This is an attempt to redefine the graph made famous by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth that showed temperature leading CO2.
From a press release embargoed until 1PM EST 4/4:
Work that may clarify the relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and temperature at the end of the last ice age is presented in this week’s Nature. The study reveals that rising temperatures were preceded by CO2 increases during the last deglaciation, contrary to prior findings derived from ice cores that were thought to represent larger global patterns. These results support an important role for CO2 in driving global climate change.
Antarctic ice-core records indicate that CO2 may have influenced climate changes during the Pleistocene ice ages, which began around 2.6 million years ago and ended about 11,700 years ago. However, the exact role of CO2 in producing climate changes has remained unclear, partly because ice-core records only reflect local temperatures. To better understand the relationship between CO2 and global climate change, Jeremy Shakun and colleagues reconstruct global surface temperatures for the last deglaciation. They show that rising temperatures are correlated with, and generally lag behind, increasing levels of CO2.
The reconstructed global temperatures were produced using proxy records of temperature variability, such as those recorded in planktonic microorganisms. Anomalies in the correlations, such as in the Antarctic where the CO2 changes lag behind temperature, are explained by redistribution of heat between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the authors suggest.
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Here is the long form press release (h/t to junkscience.com):
Rising CO2 levels linked to global warming during last deglaciation
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Many scientists have long suspected that rising levels of carbon dioxide and the global warming that ended the last Ice Age were somehow linked, but establishing a clear cause-and-effect relationship between CO2 and global warming from the geologic record has remained difficult.
A new study, funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the journal Nature, identifies this relationship and provides compelling evidence that rising CO2 caused much of the global warming.
Lead author Jeremy Shakun, who conducted much of the research as a doctoral student at Oregon State University, said the key to understanding the role of CO2 is to reconstruct globally averaged temperature changes during the end of the last Ice Age, which contrasts with previous efforts that only compared local temperatures in Antarctica to carbon dioxide levels.
“Carbon dioxide has been suspected as an important factor in ending the last Ice Age, but its exact role has always been unclear because rising temperatures reflected in Antarctic ice cores came before rising levels of CO2,” said Shakun, who is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Post-doctoral Fellow at Harvard University and Columbia University.
“But if you reconstruct temperatures on a global scale – and not just examine Antarctic temperatures – it becomes apparent that the CO2 change slightly preceded much of the global warming, and this means the global greenhouse effect had an important role in driving up global temperatures and bringing the planet out of the last Ice Age,” Shakun added.
Here is what the researchers think happened.
Small changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun affected the amount of sunlight striking the northern hemisphere, melting ice sheets that covered Canada and Europe. That fresh water flowed off of the continent into the Atlantic Ocean, where it formed a lid over the sinking end of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – a part of a global network of currents that brings warm water up from the tropics and today keeps Europe temperate despite its high latitudes.
The ocean circulation warms the northern hemisphere at the expense of the south, the researchers say, but when the fresh water draining off the continent at the end of the last Ice Age entered the North Atlantic, it essentially put the brakes on the current and disrupted the delivery of heat to the northern latitudes.
“When the heat transport stops, it cools the north and heat builds up in the Southern Hemisphere,” Shakun said. “The Antarctic would have warmed rapidly, much faster than the time it takes to get CO2 out of the deep sea, where it was likely stored.
“The warming of the Southern Ocean may have shifted the winds as well as melted sea ice, and eventually drawn the CO2 out of the deep water, and released it into the atmosphere,” Shakun said. “That, in turn, would have amplified warming on a global scale.”
The researchers constructed a record of global surface temperature from 80 temperature reconstructions spanning the end of the Ice Age and found that average temperature around the Earth correlated with – and generally lagged behind – rising levels of CO2.
Peter Clark, an Oregon State University scientist and co-author on the paper, said changes in solar radiation were the likely trigger for the series of effects that followed. His 2009 study, published in Science, confirmed an earlier theory that wobble in the Earth’s axis, which changes the amount of sunlight captured by Earth, first caused melting of the large northern ice sheets.
