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…
990 trrll: Mark Lynas wrote his book based on peer reviewed papers. That is, Mark Lynas says he condensed many papers into a book. The Guardian published a review if Mark Lynas’s book. I know The Guardian isn’t peer reviewed, but it is where you get a brief review of the book. The book is derived from peer reviewed work.
geosociety.org is peer reviewed. On the subject of H2S as a kill mechanism, the 6 other references are derived from peer reviewed work.
Climate Code Red is derived from peer reviewed work in that the authors read peer reviewed work before writing.
I didn’t say all the direct references were peer reviewed. You have to dig through the references I gave to get to the peer reviewed papers. Digging through the books is more difficult because they don’t list their sources.
Peer reviewed publications are difficult for me to get and difficult reading. I read what is easy to get. I don’t complain about paywalls.
Jim Hansen’s opinion is in a separate comment. My opinion is that Jim Hansen is so highly respected in the climate business that Jim Hansen’s opinion is golden. I mean if it is Jim Hansen’s opinion, I am ready to believe it. It may not be gospel, but close to it. I think that Jim Hansen was the agency chief at NASA GISS where several RC people work now. Jim Hansen is now retired, I think. Jim Hansen was the NASA spokesman to Congress in 1988. That makes Jim Hansen the elder statesman of GW. Am I right, Gavin? I don’t know the correct office symbol.
Since I don’t know your email address, I emailed a copy of Dr. Hansen’s speech to RealClimate so that they can forward it to you. I doubt that they will.
Ike, I luv ya. Gavin tolerates our talking about everything else besides the 2nd CRU report here, so no worries.
BPL:” Bzzzzt! Wrong! Global warming causes increasing drought in continental interiors. In 1970 12% of Earth’s land surface was “severely dry” (Palmer Drought Severity Index of -3.0 or lower). In 2002 that figure was 30%, and it’s still climbing”
Sorry but where is your source ? and is it due to a change of precipitations or a more intensive use of water ? following IPCC, a statistically significant change in land precipitation can be hardly measured yet ;
“The observed GHCN linear trend (Figure 3.12) over the 106-year period from 1900 to 2005 is statistically insignificant, as is the CRU linear trend up to 2002 (Table 3.4b). However, the global mean land changes (Figure 3.12) are not at all linear, with an overall increase until the 1950s, a decline until the early 1990s and then a recovery. Although the global land mean is an indicator of a crucial part of the global hydrological cycle, it is difficult to interpret as it is often made up of large regional anomalies of opposite sign…Nevertheless, the discrepancies in trends are substantial, and highlight the difficulty of monitoring a variable such as precipitation that has large variability in both space and time. .”
what is the significance of the correlation with temperature and/or CO2 ?
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-3-2.html
Waaayyy back in 955 is this gem:
“How about freedom TO harvest a vast and endless supply of FREE wind and solar energy?”
Neither is a “free” source of energy, unless one is a plant in the process of photosynthesis or spreading seeds.
Once we get past the methods for energy conversion (solar cells or wind turbines), the same overhead cost of power distribution that one incurs with every electrical grid come into play.
And we will need the grid, as neither solar or wind is uniformly reliable and therefore must be made up of many nodes spread out, hopefully keeping an adequate average current available for the whole of the grid.
The good news is much of the infrastructure is in place. The bad news is it is a victim of its own successful growth over time, which means it is inefficient.
I won’t comment again on the sky is falling, we’re all gonna die as civilization collapses predictions. They are as stupid and unfounded in the peer reviewed literature as creationism, and lack the necessary inclusion of brain eating zombies in order to be truly interesting.
BPL(?) was looking for confirmed global warming predictions a while back, and I just came across these articles:
Prediction –
Coastal Ocean Upwelling
Andrew Bakun Science 12 January 1990: Vol. 247. no. 4939, pp. 198 – 201 DOI: 10.1126/science.247.4939.198
“A mechanism exists whereby global greenhouse warning could, by intensifying the alongshore wind stress on the ocean surface, lead to acceleration of coastal upwelling.”
Confirmation –
Warming of the Eurasian Landmass Is Making the Arabian Sea More Productive
Joaquim I. Goes, Prasad G. Thoppil, Helga do R Gomes, John T. Fasullo, Science 22 April 2005: Vol. 308. no. 5721, pp. 545 – 547 DOI: 10.1126/science.1106610
“The recent trend of declining winter and spring snow cover over Eurasia is causing a land-ocean thermal gradient that is particularly favorable to stronger southwest (summer) monsoon winds. Since 1997, sea surface winds have been strengthening over the western Arabian Sea. This escalation in the intensity of summer monsoon winds, accompanied by enhanced upwelling and an increase of more than 350% in average summertime phytoplankton biomass along the coast and over 300% offshore, raises the possibility that the current warming trend of the Eurasian landmass is making the Arabian Sea more productive.”
