Left to Right: Dr. Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Dr. Paul Knappenberger (President of the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum), Dr. Wally Broecker (Columbia University), and Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert (University of Chicago) pose for a photo after the first of the Global Climate Change forum. Forum I was held at the Adler Planetarium.
From Roger Pielke Jr.’s blog.
Two Decades of No Warming, Consistent With . . .
Over at Real Climate they are busy giving climate skeptics reason to cheer:
We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal, and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.
Imagine, twenty-two or more years (1998 to ~2020) of no new global temperature record. What would that do to the debate?
Real Climate does say something very smart in the piece (emphasis added):
Nature (with hopefully some constructive input from humans) will decide the global warming question based upon climate sensitivity, net radiative forcing, and oceanic storage of heat, not on the type of multi-decadal time scale variability we are discussing here. However, this apparent impulsive behavior explicitly highlights the fact that humanity is poking a complex, nonlinear system with GHG forcing – and that there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond.
As I’ve argued many times, uncertainty is a far batter reason for justifying action than overhyped claims to certainty, or worse, claims that any possible behavior of the climate system is somehow “consistent with” expectations. Policy makers and the public can handle uncertainty, its the nonsense they have trouble with.
Hmmm, I seem to remember making that conjecture awhile back (you published a graph I had made).
I just commented on a way earlier post. Anthony, you are posting so fast — I think this belongs here, if accepted. As this article emphasizes, it is the GHG-forcing fantasy that must be dismantled.
pyromancer76 (08:02:20) :
As many WUWT have been urging, it is not the cold or the warm at the heart of our existence today, it is the falsity that human-origin CO2 or incorrectly labeled Greenhouse Gases (get rid of that term and people’s confusion would lessen) has much of anything to do with climate change, or CO2 with pollution.
I think we should relax about our Sun, the bringer of warmth to Earth. Every hundred years or so (~Gleissberg), for the last few hundred years, it cycles “down”. Leif Svalgaard has pointed to 1912-13 as being similar to today — so far. Also take a look at the early 1800s. I counted the months in all three periods with less than 4 and less than 2 sunpots. 1807-1813 less than 4, 44 months; less than 2, 37 months. 1911-1914 less than 4, 25 months; less than 2, 12 months: 2007-xxxx less than 4, 20 months, less than 2, 10 months. We have had no months at 0 sunspots — yet, I think. In the 19th C there were 3; in the 18th C, 26. Also, we do not know exactly how a lower number of sunspots affects temperature/climate.
If I am correct in my other internet readings, Leif finds somewhat significant cycling on 108 years — don’t know how far back he goes. Basil finds some significance at 104 years.
I am still interested in Ann V’s question — what are the conditions that enabled to emerge from the “Little Ice Age”.
Re Real Climate’s K Swanson claiming that after this cooling, we will return to the dirty warming deeds of CO2 (Randall 20:25), remember the 1930s. How long was that after 1911-1914? The main issues seem to be the essential nature of CO2 and what makes for a “warm period”. How long might this one continue? Can we help it along in any way?
So how far after 2020 do we have to wait to see if their AGW hypothesis pans out? 30 years for a ‘real’ climate system buggered by human carbon emissions to roar its ugly head?
The insanity continues.
I assume that the 1997/8 overshoot is entirely consistent with the GCMs.
And how many months do we now have to save the planet ? Quick, someone call the Palace !
Why is it that professors of French origin so often look like contestants in a game of who can look the most ridiculous?
That can’t be right … because every year since 2000 we have been told that we have “only 10 more years” to “save” the planet from burning to a crisp or something.
What I fear they are doing is getting the people spring-loaded to cry “global warming” when the next natural warming cycle comes along. Considering that we saw warming until the late 1930’s, cooling until 1976, warming until about 2006, and cooling since, there is some evidence of longer term cycles involved. If that is so, then sometime between 2025 and 2035 we have a good possibility of seeing a return of a warming period. The object here is going to be to try to scare the bejezuz out of people when that comes around again and just as soon as we get a few years trending upwards again, turn the chicken-little act back on.
“Nature (with hopefully some constructive input from humans) will decide the global warming question…”
There’s a “question”? That’s new from them. I thought it was “settled”.
…based upon climate sensitivity, net radiative forcing, and oceanic storage of heat, not on the type of multi-decadal time scale variability we are discussing here.
Really? I thought the climate did what the computer models told it to do.
One can only laugh at such buffoonery
This gives them 20 years of more government grants while we wait to see if their “new” models pan out.
“..established pre-1998 trend..” – eyeballing the UAH trend, 1979-1997 is basically flat except the volcanic events.
Doh, El nino spiked the ‘trend’, and now that naughty radiation is dissipating the GHG ‘trend’, no warming (we think) till 2020?
“there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond”.
Succinctly and pithily put – are they joining the real (climate) science debate?
Its all mere HYPOTHESISING! – are you listening Al?
This new RC hypothesis makes perfect sense to me… In fact I think we should wait til 2050 before we decide that AGW is a crock of (snip). Yeah! That’s the ticket… Meanwhile, we can give all our worldly possessions to our betters, the scientists and politicians, while we freeze in the dark.
It makes perfect sense…
So what does the hockey stick look like now ?
So much for the attribution argument-namely “Given that our models realistically simulate natural variability [HA!] they need anthropogenic forcing to explain warming” Hence the IPCC statement “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Oops, major problem. Model internal variability is NOT well simulated by models, as this research itself shows!
My eyes can’t detect much trend growth in the graph of continuously monitored sites (the 2nd graph in http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/ ) between 1940ish and 1997….60 years when anthropic CO2 was taking off. Why should I suddenly expect growth after 2020. Am I right in deducing that the growth in the global chart (post 1950) comes from the addition of the non-continuously monitored sites? What is so special about those sites to give such growth? If the non-continuous sites were presented without the continuous sites I guess the growth would appear to be even higher? Is such a difference chance?
That gives the Alarmists (Hello, Mr. Hansen?) 20 years to RETIRE and still save face.
Very unusual of them to actually look at measured temperatures. I look forward to their explanation of why their favorite computer simulations are nevertheless correct. I’ll get a cold one and watch.
As ridiculous as this situation seems, Swanson is actually heading in the right scientific direction.
I’ve written a reply to his post, here:
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/swansons-not-so-novel-post-at-realclimate/
The dwarf looks cheerful.
All they do is try to justify the cooling that we are experiencing but their El Nino “overshoot” hypothesis is not supported by the amount of cooling we’ve had will will get. How can ONE year of a warmer El Nino packed so much energy that it wouwld take 20 years of constant cooling to “get rid” of the heat? If that was the case, what would have been the actual global temperature that year?
The alarmist’s method is to predict the ridiculous and when it doesn’t come to fruition, to push out the date.
The alarmist have been making predictions my entire life, at least since I can remember, be it population, food or now temperature. They are fortunate that the majority of the population and it’s elected representatives have short memories for these chicken littles hung for continually screaming fire when there is not even smoke.
So Gavin Schmidt really is short. Since he gave that as the reason he lost his debate with Viscount Monckton, maybe he should quit slouching.
Stand up straight, Gavin. Head up, shoulders back! You look beaten down in that picture.
“We hypothesize . . . blah . . . blah . . . ”
Translation: “We never did know what was going on, don’t know now, and it is unlikely we ever will.”
I think when NOAA claim they understand everything from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the sun, yeah it might be true, but the most important part, they obviously don’t understand: The Interior of the Sun. And so, they must find another explanation and the best they come up with… is us. It’s totally shortsighted to think that the sun has always been constant and will always be constant… when in fact it is the biggest VARIABLE in the whole equation.
Sounds like clutching at straws to me – This seems to be demonstrating a belief that the minimum roughness smoothing reflects reality, and next year’s measured values will really be the same as the linear trend including 1998 would project. Where is their physical model to back up this concoction? What drives the lost heat to be stored up where we can’t see it all ready for El Nino to throw it out at us? Did 1998 borrow from before or after on the curve, and why?
How does the energy to drive an overshoot get sucked out of the ether?
mick (08:53:52) :
The dwarf looks cheerful.
Leave him alone – he allowed my comment to be posted at RC.
So what would happen if there were to be another 1997/8 type El Niño event, say in 2019. How much colder would the planet become due to that warming ?
“there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond”.
Tell it to Gore and Hansen.
“Regardless, it’s important to note that we are not talking about global cooling, just a pause in warming. ”
A pause?
UAH data since June 2001. Copy. Paste. Tappety-tap. Add trendline. Tappety-tap….
Er… That’s not a pause, its a ski slope.
But I’m just cherry-picking data of course…
If they think anyone will have anything but scorn for them in 20 years they’re deluding themselves. Future historians will look back on this era a mixture of pity and contempt, and I won’t be surprised if my great-grandkids see that same photo in their high school sociology textbooks, at the beginning of the chapter on mass delusions.
Besides, between now and the next warming cycle we’ll have to deal with the next Ice Age scare. I think its already starting.
“overshot”???
I never knew that heat exchange had momentum. Must have missed that in my fizix course.
Overshoot is also common just before the steep fall into a serious cold period.
Talk about back pedalling – and what if it’s not a dozen years but more than 30 years of cooling? With a negative PDO and the AMO slowly cooling, those models are looking rather sillier than usual about now.
So where does CO2 now rank in importance when compared to all the other things we do which are also pokes at complex non linear dynamic systems of the world in which we live?
Nice picture – so that’s what Marxists look like these days!
I’ve asked RC if we can have a guest post from Tsonis – he seems to have a slightly different view from Swanson:
Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have?
“But if we don’t understand what is natural, I don’t think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand — first the natural variability of climate — and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.
Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.
http://www.wisn.com/weather/18935841/detail.html
Ray (08:54:14) :
How can ONE year of a warmer El Nino packed so much energy that it wouwld take 20 years of constant cooling to “get rid” of the heat? If that was the case, what would have been the actual global temperature that year?
Not that much heat escaped that year anyway. Look at Bob Tisdale’s OLR graph for the Nino 3.4 area:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png
mick (08:53:52) :
The dwarf looks cheerful.
“All dwarfs are by nature dutiful, serious, literate, obedient and thoughtful people whose only minor failing is a tendency, after one drink of koolaid, to rush at enemies screaming “Arrrrrrgh!” and axing their legs off at the knee.”
But then also about discworld dwarves: “All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.”
Damn you Terry, its almost too perfect.
Exactly. Take a look at any religious armageddon site. They’ve been “predicting” things for thousands of years, and none of them have come true. Why should it be any different now?
Rotfl, I’m going to start using this, if you don’t mind.
Well, this is most interesting. For years they’ve been warning us that there is more warming “in the pipeline”. Now, they’re saying that because of extra warming in 1998, there’s more cooling in the pipeline … say what?
To see why this is nonsense, suppose we have a block of steel. We have a small fire under it, so it is steadily warming. Then suppose we hit it with a hot blast from a blowtorch, so it has “effectively overshot” the underlying warming.
If that is the case, it will cool from the peak of the overshoot … but because the small fire is under it, it will not cool beyond the level of the underlying warming. In fact, it will never fall below the underlying trend. Instead, it will pick up the underlying trend as soon as the steel cools to the level of the original trend. The fire under the steel is adding energy no matter what the temperature of the steel is, so it will not go cooler than that.
In other words, their claim doesn’t make sense. It’s a great claim that lets them push out the date of the expected warming … but it simply won’t work that way.
I encourage them to try it with a block of steel, and see how well it works out. As long as the underlying warming continues, it cannot fall below that trend.
w.
This is the usual exit-strategy of the Doomsayers:
At the moment it’s not exactly how we predicted it, but in twenty years, it will happen like we’ve told it.
This worked very well with the ozon-hole hoax, why shouldn’t work it now.
“Peter (08:20:01) :
Why is it that professors of French origin so often look like contestants in a game of who can look the most ridiculous?”
Prière de nous envoyer votre propre autoportrait pour que nous puissions vous juger dans ce concours de beauté.
= Please post your own self-portrait and let us see how you fare in the beauty contest.
I wonder how this post passed the snippers
Amazing.
There’s no more reliability in this new 2020 concept than any of the weaker parts of AGW movement.
This appears to be leading towards the ultimate default for people who are wrong.
Fabricate a scenario where there’s no definitive way to prove them wrong until
everyone involved on both sides is dead.
How special.
Government accountability at it’s best.
What an epic waste of time and resources.
Or crime of the century.
Three points
1. It’s not Gavin its a guest post
2. It’s a sensible paper which should be commended for its balance rather than accusing a web site of backpedalling and worse
3. Overall the paper is consistent with a lukewarmer position.
Good to see a bit of balance over at Real Climate I say!!
They “hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal,” ??? Don’t the models “prove” this? Why the need to hypothesize?? That’s too funny!
tallbloke (09:22:48) :
I understand that some of that heat got trapped, obviously. But certainly, it would not take 20 years of cooling to return to pre-overshooting-El Nino.
So they are saying that they can’t be proven wrong until 2020? And until then the debate remains closed? No matter what the facts are until then? So they get to save face (and cash grant checks at the liquor store) until they retire?
It makes perfect sense to me.
However, this apparent impulsive behavior explicitly highlights the fact that humanity is poking a complex, nonlinear system…
Yes. We call it “the Economy.”
Laugh a lot. This post by tamino at RC is a perfect demonstration of why and how this lunacy will continue till we’re all dead.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/
tamino says:
13 July 2009 at 7:31 PM
Re: #91 (Alex)
I agree that there’s tremendous room for improvement in how climate science is communicated to the public. RealClimate is top-notch, but doesn’t reach enough people to counter the very effective propaganda campaign attempting to deny the reality, human origin, and danger of global warming.
I’m especially vexed by the perception by so many that there’s “proof” that “global warming has stopped.” This is based on faulty statistics (often by those who should know better, hence are not just mistaken but dishonest) and the truly silly, but pervasive, idea that global warming means every year should be hotter than the one before it. Anyone who reads my blog knows I work very hard to dispel these myths, but a lot remains to be done to communicate these sometimes not-so-simple truths to the voting public.
In fact, perhaps Al Gore did a better job of it than the scientific community. But much of his efforts are negated by the mean-spiritied, dishonest, but effective character assassination aimed at him. Despicable, yes — but also effective propaganda.
On topic: I’ve posted a comment on this post:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/warming-interrupted/
You know this just had to hurt. I wonder what they will pick as the next catastrophe? Probably over-population. That’s a perennial favorite.
I wonder if they cleared this with Mr. Holdren? And has anyone checked on Gore’s investments lately to see if he’s getting out of the carbon trading business?
Global warming’s all a myth, says the Spectator. Read about it on BBC Bloom.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/07/anyone_seen_the_front_page.html
If they had come out with this theory in 1999 (or even better in 1997) it might have been impressive.
Talking of rewriting history: Gore tells Australia that the UK court ruling was in his favor?
http://noteviljustwrong.com/blog/9-general/123-al-gore-rewrites-history.html
Left to Right: Dr. Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Dr. Paul Knappenberger (President of the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum), Dr. Wally Broecker (Columbia University), and Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert (University of Chicago).
AKA The Four Weathermen of the Apocalypse.
So we are back to “still recovering from the LIA”
tallbloke (09:22:48) :
re: ..Not that much heat escaped that year anyway…
tallbloke, when I look at the numbers at:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/wwv/data/wwv.dat
I do see a decrease of approx. 25% that year.
Doesn’t look like small money to me.
KlausB
I’m not trying to besmirch the good name of cold fusion, but much of climate science belongs in the Pathological science category.