“It has long been known that Earth’s slow wobble is caused primarily by the gravitational influences of the larger planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, which pull and tug on the Earth in slightly different ways over periods of thousands of years,” said Clark, a professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.
Shakun said there is “an enormous amount” of carbon sequestered in the deep ocean.
“The Southern Ocean is connected to all the deep ocean basins,” he pointed out, “so the most likely mechanisms to draw it out of the ocean were certainly there.”
The question now, the researchers say, is how human-generated carbon dioxide will affect the planet when there isn’t an ice age.
“CO2 was a big part of bringing the world out of the last Ice Age,” Shakun said, “and it took about 10,000 years to do it. Now CO2 levels are rising again, but this time an equivalent increase in CO2 has occurred in only about 200 years, and there are clear signs that the planet is already beginning to respond.”
“While many of the details of future climate change remain to be figured out, our study bolsters the consensus view that rising CO2 will lead to more global warming,” Shakun added.
###
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The paper is at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/nature10915.html and named:
Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation
Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark, Feng He, Shaun A. Marcott, Alan C. Mix, Zhengyu Liu, Bette Otto-Bliesner, Andreas Schmittner & Edouard Bard
Abstract:
The covariation of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration and temperature in Antarctic ice-core records suggests a close link between CO2 and climate during the Pleistocene ice ages. The role and relative importance of CO2 in producing these climate changes remains unclear, however, in part because the ice-core deuterium record reflects local rather than
global temperature. Here we construct a record of global surface temperature from 80 proxy records and show that temperature is correlated with and generally lags CO2 during the last (that is, the most recent) deglaciation. Differences between the respective temperature changes of the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere parallel variations in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation recorded in marine sediments. These observations, together with transient global climate model simulations, support the conclusion that an antiphased hemispheric temperature response to ocean circulation changes superimposed on globally in-phase warming driven by increasing CO2 concentrations is an explanation for much of the temperature change at the end of the most recent ice age.
METHODS SUMMARY
The data set compiled in this study contains most published high-resolution
(median resolution, 200 yr), well-dated (n5636 radiocarbon dates) temperature
records from the last deglaciation (see Supplementary Information for the full
database). Sixty-seven records are from the ocean and are interpreted to reflect sea
surface temperatures, and the remaining 13 record air or lake temperatures on
land. All records span 18–11 kyr ago and,85% of them span 22–6.5 kyr ago. We
recalibrated all radiocarbon dates with the IntCal04 calibration (Supplementary
Information) and converted proxy units to temperature using the reservoir corrections
and proxy calibrations suggested in the original publications. An exception
to this was the alkenone records, which were recalibrated with a global
core-top calibration41. The data were projected onto a 5u35u grid, linearly
interpolated to 100-yr resolution and combined as area-weighted averages. We
used Monte Carlo simulations to quantify pooled uncertainties in the age models
and proxy temperatures, although we do not account for analytical uncertainties
or uncertainties related to lack of global coverage and spatial bias in the data set. In
particular, the records are strongly biased towards ocean margins where high
sedimentation rates facilitate the development of high-resolution records. Given
these issues, we focus on the temporal evolution of temperature through the
deglaciation rather than on its amplitude of change. The global temperature stack
is not particularly sensitive to interpolation resolution, areal weighting, the
number of proxy records, radiocarbon calibration, infilling of missing data or
proxy type. Details on the experimental design of the transient model simulations
can be found in ref. 25.
The temperature stacks and proxy data set are available in Supplementary Information.
Full Methods and any associated references are available in the online version of
the paper at www.nature.com/nature.
PDF files
-
- Supplementary Information (9.2M)
- This file contains Supplementary Text and Data, Supplementary Figures 1-30, Supplementary Tables 1-3, additional References and Supplementary Appendices 1-2.
