I don’t have much time for a detailed post, a number of people want to discuss sea ice, so here is your chance. We also need to update the ARCUS forecast for August, due Monday August 6th. Poll follows:
eyesonu: The terms “Arctic cyclones” and “Arctic lows” are easily searched using any standard search engine technique. You will get lots of links to good information.
Entropic man
August 9, 2012 7:46 am
Pamela Gray says:
August 9, 2012 at 7:33 am
“natural intrinsic drivers that are part and parcel of a highly variable planet.”
Which drivers do you have in mind?
What evidence can you show us regarding the existance and amount of warming attributable to each driver?
Remember the old scientific adage that you dont really understand something until you can discuss it with numbers.
Pamela Gray
August 9, 2012 8:58 am
Entropic man, we live on an atmospherically leaky planet but with tremendous storage capacity for heat energy (which should always be calculated in joules) in our oceans. The oceans, our main joule storing body, are a huge, teleconnected with the atmosphere and land masses, driver of climate over short and long term time spans.
How do we leak? Of the solar SW infrared joules that are absorbed into the atmosphere and below instead of reflected back to space, the water cycle, teleconnected with both the oceans, land forms, and the atmosphere, forms the main source of leakage of left over joules (mostly from LW infrared) into the upper troposphere and eventually out to space, especially as a result of storm systems.
How do we store? During trade wind events driving La Nina-choppy oceanic conditions, the surface wind over the ocean sends warm layers westward as well as mixing it into deeper layers, and the ocean surface absorbs lots and lots of joules deep into the churned seas, even though SST’s are colder than average. Why? The surface is not in evaporation mode. As the event dies down and the oceans calm, these warm pools of water slosh back over the surface and send stored joules back out of the oceans (those warm SST’s are evaporating stored heat like gang busters). When the trades pick back up again, what is left of the warm water gets sent back up against the western land masses. This is the cool part (or warm part). This cycle of trades versus no trades over the equator produces a series of warm pools that can be tracked as they meander through a fairly well defined highway of ocean currents, ending up at the poles. The same is true for cold pools. It can take decades for these original pools to completely go away.
How do we trend up or down? For some reason, episodes of ocean warming or cooling (due to changes in El Nino versus La Nina versus Neutral cycling patterns driven by trade wind changes) have long term oscillations where we have a series of warm pools meandering around with smaller, fewer cooler pools in the highways. And then the reverse will happen, providing us with more cooler pools versus smaller, less frequent warmer pools. These pools affect our weather pattern systems in fairly well-understood ways at regional scale and over short and long term time spans.
Each one of these systems can separately be calculated in terms of joules under ideal conditions (IE “clear sky” conditions, etc) but the teleconnected real-time mathematical formula is filled with variables (some constant, some not) with few actual absolute numbers. The Sun is one of the few pieces of the formula that provides a fairly absolute number. The separate math formulas are easily obtained on the internet.
Pamela Gray
August 9, 2012 9:48 am
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008JCLI2366.1
A more recent article on climate change and Arctic cyclones. Haven’t read it yet but the abstract is interesting. Last paragraph:
“Interannual variations in Arctic cyclone numbers are closely related to the Arctic Oscillation (AO index in the full reanalyses records. An even stronger relationship is found between the AO and the number of deep cyclones. These relationships have still held in the last decade when the AO has returned to more normal values but the summer and fall sea ice extent has continued to decrease.”
More bad news for the believers in scary Arctic melting.
Entropic man
August 9, 2012 10:20 am
Good, Pamela, you’re starting to get the idea. Earlier on this thread I calculated the contribution of increasing solar insolation myself, with some help from tjfolkerts and NASA data. (it was 17% of the observed warming.
Show me numbers for these El Nino/ La Nina changes. What % do they contribute?
Pamela Gray
August 9, 2012 10:43 am
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter3/Ency_Oceans/Radiative_Transfer_Ocean.pdf
Above is a very good paper on radiative heat transfer into the oceans. Complicated enough but one of the more straightforward pieces of the “everything” real-time mathematical formula. The formula for how much shortwave infrared gets through the atmosphere to the ocean surface on any one day, week, month, year, decade, is waaaayyyy more complicated and depends on several atmospheric variables.
donald penman
August 9, 2012 10:51 am
Tim Folkerts
In reply I think that the noaa and nsidc map might be telling the same story for ice concentration but the cryosphere map is saying there is no ice there 0% ice level and it has broken up which cannot be true if either of the noaa and nsdc map are correct.
