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…
I was hoping to see Lord Oxburgh speak at the NAE Grand Challenges Summit in Chicago yesterday, but the Icelandic volcano caused cancellation of his flight!
This link is to the presentation slides of Dr. John Holdren, chief science advisor to President Obama. Very powerful and highly recommended:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/jph-chicago-04212010.pdf
I think this is once again an example of overstating the case being counter-productive. Actual predictions about the near future are serious enough, without just making stuff up.
It is easy to see how the media gets led astray when there is a minority trying to sensationalise everything.
So, a message to everybody: if you want to make extreme predictions, please attach a timescale based on current scientific knowledge – otherwise you will be written off as yet another doom-and-gloom merchant with no grasp of reality.
And as for those taking these silly “predictions” seriously? Gavin put it rather well: “Get a grip. […] There is lots of stuff in the threads that is wrong or misguided, but there are only so many hours in a day.”
David #769
Many thanks for your comments
I was just trying to understand the statement made by Ray #683
“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.”
I always like to do a few quick mental checks with “facts” just try and ensure they bear up to reality.
I can certainly accept the 33 Deg GHG warming of the planet and the physics of this is realatively simple to understand, but the 7 deg due to C02 seems to be more speculative rather than hard fact?
[Response: Indeed. No-one knows the effect of removing CO2 from the atmosphere since that has never happened. Instead, people have calculated the radiative impact of the different constituents. CO2 once you adjust for the overlaps accounts for about 20% of the long wave absorption – so just under 7 deg C out of 33 deg C. However, this is a no-feedback calculation. Actually removing the CO2 would cause changes in water vapour and clouds and surface albedo, and you would likely end up with temperatures with much more than 7 deg C cooling. In tests with the GISS model, removing CO2 cools the planet by 20+ degrees C and produces a snowball earth for instance. – gavin]
Frank Giger,
I’ve read Guns, Germs and Steel. It doesn’t explain why agriculture began 10000 years ago rather than 8000 years or 80000 years. After all, the temperature regimes were similar. You had similar flora and fauna at least in latitude bands up to +/-35 degrees. We could certainly have domesticated the dog up to 100000 years ago.
Frank, I think you misunderstand my concern. It is not that I am predicting catastrophic collapse of civilization. It is that I cannot rule it out given the evidence we have. As a risk management professional, that rings alarm bells. It is like the situation when I cannot rule out the loss of a space mission. My training tells me that I can’t ignore this.
We already know that the globe is over its carrying capacity. We know this is causing significant degradation of ecosystems, soil, oceans, etc. We know that climate change will exacerbate many of these problems, as will another 3 billion people. It is irresponsible to simply whistle past the graveyard and say “Oh, everything will be all right.”
David Benson #774 – Scotland had 3 to 400 people in NEolithic times? Where on earth did you get that idea from? Scotland supported hunter gatherers from something like 7 to 3,000BC, with a population that was growing much of that time. OF course there were few people in the early settlements 9 thousand years ago after th glaciers retreated, but numbers increased as you would expect.
Gilles (696): 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 ?
BPL: Try here:
Battisti, D.S., and R.L. Naylor 2009. “Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat.” Science 323, 240-244.
Dai, A., K.E. Trenberth, and T. Qian 2004. “A Global Dataset of Palmer Drought Severity Index for 1870–2002: Relationship with Soil Moisture and Effects of Surface Warming.” J. Hydrometeorol. 1, 1117-1130.
12% of Earth land surface “severely dry” by Palmer Drought Severity Index 1970. 2002 figure 30%.
UN warns of 70 percent desertification by 2025
Published by Jim on Monday, October 5, 2009 at 4:15 PM
BUENOS AIRES (AFP) — Drought could parch close to 70 percent of the planet’s soil by 2025 unless countries implement policies to slow desertification, a senior United Nations official has warned.
“If we cannot find a solution to this problem… in 2025, close to 70 percent could be affected,” Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, said Friday.
Drought currently affects at least 41 percent of the planet and environmental degradation has caused it to spike by 15 to 25 percent since 1990, according to a global climate report.
