The Uncertain Inn, Uncertain TX. Image from Travelpod - click
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.
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).
Blade
September 7, 2010 1:22 am
Bart Verheggen [September 6, 2010 at 12:13 pm] says:
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).
Has AGW dogma mutated so far that anything other than model input parameters is now considered magic? On one side of a room we have mathematical models attempting integrate countless variables representing the locally visible features of a dynamic and chaotic climate system. On the other side is an 800 pound gorilla comprised of all the long known large scale macro forces: the sun, its output and cycles, the earth’s tilt, orbital eccentricity, precession, perhaps the moon and yet unknown astronomical conditions. Yet this quote tells me to ignore the 800 pound gorilla: “Big changes in the past climate can only be explained if positive feedbacks dominate“. This quote also implies that an asteroid 65 MYA (a real climate changer!) should also be considered magic?
I also fail to see what Dave Springer literally got backwards. I re-read his post (the one immediately before yours?) and IMHO it is 100% dead-on target. Even climate scientists have to admit we are in a brief interglacial and are very lucky to be alive now. I never thought I’d say this, but the ‘ice-age is coming‘ late-70’s pop-scientists are looking far more rational than the current PoliSci AGW climate cult.
P.S. I too followed the epic VS thread. So I have to ask you Bart: Did you attempt to get a VS vs. Tamino only thread started? Someone came here (maybe you?) and said it was in the works. Did you ever ask Tamino and what did he say? Did he chicken out (ala James Cameron)? [snip] I would love to hear the truth of this from someone who actually knows, and that would be you.
DaveF says:
September 4, 2010 at 4:23 am (Edit)
“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. ”
It is following a diminishing returns log curve that is consistent with a fixed rise in warming for each doubling, so a rise from 250ppm to 500ppm would cause the same amount of warming as a rise from 500 ppm to 1000 ppm. That it would take us a lot more work to get from 500 to 1000 ppm than from 250 to 500 is where the diminishing returns kicks in. We burned, some experts claim, half our oil reserves and about 10% of our coal reserves to achieve a mere 50% increase from 265ppm to 390 ppm in the last few centuries. This tells sane individuals that, following the power law, we’ll be able to extract another 30% of historically proven reserves. The last 20% will cost as much to extract as the first 80%, which will put a serious crimp on the utility of those reserves when a significant fraction of the energy we extract from the ground is consumed in delivering the rest of it to the consumer. So we won’t achieve a full doubling of CO2 merely on exhausting our oil. We can consume coal at the same rate we’ve consumed it over the same past century and still be within that doubling trajectory.
Both of these projections are based on a rather baseless assumption that we will develop zero new energy sources over the coming century. Much like the Club of Rome’s absurd projections in the 70’s that even Ehrlich admitted were bunk, the IPCC fails to consider the impact of technological advancements, either in efficiency improvements in consumption, in distribution or utilization, or in terms of energy sources.
While Joe Romm and his paymaster, George Soros, would like folks to believe that we in the skeptic camp are riding the Koch Industries gravy train (none of us have seen a dime from the Koch brothers, though frankly, when you get accused of sins such as these, you start to wonder, why not enjoy the benefits of the sins they claim you are already committing?), I think it’s been fully documented in Climategate that it is in fact folks like CRU that are in the pay of BP and Shell, sources of funding who are manipulating the climate change debate not in conflict with their own interests, but to enhance their own interests, by promoting the shuttering of coal based energy production in favor of their replacement with natural gas fired electric plants (in line with T Boone Pickens’ Plan, which I suggest you research if you haven’t already). That is the real political game being played in the AGW arena. Hansen calls coal trains “death trains” because he is in the pay of the natural gas money interests.
Yet natural gas is also a fossil fuel that puts CO2 into the atmosphere, just less per BTU than coal does. This also explains why the AGW crowd tends to also continue to be anti-nuke, despite nuclear power being the real non-carbon energy source, and which produces significantly less toxic waste than solar power panel production does per watt-hour.
