This month’s open thread for general climate science discussions.
Reader Interactions
321 Responses to "Unforced Variations: Apr 2018"
Killiansays
Climate Forcings: New Stuff.
New cell phones equal 10 years of keeping an existing phone.
I have made similar statements about new cars, new energy systems, etc. Climate scientists will perhaps want to figure out the forcings of additional tech/complexity.
After 20 years an initial mass of methane will have been equivalent in greenhouse effect to about 70 times that mass of carbon dioxide (and the carbon will still be present as (LONG LIVED ) carbon dioxide, the methane oxidation product) http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/Methane2017.pdf
For the same mass of each gas, methane is at least 100 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Understanding methane sources is important because it is the second-most important contributor to global warming behind carbon dioxide and contributes to smog pollution. Methane is roughly 28 times more efficient at trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere over a 100-year time frame, and current levels of methane in the atmosphere are higher than at any point in the past 2,000 years. NOAA’s global greenhouse gas measurement database shows methane levels have been rising steeply since 2006. The underlying causes of this increase in methane levels are not fully known. https://research.noaa.gov/News/NewsArchive/LatestNews/TabId/684/ArtMID/1768/ArticleID/13337/New-National-Academies-report-lays-out-path-forward-for-methane-research.aspx
and 1998 snippets
Methane now contributes about 20% to the increased direct radiative forcing
by greenhouse gases compared to preindustrial times [Shine et al.,1995]
Oxidation of CH4 in the troposphere produces carbon monoxide (CO), can lead production of ozone (03), and involves atmospheric oxidant, the hydroxyl radical (OH).
In the stratosphere, methane oxidation … source of water vapor.
A major growth rate decrease in 1992 was partly attributed to a reduced
fossil fuel source resulting from the atmospheric cooling following the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, and reduced biomass burning https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/98JD00923
While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2.
In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But policymakers typically ignore methane’s warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling a nation’s emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane’s warming impacts over a century, which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-greenhouse-gas-is-methane/
It’s not nothing. and is rising “steeply” the science literature says.
any positive feedbacks from present or future methane caltrates degassing and permafrost melt in the arctic regions. any CH4 from these sources has not been included in any future GCSMs or IPPC long term projections afaik and confirmed by many such as Gavin S of nasa and the IPCC reports themselves. Maybe there is nothing to it? Though I do believe the literature says differently at present. Then there is the logic of basic systemic causation driving the climate system changes as well.
I would like help understanding ocean uptake of CO2 in a world where CO2 emissions are dropping rapidly. According to James Hansen, if we reduce emissions by 3%/year starting in 2020, atmospheric CO2 levels will stabilize and we can stay below +1.5ºC warming (see his Young Peoples Burden Paper (Figures 10-12): https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/8/577/2017/esd-8-577-2017.pdf
According to a conversation I had with Hansen, the reason atmospheric concentration stabilizes is that the ocean sink, that is currently sinking about half of our CO2 emissions, keeps sinking CO2 at around that level so that as we lower emissions at 3%/year (about 50% in 20 years) the oceans are sinking most of our emissions and, therefore, keeping atmospheric concentrations stable.
I knew that oceans sequester about half of our emissions but I thought it tracked the level of emissions closely (the “balance time” was about a year), but if the balance time is longer than a year, the “inertia” of the sink would capture a growing proportion of manmade emissions over time.
Can anyone please explain this mechanism in more detail? What is the “balance time” for ocean CO2 concentration balancing with the atmosphere? I understand that the oceans will eventually sink about 85% of our emissions but that takes on the order of 1000 years. What happens over 100 years if we begin lowering our emissions at 3%/year? What are the physical mechanisms that determine the ocean response time over this period?
(also for Dan Miller)
Use the “tools” options in the Google search results to limit the question to verbatim results (using all the words in the query) and to select the time range so you see only recent results.
Atmospheric aerosols versus greenhouse gases in the twenty-first century
Meinrat O Andreae
Published 15 July 2007.
DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2007.2051
SystemicCausationsays
312
Killian says:
3 SystemicCausation and MA Rodger March @393, 365, 378
all about @312 Killian scientific query
CH4 and Permafrost – This new study seems to take us back to where I thought we were in 2007 with this issue, before some studies started suggesting less dangerous possibilities and certain researchers started getting some pretty serious, and I thought unfair, heat.
I hope someone with some chops will explicate this in plainer English in case I am misunderstanding the gist.
Then Rodger get’s all Strawmanny with “skyrocket?”, and “Schaefer et al (2016) found no sign of it.”, and “no increase in the annual cycle at Barrow over the period to December 2017” (now that’s very short termy compared to 2100+ of Knoblauch and so exceptionally Strawmanny given Knoblauch was not addressing 2017 at all), and “the methane skyrocket” (yet no mentions any 2017 skyrockets anywhere = Argumentatively Strawmanny on steriods) ending with “is there any actual evidence that supports arctic methane skyrocketry theories?” and the answer is no one was speaking of any “skyrocketry theories”, not Killian and not Knoblauch.
What Killian said @387 was “Basically, this research says the risk of significant CH4 emissions this century is substantially higher than believed before this paper, assuming it is accurate.”
That’s this century and not the post summer of 2016 nor 2017 – which is probably why Killian then said in @388 That study in no way says there should be a big sign of emissions now, only that future emissions should be higher than other studies have found because they were over too short a time frame. No Straw Men, please.
393 MA Rodger’s reply curiously still includes-
– Such methods do not in any way include a ‘Get out of explaining your evidence/method’ card.
– as of end-2017 I see no evidence for a recent surge in late-summer CH4 emissions from the arctic,
– With an absence of such evidence, it is very likley that we can negate the CH4 emissions (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – especially regarding the scientific evidence produced by Knoblauch towards the future – very Strawmanny yet again despite request to avoid them)
I think the comments made by Rodger were overall Strawman, and stupid, wrong, missed the point, off base, unrelated to the Knoblauch Letter Graphs and Data, emotive, flippant, and especially unnecessary, unhelpful and unscientific.
Strawman? – You misrepresented someone’s argument to make it easier to attack.
In this instance both Killian and Knoblauch
By exaggerating, misrepresenting, or just completely fabricating someone’s argument, it’s much easier to present your own position as being reasonable, but this kind of dishonesty serves to undermine honest rational debate.
Indeed I think it does undermine rational debate and discussions and this happens very regularly usually daily from my anecdotal reading at least.
Therefore, the current evidence suggests that permafrost thaw in dry soils will cause a stronger permafrost carbon–climate feedback than in water-saturated soils 1,7. However, anoxic incubation studies of permafrost are scarce and generally last for only several days to weeks 4–6. Consequently, the role of CH4 production on climate-relevant timescales is still highly uncertain.
We challenged the existing view that CH4 production is of minor importance for organic carbon decomposition in thawing permafrost by two hypotheses.
(1) The reported low contribution of CH4 production to anoxic carbon decomposition in thawing permafrost is due to the lack of an active methanogen community that only establishes over longer time periods.
(2) Long-term anoxic permafrost organic matter decomposition releases less carbon but more CO2–Ce than oxic organic matter decomposition when considering the higher GWP of CH4.
To test these hypotheses, we combined long-term incubation studies (> 7 yrs) of permafrost samples with numerical modelling and simulated both oxic and anoxic GHG production from thawing permafrost until 2100.
(refs are included in the Nature Letter and in Supplemental)
I believe, based on long term evidence, that it would be very much better if one or two of
Gavin Schmidt
Michael Mann
Rasmus Benestad
Ray Bradley
Stefan Rahmstorf
Eric Steig
David Archer
Ray Pierrehumbert
would address Killian’s query about this paper, rather than others here who seem to regularly default their style and comments into ridicule of others, exaggeration, flawed cherry-picking and seemingly endless Strawman creation. I believe this destroys the potential value of this blog service provided by working climate scientists.
Logical Fallacy proponents are, in my view, far more suited to WUWT type blogs and Brietbart Fox News comments pages and not here. YMMV.
nigeljsays
The problem with smartphones and their ultimate high use of energy and resources is the built in osolescence. For example, the memory in the cheaper devices fills up with ‘updates” alarmingly fast, and it looks like my phone will be full after just three years or less. And without updates, various things stop working properly. Three years is just not good enough.
Killian, can you indeed please clarify whether you support all that tax payer finance for regenerative farming described in the link you posted? Because when I proposed better environmental laws, and subsidies for permaculture etc, you rubbished me. Have you now changed your mind?
SystemicCausationsays
March average for Bering Sea SIA?
Here’s the top 5 (lowest SIA) from Neven:
2001: 401 K
2015: 369 K
1996: 341 K
1989: 310 K 2018: 172 K
Most recent highest SIA was +800K in 2012
‘skyrockety’ or a ‘skylab crashing’ down upon humanity’s head?
Natural variation maybe?
Natural climate variability refers to the variation in climate parameters caused by nonhuman forces. There are two types of natural variability: those external and internal to the climate system.
No need to panic. Lot’s of time left to make a difference. Many Decades at least.
SystemicCausationsays
Skyrockety Show Down or Calamity Countdown?
I just noticed that NASA posted an update on their satellite sea level observations for the period ending 12/17/17.
After over a year of sideways and downward movement from late 2015 through early 2017, the most recent NASA report shows that over the past year an acceleration in sea level rise has become visible on the NASA graph, even with just a quick glance (then again, while the long term trend is consistently upward, the annual trend is so variable, that it’s likely foolish on my part to suggest a change in trend based on the most recent periods of increase which have only been occurring for less than 12 months).
ATTP recently posted this video which includes a segment from our very own Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate. It is very well done so I thought I’d repost here. Enjoy.
Smithsonian Magazine
In this special program, NASA Goddard director and earth scientist Gavin Schmidt and Penn State climate scientist Richard Alley discuss what makes our paleoclimate models so robust—and how they can be used to confidently predict the future. In recent years, interdisciplinary work between data scientists and modelers is promising to make global models more accurate, detailed, and useful to those charting the future of our planet.
Dan @5.