1. The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause. (This is certainly true for CO2.)
2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectablilty, or many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results. (It is certainly difficult to detect the warming trend.)
3. There are claims of great accuracy. (Claims of great certainty, at least.)
4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience are suggested. (It fits the bill here to a T.)
5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses. (Ad hoc excuses plus outright hostility.)
6. The ratio of supporters to critics rises and then falls gradually to oblivion. (This seems to be happening now, I HOPE!)
When water is warmer than the air heat goes out and when water is cooler then air heats water. This is a gradient of energy working both ways.
So warming sea water began many years before the 97-98 “overshot” (or rogue wave, or a jump in TSI as reported by Scafetta´s paper)
I’ll get a cold one and watch.
You are going to need a brewery. Provided you an afford the CO2 permits.
Doesn’t this fly in the face of claims that climate change has recently been observed to be proceeding faster than predicted?
Jim (10:10:23) :
Cold fusion has actually been verified. It is not well enough understood to be reliably reproduced. The number of experiments that actually produce results is now in the 50% range.
Oh. Wait. Maybe I agree with you – mostly.
Just a bit of hyperbole there. Or taking the liberty to paraphrase: “We don’t know what will happen, but we hope and pray the warming will return.”
So …the science is NOT settled then!?
Good news is that the 2dC limit will be met for the forseeable without any help from us.
If only CO2 explains Recent Warming, what could have caused this overshoot? It obviously wasn’t CO2. And we’re told it’s not the sun.
That’s the amazing thing about model-based attribution. It allows unbridled experimentation with novel concepts like thermal inertia, thermal overshoot, temperature amplification by positive feedback.
I hope the climatologists are interacting with mainstream physicists down the corridor, as well as the statisticians just up the corridor.
klausb (10:05:13) :
tallbloke (09:22:48) :
re: ..Not that much heat escaped that year anyway…
tallbloke, when I look at the numbers at:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/wwv/data/wwv.dat
I do see a decrease of approx. 25% that year.
Doesn’t look like small money to me.
KlausB
Yes, subsurface heat not counted in the temperature records gets into the atmosphere and causes a big spike which then has the monkeys climbing the pole with their measuring string. The big downspike in the OLR shows water vapour is the really dynamic controller of the climate.
My point on this exactly!
If this does not emphatically invalidate GCM’s, ALL GCM’s, then I don’t know what does. There is not a single GCM that has ever exhibited results anywhere near what they are saying here. GCM’s are complete and utter BS (bad science)…
This reminds me of the Realtor’s declarations as the housing bubble was bursting. Something like ‘right now prices are taking a breather heading for a soft landing. You must buy now before they start shooting up again!’
Your fears are well founded Crosspatch. As long as humans are alive, this will never go away. Global Warming, Global Cooling, Climate Change, Climate Chaos, what ever they want to call it that week, that month, that year, it will never, ever, cease to exist in some fashion or another. My friends, this is not a new topic. This same topic has been going on for as long as there have been humans on this planet, and it will continue to go on until we are extinct. Get used to it, and learn how to fight against the uses of this topic in manipulating our lives!
Willis Eschenbach:
The block of steel analogy can be replaced with a real-world example: the heat sink on your CPU. Your CPU generates heat even when idle, however a burst of 100% processor will heat it more rapidly. Of course, since it’s heated more, it radiates heat more quickly, but will never drop below the underlying idle heat balance. The concept of “overshooting” dissipation is really quite amusing, and quite against the entire “thermodynamics” thing.
That’s the amazing thing about model-based attribution. It allows unbridled experimentation with novel concepts like thermal inertia
Thermal inertia is real. It is called specific heat. The rest of the concepts are as you point out dodgy.
The IPCC employs 40 different climate models. Out of these models, not a single one of them predicted the global cooling brought on by a El Nino event. Even with 10 years to back fit the data from 1997 / 1998 into the models, no indication of Global Cooling was shown to be happening, nor that Global Warming would not resume at its pre – 1997 rate until the year 2020.
For a world recognized group of scientists such as the IPCC to require 10 years to realize an event has taken place that directly affects their policy is astounding. For a world recognized group of scientists to believe the incorrect results of 40 different climate models is beyond the limits of human comprehension.
(Who ever paid for those computer models would be well advised to put in a warranty claim.)
Well Peterhumbug looks way shorter than Gavin does; even with Gavin slouching.
Well how do you eat with all that food strainer blocking the plumbing. I used to have a beard; I thought I looked really cool. Then I shaved it off, and discovered that all it did was make be look 20 years older than I was. Now people think I am 60; so I guess they’ll keep me on the staff until they really figure out how old I am.
So he’s French eh? Well Hector Berlioz was French; and then there was Aristide Cavalle-Coll. There has to be some other notable Frenchmen; but off hand I can’t remember their names.
And I would recommend to the whole gang that they abandon that nonsense about climate sensitivity; and net radiative forcing; and come back down to earth. Peter should try modelling planet earth; rather than whatever he has been dishing up instead. then he might get the right answer.
Now what is their explanation for why the CO2 will continue to climb and at anaccelerated pace, but the temperature won’t.
One final question; just what was the source of the mammoth thermal impulse, that caused that 1998 “overshoot” ? Remember that was an overshoot of the entire planet (Hansen claims); and we are supposed to take seriously their new claim that it will take 20 years to dissipate that “overshoot”. I thought that overshoot had already dissipated before 2000; so what is left to dissipate ? These guys are first class chumps; or they take us to be.
George
I’ve been intending to do this simple computation, but have not gotten around to it, but we know the heat capacity of water is much greater than that of air at STP. Now multipy the heat capacity of water times the grams of water in the ocean and compare that to the same number for air. Air won’t be a significant force WRT to heat or heating effect if I’m thinking correctly.
Boudu (10:01:16) :
AKA The Four Weathermen of the Apocalypse
HaHaHa – big belly laugh!!!! Too funny – and so apropos – I’m still laughing…. 🙂
“”” M. Simon (10:51:19) :
That’s the amazing thing about model-based attribution. It allows unbridled experimentation with novel concepts like thermal inertia
Thermal inertia is real. It is called specific heat. The rest of the concepts are as you point out dodgy. “””
Well thermal inertia doesn’t have anything at all to do with specific heat.
Specific heat tells you what the temperature increment (or decrement) will be for a change in energy input (or outtake). Thermal inertia has more to do with the mass of material that the energy is delivered to.
And as I said just above; the rapid rise of 1998, was immediately followed by an equally rapid fall of about the same extent; so there wasn’t any significant inertia at all; the whole episode was over in about two years. Looking at UAH and RSS, it does seem that the rise is a tad faster, than the fall, but that is typical of driven systems, where the initial state is driven to a new state, but the return is quite passive.
Willis Eschenbach (09:35:25) :
It would be easier to do with water, but they would have to make sure they don’t use carbonated water. LOL 😉
I agree with your thermal analysis though. When you have a constant rate of heating (as shown in their climate models) you will NEVER get cooling after a sudden and limited spike of increased heating rate. The only time cooling can be observed is if the heat source is reduced. Of course we assume here that the “container” is not changing its heat capacity constant and certainly it is not a little CO2 ppm change that will affect it that much.
So, they’re saying climate is like a giant beehive, and we are poking that beehive with our GHG “stick”, with “no guarantees” of what will happen. Of course, any child knows what will happen. Sooner or later you’ll get stung. In other words, whatever happens climatically speaking, particularly if it’s bad, will be our fault, for poking at the climate beehive. Whatever happens, their arses are covered then. How convenient.
Jordan (10:33:29) :
“It obviously wasn’t CO2. And we’re told it’s not the sun ”
It was the sun, back in 1989, eight years before:
http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/wkshp.nsf/vwpsw/84E74F1E59E2D3FE852574F100669688/$file/scafetta-epa-2009.pdf
CodeTech (10:50:29), thanks for the vote of support. It seems to me that their claim fails just on that most elementary thermodynamic level, regardless of anything to do with climate.
For their claim to work, there would have to be some kind of mysterious “thermal inertia” that would drive a heated CPU below equilibrium temperature … funny that I’ve never heard of that before, but in the world of climate “science”, I guess anything’s possible …
w.
“”” CodeTech (10:50:29) :
Willis Eschenbach:
The block of steel analogy can be replaced with a real-world example: the heat sink on your CPU. Your CPU generates heat even when idle, however a burst of 100% processor will heat it more rapidly. Of course, since it’s heated more, it radiates heat more quickly, but will never drop below the underlying idle heat balance. The concept of “overshooting” dissipation is really quite amusing, and quite against the entire “thermodynamics” thing. “””
I would say the distinction is more specific. Overshoot occurs in systems, where energy is exchanged between two different storage mechanisms; and the other requirement is feedback; or some form of bidirectionality.
A unidirectional system can’t overshoot; and applying an impulse of thermal energy to an inanimate object, would be one example of a unidirectional system. But in feedback systems, the system reacts to its own output, in a way, that alters the equilibrium condition, so the system must seek a new target.
The El Nino of 1998 shows remarkably little if any overshoot. In two years from the onset, there is not a shred of evidence of the event (in the anomaly record).
But the trend before that is influenced by the 1986/87/88 El Nino which caused an upward step change in global temperatures, so we have to discount the period after that as well. And then the trend before that is impacted by the 1972/73 El Nino. It too resulted in a change, one that was counteracted by a volcanic eruption. Blah, blah, blah.
So, 22 years to dissipate one year of el nino?
Nature (with hopefully some constructive input from humans) will decide the global warming question based upon climate sensitivity, net radiative forcing, and oceanic storage of heat, not on the type of multi-decadal time scale variability we are discussing here. However, this apparent impulsive behavior explicitly highlights the fact that humanity is poking a complex, nonlinear system with GHG forcing – and that there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond. And with that he promptly disappeared up his own backside.
Yes minister came straight into my head when I read it.
It’s curious that the 3/09 Copenhagen report attributes the current cool spell in part to low sunspot numbers, yet according to the IPCC4 report, warming has little if anything to do with high sunspot numbers. How can this be? 🙂
Cap and Tax
“Well it’s there now it does insulate the roof and we aren’t building any more”
M White (11:22:01) :
tamino says:
13 July 2009 at 7:31 PM
Re: #91 (Alex)
But much of his [Algore] efforts are negated by the mean-spiritied, dishonest, but effective character assassination aimed at him. Despicable, yes — but also effective propaganda.
And wasn’t it Al who brought the battle to the beacon in the first place? What goes around pal. In the end, isn’t that what’s important? Little propaganda wars?
The important part of this (other than the political part ) is that they have admitted that we are unable to predict the future. Well, DOH! That’s what people have been trying to get across to them for years. As for resuming the “pre-’98” trend, a heck of lot can happen in 10 years.
RealClimate in May 2008:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/global-cooling-wanna-bet/
No matter what happens, they just can’t bring themselves to say that dreaded word: “we were wr…..wr….wro….wron….”.
Nope, they can’t say it.
The 1998 temperature increase wasn’t even a 2 sigma event.(+/-0.22C change in one year) There was a 2 sigma temperature drop in 1999 that wiped out all the 1998 increase and part of the 1997 increase.
There are seven 2 sigma temperature changes in the Giss record. Temperature increases in 1957 & 1977. Temperature drops in 1890, 1964, 1974, 1992, and 1999.
Here is a graphic. http://i30.tinypic.com/10o1vz5.gif
I don’t see how they can say there is anything ‘in the pipe-line’.
The 32 year trend lines sure look to me like the PDO cycle enhancing a little natural warming. I’d say the CO2 contribution is negligible.
Boudu (08:34:18) : So what does the hockey stick look like now ?
Turn it upside down, they just had it backwards.
I tried to post this at Real Climate unfortunately it will go the same way as all my earlier posts.
This is great news and to think we heard it first on this great site.
Global Warming is over.
Well done you guys at Real Climate and an especial thank you to Gavin for making the world a safer place
End of salutations
Seriously though, wasn’t this always going to be the case, Global Warming has morphed into the c words of Climate Change.
On a recent post at CIF guardian someone said it will get warmer if not next year then the year after that or the year after that. They should have posted under the screen name Mogadon Man.
For what it’s worth the amount of spiteful and rude comments which are made against posters who do not support AGW does give me some joy as it shows they have lost the argument. Now to persuade the politicians that if they are not careful they will be sending good money after bad money.
So, if the 1998 El Nino caused an overshoot, and the excess is being radiated off ( with the help of a lackadaisacal Sun), and human poking is to be avoided, then the agenda of forcing the climate with further pokings to a cooler state is
a double standard.
i.e. – if the Earth is capable of shedding excess heat from a monster El Nino, what does this say about the Feedback Multipliers? It says that they are bunk.
The goalpost is moved once again.
@Curious George
You know this just had to hurt. I wonder what they will pick as the next catastrophe? Probably over-population. That’s a perennial favorite.
I wonder if they cleared this with Mr. Holdren? And has anyone checked on Gore’s investments lately to see if he’s getting out of the carbon trading business?
Curious George
In answer to your questions it has already been chosen Acidification of the Seas therefore Mr Gore’s investments are safe:-{}
CodeTech (10:50:29) :
The concept of “overshooting” dissipation is really quite amusing, and quite against the entire “thermodynamics” thing.
The overshooting dissipation, the energy (heat) loops, the enhancing tunnels, etc., are imaginary processes invented for explaining an unreal hypothesis which is pseudoscientific if it is examined against real thermodynamic processes. The proponents of AGW idea have dared to change the scientific methodology by reducing it to consensuses and opinions, and have tried to erase science and change the fundamental laws of the Universe. 🙂
I think when they will squeeze all the juice out of this CO2 lemon and run out of arguments, they will switch molecules. You can bet they will define water as a pollutant soon since it is more abundant, has a greater greenhouse effect and basically defines the heat content on earth. Of course, we will be made responsible for its increased concentration in the atmosphere since it is also a by-product of combustion… and be all breath it out.
Of course they will claim that water vapor produced from the burning of fossile fuel is worst. They will conveniently ignore that 97.2% of all water is in the ocean, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum. They will find a way to tax it.
Anyway, you see where this is all going.
The debate is settled for the public when policies are pre-defined, but it will never really be settled in their closed community since they always change and manipulate science to support only those policies. What they should really say is; “The policies are settled”.
CodeTech (10:50:29) :
The concept of “overshooting” dissipation is really quite amusing, and quite against the entire “thermodynamics” thing.
Movements of water in the ocean have momentum. Water is heavy stuff. An upwelling of warm water caused by a cooler atmosphere will warm the atmosphere above. There will be a lag time before the newly warmed atmosphere starts to suppress the escape of heat from the ocean. I think this is how modoki el nino works. Like the one starting now.
In the case of the ’98 el nino, the process is different, Bob Tisdale explains it well.
I’m confused.
If CO2 is driving a radiative imbalance that is consistently adding joules to the “system” year after year with positive feedbacks dominant, how can the 1997/98 “overshoot” be radiatively dissipating over the next few years?
Wouldn’t the heat accumulation simply continue on top of the ’98 event rather than dissipating?
Radiative dissipation is another way to describe negative feedback – no?
Are they now admitting that sufficient natural negative feedbacks exist that can overcome both the ’98 event and the continued radiative imbalance?
Can someone explain this to me?
I don’t know if any of you calculated the numbers, guys. But the author is saying that the 1979-1997 trend is probably the true underlying warming trend. If you do the numbers with GISTEMP data, that’s a rather unimpresive 0.113ºC/decade as the “true trend”. If you add to this that the warming would not resume until 2020, meaning that there will be no change in temperatures until then, and then the reduced trend would go on, that gives a forecast of only +0.9ºC by 2100 compared to now.
