Global Sea Level Updated at UC – still flattening

Leland Palmere:
Download and read the following paper (made by the same UN of the IPCC). You will see there, a forecast of temperatures until 2100, where there is no global warming at all. At FAO they use this study to forecast temperatures and fish catches all over the world.:
You can dowload the complete paper from (12 pdf documents):
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/005/y2787e/
Which UN report will you believe?…It is up to you to decide. If armageddon or your happy life.

Leland Palmer, thanks for your comment. You say:

It’s really amazing to me how the people on this site can look at that graph, and focus on the last three years, while ignoring the long term trend, which is clearly increasing.

The long term trend shows an increase in sea level … but the trend is not “clearly increasing”, it is not increasing at all.
w.

Hi all-
Three years is not long enough, because the noise in the data is great enough to obscure the long term trend.
A quick and dirty way of determining the signal to noise ratio in data is to visually draw confidence limits. Draw a line roughly through all the high points on the graph. Draw another line roughly through all the low points on the graph. The vertical distance between the two confidence limits gives you a rough figure for the noise.
Data with a trend greater than three times the noise (a trend that is larger than three times the vertical distance between your visually drawn confidence limits) is generally considered to be significant, and is considered to be showing a statistically significant trend. In this case, the trend in the last three years is within the confidence limits, and so is not generally considered to be significant. Extend the time line long enough, though, and a clear upward trend, greater than three times the noise, clearly exists.
Like I say, it is amazing to see people on this site look at that graph, which contains a lot of noise from seasonal variations, tidal variations and measurement error, and think that the last three years is significant (it’s not, any trend over this time period is obscured by the noise) while ignoring the long term trend.
Sea level rise is very strong evidence that global warming is indeed occurring, and is increasing along with greenhouse gas concentrations.
So, if we can’t agree on anything else, just looking at the long term rise in sea level should convince most of you, if you were being reasonable and rational, that global warming is indeed occurring.
It’s obvious. Just look at the long term trend.
How dangerous global warming is, whether it could trigger runaway positive feedback effects that totally destabilize the system, as many scientists fear, can reasonably be debated, perhaps.
But the fact that warming is occurring seems pretty obvious from the long term trend in sea levels, which, over a long enough period of time, are clearly increasing.
Ice melts, and increases sea levels.
Does anyone have an alternate explanation for the clear long term trend in sea levels, other than global warming?

Leland Palmer (19:25:49) :
Does anyone have an alternate explanation for the clear long term trend in sea levels, other than global warming?
No I believe it IS due to warming seen since LIA at around 20cm per century, with warming at 0.7C per century, over the last 2-300 years.
And yes, even some CO2 impact in there, maybe as much as 20%.

Leland Palmer, you advise a “quick and dirty” method of determining errors, which apparently involves looking at the data and drawing some confidence interval lines where you think they should be.
Here on this site, we prefer the scientific method over homespun “just draw a line somewhere” methods. For example, the excellent paper by Anny Cazenave et al referred to above, which says:

Abstract. A new error budget assessment of the global Mean Sea Level (MSL) determined by TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1 altimeter satellites between January 1993 and June 2008 is presented using last altimeter standards. We discuss all potential errors affecting the calculation of the global MSL rate. We also compare altimetry-based sea level with tide gauge measurements over the altimetric period. Applying a statistical approach, this allows us to provide a realistic error budget of the MSL rise measured by satellite altimetry. These new calculations highlight a reduction in the rate of sea level rise since 2005, by ~2 mm/yr. This represents a 60% reduction compared to the 3.3 mm/yr sea level rise (glacial isostatic adjustment correction applied) measured between 1993 and 2005. Since November 2005, MSL is accurately measured by a single satellite, Jason-1. However the error analysis performed here indicates that the recent reduction in MSL rate is real.

So you are free go ahead and draw your lines where you wish, and try to convince the credulous that yours is a valuable, accurate, and valid procedure for determining errors. Me, I’ll put my trust in science and mathematics …
w.
PS … you do note the part where she says the recent reduction in sea level rates is real?

“”” Leland Palmer (19:25:49) :
Hi all-
Three years is not long enough, because the noise in the data is great enough to obscure the long term trend.
A quick and dirty way of determining the signal to noise ratio in data is to visually draw confidence limits. Draw a line roughly through all the high points on the graph. Draw another line roughly through all the low points on the graph. The vertical distance between the two confidence limits gives you a rough figure for the noise. “”
So; under whose authority do you claim this is “noise” ?
It actually IS the data. The whole climate/weather system is chaotic, and of such a nature that regardless of what variable you are measuring; temperature, sea level, ice area, etc; at no point is it possible to predict what the result of the very next measurement will be; it is not even possible to predict, whether the next value will be higher or lower than the most recent value.
If there is any “noise” or fictitious value, it is the mathematically extracted so-called “trend” that is a noise; it is a complete fiction generated by mathematics; and it has no physical significance whatsoever.
Whatever tomorrow’s climate/weather will be; we can be certain that it will be the result of adding the result of the operating physical effects to whatever today’s climate/weather is. You will not get any meaningful prediction for tomorrow, by starting from some fictional point of global mean; because the real physical processes that determine the climate/weather are functions of what the present values are not some mathematical abstract value that can be observed nowhere in the system.

