At WUWT, one thing we pride ourselves in is helping visitors learn about the issues and the science, even if those visitors should already know what these things mean. Take for example, Michael Tobis proprietor of “Only In it for the Gold” and “Planet3.0”, both heavily pro-warming sites. Readers may remember Mr. Tobis from his famous F-word Fusillade.
Mike came to WUWT to ask a simple question, and of course, we are always happy to help him out.
Original comment asking to define “CAGW” here.
Honestly, I thought most everyone (especially the bloggers) in this debate knew this term, but apparently not. So, this post will make sure everyone does now.
CAGW is an abbreviation for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming
For more abbreviations, see our WUWT Glossary Page
He’s also not responded to why he’s still using computers and taking advantage of the huge fossil fuel infrastructure.
Babsy, I did respond. I said I would write a long article about it, and gave you a summary of what it would say.
Jeff, this is also an interesting question. I have raised it on Planet3.0 and will do so again. My short answer is an analogy. I am overweight and trying to cope with it. But I have not stopped eating.
Shevva, that is exactly my point. I am not taking the worst case. I am not even taking the risk-weighted case. Just the best estimate. **You** are taking the best case, or really, the best case and then some.
As for Gary H’s latest point, “There is nothing unprecedented about the current situation”, that is ridiculous. Of course the earth experienced very high CO2 levels in the distant past. But it had a dramatically warmer ice-free climate at those times.
That said, there is indeed something unprecedented about the current situation.
What is unprecedented is the **rate of change** of radiatively active gases. We can expect the transition to be very rocky. People live in the wrong places, borders are in the wrong places, biomes are in the wrong places, and fertile soil is in the wrong places.
The Paleocene/Eocene transition is the closest analogy. A very large carbon release, probably from clathrates, happened very quickly, probably over thousands of years. The fossil record is very clear that there was a major extinction event in the ocean due to ocean acidification as the ocean chemistry adapted. Land extinction was minor, but it probably was a slower event than the present one. Also, there weren’t billions of people constrained to stay where they are by border guards.
Finally, and this is a point that I make more than others do, in engineering we know that a sudden transition in a system is accompanied by “ringing”; all major modes get excited, and things break. On the time scales of the ocean and the ice, the transitions we are undertaking are extremely sudden, and we can expect huge adjustments to occur that are only beginning. This all is very hard to predict. I would call it outside our current modeling capabilities, though I know some glaciologists working on their side of the puzzle furiously. What it will mean on the ground is huge year-over-year and decade-over-decade swings, much to the detriment of agriculture. We are seeing signs of this already.
The idea that carbon fertilization is good for agriculture is not actually supported by evidence. There are three major issues that complicate the picture. First of all, crop growth is not limited by availability of CO2 but by other nutrients. Second, CO2 fertilization in many cases promotes the growth of the woody parts of plants rather than the seeds and leaves which we and our livestock eat. Third, CO2 fertilization also helps weeds.
Is Gary H in a position to offer me a guest posting? I’d like to hear it from Anthony.
REPLY: Huh? Sentence makes no sense, clarify -A
mt, temperature leads CO2. This can be demonstrated in the laboratory. If there was experimental data, not from a computer program but from a lab, showing how CO2 *LEADS* temperature rises, the warmists would be shouting it from the rooftops.
Anthony, are you offering me a guest post?
Else, is Gary H in an editorial position to do so?
REPLY: Why not both? I’ll combine both essays into a point-counterpoint post then. – Anthony
Babsy, I responded twice. The second time I said “Babsy, I did respond. I said I would write a long article about it, and gave you a summary of what it would say.”
(I am willing to keep playing this game if the moderators allow it. It might be fun to write some code to automate it.)
Of course there is laboratory evidence of the greenhouse effect. That is 150-year-old news.
Michael Tobis says:
February 2, 2012 at 10:36 am
Really? Why haven’t we been bombarded with this information? I don’t believe you can take any volume of air, inject CO2 into it, and cause the temperature of the air to increase. That is the central premise of AGW. If you could do this, I believe you would be in line to get a Nobel Prize! It *CAN* be demostrated that a volume of sea water, or Diet Coke, for that matter, can be made to lose its CO2 to the atmosphere by simply raising its temperature, and it doesn’t require eons for the change to occur. No radiative forcing, or references to ancient earth history, or any other hocus pocus involved. The planet warms by that big yellow ball in the sky and the CO2 in the atmosphere increases without any interference by us humans and our quest to live somwhere other than in a cave. Have a great weekend!
mt, here’s a paper for you.
