From his blog http://www.drroyspencer.com/ which I’m repeating here to help get wide exposure.
A Challenge to the Climate Research Community
I’ve been picking up a lot of chatter in the last few days about the ’settled science’ of global warming. What most people don’t realize is that the vast majority of published research on the topic simply assumes that warming is manmade. It in no way “proves” it.
If the science really is that settled, then this challenge should be easy:
Show me one peer-reviewed paper that has ruled out natural, internal climate cycles as the cause of most of the recent warming in the thermometer record.
Studies that have suggested that an increase in the total output of the sun cannot be blamed, do not count…the sun is an external driver. I’m talking about natural, internal variability.
The fact is that the ‘null hypothesis’ of global warming has never been rejected: That natural climate variability can explain everything we see in the climate system.
I looked through KR’s reference Hansen-04-29-05.pdf to find out more about the infra-red radiation imbalance, but couldn’t find anything direct, that is any discussion of satellites, measurement methods, results, and conclusions. Only this:
“Our climate model, driven mainly by increasing humanmade
greenhouse gases and aerosols among other
forcings, calculates that Earth is now absorbing 0.85 ±
0.15 W/m2 more energy from the Sun than it is emitting to
space. This imbalance is confirmed by precise
measurements of increasing ocean heat content over the
past 10 years”
The only evidence indicated by Hansen’s paper is increasing ocean heat content. However the wikipedia article on ARGO assures me that “The Argo Network has shown a continuous declining trend in ocean temperatures.” So Hansen’s paper must be regarded as invalid.
For mine, if the ocean temperatures were increasing, and the surface temperatures were increasing, then that would be extremely strong evidence that internal climate cycles are not responsible for recent warming. However with increased surface temperatures but declining ocean temperatures, that seems strongly suggestive of the oceans expelling heat in what must be a natural cyclic way.
steven mosher says:
February 2, 2011 at 9:38 pm
Possibly true … but when I say I have done something, and you interpret it as me promising to do something that then you insinuate I haven’t done, yeah, I get a little cautious …
True. However, I suspect that if he had specified a null, that people would be arguing about whether it was the proper null. So he has left the field open, to allow a challenge from a variety of directions … that might be bad or good, not sure, but it’s not a settled question as you seem to think. Seems to me like a kinda good thing.
I did, in fact I was the first person to file an FOI with CRU.
Nope. If I sent an FOI request to every scientist I didn’t get an answer from, I wouldn’t have much time left.
More to the point, I follow things that I think are of interest and that I feel will be productive and contribute to the discussion. I didn’t feel that info would be productive, so I let it go. If others feel that it was important, it is still there for them to follow up on it. I can’t follow every lead, much as I would love to.
Not clear what your meaning is here, or who is getting in a huff, or which scientists are doubting what data.
Thanks as always for your thoughts,
w.
Dr. Spencer,
Have we not already seen a real NASA scientist demolish your line of argument?
I specifically recall one Gavin Schmidt demonstrating that natural variation could NOT indeed account for the rise in temps when he added a volcano going off about every 15 yrs. to his GCM. ‘Bloop’, ‘bloop’, ‘bloop’, about every 15 years. And thus ALL natural variation was accounted for and proven inadequate, was it not, Doctor?
Although I’m not certain that it was peer-reviewed, I’m think we can all agree it would fly through the process without hitting nary so much as a speed-bump, can’t we?
And also, is your wager doing anything to increase the Islamic world’s confidence in their scientific accomplishments, sir? In witnessing Mr. Schmidt’s deft work, I am sure they cannot help but to feel a bold and renewed sense of towering accomplishment. But with you sir, I’m afraid we are just getting more of the same-ol’, same-ol’.
I think you need to get with program, Doctor, and embrace science the way it is done by real NASA scientists in the Twenty-First Century.
G’Day, sir.
KR says
February 4, 2011 at 9:45
Myrrh, look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect . I think that covers your “evidence”. Five minutes with Google should answer all the questions you’ve posed.
