Thanks for this excellent WUWT blog.

Greenhouse Gas Amounts, Weighted contribution
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

Greenhouse Effect (By Gas)
http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

Table 1 in both pages (the verizon one is a mirror site) lists two columns “man-made additions” and “natural additions”. The data is attributed to the DOE in the caption. Footnote 1 gives the alleged source:

1) Current Greenhouse Gas Concentrations (updated October, 2000)
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
(the primary global-change data and information analysis center of the U.S. Department of Energy)
Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Greenhouse Gases and Climate Change (data now available only to “members”)
IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme,
Stoke Orchard, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL52 7RZ, United Kingdom.

Neither the current incarnation of that page holds the info to the abovementioned columns
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html
Nor do the pages archived by Archive.org
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html
(I have checked all of the starred pages, which indicate updates).

The second source refers its readers to the IPCC report, which in turn attributes the increase from pre-industrial levels to todays levels in CO2 and other GHGs to human activities.

At the minimum Monte Hieb misattributes the data to the DOE, giving them undeserved credibility. As I do not see any source for these numbers whatsoever, I have to wonder, where these numbers come from; after all they are fundamental to Hieb’s whole argument.

The Monte Hieb page is referenced repeatedly on this blog
http://www.google.com/search?q=WVFossils+greenhouse_data+site%3Awattsupwiththat.com
by multiple users.

I think, for the reasons given above it ought to be removed from the resources list, at the very minimum a warning label is in order.

Reply: Anthony was clear the first time ~ charles the moderator

Watts up with Chemtrails? I would like to know if you have any information.
No one is touching this massive subject – its the biggest Pink Elephant in this area of study…this is happening all aroung the globe everyday!!!!
[snip]

REPLY: That’s because the whole chemtrails as government control “story” is absolute juvenile rubbish of the highest order, and there will not ever be any discussion of it here. No ifs, ands, or buts. No rebuttals, all will be wholesale deleted.- Anthony

It seems like absolutely fanciful garbage to me in that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, seems to have the slightest efect on the faith of the believers.
Anyone who is reasonable could agree (possibly) that somone could possibly reach a conclusion that the probability is towards AGW however the information is so poor and the subject so feebly understood that certainty is at best a mark of foolishness and at worst greed and meglomania.

“Britain may be in the grip of the coldest winter for 30 years and grappling with up to a foot of snow in some places but the extreme weather is entirely consistent with global warming, claim scientists.

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 6:41AM GMT 03 Feb 2009

Temperatures for December and January were consistently 1.8 F ( 1 C) lower than the average of 41 F (5 C)and 37 F (3C) respectively and more snow fell in London this week than since the 1960s.

But despite this extreme weather, scientists say that the current cold snap does not mean that climate change is going into reverse. In fact, the surprise with which we have greeted the extreme conditions only reinforces how our climate has changed over the years.

A study by the Met Office which went back 350 years shows that such extreme weather now only occurs every 20 years.

Back in the pre-industrial days of Charles Dickens, it was a much more regular occurrence – hitting the country on average every five years or so.

During that time global temperatures has risen by 1.7 F (0.8 C), studies have shown.

“Even though this is quite a cold winter by recent standards it is still perfectly consistent with predictions for global warming,” said Dr Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at Department of Physics, University of Oxford.

“If it wasn’t for global warming this cold snap would happen much more regularly. What is interesting is that we are now surprised by this kind of weather. I doubt we would have been in the 1950s because it was much more common.

“As for snowfall that could actually increase in the short term because of global warming. We have all heard the expression ‘too cold to snow’ and we have always expected precipitation to increase.

“All the indicators still suggest that we are warming up in line with predictions.”

This winter seems so bad precisely because it is now so unusual. In contrast the deep freezes of 1946-47 and 1962-63 were much colder – 5.3 F (2.97C) and 7.9 F (4.37C) cooler than the long-term norm.

And with global warming we can expect another 1962-63 winter only once every 1,100 years, compared with every 183 years before 1850.

Dave Britton, a meteorologist and climate scientist at the Met Office, said: “Even with global warming you cannot rule out we will have a cold winter every so often. It sometimes rains in the Sahara but it is still a desert.”

Scientists point out that the people must distinguish between climate and weather. Weather is what happens in the short term whereas climate is the long term trend.

“Just as the wet summer of 2007 or recent heat waves cannot be attributed to global warming nor can this cold snap,” said Bob Ward, spokesman for the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change at London School of Economics.