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/zeebe_files/Publications/ZeebeWolfEnclp07.pdf
Very clearly, the solubility of CO2 in sea water is a function of temperature and salinity.
Michael Tobis
Your ignorance is incredible, while you’re discussing CAGW and trying to semantically weasel in a redefinition of how much WARMING from the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause and still, you suggest that this will endanger the entire world, And your arrogant demand to see proof that it wont is an insult.
WOW!! just freaking WOW!
I’ll point out some recent developments in Europe,
the death toll went up to160 as PEOPLE struggled to cope with temperatures that plunged to record lows. Tens of thousands of PEOPLE have headed to shelters to escape the freeze.
In the Ukraine 63 PEOPLE died “Most of them literally froze to death on the street, with only a handful making it to hospital before succumbing to hypothermia”
In Serbia, the cold has killed seven PEOPLE and trapped 11,500.
Hundreds of PEOPLE are in hospital suffering from hypothermia and frostbite.
More than 1,000 schools remain closed in Bulgaria after 16 towns reported their lowest temperatures since records began 100 years ago.
The mercury also plunged below zero in central regions, with -14C (7F) recorded in Berlin, -8C (18F) in Paris and -20C (-4F) in Warsaw.
Now Tobis, As Anthropogenic production of Co2 (a trace gas) has gone up, would you like to further add insult to injury to all those PEOPLE shivering and hungry and literally freezing to death? Would you like to redefine CAGW for them? would you like reveal to the world how much of a complete moron you really are and redefine CAGW as Anthropogenic Climate change, Climate disruption or any other way that you can dream up that fits your cause?
🙂
“the solubility of CO2 in sea water is a function of temperature and salinity.”
Stipulated. Nice review of the chemistry, thanks. The first author you cite has an interesting and accessible article at:
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/zeebe_files/Publications/ZeebeNGS11.pdf
wherein he discusses, among other things, the sensitivity of global temperature to CO2.
===
“Why haven’t we been bombarded with this information? I don’t believe you can take any volume of air, inject CO2 into it, and cause the temperature of the air to increase. ”
Not as such, no.
A couple more features are necessary. For the complete effect, you have to heat it from below (sunlight hitting the surface) and cool it radiatively from the top (outgoing infrared radiation), and the system has to have multiple temperatures at multiple layers. This is how all atmospheres work. It’s not shouted form the rooftops because it was established long ago. It’s commonly called the “greenhouse effect” and there are numerous expositions of it.
There are YouTubes of children shining infrared light into bottles of CO2 enriched air vs normal air and finding that the CO2 enriched ones warm more. This is pretty elementary stuff. It’s a five dollar experiment to make it entirely clear that CO2 absorbs infrared. The rest follows logically, and as is well known, the Swede Arrhenius worked it out in 1898. All satellite-based measurements of temperature are based on related principles.
Well, Sparks, thanks for letting me know about this interesting event. Cold outbreaks have not gone away yet.
Indeed, as climate shifts around, they may show up in previously unlikely places. It is the global energy balance that is the driver of all this. Climate shifts are the consequence. And with a shifting climate system we see unfamiliar weather. So, with regard to the current cold outbreak in Europe, consider :
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/02/grain-europe-weather-idUSL5E8D24QJ20120202
===
No actual damage has yet been reported in top producers France, Germany and Britain but if the cold snap continues there will be increased worry next year’s harvest will suffer.
Grains can survive frosts as deep as minus 20 degrees centigrade if they have protective snow to insulate them. But unusually warm winter weather up to the start of this week means snow is scarce in west Europe’s grain belts.
…
Soft wheat is about 2 to 3 weeks in advance of normal growth for the start of February and it is hard to say if plants are more vulnerable to frosts in their current advanced growth phase, observers said.
…
“We cannot say what will be the impact of the cold spell (on soft wheat) because it is a situation that we have never seen,” said Jean-Charles Deswarte of French crop institute Arvalis.
===
So part of the reason for concern is that the snow cover is absent amd that winter wheat is ahead of schedule. “Situation we have never seen” is the thing to watch for.
And the situation is indeed quite remarkable.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2024
These are deep and extensive anomalies.
(I believe these anomalies are re: 1980-2010. If so, much of the global warming is factored out.)
Michael Tobis says (February 2, 2012 at 10:31 am): “Anthony, are you offering me a guest post?
Else, is Gary H in an editorial position to do so?”
