A global temperature conundrum: Cooling or warming climate?
From the University of Wisconsin-Madison
MADISON, Wis. â When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently requested a figure for its annual report, to show global temperature trends over the last 10,000 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Zhengyu Liu knew that was going to be a problem.
“We have been building models and there are now robust contradictions,” says Liu, a professor in the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. “Data from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming.”
Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, Liu and colleagues from Rutgers University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, the University of Hawaii, the University of Reading, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Albany describe a consistent global warming trend over the course of the Holocene, our current geological epoch, counter to a study published last year that described a period of global cooling before human influence.
The scientists call this problem the Holocene temperature conundrum. It has important implications for understanding climate change and evaluating climate models, as well as for the benchmarks used to create climate models for the future. It does not, the authors emphasize, change the evidence of human impact on global climate beginning in the 20th century.
“The question is, ‘Who is right?'” says Liu. “Or, maybe none of us is completely right. It could be partly a data problem, since some of the data in last year’s study contradicts itself. It could partly be a model problem because of some missing physical mechanisms.”
Over the last 10,000 years, Liu says, we know atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by 20 parts per million before the 20th century, and the massive ice sheet of the Last Glacial Maximum has been retreating. These physical changes suggest that, globally, the annual mean global temperature should have continued to warm, even as regions of the world experienced cooling, such as during the Little Ice Age in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries.
The three models Liu and colleagues generated took two years to complete. They ran simulations of climate influences that spanned from the intensity of sunlight on Earth to global greenhouse gases, ice sheet cover and meltwater changes. Each shows global warming over the last 10,000 years.
Yet, the bio- and geo-thermometers used last year in a study in the journal Science suggest a period of global cooling beginning about 7,000 years ago and continuing until humans began to leave a mark, the so-called “hockey stick” on the current climate model graph, which reflects a profound global warming trend.
In that study, the authors looked at data collected by other scientists from ice core samples, phytoplankton sediments and more at 73 sites around the world. The data they gathered sometimes conflicted, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere.
Because interpretation of these proxies is complicated, Liu and colleagues believe they may not adequately address the bigger picture. For instance, biological samples taken from a core deposited in the summer may be different from samples at the exact same site had they been taken from a winter sediment. It’s a limitation the authors of last year’s study recognize.
“In the Northern Atlantic, there is cooling and warming data the (climate change) community hasn’t been able to figure out,” says Liu.
With their current knowledge, Liu and colleagues don’t believe any physical forces over the last 10,000 years could have been strong enough to overwhelm the warming indicated by the increase in global greenhouse gases and the melting ice sheet, nor do the physical models in the study show that it’s possible.
“The fundamental laws of physics say that as the temperature goes up, it has to get warmer,” Liu says.
Caveats in the latest study include a lack of influence from volcanic activity in the models, which could lead to cooling â though the authors point out there is no evidence to suggest significant volcanic activity during the Holocene â and no dust or vegetation contributions, which could also cause cooling.
Liu says climate scientists plan to meet this fall to discuss the conundrum.
“Both communities have to look back critically and see what is missing,” he says. “I think it is a puzzle.”
The study was supported by grants from the (U.S.) National Science Foundation, the Chinese National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.
“âThe fundamental laws of physics say that as the temperature goes up, it has to get warmer,â Liu says.
hmmmm…..
Stop the insanity!
So what happened to all that “settled science” I keep hearing about?
The climate modellers (and pretty much everyone else) are uncertain of the causes of very low-frequency climate effects.
Maybe they could conduct a poll to determine the consensus?
Ooopsie!
Oh, by the way, Antarctic sea ice has been greater than +2x standard deviation above its established NSIDC daily averages for a couple of years now …
Been steadily increasing ever since 1996.
When did the parameter aka as climate sensitivity become a fundamental law of physics
So these guys still believe in Mann-made hockey sticks, eh?
97% – nn% = ?
so they eliminated everything “known”.. it had to be CO2
…now we have unprecedented never before global cooling
Yea, so the volcanos in 1253, 1783, and 1816 meant nothing to climate….
One thinks as ice melts, it cools the surroundings. The heat goes into making water out of ice (“Heat of Fusion”).
So, the idea that “glacier retreat” signals increasing temperature seems wrong. We may have reached a “maximum” that caused ice to melt — and are being pulled down from that maximum by the melting ice. Of course, I may be missing something.
The doi link is broken for the paper, but the supplemental info is online:
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/08/08/1407229111.DCSupplemental/pnas.201407229SI.pdf
Says they used Marcott’s data, previously ripped to shreds by McIntyre & others
âThe fundamental laws of physics say that as the temperature goes up, it has to get warmer,â Liu says.
Grrrh!
“The fundamental laws of physics say that as the temperature goes up, it has to get warmer,â Liu says.”
What? This is better than the “freezing water causes ice” government report we were recently treated in ref. to the Great Lakes.
denniswingo says:
August 11, 2014 at 3:41 pm
Yea, so the volcanos in 1253, 1783, and 1816 meant nothing to climateâŚ.
————————————————————————————————————————–
In terms of a 10k year trend, no hey probably don’t. Just blips along the way.
Besides, surely the real interest in this is that (gentle) challenges to (some aspects of) the “settled science” are not only being invesigated but also being reported. Hard to imagine that happening even 5 years ago.
Big avalanches start with little snowballs and there’ve been a few snowballs thrown recently.
“For instance, biological samples taken from a core deposited in the summer may be different from samples at the exact same site had they been taken from a winter sediment.”
Pure bullshit. Annual layers are extremely rare and only exist in areas with oxygen-free bottom water (which doesn’t exist in the North Atlantic). Otherwise bottom living animals churn up the sediments (“bioturbation”), so no matter how finely you slice a core you will be sampling a mixture of sediments deposited over a longish period.
When Marcott did his PhD thesis, before he apparently felt compelled to join the IPCC crowd, his proxies showed global cooling for several thousand years.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2013/03/fixing-marcott-mess-in-climate-science.html
i don’t understand how everyone missed the obvious solution…
we just need to refine & adjust the data until it fits the model: problem solved.
you can mail me my Nobel Prize
“It does not, the authors emphasize, change the evidence of human impact on global climate beginning in the 20th century.”
Yes, it does. Proclaiming, with emphasis, to the contrary, does not change the fact that this is just more evidence that their guesstimate of human induced warming is wrong. Talk about denial. ..
Actually everybody who has the slightest interest in Quaternary Geology knows that it is normal for the beginning of interglacials to be warmest and for the temperatures to then gradually decline, just as they have done in the current interglacial. This is the way things are, and it’s about time that ‘climate scientists’ start taking note of the real world, even when it doesn’t fit their models.
Jim Clarke says:
August 11, 2014 at 3:57 pm
Proclaiming, with emphasis, to the contrary, does not change the fact that this is just more evidence that their guesstimate of human induced warming is wrong. Talk about denial.
——————————————————————————————————————–
Denial, or “pointing out a problem while still gettiing into print”?
“So, the idea that âglacier retreatâ signals increasing temperature seems wrong. We may have reached a âmaximumâ that caused ice to melt â and are being pulled down from that maximum by the melting ice. Of course, I may be missing something.”
You certainly are. The glaciers have been expanding for the last 7,000 years or so, which is just what you would expect in a cooling world.
Take an ice cube and stick it in 80 F temps, then reduce the temp to 75 F. I assume even though the temperature decreased that the ice cube kept melting. I will wait for Nye/Gore/Stokes to confirm.
The Tautologist said: âThe fundamental laws of physics say that as the temperature goes up, it has to get warmer,â Liu says.
Don B says: August 11, 2014 at 3:52 pm
“When Marcott did his PhD thesis, before he apparently felt compelled to join the IPCC crowd, his proxies showed global cooling for several thousand years.”
It still does. That’s the result they are quoting.
Doesn’t seem to understand that Marcott smoothed any previous ‘profound global warming trend’. Honestly, does he think slipping that in is going to add to his credibility?
Marcott’s downward trend through the Holocene has not been debunked.
Again, it’s models vs proxies.
Read his stuff again; the credulity of some of those clowns.
