Image Credit: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
From CNN with comments below by WUWT regular Just The Facts:
Global warming has propelled Earth’s climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest — in just one century.
A heat spike like this has never happened before, at least not in the last 11,300 years, said climatologist Shaun Marcott, who worked on a new study on global temperatures going back that far.
“If any period in time had a sustained temperature change similar to what we have today, we would have certainly seen that in our record,” he said. It is a good indicator of just how fast man-made climate change has progressed.
A century is a very short period of time for such a spike.
It’s supposed to be cold
The Earth was very cold at the turn of the 20th century. The decade from 1900 to 1909 was colder than 95% of the last 11,300 years, the study found.
Fast forward to the turn of the 21st century, and the opposite occurs. Between 2000 and 2009, it was hotter than about 75% of the last 11,300 years.
If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder, according the joint study by Oregon State University and Harvard University. Marcott was the lead author of the report on its results. Read More
Here is the National Science Foundation article that the CNN article appears to be based upon and here is the paper, A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years, published in Science today. This is the abstract:
Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
While the warming of the second half of the 21st century, and its causes, are the subject of vigorous debate, the fundamentally erroneous element of the CNN article above is the attribution of warming from the first half of the 21st century to human influence. Per Overpeck et. al 1997:
“Together, they indicate that the Arctic has warmed up to 1.5°C since 1850 – the coolest interval of the Arctic “Little Ice Age.” Much of the recent Arctic warming took place between 1850 and 1920, most likely due to natural processes”
If you look at anthropogenic CO2 emissions;
it is apparent that the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was minimal prior to 1945, thus attribution of the warming that occurred prior to 1945;
to “man-made influences”, is fundamentally erroneous. CNN should correct this error in their article.
For further information on Earth’s paleoclimate please visit WUWT’s under construction Paleoclimate Reference Page.
“The Earth was very cold at the turn of the 20th century. The decade from 1900 to 1909 was colder than 95% of the last 11,300 years, the study found”
hmmm, uncovered data from DMI ( as covered by WUWT last year) shows Arctic ice from 1900-1920 to be about the same as today.
We’re barely 11,000 years out of the last ice age – we better damn well be warming a touch. Matter of fact, Canada just found camel bones up in the high Arctic on Ellesmere Island. Duh! Do we have camels roaming around there now? Jeez – there are days when stupid gets to me. This is one of those days.
The ammount of green bovine drizzle seems to be increasing exponentially as of late. There must be some significant legislation in the pipeline.
We should be very glad if human activity could in fact forestall the next ice age.
Close to 90% of the past one million years have seen planet earth in ice ages, yes?
2 kilometer thick ice over much of the land in the northern hemisphere would not be good for human appreciation of Gaia!!
“If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder, according the joint study by Oregon State University and Harvard University.”
Why would we want it colder? Do these people give any thought to what they say? And how can they be so sure that it would be getting colder???
It boggles the mind!
Pop the cork on a bottle of champagne. It has now been proved that we live in an age of unprecedented warmth and bounty, unlike much of the Holocene when life was troubled by cold, famine and plague.
There are too many inconsistencies here. Where did the MWP go for one? We know the arctic ice caps have melted off in the past and there is good evidence Southern Greenland was forested with conifers like Southern Sweden. There are the remains of over 100 farms that were active in Greenland 1000 years ago. And these people are telling us it’s warmer now than it was then? There is still some explaining to do here.
If this heat spike were to drop back down just as quickly, would it have shown up in the record which these researchers were using?
So it’s possible that manmade global warming has slowed or even prevented the onset of the next ice age. That might be a good thing to know.
Got a question: What about the Siberian mammoth remains that we almost flash frozen?
I mean with stomach contents undigested under feet of ice and permafrost?
Don’t have time to look it up that happened ah, quickly…
When will some humans learn, within mere human lifespans, that a hefty-looking spike between the years 1880-2010 sits amidst spikes that are even more hefty-looking on longer time scales.
In this regard, that spike is just an upward jiggle on the downward side of an even bigger dip.
Myopia is a terrible thing.
Yahoo! is on a full out blitz today. Something up…
The caution about the 400 year resolution specifically contradicts CNN’s claim. If CNN had any brains, and had actually read the report, they’d know that it’s not possible to conclude that there hasn’t been a rise this fast in the past.
Astonishing.