Excel files
-
- Supplementary Data (2.4M)
- This file contains Supplementary Data.
==============================================================
Don Easterbrook has some initial thoughts on the Nature paper.
The paper is based on many assumptions without supporting data. Here are a few examples:
1. They assume that CO2 is capable of causing climate changes, even though 95% of the greenhouse gas (GHG) effect is from water vapor. In order to seriously consider CO2 as a causal mechanism, you first need to prove that very tiny increases in CO2 do indeed increase atmospheric water vapor. However, during recent warming, purported to be caused by increased CO2, atmospheric water vapor has not gone up, it has decreased slightly. CO2 by itself cannot cause significant warming because there is little of it in the atmosphere (0.038%) and CO2 accounts for only a few percent of the GHG effect.
2. They assume that the AMOC is the only driver of climate change, totally ignoring the influence of the Pacific Ocean, which covers almost half of the Earth’s surface and we can see in the modern data a strong influence of ENSO as a driver of climate changes (actually a closer correlation than the AMOC). They offer no evidence that the AMOC is the main and only driver of climate change.
3. They assume a hemispheric ‘see-saw’ of climate changes in which the North and South Hemispheres are out of phase, despite strong evidence in both hemisphere that climate changes were closely simultaneous, not out of phase with one another (Easterbrook, 2011).
4. The dismiss all other causal mechanisms by simply stating that they are only of ‘regional importance’, similar to the tactic of dismissing the MWP and Little Ice Age as only regional climate changes, not global. They also totally ignore the complete lack of correlation of CO2 with Holocene climate changes. They don’t even mention the very strong correlation of variation in 10Be and 14C with climate changes, suggesting a solar cause.
================================================================
The Antarctic Ice core graph is particularly troublesome.
In the long scale graph at top, I pointed out that the resolution of the temperature reconstruction diminished as the sample got older. Willis responded to my query with this:
The resolution for temperature drops, as does the CO2 resolution, because the ice is getting more compressed and so there is more and more time between equally spaced samples. Here’s one of my old graphs of the same data, showing the same phenomenon:
Where I think they go wrong is the claim that they can somehow reconstruct, not just the couple thousands of years of temperature that Mann claimed, but nearly a million years of temperature … and that the timelines for the two wouldn’t have errors.
My rule of thumb about these kinds of things is, no error bars … no science.
w.
Other rebuttals are in the works. I will add to this posting as they develop.
Pat Michaels writes to junkscience.com:
I am very unexcited about this. I have always thought that the timing of carbon dioxide changes and warming/cooling is pretty much irrelevant… What is interesting about this latest “finding” is that it demonstrates, yet again, the unfalsifiability of climate change “science”. The standard argument on the ice cores has been that temperature preceding carbon dioxide changes is simply evidence for positive feedback rather than lack of forcing. Now the argument will revert back to the other way around — that CO2 causes all the major pleistocene (which we are still in — see Greenland) climate fluctuations.
About that carbon dioxide–it’s just another attempt to explain the true mystery of climate change, which is why major glaciations ever go away.
My mantra is that “it’s not the heat, it’s the sensitivity”, which is obviously overestimated in climate models, for a variety of reasons that should be obvious.
Tom V. Segalstad Associated Professor of Resource and Environmental Geology, at the
University of Oslo writes:
There are some serious problems with ice cores.
I’ll be surprised if the new Nature paper cites our paper by Jaworowski, Segalstad & Ono (1992): Do glaciers tell a true atmospheric CO2 story? in the professional peer-reviewed Elsevier journal “Science of the total environment”, Vol. 114, pp. 227-284 (1992). The paper is available on my website here: http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf
There’s a follow-up paper (abstract) on the stable isotope temperature measurement technique in ice cores here: http://www.co2web.info/aig.pdf
I checked the references of the Shakun et al paper published today, and the paper Segalstad mentions is not part of the references section. I guess it was too inconvenient to mention.
mwhite says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:41 am
This has appeared on the BBC
I’ve read this a few times and all I see is, the warming starts first and the oceans get warmer.
