This is an essay professor Richard Lindzen of MIT sent to the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va for their Opinion Page in March, and was recently republished in the Janesville, WI Gazette Extra where it got notice from many WUWT readers. It is well worth the read. – Anthony
To a significant extent, the issue of climate change revolves around the elevation of the commonplace to the ancient level of ominous omen. In a world where climate change has always been the norm, climate change is now taken as punishment for sinful levels of consumption. In a world where we experience temperature changes of tens of degrees in a single day, we treat changes of a few tenths of a degree in some statistical residue, known as the global mean temperature anomaly (GATA), as portents of disaster.
Earth has had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a 100,000-year cycle for the last 700,000 years, and there have been previous interglacials that appear to have been warmer than the present despite lower carbon-dioxide levels. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th century, these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat, and, indeed, some alpine glaciers are advancing again.
For small changes in GATA, there is no need for any external cause. Earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Examples include El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, etc. Recent work suggests that this variability is enough to account for all change in the globally averaged temperature anomaly since the 19th century. To be sure, man’s emissions of carbon dioxide must have some impact. The question of importance, however, is how much.
A generally accepted answer is that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (it turns out that one gets the same value for a doubling regardless of what value one starts from) would perturb the energy balance of Earth about 2 percent, and this would produce about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming in the absence of feedbacks. The observed warming over the past century, even if it were all due to increases in carbon dioxide, would not imply any greater warming.
However, current climate models do predict that a doubling of carbon dioxide might produce more warming: from 3.6 degrees F to 9 degrees F or more. They do so because within these models the far more important radiative substances, water vapor and clouds, act to greatly amplify whatever an increase in carbon dioxide might do. This is known as positive feedback. Thus, if adding carbon dioxide reduces the ability of the earth system to cool by emitting thermal radiation to space, the positive feedbacks will further reduce this ability.
It is again acknowledged that such processes are poorly handled in current models, and there is substantial evidence that the feedbacks may actually be negative rather than positive. Citing but one example, 2.5 billion years ago the sun’s brightness was 20 percent to 30 percent less than it is today (compared to the 2 percent change in energy balance associated with a doubling of carbon-dioxide levels) yet the oceans were unfrozen and the temperatures appear to have been similar to today’s.
This was referred to by Carl Sagan as the Early Faint Sun Paradox. For 30 years, there has been an unsuccessful search for a greenhouse gas resolution of the paradox, but it turns out that a modest negative feedback from clouds is entirely adequate. With the positive feedback in current models, the resolution would be essentially impossible. [Note: readers, see this recent story on WUWT from Stanford that shows Greenhouse theory isn’t needed in the faint young sun paradox at all – Anthony]
Interestingly, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the greenhouse forcing from manmade gases is already about 86 percent of what one expects from a doubling of carbon dioxide (with about half coming from methane, nitrous oxide, freons, and ozone). Thus, these models should show much more warming than has been observed. The reason they don’t is that they have arbitrarily removed the difference and attributed this to essentially unknown aerosols.
The IPCC claim that most of the recent warming (since the 1950s) is due to man assumed that current models adequately accounted for natural internal variability. The failure of these models to anticipate the fact that there has been no statistically significant warming for the past 14 years or so contradicts this assumption. This has been acknowledged by major modeling groups in England and Germany.
However, the modelers chose not to stress this. Rather they suggested that the models could be further corrected, and that warming would resume by 2009, 2013, or even 2030.
Global warming enthusiasts have responded to the absence of warming in recent years by arguing that the past decade has been the warmest on record. We are still speaking of tenths of a degree, and the records themselves have come into question. Since we are, according to these records, in a relatively warm period, it is not surprising that the past decade was the warmest on record. This in no way contradicts the absence of increasing temperatures for over a decade.
Given that the evidence (and I have noted only a few of many pieces of evidence) suggests that anthropogenic warming has been greatly exaggerated, so too is the basis for alarm. However, the case for alarm would still be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc., all depend not on GATA but on a huge number of regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, and direction and magnitude of wind and the state of the ocean.