“There will not be global security without food security” in dry regions, Gnacadja said at the start of the ninth UN conference on the convention in the Argentine capital.
There is some dispute over whether 70% of land surface or just 70% of current farmland is meant. The official may have misread the report.
Giiles: 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 ?)
BPL: We should get rid of all the artificial CO2 sources we can as fast as we can. That’s the threshold.
CM (708),
I don’t say harvest will fail globally in 2050. I say they will fail globally somewhere between 2010 and 2050. I don’t know when as I don’t have enough information to pin it down more precisely. That it will happen I have no doubt. Human civilization is on the way out if we don’t act very soon.
CFU (713),
Not to mention Spencer has been openly dishonest in the past:
http://BartonPaulLevenson.com/Spencer.html
Re #761 Simon Abingdon
Have you heard the expression that climate is “average weather”?
I’m having difficulty in understanding your suggestion that climate should be based on an average of a sample size of 1.
For example, I live in Wellington NZ. A reasonable question I might ask a climatologist is “What is the best time of year to play cricket in Wellington?” You seem to suggest that climate should be defined as the average of months over a single year. If this were so, then the climatologist would tell me that I should never play cricket in Wellington, because the average annual rainfall indicates that it will rain more often than not. But that’s silly, because most of the rain that falls in Wellington occurs during winter, so clearly the months are not all the same.
So we need to at least treat each month separately. But let’s stick with your suggestion of a sample size of 1. We’ll define the climate of Wellington as based on the last 12 months. OK, so February and March are clearly the best time to play cricket, because those had the least rain in the last 12 months.
But hang on, last year, February and March rained almost continuously. The November and December before that (2008) were actually better for cricket. So is the answer Feb/Mar or Nov/Dec?
Using your definition of climate, based on averages of a sample size of 1, we get different answers depending on which year we use as a reference frame. Hmmm. That doesn’t sound so useful.
This suggests that if we want to define climate as “average weather”, then a sample size greater than 1 might be a good idea. Is 30 an arbitrary number? Maybe. Is 30 a better sample size for an average than 1? Yes.
Do you think you can come up with a number for sample size that is better than either 30 or 1? If so, please let us know, along with your reasoning.
the sample “sample size” discussion above made me think of this.
http://dailyradar.com/beltwayblips/video/it-s-dark-where-i-am-yet-just-two-hours-ago-it-was/
you can watch the whole thing, but the “good part” that i’m thinking of starts around 3:40. my favorite is the graph of the cooling trend since august – can’t argue with those facts…..
“I have seen several claims here by other posters that PBS is bisased against AGW and other environmental concerns known in science.”
It isn’t that they are biased against AGW but that they (like almost all media) DO NOT CARE to check their sources.
Therefore false balance is given because denialists are very loud and promoted by those media which are hostile to science and AGW.
E.g. Monkton has still not been chastised over his claim to be a science adviser to Mrs Thatcher.
Gilles: “Again, average temperature is NOT a physical quantity linked to energy, ”
E~nkT
average kinetic energy per molecule in a gas. Yup, no link there.
Quite an odd one given you state yourself as a scientist.
“As someone who actually runs, and pays to have run, web servers,”
What does this have to do with science journals and paywalls?
“I assure you that you’d likely save on those tax dollars if the data weren’t so closely guarded and those paywall sites weren’t, you know, making people pay.”
I assure you you’re full of crap.
Not only are they not closely guarded, the cost of building and maintining a paywall pays for more than just the paywall, it pays for the research too.
“I assure you that you’d likely save on those tax dollars if the data weren’t so closely guarded and those paywall sites weren’t, you know, making people pay.”
PS I don’t pay. So it’s not costing ME anything. What it IS costing is people who want it. They aren’t paid by my taxes, so how can their expense increase my tax burden?
“806
Barton Paul Levenson says:
23 April 2010 at 6:06 AM
CFU (713),
Not to mention Spencer has been openly dishonest in the past:”
And I’ll just say that I don’t have a problem with Spencer being religious.
What I DO have a problem with is that he’ll ignore and bend science merely because he doesn’t like the results when it comes to science vs his religion.
And he does the same when it comes to science vs his politics.
