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
To Jbar,
Compentent researchers have produced many models that evidence the minimal effects of CO2 on climate. They just don’t have the press and political backing. I’ve been retired, from environmental research at EPA, for 19 years. One reason I retired early was because objective research was beginning to be sidetracted for political purposes. EPA has now been derailed. Read Alan Carlin’s posts. Read my presentations. http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf and http://www.kidswincom.net/CO2OLR.pdf. Read Roy Spencer’s blog. Read objectively. These are people who are willing to take the political heat in trying to find the truth.
I keep reading in various online supposedly ‘authorative’ scientific sources about how huge amounts of CO2 were present in the atmosphere back in prehistoric times when warming was at a high period and that they caused the increases like they are doing today. Hello…warmer weather makes plants grow and thrive, forests grew faster and more abundantly because of the warmer weather and plants covered more and more areas of the planet. The extra plants produced an evironment richer in CO2. The CO2 came after the plants proliferated and they proliferated because of the hotter climate. Carboniferous. Carbon-rich fossil fuels (coals and oils) which are formed form the massive rotted fields of plants which filled everything when it got hot. We are made of carbon ourselves, aren’t we? Carbon-based life-forms. Carbon is natural and part of the life cycle which increases as it gets hotter. CO2 comes from the result of it getting hot, not as a the cause of heat increases.
1) CO2 can only double or triple from here because it won’t be economic to burn fossil fuels at some point and alternatives will be cheaper. That means only a couple degrees rise anyways even if models are correct – even the new “sensitivity” ones.
2) Models have uncertainties greater than the anomoly predicted. Temperatures could be wildly different than the “4-6” degree prediction commonly touted for 2100 including actually lower than today.
3) Models are based on “theories” of feedback that are unproven. Feedback could just as likely be negative.
4) Even if models are correct a few degrees (even 6) is NOT going to cause much damage over 100 years. Studies show the cost of fixing the damage caused is incredibly small on the scale of the world economy over a century. Spending almost any money today to fight GW would be an incredible waste of money. Technology better and costs in future less than today make doing anything today stupid.
5) The damage estimates are way overstated. Most of the damages can be mitigated with minimal cost and eliminated. Humans are really good at mitigating natural disaster deaths. In the 20th century 98% reduction in deaths from natural disasters. France had a worse heat wave 2 years after the 1998 wave that killed 15,000 people and 10 people died. These things are easy to remedy. Cities are rebuilt over a period of a century and can be easily rebuilt to withstand higher water levels and other obstructions are cheap on a century scale compared to incurring trillions in cost today.
6) They never count the lives saved and economic benefits of increased temperatures. Studies show 6 more people are saved for every person dying from increased heat. So, paradoxically temperatures rising will increase human lifespan and reduce mortality from many diseases.
jbar says:
May 6, 2010 at 8:16 am
Anti CAGW scientists do not need to model anything, mother earth has disproved all the CAGW theories and models for them.
OT but thank you very much for that bit of trivia, Enneagram.
After reading about what that wonderful woman did and how she endured the breaking of both arms and legs and who knows what other torture at the hands of the Gestapo without giving up the identity and location of the children she saved, I could only sit in silently fury and shed a few tears to think that a self-important fraudster would be chosen over her for this award. Shame on you Nobel Committee, shame on you.
For those of you in the AGW camp– please consider the character of the people who are leading the charge for you and then tell me with a straight face that you still believe in their message. That takes a mighty leap of faith and I’m afraid you may be finding yourself now in mid-air with a gaping chasm below you and no solid ground up ahead to land on.
Steve
I think this rush of papers are to be stacked into the AR5.
It will be so full of voodoo science that it will take us 800 years to go through it all.
Yes, it will get worse than we thought.
Because there is still one paper left;
The paper telling us that models show that an increase of 1 ppm will increase the length of a superstring in the 21’st dimension up to 50%.
The only solution will be to move everyone out from the cities into the fields and stick a shovel into their hands.
Everyone that protest will be taken to a “Green Court” and dealt with accordingly.