Pamela Gray
August 9, 2012 11:22 am
http://www.powerfromthesun.net/Book/chapter02/chapter02.html
A very good engineer’s chapter on solar input. Lots of formulas. And lots of caveats to consider when applying these formulas to non-clear sky conditions when developing solar-powered systems or needing to take solar joules into consideration in other application areas.
Provides one of the best descriptions of why we call solar radiation the solar constant.
dave
August 9, 2012 11:51 am
Smokey says:More bad news for the believers in scary Arctic melting.
Does this mean you think the sea ice isn’t melting, or at record low extent at the moment? Cherry picking 5 years of data actually doesn’t help make your point, since what it does suggest is that the Arctic is in a new climate state where the summer sea ice extent drops below 5 million sq-km every September. Pretending that the ice cover isn’t melting makes you look somewhat foolish in my opinion. The debate centers around what is causing the ice to decline (and the background warming of the planet). Your argument is consistently that it has been warmer in the past so it’s 100% natural. But that argument lacks logic. Human activities are increasing the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, and CO2 is a heat trapping gas. Both of those are true statements. The problem is how much of the warming we’re seeing is a result of that increase in CO2 versus natural climate variability. Observational and modeling studies continue to agree that CO2 is a factor, but it remains unclear exactly how much is from CO2.
Pamela Gray
August 9, 2012 12:07 pm
Entropic man, I’ve been asking those who say that CO2 is causing these changes to back that up with math for quite a while, so no I am not just getting the idea. I’ve been waiting for the AGW crowd to show me the math for their assertions. And waiting. And waiting.
Blocking highs are characterized by heat and lack of precipitation. These things explain why we have heat waves. It takes quite a bit of energy to keep a normal, natural blocking high in place or drive it away. How much energy do you think you need to make blocking highs occur more frequently, last longer or heat up more? And does the anthropogenic portion of greenhouse gases have enough energy to be that source?
Let’s just take this last one that happened in the US (or you could use the one over Russia–oh wait, they already figured that one out and it could not have come from anthropogenic sources). Show me the math.
Step one: Figure out how much energy was needed to sustain that particular pressure system.
Step two: Figure out how much extra energy we have from anthropogenic greenhouse gases capable of interacting with the location of that system and explain just how it does that. Better practice on the one that happened in Russia first.
Step three: subtract the results from the two calculations. Good luck proving your hypothesis. If you cannot come up with a verifiable mechanism that considers all the insitu variables, the null hypothesis remains.
Look folks, the mathematical formulas for the major parts of the natural climate system we have in place have been put to paper for many years. The rub is the variables (many and complicated) at any given moment and that interact with each other to produce more variables. Very few pieces are absolute numbers and the variables range all over the place, some randomely, some with various rhythms. The entire formula, starting at the Sun’s rays and ending at the temperature outside my door on any given day, with all its representative variables, would take several volumes. The CO2 formula piece is incredibly tiny compared to the major parts.
But it’s your hypothesis and it is up to you to present where and how CO2 interacts with those intrinsic natural drivers and their mathematical formulas to make a blocking high worse than it would ordinarily be. Or a Summer Arctic low worse than it would ordinarily be. Or an El Nino worse than it would ordinarily be. Or a hurricane worse than it would ordinarily be. So start cracking.
Entropic man
August 9, 2012 12:23 pm
Your radiative transfer paper gives relative absorbtion rates,not absolute figures. . With the solar input around 880W/M2.and some 480W absorbed, the high reflectance means that the amounts of energy absorbed by the oceans are relatively small, about 5% or 25W/M2. This is one reason why sea level temperatures are rising more slowly than air temperatures, lagging up to 100 years behind land equilibrium temperatures for the present level of direct and back radiation insolation.
This gives some feel for the energy flow involved. Note particularly the 324W back radiation in the infrared, which Smokey does not think exists, but which actually exceeds the direct solar insolation reaching the surface.
Spence_UK
August 9, 2012 12:30 pm
But Spence, isn’t the “woodless period” from 0.5-0.3 ky BP known as the LIA ? And doesn’t the “woodless period” from 1.7 to 0.9 ky BP covers much or the RWP and the MWP ?
