Guest post by Dr. J Storrs Hall
A bit over a year ago, in the wake of Climategate, I put up a blog post over at the Foresight Institute which got picked up and run here at WUWT. The essence of the post was that there was lots of natural variation in the ice core record of climate, so that it was reasonable to be skeptical of scientists who claimed that recent CO2 variations were “the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend” (quoting myself).
Apparently that got enough exposure — and was persuasive enough — that over a year later the alarmists still feel the urge to “debunk” it. Most recently, Rob Honeycutt at the “SkepticalScience” alarmist fanboi blog weighed in with this: Crux of a Core, Part 1 – addressing J Storrs Hall. Now the thing about this particular piece that jumped out at me at first was the fact that he associated me with a graph I never used, and he calls me “Mr. Hall” to make me sound less qualified than other sources such as “Dr. Alley” he refers to. It’s Dr. Hall (and yes, I am a scientist, not a nanotech engineer as he claims), a fact that he could have discovered in 3 seconds with Google. That told me about all I needed to know about Honeycutt’s bona fides (in the original Latin sense of acting in good faith).
The only substantive point in the post is that GISP2 (or any specific ice core) is a local as opposed to global temperature record. Is it misrepresentation to use it as a proxy for global climate? Well, the inconvenient truth is that I’m hardly the first person to use ice cores as climate proxies in popular presentations:
… but, on the other hand, it’s actually an interesting question and one worth looking at.
How Ice Cores Record a History of Climate
That’s not my title, it’s from this page at the GISP2 site. Not “a history of local temperature,” — of climate. Here are some quotes from the abstracts of papers by GISP2 authors:
“Ice cores provide high-resolution, multi-parameter records of changes in climate and environmental conditions spanning two or more full glacial- interglacial cycles. …”
“Polar ice contains a unique record of past climate variations; …”
“One of the most dramatic climate events observed in marine and ice core records is the Younger Dryas (YD), … High resolution, continuous glaciochemical records, newly retrieved from central Greenland, record the chemical composition of the Arctic atmosphere at this time. This record shows that both onset and termination of the YD occurred within 10-20 years …”
“The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) core can enhance our understanding of the relationship between parameters measured in the ice in central Greenland and variability in the ocean, atmosphere, and cryosphere of the North Atlantic Ocean and adjacent land masses. …”
“High-resolution, continuous multivariate chemical records from a central Greenland ice core provide a sensitive measure of climate change…”
“The accumulation record from the GISP2 core as an indicator of climate change throughout the Holocene” (paper title)
So, sure, a single ice core is not a global average temperature record; but it is quite a bit more than one thermometer. It’s just mud-slinging to claim that using it for a climate proxy is “misinformation”.
… especially when I didn’t just use one ice core in my post but two, and the other one was from Antarctica. One way to cut past the verbiage is simply to look at a comparison of the Greenland and Antarctic data and see how well they correlate:
(This is GISP2 in green, NGRIP, another Greenland core, in cyan, and the Vostok Antarctic core in blue. The Vostok has been scaled and shifted for a best match with the others; the temperature in Antarctica is colder, with smaller variations, than in Greenland. Furthermore, there are some time-scaling issues — note the temporal divergence of the two Greenland records before about 40 kya. It’s possible that NH/SH actually match better than this plot indicates. Look here for data.)
Nowhere near a perfect match, but it’s pretty clear that these are all from the same planet. Even Vostok shows the Younger Dryas, which is generally believed to be a mostly northern-hemisphere event. The NH has more variability in ice ages, notably the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, but the SH more, on a relative scale, in the Holocene.
The GISP2 people also compared their core’s record with Antarctic ones; on this page they say that it “shows close correlation between GISP2 and Vostok in the delta 18O of air in these ice cores.” (That’s a key temperature proxy.) On this page they say “Holocene climate is characterized by rapid climate change events and considerable complexity. GISP2 Holocene ¶18O (proxy for temperature) (Grootes, et al., 1993) and EOF1 (composite measure of major chemistry representing atmospheric circulation) show parallel behavior for the Early Holocene but not for the Late Holocene (O’Brien, et al., 1995).”