Phil. (07:44:24) :
Patrick Davis (05:44:58) :
Well, I will say this, if you dig through very old Royal Naval (UK) maritime records, hundres of years old, you will see there is *NO* sea level rise of any significance. These records are now lock from public view, which is a shame. Not sure when that happened.
The whole south coast of England, an old naval nation after all it was ships in “Great Britain’s” time which made it a “suprepower”, and all the records show no significant change in sea levels. Hundreds of years of measurements, not just 30 years of “data”.
“And yet the UK saw fit to invest over $1billion in the Thames barrier and had to use it with increasing frequency”.
Phil, the closing of the Thames Barrier has nothing to do with sea level rise.
It has everything to do with the track of storm depressions and the fact that the surge they cause is pushed into a funnel.
Just have a look at the map and you see what is causing this problem.

Another alarmist story, 12 meter sea level rise!
http://www.canada.com/technology/Climate+clock+ticking/1462485/story.html

Leland, in the midst of a variety of insults directed at I don’t know who, you say:

In the words of Stephen Hawking – “the risk is that the temperature increases could become self-sustaining”. In other words, a series of vicious cycle positive feedback events could be initiated, which would be hard or impossible to stop.

I know Hawking is brilliant … but so is Steven Chu, and he seems to be equally clueless about climate.
First, perhaps you might comment on why such a thermal runaway has (as far as we can determine) never happened in the history of the planet, and what that means for our ability to estimate the odds of such a runaway …
Second, saying that “X might happen, and although the probability is low, the probable cost is high” is meaningless. Nor can we get from that to a expected cost by multiplying the two.
For example, the sun might go nova tomorrow. Probable cost? Trillions and trillions and trillions. Multiply that by any conceivable probability of nova, and you end up with a huge number. Does that mean that we should begin studying ways to prevent the nova?
Out at the fringes of probability, such calculations are … well, not to put too fine a point on it, meaningless. You might profit by a look at Michael Crichton’s speech on the Drake Equation to understand why a small probability of the end of the world as we know it should not trigger emergency, drastic action.
w.

Hi Smokey-

First, perhaps you might comment on why such a thermal runaway has (as far as we can determine) never happened in the history of the planet, and what that means for our ability to estimate the odds of such a runaway …

Not so, sad to say. It’s looking more and more like both the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum and the Permian/Triassic mass extinction were caused by runaway global warming leading to the release of a couple trillion tons of isotopically light methane from the methane hydrates. It’s looking in fact like the “clathrate gun” or “methane catastrophe” hypothesis is in fact the correct explanation for these extinction events, and possibly several mass extinction events.
The Permaian/Triassic mass extinction killed 95 percent of all species on earth, roughly.
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

he sudden release of large amounts of natural gas from methane clathrate deposits in runaway climate change could be a cause of past, future, and present climate changes. The release of this trapped methane is a potential major outcome of a rise in temperature; it is thought that this is a main factor in the global warming of 6°C that happened during the end-Permian extinction,[8] as methane is much more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (despite its atmospheric lifetime of around 12 years, it has a global warming potential of 62 over 20 years and 23 over 100 years). The theory also predicts this will greatly affect available oxygen content of the atmosphere.
Possible release events
Two events possibly linked in this way are the Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. It may also have had a role in the sudden warm-up of “Snowball Earth”, 630 million years ago.[9] However, warming at the end of the last ice age is thought not to be due to methane release.

Methane from hydrates is depleted in C13, relative to methane or CO2 not from hydrates. So, if a large amount of methane is released from these hydates, you would expect that there would be a sudden drop in the C12/C13 isotope ratios, in rocks laid down during these past extinction events.
Exactly that sort of signature is seen, for each of the extinction events mentioned above.
So, it looks like past runaway warming events, leading to mass extinctions, have indeed occurred.
We can hope that the triggering event for the Permian/Triassic extinction event was the Siberian Traps volcanism, which might have heated the deep ocean fast enough to trigger the catastrophe.
We can hope that outgassing from the Arctic tundra, as the frozen plant material in permafrost decays into methane will not trigger another methane catastrophe, and that the methane hydrates will stay stable.
We can hope that as tropical and boreal forests burn in huge firestorms, that this is insufficient CO2 forcing to trigger widespread dissociation of the methane hydrates.
We can hope that Chris Field, one of the IPCC group leaders, who talked about “vicious cycle” feedbacks on Democracy Now! on February 26,2009, was wrong when he worried that melting of the permafrost, the ice/albedo feedback, tropical forests burning, boreal forests burning, outgassing of CO2 from the oceans as they warm, and so on, was wrong when he worried about these positive feedback processes leading to runaway global heating.
We can hope.

“The risks of runaway global heating are simply too great, and the consequences too immense, in my opinion, to be ignored.”
The risks of runaway global heating are non-existent as the fossil record shows. Wiki is simply lying if it tries to ascribe those extinctions to CO2 warming while forgetting to mention flood basalts that would be destroying the atmosphere at the time.
The World is getting colder and government funded scientists are deliberately lying to hide it.
The idea that Man could tune the climate to order is actually extremely funny, apart from the number of people who believe it.

