Estimated CO2 Warming Cut By 65%
Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman, Resilient Earth via ICECAP
Any competent researcher involved with the science behind climate change will admit that CO2 is far from the only influence on global climate. It has long been known that short-lived greenhouse gases and black-carbon aerosols have contributed to past climate warming. Though the IPCC and their fellow travelers have tried to place the blame for global warming on human CO2 emissions, decades of lies and erroneous predictions have discredited that notion. For anyone still clinging to the CO2 hypothesis, a short perspective article on the uncertainty surrounding climate change in Nature Geoscience has put paid to that notion. It states that not only did other factors account for 65% of the radiative forcing usually attributed to carbon dioxide, but that it is impossible to accurately determine climate sensitivity given the state of climate science.
In “Short-lived uncertainty?” Joyce E. Penner et al. note that several short-lived atmospheric pollutants – such as methane, tropospheric ozone precursors and black-carbon aerosols – contribute to atmospheric warming while others, particularly scattering aerosols, cool the climate. Figuring out exactly how great the impacts of these other forcings are can radically change the way historical climate change is interpreted. So great is the uncertainty that the IPCC’s future climate predictions, which are all based on biased assumptions about climate sensitivity, are most certainly untrustworthy. As stated in the article:
It is at present impossible to accurately determine climate sensitivity (defined as the equilibrium warming in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations) from past records, partly because carbon dioxide and short-lived species have increased together over the industrial era. Warming over the past 100 years is consistent with high climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide combined with a large cooling effect from short-lived aerosol pollutants, but it could equally be attributed to a low climate sensitivity coupled with a small effect from aerosols. These two possibilities lead to very different projections for future climate change.
All truthful climate researchers know these facts, yet publicly the party line is that catastrophic changes are in the offing and CO2 emissions are to blame. The perspective authors argue that only by significantly changing the amounts of these other pollutants and carefully measuring the impact on global climate over a period of several decades will science be able to figure out what is going on. “Following this strategy, we will then be able to disentangle the warming and cooling contributions from carbon dioxide and short-lived pollutants, hence placing much tighter constraints on climate sensitivity, and therefore on future climate projections,” they state. See chart below, enlarged here.
And they said it was all carbon dioxide’s fault.
Most of the factors under discussion have relatively short lifetimes in the atmosphere, several less than two months. We do not know how the relative influences of these various substances (referred to by climate scientists as “species”) may change in a warming climate. It is also not clear how to reduce short-lived species under present conditions but the uncertainties in atmospheric chemistry and physics must be resolved if Earth’s environmental system is to be understood. Again quoting from the paper:
Of the short-lived species, methane, tropospheric ozone and black carbon are key contributors to global warming, augmenting the radiative forcing of carbon dioxide by 65%. Others – such as sulphate, nitrate and organic aerosols – cause a negative radiative forcing, offsetting a fraction of the warming owing to carbon dioxide. Yet other short-lived species, such as nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds, can modify the abundance of both the climate-warming and climate-cooling compounds, and thereby affect climate change.
Quantifying the combined impact of short-lived species on Earth’s radiative forcing is complex. Short-lived pollutants – particularly those with an atmospheric lifetime of less than two months – tend to be poorly mixed, and concentrate close to their sources. This uneven distribution, combined with physical and chemical heterogeneities in the atmosphere, means that the impact of short-lived species on radiative forcing can vary by more than a factor of ten with location or time of emission. The situation is further complicated by nonlinear chemical reactions between short-lived species in polluted areas, as well as by the interactions of clouds with aerosols and ozone. These processes add further uncertainty to the estimates of radiative forcing.
Unfortunately, climate models neither accurately deal with local effects of these pollutants nor are the complex interactions among these substances understood. That not withstanding, the report is clear – CO2 does not account for even a majority of the warming seen over the past century. If other species accounted for 65% of historical warming that leaves only 35% for carbon dioxide. This, strangely enough, is in line with calculations based strictly on known atmospheric physics, calculations not biased by the IPCC’s hypothetical and bastardized “feedbacks.”
Of course, the real reason for the feedbacks was to allow almost all global warming to be attributed to CO2. This, in turn, would open the door for radical social and economic policies, allowing them to be enacted in the name of saving the world from global warming. The plain truth is that even climate scientists know that the IPCC case was a political witch’s brew concocted by UN bureaucrats, NGOs, grant money hungry scientists and fringe activists.