Note that bit about “rapid climate change events.” In the words of Jeffrey Masters here, “The historical records shows us that abrupt climate change is not only possible–it is the normal state of affairs. The present warm, stable climate is a rare anomaly.” (And he’s talking specifically about the lessons of GISP2 — although alas he takes home the wrong lesson from it.) See also this recent post here by Don Easterbrook.
Does GISP2 — or any other paleoclimate record — show us that climate change isn’t happening? No, of course not. It shows us that climate change always happens. The 20th-century warming was hardly unprecedented, and doesn’t call for unusual explanations.
Now it’ll be a really great day when you figure out which side has the science and which is a well oiled propaganda machine.
I suggest you read the financial reports of the oil majors more carefully. Look how much UEA received and the unis in USA.
Joel Shore, read Montford’s book, Hockey Stick Illusion, because it explains what is wrong with Mann’s early work, and what is wrong with science (coverup of errors, etc). If you have issues with specifics, that’s fine, but I would like to hear how you address the general problems noted in the book.
Citizens Challenge, you say “But it’s on the other side of that political line you folks seem to have drawn and refuse to look beyond.” Please try to understand why so many of us have wasted so much time on such a nonissue. It is not from political bias as you would dearly like to believe, but because we believe in science. We believe that science (e.g. statistics) is not a kudgel to provide propaganda points like the hockey stick. If such mistakes happen they should be quickly corrected, not defended in circles for years. Start with Mann’s data normalization: normalizing over the instrument interval rather than the whole record, followed by PCA, selects samples with the highest variance over the instrument interval (i.e. flattens the stick part of the hockey stick). Not hard at all to understand, not political, just an error. Not caught but rather celebrated in the IPCC report.
Years upon years of stonewalling and obfuscation follow. Yet you waltz in lately and say we are just being political. Well, you are wrong about that.
@Dale Rainwater. J Storrs Hall
“Nowhere near a perfect match, but it’s pretty clear that these are all from the same planet. Even Vostok shows the Younger Dryas, which is generally believed to be a mostly northern-hemisphere event.”
@Rob R
“1. So when the Greenland and Antarctic temperature graphs are overlaid, one on the other, the position of the temperature peaks actually should be displaced by around 800 to 1500 years.
“2. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Younger Dryas is not represented in Antarctic Ice Cores. The cooling event one sees in the Vostok core dates from around 15,000 years ago. It is called the “Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR)” and can also be found in climate records from New Zealand, Tasmania and Chile. This event predates the Younger Dryas by at least 1000 years. It is another manifestation of anticorrelation or at least “phase shift” between events at the two ends of the world.”
@BA
“There was no science posted by Hall. He threw insults, then showed a line graph he’d put together from data found on the internet. Waving at this graph he declared
“Nowhere near a perfect match, but it’s pretty clear that these are all from the same planet,”
which nobody ever disputed, and
“Even Vostok shows the Younger Dryas”
which is wrong enough to be a test of what his readers know about science.”
@Bill Illis
“As one who has spent a huge amount of time collating and translating paleoclimate data into useful form …
… I fully endorse Dr. Hall’s methodology and results here.
I have almost the same chart (at higher resolution).”
@Jack Greer
“… misleading assertions of phase matching, especially the Younger Dryas event.”
@BA
“Mean Vostok temporal resolution is on the order of decades to centuries, not months. An 18-month lag between NH and SH CO2 has nothing to do with the 1,800 year offset between the Antarctic cooling event and the Younger Dryas.”
@John from CA
“Exactly, so why are they presenting charts and graphs implying some linear understanding of past events?
There isn’t any linear understanding, its simply missing data and circumstantial assumptions that connect the sample points or am I missing the “point”?”
Well I sure am missing a point or something here!
Given the phase angle between the two sides of opinion, it doesn’t seem to be established with any degree of certainty whether or not the Younger Dryas is even represented in the Vostok core. So is it or isn’t it? And does the graph genuinely depict correlation or does it not?