Leland, thanks for your response.
I can find nothing in the geological history of the world where a slight rise in CO2 has caused any catastrophes. In fact, the CO2 level is currently at the low end of its historical range over geological time. See e.g.
Science 21 September 1990:
Vol. 249. no. 4975, pp. 1382 – 1386
DOI: 10.1126/science.249.4975.1382
Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels Over Phanerozoic Time
Robert A. Berner (requires subscription)
which shows that the CO2 levels in the last 500 million years have been 5-10 times what they are now for millions of years at a stretch.
The cause of the PETM warming some 55 million years BP is the subject of ongoing scientific debate and uncertainty. It is hypothesized that an unknown event caused a huge loss of methane from clathrates, poisoning the ocean and raising the temperature. There were mass extinctions in the ocean, but not on land, indicating an oceanic origin.
However, the high CO2 levels (up to 10x the present) in the last half-billion years have not caused any other such event, despite the presence of clathrates … which makes it unlikely that CO2 caused the PETM warming.
So do I think a doubling or even a tripling of CO2 will cause thermal runaway? Absolutely not, we’ve seen much, much more than that in the last hundred million years or so without thermal meltdown.
Now, if you want to worry about that, it’s up to you. But there is no scientific case to be made that the projected worst case CO2 rise will cause thermal runaway.
Next, you say:

Risks are commonly assessed by multiplying the probability of an event by the consequences of an event.

Well, you know … I actually knew that. And discussed it above. And recommended that you read Crichton’s speech on that very subject before you made yourself look more uninformed than I suspect you actually are.
However, you’ve obviously not done so … so let me recommend it again.
Next, quoting Wikipedia on a scientific site such as WUWT will not gain you any traction at all, it simply calls your credibility into question. Some things Wikipedia is good for, but climate science is not one of them. See this article for a good explanation of why it absolutely cannot be trusted in re climate.
Next, enough with the accusations of bad faith, please. Speculations on people’s motives and the like go nowhere. I’ll assume that you are trying to learn more about the relatively new science of the climate, which we’ve only been really seriously and intensively studying for about a quarter century or so. As such, there are many more questions than answers. Most of us are trying to discuss and find answers here on this site, not looking to get into food fights or pretend that we understand why others believe what they believe. Please do us the courtesy of assuming that we, like you, are looking to gain further scientific understanding of the climate.
And finally, citations are your friend. If you want to make a claim, back it up with some science or at least a citation to further support for your ideas.
My best to you,
w.

Oh, on edit –
The dinosaur killer extinction was the Cretaceous/Tertiary extinction event, and that extinction is indeed generally thought to be caused by an asteroid hitting the earth.
Another reference for the methane catastrophe hypothesis, this one for the Permian/Triassic mass extinction:

How to kill (almost) all life:
the end-Permian extinction event
Michael J. Benton and Richard J. Twitchett
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1RJ, UK
The biggest mass extinction of the past 600 million
years (My), the end-Permian event (251 My ago), witnessed
the loss of as much as 95% of all species on
Earth. Key questions for biologists concern what combination
of environmental changes could possibly have
had such a devastating effect, the scale and pattern of
species loss, and the nature of the recovery. New
studies on dating the event, contemporary volcanic
activity, and the anatomy of the environmental crisis
have changed our perspectives dramatically in the past
five years. Evidence on causation is equivocal, with support
for either an asteroid impact or mass volcanism,
but the latter seems most probable. The extinction
model involves global warming by 68C and huge input
of light carbon into the ocean-atmosphere system
from the eruptions, but especially from gas hydrates,
leading to an ever-worsening positive-feedback loop,
the ‘runaway greenhouse’.

With regard to your link, that shows human sources to be a small fraction of the total, this is true but taken out of context.
Yes, of course, human caused carbon entering the atmosphere is a small fraction of that contained in the oceans and other carbon reservoirs.
What that link does not tell you is that natural carbon fluxes are in balance, while human caused sources are almost entirely one way, taking carbon from the ground in the form of fossil fuels, and putting it in the air as CO2 from combustion of those fossil fuels.
This is in fact one of the scary things about runaway global warming. Once initiated, it appears to have the ability to “become self-sustaining”, in the words of Stephen Hawking. And the quantities of carbon are so huge that we might not be able to do anything about it, once the process starts running away.
Regarding humans adding carbon to the atmosphere hundreds or thousands of times faster than natural process, that is simply factually true. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing at about one percent per year, which is a huge, unprecedented rate of change, much higher than the very slow rates of change that have occurred in the geological record.
Increases of 100 ppm of CO2 in the fossil record would generally take tens of millions of years, not two centuries. The only comparable rates of change of CO2 concentration we know of were during the extinction events that are referred to above, and generally, the rates of change during those extinction events appear to be slower than our current huge rate of one percent per year.
It’s all very sad, and I mean that sincerely, not angrily. You appear to have internalized a lot of climate skeptic talking points, and will simply not change your predetermined conclusion, ever, no matter what the evidence.

Leland, you should read the links people have provided. Ill formed arguments do nobody any good.
It is clear that you misunderstand many very basic things. For example, there was a link that compared anthropogenic and natural sources of CO2. In your reponse “Yes, of course, human caused carbon entering the atmosphere is a small fraction of that contained in the oceans and other carbon reservoirs.” you seem to confuse natural sources and total CO2. Quite different.
Another simple example of how far out of touch you are. You state above “Increases of 100 ppm of CO2 in the fossil record would generally take tens of millions of years, not two centuries.”
Please look at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/carbon_cycle4.php . This chart from NASA shows atmospheric CO2 rising more than 100ppm in about 15,000 years. (Please note, 15,000 years is much shorter than tens of millions of years).
Why are you so worried about potential runaway heating, but seem unperturbed by the very real, although small, risk of an asteroid hitting the earth?