Er no, that wasn’t my point in asking you. I’ve read all these lame descriptions from AGW Science and found them severely wanting in logic. I’m asking you to show me here step by step how CO2 drives global warming when for hundreds and thousands of years it had nothing to do with it.
You say the levels of CO2 during this time didn’t change so its amount is obviously irrelevant to the massive global climate changes we go through in our Ice Age, in and out of glacials and interglacials around every 100,000 years, and, it’s well known from real data that CO2 lags temperature by around 800 years, so can’t be having any effect at all on rising or falling massive global climate changes because there’s no connection in time to these changes.
Concentrate please on just the above, the very basic AGW claim. Tell me step by step the AGWScience which proves the claim that Carbon Dioxide is now doing all of this all on its own. How has it taken immediate control? What has changed?
Anthony – My apologies for my tone; I was out of line there. I will attempt to keep postings relatively short with clear and/or minimal links, and try to not trigger wordpress filters. And try not to post late at night, either…
—
Myrrh – CO2 and cause/effect? I’ll give it a try.
Basic greenhouse effect – IR absorbing/emitting gases reduce the IR going to space relative to a no-GHG scenario (reduced emissivity, Stefan-Boltzmann relationship), and the planet warms until outgoing = incoming. That’s just conservation of energy.
Over glacial cycles orbital precession cycles have changed insolation, heating the Arctic more or less, causing melt albedo changes and redistribution of energies, with small changes in climate temps. CO2 responded as lagged feedback to this, varying from 190 (lots of ice) to 290 (warm, very little ice) amplifying what would otherwise be fairly small changes. Ocean solubility for CO2 goes down as temps go up, vegetation changes, etc., and these factors drove the CO2 feedback. H2O also acted as a feedback to temps on a very short time scale. Warming in the glacial cycle happens several times faster than cooling – CO2 absorption (rock weathering and the like) takes a while, as apparently does growth of ice caps.
From this come a lot of our climate sensitivity measures – how much will the climate change given a particular radiative imbalance.
Now, over the last 150 years or so, we’ve driven CO2 levels to 395ppm and rising; 100ppm higher than it’s been in the last half million years. This decreases IR going to space at any particular temperature, causing a radiative imbalance.
This is the difference – now CO2 levels are causing an imbalance, acting as a forcing, rather than solar angle or ice albedo. It’s still an imbalance between incoming/outgoing energy, just like the glacial cycles, only happening an order of magnitude faster than we’ve seen before.
So the expectation (and observations) are that the climate will respond to a radiative imbalance as it has in the past. The initial cause is different, but it’s an imbalance. We should expect melting ice caps (yep), increasing specific humidity (yep), crop zone movement (yep), and eventually feedbacks from the ocean either ceasing to absorb so much CO2 or even (if it gets warm enough) releasing some, adding to what we’re producing. And it’s going to get warmer.
KR says:
February 5, 2011 at 8:52 am
– CO2 and cause/effect? I’ll give it a try.
Basic greenhouse effect – IR absorbing/emitting gases reduce the IR going to space relative to a no-GHG scenario (reduced emissivity, Stefan-Boltzmann relationship), and the planet warms until outgoing = incoming. That’s just conservation of energy.
Maybe later about ‘basic greenhouse’, I’d really like to concentrate on the AGW basic claim as I’ve explained above.
<Over glacial cycles orbital precession cycles have changed insolation, heating the Arctic more of less, causing melt albedo changes and redistribution of energies, with small changes in climate temps.
Irrelevant to my question, even if I could work out what you were saying, my base is ‘these cycles happen’.
But, “small change in climate temps” it most certainly isn’t. Rapid rise in temperature to melt gazillion tons of ice after 80,000 years and raise sea levels by around 350 feet is not small. I realise that AGW like to downplay these changes, eliminating the MWP and LIA, and would like to extend their Hockey Stick handle even hundreds of thousands of years into the past, but you’re failing to get the whole picture by this and so, I think, failing to appreciate what I’m arguing here. For example, Greenland temps rose by 5-10°C at the end of the last glacial, within a period of 40 years.