It doesn’t look like a “manifestation of anticorrelation” to me, but what would I know!
eadler:
peden,
Your rant regarding the IPCC is incorrect. The IPCC has recommended mitigation activities, but no countries are specifically excluded or included. You are talking about the Kyoto Protocol, which is a political agreement. Scientists had nothing to do with inclusion or exclusion of countries from any obligations under the protocol.
Briefly, that’s a distinction without a difference. You probably don’t believe the alleged “science” yourself, as judged by your acts. If not, would that also be “political”? Does Al Gore act like he really believes the alleged CO2=CAGW “science”? Are y’all still in love with windmills? And the Stone Age?
Then you diss the Chinese and Indians as though they don’t really know what they’re doing, when their logic makes perfect sense given the facts, as repeatedly and continually demonstrated going forward and even as we speak.
eadler, if what you display here is truely your brain acting freely, in particular without recompense, your thinking has come to the end of its line, and you have proven that at best you have nothing to offer in terms of solutions to real problems concerning the wellbeing of Humanity.
Eadler – you say (or at least my email alert says you say – I can’t see it above) that the experts have spoken!
You could do with a history lesson on the UN’s record of expert judgement! I have been in and out of their panels and committees since about 1982 – though not as recent as some of my colleagues in climate policy (the science advisor to the drowning Pacific Island States and cowriter of the Kyoto Protocol endorsed my book by saying – ‘these questions need answering before we can accept the truth of global warming’) – and so perhaps you will be open to some historical experience:
* the UN panels on the risks of low-leve radiation ALL and to a man, held that there was a threshold beneath which there were no effects. This consensus was overturned eventually by the work of a single (woman) scientist – Dr Alice Stewart, and it took 15 years of dogged battle with the defenders of the orthodoxy, before, for example, X-raying pregnant women was banned;
* UN panels of experts oversaw the release of CFCs (and many other eco-toxic substances) despite warnings regarding the ozone layer;
* UN panels licensed the dumping of nuclear waste in the oceans until that decision was reversed by intense campaigning and public outcry (and they used dodgy GCM models to justify themselves).
I hate to think what the world would look like if individuals had not stood up and persevered against the authorities on environmental science.
And on this particular issue – Prof John Christy is a leading atmospheric physicist, compiler of one of the foremost satellite data sets, and a lead author with the IPCC – in other words, an expert! His estimation of the CO2 GHG contribution to ‘global warming’ is 25% (I came to 20% in my own review). Others within IPCC – who I think are less competent and in defense of old models think it is nearer 75%. There is NO consensus – just a well-chosen majority (chosen by governments) out-voting a minority – that is NOT my definition of a consensus! If Christy is right and you cut emissions of CO2 by half at enormous cost, you will deal with about 10% of the driving force of climate change. That is – no significant effect. If the world gets warmer, it will be just 10% warmer than it would be without us, and if it gets colder – which many students of natural cycles thing will happen int he next two decades, then CO2 will just take the edge of that cold.
Smokey says:
Where is it dated thus? It is the supplement connected to their paper. The URL has within it “2008/09/02/” which I assume is the date associated with that paper.
Smokey, have you noticed that in this whole debate, I link to the primary sources, i.e., the original papers by Mann, and all you ever link to is secondary sources who, to put it charitably, are not completely without their own biases.
From citizenschallenge on March 2, 2011 at 9:04 pm:
Did that years ago. To identify a well-oiled propaganda machine, just follow the money and see who gets the payoffs.
Governments get to tax “carbon emissions” and raise revenues while seizing additional regulatory power? Governments endorse (C)AGW!
“Nonprofits” have an issue suitable for fundraising, drawing in more money as they hype it up higher and higher? “Nonprofits” endorse (C)AGW!
Researchers want grant money and to get papers published in prominent journals? Researchers endorse (C)AGW!
Television networks and print media want to draw in viewers with their “Upcoming Important Disasters!” specials and features? Television networks and print media endorse (C)AGW!
Major companies have a “problem” that they can make major profits selling “solutions” for, with large quantities of government money available for the buying of their “solutions?” Major companies endorse (C)AGW!