Hi Charlie-

Please look at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/carbon_cycle4.php . This chart from NASA shows atmospheric CO2 rising more than 100ppm in about 15,000 years. (Please note, 15,000 years is much shorter than tens of millions of years).

OK, ya got me, I didn’t know this. I thought that CO2 variations were slower. The last 20,000 years is an atypical period, though, as we were coming out of an ice age, and so according to the text underneath the graph:

Periods of low carbon dioxide concentration correspond to ice ages, while higher carbon dioxide concentrations are linked to warmer periods. The last ice age ended 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, as carbon dioxide levels rose from below 200 parts per million to about 280 parts per million. Current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are above 370 parts per million because of the burning of fossil fuels.

Even on the graph from NASA, though, which shows an atypical period with multiple ice ages during the past 160,000 years, the last 200 years would show up as a vertical spike, extending approximately 2/3 the height of the graph, on the right hand side of the graph. This spike would be almost totally vertical, “geologically instantaneous” in the words of some of the scientific papers I quoted, similar to spikes seen during mass extinction events.
If we go up to 450 ppm CO2, that would be an almost vertical line on the right hand side of the of the graph, extending past the top of the graph, extending an additional 150 ppm (the height of the graph) above the top of the graph.
If we go to 1000 ppm, which is looking pretty likely by the end of the century, that would be an almost totally vertical line on the right hand side of the graph extending about 5 times the height of the graph.
Suppose we were to plot total greenhouse gas equivalents, and include methane in the graph. If we see a methane catastrophe, that would equal an almost totally vertical line of the right side of the graph that is perhaps 10 to 50 times taller than the graph, or even more.
So, perhaps you see my point about rates of change.
The huge rate of change of our current CO2 increase appears to be totally unsustainable and could trigger a methane catastrophe – which would be much, much worse that a simple CO2 increase.

Leland, to review the bidding, you had said

The majority of climate scientists believe that there is a significant probability of runaway global warming.

I asked for a cite. You replied:

Nothing easier, I have already provided one. Here’s a summary of several:

Either my writing skill are slipping, or you’ve forgotten what you said. They were good cites, and I learned inter alia that of the 36 state meteorologists who answered one poll, 44% considered global warming to be a largely natural phenomenon, compared to 17% who considered warming to be largely man-made … which hardly supports the idea that GW is A, much less running away … and a host of other interesting things
But not one of your cites mentions a single word about runaway global warming.
You do understand that a citation to support a claim that “The majority of climate scientists believe that there is a significant probability of runaway global warming” should have the word “runaway” in it somewhere, don’t you?
w.

Leland, here’s something else for you to worry about. The very high energy particle accelerator at CERN might make a black hole that would grow, and grow, and grow until it devours the earth.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/2650665/Legal-bid-to-stop-CERN-atom-smasher-from-destroying-the-world.html
Of course, a more rational person would realize that the experiment that CERN is doing has been going on in nature for millions of years and the resultant black holes, if any, have not gone on to devour the earth. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/science/21cernw.html?_r=1
A similar argument in regards to CO2 and runaway temperature rise makes such a runaway rise extremely, extremely unlikely category by using the same sort of logic.
Are you also afraid of a mini black hole consuming the earth? If not, why not? Do you understand the logic of those that say nature has already run the experiment billions of times?

Hi Smokey-
It’s a very strange value system displayed on this site, I think.
Normal caution with the fate of the planet and the welfare of present and future generations becomes craven, irrational fear, for example.
I’m sure that future generations will congratulate some of you on your courage.

Your CD affliction prevents you from accepting the established fact that for every one molecule of beneficial CO2 emitted by human activity, the Earth emits 34 molecules of CO2 naturally.

Which is no doubt why we have an almost vertical spike in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, when these increases are plotted on a geological timescale.
Something is happening to very, very rapidly increase CO2 in the atmosphere, in the biomass, and in the oceans.
I’ll leave it as an exercise for you, Smokey, to tell us what that is.
Cognitive Dissonance in fact seems to be part of your problem. Try, for example, to reconcile your statement about the earth emitting 34 times as much CO2 as humans do, with the almost vertical spike in CO2 concentrations we have been seeing.
Regarding modeling, normal scientific caution has in fact made them too conservative, as climate scientists like Chris Field, one of the IPCC group leaders, admitted on Democracy Now on February 26, 2009. Uniformly, as the Arctic continues to melt at a pace far faster than predicted, and wildfires around the world increase to unprecedented levels, the warming is happening far faster than the models predicted.
Regarding the Antarctic, it appears that the whole glacier creation and destruction process has sped up down there. I’ll find out more about this, and report back.
Like I said, though, it’s a strange value system displayed on this site.
In a way, it appears to be a class issue. People on this site have internalized and now advocate positions that are very important to the hugely rich coal power plant owners and super rich families that control major oil companies, but which are not in their own self interest. Really, there is no class issue that is more fundamental than threatening the stability of the earth’s climate system itself.
There’s a very interesting science fiction story called The Marching Morons, by C. M. Kornbluth, I think. In that story, a conman from the past helps future genius level people con the general population into cooperating with their own destruction.
More and more, the behavior of people on this site is reminding me of the behavior of the victims in that story. People in this site have swallowed commercially motivated propaganda, and internalized it, so much so that they are advocating policies that are not in their own self-interest, I think.