The fact that some models suggest changes in alarming phenomena will accompany global warming does not logically imply that changes in these phenomena imply global warming. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred, and this will not change in the future. Fighting global warming with symbolic gestures will certainly not change this. However, history tells us that greater wealth and development can profoundly increase our resilience.
One may ask why there has been the astounding upsurge in alarmism in the past four years. When an issue like global warming is around for more than 20 years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence and donations are reasonably clear. So, too, are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of carbon dioxide is a dream come true. After all, carbon dioxide is a product of breathing itself.
Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted to save Earth. Nations see how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. So do private firms. The case of Enron (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, Enron was one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon-emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to trillions of dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions.
It is probably no accident that Al Gore himself is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense.
Finally, there are the well-meaning individuals who believe that in accepting the alarmist view of climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue. For them, psychic welfare is at stake.
Clearly, the possibility that warming may have ceased could provoke a sense of urgency. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, the need to courageously resist hysteria is equally clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever-present climate change is no substitute for prudence.
Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric science at MIT. Readers may send him e-mail at rlindzenmit.edu. He wrote this for The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va.
It is all very well debating the fine details of the results of the Argo buoy project, but I see responses to my posts have studiously avoided the paper linking temperature to sea level rise.
This seems to be cognitive dissonance as in order to refute it you need to take one of the following stances:
1. The temperature is not rising. In which case you have to think of another reason why sea levels are rising. Apart from melting land ice (which of course would have to be caused by warming) I cannot think of another mechanism for sea levels rising, can you?
2. Neither sea levels nor temperatures are rising – it is all fraudulent made up research which is part of a vast government conspiracy to dupe the American public into giving up their trucks and buying Toyotas, er, I mean Hondas.
3. Every single bit of research into global warming is riddled with mistakes and done by idiots who clearly have no idea what they are talking about.
If it is 2 above I pity you living in such a paranoid world where everybody is out to get you. Must be hell going to the shops…
If it is 3 above must be great to know you are so much more clever than all those stupid Professors.
Of course you could acknowledge the connection between Global Warming and sea level rise, in which case the only argument would be about what is causing the warming. Now I would consider that to be major progress on this site!
Smokey, Francisco, Cohenite et al, on the assumption that you do not subscribe to view 1 (dumb), view 2 (paranoid) or 3 (deluded) I would love to know where you think all that warmth is coming from and what your source is for those thoughts. Some kind of genuine academic research would be good.
It is all very well arguing the finer points of the Argo buoy project, but I notice nobody has commented on the paper linking Global Warming with sea level rise.
Some here clearly have a major problem with cognitive dissonance as in order to refute it you have to take one of the following stances:
1. Temperatures are not rising. In which case you have to think of another reason why the sea level is rising. Other than the melting of land ice (which would have to involve warming of course) I cannot think of another mechanism, can you?
2. Neither the temperature nor the sea level is rising. It is all a vast government conspiricy to force the great American public into giving up their trucks and to buy Toyotas, er, I mean Hondas.
3. All of the studies on global warming and CO2 are riddled with faults and clearly the people writing them are all stupid and do not have a clue what they are doing.
If you subscribe to view 2, I pity you having to live in such a paranoid universe. It must be hell going to the shops…
If you subscribe to view 3 it must be nice to know how much cleverer you are than all those stupid professors.
Assuming you do not subscribe to view 1 (dumb), view 2 (paranoid) or view 3 (deluded) then you have to acknowledge that global warming is happening. In which case the only arguments are what is causing that warming and how much temperatures are likely to rise. I would call that a major advance on this blog!
Smokey, Francisco, Cohenite, assuming you are not either dumb, paranoid or deluded, what do you think is causing the warming? A source for those thoughts would be handy, such as some kind of proper scientific study.
TLM (05:58:01),
You are projecting your inability to understand onto those who do understand, like Prof Lindzen, who answers your questions in the article. You did read the article …didn’t you?
Any minor effect CO2 might have is swamped by those and other factors.
As a matter of fact, the effect of CO2 has not been quantified. However, the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 has inexorably ratcheted down by everyone except the 100% political appointees comprising the UN/IPCC and their well paid followers.
