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Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
You readers here at Watts Up With That have been very kind to me during my guest-blogging stint here, and I’d like to express my thanks for the cordial reception I have found, especially since I’m well aware that my views are not really congruent with those of many viewers. You all are certainly more open-minded and accommodating than the audience at many other internet locations. (Okay, enough sucking up–get on with it!)
However, one commenter on my last post had the audacity–the sheer audacity–to criticize my writing because this is a science blog after all, and my guest posts have not been about the science. Well, touche and all that, my dear sir, but well, I’m not a scientist.
We are not really at the point where only scientists can say intelligent things about climate change.
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.
Second, the controversial part of the discussion is not going to be settled any time soon. We really do not know the sensitivity of the atmosphere to a doubling of CO2 concentrations. We are not likely to know for at least 30 years–and that’s if we’re lucky, according to Judith Curry.
To offer the extreme and absurdist example, as Roger Pielke Jr. points out on his weblog, we could achieve our emission reduction goals overnight, by switching from BP’s estimate of our 2009 emissions of CO2 to the IEA’S estimates of the same. There’s quite a bit of uncertainty out there.
So, despite their protestations, climate scientists at this point have about as much ‘clout’ in deciding what we should do as anybody else. So your comments and my guest posts here are not automatically dismissable as coming from the rabble. What we write on this weblog and others should be evaluated on the merits of what we say. Of course, people who have been studying the biology, chemistry, geology and ecological interactions of this planet should be treated with quite a bit more respect, and many climate scientists got their start in one of those fields–by no means am I trying to exclude them from the conversation, just because they can’t point at a red dot on a thermometer and say ‘that’s where we’ll be in 90 years.’
It is my own belief that other things we do here on this Earth have an impact on this planet, and that we should be aware of the impacts and in some cases work to lessen them. It is a happy coincidence that lessening these other impacts may also serve to reduce the impacts of whatever climate change we may be causing with CO2.
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. 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. As they are by creation of manmade reservoirs behind the 850,000 dams we have built.
We have cut down forests, and not only for agriculture. They’re recovering in the developed world, but not in the emerging nations that still need the wood for fuel and the land for space. And again, this has affected the entire ecology and that does include climate.
(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.)
I could go on, but the point is clear enough for you to either agree or disagree. We are changing our planet, and one poorly understood change is the composition of the atmosphere.
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.
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.
We Talk About Politics Because The Science Is Uncertain
You readers here at Watt’s Up With That have been very kind to me during my guest-blogging stint here, and I’d like to express my thanks for the cordial reception I have found, especially since I’m well aware that my views are not really congruent with those of many viewers. You all are certainly more open-minded and accommodating than the audience at many other internet locations. (Okay, enough sucking up–get on with it!)
However, one commenter on my last post had the audacity–the sheer audacity–to criticize my writing because this is a science blog after all, and my guest posts have not been about the science. Well, touche and all that, my dear sir, but well, I’m not a scientist.
We are not really at the point where only scientists can say intelligent things about climate change.
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.
Second, the controversial part of the discussion is not going to be settled any time soon. We really do not know the sensitivity of the atmosphere to a doubling of CO2 concentrations. We are not likely to know for at least 30 years–and that’s if we’re lucky, according to Judith Curry.
To offer the extreme and absurdist example, as Roger Pielke Jr. points out on his weblog, we could achieve our emission reduction goals overnight, by switching from BP’s estimate of our 2009 emissions of CO2 to the IEA’S estimates of the same. There’s quite a bit of uncertainty out there.
So, despite their protestations, climate scientists at this point have about as much ‘clout’ in deciding what we should do as anybody else. So your comments and my guest posts here are not automatically dismissable as coming from the rabble. What we write on this weblog and others should be evaluated on the merits of what we say. Of course, people who have been studying the biology, chemistry, geology and ecological interactions of this planet should be treated with quite a bit more respect, and many climate scientists got their start in one of those fields–by no means am I trying to exclude them from the conversation, just because they can’t point at a red dot on a thermometer and say ‘that’s where we’ll be in 90 years.’
