The 4th International Conference on Climate Change – Chicago, Il., USA
Consensus? What consensus?
by Roger Helmer MEP
I’m writing this in the Marriott Hotel in Chicago, where I’m attending the Heartland Institute Climate Conference (and I’ve just done an interview with BBC Environment Correspondent Roger Harrabin).
Ahead of the interview, I thought I’d just check out the Conference Speaker’s list. There are 80 scheduled speakers, including distinguished scientists (like Richard Lindzen of MIT), policy wonks (like my good friend Chris Horner of CEI), enthusiasts and campaigners (like Anthony Watts of the wattsupwiththat.com web-site), and journalists (including our own inimitable James Delingpole).
Of the 80 speakers, I noticed that fully forty-five were qualified scientists from relevant disciplines, and from respected universities around the world — from the USA, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, Norway, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
All of them have reservations about climate alarmism, ranging from concerns that we are making vastly expensive public policy decisions based on science that is, to say the least, open to question, through to outright rejection of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) model.
Several of these scientists are members or former members of the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But how do 45 sceptical scientists stack up, you may well ask, against the 2500 on the official IPCC panels? But of course there aren’t 2500 relevant scientists on the IPCC panel. Many of them are not strictly scientists at all. Some are merely civil servants or environmental zealots. Some are economists — important to the debate but not experts on the science. Others are scientists in unrelated disciplines. The Chairman of the IPCC Dr. Ravendra Pachuari, is a Railway Engineer.
And of the remaining minority who are indeed scientists in relevant subjects, some (like my good friend Prof Fred Singer) have explicitly rejected the IPCC’s AGW theory. Whittle it down, and you end up with fifty or so true believers, most of whom are part of the “Hockey Team” behind the infamous Hockey Stick graph, perhaps the most discredited artefact in the history of science. This is a small and incestuous group of scientists (including those at the CRU at the University of East Anglia). They work closely together, jealously protecting their source data, and they peer-review each other’s work. This is the “consensus” on which climate hysteria is based.
And there are scarcely more of them than are sceptical scientists at this Heartland Conference in Chicago, where I am blogging today. Never mind the dozens of other scientists here in Chicago, or the thousands who have signed petitions and written to governments opposing climate hysteria. Science is not decided by numbers, but if it were, there is the case to be made that the consensus is now on the sceptical side.
Roger Helmer MEP Follow me on Twitter: rogerhelmerMEP
[snip – look, I’m fine if you want to discuss issues or even call me names here like you do on your blog, but your constant trolling for traffic is a no-no – Anthony]
Anthony, I looked into your blog’s policy and I looked into the definition of troll.
1. Your policy: No links to commercial websites that are not relevant to the discussion.
2. Troll: In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion [source language=”wikipedia”][/source][/source].
A link to an article relevant to the topic that is published/posted elsewhere does not constitute a violation to your site’s policy or ‘trollism’. Alone your linking of commenter’s name and website could be considered ‘trolling for traffic’, which it isn’t in this case, but would be if the link was, let’s say, to the coca cola website. This was not the case.
Since you guys are constantly attempting to re-invent the wheel, is the commenter advised by you to do the same and copy and paste the stuff over?
You have my email address!
P.S. 3 words on calling names:
1. If somebody takes seasonal 2D snow extent in the northern hemisphere as evidence of AGW or not AGW or whatever, then my toenails roll up and down. You as a weatherman should know better [and if not, here are the keywords: short-term; regional]. In Calgary, we had the warmest winter on record – which still says absolutely nothing on AGW/not AGW.
2. If somebody starts a discussion on satellite vs. surface temps…and this has been discussed by relevant people (who deal with this on a daily basis), why is this ignored in your blog? Answer: because the your discussion woul a non-issue. You just use this to create doubt on AGW.
3. Most of what Mr. Helmer says is factually, errr., not feasable. Examples:
“you end up with fifty or so true believers” [referring to climate scientists]
“…Hockey Stick graph, perhaps the most discredited artefact in the history of science.” [by who?]
“small and incestuous group of scientists ”
“They work closely together, jealously protecting their source data, and they peer-review each other’s work. This is the “consensus” on which climate hysteria is based.” [I would say this is paranoia]
This is true creationism!
Below is the text I had attempted to link to, but the linking had been critisized and the post removed. I think it is a very subtle rant that applies extremely well to Mr. Helmer.
Some skeptics consider proponents of what the broad body of science and the IPPC say, that global warming is manmade and real, as true believers: knowledge vs. belief. This is principally true, albeit it is the other way round.
That is because this ‘belief’ that AGW is true is not contained in a confessional framework, which only holds together by a multitude of non-testable additional statements. It is rather a reasonable assumption based on the knowledge of physical laws and empirical observations.
