Bob Carter's essay in FP: Policymakers have quietly given up trying to cut ­carbon dioxide emissions

Steven Kopits says:
May 24, 2012 at 12:57 pm
“Climate change takes place over geological time scales of thousands through millions of years,..”
Do we actually know this to the level of an assertion? Do we know for sure that the global climate could not tip into an ice age in only a few hundred years?

No we don’t know this to more than an optimistic assumption. It would appear that O-S and Bond events can be far more rapid large changes of average temperatures in a decade. I read (but cannot find a reference) of ice melting in a mountainous area disclosing flowers in bloom. So some areas could find that an extreme weather event becomes a permanent ‘climate’ state overnight..

He’s fired!

and in australia we are having a $23 cabon tax starting 1st july by our left wing,water mellon head, GOVT

Fan, a theory may be beautiful, but if data coming in doesn’t support that theory it needs to be modified or dropped altogether. Love the data not the theory.

An excellent summation BUT :
Nonetheless, a key issue on which all scientists agree is that natural climate-related events and change are real, and exact very real human and environmental costs. These hazards include storms, floods, blizzards, droughts and bushfires, as well as both local and global temperature steps and longer term cooling or warming trends.
These hazards are weather events not climat. Had he said ENSO, AMO, MJO I would not have complained at all.
Bob Carter has always brought rational and clear thinking to the debate and for that he has been attacked and ridiculed in the MSM. Somewhat unfairly.

I applaud Bob Carter’s FP article only to the extent that he is speaking as an objective scientist to policy makers about climate science findings/assessments. I appreciate his logical reasoning and the basic thrust of his empirical findings. Thank you Dr. Carter.
But, I disagree with Bob Carter to the extent that in his FP article he is projecting overhyped and artificially stereotyped views onto the beneficial extreme spectrum of climate scientist proponents who are voluntarily active in the open, free and very rigorous discourse on climate science. I find his views in his FP article to that effect are inappropriate to say the least. I think Carter significantly weakened his FP article in that regard.
Also, I disagree with Bob Carter to the extent that in his FP article he is advising policy direction at the same time he is providing scientific findings/assessments. To me that kind of apparent conflict of interest situation he expresses is a fundamental reason we have arrived at our current irrational policy situation wrt CAGW from burning fossil fuels. I suggest the profession of scientists is best served when scientists, as scientists, does not overlap the profession of policy advisors/makers as policy advisors/makers; and vice versa.
John

As said by “Temp” there is a tone in this article that is worrying. I have generally liked Bob Carter’s stuff but here is something of a centrist positioning going on. It is like the politicians who try to occupy the middle ground by calling a plague on both houses.
Perhaps this is another piece in the disintegration of the skeptic camp, as the warmist campain fails and the realisation dawns that CO2 thing is irrelevant, it would be natural for the skeptics to divide.
I hope I am wrong.

I agree with Bob Carter.
Climate change. There is none.
And we should be damn glad it is a few tenth of a degree warmer now that in the Little Ice Age.
I am still waiting for anyone, any source, to show me some meaningful, out of the local norms, change in a local climate anywhere on this globe. I have looked for three years and still can find none. Some parameters are up, some down, at any given moment but locally they are in the normalcy of the last 2000 years locally. I don’t live in Missouri but “Show Me” anyway.
This charade has been, once again, renamed, but the corruption still remains, and this must be rooted out for the future generation’s sake. I will rule-out no one as members of this crime against humanity, much life has already killed by their actions, humans included.

PaulH from Barcelona says:
“My take on his post is that he has recognised that in order to make progress we have to allow scientifically-bereft, yet zeitgist-tuned politicians to save face. Such is the realpolitik of an imperfect real world.”
Yeah… I know that in the end that many of these religious nutjobs are going to not only walk for what is clearly massive fraud, embezzlement and a host of other ethics related stuff. To many will keep their jobs as well. Unless we can at least fire and disgrace many of them they will reform and be at it again. Global warming is nothing but a modern day eugenics movement. If real punishment isn’t put out on these people they will come back and at some point win. They are far to close right now for comfort to making all they’re dreams come true. Next time maybe the last time… and next time maybe just 10 years away.

“Despite an estimated spend of well over $100-billion since 1990 looking for a human global temperature signal, assessed against geological reality no compelling empirical evidence yet exists for a measurable, let alone worrisome, human impact on global temperature.”
This is a metaphorical breath of fresh air, sweetly relished after a hard day of shoveling out the chicken coop!

