We Talk About Politics Because The Science Is Uncertain

“CO2 should cause about a 1.5 to 2.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures if we double its concentration in our atmosphere…. This really is not very controversial at all.”
Well, I’m not a scientist either but I have read several posts here and elsewhere that the effect of CO2 upon the atmosphere rises logarithmically and that we’re not too far from the point where more of it will cease to have much more effect. So, unless I have misunderstood the things I have read, (always a distinct possibility) then your statement is still controversial.

You make some interesting points but I am struggling to grasp if they are really significant.
“In the past century we have gone from cultivating about 3% of the world’s land for agriculture to about 33%”
Sounds very dramatic but assuming 70% is sea then your statement is that we have gone from cultivating 1% to 9% of the world’s surface for agriculture. Likewise you mention 850,000 reservoirs which sounds a lot and may be significant but I cannot tell.
I am always a little wary of arguments that insist “man is so important and so powerful he must be changing the planet” when in truth it might be better described as two fleas arguing which made the dog fart.

I don’t believe they wanted to examine the big picture regarding all the changes we are making to the planet; I think they were looking instead for something identifyable, tradeable and taxable.

Thomas Fuller, you don’t get it.
The UN IPCC is pushing policies not climate science.
They are pushing policies to give the strong hand to a political elite providing them absolute power to regulate every detailed aspect of our world.
It doesn’t matter to me if such an organizations crooks up climate science or any other human related impact on this world.
I simply reject the entire initiative and the organization involved.
And if you intend to live your future life in freedom, I advise you to do the same.

Anybody with the power of conscious cerebration knows there must be huge uncertainties associated with such a vast and complex system as the earth’s climate on land, sea and in the atmosphere.
Thus, we are angered to be told ‘the debate is over’, especially as that statement appears to us to be made usually by people who lack the critical abilities referred to above, and who are either mindlessly following or malevolently driving an illogical and emotional crusade to an alarmism-ruined future.

If you want proper feedback for your writings (you are not a scientist as you mention), you should write somewhere else.
[snip]
There is not much critical thinking going on here. Critical commenters gave up.
[snip]
Your post is a scatter gun of issues that is too much of a task to start dealing with.
[Advertising blogs that incessantly badmouth WUWT is getting out of hand. ~dbs, mod.]

(Digression–with the increasing urbanisation of this planet, some of these effects will lessen. More of us will live in cities, occupying a smaller space. Technology will reduce the amount of land needed for agriculture, despite our growing population. Some things will get better–maybe a lot of things, if we work for them.)

Ah, yes, of course, we’ve gone from 3% land use to 33% land use, but increased urbanization will take care of the problem because, of course, the physical footprint of a human being is the same as its ecological footprint, and both of those decrease with urbanization. Absolutely makes sense.
And of course, technology will make tons of corn grow on square centimeters of land. Because, of course, photosynthesis uses cold fusion to generate biomass and it is not at all dependent on such things as energy flow from the sun, water, nutrient availability, and its own efficiency at converting sunlight to chemical energy. So we can increase yields indefinitely…
You have to love these people, they seem to be having so much fun… Only problem is [snip]

The major impact on climate will come from increasing the amount of the land surface used for agriculture (as you state 3% – 33%) and especially ‘turning deserts green’. Plants survive by using a kind of ‘total loss’ circulation system. They take water in through their roots and transpire that water out through the stomata in their leaves. This transpiration can be at a surprisingly significant rate with mature trees transpiring more than 100 litres of water an hour in summer. All those desert areas in Libya, the Negev going green are doing so by using cubic kilometers of ‘fossil water’ (Google it).
Water is only normally required for irrigation where the surface is dry (rather obviously) and so in these dry areas the relative humidity is raised by adding water vapor transpired by plants. Water vapor accounts for ~70% of the ‘green house effect’ yet for some reason the cubic kilometers of additional water being continually added to the atmosphere by agricultural irrigation in just the right hot dry places to have the maximum effect on global heat retention, is not even seen as an ‘anthropogenic’ effect.
The insistence that water vapor is ‘only a feedback’ is one of the major faults in the IPCC reports.

DaveF September 4, 2010 at 4:23 am
“CO2 upon the atmosphere rises logarithmically”
Sure does.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
“I’m not a scientist either but I have read”
Yes, that’s all that’s needed to get across the essentials!

First, the basics are pretty well understood. CO2 should cause about a 1.5 to 2.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures if we double its concentration in our atmosphere. (If it doesn’t, it’s because other forces are counteracting it, not that it doesn’t exist.) This really is not very controversial at all.
===================================================
Hold on to your seat Tom, you’re about to get an edjumacation…..

Hi Tom,
Thanks for your reasoned discourse on this issue. As for your claim: “CO2 should cause about a 1.5 to 2.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures if we double its concentration in our atmosphere. (If it doesn’t, it’s because other forces are counteracting it, not that it doesn’t exist.) This really is not very controversial at all.”
Uh, yes, that is THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL THING THAT YOU WROTE! Scientists are surprised to find similar temps to today with up to 20 times level of Co2! The “not very controversial” claim of temp impact of doubling Co2 is starting to sound like a “crystal ball” prediction.
New studies are showing the atmosphere less sensitive to Co2 than previously thought. See: Climate CO2 Sensitivity Overestimated making simplifying assumptions about nature has led to an over estimation of carbon dioxide’s impact on temperature. — http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/climate-co2-sensitivity-overestimated
Peer-Reviewed Study finds ‘ancient’ Earth’s climate similar to present day — despite CO2 levels 5 to over 20 times higher than today! — Geologists reconstructed Earth’s climate belts between 460 and 445 million years ago and found ‘ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present’ — Also included ‘a brief, intense glaciation’
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/7649/PeerReviewed-Study-finds-ancient-Earths-climate-similar-to-present-day–despite-CO2-levels-5-to-over-20-times-higher-than-today
Continued…

‘thats where we’ll be in 90 years’
And thats effectively the claim thats being made, so we must have policy solution xyz now. Except the claim just refuses to stand up to scrutiny, notwithstanding the tactics of Leninst advocates to close debate down.

Thomas, I think that the issue is more nuanced.
The most frequent reason for veering from science to politics that I’ve seen here looks to me more like a general avoidance of scientific investigation because it’s too much work. Much easier to make pronouncements on people, or general handwaving remarks. Easier to simply believe others (as at RC), or blame others for failing to produce a science that is clear enough – when perhaps we all need to do our bit in clarifying the science.
Crucially, skeptics have not been given space for their main concern: to re-examine the root science, in any of the recent reports, to say nothing of IPCC itself. Here, politicking has not happened because the science is uncertain but because discussion of the science has been drowned out with alarmist bullying. And this bullying has helped to keep the science uncertain. Or at least, that portion of the science which reaches Joe Public has been often utterly confusing.
That was why I taught myself the science – and arrived at the conclusion that there was a lot better understanding of climate around than first meets the eye – click my name, I collected together what I found – and none of the better understanding supports CAGW, and a lot does not even support a measurable AGW. Now if we were not so distracted by political takes, all this material would have been processed, checked, tested, and distilled according to the real precepts of Scientific Method, and Climate Science would have developed a lot further.
Stand your title on its head: “The science is uncertain because we talk about politics”.

Part 2: Rising CO2 a Boon for Biosphere – Earth in ‘CO2 Famine’ – Cutting CO2 ‘a profoundly evil act’ — http://www.climatedepot.com/a/2355/Rising-CO2-a-Boon-for-Biosphere-ndash-Earth-in-CO2-Famine-ndash-Cutting-CO2-a-profoundly-evil-act–Climate-Depot-Fact-Sheet-on-CO2
Tom,
Here is the bottom line when it comes to Co2:
UK Professor Emeritus of Biogeography Philip Stott of the University of London decried the notion that CO2 is the main climate driver. “As I have said, over and over again, the fundamental point has always been this: climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor is as misguided as it gets,” Stott wrote in 2008.
Even the climate activists at RealClimate.org let this point slip out in a September 20, 2008 article. “The actual temperature rise is an emergent property resulting from interactions among hundreds of factors,” RealClimate.org admitted in a rare moment of candor.
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/2597/Exposed-Climate-Fear-Promoters-Greatest-Fear–A-Public-Trial-of-the-Evidence-of-Global-Warming-Fears-Inconvenient-Developments-Continue-To-Mount
##
Here is some more “controversy.”
“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact,
as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide
scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical
and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.
“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist
knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so…Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps
Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.” – Dr. Takeda
Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu
University in Japan.
“I have yet to see credible proof of carbon dioxide driving climate change, yet alone
man-made CO2 driving it. The atmospheric hot-spot is missing and the ice core data
refute this. When will we collectively awake from this deceptive delusion?” – Dr. G
LeBlanc Smith, a retired Principal Research Scientist with Australia’s CSIRO. (The full
quotes of the scientists are later in this report)
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=83947f5d-d84a-4a84-ad5d-6e2d71db52d9
#
Not to mention that there is a contingent of scientists now challenging key points of the long “accepted” notions of the Earth’s greenhouse effect. Please do not murder the English language by using the phrase “not very controversial.”
Thanks
Marc Morano
ClimateDepot.com

I would like to see someone, anyone point to this thing called climate and say ” See there, it changed. That is the because this thing over here did this.” In more than 50 years of observing climate with my eyes open most of that time I have never seen the climate change in much of any direction and never for long when it does change. Much like the ocean where waves come in and waves go out. Tide comes up and tide goes down. Storms blow up and pass by, but in the end the weather is quite similar to what it was like 50 years ago. If anyone disagrees with this prove me wrong. Point to the change, and prove out the worldwide implications. Until then I remain sceptical.