We can clearly call the author a “denier” by RC standards.
Jordan (10:33:29) :
I hope the climatologists are interacting with mainstream physicists down the corridor
I hope the psychologists will start interacting with the climatologists who are round the bend.
I thought realclimate’s position has been that there is no slow-down in warming – that in fact it has been accelerating?
Please our mother Earth, save yourself this way: remove the stupid people who want save you. This people want save only themselves. (sorry for my english)
“Good to see a bit of balance over at Real Climate I say!!
Your “balance” is their butt-covering, back-peddling, head stuck up somewhere refusal to just admit they were wrong.
Wrong.
Period.
“If ya mess up, fess up” would be my advice to the Warmongers . . . bite your bullet now before you do any more damage to the legitimate environmental movement.
I said ‘pull the other one, it’s got bells on!’
Can you hear the bells?
DaveE.
This anthropogenic global warming stuff is looking more and more like a religious cult. When the doomsday doesn’t happen, “just wait a little longer, and oh, by the way, give us all your wealth, present and future, while we recalculate doomsday.”
I keyed in on the comment about the effects of soot in the models perhaps being off. Once again, the output of the models cannot be used as data. Computer model outputs cannot be used for verifying, modifying, or discarding the dozens of laws, theories, and hypotheses mathematically represented in the GCMs. The model outputs cannot distinguish one hypothesis from another, and certainly cannot indicate when entirely new hypotheses need to be developed.
Have the Realclimate chaps seen this ?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/13/el-nino-climate-change
The reporter says that the coming El Nino will cause a series of the hottest years in the record over the next few years whereas Realclimate is fast backtracking and saying that natural variability may prevent further warming until 2020.
Looks like chaos in the alarmist camp. No joined up thinking at all.
Anyway if an alarmist reporter is saying that a single forthcoming El Nino can have such a big effect how can they ignore the warming effect of the series of powerful El Ninos from 1975 to 2000. By their own logic any observed warming then would have been El Nino induced and not CO2 induced.
A total collapse of logical thought
“Besides, between now and the next warming cycle we’ll have to deal with the next Ice Age scare. I think its already starting.”
The mammoth, sloth, and saber tooth tiger say, “Sorry, you aren’t following the story line, the Dawn of the Dinosaurs, is next.” 😉
Always good to see facts proving the fiction to be wrong. The serious problem with the BIG lie is that once discovered you’ve no-where to hide :-))
I’m hoping they stick to the excuse that AGW has only been delayed, as if they do they will end up burying themselves. Their is such an obvious flaw in their argument that I can’t believe they haven’t spotted it, but once belief takes over from reason, perhaps this is no surprise.
I wonder if this is all a precursor to what will happen to the ice in the Arctic? At the mo its hard to say. Is it following a 2007 like dip or 2005? I have a feeling there might be a lot more ice than expected (if you believe the 2-year ice stuff) and if so this is possibly going to be the most hilarious September/October for AGW theory on record.
‘Global Warming causes Arctic to freeze over’
But…, but …, it is not peer reviewed, so it cannot be right.
Interesting thing is that the air can’t heat the water. Even if there is a significant gradient, the difference in the specific heat of air (.001J/(cm3*K)) and water (4.8J/(cm3*K)) dictates that no meaningful amount of heat can be transported from air to water. When the gradient is reversed, however, the air temperature can be affected by water. This is seems important because CO2 can only heat the air, and the air can’t heat the water. Water gets all its heat from the sun. The only effect that CO2 can have on the ocean is some sort of feedback that affects clouds. Again, it seems physically impossible for the direct effects of CO2 to have any measurable affect on the ocean, but the ocean does have an effect on the atmosphere, probably much larger than the direct effect of CO2. Is this accurate?
Those flogging the dying horse of AGW are either suffering from Cognitive Dissonance [CD], or they have a political agenda. Those gaming the system for money and status are very much in the minority, since there is not enough of either to go around.
That means most of the die-hard AGW believers suffer from CD. They’ve taken as fact a flimsy hypothesis that has been falsified over and over. They confidently talk about a mythical “tipping point” as if it exists, but they can not identify it; its existence must be taken on faith. Polar bears drowning due to a fraction of a degree of global warming is uncritically assumed based on an iconic picture, without other corroborating evidence.
And the Scientific Method is turned on its head. Skeptics are told to prove that AGW does not exist — when it is up to those promoting AGW to demonstrate, with strong, reproducible and falsifiable evidence, that AGW exists outside of their fevered imaginations and their always-inaccurate computer models.
They are True Believers, as locked into their belief system as any Scientologist. With so much of their ego tied up in their AGW belief, they soon succumb to full-blown CD.
Dr. Festinger explains the process, using as his example an actual group that believed in the imminent arrival of space aliens on a particular date, who would save them from being destroyed with the rest of the world.
The famed social psychologist Leon Festinger, developer of the concept of Cognitive Dissonance, conducted studies of the phenomenon. The psychological model is that their belief system becomes part of their identity, their self, and information at odds with that belief system becomes an attack on the self. This helps explain why such people can be so resistant to information that would otherwise be judged contrary to their beliefs on a rational basis. The following example is based on true events:
Festinger’s book, When Prophecy Fails, tells of a group of doomsday believers who predicted the end of the world on a particular date. Their group would be saved by a deus ex-machina in the form of space aliens in flying saucers. Everyone else was toast.
But when the world didn’t end, and the flying saucers never appeared, the believers became even more convinced that they were right. A few left the group, but most became even louder, and proselytized even more aggressively after the disconfirmation. Eventually, they came to believe that their very goodness was the reason that the aliens decided to save the world. Pointing out the fact that there never were any space aliens only resulted in more argument.
We can expect more strange defenses from AGW believers as evidence continues to mount against catastrophic AGW and runaway global warming. For example, we are now told by those afflicted with CD, in all sincerity, that global warming is causing global cooling. And the few who are cashing in on the scam quietly enable those afflicted by CD by censoring skeptical points of view wherever possible.
Looking at that picture, I now understand.
And after reading what they said, including AND especially – “there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond”, I’m shaking my head and all I can say to those folks over there is – “Here’s your sign.”
@ Stacey
Thank you. I hadn’t thought about that one. 🙂 Hmm, now to figure out how to make some cash on acid. Oh, wait; tried that in the ’60’s 😉 Didn’t work out too well. 😀
Shanta (09:52:55) : Global warming’s all a myth, says the Spectator. Read about it on BBC Bloom.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/07/anyone_seen_the_front_page.html
I can’t stand Monbiot – but he’s listed points that Plimer has, supposedly, got wrong. Plimer’s book is excellent, but I did find some slapdash writing as well as the mainly excellently, heavily referenced passages. So *some* of Monbiot’s damning list of complaints could have a basis in fact. Some are at the very least contentious, like Monbiot’s claim that the CO2 rise is all (or even mostly) due to us sinners. But I’d like to know exactly what Plimer would answer.
Great to see Spectator giving a clear thumbs-down.
rbateman (11:40:27) :Here your “overshot”
The origin of all, back in 1989:
Back in September 29, 1989 it happened a gap or jump in TSI of 0.47 w/sq.mt. (scafetta paper cited above)
Largest Solar Flare in a Decade Erupts
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1178303.html
After a time lag of eight years..the 97-98 big El Nino.
Google for “September 29, 1989” and you’ll be surprised.
Nogw (10:20:47)
“When water is warmer than the air heat goes out (from water to air) and when water is cooler then air heats water. This is a gradient of energy working both ways”.
No it doesn’t. If water is cooler than air then it cools the air (sea fog, anyone ? ). The energy taken from the air by the water is trivial compared to the amount of energy required to warm a volume of water as much as the same volume of much less dense air.
Furthermore, evaporation is a continuing process caused by density and pressure differentials between water and air so that evaporation actually accelerates when air is warmer than water (especially if the air is dry).
Thus ANY energy taken from the air by cooler water will just go to bringing forward the timing of the change of state of those molecules already on the cusp of changing state. In relation to those molecules the energy required to effect the change of state is less that the latent heat taken from the surrounding environment of water AND air when the change of state occurs.
As a result of the consequent cascade effect bringing forward the timing of the change of state of multitudes of water molecules, the increased evaporation results in an increased net flow of energy from water to air just because the air is warmer than the water.
When the air is cooler than the water, evaporation slows down (especially if the air is humid) because the transfer of energy from water to air is inhibited by the reduced capacity of the air to carry it as water vapour with it’s attendant latent energy but it still occurs continuously.
The transfer of energy from water to air is always in that one direction whether water or air is the warmer. It is part of the one way transmission of solar energy through the Earth system, sun to oceans to air to space (at variable speeds dependant primarily on internal oceanic behaviour, not the composition of the air).
Either way, energy removed from the water becomes latent energy in the air which does not raise the air temperature of the air (it being latent) so the water continues to cool, the air temps come down to the level of the water and the flow of latent energy from surface to space is enhanced via wind, convection and ultimately condensation out at a higher level when that energy is more readily radiated to space.
Thus extra energy in the air from extra GHGs increases the evaporation rate which increases the speed of the hydrological cycle which prevents the extra energy in the air from warming the oceans.
AGW is thus falsified (I think).
Climate models do not reflect this simple truth and the ideas of Tyndall et al whilst correct if taking the air in isolation cannot affect the global equilibrium temperature set by the constantly varying interplay of sun and oceans.
It seems that this El Nino overshoot is quite inconvenient to the AGWiers. They should ask Mann to make it dissapear… if he can make dissapear 150-400 years periods, surely he can make dissapear a little 2 years annomaly. Oh, right… we remember 97/98… too bad.
Steve McIntyre should have real fun with this one.
Ashby Lynch (12:35:06)
Spot on.
The models have apparently been doing a good job of hindcasting and are very close to the current temperature pattern (paraphrasing gavin) so I don’t know why they posted this unscientific guest opinion.
Seriously, there is natural variability that the models do not focus on. There was a big El Nino in 1997-98 and the models undershot the actual temperatures (except for Hansen’s 1988 predictions but the newer models missed under). Then there was a La Nina in 2007 and 2008 and the models are overshooting the actual temperature record now.
The models are never going to be far off because there are several plugs available to them like Aerosols (-0.6C) and 30 year climate system lags like warming in the ocean pipeline (-0.3C) to bring things back into line.
What is definitely not happening is that temperatures are not keeping up with the greenhouse gas warming formulae that the models and the theory are based on.
At some point, they have to go back to the drawing board and have physicists perform some actual experiments on the greenhouse gases so we can rewrite the theories based on empirical evidence instead of just solving for a few theoritical equations.
Is there heat “in the pipeline”?
http://climatesci.org/2009/03/05/is-there-climate-heating-in-the-pipeline/
The answer to the question posted in this weblog “Is There Climate Heating In “The Pipeline”? is NO.
An all-too-transparent exercise in CYA is now replacing the cock-sure predictions of doom. Except for the polarity, it reminds me of the rationalizations of portfolio managers who put their clients’ money into the top of the market.
“…If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.”
There have been lots of broken records this year…in the other direction.
Did this Forum just take place as it appears? This is confusing:
http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/climatechange/forums.html
“FORUM 1 HOW MUCH? HOW SOON? HOW DO WE KNOW?
Saturday, February 25, 2006 “
I wouldn’t agree that “uncertainty is a far batter reason for justifying action”.
Even if you estimate chances of model calculations to become true to be at 30%, chances to be wrong are 70%. In the latter case, however we are very likely to be heading into a new ice age and any action would have been not only useless but counterproductive.
CodeTech (10:50:29) :
The block of steel analogy can be replaced with a real-world example: the heat sink on your CPU.
But of course in a real cpu example, the fan speeds up as the cpu gets hotter. All we need to do now is explain how the earths fan got stuck at the higher RPM for 10 years (due to CO2 of course)and build it into the IPCC models and we are away again to fix the fan.
There are some things in physics that are givens like; the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Heat travels to cold and NEVER cold to heat. Its the exchange of molecular kinetic energy which transfers the heat to cold. Sea water is more dense than air and hence the transfer is more efficent from water to air. The evaporation of water molecules from the surface of water cools the water because heat energy is removed. If you pump this evaporation the cooling is deeper and quicker. Extra heating is a form of pumping etc etc etc.
Jim (10:54:57) :
I’ve been intending to do this simple computation, but have not gotten around to it, but we know the heat capacity of water is much greater than that of air at STP. Now multipy the heat capacity of water times the grams of water in the ocean and compare that to the same number for air. Air won’t be a significant force WRT to heat or heating effect if I’m thinking correctly.
The whole of the atmosphere has the same heat capacity as the top 8 feet of the ocean. The heat stored in the ocean from the sun goes down to 3000 feet, more in some places, less in the tropics.
Pierrehumbug took a swipe at Roy Spencer for using the correct thermocline depth in his simple model he used to demonstrate cloud forcing. Whichever planet Pierrehumbug models, it apparantly has a thermocline depth of 50 metres.
No wonder they don’t get it right when they do sums..
“Thermal inertia is real. It is called specific heat.”
Not my understanding at scales greater than quantum.
When I said “interia”, I was alluding to a second order differential equation in temperature. The quadratic is necessary for at least one complex conjugate pair of poles which would tranform into underdamped/oscillatory response in time.
I haven’t heard of thermal dynamics in excess of the first derivative of temperature (analogous to force=mass*accelleartion). Is there a known physical process to support this?
the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal.
Is it me, or does this come awfully close to ascribing sentience to climate?
Nature…will decide the global warming question
That answers that, doesn’t it?
To be true, you would have to draw a trendline under some number of years prior to 1997/98 and extend it out to the future and find that we are still above that rising trendline, returning at some undefined rate to this line of increase, whereupon temperatures will resume their predicted increase. Are we slowly dropping back to meet that rising trend? We don’t appear to be. We appear to have dropped below it.
If the climate doesn’t warm for a period of over 20 years, then the period of non-warming will approach the earlier period of warming. Is it climate yet? And if they look sad, it’s probably because their careers depend on AGW being right. What a disaster it would be for them if it isn’t.
How impertinent of it. But it is good to know that even a climate system is inclined to err – makes it seem so much more human.
The two guys on the right look like Mad Scientists. Actually, Dr. Broecker looks like me, or at least dresses the same way and seems about the same age; but I’m not a scientist.
The guy on the far right, Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert, looks like the prospector from the movie Blazing Saddles. Or, if you watched MST3K, the prospector from the Final Sacrifice movie parody. Every time I look at him, I think of those movies and then start to think of Yosemite Sam.
Bad construction of my last sentence: “I haven’t heard of thermal dynamics in excess of the first derivative of temperature (analogous to force=mass*accelleartion)”
The point I wanted to make is that the higher order derivative would be analogous to F=m.a (not that the first derivative would be).
Ujagoff:
You ” thought the climate did what the computer models told it to do.”
So have Australian farmers for the last 10 years or so. According to the story below it seems they’ve got sick and tired of being misled:
http://news.brisbanetimes.com.au/breaking-news-national/farmers-lose-faith-in-weather-forecasts-20090714-djci.html
Implications.
“Oceanic cycles may have contributed to mid century cooling” – So their positive phases may have contributed to warming. Therefore the claimed sensitivity of climate to co2 is – FALSIFIED
Thanks ray pierrehumbug, great ad hoc reply to comment on RC.
