I’ve been watching this NSIDC graph for a few days, figuring it was just noise. Now, it looks like “something worth blogging about“. The Arctic sea ice extent is continuing to grow past the normal historical peak which occurs typically in late February/early March. [Note: I added the following sentences since at least one commenter was confused by “peak point” in the headline above, which I’ve now changed to “peak date” to clarify what I was referring to. -A] Of course it has not exceeded the “normal” sea ice extent magnitude line, but is within – 2 STD. The point being made is that growth continues past the time when sea ice magnitude normally peaks, and historically (by the satellite record) is headed downward, as indicated by the dashed line.
Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center – link
To be fair though, the Earth seems to be suffering from “bipolar disorder” as we have a similar but opposite trend in the Antarctic:
Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center – link
If we look at Cryosphere Today’s dandy sea ice comparator tool, and choose a standard 30 year climatology period span, it looks like we may actually be ahead this year, compared to 30 years ago. Certainly the arctic sea ice today looks a lot more solid than in 1980. I wish CT offered comparisons without the snow cover added (which was added in 2008) so as to not be visually distracting.
We live in interesting times.
h/t to WUWT commenter “Tommy” for the “tipping point”.
barry (20:25:02) :
“The MWP issue is a political, not a scientific argument.”
You could not be more wrong:
click1
click2
click3
click4
click5
click6
Smokey (21:13:16) :
And Phil, ‘rubbish’ isn’t as big a word as ‘absolutely.’ More wiggle room, too. But the natural warming of the planet has been followed by a rise in CO2, not vice-versa. The “greenhouse” effect is motivated by grant money. Do you get paid with any public money, Phil? University? Government? I have the feeling your ox is being Gored.
Reverting to ad hominem is a sure sign that you’ve lost your argument, plus of course the lack of any attempt at rebuttal! Try sticking to the science.
Also, the claim that carbon dioxide can increase the air temperature by “trapping” infrared radiation [IR] like a blanket traps heat ignores the fact that physicist R.W. Wood falsified the hypothesis that a greenhouse stays warm by trapping IR.
Argument by false analogy doesn’t get you anywhere either!
David Alan Evans: “There is a major problem with the arguments posed by both Phil AND Brendan H,
The MWP!”
Temperatures, MWP or otherwise, have no relevance to my arguments.
Smokey, the MWP is a red herring. It’s not the foundation-stone for AGW theory. People bicker over a graph in one of the reports and whether or not a team of scientists used data appropriately. Over a dozen studies since that graph have roughly borne out the conclusions. Discard Mann et al and nothing much changes. Discard the rest of the studies and nothing much changes. Whether it was warmer or not in the MWP simply doesn’t undercut AGW theory. The world has been warmer and cooler before now. All that tells us is that there is natural variability. It says nothing of attribution. The central period of reference for the theory is the 20th century.
And despite there being many corroborative studies to Mann et al, which should render the argument moot, and despite it not mattering if it was half a degree warmer for some time in the last millennium, this issue gets trotted out as if it’s the lynch pin to the whole shebang.
The reason it’s political is that, where skeptics should be assessing the wide body of literature on millennial reconstructions to arrive at informed opinion (applying vigorous skepticism to the notion of a big fat conspiracy amongst paleoclimatologists), they instead home in on a couple of twelve year old studies – not so much to assess its validity, as to provide ammunition for charges of fraud in order to besmirch the reputation of people who have has senior participation in the IPCC.
Some politicians in Canada brandished the Mann et al 1998 graph, which appeared prominently in the TAR. It appeared in schools and the media in that country, and Canadian Steve McIntyre got suspicious, audited the paper, and has been rattling on about it ever since, while science has continued to shore up the basic conclusions, and when it is not central to AGW theory. The graph has been used politically, and the response has been, at heart, political ever since. Which is why there was a government investigation, for goodness sake.
Now, let me just stop there. A government investigation of a scientific paper because it may contain flaws? Why is the government involved? Because the science is not sound? No, because the paper has political significance, obviously. That is the heart of the matter, not science.
12 years and more than a dozen studies later, anyone banging on about Mann et al’s hockey stick and ignoring or waving away the reconstructions that have emerged since, is demonstrating neither skepticism nor interest in science. It’s pure point-scoring. And that’s politics.
