September 12th, 2008 Ozone hole over the Antarctic
From NASA News
This is considered a “moderately large” ozone hole, according to NASA atmospheric scientist, Paul Newman. And while this year’s ozone hole is the fifth largest on record, the amount of ozone depleting substances have decreased about 3.8% from peak levels in 2000. The largest ozone hole ever recorded occurred in 2006, at a size of 10.6 million square miles.
The Antarctic ozone hole reached its annual maximum on Sept. 12, 2008, stretching over 27 million square kilometers, or 10.5 million square miles. The area of the ozone hole is calculated as an average of the daily areas for Sept. 21-30 from observations from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite.
What I find most interesting is this press release from last year from NASA:
NASA Keeps Eye on Ozone Layer Amid Montreal Protocol’s Success
NASA scientists will join researchers from around the world to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Protocol.
In that PR they write:
“The levels of ozone depleting compounds in the atmosphere continue to drop, thanks to 20 years of scientific advances following the signing of the Montreal Protocol.”
“The Montreal Protocol has been a resounding success,” said Richard Stolarski, a speaker at the symposium from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “The effect can be seen in the leveling off of chlorine compounds in the atmosphere and the beginning of their decline.”
No mention of the possibility of cosmic rays then, but in the face of a reversal, I wonder if maybe they’ll consider alternate suspects. Sometimes I think of our current atmospheric science like a stubborn district attorney that refuses to look beyond what he considers the prime suspect.
“We’ve got our criminals and their names are CO2 and CFC, I’m confident that the forensics will show them guilty beyond a shadow of the doubt”.
Trouble is, if forensics had the same sloppy data gathering and adjustment procedures as we’ve seen climate science, the defense would have the forensics tossed out easily.
h/t to David Walton
evanjones: I won’t derail things with any further discussion about the Iraq War except to say that your spinning and speculation there makes me see what you consider to be “cost-benefit analysis” which is basically to come up with estimates / interpretations / WAGs of the costs and benefits that give you the conclusion that you seem to favor.
Unfortunately, that leaves with a period so short that the errorbars are any trend estimates are huge. And, that is confirmed by the fact that using, for example, NASA GISS and Hadcrut data gives quite different estimates of the trends (although this difference just accounts for the error due to analysis of the data and doesn’t include the contribution due to “climate noise” like El Nino – La Nina etc). And, of course, climate models runs with steadily increasing CO2 levels see the same large variations in trends over such short periods (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/what-the-ipcc-models-really-say/langswitch_lang/sk ).
I’d call it pure speculation based on essentially no mechanistic reasoning and ignoring all understanding we have of climate and its responses to radiative forcings, etc.
What are you talking about exactly? Most of what I have seen, from e.g., Soden or from Dessler’s group, confirms that the water vapor feedback is behaving basically as expected by the climate models. Although the cloud feedback is more uncertain, there are many good reasons (from estimates of the total climate feedback by various means such as paleoclimate data and the Mt. Pinatubo eruption) to believe that this total feedback is in the range that the IPCC says it is.
Mike Bryant says:
No…That’s a different Joel Shore. (There seem to be at least 3 of us floating around.) If you want me, you might try googling “Joel D. Shore”.
Joel,
If that blurb is about you, it makes me wonder if you have been crafting this editorial content for a paying customer. Of course I could be way off base here, but I understand that there is a $300,000,000.00 budget for precisely this type of “content”.
I also just realized that you and Yaakoba are on the same side of this discussion. Just a couple of “real” skeptics trying to set the record straight.
Mike
Spinning and speculation? Any historian (or policymaker) worth half his salt is well aware that doing nothing is doing something (to quote liberal Tony Blair). Why do you think I “favor” what I favor? Repressed imperialism? Try lives and freedom. Since 1991, Saddam had massacred (not just in ’91) and/or starved between half a million and a million of his own people already. No WAG there. The only war crime the US is guilty of is the “war crime of inaction” of not having invaded once Saddam violated the treaty and started massacring his own people. A crime of inaction we committed every day from then to 2003. Your mileage may vary. As for me, I am proud of my country, proud of great Britain, and grateful to every nation that lifted a finger or paid a penny to help Iraq in its agony, even though we took action so late in the day.
I don’t favor invasion of Iran. But Iran is not a bleeding sore, a charnel-house, a slow-motion holocaust in progress. Iraq was.