More irresponsible journalism at CNN today. The Iceland volcano was caused by global warming.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/04/23/weisman.volcano.iceland.earth/index.html?hpt=C2
I look forward to reading comments on CNN from you guys about how there is not enough scientific data to back up a claim like this, and they are doing the cause more harm than good.
At least they put it in the Opinion section, that’s an improvement.
“More irresponsible journalism at CNN today. The Iceland volcano was caused by global warming.”
Think of it from their POV (as lazy buggers).
Today: Big hit and lots of page impressions for little work.
Tomorrow: Print up something from someone saying “Iceland volcano not caused by global warming”.
Day after:Big hit and lots of page impressions for little work.
Tom S., You are right. It’s absolute horse puckey. It is also, as you point out, on the op ed page, and so, not really journalism. It would be nice if the intelligent folks on both sides of the political debate could simply accept the science and get on with addressing the threats. Unfortunately for the sake of rapid progress, accepting the science is a prerequisite.
sidd 744″please, what is your definition of “effective temperature” ?
Sorry to be late, I didn’t notice the question . “My” (actually THE ) definition of effective temperature is the black-body temperature corresponding to the same emitted power per unit area. I should have said more exactly “average effective temperature”, i.e. the equivalent BB temperature corresponding to the same whole radiative power, if it were constant over the whole Earth surface (TOA more exactly).
“Gilles (696): Can you give me the chapter of AR4 where a total destruction of every harvest in 2050 is described ?
BPL: Try here:”
Sorry, none of this is an AR4 chapter. Are you implicitly accusing IPCC of incompetence for not having clearly warned for such a danger ?
BPL :UN warns of 70 percent desertification by 2025…
BPL: We should get rid of all the artificial CO2 sources we can as fast as we can. That’s the threshold.
Sorry again, this has nothing to do with a “threshold” in the sense I know. But tell me : given that the current temperature trend is around 0.15 °C/decades, meaning that an average of 0.2°C is expected until 2025, (which could well be completely washed out by natural variability, AMO, any volcanic eruption , and so on..) and given that climate inertia is much larger than 15 years : what the hell can you expect from getting rid of any CO2 source to influence the droughts in 2025 ? isn’t it a kind of magic thought ?
Re 805 It is effects (just an example) such as this
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36722426
which are not properly taken account:
“A deadly, airborne new strain of fungus has emerged in Oregon. It has killed nearly one out of four known affected people so far and might also attack animals ranging from dogs to dolphins. And it is likely to spread, researchers now warn.”
As the climate changes will we see more of these pathogenic changes? Wheat crops have already been increasingly hit by wheat fungus. Are we determined to change the climate so much so as to create a fungal epoch about which we could very little?
Gilles says, “Again, average temperature is NOT a physical quantity linked to energy, for an inhomogeneous distribution.”
I’m sorry Gilles. That comment was intended for those of us who live in a physical world–you know the places where you have to add energy to see significant, long-term increases in temperature.
Ya know, sophistry isn’t really helping your credibility. In fact it is merely cementing your reputation as a troll.
#801 CRS
Thanks for the link to Holdren’s presentation. An excellent overview, in my opinion. I agree that it would be a positive step to replace “anthropogenic global warming (or climate change)” with the phrase “anthropogenic climate disruption”. It speaks more powerfully and broadly to the actual impact of what’s happening already, and likely to happen with BAU.
Jacob Mack says: “I have seen several claims here by other posters that PBS is bisased against AGW and other environmental concerns known in science. I could not disagree more with these claims. I have watched PBS my entire life…”
Yes, well the argument is that something seems to have changed at PBS, and they’re now taking money from some of the most deceptive and dishonest actors, like Koch Industries. Senator Inhofe (noted climate denialist) has Koch as his top lifetime donor – along with Massey Energy of coal mine disaster fame. ExxonMobil (recent recipient of a $3 billion grant from the Obama Administration to develop their $15 billion Papua New Guinea gas field – despite their recent $40 billion in profits!) also contributed to this PR effort.