In other words, proponents of AGW do not believe this in a religious sense but in a pragmatic one, based on knowledge.
People who do not believe that AGW is real do this in a dramaturgy that has religious patterns. The opposite of knowing is not not-knowing but believing. Not knowing something can be remedied by knowledge. Just ask somebody who knows that and you know it, too.
Things that are believed in a religious way are being corrected by the normative power of fact because the statement to be believed was formulated without knowing the facts. Is the fallacy obvious and provable, then the believed statement is not revised, however blocked from the harsh reality by a false, protective statement, in which facts should run out of steam. An example is intelligent design.
What does this mean for climate change denial? Climate skeptics believe that global warming cannot be triggered by greenhouse gases because this is physically not possible. But this does not hold water. Science proves that wrong. Now the skeptics could say: ‘Wow, I didn’t know that, I have learnt something. Done deal!’ This would be the case if we were talking knowledge – but this is not the case.
Therefore, an additional statement is attached to the believed item: it is a conspiracy. The physicists are wrong. This statement is supported by the fact that ‘these physicists’ use the elitist language that has been disliked from school days on: the language of maths, which is considered a secret language, but only by those who do not want to learn it. Maths is actually quite a public language. Once a group of people has been caught using secret language, this opens the door for a conspiracy theory.
Somebody believes that something like a moon landing cannot have happened. Another person knows that this was very well possible. He could even prove it with maths. The ‘believer’ might say: cannot check it 100% because I am not a math whiz, but I am assuming that the experts arrived at the right decision and don’t all lie simultaneously.
Or he believes something new that supports the original claim and is in contrast to its rebuttal. This includes isolated studies that contradict the broad body of scientific research or simply fringe-science. Whatever is convenient.
The ‘skeptic’ says: all physicists are lying (Al Gore is lying; Michael Mann is lying; Phil Jones is lying)! This removes all facts from the equation.
But why is belief sometimes more attractive than knowledge?
Knowledge involves a rather inflexible, tedious learning process, based on testable statements. Belief is easy: one just has to be ready to believe something. This requires much less work and failure is excluded because belief is not subjected to the principles of falsifiability.
In contrast, scientific statements underlie the demand to be testable.
If a test turns out wrong, then the statement is proven wrong. Science is principally no surrogate religion. It distinguishes cause and effect. Failure is acknowledged and part of the equation. It sends the scientist back to the drafting table to revise the statement. The path to knowledge leads always through error. Per aspera ad astra. A painful, repetitive process.
In summary, the world is not as we believe it to be, the world is as it is.
Comment: This rant was addressing people who claim the moon landing was a hoax. Do you see how interchangeable the thinking patterns of deniers are? They do actually not rely on a certain topic at all.
REPLY: You can post comments so long as they aren’t off topic, insulting, or trolling for traffic by making excessive links. You were pushing links to generate traffic. This post is borderline, and was removed from another section because you posted it in error making it off topic, but I’ll allow it. Given your labeling/name calling and treatment of me and others, I’m not concerned if you think you are being treated fairly of not. As I mention, this is my home on the Internet, and like a boorish dinner guest in my home, I have no compunction of tossing you out on your ear. You aren’t off to a good start with the tired old moon lander deniers shtick. Bottom line, be civil and treat people with respect, stop on the names/labels and you can stick around. Bear in mind that I and other moderators have alow tolerance level for the sorts of arguments you make, we’ve heard them all before, and aren’t worth the effort to moderate. – Anthony
Well Willis, first off they can’t say “ice free” can they when they are looking at only 1 location in the Arctic, the North Greenland coast. And while wave action does indicate the presence of open water, there is no way they can say the entire Arctic was ice free. So until you can present a paper that gives scientific evidence that the entire Arctic was ice free at some point during the summer, you nor I really know the last time it happened.
jeff brown says:
May 20, 2010 at 2:14 pm (Edit)
Thanks, Jeff. I don’t know if they “can’t say ‘ice free'” … I just pointed out that they did say the Arctic Ocean was nearly free of sea ice. Here’s why they said it:
My point was simple, that there is good evidence that ice free conditions occurred during the Holocene. You are correct that we can’t prove it happened, so we really don’t know for sure (and never will) … but we have good evidence. Unless you have some other explanation for the striated boulders and the “staircase” beach ridges, I’ll go with that. In other words, current conditions are not outside historical variation.