“Although our findings have an immediate and important bearing on regional fisheries, the implications of a more productive Arabian Sea go far beyond that; for example, to our planet’s climate. The Arabian Sea hosts a distinct, basin-wide oxygen minimum zone between 150 and 1000 m (35–37), whose presence has a substantial impact on marine elemental cycles, in particular those linked to the production of climatically relevant trace gases. ” e.g., production of more N2O
Rapid 20th-Century Increase in Coastal Upwelling off Northwest Africa
H. V. McGregor, M. Dima, H. W. Fischer, S. Mulitza Science 2 February 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5812, pp. 637 – 639 DOI: 10.1126/science.1134839
“Near-shore waters along the northwest African margin are characterized by coastal upwelling and represent one of the world’s major upwelling regions. Sea surface temperature (SST) records from Moroccan sediment cores, extending back 2500 years, reveal anomalous and unprecedented cooling during the 20th century, which is consistent with increased upwelling.”
“The above quote is even prepared to write Judith Curry off because she cited a book, which no one is prepared to read!”
No, I haven’t written off Dr. Curry (nor would it matter much whether I did or didn’t), I simply would have written something different had I read her post first.
Yet from reading her most recent work on collide-a-scope, I’m moved more to despair. It’s as if she’s drunk only McIntyre/Watts kool-aid for the last three months, and seems oblivious to counternarratives to the stories they and their ilk are retailing. Now she feels betrayed by the IPCC, which she formerly cited as authoritative. Apparently she’s positioning herself as an ‘outsider’ critiquing the ‘tribal’ establishment of mainstream scientists. Historically this is risky; she could end up being either heroic, a naive tool of ideologues, or a crank. Unfortunately getting details of the substance of her reservations/complaints about the science and the ‘process’ has been like pulling teeth, though Hank Roberts has been making progress in this. It’s important to do this because when an ostensibly ‘unbiased’ scientist in a field under attack from ideologues starts throwing around the dark accusations of the sort she’s now writing, people listen. It’s important to find out if she’s basically regurgitating the same discredited narratives as the denialists, or if she’s on to something important.
I think a detailed and open debate between her and RC mods would be air-clearing. At the very least I’d know she’d really heard the ‘other side’.
@Norman #997:
I’m not intelligent enough on the issue you raise to explain it, but you may want to search this site for some comments on the lack of robustness of Lindzen & Choi 2009. Something with a published comment and all that…
“Under scatter graphs, which show increasing carbon dioxide Vs Outgoing Long Wave radiation”
Now try looking at the Incoming LW Radiation.
The Greenhouse effect takes it’s power from the return of LW radiation.
Therefore that extra radiation heats the earth and, since its radiative peak at ~300K is in the IR, the IR or longwave radiation increases.
Someone is flim-flamming and you fell for it.
Manny Concern Trolls: “Agreed, and I assume you will be noting that across the board regardless of the point of view of the poster.”
How come you didn’t complain either Wally?
How come you never worry about offensive language or accusations of fraud from denialdittos and, in fact, engage in them as often as you feel you can get away with them?
David Benson # 983
“and you could actually study a recent review about climate sensitivity:
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/knuttir/papers/knutti08natgeo.pdf ”
Thank you, that is an excellent article. I really encourage everyone to read every word of this. The authors are quite honest and mention most of the concerns I had with the estimates of climate sensitivity. They even admit that there may be different sensitivities to different types of forcing and different planetary conditions! If this is true, doesn’t that indicate that CS may not even be a meaningful value? They also say that this could call into question the accuracy of the estimates of Sensitivity based on historical data — since planetary conditions have changed since the data was collected. Could this all just be an attempt to simplify something exceedingly complex that really shouldn’t be simplified or condensed? Could CS have zero predictive value?
I don’t agree with the Policy Implications section. How the authors go from admitting all those shortcomings to that is a little puzzling. In short, this article and the estimates of CS are absolutely, totally saturated with UNCERTAINTY. Since this value is central to claims about dangerous AGW, how on earth can you guys walk around and with a straight face claim 100 percent certainty?
“996 Geoff Wexler says:
“Are you saying that the huge energy changes involved in the melting and freezing of large ice sheets and the associated changes in sea levels are due to large energy changes in energy input?” [and output].
Lets assume that the alternative is the case i.e that this was merely an internal exchange between two energy reservoirs. We are deep in an ice age with low sea levels and a dry atmosphere. How to escape? Perhaps a giant global super El Nino might come to the rescue? If you can justify such a mechanism , while also avoiding energy entering and leaving the system I suggest that you try to get it published.
But whats wrong with the standard explanations roughly based on the Milankovitch effect amplified by positive feedbacks which cause large energy inputs into or outputs from the system?
Ray postulated to Sam that there was a direct relationship between positive forcing due to energy increase and near surface temperatures ie increase one and increase the other.
I say again this is twaddle!
We have unchallenged evidence that there is no such direct linear relationship between energy input and near surface temperatures. We have the glacial cycles with tiny changes to overall TSI input and large changes to near surface temperatures.
A more pointed example would be the Sun itself. It has been increasing its output consistently seen the birth of the Earth. It has increased its output by 10% in the last billion years alone. This dwarfs any proposed forcing from CO2. The general opinion seems to indicate a 2% increase in the Suns output is a forcing effect equivalent to a doubling of atmospheric CO2.
So was the Earth was freezing a billion years ago? No!
In fact there has been no overall warming in the last billion years which puts the nail in the coffin of any hypothesis that there is a linear relatiionship between energy and temperature. If you want to go back even further we can see a 30% change in the Suns output but the planet’s temperature seems little different as there was definitely plenty of liquid water at that time.
