Guest essay by Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT
A recent exchange in the Boston Globe clearly illustrated the sophistic nature of the defense of global warming alarm.
In the December 3, 2015 edition of the Boston Globe, the distinguished physicist, Freeman Dyson, had on op-ed, “Misunderstandings, questionable beliefs mar Paris climate talks.” His main point, stated immediately, is that any agreement reached in these talks would “likely do more harm than good.” In an otherwise, thoughtful commentary, however, Dyson begins with a common error. He attributes the basis for climate alarm to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
For reasons that I will address shortly, this is an entirely understandable error. Dyson’s description of the IPCC position is
“The IPCC believes climate change is harmful; that the science of climate change is settled and understood; that climate change is largely due to human activities, particularly the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by industrial societies; and that there is an urgent need to fight climate change by reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide.”
To be sure, it would be hard to identify the ‘beliefs’ of the IPCC, but I take it that he means their position. Obviously, the IPCC does not claim that the ‘science is settled;’ that would destroy the raison raison d’être for the existence of the IPCC.
Also, insofar as the IPCC is not supposed to make policy recommendations, it does not claim “that there is an urgent need to fight climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide.” That climate change is harmful is, of course, the basis for the existence of the IPCC, and is an intrinsic source of regrettable bias. The IPCC does not claim that climate change is mostly due to human activities generally; it restricts itself to the period since about 1970, which was the end of the most recent cooling period (a period which gave rise to global cooling concerns). Even the IPCC recognizes that climate change has always occurred – including a warming episode from about 1919 to 1940 that was almost identical to the warming episode from about 1978 to 1998 that the IPCC does identify with human activities. However, all the claims cited by Dyson are frequently made by politicians and environmental activists (including Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the UN), and the IPCC scientists never really object. Why should they? Support for climate science (a rather small backwater field) has increased from about $500 million per year to about $9 billion.
Dyson, further notes that the ice ages were major examples of climate change that we don’t fully understand, and that lacking this understanding suggests that we don’t really understand climate change. As another example of something that we don’t understand, he cites the potential role of the sun. Dyson then goes on to praise environmentalism in general, to approve of the increasing wealth of China and India, and their understandable unwillingness to forego this, and finally notes the well-known fact that CO2 is plant food whose increase has been associated with extraordinarily valuable increases in agricultural productivity.
In the December 13, 2015 Boston Globe, 8 members of the MIT faculty (three physicists, two hydrologists, one meteorologist, and two atmospheric chemists) attacked both Dyson and his claims. Their letter was entitled “So much more is understood about climate change than skeptic admits.”
They proceed to express their dismay with Dyson’s “limited understanding and short-sighted interpretation of basic elements of climate science.” There follow 3 disingenuous objections to Dyson’s scientific examples. As concerns ice ages, the MIT professors argue that they took thousands of years, allowing humans to adapt. They ignore the Dansgard-Oeschger events (episodes of dramatic change within glacial periods) which involved major changes in decades as well as the onset of the Younger Dryas (where glaciation suddenly reoccurred after the initial deglaciation of the last major glaciation) that also involved major changes setting on in decades. With respect to the sun, they argue that solar activity changes have been minor, ignoring the potential amplification due to solar impacts on cloud formation, most recently explored by Svensmark and Shaviv, but already suggested by Dickinson in the 1970’s. With respect to the role of CO2 as plant food, the letter writers appeal, without justification, to other limiting factors, ignoring that the greatest limiting factor, water, is alleviated with elevated levels of CO2. They also ignore literally hundreds of observational studies.
The letter writers then propose that ‘prospects’ in renewable energy, energy efficiency and safe and secure nuclear energy should presumably justify the abandonment of cheap, safe and available fossil fuels by developing nations. Yes, safe. Control of real pollutants is well developed already.
The letter writers go on to their only unambiguously correct claim: namely, that the IPCC does not declare that the science is settled. They then present the iconic statement if the IPCC’s Working Group 1 (the one dealing with the scientific assessment – as opposed to the remaining 2 working groups that generally begin with worst case scenarios in order to claim impacts and design mitigation strategies): “The IPCC report presents strong evidence that more than half of the climate change seen in recent decades is human-driven.” One may readily disagree with the claim of ‘strong evidence’ since the claim (based on model results) depends on the assumption that models correctly display natural internal variability which very clearly they don’t.
That said, the claim that most of the climate change since 1960 is due to human activities, refers to more than half of a change on the order of only 0.5C, and is entirely consistent with the possibility that the sensitivity is low and far from dangerous – especially since model projections for warming since 1978 have almost all exceeded what has been observed (regardless of ‘adjustments to the data). Indeed, the warming since the end of the little ice age (around 1800) of about 1C has been accompanied by improvements in virtually all measures of human welfare. Why another 1C should be considered planet threatening is rarely explained. The letter writers’ conclusion that the observed warming implies “a great risk that increasing greenhouse gases will result in future climate change with destructive consequences for humanity and the natural environment” does not follow from the iconic statement; nor is it made by the IPCC. Rather, it is, as has already been noted, the conclusion that is added by environmental activists and politicians.
A careful reading of the letter of the 8 professors leaves one wondering whether the dismay they express over Dyson’s “limited understanding and short-sighted interpretation of basic elements of climate science” is not merely a projection of their own limitations and biases.
But those 8 scientists are “saving the world”, don’t you know? Just ask them. Oh, and they have also built very nice careers for themselves with the HUGE increases in climate science grants over the past couple of decades. Those junkets to Paris, Copenhagen, etc. aren’t cheap. But only a cynic (skeptic) would accuse them of putting their egos and self-interest ahead of science.
No they are not saving the World. They are in fact destroying the World in order to save Marxism?
A great insight said with so few words. I am going to steal that last sentence and use it elsewhere.
“Marxism,” “careerism,” “egos” — dream on, climate change–denying bozos, dream on. You”re all, quite simply and quite scientifically provably, crainiorectal.
You folks who don’t read the science, don’t read the data, huddle in conspiratorial covens used to worry me, but now you just crack me up.
You’re on the same level as folks such as these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfMZ9sDXAp0
Yup, that’s you. Science has left you behind. You’re consigned to paranoid fantasies of conspiratorial leftists “steeeeeling me guns un me freedom ‘n’ me taxes!”
You’re wrong. Quite simple, provably, irrefutably, and embarrassingly, you’re wrong. “Wrong.” Y’know what that means? “Not right.” Got it?
OK Ric, we did a test, and this is the result of your comment:
http://americandigest.org/aabullshitdetect.gif
Rik Myslewski
This statement is true: “You’re wrong. Quite simple, provably, irrefutably, and embarrassingly, you’re wrong. “Wrong.” Y’know what that means? “Not right.” (There is no evidence of man-‘s present or potential future release of CO2 to be anything but beneficial to Mankind as a whole. )
Wow Rik, so much disdain for people who don’t believe that govt is the solution to all problems.
“You folks who don’t read the science, don’t read the data, huddle in conspiratorial covens”
I so wish I could make long term legally binding bets. Clearly one of us hasn’t spent much time going over the intricacies of the data. LOL.
Check out Long Bets dot org. They’re legally binding. Or go to Las Vegas, they’ll fade anything.
@Rik – always fun to be lectured by an atheist who warships at the church of climate change. Remember this quote: “It was the hierarchy I didn’t like, the idea that there is one way of looking at the world, and it’s either my way or the highway. After that, it took me a few years for the scales to fall completely from my eyes and realize it’s not just the church that’s untrue. It’s also everything else it’s based upon.”
Soooo . . . let’s write a rebuttal and dispute them, point by point. That’s what it’s going to take for the average newsbag to start dismissing this stuff as the sophistry it is.
@ Goldrider – If you mean MSM by newsbag, or the people who read or watch MSM pundits, they will simply ignore rebuttals. The truth impinges on core beliefs that university scientists are absolutely to be believed with no skepticism whatsoever. They have not been taught thinking, much less critical thinking. They will never feel the joy that comes in the exchange of ideas and discoveries. In a mob they may very well attempt to literally crucify those trying to rebut implanted ideas that now form a basis for their religious beliefs. It’s a minefield out there for skeptics.
Ernest
There is no longer a Main Stream Media. They are leftist and way out of the mainstream considering the population they wish to subject. It is propaganda and the and they only preach to the choir. The term MSM needs to be changed to something that would better identify them.
D
Nature is working on a rebuttal all her own. The temperature trend will be looking so negative once the next La Nina occurs that it will be fun to see how Climate inc. responds.
Goldrider:
You cannot be serious; no sentient person with the intellect of a pebble could possible believe what you suggest.
The AGW thesis is a political ideology akin to a religious movement. Just as citing the relevant passages in the Koran showing that islam is a religion of peace will have zero influence on the ISIS muslim killers, laying out the real climate science will have zero affect on the AGW true believers and their most influential propaganda arm, the mainstream media.
True believers cannot be swayed; they just believe. There is no evidence, fact(s), results, data – NOTHING AT ALL – that will even have them reconsider their belief. Add on top of that all the “research” $$$$ they receive, and you are literally trying to communicate with a dead horse.
Try convincing an individual who believes that the 9-11 World Trade attack was an inside job carried out by Bush/Cheney/Halliburton/Israeli Mossad that he/she is mistaken. And they don’t even get paid to believe that.
Good luck.
@Rik – You do realize that you made that comment on an article written by a world renowned climate scientist commenting on the arguments made by one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, yes? Ya wanna tell us all how “the Science has left you behind” still? Ya wanna try and stand toe to toe with Lindzen? Tell us all, could you even get admitted to MIT? Get accepted to a program he teaches? Get enough of his attention to support your research or doctoral thesis?
Do you realize how completely detached from reality you are? As for cringing over Marxism, apparently you don’t read leading voices of the AGW hysteria movement like Naomi Klein or Obama’s own energy czar who claims to be “rewiring the DNA of capitalism”? Or Obama himself who actually taught the tactics of Saul Alinsky in classes to “organize” – Alinsky a devout commmunist.
These are all straight up facts that are non-controversial and destroy your entire commentary and view. You claim to be scientific, I’ve just falsified your premise, are you going to change your position now? Lol, here’s what you really need to get. You are becoming irrelevant. Nobody actually believes you, they just tolerate you because they want to telegraph that they have “virtue”. In fact the entire catastrophic AGW cabal is run on virtue signalling – but in reality nobody believes you. No govt will take real steps, and nobody will vote for someone who does. Hmmm, what does that say about you, ehh, Rik?
Rik Myslewski:
The above essay by Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT, concludes saying
Your response says
Well, Lindzen certainly does “read the science”, and he does “read the data”: indeed, he provided much of it. Furthermore, his work leads “the science” so has not “left {him} behind”. His comments on “the 8 professors” are informed realism and NOT the “paranoid fantasies” which you imagine.
In other words, your post demonstrates beyond any possibility of doubt that you are wrong. Quite simple, provably, irrefutably, and embarrassingly, you’re wrong. “Wrong.” Y’know what that means? “Not right.” Got it?
In case you cannot grasp the reality of how utterly and completely wrong you are, I refer you to the wicki account of Lindzen whose views you have the audacity to call “wrong”.
Richard
Ah, the voice of sanity. Well said, Dr. Lindzen.
And Season’s Greetings to you.
Dr Lindzen…your reply to the reply should also be in the Boston Globe.
+1
It’s concerning that the MIT 8 does not recognize this.
“A careful reading of the letter of the 8 professors leaves one wondering whether the dismay they express over Dyson’s “limited understanding and short-sighted interpretation of basic elements of climate science” is not merely a projection of their own limitations and biases.”
Sadly, there are grant whores at MIT too. It is enough to make me want a refund on my PhD from that institute.
Here’s a photo from 2009 showing MIT’s new climate computer, AKA climate roulette wheel. This was NOT a joke! It was intended to epitomize MIT’s grasp of AGW as of publication. I’m not sure how they managed to keep straight faces during the photo shoot. I tried to contact MIT’s News Office to verify that this was a bit of whimsy, but received no reply, so I must assume they took this ludicrous piece of junk seriously. Prinn, one of the MIT eight, is third from the left in the 2009 photo.
http://news.mit.edu/sites/mit.edu.newsoffice/files/styles/news_article_image_top_slideshow/public/images/2009/200908311113506360_0.jpg?itok=OiSXfou7
I just refer to those professors as the Hateful 8,
I don’t know which venue will give Dr. Lindzen’s reply more eyeballs. It is likely that Dr. Lindzen’s reply will have more relevant eyeballs given the specialist nature of WUWT and the general nature of the Boston Globe. readership is done differently for print and web.
The readers of the Boston Glop usually have a skill set that only allows them to find a restroom (of some sex or other) at high noon on a cloudless day. To say that anything that does not parrot the “liberal line” would not be published and if it were, that it would be subject to derision is an understatement. You might as well be trying to convert the Pope to Buddhism if you tried to talk rational science with these folks. I will admit that they are not as bad as Bloomberg News, but they are not far behind.
“limited understanding and short-sighted interpretation of basic elements of climate science”
What is “climate science”? From what I have read and observed, most of the climate scientists who perpetuate the AGW hoax are anything but scientists. Pre-eminent among them is Michael Mann, who refuses to release his data and methodology. Mann has no problem suing those who disagree with him, but refuses to answer interrogatories from those he is suing. And rather than debate the merits of their science and findings, the AGW proponents resort to name calling, personal attacks and attempt to stifle debate on the subject through legislative and governmental decree. So to me, “climate science” is on par with astrology and phrenology. In other words, it’s not science.
Astrology successfully predicts the ocean tides. Climate science projects with no skill. That is the difference between prediction and projection. Skill.
you mean astronomy, no doubt
Yes, for me, the only thing Astrology has ever predicted was, due to my being an Aries, I am therefore stubborn.
I’ve actually seen horoscopes more accurate than some climate studies 🙂
I agree with Aphan: The astrology in newspapers is simply entertainment, but there are astrology sites and skills out there that are disturbingly accurate day after day. I don’t know how they do it but there you go, believe it or not.
PS: I’m not into astrology myself but a close friend is, and she has on many occasions read my stars from astrology.com and I have to admit, it is spot on 9 times out of 10.
In IPCC terminology, predictions are susceptible to “validation” while projections are susceptible to “evaluation.” It follows from the definition of “validation” in mathematical statistics that a “prediction” is a kind of proposition and that a “projection” is not a kind of proposition. Thus with reference to IPCC terminology “prediction” and “projection” are not distinguished by the level of the skill contrary to Mr. Berple’s assertion.
Terry Olberg…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
BusterBrown:
I’ve used “validate” as it was used by the IPCC in writing its early assessment reports. In “Spinning the Climate” the IPCC peer-reviewer Vincent Gray reports informing IPCC management of the fact that none of its models had been validated, contrary to the claim that was made by an assessment report manuscript. IPCC management reacted by changing “validate” to “evaluate” in this and subsequent assessment reports.
Authors sometimes use “cross-validate” as a synonym for the term that Gray, the IPCC and I call “validate.” See, for example, the article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_(statistics) for Wikipedia’s definition.
In composing the manuscript for the peer-reviewed article at http://wmbriggs.com/post/7923/ I used “validate” in the same way as here. The referee, a PhD-level statistician and professor of statistics exhibited no difficulty in understanding what I meant. I’m surprised to learn that a person as accomplished in statistics as you claim to be would have difficulty.
Terry Oldberg says: “I’ve used “validate” as it was used by the IPCC in writing its early assessment reports.”
…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
PS Terry Oldberg.
…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
BusterBrown:
Whether an article that was reviewed before its publication by a person holding an M.S. in meteorology and Ph.D in statistics, a person who was a professor of statistics at an elite research university and who had served on the committee of the American Meteorological Society on statistical issues was “peer-reviewed” when reviewed by him and published by him in his blog lacks logical relevancy. Whether a model that was not “validated” under the IPCC’s definition of the term was “validated” under your definition of the term is logically irrelevant.
If you’d like, we can move past your semantic quibbles and on to the substantive issue of the logic (if any) of the IPCC’s conclusions. Otherwise sayonara.
Terry Oldberg makes mention of “semantic quibbles ”
..
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Re. Greg Cavanagh
December 26, 2015 at 1:13 pm
Forer’s demonstration (one size fits all):
You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.
You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
Security is one of your major goals in life.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
–AGF
Lindzen eloquently exposes the “climate shmexperts”! See Marc Fitch Shmexperts: How Ideology and Power Politics are Disguised as Science
Fitch explains why we need to apply common sense critical thinking to sift the “wheat from chaff” in such exchanges.
The Younger Dryas evidence Lindzen cites is expertly addressed by Don Easterbrook.
But it COULD happen, therefore, we must panic!
That’s right RC. And if doesn’t happen, panic was for a good cause.
Panic is their only cause. Without panic, they have no cause.
CAGW is not even a quantitative theory, and the aim is to keep it as ambiguous and undefined as possible. That way it is more difficult to falsify. Only if the theory is kept undefined they can arque that every single climate event is due to global warming. Blizzards in New York or Boston, polar vortex, south pole record ice extension and accumulation, the pause or hiatus, big lakes ice estension, the missing red spot, everything can be explained cualitatively with a mathematically undefined theory.
urederra,
You are EXACTLY right ! (They perpetuate the myth.)
Regards,
WL
Why is it so difficult for ANYBODY to define climate change? A change in the statistical distribution of weather events over a long period (centuries). So show me the changes already.
All skeptics should refrain from using the term ?climate change”.
The meme is global warming, and we should not assist the climate liars in their slippery attempts to change the subject or obfuscate what they are claiming.
Concur. This has been mentioned many times.
The CAGW position has not been able to show evidence that human CO2 emissions are causing any discernable warming and if it isn’t doing that, it can’t possibly be causing a discernable change in the climate.
Yes, I fully agree with that thought. I typically respond to others with “Didn’t you mean to say catastrophic climate change?”. Or I will also use catastrophic global warming. The adverb “catastrophic” is the important addition in any conversation when responding to warmists so that any other readers of the comments are exposed to the true thought being expressed by warmists.
Menicholas,
Concur also.
I’ve been banging on about this for a long time with OTHERS HERE.
Anthony
Please, I ask again, DELETE the word “change” from your WUWT heading.
Thank you.
Regards,
WL
‘That said, the claim that most of the climate change since 1960 is due to human activities, refers to more than half of a change on the order of only 0.5C, and is entirely consistent with the possibility that the sensitivity is low and far from dangerous’
One of the most ‘holy cow’ moments for me in climate science was realizing that sensitivity studies already assume ALL net warming is manmade – and not since 1979 or 1950, but since thermometer records started!
Now, observational / energy budget studies (Otto, Lewis, etc) do make an allowance for natural variability, usually by taking into account the Atlantic multidecade oscillation. This means that if you’re going to compare a beginning period with an end period (decades) you have to pick them in the same phase of the AMO, meaning they must be 60-70 years apart. I think they also take into account some (minimal) solar forcing and choose beginning-end periods with little volcano activity. But that’s it – in the end they take one decade at the beginning, another at the end, and assume any temperature increase has been due to man.
And still they end up with sensitivity of 1.5ºC or something like that, i.e. at the very bottom of the IPCC range.
The problem with natural variability is that the most obvious natural factor affecting temperature, clouds, is very poorly understood. AFAIK there still isn’t a good dataset on exactly how much of the planet is covered by clouds (and of what kind) at any moment, so good luck modelling that for the XIX century. Since natural changes in cloud cover cannot be quantified, the IPCC and climate scientists in general assume they don’t exert any forcing, i.e. their effect is the same now as in 1970 as in 1870. (Ironically, the IPCC does try to estimate effects of man-made aerosols on clouds – though these are minimal, something like an additional 0.5w/m2 vs 70w/m2 for clouds as a whole).
Anyway, what I want to say is that the IPCC’s iconic statement, which many have taken as justifying climate action, is in fact extremely conservative. Even studies assuming far more end up with low sensitivity estimates.
Lindzen also says:
‘Indeed, the warming since the end of the little ice age (around 1800) of about 1C has been accompanied by improvements in virtually all measures of human welfare. Why another 1C should be considered planet threatening is rarely explained.’
I have nothing more to say. Except, that Lindzen overplayed his hand with the ‘planet-threatening’ thing, which is something of a strawman as almost no one actually says that (maybe John Kerry). But yeah, why another degree would bring catastrophe remains an unanswered question…
…and with the news coming from Antarctica, a catastrophist answer is getting more and more untenable.
Also Al Gore, Michael E. Mann, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Tim Osborn, Mike Hulme, B Obama.
Also, nearly every political leader in socialist and other backwards countries around the world plus God’s representative on earth all push CAGW.
“Except, that Lindzen overplayed his hand with the ‘planet-threatening’ thing, which is something of a strawman as almost no one actually says that (maybe John Kerry). ”
Hogwash.
This claim is made all the time by posers large and small.
You must not be paying very much attention, sir, if you honestly believe this to be the case.
Lindzen’s entire essay was very much of an understatement.
+100
Correct. “Planet-threatening” is implied by “We’re trying to save the planet,” etc.
Besides clouds, ocean currents comprise another obvious natural factor that seems poorly accounted for. The world ocean covers 71% of the Earth’s surface, has a huge thermal capacity (compared to the atmosphere or ground), and has an average temperature somewhere south of 4C. The only thing protecting us from this cold temperature is a relatively thin layer of water, warmed by the sun, that is constantly being removed by circulating ocean currents and tidal mixing.
The onset of the Younger Dryas, a rather severe climate change event, is thought to have been caused by a decline in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. In our present-day climate conditions, how much change might be needed in ocean current circulation patterns and/or rates to induce a comparatively smaller 1C change in global temperature?
The problem with the oceans as a positive forcing is, well, where is the heat coming from? Because we know for sure that they are accumulating heat.
Now, the oceans inducing some change in clouds which in turn causes positive forcing, that sounds more likely.
I literally just read about Younger Dryas in this article. Can’t find anything on what oceans temps were doing, though.
I frequently make this point when it is claimed that the GHE adds 33degC to the planet’s temperature.
it is incorrect to assess the planet’s temperature based upon a very thin layer of SST. It is only by chance that we have the SST that we currently see. Come back in a different period, and the SST would be very different, and that would be so not because of any significant difference in the incoming radiative budget..
We would not have ice ages if the oceans were uniformly as warm as the SST. It is the low average temperature of the oceans that comes back to bite when ice ages begin to onset.
+10
“… has an average temperature somewhere south of 4C. The only thing protecting us from this cold temperature is a relatively thin layer of water, warmed by the sun, that is constantly being removed …”
I do not think that most people appreciate the gravity of that observation.
Consider Lake Superior or Lake Baikal as a temperature analog to the ocean. Both lakes have bottoms that extend well below sea level with deep water temperatures just below 4C. I have gone swimming in Lake Superior in August when the thin top layers have finally warmed to 70F/21C in the shallow bays of the Apostle Islands, and I can tell you that any wind-producing passing summer storm will churn the water enough to destroy the thin layer of warm water that makes swimming possible. On most days, if you stop swimming and stand in the shallows, you toes will notice the cold lurking just feet below the surface. The bottoms of these lakes are always just below 4C because that is the temperature at which water reaches maximum density, and that cold water sinks to the bottom and stays there. Water is such a poor conductor of heat that not even the surface of the earth, presumably 55C just below the lakes, can warm the water. Lake Baikal is so deep and narrow that it actually cools the earth’s crust around the lake bottom (see link below).
http://www.bww.irk.ru/baikalwater/temperature.html
So if cold water (4C) sinks to the bottom, and water in general is a poor conductor of heat, and the deepest waters actually cool the earth’s crust, how can there be ANY heat hiding in the deep oceans?
OK, so sea water is slightly different to fresh water but….
The energy can be hiding in the oceans as global rotational energy rather than heat. That’s just where they think to look.
In comparing the temperatures of Lake Superior and Lake Baikal to that of the ocean, there are a couple of differences to consider:
– The average yearly surface temperatures of those two lakes are very cold compared to the average yearly surface temperature of the Earth as a whole.
– The lakes don’t have an equivalent to the ocean’s meridional overturning circulation.
Regardless of the cause of the “forcing”, there is always only one source for the heat – the sun. And I don’t think it’s surprising at all that the oceans are accumulating heat. With the average ocean temperature at less than 4C and the average global surface temperature at 16C, I think it’s quite probable that the oceans have been gradually gaining heat since the beginning of the Holocene.
What could contribute to a positive ocean “forcing”? One possibility (purely speculative) – if the rate of ocean current circulation slowed a bit then the surface waters would have a chance to accumulate more energy from the sun before circulating down to the abyssal plain. More accumulated energy in the surface waters = higher surface temperature.
What we should be asking is why is the ocean so cold if the ocean has been receiving solar + DWLWIR for approximately 4.5 billion years, and if DWLWIR is effectively mixed into and warms the oceans.
If Solar + DWLWIR is effectively sequestered to depth, then the oceans should be a lot lot warmer after all this time.
The reason the average ocean temperature is 4C is because 4C is likely close to the Earth’s average surface temperature during the Quaternary period. The Earth is now in an ice age but thankfully for us we are presently living during a (relatively brief) interglacial, when surface temperatures are substantially warmer than normal.
The oceans themselves would have been much warmer during the Eocene (50 million years ago). It has probably taken them millions of years to cool to their present temperature.
Actually. Two sources: the sun and the radio-generated internal heat of the Earth, via volcanic vents (as described in another recent WUWT article). The last probably has about as much effect on oceanic temperatures as the first.
The answer to Mr Verney below is simple. During the night, any part of the ocean that isn’t shielded by clouds is staring into the 4K background of space, the ultimate heat sink. The whole AGW debate boils down to the atmospheric and ocean surface temperature (including effects leading to cloud formation) at which the energy lost by blackbody radiation from the Earth equals the energy received from the Sun + that due to the Earth’s internal heat leaking through the crust.
“maybe John Kerry”. I’m not sure he’s an actual person, but a holograph. No real human could be that obtuse.
Why can’t anybody define climate change?