“Climate change takes place over geological time scales of thousands through millions of years,..”
Do we actually know this to the level of an assertion? Do we know for sure that the global climate could not tip into an ice age in only a few hundred years?
Probably not. You can look at e.g. the Vostok ice core (or other proxy) data and judge for yourself the timescale of the hot-cold transition. Actually, I would have said that the transition back to glaciation in general has been quite rapid for the last million years of glaciation cycles, but the period and other things have been changing as well and the record we have is itself probably only indicative and not necessarily as quantitative as the curves (without error bars, sigh) suggest.
As I’ve remarked a few times on the list, from the point of view of empirical (not “theoretical, model based”) stability analysis, there is zero evidence of a still-warmer metastable climate phase in the Pliestocene (within the last 5 million years, say). The current interglacial is ALREADY as warm is it appears possible for it to get before some known or unknown feedbacks regulate and limit temperature rise.
There is ample, compelling evidence that in spite of the unknown or known feedbacks that have us in a warm interglacial interval (the Holocene) at the moment, there is a pernicious and much colder glaciation phase that is a lot more stable and temporally dominant. Basically the Earth has spent around 85% of the last million years some 5-6C colder than it is right now. If you rolled a die to determine the climate, only the 1 face would denote warm interglacial — the other 5 faces would all be icy cold.
The way dynamical phase transitions like this (usually, generically) work is that there is a nonlinear equilibrium curve in some critical parameter (or parameter set), one that folds back underneath itself in an unstable branch connecting two stable branches. In the overlap region of the fold, you could be in warm phase OR cold phase, either way stable, depending on your recent history — if warm stay warm, if cold stay cold. But as the parameters shift around, the system eventually finds itself near the fold creases themselves. At those points one of the two solutions typically disappear — they become “imaginary” solutions or have other problems that say “no stable solution here”. Drive the parameters past those points, and the system will literally drop out of the now UNstable phase and relatively rapidly transition to the (now only) stable phase.
How long it takes really depends on many things. How much energy the system has to gain or lose to re-equilibrate around the now-dominant single stable branch. How long it takes the energy to redistribute itself and go where it can actually be lost. How much the shape of the stability sheet itself changes as the system evolves in time, losing or gaining heat, re-self-organizing its dominant dissipation modes as the temperature differentials they operate across change.
The one unmistakeable message of Vostok is that whether it takes 100 years or 1000, there comes a point fairly quickly — within 100 years or even less — where it becomes clear that the system has at least entered the tipping domain, where it is plunging towards the cusp of the vanishing fold. If the parameters that pushed it there reverse, it isn’t unlikely that the system will pull back to the formerly stable phase (and this sort of bobble is clearly visible in the record — the LIA is a low-rent version of it, although I don’t think it really pushed all that far down the side). But then there is that invisible line — cross it and you go steadily downhill (or uphill) as the colder (warmer) it gets positively feeds back to colder (warmer) still until you hit the stable sheet again.
The real danger here is the following scenario. Let’s assume that non-ice-based albedo variation is the missing elephant in GCMs — the non-ignorable cause. We won’t worry about what makes global bond albedo vary — we’ll just use the empirical observation that around 15 years ago it dropped by close to 7% (after being historically high for most of the 80s and 90s) and that a 7% drop in albedo — all things being equal — corresponds to a drop in the pre-GHG greybody baseline temperature (the thing GHE warming supposedly proceeds “from”) of roughly 2C. If GHE warming proceeds from the greybody base (something nearly everybody agrees is at least mostly/partly the case then it is very reasonable to infer that we’ve just started to lose heat accumulated in the entire global climate system during the low-albedo period, en route to a gradual cooling off of 1-2C.
How gradual? Nobody really knows. Remember, albedo variation isn’t even taken seriously and entered as an empirical parameter, at least not as far as I know — it is part of the “climate sensitivity parameter” that is supposed to include the effects of albedo and much else, and if anything it is estimated to provide net warming, although that argument is tough to really justify in the face of 2C in greybody OFF THE TOP before all that crap kicks in. Empirically, there appears to be a 10-30 year lag that is part of the “self-re-organization” that has to occur before the Earth loops through some of the short-term heat reservoirs (I’m not talking about the really short term ones that do year to year, I’m talking decadal) and one can start to seriously move heat. We’re well into that, but it isn’t that surprising — still — that there has been little overt cooling, rather just as emerging stabilization post 1999, temperatures that aren’t going up or down but are just meandering around. The PDO just inverted (first time in 30 odd years), the NAO is always wonky and may or may not invert soon, and ENSO is ENSO, looking a bit woozy itself with a double Nina just passed and a still undetermined future this year.
Might as well read chicken entrails as try to predict the response of four or five coupled chaotic oscillators being driven by a noisy energy source — right after taking one of the main control knobs of the oscillators and giving it a jerk to the left a couple of notches. Hell, if the small intestine loops up instead of down it could get warmer in response, seriously! Or the butterfly could pick, beating its wings down in Brazil (pick for ten years from now, but pick).
IF it starts getting cold systematically — starting Maunder Minimum (IF that is a cause of the albedo shift) and we start to lose the 2C in earnest, we are probably still fine — although the LIA happening today would be far deadlier than any observed or reasonble outcome of moderate further warming, given the lack of reason to expect a “still warmer phase” out there to tip over to — and the Holocene will probably continue — unless/until the long time-scale variation in albedo — actual significant growth in glaciation — starts to occur. When the Northern ice pack starts to march south AND the Southern pack grows to the North, that’s very likely one of the key critical parameters in the actual cold phase transition. Pass the critical point and ice will grow (increasing the mean albedo further still) year to year, until latitude and insolation limit its further creep.
If we get there, the transition might still take 100-300 years to complete and re-equilibrate in cold phase, but it will get colder systematically, year after year, a few hundredths of a degree or more per year. In a decade, maybe 0.2-0.4C. The latter is really racing — it would get scary cold, scary fast, but we’re far from that point.
rgb
2C is not “ice age”

Indeed climate change and bad weather has always been with us.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/bad-weather/
All I ever ask Warmists is to provide evidence that man-made co2 caused most of the recent warming.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2012/05/new-paper-finds-water-vapor-feedback-is.html

I wouldn’t start on that victory lap yet. I’ve always contended that CAGW’s ends was nigh because citizens of the world recognized that it was merely a way of increasing taxes, & more lately, of stifling capitalism’s economic growth.
Dr Carter says that governments have realized a move toward “the most cost-effective way… to deal with the undoubted hazards of climate change…” is “choosing… adaptation…” He’s saying that there’s still a drive to increase taxes! Governments are still going to use “climate” to increase government spending. We are still screwed!

“Over the last 18 months, policymakers in Canada, the U.S. and Japan have quietly abandoned the illusory goal of preventing global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”
Of course they will quietly abandon the goal. If they admit that they are doing this they will be decimated in the polls.

Excellent piece by Bob. I fear the alarmist are also Camelot-ists (?!) They seem to believe, as in Camelot, that “it only rains at night and sun shines all day, and snow falls evenly for three months in winter” – or some such ideas. Any deviation from this pattern is clear ‘evidence’ of man-made climate change/warming/abrupt climate tipping… we’re dooomed. – sorry just discovered http://www.ggweather.com/camelot.html is way ahead of me!

I’d like to know which “policy makers” in these United States he refers to as “quietly abandoned…reducing carbon dioxide emissions”. He is either mistaken (a fool), or lying. I’m unable to affirm or deny with respect to Canada and Japan, except for Japan’s full nuclear shutdown which forces reductions or carbon replacements.

[snip. Site Policy forbids comments about “denialists”. ~dbs, mod.]

Woah!!! Wait a minute there. Canada did not QUIETLY abandon the goal of preventing global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. I remember it being fairly loud. At least as far as Canadian standards go for being loud about something.

Just to throw this out there…
In the physical sciences (anything having to do with global warming will fall into this category) empiricism trumps theory. Top down approach, to “let the facts speak for themselves.” This is the correct method.
However in the social sciences such as economics or psychology, the correct method ought be a bottom up approach. In other words, theory trumps empiricism. Theories are deduced a priori logically (even though unfortunately this is not the case in most universities yet). There are no experiments in human action, and empirical analysis of data is often useless due to so many variables, whereas in the physical sciences, things can be held constant.