If, as is becoming more apparent, climate sensitivity to CO2 is <1, then the warming from “carbon” is so insignificant that it can be entirely disregarded. It is inconsequential compared to the natural climate variability caused by the factors Prof Lindzen mentions above.
Since you say you want genuine academic research, here is the best starting point: click. Pages 4 – 14 contain peer reviewed papers, many of which show climate sensitivity to CO2 to be 0.5 – 1.0. Other climatologists put it even lower.
Finally, scientific skeptics are immune from the cognitive dissonance that you project. Skeptics are neutral, only asking for empirical evidence for the hypothesis that CO2=CAGW. Provide testable, replicable evidence based on unadjusted raw data, and the methods, code and any other tools the promoters of the CAGW hypothesis used to arrive at their conclusions, and you will convince skeptics that CO2 is the primary driver of the climate. It’s that straightforward.
Since skeptics are only asking for empirical evidence that CO2=CAGW, and not promoting a hypothesis [other than the null hypothesis], they cannot be subject to cognitive dissonance. That only leaves you and the rest of the climate alarmists. QED.
@TLM (05:58:01) :
=================
The causes of sea level rise (virtually uninterrupted for some 8,000 years now) are likely the same as those that marked the subsiding of the last glaciation, a process we should pray does not reverse itself abruptly any time soon. If you obtain conclusive information as to what causes glaciations and ice ages to come and go, sometimes swiftly, you may get some kind of prize, and you will also find out the answer to your existential question: “”why are sea levels rising.” I do not know the answer to those questions, and am not inclined to bet on one of the various hypothesis currently available. If you are convinced that something quite extraordinary and unprecedented is going on at the moment on the climate front, I understand your aprehension. My only therapeutic suggestion is that you collect some serene temperature reconstructions going back a few million years, the longer the better, blow them up, place them on your wall, and stare at them in meditation, focusing your attention on the absolutely insingificant and unremarkable nature of the current period, in order to start seeing that nothing special seems to be going on. Only in this manner can you hope to overcome the long term traumatic effects of looking at charts as those displayed in Gore-like horror movies, and reading stories about “unprecedented” this and unprecedented that, where the precedent turns out to be the day before yesterday, and the conclusion is driven home with titles like “The Day After Tomorrow.”
There is an interesting article from 2008 at the World Climate Report site, where they keep track of the literature on ice and sea level matters. Here’s a brief excerpt:
“We have written about sea level rise many times in the past, and there is no doubt that the sea is currently rising worldwide. However, the sea level rise has been taking place almost monotonically over the past 8,000 years, with substantial decadal variability embedded in the trend. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected.” In 2007, IPCC notes “Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3] mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003: about 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8] mm per year. Whether the faster rate for 1993 to 2003 reflects decadal variability or an increase in the longer-term trend is unclear.” A key question is not whether sea level is rising, but rather, has there been any acceleration in the rise – the jury is still very much out on that issue.”
“Yet another major article has appeared on the subject of sea level rise, and the results are not going to be popular with the developers of the million or so websites on the topic. The article is published in Geophysical Research Letters, the authors are from Tulane University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the work was not funded by any horrible industry group. Kolker and Hameed begin their article stating “Determining the rate of global sea level rise (GSLR) during the past century is critical to understanding recent changes to the global climate system. However, this is complicated by non-tidal, short-term, local sea-level variability that is orders of magnitude greater than the trend.” Once again, some element of the greenhouse scare that might seem simple at first glance appears to be a lot more complicated than we originally may have thought. The authors further note that “Estimates of recent rates of global sea level rise (GSLR) vary considerably” noting that many scientists have calculated rates of 1.5 to 2.0 mm per year over the 20th century. They also show that other very credible approaches have led to a 1.1 mm per year result, and they note that “the IPCC [2007] calls for higher rates for the period 1993–2003: 3.1 ± 0.7.” They state that “Debate has centered on the relative contribution of fresh water fluxes, thermal expansion and anomalies in Earth’s rotation.”