Warmer water holds less gas than colder water
Dr Shakun’s narrative suggests that the warming precedes the rise in CO2 or am I losing it?
____________________________
No you are not losing it, I think you caught his lies. ( Good catch)
First by using the words Milankovitch “wobble” he is referring only to Obliquity ~ On a 42,000 year cycle, the earth wobbles and the angle of the axis, with respect to the plane of revolution around the sun, varies between 22.1° and 24.5° and leaves out “Eccentricity ~ the change in the shape of the earth’s orbit” and Precession ~ the shift of the seasons around the calender years so “the Northern Hemisphere will experience summer in December and winter in June” That is lie number one.
Next Shakun uses the words “increases the amount of light” to describe the increase in solar insolation implying that the solar insolation increase was not translated into heat at the earth’s surface. Shakun is of course talking about SOLAR INTENSITY AND SNOW SUBLIMATION where the air temperature would not necessarily rise because the energy is going directly into sublimating the ice.
This is another case of misdirection. While the ice sheets are sublimating at the higher latitudes the rest of the earth is also receiving more solar energy. That is why Shakun only refers to Obliquity, the “wobble” that would effect the northern latitudes and not the rest of the parts of the Milankovitch cycle which effects the earth as a whole..
This study, that only discusses solar energy changes in the Holocene, gives an indication of the type of increase in solar insolation under discussion and what it can do.
Once you look at it you can see the whole edifice is a case of misdirection so the rise in temperature can be said to be caused by an increase in CO2 instead of by the primary cause an increase in solar energy especially at the 65N A change in the order of +/- 60 Wm^2 in June. http://lh4.ggpht.com/_4ruQ7t4zrFA/TDL7RSCEgZI/AAAAAAAAEGE/0HeA3XYGVmM/milankovitch-roe-fig2.JPG
The Warmist reinterpretation of the “Milankovitch Model” http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu/studentresearch/climate_projects_04/glacial_cycles/web/data.html Particularly note the part:
Luboš Motl, a contributor to WUWT has a pointer and discussion on his website about a new paper In defense of Milankovitch, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L24703, doi:10.1029/2006GL027817, 2006
A site with good animation illustrating Obliquity, Eccentricity, and Precession: http://www.sciencecourseware.org/eec/GlobalWarming/Tutorials/Milankovitch/
John Finn,
You’re fooling no one here talking about scientific skeptics, when you are a dyed in the wool, wild-eyed climate alarmist. However, you didn’t identify which chart you’re complaining about. Was it this one? Or maybe this one? Or this one?
They are all based on real data, so if the axes are not to your liking, you can rescale and post them yourself. Nobody is stopping you. This chart was made by your fellow alarmist “Deep Climate“. Even he knows the IPCC’s predictions diverge far from reality.
Your defense of the IPCC is based on your belief system, not on real world observations. Face it, the IPCC is wildly overestimating sensitivity. My advice: listen to what the planet is saying, not to what the self-serving IPCC is promoting.
Once again, the long term rising temperature trend shows us that nothing unusual is occurring. And your attempt to question the existence of the LIA — one of the coldest periods of the Holocene — is irresponsible nonsense that is contradicted by a mountain of peer reviewed evidence.
So there are two step changes in CO2 concentrations that according to these published results resulted in lagged step changes in global temperature of approximately 1000 years.
What caused those two step changes in CO2? Why did they stop and not continue to rise? Why the substantial lag in changing global temperature? Why didn’t global temperatures immediately rise as CO2 rose?
This study poses more questions than the answer the scientists saught to discover.
I’m a bit confused are they saying that ice melts at the pole(s) first? and through the domino effect the final stage is CO2 is released and then this causes multiple degrees of warming?