I’m not affiliated with WUWT except as a reader and occasional commenter. I assumed Anthony would accept a guest post that meets WUWT’s standard criteria. I suggested a guest article as a good way to inject the “substance” that MT called for earlier in the thread. Discussion threads are fine, but tend to have a low signal-to-noise ratio despite the occasional gem.
Michael Tobis says:
February 2, 2012 at 12:22 pm
“There are YouTubes of children shining infrared light into bottles of CO2 enriched air vs normal air and finding that the CO2 enriched ones warm more.”
You missed Anthony’s example of this here on WUWT. Suggest you go back and review the thread. Also you are ignorant of the specific heats (Cp) of air and CO2 or you would know that for the same Q (heat input) and same volume CO2 cannot get to the same temperature as air.
Michael Tobis says (February 2, 2012 at 8:34 am): “As for Gary H’s latest point, “There is nothing unprecedented about the current situation”, that is ridiculous. Of course the earth experienced very high CO2 levels in the distant past. But it had a dramatically warmer ice-free climate at those times.”
In which life on earth thrived, right? Which didn’t tip the planet into irreversible thermageddon, right? So, figuratively speaking, we’ve been here before and didn’t die, right? Pascal’s Wager would seem to be busted, not once, but multiple times in the earth’s history.
“That said, there is indeed something unprecedented about the current situation.
What is unprecedented is the **rate of change** of radiatively active gases. We can expect the transition to be very rocky. People live in the wrong places, borders are in the wrong places, biomes are in the wrong places, and fertile soil is in the wrong places.”
Well, I guess he has me there. Atmospheric CO2 has rapidly increased to 140% of pre-industrial levels and the effect on the temperature trend since the Little Ice Age has been a staggering…er…zero? OK, but all that CO2 has increased the rate of sea level rise by…uh…zero? How about extreme weather, surely that’s getting more extr–no? Droughts! Droughts are getting wor–no? Hah! Then floods must be incr–no?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/13/congenital-climate-abnormalities/
But I forgot, all that bad stuff is still in the future. We know this, because the crystal ba–I mean, models–tell us so. I guess the climate apocalypse is like Max Headroom: always 20 minutes (years?) into the future. 🙂
mkelly says (February 2, 2012 at 12:55 pm): “You missed Anthony’s example of this here on WUWT.”
mkelly beat me to it. But here’s the link, courtesy of Rick Werme’s Guide to WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertised/
Michael Tobis says:
February 2, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Stipulated? I would not have chosen stipulated.
Definition of STIPULATE
intransitive verb
1: to make an agreement or covenant to do or forbear something : contract
2: to demand an express term in an agreement —used with ‘for’
transitive verb
1: to specify as a condition or requirement (as of an agreement or offer)
2: to give a guarantee of
Dr. Zeebe stated in the commentary you cited that ‘a large mass of carbon was released into the Earth’s surface reservoirs, and and temperatures rose by 5-9 degrees C in a few thousand years’. How did he establish the carbon release was prior to the warming? We know that warming Diet Coke drives the CO2 out of solution. It is entirely possible that the carbon came before the warming(and he has no way of knowing) as he made several references to the uncertainty in the ‘proxies’ (the uncertainties are still significant).
Michael Tobis says:
“You still have to come up with a strategy that is the best one given the information at hand.”
Can you explain why mitigation (CO2 emission reduction) would be a better strategy than adaptation? Seems to me the best strategy is the one that works over the greatest range of possible outcomes. Adaptation works if it gets warm or cool or nothing at all happens, it’s cheaper than mitigation for any particular scenario, and as long as we don’t waste our resources on mitigation efforts it’s actually affordable.
Tobias acting dumb about CAGW is a denial of degree.
Policies rely on CAGW, but even the most alarmist “evidence” points to a more moderate view. There are no accelerations in temperatures, sea levels, storms, droughts, floods etc. There is plenty of evidence of slowing down, with more limited evidence of continuing trend. But it is only if CAGW is certain and imminent that one can justify reducing living standards and covering every hilltop with wind turbines. Emphasising CAGW shows how untenable the warmist position actually is.
Michael Tobis,
You have put your self in a remarkable position, when you say,
“It is the global energy balance that is the driver of all this. Climate shifts are the consequence.”
Are you in fact implying that Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide (a trace gas) is disrupting an “energy balance” of Earth on a global scale and Climate shifts are the consequence of this?
Yes/No?