CO2 should cause about a 1.5 to 2.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures if we double its concentration in our atmosphere. (If it doesn’t, it’s because other forces are counteracting it, not that it doesn’t exist.)

The number from CO2 is about 1.1 C, isn’t it?
More than half of the modeled scenario temperature rise is attributable to
positive water vapor feedback. This means that ‘global warming’ theory
is depending on positive feedback.
That is evident in the IPCC predictions.
The LOWEST possible trend they invoke is 1.1C, meaning net zero feedback.
Given that there are positive AND negative feedback mechanisms, though
uncertain, and the most likely outcome would be the 1.1C rate and not
the higher rates bandied about.

Smokey, 5:16am:
“….because taxing water vapor is next to impossible.”
Don’t give them ideas, Smokey!

The AGW scam always was a political animal. To justify it the use of a higher authority was required. Hence the use of Political Activists Masquerading As Scientists. PAMAS
What generated the political heat was, I believe , a double headed Hydra. The oil shock of the 70’s and the dawning realisation by the US that their corporations no longer had the upper hand. 95% of the worlds oil is now controlled by Sovereign departments. Aramco etc. This threatened the largest user of oil in the world, the US military. The emergent Empire ran on the stuff.
Then in 1979 something else happened. Something big. ???
regards

DaveF says:

Well, I’m not a scientist either but I have read several posts here and elsewhere that the effect of CO2 upon the atmosphere rises logarithmically and that we’re not too far from the point where more of it will cease to have much more effect. So, unless I have misunderstood the things I have read, (always a distinct possibility) then your statement is still controversial.

Anthony says:

CO2 alone will cause less then a tenth of one degree, because of the fact that CO2 to Temperature is a logarithmic relationship, and we are right now well beyond the saturation point. The first 20-40 ppm contribute over half of CO2′s warming effect.

Both of you misunderstand how a logarithmic function works. The function y = a log(x) + b has the property that a given FRACTIONAL increase in x produces the same increase in y no matter what the initial value of x is. In particular, if you double x, you always get the same increase in y no matter where you start from. [This is opposed to a linear function like y = a x + b where it is a fixed additive increase in x that produces the same increase in y.]
So, in other words, scientists talk about the effect of doubling CO2 levels exactly because the relationship between temperature rise and CO2 levels is expected to be logarithmic. So, when you talk about effects of doubling saturating, you are trying to claim that the dependence of temperature on CO2 decreases with CO2 concentration significantly more than a logarithmic function does…and I don’t think there is any evidence for that.

One thing that we can agree on is that what some people call “conventional wisdom” turns out to be “conventional stupidity”.
I have been burned a lot by not checking the source of what I “know”. I went to public schools and I listed to the “main stream media” for so many years that I no longer trust anything that I “believe”.
Your comment about clearing the forests may be true. But…..Massachusetts had been nearly clear cut by about 1900. Most all those trees that you see today are relatively new growth. The reason that those trees came back is that there was a switch to coal for fuel. Also, we can thank Norman Borlaug for creating new strains of wheat and rice that have increased food production per acre by two or three times and thereby removed much of the need of additional acreage. It is just as likely that there is as much forest now as there was 100 years ago. I don’t know and until I see a source that can be trusted I will not say either way.
Another Great Cause is “Save the Whales”. I suspect that the whale population is better off today than 100 years ago. You can thank “Big Oil” for saving the whale. John D. Rockefeller made kerosene so cheap, people stopped using whale oil for lighting and the economic reason for harvesting whales disappeared.
And the deer population.
And the coyote population.
Yours in skepticism,
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)

“In the past century we have gone from cultivating about 3% of the world’s land for agriculture to about 33%.”
Good grief Tom, where did you come up with this BS? Only 10.57% of the land area of the world is arable, with another 1.04% in permanent crops. This amounts to 3.4% of the planets surface. Not to mention that “arable” only means that it could be farmed, not all of it is.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html
Registration is now open for the fall semester of Remedial Fact-checking 101. You need to get signed up Tom.

*****
Ian W says:
September 4, 2010 at 5:00 am
The major impact on climate will come from increasing the amount of the land surface used for agriculture (as you state 3% – 33%) and especially ‘turning deserts green’. Plants survive by using a kind of ‘total loss’ circulation system. They take water in through their roots and transpire that water out through the stomata in their leaves. This transpiration can be at a surprisingly significant rate with mature trees transpiring more than 100 litres of water an hour in summer. All those desert areas in Libya, the Negev going green are doing so by using cubic kilometers of ‘fossil water’ (Google it).
*****
You are making the unstated assumption that in the future, more land will be required for food. You obviously haven’t considered the implications of, via genetic engineering, crossing corn with bull kelp. 😉

Mr. Fuller, your sapience and humanity exudes through your words, I always read your posts on SF Examiner and have much time for your clearly reasoned points of view.
Mr. Fuller here, we must agree to differ.
My word! I have read many learned papers, opinions and much scientific literature on the effects of MM CO2e on likely effects on the earth’s atmosphere.
It all adds up to squat, and no man on this earth can stand up and hold his hand on his heart and espouse, “we are certain, man’s activities which produce emissions of CO2 do and will cause warming of the atmosphere.”
If we knew a little more about cloud physics and the thermodynamics thereof we would be a bit further down the line of understanding but we do not and we ain’t!
OK so geology is my thing, what do I know of climatology?
Palaeoclimatology, stratigraphy, the fossil record, petrology -that’s what, the long view, that’s what.
– We must put a lid on the hype, hysteria and governmental interference in something they know less about than the political sphere they profess that they do know about.
Let us not, mix our ‘spheres’ up, governments and politically motivated shills and failed politicians should not trespass into the [atmo]sphere of earth sciences and climatology.
But they do, that is where I have a problem with politicians, one of their great cries is; “save the planet, a warming of 1.5/2 degree C, is imminent!”
No it isn’t.

Gary P says:

This estimate comes from the global climate models. The whole CO2 hypothesis relies on the absorption of IR by CO2. The Earth emits the most IR from the tropics where it is the warmest. If the CO2 absorption of IR is going to warm the atmosphere it is going to warm the atmosphere the most over the tropics. All of the models predict a warming of the atmosphere at mid altitudes over the tropics. This predicted warming of the atmosphere by the models is not controversial. The fact that the measured temperatures over the tropics shows no warming is not controversial.
Yet somehow the proven fact that the models are wrong is controversial.

You have a large number of confusions here. The troposphere has more than radiative effects going on and the pattern of the warming is not simply determined by what you seem to think it is. In fact, the largest warming at the surface is expected to be in the arctic region (and the antarctic region too eventually…although there is a lag time on that because of the thermal inertia of the southern oceans).
The tropical tropospheric amplification that you speak of (whereby the higher altitudes of the tropical troposphere warm more than the surface) has nothing to do with the warming being due to increased CO2…It is simply due to the fact that the temperature structure there is expected to closely follow the moist adiabatic lapse rate. And, the difficulties in observing if such amplification of the long term (multidecadal) temperature trends is occurring is complicated by the fact that the satellite and radiosonde data both have problems that can contaminate those long term trends. In fact, there are significant differences between different empirical data sets and even different analyses of the same data sets. Interestingly, the amplification is predicted by the models and seen in the empirical data for short term fluctuations in temperature (such as that due to ENSO), so the data and models are in good agreement over the timescales where the data is known to be reliable. (And, at any rate, this whole issue has nothing to do with the mechanism causing the warming.)
By the way, one structural aspect of the warming that is predicted to be different for the mechanism of greenhouse gases than other warming mechanisms like solar is that greenhouse gas warming is predicted to cause cooling of the stratosphere while the the troposphere warms…and that is indeed what is seen. (To be fair, some of the cooling of the stratosphere is understood to be due to stratospheric ozone depletion.)