It is my own belief that other things we do here on this Earth have an impact on this planet, and that we should be aware of the impacts and in some cases work to lessen them. It is a happy coincidence that lessening these other impacts may also serve to reduce the impacts of whatever climate change we may be causing with CO2.
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. 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. As they are by creation of manmade reservoirs behind the 850,000 dams we have built.
We have cut down forests, and not only for agriculture. They’re recovering in the developed world, but not in the emerging nations that still need the wood for fuel and the land for space. And again, this has affected the entire ecology and that does include climate.
(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.)
I could go on, but the point is clear enough for you to either agree or disagree. We are changing our planet, and one poorly understood change is the composition of the atmosphere.
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.
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.
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OssQss
September 4, 2010 5:34 am
It is interesting that few link the IPCC CO2 initiative to the larger UN Agenda 21 initiative.
CO2 is, after all, the vehicle that is intended to leverage and force implementation of the underlying sustainable development plan. Quite the scary plan if you read up on it, and very real. http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
bill
September 4, 2010 5:35 am
‘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.
slow to follow
September 4, 2010 5:36 am
Tom – please can you provide the source references that supports these claims:
“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.”
Thanks
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”.
Richard111
September 4, 2010 5:38 am
Hear, hear! Very well said. I live “green”, beyond any greenie who doesn’t live in a tree.
(how that will save the planet with an increasing population is plain stupid)
We need to get our erstwhile leaders to see the obvious. No hope there I guess.
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
John Whitman
September 4, 2010 5:47 am
Thomas Fuller,
….[edit] . . . 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.
——————–
Thomas Fuller,
Keep on posting, you do tee up the key points. Thank you.
Step back and think. Why do you say that, again? It is exactly what needs to be more widely discussed in a non-authoritarian scientific venue. If it clears that hurdle successfully, then say it.
Anthony, you do know how to keep us blogging. : )
John
mike sphar
September 4, 2010 5:51 am
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.
DocWat
September 4, 2010 5:52 am
It was good to see the IPCC get a head slap.
Thomas Fuller, you did good, even if you are wrong about humans’ role in increases in CO2 and global warming. Humans should improve their stewardship of our small planet.
ClimateWatcher
September 4, 2010 5:54 am
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.
paulw
September 4, 2010 6:00 am
[snip. Decision made, arguing is pointless. ~dbs, mod.]
William
September 4, 2010 6:08 am
“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.”
In arms about what? The extreme AGW warming hypothesis is not correct.
The Greenland and Antarctic Ice are not melting and will not melt. The planet is not going to warm 2C to 3C for a doubling of CO2. The planet’s response to a change in forcing is net negative (planetary cloud cover increases or decreases over the ocean to regulate the temperature of the planet.) A significant portion of the 20th century warming was due to process called electroscavenging where solar wind bursts create a space charge in the ionosphere which removes cloud forming ions. Planetary cloud cover closely tracks galactic cosmic rays which are modulated by the solar magnetic cycle up until 1994 at which time planetary cloud cover is reduced. The sun is in Dalton like minimum. Based on what has happened before the planet is going to cool.
There are cycles of warming and cooling in paleoclimatic record. To stoke the panic Mann cherry picked tree ring data to create the hockey stick to remove the cyclic temperature pattern in the paleoclimatic record. There is obvious indication of temperature data manipulation (current and past) to stoke the panic.
There are scientific papers and observational data that supports what is stated above.
Policy decisions need to be based on truth not propaganda.
Plants eat CO2. Greenhouses inject CO2 into the greenhouse to increase yield. As CO2 increases plants make more affective use of water. Shrubs and grasses have moved into desert regions due to the increased CO2. One of the few positive impacts humans have had on the ecosystem has been to increase atmosphere CO2.
Government funds are finite not infinite. Governments must tax people to raise funds to avoid third world super inflation. The idea that the public (US or any other Western country) will support a $100 billion/year program that is run by an inept EU like bureaucracy to fiance corrupt third world governments is absurd.
Come back with a specific plan that addresses real problems.
Gary P
September 4, 2010 6:11 am
“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. …. This really is not very controversial at all.”
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.
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
DaveF
September 4, 2010 6:13 am
Smokey, 5:16am:
“….because taxing water vapor is next to impossible.”