Beyond ignoring nuclear power, the AGW crowd also fails to consider the maturation of fusion power in the coming few decades. While big government programs like ITER, NIF, etc continue to falter and fail to advance fusion toward net-power production, there are a number of more or less independent programs that are making far better progress on far smaller budgets. Both Focus Fusion and Polywell Fusion are making advancements. Polywell fusion, Dr. Robert Bussards project, is currently on its final stage of testing with its WB-8 fusion reactor (on an $8 million research contract with the Navy) and should be reporting some time this winter to the US Navy whether a 100 MW net power reactor will work (for about $200 million, far less than major government fusion programs have consumed). If the scaling math works out, then it will be possible to build 4 meter diameter polywell fusors into shuttered coal plants to produce 2 GW or thereabouts per fusor, at a price not much more than the $200 per fusor that the net power reactor is projected to cost.
This is not pie in the sky technology, we will know within 6-8 months whether the US can go ahead with a program to convert a sizable portion of our grid to fusion power over a 5-10 year period. Fusion is no longer perpetually 30 years away.
Joel Shore
September 7, 2010 2:51 pm
Fred H. Haynie says:
This is where the unbiased use of statistical techiques is a valuable tool. Least squares curve fitting of accurate data is a good tool. The amount of data and it’s accuracy as well as the shape of the assumed curve affect the goodness of fit. In the case of fitting a segment of a 308 year cycle defined by three parameters versus an exponential curve defined by two pararameters to over 20,000 relatively accurate points of data, the cycle segment is a statistically better fit. Time will tell which is a better predictor. If the slope of the CO2-time curve does not continue to increase, the curve is not exponential.
Time has already told…Your curve-fitting model fails completely when one looks back at data from ice cores. Heck…I bet it wouldn’t even do a good job with Beck’s alternative CO2 history (which most of us know to be garbage anyway). And, it is not surprising since fitting data to empirical models is generally inferior to actually studying the process to the degree that you have a real physical understanding of what is going on. So, even if I accept that your model does produce a better fit than an exponential model over the limited range of data that you used (and, I have my doubts about that…particularly once you account for the additional parameters in your model…but, hey, maybe it does), that doesn’t mean it has any predictive validity.
Oh, and nobody says that CO2 will increase exactly exponentially…Emissions are increasing approximately exponentially but it is more of a rough empirical fact any deep physical law.
Joel Shore
September 7, 2010 3:08 pm
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.
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?
Joel Shore
September 7, 2010 4:11 pm
Blade says:
You give us literally a +/- of 250% in units of degrees, and then you take this and wrap undefined error bars around it: “Higher or lower values than this cannot be ruled out …”.
You must have pressed the big red climate alarm button for some reason, and I want to know what it is. After spending millions of our dollars climate scientists must expect something to happen during the next doubling of CO2?
First of all, you have misstated uncertainty. I gave you a range with a central value of 3.25 C per doubling, with +/- 1.25 C error bars. In my book, that translates to about 3.25 C +/-38%.
Second of all, there is always uncertainty in science…and policy decisions are always made in the context of uncertainties. So are everyday life choices. In fact, in the case of things like fire insurance, people pay money for protection against quite unlikely events. And, everyday we make countless decisions in an uncertain world. This notion that one has to be certain before taking any action is just nonsense. One takes action based on the risks present both in the action and the inaction. In fact, it fascinates me that many of the same people (not sure if you were one) who think uncertainty should stop us from doing anything about climate change didn’t think that uncertainty should stop us from taking rather dramatic action about WMDs in Iraq; It makes me think that the argument is less about whether to act in the face of uncertainty than whether one puts greater faith in science or in political propaganda.
On the other side is an 800 pound gorilla comprised of all the long known large scale macro forces: the sun, its output and cycles, the earth’s tilt, orbital eccentricity, precession, perhaps the moon and yet unknown astronomical conditions.
Just saying these things exist is not the same as calculating the effects. Most scientists agree that the ice age – interglacial cycles are triggered by the cycles in the earth’s tilt, orbital eccentricity, and precession. However, these are things that can be calculated backwards with time with very good accuracy. What can also be calculated is the effect they have on insolation and the effect, while pretty dramatic on latitudinal and seasonal variations in insolation, is almost zilch on the global annually-averaged insolation. Hence, it is widely accepted that, while triggering these events, the variations do not contribute a very large direct forcing…What they do is cause the growth or decay of ice sheets (because of the more significant seasonal and latitudinal variations) and hence changes in albedo which, along with the changes in atmospheric greenhouse gases that occur, are responsible for most of the significant forcing.
What is your opposing picture to this?