Now, after three decades of sturm und drang over climate policy, the truth has emerged – scientists have no idea of how Earth’s climate will change in the future because they don’t know why it changed in the past. Furthermore, it will take decades of additional study to gain a useful understand climate change. To do this, climate scientists will need further funding. Too bad the climate science community squandered any public trust it may have had by trying to frighten people with a lie.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. Read full post here.
Icecap Note: Whatsmore, this totally ignores the other external and internal global factors like solar, ocean multidecadal cycles related to variations in the thermohaline circulation or ocean gyres.
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Here is the paper at Nature Geosciences:
Short-lived uncertainty?
Joyce E. Penner1, Michael J. Prather2, Ivar S. A. Isaksen3,4, Jan S. Fuglestvedt4, Zbigniew Klimont5 & David S. Stevenson6
- University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-2143, USA
- University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA
- University of Oslo, PO Box 1022, Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway
- Center for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO) Oslo, PO Box 1129 Blindern, 0318 Oslo, Norway
- International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Schlossplatz 1, 2361 Laxenburg, Austria
- School of Geosciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JN, UK.
Correspondence to: Joyce E. Penner1 e-mail: penner@umich.edu
Abstract
Short-lived greenhouse gases and black-carbon aerosols have contributed to past climate warming. Curbing their emissions and quantifying the forcing by all short-lived components could both mitigate climate change in the short term and help to refine projections of global warming.
Earth’s climate can only be stabilized by bringing carbon dioxide emissions under control in the twenty-first century. But rolling back anthropogenic emissions of several short-lived atmospheric pollutants that lead to warming — such as methane, tropospheric ozone precursors and black-carbon aerosols — could significantly reduce the rate of climate warming over the next few decades1, 2, 3.
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On another note;
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/authors/content_types.html
“Commentary
Commentary articles focus on policy, science and society or purely scientific issues related to the geosciences. Single-author articles are preferred as this is an ‘opinion’ section of the journal. Commentaries are usually commissioned by the editors, but proposals are welcome. They should be of immediate interest to a broad readership and should be written in an accessible, non-technical style. Figures and diagrams are encouraged, but are not a requirement. Commentaries are typically no longer than 1,500 words and include up to 15 references. Article titles are omitted from the reference list.
Commentaries may be peer-reviewed at the editors’ discretion.”
So we don’t even actually know if this 1+ page commentary was ever even peer-reviewed, since it’s at the editors’ discresion.
Zorro says:
“That’s why they (google ) regularly visit my website and have tried to take it down ( they did for a few days recently saying the blog was withdrawn). There are powerful interests at work here and we have to defeat them.
http://www.palmerston-north.info”
Your web address is http://palmerstonnorth.blogspot.com/ which is a Google-hosted blog. Try using another host such as WordPress or set up your own website. That will end Google’s interest in you.
I am a little molecule
My name is CO2
I get the blame for warming
That makes me very blue
I need some brainy human
To help me with my case
And tell Dr Pachauri
I love the human race
HenryP says:
October 12, 2010 at 1:03 pm
“…I noticed an evaporation rate of 2500 liters per week in my 50m2 swimming pool (clear blue skies, max temp. 31-34 C, water temp. 25-26 C)
1 mole water vapor (18g) releases 40.7 kJ when it condenses to water.(=rain)
I am thinking that perhaps 50% of that heat is lost to space, but the rest is directed to mother earth. So there is your most probable reason for global warming. If it continues and if it becomes a problem…”
Not so. The enthalpy of condensation is equal to that of evaporation, but has the opposite sign. So it takes the same amount energy to convert water in a swimming pool to a vapour (cooling), as is released to the atmosphere when water vapour condenses back to a liquid (warming) – no net energy loss or gain.
However, as evaporation removes heat from the surface and moves it higher in the atmosphere where it can be more easily lost to space, the combined cycle has a net cooling effect.
Atmospheric Cooling by H2O Condensation Radiation
One effect that I have not seen discussed in estimating the overall heat budget of the upper atmosphere is the emission of photons that must occur whenever any two H2O molecules bond by the mutual attraction of their polar electric fields.