Because they don’t want to. They know the common person will latch onto a general phrase such “climate change”, adopt it and spew it around at all their social gatherings as a pretense to being informed on matters of great importance. As long as that continues the politicians will use it to stick more control over us under the premise that it is the people’s will being done. Then the politicians will continue to fund climate change using our dollars and the circle becomes complete. No sense upsetting the apple cart or the gravy train.
Your use of the term “Common Person” is without meaning. Historically the use of the word COMMON in a social setting referred to someone in an inferior status, as in common thief, as opposed to Bernie Madoff. My experience with the term “Climate Change,” understood as caused by human activity, was usually stated by college students or graduates. The people I know that work with there hands and minds to make and fix things know full well what the Climate Quacks are pushing with Climate Change. Spend some time with mechanics and carpenters et al gives insight into what is real.
re: Fly over Bob December 26, 2015 at 10:35 am
As a sales person I come in contact with many, many different types of people. Most of them, especially when in a social setting, will mention “climate change” or “global warming” or such without any idea of the science of climate or what the issues are. They simply parrot what they see or read on the internet or TV. These are retail persons. cashiers, office persons, secretaries, business assistants, administrators, etc. Most have regular jobs, live a modest life and worry about their income month to month. These “common people” as I referred to them are the everyday people that are essential in making the world go round. But they are not the so called skilled laborers. They do not have a technical type mind which is why they tend to defer to what they read or see with little effort to dig deeper. They are the majority who tend to believe the consensus and express that in their votes. The politicians know this so they play them and we end up getting what we have now.
“As a sales person I come in contact with many, many different types of people. Most of them, especially when in a social setting, will mention “climate change” or “global warming” or such without any idea of the science of climate or what the issues are. They simply parrot what they see or read on the internet or TV. These are retail persons. cashiers, office persons, secretaries, business assistants, administrators, etc. Most have regular jobs, live a modest life and worry about their income month to month. These “common people” as I referred to them are the everyday people that are essential in making the world go round. But they are not the so called skilled laborers. They do not have a technical type mind which is why they tend to defer to what they read or see with little effort to dig deeper. They are the majority who tend to believe the consensus and express that in their votes. The politicians know this so they play them and we end up getting what we have now.”
Wow. The number of generalizations in that paragraph is stunning. That MOST of the people you come into contact represent an accurate aggregate of the whole of all those people. That all of the people you meet who mention “climate change” or “global warming” in a social situation do so “without any idea of the science of climate or what the issues are”-unless of course you have made the time to speak to each and every one of them personally and have empirical evidence that NONE of them have any idea…in which case, I apologize for questioning. That “common people”, unlike “skilled laborers” cannot/do not have “technical type minds” and defer to what they read or see with little effort. Seriously? Some of the smartest people I know never went to college, or aren’t even in the work force. The “majority” of people DO NOT BELIEVE the consensus, according to recent polls, and how a candidate feels about “climate change” is only ONE of many things people take into consideration when voting. In fact, only 40% of Americans vote in the midterm elections, and roughly 50-60% in the Presidential ones. A lot of people do not vote because they feel it makes no difference, so you’re assumptions about all those “common people” are just that…your personal assumptions.
+1 though I’d add that even if they had a technical mind they don’t the time nor inclination to figure out what lies behind the curtain.
as a salesman u know that if a scientist says it many people suspend doubt.
re: Aphan December 26, 2015 at 4:25 pm
Yes, Alphan as a real estate sales person my job, about 90% of what I do, is to talk to people. I spend the majority of my days out and about talking to people. I go to Chamber of Commerce events and talk to people. I go to happy hours and talk to people. I go to any gathering I can attend and talk to people. Now, in my travels I hear conversations about climate change. These are people from every walk of life, all ages, all income levels, all levels of education, all different skills. I listen to what they are saying and if I can, I calmly interject myself into the conversation. I can tell you that in almost all of those conversations most of the people have no idea what they are talking about. They are just parroting what they heard on the news. My favorite question to ask is “Do you know what percent of the atmosphere is made up of CO2”. No one, not one in three years, has been close to being correct. Most people say about 20%. So yes, I speak to many, many people about their climate change views. So I will stand by my generalizations. After all, we all form out judgements by out personal experiences. These are some of mine.
“Historically the use of the word COMMON in a social setting referred to someone in an inferior status . . .”
That was more true in Britain than here. In the US, the term, “the common man” has a neutral (means “average”) or positive connotation.
My Alerts.
Monumental Earth Changes.
This Changes Everything.
This one-sided growth of the inner core deforming crust inside,changes the shape of the Earth’s shape depends Earth’s. Out is albedo http://go.nature.com/w6iks3 Big Under Ground Alteration Around the World http://ln.poleshift.ning.com/p/s9JyK Inexplicable Giant Sinkholes Opening Worldwide http://wp.me/P2HHA2-P4
Precession Earth Matters://Earth’s tilt brings big changes during seasons of the year http://shar.es/1fFoSQ New research shows Earth’s tilt influences climate change http://wp.me/p7y41
Orbit http://wp.me/p7y41-vDW
Climate Changes is a measure of the Speed and one of the flags katastrofy.
Great article!
In all conditioned phenomena – change is inevitable. The cult that has risen to thwart this law of the universe are the true ‘deniers’/’skeptics’. Obvious to those familiar with past climate. A simple and frequent post of the Vostok data is ample evidence alone to undermine the propaganda used to move the masses. Is reveals nothing but change and the maximums and minimums we can and should expect. Moreover, it reveals the peril that will follow in the inevitable cooling and subsequent crop failures – like those witnessed in the ‘Little Ice Age’. Let them know they should rejoice each time they hear – “it has warmed” or “not cooled.” CO2 and warmth bring food, and food brings life. Keep it simple. They are not even aware that they are made of CO2 – as is all life on earth.
In addition, carbon is the fourth most common chemical element in the Milky Way (4600 ppm), only the fifteenth on Earth (760 ppm) and, yet, the second in the human body (18%). What’s the point of the carbon footprint?
Climate ‘science’ is largely a political project.
Just another brick in the wall.
The academic institutions in the Boston area rake in big bucks from the climate agenda and have plenty of influence political and other on the residents of that area. Climate agenda is a bread and butter issue for these people.
Since the sceptics are always accused of taking money from the Koch Bros, or from Big Oil, Professor Dyson should find out the amount of ‘climate change’ government grants given to MIT over the past 25 years
Dr. Lindzen,
“The IPCC does not claim that climate change is mostly due to human activities generally; it restricts itself to the period since about 1970, which was the end of the most recent cooling period (a period which gave rise to global cooling concerns). ”
I recall more than a couple presentations by Dr. Iben Browning in the early to mid 80’s where the concern was still global cooling. I believe the disaster mongers did not get on the global warming train until somewhat later than you indicate and the main impetus, to me, seems to be the redistribution of wealth to themselves.
Jim G, CIT 1970
The AGW crowd goes where the political money leads them. There is little science where the meal ticket goes.
Dr. Lindzen,
I infer from this that you therefore believe that climate change is not harmful. One wonders how you arrived at this conclusion, especially given …
… all that you claim we don’t understand about how climate works.
I would think that dramatic change requires a dramatic driver. So, if this is not the most dramatic driver …
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/global.total.jpg
… what is it?
Bit of an incomplete analysis. One of several other factors to consider:
http://image.slidesharecdn.com/pppp-140207172858-phpapp02/95/modern-agricultural-practices-6-638.jpg
And yet, water is still the greatest limiting factor.
How many of those hundred observational studies occurred in literally controlled conditions vs. in open fields where, say, noxious weed species also benefitted from the increased levels of CO2?
Hello Brandon,
can you please go into further detail on exactly how your carbon graph relates to CO2 in the atmosphere, heck I can’t recall ever getting caught in a rain of liquid CO2, cement, or better yet diamonds! And with that explanation can you please provide a little more insight as to how carbon is a “dramatic driver” of global temperature, especially since your carbon graph is off by 30-50 thousand years in comparison to the “Dansgard-Oeschger” events?
Mason,
Requoting Dr. Lindzen: They ignore the Dansgard-Oeschger events (episodes of dramatic change within glacial periods) which involved major changes in decades as well as the onset of the Younger Dryas (where glaciation suddenly reoccurred after the initial deglaciation of the last major glaciation) that also involved major changes setting on in decades.
Thanks Brandon,
you’ve shown how methane (gas) is converted into CO2 in the atmosphere, but your graph shows that over 2/3 of the carbon (I assume the graph shows carbon produced by humans) is in solid and liquid form. So please explain the mechanism which puts solid and liquid carbon into the atmosphere?
Brandon, your graph shows “Metric Tons of Carbon” for which the chemical element’s symbol is C. When asked “How does your “carbon” graph, relate to CO2 in the atmosphere”? you posted the chemical formula
CH4+202—–> Co2 + 2H20. Not only is CH4 = METHANE, but your graph doesn’t mention amounts of methane or oxygen or water or CO2 in the atmosphere….so…?
BG-“I would think that dramatic change requires a dramatic driver. So, if this is not the most dramatic driver (metric tons of Carbon)…what is it?”
If whatever your graph is talking about IS some kind of “dramatic driver”, when why hasn’t it driven any dramatic changes since 1750? It certainly hasn’t driven a Dansgard-Oeschger or Younger Dryas type change in a decade or less. Maybe there’s just a MORE dramatic driver at work overwhelming the less dramatic driver you seem to be concerned with.
Mason,
See below.
Aphan,
http://www.bpc.edu/mathscience/chemistry/images/periodic_table_of_elements.jpg
Below the symbol for each element is a number representing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_mass
The rest is just arithmetic.
Since Dr. Lindzen is the one who introduced the word “dramatic” to this discussion, your question is perhaps best directed to him about what he does and does not consider “dramatic”.
Since Dr. Lindzen is talking Dansgaard-Oeschge-level drama [1], it sure seems to me that the cause would be difficult to miss. That’s pretty much the point in me asking him his thoughts on the cause(s).
—————
Wikipedia quantifies the level of “drama” thusly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event
In the Northern Hemisphere, they take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet warmed by around 8 °C over 40 years, in three steps of five years (see,[3] Stewart, chapter 13), where a 5 °C change over 30–40 years is more common.
BG- Said “Since Dr. Lindzen is the one who introduced the word “dramatic” to this discussion, your question is perhaps best directed to him about what he does and does not consider “dramatic”.”
Here’s the context of Dr. Lindzen’s use of dramatic-
“As concerns ice ages, the MIT professors argue that they took thousands of years, allowing humans to adapt. They ignore the Dansgard-Oeschger events (episodes of dramatic change within glacial periods) which involved major changes in decades as well as the onset of the Younger Dryas (where glaciation suddenly reoccurred after the initial deglaciation of the last major glaciation) that also involved major changes setting on in decades.”
Seems obvious to me that the MIT professors think that rapid/dramatic changes take thousands of years, when in fact, evidence suggests that rapid/dramatic changes happen much, MUCH faster.
BG-“Since Dr. Lindzen is talking Dansgaard-Oeschge-level drama [1], it sure seems to me that the cause would be difficult to miss. That’s pretty much the point in me asking him his thoughts on the cause(s).”
Which cause would be difficult to miss? Since it’s never been established that D-O events all have the same trigger, and the global climate changes that they have triggered have occurred in VERY “short” time frames geologically speaking (some in as little as a decade) what point were you trying to make with a chart that seems to be showing large “Carbon” increases over a 250+ year period with NO significant global climate changes?
Aphan,
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6248/602.short
Abrupt warming events drove Late Pleistocene Holarctic megafaunal turnover
The mechanisms of Late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions remain fiercely contested, with human impact or climate change cited as principal drivers. We compared ancient DNA and radiocarbon data from 31 detailed time series of regional megafaunal extinctions and replacements over the past 56,000 years with standard and new combined records of Northern Hemisphere climate in the Late Pleistocene. Unexpectedly, rapid climate changes associated with interstadial warming events are strongly associated with the regional replacement or extinction of major genetic clades or species of megafauna. The presence of many cryptic biotic transitions before the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary revealed by ancient DNA confirms the importance of climate change in megafaunal population extinctions and suggests that metapopulation structures necessary to survive such repeated and rapid climatic shifts were susceptible to human impacts.
Maybe those fancy MIT profs. know more than you think.
Pick one. Any event(s) big enough to cause D-O-level drama in surface temps seems unlikely to go unnoticed by modern measuring equipment.
I don’t understand why D-O events would require the same trigger for any of them to be noticed by modern observers should one be occurring at present.
Was my question to Dr. Lindzen not clear when I first asked it? I would think that dramatic change requires a dramatic driver. So, if [fossil fuel use] is not the most dramatic driver … what is it?
As for geological time frames, 150 years is still peanuts. Glaciation cycles over tens of thousands of years are not associated with mass extinctions to the same extent that D-O events and other instances of near-instantaneous climate disruptions are. Typically larger, slower reproducing species are more vulnerable than smaller, rapidly reproducing species.
Maybe, just maybe, our effect on the biosphere will be gradual enough for the species we depend on for health and happiness will be able to cope. But again, in keeping with the theme of the head post, there is much we don’t understand about climate … AND ecology. It amazes me (but not really) that Dr. Lindzen would follow up his “it’s alll soooo impenetrably complex and uncertain” argument with appeals to elementary biology along the lines of “CO2 is plant food”, and that the hard-core skeptics in this forum aren’t all over him for trying to have it both ways.
BG-“I would think that dramatic change requires a dramatic driver. So, if [fossil fuel use] is not the most dramatic driver … what is it?”
Fossil fuel use has not caused a dramatic change as far as YOU defined “dramatic change” as being of D-O impact. No change, no driver.
“As for geological time frames, 150 years is still peanuts. Glaciation cycles over tens of thousands of years are not associated with mass extinctions to the same extent that D-O events and other instances of near-instantaneous climate disruptions are. ”
Dr Lindzen doesn’t say the MIT professors don’t understand ice ages, nor does he claim they are wrong about ice age glaciation cycles. He brings up quote “episodes of dramatic change within glacial periods”. So you trying to insinuate that either he, or I, are equating the two is erroneous. It is idiotic to debate about the cause of any future D-O event until one actually occurs.
BG- “Dr. Lindzen would follow up his “it’s alll soooo impenetrably complex and uncertain” argument with appeals to elementary biology along the lines of “CO2 is plant food”, and that the hard-core skeptics in this forum aren’t all over him for trying to have it both ways.”
That he is trying to have it both ways IS YOUR OPINION. He’s not saying “since Co2 is plant food…it cant possibly ever be bad”. If he actually HAD (and you admitted that he did not make that claim) we’d be all over him for it. But he didn’t. However, YOU keep trying to insinuate that he MEANT that, without any real evidence to support your idiotic, and illogical claim, and so YOU became the target. YOU keep attempting to have it both ways by BY your own ADMISSION. You want to claim that Dr Lindzen is a moron for saying “We don’t know…so its no big deal” while actually CLAIMING “We don’t know…so it is a big deal. You can only make assumptions about Dr. Lindzen meant, but we can all read your own words!
You’re either deliberately annoying or oblivious.
Gee Brandon, nice periodic table, but it isn’t quite as nice as your dodge on my and Aphan’s questions. If you really believe all the carbon in your graph ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere, then you need to explain the chemical reactions that lead to it becoming CO2 in the atmosphere. Showing a periodic table and then saying it is just arithmetic demonstrates a lack of understanding of basic chemistry. So if you don’t understand basic chemistry how can I possibly believe you know anything about CAGW/Climate Change/whatever-crazy-name-it-will-be-next, oh that’s right it isn’t about actual science and facts, it’s more like a religious dogma!
Regards
Aphan,
You have seriously selective reading skills. That’s Dr. Lindzen’s “definition” not mine. One more time for the slow half of the class, here is his direct quote:
They ignore the Dansgard-Oeschger events (episodes of dramatic change within glacial periods) which involved major changes in decades as well as the onset of the Younger Dryas (where glaciation suddenly reoccurred after the initial deglaciation of the last major glaciation) that also involved major changes setting on in decades.
See the word in bold text above? It’s: dramatic. Those words were written by Dr. Lindzen, not me.
I didn’t say that Dr. Lindzen said any of those things. What I wrote (which you quoted) was: As for geological time frames, 150 years is still peanuts. Glaciation cycles over tens of thousands of years are not associated with mass extinctions to the same extent that D-O events and other instances of near-instantaneous climate disruptions are.
Nice to see that your ability to do proper attribution has returned.
Um, no. Feel free to guess again, or conversely …. ask me for clarification.
I beg to differ. See, one premise of Dr. Lindzen’s essay is that we don’t know much about climate. Calling it idiotic to debate about the cause of past or putative future D-O events is the surest way I know to remain in perpetual ignorance.
Duh. Do you have something against me having and/or expressing my opinion?
As I’ve said previously, I think (I believe) that he knows his audience. As I’ve done previously, I cite dbstealey:
Here’s a good example of the truth: the rise in CO2 is harmless. It is not the cause of Arctic ice fluctuations or any of the other ‘carbon’ scares. Furthermore, the truth is that the added CO2 has caused increased agricultural productivity around the globe, which directly affects the world’s poorest who subsist on less than $2 a day.
If the alarmist contingent got its way and reduced CO2 to 350 ppm or less, the world’s poorest would get whacked hard, suffering malnutrition and starvation as food costs would necessarily rise.
The totally cost-free and very effective natural fertilization by atmospheric CO2 keeps food costs down; a savings that directly benefits those routinely subsisting on the edge of starvation.
Therefore, a corollary truth is that those who push for lower CO2 levels are complicit in what their proposal would cause: sickness and death. That is another truth.
I disagree with the man about many — well no, most — things, but I do admire his eloquence and in this case his directness. There’s no doubt in my mind what he actually thinks, and especially in this case, why he thinks it.
It’s nice to know that it’s ok for you to read between the lines, but not ok for me to do it.
Is it that you either don’t understand the fallacy of false dichotomy, or you simply don’t care to avoid using them? I wouldn’t want to assume either way.
Gates,
You say you know what I mean when I write something. Since you follow enough of my comments to know, you also know that I’ve often said I don’t predict the future. I can’t; it’s the future. Almost all the climate predictions are made by the alarmist crowd, from accelerating sea level rise, to ocean acidification, to disappearing Arctic ice, to Micronesia being drowned, to… well, to everything bad. Every alarmist prediction has failed, but that doesn’t stop them from continuing to falsely yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
So when I wrote that the rise in CO2 has been beneficial, my apologies for not being clearer. The rise in CO2 has been an unmitigated benefit with no global damage or harm found. (If that’s wrong, then identify the harm caused by the rise in human-emitted CO2.)
I stand by that view, and so far no one has ever identified any global harm from the rise in CO2 (from about 3 parts in 10,000, to only 4 parts in 10,000. Yikes. How frightening.)
Therefore, we can confidently say that the rise in CO2 is “harmless”. I understand that you fervently wish it were otherwise. But it’s not. The climate alarmist crowd was flat wrong. What keeps the argument going incessantly is that they won’t admit they were wrong. If they acknowledged it then we could all move on to the next step; getting China, India, Russia, and a hundred smaller countries to reduce their particulate and other pollution to U.S. levels.
But that isn’t happening, and the reason is that the alarmist gang won’t swallow their stupid pride and admit what everyone knows: that all the predictions of runaway global warming and climate catastrophe from human CO2 were WRONG.
Mason,
Thanks, it’s nice to be appreciated.
Oh, well that’s easy, I don’t believe it all ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere.
Showing a periodic table and then saying it is just arithmetic demonstrates a lack of understanding of basic chemistry.
My chem professors would disagree with you.
You know what a zeroth-order approximation is, don’t you?
ROFL, if you’re relying on me to learn about (C)AGW/CC you’re Doing it Wrong. Try the primary literature instead.
Mason,
That’s probably because high school and undergrad chemistry problems are designed to be readily solvable by more exact means. In real world applications like atmospheric chemistry / carbon cycle geology — which is post-doctoral level work — zeroth-order approximations help laymen such as myself get a feel for how things work without having to get a PhD in the process.
Besides, recalling that your original question to me on this subthread …
can you please go into further detail on exactly how your carbon graph relates to CO2 in the atmosphere
… didn’t call for detailed calculations, I haven’t been exactly motivated to break out the mainframe and start crunching numbers. I mean really, if you’re going to keep moving the goalpost on me, it seems only fair that you be the one to also kick the ball.
Brandon Gates,
Regarding “dramatic drivers,” what do you know about CO2? Did you know that CO2 absorbs virtually 100% of 15-micron IR, including the so-called blanket-blank “shoulders,” within 3 meters of the Earth’s surface? Did you know that doubling the CO2 to 800 ppm would lower this to maybe 2 meters? Did you know that radiating CO2 at the so-called Top of Atmosphere cannot heat the surface, as this radiation is thermalized miles above the surface?
Dramatic? If you say so…
Michael Moon,
The number I usually see is 10 meters, but what’s a few meters among friends?
It would be nice if you showed your work, but for sake of argument I can run with that figure.
You’ve confused the change in net radiative forcing (the difference between ingoing and outgoing flux) as calculated at TOA with the mechanics how IR-active molecules affect flux balance at every level of the atmosphere wherein they are present. Using the numbers you provide above, 100% of the radiation emitted from the surface is thermalized at 3 m above the surface at 400 ppmv CO2, 2 m at 800 ppmv.
Association football players call what you have just done an “own goal”.
Requoting Dr. Lindzen: They ignore the Dansgard-Oeschger events (episodes of dramatic change within glacial periods) which involved major changes in decades as well as the onset of the Younger Dryas (where glaciation suddenly reoccurred after the initial deglaciation of the last major glaciation) that also involved major changes setting on in decades.
Brandon,
“You’ve confused the change in net radiative forcing (the difference between ingoing and outgoing flux) as calculated at TOA with the mechanics how IR-active molecules affect flux balance at every level of the atmosphere wherein they are present. Using the numbers you provide above, 100% of the radiation emitted from the surface is thermalized at 3 m above the surface at 400 ppmv CO2, 2 m at 800 ppmv.”
Can you explain how IR-active molecules affect flux balance at middle levels when they emit equally in all directions? Absorptions will be thermalized within a few meters in any direction.
Brandon Gates,
Maybe a little thick? Think this through: yes right now 100% thermalizes at 3 meters, the real Greenhouse Effect. What important change would come about from moving this one meter closer to the surface? You made my point for me…
Chic Bowdrie,
They emit equally in all directions, but generally speaking don’t receive equally from all directions due to lapse rate.
Brandon,
“They emit equally in all directions, but generally speaking don’t receive equally from all directions due to lapse rate.”
The differences in absorption from up or down are miniscule if you consider mean free path lengths on the order of meters. As the atmosphere thins, these differences become more meaningful, but net radiation is always upward. Meanwhile convection moves the bulk of the energy up. CO2 won’t change that.
Michael Moon,
I have thought it through. There’s another 3 meter layer stacked on top of the first 3 meter layer. That’s a total of 6 meters, yes?
Now we increase CO2 until upwelling LW from the surface is thermalized within 2 meters. Now we have a total of three layers within the first 6 meters of atmosphere, each approximately 2 meters thick.
Chic Bowdrie,
With the troposphere being ~10 km thick, there are a lot of layers.
Of course net radiation is outbound on balance, the atmosphere is not a net source of energy.
As the atmosphere thins, the absorption cross-section decreases, which means that our 3 meter layer at the surface becomes 30 meters at some height, then 300, then 3,000, etc.
Photons move faster than bulk masses of atmosphere.
“Photons move faster than bulk masses of atmosphere.”
It’s not a race, Brandon. No matter how fast photons travel, they only go as far as the first impact with an IR active molecule. This will be most likely within a few meters unless the air is thin or if the concentration of IR active molecules is low. Because collisions predominate over re-emissions, the photons’ energy will be assimilated in the bulk air. How do the photons that are emitted near the surface at present atmosphere composition get to where the air is thin enough for photons to escape to space?
Chic Bowdrie,
I know, Chic. However, your argument as I understand it makes it sound so.
I’m in agreement with you there, and have been all along.
Yes, as I’ve stated before, 99.9999% of absorbed photons are thermalized, and 6% of collisions cause a photon to be emitted back out. I think we both agree that this is the warming mechanism for at least the ground layer.
Convection does the bulk of it of course. However, the way you’ve been describing the process makes it sound as if photons are absorbed in the lobby, and don’t pop out until the lift reaches the top floor. Hence the “race”, because I’m telling you that every 6 out 100 collisions are causing photons to hop off the elevator and start the thermalization process all over again.
I’m suggesting you’d do well to think about the implications of that.
That is a great analogy. The way I see it, those six photons get on the next elevator and therefore 94% of the energy is going up by convection. Also increasing CO2 doesn’t slow down the rate at which the energy is going up. That is determined by how much solar insolation gets on at ground level.
Chic Bowdrie,
Thanks. Keep in mind that for every up elevator in the world there is one which is going down.
161 W/m^2 at ground level is the global average for absorbed solar according to Trenberth and Kiehl. 396 W/m^2 is the global average upwelling LW from the surface according to same. Please explain the difference?
Brandon, your pathetic response to Dr. Lindzen reminds me of a line form Ghost Busters II,
“You are like the buzzing of flies to him!”
Brandon sometimes talks a lot (but thankfully sometimes clams up or goes away) but rarely says anything.
Lancifer,
Given that others far better credentialed than I have rebutted his arguments in the past with little to no apparent effect, I don’t doubt it.
In some places water is the limiting factor, in other places CO2 is, In others Nitrogen or phosphorus is the limiting factor. Temperature is the limiting factor in other places.
If water is the limiting factor, then we irrigate.
If nitrogen and phosphorus are the limiting factors, then we fertilize.
If CO2 is the limiting factor, then smart, not brainwashed people inject CO2 into greenhouses. The Netherlands is a good example.
If you want to read about the effect of increased CO2 on plant growth you can find thousands of peer reviewed papers at co2science.org including weeds, which are also living beings, like rye or polar bears.
If you want to find a correlation between temperature and atmospheric CO2 levels, I recommend a temperature versus CO2 concentration graph, not a CO2 production versus time. BTW, your graph shows that the largest CO2 production ocurred on the XXI century, when the temperature hasn’t changed at all, which falsifies AGW.
