The Unbearable Complexity of Climate

I carried out a similar thought experiment last week:
Suppose we did not know that water boiled at 100C, and we were engaged in predicting the long-term surface level in a tank which we were also heating. Based on measured trends we would confidently expect the depth of water to go on increasing in a linear fashion as we warmed it and it expanded. We would be correct only until boiling started! Then we would have a period of turmoil, followed by a steadly FALL in the level due to the loss of water as it boiled off as steam.
When you get complicated and REAL, it’s what you don’t know and didn’t think of that stuffs things up!
Hmm – that boiling WAS a tipping point though!!

Are there any researchers looking at climate as a system governed by a Constructal Law?

A wonderfully simple illustration of the difficulty of modeling fluid dynamics.

_Jim (20:01:03) :
So far, it has worked in downtown Battle Creek; however, it should be mentioned that the banks of said river are now made of concrete 😉 … that was >30 years ago.
Battle Creek and the ‘plains’ it and surrounding communities exist in are an area that was effectively evened out over geological time (after the glaciers) by the ‘meandering river’ and oxbow lake (and swamp) effect.
So what? I don’t know what you are saying. There is nothing wrong with routing a river through a city by using concrete. The concrete banks may not last forever, but they will serve their purpose for as long as they can. And your city will be able to crank out corn flakes for the good of the nation until they collapse.

SHOUTS “WIKI TRYING TO DELETE CLIMATEGATE ARTICLE! PLZ HELP!”
http://magicjava.blogspot.com/2009/12/wikipedia-now-trying-to-delete.html

“The important thing is that we know how greenhouse gases affect climate. It has even been predicted hundred years ago by Arrhenius. It is simple physics.”
And every time I here James Hansen say this, I giggle uncontrolably. Arrhenius also concluded that the sun was made of coal, and that the earth was less than ten thousand years old.

The important thing is that we know how greenhouse gases affect climate. It has even been predicted hundred years ago by Arrhenius. It is simple physics.

This whole Arrhenius thing has always bothered me. His calculations were done before either Einstein or Plank’s work and without the foundation in quantum mechanics it is impossible to understand the absorption and emission of infrared radiation. I have been laboring through several of the papers that form the foundation that are used by the AGW community and have found that many of them do not say what it is claimed that they say. The best work in this area was actually done in the fifties and sixties and yet little of it has been applied to this modern era of computer analysis of the effect of CO2.

“So I sit with my feet in the bucket of hot water, put the thermometer in my mouth, and wait for my head to heat up.”
More than anyone needed to know, Willis. 🙂

And it is no wonder that California schools are eliminating science labs. After all, you can get all the ‘science’ you need from the Acadamy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Just follow the Oscar!

Several problems with this. First, rivers are non-steady-state, that is, they wax from high flow (Spring runoff), then ebb to low flow (late summer). The shape of a river is created much more by the high flow events than other flow regimes. Anyone who has lived near a river knows this.
Second, climate is also non-steady-state, as is well-known.
Third, it is puzzling that climate is described as a flow. While it is true that some portions of the earth do flow (atmosphere via winds, and vertically via thermals, also ocean currents and icebergs, etc), as a whole the earth is not flowing anywhere. It is much more reasonable to view the earth as a heat transfer system, with heat input and heat output with very minor amounts of heat accumulations or loss, and having several heat transfer systems. Having some experience with design and control of heat transfer systems, including those at steady state and non-steady state, my conclusion is that Constructal Law has nothing to do with it.
The points made about the climate systems being complex and not understood are excellent, however. As Anthony pointed out in another (and recent) post, NOAA missed the 3-month prediction for temperatures in the USA for Oct-Nov-Dec 2009. They not only missed, they got it entirely wrong and by a large amount in the wrong direction. In short, they could not have been more wrong. And they used some sort of predictive model for this.

Any Fahrenheit 451 intellectuals here? It’s quite telling. State of Play readers? Orwellians?
Don’t you all find it ironic that Orwell and Bradbury used totalitarianism as their protagonists as the world is now falling further and further into the very grasp of control that they preached Socialism would protect us from?
Don’t let yourselves get caught up into what Bradbury called the family; A circle of people connected via the internet that think that they know each other.
Sometimes, one has to just make things right. Or you don’t.

Dear Mr. Eschenbach,
I have read your article with a great deal of interest. It brought up some interesting arguments, which I think are right at a certain level, but it misses the point on a very different, but equally important level. The complexity of the climate is undoubtedly great and it is not inconceivable that we will never achieve a total comprehensive understanding of it. But lack of total understanding does not mean that we can not derive some understanding from interaction of some of the basic variables. I give you an example from two other comparably complex system. One is the human body and the other is the free market economy. While we know that the chemical processes used by the body to digest food involves an incredible complex series of chemical reaction involving the food, chemicals and enzymes generated by our bodies and other organisms that live in our digestive system. While these processes are incredible complex and our understanding of them is by no means complete we can predict with a relatively high degree of confidence that overeating will lead to obesity and starvation will lead health problems and possibly death. Similarly, a free market economy is incredibly complex, but it nevertheless responds positively to low interest rates and negatively to high interest rates.
The problem with using basic physics like CO2 being a greenhouse gas and such it causes global warming is not the fact that it cannot be applied because the climate is too complex. The problem with CO2 caused global warming that the numbers do not support it. Doubling of CO2 may cause a 1 degree C temperature increase (no feedback case), or somewhere between
0.5 to less than 1degree C if the feedback is negative. Since these were not scary enough scenarios, positive feedback was postulated by the proponents of AGW, to predict catastrophic warming. The problem with positive feedback is twofold. It implies an unstable runaway climate, which is not supported by paleoclimatic data, secondly there is absolutely no empirical evidence that it exists at all. Excellent scientists like Dr.Lindzen and Dr Spencer did a lot of work to show that in fact the climate feedback is negative. While their scientific work is excellent, there is one problem with their work. They fight against an unproven hypothesis. Rather like an accused has to prove his innocence in a court of law rather than the accuser has to prove the guilt of the accused. It would more effective for the sceptics to demand rigorous proof from AGW supporters to demonstrate that the climate system operates with positive feedback.