Bill Illis (12:47:13) : Doing lab experiments on GHG isn’t going to help. The models need to take into account water in all places and in all its roles including clouds. It is hard to see how they can hand-wave the effect of clouds away given the mulitple effects (heat transport to upper atmosphere, albedo, etc). You can’t do that in a lab.
far batter reason
I think you meant “better” not “batter” …
“Regardless, it’s important to note that we are not talking about global cooling, just a pause in warming. ”
Yes, and
“WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” George Orwell, 1984
Ashby Lynch (12:35:06) : Your statement made me think of something else. In my (limited) understanding of the climate models, they treat the upper atmosphere as the most important “layer” of the atmosphere. The upper atmosphere is very thin. One input to Beer’s law is the concentration of the absorbing entity. The concentration of CO2 per unit volume has to be very low due to the low pressure. If the CO2 molecules in the lower atmosphere are emitting over a broadened molecular band due to the higher pressure, then it seems like getting the photons from same though the upper atmosphere would be like driving a Mack truck through Death Valley. The upper molecules are few and far between and have sharp absorption peaks.
Stephen Wilde (12:45:10) :
EXACTLY!
Model the oceans. Take your average gymnasium, say the one over at the local high school. Fill it with 55 degree salt water up to within one inch of its flat ceiling. You now have a model of the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, with one exception – the real atmosphere has NO cap (ceiling) over it, which makes it even more of a mismatch to the kinetic capacity of the real oceans. Now turn on the gym’s heating system with it’s 30 air vents it the ceiling and crank it up to – 110 degrees. Leave it on for – well, as long as you want, say a week. Take the temperature of the water – a yard, a meter down from the surface. Right, 55 degrees.
Now remind yourself that the average temp of the oceans, the ground and the atmosphere (a few feet down or up from the surface)- each averaged globally, is with in a degree of each other… as best we can tell and I will have to say, after 50 years of study there are no guarantees to know exactly……..
But hey, I’m no “scientist”, it’s probably just coincidence….
Hey! Don’t forget to turn off that heater. We don’t want to be wasting energy like those computers geeks running all those global climate models….
So not only does AGW cause warming and cooling, it also causes nothing.
It is the true faith-based theory of climate science.
AGW is jsut the latest example of the human appetite for apocalyptic clap trap.
Colin,
It is a garbage paper that is such blatant CYA back tracking as to gag anyone who is not drunk on AGW koolaid.
AGW was, is and will be known in all of history as a popular delusion. It has as little to do with Climate Science as eugenics had to do with Evolution.
“”” Ashby Lynch (12:35:06) :
Interesting thing is that the air can’t heat the water. Even if there is a significant gradient, the difference in the specific heat of air (.001J/(cm3*K)) and water (4.8J/(cm3*K)) dictates that no meaningful amount of heat can be transported from air to water. When the gradient is reversed, however, the air temperature can be affected by water. This is seems important because CO2 can only heat the air, and the air can’t heat the water. Water gets all its heat from the sun. The only effect that CO2 can have on the ocean is some sort of feedback that affects clouds. Again, it seems physically impossible for the direct effects of CO2 to have any measurable affect on the ocean, but the ocean does have an effect on the atmosphere, probably much larger than the direct effect of CO2. Is this accurate? “””
Almost. There’s basically two ways for air (heated by GHG absorption) to heat the oceans. The simplest is by conduction from warmer air to cooler water via the contact at their interface; at the molecular level, more highly agitated molecules of the air, in colliding with slower moving colder water molecules transmit kinetic energy between them. But the big problem that air has, is that when it gets warmer, it expands per the gas laws, and becomes less dense, and so rises, taking its thermal energy with it. So convection which is what the mass transport of the energy containing material (air) is, tends to operate against the conduction mechanism. It is almost universally true that convection always trumps conduction, and the atmospheric upward convection tends to remove the energy to some cooler place, where it eventually can be lost to space.
The other way the air heats the water, is by radiation; thermal radiation along the lines of black body radiation, which varies as the 4th power of the absolute Temperature (Kelvins). Although real materials are never true black bodies, some of them can be very close. At the temperature of the atmosphere shall we say +20 deg C (68F or 293.15K), the intensity of the emitted radiation is not very high; and the emitted spectrum peaks at about 10 microns wavelength; pretty much completely dependent on the Temperature; in fact the Temperature (K) times the spectrum peak wavelength is a constant (Wien’s Displacement Law). That is not a constant of the IPCC “climate sensitivity” kind, that is somewhere between 1.5 and 5 deg C per CO2 doubling; it is a real constant of fundamental Physics, with the value 2.897756 E-3 m.K (+/- 8.4ppm), so at the sun’s surface temperature of a bit under 6000 K, we get about 0.5 micron in the green region for the spectral peak for sunlight. For the earth at around 300K, the wavelength will be 20 times longer, which puts it at about 10 microns as I said.
That radiation from the atmospheric air, goes in all directions so only about half of it is directed downwards towards the surface; and if the surface is water, that 10 micron long wave IR is totally absorbed in about the fist 10 microns of the ocean surface. The fact that it is absorbed in such a thin layer, means the surface heating can be significant. Remember that the mass of the atmosphere is about the same as the mass of 34 feet or about 10 metres of water. But confining that radiant energy to only 10 microns, which is only one millionth of that 10 metres of water, means an appreciable sirface heating, and that will result in prompt evaporation from the surface.
It is important to understand that evaporation is a property of the liquid phase; and it doesn’t have anything to do with the temperature of the atmosphere; only the temperature of the water surface; and it is only the more energetic surface molecules out of the Maxwell Boltzmann distributtion of energies, that escape from the surface. this loss of the more eneretic surface molecules lowers the mean molecular velocity remaining, so the surface temperature falls.
Now the temperature of the air, does determine, how much water vapor can remain in the air; but it does not control the evaporation itself.
And each gram of water evaporated takes with it about 545 Calories of “latent heat” energy of evaporation; and that is a massive transport of energy from water to air.
So yes it is very hard to bet on the atmosphere; it is at a big disadvantage, when it comes to heating things; especially the ocean.
Water has the highest specific heat of any known ordinary room temperature liquid (not counting the liquid metals, Mercury and Gallium.)
Now the GHG inspired radiation may not be able to do much for the water temperature; but it probably can significantly heat the lower air layers; but then if you warm the lower air layers, along comes that convection gremlin, and moves that warm air to a higher altitude where it is colder and less dense.
It’s not easy being atmosphere.
George
Stephen Wilde (12:45:10) :You are absolutely right. What I meant when I said “air” was heat over sea (sun’s heat and warmed air during sun’s daylight), because we all know that air has a too low volumetric heat capacity compared to sea water.
If CO2 is driving a radiative imbalance that is consistently adding joules to the “system” year after year with positive feedbacks dominant, how can the 1997/98 “overshoot” be radiatively dissipating over the next few years?
Wouldn’t the heat accumulation simply continue on top of the ‘98 event rather than dissipating?
Radiative dissipation is another way to describe negative feedback – no?
Are they now admitting that sufficient natural negative feedbacks exist that can overcome both the ‘98 event and the continued radiative imbalance?
@ D. Caldwell: that is exactly my point….
CO2-concentration is higher than in 1998. The higher CO2 should prevent that radiative dissipation.
Second question: this radiative compensation of overheating is probably not a unique event. What are the changes of another radiative compensation in 2025 ?
We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal
‘Hypothesize’ is science-speak for ‘We don’t know’.
The problem is that 90% of the population don’t know this is what it means.
Otherwise, this is a roundabout response to Pielke senior taking RC to task for not facing up to the fact the ocean heat content data isn’t showing any warming.
And while I am on the subject of science-speak, ‘signal’ means data that is indicative but not direct evidence or measurement.
So you could read the statement above as meaning,
‘We don’t know because we don’t have any data.’
Which is true, as the ocean heat content data only goes back 5 years.
Anthony,
I had the honor of working with a dwarf named Mike Flannigan. Mike was a hellofa engineer and a good soul to boot. He poked fun at his stature, but we that worked with him did not, not because we were PC (engineers remember) but because he was so damn good. OK, his nickname was Mikey.
I agree that some vitrol should be aimed at those who attack rather than reason, but physical stature isn’t in the playing field. Mikey helped me to see that.
I’ll shaddup now.
Mike Bentley
I would like for them to describe the factors how the enviironment “overshot” the mark, then what factors will come back into play in 2020. also, I’m looking for information for the period btwn 1998-2020 – what happens here?
I suppose I’m looking for the models that describe all this…..stuff…..but as I know how statistics are so easily skewed/wieghted/adjusted it’s pretty much meaningless. I’m not sure I can infer anything from what on the surafce should be empirical data – but isn’t.
Reminds me of the fights in the Rocky movies. The big champ (Al “Apollo Creed” Gore) steps into the ring with nobody non-contender (Anthony “Rocky” Watts) and gets his clock cleaned.
This is only the fifth round or so. Wait until the twelfth when the have to carry Apollo out on a stretcher.
Meanwhile the bookies are in a panic and headed for the exits.
tallbloke: You wrote, “Not that much heat escaped that year anyway. Look at Bob Tisdale’s OLR graph for the Nino 3.4 area…”
Though the Global OLR dataset doesn’t disagree with your conclusion, NINO3.4 Outgoing Longwave Radiation is not Global Outgoing Longwave Radiation:
http://i29.tinypic.com/2cn85qe.png
Hair is composed primarily of proteins (88%). These proteins are of a hard fibrous type known as keratin. Keratin protein is comprised of what we call “polypeptide chains.” These chains are broken down by global warming. In the picture it is evident that the north polar regions of Gavin have been seriously effected by the lowering of the polypeptide chain area and extent. I also have been a victim of this pernicious assault on my northern region. With the anticipated cooling, perhaps we may see increased area and extent of pate polypeptide chains.
Here’s hoping,
Mike
PS I hope this doesn’t kill any polar bears…
This reminds me of a movie I saw one time about a baseball pitcher named “Alibi Ike”
Twenty-twenty used to mean acute vision, now it’s used to disguise Myopia.
In the words of the late and much lamented Douglas Adams:
Keep banging the rocks together, guys!
and as for Co2 -> Mostly Harmless!
Kyoto must have worked after all!!! We’re all saved and Algore gets the credit! We should give him another Peace Prize!!
Parody works better than straight argument with these guys.
“…there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond.”
What’s that? Don’t your models tell you?
Ashby Lynch (12:35:06) :
“Interesting thing is that the air can’t heat the water. Even if there is a significant gradient, the difference in the specific heat of air (.001J/(cm3*K)) and water (4.8J/(cm3*K)) dictates that no meaningful amount of heat can be transported from air to water. […]”
Interestingly, I would say the same must apply to rock/asphalt/concrete (what is the specific heat of these?). So I guess air can hardly heat these materials directly. But these materials are also less effective in heating air, as there is no evaporation of significance taking place. So in this case the IR absorption/emission of the CO2 molecules might indeed be of some consequence. (please correct me if I’m wrong here)
But what about plants? I’ve read somewhere in the past year that plants were found to control the temperature of their leaves, that they always try to keep it around a certain temperature, no matter what the weather.
So a similar evaporation effect as with the oceans might also be in effect here, complete with the “warmer air can contain more H2O and thus can suck more heat from the plants, rather than warming them” analogy.
How much of the landmass was covered by vegetation again?
And does snow/ice not have the ability to sublimate, too?
Tamino said, “A recent post on RealClimate explores a new approach to understanding some of the natural variability in the climate system.”
What? Natural variability? The warmers have for years insisted that most of the temperature change (warming) is due to greenhouse gases, and now dare to mention variability. It may be new on RC, but it has not been new elsewhere.
So they have overshooting. Let us see some error bars on that – should go sky-high. Where is the peer-reviewed study that supports this? The sun was even mentioned. What will the IPCC do with this?
George E. Smith (14:12:00) :
“[…]
That radiation from the atmospheric air, goes in all directions so only about half of it is directed downwards towards the surface;
[…]”
Given, on the large scale, the planet is a globe, I’d say it’s less than half. Or is the atmosphere too thin to even notice the difference?
Looks like Gavin overshot himselfs foot.
The Team is having doubts; preparing for a change of climate 🙂
Weather not climate:
Here in Ottawa, Canada, we are having an overnight low of 8 centigrade. This time of teh year, we should have our ACs on and be having sleepless, sweltering nights.
George E. Smith @14:12:00
Good discussion there George. For most readers, the odd switch between Joules and Calories as quantities of energy may be a bit confusing. There are 4.18 Joules in a calorie.
Alternate caption for photo above.
Climate mastery… the Final Frontier. These are the continuing voyages of the starship RealClimate. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new hypotheses, to seek out endangered life forms and new statistical procedures, to boldly go where science has not gone before.
[snip]
Now which movie with Jack Nicholson does this presentation of doctors remind me of? There will be no prices for the right answer.
Jordan (13:21:21)
Jordan, I always find I’m up against a bit of a brick wall with the trend line thingy, as the AGWers always choose the depth of the Little Ice Age as their start point.
After being criticized for pointing to satellite temps for the past 30 years, out comes the “but look since 1850!!” as if it were a game winner.
I then state “Well, why cherry pick that period, after all you accused me of cherry picking. Let’s look at 1000 years, or 7000 years”.
Such is the vile deception of the evil AGWers – and I mean that seriously, folks. The scare-mongers are profiting from this. They don’t believe it themselves. See the subject of this post, where the RC Team are simply developing the message to counter new attacks.
Al Gore is Elmer Gantry.
This Global Warming Parrot is not dead.
He’s just sleepin’ . . . you know, shagged out after a long, loud squawk.
Beautiful plumage on the Gorons.
It is very dangerous for the AGWers to discuss “natural variability”. They are obliged to dismiss natural variability because the come-back argument is “if the current cooling is just natural variability, then perhaps the previous warming was as well”.
There is no come-back to that argument. I think we are witnessing the slow collapse of “The Science”.
by Tamino in open mind ….quote
“I’m especially skeptical of the suggestion that we may be beginning an extended “plateau” of temperature change.”
wellcome.
They used the wrong term. The 1997 – 98 spike was overshoot. What they are trying to say is, the current cool is undershoot, not overshoot. The truth is, it’s not possible to declare the current downward trend undershoot. It may be the beginning of a much larger drop. Of course at its bottom there may be undershoot.
The Evil Tamino said (apparently):
I’m especially vexed by the perception by so many that there’s “proof” that “global warming has stopped.”
It appears he confuses “facts” and “proof”.
Darn, does this all mean I’ve got to postpone my “ice free Arctic” cruise?
I am disappointed by the tone here. Ad hom, mockery, and general piling on directed at RC when they really should be commended for posting that potentially controversial (to them) article and allowing the subsequent discussion.
When did it the pacific ocean heat more than usual, before 1997-98 el nino.
As after H.Svensmark
Influence of Cosmic Rays on Earth’s Climate
VOLUME 81, NUMBER 22 PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 30 NOVEMBER 1998 Influence of Cosmic Rays on Earth’s Climate Henrik Svensmark* Solar-Terristrial Physics Division, Danish Metorological Institute, Lyngbyve
http://hep.physics.indiana.edu/~rickv/quarknet/article2.pdf
It was during low clouds cover 1989-1992 (Fig.1 in cited paper), coincidental with higher 1989 march and september solar flares:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/05/07/a-reminder-to-us-flyspecks-on-an-elephants-butt/
Here’s another major admission (5th line in quotes from RC) from dem folks at RC.. looks like their own are turning on them LOL
[Response: Wayne, please note that this is Kyle’s article not mine, though I did encourage him to write it for us. I think the interesting question raised (though not definitively answered) by this line of work is the extent to which some of the pause in warming mid-century might have been more due to decadal ocean variability rather than aerosols than is commonly thought. If that is the case, then a pause or temporary reduction in warming rate could recur even if aerosols are unchanged. Learning how to detect and interpret such things is important, lest a temporary pause be confused with evidence for low climate sensitivity. –raypierre]
Do you suppose they have figured out Waxman-Malarkey will not pass the Senate and they have decided to throw in the towel early?
