"There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

What else was going on 55 million years ago?
What about the extinction that occured 65 million years ago that is in a layer all over the place?

If they are missing it this badly on a scale that makes all of the multidecadal oscillations moot, they have no hope of appeasing those that expect model results to validate against any real-world current data.
Thank You Rice researchers…now if only you could get the readership of the latest Discover mag so you counter the Pelosi-approved message mailed to millions a couple of weeks ago. (I sure am canceling my subscription)

So either our data on the climate millions of years ago is wrong?
Or Co2 should be causing much more warming than we are seeing and models predicting? So something unknown has been stopping the warming from happening and we don’t know whether this something may stop – making things much warmer sudenly. Or get stronger to make things cooler.
Or there was an unknown something back then that caused earth to get warmer for a given CO2 that isn’t happening now?
Which are we more likely to be wrong about? The climate millions of years ago? Or the climate between 100 years ago and 100 years in the future?

10,000 years to rise 7C? Linearly?
Why am I not worried.

From the commentary on this paper by David Beerling in the same issue:
“The upshot of the study by Zeebe and colleagues is that forecasts of future warming could be severely underestimating the extent of the problem that lies in store for humanity as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. Understanding warming feedbacks that were triggered by rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations in the past constitutes a pressing scientific challenge. However, if we are to avert irreversible long-term warming, prudence dictates that we urgently cut greenhouse-gas emissions, primarily through phasing out our dependence on coal-fired power stations, unless fitted with carbon capture and sequestration technology. But the global energy demand is rising, and there is no technological ‘magic bullet’ to solve the alternative-energy challenge. Unremitting release of CO2 into the atmosphere therefore looks set to continue in the coming decades, and evidence from Earth’s history suggests that humanity is in danger of entraining feedbacks that will accelerate the arrival of a much warmer planet.”

“In addition to rapidly rising levels of atmospheric carbon, global surface temperatures rose dramatically during the PETM. Average temperatures worldwide rose by about 7 degrees Celsius — about 13 degrees Fahrenheit — in the relatively short geological span of about 10,000 years.”
Maybe 55 million years ago our primitive pre-human ancestors learned about the magic of FIRE! The idea spread around the uncivilized globe over a period of about 10,000 years as fire migrated with our primitive pre-human ancestors.
At least that’s a better hypothesis than others I’ve heard.

I would like to know how they determined that temperatures went up 7 degrees C 55 million years ago. Occam’s razor would suggest that whatever proxy they are using for the temperature is wrong.
I’m also curious about what mechanism they suggest for a 70% increase in CO2.

Well wat they are not saying is that since the temperature rise is proportional to the log of the CO2 rise, then 70% rise is not so much more than 38% rise logarithmically, so howcome they got a seven drgree rise back then, and we got almost nothing.
And of course we know the earth’s orbit was exactly the same as it is today, and the solar constant was 1366 W/m^2 just like now; so absolutley nothing has changed except the climate sensitivity.
Maybe if the modellers used a bigger clmate sensitivity they may get an answer more like the result they are looking for.
How many million years ago did they say this was ?
Yeah these proxies for real data, are just a joy to work with; the biggest problem is trying to convince your Professor, that is isn’t just all guess work.

Carbon dioxide concentration was high during the PETM, true; however, it was declining since the Early Cretaceous. For the transition Paleocene-Eocene, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 340 ppmV, lower than during the Miocene, which could explain only 0.8 °C from the total effective fluctuation of 13 °C; nevertheless, the temperature was sustainably increasing since the end of the last Ice Age during the transition Middle-Late Jurassic. The dramatic rise of carbon dioxide during the transition Paleocene-Eocene could be easily explained when considering the release of this gas from the oceans and the dry sand by the increase of surface temperatures.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-49567JH-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=957579875&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=52c5af9622535b34fb667c4606561759

“Eric Naegle (17:55:24) :
Just wondering. Is there any chance that the elevated carbon levels in the atmosphere during PETM could have been the result of warming and not the cause?”
Good question….. Because as we all know, CO2 lags behind temperature rise. The Ice cores dating around 400 thousand years show at least an 800 year lag.
It would be a good assumption to say the same was true 55 million years ago.

andy stoffers (18:11:38) :
So seven degrees warming in 10,000 years produced one of the worst mass extinctions in the history of the world.
One of the five worst massive extinctions occurred in the transition Cretaceous-Tertiary (65 million years ago) and it is attributed to flood volcanic eruptions of basalt from India’s Deccan Traps which were accompanied by massive emissions of volcanic toxic gases. The fluctuation of temperature and climate change occurred 10 million years after the massive extinction occurred.
As I have said in my previous post, the rise of carbon dioxide occurred millions of years after the warming started. It seems that the volcanic activity is related in some way to warming.

The can of coke heated was used to prove runaway warming on NOW.
If the Earth was the can of coke, something had to have heated it to cause it to release so much CO2.
Passing dwarf star?
Hot arm of the Milky Way?
Intense cloud of radiation?
Nearby Supernova?
Big slowdown in Earth rotation rate (releasing stored energy)?
Incendiary comet swarm torching planet?
Highly elliptic orbit dwarf star getting close in (the Sun’s unknown companion)?
Sun in massive active overdrive?
Whatever it was 55 million years ago, we were NOT around.
Not even close by a factor of 10.
No mass extinction 55 million years ago, so an impact event is way down of the list. Maybe a swarm of meteorites, but then the evidence would be the layer along with the carbon.
How’s about a Carbon Meteorite?

Let’s see what scientists believe happened during this horrible time 55 million years ago. I am wondering where the now Arctic was during that time .. At any rate, it appears life made some major strides back then.
From: http://www.sdnhm.org/exhibits/mystery/fg_timeline.html
(San Diego Natural History Museum)
“Eocene Epoch
55-34 million years ago Plate tectonics and volcanic activity form the Rockies in western North America. Erosion fills basins. Continental collisions between India and Asia culminate in the Alpine-Himalayan mountain system. Antarctica and Australia continue to separate and drift apart.
The climate is subtropical and moist throughout North America and Europe. Early forms of horse, rhinoceros, camel, and other modern groups such as bats evolve in Europe and North America. Creodonts and ruminant ungulates evolve.
Archaic whales (archeocetes) evolve from terrestrial meat-eating ungulates. Sirenians (dugongs and manatees) first evolve in the shallow Tethys Sea.
Paleocene Epoch
65-55 million years ago During the Paleocene, the vast inland seas of the Cretaceous Period dry up, exposing large land areas in North America and Eurasia. Australia begins to separate from Antarctica, and Greenland splits from North America. A remnant Tethys Sea persists in the equatorial region. Mammalian life diversifies, spreading into all major environments. Placental mammals eventually dominate the land, and many differentiated forms evolve, including early ungulates (hoofed animals), primates, rodents, and carnivores. “

Isn’t this just the same point that can be made from the ice core data?
The temperature changes in the Vostok ice core cannot be explained by the change in CO2 if 2CO2 leads to 3K.
Either 2CO2 is larger than 3K or… CO2 is not the main driver of temperature.

