standard of living, sustainability, and increasingly, survivability on ever increasing scales.
We are risking the global economy for the sake of profit that can not be attained in the long run (decades). Any reasoned qualitative assessment indicates that on a business as usual approach all corporations fail and all monetary profits are lost, eventually (within decades, increasing in severity of impact as we move deeper into the warming trend). The CSIS report, when combined with the BAU MIT analysis, that all geopolitical borders fail by around 2080 on this course.
Of course then you might say I’m being alarmist. To say there will be no United States by 2080 to 2100 sounds ridiculous. But I’m not saying this, this is the combined assessment of geopolitics based on the resource issues, based on the climate path predictions assigned to probabilities and ranges and the mean values. So, though these are merely potentials, they are potentials that can be achieved simply by doing nothing different (BAU).
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/security
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/summary-docs/leading-edge/2009/2009-may-leading-edge
Where is the profit in delay of meaningful climate policy? If we delay enough there is not profit, there is only system failure on many levels in many economies. The magnitude of inertia we allow will dictate potentials. Delay should not be an option. But in reality delay is an option, and we have been delaying action far too long.
This is why the climate petition is so critically important. We really do need a ‘Fee & Dividend’ approach and we need it immediately, in order to lessen the impacts and create a less worse future.
I recommend you sign the petition, and help educate your friends as to the importance of rapid and meaningful action.
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#249 ccpo
Thanks for the perspective.
If I recall properly, the price spike may have been due to deregulation of the controlling parameters during the Bush administration. It was not a supply/demand influence event as far as I can tell. I my opinion, if true, it was truly a sad statement about our leadership.
PO is not an area I am knowledgeable on other than a few reports I have read such as the Princeton report that came out around 2005(?). I think the key to PO is knowing the water pumping numbers and that is not information that is revealed publicly by the oil companies. I can only hope we have not yet hit it, but we may have. This will put further strains on our ability to transition to renewable sustainable, but it will also add further impetus to transition rapidly, so all I can say is I don’t know how it will play out.
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gary thompson 258
I found RC at https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/regional-climate-projections/
quite helpful. I see the key technical problem in cloud radiation understanding and description. The measurement and theory improvements hoped for and needed since TAR still haven’t happened. Progress is very slow.
Regional weather forecasts have the same sort of problems with clouds…
“But the points you both bring up reinforce, in my mind, the need for an aggressive energy efficiency / renewable energy program, sooner rather than later. I’m baffled why Gilles apparently does not.”
Seriously, how can you think that I could be against improving energy efficiency ? why the hell could anyone be against that, in any case ? I already said that even if CO2 hadn’t IR absorption lines, this would be mandatory in any case. And it is rather obvious that economy would ALWAYS benefit from improving energy efficiency. Actually the modern economy has never stopped improving efficiency – it cared more or less about it, following the price of energy of course, but on average it has always improved it.
On the very long term, we’ll all use only renewables (again.. ! ). That’s a certitude. So I don’t see why our grand grand children wouldn’t do exactly the same as our grand grand parents : improving their use as well as they can. There is no point that they WILL do it. Why not ?
So this is not the point. What is the point ? the point is only (I stress : ONLY) : an infinite growth being physically impossible, there is an asymptotic upper limit to the “useful” energy consumption per capita you can achieve with any energy system (by “useful” I mean that can be transformed into some valuable thing, barring any waste of energy). It seems that this point has been more or less reached since the 80’s (the energy consumption per capita has more or less plateaued since this date, its growth has only been parallel to demographic growth), around 1,5 tep/cap/yr. Of course this allows still some progress , for instance the development of computers and internet. But I think it is fair to say that the world has not become much richer/cap since this time – there has been progress, but the number of poor people is still very large and doesn’t seem really to improve. In any case, the world has less changed from 1980 to 2010 than from 1950 to 1980 – meaning that the average growth rate has decreased after the “30 glorious years” (essentially due to Green Revolution).
Now the use or renewables would probably have its own plateau. So the question is : how will the asymptotic value of the consumption/capita based only on renewable energy compare with that of fossil fuels ?
I don’t know, of course, and I think nobody can claim he knows. I have just a very general thought. Well there are only 3 possibilities : it could be much lower, much larger, or approximately the same.
Well I doubt that it could be much larger, for the reason I already mentioned. If renewable energies were much more productive than fossil fuels, why wouldn’t they have already replaced them? If it is more expensive and less convenient, they would probably sustain only a lower consumption.