The Earth is seeing a rate of warming exiting the Little Ice Age not seen across the entire Holocene. Is it intentional that they do not see the rate of cooling entering the Little Ice Age was not seen across the Holocene either?
“If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder’
DUH!
Well then all the more reason to fill the atmosphere with CO2 because if these chuckleheads think a couple of degrees of warming is bad for humanity, they must think an Ice Age is way beyond awful.
On the other hand, when New York is buried under two miles of ice, Hanson will no have to worry much about flooding in Manhattan.
Ho Hum, another hockey stick. You would think the warmists could come up with something original?
If I were of a mind to try to scrape some money off the climate-change scam myself, I might consider starting a carbon-offset service for those distraught greenies who find it necessary to set themselves afire on television (or possibly Youtube) in order to call attention to their cause.
Younger Dryas – the Real Inconvenient Truth
Has anyone liberated the full text? Have the authors agreed to provide all data and code to those who “want to find something wrong with it”?
REPLY: I have it all, and I’ve sent it to McIntyre also. Anthony
Desperation, Louder, faster more franticly.
I love it.
Good thing history does not contradict this wisdom, eh?
So the building, plants,ectera under existing glaciers must be from enos ago, who knew european civilization was so old?
“It is apparent that the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was minimal prior to 1945, thus attribution of the warming that occurred prior to 1945; to “man-made influences”, is fundamentally erroneous. CNN should correct this error in their article.”
Is that annual emissions or atmospheric concentration ? – 2 different things.
By 1959, when the Mauna Loa sequence starts, concentration was 316ppm, which was already about 14% above pre-industrial levels.
We simply do not know the extent of warming (if any) due to early carbon emissions so to say that the original article is “fundamentally erroneous” is …. fundamentally erroneous.
The correlation of CO2 emissions and global temperatures is broken on their own graphs, is this another attempt at GCD?Glibbering Climb Down that is.
The blatant disconnect between the headline and the detail here is a clear sign that all and any spin is now acceptable in the effort to save the “cause”.
Go team CAGW, another beautiful own goal.
There’s little evidence that warmer weather causes famines, wars and other disasters. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that a cooler climate causes all kinds of catastrophes. http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/10/got-war-blame-the-weather.html
Marcott seems to be bolstering the argument that we should be burning all the fossil fuels we can get our hands on. It’s the only way we can keep the planet from cooling and causing famines, epidemics and global war. “Oh, the humanity …” (apologies to Herbert Morrison)
So our poor great-grandparents shivered and laboured under cold conditions barely seen in the Holocene, while we’re sweltering near the top?
Sorry for the handwaving, but this just sounds like bollux. The records (from weather to newsreel) are hardly screaming ‘largest change in one century evuh’. Shakun, Marcott and the New Mannites have something seriously wrong somewhere. Again.
Some days I wish the end of the world would just get on with it, then we can all go back to what we were doing before.
It would be nice if they had compared the most recent warming to previous Daansgard-Oeschger events and to the end of the Younger Dryas. In the article the charts all eliminate the major climatic hiccups of the Holocene. They compare the “average” cooling of the last 5,000 years to the absolute warming of the last 150, then talk about the rate of warming. The last 5,000 years takes in the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods, all of which were as warm as, or warmer than the present. It is also fairly clear that the warming does not correlate with anthropic CO2 emissions.
So why am I still freezing to death?
James Abbott says: March 8, 2013 at 10:25 am
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
“It is apparent that the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was minimal prior to 1945, thus attribution of the warming that occurred prior to 1945; to “man-made influences”, is fundamentally erroneous. CNN should correct this error in their article.”
Is that annual emissions or atmospheric concentration ? – 2 different things.
The “anthropogenic contribution” and the chart;
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.html
are emissions;
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/emis/meth_reg.html
which would thus impact CO2 concentration, i.e.:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"]
By 1959, when the Mauna Loa sequence starts, concentration was 316ppm, which was already about 14% above pre-industrial levels.
We simply do not know the extent of warming (if any) due to early carbon emissions so to say that the original article is “fundamentally erroneous” is …. fundamentally erroneous.
The article states “A century is a very short period of time for such a spike.” … “If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder”. This implies that the warming over the last century, including over the first half of the century, occurred because of man-made influences. Drawing a relationship between anthropogenic CO2 and warming in the second half of the 20th century warming is tenuous at best and potentially erroneous, however there is no substantive relationship between anthropogenic CO2 emissions and the warming in the first half of the 20th century, thus implying that there is is fundamentally erroneous.