A lot of hydrothermal activity goes on at these spreading centers…
Well, no wonder – I mean, they are several million degrees, right?

With all the complex non-linear feedbacks in the climate system I would expect that the default position to start from would be that it is chaotic. With the temperature reconstructions of the last million years you would also expect the climate community to start from the position that climate is chaotic.
Chaotic, most people know but not everyone, means that the system is not random it is deterministic, but very small changes in initial conditions cause totally different outcomes. Therefore, chaotic systems under certain circumstances are impossible to model.
The visible climate community has talked itself and its followers into the view that weather is chaotic, but because climate is the average of weather it isn’t chaotic.
This I don’t understand.
There is a lot of *certainty* over at realclimate.org on this subject. “Climate is not chaotic” is the mantra.
I’d like to understand this better. Willis has given a nice analogy which just demonstrates how easy it is to form a conclusion about a system based on limited understanding of the processes in that system.
Anyone know of less certain people than realclimate who look into the subject of climate as chaotic and any papers on it?
http://scienceofdoom.com
REPLY: “weather” is known to be chaotic. Climate is a long term collection of weather events, so it stands to reason that it is also chaotic, but on a longer, slower time scale. – Anthony

Cut off an oxbow, reduce the resistance by shortening the path, get a more energetic water flow. Then come the surges, like with seasonal flooding. When the water goes to leave the banks of the river, it goes to flood-prone areas that have wetter softer ground to start with (due to decreased drainage). The energetic rushing water will cut a new channel, and what caused the river to be where it is (water flowing downhill, rivers being at the lowest points of the terrain) will lead the new channel to reconnect with the river.
Then at the start of the new branch there will be a drop in water speed, as there are now two paths for the water to go. With the drop in speed, sediments being carried along in the water will tend to be dropped off right there, and since the new branch goes off at an angle the sediments will land at the straight part rather than make the turn. Eventually the build-up will keep choking off the straight part, leading to more energetic water in the branch so it will cut a deeper channel for itself resulting in more water volume through it, until finally the straight part no longer exists.
Does that sound like a proper description of the process?

crosspatch (20:56:39) : – Ever thought of going radical? In a good way, I mean.

gtrip (21:27:39) :
jorgekafkazar (20:31:08) :
gtrip (20:00:23) : “Where do the proles fit in?”
“north prole at the top, south prole at the bottom.
I thought those things cost money.”
Depends on your proint of view.

wow

Yep, good stuff Willis. I will use that bar of iron or copper in hot water, then substituted for a human body, when in causual conversation with AGW proponents… Makes a good rough analogy for people caught up on the CO2’s properties are thus, therefore heating must be a given.
It’ll make them think about complexity…. Which is the arguement of the skeptics and their support of Natural variation of the climate system.

“A lot of hydrothermal activity goes on at these spreading centers. The process involves downward migration of ocean water through the broken basalt along the flanks of the spreading centers and expulsion of that water as heated, mineral-rich hydrothermal fluids adjacent to the spreading axis in a continuous flow.”
Er, no, the water cycle as envisaged by standard plate tectonics theory requires the suspension of gravity for starters, (less dense matter cannot descend into more dense matter), and it is more likely that the water coming out of the spreading ridges comes from the asthenosphere itself. Remember that igenous quartz crystals of the milky white color contain water in their crystal lattices – quartz without water is transparent – like a wine glass or the glass thermometer Willis used in his personalised experiment.
This raises the interesting possibility that rising sealevels might be due to degassing of the athenosphere and extraction of ground water by humanity causing land subsidence in the case of some areas in California. And this isn’t in any climate model.
Actually while WIllis’ concise description is spot on, he neglected to mention the role electricty plays in earth and solar dynamics, and when you add this component to the physics of climate, the whole argument for CO2 raising temperatures becomes farcical.

Dennis Wingo (20:52:57) :
“This whole Arrhenius thing has always bothered me. His calculations were done before either Einstein or Plank’s work and without the foundation in quantum mechanics it is impossible to understand the absorption and emission of infrared radiation. I have been laboring through several of the papers that form the foundation that are used by the AGW community and have found that many of them do not say what it is claimed that they say. The best work in this area was actually done in the fifties and sixties and yet little of it has been applied to this modern era of computer analysis of the effect of CO2.”
Dennis, you’re not the only one who found out that Arrhenius didn’t say what some of the AGW community claim he said:
“Authors trace back their origins to the works of Fourier [37,38] (1824), Tyndall [39-43] (1861) and Arrhenius [44,46] (1896). A careful analysis of the original papers shows that Fourier’s and Tyndall’s works did not really include the concept of the atmospheric greenhouse effect, whereas Arrhenius’s work fundamentally differs from the versions of today.”
Quoted from Gerlich and Tscheuschner, Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Framework of Physics, P. 13, electronic version of an article published in International Journal of Modern Physics B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275-364.
I haven’t read the whole paper (mainly because I don’t think I’ll understand it all), but these two German physicists are onto something.

Willis,
Thanks so much. I liked the “steel” block/human body comparison. Well done.
Thank you,
Clive

We live on a liquid metallic ball,
covered by dirt and rock that moves,
surrounded by water,
encapsulated in a gas sphere,
spinning at over 1000 miles per hour, and wobbling,
hurtling around a sun, in a spinning galaxy, in an
expanding universe.
Simple physics!
P.S. I forgot CO2

tom (21:09:47) : “But lack of total understanding does not mean that we can not derive some understanding from interaction of some of the basic variables. I give you an example from two other comparably complex system.”
First, out of curiosity, how does one compare or rank the complexity of complex systems? Intuitively I would expect the earth’s climate system to be far more complex than a single human body, since as Willis pointed out, the entire biosphere (including countless human/non-human biological systems) is only one of several components.
Second, living creatures and market systems, of which we have multiple instances, would seem to be far easier to experiment on than the Earth itself, of which we have only one. It’s true we’re “experimenting” on the planet by adding various gasses and particles to the atmosphere and messing with its surface, but it’s hardly being done in a scientifically controlled way, and there are multiple “natural” experiments going on at the same time.