Because of high treason against the DPG. (The Democratic Party of Gaia)
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.
Drown San Francisco? You’re kidding, right? Have you ever been there? Go rent a copy of “Bullit” and then get back to us on that one.
Complete and utter balderdash; this whole CO2 thing boils down the the EM re-rad (re-radiation) from ‘heat’ energy impinging on this silly molecule, and THAT effect should be quantifiable, it should not be ‘guesswork’ or be in the realm of ‘previously thought’ horse-hockey …
.
.
globalwarmingisnotcausedbyco2 says:
May 6, 2010 at 11:27 am
Except that oil and gas are not formed by fossils, plants or dinosaurs, See the Russian work on abiotic oil.
Where do you suppose the massive methane and ethane and higher hydrocarbon lakes come from on Titan, moon of Saturn? Same as on earth – carbonate + water + iron/cobalt catalyst + high temperature + high pressure.
Think what this means…
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.
_________________________________________________________
CodeTech says:
May 6, 2010 at 8:42 am
Hah! If only it was that simple…
______________________________________________________________
Vincent says:
May 6, 2010 at 9:32 am
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.
__________________________________________________________________
There are times I think the lemmings faithfully following Pied Pipers Al Gore and Maurice Strong deserve exactly what they are going to get and that is another Dark Age complete with slavery, famine and misery. For families it is shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations for civilizations it generally takes about two hundred years. The evidence is pointing to the self-destruction of Western Civilization as we watch. And the rest of the world is laughing and waiting to pick up the pieces. That is why at Copenhagen China only sent a gofer to deal with Obama, a real slap in the face to the USA. The know the USA is on her last legs.
Russia is laughing too: Pravda: The American Self Immolation, Truly a Sight to See
“…As they say: Rome did not fall to the barbarians, all they did was kick in the rotting gates.
It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke than that of the Americans.
While taking a small breather from mouthing the never ending propaganda of recovery, never mind that every real indicator is pointing to death and destruction, the American Marxists have noticed that the French and Germans are out of recession and that Russia and Italy are heading out at a good clip themselves. Of course these facts have been wrapped up into their mind boggling non stop chant of “recovery” and hope-change-zombification. What is ignored, of course, is that we and the other three great nations all cut our taxes, cut our spending, made life easy for small business…in other words: the exact opposite of the Anglo-Sphere.
That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies…..”
I am very glad I never had children, I would hate to tell them I allowed the greedy corrupt politicians, bankers and industrialists take their bright futures from them.
#
jbar says:
May 6, 2010 at 8:16 am
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.
MONEY is in short supply for counter CO2 AGW research, it is blocked from publication, some of the best work has been done by those outside of academia, who cannot get funding of grants, with out THE GOOD OLD BOY support structure.
What part of suppression of outside ideas, don’t you understand, the MSM only prints what is good for the AGW cash flow they wade around in.
Phil. says:
May 6, 2010 at 8:26 am
“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.”
=======================
The three paragraphs preceding that statement suggest it is not false. Common sense tends to do that too. Of course one can “model” anything. But how usefully. How long can the dispersion model keep up with reality? A few hours? And yes, contrasting the limitations inherent to this comparatively simple task with the “mind boggling hubris of trying to model the climate of the entire globe” is very appropriate as a mental exercise.
This whole thing would be funny if it weren’t so depressing. Reducing temperature fluctuations of the distant past to the function of a couple of variables of one’s own picking, then feeding that trash to a model, and then presenting its regurgitations as a “scientific” finding ,is what passes for serious research these days. Gavin seems the prototype of a specialist, in the old well known definition: “A specialist is someone who seeks to know more and more about less and less –until he finally reaches the ideal state where he knows everything about nothing.”
