How do we know what caused climate to change – or even if anything did?
This is a central question with respect to recent temperature trends, but of course it is much more general and applies to a whole range of climate changes over all time scales. Judging from comments we receive here and discussions elsewhere on the web, there is a fair amount of confusion about how this process works and what can (and cannot) be said with confidence. For instance, many people appear to (incorrectly) think that attribution is just based on a naive correlation of the global mean temperature, or that it is impossible to do unless a change is ‘unprecedented’ or that the answers are based on our lack of imagination about other causes.
In fact the process is more sophisticated than these misconceptions imply and I’ll go over the main issues below. But the executive summary is this:
- You can’t do attribution based only on statistics
- Attribution has nothing to do with something being “unprecedented”
- You always need a model of some sort
- The more distinct the fingerprint of a particular cause is, the easier it is to detect
Note that it helps enormously to think about attribution in contexts that don’t have anything to do with anthropogenic causes. For some reason that allows people to think a little bit more clearly about the problem.
First off, think about the difference between attribution in an observational science like climatology (or cosmology etc.) compared to a lab-based science (microbiology or materials science). In a laboratory, it’s relatively easy to demonstrate cause and effect: you set up the experiments – and if what you expect is a real phenomenon, you should be able to replicate it over and over again and get enough examples to demonstrate convincingly that a particular cause has a particular effect. Note that you can’t demonstrate that a particular effect can have only that cause, but should you see that effect in the real world and suspect that your cause is also present, then you can make a pretty good (though not 100%) case that a specific cause is to blame.
Why do you need a laboratory to do this? It is because the real world is always noisy – there is always something else going on that makes our (reductionist) theories less applicable than we’d like. Outside, we don’t get to perfectly stabilise the temperature and pressure, we don’t control the turbulence in the initial state, and we can’t shield the apparatus from cosmic rays etc. In the lab, we can do all of those things and ensure that (hopefully) we can boil the experiment down to its essentials. There is of course still ‘noise’ – imprecision in measuring instruments etc. and so you need to do it many times under slightly different conditions to be sure that your cause really does give the effect you are looking for.
The key to this kind of attribution is repetition, and this is where it should become obvious that for observational sciences, you are generally going to have to find a different way forward, since we don’t generally get to rerun the Holocene, or the Big Bang or the 20th Century (thankfully).
Repetition can be useful when you have repeating events in Nature – the ice age cycles, tides, volcanic eruptions, the seasons etc. These give you a chance to integrate over any unrelated confounding effects to get at the signal. For the impacts of volcanic eruptions in general, this has definitely been a useful technique (from Robock and Mao (1992) to Shindell et al (2004)). But many of the events that have occurred in geologic history are singular, or perhaps they’ve occurred more frequently but we only have good observations from one manifestation – the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the KT impact event, the 8.2 kyr event, the Little Ice Age etc. – and so another approach is required.
In the real world we attribute singular events all the time – in court cases for instance – and so we do have practical experience of this. If the evidence linking specific bank-robbers to a robbery is strong, prosecutors can get a conviction without the crimes needing to have been ‘unprecedented’, and without having to specifically prove that everyone else was innocent. What happens instead is that prosecutors (ideally) create a narrative for what they think happened (lets call that a ‘model’ for want of a better word), work out the consequences of that narrative (the suspect should have been seen by that camera at that moment, the DNA at the scene will match a suspect’s sample, the money will be found in the freezer etc.), and they then try and find those consequences in the evidence. It’s obviously important to make sure that the narrative isn’t simply a ‘just-so’ story, in which circumstances are strung together to suggest guilt, but which no further evidence is found to back up that particular story. Indeed these narratives are much more convincing when there is ‘out of sample’ confirmation.
We can generalise this: what is a required is a model of some sort that makes predictions for what should and should not have happened depending on some specific cause, combined with ‘out of sample’ validation of the model of events or phenomena that were not known about or used in the construction of the model.
Models come in many shapes and sizes. They can be statistical, empirical, physical, numerical or conceptual. Their utility is predicated on how specific they are, how clearly they distinguish their predictions from those of other models, and the avoidance of unnecessary complications (“Occam’s Razor”). If all else is equal, a more parsimonious explanation is generally preferred as a working hypothesis.
The overriding requirement however is that the model must be predictive. It can’t just be a fit to the observations. For instance, one can fit a Fourier series to a data set that is purely random, but however accurate the fit is, it won’t give good predictions. Similarly a linear or quadratic fit to a time series can be useful form of descriptive statistics, but without any reason to think that there is an underlying basis for such a trend, it has very little predictive value. In fact, any statistical fit to the data is necessarily trying to match observations using a mathematical constraint (ie. trying to minimise the mean square residual, or the gradient, using sinusoids, or wavelets, etc.) and since there is no physical reason to assume that any of these constraints apply to the real world, no purely statistical approach is going to be that useful in attribution (despite it being attempted all the time).