Just one more hot year and the crooks might have pulled it off.
This is not the first time the “government science” has done a reversal. The same has happened with addiction science. Once the scary research was disproved real research has started to come to the fore. Part of the reason is that some of the committed drug war scientists who were honest recanted based on the fact that effects they were looking for did not appear.
We may be seeing that here.
From here on out I expect that climate science will get honest. Out of necessity.
Another major instance of “backing off” from AGW/Models here
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/07/14/global.warming.our.best.guess.likely.wrong
There definitely seems to be a major shift in mainstream and even AGW scientists re AGW happening right now.
So, you’re telling me that I can’t warm the surface of a bowl of water by blowing a stream of hot air over it with an air dryer?
And if the cooling keeps going, and passes the 1990s average… What then will they claim?
George E. Smith @14:12:00 I, too, enjoyed that, George.
I have posted the following on RC as it states it is a ‘test’.
The test is actually to see whether it is censored or not. Given my past record on there it is 95%+ certain it will be.
Lets see!
“TEST
“” Again, as the temperature anomaly associated with this jump dissipates, we hypothesize that the climate system will return to its signal as defined by its pre-1998 behavior in roughly 2020″
Exactly what signal is this then?
Is it this one from when we first got satellite data to the mid 1990s?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1995/trend/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1995
Or is it this one from 1940 upto when the satellite launched in 1979?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1940/to:1979/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1940/to:1979
Which one should we worry about in 2020?
Alan”
Just wondering aloud:
I work in signal processing. One of the frequent tasks is to find “drifts” in time sampled signals. You could also call them “trends”. Basically the direction and speed of a drift can be seen by getting the 1st order derivative of the original signal. What I found to be a good way of doing that is to normalize the signal to zero end points by subtracting a line connecting the end points. Remember the slope of that line.
Then do an FFT on the resulting sample series.
Multiply the FFT vectors with a Gaussian, basically running it through a gaussian filter. Gaussian filters minimize overshoots.
Then rotate the resulting complex frequency vectors of the filtered FFT by 90 degrees counterclockwise.
Scale the resulting frequency vectors with the normalized frequency, starting at zero.
The rotation and scaling results in basically the derivative of each vector.
Do an inverse FFT and add the original line slope to each resulting time point.
Voala, you have the deriviative of the signal, and thus the low pass filtered slope (trend) at each point.
Has something like that been done with temperature data?
All I’ve seen so far uses either FIR filters of various shapes in the time domain, while FFTs were mostly used for spectral analysis.
Eric (16:19:20) : I commend RC for publishing it. However, that does not mean I don’t believe it’s just CYA.
VG (16:27:38) : I still haven’t figured out why the warmists don’t consider clouds to be aerosols.
Ashby Lynch (12:35:06) :
“Interesting thing is that the air can’t heat the water. Even if there is a significant gradient, the difference in the specific heat of air (.001J/(cm3*K)) and water (4.8J/(cm3*K)) dictates that no meaningful amount of heat can be transported from air to water. […]”
This assertion probably needs some qualification. It is falsified by the simple fact that ice water (and cold beer) does get warmer when exposed to warmer air. A similar mechanism certainly does transfer energy from the atmosphere to the ocean.
I suspect that the assertion turns on what is meaningful? This requires quantitative analysis. We cannot draw “meaningful” conclusions with thought experiements.
Does this mean that the current period of Global Cooling is now official?
Gaivn Schmidt and Michael Mann could be twins!
“This assertion probably needs some qualification. It is falsified by the simple fact that ice water (and cold beer) does get warmer when exposed to warmer air. A similar mechanism certainly does transfer energy from the atmosphere to the ocean.”
Are you serious?
Warm air over cold ocean gives fog, which blocks solar heating.
I think we can now safely say we have entered the Paul Ehrlich phase of AGW: it will happen in fill-in-the-blank years in the future and if that does not work out, just keep on extending it further. You will still be seen as a serious and visionary scientist because you see gloom and doom and doubt the genius and innovativeness of the human animal.
Robert (17:15:21):
This assertion probably needs some qualification. It is falsified by the simple fact that ice water (and cold beer) does get warmer when exposed to warmer air. A similar mechanism certainly does transfer energy from the atmosphere to the ocean.
What mechanism are your referring to when talking about a mechanism through which the atmosphere transfers heat to the ocean?
One hot year takes 20 years to dissipate into the climate system and will mask any warming for that period of time ? I have a hard time believing that’s possible.
I would like those AGWers, like Flanagan, who post on here, to comment on the famous ‘pipelne’.
We have been told for many years that even if we completely halted our CO2 emissions we would still have many years of warming to come due to the committed heat in the ‘pipeline’.
So has this been falsified or not?
If not can you be specific as to what what natural factors could possibly prevent this?
Of course we now know that CO2 emissions have actually continued at an increasing rate. So these factors now need to be big enough to stop a temperature rise notwithstanding this increased rate.
Oh, of course, we also now now know that temperatures have actually dropped since the start of the 21st century. So what possible natural factors can have caused this amazing situation, to have stopped all the built up heat in the pipeline, to have stopped all the further increases caused by the increasing CO2 and to top it all, to actually cool the planet all during the same period?
Wow!!
Surely you will wish to comment on this previously ‘settled’ science of the pipeline?
If you do not, be assured that after every subsequent post you make in this forum, that I spot, in support of AGW I am going to pose this question to you
Alan
These are dangerous volatile times in the Global Warming Futures market. Expect stock price ramping and crashes.
I beg your pardon, Boudu. How is the president of the Adler Planetarium a weatherman of the Apocalypse?
-Chip Knappenberger
Did some one say Pipeline?
Alan Millar (18:08:43) :
I would like those AGWers, like Flanagan, who post on here, to comment on the famous ‘pipelne’.
I suspect that ‘the pipeline’ is blocked and full of something unmentionable that the AGW mob have been spouting for the last 20 years.
The lead photo shows 4 gentlemen, 2 of whom (Schmidt and Pierrehumbert) are Contributors to Real Climate, where the article in question by guest contributor Kyle Swanson appeared. Pierrehumbert himself posted the article, and therefore presumably agrees substantially with it.
However, the other two, Paul Knappenberger of Adler Planetarium and Wally Broeckner of Columbia may, for all we know, just be posing politely with Schmidt and Pierrehumbert and know nothing about Swanson’s arguments. Knappenberger’s institution hosted the climate conference at which these gentlemen gathered, but he is presumably an astronomer who may or may not have any knowledge of or interest in the issues involved.
Are Knappenberger and Broeckner being carelessly tarred by “guilt by association” here as fellow-traveling “weathermen of the apocalypse”?
Note that one Chip Knappenberger (likely some relation given the number of Knappenbergers in the phone book) raised the same issue above on 7/14 at 18:14:01.
James H.,
Your realtors’ analogy is spot on.
I have had to deal with my young children being worried over the content of school lessons about global warming and told that not believing in global warming is akin to “not believing that man landed on the moon.” We face the prospect of Waxman-Markey devastating our economy for decades to come.
Global warming advocates incessantly put forth predictions that this season or that would be the “hottest ever” which never materialized.
Swanson and Tsonis now are putting forth their fantasy about how we will have a “pause in the warming.” This theory sounds like a way out for global warming proponents to hedge their bets. No dice. This theory and its societal ramifications and consequences is their responsibility.
Don’t worry guys, (King Canute) Obama and fellow follower Rudd will keep temperatures within 2 degrees (?F). So if it gets too cold they can turn on a few more factories. Much easier than messing around with Milanković Cycles, ocean circulation, sunspots and volcanic emissions etc.
“”” Remmitt (15:11:20) :
George E. Smith (14:12:00) :
“[…]
That radiation from the atmospheric air, goes in all directions so only about half of it is directed downwards towards the surface;
[…]”
Given, on the large scale, the planet is a globe, I’d say it’s less than half. Or is the atmosphere too thin to even notice the difference? “””
Well the globe thing is not a factor Remmitt, for the following reason. The radiation from a small volume of gas, is essentially isotropic; there’s no preferred direction of emission, so it’s spherical distribution.
But think about the radiation that is emitted nearly parallel to the ground (but downwards). When it gets to the surface, it is going to be spread over a huge area, because of the extreme obliquity. Consequently, that portion of the radiation is going to do very little surface warming at all; don’t forget for near optical surfaces like the water for example, you will also have grazing incidence reflection, to further reduce the absorbed flux density.
As a result, only the flux from a more confined cone angle is going to do much warming.
Now of course a given surface area is going to receive radiation from directly above, but also from surrounding large areas of atmosphere, but at ever more glancing angles.
It’s a fairly straightforward text book calculation to compute the average irradiance on the surface, but the atmsophere is so thin relative to the earth radius, that it might as well be flat; well the eartyh is flat, isn’t it; isn’t that one of our core beliefs?.
The real complication of the downward radiation problem, is that some of that radiation is going to get re-absorbed by GHG on the way down; and maybe many times.
As a result, accurate modelling of the atmospheric absorption is extremely complex. I’m not sure anyone has ever got it completely correct.
Ordinary optical absorption in most materials, is a one shot deal. A photon captured by an atom or molecule, transfers its energy to that molecule, and it ultimately becomes thermal agitation of the material, so heating the sample. Ordinary materials do not re-emit the photon that was absorbed, before the energy gets thermalized, so in that case the beam intensity drops steadily as energy is removed, and the absorption follows the usual e^-alpha. z extinction.
The atmospheric thermal radiation doesn’t behave that way, because the thermal photons that are captured by the GHG molecule, such as CO2, is transferred to the ordinary non GHG molecules, which are far more numerous, and then that heated body of gas eventually emits its own thermalradiation spectrum, which is similar to what is flying around anyhow, depending on temperature gradients and such.
So the atmospheric IR absorption is vey complicated, even in a simple one dimensional model; and then you still have convection mucking things up all the time. But it is fairly easy to show that the thermal radiation can travel upwards to cooler less dense atmosphere, much easier, than it can travel in the opposite direction into denser warmer GHG containing layers.
CO2 is 385 ppm by volume of the atmosphere; which is pretty much the same as saying by molecular species, treating the components as all ideal gases. That means there is once CO2 molecule for every 2596.4 non CO2 molecules. Taking the cube root of that number, and you get about 13.75.
So that means that individual CO2 molecules, on average, are separated by about 13.75 layers of other molecules in all directions. It’s what I call “Cocktail Party Physics”. The gal you want to talk to has so many guys around her; she doesn’t even know you are in the room.
So the GHG molecules operate single handedly; they are totally unaware of each other’s presence, so they act alone.
A single IR photon could easily pass through the entire atmosphere in less than a millisecond, and perhaps never encounter a single CO2 molecule. Maybe not too likely, but not impossible either, so a vast cascade of absorptions and re-absorptions is going on all the time, as the thermal energy tres to get from one place to another.
Bear in mind that a photon heading downwards, after transferring its energy to the air by collsions, and getting re-incarnated as a differnt IR photon of a different (but nearby) wavelength, may be re-emitted in the upwards direction, and retrace its track for a while.
No wonder the problem has not been completely solved; it is total chaos at its finest.
George
“If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.”
Of course, there is no evidential support for this hypothesis other than the fact that their models need it to be correct.
Well, having said all that it looks like the only thing that really matters is the Humboldt Current, and the Trade winds over the Andes. When they’re clickin, we’re cool. When they take a break, we’re hot.
If I were a “climate scientist,” I think I’d be trying to figure out what drives that.
So… are we all gonna die in the next 50 years or not? I’m tired of this emotional roller coaster.
Oh cool! RealClimate has a wordpress blog and I can actually SEE the scientists who taught me a little about Climate Change. I’m no scientist, so I can’t understand some of it but I’m really good at recognizing the truth when I see/hear it!!
Nice!
I hypothesize that it may get hotter, colder, or stay the same 20 years from now, based the computer program I wrote to do my income taxes, modified to predict weather 20 years from now.
Now, where can I pick up my well-deserved climatology degree?
Graeme Rodaughan (16:47:15) :
“And if the cooling keeps going, and passes the 1990s average… What then will they claim?”
A possible answer to Graeme Rodaughan’s question is,,,,,,,
Did anyone catch this response over at RealClimate?
“When the Keenlyside paper came out, Andy Revkin had a nice blog article on whether the drive for carbon mitigation action could survive a decadal interruption in warming. It’s a good question, but one I wouldn’t presume to know how to answer. Our best armory for the arguments you fear quite rightly is to build up our understanding of decadal variability and the extent to which it can cloud the long term trend. It’s too soon to say whether the current “pause” in warming is anything more than statistics being clouded by one unusual El Nino event, but we should be thinking now about possible explanations just in case something more interesting is going on. –raypierre]”
This overshooting hypothesis appears to be utter nonsense.
How does overshooting work? Can it physically exist?
Where is the evidence of overshooting?
Where are the overshot spots?
Robert (17:15:21)
“This assertion probably needs some qualification. It is falsified by the simple fact that ice water (and cold beer) does get warmer when exposed to warmer air. A similar mechanism certainly does transfer energy from the atmosphere to the ocean.”
In that situation the ice water or cold beer warms by conduction from the surroundings through the container. There is no direct net energy transfer from air to liquid.
Evaporation from the open surface of the container continues throughout and removes more energy from the liquid than is added from contact with the air.
The liquid nevertheless warms up because the energy from conduction exceeds the energy lost by evaporation. That cannot happen with a huge ocean overlain by a thin layer of air exposed to space. In that situation the energy flow is always continuous and one way only. However the rate of flow does vary and it is that variability in the rate of flow that falsifies the idea of human induced climate change.
I guess the thing with these shifts are that they are like rolling straight 6’s – it might happen occasionally and give you a break, and are lucky breaks which randomly ‘mitigate’ the effects of AGW – but to gamble on them continuing to happen when there is a known and physically proven forcing effect from CO₂ would be foolish. The author makes this clear.
OT, but more GW hype…I can’t seem to find any other media reports of this, potential, (Summer?) event.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/global-warming/arctic-glacier-poised-to-split-up-20090715-dl0w.html
Sam Vilain (21:48:48) :
“… there is a known and physically proven forcing effect from CO₂ ”
You can not be serious!!!!
sounds scareing,,,,, so the effects must be dangerous
I hadn’t even noticed, but-is That Paul Knappenberger in any way connected to Chip, above, who HAPPENS to have the exact same name?
http://masterresource.org/?page_id=71/#chip
Clearly the deniers and the alarmists are engaged in a cabal to distract us with whether AGW is a threat or not so that we miss their plan to steal the Hope Diamond. Or was that an Episode of South Park with politicians? Anyway.
You have to admit the eerie “coincidence” is hard to dismiss. 😉
So……… If I’m reading this right, these guys just gave themselves an additional 11 year pass on being wrong about global warming. I see how it works. Take observable data that does not jive with your model’s predictions and “hypothesize” some lame excuse to give your self a pass, so you and your buddy’s can still hit the lecture circuit until it’s time to retire. Brilliant!