Mann et al isn’t central anymore but it remains a passionate obsession for point-scoring types. If Mann et al retracted now, it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference to scientific understanding of millennial temps. But it might make a difference on the political front.
Those claiming natural climate change is a hypothesis are being silly. It is a theory. It graduated from hypothesis to theory long ago and supported by literally millions of pieces of evidence.
Naturally, as scientific skeptics we should all continue to consider evidence that might falsify this theory, but I don’t think anyone would get much money for such work. The theory is probably more solid than just about any theory you can name.
Now, along comes a couple of new “hypotheses”. One of those (1) is that CO2 emissions by man will lead to about 1C warming per doubling of CO2. Another (2) is that CO2 will lead to catastrophic global warming. As Smokey has correctly illustrated, it is now correct scientific procedure to consider these hypotheses in light of the ACCEPTED theory of natural climate change.
To date there is some scientific evidence to support (1) and almost nothing to support (2). In both cases the evidence is not yet sufficient to dismiss the current ACCEPTED theory. In fact, thanks to recent statistical analysis of the GISS temperature series (thanks VS), we now know that even GISS (the largest indicator of warming) is not outside the bounds of natural climate changes. So, the proper scientific approach should be to continue to study these new hypotheses, but understand that they have not reached any kind of scientific status where they should be considered correct.
barry, you misunderestimate badly the degree to which subsequent millenial reconstructions are corrupted by the same or similarly bogus data as that of the Piltdown’s Mann. Sure the statistics improved marginally, but the cherry-picking continued.
And heh, the presence or absence of the MWP is the important point. Almost everyone agrees with some sort of blade or another. We have a temperature record after all. Or thought we did.
===========
barry (07:08:21):
You may believe that natural climate variability has nothing to do with the current climate, but I have to agree with you that the MWP is a political football.
The peer reviewed paper [click2] from Harvard that I linked to above begins:
But now the widely accepted warmer MWP and cooler LIA are political, made so by the IPCC’s widespread and repeated use of Michael Mann’s falsified Hokey Stick chart, which attempted to delete those repeatedly verified events. Mann is either incompetent or dishonest, possibly both. And since the IPCC is composed of 100% political appointees pushing an AGW agenda, of course the MWP has been made political.
But we disagree when you say that the MWP doesn’t undercut the AGW
theoryhypothesis. It certainly does, or it wouldn’t be repeatedly cited by the entirely political IPCC [which, BTW, can no longer use Mann’s repeatedly falsified chart].Also, since you apparently did not read Dr Glassman’s definition of a scientific theory vs a hypothesis, I’ll post it for you again: click
Glassman shows why CAGW can not qualify as a scientific theory, and in fact, why it is actually more conjecture than a hypothesis. I usually refer to CAGW as a hypothesis in order to avoid the tedious wild-eyed, spittle flecked arm waving by those whose arguments are deconstructed by using proper scientific definitions.
Should you wish to dispute Dr Glassman, please also post your CV, as Dr Glassman was good enough to post his at the end of his paper.
Finally, you are correct about Michael Mann’s increasing irrelevance. In addition to the debunking of his MWP-erasing Hokey Stick chart, and the political shenanigans that were exposed in his Climategate emails, his status has taken a nose dive.
Phil. (22:33:40),
Still dodging the question of who pays you, I see. Does any of it come from the public purse? Enquiring minds want to know.
My question is not intended to be an ad hom attack; rather, it goes to credibility. If any of our tax money is in your pockets, then you have a motive to keep the CAGW scare alive.
And the “false analogy” is actually the warmists’ claim that CO2 acts like a covered greenhouse blanketing the Earth and trapping radiant heat. As Wood’s experiments show, that analogy is false.
barry, you misunderestimate badly the degree to which subsequent millenial reconstructions are corrupted by the same or similarly bogus data as that of the Piltdown’s Mann.
Subsequent millennial reconstructions use varying data, some not even tree-rings. Is there a hockey stick in borehole reconstructions? Yes. Is there an MWP? Yes, as there is in all paleoreconstructions, including Mann et al (he discusses its magnitude, after all). In ice-cores? Yes. Throw out tree-ring proxies altogether – nothing much changes.
There is proxy overlap between various studies, and there are reconstructions with completely independent data.