Joel Shore
September 7, 2010 at 2:51 pm
How strong is your faith in the IPCC bible? I call you to prove that faith and pick a month in the future, using an exponential curve regressed on all the Mauna Loa monthly data and predict an expected mean value with confidence limits for the data points and confidence limits on the true mean. I will do the same using my curve fit model for your chosen month. Let’s see who comes closest. If you don’t feel qualified to do the math, see if you can get Tamino or some other CAGWr to accept the challange. I’ve been nice in hopes that you could learn something. Now put up or shut up.
Joel Shore
September 7, 2010 at 4:11 pm
The phase changes of water is the 800 pounder that is controlling our weather and climate on any time scale, and it will continue to do it unphased by the flee, CO2. If you know enough classical thermo and quantum mechanics you can calculate their relative weights in energy exchange. Use the rigid rotator harmonic oscilator approximation to calculate the thermodynamic functions of atmospheric gases as a function of temperature and throw in the heats of vaporization/condensation and freezing with observed concentrations. This will give you an idea of direction processes will go and which constituents are doing the forcing. The rates for those processes depends on factors like convection, diffusion, and conductivity. I used a simpler approach by analyzing observed data. http://www.kidswincom.net/CO2OLR.pdf.
Blade
September 8, 2010 3:39 am
Joel Shore [September 7, 2010 at 4:11 pm] says:
First of all, you have misstated uncertainty. I gave you a range with a central value of 3.25 C per doubling, with +/- 1.25 C error bars. In my book, that translates to about 3.25 C +/-38%.
Wrong. That is what you say now. What you actually said before was:
… climate sensitivity to by 2 to 4.5 C. Higher or lower values than this cannot be ruled out …
That would be 3.25 C +/- 1.25 C PLUS further undefined (possibly gigantic) error bars. Yeah I shouldn’t have said +/- 250%. But you give such a wide range in units of whole degrees (with error bars layed on top of that) which is hardly an answer, expecially considering the tendency of your AGW comrades to commonly use anomaly graphs purporting to be accurate to half degree C. The original question was this (do we have an answer yet?): If the CO2 concentration doubles from the current 390 ppm to 780 ppm, what will happen to the temperature?
I am looking for a clear answer to this question. I would also like to know the timeframe. Is this too much to ask of the AGW science community? I helped pay for the computers and offices they use (and probably the jets, limos and junkets as well). Taxpayers like myself are running out of patience.
So are everyday life choices. In fact, in the case of things like fire insurance, people pay money for protection against quite unlikely events.
Oh puhlease! Pardon the pun but this really burns me up. Fire is quite probably the longest running and most dangerous hazard to civilization (and earlier). It has wiped out entire cities, taken away countless lives and destroyed vast accumulated knowledge. It is real and is here now. There is hardly a virgin firefighter anywhere. Your FAILED analogy wants us to purchase insurance against something that has never happened, and if the Thermostat Earth hypothesis is correct – can never happen.
This analogy would make sense to me if it addressed asteroid insurance however, because this too has actually happened (with an actual climate change as well). Anyone who can see the surface of the moon (or who remembers Jupiter 1994) should realize we dwell in a cosmic shooting gallery (note, see Colombia today, somewhere else tomorrow). If it were up to me we would defund every political science especially all AGW related nonsense and pour that money into the highly underfunded sky mapping operations. Let them have your supercomputers too.
Mitigating risks is none of your business anyway. The large majority of risks are self-mitigated by individuals at low cost. Chasing down that last few percent of risk (or worse, an imagined risk) is where it gets real expensive. A rough analogy is cleaning a room. Start with a broom, clean it well. Bring in hired help and sanitize it better. Contract some company to make it a class 100 clean room. Contract with IBM or Intel to get it to Class 10. Then spend a fortune to get Class 1 or better. Most people won’t go chasing those micron sized particles (analogy to small risk) because they are not insane. They will settle for clean enough.
Besides, none of the AGW scenarios acknowleges the possible consequences of mitigating their imaginary risk, that would be promoting or accelerating global cooling and shortening or ending our nice cozy interglacial. If there were a possible tipping point to runaway warming, the inverse is worse, and real because it has already happened. I just want to hear somebody actually say what they clearly are alleging: Hey! This interglacial is too darn warm!