The paleoclimate record of Temp vs CO2 tells us something very important about our climate and CO2. That is that CO2 is not a very sensitive driver of temperature and that in fact if anything it is temp that drives CO2. Of course though the alarmist will tell you that we are entering a dangerous period of CO2 driven warming. That is that our earth can tell the difference between natural CO2 and anthropogenic CO2 and it will react differently to smit us for our evil ways.

Lot’s of ‘Death-trains” even back then…how dare they unsettle the settled science?

Jim (18:53:56) :
NPR are citing this as a mechanism to heat the arctic. I think we can see how this will play out in the media …
Those people are “greenhouse” gases-obsessed. They cannot think in the real causes of warming, but only in their fabulous-“greenhouse” gases.

55 million years ago eh ?
Just proves Fred Flintstone did drive a Hummer through that Drive In restaurant for those giant ribs.

I find it hard to compare the anomalies of NOAA, Unisys, and the SST of Marine Weather. NOAA shows us that the warmest anomaly is on the west coast of South America with the anomaly droping off the the west. While Marine Weather shows us Cooler water off the coast with warmer water off to the West. It looks like the wind is pushing water to the west not to the east like I thought El Nino is reported to do. Cooler water is still moving north in South America and lots of winter left down south.
While at it, what is up with all that cool water between Labrador and Greenland? It is 2-4 degrees below normal and Marine Weather shows it at 2-4 degrees C. Hudson bay is siting around 1 degree C on we are nearly halfway through July.

The problem with rejiggering the climate models to show more sensitivity is that they will be in more trouble when it comes to explaining the current cooling.
The warmists are so…. (begins with an “S”)

Leif,
Read the last Paragraph! It states:
The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of the heating during the PETM. “Some feedback loop or other processes that aren’t accounted for in these models — the same ones used by the IPCC for current best estimates of 21st Century warming — caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM.”
Especially the first sentence! “Something other than carbon dioxide caused much of the heating during the PETM.
So Climate Models are not getting the TOTAL picture in their runs. Which means inaccuracies galore! Something Us “Realists” have been trying to say for some time!

2) I expect RC to be in FULL DEFCON 1 RETALLIATION/DAMAGE CONTROL tomorrow….
And who would notice?

Smokey (19:26:18) :
Here’s the money quote:
“The researchers found that the models could only explain about half of the warming that Earth experienced 55 million years ago.”
Like you, my take on this is that modern AOGCMs are NOT skillful both for today’s climate AND for the climate the earth experienced 55 million years ago! However, this is still surprising given that this is a hindcast and climate models can usually perform fairly well when you know the answer beforehand…

RE: Leif Svalgaard (19:14:39) :
If I didn’t know any better, the conclusion one might draw is that if climate models only predict half the actual warming due to CO2, then the effect of AGW would be twice what is predicted…
Come on, Leif, didn’t you read the whole thing? The salient point is below.
The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of the heating during the PETM. “Some feedback loop or other processes that aren’t accounted for in these models — the same ones used by the IPCC for current best estimates of 21st Century warming — caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM.”

The problem with rejiggering the climate models to show more sensitivity is that they will be in more trouble when it comes to explaining the current cooling.
Actually, the bigger problem would be that the carefully plotted synchronization between low CO2 and temps over the last millennium would go all meshugenah on them.

Oh dear, all your science chaps are doing it again. You’re looking at proxies and jiggling formulae when you should be seeking out direct evidence.
If we want to know what happened back then all we need to do is ask someone who witnessed it. Does anyone have Raquel Welch’s phone number?

Of course what happened 55 million years ago is relevant to present day and is as well known especially at the 150 years scale or even 5,000 y scale… we are in full delirium here.
Notwithstanding, the North Atlantic is barely existing, the Himalayas are still an ocean, and the Alps are just starting to be formed… Anyone with knowledge of atmospheric circulation must understand that this is a fundamentaly different pattern and aerological domains than those of todays, with consequences as to the climates experienced in various places.
So models cut off from the physical reality of meteorological phenomenons are as inept now than they are when applied to a 55million year old world. Who is reviewing these papers? Who is allowing that stuff to pass for science?

Maybe Al Gore can start a company that profits from the anti global warming point of view. Maybe subsidies to Al Gore enterprises for new coal plants? The poor guy has only made a $100 mil on the GW scam. Give him a break.

The world at the time of the PETM looked dramatically different than the world of today. Different geographic locations for all land masses, different ocean systems. Apples and oranges.

Now all they need to do is publish an article on how increased levels of CO2 actually suppress the mechanisms for measuring temperature and we are really 3 degrees warmer than what we thought we were.

Also from wikipedia
On the other hand, there are suggestions that surges of activity occurred in the later stages of the volcanism and associated continental rifting. Intrusions of hot magma into carbon-rich sediments may have triggered the degassing of isotopically light methane in sufficient volumes to cause global warming and the observed isotope anomaly. This hypothesis is documented by the presence of extensive intrusive sill complexes and thousands of kilometer-sized hydrothermal vent complexes in sedimentary basins on the mid-Norwegian margin and west of Shetland [30][31]. Further phases of volcanic activity could have triggered the release of more methane, and caused other early Eocene warm events such as the ETM2.[10]
The methane caused the warming and the CO2 just resulted from its decay in the atmosphere.
We can’t assume CO2 caused any of the warming until we know what happened in the PETM. Until then what is cause and what is effect is just speculation.