Willis, since you seem to have read the paper, then tell me how high were the waves and what sort of fetch was that related to? i.e. what length of open water did they need to achieve it? Just because there is no ice in that region for a period in summer to allow for the wave action results they looked at it doesn’t mean that the distribution of ice in the Arctic Basin wasn’t different than it is today. Yes, today the oldest and thickest ice is found north of Greenland and in the Canadian Archipelago, but what if things were shifted so that it piled up elsewhere in the Arctic 6,000 years ago? That’s entirely possible and until they take cores, or do similar analysis at other land locations around the Arctic to match up with what is observed in Northern Greenland, you really don’t know. If conversely, a paper had said the evidence is that the Arctic Ocean had not been ice free in a million years based on one location, I’m sure you would find fault with the study. Apply the same rigor to all studies, regardless of your known bias as to the outcome you want to see…
jeff brown says:
May 20, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Like I said, YMMV … all you can do is read what they say, and judge for yourself. What you say is certainly possible.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Once you tell us which study you’re talking about, I’ll let you know. I judge each study as it actually appears.
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 20, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Oh, yeah, to your question. In addition to the beach ridges, they found striated boulders. This indicates that the ice melted there, rather than moving away from there.
Also, if wind was blowing the ice away from North Greenland, you wouldn’t get much wave action on the shore because the wind would be blowing offshore.
But like I said, YMMV, all we can do is consider these issues and decide what the preponderance of evidence indicates …
Brighton Early;
There are so many fallacies in your comment that refuting them would take considerably more time than I have right now. Two points:
1. Anthony’s Blog. His. The amount of tolerance he displays and insists that others display is remarkable. But still his blog.
2. Your comment as follows:
” Climate skeptics believe that global warming cannot be triggered by greenhouse gases because this is physically not possible.”
I’m certain there are skeptics out there that believe this. I’m also certain that the bulk of us that have investigated the matter in detail readily admit that this is possible. Our objection is NOT, as you assert, based on dissmissing the physics and math. It is exactly the opposite. The physics and math is presented in such a manner that it is technicaly accurate, and incredibly misleading. When the physics and math is presented in a straight forward and honest manner, AGW follows apart, not by dismissing the physics, but by endorsing it. Yes CO2 absorbs LW and re-emitts it such that some of what would otherwise have escaped into space is instead returned to earth. Agreed.
1. CO2 suffers from the law of diminishing returns because it is logarithmic. Sound prinicples of physics that the IPCC quietly ignores.
2. A warming planet increases the amount of radiance to space exponentially, also sound physics, and further diminishes the effects additional CO2 can have.
3. IPCC projections are predicated upon a continued acceleration of fossil fuel consumption that cannot physicaly be achieved, and so arrive mathematicaly at CO2 concentration projections that are unrealistic. The math is sound but rests upon a false assumption.
4. IPCC projections claim a climate sensitivity of 1.1 degrees for CO2 doubling from pre-industrial levels. They fail to make clear that this is a number representing the average for the surface to the atmosphere, that the effects are much amplified at higher altitudes, and much diminished at near surface. They compound this misleading statement further by failing to provide a graph of the sensitivity beyond their computed range as this would expose the law of diminishing returns alluded to above in a most convincing fashion.
5. The IPCC claims positive feedbacks from water vapour based on the assumption that water vapour levels will consume the available capacity of the atmosphere as temperatures increase. Observation suggests that this hasn’t happened on a long term basis, it doesn’t happen on a short term basis such as daily fluctuations in temperature 15 times those suggested for CO2 forcing, and if this were possible in the first place, there have been conditions in earth’s past that would have triggered a tipping point, but did not.
So you see, I reject AGW not by dismissing the math and physics, but by understanding math and physics and properly applying them.
The manner in which you attempt to characterize skeptics across the board is disingenuous at best. It is like me asking you… is it true that you have stopped beating your wife?
davidmhoffer says:
[1. CO2 suffers from the law of diminishing returns because it is logarithmic. Sound prinicples of physics that the IPCC quietly ignores.]
By the time we have doubled once to 560 ppm, we will be warm enough. If there are diminishing returns later, it won’t matter by then.
[2. A warming planet increases the amount of radiance to space exponentially, also sound physics, and further diminishes the effects additional CO2 can have.]
Increasing CO2 actually reduces the longwave output, and the earth has to respond by warming to rebalance the solar input.
[3. IPCC projections are predicated upon a continued acceleration of fossil fuel consumption that cannot physicaly be achieved, and so arrive mathematicaly at CO2 concentration projections that are unrealistic. The math is sound but rests upon a false assumption.]
No, they have optimistic and pessimistic projections in terms of CO2 levels. These bracket the expected range, though the pessimistic ones are looking more realistic at the moment.
[4. IPCC projections claim a climate sensitivity of 1.1 degrees for CO2 doubling from pre-industrial levels. They fail to make clear that this is a number representing the average for the surface to the atmosphere, that the effects are much amplified at higher altitudes, and much diminished at near surface. They compound this misleading statement further by failing to provide a graph of the sensitivity beyond their computed range as this would expose the law of diminishing returns alluded to above in a most convincing fashion.]