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/01/04/lowering-sea-level-rise/
You’re pretty smooth Anu; the Levitus 2009 paper sees “plenty of ocean warming”; I suggest you look at Fig S9 of that paper; and I note you haven’t commented on the 2003 spike in OHC which must be a transition error and contributes 1/2 of all OHC over the whole data period. And I find remarkable that you think eustatic, not steric sea rise is the crucial thing; this doesn’t make sense; if the oceans are the missing pipeline where the extra heating from ghgs is being stored then it must be shown in OHC and steric sea level rise; there is not enough water coming from either Greenland or the Antarctic to fuel an eustatic sea level rise.
I have to say it’s a remarkable finding by the Schuckmann paper to find OHC increasing when OHC is declining at the 700m mark;
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/dipuccio-2.jpg
How can a body of water cooling at the top be warming at the bottom when the putative warming source is the AGW effect which is top-down?
cohenite (16:36:48) :
What, no “thank you” for helping you with your although anyone who can get a global 69% increase in OHC over the period with the SH increasing by 62% and the NH by 68% needs watching. mistake ?
I suggest you look at Fig S9 of that paper
I see the world oceans heating up about 14 x 10^22 Joules since 1955.
What do you see ?
and I note you haven’t commented on the 2003 spike in OHC
cohenite (03:09:00) :
In addition, it is uncontroversial that the upper ocean [to 700 metres] heating has been decreasing since 2003
Ah, in one Comment, 2003 saw a huge spike in Ocean Heat Content. In another, it is “uncontroversial” that the ocean heating has been decreasing since 2003.
Which one is your final answer ?
which must be a transition error
Sure, data that you don’t like must be some sort of error. 2001 to 2004 must be some sort of “error”, just like 1973 to 1976, or 1993 to 1997. And don’t forget that “0” is just the 1957 to 1990 reference period – the ocean heat content was below -4 during this entire time period.
Eustatic is the interesting sea level rise, because it will not be linear over the next century like the “cautious” IPCC projections are saying. I don’t care about steric rise because it is chump change, and things like salinity affect the expansion – if I’m interested in OHC, I want to see temperatures down to 3000m. 2000 m will do for now.
there is not enough water coming from either Greenland or the Antarctic to fuel an eustatic sea level rise.
What does that mean ?
Some of that ice is melting, some sea level rise is being caused, but as I said, I am not interested in the early decades of this century for sea levels.
How can a body of water cooling at the top be warming at the bottom when the putative warming source is the AGW effect which is top-down?
The ocean is not a stagnant body of water, being warmed from above by heat diffusion. It is a complex, irregular shaped body of water, with complex seabed terrain, on a spinning planet, with established currents occurring in both 2D and 3D. It’s the 3D currents that mix up the water, taking upper level heat and moving it to the depths. Look at the thermohaline conveyor belt, for one example of vertical currents. There are others.
How can the ENSO take heat from below and cause warm surface temperatures one year (eg 1998)? How can La Nina make the surface colder, another year ? The heat is sloshing across the oceans, and vertically, from top to below, or below to top.
Imagine the oceans were clear, and extra heat from radiative imbalance is red ink – the ink pools in certain places (certain oceans, certain regions), and also gets pulled below. There would be red, inky currents, in slow motion, going all over the ocean in complicated patterns.
Look at the Karina’s papers again (von Schuckmann). Certain parts of the ocean have quite a bit of heat below 700m.
http://www.euro-argo.eu/content/download/49437/368494/file/VonSchukmann_et_al_2009_inpress.pdf
Figures 7, 8, 9, 10.
Thank you very much Anu, but “That just means the trend fit for the entire ocean is slightly better than the trend fit for either SH or NH – the regional variability cancels out a bit on a global scale”. Yes well, I’ll still look askew at anyone who can get a better fit of 69% from a combination of 1/2’s of 62 and 68%, however described. Speaking of statistics and the 2003 transition spike; statistically that spike does not compute:
http://landshape.org/enm/possible-error-in-ohc/#more-3180
Francisco (05:28:35) :
Admission of ignorance, by any name, is much, much preferable to blowhard pretensions of knowledge and understanding where none exist.
Well, I suppose we can agree to that.
And I won’t make the obvious comment about the rest of your post.