Do you want to be ostracized professionally and be regularly attacked by a well-oiled propaganda machine? Do Not Endorse (C)AGW!
J. Shore,
smokey gave you a bad spanking and so did eric (sceptic) and all you did was talk about dates and sources. Do you honestly believe your sources are without any bias?
You didnt answer about stonewalling or manns hiding censored data either. I dont think your a real scientist, you just play one on the intertubes.
March 2, 2011 at 6:55 pm
Smokey says to Joel Shore: “I’m not going to get into an endless debate with someone hopelessly afflicted with cognitive dissonance. So you get to have your last Michael Mann apologia.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Smokey,
you sound like an agenda driven politician more than anyone interested in learning about climate processes.
The thing about learning about climate science is that you actually have to read and think about what the other guy is saying. Something you sound incredibly hostile to.
And as much as you might try to deny it, the “establishment climatology community” has given every conceivable skeptical argument way more airing than the likes of you afford the “consensus science” –
eadler says:
March 2, 2011 at 6:59 am
The last D O event ocurred 11,000 years ago. This kind of event is unusual in human history as is the climate change we are experiencing today. There is no indication that I have read that the current warming is a D O event. Certainly the expert, Dr Alley doesn’t believe this.
Since other commenters have already criticised Dr Alley’s personal reasoning as expressed in the quote you provided, I’ll stick to the argument you make here.
Firstly, the ice core data suggests only that the last clearly discernible D-O event occurred during the current interglacial, 10 500 years ago.
A considerable number of researchers propose that such events have not ceased during the Holocene, but instead registered a much smaller temperature change in Greenland. Stefan Rahmstorff is one of them, he believes not only that D-O events are strongly cyclical – occuring every 1470 years – but that they continued during the last interglacial as well as the current one. (I mention him in particular as he can not be considered a skeptic on AGW.)
Secondly, notwithstanding steadily dropping temperatures since the end of the Holocene climatic optimum 5k years ago, the current interglacial does indeed seem stable on millenial timescales. On centennial and decadal timescales, however, there is significant evidence of climate disruptions in numerous proxies from many locations on the planet, although none of them seem to have been as drastic in their warming as the D-O events during the last glaciation. The Roman and the Medieval Warm period as well as the Little Ice Age are probably the best known of those fluctuations.
Thirdly, global average temperature is nothing more or less than an artificial product. By necessity we are limited to constructing historical global temperatures by combining numerous proxies. As seen in the literature, the debate is still ongoing which of the climate fluctuations suggested by the various proxies are sufficiently widespread to pronounce them global in nature. The state of knowledge in climate science today does not allow one to absolutely pronounce on historical global temperatures, which btw is rightly reflected in the papers themselves where scientists “suggest”, “propose”, ”assume”, and assign likelyhoods – not certainties – to their conclusions that are a far cry from pronouncements of unquestionable truths.
Lastly, returning to Greenland itself. According to the most recently completed Greenland Ice core project, NGRIP, it was 1 to 2 degrees warmer there during the MWP than today.
Thus, I would point out to you that the most recent warming in Greenland, and in the entire Northern Hemisphere, is unprecedented only if you limit your temperature review to less than a thousand years ago. Given that Greenland started warming more than 140 years ago, I suggest that at least part of the 3°C warming you mentioned has natural causes.
P.S. While Dr Alley is one of the most prominent scientists in the field, he is by no means the only expert and others are more cautious in their statements. The curator of NGRIP, Dr Jørgen Peder Steffensen, says the following at the end of the video another commenter linked to earlier in the thread:
“The problem is, that we – and I agree completely that we have had a global temperature increase in the 20th century. Yes. But an increase from what? Probably an increase from the lowest point we’ve had for the last 10 000 years. And this means that it will be very hard indeed to prove whether the increase of temperature in the 20th century was manmade or it’s a natural variation. That will be very hard because we made ourselves an extremely poor experiment – We started to observe metereology at the coldest spot in the last 10 000 years.” [This coldest point was reached 140 years ago]
http://climateclips.com/archives/132
RockyH says:
You are clearly a bit confused here. For example, Smokey talks about “Mann’s deliberately mendacious hiding of the ‘censored’ file which, had he used the data, would have shown declining temperatures instead of rising temperatures”. Then I show how Mann, in his 1999 GRL paper in fact said, “Positive calibration/variance
scores for the NH series cannot be obtained if this indicator is removed from the network of 12 …” In other words, he described the fact that this particular proxy is vital (amongst the datasets that go back for a full millenium) for getting rising temperatures over the period for which we have both instrumental and proxy data.