Hi Willis-
Oh, do you set the rules by which people are allowed to post on this site?

Hi Smokey-
Your “honest graph” with the scales modified so that the vertical axis represented CO2 in percent, with the values going from zero to one hundred thousand percent, was funny, for maybe a fraction of second. It was meant, no doubt, to illustrate a standard climate skeptic talking point, that CO2 has to be present in large percent concentrations to be important. No, it doesn’t. A few hundred years ago it was at about 280 ppm, and now its at something like 385 ppm. And yes, ppm means “parts per million”, and no, CO2 does not have to be present in large concentrations to have a large greenhouse effect. Methane has a much greater effect on warming on a molecule per molecule basis, and it is present in the atmosphere at approximately 1700 ppb, which means parts per billion. Although methane concentrations are currently only 1.7 ppm (1700 ppb) the real climate scientists say that it is responsible for about 30 percent of global warming.
Your “honest graph” is an example of a standard propaganda technique to try to invoke the scorn or ridicule response in the victim of the propaganda, to make the victim of the propaganda scornful of the truth. Many people apparently do not understand that empty ridicule or a scornful attitude are meaningless, and in fact get in the way of scientific analysis.
Science is just a quantitative extension of common sense. Scientists are ideally reasonable, logical, quantitative, experimental, and willing to admit error when error occurs. Scorn or ridicule are monkey responses, and have absolutely nothing to do with science.

Well, Leland, CO2 is not increasing in the biomass, as you incorrectly assert. Carbon is increasing in the biomass, as the O2 is stripped from the CO2 and emitted for us to breathe. And even if we doubled beneficial atmospheric carbon dioxide, there would be no ill effects because of the log response. The only downside to doubling CO2 would be that you’d be even more frightened.

Yep, I’m frightened, for future generations mostly, and not afraid to admit it. If the runaway positive feedback does make the climate accelerate out of control, I’m sure the maybe one or two future generations of human beings will congratulate you on your “courage”.
Yes, I misspoke about the CO2 in the biomass, sorry. Yes, of course it is carbon in biomass, not CO2. I’m an analytical chemist by profession, so I realy do understand this. Carbon in biomass, though, has increased, I seem to remember reading somewhere. This is a concern because much of that standing carbon is vulnerable to wildfires.
Regarding wildfires, we had 1.2 million acres of California burn last year, when a couple of hundred thousand acres is normal, except that we really have no normal years any more.
Here’s a study from Science in 2006, which shows that with only a one degree centigrade increase in temperature, wildfires in the Western U.S. increased by 600 percent. Most of those wildfires happened at high altitudes, in very isolated areas, and are not considered to be caused by humans.
http://secure.ntsg.umt.edu/publications/2006/Run06/SRunningScienceAug18.pdf
If a one degree C increase leads to a sixfold increase in wildfires, does this mean that a 3 degree C increase would lead to a 216 (6x6x6) fold increase?
If you won’t believe the scientists, how about listening to the firefighters?
Watch the video: 60 Minutes: The age of Megafires
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/18/60minutes/main3380176.shtml
You don’t really think that I would fall for the log response line, did you? This is based on a logarithmic curve fit approximation equation for radiative forcing, with a incorrect number used for C0:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing

For instance, the simplified first-order approximation expression for carbon dioxide is:
Incremental change in forcing (delta F) = 5.35 x ln [C/C0] (watts per square meter)
where C is the CO2 concentration in parts per million by volume and C0 is the reference concentration[1]. The relationship between carbon dioxide and radiative forcing is logarithmic so that increased concentrations have a progressively smaller warming effect.

The only way to get the sort of steep logarithmic decline your graph shows is if you use a value for the reference concentration (C0) which is close to zero. The correct reference concentration is approximately 280 ppm – roughly what CO2 levels were a few hundred years ago. If you pick a value for C0 of one, for example, it makes the logarithmic decline 280 times faster than it should be.
The graph claims to be from the University of Chicago. What was this? A student exercise? They picked a wrong, unrealistic number for C0. Plug in 280 ppm or so for the reference concentration of CO2, as the equation was designed to do, and you get a very slow decline in radiative forcing, not the sort of steep decline the graph shows.
Is their case so weak that the climate skeptics need to take a student mistake on his homework, and turn it into a major climate skeptic talking point?
Yes, I think climate skeptics are just about that desperate.

