From the press package:
The findings confirm that carbon dioxide is the most potent greenhouse “control knob”
This seems like a last ditch effort (in the face of falling public opinion) from Gavin Schmidt et al. to make CO2 more important than water vapor in regulating the temperature of the planet.
Via emailed press package, embargoed until 2PM EST 10/14/2010:
Of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide exerts the most control on Earth’s climate, researchers report. Although carbon dioxide’s greenhouse effect has been known for more than 100 years, its primary role in climate warming is still not universally acknowledged.
For example, water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas and is more abundant in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. But, it condenses and precipitates from the atmosphere and thus plays a different role than carbon dioxide and other, noncondensing greenhouse gases, such as ozone, methane and chlorofluorocarbons. Andrew Lacis and colleagues conducted a set of idealized climate model experiments in which various greenhouse gases were added to or subtracted from the atmosphere, in order to illustrate their roles in controlling the temperature of the air.
The findings confirm that carbon dioxide is the most potent greenhouse “control knob” and that its abundance determines how much water vapor the atmosphere contains. Without carbon dioxide, the Earth would plunge into a frozen state, the researchers report, though they caution that increasing levels of this atmospheric gas are also worrisome. “This makes the reduction and control of atmospheric CO2 a serious and pressing issue, worthy of real-time attention,” they write.
[Seems a bit out of balance though.]
- Fig. 1. Attribution of the contributions of individual atmospheric components to the total terrestrial greenhouse effect, separated into feedback and forcing categories. Horizontal dotted and dashed lines depict the fractional response for single-addition and single-subtraction of individual gases to an empty or full-component reference atmosphere, respectively. Horizontal solid black lines are the scaled averages of the dashedand dotted-line fractional response results. The sum of the fractional responses adds up to the total greenhouse effect. The reference atmosphere is for conditions in 1980.
Article #14: “Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature,” by A.A. Lacis; G.A. Schmidt; D. Rind; R.A. Ruedy at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, NY.
Contact: Andrew A. Lacis at alacis@giss.nasa.gov (email).
Here’s the paper: lacis101015 (PDF)
[REPLY: Lets try to keep the dialog a bit cleaner,,, K? …. bl57~mod]
Thank you for just snipping the offending word… I was trying to make a serious point… that these guys are seriously out of control in a very Freudian sense.
“Although carbon dioxide’s greenhouse effect has been known for more than 100 years, its primary role in climate warming is still not universally acknowledged. ”
Not universally aknowledged? Does this mean the 98-or-so % of all scientists who agree on global warming aknowledge something else??? It is worse than we thought.
Brego says:
October 14, 2010 at 5:23 pm
I hope you are being careless with your wording and mean in a continuous (i.e. grey body) spectrum and not continuous in time. You are confusing Fred Moolten already.
It is worth noting that as the gas pressure increases IR emission will become more black body like.
Found a great blog article that very succinctly sums up the skeptical argument without going overboard, being too technical, or jargoning it up. Excellent primer for people who don’t quite get how/why someone could question Catastrophic Climate
ChangeDisruptionhttp://blogs.forbes.com/warrenmeyer/2010/10/15/denying-the-catstrophe-the-science-of-the-climate-skeptics-position/?boxes=financechannelforbes
Different story, same Schmidt !
Cold Englishman says: “Climate change will be blamed and our rulers will decide to urgently increase the construction of windmills.”
This would be funny, if it was not so scary. All British political parties believe the way to the UK’s energy salvation is by building forests of giant windmills in the North Sea. I am sure – apart from the occasional warmist ranter – no reader of WUWT needs any explanation of the stupidity and horrendous economic cost of this policy. At the same time our politicians shy away from the obvious and only sane solution of nuclear power.
I reluctantly have told my children that their best hope is to emigrate, the policies of expanding welfare dependence, runaway bureaucratic growth and dependency on bad science have resulted in a grim future for those of us living on this side of the pond.
“Andrew Lacis and colleagues conducted a set of idealized climate model experiments in which various greenhouse gases were added to or subtracted from the atmosphere, in order to illustrate their roles in controlling the temperature of the air.”
A.k.a more models. More theoretical models. Will anyone actually do a real experiment? Throw the d-mn computers away and study this effect like real scientists. They won’t do it because it’s 1) hard and 2) probably won’t give them the answer they want.
