Earth's Climate System Is Ridiculously Complex – With Draft Link Tutorial

Great work. I agree, climate science is in it’s infancy.

Holy….!! This post will go down in history as the post that killed the AGW debate once in for all.

Quantify those factors exactly and all interrelationships, type up a quick model and run it. With all the chaos in the system it probably wouldn’t be worth squat.
Can you have it done by next week?

To be honest I think your over simplifying things a bit.

You forgot a significant variable: Biological. Everything that isn’t human on land, air and sea.

Just Great – a perfect reference guild to the climate!

The point is, you need to keep it short. Attention spans these days are vanishingly small – if that wasn’t the case we wouldn’t be in the fix we are today. Although I must say that even in the era I grew up in (60’s/70’s), your post would still have been TLDR.
The message that it is complicated doesn’t have to be communicated by demonstration; there are better ways to get that message across.
IMHO, YMMV, etc.

Really informative.
However, isn’t sulfur, sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid, more “important” parts of the atmosphere, alongside soot, than perhaps argon? Not to say argon might not have a major impact on earth’s atmosphere, no studies seem to exist, but pretty much everything sulfur has been studied as far as everyone seem to know.
If pointing out details . . . :p
Also, isn’t there really no study that has been done on how Earth behaves when the good old Sol quiets down and withdraws its influence into itself? I find that very weird considering what we already know about gravitational forces and all.

heh. maybe people with vanishingly small attention spans are not the target market?
very cogent and acute, justthefactswuwt.
somebody already mentioned biology – the white cliffs of dover, carrera marble, oxygen, coal, forest fires (it’s live stuff that burns), methane, ocean surface albedo from algae –
makes one wonder… bravo for a winner.

Dunno about just a page, you’re in serious danger of gathering enough data here for a whole new website – well done, one heck of a project. Good luck with it.
I’d like to add mention that many, if not most or all, of the oscillations mentioned in “Gravitation” are probably also synchronised by resonance effects of the whole terrestrial system (honourable mention here of the ‘Stadium wave’ which suggests how the energy may transfer between the different oscillations). I also suspect related resonsnce influences in both solar system and solar data – after all, the whole system has had plenty of time to fall into ‘sync’, and we know that weather is broadly cyclical.
Oh. And you may need, under “Anthropogenic”: “Political interference with any or all of the above”. It’ll be one heck of a parameter to calculate, but boy, if someone could work out a formula allowing that to be allowed for …

But could it all just boil down to the net size, intensity and positioning of the surface air pressure distribution?
Variations in that distribution acting via the location of the various climate zones and the weather within them seem to be well capable of stabilising everything thrown at the climate system over a period of more than 4 billion years so as to avoid the loss of our liquid oceans.

Great start! Presentation is key though as most true believers have hardly any attention span, especially with content that may give rise to cognitive dissonance.

This is great “justthefacts”, what a round up – Thanks you, I am but a layperson in this so it’s lots of very interesting reading. Anthony may have to make your post another tab on the reference page.
My only concern is with the wiki links – as they still reference AGW in these articles…like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Two caveats are necessary: that anthropogenic effects may modify or even overwhelm orbital effects and that the mechanism by which orbital forcing influences climate is not well understood.

And yes, I know to take ‘their AGW claim’ part with a grain of salt the size of Montreal – but it makes me doubt them and wonder if they were as cavalier about other details that didn’t suite their political views.

So which one (or set) of those variables caused the Little Ice Age (end of MWP to 1900)?
The volcanoes are too short-lived. The TSI is too invariable. The UV lacks the energy %. The Milankovitch cycles are too short. In fact, we don’t have anything concrete as of yet.

I would have pointed out that the Milankovitch cycles never exactly repeat, as the moon is slowly moving away from the earth.

I didn’t notice a category for the effects on earths climate from passing comets, meteor Impacts and rare asteroid impact events, Meteors and interplanetary dust particles and the gases from these particles add about [Add an estimate here] tons of mass to Earth and earths atmosphere each year, it could be as significant or not as man made co2 but it is another factor.