This is where the 255 K number comes in. That is just a temperature equivalent to the actual longwave output, but people understand temperatures better than Watts per square meter, so it is expressed that way to improve understanding. For CO2 forcing, warming occurs at the surface and cooling at the top of the atmosphere.
[5. The IPCC claims positive feedbacks from water vapour based on the assumption that water vapour levels will consume the available capacity of the atmosphere as temperatures increase. Observation suggests that this hasn’t happened on a long term basis, it doesn’t happen on a short term basis such as daily fluctuations in temperature 15 times those suggested for CO2 forcing, and if this were possible in the first place, there have been conditions in earth’s past that would have triggered a tipping point, but did not.]
The water vapor feedback is based on the idea that as the air warms, so will the ocean, and the equilibrium vapor will increase with ocean temperature. The feedback factor is not sufficient for a runaway greenhouse, just an amplification of the CO2 effect by 2-4. No credible scientist talks about runaway greenhouse in the context of Earth (maybe Venus).
“So, please barefootgirl, tell me, are there empirical hypotheses that can be stated as universal generalizations and used to explain forcings and predict their behavior?”
Let me try instead. Empirical hypothesis: What comes in, goes out. This is earth’s energy balance in equilibrium. Incoming is solar, outgoing is reflected solar and emitted infrared.
What can upset this balance? CO2 can.
How? It prevents energy from getting out by reducing outgoing infrared.
How is equilibrium re-achieved? Either outgoing infrared increases (atmosphere warms or CO2 is reduced or high clouds are reduced) or reflected solar increases (more clouds, aerosols, ice cover). Note that high clouds have both positive and negative effects, and are generally a wash regarding the budget.
Consensus is: atmosphere warms, but increasing pollution aerosols can mitigate it too (see global dimming) as can volcanoes (Pinatubo).
Furthermore atmospheric warming eventually leads to a warmer ocean and more water vapor which has a heat-trapping effect of its own. Reduction of ice cover also feeds back positively, but that effect is less important now than in the Ice Ages when more ice was around.
Is this empirical enough? Bottom line is that the earth’s energy balance, as viewed from space, is the driver, and we are doing things that affect that. Hope this makes it clear as there is some confusion here that became evident from this question.
davidmhoffer says:
There is a good reason why climate scientists consider the first-order (no-feedback) case to be what happens at the effective radiating level and that is that this is what controls the energy balance of the earth (with sun and space), since the only significant thermal communication that the earth has with the sun and space is via radiation. And, it doesn’t make sense to look at the radiative balance at the surface because it turns out that the surface temperature relative to the temperature in the rest of the troposphere is determined not so much by radiation as by turbulent mixing, e.g., convection, latent heat, … [There is a particularly nice little calculation in the book “Global Warming: The Hard Science” by L.D. Danny Harvey in which he shows that (under the assumption of a 2 C per CO2 doubling climate sensitivity), a 10 W/m^2 change in the greenhouse effect produces a warming of about 5 K at the surface whereas a 10 W/m^2 in the amount of downwelling radiation from the atmosphere to the surface produces only about a 0.1 K increase in the surface temperature while warming the atmosphere by about 0.3 K.]
So, no your 5.5 W/m^2 number is not particularly relevant. That said, there is a little germ of truth in your post, namely that it is expected that the mid-troposphere will warm faster than the earth’s surface. This is especially true in the tropics (and actually reversed at the poles), but on a global scale the warming is still expected to be modestly warmer at altitude than at the surface. This is included in all of the climate models by what is called the “lapse rate feedback” and this is a negative feedback that “takes back” some of the temperature rise at the surface due to the positive water vapor feedback. It turns out that while different models have different strengths for these two feedbacks, models with stronger water vapor feedbacks tend to have stronger lapse rate feedbacks (since the same convective processes play into both) and so the sum of the two feedbacks (one positive and one negative) tends to vary considerably less from model to model than the two individual feedbacks do.
There’s lots of interesting science to read about in the climate system and I encourage you to read more about our current understanding rather than just ignoring it. A little humility and respect for what other scientists have learned through the collective scientific enterprise goes a long way in all branches of science!
Right Willis, but you are the one who said that the issue was clear in your 12:32 post. So now you are saying it’s not certain the last time the Arctic Ocean was ice-free? Which is it? And if the ice melted there again that doesn’t mean the entire Ocean was ice-free right? It only indicates that in that region for some time there was some open water present.
Willis Eschenbach says:
I think you are missing the question here, Willis. It is not whether subjects like physics do or do not provide a good grounding for getting into the field of climate science…Of course they do. Rather, the question is whether, say, a degree in physics automatically qualifies one as any sort of expert in climate science, absent any evidence that the person has actually done a significant amount of studying in the field, has actually become an active participant in the field (publishing papers in reputable peer-reviewed journals), and so forth.