… and hence changes in albedo which, along with the changes in atmospheric greenhouse gases that occur, are responsible for most of the significant forcing. … What is your opposing picture to this?
That ties right into my second question which you ignored: During the last doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration from 195 ppm to 390 ppm (currently), what did happen to the temperature?
Joel Shore
September 8, 2010 5:52 pm
Blade says:
I am looking for a clear answer to this question. I would also like to know the timeframe. Is this too much to ask of the AGW science community? I helped pay for the computers and offices they use (and probably the jets, limos and junkets as well). Taxpayers like myself are running out of patience.
Well, sorry that you are so impatient. I guess it is your lack of understanding of science (and how it can be used to inform policy) that is coming into play here. Science never deals in complete certainty. All estimates have error bars…and there is no guarantee that the answer lies within the error bars (e.g., for 1-sigma error bars, it will ~2/3 of the time, for 2-sigma, about 95% of the time). The earth’s climate system is complicated, making this a challenging scientific question. Someone like yourself who seems so strongly philosophically opposed to the sort of actions that most think need to be taken can…and likely will…always demand greater certainty. Whereas, more level-headed people will understand the need to make decisions in the face of uncertainty that always exists.
Oh puhlease! Pardon the pun but this really burns me up. Fire is quite probably the longest running and most dangerous hazard to civilization (and earlier). It has wiped out entire cities, taken away countless lives and destroyed vast accumulated knowledge. It is real and is here now. There is hardly a virgin firefighter anywhere. Your FAILED analogy wants us to purchase insurance against something that has never happened, and if the Thermostat Earth hypothesis is correct – can never happen.
First of all, by their very nature, analogies are just analogies. One can always play the game of nitpicking irrelevant differences. However, in this case, you fail because in fact climate change has also happened in the past…and there have been dramatic rises and falls in sea levels and dramatic extinctions as a result of such change. It is clear that the thermostat earth hypothesis is not in fact correct.
This analogy would make sense to me if it addressed asteroid insurance however, because this too has actually happened (with an actual climate change as well). Anyone who can see the surface of the moon (or who remembers Jupiter 1994) should realize we dwell in a cosmic shooting gallery (note, see Colombia today, somewhere else tomorrow). If it were up to me we would defund every political science especially all AGW related nonsense and pour that money into the highly underfunded sky mapping operations. Let them have your supercomputers too.
It is strange that you are advocating defunding science for something that most scientists say is a serious threat in the next century in favor of something that most scientists believe to actually be a fairly small threat over the time period of the next century. I guess that is what one gets if one bases one makes decisions on the bases of one’s ideology rather than science.
During the last doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration from 195 ppm to 390 ppm (currently), what did happen to the temperature?
The rise from ~180ppm to 280ppm was accompanied by a rise in global temperature of ~6 C, rises in sea level measured in tens of meters, and the melting of vast ice sheets. Of course, the CO2 rise was both an effect and a cause in this case…It is understood to have contributed about 1/3 of the forcing and thus ~1/3 of the temperature change (although it is also believed to have played a vital role in synchronizing the climate change in the two hemispheres).
Blade
September 9, 2010 6:17 am
I now understand what everyone else has stated about Joel Shore. Obtuse and purposefully slippery just about covers it.
…who seems so strongly philosophically opposed to the sort of actions that most think need to be taken can…and likely will …
Now who is in [self-snip D-word]!
Your FAILED analogy wants us to purchase insurance against something that has never happened, and if the Thermostat Earth hypothesis is correct – can never happen.
First of all, by their very nature, analogies are just analogies. One can always play the game of nitpicking irrelevant differences. However, in this case, you fail because in fact climate change has also happened in the past…and there have been dramatic rises and falls in sea levels and dramatic extinctions as a result of such change. It is clear that the thermostat earth hypothesis is not in fact correct.
You know full well that when I said Your FAILED analogy wants us to purchase insurance against something that has never happened, that was not about Climate Change, it was about Catastrophic AGW / Global Warming / Tipping Point. Either you are tired or drinking or purposefully deceitful, but you are not getting away with comparing Fire Insurance with sacking the economy for trillions of dollars to mitigate a fantasy.
Friendly tip: folks like you should be careful when slinging careless analogies, you just may come across someone who lost his house or even a family member to a blaze. You might even try it on a firefighter who steps into actual flames for a living. In a situation like this no amount of pontificating will spare you from a well-deserved lesson. That is just human to human friendly advice.