Quote: “noncondensing greenhouse gases, such as ozone, methane and chlorofluorocarbons.”
I must be gullible then…
If you can compress these gases with enough force, they become liquid. The pressure on this planet is insufficient to compress these gases into a liquid state. But the gases still play a small part in our atmosphere.
Einstein theorized about gravity warping space (and he didn’t even use a computer model!) People were skeptical of this radical idea for decades until physical observation of the stars behind a solar eclipse was made to confirm the theory. The proof came from someone completely removed from originator of the idea.
In the case of AGW, people have an idea, then they code that idea into a computer and the computer confirms the idea. The physical observations are extremely weak or only very indirectly proof of the idea, if proof at all. So the science continues to churn. Where is the hard-core physical evidence and why aren’t these clowns trying to get it? All we get are more and more computer models and maybe some massaged proxy data. If the AGW crowd want to prove their idea, they need to start looking for the physical data. The direct irrefutable observation of physical data.
Come on: proving that CO2 is or is not warming the planet can’t be any more difficult than proving gravity warps space?
I would also like to draw readers’ attention to the over-the-top editorializing that oocurs at the end of their article. I have highlighted the scare words which is now a trademark of GISS publications:
“The anthropogenic radiative forcings that fuel the growing terrestrial greenhouse effect continue unabated. The continuing high rate of atmospheric CO2 increase is particularly worrisome, because the present CO2 level of 390 ppm is far in excess of the 280 ppm that is more typical for the interglacial maximum, and still the atmospheric CO2 control knob is now being turned faster than at any time in the geological record (20). The concern is that we are well past even the 300- to 350-ppm target level for atmospheric CO2, beyond which dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system would exceed the 25% risk tolerance for impending degradation of land and ocean ecosystems, sea-level rise, and inevitable disruption of socioeconomic and foodproducing infrastructure (21, 22). Furthermore, the atmospheric residence time of CO2 is exceedingly long, being measured in thousands of years (23). This makes the reduction and control of atmospheric CO2 a serious and pressing issue, worthy of real-time attention.”
I have reviewed many journal papers in my field, and this kind of editorializing would have been flagged as highly inappropriate. Needless to say, they simply don’t care in the climate science community.
“The anthropogenic radiative forcings that fuel the growing terrestrial greenhouse effect continue unabated. The continuing high rate of atmospheric CO2 increase is particularly worrisome, because the present CO2 level of 390 ppm is far in excess of the 280 ppm that is more typical for the interglacial maximum, and still the atmospheric CO2 control knob is now being turned faster than at any time in the geological record (20). The concern is that we are well past even the 300- to 350-ppm target level for atmospheric CO2, beyond which dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system would exceed the 25% risk tolerance for impending degradation of land and ocean ecosystems, sea-level rise, and inevitable disruption of socioeconomic and foodproducing infrastructure (21, 22). Furthermore, the atmospheric residence time of CO2 is exceedingly long, being measured in thousands of years (23). This makes the reduction and control of atmospheric CO2 a serious and pressing issue, worthy of real-time attention.”
Does the logical fallacy “SLIPPERY SLOPE” ring a bell?
There are consequences for doing real observations and measurements over time. Darwin, sleeping in a bed way too short for him during the four years of the epic voyage of HMS Beagle, shrank in height by a measurable amount, over an inch, if my memory serves me correctly.
Does sitting playing with models every working day shrink one’s intellect?
“Furthermore, the atmospheric residence time of CO2 is exceedingly long, being measured in thousands of years”
Didn’t APS say it was hundreds of years? Now it’s thousands of years? Why not just say it’s indefinite. No molecule of CO2 will ever come out of the atmosphere once it’s there. That’s even scarier.
Has anyone else noticed that when the pestest and grightest among us “get it wrong” and they come out with a NASA GISS Study like this, that Mother Nature has a habit of becoming really mad and making things uncomfortable for all of us? I guess she thinks it’s a might stupid on our part and she needs to deflate our egos. I have a terrible feeling the Ol’ Girl isn’t going to like what these guys and gals are saying. Wish they’d done it in the northern Spring and NOT in the Fall. I hate too much snow and ice; I really do;-(
We know that water condenses out of the atmosphere, you only had to be living in Canberra for the last month to see all that condensing going on. But my question is, how much CO2 is dissolved in the rain ?. Does colder rain dissolve more CO2 ?