Ermm.. yes, 0.5-0.3kyr is the little ice age. Woodless mean cold. No, the 2.0kyr to 1.7kyr period which is “not woodless” sits towards the back half of the RWP, and the “not woodless” period from 0.9kyr bp to 0.5kyr bp sits in the back half of the MWP. One presumes that this is because iced over beaches take time to respond to warming, and take time to ice over again – which also seems to be true of the modern warming.
As for LOVECLIM, do you not understand that models are not evidence? Climate models do not capture natural variability accurately at all for the simple reason that they are set up to model natural variability as a Markov process, but the hydrological cycle (including ocean circulation and sea ice) is not a Markov process, it is a Hurst process (ref below), and until models are fixed to correctly represent this they will ALWAYS fail across scales to correctly mimic natural behaviour.
Of course, by choosing deteriministic models which demonstrably fail to model natural variability as our null hypothesis, we can show anything we like.
ref: Koutsoyiannis, D., Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics as a result of extremal entropy production, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 390 (8), 1424–1432, 2011, preprint available at http://itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/1102/
dave says:
“Human activities are increasing the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, and CO2 is a heat trapping gas.”
Well then, CO2 had better get to work, because it’s falling down on the job.
Instead of running around in circles waving your arms, get a little education on the null hypothesis and its implications. You will see that there is nothing to worry about.
And FYI, the models are completely wrong.
Spence_UK
August 9, 2012 12:34 pm
Just to add to the above: Rob Dekker, if you read the Funder paper you will see the explanation of the woodless period is because the beaches are ice locked and the driftwood cannot reach them. So the beaches were ice locked during the LIA and between the RWP and MWP; they were not ice locked during the “back end” of the RWP and MWP. Simples!
dave
August 9, 2012 12:57 pm
Smokey, you continue to link to graphs that show a handful of years. Why do you keep cherry picking, do you not understand the difference between weather and climate? None of the links you post to contradict CO2 warming the atmosphere. And you also haven’t shown that climate models are wrong. Seems to me many of their predictions are panning out.
dave,
Since I have posted numerous charts showing the same thing, covering time spans from months to hundreds of years, it is hardly cherry picking. And worse than cherry picking is someone who posts no supporting links, making his comments just baseless opinion.
Instead of getting your talking points from the television set, get some real education: do keyword searches in the WUWT archives. You will learn a lot that you don’t know, such as the fact that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature. That blows a big hole in the CO2=AGW conjecture, no?
dave
August 9, 2012 1:33 pm
Sorry Smokey, but I prefer to read the scientific articles rather than rely on a blog for expert advice. While I do appreciate Watts efforts to discuss scientific papers/results and his work on the station temperature data set, comments from those not directly involved in doing climate science don’t carry as much weight as those papers from folks actively engaged in climate science. If you could instead link to published papers that you feel support your view, I will read those. And you should know that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature is well-understood and does not in any way refute that CO2 leads to warming of the atmosphere. Seems you are the one who needs to get an education outside of blogs and the TV
Entropic man
August 9, 2012 1:51 pm
Dave, I have tried repeatedly to get across to Smokey the differnce between the temperature-driven CO2 changes driving interglacials and the CO2 driven temperature changes of the last 60 years. It doesn’ get past his cognitive dissonance.
Entropic is another one who relies on always-inaccurate models, but disregards charts based on empirical evidence. No wonder he is so confused that the planet is not doing as he expects.
As I have often pointed out, CO2 has an effect — a minuscule effect, which is too small to show up in real world measurements. But the rise in CO2 due to the rise in temperature does show up in measurements, as I have repeatedly shown.
Inescapable conclusion: CO2 is a non-problem. It is entirely harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. More is better. And most of the rise is the result of natural warming, not vice-versa. But the CAGW lunatic contingent has their collective minds made up, and no scientific evidence will convince them otherwise.
James Abbott
August 9, 2012 2:19 pm
Looks increasingly like the arctic ice is headed for a new record melt in the satellite record. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
is showing the anomaly in ice area is now – 2.2 million km2 cf 1979-2008 base and tracking below any other year for date. http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
has the ice extent tracking below the record year of 2007.