Les Francis (22:06:09) :
Physics.
According to the laws of physics and aerodynamics, it is impossible for the humble bumblebee to fly.
Or the Hiller 23 helicopter. But no one bothered to inform the bumblebee, and the Hiller was flying successfully for seventeen years before some bright light “proved” that it was physically incapable of hovering, much less flying.
And learning to hover a Hiller required chaotic control application…

Thank you Willis, for a very clear explanation as to why increases in CO2 does not inevitably warm the planet. It is too simplistic and assumes that all other sources of heat input, absorption and radiation as well as pressure and volume remain constant over the entire earth. I read a blog which stated that it was obvious that temperature would rise in a garage if CO2 increased. I replied that the earth’s atmosphere is far more complex that a garage.

What you propose is called independent and impartial thinking, Mr. Eschenbach.
Now, it may be assumed axiomatically that most scientists are human beings.
Multiple observations (history) show that human beings, in most cases, are guided by preconceived conclusions.
Their choice of preconceived conclusions depends on the source of funding.
Or, as folk wisdom puts it, “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.”
Depending on the complexity of the financing scheme and of the political situation of the moment, telling your bosses exactly what they want to hear may require some significant thinking.
That is the kind of thinking our publicly funded scientists (i.e. Dr. Hansen and Prof. Mann) are doing all the time.
What they do is called “politically correct science.”
Which means that what you propose (independent and impartial thinking) is entirely politically incorrect, runs against the public (government’s) interests and, as such, should be banned and persecuted.
You are an enemy of the people, Mr. Eschenbach.

Great analogy demonstrating how linear relationships are rarely found in a complex dynamic. Sweetly done Willis.

Perhaps the meandering rivers are interesting also because they illustrate:
– they appear to have a very obvious and striking pattern which is easy to recognise
– but the particular configuration of that pattern is highly unpredictable
Maybe this is a point which contributes to people’s sense that, because they can discern patterns in the statistics of weather, that they can therefore predict that weather. Well, we can predict that a river may meander, but anything more than that is really stretching things.
Perhaps there are certain key variables about the sun which can be used to predict certain aspects of Earth’s weather — perhaps — but we can only know by real world testing. Computer models are worse than useless, they are positively harmful; a huge distraction. Imagine they were used to model meandering rivers. The computer could draw always the same configuration. It would look real, because it meanders, but the real life river would meander in a completely different configuration. So then the modellers try an “ensemble” of models. Well that could give you an infinite number of possible configurations, in other words, no answer at all! So the modellers decide that certain categories of configurations are just far too unrealistic in their professional opinions. Whatever is left is the carefully researched peer reviewed and consistent prediction. Meanwhile the real river runs off in a different configuration. Scientists act “surprised”.
But the greater worry is perhaps that NGOs worldwide and the UN seem to belive that they can manipulate the world populations’ development along the lines of “simple physics”.
Like, educated women have fewer children so let’s educate women in underdeveloped countries, to help them develop sustainably.

Ok, I got it. You, sir, are a fictional character.
A guy with a penchant for lateral reasoning and exotic scientific theories. Eschenbach as in “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”: ESCHEr ‘N’ BACH.
See? See?

There’s nothing complex about climate.
It’s simple:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/QBOperiod.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/QBO_fGLAAM_fLOD.png
(to be continued…)

Wow! that was a pretty good explanation! (I bet the “consensus” couldn’t do a similar thought experiment to prove that their model and predictions are accurate!)
And there is irony, here. The truth about falsehood was revealed by simple physics, via what simple physics couldn’t reveal about the truth.
Or something like that (it’s early, and I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer to begin with, so if that sounded dumb… 🙂

Beware of becoming what you despise…and that’s all I got to say about that.

I think we’re wearing out the evil doers and the people promoting evil deeds. I just get that feeling.

Les Francis (22:06:09) :
Physics.
According to the laws of physics and aerodynamics, it is impossible for the humble bumblebee to fly.

NO you should have phrased it as :
Blockquote>According to (our understanding of) the laws of physics and aerodynamics, it is impossible for the humble bumblebee to fly.
It is not the laws of physics which are wrong the bumble bee did in fact fly, it was our lack of understanding of insect flight and how aerodynamic processes change in very small flight environments. Many insects use vortex generation to create lift not conventional airfoil lift generated by flow over a surface.
The problem of how the butterfly or bumble bee flies is a good example of how chaotic things get when you move outside of the domain your models have skill in. We can adequately model aerodynamic forces on conventionally constructed planes operating in well understood aerodynamic environments. When we push the envelope as we did passing into supersonic flight we had to learn some new rules to add to our formula.
There is no reason to think that the same applies when you go from a weather model which is competent at 3 days but is marginally competent at 10 days and totally worthless beyond 30 days. If the “climate models” cannot given the weather information existing in 2008 give a competent prediction for the the winter climate in 2009 why should we expect they can predict climate in 2109.
Larry

[please never post offensive tripe, such as that, again. ~ ctm]

Willis
“The IPCC says that if CO2 doubles, we will get a rise of around 3C in the global temperature. However, there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, only computer models.”
According to this guy they are dead on – maybe even a bit more sensitive. Paleogeology (is there such a word?) seems to indicate it more and more. Care to comment?
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml

RR asked “How is it that alarmists can quote “simple physics” to prove AGW, when CO2 only makes up .003 parts of the atmosphere? What law of physics explains how .003 parts of a fluid can warm the other 99.997 parts? Seems like a serious case of the tail wagging the dog to me!”
Take a look at http://scienceofdoom.com/2009/11/28/co2-an-insignificant-trace-gas-part-one/ – the follow up post will be out shortly.
In brief, the argument from incredulity isn’t much help in working out the properties of molecules.
The fact that CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere isn’t what determines how much radiation it absorbs. The wavelengths of long wave radiation – the earth radiates longwave – that each and every gas in the atmosphere absorbs and re-emits is incontrovertible physics. The very same absorption that is measured in the lab can be seen at the top of the atmosphere by satellite measurement.
It might seem like “the tail wagging the dog”, but CO2 absorbs radiation at 4.26, 7.52 and 14.99μm. Water vapor and methane gases absorb at other frequencies.
Can a tiny amount of cyanide kill someone? Can a tiny spark cause a big explosion? Can a gas which is 0.04% of the atmosphere cause 25% of the “greenhouse effect”?
Yes.