In other words the Earth’s climatic processess seem perfectly capable of changing near surface temperatures with little assistance from energy increase or decrease. This is the whole point, unless we can understand fully these processes, and we don’t, we can have little confidence in predictions based on an increase in forcing.
It is human nature to want answers and the simpler the better, I understand that. How nice it would be if forcing = temperature in some sort of direct relationship, but it doesn’t and we just don’t know enough of the Earth’s climatic processess and responses at this stage to map the future.
Alan
Alan
“Neither is a “free” source of energy”
You don’t pay to recieve a watt of sunlight or a watt of wind or a watt of wave.
But to get a watt of coal power, you have to buy coal. It doesn’t create itself handily nearby for nothing.
“In fact there has been no overall warming in the last billion years”
So you say.
But since CO2 is a warming agent:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png
since the sun was much colder, what kept the earth from being eternally frozen?
CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Gilles (989): really ? so if Pluto anomaly or anything else increases with time, it proves its anthropogenic origin ?
you have a strange way of using correlations …
BPL: No, I don’t. YOU said significance was what mattered, I showed you that the significance for key checks on AGW theory was very high. Note that–CHECKS on AGW theory, not PROOF of it. The correlations help to confirm the theory, but the theory is not based on the correlations. And no, correlation with something on Pluto obviously wouldn’t show anthropogenic causation, because that’s NOT how you use regression-correlation analysis. On the other hand, if we did find a tight correlation between something on Earth and something on Pluto, and we could (statistically) rule out spurious correlation, then it might show that some process existed which was common to both.
BPL: Bzzzzt! Wrong! Global warming causes increasing drought in continental interiors. In 1970 12% of Earth’s land surface was “severely dry” (Palmer Drought Severity Index of -3.0 or lower). In 2002 that figure was 30%, and it’s still climbing
Gilles (1003): Sorry but where is your source ?
BPL: Right here:
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.
Gilles: and is it due to a change of precipitations or a more intensive use of water ?
BPL: How the HELL could increasing DROUGHT be due to a MORE intensive use of water???
Brian (1005): Thanks! That’s going right on my list!
We have unchallenged evidence that there is no such direct linear relationship between energy input and near surface temperatures. We have the glacial cycles with tiny changes to overall TSI input and large changes to near surface temperatures. – Alan Millar
And of course we understand why: positive feedbacks from the initial warming, most notably outgassing of carbon dioxide.
In fact there has been no overall warming in the last billion years which puts the nail in the coffin of any hypothesis that there is a linear relatiionship between energy and temperature.
Whoever said there was, over all timescales? There is a well-understood long-term negative feedback process: increased temperature and CO2 speed erosive processes, drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere, but this takes place over tens of thousands of years – hence, will not save us from the dire effects of AGW.
we just don’t know enough of the Earth’s climatic processess and responses at this stage to map the future.
Utter crap. We have quite sufficient knowledge to know that unless we severely restrain emissions of greenhouse gases, disastrous consequences are very likely.
Sam (1010): Could CS have zero predictive value?
BPL: Sure. It’s just that the chances against that being true are about a zillion to one.
Sam: In short, this article and the estimates of CS are absolutely, totally saturated with UNCERTAINTY.
BPL: UNCERTAINTY is not your friend, Sam. It means it’s just as likely that it’s HIGHER than the models predict. Duh. Do you understand what “uncertainty” means?
Sam: Since this value is central to claims about dangerous AGW, how on earth can you guys walk around and with a straight face claim 100 percent certainty?
BPL: Straw man argument. Nobody is claiming 100% certainty. What we do claim is that it’s so likely climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 is in the range 2.1-4.5 K, that it will almost certainly be a disaster if we let CO2 double. It really is that painfully simple.
Alan (1011): Ray postulated to Sam that there was a direct relationship between positive forcing due to energy increase and near surface temperatures ie increase one and increase the other.
I say again this is twaddle!
BPL: I say again this shows how little you understand the field!
Alan: We have unchallenged evidence that there is no such direct linear relationship between energy input and near surface temperatures. We have the glacial cycles with tiny changes to overall TSI input and large changes to near surface temperatures.
BPL: Did you read my explanation of glacial cycles above? The energy changes to TSI were “tiny.” The energy changes at the Earth’s surface were NOT “tiny.” Do you understand that they can differ?
Alan: A more pointed example would be the Sun itself. It has been increasing its output consistently seen the birth of the Earth. It has increased its output by 10% in the last billion years alone. This dwarfs any proposed forcing from CO2. The general opinion seems to indicate a 2% increase in the Suns output is a forcing effect equivalent to a doubling of atmospheric CO2.
So was the Earth was freezing a billion years ago? No!
In fact there has been no overall warming in the last billion years which puts the nail in the coffin of any hypothesis that there is a linear relatiionship between energy and temperature.
BPL: It does no such thing. The decreased sunlight was compensated by increased greenhouse gases, so while TSI was low, radiant energy at the surface was about the same (actually, higher than now, since the world was considerably warmer). You seem to think only TSI at the top of Earth’s atmosphere matters. It doesn’t. You’re wrong. CRACK A BOOK, for Christ’s sake!
Babbling like a crackpot won’t convince anybody. There are too many people here who can see you’re talking nonsense.