Several on this thread rely on weather patterns to explain the ongoing decline. There is evidence to support a contribution, which was an agreed feature of 2007.
But presumably if this trend continues with new records set repeatedly, unless those patterns can be shown to be ever more extreme forcing events, there must be a point at which the “anything but warming” camp will have to think again ? If so, can they say what that point might be ?
Entropic man
August 9, 2012 2:57 pm
Pamela Gray says:
August 9, 2012 at 12:07 pm
“It takes quite a bit of energy to keep a normal, natural blocking high in place or drive it away. How much energy do you think you need to make blocking highs occur more frequently, last longer or heat up more? And does the anthropogenic portion of greenhouse gases have enough energy to be that source?”
The energy content of air or water is proportional to the Absolute temperature. To raise the temperature of either from, say, 288 to 289K you have to add about 0.35% extra heat. For water that,s 1Joule/gram. For air its a lot less.
Second stage is to look at the influence of CO2.
This gives a rough heat flow budget for Earth. http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/earth_radiation_budget.html&edu=high
Note the 168W/M2 from direct insolation and the 333W/M2 from back radiation due to water vapour, CO2 etc; 501 W/M2 in total. To increase the equilibrium temperature by 1C would need an increase of 0.35%, an extra 3W/M2.
By their percentage contribution to the greenhouse effect on Earth the four major gases are:
water vapor, 36–70%
carbon dioxide, 9–26%
methane, 4–9%
ozone, 3–7%
For CO2 we’ll assume a conservative 10%. 10% of the back radiation is 33W/M2, CO2 is providing about 7% of the total ground insolation, and enough energy to directly contribute 10C to the temperature.
Increase CO2 form 0.035%( in 1957) to the 0.004% due soon, an increase of 14% would add 4.6W/M2, equivalent to an increased temperature of 1.53C. Since the sea and the Arctic are still warming, the observed temperature change so far should be less. The 0.54C shown in the NASA/Goddard data since 1957 ( 1/3 of our calculated increase) suggests that we have another century before the effect of the CO2 released to date is fully apparant in the temperature record.
This is my own back-of -the envelope calculation, done to show how to do it yourself.. All of my starting figures are checkable in the literature.
The key points:-
1) The amount of energy needed to drive temperature and weather changes is a relatively small proportion of the total energy in the system.
2) Changes in CO2 since 1957 are sufficient to account for the changes we are seeing.
Entropic man
August 9, 2012 3:08 pm
I always taught my pupils to check for themselves, and do so myself. Hence my 2.57pm calculation, and others before it.
Waving charts at me without bothering to explain them properly is following the “appeal to authority” fallacy, especially since you do not always seem to understand them yourself.
I liked the picture. Two small changes. My glasses are silver, not green, and you forgot the Campbell tartan on my kilt. 🙂
tjfolkerts
August 9, 2012 3:25 pm
Smokey says: August 9, 2012 at 10:06 am
More bad news for the believers in scary Arctic melting Smokey.
The linked graph is woefully short on information (what sort of melt season is being plotted?).
The linked graph is woefully short on time scale (7 years).
Here is a BETTER graph of the melt season ( [date of minimum sea ice area] – [date of previous maximum sea ice area] showing 30+ years of data. No trends at all in the start, the end, or the length of the sea ice area melt season. https://sites.google.com/site/sciencestatsandstuff/misleading-graphs
tjfolkerts
August 9, 2012 4:11 pm
Smokey says: “Since I have posted numerous charts showing the same thing … ”
Yes, they all seem to show incorrect data and/or incorrect interpretation.
“Folkerts is going nuts nitpicking occasional tiny, insignificant fluctuations and going, “AHA!!”, as if he’s found anything other than natural fluctuations.”
No, I am pointing out HUGE errors. Would you consider it “insignificant” if an “AGW activist” mistook decades for centuries? Or said a graph was linear when in fact it was parabolic? Or said that data agreed with expectations when it actually fell outside expectations?
And now, even after having the obvious short-comings of a graph pointed out to you, you re-post the same flawed graph as if you had learned nothing from this thread.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
This new graph (http://i27.tinypic.com/25fuk8w.jpg) is interesting — could you explain what it means and where it comes from?
* Why does the horizontal axis (CO2) suddenly seem to change near 400 ppm (from numbers with odd decimal places to nice round number)
* Why does the “expected logarithmic warming trend line for CO2” switch from curving upward before 2007 to a straight line after 2007? What method is used to generate these expectations?