==================
Or as Alexius Meinong reminds us:
“Truth is a purely human construct, but facts are eternal”,
best read together with
“âThe Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other.â
Thomas Payne THE AGE OF REASON
This is only a small part of the problem. The Holocene is, after all, an interglacial in a protracted ice age. Trying to explain the Holocene out of context of the last five million years:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png
which is all impossible to explain within existing climate models, or worse, back 65 million years:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
or still worse, 542 million years:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png
illustrates the real difficulties facing us. We are in a geological era of major glaciation the likes of which the world has only seen once in the last half-billion years, experiencing the coldest local (short term) average temperatures in 450 million years. The last time temperatures were this low, atmospheric CO_2 was roughly 4000-5000 ppm — over ten times what it is today. Well over 95% of the last half-billion years has been spent with temperatures higher than they have been on average (including interglacials) in the Pleistocene ice age. At least, if we can trust the radiometric proxies and their interpretation.
We cannot explain or predict the climate dynamics on any of the timescales from the Holocene only:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
right up to the present, where at the moment we thought we could explain the one 15 year burst of warming in the latter 20th century, at least, as the result of CO_2 increases, only to have it stop for the next 15 years while CO_2 continued to increase. The paper above is merely openly acknowledging a problem that we’ve been discussing on WUWT threads for many years now, a problem that is, after all, obvious. We cannot predict, or understand, the shortest time dynamics of the climate, the interval directly following the reference period used to normalize the models, let alone the last 400 years (LIA and post-LIA warming), the last 1000 years (MWP warming followed by LIA cooling followed by modern warm period warming that continues today, all part of the general cooling trend that followed the Holocene Optimum that we cannot explain or predict or model any more than we can explain why the Wisconsin glaciation ended, the Younger Dryas returned to glaciation for 1000 or so years, and then the world warmed right up to the Holocene optimum. We can do no more than guess that orbital dynamics and oceanic mixing patterns or global galactic dynamics and solar dynamics (basically nothing but words at this point lacking more than unexplained data and explanatory possibility devoid of direct evidence) have something to do with it, but only at the expense of acknowledging that these effects are, or can be, an order of magnitude stronger than the strongest possible greenhouse effect modulation because at the nadir of the Wisconsin CO_2 was down to 180 ppm, making one wonder how glaciation could ever have ended with CO_2 less than half its current value, if it is responsible for the bulk of the temperature increase since then.
However, this paper is still quite welcome. Sooner or later, climate scientists are going to realize the limits of their models, and in the process they may learn some things that are quite valuable.
Now, if only they’d stop mixing high frequency sampled data with low frequency sampled data and asserting that the modern warming is “unprecedented”:
Note well how this quote from the top article leaves one with the dual impression that humans were responsible for “the hockey stick”, neglecting the facts that:
a) The hockey stick has long since been discredited. Yes Virginia, there really was both a MWP and a LIA (the coldest stretch of the entire Holocene), so there was no “stick”.
b) That humans began to “leave their mark” on the climate at the end of the LIA or Dalton minimum, when most climate scientists agree that CO_2 forcing was more or less irrelevant to the warming that took place before 1950, when atmospheric CO_2 was supposedly (still) only 300 ppm, within a hair of its presumed but arguable longer term (Holocene?) average of 280 ppm. The “human mark” is thus restricted to a single burst of warming from roughly 1983 to 1998 (plus a few years either way if you like, I’m not trying to cherry pick dates, only to point out that there was actual neutral-to-cooling temperatures from roughly 1940 to maybe 1980, then a bounce that started a warming trend up to the 1997-1998 super El Nino bounce that ended it. How, exactly, did humans cause the 1997-1997 super El Nino?
c) The almost identical pattern of warming that held from maybe 1920 to around 1940. CO_2 did not cause this warming, or the great Dust Bowl, unless my notion of entropy and causality is badly confused, that causes must precede effects. So perhaps this is part of the “human mark” but I defy anyone to illustrate this with anything like a defensible argument.
d) This latter data showing two bursts of sudden warming is high frequency thermometric data, sampling a direct measure of temperature, well distributed globally every day — and is still only accurate to 0.15C now (HADCRUT4). They are asserting a “profound global trend” on the basis of this thermometric data compare to what? The linked graph of the Holocene temperatures above, for example, openly acknowledges that the granularity of the data cannot resolve fluctuations of shorter duration than 300 years. Does the paper/top article above do better? I very much doubt it. It is just once again comparing 300 year smoothed apples to daily-sampled oranges, attributing all of the variation of the latter to humans in spite of the fact that the models themselves would have to contain an implicit time machine to attribute more than the warming that occurred in only 20 of the last 70 years — around 0.5 C total and almost the equal of the non-anthropogenic 0.4 C from the first half of the 20th century — to anthropogenic CO_2.
Arrgh! Why not just state up front that the models are broken, that this casts substantial doubt on the quantitative implementation of the CO_2-linked part of those models (since it CANNOT be made consistent with the observations of the entire Holocene, any more than it works for the last 150 years in figure 9.8a of AR5) and leave off the assertions that there is anything like a human-attributable hockey stick in the already misrepresented data. In order to assert warming at all for example, one has to say a few words about the error bars routinely omitted from HADCRUT4. Errors might be only 0.15C in 2014, but what about 1914? What about 1864? How much of the supposed warming is statistically uncertain in addition to being high frequency noise when compared to 300 year average warming presented in long term temperature graphs?
rgb
“Because interpretation of these proxies is complicated, Liu and colleagues believe they may not adequately address the bigger picture. For instance, biological samples taken from a core deposited in the summer may be different from samples at the exact same site had they been taken from a winter sediment. Itâs a limitation the authors of last yearâs study recognize.”
All the conditions have to be taken into account. When they are, all proxy records are found to be near worthless.
“Data from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming”
“Data from observation says the sun is at the centre of the solar system. The Bible says it circles the Earth”
We’ll hold an inquisition to persecute the unbelievers…
More computer games…
From the last paragraph in the Introduction of Liu, Z, et al (PNAS, 2014):
Our analysis shows a robust warming trend in current climate models, opposite from
the cooling in the M13 reconstruction. This model-data discrepancy suggests potentially significant biases in both the reconstructions and current climate models, and calls for a major
reexamination of global climate evolution in the Holocene.
Note that last statement. Those Climate Scientists are beginning to feel their reputations are at serious risk with the coming cooldown and the IPCC’s model failures.
First they went after the LIA and MWP, now they’re going after the Holocene Optimum and everything in between. Can’t have that big hump of warming 10000 years ago warping the hockey schtick. Everything and anything that doesn’t support the ‘settled science’ has to disappear. I wonder when the Younger Dryas will go.
Real world data trumps models. Not sure why there is even a debate.
Unless of course, there is a much higher level of confidence in the output of a million line super-computer program that uses thousands of variables, each which may vary output radically, not to mention that the program produces different results on different computers vs. someone reading a temperature and writing it down.
Kind of an Anti-Occam’s Razor fixation I guess.
Actually on reading Liu et al a little closer, it seems they may also try to erase/reduce the Holocene Thermal Maximum to resolve the conundrum. But that would present a hornet’s nest of blowback from paleoclimate scientists who have spent their careers building that HTM from proxy data..
As it is climate models all the way down, that tortoise at the bottom must be getting pretty darn overloaded by now with all the climate modeler’s BS..
Gonna be quite mess for somebody to clean up when that tortoise finally collapses.
If anyone wants a pdf copy of Liu et al, email me at joel(dot)obryan(at)gmail(dot)com. and I’ll reply with the pdf.
What these guys never got the memo?
Where actual measured values conflict with modelled “information” the models will rule.
Says they used Marcottâs data, previously ripped to shreds by McIntyre & others
He never attacked the data. Nor even the real conclusion of the actual paper. What was ridiculed was the comparison of non-proxy to proxy measurements, mostly made in press releases and articles.
Marcott’s actual paper supports long-term cooling quite strongly.
â⌠the bio- and geo-thermometers used last year in a study in the journal Science suggest a period of global cooling beginning about 7,000 years ago and continuing until humans began to leave a mark, the so-called âhockey stickâ on the current climate model graph, which reflects a profound global warming trend âŚâ
===============================
The first bit, the base, of the âhockey stickâ blade, represents the warming before ~1950 which was before human fossil fuel emissions were of any significance.
It’s unprecedented and we must act now!
The robust observations are wrong, coz the models say so.
Aw come on,
increase in Arctic sea ice – man made global warming
< in Arctic sea ice – mm global warming.
Bad freezing cold winter – mm global warming,
wet winter – mm global warming,
warm winter – mm global warming,
Black is white – mm global warming,
which way is north? – mm global warming,
Save the presidency – mm global warming,
Penn State U down the tubes – mm global warming.
mm global warming – it's time to have a tea party.
Next please.
