The Oxburgh report on the science done at the CRU has now been published and….. as in the first inquiry, they find no scientific misconduct, no impropriety and no tailoring of the results to a preconceived agenda, though they do suggest more statisticians should have been involved. They have also some choice words to describe the critics.
Carry on…
“We don’t even share a genus with chimpanzees, let alone a species or subspecies. (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus versus Homo sapiens.)”
Although taxonomically, there’s no reason apart from hubris to have Homo rather than Pan as our genus.
We certainly haven’t shown a lot of wisdom. So sapiens is already on shaky ground.
stevenc (625),
Thanks! I found the data.
caerbannog (628),
Hear, hear! I left a comment to that effect at “Earth Times,” but somehow I doubt they’ll print it. I was just a wee bit harsh on the folks who made the video.
BPL: Drought becomes so severe that harvests fail all over the globe.
Gilles (630): could you precise where the water evaporating from oceans is supposed to condensate in your scenario ? and on which known facts it is based ?
BPL: Try reading the AR4 report, then you’d know. But here’s the answer on a silver platter: With global warming you get more rain along coastlines and less in continental interiors.
Merely moving the rainfall pattern is enough to destroy harvests. Increasing the drought to pretty much all farmland by 2050 or so will destroy every harvest.
flxible (647),
Of course population is a big part of the problem. But it’s not a big part of the problem on the same time scale. Stopping fossil fuels has to be done in 5-10 years. Slowing and eventually reversing population growth can take longer.
You seem to almost revel in the prospect of most of humanity dying. What the heck, they’ve always died, they always will. Tell me, is murder good or evil in your view? Or are good and evil meaningless concepts to you?
CFU (650): Or is there some reason why farming will be impossible?
BPL: Lack of cropland? No more irrigation systems? No ability to manufacture even an iron or bronze plow? No more artificial fertilizer? No more natural fertilizer either when most of the plant, animal and human life is dead? Any of these seem like a potential problem?
“Since the temperature difference between the equator and the poles will lessen, my admittedly naive expectation would be for less active weather.” NoPreview NoName — 21 April 2010 @ 5:30 AM
The response to global warming and the change in temperature differences depends on what kind of weather or storm. Thunderstorms have same order of magnitude vertical and horizontal dimensions, and their energy primarily comes from vertical temperature differences + latent heat of water vapor. As Global warming raises temperatures and humidity near the surface, more energy becomes available to drive local storms, and the (moist) adiabatic lapse rate will always provide a path for creation of storms. Tropical thunderstorms are common and intense; winter temperate thunderstorms are rare. [1]
The temperate zone mass air movements, (high)low pressure (anti)cyclones, are much larger horizontally (~10^3 km, ~continental) than vertically (~10km, tropospheric) and their energy primarily comes from horizontal temperature gradients. so the decrease in average delta T from the equator to the pole should decrease the average speed of weather forming Walker circulation. However, this doesn’t simply mean less intense thunderstorms; there will be enough instability for even weaker frontal systems to trigger thunderstorms. They will be slower moving, so the straight line winds(vector sum of downdraft outflows and gross storm velocity) will decrease, but slower moving storms will drop more rain => less wind damage, more flooding. The other complicating factor is seasonal variations in temperature differences; when the sun goes down north of the arctic circle, the ocean will get cold enough to freeze over, and the loss of convection will allow air temperatures to drop well below zero. Although the average temperature gradient will decrease, the peak gradients may increase, especially in spring and fall; we might expect more damaging floods in the springtime, or possibly even the whole of England snow covered in early winter.(Hmmm… [2] &;>).
Atlantic hurricanes are intermediate in the ratio between their vertical and horizontal scale. They are triggered by continental scale air mass movements coming off North Africa, but derive most of their energy from the vertical gradient of high sea surface temperature/humidity to the cold dry top of the troposphere[3] – Katrina grew from a Category 3 hurricane to a Category 5 hurricane in just nine hours as it crossed an unusually warm patch of the Gulf Loop Current. The latest information[4] indicates fewer but more intense storms, consistent with weaker triggering weather patterns but warmer SST. There is a considerable spread in model results, and I wonder if weaker harmattan winds across the Bodele Depression will result in less dust over the tropical Atlantic; the dust tends to suppress hurricane formation.[5] “Dust”, “Bodele”, and “harmattan” don’t appear in the Knutsen et al paper.