Hi Willis-
Yes, certainly it is difficult to poll scientists, because most of them fail to respond. This is a problem. Regardless of this, most climate scientists do indeed acknowledge the possibility of runaway global warming.
Why?
Because there is a real possibility of global warming.
One of the things you skeptics need to worry about is that the more scientists know about this problem, the more likely they are to be worried.
Possibly the foremost expert in the world on the climate as a self-regulating system is James Lovelock. Here’s what Lovelock has to say:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16956300/the_prophet_of_climate_change_james_lovelock

The Prophet of Climate Change: James Lovelock
One of the most eminent scientists of our time says that global warming is irreversible — and that more than 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century
At the age of eighty-eight, after four children and a long and respected career as one of the twentieth century’s most influential scientists, James Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed. “I wish I could be more hopeful,” he tells me one sunny morning as we walk through a park in Oslo, where he is giving a talk at a university. Lovelock is a small man, unfailingly polite, with white hair and round, owlish glasses. His step is jaunty, his mind lively, his manner anything but gloomy. In fact, the coming of the Four Horsemen — war, famine, pestilence and death — seems to perk him up. “It will be a dark time,” Lovelock admits. “But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting.”
In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. “The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia,” Lovelock says. “How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable.” With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes — Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.
By the end of the century, according to Lovelock, global warming will cause temperate zones like North America and Europe to heat up by fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sanctioned body that includes the world’s top scientists. “Our future,” Lovelock writes, “is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.” And switching to energy-efficient light bulbs won’t save us.
Until recently, Lovelock thought that global warming would be just like his half-assed forest — something the planet would correct for. Then, in 2004, Lovelock’s friend Richard Betts, a researcher at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change — England’s top climate institute — invited him to stop by and talk with the scientists there. Lovelock went from meeting to meeting, hearing the latest data about melting ice at the poles, shrinking rain forests, the carbon cycle in the oceans. “It was terrifying,” he recalls. “We were shown five separate scenes of positive feedback in regional climates — polar, glacial, boreal forest, tropical forest and oceans — but no one seemed to be working on whole-planet consequences.” Equally chilling, he says, was the tone in which the scientists talked about the changes they were witnessing, “as if they were discussing some distant planet or a model universe, instead of the place where we all live.”
As Lovelock was driving home that evening, it hit him. The resiliency of the system was gone. The forgiveness had been used up. “The whole system,” he decided, “is in failure mode.” A few weeks later, he began work on his latest and gloomiest book, The Revenge of Gaia, which was published in the U.S. in 2006.

And Lovelock is right about this, I am convinced. If we ignite a methane catastrophe, his predictions will actually turn out to be conservative, in my opinion.

Leland, I personally don’t care about Lovelock’s fantasies any more than I care about yours. You say:

Yes, certainly it is difficult to poll scientists, because most of them fail to respond. This is a problem. Regardless of this, most climate scientists do indeed acknowledge the possibility of runaway global warming.

I sihope you are just pretending to be as thick as two short planks, because if not, you’re in bad trouble.
The problem is your carefully chosen poll takers are slanted, they are trying to prove something, they have an axe to grind. You have no evidence that “most climate scientists do indeed acknowledge the possibility of runaway global warming.” Do you truly think that repeating it one more time will make up for your total lack of evidence?
I understand you care passionately about the world. Curiously, so do I … but that’s not enough. You have to think about what you are saying.
Lovelock is a guru and a visionary, and it’s great that you respect him. But he is not the “foremost expert in the world on the climate as a self regulating system.” He’s published some books, and was co-author on one paper. Now he’s getting old and depressed, and he has become a doomsday proponent … OK, fine, but why should we believe him? He presents no new evidence that there will be a thermal meltdown. He says

In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace

Obviously, he hasn’t even noticed that there has been absolutely no increase in extreme weather events … hardly a recommendation for his use of the scientific method. He’s been taken in by the AGW stories of death and destruction.
I’m one of the people on this list who has actually written about the climate as a self regulating system. I have presented evidence to substantiate my view.
As far as we know, the self regulation is so good that in millions and millions of years, it has not failed once. There’s a name for thinking that we might break a million year old system based on the unchanging physics of wind, wave, and water.
Hubris.
Look it up.

Hi Willis-
As far as James Lovelock goes, he really is the author of the standard model of climate science, these days. His Gaia hypothesis, at first ridiculed, has become the standard model, although it is called climate system science, or something equally bland, rather than “Gaia”. He really is one of the 20th century’s most influential scientists, and has a truly nasty habit of being both first and right.
I believe that the self-regulating properties of the climate system are good, but not infallible. In fact, I think that most of the major mass extinction events are due to runaway global heating during massive methane release events from the methane hydrates.
There are quite a few mainstream peer reviewed papers on this “clathrate gun” or “methane catastrophe” model of mass extinctions. There appears to be a telltale isotope signature left in the rocks when trillions of tons of isotopically light (C13 depleted) methane is dumped into the atmosphere – a sharp simultaneous drop in C12/C13 and O16/O18 isotope ratios deposited in the rocks laid down at those times.
Here is a list of links, from the Wikipedia article on the clathrate gun hypothesis, some of which I provided before:
Martin Kennedy, David Mrofka and Chris von der Borch (2008), Snowball Earth termination by destabilization of equatorial permafrost methane clathrate, Nature 453 (29 May), 642-645
http://earthscience.ucr.edu/gcec_pages/Kennedy%20et%20al%202008-Nature-Methane.pdf
Benton, Michael J.; Richard J. Twitchett (July 2003). “How to kill (almost) all life: the end-Permian extinction event” (PDF). TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution 18 (7): 358–365. doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(03)00093-4. http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Benton/reprints/2003TREEPTr.pdf. , cited by 21 other articles.
Thomas, Deborah J.; James C. Zachos, Timothy J. Bralower, Ellen Thomas and Steven Bohaty (December 2002). “Warming the fuel for the fire: Evidence for the thermal dissociation of methane hydrate during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum” (PDF). Geology 30 (12): 1067–1070. doi:10.1130/0091-7613(2002)0302.0.CO;2. http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~jzachos/pubs/TZBTB_02.pdf.
Notice that the peer reviewed scientific papers are talking about three different mass extinction events – the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum, the Permian/Triassic mass extinction (the greatest mass extinction of them all), and the Precambrian “Snowball Earth” termination . Each of these events has a similar isotope ratio signature, fully consistent with the release of a few trillion tons of C13 depleted methane from methane hydrates into the atmosphere, resulting in a methane catastrophe.
So, yes the self-regulation of the Earth’s climate is good. No, it does not appear to be perfect.
Our atmosphere is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, as Lovelock, in his work for NASA pointed out to them. Life has left its signature on our atmosphere, which is full of highly reactive oxygen which would have long since combined with carbon and metals to form CO2, carbonates, and metal oxides if there was no life. Our atmosphere is far from thermodynamic equilibrium, kept there by life itself, Lovelock pointed out to NASA in many years ago, a huge anomaly potentially detectable at astronomical distances.
What would happen if we return to thermodynamic equilibrium, the true lowest energy state of our Earth’s climate, and therefore the preferred state of the climate in the absence of life?
Think Venus.