Well how about the role of submarines, surface boats and ships, and surfers on the mixing/interruption of oceanic currents? Didn’t think of that one didja? 🙂
On the serious side how about the possible affect(s) of large scale wind farms on the atmosphere. For your consideration:
http://www.savewesternny.org/environment.html
and
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~keith/WindAndClimateNote.html

This is the article I have been waiting for!
A while ago I wanted to gather together all the parameters that would need to go into THE MODEL we would need to predict climate. I soon realised that I did not have anywhere near the knowledge and from this list I can see that I was not even close. (I came up with only about a dozen factors)
The list above is an excellent start and can only grow.
What might also be interesting would be to produce a matrix indicating how each factor affects any of the other factors.
When that is done then maybe Al Gore or the Hockey Team will be kind enough to show us how they have solved it all.
I mean they have solved it haven’t they?…

“I didn’t notice a category for the effects on earths climate from passing comets, meteor Impacts and rare asteroid impact events, Meteors and interplanetary dust particles and the gases from these particles add about [Add an estimate here] tons of mass to Earth and earths atmosphere each year, it could be as significant or not as man made co2 but it is another factor.”
Sorry!! that category is there, I found it the third time I looked. It’s 1:58 am here and I’m half asleep. 🙂
good job!!

Wil says:

That particular area is not a normal ice melt – it should not melt in the middle first.

There are places where the water never melts, they are called polynya.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynya

Bystander says:
June 30, 2011 at 3:40 pm
“That seems to be a silly thing to say.- there is a vast amount of science being done in each area and the basic physics and chemistry are know.It is like saying because the human body is complex no one should pursue an understanding of disease.”
Cool!!! So, now you are going to show us the physical hypotheses that enable explanation and prediction of forcings and that go beyond Arrhenius’ work to reveal that dangerous warming from CO2 is coming down the pike? Huh? Huh? Are you going to do it?

I need about a week or two to study all of this, Justthefacts, but your logic is impeccable.
Thanks for this and I plan to print everything out and put it in a notebook to study.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

The whole point is to counter AGW as sound bite: “It’s the CO2.” “No, it’s far more complicated, and we don’t know as yet the proper weighting of the many factors which produce climate — check this out.”

I have always wondered why scientists had to go to grad school! Now we know! Now it is clear why people with little training are so easily confused.

To Wermet,
Exactly correct, these folks don’t even have a clue about how much they do not know….
I would much rather calculate how many angel’s would fit on the tip of a pin than attempt to predict the temperature in one hundred years………
I have been humbled many times when what I built did not perform as my model said it should, and I was just working with electronic circuits and optics, stuff that we supposedly totally understand.
In my field the proof (aka “in the pudding”) is what the real hardware does, not what the computer says “SHOULD” happen. Funny that planes even manage to fly when I’m sure there is a computer model someplace that shows it is NOT POSSIBLE.
Cheers, Kevin

You could, as well, consider the computational complexity of the computer algorithm that accurately models climate change using all known and unknown inputs.
We already know that local weather prediction algorithms frequently fail 24 hours out into the future. They can fail 30 minutes out. Billions have been spent on the algorithms since the first one failed miserably. The climate modelers claim to have algorithms that accurately predict the entire global climate 1, 5, 50, and 100 years into the future.
The complexity of the algorithm that supports all of the known inputs above very likely exceeds all the computing power of all computers for all time combined, and would probably take millions of years just to move from one climate model moment to the next.
In computer science, complexity is measured using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation.
The algorithm (at the bottom of the page) used by weather.gov is an amazing O(1):
http://www.weather.gov/om/educ/activit/coffee.htm

Earth’s Climate System Is Ridiculously Complex – With Draft Link Tutorial
Derek Sorensen says:
June 30, 2011 at 4:05 pm
The point is, you need to keep it short. Attention spans these days are vanishingly small – if that wasn’t the case we wouldn’t be in the fix we are today. Although I must say that even in the era I grew up in (60?s/70?s), your post would still have been TLDR.
QED

Oops, correction, Nabro is now taking a break.
African Volcanic Eruption Ceases – Irish Weather Online
http://www.irishweatheronline.com/news/earthquakesvolcanos/african-volcanic-eruption-ceases/22224.html
But the one in Chile is still producing ash clouds.
http://www.volcano.si.edu/reports/usgs/index.cfm?wvarweek=20110622#puyehue
Crops look a little better with the usda report. I’ve seen late plantings like this do alright.
Corn Plunges Most Since November, Wheat Falls as U.S. Reports Acreage Gain -Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-30/wheat-plunges-to-11-month-low-corn-drops-after-u-s-reports-acreage-gains.html