I’ll let this thread fade away on a diplomatic note…
Cheers.
cohenite (20:48:41) :
It does make sense, if you think about it. Also, keep in mind that even Argo can’t measure the pole oceans too well yet, when they are iced over – I wonder how much heat gets sloshed into and out of there over the years ?
Yes, I admit the jump in 2003 looks suspicious, especially tying together different datasets like that. But look at those two other periods I gave you…
There was a perhaps similar problem in tying together TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) levels over a satellite time coverage gap (one blew up on the Challenger Space Shuttle).
Whether that 2003 jump is eventually found to be an artifact or not, overall the oceans are warming, even at 700m.
And even more clearly if you look at the entire upper layer down to 2000m. Those vertical currents mixing heat are real, and significant.
I see Bob Tisdale is active on that other site – I argued with him about this stuff once. He also downplayed vertical mixing to 2000m. Seems easy enough to grasp – NASA should make some movies of the data, they can do 3D moving datasets pretty well using semi-transparent oceans on a spinning planet, with actual ocean floor terrain, actual data, etc. I bet someones already done it with Argo data – have you ever seen scientific data visualization with 3D glasses ? Impressive.
Not quite “Avatar”, though.
Heat sloshed under the poles? I don’t know about heat sloshed under the poles but I need a slosh of scotch heat after this; since you know Bob well you will know he has discussed a reemergence mechanism to explain how the ocean can put heat into the atmosphere in an El Nino year yet keep warming itself; and despite the fact that the oceans are a complex eddying mess the fact remains that AGW is a top down heater; if the oceans were going to be heated by AGW a shallow ocean would be heating; but it ain’t:
http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/scientists-mediterranean-sea-not-warming/
Francisco (10:16:20) :
You still haven’t answered my most basic question. What is it about the sea that is changing and causing it to rise?
There can only be two mechanisms, it is expanding and/or more water is being added to it.
Now the only way the water in the oceans can expand is if it is getting warmer.
The only way more water can be added is if the glaciers and ice sheets currently perched on land above sea level are warming, melting and pouring into the sea.
Now can we at least agree therefore that the only way the sea level can rise is if the sea and/or the land are getting warmer?
As I said before, the only argument can then be what is causing the warming?
Yet again the answer is very simple. The sun. There is no other heat source available of a magnitude to cause the oceans to expand.
Again this leads to some simple possible answers either:
1. solar activity (TSI) has increased by a magnitude sufficient to cause that expansion, or
2. solar activity has increased slightly, but the atmosphere has net positive feedback of a very high magnitude that amplifies that small change in TSI to cause that expansion or,
3. greenhouse gases in the atmosphere mean that less heat from the sun is escaping than is arriving.
You can of course also combine 2 and 3 together – which is what most climate models do.
All the studies of TSI that I have read show that it has not increased sufficiently to cause the magnitude of warming and sea level rise that we have seen over the last at least 30 years, which is why most climatologists discount 1.
That leaves the possibility that either the Earth’s atmosphere has an incredibly high positive feedback – sufficient to amplify a relatively small natural variability in TSI enough to cause the sea level to rise in this way – or that greenhouse gases are trapping heat.
If you believe Lindzen is right, that this all might be natural variability, then you have to believe the earth’s atmosphere is subject to enormous positive feedbacks.
I do hope he is not right, because if he is, then those massive positive feedbacks will apply to greenhouse gas forcing as well!
It is no good just waving your hands and saying “the Earth has always changed, always got colder and warmer and this is just natural variation” without understanding that the natural feedback mechanisms driving that “natural” variation also have implications for our “unnatural” emissions of CO2.
Francisco, have you seen the satellite record of sea level rise?
http://www.climate4you.com/SeaTemperatures.htm#Global sea level
That shows an 18 year record of consistent and steady rise at a rate of about 3mm a year. Not quite a 30 year trend yet, but showing no signs of slowing down.
Now, as you say, there are all sorts of problems with the historical records of sea level but – just as with temperatures – it is likely that measurements from the satellites will be more accurate and less prone to random variation and sampling error than measurements from ground based sensors.
The seas are rising and that means that the earth is warming.
Do you agree or disagree with that statement?