To be clear, defining any externally forced climate signal as simply the linear, quadratic, polynomial or spline fit to the data is not sufficient. The corollary which defines ‘internal climate variability’ as the residual from that fit doesn’t work either.
So what can you do? The first thing to do is to get away from the idea that you can only be using single-valued metrics like the global temperature. We have much more information than that – patterns of changes across the surface, through the vertical extent of the atmosphere, and in the oceans. Complex spatial fingerprints of change can do a much better job at discriminating between competing hypotheses than simple multiple linear regression with a single time-series. For instance, a big difference between solar forced changes compared to those driven by CO2 is that the stratosphere changes in tandem with the lower atmosphere for solar changes, but they are opposed for CO2-driven change. Aerosol changes often have specific regional patterns change that can be distinguished from changes from well-mixed greenhouse gases.
The expected patterns for any particular driver (the ‘fingerprints’) can be estimated from a climate model, or even a suite of climate models with the differences between them serving as an estimate of the structural uncertainty. If these patterns are robust, then one can have confidence that they are a good reflection of the underlying assumptions that went into building the models. Given these fingerprints for multiple hypothesised drivers (solar, aerosols, land-use/land cover change, greenhouse gases etc.), we can than examine the real world to see if the changes we see can be explained by a combination of them. One important point to note is that it is easy to account for some model imperfections – for instance, if the solar pattern is underestimated in strength we can test for whether a multiplicative factor would improve the match. We can also apply some independent tests on the models to try and make sure that only the ‘good’ ones are used, or at least demonstrate that the conclusions are not sensitive to those choices.
These techniques of course, make some assumptions. Firstly, that the spatio-temporal pattern associated with a particular forcing is reasonably accurate (though the magnitude of the pattern can be too large or small without causing a problem). To a large extent this is the case – the stratospheric cooling/tropospheric warming pattern associated with CO2 increases is well understood, as are the qualitative land vs ocean/Northern vs. southern/Arctic amplification features. The exact value of polar amplification though is quite uncertain, though this affects all the response patterns and so is not a crucial factor. More problematic are results that indicate that specific forcings might impact existing regional patterns of variability, like the Arctic Oscillation or El Niño. In those cases, clearly distinguishing internal natural variability from the forced change is more difficult.
In all of the above, estimates are required of the magnitude and patterns of internal variability. These can be derived from model simulations (for instance in their pre-industrial control runs with no forcings), or estimated from the observational record. The latter is problematic because there is no ‘clean’ period where there was only internal variability occurring – volcanoes, solar variability etc. have been affecting the record even prior to the 20th Century. Thus the most straightforward estimates come from the GCMs. Each model has a different expression of the internal variability – some have too much ENSO activity for instance while some have too little, or, the timescale for multi-decadal variability in the North Atlantic might vary from 20 to 60 years for instance. Conclusions about the magnitude of the forced changes need to be robust to these different estimates.
So how might this work in practice? Take the impact of the Pinatubo eruption in 1991. Examination of the temperature record over this period shows a slight cooling, peaking in 1992-1993, but these temperatures were certainly not ‘unprecedented’, nor did they exceed the bounds of observed variability, yet it is well accepted that the cooling was attributable to the eruption. Why? First off, there was a well-observed change in the atmospheric composition (a layer of sulphate aerosols in the lower stratosphere). Models ranging from 1-dimensional radiative transfer models to full GCMs all suggest that these aerosols were sufficient to alter the planetary energy balance and cause global cooling in the annual mean surface temperatures. They also suggest that there would be complex spatial patterns of response – local warming in the lower stratosphere, increases in reflected solar radiation, decreases in outgoing longwave radiation, dynamical changes in the northern hemisphere winter circulation, decreases in tropical precipitation etc. These changes were observed in the real world too, and with very similar magnitudes to those predicted. Indeed many of these changes were predicted by GCMs before they were observed.
I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to apply the same reasoning to the changes related to increasing greenhouse gases, but for those interested the relevant chapter in the IPCC report is well worth reading, as are a couple of recent papers by Santer and colleagues.
Off topic, but has anybody else noticed that BP’s video feed now shows a big crater with oil streaming out, seemingly where the riser used to be? I’m wondering if anyone here has heard about an intentional removal of the riser, a new seafloor leak or the like?
Also Off Topic, but lots of americans seem to have forgotten that BP is the name of a corporation that is the merger of British Petroleum and Amoco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoco
Not that BP don’t deserve ransacking to pay for the mistake, but just noting that it was a lot harder when it was an American firm spilling oil.
Off topic but highly important to the whole environmental scheme of things. I am speaking of the BP disaster going on as we watch. The ongoing failure to deal with this could well undo our energy based economy.