Some of these studies have been picked over on blogs, but there has not been a corresponding bunch of serious papers addressing them. McIntyre and others have gone looking for problems – not because of any curiosity about the science, but because it is necessary now to take these papers down and imply that the scientists are incompetent, or victims of groupthink, or involved in a conspiracy, and for what? To try and say that the MWP was warmer? It doesn’t dent AGW. To call into question the honesty of the scientists? Well, that’s why you analogise with the Piltdown hoax, isn’t it? You are casting the scientists – all of them – as deliberate fraudsters, so AGW can be attacked. This is the point of the exercise, not fixing the science.
Hop many millennial reconstructions have you done?
Why do so many people who have no idea how to centre principal components take a couple of outlying studies on faith against the great majority that speak against their views. Why do skeptics emphasise outliers on any topic over the full body of literature? Because the science doesn’t interest them. It’s enough for them to read on some blog a rebuttal to a formal study that supports the mainstream conclusions, and hey presto! Without the qualifications to assess for themselves, they accord this paper a high standard against which the others must be measured. A real skeptic would simply not do this. They would say, “I’m not qualified to judge.”
Proving alleged dishonesty isn’t possible. Yet it’s the meme-de-decade. Because insinuation gets the job done. There’s no effort to redeem paleoclimate science here, but to tarnish it and its practitioners. Since M&M 05, skeptics have largely abandoned trying to reconstruct Northern Hemispheric millennial temps. It’s a similar story for the global instrumental record. Years of talk about bias and no skeptic bothered to get all the freely available online raw data and off their own bat and properly plot a global temp profile. Anthony Watts still hasn’t plotted a US profile from his nominated good weather stations. This quantitative work just hasn’t been done. The exercise has become one of tearing down, not advancing science. So if skeptics have abandoned advancing science? What are they doing? Politics.
A warmer MWP doesn’t scotch AGW. AGW is not built on the premise that the medieval warm period was cooler than today.
Smokey: “And Brendan H is still saying that black is white, down is up, evil is good… and skeptics emit unintended hypotheses with every CO2-laden breath.”
By no means. My argument is easy enough to follow: the burden of proof lies with the claimant.
Where you claim that the current climate is operating within natural climate variability, or make any other claim, you have chosen to bear the burden of proof. This holds regardless of the label you choose to attach to the claim.
“Unless it is made clear that a comment is specifically intended to be a scientific hypothesis…”
Smokey, you have already made a specific claim about the “long-accepted theory [which] states that the climate naturally fluctuates.” Presumably your inclusion of the phrase “long-accepted theory” was a genuine reference to a scientific claim. But perhaps it was merely a rhetorical flourish.
“…the false claim is made that every point raised, every comment made, every fact cited, every question asked, every analogy compared, every deduction presented, is automatically its own new hypothesis that must be endlessly defended by the skeptical scientist.”
You would need to support this claim with some evidence. You are also assuming that every claim is a hypothesis. Not so. Some are, some are not. But, whatever the nature of the claim, the burden of proof lies with the claimant.
“barry (07:08:21) :
[…]
12 years and more than a dozen studies later, anyone banging on about Mann et al’s hockey stick and ignoring or waving away the reconstructions that have emerged since, is demonstrating neither skepticism nor interest in science. It’s pure point-scoring. And that’s politics.”
Studies like this?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/17/iq-test-which-of-these-is-not-upside-down/
Brendan H (10:46:39) :
Where you claim that the current climate is operating within natural climate variability, or make any other claim, you have chosen to bear the burden of proof. This holds regardless of the label you choose to attach to the claim.
Like it or not, you’re wrong from a scientific point-of-view but the argument is now moot. The GISS temperature series has been shown to be statistically consistent with natural climate variation.
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/global-average-temperature-increase-giss-hadcru-and-ncdc-compared/#comments
Next.
Smokey (08:34:36) :
Phil. (22:33:40),
Still dodging the question of who pays you, I see. Does any of it come from the public purse? Enquiring minds want to know.
Well it’s none of your business, and it isn’t relevant to the discussion.
My question is not intended to be an ad hom attack; rather, it goes to credibility. If any of our tax money is in your pockets, then you have a motive to keep the CAGW scare alive.
Actually it is quite clearly an ad hominem, if you think it isn’t then you don’t know what that term means. Not only is it insulting but it impugns my professional integrity, regrettably a common form of attack these days.