O/T (please don’t snip!), I once had a guy in his 20’s working for me that learned everything he knew about Vietnam from Oliver Stone movies. He would refer to a Vietnamese co-worker as Viet-Cong in jest. I took him aside and explained to him that guy was like 12 years old when the NVA killed his father, and he later bought his way out and made his way here with his mother while dodging pirates on the high seas. It was friendly advice that mitigated the catastrophic beat-down he was headed for. Years later I saw him and he reminded me of that and thanked me. Thing is, I did it less for him (20’s spoiled brat) than the Vietnamese who already suffered enough crap for one life. The comparison to you Joel for example, is that someone who’s elderly mother perished in a blaze does not need to hear from you that they need to ante up more money as insurance to stave off your academic fantasies.
Having said that, the less friendly side of me would encourage to disregard this friendly advice and continue making obviously deperate analogies. People are waking up, taxpayers are revolting, and your so-called consensus is crumbling. Whether this has penetrated your thought process is another question.
It is strange that you are advocating defunding science for something that most scientists say is a serious threat in the next century in favor of something that most scientists believe to actually be a fairly small threat over the time period of the next century.
Negative. I said defund the political sciences. Please don’t confuse yourself with science. And don’t hide behind the word: science. If you’re a scientist then so is Al Gore.
The thing about impacts is that they are not on a schedule. From our frame of reference they are chaotic, perhaps they may be considered cyclic on geologic timeframes. But you already know this. The people that quantitize impacts into 1-in-xxxx centuries are the same type that enlist into the AGW cult. An impact can and has caused mass extinctions. No amount of warming ever will. Even if both poles melted and we had palm trees in Canada and Scotland we would thrive. Mile-high glaciers across NY and Iowa would be more painful. Come back to reality sir.
The rise from ~180ppm to 280ppm …
That was not the question. Nor did you give a timeframe. Next time answer both simple questions back to back.
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).
Has AGW dogma mutated so far that anything other than model input parameters is now considered magic?
On one side of a room we have mathematical models attempting integrate countless variables representing the locally visible features of a dynamic and chaotic climate system. On the other side is an 800 pound gorilla comprised of all the long known large scale macro forces: the sun, its output and cycles, the earth’s tilt, orbital eccentricity, precession, perhaps the moon and yet unknown astronomical conditions. Yet this quote tells me to ignore the 800 pound gorilla: “Big changes in the past climate can only be explained if positive feedbacks dominate“. This quote also implies that an asteroid 65 MYA (a real climate changer!) should also be considered magic?
I also fail to see what Dave Springer literally got backwards. I re-read his post (the one immediately before yours?) and IMHO it is 100% dead-on target. Even climate scientists have to admit we are in a brief interglacial and are very lucky to be alive now. I never thought I’d say this, but the ‘ice-age is coming‘ late-70’s pop-scientists are looking far more rational than the current PoliSci AGW climate cult.
P.S. I too followed the epic VS thread. So I have to ask you Bart: Did you attempt to get a VS vs. Tamino only thread started? Someone came here (maybe you?) and said it was in the works. Did you ever ask Tamino and what did he say? Did he chicken out (ala James Cameron)? [snip] I would love to hear the truth of this from someone who actually knows, and that would be you.
DaveF says:
September 4, 2010 at 4:23 am (Edit)
“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. ”
It is following a diminishing returns log curve that is consistent with a fixed rise in warming for each doubling, so a rise from 250ppm to 500ppm would cause the same amount of warming as a rise from 500 ppm to 1000 ppm. That it would take us a lot more work to get from 500 to 1000 ppm than from 250 to 500 is where the diminishing returns kicks in. We burned, some experts claim, half our oil reserves and about 10% of our coal reserves to achieve a mere 50% increase from 265ppm to 390 ppm in the last few centuries. This tells sane individuals that, following the power law, we’ll be able to extract another 30% of historically proven reserves. The last 20% will cost as much to extract as the first 80%, which will put a serious crimp on the utility of those reserves when a significant fraction of the energy we extract from the ground is consumed in delivering the rest of it to the consumer. So we won’t achieve a full doubling of CO2 merely on exhausting our oil. We can consume coal at the same rate we’ve consumed it over the same past century and still be within that doubling trajectory.