Another issue is how broadly representative a sample is of the actual viewpoint of the people it purports to be sampling. The Oregon petition is not representative both because it chooses from a very large sample of people (e.g., there are probably millions of Americans qualified to sign by their standards) and because it doesn’t do anything close to a random sample of these people…It only records the opinions of those who agree with it, not those who disagree.
Dr. P says:
And who has said it is? Obviously, we want to continue to reduce the uncertainties and so forth. However, also note that the APS does not advocate doing nothing to mitigate emissions on the policy side until the science reaches some higher level of certainty. In fact, they argue quite directly for taking action. And, this is because the APS understands that uncertainty is a natural part of science and that it is not an excuse for inaction. They know that in science, we never know everything but just because we do not know everything, it does not mean we know nothing. In general, we know different things to different degrees of certainty and we always have to make choices of how to act in such an environment.
Jim D
May 20, 2010 at 6:33 pmdavidmhoffer says:
[1. CO2 suffers from the law of diminishing returns because it is logarithmic. Sound prinicples of physics that the IPCC quietly ignores.]
By the time we have doubled once to 560 ppm, we will be warm enough. If there are diminishing returns later, it won’t matter by then.>>
Do you know what logarithmic means? We started at 280 and now we are at 390 which is +1.8 watts for an extra 110 parts per million. It would require an additional 170 (about 1.5 times as much)to get us to 560, but that would only add an additional 1.9 watts, about the same as what we got from the first 110. Of the six stabilization strategies presented in AR4, three are in that range or higher. Why bother with a stabilization strategy at 660 to 790 if we’re all going to die at 560? Scenario VI in AR4 is 790 ppm, 210 ppm more than 580, but only another 1.6 watts. The mean surface temperature of the earth is 15 C. Do you know what it takes to heat it up one degree? 5.5 watts. Ooops.
[2. A warming planet increases the amount of radiance to space exponentially, also sound physics, and further diminishes the effects additional CO2 can have.]
Increasing CO2 actually reduces the longwave output, and the earth has to respond by warming to rebalance the solar input.
Exactly right and still wrong. During a transient temperature response the LW output is reduced. At equilibrium it is the same as before, but at a slightly higher temperature. The dispute is about how much higher the temperature would be.
[3. IPCC projections are predicated upon a continued acceleration of fossil fuel consumption that cannot physicaly be achieved, and so arrive mathematicaly at CO2 concentration projections that are unrealistic. The math is sound but rests upon a false assumption.]
No, they have optimistic and pessimistic projections in terms of CO2 levels. These bracket the expected range, though the pessimistic ones are looking more realistic at the moment.>>
AR4 quotes CO2 annual increase at about 1.9 ppm and growing 25% or more per year which would get us to 4 ppm in just a few years. Here’s the link to Manua Lao, you decide if that makes sense or not. AR4 was 2005 data so we conveniently have several years since then to see if 1.9 +25% per year makes any sense at all. Quick math that should mean about 4 ppm/year by 2010. Ooops. Scroll down to the full record, does it look linear or exponential? Ooops.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html
[4. IPCC projections claim a climate sensitivity of 1.1 degrees for CO2 doubling from pre-industrial levels. They fail to make clear that this is a number representing the average for the surface to the atmosphere, that the effects are much amplified at higher altitudes, and much diminished at near surface. They compound this misleading statement further by failing to provide a graph of the sensitivity beyond their computed range as this would expose the law of diminishing returns alluded to above in a most convincing fashion.]
This is where the 255 K number comes in. That is just a temperature equivalent to the actual longwave output, but people understand temperatures better than Watts per square meter, so it is expressed that way to improve understanding. For CO2 forcing, warming occurs at the surface and cooling at the top of the atmosphere.>>
255 K is the temperature at about 4 kilometers above sea level. 3.7 watts would cause about a 1.1 degree temperature rise. But at earth surface, where the mean temperature is about 288, 3.7 watts would only cause a 0.65 degree increase. This is precisely how the various models expected things to happen, a temperature rise mid troposphere of about double that of the surface. But as the plot of actual trend at various altitudes versus what various models predicted, we can see that they got it really, really, wrong: http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0407/0407074.pdf
Scroll down to the very last page where you can see all the graphs. The green lines are the models which predicted the numbers I just quoted based on the physics claimed by the IPCC, high change mid troposphere and low change surface, the blue lines wandering off in the opposite direction are what actually happened. Ooops.
[5. The IPCC claims positive feedbacks from water vapour based on the assumption that water vapour levels will consume the available capacity of the atmosphere as temperatures increase. Observation suggests that this hasn’t happened on a long term basis, it doesn’t happen on a short term basis such as daily fluctuations in temperature 15 times those suggested for CO2 forcing, and if this were possible in the first place, there have been conditions in earth’s past that would have triggered a tipping point, but did not.]