[1] http://www.meted.ucar.edu/topics_convective.php
[2] news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7963490.stm, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8447023.stm
[3] http://www-das.uwyo.edu/%7Egeerts/cwx/notes/chap13/trop_cyclogenesis.html
[4] http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/knutson-et-al-nat-geo.pdf
[5] https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/05/of-tempests-barren-ground-and-a-thousand-furlongs-of-sea/
CFU (651): Although taxonomically, there’s no reason apart from hubris to have Homo rather than Pan as our genus.
BPL: Yes, there is. We may share 95% of our genome with chimps, but morphologically and developmentally we are very unlike chimpanzees. We have 46 chromosomes, chimps have 48. We are fully bipedal, chimps are knuckle-walkers. We have a menstrual cycle and are continuously sexually receptive; chimps have an estrus cycle and are not (yes, I know about sex-as-communication among bonobos). Humans are born at a much earlier stage of gestation and infants are dependent much longer. We take 12-16 years to become sexually mature, chimps take 8-10. We live twice as long as they do even under optimal conditions. We are hairless, chimps are furry. Chimps are about three times as physically strong as we are, which is why they are so extremely dangerous when they get aggressive. They copulate ventro-dorsally, we copulate ventro-ventrally. We have articulate speech, they don’t and can’t, lacking Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in their brains. We make fire and space shuttles, they don’t. And we are about three times as encephalized as they are (Jerison EQ about 7.3 versus about 2.3 for chimps). That alone is very much a non-trivial difference.
I’m sorry my simple request for a specification of the various metrics by which we might characterise climate has apparently caused some unintended fluttering in the dovecotes.
Maybe the answer is that climate is just an unknowable Schroedinger wave function of innumerable probabilities, which collapses into weather when we try to measure it.
[Response: Or not. – gavin]
Walter Crain — Here is a simple climate model which shows that CO2 accounts for most of the variance in the last 13 decades:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/unforced-variations-3/comment-page-12/#comment-168530
David B. Benson,(659)
thanks. it will take me a bit of time to read/absorb all that. thanks again. i’ll be back!
****PROJECT JIM****
Barton Paul Levenson — Your response from J. Climate is quite disappointing, especially as the AO is defined as the lienrly detrended North Atlantic SSTs (NASSTs) from CRU. One approach to revising your paper is to first due the correlation for NASSTs, then cite te paper defining AMO followed by the correlation for AMO.
Of course, the linear trend will quite closely match the effects of CO2 forcing. I attempted to detrend AMO using the actual CO2 forcings rather than just linear, but this turned out inessentially different than just using AMO; details are in the link to follow from prior comment #659.
The other choice is to consider an AGU journal instead. Presumably the editor and referees there will actually know what the AMO is. As I imagine jour paper is rather short, is GRL a suitable choice?
BPL @ 654:
If that’s the “Official” answer, you’ve just turned me into a complete and total opponent of everything that the AR4 advocates.
If you want to point me at a non-fee article that explains the mechanics behind that, I’d be happy to review it. However, absolute humidity increases exponentially with temperature. That alone insures that any winds from coastal to interior areas will carry moisture which will then be more likely to precipitate over night, evaporate the following day, and be carried further inland the following day.
Unless I’m missing something really basic, the exponential rise in absolute humidity with respect to temperature will insure that what you’ve described isn’t going to happen.
I’ll buy changes in Hadley Cells moving precipitation patterns leading to changes in growing regions — including the reduction in growing regions as Hadley Cells move northward — but what you’ve described doesn’t seem to agree with my knowledge of basic meteorology.
Ray Ladbury, 623
“1) climate models are dynamical models. You put in the physics and let them run. There can be no tweaking based on a single criterion.”
Uh?? If only it was so easy…as powerful as the computer can be, you will never be able to “put the physics” and simulate 50 years…so there is some “tweaking”. Good or bad, biased or not is another problem…
[Response: Please read the FAQs on the subject. – gavin]
Walter Crain (660) — The first formula is missing a right parenthesis; it ought to read
AE(d) = k(lnCO2(d-1) – lnCO2(1870s)) – GTA(1880s)
CO #592,
I read the content of the link you posted https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/ supposedly addressing the C02 temp lag I brought up. Problem is it doesn’t actually address the specific problem of the lag. He claims that James Hansen predicted it but doesn’t go into detail how he did this…
The older link on RC which is mentioned in the article actually does attempt to address the lag but what comes out is quite frankly embarassing.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/
Here is what he says: “So CO2 could have caused the last 5/6 of the warming, but could not have caused the first 1/6 of the warming.”