Importantly, a policy of adaptation is also strongly precautionary against any (possibly dangerous) human-caused climate trends that might emerge in the future.
————
But there is a massive contradiction here. The whole climate skeptic thing is driven by the conservative fear of change.
So given a choice between a doing a little yourselves to avoid change, you are insisting do nothing and then have change rammed down your throats by mother nature. That might not be pleasant.
There is also avoidance of considering what adaption will mean and how effective it will be. Are you going to jack up Venice on stilts or are you going to say SUV yes, Venice too bad?

Doesn’t matter anyway. Global CO2 levels are overwhelminghly controlled by temperature and have nothing to do with humans.

Steven Mosher says:
May 24, 2012 at 3:37 pm
<>
Not sure I follow your poiunt Steve, I think I see what you are saying, but it only makes partial sense, for two reasons:
1) that the models for the MSU data were presumably also ‘set’ to match the surface records at the time ? (with all the inherent errors, station siting, UHI etc, etc)
and
2) just because a limited temporal match over a period was ‘made’ certainly does not validate an earlier unmatched period of the second ‘correlated’ or any other temporarily ‘correlated’ dataset.

temp says:
May 24, 2012 at 1:21 pm
“I can’t say I’ve ever heard of someone say “c02 has zero effect on warming/climate” and mean exactly as stated.”
Not anyone in the slightly oxymoronic skeptic mainstream. All other conditions being equal, added CO2 should have a warming effect. But, other conditions are most decidedly not equal. There are a plethora of reactions, generally of the negative feedback variety, which oppose any significant warming from CO2. Indeed, it is now apparent that the regulatory systems of the Earth act rapidly to sequester our addition to CO2, so that the major driver of CO2 level in the atmosphere is temperature itself.
This plot shows unequivocally that temperature drives the rate of change of CO2 to very high significance. The human input to CO2, the rate of which is an upward trend, simply cannot fit in anywhere to any significant level once you remove a linear regression against temperature anomaly from the rate of change of CO2.
I’ve been skeptical of the human attribution for years, because it is simply not plausible that CO2 can remain within a tight neighborhood of an equilibrium point without strong negative feedback holding it there. I found my proof in this plot about a month ago.
The debate is over. Not only does CO2 not significantly drive temperature (because of cloud and other negative feedbacks), but we are not even driving the level of CO2. All that remains now is to wait for the entire sorry edifice to come crumbling down.

temp says (May 24, 2012 at 1:21 pm): ‘Chute_me says:
May 24, 2012 at 1:10 pm
“There are without doubt a number of folks in the so-dubbed “denier” camp who reject even the most basic premises of co2-enhanced warming.”
Really got any names? I know of none.’
Dr. Carter may be thinking of the so-called “slayers”, who “deny” basic radiative physics as seen here:
http://www.amazon.com/Slaying-Sky-Dragon-Greenhouse-Theory/dp/0982773404/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337901368&sr=1-1
Their arguments are on display in the comment thread to Dr. Roy Spencer’s “Yes Virginia” article here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
and in a rebuttal to Dr. Spencer’s article here:
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/home/9549-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still
or at WUWT for example in the comment thread here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/
Their numbers are small, but they’re something of an embarrassment to “real” CAGW skeptics whose doubts are based on science, not fantasy.
Nevertheless I agree with temp that Dr. Carter has been too even-handed in his criticism. One side of the debate has been “fueled by lobbyists and media interests” far more than the other, and most of the “unfortunate tribal emotionalism” is to be found in one camp, not the other.
I also think he’s far too optimistic. Perhaps some policymakers “have quietly given up,” but alarmists and CAGW profiteers haven’t, and won’t.

Scott Chris says:
May 24, 2012 at 3:53 pm

You’ll note one major difference between this [flawed] opinion piece and actual scientific literature is that Carter fails to provide embedded links to his spurious assertions

Please show us the links Hansen used in his WSJ “opinion” piece.
But if Carter had linked to a figure, it probably would have been this.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadat/images/update_images/global_upper_air.png
Real scary, huh?

Lazy Know-it-all says:

But there is a massive contradiction here. The whole climate skeptic thing is driven by the conservative fear of change.

Well, I suppose you’re entitled to your own definitons, but there are more rational analyses…
http://www.studentnewsdaily.com/conservative-vs-liberal-beliefs/

Are you going to jack up Venice on stilts or are you going to say SUV yes, Venice too bad?

Surely, you can’t be that simple-minded.

Vewy vewy quiet, so quiet that nobody is noticing.
Yet.

Bart says: The debate is over. Not only does CO2 not significantly drive temperature (because of cloud and other negative feedbacks), but we are not even driving the level of CO2. All that remains now is to wait for the entire sorry edifice to come crumbling down.

Over the medium to long term when CO_2 has a chance to reach equilibrium I agree. But over the short term I think it is clear that we are currently having an effect on CO_2 levels. Current CO_2 levels are the highest they’ve been for a very long time indeed. It is hard to explain this as a purely natural phenomenon. For example temperature alone cannot explain it since current temperatures are not all that unusual.

Ian H says:
May 24, 2012 at 5:31 pm
“But over the short term I think it is clear that we are currently having an effect on CO_2 levels.”
The plot I have linked to says you are wrong. There is no room for a significant human influence to fit in here.
“It is hard to explain this as a purely natural phenomenon.”
I don’t have to explain it. The data are unequivocal. The net result is overwhelmingly natural.
“For example temperature alone cannot explain it since current temperatures are not all that unusual.”
Again, this plot shows the relationship.

Sorry. I thought it was “denier” that you objected to. But if you don’t like “denialist” either I will keep that in mind.