This from physicsforums.com strikes me as plausible
Andre et al, (2006) Understanding the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, a reconstruction
Keywords Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum clathrate Pangea PETM
Abstract
The Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum is characterized by enigmatic proxy evidence suggesting warm climates, and, as inferred by numerous publications, massive marine methane hydrate (clathrate) destabilization events. The recent discovery of a near-tropical Arctic ocean however requires a review of existing hypotheses, including greenhouse forcing, to check for the trigger and the cause of events of the PETM.
Here we propose that alternately the same proxy evidence, in toto, could have been caused by another mechanism. After the breakup of the Pangaea supercontinent some 200 million years ago, North America moved in a semicircle clockwise towards the north, hinging around the Greenland – Svalbard area until Alaska and Beringia made contact. Thus the Arctic Sea became isolated and no longer had contact with open oceans. Then the evaporation of the Arctic inner sea exceeded accumulation for a prolonged period causing a significant sea level lowering in comparison with the rest of the oceans. Furthermore, the tectonic movements of the plates may have enlarged the Arctic basin as North America continued to move progressively to the southwest, lowering sea level iin the Arctic basin further.
At the start of the Eocene, 55 Ma ago, the Turgai Strait, splitting Siberia from North to South may have connected the virtually empty Arctic basin and the near-tropical Tethys sea, resulting in an Arctic basin which would have started to fill rapidly with the warm surface water of the Tethys sea, not only transporting alien biota towards the Arctic but also warming up the area. The resulting abrupt sea level drop of some 15-30 meters in a very short time would have caused a secular destabilization of the marine methane hydrates, which would then explain the remaining proxy evidence pertaining to isotope excursions and the Elmo. Hence the empty-Arctic-basin-hypothesis appears to be backed by the evidence, challenging the case for the Palaeocene Eocene Thermal Maximum to be explained primarily as an enhanced Greenhouse forcing scenario.
That’s how you get tropical algae at the North Pole

I just read that GISS has a huge June anomaly of 0.63 Celsius !!!
Global warming is really getting bad now!!

“The Eocene global climate was perhaps the most homogeneous of the Cenozoic; the temperature gradient from equator to pole was only half that of today’s, and deep ocean currents were exceptionally warm. The polar regions were much warmer than today, perhaps as mild as the modern-day Pacific Northwest; temperate forests extended right to the poles, while rainy tropical climates extended as far north as 45°. The difference was greatest in the temperate latitudes; the climate in the tropics however, was probably similar to today’s.”
Stanley, Steven M. Earth System History. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1999. ISBN 0-7167-2882-6.
“There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess. … Even if there were, the projections are based on model results that provide differences of the future climate relative to that today. None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil causing it.”
Dr. Kevin Trenberth, IPCC Global Modeller, Nature Blog, June 2007.

Leif Svalgaard (19:14:39) :
Or, one could assume a much more active solar forcing. Or one could assume that CO2 and temperature do not have the ‘understood’ relationship they do now. Or one could assume that we should be much colder than we are now, and that the only thing preventing an advance in glacial coverage is AGW.

rbateman (19:38:14) :
“the_Butcher (19:20:40) :
Ask not for whom the Carbon Meteorites fall, they fall for you.
Ideas for Gore? No, but if it’s true, I have some advice for Gore: Dump the luxurious mansion and get a cave.”
Hmmm….. as I have wondered before. Why exactly were they in caves?
Didn’t know how to make huts? I doubt it.
Only hermits and monks live in caves.
Nobody lives in caves. So what were they doing in there?
Ha
http://www.images.com/image/439680/north-africa-tunisia-matmata-a-troglodyte-underground-dwelling/?&results_per_page=1&detail=TRUE&page=49
Caves are cool in hot climates? underground it is 18 degrees up it is 45?
In addition for the same reasons they protect from cold. That 18 degrees is great when all winter is below 0. In Finland they have a whole conference and museum center underground.
Our ancestors were conservationists :).
My direct ancestry comes from Kappadocia in what is now Turkey, where there are villages that can be visited, all underground, down to seven levels. It is a plateau at 2000m bitterly cold in the winter.

Leif Svalgaard (22:19:23) :
“Hey, let’s have some more of it. Warm is better than cold…”
Agreed! You work for NASA, so have them shoot off another satellite. Wait until fall, so we can get those GHGs during the winter time, when we need them most. Ohio gets cold in the winter. Not as cold as MA, where I used to live, but cold enough.

” 10,000 years to rise 7C? Linearly? ”
which is only 0.07C per century!
and we’ve done 1.0C in the last century! 14x as much!
OMG, the warmists will kill us with this information. It’s a good thing you never forget how to ride a bike, because that will be the only transport left to us (as long as we don’t fart).

You know, the answer I always get when criticizing model sensitivities is “GEOLOGY DENIER! What are you some kind of young Earth Creationist? The Paleo-record SUPPORTS our models FLAT EARTH HOLOCAUST DENYING POOPYHEAD!”
Oops, so much for that…

Call me a simpleton, but:
Freshman chemistry shows that increasing the temperature of carbonated water will cause an outgassing of CO2. In an open system, reducing the atmospheric pressure will have the same effect. On this, all will agree?
For the AGW folks, increasing atmospheric CO2 will increase temperature, which (presumably) wll cause more outgassing of CO2.
If both these theorems are true, is seems the Earth would long ago have assumed room temperature- the room temperature of Venus.
This hasn’t happened, so it follows logically that both cannot be true. The AGW folks want their premise to be true, no matter how self-evident the alternate explanation may be. Does it follow that if the first is true (and it undoubtedly is), the second cannot also be true? Just asking.

Hi L.
Key point. If the climate is sensitive to CO2, why haven’t we had runaway global warming in the past 500 million years…
Yeah it never get’s answered by the AGW Alarmists.

About an EARLIER paper by the same authors (2008):
A particular concern over the long run is the potential for positive feedback that could amplify the initial warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions. For example, one possible cause of the PETM is the decomposition of methane deposits on the sea floor, which could have been triggered by an initial warming. Methane hydrates are frozen deposits found in the deep ocean near continental margins. Methane released from the deposits would react with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. Both compounds are potent greenhouse gases.
“We have some new evidence that there was a lag between the initial warming and the main carbon excursion of the PETM…It’s consistent with the notion of a positive feedback, with an initial warming causing the hydrates to decompose,” he said.
However, methane hydrates are not specifically mentioned in the current paper’s Abstract:
…We conclude that in addition to direct CO2 forcing, other processes and/or feedbacks that are hitherto unknown must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Once these processes have been identified, their potential effect on future climate change needs to be taken into account.

morganovich (18:23:28) :
The heating came about 3,000 years before the CO2 rise during the PETM. See here for example:
http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2006-0906-200913/index.htm
Bill Illis (18:20:27) :
You are conflating two different processes, the long-term paleocene/eocene climate warming and the short-term PETM excursions. The interesting thing is that after the PETM temperatures went back to where they started, and the long-term rise went on just as before, suggesting that two independent mechanisms were involved. Incidentally there is evidence that PETM and a couple of similar though smaller eocene temperature excursions are related to orbital cycles which suggests that insolation chanes arte somehow involved (surprise!).