This is not a small temperature rise.
CO2 lags behind such rapid, massive, temp increases by 800 years.
You’re telling me that CO2 has the power to do this 800 years before it even wakes up?
CO2 responded as lagged feedback to this,
? What does this mean exactly? Where on the graph, Vostok which AGW use, does CO2 show anything but response to temperature and that only by lagging behind by around 800 years? For example, when temperatures plummet again, CO2 plays catch-up following (as it does when temperatures rise), but not dropping as swiftly as it does when it rises.
There’s nothing in the Vostok graph to back up your statement.
varying from 190 (lots of ice) to 290 (warm, very little ice) amplifying what would otherwise be fairly small changes.
800 years after temperatures begin soaring? These are massive changes before CO2 even moves!
Are you seriously expecting me to believe this? I often get the impression that AGW’s arguing as you do here, are simply reeling off stuff they’ve learned without actually looking at what they’re saying. It’s another of the “assumptions memes” of AGWScience, so taken for granted as ‘fact’ that hardly anyone bothers to actually examine what’s being said.
How has CO2 driven these dramatic changes in global climate over hundreds of thousands of years when these happen around 800 years before CO2 even begins to move?!
These changes happened and are happening without the amount of CO2 being at all relevant. These changes happened and are happening so far ahead of CO2 rises that there is no way that CO2 can be driving them. In other words, it doesn’t matter how much CO2 is in the atmosphere, it plays no part in driving these massive changes, it doesn’t affect them in any way whatsoever.
And please, KR, these really are massive changes in global climate. Compare with the recent AGW rise of CO2 and the miniscule temp changes in the last century, CO2 failed to show any propensity for driving anything, except us all batty.
This AGW ‘doubling of CO2 will raise global temps and melt all the polar ice meme’ is simply not logical. The climate cycles, whatever their actual cause, really do this and do this regardless of the amount of CO2 around at the time.
Myrrh – We know what forcings cause the glacial cycle; orbital precession and varying exposure to sunlight at the poles, the Milankovitch cycles. Those aren’t happening now – we should be seeing the climate slowly cooling due to those natural cycles. Instead, we see it warming.
If the Milankovitch cycle was driving current warming, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
CO2 didn’t initiate any of the glacial changes – it did, however, respond to those changes and amplify them through positive feedback. Quite simply, insolation changes could not alone have changed the climate as much as we see in the glacial record without feedbacks.
I’ll have to disagree with you on the rate of warming – unless you have a reference for that? It’s been my understanding that current temperature changes are happening an order of magnitude faster than glacial cycle changes. 5,000 to 20,000 years, not 120. Only the PETM event seems close in rates (Permian era); and that was likely (but not certainly) due to a clathrate venting.
Myrrh – With regards to temperature rates, I’m guessing (?) that you are referring to Greenland Dansgaard-Oeschger events? Where temps in Greenland went up very rapidly?
Those certainly occurred, but were only regional events – Antarctic ice core records from the same time periods show much more gradual warming and smaller temperature swings, indicating a much slower global rate of change. The hypotheses about the D-O events are tied to changes in the Atlantic conveyor, the Gulf Stream – if the circulation shifts then Greenland can be strongly affected. But the global rate in glacial transitions is much much slower than we are currently seeing for global temperature changes.
KR – please, for my question I really do need you to concentrate on the bigger picture as depicted in the Vostok graphs, I am not at all interested in discussing the causes of these cycles except for how the subject relates to it in my question.
CO2 didn’t initiate any of the glacial changes – it did, however, respond to those changes and amplify them through positive feedback.
You began well.. the rest is simply, to be blunt here hoping you’ll concentrate on it, invisible.