I am not interested in whether you think this is a natural progression from our exit from the last ice age or whatever, I am just interested in pinning down a starting position for discussions rather than arguing about stuff that proves something that you already believe anyway.
The problem with discussions here is that nobody is willing to commit to stating what they actually believe and are more interested in contradicting what the other person said, regardless of whether they think that other person is right or not. In the end that is just pointless and childish “yes it is, no it isn’t, yes it is…” argument rather than rational discussion.
TLM (04:32:46),
The answer is pretty straightforward: the planet has been warming since the last great Ice Age, and the subsequent LIA. The oceans are still rising as a result: click
It’s entirely natural, and CO2 has nothing to do with it.
cohenite (23:09:26) :
“the fact remains that AGW is a top down heater; if the oceans were going to be heated by AGW a shallow ocean would be heating; but it ain’t”
=========
Heat going to the bottom of the oceans and hiding there. This is where CAGW attains symphonic depths of absurdity. Let’s see. The atmosphere is supposed to warm by a minuscule, if unquantified amount, due to CO2 increases over, say, a decade. The amount, whatever it is, would be barely detectable in the atmosphere itself. Over the last decade, none has been detected, or maybe even some cooling. Therefore it must have gone straight to the oceans. Now, the first 2.5 meters of ocean water have about as much heat capacity as the entire atmosphere, so its detectability there would be as difficult as in the atmosphere, assuming all of it went there instantly (without affecting the atmosphere). If you go down, say, to a depth of a mere 1000 meters, the diffusion of this transferred heat, over a volume of water with a heat capacity that now is some 400 times larger than the entire atmosphere, would make it 400 times more undetectable, we suppose. If nothing is detected there either, it is claimed that this little amount of heat has gone straight down to unfathomable depths, without ever affecting the surface temperature. Once down there, it has diffused itself over the entire depths of the oceans. So we are now dealing with diffusion over a mass whose heat capacity is several orders of magnitude larger the heat capacity of the mass where it could not be detected to begin with (the atmosphere). But now, you see, it CAN be detected over periods of a few years. Or if it can’t, it will one day.
In other words. If you can’t find a needle in your sewing room, it must have gone to the hay barn. You will find it there. But deep, deep in the hay, one day.
These marvels only happen during periods when no heat accumulation can be found in the atmosphere itself, like the last decade. In periods of detectable atmospheric warming, the extra heat forgets to do these acrobatics. And if it does not show up anywhere at all, you can always move up the “aerosol” lever a few notches until the necessary offsetting is done. Or you could claim it is moving straight to the Earth’s core and hiding there.
As a commenter elsewhere has put it, “the whole AGW field, from the ‘science’ to the sociological consequences is a bizarre, Alice in Wonderland, off with their heads surrealistic project, in my physicist opinion.” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/13/lies-damned-lies-statistics-and-graphs/ anna v (23:35:27)
Smokey (04:51:31) :
A straight answer, thanks Smokey! A rare commodity in these forums 🙂 At least I don’t feel I need to discuss with you whether or not it is warming at any rate.
That is a major hurdle you have crossed. You can now happily ignore about 80% of the articles on this site.
There are a few nuggets worth reading here. I learnt a lot from the guy who recently posted about the threat or otherwise to the coral atols from sea level rise. It made perfect sense that sea level rise actually created the atols in the first place. However if I read another piece by Stephen Goddard about how cold the weather is I think I will toss a brick through my monitor.
As a quid-pro-quo I am not convinced by a lot of the alarmist projections either. I find many of the claims about what has been caused by global warming risible. The sinking sand bar in the Bay of Bengal was a classic. I prefer to stick to the science and leave the political hype and journalistic sensationalism to those who like to play those games.
Francisco (05:37:04) :
Where on earth did that stream-of-conciousness “off the top of my head” load of drivel come from? This is all how you imagine ocean thermal dynamics to work is it? I suggest you take a course on the subject.
However, you don’t really need to go to all that bother. The sea is rising which means it must be getting warmer – there is no other explanation. At least try and get your head where Smokey has got his.