Hmmm, so now we have 12 years before the warming starts again. How convenient for the AGW’ers. They can keep pushing this and tweak their models to include this, since they overlooked it in the past. By the time 2020 comes about and the temperature doesn’t fall we’ll all be broke and they’ll be nothing we do do about it.
How can we disprove a negative, that’s what they’ve basically given us and from here on in everything will match with their new pet theory, and even if the world heats up, they have it covered. AGW >> CC >> World Government coming too soon!!!!
This announcement, as I see it, gives the whole pro-AGW movement the time it needs for the masses to be force feed, and then accept, the spoon of “cod liver oil” that is cap and trade, emissions trading, carbon pollution policy etc etc. Had to laugh at the “pat on the back” Rudd received from Obama etc when he announced the formation of the carbon pollution institute, a bunch of people to determine climate policy none the less.
No disrespect however, I see more and more young “gen Y’s” etc taking this AGW poop hook line and sinker.
OT, Peter Garrett, Australian Environment Minister, has just announced a new uranium ore mine for South Australia.
Of the 385 ppm of CO2 contained in the atmosphere, how much is naturally there as a baseline to our added CO2?
If the earth cools for the next 20 or so years, the Global Warming Alarmists (excuuuuuse me, the Global Climate Change Alarmists) have a ready-made re-characterization of CO2 that fits their real agenda: “the anthropogenic release of CO2 into the atmosphere is baaaaaad and must be controlled”.
Because Global Climate Change Alarmists believe that like a greenhouse CO2 traps heat and thereby warms the planet, they feel justified in calling CO2 a Greenhouse Gas. By the same token, they could equally as well call CO2 an “Igloo Gas”. After all, like a greenhouse an igloo helps keep its interior warm.
If global cooling continues, instead of using the phrase Greenhouse Gas, which carries the connotation of an uncomfortably hot earth, to characterize CO2, the Global Climate Change Alarmists will use the phrase Igloo Gas, which carries the connotation that CO2 is responsible for an uncomfortably cold earth. Thus simply by deciding which CO2 characterization to use (Greenhouse Gas or Igloo Gas), Global Climate Change Alarmists can promote their real agenda.
George E. Smith (19:00:36) :
Thanks for the elaborate reply.
Bob Tisdale (14:30:42) :
tallbloke: You wrote, “Not that much heat escaped that year anyway. Look at Bob Tisdale’s OLR graph for the Nino 3.4 area…”
Though the Global OLR dataset doesn’t disagree with your conclusion, NINO3.4 Outgoing Longwave Radiation is not Global Outgoing Longwave Radiation:
http://i29.tinypic.com/2cn85qe.png
Thanks Bob, I’m learning all the time.
According to your global outgoing longwave radiation graph, OLR started to fall at the start of 1998, was falling sreeply by mid 1998 and carried on falling steeply all the way past the millenium. Definitely less OLR in ’98 than in ’97, followed by much less in ’99 and ’00.
However, if less heat was able to escape to space due to the reduced OLR, and as we know from George E smith, the air doesn’t warm the ocean, and yet global temperatures dropped, I’m left wondering where it went. Back into the ocean as precipitation? Out to space at the poles where the satellites don’t pick up the data so well?
What are your thoughts on that?
Warmists admit that the earth is in a cooling trend, the length of which just happens to coincide with realist scientistific prediction, but…AGW (aka natural cyclical warming) will be back on track?
Sounds like a lot of hubris and weasel words to me. Nothing new at all then…
@ Sam Vilain (21:48:48) : “…there is a known and physically proven forcing effect from CO₂ …”
Can you please direct me to the source of this claim?
Warmists admit that the earth is in a cooling trend, the length of which just happens to coincide with realist scientistific prediction, but…AGW (aka natural cyclical warming) will be back on track?
Sounds like a lot of hubris and weasel words to me. Nothing new at all then…
Oops…forgot to say great post! Looking forward to your next one.
We hypothesize…
Is this all RealClimate has to do to be believed?
Much Ado about CO2
(Twenty years or what you will)
Remember last week our Gav was in the UK, maybe the article is a cod and when our Gav returns he’ll sort them out and put these young whippersnappers back in their place?
He will show us all, that honest debate and contrary views are allowed on the greatest scientific web site ever created.
Aren’t you people lucky that we have given you the works of William Shakespeare and those of our Gav.
@Willis and Codetech
Great analogy’s so forgive me for my pathetic attempt at joining in:
1 Apply a constant tension to a steel rod. Load 1
2 Strain occurs at a linear rate
3 Increase the tension Load 2
4 Strain increases in direct proportion to the increase in load
5 Remove load 2
6 The bar stops extending even with load 1 applied 😉
7 Twenty years later the bar starts extending again :-]
A miracle!
This is relevant here as well as on another thread:
The article says this :
“A climate that is highly sensitive to radiative forcing (i.e., responds very strongly to increasing greenhouse gas forcing) by definition will be unable to quickly dissipate global mean temperature anomalies arising from either purely natural dynamical processes or stochastic radiative forcing, and hence will have significant internal variability. The opposite also holds.”
I wholly concur but what do we see ?
Despite huge changes in the rate of energy emission from the oceans and consequent attempts by the oceans to change global humidity the hydrological cycle keeps global humidity almost stable by altering the speed of it’s activity through adjustments of the sizes and positions of all the main circulation systems.
The climate is therefore seen to be highly INsensitive to attempts at forcing by huge changes in the primary greenhouse gas.
Applying the same logic it must also be highly INsensitive to attempts at forcing caused by extra CO2.
The same mechanism would apply in both cases but to deal with CO2 the necessary adjustments would be too small to measure in the face of natural variability because the real forcing agent is the oceans and not the air.
It seems to me climate may not be getting warmer, but it definitely getting worse.
Realising that global warming was a stepped process is what caused me to recant my skepticism on 8 February 2009. Here’s what I said then: doesn’t seem so different now.
http://vibenna.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/global-warming-a-skeptic-recants-part-two/
The nice thing was, I got roundly abused by both skeptics and warmists, so I felt I was definitely on to something.
I think the decision to only quote part of the article has led to some confusion as to what it is trying to say. Particularly in regards to “this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.”
The article is saying that the average global temperatures will continue to rise at the pre-1998 rate of 0.3 deg C per 10 years. If you extrapolate the trend line from 1979-1997 the average temperature will not reach the 1998 high until 2020. This is contradictory to the ‘hockey stick’ graph which shows the rate of warming to increase whereas they argue the warming rate is constant.
What they do not say is that there is any cooling trend. They have average global temperature rising from around 1950 to 2020 at a constant ~0.13 deg C per 10 years.
They also are not saying 1998 will be the hottest year until 2020. If there hypothesis is correct then in fact the 1998 record should be broken a few times before then.
Apolgoies “pre-1998 rate of 0.3 deg C per 10 years” should be ~0.13 deg C, the 0.3 deg C is the ‘hockey stick”.
[i]Because Global Climate Change Alarmists believe that like a greenhouse CO2 traps heat and thereby warms the planet, they feel justified in calling CO2 a Greenhouse Gas. By the same token, they could equally as well call CO2 an “Igloo Gas”. After all, like a greenhouse an igloo helps keep its interior warm.[/i]
The reason it’s called a greenhouse gas because much like the glass in a greenhouse it lets the heat in but stops it all from leaving again. The igloo stops heat getting in or out and is more like clouds in that respect.
“and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño.”
Where did the energie fro this overshoot come from? Since it couldn’t come from earth (which would necessarily mean cooling in another part of the planet), it must have come from outer space.
I understood the general theory held that IR radiation emitted from the sun was at a wavelength allowing it to penetrate the earth;s atmosphere, but the reflected (re-radiated) IR wavelengths at the generic (?) earth’s temperature (from all objects = water surface, ground, asphalt and conrete, and atmosphere ?) was at the right length to be absorbed and re-re-emitted from the greenhouse gasses such as water vapor (98%) and CO2 (1%).
True?
cacklinrose (20:29:08) :
So… are we all gonna die in the next 50 years or not? I’m tired of this emotional roller coaster.
—
No, no. You are mindlessly worried, m’ dear rose.
Only SOME of us are going to die in the next 50 fifty years.
(The rest of us will probably die in the next fifty years after that.)
Stephen and George,
Thanks for your discussions. I appreciate you both taking the time to keep the science straight on the thread.
It appears that the models are highly complex, and are forced to use some numbers for which science does not have a definitive answer (unlike the heat capacity). It would be interesting to see a single representative model run twice. The first time with the “conservative” number for each factor for which science does not have a definitive answer, and the second time with the most reasonable number on the opposite side of the range. Then compare the results.
I like beautiful blogs!
You made me smile Robert. Being a bear of very little brain I tend to look for the bottom line: Is this gonna kill me immediately and painfully, or do I still have time to make a run to The Target for some endcap sales?
vibenna (03:43:40)
I don’t think the ’stepping’ is helpful either way as regards the question whether the cause of any background warming is anthropogenic or not.
Whatever the cause of a slow cooling or of a slow warming the PDO phase shifts will superimpose a stepped appearance.
You have ignored the gradual 400 year increase in solar activity which is a plausible candidate for the observed background trend.
That is why the current quiet sun is so interesting. If it continues we will be better able to try and decide whether it is the sun after all which provides the basic background trend.
The importance of the PDO phase shifts is not that they create warming or cooling over longer time periods. They clearly do not, being dependent on the solar input to the oceans. The importance of them is that they can explain the observed size of global air temperature shifts despite the smallness of solar variation from one cycle to another or from the top to bottom of a single cycle.
Therefore combining PDO and other oceanic phase shifts with a background solar induced trend one no longer sees anything unnatural in observations to date and CO2 need not be implicated.
Robert A Cook PE (05:09:10) :
Yep. The IR emitted from the earth is a range 0.5-30 micrometers. H2O and CO2 are some of the greenhouse gases but they don’t absorb at the same frequencies. H2O will absorb and re-emit radiation which would have got past all the CO2 and visa-versa.
OMG, OMG, OMG,
If I grow a beard, I would look exactly like Gavin.
I prefer Khakis over jeans, though.
Justin Sane (22:59:18) :
“Of the 385 ppm of CO2 contained in the atmosphere, how much is naturally there as a baseline to our added CO2?”
Nobody knows – is the honest, short answer. And to make it into the devil it isn’t, enough junk science in the form of false physics and propaganda has been foisted onto the world population to make Joseph Goebbels proud! And just in case you’re not real clear as to who Joe is and what his primary function was –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels
Check out paragraph 3 – “…… the “Big Lie” technique of propaganda, which is based on the principle that a lie, if audacious enough and repeated enough times, will be believed by the masses.”
Any resemblance to current officials and their communication methods is, of course, purely coincidental…….. ROFL
But I digress… As for the density of CO2 in the atmosphere, the ONLY “place” a higher PMM of CO2 has been BRANDED as the evil twin of the Joker is inside of a few computers, which contrary to mass belief really DO NOT have any inherent intelligence and their resultant output(s) have only a passing resemblance to the real world. So, what’s ours and what’s natural is technically irrelevant. BTW, those models/computers have to assume that CO2 is a “well mixed” gas, other wise they DO NOT work.
That said, to ascertain the answer to your very valid question, you would first have to define what “naturally” produces CO2 (for example, do we include in that category OUR breath? it is pretty “natural” for 6 billion+ of us to exhale, etc.), then what “naturally” absorbs CO2 (For example, would you include planted by humans food crops?) then you would have to accurately measure the in and out of each……
and therein lies a Nobel Prize, so good luck with that.
Then once you’ve got your base line….. ok George and Stephen, i’ll stop now….
tallbloke: You wrote, “as we know from George E smith, the air doesn’t warm the ocean…”
I searched for a while but couldn’t find a source for this part of your comment. Got one?
Andrew,
“Clearly the deniers and the alarmists are engaged in a cabal to distract us with whether AGW is a threat or not so that we miss their plan to steal the Hope Diamond. ”
Congratulations, you sleuthed out the master plan that Dad and I carefully came up with years ago. Darn. Now I’ll turn may attention away from nonsensical global warming ideas and onto some other distracting issue…like maybe health care. :^)
-Chip
Okay, peeps, I think this has become very simple!!
It’s ALL water vapor! El Nino releases a LOT of water vapor into the atmosphere which blocks OLR which raises the temps. The water vapor dissipates through natural processes. Quickly at first, then more slowly. OLR recovers.
CO2 is nothing special. It’s merely the equivalent of about 100 PPM of water vapor added to the atmosphere. The general ball park of water vapor is, what, 14,400 ppm. This is miniscule. The variations in water vapor due to ENSO is larger than the additional CO2.
Willis, Tisdale? Anyone estimate the amount of water vapor added in 1998? How much removed during the last big la Nina?
No wonder they can’t find the CO2 signature, it’s lost in the much larger water vapor signal variations!
Beware! Now that they have a new “explanation” for the drop in temperatures that seems “consistent” with global warming, they will be yapping about how the cooler weather confirms their dire predictions about global warming in the future.
You can never win with conspiracy theorists. Every piece of evidence just confirms the theory.
Bob Tisdale (06:59:21) :
tallbloke: You wrote, “as we know from George E smith, the air doesn’t warm the ocean…”
I searched for a while but couldn’t find a source for this part of your comment. Got one?
Hi Bob, here you go.
George E. Smith (14:12:00) :
It has since occurred to me that one reason for a fall in OLR could be that the oceans emitted less heat for a while. Less wind to churn things up when it turned colder after the end of the el nino maybe?
“”” George E. Smith (14:12:00) :
It has since occurred to me that one reason for a fall in OLR could be that the oceans emitted less heat for a while. Less wind to churn things up when it turned colder after the end of the el nino maybe? “””
Just to avoid confusion; this statement is not anything I have said; for one thing I have no idea what means OLR; I am not up on all this texting code, and prefer to write in ordinary English; well at least as close to the American form of it, that I can constrain myself to use.
I have a hard time here discerning what people are abstracting from other posts; and what is their own contribution; but anyway, I didn’t say that.
I’m sure I did say thaqt the air “doesn’t warm the ocean”, and I do hope there is nobody reading this blog who believes I meant that the heat transfer from air to ocean is precisely zero; just that it is miniscule compared to what the sun is pouring into the oceans, or what the oceans are transporting back to the atmosphere.
George
“I beg your pardon, Boudu. How is the president of the Adler Planetarium a weatherman of the Apocalypse?
-Chip Knappenberger”
My apologies Chip, apparently I sometimes let preconceptions cloud my appreciation of the truth, even when it is staring me in the face !
I heard about this site from realclimate.org – which is moderated by some pretty smart climate scientists. I read the same article about the spike in temperature in 1998, which may have been an anomaly from El Nino. However, there’s nothing in the article I could see that implied global warming is not currently occurring. I’m aware that temperatures have dropped in the last ten years, which is a good thing. I’m a little curious if people who are stating that global cooling is now the norm, would they be consistent enough to say that global warming was possible, if the temperature in 2010 is hotter than 1998?
To get a good idea of a trend, it helps if you use a very long time frame. Maybe not thousands of years, just the average lifetime of a human, about 60-80 years. In some ways, that’s the only time span that is of use to people, as it’s hard to project a hundred years or more into the future.
A lot of debate about global warming is a moot point, because it’s going to be obvious if it’s happening or not in about 50 years. The concern I have is that right now, it’s possible that we are adding just enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to possibly move it to an unstable tipping point. If you doubt that the planet can be easily tipped into an ice age or very warm age, read up on paleoclimatology.
