This month’s open thread. Sorry for the slow start – you know what it’s like after the holidays…
Reader Interactions
226 Responses to "Unforced Variations: Jan 2015"
Adamsays
Hi everyone
I do research in the field of climate extremes (specifically tropical cyclones and European windstorms). This has led to me looking at trends in global storminess and (briefly) flooding over the last 40 years or so, which is a period of rapid global warming. What the data suggests is that, for the UK and Europe, any trends in storminess and rainfall are small, and are at least one or two orders of magnitude lower than the internal climate variability. The conclusion I would naturally draw from this is that firstly there is no evidence that recent flooding and storms in the UK/Europe are linked to climate change and secondly, future losses from these events will continue to be primarily driven by natural variability (e.g. a persistent weather pattern in the case of flooding). To me this conclusion doesn’t feel quite right, like it isn’t the full story and I have missed something. Is there anything I have missed, as I frequently hear assertions that climate change is, or will increase storms and floods in the UK.
Ray Ladburysays
The reason mitigation discussions are not encouraged here is because this is a blog about climate SCIENCE. There are plenty of places one can go to talk about mitigation. Might I suggest the town hall meeting of a senator or representative and that you refer them to this blog when they say “Well, I’m not a climate scientist…”
It is not even 100% clear what constitutes mitigation. The science, on the other hand is clear and fascinating. Try it.
Quantifying human impacts on rates of erosion and sediment transport at a landscape scale
Lucas Reusser et al. (corresponding author: Paul Bierman), University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA. Published online 7 Jan. 2015; included in the February issue of Geology; http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G36272.1.
“… measurements show that before the arrival of Europeans, erosion was slow — only a fraction of an inch every thousand years. Then, the settlers came, cleared the land, and erosion increased more than 100-fold. These measurements clearly demonstrate the dramatic effects that humans can have on the landscape. So much soil sluiced off hillslopes that the rivers could move less than 10% of what was eroded. The rest was left behind on valley bottoms. Background erosion rates are critical for developing realistic landscape management strategies.
The scientists concluded that the increase in water vapour was making the process less efficient by evaporating water into air that is not already saturated with water vapour. They showed that this inefficiency limited the strengthening of atmospheric circulation, though not in a uniform manner. Air masses that are able to reach the top of the atmosphere are strengthened, while those that can not are weakened.
“Put more simply, powerful storms are strengthened at the expense of weaker storms,” said Laliberte. “We believe atmospheric circulation will adapt to this less efficient form of heat transfer and we will see either fewer storms overall or at least a weakening of the most common, weaker storms.”
###
The findings are reported in the paper “Constrained work output of the moist atmospheric heat engine in a warming climate” published January 30 in Science.
Hmmm … “top of the atmosphere”?
I’d guess that’s referring to storms that can reach near the top of the troposphere</em, or breaking through the local inversion layer — that’s what lets an ordinary little cloud develop into a thunderhead, getting up to cold air where heat of condensation is released, the water condenses to make a cloud, the surrounding air takes the heat and expands and I believe the technical term is “kicks ass” …
Chuck Hughessays
Comment by Adam — 1 Feb 2015
“The conclusion I would naturally draw from this is that firstly there is no evidence that recent flooding and storms in the UK/Europe are linked to climate change and secondly, future losses from these events will continue to be primarily driven by natural variability (e.g. a persistent weather pattern in the case of flooding).”
“There is no evidence that recent flooding and storms in the UK/Europe are linked to climate change” is an absolute statement.
I assume you have published scientific findings and research to back that up. I would love to see it.
Edward Greischsays
202 Ray Ladbury: I have worked in the commercial world as well as for the government. In the commercial world, I have encountered places where everybody in the plant wants to do every job in the plant except his own. In another plant, I found out how desirable it is to put engineers in a separate building from sales people. In another place, you need to keep technicians from badgering engineers or stuff will never work. You have to have configuration control and strictly enforce it or the purchasing manager does engineering, with disastrous results.
So at RC, salesmen and others who have other agendas, and others who are never going to understand science, have to be kept strictly out.
There are those of us who fall in the cracks between science and engineering. We are useful for translating what the scientists said into actionable language. The salesmen, politicians, preachers and riffraff have to be kept out of this process as well so that we will be able to give meaningful requirements documents to the pure engineers.