As mentioned in the previous article about this paper the resolution is not adequate to discuss recent temperatures. I suspect they factored in the adjusted temperature data and are now calling that the results of the study. Not quite as bad as Mann but just as bogus.
“A heat spike like this has never happened before, at least not in the last 11,300 years, said climatologist Shaun Marcott, who worked on a new study on global temperatures going back that far.”
What a complete and utter tool, or is it fool? The warming from 1910 to 1940 had the same slope as the one from 1980 to 2000 – which ended in 2000.
Stupid or evil? Maybe both.
Although not very scientific, it is worth comparing the rise in CO2 emissions over the last 110 years with the rise in average surface temperatures. My reckoning is that that although both rose significantly since 1900, the match the rise is not close at all.
I am a novice compared to many of you. Is the Met chart claiming they know the worldwide land temperature in 1850 to within one degree C? If so, how do they determine that accuracy?
“For further information on Earth’s paleoclimate please visit WUWT’s under construction Paleoclimate Reference Page.”
==========
Looks like the beginnings of another great page.
I just put it on my reading list, for leisurely perusal in the near future.
Thanks, “justthefactswuwt”.
It’s supposed to be cold? Who the hell does he think he is? God?
Where’s that comparison between model runs with and without GHG forcings included, that shows that even by the AGW hypothesis, human effects on warming didn’t begin until 1950? I’ve been looking for it lately, and can’t find it. It was created to show that recent warming can’t be explained except by GHG forcings, but it also demonstrates that warming earlier than 1950 couldn’t have been caused by changes in GHGs.
Arctic temperature and CO2 compared
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CO2-Arc.htm
But actually one of the report’s authors endorses that interpretation:
you will always get an exaggerated movement when you change the scale, in that graph the large movements are filtered out to give a mean,the last movements havenot been averaged, there will be many such spikes (up and down)that have been filtered out.
I fully expect to see more and more of this, ever since Dear Leader gave his “you’re stuck with me for another 4yrs, and here’s what I’m going to focus on” speech. He essentially politically validated and re-enabled everything that’s been shot down regarding climate change/C02 over the past 4 yrs, and pumped some serious air into the almost flat tires of that movement.
I fear we ain’t seen nuttin yet.
Jim
That last MetOffice graph looks like it uses GISS’s massively adjusted trend manufactured pretext for data.
You know, the ex-data that has had everything before the satellite data era dropped down by nearly a whole degree..
Where is the mid 1930’s peak.. gone, just like Mann disappeared the Medieval period.
The whole graph is a LIE !!
The Overpeck graph is out of date; the North Pole has warmed by 0.8 C since the end of 1997, according to UAH data for the lower troposphere….
If not for man-made influences…
=======
I would be more inclined to agree with this…..if they are talking about UHI, deforesting, etc
….I’m not convinced man could ever add enough CO2 to the atmosphere to make a difference
Just ask any pot grower that jacks the CO2 levels up to 1200-1500 in their closet…only to have a hand full of plants drop it back down to where it’s limiting again in less than 24 hours……
Planted fish aquarium…..again inject CO2 or it’s limiting
Closed greenhouses…..again inject CO2 or it’s limiting
Bacteria….
and on and on
With all the reservoirs for CO2……..
The science of climate change is interesting and fun…..I’m not convinced at all that man can add enough CO2 to make a difference….and it would have to be a special CO2….one that stays in the atmosphere not used by biology
The post says, “…the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was minimal prior to 1945.”
This isn’t true. When you include land use changes, you find that global anthropogenic carbon emissions were 126 GtC by 1945, or 23% of such CO2 emissions to-date.
Sources:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.html
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/landuse/houghton/1850-2005.txt
R. Shearer says: “So it’s possible that manmade global warming has slowed or even prevented the onset of the next ice age. That might be a good thing to know.”
We have already prevented the next ice age (and probably the one after that) — the problem is we’ve overshot the mark considerably. CO2 concentration should have dropped to about 250 ppmv by now, had the LIA continued, and probably just 280 ppmv would have avoided the next ice age (Tzedakis et al, Nat Geo 2012). Instead we will swing wildly in the other direction.