Both of these projections are based on a rather baseless assumption that we will develop zero new energy sources over the coming century. Much like the Club of Rome’s absurd projections in the 70’s that even Ehrlich admitted were bunk, the IPCC fails to consider the impact of technological advancements, either in efficiency improvements in consumption, in distribution or utilization, or in terms of energy sources.
While Joe Romm and his paymaster, George Soros, would like folks to believe that we in the skeptic camp are riding the Koch Industries gravy train (none of us have seen a dime from the Koch brothers, though frankly, when you get accused of sins such as these, you start to wonder, why not enjoy the benefits of the sins they claim you are already committing?), I think it’s been fully documented in Climategate that it is in fact folks like CRU that are in the pay of BP and Shell, sources of funding who are manipulating the climate change debate not in conflict with their own interests, but to enhance their own interests, by promoting the shuttering of coal based energy production in favor of their replacement with natural gas fired electric plants (in line with T Boone Pickens’ Plan, which I suggest you research if you haven’t already). That is the real political game being played in the AGW arena. Hansen calls coal trains “death trains” because he is in the pay of the natural gas money interests.
Yet natural gas is also a fossil fuel that puts CO2 into the atmosphere, just less per BTU than coal does. This also explains why the AGW crowd tends to also continue to be anti-nuke, despite nuclear power being the real non-carbon energy source, and which produces significantly less toxic waste than solar power panel production does per watt-hour.
Beyond ignoring nuclear power, the AGW crowd also fails to consider the maturation of fusion power in the coming few decades. While big government programs like ITER, NIF, etc continue to falter and fail to advance fusion toward net-power production, there are a number of more or less independent programs that are making far better progress on far smaller budgets. Both Focus Fusion and Polywell Fusion are making advancements. Polywell fusion, Dr. Robert Bussards project, is currently on its final stage of testing with its WB-8 fusion reactor (on an $8 million research contract with the Navy) and should be reporting some time this winter to the US Navy whether a 100 MW net power reactor will work (for about $200 million, far less than major government fusion programs have consumed). If the scaling math works out, then it will be possible to build 4 meter diameter polywell fusors into shuttered coal plants to produce 2 GW or thereabouts per fusor, at a price not much more than the $200 per fusor that the net power reactor is projected to cost.
This is not pie in the sky technology, we will know within 6-8 months whether the US can go ahead with a program to convert a sizable portion of our grid to fusion power over a 5-10 year period. Fusion is no longer perpetually 30 years away.
Fred H. Haynie says:
Time has already told…Your curve-fitting model fails completely when one looks back at data from ice cores. Heck…I bet it wouldn’t even do a good job with Beck’s alternative CO2 history (which most of us know to be garbage anyway). And, it is not surprising since fitting data to empirical models is generally inferior to actually studying the process to the degree that you have a real physical understanding of what is going on. So, even if I accept that your model does produce a better fit than an exponential model over the limited range of data that you used (and, I have my doubts about that…particularly once you account for the additional parameters in your model…but, hey, maybe it does), that doesn’t mean it has any predictive validity.
Oh, and nobody says that CO2 will increase exactly exponentially…Emissions are increasing approximately exponentially but it is more of a rough empirical fact any deep physical law.
Dave Springer says:
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.
Well, the scientists who actually study paleoclimate seem to feel otherwise: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;306/5697/821
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.
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?
Blade says:
First of all, you have misstated uncertainty. I gave you a range with a central value of 3.25 C per doubling, with +/- 1.25 C error bars. In my book, that translates to about 3.25 C +/-38%.
Second of all, there is always uncertainty in science…and policy decisions are always made in the context of uncertainties. So are everyday life choices. In fact, in the case of things like fire insurance, people pay money for protection against quite unlikely events. And, everyday we make countless decisions in an uncertain world. This notion that one has to be certain before taking any action is just nonsense. One takes action based on the risks present both in the action and the inaction. In fact, it fascinates me that many of the same people (not sure if you were one) who think uncertainty should stop us from doing anything about climate change didn’t think that uncertainty should stop us from taking rather dramatic action about WMDs in Iraq; It makes me think that the argument is less about whether to act in the face of uncertainty than whether one puts greater faith in science or in political propaganda.