If you google “Constructal Law”, and go to Wikipedia, you come across an “allometric law of cruising speed vs body mass”. This shows that the bigger a thing, the faster it can comfortably fly (=cruise). Now, speed record attemptists (?) routinely reduce mass to the minimum achievable, to go faster, but this new law says the opposite. Horse racing authorities routinely load up faster horses in order to make them go slower. Have they got it wrong?
This is not, of course connected with climate change, but it is Christmas after all.
Peter Melia

Sounds suspiciously like the G… word (the earth behaving like a simple organism).
Does the fact that Venus has the same atmospheric temperature on its dark side that it has on it sunward side sound like a rock at the bottom of canyon or an adaptive self correcting system?
Does such a distinction even matter?
Also it would seem we run into the anthropic principle here as well. Sure it seems kind of odd that our atmosphere might behave like an organism. Of course if it our planet did not act that way, with an adaptive atmosphere that actively preserves a steady state of mild temperatures over multiple millennia, then it would not be able to evolve life on it to begin with. If the earth’s climate were fragile we would not exist.

new scientist had a recent piece on
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18301-five-laws-of-human-nature.html
and I had to laugh at the thought of Parkinson & the Copenhaen conference!!
“Parkinson also came up with the “law of triviality”, which states that the amount of time an organisation spends discussing an issue is inversely proportional to its importance. He argued that nobody dares to expound on important issues in case they’re wrong – but everyone is happy to opine at length about the trivial.”
40000 trivialists at copenhagen!
“This in turn may be a result of Sayre’s law, which states that in any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.”
and dont the NGO”s know it!
Parkinson also proposed a coefficient of inefficiency, which attempts to define the maximum size a committee can reach before it becomes unable to make decisions. His suggestion that it lay “somewhere 19.9 and 22.4” has stood the test of time: more recent research suggests that committees cannot include many more than 20 members before becoming utterly hapless.

Thanks to Willis and Richard Patton for alerting me to the ClimateAudit discussion which I have taken a look at (and the discussion that followed).
Is there more out there on this topic? I’d expect that some mathematically included people have analyzed the available proxies – temperature at least – across different time periods and formed some tentative conclusions.

scienceofdoom (21:25:35) :
“—Chaotic, most people know but not everyone, means that the system is not random it is deterministic, but very small changes in initial conditions cause totally different outcomes. Therefore, chaotic systems under certain circumstances are impossible to model.
http://scienceofdoom.com
REPLY: “weather” is known to be chaotic. Climate is a long term collection of weather events, so it stands to reason that it is also chaotic, but on a longer, slower time scale. – Anthony”
Not sure I entirely agree with Anthony : I think a more accurate statement might be that Climate is Stochastic rather than Chaotic.

A micro-scale chaotic system does not mean that a macro-scale chaotic system is as well.
There are many examples of this in nature. Fluid flow is a good example. The flow can become chaotic over a certain Reynold’s number, but the macro flow is entirely predictable – if inefficient. bumble-bee flight springs to mind.
The example of the river meander is the classic. The meanders are chaotic, but the mean of the meanders is highly predictable – the total river length becomes pi x crowflight length (?) and the gradient is continuously refined to a well known curve.
I’m also not sure that larger scale weather is chaotic either. The numerical models do a pretty good job now – out to a week.

For me, the simplest falsification of the whole CO2 theory is Arctic. Arctic has dry and cold air, so the “greenhouse effect” should be strengthened by increase of CO2 much more than in warmer latitudes. Also, at low temps. the absorption-emission is much more effective.
But real arctic temperatures show no net increase since 40ties, except regular ups and downs, tied to AMO. Even 1860s are similar to present. What more, the curve heads down again.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/icrutem3_hadsst2_0-360E_70-90N_na.png

If as RealClimate claims, climate is NOT chaotic, then it should be easier to understand and predict. Despite over 20yrs of intensive research by “thousands” of scientists backed by billions of dollars, and sattelites, and super dooper computers, they are no where near being able to predict anything. Not climate, not even weather any more than 3 or 4 days out.
But if they were to remove their heads out of their rears, and really studied the large external forces which drive our climate, they may stand a chance to predict the smaller forces we call weather.
They don’t even have to predict all weather, just the less than 1% portion of weather we call extreme.
Afterall, climate isn’t going to hurt us, it’s the smaller forces climate creates (cyclones, flooding rains, extended periods of drought etc) we call extreme weather that hurts us and costs us in economic terms.
So these wags can’t predict anything to do with climate a month out, a year out, yet we are to believe they can predict 100 years out.
Gimme a break

Seems I skipped past some similar discussion, about life…
I do not apologize for the “G..” word. You cannot prove there is no God.

Smokey (20:04:30) :
“Where do the proles fit in?”
“Everyone has a job in the new world order. The job of the proles is to pay the freight.”
Pithy and to the point and I totally agree.
We are as ever……. merely cannon fodder.