REPLY: Bloviating phantom: you really should demonstrate how that increase in CO2 has “prevented the next ice age” – show your work – Anthony
Cement manufacture is always cited as a significant emitter of CO2. Calcination of limestone, a prime ingredient in portland cement, emits ~40kg of CO2 per 100kg of limestone – 60% of the CO2 from the process – quite a lot! However, as the cement ages it recaptures this CO2. Similarly plasters, and other products using burnt lime recapture their calcined CO2.
http://www.dti.dk/reports-on-co2-uptake-from-the-carbonation-of-concrete/guidelines/18487,5
Can we please remove this miraculous building material off the list of things that are supposed to be killing us with CO2. A couple of other facts about cement – it makes up only 10 to 14% of concrete, it has high strength and no competing building material has such a long life. Other materials would require replacement more frequently and ultimately would result in greater net CO2 emissions in the production and construction process.
Why oh why do these high schoolish scientists not look for corroboration from other sources. It’s fine to look at 70-odd proxies for their study (that many thermometers today wouldn’t be acceptable it seems) but there is so much out there that they could cite and possibly even strengthen their analysis. To be giving statistics on what percentage of time something has been above and below certain temperatures is totally incompetent. Each point on their temp line is a 120 year bundle (avg), except for the recent observed temperature record – try bundling the last 120 years into an average an see where it plots on your graph. Meanwhile, they move along, completely oblivious of some irrefutable observations on former climate conditions – like the Arctic having ~50% less ice coverage 5000 years ago, evidenced by datable driftwood on a wave formed sandy beach on the north coast of Greenland that hasn’t seen open water centuries.
http://www.iceagenow.com/Surprise-Arctic_tipping_point_not_even_close.htm
“By analyzing and carbon-dating ancient pieces of driftwood in Northern Greenland, the team has found evidence that ice levels were about 50% lower some 5,000 years ago.”
1850 was the end of the mini ice age, an age of famine and pestilence. Do the warmists wish us to return to these days? In the three warm periods in recorded human history, the Minoan, Roman and Medieval , the earth was warmer and wetter. Life, both human and natural flourished. To say we are at the warmest in 11,000 years is a LIE. During the Medieval warm period, grapes were being grown as far north as Scotland.
What hight of arrogance to assume that humans are responsible and CO2 in particular causes this, when natural variability in the past could not have been caused by CO2. It is well known that CO2 is plant food. Below about 200ppm, plant life stalls. Hello warmists, plants LOVE extra CO2. Yields are higher and stomatal conductivity(transpiration and water use) is lower.
Perhaps humans were put on this earth to recycle the carbon buried beneath the earth during the Carboniferous Era .
The recent avalanche of new hockey sticks and worse-than-we-thoughts is aimed to meet the deadline of the new IPCC report. Remember when inconvenient truths about observations and forecasts not matching and that maybe the sun has something to do with the climate was mused about in an unauthorized draft of the coming report. They responded that they will be including supportive drivel published up until May 2013.
Not sayin’ I agree with the NSF study or the CNN spin, but the NSF study is about “regional and global temps” and the Overpeck study cited in rebuttal appears to be about arctic temps only. Is this not a problem? What am I missing?
The only thing these authors were attempting to do is ensure their careers are sufficiently lengthened to last into retirement, plus gain a substantial amount of fame and notoriety along the way.
Us folk here spouting facts have no real meaning.
In Maine we call it “Pissin’ against the tide”. And the tides are 8-12ft, depending on where you are. That being said, you’ve gotta go somewhere…
Jim
So haven’t read the paper but if it says that the current model outputs are plausible then where have they been for the last 16 years.
As I read this its essentially saying that if the models are right then it will be very warm. Well duh!
CNN is in the ‘news’ entertainment business. No fact checking or retractions will be forthcoming.
CO2 does not force the temperature to rise, it is the other way around; due to the voracity of the biosphere after a few centuries of accumulated decomposition.
The ice sheets do not form over the lifespan of the luckiest human but rather over the lifespan of a lucky civilization…like the one after this one.
If the planet is supposed to be sliding into an ice age (true but 10,000 years away) and human activity is warming (not been established yet by direct measurement) then turbulence will be weather locally and globally insignificantly either warm or cool…for awhile until the Sun rules again by then you will be too thirsty, hungry, and wrapped with all of the bickering over which God to hold dear.