Don’t give them ideas, Smokey!
Tom,
I always enjoy your writing, but there is a problem in the science which bugs me. People often make this claim.
“CO2 should cause about a 1.5 to 2.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures if we double its concentration in our atmosphere. ”
This is simply not known. Roy Spencer just demonstrated a negative feedback to temperature detected in the satellite data, even if the Planck calculations that generate the number you expressed were true, it’s quite possible that we would see half or less of the warming above.
We simply do not know.
It’s not uncertainty, it is unknowanty.
nevket240
September 4, 2010 6:18 am
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
Dear Mr Fuller,
I am not a scientist either, but when the recently-deposed British Prime Minister announced during the last Copenhagen conference that the science is settled, and anyone who doubted that he branded a ‘flat-earther’ was a step too far in the direction of villification of the citizenry for me to swallow. At that point I began to read copiously on the subject of climate and I now understand that the alleged villain of the global warming cause, CO2, is plant food whose measurable ppm in the atmosphere FOLLOWS the temperature curve and does not precede that curve.
I also understand that Mann’s ‘hockey stick’, the principal evidence against the MWP and other warm periods of the earth’s history, has been thoroughly discredited and that there is considerable validated evidence that the MWP and other warmings were indeed global.
I have also read enough to know that the IPCC is agenda-driven, not science-driven and its work has been an exercise in the advocacy of a spurious cause.
Your understandings of ‘the basics’ are rather different from mine and I therefore see no point in the taking of extreme precautions to the point where the economies of developed nations will be made to fail,’ just in case’.
Joel Shore
September 4, 2010 6:24 am
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.
I agree. Our future is in the hands of politicians who believe that they are able to control it. What we are able to do in the future depends on the resources we have to adjust to regional changes in climate and the effects of those changes. IPCC was established to find tools politicians could use to possibly change regional climates on a global scale. Politicians know that controlling the use of resources is key. So the IPCC gives them what they want in the form of CAGW and carbon trading and offsets. Unfortunately, the tool was poorly designed, will never work as intended, and it’s use will be detrimental to our future.
Bruce Cobb
September 4, 2010 6:32 am
paulw says:
September 4, 2010 at 4:54 am If you want proper feedback for your writings … you should write somewhere else.
There is not much critical thinking going on here.
Translation: Come on over to the Church of Warmology – we would accept you with open arms there. After all, we are on a roll now, with the recent conversion of Bjorn Lomborg. You will even be given a free IPCC bible.
stephen richards
September 4, 2010 6:34 am
You are still thinking and behaving like a politician. You quote statements as facts for which science has no proof. You assume a human influence because you can’t imagine that we are insignificant. You simply miss the point of what a huge system this planet actually is. I am all for treating our environment sympathetically. I’m am all for distributed power where possible. I’m all for recycling, saving the forests, the whales etc but I am not for the lying and cheating, sorry, misrepresentation of science per se. I am totally against a governmentally biased media. I am totally against the use of serious sums of money by large investors in distorting the truth for their own gain and I am entirely against a world government run by a bunch of idiots who want to take my money and my freedom based on incomplete and unproven science.
No-one has yet proven decisively the effect of CO² on the planet. We know that plants grow better when there is more of it, we know that above 20000 ppm or so humans will find it difficult to breath, we know that the planet warms and coole periodically and we know that there have been about 10 ice ages and 10 warm ages. What we don’t know precisely is the exact level of cold and warm of the past whether that be the 20th century(thanks to GISS manipulations) or the – 20century. So please, keep your politics to yourself and work only with the known truth. Not your known truth.
Having said all that we do welcome your input. It is much more useful than the likes of gates et al.
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)
John Whitman
September 4, 2010 6:39 am
My independent thinker “spidey sense” detects, in these recent posts by Tom Fuller and some associated comments by Steve Mosher, a developing theme for the middle-of-the-road. This is a political concept, not a scientific concept.
This middle-of-the-road theme seems to make an assumption that you can arbitrate scientific truth independent of the scientists and scientific process. Forget that.