The modelers have managed to get results that up till the last decade matched the surface temperatures. (Hansen’s homogenized, bent, twisted, spindled and mutilated temperatures more than the satellites.) The only way that they could have done this was to tweak other parameters in the model to force fit the results. They managed to get the elephant to wiggle his trunk. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

These are not empirical models…They are mechanistic and there is way more data to compare to than there are “free parameters”. These parameters are generally adjusted to get good agreement with more specific data (e.g., cloud parameters to get aspects of clouds right). Neumann’s quote only applies to a well-chosen model. It is true that I could come up with a four-parameter empirical model that does a good job fitting the historical global temperature record. However, it is also true that I could present you with a million-parameter model that you could not fit the record with no matter how hard you tried.
If it was merely a matter of fitting, then one would expect that the parameters could be adjusted in a way that fits the historical temperature record (and agrees as well with other climate data) but does not predict significant future warming in response to greenhouse gases. Even if you believe that there is a vast conspiracy among the nearly 20 groups that have developed these models that has hidden this fact, you could still have expected one of the skeptics to have used one of the publicly-available models like NASA GISS Model E to demonstrate this. And yet, this hasn’t happened.

Thomas Fuller: You wrote, “Two reasons: First, the basics are pretty well understood. CO2 should cause about a 1.5 to 2.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures if we double its concentration in our atmosphere. (If it doesn’t, it’s because other forces are counteracting it, not that it doesn’t exist.) This really is not very controversial at all.”
Actually, it is controversial. The basics are understood for a world without oceans. But the oceans have their own “greenhouse effect”. They are warmed by Downward Shortwave Radiation (Visible Sunlight) to depths of about 100 meters, but they are only capable of releasing heat at the surface. John Daly discussed this in his post “The Deep Blue Sea”.
http://www.john-daly.com/deepsea.htm
Under the heading of “Which ‘Earth’ would be warmer?” he discusses the difference in global temperature between an earth comprised only of land and one that was only ocean. He writes, “It is difficult to estimate how much warmer the ocean planet would be, but comparisons of data between the larger absorbed radiation and the much smaller re- emitted infra-red from the oceans, suggest that the ocean planet could be about 8 to 10 degrees warmer than the land planet. The key would be the ocean planets’ inability to radiate as much heat from the ocean surface at night as it collected to 100 metres depth in the daytime.” And he continues, “In reality of course, the real earth is a mixture of the two, with oceans being predominant covering over 70% of the planet and with a complex atmosphere of many gases. This being the case, we can estimate that the Earth is about +6 deg warmer, simply due to the radiative imbalance in the ocean. Fortunately, the real oceans can also cool themselves by evaporation and direct heat exchange with the atmosphere.”

Mr Fuller, you state:
”Had the IPCC and others been savvy enough to look at all the changes we are making instead of just focusing on the ‘flavor of the month,’ I think the science–and our options–would have been more clearly expressed and more believable…”
There is a very big problem with the CO2 blinders of the IPCC and most climate scientists. Their vision is so narrow they never really consider the other option – a cooling planet.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution expressed it better than I in Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?
“Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earthvs climate can shift gears within a decade….
But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur…“
This blindness can be seen in this peer reviewed paper
“Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”
Orthodox climate scientists assume “early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started… The biggest problem with CAGW theory, is it assumes no changes in the energy from the sun as received by the earth. However during the 20th century the sun has been very active according to this paper and NASA This is no longer true as we enter the new century according to the Solar Dynamics Observatory Mission News
”A method for predicting the next Grand Episode…One of the results was the recognition of a transition from the Grand Maximum of the 20th century to another Grand Episode… Based on the above mentioned methodology and by using new data for the geomagnetic aa index we foresee that a Grand Minimum is immanent. Thus, a prolonged period of relative global cooling is forecasted. The relevant mechanisms are described….” The Forthcoming Grand Minimum of Solar Activity
Another peer reviewed paper, Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic, states:
“..Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages,…”
Are we headed into a period of cooling? Probably. Are we seeing the start of the end of the Holocene interglacial? Who knows, but given the length of the Holocene, that possibility should not be ignored as it has been due to the CO2 hysteria.

R. de Haan says:
September 4, 2010 at 4:47 am
What the man said. Agree 100%.

OT
Uncertain Climate – Episode 1
___________________________________________
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tj525/Uncertain_Climate_Episode_1/
___________________________________________
In a special Radio 4 series the BBC’s Environmental Analyst Roger Harrabin questions whether his own reporting – and that of others – has adequately told the whole story about global warming.
Roger Harrabin has reported on the climate for almost thirty years off and on, but last November while working on the “Climategate” emails story, he was prompted to look again at the basics of climate science.
He finds that the public under-estimate the degree of consensus among scientists that humans have already contributed towards the heating of the climate , and will almost certainly heat the climate more.
But he also finds that politicians and the media often fail to convey the huge uncertainty over the extent of future climate change. Whilst the great majority of scientists fear that computer models suggest we are facing potentially catastrophic warming, some climate scientists think the warming will be restricted to a tolerable 1C or 1.5C.
At this crucial moment in global climate policy making, Harrabin talks to seminal characters in the climate change debate including Tony Blair, Lord Lawson, Professor Bob Watson, former diplomat Sir Crispin Tickell and the influential blogger Steve McIntyre.
And he asks how political leaders make decisions on the basis of uncertain science.

In the past century we have gone from cultivating about 3% of the world’s land for agriculture to about 33%.

Tom, perhaps you meant to write “arable” land rather than an implied total land surface area. Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#cite_note-4 ) cites an FAO report ( ftp://ftp.fao.org/agl/agll/docs/wsr.pdf ) with 1994 data indicating that about 14.6 million km2 of the 41.4 million km2 of gross potentially arable land is actually utilized (approximately one third) . Total land surface is abut 149 million km2. 50 million km2 under agricultural production just don’t sound right.

The AGW alarmists/politicians are magicians. As everyone knows the secret to being a good magician is the ability to distract your attention and CO2 is their chosen distraction vehicle. Though I have great differences with Tom on political philosophy, I am very much in agreement with him on the need to recognize that mankind does have a huge impact on the environment. I take seriously the biblical injunction for us to be good stewards of God’s creation. If we can’t impact the environment there would be no need for such a directive. How “we the people” can be good stewards and not turn the problem over to the “ruling class” is our biggest challenge.

Mr. Fuller:
“In the past century we have gone from cultivating about 3% of the world’s land for agriculture to about 33%.”
Please, wehere do you get this figure from?
“And of course this has had an effect on the planet, and of course that includes this planet’s climate.”
Hard to get. Suppose your figure is correct, in what amount can this affect the world climate that is dominated IMHO by the atmosphere, the oceans, the clouds, the 24 hour rotation (12 hours night, 12 hours day) and the inclination of the its axis (seasons)?
“It has changed the albedo of the land and it has changed the level and movement of moisture over (and around) the cultivated areas. The vertical columns of air that shape what we perceive as weather are hugely affected by this.”
Again how “hugely” is the world climate affected by this?.
“As they are by creation of manmade reservoirs behind the 850,000 dams we have built.”
When they are full what is their water surface compered to the world oceans, seas and lakes?. Reservoirs are, among many others, ones of man greatest achievements.
Thanks.

Most people that believe humans are destroying the planet tend to disregard (or are uneducated about) historical evidence of natural disasters, sudden blooms in flora and fauna, and equally sudden extinctions, all without significant input from humans. If you think forest land is being cleared now, you should have been around when fires roared across the face of the Earth unimpeded by human attempts to suppress.
One example, the numbers of cows currently grazing in the US equals the number of buffalo that once did the same thing. Now if the buffalo were still around in previous numbers, and we ADDED cows to grazing, we would surely be seeing land stress.
I always wonder why folks want buffalo back and for cows to go away. It wouldn’t make a tinker’s dam bit of difference in grazing affects.

Very well stated. The public policy aspect, as Monckton so cleverly realized is as fundamental the science aspect, so he gives us Science and Public Policy. Many articles cited here are news stories, sometimes even opinion pieces, such as Terry Corcoran’s completely dismantling of Jonathon Kay at the National Post. The reason the discussion extends beyond the science is that the policies promoted by the climate scientists interact with many different aspects of everyday life. So, relevant points can be recognized by not only scientists, but lay people and people in fields related to politics, economics, commerce, statistics and many more areas. For example, it doesn’t take a Ph. D. in a recognized climate science to realize 2+2 doesn’t equal 5, nor even Mathematics for that matter. The dissenting opinion is valid regardless of the source as long as it’s clearly demonstrated.
We are an interested and discriminating readership, but we’re also a very understanding one. From what I can tell the majority of the reader’s on WUWT don’t discount information out of hand, anymore than the embrace it as fact, based on someone’s CV.
Thank you Anthony and all of WUWT for bringing us so many diverse points of view on science, the problems and benefits, as well as discussion on their implications in our lives.