In the last million years the Earth has settled into a varied but regular pattern due to the biosphere’s harmony with the Sun’s varying smiles even with a few geological wrenches. Fear not the CO2 folks, fear the results of the sixth mass extinction event on the biosphere. How will this affect climate i do not know, nor shall we ever as long as the Red Herring is being served up for scientific consumption.
How is the concentration of oxygen doing in the atmosphere? Oh i am sorry i forgot that it is the CO2 concentration that is important, my bad.
The thing I get from the report is that we are currently below the highest temperatures seen in the last 11,000 years, and that even with all of the “unprecedented” warming of late, it will take another 90 years of the increasing warming to actually break those records. Which pretty much kills the whole hockey-stick idea. Even with out unprecedented warming, we’re not even half way to matching previous highs.
Just a few years ago the warming in the early 20th century was considered to be due to the sun. However, with the changes in the solar sun spot count that explanation no longer holds water. This paper appears to be part of another revisionist plan to change that attribution to CO2.
Phobos says: March 8, 2013 at 1:25 pm
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
The post says, “…the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was minimal prior to 1945.”
This isn’t true. When you include land use changes, you find that global anthropogenic carbon emissions were 126 GtC by 1945, or 23% of such CO2 emissions to-date.
Sources:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.html
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/landuse/houghton/1850-2005.txt
Land Use Changes were measured by Houghton et al. as Carbon Flux to the Atmosphere, i.e.;
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/landuse/houghton/houghton.html
shown graphically here:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="542"]
the most recent paper can be found here;
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp050/ndp050.pdf
and the abstract here:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ndp050/ndp050.html
When you look at the Net flux of carbon to the atmosphere from land-use changes, by region, 1850 to 1990;
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="542"]
it is apparent that the vast majority of the increase occurred after 1945 and that “the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was minimal prior to 1945”.
Don says: March 8, 2013 at 2:41 pm
Not sayin’ I agree with the NSF study or the CNN spin, but the NSF study is about “regional and global temps” and the Overpeck study cited in rebuttal appears to be about arctic temps only. Is this not a problem? What am I missing?
Agree that Overpeck is a regional temp reconstruction, but essentially so is every other temperature record and reconstruction prior to 1979 when satellites allowed us to begin making reasonable estimates of “Global Temperature”. The Overpeck reconstruction reasonably mirrors other reconstructions of the time, and was intended solely as the setup for the point in terms of minimal anthropogenic CO2 emissions prior to 1945. For further background information on all paleoclimate reconstructions, I’d recommend this thread;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/23/crowdsourcing-the-wuwt-paleoclimate-reference-page/
and for further information on “Global Temperature” this thread should help:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/10/a-big-picture-look-at-earths-temperature-extreme-weather-update/
If you have further questions or concerns on this point, please let me know.
I recollect that Planet Mars warmed commenserate with Planet Earth last 50 years. No SUVs there.
JTF replies to Abbott:
“Drawing a relationship between anthropogenic CO2 and warming in the second half of the 20th century warming is tenuous at best and potentially erroneous, however there is no substantive relationship between anthropogenic CO2 emissions and the warming in the first half of the 20th century, thus implying that there is is fundamentally erroneous.”
Correctomundo. Unless anthropogenic CO2 exactly calibrated the global temperature to precisely offset the putative AGW effect. Does anyone really believe that?
And how many times does “Phobos” have to be proved wrong before he admits that the AGW scare is nonsense?
Well beyond the “in-line” speculation this is a curious story;
http://news.yahoo.com/canadas-arctic-glaciers-headed-unstoppable-thaw-study-190610158.html
Take your typical happy farmer or shepherd from 6000 BC and toss them into the world of today. In spite of being awed by our level of development they’d despise our colder, dryer climate versus what they’s be used to.
RE: High Treason says: March 8, 2013 at 2:19 pm “It is well known that CO2 is plant food. Below about 200ppm, plant life stalls. ”
You’ve no doubt heard of 350.org. But the deepest of Deep Ecologists are more like 200.org or even 150.org. They have a mass death wish. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bath water. Of course, it would be great to be a slug or fungus, in the event PP(CO2) drops below a certain level. But Bambi? Not so much. As for me, I am more like 1000.org. But we’ll never see that. Our little upward blip is soon to be overcome by forces we cannot stop.
Thanks for the added information and explanation, justthefactswuwt. This openness and responsiveness is what I have come to expect from the “good guys” here, and is one reason why I visit WUWT daily.