“What is important to do is look at the long term global trends and they are still up. What we experience in the short term in this country is not important. After all, Melbourne had a heat wave last week.”

As for the suggestion that the recent cold weather is due to a reversal of the warming Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift – otherwise known as the Thermohaline Circulation – this has been mostly ruled out by recent research.

“It has a very low chance of happening and if it does occur it will be in centuries time,” added Mr Ward.

The North Atlantic Drift is an extension of the Gulf Stream which brings warm tropical water from the Gulf of Mexico to northern Europe, including Britain. Its effect is to bring up the average temperature.

E.M.Smith (13:36:31) :

How about Ozone?

A very interesting and provocative post.

I suggest you copy it to another WUWT page with more traffic than this one if relevant to the topic of that page. It should arouse many comments.

[or maybe you already have?]

To download the GISSTEMP source code go to:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/

and click on the download link.

Unpack the archive, and read gistemp.txt

GISS temperatures are replicated here:

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/

The papers describing the GISS methodology can be found here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

Inside GISStemp:

They say to unpack the archive and read the documentation, but it’s a bit thin… a file at the top level of the directory structure, gistemp.txt, that gives a general idea of what’s going on but says little about algorithms. Variables and files are poorly documented (you have to hunt through the code and figure them out…) but the code isn’t very fancy. It’s about 4.5Mb unpacked and that includes some of the data files that they left in directories. Very little of it is actually code. About 6000 lines all told, of which I would estimate 1000 or so is actually ‘functional’ in the sense that it is not a file open/close, data format declaration, comment, or gratuitous FORTRAN program re-compile wrapper. Mostly you need to resort to whatever readme files are in the STEP* directories and the top level driver scripts of the form do_comb_stepX.sh where X is the step number. The methodology descriptions from the location listed above may be helpful.

Manual Steps:

Getting the input data: ftp the data from the origin sites.

The antarctic data is already in the downloaded source package.

From ./gistemp.txt:

Basic data set: GHCN – ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2
v2.mean.Z (data file)
v2.temperature.inv.Z (station information file)

For US: USHCN – ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn
hcn_doe_mean_data.Z
station_inventory

For Antarctica: SCAR – http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER/surface/stationpt.html
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER/temperature.html
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER/aws/awspt.html

For Hohenpeissenberg – http://members.lycos.nl/ErrenWijlens/co2/t_hohenpeissenberg_200306.txt
complete record for this rural station
(thanks to Hans Erren who reported it to GISS on July 16, 2003)

I enjoy your site very much and visit often.

In a previous post [not on this page] I asked if you have a PO Box or other address to which donations could be made for those of us reluctant to use PayPal or credit cards on line. No direct reply was made. Might be worth posting such if you have one.
**********************************************
FWIW today I sent the letter below to our new president. I don’t really expect anything to come of it, but if enough people also wrote … well, who knows?

The folowing email address was used: comments@whitehouse.gov
[sorry, don't know how to make that an active link]

President Obama,

Congratulations on your historic inauguration. I wish you great success in your administration. The great American experiment in civilization, begun over two centuries ago, continues. It is our obligation to make sure, as best we can, that experiment succeeds and flourishes

Mr. President, you recently made public statements regarding the openness of government information and how you would try to reinforce this policy.

In this regard I would like to recommend that – perhaps through the mechanism of Executive Order – you require that all scientists and researchers whose work is supported in any way by public funds, on the publication of their theories, conjectures or findings, make publicly available through electronic or other suitable media, all relevant data, methods, procedures, etc. that may be required for their work to be reconstructed and then reproduced or verified/falsified by interested parties.

In the interest of true scientific advancement, all published scientific theories and conjectures must be subject to review – especially when financed by public funds. If not subjected to review and verification, such research becomes no better than “magic” and is equivalent to “Trust me, I’m right!”

When potentially very expensive public policy may be made based on the recommendations and opinions of the scientific community, those recommendations/opinions should be subject to open review.

The above suggestion would, of course, not apply to matters related to national security.

Thank you for your attention,

Floyd Ross
Santa Barbara, California

I have a thought, since thousands of private weather stations are listed on Weather Underground with their physical location, would it be practicle to look at parallel data from stations in urban areas compared to stations in suburban and rural areas by their distance from urban centers to get a real index of UHI?

Of course data quality would be crappy but since there is so much data, that might smooth out the errors since urban errors would most likely be as large as rural errors.