I wouldn’t go any broader than 1000 years to coincide with global over-turning circulation. The only thing that stores and releases more or less heat that more or less heats the atmosphere is the ocean. Smooth to that. Then look for why more or less heat went into the oceans to explain the rise and fall of atmospheric temperatures.
It requires a tenured position to pretend that âThe fundamental laws of physics say that as the temperature goes up, it has to get warmerâ constitutes profound insight.
Ok, I am no Feynman. But do you need to be? When your models do not agree with the data, there is nothing wrong with the data! Your models suck!
The ignorance of climate scientists is mind boggling.
Yet, the bio- and geo-thermometers used last year in a study in the journal Science suggest a period of global cooling beginning about 7,000 years ago and continuing until humans began to leave a mark, the so-called âhockey stickâ on the current climate model graph, which reflects a profound global warming trend.
It’s….. ALIVE!!!!!!
http://youtu.be/0VkrUG3OrPc
Well…. In aerospace engineering when the models say; ‘That Pig Can’t Fly”, we always launch it anyway (and keep our fingers crossed that nobody will notice that its not really flying). I assure you good sir that contrary to your observations those tires are definitely not in contact with the ground…..
/sarc off
Cheers, Kevin
Having one of these disciples state that “the proxies are complicated” is a bit like having an IRS agent tell you that “the tax code is complicated”…really? You MADE THE FREAKIN TAX CODE, dude.
Here’s a thought…if the proxies are too complicated?…
Stop
Using
Proxies.
Jim
âBoth communities have to look back critically and see what is missing,â he says. âI think it is a puzzle.â
Rising CO2 levels have only been shown to follow warming trends. Or in other words, CO2 has never caused global warming.
Earth global temperature has been cooling for millions of years. This fairly recent condition of last 50 million years is called Ice house climate. Wiki: “During an icehouse earth, greenhouse gases tend to be less abundant, and temperatures tend to be cooler globally. The Earth is currently in an icehouse stage”.
It thought the reason for our icehouse climate is most related to geological and/or geographical issues [where land masses, ocean basins, and mountains are located]. And the reason for periods of deep freeze of glacial periods and the warmer intergalactic periods is related to Earth orbital and it’s axis spin- or the precession of earth’s axis. So we have very roughly about 20,000 year of interglacial warmer period, and 100,000 year glacial period. One can compare that to precession period of 26,000 years. So the precession period of earth’s axis does not simply turn off and on glacial and interglacial but rather it an influences. So dominate effect is geological which causes earth to be much colder than it would be lacking these elements, in which has precession of axis affecting it- has cooling and warming effect in which warming effect can be amplified [one could look at precession another verison of a geographical effect- or if Earth was completely covered with water then precession would not have an effect- or what the sun “sees” during the 26,000 cycle is a slightly different earth because of variation of topography].
Or said differently Earth’s climate is fundamentally related to earth’s ocean temperature- average temperature. Icehouse climate has cold ocean, ocean requires thousands of years to warm it’s average temperature by 1 C, though just the surface of ocean- top 100 meter, can warm on decade to century time periods, this top layer determine global weather or is what is measured in terms of Earth average temperature, and ocean temperatures can mix at various rates [location of land masses affects this, as do many other factors]. So precession would warm average ocean temperatures, but to have a significant amount warming within a thousand year period , it has to be mostly about warming top layer of ocean. And colder ocean more significant ocean mixing and warmer ocean the mixing is less significant.
And in terms of how warm we are, the interglacial before this one, had an average ocean temperature somewhere around 2 C warmer then our oceans, and it will require thousands of year to possible become as warm at that period was.
Carefully constructing and testing complex models to confirm they don’t work appears to pay exceptionally well.
âThe fundamental laws of physics say that as the temperature goes up, it has to get warmer,â Liu says.
Perhaps the fella is gunning for Captain Obvious’ job over at Hotels.com
They still say that the mediaeval warm period was just in Europe. I get the sense they are searching for reasons why the data doesn’t fit, rather than deciding to throw away the AGW hypothesis.
bh2 says, “Carefully constructing and testing complex models to confirm they donât work appears to pay exceptionally well.”
No. They are working per specification to support the desired economic, and tax policies to drive the de-industrialization desires of the environmental Left. The GCMs do their job to warn of significant warming if mankind doesn’t stop building ever richer, more natural resource intensive economies. That the scientists are at severe reputational risk [matters] little to the environmental Left. They are simply to be casualties of the environmentalist’s war on industrialized societies by whatever means they need.
âThe fundamental laws of physics say that as the temperature goes up, it has to get warmer,â Liu says.
“When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.”Calvin Coolidge
If Aesop didn’t, someone should write a childrens’ book about a character and a conundrum, where the protagonist learns in the end the conundrum did not really exist – that he has been a child (or a delusional narcissist) and that why he thought it did.
Only small minds would have a problem with concurrent global warming and cooling.
âData from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming.â
—–
Well, Liu, since you know the science is settled, you had better trust the models rather than your lying eyes; otherwise, you will suffer the ultimate punishment of forfeiting your right to comment at the Guardian, Times, BBC, etc.
A peer reviewed paper on unsettled science! My, the times are changing.
That CO2 change, and therefore human activity, does not cause global warming has been demonstrated.
Terrestrial radiation absorbed by CO2 is immediately thermalized, i.e. the energy absorbed by CO2 is transferred (in a process similar to thermal conduction) to other atmospheric molecules which outnumber CO2 molecules 2500 to 1. CO2 can only absorb terrestrial EMR that has wave length 14-16 microns out of the significant range 5-50 microns of terrestrial radiation. The absorption/thermalization quickly reduces the 14-16 micron radiation flux.
But this leaves the question of what actually does drive average global temperature change.
After some research to find out what causes climate change. . .
Two primary drivers of average global temperature have been identified. A simple equation, using only them, very accurately explains the reported up and down measurements since before 1900. The coefficient of determination, R2 is greater than 0.9 (correlation coefficient = 0.95). The equation provides credible estimates back to the low temperatures of the Little Ice Age (1610). The current trend is down.
R2 = 0.9049 considering only sunspots and ocean cycles.
R2 = 0.9061 considering sunspots, ocean cycles and CO2 change.
The tiny difference in R2, whether considering CO2 or not, corroborates that CO2 change has no significant effect on climate. All measurements, including the recent since before 2001, are within the range of historical random variation.
The coefficients of determination are a measure of how accurately the calculated average global temperatures compare with measured. R^2 greater than 0.9 is very accurate.
The calculations use data since before 1900 which are official, accepted as valid and are publicly available.
Solar cycle duration or magnitude, considered separately, fail to correlate but their combination, expressed as the time-integral of sunspot number anomalies, gives excellent correlation. A sunspot number anomaly is the difference between the sunspot number for a year and an average sunspot number for many years.
Everything not explicitly considered (such as the 0.09 K s.d. random uncertainty in reported annual measured temperature anomalies, aerosols, CO2, other non-condensing ghg, volcanoes, ice change, etc.) must find room in the unexplained 9.51%.
The method, equation, data sources, history (hind cast to 1610) and predictions (through 2037) are provided at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com and references.
Yet, the bio- and geo-thermometers used last year in a study in the journal Science suggest a period of global cooling beginning about 7,000 years ago and continuing until humans began to leave a mark, the so-called âhockey stickâ on the current climate model graph, which reflects a profound global warming trend.
====
dunno….looks perfectly normal to me
Lots of little hockey sticks…and the overall trend is still down……….and not a single one of them is because of CO2
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo3.png
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
Damnit! How many times do I have to tell you? THIS IS SETTLED SCIENCE!!!!!!!
Andrew N says:
âData from observation says the sun is at the centre of the solar system. The Bible says it circles the Earthâ
—
And a Pulitzer prize and Nobel winning author, Ernest Hemingway, titled one of his books, “The Sun Also Rises.” Everyone knows the sun does not rise; the Earth turns. But we still talk about “sun sets” and “sun rises” as if we were ignorant of the science. Or perhaps it’s perfectly acceptable to speak from one’s perspective in conversation when not speaking in scientific terms. The Bible never claims to be a scientific dissertation but speaks in the language and perspective of the writers of the time.
âBoth communities have to look back critically and see what is missing,â he says. âI think it is a puzzle.â
If they assign CO2 as a cause of cooling instead of warming then the puzzle is solved. I wonder if that thought ever occurred to them …
Over the last 10,000 years, Liu says, we know atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by 20 parts per million before the 20th century, and the massive ice sheet of the Last Glacial Maximum has been retreating. These physical changes suggest that, globally, the annual mean global temperature should have continued to warm, even as regions of the world experienced cooling, such as during the Little Ice Age in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Dare I point out that it can be warm enough to cause the ice sheets to shrink without actually getting warmer. How complicated is that?