Could have?? Mickey mouse COULD have caused the last 5/6 of the warming! So many times with pro AGW “evidence” you run across the statement “consistent with”. “Consistent with” is certainly not the same thing as proving. It sounds like lawyer speak. They assume that CO2 amplified the warming but give no proof as to how they knew this. If C02 really did amplify warming with a feedback effect, wouldn’t that neccisarily be a runaway effect, where temps increase until there is basically no more CO2 that can be released from the oceans by increased heat?Since this obviously isn’t the case, there must be some dampaning there. So the question is how much, correct? What if the system is almost or entirely critically damped?
[Response: You are very confused. Positive feedback does not lead to a runaway effects (hint, some series converge). The words ‘consistent with’ are not used in that post so what you are complaining about is unclear. And CO2 is greenhouse gas – something that has been known for over a century. More than likely it was still a greenhouse gas during the ice ages. – gavin]
Naindj,
You are thinking of statistical models, in which parameters are adjusted to give best fit. In dynamical models, you can put in new physics, but this is very unlikely to overfit. This is a very different beast.
Apropos Gilles: could you precise where the water evaporating from oceans is supposed to condensate in your scenario ? and on which known facts it is based ?
Enjoy this child’s treasury of global drought stories.
[Response: Also, see what the models suggest will happen. – gavin]
One common fallacy I see repeated is that it is easier to predict climate 100 years in the future than it is to predict it in 10 years.
I have created models professionally, but not climate models, so I have some knowledge of the subject.
The problem is iterations and positive feed forward. The argument is that errors cancel out over time but exactly the opposite is true.
It is like 100 computations in a row with the output of #1 being the input of #2 etc. A small error or misunderstanding of the physics involved in problem #1 is amplified in #2 and #3 etc until it makes the model worthless.
This is usually solved with software plugs like the effect of particulates in the atmosphere which is unknown so any value can be used to make things come out right. The problem is that as time progresses the plugs have to be adjusted to account for the fact that the models drift. Without constant tweaking they become worthless.
[Response: This is simply not the case for climate models. Please read the FAQs to get a better sense of what is done. There is no ‘constant tweaking’ in the sense you imply, and no long term accumulation of errors. The climate of the model is the generally the same in the first 100 years as it is in the last 100 years of a thousand-year+ control run. – gavin]
“I’d bet on Blattella germanica …” SecularAnimist — 20 April 2010 @ 9:48 AM
“The future is bright for dinoflagellates.” Jim Galasyn, quoting Jeremy Jackson — 20 April 2010 @ 11:22 AM
but maybe not for Rattus species –
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBKK27922820080828 “(Reuters) – The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation has put other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials said on Wednesday.”
Or the subspecies homo sarahpaliens which is dependent on salmon fishing –
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/02/tech/main6165328.shtml “Humboldt Squid Invade California – They can grow up to 100 pounds and 6 feet long and follow food sources. The squid have also recently been spotted off San Diego, Oregon and Washington, all on the U.S. West Coast.”
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009859494_apwahumboldtsquid1stldwritethru.html “Large Humboldt squid have shown up in the Strait of Juan de Fuca where commercial fishermen say they are stealing their catches. Now, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife is giving the fishermen some revenge by allowing them to sell squid they accidentally catch as they troll for salmon.”
“Greg Bargmann, Fish and Wildlife marine ecosystem manager, said the state decided last week that commercial fishermen could sell squid they inadvertently catch.”
“in four days of fishing earlier this month, Willmett said he caught two king salmon, 42 silver salmon – and 30 squid. Normally, he would have caught up to 100 salmon.”
“In 2009, adult spawning escapement for Sacramento River fall chinook was dismally low — only 39,500 adult salmon returned compared to the escapement goal of 122,000 adults, which was the management target in 2009. ” http://www.cbbulletin.com/378071.aspx
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=humboldt-squid-expansion “Many researchers attribute the squid’s recent success to the very climate, current and oxygen-level changes that have been hurting populations of other species in the diverse California Current.”