My recent pet theory is that the whole idea of cooling from volcanoes may be wrong – their net effect may even be warming! What got me interested, is that the stratosphere showed a very clear stepwise cooling as an aftereffect of the stratospheric warming the El Chichon and Pinatubo eruptions: http://www.ssmi.com/data/msu/graphics/tls/plots/sc_Rss_compare_TS_channel_tls_v03_3.png
I was wondering if this was due to destruction of ozone as the atmosphere “cleaned itself” after the eruptions, but yesterday I found a paper that may offer an explanation: One longer-time effect of the volcano eruptions was increased stratospheric water vapor.
” If the frequency of volcanic activity was high enough, then a water vapor anomaly would be introduced into the lower stratosphere before the anomaly due to the previous eruption had disappeared. The result would be threefold in the long term: stratospheric cooling, stratospheric humidification, and surface warming due to the positive radiative forcing associated with the water vapor.”
See: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442(2003)016%3C3525%3AAGSOVE%3E2.0.CO%3B2#h1
So could part of the warming in the 80s and 90s actually be caused by – and only briefly counteracted by! – the El Chichon and Pinatubo eruptions? I think so (but in the meantime AGW proponents are using volcano cooling for what it’s worth and even ignore the step change and talk about a downward “trend” in stratosphere temperatures as a “proof of AGW theory).
Just wanted to throw in yet another effect that may add to the complexity 😉

With regard to the earth´s rotation causing plate tectonics, there are additional issues such as lithospheric convection and heat loss. Heat loss is achieved by so-called hot-spot volcanoes. Hawaii is an example on earth, whereas Mons Olympus is an example on Venus. On earth, in addition, the planet loses heat via plate tectonics, via lines of volcanoes at mid ocean ridges and at subduction zones (upwelling and downwelling limbs of convection respectively).

Sorry Mons Olympus is on Mars

“If you don’t mind I will send a hard copy to the UK government Chief Scientific Advisor. It’ll reduce him to tears.”
Yes, tears of launghter. I read yesterday that HMG was raking in £40 billion per year in “green taxes”, and he is in charge of the “settled science” that underpins it. The Ministry of Truth will never admit that they are wrong.
Sorry for the rant – this is an excellent post and a good point of reference – please keep it up and develop it.

Excellent post and reference page, justthefacts. Kudos.
Additional input on this section, especially links to sources indicating biological impacts on climate, are most welcome.
If the carbon cycle is important, then:
=======
Inconceivable Bugs Eat Methane on the Ocean Floor, Science, July 2001
Most of the methane that rises toward the surface of the ocean floor vanishes before it even reaches the water. On page 484 of this issue, a team of researchers provides the clinching evidence for where all that methane goes: It is devoured by vast hordes of mud-dwelling microbes that belong to a previously unknown species of archaea.
These methane-eating microbes–once thought to be impossible–now look to be profoundly important to the planet’s carbon cycle.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/293/5529/418.summary
========
And phytoplankton account for 50 percent of photosynthesis and oxygen::
http://www.frequenseamarinephytoplankton.com/What-is-Phytoplankton.html
North Atlantic phytoplankton bloom, ocean, clouds, and transcontinental contrails – a pretty picture:
http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/ve/1193/S1999158143752.png