Now we have the choice between “much lower” and “approximately the same”. Here I ask : why should two very different sources of energy converge towards “approximately the same” standard of living? after all, that’s a strange idea. The use of fossil fuels instead of “traditional” renewable energies has increased by a factor of 10 the use per capita and by 100 the total energy use. There is no reason that giving them up would leave the system untouched. That’s not a natural expectation if the whole energy system is totally modified. So at least I think that the standard of living will sensitively decrease. Now remember that the consequences of GW have been estimated by N. Stern around 20 % of GDP, which is considered as unbearable. I don’t know if it is realistic or not, but I simply ask : why do you expect that the total replacement (on the long term , it WILL be total) of fossil fuels by energies that are more expensive, less convenient, and cannot even been produced at this price without fossil fuels, won’t cause a similar change in the economy ? I can’t find any reasonable argument for that – apart from that we would LIKE that it can do it.
“In addition to CFU’s response, remember that:
– regional is not global
– the temperature in your backyard does not represent the temperature of the earth
– short term is more strongly mixed with natural variation in climate variance influenced by oceanic cycles and other factors
– weather (short term variability) is not climate (30+ years)”
of course, but you should also remember that everybody :
* is only sensitive to regional temperature and doesn’t have any idea of the global one if he doesn’t read GISS home page.
* live in his backyard and not “on the earth” as a whole.
* is much more sensitive to short term weather and doesn’t have a clear remembering of how it was 30 years ago – and doesn’t really care. For the supposed incapability of mankind to adapt to changes at a 30 years scale, well,look at the recent history, and remember that 30 years is just close to an average working time in your life, meaning that after this time you’re just replaced by young people who have no idea of how you were living 30 years ago – and care very little about it.
#250 – ccpo
What does the Bloom Box – or any of the comments – have to do with hydrogen?
There was one mention of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Amory Lovin is my hero. He not only gets the vision right (distributed micropower, conservation/efficiency ethic, transition to hydrogen, holistic vehicle design, etc) the RMI Hypercar concept is the realization of that vision. Bright Car will be launching a first generation (gas/electric hybrid) Hypercar in 2012. Hydrogen fuel cell powered versions will be in volume production by the end of the decade – as will vehicles from Honda, BMW and others. It’s not science fiction – it’s industrial innovation at its finest.
“but then we have short term variations (noise) that have the same magnitude as the very critical variable that is so often quoted.”
And noise doesn’t accumulate, whereas a bias trend does.
“if you have variation in a process of 1C (which is how much the US temperature anomaly dropped over the past few years) then how can you statistically quote trends in values less than the variation (0.5C to 1C)?”
Because the noise doesn’t accumulate, whereas the bias does.
Just remember: noise doesn’t accumulate. Bias does.
RE: 122 JiminMpls says:
19 March 2010 at 11:18 PM
“The supply of oil isn’t as limited as you seem to think. Cheap oil, yes, but recoverable oil, no.
… At a $100/bbl, it would be economically recoverable. As prices go up, so will the supply. ”
This isn’t necessarily so. If it takes more energy to extract the oil than the oil provides it won’t be worth doing no matter what the price. If the energy returned is less than the energy invested you have a negative ERoEI.
Gary Thompson (236),
Look again. Temperatures are rising in the US as well:
http://BartonPaulLevenson.com/1930s.html
cm (256): the points you both bring up reinforce, in my mind, the need for an aggressive energy efficiency / renewable energy program, sooner rather than later. I’m baffled why Gilles apparently does not.
BPL: Because he’s a political conservative who works for the fossil fuel industry, as he originally admitted before later denying it.
gray thompson (258): if agw proponents are allowed to use the north pole warming over the past decade (which also doesn’t equal the world) to validate agw theory then why can’t we use the US cooling over the past decade to invalidate the agw theory?
BPL: Polar amplification A) was predicted by AGW theory long before it was observed, and B) can be demonstrated by analyzing the temperature field over the entire globe. It’s a statement about the latitudinal gradient of mean global annual surface temperature.
#270 Completely Fed Up
“the noise doesn’t accumulate, whereas the bias does”. Really? That sounds to me like a surprisingly uncompromising assertion.
Is not “the noise” simply what’s happening in the background that we haven’t yet analysed or understood? Wouldn’t we expect such “noise” to come and go unpredictably since we haven’t yet accounted for its origins?
““the noise doesn’t accumulate, whereas the bias does”. Really? That sounds to me like a surprisingly uncompromising assertion.”
