Sensitive side (from the NASA Global Climate Change Website)
By Rosemary Sullivant,
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
A little extra carbon dioxide in the air may, unfortunately, go further towards warming Earth than previously thought. A team of British and U.S. researchers have uncovered evidence [1] that Earth’s climate may be up to 50 percent more sensitive to long-term increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide than current climate models predict. The reason for the underestimation, they say, may be due to long-term changes in ice sheets and vegetation that are not well represented in today’s global climate models.Just how much will global temperature rise in response to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide? This is one of the key questions that climate scientists need to answer. According to the climate models used in the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from pre-industrial levels is expected to warm Earth by about 3 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit), once the atmosphere and oceans spend a few years or decades adjusting and reaching a balance.
But according to a recent study by a team of researchers that includes Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Earth’s climate is also influenced by other, much slower processes. These include changes in ice sheets, vegetation and aerosols, for example, that take place over hundreds and thousands of years.
Because of their complexity and long timescales, these processes are almost impossible to integrate into today’s climate computer models. As a result, it has been difficult to know just what their effect on Earth’s climate sensitivity would be.
To learn more about this sensitivity, Schmidt and his co-authors looked back 3 million years into Earth’s past. They used a computer model that describes the oceans and atmosphere to predict, retroactively, the climate of the mid-Pliocene — a period when both global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were higher than today. The model substantially underestimated just how high temperatures would go. When the researchers adapted the model to include the effects of long-term climate changes in vegetation and ice sheets, they were able to get a much closer representation of the warming in the Pliocene era.
The team found that it took much lower concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide to recreate the Pliocene’s warm climate than current models — which consider only the relatively fast-adjusting components of the climate — predict. Pliocene carbon dioxide levels are estimated to have been around 400 parts per million by volume (ppmv), while according to current simulations it would take 500 to 600 ppmv of carbon dioxide to bring about the warm temperatures of the Pliocene. As a result, the researchers estimate that Earth’s response to elevated concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 30 to 50 percent greater than previously calculated. In other words, the climate is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than we thought.
This higher sensitivity of the climate should be taken into account, the team concludes, when targets are set for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The results of the study appear in Nature Geoscience.
Research paper: [1] Daniel J. Lunt et al., “Earth System Sensitivity Inferred from Pliocene Modelling and Data,” Nature Geoscience, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2010).
PDF Here
They keep on repeating the same stupid MANTRA again and again. Does anyone among you Gaia believers, know how CLIMATE works on earth? If you don´t then stop trying to cheat innocent people with your computer games.
To continue the quote in the link in Francisco’s post at 6:41:
“Here we start with endlessly faulty data – from instruments parked on urban ‘heat islands’ to severely massaged data bases of daily temperature readings, from sketchy numbers for the vast reaches of the planet where there are almost no readings, to purging of decades of inconvenient data. Then these are meshed with models constructed around bad thermodynamics, baseless suppositions about the hugely dominant heat effects of water vapor and clouds, and hopelessly inaccurate quantifications of carbon uptake by the earth’s forests and oceans.
“These quack science models are further skewed by the modelers’ doctrinaire anti-carbon passions, the vetting of their results by the corrupt bureaucracy of the UN’s IPCC, and the dependence of their salaries on the expectations of funding agencies.
“Small wonder, then, that the modelers’ computer ‘reconstructions’ of the planet’s past climate conveniently wiped out the well-documented three century long Medieval Warming Period as well as the subsequent five hundred years of Little Ice Age–nor is it surprising that their terrifying computer prognostications in the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment failed to predict the next decade’s absence of any global warming trend at all.”
I find Cockburn’s politics abhorrent, but his writing is impeccable.
Anyway, who do you know who would preface a request for more research funding with the words, “by the way, things are not as bad as we thought”?
I would like to repeat, here, once more that:
Al Gore took the Nobel Peace Prize away from the hands of a 90 years old woman, Irena Sendler, who saved 2,500 jewish children from being killed, during the II WW and who had been previously selected for this prize
http://www.auschwitz.dk/sendler.htm
Markey’s U.S. Senate Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming hearing, testimony and CAGW model cheerleading is continuing:
http://budget.edgeboss.net/wmedia-live/budget/11374/100_budget-video_060519.asx
Monckton tried to give an explanation as to why he was chosen to rep. the non-CAGWers as the Reps. didn’t want to subject a non-CAGW scientist to the anticipated haranguing that he is, in fact, experiencing during the hearing. However, the Repubs have handed the Dems (generally the agwers) a convenient opportunity to characterize non-CAGWers as a cause without credentialed authoritative representation.