Of course, if Exxon and Koch and Massey had produced this piece, then who would believe it? They need to put it on a “trusted, neutral news outlet” if they have any hope of getting people to swallow it.
If you watch the program, you’ll see that it is as deceptive and dishonest as the “Great Global Warming Swindle” aired in Britain.
That’s not science journalism, that’s paid political propaganda run by a front group – and if I was you, I’d be very upset about the direction that PBS has decided to take. Look at their leading questions:
Q: Is California’s push toward renewable energy too aggressive?
(Translation: It’s too aggressive)
Q: What’s wrong with California’s strategy in the energy game?
(Translation: There’s something wrong with the strategy)
Q: Why aren’t you a big fan of nuclear power?
(Translation: What’s wrong with you?)
Q: What could make renewables like wind and solar more practical?
(Translation: wind and solar aren’t practical)
Q: Some environmentalists want to build wind farms and solar farms but don’t want them in their backyards… the NIMBY syndrome…
(Translation: only hypocritical enviro types support wind and solar)
Q: You put a lot of hope in the so-called car of the future. Why?
(Translation: Why stop running cars on fossil fuels?)
The most deceptive, dishonest exchange was this, however:
Q: What’s allowed California to lead the way on environmental issues?
Vaitheeswaran: First of all, they have the technological base, with universities like Berkeley and national labs like Livermore…
As anyone who bothers to look knows, Berkeley got in bed with oil giant BP and is not funding any renewable energy research centers – which is understandable, since DOE isn’t making any money available for such work. On that issue, nothing has changed since Bush. Efforts to convert Livermore from a nuclear weapons lab to a energy research center were scuttled by the Bechtel-BWXT-Battelle-Washington Group-UC contractors at Livermore. There’s zero discussion of this basic fact, however.
This is pretty deceptive and dishonest by any standard – and PBS should be roundly pilloried for agreeing to run Koch-Exxon propaganda as “science journalism.”
It’s really a shame, since PBS NOVA used to be a pretty good science journalism program.
JBob,
I think the problem you are having is that you seem to think that the purpose of models is to explain test results. It is not. Models–as well as data–are meant to yield insight into the physical system. While it is generally assumed that a model that better matches representative data will have greater predictive power, the degree to which this is true depends greatly on the model
In a statistical model, overfitting the data is a real risk, and so metrics such as Akaike information criterion (AIC), Bayesian information Criterion (BIC), etc. are used to guard against this.
In dynamical models, the risk of overfitting is significantly reduced–indeed virtually nil–because the contribution of the factors is determined by physics. One includes a factor if it is deemed likely to contribute significantly. If the match to the calibration dataset is poor, one includes additional factors. One then validates the model against an independent dataset. As long as the physics of the system are pretty clear–and the climate is pretty well understood–the approach converges. You and netdr seem to be claiming some special knowledge based on the fact that you have implemented some models before. I’ve seen a chimp drive a car before. It doesn’t mean he understood the rules of the road.
Re drought and agriculture, there are reasons other than drought to be concerned about agriculture in a warming world:
Global warming is changing organic matter in soil
Soils release more carbon dioxide as globe warms
Response of Nitrogen Emissions and Soil Respiration to Increasing Temperature
‘Carbon starvation’ killing trees globally
Scientists at climate talks: ‘The nitrogen cycle is changing faster than that of any other element’
Even in the desert, plants feel the heat of global warming
U.S. Hardiness Zone Changes Between 1990 and 2006
Global warming will render half of world’s inhabited areas unliveable
> Is 30 an arbitrary number? Maybe.
Nope.
http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2009/01/results-on-deciding-trends.html
Seriously, he explains where the numbers come from. You can do it yourself.
It’s a lesson at high school arithmetic level in how it’s decided by statisticians based on how much the particular data set varies over time.
Clear, straightforward, reality-based, depends on the particular data set used.
Tom S:
You are quick to accuse CNN of “irresponsible journalism”. But is it really? As you observe, it is an opinion piece. But most importantly, it doesn’t make the silly claim you say that it does.