Here are the paragraphs from the Cockburn article leading to the statement you call “rubbish”:
“The plume had spread in entirely unanticipated ways, ways that seem obvious after seeing photographs of the Eyjafjallajökull eruptions. Take a look at both the ground level and satellite pictures of the plume and you’ll understand the hopelessness of modeling the peculiar vagaries of the plume: swirls, layering, branching, etc. Every aspect of this well-described incident defies computer modeling and prior turbine design knowledge: the plume was somewhere that would never have been predicted by a model, the ash particles were ice-encased , the expected turbine blade erosion damage didn’t show up; the main damage mechanism was overheating.”
“I called Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst with a background in statistics and a healthy skepticism about climate modeling and he gave a dry laugh. Back in the 1970s Sprey had done some environmental consulting and speedily learned first hand the insuperable difficulties of a seemingly elementary assignment in air pollution: modeling the behavior of a plume drifting downwind from a single smoke stack. “It was a vastly simpler problem than some generalized climate model, but still hopelessly intractable” when it came to predicting the downwind dispersion of the plume and its toxic constituents.”
“Sprey found, to his surprise, that the useless air pollution models he was dealing with in the early 1970s were actually based on WWII models developed to predict the behavior of chemical warfare weapons being tested by the British at Porton Down back in the 1940s. What emerged with finality from those tests was that there was no knowing where the poison gases might head, and indeed one powerful inhibition against the use of chemical weapons has always been the ease with which, amid a sudden shift in the wind, some act of stupidity by the gassers can end up killing one’s own troops, as unforgettably described by the poet Siegfried Sassoon in his WWI memoirs.”
“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.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn04302010.html
Ha ha ha ha ha.
I know you can get it on Playstation but can you get ‘Pliocene climate modeling for amateurs’ on Nintendo?
Who cares about Gavin or any of the other RC bunch. They are known to need AGW to continue their jobs. I for sure will not take them serious, they have overplayed their hand. Crying Wolf. They did not manage to have their case made with current day data, so now they do the time flash back and spell doom. It almost looks as if any serious science journal tries to outbid the competitors by staging even more frightening horror. What this has to do with science is a riddle to me. It is just run-away modelling. Stop the modelling, get your data right!
Gavin! Stop blogging, stop modelling, start working on a validated temperature record. And make sure you do not lose any (meta) data in the process.
Why can’t you “deniers” out there behave like good sheeple and show some fear when Gavin puts on his Wolf Mask and growls and shows you what can happen when REAL wolves come around?
This study is built on the unquestioned assumption that CO2 causes warming and makes some model adjustments using a cherry picked piece of climate palaeohistory to conclude – CO2 causes warming – its worse than we thought! Vacuous circular logic.
Here are some other palaeoclimate episodes they should try to model next:
1. Late Cambrian (550-500 mYrs ago): CO2 rises from 4500 to 7000 ppm then back again. Global temperature over this whole period? – flat.
2. Late Ordovician ice age, global temps drop from 22C to 12 C, while simultaneously atmospheric CO2 rises from 4100-4300 ppm. (440-455 myrs ago). At the Ordovician-Silurian boundary temperatures sharply rise while CO2 coincidently sharply falls.
3. Late Devonian to mid Carboniferous, (370-320 mYrs ago) CO2 falls sharply from 2300 to 350 ppm. Global temperatures follow CO2 down – 60 MILLION YEARS LATER! (some feedback!)
4. During the Jurassic to the Cretaceous (170-120 mYrs ago) global temps dip from 22C to 17C, then return to 22C. Over this period CO2 declines more or less steadily from 2300-1500 ppm. No correlation.
5. Tertiary, 20-30 mYrs ago: temperatures rise from 16-19 C, while simultaneously CO2 falls steadily from about 400-300 ppm.
(http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html)
Sometime, watch a bullfight.
See what the job is of the picadors.
See what is the function of the banderillas.
See how stupid the bull is attacking a rag.
The bull can’t win because he attacks rags.
CO2 is the rag and Gavin is a Matador.
bubba gyro
You conspiratorial denier! 🙂
It is just that skeptics need some opportunity to prove that they are nice guys too.
We should all thank Cuccinelli. Mann becomes a martyr. The skeptics become all goody-goody. It is a ‘win-win-win-win…’ situation
bubba gyro
You conspiratorial denier! 🙂
I think it is just that the skeptics need a chance to show they are good guys too.