More CO2 will continue to make water less of a limiting factor.
urederra,
I’m glad you realize that there are multiple factors to consider.
You forgot: If temperature is the limiting factor, we air-condition.
Smart, not brainwashed, people realize that most agriculture in the world is done in open fields not greenhouses. Something else smart people realize is that as temperature changes, so does evaporation rate … not just from plants but from irrigation ditches and the soil itself. A robust analysis would net such expected effects against the expected water efficiency gains due to elevated CO2. A very robust analysis would consider how changing rainfall patterns would be expected to affect water available for irrigation in places where that is already necessary, and places where crops are less reliant on irrigation.
If we take him at his word, Dr. Lindzen cannot do this because he is claiming that we don’t know much about how climate works. As such, I find it more than a bit odd that he’s apparently confident that elevated CO2 will be a net benefit to agriculture.
I’ve read several. I have no doubt that pumping CO2 into greenhouses promotes crop growth even when all other required inputs remain fixed.
Oh sure, I like scatter plots just fine …
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W0dggL-4e68/VMzoRRfoyHI/AAAAAAAAAUE/yAHA4IAVS4c/s1600/Temp%2Bvs%2BCO2%2BScatterplot%2BEDC%2Bwith%2Bmodern.png
… I made that one about a year ago.
It falsifies the statement that surface temperature is 100% dictated by the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Fortunately the people who study this stuff aren’t as completely brain-dead as their detractors bizarrely make them out to be …
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oxFP6mUKqIY/VTWEdb3gJzI/AAAAAAAAAbU/YiRjFJ8Zb8M/s1600/HADCRUT4%2B12%2Bmo%2BMA%2BForcings.png
… so there are plenty of data out there for curious truth-seeking skeptics such as myself to have a go at figuring out what other factors are relevant over periods of months all the way out to decades and centuries.
Nice try,. but you are not going to mess with me.
Go and poke fun at somebody else.
noxious weed species also benefitted from the increased levels of CO2?
===
that was really lame
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Because it is an irrelevant, alarmist ‘truth’.
Growth is welcome even if some of it is lost to weeds.
Thank you…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
I recall when the CO2 fertilization affect was first noted by realists, several studies were published that tried to make the case that increasing CO2 only benefitted weeds, and not desirable plants.
So i suppose Brandon’s admission can be seen as a sort of progress among the alarmist crowd.
Bluster Brown sez:
Thank you for admiring it is “the truth”
Here’s a good example of the truth: the rise in CO2 is harmless. It is not the cause of Arctic ice fluctuations or any of the other ‘carbon’ scares. Furthermore, the truth is that the added CO2 has caused increased agricultural productivity around the globe, which directly affects the world’s poorest who subsist on less than $2 a day.
If the alarmist contingent got its way and reduced CO2 to 350 ppm or less, the world’s poorest would get whacked hard, suffering malnutrition and starvation as food costs would necessarily rise.
The totally cost-free and very effective natural fertilization by atmospheric CO2 keeps food costs down; a savings that directly benefits those routinely subsisting on the edge of starvation.
Therefore, a corollary truth is that those who push for lower CO2 levels are complicit in what their proposal would cause: sickness and death. That is another truth.
There are many nefarious reasons for that cold-hearted attitude. But the real reasons are hidden behind their Noble Cause Corruption: they pretend that they’re killing people ‘for the good of the planet’, or some such high sounding wonderfulness. They’re good, ethical people, see?
But the truth is, they are not. They are thoroughly evil, reprehensible charlatans, with self-serving schemes floating around under their skewed haloes. Their ‘carbon mitigation’ schemes will not help those most in need. Rather, the truly poor will be even more miserable if the do-gooders ever get their way.
The clueless mouth breathers who watch the Nightly News while nodding their heads alaong with the anchor babe, and the stock video clips of calving glaciers and polar bears apparently stranded on ice floes, are easy pickings for the untruthful clique who are manipulating those lemmings like string puppets.
But that pesky ‘truth’ is causing the climate alarmist clique endless problems. Now the public rates concern over “climate change” as the least important problem the country faces. And as readers here know, the rise in CO2 (AKA: “global warming”, which morphed into “climate change”) has turned out to be completely harmless, and greatly beneficial to the biosphere of which we are a part. It is not a problem at all, but rather, an unexpected benefit.
The truth is that CO2 is harmless and beneficial. The alarmist crowd got everything completely backward, upside down, and wrong. But becauase the truth is not in them (otherwise they would have admitted they were wrong, instead of mendaciously doubling down with their ‘carbon’ scare), they refuse to admit what the rest of us know: their original conjecture was flat wrong. A few degrees more global warmth would be a net benefit. Cold kills. Polar bears are doing just fine. Natural sea level rise is not accelerating. The Arctic ice scare is a completely bogus false alarm over the natural ebb and flow of polar ice. And every other alarming prediction they’ve made has truned out to be untrue. No exceptions. They have been completely wrong from the get-go.
The truth is a beautiful thing to most scientists. Not to the climate alarmist crowd. They hate what the truth is telling them, because it threatens their easy money, and their endless all expenses paid jaunts to holiday venues, and their undeserved rock star treatment by a fawning media (they were dweebs and nerds before the ‘dangerous AGW’ scare came along, and they’re not going to easily give up that unexpected and fun lifestyle, and being ‘Mr. Popularity’ for something they consider unimportant, like telling the truth).
Yes, the truth is a wonderful thing. And it often takes time, but the truth always prevails. Smart alarmists will quietly begin hedging their bets; the smartest ones will admit they were wrong about the ‘carbon’ scare. But the rest will eventually crash and burn, because the internet never forgets. And skeptics won’t let anyone forget.
DB,
The rise in CO2 isn’t harmless; it’s beneficial.
Hi GM,
I’ve been asking the following question for a few years now:
“Can anyone post verifiable examples of global damage or harm directly attributable to the rise in human emitted CO2?”
So far, no one has ever posted any examples of such harm. Therefore, the rise in CO2 has been ‘harmless’. …QED, no?
But I’m always willing to learn, so if you have any such examples of global harm, please post them.
Keep in mind that the rise in CO2 over the past century and a half has been from about 3 parts in 10,000, to only 4 parts in 10,000. No one could even tell without using sensitive measuring instruments.
The entire “man-made global warming” debate is about the rise in CO2. They have made that into the scare; their climate alarmism couldn’t exist without the CO2 boogeyman.
So I continue to hold the alarmists’ feet to the fire by challenging them to post empirical observations quantifying the harm, if any, caused by the rise in CO2.
And you are right concerning the fact that CO2 is beneficial. It has been up to ≈20X higher in the past, without causing any runaway global warming (or regular old global warming, for that matter).
More CO2 is causing a GREENING of the planet, as observed by satellites, and coroborrated by numerous field experiments. They all show solid evidence of the beneficial effects of more CO2.
Latitude,
Surely you’re not arguing that only crop plants benefit from elevated CO2 in the atmosphere?
Dbstealey: ” natural fertilization by atmospheric CO2 ”
…
Correct…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Observe Bluster’s ‘weeds’ comment for a textbook example of deflection.
Weeds don’t matter. Agricultural productivity matters. And ag productivity is rising in lockstep with rising CO2.
Bluster prefers 3rd World subsistence farmers to starve, or at least suffer from malnutrition. If he didn’t, he would be cheering the rise in harmless CO2.
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Bluster Brown,
And your point is …?
More CO2 has been entirely beneficial. It did not cause the endlessly predicted global warming (thus, the tap-dancing to “climate change”).
So the climate alarmist contingent was flat wrong. They could not have been more wrong. They are the textbook definition of WRONG.
And as a member of that wrong cult, you are also… ☺.
LOL, Brandon’s gardening advice, whatever you do don’t fertilise those tomatoes don’t water those chrysanthemums, it’ll just help the weeds grow.
DB,
My point is that harmless implies neither harm nor benefit, whereas more CO2 in the air is in fact beneficial, not just harmless.
GM,
That’s why I wrote: ‘Harmless and beneficial. CO2 is both.
Chris Hanley,
LOL, I’m the worst person in the world to ask gardening advice of, but I do know from direct observation that it takes a crew of 5 guys over an hour to pull up the weekly crop of foxtails in the landscaping … and that left unattended they would quickly overwhelm the less competitive — but pretty — plants they worked so hard to install in their place. Rare is there a benefit on this orb that doesn’t come with some additional cost.
Whether more CO2 would be a NET benefit is the question, and a good one at that. In the spirit of the OP, for the answer, I refer you to Dr. Dyson by way of Dr. Lindzen; there are many things about climate that we don’t fully understand.
I’m saying; ok then, if you don’t understand it, probably best to not be tweaking it.
Pretty simple logic … I marvel that so many folks struggle with it.
BG- “LOL, I’m the worst person in the world to ask gardening advice of, but I do know from direct observation that it takes a crew of 5 guys over an hour to pull up the weekly crop of foxtails in the landscaping … and that left unattended they would quickly overwhelm the less competitive — but pretty — plants they worked so hard to install in their place. Rare is there a benefit on this orb that doesn’t come with some additional cost.”
So, you consider it a “benefit” when humans tear up the indigenous plants (weeds) in a given area and attempt to “tweak” the terrain with landscaping that cannot thrive on it’s own without man’s help. Right? Do those 5 guys also use powered mowers, edgers, weed whackers, automobiles and/or trucks? I ask because you seem perfectly ok with the “benefit” of having professional landscapers come with some additional cost to the planet itself. But then again, you may have attempted (and continue to attempt) to have all that “tweaking” stopped and left alone to return to nature. I’d hate to assume either way…
BR-“there are many things about climate that we don’t fully understand.” “I’m saying; ok then, if you don’t understand it, probably best to not be tweaking it.” “Pretty simple logic … I marvel that so many folks struggle with it.”
Captain Marvel…and by the very same logical premise, that “if we don’t fully understand the climate”, then you have no support for the argument that human emissions are damaging it, or “tweaking it” even a little! That you cannot SEE how the same flawed logic undermines your entire argument, is pretty stunning to everyone else.
Thanks for providing the patient Brandon. Appeal to ignorance and fear wrapped in one.
The next most popular of the holidays heard from lollygaggers …
“Are you saying we should go back to burning dirty fuels, clogging our air and ruining our waters ??”
“… it takes a crew of 5 guys over an hour to pull up the weekly crop of foxtails in the landscaping …”.
============================
Great, more CO2 = more green jobs.
Chris Hanley says: ” more green jobs.”
…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Buster Brown-
“Unfortunately, most of the landscaping jobs created are taken by undocumented illegals. It exacerbates the problem with the southern border.”
Well then shame on Brandon Gates right? There would be no jobs for undocumented illegals if people did their own landscaping. And perhaps there would be no undocumented illegals taking jobs if our government actually spent as much time trying to protect the country that they do trying to protect the environment.
Aphan: “then shame on Brandon Gates right?
…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Sure I can blame the contractors for hiring illegals. What they’re doing is illegal.
The ends justifies the means on multiple issues in society these days.
Mr Ed would have a very difficult time explaining this to Wilbur.
knutesea,
Here’s the original “appeal to ignorance” to which I am responding: Dyson, further notes that the ice ages were major examples of climate change that we don’t fully understand, and that lacking this understanding suggests that we don’t really understand climate change.
Fearing the unknown may very well be fallacious, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an effective survival trait.
It’s an effective survival trait when the fear is based on reality. When it’s not you increase your chances of wasting precious attention and energy on less meaningful things.
Let’s take investing/building wealth. Many an uninformed informed investor chases a popular thing out of fear that they are missing something and they end up losing more often than not. The informed investor learns to watch for the panic (uninformed fear) and then buys.
One of the best leadership traits is knowing the difference between what is real and what is not. It’s no easy task as evident from the multiple biases man possesses. Most good leaders have trusted advisors who call them on their bullshit.
Aphan,
Yes.
Yes.
I don’t give a flying leap about the planet. George Carlin’s epic rant about plastics and the planet is a fair assessment of my feelings on it being existentially impervious to our influence. What I do care about is the planet’s ability to support human life and civilization in the style and comfort to which we have been accustomed. Since we are unarguably reliant on the biosphere for our continued sustenance, I have a selfish interest in its continued productivity.
When stuff like this goes down …
http://scriptshadow.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/rUNFYnD.jpg
… images like this …
http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/wp-content/uploads/oil-bird.jpg
… can’t help but tug at my heart strings, but what literally puts me off my feed are images like this …
http://www.marketplace.org/sites/default/files/WWW/data/images/repository/2010/06/16/20100616_dead_fish_23.jpg
And my empathy really gets into 5th gear reading headlines like this: Empty nets in Louisiana three years after the spill
The money quote: “This economy is totally gone in my community,” said Encalade, 59. “There is no economy. The two construction jobs that are going on — the prison and the school — if it weren’t for those, the grocery store would be closing.”
These are the thoughts I have in my head when the landscapers show up with two-stroke-powered leaf blowers and chainsaws. For visceral emotional response, CO2-driven warming just doesn’t rate because frankly, for me, things like Katrina, Sandy and Haiyan occur at a frequency which I personally think is indistinguishable from the base rate.
I have zero interest in “giving” the planet back to “nature”. I’m part of nature, and damn glad to belong to the species which is the apex predator.
But you apparently don’t hate irrelevant discussions about my personal lifestyle.
What’s stunning for me is that you and others here continually edit out the context of my argument, which is in response to Dr. Lindzen paraphrasing Dr. Dyson: Dyson, further notes that the ice ages were major examples of climate change that we don’t fully understand, and that lacking this understanding suggests that we don’t really understand climate change. As another example of something that we don’t understand, he cites the potential role of the sun.
Either learn how to read, or find it within yourself to honestly portray what you read. I’d hate to assume either way …
BG
You put alot of effort into your posts and your a decent writer. Because you put so much effort, I assume it reflects a major part of your persona. This part struck me as a central theme :
.
Heartfelt and sincere.
I also see that your are pushing the narrative that the uncertainty of climate change is something we should protect ourselves from. You tag team that narrative with dirty fossils have no place in sustaining the world you envision.
Obviously you know that climate always changes. I’m sure your also smart enough to know we were both warmer and colder in the past all without little man’s influence.
“Better” forms of energy are a fine aspiration and those that want that should achieve it on its own merit, not by manipulating fear. Being honest and not fooling people will achieve a better chance that the world you envision will occur.
The effort becomes more efficient. The movement meaningful.
Lead.
One has to wonder why he didn’t just start with that instead of all the dancing and strawman building and finger pointing when no one would attack his strawmen with him. What did he hope to accomplish? What was his purpose? His tactics certainly do not win others to his position or engender trust or belief. Perhaps he just wanted to waste our time, but at least it increases traffic here at WUWT. 🙂
Don’t know.
What I do know is WUWT has a certain caliber of thinker and someone throwing themselves into the pot may think they have to impress with some hyper attempt at thought swordplay.
Countless examples of that behavoir in all types of societal groups. It’s obviously easier to observe when you’re not in it. I’m just guessing and of course don’t “know”. E-behavoir is harder to read than real life.
knutesea,
Fear of the unknown makes it explicitly clear that reality is not known.
Which odds can only possibly be calculated after the fact. And then only if the thing wasn’t deadly and didn’t kill you.
Most stock pickers do not beat the market index of choice. Many many get completely wiped out. That reminds me, has Chipotle hit bottom yet?
Are you SURE?
Yes of course, and I would agree with you that accurate perception of past reality lends itself to forecasting future realities, but it’s not guaranteed. Shit happens.
I totally agree.
And more importantly; are humble and wise enough to listen to good advice.
So. I don’t do risk management for a living, but I’ve visited various risk departments enough to pick up some basics:
1) Have a good handle on one’s total exposure.
2) Be diversified.
3) The higher the uncertainty, the higher the percieved risk.
With respect to AGW and (1) I consider myself almost wholly in the dark.
I can, and have, made a case for “early” transition to renewables and nulear power by way of (2).
(3) is the main one I’ve been banging on in this thread, and it has been, shall I say, mostly falling on deaf ears. Or interpreted as fear-mongering.
[break]
Thank you. I like to write and I like to learn, and have a touch of evangelical spirit. I also like to argue.
It felt good to write, glad it was appreciated.
Almost. I’m saying that climate change is something we should avoid because it is uncertain how it will play out. I’m a long way from being able to tell you honestly that yes, I absolutely believe a > 1.5-2.0-(pick one)-degree rise in temperature is going to result in unambiguous disaster.
What I’m most confident about is that we are having a noticeable affect on multi-decadal temperature trends, and that the main mechanism is CO2. IOW, the past and present is written, it’s livable, and therefore keeping things as close as possible to that range is more prudent than forging ahead into an uncertain, unknown future which is already full of those things for a litany of other reasons.
No. One of my rules of thumb is that thinking in such absolutes is not realistic or practical. Shale gas fracking is a good short-term trade for coal-fired electrical power in my mind. I’d rather build more nukes and use the methane for surface transport, but that runs afoul of the solar and wind or bust crowd to my perennial consternation. If tales of our imminent demise hold even a sliver of truth, I think the best call is to keep all options on the table.
I’d like to conserve as much crude oil as possible for use by the petrochemical industry, from which we get medicines and fertilizers.
I’m a data junkie, and I’ve got over a million years worth of it on this very laptop. My inexpert personal opinion having sifted and sorted through it over the years is that our signal is clearly detectable amidst the natural ones.
A couple of thoughts. I’m a 70’s child, old enough to remember the 2nd (1979) oil crisis. The clean energy, free of foreign entanglements bit has been tried — I got more than my fair share of it in my formative years. I’ve argued it myself in this very forum several times earlier this year. Market forces are still winning the argument.
Secondly, when people sincerely believe in some existential threat, I don’t consider it manipulative or otherwise dishonest for them to speak to their fear of it.
Ah, if only I had the skills and means, I’d throw most of it at setting up my own geothermal drilling/generating operation and then franchise. Perhaps it isn’t too late to try.
Aphan,
Ok, so a few things. I didn’t have a very good opinion of Dr. Lindzen before I read this essay, and each re-reading of it only serves to reinforce my negative opinion. He makes a number of arguments I consider flawed and that I think someone with his intelligence and resume wouldn’t give in error. In short, I suspect his motives, but I generally make a point of not imputing motive because,
1) Motives are difficult to discern and all but impossible to “prove”,
2) I think it’s better to attack the argument not the man, and
3) arguing that someone who holds contrarian views on AGW is an industry shill (or anything in the that neighborhood) is literally pouring gasoline on a fire that simply doesn’t need the encouragement.
I mainly wanted to see if anyone on your “side” of the fence saw the same thing AND was willing to speak to it.
I don’t expect someone with your views to be swayed no matter how I comport myself. To the extent that I have any hope of having some influence — which I realistically consider quite slim — I would only ever expect to reach those who remain undecided.
If tactical considerations are your thing, I suggest you step back a moment and look at things like who has been calling whom names and other “tone” kinds of things. I have certainly not been “perfect” in that respect, but if you review my conversations I think you’ll find that I’m generally polite and respectful toward others who extend me the same courtesy.
Which means I’m getting read too. Seems a fair trade.
Gates says:
Which means I’m getting read too.
Dream on. Like most readers, I skip over your anal-retentive parsing of everything. Can’t you ever just cut to the chase? Apparently not.
NONE of your alarmist pals’ predictions or fantasies have ever come true. They were all wrong. NO exceptions.
Normal, rational folks would realize that their scardey-cat worries about climate catastrophes have been so thoroughly debunked that continuing to post about them would make people like Gates a laugingstock.
But True Belief is religion; in this case, it’s Gates’ own eco-religion. He’s infected by it, and there’s no hope of salvation or redemption. The scales will never fall from his eyes.
So prove me wrong, Gates: post empirical, verifiable, testable measurements quantifying the putative fraction of global warming caused by human CO2 emissions. Or go home.
You write long posts which unfortunately are not conducive to the blogosphere because they are not very conversational. In the e-world IM is better. Obviously face to face is best. I carved out the above quote because it articukated the core of yoir belief.
Since you “believe” that what man is doing to change climate is imprudent (notice I’m reflecting your words) and you’re not interested to personally evaluating that belief, you should move on to a forum that discusses how to fix that imprudent choice.
I don’t run WUWT, but my personal opinion of this site is that it is very useful for those who doubt that CAGW exists. Here, they are rigid about providing evidence to beliefs and fervent concerning the routing out of fallacious debate concerning that evidence.
In summary, since your not here to challenge your own beliefs concerning CO2 influenced CAGW, you’ll eventually end up talking to yourself.
Lastly, since you’re a data head, I’d suggest one of the ways to test your belief is to create a business proposal concerning your energy solutions and shop it to the targeted market. I think you’ll find that options such as geothermal are good local alternatives. The new trend is a decentralization of coal based electricity. This will result in the localized choices for what works best and the localized infrastructure to support it. If you can make or save people money, the market will reward you.
Good luck and if you go this route please send me a link to your webpage.
knutesea
I offer the possibility that discussing a massive and complex system as climate is not conducive to short communications. That said, I am all too aware that concision is not one of my strengths.
You proceed from a false explicit assumption that I’m not interested in evaluating my beliefs, a false implicit assumption that I don’t read/participate in fora which discuss how to reduce CO2 emissions and cap it off with the false choice that I can only participate here or somewhere else.
I think that sometimes, some do a good job of living up to it. Sometimes, it gets a bit overdone … witness the several comments on this thread characterizing my arguments invoking principles of risk mitigation as fallacious appeals to ignorance as if it is somehow possible for me to provide evidence of future events.
Probably the best option for me personally is to find a start up offering some ground floor opportunities. Your point about offering geothermal as an alternative to decentralized coal is an interesting one. Very small wells require less up-front capital risk, but to be cost-effective they would also have to be very shallow relative to larger installations. That puts a limit on the number of opportunities, but if it’s an under-served niche there could be a viable business model to serve it.
dbstealey,
Haven’t we done this dance already? Didn’t I already tell you that all I can give you are estimates of human contributions to temperature trends? Haven’t you therefore already declared victory because the fact that I can’t provide a direct measurement means that I must be wrong?
Why do you repeat the same question over and over and over after it has already been honestly answered to the best of present human ability?
Here is the IPCC attribution statement: More than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature (GMST) from 1951 to 2010 is very likely due to the observed anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations.
This is a summary of the estimated component contributions:
And this is the probability distribution function of the causes attributed to anthropogenic influences based on the above plot:
http://www.realclimate.org/images/attribution.jpg
Based on that PDF, the best guess is that 110% of the observed warming since 1950 is due to anthropogenic influences.
You may read about the particulars here:
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter10_FINAL.pdf
I am home.
Gates says:
“all I can give you are estimates”
That’s all anyone has. But we need measurements, because measurements are data and without data you’re really just guesstimating. Posting graphics doesn’t make your guesstimates valid.
Based on those guesstimates, every alarming prediction ever made has turned out to be wrong. When that happens rational folks will admit that they’re on the wrong track. And of course, you are: you have no credible evidence showing that human emitted CO2 does anything. All you have are your guesstimates. But you’re ruled by your belief system as surely as any Jehovah’s Witness, and your lengthy, drawn out commentaries are accomplishing nothing except re-confirming your bias.
Without measurements quantifying what you believe is happening, you’ve got nothing.
dbstealey,
You asked for the fraction of warming attributable human activity. That is a calculation. Because that caluclation involves things which we cannot measure directly, estimates are used. That means that the final calculation is an estimate, yes? We agree? Good.
Now, just because estimates were used in the calculation does not mean that no measurements were included in the calculations. I repeat, you can find the particulars of what went into making those pretty pictures here:
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter10_FINAL.pdf
As much as I personally would love to have a handheld device that I could take outside and measure the A in GW with, no such device exists and all but certainly never will.
Once again, I have answered your question. I understand you don’t accept the answer because about the only data I know of that meet your requirements for being empirical, verifiable, and testable either come from ice cores or microwave sounding units (with bonus points awarded for using the Wood for Trees website). Not much I can do about that, but it does tend to make me wonder how truly genuine your requests for data are given how much page space you fill rejecting so much of it.
Gates says:
I understand you don’t accept the answer …
Oh, but I do accept your answer. Your answer is a guesstimate.
But it’s fun watching you try to tap-dance around the fact that the entire ‘carbon’ scare is supported only by guesstimates and mountains of propaganda money.
Wake me when someone measures AGW.
DB
A post over at CE laid down a descriptive phrase … warmist wriggle worms … deny, divert, confuse … I think his name was Mike Flynn.
Gates: “I infer from this that you therefore believe that climate change is not harmful. One wonders how you arrived at this conclusion, especially given …”
Lindzen does not appear to make any such inference as fact. What he points out is the one degree warming thus far (mostly natural) has been accompanied by beneficial impacts on humans. The world is still generally a cold place for human beings (note: equatorial population rates versus polar population rates per sq meter). While such a measure is not conclusive, Lindzen has often pointed out that the preponderance of evidence suggests warming will more likely be beneficial than harmful. Your response is cherry picking suggesting other developments as accounting for the unquestioned net beneficial effects on human populations over the past 150 years without any kind of proof.
What is really being challenged here is the freedom of people to improve their chances of survival based upon their personal choices without clear scientific evidence that their personal choices are going to be harmful to the environment. Its the same kind of thinking employed by dictators from the beginning of time. Evidence is not important, what is important is what I believe and what I believe is more important than what others believe.
bill hunter,
I’m well aware that he doesn’t come right out and say, “everything is going to be fine, there’s nothing to worry about” … that’s what Stealey is for: Here’s a good example of the truth: the rise in CO2 is harmless.
I’m pretty sure Dr. Lindzen knows his audience.
Requoting Dr. Lindzen parphrasing Dr. Dyson: Dyson, further notes that the ice ages were major examples of climate change that we don’t fully understand, and that lacking this understanding suggests that we don’t really understand climate change. As another example of something that we don’t understand, he cites the potential role of the sun.
My main argument is this: in the face of large uncertainty about how the climate system works (we don’t fully understand), the conservative risk-management response is to minimize changes to that system.