Energy use and distribution affects us ALL. It is inherently political in the sense that we (in a democratic society) have the right to express our opinion on this subject. It is a part of the interface between science and politics. Unfortunately due to the vast holes in our knowledge of the climate, what we should do becomes very vague. Opinions are all over the map as to best practices. I have maintained that to prepare only for warming is a dangerous thing to do. As a person who lives in an area of weather extremes, cold is the most deadly to deal with if unprepared. The arrogance of some posters “certainty” of what is going to happen is laughable. The funniest part to me was when they tell us that “hurricanes will increase exponentially” and then there is a 5 year lull (so far) in hurricane numbers and intensity. Almost as if the statement nullified the outcome. She is a sly one that ol’ mother nature.

Tom,
One of my favorite quotes is from renowned Climatologist Dr. Reid Bryson. (who died in 2008)
Bryson said. “You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.”

I am of the opinion that man is able to alter the climate, but only the aspect of where it vents itself, not how much.
Man does not build immovable objects, for the very ground built upon is subject to mass-alteration by the climate, and therefore man is not capable of opposing the irresistable force of climate.
For that reason alone, talk of permanent change in climate due to man is a reality measured only in a few lifetimes.
500 to 1,000 yrs after collapse of civilization, the climate will have managed to obliterate most change man has imposed.
So, if man makes too much alteration in one place, natural climate will eventually cauterize the wound by means of brute force.
The Planet will save itself. Not so mankind.

Thomas Fuller says:- “Instead, they focused on CO2 and treated all who disagreed as the rabble I mentioned before. What they wanted was a rabble alarmed. What they got was a rabble in arms.”
Yes, the plan was that everyone in the world would agree that the coming apocalypse could only be solved by controlling global CO2, which would require a world government – see UN Agenda21 which puts in place the first steps – http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
However, few people believed in the alarmist scare of CAGW, and as time goes on the proportion of non-believers grews bigger and bigger – fuelled by the hockey stick lies, the Climategate revelations and the IPCC misleadingAR4. What was planned to unite us has now become divisive, with a few believers and a large group who smell a scam!
Time for the global governance brigade to go into damage limitation mode. It’s difficult as most people no longer believe the propaganda served up by the MSM. Science itself can no longer be trusted, rather it is seen by many as some strange cargo cult religion, where belief comes before facts, unfalsifiable theories are seen as consensus gospel and computer models are given more credence than observation.
It will be interesting to see what those seeking global power will throw at us next. I’m sure the plan is in place, so we all need to be alert and ready to nip it in the bud. Pareto analysis tells us they have to have 80% acceptance from the people of the globe for a world government to have a chance of long term success. Without this high level of support human conflict will continue and they are very aware that we are many, but they are few. Apply critical thinking to everything you read, and shout loud and long if you smell a rat!

Gail Combs says:

Orthodox climate scientists assume “early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started…

No…Ruddiman’s view is only a hypothesis. Climate scientists have found it interesting but I don’t think most of them have yet been convinced by it. For one thing, it would tend to imply a climate sensitivity at the high end of the IPCC estimates or higher. For another, there are other perfectly valid reasons for expecting that this interglacial would be longer-lived than the average interglacial (I believe the main reason being the small eccentricity of the earth’s orbit around the sun at this point…and analogies to the last interglacial ~400k years ago when this was similarly the case).

The biggest problem with CAGW theory, is it assumes no changes in the energy from the sun as received by the earth.

No. It doesn’t assume that. In fact, solar effects are believed to be responsible for some of the early 20th century warming…although there is still disagreement about exactly how much. A problem is that the changes in solar output are just too small to explain the warming that we’ve seen (in the absence of some positive feedback that selectively enhances only the solar forcing), and this is becoming only truer still as the estimates of the magnitude in 20th century variation in solar output are now lower than they were no too long ago (as Leif has talked about). Another problem is that the warming that we have seen does not show the right pattern either in space or time to be explained by solar variation. (I.e., the warming that has occurred over the last ~35 years has come at a time when solar has not increased and the warming has been accompanied by a significant cooling of the stratosphere, which is not what would be expected for the solar forcing but is expected for a greenhouse gas forcing.)
Those who advocate solar forcing as explaining the warming are in the double bind of having to explain both why the solar forcing ends up being selectively enhanced by positive feedbacks and why the known greenhouse gas forcing ends up being suppressed by negative feedbacks.

In general quite a useful post there are many aspects to how humans have influenced our climate certainly soot, fly ash, land use change has had an effect. The urban heat island has effected the statistics more than the actual temperature. I agree with others the 3% to 33% statistic is a bit misleading especially since the land is only 29% of the earth’s surface and is that the percentage of the total possible arable land or the entire 29%?. Because by the time you consider the Antarctic continent, northern Canada, Siberia, the Australian outback, the Sahara etc it seems a little high.
I must take issue with the assumption of the increase in temperature with a doubling of CO2. This prediction is based on empirical data and includes related effects such as increased forcing by increased water vapour in the atmosphere so it is virtually impossible to separate out just the CO2 effect, this is the sort of misinformation which the IPCC are very prone to.
Many papers have been written by eminent Physicists mathematically analyzing the effect of CO2 in strict accordance with the laws of physics. All reach the conclusion that the effect of CO2 is saturated and no longer has any impact on temperatures. The IPCC have produced 4 reports and have not included a single paper by a physicist proving the greenhouse gas effect as described by the IPCC.
I believe that if such a paper existed it would be trumpeted front and center by the IPCC, their deafening silence on this issue speaks for itself.

Mr. Fuller, please take a look at this pdf. It may cool your lukewarmishness.
http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.pdf

David Ball says:

The funniest part to me was when they tell us that “hurricanes will increase exponentially” and then there is a 5 year lull (so far) in hurricane numbers and intensity.

Could you familiarize me with where that statement “hurricanes will increase exponentially” comes from? Because all of what I heard were predictions that the intensity is likely to increase somewhat but that it is unclear what would happen to total numbers. (I could quote the relevant statements from IPCC AR4 but it is easy enough for you to look them up yourself.)
Furthermore, nobody ever said that this change would be so dramatic that it would swamp the significant variability that occurs year-to-year or even decade-to-decade. So basically, you have just knocked down a total strawman. Yesterday, I could just as easily said, “The weather service claims that because of the seasonal cycle, temperatures should be dropping significantly over the next few months…and yet it has been warmer in Rochester this week than it was for most of the last few months.” (I say “yesterday” because today we have finally gotten a break in our late summer heat wave.)

tarpon says:

BTW, isn’t the heat trapping ability of CO2 logarithmic? And somewhere around 400 ppm we reach the point where CO2 has absorbed all the suns energy it can absorb, since there really no more sunlight available in the CO2 absorption bands? The old painting a window with successive coats of white paint to make the room darker experiment.

See my post above http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/04/we-talk-about-politics-because-the-science-is-uncertain/#comment-474959 about what logarithmic means. As for your saturation argument, you are showing that you are up to the point where the understanding of the scientific community was about 50 years ago or so. You may want to read here to understand how to advance beyond that: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#theory (read both above and below this).

What we don’t know about climate, you can fill a library of gigantic sic, but we really don’t know how big.

I think that statement is true if by “we”, you mean yourself…which means it is worth learning about climate science of the last 50 years rather than repeating discredited arguments. Not to say that there are not legitimate sources of uncertainty, but that does not mean that there are lots of things that are known and quite settled science.

gm
“Unfortunately, the inescapable conclusion is that there isn’t much difference between the motivations and intelligence level of flat-earthers on one side and the majority of the crowd around here on the other.”
Whats the matter GM – been looking in the mirror again?

Joel Shore has apparently not viewed “an inconvenient truth”. C’mon Joel, that was pretty weak.

One other item I would like to address. I have been accused of wanting to maintain the “status quo” with regards to fossil fuels . In fact the opposite is true. We need energy (abundant and reliable energy) to develop new and more efficient ways to produce cleaner less polluting energy. This is not “maintaining the status quo”. It is moving forward.

Tom Fuller,
Perhaps following will help you with historical background on your next middle-of-the-road climate post.
JW’s History of the Study of Climate Science In-One-Lesson:

: )
John

paulw says (on another thread):
September 3, 2010 at 5:34 pm
…Apparently, this figure is not ’0.4%’ (who first said that?) but 20%.
Source: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=sc05400j
If you have a comment on this, please substantiate it. I really do not want to hear comments such as rejecting the author for some conspiracy theory. If you do that, I’ll leave this website.
I did reject the author and you’re still here.
Empty threats?

