Only a Century? Ya Wimps!

Sorry the second question should have referenced the “RED” curve, not the green one. I think we’ll probably observe the green one with continued increases in human CO2 emissions 🙂

Mr. Author of mocked paper, your relationship of rising CO2-warmer world-rising sea level has been spliced onto the natural rising sea level, has it not? Since natural conditions have not changed prior to the recent advent of anthropogenic CO2, and are still operating as far as I can see, you seem to be saying that natural sea level rise has ceased (and the conditions driving it) and has been overtaken by AGW sea level rise. What evidence do you have that natural drivers have ceased operating?
However, isn’t it conveniant that the current proposed anthropogenic sea level rise measurements exactly model previous natural sea level rise. Nonetheless, if you are going to show that we should be worried about this change from one driver to another, I suggest using some kind of nature trick when splicing previous natural with current anthropogenic sea level rise. You should also find a better proxy for natural sea level rise so that you can more clearly distinguish between the two drivers and show that natural sea level rise was just a regional myth. If you are unsure how to proceed, I know of one or two esteemed scientists who would be happy to help you.

richardjamestelford says:
October 20, 2011 at 2:22 am
“Unable to accept the inevitable long-term consequences of global warming, and ill-equipped to critique the science, Eschenbach resorts to mockery.”
What science? More mumbo-jumbo computer models? Present some genuine science containing actual reasonably well-confirmed physical hypotheses and I will provide a useful analysis of it.

Aslak Grinsted says:
October 20, 2011 at 3:21 am
“Here is a causal chain of events as i see them, and I would appreciate if you man up, and acknowledge exactly what it is you dispute:
1) Increased CO2 -> Increased radiative forcing
2) stronger radiative forcing -> increased heat / warming
3) Heat/warming -> shrinks land-based ice, and expands the world oceans.”
Thanks for posting here! To express causal chains, arrows won’t do the work. You need some reasonably well confirmed physical hypotheses. These are universal generalizations that, when combined with statements of initial conditions, actually imply the phenomena, ocean rise, that you intend to explain scientifically.
Your reasonably well confirmed hypotheses have to go beyond Arrhenius’ work. From Arrhenius’ work, it is not possible to infer more than a modest rise in temperature. No CAGW is to be found in Arrhenius’ work however far out you take it. In addition to that reason for going beyond Arrhenius, we taxpayers would like to see that climate science has actually produced some science. If you have no reasonably well confirmed physical hypotheses that go beyond Arrhenius’ work then you have produced no new science.
If you depend on models then you are not practicing science at all.

Dear Willis
I am a coauthor on the study. I take no offense at your mockery, because that is pretty much the level of debate that I expect from WUWT (sorry, if that offends you).
Lets try to find some common ground for discussion. I assume you agree about the following observations (concerning on average over the 20th century):
* Sea level has been rising
* Earth has warmed (Global Mean SATs)
* Ocean heat content is increasing (since observations has been available= 1955)
* CO2 is increasing.

Two out of four…what does that mean?
Earth has “warmed”. Dang, I keep having to repeat the same mantra, over and over and over again. 1 Cubic Foot of Air at 86 F and 60% in MN has more ENERGY in it that one cubic foot of air in AZ at 105 F and 10% RH. Unless you account for humidity, unless you account for urban heat island, you have NO IDEA WHAT THE NET ATMOSPHERIC ENERGY IS. And none of these WONKS even makes an ATTEMPT to calculate that.
In a similar vein: “Ocean heat content is increasing.” Can we dispense with this “Gobels moment”? The measurements from 1955 to the Argo Buoys are garbage. They are a complete
fabrication. There is NO WAY to compile the sparse data available and come up with a reliable
record. That marvelous little graph with the continuous increase was as bogus as the Mann tree rings.
The “miraculous flattening” found with the Argo buoys can simply be explained by the fact that the “Ocean heat” has not changed a WIT…and one can figure this out simply by the net density of the ocean, and doing a simple engineering calculation assuming the complete 0.9 watts per meter sq. of Hansen, et. al. (2006 publication) has gone into the sea..one would have a 0.009 F rise in temp. of the ocean (assmuing 15,000′ average depth. For a variety of reasons we have to realize the “Ocean” turns over and moves energy from the top to the bottom over the decades involved.
The sea level as been rising. In a miniscule manner by the satellites. And I’m NOT GOING TO TRUST THAT NUMBER until we have say, 2 or 3 systems running at the same time. Why? Because there are DRIFTS that occur in that instrumentation. The plots I see have a signal tendancy which, alas, as an engineer “older than dirt”…I’ve seen far too many times in long term A/D data gathering systems…to put total confidence in the measurement. (And I HAVE worked with some sophisticated stuff, starting with 8 bit A/D and going to 32.)
CO2 is increasing. Yeah, so what! We get into the whole “forcing factor”. On this I will put my “line in the sand”, and make the individual claim…that CO2 is NOT a controlling “Atmospheric Effect” gas. (HA HA, Why do I NOT use the term “Greenhouse” gas? Any idea on that from your Sea Level people. Quiz question, if you don’t know the answer to that you don’t know MUCH at all!) Rather, as Elsasser “S.W.A.G’ed” in his 1942 “On the IR Heat Balance of the Atmopshere”, and I have been ratching towards in my study of radiative transfer in a “grey gas”, up to some limit (2500 PPM, 3500 PPM) when distributed with the gradient H2O, CO2 acts as a “net exchange agent” in the troposphere. I.e., every quanta of I.R. in the 6 and 12 Micron range, absorbed, is re-emitted when the high end of the Boltzman distribution of energy O2 and N2, excite a CO2 molecule to a translational/rotational vibration mode and the CO2 “relaxes” emitting IR.
Max

