This is a familar set of issues in one article. – Anthony
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Environment: The solar wind is slowing, but Al Gore is still spewing hot air. The Oscar winner is promoting civil disobedience to stop energy and economic growth as the first U.S. emissions cap-and-trade program begins.
Speaking before Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative, junk science advocate Gore called on young people to take the law into their own hands because the climate, he claims, is a-changin’. He told the gathering in New York City that “the world has lost ground to the climate crisis” and the time for action is now.
“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration,” Gore said to loud applause.
His comments come two weeks after a British jury acquitted six Greenpeace activists accused of causing property damage at a power plant. The jury felt the “protest” was acceptable because the “protesters” feared the plant would contribute to global warming.
Luddites of the world, unite!
On the same day Gore spoke, scientists involved in NASA’s Ulysses project reported that the intensity of the sun’s solar wind was at its lowest point since the beginning of the space age – one more indication that the sun, the biggest source of energy affecting the Earth, is getting quiet.
The weaker solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun’s magnetic field, but the cause is unknown. Sunspots, which normally fluctuate in 11-year cycles, are at a virtual standstill. In August, the sun created no visible spots. The last time that happened: June 1913.
The results of the Ulysses spacecraft’s mission, according to Jet Propulsion Laboratory project scientist Ed Smith, show that “we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated.”
The consequences for Earth are enormous. The lack of increased activity could signal the start of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event that occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century. It leads to extended periods of severe cooling such as what happened during the Little Ice Age.
It may already be happening. The four major agencies tracking Earth’s temperature, including NASA’s Goddard Institute, report that the Earth cooled 0.7 degree Celsius in 2007, the fastest decline in the age of instrumentation, putting us back to where the Earth was in 1930.
The climate is changing, but not in the direction Al Gore thinks. As the Earth demonstrably cools under a weakening sun, a 10-state coalition on Thursday held the nation’s first carbon allowance auction to deal with a warming trend that may have ended a decade ago.
They will impose a minor league version of the Lieberman-Warner economy-killing cap-and-trade rationing system in which emissions are limited by a progressively lowered cap. Emission permits are auctioned off by government, making it a cap-and-tax system. Permits can be traded or sold between companies like baseball cards.
The Lieberman-Warner bill would mandate emission cuts of 44% below 2007 levels. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that it would cost as much as $3 trillion a year in lost GDP in an economy of roughly $14 trillion. It dwarfs the current financial crisis. But then, it’s for a good cause – right, Al?
The New York-based Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, launched Thursday, strives to freeze CO2 emissions through 2014 and then gradually reduce them to 10% below current levels by 2018. The states participating are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Like its bigger cousin, it’s a job- and growth-killing plan in a time of economic crisis. As the sun slows and the Earth cools, it’ll mean higher energy prices during colder and snowier winters.
Al Gore’s hippie legions may have to wear their winter coats.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Dee Norris (03:55:53) :
From a book on political polling (the science, not the art), George Gallup had chapters on selecting the population and verifying that it’s random.
One key point is that to interpret poll results, you need to know the exact questions asked, so please include that too.
If the poll was done as a web poll, it’s likely useless. If it was done as a questionnaire via mail or Email, knowing the response percentage is important.
Also, the date of the poll, please. Much has changed and continues to change.
@Ric:
I would also want to know if the population surveyed actually saw AIT or read State of Fear? If not, on what did they base their opinions?
Smokey,
Water vapour is the most powerful GHG, however it is not included in CO2e as it is incapable of driving temperature change. Its residence in the atmosphere is approximately 10 days (as opposed to centuries for CO2). To a first approximation the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere is fixed for a particular temperature – Water vapour enters the atmosphere via evaporation – the rate is determined by the air and ocean temperatures and is governed by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation.
So if any ‘extra’ water is added to the atmosphere, it precipitates out in a matter of days. However the amount of water vapour that the atmosphere can hold is a function of temperature, so if the atmosphere is warmed by an external influence then the concentration will increase and so its greenhouse effect will increase – a positive feedback. Of the factors that can influence climate over time, GHGs are dominant over the industrial age
…http://www.realclimate.org/images/ipcc2007_radforc.jpg
If anyone has an example from the academic literature that demonstrates that the central value of 3 °C is an amplification by a factor of 2.5 over the direct effect of 1.2 °C (2.2 °F) please prove it.
Proof is rare in science, however climate sensitivity is estimated in two ways:-, by examining historical forcings and the way the planet responded or by simulations from a climate model. There are many peer-reviewed papers using either method – a Google scholar search on ‘climate sensitivity’ produces >10,000 hits. One of the first was the Charney report to the NAS in 1979 which gave a range of 3C plus or minus 1.5C.