Where does the “bias” of my sources come in? My source is the actual Mann paper where he seems to talk about what Smokey claims he hid from his fellow scientists.
In other words, you seem to be saying, “Don’t trouble me with the facts…I have already decided that Mann is guilty of these things. So, if you bring facts, I’ll just repeat my mantra over again and hope that nobody notices.”
citizenschallenge says:
March 3, 2011 at 5:09 pm
And as much as you might try to deny it, the “establishment climatology community” has given every conceivable skeptical argument way more airing than the likes of you afford the “consensus science” –
Uh huh, so that’s why, for example, the “establishment climatology community’s” superior Collective Scientific Mind has so assiduously refused to release and has otherwise obstructed the release of its own “materials and methods” science, eh, leading to the necessity of the “skeptics” = real scientists, by the definition of science as given by the scientifc method, having to go to even the FOIA process in order to try to “afford” the CO2=CAGW Climate Science “science” an actual scientific review and hearing?
Your argument above is illogical since it is simply a postulate which also contradicts the facts. Its PNS “quality” wouldn’t be fit enough even for my 7 year old grandaughter, or even on a par with “Dora the Explorer’s” thinking, which starts to address the minds kids at about the age of 4 and up.
Being charitable, since you sound more like a groupthink cloned Parrot, are you by chance eadler’s twin? [My apologies to the real Parrots.]
citizenschallenge has not got a clue about how the scientific method works. Not a clue. Scientific skeptics have nothing to prove. I’m not agenda driven, because I have nothing to prove.
And RockyH says about Joel: “I dont think your a real scientist, you just play one on the intertubes.”
LOL! Too true. Here’s a Joel Shore quote that gives us some insight to his cognitive dissonance:
“The problems lie not with the models but with the observational data itself.”
Ri-i-i-i-i-ght. Observational data is wrong and computer models are right. So why hasn’t Joel made a killing in the market with his fantastic computer models?
And regarding my prior post showing that almost 97% of CO2 is natural, Joel wrote:
“If you don’t want to be taken seriously by any real scientist, I strongly suggest that you continue to repeat the 3% nonsense.”
Well, it’s nonsense to Joel, anyway. But he suffers from cognitive dissonance. Rational adults can just check the IPCC’s numbers.
Smokey says:
Since, unlike you two, I use my real name here, it is easy enough to check my scientific background. Hint: google scholar is your friend.
I don’t think you even quoted the whole sentence, let alone the context around it that provided the reasoning why the data was suspect in the particular case of which I was speaking. It is amusing how someone who has such high standards for the honesty of others seems to have such abysmally low standards for himself!
Let me give you a little hint here…See that number “absorption”; it matters too. Let me try to make this simple for you: If I proposed withdrawing $100 per day from your bank account and transferring to mine, you would probably object. However, using your logic, I can make it more palatable to you by making the following modification: We can set it up so that your bank also withdraws $10000 per day from your account to themselves and then immediately transfers that $10000 back the same day. Then you could not possibly have any significant objection to my withdrawing of a paltry $100 per day from your bank account. After all, it is only 1% of the withdrawals that are occurring from your account and hence it makes hardly any difference at all to your bank balance…It is completely negligible! Heck, if you still object, we can have the bank transfer back and forth $100,000 per day from your account and then the $100 withdrawal to my account will amount to 0.1%…even more negligible!