“Just the Facts” I like your mission! I missed explicit mention of the link between lithosphere and atmosphere through limestone deposition. We know subduction drives volcanism, but what drives subduction rates?
Steven Mosher: I generally agree with your comments – but I’m with Wermet here. Earth’s climate is clearly driven by fluid dynamics, in the atmosphere – the oceans and within the mantle. Not only that, there is layer on layer of complexity within that dynamic system: the chemistry, the physical processes. If fluid dynamics was so great in a model, no one would need full-size wind-tunnels to make racing cars or aircraft. How is there any point worrying about the detail (radiative impacts of CO2) if you can’t get the basic transport right (and there are a lot of transport processes you need to get right if you are forecasting 50 years into the future!).
As others’ have taken issue with you already: the line that has made it through to the general populace who know little of the science is EXACTLY that CO2 is the only villain (and there’s no point debating otherwise). Now if those noble folk at AGU DON’T think that too, they are beholden to the public to make a bit more of a fuss.
I don’t doubt for one moment that most of those at AGU are sincere in their desire to understand Earth’s physical processes better. Earth is a fantastic system, and well worth studying. My objection is that study should take it’s place at the funding pot with all the other fields of science; not scamper onto the next hot topic leaving a trail of half-finished experiments and semi-finished theories and very little conclusion in it’s wake. The more complex the problem, surely the more systematic we should be in trying to solve it? I could be wrong, but I don’t see the systematic, transparent review and assimilation in climate science that you get in mature sciences like chemistry, geology, mathematics and physics or even medicine. That’s why I think Just the Facts aims are noble.
So why would it be that so many of those involved in real climate science are unwilling to publicise the uncertainty and the complexity and (largely) silently endorse the CAGW line? The obvious answer is: because it suits them, because they are dependent on the funding, and that funding is dependent on the problem being real and significant and urgent. It’s not necessarily corruption – though it is certainly fertile grounds for that, it is simple common sense. Unfortunately that ‘common-sense’ is leading to the very real debate around the policy response to a spectre of CAGW when it’s obvious to anyone without a vested interest that government market subsidisation to cut small amounts of anthropogenic CO2 is pointless. I very strongly resent paying a tax for that.

A. Feht: “Very useful list, clearly demonstrating the unbelievable arrogance and ignorance of IPCC.”
I must have missed a step. Could you explain how this list reflects on IPCC?

To the list in section 9. Albedo, I would add plants.
Over the course of a year, plants change, which in turn affects the albedo in the region containing the plants. Additionally, any changes to climate are going to affect what plants grow in a region, which will in turn affect the average albedo of that region.

Michael Tobis says:
June 30, 2011 at 4:51 pm
The alarmists are making the claim that CO2 is big enough to worry about based on the claim that there are no other known mechanism that could have caused the warming of the last 100 years, therefore CO2 caused it.
This post is just further evidence that this belief is not justified. It also puts a bullet between the eyes (oh no, did I just make a death threat?) of the claim that we can believe the output of the models because they account for everything.

I’ve tried to explain the complexity of climate by referencing what I call the 5 spheres
biosphere
hydrosphere
atmosphere
lithosphere
cryosphere
This alone defines 10 interfaces between the 5 spheres. And that doesn’t include interactions within each sphere. Everyone of these areas of interaction is known poorly at best, yet a solid understanding of all of them is vital in order to make predictions regarding the climate.

Espen has eyeballed a complex graph (a more detailed reference would help; there’s no information as to what time series that is or whether it constitutes published data) and applied an informal interpretation to it. My strong expectation is you can’t get anything remotely resembling statistical significance for your interpretation. An alternative view is that there is some slight overshoot in recovery from a volcanic event for some reason, and that is all superimposed on a trend. It would be very hard on a record of that duration to make the distinction: you only have two events after all. Indeed, you’d have to make some very rigorous physical (non-statistical) characterizations of the signal to have any hope of getting anything beyond the trend out.
Regarding the other question, it is important to understand that atmospheric column moisture and the hydrological cycle are different things. Both are expected to increase, but there is no elementary guarantee that they are tightly correlated with each other. For moisture I come up with Trenberth, K. E., J. Fasullo, and L. Smith (2005), Trends and variability in column-integrated atmospheric water vapor, Clim. Dyn., 24, 741–758. For precipitation/evaporation there is Zhou et al, Recent trends of the tropical hydrological cycle inferred from Global Precipitation Climatology Project and International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project data, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 116, D09101, 16 PP., 2011 doi:10.1029/2010JD015197.
As proof that scientists are not PR professionals, I also offer you Kevin Trenberth’s visually hideous PDF on these subjects. http://www.agci.org/dB/PPTs/04S2_KTrenberth_0713.pdf It otherwise looks very solid. One might wish to have the audio for some parts. Please note especially the slide called “a conundrum” (the 15th I think). This is a succinct statement of mainstream science about anticipated precipitation changes, and it stands alone without the audio well enough.