And the “false analogy” is actually the warmists’ claim that CO2 acts like a covered greenhouse blanketing the Earth and trapping radiant heat. As Wood’s experiments show, that analogy is false.
Another term you don’t understand, the false analogy fallacy in logic is to create a false analogy and use a falsification of the analogy in an attempt to falsify the original position. Similar to a strawman argument.
The merits of Wood’s cold frame experiment have absolutely nothing to do with the effect of CO2 on near surface temperatures. As you describe it the experiment doesn’t even show what you think it does.
Richard M (07:26:21) :
Those claiming natural climate change is a hypothesis are being silly. It is a theory. It graduated from hypothesis to theory long ago and supported by literally millions of pieces of evidence.
No it doesn’t, it certainly doesn’t meet the requirements of a theory since it’s not able to make falsifiable predictions. Perhaps you’d like to cite a source for this ‘theory’?
DirkH (10:58:56),
Thanks for the link to one of the more interesting WUWT articles on Michael Mann. It is astonishing that someone so incompetent could be taken seriously by anyone. Maybe the handful of escapees here from realclimate, tamino, and climate progress will learn something.
Richard M (11:12:48),
The chart in your link shows what many other charts show: that temperatures have increased at the same rate in the past, well before the first SUV rolled off the assembly line.
But no evidence, no matter how strong, will convince cognitive dissonance-afflicted alarmists that climate fluctuations, including the recent small, 0.7° rise are largely, if not completely of natural origin.
And exactly as I predicted, Brendan H takes any and all statements skeptical of CAGW, and preposterously claims they are new scientific hypotheses that must be defended.
They are not; they are arguments and refutations of the new CO2=CAGW hypothesis. No honest scientist would claim that citing natural climate variability as a rebuttal of the hypothesis that a minor trace gas drives the climate is itself a new hypothesis.
Brendan ignores the hundreds of peer reviewed scientists cited in the Harvard study showing that the MWP and the LIA were worldwide events, and now claims it is a new hypothesis that must be defended. Going one step further, Brendan designates himself as the umpire who picks and chooses which statements are new scientific hypotheses that must be defended by skeptical scientists.
That is simply a tactic; a circular argument intended to take the spotlight off of the falsification of the CAGW hypothesis. So Brendan designates himself as the sole arbiter of which skeptical statements are a new scientific hypothesis to be defended, and which ones he is magnanimous enough to let slide. As if.
To Brendan’s preposterous doublethink regarding the scientific method, in which Mann’s peer reviewed and ultimately falsified hypothesis that CO2 drives the climate [which was — according to Mann — stable and unchanging for a thousand years], we can now add barry (08:54:32), who appears to confuse the blade of the Hokey Stick with the shaft.
No one is arguing that temperatures have not risen over the past century. That is Mann’s “blade.” There have been the same recurring “blades,” both up and down, for millennia.
Global temperatures always oscillate, in fits and starts and on a multi-decadal time scale, above and below a gradually rising trend line going back to the LIA, and to the last great Ice Age before that. That is the blade of Mann’s chart, and it is based on the instrumental record.
But the shaft of the hockey stick is what has been repeatedly falsified. Mann shows a very steady, unchanging climate for a thousand years — based on falsified proxy data. But as scientific skeptics, Vikings and Thames ice skaters know, the climate has always changed.
The CAGW conjecture is over the primary cause of the rise. Alarmists blame it on the minor trace gas CO2 — which follows temperature rises on all time scales.
Skeptics simply ask, where is your empirical evidence? Show us your raw data, your algorithms and other code, and your methodology. Make it transparent and testable.
But to this day, Michael Mann and his pals at the CRU refuse to show scientific skeptics — the only honest kind of scientists — their data and methods, which were paid for by taxpayers.
That tells us all we need to know about their CAGW conclusions: their conclusions can not withstand scrutiny, and they would be promptly falsified upon disclosure. So they stonewall, rather than admitting to being incompetent con men.
{It’s a similar story for the global instrumental record. Years of talk about bias and no skeptic bothered to get all the freely available online raw data and off their own bat and properly plot a global temp profile.}
Barry, try the air vent, you’ll find it in the blog roll above.
Interesting things happening on sceptic and non-sceptic sites right now.
