Watts Up With That?

Mayan ruins in Guatemala.

This is an email I recently received from statistician Dr. Richard Mackey who writes:

The following appeared on Gore’s blog of Nov 19, 2008:

Looking Back to Look Forward

Looking Back to Look Forward November 19, 2008 : 3:04 PM

A new study suggests the Mayan civilization might have collapsed due to environmental disasters:

These models suggest that as ecosystems were destroyed by mismanagement or were transformed by global climatic shifts, the depletion of agricultural and wild foods eventually contributed to the failure of the Maya sociopolitical system,’ writes environmental archaeologist Kitty Emery of the Florida Museum of Natural History in the current Human Ecology journal.

As we move towards solving the climate crisis, we need to remember the consequences to civilizations that refused to take environmental concerns seriously.

If you haven’t read already read it, take a look at Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse.”

This is a most curious reference.

It means that Gore is advocating the abandonment of the IPCC doctrine and barracking for the study and understanding of climate dynamics that ignores totally the IPCC/AWG doctrine and focuses on all the other variables, especially how climate dynamics are driven by atmospheric/oceanic oscillations, the natural internal dynamics of the climate system and the role of the Sun in climate dynamics.

Brian Fagan in Floods, Famines and Emperors  El Nino and the fate of civilisations  Basic Books 1999, shows that the Maya collapse, whilst having complex political, sociological, technological and ecological factors, was largely driven by the natural atmospheric/oceanic oscillations of ENSO and NAO.  The book is one of three by Brian Fagan, Prof of Anthropology UC Santa Barbara, that documents how natural climate variations, ultimately driven by solar activity, have given rise to the catastrophic collapse of civilisations.  The book has a chapter on the Mayan civilisation which collapsed around 800 to 900 AD.

Here are some quotes from his book: Read the rest of this entry »

Source: Mantua, 2000

The essay below has been part of a back and forth email exchange for about a week. Bill has done some yeoman’s work here at coaxing some new information from existing data. Both HadCRUT and GISS data was used for the comparisons to a doubling of CO2, and what I find most interesting is that both Hadley and GISS data come out higher in for a doubling of CO2 than NCDC data, implying that the adjustments to data used in GISS and HadCRUT add something that really isn’t there.

The logarithmic plots of CO2 doubling help demonstrate why CO2 won’t cause a runaway greenhouse effect due to diminished IR returns as CO2 PPM’s increase. This is something many people don’t get to see visualized.

One of the other interesting items is the essay is about the El Nino event in 1878. Bill writes:

The 1877-78 El Nino was the biggest event on record.  The anomaly peaked at +3.4C in Nov, 1877 and by Feb, 1878, global temperatures had spiked to +0.364C or nearly 0.7C above the background temperature trend of the time.

Clearly the oceans ruled the climate, and it appears they still do.

Let’s all give this a good examination, point out weaknesses, and give encouragement for Bill’s work. This is a must read. – Anthony

A guest post by: Bill Illis

People have noted for a long time that the effect of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) should be accounted for and adjusted for in analyzing temperature trends.  The same point has been raised for the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).  Until now, there has not been a robust method of doing so.

This post will outline a simple least squares regression solution to adjusting monthly temperatures for the impact of the ENSO and the AMO.  There is no smoothing of the data, no plugging of the data; this is a simple mathematical calculation.

Some basic points before we continue.

-         The ENSO and the AMO both affect temperatures and, hence, any reconstruction needs to use both ocean temperature indices.  The AMO actually provides a greater impact on temperatures than the ENSO.

-         The ENSO and the AMO impact temperatures directly and continuously on a monthly basis.  Any smoothing of the data or even using annual temperature data just reduces the information which can be extracted.

-         The ENSO’s impact on temperatures is lagged by 3 months while the AMO seems to be more immediate.  This model uses the Nino 3.4 region anomaly since it seems to be the most indicative of the underlying El Nino and La Nina trends.

-         When the ENSO and the AMO impacts are adjusted for, all that is left is the global warming signal and a white noise error.

-         The ENSO and the AMO are capable of explaining almost all of the natural variation in the climate.

-         We can finally answer the question of how much global warming has there been to date and how much has occurred since 1979 for example.  And, yes, there has been global warming but the amount is much less than global warming models predict and the effect even seems to be slowing down since 1979.

-         Unfortunately, there is not currently a good forecast model for the ENSO or AMO so this method will have to focus on current and past temperatures versus providing forecasts for the future.

And now to the good part, here is what the reconstruction looks like for the Hadley Centre’s HadCRUT3 global monthly temperature series going back to 1871 – 1,652 data points. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a look at what black carbon does to radiation flux according to GISS, so it appears they are aware, but maybe not using the right numbers

This is for Asia, I’d really like to see Russia. Also see below the “read more” for an interesting experiment that Mike Smith of WeatherData Inc. did last year to show the effect of carbon on snow. It is a simple experiment that you can do at home. I wonder how much of that soot from Asia finds it’s way to snow at high latitudes?

And here is the article that has been making the rounds this week, h/t to Leif Svalgaard

Click for larger image Grant Stone, QCCCE

(PhysOrg.com) — A detailed analysis of black carbon — the residue of burned organic matter — in computer climate models suggests that those models may be overestimating global warming predictions.
A new Cornell study, published online in Nature Geosciences, quantified the amount of black carbon in Australian soils and found that there was far more than expected, said Johannes Lehmann, the paper’s lead author and a Cornell professor of biogeochemistry. The survey was the largest of black carbon ever published.

As a result of global warming, soils are expected to release more carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, which, in turn, creates more warming. Climate models try to incorporate these increases of carbon dioxide from soils as the planet warms, but results vary greatly when realistic estimates of black carbon in soils are included in the predictions, the study found.

Soils include many forms of carbon, including organic carbon from leaf litter and vegetation and black carbon from the burning of organic matter. It takes a few years for organic carbon to decompose, as microbes eat it and convert it to carbon dioxide. But black carbon can take 1,000-2,000 years, on average, to convert to carbon dioxide.

By entering realistic estimates of stocks of black carbon in soil from two Australian savannas into a computer model that calculates carbon dioxide release from soil, the researchers found that carbon dioxide emissions from soils were reduced by about 20 percent over 100 years, as compared with simulations that did not take black carbon’s long shelf life into account.

The findings are significant because soils are by far the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10 times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from human activities combined. Small changes in how carbon emissions from soils are estimated, therefore, can have a large impact. Read the rest of this entry »