Tony Weddlesays
Adam,
Attribution research is ongoing. For earlier work, you might want to try this article (part 1 of 3 part series) or this paper.
Ray Ladburysays
Adam@201,
Fascinating, Adam, Please post the journal articles you published on the subject.
Everyone, Now enjoy the sound of crickets chirping, brought to you by a request for the truth.
Adam, those conclusions don’t feel right to me, either.
The first might be true if rephrased “there is no statistical evidence…”, since there may be other forms of evidence, such as numerical modeling experiments, or paleo-climate evidence of links between temperature and storminess. And even with regard to statistical evidence (or its lack), one has to bear in mind that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ It’s quite possible that the high variability is more relevant in that regard than the low trend.
The second conclusion appears to me to be a complete non-sequitur. If the warming trend continues, then it will, at some point, become more commensurate with variability (unless variability is also increasing–not a comforting thought, as applied to storminess and precipitation!)
Another point that’s important to bear in mind–and forgive me if you are already well aware of this–is that for normal statistical distributions, small shifts in the mean can produce large changes in the probabilities for outlying events. That point is famously made for the (I think rather more straightforward) case of heat waves by Hansen et al., in the “climate dice” paper of 2012:
“THE Obama administration’s whiplash decision last week to allow oil and gas companies to drill along a wide area of the Atlantic Coast is a big mistake.
The facts support a ban on offshore drilling not only in the wilds of Alaska — as the administration has announced — but also along our densely populated, economically vibrant and environmentally diverse Eastern Seaboard.
The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster should remind us that the benefits of drilling do not outweigh the threat to local economies, public health and the environment when an inevitable spill occurs. The spill, occurring off the Louisiana coast less than five years ago, devastated the Gulf of Mexico region — most likely costing over $100 billion in lost economic activity and restoration expenses, disrupting or destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs and causing long-term damage to 3,000 miles of fragile wetlands and beaches. Experts estimate that only 5 percent of the 4.2 million barrels of oil spilled in the gulf was removed during the cleanup; even today, oil from the spill is still appearing on the white sand beaches of the Florida Panhandle.
To allow drilling off the Atlantic Coast is to willfully forget Deepwater’s awful lesson even as the economic, environmental and public health consequences continue to reverberate in communities along the gulf. If a disaster of Deepwater’s scale occurred off the Chesapeake Bay, it would stretch from Richmond to Atlantic City, with states and communities with no say in drilling decisions bearing the consequences. The 50-mile buffer the administration has proposed would be irrelevant. And unlike the gulf, the Chesapeake is a tidal estuary, meaning that oil would remain in the environment for decades.”
206 Chuck: No I haven’t published anything myself (I am not directly involved in climate change research) but I can illustrate what I am saying using data from the UK Met Office.
If you go to http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly and look at time series for UK rainfall for each season you will see time series going back to 1910. If you look at each season you can see large inter-annual variability, plus some evidence of inter-decadal variability, but the overall trend is very small, if it exists at all. For example take summer rainfall; there has been a trend towards wetter summers in the last decade, and 2012 was the second wettest since 1910, but generally in the last decade the UK summer rainfall has been comparable to the period from the early to mid 20th century, which is before the period of recent rapid warming from the 1970’s. The temperature time series does show a long-term upward trend consistent with a warming climate. Similarly for winter rainfall, although last winter was the wettest on record there is generally no upward trend in UK winter rainfall going back to 1910, and the wet winters of the 1990’s are comparable to those in the early 20th century. Thus just looking at this dataset, it can be seen that seasonal rainfall in the UK is dominated by inter-annual variability, and any influence of climate change *so far* appears to be negligable. Hence if the inter-annual variability dominates any long-term change then it becomes difficult to conclude that climate change is having any noticeable influence on UK seasonal rainfall.
This is my reasoning just looking at this dataset. Like I said, I get the feeling that I am not interpreting the full story, given that I have heard statements suggesting that the UK should be prepared for more extreme rainfall events as a result of climate change, hence I feel I am missing something somewhere. Someone has kindly posted a link to a paper which I will have a look at when I have an hour or two spare.