Why?
Do you think that if the average of a real series is 3.5 but the random variation around it means it varies anywhere between 1 and 6, that you will inevitably see the dice rolls accumulate to higher and higher values?
“Is not “the noise” simply what’s happening in the background that we haven’t yet analysed or understood?”
Yes, but it is, as far as climate signal is concerned, it is noise.
Check up on UDMA and its use of the frequency domain to discern signal (from the connecting mobile phone) from noise (both other mobile phones and genuine out-of-system noise from other things “happening in the background that we haven’t analysed or understood”).
Tim Jones #271, you’re both right. He is right and you’re right because there’s a limit where energy out has to be a net positive, therefore a limit to the increase Jim is talking about.
Gilles says:
“of course, but you should also remember that everybody:
* is only sensitive to regional temperature and doesn’t have any idea of the global one if he doesn’t read GISS home page.”
Well, actually, no. Ever hear of the global economy? Brazilian orange farmers are watching the frost reports for Florida. La Nina and El Nino influence the price and availability of seafood. Flooding in the US midwest can raise flour prices around the globe, causing food riots in Asia and Africa. And what is more, our ability to feed 6.6 billion people is dependent on the global economy.
“* live in his backyard and not “on the earth” as a whole.”
And remember that ENSO can determine whether it’s a nice spring day or whether your backyard is under six inches of water.
* is much more sensitive to short term weather and doesn’t have a clear remembering of how it was 30 years ago – and doesn’t really care.”
You clearly don’t talk to old people much. They do remember what the weather was like in their youth and they know it’s different now.
Gilles
#267:
OK, you favor energy efficiency. Sorry. But what is your beef with renewables, given that sooner or later we’ll depend on them anyway? Are you just concerned to dispel the wishful thinking of naive Greens and prepare us mentally for the economic decline you think is to come? Or are you arguing that a transition to renewables will be bad for us, and therefore our best course of action is to postpone the inevitable for as long as possible?
#240:
Thanks for putting numbers on your assertions regarding the relationship between fossil fuel use and GDP. Could you also explain some of your assumptions?
I’m looking at the IEA statistics publication “CO2 emissions from fuel combustion: Highlights” (2009 edition, http://www.iea.org/co2highlights/) which has a table for CO2 emissions / GDP in exchange-rate terms.
It gives the CO2/GDP of the world economy in 2007 as 0.73 kg CO2 per dollar GDP, hence, in your terms, closer to 1.5 tons CO2 per $2,000 than to 1 ton as you stated. You may be using a different source.
> Specifically, I don’t think this will change a lot,
What’s a lot? Over the period 1971-2007, the world economy became 33% less carbon intensive. The OECD countries cut their CO2/GDP by 50%.
> Let’s say to be conservative that it could be improved up
> to 1tCO2/3000 $,
Why should we assume no further gains are possible? Is that an arbitrary figure? If not, could you show your reasoning?
> but not faster than a rate of about 1% /yr in the best case
>(I’m not even sure this is possible).
Why not? With a 33% reduction (1971-2007) I make the rate out to be 1.1% a year, so on past experience, it’s possible. Why should we not expect a 1%/yr reduction in CO2/GDP to continue, in the absence of radical new policies to cap emissions? Why would this be the upper bound on what’s possible?
> it [GDP/CO2?] has a finite upper bound,
Possibly. But what are the real considerations that define this upper bound?
—–
PS. Just for the record: I think your English is better than that of some native speakers who comment here, and that jokes stereotyping national drinking habits get old fast.
#258 gary thompson – follow up to my post #262
To clarify, I’m not just referring to Australia because it’s where I live. It’s also because it’s the 96% the size of contiguous USA (and 79% of the size of all the USA incl Alaska and Hawaii). So the increase in temperature of 0.7C (1.3F) since 1960 in Australia overall (and in some parts up to 2C (3.6F) in the same period), adds more to global warming than the lesser warming of the contiguous USA of 0.4F since 1960. (I didn’t check Alaska, but I understand it’s warming faster than the contiguous USA.)
BTW – when is the USA going metric – please?
Sources:
http://www.csiro.au/files/files/pvfo.pdf
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
#280 correction to my previous post – that should read USA has a trend of 0.4F per decade increase since 1960, not an actual rise of 0.4F since 1960. My mistake.