Each H2O molecule has two hydrogen atom ‘pins’ off to one side and an oxygen atom ‘socket’ on the other. This gives the water molecule a polar electric field much like the polar magnetic field around a magnet. Thus any pin-to-socket collision between two H2O molecules is likely to result in the pair being locked together. As this is a result of electric attraction, the energy lost by combining should result in the emission of a photon.
If there are so many water molecules in a given volume of the atmosphere that these water-molecule clumps can accumulate faster than high velocity collisions with other molecules can break them apart again then these clumps should grow until they fall out of the atmosphere. Otherwise, I believe we should have a condition that might be called ‘incipient condensation’ where these H2O molecule aggregates are broken up as fast as they form.
I note that the net heat of condensation water vapor to ice is about 46.66 kJ per mol. By Avogadro’s constant, this works out to be about 7.75E-20 joules per water molecule or 3.87E-20 joules per hydrogen bond. Using Planck’s constant and the speed of light, I calculate that the formation of a single H2O hydrogen bond should create a photon having a wavelength of about 5.13 microns. These photons would have three times the energy of the 15 micron CO2 photons. It looks like CO2 is largely transparent at 5.13 microns.
Perhaps this is a well-known and insignificant effect that is routinely included in all models of the atmosphere, but I have seen little or no mention of continuous H2O collision condensation radiation as a factor in cooling the upper atmosphere. I have found only one reference on the internet that refers to near 5.13 micron hydrogen bond radiation of water. I assume there may be rotational and other considerations that may spread this radiation over a wider range of wavelengths or affect this calculation in the upper atmosphere.
This paper relies on the premiss that the theory of GHG’s is true. Let’s get some research based on the fact that it is not. The theory of GHG’s uses several incorrect assumptions, some based on assumptions of what is being measured. Water vapour moves heat around the planet using latent heat, which cools and warms depending whether evaporation or condensing is taking place. Cloud cover also reflects radiation and acts as an insulator to radiation leaving the planet. So it cools and ‘warms’ (in a sense) which will confuse when relying on the GHG theory.
I can find no attribution for the pretty picture of ‘long range transport of aerosols and gases’. Please correct it if it’s an in-house production to include salt aerosols produced by the ocean.
Perhaps someone could post the relative amounts of, say, human SO2 compared with salt aerosols?
JF
And then we can wonder if we’ve altered that figure at all by polluting the ocean surface.
we should demand thay pay all the grants thay recieved over the years back to us
Henry@Tenuc
Your argument is correct – the heat of evaporation is the same.
But, if you had followed my argument, I am saying: man is interferring with the surface of the planet by creating more and more surfaces where there is SHALLOW water. Deeper water with lower SST’s causes much less water to evaporate.
Shallow water easily obtains higher temp. whereby more water is evaporated than otherwise would be the case. We also have massive planes and rockets that bring loads and loads of water vapor in the air. Have you ever seen a big factory that does not have a (water) cooling plant? All that extra water vapor has to condense. Must be a lot more than the CO2 increase (ca 80- ppms increase in the last 50 years)
Water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2 and traps earth’s heat.
I am saying: there is your real reason for global warming (if it is or becomes a problem)
Doug L. Hoffman’s post on WUWT is yet another attempt to discredit scientific consensus by misinterpreting a short commentary in Nature Geoscience. His claim that ”figuring out exactly how great the impacts of these other forcings are can radically change the way historical climate change is interpreted.” is quite the opposite of what the authors of the commentary mean.
The Penner et al. commentary is not about historical climate, but about future climate predictions!
The authors of the commentary fully agree that CO2 and other anthropogenic emissions are responsible for global warming. They state: “warming over the past 100 years is consistent with high climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide”. However the effect of short-lived aerosol pullutants are still poorly understood. The major question is whether the warming effect of greenhouse gases is surpressed by (1) ”cooling effect from short-lived aerosol pollutants” or (2) ”a low climate sensitivity coupled with a small effect from aerosols”.
These two possibilities lead to very different projections for future climate change…, which is clearly illustrated by their Figure 1.