If you don’t think it was a lot warmer 5000 or so years ago, you might try reading the article in the recent National Geographic about the recently discovered ruins of a rich maritime civilization based on the Orkney Islands north of Scotland (yes, those Orkney Islands, extremely cold and barely habitable today). Back then there seems to have been a prolific agricultural society lasting for about a thousand years or so and rich enough to support perhaps ten thousand or more people — a lot for megalithic Europe. No one had discovered these ruins before — even though they were right there underneath the surface — perhaps because it seemed “obvious” that no large megalithic civilization could exist so far north in such a rotten climate. Clearly it wasn’t such a rotten climate back then. When even the archaeologists are saying temperatures were much warmer during the holocene optimum, I think the debate is over!
Sounds to me like a few CAGW proponents are starting to get cold feet and formulating strategies on how to jump from the consensus train before it plummets into the canyon.
D. Cohen says:
August 11, 2014 at 7:14 pm
(Orkney Islands) “barely habitable today”
“Orkney has a cool temperate climate that is remarkably mild and steady for such a northerly latitude, due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. The average temperature for the year is 8 °C (46 °F); for winter 4 °C (39 °F) and for summer 12 °C (54 °F)”
“The soil of Orkney is generally very fertile and most of the land is taken up by farms, agriculture being by far the most important sector of the economy and providing employment for a quarter of the workforce. More than 90% of agricultural land is used for grazing for sheep and cattle, with cereal production utilising about 4% (4,200 hectares (10,000 acres)) and woodland occupying only 134 hectares (330 acres)”
YEAR POPULATION
1941 21,688
1951 21,275
1961 19,125
1971 16,976
1981 18,418
1991 19,570
2001 19,245
2011 21,349
Interestingly, this is exactly what one would expect if the warming effect from CO2 was saturated. The effect of increased CO2 at higher altitudes is one of cooling. So, if the low altitude warming effect were saturated then the overall effect would be cooling.
If the data says cooling, maybe the models are wrong?
Orbital and tilt and seasonal variations in solar energy? Once again the sun is under-estimated. They prefer 20ppm co2, which is 0.00002%.
thingadonta says:
August 11, 2014 at 7:45 pm
.
“20ppm ”
20 / 1,000,000 = 0.002%
philjourdan says:
August 11, 2014 at 5:13 pm
Ok, I am no Feynman. But do you need to be? When your models do not agree with the data, there is nothing wrong with the data! Your models suck!
The ignorance of climate scientists is mind boggling.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Feynman – nice touch.
Actually, I’ve suspected for some time that most of the real CAGW scientists (excludes, among others, psychologists, historians, economists and railroad engineers) actually understand they’ve lost the battle with Mother Nature’s data. They’re simply hoping the funding lasts until retirement.
I could be wrong – they could actually be that stupid.
An excellent post by rgbatduke at August 11, 2014 at 4:21 pm.
“The last time temperatures were this low, atmospheric CO_2 was roughly 4000-5000 ppm â over ten times what it is today. Well over 95% of the last half-billion years has been spent with temperatures higher than they have been on average (including interglacials) in the Pleistocene ice age.”
That should tell you something: the planet is rather cold, and life in general would like it considerably warmer than it is today, and hey, it appears that even 4000 to 5000ppm of CO2 does little to maiintain/drive temperatures.
When the authors say âWe have been building models and there are now robust contradictions,â they mean that the divergence between models and observational data is now so stark, it cannot be concealed any longer. The jig is up.
As the pause continues, this will become even more obvious and problematic. If the pause continues through to 2019 (and many warmist suggest that there will not be a resumption to warming for at least a decade), all the models will be outside the 95% confidence bounds. As I have often commented, if the pause continues through to 2019 (and assuming no significant volcanos), it is difficult to see how there can be an AR6. The IPCC will be forced to acknowledge that their model projections are way off target, and not reliable. More and more papers will be coming in with ever lower figures for climate sensitivity such that there will no longer be scary cAGW. Human nature is that it does not like admitting that it was wrong, and would sooner cut and run, and for that reason I do not expect to see an AR6.
Liu says “climate scientists plan to meet this fall to discuss the conundrum.” Of course they may discuss massaging the data, but whilst that might ‘help’ the hindcasting, the problem is that it will do nothing to address the looming problem with the forward projections should the pause continue. They are in a lose lose situation, because we do not understand enough about climate and its drivers, and even the little that we do know, is not well modelled. The models are fundamentally flawed as rgbatduke frequently points out and it is time that this is acknowledged. At this stage, I do not see the point of keeping any of the models; our knowledge is just too incomplete to make them worthwhile. .
It does appear that we are fast reaching a point where the inconvenient truth cannot be concealed any longer, and it is time to hit the reset, and get back to the basics. A good place to start is to properly acknowledge the paleo record, accept the Holocene Optimum, the Minoan, Roman and Viking Warm Periods, the LIA are real and to accept that none of those can be explained by CO2 alone and that something else drove the climate in those eras. Let us acknowledge the wide bands of natural variation and let us try and get a proper handle on natural variation and what drives it. Also a reexamination of whether CO2 is simply a response to warming (outgassing from a warmer ocean), as opposed to being the driver of temperature change.
When hitting the reset button, Personnaly, I would ditch the land based thermometer record. It is now too basterdised to be of much use. The main climate driver is the oceans, and that is where we should concentrate our efforts.
Edward Richardson says:
August 11, 2014 at 7:23 pm
/////////////////////////////////
Edward sets out some details on the climate of the Orkney Isles. Average temperature is 8degC.
Personally, I consider that it is difficult to see how the Vikings managed to settle and farm their settlements in Greenland given the primative tools available (no mechanical diggers, no tractors to distribute food, rescue distressed animals, no running water etc) unless the climate at their settlements were on a par with the Orkney Islands. A couple of years ago, the UK had a harsh winter and this took an extreme toll on hillside farming in Scotland and Wales, and many small hillside farms were wiped out. The conditions in Greenland, at the time of the Viking settlements, must have been quite benign since just one or two harsh winters would have killed off the community.
Greenland’s climate data can be found at http://www.greenland.climatemps.com/
Personally, I consider that we under-estimate how much warmer Northern Europe/North Western Europe must have been during the Viking Warm Period. I consider that for the Viking sttlements to have flourished (given their primative farming technology) the temperatures around South Western Greenland must have been about 4 to 8 deg warmer than today. To what extent that was local, say being influenced by a very warm gulf stream, I do not know, but I do consider it probable that South Western Greenland was very much warmer than it is today
What they are really saying:
“We know with certainty that 1 +1 = 3, but observations tells us that it is 2 … We need more funds to investigate this!“
Hey I’m just a guy who wears jeans and tennis shoes most of the time but I have a wild notion for Lui to ponder.
The fundamental laws of physics say that as the temperature goes down, it has to get colder.
This is standard AGW trash publication feeding the warmist trolls. I don’t know why this site gives continues to quote them/give them so much attention They should simply be avoided as it tends to give them credence. We are past the time that anything they produce is credible. Refer to Steven Goddard.(and numerous others) for evidence of outright lies and fraud.by the AGW establishment (icluding Nature Publication ect)
These wretched people still can’t allow themselves to admit the obvious; the models are completely useless.
I’m not sure they will even when the dumbest citizen with the IQ of doorknob has positively concluded the complete lack of any utility.
The only upside of this is… the ever expanding body of evidence of their ineffectiveness and the increasingly desperate excuses are going to deliver a bonanza in terms of entertainment value for WUWT readers.
When the wind speed goes up it is supposed to get windier. Innit?
Lewis P Buckingham says:
August 11, 2014 at 8:32 pm
I believe the temperature went out.
To: mod, I like the like button but for some reason world press wants info from me I am not inclined to give is there another way around ( Apologize for using the thread), Asybot
richard verney says:
August 11, 2014 at 8:25 pm
Thanks Richard.
An outstanding 2nd round post and a nice to read a clear, well articulated follow-on to rgbatduke’s round one on this thread. It is so past time that Climate Science started cleaning up the mess that political viewpoint activism has wrought on science.
With every passing day, I am happier and happier about Anthony’s “I Support Climate ^Science Change” on my truck. Buy one. Support Anthony’s blog. Climate science is entering a crisis period our grandchildren will read about, much like Galileo’s confrontations 400 years ago with the Vatican.