What feedback? It didn’t do anything for 800 years, which is a very, very, very long time. These changes happened with complete disinterest in the amount of CO2 around. Show me where, on these graphs, there is any sign, any, of this mythical ‘feedback’ you claim for CO2.
So, I am what I am now and stay that way for the next 800 years, yet now there is a sudden rise in temperature and after 800 years it has got hot enough for me to expand and I begin doing so. Warm climate, more food, I get fatter. Suddenly, the temperature begins to fall, I’m distraught, food is scarce, I can live off my fat reserves for a while as I forage to find what’s still available and I stay plumper than I am now, but sadly, I again shrink back into my skinny me as temps plummet and the ice obliterates all but survival mode dinners. Where in that has the amount of fat I gain had any influence on the temperatures STILL moving 800 years ahead of me? Is it magic?
Quite simply, insolation changes could not alone have changed the climate as much as we see in the glacial record without feedbacks.
I’m not saying that insolation alone has done this, you don’t know what the cause/causes were any more than I do. So your ‘insolation doesn’t explain it without feedbacks’ here is irrelevant, a straw man argument by you deciding what the cause was. I’m saying the causes don’t matter, all I’m interested in is how CO2 relates to these changes.
I have to disagree with you on the rate of warming – unless you have a reference for that?
S. Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany.
It’s been my understanding that current temperature changes are happening an order of magnitude faster than glacial cycle changes. 5,000 to 20,000 years, not 120.
He says within 40 years from the end of the last glacial for Greenland. He also says: “The ice ages were not just generally colder than the present climate but were also punctuated by abrupt climatic transitions. The best evidence for these transitions, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger (D/O) events, comes from the last ice age. D/O events typically start with an abrupt warming by up 12°C within a few decades or less, followed by gradual cooling over several hundred or thousand years.”
Anyway, this ‘last 120 years unprecedented’, is just not. Dramatic changes happen in all our cycles, from dramatic change in degree of cold to degree of hot and the often seen dramatic change in the rapidity of these events happening. CO2 is irrelevant in all of these.
Whatever causes them, CO2 is irrelevant. This mythic ‘feedback’ when temps have around 800 year start is absurd, isn’t it? If you still think it isn’t then you’ve got to do a better job of proving it, just claiming it doesn’t work for me.
(It still doesn’t matter what you think these causes are, there is nothing to suggest they have stopped.) In other words, whatever is happening now is still of the same cyclic pattern we’ve been in for hundreds of thousands of years and we’ve no reason to think that it won’t continue like that.
What Vostok shows is after the highs at the end of glacials which ushers in the next interglacial, like our own Holocene, the temps go through fits of highs and lows but in a decreasing line of temp. That’s what we’re in now, a phase of that. We’re in a blip up from the previous dip down into the LIA which was preceded by another blip up in the MWP, and so on back to the big blip up which began our Holocene. Interglacials come to an end and if this cycle continues as it has done for all these hundreds of thousands of years, however you perceive this time being hot, it will stop being so.
If CO2 really has changed into this amazingly powerful molecule then we should be pumping as much into our atmosphere as we can, to really play gods, to stop us going back into the Ice Age..
This page is rather good on the Holocene: from which: “The global change of temperature during the Holocene Epoch has been from 2.25 K to 7 K. In the last two centuries the change has been only 0.52 K. Thus, the global warming throughout the last decades has not been unique or higher than in the past.”
Nahle, Nasif. (2007) Warming Periods in the Holocene Epoch. CopyrightBiology Cabinet Organization. 22 March 2007. http://www.biocarb.org/Holocene.html . Last visit on 05/02/2011.
And this page for a look at the ‘feedback’ idea by zooming around the graphs, changing perspective and so on, in order to make it easier to see how CO2 is irrelevant. (To look at Vostok one has to keep in mind that the line of CO2 is actually lagging such a long time behind, which isn’t easy to follow on the scale generally shown – although if you want to see that stretched out over several pages, go to the Jo Nova site.)