A model walks into an error bar….

Like all religions, they are waiting for future predictions that never happen.

@Aslak Grinsted
>I am a coauthor on the study.
I am impressed that you are here and reading. Most authors of papers we discuss read and hide because of the sound arguments and serious discussions. We are of course used to the trolling and humour/derision that is inevitably provoked. You have to make allowances.
>I take no offense at your mockery, because that is pretty much the level of debate that I expect from WUWT (sorry, if that offends you).
We are toughened by years of abuse at the sites like RC and SkS. However I don’t think Ellis mocked you at all. I certainly hope I only mock actions, not people.
>Lets try to find some common ground for discussion.
That is what Anthony wants, and why the site does not delete anything that happens to contradict a particular paradigm. As you are no doubt aware, it is far more likely your works will be read here than anywhere else.
The skeptical approach take my most reders here is captured well by Spender, “Of course, this evidence also supports one of the main conclusions of our Remote Sensing paper published earlier this year: there is a large discrepancy between the IPCC climate models and observations.”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/10/our-grl-response-to-dessler-takes-shape-and-the-evidence-keeps-mounting/
>I assume you agree about the following observations (concerning on average over the 20th century):
* Sea level has been rising
* Earth has warmed (Global Mean SATs)
* Ocean heat content is increasing (since observations has been available= 1955)
* CO2 is increasing.
Well that is the main point isn’t it? From the style of your argument above, I presume you take these as ‘givens’ and thus the conclusion you seek is simply a matter of putting a scale on it. That is fine around a coffee table but it is not how one makes a scientific investigation. Anyone well read on the subject will know:
* Sea level has been rising for far longer than any causal link to CO2 can be mooted and there is no meaningful (statistically significant) correlation between CO2 and sea level, particularly over the past 1000 years.
* The Earth has warmed and it has also cooled and warmed again just within the past 110 years and the corrleation between temperature and CO2 is less than 0.6 while the correlation between tempeature and solar activity + clouds (GCR) is much better.
* The ocean heat content is poorly known and it has not (detectably) risen to match the expected temperature rise that has been suggested by the rising and falling air temperatures, and now it is falling as the temperature stablises. Not so? According to you both should be rising.
* CO2 is increasing but the increase is not entirely from anthropogenic sources. The balance between natural and human sources has not changed at all. Thus natural fluctuations must be considered and the lack of correlation to temperature explained. There is wide disagreement on the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere – by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude.
>Here is a causal chain of events as i see them, and I would appreciate if you man up, and acknowledge exactly what it is you dispute:
To remain civil and get a response from Ellis I suggest you don’t ask him to ‘man-up’. He wrote an analysis and put it on a public site where it is well known that 99% of posts of all types are allowed by the moderators.
>1) Increased CO2 -> Increased radiative forcing
Ellis and everyone I know agrees with this. It is a basic fact of life. It is more accurate to describe it as an increased forcing potential. If the IR has already been absorbed, there is no additonal heating available. Increased CO2 does not necessarily mean increased temperature in all possible cases, for example high ozone or water vapour levels will render the additional CO2 meaningless. It is also recognized that the temperature response to CO2 (even alone) is logarithmic, decreasing with increased concentration: 6 deg C for the 0-20 ppm and 0.04 deg for 700-840 ppm. Adding CO2 is NOT like adding insulation around a hot cup of coffee. The insulation is a fixed material and the CO2 is in a free flowing, open ended atmosphere. I assume you are already aware of the invalidity of that ‘insulation’ comparison.
>2) stronger radiative forcing -> increased heat / warming
There you are making a logical error. Stronger forcing potential for a particular component of the atmosphere does not mean an elevated response by the whole system. Not at all! And that is before auto-compensating system losses to space are calculated, such as was done by Prof A Bijan who used Constructal Theory to describe the behaviour of the atmosphere as a heat engine with an enormous capacity to vent additional heat if it was available. First you must deal with the actual response to additional CO2 within the whole system when its forcing potential rises. Basically, if there is no more IR to absorb, there is no more IR to absorb and if there is a temperature response, the atmosphere responds by dumping heat from the hotter zone faster into space.