Joel Shore says:
September 4, 2010 at 9:59 am
“[…]As for your saturation argument, you are showing that you are up to the point where the understanding of the scientific community was about 50 years ago or so. ”
You can’t make a fog brighter by making it thicker.

evanmjones says:

That is the bottom line. Can you explain why temperature increase could be as low as 0.7C if the forcing equation is correct and positive feedback is an issue? It simply does not add up.

One thing you are neglecting is the difference between equilibrium climate sensitivity and transient climate response. The oceans create a large lag time in the climate system so that the system has not yet equilibrated with the current greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
For this and other reasons, the unfortunate fact is that the 20th century climate record does not provide a very tight constraint on climate sensitivity. Within the errors that we know the total forcings, with the intrinsic climate variability, and with the lag time for the climate system to equilibrate, the empirical data for the 20th century is compatible with quite a broad range of climate sensitivities that includes the IPCC range and then some on either side. Better constraints are obtained by combining this with other empirical data. Perhaps the best constraints are from the ice age – interglacial cycles, for which the forcings and temperature change are reasonably well-understood and the time scales are long enough that you see the “equilibrium” change. Others data is provided,for example, by the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. All these data taken together agree well with the likely range for climate sensitivity given by the IPCC.
Coalsoffire says:

Thanks for this interesting defence of the climate models. How do the models deal with C02? I seem to recall an article by Lintzen or someone that showed the models introducing a significant positive effect of increasing C02. Every model used a slightly different figure for it… I think that was one of his complaints, but they all ratcheted up the future temperature by that process. Isn’t that all it takes to effect a “conspiracy” or at least a consensus?

You are touching on a real issue here, which is that the effect of aerosols still has considerable uncertainty. So, within the uncertainties of the temperature data, it is possible for two different climate models to get similar good agreement over the 20th century but with different climate sensitivities and different estimates of the aerosol forcing that partly cancel out.
Since this thread is all about coming together and finding a middle ground, I’ll admit that this is a legitimate source of uncertainty. However, it is also one that is already taken into account in the range of climate sensitivity given by the IPCC. It is just an explanation of why there is still a considerable spread in the model projections for the 21st century (even if you restrict yourself to just one emissions scenario…since some of the spread is due to uncertainty in future emissions). And, it does not nullify the fact that nobody has shown that they can use a climate model and reproduce the temperature record without including the forcing due to greenhouse gases.

jmbnf says:
September 4, 2010 at 10:22 am
“[…]Yet Haiti only uses half it’s arable land for permanent crops
Haiti
arable land: 28.11%
permanent crops: 11.53%”
Please don’t misunderstand arable land vs. permanent crops; here’s the definition the World Factbook uses:
“Land use
This entry contains the percentage shares of total land area for three different types of land use: arable land – land cultivated for crops like wheat, maize, and rice that are replanted after each harvest; permanent crops – land cultivated for crops like citrus, coffee, and rubber that are not replanted after each harvest; includes land under flowering shrubs, fruit trees, nut trees, and vines, but excludes land under trees grown for wood or timber; other – any land not arable or under permanent crops; includes permanent meadows and pastures, forests and woodlands, built-on areas, roads, barren land, etc.
”
from
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/notesanddefs.html?countryName=World&countryCode=xx&regionCode=oc#L
“Arable” doesn’t mean unused. That being said, you’re right; we’re not short of land. We could, if the need arises, stop feeding pigs and cattle with grain and eat it ourselves. Why don’t we do that already? Market mechanisms. If the demand for simple foods rises astronomically the price will go up and producers won’t be interested in feeding it to animals anymore.
Why is there still hunger? It’s not a shortage of food but poverty and impossibility of distribution under conditions of civil war that causes hunger these days.

Charles Higley says:
September 4, 2010 at 9:30 am
…The biofuels industry is just plain wrong. It is clear that it does not work and represents a net loss of money and energy by the time the fuel is produced….
_______________________________________
You forgot the record profits of Monsanto and Cargill in 2008. (Jim you go look up the references this time.)

To Anthony and Thomas Fuller: Respectfully, Thomas Fuller does not deserve a guest post on WUWT, not because he is not a scientist, but because a non-scientist should be responsible to a field within which he is not an expert such that he reads (and understands) the variety of views and proofs given. The result: way too many unsubstantiated statements and “way too many” comments by responsible and respectful WUWT-regulars to right the misperceptions and errors. In my personal opinion, a frustrating waste of time. I am trying to be respectful; Thomas Fuller, research more fully before you write. Read the respectful comments here and you will know where to look.
Unfortunately, the politics is not uncertain. Look who is behind the Chicago Climate Index and the one-world, we-know-best totalitarians who are trying to snuff out CO2 — or rather the developed world so they can control the rest of it. I think we might as well go back to James Bond for a primer.

The sad thing is, that the “you understand the climate from 50 years ago” comment might actually be relevant. If we lose all of the bad science that is “buddy” reviewed over the last 30 years which is bound to happen, everyone is going to be transported to virtually the same state of understanding on the climate that we were 50 years ago. Its a sad fact when the scientific process is hijacked by politics and philosophy that the eventual progression is that we have to go backwards.
We take 1 step forward, but 3 steps back. All that wasted money…and what to show of it? Statistics 101 examples of how NOT to model, that is what….
Now don’t get me wrong, there are things we have learned in the last 30 years that are not shams, but overall our progress is like I said, we took 1 step forward on some things, but the overall picture is 2 steps back.

Gnomish
September 4, 2010 at 9:37 am
I’m pleased that you used some basic classical thermo to demonstrate that the global phase changes of our vast amount of water is our thermostat that controls climate within a range that sustains life. CO2 is a minor constituant that is going along with these changes. Because it is now being accurately measured and is globally consistant, it’s natural background levels are probably our best “lagging” indicator of global climate change. I think we are measuring atmospheric CO2 in a rising portion of a 308 year cycle that will max out at around 500 ppmv some where between 2080 and 2100. Few of us will be around to see it, but we can watch the slope decrease while the slope for emissions continues to increase. Then watch for short sales in carbon trading.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Two reasons: First, the basics are pretty well understood. CO2 should cause about a 1.5 to 2.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures if we double its concentration in our atmosphere. (If it doesn’t, it’s because other forces are counteracting it, not that it doesn’t exist.) This really is not very controversial at all.
It is controversial. So let’s try the basics. A 1.5 to 2.1 C rise where?
Artic? Antartic? New York? Sydney? Equador? Mount Everest? Mariana Trench? Where?

Gnomish says:
September 4, 2010 at 9:37 am
Great work! Thanks for remembering us some of the many fantastic (almost magical) properties of water.

jmbnf says:
September 4, 2010 at 10:22 am
….In a recent discussion with an environmentalist with a masters degree is was common knowledge the world was at a agriculture breaking point citing food riots in Haiti etc. Yet Haiti only uses half it’s arable land for permanent crops
Haiti
arable land: 28.11%
permanent crops: 11.53%
other: 60.36% (2005)
Why?
Here is the answer to that question
Structural Adjustment Policies are economic policies which countries must follow in order to qualify for new World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and help them make debt repayments on the older debts owed to commercial banks, governments and the World Bank…
SAPs generally require countries to devalue their currencies against the dollar; lift import and export restrictions; balance their budgets and not overspend; and remove price controls and state subsidies.
…As a result, SAPs often result in deep cuts in programmes like education, health and social care, and the removal of subsidies designed to control the price of basics such as food and milk. So SAPs hurt the poor most, because they depend heavily on these services and subsidies.
SAPs encourage countries to focus on the production and export of primary commodities such as cocoa and coffee to earn foreign exchange. But these commodities have notoriously erratic prices subject to the whims of global markets which can depress prices just when countries have invested in these so-called ‘cash crops’.
By devaluing the currency and simultaneously removing price controls, the immediate effect of a SAP is generally to hike prices up three or four times, increasing poverty to such an extent that riots are a frequent result.” http://www.whirledbank.org/development/sap.html
The net effect is to bankrupt indigenous farmers so large factory farms run by transnational corporations can move in. The Smithfield farm of “swine flu fame” in Mexico is an example.

Mr. Fuller,
Nice article. Perhaps I could offer some philosophical sound bites in connection with this at some later date.
Probabilist motto: I used to be certain, but now I’m not so sure.
And;
In the absence of Reality, Probability rules. Which relates to a quote attributed to Bruno De Finetti: “Probabilities do not exist”. http://www.brunodefinetti.it/Bibliografia/definettiwasright.pdf . And if I may expand on that a bit: Else they would be Reality. Conceptually, P=1 is the Realization of a Probability (an Event ), and all other probable outcomes (given the known and unknown conditions) go to zero.