So despite the last couple of years when the annual mean has been average for the period 1960 to 2009, contiguous USA is warming at least as fast if not faster than Australia! (I wasn’t comparing apples with apples, mixing trends and annual means.)
#276 Completely Fed Up
simon abingdon: “Is not “the noise” simply what’s happening in the background that we haven’t yet analysed or understood?”
Completely Fed Up: “Yes, but it is, as far as climate signal is concerned, it is noise.”
So how can you make any meaningful statement at all about such “noise” and why should it have anything to do with dice rolls or mobile phones? On what grounds can you be sure that it might not accumulate, at least over millenial timescales?
Neal King (255), I was quite impressed with the summary description of the situation in The Economist that you referenced, especially the second one. Though I didn’t read and make judgements on the comments.
Ray L (278), I’m old (chronologically ;-) ) and don’t recall material differences from the weather of my youth…
“So how can you make any meaningful statement at all about such “noise””
It’s called “statistics”.
“and why should it have anything to do with dice rolls or mobile phones?”
Because with dice rolls, your deterministic view that associates variations about the mean would have the variations in dice rolls be the result of mitroscopic changes in the forces enacted upon the dice deterministically, where the randomness that is the “dice roll” is a result of processes “happening in the background that we haven’t analysed or understood”.
And as far as your UMTS phone is concerned, the effects of out-of-system noise and other-caller noise are noise that must be discounted before you can get the signal you are attempting to detect: your phone call.
PS: “On what grounds can you be sure that it might not accumulate, at least over millenial timescales?”
On what grounds do you assume that something you admit you don’t know about and aren’t measuring will accumulate, at least over millenial timescales?
For me (or, rather, climate models), the reason why not is that the processes are not sources of millenial-scale climate forces.
So what do you have?
CM: “OK, you favor energy efficiency. Sorry. But what is your beef with renewables, given that sooner or later we’ll depend on them anyway?”
And how does moving to renewables stop you being more efficient with energy? Does he think that they are the wrong sort of electrons?
> Simon Abingdon
> background noise
Simon, do you recall the other times your question has been answered?
I’ve seen you post the same doubt and uncertainty repeatedly. Examples:
RealClimate – Comments on FAQ on climate models
I may be too pessimistic, but the problem with regional temps is that the background noise, … Comment by simon abingdon — 11 November 2008 @ 1:28 PM
RealClimate – Comments on The CRU hack
Comment by simon abingdon — 21 November 2009 @ 2:43 PM … There are outliers, background noise, maybe data just plain wrong.
Statistics 101 is the answer to this confusion. Once you’ve passed a beginning statistics course, the doubt and fear are much less because you have an idea of how science and math help us understand this stuff.
Sou @262
Seems to me you’re standing a very slippery slope when you parcel out different temperatures and then average over regions. You don’t do that for CO2, you say that’s uniform. Same with the radiation energy balance.
BTW, you have lots and lots of company whereas I’m pretty much alone ;-)
“Journalism” strikes again… slightly OT, except it’s another example of the press twisting a valid scientific study to say something it doesn’t…
The Fox News headline:
The Fox News opening sentence:
The Fox News admission, quoting the lead scientist in the study, doesn’t come until the 7th (next to last) paragraph:
At the same time, none of this even stops to consider that if this is caused by a change in wind patterns, then are those changes anomalies in themselves or a result of warmer temperatures? And would the winds have had that same effect without the addition of anomalous warming? That is, would the winds have had anywhere near that degree of effect if that volume of ice had not also broken up, due to heat, to free it?
A good journalist would have asked those questions of the lead scientist.
It looks like the paper isn’t published yet, though, so it’s hard to say what’s actually in it.
simon abdington, #282:
“Noise” is, by definition, a part of the signal that doesn’t add up to anything. If instead it adds up, it becomes part of a trend.
Example: Every month you put $100 into your bank account. Every month you spend about $50 from that bank account – not exactly $50, some months it’s $40, some months it’s $60, $55, etc. You get the idea.
– If on the average, you spend $50, then on the average you will be contributing a net $50/month. That’s the main part of the trend.
– On top of that, if you watch long enough, you will notice that the bank account grows at a rate slightly larger than $50/month, because you’re earning something like 1% on the amount in the account. That’s also part of the trend.
What’s the noise? The noise is the difference between the actual spending each month and the average, which was $50. The noise will fluctuate between -$10 and $10. And it will average to 0.
That’s why “noise” doesn’t accumulate.