I know you don’t need another project but maybe a few cities could be surveyed.

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1987SoPh..110..191F/0000191.000.html

The paper at the above link, “Prolonged Minima and the 179-Year Cycle of the Solar Inertial Motion,” by R.W.Fairbridge & J.H.Shirley (Received 3 January 1987) tentatively predicted that the Sun would go into a ‘deep minimum’ between 1990-2013…and would (will?) terminate the minimum about 2091!

The authors used an approach that examined the effect of the major planets (Jupiter & Saturn in particular) pulling the Sun’s orbital path “off center” (like the smooth path taken by the center of mass of a tossed twirling barbell vs. the weighted ends traveling a complex path): the barycenter of the solar system (the solar barycentric orbit) moves in predictable (largely repeating in a consistent pattern) cycles of 179 years (with eight patterns at shorter intervals embedded within the 179 year cycle).

The effect studied was NOT tidal forces acting on the Sun. Apparently this planet-induced motion, or recently induced stillness, affects internal fluid motions in the Sun like causing water to swirl, or stop swirling, in a cup (this is my layman’s guess-explanation). I can’t help but wonder if this dynamic might explain the recent noteworthy slowdown in the Sun’s Meridianal Flows (“Conveyor”)…but I digress…

The authors show that when two particular derived measures have certain parameters at-the-same-time, the Sun has gone into a deep minimum (Maunder, Sporer, and Wolf were covered by the data ranged studied). Per their 1987 findings, this would happpen again (has happened?) about 1990-2013.

I haven’t seen ANY discussion of the above ANYWHERE…just happened upon the paper (though I might have missed it). I wonder if this effect has been incorporated in the solar dynamo models often referenced (e.g. M. Dikpati’s at HAO, which is predicting a large cycle 24)?

ALSO, consider the paper (available on-line): “Sunspots may vanish by 2015″ by Willam Livingston & Matthew Penn — where they document how since 1990 sunspot magnetic field (& other) intensity has been found be have been declining within the sunspots while the darkest parts have shown a warming trend…with a linear projection giving the 2015 spot-vanish figure. I believe a recent (past few months/weeks) mention in this or related blog indicated that Livingston’s/Penn’s observations were (are?) still on the same track noted in the paper…

Both seem credible & suggest things could get nippy….

I would recommend you try Foxmarks.com to syncronize your bookmarks on all your computers and its free on the firefox website.

http://www.mri-jma.go.jp/Dep/cl/cl2/personal/kuroda/Solar_cycle/Solar_cycle.html

Connects cyclical solar output with ozone modulation of the Southern Annular Mode. We get QBO variation from:

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2007JD008983.shtml

We suggest that the decadal variation of the QBO period originates in the upper stratosphere, where the solar-ozone radiative influence is strong.

And does it drive climate? These folks think maybe so:

http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/5/12103/2005/acpd-5-12103-2005-print.pdf

3.3 Impact on meteorology and possible climate implications

[...]In fact, we find for both hemispheres a close correlation between measured ozone in the mid-stratosphere during early winter and the flux of planetary waves into the stratosphere during mid-winter, expressed by the vertical component of the Eliassen-Palm (EP) flux25 at 100 hPa during February (northern hemisphere, Fig. 4b) or August (southern hemi-sphere, Fig. 4c). The EP flux during mid winter largely controls polar stratospheric temperatures (Newman et al., 2001) and total ozone during late winter and spring. At present we can only speculate what causes the relation between early winter ozone and mid-winter EP flux. Following Hu and Tung (2003), a possible explanation could be as follows:

A reduction of polar ozone may lead to an increased temperature contrast between mid- and high latitudes due to reduced radiative heating, modifying the refractive index for planetary waves and thereby suppressing the propagation of planetary waves into the stratosphere, which then could lead to further polar cooling and increased ozone loss.

4 Conclusions

Our finding of a large decadal scale variation in early winter stratospheric ozone suggests that solar variability exerts a larger influence on polar ozone than previously thought. Although we cannot give a complete explanation for the observed decadal scale ozone changes, the close correlation of the difference between modeled and observed ozone with the flux of energetic electrons in the radiation belt provides some evidence for a large-scale influence of energetic electron precipitation on stratospheric
ozone. Moreover, if there is a direct link between early winter ozone and mid-winter EP15 flux, as suggested by the empirical correlation shown in Fig. 4, then energetic electron precipitation could have a significant impact not only on polar stratospheric ozone and temperatures but also on climate.