The authors also argue that these short-lived compounds that induce warming need to be brought under control within a timescale of a few decades to alleviate health impacts or damage to crops and natural ecosystems. In doing so we will be able to better constrain climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
Better read the article in stead of Doug’s reinterpretation: http://xweb.geos.ed.ac.uk/~dstevens/publications/penner_ngeo10.pdf
Looks like paulhan has provided his own proof of global warning
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At the same time, we find that the extra CO2 causes a big increase in vegetation. Did I say already it makes my blood boil :).
Gary Pearse says
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I can’t accept that an experiment can not be done to quantify the affect of increasing CO2. Maybe a huge plastic greenhouse in which various amounts of CO2 could be added.
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Its not as easy as you would think. It would be necessary to reproduce the change in atmospheric pressure with height and the change in temperature and H2O percentage as well. Maybe a scaled experiment with fluorescent dye in water?
Enneagram says
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That’s common sense, that nasty sense common and despicable people who need to work for a living have. Aahrrg
—————
There is no such thing as common sense. There is only uncommon sense.
I could test you on a dozen things from every day life that would be provably correct but which would violate your common sense. And that’s before I even start in the weird quantum mechanical and relativity stuff.
“If CO2 was any good for us, why would we breathe it out – and not in?
Therefore CAGW exists. QED.”
You must be joking(I hope)! hehehe!
You would not be breathing if not for CO2, ALL living creatures are alive because of it, for nutrients, building their exoskeletons/skeletons, respiration or living off organisms that depend on it.
You need to ask yourself where did this CO2 come from to start this life cycle on earth? Or maybe where did the other HUGE amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere come from on other planets, and where is the over 96% natural CO2 on earth coming from right now?
“Warming over the past 100 years is consistent with high climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide combined with a large cooling effect from short-lived aerosol pollutants, but it could equally be attributed to a low climate sensitivity coupled with a small effect from aerosols. These two possibilities lead to very different projections for future climate change.”
Hooray for common sense, now we just need some more comprehensive and conclusive science (5th IPCC report), and a consequent policy response untainted by ideological activism (thank you climategate).
http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/at-the-gates-of-climate-hell-%E2%80%93-the-fifth-ipcc-report-will-hold-the-answers/
Just wait. The no-meaters will get worse now. Cows produce methane therefore it’s a sin to eat meat and all that baloney.
Henry@Phil Clarke
I think the Dessler paper assumes too much and brings little.
I cannot check their maths and physics from the other papers quoted here.
But from (23) I would also say that they assumed that the increase in water vapor is due to the increase in CO2 –
which is illogical and completely contrary to my own beliefs as stated before, e.g.
http://letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
If you followed what I have said earlier on this threat it is rather the increase in water vapor caused by human activities that can be singled out as a cause for global warming.- The Co2 increase does little or nothing (I have not been convinced by actual test results that the nett effect of CO2 is warming rather than cooling).
This is also supposing that you live in a country that does not appreciate the extra warming of earth by 1 degree C or K warming during the past 100 or 150 years or so.
Family and friends of mine living in the NH have expressed great joy at this warming trend.
Regards.
Henry
dbs (mod): I did not do either of the things you accuse me of. I did however use the term “denialist” and I see that alone is a violation, so, for that I apologize.
I would think the “best science site on the internet” might concern themselves a little more with the factualness of their thread titles rather than (passively) encouraging folks to employ proxy servers to avoid being falsely accused.
But hey, it’s your ball.
Flavio, thanks for the link.
Now that you can all read Penne et al you can see that implication of the paper is that the effects of CO2 have not been decreased by 65% or 61% even 35%, but %0. You can’t subtract an effect that was never included in the calculation of the effects of CO2.
Once again see fig SPM.2:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-human-and.html
dbs, mod: “arch stanton”
Interesting choice of names. It was the name on the grave next to the unmarked one where the gold was buried in the movie “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”.
Flavio says:October 13, 2010 at 2:48 am
The authors of the commentary fully agree that CO2 and other anthropogenic emissions are responsible for global warming. They state: “warming over the past 100 years is consistent with high climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide”.
Flavio’s post on WUWT is yet another attempt to sidetrack intellegent scientific reasoning by cherry picking fragments and by misinterpreting a short commentary in Nature Geoscience.
The full sentence is as follows:
Warming over the past 100 years is consistent with high climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide combined with a large cooling effect from short-lived aerosol pollutants, but it could equally be attributed to a low climate sensitivity coupled with a small effect from aerosols.