A more interesting question: How do you know something is a noise signal and not a trend signal? It comes down to knowing what the source of the noise is. If you can pin the blame on a source that is unrelated to what you are trying to find out (e.g.: climate change CANNOT be related to diurnal variations, because the timescales are inappropriate), the magnitude is actually not important. If you can’t prove a specific cause, you can’t say that some UNKNOWN cause is impossible – but you can make an effort to rule out anything interesting.
A proposal that “This variation is not noise, but is actually a signal from an unknown source with unknown behavior” is not likely to win many converts, if there are plausible alternative explanations.
#264 John P. Reisman
I should add to my post that with meaningful effective climate policy we may be able have/achieve a ‘relatively’ sustainable and functional future.
The case scenarios derived from the security perspectives are looking at potentials and when combined with BAU don’t look very good. I still believe that we can mitigate substantially with meaningful action. It’s just that we are not doing that.
Overview of security/economic perspectives:
DOD QDR Report, Feb. 2010: “Assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.”
The Center for Strategic International Studies analysis outlined needs in their 2007 report regarding climate change establishing there is a general consensus that multilateral cooperation is key to solution development.
In March 2007 the U.S. Army War College analyzed the security perspective of military mitigation, adaptation and preparation for climate change. They “climate change-related security problems likely would require multi-agency cooperation, especially for domestic emergency management, and typically multinational action.”
In April 2007, the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) issued a report which addressed the concerns of the national security community. “The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide, and the growth of terrorism.” The report warns of contribution to state failure, interstate conflicts, and other security problems.
In the October 2006 review on the Economics of Climate Change, economist Nicholas Stern: near-term costs of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG’s) would cost 1% of global GDP, major delay would result in substantially higher aggregate costs with estimates reaching 20% of the worlds GDP.
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#268 Gilles
Education, education, education.
Therefore the onus of responsibility is upon all those who do understand to help others learn the contexts involved regarding well reasoned expectations for ramifications in the global economy. Especially how it impacts our lives with expected trending inflation rates.
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#260 – > Gary Thompson
You’re asking a fairly basic question in statistics — is it fair to say you haven’t taken a 101 statistics class?
Comment by Hank Roberts — 22 March 2010 @ 9:34 PM
When you take the US temperature anomaly yearly averages for the past 30 years and put them on a run chart and then test for trends and oscillations you get a p-value for trends of 0.28 and a p-value for oscillations of 0.72. and if you want to be at 95% significance, then both of these suggest accepting the null hypothesis which states that the data has a random sequence. and using this data which has a standard deviation of 0.494C and running a 2-sample t-test to determine the sample size required to discern a shift in the mean of 0.25C would require a sample size of 103 (years).
Simon Abingdon–I hesitate to respond given your past sophistry. However, we know how the “noise” of climate behaves because of 1)conservation of energy, and 2)paleoclimatic studies.
We know most of the sources of such noise–factors from ENSO to volcanism, etc. They tend to oscillate quasi-periodically. For a long-term trend to emergy there must be a long-term driver.
Okay, last OT post on this… Ogi et al is a good paper for a non-scientist to read (IMHO). Well written, restricted to the topic at hand, and seemingly pretty solid. They looked for a statistical correlation between winds and SIE and found a good one. End of story (or rather, the end of the next chapter in the story). I look forward to the next piece to which they allude:
I seem to remember some graphs from previous years pitting various model’s minimum SIE predictions for a year against each other and the actual, like a horse race. It will be interesting to see how much better predictions become with this new variable factored in… if people can also accurately predict the 925-hPa wind field.
Back on topic, however… glad to see it’s only the media at fault for spinning this. The scientists did science, and answered the journalists’ questions with science answers.
Here’s the link to the Ogi et al 2010 SEI paper.
“When you take the US temperature anomaly yearly averages for the past 30 years…”
… you aren’t going to get a global temperature record…
But the points you both bring up reinforce, in my mind, the need for an aggressive energy efficiency / renewable energy program, sooner rather than later. I’m baffled why Gilles apparently does not.
Comment by CM — 22 March 2010 @ 6:34 PM
Speaking for myself, we are agreed. My point has been to broaden the scope of vision required. There are many solutions that deal well with all aspects of the problems we face, but some actually make things worse when all factors are considered (corn-based ethanol). Those are what we need to avoid, and can only do so if we consider all major criteria: climate, energy, economics.
Cheers
“You don’t do that for CO2, you say that’s uniform. Same with the radiation energy balance.”
Nope, please show where this is stated.