It looks to me like there is a peak of IR absorption that only O3 covers in the 9 to 10 micrometer range:

http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/2-03.jpg

We have O3 dropping like a rock with the sulking sun:

http://exp-studies.tor.ec.gc.ca/e/ozone/Curr_allmap_g.htm

Has -10 to -20% on 22Dec08 and had ozone at about -10% to -30% deviation in the north pole and up to (down to?) -40% deviation in the south pole on 13Dec08.

The climate models take no account of this… From: (The Dark Side… ;-)

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/greenhouse-gases/

Thus a statement like the one above, and the headline that came from it are interpreted to mean that the estimates of sensitivity or of future warming are now in question. Yet this is completely misleading since neither climate sensitivity nor CO2 driven future warming will be at all affected by any revisions in ozone chemistry – mainly for the reason that most climate models don’t consider ozone chemistry at all. Precisely zero of the IPCC AR4 model simulations (discussed here for instance) used an interactive ozone module in doing the projections into the future.

And at least one site says ozone does matter:

http://www.global-climate-change.org.uk/6-8-1.php

If the negative forcing of aerosol loading and ozone depletion is also included, the climate sensitivity is much greater. This result is intuitively correct, since the radiative effects of aerosols and ozone loss would offset the warming due to increased greenhouse gases.

When solar variability is included into the model, the explained variance of the observational record is greater than for greenhouse forcing alone. This is true for all of the solar variables considered here. The forcing combination that explains the most variance in the observational record (57%) includes the effects of greenhouse gases, aerosols and ozone depletion, and the rate of change of solar diameter. The latter, it seems, is accounting for much of the inter-decadal variability in the instrumental record.

We even have the obligatory “blame it on greanhouse gases” via computer models. Hmmm GHG causes GHG… so are we off the hook? ;-)

http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlkop/ozdep.html

In late 1997, larger levels of ozone depletion were observed over the Arctic than in any previous year on record. Now, using climate models, a team of scientists reports why this may be related to greenhouse gases, according to a paper published in the April 9 issue of Nature.

“Buildup of greenhouse gases leads to global warming at the Earth’s surface, but cools the stratosphere. Since ozone chemistry is very sensitive to temperature, this cooling results in more ozone depletion in the polar regions,” said Dr. Drew Shindell of Columbia University, the lead author of the study. NASA will continue research in this area to determine if these models are accurate.

This site: http://www.ghgonline.org/otherstropozone.htm

says ozone matters a lot; that it is 1/3 of direct GHG warming; AND that most of it comes from the stratosphere (which I would assert means not from us down here on the surface… i.e. probably the sun…)

As a direct greenhouse gas, it is thought to have caused around one third of all the direct greenhouse gas induced warming seen since the industrial revolution.
[...]
The largest net source of tropospheric ozone is influx from the stratosphere.

So am I the only one who thinks there might be something interesting going on here WRT ozone and our present freezing weather?

See the “You can use these tags” line in the “Leave a comment” area? They’re a subset of the HTML language that provide formatting directions on web pages. If you type Ctrl/U on most browsers they’ll display the raw HTML for the page you’re reading.

Important ones include:
<i>The i tag italicizes text</i>
<b>The b tag bolds text</b>
<em>The em tag (emphasize) also italicizes.</em>
<strike>This is what strike does.</strike>

I use <blockquote> frequently. Don’t forget to end with
</blockquote>

If you want to use a “less than sign”, use “&lt;”.
If you want to use an ampersand, use “&”.
Multiple spaces are compressed into a single space, but “&nbsp” will create a space that also disallows wordwrapping.

<code> is a marginally broken thing that lets you use
a monospace font so things line up. Unfortunately, it still
collapses multiple spaces into one, so you should replace at
least every other space with &nbsp;


In fact, you should replace all spaces with   or else your nice
table may get word wrapped on you, like the above paragraph.
The result is hard to read.


Less useful tags, included largely to document them so you don’t have to try them:

I don’t know what
<del datetime=”2008-12-31 23:59:59″> does. Hmm, looks like <strike> and ignores the datetime argument.

I’ve never used <cite>, it might be nothing more than italics.

or <blockquote cite=”foo”> which seems to ignore the cite argument.

or <q cite=”foo”> which also seems to ignore cite. The “q”
might stand for quote, it seems to put stuff in quotes.

I wonder what <abbr title=”foo”> does.

WordPress’s formatting options need some attention….