That’s a lot of dominos. What happens if one of the so far guessed at dominos is wrong?
I’d be just as impressed if they could prove a meteorite of pure water and CO2 crashed into the planet adding GHG’s to the atmosphere (Post-Modern Science states you have to prove me wrong for me to be wrong, I think that’s the way these grant seekers work anyway).
Mike, on 4-4-12 @11:35 pm
You come off as a typical AGW troll who assumes he is smarter than everyone who comments on this site. While I’m not a “scientist”, I am a degreed accountant, was a CPA, and took (and passed) classes while in university in biology, microbiology, inorganic chemistry and organic chemistry. Until I came down with rheumatoid arthritis, I was a SCUBA diving instructor and certified in mixed gas diving. In my SCUBA and mixed gas training, I became very familiar with CO2 and physics as they pertain to gasses. As an accountant, I was an auditor, trained to audit financial statements and government programs and grants. In financial auditing, I was trained to look at all management statements with a critical eye. In auditing government programs and grants, especially when there was a problem, I was trained to look for condition, cause and effect. Therefore, while I might not be a “scientist”, I do have enough education and practical experience to tell when someone may be BS ing me. And I know how to do the research to confirm my suspicions! And this paper is BS.
Jay Davis
ars technica has latched onto the report too. They tend to report only that which supports global warming, and dismiss anything else. Here’s their take:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/greenhouse-gases-drove-the-close-of-the-last-ice-age.ars
Mike says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:35 pm
So many armchair experts and google galileos having a say here. Better get writing people, The journals will be keen to present your detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound debunking off this detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound research. You should all probably go and do some university level science courses at least at undergraduate level first though.
For those of you who don’t know what negative feedback is, this is a fine example!
****
Gail Combs says:
April 5, 2012 at 6:12 am
****
Gail, you have it right. Since the ice changes/65N summer insolation are so tightly correlated, it leaves little else to affect the ice changes — unless CO2 level changes are the same as the Milankovitch changes (which they are obviously not).
Smokey says:
April 5, 2012 at 6:20 am
John Finn,
You’re fooling no one here talking about scientific skeptics, when you are a dyed in the wool, wild-eyed climate alarmist.
I can point to a number of online ‘exchanges’ I’ve had with AGW proponents (including Michael Mann). In fact one particular case involving Mann was cited on WUWT. I’ve been challenging AGW issues for several years.
However, you didn’t identify which chart you’re complaining about. Was it this one? Or maybe this one? Or this one?
It was the US chart I referring to in the post, i.e. the last ‘this one’, but it’s largely immaterial. Most of what you link to is nonsense.
They are all based on real data, so if the axes are not to your liking, you can rescale and post them yourself.
The choice of axes and the presentation of the graphs has been done with the specific intention of obscuring the detail.
Your defense of the IPCC is based on your belief system, not on real world observations. Face it, the IPCC is wildly overestimating sensitivity
I’m not defending the IPCC. I think their estimate of climate sensitivity is probably too high.
Once again, the long term rising temperature trend shows us that nothing unusual is occurring.
Again you show the CET record, but the calculated trends contradict your assertion that “nothing unusual is occurring”. The trends for the last 3 centuries are as follows
1700-1800 -0.3 deg per century i.e. NO warming
1800-1900 0.04 deg per century i.e. flat – NO sig warming
1900-2000 0.7 deg per century i.e. Warming
The trend for the last 50 years is ~1.6 deg per century. So, after 200 years with very little trend in the CET record, we have significant warming in the most recent 100 years – and that warming is accelerating. As I stated earlier constructing a trend line from the start of the data may give the visual impression of ‘sameness’ but the numbers say different.
And your attempt to question the existence of the LIA — one of the coldest periods of the Holocene — is irresponsible nonsense that is contradicted by a mountain of peer reviewed evidence.
I didn’t question the existence of the LIA. I asked for the start and end dates. The fact that you appear unable to provide them suggests the “mountain of peer reviewed evidence” is not as clear cut as you’d like to think.