If you think greenhouse gases do not cause warming, fair enough, in the past greenhouse gas increases have probably followed natural warming from solar variations, but if you read objective studies, you would also find out that carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases do absorb or block radiative heat from the earth, trapping it in the atmosphere. So, even if warming is caused naturally, all the greenhouse gas we are adding is probably making it even warmer.
I’m a scientist with training in hazardous material technology, so I freely admit I’m not an expert on climate. However, I have also studied climate change science since 1978, long before it became fashionable. I’ve read literally hundreds of studies and thousands of pages of direct research from what I believe are fairly objective scientists. For the commenters who think global warming is a hoax, I’m a little curious as to how much direct research they’ve read with their own eyes, as opposed to reading something on the internet (a fairly bad place to get your information), reading in the newspapers (some journalists print everything they are told), or hearing it on the radio or television (journalists, talk-show hosts, and media types tend to be frighteningly ignorant of basic science). My advice is to read actual studies from unbiased sources, which tend to be the peer-reviewed scientific journals. Read everything you can on climate science. Avoid the political stuff, politicians do not know much. People who are strongly political are probably letting their personal viewpoint of the world get in the way of the real, measurable, physical data. Do not let your personal ideology (liberal, conservative, etc.) get in the way of understanding the basic science. Look at the hard, measurable data, do not take anybody’s word for anything. After about a year and thousands of pages later, you will be able to make an informed opinion.
So, does this mean that the folks at RealClimate will be pushing for governmental action to prepare for the catastrophic effects of cooling? Are they going to send media-ready reports of the estimated number of people who will die in cold weather? Are they going to suggest ways to reduce cold-related injuries? Will there be a laundry list of ways to stay warm while being green? Hmmm?
Thanks, Boudu. I just didn’t want rather innocent bystanders to get swept away in the flood!
-Chip
GlennG, you must be very new to this site. For starters, your notion of a variable Sun causing climate change is interesting. From your research review what would the mechanism be and how much change does it cause? I also didn’t see anything in your post related to oceans. Do you know what the Coriolis is? ENSO? SOI? Trade winds? What have you read about oceanic oscillations and the effects on climate variability? Some of these oscillations take longer than a human lifespan. You don’t mention these weather pattern drivers in your post. If you don’t know anything about them, I would suggest you start at the U of W for peer reviewed articles. They were the first to introduce the PDO after discovering its oscillation being in tandem with salmon cycles.
Stick around. You will read TONS more peer-reviewed scientific articles here than at many other sites.
GlenG:
Welcome aboard, Glen.
This site beats RealClimate hands down, as you can see. That’s because RC is a political site masquerading as a science site. They have a heavy AGW agenda.
This site attracts scientific skeptics who don’t blindly accept the falsified CO2=AGW conjecture. That’s why the people interested in the AGW question voted WattsUpWithThat the Weblog Awards “Best Science” site, trouncing RealClimate by a 10 – 1 margin.
You’ll learn more here than at that alarmists’ echo chamber, because dissenting opinion here is not censored, like it routinely is at RealClimate — and your comments will be seen by lots more people here because of the heavier traffic. Smart move.
Is the Real Climate story new?
The news item below is May 2008.
“The Earth’s temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.
A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming.
However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7376301.stm#map
“”” James (06:29:58) :
Robert A Cook PE (05:09:10) :
Yep. The IR emitted from the earth is a range 0.5-30 micrometers. H2O and CO2 are some of the greenhouse gases but they don’t absorb at the same frequencies. H2O will absorb and re-emit radiation which would have got past all the CO2 and visa-versa. “””
I can’t discern who said this, whether it was James, or Robert; but I think some adjustments are in order.
I would recommend that anyone interested in climate at all, should equip themselves with a copy of a GOOD normalized black body radiation curve.
While the radiations of interest aren’t strictly black body, we can be sure that the BB curves provide an outer bound for what the real observed radiations are. The best such curve I know of can be found in one of the most standard of all optics text books; “Modern Optical Engineering” by Warren J Smith; who sadly recently departed from us; the most influential Optics instructor of the last 50 years.
The normalized curve has a vertical scale going from zero to one (for W/W_max), and the horizontal axis goes from 0.15 to 50 for L/Lmax, where L is my half baked substitute for Lambda, or wavelength. There is also a logarithmic vertical scale from 1.0 down to 1.0E-5
Maybe I’ll try to photograph it, and send it to Anthony somehow, or I can e-mail it to ChasMod, and he can forward it to Anthony.
You have to become familiar with the proportions of the BB radiation curve.
The most well known fact is that 25% of the total energy is radiated BELOW the peak wavelength, and 75% ABOVE the peak wavelength. That 1:3 ratio is EXTREMELY close; but I have never done the integral myself to satisfy my curiosity as to whether that is exact. I can tell you that I left the University environment believing it was exact; but I can’t prove that. Certainly in climatology terms it is as good as being exact. So why does that matter ?
Well the extreme range of surface temperatures on the planet covers from +60C in the hottest tropic deserts, down to -90C in the highest Antarctic niches like Vostok Station. So that is 183.15 K to 333.15 K.
Wien’s Constant is 2.897756E-3 m.K ; so that places the peak IR emission wavelengths between 8.698 microns at the high temperatures out to 15.822 microns for the coldest tempertaures. OK you don’t need this kind of precision; but if I give you the accurate values, you can round them to whatever feels good to your needs.
But now back to the BBshape. For the linear curve, on the short wavelength side, your are down to 1% of peak at just 0.33, or 1/3 of the peak wavelength; which doesn’t get any shorter than 2.90 microns for the hot deserts. At 1.74 microns or 1/5 of the peak wavelength the emission is donw to 10^-5 level.
So first result is that there are no earth surface emissions below 2.9 microns of any consequence; certainly not down to 0.5 microns, which is the peak of the solar spectrum insolation.
Going up to the long wave side of the curve, effectively half the total emission is below 1.5 times the peak wavel;enght, and half is longer than 1.5X,a nd we are back down to that 1% level at about 6.7 times the peak wavelength, which is 106 microns for the emission at the coldest places. Well there isn’t much radiation at all from those colder places; so if we stop at just 10% of the peak level, that occurs for just 3.5 times the peak wavelength, so 90% is emitted below 3.5 times the peak, and only 10% longer than that, which is about 55 microns for the coldest places.
So realistically earth’s emissions cover the 2.9 to 50 micron range of wavelengths.
If we apply the 6.7 1% factor to the solar spectrum peak of 0.5 micorns, that gives us 3.35 microns; so you can see there is basically no useful infrared from the solar spectrum,beyond the bottom end of the available earth emission in the 3 micron wavelength range. It turns out that three microns, is the boundary between a very prominent water absorption band that absorbs below there, and a water hole above there, and then there is a big water block from 5-8 microns, before you get to the climate window from 8-14 microns, after which both water and CO2 kick in.
The full Planck Law Radiation curve has the form:
W = C1 / L^5 (e^C2 / LT – l) (L = lambda)
C1 and C2 are known as the first and second radiation constants (Fudge factors ??) No way; it happens that we know the EXACT values of those constants.
C1 = 2pi.h.c^2 hwere h is Planck’s constant, and c is the velocity of light, and C2 has the value h.c/k where k is Boltzmann’s constant. This to me is a staggering result; Planck’s law is one of the Crown Jewels of Physics. It has been verified over temperature ranges from close to absolute zero, up to millions of Kelvins. The Microwave background radiation echo of the big bang is simply black body radiation at a temperature of about 3 Kelvins, and you can use Wien’s Displacement Law yourself to calculate the peak of the 3K radiation as being about 966 microns in the mm microwave range.
There are more precious stones hidden in BB radiation Physics; but that will keep.
George
@Glenn G
“I heard about this site from realclimate.org – which is moderated by some pretty smart climate scientists.”
End of part post
I would prefer the word censored myself but who’s to care.
I am not going to say too many good things about this site otherwise I will probably get snipped for grovelling. I was moderated once by Mr Watts because I said something which was offensive and it was a fair enough snip. I also got a message explining why.
The link below is to a site called Climate4you, I suppose a toysrus of climate data.
The following is a link about Ice conditions in the arctic in The Monthly Weather Review October 10, 1922 where the arctic was Ice free up to 81degrees 29 ‘.
An extract reads:-
Dr. Hoel, who has just returned, reports the location of hitherto unknown coal deposits on the eastern shores of Advent Bay – deposits of vast extent and superior quality……The oceanographic observations have, however, been even more interesting. Ice conditions were exceptional. In fact, so little ice has never before been noted. The expedition all but established a record, sailing as far north as 81Degrees 29’ in ice-free water. This is the farthest north ever reached with modern oceanographic apparatus…..
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/1922%20SvalbardWarming%20MONTHLY%20WEATHER%20REVIEW%20.pdf
I hope you find the article of interest.
One point, I don’t think that the hypothesis of dangerous climate change due to man made CO2 emissions is a hoax, I just think the hypothesis isn’t proven and in fact there is enough emperical evidence alone to show the hypothesis to be false.
Finally, given your background and if you have not read it I would recommend you scroll back to Willis’s analogy.
Regardless of the science and the data, we have to understand that environmentalism has moved beyond recycling to saving the world from all of the ravages of dirty fossil fuels. 30 or 40 years people may wonder where all that warming went as they battle a cooling climate but you will not be able to convince a warmer today that his worldview of the next 50 years is wrong. All you need to do is try and post a dissenting comment at RC to know what I mean.
Thanks
Will
Okay, wait a second. Everyone here has missed something. I always read these kind of pronouncements carefully, with an eye towards the details, and there’s a big one in here that no one has commented on.
Why did he pick the year 2020 for new warming? Apparently there’s no good reason, other than it being a round number. It’s not 20 years after the ’98 El Nino, as that would be 2018. It’s unlikely that he did some phenomenal calculation that said it would take 22 years to “drain off” the heat.
Is there something else that happens in 2020? Something that might affect climate?
That would be 11 years from now, just about the time Solar Cycle 25 should be climbing up out of the minimum. Here we are with Cycle 24 digging at the bottom of the barrel, and temperatures falling since Cycle 23 peaked back in 2002/3.
I’m thinking that the date wasn’t just pulled out of the air, and that they know it has nothing to do with CO2 levels.
Have you noticed that RC has changed the details on their home page?
Where their used to be a quite a long list of contributors, that list has now disappeared. Instead you now have to click on a link “Contributors” and when you get there, there are only five names – Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Caspar Amman, Rasmus Benestad and Raymond Bradley.
Disappeared are Eric Steig, Stefan Rahmstorf, Raymond Pierrehumbert, and a whole lot more names that I can’t remember.
I wonder why luminaries who were once so keen to tie their colours to the RC mast are not now so keen?
George E. Smith (09:12:59) :
“”” George E. Smith (14:12:00) :
It has since occurred to me that one reason for a fall in OLR could be that the oceans emitted less heat for a while. Less wind to churn things up when it turned colder after the end of the el nino maybe? “””
Just to avoid confusion; this statement is not anything I have said
Hi George, no, that was me answering Bob Tisdales query about where to find your post on Air – Ocean heat transfer. And a damn fine post it was too.
OLR = Outgoing Longwave Radiation
Now you see why we abbreviate.
By the way, you’ll be interested in Bob’s graphs of Global and nino 3.4 locale OLR. Very informative regarding the dynamic way water vapour controls climate, compared to the steady upward plod of co2.
I’m offering a prize to anyone who can show me the “proven decadal fall in OLR due to the increase of co2” in the global graph
http://i29.tinypic.com/2cn85qe.png – global
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png – nino 3.4
I just had a laugh when I found myself looking at the photo at the top of this thread. I recalled Foinavon’s comment (Whatever happened to him?) about AGW science being full of dynamic and good looking young women. Betthey didn’t hang around long after the show when these luminaries were speaking.
Funny you mention that tallbloke. I could see that photo being used in a textbook on body language on how to spot people who appear to be hiding something.
Click on the “Previous Posts” button at the bottom of the page, which in fact acts like a “more” button. They’re all down there, but now harder to find, due to the recent “upgrade” of the blog software.
Jeff Naujok (11:07:22) : Nice catch. Gives me an idea for a test of the emergency broadcast system-er, I mean, RC’s censoring habits.
Post that on RC, but with out the solar comments and posed as an innocent question: What is the basis for the seemingly arbitrary choice of 2020 as when warm kicks off again?
Maybe you’ll have a better chance of getting through if you add: “Why not sooner?”
Jeff Naujok (11:07:22) :
Okay, wait a second. Everyone here has missed something. I always read these kind of pronouncements carefully, with an eye towards the details, and there’s a big one in here that no one has commented on.
Why did he pick the year 2020 for new warming? Apparently there’s no good reason, other than it being a round number.
The graph shows a horizontal line from the ’98 el nino peak to the one true trend which crosses at 2020. I think. I’m not going back to look again and give RC another visitor click to count.
GlenG, welcome. But I don’t think you’re a scientist. You do not write like one and how you do write, I find illogical and full of what I call “personal relativity”. For example,
“… some pretty smart climate scientists.” What is – “pretty smart”?
“… which may have been an anomaly from El Nino. “ What is – “an anomaly from”?
“… that implied global warming is not currently occurring.” Why should it have & what is “currently”? What time frame?
“…. temperatures have dropped in the last ten years, which is a good thing. “ How’s that a “good thing”? How is it not?
“…. stating that global cooling is now the norm,” Where? And what is “the norm”?
“… would they be consistent enough” What is “consistent enough”?
“…. global warming was possible” Was? Always IS! Never read anyone here that said otherwise.
“…. if the temperature in 2010 is hotter than 1998?” “the temperature” … “is hotter”? Where?
“To get a good idea of a trend,” What is a “good idea”? “of a trend”? Temperature? Globally? Or in general, scientifically speaking?
“…. it helps if you use a very long time frame.” Helps? How? “… very long”? As in measuring the internal temp of a tornado?
“Maybe not thousands of years….” Why not? The longer the better, if it’s accurate.
“…. In some ways,” What ways? “…. that’s the only time span that is of use to people…” Is that scientifically?
“…. as it’s hard to project a hundred years or more into the future.” While I agree, are you as a “scientist” saying it’s easy to project 60 – 80 years into the future? No? How far? 10 years? 1 year?
“…. it’s going to be obvious if it’s happening or not in about 50 years. “ Really? “… about 50 years”? Why 50? Why not 11? Or in 3?
“…. it’s possible that we are adding just enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere” Anything is theoretically possible, but what do you mean “we”? What if “we” are subtracting more out than “we” are adding in and the “increase” IS ALL “NATURAL”? Prove it’s not.
“…. to possibly move it to an unstable tipping point. “ “possibly”? See above.
“If you doubt that the planet can be easily tipped…” Doubt is what science is ALL about and is the genesis of theories and in paleoclimatology, theories abound! But “easily tipped”? Surely you jest?
“…. in the past greenhouse gas increases” Scientifically, how does atmospheric gas function like a greenhouse?
“…. natural warming from solar variations…” Really? “solar variations”? So, we have our answer!?
“… but if you read objective studies” Scentifically, what is an “objective” study?
*****
“…. greenhouse gases do absorb or block radiative heat” I’m sorry, what kind of “heat” is that? Can ANYONE reading this tell me the temperature of ANY length radiative wave form? Ultraviolet? Infrared? Sound? Visible light?
*****
I saw that same phrase on the Royal Society of England’s web site.