Hi Smokey-
Coming from you, Smokey, that really means a lot. Yes, I am wonderful, thank you for confirming it. Thanks a lot. 🙂
Hi Willis-

Umm … that would be trying to keep clue-free folks from ruining the economy in pursuit of a failed solution to a non-existent problem.

Considering the huge number of free goods and services that we receive from the biosphere, including clean air, clean water, sunlight for food and fuel production, a limitless supply of clean energy from sunlight, huge biomass production, and so on, the economic arguments against taking action on climate change have a touch of insanity to them, IMO.
Without the economically valuable goods and services we receive from the biosphere, we are paupers. Not to mention dead, if it gets bad enough, and it’s looking pretty grim at the moment, IMO.
A little reasonable caution is in order.
And no, it won’t ruin the economy.
General Motors did not go broke producing hybrid cars, for example.
The Prius really has economically ruined Toyota, hasn’t it?
You sound kind of like a scared child, cowering in a corner, afraid of space aliens, when you talk about the economic disaster that tapping into an almost limitless supply of clean energy would create, Willis.

I agree with Willis completely. I’m a life long democrat who regrettably voted for Obama. There is the thinking man and woman’s anti-establishment and pro-green stance and then there is what we have today for protesters. I have protested against unequal treatment and funding for women in sports, healthcare, insurance coverage, and university glass ceilings, and have protested loudly against uninformed selection of human study subjects before mandatory informed patient rights became the law. My votes against the moral majority stance on abortion and gay/lesbian rights has and will stand the test of time. I leave no footprint behind when I am out in the forest and tread lightly on the flora and fauna around my house. Given that stance of being someone who protested before most of these green wannabe’s were born, their current loud screams against CO2 are as hollow as a rotten stump and should be recycled by Earth worms, their screams devoured and removed from the land. For God’s sake man, Gandhi is rolling over in his ashes listening to this nonsense against CO2 while 16,000 babies still die every day from lack of food. You know, that stuff that requires CO2 in abundance in order to grow and fuel in order to distribute. Why are you not protesting against the tankers sitting off shore, loaded with fuel, and locked and idle store houses filled to the brim with food while these babies die?

Pamela Gray, thanks for your thoughts. People like you and myself, who have actually seen the world’s misery up close, people who have spent a lifetime in the real environmental movement, often have a clear sense of what is important and what is not.
Leland, you still want to dick around with carbon and make energy even more expensive than it is, the following quote could have been written specifically for you.

The average African life span is lower than it was in the United States and Europe 100 years ago. But Africans are being told we shouldn’t develop, or have electricity or cars because, now that those countries are rich beyond anything Africans can imagine, they’re worried about global warming. Al Gore and UN climate boss Yvo de Boer tell us the world needs to go on an energy diet. Well, I have news for them.
Africans are already on an energy diet. We’re starving!
Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year. And those anti-electricity policies are keeping us impoverished. […] Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities. Hypothetical global warming a hundred years from now is worse than this? Telling Africans they can’t have electricity and economic development – except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels – is immoral. It is a crime against humanity.

Fiona Kobusingye, a coordinator of Congress of Racial Equality Uganda and the Kill Malarial Mosquitoes Now Brigade.
According to me, and Pamela, and the Africans themselves, you are condemning Africans and poor people around the world to death through your asinine policies.
Now, that’s your choice … but lecturing us while you are killing people, spouting platitudes about how moral your path is while spending billions on failed policies, accusing us of “commercially motivated propaganda sniveling” while your hero Al consumes a nation’s worth of energy, and telling us how we don’t care about the earth and you do, is pitiful, pathetic, and deeply offensive.
As you pointed out, I don’t make the rules here. I suspect it’s a good thing I don’t. So you have two choices here. 1) Keep your electronic pen capped and your ears open, and have people suspect that you’re a petulant, whining, unpleasant fool … or keep on writing and remove all doubts forever.

Hi Willis-

It takes huge amounts of energy to strip CO2 from the air, then liquify it, then pump it underground under pressure — and the only efficient energy source [outside of nuclear] is the burning of even more very expensive fossil fuel. [Forget windmills and other ridiculous greenie power generation schemes; they produce far too little energy for such a monstrous undertaking.]