If you build models to look for anthropogenic influences then you will get models that do just that. What has been clear for some time is that the influences on climate are way more tricky than the simple forcing the AGW folk seem so attached to. I still reckon Joe Weizenbaum had it spot on (he wrote his book Computer Power and Human Reason after witnessing the behaviour of humans in using a simple model of a Rogerian counselor) when he wrote:
What is important in the present context is that models embody only the essential features of whatever it is they are intended to represent. … What aspects of reality are and what are not embodied in a model is entirely a function of the model builder’s purpose. But no matter what the purpose, a model, and here I am concerned with computer models of aspects of reality, must necessarily leave out almost everything that is actually present in the real thing. Whoever knows and appreciates this fact, and keeps it in mind while teaching students about the use of computers, has a chance to immunize his or her students against believing or making excessive claims for much of their computer work.
(Weizenbaum 1984, xvii)
Weizenbaum, J. (1984). Computer Power and Human reason. From Judgement to Calculation. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

The reason is because there were no climate models during te PETM. Mann and Schmidt et. all would have worked the numbers into shape had they been around to do so.

“gtrip (23:51:05) :
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) English novelist, author of “Sense and Sensibility”
What a nice way to say ‘sweating like a pig!
cheers David

Mal (01:39:56) : What is not debatable is that human society has allowed far too much burning of fossil fuels in a dirty way, and the world population growth without a way to sustain it is a terrible tragedy.
Why is this not debatable?

This is what is wrong with the models:
The article says this :
“A climate that is highly sensitive to radiative forcing (i.e., responds very strongly to increasing greenhouse gas forcing) by definition will be unable to quickly dissipate global mean temperature anomalies arising from either purely natural dynamical processes or stochastic radiative forcing, and hence will have significant internal variability. The opposite also holds.”
I wholly concur but what do we see ?
Despite huge changes in the rate of energy emission from the oceans and consequent attempts by the oceans to change global humidity the hydrological cycle keeps global humidity almost stable by altering the speed of it’s activity through adjustments of the sizes and positions of all the main circulation systems.
The climate is therefore seen to be highly INsensitive to attempts at forcing by huge changes in the primary greenhouse gas.
Applying the same logic it must also be highly INsensitive to attempts at forcing caused by extra CO2.
The same mechanism would apply in both cases but to deal with CO2 the necessary adjustments would be too small to measure in the face of natural variability because the real forcing agent is the oceans and not the air.

Whoops,
The quote was from this article but is relevant here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/

Mal (01:39:56) :
human society has allowed […] the world population growth without a way to sustain it

And just to add, we don’t have the right to tell Africans that they can’t have children, or to tell Indians that they can’t have children, or cars, or whatever it is they want. We do no have the right to tell them to stop developing.
Once they have developed enough, they will in their own time change their needs and wants, and nobody is going to make them do otherwise.

As several posters have pointed out, it all comes down to cause and effect. The 70% increase in CO2 may well have occurred simply because the oceans warmed and released vast quantities of CO2. By the way, does anyone know how much additional atmospheric CO2 would be caused by a 7 degree rise. There are indications that the CO2 increase occurred several thousand years *after* the temperature increase started. Just as with the ice cores, this strongly suggests something very simple and yet extraordinarily important: that CO2 changes are primarily an effect and not a cause.
Many dramatic climate changes (e.g. the end of Snowball Earth) have been attributed to CO2 (in the case of Snowball Earth, the assumption that large volcanic eruptions released enough CO2 to warm the earth). But is there any *proof* that the CO2 caused the warming and not the other way around? Probably the only way to prove it is to demonstrate that the CO2 increased *before* the warming started. The ice cores clearly show that CO2 was an effect, and not a cause, but it must be far harder, if not impossible, to achieve the same time resolution for events tens or hundreds of millions of years ago.
If this evidence does not exist, then probably the simplest assumption is that changes in CO2 were largely driven by temperature changes. Therefore, to explain the temperature changes we need to look elsewhere.
As far as I can see, this study is consistent with the anti-AGW hypothesis: that carbon dioxide has a negligible effect on the climate.
Finally, I’ll repeat a question I’ve asked several times before. So far there’s been no answer.
Is there any period in earth’s history when it can be proven that the global temperature was driven by carbon dioxide? (and not the other way around).
Chris

Hi Chaps;_)
I am getting rather tired of saying this, but you’re next! I know this is OT, but thought you would like a wheese at the nutty fruitloop UK, or Disney Land as I like to call it. I have received in this morning’s post a document from a company called Z-led, based in Nottingham, UK. They provide design solutions to ground gas migration. I suspect you’re ahead of me on this one, but yes dear old CO2 is catagorised under new Government guidelines as a “Toxic” and “asphyxiating” gas! Now I know the context in which they are operating as I have worked on radon/methane protection systems in the past & still occasionally do, but this is how it will go for you. We have an organisation paid for by the Building Industry called the National House Building Council (NHBC). We also have a prtofessional group know as the Building Research Establishment (BRE) part industry part governemnt funded. They have obviously been re-doing their little courses & now include CO2 in the tables. It has a maximum allowable safe volume of 5%!!!!!!!!!!! not 0.04% as it is inthe atmosphere. However note 3 does say higher levels are permitted should the Site Model (whatever that is?) says it is safe to do so!
Now we’ve known about CO2 in this instance for ages, but it is just the way it is presented here (www.z-led.com) that makes me suspiciously laugh.
AtB

Forgot to add, the 5% limit is calssified as the GREEN safe traffic light zone in the tables!

Correction: It should say “IF the petm warming was linear”.