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~brianpm/download/charney_report.pdf
Most subsequent studies have confirmed this, with different uncertainty constraints.Here are a couple recent papers that discuss the issue:
Annan, J.D., and J. C.Hargreaves, 2006. Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity. Geophysical Research Letters 33
Gregory J.M., R.J. Stouffer, S.C.B. Raper, P.A. Stott, and N.A. Rayner, 2002. “An observationally based estimate of the climate sensitivity”. Journal of Climate
If anyone is interested I am self-employed, and advocate peaceful protest only. The thrust of my remark was impatience with purely ad hominem attacks on the Oscar-, Nobel- and Emmy- winning ex-VP, unsupported by any analysis of his arguments. There are indeed minor flaws in AIT, some identified (and some misidentified, eg corals) by a UK Judge are discussed here: http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2007/10/al-gores-inconvenient-truth.html
The details of the poll can be found by clicking the link.
John Phillips,
Anyone who reads Real Climate and New scientist without a healthy skepticism is bound to be lead astray.
Mike Bryant
John Phillip
1)Please cite your CO2 residing in the atmosphere for centuries source. If true we should have 8000ppm or so from previous history.
2)Your reference to the IPCC temperature chart ends with 2001 and speculation on the chart that the temperatures would go up asymptotically. The temperature did not go up to match the hockey stick graph even by your own statements.
I appreciate that these are your beliefs and that you appear to only find thing in support of those beliefs. But maybe you are trying to get readers here to check your ‘facts’ and see how the AGW theory doesn’t fit the current reality. If so thank you for your efforts.
@John Phillip:
The details of the poll can be found by clicking the link.
As a good skeptic, I clicked the link to ‘examine’ the survey and having found none of the answers to my questions, I asked you as you represented the survey to reflect reality.
So, the questions still stand –
I am sure you fully investigated the methodology of the survey before presenting it here. I hope you will provide the answers to these important questions with the same zest and vigor as you have shown defending AGW, Hansen, Gore, Mann, etc…
“The Day the Earth Cooled”
may also be the day the Earth went dry.
Most of you know we’re due for a Bond Event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_event
i.e. these occur ~ every 1500 years and the last one was ~ 1500 years ago; coincided with the Migration Period Pessimum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period_Pessimum
Historically, Bond events are also “aridification events.”
See for example
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age_Cold_Epoch
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2_kiloyear_event
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5.9_kiloyear_event
An oft-suggested idea for the aridification is that atmospheric water vapor is continually lost as snow cover and ice, so over time, less and less precipitation falls, leading to very widespread drought.
and in your latest comment you seem to be implying you haven’t actually READ the review that you are critiquing. Can this be true 😉
Actually, I directly stated in my last comment I spent three days reading all 400-plus pages of it.
Corrections are made in comments. I have no power of edit at el Reg.
– You confused CO2 with CO2e
This makes my argument much stronger and Stern’s goals considerably more restrictive.
– You confused consumption with production
Corrected via comment. For the article it makes little difference. A consumption rate of 1.3% indicates GDP of under 2%. That it is a very serious lowball. (You also said or strongly implied that it included worsening climate effects, but it does not, a far more fundamental error.)
– You stated Stern used the worse case IPCC scenario – he did not.
He states a range. Actually, he goes even further than the worst case IPCC. And the media, of course, with no contradiction seized on the most apocalyptic scenarios. (There was a citation on that, which I assume you did not check).
And, as I said, if he was not using the worst case, and he advocates sacrificing 1% per year to level off the effects, it just makes his proposals that much more draconian and strengthens my argument.
Did you read her majesty’s government’s stinging critique of Stern? (I assure you it was far more interesting reading than the report itself.)
John Philips
“Eighty-four percent say they personally believe human-induced warming is occurring, and 74% agree that ‘currently available scientific evidence’ substantiates its occurrence. Only 5% believe that that human activity does not contribute to greenhouse warming; the rest are unsure.”
I am a physicist, very strongly against AGW as a “chicken little” effect. Up until last November, I swallowed the AGW and accepted all the AGW rhetoric, trusting in the “scientific ethos”. After all, I would expect climatologists to trust me on the behavior of quarks. I first became curious and then suspicious when the hockey stick dominated the news: no medieval warming. I said to myself: that is funny. After all there was recently in the news the Roman period warming from that hunter who was mummified in the Alps and suddenly appeared, and also, even though a physicist I was aware of the thawing of permafrost and the settling of Greenland and Finnland.