The claim that Alan Weisman does make, “the Earth’s crust, relieved of so much formidable weight of ice borne for many thousands of years, has begun to stretch and rebound. As it does, a volcano awakens in Iceland” – this claim is based on recent scientific research, published by the Royal Society. Isostatic adjustment is a well known phenomenon, so it should not be surprising that scientists are examining the short term effects of unprecedented ice sheet changes.
Is this rock solid science? No, it is an opinion piece about ongoing science and its immediate relevance to current events. That much is made very clear.
Tom S, I’m not sure whether your error was failing to discover the fact that this is actually an active area of research, or whether you inferred more from the article than was actually said. Either way, your response was a knee-jerk reaction.
Alan Weisman works very hard not to draw a straight line from cause to effect, precisely because so many people can’t get their head around the idea of climate change being only a contributory factor in extreme events. Global warming didn’t directly cause Katrina, or the Australian fires. But we expect these events to become more frequent in a warmer world, so ignoring the link is equally disingenuous.
Tom S., You are right. It’s absolute horse puckey. It is also, as you point out, on the op ed page, and so, not really journalism. It would be nice if the intelligent folks on both sides of the political debate could simply accept the science and get on with addressing the threats. Unfortunately for the sake of rapid progress, accepting the science is a prerequisite.
And of course, for every idiotic piece in the MSM that exaggerate the impacts of global-warming, one can find dozens of idiotic pieces that deny the same. It is pure sophistry to imply otherwise.
“824
Ray Ladbury says:
23 April 2010 at 8:59 AM
JBob,
I think the problem you are having is that you seem to think that the purpose of models is to explain test results.”
I disagree. JBob’s problem is that the science supports AGW and the models use the science. Therefore he has to paint a picture that models do not use the science and that they are being manipulated for nefarious purposes.
Ray ”
I’m sorry Gilles. That comment was intended for those of us who live in a physical world–you know the places where you have to add energy to see significant, long-term increases in temperature.”
But Ray, that isn’t always true even in the real physical world ! if you add heat to melting ice, you have NO increase of temperature. When the inner core of stars is getting hotter, when they start burning helium , their surface become COOLER. During solar cycles, the temperature increase or decrease but the core activity doesn’t change.
I agree that it seems unlikely that an increase of forcing results in a decrease of average temperature. But
* even this cannot be excluded on physical grounds, and it wouldn’t be contradictory with energy conservation, since the average effective temperature can increase with a decreasing average temperature, with a change of relative latitudinal temperature distribution
* such variations could contribute significantly to multidecadal trends if there are limit-cycles. I don’t see clearly why this can be excluded by current data.Whether I’m a troll or not.
CFU:
I see you responded to Tom S without reading the story he linked, or finding out whether there is any substance to it. I don’t wish to be overly rude, but reading more and posting less may help the signal to noise ratio here.
“if you add heat to melting ice, you have NO increase of temperature.”
Your assertion was the other way around.
YOU said : If you increase the temperature of ice, you’re not adding energy to it.
Ike:
I watched the same recent NOVA presentation about California’s Energy initiatives, but I had a somewhat different take. It is true that it emphasized the uncertainties quite a lot. And, I was annoyed at their letting the CEI representative sound off. But I felt the overall impression was that the initiatives had a signficant chance of succeeding. Moreover, it seemed to me that there was a implicit suggestion that even if everything was entirely successful, all told it was worthwhile.
Finally, at the end, it asked whether we have any choice in trying such things, with the clearly implied message that we don’t.
Most important, it seemed to me that it took for granted that global warming was a serious problem and that just doing nothing was not an option.
“I see you responded to Tom S without reading the story he linked”
I see you didn’t bother thinking.
Headline was lazy.
But controversy sells.
Refute that but don’t decide you can avoid reading.
“When the inner core of stars is getting hotter, when they start burning helium , their surface become COOLER”
Yup, just what I’d expect from someone who is clueless about science.
You see, the inner core of the star is not the surface of a star.
But you see to forget this even as you state it.
Completely Fed Up @ 813:
You are completely delusional. There simply aren’t enough people buying papers from paywall sites, or the journals themselves, to pay for the research that’s being performed.