Go back, again, to the Dr. Curry-esque Uncertainty Monster Dr. Lindzen has invoked and consider the other side: without clear scientific evidence that our personal choices are going to be beneficial to the environment, there’s little assurance to people of the poorer nations of the planet that their chance of survival (as a nation) is as good as those of rich nations.
It really would have been priceless to have seen you argue with the representatives of low-lying island nations at COP21 about the importance of your personal freedoms as an enhancement to their chances of their survival on their own soil.
Evidence of future events has been impossible to come by since the beginning of time. Evidence from past events suggests that the relative stability of temperatures during the Holocene is most beneficial to our success as a species.
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
“My main argument is this: in the face of large uncertainty about how the climate system works (we don’t fully understand), the conservative risk-management response is to minimize changes to that system.”
It is equally as illogical to assume that we can minimize changes to a system WE DO NOT understand! You’re standing on the same platform you are mocking Lindzen for, you know that right?
“Evidence from past events suggests that the relative stability of temperatures during the Holocene is most beneficial to our success as a species.”
Evidence from the past suggests that thee relative stability of temperatures during the Holocene is a FREAK of nature, is NOT the norm, is an ANOMALY in the history of this planet! If you want to go all correlation is causation irrational, then you cannot object to the statement that maybe human development is the REASON the climate has remained so stable during this exact period in history! What if our attempt to remove Co2 from the atmosphere results in a RETURN to the chaotic, abruptly changing climate of the past?
There is ZERO empirical evidence that minimizing changes to that system will prevent that system from changing.
Lots of tight +1 logic in this thread esp aphan’s … excellent educational reading.
Brandon,
That increasing CO2 concentration from three to four molecules per 10,000 dry air molecules over the past 115 years or so has in fact been beneficial is a fact. There is no hypothetical about it.
Adding another two molecules, to 600 ppm, over the next century would be even more beneficial. Better yet would be doubling the vital trace gas to 800 ppm, at which level most plants would still be gasping for the CO2 they need. Best of all would be 1200 ppm, ie the level in real greenhouses.
Gloateus Maximus says:
.
” or so has in fact been beneficial is a fact.”
…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Buster,
Dunno how the greening of the earth via CO2 fertilization has escaped your notice.
http://earthsky.org/science-wire/elevated-carbon-dioxide-making-arid-regions-greener
The Sahel, for instance, which used to be a region of concern, no longer is or less so, thanks to a little more plant food in the air. As you must know, with more CO2 available, plants don’t need to leave their leaf stomata open as long to get the food they need, hence they lose less water, so can live in more arid environments.
Buster,
[snip. -mod]
I was counting on that, dangit, now you’ve gone and ruined it! 😀
Aphan,
Typically I assume that a steady-state system will not depart from that state unless perturbed.
I’m challenging Dr. Lindzen’s implied conclusion that more CO2 is good because … plant food … in light of his opinion (buttressed by Dr. Dyson’s) that “we don’t fully understand” climate. I’m a bit surprised (but not really) that some of the more skeptical folks here aren’t all over him for that apparent contradiction.
Be that as it may [1], it still does not address the observation that said relative stability may have been of the utmost benefit to human beings.
That’s a logical possibility of course, but I’d need a plausible physical explanation backed by evidence to support it. I must confess; I have no such explanation or evidence. OTOH, I have a plausible physical explanation for CO2’s radiative effects on the atmosphere, and gobs of evidence supporting the argument that it has indeed had an effect on global temperatures since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
10,000 years of CO2 ~280 ppmv with global temps only varying on the order of 0.5 K suggest that such concerns are unlikely.
Well again, my default assumption about steady state physical systems is that they don’t change state on a whim. I suppose it’s possible that cyclical boom/bust cycles of unseen Leprechauns smelting gold on the bottom of the oceans explains the ice-age cycles over the past 800 k years, but …
… evidence suggests that the planet is fairly predictable in its response to long-period external forcing changes.
————
[1] The relative stability of the Holocene is almost certainly due to orbital forcing cycles being presently out of phase with each other relative to previous interglacials, thereby damping the rate and amplitude of their combined forcing.
Gloateus Maximus says:
.
“greening of the earth via CO2 fertilization”
…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
BG-“Typically I assume that a steady-state system will not depart from that state unless perturbed.”
Earth is not a “steady state system”. The past 11,000+ years or so are an anomaly, out of the ordinary.
BG-“I’m challenging Dr. Lindzen’s implied conclusion that more CO2 is good because … plant food … in light of his opinion (buttressed by Dr. Dyson’s) that “we don’t fully understand” climate. I’m a bit surprised (but not really) that some of the more skeptical folks here aren’t all over him for that”
He said Co2 IS plant food….which it is. Do you disagree? Too busy being all over YOU for attributing your irrational “implied” conclusion to HIM….while using the same flawed logic to defend yourself. You see, logic dictates that in his absence, I can only make assumptions about what he meant or implied, and assumptions are often wrong. But you ARE here, hence, I’m questioning YOUR logic, which continues to be flawed even after questioning.
BG- “Be that as it may [1], it still does not address the observation that said relative stability may have been of the utmost benefit to human beings.”
That relative stability started at the beginning of, and continues through, human civilization,…it’s STILL OCCURRING under high CO2 levels. That high CO2 level is PART OF that utmost beneficial to human being period.
BG-“Well again, my default assumption about steady state physical systems is that they don’t change state on a whim.”
Well again, only a fool’s default position would be that the last 11,000+ years, of relative stability, cancels out/negates the other 4.5 Billion years of Earth’s existence. The “steady state” of Earth’s climate is abrupt, often chaotic climate change. So I eagerly await you explaining upon what “whim” Earth’s “steady/changing constantly/state changed 11,000+ years ago! I’ll make popcorn and sit by my monitor.
BusterBrown@hotmail.com
December 26, 2015 at 3:20 pm
Can you really be this misinformed? Of course it’s not from algae. It’s from C3 green plants, which represent approximately 95% of Earth’s plant biomass. C3 plants lose 97% of the water taken up through their roots to transpiration. Examples include cereal grains such as wheat, rice, barley and oats, plus other important crops, like peanuts, cotton, sugar beets, tobacco, spinach and soybeans, as well as most trees and lawn grasses, eg rye and fescue.
GM says:
Can you really be this misinformed?
He is, believe me. I know first-hand.
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
PS: People don’t grow algae in greenhouses. They keep greenhouses at 1300 ppm of CO2 because that’s optimum for the valuable plants grown in those ideal conditions.
The ignorance of alarmists of the most elementary scientific facts never ceases to amaze me.
Buster,
Re weeds. Apparently you’re unaware of how agriculture works. Farmers, orchardists and gardeners seek to control weeds and encourage crops. In a state of nature, “weeds” are often preferable to desert sand and soil without vegetation. Pastoralists can graze or browse their livestock on many wild plants.
Strange that so-called Greens hate the greening of the Earth thanks to man-made plant food added to the air.
Gloateus Maximus…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Gloateus Maximus
.
“seek to control weeds and encourage crops.”
…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Buster,
I’m getting tired of having to educate you on the most elementary science and agriculture.
Most phytoplankton get their CO2 from the water, not the air.
Farmers spray or harrow to get rid of weeds in any case, regardless of how many there are going to be. “Weeds” outside of cropland are forage for the animals which pastoralists drive over the pasture or rangeland.
How many times must such simple realities be explained to you? “Weeds” are green plants, so also green the earth. Growing vegetation where before there was desert is a good thing. Even plants without use for humans are a carbon sink, which you should like.
Gloateus Maximus says: “Most phytoplankton get their CO2 from the water, not the air. ”
…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Movie review
The popcorn was cheap but the warmist character’s script was wordy and poorly developed.
Was that the intention of the director ?
@Brandon Gates December 26, 2015 at 12:54 pm
‘It really would have been priceless to have seen you argue with the representatives of low-lying island nations at COP21 about the importance of your personal freedoms as an enhancement to their chances of their survival on their own soil’
Brandon FYI
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27639-small-atoll-islands-may-grow-not-sink-as-sea-levels-rise#.VXI6nzcw-id
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/150213-tuvalu-sopoaga-kench-kiribati-maldives-cyclone-marshall-islands/
So who would you have me argue with,while you’re busy sorting Dick Lindzen out?
This guy?
How about Ian Fry,who lives in Australia just on the outskirts of Canberra in a landlocked city called Queanbeyan.He starts crying at the 3min mark.
Thanks Brandon, you’re priceless.
Buster Brown- “PS, I checked pictures of Death Valley, and the increased CO2 doesn’t seem to have done much to “green” that area.”
Oh, well THAT proves him wrong right there! Because everyone knows that all you need is CO2 to turn things green!
Aphan…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Aphan,
I didn’t say that it was. What I did say is: Typically I assume that a steady-state system will not depart from that state unless perturbed.
Now are you honestly going to argue with me that the planet isn’t trying to achieve thermodynamic equilbrium with itself and its surroundings?
Yes, you said that already. The Milankovitch plot I already posted above contains some clues as to why that might be.
Don’t be silly, of course I agree.
Dr. Lindzen not being here didn’t stop me from questioning his argument. Perhaps he’ll be so kind as to clear up any confusion.
Not according to data I consider reliable …
http://skepticalscience.com//pics/regemcrufull.jpg
… your mileage will likely vary.
I would say that the abundance of cheap energy which caused that rising CO2 level was the most benefit. The total cost side of that ledger remains to be seen.
Oh, I agree, but what that has to do with my argument is anyone’s guess. My macroecon prof put it to me this way: prior to the industrial revolution, human economic output amounts to basically … nothing. Kind of drove home the point that climate conditions 150 years ago to now is more relevant to our lives of relative wealth and luxury than 4.5 billion years ago is.
And my response to you is the same as it is to Dr. Linzden: if CO2 isn’t the main driver for the changes we’ve seen since the mid-19th century, what is?
Chaos is not a cause, and deterministic physical systems don’t respond to magic so far as I know.
For the third time now, look at the Milankovitch plot I already posted. If you don’t get what is there to see and understand, ask.
Me-Earth is not a “steady state system”.
BG-“I didn’t say that it was. What I did say is: Typically I assume that a steady-state system will not depart from that state unless perturbed.”
Let me clarify-Earth has never been a “steady state system”, not in the past, nor now. So references to a steady state system and what may or may not perturb that system are irrelevant here.
BG-“Now are you honestly going to argue with me that the planet isn’t trying to achieve thermodynamic equilbrium with itself and its surroundings?”
First, I would never argue with you that the planet is, or is not, “trying” to do something. Use of the word “try” indicates will, conscious effort towards something. So it would be irrational to assume the Earth can “try” anything. Second, objects in thermodynamic equilibrium have the same temperature. For the planet to be in thermodynamic equilibrium with itself and its surroundings, by definition, the planet and its surroundings would all have to achieve the same temperature. Such a thing has never happened in the past, and it’s very unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Me-“That relative stability started at the beginning of, and continues through, human civilization,…it’s STILL OCCURRING under high CO2 levels.”
BG-“Not according to data I consider reliable …”
Even Marcott didn’t think his 20th century data was reliable!
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/comment-page-1
Q: What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?
A: Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.
BG-“And my response to you is the same as it is to Dr. Linzden: if CO2 isn’t the main driver for the changes we’ve seen since the mid-19th century, what is?”
Oh I can play that game! If magic unicorn farts are not the main driver, what is? If bologna sandwiches are not the main driver, what is? Let’s see…Twinkies were invented in 1933…and sales began dropping around 2009…when did the “pause” “slowdown” “hiding heat” start? Maybe Twinkies are the main driver! Burden of proof is on the person claiming Co2 is the main driver, not me.
You bore me. And I want a Twinkie. Night!
Aphan
Thanks again for the back and forth w BG.
After spending the past few months reading the blogger debate I became more confident in engaging in real life. It bore fruit this holiday as I was fortunate to discuss the issue with a few up in coming college graduates. All 3 youngins sent me text messages asking for more information and definitely are now skeptical of cagw.
The skepticism has caused them a bit of a quandary since they are also dedicated green energy advocates.
Again, much appreciated. I don’t think I’m the only whippersnapper that benefits in this manner.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/11/a-simple-test-of-marcott-et-al-2013/
look like wuwt had a field day with this reconstruction attempt
Gloateus Maximus,
Nice to see that my side of this debate doesn’t have a monopoly on the science being settled. Sharing is good. I like to share.
Two mere molecules of a trace gas can have that profound of a benefit? With no undue plausibly conceivable negative side effects? As DB is fond of saying: what a magical gas!
Well, so long as wet bulb temps stay below 37 C most of the time over most of the planet at 1200 ppmv, land-based mammals (particularly the ones on the order of our size and higher) will probably be ok … so perhaps there isn’t much to be concerned about. Heck, there’s probably a killing to be made building boats for the express purpose of navigating downtown Miami … get in early and literally ride the wave of financial success!
I can’t speak for how crustaceans will react to the lowered pH in oceans though. Remember, this is complex stuff, and according to Dr. Dyson by way of Dr. Linzen, there is a lot we don’t understand about climate … AND the biosphere. Nevermind economics ….
JB Goode,
I guess you missed this: However, Kench’s findings do not apply to other types of island, like the volcanic main islands of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa.
And this: “There will be less emphasis on external migration of ‘environmental refugees’ from atoll nations that has gained such prominence in the last few years,” he says. But he notes that the atoll-building sediment comes from productive coral reefs, which face a range of threats such as warming oceans and pollution.
Other than that, it’s nice to read some potential good news for once.
” … could the islands … you know … tip over?” Priceless. Yes, I’d be happy sorting that guy out with you.
Skipped that one, pehaps you can summarize why he started crying and tell me how that in any way shape or form actually addresses any of my arguments on this thread … especially how that gets Dr. Lindzen off the hook for saying there’s much we don’t know about climate out one corner of his mouth and then amost immediately telling us out of the other corner that CO2 is plant food … implying that we’re obviously only going to benefit from changing the chemistry of our atmosphere.
Awww shucks, I really do try you know.
“especially how that gets Dr. Lindzen off the hook for saying there’s much we don’t know about climate out one corner of his mouth and then amost immediately telling us out of the other corner that CO2 is plant food … implying that we’re obviously only going to benefit from changing the chemistry of our atmosphere.”
YOU inferred that, HE did not say that. False Attribution=logical fallacy, false dilemma=fallacy,appeal to ridicule=logical fallacy, straw man=logical fallacy.
I don’t know much about cow manure (fact) but it’s plant food (fact). Now tell me, using logic, that I just implied that we’re OBVIOUSLY only going to benefit by adding cow manure to our atmosphere. Go on. You got this! (See how idiotic your argument is?) Probably not..
Are there any weeds a goat won’t eat?
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
If they can be trained to not eat the crops, we’re all good. One wonders why this isn’t already standard practice amongst the industrialized farming concerns of the world.
lol Buster, I see your search-fu has exceeded mine this fine day.
Brandon…
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Near as I can tell … I went away for a time and ignored him upon my return.
Yum yum! Cheaper curried goat on the menu.
Artichoke Thistle
Black Berry’s*
Bull Thistle
Canada Thistle
Cheat Grass
Common Mullein
Common Tansy
Dalmatian Toad flax
Dandelions
Downy Brome
Horsetail
Indian tobacco
Ivy
Knap Weed
Kosia Weed*
Larkspur
Leafy Spurge*
Loco Weed
Medusa Head
Morning Glory
Musk Thistle
Nettle
Oxide Daisy
Plumless Thistle
Poison Oak
Poison Hemlock*
Puncture Vine (goat heads)
Purple Lostrife
Purple Star Thistle
Rush Skeleton Weed
Russian Olives*
Sage
Scotch Broom
Scotch Thistle
Snap Weed
Spotted Knapweed*
Sweet Clover
Yellow Star thistle*
Yucca
Wild Roses*
* Goat favorites
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
Buster, you hacked off a sentence.
The following alkaloid-containing plants are rarely eaten, except to stave off starvation.
http://www.dairygoatjournal.com/87-2/plants_toxic_to_goats/
(Note: “Buster Brown” is the latest fake screen name for ‘David Socrates’, ‘Brian G Valentine’, ‘Joel D. Jackson’, ‘beckleybud’, ‘Edward Richardson’, ‘H Grouse’, and about twenty others. The same person is also an identity thief who has stolen legitimate commenters’ names. Therefore, all the time and effort he spent on his comments is wasted, because I am deleting them wholesale. ~mod.)
There appear to be two different worlds, but, in each of them, CO2 is recognized as a wonder gas.
On planet Burnt Toast, CO2 is a potent but duplicitous vapour, giving birth to an abundance of life but ready at an instant to scorch all terrestrial organisms and dissolve their marine counterparts in a bath of acid.
On adjacent orbit, Heavenly Leavener has never enough of the miraculous gas; here, CO2 is as beneficent as it is malign on the other world.
Wherever it is that I’m from, the destructive powers have not been observed, whereas it seems hard to dispute that healthy, well-watered plants do better when they are given more CO2.
It is not clear, however, that moribund plants (due to lack of water) will thrive because they get more CO2.
Yes, we know that substantial enrichment of CO2 prompts partial closure of stomata (not early closure) and we know that if water, warmth and nutrients are not lacking, plants will grow both faster and bigger.
It’s a very interesting part of the world that, for years and years, had water availability that was just shy of the critical difference made by a few ppm of CO2 and now that we’ve got that increase, greenery is springing up where there was none before. At what stage of their growth would that happen?
Obviously CO2 can’t compensate for failed germination, since there aren’t any leaves.
CO2 makes green things bigger, it does not make brown things green and it doesn’t make green things brown.
Goats don’t need anyone to tell them what’s edible.
Brandon Gates
December 26, 2015 at 7:31 pm
lol Buster, I see your search-fu has exceeded mine this fine day.
Fine day indeed. Buster’s “search-fu” consisted of clicking on the first google goat link and failing to properly read it in his haste to counter the fact goats love CO2.
Aphan,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state
I’m not wedded to convincing you that thinking of the planet in terms of the steady state concept is valid or not. It’s pretty clear that you’re more interested in rebutting my argument about deterministic sytems following a chain of causality with semantics and invoking chaos as some kind of mythical cause in and of itself.
Oh look at me, anthropormorphizing when I should have been anthropogenizing. That’s it, I admit it, my whole argument is now dust. Congratulations, you got me.
Yup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
Heat death does not imply any particular absolute temperature; it only requires that temperature differences or other processes may no longer be exploited to perform work. In the language of physics, this is when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium (maximum entropy).
The entropy definition of the 2nd law of thermodynamics is what?
Yes I know, that’s one reason HADCRUT4 was tacked on to the tail end of the proxy data series.
Ok good, now you know what I’m thinking when people like you warble on about chaos, and repeat ad naseum that climate is always changing and always has.
Ah, well that has been explained and demonstrated to me quite convincingly in peer reviewed literature and first year atmospheric meterology texts. I get it that you don’t buy into it, seems reasonable to ask you for an alternative explanation.
I’m crushed.
It appears that I’m not the only one who did, as the CO2 is plant food argument is being pressed with alacrity on this thread. Perhaps you should also set them straight until such time as Dr. Lindzen clarifies his meaning.
Brandon Gates,
“My main argument is this: in the face of large uncertainty about how the climate system works (we don’t fully understand), the conservative risk-management response is to minimize changes to that system.”
Regardless of “down side” of that approach? Like it was just a matter of picking the option that carried least risk of :”the system” changing?
Sir, if we don’t know whether the hypothetical change would be beneficial or harmful overall, that entire argument is based on the unspoken presumption that our current climate state is optimum. If we don’t understand it, then by definition we don’t know it’s optimum.
Your main argument is very weak, it seems to me sir, and it’s a very expensive sort of conservatism you’re championing, that much we do know.
JohnKnight,
No, it’s based on the implicit assumption that knowledge of the past states of the planet which coincide with human presence is more certain than unprecedented future states we’d like to be compatible with human presence on the planet.
Do you own a home? Is it insured? If a lien-holder didn’t require you to insure it, would you still have a policy?
If your answer to all or most of the above is “no”, well then I truly get it that you think my argument is weak.
How does having homeowners insurance, or not, support your argument? Homeowners insurance doesn’t prevent your house from being destroyed in any way. It merely replaces your home if it does get destroyed. Reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t mean the planet won’t destroy your home, and it certainly won’t replace it. We have homeowners insurance for two reasons, accidents happen, and because we cannot control nature.
BG sounds like many of the young 20s that I’ve spoken to. I understand the analogy. Hes grasping at a straw to demonstarte how doing what he suggests is not effort poorly spent.
CO2 control is access to controlling a dirty energy creation paradigm that they want to change. Heard a very interesting pov from a youngin … ‘ya know, we have spent several wars over oil and my generation wants that to change’.
Now before you go nitpicking into their opinion and their sense of oil wars just let it sink in …..
They don’t want to fight over oil.
They prefer a future with clean and as little damage to the environment as possible energy.
They think CO2 control gets them there.
It would have been far cleaner to say that upfront but from their pov the ends justifies the means.
Brandon Gates,
“No, it’s based on the implicit assumption that knowledge of the past states of the planet which coincide with human presence is more certain than unprecedented future states we’d like to be compatible with human presence on the planet.
And those states don’t include colder that optimum conditions? Is this some kind of joke ort something? And what’s with the “unprecedented future states”? Are you assuming humans never existed in a warmer climate state? . . .
(Oh my goodness, you’re a climate change denier! I thought there was no such animal, but you’ve proved me wrong it seems ; )
“Do you own a home? Is it insured?
You don’t seem to understand; to me, pumping trillions of dollars out of the people’s hands insures they will be poorer, and less able to deal with real problems that arise for whatever reason. A “conservative” approach precludes radically changing things, at great expense, without clear evidence that greater expense will be uncured if CO2 emissions continue. (At minimum).
Essentially catastrophically more harm that benefit, for sure . . when we don’t know there will actually be any “unprecedented” warming, let alone that there won’t be significant benefits, even if there are significant harmful aspects that result from AGW.
We’re not talking about anybody replacing the world should it get severely damaged, the insurance analogy is silly. This is more like moving into a trailer, so if the house burns down, I’ll have a head-start on trailer life ; )
(I don’t think you’re sincere, you’re too clever to believe what you’re pitching here, it seems to me.)
+1
Trust your instinct JK
Aphan,
Yes, IF it does get destroyed. IF nobody can tell me for certain whether my house will be destroyed or not, why should I be forced by the lien-holder to buy a policy?
It’s a rhetorical question, deliberately disingenuous for effect.
Clearly earthquakes, fires, acts of terrorism (and/or God, which most insurance policies explicitly don’t cover), etc. would continue to occur.
Yes, and we have a good idea based on past rates of accident what sort of future losses to expect on a per-home basis. This means that, in theory, an insurance premium is some function of the replacement value multiplied by the rate of loss.
The problem with the cost of CO2 mitigation is that the actuarial tables do not exist. All estimates of future human, biosphere (and ultimately, economic) loss are just that — estimates based on subjective economic models loosely coupled with output from very imperfect physical models … and maybe here and there some semi-empirical models based on flood and wildfire damages.
I don’t like it any more than you do, I assure you.
The thing is, we make risk management decisions using imperfect (or non-existent) knowledge all the time, and spend a lot of money attempting to make sure that worse than the worst case scenario does not happen. About the largest scale I can immediately think of is national defense, which in the US accounts for about 4% of GDP, and around 35% of federal tax revenues.
Can you tell me for certain that we’re not overpaying our premium? How would you know? Here’s one view:
Says the stereotypical bleeding heart envirowingnut leftist: Are we planning on getting into a war with the entire rest of the world or something? I could slightly less irrationally argue: look, of the nations on that leader board, the most we’d have to worry about handling simultaneously is China and Russia. Parity with them in nominal dollars is $276 billion, so why not slash $364 billion from the defense budget and save ourselves 57%? Heck that would reduce the budget deficit from $426 billion to $62 billion without raising taxes OR going after entitlement spending.
Do I really advocate doing such a thing? No. My first objection right off the bat is that instantly slashing 57% of our military spending would all but surely send our defense contractors’ stocks into a tailspin and the economy would tank. My second objection is: it’s hard to argue with success — no foreign state has attacked us on our own soil since 1941, and no foreign state has set hostile feet on our mainland since 1812 [1]. Maybe halving our military budget would not affect the deterrent value of our armed forces … but I can’t be sure can I? Seems to me that the result of our overwhelmingly world-best military power has reduced the risk of invasion close enough to zero as to make quibbling over whether it’s to three or four decimal places moot.
Sounds rational doesn’t it? No. No, it really isn’t. It’s an emotional argument. I pay my share of the US defense budget for the peace of mind.
I would gladly fork over 1% of my income in carbon taxes for the same peace of mind, with the added benefit of a cleaner conscience.
————
[1] Pancho Villa’s 1916 incursion wasn’t state-sanctioned, but it does arguably qualify as an invasion by an occupying force. I’m not forgetting the Civil War either.
Brandon Gates,
“I would gladly fork over 1% of my income in carbon taxes for the same peace of mind, with the added benefit of a cleaner conscience.”
I seriously doubt the sort of people you’re targeting with this meandering justification for handing over more money and power to the DC/UN elites to play God with, sir. Therefor I see no point in chasing down your every “Big Brother is our Saviour” line of fear mongering pretend reasoning. The “defense” expenditures have resulted in nothing remotely resembling “peace of mind”, it seems to me, but rather a multitude of violent escapades abroad, and a whole lot of carnage that only a psychopath could feel a clean conscious as a result of, as I see the world.
The early 20s age bracket that I’ve hung out with these holidays say they would gladly fork over 10% for the new energy frontier they envision. As one joked … yeah, but that may change as we pay our own bills.
That was funny in its honesty.
The one that really caught my attention was the one that said … at least we aren’t spending the money defending some oil rich desert. What I sensed in that remark was that part of this current mass movement is a backlash to war that they perceive is alot about oil.
My peanut gallery perception is that the youth are latching onto the cagw movement at least in part a a rejection of the “old ways” of war and specifically war for oil.