You’re willing to take action to prevent climate change that I believe will result indirectly in an awful lot of deaths. But no doubt you think death from climate change is certain and no ill effects to the poorest nations of the world will result if we sacrifice a third to a half of world growth in the process. And you believe we are reaching a tipping point, so immediate action is necessary.
Well I think such action will result in an awful lot of deaths. And I think that if AGW is a problem we will have plenty of time to solve it down the road–if it even is a problem. And I think we’ll know a lot more about it either way in a few years than we do now.
However, I know you genuinely believe what you believe, and I respect that even though I do not agree. So I do not accuse you of spin.
What are you talking about exactly? Most of what I have seen, from e.g., Soden or from Dessler’s group, confirms that the water vapor feedback is behaving basically as expected by the climate models.
Spencer flatly claims otherwise. He asserts that the bulk of the extra water in the lower trop is going towards to cloud formation, and that this is resulting in negative, not positive feedback. The last decade of the record (flat) would seem to be consistent with that.
And the Rev has posted humidity measurements some time back, and they do not conform with any models I ever heard of. Specific humidity is down in all but the lowest altitudes.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/21/a-window-on-water-vapor-and-planetary-temperature-part-2/
Furthermore, your assertion baffles me: the climate models are badly off, so how can water vapor feedback be behaving “basically as expected”? I agree that non-cloud water vapor would create feedback, but I am not seeing that vapor. That’s the point.
I’d call it pure speculation based on essentially no mechanistic reasoning and ignoring all understanding we have of climate and its responses to radiative forcings, etc.
Is it you contention that the PDO, AMO, IPO, NOA, AO and AAO do not have warm and cool phases or that they do not affect global temperatures and that there is nor mechanistic reason to believe they do? Really?
I believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. And I believe that if there are positive feedback loops at work, it will magnify the effects. But what I do not believe is that there are any significant positive feedback loops at work, here.
Much like real scientists never claim that CO2 is the _only_ driver of climate change, real scientists never claim that CFCs are the _only_ driver of the magnitude of the Antarctic ozone depletion. Given that the loading levels of anthropogenic chlorinated compounds aren’t even 10% less than their peak (which was more than 200% more than natural background chlorine), it isn’t surprising that year to year variability might obscure that trend (due to temperatures, cloud formation, cosmic rays, whatever).
I do recommend the UNEP report, much like I would recommend the IPCC reports: if you actually _read_ them, you will see that scientists are quite upfront about what is and is not consistent with their expectations, and what the sources of natural as well as anthropogenic variability are.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/csd/assessments/2006/chapters/executivesummary.pdf
Also, check out the figure in Q13 in their twenty questions document to see the fairly dramatic decrease in global ozone (not just the Antarctic hole) that pretty much peaked in the early 1990s, which is when stratospheric chlorine loading also peaked.: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/csd/assessments/2006/chapters/twentyquestions.pdf
Marcus,
” I would recommend the IPCC reports: if you actually _read_ them, you will see that scientists are quite upfront about what is and is not consistent with their expectations, ”
Such as the Medieval Warm Period and The Little Ice AGE …..
How can any part of any IPCC report be trusted.
Nigel Lawson said it best,
“A grain of truth, and a mountain of nonsense.”
They (the IPCC) are politicians pretending to be scientists,
read between the lines mate.
Mike Bryant says:
And, if pigs could fly… I told you that it is not about me. And, while it would be great if I actually could get paid for doing this, alas I do it as the scientific equivalent of a lawyer’s “pro bono” work. At any rate, my real job completely unrelated to climate change pays me fine. (By completely unrelated, I mean in the content of what I am studying; I do use a lot of computational modeling techniques and study issues like light scattering that have applications both to my work and to climate science even though what I am studying is very different.)
I won’t touch that one except to say that I have no idea what Yaakoba is saying most of the time. “Helium is lighter than gravity but it evaporates”? Whatever.
[REPLY – Yes, you did make that clear, but it’s quite possible that Mike Bryant hadn’t read your reply because it had yet to be approved when he made his post. I am quite sure we take you at your word. There are a number of Evan Joneses in the internet, including at least one environmentalist whom I sincerely doubt would share ANY of my views. ~ Evan]
Thanks for the try Tom, but the articles you site did not show that the proposed mechanism actually happened in real birds, and in fact tests on birds generally showed positive reproductive effects at least as often as negative. One experiment I recall that had slight but significant negative result fed the birds 200 times the highest dosage ever encountered in the wild. Even that dosage didn’t discourage ducks.
It has been almost 30 years but I recognized a couple of you citations immediately .