Paywall sites exist to replace the revenue that’s been lost by publishers for the print versions of their journals. Unless you want to find some way that journals kicked-back revenue to researchers (hint: they didn’t), there’s simply no connection between an organization, such as SpringerLink, and the money going to researchers.
Here, have an article about them —
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Science%2BBusiness_Media
Their total sales were €880M, per that article, with 5,000 employees. Since it’s a business, I’m sure it also pays it’s stock holders a return on their investment in some form.
Would you care to tell me how much of that €880M was left to send to researchers after paying operating costs and investors?
So … care to try again?
TomS’s CNN piece is bizarre. Mostly description of Iceland, a bit about early Icelandic government, a wee bit o’ plate tectonics, then:
“…something else is lately worrying geologists: the likelihood that the Earth’s crust, relieved of so much formidable weight of ice borne for many thousands of years, has begun to stretch and rebound.”
-ok, fine, isostatic rebound…no problems so far, but then:
“As it does, a volcano awakens in Iceland (with another, larger and adjacent to still-erupting Eyjafjallajokull, threatening to detonate next). The Earth shudders in Haiti. Then Chile. Then western China. Mexicali-Calexico. The Solomon Islands. Spain. New Guinea. And those are just the big ones, 6+ on the Richter scale, and just in 2010. And it’s only April.”
/facepalm
Now, he doesn’t say “I think THIS causes THAT.” He just puts the fact of isostatic rebound right next to those other events and kind of waggles his eyebrows at us. So my question(s) to Weisman would be “do you in fact see a connection between glacier mass loss and earthquakes in, say, Chile? If so, can you explain to me how that might work? If not, can you explain why you completely changed the topic like that?”
And as for the “it’s only April” bit…USGS says the averages are one magnitude-8 or higher earthquake per year, 17 between 7 and 7.9, and 132 earthquakes between 6 and 6.9. So he mentions seven earthquakes above 6.0, and then says “And it’s only April” in such a way that you can almost hear the ominous background music…but according to USGS, 10+ earthquakes at 6.0 or larger in ONE MONTH wouldn’t be unusual at all.
So yeah, Didactylos, he doesn’t actually make any outlandish claims…he just hints (blatantly) at stuff that’s outlandish (or just wrong) and tries to get the reader to believe crazy sh*t without him actually having to say it directly.
Reminds me of (US Senator from Kentucky) Mitch McConnell in that sense. Functionally lying all over the place, but a lot of the time each individual sentence is technically true…just incredibly misleading in context. But that’s OT, I suppose.
CFU : I didn’t say that for the ice -although this may be true for non isothermal system.
But actually I didn’t even say that for the Earth : i said that you can conserve energy balance (= emissivity) with an increased average temperature. It is easy to check it :
a) assume a temperature latitude distribution T(theta)
b) compute the total emissivity :E1 = integral (T^4 2 Pi sin(theta) d theta)
c) do a perturbation ∆T(theta) with a vanishing average, that transfers heat from the low latitudes to high latitudes . The most general form is a linear combination of P2n (Theta) where Pl are the Legendre polynomials and n>1 (average = 0), with the right sign of coefficients. For instance +a (1-3 cos^2(theta)) with a >0 .
d) recompute the total emissivity E2 = integral (T+∆T)^4 2 Pi sin(theta) d theta)
since the relative variation of (T+∆T)^4 is proportionnal to T^3, the effect of pole warming is less than that of equator cooling, so the emissivity decreases, although the average temperature is the same : E2 1. This time the emissivity is the same , whereas the average temperature has increased. So radiative balance is conserved, with an increased average temperature.
You can easily check that average temperature is proportional to effective temperature only if the relative repartition T (theta) / is constant, i.e., temperature variations are strictly proportionnal to the initial temperature. Which is NOT the case in GCM outputs, since the (cooler ) poles are more warmed than (hotter) equator. Actually this is understandable since the relative sensitivity of high latitudes to temperature variation is less than that of the low latitudes, so in some sense they are more “elastic ” or more variable.
Although it may be seem counterintuitive, it is quite possible to transfer heat, for instance by a modification of oceanic circulation, and conserve radiative balance with an increasing temperature. I do not claim it is the case, but you can’t dismiss it by physical arguments – and i do not see any impossibility that it can contribute to a fraction of degree of average anomaly.