Gail Combs says: April 5, 2012 at 6:12 am
Surely this paper is a HUGE piece of information?
Rate of change of ice volume is directly related to the Milankovitch cycles.
“…comparing June 65N insolation anomaly with the time rate of change of global ice volume (dV/dt). …”
original paper http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/roe/GerardWeb/Publications_files/Roe_Milankovitch_GRL06.pdf )
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-milankovitch-by-gerard.html
Mervyn says:
Unfortunately, you didn’t get it right at all.
First of all, the claim you’ve heard that 97% of emissions is natural is what we might call a lie of omission: It considers only one side of the equation. It is like computing your bank balance by considering only paycheck deposits and only withdrawals. In particular, there are large exchanges between the atmosphere and the biosphere + ocean mixed layer, but these exchanges were, before the industrial revolution, virtually imbalance. So, of the rise in CO2 that we see in the atmosphere (from ~280 ppm before the industrial revolution) to 390+ ppm today, humans are responsible for all of it. In fact, the change in concentration would have been about twice as large as we observed if all of the excess CO2 remained in the atmosphere. However, about half of what we emit rapidly segregates in the biosphere and ocean mixed layer (which are hence now net absorbers of CO2, not emitters).
Second of all, it is not particularly useful to count molecules. About 99% of the atmosphere consists of diatomic molecules that are transparent to the IR radiation emitted by the Earth. Hence, that 1% that are greenhouse gases have a disproportionate effect on the Earth’s radiative balance. Add to that the fact that the effect of a particular gas is not (except over a very small range) linear in concentration, but more like logarithmic in concentration and you get a further disproportionate effect for small amounts of a substance. Finally, consider that the most prevalent greenhouse gas, water vapor, is condensable and has huge sources available…so that, as a result, its concentration in the atmosphere is determined by the temperature. This means that it is the non-condensable greenhouse gases like CO2 that help to support the effect of water vapor by warming the atmosphere enough that water vapor concentrations increase. All this put together means that CO2 (and the other non-condensable greenhouse gases like CH4) play an extremely important role in the radiative balance of the Earth.
Further note re Roe paper mentioned above :
it goes on to say: “The Milankovitch hypothesis as formulated here does not explain the large rapid deglaciations that occurred at the end of some of the ice age cycles (i.e., the several
large negative excursions in Figure 2):…”
original paper http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/roe/GerardWeb/Publications_files/Roe_Milankovitch_GRL06.pdf )
Smokey says (to John Finn):
Smokey’s idea of skepticism is that it is a one-way street. One is supposed to be skeptical of science that happens not to agree with Smokey’s political ideology but one is supposed to be completely gullible about anything that agrees with that ideology. He is what tamino rightly calls a “fake skeptic”. Fake skeptics despise real skeptics.
@ur momisugly Milankovitch
Time derivitaves of sunspots also produce impressive correlations.
My hairline recedes, the tree in the backyard gets taller=correlation.
There is confusion between the glacial-interglacial oscillations within a large scale glacial period and the large scale periods themselves that briefly punctuate earth’s predominantly warm and CO2 ridden climate every 200 million years or so.
Just lucky I guess, we are living somewhere near the end of an interglacial period within a large scale glacial punctuation.
Milankovitch seems to be no help explaining the large scale glacial periods. Obliquity and precession have no effect on net insolation, but redistribute the same insolation between seasons and hemispheres. Eccentricity is the only signal that changes insolation, but the net change is very small because the long trajectory out in the cold is offset by being closer to the sun at perihelion.
About a million years ago the glacial-interglacial periodicity changed from correlating with the 40kyr Milankovitch cycle to correlating to 100kyr, but the correlation is inverse. A 100kyr signal can be construed without invoking eccentricity.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.3610
Joel Shore said:
Ughh…That should have read: “It is like computing your bank balance by considering only paycheck deposits and not withdrawals.”