The oceans are not a single reservoir for CO2, but a combination of near surface waters and deeper layers. Balance time for those surface layers is short, but for the deep ocean, CO2 doesn’t diffuse but is gradually carried there by slow moving ocean currents, these may take on the order of a thousand years to complete. I once worked out an emissions schedule for keeping CO2 concentration fixed, initial reductions had to be steep, roughly 50% so that instantaneously sinks equal emissions, but as the sinks with short time constants are saturated quickly, the slower sinks begin to dominate. Even after several hundred years the constant concentration scenario still had emission rates of a few percent of peak…
Of course other feedbacks can come into play. Release of Carbon in melting permafrost being one, and changes in ocean temperatures and distribution of land vegetation and so on will clearly complicate the issue.
So when we have a new empty UV thread at RC, where’s Thomas when you need him? Never fear. We now have SystemicCausation as a substitute ultra-verbose Skyrocketman.
This time last week we were informed by our new-thread-blocker-to-be that “Data indicates that the CO2 annual increase rate is accelerating.” The data presented was the annual CO2 rise averaged over the previous week (+2.72ppm) and the previous decade (+2.34ppm).
Of course, the decadal value hasn’t shifted since then but the average for the last week is now +1.79ppm. So is it now true to say ”Data indicates that the CO2 annual increase rate is decelerating“? Or is there some other phenomenon to cherry-pick and skyrocket about this week?
Systemic Causation @3 (500 words)
I don’t think a press release counts as ”scientific literature” and without belittling the impact of anthorpogenic-caused CH4 emissions, if I rail against CO2-skyrocketry when CO2-forcing with its multi-millenia lifespan continues to grow at ~1.5%/year, I am hardily going to ignore your unmitigated CH4 skyrocketry and bring it back to a more solid foundation. With reference to this EPA webpage and also more up-to-date CH4 data*, the methane rise “since 2006” means CH4 climate forcing with its multi-year lifespan is now growing at ~0.5%/year. In 2016 total CH4 forcing relative to CO2 forcing would have dropped below the 25% mark for the first time in history.
*Note the recent rise of CH4 concentrations peaked in 2015.(120 words)
SystemicCausation @9&10 (1,340 words)
Even if they were done properly, is such a lengthy review from the March UV thread or summation of Knoblauch et al (2018) actually justified. And even with such lengthy blather, I note your failure to appraise the comment @406.
If you feel my rebutting of Killian’s skyrocketry regarding Knoblauch et al (2018) is ”exaggerating, misrepresenting, or just completely fabricating someone’s argument” so as to make it ”much easier to present (my) own position as being reasonable” and that ”this kind of dishonesty serves to undermine honest rational debate”; if you feel all that, you would have more sympathy from me if you were able to demonstrate this alleged ”dishonesty”, or even better begin by demonstrating some justification for the skyrocketry.
But I fear that is asking too much of you. (130 words)
Omega @15. I would think that initial reductions need to be steep to keep atmospheric CO2 constant. Does it stay constant (after a short while) with 3%/year reductions?
Also, the idea is to keep warming below +1.5ºC even with the current energy imbalance (warming in the pipeline) and reductions in aerosols that accompany emissions reductions (though Hansen says the impact of aerosols from fossil fuels was overstated and other manmade aerosols seem to dominate). Is this possible? We are already at 1~1.2ºC warming. Let’a leave permafrost and other feedback out of it for now.
Killiansays
#407 nigelj said The only reliable source off knowledge about this world is science based.
Besides defense, it also serves as a communication network, connecting even to plants which are far away. Paul Stamets first had the idea of such a network in the 1970s, while studying fungi under an electron microscope. He found that there were startling similarities between the precursor to the internet, the US defense department’s ARPANET, and these fungal networks. Yet, it took decades of research to uncover the sheer breadth of the phenomenon. Other scientists have since likened it to an animal’s nervous system.
Or, heck, even my own Aug 2015 post on El Ninos and Arctic Sea Ice… an effect that isn’t supposed to exist.
And… and…. and…
“What a fool believes he sees no wise man has the power to reason away.” – D. Brothers
SystemicCausationsays
16 MA Rodger, for clarification, a rose by any other name is still a rose. My name is irrelevant, as is your own. I am dealing with what you WRITE here, and that’s it.
A clarification is sorely needed here, in that I am not speaking to you Rodger, but about what you said. I have nothing to prove and will not go there. Your understandig is your problem not anyone else’s in my view.
I believe your comments speak for themselves. What others *believe* about that is their business, not mine.
I think your prior comments about Killian and the ref he gave are stupid, and an insult to the *groups* collective intelligence bordering on childish gibberish and so far off base Strawman simply doesn’t cut it as the right word to use linguistically.
There’s more reason and logic in one of my words than in the 4 posts you have made thus far on the subject raised by Killian. The assumptions made are wrong, the conclusions are wrong, the subject matter is not addressed even once. That’s my view.
Strawmanish and childish enough of a comment for you Al?
Really, where’s an adult (or a policeman) when you need one?
SystemicCausationsays
Memo for MA Rodger (and others)
From RC Founder Prof Michael Mann
April 2nd 2018
Mann called upon audience members to shift the conversation on global warming, bypassing the fight against climate-change denial with informed discussions about best solutions.
“This is really an ethical obligation that we have not to destroy the planet,” he said. “We will need leadership in the U.S.”
(May as well start right here on RC. Yes? )
An interesting sidenote. the title of his talk was: “A Return to the Madhouse: Climate Change Denial in the Age of Trump.” That’s odd.
Anyway, According to Mann, these changes will only become more intense and difficult to adapt to, unless the world economy is transformed to no longer depend upon fossil fuels.
“We have to fight for the role of objective science in policy-making,” said Mann
Try this section to test out any new ethical efforts … and have your voice heard!
This month’s open thread on responses to climate change (politics, adaptation, mitigation etc.). Please stay focused on the overall topic. Digressions into the nature and history of communism/feudal societies/anarchistic utopias are off topic and won’t be posted.
(one can only hope that’s the case – no guarantees there, unfortunately.) https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/03/forced-responses-mar-2018/comment-page-6/
Given the admonition to please reflect on the whether you are using your time online to maximum efficiency I humbly request that from now on any use of the word skyrockety in any comment be immediately consigned to the Borehole where it belongs.
UAH prompt as usual, are reporting a TLT global anomaly for March of +0.24ºC, a bit of a bounce back up from +0.20ºC in February. It is =6th warmest March on record (following the 10th warmest January and 8th warmest February last month) and is tied with March 2002 and behind Feb 2016, 2010, 1998, 2004, 2007.
March 2018 sits as =74th highest UAH TLT anomaly on-record for all-months.
It is the 9th warmest start to the year, the top ten being 2016 +0.72ºC, 1998 +0.53ºC, 2010 +0.49ºC, 2017 +0.32ºC, 2007 +0.29ºC, 2004 +0.27ºC, 2002 +0.26ºC, 2003 +0.25ºC, 2018 +0.23ºC, 2015 +0.23ºC, the top of the pile dominated by El Nino years which TLT gives bigger wobbles to than the surface records.
I note the grand AGM-busting thesis of Looney Lord Monckton et al is defended my Monckton in a post at Woy’s (after Woy said bad things about this grand thesis). Happily and unlike other versions, this AGM-busting account does manage to give some inkling of what the Looney Lord is on about (prior to him losing the plot) and the basis underlying the grand thesis can be set out as follows:-
☻ AGW is driven by climate forcings that are multiplied three-fold by net positive feedbacks (a finding the Looney Lord hotly disputes).
☻ In pre-industrial times prior to AGW, the natural non-condensing GHGs (NOGs, apparently) gave an average global temperature of 287K, 32K above the theoretical 255K black-body temperature.
☻ This 32K is often accounted for as a directly-NOGs-forced 8K that is multiplied four-fold by feedbacks.
☻ A 255K black-body involves no feedbacks.
☻ Yet if an extra 8K of warming is forced by NOGs onto a sun-warmed 255K world and results in an extra 24K of feedback warming, why didn’t the sun-warmed 255K result in some feedback?
(At this point, the Looney Lord loses the plot totally. He decides that the 255K would result in a +23.3K feedback response yielding a zero-NOGs global average temperature of 278.3K. NOGs + feedback then give +8.7K warming to yield the 288K pre-industrial temperature and a denialist-friendly ECS of 1.2ºC.)
So the interesting question is ‘what feedbacks would be invoked in a zero-NOGs world? Lacis et al (2010) show a fifty-year-old zero-NOGs world still cooling at 253K but with some remaining atmospheric H2O and clouds which must provide some sort feedback, as would any albedo change from a sunless ultra-cold earth. Merlis & Schneider (2010) show a zero-NOGs water-world to be a little warmer (perhaps 270K from their Fig 1) but they fail to consider the effect of accumulating ice at the poles. Would this accumulation result in ice/water-free tropical deserts (they do mention deserts but not in this context), deserts that would put an end to any serious atmospheric H2O warming resulting from the hot noon-day tropical temperatures?
Killian @18, ha, fair enough. However that ancient ecological knowledge has been carefully observed, collected and checked over generations, so I would contend it is actually moderately science based anyway. I clearly suggested it’s your tendency to rely on instinct and intuition that seems to get out of hand at times, but you miss the point as usual.
nigeljsays
SystemicCausation @22. So the word skyrockety gets under your skin. Skyrockety is rather descriptive. I say add it to the dictionary.
nigeljsays
One to worry about: “Underwater melting of Antarctic ice far greater than thought, study finds. The base of the ice around the south pole shrank by 1,463 square kilometres between 2010 and 2016” Study published April 2 in Nature Geoscience.
Hank Roberts @25,
It is bizarre that when I google “Systemic Causation” the first reference is to a post by Judy ‘air-head’ Curry who in turn refers to an essay by a George Lakoff who had coined the term in an article a few weeks earkier (actually “the second of two articles”) which contains the wonderous line “No language in the world has a way in its grammar to express systemic causation.”
Curry is rather dismissive of the term “Systemic Causation”, accusing it of being “a license to blame anything on global warming.” Yet she manages to end a little more respectfully towards Lakoff seeing his artilce as “Lakoff’s article is an interesting and timely intro to the topic” of causation, this a subject of great interest to her as for some time she had “been planning my next ‘series’ on this topic.”