@TLM (04:32:46) :
—————-
Whatever cause you wish to assign to current sea level rise, you should also assign it to previous sea level rise, unless current sea level rise is shown to be clearly anomalous, which does not seem to be the case at all.
On this topic there is an instructive comment in a recent post that puts things nicely in detailed perspective. You should read it in full.
———-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/13/ipcc-sea-level-prediction-not-scary-enough/#comments
David Middleton (04:45:29) :
Is there any reason to think that sea level could rise another 0.5, 1.5, 3.0 meters or more over the next few hundred to few thousand years? Sure. Sea level was 3 to 5 meters higher than it is now during the previous interglacial (Sangamonian/Eemian ~130 kya). There’s no reason to expect the Holocene sea level to behave any differently than the Sangamonian sea level.
How about over the next few decades? Is there any reason to think that sea level might rise 0.5 meters or more by the year 2100? Well, to answer that question, we have to look at how sea level has been behaving over the last few decades to few centuries and see if it has been behaving anomalously over the most recent few decades. […]
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/13/ipcc-sea-level-prediction-not-scary-enough/#comments
Going over all the charts presented in the comment I quoted previously:
David Middleton (04:45:29)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/13/ipcc-sea-level-prediction-not-scary-enough/#comments
it makes you wonder why CAGW proponents even bring up sea level rise at all. The history of sea level fluctuations shows very clearly that *nothing* unusual is going on. Nothing at all. And to the extent that sea level might be used as a proxy for global temperature, it would show the same for the latter.
A nice project would be to plot those charts against CO2 levels.
TLM (07:50:51) :
This is all how you imagine ocean thermal dynamics to work is it? I suggest you take a course on the subject.
—————–
Well, I suggest you give us the course yourself. Go ahead and explain how additional heat in the atmosphere moves from the atmosphere to the ocean surface, and from there to the deep oceans, **without first producing any warming in the atmosphere or on the ocean surface water**. Invoking ocean currents to bring it down without detection won’t work, unless you imagine that the atmosphere brings that heat to the ocean only on exquisitely selected spots where it can be quickly brought down by currents. This hieat is applied over the entire ocean surface, the overwhelming majority of which does not have direct and quick communications with the bottom by currents. You should also explain whether the increasing diffusion of that heat as it moves down an increasingly large mass, should make it easier or harder to detect. Go ahead, give us the course.
Francisco (09:12:57):
Go ahead and explain how additional heat in the atmosphere moves from the atmosphere to the ocean surface, and from there to the deep oceans, **without first producing any warming in the atmosphere or on the ocean surface water**
Just because you don’t know how it can happen, does not mean that it is not happening, just that you don’t understand how.
I am not qualified to answer that question – and clearly neither are you!
The elephant in your particular room that you are so spectacularly failing to notice is that because the sea level is rising the sea must be warming.
It really is the most basic of physics, you do not need a PhD in ocean thermal dynamics to understand that.
Francisco (08:07:07) :
Whatever cause you wish to assign to current sea level rise, you should also assign it to previous sea level rise
Erm, I don’t think you meant to put it that way which sounds a bit like sea level rise is caused by rising sea levels. I think what you meant to imply, and what is linked to in your post, is that sea levels are not rising any faster than they have in the past.
Well that is only half the story. Just because sea levels have been higher and temperatures warmer in the past, or that they have both risen as quickly as they are rising now, does not mean that inevitably they should be higher and warmer now. There is no reason why graphs should show a trend rise into infinity. The modellers are trying to extract cause and effect from the data so that they can derive rules to apply to the current conditions.
The point that the CAGW theory makes is that temperatures, and hence sea levels, would be lower and possibly falling were it not for the greenhouse effect from CO2. There is plenty of evidence that CO2 is having an effect most notable of which is that the stratosphere is not warming as quickly as the troposphere – a “signature” of the growing concentration of a greenhouse gas.
Now clearly that is where the major disagreement between the “sceptics” and the “warmists” lies. All the serious “sceptics” now accept that the earth and seas are warming, even Lindzen. Perhaps we can move on from your (and my) ignorance of ocean thermal dynamics onto the more substantive and controversial area of whether and how much of the measured warming is due to CO2.
Probably one for another thread.