You don’t HAVE to talk nonsense. You can try to actually learn something about the subject. But that requires getting your lazy butt to the library and doing some studying. Do it!
Ah, I see that Alan Millar @1011 continues his one-man campaign against conservation of energy. Good luck with that, Alan. Did it ever occur to you, Alan, that climate models might have to consider more than one factor at a time to understand the planet’s climate. GCMs do that, and they have an excellent record of predictive success. You…, not so much.
But, hey, Alan, we’re all open minded. Submit your non-energy-conserving model to peer review and let us know when and where it is going to be published. Just be careful, Alan, because the model you seem to be proposing, where tiny changes in energy cause huge changes in temperature really doesn’t bode well for a planet with an increasingly greenhouse atmosphere. You are very, very close to an own goal here.
CFU says:
“You don’t pay to recieve a watt of sunlight or a watt of wind or a watt of wave.
But to get a watt of coal power, you have to buy coal. It doesn’t create itself handily nearby for nothing.”
So you’re actually saying that we won’t have utility bills if we switch to solar and wind? Rubbish.
The cost of coal itself isn’t driving the bulk of electric bills. Maintaining the infrastructure around it makes it up.
Coal is “free” in that it’s right there in the ground waiting to be taken, just as the sunlight and the wind is in the air. There is absolutely nothing “free” about power generation. Period.
More half truths, if we’re to be generous by a fourth.
BPL
You seem to have a very aggressive approach when your beliefs are challenged. Still, that is a very well observed phenomena in the matters of faith.
Thank you for your recommendation that I read the occasional book. Perhaps you would like to list your educational background and achievements and we can then compare with my own to get some idea of the breadth and depth of our comparitive reading so far in our lives.
Perhaps you ought to read more about the Archean period, whose sediments show no massive concentrations of greenhouse gases, yet maintained life and liquid water with the Sun’s output of only 70% of todays.
Perhaps you would like to quote the actual concentration of say atmospheric CO2 that would be required to make up for a reduction of 30% in the Sun’s output given that opinion states that a 2% change is equivalent to a doubling of atmospheric CO2.
I think you might find the calculated figure instructive!
Alan
Norman (#998),
As far as I can see you have only received a bogus answer so far. I’m not terribly intelligent but your query is basic enough I think.
OLR was never supposed to be a function of CO2. The web site you link to correctly relates OLR to temperatures (because an imbalance between incoming and outgoing radiation affects temperatures but also because temperatures affect the OLR). But it is also linked to greenhouse gases such as water vapor or CO2. Naturally these realtionships are complicated in the real world. OLR is supposed to vary with weather because weather affects temperatures and the amount of water in the atmosphere.
The graphs on the website you link to have an OLR which is not increasing along with global warming as one would expect from the Stefan-Boltzmann law. This is probably explained by increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And a relatively stable OLR implies continuing global warming.
Re #998 (outgoing LR) Without making great claims–I’m an artsy, doctorate in music composition, not a scientist–I’d note that the premise appears to be wrong: I wouldn’t expect steadily decreasing outgoing LR with increasing CO2, for at least 3 reasons:
1) It’s not true that “less radiation leaves Earth for space”–or at least, it’s very poorly stated. The imbalance at TOA is proportionately tiny, and transient. I note that Climate4you does not define the anomalies and how they are measured (I’m sure that the original NOAA data has such meta-information available.) That’s important because there should be a lot of significance to information in the frequency domain that’s not captured by a single anomaly number. In short, I think the analysis is *way* too dumbed down here; interpreting OLR isn’t as simple as all that. And I’d (naively) expect that a warmer planet would show *higher* OLR; Stefan-Boltzman and all that. . . and it looks like there are in fact hints of that in the plots.
Checking what more knowledgeable folks than I have to say about that, I found this on Skeptical Science:
“What do models predict will happen with rising greenhouse gases? Less longwave radiation will escape at the absorptive wavelengths of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. As the atmosphere warms, it will emit more radiation over the whole longwave spectrum. So we expect to see an increase in outgoing radiation over some of the longwave spectrum with sharp drops at certain wavelengths. This is indeed what is observed, consistent with model simulations.”
http://www.skepticalscience.com/American-Thinker-claims-to-have-disproven-global-warming.html
Well, that’s a lot clearer than my muddled musings, but evidently my wanderings were at least proceeding down the right general track.
2) OLR should be strongly affected by albedo, since the more visible reflected, the smaller the proportion available to be absorbed and re-emitted as LR in the first place. This means that sea ice extent will affect OLR quite strongly, and in fact you can clearly see this effect in the plots for the Arctic–note the annual cycle, which is plainly evident. It’s interesting, also, that OLR appears to peak in 2007, which of course was the year of the record minimum sea ice extent. That makes sense: the low extent meant a lot more absorption and thermalization of visible light, with a consequent rise in OLR.
3) Aerosol burden in the atmosphere should affect OLR pretty strongly, too. High sulphuric aerosols should raise albedo, lowering OLR, just as noted for ice albedo effects; the infamous “Asian Brown Cloud” should do the reverse. I don’t think there’s a way to check for that just using the graphs pointed to, but I also don’t think there’s any reason to doubt the logic.