Smokey says:
May 24, 2012 at 6:03 pm
“although a fraction of a degree warming …may be the result of radiative physics”
No doubt, the increase in CO2 is causing some warming, which is apparently being counteracted by negative feedback to the point where it is negligible. Otherwise, we would have continued warming for the last decade while CO2 levels increased.
But, it’s a moot question, because we are clearly not responsible for the rise in CO2, and there is therefore nothing we can do about it in any case.

rgbatduke says:
May 24, 2012 at 6:20 pm
Bart says:
May 24, 2012 at 6:40 pm
Perhaps you would contend that you might be able to add a ramp in by scaling the temperature dependent input down. Then, you won’t match the fine detail as in the plot.
Occam’s razor – it’s almost all natural.

rgbatduke says:
May 24, 2012 at 6:20 pm
And, keep in mind what these plots are showing. This is the derivative of CO2 with respect to time. And, it is proportional to temperature anomaly (with respect to the appropriate baseline). That means, when you integrate it, the result lags the temperature, That means, in this causal universe, temperature is driving CO2, and not the other way around.
It is not possible, e.g., to have humans driving CO2, and that driving temperature anomaly , because the temperature anomaly is not proportional to CO2, but to its rate of change.
The human attribution argument claims that the entire rise is attributable to half of the anthropogenic inputs. That leaves no room for this obvious correlation. To believe it, you have to believe this incredibly good agreement between the time series is just a coincidence.
That is simply untenable.

“LazyTeenager says:
May 24, 2012 at 3:38 pm
So given a choice between a doing a little yourselves to avoid change, you are insisting do nothing and then have change rammed down your throats by mother nature. That might not be pleasant.
There is also avoidance of considering what adaption will mean and how effective it will be. Are you going to jack up Venice on stilts or are you going to say SUV yes, Venice too bad?”
The Reality of the the situation is:
The vast majority of Climate/weather related issues ‘blamed’ on CO2. Aren’t caused by CO2.
That includes Venice. Venice is sinking. And yes it does need ‘repiling’. The old piles are going further into the mud or disintegrating!

Perhaps you would contend that you might be able to add a ramp in by scaling the temperature dependent input down. Then, you won’t match the fine detail as in the plot.
OK, suppose we try “Nitrate supply affects plant growth”. Nitrates come in two forms — lightning fixed “natural” nitrogen that is delivered to plants proportional to the frequency of thunderstorms, and by Farmer Joe. The growth rate of the plants varies (we will imagine) with total nitrate supply.
Farmer Joe delivers half of what the plants get in any given year (on average). It is delivered at a very steady rate (he uses time-release nitrogen that maintains a constant rate of delivery). Thunderstorms, on the other hand, are both seasonal and local in time — you might have one and then not have another for several weeks, or you might have one a day for a week. On average they deliver half of the total nitrogen used to make the plant grow, but of course they modulate the hell out of the growth rate because it is feast or famine. The resulting growth curve, detrended and rescaled (steps that make it absolutely impossible to assign fractional contributions to total nitrogen after the fact, BTW) will wiggle quite nicely with the thunderstorm rate and it will be really easy to forget the contribution of the tireless Farmer Joe.
The problem is that curve fitting, especially multivariate nonlinear curve fitting when you look only at rescaled anomalies, can be a deceptive process. It’s not Ockham’s Razor, it is that your assertion remains unproven because the evidence presented does not suffice to rule out human CO_2. Remember, by detrending you don’t know the constant that determines the fractional contribution.
So I remain unconvinced.
You also fail to address my observation that the real problem is way harder than that. CO_2 is contributed to and absorbed from the atmosphere by multiple channels. Some comes literally out of the ground from e.g. soil chemistry, breakdown of methane, and so on. Some comes from human or natural burning. The biosphere both absorbs and/or contributes. Some comes out of “general vulcanism” — outgassing of CO_2 either from the crust directly or from active volcanoes. But of course the elephant in the room CO_2-wise is the ocean — the ocean is an enormous CO_2 source and sink, holding order of 100x as much CO_2 as the atmosphere, and with a large number of dynamical mechanisms with different timescales that buffer the CO_2 content of the atmosphere, adding some or taking some away via first surface chemistry, then transporting it and doing any of a number of things with it in the middle and deep ocean. And best of all, a lot of the control parameters (e.g. time constants) describing all of this dynamic balance and feedback are either unknown or poorly known, measured or estimated from inadequate data and studies or filled with assumptions.
In this mix, the known, tallied, counted, measurable, utterly predictable and understandable human contribution stands out as one of the largest. You burn a certain amount of fossil fuels in a year, you get a certain amount of CO_2, it’s that simple, and that amount is not small, not in aggregate.
The question is then, how long does the human contributed CO_2 hang out? Which of the systems above absorb how much at what rate? How long do those systems hold onto it (it doesn’t do much good to absorb during the winter only to get it back when the water warms in the spring, but that’s exactly the kind of thing responsible for so<me of the observed thermal/seasonal correlation in the Mauna Loa data, the annual "ripple" on the smoothed curve)?
Note that answering any of these questions isn't as simple as saying "it's Nature, humans have nothing to do with it" because the rescaled fluctuations in the derivative of one curve happen to line up with the rescaled fluctuations in another. Nor is "Nature" a simpler explanation (and hence arguable for using Mr. Ockham, who actually can be and often is wrong, incidentally) if you can add up a human contribution that is definitely there and should be quite comparable to Nature. Why doesn’t the human contribution contribute? What happens to it? CO_2 doesn’t come with a label — once produced Nature doesn’t care who or what produced it.
Give me coherent answers to some of these questions and I might believe you. As I said, I’d love to think you are right — but that simply acknowledges a personal bias and has nothing to do with whether or not you probably ARE right. And every time I’ve looked into it in detail, I’ve ended up being convinced that you are not, that in fact one probably cannot explain the CO_2 concentration increase only from e.g. a warming ocean. But it even the negative conclusion is premature, because we really don’t know whether or how much or how fast or how permanently the ocean pulls CO_2 out of the atmosphere (driven by which parameters). A whole lot of unfinished work here…
rgb

Ric Werme says:
May 24, 2012 at 6:55 pm
I don’t know who you are and frankly unless you got something USEFUL to say i could care.
Letting them off the hook for whats been done is clearly moronic… at the least. This giving them life boats crap has to stop.

@temp
The key word in that quote would be “depicted”. We’re all “depicted” as deniers in certain circles, including himself.
@John Whitman
What profession would you suggest serve as scientific advisors to policy makers if not scientists?

rgbatduke says:
May 24, 2012 at 7:41 pm
I don’t know what to tell you, Doc. When you see a correlation as strong as this… to maintain that such complete congruence in almost every detail still leaves substantial, even dominating, room for something else which bears little resemblance to it… I think maybe you need to take some time and consider all the possibilities. I do not think you can fail eventually to come to the conclusion that any other explanation is grasping at straws.
Sure, lots of small scale stuff occurs. Lots of complexity. Physics is nasty on a small level, but Ehrenfest’s theorems showed how simple Newtonian dynamics evolves from all that low level complexity. Here, we see that it all adds up to temperature controlling CO2 level.