“Whether or not the “Global Warming” models are correct is clearly debatable. What is not debatable is that human society has allowed far too much burning of fossil fuels in a dirty way, and the world population growth without a way to sustain it is a terrible trage”
The 2 foundation stones of the Enviormental Left in recent decades has been Anthropological Climate Change and Unsustainable Population Growth. These 2 issues have driven not only pop science but much of our international and domestic politics. In recent years, both subjects have come under more and more scrutiny, and lo and behold, the Left is wrong on both counts.
Funny how reality usually sets in after policies have been put in place. In Europe, the governments there are finally realizing that they don’t have enough people to sustain neither thier generous social welfare state nor thier standard of living. In the US, where were are about to officially tackle Antrhological Global Warming, we are finally realizing that there has been no warming for about a decade (this despite the antics of GISS and NOAA. Both are becoming irrelavant).
As the globe slowly but steadily cools, and much of Europe, Russia, and Asia begins to depopulate (North America is not too far behind in that respect), more and more people are finding out that a)It is much more pleasant and efficient to live in a warm world, and b)society actually needs people to if it wants to improve its way of life.
I know farmers here in Northen Indiana aren’t especially happy with the propescts of lower crop yields this year, and a few pundits around here are even calling 2009 a year without a summer. The last time we had such a cool June-July was 1992 (the year after Mt Pinutumbo went off). This could be the first year since 1901 that this area will see a summer where the temperature failed to reach 95, and had less than 5 days with temperatures above 90.

I imagine the geologic positions of the continents played a part in this overall time period.
At the south pole, the deep ocean was able to circulate all the way to the pole (or very near to it). This allowed warm and cold water to be exchanged at a maximum rate and kept the south pole in a maritime climate.
At the north pole, the smaller Arctic ocean seems to be nearly completely cut-off in the reconstructions. The north Atlantic was just starting to open at this point.
It is possible that this Atlantic opening happened in a way that allowed the oceans to completely enter and exit the Arctic efficiently (and/or perhaps the Pacific side also opened at the same time) and this took the Earth from having a warm south pole and a cold north pole to a world which had both a warm south pole and a warm north pole. Any other time this has occurred in geologic history, the earth has been quite warm.
Earth 50 million years ago – a little after this event.
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/050_Eocene_sm.jpg

RE: Leif Svalgaard (19:14:39) :
If I didn’t know any better, the conclusion one might draw is that if climate models only predict half the actual warming due to CO2, then the effect of AGW would be twice what is predicted…
——————————————-
That is how the alarmist end of the media are playing this. Their argument is along the following lines:
“Our computation of carbon effect on climate accounts for only half of that rapid warming, so there is some terrifying effect that we do not understand yet that means that our current contribution of dirty, polluting, poisonous greenhouse gas may have twice as bad an effect as our models predicted.”
Funny how the alarmists can only ever accept that their models are wrong when they think that the outcome could be worse. Never the other way round. They only accept error when they think the models could be underestimating the carbon effect.
IF there was such a dramatic carbon effect, then why have we not seen much greater increases over the last 30 years? We are currently closer to the average over that time than we are to the cataclysmic predictions of the alarmists.
I mean we have only had 0.6 degrees of warming over a century and that is if you take the “anomolies” and piss poor recording of temperatures. It has likely been rather less than that in reality. Probably closer to 0.3 degrees. That level of climate change is actually, remarkably still. In historical terms, that is as close to stasis as you are going to get, so I really do not see a lot to be getting all steamed about.
The massive changes in temps back in the PETM are way outside of what we are getting all steamed up about now.
Could it not be that actually, most of the massive increase in temps back then had nothing to do with carbon? What was the sun doing? how about volcanic activity under the oceans? Was there any super massive meteorites hitting the earth then? What about the orbit of the earth, was that any nearer the sun back then? What about cloud cover? what about conditions which may have existed naturally back then that no longer exist and we have no clue about?

John Edmondson (06:02:35) :
This event lasted 20,000 years so what is left. Some kind of albedo related event, making the Earth’s surface darker? To get the required temp increase would mean dropping the albedo from 0.3 to 0.26 , that’s a lot of stagnant algal bloom in the sea?
So ,how about this?
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/environment/story/71842.html
” Hunters from Wainwright first started noticing the stuff sometime probably early last week. It’s thick and dark and “gooey” and is drifting for miles in the cold Arctic waters, according to Gordon Brower with the North Slope Borough’s Planning and Community Services Department.”

According to a BBC Horizon prog some years ago now, I understood that one theory of mass extinction c500MYA, was volcanic Basalt lava eruptions in what is now Siberia that lasted for million(s) of years, when the Earth was in Pangea, raising Earth’s temp by 5°C. This then allowed (theoretically) methane clathrates (another scary story) to melt in the oceans & seas raising the Earth’s temp a further 5°C, which theoretically killed off 95% of the life on Earth! Question, now why could it not be anything to do with CO2 raising temp, but simply the massive heat exchange into the atmosphere from billions of tons (or tonnes if you prefer) of molton rock spewing out causing the CO2 to be released from the seas & oceans, as well as that from the eruptions themselves & from subsequent mass eruptions? The heat had to go somewhere & do something & the outgassing must have been significant! Or am I too simple & dumb?

Why not give the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Reconstruction data to the people at GISS. Chances are they can adjust it to be in line with the current models.

I don’t see what the fuss is about.
The man-made global warming hypothesis is dependent on current warming being caused by CO2. The fact that previous warming is half an order of magntude higher for a period with a 70% CO2 rise is irrelevant. It is obvious that either the temperature measurement is wrong or there was another force at work. There is no evidence beyond “we can’t find anything else” that CO2 was the cause of the PETM warming. Whether CO2 aided, hindered, or sat idle while that other cause warmed the Earth is unknowable from this data.
In short, this isn’t evidence for either side of the debate, and anyone who brings it as evidence for or against the CO2-Temperature link is misconstruing evidence and deserves to have their degree revoked.
Now, one thing that I can say is that it does show that large-scale warming doesn’t necessarily cause mass extinctions. That’s all it shows.

By the way, all this issue of CO2 and global warming will surely be forgotten , even temperature records will get back to normality if everbody accepts to pay a bit more for the energy we use.

Energy can be released as movement also, as in this morning’ s big earthquake in New Zealand, so, what if accumulated heat (energy) is released as such?

Leif Svalgaard (10:10:22) :
1. From what I have read, the models don’t do a very good job of explaining recent temperatures, so I’m not ready to say they are working. AFAIK, the models as they stand don’t prove the recent climate changes are due to man-made CO2.
2. If I knew the models were based 100% in physics with no adjustable parameters and one could input the appropriate initial conditions and replicate a past temperature dataset for some, even if small, amount of time; then I might rely on the model to tell me how the climate works. But since climate is chaotic, such a model would not allow me to predict longer term temperatures.
3. You have to assume the models are working in order to do as you describe. That assumption seems invalid.