In short, with OLR as with surface temps, there’s more at work than just CO2 levels, especially over short timescales. “Climate4you” is basically setting up one big strawman. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, whether or not the bloggers were cognizant of the analysis cited by Skeptical Science; it’s in the literature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
#1011
You call that an answer?
Physics depends on accounting for all of the energy, at least the most important contributions to it, not just the terms which you select for a rhetorical argument. Please read the other remarks about your comment.
Having said that, the Milankovitch effect is an exceptional kind of forcing because, as I understand it, its initial effect depends on seasonal changes such as shorter/longer summers in the northern hemisphere rather than changes in total incoming power.
Sam@1010,
Have you ever even taken a science class? Did you even look at figures 3 and 5 in Knutti and Hegerl? Evidently not, becuase you would have noticed that if the estimates of sensitivity are wrong, it’s much more likely that the actual value is higher rather than lower than the estimates–and that there’s virtually no probability of a value much below 2 degrees per doubling.
And while Knutti and Hegerl admit that the idea that the climate is blind to the source of energy may be too simplistic, there is no evidence that actually supports that hypothesis. Indeed, the success of climate models that assume a source-blind sensitivity to energy would argue against such a complication.
Sam, you need to realize that uncertainty is not your friend. There is precisely one habitable planet that we know about–one planet that supports a complex civilization. The odds against the consensus model of Earths climate being sufficiently wrong that we don’t have to worry about climate change are better than 20:1. Do you really want to wager the future of human civilization on a 20:1 longshot? Because those are the choices, Sam. You can bet on the best science we have about Earth’s climate, or you can go 180 degrees against that science. There’s no middle ground. Science or anti-science. Choose.
“It is rather strange that people admiring the huge work made by climate scientists do also believe they can prove this complicated stuff by some back-of-the-envelope computation and some rapidly made correlations posted on blogs. If it were that easy , we wouldn’t need climate scientists.”
It’s even stranger that some people think they can *disprove* it by similar means!
(Or should I have used scare quotes: “disprove?”)
1020 Ray Ladbury
“Submit your non-energy-conserving model to peer review and let us know when and where it is going to be published. Just be careful, Alan, because the model you seem to be proposing, where tiny changes in energy cause huge changes in temperature really doesn’t bode well for a planet with an increasingly greenhouse atmosphere. You are very, very close to an own goal here.”
Ray Ladbury
Ray, this is not about conservation of energy and you know it.
This is about what you are stating and what is generally stated about the effect of increases in energy forcings on the Earth’s climatic system.
You, and AGW proponents, state that it is inevitable that an increase in forcings will upset the Earth’s climatic equilibrium and cause it to settle at a new equilabrium but at a higher state.
I say that actual observation of the Earth’s climate history shows that this is far from inevitable. I give as an example the Archean period with a very much reduced outside energy input but with the Earth in an equilibrium state not hugely different than today. Current evidence from this period does not support any vast influence of greenhouse gases
Alan
[Response: Yet you ignore the ice ages of the last million or so years for which we have magnitudes more evidence for the planet being in a hugely different state from today. Curious. – gavin]
1011 (Alan)
Not we, you… You don’t know enough about the Earth’s climatic processes and responses, but you spend all of your time telling other people what they don’t know when you could be studying and learning and understanding. At the same time, you dismiss a theory held by thousands of trained, educated people in the field, replacing it with your own theory, held by… you.
And that theory basically argues for a very, very sensitive climate, one where internal mechanisms can mysteriously make dramatic changes in the climate with no noticeable change in energy, and yet you are unafraid of tampering with that system by dramatically changing the CO2 content in the atmosphere… because it’s mysterious and mystical and since “we” obviously don’t (and can’t?) understand it… there’s just nothing to worry about.
The denier “argument from ignorance” (as in “I don’t know, so you can’t know, and so we can never know, it’s too complicated, so lets continue with business as usual”) never ceases to amaze me.
Frank Giger wrote: “Neither [solar energy nor wind energy]is a ‘free’ source of energy, unless one is a plant in the process of photosynthesis or spreading seeds.”
With all due respect sir, that is utter nonsense.
Are you suggesting that the sun shines on plants pro bono, but sends a monthly bill to solar panels?
Solar energy is equally free to a plant in the process of photosynthesis and to a solar panel in the process of photovoltaic conversion of light to electricity. Wind energy is equally free to a plant spreading seeds and to a wind turbine converting kinetic energy into electricity.
Of course the equipment to harvest, store and distribute electricity from solar and wind energy is not free — although costs are rapidly dropping and given the inherent nature of the technologies involved are likely to drop much, much more in the not too distant future (similar to the trajectory of the cost of computing technology). In particular, rapidly developing photovoltaic technologies are making possible ultra-low-cost, high-efficiency, distributed PV that will revolutionize the way we generate and use electricity, much as the personal computer revolutionized “data processing” and the cell phone revolutionized telecommunications.
Sure, you have to buy the technology — but you NEVER, EVER have to buy fuel.
Because the source of energy itself — sunlight and wind — most certainly IS free, unlike fossil fuels, and moreover it is ubiquitous and inexhaustible on time scales that matter to human civilization, and the amount of energy available is vastly more than the entire human enterprise uses. And all of that is in addition to it being clean and non-polluting.