I viewed the “live spill stream” available on the Wall Street Journal page this morning and see that the brownish flow has turned dark black. I would interpret this as meaning that the mud has been fully disgorged by oil pressure upward and the disaster is completely unabated.
I am beginning to think more harshly about the ability of our government to take appropriate action in a national emergency.
The way things are going, I am afraid this is like allowing all air flights to continue throughout the day of 9-11 and for a month after, while limiting response to digging up bodies. It was true then that Al Qaeda had much expertise in the technology needed to stop the flow of terror. Just like BP has the expertise to stop the leak.
But I am suggesting, maybe BP is not really acting with stopping the leak as their highest priority, instead they are acting to stop the leak while preserving the oil well as an assett.
I am more and more convinced that BP is trying hardest to salvage this as a working well. Perhaps the potential here is so great that they are planning to tough it out with the environmental damage, and apparently there is a $75 million cap that can be used, if necessary, to keep the cost of damages charged to BP down. I say that because there seems to be much that could be done with a heavy handed approach that would leave the well useless. A leak that is allowed to go unplugged should be considered differently from a single quick spill when it comes to limits on damages charged to the drilling operator. The $75 Million cap on damages was put in place by Congress in 1990. So though BP has reportedly said they will waive that limit, this seems to be something that is their option. That must be a serious gulp when clean-up operations on the scale needed are ordered by government officials.
For a heavy handed but reasonably cheap example of how to stop the leak, putting the “Top Hat” back on and pumping concrete, yes ready-mix, downward should build up a containment block. As it filled to the top, there should be enough pressure to block flow. Yes, put a hatch on top of the “Top Hat” to allow oil to escape until enough concrete was in place to hold the “Hat” down. Then close that hatch. That should end it. Maybe it needs to be a much bigger top hat to cover both leaks. This would render the existing bore hole useless, though the resource would still be available to a new drilling operation.
I am not sure if the actions to stop the leak are understood to be different from actions to clean up the mess.
Though I think Pres. Obama has a steady hand on the controls of government for many kinds of crises, the frightening thing is that our government seems not capable of understanding the differenec between the kind of operations needed to save the environment versus the kind of operations needed to stop flow from the leak. Thus, choice of leak stopping actions may be limited to those that retain the ability to re-establish the well as a hugely profitable operation.
Not able to deal with the problem directly, we now have a broad moratorium on oil and gas production in ocean locations. This will seriously impact natural gas supplies. Then add the climate bill and get ready for our energy based economy to fail. Well, maybe that will be the solution for global warming.
J. Bob: “That’s why they still test cars and trucks in wind tunnels, besides A/C.”
Actually that sort of thing isn’t even remotely close to as important as it was years ago. When I was studying fluid dynamics in graduate school (1980-1984) we heard about how various aircraft were so well modeled that there test flights agreed to predictions to three digits (that one was about the Vought F-8 – first flight in 1955). Not too long after I graduated, Boeing flew the 777 with almost no physical models (http://www.autofieldguide.com/articles/100309.html):
“Nowadays, aerodynamics analysis at Boeing is almost all done from internally developed programs. Virtually all of the company’s aerodynamic modeling is done without a wind tunnel. “Physical models have gone down in significance,” continues Smith. “We produce a number of aerodynamic test cycles digitally, and one cycle physically. The physical model [measuring three to four feet in wingspan] validates the simulation, to see if the simulation is giving us the right answers.” That’s a huge difference compared to 30 years ago. Back then, Boeing engineers used the wind tunnel model to create new and working designs.”
So even then, (pre-1994 which was the first flight of the 777), one was quite sure of what the physics involved were and how to simulate them. And that was 16 years ago. A lot of the work back in the twentieth century was figuring out how to cram the problem onto those miniature old school computers. I’m making this comment using a laptop which has a processor orders of magnitude faster than the CDC 6600 supercomputer I used for my thesis. You don’t need to be anywhere as hard core to get the science onto machines these days as then. However, the people doing the science have not lost their ability to use machines in proportion to the increase in machine capacity – on the contrary the fact that more money depends on such computations now means that many more people are involved in such computations, and from that expanded population, the best of the computational people are that much better. And the software has improved at about the same rate as the hardware (Jon Bentley did an article measuring this back in the 1980s). So modern computations are vastly superior to for example, the computations which designed the 777.