Re: Bart
It’s been a while since I’ve been out here, but do you remember an Econometrics brain named VS (IIRC)? If so any idea whatever happened to him?

Werner Brozek says:
May 24, 2012 at 9:58 pm
“But over the last 11 years, the correlation has not been that good.”
Would it be too much to ask you to pay attention to the variables which have been plotted for comparison???
And, maybe read what I have written?

Bart – you have latched onto this one graph and are ignoring everything else. As rgbatduke has pointed out a correlation between temperature and the scaled derivative of CO_2 means very little and ignores absolute CO_2 levels. You have left room for a linear increase in CO_2. Actually this is pretty close to what we see when you look at the recent history of absolute CO_2 levels. You graph does NOTHING to explain this. This linear increase is the SINGULAR MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE of recent CO_2 history and you simply wipe it away by taking a derivative and scaling and now want to pretend that it doesn’t exist. When we complain you argue instead that human CO_2 output has been increasing at faster than linear so the linear output can’t be due to human influence. I don’t see how this absolves you from having to explain it, but in any case the argument is wrong. The rate at which CO_2 is absorbed certainly depends on overall CO_2 concentration. It is entirely possible therefore for us to be pumping CO_2 into the system at an increasing rate and have the response of the CO_2 concentration to that input be close to linear.
In the meantime you have ignored my question as to why current CO_2 levels are the highest they’ve been for hundreds of millions of years. What is it about NOW that is so unusual that it could cause such a high CO_2 level – apart from us being here that is. Temperatures are NOT unusually high at present.
rgbatduke asked you to explain where all the CO_2 we have released into the troposphere by mining hydrocarbons has actually gone. We burn it. There is a lot of it. It goes into the atmosphere. What happens to it? You can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. As in – “Ignore those billions of tons of coal over there – look at my graph!”.
Well we looked at your graph. We answered your questions. You ignored ours. You seem to me to be obsessed with this simple model you’ve constructed and are ignoring reality. Isn’t that precisely what we don’t like warmists doing?
How about you look at the two questions you’ve been asked and see if you can answer them
1. Why are current CO_2 levels unusually high?
2. Where did the hydrocarbons we dug up and burned go?
If you can’t do that I can’t be bothered arguing with you.

For me, cAGW was a busted flush as soon as I heard that charlatan Gore start talking about the ‘consensus’. That term is anathema to any genuine scientist because what it effectively says is pack your bags there is no more work to be done here. Physicists learned the folly of that approach the hard way in the period that immediately preceded the emergence of quantum mechanics.
Science has been hi-jacked in the MSM by arts educated, post-modern, environmental activists with an agenda. They happily use scientific terminology, in order to ride on the back of the qudos generated by the progress made in applying the scientific process since the 16th century, but steer well clear of applying the necessary rigour.
Their edifice is crumbling and they don’t like it; hence the increasingly shrill responses to even the gentlest criticism.

tango says:
May 24, 2012 at 1:22 pm
and in australia we are having a $23 cabon tax starting 1st july by our left wing,water mellon head, GOVT
________________________________
My thoughts exactly. Here in the USA we had an EPA “ruling” that will wipe out 42% of our electric generating capacity and the cost of replacement is 8 to ten times the current amount we now pay. This means a four fold price in electric at minimum.
Here in North Carolina

North Carolina households with annual incomes below $50,000, representing 56% of North
Carolina’s population, spend an estimated average of 23% of their after-tax income on energy. Energy costs for the poorest households earning less than $10,000 represent 77% of their family incomes….
The relatively low cost of electric power is due in part to North Carolina’s historic reliance on domestic coal for most of its electric generation….
http://www.americaspower.org/sites/default/files/NC_Energy_Cost_Analysis_2012.pdf

The paper goes on to say the residential energy cost for households with annual incomes below $50,000,ranges from $1531 to $2045 annually. (Fuel costs for private vehicles are about the same)This means we can see a rise in electric cost to at least $4000 a year. Even if vehicle fuel cost do not rise above the $2K to $6K and the usage stays the same, the total energy cost will rise to between $7,500/year to $10,000/year for those with incomes below $50,000. This represents a rough doubling bringing the expense for energy to about 50% of the after tax income. And that is just a conservative ball park figure.
The politicians method for dealing with this will be a tax payer subsidy so the turkeys who cause the problem in the first place will be voted in again because they promise to pay the “poor” for the added cost in energy from the already depleted tax payer funds.
They really do want to bankrupt our countries don’t they? Here is how bankrupted countries are treated: http://www.whirledbank.org/development/sap.html

*****
Robert Brown says:
May 24, 2012 at 2:07 pm
*****
Thanks for the comments — expands on my ideas. No need to invoke cosmic rays, GHGs, solar cycles, etc.
You’ve prb’ly seen it before, but look at this:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-milankovitch-by-gerard.html
Rather remarkable correlation…

Should have said “at least in the short term for which we have reliable observations.”

richardscourtney says:
May 25, 2012 at 10:36 am
Fair enough, Richard. But, surely you should modify that to say: “…but it is possible that the rise may have a significant contribution from the anthropogenic emission.” You cannot possibly look at the graph to which I have been linking and believe that temperature does not play a major role (I would say, the major role).

Bart,
I didn’t know we were arguing, and my apologies if I came across as rude. Also, in case I wasn’t clear, by spurious relationship I did not mean to imply that the correlation was invalid… the technical definition of that term is that two variables correlate but have no direct causal relationship (as in both could be driven by some other unaccounted for variable).
Regarding econometrics, I’ve never put confidence in it for predictive value (i.e. economic systems are too complex to predict, and I personally feel GCMs fall into that same category 🙂 but I’ll just put it this way… what passes for statistics in Climate Science isn’t, shall we say, always top shelf… and I’ve never seen better statistical methods for analyzing historical data in multivariate systems than those in econometrics.
BTW – I found the VS thread – http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/global-average-temperature-increase-giss-hadcru-and-ncdc-compared/ – different Bart confirmed (apparently the one I was thinking of is definitely not a skeptic).
Temperature changes preceding CO2 changes is definitely not a stretch. Don’t forget, that “inconvenient” Vostok record ; ) But I don’t recall what methods have been proposed – if any – by which temperature would drive CO2.