(And as somebody who has actually taught systems thinking, it is beholden on me to point out that the concept described as “Systemic Causation” in Curry’s quote of Lakoff is completely nonsensical. Death by lung cancer so often does have linkage to smoking but it is conceptual twaddle to say that a broken nose from another’s fist is in some way different because it doesn’t have linkages to some prior behaviour/events. The words ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ causation would be better used and if you want to be ‘systemic’, it will be the system you define for your analysis that will determine which form of causation is appropriate to adopt.)
There’s important matter in there, but it rather gets lost in the verbiage, so I fixed it:
16 MA Rodger, for clarification, a rose by any other name is still a rose. My name is irrelevant, as is your own. I am dealing with what you WRITE here, and that’s it.
A clarification is sorely needed here, in that I am not speaking to you Rodger, but about what you said. I have nothing to prove and will not go there. Your understandig is your problem not anyone else’s in my view.
I believe your comments speak for themselves. What others *believe* about that is their business, not mine.
I think your prior comments about Killian and the ref he gave are stupid, and an insult to the *groups* collective intelligence bordering on childish gibberish and so far off base Strawman simply doesn’t cut it as the right word to use linguistically.
There’s more reason and logic in one of my words than in the 4 posts you have made thus far on the subject raised by Killian. The assumptions made are wrong, the conclusions are wrong, the subject matter is not addressed even once. That’s my view.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0082-z
study on Antarctica ice melt is behind a paywall. Guardian and WAPO are reporting the study ways coastal glaciers are melting from below at faster rate than had been predicted. It happens almost every time that when the calculated rate of change has to be adjusted because actual occurrence is varying from predicted rate of change that the adjustment has to be in the category of “happening faster than expected.” I would love to see a post about that topic. If this is true, as I think it most assuredly is, then climate scientists should be asking themselves, why is the variation from prediction is happening so much in one direction? All models are wrong, but some are useful is a pleasant aphorism, but when the majority of the models are wrong in one direction or another, it suggests a systematic problem with the models, does it not?
Don’t feed the trolls, ignore the theatrics, let’s talk about climate science. I wonder if the Nature article really says what the Guardian and WAPO think it says? Anybody looking at the source article?
Cheers
Mike
MartinJBsays
HR (@25): Reminds me of when Victor showed up on Tamino’s pages under the name “docgee”. Same voice, different name.
Mr. Know It Allsays
16, 18, 19, 20…..Oh Good Gawd Almighty! It looks like this thread is going to devolve into another insult-fest as usual! It’s like playing cards with my brothers kids!
Try to stick to science folks. Talk about “policy”, “Pruitt may be invited to the Korean Summit”, and “leadership in the US” is not science – that’s politics – and it belongs in the mitigation thread, not in a science thread.
Back to science, please explain to me or provide a link where I can review the math used in climate science computer models to calculate the increased temperature rise due to increased CO2 levels. Just want to know the method used in the models. Do not want to know, yet, how the feedbacks increase the temperature rise – just want to understand how CO2 concentration is used in the models. Does anyone know? Before I can become a “believer” in AGW, I want to have a reasonable understanding of what the scientific experts are telling us. And, no, I do not want to read an entire book about it, or to read the 1898 literature on it, I want to know basically how the all-mighty, all-knowing, 97%-concensus-approved, cannot-be-questioned, computer models work. I don’t need to see the code, just the basic math used. Maybe there’s a flow-chart for the computer programs that would be useful? Do programmers make flow-charts like they did when I was in school back in the last ice age?
And RSS has posted for March with a TLT global anomaly of +0.54ºC, another a bit of a bounce back, up from +0.49ºC in February. January sat at +0.56ºC. It is 5th warmest March on record (=6th in UAH) behind March 2016, 2010, 1998, 2017. Last month was 6th warmest Feb with Jan the 7th warmest Jan.
March 2018 sits as 52nd highest RSS TLT anomaly on-record for all-months (=74th in UAH).
The three-month average gives the 6th warmest start to the year (9th in UAH) behind 2016, 2010, 1998, 2017 & 2007, all excepting last year an El Nino years which TLT gives bigger wobbles to than the surface records. See here for a graph of recent years’ monthly anomalies (usually 2 clicks to ‘download your attachment’)
The RSS TLT Browser (linked above) shows the rise in the RSS TLT anomaly since Feb was due to strong warming in mid-northern latitudes with elsewhere only the tropics not recording a drop in anomaly.
This month’s RSS and UAH TLT numbers also means that the future combined RSS & UAH TLT anomaly has to average below zero for the next 33 months for the foolhardy denialists to win the Decadal TLT bet. Such a run of low anomalies was last seen starting way back in 1992. A graph of the progress of the bet can be found here (usually 2 clicks). The only remaining question is how quickly the ‘pyramid tace’ on that graph disappears off the bottom of the graph.
Killiansays
#26 nigelj said Killian @18, ha, fair enough. However that ancient ecological knowledge has been carefully observed, collected and checked over generations, so I would contend it is actually moderately science based anyway.
Really, Sherlock? I hadn’t noticed. Thanks for informing me of what I’ve been trying to teach you for a year or more… You make a strange habit of doing this sort of thing.
I clearly suggested it’s your tendency to rely on instinct and intuition
That is more wrong than should be possible given the number of interactions we have had, but a good analyst you are not.
Gestur Davidsonsays
Hank Roberts:
A belated but sincere thanks for posting the link to that study on soil erosion in North Dakota back in the November 2017 Unforced Variations (#55). It had some important information that I used in writing the first of what I hope will be a series of familiar essays in which I try to bring selected ideas—that my reading of Aldo Leopold has placed in my head—into a contemporary context and personal meaning for me.
On Dave Franzen’s webpage at NDSU, I discovered a YouTube lecture he gave that covers in more detail the research results he presented in the piece you linked. https://youtu.be/vQF0hy2crH0
Finally, if you’d like to read my essay—“New Directions in My Thinking I Owe to the Compass Plant (Silphium laciniatum)”—google my name and the email address given in some of the papers I wrote or co-authored is still valid, although I’m long since retired.
Dr. Systemic Causationsays
A few useful recent papers/work on Sub-Arctic Tundra Methane fluxes etc.
After a short-lived warm phase at ~700 cal. yr BP, the climate again cooled, and a progressive climate warming trend was evident from the most recent sediment samples, where the biological assemblages seem to have experienced an eutrophication-like response to climate warming. The temperature reconstruction showed more similarities with the climate development in the Siberian side of the Urals than with northern Europe. This study provides a characteristic archive of arctic lake ontogeny and a valuable temperature record from a remote climate-sensitive area of northern Russia. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959683616660168
Interannual Variability of Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Nitrous Oxide Fluxes in Subarctic European Russian Tundra
Here, we summarize the growing season fluxes of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide measured by chamber techniques over the study years. We analyzed the flux time-series together with the local environmental data in order to understand the drivers of interannual variability. Detailed soil profile measurements of greenhouse gas concentrations, soil moisture and temperature provide insights into soil processes underlying the net emissions to the atmosphere. The multiannual time-series allows us to assess the importance of the different greenhouse gases and landforms to the overall climate forcing of the study region. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AGUFM.B11J..07M
(already mentioned here) Methane production as key to the greenhouse gas budget of thawing permafrost on climate relevant time scales
Authors:
Knoblauch, C. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AGUFM.B31J..01K
Highly recommended
Methane Feedbacks to the Global Climate System in a Warmer World
Joshua F. Dean
Here we describe the most important natural environments for methane production that have the potential to produce a positive climate feedback. We discuss how these feedbacks may develop in the coming centuries under predicted climate warming using a cross‐disciplinary approach. We emphasize the importance of considering methane dynamics at all scales, especially its production and consumption and the role microorganisms play in both these processes, to our understanding of current and future global methane emissions. Marrying large‐scale geophysical studies with site‐scale biogeochemical and microbial studies will be key to this.
Sediment CH4 release enhances substrate availability for aerobic methanotrophy in ocean waters and thus increases O2 consumption. This process together with a warming‐induced decreased solubility of O2 and a reduction in ocean ventilation might lead to expanding ocean hypoxia (Yamamoto et al., 2014).
Figure 6 – Estimated timescales of the potential CH4 climate feedbacks
8.3 Limitations and Future Directions
The interconnected nature of the feedbacks discussed in this review, and their mismatched timelines, makes complete understanding of their interactions complex and reliable predictions difficult (Khalil & Rasmussen, 1993). We have focused here on CH4 climate feedbacks from a bottom‐up perspective, that is, based on observations at the Earth’s surface. However, there is considerable disagreement between the global CH4 budgets derived from these observations and those derived from atmospheric, or top‐down, approaches (Table 1).
The renewed increase in atmospheric CH4 since 2007 is evidence of a new global‐scale imbalance between sources and sinks. Increased emissions from the feedbacks discussed in this review would increase this imbalance in the future, but it is unclear how the atmospheric OH sink will respond to these additional emissions. Given the many uncertainties in the global CH4 budget and the potential major feedbacks, continued and expanded monitoring of the evolution of atmospheric CH4 is required to provide high‐quality top‐down constraints on the source‐sink imbalance. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017RG000559
Primary Research Article
Warming of subarctic tundra increases emissions of all three important greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide
Carolina Voigt
Taken together, our results emphasize the tight linkages between plant and soil processes, and different soil layers, which need to be taken into account when predicting the climate change feedback of the Arctic. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.13563
I think what these papers are saying when one combines all the info and the top line advice prognosis recommendations conclusions is crystal clear and should be noted. It should be sufficient to potentially change some poeple’s beliefs/opinions and their future behavior/responses about ghg feedbacks driven by the arctic regions as temperatures and ghg emissions continue to rise the next 25 years at least with NO CH4+CO2 feedback mechanisms.
nigelj @20,
Concerning ‘skyrockety’, here is no need to “add it to the dictionary” as you suggest. Rather it simply needs adding to ‘more’ dictionaries. Despite Systemic Causation @22 reporting he that had “done the proper research” (not the usual adjective to attach to the noun ‘research’) and that “there is no such word as ‘skyrockety’, in truth the word is already a dictionary word. (Another strange fact is that the person who most used this ‘skyrockety’ word prior to the complaint @22 was the very same SystemicCausation: this I can report both ‘properly’ and easily as I have a searchable spreadsheet groaning under the weight of originally Thomas and now it seems SystemicCausation verbage.)
skyrockety – adjective – ‘Resembling or characteristic of a sky rocket; explosive.’