Techniques of using physical models – especially models with many different important physics flavors (measured by the how many ‘dimensionless numbers’ are involved) – are not greatly improved by the same factors that improve computations. They are limited by the difficulty of achieving “dynamic similitude” – a problem which in the case of climate I would say is intractable from the start. To build a physical model climate you would need to have global ocean and atmosphere models, and offhand I can’t think of any way to get whatever model fluids you use for air and water to stick to a sphere (it has to be a rotating sphere because of well known effects of geophysical fluid dynamics – check your copy of Pedlosky). But to go faster than real time (otherwise what’s the point) you need the sphere to be smaller than the real Earth. (Besides, where are you going to put a full scale one? At a Lagrange point?) But then you need the model ocean and atmosphere to have dynamic similitude over this scale reduction of many orders of magnitude. I can’t think of any fluids that would do this. Physical modeling in climate dynamics is pretty much a non-starter for these reasons.
Holding out for the importance physical models is really way past the objective sell-by date. The utility of such models is largely for demonstration as opposed to inquiry; (e.g. Feynmann’s famous O-ring, which was based on a lot of information left in his path by people who really knew what was going on, as opposed to him discovering the effect anything using that model). When you have as many different physical effects as we have in climate, physical modeling is a fool’s errand.
People once had to get comfortable with the idea using telescopes to do astronomy. When telescopes started to reveal disturbing facts (sunspots, the rotation of the sun) some scholars denied the observations and refused to look through the telescope themselves.
Well maybe people need to get comfortable with the use of computations on large scale systems of known physics. There are lots of questions where computation is the only hope.
Doug, MT’s got BP spill links; try this recent one http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2010/05/aardvark-and-no-play.html
Ah, I found the NASA host page for the energy budget graphic I mentioned above. This is interesting…I read this page twice and I don’t see anything I disagree with. I’m not sure who is primarily responsible for this analysis (is it Paul Stackhouse?), but I’d trust this person to balance my energy checkbook, no problem.
http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/radiation_facts.html
RalphieGM:
Shorter Ralphie: Show me the evidence!
Apparently the riser and BOP were sawed off earlier today. BP of course is still saying they’re trying the top-kill, don’t know if it will work.
With the available casing now -below- the seafloor, they’re still trying the same method?
Ask yourself: If you were renting a building to a tenant and the tenant set your building on fire, would you be ok with the tenant insisting you remain blocks away from your building, with the tenant occasionally letting you know how firefighting efforts were going, your only direct knowledge of the situation coming via a video camera controlled by the tenant? If the tenant said water was being poured on the fire yet the video showed no such thing, would that be acceptable?
This is an indescribably twisted and absurd scenario. As far as I know, we did not cede sovereignty of our economic exclusion zone to BP. Nowhere is there a deed describing the seafloor in question as BP’s exclusive property. Yes, BP and the industry are the only folks with the technical savvy to get us into this trouble and then get us out, but this does not mean we have to simply wait for messages from them on progress and take their broken word for what’s happening.
ralphieGM: Somebody on a previous article posted the comment that deserts have increased from 12% to 30 % of land area.
I commented before that where I am, corn farmers are in trouble from excess rain.
Here it is ralphieGM: You will understand GW when you go to the grocery store and there is no food there. Maybe you will begin to notice when the price of bread hits $10/slice. You, ralphieGM, are going to die of starvation because of GW. It won’t be possible to fix it by the time you notice.
296 Doug Bostrom: It isn’ just the running code, but that counts. The average wetware machine has some real limitations.
We are dealing with people who “think” with emotions. We are also dealing with people who have psychiatric problems. The conspiracy theorists may have paranoid personality disorder. See http://www.newscientist.com/special/living-in-denial
Remember, average IQ is only 100.
“But in terms of a mass balance – we are only returning to the atmosphere what was here before – regardless of the speed at which it is reflowed. It seems to me we are just re-distributing CO2 rather than creating it – and I can’t see cause for alarm.”
Now apply your argument about the changing solar luminosity. If we return the atmosphere to the same state as it was a few hundred million years ago, but now the sun has brightened due to stellar evolution, what do you think is going to be the result?
> we are just re-distributing CO2 rather than creating it
Same argument can be made for water, of course: There’s no important difference between ice a mile or two thick across the northern part of North America, Europe and Asia, versus deeper water around the coastlines. You’re just redistributing the water. Ask any Minnesota or North Dakota farmer if it’d make a difference where the water is.
Ralphie 275: But it is also possible that increased solar radiation has raised ocean temperatures, thereby releasing a bit of that ancient CO2 into the atmosphere.
BPL: No, it isn’t. We can tell from the radioisotope signature that the new CO2 is coming mainly from burning fossil fuels:
http://BartonPaulLevenson.com/Lag.html
#288 manaker (Max Anaker)
Your aiming at the argument, which distracts from concentration on the science.
The point is it’s not about views aka opinions. It’s about the science.
The moderators are obviously not shutting anyone deniers. All I and others want to see is that they bring evidence to support their assumptions based on science rather than opinions and blogs.
Where’s the evidence that this is not serious?
Where’s the evidence that this is nothing to worry about?
Where’s the evidence that it’s not human caused?
Opinions just don’t cut it in reality.