Simply untrue. By the way, my “fevered imagination” seems to be producing scientific papers and links to them, that back up my position, too. 🙂
Yes, if you want to strip CO2 from the air, this is difficult because CO2 is only present in very small amounts, in the 380 ppm range, right now.
But oxyfuel combustion of biomass or biochar produces a stream of exhaust gas that is 70 percent (700,000 ppm) CO2, and all it requires is cleanup, stripping out the water, and compression to be ready for deep injection.
Many other sources of CO2, including oil refineries and ethanol plants, produce almost pure streams of CO2, approaching 100 percent pure, certainly pure enough for deep injection.
Vattenfall, the Swedish owned utility that has a lot of coal fired power plants, plans to reduce their CO2 emissions by 50 percent by 2030. And they plan to do it mostly by using oxyfuel combustion and CCS. Here is a link to Vattenfall’s next step, following the construction of their oxyfuel pilot plant, they are planning a 250 MW demonstration oxyfuel/CCS power plant:
http://www.vattenfall.com/www/co2_en/co2_en/879177tbd/879231demon/879320demon/index.jsp

Demonstration plant in Jänschwalde
The first demonstration plant on Oxyfuel capture technology is investigated at Jänschwalde in Germany. The scale-up from the size of the 30 MW pilot plant at Schwarze Pumpe is the last development step before the technology could be commercially introduced. The new Oxyfuel boiler at Jänschwalde would be of 650 MW thermal (around 250 MW electric), which is about 20 times more than Vattenfall’s 30 MW pilot plant under construction and compares to today’s largest Oxyfuel test rigs of 0.5 MW. With this milestone, Vattenfall is taking another step towards development of commercial CCS concepts. Also Postcombustion capture technology will be demonstrated at Jänschwalde.
The existing lignite fired 3000 MWe power plant at Jänschwalde was taken into operation in the 1980-ies and was modernised in the 1990’s. At each of the six blocks two 250 MW boilers produce steam to one joint steam turbine. This makes the site excellent for conversion into a double CCS demonstration plant.

So, the Swedes and the Germans can do this, but we can’t.
By the way, I think that Vattenfall could do better, and increase the efficiency of their oxyfuel process, if they were willing to add the National Energy Technology Lab’s IFCC process to their new oxyfuel plants. Once the demonstration plants are open, they will need to do something with their 30 MW pilot plant. Why not add NETL’s IFCC process onto it, and increase its thermal efficiency from roughly 35 percent or less to 50% or more? This should be enough extra efficiency to compensate for the parasitic CCS energy loss, and give them essentially free CCS:

TESTING OF A VERY HIGH-TEMPERATURE HEAT EXCHANGER FOR IFCC
POWER SYSTEMS
John P. Hurley
University of North Dakota, Energy & Environmental Research Center
PO Box 9018, Grand Forks, ND 58202-9018
jhurley@undeerc.org
Nathan J. Kadrmas
University of North Dakota, Energy & Environmental Research Center
PO Box 9018, Grand Forks, ND 58202-9018
nkadrmas@undeerc.org
Fred Robson
kraftWorks Systems, Inc., PO Box 115, Amston, CT 06231
ABSTRACT
Laboratory and pilot-scale tests of a very high-temperature heat exchanger (HTHX) that could be used to produce pressurized air at up to 2000°F for an indirectly fired combined-cycle (IFCC) power plant were performed while three coal–biomass blends were fired. An IFCC using this type of heat exchanger has the potential to reach efficiencies of 45% when firing coal and over 50% when a duct burner is used to additionally heat the gas entering the turbine. Because of its high efficiency, an IFCC system is the most appropriate power concept for employing oxygen enriched combustion in order to make carbon dioxide removal more economical.
In this paper, we summarize economic analyses of IFCC systems operated under an oxygenblown near-zero-emission scenario. The calculations show that the cost of electricity is similar to that of an emissionless integrated gasification combined cycle, whereas the operation of an IFCC is much better understood since it is essentially the same as current pulverized coal (pc)-fired systems. In addition, we summarize the results from initial joining tests of MA956, an aluminascale-forming oxide dispersion-strengthened alloy that is a candidate for construction of an HTHX.

If we don’t hurry up, we will be buying this technology from the Swedes and Germans, and so will the rest of the world, even though we invented all of this stuff here in the U.S.

Leland, you say:

Leland Palmer (13:06:35) :
Hi Willis- …

and then go off about something I never said. Given how wrong you are about other things, I guess this is no surprise.
For example, you seem to think we don’t believe in your solutions, aluminascale-forming oxide and CCS and the like, so you think you need to send citations on those. That’s not the issue.
We don’t believe in your underlying claim, that CO2 is a problem.
w.

Leland, the Editor-in-Chief of the American Chemical Society recently wrote an article claiming the science was settled and global warming was real.
Many members of the ACS were outraged, and a large number of them wrote letters expressing their disgust at his actions.
In addition, the American Physical Society has decided to revisit their stance on global warming, after fifty-four of their members protested the statement.
The lessons from this are:
1) “Official” statements by a scientific organization often only reflect the views of a few of the members.
2) The “consensus” is not falling apart … it is simply being revealed that the “consensus” never existed.
3) Your claims that we need to act now, right now, to make a meaningless dent in CO2 production are not supported by the science. The truth is that, as in many young sciences, we don’t know the truth …
w.