Phobos it is likely that there has been an ice age in the late Orodovician with CO2 at 5600ppm.
i love the way “cement” is always the big nasty worth mentioning… but its always the tiny little piece of the pie that the mice might hope for.
big oil bad…big buildings bad…big renewable energy hydro dams bad.. sarc/ off (or not)
justthefactswuwt says: “it is apparent that the vast majority of the increase occurred after 1945 and that “the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was minimal prior to 1945″.
The data does not support this. You don’t have to cite any papers or eyeball any graphs — the data is available and you can easily calculate it for yourself. I have. The results are, combining fossil fuel emissions and land use changes, as I said: 23% of total carbon emissions occurred before 1945.
That is not “minimal.”
Leo Danze says: “I recollect that Planet Mars warmed commenserate with Planet Earth last 50 years.”
Says what data? (Seriously, I’d like to know.) I’m dubious that we’ve been monitoring the temperature of Mars for 50 years, especially in anything like a global way.
I see this claim being made often, but never any data to support it.
High Treason says:
March 8, 2013 at 2:19 pm
“It is well known that CO2 is plant food. Below about 200ppm, plant life stalls. ”
Why should we worry that CO2 levels are going to drop below 200 ppmv? They did not during the ice ages, and have not for 100s of millions of years — otherwise there would be no plants today.
Plants need CO2, but too much of it brings warming that stresses them. There is already evidence that for some crops this warming is reducing yields below what they would otherwise be, cancelling out the CO2 fertilizer effect:
Global scale climate–crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming
David B Lobell and Christopher B Field 2007 Environ. Res. Lett. 2 014002
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/2/1/014002
Phobos says:
“Plants need CO2, but too much of it brings warming that stresses them.”
Alarmist horse manure. Note that plants endure a diurnal “stress” of 50º or more every day. So how can a tiny 0.7º temperature blip over 150 years cause stress? Note also that 150 years is far longer than the life span of most plants.
Global warming, which is natural, does not cause ‘stress’. That is just another of the incessant lies told by climate alarmists.
Phobos also wonders about Mars warming along with the Earth. We’ve been ove this many times here. Global warming affects many of the solar system’s planets and moons — another fact that the alarmist crowd would rather not hear about.
Nick in Vancouver says: “Phobos it is likely that there has been an ice age in the late Orodovician with CO2 at 5600ppm.”
Seems not:
Did changes in atmospheric CO2 coincide with latest Ordovician glacial–interglacial cycles?
Seth A. Young et al
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology
Volume 296, Issues 3–4, 15 October 2010, Pages 376–388
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003101821000115X
“High-carbon ice age mystery solved,” New Scientist, March 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18618-highcarbon-ice-age-mystery-solved.html
@Nick in Vancouver: Also remember, the Sun was not as intense during the Ordovician as it is today. I calculate it’s luminosity was about 4% less….
Anything short of bringing a lawsuit against the AGW liars will be insufficient.
The wholesale lies being propagated throughout the journals and MSM will continue!
Phobos,
Wrong again. You’re batting 1.000. From your link:
“The Ordovician ice age happened 444 million years ago…”
So let’s look at 444 mya.
CO2 was far higher than today 444 million years ago.
Still batting 1.000…
Phobos ‘calculates’, heh:
“I calculate it’s luminosity was about 4% less…”
Note in the chart I posted above that global warming naturally shot up following the Ordovician ice age. So much for calculating.
Phobos will never admit what all the empirical evidence shows: that CO2 has little or no effect on temperature. We’re witnessing cognitive dissonance in action.
D.B. Stealey says: “So let’s look at 444 mya.”
I will take published, peer reviewed science over a cartoon from something called “image shack.”
Clearly we have different standards.
Phobos says:
“Clearly we have different standards.”
Yes. Your standard is evidence-free computer models and pal reviewed papers.
My standard is real world evidence and empirical observations.
That is why scientific skeptics are right, and alarmists are wrong. The umpire is Planet Earth.
“If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder, according the joint study by Oregon State University and Harvard University.”
…… And that would be a good thing ???????
Phobos says:
March 8, 2013 at 6:25 pm
“Clearly we have different standards.”
==========
Care to declare a standard ?
I came in late.
D.B. Stealey says: “My standard is real world evidence and empirical observations.”
The Young article is based on observations — better ones.