BPL: How the HELL could increasing DROUGHT be due to a MORE intensive use of water???
don’t know, but I read in your reference :”The PDSI was created by Palmer (1965) with the intent to measure the cu- mulative departure (relative to local mean conditions) in atmospheric moisture supply and demand at the sur- face. It incorporates antecedent precipitation, moisture supply, and moisture demand…. the PDSI, soil moisture, and streamflow should correlate with each other, as these all are measures of large-scale droughts and wet spells that are driven by regional atmospheric moisture supply (i.e., precipitation) and demand (i.e., evapotranspira tion).
so as I understand, it is not precipitation, but balance between supply and demand.
I don’t know the topics, but is it absurd to think that evapotranspiration depends on the agricultural use ?
Other thing :”Figure 9 shows that the very dry area has more than doubled (from 12% to 30%) since the 1970s, with a large jump in the early 1980s due to precipitation decreases and subsequent expansion pri- marily due to surface warming. The precipitation de- creases around the early 1980s that occurred mainly over ENSO-sensitive regions such as the Sahel, southern Af- rica, and east Asia as El Nin ̃os, which reduce rainfall over these regions (Dai et al. 1997; Dai and Wigley 2000), became more prominent after the late 1970s (Trenberth and Hoar 1996). In contrast, the warming induced drying has occurred over most land areas, with the largest effects in northern mid- and high latitudes (Fig. 8)”
As I understand, the “warming induced drying” is invoked only for a part of the total effect, ~10% increase. It is obvioulsy a research paper that deals only with pre 2000 data, so I think it is fair to say that it requires confirmation to test its predictive power; Is it confirmed by new observations since this date ?
998 (Norman),
I’ll take a crack at this, but “those who know better,” please, please, please feel free to jump in and correct any misconceptions I have. I don’t want to confuse things any further…
I like this graph, from climate4you.
A big problem that I found with Lindzen and Choi, and a lot of other arguments against warming, is that many statements are based on expected descriptions of a system in equilibrium. The system is not in equilibrium.
We continue to add CO2 to the atmosphere, the planet continues to warm due to CO2 we added decades ago, and warming takes time, just like boiling a pot of water takes time, or getting warm after pulling up a blanket takes time. The earth has a huge amount of deep water, land surface and various levels of atmosphere which all must eventually warm, and will shuffle energy around in various ways until a general (new) temperature equilibrium is reached.
What you can see from the scatter plot is that for a while, when CO2 levels were lower but increasing, outgoing OLR decreased. This could happen as the CO2 is trapping OLR (redirecting more of it downward than in the past, warming the planet). This continues until the planet warms enough to produce even more OLR to overwhelm the GHG effect. Then, as the planet warms further, OLR increases even more, although not as much as it might, because we continually increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, holding OLR further down… until the temperature catches up.
At the same time, some of the warming is from positive feedbacks (changes in albedo, water vapor, etc.) which in turn are not seen until the planet warms even further. They aren’t caused directly by the CO2, they are caused by the warming that is caused by the CO2 but takes time to develop, and then they take time to develop, and then more time to increase temperatures further.
I expect you’ll see that upswing in outgoing OLR (in the scatter plot) increasing.
I see nothing at all inconsistent with this graph and our understanding of the system. I do have a large problem with climate4you’s over simplification of the system, and misinterpretation of what you are looking at, and hence the “doubt” that they are able to create by misrepresenting things.
Oh, dear:
No climate paradox under the faint early Sun
MT Rosing, DK Bird, NH Sleep, CJ Bjerrum – Nature, 2010 – nature.com
… thin cirrus clouds in the tropics provide a solution to the faint young Sun paradox?
R Rondanelli, RS Lindzen – Journal of Geophysical Research, 2010
Gilles says: As I understand, the “warming induced drying” is invoked only for a part of the total effect, ~10% increase. It is obvioulsy a research paper that deals only with pre 2000 data, so I think it is fair to say that it requires confirmation to test its predictive power; Is it confirmed by new observations since this date ?
Ask farmers in Australia:
Australia farmers stranded as irrigation supply cut off
Desperate Australia farmers volunteer to sell water entitlements
Parched Australia farmers vote to abandon irrigation: ‘I just want the nightmare to end’
Western Australia has hottest and driest summer on record
Australia baked under hottest decade on record
Secular Animist is right, Frank Gigner – you can’t put a meter on the sun.
However, if you convert the energy of sunlight to stored chemical energy (via the conversion of CO2 and H2O to hydrocarbons, say) then you do have an energy commodity that you can use yourself or sell to others. See link for more on this, as well as a more complete discussion of the flaws in the PBS NOVA program.
There are many other methods for storing and releasing solar & wind energy – this latest one seems pretty innovative:
Giant gravel batteries could make renewable energy more reliable, Guardian UK Mon Apr 26
For the latest on the fossil fuel world, in contrast:
On the climate front, the equatorial Pacific Ocean is running about +1.0 C on the anomaly scale as El Nino breakdown is continuing. It might be interesting to compare this breakdown to other El Nino breakdowns – is there something anomalous about it?