Most puplished papers are of course proven wrong eventually. Saddly we set our fears in stone with the “Ban”. By the way the idea that a US ban did not stop others from using DDT is a talking point but is not honest. As UN programs throughout the 70s and 80s were largely US funded and DDT use was forbidden in US funded programs the results were a wider ban. Yes places like India eventually built their own manufacturing infrastructure.
On the supposed egg shell thickness measurements, as I recall these were done before people realized that the break down daughter substance that was being tested for, and that could “only” come from DDT was in fact found to come from natural sources in at least 90% of all identified cases prior to about 1980.
The great DDT poisoning of the “Elephant” population being the straw that broke that one.
It could be a result of the manufacturing of chemosynthesis for the cure.
evanjones says:
Sorry. “Spin” was a poor choice of words as I did not mean to imply that you do not believe what you said. Let’s leave it at that we disagree on a lot of the facts and speculations about what might have happened had different actions occurred or not occurred.
Well, yes, Spencer may believe this. However, this is very new work by him, some of which is just beginning to be published in the peer-reviewed literature so there has not been much opportunity for scientists to react to it (although I have seen some blog criticisms of aspects of Spencer’s work, e.g. by RealClimate and tamino) and it contradicts a lot of other work in the field. So, in other words, you are betting a lot on the idea that Spencer is correct and a lot of other science, including some that has withstood a considerably longer period of scrutiny by other scientists, is wrong.
As for the fairly flat temperatures over the last several years, since this is not in contradiction with the global climate models forced with constantly increasing CO2, I don’t really see it as evidence in support of Spencer’s hypothesis.
So, you accepting the results of data available on the web with little explanation being plotted and interpretted by people who don’t know much about it and not being written up for peer review even though these claims are in contradiction with peer-reviewed work. (See here for some references: http://sciencepoliticsclimatechange.blogspot.com/2006/08/more-on-water-vapor-feedback.html ) Note that the Soden paper explicitly mentions the problem with the radiosonde re-analysis data that I believe Anthony has relied on here.
The peer-reviewed evidence that I am aware of (noted above) demonstrates that the water vapor feedback is indeed behaving basically as expected. And, note that the Soden paper looks not only at the trends over long times but also at the shorter-term fluctuations and how they correlate with temperature fluctuations.
I believe that these result primarily in the redistribution of heat, not in significant global warming or cooling…particularly sustained for decades. (El Nino and La Nina can have an effect on global temperatures but that is for a much shorter period of time, over which exchanges of heat between the oceans and the atmosphere can be significant.)
Joel
Tamino apears to have misunderstood this paper and his critique at real climate appears to show this.
I’m not taking sides other than that at the moment,
Let’s leave it at that we disagree on a lot of the facts and speculations about what might have happened had different actions occurred or not occurred.
Okay.
Well, yes, Spencer may believe this. However, this is very new work by him, some of which is just beginning to be published in the peer-reviewed literature so there has not been much opportunity for scientists to react to it (although I have seen some blog criticisms of aspects of Spencer’s work, e.g. by RealClimate and tamino) and it contradicts a lot of other work in the field.
Yes, it’s new.
So, in other words, you are betting a lot on the idea that Spencer is correct and a lot of other science, including some that has withstood a considerably longer period of scrutiny by other scientists, is wrong.
Say rather that I would wait until it is proven or disproven before enacting policy. This is an important distinction.
The peer-reviewed evidence that I am aware of (noted above) demonstrates that the water vapor feedback is indeed behaving basically as expected.
Wasn’t it expected that positive feedback would accelerate temperature increase from a rate of c. 0.7C per century to over 3.0C?
I believe that these result primarily in the redistribution of heat, not in significant global warming or cooling…particularly sustained for decades.
Well, yes. But we measure that which is at the surface.
Oceans seem to have been cooling for several years (and sea level dropping, even with its positive adjustment).
not in significant global warming or cooling…particularly sustained for decades.
But note the trends from 1950-1976 and 1976 to 2001. An up-down correlation is more significant than the straight-line variety.
(El Nino and La Nina can have an effect on global temperatures but that is for a much shorter period of time, over which exchanges of heat between the oceans and the atmosphere can be significant.)
But that is what the PDO is said to affect: Duration and intensities of Nino vs. Nina.
Such as the Medieval Warm Period and The Little Ice AGE …..
Yes, that was very careless of Dr. Deming.