Just saying these things exist is not the same as calculating the effects. Most scientists agree that the ice age – interglacial cycles are triggered by the cycles in the earth’s tilt, orbital eccentricity, and precession. However, these are things that can be calculated backwards with time with very good accuracy. What can also be calculated is the effect they have on insolation and the effect, while pretty dramatic on latitudinal and seasonal variations in insolation, is almost zilch on the global annually-averaged insolation. Hence, it is widely accepted that, while triggering these events, the variations do not contribute a very large direct forcing…What they do is cause the growth or decay of ice sheets (because of the more significant seasonal and latitudinal variations) and hence changes in albedo which, along with the changes in atmospheric greenhouse gases that occur, are responsible for most of the significant forcing.
What is your opposing picture to this?
Joel Shore
September 7, 2010 at 2:51 pm
How strong is your faith in the IPCC bible? I call you to prove that faith and pick a month in the future, using an exponential curve regressed on all the Mauna Loa monthly data and predict an expected mean value with confidence limits for the data points and confidence limits on the true mean. I will do the same using my curve fit model for your chosen month. Let’s see who comes closest. If you don’t feel qualified to do the math, see if you can get Tamino or some other CAGWr to accept the challange. I’ve been nice in hopes that you could learn something. Now put up or shut up.
Joel Shore
September 7, 2010 at 4:11 pm
The phase changes of water is the 800 pounder that is controlling our weather and climate on any time scale, and it will continue to do it unphased by the flee, CO2. If you know enough classical thermo and quantum mechanics you can calculate their relative weights in energy exchange. Use the rigid rotator harmonic oscilator approximation to calculate the thermodynamic functions of atmospheric gases as a function of temperature and throw in the heats of vaporization/condensation and freezing with observed concentrations. This will give you an idea of direction processes will go and which constituents are doing the forcing. The rates for those processes depends on factors like convection, diffusion, and conductivity. I used a simpler approach by analyzing observed data. http://www.kidswincom.net/CO2OLR.pdf.
Wrong. That is what you say now. What you actually said before was:
That would be 3.25 C +/- 1.25 C PLUS further undefined (possibly gigantic) error bars. Yeah I shouldn’t have said +/- 250%. But you give such a wide range in units of whole degrees (with error bars layed on top of that) which is hardly an answer, expecially considering the tendency of your AGW comrades to commonly use anomaly graphs purporting to be accurate to half degree C. The original question was this (do we have an answer yet?):
If the CO2 concentration doubles from the current 390 ppm to 780 ppm, what will happen to the temperature?
I am looking for a clear answer to this question. I would also like to know the timeframe. Is this too much to ask of the AGW science community? I helped pay for the computers and offices they use (and probably the jets, limos and junkets as well). Taxpayers like myself are running out of patience.
Oh puhlease! Pardon the pun but this really burns me up. Fire is quite probably the longest running and most dangerous hazard to civilization (and earlier). It has wiped out entire cities, taken away countless lives and destroyed vast accumulated knowledge. It is real and is here now. There is hardly a virgin firefighter anywhere. Your FAILED analogy wants us to purchase insurance against something that has never happened, and if the Thermostat Earth hypothesis is correct – can never happen.
This analogy would make sense to me if it addressed asteroid insurance however, because this too has actually happened (with an actual climate change as well). Anyone who can see the surface of the moon (or who remembers Jupiter 1994) should realize we dwell in a cosmic shooting gallery (note, see Colombia today, somewhere else tomorrow). If it were up to me we would defund every political science especially all AGW related nonsense and pour that money into the highly underfunded sky mapping operations. Let them have your supercomputers too.
Mitigating risks is none of your business anyway. The large majority of risks are self-mitigated by individuals at low cost. Chasing down that last few percent of risk (or worse, an imagined risk) is where it gets real expensive. A rough analogy is cleaning a room. Start with a broom, clean it well. Bring in hired help and sanitize it better. Contract some company to make it a class 100 clean room. Contract with IBM or Intel to get it to Class 10. Then spend a fortune to get Class 1 or better. Most people won’t go chasing those micron sized particles (analogy to small risk) because they are not insane. They will settle for clean enough.
Besides, none of the AGW scenarios acknowleges the possible consequences of mitigating their imaginary risk, that would be promoting or accelerating global cooling and shortening or ending our nice cozy interglacial. If there were a possible tipping point to runaway warming, the inverse is worse, and real because it has already happened. I just want to hear somebody actually say what they clearly are alleging: Hey! This interglacial is too darn warm!