* The “IPCC projected warming trend” seems to be exponential, but I have always heard it should be logarithmic. Which specific projection is this based on?
eyesonu: The terms “Arctic cyclones” and “Arctic lows” are easily searched using any standard search engine technique. You will get lots of links to good information.
Pamela Gray says:
August 9, 2012 at 7:33 am
“natural intrinsic drivers that are part and parcel of a highly variable planet.”
Which drivers do you have in mind?
What evidence can you show us regarding the existance and amount of warming attributable to each driver?
Remember the old scientific adage that you dont really understand something until you can discuss it with numbers.
Entropic man, we live on an atmospherically leaky planet but with tremendous storage capacity for heat energy (which should always be calculated in joules) in our oceans. The oceans, our main joule storing body, are a huge, teleconnected with the atmosphere and land masses, driver of climate over short and long term time spans.
How do we leak? Of the solar SW infrared joules that are absorbed into the atmosphere and below instead of reflected back to space, the water cycle, teleconnected with both the oceans, land forms, and the atmosphere, forms the main source of leakage of left over joules (mostly from LW infrared) into the upper troposphere and eventually out to space, especially as a result of storm systems.
How do we store? During trade wind events driving La Nina-choppy oceanic conditions, the surface wind over the ocean sends warm layers westward as well as mixing it into deeper layers, and the ocean surface absorbs lots and lots of joules deep into the churned seas, even though SST’s are colder than average. Why? The surface is not in evaporation mode. As the event dies down and the oceans calm, these warm pools of water slosh back over the surface and send stored joules back out of the oceans (those warm SST’s are evaporating stored heat like gang busters). When the trades pick back up again, what is left of the warm water gets sent back up against the western land masses. This is the cool part (or warm part). This cycle of trades versus no trades over the equator produces a series of warm pools that can be tracked as they meander through a fairly well defined highway of ocean currents, ending up at the poles. The same is true for cold pools. It can take decades for these original pools to completely go away.
How do we trend up or down? For some reason, episodes of ocean warming or cooling (due to changes in El Nino versus La Nina versus Neutral cycling patterns driven by trade wind changes) have long term oscillations where we have a series of warm pools meandering around with smaller, fewer cooler pools in the highways. And then the reverse will happen, providing us with more cooler pools versus smaller, less frequent warmer pools. These pools affect our weather pattern systems in fairly well-understood ways at regional scale and over short and long term time spans.
Each one of these systems can separately be calculated in terms of joules under ideal conditions (IE “clear sky” conditions, etc) but the teleconnected real-time mathematical formula is filled with variables (some constant, some not) with few actual absolute numbers. The Sun is one of the few pieces of the formula that provides a fairly absolute number. The separate math formulas are easily obtained on the internet.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008JCLI2366.1
A more recent article on climate change and Arctic cyclones. Haven’t read it yet but the abstract is interesting. Last paragraph:
“Interannual variations in Arctic cyclone numbers are closely related to the Arctic Oscillation (AO index in the full reanalyses records. An even stronger relationship is found between the AO and the number of deep cyclones. These relationships have still held in the last decade when the AO has returned to more normal values but the summer and fall sea ice extent has continued to decrease.”
More bad news for the believers in scary Arctic melting.
Good, Pamela, you’re starting to get the idea. Earlier on this thread I calculated the contribution of increasing solar insolation myself, with some help from tjfolkerts and NASA data. (it was 17% of the observed warming.
Show me numbers for these El Nino/ La Nina changes. What % do they contribute?
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter3/Ency_Oceans/Radiative_Transfer_Ocean.pdf
Above is a very good paper on radiative heat transfer into the oceans. Complicated enough but one of the more straightforward pieces of the “everything” real-time mathematical formula. The formula for how much shortwave infrared gets through the atmosphere to the ocean surface on any one day, week, month, year, decade, is waaaayyyy more complicated and depends on several atmospheric variables.
Tim Folkerts
In reply I think that the noaa and nsidc map might be telling the same story for ice concentration but the cryosphere map is saying there is no ice there 0% ice level and it has broken up which cannot be true if either of the noaa and nsdc map are correct.
http://www.powerfromthesun.net/Book/chapter02/chapter02.html
A very good engineer’s chapter on solar input. Lots of formulas. And lots of caveats to consider when applying these formulas to non-clear sky conditions when developing solar-powered systems or needing to take solar joules into consideration in other application areas.