JMO
Looks like a brewing moment before the conflagration where both sides armies face off then proceed to kill each other to the last man en echelon style.
Good !
I’ll watch from Shenandoah Mountain. Later pick the pockets of the dead. Lots of trinkets to sell in San Francisco. Good money.
đ
What if climate models said the sun would not rise and it did anyway?
Would it be a toss up over what was wrong?
Tony B says:
August 11, 2014 at 7:22 pm
paraphrase, “CAGW proponents …. strategies on how to jump from the consensus train before it plummets into the canyon.”
An appropriate Youtube video on what the CAGW train looks like right now.
Allen63 says:
August 11, 2014 at 3:43 pm
==============================================
What was the temperature in the oceans prior to the melt? Would the Ice Age level oceans have been warmer on average than today,s oceans due to the lower sea level?
Another thought, would the rush of cold water raise warmer waters to where they would become part of the warming force that breaks the glaciation and helps lead to the interglacial?
The empirical data is right, always the empirical data.
And the mere fact that he is asking that question shows how bad climate science is.
Go back to high school, Mr. Liu, to learn, not to teach.
“… as regions of the world experienced cooling, such as during the Little Ice Age in Europe… ”
Please somebody verify, the LIA surely was NOT a “regional” event but a global event wasn’t it?
Andrew N says:
August 11, 2014 at 4:24 pm
The Bible says it circles the Earthâ
=======================================================
Strange, I don’t remember that section of the Bible where that is stated. Perhaps you meant to say that men who believed in the Bible also thought the Sun circled the Earth. There is a difference.
“Yet, the bio- and geo-thermometers used last year in a study in the journal Science suggest a period of global cooling beginning about 7,000 years ago and continuing until humans began to leave a mark, the so-called âhockey stickâ
Prof. Liu, the fundamental laws of physics do not include the hockey stick and climate models. It has to be cooling because that was the interglacial optimum (or maximum). Common knowledge to geologists but surprising news to climate modelers and hockey stickers.
My eyeballs say it will take only 18-24 more months of the plateau for the lower line of the 95% envelope to be breeched.
Madison, Wisconsin – 25 square miles surrounded by reality.
Could this, perhaps, become known as the Liu paper?
Now it is definitely time to replace reality.
Isn’t “Physical Model” a strange phrase ? Why are they using the word “physical” ?
goldminor August 11, 2014 at 11:01 pm
and Louis August 11, 2014 at 6:49 pm
My sarcastic comment was in relation to the interpretation of the Bible in relation to Galileo in front of the Roman Inquisition regarding his support of heliocentrism.
In 1616, an Inquisitorial commission unanimously declared heliocentrism to be “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.”
As a counter to the many comments here that are either ad hominem or off-topic, I offer the following references that falsify many of the points raised in Zhengyu Liu’s paper. These references show that many of the points are not relevant to the comparisons between theory and observations.
Earthâs Energy Budget
The radiation budget is the most important tool in quantifying the warming or cooling of the Earth. Moreover, the data for radiation budget has been acquired by several satellites for a long enough period to allow testing the theoretical models. Even better, the NASA researchers who investigate the data quality and their adequacy operate under different managers, apparently with different terms of reference.
The current global energy budget can be derived either from satellite data or from theory using a few parameters, by the “classical method”. The theoretical approach is described by Goody and Yung, Atmospheric Radiation: Theoretical Basis, 2nd Ed. 1995 (1989 hardback).
Goody and Yung is the standard text used by writers of atmospheric physics textbooks. In the Introduction, the authors say, “Historically, before large computers became available, two classes of study developed, one synthetic but limited in scope and the other descriptive but aiming at completeness…..These classical methods, rather than the theory and results from large numerical models, are emphasized in this book.” The URL is:.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Ji0vfj4MMH0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=goody+and+yung+Atmospheric+Radiation&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ScnlU_KSMYq48gWT54D4Bg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=goody%20and%20yung%20Atmospheric%20Radiation&f=false
The way to tell whether or not Goody and Yung is the basis for a textbook’s approach is to look for a dozen or more pages of mathematical equations. Murray Salby’s Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate (Cambridge U Press, 2012) is a good example of a clear presentation of the leading classical method. See Chapter 8, Radiative transfer, p.203. Those who do not have the book can get an general idea from this URL:
http://books.google.com.my/books?id=CeMdwj7J48QC&q=radiation#v=snippet&q=radiation&f=false
Both Goody & Yung and Salby calculate the Earth’s energy budget from formulas by plugging in various parameter values. Goody and Yung use 1400 Watts/m2 as the solar constant and 0.31 for albedo. Salby uses 1372 W/m2 and 0.30 for albedo. Both use 4 as the ratio of the Earth’s surface area (4Pi * R2) to the area of the disc (Pi * R2) as seen from space.
Goody and Yung derived a value for LW radiation from TOA of 108.5 W/m2 and Salby derived 102.9 W/m2. The published ERB figure based on satellite observations was 107 W/m2 (Trenberth, j. Climate, 1997).
In 2009, a team comprising five NASA and NIA scientists plus two private sector scientists published corrected values for all three parameters and demonstrated that the errors in calibration of the satellites were substantial in comparison to the energy imbalance upon which rests alarmist claims of global warming.
In 2005, James Hansen and others took a different approach from both Goody and Yung and from those who used satellites to computer the Earth’s energy budget. (Earthâs Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications (Science 3 June, Vol. 1434 308)) Hansen et al found an imbalance of +0.85 W/m2 as the excess of incoming energy over that re-emitted by the Earth. This excess was imputed to storage of the excess heat by the oceans.
In 2009, a different group led by NASA’s Norman Loeb reported their study, “Toward Optimal Closure of the Earthâs Top-of-Atmosphere Radiation Budget” based on satellite observations. (J.of Climate, AMS, V.22, p.748.) This group found that the parameters used for the classical method cannot account for satellite observations. Work by the NIS gives 1361 W/m2 as the solar constant S. Previous bias Bias +1.00 W/m2.
Correction for the Earth’s oblateness gives 4.0034 as the denominator N in the formula S/N instead of 4 as used in the classical approach. Previous bias +0.29 direct and indirect +0.16 W/m2 via latitude weighting, total potentially 0.45 W/m2.
Correction to albedo to 0.293 instead of the usual 0.30. Bias +0.30 W/m2.
The authors state, “We assume the ââtrueââ global net flux imbalance during the CERES period considered is +0.85+/-0.15 W m2, based on Hansen et al. (2005). ”
The authors summarize the combined effect of all of these errors. When estimates of solar irradiance, SW and LW TOA fluxes are combined, taking account of +0.85+/-0.15 W/m2 heat storage by the oceans, the possible range of TOA flux becomes ) minus 2.1 to plus 6.7 W/m2,
In passing, I note that Loeb and his team do not refute Hansen’s estimate of +0.85 W/m2 but merely show that the satellites show that previous satellite estimates of TOA flux had errors due to instrument miscalibration. The former total TOA flux of 341.0 was corrected to 339.1, an adjustment of minus 1.9. The error was approximately double the imbalance reported by Hansen et al.
In 2011, Hansen and others revised the earlier estimates of energy imbalance to be +0.58 W/m3.
(Earthâs energy imbalance and implications, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 13421â13449, 2011)
“The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.58Âą0.15 Wmâ2 during the 6-yr period 2005â2010, confirms the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change.” (Abstract) and later in the text “The importance of the uncertainty in aerosol forcing is
highlighted by considering two specific values of the net (GHG + aerosol) forcing: +1 Wmâ2 and +2 Wmâ2. Either of these values has a good chance of being correct….”
In passing, I note that the error bars for the figure 0.58 W/m2 do not appear to take account of the uncertainty in aerosol forcing. The authors therefore signify that the figure 0.58 W/m2 is what professors used to tell students constitutes “empty precision”. This criticism is supported by generally recognition that sea temperature data is still too uncertain to be the basis for estimating an imbalance as precise as +0.58+/-0.15 W/m2.
Loeb’s team of authors based their estimates on satellite data while Hansen’s studies were based on ocean temperature data. Hansen’s study indicates where the excess heat was stored. Loeb’s study calls into question whether or not there was any excess heat to be stored.
In August , 2000, Hansen et al published in PNAS the paper, Global warming in the twenty-first century: An alternative scenario (vol. 97 no. 18).
“A common view is that the current global warming rate will continue or accelerate. But we argue that rapid warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO2 greenhouse gases
(GHGs), such as chlorofluorocarbons, CH4, and N2O, not by the products of fossil fuel burning, CO2 and aerosols, the positive and negative climate forcings of which are partially offsetting.”