Using Marcott’s gift of hyperbole, could the following not also be said?
“If any period in time had sustained a 60% increase in annual CO2 emissions with no statistically significant warming trend observed, similar to what we have experienced over the past sixteen years, it would certainly be seen as a record lack of warming ” he said. It is a good indicator of just how fast man-made climate change has gone to hell.”
Isn’t this the study that doesn’t have the kind of granularity to make any conclusions about century scale trends?
Jeff Alberts says:
“Isn’t this the study that doesn’t have the kind of granularity to make any conclusions about century scale trends?”
a) Why do you need century-level granularity?
b) Are you suggesting the available data allows more resolution than these authors have obtained?
c) the paper, and its supplementary material, is very up front and careful about what their uncertainties and limitations are. That’s exactly how good science should be done.
@phobos check your email
Phobos says: March 8, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Met Office – Hadley Center – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
justthefactswuwt says: “it is apparent that the vast majority of the increase occurred after 1945 and that “the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was minimal prior to 1945″.
The data does not support this. You don’t have to cite any papers or eyeball any graphs — the data is available and you can easily calculate it for yourself. I have. The results are, combining fossil fuel emissions and land use changes, as I said: 23% of total carbon emissions occurred before 1945.
That is not “minimal.”
Firstly, if you look carefully at the Met Offices Annual Global Average Land Temperature Anomaly – 1850 to Present:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"]
you’ll note that the warming of the first half of the 21st century, actually started around 1895, when less than 8% of the purported anthropogenic CO2 contribution had occurred and ended in 1940, 5 years before the end point you used for your calculation.
Secondly, in Houghton & Hackler 2001;
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp050/ndp050.pdf
they found that:
However, by Houghton, R.A. 2008 he managed to find that:
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/landuse/houghton/houghton.html
The IPCC even had to acknowledge Houghton’s numbers were suspect;
in AR4:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch7s7-3-1-3.html
If you use the highly suspect Houghton, R.A. 2008 500.6 Tg, starting point, versus the still questionable Houghton & Hackler 2001 starting point of 397 Tg it inflates your calculation by 26%.
Finally, according to Canadell et al. “Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks”:
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/47/18866.long
and they found evidence “implying a decline in the efficiency of CO2 sinks on land and oceans in absorbing anthropogenic emission” since 1950, thus this absorption rate was likely significantly higher prior during the period of question. Even if we go with the present figure your calculation overestimates anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentration by more than 50%.
It is thus apparent that the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was “minimal” during the period of warming that occurred from 1895 to 1940. I await your response with bated breath…
Phobos! THERE you are! I’ve been looking all over for you. I’m sorry Stealey, did my pet troll crap on the floor again? I’ve been trying to train him, but he’s slow.
Phobos, regarding the crops, which is it that you claim is already reducing yields – is it increased temperature or decreased precipitation, and specifically which crops are we talking about?
(Moderators): if I cross the policy lines with respect to Phobos (I mention this because I know perfectly well I’m pushing as close to the line as I can and am doing it deliberately), I absolutely understand if you decide to snip my comments and I’m good with it. I understand this is Anthony’s home and generally rudeness isn’t acceptable. I’m just not sure how much leeway is appropriate in dealing with people like Phobos who clearly (in my view anyway) come here with no purpose except to be disruptive. At any rate, I absolutely mean no disrespect to our host and if I’m violating the rules and need a snipping I apologize for my error and hope no offense is taken.
Best regards,
Mark
justthefactswuwt: You haven’t taken into account that solar luminosity increased by about 0.6 W/m2 over the first half of the 20th century:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/tsi_data/TSI_TIM_Reconstruction.txt
The carbon numbers are pretty clear, and all tabulated for easy calculation. I gave the links above.
[snip – respond to the email – you don’t get to put the private communications in public comments – Anthony]
Note to commenters.
“Phobos” is a person known in the climate blogosphere who also operates a blog, who has been banned from WUWT for some very unsavory behavior and personal attacks upon me, both here and externally. The person was banned from here for that behavior, so the person created a new email account (which he never checked until I publicly asked for a check) and a fake sockpuppet persona to get around the ban. The person revealed their identity in an email to me on the “phobos” account they use when I inquired and made several taunts, plus bragged about using other fake identities here in the past with a promise to do it again in the future.