Dr. Systemic Causationsays
29 Dr. MA Rodger regarding Lakoff
This lecture by Lakoff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuUnMCq-ARQand prove that you can teach an old dog new tricks by posting a ‘review’ of it and what you learned that you wished you knew when teaching systems thinking (if you wish, I don’t want to embarrass you.) (I am learning as I go)
Would you please give the group the benefit of your knowledge and insights by critiquing that Lakoff lecture like you have critiqued Killian and the Knoblauch paper? Focusing especially on anything in that which might enhance our solving the coming climate change catastrophe before it happens or enabling climate models to be enhanced in their predictive power.
SystemicCausation @37 (700 words)
(I see you’re now clutching a doctorate of some form. Well done you.)
You set out allegedly “(a) few useful recent papers/work on Sub-Arctic Tundra Methane fluxes etc. “
You evidently aim these five papers at me believing that they present convincing material contrary to my current understanding of permafrost CH4 feedbacks, as you say “I think what these papers are saying when one combines all the info and the top line advice prognosis recommendations conclusions is crystal clear and should be noted.” While I don’t understand what you mean by “the top line advice prognosis recommendations conclusions,” perhaps these ‘chrystal clear’ papers will convert me to “Skyrocketry”.
Yet SystemicCausation, in the past your thoughts have so often proved entirely worthless, so don’t hold your breath.
Knoblauch et al (2018) ‘Methane production as key to the greenhouse gas budget of thawing permafrost’
The findings of this paper are already a matter of dispute between you and me, in that my not inconsiderable assessments of this paper and its context in UVMarch2018 @365 and @378 and @393 & @406 which show zero “Skyrocketry” are already dismissed by you as “exaggeration, flawed cherry-picking and seemingly endless Strawman creation” although the rationale you present underlying such comment is mostly non-existent and nowhere approaching adequate.
Dean et al (2018) ‘Methane Feedbacks to the Global Climate System in a Warmer World’
You present @37 a lot of blather from this wide-ranging study but fails to spot the main finding germane to the issue at hand. This failure is a little strange as the assessed scale of future permafrost CH4 emissions are plain within the paper’s Fig 6 while Section 6.4 – Sensitivity of Permafrost Methane Fluxes to Climate Change concludes “The potential strength of the permafrost CH4 feedback may be considered small through to 2100 but remains uncertain at these and longer timescales.” This finding is not supportive of the “Skyrocket” position under consideration.
…no, I do not want to read an entire book about it…
Too bad, as “A Vast Machine” would be a good choice, if you were willing to take the time. Not actually a painful experience reading it… in fact, I thought it was pretty interesting.
As to the radiative transfer math, it’s my understanding that it’s not really amenable to hand calculation–the calculations are too voluminous, I think–which is why that piece of the puzzle didn’t get thoroughly nailed down until it became possible to automate the calculations with computers. (If I’m mis-stating this, please correct me, someone!)
There are educative models of this, however–haven’t tried ’em myself, to be frank–this may be helpful:
Could this help understand how to communicate effective solutions for systems thinking and causing systemic changes?
Lakoff https://youtu.be/WuUnMCq-ARQ?t=1h23m42s
#31 mike said …glaciers are melting from below at faster rate than had been predicted. It happens almost every time… the calculated rate of change has to be adjusted because actual occurrence is varying from predicted rate of change… “happening faster than expected.” I would love to see a post about that topic. If this is true
What would be truly useful is an analysis of past scenrios, across the board, vs. reality to get a sense of what “faster than expected” means at this point, and vs. what time in the past?
Basic Radiation Calculations
The foundation of any calculation of the greenhouse effect was a description of how radiation and heat move through a slice of the atmosphere. At first this foundation was so shaky that nobody could trust the results. With the coming of digital computers and better data, scientists gradually worked through the intricate technical problems. A rough idea was available by the mid 1960s, and by the late 1970s, the calculations looked solid — for idealized cases. Much remained to be done to account for all the important real-world factors, especially the physics of clouds. (This genre of one-dimensional and two-dimensional models lay between the rudimentary, often qualitative models covered in the essay on Simple Models of Climate and the elaborate three-dimensional General Circulation Models of the Atmosphere.) Warning: this is the most technical of all the essays. Keywords: climate change, carbon dioxide CO2, computer models, greenhouse effect, infrared saturation
Subsections: Early Attempts – The CO2 Greenhouse Effect Demonstrated (1950-1967) – Further Uses of Primitive Calculations
Looking for a complete explanation of greenhouse warming, equations and all? For basic physics in one page see Wikipedia’s “idealized greenhouse model” article. But you can only really understand the system by studying a textbook that explains how to run the equations on a large computer model that takes into account crucial factors like convection, clouds and ocean circulation (see the links page).
“No branch of atmospheric physics is more difficult than that dealing with radiation. This is not because we do not know the laws of radiation, but because of the difficulty of applying them to gases.” — G.C. Simpson(1)
KIA 33: provide a link where I can review the math used in climate science computer models to calculate the increased temperature rise due to increased CO2 levels. Just want to know the method used in the models.
If the second link doesn’t work because of the blanks, just go to my climatology page and click on the “RCM Tutorial” link. Or substitute %20 for the blanks.
Killiansays
Reading this article will leave you wanting to use your cell phone a lot less. Something not discussed is, given what seems to be a clear carcinogenic effect from cell radiation, what effect might be happening to the ecosystem? Is this part of the collapse in biota?
Worse, 5G is described as creating a bath of radiation. Would that not spill over to the rest of the ecosystem? Killing off much of the ecosystem is a major uptick in climate issues.
Slightly OT (but giving relevant empirical back story, for those with a bent toward science history)–this 2011 article of mine looks at some of the empirically-based (or practically-oriented) work done on the topic of DLR between the second decade of the 19th century and the 1960s.
(It was written partly in response to folks in denial that DLR could possibly raise surface temperatures, because Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Remember Gerlich and Tscheuschner’s squib?) Related discussion I had led, in one instance, to one allegedly skeptical gentleman insisting that the measured downwelling radiation conveyed *information*, but not *energy*–a hypothesis as novel and imaginative as it is lacking in any logical consistency or, indeed, plausibility. At least it was entertaining, in a nerdy sort of way.)
Notable, in the current context, among the research I discussed was the work of Walter M. Elsasser. He published a study of radiative heat transfer in 1942, working from first principles and doing ‘lab’ experiments–in quotes because his apparatus was 300 meters long and situated next to a CalTech athletic field! His results were used in practical meteorology for a couple of decades, and the 1942 paper, “Heat Transfer by Infrared Radiation in the Atmosphere”, (currently sitting with nearly 500 citations) appears in the references of, for instance, Hansen et al., (1983) “Efficient Three-Dimensional Global Models for Climate Studies: Models I and II”.
Climate Forcings: New Stuff.
New cell phones equal 10 years of keeping an existing phone.
I have made similar statements about new cars, new energy systems, etc. Climate scientists will perhaps want to figure out the forcings of additional tech/complexity.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90165365/smartphones-are-wrecking-the-planet-faster-than-anyone-expected
Biodiversity is falling massively, but what if we counted from 8,000 BCE?
How do biodiversity tipping points interact with climate tipping points? Does it even make sense to separate them in this way?
http://m.gulfnews.com/amp/news/americas/usa/why-does-biodiversity-matter-1.2197149?__twitter_impression=true
393 UV March MA Rodger says something about methane.
some refs however say
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends_ch4/#global_growth
After 20 years an initial mass of methane will have been equivalent in greenhouse effect to about 70 times that mass of carbon dioxide (and the carbon will still be present as (LONG LIVED ) carbon dioxide, the methane oxidation product)
http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/Methane2017.pdf
For the same mass of each gas, methane is at least 100 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Understanding methane sources is important because it is the second-most important contributor to global warming behind carbon dioxide and contributes to smog pollution. Methane is roughly 28 times more efficient at trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere over a 100-year time frame, and current levels of methane in the atmosphere are higher than at any point in the past 2,000 years. NOAA’s global greenhouse gas measurement database shows methane levels have been rising steeply since 2006. The underlying causes of this increase in methane levels are not fully known.
https://research.noaa.gov/News/NewsArchive/LatestNews/TabId/684/ArtMID/1768/ArticleID/13337/New-National-Academies-report-lays-out-path-forward-for-methane-research.aspx
and 1998 snippets
Methane now contributes about 20% to the increased direct radiative forcing
by greenhouse gases compared to preindustrial times [Shine et al.,1995]
Oxidation of CH4 in the troposphere produces carbon monoxide (CO), can lead production of ozone (03), and involves atmospheric oxidant, the hydroxyl radical (OH).
In the stratosphere, methane oxidation … source of water vapor.
A major growth rate decrease in 1992 was partly attributed to a reduced
fossil fuel source resulting from the atmospheric cooling following the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, and reduced biomass burning
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/98JD00923
and
The amount of the greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere is once again increasing rapidly after a period of stagnation through 2007
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-breakthrough-debate-atmospheric-methane.html
While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2.
In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But policymakers typically ignore methane’s warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling a nation’s emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane’s warming impacts over a century, which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-greenhouse-gas-is-methane/
Methane sources are hard to track — though agriculture and oil/gas are two major culprits
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2016/12/12/13915950/methane-atmosphere-rise-agriculture
and
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0074614208606312
last but not least
http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/114/21/5373.full.pdf
It’s not nothing. and is rising “steeply” the science literature says.
any positive feedbacks from present or future methane caltrates degassing and permafrost melt in the arctic regions. any CH4 from these sources has not been included in any future GCSMs or IPPC long term projections afaik and confirmed by many such as Gavin S of nasa and the IPCC reports themselves. Maybe there is nothing to it? Though I do believe the literature says differently at present. Then there is the logic of basic systemic causation driving the climate system changes as well.