Doug S says:
September 4, 2010 at 10:34 am
R. de Haan says:
September 4, 2010 at 4:47 am
I think R. de Haan has touched on the root of the issue….
Can you imagine, after all the sacrifices that free men and women have made in the fight to be free from an elite ruling class, that we would now surrender to the likes of Al Gore and the clowns at the UN. A surrender that would enable the elites to become rich by trading carbon credits and subjecting the working class to higher and higher taxes? Not possible.
_____________________________
Oh but Mr deHaan and Mr Doug S.
David Rockefeller has assured us “..the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war, but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in the past centuries.” . 
How could you possibly think freedom of the individual is better than Mr. Rockefeller’s benign guidance?

We mustn’t forget that the IPCC was set up to to do what it does, acting on the assumption that manmade CO2 is the only cause of climate change. It can (and should therefore) just ignore any evidence to the contrary. It cannot, by its terms of reference, be an unbiased authority on climate change.

Dear Mr Fuller, Thank you for your thoughts, but I read a comment by Lucy Skywalker above to the effect that she has a site. I looked it up and have just read it all. It is really excellent, and explains everything very clearly. I never knew that it existed. Thank you Lucy Skywalker, I will recommend your site to everyone I meet. We can only hope that eventually people will learn, and governments will stop wasting time and money on reducing CO2, and be grateful that CO2 is indeed increasing because if it had fallen instead of rising since 1850 plants would by now be finding it hard to grow, and that really would be a disaster.

See my previous comment about Probability to Mr. Fuller, in particular the pdf I linked to.
From Pachauri’s lips to our ears: ” They have talked about quantifying uncertainties. To some extent, we are doing that, though not perfectly. But the issue is that in some cases, you really don’t have a quantitative base by which you can attach a probability or a level of uncertainty that defines things in quantitative terms. And there, let’s not take away the importance of expert judgment. And that is something the report has missed or at least not pointed out.”
So if you can’t quantify uncertainties (like is climate sensitivity say 0.5 degrees or 6.5 degrees, and with what probabilities) just go with your best guess, call it expert opinion (especially if you only pick and pay the “right” experts) and say that there is a 90% certainty, even if there are no numbers you can add up to get that.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/09/pachauri-admits-the-ipcc-just-guesses-the-numbers/

_Jim says:
September 4, 2010 at 1:07 pm
“Gail apparently is unaware of the term “the commons” – a term referring to resources that are collectively owned or shared between or among the population e.g. ground water.”
Yes, and living on the water planet, if we only knew how to desalinate.
We could co-locate nuclear power plants and desalinization plants on
the coast. And if there were only ancient civilizations, from which we
could have learned how this new clean water could be shifted around,
we’d be set. But alas, we’re stuck with “the commons”, and no water.
http://tinyurl.com/237ass8

_Jim,
Try this link. I used Bing and just removed the operative “Massachusetts” from the search.
http://www.rense.com/general53/wasa.htm

LOL! Love that pick! My sis-in-law has a lakehouse about 5 miles from the Uncertain Inn. (Caddo Lake is a cool place, btw)
And actually the politics ARE certain now – a wave is coming that is going to wipe out the congressional dems in 60 days. There will now be no cap and trace, no climate bill, no carbon cap of any time. Also, Kyoto is going to expire and nothing is going to replace it – there will be no international regime, no new treaties. Politically speaking, you can chisel that in stone.
So whatever is going to happen as a consequence of that inaction is going to happen. You really should hope (as I happen to believe) that nothing at all of note is going to happen and life will go on as always, proving that this was never anything but a manmade scare. Because it’s too late for any political fix to come along now.

Darn it. The * was meant to carry over the *= 1000HA in the two reports which I neglected to include, above.

Joel Shore:
“Since this thread is all about coming together and finding a middle ground…”
Depends what “middle ground” means. This thread, and very many others at WUWT, are about trying to get to the truth, which has nothing to do with “middle ground” in the sense of making a compromise.
Having said that, I have no objection to your posting here and what you write seems level-toned and respectful. If by “middle ground” you mean meeting and sharing/debating ideas with all parties being open to persuasion – in an attempt to get closer to the truth – then I’m all for that.
There may also be some points which are not in dispute by most on both sides, however…
Tom Fuller:
As you’ve probably realised, you made assumptions about what it was easy for all to agree on, and have now discovered that many reject those assumptions.
To me, this is a key issue. We all tend to have pet assumptions, and maybe we project those onto others. Scepticism, in my book, is what happens when people cultivate the habit of a) identifying the things they take for granted (often through uncritical acceptance of received opinion), and b) checking whether they are justified.
The more we are acquainted with a subject, the better we’ll be able to understand it, but I think most, if not all, of us, also know that that leads to the realisation of how much we still have left to learn.
All teachers (I am one) realise early in their careers that trying to teach something very rapidly reveals how ignorant one actually is. But teachers have no choice but to deal with the awkward, “simple” questions that students ask that they haven’t previously though to ask themselves. They have to try to learn more about their subject, maybe beginning to understand it in depth for the first time.
Unfortunately, the “teachers” on the subject of CAGW have for too long isolated themselves from the obligation to deal with the “simple” questions, and seen no necessity to identify and challenge their own assumptions. I think they are becoming increasingly discomfited now that they are having to address issues they have blocked out for years.
Some folk (to be fair, on both sides) really only *want* certain things to be true, and seek out authoritative sources to back them up. They’re abrogating their responsibility to try to understand for themselves, which, in the end, is the only way to truly understand *anything*.
Without scepticism, one can’t learn. Without learning, there can be no true knowledge. Without knowledge, the best we can manage is to parrot assumptions, our own or borrowed. For my money, the smartest people here, however great or small their expertise, are those who know and admit how little they really know.
Do you know how little you know? I’m not having a dig at you. I’m just encouraging you to be smarter than you currently are, and hopefully I try to be just as tough on myself about this.

Dr. Dave says:
September 4, 2010 at 2:34 pm
_Jim says:
September 4, 2010 at 1:07 pm
“Another ‘old wives tale’ debunked?”
The issue of water rights vary widely across the country. In much of the midwest if you own the property you own everything beneath it.,,,,
_____________________________________________
Dr. Dave thankyou, I am get rather sick of defending any statement I make from attacks by Jim calling me an out right liar. He usually never even bothers to cite a reference during his attacks although I normally do if possible. And yes I own my mineral/water rights per my deed but that has never stopped a money hungry politician.
The towns I was talking about were Mebane NC and a well owned by Alton and the other town was Ashburnham MA and a well owned by Larry and Sue. So no Jim googling is not going to find the information about the complaints by my personal friends. Do you want me to ask for a copy of their water bills, a copy of their deeds and a photo of their wells all notarized so you will believe me???

Hi Tom,
You created some interest, didn’t you? I like it.
Booker, in his Sunday Telegraph column posted online today,says that the IPCC was always a political pressure group.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7981979/A-cunning-bid-to-shore-up-the-ruins-of-the-IPCC.html

Gail Combs says:
September 4, 2010 at 4:16 pm
“Dr. Dave thankyou, I am get rather sick of defending any statement I make from attacks…”
No problem, Gail. Yours are always some of my favorite comments on these threads. Besides…_Jim hit a couple of my buttons. I don’t get it. Your comments are always quite erudite and well-referenced. The issues of water rights and biofuels are guaranteed to make me see red. I still mourn the loss of my sweet well in Texas (part of the post-nuptial agreement) and the local eco-nazis have ridden roughshod over the water supply here ever since they had the water facility legally condemned so they could buy it from the Dutch company that owned it. They wanted “local control”. This really just meant that a cabal of local enviro-zealots got to run it and double the rates.
Biofuel debates nearly send me into a rant. This is the dumbest “good idea” I’ve ever heard. Just do the math! Consider the variables. One bad season could wipe out most of a year’s fuel production…if you weren’t already starving. I grocery shop frequently and I casually watch the prices of beef, pork and chicken. I wonder if anybody ever taught these geniuses about the “corn-hog cycle” in introductory economics.

Money, Money , Money , always funny in a carbon trading goldman sachs world.

evanmjones says:

How big a lag? A big enough lag so as not to show up during the 20th Century — yet small enough to create a 3.2C rise in the next 90 years?

Most of the forcing has occurred near the end of the century. The estimate is there is about another 0.5 C in the pipeline, the majority of which I believe we would see over the next 20 or 30 years. The IPCC makes two different sorts of estimates, one of equilibrium climate sensitivity upon doubling CO2 and another of what the temperature would be in 2100 under various emissions scenarios (and using the transient climate response, so that temperatures would continue to rise after 2100 even if greenhouse gas levels didn’t). I have no clue which of these your 3.2 C number actually refers to, since there are a range of estimates for both climate sensitivity and the temperature rise by 2100 and the latter, of course, depends on the emissions scenario as well as the climate sensitivity.