In the first example Willis showed that human’s like all mammals regulate their own temperatures. I assume we do not call the regulation of internal temperature by mammals chaotic.
Of course we do, when measured in the short term, if we don’t know exactly what the body is doing and why but only rely on temperature. A body temperature rises and falls all the time, with eating and sleeping and exercise and excitement all affecting it. Only if it is greatly out of the unusual for a long period of time do we raise an eyebrow.
It is surely the same with the earth. We know sometimes why it is hotter or colder (el nino, pinatubo) and we don’t know sometimes. The arguments over climate change surely are:
— are we at an unusual point?
— is this a short or long term rise?
— can we reliably predict the cause?
With a chemistry degree my argument is that saying “climate change is simple physics” is the same as saying “medicine is simple chemistry”.

Counter analogies to AGW alarmism are nice to ponder. Positive feedback analogies exist too.
Rev your parked car right up to the red line. It will likely survive as long as then temperature light doesn’t come on. Rev it up just a bit more and boom, your radiator vents and the engine dies. AGW alarmists claim the earth’s temperature light has been ominously flickering for thousands of years, despite clear evidence of hot spikes over the last 10K years that dwarf the controversial Medieval and Roman humps (http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lanser_holocene_figure5.png). There’s nothing special about CO2 in AGW theory. They seem to claim that no temperature rise of any cause can be a mild one.
It’s curious since Tipping Point theory does resemble a chaos theory. Non-linear positive feedback is required since simple positive feedback is a ridiculous idea, since if any temperature increase is amplified then logically that amplified rise will itself be amplified since an amplified rise in temperature is just like any other increase in temperature. It’s confusing.
The only support I can imagine for it is the evident ice core fact that CO2 has been rising sharply for the last 10K years on its own, so really did start out at its naturally maximum value when the Industrial Revolution kicked in, so former hot spikes did not occur when CO2 was yet very high. I guess that’s why more recent warm periods are so important to the debate.

Roger Sowell (21:03:31) :
Third, it is puzzling that climate is described as a flow. While it is true that some portions of the earth do flow (atmosphere via winds, and vertically via thermals, also ocean currents and icebergs, etc), as a whole the earth is not flowing anywhere.
Actually, the earth is flowing, and has been since Day 1. It’s called Plate Tectonics. Although not flowing at incredible speeds, the continents and oceanic basins are moving on a conveyor belt of sorts. Also, if you want to break it down even further, colliding continents are pushed up, oceanic basins are subducted down, rock is eroded and flows downstream as sediment, mass earth movements, and even in the atmosphere as dust. So, I would reevaluate your statement in light of the above.
Louis Hissink (22:15:02) :
“A lot of hydrothermal activity goes on at these spreading centers. The process involves downward migration of ocean water through the broken basalt along the flanks of the spreading centers and expulsion of that water as heated, mineral-rich hydrothermal fluids adjacent to the spreading axis in a continuous flow.”
Er, no, the water cycle as envisaged by standard plate tectonics theory requires the suspension of gravity for starters, (less dense matter cannot descend into more dense matter), and it is more likely that the water coming out of the spreading ridges comes from the asthenosphere itself. Remember that igenous quartz crystals of the milky white color contain water in their crystal lattices – quartz without water is transparent – like a wine glass or the glass thermometer Willis used in his personalised experiment.
Not quite true. The subducting basalt and sediment (sediments are also subducted, although not in the same quantities as basalt) are normally rich in hydrous minerals and clays. During the transition from basalt to eclogite, these hydrous materials break down, producing copious quantities of water, which at such great pressure and temperature exists as a supercritical fluid. The supercritical water, which is hot and more buoyant than the surrounding rock, rises into the overlying mantle where it lowers the melting temperature of the mantle rock to the point of actual melting, generating magma.

@ScienceofDoom
It is true that if you have a very simple chaotic system like the logistic map, the long run behaviour / average is predictable – called the invariant density. But that assumes that the parameters of the system are constant. If you start twiddling with the parameters, then the long run average is also unpredictable ! So not only is the weather chaotic, but if you have all these parameters changing such as CO2, solar flux, and god knows what else, then the climate itself has no long run average either.

Thank you, I will store a copy of this article because it puts across a complex scientific message in language that I and my friends can easily cope with.
I really useful service for those that want to understand the science behind the sceptics case against the hysterical outpouring in the media that the world is heating up because of C02 emissions, but do not always have the scientific and mathematical where-with-all to fully understand many of the posting on this site.

“People seriously believe that a change of X in the forcings will lead inevitably to a chance of A * X in the temperature.”
I think I do find a correlation between CO2 and Temperature:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/mean:24/derivative/scale:7.7/offset:-0.853/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:1/from:1959.8
Of course it’s adjusted by the slope and offset to be similar, in fact to match the linear trend between 1965 to the end, as for the first years there’s a big discrepancy.
There are other areas with high error, between both trends, as around 1993 (Pinatubo effects?) but I think they look quite similar.

OK. I get what is being said here. This is a very good piece and the reason I read this site is because although most of the time I don’t agree, it’s thought-provoking.
But the part about the climate of planet earth not being in equilibrium? How do we know that? Isn’t the case being made by the AGW side that it IS in balance and that the additional CO2 is throwing it out of balance resulting in the behavior described?
“Final conclusion? Because climate is a flow system far from equilibrium, it is ruled by the Constructal Law. As a result, there is no physics-based reason to assume that increasing CO2 will make any difference to the global temperature”
Quite a conclusion! I am not seeing how the piece actually links the well-described and very interesting Contructal Law, but it doesn’t really link this law to climate. The conclusion simply doesn’t follow.
Enquiring AGW but open-minded people- like me- want to know how this thinking pieces together. It’s too important.
Thanks.