One of the issues I have with the “CO2 causing the ice-ages” proposition is: why did the ice-ages suddenly start 2.7 mya? Why did not CO2 amplify the orbital variations prior to this?
The only sensible theory is continental drift moved the continents into position so that the climate system became more sensitive.
Sorry, forgot the URL for the last link: http://icecap.us.images/uploads/CO2,Temperaturesandiceages-f.pdf
Myrrh – 500 years is about the right time for a CO2 feedback.
CO2 in the global carbon cycle is primarily tied to carbon neutral exchanges – plants grow and absorb CO2, die and release it. Oceans, on the other hand, maintain a balance of dissolved CO2 based upon temperatures. The surface layers (mainly the “well mixed” layer of the top 100 meters or so) exchanges with the atmosphere fairly quickly, but the deep layers take ~500 years or so to circulate (http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-10.html) and respond to changes in either CO2 or temperature, before reaching equilibrium again. And if conditions continue to change, ocean CO2 balance will lag about half a millenium behind.
You’re quite right, it’s difficult to see the lag on the normal Vostok presentation due to scale, but 400-800 years appears to be the CO2 lag time behind a temperature change. And once things start moving in glacial cycles, they keep moving for thousands of years.
If you read my last post regarding Greenland Dansgaard-Oeschger events, those were fast. They also only involved Greenland, not global temperatures, which change much slower and over a smaller range.
Incidentally, the peak-to-peak insolation changes (Milankovitch cycle changes) work out to a radiative forcing of 3.4 W/m^2 (http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/milankovitch-cycles), for a direct temperature change of only ~1C. The rest of the temperature swings is due to various feedbacks, short term and quite long term.
(Note the similarity between Milankovitch cycle insolation forcing and CO2 doubling forcing of 3.7 W/m^2.)
As to oncoming ice ages – yes, we appear to be quite safe from that for the next 10,000 or so. We might end up with alligators in the Arctic Sea, though…
JohnWho says
“In the simplest terms – if I were to flip a coin, and cover it up so no one can see it, and claim that it is heads and therefore you owe me a great sum of money, would you give me the money or would you want to see the coin first? What I see a large number of AGW by CO2 supporters doing is accepting that the coin is heads without seeing the coin.”
Or, a better one is, if you were blindfolded and walking forwards and someone said you could be walking off a cliff, would you stop or keep going until it was proved the cliff was there?
KR says:
“the burden of proof is on those who deny CO2 spectroscopy, measurements of temperature increase, and who claim conspiracies among thousands of independent researchers… Not on everyone working from the evidence.”
Incorrect… if you’re following the scientific method, which says that the onus is on those proposing a hypothesis. I’m responding to the [repeatedly falsified] hypothesis that a rise in human-emitted CO2 will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe; abbreviated as CO2=CAGW.
The climate alarmist crowd generally believes in CO2=CAGW, because if CO2 only caused an insignificant temperature rise [or none at all], there would be no justification for the $billions wasted every year on “climate studies.” So the crowd must support the hypothesis that a rise in a small trace gas will lead straight to catastrophe.
The problem is in the lack of real world evidence. There is no testable, verifiable evidence that the rise in CO2 has caused any global damage at all. None.
Since the alarmist crowd has proposed the CO2=CAGW hypothesis, they have the burden of showing convincingly that runaway global warming is in process. But Mother Gaia has decisively falsified that hypothesis: the current natural warming cycle over the past century is not accelerating, despite a continuing rise in CO2.
Further, the CO2 rise has not been small. It is up almost 40%. With such a large increase, we should be seeing some global harm as a result. But, nada. The only verifiable result has been increased agricultural production.
The conclusion of unbiased observers is that CO2 is harmless and beneficial at current and projected concentrations. The rest is simply hand-waving over the failure of the CO2=CAGW belief.
Myrrh – My apologies, a poor link in the CO2 lifetime and rate of change to conditions. See http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2009.ann_rev_tail.pdf for a much better overview.