Or the sensitivity/feedbacks are not as expected.

No…Saying that the data does not constrain something means that the data do not constrain it. It means that the sensitivity and feedbacks are consistent with the data; on the other hand, the data do not demonstrate that the sensitivity and feedbacks are in the IPCC range either since the data are consistent with a broader range than the IPCC estimates of the likely sensitivity.

Assuming that the “empirical data” by which you mean adjusted data is correct. The average USHCN station warmed 0.14C over the 20th century. USHCN has adjusted this to +0.72C for no good reason I can tell.

So, now all of a sudden you don’t believe the data that a moment ago you were claiming showed that the climate sensitivity is not what the IPCC predicted. And, I have no idea why you are even talking about the 20th century data when I just got through explaining that better constraints are provided by the empirical paleoclimate data (e.g., the ice age — interglacial) and the Mt. Pinatubo eruption (which is a short-term event in the 20th century…not a long-term trend issue).

Besides, IPCC stakes its lot on positive feedback loops which don’t have anything to do with the ocean “catching up”, so far as I can tell. Those feedbacks are not and have not been in evidence.

Here is a paper that will give you a good lead into understanding the increasing amount of evidence for a water vapor feedback that is closely matching the expectations of the models: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;323/5917/1020

I have trouble buying (at huge expense) any theory which has constant pressures that bring about a slow response up to now but will surely be a Real Big Response in the Real Near Future (pay the man at the door).

You can believe what you want to believe but it might behoove you to understand why the scientific community as a whole has indeed bought the theory and why people like Tom Fuller are struggling (what seems to be a losing battle) trying to make the “skeptic community” at least marginally relevant to the discussion.

I came across a blog a couple of years ago that pointed out that the emissivity of GH gases increase with temperature resulting in an increase in radiation for a fixed temperature of the atmosphere, unlike other power absorption changes.
To quote the last two paragraphs:-
“Again, calculating the epsilon (emissivity) for the atmosphere for an old and new value using atmospheric absorption from the Hitran database results in a negative result when the new emissivity is applied. That means the temperature drops because the radiation output of the atmosphere becomes more efficient with the new increased emissivity.
That brings to question, what does cause the earth to be warmer if ghgs don’t have much of anything to do with it. It would appear that cloud cover might be the actual reason – that combined with albedo – as well as being the dominant reasons for variations.”
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-174215.html
Has anyone any explanation to refute this? It does seem very important in that arguments about the effects of GHG’s in raising temperatures at all become irrelevant.

Isn’t this just the soft approach to reinforcing the old CO2 ‘science’ being settled premise
“Two reasons: First, the basics are pretty well understood. CO2 should cause about a 1.5 to 2.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures if we double its concentration in our atmosphere. (If it doesn’t, it’s because other forces are counteracting it, not that it doesn’t exist.) This really is not very controversial at all.”
He massages our egos then suggests that we are all in acceptance of the CO2 ‘science’.
Classic trick. Lets not give this guest any more time.

It seems a good place for a discussion on CO2, whether it has any effect on climate in the real world, as correlation does not seem to point that way, and to bring forward ideas that do explain climate variations.
Here is one for discussion,
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/FunctionOfMass.pdf
in which the author thinks that greenhouse gases are only relevant as contributing to the total mass of the atmosphere. I think we had a discussion here on pressure and temperature on Venus which also pointed that out, with much opposition!
Then there is Miscolski’s latest paper,
http://www.suite101.com/content/no-greenhouse-effect-in-semi-transparent-atmospheres-a243477
Which does away with any need to invoke CO2 as a warming agent.
Together with several other posters above they seem to dispel the ‘Evil CO2’ myth, but as the initial posit by the IPCC was not scientifically motivated, and was purely political, it will take more than science to refute it.
As for variation in climate, how about the thinning of the atmospere recently that took many by surprise but is explained by a quiet Sun emitting less Extreme UV in a long Solar Cycle, lowering the thermosphere temperature by 41°K.
This may allow the polar jet streams to move equatorwards, giving rise to more extreme weather events, especially when blocked.
Think of say a heatwave in Russia,together with low temperatures in Siberia, and blocking of the monsoon in Pakistan giving flooding. Plus, say a cold jet stream reaching up to the Amazon, killing millions of aquatic animals and fish, 400 people dying of cold in Peru, and temperatures lower in Argentina than Antarctic stations, and a cold wet winter in S.E. Australia with more rain than we have had for 20 years, at least where I live.
That was this year, Mongolia suffered the coldest winter for decades last winter and lost over half their stock. You don’t even need an average temperature drop, just a change in circulation patterns to create catastrophic extremes, 540 A.D. saw the Seine and Rhine dry up, and that was a ‘cold’ period.
Just ideas, let the scientists work it out to their satisfaction, it won’t change the climate.

@Fuller
“CO2 should cause about a 1.5 to 2.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures if we double its concentration in our atmosphere.”
That would be Fahrenheit not Celsius. IPPC figure is 1.1 Celsius for CO2 forcing without feedbacks.

@Fuller
“In the past century we have gone from cultivating about 3% of the world’s land for agriculture to about 33%. And of course this has had an effect on the planet, and of course that includes this planet’s climate.”
That effect is debatable. First of all the climate is controlled by the ocean not the land and the ocean is 70% of the surface. So in effect what you wrote (and I’m not sure of the accuracy of 33%) is that humans have gone from using less than 1% of the earth’s land surface for agriculture to more than 9%.
Given that the land used for agriculture was not barren beforehand then it becomes a matter of the effect of changing over from wild plants to domestic plants on that land surface. While there is a large effect on local biota and some small effect on local weather there shouldn’t be much if any effect at all on global climate – the tail does not wag the dog. That’s the problem with most of the anthropogenic climate change mythology – it’s largely based on the false premise that the tail wags the dog. Except for the effect of continental land masses forcing ocean currents to take detours around them then you can essentially discount the land from having any large effect on global climate. And one thing is for sure, there is nothing anthropogenic about the configuration and movement of tectonic plates.

Gnomish (Sept. 4 2010 937 am )
Water, Water, everywhere and not a drop to drink,
Water, Water, everywhere and all the boards did shrink,
Water, Water, everywhere and Joel Shore is away out of his depth !

Blade says:

Never has anyone said so little with so many words! With the exception of your mega-FAIL condescending pseudo-lecture on Exponential/Logarithmic functions (you really think people here do not understand this?) you appear to have no focus.

My focus has been responding to some of the incorrect things that people have posted here in the comments. If you feel the topics were off-track, then you ought to blame them for raising them. As for the logarithmic function explanation, it was clear that the two commenters who I quoted indeed did not understand this.

Question to Joel Shore: if the CO2 concentration doubles from the current 390 ppm to 780 ppm, what will happen to the temperature?

I don’t claim to have any special knowledge above and beyond that of the climate science community who estimate the likely range of equilibrium climate sensitivity to by 2 to 4.5 C. Higher or lower values than this cannot be ruled out but they do not appear to be consistent with our current understanding of most of the empirical data.

Smokey says:

The OISM Petition proves that conclusively; no alarmist petition has been able to round up more than a small fraction of the OISM’s numbers.

Almost nobody in the scientific community takes such a petition seriously and I am surprised that you do. It is strange that someone of your political persuasion endorses a petition run like an old Soviet style election: bombard people with propaganda and then only allow them to vote YES.
Of the signers, how many of those have any sort of real qualifications in the field? Polls of scientists, taken using serious statistical polling methods, show something entirely different than the self-selected petition that you site.

Joel Shore falls into that category — to the point that he has stated: “…the problems lie not with the models but with the observational data itself.” Of course, that is completely backward. The problems lie with the models, not with the reality they are failing to emulate.

It is a bad habit to quote people out of context. If you look at the full context, you will see strong reasons to believe that in this particular case that there are serious problems with the data analysis…not the least being that different analyses of the same data set get very different results. And, it is never smart to abandon your model when it works well with the data that you know to be reliable and only works less well with the data that you know to suffer from artifacts.

And regarding the fact that human CO2 emissions constitute less than 3% of total CO2 emissions, Joel has said: “if you don’t want to be taken seriously by any real scientist, I strongly suggest that you continue to repeat the 3% nonsense.” But that ‘nonsense’ comes out of the UN/IPCC that Joel worships.