It has been understood for a long time that a small difference in input values can result in large differences in output values (LORENZ, Edward N. 1963. Deterministic nonperiodic flow. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20: 130-141.). Lorenz maintained that it is impossible to know the initial state values with enough accuracy to predict the outcome. However, I would ask if, in a continuous system, is there even an initial state at all? Or is it just our convenience? The modern approach is just ‘buy a bigger computer,’ but this doesn’t work, as the derived values diverge with each iteration. All that happens is that we get the wrong answers faster.
This was also discovered decades earlier by Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) (Les Méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste, 3 vol. (1892, 1893, 1899; “The New Methods of Celestial Mechanics”), who also substituded approximations to speed his calculations, and got some wild results. Lorenz probably didn’t know of Poincaré’s work, as it wasn’t translated into English until the 1970’s, when it became useful to NASA. Established science (and math)? Maybe some were ahead of Arrhenius.
————
gtrip (20:00:23) :
Where do the proles fit in?
I’ve noticed that when we disagree with them we cease to be the proletariat, and become the ‘brainwashed masses!’
jorgekafkazar (20:31:08) :
north prole at the top, south prole at the bottom.
Good one. Come back Chico Marx, all is forgiven.
Taxes? I got a brother lives in Taxes.
No, Ravelli, taxes is about dollars.
Yeh. That’s where he lives – Dollars, Taxes.

WIKI HAS DELETED CLIMATEGATE PAGE! DELETION UNDER REVIEW FOR SHENANNIGANS! PLZ HELP SAVE CLIMATEGATE PAGE!
http://magicjava.blogspot.com/2009/12/climategate-page-deleted-from-wikipedia.html

Pippa Biggs,
“I do not want to sit and wait for the consequences – I should like to try to take whatever small action I can on a personal level to try and play my part & make my contribution to preserving an Earth worth living in for the next generation!”
Even if such action comprises burning down rainforests to grow palm oil for biodiesel? And even if such action has, by IPCC’s own figures, a negligible effect on global temperatures?

Fine exposition, Willis.
All I have to say is that the “consensus” and the IPCC make it up as they go along. One aspect is fairly certain: Climate change has very little towards nothing to do with c02, yet it is the most dominant parameter of AGW. As R Lindzen maintains: its a framed up culprit (c02) since it goes after people, puts the blame on them and so people are likewise framed up, so as to be punished, taxed and fined.
In other words, since the ideology isn’t accountable neither are the statisticians – I don’t like to call them scientists – and politicians behind the ideology. Its like a throwback to the 1930’s when communism and fascist ideologies put the blame on man as the great fault of civilisation, so people ought to be bent to the ideologies of political extremes to save them and civilisation.
That seems to be the way its developing as an ideology

The Unbearable Complexity of Climate.
Exceeded only by the Unbearably Absurd Linear Climate Predictions of the IPCC and their list of clueless subscribers of the models.
If ever there was a clear choice of agencies to cut funding for, the subscribers have recently stuck out like a sore thumb.

Originally I stated:
“A lot of hydrothermal activity goes on at these spreading centers. The process involves downward migration of ocean water through the broken basalt along the flanks of the spreading centers and expulsion of that water as heated, mineral-rich hydrothermal fluids adjacent to the spreading axis in a continuous flow.”
Which got this response:
Louis Hissink (22:15:02) :
“Er, no, the water cycle as envisaged by standard plate tectonics theory requires the suspension of gravity for starters, (less dense matter cannot descend into more dense matter), and it is more likely that the water coming out of the spreading ridges comes from the asthenosphere itself. Remember that igenous quartz crystals of the milky white color contain water in their crystal lattices – quartz without water is transparent – like a wine glass or the glass thermometer Willis used in his personalised experiment…”
So my responses are:
Response: Any theory that requires “suspension of gravity for starters” is a non-starter; it obviously doesn’t apply to the real world. Basalt formed and cooled at the spreading ridges is highly fractured and very porous (remember columnar basalt?)—the seawater in which it finds itself is heavier than this same water that is heated by contact with the hot or molten basalt, which sets up major convective cells involving seawater.
Response: If “it is more likely that the water coming out of the spreading ridges comes from the asthenosphere itself”, the volume of the ocean would double in about 8 million years, which flat out doesn’t happen.
Response to: “Remember that igenous quartz crystals of the milky white color contain water in their crystal lattices”. Problem with that argument is that mid-oceanic ridge basalt (MORB) contains precious little quartz (they are unsaturated with respect to SiO2), so it cannot be invoked as a transfer mechanism.
That there is some virgin water from the asthenosphere added to the ocean is not argued, but seawater water takes the dominant role in transferring copious amounts of heat (and minerals) from MORB to the overlying oceans. As long as the spreading center is found in the ocean, the system is innundated with seawater at fairly high pressures.
What virgin water is introduced from the asthenosphere at the spreading centers is balanced with that consumed as the oceanic plate is taken back into the asthenosphere along subduction zones; much of the incorporated water is expelled in the subduction process because the ocean volume has remained fairly steady for much of earth’s history.
And sorry to disappoint Al Gore—but there are no naturally-occurring temperatures approaching millions of degrees anywhere in the earth. That’s another fantasy he entertains, apparently.

Richard Patton (23:40:56) :
Tsonis et al, a paper discussed here, made an analogue neural net of the climate assuming deterministic chaos, and gave predictions using the ocean and air current cycles. Their model foresees a cooling/stasis.

Louis Hissink (01:18:22) :
re. dust devils and electricity, I don’t see the connection?
I would have thought a dust devil is an air vortex induced by a rapidly ascending parcel of warm air, caused by localised heating of ground layer air by the sun. Commonly seen in rangelands.

Recently (DEC 09), Gavin Schmidt has even ramped up his estimates of CO2’s climate sensitivity. Because they can’t explain the Pliocene warm period any other way.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n1/abs/ngeo706.html
This is a risky bet on their part. If current climate doesn’t get really warm real soon now, their models will break even harder than they did in the past. Now if you’re a politician funding them toying around there and the results get ever more unbelievable how long will you go on footing their bill?