Here we revisit estimates of twentieth-century GMSL rise using probabilistic techniques 9,10 and find a rate of GMSL rise from 1901 to 1990 of 1.2 +/- 0.2 millimetres per year (90% confidence interval). Based on individual contributions tabulated in the Fifth Assessment Report 7 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this estimate closes the twentieth-century sea-level budget. Our analysis, which combines tide gauge records with physics-based and model-derived geometries of the various contributing signals, also indicates that GMSL rose at a rate of 3.0 +/- 0.7 millimetres per year between 1993 and 2010, consistent with prior estimates from tide gauge records 4. The increase in rate relative to the 1901–90 trend is accordingly larger than previously thought; this revision may affect some projections 11 of future sea-level rise.
http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14093.epdf
Probabilistic reanalysis of twentieth-century sea-level rise
Carling C. Hay et al., Nature 517, 481–484 (22 January 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14093
Adamsays
I posted a response last night clarifying my point but it hasn’t appeared so just wanted to try a quick test post before re-submitting my original (it was quite long).
“An Environmental Protection Agency review of the Keystone XL pipeline emphasized that the recent drop in global oil prices might mean that construction of the pipeline could spur increased development of the Canadian oil sands — and thus increase planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
<<Last week, in his State of the Union address, Obama reiterated at length the urgent threat climate change presents and the importance of taking decisive action to address it. “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” he said. “We should act like it.”
But Obama himself isn’t acting like it. This week, his administration released a draft of its next five-year plan for offshore drilling.
>>Last week, in his State of the Union address, Obama reiterated at length the urgent threat climate change presents and the importance of taking decisive action to address it. “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” he said. “We should act like it.”
But Obama himself isn’t acting like it. This week, his administration released a draft of its next five-year plan for offshore drilling<<
Killian O'Briensays
“What is more, one of the reasons why we have had so little progress in addressing climate change and other problems caused by our economic and energy infrastructure is that no one has made a compelling case for what will replace that infrastructure and how.”
This is false. More accurate to add, “…and how, that Ladbury is willing to accept and able to understand.”
More later. Busy writing something else.
Jon Kellersays
Hi all,
Recently I found this article from MIT suggesting that as global warming proceeds the effects of CO2 itself diminish? I don’t mean by saturation, but by some physics that is apparently common to all warming bodies.
“Meanwhile, like any physical body experiencing warming, Earth sheds longwave radiation more effectively, canceling out the longwave-trapping effects of CO2.”
#219–They seem to be referring to the so-called “Planck feedback,” which is simply the fact that warmer bodies radiate more strongly. (Cf., the Stefan-Boltzmann Law.)
#219 Jon Keller the wording in this article is a b bit obfuscating, for my taste. But in the comments section, co author Kyle Armour explains things
“Significance Statement: The greenhouse effect is well established. Increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, reduce the amount of outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) to space; thus, energy accumulates in the climate system, and the planet warms. However, climate models forced with CO2 reveal that global energy accumulation is, instead, primarily caused by an increase in absorbed solar radiation (ASR). This study resolves this apparent paradox. The solution is in the climate feedbacks that increase ASR with warming—the moistening of the atmosphere and the reduction of snow and sea ice cover. Observations and model simulations suggest that even though global warming is set into motion by greenhouse gases that reduce OLR, it is ultimately sustained by the climate feedbacks that enhance ASR.”
Psst — Ray — when you see tasty bait, it might be worth waiting a few hours or a day or so — see if it gets moved to the borehole. Don’t bite right away.
Sometimes the people who come looking for an argument get sent down the hall.
Patience furthers.
Jasper Jaynessays
Wili#217,
Obama is giving his constituents what they want. And, what they want is cheap and plentiful gas. For example:
(http://www.expressnews.com/business/local/article/Truck-SUV-sales-fuel-strong-start-to-2015-6060193.php#/0)
“Typically one of the slowest months of the year for automakers, January delivered a strong start to 2015 as demand for pickups and small SUVs benefited from cheap fuel prices.
Most major auto manufacturers, including Toyota, reported double-digit increases in new cars and trucks sold last month, a sign that sales didn’t spin out even with a major snowstorm hitting the Northeast.”
So, as soon as the price of gas decreases, back to the old habits.
Another example. In the recent Keystone XL Senate vote, the vote was 62-36, with nine Democrats voting for the bill. That’s not only a majority; that’s a super-majority.
Obama has promised energy independence and all-of-the-above. Now you’re seeing what that means. We as a civilization will squeeze every drop of fossil fuel that we can from this planet.