—
A Climate Minute The Greenhouse Effect – History of Climate Science – Arctic Ice Melt
‘Fee & Dividend’ Our best chance for a better future – climatelobby.com
Learn the Issue & Sign the Petition
max 288,
Thanks, but there is plenty of life in threads about scientific issues without the idiot squad showing up to annoy everybody. If there’s an astronomy blog discussing celestial mechanics, it doesn’t “need” a Velikovsky freak to show up and “add life to it.” If archaeologists are discussing the pyramids on a blog, they don’t “need” fans of Erich von Daniken to challenge them with the idea that aliens actually built the things. Etc.
AGW denial is in exactly the same category of thought–ignorant pseudoscience idiocy.
RGM 291,
Ask the Australians.
Rod B.ys:
“While models are extremely helpful and supportive, especially in multi-parameter analyses as climate, they are still built by the scientists and contain no independent cognitive process separate from what they are given and told to do. While indicative, they are not a nail-in-the-coffin proof/validation of any process as you come near to implying.”
I am having a hard time parsing these statements. Just what does “independent cognitive process” mean in this context? Are you saysing that models used in climate science don’t think independently for themselves? Without getting into controversies about the possibility of artificial intelligence, I think we will all agree with that. Or are you simply saying that they can’t draw conclusions except those already inherent in the theory and data that are used to build them. I, at least, will agree with that. But the same can be send for any application of theory in science, and we use scientific theories all to time to guide our behavior.
Climate models are based, for the most part, on classical physics, which has been shown to work extremely well for phenomena on the relevant scales.. (Some of the radiation physics requires quantum mechanics.) If we were able to solve the equations exactly and specify initial conditions with sufficient accuracy, we should expect the results to be definitive. But in reality, modelers have to make approximations and rely on uncertain data. Hence there are uncertainties about the results obtained. But a lot can be done to estimate those uncertainties and hence tell how much certainty we may place on the gross outlines of the results. And that is in fact how they are used. No one attempts to predict exactly what things will be like in 2100 or thereafter, but they do attempt to project the range of possiblities in matters such as global temperature, sea rise, drought, etc. These projections raise concerns even at the lower limits of what is likely, but they suggest a dire future for humanity at the upper limits.
The serious argument is about how to change our current behavior to deal with the various likelihoods of these outcomes, not with any specious arguments about the nature of scientific theories. If we wait until the arguments are so absolutely airtight that no one can possibly object, then it will be much to late to take effective action.
This situation is no different than how we use science in other areas. If we can’t use models to conclude things about climate for the reason you give, there is precious little we can use science for.
Thanks Hank and aardvark’s discussion of formation pressure and hydrostatic balance here http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6524#comment-633178 is good.
They’ve removed the riser so the bad scenario aardvark describes of unchoking the full 21″ of pipe is reality. I read that BP is going to attach a “lower marine riser cap” to that; the delay between cutting off the riser and putting that on is presumably a matter of logistics and manipulation. Obviously they’re not going to be able to have the cap hovering in place right before chopping the riser. I guess that’s obvious; there’s a limited amount of people and gear capable of doing this work.
Then just cross fingers, hope nothing goes up the outside of the casing.
Anyway, all off topic so that’s the last on this subject from me here.
#302 Andrew, no one said you rely exclusively on one or another, but it’s a general practice to cross check. I notice you said “almost” as far as Boeing using wind tunnels. Can you imagine the liability Boeing would have if they didn’t cross check with wind tunnel data. However the point of the Machine Design article was that in this case the physical model trumped math model because the math model didn’t reflect reality. Did you know they still use the old wind tunnel at Langley. It’s cheaper to drive a car up there, put it on a tilt table. With the automated sensors ( we had to manually read monometers when I was in grad school) in a few hours they not only have data at various speeds as well as different sideslip angles. Unless one has a system to transform the vehicle outline (CAD data) seamlessly to a flow program, one can spend a week just doing that. Doesn’t the Navy still use tanks to check their ship design?
But coming back to the main point. The math models have to reflect reality and test results. If they don’t, one has to find out why. As far as math models go I have personally been using them for over 50 years, since the X-15 days, and have no problem with them, as long as they reflect reality, which I’m not sure the current climate models reflect.
P.S. Solar motion of sun spots were observed long before the telescope. They used the “camera obscura”.
JimBullis: I am more and more convinced that BP is trying hardest to salvage this as a working well
Yes they are, by frantically drilling 2 “relief wells” – there isn’t likely to be any way to ever use that blown out well for production, and I would bet they’re hoping to get it capped aoon so they don’t loose even more of that deposit than they already have before the other wells are done.
Re BP. Here in NZ, the various service stations link up with supermarkets to give discounts on petrol (gas). The normal rate is a 4 cent per litre discount, but from time to time they have specials (e.g. spend over $250 at the supermarket and you get 20c per litre discount, this weekend only).