“…[O]ur understanding of Earth’s climate system is currently rudimentary at best, our measurement capabilities are limited and our historical record is laughably brief.”
Oh my goodness – a climate denier just made a patently offensive statement. Whatever do I do?!? Wait, wait, I know! I’ll consult my nifty “Skeptical Scientist” iPhone, Android or Nokia app for a witty yet damning rebuttal – http://www.skepticalscience.com/software.shtml .
I’ll use the terms “climate, natural, cycle, and complex.” Well, for good measure let me throw in “Watts.” And the result is:
CHALLENGE THE DENIER WITH: “Then you admit confirming not denying you ever said that?” – “Bloom County”
Phew! Now, that’s a rebuttal with logic a denier cannot refute! With the sanctity of AGW affirmed anew, I’m off to check my carbon footprint – http://www.takepart.com/actions/act-now-calculate-your-carbon-footprint/33587 .
Just for giggles… the rebuttal best poised to answer the odious statement above:
“No known natural forcing fits the fingerprints of observed warming except anthropogenic greenhouse gases,” – Argument 59.
Well, I’m sold! So, put the above in your pipe and smoke it, deniers! Personally, I weep for the generation raised on such social networking drivel.

@- Espen says:
July 1, 2011 at 7:17 am
“Regarding the hydrological cycle: Do you know if there are any publicly available plotted time series of tropospheric water vapor? I can’t find any.”
You can find the data available listed and discussed in detail here –
http://scienceofdoom.com/2011/06/05/water-vapor-trends-part-two/
Also in the preceding and succeeding parts…
@- Richard M says:
July 1, 2011 at 8:07 am
“So, you believe “it’s the Sun”? Or are you stating CO2 changes over 6 months accounts for the changes? Oh wait, you are trying to equate “weather” with “climate”. Isn’t that interesting.”
Okay fair point, if you restrict ‘climate’ to changes in the the average of temperature, rainfall, humidity, snowcover, ice extent, glacier mass balance etc over a >30 yr period then seasonal changes are certainly NOT climate.
I am not sure many people attribute the difference between summer and winter as just ‘weather’ though…
The point I was trying to make, perhaps too obscurely, was that this list of factors, although extensive, does not include some very important factors because it seems to be unconnected with any sense of the relative magnitude, timescale and importance of the factors.
The distribution of sunlight over the surface is not only responsible for the seasons, but is also the trigger factor for the last ~3million years for the end of glacial periods as spring snow cover gets more readily melted in the N hemisphere when the Milankovitch cycle alters that distribution of sunlight.
Just as the seasons change when the distribution of sunlight alters.
A list like this is scientifically useless unless it is grounded in actual climate changes and what DOES cause them.
Other posters have compared this to the complexity of human biology and the problems in medicine.
If a patient presents with a number of signs and symptoms consulting a VERY long list of all the things that might affect the health of the individual is pointless. And human biology is FAR more complex than the climate.
What is done is to look at what has been found to cause those symptoms before and use them as a fingerprint to prepare a much shorter list with various levels of probability of the known causes of similar cases. Past research into the epidemiology of a disease. and what IS known about the biology of illness has discovered what causes a particular set of symptoms.
The methodology of research into complex and often chaotic systems – of which human health is one of the most difficult – is to approach it from the end of the effects and then look for the causes.
Not to make a long and exhaustive list of possible causes with no distinction as to magnitude or timescale and then claim that in the
face of such complexity any conclusions are impossible.
If the patient presents with raised a raised temperature and further investigation reveals an abnormally raised level of CO2 with predicted changes in the surface emissions and downwelling long wave radiation over less than a century you have a ‘fingerprint’ of a condition that eliminates most of the long all-inclusive list of possible causes.

Michael Tobis says:
July 1, 2011 at 6:37 am
I must have missed a step. Could you explain how this list reflects on IPCC?
In a very simple and obvious way, Michael. IPCC does NOT take into account most of the influence factors and feedback mechanisms listed above.

proving the earth is more than a few thousand years old and man is a slightly evolved monkey shut up the religious.
—
Why do you believe that this should or could shut up the religious?

“Ridiculous?” No – it is totally normal for climate (the “earth system”) to be characterised by profoundly complex nonlinear-nonequilibrium dynamics.
It would be ridiculous for it to be anything else.
But a great and valuable post none-the-less.