Provides one of the best descriptions of why we call solar radiation the solar constant.
Smokey says:More bad news for the believers in scary Arctic melting.
Does this mean you think the sea ice isn’t melting, or at record low extent at the moment? Cherry picking 5 years of data actually doesn’t help make your point, since what it does suggest is that the Arctic is in a new climate state where the summer sea ice extent drops below 5 million sq-km every September. Pretending that the ice cover isn’t melting makes you look somewhat foolish in my opinion. The debate centers around what is causing the ice to decline (and the background warming of the planet). Your argument is consistently that it has been warmer in the past so it’s 100% natural. But that argument lacks logic. Human activities are increasing the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, and CO2 is a heat trapping gas. Both of those are true statements. The problem is how much of the warming we’re seeing is a result of that increase in CO2 versus natural climate variability. Observational and modeling studies continue to agree that CO2 is a factor, but it remains unclear exactly how much is from CO2.
Entropic man, I’ve been asking those who say that CO2 is causing these changes to back that up with math for quite a while, so no I am not just getting the idea. I’ve been waiting for the AGW crowd to show me the math for their assertions. And waiting. And waiting.
Blocking highs are characterized by heat and lack of precipitation. These things explain why we have heat waves. It takes quite a bit of energy to keep a normal, natural blocking high in place or drive it away. How much energy do you think you need to make blocking highs occur more frequently, last longer or heat up more? And does the anthropogenic portion of greenhouse gases have enough energy to be that source?
Let’s just take this last one that happened in the US (or you could use the one over Russia–oh wait, they already figured that one out and it could not have come from anthropogenic sources). Show me the math.
Step one: Figure out how much energy was needed to sustain that particular pressure system.
Step two: Figure out how much extra energy we have from anthropogenic greenhouse gases capable of interacting with the location of that system and explain just how it does that. Better practice on the one that happened in Russia first.
Step three: subtract the results from the two calculations. Good luck proving your hypothesis. If you cannot come up with a verifiable mechanism that considers all the insitu variables, the null hypothesis remains.
Look folks, the mathematical formulas for the major parts of the natural climate system we have in place have been put to paper for many years. The rub is the variables (many and complicated) at any given moment and that interact with each other to produce more variables. Very few pieces are absolute numbers and the variables range all over the place, some randomely, some with various rhythms. The entire formula, starting at the Sun’s rays and ending at the temperature outside my door on any given day, with all its representative variables, would take several volumes. The CO2 formula piece is incredibly tiny compared to the major parts.
But it’s your hypothesis and it is up to you to present where and how CO2 interacts with those intrinsic natural drivers and their mathematical formulas to make a blocking high worse than it would ordinarily be. Or a Summer Arctic low worse than it would ordinarily be. Or an El Nino worse than it would ordinarily be. Or a hurricane worse than it would ordinarily be. So start cracking.
Your radiative transfer paper gives relative absorbtion rates,not absolute figures. . With the solar input around 880W/M2.and some 480W absorbed, the high reflectance means that the amounts of energy absorbed by the oceans are relatively small, about 5% or 25W/M2. This is one reason why sea level temperatures are rising more slowly than air temperatures, lagging up to 100 years behind land equilibrium temperatures for the present level of direct and back radiation insolation.
This gives some feel for the energy flow involved. Note particularly the 324W back radiation in the infrared, which Smokey does not think exists, but which actually exceeds the direct solar insolation reaching the surface.
Ermm.. yes, 0.5-0.3kyr is the little ice age. Woodless mean cold. No, the 2.0kyr to 1.7kyr period which is “not woodless” sits towards the back half of the RWP, and the “not woodless” period from 0.9kyr bp to 0.5kyr bp sits in the back half of the MWP. One presumes that this is because iced over beaches take time to respond to warming, and take time to ice over again – which also seems to be true of the modern warming.
As for LOVECLIM, do you not understand that models are not evidence? Climate models do not capture natural variability accurately at all for the simple reason that they are set up to model natural variability as a Markov process, but the hydrological cycle (including ocean circulation and sea ice) is not a Markov process, it is a Hurst process (ref below), and until models are fixed to correctly represent this they will ALWAYS fail across scales to correctly mimic natural behaviour.