Mike says:
April 5, 2012 at 6:05 am
You gleaned all that from a blog I spend 5 minutes a day on? You are in the wrong profession. You should be a clairvoyant. They also overestimate their abilities and are never correct beyond chance. I guess someone finds you impressive. So, what is epizooiology? I’ve never heard of that discipline. Is it a climate science? Oh, you mean epizoology or epizootiology, neither of which are climate sciences either although I suppose as AGW really starts to ramp up we can expect animal diseases to undergo range shifts. I might even have a reference or two over at my blog. Anyway, its probably time for your nanna nap, so its been a pleasure. Thanks for your hypocritical criticism.”
Thank you for proving my point. You are what you write. 5 minutes a day for slurs and slams. Why bother? That’s your arrogance, not your intellect (well, maybe), talking. You don’t know science, yet (least of all the science of zoonoses). You’re welcome, but there’s nothing hypocritical about it. I don’t challenge the science I’m not up on; I leave that to much more learned folk, while I read, listen and learn. You, it took less than 5 minutes to figure out. Done troll-baiting, won’t waste anymore of Anthony’s/mod’s time. Time for my nap. /sarc.
I see that Joel Shore is busy posting right in the middle of the work day again, a privelege that honest folks in the private sector don’t get. And once again Shore’s psychological projection is on display, labeling anyone he disagrees with as an ideologue. That is simply a lazy jamoke’s way of admitting that he doesn’t have a credible argument. Poor old Joel doesn’t like it when scientific skeptics present facts that he can only object to with his baseless opinions, and by labeling those he doesn’t agree with using self-projection terms like “ideologue”. And there is another name for “fake skeptics”: alarmists. I am a true scientific skeptic; I know the difference between a conjecture and a hypothesis. But Joel Shore, being a climate alarmist and a fake skeptic, can’t handle the truth. AGW is a conjecture.
. . .
John Finn, if one of the many charts that I posted bothers you so much, just disregard it. The rest of them make my case. And I have plenty more I can post… Which bring up a funny story: when Joel Shore objected to a chart I had posted, I replied by posting FIFTY [50] more charts, from dozens of peer reviewed sources, and all showing the same thing as my original chart. Joel Shore objected to every one of them! So who is really the blinkered ‘ideologue’?☺
And please post all those ‘exchanges’ with Mann. I’d be interested in seeing his tap dancing. Could even be a duet. We’ll see.
Smokey says:
That is Smokey’s M.O.: Throw up as much nonsense as possible with the hope that a little of it sticks. Apparently, the notion of credibility is foreign to him. (Oh, no, right that is another one of those concepts that applies only to one side of the discussion! AGW “skeptics” don’t have to be credible.)
“dozens of peer reviewed sources”? Right! I have rarely seen you show anything from a peer-reviewed source. (And, no, graphs produced by Icecap using real data but cherrypicking it or otherwise distorting it don’t count as peer-reviewed sources!)
John Finn, the interesting thing about HADCET is seasonally ranked data.
Warmest DJF 1869, 1834, 1989, 2007
Warmest MAM 2011, 1893, 2007, 1945
Warmest JJA 1976, 1826, 1995, 2003
Warmest SON 2006, 2011, 1731, 1730
I don’t see any catastrophic warming …
You can talk about trends … but if UHI is .25C or .5C which I think is most likely ….
Joel Shore says:
April 5, 2012 at 9:28 am
Joel Shore has jumped the shark.
“So, of the rise in CO2 that we see in the atmosphere (from ~280 ppm before the industrial revolution) to 390+ ppm today, humans are responsible for all of it.”
I rest my case.
referring back to a comment made by LC Kirk Perth. There is another method for determining past Co2 levels that I am aware of, and that is the use of mosses and sedges. A study a number of years ago done in South America by researchers Figge and White, determined Co2 amounts as far back as the Youngter Dryas about 13,000 BP. I still do not think the resolution was that good that it could be said with certainty whether Co2 lead tmeperature or the other way around.