April is indeed the cruelist month- as Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un approaches some fear Pruitt may be invited.
I would like help understanding ocean uptake of CO2 in a world where CO2 emissions are dropping rapidly. According to James Hansen, if we reduce emissions by 3%/year starting in 2020, atmospheric CO2 levels will stabilize and we can stay below +1.5ºC warming (see his Young Peoples Burden Paper (Figures 10-12):
https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/8/577/2017/esd-8-577-2017.pdf
According to a conversation I had with Hansen, the reason atmospheric concentration stabilizes is that the ocean sink, that is currently sinking about half of our CO2 emissions, keeps sinking CO2 at around that level so that as we lower emissions at 3%/year (about 50% in 20 years) the oceans are sinking most of our emissions and, therefore, keeping atmospheric concentrations stable.
I knew that oceans sequester about half of our emissions but I thought it tracked the level of emissions closely (the “balance time” was about a year), but if the balance time is longer than a year, the “inertia” of the sink would capture a growing proportion of manmade emissions over time.
Can anyone please explain this mechanism in more detail? What is the “balance time” for ocean CO2 concentration balancing with the atmosphere? I understand that the oceans will eventually sink about 85% of our emissions but that takes on the order of 1000 years. What happens over 100 years if we begin lowering our emissions at 3%/year? What are the physical mechanisms that determine the ocean response time over this period?
Dan Miller, have you googled that question?
I won’t recopy the results of the search into the thread here, but here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=ocean+co2+sequestration++What+are+the+physical+mechanisms+that+determine+the+ocean+response+time
(also for Dan Miller)
Use the “tools” options in the Google search results to limit the question to verbatim results (using all the words in the query) and to select the time range so you see only recent results.
Atmospheric aerosols versus greenhouse gases in the twenty-first century
Meinrat O Andreae
Published 15 July 2007.
DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2007.2051
312
Killian says:
3 SystemicCausation and MA Rodger March @393, 365, 378
all about @312 Killian scientific query
CH4 and Permafrost – This new study seems to take us back to where I thought we were in 2007 with this issue, before some studies started suggesting less dangerous possibilities and certain researchers started getting some pretty serious, and I thought unfair, heat.
I hope someone with some chops will explicate this in plainer English in case I am misunderstanding the gist.
Then Rodger get’s all Strawmanny with “skyrocket?”, and “Schaefer et al (2016) found no sign of it.”, and “no increase in the annual cycle at Barrow over the period to December 2017” (now that’s very short termy compared to 2100+ of Knoblauch and so exceptionally Strawmanny given Knoblauch was not addressing 2017 at all), and “the methane skyrocket” (yet no mentions any 2017 skyrockets anywhere = Argumentatively Strawmanny on steriods) ending with “is there any actual evidence that supports arctic methane skyrocketry theories?” and the answer is no one was speaking of any “skyrocketry theories”, not Killian and not Knoblauch.
What Killian said @387 was “Basically, this research says the risk of significant CH4 emissions this century is substantially higher than believed before this paper, assuming it is accurate.”
That’s this century and not the post summer of 2016 nor 2017 – which is probably why Killian then said in @388 That study in no way says there should be a big sign of emissions now, only that future emissions should be higher than other studies have found because they were over too short a time frame. No Straw Men, please.
393 MA Rodger’s reply curiously still includes-
– Such methods do not in any way include a ‘Get out of explaining your evidence/method’ card.
– as of end-2017 I see no evidence for a recent surge in late-summer CH4 emissions from the arctic,
– With an absence of such evidence, it is very likley that we can negate the CH4 emissions (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – especially regarding the scientific evidence produced by Knoblauch towards the future – very Strawmanny yet again despite request to avoid them)
To whit Killian ably responds with @400
– Let me know when you 1. care to address the point I made, which you did not, and 2. when you actually have a question.
– To be clear, you stated there had been no increase measured. I pointed out the paper in no way said there had been. Straw Man.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/02/unforced-variations-mar-2018/comment-page-8/#comment-700099
I think the comments made by Rodger were overall Strawman, and stupid, wrong, missed the point, off base, unrelated to the Knoblauch Letter Graphs and Data, emotive, flippant, and especially unnecessary, unhelpful and unscientific.
Strawman? – You misrepresented someone’s argument to make it easier to attack.
In this instance both Killian and Knoblauch
By exaggerating, misrepresenting, or just completely fabricating someone’s argument, it’s much easier to present your own position as being reasonable, but this kind of dishonesty serves to undermine honest rational debate.
Indeed I think it does undermine rational debate and discussions and this happens very regularly usually daily from my anecdotal reading at least.
Knoblauch et al CH4 key issues extract from
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0095-z.epdf?referrer_access_token=QimruZqY0uQyvJhlxat8ItRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0N8I-MYIYWzKL_kSfxnCJqK5MhEqa1ECTKGMkwkdtwwdRBnpqZb1-iie3xj4GeIn_ATzYOYZ_qH4owg6tA5W_yYLypIP2SUN5-B1T5yexwNadXdwCZt3wyAarxCPC0Nv3lXljO2n4dUQQDimyNua3Tnd21O6bRqgq5YEXModik7bKXZTRVCsXL5btzFCn1ue-c-ltsrUkl1ZlWfKJ4h4XiaA6qEcw5474V3V54ossVOcVqoW3t1_ow7xF60nqcgwrNXk5mNIEx9Z6M48j2ZmaN7wOxfwaQ5BDzgkO51tABEDT710d1AeRsMA44IH8haLVAGf3Z3T9_HC0MLnAaJfWJo&tracking_referrer=www.washingtonpost.com
Page one column two
Therefore, the current evidence suggests that permafrost thaw in dry soils will cause a stronger permafrost carbon–climate feedback than in water-saturated soils 1,7. However, anoxic incubation studies of permafrost are scarce and generally last for only several days to weeks 4–6. Consequently, the role of CH4 production on climate-relevant timescales is still highly uncertain.
We challenged the existing view that CH4 production is of minor importance for organic carbon decomposition in thawing permafrost by two hypotheses.
(1) The reported low contribution of CH4 production to anoxic carbon decomposition in thawing permafrost is due to the lack of an active methanogen community that only establishes over longer time periods.
(2) Long-term anoxic permafrost organic matter decomposition releases less carbon but more CO2–Ce than oxic organic matter decomposition when considering the higher GWP of CH4.
To test these hypotheses, we combined long-term incubation studies (> 7 yrs) of permafrost samples with numerical modelling and simulated both oxic and anoxic GHG production from thawing permafrost until 2100.
(refs are included in the Nature Letter and in Supplemental)
I believe, based on long term evidence, that it would be very much better if one or two of
Gavin Schmidt
Michael Mann
Rasmus Benestad
Ray Bradley
Stefan Rahmstorf
Eric Steig
David Archer
Ray Pierrehumbert
would address Killian’s query about this paper, rather than others here who seem to regularly default their style and comments into ridicule of others, exaggeration, flawed cherry-picking and seemingly endless Strawman creation. I believe this destroys the potential value of this blog service provided by working climate scientists.
Logical Fallacy proponents are, in my view, far more suited to WUWT type blogs and Brietbart Fox News comments pages and not here. YMMV.
The problem with smartphones and their ultimate high use of energy and resources is the built in osolescence. For example, the memory in the cheaper devices fills up with ‘updates” alarmingly fast, and it looks like my phone will be full after just three years or less. And without updates, various things stop working properly. Three years is just not good enough.
Killian, can you indeed please clarify whether you support all that tax payer finance for regenerative farming described in the link you posted? Because when I proposed better environmental laws, and subsidies for permaculture etc, you rubbished me. Have you now changed your mind?
March average for Bering Sea SIA?
Here’s the top 5 (lowest SIA) from Neven:
2001: 401 K
2015: 369 K
1996: 341 K
1989: 310 K
2018: 172 K
Most recent highest SIA was +800K in 2012
‘skyrockety’ or a ‘skylab crashing’ down upon humanity’s head?
Natural variation maybe?
Natural climate variability refers to the variation in climate parameters caused by nonhuman forces. There are two types of natural variability: those external and internal to the climate system.
No need to panic. Lot’s of time left to make a difference. Many Decades at least.
Skyrockety Show Down or Calamity Countdown?
I just noticed that NASA posted an update on their satellite sea level observations for the period ending 12/17/17.
After over a year of sideways and downward movement from late 2015 through early 2017, the most recent NASA report shows that over the past year an acceleration in sea level rise has become visible on the NASA graph, even with just a quick glance (then again, while the long term trend is consistently upward, the annual trend is so variable, that it’s likely foolish on my part to suggest a change in trend based on the most recent periods of increase which have only been occurring for less than 12 months).
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
The 2/27/18 PNAS report that sea level rise was accelerating barely seemed to get any notice (of course, how could it compete with a story about hush money paid to a porn star to keep quiet about her decade ago one-night stand with Trump)
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/9/2022
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11022018/sea-level-rise-accelerating-satellite-study-coastal-flood-risk-antarctica-oceans
ATTP recently posted this video which includes a segment from our very own Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate. It is very well done so I thought I’d repost here. Enjoy.
Smithsonian Magazine
In this special program, NASA Goddard director and earth scientist Gavin Schmidt and Penn State climate scientist Richard Alley discuss what makes our paleoclimate models so robust—and how they can be used to confidently predict the future. In recent years, interdisciplinary work between data scientists and modelers is promising to make global models more accurate, detailed, and useful to those charting the future of our planet.
https://www.facebook.com/smithsonianmagazine/videos/vb.47619793252/10155667116273253/?type=2&theater
Dan @5.