The Missing, forgotten and Only Factor: The Sun.
That inconvenient, “invisible” for many, oil-painted fireball on heavens’ spheres. Heh! 😉

Leif,
The paper did model the PETM climate – the climate sensitivity is directly extracted from the derived values of CO2 injected into the atmosphere and the temperature change from the isotopic ratios.
There is no big discrepancy between this value of climate sensitivity and the values from current models – it’s just at the upper end of the range. It’s not even obvious that there should be good agreement – the climate was several degrees warmer then than now and there was 1000 ppm of CO2 even before the injection event. Hence the climate sensitivity could have been substantially shifted from today’s values.

Correction to above: that should be “The paper did NOT model the PETM climate.”

Leif Svalgaard (11:07:23) :
Nasif Nahle (10:48:17) :
The Missing, forgotten and Only Factor: The Sun.
Well, the orbital elements of the Earth and the distribution of land and oceans [including ocean currents depending on that] are very important factors, even assuming an absolutely constant Sun. Solar variations cannot explain a change in temperature a hundred times larger than the effect of the solar cycle today.
I consider those factors just as modifiers; nonetheless, the Sun is the only patent source of energy for climate. Factors like volcanic ash that obstructs the path of sunbeams towards the surface and the modification of albedo by ecological succession are factors which modify climate, but do not produce it. The Sun produces climate. I have said it many times that the external operator of climate on Earth is the Sun; the other factors are just distributors, like the carbon dioxide, and internal modifiers.
Just for comparison, Mercury, the planet, has a very tenuous atmosphere composed of hydrogen and helium which has not an appreciable effect on Mercury’s climate. However, Mercury has an intense climate driven almost exclusively by the Sun, although factors as those that you mentioned modify it. On Earth the thing is different because it has an atmosphere and, most important, water.

Leif Svalgaard (11:44:08) :
Nasif Nahle (11:40:40) :
the idea on a fixed, static Sun which has nothing to do with Earth’s climate would be more credible.
The other way around: before you can discount or accounted for all the other sources, you cannot claim that the variable Sun is solely responsible, as you did.
If it just were my claim, your assertion would be valid; however, it’s not just an idea, but what nature exhibits. Now I will say what you much hate: Turn off the Sun and see what happens with climate, distributors of energy, internal modifiers, and internal operators. 🙂

rbateman
“You can’t take a cave with you to follow the herds. Living permanently in a cave says affluent.”
Animals (horses at least) follow great circle routes. Paleolythic Indian hunter-gathers were found to improve the plants they gathered by selective breeding! Yes that is correct Hunter-Gathers planted the seeds from the best to be available to gather next year when they visited the same spot.
If there were caves available I imagine they would be used as shelter and possibly improved. You may not be able to take it with you but you can use it as a vacation home until you hunter out that area.
(from my long time ago anthro course in college)

Gene Nemetz (02:32:58) :
Mal (01:39:56) : “What is not debatable is that human society has allowed far too much burning of fossil fuels in a dirty way, and the world population growth without a way to sustain it is a terrible tragedy.”
I strongly suggest you take a good hard look at Maurice Strong, oil billionaire, and his connections to the Banksters (Rockefeller) who back Greenpeace and Sierra club and the rest. The bankers/oil are manipulating Activists to do their dirty work and will institute a form of Feudalism if they can. If you want to be a serf to the Banksters go find some other country. The USA has close to a zero population growth and we are a heck of a lot cleaner than the socialist country CHINA. A friend in Alaska complains the pollution from China has ruined Alaska’s clean air.
These are examples of your friendly socialist banker advisors such as Maurice Strong at work. He was a top advisor to the World Bank and Rockefeller meets with the World bank often. Actually he trained the World Bank president at Chase.
SAP The globalization of poverty   http://www.doublestandards.org/sap1.html
Structural Adjustment Policies http://www.whirledbank.org/development/sap.html
Mr. Budhoo’s Bombshell: Former employee Breaks Code of Silence on IMF of crimes: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/IMF_WB/Budhoo_IMF.html
Info on Bank crimes:
http://freedomprime.blogspot.com/2008/08/money-is-created-by-banks-evidence.html
According to Congressional record the U.S. Government can buy back the FED at any time for $450 million.  That’s about half the amount of money we pay them daily. http://www.libertyforlife.com/banking/federal_reserve_bank.html
Actual copy of the act (confiscated all US citizens gold) http://www.fame.org/PDF/Emergency%20Banking%20Act%20of%201933.pdf
As an Activist I would hate the thought I was a shill for the corporate/banking ellite.

Co2 rising back then was due to the warming, hence the models explain NONE of the natural warming! Outgassing of the sea etc…
As I have always maintained, if the models can not replicate iceages and long term variation they are useless for making projections. They cant even explain why the co2 rose back then in their models! Thats the key, why did the sea warm in the first place, before the co2 rose?
Models need to be tested and proven before used. When people test the GCM’s they fail the test – hence they are of no worth.
Will they now stop using them? I doubt it!
All they need to do is double the climate sensitivty again and factor up the strength of aerosols and they will be happy again, just fudge it. Then they can declare even more drastic warming now predicted based on past historical data! Models are calibrated ever better!

Leif,
To determine the climate sensitivity at the PETM it is only necessary to divide two numbers, the increase in temperature and the increase in CO2 concentration. This can by no stretch of the imagination be described as running a model or even a fit, so where is the confusion?
Another important point is that the 5 to 9 degC increase in temperature seen at the PETM is likely to have been close to an equilibrium value, with thousands of years to equilibrate to the injection of CO2. The current climate has only had a few decades to respond to most of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. We could be seeing our future by looking back into the past.

Leif Svalgaard (12:06:59) :
This is the same, old, tired, worthless argument [turn off the Sun and see what you get]. The Sun produces the energy that allows climate on ALL the planets. The important question is what causes climate variability, and that is hardly the Sun, as already on the Earth orbital changes and surely volcanism produce much larger changes than can be ascribed to the Sun. In fact, we have a hard time proving [to the satisfaction of the AGW crowd – and if we can’t convince them, we don’t have compelling proof] that solar variability has any significant impact.
And what if the response is gradual, that is, not instantaneous but cumulative? We have observed at least four bodies of the solar system which simultaneously are undergoing climate changes. The local conditions are different for each body, including composition of atmospheres and land surfaces; the effect is there. I am sure you will not evade answering the problem by trying to unlink one planetary climate change from the others referring to local particular planetary conditions. Simultaneity is a hint which guides us to a common cause, whether the changes are identical or not in each planet, planetoid or natural satellite. The only common source of energy for climate in this solar system is… the Sun.