“Hungry, hungry Humboldts – A growing mass of these hungry squid could have a large impact on some fish stocks, especially those that are already faltering. ‘They can eat pretty much all they want,’ Gilly says, noting that researchers have found a range of meals inside the squid, ranging from tiny krill to 40-centimeter-long hake—and even some salmon remains.”
“One factor contributing to the squids’ expansion seems to be the eastern Pacific’s growing dead zones, where they spend much of the day.”
Soon to be heard at your local fish ‘n chips – “would you like fries with your calamari nuggets?” Remember when canned salmon was considered cat food?
BPL: “Of course population is a big part of the problem. But it’s not a big part of the problem on the same time scale. Stopping fossil fuels has to be done in 5-10 years. Slowing and eventually reversing population growth can take longer.
You seem to almost revel in the prospect of most of humanity dying. What the heck, they’ve always died, they always will. Tell me, is murder good or evil in your view? Or are good and evil meaningless concepts to you?”
Considering that I’ve long seen overpopulation as a very major problem, maybe I do revel in the prospect, specifically because “good and evil” do have some meaning to me, prompting my view that what’s selfishly being done to the biosphere is the evil – and considering that humanities current operational values are very unlikely to do anything helpful in the next 5-10 years, claiming that “time scale” is more pressing is …. well, denialism, just like the inclination in the US and Canada to view providing birth control, particularly abortion, as evil is denying the population problem.
I’m not about to murder anyone, even with extreme provocation, but I haven’t hesitated thumping anyone I catch raiding the results of my personal labor with a club, people are capable of learning. Yes, humans always die, I watched both my parents do so, and some siblings, without considering whether those events were “good or evil” – sad, yes, but just part of the cycle, the most pressing part of the cycle actually, and we “developed” types spend an amazing amount keeping everyone alive for every possible minute. Humanity continues to view itself as somehow outside or apart from the biosphere, and able to manipulate it to advantage [especially using our “economics”], when what’s really more to the point is how can we accept we’re an inextricable part of it, and find our “niche”. Excessive FF consumption is but one aspect of the “unpaid capital” we extract from the planet, as you and many here recognize, and right now it doesn’t look likely to change much in even 50 years.
BPL: “Lack of cropland? No more irrigation systems? No ability to manufacture even an iron or bronze plow? No more artificial fertilizer? No more natural fertilizer either when most of the plant, animal and human life is dead? Any of these seem like a potential problem?”
It’s happening now Barton, and will continue exponentially regardless of FF use. A very real problem for the industrial agriculture our economic system has developed for sustaining the excess population packing our cities who primarily keep the cash-flow wheels turning, but not so much for those who’ve been avoiding that mentality and developing productive, sustainable organic agriculture, which is supporting a pretty sizeable population now without buying into the “disposible” lifestyle.
An aside – note that my use in a previous post of ‘specialization’ takes care of the spam filtre, no need to make posts harder to read by inserting underscores or dashes in that commonly used word :)
Brian Dodge: [long, informative post]
What constitutes “active weather” wasn’t well defined in the prior discussion. I did consider that what I was considering less active weather could lead to more flooding in the way you described.
You motivated me to look up more on lapse rate, and apparently it is expected to decrease in the tropics and increase otherwise. [http://stratus.astr.ucl.ac.be/textbook/chapter4_node7.html] It makes me wonder if tropical thunderstorms will become weaker and temperate ones stronger? Doubtless it’s not that simple.
Thanks for your above reply.
“If you want to point me at a non-fee article that explains the mechanics behind that, I’d be happy to review it”
What if the only articles are paywalled?
Just because you have to pay for it doesn’t make it wrong, you know.
The mechanics are fairly simple and obvious. The mechanics to counter that are also simple and obvious. Which one wins is fairly dependent on the specifics.
So BPL’s answer may be correct in general and therefore, given only space for one answer, the best answer (in the same way as the best answer to “how many legs do I have” is NOT the average number of legs, but the average number (between 2 and 1) is the one that reduces the amount you’re wrong by).
“BPL: Yes, there is. We may share 95% of our genome with chimps, but morphologically and developmentally we are very unlike chimpanzees. We have 46 chromosomes, chimps have 48.”
And we have two chromosomes that are doubles bound together.
Therefore, we really have 48.
“BPL: Lack of cropland? No more irrigation systems?”