Jim D says:
“…Or, a better one is, if you were blindfolded and walking forwards and someone said you could be walking off a cliff, would you stop or keep going until it was proved the cliff was there?”
————————-
The only way you can think that is a better analogy is to whip yourself into a frenzy of panic. How did you do that?
Jim D says:
February 5, 2011 at 5:58 pm (Edit)
(responding to)
JohnWho says
What I see a large number of AGW by CO2 supporters doing is accepting that the coin is heads without seeing the coin.”
“Or, a better one is, if you were blindfolded and walking forwards and someone said you could be walking off a cliff, would you stop or keep going until it was proved the cliff was there?
The CAGW believers (and their propagandists in the mainstream press, US democrat party and the 18 politicized “so-called scientists” who are requesting Congress deliberately ignore and silence the skeptical community) DID drive our economy off the cliff in 2007 with Pelosi’s energy agenda and oil policies and restrictions. But we (the skeptical community) do NOT have a blindfold on, not are we mindlessly walking towards a cliff believing the propagandists and their CAGW “profits” who seek to make money and control economic policies for their own good, and the illness and early death of millions of innocents.
We DO see mankind walking up a long 400 year old “hill” from the depths of the Little Ice Age in 1600 towards a peak in the next few years, if indeed the peak has not already occurred in 2000-2010. It is the only CAGW alarmists who are seeking to destroy mankind in their belief of theoretical dangers that lay in front of our wide-open, inquisitive eyes.
>>
KR says:
February 5, 2011 at 12:53 pm
CO2 didn’t initiate any of the glacial changes – it did, however, respond to those changes and amplify them through positive feedback. Quite simply, insolation changes could not alone have changed the climate as much as we see in the glacial record without feedbacks.
<<
This is the standard argument made by those supporting CAGW. They (you) claim that a tiny increase in CO2 (even 800 years after the fact) causes the initiation of the warming and the end of an ice age cycle. They (you), of course, never talk about the region where the temperature is dropping. Here the CO2 level is WAY above the tiny amount that they (you) say triggers major warming. By their (your) original logic, the higher CO2 level would never allow the temperature to start falling, because the CO2 feedback level is too high.
Unfortunately, your argument fails the moment temperature starts falling but CO2 is still rising and remains far higher than the so-called trigger level.
Jim
Jim – Feedback has a limit – it’s not a run-away. Once things stabilize out, and the initial forcing changes direction (cooling due to insolation changes) temps will drop a bit. And CO2 will dissolve into the ocean a bit as temps drop. And water vapor will drop a bit. And ice will grow in extent, increasing albedo. On and on and on – both directions (down as well as up) respond to feedbacks.
CO2 didn’t initiate glacial cycles – it responded to them. The difference is that now we’re initiating a radiative imbalance with CO2 rather than orbital dynamics.
Positive feedbacks work both ways, both amplifying warming when forcing increases, and amplifying cooling when forcing drops. Your issue with cooling is simply something I’ve never seen argued – a strawman (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html).
By the way, catastrophic AGW is something I’ve never claimed. I think we’re going to have warming. I suspect we’ll adapt, albeit at some fairly high cost (watching crop zones migrating north to lands not well fertilized or tilled). I would prefer to minimize the significant price… Catastrophe is a word introduced by skeptics, not climate scientists – I certainly don’t expect a catastrophe if we do anything about the problem, although things could get rather expensive if we continue business as usual.
(I keep forgetting how HTML handles certain characters. Ignore my previous post.)
>>
KR says:
February 5, 2011 at 9:18 pm
Feedback has a limit . . . and on and on – both directions (down as well as up) respond to feedbacks.
<<
My undergraduate degree is EE. I’m very much aware how feedback systems work. Do you even understand GHG science?
>>
CO2 didn’t initiate glacial cycles – it responded to them. The difference is that now we’re initiating a radiative imbalance with CO2 rather than orbital dynamics.