While it’s fine to discuss science and get into the rough and tumble of disagreements over it, creating fake identities for the purpose of circumventing a ban for bad behavior isn’t OK. The pattern of behavior here seemed familiar, and that is what made me ask about who was behind it.
So, back into the troll bin this person goes. It is unfortunate that some people simply don’t have integrity. – Anthony
I finally re-found the article that outlines the declining levels of oxygen, but it appears my points are lost in this cloud of CO2. Anyways…
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/O2DroppingFasterThanCO2Rising.php
It’s almost like these academes have had no formal education at any level at any time in their lives. Is it just me, or does anyone else picture in their minds Oregon State students and faculty spending most of their waking moments wearing beer helmets with multi-tubes feeding into their mouths?
Maybe it’s just my bad…
a) if you’re going to make conclusions about trends which occur in less than a century, it would seem to this complete layman that the data should support that.
b) I’m suggesting the exact opposite. That the available data doesn’t support their granularity claims of unprecedentedness in the 20th century.
c) Agreed. But I don’t have the background to be able to analyze it. I have to rely on others who don’t have a vested interest in the outcome.
Phobos says: March 8, 2013 at 8:07 pm
justthefactswuwt: You haven’t taken into account that solar luminosity increased by about 0.6 W/m2 over the first half of the 20th century:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/tsi_data/TSI_TIM_Reconstruction.txt
The carbon numbers are pretty clear, and all tabulated for easy calculation. I gave the links above.
So we can take your laughable redirection and non response as your acknowledgment that the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was “minimal” during the period of warming that occurred between 1895 and 1940?
In case the previous citation is not read i boil it down to one quote:
“The crucial role of forests and phytoplankton [4] in oxygenating the earth shows how urgent it is to take oxygen accounting seriously in climate policies. Reductionist accounting for CO2 alone is insufficient, and even grossly misleading and dangerous.”
Phobos, thanks for the citation, the abstract clearly stated
“The integrated datasets are consistent with increasing pCO2 levels in response to ice-sheet expansion that reduced silicate weathering. Ultimately, the time period of elevated pCO2 levels is followed by geologic evidence of deglaciation.”
ie the ice sheets were expanding as CO2 levels were increasing – the proxies suggest CO2 ppm of 3000-5600 for that period.
“Phobos” has consistently lost the argument. He uses the usual tactics of re-framing the debate, moving the goal posts, changing the subject, and not answering questions; typical alarmist obfuscation tactics.
That is why the alarmist crowd runs and hides out from any honest, moderated debates: they always lose genuine debates, because their premise — runway, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming — has been so thoroughly debunked by real world facts. Because their premise is easily falsified, their conclusions are necessarily wrong.
Kudos to Anthony Watts for exposing this anonymous site pest/troll. No doubt the pest will now find another rock to hide under.
I don’t recall running into Phobos in my past. It would have been a nice sparing match on a site like ZeroHedge.com where I ran off a CIA agent not too long ago. Anthony has a lot of tolerance, I’m an example of that, but enough is enough some times.
Hi,
I know nothing about a previous ban to this Phobos, but I didn’t see him break any blog rules in this occasion. In fact he was doing us a favor by constantly introducing easily rebuttable information into the comments. It allows others to rebute it and leave the issue even more clear, plus makes him look the fool that he is. He was digging his own hole and now you have taken the shovel from him. It ruins the fun!
Nylo says:
March 8, 2013 at 10:33 pm
———————-
I like a good discussion or a good argument too, but talking with Phobos is like fighting with the black knight from a Monty Python skit. You can lop off his arm and he’ll insist he hasn’t been refuted, ignore the point, and come back with the same refuted argument under the cover of a different research paper. That’s just a troll pretending to have a discussion. Wade through the comments here and see:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/25/fact-check-for-andrew-glickson-ocean-heat-has-paused-too/
****
Anthony Watts says:
March 8, 2013 at 9:29 pm
****
Thanks for stopping the incessant thread-bombing.
“A century is a very short period of time for such a spike.”
Not if the great Dr. Hansen puts his massaging gloves and homogenizes the early 20th century data. Guess he’ll have to revise that data down even more.
Cumulative Global Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions added for reference:
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="542"]
Carbon? Interesting that for PR reasons they switched from colorless CO2 to black carbon to make it sooty, coaly, dirty, but they lost the PR factor of tonnage: 337Gt of C as opposed to the more impressive 1,236Gt of CO2.