We didn’t have much in the way of irrigation complexity in the C15. Praying for rain was the best we had…
~659 If by “unintended fluttering in the dovecotes” you refer to the heaping of poor analogies — with a side order of vitriol — that your observations have inspired, I hear you, but it’s more like a fluttering in the chainsaw convention. Curry’s “tribalism” is too mild a description.
simon abingdon – something wrong with a 30-year average of global temperature as an indicator for global climate? For regional, 30 year trends in precipitation, temperature.
“that your observations have inspired,”
simon’s post was little more than “fire the phasers into the dilithium crystals to realign the quantum flux” answer.
I.e. BS.
But you two have a love fest.
“One common fallacy I see repeated is that it is easier to predict climate 100 years in the future than it is to predict it in 10 years.”
Strawman.
It’s easier to predict the 100 year climate than it is the 10 year climate.
But you change your hearing to fit your preconceptions.
#667 repeats a fallacy which Eli last saw on Dot Earth, the idea that
———————————
The problem is iterations and positive feed forward. The argument is that errors cancel out over time but exactly the opposite is true.
It is like 100 computations in a row with the output of #1 being the input of #2 etc. A small error or misunderstanding of the physics involved in problem #1 is amplified in #2 and #3 etc until it makes the model worthless
—————————
Were this true, computational fluid dynamics would never work, and clearly it does, to the extent that wind tunnels are being closed down, chemical engineering of fluid transport would not work, which it clearly does, and global climate models (nee global circulation models) would also not display the observed circulation patterns seen in the atmosphere, which again, they do, and yes, Virginia, great progress is being made in the area of turbulent flows.
Anyone who claims differently should take it up with Ansys first.
simon says:”Maybe the answer is that climate is just an unknowable Schroedinger wave function of innumerable probabilities, which collapses into weather when we try to measure it.”
I cannot resist a bit of wordplay – simon’s idea lacks coherence. Note the second sentence on wikipedia about quantum decoherence: Quantum decoherence gives the appearance of wave function collapse and justifies the framework and intuition of classical physics as an acceptable approximation: decoherence is the mechanism by which the classical limit emerges out of a quantum starting point and it determines the location of the quantum-classical boundary.)
“Right now, we’re having 700-year floods every year in the Midwest.
Severe flooding in the Midwest is a consequence of uncontrolled agricultural expansion and wetland draining, not climate change.
Sam@666, OK, so I see that rather than going to the top of the page and clicking the “Start Here” button to learn the actual science, you’ve decided you’d rather remain ignorant. OK, then, I’ll just put you down for one ignoramus. And I will look forward to you publishing your PHYSICAL MECHANISM whereby Mickey Mouse could account for the last 5/6 of the warming.
Care to try agian?
1)We know with 100% certainty that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
2)We know that CO2 accounts for more than 7 of the 33 degrees of greenhouse warming that keep Earth from turning into a snowball.
3)We do not know of any mechanism whereby CO2 should magically stop being a greenhouse at 280 ppmv.
4)We know there are natural sources of CO2 that are currently frozen in parmafrost or CO2 dissolved in the oceans.
5)We know that as the planet warms the CO2 is released.
6)We know that the small changes in solar irradiance are not sufficient to account for all of the warming seen in an interglacial (it accounts for at most 1/6).
7)We know CO2 can account for the remaining 5/6.
OK, got that, Punkin? Now go the the fricking top of the page and click on the fricking “Start Here” button.
> Jack Maloney
> … not climate change …
[Citation needed, unless you’re saying “couldn’t be, nope, no way”]
Try this one: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/delgenio_02/
“… We find that in much of the middle and high latitudes, precipitation has systematically increased over the 20th Century. This is consistent with changes predicted by climate models when concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are assumed to increase. The dataset also helps us to put some recent damaging extreme precipitation events into a global, long-term perspective….”
or
Contemporary Changes of the Hydrological Cycle over the Contiguous United States: Trends
Pavel Ya. Groisman1, Richard W. Knight, Thomas R. Karl, David R. Easterling, Bomin Sun, and Jay Lawrimore
Abstract
Over the contiguous U.S. precipitation, temperature, streamflow, heavy and very heavy precipitation and high streamflow in the East have increased during the 20th century. In the past 50 years, in addition to these changes, increases in evaporation, near-surface humidity, total, low, and convective cloudiness, earlier snow cover retreat and spring onset in the West, and a decrease in near-surface wind speed have been documented.