I stand by my statement: “If you don’t want to be taken seriously by any real scientist, I strongly suggest that you continue to repeat the 3% nonsense.” Please, go ahead, make it the centerpiece of your argument. The more you repeat it, the sillier you look to real scientists.
Joel Shore is twisting himself into a pretzel trying to explain that what he said isn’t really what he said. That’s OK. Cognitive dissonance is a viable excuse.
The central issue, as always, is this: does CO2 cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe? Well, does it??
Answer: there is zero evidence that CO2 causes any global harm. Joel is flogging a dead horse, like the rest of his cohorts from climatology clown college. Mann, Schmidt, Amman, Trenberth, and the rest of the self-serving climate charlatans have all been repeatedly debunked. They are not credible. That’s why they all hide out from any honest debate. If they really beieved in their conjecture, they would stand up like men and defend it.
Instead, they take pot shots from the sidelines, then run and hide like whipped dogs into the safety of their Ivory Towers. None of them have the balls to face skeptics publicly, mano a mano. They are craven cowards, intent only on keeping their gravy train on the rails. And the truth is not in them.
March 3, 2011 at 7:16 pm Smokey says: “Ri-i-i-i-i-ght. Observational data is wrong and computer models are right. So why hasn’t Joel made a killing in the market with his fantastic computer models?”
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CC: Smokey, it’s the cherry picking of observational data that is wrong!
You should give the full scope of data a good-faith effort, not just that sliver which suits your particular purposes… or one risks falling victim to Dunning-Kruger. {http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201006/when-ignorance-begets-confidence-the-classic-dunning-kruger-effect}
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Smokey says: “And regarding my prior post showing that almost 97% of CO2 is natural, Joel wrote:“If you don’t want to be taken seriously by any real scientist, I strongly suggest that you continue to repeat the 3% nonsense.”
Well, it’s nonsense to Joel, anyway. But he suffers from cognitive dissonance. Rational adults can just check the IPCC’s numbers.”
~ ~ ~
CC: NO. Smokey, where the nonsense comes in, is that you, et al., don’t make any attempt to acknowledge that this 97% of CO2 has, over eons, reached a dynamic natural equilibrium breathing in and out of our plant’s biosphere as the seasons progress.
The deal is that over the past decades humanity has managed to supercharge that ±315ppm background CO2 level to ±390ppm. 75ppm above normal natural background absorption processes!
Check out this carbon clock {http://www.dbcca.com/dbcca/EN/;jsessionid=103278DC7A96917252F16ABB70EE31BD} ~
society is injecting ± 1000 pounds of GHGs into our atmosphere every second.
GHGs that have no natural place to go and be of constructive use… except to warm the atmosphere and acidify the oceans, ok and also to help some specially adapted plants to grow better especially Kudzu, Poison Ivy and such vines, but not near enough to offset their other cascading effects.
Now that’s big, how do you deny it?
75ppm above normal natural background absorption processes!
Perhaps I should have said “historical background levels”… excuse me.
citizenchallenge brings up the thoroughly debunked canard that the oceans are “acidifying.” He’s so far behind the curve that it’s embarassing for him.
The central issue is this: does CO2 cause global harm? If so, identify the damage, and show convincingly that it is due specifically to carbon dioxide.
If evidence of measurable, quantifiable damage to the planet cannot be shown, the entire CO2=CAGW canard comes crashing down. Demonizing harmless “carbon” is simply a propaganda tactic designed to raise taxes and exert political control. Useful idiots are most useful to the propagandists when they repeat silly alarmist talking points without understanding the science or the scientific method.
citizenschallenge says:
March 3, 2011 at 11:09 pm
“GHGs that have no natural place to go and be of constructive use… except to warm the atmosphere and acidify the oceans, ok and also to help some specially adapted plants to grow better especially Kudzu, Poison Ivy and such vines, but not near enough to offset their other cascading effects.”