Roman and Jeff may have found a better way to analyze the GISS temp. Of course VS has shown that statistically, the recent warming is not out of bounds from natural variations (and Eduardo has said that he would gladly accept help from a statistician, which may be a HUGE BREAKTHROUGH finally!!!!).
Anthony and Steve are showing that the arctic is still creating more ice as of TODAY, going past the historic date of the usual downturn in ice production. Drs. Spencer and Christy may have found spurious trends in temp rise from UHI, Zeke and Nick Stokes (niether of whom are sceptics) are engaged in discussions at Lucia’s, Bishop has some facinating thoughts.
These are interesting times to be alive. In this month’s Discovery there are features on differing perspectives of physics. Two of the options discussed are that the laws of the universe may evolve just like biological life forms. Or that future events can and do alter present experiences.
Just because right now at this time, a majority of scientists hold that CO2 is driving the upward temp trend, is not all that unique. Think of Darwin, stomach ulcers (not tension, but bacteria), Tectonic plate theory, Einstien, dino’s versus cruros, on and on it goes.
Science is being done on the sceptic side. A lot of it in blog form, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your point of view. But it is being done. So this meme that sceptics are there to only disparage credible scientists, needs to be layed down, and it is time for the sides to get together and really get to the truth of the matter.
Phil – you said “Do the mass balance, this is nonsense!” in reply to my assertion that “There is far more CO2 sloshing around than comes from fossil fuels.” and “the atmospheric CO2 content might not be very different now if none of the fossil fuels had been burned“(I assume you weren’t referring to the part where I was agreeing with you : “I do think that your conclusion may be approximately correct“).
I would have appreciated a more reasoned argument, but no matter …..
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the ocean surface layer (usually put at about 150m), which is where most of the sloshing around occurs, is a lot greater than total fossil fuel emissions. On top of that, there are transfers between the surface layer and the depths (eg. THC, bio activity, etc) so my “sloshing around” statement is substantiated. And it is also the case that CO2 measured at Mauna Loa goes up and down each year by a lot more than the annual emission, so there’s quite a lot going on.
As an aside, I don’t think anyone has yet explained the 800-year delay from temperature increase to CO2 increase shown in Al Gore’s film. The most likely solution maybe involves the THC. If anyone knows of an explanation, I am interested!
But there is a simpler way of looking at this issue. The oceans release CO2 when they warm up, and absorb it when they cool. With the oceans having warmed, especially during the last PDO warming phase, the atmospheric CO2 content would have risen anyway. So AGW cannot be responsible for all of the observed increase (even AGWT doesn’t claim that all temperature increase is A).
It so happens that I do think that fossil fuel emissions are responsible for much of the recent atmospheric CO2 increase, but I might be wrong. I would like to see better analyses before committing to that and to any particular proportion.
Barry – you say “Fossil fuel CO2 has a different isotopic ratio to naturally occurring. The measured change in ratio in the atmosphere is exactly in line with what is expected from the estimated amount that has been burned. It’s also indicated by ocean CO2 changes. This is one of the things that is ’settled’.“.
I have seen that claim, but I have seen papers (plural) that say the opposite. eg. Roy Spencer on WUWT in Jan 2008
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/28/spencer-pt2-more-co2-peculiarities-the-c13c12-isotope-ratio/
So I do not agree that it is ‘settled’. Like Roy Spencer’s isotope analysis, every analysis I have seen or done on temperature vs CO2 fails to show any deviation for the 1998 El Nino, and they should do so if your view is correct. There is more to this than we know yet.
I have seen that claim, but I have seen papers (plural) that say the opposite. eg. Roy Spencer on WUWT in Jan 2008
Spencer is not saying the ‘opposite’. Quoting his second post:
That link is not to a paper but to a post on a blog. Let’s describe out sources accurately. Spencer mentioned in the comments that he might publish a paper on the topic, but 2 years on he hasn’t yet done so.
Semantically, you have see-sawed the credibility of your sources, elevating Spencer’s post by calling it a ‘paper’, and reducing the body of scientific literature on the subject to a ‘claim’. Perhaps you are unaware the subject has been intensely studied in the scientific literature?
There is a fine rebuttal to Spencer in the comments section by someone with more expertise in the subject (Ferdinand Engelbeen). It’s a good conversation in that thread. I wouldn’t suggest it is conclusive, but it is edifying.