BG said “I would gladly fork over 1% of my income in carbon taxes for the same peace of mind, with the added benefit of a cleaner conscience.”
Poor guy. Burdened with a disquieted mind, a dirty conscience, and disposable income! I myself do not suffer from any of those afflictions, but I can genuinely pity those who do. 🙂
False guilt has been preyed upon by the manipulators … Dante would have them burn the hottest.
I wonder if their ashes in the atmosphere of hell will cool it or warm it further? At least if it cooled it, they’d feel better about themselves. 🙂
Oops, I left out the “have read this far” at the end of my first sentence above.
JohnKnight,
Here’s exactly what I wrote: I would gladly fork over 1% of my income in carbon taxes for the same peace of mind, with the added benefit of a cleaner conscience.
Apparently I did not make myself clear enough. I recognize that my relatively lavish and comfortable lifestyle is due in no small part to our history of importing foreign oil. To ensure safe passage of those products by way of ocean shipping, we have historically deployed the most powerful navy in human history. And yes, I believe that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was more about securing its oil reserves (and doing favors for the Administration’s various corporate financiers) than it was about yellowcake and aluminum centrifuge tubes. I thought it was a bad call before we went in, and I know for a fact that it was a bad call in retrospect.
The non-invasion part of that is the dirty conscience which goes along with the sense of security. I simply do not see that it would have been feasible to have imported all of that oil without projecting military power around the choke points along the shipping lanes.
Moving to non-fossil fuel energy would go along way toward undirtying my conscience for two reasons:
1) It would mean that I am passing on less of fossil fuel’s externalized costs in terms of climate impacts to future generations, and
2) Offers some hope of reduction in our foreign entanglements, particularly the Middle East.
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/150444802/where-does-america-get-oil-you-may-be-surprised
Your irrational guilt and fear in the #1 area aside, this should make you feel better in the #2 department (unless you object to enriching foreign countries through purchasing their exports for some odd reason)
Aphan,
I’m of the mind that a person who doesn’t find some dirt in his or her conscience isn’t looking hard enough, isn’t being honest about what they see, lacks empathy, or some combination of those.
What your mind “finds” is both questionable and irrelevant to this discussion.
Aphan,
Let’s rewind, shall we?
Let me get this straight. It IS relevant for you to tell others what’s going on inside my head. It is NOT relevant for me to tell others what’s going on inside my own head. Surely I’m missing something, because I’ll be damned if that makes any rational sense.
“Moving to non-fossil fuel energy would go along way toward undirtying my conscience for two reasons:
1) It would mean that I am passing on less of fossil fuel’s externalized costs in terms of climate impacts to future generations, and
2) Offers some hope of reduction in our foreign entanglements, particularly the Middle East.”
!) assumes severe “climate impacts on future generations due to use of fossil fuels”. You don’t say “in case there will be big problems for future generations due to atmospheric CO2”, you assume it. When challenged about that assumption, you played the “insurance” card”, so to speak, but you can’t manage to stay consistent, for when that was challenged, you went back to the assumption.
2) assumes that we have no hope of reducing “our foreign entanglements, particularly the Middle East”, without “moving to non-fossil fuel energy”, which implies that the people who steered this ship, so to speak, into such “entanglements” are still steering it . . but will somehow lose that status if we fork over lots of money to . .. the people steering it.
I tire of the shell game, sir.
JohnKnight,
Risk management involves making assumptions. There is no other way because empirical evidence of future events does not exist by definition.
Really? In what way did my statement, “Offers some hope of reduction in our foreign entanglements, particularly the Middle East” preclude the possibility of reducing tensions in the Middle East by some other means?
BG Said- “Let me get this straight. It IS relevant for you to tell others what’s going on inside my head. It is NOT relevant for me to tell others what’s going on inside my own head. Surely I’m missing something, because I’ll be damned if that makes any rational sense.”
My word, you’re like a long winded bouncy ball that never lands in the same place twice. Let’s review-
BG said “I would gladly fork over 1% of my income in carbon taxes for the same peace of mind, with the added benefit of a cleaner conscience.”
AFTER which I said “Poor guy. Burdened with a disquieted mind, a dirty conscience, and disposable income! I myself do not suffer from any of those afflictions, but I can genuinely pity those who do. :)”
BECAUSE you indicated you wanted peace of mind (logically indicating you have an UNpeaceful mind=disquieted) and a “cleaner conscience” (something that needs to be cleaner is thus dirty).
So YOU told us what is going on in your head. I merely commented ON what you had already STATED-to someone else, who also seems concerned about your current state of mind. Your state of mind is only relevant to discussions about your state of mind. It bears no relevance to climate science or vegetation production or anything scientific at all.
THEN you came back with this-
BG “I’m of the mind that a person who doesn’t find some dirt in his or her conscience isn’t looking hard enough, isn’t being honest about what they see, lacks empathy, or some combination of those.”
“To which I replied that what your mind “finds” is both questionable and irrelevant to this discussion.”
It makes PERFECT rational sense. Personal opinions are ALWAYS questionable (doubtful as regards truth or quality) and your personal mental determinations (what your mind “finds”) regarding any person (including yourself) “who doesn’t find…” aren’t really relevant to any discussion that isn’t about that topic.
You seem to like to talk, a LOT, but many of the things you say are not based in reason and logic and thus do not support the claims you make or some of the conclusions you have drawn. Attempting to point this out to you has proven completely futile, and your constant gish galloping and off topic careening gets old really fast. If I wanted to converse with a hyperactive, long winded person who can’t stay on topic and bases every other comment on emotions like fear and guilt and hysteria, (vs facts and logic) all I have to do is say “Hi” to the 13 year old girl next door. I come to WUWT for conversations that ARE NOT like that.
Aphan,
I agree. However, my state of mind is apparently relevant to you for some reason:
Aphan
December 27, 2015 at 2:52 pm
One has to wonder why he didn’t just start with that instead of all the dancing and strawman building and finger pointing when no one would attack his strawmen with him. What did he hope to accomplish? What was his purpose? His tactics certainly do not win others to his position or engender trust or belief. Perhaps he just wanted to waste our time, but at least it increases traffic here at WUWT. 🙂
I’d ask why you feel compelled to speculate about my motives, but since “It bears no relevance to climate science or vegetation production or anything scientific at all,” and you “… come to WUWT for conversations that ARE NOT like that,” it would seem that you are bound by principle to not answer. However, I could be missing something or just being irrational again — not that it matters, right?
Right.
Once again Brandon Gates has demonstrated the inability to represent what someone else said accurately. Until he can do so, his conclusions about that person cannot be viewed as logical or rational because they are not based on facts/evidence. (So yes BG, you are missing something AND being irrational again)
Aphan said – “One has to wonder why he didn’t just start with that instead of all the dancing and strawman building and finger pointing when no one would attack his strawmen with him. What did he hope to accomplish? What was his purpose? His tactics certainly do not win others to his position or engender trust or belief. Perhaps he just wanted to waste our time, but at least it increases traffic here at WUWT. :)”
BG replied- “I’d ask why you feel compelled to speculate about my motives, but since “It bears no relevance to climate science or vegetation production or anything scientific at all,” and you “… come to WUWT for conversations that ARE NOT like that,” it would seem that you are bound by principle to not answer. However, I could be missing something or just being irrational again — not that it matters, right?”
Now, you’ll notice BG uses quotation marks to indicate that he’s referencing something that I said previously. Unfortunately, he selectively chose parts of TWO different statements I made (in different contexts) and combined them together in a way that does not represent what I actually said, either time, accurately.
(Aphan December 28, 2015 at 6:01 pm )
(Aphan speaking) “So YOU told us what is going on in your head. I merely commented ON what you had already STATED-to someone else, who also seems concerned about your current state of mind. Your state of mind is only relevant to discussions about your state of mind. It bears no relevance to climate science or vegetation production or anything scientific at all.”
(Aphan speaking again, later on, about something else) “If I wanted to converse with a hyperactive, long winded person who can’t stay on topic and bases every other comment on emotions like fear and guilt and hysteria, (vs facts and logic) all I have to do is say “Hi” to the 13 year old girl next door. I come to WUWT for conversations that ARE NOT like that.”
As anyone can see for themselves, I made a comment about what HE SAID about his state of mind, in a conversation with someone else, about his state of mind=relevant to THAT conversation, but obviously his state of mind is completely irrelevant to conversations about climate science, or vegetation production or anything scientific at all. ( only logic I’m using there)
I ALSO stated that I come to WUWT for conversations with people who are NOT -“hyperactive”, “long winded” “can’t stay on topic” and who don’t base “every other comment on emotions like fear and guilt and hysteria, (vs facts and logic)”. I NEVER said that
Now, I DID express curiosity about HIS ACTIONS-Why he didn’t just start out here explaining his positions instead of dancing around and building strawmen and finger pointing when no one would attack his strawmen with him.
But to speculate is to -“form a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence.” After pointing out his exact behavior here, I asked two questions -“What did he hope to accomplish?” and “What was his purpose?” And the ONLY speculation I offered in response to my own questions was “Perhaps he just wanted to waste our time”. Dictionary- “Perhaps-used when one does not wish to be too definite or assertive in the expression of an opinion.”
It is perfectly normal, and logical (and scientific) to observe something-such as how someone behaves-and wonder what was the purpose for that behavior? What did the person behaving so hope to accomplish with that behavior? But because I cannot possibly KNOW either one of those things (I lack firm evidence on either one) I refrained from making any statement that could be viewed as a definitive or assertive “theory or conjecture” on the matter.
Brandon, you have irritated almost every single person you’ve engaged with here because you do not clearly state outright and directly what YOUR position on any given subject is, and you constantly come to conclusions about other people say that are unsupported by the evidence of their words, and thus illogical and irrational. This does not move conversations forward. It is irritating as crap and thus is not constructive. And your behavior fits a the following definition of a “concern troll” -“A concern troll is a… user whose actual point of view is opposed to the one that the troll claims to hold. The concern troll posts in Web forums devoted to its declared point of view and attempts to sway the group’s actions or opinions while claiming to share their goals, but with professed “concerns”. The goal is to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt within the group.”
If you’re not a concern troll, stop acting like one. If you keep acting like one, I’ll ask the mods to treat you like one.
Aphan,
And, not that it’s relevant according to you, I gave you my answer already: December 27, 2015 at 9:40 pm
Did you miss that post?
Yes obviously, my state of mind does not affect the truth value of a scientific — or any — statement. I can “feel” that 2 + 2 = 5 all I want, but that won’t make it so.
However, your original post …
… didn’t contain the qualifiers, “climate science, or vegetation production or anything scientific at all”. When you first introduced those qualifiers …
… I agreed with you.
I don’t consider myself a concern troll. If Anthony or the mods would like me to amend my posting behavior, I welcome them to request it of me.
As you have an obvious problem with my posting behavior, I would suggest that it’s best if you simply ignored me.
“I mainly wanted to see if anyone on your “side” of the fence saw the same thing AND was willing to speak to it.”
I’m not even going to speculate, I’m going to ASK you to state, precisely and clearly, what “side” of what “fence” you are referring to.
Wriggle worm wriggles.
Deny
Divert
Confuse
*gasp* Sounds like TROLL behavior to me.
Aphan,
People who argue that rising CO2 levels are not a credible environmental/economic risk, and/or may be a net benefit, and therefore oppose policies designed to reduce emissions.
IOW, the opposite of “alarmists”, “climastrologists”, “chicken-littles”, “envirowingnuts”, “warmunists”, “warmistas” etc.
Brandon Gates (replying to Aphan)
Brandon: You have created two sets of descriptions of “typical stereotypes. Those descriptions do describe two Venn diagrams of stereotypical behavior (belief systems that in turn proscribe life styles and a desire to force those decision of other peoples’ life choices, i.e, two “religions”. One of freedom and choice. One of dictatorship and intolerance and slavish obedience to the external demands of an unconscious, unaccountable bureaucratic government.)
But your two sentences did NOT tell Aphan which closed minded loop of the two Venn diagram circles you place yourself in!
RACookPE1978,
Aphan’s question was about my binary categorization, not yours.
BG- “People who argue that rising CO2 levels are not a credible environmental/economic risk, and/or may be a net benefit, and therefore oppose policies designed to reduce emissions. IOW, the opposite of “alarmists”, “climastrologists”, “chicken-littles”, “envirowingnuts”, “warmunists”, “warmistas” etc.”
False dilemma-“A false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, false binary, black-and-white thinking, bifurcation, denying a conjunct, the either–or fallacy, fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses, the fallacy of false choice, the fallacy of the false alternative, or the fallacy of the excluded middle) is a type of informal fallacy that involves a situation in which only limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option.”
Brandon, ANY “binary categorization”, is obviously an example of flawed logic if there is at least one other possible option. For example, I personally don’t fit all the stated parameters of the first category, nor do I fit the opposite of all those things, so I can only conclude that I myself present at least that one additional option.
It has been my experience in this forum that there are many different opinions and positions held by those who post here. In fact, people who fit the definition you posted, or the exact opposite of it, are truly rare, fringe individuals here, and are not representative of the vast majority. You came into this blog with expectations based on that flawed conclusion that there are only twotypes of people in the global warming debate. And that is exactly why you could have only expected one of two illogical reactions from posters here to your personal opinion about Dr. Lindzen- either vocal support for it, or vocal support against it.
BG said “I mainly wanted to see if anyone on your “side” of the fence saw the same thing AND was willing to speak to it.” [“it” being what HE personally concluded from Dr. Lindzen’s post].
In order to make that statement BG, you must have already made the following, illogical, assumptions:
1) that everyone at WUWT is on the same “side” that I, Aphan, belong to.
AND
2) If no one speaks to it- then a) they did not see the same thing I did b) they saw the same thing, but were unwilling to speak to it.
Since no one spoke to it (except BusterBrown who was identified as a troll and banned) you then attempted to try to force people to a) see the same thing you did. When no one agreed that they saw the same thing you did, your self-limiting thinking forced you to assume b) that they DID actually see it, but were unwilling to admit it.
Now, what is interesting is that at one point BG you said-
“Ok, so a few things. I didn’t have a very good opinion of Dr. Lindzen before I read this essay, and each re-reading of it only serves to reinforce my negative opinion. He makes a number of arguments I consider flawed and that I think someone with his intelligence and resume wouldn’t give in error. In short, I suspect his motives, but I generally make a point of not imputing motive because,
1) Motives are difficult to discern and all but impossible to “prove”,
2) I think it’s better to attack the argument not the man, and
3) arguing that someone who holds contrarian views on AGW is an industry shill (or anything in the that neighborhood) is literally pouring gasoline on a fire that simply doesn’t need the encouragement.”
BG, it’s obvious from your statements that you knew better than to attack the man, but what you did insteaad was create a strawman argument (one that Dr. Lindzen didn’t make himself or you could have just quoted him doing it) and proceeded to attack the strawman.
I tried to point out what you were doing over and over and over again. Others here tried to get you to listen to WHAT I was actually saying-not what you thought I was attempting to DO. Brandon, the flawed way that you THINK about people is revealed in the flawed way you TALK/respond to the people here. You are logical one moment, and irrational and illogical the next. Your assumptions about people appear to drive most of your responses to them, because you only selectively respond to SOME of the things people say (and taken out of context) rather than to everything they said. Context matters Brandon.
Something that I hope you come to accept, whether you like it or not is this: What people say exactly on the internet is the only logical evidence you can use for or against that person, because once it passes through your mental, interpretive filter, if it comes out with any modifications, at all, it instantly becomes YOURS, not theirs.
I’m done explaining this to you, and everyone else here already knows and accepts it.
Brandon-I replied to you, but I started a new subthread because the scrolling is making me insane.
Brandon,
How about showing a time series of the total flux of Carbon through the atmosphere, or are there no propaganda sites with a picture that you can copy and paste?
Mike Singleton,
I consider using loaded terminology to be a propaganda technique.
Dear Brandon
Are you still insisting that every wiggle on a climate temperature curve needs to have a specific driver (which of course can only be CO2)?
Are you clinging so hard to your “right” to be wilfully ignorant of, to religiously scrub your brain of any knowledge of, dissipative chaotic-nonlinear systems which comprise most of the universe? That these systems change without “forcing” as was simply and elegantly shown by Ed Lorenz in 1962?
The scientific community is in denial of chaos and nonlinearity. The AGW fiasco is the catastrophe to which this denial has led.
philsalmon,
Are you still beating your wife?
a) Every temperature change must be in response to some physical mechanism.
b) Even though our powers of observation with respect to (a) are limited, it’s bleeding obvious that CO2 is not causing every wiggle.
Are you still beating your wife again?
Lorenz (1963) “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow”: http://eaps4.mit.edu/research/Lorenz/Deterministic_63.pdf
Yes, I’ve read it … several times. Let’s start with the final sentence of the abstract: The feasibility of very-long range weather forecasting is examined in light of these results.
If you’re of the mind that a butterfly can cause temps to change on the order of a few degrees (up or down) over the course of 50-100 years, and that such a move would be completely unpredictable, it really boggles my mind that you’d be a-ok with doubling the concentration of a radiatively-active molecule in the atmosphere without so much as a second thought.
So you read DNF 63, but clearly didn’t get the message; you can lead a horse to water etc.
That argument about butterfly wing sensitivity and CO2 is the only only on used by warmistas to reply to the chaos-nonlinearity issue, last time about 5 years ago by your colleague / alter-ego R Gates. This argument is clearly not the result of any serious though about the issue. The merest glance at the history of CO2 levels shows it to be false. CO2 in the atmosphere has been many times higher that the present level for most of the Phanerozoic. Where is the evidence of super-sensitivity to CO2? Nowhere. CO2 has always followed, not led, temperatures.
“They have eyes but do not see,
Ears but do not hear”
So you read DNF 63, but clearly didn’t get the message; you can lead a horse to water etc.
That argument about butterfly wing sensitivity and CO2 is the only one used by warmistas to reply to the chaos-nonlinearity issue, last time about 5 years ago by your colleague / alter-ego R Gates. This argument is clearly not the result of any serious thought about the issue. The merest glance at the history of CO2 levels shows it to be false. CO2 in the atmosphere has been many times higher that the present level for most of the Phanerozoic. Where is the evidence of super-sensitivity to CO2? Nowhere. CO2 has always followed, not led, temperatures.
“They have eyes but do not see,
Ears but do not hear”
Brains but do not think
philsalmon,
Don’t I know it.
Obviously I must defer to your superior mind-reading skills.
Truer words have never been spoken.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oxFP6mUKqIY/VTWEdb3gJzI/AAAAAAAAAbU/YiRjFJ8Zb8M/s1600/HADCRUT4%2B12%2Bmo%2BMA%2BForcings.png
Good golly, you’re correct!
We weren’t around for most of the Phanerozoic. But if you’re really looking to beat the record:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
That depends on where you draw the line between middling and super.
Humans have only been desequestering the stuff for 150 years. That’s almost always I suppose. Well except for that PETM thingy.
In other news: chickens do not lay eggs because they’ve been observed to hatch from them.
Brandon
Again you give the appearance of an itemised reply while completely avoiding substantive points.
A CO2 graph starting in 1870 does not address a point about CO2 and temperature over the Phanerozoic, which means starting with the Cambrian, 640 million years ago. Don’t you have anything going any further back?
“Humans have only been desequestering the stuff for 150 years”
Mechanistic study of historic temperatures and CO2, ocean currents, continental configuration etc, do not require the presence of humans. That’s the whole point.
Is the PETM 50 mya, the only feature of the palaeo climate record that the Jehovahs Witness-like little black book of AGW questions and answers, allows you to talk about?
Here’s a question for you. What is the main thing that changed, causing climate to have cooled since the PETM to current glacial conditions?
philsalmon,
We apparently disagree on what is substantive and what isn’t.
Does 65 million years work for you?
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/1b/65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
Odd point to make since I’m not claiming that climate changes only due to human influences.
I’m aware of no such book, and wouldn’t bind myself to one if there were. Are we discussing physical science here, or political science?
Dunno. That’s 55 million years of history you’re asking about there. I’d be surprised if there were one identifiable main thing, and even more surprised if there aren’t a number of competing hypotheses about the combination of factors involved. As a general rule, further back one goes in the paleo record, the bigger the error bars get.
Brandon
You’re spreading yourself thinly here so, while your chief skill is clearly speed typing, it’s understandable that you can’t think too much about substantive answers.
But thanks for answering the question I posed – what is the main cause of global cooling toward glaciation over the last few tens of millions of years. “Dunno” is good – you appreciate the point, made also by Lindzen, that while we remain clueless as to the triggers of – for instance – the inceptions and terminations of the recent few dozen glacial cycles, how can we claim to be able to identify any single “control knob” of climate change i.e. supposedly CO2. We of course can’t.
However what is well understood in answer to the above question is actually featured prominently (twice, in fact) in the figure that you kindly contributed – thanks BTW – on tertiary cooling, although being in such a hurry it’s excusable that you missed it. “It” is of course Antarctica; the final completion of the breakup of ancient Gondwanaland saw Antarctica become fully separated by deep ocean from South America and Africa, critically allowing the circumpolar current of the Southern ocean to cut off the south pole from any warming currents from the north. The glaciation of Antarctica led eventually to reciprocal (but smaller) glaciation of the northern Arctic also and our current (and deepening) glacial state. It is possible to argue that Antarctica is the dominant feature of our current global climate. It is certainly the “Grand Central Station” of the THC (thermohaline circulation).
There is a thing called fractality in nature. It’s connected with the chaos-nonlinearity aspect that you keep on energetically excluding from any possible engagement with your thinking with you loud off-topic la-la-la-la-ing. But you’re in good company there, most scientists, including all “climate scientists”, do the same.
But, if the teeniest pauze in your la-la-la-la shouting is possible, what fractally means is that what is visible on the large scale will be also visible on the small. And very small. And very very small. For me, what this means is that, if the recent cooling over tens of millions of years is due to ocean circulation as influenced by changing continental configuration, then ocean circulation changes, featuring the THC, are also responsible for “climate change” of time scales all the way down to century and decadal.
You no doubt appreciate BTW that the terms “climate” and “climate change” are identical in meaning and interchangeable. In fact the cumbersome phrase “climate change” is a redundant tautology, a bit like saying “wet water”. To understand why – again just pause the la-la-la-la shouting for a few moments.
This brings us to the central, overarching flaw and error of CAGW. Your threadbombing here with pretend itemised replies, cannot hide this error. It is the idea that it is normal for climate to be static. This horrible mistake is betrayed by your frequent use of phrases such as “steady state” and “equilibrium”.
This error of assumed normative climate constancy is in the super big league of all time scientific blunders, such as the prolonged resistance to Wegener’s continental drift (particularly in the USA). It means that simply to detect or measure changing local or global climate temperature can immediately be monetized into alarm. As if it were unusual to detect change in an entity which by its fundamental nature is always changing. This happened in the 70’s with global cooling and currently is happening on a much larger scale with your CAGW alarmism.
Lindzen is correctly saying that the mere detection of warming over a few decades should not be so easily monetized into alarm. And that CO2 is actually good for the biosphere so its increase should not likewise be monetized as a threat.
I like very much an earlier quote from Richard Lindzen: “what would be really unusual would be to find climate stasis. It would be like something that had died”
(my paraphrase).
philsalmon,
Thanks … I guess. By the way, you’re a horrible mind-reader, don’t quit your day job.
We do NOT know how climate works when CO2 IS involved, a major theme in this thread.
We DO know how climate works when CO2 is NOT involved, another major theme in this thread.
Don’t you mean “could also be responsible for ‘climate change'”?
You must be thinking about someone else’s argument on stasis. Closest to that I’ve come on this thread is refering to the Holocene as relatively stable as compared to the past million or so years.
Sorry, no, I absolutely agree that the planet is NEVER in equilibrium. If you would like to understand why I introduced those terms into the discussion, you will need to ask for clarification instead of just quoting me out of context, correcting my egregious “error”, declaring victory and patting yourself on the back for being so clever.
Brandon
We do NOT know how climate works when CO2 IS involved, a major theme in this thread.
On a very coarse scale we know that high levels of several thousand ppm CO2 have existed for many millions of years. Of course there are major uncertainties in the palaeo record. However this is still a serious problem for the argument that current rising CO2 levels per se threaten some major destabilisation of the climate. I don’t think the “unprecedented rate of change” refinement of CO2 alarmism really represents an escape from this problem. We do know that mineralised corals evolved and thrived during the Cambrian while atmospheric CO2 was around 10,000 ppm. So some alarmist claims of ecosystem damage from rising CO2 are falsified by the palaeo record.
We DO know how climate works when CO2 is NOT involved, another major theme in this thread.
Do we really? – this goes back to Lindzen’s point about the unknown triggers of inception of glacials and interglacials. We have circumstantial evidence of Milankovich orbital influences, but nothing like a mechanistic understanding of the process.
It’s good that we agree that the climate heat system is far from equilibrium. This has far reaching implications about the fundamental nature of the system.
philsalmon,
No dispute.
Definitely no dispute.
Using an examples times when the absolute value of CO2 or temperature exceeded present (or pre-industrial) values does not necessarily falsify claims that relatively rapid changes in those quantities tend to stress the ecosystem. Note the qualifier “relatively” in front of the word “rapid”. As a general rule, the more rapid a change to the environment, the greater the negative impact on species which had adapted to the prevailing conditions prior to the change.
Let’s go back first to your statement I was responding to: “It” is of course Antarctica; the final completion of the breakup of ancient Gondwanaland saw Antarctica become fully separated by deep ocean from South America and Africa, critically allowing the circumpolar current of the Southern ocean to cut off the south pole from any warming currents from the north.
I think that’s a perfectly plausible explanation. The thing I wish to note is that you are apparently very certain that it is THE explanation.
I’m having difficulty with that statement, because again it reads to me as over-certain. I also don’t understand why evidence of orbital influences should be any more (or less) circumstantial than evidence for changes in continental configuration and ocean currents, nor why our understanding of same is less (or more) mechanistic.
Please expand.
Brandon,
pS: It’s good that we agree that the climate heat system is far from equilibrium. This has far reaching implications about the fundamental nature of the system.