A few days ago we got a discount at the supermarket that is linked to BP – for 30c per litre, easily the largest discount I have seen in the 3-odd years this promotion has been running. (Petrol costs about $1.80 per litre, so 30c is a *big* discount).
Coincidental timing? I think not. Just goes to show how much money BP are prepared to throw at PR.
Or New Orleans. All Katrina did, after all, is transport a lot of water from the sea to the city.
#261 RalphieGM
“Sir: CO2=> C + O2 also.”
In the short-term carbon cycle, this describes what photosynthesis does.
However, this is almost exactly balanced by respiration and decay.
By burning fossil fuels, we have created a new flux of CO2 into the atmosphere — one that is NOT balanced by anything. The result: atmospheric CO2 has been rising rapidly.
“Here it is ralphieGM: You will understand GW when you go to the grocery store and there is no food there. Maybe you will begin to notice when the price of bread hits $10/slice. You, ralphieGM, are going to die of starvation because of GW. It won’t be possible to fix it by the time you notice.”
Oh, B.S.
Show me the model that predicts that within his lifetime he will starve to death because nothing – not even wheat (or any number of grains) – will be able to grow due to global warming.
That’s utter nonsense and not supported by the science.
Max says, “You need a “troll” or two to keep the thread from becoming a “yawner”, right?”
Actually, Max, no. Most people are here to learn about Earth’s climate. We find the science more interesting than playing whack-a-zombie-argument with the same lame arguments we’ve slain many times before. I come to RC because I learn things here. I don’t frequent the denialist blogs because they don’t teach me anything. Pretty simple, really.
On top of that, we’ve been measuring the isotope ratio of carbon 13 to carbon 12, and it’s been going up in both the atmosphere and in ocean surface water, which means the CO2 is not coming from the ocean, as some people have suggested.
You’re not on thin ice here, Ralph, you’ve fallen right through and are up to your neck in delusion.
Ralph @233: we are just re-distributing CO2 rather than creating it – and I can’t see cause for alarm.
You might want to take a look at what earth was like the last time atmospheric CO2 was at 392 ppmv, which was at least 3 million years ago and perhaps as long as 10-15 mya, before the current cycle of glaciation and interglacials began, that is to say before the Greenland ice cap formed, which means global sea level was at least 6 meters higher than it is today.
Care to hazard a guess how many human beings live within 6 meters of current sea level? How much urban area lies within 6 meters of current sea level? How much rice is currently grown within 6 meters of current sea level?
You might also want to find out what global average surface temperature was the last time CO2 was at 392 ppmv, and then consider that in some parts of southern Asia night time temperatures are already at or higher than the tolerance limit for the germination of rice. Care to hazard a guess how many human beings depend on rice grown in southern Asia?
You might also want to find about how absorbing all that CO2 out of the atmospheric is lowering the pH of the ocean surface water layer, and what that impact will have on carbonate shelled sea live, which forms the basis of the marine food chain. Now consider how many human beings get most of their protein from marine life.
That you can’t see cause for alarm does not mean that there is not cause for alarm.
Ralph @261: If we burn fossil hydrocarbons we will merely return the CO2 to the atmosphere where it will be dissolved in the oceans or used up by plants
Having had this nugget shown to be a non starter Ralph then moves the goal posts:
Ralph @291: But if you can point to a single environmental problem linked to the rise in CO2 over the past 50 years
I just did. I’m now inclined to agree with Ray Ladbury.
“I am more and more convinced that BP is trying hardest to salvage this as a working well. …” -Jim Bullis
I am in the oil biz. You will never meet anybody on the face of the earth who hates and distrusts BP more than I do, and I can assure you the oil well became unsalvageable as an oil production vehicle the second the accident happened. It was rendered useless, and there is no viable way to fix it. BP has known from that second forward that the well would have to be plugged and abandoned, and every day that passes with that unaccomplished is an enormously costly one for BP, and for the industry.
I was hopeful Top Kill would succeed. It was a sincere attempt, though the odds BP placed upon its likelihood of success were preposterous. It was a long shot that was either going to work or not, but, IMO, a long shot worth taking.
In #241, the great BPL posted thusly:
First of all, that is absolutely beautiful; you can fit it on a 3 x 5 card! BPL goes on to inquire which of these eight points our logical troll takes exception to. When a case is phrased with such perfect concision, note the response of a coward: none.
310: Hank quoted: “we are just re-distributing CO2 rather than creating it”
and then replied “Same argument can be made for water”.
While your reply is essentially correct, (we’re not creating any water to speak of) the original poster’s claim that we’re not creating CO2 is false. We are creating it via the combustion of coal which combines solid carbon with O2 to make CO2.
The original poster’s claim is pure nonsense.