<<
If there is a radiative imbalance, then the atmosphere should be warming at a much faster rate than it is. I’ve modeled Kiehl and Trenberth’s global energy budget diagram, and the GHG effect is missing. That missing tropical hotspot isn’t a minor inconvenience–it invalidates the GHG model or at least means that the current warming isn’t being driven by GHGs.
>>
Positive feedbacks work both ways, both amplifying warming when forcing increases, and amplifying cooling when forcing drops. Your issue with cooling is simply something I’ve never seen argued – a strawman
<<
Thanks for strawman link, but I know what a strawman argument is. This is sort of a leap. If my CO2 argument is a strawman, then you’re saying that the physics of GHGs changes depending on how the temperature is changing. They drive temperature upward, but can’t stop its decrease. If something can overpower CO2 at higher levels than we now have, then how can CO2 be driver? Have you written and published a paper describing this new effect?
>>
I think we’re going to have warming. I suspect we’ll adapt, albeit at some fairly high cost (watching crop zones migrating north to lands not well fertilized or tilled).
<<
This is what I would call a strawman. I’ve heard this argument made in reference to corn: “The Corn Belt will move north.” Corn is a tropical plant. What is more likely (assuming warming is occurring) is that the Corn Belt will EXPAND north. We grow hybrid varieties. I’m sure new hybrids will become available to handle the rather slow changes in climate. And even though corn is a C4 plant, it still responds favorably to increased CO2. Not only is CO2 an aerial fertilizer, but plants become more drought and ozone tolerant with higher levels of CO2.
>>
I would prefer to minimize the significant price… Catastrophe is a word introduced by skeptics, not climate scientists – I certainly don’t expect a catastrophe if we do anything about the problem, although things could get rather expensive if we continue business as usual.
<<
(I think you’re missing a “don’t” in there somewhere.)
What’s getting rather expensive is using food grains as fuel and not developing known fuel reserves.
Jim
KR says
February 5, 2011
500 years is about the right time for a CO2 feedback. ….
Again, you’re not proving feedback by giving a description of the growth of CO2 from the change to warmer conditions. Prove “feedback” of CO2 driving global temperatures.
If you read my last post regarding Greenland Dansgaard-Oeschger events, those were fast. They also only involved Greenland, not global temperatures, which change much slower and over a smaller range.
Actually, don’t know how, I did miss that one. But anyway, not true that they only involved Greenland, they were initiated in the North Atlantic but had a global footprint.
Again, this shows anyway that CO2 was of zilch relevance to these and they happen every few thousand years. Rapid climate change is becoming better understood, 16°C not unusual and cannot be explained.
You have still not shown that CO2 has ever been the driver of global warming. You still have not shown that these events of massive changes in climate have stopped happening (so, you can’t rule them out of the picture now).
As to oncoming ice ages – yes, we appear to be quite safe from that for the next 10,000 or so. We might end up with alligators in the Arctic Sea, though..
100,000 years ago, before the last glacial, we had hippos wallowing in English mud.
You’re optimistic with the ‘not for another 10,000 years’..
Myrrh – I’m going to disagree strongly with you on the D-O events; they involved ~5-10% of the Earth’s surface including the surrounding ocean, and global temps changed much less and much more slowly, as shown by Antarctic ice core data.
Milankovitch Cycle forcing (as per the link I gave above) amounted to 3.4 W/m^2, which would change temps by about 1C. The rest of the glacial temperature cycle had to come from feedbacks, including CO2. CO2 did not drive/force glacial cycles, it amplified them – an extremely relevant factor. Multiple feedbacks (CO2, albedo, specific humidity, plant coverage, etc.) acting on a small temperature change, amplifying them to a much larger one. We couldn’t have had the 5-10C glacial cycle temperature swings without feedbacks.