BG: Please expand.
As a biologist I cannot give chapter and verse on non-equilibrium dynamics or the mathematical side of chaos and nonlinearity (I prefer to look at the pictures). Nonetheless I have a strong feeling which I believe to have scientific validity, that this is the direction in which to look to answer the important climate questions. Being far from equilibrium is on of the chief prerequisites for a system to move toward a nonlinear-chaotic regime.
As so often, there is a good wiki article to get one started:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-equilibrium_thermodynamics
Here is an excerpt:
In stationary conditions, such forces and associated flux densities are by definition time invariant, as also are the system’s locally defined entropy and rate of entropy production. Notably, according to Ilya Prigogine and others, when an open system is in conditions that allow it to reach a stable stationary non-equilibrium state, it organizes itself so as to minimize total entropy production defined locally. This is considered further below.
One wants to take the analysis to the further stage of describing the behaviour of surface and volume integrals of non-stationary local quantities; these integrals are macroscopic fluxes and production rates. In general the dynamics of these integrals are not adequately described by linear equations, though in special cases they can be so described.
We can infer a couple of things from this,
(1) standard linear equations cannot be applied to such systems; this may undermine the basis, for instance, of the simple arithmetic behind climate sensitivity calculations;
(2) when an open system is in conditions that allow it to reach a stable stationary non-equilibrium state, it organizes itself so as to minimize total entropy production defined locally.
This is important; for instance as CO2 changes the optical thickness of the atmosphere, or the emission height, the thermal outcome is not necessarily easily predictable. If “the system reorganises itself to minimise entropy” them new complexity and dynamics may well enter the system, and possibly negate any overall radiative warming effect that a merely linear analysis might predict. This is the territory of Ilya Prigogine’s nonlinear thermodynamics; I suspect it is what underlies Miscolczi’s arguments.
Brandon,
“I infer from this that you therefore believe that climate change is not harmful.” Why on earth would you infer that? If someone notes a bias why would you infer that they prefer the opposite bias? It simply can’t be, in your mind, that they are not biased?
“I would think that dramatic change requires a dramatic driver.” Why would you think a change from 0.03% of atmosphere to 0.04% of atmosphere in 100 years is dramatic? Numbers of tons are not dramatic. In fact they would have 1/10 the effect on a earth that is 10 times bigger and 10 times the effect on a earth that is ten times smaller. Citing tons or billions of tons on matters concerning planetary scales is the hallmark of propaganda.
“Bit of an incomplete analysis. One of several other factors to consider:” Nothing incomplete about the analysis at all! If I am talking about my classic car and brag about how valuable it is, is my analysis incomplete until I talk about all things that have value? What a ridiculous claim! Nowhere was any assertion made that the only source of an increase in agricultural productivity was from CO2. The other sources, though, require an extreme amount of resources work. CO2 is for free!
“How many of those hundred observational studies occurred in literally controlled conditions vs. in open fields where, say, noxious weed species also benefitted from the increased levels of CO2?” Actually quite a few studies are performed in open fields with CO2 monitors and tanks of CO2 to maintain a controlled CO2 concentration in a test vicinity. Go to the website Co2science.org for further details. Also, by this argument, farmers should never put fertilizer on their crops because they are fertilizing the “noxious weeds” also.
Scott Scarborough,
I assume everyone has biases, including myself. Lindzen shows his leanings other places throughout the essay; this one sums it up pretty well:
That said, the claim that most of the climate change since 1960 is due to human activities, refers to more than half of a change on the order of only 0.5C, and is entirely consistent with the possibility that the sensitivity is low and far from dangerous – especially since model projections for warming since 1978 have almost all exceeded what has been observed (regardless of ‘adjustments to the data). Indeed, the warming since the end of the little ice age (around 1800) of about 1C has been accompanied by improvements in virtually all measures of human welfare.
Again, I find it difficult to reconcile those statements with: Dyson, further notes that the ice ages were major examples of climate change that we don’t fully understand, and that lacking this understanding suggests that we don’t really understand climate change. As another example of something that we don’t understand, he cites the potential role of the sun.
Dr. Lindzen introduced the word “drama” to this discussion, not me.
Now there’s this: (400-280)/280 = 42.9%
Some might call that dramatic, others might call it significant. A lot of people definitely call it scary as hell.
Yes, I forgot (but not really) that all absolute values relating to carbon dioxide must be made as small as possible. Very well, divide 9,000 metric tonnes of carbon by 5.972 × 10^24 kg and you should get a pleasing number of goose eggs after the decimal point. As an added bonus, you can then ask me how such a tiny value can be measured with any precision. And then I predict you will feel much better.
I think that quibbling about the units on the y axis when that does absolutely nothing to change the shape of the curve is the hallmark of being deliberately obtuse.
Ok, let’s try some word substitution.
Original: Dyson … notes the well-known fact that CO2 is plant food whose increase has been associated with extraordinarily valuable increases in agricultural productivity.
Modified: Schmidt … notes the well-known fact that CO2 is a longwave absorber/emitter whose increase has been associated with extraordinarily dramatic increases in global temperature.
What percentage of studies?
This is your argument, you get to do the legwork to back it up.
I’d be quite surprised to learn that farmers are intentionally fertilizing soils they are not actively cultivating. And there’s really no need for the “scare quotes” around noxious weeds. It’s a standard industry term with which anyone professing only a passing familiarity of literature should be familiar. You may wish to adjust your punctuation accordingly.
BG said “Ok, let’s try some word substitution.
Original: Dyson … notes the well-known fact that CO2 is plant food whose increase has been associated with extraordinarily valuable increases in agricultural productivity.
Modified: Schmidt … notes the well-known fact that CO2 is a longwave absorber/emitter whose increase has been associated with extraordinarily dramatic increases in global temperature.”
Dyson statement is demonstrably true, it is a plant food, and increased CO2 has been associated with extraordinarily valuable increases in agricultural productivity.
Modified Schmidt is only demonstrably half true. CO2 is a longwave absorber/emitter, but increased amounts of it in the atmosphere have not produced extraordinary or dramatic increases in global temperatures, so there is only a suggested association between its absorb/emit properties and global temperatures.
One more time for the slow kid. If DYSON or Lindzen had made the modified Schmidt statement, I’d say the exact same thing-it’s only demonstrably half true. Doesn’t matter who said it. If Schmidt had made the Dyson statement, I’d say the exact same thing-it’s demonstrably true. If Dyson or Lindzen had made the modified Schmidt statement, I’d say the exact same thing, it is only demonstrably half true.
What matters is what is said. Not who said it, not what you or I imply, not our personal assumptions about the person.
Come on Brandon.
I’m routing for you to see the wisdom in what Aphan eloquently laid out.
Breath.
She’s setting the stage for productive discourse.
Take this moment.
Aphan,
I agree with you. I’ll add: I think that both statements as (re)written suffer from use of adverbs and adjectives like “extraordinarily valuable” and “dramatic”. My preference is always to have the objective information presented without those kind of modifiers and subjective value judgements. All too often I read statements like, “The fact is, this President’s administration has been an abject failure” and it makes my teeth grind.
I much prefer constructions like, “The facts are a, b and c. What I think that means is x, y and z.” I think that clear separation of fact from opinion is more honest and therefore more credible.
In my opinion, “Dyson … notes the well-known fact that CO2 is plant food whose increase has been associated with extraordinarily valuable increases in agricultural productivity,” blurs that distinction. But that wasn’t the point of me doing the word substitution.
I agree that the truth value isn’t contingent on who said it. I think we can agree who believes whether it is true or not often depends on who said it. But that wasn’t the point either. The question was about whether both statements were incomplete analyses.
knutesea,
It’s a principle that I already consider to be in my possession. I’m rooting for you both to acknowledge the actual point I’m making. 🙂
We have acknowledged your point and indicated, repeatedly, that your point is based on flawed logic, irrational emotions, and absolutely zero empirical evidence.
Aphan,
Well, let’s see. The particular point of contention in this subthread is whether the rise in CO2 being associated with increases in crop production is an incomplete analysis. If you or anyone has opined on that exact question in the affirmative or the negative, I apologize for having missed it.
Whatever question to me you think has gone lacking support with evidence, please feel free to point my specific argument and ask for substantiation. Thank you kindly.
“Using the numbers you provide above, 100% of the radiation emitted from the surface is thermalized at 3 m above the surface at 400 ppmv CO2, 2 m at 800 ppmv.”
Not only is it thermalized, but all the radiation is extinguished as well. Aircraft flying spectrophotometers at the tropopause which collected the enormous database the HITRAN model is based on recorded ZERO transmission in in the bands where 8 of the 13 CO2 excitation states absorb and radiate.
The graphic above is at pre industrial level. Today the zero transmission wavelengths have expanded.
It is only when satellites 5-800 Km up look down that any spectral intensity is seen, but the optical thickness is so great that these satellites see 217K photons in the saturated bands.
The graphic above shows Nimbus level spectra over the Sahara desert above the atmospheric lapse rate. It can be seen that the 217K photons seen in what were zero transmission bands at the tropopause could be coming from atmosphere at this temperature anywhere above the tropopause to the ozone, again in the mesosphere, and again in the thermosphere.
In any band with zero transmission to the tropopause, adding more CO2 will not cause any increase in radiation or thermalization. The light is exhausted. All adding more gas will do is lower the altitude of exhaustion and move the thermalization closer to 2 meters where the surface thermometers are located.
gymnosperm,
Well yes, the extinguishing process via absorption entails thermalization.
There is no dispute here that the atmosphere is 100% opaque to EM in those frequency bands due to the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Showing the model output for present day concentrations would be a welcome comparison.
Hmm. You wouldn’t happen to know of observational spectra looking down from altitudes < 5 km would you?
I discuss “saturation” below. Aside from that, I agree that CO2 emissions from the atmosphere as seen from above show an effective temperature which roughly corresponds to the altitude of the tropopause.
Direct transmission from the surface has been extinguished and thermalized. By way of the LW-active molecules in the atmosphere, it is still emitting in all directions — and conversely, still absorbing from all directions.
Adding more gas shortens the extinction path, effectively creating ever more optically opaque layers which absorb, thermalize and re-emit. This effect does not “saturate”, it is only limited by the maximum plausible amount of CO2 which could be added to the atmosphere.
We pretty much agree. I suspect our disagreement may hinge on the terrible descriptor “saturation”. I use it only because I have not been able to think of a better word (unusual for me) and it has been out there.
Completely agree that all of the light continues to excite CO2 and water molecules and they are absolutely NOT saturated in any sense. If there were more light available, they would totally be heating the “planet”.
But there isn’t any more light available. Zero=extinguished. The molecules do not manufacture energy.
Really interested and all ears as to what Nimbus 4 was measuring with its IR radiometer from 1100 Km:
gymnosperm,
I don’t think we agree, and that’s ok. I take your use of saturation to mean just what you say: adding further CO2 will not cause any additional heating at the surface. I think that’s a perfectly good use of the word saturation in this context.
I disagree with you because I think it’s conceptually wrong according to my understanding of how the “greenhouse” effect works. For example …
But there is more light available. In another post, I linked you to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
That describes why upwelling LW is emitted from the surface to begin with, and it still holds true in all layers of the atmosphere from the surface all the way up to TOA.
Yes, zero=extinguished, and correct, CO2 does not create energy. But it can both absorb and dissipate energy. When CO2 extinguishes a photon, it does so by absorbing it and converting that radiant energy into kinetic energy. That’s thermalization. It then has two methods of dissipating the absorbed energy, it can either burp out another photon, or it can bump into another gas molecule and transfer the energy kinetically.
Interesting way of plotting it, but I don’t particularly like it. The combined units on each axis fool my eye into thinking that the average emission height in the 15 micron band is 40 km, whereas the candidate altitudes are actually between 10-20 and 90-100 km. We know from aircraft and weather balloon observations taken from inside the stratosphere below 90 km that the average emission height for CO2 in that band is actually in the 10-20 km range:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/infrared_spectrum.jpg
The expectation based on that information is that above 10-20 km, additional CO2 will lead to cooling, below that level, warming. Data from the RATPAC-A radiosonde temperature time series are consistent with that prediction:
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ratpac/ratpac-a/RATPAC-A-annual-levels.txt
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rVss1ZRHvx4/VnsKTcQxreI/AAAAAAAAAg4/VQyhN-gPj6o/s1600/RATPAC-A%2BTemperature%2BTrends%2Bby%2BAltitude%2B1958-2015%2Bglobal%2Bvs%2Btropics.png
The crossover from warming to cooling appears to be occurring between 10 and 15 km.
I think we have agreed that there are no photons in the saturated bands at the tropopause, yet they suddenly reemerge in the lower stratosphere. Why?
My working hypothesis is that CO2 in the lower stratosphere has begun burping photons again because it has been thermalized by Nitrogen in the process below:
The N2 was in turn thermalized by O3 as one would expect at that level. N2, O2, (and CO2 I think) are proportionately concentrated below the mesopause.
But the lower stratosphere is not warming:
Since saturation it the troposphere is profound even at pre industrial 280ppm, I believe the concept that human CO2 is cooling the stratosphere is wrong.
gymnosperm,
We have not agreed that there are no photons at any altitude. I have said several times now that CO2 is constantly emitting as a function of the 4th power of its temperature per Stefan–Boltzmann law.
Those photons don’t suddenly start emerging from CO2 between 10 and 20 km altitude, that’s just the average height at which they finally manage to escape into space where they are observed by instruments in orbit.
Collisions with nitrogen (and oxygen, other CO2 molecules, etc.) is also always occurring in all layers of the atmosphere. Where water vapor, ozone, etc. are present, same thing.
Here are the stats as I know them. 1 in a million photons absorbed by a CO2 molecule will be re-emitted. The other 999,999 times, the energy absorbed will be transferred to another molecule kinetically in a collision. 99% of the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen at 78 and 21% respectively. As those molecules are not good LW emitters, the main way they lose energy is to collide with cooler molecules.
About 6% of collisions with warmer molecules cause CO2 to emit a photon in response. Thus, in the stratosphere where those photons have a higher chance of escaping to space than they do being reabsorbed and thermalized by another CO2, the effect of additional CO2 in the atmosphere is to cool the stratosphere.
The radiosonde trends I posted previously are consistent with that mechanism.
I’m aware that two lower troposphere temperature products derived from orbiting microwave sounding instruments disagree with surface based and balloon-borne thermometers.
Starting from the bottom up, lower troposphere microwave sounding (at least by UAH) is calibrated to balloons. The disagreement with surface thermometers is a result of a tall profile compared with the nano profile at human nose height represented by the surface thermometers. Anyway, I was talking about the lower stratosphere.
I generally agree with your thermalization coefficients, and absolutely with the fourth power.
So what? Nothing radiates or thermalizes at any power without first gaining that energy. You have to get to the root of where that energy comes from.
There is this huge confounding problem that a bit more energy than the earth receives from the sun cycles back and forth between the surface (mostly ocean) and the first several meters of atmosphere in a process I like to call the photon food fight. So far I’m the only one on the planet who resonates with this analogy, but most people don’t like to think.
The reason this is important is that it would be easy to believe that there is an unlimited supply of energy emitted by the surface, when there is not.
Were the sun to go out tomorrow, that food fight would begin to diminish, and its ultimate extinction would be limited mostly by the specific heat of the oceans, and to a lesser and unknown extent by radioactive decay in the earth’s core.
It seems to me that our disagreement boils down to what zero transmission to the tropopause means. I have not been up there with a radiometer and neither have you.
I’m trusting the B-52 radiometers at their word. Zero transmission=zero photons. If you think they’re hiding somewhere before reaching the lower stratosphere, I’d love to know where.
gymnosperm,
That doesn’t really settle things in this argument because there are several radiosonde products which show different trends over the satellite era.
I agree that’s one potential source of divergence since different layers of the atmosphere are not expected to change temperature at the same rates.
That’s fine. I’m constantly attempting to reconcile theory with observation, so I’m interested in all altitudes over all time intervals.
The sun. For purposes of this discussion, geothermal energy can probably be ignored.
I think that’s an apt analogy.
My observation is that folks who are critical of the “greenhouse” effect are often loath to net out the ground level fluxes in energy budget diagrams and note that the answer comes back between zero and one depending on the rounding errors. I don’t know whether that applies to you or not.
That does seem to be the main sticking point.
I’m with you.
Review your statement: I generally agree with your thermalization coefficients, and absolutely with the fourth power.
If you agree that the Stefan-Boltzmann relationship is operative for any IR-active molecule in the atmosphere no matter what its altitude, there is your answer.
So you think thermalized but not radiating CO2 molecules are physically moving up (as in convection cells) or handing off by way of a kinetic fire brigade and thereby transmitting energy to the lower stratosphere in the zero transmission bands?
This would be measurable as a decrease in the lapse rate but probably impossible to separate out the relevant bands.
Not at all critical of the greenhouse effect, but adamant that we need to do a lot more critical thinking about CO2’s role in it. About half of CO2’s excitation potential lies in those saturated zero transmission bands.
My intuition is that nothing important is going on with CO2 in the zero transmission bands between the altitude where radiation stops and where it resumes in the ozone layer.
I think the radiation stops in the zero transmission bands because the energy to support it is exhausted. I think that adding more CO2 does not further slow the radiation to space (thereby the greenhouse) in these bands because the energy to support thermalization and radiation is already exhausted.
Essentially CO2 is “too good” in these bands. At 180 ppm or whatever in the glacial maxima those poor photons and their supporting thermalization could get a little higher in the atmosphere, but even then CO2 was gobbling them up and not letting them out to space.
Nothing has changed since then except the broadening of both the zero transmission bands and the excitation “wings”, roughly proportionally; and the altitude of energy exhaustion.
Zeroth-order approximations, really? Anyone using approximations (best guess) in chemistry at university or high-school would not have passed when I was studying. Heck if that’s how they teach science classes now, why don’t they just guess your final grades and hand you a diploma/degree.
Many decades ago there was once a science called climatology, a branch of physics after meteorology. Perhaps what goes for as “climate science” today is like a branch of Scientology.
By the way, the IPCC’s beliefs are found in their Founding Principles. In those ‘Principles’ we find the ‘science’ is settled, humans are guilty, and the IPCC must assess the costs, risks and vulnerability of the planet and tax humans for their deeds and advise governmental policy to mitigate human’s deeds accordingly. Of course the IPCC exempts itself and the UN from cause, guilt and especially taxation. After all, they will be the benefactors of the taxation, the new saintly kingdom of earth, and not give it away without a toe-to-toe thermonuclear fight.
Ha ha
Reading the letter from the 8 scientists, there is no distinction between the authority of climatologists and the physicists. They are all “scientists“. Then there is this comment
There is no distinction between what is currently the case and wishful thinking. Economic development is the antithesis of constraining GHG emissions. This is due to economic (cost and availability) and political (maximizing growth to keep discontent at bay) reasons. But most of all, governments cannot plan economic development to the level required to reconcile the conflict between climate mitigation and economic development. Compared to this the technological problems of renewables are child’s play.
Just in my little corner of NOAA-using modern automated weather stations, the standard measurement error for both stations is far greater than the averaged global warming statistic referred to in your post. We old farts out here in rural pioneer land with little time left to speak our peace, tend to boil things down to where the rubber meets the road. The IPCC group is made up of mostly spoiled gravy train addicted researchers who dare not use anything other than techno-speak that supports the anthropophobic political paper that is after all the point of the entire exercise.
Right on Pamela, as usual.
Yes, indeed.
+ 10,000
Yes and you can be guaranteed that much like the big money that was spent on satellite monitoring of CO2, there will be globs more spent on increasing accuracy beeeeecause all the technogeeks hear is you need better data.
It’s quite the self fulfilling adventure.
In recent memory it reminds me the hubris just prior to the last financial crisis. Numerous risk managers laid out statistically accurate models for changes in the market. The Big Short lays the hubris in how well they could MEASURE risk led to missing the obvious elephant in the room.
We are very good primates at measuring things and we convince ourselves that because we can it matters. 100 years from now we will continue to distract ourselves with the same folly.
speak our piece …
You are right of course. But I am Catholic. We give peace. So I will give mine.
I am a catholic** person in philosophical concepts.
Peace or no peace, the necessary principle of freedom remains uncompromised.
** Catholic (adj) defined as including many or most things. Taken from the Oxford dictionary.
John
Lindzen should look at this, its up his alley
http://contextearth.com/2015/11/21/qbo-model-sensitivity/
“insofar as the IPCC is not supposed to make policy recommendations”
So why is there a Summary for Policy makers ??
Looks to me that there is the basis for a climate ‘throw-down’ series of academic debates at MIT, perhaps with publication of transcript by the Boston Globe. I propose that an appropriate structure would be Lincoln-Douglas, with the addition of golf-like ‘match-play’, in which team members debate/compete round-robin. All debaters are free to draw on materials from peer-reviewed publications.
If there is going to be a debate on human-caused global warming/climate change at MIT, my money is on Freeman Dyson.
TA
Unfortunately, the warmists always seem to run away from debate…
Marcus
I see a trend (of course subject to my small sample pool). In real life I see average intelligence more open to discussing basics such as ever changing climate and in fact warmer and colder histories. I see more educated folks (esp upper tier university graduates) much more stuck in what they believe.
I also see a strong bias in how people make a living, but there is no surprise there.
By the same token, why should an extra 0.5 C matter since some want to aim for only a 1.5 C increase.
Recall that urban heat island effect in a human actuivity.
In answer to “why can’t people define climate change” is that we are among and belong to ” ever changing climate”. There can be no other answer.
But we have had words for that since language began;Weather and Climate.
Climate Change is for the truly special ones, who insist on saying”Water wet”., where the rest of us just say water.
I figured Kerry Emanuel would be one of the signers, I guess this means he was one of the authors.
From the Globe’s letter https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/letters/2015/12/13/much-more-understood-about-climate-change-than-skeptic-admits/1IwwWJ94z2e77e3bkpHhaI/story.html :
Who are these people?
What are their areas of expertise?
It is interesting to look at that. Jaffe is a theoretical particle physicist, and you’d think from his experience working with statistical physics he’d have built up some appreciation of the limitations and need for verification of models of complex systems.
There is even less excuse for Emanuel who works in the field of the impact of tropical cyclone activity and global climate and should understand the lack of certainty in this general area of climate behaviour. Particularly when most of his work seems to rely on downscaling GCMs a practice that most in the industry understand the limitations of. Having said that id GCMs go for a Burton as increasingly looks likely, much of his recent output will end up on the srcap heap as a footnote in history, and that prospect can put people into denial (as it were).
Most of them are related to some meteorology or atmosphere etc. Kerry Emanuel is the well-known hurricane opportunists who have changed his claims about the relationships between CO2 and hurricanes and future a few times.
Jaffe is a veteran guy doing quark theory. And Wati Taylor whom I know in person is a theoretical physicist and string theorist. It’s terrible when a string theorist adds his signature under something so embarrassing.
Had a college professor once who couldn’t row a canoe, another couldn’t drive. The problem with the term “professor” is that all they do is profess what they’ve been taught. They rarely step outside the bounds of the binding and when they do they’re limited by another binding. They almost never do actual research, just make-work research that keeps their job.
The main legitimate concern about warming is sea level rise due to the melting of the polar ice caps. But even in the most favored conclusion of glacier melt rates for recent decades taken from highly cited Shepherd et al., 2012, we see that the polar ice sheets are only contributing to sea level rise at a rate of a little over 2 inches per century:
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1183
Between 1992 and 2011, the ice sheets of Greenland, East Antarctica, West Antarctica, and the Antarctic Peninsula changed in mass by –142 ± 49, +14 ± 43, –65 ± 26, and –20 ± 14 gigatonnes year−1, respectively. Since 1992, the polar ice sheets have contributed, on average, 0.59 ± 0.20 millimeter year−1 to the rate of global sea-level rise.
How are we going to get feet and meters of sea level rise by 2100 (the latest Hansen et al., 2015 paper suggests 10 feet in 50 years) if the polar ice sheets are only contributing to sea level rise at a rate of a few inches every 100 years?
But it COULD be worser, scientists SUGGEST.
KR, your question is rhetorical. You cannot get there by melting.
That is why Hansen et. al. introduced the concept of tipping points. (Ice ‘slides off’ fast.) Except there are’t any for Greenland and EAIS because of basic geology. For WAIS, Ronne and Ross (ANDRILL program) were studied in detail. Stable. What was left was mainly PIG in Amundsen Embayment. Which Rignot of NASA managed to misrepresent as the entire Embayment catchment basin rather than a glacier draining at most 15% of it. Essay Tipping Points.
And OLeary’s effort to show a tipping point happened during the Eemian constitutes academic misconduct. Essay By Land or by Sea. Both essays in ebook Blowing Smoke.
Kenneth,
“The main legitimate concern about warming is sea level rise due to the melting of the polar ice caps.”
You have likely seen the chart of sea level rise since the Last Glacial Maximum. At about 21,000 years ago the level was roughly 130 m. (430 feet) below what it is today. From there, sea level rose sharply until about 7,000 years ago.
The rise continues very slowly – so slowly that the reasons (plural) for the change cannot now can separated.
Nearly all of the ice that can be easily melted has already been melted. Mountain glacial ice is much decreased and seems to come and go with not much ado in the sea. The Arctic Ocean ice doesn’t mean much for sea level rise – it is floating. The ice on Antarctica is mostly at high elevation and cold. Not much of an issue unless one has a reasonable mechanism for melting all that ice in 50, 100, or even 1,000 years. I don’t.
“….illustrates the sophistic nature of the defense of global warming alarm” is too polite a way of describing street-corner bullying tactics in which thugs try to beat into silence anyone who isn’t part of the Global Warming Alarm Gang. Their motivation is greed. Their strength is numbers. Their bludgeons are lies. They know no virtue. They are disgusting.
We need to learn how to speak their language.
We shouldn’t emulate their tactics. We have the huge advantage of truth on our side, even if they have money and numbers. The lies and the fake science will in the end bring them down.
I agree. It is their language that identifies them to us. A human being “rolling in the mud with pigs” is just as repugnant as the pigs are.