In my opinion, Hansen and his team were admitting that alarmist statements regarding TOA energy imbalance. I interpret this paper as a concession to other NASA researchers that the TOA energy imbalance is too small to be estimated with certainty.
In 2012, Loeb and his team published the paper, Observed changes in top-of-the-atmosphere
radiation and upper-ocean heating consistent within uncertainty. (NATURE GEOSCIENCE j VOL 5 j FEBRUARY 2012)
âCoupled Model Intercomparison Project 3 (CMIP3) simulations for the A1B scenario from 15 coupled atmosphere-ocean models exhibit a large spread in annual mean net TOA flux during the past decade, ranging from 0.09 to 1.5Wm-2 (Fig. 3b, grey bar). Interannual variability of net TOA flux in the models is surprisingly large: the standard deviation in model net TOA flux between 2001 and 2010 exceeds that from the observations in 11 of the 15 models considered.â
I ignore the term âobservationsâ in the last sentence because it is not certain whether these are observations of nature or observations of model behavior.
The main points of the paper are that (1) the variations in sea temperatures are not statistically significant and (2) the modal value for TOA flux for the 15 models was 0.75 W/m2 with a high (unstated) standard deviation.
In my opinion, this paper effectively demolishes the work of Hansen et al (2005, 2011) by showing that the satellite energy estimates are more certain than the estimates based on ocean temperature data.
When read together with the 2009 paper (J. Climate) by the same team, this paper shows that the satellite estimates are not certain enough to demonstrate that the net TOA flux trends monotonically upwards. There appear to be substantial variations sufficient to flip from positive to negative net flux inter-annually. The magnitude of the TOA flux when positive appears to be small enough to be overwhelmed by internal variability as observed in the ENSO (considered in the 2012 Nature paper) and other by ocean oscillations such as the AMO and PDO.
Finally, this review of five papers by (mostly) NASA scientists between 2000 and 2012 reveals that global warming may be an artifact of the acquisition and processing of the data filtered through confirmation bias initially established by the imprecision inherent in the Goody & Yung approach to the âclassical methodâ of estimating the Earthâs energy budget that is taught in all atmospheric physics courses.
The classical physics approach is not wrong. It is merely too blunt a tool for determining TOA flux. The billions spent on climate satellites is starting to pay off. And fortunately, many scientists in NASA and other government research establishments are not blinkered by global warming activism.
Sorry, I omitted a closing bracket at “Historically, before large computers became available,/b>”
[Fixed. ~mod.]
âData from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming.â
Obviously , it must be warming . All else is heresy of the first , second and third order , besides , big oil has been known to use data which immediately makes data untrustworthy and guilty of apostasy by association
If the models fail to mirror reality the MODEL is wrong. BASIC science. Learn or fail!!
I’m just glad that – at a time we need supercomputers to save us – we have supercomputers!
What I forgot to say in my earlier comment: THERE SIMPLY IS NOT A SINGLE CLIMATE MODEL worth the name, in existence anywhere, as I tried to illustrate in
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/snippets-questions-2-climate-models.html
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/snippets-questions-2-comments.html
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/snippets-questions-2-some-answers-re.html
or in
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/blog-post.html
or
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/eating-sun-fourth-estatelondon-2009.html
That said, I am now rueing that I allowed myself to fall into the trap I should have avoided in line with an earlier comment I made elsewhere:
âI am getting bored. The globe can be getting warmer or colder, but the idea that the human contribution from burning carbon fuels has anything to do with it is not only IMHO the biggest political and intellectual fraud ever â but so says the IPCC itself: http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.com/2011/10/west-is-facing-new-severe-recession.html. The ongoing discussion pro and con is becoming akin to the scholastic argument as to how many angels can dance on the head of a needle. Which is, of course, exactly what is intended to achieve worldwide disorientation away from the actual IPCC aims of monetary and energy policies â and bringing a whole, if not all, of science into disrepute”.
And if you want to see how big that trap is, try those two TYGER reads, as in http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/tyger-spoors.html and
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/tyger-lair-from-edenhofer-interview-1.html
Warning: you read these at your own risk!
Now, after five years of my bloggery I put together a BLOG LOG http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/blog-post.html
of all my postings, after which I consider that my first blog is still as valid as ever
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/clean-energy-primer-quousque-tandem.html
Many things I learned since during my meanderings, above all the recipe book for the way ahead, by the incomparable Hermann Scheer:
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/at-risk-of-boring-you-i-must-quote.html
What is wrong with these idiots ? They ALWAYS start with the same effing flawed assumption, that CO2 is a significant driver of global temperature. And then when they can’t square the circle they say there must be someong wrong with the data, or there is a conunudrum, or we haven’t worked it out yet.
What is wrong with them? Why can’t they just say maybe CO2 is irrelevant.
Thanks, Fred C; lucid.
=============
We have to disappear the Holocene Optimum,
that that young fool Marcott exposed to the world.
====================
Well, the answer to their “conundrum” is obvious; the climate is confused, due to man’s sudden and massive increase of CO2. Climate ConfusionŠ can create an appearance of cooling when in fact it is warming. The Climate ConfusionŠ factor simply needs to be put into the GCM’s, and presto, problem solved.
Jennifer Marohasy ( http://jennifermarohasy.com/ ) insightfully points out that bad paradigms do not simply fade away. They last until replaced with something better. The paradigm behind the climate catastrophe madness of the past ~25 years is an example of this idea. CO2 obsession has motivated many millions of words to be written. Laws passed. Conferences held. Academic and political careers. Funding for NGOs. Industrial investments. Treaties. Endless news reports. Personal arguments. Etc. etc. etc. That is what a a paradigm does. CO2 obsession reached a critical mass in the public space years ago. Claiming CO2 has no influence is not going to work for many reasons.
This sort of report offers a new paradigm. It shows that there is a context for what CO2 can do.Let’s see if it holds up.
I wonder if one was to create a word list, then ‘sort’ the model source code, de-duplicate it etc and end up with a list of functions, could one say that every function in this list was
a) mapped physical reality (based on tested physics)
b) that the function had been fully tested
Looking at the results of models published so far, the answers appear to be No and No.
When the world of climate modelers crashes, please keep them away from aircraft simulators…
Mooloo spouted: âSays they used Marcottâs data, previously ripped to shreds by McIntyre & other. / He never attacked the data. Nor even the real conclusion of the actual paper. What was ridiculed was the comparison of non-proxy to proxy measurements, mostly made in press releases and articles. / Marcottâs actual paper supports long-term cooling quite strongly.â
DUH alert: Since Marcott raw data failed to tick up in the modern era, obviously to any school child is the fact that his proxies are not reflecting temperature at all. Nor did his fake hockey stuck use any non-proxy data, but relied for the blade instead upon sudden spurious data drop-off at the end due to bizarre proxy re-dating. That it was then described to NY Times reporter Revkin as a âsuper hockey stickâ with a swoosh gesture, over video chat, removes all doubt that Enron level fraud was at work. Citing Marcott except as an example of brazen in-your-face pure power play fraud enables the âscientificâ âdebateâ to continue to make a mockery of reason and of morality too.
-=NikFromNYC=-, Ph.D. in carbon chemistry (Columbia/Harvard)
The models are just too primitive. Do they have clouds in the models? Do they account correctly and for all cloud forming phenomena? Do they do cloud-radiation physics correctly? Do they take into account solar spectrum shift towards UV at time of high activity? Do they take Svensmark’s Effect into account? Do they account for MHD heating in the ionosphere and in the polar regions? And then there’s the whole gamut of biosphere interactions and influences, from changes in albedo to changes in air and water chemistry.
I see they are still trying to push the claim that the Little Ice Age was only in Europe.
Stephen Richards, thanks for pointing out just how deep the rabbit hole goes with âphysicalâ climate models. Next I want to hear their physical musicians and physical poets. Oh, I guess they already are physical, as are supercomputers and perhaps likely our every thought too. The joke is on them though since climate models rely much more on parameters than on physics, for their wiggle matching and future magic spells.
Stephen Richards says:August 12, 2014 at 1:38 am
Isnât âPhysical Modelâ a strange phrase ? Why are they using the word âphysicalâ ?
That seemed odd to me as well, perhaps hoping to lend credence to their silicon model, which isn’t working.
Maybe now we can rename it to the “Selfie Science”. Selfie Science – to apply one’s own catastrophic propaganda agenda that warmist’s thought processes abide by, while promoting the fraudulant 97% facade.