The committee is being called to the floor for a vote and are summing up (1.5 minutes/panel member).
If the anthropogenic global warming theory is so certainly wrong, then it should be a relatively easy thing for skeptical scientists to build computer climate models that unequivocally show a minimal role for CO2 and a major role for their pet cause. You know, beat the AGW climate modelers at their own game.
So where are these models??? If one had been produced, surely that contrary result would have been heralded in every conceiveable media outlet on the planet.
I suspect this has already been tried, repeatedly, but the attempts failed to produce the desired result (i.e., “it’s sunspots”, “it’s the PDO”, “it’s UV radiation”, “it’s continuation of the LIA recovery”, “it’s galactic cosmic ray flux”, etc.) using realistic inputs. They could not do it (without bending some law of nature), or surely they would have by now.
Francisco says:
May 6, 2010 at 6:41 am
An interesting piece by a well known hardcore leftist dismissing the whole scaremongering climate change industry and its computer models.
Volcanoes, Weather and Computer Models
By Alexandere Cockburn
“Contrast the demonstrated impossibility of computer modeling the simple downwind
dispersion of a plume from a single smokestack or volcano with the mind boggling
scientific hubris of trying to model the climate of the entire globe.”
A load of rubbish, especially the “demonstrated impossibility of computer modeling the simple downwind dispersion of a plume from a single smokestack or volcano”, which is totally false. Needless to say he didn’t demonstrate the ‘impossibility’ just handwaved about some strawmen., the success of modelling such plumes is demonstrated regularly including the current emissions from Iceland. Continental cancelled their flight from Newark to Edinburg several days this week as a result.
And we can’t verify the models with observations because the effects take place over hundreds or thousands of years.
Beautiful.
Let me see if I have this straight?
Very roughly…..The current belief on CO2 to temperature response (i.e. Charney sensitivity) is not “robust” since it only includes “fast” short-term feedbacks.
“However, there are many other processes operating, over a variety of timescales, that have a role in determining the ultimate response of the climate system to a rise in greenhouse gases.” Including, changes in [1]dust and [2]other aerosols, [3]vegetation, [4]ice sheets and [5]ocean circulation. “We term this temperature response the `Earth system sensitivity’ the long-term equilibrium surface temperature change given an increase in CO2.”
This paper attempts to improve upon our understanding of this sensitivity since, “data sets exist that allow at least two of the important longer term feedbacks, vegetation and ice sheet extent, to be addressed” (i.e. not modeled) However, many other factors are in their model infancy, e.g. ice sheets which currently cannot be model in reasonable time frames using modern computing power (according to the paper), so they substitute using proxy information.
So, despite many current factors being unknown even for “fast” feedbacks, we improve upon this by addressing JUST TWO of the many other unknown slower acting feedbacks and ignoring the others. Despite adding all this uncertainty to the current uncertainty, they confidently claim, “carbon dioxide concentrations is 30–50% greater than the response based on those fast-adjusting components of the climate system that are used traditionally to estimate climate sensitivity.”
This is like saying that there is a broken window in my house and a missing wallet. It could be on of the thousands of people who have been in my neighborhood last night or it could be my son. Since I cannot interrogate (i.e. understand these unknowns) it must be the only thing I do know, my son. Therefore, he is at fault.
From the article: “. Pliocene carbon dioxide levels are estimated to have been around 400 parts per million”
How handy. Just what scientific methology was used in making this “estimate”, and what might be the margin of error? Oh yes, with this particular estimated value, the model “worked”. I do think that this highly resembles the “finagle factor” when I was taking a college chemistry course back in 1963. Insert the proper “finagle factor”, and the results of the physical experiment agrees with theory.
Hah! If only it was that simple…
“Hocus Pocus
Slippety Slam
Raz a ma taz
and Alakazam” – Daffy Duck
Ale Gorney says:
May 6, 2010 at 6:48 am
Ignore Gavin’s warnings at your risk. Would you rather the S.F and NYC be drowned or make the responsible decisions to reduce CO2 emissions today? Your choice.
Yes! And Washington DC. Isn’t East Anglia also close to sea level?
But I still think the danger to NY is more likely ice.
Markey’s U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming hearing, testimony and CAGW model cheerleading has concluded.
Among the outcomes has been the inflating of the egos of the CAGWers’ and their exploiting another opportunity to spew one-sided CAGW propaganda – at the expense of scientific debate and public perception (political near-reality). The CAGWers’ will be able to use this exercise as another propaganda tool for years to come. What a loss for all.