“…a key issue on which all scientists agree is that natural climate-related events and change are real, and exact very real human and environmental costs. These hazards include storms, floods, blizzards, droughts and bushfires, as well as both local and global temperature steps and longer term cooling or warming trends.”
This has everything to do with weather prediction and very little to do with “climate change”.
“Dealing with climate reality as it unfolds…”
Yeah again – weather. This guy is just trying to wrap weather prediction in the garb of “climate change”. The fact that he is unwilling to acknowledge that he is simply talking about weather prediction makes me very wary of trusting anything he says.

How much of the increase CO2 in the atmosphere is due to fertilization that promotes the growth and metabolism of the many species of soil oganisms such as bacteria, fungi, nemotodes, worms, insect larvae, etc? Probably a lot.

richardscourtney says:
May 25, 2012 at 1:11 pm
“However, those facts only suggest that the rise in global temperature since 1958 caused the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration observed at Mauna since 1958. The correlation may be indicating a short-term effect which is not significantly involved in the rise since 1958.”
Richard, the correlation holds up continuously since 1958. That’s 54 years.
I must admit I am not following your logic. I’m wondering if what you are suggesting is that a short term event might have independently launched both the temperature and the CO2 on their current (since 1958) trajectories, without the one actually causing the other. That seems rather a stretch to me, when you consider that temperature would be expected to have an effect on CO2. Indeed, I do not think anyone denies the short term effect. The plot shows that there is also a long term effect.
Here is the integrated result to consider. There’s room for maybe 4-6 ppm from anthropogenic inputs. And, that is roughly what you would expect if the sinks are fairly active, given the estimates that we are currently pumping something like 3% of the natural flux into the system. If we had been pumping that much in for the last century, we should expect a 3% rise in concentration. That would be 9ppm. But, since we’ve been ramping up to that level, the rise should be about 1/2 that, or 4.5 ppm.

When there’s a major error of fact in the very first sentence, that doesn’t provide great trust for the rest of it. Canada did not “quietly abandon” greenhouse gas targets. It did so very noisily and publicly.
First, it stated outright that it had no intention of meeting its Kyoto Protocol commitment of a reduction of 6 per cent by 2008-12. That was the bombshell at Copenhagen. Then at Durban two years later it publicly stated that it had no intention of signing on to any form of a Kyoto Protocol extension agreement.
If this constitutes “quiet” then I’d not like to see Bob’s definition of “loud”.

Ian H says:
May 25, 2012 at 7:57 pm
Ian, it is more like this:
T = K1 + K2*t + m1*cos(w1*t+phi1) + m2*cos(w2*t+phi2) + …
CO2 = a + alpha*((K1-T0)*t + 0.5*K2*t^2 + (m1/w1)*sin(w1*t+phi1) + (m2/w2)*sin(w2*t+phi2) + …)
dCO2/dt = alpha*(T – T0)
for a constant alpha and offset T0. The temperature series is quite complicated, and the CO2 derivative matches virtually all of it one-to-one with just a scale factor and offset. And, the offset is hardly eyebrow raising when the temperature series is itself an anomalistic term with respect to an arbitrary baseline.
So, basically, you’re bugging me because of “a” and “T0”. But, at most, these account for a linear term in the CO2, while the integrated emissions are most decidedly an upward series with pronounced curvature (i.e., at least quadratic and arguably higher powers). As I have been saying, there is no place to fit them in to any significant degree, once you have incorporated the temperature dependency into the CO2 rate to match the slope and other fine detail.

Ian H says:
May 25, 2012 at 7:57 pm
“I’ve explained to you that since the CO2 absorption rate depends on CO2 level this is quite possible.”
You’ve asserted it. You have not explained it. You would be hard pressed to, since it would require some very fancy feedback (basically double integral feedback – very difficult to stabilize robustly and hardly a dynamic likely to be found in a naturally evolved system). This is worse than epicylic. It is really grasping at straws.
No, if humans are affecting CO2 levels to any appreciable degree, it has to show up as a marked quadratic or better term in the absolute level. There is no room for it – that particular morphology is already accounted for by the influence of temperature.

You’ve asserted it. You have not explained it. You would be hard pressed to, since it would require some very fancy feedback (basically double integral feedback – very difficult to stabilize robustly and hardly a dynamic likely to be found in a naturally evolved system). This is worse than epicylic. It is really grasping at straws.

Challenge accepted. Lets be clear about this. You claim that it is impossible to obtain a linear
increase in CO2 in a situation where human input is “ramping up”. I claim this is quite possible in the case where the rate of CO2 absorption depends on CO2 concentration to which you reply that this require “double integral feedback” and wouldn’t be stable.
OK – here is a very simple model for the rate of change of CO2
dC/dt = H(t) -kC
Where C is the CO2 concentration and H(t) is the rate of human input into the system. This is obviously an extreme simplification but it has all the features we are interested in. As you can see the rate of change of CO2 in this model depends on the amount of CO2 present. With no human input the solution to this differential equation would be exponential decay of CO2 concentration to zero.
Now lets assume that we observe CO2 increasing linearly and see what human input H(t) would be needed to cause that.
Let C(t) = at + b . Then dC/dt = a and we have
a = H(t) – k(at + b) => H(t) = ka t + (kb+a)
Human input needs to increase linearly. Let me stress that H(t) is the RATE of input. The rate of input is “ramping up” – exactly what you said couldn’t happen without “double integral feedback”.

Ian H says:
May 25, 2012 at 11:23 pm
Looks like we crossed paths where I already explained this above, saying: “But, you’d need wide bandwidth, which would drive your output into the negligible range, which is my whole point.”
You have solved for a steady state. You don’t reach steady state in any reasonable length of time unless you have wide bandwidth, i.e., in your equation, k is large. What happens if k is large? you say
H(t) = ka t + (kb+a)
Well, H is bounded to a not so very large value, so ka has some not so very large value. If k is large, and ka is not so very large, then a = ka/k is small. The contribution to C is negligible. Thank you for illustrating my point.