Ged says:
July 1, 2011 at 9:59 am
“The human body is also not nearly as complex. We also know the human body intimately … Why have theories, we know what’s acting during the disease states, but we have no idea how they begin, what triggers them, or how to cure them.”
So no point in accessing any treatment in the event of injury or disease ?
sarc/off
But you seem to suggest that if human biology is less complex than the climate, and known in much greater detail BUT we still have no idea about important aspects of it then the climate would be even less knowable?
This would be an appeal to permanent ignorance of the subject unless you have a suggestion for a means of dispelling it with research. Can you suggest a better approach than to look at the effects and track back to causes?
Perhaps this is the point of an exhaustive list of causal factors at all levels of the total climate system. If you observe an effect, then you can look through a list of possible causes and determine which could, and could not, be contributing to the observations.

“You accused me of making an unsubstantiated statement … The burden of proof is on you.”
I find that position peculiar, to say the least.

While I continue to object to the “stair-step” characterization, I acknowledge that others have used it. I thank Espen for raising an interesting issue. I withdraw and apologize for my offhand dismissal of it.
I am reading the recent review article of Seidel et al: Stratospheric Temperature Trends: Our Evolving Understanding (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate ChangeEarly View, Article first published online: 17 JUN 2011)
They say: “In contrast to the relatively unchanging expectations of surface and tropospheric warming primarily induced by greenhouse gas increases, stratospheric temperature change
expectations have arisen from experiments with a wider variety of model types, showing more complex trend patterns associated with a greater diversity of forcing agents.” That said, at first glance their figure 5 seems to indicate that long-lived greenhouse gas forcing dominates the observed trends.

Far out and solid Just the Facts. (good job) Keep pushing, keep pushing on..
Lest we forget..
Interstellar clouds..
Cloud Tripping Through the Milky Way
..Linsky says we’ll enter the G cloud in less than 5,000 years — perhaps even tomorrow.
Once that happens, there’s a chance the G cloud will affect the Sun’s solar wind and Earth’s climate.
For instance, a dense enough cloud could push in on the solar wind and pollute the interplanetary medium, decreasing the Sun’s intensity and cooling the Earth. A very dense cloud could even produce an ice age on the Earth. Luckily, the G cloud isn’t dense enough to cause an ice age. It would only cool the earth a little relative to the environment we’re in now. Still, Linsky says, it’s only a matter of time until we encounter a cloud that is dense enough to radically alter our climate.
Until then, however, there is a lot to learn about the clouds currently flowing through the heavens around us.
http://jila.colorado.edu/content/cloud-tripping-through-milky-way
Accretion of,
Helium
Hydrogen
Carbon
Oxygen
Dust
etc..etc..
Good to see also you had mention of Interstellar Magnetic Fields, like the one they think is denting the heliosphere bubble in the nose.
sshh don’t tell Dr. S.. eeee

One more thing, originally signed on to this site as earthunderfire, Neve posted using that name that I recall. How do I get rid of it?

“Please let me know if you have any suggested improvements”
A couple of major factors such as solar and oceanic variability would pretty much swamp everything else with all the lesser factors simply offsetting each other on average over time.
Would it be possible to rank the various items and processes on the list in order of significance or perhaps group them in batches of compareable magnitudes?
In practice I think the climate system is more simple than such a list suggests because of the primacy of a small number of major factors.

Michael Tobis finds a presumption of innocence to be a “peculiar” notion.
No wonder he trusts the conclusions of an irresponsible and corrupt UN organization.

Just the facts,
People like Michael Tobis do not want to see facts. They only throw unsubstantiated accusations and inane party line cliche’s. And rationality is the last thing in the world you can expect from them. Look at all his posts in this thread. Entirely devoid of any rationale or facts.
It’s good that you put up these counter arguments with facts which will show every time to every one as to how shallow and devoid of facts arguments of such people are.