Meanwhile, back on the original thread, I’ve been wondering about this statement:
There seems to be something paradoxical in this. If I downgrade “unprecedented” to “unusual” the same paradox is thrown into greater relief: If there weren’t something anomalous for which to seek an explanation, there wouldn’t be any motivation for attribution. Indeed, if phenomena in general were perfectly regular and continuous, they wouldn’t even be recognized as phenomena.
The substance of an attribution per se may have nothing to do with anything surprising, but there probably was some surprise at the origin of the investigation.
ralphieGM: “If it took a billion years to accumulate fossil hydrocarbons how is it possible to release the CO2 in that mass in “a couple of dozen decades”?”
So if it took a tree 150 years to pull it’s carbon out of the atmosphere it has to take something like another 150 years to burn it back into the atmosphere? Quick someone tell the forest service.
Or maybe, different chemical reactions under different conditions could proceed at different rates?
@Lichanos: “I would, however, bet money on it.”
Well jump on over to http://www.intrade.com and get a contract set up. Make the contract for say, 2.5 ounces of gold (to avoid inflation or currency effects). Try and promote the idea with any skeptical friends you can find. It will be nice to have at least a financial hedge against the effects of AGW. You would be surprised to find how deep the other side of your trade is.
John Pearson “While your reply is essentially correct, (we’re not creating any water to speak of) the original poster’s claim that we’re not creating CO2 is false. We are creating it via the combustion of coal which combines solid carbon with O2 to make CO2.
The original poster’s claim is pure nonsense.”
Nonsense? The coal you refer to was originally plant material which once converted CO2 to C (carbon coal). So – burning coal returns the original CO2 to the atmosphere from whence it came. Simple conservation principle – we are not really creating CO2 – just re-animating it.
BPL: “No, it isn’t. We can tell from the radioisotope signature that the new CO2 is coming mainly from burning fossil fuels”
All carbon isotopes may be dissolved in the ocean – you can’t tell whether the isotope emanated from burning or vaporization from the ocean.
[Response: Complete nonsense. Plants discriminate against C13. It’s atmospheric decline, combined with well quantified estimates of fuel emissions make this one of the most solid pieces of knowledge we have. If you’re questioning this then you really have issues with denial.–Jim]
…if phenomena in general were perfectly regular and continuous, they wouldn’t even be recognized as phenomena.
Such as, the sun rising regularly, predictably? That’s not a phenomenon?
OT, but at ScepticalScience Riccardo has done a graph on correlation between temperature and CO2 in Antarctic. The divergence between current conditions and glacial cycles during the last 420000 years is very notable. http://www.skepticalscience.com/On-temperature-and-CO2-in-the-past.html
I am agreement with those that have already posted on this issue; this site is about education. I learn a great deal from the RC posts.
It would be great if these threads were not infiltrated with ridiculous unfounded questions and assertions by people that are either naive, ignorant or actually just trying to show how smart they are by claiming their opinions can override well established science.
It would be great not to have to refute the garbage that is posted here by those that haven’t a clue. It would be wonderful if people asked sincere questions, not to confuse the issue. but actually to learn. Yes, that would be wonderful.
And it would not be boring, it would be more informative and easier to read.
[Response: Couldn’t say it any better John. Excellent way to close the day.–Jim]
—
A Climate Minute The Greenhouse Effect – History of Climate Science – Arctic Ice Melt
‘Fee & Dividend’ Our best chance for a better future – climatelobby.com
Learn the Issue & Sign the Petition
#279 GFW
I know how you feel ;)
#324 DG:
… note the response of a coward: none.
I have responded twice, but in both cases, it failed to appear on this post.
326 Daniel Goodwin: I’m with gavin. There are lots of things we have been familiar with for a long time that have had wrong attributions. For example: Weather. People used to think that weather was caused by gods.
He says he presents two graphs from the paywalled (Etkin 2010) and (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2010), and I still do not know how to cite paywalled articles. Should it be (Etkin 2010, as presented by Riccardo@SkepticalScience.html)? Of course I should somehow check the article myself were I to use that, but that’d require 200 miles of travel…
ccpo, you seem to think that gathering the homogeneous student body around the bonfire at the pep rally and yelling out the cheers that everyone knows by heart is somehow “getting on to the business of dealing with AGW.” Curious. (Though I can maybe see some tangential help to your cause there…)
Comment by Rod B — 28 May 2010 @ 11:53 AM
Oh, Rod, my dear little debater. While in high school, we can win a debate based on the structure of the argument alone, the merits be damned. (Because the point of the class is to learn debate techniques, not solve social ills.) In real life, while we are generally wired to favor emotion over logic and ideology over reality, it’s not an acceptable method of discourse among the more pragmatic, objective set.