“…. trapping it in the atmosphere.” Permanently?
“So, even if warming is caused naturally, all the greenhouse gas we are adding is probably making it even warmer.” Probably?
“I’m a scientist …” Really?
“…. as to how much direct research they’ve read with their own eyes,” As opposed to someone else eyes? Oh, “…. as opposed to reading something on the internet “
“…. (a fairly bad place to get your information)”? So a peer reviewed study by a group of highly respected scientist (without an agenda) that can be found on this “fairly bad place” is not to be believed simply BECAUSE it’s on this “fairly bad place” ? WOW! THAT’S real scientific observation.
“….. reading in the newspapers …. hearing it on the radio …. types tend to be frighteningly ignorant of basic science)” So to some people whom call themselves “scientist” and bloggers.
“My advice is to read actual studies from unbiased sources” What is “unbiased”? How does one obtain that state of mind?
“… which tend to be the peer-reviewed scientific journals.” But NOT IF THEY ARE ON THE INTERNET? I think one should FIRST study the history of “peer-reviewing” and HOW that process functions in the “scientific” community both historically and currently!
“Read everything you can …..” To “read” is nothing. To “comprehend” and apply the “truth” of what you have read to your life is the only path to success, however you measure it.
“Avoid the political stuff, politicians do not know much.” Hmmm, You’d be surprised.
As for the last 4 sentences –
“People”? … “strongly political”? … “are probably”? … “personal viewpoint”? … “of the world”? …. “get in the way”? … “of the real”? … “measurable”?… “physical data”? WHAT? You have a lot of defining to do.
“Do not let your … get in the way of understanding the basic science.”? Who you talking too?
“Look at … do not take anybody’s word for anything.”? Then you would KNOW absolutely NOTHING! For 99.999% of ALL information that one learns in life comes from others!
“After about a year and thousands of pages…”. Why not “about” 1 minute and 1 page? If it has the data you seek?
I wish I could contribute more here, technically/scientifically and I apologize to all who do, for taking so much space in the above response to GlenG. But “people” I do understand and I hope GlenG stays around and learns, but “know” that if your going to pontificate here there are some of us that will take you to task and ask you to PROVE that which you state.
@Milwaukee Bob
I understand where you are coming from but your response is a bit like one from our Gav’s.
Some American guy called Benjamin Franklin said
“Tart words make no friends; a spoonful or honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar”
Take Care
Stephen Wilde: if I understand you correctly, we agree on everything except the source of the upwards trends – you say solar, I say carbon. Fair enough, there is scope for argument.
I plump for carbon because the effect was predicted 100 years ago, there seems to be well-established physics behind it, and I see the trend correlating with the start of the coal era. For solar, I get the impression the effect is not so well established, I’m not aware of data showing a correlation for 400 years, and I would have also thought that we would be seeing more of a response to the quiet sun than we are.
I’d be interested to explore your hypothesis further, if you care to link to data? Or post it in my blog comments?
Re : KLA (17:10:45) :
” Just wondering aloud .. I work in signal processing…”
Hope you’re still on the thread. I spent a little time this evening, experimenting with the method you described. It works very well for the most part, but ….
I popped a sinusoid into the real part of an FFT input signal. Then, as you describe, multiplied the transformed signal by (jW) to get the transform of the derivative (you refer to “rotation” and “scaling”), and then inverted. I got confirmed a pretty good cosine, as required.
I say “pretty good” because the middle is great, but there is distortion at the ends. This will be the effects of the rectangular window which (as you’ll know) cannot be avoided for a finite data sample. So the time derivative becomes a little problematic at the ends of the series with spectral analysis.
I tried a different window to the input series (smoothed edges) , but the the extremes of the derivative series still look pretty unreliable as it then reflects the “attenuated” input signal at the ends.
If you are thinking about experimenting with temperatures, it might be worhtwhile “packing” a sinusoid into the real part of the input series and test data into the imaginary part. They can be unscrambled later using complex conjugates. The shape of the derivative of the sinusoid will give handy visualisation of what is probably happening to the derivative of the series you are trying to measure.
“Has something like that been done with temperature data?”
Not sure of anything very recent. There was a paper published in JSTOR back in 1976 (Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages) which claimed to detect Milankovitch cycles using FFT. There will probably be a lot of experimenting with FFT and other methods out there in the field.
Apart from end effects, I suspect one of the limitations will be a need for low-pass filtering of the temperature data to avoid frequency folding (look at the edges of the spike in 1998). From that point, perhaps the case that further processing by spectral analysis starts to diminish. Just a thought.
Thanks for describing the method.
“”” vibenna (16:01:08) :
Stephen Wilde: if I understand you correctly, we agree on everything except the source of the upwards trends – you say solar, I say carbon. Fair enough, there is scope for argument.
I plump for carbon because the effect was predicted 100 years ago, there seems to be well-established physics behind it, and I see the trend correlating with the start of the coal era. “””
Not so fast vibenna; you’re a bit loose with your terms. What “effect” was predicted 100 years ago that was due to “carbon” ? I’m not aware of any.
There was a prediction somewhere in that time frame that “carbon dioxide” in the atmosphere could absorb surface emitted long wave radiation, which would raise atmospheric temperatures; but I know of nothing predicting a carbon effect.
And the CO2 effect has not panned out since the observed temperature fluctuations don’t in any way follow the measured CO2 changes, and the science shows that if anything, the CO2 changes are a result of the temprature changes, and not the other way round.
So no you are wrong; there is no well established Physics behind what you say. And that is the whole point; it is a much mangled computer program that comes up with these claims; not any measured observations.
How come Roger gets only eleven comments and WUWT? gets 271 on a copy of Roger’s post? Anthony, you have really outdone yourself here!!
Vibenna, you show me your correlation and I will show you mine.
Pamela….
vibenna (16:01:08) :
I suppose you’re referring to Svante Arrhenius, who hypothesized that CO2 would cause global warming in his 1896 paper.
But ten years later Arrhenius reversed himself [can you imagine Al Gore or Michael Mann admitting they were in error?] In his 1906 paper, Arrhenius drastically reduced his climate sensitivity number. We know now that it was still too high, but he was finally going in the right direction.
The central, glaring error in the whole CO2=AGW conjecture is that carbon dioxide [“carbon” to those who get their information from TV and realclimate] causes global warming. Any warming due to CO2 has already happened. Now, CO2 levels are a response to temperature, not a cause of temperature rises. No matter what time scale you use, you can not show that changes in CO2 have ever caused subsequent changes in temperature:
click1
click2
click3
click4 [note the R-squared (non)-correllation]
click5
The facts make clear that almost all the warming possible due to CO2 has already taken place, and more CO2 will not cause any noticeable warming — even if CO2 levels double or triple.
Smokey (19:04:22) :
Blimey Guv,
The cherries were ripe when you went through that orchard, and I see you picked a few.
2 of the plots have no real data behind them and a timscale at years per pixel
1 has a cerrypicked temperature scale
one has a cherry picked time span
On is Christopher Monckton – say no more!
a real scale comparison of CO2 and TSI. Which has the possibility of changing global temperatures?
http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/7777/tsico2realscale.jpg
CO2 is not the only GHG in the equation!
Hu McCulloch (12:36:59) :
trevor (11:35:26) :
Have you noticed that RC has changed the details on their home page?
Where their used to be a quite a long list of contributors, that list has now disappeared. Instead you now have to click on a link “Contributors” and when you get there, there are only five names – Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Caspar Amman, Rasmus Benestad and Raymond Bradley.
Disappeared are Eric Steig, Stefan Rahmstorf, Raymond Pierrehumbert, and a whole lot more names that I can’t remember.
I wonder why luminaries who were once so keen to tie their colours to the RC mast are not now so keen?
Click on the “Previous Posts” button at the bottom of the page, which in fact acts like a “more” button. They’re all down there, but now harder to find, due to the recent “upgrade” of the blog software.
If they’ve finally realised the water coming up past the portholes of the fair ship MV-RC is due to rising sea levels, you have to wonder why they have headed for the bilges.
Here’s the old list:
* Caspar Ammann
* David Archer
* Eric Steig
* Gavin Schmidt
* Michael Mann
* Rasmus Benestad
* Ray Bradley
* Ray Pierrehumbert
* Stefan Rahmstorf
* Thibault de Garidel
* William Connolley
William Connolley, hah! I wonder what his new vocation will be once policing wikipedias gorebull wombling pages becomes a thnkless task.
Smokey – yes (to the first part anyway). George E. Smith – what smokey said. Smokey, I’m really interested in your claim about diminishing responsiveness – care to post some more links on that so I can dig a bit?
My confidence in AGW partly comes from the prediction 100 years ago, and partly from the current majority climate science view about the physics of warming. I don’t overrate the consensus though. I work a lot with time series in the social sciences, and historical fitting in unbelievably hard. You get over-fitting, omitted variable bias (specification error), failure to account for non-sampling error, you name it. If you added up your degrees of freedom genuinely (including all the analyst decisions, as well as the obvious parameters) they would be very low. There is only one person in the world in my field that automatically I trust to get this stuff right. For the rest, fancy models run the risk of being just … fancy models.
However, I rate the 100 year old prediction highly. I’m a Popperian: show me the predictions. Show me the explanations. Show me that one set of hypotheses has more explanatory power than another set. That’s why I was a skeptic, but recanted once I realized warming could be stepped, and there was a mechanism that could explain the stepping.
Pamela – if you’ll come behind the bike sheds with me, I’ll show you my British Coal Production figures as a proxy for the start of the modern carbon emission. And compare them with my 150 year long Hadcrut temperature data set http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/. Looks like the temperature turning point roughly coincides with peak British coal production. More than coincidence? You be the judge.
Sorry, those British coal production figures are a bit shy. Here they are again;
http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file40592.xls
vibenna (02:54:01) :
So you are a ‘social scientist’ are you? Well, OK. I guess that qualifies you as a ‘climate scientist’ as well.
vibenna (02:54:01) :
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
Jolly hockey sticks again I’m afraid.
bill (21:53:56)
Then surely the goron crowd is regretting that they’ve hung their hat pretty much exclusively on CO2, now that it’s clear that CO2 has only a minuscule effect. As we can see, the tiny effect of CO2 is overwhelmed by many other effects.
As I believe I originally made clear, I provided several graphs in order to avoid the usual claim that only a short time scale was used. Lacking any other argument, you say it’s a ‘cherry picked’ time span anyway — when I provided several charts with different time scales. So if that’s all you’ve got, you really haven’t got anything except your newest strawman argument, TSI. That wasn’t in the discussion, was it? Good job setting up Mr. Strawman and knocking him down. You invented your new argument and took it on. Bravo, sport!
Finally, you’re getting to be a parody of the typical goron response when you casually dismiss Christopher Monckton with a wave of your hand and the comment, “…Christopher Monckton – say no more!” Pure ad hominem; no substance whatever.
I understand, bill. When you can not refute Monckton’s reasonable argument, then ad homs are all you’ve got left. Recall that Monckton kicked Schmidt’s butt in their last debate. Maybe Gavin would have done better if he’d told the audience, “Christopher Monckton – say no more!” [Hmm-m-m. Maybe he should have tried it – he couldn’t have done much worse.]
Ad hominems are the default position of the climate alarmists.
vibenna (2:54:01),
The diminishing effect of CO2 has been discussed many times on WUWT. Being new here [and apparently fairly new to the subject], you need to get up to speed. There’s probably no better way than to make WUWT your home page. The chart I provided shows the reason that, despite the steady increase in CO2, the planet isn’t warming in response. All of the CO2 warming has already taken place. Even doubling CO2 from here would only cause a negligible effect, so small that it would not even be measurable and hardly worth spending any more money on, much less $trilions. [The AGW scam is costing other, much more deserving sciences a cut of the action. The AGW crowd is hogging $billions at their expense. Malaria eradication, childhood vaccination programs, medical studies — they all lose their share of the grant budget because AGW grants have shouldered them all out of the public trough. Grant money that should have gone to deserving programs goes instead to promoters of the AGW scam. It’s really amazing that other scientists meekly put up with it.]
Carbon dioxide has been demonized by the climate alarmists. But if CO2 is harmful in any way, please tell me exactly how? Let’s compare your CO2 answer with H2O.
CO2 and H2O are both beneficial, and essential to life. In the concentrations we’re discussing, both are completely harmless.
If you believe otherwise, show me. I’m a skeptic.
Re Jordan (16:35:21) :
Thanks for trying it out.
Your suggestion of superimposing a known wave to estimate end effects is a good one. It seems to me that for example superimposing a triangle wave would be a good way to go, as the differential of that would be a nice, easy to remove rectangle, and it contains frequencies predictably decreasing throughout the spectrum.
I know about the pesky end effects. I threw the FFT method out there because it allows to better estimate artifacts of filtering than the usual FIR methods IMHO.
I suggested a Gaussian filter as lowpass, because its transformation invariant and therefore minimizes artifacts.
Jimmy Haigh: that is neither an argument, nor evidence. Nor does it relate to my claims.
Smokey: Go on, gimme a link. As for harmfulness – climate change will bw disruptive. Humanity will adapt, but the adaption might be very unpleasant to existing societies. As unpleasant as, say, the Normal invasion of England was for the Anglo-Saxons, or the invasions of Poland in 1939. That’s my view, but it is argument from analogy only.
vibenna (14:33:30) :
“As for harmfulness – climate change will bw [sic] disruptive. Humanity will adapt, but the adaption might be very unpleasant to existing societies. ”
Now – I agree with all of that.
But you lose the plot with: “As unpleasant as, say, the Normal [sic] invasion of England was for the Anglo-Saxons, or the invasions [sic] of Poland in 1939. That’s my view, but it is argument from analogy only.”
I don’t see how you can compare climatic changes with one country invading another. Doesn’t work. Real science is a lot more complex than social science.
Gosh! Scientists discover that they aren’t divinely inspired and everything they predict isn’t the absolute truth! What a surprise! (Is there a smiley for *sarcastic smirk*?)
vibenna (16:01:08) :
Stephen Wilde: if I understand you correctly, we agree on everything except the source of the upwards trends – you say solar, I say carbon. Fair enough, there is scope for argument.
I plump for carbon because the effect was predicted 100 years ago, there seems to be well-established physics behind it, and I see the trend correlating with the start of the coal era. For solar, I get the impression the effect is not so well established, I’m not aware of data showing a correlation for 400 years, and I would have also thought that we would be seeing more of a response to the quiet sun than we are.
I’d be interested to explore your hypothesis further, if you care to link to data? Or post it in my blog comments?
vibenna – have not heard of the Little Ice Age (LIA), Maunder Minimum, Dalton Minimum.
One could reasonably argue that natural warming over the last 160 years has allowed for the flowering of our current civilization, by supporting improved agricultural yields that liberated enough people to allow for the industrial revolution to occur, which than produced a positive feedback on agricultural production to produce a runaway “civilizing” effect.
So we are just warming up out of a nasty LIA cold spell. Lets hope that the current warming continues, for everyones benefit.
Unfortunately the Suns gone quiet.
Jimmy Haigh (18:56:09) :
I don’t see how you can compare climatic changes with one country invading another. Doesn’t work. Real science is a lot more complex than social science.
Invasions and climate are closely linked. The sack of Rome by the Visigoths came about because of a cold snap in the C4th. Ditto the invasion of Britain by Jutes and Saxons around the same time. They pushed a lot of Brit’s over to what became Brittany in northern France. They Joined forces with the Normans in 1066 to go and reclaim their birthright.
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