The water vapor feedback is based on the idea that as the air warms, so will the ocean, and the equilibrium vapor will increase with ocean temperature. The feedback factor is not sufficient for a runaway greenhouse, just an amplification of the CO2 effect by 2-4. No credible scientist talks about runaway greenhouse in the context of Earth (maybe Venus).>>
Wrong. Water vapour feedback is based on the properties of water which include the fact that for every 10 degrees of temperature increase of the ATMOSPHERE, the amount of water vapour the atmosphere can hold at maximum about doubles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Relative_Humidity.png
Since water vapour vastly exceeds CO2 as a greenhouse gas, the calculations of the IPCC were that water vapour feedback would about triple the direct effects of CO2 increases because of this property of water. However, water vapour concentrations have NOT increased with temperature. In fact, if the IPCC calculations of 3 degrees for CO2 doubling were correct, the temperature increase from CO2 should have added 1.0 degrees by 1975. By 2005, there should be enough forcing from CO2 and water vapour feedback to give us almost 1.5 degrees. What did we actually get? About 0.6 degrees. What was the temperature increase in the century before CO2 emissions became significant? 0.5 degrees. Ooops.
CO2 projections, wrong, see the link.
Troposphere modeling projections wrong, see the link.
Sensitivity wrong.
Water vapour increases wrong.
Logarithmic CO2, ignored
Exponential increase in radiance ignored.
Proposed solution => reduce emissions by 80%.
Number of people who will starve to death if we do… I dunno. 2 billion? 3 billion?
nedhead says:
May 20, 2010 at 8:04 pm
I’m not going to get into the semantics of “clear”, “kinda clear”, “pretty clear”. For me, the evidence presented is sufficient to let me know, as a seaman who has spent some time fishing in the Bering Sea up among the ice, that rafted boulders and ridged stairstep beaches on North Greenland are pretty convincing evidence of a degree of summer lack of Arctic ice that has never happened since we started keeping records.
Does it mean “ice-free”? No, there were likely a few areas with a few bergs, or some brash ice, or some areas of pack ice, or even enough ice cubes to chill a few martinis, so no it wasn’t ice-free, are you happy now? But … so freakin’ what? You want satellite pictures from 8,500 years ago? For me, the issue is that we haven’t seen waves on the beach or melting ice dropping boulders on North Greenland in human memory, but the study shows it definitely has happened during the Holocene. I see that as very significant. You don’t. So?
In closing, let me say for the third time, in the hope that you can take the hint:
Judge the dang thing for yourself, nedhead, but please stop pestering me about how I judge it. I’ve been very clear what I think, and I know what you think, so give it a rest.
Smokey: “And note that skeptics are by definition immune from CD: skeptics question…”
Except when they’re making dogmatic claims about the “climate alarmist” crowd walking in lockstep, all the while claiming a consensus of climate sceptics.
Smokey’s “definition”, meet reality.
“Despite all the frantic handwaving by the losing side of the argument…”
I’ve been reading a report by the US National Academies of Sciences, which begins:
“A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”
This doesn’t sound like “frantic handwaving” by losers. And the report is also optimistic and inclusive: “decision makers of all types – including individuals, businesses, and governments at all levels – are now taking or planning actions to respond to climate change.”
There’s also a photograph of a farmer in his field, so you shouldn’t feel left out.
http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/materials-based-on-reports/reports-in-brief/Science_Report_Brief_Final.pd
Joel Shore;
There’s lots of interesting science to read about in the climate system and I encourage you to read more about our current understanding rather than just ignoring it. A little humility and respect for what other scientists have learned through the collective scientific enterprise goes a long way in all branches of science!>>
WELL EXCUSE ME MR HUMILITY!
Joel Shore;
So, no your 5.5 W/m^2 number is not particularly relevant>>
So may I ask, with all due humility, if the sea and land surface of the earth, at a mean temperature of 15 C, increases in temperature by one degree, and begins radiating an additional 5.5 watts/square meter at equilibrium, where the energy input to support it comes from? Is Stefan Boltzman suspended? Are the laws of thermodynamics suspended? Does magic work? You’re the one with the PhD in physics, you say the number isn’t relevant. Fine. Is it wrong? If so, explain why. Is it right? If so, then explain where the power is coming from to support it.