The oceans are not a single reservoir for CO2, but a combination of near surface waters and deeper layers. Balance time for those surface layers is short, but for the deep ocean, CO2 doesn’t diffuse but is gradually carried there by slow moving ocean currents, these may take on the order of a thousand years to complete. I once worked out an emissions schedule for keeping CO2 concentration fixed, initial reductions had to be steep, roughly 50% so that instantaneously sinks equal emissions, but as the sinks with short time constants are saturated quickly, the slower sinks begin to dominate. Even after several hundred years the constant concentration scenario still had emission rates of a few percent of peak…
Of course other feedbacks can come into play. Release of Carbon in melting permafrost being one, and changes in ocean temperatures and distribution of land vegetation and so on will clearly complicate the issue.
So when we have a new empty UV thread at RC, where’s Thomas when you need him? Never fear. We now have SystemicCausation as a substitute ultra-verbose Skyrocketman.
This time last week we were informed by our new-thread-blocker-to-be that “Data indicates that the CO2 annual increase rate is accelerating.” The data presented was the annual CO2 rise averaged over the previous week (+2.72ppm) and the previous decade (+2.34ppm).
Of course, the decadal value hasn’t shifted since then but the average for the last week is now +1.79ppm. So is it now true to say ”Data indicates that the CO2 annual increase rate is decelerating“? Or is there some other phenomenon to cherry-pick and skyrocket about this week?
Systemic Causation @3 (500 words)
I don’t think a press release counts as ”scientific literature” and without belittling the impact of anthorpogenic-caused CH4 emissions, if I rail against CO2-skyrocketry when CO2-forcing with its multi-millenia lifespan continues to grow at ~1.5%/year, I am hardily going to ignore your unmitigated CH4 skyrocketry and bring it back to a more solid foundation. With reference to this EPA webpage and also more up-to-date CH4 data*, the methane rise “since 2006” means CH4 climate forcing with its multi-year lifespan is now growing at ~0.5%/year. In 2016 total CH4 forcing relative to CO2 forcing would have dropped below the 25% mark for the first time in history.
*Note the recent rise of CH4 concentrations peaked in 2015.(120 words)
SystemicCausation @9&10 (1,340 words)
Even if they were done properly, is such a lengthy review from the March UV thread or summation of Knoblauch et al (2018) actually justified. And even with such lengthy blather, I note your failure to appraise the comment @406.
If you feel my rebutting of Killian’s skyrocketry regarding Knoblauch et al (2018) is ”exaggerating, misrepresenting, or just completely fabricating someone’s argument” so as to make it ”much easier to present (my) own position as being reasonable” and that ”this kind of dishonesty serves to undermine honest rational debate”; if you feel all that, you would have more sympathy from me if you were able to demonstrate this alleged ”dishonesty”, or even better begin by demonstrating some justification for the skyrocketry.
But I fear that is asking too much of you. (130 words)
Omega @15. I would think that initial reductions need to be steep to keep atmospheric CO2 constant. Does it stay constant (after a short while) with 3%/year reductions?
Also, the idea is to keep warming below +1.5ºC even with the current energy imbalance (warming in the pipeline) and reductions in aerosols that accompany emissions reductions (though Hansen says the impact of aerosols from fossil fuels was overstated and other manmade aerosols seem to dominate). Is this possible? We are already at 1~1.2ºC warming. Let’a leave permafrost and other feedback out of it for now.
#407 nigelj said The only reliable source off knowledge about this world is science based.
Thus ignorance reveals itself.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1890/1051-0761%282000%29010%5B1270%3AUTEKIS%5D2.0.CO%3B2
Or this:
http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/plants-and-trees-communicate-help-each-other-and-even-poison-enemies-through-an-unseen-web
Besides defense, it also serves as a communication network, connecting even to plants which are far away. Paul Stamets first had the idea of such a network in the 1970s, while studying fungi under an electron microscope. He found that there were startling similarities between the precursor to the internet, the US defense department’s ARPANET, and these fungal networks. Yet, it took decades of research to uncover the sheer breadth of the phenomenon. Other scientists have since likened it to an animal’s nervous system.
Or, heck, even my own Aug 2015 post on El Ninos and Arctic Sea Ice… an effect that isn’t supposed to exist.
And… and…. and…
“What a fool believes he sees no wise man has the power to reason away.” – D. Brothers
16 MA Rodger, for clarification, a rose by any other name is still a rose. My name is irrelevant, as is your own. I am dealing with what you WRITE here, and that’s it.
A clarification is sorely needed here, in that I am not speaking to you Rodger, but about what you said. I have nothing to prove and will not go there. Your understandig is your problem not anyone else’s in my view.
I believe your comments speak for themselves. What others *believe* about that is their business, not mine.
I think your prior comments about Killian and the ref he gave are stupid, and an insult to the *groups* collective intelligence bordering on childish gibberish and so far off base Strawman simply doesn’t cut it as the right word to use linguistically.
There’s more reason and logic in one of my words than in the 4 posts you have made thus far on the subject raised by Killian. The assumptions made are wrong, the conclusions are wrong, the subject matter is not addressed even once. That’s my view.
Lest we forget – the request he made was this: I hope someone with some chops will explicate this in plainer English in case I am misunderstanding the gist.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/02/unforced-variations-mar-2018/comment-page-7/#comment-696785
I hope someone here can address that genuine query, for it appears to meMA Rodger lacks Chops and an ability to stay on track, unfortunately.
OK?
This is enough.
Further pointless repetitions of ridiculous points should get boreholed. Try harder to be interesting! And at least half-accurate!
OMG warning warning Rodger a skyrockety 678 word count!
– here, please check the number is correct, hurry. This cannot stand.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/03/forced-responses-mar-2018/comment-page-6/#comment-700898
Strawmanish and childish enough of a comment for you Al?
Really, where’s an adult (or a policeman) when you need one?
Memo for MA Rodger (and others)
From RC Founder Prof Michael Mann
April 2nd 2018
Mann called upon audience members to shift the conversation on global warming, bypassing the fight against climate-change denial with informed discussions about best solutions.
“This is really an ethical obligation that we have not to destroy the planet,” he said. “We will need leadership in the U.S.”
(May as well start right here on RC. Yes? )
An interesting sidenote. the title of his talk was: “A Return to the Madhouse: Climate Change Denial in the Age of Trump.” That’s odd.
Anyway, According to Mann, these changes will only become more intense and difficult to adapt to, unless the world economy is transformed to no longer depend upon fossil fuels.
“We have to fight for the role of objective science in policy-making,” said Mann
“I think people have awakened in the past few weeks to the fact that people still have a voice,” said Mann. “We need to hear your voices.”
https://www.athensnews.com/news/campus/speaker-at-ou-takes-aim-at-climate-change-denial/article_b1af5ca2-35d5-11e8-8234-b3926e0e9f84.html
Try this section to test out any new ethical efforts … and have your voice heard!
This month’s open thread on responses to climate change (politics, adaptation, mitigation etc.). Please stay focused on the overall topic. Digressions into the nature and history of communism/feudal societies/anarchistic utopias are off topic and won’t be posted.
(one can only hope that’s the case – no guarantees there, unfortunately.)
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/03/forced-responses-mar-2018/comment-page-6/
Having done the proper research I can confirm there is no such word as “skyrockety”
1 – https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=skyrockety
2 – https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/skyrocket
Given the admonition to please reflect on the whether you are using your time online to maximum efficiency I humbly request that from now on any use of the word skyrockety in any comment be immediately consigned to the Borehole where it belongs.
Thank you.
UAH prompt as usual, are reporting a TLT global anomaly for March of +0.24ºC, a bit of a bounce back up from +0.20ºC in February. It is =6th warmest March on record (following the 10th warmest January and 8th warmest February last month) and is tied with March 2002 and behind Feb 2016, 2010, 1998, 2004, 2007.
March 2018 sits as =74th highest UAH TLT anomaly on-record for all-months.
It is the 9th warmest start to the year, the top ten being 2016 +0.72ºC, 1998 +0.53ºC, 2010 +0.49ºC, 2017 +0.32ºC, 2007 +0.29ºC, 2004 +0.27ºC, 2002 +0.26ºC, 2003 +0.25ºC, 2018 +0.23ºC, 2015 +0.23ºC, the top of the pile dominated by El Nino years which TLT gives bigger wobbles to than the surface records.
I note the grand AGM-busting thesis of Looney Lord Monckton et al is defended my Monckton in a post at Woy’s (after Woy said bad things about this grand thesis). Happily and unlike other versions, this AGM-busting account does manage to give some inkling of what the Looney Lord is on about (prior to him losing the plot) and the basis underlying the grand thesis can be set out as follows:-
☻ AGW is driven by climate forcings that are multiplied three-fold by net positive feedbacks (a finding the Looney Lord hotly disputes).
☻ In pre-industrial times prior to AGW, the natural non-condensing GHGs (NOGs, apparently) gave an average global temperature of 287K, 32K above the theoretical 255K black-body temperature.
☻ This 32K is often accounted for as a directly-NOGs-forced 8K that is multiplied four-fold by feedbacks.
☻ A 255K black-body involves no feedbacks.
☻ Yet if an extra 8K of warming is forced by NOGs onto a sun-warmed 255K world and results in an extra 24K of feedback warming, why didn’t the sun-warmed 255K result in some feedback?
(At this point, the Looney Lord loses the plot totally. He decides that the 255K would result in a +23.3K feedback response yielding a zero-NOGs global average temperature of 278.3K. NOGs + feedback then give +8.7K warming to yield the 288K pre-industrial temperature and a denialist-friendly ECS of 1.2ºC.)
So the interesting question is ‘what feedbacks would be invoked in a zero-NOGs world?
Lacis et al (2010) show a fifty-year-old zero-NOGs world still cooling at 253K but with some remaining atmospheric H2O and clouds which must provide some sort feedback, as would any albedo change from a sunless ultra-cold earth.
Merlis & Schneider (2010) show a zero-NOGs water-world to be a little warmer (perhaps 270K from their Fig 1) but they fail to consider the effect of accumulating ice at the poles. Would this accumulation result in ice/water-free tropical deserts (they do mention deserts but not in this context), deserts that would put an end to any serious atmospheric H2O warming resulting from the hot noon-day tropical temperatures?
http://start-mp3.su/songs/systemic-causation-thomas-sowell-238334169469.html
Killian @18, ha, fair enough. However that ancient ecological knowledge has been carefully observed, collected and checked over generations, so I would contend it is actually moderately science based anyway. I clearly suggested it’s your tendency to rely on instinct and intuition that seems to get out of hand at times, but you miss the point as usual.