That ties right into my second question which you ignored:
During the last doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration from 195 ppm to 390 ppm (currently), what did happen to the temperature?
Blade says:
Well, sorry that you are so impatient. I guess it is your lack of understanding of science (and how it can be used to inform policy) that is coming into play here. Science never deals in complete certainty. All estimates have error bars…and there is no guarantee that the answer lies within the error bars (e.g., for 1-sigma error bars, it will ~2/3 of the time, for 2-sigma, about 95% of the time). The earth’s climate system is complicated, making this a challenging scientific question. Someone like yourself who seems so strongly philosophically opposed to the sort of actions that most think need to be taken can…and likely will…always demand greater certainty. Whereas, more level-headed people will understand the need to make decisions in the face of uncertainty that always exists.
First of all, by their very nature, analogies are just analogies. One can always play the game of nitpicking irrelevant differences. However, in this case, you fail because in fact climate change has also happened in the past…and there have been dramatic rises and falls in sea levels and dramatic extinctions as a result of such change. It is clear that the thermostat earth hypothesis is not in fact correct.
It is strange that you are advocating defunding science for something that most scientists say is a serious threat in the next century in favor of something that most scientists believe to actually be a fairly small threat over the time period of the next century. I guess that is what one gets if one bases one makes decisions on the bases of one’s ideology rather than science.
The rise from ~180ppm to 280ppm was accompanied by a rise in global temperature of ~6 C, rises in sea level measured in tens of meters, and the melting of vast ice sheets. Of course, the CO2 rise was both an effect and a cause in this case…It is understood to have contributed about 1/3 of the forcing and thus ~1/3 of the temperature change (although it is also believed to have played a vital role in synchronizing the climate change in the two hemispheres).
I now understand what everyone else has stated about Joel Shore. Obtuse and purposefully slippery just about covers it.
Now who is in [self-snip D-word]!
You know full well that when I said Your FAILED analogy wants us to purchase insurance against something that has never happened, that was not about Climate Change, it was about Catastrophic AGW / Global Warming / Tipping Point. Either you are tired or drinking or purposefully deceitful, but you are not getting away with comparing Fire Insurance with sacking the economy for trillions of dollars to mitigate a fantasy.
Friendly tip: folks like you should be careful when slinging careless analogies, you just may come across someone who lost his house or even a family member to a blaze. You might even try it on a firefighter who steps into actual flames for a living. In a situation like this no amount of pontificating will spare you from a well-deserved lesson. That is just human to human friendly advice.
O/T (please don’t snip!), I once had a guy in his 20’s working for me that learned everything he knew about Vietnam from Oliver Stone movies. He would refer to a Vietnamese co-worker as Viet-Cong in jest. I took him aside and explained to him that guy was like 12 years old when the NVA killed his father, and he later bought his way out and made his way here with his mother while dodging pirates on the high seas. It was friendly advice that mitigated the catastrophic beat-down he was headed for. Years later I saw him and he reminded me of that and thanked me. Thing is, I did it less for him (20’s spoiled brat) than the Vietnamese who already suffered enough crap for one life. The comparison to you Joel for example, is that someone who’s elderly mother perished in a blaze does not need to hear from you that they need to ante up more money as insurance to stave off your academic fantasies.
Having said that, the less friendly side of me would encourage to disregard this friendly advice and continue making obviously deperate analogies. People are waking up, taxpayers are revolting, and your so-called consensus is crumbling. Whether this has penetrated your thought process is another question.
Negative. I said defund the political sciences. Please don’t confuse yourself with science. And don’t hide behind the word: science. If you’re a scientist then so is Al Gore.
The thing about impacts is that they are not on a schedule. From our frame of reference they are chaotic, perhaps they may be considered cyclic on geologic timeframes. But you already know this. The people that quantitize impacts into 1-in-xxxx centuries are the same type that enlist into the AGW cult. An impact can and has caused mass extinctions. No amount of warming ever will. Even if both poles melted and we had palm trees in Canada and Scotland we would thrive. Mile-high glaciers across NY and Iowa would be more painful. Come back to reality sir.
That was not the question. Nor did you give a timeframe. Next time answer both simple questions back to back.