To continue the human body analogy:
While we know a lot about the human body, we still don’t know a great deal. With our current understanding of genetics, brain functions, physiology, psychology, education, and group dynamics, can we predict what college your infant will go to with any level of certainty? Or for that matter, what you will want to eat for breakfast next Tuesday?
You may counter that we don’t know if you will want bacon and eggs or cereal, but we know that if you eat a lot you will get fat. However, we don’t really understand why you get fat and I don’t when we eat the same amount and do the same activity. We may recognize it happens, but not understand the dynamics of why. And on it goes.
REALLY complex systems are even harder to predict than they are to understand. Inability to grasp how all the small scale influences affect the larger scale is problematic, regardless of the time scale, but a show stopper in any long-term time scale.

@- Smokey says:
July 1, 2011 at 7:43 pm
“If Tobis took the time to notice, he would see that the rise in [harmless, beneficial] CO2 has been stagnant since the beginning of the year. ”
No, it hasn’t –
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
Up-to-date weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
Week of June 19, 2011: 393.46 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 391.53 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 373.12 ppm
And as you can see from the graph it is following the usual seasonal pattern of a spring peak.
CO2 varies by around 5ppm a year from the seasonal biological cycle.
Superimposed on this regular annual cycle has been a net gain of about 1.8ppm per year.
Are you suggesting this year will be any different?

@- justthefactswuwt says:
July 1, 2011 at 11:36 pm
“Do you agree that Oceanic Oscillations can have a significant influence on Earth’s Temperature?”
On the immediate temperature, but not on the climate.
There is little historical evidence that the pattern of Oscillations drives unidirectional climate change.
It is considered more likely they respond to, not initiate significant trends that extend beyond the average cycle length.

Michael Tobis says:
June 30, 2011 at 4:51 pm
……
You take the needle, bury it in the haystack, and then question whether there is a needle at all. If this defense works nobody will ever be able to make a case for anything.
/end quote
exactly the point. The needle makes NO observable difference to the haystack – which is why it is so hard to find. Nice analogy, demonstrating the probable impact of anthropological CO2 / other impacts on the global climate – although it is possible that it may underestimate the impact – maybe 10 needles (an order of magnitude) would be better

http://mgg.coas.oregonstate.edu/~andreas/pdf/S/schmittner07agu_intro.pdf
Let’s do the really long one first. The meridional overturning circulation. A super El Nino event warms a vast area of the Pacific as it sits idly in the lazy trade wind, soaking up the Sun, and leaving the cold waters underneath to sullenly sit there. Now set this warmed ocean into the overturning circulation. How many days, months, years, decades, or centuries does it take for this heated pool to make it round the circulation?

I am surprised justthefactswuwt doesn’t know how to convert TSI to global-average solar input. First you take a quarter of 1350 which is about 340 W/m2 which is the average value at the top of the atmosphere (see Kiehl and Trenberth energy diagram). Then you multiply by 0.7 which takes into account albedo to get the amount absorbed by the earth system, which leaves 240 W/m2. So the 0.1% variation of that is about 0.24 W/m2 as Tobis and izen say. This is the number to compare with 4 W/m2 forcing from doubling CO2.

@-justthefactswuwt says:
July 2, 2011 at 7:11 am
“What is unidirectional climate change? Do you think that some portion of the increase in temperature between 1975 and 2005 might have been related to the PDO Warm Regime?”
Unidirectional climate change is driven by an energy imbalance. If the surface is consistently receiving less radiation than it is loosing to space then it cools until there is a close but dynamic balance between energy in and out.
The PDO phase may have been correlated with an increase in temperature between 1975 and 2005. But the 1LoT means it is restricted to energy storage, it can only affect the timing of any re-balancing of the energy budget.
Are you certain about the direction of causal relationship between a reified concept like the PDO and observational data?
“How did you arrive at an “average surface change” of “around 0.3W/m2 or 0.1% of the surface average total”? ”
Geometry.
The ‘top of atmosphere’ values are 1366 W/m2. with a 0.1% varience -~ 1.3W/m2
But the Earth surface is not a square metre, its a revolving sphere.
surface area of a disc = PIr2
Surface area of a sphere = 4PIr2
You are right that there is much in the literature that refers to the top of atmosphere figure, but it is most often qualified with the need to put it in context of the ACTUAL surface over which it falls.