LazyTeenager says:
May 24, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Importantly, a policy of adaptation is also strongly precautionary against any (possibly dangerous) human-caused climate trends that might emerge in the future.
————
But there is a massive contradiction here. The whole climate skeptic thing is driven by the conservative fear of change…..
________________________
Fear of Change?
And what if you and the others are incorrect? There is more solid evidence that we are at the end of the Holocene and headed into a gradually decline in temperatures. Even people like Joe Romm understand that. He stated over at Climate Progress”
“Absent human emissions, we’d probably be in a slow long-term cooling trend due primarily by changes in the Earth’s orbit …” http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/16/hockey-stick-paper-mcshane-and-wyner-statisticians/#more-31767
An Arctic study, Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic states:
“..Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages,…”
A second study, Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception (2007) states:
“Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial….”
And even Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution gives a clear warning:
Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?

Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth vs climate can shift gears within a decade….
But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur…“

The earth has already seen a 1-3° C above 20th century averages during the Holocene. CO2 makes plants grow faster with less water. Given the earth is near the end of the Holocene and headed toward the next Ice age thanks to the Milancovitch cycle, I really doubt warming is an issue at present even if CO2 has an effect. TSI may only vary 0.1% in the short term but the earth has already dropped 9% in solar energy from the Holecene maximum.
The only “Magic” CO2 could possibly preform at this late date in the Milancovitch cycle is slow the slide into the next Ice Age. Even so cooling and crop failures are more of a threat than Sea Level rise.
It is extremely frustrating to see politicians not only ignore the possibility of a cooling earth but do everything possible to make sure the deaths (and PROFITS) from cold and famine are as high as possible by jacking up energy costs and regulating family farms into bankruptcy while the wealthy corporations, individuals and even universities grab farmland. ~ So much for “Socialists” caring about anything but their bank accounts.
I suggest you take a good hard look at the newest info on the Milancovitch cycle BTW: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-milankovitch-by-gerard.html

LazyTeenager says:
May 24, 2012 at 3:38 pm
But there is a massive contradiction here. The whole climate skeptic thing is driven by the conservative fear of change…..
How do you manage to keep a straight face while you’re writing that stuff?
Atmospheric CO2 has been increasing — who panics? Warmies.
The world has been warming since the LIA — who panics? Warmies.
Some glaciers are in retreat while others are advancing — who panics? Warmies.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
The only fear generated by the climate doing what the climate has been doing for billions of years is entirely on the *Left* side of the fence, and it’s being generated (loudly and shrilly) in hopes of greasing the skids for global wealth redistribution — aka, Agenda 21.

Bart, I followed your newer link to the graphs (including the integral graph) and again, while I do find it suggestive, it isn’t smoking-gun compelling. To make it so, you really do have to eliminate all reasonable alternatives. It isn’t enough to show that your very simple model works, you need to show that alternative models do NOT work, AND — and this is a very important and — you have to come up with a concrete physical model, not just point out a coincidence in the data. Otherwise one can easily show that smoking cigarettes causes teenage pregnancy, or any of the eight-zillion examples in stats textbooks for why correlation is not causality. There are many things that are covariant but are not plausibly causal.
On a second note: on the new graph, although my eyes aren’t what they used to be, I can pick up numerous places where CO_2 derivative increase precedes the GISS temperature. Systematically, not as a “noise” fluctuation — in fact several of the GISS temp fluctuations appear to be a lagged version of the CO_2 fluctuations. I know you are applying smoothing filters, and this may be an artifact of that, but I have to say that at the moment the best inference I could make from the graph is that when something causes the rate of CO_2 increase to jump, that same something (or the resulting CO_2 bump) cause a bump in the GISS temp. But this isn’t completely consistent — sometimes the temperature slightly leads or they move at the same time. Could it be that both CO_2 levels AND temperature are being modulated, through slightly different mechanisms, by a third causal mechanism altogether? Say rainfall/cloudiness, state of the sun, the value of the DJIA…
As they say, what’s up with that?
rgb

Rather, the property of the data which confirms…

rgbatduke says:
May 27, 2012 at 7:18 pm
I do not even have to run the simulation to know what you will get out. y(1) will track y(2) plus the effect on y(1) due to k1*H, which will be approximately tau1*k1*H with a delay of about tau1 seconds.
y(2) will be approximately the integral of the input, fairly well for perhaps 1/3 of tau2.
So, let’s see, currently your value of tau1 shown is 1.0, your value of k1 is 1.0 (actually, you cannot be this large because a large fraction, which the IPCC claims is roughly 1/2, goes rapidly into the oceans), and your value of H is 0.1. So, the effect on the output y(1) from H is about 0.1 ppm.
For sizing things, you can do the following. Atmospheric levels have gone up maybe 100 ppm in 100 years. That is supposed to represent about 1/2 of human emissions in the time, so they should be about 200 ppm equivalent. If you assume H is a ramp, H = Hdot*t, then you should perhaps have 200 = 0.5*Hdot*100^2, so that Hdot= 0.04 ppm/year^2.
I will assume k1 = 0.5. Now, because you have selected tau1 to be 1 year, your routine should produce about 1*(100-1)*0.5*0.04 = 1.98 ppm in the output of y(1) after 100 years.
As I stated, the maximum value of tau1 is indicated by the max possible lag in CO2 with respect to temperature, and should be perhaps 3 years. If you set tau1 = 3 years, you should get about 3*(100-3)*0.5*0.04 = 5.8 ppm from the H input alone. The rest has to be made up by the Delta(t) input.
You can try a longer tau1, which will help amplify the input from H until, in the limit, you get a straight integral. But, you will find y(1) tracks y(2) less and less well, and the temperature will lead its effects on y(1) more and more.