Are they going to ignore Otzi the hunter found under retreating ice and large forests that existed 4-5000 years ago where glaciers cover in Switzerland today? Look, before the meeting, how about: it warmed like hell out of the glacial max, grew deep dark forests even high up in the Alps, cooled again burying forests under 100s of metres of ice and entombing a fallen hunter, then, with warming and cooling spells oscillating, remelted 5000yr old ice showing us the evidence of a much warmer world – not yet fully uncovered. We know Hannibal’s elephants didn’t have snow shoes and crampons. We know George Washington’s men rolled cannons across the ice from Manhattan to New Jersey under the noses of British troops and people walked across the ice of New York Harbor to Staten Island in the early 19thC….Proxies are only equivocal if you insist it either warmed or cooled. It did both and the proxies are screaming it at you linear loons.
these people spent how long in education,then how many years as “climate scientists” ? what a complete and utter waste of a life.
“Physical Model?” I thought that was what aircraft designers stuffed into a wind tunnel to see if the design would, perhaps, fly.
It’s actually quite revealing, that the computer model is seen as some kind of physical reality, while the temperature “data” is somehow a malleable construct that we should be able to force into conformance with that model.
We’re not cooling, we’re just warming in another direction.
Mike
(apologies to Major General OP Smith)
In other news, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was only ranked number 8 in the Princeton Review’s 2014 ranking of top Party Schools in the USA while being ranked number 2 in Playboy’s 2014 ranking. UW-M is a perennial top ten finalist and previously ranked as high as number 1 by Playboy in 2006 and 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_school
UW-M promises to relentlessly strive to re-attain its former illustrious standards and high ranking; this is demonstrated by the University’s professor’s willingness to contort like a pretzel for the good of the global warming cause.
D. Cohen says:
August 11, 2014 at 7:14 pm
If you donât think it was a lot warmer 5000 or so years ago, you might try reading the article in the recent National Geographic about the recently discovered ruins of a rich maritime civilization based on the Orkney Islands north of Scotland (yes, those Orkney Islands, extremely cold and barely habitable today). Back then there seems to have been a prolific agricultural society lasting for about a thousand years or so and rich enough to support perhaps ten thousand or more people â a lot for megalithic Europe. No one had discovered these ruins before â even though they were right there underneath the surface â perhaps because it seemed âobviousâ that no large megalithic civilization could exist so far north in such a rotten climate. Clearly it wasnât such a rotten climate back then. When even the archaeologists are saying temperatures were much warmer during the holocene optimum, I think the debate is over!
You need to reread your history, the megalithic monuments have been known for a long time, the neolithic village of Skara Brae was uncovered in the 1850s for example and is a designated european heritage site. The henge structure at Stenness has been known for a long time (hard to miss) the locals used to use it in various rituals, Sir Walter Scott visited it in 1814.
“With their current knowledge, Liu and colleagues donât believe any physical forces over the last 10,000 years could have been strong enough to overwhelm the warming indicated by the increase in global greenhouse gases and the melting ice sheet, nor do the physical models in the study show that itâs possible.”
–>warming indicated by the increase in global greenhouse gases and the melting ice sheet<–
The models are probably assuming far too high of a climate sensitivity to CO2, as well as neglecting other variables, e.g. clouds. It sounds like the study using proxy data from 72 locations treated the contradictory data which showed warming as outliers and were ignored, producing a supposed gradual cooling over the past 7,000 years in order to produce a hockey stick.
But, there is at least now empirical evidence that they are starting to get it, âOr, maybe none of us is completely right. It could be partly a data problem, since some of the data in last yearâs study contradicts itself. It could partly be a model problem because of some missing physical mechanisms.â
Despite the crusade to discredit the "amazing coincidence" of correlation of solar activity and the relatively very minor climate perturbations during the Holocene, my money is on a light bulb moment occurring during solar cycle 25 when this "amazing coincidence" again takes place.
denniswingo says:
August 11, 2014 at 3:41 pm
That is correct. Volcanoes have no effect on climate, but can & do affect the weather for a year or two, making it colder at first, then warmer in general.
“Nature sides with the hidden flaw.” The hidden flaw in their models is that there is much the models fail to account for. Unfortunatel there is also something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which in instances like these means that the more you think you know about something the harder it will be to discover what you don’t know.
Imagine how many lives will be lost now that emergency level funding has been channeled away from medical research into climate âscienceâ when a hospital visit becomes a massive risk due to bacterial resistance to idiotically overused antibiotics. We are at least a couple of centuries away from being able to quickly defeat infections, and are now an extra century away more due to this continued theft of research and development money into green banking schemes and boondoggles. That real concern for health is not actually on the mind of environmental activists and their academic and institutional enablers is revealed in their lack of basic Economics 101 concern for real hard science R&D, as they promote artificial energy rationing. Left wing politicians have become genocidal maniacs in sheepâs clothing. And the medical and biological sciences have themselves failed to defend themselves from this psychotic theft, to the ruin of all of us in the near future.
We hardly even know what subconscious forces are at work in the climate delusion since sociologists and psychologists refuse to face the facts of a revealed scam and instead turn Stalinist and pathologize everyday skepticism.
The left is destroying itself here and trying to take down Western civilization with it, but since delusions lift and actual temperature isn’t cooperating either, they merely destroy themselves. One thing is clear: the bulk of climate alarmists outside of the devious hockey stick team of sociopaths have their blinders on completely, and cannot be swayed by facts whatsoever unless strongly confronted and called out as enablers of f-r-a-u-d. Even that wonât phase fanatics like Nick Stokes above who claim Marcott has a valid result to offer when the proxies all fail to act as thermometers in the modern era, making a mockery of his deadpan claim that they represent temperature at all. This is grade school level logic here, anybody can now fully understand. It’s really no different from the fine art deception in which to this day an upside down urinal is worshipped as multimillion dollar âartâ in order to seize control of a profitable market in arbitrary fashion, claiming everyday reasonable common sense no longer applies. What these activists forget is that such social oppression causes sudden youthful backlashes, as will be also so with the climate deception but this time taking the whole anti-intellectual left wing movement down with it.
âThere is no law of progress. Our future is in our own hands, to make or mar. It will be an uphill fight to the end, and would we have it otherwise? Let no one suppose that evolution will ever exempt us from struggles. You forget, said the Devil, with a chuckle, that I have been evolving too.â â Dean Inge
Just a quick thanks to rgbatduke for his typically excellent comment. I feel like I learn more by simply reading his comments than I could spending days with textbooks and journal articles.
Again it comes down to saying “but the proxies say this” and the models, based on the proxies don’t seem to understand what is happening. I’ve made the comment before, and I’ll make it again – Proxies are someone’s best opinion of what things might have been, based on a correlation between what is measurable now and what, in the opinion of the “scientist,” the proxy relationship is. Proxies are not data, they are guesses. Yes, much seemingly good observations based on proxies hold up under current observations, but since the relationship between proxies and actual data has been tampered with every few years – the temperature records are “massaged” to better fit the message – how can you base a model on a moving target? Every study I read starts to say the same thing – “we have solved this problem” or “we have discovered this relationship” or “we have found a relationship between this isotope and temperature” and from there “the fact of the proxy relationship” is treated as an absolute. Maybe it can be, and maybe it can’t. I still contend that if we represented all the knowledge that man has accumulated – everything that he KNOWS to be true – and compared it to what he doesn’t know, it would be comparing a bucket of water to the contents of the Pacific Ocean. However, if you listen to the scientists, the comparison would be more like all the water in the Atlantic represents what they know and all the water in the Pacific would represent unknowns. Because E=MC (squared) seems to work, doesn’t even mean that the equation actually IS accurate to 20 decimal places, so to speak. Science has put itself on a pedestal that only Divine knowledge can occupy.
Nick Stokes says
Nick I have a question for you. i will not reply to it I just want your honest answer.
if we replace the entire atmosphere mass for mass with CO2 what would the average temperature (energy content) be compared to what we have now.
rgb at duke: rgbatduke says:
August 11, 2014 at 4:21 pm
This is only a small part of the problem. The Holocene is, after all, an interglacial in a protracted ice age.
excellent post!
âBoth communities have to look back critically and see what is missing,â he says. âI think it is a puzzle.â
That strikes me as a huge step forward in communicating science.
Thus the so-called global climate models are effectively global weather models. It is woefully naĂŻve to assume that all that is needed to turn a global weather model into a global climate model is to run it longer. http://consensusmistakes.blogspot.com/
hunter says:
August 12, 2014 at 4:56 am
Jennifer Marohasy ( http://jennifermarohasy.com/ ) insightfully points out that bad paradigms do not simply fade away.