I still don’t know why Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, Ranking Member seek to subject an experienced, respected, lettered non-CAGW scientist to this public dissection? Did all of them decline invitations? My hats off to Monckton for taking the hit, he does serve non-CAGW well in appropriate situations, but I believe this was a very bad outcome for the climate science “debate”. The truth denying continues.
Re Chili Palmer and Barry R
” He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future”… George Orwell. The AGW scientists and the people who publish history textbooks are both part of a process that is as ubiquitous as gravity and draws human society toward its natural state of tyranny.
The lucid and sometimes sarcastic comments above are far better reading then the press release. Good on us all. That said to you I do have a few less sarcastic comments for Garvin et al. :
I have been a self styled “natural philosopher” and Geologist for over 40 years. I have been reminded every day of that 40 years how much I do not know. That knowledge is a source of humility and I hope humanity. I do not often offer unsolicited advice to others but I will here. Get your “ass” out of your lab and your “nose” out of you math books and experience the real world. Numeric models like man, may be at the center, they are not in the center of science. That would be a logical impossibility. Numeric models are just that, models. They are not science. They can be used as a source of information that adds to knowledge. They are not knowledge.
I remind the modelers that the Heliocentric vision of the solar system was a numerical model, all be it using less sophisticated algorithms. Is was wrong too. The mathematics were not in gross error, the model was based on an incorrect assumption. That incorrect model had become dogma and orthodoxy. Modern numeric models are not new and not a new paradigm, they are just upgraded versions of the old.
I think Hansen had a paper in 1993 on paleo climate sensitivity.
Hansen, J., A. Lacis, R. Ruedy, M. Sato, and H. Wilson (1993), How sensitive is the world’s climate?, Natl. Geogr. Res. Explor., 9, 142–158.
What do the skeptics have to say?
This skeptic, believes that a number of other factors have been obscured (or neglected) in the analysis that put a (predetermined) bias on the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere.
A number of geophysical and astronomical factors contributed to Pliocene climate, which in turn fixed the relative concentration of CO2 in the air, and the Pliocene climate had been quite thoroughly analyzed 40-50 years ago, making no mention of CO2 influencing the climate.
Climate models have the wonderful property of making what you want to see happen with greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, happen. They have the ability to rewrite history.
Note to gavin.When building models open window and place cap on glue.
Ale Gorney says:
May 6, 2010 at 6:48 am
Ignore Gavin’s warnings at your risk. Would you rather the S.F and NYC be drowned or make the responsible decisions to reduce CO2 emissions today? Your choice.
============
I’ll take the risk any day. Of course, it’s a false dichotomy anyway. NYC will not be drowned because somebody called Gavin has run a computer program which has only a tenuous relationship to reality. Anybody who thinks this is in anyway science is being duped. I feel sorry for you.
Just came across something interesting that casts doubt on the accuracy of all that paleoclimate ice-core data. The article
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080603104418.htm
suggests that these ice cores may be contaminated by the metabolic effects — changing of CO2 amounts trapped inside, and so on — of long-lived, slow-metabolizing bacteria. So much for the assumption that all those trapped gasses, isotope ratios, and so on inside the ice cores have stayed there in “cold storage”, unchanged for tens of thousands of years …
it is just unbelievable that they keep publishing this crap.
temperatures have already been running well below all of their predictions
yet now they tell us that the sytem is more sensitive to the added co2
so the added co2 should have a stronger effect than their already failed models predicted
CodeTech says:
May 6, 2010 at 8:42 am
Ale Gorney says:
Ignore Gavin’s warnings at your risk. Would you rather the S.F and NYC be drowned or make the responsible decisions to reduce CO2 emissions today? Your choice.
Hah! If only it was that simple…
My apologies to the few sensible people in both of those cities, but in my estimation, American society would benefit greatly with the disappearance of both bastions of insanity.
Since CO2 rose 1000 years after the temperature increased, we can surely say (based on the exact same core data Gavin cites), ITLS! ITLS! ITLS! (It’s the lag, stupid)
meemoe_uk says:
May 6, 2010 at 2:12 am
Shub Niggurath says:
May 6, 2010 at 3:30 am
Uh-oh! I think that WUWT has developed a melvin of the underpants over the investigation of Mann by Virginia. His reasons for defending Mann just did not hold logical water with me, and my spider-sense then detected something in the aether. But maybe I am just suspicious of everyone since the Morlocks have taken over the government and science, as Eisenhower presciently predicted. I hope in my heart that power and $$$ do not corrupt every living person. I think these bad thoughts, but I hope they are not true. Say it’s not true, please. Someone slap me!