You’re not serious about the “constructive use” part are you? Let’s see if we burn natural gas CH4
CH4 + O2 –> CO2 + 2H2O
Now CO2 can be used by plants to make carbohydrates and H2O(a GHG) can be used by almost anything in the biosphere including the plants in carbohydrates. Did I mention carbohydrates. That’s food for you and me. So there are other “constructive” things CO2 and H2O can do.
yea, like hold in more heat in our atmosphere, which then opens the way for more atmospheric moisture and more heating, which then opens the way for altering hydrological cycles, which also effects things like droughts and mega storm fronts… flooding (yes global warming produces both.), for proxy data why not look at that wonderful thermometer, our planet’s cryosphere ~ http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
======================
Smokey “citizenchallenge brings up the thoroughly debunked canard that the oceans are “acidifying.” He’s so far behind the curve that it’s embarrassing for him.”
~ ~ ~
If it’s such a thoroughly debunked canard why does Science Daily presenting so many studies showing areas concern? {Or will you remind they are all part of the conspiracy?}
All the papers cited in your WUWT link are behind a paywall – but I will keep trying to find something on them. I am curious to see what they say.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
New Ocean Acidification Study Shows Added Danger to Already Struggling Coral Reefs
ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2010) — Over the next century, recruitment of new corals could drop by 73 percent, as rising carbon dioxide levels turn the oceans more acidic, suggests a new study led by scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. The research findings reveal a new danger to the already threatened Caribbean and Florida reef Elkhorn corals.
~ ~ ~
Acidification of Oceans May Contribute to Global Declines of Shellfish
ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2010) — The acidification of the Earth’s oceans due to rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) may be contributing to a global decline of clams, scallops and other shellfish by interfering with the development of shellfish larvae, according to two Stony Brook University scientists, whose findings are published online and in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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Rising Carbon Dioxide and ‘Acidified’ Waters Found in Puget Sound, Off Seattle US
ScienceDaily (July 19, 2010) — Scientists at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory and School of Oceanography (UW)have discovered that the water chemistry in the Hood Canal and the Puget Sound main basin is becoming more “acidified,” or corrosive, as the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These changes could have considerable impacts on the region’s shellfish industry over the next several decades.
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Leading Scientists Call for More Effort in Tackling Rising Ocean Acidity
ScienceDaily (May 19, 2010) — Ten years ago, ocean acidification was a phenomenon only known to small group of ocean scientists. The ‘Impacts of Ocean Acidification’ science policy briefing presented by the European Science Foundation on 20 May for European Maritime Day 2010 gives a comprehensive view of current research.
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Carbon Dioxide Emissions Causing Ocean Acidification to Progress at Unprecedented Rate
ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2010) — The changing chemistry of the world’s oceans is a growing global problem, says the summary of a congressionally requested study by the National Research Council
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Ecosystems Under Threat from Ocean Acidification
ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2010) — Acidification of the oceans as a result of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide could have significant effects on marine ecosystems, according to Michael Maguire presenting at the Society for General Microbiology’s spring meeting in Edinburgh.
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U.S. Pacific Coast Waters Turning More Acidic
ScienceDaily (May 23, 2008) — An international team of scientists surveying the waters of the continental shelf off the West Coast of North America has discovered for the first time high levels of acidified ocean water within 20 miles of the shoreline, raising concern for marine ecosystems from Canada to Mexico.
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And there is plenty more where this came from. What should a person make of all this data?
Well, Smokey I have read one of the reports, but don’t see anything to justify your statement: “thoroughly debunked canard that the oceans are “acidifying.””
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/322/5907/1466.2.fullComment on “Phytoplankton Calcification in a High-CO2 World”
@ur momisugly Joel Shore:
You want people to look at this file?
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2008/09/02/0805721105.DCSupplemental/0805721105SI.pdf
Page after page, all those reconstruction graphs, attacked with thick red or black crayon strokes to cover up what’s actually happening as they get closer to the present. The “instrumental record,” either CRU or HAD, and not always clearly labeled as to which. Some instances, they don’t even label the ham-handed concealment, as with Fig. S7b and S10. Yet even then, with the clarity of the electronic record and ability to zoom in clearly, you can still often see the ends of the proxy series peek out from under the thick covering, and notice how far out of line the instrumental records, with the sharp rise at the end, are in comparison to the other data. As is clear in many of the graphs, without said instrumental records they have nothing, we’ve been coming out of a cold period and still aren’t as warm as it’s previously been.