So I started reading TAR and than the AR, all the physics pages. I had a very hard time, I was walking around at times pulling at my hair on how bad the science and the use of tools was. Mind you I have 35 years experience in computer modeling, long before most of you ever heard of computers, and model evaluations.
I agree with all the critics, the IPCC reports are not science, they are politics in scientific language and a disgrace to the scientific community.
Nevertheless, as an “honest scientist” I would be in “and 74% agree that ‘currently available scientific evidence’ substantiates its occurrence. “, because of course humans affect climate in many ways: deforestation, urbanisation , irrigation, energy consumption, particulates in the atmosphere…also CO2. CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas ( wrongly called so, even the gurus of AGW agree to the bad use of the greenhouse analogy), mostly a small percentage of the effect water vapor has.
It makes a great difference how poll questions are phrased, is what I am saying.
I will not preach to the choir. People here are on the same wavelength, most of them after serious study of the data.
I have a web page in greek, where I summarize the data versus the IPCC spaghetti models, which are the only source of “chicken Little” scenaria.
1) the IPCC spaghetti temperature predictions for the average temperature diverge from data since 1998 at least ( not to say from the infamous Hansen speech in 1988)
2) By all measures CO2 lags temperature, showing the increase of CO2 is an effect and not a cause. The 138 anthropogenic CO2 molecules in the 100.000 atmospheric molecules are a fly on an elephants trunk as far as additional shielding goes. ( including the logarithmic effect of doubling, and the frequency windows that H2O picks up if CO2 is not there)
3) The tropical troposphere which was supposed to be the CO2 anthropogenic run away feedback fingerprint in earlier versions of the IPCC ( it has almost disappeared now, consistent with change the predictions when they do not fit principle) is absolutely not there. The air over the oceans is not heating.
4) The runaway feedback of moisture driven by CO2 is not there. The atmosphere is drier
One disagreement of a model with data, throws out the models and they have to be rethought from scratch.
When Keenlyside at al reworked the PDO in the infamous climate models, lo and behold, they get cooling for the next ten years.
Who can believe them except people who are making money or expect to make money or are looking for tenure and grants out of this mess?
I am not giving links, since all these have been stated in this blog and in many others. Over at Climate Audit the new hockey stick is once again in splinters.
Again at CA there is a thread on the last paper by Koutsoyannis et al, where not only the futility of using the IPCC models for predictions is amply demonstrated, but a deeply mathematical discussion on chaos and complexity went on for a while. Chaos and other complexity tools are the only way to study the multiparameter system of coupled differential equations that a true climate model must be, IMO.
Do your research or not, I do not care.
Please cite your CO2 residing in the atmosphere for centuries source.
Certainly – Of a given pulse of emitted CO2, about one-third remains in the atmosphere after a century but about one fifth is still present after 1000 years. See fig 9a in this paper published in Journal of Atmospheric. Chemistry and Physics Vol 7, pg 2287-2312
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/7/2287/2007/acp-7-2287-2007.pdf
Dee – the survey was by mail of a random selection of 489 AGU and AMS members. It does not take much detective work to deduce that if 64% of the scientists polled found Gore’s movie reliable, then the ‘don’t knows’ – those who had not seen it – must reside in the other 36%.
@John Phillips:
Lets see… the questions are:
How was the study population was selected?
Random from the self-identified members of AWS and AGU members.
What are the qualifications of the studied population to opine on the questions asked?
Not answered. How many were PhD, MS, BS? What was their discipline?
What were the questions asked?
Not answered.
Did the population surveyed actually watch AIT AND read State of Fear?
It does not take much detective work to deduce that if 64% of the scientists polled found Gore’s movie reliable, then the ‘don’t knows’ – those who had not seen it – must reside in the other 36%.
Sorry, this is an assumption on your part. There is no evidence that supports this assumption.
Perhaps you can provide the rest of the answers, please.
Its residence in the atmosphere is approximately 10 days (as opposed to centuries for CO2).
Centuries? Plural? I’ve read a number of competing estimates for CO2 persistence ranging from years to decades.
(You also fail to note that according to the DoE and IPCC, half the industry-emitted carbon winds up in the land and ocean sinks.)
Only 5% believe that that human activity does not contribute to greenhouse warming; the rest are unsure.”
But was there a question separating CO2 from, say, land use? Or indicating that CO2 does increase the GH effect but only by a trivial amount?
John Phillips comments that 8 inches of sea level rise in the past century or so is indicative human influence on climate change. What about the 2 meter drop in the past 2000 years? or the 100 meter rise since the last ice age which is only 75% of the rise two ice ages ago?