#669
“I have created models professionally, but not climate models, so I have some knowledge of the subject.”
I know a lot about dogs, so let me tell you about horses.
Gavin says: “You are very confused”
Me: Guilty!
To Ray,
I think this has been said to you before here, but you sound a little pissed! We just refuse to be re-educated, don’t we?
Hows about I make you a deal. I will buy and read, cover to cover, any book that you recommend on climate. But you have to read Roy Spencer’s new book “The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists”. (I gonna try reading it on my shiny new Ipad tonight) I would be happy to pay for your copy. (no ipad included) Afterwards, you can you use it for toilet paper or piss on it if you like.
630 Gilles: Iowa and Illinois are 22 inches ahead on rain over the past 2 years. The muddy fields have prevented harvesting and planting by about 5 or 6 %. Meanwhile, South Texas got zero rain for a whole year. EITHER flood OR drought can prevent agriculture from happening. GW causes both, in different and shifting places. The constant change makes life difficult for farmers. The thing GW does is it moves the rain to an unexpected place. Crops then fail in both places. See 668
638&658 Barton Paul Levenson: Some geneticists have said that human and chimpanzee genes are more similar than the genes of some single species. I can’t give you a reference off hand. We and chimps have the same emotions per Jane Goodall. In the context of population biology, we act the same as chimps.
647 flxible: OK, so you are someplace you think is far away and you have your own little farm or whatever. You think you will be the survivor because you are self sufficient. WRONG. Because: Population growth continues without an apocalypse: The apocalypse used to have 4 horsemen, but now it has more: famine, pestilence, war, disease, asteroid impact, ecological disaster phase 1, ecological disaster phase 2, genocide, etc.
WHEN the population crash happens: PEOPLE WILL FIND YOUR FARM AND TAKE YOUR FOOD. We know somebody can find you because you found a way to connect to the internet. YOU ARE NOT FAR ENOUGH AWAY. The closest place that is far enough away is Mars, the planet. How do you get other people to stop breeding: Simple: You don’t.
“where is “there”, and how, realistically, do we get there from here?”
NOT IN MY JURISDICTION. And I am so glad it is not in my jurisdiction. Since it is not in my jurisdiction, it is not my job to answer your question.
NOT IN REALCLIMATE’S JURISDICTION.
We aren’t going to answer that question. It isn’t a science question.
663 FurryCatHerder See:http://environmentaldefenseblogs.org/climate411/2008/01/14/global_winds/
and my answer to Gilles above
682 Jack Maloney: No it isn’t. I never saw it rain before like it did last year. I live on the boundary between Illinois and Iowa. See 684.
CFU @ 673:
I’m going to give you an opinion that many here will not like:
Paywalling papers related to climate change is pretty sleezoid behavior. It’s also counter-productive and probably related to why the denialosphere has the success it has. And it certainly doesn’t help with the reputation problems this thread is dealing with …
Edward @ 686:
That link points to an article that’s consistent with my response to BPL. See my comments about Hadley Cells and the poleward migration of same.
BPL’s claims are completely different.
I don’t see why paywalling climate change (or any) papers is “sleezoid.” Journals have the right to charge for their product, same as any other publication.
OTOH, I too wish they wouldn’t, for much the reasons FCH gives–a) I can’t read them so readily; and B) Joe Public would have good access to them in an ideal world.
Sam, Sam, Sam …
Just how likely do you think that there’s any truth there?
And … Spencer’s a scientist (sometimes, fewer times than in the past apparently, and the trend’s increasing in the wrong direction).
You do realize that if Spencer’s right, proper publication in the scientific literature would lead to worldwide fame in his field, and since he’s turning a bunch of applied physics on its head, even a possibility for a Nobel, right?
If his argument’s sound, why do you think he’s having it published by a very openly extremist right-wing publisher, rather than submitting it for review by fellow scientists as is common practice in every field of science you can think of?
Could it be because it’s utter silliness that would be shot to pieces and would never be published if he were to do so?
Or is it because you believe that only extreme right-wing publishers are uniquely qualified to publish this so-called “science”?