There’s something I can’t figure out, though – Accuweather is claiming that a “cooling Pacific Decadal cycle” will soon kick in… but how can they predict that when they can’t even predict what ENSO is going to be doing nine months from now – let alone two years from now? Will Accuweather be putting up ENSO forecasts for the next three years? And if not, how can they be putting up Pacific Decadal Fluctuation predictions for the next three decades? It’s so confusing…
I’m also disappointed to see that no press outlet has gone gaga over the Indian Ocean monsoon tree ring report… I thought that tree ring data was all the rage right now?
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100422/full/news.2010.196.html
Gilles, “moisture demand” is not referring to “supply and demand” for water use in agriculture, as you assume.
You can look this stuff up for yourself.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=+moisture+demand++Thornthwaite+%281948%29
Why not actually look up what the words mean? It would save much typing.
AGW proponents, state that it is inevitable that an increase in forcings will upset the Earth’s climatic equilibrium and cause it to settle at a new equilabrium but at a higher state. I say that actual observation of the Earth’s climate history shows that this is far from inevitable. I give as an example the Archean period with a very much reduced outside energy input but with the Earth in an equilibrium state not hugely different than today. Current evidence from this period does not support any vast influence of greenhouse gases – Alan Millar
Oh yeah? Geological sulfur isotopes indicate elevated OCS in
the Archean atmosphere, solving faint young
sun paradox.
Why would anybody think that the Archean, shortly after the earth formed with high internal heat sources, would be relevant to compare to current times?
#999 J. Bob
“Like a true “Pro””
I used to go to Turnaround Management Association ,meetings in Detroit when I was running a company out there. I remember the ‘true pro’s’. Example of true pro’s: K-mart executive managers bragging about how soon they could get out of the office and get to the golf course. It was bragging rights (10am, 9:45 etc.). Who could get the earliest tee time. I told my partner at the time, you watch, that company will be bankrupt within five years.
I was wrong through, they went bankrupt in two years.
I have no respect for ‘true pro’s’ who think money is more important than truth or honor. If you are telling them we don’t know enough for action on global warming then you are not telling them the truth.
—
A Climate Minute The Greenhouse Effect – History of Climate Science – Arctic Ice Melt
—
Our best chance for a better future ‘Fee & Dividend’
Understand the delay and costs of Cap and Trade
http://www.climatelobby.com/fee-and-dividend/
Sign the Petition!
http://www.climatelobby.com
I find these arguments over whether sunlight is free (while fossil fuel, of course, is not) to be empty and misleading. I mean, oil is free, too. It just sits there in the ground, and all you have to do is put a match to it. Well, OK, there are a few more details. But, mutatis mutandis, so there are with renewable energy technologies.
The real question is how to take free sunlight, which is far more dilute than the energy concentrated for us for free over eons into fossil fuels, and get useful work out of it, sufficient to keep several billion people at least as rich as today, using technologies made ONLY WITH RENEWABLE ENERGY, except a bit of fossil energy to get started over the next few decades.
I wish people would take my previous hint to read up on these issues. Y’all sound pretty silly expounding without much knowledge or data. I’m no expert, but at least I say that. I’m not even sure if anyone is expert at this, but I know for sure that no one commenting on this site in the last few months is. At least Gilles is asking the right questions about renewable energy, whatever you think of his climate opinions. (I think he downplays the dangers.)
If you don’t know where else to start, try The Oil Drum and its references for a few months. There’s a lot in there, which I have only dipped into. Y’all haven’t even started.
Alan Millar,
Actually, nothing in your example from the Archean suggests that if we added energy to an Archean climate, it would have warmed–just as adding energy to the current climate must warm it.
Indeed, even for the Archean, we have some ideas on how to resolve the “Faint-Sun Paradox” (e.g. slower global rotation leading to less cloud cover, biogenic methane, possibly even a different orientation for Earth).
Alan, you can keep saying we don’t understand and that we can’t know, but that is not an acceptable scientific answer. Science consists in persisting to try new hopotheses and models until you find a solution. It is absolutely pointless to argue against the significant successes of GCMs. They work. And when it comes to something that sticks out like a sore thumb–like the effects of a long-lived, well mixed greenouse gas like CO2–they do just fine. Sceince works.
Frank Giger @1021: “Coal is “free” in that it’s right there in the ground waiting to be taken, just as the sunlight and the wind is in the air.”
Say what?
Coal is not at all free in the same way that wind and sunlight are free.
Coal must be dug out of the ground, expending both energy and capital, and unless the power plant is right at the mouth of the mine it must be transported to where it will be burned, expending more energy and capital.
There are no equivalent extraction or transportation steps with wind or sunlight.
The wind turbine, PV panels or solar thermal collectors and turbine are the equivalent to the coal-fired boilers & turbines of a coal powered generation plant. The “fuel” itself is literally free, unlike coal.
The distribution costs over the grid are the same regardless of fuel.
And you have the audacity to use words like “rubbish” to describe the posts of others?
Bob #1029
The denier “argument from ignorance” (as in “I don’t know, so you can’t know, and so we can never know, it’s too complicated, so lets continue with business as usual”) never ceases to amaze me.
This is a good one. I´ll write it down.
CFU (1008), interesting point, but it does not explain the very peculiar shape of the scatter point CO2 vs OLR graphs.
Is NOAA trying to flimflam us???
977, Ray Ladbury: There simply is no “theory of anthropogenic warming”. Instead there is a theory–a single working theory–of Earth’s climate. That humans will warm the planet if they dump CO2 into the atmosphere an inevitable corollary given that theory. Period.