The level of any tyranny is directly proportional to the level capriciousness inflicted by those in power.
CAGW alarmists capriciously pick and choose what “evidence” they present to political authorities and suppress or “adjust” data that doesn’t support their pro-CAGW agenda, and their deafening silence when politicians purposefully make unsubstantiated alarmist claims based on the skewed data they receive from alarmists is, in fact, a form of advocacy.
In the words of the executed anti-Nazi activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Not to speak IS to speak.”
Thanks, Dr. Lindzen. You bring common sense to the forum.
Naturally, the climate changes, what little effect human-produced additional CO2 in the atmosphere can have, we do not know. If it can rise global temperature, why can’t we see the rise (except in homogenized and adjusted data sets)?
Never mind that a couple degrees of warming would mostly be beneficial, not harmful.
Never mind either that the plants we eat, and our animals eat, need more CO2, not less.
CO2 is not a pollutant, it is the gas of life for us carbon-based creatures.
Just a thought. 15°C to 17°C = an increase of 13.33℅ but from 287K to 289K it is 0.7℅. Surely when we talk about the temperature of the earth we should use the scientific notation? Once we do we can see we are currently concerned with normal and trivial fluctuations.
Also an increase in the modelled temperature of the Arctic regions of 2°C above an average of, say -15°C would = a much larger increase in % terms than an increase from 25° to 27°C in more equatorial regions.
I propose that (1) Kelvin is used in these discussions and (2) that
anomalies would be better expressed as ℅s of the 30 year average for a reporting region. It is, after all, how fluctuations in stock markets are generally discussed.
Even if K were not adopted tracking °C changes as percentages would be an interesting exercise.
I have 270K outside and 295K inside, thanks to modern power generation. If the 270 K will change to 272K by 2100 I’m not unhappy.
Pure ad hominem. No proof.
These “scientists” are so blinded they will hand you the rope to hang them with. Their blind ideology and group think shelters them from ever realizing how nonsensical their belief is.
No data set that I am aware of demonstrates that the heat trapped by CO2 in the past 150 years is statistically abnormal for the climate (note I said the heat trapped by CO2, not the PPM), also there is absolutely nothing abnormal about the temperature variation of the past 150 years, just check the ice core data for the Holocene.
This has plenty of rope. 1) It isn’t the sun that matters, it is the amount of radiation that reaches the earth to warm the oceans and surface that matters. Global cloud cover can’t be modeled in real time, let along historical data. There is no global measure of earth’s albedo, and certainly no historical record. They really drop the ball with the “long-lived” greenhouse gas. Volcanoes have been producing significant CO2 for million and millions of years. If CO2 does stay in the atmosphere long, volcanoes would have filled it up with CO2 a long long long time ago..
Talk about out of touch, China doesn’t care about what these liberal want, and the IPCC doesn’t have a military to force them…yet.
I simply can’t believe they put that is writing. Exxon should have that published in every newspaper in the Nation, put in every Commercial they run, and restated in a National debate. Exxon should present that as evidence in every lawsuit they are part of. Once again, I simply can’t believe that put that in writing.
Oil companies are truly helping to save the earth, or at least society, by ensuring that we have a realistic, inexpensive and effective energy sources. Wind and Solar won’t work in an ice age.
This is pure ratings gold if there is ever a Nationally Televised Debate:
Where does the IPCC say that only “climate change” since 1970 is primarily man-made?
CO2 levels took off after WWII, and have risen monotonously since then. Why did man-made global warming only start over 30 years later? The reason is that that is when the PDO flipped, entirely naturally. It had little or nothing to do with more plant food in the air.
The world cooled so dramatically from c. 1945 to 1977 that scientists then feared a return of the ice sheets. Then, after the PDO flip, the world warmed slightly for 20 years or so (less in some data sets), just accidentally happening to coincide with continuing CO2 concentration rising. Since the late ’90s, however, even more rapid CO2 increases have produced flat to once again cooling temperature, although not yet to the same degree as during 1945-77, about half of the postwar period. But the oceanic oscillations have only just flipped again or are about to do so.
The correct response to “the sky is falling” is “no it’s not”. If this were a scientific question, we should all be skeptics. But it’s not, it’s a political mass hysteria. The skeptic tactic of arguing scientific details won’t change the opinions of those who do not understand them.
The Chicken Little motif goes back about 25 centuries and even has a folktale designation (20C and 2033).
Richard Lindzen,
I concur with your above quoted logic and assessment statements about the situation, with one exception as note below about the cause of IPCC contributing scientists not objecting to climate alarmism by environmental activists and politicians. Your communication of the science focused on climate and the associated non-scientific factors impacting it is an example of the kind of communication that will restore trust in science focused on climate.
Behavior of scientists who are contributors to the IPCC assessment process isn’t sufficiently or necessarily explained by your position “IPCC scientists never really object[to environmental activists’ and politicians’ alarmist statements]. Why should they? Support for climate science (a rather small backwater field) has increased from about $500 million per year to about $9 billion.”.
I think the question that would lead to the fundamental understanding of their behavior is: Does their ‘fundamental conceptions of what is science’ require it be used as it is being used for creating climate alarm? Is it socially subjectively purposed science?
If the answer is yes, as I think it is, then that is the sufficient and necessary explanation of their behavior. The antidote to it is re-establishing objective ‘fundamental conceptions of what is science’ that in principle seeks to destroy alarmist misuse.
John
Lest we forget the main proof of AGW was a warming of the Tropical Troposphere with trapped hot spots…epic fail. Aqua satellite and 30 million plus weather balloons have drawn a blank.
Sea Ice stabilised and we have no historical record as satellite coverage only goes back as far as 1978 but as the North West passage was open in 1940 we clearly have more ice than back then.
Every melting season 80% of the ice is lost yet we do not even notice it but are led to believe that if the remaining 20% goes New York and James Hansen will be under 30ft of water….really?
Polar Bears at a recorded high 26,500 but not reported in msm.. They cope with diminished Summer Ice…it is thick Spring Ice that is an issue as it deters seal pups from coming out of their dens…thus polar bar cubs are denied their main food leading to high mortality rates. Watch this space next Spring.
Severe natural climate change?….refer the Younger Dryas Period.
Computer Models….try factoring in Internally generated natural variations…that’s clouds , rain and volcanic ash for starters.
Historic CO2….circa 13 times current levels….was solar irradiance down at the time?…yes but not enough to overcome a 1,300% increase in CO2.
Were the oceans turned acidic?….no.
In the early 1950’s industrial output increased and so did CO2 emissions….but the temperature went DOWN!
Min level of CO2 required for all life forms on plant earth?…..150ppm. At end of last Ice Age it was a very precarious 180ppm!!!!
At 400ppm we are near historically low levels of CO2…..”starvation” and if we double it will only get a degree or so of warming. Double again?…..about a tenth of one degree as Carbon Dioxide’s ability to create heat is logarithmic. What is more it is doubtful that we could double it again as apparently there are not enough fossil fuel reserves left. Panic over?…should be.
Is it any wonder we are sceptics?….Meanwhile over at AGW HQ…..please write your name clearly at the top of the page and under the heading TITLE write “Carbon Dioxide is leading to dangerous Global Warming”.
Really?…wait around 20 years and the onset of GLOBAL COOLING……now that is a problem.
.
Dr. Lindzen,
There are number of correlations between various natural events and temperature data (of course ‘correlation doesn’t always mean a causation’). Illustrated correlation (it fails during WWII) again may be just another coincidence, but if it is not we sceptics do have a problem.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Lod-CrT4.gif
p.s. I do think that rise of 1-2 degrees would be beneficial, e.g. this winter’s temperatures have been far more than 1-2 degrees above the usual,, enabling inhabitants of Europe to save significant sums on the heating bills.
vukcevic,
I have only very recently become aware of the correlation between LOD anomaly and surface temps. It’s quite compelling, but robust demonstration of plausible physical mechanisms isn’t on my radar as of yet. I rate what I have read quite a bit higher than, oh, cosmic wave/cloud nucleation though.
I note that you use a detrended NH temperature time-series though, which doesn’t explain the secular trend over the interval. Shame. It’s really not too difficult to do a multiple regression that does both at the same time (with NINO, AMO, volcanic aerosols and solar thrown in to boot) …
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oxFP6mUKqIY/VTWEdb3gJzI/AAAAAAAAAbU/YiRjFJ8Zb8M/s1600/HADCRUT4%2B12%2Bmo%2BMA%2BForcings.png
… surely you could manage it. If I pull LOD out of the mix, the regression still works as AMO then picks up a bit more of the ~80 year variability leading me to wonder if AMO timing based on LOD is not coincidental.
When I pull CO2 out of regression, the whole thing goes to hell of course. And of course, there is a very robust description of the physical mechanism behind that correlation.
Not robust. Inflated. Temperature explains the variation of CO2. Of course, when you remove the temperature proxy it goes to hell.
Surely you could manage to learn about the CO2 transitions and their saturation.
Mr. Gates, you could start here
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20110309.html
and then consider this
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GT-GMF1.gif
vukcevic,
Interesting, thanks.
gymnosperm,
December 26, 2015 at 9:20 pm
Yes, CO2’s solubility in water is one of its known physical properties.
Explain please?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer%E2%80%93Lambert_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
–Dyson begins with a common error. He attributes the basis for climate alarm to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
For reasons that I will address shortly, this is an entirely understandable error. —
A problem with “the error” of Dyson is that IPCC is comprised of largely global warming activists- most of which lack any significant scientific understanding [about anything and specifically about weather and climate]. And that includes the railroad engineer who use run IPCC and will probably include anyone runs the place in the future.
And in terms of entire body of the IPCC reports they filled the pseudo of political activism of such trashing organization as Greenpeace and it’s due this type of influence of this pseudo science that the railroad engineer made the mistake of saying glacier of the Himalayas would melt by 2035 and is reason many politicians are badly informed.
And/or the clergyman of IPCC are incompetent and evil, though they might enlist some actual scientists [which usually mistreated by the IPCC],
.
Wow, 8 professors from a premier American school of engineering and science taking the time to articulate and document disingenuous arguments as outlined by Dr. L.
They just made a mistake. They opened the public dialogue and created an opportunity for public back and forth. If skeptics can seize the opportunity they can elevate awareness of their line of argument.
It’s unfortunate that he chose that argument, since so many he has made before are far more compelling. However, the response by the climatist boobs is interesting, in that they use nonsense and red herring arguments;
“Much is understood” is completely meaningless, and in no way responds to what Dyson said about them being not fully understood, and they then bring up the meme about how present-day “climate change” is “too fast”, which is not only a total lie, but is a red herring argument.
ROFL….so…”the planet descends into ice ages slowly allowing time for ecosystems and humans to adapt.” Really? That’s not what the EVIDENCE says. Maybe these “scientists” need to brush up on the past 20+ years of research! How embarrassing for MIT!
https://www.aip.org/history/climate/rapid.htm
Huge opportunity for some of you smart eggs to write a counter letter to MIT. They made a mistake by replying thru the Globe and thus made it fair game for the public to respond to them.
By making the Globe the place where letters are exchanged, it makes the other outlets jealous and could spark a competition of sorts if it increases readership.
Pssst, Globe is in Ivy country and is a bigger paper of influence than one might think.
It’s really great to see Dr. Lindzen engage publicly. I wish he would do so more often, though I think I understand why he doesn’t.
“…………the claim that most of the climate change since 1960 is due to human activities, refers to more than half of a change on the order of only 0.5C…………..”
Bottom line is that more than half of almost nothing is still almost nothing.
Mark,
Prof Bob Carter as part of a presentation puts the 0.6C warming that is claimed into wonderful perspective,
The lapse rate as you climb through altitude is 0.6C for every 100 metres vertical.
Bob suggests you take the dog for a walk up hill 100 metres and then return and you will have experienced the total climate change of the late twentieth century walking the dog….ha.
Dangerous?…err no.
Idiot. He refers to the ice ages and anthropomorphic change as the same entity. He losses all credibility at that point.
“Idiot. He refers to the ice ages and anthropomorphic change as the same entity. He losses all credibility at that point.”
ROFL! You referred to anthropomorphic change as if it’s the same entity as anthropogenic! But you had no credibility here that I know of prior to that anyway, so no loss.
P.S. Anthropogenic=originating in human activity.
Anthropomorphic= having human characteristics.
Such an alert one.
God I happy now.
anthropophobic= the desire to anxiously believe that any change is human-caused and feel it is bad.
I think it is clear that almost all the global warming is indeed man made through the unjustified adjustments by AGW influenced activists who are employed in institutions who are responsible for providing that data. I suspect that if raw data only was used there would’ve been little or no AGW to be seen.
David,
They have spent around $100b over twenty years but still cannot identify the human signal…..however by calling it Climate Change they infer any weather event is caused by CO2.
And when inconvenient information comes to hand that knocks the stupidity on the head it is not reported……the recent good news about Polar Bears but one example.
Not only do the MSM refuse to comment…even Sir David Attenborough has said zilch…sad…and pathetic.
Artificial Global Warming (AGW) 🙂 Now THAT is the AGW I believe is occurring!
“I think it is clear that almost all the global warming is indeed man made through the unjustified adjustments by AGW influenced activists who are employed in institutions who are responsible for providing that data. I suspect that if raw data only was used there would’ve been little or no AGW to be seen.”
I disagree.
I think the Little Ice Age was centuries of a cooler average global temperature and there has been warming from about 1850 [end of LIA] to the present.
And that there was warming in first half of 20th century, followed by a pause [or slight cooling], followed by some warming and then for almost last 20 years [up to 2015] there hasn’t been any significant or measurable increase in global average temperature.
Said differently we are without doubt warmer than compared to the LIA. We have been recovering from a cooler period for about 200 years and we have clearly left the Little Ice Age period.
And I don’t think we going have any definite signs of returning to LIA type cooling within next 50 years, nor that we will leave The Pause within the next 5 year [though at end of 5 years we might possibly begin to have a vague clue of having measurable slight increase or decrease in the long term trend or there may be actually temperature measurement indicating The Pause might be ending.
Perhaps Dr Lindzen would like to comment in this exchange with Professor Lindzen ?
E-mail 4/7/15
Dr Norman Page
Houston
Professor Dyson
Saw your Vancouver Sun interview.I agree that CO2 is beneficial. This will be even more so in future because it is more likely than not that the earth has already entered a long term cooling trend following the recent temperature peak in the quasi-millennial solar driven periodicity .
The climate models on which the entire Catastrophic Global Warming delusion rests are built without regard to the natural 60 and more importantly 1000 year periodicities so obvious in the temperature record. The modelers approach is simply a scientific disaster and lacks even average commonsense .It is exactly like taking the temperature trend from say Feb – July and projecting it ahead linearly for 20 years or so. They back tune their models for less than 100 years when the relevant time scale is millennial. This is scientific malfeasance on a grand scale. The temperature projections of the IPCC – UK Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore worse than useless. A new forecasting paradigm needs to be adopted. For forecasts of the timing and extent of the coming cooling based on the natural solar activity cycles – most importantly the millennial cycle – and using the neutron count and 10Be record as the most useful proxy for solar activity check my blog-post at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
The most important factor in climate forecasting is where earth is in regard to the quasi- millennial natural solar activity cycle which has a period in the 960 – 1020 year range. For evidence of this cycle see Figs 5-9. From Fig 9 it is obvious that the earth is just approaching ,just at or just past a peak in the millennial cycle. I suggest that more likely than not the general trends from 1000- 2000 seen in Fig 9 will likely generally repeat from 2000-3000 with the depths of the next LIA at about 2650. The best proxy for solar activity is the neutron monitor count and 10 Be data. My view ,based on the Oulu neutron count – Fig 14 is that the solar activity millennial maximum peaked in Cycle 22 in about 1991. There is a varying lag between the change in the in solar activity and the change in the different temperature metrics. There is a 12 year delay between the activity peak and the probable millennial cyclic temperature peak seen in the RSS data in 2003. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980.1/plot/rss/from:1980.1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
There has been a cooling temperature trend since then (Usually interpreted as a “pause”) There is likely to be a steepening of the cooling trend in 2017- 2018 corresponding to the very important Ap index break below all recent base values in 2005-6. Fig 13.
The Polar excursions of the last few winters in North America are harbingers of even more extreme winters to come more frequently in the near future.
I would be very happy to discuss this with you by E-mail or phone .It is important that you use your position and visibility to influence United States government policy and also change the perceptions of the MSM and U.S public in this matter. If my forecast cooling actually occurs the policy of CO2 emission reduction will add to the increasing stress on global food production caused by a cooling and generally more arid climate.
Best Regards
Norman Page
E-Mail 4/9/15
Dear Norman Page,
Thank you for your message and for the blog. That all makes sense.
I wish I knew how to get important people to listen to you. But there is
not much that I can do. I have zero credibility as an expert on climate.
I am just a theoretical physicist, 91 years old and obviously out of touch
with the real world. I do what I can, writing reviews and giving talks,
but important people are not listening to me. They will listen when the
glaciers start growing in Kentucky, but I will not be around then. With
all good wishes, yours ever, Freeman Dyson.
Email 4/9/15
Professor Dyson Would you have any objection to my posting our email exchange on my blog?
> Best Regards Norman Page
E-Mail 4/9/15
Yes, you are welcome to post this exchange any way you like. Thank you
for asking. Yours, Freeman Dyson.
Obviously first line should read …….exchange with Professor Dyson.
A probably accurate summation of what is being done and the consequences that arise. 91 years old and still sharp as a scalpel.
I’d really like to see one of the 3 MIT physicists point us to the basic equations which explain how a series of spectral filters , ie , layers of atmosphere , “trap” heat in excess of the equilibrium temperature calculated for their spectrum and the spectrum of their source . Better yet — the supreme authority — an experimental demonstration .
Once again: “the incompetence of ‘experts'”!
Brandon, you have a gross conceptual error. The earth’s climate is not a steady state system. It is a deterministically choatic dissipative system never in equilibrium.
And he never responded to your comment either. How odd. 🙂 I wonder why?
Ummm … because it wasn’t posted inline with any of my replies to the tens of other responses to me upthread?
Well there you go! See what happens when you assume stuff about people! 🙂 So, answer him now.
dougbadgero,
Again, I did not say that the planet is a steady state system. What I said was: Typically I assume that a steady-state system will not depart from that state unless perturbed.
Here, let’s look at what Wikipedia has to say: The concept of steady state has relevance in many fields, in particular thermodynamics, economics, and engineering. Steady state is a more general situation than dynamic equilibrium. If a system is in steady state, then the recently observed behavior of the system will continue into the future. In stochastic systems, the probabilities that various states will be repeated will remain constant.
In many systems, steady state is not achieved until some time after the system is started or initiated. This initial situation is often identified as a transient state, start-up or warm-up period.
While a dynamic equilibrium occurs when two or more reversible processes occur at the same rate, and such a system can be said to be in steady state, a system that is in steady state may not necessarily be in a state of dynamic equilibrium, because some of the processes involved are not reversible.
I don’t see any reason why the bolded statement could not also apply to a deterministic system which exhibits chaotic behavior.
Now I’ll repeat the same question to you as I had for Aphan: surely you’re not going to argue that the planet isn’t trying to achieve thermodynamic equilibrium with itself and its surroundings?
Thanks for the reply. You seem to have heard of the concept of deterministic chaos but don’t really understand the implications. The thermodynamic equilibrium points are not on the chaotic attractor. The concept of thermodynamic equilibrium has no relevant application to the earth’s climate.
The real questions are the shape of the attractor and what the addition of a small amount of CO2 will do to the trajectory through the attractor or if it can change the shape/destroy the existing attractor IMO. It is possible/likely that prediction of future climate states is an impossibility in principle and no amount of computing power can change that.
Dr Robert Brown and Tomas Milanovic have written about this issue here and at Climate Etc.
As another point of discussion, you could posit that the climate will remain on the existing attractor. This could be considered a general “steady state”. IMO the best estimate of future climate would be bounded by the conditions of the existing interglacial…with or without anthropogenic CO2. However, we don’t really know how much of the existing phase space we have “explored” during the existing interglacial.
Gates
Now, I will agree with the general trend, overall thermodynamic process may be “trying to achieve thermodynamic equilibrium with itself and its surroundings”. But the only thermodynamic equilibrium the earth will achieve will happen after the sun passes its red burning stage and the earth becomes a ever-cooling simple burned out shell in a vacuum of steadily lowering thermal and gamma ray radiation.
But, you seem to feel, to believe as a necessary requirement for your CAGW premise of equilibrium, that the earth’s “climate” will reach some thermodynamic equilibrium, and so only an external perturbation could explain changes to that equilibrium. Thus, it is necessary for Mann (for example) to eliminate the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age because he could explain them within his belief system of man-made-CO2 warmth in the late 20th century. They did not fit his theory because there was no evident man-made perturbation, therefore they must be removed so his belief system could work.
Rather, you need to understand that the earth’s thermodynamic systems and their measures (temperature, pressure, humidity, winds, and heat imbalances and differences) will NEVER reach even a “dynamic equilibrium”.
Like a weight suspended by a series of 5 different springs, the top of the spring attached to a flexible bar held in mid-air by 4 other springs. What is the motion of the mass when you fly a series of NASA’s “zero-g” parabolic flight paths? There is “only” a single constant “forcing” on the mass (gravity) but its motion is never in dynamic or static equilibrium. Its movement (vertical, horizontal, and forward or backward) is NOT ever in equilibrium because every mass in every spring and every flexible rod keeps changing the net force on the mass. As it moves, each spring is further compressed (each at a different rate) and is expanded – again each at a different rate.
“You” have put your faith and the lives of billions of innocents to force the early death of millions in the simple “flat-line” projections of simple trends of simplified flat plate models of averaged dynamic systems that are actually constantly ebbing and flowing irregularly at different rates in systems of greatly differently amounts.
“… surely you’re not going to argue that the planet isn’t trying to achieve thermodynamic equilibrium with itself and its surroundings? …”.
=========================
The planet (Earth) is a rock, it’s not “trying” to do anything.
Anthropomorphism:
‘In this illustration by Milo Winter of Aesop’s fable, “The North Wind and the Sun”, an anthropomorphic North Wind tries to strip the cloak off of a traveler’ (Wiki).
RACookPE1978
“Will never reach even dynamic equilibrium”
Spot on.
Imagining climate is anywhere close to equilibrium, on a timescale where human history is even resolvable, is one of the core error of CAGW.
The ocean’s heat capacity and long term circulation keep earth’s climate far from equilibrium.
Far from equilibrium
+ dissipative and thermodynamically open system
= nonlinear emergent pattern at the edge of chaos
= climate system which continually changes fractally without need of external “forcing” to cause change
= sound of CAGW being flushed down the toilet
RACookPE1978,
No, internal pertubations will suffice. El Nino is a good, topical example.
I already get that, and have said so previously.
The question relevant to my argument is whether or not the sum of the entropies of springs and the bar is always increasing.
““You” have put your faith and the lives of billions of innocents to force the early death of millions in the simple “flat-line” projections of simple trends of simplified flat plate models of averaged dynamic systems that are actually constantly ebbing and flowing irregularly at different rates in systems of greatly differently amounts.”
Not only that, somehow they believe that Nyquist Sampling theorem does not inform the accuracy with which they can model/estimate the very 3D Temperature Field they are attempting to re-create.
And fail to realise that the width of any given data sample window limits the recoverable low frequency/long period effects in the system.
In the same way a rock tumbling down a hill will achieve local stability as it bounces. Down is easy but left and right are not so certain.
“The sensitivity” is a scientifically and logically bogus concept.
Due to now dangerous catastrophic anthropogenic global warming in our experience, which we are not experiencing, the deniers, i.e. the real deniers of natural clime change, came up with, “Things aren’t hurting you, but we need to consider our grandchildren; to wit, in 80 years the catastrophic changes will happen.”
I guess they mean, “Me and my fiends’ grandhicldren,, not yours . you neanderthals,” because they want the earth’s human population to drop 90% to 500M by 2200. That’s what degrowth, de-industrialisation envisions.
Unless somebody points out that “saving our grandchildren” means killing off 90% of everybody else’s grandchildren you can’t see the evil in these people’s “vision”. It boils down to, “We have to destroy 90% of humanity in order to save the part we like. Not our elite’s grandchildren, but the proles’ grandchildren, must die, or not come into existence.”
You know this is that they mean. Decrying carbon-fuel-burning, did these miscreants set up an online videoconferencing COP21? No, they burned thousands of tons of fossil fuel to travel to Paris, without any regret. They’re leaving brachiosaurus sized carbon footprints, but that didn’t hurt the environment? The problem is too many proles leaving Bambi-sized footprints.
Not sure what the point of this chart was, but it looks to debunk the myth that Man is producing the atmospheric CO2. CO2 increased from 180 to 280 before man began producing CO2 in significant amounts. 180 to 280ppm resulted in an increase in 6°C change, 280 to 400ppm resulted in a 1°C change. It looks like man producing CO2 slowed the temperature increase.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W0dggL-4e68/VMzoRRfoyHI/AAAAAAAAAUE/yAHA4IAVS4c/s1600/Temp%2Bvs%2BCO2%2BScatterplot%2BEDC%2Bwith%2Bmodern.png
Perfect observation. Brandon just debunked himself.
co2islife,
urederra said that I should look at a T vs CO2 scatterplot instead of a time series, so I posted one. (S)he then exited the conversation, so I’m not sure what the point was either.
My, what a creative argument.
That one isn’t terribly hard to figure out, as temperatures warm, the partial pressure of CO2 in aqueous solution rises.
That’s the tricky part; the scatter plot makes it seem that the entire rise in temps was due to CO2, something I certainly do not believe to be the case because I know from reading the literature that a number of other forcings and feedbacks are relevant on geological time scales.
Couple issues there. First is that the scatter plot doesn’t show the time evolution …
http://skepticalscience.com//pics/regemcrufull.jpg
… and like that time series plot, the scatter plot also mixes time resolution. So, in the Marcott time series, the HADCRUT4 portion presumably contains annual time resolution, whereas Marcott can only resolve something on the order of 50-100 years so it potentially makes the temperature rise look “faster” than if Marcott’s 20th century reconstruction had been robust. IIRC, Marcott’s conclusion was that present day temperatures are not definitively higher than the Holocene maximum, but that he couldn’t rule it out either.