Bill Illis’ graph (18:20:27) does demonstrate a geological disconnect between CO2 and temperature, with only two exceptions: Antarctic Glaciation, and PETM.
From ScienceNOW:
…Zeebe…ran carbon-cycle simulations…They even simulated what would happen to global temperatures when they increased the atmosphere’s sensitivity to doubling CO2 levels…
“It’s possible that other greenhouse gases such as methane could have contributed to the (PETM) warming,” Zeebe says…

I ran across a reuters article on this study, and promptly popped over here to see if it was already noted or to mention it if not because reuters interviews lead author Zeebe. Headline is reasonable (knowledge gap). Unfortunately article is anything but reasonable and distinctly uses the faulty logic “tipping point” chicken-little ‘this means things are far worse for us than the worst we’ve considered’ tact. It puts this forward as only possible interpretation, no mention of any alternative view. http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-41050320090715?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=11584
I know here at Wattsup I’m not alone in this, but I don’t anger easily and yet this stuff utterly infuriates me. A major component of that is how grossly flawed an idea the general public winds up with regarding what is or isn’t science and what can or can’t be CONCLUDED or even reasonably speculated on from any particular study.
It FLOORS me that the authors of this study would speculate on the tipping point ‘its worse’ scenario and yet not emphasize just as strongly at the same time that it may also mean that CO2 may not be driving temperatures as commonly believed AT ALL. Floors me enough that I very VERY much hope they did/do, and its the reporters who are skewing the picture. If not, can we immediately revoke those scientist’s licenses and ban them from practice entirely please?
I hope that I might impose on everyone’s knowledge here a little, for some brief answers of things that I fully realize have full books written about them….and a couple of ignorance of the day types.
There’s enough solid science on both sides to argue either that CO2 leads OR lags temperature changes, correct?
If a large number of temp. monitoring stations record data that is at best +/- 2 degrees, and some worse than that, how do they justify 0.x outputs (referring to both post data manipulation and model calculations)?
It seems that the degree of debate over how the base temperature data should be handled/manipulated ought to be more than enough in and of itself to say the science on the issue isn’t far enough along to draw ANY conclusions yet, let alone talk public policy….. am I off base here?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Help please? (15:16:57) :
The other thing I’d meant to ask was about ‘warmer’ temperature conditions. My understanding was that it during historical time periods when the earth was warmer than present day, flora and fauna seemed to flourish -e.g., almost certainly more life, plants, and animals on average than during cooler periods. If that’s correct, how is the IPCC et. al, justifying all the claims of deserts, water shortages, decreased life overall, etc.
During geological eras biodiversity reaches higher numbers than during cooling periods. As the surface is warmed up by the incident solar radiation, evaporation and cloudiness increase, so in general rainfalls tend to increase. I see all climate changes are natural until present. I have talked about ecological succession many times; some species are displaced by other species, but that does not mean “extinction” but change, i.e. succession. I think the term has been extremely abused by environmentalists for scaring people through showing them local “extinctions” of such or that species, when in reality those species are fluorishing abundantly at other locations.
For example, after fire in a taiga, the land finishes almost devastated. In the natural way of recovery, there will not be production of conifers immediately after the devastation, but organisms which can prosper under extreme conditions like drought, low levels of nutrients in soil, dragging by winds and water, etc.; for example, lichens and photosynthetic bacteria. Lichens and photosynthetic bacteria restore the best part of fertile soil which had been lost by the fire until ferns and mosses. When soil restoration has almost concluded, some weeds start populating the area; grass, herbs and scrubs for example. The humus layer must have been restored completely so that trunk plants can grow there. If there are survivors of native trees, their seeds could be transported by currents of air or water, or carried by animals, so the same species of trees could appear again populating the area. This can be completed in decades, centuries or millennia.
Next, for warmer temperature effects…. suspect I’ll feel very silly when someone answers this one for me… but doesn’t one have to look to the tropics and see rain forests and massive amounts of life and diversity? Seems an apparent disconnect to me, present day warm often results in vastly more life, but theoretical warm = death and drought? Obviously location relative to oceans, mountain ranges, atmospheric jet stream etc., have huge impact on the issue, but in general….. ??
Unfortunately, tropical rainforest is the most easily broken biome in terms of recuperation.

Ammendment: “During geological eras biodiversity reaches higher numbers than during cooling periods.”
It should have said:
“During periods of warming through geological eras biodiversity reaches higher numbers than during cooling periods.”

I swear, I am not drunk. It’s just another correction:
“Lichens and photosynthetic bacteria restore the best part of fertile soil which had been lost by fire until ferns and mosses can grow again there.

Leif Svalgaard (05:26:04) :
Drudge picked up the story
Thanks for the tip Leif !

RE: rbateman (17:32:17) :
What else was going on 55 million years ago?
What about the extinction that occured 65 million years ago that is in a layer all over the place?
=========================
Indeed. That extinction resulted in a massive explosion of fungi. The fungi, combined with the sudden exposure of soil in areas with humid climates that were previously heavily covered by green plants, would have liberated a massive amount of methane and CO2 not to mention water. That incident is instructive in another way. Just prior to the extinction, CO2 levels were quite low … on par with what we currently have. I consider this a grave threat. Any serious interruption in photosynthesis at this low level of CO2 and we may have another great extinction on our hands. A big bolide may be all that’s required to crash the system. We have almost no margin right now, CO2 is so low green plants must be stressed and low functioning, relatively speaking.