In other words, your implication there is something to debate is a joke and an offense to thinking people everywhere. You are suggesting, e.g., we should still be discussing whether penicillin is worth producing and making available to the public, or whether the lift created by wings can be made to work on a machine.
While we can debate the extent to which we should use antibiotics and we can learn more about aerodynamics, discussing whether the two exist and are useful is… idiotic. Ditto AGW.
Those of us who know this – and that includes most denialists, imo – have no business, nor responsibility, wasting time on people who are either married to their ignorance or lying.
Cheers
“There have been indications that the hackers could have been based in Russia, and some experts believe they may have been hired by sceptics based in the US.”—The Financial Times (4-15-10)
I hate to think Americans did this to the British.
This would no surprise me at all. Last winter there were trolls all over here and, well, everyhwere, talking about how 2009 would be the year AGW was proven a fraud. It was freaky because they were 1. adamant, 2. posting everywhere, 3. under many different names.
And, viola!, hacked e-mails.
What’s equally eerie is the dearth of them over the last few months. Nothing at all like in the months leading up to and just after the hacks became known.
One gets the sense they are 1. hiding to avoid leaving a trail and 2. letting the damage sink in.
Yeah, I know this sounds tin hat-ish, but all I’ve done is describe their actions.
Odd.
Cheers
At the risk of being a broken record, please get something like “shadow threads” I’ve mentioned here before, i.e., a simple way to move posts to alternate thread, so they can exist without degrading the SNR of the main thread. This was an importnat topic, but relatively few posts actually discussed it in any useful fashion.
PLEASE do not go the way of once-useful USENET newsgroups whose SNR degraded from terrific to awful over time. At least in USENET, we had comprehensive Killfiles, but good moderators could add a lot of value to a blog if they can do this.
On my calculations the bp oil spill in the gulf is already the world’s worst crude oil accident ever (discounting the gulf war in ’91). Based on 3.53 million gallons of oil/day it would have only taken 39.66 days to exclipse the ixtoc offshore rig in the mexican gulf which stands at 140mil gallons before it was finally capped in 1980 after gushing for a year.
I read that vaste amounts of methane gas has also been released in the accident..probably insignificent in the global scheme of things but still one more nail.
My hope is that this latest event in gross global vandalism acts as a wake up call or catylist for concerned citizens everywhere that fossil fuels just ain’t the way to go..that we must embrace clean/sustainable energies ASAP. Liquified hydrogen for the automotive industy (see Honda Clarity) must be the way to go. What do you think?
“There seems to be something paradoxical in this. If I downgrade “unprecedented” to “unusual” the same paradox is thrown into greater relief:”
Except it doesn’t.
You don’t have to have killed 10 people to be a killer, even though there are many people who have done so, therefore 10 deaths is not unusual.
Yet you can attribute a death to the killer who did it.
MegaCorp may post hints of a good quarterly report and its stock may go up a couple of points on the news. This is not unusual a change in a day for a MegaCorp stock trade.
Yet we can attribute the stock increase to the rumours.
Frank runs back to the hay bale:
“Show me the model that predicts that within his lifetime he will starve to death because nothing – not even wheat (or any number of grains) – will be able to grow due to global warming.”
Frankie, it’s not that there will be NOTHING growing (though you’re nicking all the straw), but that there won’t be enough for a nobody like ralphie to buy ENOUGH food to keep from starving.
Remember, even Etheopia were growing SOME food.
Just not enough to feed everyone.
Remember, the starving people were eating SOMETHING.
Just not enough to stop from starving.
Now please put that straw back where you found it, it’s needed for winter feed.
“As far as math models go I have personally been using them for over 50 years, since the X-15 days, and have no problem with them, as long as they reflect reality, which I’m not sure the current climate models reflect.”
Yah, reelly?
I’ve googled but found no J Bob and X-15 related.
Your postings also designate either a fairly extreme DK or a complete lack of science.
DG 327,
In fairness to Lichanos, he emailed me claiming he tried to post in response twice but couldn’t get his post accepted. I don’t know what the content was.
“As far as I know, we did not cede sovereignty of our economic exclusion zone to BP. Nowhere is there a deed describing the seafloor in question as BP’s exclusive property.”
Yes there is:
1) The US have extended *their* territorial waters to 200 miles offshore.
2) The US government have sold rights to drill in that area to BP
Your complaint is similar to complaining about Mall Security on land that belongs to the US (the shopping mall).
“Drill, baby, drill” crowd won’t let Obama NOT expand offshore drilling, he has “advisors” who get paid by lobby firms to advise him (Obama is smart enough to avoid DK, but not smart enough to notice BS when peddled) and his political power is harmed by refusing. And, lets face it, he likes the money and the country needs the money too.
So as a *political* animal, Obama sold rights to BP and part of that agreement was to give BP rights and aid in enforcement.
As a human being with power, he should have refused.