You did an excellent job of explaining the complexity of the world’s climate system. This is probably why the AGW advocates use computer climate models. Nature is messy. It doesn’t always behave as one expects. When the unexpected happens, one needs to re-evaluate ones hypothesis and go where the data leads. Computer models, once fully debugged, are clean. With them, you define the rules. There are no surprises. Computer models are great investigative tools, but there is no way one can consider the output from climate models evidence.
The IPCC not only presents the results of climate models as evidence, but states, “The fact that climate models are only able to reproduce observed global mean temperature changes over the 20th century when they include anthropogenic forcing, and that they fail to do so when they exclude anthropogenic forcing, is evidence for the influence of humans on global climate.” (IPCC-Working Group 1, The Physical Basis of Climate Change, 9.4.1.2, p684). ). The IPCC is actually saying that the absence of evidence of natural causes of the climate change is actually “evidence for the influence of humans on global climate.” This logical contortion is best described in Wikipedia, “The argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam (“appeal to ignorance”), argument by lack of imagination, or negative evidence, is a logical fallacy in which it is claimed that a premise is true only because it has not been proven false, or is false only because it has not been proven true.”
In a Climategate email in April of this year, Steve Colman, professor of Geological Science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told scores of climate scientists “most people seem to accept that past history is the only way to assess what the climate can actually do (e.g., how fast it can change). However, I think that the fact that reconstructed history provides the only calibration or test of models (beyond verification of modern simulations) is under-appreciated.” (From a post by Terence Corcoran) In light of the Climategate emails, “under-appreciated” is probably one of the greatest understatements in scientific history. The foundation on which the climate models were built has suddenly turned to quicksand.
Can the evidence of anthropogenic global warming be any weaker? It is not evidence of a cause, but the evidence of absence, manufactured by computer models calibrated to questionable data.

Mathematically simple: If you remove CO2, at the beginning you remove money from peoples´wallets, then you remove people…

Instead of removing CO2 from the atmosphere it would be advisable to remove ideology from science.

This is something that has bugged me a lot also. If it were a matter of just one equation, there would be no argument and no money spent on climate models. I tried to leave a comment on Lubos’ web site about this in response to someone who trotted out the Arrhenius equation for the 1000th time , but didn’t have a proper account.

Knowledge it is neither esoteric nor hidden, it is out there for those who don´t reject it. Trouble is that ideology makes them “believe”, and behind passionate ideology there is some grade of psychological instability, to say the least, and consequently, biased perception of reality.
In the millions of years of man´s existence on earth can you imagine that a complete explanation of cosmos has not been achieved?.
Just cool it down and you will see the light! 🙂

Mike Borgelt (22:47:50) :
Leif Svalgaard (20:40:16) :
“Unfortunately, while the physics is simple, the climate is far from simple
That is because the Earth basically is cold without being too cold. Heat it up enough [say to 10,000 degrees] or cool it a couple hundred degrees, and simple physics takes over.”
Oh you mean like a star or the sun? Simple physics, totally predictable????
Mike: well, if there were no magnetic fields a star or the Sun would be nice and easy. My third year undergraduate students used to be able to produce decent models of quite realistic stars on an old BBC microcomputer in the 1980s; the global properties (ignoring magnetic fields) are not too difficult since the physics is not too complicated.
Introduce magnetic fields though and then you can get all sorts of complicated stuff, as we see with sunspots, flares, coronal loops, and so on. Another complex (and not too well understood) system; in the case of stars it’s the magnetic field that clobbers the simple models.
Great post, Willis.

Just sitting here in Houston, ready to start another relatively complex CFD (computational fludi dynamics) model (likely ~5 MM hexhedral cells, yikes) when I read this post.
Brilliant stuff.
Anybody can teach advanced concepts to highly qualified grad students (my materials prof, ex-Chalk River Nuke guy, who wrote on the blackboard (!) with his left hand, and in the next motion erased with his right, comes to mind)
I find that it takes the brighest minds to clearly explain complex concepts to the Rest Of Us.
OTOH I wouldn’t expect less from Science Blog of the Year.
This one gets forwarded to all the usual suspects.

Les Francis (22:06:09) :
Physics.
According to the laws of physics and aerodynamics, it is impossible for the humble bumblebee to fly

That is a statement from 1934 by the French entomologist August Magnan and of course he was wrong, which is obvious…he just couldn’t explain how the bumblebee flaps it’s wings

RE: THE FIVE STAGES OF DEATH
The five stages of death are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. After Copenhagen where we found change is not about our climate but what is in our pockets, the latest rhetoric suggests we have entered the bargaining phase. Depression and acceptance will eventually follow.

To scienceofdoom:
The atmosphere is not an explosive mixture and CO2 is not a poison like cyanide!
Recall that CO2 is non combustible. Far from being a bomb or a pollutant, it is first and foremost an essential component to the very complex fabric of life on the planet.
What a silly way to attempt to clarify your argument. Nothing more than another oversimplification by “Warmanistas” who mix scientific sounding metaphors to strike fear in the minds of children.
Try to remember that adults populate this blog. No one here is ignorant of nor doubts the radiative properties CO2. However, we do say that the climate is far too complex and the knowledge of its behavior too poorly understood to say with certainty that 0.04% CO2 in the atmosphere will destroy the earth as you assert.

Two typos:
“a chance of A”
“miniature steel shed”

Meandering rivers is a great analogy. We should challenge James Hansen to write a computer model to predict river meandering! With fewer variables, it HAS to be simpler than predicting climate so, if he’s successful at predicting that, then and only then will I begin to take any notice of his climate models that cannot even predict the price of carbon credits let alone the climate. It seems that CO2 is the only thing that alarmist climate models are based upon. Their algorithm might as well boil down to Td = k(C-350) where Td is the change in global temperature, C is concentration of CO2, 350 is an arbitrary concentration value that these arrogant fools think they have the authority to declare as being the ‘correct amount’ of CO2 and k is as large as they think they can get away with. Simple physics, meet simple arithmetic.

Government policy of supporting research is wrongheaded.
When an institution is formed out of the need to solve a problem,
if the problem is solved there no longer is a need for the institution.
This is observable in the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton’s “fight”
against racism. Attempts to provide “social justice” are in reality
nothing more than fanning racial flames.
Same with climate science institutions funded by government money. Solve the problem by administering the “fixes” and no more need for climate institutions.