Cuccinelli was great. Mann becomes a martyr. The skeptics are all goody-goody. It is a win-win-win-win… situation.
Gail Combs says “I am very glad I never had children, I would hate to tell them I allowed the greedy corrupt politicians, bankers and industrialists take their bright futures from them.”
——
I’ve got four sons. How exactly am I supposed to find the time to prevent greedy corrupt politicians, bankers, and industrialists from stealing their ‘bright’ futures? And what methods am I to use? Please let me know! (And believe me, I do worry about their futures.) I am pointing out the folly of anti-AGW policies to everyone who will listen, but it’s often uphill as it seems many have been brainwashed. (I am working on academic colleagues).
The team found no such thing. They played for a million CPU hours on an expensive supercomputer at taxpayers expense running what amounts to an elaborate computer game that bears little resemblance to climate processes, or rather pretends that the world is a giant brick that heats and cools in a linear fashion. They twiddled with four or five knobs, and tinkered with code until they reached something that, subjectively, but by no objective measure, resembled tenuous proxies for temperature and chemical concentrations, with very poor time resolution and very large error bars.
The “climate models” used today consume enormous resources to do a demonstrably bad job of predicting even short-term changes on the decade scale, with worldwide initial data supposedly carefully recorded and preserved from millions of direct measurements with highly accurate modern equipment. But they are claiming that they have a climate model that does a much better job with a single time series of extremely crude data tens of millions of years old, and running over time scales orders of magnitudes larger? It is computationally impossible for them to run the *same* models over these scales, so clearly they are using even simpler and less appropriate calculations, with even more coarse grids.
This result is less than meaningless. Is it any surprise that out pops a “result” completely consistent with Mr Schmidt’s evident prior bias on the matter?
NASA, once upon a time, was a pretty good science-based institution.
How the mighty have fallen.
I guess computer models cant even explain the past let alone the future. And this is what passes as “scientific” evidence nowadays as well!
From the desription in the article –
“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.”
Without being able to read the paper I am not fully justified in making this next comment. But as a matter of logic, maybe I can get away with it…..(!)
It appears that the authors ‘adapted’ the model and made assumptions which ‘fitted’ the picture. I’ve no problem with that, it’s what one does with models. But it says nothing about other ‘adaptations’ which might give an equally good fit.
This is not trivial. If one particular model ‘adaptation’ does the trick, (I know, I know – but I couldn’t resist) the authors may be justified in claiming to have identified one possibility. But that is as far as the logic can take them. It says nothing, for example, about a set of factors which is unknown to the authors. And since the whole enterprise is, presumably, to discover those things which are unknown …well, you can see the problem – it all becomes an exercise in circular logic.
Without more, such a process simply cannot eliminate possibilities which are unknown. But importantly, it can’t even eliminate an alternative known possibility!
If you can’t explain it with science, explain it with climate sensitivity. Another proof that climate sensitivity is not science these days.
I assume the model took into account the different configurations of the oceans and land masses due to tectonic plate movements some 2-5 million years ago?
Probably not. It was only in the late Jurassic the icecaps formed again due to land mass movement creating favourable conditions. Although 3 million years is a small timescale when moving continents around, that would be another “unaccounted for” variable.
Needless to say, the Carboniferous around 350Mya had some 20x the CO2 we have now, and the Jurassic around 200Mya some 10x CO2 of today, without ever a runaway greenhouse or fabled “tipping point” – ever. Life clearly thrived and delicate aragonite corals evolved in the Jurassic, in non-acid oceans since the oceans always lap upon alkaline rocks.
If the oceans had been acid at all, we wouldn’t have fossils from that era as they would all have been dissolved. The oceans all range in PH of 7.9 to 8.3, which is alkaline. PH neutral is 7.
Somehow the Mann-made alarmists forgot all these well established facts, notably a large proportion of them didn’t even bother to study the subject before greening up on their new found religion. Lemmings.