>3) Heat/warming -> shrinks land-based ice, and expands the world oceans.
This is admitted by all. It is the physics of thermal expansion. You are probably aware that during certain climate cycles the total heat in the atmosphere is concentrated near the equator and the poles are frozen all year, and during others the heat is more evenly spread. As the heat from the sun is virtually constant (taking a long term view) and there is plenty of evidence that the ice comes and goes from the poles, an attempt to attribute any temperature change (up or down) to anthropogenic CO2 emissions must first assess, quantify and explain the natural variation for which there is so much evidence. This is not a delaying tactic, this is the baseline against which you have to show any AGW. I presume you are aware that the summertime temperature in the Arctic has not changed at all as the ice goes and comes (think: ocean currents + wind).
>Perhaps you do not dispute any of these points and agree with our projections.
Subject to my interpretations of them, I agree.
>From your mockery it sounds as if your only question the value of multi century projections in general. Please clarify.
I certainly question the value of multi-century projections based on defective premises. If you changed your stated premises to capture reality more closely, your projections would have very much larger error bars.
>“Lukewarmers” usually agree with all of the points above but only question whether the “climate sensitivity” in step 2 of the chain is really as large as climate models imply.
This is incorrect. Any ‘lukewarmer’ would know that there is a huge difference between an increase in forcing potential and forcing realised, same as in a heat engine. They question the sensitivity but in a broader manner. There is a (free download) programme available from Los Alamos Lab for determining the behaviour of any heat engine including all types of Stirling Engines and thermo-acoustic refrigerators (which is a class of Stirling). If you were to acquaint yourself with this programme it would serve to show that putting additional heat intput into a balanced system (one that is not ramping at the time) can often give very little to no change in the system parameters other than to increase the heat lost to the cooling side. This is particularly true for systems that have large radiative components in the heat flux, even when they are closed, which the atmosphere is not.
>In our study we avoid any uncertainty in climate sensitivity, by simply looking at the relationship between radiative forcing and sea level rise directly.
On that score you have failed and Ellis was correct to point it out. The rise in sea level taken on a decadal scale shows it is tapering down and CO2 is still ramping up. At any level of time delay, there is simply no good CO2 explanation. If you subtract the sea level rise that existed prior to industrialisation, factor in the temperature rise that was already occurring as we rose from the last ice age, and then examine the remainder as a function of CO2, what do you get? You will quickly see there is no visual correlation. This should incline you to assume that there is no close link between any sea level change and CO2 but it has not. The root of your problem is the assumption that the premises are valid at all times and therefore the challenge is to project the resulting assumed relationship.
When you correct your assumptions will give a very much broader range of projections. The result will be highly unreliable for predicting the future sea level.
Sincerely
Crispin

All I have to say is that any projection of the future is not science. It is at best extrapolation and more then likely when you are extrapolating at the scale of 500 years as seen here is nothing but fortune telling.
To even ATTEMPT to call it science is nothing but ignorance or malice. I will give the people who call fortune telling science the benefit of the doubt and call them ignorant in this case, because obviously they forgot as Willis said the high school level stuff they “should know.”
Regardless, computer modeling is never going to be real science. In science you confirm and test, you do not merely show that something is possible. This is not science, this is just some backwards attempt to fortune tell. Crystal balls? Yes, I think this is what this is.
Sometimes I read other things on the internet and just sigh because it is not just climate science that is going down the road to “non-science” but other disciplines as well. I think in the end computers will be the death of us all through scaring us to death through stories that “could possibly maybe be true.”
And to call that science? Hardly, more like fortune tellers who are peddling their stuff in the guise of science. I have no problems with them peddling scary stories or fortunes, but they should put in their papers “warning, no science involved” and they should not be taken seriously.