Then there’s Fig. 9, showing those 19 proxy records. Garbled mess that it is, it can still be seen that something’s off with the Tiljander series. Nearly flat for over 1200 years, with something causing them to get rather noisy at the end, except for the most non-flat looking one, xraydenseave, which has a 10^4 scaling factor according to the mushed-in note and otherwise shows nothing remarkable happening. Indeed, overwhelmingly the non-Tiljander series show that nothing remarkable is happening.
It’s been repeatedly shown here on WUWT and elsewhere how the homogenized pasteurized highly-processed “instrumental records” shouldn’t be trusted as they stand. In this document we see consistently how said records were used to cover up what the proxies were trying to say about more recent temperatures, laid right on top of the proxies wide and thick. Just looking at how they did it, one wonders “Are they trying to conceal something?” Then you can look closer at the electronic version, and see what it was.
And this is the “science” you endorse and defend? And you want people to see such obvious glaring attempts at deception?
citizenschallenge,
Pseudo-Science Daily is your Authority?? Well, no wonder you’re so confused.
Here is an article by Willis Eschenbach debunking the ocean acidification BS. It’s got some good graphs that totally deconstruct the claim that the oceans’ pH is rising. Read the comments, too. Get up to speed. Learn some accurate facts for a change.
kadaka:
What I showed that paper for was to demonstrate that Smokey apparently was not telling an accurate story about Mann’s use of the Tiljander data. (To be fair to Smokey, it may be more that others didn’t tell him the accurate story than that he actively tried to deceive us. Still, a real skeptic would not simply take a serious accusation of deception against a respected scientist without trying to verify its veracity.) Mann actually did exactly what any good scientist would do when faced with using some data that there is some dispute about: He showed what the results were like both with and without this data.
Now, you want to raise new issues with the paper, arguing about the use of the modern temperature series along with the proxy reconstruction. However, despite your attempts to impugn the modern instrumental temperature series (which noone has shown to have any significant problems despite the various hype here and other places), the fact is that it is well-verified: If you really think you can’t trust the instrumental record, you could replace with the UAH satellite record analysis by skeptics Roy Spencer and John Christy and you would get basically the same thing. Here is their data http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt and note that the trend since 1979 shows that Northern Hemisphere temperatures over land (which is what most of the figures in that paper refer to) in the lower troposphere have gone up by ~0.75 C over that time period!
The main issue with the proxy records is that the data tend not to be quite up-to-date and thus miss some of the recent temperature rise. And, if you want to see detailed comparisons between the proxy records and the instrumental data, Figure S4 (and Fig. 2 of the original paper) blows up the validation intervals so you can see in gory detail how the proxy and instrumental data compare over those times.
I am not trying to claim that these proxy-based reconstructions are the end-all and be-all. I happen to think they constitute one of the weakest arguments for AGW, given all the genuine issues and uncertainties associated with the proxies and also the fact that the whole connection these reconstructions give between the rise in CO2 and temperature is only circumstantial. I much prefer more direct attribution methods, as well as a fundamental understanding of the physics behind the relationship between CO2 and temperature, and past “empirical experiments” such as the ice age – interglacial oscillations.
Sorry Smokey, but we’ll have to write off “citizenschallenge” as another of the deluded. I looked at his blog.
Peter, and I assume that’s his name as it’s the one on the blog posts, posted the following in his first post, Why start this blog?, on August 2, 2008:
Having said that, he then chose (C)AGW, endorsed by the establishment, hyped by special interests and the media, supported by corporate interests wanting to sell their expensive “solutions,” beloved viewpoint of officialdom, whose deceptions and mis-truths are regularly torn apart on WUWT and elsewhere and exposed for they what they are, to champion.
Here we are, the skeptics, the voice in the wilderness, regularly fighting against the money-fueled political propaganda machine that is (C)AGW. There Peter is, having made his declaration, standing there as willing defender of the establishment.
It is sad.