I encourage the scientists, in an open public non-authoritarian venue (finally), to get on with what they do best. Scientists, please blog with us while you do your science thing, it will benefit society . . . . . . and we really love it!
John
Brego
September 4, 2010 6:42 am
“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.
RockyRoad
September 4, 2010 6:46 am
I suppose we skeptics/realists/dissidents have to keep beating the CO2 climate horse to death until those “climate scientists” that continue to ride it finally realize they’re not getting anywhere. Take your blinders off, “climate scientists” (and their acolytes).
Have you noticed that anybody that doesn’t agree with the “climate scientist’s” CO2 agenda isn’t considered a “climate scientist”? No, he’s branded something else and expelled–showing exactly how the cult of “climate science” polices itself. It does, however, expunge the notion that “science” has any part of their definition; they should be called “climatists” instead.
It is interesting that few link the IPCC CO2 initiative to the larger UN Agenda 21 initiative.
CO2 is, after all, the vehicle that is intended to leverage and force implementation of the underlying sustainable development plan. Quite the scary plan if you read up on it, and very real.
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
‘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.
Tom – please can you provide the source references that supports these claims:
“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.”
Thanks
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”.
Hear, hear! Very well said. I live “green”, beyond any greenie who doesn’t live in a tree.
(how that will save the planet with an increasing population is plain stupid)
We need to get our erstwhile leaders to see the obvious. No hope there I guess.
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
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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
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Thomas Fuller,
Keep on posting, you do tee up the key points. Thank you.
Step back and think. Why do you say that, again? It is exactly what needs to be more widely discussed in a non-authoritarian scientific venue. If it clears that hurdle successfully, then say it.
Anthony, you do know how to keep us blogging. : )
John
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.
It was good to see the IPCC get a head slap.
Thomas Fuller, you did good, even if you are wrong about humans’ role in increases in CO2 and global warming. Humans should improve their stewardship of our small planet.
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.
[snip. Decision made, arguing is pointless. ~dbs, mod.]
“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.”
In arms about what? The extreme AGW warming hypothesis is not correct.
The Greenland and Antarctic Ice are not melting and will not melt. The planet is not going to warm 2C to 3C for a doubling of CO2. The planet’s response to a change in forcing is net negative (planetary cloud cover increases or decreases over the ocean to regulate the temperature of the planet.) A significant portion of the 20th century warming was due to process called electroscavenging where solar wind bursts create a space charge in the ionosphere which removes cloud forming ions. Planetary cloud cover closely tracks galactic cosmic rays which are modulated by the solar magnetic cycle up until 1994 at which time planetary cloud cover is reduced. The sun is in Dalton like minimum. Based on what has happened before the planet is going to cool.
There are cycles of warming and cooling in paleoclimatic record. To stoke the panic Mann cherry picked tree ring data to create the hockey stick to remove the cyclic temperature pattern in the paleoclimatic record. There is obvious indication of temperature data manipulation (current and past) to stoke the panic.
There are scientific papers and observational data that supports what is stated above.
Policy decisions need to be based on truth not propaganda.
Plants eat CO2. Greenhouses inject CO2 into the greenhouse to increase yield. As CO2 increases plants make more affective use of water. Shrubs and grasses have moved into desert regions due to the increased CO2. One of the few positive impacts humans have had on the ecosystem has been to increase atmosphere CO2.
Government funds are finite not infinite. Governments must tax people to raise funds to avoid third world super inflation. The idea that the public (US or any other Western country) will support a $100 billion/year program that is run by an inept EU like bureaucracy to fiance corrupt third world governments is absurd.
Come back with a specific plan that addresses real problems.
“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. …. This really is not very controversial at all.”
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.
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
Smokey, 5:16am:
“….because taxing water vapor is next to impossible.”
Don’t give them ideas, Smokey!
Tom,
I always enjoy your writing, but there is a problem in the science which bugs me. People often make this claim.
“CO2 should cause about a 1.5 to 2.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures if we double its concentration in our atmosphere. ”
This is simply not known. Roy Spencer just demonstrated a negative feedback to temperature detected in the satellite data, even if the Planck calculations that generate the number you expressed were true, it’s quite possible that we would see half or less of the warming above.