So, In fact you have yet again redefined “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming”, (a very predictable Modus operandi from proponents of CAGW) as “Anthropologically Induced Climate Shifts”.
You now wish to assert that Freezing European winters are the result of “Anthropologically Induced Climate Shifts” WOW, Tobis, I don’t wish to cause you offense and do take attitude towards you lightly but, my built in Idiot Meter (common sense) just went off the scale, I originally thought that you were just a potential Moron and a bit misguided, uninformed, but you keep climbing up that scale towards being a complete village idiot.
All joking aside, how would you go about informing all those people battling Freezing temperatures over the Northern Hemisphere this winter that they are producing Carbon Dioxide to heat their homes to stay alive from the freezing cold and that in doing so this causes “Anthropologically Induced Climate Shifts” and as a result they will be battling Freezing temperatures in winter?
You’ll find that, in a desert, selling sand for camels doesn’t work either.
Definition of CAGW is similar in nature to you belief in “Anthropologically Induced Climate Shifts”
We’re all delighted you asked!
🙂
re: stipulated. Yes, I used the word erroneously. It seems a common error per Google. I have the sense there is a ten dollar word I am not coming up with, but maybe I’ve just been wrong about “stipulate” for a long time. “Concede” seems wrong, when the other person makes a point with which I fully agree.
I will just use “agreed” in future. Thanks.
Re the Nye experiment, did you use 780 ppmv CO2 at 1 atm? I would expect the radiative effect of that in such a small jar to be undetectable with a homebrew setup.
When politicians – as Tobias claims – exaggerate the understated and modest claims “true scientists” make about CAGW and CO2 levels, please name ONE unbiased “scientist” who stands up in public and CORRECTS the false and misleading IPCC summaries and political speeches that are responsible for the world’s continuing economic crisis due to (artificially high) energy restrictions? It is, after all, Pelosi’s CAGW beliefs and processes that directly increased the US energy prices in 2007 and 2008. It IS CAGW dogma that maintains those prices worldwide through propaganda and outright lies. By your supposed impartial “scientists” who are manipulating the data and massaging their conclusions for press time, profit, and personal gain.
Do you personally deny you yourself are not responsible for immediate and continuing deaths of millions of innocents due to lack of food, fuel, clean water, sewage treatment, proper and inexpensive pesticides, proper fertilizers, better irrigation, reliable power and efficient food preparation, shipping and storage?
Get government corruption out of the way and the world’s poor and starving WILL be better off. You – personally and intentionally – are maintaining their poverty, illness and death rates in the name of CAGW.
In the past 140 years of the instrument record,
CO2 has been steady. And temperatures fell 1/4 of one degree.
CO2 has been steady. And temperatures rose 1/3 of one degree.
CO2 has been steady. And temperatures were steady.
CO2 has been rising. And temperatures fell 1/4 of one degree
CO2 has been rising. And temperatures were steady
CO2 has been rising. And temperatures rose 1/3 of one degree.
CO2 has been rising. And temperatures were steady.
The only measurements that show warming are those manipulated by climate “scientists” … The raw data in unaltered locations worldwide show no trend.
Yes, we are warming out the cold period of 1650. And you can’t tell us why. You have no idea why the Roman Warming Period happened. Why the cooler Dark Ages occurred. Why the Medieval Warming Period occurred. You – climate “scientists” collectively – have no idea and no explanations why the earth’s temperature behaves as it does.
By the way, the DMI summer temperatures at 80 north since 1958 – where the Arctic Ocean actually has ice coverage during the months when the sun actually shines up there – have been steadily decreasing. And that rate of cooling has been increasing as CO2 levels have increased.
Bad analogy. Either you believe we’re on the verge (or in fact in the middle) of global catastrophe or you don’t. If you do, and you have such a lackadaisical attitude about it, why should we listen to you? Being a little overweight would not be a reason to stop eating. But, the only way to reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels is to cease ALL industry right now. Why aren’t you on board?
Michael Tobis says:
February 2, 2012 at 10:31 am
Anthony, are you offering me a guest post?
Else, is Gary H in an editorial position to do so?
REPLY: Why not both? I’ll combine both essays into a point-counterpoint post then. – Anthony
#########################
Michael Tobis has nothing to say, Anthony.
Don’t do it !!!!!!!
[SNIP: Not really appropriate, even with some of the letters changed. -REP]
“But, the only way to reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels is to cease ALL industry right now. Why aren’t you on board?”
That is a straw man. I don’t know or know of anybody who believes anything like that.