Sayonara.
TLM (10:20:36),
You completely misrepresented Francisco’s answer. Look at his sentence between the double asterisks, and explain how the your putative heat gets into the deep ocean.
Scientific skeptics inhabit this site. When people come in convinced that skeptics have something they must prove, it grates. We are helping you to understand that there are other plausible explanations for global warming, and the assumption that it is due to CO2 is based only on opinionated papers hand-waved through the peer review process by friendly referees [while skeptical papers rarely see the light of day], and by computer model outputs, which are invariably unable to predict the future climate, or even today’s climate with all available past data as the input.
If it were not for the enormous sums of money involved, CAGW would have been laughed out of existence long ago as a ridiculous conjecture based on invalid assumptions that disregard water vapor and clouds. The fact that people still try to justify it doesn’t make it true, and there is still no empirical evidence to support it.
Smokey (11:02:28)
What happened?
A few hours ago you were saying:
The answer is pretty straightforward: the planet has been warming since the last great Ice Age, and the subsequent LIA.
Now you are questioning how heat from the sun can get into the deep oceans – when clearly it has to be – otherwise said oceans would not be warming and rising in level (unless you have some other miraculous source for that heat?).
Either the ocean is warming or it isn’t. Make up your mind.
I cannot explain the statement in the double asterisks because I do not even know if it is true. I suspect it isn’t and that he misunderstands the processes involved. Anu (20:32:51) seems to make a lot of sense and seems to know much more about the subject than me. Why don’t you address the question to him?
The more I read the last few posts the more astonished I am by how apparently intelligent people can also be rather dumb.
There seems to be a view here that if something is “natural” then it doesn’t need to have a cause. The fact that global warming has been happening “naturally” since the end of the last ice age means that it is happening spontaneously completely independent of the need for that warming to be caused by the sun heating the oceans (and land of course).
Of course I mean in that last post (11:36:03) that there are other people here that seem to think that natural warming does not need a cause – in case anybody here thought that I subscribed to that view!
TLM (11:29:33) :
I didn’t see where Smokey denied that energy from the Sun was getting into the oceans. I did see that downwelling IR was seen as an unjustifiable energy source.
DaveE.
TLM (11:29:33),
Once again you are misrepresenting what I said. I did not say that ‘heat from the sun can get into the deep oceans.’ I didn’t say it couldn’t, either, although that would take considerable time. That was a response by someone else to something that you seem to believe, along with your evidence-free belief that the anthropogenic portion of a very minor trace gas, to which humans contribute only a very tiny fraction, is going to send the planet into runaway global warming causing climate catastrophe.
The fact that CO2 has been almost twenty times higher in the past, for millions of years at a time without triggering a catastrophe is completely ignored due to the cognitive dissonance of the true believers in Al Gore’s movie fantasies – as is everything else that can be explained by natural climate variability.
Unless you can empirically demonstrate that CO2 is the driver of the climate, you have a conjecture. You seem to believe in some sort of “hidden heat in the pipeline” to explain why model predictions are wrong. Model predictions are wrong because of their programming and assumptions.
Of course the *one* model prediction that is argued incessantly is the stratosphere/troposphere temperature gradient, which has been shown can also be caused by differences in precipitation and relative humidity. All the other predictions from the expected model results have been wrong: click
Face it, none of the CO2-predicted disasters or events, whether true or false, have been empirically linked to CO2 by falsifiable, testable evidence; they are simply speculation: ocean acidification, coral bleaching, Arctic ice cover, frog extinctions, global warming, global cooling, glaciers coming and going, etc. But where is your evidence that CO2 is the cause?
The same wrong models all predicted fast rising temperatures — not one model predicted the flat to declining temperatures over most of the past decade: click
Likely causes of warming and cooling are cycles such as Jupiter’s oblique orbit, which Dr Svalgaard shows is at least a large part of the cause of glaciations. Prof Lindzen also explains natural climate variability in this article. And how many times does it have to be pointed out that the planet is warming from an Ice Age, and from the recent LIA?
You can believe that CO2 is the main driver of the climate; for belief you don’t need evidence. I prefer to listen to the experts in their respective fields.