Gerald Meehl at NCAR thinks he knows, and he made a very good case for it in a talk at the AMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix this month. He has co-authored a paper in NATURE about it and others are researching this as well and the answer is it’s going into the deep cold oceans. How they know this is what is really fascinating, and instead of just taking their word for it, or assuming I am telling you the truth, why don’t you watch him explain how they know.
Now after the video below, I am going to write a very short summary of what he said, because I am used to meteorological speak, and sometimes what I think is plain and easy to understand is not (at least that’s what my wife says!). I suspect that most folks will understand the video perfectly though.
Hi everyone
I do research in the field of climate extremes (specifically tropical cyclones and European windstorms). This has led to me looking at trends in global storminess and (briefly) flooding over the last 40 years or so, which is a period of rapid global warming. What the data suggests is that, for the UK and Europe, any trends in storminess and rainfall are small, and are at least one or two orders of magnitude lower than the internal climate variability. The conclusion I would naturally draw from this is that firstly there is no evidence that recent flooding and storms in the UK/Europe are linked to climate change and secondly, future losses from these events will continue to be primarily driven by natural variability (e.g. a persistent weather pattern in the case of flooding). To me this conclusion doesn’t feel quite right, like it isn’t the full story and I have missed something. Is there anything I have missed, as I frequently hear assertions that climate change is, or will increase storms and floods in the UK.
The reason mitigation discussions are not encouraged here is because this is a blog about climate SCIENCE. There are plenty of places one can go to talk about mitigation. Might I suggest the town hall meeting of a senator or representative and that you refer them to this blog when they say “Well, I’m not a climate scientist…”
It is not even 100% clear what constitutes mitigation. The science, on the other hand is clear and fascinating. Try it.
> Adam … I do research in the field of climate extremes
Do you mean like you do and publish research science, or do you mean research like library research?
(I’m one of the latter, not a scientist, but I try to keep up)
Last I recall was ‘not more storms’ but ‘an increased number of, and more intense’ storms, which fits I think with the paleo work.
But that’s trusting memory, I know better, but ‘gotta go’
What sources are you reading now?
Another “shifting baseline” discovered: the erosion rate in N. America pre-European settlement increased by 100x after the Europeans came.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-01/gsoa-suk013015.php
for Adam:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-01/uot-gww012915.php
Hmmm … “top of the atmosphere”?
I’d guess that’s referring to storms that can reach near the top of the troposphere</em, or breaking through the local inversion layer — that’s what lets an ordinary little cloud develop into a thunderhead, getting up to cold air where heat of condensation is released, the water condenses to make a cloud, the surrounding air takes the heat and expands and I believe the technical term is “kicks ass” …
Comment by Adam — 1 Feb 2015
“The conclusion I would naturally draw from this is that firstly there is no evidence that recent flooding and storms in the UK/Europe are linked to climate change and secondly, future losses from these events will continue to be primarily driven by natural variability (e.g. a persistent weather pattern in the case of flooding).”
“There is no evidence that recent flooding and storms in the UK/Europe are linked to climate change” is an absolute statement.
I assume you have published scientific findings and research to back that up. I would love to see it.
202 Ray Ladbury: I have worked in the commercial world as well as for the government. In the commercial world, I have encountered places where everybody in the plant wants to do every job in the plant except his own. In another plant, I found out how desirable it is to put engineers in a separate building from sales people. In another place, you need to keep technicians from badgering engineers or stuff will never work. You have to have configuration control and strictly enforce it or the purchasing manager does engineering, with disastrous results.
So at RC, salesmen and others who have other agendas, and others who are never going to understand science, have to be kept strictly out.
There are those of us who fall in the cracks between science and engineering. We are useful for translating what the scientists said into actionable language. The salesmen, politicians, preachers and riffraff have to be kept out of this process as well so that we will be able to give meaningful requirements documents to the pure engineers.
Adam,
Attribution research is ongoing. For earlier work, you might want to try this article (part 1 of 3 part series) or this paper.
Adam@201,
Fascinating, Adam, Please post the journal articles you published on the subject.
Everyone, Now enjoy the sound of crickets chirping, brought to you by a request for the truth.
Adam, those conclusions don’t feel right to me, either.
The first might be true if rephrased “there is no statistical evidence…”, since there may be other forms of evidence, such as numerical modeling experiments, or paleo-climate evidence of links between temperature and storminess. And even with regard to statistical evidence (or its lack), one has to bear in mind that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ It’s quite possible that the high variability is more relevant in that regard than the low trend.