#573 simon abingdon
How about ‘pinning down’ climate by stating all those parameters you use for weather, but averaged over a period of time, and averaged in a way appropriate for that parameter. Usually 30 years is taken as the averaging period.
Terms like maritime, continental etc do not define a climate. They are simply names for climates with average values for all those other parameters,which fall within agreed limits for each particular name.
Also, Sam, as a creationist, Spencer could easily write a book entitled “The Great Evolution Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Biologists”, and just as “authoritatively” overthrow a century plus of biological science.
He’d be just as believable … and frankly, has written things that, while not of book-length, are just as ridiculous.
Edward!! Not a science question?? Not in your or RC’s jurisdiction? Population/social dynamics and sustainability and whether we’re smarter than chimps is about as appropriate as I can imagine when the discussion is about reducing CO2 generation drastically in 5-10 years to prevent extinction. Is climate change a purely academic question?
Sorry to rub your sore spot, but the whole of the situation is only academic to an oldster like I, who won’t be dealing with the mess our predecessors and leaders have made of Eden …. I’ll be real suprised if I live to see any collapse beyond what’s been happening in my lifetime, but I’ve been aware of those many horsemen the majority of my life, they’ve just picked up the gallop a bit due to our exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet. Discussion here that bears on the critical variables that the science brings to light is the education that’s the purpose of this roundtable I believe.
Re 634 Hank Roberts – I think it’s more complicated than that; the meridional temperature gradient change is different in the upper troposphere (and at least some of the stratosphere, at least for CO2 and solar forced warming); at least the changes in the lower troposphere and surface are affected by oceanic upwelling and the persistence (one hopes) of the Antarctic ice sheet and in general the seasonal and latitudinal distributions of the tendency… If water vapor increases in general, I could imagine there *might* be greater variations in water vapor, which might affect severe thunderstorms (dryline type contrasts) … other things being equal, global teleconnections of low-frequency variability via Rossby waves tend to be more sensitive to SST anomalies when the SST anomalies are against a background of higher SST … Concentration of precipitation into shorter time periods would be one form of increased variability. Could greater water vapor increase the rate of depening of synoptic-scale extratropical lows?
BPL :”Merely moving the rainfall pattern is enough to destroy harvests. Increasing the drought to pretty much all farmland by 2050 or so will destroy every harvest.”
Can you give me the chapter of AR4 where a total destruction of every harvest in 2050 is described ? As I understand, this would mean a global shift of the whole precipitation pattern , where all the rain would suddenly avoid all cultivated area and fall only on empty regions , and where all possibility of irrigation suddenly disappear ?
is it sustained by any scientific literature and reported by IPCC? or do you accuse them implicitly of incompetence ?
Other question : if you’re right, could you explain what should be done to avoid that and where is the dangerous threshold to avoid, quantitatively , before 2050? (amount of burnt carbon and temperature for instance ?)
Sam #686: we don’t owe you an education, you do. And if you seriously think that forcing Ray to read Spencer’s new turd is going to do anything but put him (or any scientist) in a mighty foul mood, you need to get out more my friend ;-)
“630 Gilles: Iowa and Illinois are 22 inches ahead on rain over the past 2 years. The muddy fields have prevented harvesting and planting by about 5 or 6 %. Meanwhile, South Texas got zero rain for a whole year. EITHER flood OR drought can prevent agriculture from happening.”
Sure, but this kind of variability has always existed. As a whole on the Earth, I would expect some gaussian distribution around normal conditions. Could you explain why this distribution could evolve towards a “two-humps” distribution around “no water at all” and “much too much water” , and suppress quantitatively all crops ? statistically, this would be very strange that nature would know exactly what to do to kill us …
again, quantitatively, can you give a scientific argument for drawing for example the average expected yearly crops as a function of average temperature ?
or is it just a scenario for the next Hollywood scary movie, in the case we would have escaped 2012 ?
I just finished reading the Discover interviews with Judith Curry and Michael Mann. Looking at data for a number of years now and having read the emails, I like what Mann had to say. Having read many of of Mann’s papers recently, I also must say there is nothing in his work suspect or off statistically.
dhogaza, If Roy Spencer is a creationist as you claim I admit that that is not really a plus for me…. but I have known many engineers, professors, doctors, surgeons etc that have been deeply religious yet were very good in their fields. I’ve always thought of that as a bit of a contradiction, but whatever. Lets not drag the man’s religious views into this.