It says nothing about suppression of warmth. It states a dichotomy with equal chances of being correct:
Is the aerosol effect high or low?
Is sensitivity high, or low?
We don’t know.
Tim Clark says:
October 13, 2010 at 11:07 am
Flavio’s post on WUWT is yet another attempt to sidetrack intellegent scientific reasoning by cherry picking fragments and by misinterpreting a short commentary in Nature Geoscience.
Is the aerosol effect high or low?
Is sensitivity high, or low?
We don’t know.
No, I’m sorry. You are cherry picking. If you read my post you can see that I address the aerosols as well as the sensitivity. You are right, we don’t know… yet.
And I did not write about suppression of warmth, but about suppressing the warming effect of greenhouse gases.
And it is not a dichotomy either, since aerosols and climate sensitivity are not mutually exclusive…
Flavio says: October 13, 2010 at 11:48 am
Reduced to arguing semantics, are we? My post stands. Find another strawman.
Tim Clark says:
October 13, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Reduced to arguing semantics, are we? My post stands. Find another strawman.
No, I am not arguing semantics. I am just pointing out that you are accusing me of cherry picking and misinterpreting and why I think you are wrong in doing so.
The cherry picking is mostly done by Doug Hoffman.
If half the radiation from the sun is IR, I don’t understand how this in itself doesn’t “saturate” atmospheric CO2 IR capture on the way in, causing the IR that is irradiated from the earth/sea surface largely to escape.
“”” Gary Pearse says:
October 13, 2010 at 1:50 pm
If half the radiation from the sun is IR, I don’t understand how this in itself doesn’t “saturate” atmospheric CO2 IR capture on the way in, causing the IR that is irradiated from the earth/sea surface largely to escape. “””
Well Gary, you did say “if”, so your question is moot, since half the radiation from the sun is NOT IR. But maybe 40% is if you put the visible IR boundary at 800 nm.
Unfortunately, CO2 does not become significantly IR active until about 2.0 micron wavelength (weakly) ; and we can show that only about 7% of the solar radiation is at wavelengths longer than that. It is somewhat more active at around 2.7 microns, but by then there is only about 3% of the energy. Then at 4.0 microns CO2 has a fairly strong band which is one that is active on Venus; but at 4 microns and beyond there is less than 1% of the total solar energy; and at the 15micron main CO2 GHG band; the fraction of solar energy is quite negligible, and even the spectral emittance is about 3 x 10^-5 of the peak value at 0.5 microns. So CO2 interracts very little with incoming sunlight.
H2O on the other hand does become active even in the visible, at about 750 nm, and has respectable absorption bands at about 0.85, 1.0, 1.2, 1.8, 2.3-3.2, 4.5-7.0 and 10.5-100 microns, and it would appear thatwater could absorb about half of the total spectral energy in that range (750 nm to 100 microns) and maybe 45% of the total solar energy is in that range; so H2O vapor could absorb perhaps as much as 20-25% of the total incoming solar energy.
And that is good high quality photonic energy that DOES NOT reach the earth surface or oceans, where about 98% of it (oceanic) would be stored in the deep oceans as heat; so that is a very large surface cooling effect.
And the maybe 20% that the water vapor absorbs, will of course be converted into thermalized heat in the atmospheric gases themselves; and when subsequently re-radiated as a thermal LWIR spectrum; isotropically, only about half of that will reach the surface (and is delayed in doing so). The other half is lost to space; whcih is another net surface cooling effect; and then to add insult to injury; that LWIR downward radiation gets absorbed in the top 50 microns of the ocean surface (70% of the surface), and that results in rather prompt evaporation of the selectively heated surface water; which then transports huge amounts of latent heat into the upper atmospere where it too will be deposited for loss to space.
In short; the interraction with atmospheric water vapor and incoming solar energy results in a massive cooling of the surface; over the case without water vapor; meanwhile CO2 has very littel interraction with the solar energy; BUT !!! If it did, THAT TOO would be an additional SURFACE COOLING EFFECT.
Yes absorptive atmospheric gases like H2O, CO2, O3, are very beneficial in cooling the surface by intercepting incoming solar energy and preventing it from reaching the surface.