On the other side of the coin, the scatter plot shows the CO2 concentration zipping out rapidly, but temperatures haven’t had time to fully respond to the forcing. Additionally, the orbital forcing at the top of the Holocene isn’t nearly as high as it was during, say the Eemian interglacial 140 k years ago. Those two factors combine to make modern-day CO2 forcing in the scatter plot look tepid relative to the ice core records. Any comparison of the paleo record to modern effects needs to account for as many other forcings as possible to be meaningful. Scatter plots of temperature vs. CO2 alone just doesn’t get there.
Here is an experiment every high school class to run to understand the glacier/interglacier cycle.
1) The galaxy has “fingers.”
2) Those fingers act as shades, blocking some of the sunlight headed towards earth.
3) In the “shade” the max temperature on earth is -8°C lower than the max.
4) Once the earth leaves one of the fingers, more direct sunlight reaches earth.
5) The increase in solar radiation starts to warm the earth, melt the ice, and drive sea level higher.
6) Outside the finger, a new thermal max is set.
7) The experiment is like taking a bowl half filled with H2O and putting it in an oven. On the shelf above it putting an ice block and heating the oven up 8°C.
What would happen is you would see the water would start to warm, but the ice melting would slow the warming, as cold water drips into the bowl. As the ice melts the bowl sea level would increase. Once the ice has completely melted, the water will then finally reach the thermal max consistent with the new higher solar radiation. That why the sea level stops raising just as the temperature plateaus. The warmer water outgasses CO2, but CO2 plays no role in warming. This also explains why a stable output of the sun can result is variable levels of radiation reaching the earth.
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/1d/Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
http://img12.deviantart.net/419a/i/2015/168/c/2/spiral_galaxy_a5_by_alphaspace-d5beywe.jpg
This video explains the glacial/interglacial cycle, and the warming and cooling have nothing to do with CO2.
https://youtu.be/C4V-ooITrws
The world has been blessed with an agricultural revolution and a minimum of 15% of the increased food bounty has been shown to be as a direct result of increased atmospheric CO2. NASA has even attributed a 25% increase in the planet’s entire biosphere as a result of increased CO2, since their satellite observations began in 1968.
According to some denizens of the climate fearosphere who’ve appeared on this thread, the only food increase has been because of modern technology (an implication reinforced with pics) and that CO2 as plant food can’t be good because weeds also grow better. Do I have that right?
And climate is much like financial markets where statistical aberrations eventually are self correcting. In fact stochiometrics show a 5 wave movement before reestablishing the primary trend. It’s all very anthropomorphic.
Unless you introduce the goat factor.
Climate Change means political climate change, such that they all run to fund and supply underground bunkers to protect themselves from the body politic.
Dr. Lindzen; this appears to handle the D-O events just fine: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/22/volcanoes-and-ozone-their-interactive-effect-on-climate-change/ . A seriously complete theory, readily verified. Lots of long-term data.
“A careful reading of the letter of the 8 professors leaves one wondering whether the dismay they express over Dyson’s “limited understanding and short-sighted interpretation of basic elements of climate science” is not merely a projection of their own limitations and biases.”
Too right you are.
Even basic things such as denying that Nyquist is involved in what they do.
https://climatedatablog.wordpress.com/2015/12/26/nyquist-doesnt-apply/
https://climatedatablog.wordpress.com/2015/12/27/ratio-mathematics-an-ancient-way-of-describing-things/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/29/ipcc-science-ipcc-government/comment-page-1/#comment-2083053
Note the year of Lindzen’s article in the WSJ – 2001.
Note also that none of the scary predictions of the IPCC have materialized.
The IPCC has a negative predictive track record; so no one should believe them.
Regards, Allan
Wall Street Journal
June 11, 2001
http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/OpEds/LindzenWSJ.pdf
Scientists’ Report Doesn’t Support the Kyoto Treaty
By Richard S. Lindzen
Excerpt:
The full IPCC report is an admirable description of research activities in climate science, but it is not specifically directed at policy. The Summary for Policymakers is, but it is also a very different document. It represents a consensus of government representatives (many of whom are also their nations’ Kyoto representatives), rather than of scientists. The resulting document has a strong tendency to disguise uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which there is no evidence.
Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens. This is what has been done with both the reports of the IPCC and the NAS. It is a reprehensible practice that corrodes our ability to make rational decisions. A fairer view of the science will show that there is still a vast amount of uncertainty — far more than advocates of Kyoto would like to acknowledge — and that the NAS report has hardly ended the debate. Nor was it meant to.
*******************************
WUWT, there are a few smoking gun charts posted on this thread.
1) Why is the temperature of the Holocene so relatively stable?
2) Why does the stability start almost exactly when the sea level stops rising?
3) Why would the temperature suddenly stop increasing if CO2 was the driver?
4) Why would CO2 only gradually increase from 180 ppm to 280 ppm over 10,000 years, and then increase from 280 ppm to 400 ppm over 150 years?
5) The oceans contain 1,000x the heat of the atmosphere, CO2’s contribution is the spectrum 13µ to 18µ there is no way to blame CO2 or the GHG effect for the warming of the oceans. What is warming the oceans is also warming the atmosphere.
6) Volcanoes have been producing CO2 at variable levels for billions of years, CO2 has been as high at 7,000 ppm, CO2 has never caused significant or catastrophic warming. There are natural processes in place that efficiently remove CO2 from the atmosphere. The oceans are the main regulator of atmospheric CO2, so once again, what is warming the oceans is also what is changing the atmospheric CO2.
8) This theory accepts the warmist’s point that the solar output is relatively stable
Please shoot holes in this unifying theory that helps explain all those smoking gun comments.
Comments:
1) It isn’t the radiation from the sun that matters, it is the radiation that reaches the earth’s surface and oceans that counts. That is common sense 101.
2) There are the Milankovitch Cycles which can explain how more sunlight falls on the oceans at times and more on the surface at times, explaining some of the regular cycle seen in the ice core. The earth also travels through the fingers of the Galaxy. The fingers act like shade trees. In the fingers the earth is in the shade, between the fingers the earth is out of the shade. Cosmic rays can also alter the cloud cover. Those facts explain how the sun’s radiation can be constant, but the amount of that radiation reaching earth can be variable.
The Theory:
1) The earth is in a Galaxy Finger ie the shade. That sets the maximum earth temperature 8°C below the temperature that is reached outside the shade.
2) The earth leaves the shade of the finger, and the maximum temperature then increases to current temperatures, or 8° above the temperature in the shade.
3) The earth doesn’t immediately warm 8° because it has to melt all the ice. The melting ice slows the warming of the oceans and also results in a rapidly rising sea level.
4) Once all the ice has melted, the sea level stops increasing, and the temperatures reaches a stable thermal maximum. CO2 isn’t needed in any of this theory because with the melting comes higher atmospheric H2O whose impact is 50 to 70x that of CO2.
Experiment:
1) Put two pots on a stove.
2) Fill both pots 1/2 full with water. (That is the ice age ocean)(Earth is in the shade)
3) Put a candy thermometer in both pots.
4) Turn the heat on to warm the pots. (This is the interglacial period)(The earth has left the shade)
5) Slowly pour/rapid drip cold water into one of the pots to represent melting glacier water.
6) Record the time and temperature of the two pots.
Note: to make it even more realistic you could set both burners and place a piece of fireproof insulation on them to act as the shade and then remove the insulation. The fixed burner would represent the constant sun, but the insulation would demonstrate how even a constant sun can have a variable impact on the earth.
Results:
1) What you will find is that each pot will reach the identical maximum temperature, assuming each burner has the identical setting. The pots will only get warmer if you turn up the heat. Given the sun has constant radiation, it is effectively a fixed burner. (See note above about the insulation)
2) You will see the pot that had cold water slowly poured into it reached the maximum temperature much slower than the other pot.
3) You will see that the sea level of the pot that had the cold water poured into it increased.
4) You will see that the thermal max was not reached in the pot that had the cold water poured into it until after the sea level stopped increasing.
That simple theory explains the smoking guns identified above, and doesn’t require CO2 at all given the impact of greater CO2 in the atmosphere consistent with the warming. In fact, noting in the current AGW/GHG theory can explain why CO2 suddenly stopped increasing, and why it suddenly stopped causing warming. The only logical answer there is that CO2 wasn’t what was causing the warming.
The one question I have that I don’t have an answer to is does the earth pass through the fingers of the Galaxy at regular intervals that would create a pattern similar to what is found in the ice core data? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vXsBJlcwQsc/Tx1zQrGba5I/AAAAAAAAF_Y/RAI27OlLwDk/s1600/IMG_2695.JPG
Actually I would just simply observe that most of the Carbon in the world is buried in rock, which has a very long cycle time.
and I don’t mean in Oil!
Alternate theory: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/22/volcanoes-and-ozone-their-interactive-effect-on-climate-change/ . A seriously complete theory, readily verified. Lots of long-term data. In Brief: ozone clears the way for radiation, aerosols blocks it. Some gassy eruptions cause one, explosive ones the other.
You are nit-picking about Freeman Dyson’s ideas on IPCC. Why create such unnecessay verbiage?
Indeed, attack rather than discuss seems to be the order of the day.
WUWT Posters, I have a question. The problem I have a problem. It is stated that solar output is constant, yet the ice core data shows that earth temperatures follow a cycle, as if someone dims the sun for 90,000 years and then turns it up for 10,000 years, and then it dims again. How can that be if the sun remains the same constant temperature? This video may provide the answer. The solar system circles the Galaxy, but the galaxy is flat and has fingers. The fingers act like clouds. As the solar system flies out of a finger the earth get direct sunlight, when the solar system flies into a finger the earth flies into the shade, and some of the radiation gets blocked. That theory explains why you have thermal maxes and mins with the same solar output. The fingers act like galactic clouds. Inside the cloud you have an ice age, outside the cloud you get a warming period. The constant solar output limits the thermal optimum. Is there research that shows that the earth flying through a finger reduces the radiation reaching earth? If there is, you can rule our CO2 or run away warming.
https://youtu.be/C4V-ooITrws
For an alternative conjecture as to why this ‘cycle’ happens (Ice Ages). have a look at https://climatedatablog.wordpress.com/2015/12/21/a-hockey-strick-for-xmass/
Maybe spin in relationship to ocean circulation. Or if don’t have the global oceans, one can’t get this effect from rotation, but one can also get some long duration pattern of warming and cooling of a ocean without rotation- having a slow or fast rotation has some effect upon the pattern warming and cooling.
co2islife,
Very good video, thanks for posting. Notice how the galactic arms are discrete? In a ‘normal’ liquid, coffee, for example, when cream is added the swirling begins as arms, then the arms get tighter until the swirl is almost solid, with no discrete arms visible (I hope this is making sense; it’s late here).
All spiral and barred spiral galaxies show discrete arms (well, almost all). Even after many rotations the arms remain separate. What’s happening?
The theory is that dark matter, which comprises most of the matter in the universe, is also swirling around the galaxy like a giant blob extending much farther out, allowing the galaxy’s arms to remain separate. It’s like pouring the cream into the cup without stirring, but instead, rotating the table the cup is on. Sort of. Not the greatest analogy, but it’s all I’ve got at the moment.
In fact, almost all the matter in the universe is completely unseen, undetected (except for macro gravity effects like this), and totally invisible and unknown to us.
But the science of CO2 affecting global warming is settled…
LOL, thanks 🙂
Seriously, the discreteness of them is what made me think of it, that allows for the cycles of on and off. The edges are a little fuzzy, and that allows for the temporary randomness. Do you know if anyone claims the earth flying in and out of fingers develops a regular pattern here on earth by altering the solar radiation?
The timescale for the “up and down through the finger” oscillation is on the order of 60-70 million years.
We’re generally stuck in the finger, loosely, during the 200-225 million years orbiting the galaxy.
Probably something else.
Those event can be explained by the earth flying into a galactic cloud, ie a finger. See the video above. The random and rapid cooling can’t be explained by CO2 or the sun cooling, but it could be explained in the earth some how flew into a cloud or the shade. The cosmic ray theory and the Galaxy Finger/Cloud theory could explain those events. I’m aware of the cosmic ray theory, does anyone know of a galactic cloud/shade/finger theory?
To quote Einstein, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Look at the ice core data and geologic record, there are patterns, and then odd random events. The paths are constant, the physics is constant, the radiation is constant, what provides the randomness? Clouds could explain the random events, the Galactic Fingers aren’t constant, nor are clouds. There is a randomness to them that could explain the rapid on off events, just like a jet flying through a cloud. One second clear skies, the next zero visibility, the next clear skys. The cloud may even have fingers so the visibility can turn on and off rapidly when you are inside the cloud.
.
Like us all, Einstein was entitled to his belief.
Some like to think the big G has a sense of humor and rolls to see if snake eyes pops up.
Religion requires Belief, Science requires Impartiality.
Richard, if that is true, then partial scientists are not conducting science.
I do not have the capacity to form any accurate opinion one way or another. The data will tell out in the end (as will entropy 🙂
co2islife,
I do not think anyone can cite a published scientific research paper by Einstein that has that as: a basis; a methodological component; a supporting verified observation/data; or an implicit/explicit conclusion.
So, who cares, in a discourse with a scientific context, about Einstein’s trivial gossiping?
John
Considering the points made by Linzen, and the amount of weasel-words and equivocation of the supposed rebuttal, I’m seriously surprised! One would MIT professors would be more eloquent, perhaps a refresher course in Logic and Semantics would be in order.
For you or him?
or them I suppose.
My Einstein quote was a distraction, here is the question In was asking. Can anyone answer it? What causes the interruptions to the patterns/cycles? There is a regularity interrupted by random counter cyclical trends. What is causing the cycles to be interrupted?
co2islife asked: “does anyone know of a galactic cloud/shade/finger theory?”
I don’t know of a published theory but I started looking into it myself a couple of months ago and did find some evidence the solar system is poised on the edge of an interstellar cloud and will be entering (or exiting) it in some fairly short (non geologic) time, I honestly can’t remember which. I rooted trough my notes and couldn’t find the reference.
I thought I’d asked the question on this site and it was answered but can’t find any record of it. I’m not sure the “Search” on this site looks at comments so I may never find it. But If you search hard enough I’m sure you’ll find evidence to support the hypothesis. Astrophysicists have been mapping the nearby galaxy and we do randomly pass through gas clouds capable of attenuating solar radiation.
Not exactly what you were looking for, but see:
“Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate?”
Nir J. Shaviv, Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 91904, Israel
Ján Veizer, Institut für Geologie, Mineralogie und Geophysik, Ruhr Universität, 44780 Bochum, Germany, and Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, University of Ottawa,
Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada
http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/13/7/pdf/i1052-5173-13-7-4.pdf
Regards, Allan
Thanks, you would think for a “settled” science (what ever that is), this question would be well documented and rejected.
Not exactly what you were looking for, but see:
Thanks Allen. I was aware of the Cosmic Ray theory, and I believe it works by seeding clouds in the atmosphere. I was wondering is there is a theory that claims the fingers act a galactic clouds, blocking radiation from outer space.
Quote:
“Dyson, further notes that the ice ages were major examples of climate change that we don’t fully understand”.
But we will shortly, and they do not involve CO2.
They are forced by precession and assisted by albedo.
Should be finished in a week or so.
Ralph
This might help you.
https://climatedatablog.wordpress.com/2015/12/21/a-hockey-strick-for-xmass/
But a unilateral response by the developed world will be futile and ruinously expensive. Only a nuclear-powered “response” would be affordable. Plus some safe geo-engineering like the iron powder fertilization of the Gulf of Alaska.
A multilateral response is out of the question, as COP21 documents.
PS: In the US, natural gas would be cheaper than nuclear, but in the ROW it would not be, as shale gas formations like those in the US are rare.
“… all the claims cited by Dyson are frequently made by politicians and environmental activists (including Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the UN), and the IPCC scientists never really object. Why should they? Support for climate science (a rather small backwater field) has increased from about $500 million per year to about $9 billion.”
That about sums up the climate change scare … money!
CO2 is not, and never has been a meteorological parameter. It should not be used as such in the global warming alarmism con. Anyone who looks seriously at the scientific geological data would never suspect CO2 has ever played a role in changing earth’s climate in the past. There is no reason why it should do so now or at any time in the future. The only truth about dangerous man-made global warming a.k.a. climate change is that it is actually true … it was fabricated by people, which makes it man-made!
Mervyn wrote: “CO2 is not, and never has been a meteorological parameter.”
I agree. I would add the word “significant” after “a”.
However,
There is a strong correlation between increasing atmospheric CO2 and the loss of integrity among many individuals and groups, including grant-seeking scientists, false environmentalists, corrupted politicians, and their institutions.
However:
Correlation is not causation.
Regards, Allan 🙂
___________________
Quotations:
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
“Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder’s welcome.”
“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”
“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
Source: “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”,
– a history of popular folly by Charles Mackay, 1841
“However:
Correlation is not causation.”
It helps if you find a lag leading signal. At least that only goes one way 🙂
Bingo, great way to put it.
The scam continues unabated, driven by political agenda and a torrent of money.
Gates’ last post linked to this bogus chart:
http://skepticalscience.com//pics/regemcrufull.jpg
And wouldn’t you know it, he got it from that paragon of bogosity, skepticalscience.
Whenever I read a Brandon Gates comment, my meter pegs:
http://americandigest.org/aabullshitdetect.gif
That last Gates chart blew its fuse.
Our Galaxy is ideal for a glacial/inter-glacial cycle. There are ripples and clouds all over the place that could disrupt the solar radiation reaching the earth.
http://o.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/1e73108c497d7e92677c49cfc4b6f0c9/201691469/milky-way-galaxy-ripples.jpg
http://chandra.harvard.edu/graphics/resources/illustrations/milkyWay/milkyWaySide1_300.jpg
NASA even calls them clouds.
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_feature/public/images/620032main_Clouds-Astrospheres_full.jpg?itok=lBjT0HfJ
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/gallery/solar-journey_prt.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/620014main_interstellar-clouds-arrows_946-710.jpg
BTW, look at that above graph. The Solar System travels 1 light year in about 15,000 years. It looks like we were in the cloud 15,000 years ago, and it looks like we are going into a cloud free zone, which looks to be about 1 light year across. We may be in for 15,000 more years of warming if the theory is correct.
Here is the graphic without the labels. BTW, the clouds would also explain the slow cooling and rapid heating of the cycle. Note how the cloud seems to have sharp boarders that in certain areas.
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/620018main_interstellar-clouds.jpg
Interesting that Kerry Emanuel wasn’t a signatory of this letter…
I apologize for my mistake, in fact, the letter was actually written by Dr. Emanuel and a Robert Jaffe.
In a couple of days it will be the new calendar year of 2016. Every year it is a tradition for me, about this time, to think of the far view and a broad long range strategy/plan. Over the years, I have come to associate Lindzen with having a far longer view and a broader long range strategy/plan as compared to other ‘skeptics’. His post inspired me to write something. The far view & strategy below is mine and I do not imply in any way that it is Lindzen’s.
The founding intellectuals of the IPCC’s charter had a sole premise that climate change is harmful. That premise is ‘pre-scientific’. That is the Achilles heel of their movement against fossil fuels.
My suggested strategy is not to target their ‘pre-scientific’ Achilles heel. That is reactionary and weak.
I suggest a strategy to re-ground the competitive (open society) intellectual sourcing of science. The money is out there in possession of free intellectuals. The strategy is simple, direct and has the virtue of absolute independence.
New Year’s thoughts to you all.
John
Rik M
In earth’s 4 billion year history has the climate ever changed, in your opinion, without human cause? Y/N ?
Your answer will show whether you are a con-artist or a moron.
BG- “People who argue that rising CO2 levels are not a credible environmental/economic risk, and/or may be a net benefit, and therefore oppose policies designed to reduce emissions. IOW, the opposite of “alarmists”, “climastrologists”, “chicken-littles”, “envirowingnuts”, “warmunists”, “warmistas” etc.”
False dilemma-“A false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, false binary, black-and-white thinking, bifurcation, denying a conjunct, the either–or fallacy, fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses, the fallacy of false choice, the fallacy of the false alternative, or the fallacy of the excluded middle) is a type of informal fallacy that involves a situation in which only limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option.”
Brandon, ANY “binary categorization”, is obviously an example of flawed logic if there is at least one other possible option. For example, I personally don’t fit all the stated parameters of the first category, nor do I fit the opposite of all those things, so I can only conclude that I myself present at least that one additional option.
It has been my experience in this forum that there are many different opinions and positions held by those who post here. In fact, people who fit the definition you posted, or the exact opposite of it, are truly rare, fringe individuals here, and are not representative of the vast majority. You came into this blog with expectations based on that flawed conclusion that there are only twotypes of people in the global warming debate. And that is exactly why you could have only expected one of two illogical reactions from posters here to your personal opinion about Dr. Lindzen- either vocal support for it, or vocal support against it.
BG said “I mainly wanted to see if anyone on your “side” of the fence saw the same thing AND was willing to speak to it.” [“it” being what HE personally concluded from Dr. Lindzen’s post].
In order to make that statement BG, you must have already made the following, illogical, assumptions:
1) that everyone at WUWT is on the same “side” that I, Aphan, belong to.
AND
2) If no one speaks to it- then a) they did not see the same thing I did b) they saw the same thing, but were unwilling to speak to it.
Since no one spoke to it (except BusterBrown who was identified as a troll and banned) you then attempted to try to force people to a) see the same thing he did. When no one agreed that they saw the same thing you did, your self-limiting thinking forced you to assume b) that they DID actually see it, but were unwilling to admit it.
Now, what is interesting is that at one point BG you said-
“Ok, so a few things. I didn’t have a very good opinion of Dr. Lindzen before I read this essay, and each re-reading of it only serves to reinforce my negative opinion. He makes a number of arguments I consider flawed and that I think someone with his intelligence and resume wouldn’t give in error. In short, I suspect his motives, but I generally make a point of not imputing motive because,
1) Motives are difficult to discern and all but impossible to “prove”,
2) I think it’s better to attack the argument not the man, and
3) arguing that someone who holds contrarian views on AGW is an industry shill (or anything in the that neighborhood) is literally pouring gasoline on a fire that simply doesn’t need the encouragement.”
BG, it’s obvious from your statement that you knew better than to attack the man, so instead, YOU created a strawman argument (one that Dr. Lindzen didn’t make himself or you could have just quoted him doing it) and proceeded to attack the strawman.
I tried to point out what you were doing over and over and over again. Others here tried to get you to listen to WHAT I was actually saying-not what you thought I was attempting to DO. Brandon, the flawed way that you THINK is revealed in the flawed way you TALK/respond to people here. You are logical one moment, and irrational and illogical the next. Your assumptions about people appear to drive most of your responses to them, because you only selectively respond to SOME of the things people say (and taken out of context) rather than to everything they said. Context matters Brandon.
Something that you need to accept, whether you like it or not is this: What people say exactly on the internet is the only logical evidence you can use for or against that person, because once it passes through your mental, interpretive filter, if it comes out with any modifications, at all, it instantly becomes YOURS, not theirs.
I am done explaining this to you. Regulars here at WUWT know and accept this already.
Aphan,
Which one of your following statements, if any, fit that definition of flawed logic?
Aphan
December 26, 2015 at 4:49 pm
There would be no jobs for undocumented illegals if people did their own landscaping.
———
RichardLH
December 27, 2015 at 9:15 am
Religion requires Belief, Science requires Impartiality.
Aphan
December 27, 2015 at 2:11 pm
Richard, if that is true, then partial scientists are not conducting science.
Let’s find out:
1) Do you argue that rising CO2 levels are not a credible environmental/economic risk?
2) Do you argue that rising CO2 levels may be a net benefit?
3) Do you oppose policies designed to reduce CO2 emissions?
1) Please describe where my statement …
People who argue that rising CO2 levels are not a credible environmental/economic risk, and/or may be a net benefit, and therefore oppose policies designed to reduce emissions.
… explicitly makes that generalization.
2) Please explain why there are no other logical possibilities for what I may or may not have concluded in the event I got no response.
[emphasis changed … looks up at items (1) and (2) above … smiles warmly]
Yup, human being … I was about to say “just like you” … but caught myself making an unwarranted assumption. In the future, it would be nice if — instead of making sweeping generalizations and/or arguing by assertion that I am illogical as you’ve done throughout this post — you would quote me directly and point to what you think the flaw is in my argument.
You might find that I’m less a pain in the ass to talk to doing it that way.
Brilliant … I’ve been wondering when we were going to stop talking about the irrelevancies of what goes on inside my head and back to discussing science. Cheers.
Perfect. You took things out of context, just like I said you do, and attempted to apply them to other circumstances. And just like I said “once it passes through your mental, interpretive filter, if it comes out with any modifications, at all, it instantly becomes YOURS, not theirs.”
Thank you for proving me right. Again.
After saying this to me in your previous post …
Your assumptions about people appear to drive most of your responses to them, because you only selectively respond to SOME of the things people say (and taken out of context) rather than to everything they said.
… you then fail to address a single one of the questions I put to you in my response. Puzzling to be sure.
There are 400 PPM of CO2, a critical, naturally occurring gas in atmosphere. That’s 400/1,000,000.
Mankind is responsible for less than 10%. (IPCC)
10% of 400 PPM is 40.
USA emits 25%, or 10 PPM. That’s 10/1,000,000
It would be 100’s of billions of dollars (if not tatrillion) to get a 20% reduction in our CO2 emissions.
Assume we did reduce emissions 20%. That would be 2 PPM or 2/1,000,000.
So the USA could effect perhaps a 2 parts per million change in the atmosphere
With seasonal CO2 variations of about 7 PPM, it would be near impossible to even measure any CO2 changes outside the typical margin of error.
Someone with JOSH’s ear aught to point out this great opportunity for a cartoon– “8 members of the MIT faculty” (strapping young bucks) take on the Old Geezer (and he had one arm tied behind his back).