Leif alternative point of view seems rather shaky to me.
The climate models fail to predict even the most basic aspects of today’s climate, let alone thousands of years ago. The heating profile with altitude is wrong, the precipitation rates are wrong. Some effects like net forcing of clouds are likely the wrong sign entirely, the role of dust and soot and other factors like biological influences in the biosphere are almost entirely neglected. One just has to look at the past performance of future predictions to illustrate this point. I’m entirely on the side of Freeman Dyson with my confidence that these models are very poor at describing the climate.
And thus, here we are. Instead of seeing this for what it is – yet another illustration of how over-simplistic climate models fail to model the exceedingly complex biosphere, we instead try to claim that these flaws could be a sign that climate change is going to be far worse. Its amazing…while we accept that the predictions are 50% out, we never waiver in our believe of their validity but instead suggest scaling things up.
Fortunately, we still have empirical evidence to take heart in. There are many past CO2-temperature reconstructions that illustrate the same facts. Temperatures rise and fall in many cases irrespective of CO2 levels.
* The Cambrian period had CO2 levels at over 7000ppm with no runaway effect.
* The Ordovician period has CO2 levels at 4200ppm and a temperature varying from todays up to +7C.
* Carboniferous period…800ppm…temperature varying between +8C and todays.
Lots of variation, relatively weak forcing.
Then obviously you have the time delays in the icecores with temperatures leading CO2 which gives another clue on how significant CO2 is. Then you have the lack of correlation between temperatures and Co2 levels in the present century with temperature warming and cooling periods while CO2 levels are always increasing.
Why is it so hard to accept that CO2 effects on global temperatures have been drastically overstated by the likes of the IPCC?
I also wonder about the logic. We are at an age where in the past few hundred thousand years, the global climate has been on average bitterly cold. We have had many oscillations from iceage to a relatively short warm spell and back to ice age. We are at the tail end of a warm spell right now according to the Vostok data for example. It is very likely that we would of eventually dove back into an iceage. If anything, I wish global warming was true because a 4C rise is vastly more attractive than the long term icy alternative.

Leif Svalgaard (19:36:40):
So Mars is getting warmer and the Earth is cooling all due to the Sun.
The note on Mars’ climate change was released in 2005.
Hardly climate, as the Titan ‘year’ is 30 years long. This is just weather, and as your links suggest are due to Titan causes.
Weather all over a hemisphere of the satellite? Here a fragment from the article:
“These southern clouds are thought to be caused by convection in Titan’s atmosphere, driven by the heat of the sun. They were expected to disappear as Titan’s southern summer draws to a close, before reappearing in the northern hemisphere soon after.” (bolds are mine)
However, they didn’t disappear and the southern summer prolonged beyond model predictions:
“However, the latest analysis of Cassini observations shows that the southern clouds have not budged. “Titan’s meteorology is still active in late summer, which does not agree with climate model predictions…”
So, all in all, there is no good evidence for the myth that all planets change their climate in sync because of changing solar activity.
There are not observations on all planets, only on four planets, including Earth, one planetoid and two satellites, which does not exclude the fact that other bodies’ climates are changing.

If you have the time and a fast connection, verify that the warming on Mars started off in 1998; coincidence?
http://www.nasa.gov/mov/133955main_mgsweb-cc.mov

Bill Illis (18:20:27) :
I have charted the temp vs CO2 data over this period and there is really a poor correlation between the two. This chart also shows the important continental drift timelines which are fundamental to understanding this climate period.
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/2464/tempvsco267m.png
Thank you for this. It shows that CO2 starting levels were 800ppm and end levels also 800ppm. In the “spike” temperature changed by 2.5 degrees, at least in this plot.
What guarantees that the functional relation of CO2 to temperature ( either lagging or leading) is linear and the absolute value has no effect? Out gassing from oceans I guess is linear, but am no chemist and am not sure, at least the function is known. All other possible CO2 sources come chaotically from highly complex systems and will be chaotic in output, that is highly non linear.
To get a sensitivity relevant to our value of 384 or so ppm doubling we would need that functional form .
The only known functional form is for out gassing from the heating oceans and is worthless for supporting an AGW argument as it lags. If use is to be made of this paper’s sensitivity in favor of AGW to bring it down for use to 300ppms it will be pure guess work. Of course climatologists excel in guesswork. They also excel in seeing the world as linear and ignoring logic.
I guess geologists have caught the linear bug from climatologists.
Doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is an oft-talked-about threshold, and today’s climate models include accepted values for the climate’s sensitivity to doubling. Using these accepted values and the PETM carbon data, the researchers found that the models could only explain about half of the warming that Earth experienced 55 million years ago.
Even if the sensitivity used in the GCMs were correct, which it is not as the last ten years temperatures vs CO2 show, the only conclusion could be that no linear extrapolation of current guessed sensitivities can explain the PETM CO2/tempearature maximum. No conclusion can be made for our current sensitivities for the same reasons.

So, all in all, there is no good evidence for the myth that the Earth changes its climate because of changing CO2 levels.

Leif,
You missed my correction (11.11.12). This paper did NOT model the PETM climate.
As for Martian climate change, this is primarily driven by Milankovitch cycles, which due to the increased eccentricity and lack of lunar stabilisation have a stronger effect than on Earth.

Tim Clark (04:41:02):
I should explain why PVP is involved in this process, but I can’t. If interested, follow this line of investigation:
http://www.patents.com/Agents-regulating-plant-growth/US4948415/en-US/
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0169924.html

@Leif…
I don’t know what kind of evidence you require if you don’t accept observations from nature made by astronomers and astrophysicists.

I think Nasif Nahle has a point. I think we should give NASA billions of dollars (perhaps stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to be able to finance this) and send satellites to every celestial body in our solar system (and beyond) to monitor the warming due to the sun.

Leif Svalgaard (09:30:47) :
Nasif Nahle (08:36:43) :
I don’t know what kind of evidence you require if you don’t accept observations from nature made by astronomers and astrophysicists.
I’m not aware of any such evidence of climate change anywhere in the solar system except on Earth. The links you have provided were not evidence of climate change.
That is why I asked what kind of evidence you need. I cannot go to Mars or Titan, Uranus, Pluto, etc., to plant thermometers, radiometers, hygrometers, etc. all over the surface of those bodies. I have to rely on the data released by NASA from satellite-sensors measurements, so I am limited to revise few records gotten up to date; those which NASA wants to release whenever they wish to make them public. With the few data, the conclusion is that the change is occurring at least in seven bodies of the solar system; thus it is probable that the change is happening in the whole solar system, including the Sun.

Which means that wearing a hat on a sunny day does not necessarily mean that you will have less UV than say on a cloudy day without a hat. Reflected UV from around you is just as bad on skin as “direct from above” UV. Wearing Sun protection ON THE SKIN of the entire face area, ears, neck, and eh em, bald spot, is essential at all times when out in the Sun for more than 10 minutes. Folks should take Vitamin D supplements if they stay out of the Sun or swath themselves in Sun screen. Skin cancer, even the less scary kind, should be taken seriously when they appear on these highly and shallow vascularized areas. Any rough whitish spot or mole-like dark spot should be looked at as soon as can be arranged by a dermatologist specialist in oncology.