Theo Goodwin says:
“Joel Shore has jumped the shark.”
Actually, that happened quite a while ago. And he’s still posting throughout the work day. This isn’t some sort of paid holiday, is it?
LC Kirk, Perth says:
April 4, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Surely we must have found a better way of estimating global atmospheric paleo CO2 concentrations by now than looking at squashed gas bubbles in ice cores…. Are we even looking?
_________________________________________
Actually it was looked at first using stomata on the leaves of plants: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/stomata.html
Simon says:
April 4, 2012 at 4:17 pm
This whole “CO2 lagged behind the warming” has been one of the foundations for believing there is nothing to worry about . This finding is a major blow to the wall that is the skeptic argument. This is not the removal of one or two bricks, but a major structural failure. In fact I can hear the falling of debris as I write.
_______________________________
Wrong. Skeptics do not believe there is just one “knob” that controls the climate. Most of us believe there are a number of variables with confounding effects.
There is no way to deny that various molecules absorb energy at specific wavelengths. Chemists (like me) use these “signatures” to identify different molecules.The atmospheric absorption spectrum is known: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Atmospheric_Transmission.png
This is a graph of Sunlight as it hits the earth that also includes absorption by the ocean: http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/images/instruments/sim/fig01.gif
The elephant in the room is not CO2 but H2O (water) As the last graph shows the Oceans (70% of the earth surface) absorbs the high energy area of the spectrum (UV) As the first graph showed H20 has much wider absorption bands and accounts for most of the infrared radiated by the earth that is absorbed by the atmosphere. There are about 20000 ppm of water vapor in the air, versus about 400 ppm of CO2. Also the amount of water vapor varies wildly. The Ocean surface is on average warmer than the surface temp above it, temps lag SSTs, processes like ENSO lag the kinetic energy budget. When you throw in the albedo (sun reflection) effect of clouds, snow and ice, the heat absorption capacity of the oceans and lakes vs air, as well as the ability of rapid transport of heat to the upper atmosphere by thunderstorms, CO2 is insignificant when compared to water.
This paper in no way refutes the role of water. Heck because the increase in solar insolation increases the rate of sublimation, Shakun is making a case for an increase in the total water vapor content of the atmosphere causing the increase in temperature and not a case for CO2. If nothing else you have a lot of confounding factors with an increase in total solar insolation, an increase in water both liquid and vapor, as it is unlocked from the glaciers, and a change in albedo because the melting of glaciers will make them “dirtier” giving a positive feed back effect. (See: Scientists: Soot may be key to rapid Arctic meltand WUWT guest post by Kiminori Itoh of Yokohama National University )
To me it is incredible that anyone with the least bit of knowledge of science could ignore the fact that water is a big player in our climate and instead pick a minor gas that is a plant food. If there is a “Tipping point” (and I think there is) it is caused by water not CO2. Specifically the accumulation of sun reflecting snow when the TSI descends to the critical number that tips the earth into an Ice Age or into an Interglacial.
To me it looks like sensitivity to solar UV, not TSI, that could be the more interesting solar trigger of climate affects.
Given the vast number of variables we have tentatively identified can any one of us point to which knob to turn? As a chemist with over thirty years experience wrestling with production batch and continues processes that were not as well understood as the research chemists thought,, the idea that CO2 is “THE FACTOR” in climate is just plain laughable.
Theo Godwin says:
You haven’t even made a case at all! I assume you think that some of it might be due to ocean outgassing from warming. However, while it is true that the effect of ocean warming alone has been to outgas some CO2, this ignores the fact that the bigger contribution from the oceans is in absorbing CO2 as the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere increases. Hence, as I have noted, the oceans and biosphere have in net absorbed CO2…in fact, about half of the CO2 that we have emitted into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.