I’ve mentioned skeptics brandishing outlying papers as if they somehow have cornered the market on *the truth*. Brandishing outlying conclusions from blog posts cuts even less mustard, surely? Particularly when the author is not expert in the subject and has been looking at the subject for ‘only a year’, as Spencer put it.
I’m not an expert, for sure, but if Spencer is right and the isotope ratio change is partly a product of natural processes, then where has that part that can be explained by anthro CO2 gone? If the oceans (or vegetation or whatever) are responsible for some of the rise, Spencer needs to explain why the isotope change expected from CO2 humankind has definitely emitted, concordant with the measured isotopic changes, is not all from anthro CO2. Spencer provides an alternative explanation, but doesn’t suggest a mechanism by which the biosphere somehow manages to single out the anthro CO2 contribution and store it away, leaving the remainder of isotope change due to natural processes. If he gets around to publishing a study, I’d be intrigued to learn how he deals with that.
This recent post on the human fingerprint in global warming begins with a look at CO2 levels. The first graph makes the rather strong point (Engelbeen also makes it in the comments section) that pre-industrial, holocene CO2 levels were in relative equilibrium at ~280ppm. If natural processes are responsible for the post-industrial rise, we should see similar behaviour during the pre-industrial holocene. But we don’t. Not even during the MWP. Spencer doesn’t deal with that at all. If he has subsequently, I’d be interested to read of it – even in a blog post. 🙂
Having read again, that Spencer needs to detrend the data to find a correlation, suggests to me that we’re now looking at interannual small-scale modulations rather than long-term trend. Spencer is only looking at ‘the last few decades’, too. I also would be interested to know how he gets around the fact that the oceans have been, and are currently, a net sink, not source of CO2. There was an article here a while back on a paper showing the airborne fraction of emitted CO2 hasn’t changed – that the oceans are a net sink of CO2. A post from an AGW skeptic rebutting Spencer’s thesis along those lines was also posted at WUWT.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/22/a-look-at-human-co2-emissions-vs-ocean-absorption/
I doubt Spencer will publish his thesis.
DeNihilist (14:32:58),
Very interesting post, thanks. I enjoyed being reminded of the hypothesis that future events can and do alter the present. Harvard physicist Brian Greene has written a couple of books explaining how it works in detail.
Prof Greene also explains the astonishing fact that even using conservative inflaton [inflation] math, if the universe were as large as the Earth, our visible 13 billion light year horizon would be smaller than a grain of sand!
And Greene’s simple proof that any 3 spatial dimension universe must use an inverse square law was itself worth the price of the book [The Fabric Of The Cosmos, IIRC]. Universes with different spatial dimensions use an inverse cube law, etc.
I’m reading Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds right now, but just recalling Green’s books make me want to start on them again.
Phil. (12:48:41),
To make you happy [but probably nothing really will], I’ll make a falsifiable prediction regarding natural climate variability for you: the climate will remain within its Holocene parameters, and it will not go into runaway global warming regardless of CO2 levels. Put whatever time limits you want on it.
And that prediction is surely going to be more accurate than Hansen’s Texas Sharpshooter predictions A, B and C [at least one of them had to be right, didn’t it? Alas, they were all wrong].
Regarding my statement that I did not intend my comment as an ad hom attack, what part of “intend” do you not understand?
You’re like the guy who takes someone’s hat off a hat rack, puts it on, and says, “Hey, this hat fits me perfectly! So it must be my hat.”
I think you’re overly sensitive because I’ve zeroed in on the reason you’re so protective of the continuing global warming scam. That’s OK. Lots of people have their hands in my pockets, one more won’t make any difference.
You say: “…the false analogy fallacy in logic is to create a false analogy and use a falsification of the analogy in an attempt to falsify the original position. Similar to a strawman argument.” If you haven’t noticed, there are a huge number of false arguments, subdivided into ever smaller categories. Your fallacy is like the one claiming that every response to CAGW is a new hypothesis which, at the option of the defender of the original, actual hypothesis, must be first defended – which turns the scientific method on its head, and stops all possibility of falsification. In fact, that is a strawman argument, combined with a red herring argument. Cool.
Finally, regarding R.W. Wood’s experiments, you say: “As you describe it the experiment doesn’t even show what you think it does.”