I would have thought that with all the rain SE Australia has had recently the local atmosphere should now be scrubbed clean of CO2. Of course I could be totally wrong with this idea. Now where can I get a pH kit?
Cirrius Man says:
October 15, 2010 at 4:24 am
Different story, same Sch
midtt !Fixed.
DaveE.
When I was an academic, my colleagues and I used to laugh about the “standard language” in papers within any field. We too put this “standard language” in all of our papers. It was basically an unspoken rule of the game. Even though our research was purely for the advancement of knowledge and for no practical purpose at all, we would still include in the introduction how the research has far ranging consequences in “blah blah blah”…whatever the favorite mantra happened to be. Like flat panel displays, or curing cancer, etc. You always had to have about three or four of these bogus claims that nobody really believed. It was just window dressing that everyone overlooked. When you would read papers in your field, you’d gloss over all the gratuitous commentary and get to the meat of the paper. That commentary was simply overlooked because everyone knew it was just “doing business”. You focussed on the data, the science, and the conclusions (which didn’t contain the vacuous statements found in the introduction)
However in the AGW field, it appears to me that there is no meat in the papers and all the gratuitous window dressing, the “over-the-top” statements, the wild speculations ARE the purpose of the paper. Those are the pieces the “scientists” are focussing on. And they show up in the conclusions!
This is known as preaching to the choir. The intended audience are those folks who want to hear these exact words. Unfortunately, the congregation has had enough and are already filing out of the church.
Slabadang says: October 14, 2010 at 2:20 pm
I called GISS today! Forest Gump is Vice president on thier climate research!
Knobby is as knobby does.
ZT says: October 14, 2010 at 11:38 am
Hmm…they say (eventually):
“To this end, we performed a simple climate experiment with the GISS 2° × 2.5° AR5 version of ModelE, using the Q-flux ocean with a mixedlayer depth of 250 m, zeroing out all the noncondensing GHGs and aerosols.”
So. Using a model that simulates with some degree of precision the past climate response to certain variables that are input into the computer with assumed values:
Estimated regional response to atsmospheric airflow;
Estimated effect of surface ocean flux;
Estimated effect of noncondensing GHGs and aerosols;
Estimated effect of [CO2];
Estimated effect of everything else;
they zeroed out the estimated effect of noncondensing GHGs and aerosols and determined that [CO2] was the most potent control knob.
brilliant
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/abstraction.png
More computer models, still no use of real-world evidence and tests. In Asimov’s Foundation sci-fi books, scientists of the future no longer do field work, as it has all been done, they just review previous papers (presumably “peer-reviewed”). Asimov’s death of the scientific method has arrived in the form of computer programs.
If these “climate modellers” are so worried about CO2, why don’t they reduce their carbon footprint by scrapping all the computers and use pencil and paper?
It would at least reduce the number of rubbish papers they produce!
I have been trying to understand the CO2 problem. In reading both sides and the numerous posts both here and elsewhere here is what I have come up with. Please feel free to refute, correct or dismiss, etc.
The amount of CO2 in our atmosphere is 390 ppm.
Of that amount, we humans are responsible for about 5%.
In doing the math then the percentage of our atmosphere that is CO2 is 390 divided by 1,000,000 which equals 39/1,000th of 1%….Yes or No?
If we are responsible for 5% of the entire CO2 in our atmosphere then that amounts to 5% of 390 ppm or about 20 ppm. So doing the math and taking 20 divided by 1,000,000 we end up with 2/1,000ths of 1%….Yes or No?
I made this comment on a story of electric cars and charging stations on NPR.org
Imagine a pie chart of our atmosphere. Now slice out 39/1,000th of 1% of that pie. That is the total carbon in our atmosphere. Now imagine that small slice being another pie chart of total CO2 in our atmosphere (both naturally occuring and man-caused). Now slice 5% out of that pie. That is what we humans contribute. Now imagine that 2/1,000ths of 1% devastating planet earth…..because I can’t!
Have at it…am I way off on this?
[snip – OTT]