@- Doug Proctor says:
July 2, 2011 at 1:43 pm
“If, for example, CO2 were a keystone atmospheric element, a sudden kick into the atmosphere of huge amounts of it during the explosions Krakatoa or Tambora would have a long, solid and sustained effect on the planet. They do not have that impact. There is a sudden effect (cooling, actually) and then the previous style and detail of stability returns.”
The explosions Krakatoa or Tambora would have a long, solid and sustained effect on the planet IF they released significant amounts of CO2. The transient cooling effect is from the sulfur content of the erupted material. It alters albedo but has a short residence time.
Around 30 Gigatons of CO2 were released by buring fossil fuel in 2010.
The eruption of Tambora ejected an estimated 2 Gigatons of material in total. Krakatoa and Tambora were much smaller additions to the atmospheric CO2 than human activity.
You need something more like a Yellowstone super-volcano to erupt to exceed the annual contribution from anthropogenic sources.

Someone mentioned that the ‘greenhouse effect’ should be covered.
“Solar” in the energy budget as the means of converting to heat the land and oceans of Earth refer to Visible and the two shortwaves either side, UV and Nr Ir. None of these is thermal, they are Light, not Heat. Heat is the thermal infrared we feel from the Sun, which is what warms us and the land and the oceans. We cannot feel Light as heat, because it’s not hot…
“Light”, “Solar”, “irradiance” cannot physically heat organic matter to create the AGWScience energy budget scenario. For example, light, the visible spectrum, is transmitted through water, it is not absorbed, it has no effect in water, it cannot heat it, water is transparent to visible light. The energy budget you all seem to be working to is a creation of AGWScience, not real world traditional science. Therefore, all your ‘calculations’ if you are using these figures are absolute nonsense. The AGWScience energy budget EXCLUDES thermal infrared.
Light energies should be properly described. That these are reflected, scattered, by the oxygen and nitrogen molecules of our atmosphere, which gives us our blue sky, transmitted through water, i.e. pass through, used in photosynthesis etc., are not thermal.
The Water Cycle – the link to the wiki page mentions, but a garbled sentence, that without the water cycle the Earth would be 67°C. This is the main greenhouse gas of the real greenhouse – our gaseous atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen. This is cooling the Earth, AGWScience has reversed that in its promotion of its meme that greenhouse gases ‘warm the earth’. Water vapour is lighter than air, it always therefore rises, water has a very high capacity to store heat, in the water cycle heat is taken up and away from the surface.
Carbon dioxide – the Carbon Cycle needs to be included properly. It is heavier than air, therefore will always sink displacing air unless some work done to move it upwards, such as wind (which is a volume of air on the move). When water and carbon dioxide meet, they merge, always. Carbon dioxide and water in the atmosphere meeting become carbonic acid. Rain is carbonic acid. Every time it rains the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is removed.
Carbon dioxide cannot accumulate in the atmosphere firstly because it is heavier than air so will always displace air and come to the ground unless something is moving it up, and all rain is carbonic acid, the natural wash cycle of the atmosphere which takes out dust and brings both water and carbon dixodide back to the ground where it is food for plant life and therefore for us; we are carbon life forms, 20% carbon, the rest mainly water. Plants take in carbon dioxide from the underside of their leaves , through stromata, except for such as water lilies which have their stromata on the top of the leaf. Carbon dioxide ‘accumulating’ in the atmosphere out of reach of ground level is physical nonsense, promoted by AGWScience against real traditional science.
http://www.aces.edu/pubs/docs/A/ANR-1229/
“Acid rain, or acid precipitation, refers to any precipitation that is more acidic (i.e., has a lower pH value) than that of normal rainwater. Carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere makes all rain slightly acidic because carbon dioxide and water combine to form carbonic acid., commonly known as carbonated water.”
All rain.

Well, for those not intent on being altogether silly, let me point out that Nobel chemist Mario Molina quoted on Shell scientist David Hone’s blog, thinks the whole business is pretty much cut and dry.
see http://blogs.shell.com/climatechange/2011/07/molina/
There’s also the briefest possible summary of the physics at that link. Those who don’t follow that are encouraged to keep digging at it until they do. Then maybe they can sensibly look for the more realistic approximation using calculus and multiple wavelengths, and then look into what it implies for our present circumstances.
But if you want to look into something else, maybe inertia-gravity waves or plate tectonics, first, have fun, but it won’t actually bear on the controversy very directly. Why not start where it starts and work from there?