That is most profound, really !! It highlights what I have been saying for a very long time. The CO² scam is here to stay. Taxes that have been imposed based on this scam will not be relinquished. Most socialists countries (the whole of europe including the uk) have spent the money decades in advance.
I know its the elephant in the room but when Dr Lui says “Over the last 10,000 years, Liu says, we know atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by 20 parts per million before the 20th century, and the massive ice sheet of the Last Glacial Maximum has been retreating. These physical changes suggest that, globally, the annual mean global temperature should have continued to warm, even as regions of the world experienced cooling, such as during the Little Ice Age in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries.”
Why do they all assume the Solar output is a constant?
Hold on there senores y senoritas– this guy is either honest or willing or both. He’s just set himself up for a Galileo Moment and there is nothing a savage as the beating an apostate takes. Since the hottie-hysterics won’t exactly man-up [?sp], he’ll suffer a whisper-Macarthyesque campaign. Those 2 words: ‘robust’ and ‘contradictions’ will have to be expunged. Either way, it’s a crack in the weak dam.
It is easy to make fun of some sentences from an interview. I think it show a scientific integrity to come out with the conclusions that Mr Liu does.
“When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently requested a figure for its annual report, to show global temperature trends over the last 10,000 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâs Zhengyu Liu knew that was going to be a problem.” http://www.news.wisc.edu/23050
Scientists who follow up their knowledge and present data that is not wanted, deserve respect and protection.
“âThe fundamental laws of physics say that as the temperature goes up, it has to get warmer,â Liu says.”
The economic laws of climate research say that as the temperature goes up, it gets you more money”.
Frederick Colbourne said @ August 12, 2014 at 1:45 am
Much that was very enlightening and:
I take it that you meant Hansen et al were admitting that their prior statements re TOA energy imbalance were alarmist. Please correct me if I’m in error.
good grief people can’t you keep up?!? That’s why we changed to the phrase “climate change” it covers both plus any and all change.
kim says: August 12, 2014 at 4:50 am
“We have to disappear the Holocene Optimum,
that that young fool Marcott exposed to the world.”
The Holocene Optimum has been around for a very long time. Here is a Wiki 2007 article, edited by none other than William Conn olley. It had already acquired the alternative names of Hypsithermal, Altithermal, Climatic Optimum, Holocene Optimum, Holocene Thermal Maximum, and Holocene Megathermal.
Without the minuscule fossil fuel emissions CO2 portion of the greenhouse effect causing warming on it’s own which then increases water vapor there is no AGW.
Either that has happened or it has not.
Why can’t there be any consensus on where or not it has occurred?
When does consensus count?
Note for the record that Nick Stokes commented again while ignoring the fact that Marcott 2013 had no raw data correlation with actual temperature.
But at least you can adopt the Megathermal.
The Megathermal.
Yup.
The MEGA THERMAL.
Hey Nick, what about the Marcott lack of any deviation in the proxy data and the claim that that then represents a “super hockey stick”?
Hey NICK?
NikFromNYC says: August 12, 2014 at 7:36 pm
“Note for the record that Nick Stokes commented again while ignoring the fact that Marcott 2013 had no raw data correlation with actual temperature.”
Marcott used only proxies that were already calibrated in °C. There is no reliance on calibration against instrumental, which is impossible anyway, given the resolution.
I would suggest that Liu sue whoever granted him his degrees [because] it appears that he learned nothing about [science] if he doesn’t know that data beats models every time.
Stephen Richards says:
August 12, 2014 at 1:09 pm
hunter says:
August 12, 2014 at 4:56 am
Jennifer Marohasy ( http://jennifermarohasy.com/ ) insightfully points out that bad paradigms do not simply fade away.
=========
Okay, if you accept that a new paradigm is needed to sweep away the (mankind’s CO2) = CAGW paradigm, I’ve got one.
2018-2019, Step 1:
Global temps begin to modestly decline as the confluence of natural factors, i.e. the AMO, PDO, and Gleissberg minima lead to 4 years of bitter cold winters and mild summers, both in NH and SH.
2020, Step 2:
IPCC adherents publicly admit crisis exists in confidence of models and paradigm, but still profess that more CO2 will increase temps. Biologists and agronomists demonstrate remarkable global greening using satellite measurements. OCO-2 data shows man is not the primary source, or even a significant source of CO2, it is the ocean’s degassing. Greening of thaw arctic permafrosts are major CO2 sinks. AR6 cancelled, IPCC disbanded.
2021, Step 3:
Governments faced with chilling cold, and the need for inexpensive energy seize upon the “CO2 really is good” paradigm. Licensing of coal-fired plants is accelerated. Fracking is encouraged. A 2nd industrial-age revolution begins.
New paradigm: CO2 is good. aka, Drill, baby, baby, drill.
What these activists forget is that such social oppression causes sudden youthful backlashes, as will be also so with the climate deception but this time taking the whole anti-intellectual left wing movement down with it.
And there are forces at work that will at the same time be taking down the anti-intellectual right wing.
The left has its “climate” the right has a certain five leafed plant.
Mooloo says: August 11, 2014 at 4:53 pm
“Says they used Marcottâs data, previously ripped to shreds by McIntyre & others
He never attacked the data. Nor even the real conclusion of the actual paper. What was ridiculed was the comparison of non-proxy to proxy measurements, mostly made in press releases and articles.”
……………………….
Mooloo, this is quite wrong. There are 9 articles on Climate Audit that mention Marcott in their title. The titles alone show that Steve McIntyre’s analyses went far beyond “a comparison of proxy to non-proxy.”
Marcottâs Dimple: A Centering Artifact
Marcott Monte Carlo (written by Roman M)
April Foolsâ Day for Marcott et al
The Marcott Filibuster
The Marcott-Shakun Dating Service
How Marcottian Upticks Arise
Marcottâs Zonal Reconstructions
No Uptick in Marcott Thesis
Marcott Mystery #1
Now, please apologise so that I do not have to hang you out of the window by the feet in John Cleese style.
“Over the last 10,000 years, Liu says, we know atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by 20 parts per million before the 20th century, and the massive ice sheet of the Last Glacial Maximum has been retreating. These physical changes suggest that, globally, the annual mean global temperature should have continued to warm”
Both these factors are settling to the new, post-glacial conditions.
The ice cover takes millennia to equilibrate, parts of Antarctica are still adjusting. It does not mean temperatures “should have continued to warm”. WRONG.
20ppm rise is out-gassing of deep oceans. Again relaxing to the new warmer temperatures.
BTW how much warming are they expecting a rise of 20ppm to make ???
With that level of ignorance it’s easy to arrive at a “conundrum”.
Note again for the record that Nick Stokes refuses outright to even admit the blindingly obvious fact that you cannot have data âalready calibrated in °Câ when that data fails to track °C in the modern era, plotted here showing utterly no response to recent rising temperatures whatsoever outside of noise!
http://s6.postimg.org/jb6qe15rl/Marcott_2013_Eye_Candy.jpg
You see, folks, nothing is ever wrong with climate âscienceâ not even compete fabrication of blades as artifacts and not even non responsive proxies as thermometers. He will simply not address this point, but offer obfuscation instead, for addressing it would amount to admitting that Marcottâs paper is a fraud. It would never have been published in top journsl Science without its faux blade, and had peer review there been functioning at all the lack of response to temperature would have resulted in a blunt rejection of it. This corruption destroys all of climate âscienceâ claims, period, the entire field now being no better than astrology or homeopathy.
Reblogged this on Centinel2012 and commented:
The bottom line is that they have no clue as to what or why is going on with the “climate”!
Quick question from someone outside the field: What is the time scale and magnitude of changes in heat flux from internal radioactive decay into the atmosphere/ocean? After all, the Earth radiates about 5 to 10% MORE heat back into space than it receives from the Sun.
While the global internal heat production is a predictable, slow, radioactive decay curve, crustal movements could change the heat release rate by reducing rock cover, intrusions, etc. Convection could make the heat flux non-constant over time.
I suspect that there are low level spikes on time frames from specific volcanic eruptions (very short) to longer period intrusions short of exposure, to plate “lockup” for millennia.
” robust discrepencies”
Gotta love it.
â robust contradictionsâ
Gotta love it.
(one of these two posts contains the correct quotation.)
As most people know human civilization started around 5,000 years ago during the period of much warmer climate. Could there be any more damning evidence that the predicted “negative effects” of climate change must be bogus?
I want to read even more things about it!