Neil, in #803 says:
I always like to do a few quick mental checks with “facts” just try and ensure they bear up to reality.
Great!
I can certainly accept the 33 Deg GHG warming of the planet and the physics of this is realatively simple to understand, but the 7 deg due to C02 seems to be more speculative rather than hard fact?
There’s a disconnect there. The basic radiative effects of CO2 – which you say you accept – were established a good 50 years ago. Look up the work of John Tyndall, Joseph Fourier, Svante Arrhenius, Guy Callendar, and Roger Revelle. The AIP site is a good place to start.
If you accept a 33 degree effect but question 7 degrees from the most significant driver of the effect, what number would you assign and why?
Weird. So now I see that Weisman’s implications may not be (quite) as far -fetched as I thought:
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/site/issues/climate_forcing.xhtml
…but his form of expression is still unconvincing (and annoying).
Gilles says: I agree that it seems unlikely that an increase of forcing results in a decrease of average temperature. But…
Our ignorance of the thermodynamics of planetary and stellar atmospheres is not as great as you think. Please read carefully Barton’s How to Estimate Planetary Temperatures and do some problems from Ray’s workbook [pdf]. This will help convince you that climate scientists actually do know what they’re talking about.
The controversy over AGW/Climate Change continues and I suppose that is to be expected. Despite the contraversy, the US is moving along with policy on climate change and Canada will follow.
Refer to this link. http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N19159977.htm
The wording in the article seems to me to fit into the purpose of Copenhagen. The article doesn’t say it but I think legislation will be the position the US takes when the UN countries meet in Cancun later on this year.
I am a member of the general public. My fear is a fear of the unknown. Where is this legislation going to take us. Despite my concerns, I recognize something needs to be done. Different web sites certainly add fuel to the fire that promotes the contraversy. The problem I have with these other sites is that they mainly offer critism to the scientists and no solutions. I am taking a positive approach in realization that something needs to be done. Even if a person does not believe in AGW, fossil fuels are not going to last forever. I don’t understand the science behind it but I know there is less snow during winter than when I was child growing up. I hear stories about declining bee populations and problems the bat population is having. Bees pollinate so what happens to the food supply if the bee popluation is reduced to the point where there is not enough pollination? Bats eat insects so what effect will a larger insect population have? What about decling fish stocks etc. Some posters have spoken about crop failure and famine. That is a very real possibility. I could give many other examples. I could give other examples but hope you understand the point I make trying to make considering I am not a scientist.
> 816 Tom S says: 23 April 2010 at 7:52 AM
> … at CNN today. The Iceland volcano was caused by global warming.
No, the piece at CNN doesn’t say that.
You’ve managed to misread a fairly clear nontechnical opinion piece.
Then you invite people to criticize your mistake but attribute it to the writer at CNN.
Did anyone leap into this without actually checking? If so they’ve learned not to trust you.
You’ve confused the end of the ice age with global warming.
You’ve confused continental drift and rifting with global warming.
The writer didn’t say what you claim.
You can look this stuff up, once you understand what you’re reading. Try just the first page of this result:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=glacial+rebound+volcano
One example:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/tutgtcjgne3uhx21/
http://resources.metapress.com/pdf-preview.axd?code=tutgtcjgne3uhx21&size=largest
GE Sigvaldason – Bulletin of Volcanology, 2002
“A pronounced volcanic production maximum on the rift zones through Iceland coincided with rapid crustal rebound during and after glacier melting at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary. At peak glaciation, ice thickness over central Iceland may have reached 1,500-2,000 m, causing 400-500-m depression of the crust. Rapid climatic improvement caused glacier melting and removal of the ice load within about 1,000 years…. with an average rate of uplift on the order of nearly half a metre per year over central Iceland…. The volcanic production maximum coincides with crustal rebound after the last glaciation….”
#797 John P, looks like we are going to have a long & interesting discussion.