Joel Shore;
there is a little germ of truth in your post, namely that it is expected that the mid-troposphere will warm faster than the earth’s surface.>>
Not! It finaly dawned on me the slimy trick they played to portray 3.7 watts as 1.1 degrees by modeling the earth “surface” at an altitude of 4,000 meters where the temperature is about 255 K. I worked my math based on what I finaly understood was the way they were making the claim. Its their claim though, not mine. I spent the last couple of hours and found some projections from some models, and YUP! that’s what they do. Claim one number at 4000 meters to disguise the smaller number at earth surface because 0.65 degrees is a lot less alarming than 1.1 degrees. Of course I’ve never been a fan of modeling in isolation, I like confirmation by measurement. OOOPS SOMEONE DID!
http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0407/0407074.pdf
So Mr Humility (out of respect I hesitate to call you Joel) could you please put the full weight of your PhD in physics behind explaining why the models act the way the IPCC portrays them, they act the way YOU portray them, but they just don’t act like the real world. All the graphs are on the very last page ( I’m making it easy for you to find them so that your giant brain isn’t taxed with petty details that us poor ignorant layman have to slog through so your time can be free for PhD stuff).
You didn’t debunk my arguments except for trying to dismiss the surface radiance of the planet as “irrelevant” and you condescendingly advised me to educate myself after explaining to me how the troposphere works based on models that that are clearly refuted by observation. Pride goeth before a fall. Sir.
davidmhoffer says:
The IPCC statement is based on the combination of empirical that I mentioned, which while they include 2oth century data, also include other empirical data that gives stronger bounds on sensitivity, such as the last glacial maximum and the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. The strongest bounds (although still not that strong, since the range of the IPCC sensitivity estimate is still quite broad) are obtained by combining all of this together.
You have misunderstood my statement. I said the RATE of emissions doubles in 70 years if the emissions increase at 1% per year. (You may have misinterpreted this as stating when the CO2 level in the atmosphere will double.) This is standard mathematics. (The more naive assumption might be that it would take 100 years but it doesn’t because of compounding.)
I have one word for you: COAL. (Although also at high enough prices, more exotic sources of petroleum like the tar sands become very economically viable.) Coal is the fossil fuel that is most dangerous from the standpoint of the amount of potential rise in atmospheric CO2 levels it can produce given the known or estimated reserves.
Calculating the effective radiating temperature of the earth is straightforward, something you can have first-year physics majors do just based on what we receive from the sun (which can also be calculated from the sun’s temperature) and the earth’s albedo. It can also be quite accurately measured now. The fact that the measurements of energy transfers aren’t good down to a few W/m^2 or better that Trenberth would like them to be is a problem if you are looking at what is happening “at the margin” (as an economist would say); they matter not a wit for calculating the effective radiating temperature of the earth to an accuracy of, say, 1 K.
No…You could also conclude that for a function that consists of a slow (approximately) linear trend with significant fluctuations imposed, one has to collect data over a long enough period of time to get good enough signal-to-noise to determine the trend. Trends computed over periods of 10 or 15 years come with big error bars because of this. So, saying there has been no statistically-significant warming for certain (often cherry-picked) fairly short periods of time does not mean that the system is not still warming. It is just a statement about how long one has to wait to get small enough error bars to accurately determine a trend. (It is easy enough to confirm this sort of thing by generating artificial “data” on the computer; in this case, you know what the true underlying trend is because you determine it yourself.)
The BBC never misses a chance to promote AGW. A recent news item concerned a tiny water lily unique to, I believe, Malawi,which has been saved from extinction at Kew. The preliminary voice over implied that the near extinction was due to climate change. It was amusing to hear the scientist explain that a demand for more agricultural land was the reason. Needless to say, no apology was forthcoming from the BBC
nedhead May 20, 2010 at 8:04 pm,
Quibbling over whether the Arctic was ice free in the past, or 99.9% ice free, avoids resorting to plain old common sense. Some folks here are clearly implying that the Arctic will soon be ice free due to a very small 0.6° rise in temperature.
Since the deep ocean is cooling, and the SST has risen but not by very much, that leaves ocean currents and wind as the main suspects. But the need to predict an ice free Arctic based on global warming is obvious.
So using common sense, explain how the Arctic would not have been ice free when temperatures were much higher than they are now. Because you can’t have it both ways.
The surface of the earth communicates with the environment (i.e., atmosphere) by much more than just radiation. There is latent heat transfer from evaporation and condensation, sensible heat transfer by convection and advection, etc. The Stefan-Boltzmann Equation describes only the radiative transfer part of this.
However, radiative transfer is the only game in town in regards to heat transfer for how the earth & its atmosphere can communicate with space. This is why, as I explained, the effective radiating temperature of the earth is what is of interest. That is the thing that is constrained by simple radiative energy balance between the sun, earth, and space.
Well, you can have whatever paranoid fantasies you want but there are good reasons, as I explained above, why scientists look at the problem the way that they do. I think that you may be projecting your general approach to this problem onto how they approach it (i.e., toward getting the desired answer rather than doing the science correctly).