Have they found it yet?
evanjones says:
But, there will always be someone around to throw out a new hypothesis, so what you are really calling for is a recipe for never taking action. When you have contentious issues like this, the debate goes on forever…just look at the evolution / intelligent design example.
And, why should the default be to not enact any policy until you know with more certainty? Do you only buy fire insurance once your house is already in flames? We all have to make decisions in the face of uncertainty…and hedge our bets. Here is a good article about that in the case of climate change: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;306/5695/416
Not sure what you are saying here. The general rate of warming seen over the last 30 years is compatible with the climate sensitivity range of the IPCC. (Because of uncertainties in forcings such as manmade aerosols as well as natural forcings and variability, however, this data doesn’t provide very strong constraints on climate sensitivity, which is why it is useful to also look at paleoclimate data and events such as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, and to also look at things like the water vapor data that Soden did to test the specific feedback mechanisms in the models.)
Is it? Even so, I’d question how long term El Nino and La Nina can affect the global climate. The heat has to come from somewhere.
“We’ve got our criminals and their names are CO2 and CFC, I’m confident that the forensics will show them guilty beyond a shadow of the doubt”.
Who said this? I can’t find the source anywhere? If anybody has the link, please post it.
But, there will always be someone around to throw out a new hypothesis, so what you are really calling for is a recipe for never taking action.
Not necessarily. Spencer isn’t just “someone”. And this strikes right to the heart of the theory, If feedback loops fall, everything falls.
And, why should the default be to not enact any policy until you know with more certainty?
Partly because the default is best for wealth and world growth.
Partly because the theory is weakening rather than strengthening (and yes, I know the IPCC “certainty” progression). It isn’t gone. but it’s teetering.
Partly because if there is inaction and proof hits us in the face, there will be action, but if we take action and the theory is disproved, we’ll never reverse course.
That last is just a pathetic political reality; I didn’t make those stupid rules, but I know ’em when I see ’em.
And I also suspect that a direct fix such as pole-to-pole orbital reflectors (just an example) might prove far more effective and infinitely cheaper than “stopping the engine that moves the world”. That would (at worst) cost around two years’ worth of Stern of Kyoto.
Finally, I just don’t think the evidence is strong enough.
Do you only buy fire insurance once your house is already in flames?
It entirely depends on what the fire insurance policy costs. And then there’s the likelihood factor. Is GW as likely as a fire or less so? Why not spend half your savings on meteorite insurance? Should we wait until the meteor hits?
The fire insurance analogy doesn’t work because the factors are different. I think you are putting the farm in hock for the fire insurance.
Not sure what you are saying here. The general rate of warming seen over the last 30 years is compatible with the climate sensitivity range of the IPCC.
But not the last 60. You are taking an upswing and a leveling instead of an entire cycle, which includes a downswing. 1979 was a nadir. Sure, if you go from trough to peak you get a higher delta. try a peak-to-peak. Say, 1940 to roughly 2000.
When you go from 1979 – 2007 you take a 20-year period when all the cycles flipped to warm and a ten year cycle where they remained warm. But you exclude the cooling part. You need a full cycle.
I see no evidence that the longterm rate of warming has quadrupled. And I grant you that feedback works. But you need the non-cloud humidity to rise, and it hasn’t really. And yes, there is dirty snow and the like. It’s a biggish system.
Is it? Even so, I’d question how long term El Nino and La Nina can affect the global climate. The heat has to come from somewhere.
They fluctuate in 30-year ups and downs. The heat comes, the heat goes. There are larger cycles, too. DeVries. Milankovic. And the seasons they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down.
It comes mostly from the sun (99+%).
It is stored in the seas mostly and a little is stored in the atmosphere. It is released back to space …
The seas can absorb it in one place and give it up in another and warm the atmosphere.
They system has not run away over 600M years or more, even when CO2 levels were higher than they are today …
Richard Sharpe says:
I don’t know what your point is. Nobody serious is saying that we are going to have a Venus-like run away here on Earth either. (The folks over at RealClimate have been very clear on this point before.) However, what the paleoclimate record shows (see, e.g., here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;306/5697/821 ) is that the climate system is quite sensitive to small perturbations, presumably because of the positive feedbacks which, while insufficient to cause an instability, are large enough to magnify what the effect of the perturbation would be in the absence of feedbacks. (The paleoclimate history also suggests that there are tipping points in the climate system which can lead to quite sudden shifts in climate beyond a certain point…although again, not a runaway Venus-type instability.)
evanjones says:
You only seem to think that because you ignore the evidence in the peer-reviewed literature that it has and instead rely on someone using suspect data available on the web that he doesn’t understand very well to make some plots.