I do not even have to run the simulation to know what you will get out. y(1) will track y(2) plus the effect on y(1) due to k1*H, which will be approximately tau1*k1*H with a delay of about tau1 seconds.
I assume you mean “years”, not seconds. And yes, this is precisely what I mean. It is exactly what I was saying with my example involving fertilizer. In the steady state (the solution has a transient from nearly all initial states before settling down) the lag in H is completely unimportant in a generally smooth monotone increasing function, by the way. But you know that.
The point is — and we seem now to agree, do we not — that there exists ranges of parameter space that cannot easily be excluded on physical ground (certainly not in an offhand way by pointing at the graphs alone!) where H is responsible for a variable percentage of the total CO_2 gain from any given post-transient initial state to a given future, all of which lead to curves in which dCO_2/dt — rescaled and centered — almost perfectly tracks Delta T. The observation of the latter in real-world data does not, therefore, suffice in and of itself to conclude that ACO_2 has negligible impact on atmospheric CO_2 gain above any given baseline.
I mean, you can play with the simulation yourself or not as you please, but I’ve empirically found values of the parameters that let me crank up the fractional gain due to CO_2 to >>nearly<< whatever you like (at some point I'd have to work harder to rescale the curves automagically in order to be able to tell because of my lazy all-on-one plot) while still preserving. I've also already done a crude "version 2" of the code where I let H(t) = H_0 exp(kappa t) to demonstrate that yes, it is pretty easy to make the variation of C_0 a weak function of temperature (it is independent of C after all), and still pick up the nearly perfectly correlated dCO_2/d T.
The problem, I think, is the rescaling. Because you rescale and shift the scale of the derivative to fit on top of the delta T curve, you lose any information about relative fractions. Be that as it may, it is a simple fact that the assertion of the correlation alone is not sufficient, and your own model is ONE of the models that refute it. Richard argues — and I have no reason to doubt him — that this is one of MANY he has tested that work, and that all of them have the unfortunate multivariate problem that it is usually possible to find parametric phase volumes that reproduce the data within its uncertainties with ACO_2 a major, or minor fraction of the whole.
If you can come up with physical arguments that eliminate the parameter space regimes in question, good for you! I'd love it if you COULD prove your point. But that's WHY I'm going to be extra-damn tough on you until you do. By the time I accept your conclusion, I'd expect that everybody will have to accept your conclusion because you have a complete physical argument, backed by explicit pieces of evidence and a concrete physical model with actual, identified sources and sinks (which this is still far, far from being — this is a mathematical toy model good for demonstrating plausibility — which you have done — and little more).
Finally, as for the effect leading the cause problem — yes, I read your explanation. Read your own explanation again yourself. Read my remarks again. This is not a periodic system of equations, there are no “phase shifts of \pi/2” to account for. You’re on the wrong side of complex. Even with a periodic driving function like the one in my matlab code, the phase shift of dCO_2/dt relative to a partially periodic Delta T(t) driver must strictly be a lag, never ever a lead.
I will help you here. There is no plausible explanation for the effect leading the cause in a two component model with otherwise smooth inputs. No glib mathematical explanation will suffice, because as you yourself have noted, our universal experience in all of science is of causes preceding effects (and yes, I do teach physics and am aware of the fact that this is an entropic illusion and so on — none of it relevant here). If you show your graph to 100 physicists, 90 or more of them are going to circle the three or four points on it where effect egregiously precedes cause and instantly — and correctly — reject your assertion of sole cause. The others, when the problem is pointed out to them, will agree. That would be 100%. I cannot imagine you convincing one single person that you are correct in an unqualified manner while this feature of the data remains unexplained, and in my opinion the only possible explanation is that your argument is not correct, that there is at least one more degree of freedom you are ignoring with an external signal on it.
I’ve tried to point out how important a clue that this is — perhaps it is THE clue (since your real results ARE an interesting analysis of real measured data!) that would let us all unravel the mess. Let me put it to you as a specific question:
Is there a third parametric, time-dependent driver coupled to both dCO_2/dt and to Delta T in such a way that the latter to are strongly covariant but either one can lead or lag the other in time?
It might take four — something (perhaps at the level of random noise or chaotic noise, perhaps not) to explain why one one or the other leads — but without at least three I don’t offhand see any way for atmospheric CO_2 to accelerate ahead of the forcing that supposedly produces the acceleration.
First my car starts to speed up — then I hit the accelerator? I don’t think so.
rgb

richardscourtney says:
May 28, 2012 at 1:00 am
You said “within the measurement errors of the Mauna Loa data”. That suggests you mean that it threads the bumps and wiggles, which you have arbitrarily labeled “measurement errors”. That is not an unqualified “perfect”. In fact, it is not perfect at all.
I know what you have to do to make it match dCO2/dt = alpha*(T-T0). I have used logic and a deep understanding of how such systems work to lay it out for you. You have to make the contribution from H negligible and the contribution from temperature overriding. Just run the exercise. You’ll be glad that you did.
rgbatduke says:
May 28, 2012 at 7:32 am
“,,,the lag in H is completely unimportant in a generally smooth monotone increasing function, by the way.”
Taking account of lags is absolutely key to replicating a time series which has to settle within a finite time frame.
“…where H is responsible for a variable percentage of the total CO_2 gain from any given post-transient initial state to a given future, all of which lead to curves in which dCO_2/dt — rescaled and centered — almost perfectly tracks Delta T.”
No, we do not agree on that at all. Matching the bumps and wiggles requires a particularly narrow range of contribution from the temperature dependent term with a particular level of smoothing. The level of smoothing required and the limits on how much H you can pump in then limit the maximum contribution from H to something negligible, I claim about 4-6%.
“I let H(t) = H_0 exp(kappa t) to demonstrate that…”
H is known and bounded. You cannot just specify it arbitrarily.
“Be that as it may, it is a simple fact that the assertion of the correlation alone is not sufficient, and your own model is ONE of the models that refute it”
It is. When you have taken account of all of the above, you will see it.
“This is not a periodic system of equations, there are no “phase shifts of \pi/2″ to account for”
Don’t go there, Doc. This is EE 301. I’ve explained it as best I can in this venue. Please have some professional courtesy and assume that I might know what I am talking about. If you do not, I am going to get mean.
Additionally, there is another rather important fact which I have left out: in the woodfortrees plot, I have averaged values by 24 months to average out the yearly cycling and reduce the noisy variation. The woodfortrees site automatically centers the average to get a zero phase response. That means that each point is an average of the 12 months before, and the 12 months after. Capiche?

Here is a new series of sim plots in which I corrected the 11 year cycle, made the temperature input follow a ramp, and plotted the CO2 derivative.
These show why I say the real world observed phase relationship bounds the time constant tau1 to a relatively small value, which constrains the human induced atmospheric concentration to be negligible.

rgbatduke says:
May 28, 2012 at 2:51 pm
“That the toy model he proposes confounds his own conclusions by actually demonstrating that one CAN find parametric ranges with ACO_2 dominant on the gain and yet with a rescalable lagged correlation between dCO_2/dt(t) (effect) and Delta T(t) (non-H part of the driver) even for this model, and then there are more models…”
I just wasted a considerable part of my Holiday morning showing you were dead wrong about this, and apparently, you just toss it off without even reading.
Dead. Wrong. Demonstrated. Proved.
What a stupid thing for you to say. Well, same to you, buddy. Stay clueless. Over and out.