What you cite is one paper by one group of people who have been working very hard for many years to discredit the models with satellite (and radiosonde) data. As the satellite record has gotten longer and the errors that Spencer and Christy now admit that they made in analyzing the data have been corrected, the disagreement between models and data has gotten quite a bit smaller. But, just as one can always posit a “God of the Gaps”, so one can always blow up any remaining disagreement and use it to discredit the models if that is one’s motivation. Douglass & Christy et al. made some really silly statistical errors in their last attempt to discredit the models in this regard; I don’t know if the paper that you link to is better or not.
It is also worth noting:
(1) What that group doesn’t tell you is that it is only for the multidecadal trends that the amplification of trends in the tropics is not seen. Such amplification is seen in the fluctuations that occur, say, due to La Nina and El Nino, thus severely constraining the way in which the models could be wrong in the handling of the issues that control this amplification. The data sets have problems that would tend to contaminate the multidecadal trends (and, indeed, what trend you get depends on whose analysis or re-analysis of the data you look at), but not the fluctuations on the timescales of a few years. So, it is interesting that the agreement is good where the data is known to be quite reliable and the agreement is less good where the data is known to be problematic. That may be give you a hint as to where much of the problem is likely to lie.
(2) Interestingly, the most direct effect of believing that the datanot showing this amplification of the trends as one goes up in the atmosphere are correct is that one is forced to conclude that the lapse rate feedback does not appear to be operating as the models predict. Since this is a negative feedback, that is not necessarily a point of view one would want to take if one wants to believe that the climate sensitivity is lower than the models predict.
One observation that you happen to like does not negate all other observations. And, even if the models do have problems with certain things, it doesn’t mean that they are worthless. No model is perfect and it is only in climate science that there seems to be this idea (among a certain group of people) that if they can find any aspect where the models and some empirical data disagree then one must necessarily conclude (1) that it is the models and not the empirical data (and its analysis) that are at fault (no matter how clear it is that the data do have certain problems) and (2) that the models not being perfect disqualifies them from being useful at all.
Whoops! Just after I submitted my last post, I realized that the paper that you linked to was worse than I thought: I had thought it was a new submission by Douglass et al., but now it turns out that it actually dates from 2004. That means that, not only was it published before their later paper that has been found to be highly erroneous, but it was published before some of the significant corrections were made to the UAH satellite data set. (See here for the file containing Spencer and Christy’s own discussion of the various corrections made at various times to their data…The corrections have been particularly important in the tropics.) This was also before there was as good an understanding in regards to the problems with the radiosonde data sets (due, e.g., to adopting better shielding of the temperature sensor over time) and some attempts to re-analyze them!
The link to the UAH README file that I meant to include: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/readme.13Apr2010
Joel Shore;
The surface of the earth communicates with the environment (i.e., atmosphere) by much more than just radiation. There is latent heat transfer from evaporation and condensation, sensible heat transfer by convection and advection, etc. The Stefan-Boltzmann Equation describes only the radiative transfer part of this.>>
Of course that’s all correct. But in order for the system as a whole to heat up one degree, there must still be energy balance between all the layers no matter how you model them. If we accept that the system as a whole retains 3.7 watts/m2 that would otherwise have escaped into space, then that’s all we have to work with. If we model the system as a whole at 255K arriving at a sensitivity of 1.1 degrees, then we must arrive at a temperature change higher in the atmosphere of more than that, and lower in the atmosphere of less than that, 0.65 degrees by my calculation. In my explanation in the comment above on this matter, you responded in part:
Joel Shore;
Well, you can have whatever paranoid fantasies you want but there are good reasons, as I explained above, why scientists look at the problem the way that they do.>>
So you are saying there are good reasons for saying this, your not saying it is wrong? What ever problems the models do or don’t have, are we in agreement that the proposed sensitivity of temperature to doubling of CO2 is 1.1 degrees for the system as a whole, but that we would expect this to be only 0.65 degrees (or in that range) for earth surface? And higher than 1.1 at top of troposphere so that the average of the new gradient at equilibrium is 1.1 degrees?
davidmhoffer says:
No. Your calculation of the surface change is based on incorrect assumptions of how the atmosphere actually exchanges energy. It is true that the change is expected to have some variation with height in the atmosphere…but the variation, on a global scale, at least, is certainly not as large as you suggest. Because, while in the tropics, the warming is expected to be higher at altitude, in the polar regions it is actually modestly the other way (i.e., the surface warms more than at altitude)…and I believe that globally the factor enhancement of the warming at altitude relative to the ground is only something like 1.2.
The other point is that to the extent that the warming at altitude is expected to be greater at altitude, it is already accounted for in the models (by the lapse rate feedback). And, furthermore, the physics of this feedback is closely tied in with the physics of the water vapor feedback, which is of course a positive feedback.