As for your analogy about putting the farm in hock, if you believe that reducing (or sequestering) our carbon emissions is so difficult, what then do you think will happen when we run out of fossil fuels? We will have to get off of fossil fuels eventually. Really the only question is whether we do it before or after we have caused irreparable harm to our environment.
1. We will never run out of fossil fuels. Understand? They will simply become increasingly expensive to extract, as the easy oil becomes more scarce. With a higher price, the market will then produce more. Econ 1A.
2. Sequestering carbon dioxide underground is the stupidest idea in the history of civilization; the equivalent of hiring an army of $100,000/year unionized bureaucrats to dig 10X10X10 foot holes in the ground, then move them 20 feet every six months. In fact, sequestration is even stupider than that, because an increase in atmospheric CO2 is beneficial to life on Earth. The atmosphere is currently starved of carbon dioxide, and adding a very tiny extra bit is good for both plants and animals. Carbon is not evil as the alarmist propaganda contends; we are made mostly of carbon.
3. “Irreparable harm” is an alarmist term with no basis in fact:
Bikini atoll was subjected to multiple zero altitude thermonuclear tests using the newly invented hydrogen bomb. Today the atoll is brimming with life, and appears no different than similar atolls. If there were “irreparable” harm anywhere, it would be at ground zero on Bikini atoll.
And Pittsburgh, for example, had such heavy pollution in the 1950’s that most days you couldn’t see across the rivers. Industrial waste was discharged directly into the rivers with no processing or treatment.
Today, Pittsburgh is clean. The air is clean, and the water is clean. The EPA now states that fish caught in the rivers are fit for human consumption. In fact, the U.S. is one of the very the cleanest countries on Earth, if not the cleanest.
The entire focus of the environmental movement [as opposed to conservation] is to hobble the U.S., while most countries only pay lip service to the UN’s agenda while scolding the U.S., as they pour soot into the atmosphere and untreated industrial sludge into the rivers and oceans.
The “UN go-o-o-o-o-d, America ba-a-a-a-a-d” globaloney contingent, led by Al Gore and his clones in the UN and Hollywood, want the entire U.S. standard of living to go straight down via retarded schemes like “carbon sequestration,” with absolutely zero proof that these pea-brained proposals will do one bit of good.
Smokey says:
So, are you saying that Econ 1A implies there are infinite amounts of fossil fuels available to extract?!?! (What I assume you would say is, “No…Once the price of fossil fuels gets high enough, cheaper alternatives to it will be found.” However, this is of course exactly what will happen if we raise the price of fossil fuels (or, more precisely, the CO2 emitted from fossil fuel burning) by putting on a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. Market fundamentalists seem to believe that the market works wonderfully when nature imposes limits on us but if we artificially impose a limit ourselves with market mechanisms, it will cause impoverishment of us all!
As for the rest of your post, such paranoid “the UN and Al Gore are out to get the U.S. diatribes” are frankly too silly to merit a response.
Good idea, Joel, artificially inflate the price of oil by giving the government even more money. Brilliant! Simply brilliant.
Hasn’t the government already inflated the price enough? Did you say your doctorate is in economics?
*sigh* Some folks just can’t seem to get it. Maybe it’s a failure of reading comprehension.
So let’s try to teach today’s basic lesson again: We will never run out of oil. Is that really so hard to comprehend? The price may rise until other alternatives are preferable. Heck, the price of oil might rise to $1,000/bbl. But there will always be oil, at a market price set by the equilibrium point in the demand/supply curve. Econ 1A.
And ‘cap and trade’ is simply another tax. It does nothing at all to make the world better or the environment cleaner. It raises the price of food and energy, whacking the world’s poor the hardest.
Despite giving hypocritical lip service to “the poor,” the Left could not care less if they have a much tougher life, or even if millions die due to their anti-humanity leftist ideas. As one of their heroes, Josef Stalin, said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
The truth is that considerable numbers of “environmentalists” are secretly delighted at the prospect of large swathes of the world’s poor starving. ‘Cap and trade’ will lead in this direction, without it doing one whit of good for the environment.
Finally, being unable to formulate a reasonable response to #2 and #3 above isn’t surprising. Carbon sequestration and ‘irreparable’ harm to the environment are logically unsupportable. Better to just call rational arguments against them “silly”, huh? No thinking required.