As to Intelligent Design, again, you misunderstand. ID posits that an almighty (for all practical purposes) designer has intervened in the natural processes governing speciation, etc. at least a few times. If this is true for any occasion, we must consider it as a possibility for every occasion. Thus, if a development is considered impossible under some theory, the proponents of that theory can merely posit GODDIDIT, and thereby save their theory. By positing a mechanism that can explain everything, they have precluded the possibility of every predicting anything. If you view each decision by the “designer” as a parameter in the theory, the number of parameters is unlimited. Thus, by any information criterion you choose, ID has zero information content, and it cannot be a scientific theory. That is not hubris. It’s merely understanding what science is.
As to the first paragraph, that is a distinction with no difference. That anthropogenic CO2 will necessarily warm the earth is a theoretical statement. That C=MC^2 is also a corollary, and also a theoretical statement.
As to the second, you have tried to revise what you wrote. I merely asserted that ID was contradicted by all the evidence and that a proof that it does not exist is irrelevant to anything. I didn’t write anything in support of ID (indeed, nobody has ever defined ID sufficiently that it could even potentially be disconfirmed, and over time the examples presented have changed as all previous examples were shown to contradict the extant vague notion of ID.)
You are a smart and knowledgeable guy, but you introduce extraneous falsehoods into your posts. You have not, apparently, decided whether all scientific laws are deterministic, or whether Bell’s theorem unequivocally establishes that nuclear decay is and must always remain stochastic. Both assertions are probably false, and both are irrelevant to the discussion of climate science. You introduced each one to score a point irrelevant to the discussion, without noticing that you contradicted yourself.
CFU (1012) says, “…You don’t pay to receive a watt of sunlight or a watt of wind or a watt of wave.”
Then why is Austin TX’s plan to increase electricity production from non-renewables from 12% to 35% of the total by 2020 expected to increase rates by 25-40%?
James Hansen presentations are available at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/presentations.shtml
#990 Edward Greisch “Mark Lynas wrote his book based on peer reviewed papers. That is, Mark Lynas says he condensed many papers into a book. The Guardian published a review if Mark Lynas’s book.”
Yes, but there is a big difference between a book or article that claims to be based upon peer-reviewed papers and one that is actually peer-reviewed itself. Scientists always go to the primary source–the peer-reviewed literature describing the original research–because they have learned the hard way that secondary sources often provide an incomplete or unbalanced account. And you aren’t even relying on a secondary source, but rather a tertiary source: a newspaper account of a book account of peer reviewed research. Have you ever played the “gossip” game? Every step you get away from the original source, the more distortion creeps in. In particular, newspapers and books are much more likely to sensationalize the science, beceause sensationalism sells. Journals, which are sold to libraries by subsription, have much less incentive to do this, and peer reviewers generally do a good job of nipping overstatements in the bud.
Sorry, but there are no shortcuts. If you want to talk about what the peer-reviewed research says, you actually need to read it. Yes, I understand that it may be difficult reading, but frankly, if you don’t have the background knowledge to understand the original research, you don’t have the background knowledge to critique the work. It simply is not possible to form a meaningful opinion of the science if you can’t read the original research. Basically, a reasonable person has only two choices: either accept the scientific consensus of the overwhelming majority of scientists who have spent years learning the science, and who have been actively working in the field, as summarized in the IPCC report and the reports of the numerous independent national academies of science that have reviewed the topic, or else take the time required to do the background reading so that you can understand the research yourself.
“Jim Hansen’s opinion is in a separate comment. My opinion is that Jim Hansen is so highly respected in the climate business that Jim Hansen’s opinion is golden. ”
Science is about results, not personalities. We have experts; we don’t have prophets. Dr. Hansen is highly respected, but an opinion is not a scientific conclusion, but rather an educated guess. So you shouldn’t take Hansen’s opinion lightly, and certainly it would be foolish to dismiss his worries as “ludicrous” (especially if you don’t even have the expertise to understand the original research), but he is taking pains to distinguish between what has been established scientifically and what he speculates.
> Rod
> … why is Austin TX’s plan … expected ….
Citation needed.
This is the point they miss, Rod.
If coal were sitting above ground with shovels for the furnace growing out of it naturally it wouldn’t be “free.” Heck, as a kid I dug coal out of a seam on my grandpa’s farm for fun (just a few buckets full until I was caught – it’s an abandoned mine).
So holding a piece of coal as a kid was much like feeling the sun or the wind in my face as far as electricity goes: potential.
Coal may be dirty, but it’s actually less expensive to harvest per watt than the “free” sun and wind, and a helluvalot more predictable and dependable in output.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think we should gradually eliminate coal fired plants. But, like the 95% of everyone is going to die from global warming craziness, it is hugely counter-productive to overhype alternatives.
If one is willing to say solar and wind are “free” electricity sources, what do I should when the utility charges me for the conversion from sunbeam to watt while asking that yet more money be given to them from the public funds in order to do so?
This is why I oppose every political “solution” put forward by greenies – it’s lies. The electricity will be free, if we don’t do policy Alpha to Zulu steps we’ll all melt in a twin of Venus, etc. They’re not being the least bit honest.
And I really wonder what interest groups are funding them.