You really ought to look at the larger context from which you cherry-pick what you link to. Here is the full report that you grabbed that table out of: http://books.google.com/books?id=fsgyFcihB8AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=emissions+of+greenhouse+gases+in+the+united+states+2003&hl=en&ei=KKKDTOLkC4T7lwfVn9ChDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false On p. 5, they say:

Most greenhouse gases have both natural and human-made emission sources. There are, however, significant natural mechanisms (land-based or ocean-based sinks) for removing them from the atmosphere. However, increased levels of anthropogenic emissions have pushed the total level of greenhouse gas emissions (both natural and anthropogenic) above natural absorption rates for these gases. This positive imbalance between emissions and absorption has resulted in the continuing growth in atmospheric concentrations of these gases.

And, on p. 7 they say:

Natural processes — primarily, uptake by the ocean and photosynthesis — absorb substantially all the naturally produced carbon dioxide and some of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide, leading to an annual net increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of 11.4 to 12.2 billion metric tons.

In other words, there are large exchanges back-and-forth between the atmosphere, land biosphere, and mixed layer of the oceans, but the anthropogenic emissions are taken stores of carbon long locked away from these reservoirs and adding it to the system. The emissions that we add to the atmosphere rapidly partition between the atmosphere, land biosphere, and ocean mixed layer because of the fast exchanges. However, the CO2 concentration in all of these reservoirs rises as a result. The notion that our additions to the atmosphere are an insignificant contribution to the rise in CO2 is wrong, wrong, wrong. They are in fact responsible for essentially all of the rise…and, in fact, the rise in atmospheric CO2 would be about twice as large if not for the biosphere and ocean mixed layer’s ability to absorb some of what we have emitted.

Gary P says:

There are ongoing discussions about CO2 feedback and I believe the models include positive feedback as another parameter.

The feedback is not a parameter. It is an emergent property from the physics that goes into the models. Of course, some feedbacks are better understood than others…and it is the uncertainty in the cloud feedback that is responsible for most of the range of climate sensitivities among the different models.

The IPCC uses a long atmospheric lifetime for CO2. This is contrary to all other estimates. http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a5e507c9970c-pi

As Willis Eschenbach (a skeptic who has written many posts here) would tell you, you are confused on this point…Perhaps you have been misled by people who want to confuse you. The lifetime of an individual CO2 molecule in the atmosphere is not the same as the lifetime for a perturbation of CO2 level of the atmosphere. The former is controlled by the fast transfers back-and-forth between the atmosphere, land biosphere, and ocean mixed layer while the latter is controlled by the slow transfer of CO2 from the mixed layer to the deep oceans (after the additional CO2 has rapidly partitioned itself between the atmosphere, land biosphere, and ocean mixed layer reservoirs). You might ask yourself why some people who really do (or should) know better are purposely trying to mislead you on this point!

You may be right about the radiosonde data for the tropical atmosphere being questioned. The data became controversial as soon as people noted that it was contrary to the models. Kind of like how the Argo data had to be corrected as soon as it showed a cooling of of the oceans.

That is how science works…Data analysis is done and then the data is compared to theory. There are often discrepancies and scientists work to resolve them. Sometimes that involves modifying or discarding the theory but, more often, especially once a theory is well-established, problems are found with the data or the analysis of the data.

I also believe the sun has been set as a constant with no variability. Why is NASA wasting all this money for satellites to investigate something that is just a constant?

To the extent it is known, the forcing due to the historical variability of the sun is included in the climate models. However, the future variability of the sun is not very easy to predict and hence it is indeed ignored (although some models may try to put in an 11 year solar cycle; I don’t know). Since the observed solar variability and hence forcing are quite small, there is not a big error introduced in doing this, at least over the period of a few decades or longer.

Change “IPPC” to IPCC in my last. With respect to water in the atmosphere as a feedback. Water is the climate thermostat and CO2 is going along for the ride. http://www.kidswincom.net/CO2OLR.pdf.

Fred,
I am sure you are a very smart fellow but usually claims of “I’m right and the entire scientific community in this field is wrong” require a significant standard of evidence. Does the possibility occur to you that they might be correct and you might be wrong in your analysis?
By the way, what does it mean to have a cycle of period 308 years in data that only goes back a little over 50 years?

Over on my blog, Joel Shore has been nominated for a medal for his patience and diligence on this thread. I’m here to second the nomination.
The smugly confident confusion that everybody else here happily exudes would be funny were it not for the consequences.
To Tom Fuller’s question, the reason we find ourselves arguing about well-constrained science is to avoid the abyss of reconsidering our confused and dangerous policies. In other words, his argument is completely backwards. Climate science is the best understood part of the puzzle, and we should really be hashing out policies to support sufficient mitigation and adaptation to minimize the chances that civilization will be overwhelmed by environmental stresses.
But we need people who are less quick to latch on to half-baked ideas than most who hang around here, and who are more willing (and dare I say, better able) to test their own beliefs against evidence.
REPLY: Stay tuned for Fuller’s reply, and open a can of half baked beans for yourself too. 😉 Anthony

Michael Tobis [September 5, 2010 at 9:07 pm] says:
“… The smugly confident confusion that everybody else here happily exudes would be funny were it not for the consequences.”
Finally someone smart enough to set us straight! Joel Shore wouldn’t. So PLEASE Michael, do clear up the confusion:
Question to Michael Tobis: if the CO2 concentration doubles from the current 390 ppm to 780 ppm, what will happen to the temperature?

Joel Shore has been unable to offer empirical evidence in answer to the following questions, which are vital to the integrity of the concept of AGW and have been asked of Joel by others on this blog.
1/does increasing ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere precede an increase in atmospheric temperatures?
2/ does an increase in ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere follow an increase in atmospheric temperatures?
3/, if ppm of CO2 in the last 15 years has increased, why has there been no significant rise in atmpospheric temperatures during that period?
Only proper, peer-reviewed references, please. No ‘Most Climate Scientists say…’ types of answers will suffice.
Thanks, Joel, in anticipation,
Alexander K

I would like someone with two or more greenhouses growing the same crop under the same conditions of humidity etc. to do me a favor. I suggest greenhouses because it is a large but simple enough environment to control the parameters.
In one greenhouse keep the atmosphere “natural” and have a continuous temperature record kept over , say, a growing season.
In a second greenhouse keep the atmosphere topped up with CO2 to , say, double our current standard. Keep a continuous temperature record over the same growing season.
Then get back to us here at WUWT with your results. This isn’t high tech or difficult to do. I would do it myself but I don’t have greenhouses and I don’t know folk out here who do. This CO2 meme is so central to this whole debate that it must surely be possible to carry out such a simple experiment.
To my engineering brain this would really settle this whole “CO2 drives the temperature” thing once and for all. Once we have done this we can get along to figuring out the “forcings” if it is shown to be necessary.

Dave Springer got it backwards: Big changes in the past climate can only be explained if positive feedbacks dominate (unless you invoke some magical extra forcing that magically played a similar role in all of the large climate shifts – not likely).

Dave Springer says:

The evidence accepted by IPCC is 97% natural CO2, 3% anthropogenic, and 1.5% actual annual rise.

Not really. The 97% vs. 3% is apples-vs-oranges. It is mixing up fast exchanges (which go in both directions) of carbon between the subsystem consisting of the reservoirs of the atmosphere, biosphere, and ocean mixed layer with additions of carbon from outside of this subsystem. That is two quite different things.

There is no historical case for positive feedbacks.

Well, the scientists who actually study paleoclimate seem to feel otherwise: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;306/5697/821

There has never been a runaway greenhouse episode in earth’s history. The best evidence from the geologic column shows temperature maxes out about 6-8C warmer than today while CO2 has been at 10-15 times higher concentration. These periods lasted for millions of years without end and the earth was green from pole to pole.

Even given your numbers (which I think might be low for the temperatures … and maybe okay as estimates for the CO2, but with large error bars), we’d get 1.5-2.4 C rise per CO2 doubling using the expected logarithmic dependence of CO2 levels on temp.

In the meantime energy consumption goes hand in hand with economic growth. Economic growth is needed to fund research, development, and production of new and improved technologies of all kinds. As far as I’m concerned the CAGW crowd wants, unwittingly or otherwise, to kill the goose that’s been laying the golden eggs.

Just because the two tend to grow together does not mean that economic growth has to make so intensive use of (certain types of) energy sources. The energy intensity per unit of GDP has actually been declining significantly in the U.S. (and presumably most Western countries).
Surely, if it just happened that we had less fossil fuels than we do, you economic doomsayers would not be forecasting economic ruin because of such scarcity. You’d be talking about how wonderful human ingenuity and the market is at dealing with such things. What is being proposed is essentially to raise prices for carbon in a way that creates some artificial scarcity (except with even more flexibility, since sequestration is an option too). Why will human ingenuity and the market be crippled in the face of such action?