The results of opinion surveys are very heavily dependent on how the questions are stated. Without seeing the actual questions, it is impossible to give credence to the results. Return rates are usually low on mail-out surveys, somewhere between 2 and 10%, so the number of recipients of the survy must be in the thousands if they got 489 back. If the survey team only sent out 489, then the probable number of returned surveys would be in the 10 to 48 range, too small a sample to be reliable.
Mail-in surveys also have bias is that they usaually only evoke a response from those who feel strongly one way or the other. Luke-warmers usually don’t bother. So we must ask what the motivation was for completing and returning the survey.
Interview type surveys are not much better. Studies have been done on interviewer bias. In effect, if the interviewer is told that a survey will result in 75% positive repsonses, it does turn out that way. If the interviewer is told that she/he can expect 75% negative responses, it turns out that way. Even when the questions asked are identical and show no bias one way or the other.
We all know that research surveys are not reliable until they have been rigourously tuned to remove bias and proven to have validity. One-off surveys are interesting, but unreliable.
I would trust the British Courts’ findings that AIT is seriously flawed more than a mail-out survey.
John Philip
Thanks for the link. The paper itself is is a discussion of models and does not include measured results. Indeed taken against even your quoted temperature changes are outside the papers expected results. The figure 9a references yet another model that even in its conclusion suggests that it may be used for AGW calculations. It too does not include any actual measurements of CO2 that confirms its results. It is only a model and an untested one at that. It is very easy to speculate with a model, I write code for a living. I have a Q/A department that tests all of my code before it is released into the marketplace. The code is tested and matched to real world events. If the code cannot meet these standards it is not released. Even after rigorous testing bugs may be found many years later. These models even in their publication discussions state that there are unexpected results.
There is no real world confirmation of the life cycle of CO2 in the atmosphere according to your citation, only speculation. The speculation does not take into account how CO2 went from a very high level in the past to its current very low level.
There is a very unusual story which appeared in the National Geographic about NASA’s report on the Ulysses space probe. It is so atypical of the National Geographic that I almost have to wonder if everyone from the Ministry of Truth was on vacation this past week.
Sun’s Power Hits New Low, May Endanger Earth?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/09/080924-solar-wind.html
Read the full story but pay particular attention to the following paragraphs:
“In the early 1600s Galileo and other astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots over a 30-year period. Normally, the early scientists would have witnessed closer to 50,000.
Scientists have also speculated for centuries about an intuitive link between the sun’s intensity and Earth’s climate.
There is evidence of the sun causing short-term impacts on Earth’s weather.
The so-called Maunder Minimum, a time of low solar activity, lasted from about 1645 to 1715. During this time, access to Greenland was largely cut off by ice, and canals in Holland routinely froze solid, according to NASA.
Glaciers advanced in the Alps, and sea ice increased so much that no open water flowed around Iceland in the year 1695. “
“There is a very unusual story which appeared in the National Geographic about NASA’s report on the Ulysses space probe. It is so atypical of the National Geographic that I almost have to wonder if everyone from the Ministry of Truth was on vacation this past week.”
I think it crashed NASA’s servers, since they seem to have all been down for almost a day now. JPL is still up though, but you may have hit upon the truth, that the Ministry of Truth controls and maintains NASA’s Internet Presence, and they have been on vacation and haven’t noticed the breach of security and breakdown.
Hyonmin – depends on your definition of ‘model’ It was actually based on an analytic approach to the Bern cycle, and that paper’s findings are supported by this study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research ….
The carbon cycle of the biosphere will take a long time to completely neutralize and sequester anthropogenic
CO2. We show a wide range of model forecasts of this effect. For the best guess cases, which include air/seawater,
CaCO3, and silicate weathering equilibria as affected by an ocean temperature feedback, we expect that 17-33% of
the fossil fuel carbon will still reside in the atmosphere 1 kyr from now, decreasing to 10-15% at 10 kyr, and 7%
at 100 kyr. The mean lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 is about 30-35 kyr.
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2005.fate_co2.pdf
I know, I know, its ‘just another model’ … 😉
The speculation does not take into account how CO2 went from a very high level in the past to its current very low level.
‘in the past’ is just a bit vague. CO2 is now 35% higher than it has been throughout the period for which we have ice core proxies, some 650K years, yes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
Moderator: OT and apologise for this but my computer at work has been blocked from posting on this blog. If it is at your end- please let me know and I’ll go away…a reason would be nice but not necessary.
If it is NOT at your end, then someone in Tallahasse has placed WUWT on the blocked sites list…along with games, porno, ect…not especially a nice neighborhood, but noteworthy none the less as we normally have access to all climate sites as related to our duties….