SystemicCausation @22. So the word skyrockety gets under your skin. Skyrockety is rather descriptive. I say add it to the dictionary.
One to worry about: “Underwater melting of Antarctic ice far greater than thought, study finds. The base of the ice around the south pole shrank by 1,463 square kilometres between 2010 and 2016” Study published April 2 in Nature Geoscience.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/02/underwater-melting-of-antarctic-ice-far-greater-than-thought-study-finds
Hank Roberts @25,
It is bizarre that when I google “Systemic Causation” the first reference is to a post by Judy ‘air-head’ Curry who in turn refers to an essay by a George Lakoff who had coined the term in an article a few weeks earkier (actually “the second of two articles”) which contains the wonderous line “No language in the world has a way in its grammar to express systemic causation.”
Curry is rather dismissive of the term “Systemic Causation”, accusing it of being “a license to blame anything on global warming.” Yet she manages to end a little more respectfully towards Lakoff seeing his artilce as “Lakoff’s article is an interesting and timely intro to the topic” of causation, this a subject of great interest to her as for some time she had “been planning my next ‘series’ on this topic.”
(And as somebody who has actually taught systems thinking, it is beholden on me to point out that the concept described as “Systemic Causation” in Curry’s quote of Lakoff is completely nonsensical. Death by lung cancer so often does have linkage to smoking but it is conceptual twaddle to say that a broken nose from another’s fist is in some way different because it doesn’t have linkages to some prior behaviour/events. The words ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ causation would be better used and if you want to be ‘systemic’, it will be the system you define for your analysis that will determine which form of causation is appropriate to adopt.)
Systematic causation, #19–
There’s important matter in there, but it rather gets lost in the verbiage, so I fixed it:
16 MA Rodger, for clarification, a rose by any other name is still a rose. My name is irrelevant, as is your own. I am dealing with what you WRITE here, and that’s it.A clarification is sorely needed here, in that I am not speaking to you Rodger, but about what you said. I have nothing to prove and will not go there. Your understandig is your problem not anyone else’s in my view.I believe your comments speak for themselves. What others *believe* about that is their business, not mine.I think your prior comments about Killian and the ref he gave are stupid, and an insult to the *groups* collective intelligence bordering on childish gibberish and so far off base Strawman simply doesn’t cut it as the right word to use linguistically.There’s more reason and logic in one of my words than in the 4 posts you have made thus far on the subject raised by Killian. The assumptions made are wrong, the conclusions are wrong, the subject matter is not addressed even once. That’s my view.Lest we forget – the request he made was this: I hope someone with some chops will explicate this in plainer English in case I am misunderstanding the gist.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/02/unforced-variations-mar-2018/comment-page-7/#comment-696785
I hope someone here can address that genuine query,
for it appears to meMA Rodger lacks Chops and an ability to stay on track, unfortunately.OK?
This is enough.
Further pointless repetitions of ridiculous points should get boreholed. Try harder to be interesting! And at least half-accurate!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0082-z
study on Antarctica ice melt is behind a paywall. Guardian and WAPO are reporting the study ways coastal glaciers are melting from below at faster rate than had been predicted. It happens almost every time that when the calculated rate of change has to be adjusted because actual occurrence is varying from predicted rate of change that the adjustment has to be in the category of “happening faster than expected.” I would love to see a post about that topic. If this is true, as I think it most assuredly is, then climate scientists should be asking themselves, why is the variation from prediction is happening so much in one direction? All models are wrong, but some are useful is a pleasant aphorism, but when the majority of the models are wrong in one direction or another, it suggests a systematic problem with the models, does it not?
Don’t feed the trolls, ignore the theatrics, let’s talk about climate science. I wonder if the Nature article really says what the Guardian and WAPO think it says? Anybody looking at the source article?
Cheers
Mike
HR (@25): Reminds me of when Victor showed up on Tamino’s pages under the name “docgee”. Same voice, different name.
16, 18, 19, 20…..Oh Good Gawd Almighty! It looks like this thread is going to devolve into another insult-fest as usual! It’s like playing cards with my brothers kids!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnXgVcrcyWM
Try to stick to science folks. Talk about “policy”, “Pruitt may be invited to the Korean Summit”, and “leadership in the US” is not science – that’s politics – and it belongs in the mitigation thread, not in a science thread.
Back to science, please explain to me or provide a link where I can review the math used in climate science computer models to calculate the increased temperature rise due to increased CO2 levels. Just want to know the method used in the models. Do not want to know, yet, how the feedbacks increase the temperature rise – just want to understand how CO2 concentration is used in the models. Does anyone know? Before I can become a “believer” in AGW, I want to have a reasonable understanding of what the scientific experts are telling us. And, no, I do not want to read an entire book about it, or to read the 1898 literature on it, I want to know basically how the all-mighty, all-knowing, 97%-concensus-approved, cannot-be-questioned, computer models work. I don’t need to see the code, just the basic math used. Maybe there’s a flow-chart for the computer programs that would be useful? Do programmers make flow-charts like they did when I was in school back in the last ice age?
And RSS has posted for March with a TLT global anomaly of +0.54ºC, another a bit of a bounce back, up from +0.49ºC in February. January sat at +0.56ºC. It is 5th warmest March on record (=6th in UAH) behind March 2016, 2010, 1998, 2017. Last month was 6th warmest Feb with Jan the 7th warmest Jan.
March 2018 sits as 52nd highest RSS TLT anomaly on-record for all-months (=74th in UAH).
The three-month average gives the 6th warmest start to the year (9th in UAH) behind 2016, 2010, 1998, 2017 & 2007, all excepting last year an El Nino years which TLT gives bigger wobbles to than the surface records. See here for a graph of recent years’ monthly anomalies (usually 2 clicks to ‘download your attachment’)
The RSS TLT Browser (linked above) shows the rise in the RSS TLT anomaly since Feb was due to strong warming in mid-northern latitudes with elsewhere only the tropics not recording a drop in anomaly.
This month’s RSS and UAH TLT numbers also means that the future combined RSS & UAH TLT anomaly has to average below zero for the next 33 months for the foolhardy denialists to win the Decadal TLT bet. Such a run of low anomalies was last seen starting way back in 1992. A graph of the progress of the bet can be found here (usually 2 clicks). The only remaining question is how quickly the ‘pyramid tace’ on that graph disappears off the bottom of the graph.
#26 nigelj said Killian @18, ha, fair enough. However that ancient ecological knowledge has been carefully observed, collected and checked over generations, so I would contend it is actually moderately science based anyway.
Really, Sherlock? I hadn’t noticed. Thanks for informing me of what I’ve been trying to teach you for a year or more… You make a strange habit of doing this sort of thing.
I clearly suggested it’s your tendency to rely on instinct and intuition
That is more wrong than should be possible given the number of interactions we have had, but a good analyst you are not.
Hank Roberts:
A belated but sincere thanks for posting the link to that study on soil erosion in North Dakota back in the November 2017 Unforced Variations (#55). It had some important information that I used in writing the first of what I hope will be a series of familiar essays in which I try to bring selected ideas—that my reading of Aldo Leopold has placed in my head—into a contemporary context and personal meaning for me.
On Dave Franzen’s webpage at NDSU, I discovered a YouTube lecture he gave that covers in more detail the research results he presented in the piece you linked.
https://youtu.be/vQF0hy2crH0
Finally, if you’d like to read my essay—“New Directions in My Thinking I Owe to the Compass Plant (Silphium laciniatum)”—google my name and the email address given in some of the papers I wrote or co-authored is still valid, although I’m long since retired.
A few useful recent papers/work on Sub-Arctic Tundra Methane fluxes etc.
After a short-lived warm phase at ~700 cal. yr BP, the climate again cooled, and a progressive climate warming trend was evident from the most recent sediment samples, where the biological assemblages seem to have experienced an eutrophication-like response to climate warming. The temperature reconstruction showed more similarities with the climate development in the Siberian side of the Urals than with northern Europe. This study provides a characteristic archive of arctic lake ontogeny and a valuable temperature record from a remote climate-sensitive area of northern Russia.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959683616660168
Human footprints on greenhouse gas fluxes in cryogenic ecosystems
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S1028334X17120133
Interannual Variability of Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Nitrous Oxide Fluxes in Subarctic European Russian Tundra
Here, we summarize the growing season fluxes of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide measured by chamber techniques over the study years. We analyzed the flux time-series together with the local environmental data in order to understand the drivers of interannual variability. Detailed soil profile measurements of greenhouse gas concentrations, soil moisture and temperature provide insights into soil processes underlying the net emissions to the atmosphere. The multiannual time-series allows us to assess the importance of the different greenhouse gases and landforms to the overall climate forcing of the study region.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AGUFM.B11J..07M
(already mentioned here) Methane production as key to the greenhouse gas budget of thawing permafrost on climate relevant time scales
Authors:
Knoblauch, C.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AGUFM.B31J..01K
Highly recommended
Methane Feedbacks to the Global Climate System in a Warmer World
Joshua F. Dean
Here we describe the most important natural environments for methane production that have the potential to produce a positive climate feedback. We discuss how these feedbacks may develop in the coming centuries under predicted climate warming using a cross‐disciplinary approach. We emphasize the importance of considering methane dynamics at all scales, especially its production and consumption and the role microorganisms play in both these processes, to our understanding of current and future global methane emissions. Marrying large‐scale geophysical studies with site‐scale biogeochemical and microbial studies will be key to this.
Sediment CH4 release enhances substrate availability for aerobic methanotrophy in ocean waters and thus increases O2 consumption. This process together with a warming‐induced decreased solubility of O2 and a reduction in ocean ventilation might lead to expanding ocean hypoxia (Yamamoto et al., 2014).