You should really quit digging. Here is the 1909 account, in Prof Wood’s own words:
I wrote my account from memory [and thus said 50 degrees instead of 55], but I understand what Prof Wood was saying: trapped radiation is insignificant.
But you can not agree with Prof Wood’s experimental results, because they blow the whole CO2=CAGW conjecture out of the water.
And Mike Jonas (16:10:16) is right.
DeNihilist (14:32:58) :
Bravo!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Yo, barry (18:39:03),
You state that “pre-industrial, holocene CO2 levels were in relative equilibrium at ~280ppm. If natural processes are responsible for the post-industrial rise, we should see similar behaviour during the pre-industrial holocene. But we don’t. Not even during the MWP.”
Thank you for mentioning the MWP, which was ≈800 years ago. Perhaps we are witnessing a rise in CO2 as a result of that warming?
We do know that CO2 follows warming. It does not cause measurable global warming [prove me wrong, if you can – using empirical, testable, reproducible evidence, please].
Furthermore, if a rise in CO2 from 280 ppmv to almost 400 ppmv has caused only a mere 0.7° increase in global temperature… then what, exactly, are we supposed to be alarmed about?
Mike Jonas (18:20:08) :
Phil – you say “half of the CO2 produced annually by fossil fuel consumption and emitted into the atmosphere is absorbed by the biosphere/ocean consequently all of the increase in atmospheric CO2 comes from human activity.”
Although I do think that your conclusion may be approximately correct, your logic is not. There is far more CO2 sloshing around than comes from fossil fuels. You must therefore first eliminate the possibility that it is primarily the natural system which sets the CO2 level. ie. the atmospheric CO2 content might not be very different now if none of the fossil fuels had been burned.
d[CO2]/dt=Source-Sink+Fossil fuel
where Source and Sink refer to the ‘natural CO2’
and Fossil fuel the emissions of man by combustion.
Observations give us that d[CO2]/dt≅0.5*Fossil fuel
∴ d[CO2]/dt=Source-Sink+2*d[CO2]/dt
-d[CO2]/dt=Source-Sink
∴ Source is less than Sink
So how do you arrive at “the atmospheric CO2 content might not be very different now if none of the fossil fuels had been burned”?
Smokey, a couple of posts I made appear to have vanished. Here’s a brief response if they don’t emerge.
You are referring to the ~800 year CO2 to temps from glacial record.
Last interglacial: global warming of 5 – 6C was accompanied by a rise in CO2 concentrations of ~100ppm over 5000 years
Since MWP: global warming of 2C (hi-figure) is followed by a rise of about 100ppm over 150 years
The two rates are different by orders of magnitude.
If we use the glacial record as a template, CO2 concentrations should be only a little bit above 280ppm at this time, and should not reach 400ppm for quite some time. Further, the amplitude of the MWP, even at the highest values out there should give a rise of considerably less than 100ppm, especially within 100 years.
The lag/lead argument has been done to death. The fallacy is that if temps cause CO2 rise, CO2 rise can’t cause increased temps. There’s no logic to this. In any case, if CO2 plays no part in the warming, then only one hemisphere should get warmer according to orbital dynamics. The ice core record shows, however, that interglacial warming is a global phenomenon.
We do know that CO2 follows warming. It does not cause measurable global warming [prove me wrong, if you can – using empirical, testable, reproducible evidence, please].
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeYfl45X1wo
These tests are repeatable. There have been thousands like them, as well as calculations done from spectral analysis in the lab. The correlation of temps to CO2 for the 20th century (as well as interglacials) is a pretty good (using 2nd or 3rd order polynomial fits – better than linear regression for the temp data in this comparison).
(Yes, I know, correlation doesn’t prove causation. But that rebuttal not only wipes out much of the skeptical literature as well as mainstream, it wipes out a large swathe of science in general (medical studies for example). Correlation is but one piece of the jigsaw puzzle)
Richard M: “Like it or not, you’re wrong from a scientific point-of-view but the argument is now moot.”
Whether or not that is the case, it is irrelevant to my argument, which is: the burden of proof lies with the claimant.
You have offered a claim that: “The GISS temperature series has been shown to be statistically consistent with natural climate variation.”
That’s fine, but that does not negate my argument. Whatever arguments and evidence your source is offering, the claimant still bears the burden of proof.