Your reply would be greatly appreciated!
Env. Specialist II
State of Florida
CDL
Reply: You are coming through loud and clear this time. Not sure what is going on in Tallahassee. Please fill us in if WUWT is actually blocked in Florida. Perhaps one of our resident gurus can provide you with some simple tests you can run at your workstation to see if you can reach us. – Anne
John Philip
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
The CO2 has gone somewhere and it is not described in your links. By the way have you seen walking with dinosaurs. Ever think about how those animals survived for all those millions of years. They must have needed huge quantities of plants, nice and warm back then with lots of CO2. Amazing that the asymptote didn’t attack. It is thought that maybe the cold did.
Hi Anna
Thanks for taking the time to reply. A few thoughts
the IPCC spaghetti temperature predictions for the average temperature diverge from data since 1998 at least
As a physicist you will aware of the need to avoid cherry picking data points, e.g an anomalously high start point. Ten years is not a significant period in climate terms. The projected temperatures from the TAR are here: http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/552.htm
They are baselined at 1990. They don’t diverge much in the first 2 decades, taking A2 as a typical midrange scenario, the projected trend for the first 2 decades is 0.165C/decade. Respecting the ‘no-NASA’ rule here, this compares well with the actual observed trend from the last three decades of RSS satellite data of 0.169C /decade.
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html
Switching datasets for no better reason than that the RSS annual figures are not readily available, the Hadley Centre figures are
Actual IPCC Projected
1990 0.162 0.162
2000 0.397 0.322
2007 0.404 0.443
I’ve used the 5 year mean for the actual, except for 2007 where I’ve used the annual figure. The IPCC projected for 2007 is interpolated from the linear trend. The actual 2007 is just 0.039C below the projected, (versus a measurement uncertainty of 0.1C). Where have I gone wrong?
By all measures CO2 lags temperature, showing the increase of CO2 is an effect and not a cause.
Or the ‘the chicken came from an egg, therefore an egg cannot come from a chicken’ argument. At the glacial/interglacial timescales, temperature rises are driven by changes in orbital forcings. However once a warming is initiated it causes the release of CO2, which causes more warming, which releases more CO2 which causes more warming and so on until a new equilibrium is reached. This argument is advancd so frequently that the Royal Society has named it ‘misleading argument No 3 …’
http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=6229
When Keenlyside at al reworked the PDO in the infamous climate models, lo and behold, they get cooling for the next ten years
Actually, no. This paper was widely misreported in the media. In fact, as Joe Romm has pointed out, the authors predicted
– The coming decade (2010 to 2020) is poised to be the warmest on record, globally.
– The coming decade is poised to see faster temperature rise than any decade since the authors’ calculations began in 1960.
– The fast warming would likely begin early in the next decade ( similar to the 2007 prediction by the Hadley Center in Science) .
– The mean North American temperature for the decade from 2005 to 2015 is projected to be slightly warmer than the actual average temperature of the decade from 1993 to 2003.
See http://tinyurl.com/4xwwmf
Again at CA there is a thread on the last paper by Koutsoyannis et al, where not only the futility of using the IPCC models for predictions is amply demonstrated,
I have not read the CA thread but I am aware of the paper. Is it a fair summary to say that they examined the temperature records from some surface stations and compared them to co-located grid points in single realisations of a few climate models and found serious discrepencies?
I thought the paper inconclusive, indeed ironic. Two problems: firstly, one of S. McIntyre’s issues is the sparseness of coverage by surface stations, and of course our host here has issues with the quality of some of the surface station records. Ironic then that records from just eight of these suspect stations worldwide is apparently sufficient to render the whole literature on climate modelling ‘futile’!
Secondly, there are any numbers of reasons why metrics from a grid point in a GCM might not correspond exactly with an actual surface station – the station may be at an altitude different to the mean, it may have micro-climate effects, it may even be situated next to an air conditioner :-). GCMs are just not designed to be downscaled to single grid box resolution – and this does not detract from the IPCC’s conclusions – they state that detection and attribution of climate changes is only clearly possible at continental scales and above.
regards,
JP
“John Philip”:
Water vapor is the major greenhouse gas. Alarmists tie themselves in knots trying to downplay that fact. If water vapor dropped to zero, are the alarmists saying there would be no effect?
If H2O isn’t ‘driving’ the climate, then there’s no need to be concerned with the fact that the major greenhouse gas concentration has been trending downward: click
[…] I forgot whose site I found a link to this guys site. My apology’s to whoever it was. The Day The Earth Cooled On the same day Gore spoke, scientists involved in NASA’s Ulysses project reported that the […]