The second conclusion appears to me to be a complete non-sequitur. If the warming trend continues, then it will, at some point, become more commensurate with variability (unless variability is also increasing–not a comforting thought, as applied to storminess and precipitation!)
Another point that’s important to bear in mind–and forgive me if you are already well aware of this–is that for normal statistical distributions, small shifts in the mean can produce large changes in the probabilities for outlying events. That point is famously made for the (I think rather more straightforward) case of heat waves by Hansen et al., in the “climate dice” paper of 2012:
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/37/E2415.full.pdf+html
Martin O’Malley says:
“THE Obama administration’s whiplash decision last week to allow oil and gas companies to drill along a wide area of the Atlantic Coast is a big mistake.
The facts support a ban on offshore drilling not only in the wilds of Alaska — as the administration has announced — but also along our densely populated, economically vibrant and environmentally diverse Eastern Seaboard.
The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster should remind us that the benefits of drilling do not outweigh the threat to local economies, public health and the environment when an inevitable spill occurs. The spill, occurring off the Louisiana coast less than five years ago, devastated the Gulf of Mexico region — most likely costing over $100 billion in lost economic activity and restoration expenses, disrupting or destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs and causing long-term damage to 3,000 miles of fragile wetlands and beaches. Experts estimate that only 5 percent of the 4.2 million barrels of oil spilled in the gulf was removed during the cleanup; even today, oil from the spill is still appearing on the white sand beaches of the Florida Panhandle.
To allow drilling off the Atlantic Coast is to willfully forget Deepwater’s awful lesson even as the economic, environmental and public health consequences continue to reverberate in communities along the gulf. If a disaster of Deepwater’s scale occurred off the Chesapeake Bay, it would stretch from Richmond to Atlantic City, with states and communities with no say in drilling decisions bearing the consequences. The 50-mile buffer the administration has proposed would be irrelevant. And unlike the gulf, the Chesapeake is a tidal estuary, meaning that oil would remain in the environment for decades.”
There’s more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/opinion/dont-drill-along-the-east-coast.html
206 Chuck: No I haven’t published anything myself (I am not directly involved in climate change research) but I can illustrate what I am saying using data from the UK Met Office.
If you go to http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly and look at time series for UK rainfall for each season you will see time series going back to 1910. If you look at each season you can see large inter-annual variability, plus some evidence of inter-decadal variability, but the overall trend is very small, if it exists at all. For example take summer rainfall; there has been a trend towards wetter summers in the last decade, and 2012 was the second wettest since 1910, but generally in the last decade the UK summer rainfall has been comparable to the period from the early to mid 20th century, which is before the period of recent rapid warming from the 1970’s. The temperature time series does show a long-term upward trend consistent with a warming climate. Similarly for winter rainfall, although last winter was the wettest on record there is generally no upward trend in UK winter rainfall going back to 1910, and the wet winters of the 1990’s are comparable to those in the early 20th century. Thus just looking at this dataset, it can be seen that seasonal rainfall in the UK is dominated by inter-annual variability, and any influence of climate change *so far* appears to be negligable. Hence if the inter-annual variability dominates any long-term change then it becomes difficult to conclude that climate change is having any noticeable influence on UK seasonal rainfall.
This is my reasoning just looking at this dataset. Like I said, I get the feeling that I am not interpreting the full story, given that I have heard statements suggesting that the UK should be prepared for more extreme rainfall events as a result of climate change, hence I feel I am missing something somewhere. Someone has kindly posted a link to a paper which I will have a look at when I have an hour or two spare.
http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14093.epdf
Probabilistic reanalysis of twentieth-century sea-level rise
Carling C. Hay et al., Nature 517, 481–484 (22 January 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14093
I posted a response last night clarifying my point but it hasn’t appeared so just wanted to try a quick test post before re-submitting my original (it was quite long).
“An Environmental Protection Agency review of the Keystone XL pipeline emphasized that the recent drop in global oil prices might mean that construction of the pipeline could spur increased development of the Canadian oil sands — and thus increase planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
That review might influence President Obama’s long-delayed verdict on the 1,179-mile pipeline, which could bring about 800,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. Mr. Obama has said that an important element of his decision will be whether construction of the pipeline would contribute significantly to climate change.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/us/politics/epa-review-of-keystone-pipeline-notes-potential-rise-in-greenhouse-gases.html
“Obama ignores Obama on climate change”
<<Last week, in his State of the Union address, Obama reiterated at length the urgent threat climate change presents and the importance of taking decisive action to address it. “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” he said. “We should act like it.”