We simply do not know.
It’s not uncertainty, it is unknowanty.
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
Dear Mr Fuller,
I am not a scientist either, but when the recently-deposed British Prime Minister announced during the last Copenhagen conference that the science is settled, and anyone who doubted that he branded a ‘flat-earther’ was a step too far in the direction of villification of the citizenry for me to swallow. At that point I began to read copiously on the subject of climate and I now understand that the alleged villain of the global warming cause, CO2, is plant food whose measurable ppm in the atmosphere FOLLOWS the temperature curve and does not precede that curve.
I also understand that Mann’s ‘hockey stick’, the principal evidence against the MWP and other warm periods of the earth’s history, has been thoroughly discredited and that there is considerable validated evidence that the MWP and other warmings were indeed global.
I have also read enough to know that the IPCC is agenda-driven, not science-driven and its work has been an exercise in the advocacy of a spurious cause.
Your understandings of ‘the basics’ are rather different from mine and I therefore see no point in the taking of extreme precautions to the point where the economies of developed nations will be made to fail,’ just in case’.
DaveF says:
Anthony says:
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.
I agree. Our future is in the hands of politicians who believe that they are able to control it. What we are able to do in the future depends on the resources we have to adjust to regional changes in climate and the effects of those changes. IPCC was established to find tools politicians could use to possibly change regional climates on a global scale. Politicians know that controlling the use of resources is key. So the IPCC gives them what they want in the form of CAGW and carbon trading and offsets. Unfortunately, the tool was poorly designed, will never work as intended, and it’s use will be detrimental to our future.
paulw says:
September 4, 2010 at 4:54 am
If you want proper feedback for your writings … you should write somewhere else.
There is not much critical thinking going on here.
Translation: Come on over to the Church of Warmology – we would accept you with open arms there. After all, we are on a roll now, with the recent conversion of Bjorn Lomborg. You will even be given a free IPCC bible.
You are still thinking and behaving like a politician. You quote statements as facts for which science has no proof. You assume a human influence because you can’t imagine that we are insignificant. You simply miss the point of what a huge system this planet actually is. I am all for treating our environment sympathetically. I’m am all for distributed power where possible. I’m all for recycling, saving the forests, the whales etc but I am not for the lying and cheating, sorry, misrepresentation of science per se. I am totally against a governmentally biased media. I am totally against the use of serious sums of money by large investors in distorting the truth for their own gain and I am entirely against a world government run by a bunch of idiots who want to take my money and my freedom based on incomplete and unproven science.
No-one has yet proven decisively the effect of CO² on the planet. We know that plants grow better when there is more of it, we know that above 20000 ppm or so humans will find it difficult to breath, we know that the planet warms and coole periodically and we know that there have been about 10 ice ages and 10 warm ages. What we don’t know precisely is the exact level of cold and warm of the past whether that be the 20th century(thanks to GISS manipulations) or the – 20century. So please, keep your politics to yourself and work only with the known truth. Not your known truth.
Having said all that we do welcome your input. It is much more useful than the likes of gates et al.
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)
My independent thinker “spidey sense” detects, in these recent posts by Tom Fuller and some associated comments by Steve Mosher, a developing theme for the middle-of-the-road. This is a political concept, not a scientific concept.
This middle-of-the-road theme seems to make an assumption that you can arbitrate scientific truth independent of the scientists and scientific process. Forget that.
I encourage the scientists, in an open public non-authoritarian venue (finally), to get on with what they do best. Scientists, please blog with us while you do your science thing, it will benefit society . . . . . . and we really love it!
John
“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.
I suppose we skeptics/realists/dissidents have to keep beating the CO2 climate horse to death until those “climate scientists” that continue to ride it finally realize they’re not getting anywhere. Take your blinders off, “climate scientists” (and their acolytes).
Have you noticed that anybody that doesn’t agree with the “climate scientist’s” CO2 agenda isn’t considered a “climate scientist”? No, he’s branded something else and expelled–showing exactly how the cult of “climate science” polices itself. It does, however, expunge the notion that “science” has any part of their definition; they should be called “climatists” instead.