No, I am not just looking at short term trends, which is why I like to look at the long term trends (200+ years) from http://www.rimfrost.no/ among others. However getting back to sea ice, I have seen papers (which I will try to dig up) where satellite data and visual observations were compared. They give a error range of 5-10%. The primary error is generally along the ice edge. Assuming a 10% error, that means a starting error of 0.8-1.4 M sq.km., depending on the season. Since the ice forms/dissipates in secular fashion, one can bias out some errors, over time. Looking at the satellite specs., my guess the error is still between 3-5%, or 0.3 to 0.6 M sq. km. realistically.
Now John, your making up words, I did not say “we don’t know anything”, however I will say “we don’t know everything”. But let’s see what this summer brings, as well as the new satellite to measure ice thickness.
#824 Ray go back and read my post on the medical diagnostic model. It says, in part “In order to generate the basic steady state flow patterns,”. The reason we spent so much time inputting the 3-D data representing the physical objects in the enclosure was TO UNDERSTAND the flow patterns, and gain insight as to what was happening, and improve the design. Anyone who has worked with fluids, knows how complicated they can be, and use any help they can get. That is why they generate holograms of rocket engine exhausts, to understand what is going on.
The basic purpose of the model is to gain understanding, and it must reflect reality. To say “climate is pretty well understood”, one might paraphrase M. Twain “it might be premature”.
While statistics has it’s place, I think a good observer can pick things out better, especially the unexpected. Ever watch a neurologist pick things out of a EEG graph with a dozen “squiggly” lines?
Now that the CRU scientists have been exonerated, it’s time to look at the real scandal: the politically motivated attacks on climate science and scientists based on flimsy evidence and dubious scholarship. Here is a case in point:
More dubious scholarship from Edward Wegman and his proteges.
In both the original Wegman report and a subsequent follow-up paper by Yasmin Said, Wegman and two others, the background sections on social network research show clear and compelling instances of apparent plagiarism. The three main sources, used almost verbatim and without attribution, have now been identified. These include a Wikipedia article and a classic sociology text book by Wasserman and Faust. But the papers rely even more on the third source, a hands-on text book that explores social network concepts via the Pajek analysis software package – the same tool used by the Wegman team to analyze “hockey stick” author Michael Mann’s co-author network.
Not only that, but the later Said et al paper acknowledges support from the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, as well as the Army Research Laboratory, raising a host of new issues and questions. And chief among those questions is this: Will George Mason University now finally do the right thing and launch a complete investigation of the actions and scholarship of Wegman and Said?
Secular (732),
I have no problem with chimpanzees. I just don’t think humans are chimpanzees, for the same reason I don’t think rats are mice, or dogs are wolves, or kangaroos are wallabies. Related but not the same animal.
Titus (741),
I’m planning to publish a book about why geographers and astronomers are wrong about the shape of the Earth. About half of it deals with new research I am about to publish which proves clearly that the Earth is a flat disk supported on an infinite column of stacked turtles.
Why don’t scientists take my book seriously? I’ll tell you why–because they’re a closed-minded clique that’s already made up their minds; a stifling scientific orthodoxy more like the medieval Inquisition than like real scientists like Galileo and Immanuel Velikovsky!
CFU:
I’m sure you believe that you answered me, but you failed to string your thoughts into a coherent narrative. Or, put another way: you made no sense at all. And still no sign that you read past the headline (if you read the headline at all).
Kevin Stanley:
Glad you eventually found the link in my post. Maybe if we repeat it a few times everybody else jumping on the bandwagon will see it, too.
All:
Why is this such a controversial topic? Probably because there is already enough confusion about climate, and focussing on the aspects that are least well understood simply adds to that confusion, and provides opportunities for ignorant commentators to take things out of context and make more stuff up. Despite this, I think we can handle the discussion.
BPL: “I just don’t think humans are chimpanzees, ”
Nobody said we were.
We don’t say that Bonobo’s are Orangutans either.
We are genus Pan. We’re not Pan Paniscus.
Our common ancestor was the human like progenitor of the modern Chimpanzee who is just as evolved as humans are.
“CFU : I didn’t say that for the ice -although this may be true for non isothermal system”
No, you said it for ice. And anything else that has a temperature.