But Obama himself isn’t acting like it. This week, his administration released a draft of its next five-year plan for offshore drilling.
http://grist.org/climate-energy/obama-ignores-obama-on-climate-change/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Daily%2520Feb%25202&utm_campaign=daily
Obama ignores Obama on climate change
>>Last week, in his State of the Union address, Obama reiterated at length the urgent threat climate change presents and the importance of taking decisive action to address it. “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” he said. “We should act like it.”
But Obama himself isn’t acting like it. This week, his administration released a draft of its next five-year plan for offshore drilling<<
“What is more, one of the reasons why we have had so little progress in addressing climate change and other problems caused by our economic and energy infrastructure is that no one has made a compelling case for what will replace that infrastructure and how.”
This is false. More accurate to add, “…and how, that Ladbury is willing to accept and able to understand.”
More later. Busy writing something else.
Hi all,
Recently I found this article from MIT suggesting that as global warming proceeds the effects of CO2 itself diminish? I don’t mean by saturation, but by some physics that is apparently common to all warming bodies.
“Meanwhile, like any physical body experiencing warming, Earth sheds longwave radiation more effectively, canceling out the longwave-trapping effects of CO2.”
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/global-warming-increased-solar-radiation-1110
The article is about this paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/47/16700
Is this just another way of explaining the amplification through water vapor feedback of the initial CO2 signal?
Also, is the rise in outgoing longwave radiation since 2000 due to the la ninas we’ve had?
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries.pl?ntype=3&lat1=90&lat2=-90&lon1=0&lon2=360&iseas=0&mon1=0&mon2=0&iarea=1&typeout=2&Submit=Create+Timeseries
#219–They seem to be referring to the so-called “Planck feedback,” which is simply the fact that warmer bodies radiate more strongly. (Cf., the Stefan-Boltzmann Law.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan–Boltzmann_law
#219 Jon Keller the wording in this article is a b bit obfuscating, for my taste. But in the comments section, co author Kyle Armour explains things
“Significance Statement: The greenhouse effect is well established. Increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, reduce the amount of outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) to space; thus, energy accumulates in the climate system, and the planet warms. However, climate models forced with CO2 reveal that global energy accumulation is, instead, primarily caused by an increase in absorbed solar radiation (ASR). This study resolves this apparent paradox. The solution is in the climate feedbacks that increase ASR with warming—the moistening of the atmosphere and the reduction of snow and sea ice cover. Observations and model simulations suggest that even though global warming is set into motion by greenhouse gases that reduce OLR, it is ultimately sustained by the climate feedbacks that enhance ASR.”
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/global-warming-increased-solar-radiation-1110
Killian O’Brien: “More later. Busy writing something else.”
The translation of this from the original bullshit is:
“I have no idea what I am talking about. I need time to think of something that doesn’t sound like complete crap.”
Psst — Ray — when you see tasty bait, it might be worth waiting a few hours or a day or so — see if it gets moved to the borehole. Don’t bite right away.
Sometimes the people who come looking for an argument get sent down the hall.
Patience furthers.
Wili#217,
Obama is giving his constituents what they want. And, what they want is cheap and plentiful gas. For example:
(http://www.expressnews.com/business/local/article/Truck-SUV-sales-fuel-strong-start-to-2015-6060193.php#/0)
“Typically one of the slowest months of the year for automakers, January delivered a strong start to 2015 as demand for pickups and small SUVs benefited from cheap fuel prices.
Most major auto manufacturers, including Toyota, reported double-digit increases in new cars and trucks sold last month, a sign that sales didn’t spin out even with a major snowstorm hitting the Northeast.”
So, as soon as the price of gas decreases, back to the old habits.
Another example. In the recent Keystone XL Senate vote, the vote was 62-36, with nine Democrats voting for the bill. That’s not only a majority; that’s a super-majority.
Obama has promised energy independence and all-of-the-above. Now you’re seeing what that means. We as a civilization will squeeze every drop of fossil fuel that we can from this planet.
http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2015/01/17/looking-missing-heat-science-based-detective-story/
(links in the original)