As to how – at any particular temperature, the ocean has a certain solubility for CO2, driven by the ocean/air exchange rate. Warmer water holds less CO2 – if the oceans heat up, they release CO2, which reduce atmospheric emissivity (blocking IR emissions), and the world heats up some more. If the world starts to cool, the oceans absorb some CO2, and the world cools some more. This requires deep mixing (surface CO2, the top 100 meters mixed by winds, exchange pretty quickly), and the deep mixing via the thermohaline circulation takes centuries.
That’s the mechanism – solubility vs. temperature, basic greenhouse gas physics.
We’re now on track to double CO2 over the preindustrial 280ppm before 2100, a forcing of 3.7 W/m^2.
—
Jim Masterson – We’re warming at about the rate we should expect (http://www.skepticalscience.com/a-case-study-of-a-climate-scientist-skeptic.html – this discusses two recent claims regarding very fast and very slow warming).
KR says:
February 6, 2011 at 7:05pm
I’m going to disagree strongly with you on the D-O events; they involved ~5-10% of the Earth’s surface including the surrounding ocean, and global temps changed much less and much more slowly, as shown by Antarctic ice core data.
? Besides the fact that you are ignoring tons of data showing how widespread the atmospheric affect of these, and Heinrich, events, my response is, SO? Will you please concentrate on answering my points, I’m asking you for proof on two specific and as yet unproven AGW assumptions which you keep meming.
[For interest see http://ysgeo.yonsei.ac.kr/abstractII/A0601901014.html , but much is available, the research fascinating, and, the causes still unknown.]
Milankovitch Cycle forcing (as per the link I gave above) amounted to 3.4W/m^2, which would change temps by 1°C. The rest of the glacial temperature cycle had to come from feedbacks, including CO2. CO2 did not drive/force glacial cycles, it amplified them – and extremely relevant factor. Multiple feedbacks (CO2, albedo, specific humidity, plant coverage, etc.) acting on a small temperature change, amplifying them to a much larger one. We couldn’t have had the 5-10°C glacial cycle temperature swings without feedbacks.
You’re really not listening to me here, are you? These are dramatic changes in extremely short periods of time, CO2 does not begin increasing until around 800 years later (even your 500 is a vast length of time). There is no connection to CO2 being a feedback, for even less than a decade in some cases, huge rises in temps throughout our glacial and interglacial history.
You don’t know what causes these D/O and Heinrich cycles. Those actively researching it don’t know what causes these.
What causes these is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to the two tasks I put to you, EXCEPT, in that have to you prove that CO2 has anything to do with ‘feedback’ in them.
So far you haven’t done that. Claiming it is CO2 feedback forcing these changes in decadal timespans when its still sitting around unchanged in amount is simply, I’m sorry, ludicrous. These aren’t one-offs even, but if it was only one event it would be enough to falsify your claim that CO2 ‘amplifies by feedback’.
You can’t keep claiming this when CO2 is clearly doing nothing to drive these global changes, whether it’s a 1°C rise or 16, and obvious it has nothing to do with driving forward these huge decadal changes.
And, my second point, prove that these dramatic changes such as D/O and Heinrich, have stopped. Your claim is that there is nothing else that can account for our warming now.
[p.s. for interest, various research projects on this page: http://article.wn.com/view/2009/10/28/Findings_cast_doubt_on_ice_age_climate_theory/ ]
Myrrh – D-O events are clear evidence of a phase transition, a sudden offset in climate behavior. Best educated guesses – not firmly established yet – are that they (and likely Heinrich events, too) occur due to a redirection of the North Atlantic circulation.
And what would cause such a circulation change? Well, some base variable changing over a range from stable for one state to instability to stable for the other state of circulation. A base variable such as temperature, total ice mass/instability, etc.
If, in the spring, I see a large icicle break off and fall, I can’t claim that’s not due to warming because it was too sudden.
—
A question for you, because at this point in the discussion it’s a bit hard for me to tell: “I’m asking you for proof on two specific and as yet unproven AGW assumptions which you keep meming'” Would you mind telling me which two items you are asking about?