Dave vs Hal (23:57:26) :
A complex system with negative feedbacks maintaining an equilibrium. Sounds suspiciously like the G… word (the earth behaving like a simple organism). Life co-evolved with this planet and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the feedbacks are biological. Lovelock may one day be pardoned by the church of scepticism.
First, your “church of scepticism” is a rather hilarious example of projection. Lovelock is correct that the earth’s climate is self-regulating to a large extent, the oceans probably being the largest of the self-regulating mechanisms. Where he went wrong with his “Gaia” theory was that he seemed to think the climate was somehow in a delicate balance, which was easily perturbed by man. Under Gaia theory, man is viewed as an outside, and negative force throwing the earth’s fragile climate system out of whack. While there is no doubt man can and does affect the environment in negative ways, pollution being the best example, and he can also affect micro climates with his cities and UHI effect, as well as through deforestation, causing drying among other things, his overall effect on climate, particularly through his use of “fossil fuels” is actually relatively small. Whatever slight amount of warming effect we have is a good thing, since it is cooling that is destructive to life. The Warmist movement, with its fixation on a completely beneficial gas, C02, has actually taken man’s eyes off the prize, environmentally speaking.

Some of it IS simple physics. If you take the radiation spectrum of the planet and overlay it with the absorption spectrum of CO2 you will find that the CO2 only absorbs a very small amount of the radiation no matter what the concentration. Perhaps we have seen the maximum since the CO2 concentration keeps on going up but the planet temperature has not. The computer models that predict “tipping points” require “forcing” mechanisms which have not been demonstrated. For example warming may increase the water vapor content of the atmosphere which would increase the greenhouse warning. However, if the water vapor produces clouds that will reduce the amount of solar radiation getting to the ground giving cooling. As was said by someone “sometimes you know what you don’t know and sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know.”

Dr. Terry Mudder (05:43:48) Thanks Doc. Just your advice missing. Could it be something like this?: “Just let it go, cry. cry a lot, it will release all the stress caused by that damned “climate gate” and then by copenhagen…

“Sheridan (06:34:58) :
The main problem I have with Arrhenius result is…”
Sheridan, there’s an institute in Davos that allegedly managed to measure the IR radiation send back by CO2 . The researcher is Claus Fröhlich .
Found an article (in German) here:
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-52485438.html
By now i haven’t found the results on the web but if you search for Fröhlich on WUWT you get some hits. Mostly, a tiny amount of CO2 already suffices for near saturation of the absorption bands of CO2, causing the known 33 degree C greenhouse effect. How much of a difference further increases of CO2 make is AFAIK still subject of controvery.

To verify my results, I try the experiment with a block of copper. I get the same result, the end of the block that’s not in the hot water soon begins to warm up. I try it with a block of glass, same thing. My tentative conclusion is that simple physics says that if you heat one end of a solid, the other end will eventually heat up as well.
So I look around for a final test. Not seeing anything obvious, I have a flash of insight. I weigh about 75 kg. So I sit with my feet in the bucket of hot water, put the thermometer in my mouth, and wait for my head to heat up. This experimental setup is shown in Figure 1 above.
Cute, but poor a poor test of your hypothesis since your body is not a solid.

“It turns out that these types of flow systems are not passive systems which can take up any configuration. Instead, they actively strive to maximize some aspect of the system.”
Natural systems do not “actively strive” to achieve anything.
” As a result, there is no physics-based reason to assume that increasing CO2 will make any difference to the global temperature, and the Constructal Law gives us reason to think that it may make no difference at all.”
In that case, I think it is wise to stick to old-fashioned math and physics for the time being.
As far as I am concerned, “constructal law” is just a longer word for “God”. And I don’t believe in God.

“Dave vs Hal (23:57:26) :
A complex system with negative feedbacks maintaining an equilibrium. Sounds suspiciously like the G… word (the earth behaving like a simple organism). Life co-evolved with this planet and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the feedbacks are biological. […]”
Of course. A very interesting area here is Phytoplankton. Imagine all the oceans full of gazillion algae. With thousands of different species. All of the time they’re mutating, evolving and adapting. Some species become more plentiful, others rarer. So the composition of the entirety of the phytoplancton changes all the time. What would you expect, that it adapts toward any change very quickly or not?
It would be fascinating to incorporate this into a computer model. Oh, and clouds.

Humans need “simple” answers to deal with the challanges of life, AGW was a simple answer. Now what?

Chris Mooney “Discovers” that he is mentioned in the climategate emails after assuring us that there was “nothing to see there.”
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/12/28/my-cameo-in-the-climategate-emails/

BTW: Breaking news: More complexity..
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
Can anybody tell me what is it happening down there in the south pacific?

Larry (22:15:42) :
thanks for the link …
even if this might be OT, and even if reading or verifying the paper is difficult for us (or better: me), the summary says a lot, if not all, and basically what I would say to anybody trying to quantify or calculate anything as complex as the world’s climate: utterly impossible, and therefore a lot of bollocks !

I suppose that the specific mechanism of meander formation has to do with the way water cuts the outer curves of a streambank together with something about the way silt moves and deposits in a stream whose current varies. If you think about the way the earth’s heat is moved by things like the gulf stream together with the greater cooling that happens at higher latitudes, one can see how fluctuations in the gulf stream could make for nonlinear oscillating behavior that make models poor predictors of future conditions. It seems akin to the age old “three body problem” of celestial mechanics. In addition to the gulf stream example: variations in clouds, snow cover, land forms, turbulence, wind patterns, and occasional large volcanoes suggest themselves as things that add tremendous complexity to the earth system. It makes one wonder what amount of computer power would be required to produce an adequate model of the earth’s surface. I know that Bill Gray has said that while weather models which use momentum fields will produce credible weather forecasts a few days in advance, when you try to use more realistic energy fields the problem escalates in complexity because you now are in the realm of factors which are squared. I daresay that because earth has continents mixed with oceans, together with an atmosphere, and temperatures that vary across the freezing point of water; the earth’s climate is much more complex and variable than many other planets.