Figure 6 – Estimated timescales of the potential CH4 climate feedbacks
8.3 Limitations and Future Directions
The interconnected nature of the feedbacks discussed in this review, and their mismatched timelines, makes complete understanding of their interactions complex and reliable predictions difficult (Khalil & Rasmussen, 1993). We have focused here on CH4 climate feedbacks from a bottom‐up perspective, that is, based on observations at the Earth’s surface. However, there is considerable disagreement between the global CH4 budgets derived from these observations and those derived from atmospheric, or top‐down, approaches (Table 1).
The renewed increase in atmospheric CH4 since 2007 is evidence of a new global‐scale imbalance between sources and sinks. Increased emissions from the feedbacks discussed in this review would increase this imbalance in the future, but it is unclear how the atmospheric OH sink will respond to these additional emissions. Given the many uncertainties in the global CH4 budget and the potential major feedbacks, continued and expanded monitoring of the evolution of atmospheric CH4 is required to provide high‐quality top‐down constraints on the source‐sink imbalance.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017RG000559
Primary Research Article
Warming of subarctic tundra increases emissions of all three important greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide
Carolina Voigt
Taken together, our results emphasize the tight linkages between plant and soil processes, and different soil layers, which need to be taken into account when predicting the climate change feedback of the Arctic.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.13563
I think what these papers are saying when one combines all the info and the top line advice prognosis recommendations conclusions is crystal clear and should be noted. It should be sufficient to potentially change some poeple’s beliefs/opinions and their future behavior/responses about ghg feedbacks driven by the arctic regions as temperatures and ghg emissions continue to rise the next 25 years at least with NO CH4+CO2 feedback mechanisms.
nigelj @20,
Concerning ‘skyrockety’, here is no need to “add it to the dictionary” as you suggest. Rather it simply needs adding to ‘more’ dictionaries. Despite Systemic Causation @22 reporting he that had “done the proper research” (not the usual adjective to attach to the noun ‘research’) and that “there is no such word as ‘skyrockety’, in truth the word is already a dictionary word. (Another strange fact is that the person who most used this ‘skyrockety’ word prior to the complaint @22 was the very same SystemicCausation: this I can report both ‘properly’ and easily as I have a searchable spreadsheet groaning under the weight of originally Thomas and now it seems SystemicCausation verbage.)
skyrockety – adjective – ‘Resembling or characteristic of a sky rocket; explosive.’
29 Dr. MA Rodger regarding Lakoff
This lecture by Lakoff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuUnMCq-ARQ
and prove that you can teach an old dog new tricks by posting a ‘review’ of it and what you learned that you wished you knew when teaching systems thinking (if you wish, I don’t want to embarrass you.)(I am learning as I go)Would you please give the group the benefit of your knowledge and insights by critiquing that Lakoff lecture like you have critiqued Killian and the Knoblauch paper? Focusing especially on anything in that which might enhance our solving the coming climate change catastrophe before it happens or enabling climate models to be enhanced in their predictive power.
Thank you in advance.
SystemicCausation @37 (700 words)
(I see you’re now clutching a doctorate of some form. Well done you.)
You set out allegedly “(a) few useful recent papers/work on Sub-Arctic Tundra Methane fluxes etc. “
You evidently aim these five papers at me believing that they present convincing material contrary to my current understanding of permafrost CH4 feedbacks, as you say “I think what these papers are saying when one combines all the info and the top line advice prognosis recommendations conclusions is crystal clear and should be noted.” While I don’t understand what you mean by “the top line advice prognosis recommendations conclusions,” perhaps these ‘chrystal clear’ papers will convert me to “Skyrocketry”.
Yet SystemicCausation, in the past your thoughts have so often proved entirely worthless, so don’t hold your breath.
Luoto et al (2016) ‘A 2000-year record of lake ontogeny and climate variability from the north-eastern European Russian Arctic’
This paper presents no evidence on the subject whatever.
Karelin et al (2017) ‘Human footprints on greenhouse gas fluxes in cryogenic ecosystems’
This paper presents no evidence on the subject being concerned with direct human impacts on CH4 emissions (which it says will result in a decrease in CH4 emissions).
Knoblauch et al (2018) ‘Methane production as key to the greenhouse gas budget of thawing permafrost’
The findings of this paper are already a matter of dispute between you and me, in that my not inconsiderable assessments of this paper and its context in UVMarch2018 @365 and @378 and @393 & @406 which show zero “Skyrocketry” are already dismissed by you as “exaggeration, flawed cherry-picking and seemingly endless Strawman creation” although the rationale you present underlying such comment is mostly non-existent and nowhere approaching adequate.
Dean et al (2018) ‘Methane Feedbacks to the Global Climate System in a Warmer World’
You present @37 a lot of blather from this wide-ranging study but fails to spot the main finding germane to the issue at hand. This failure is a little strange as the assessed scale of future permafrost CH4 emissions are plain within the paper’s Fig 6 while Section 6.4 – Sensitivity of Permafrost Methane Fluxes to Climate Change concludes “The potential strength of the permafrost CH4 feedback may be considered small through to 2100 but remains uncertain at these and longer timescales.” This finding is not supportive of the “Skyrocket” position under consideration.
Voigt et al (2016) ‘Warming of subarctic tundra increases emissions of all three important greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide’
The research (now reported fully bar the detailed experimenting in Voigt 2018) applies only to peatlands and concludes that N2O emissions as an issue requiring reappraisal. On the issue considered here of CH4 its conclusions in no way support “Skyrocketry” but rather support the reverse.
So well done SystemicCausation. Your researches have “properly” drawn a dead-duck, again. (470 words)
KIA, #33–
Too bad, as “A Vast Machine” would be a good choice, if you were willing to take the time. Not actually a painful experience reading it… in fact, I thought it was pretty interesting.
As to the radiative transfer math, it’s my understanding that it’s not really amenable to hand calculation–the calculations are too voluminous, I think–which is why that piece of the puzzle didn’t get thoroughly nailed down until it became possible to automate the calculations with computers. (If I’m mis-stating this, please correct me, someone!)
There are educative models of this, however–haven’t tried ’em myself, to be frank–this may be helpful:
https://www.powershow.com/viewfl/442b54-OWFhM/PC_MODTRAN_Tutorial_powerpoint_ppt_presentation
Could this help understand how to communicate effective solutions for systems thinking and causing systemic changes?
Lakoff https://youtu.be/WuUnMCq-ARQ?t=1h23m42s
Or could this help understand that the foundation of all Mathematics lays in Metaphors? https://youtu.be/WuUnMCq-ARQ?t=58m55s
And using Gestalt Circuits when entering into public communication of climate science knowledge? https://youtu.be/WuUnMCq-ARQ?t=1h1m26s
#31 mike said …glaciers are melting from below at faster rate than had been predicted. It happens almost every time… the calculated rate of change has to be adjusted because actual occurrence is varying from predicted rate of change… “happening faster than expected.” I would love to see a post about that topic. If this is true
What would be truly useful is an analysis of past scenrios, across the board, vs. reality to get a sense of what “faster than expected” means at this point, and vs. what time in the past?
Invaluable, I’d think.
KIA, 33, “please provide a link”
Under “Science Links” in the sidebar on every RC page, you’ll find the help you keep asking for.
Nobody here likes recreational typing.
Please read. Start with the first link under “Science Links”
http://history.aip.org/climate
KIA, 33
in fact, let me help you a bit further along:
https://history.aip.org/climate/Radmath.htm
Check out this past RC post.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/the-co2-problem-in-6-easy-steps/
I think the Gunnar Myhre paper might be what you are looking for
http://go.owu.edu/~chjackso/Climate/papers/Myhre_1998_New%20eatimates%20of%20radiative%20forcing%20due%20to%20well%20mixed%20greenhouse%20gasses.pdf
KIA 33: provide a link where I can review the math used in climate science computer models to calculate the increased temperature rise due to increased CO2 levels. Just want to know the method used in the models.
BPL: Here are two.
http://saspcsus.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/64696386/planet%20temperatures%20with%20surface%20cooling%20parameterized.pdf
bartonlevenson.com/RCM Tutorial V2.rtf
If the second link doesn’t work because of the blanks, just go to my climatology page and click on the “RCM Tutorial” link. Or substitute %20 for the blanks.
Reading this article will leave you wanting to use your cell phone a lot less. Something not discussed is, given what seems to be a clear carcinogenic effect from cell radiation, what effect might be happening to the ecosystem? Is this part of the collapse in biota?
Worse, 5G is described as creating a bath of radiation. Would that not spill over to the rest of the ecosystem? Killing off much of the ecosystem is a major uptick in climate issues.
Hmmm…
Simplicity…?
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-think-that-cell-phones-are-safe-a-special-investigation/
@31…
Uh have you tried actually clicking on your supplied link https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0082-z ???
It, uh, is NOT paywalled but rather open access.
Nice responses to KIA, with helpful links, IMO.
Slightly OT (but giving relevant empirical back story, for those with a bent toward science history)–this 2011 article of mine looks at some of the empirically-based (or practically-oriented) work done on the topic of DLR between the second decade of the 19th century and the 1960s.
https://hubpages.com/education/Fire-From-Heaven-Climate-Science-And-The-Element-Of-Life-Part-Two-The-Cloud-By-Night
(It was written partly in response to folks in denial that DLR could possibly raise surface temperatures, because Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Remember Gerlich and Tscheuschner’s squib?) Related discussion I had led, in one instance, to one allegedly skeptical gentleman insisting that the measured downwelling radiation conveyed *information*, but not *energy*–a hypothesis as novel and imaginative as it is lacking in any logical consistency or, indeed, plausibility. At least it was entertaining, in a nerdy sort of way.)
Notable, in the current context, among the research I discussed was the work of Walter M. Elsasser. He published a study of radiative heat transfer in 1942, working from first principles and doing ‘lab’ experiments–in quotes because his apparatus was 300 meters long and situated next to a CalTech athletic field! His results were used in practical meteorology for a couple of decades, and the 1942 paper, “Heat Transfer by Infrared Radiation in the Atmosphere”, (currently sitting with nearly 500 citations) appears in the references of, for instance, Hansen et al., (1983) “Efficient Three-Dimensional Global Models for Climate Studies: Models I and II”.
/historical digression