Of course, by choosing deteriministic models which demonstrably fail to model natural variability as our null hypothesis, we can show anything we like.
ref: Koutsoyiannis, D., Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics as a result of extremal entropy production, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 390 (8), 1424–1432, 2011, preprint available at http://itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/1102/
dave says:
“Human activities are increasing the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, and CO2 is a heat trapping gas.”
Well then, CO2 had better get to work, because it’s falling down on the job.
Instead of running around in circles waving your arms, get a little education on the null hypothesis and its implications. You will see that there is nothing to worry about.
And FYI, the models are completely wrong.
Just to add to the above: Rob Dekker, if you read the Funder paper you will see the explanation of the woodless period is because the beaches are ice locked and the driftwood cannot reach them. So the beaches were ice locked during the LIA and between the RWP and MWP; they were not ice locked during the “back end” of the RWP and MWP. Simples!
Smokey, you continue to link to graphs that show a handful of years. Why do you keep cherry picking, do you not understand the difference between weather and climate? None of the links you post to contradict CO2 warming the atmosphere. And you also haven’t shown that climate models are wrong. Seems to me many of their predictions are panning out.
dave,
Since I have posted numerous charts showing the same thing, covering time spans from months to hundreds of years, it is hardly cherry picking. And worse than cherry picking is someone who posts no supporting links, making his comments just baseless opinion.
Instead of getting your talking points from the television set, get some real education: do keyword searches in the WUWT archives. You will learn a lot that you don’t know, such as the fact that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature. That blows a big hole in the CO2=AGW conjecture, no?
Sorry Smokey, but I prefer to read the scientific articles rather than rely on a blog for expert advice. While I do appreciate Watts efforts to discuss scientific papers/results and his work on the station temperature data set, comments from those not directly involved in doing climate science don’t carry as much weight as those papers from folks actively engaged in climate science. If you could instead link to published papers that you feel support your view, I will read those. And you should know that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature is well-understood and does not in any way refute that CO2 leads to warming of the atmosphere. Seems you are the one who needs to get an education outside of blogs and the TV
Dave, I have tried repeatedly to get across to Smokey the differnce between the temperature-driven CO2 changes driving interglacials and the CO2 driven temperature changes of the last 60 years. It doesn’ get past his cognitive dissonance.
Entropic is another one who relies on always-inaccurate models, but disregards charts based on empirical evidence. No wonder he is so confused that the planet is not doing as he expects.
As I have often pointed out, CO2 has an effect — a minuscule effect, which is too small to show up in real world measurements. But the rise in CO2 due to the rise in temperature does show up in measurements, as I have repeatedly shown.
Inescapable conclusion: CO2 is a non-problem. It is entirely harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. More is better. And most of the rise is the result of natural warming, not vice-versa. But the CAGW lunatic contingent has their collective minds made up, and no scientific evidence will convince them otherwise.
Looks increasingly like the arctic ice is headed for a new record melt in the satellite record.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
is showing the anomaly in ice area is now – 2.2 million km2 cf 1979-2008 base and tracking below any other year for date.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
has the ice extent tracking below the record year of 2007.
Several on this thread rely on weather patterns to explain the ongoing decline. There is evidence to support a contribution, which was an agreed feature of 2007.
But presumably if this trend continues with new records set repeatedly, unless those patterns can be shown to be ever more extreme forcing events, there must be a point at which the “anything but warming” camp will have to think again ? If so, can they say what that point might be ?
Pamela Gray says:
August 9, 2012 at 12:07 pm
“It takes quite a bit of energy to keep a normal, natural blocking high in place or drive it away. How much energy do you think you need to make blocking highs occur more frequently, last longer or heat up more? And does the anthropogenic portion of greenhouse gases have enough energy to be that source?”
The energy content of air or water is proportional to the Absolute temperature. To raise the temperature of either from, say, 288 to 289K you have to add about 0.35% extra heat. For water that,s 1Joule/gram. For air its a lot less.
Second stage is to look at the influence of CO2.
This gives a rough heat flow budget for Earth.
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/earth_radiation_budget.html&edu=high
Note the 168W/M2 from direct insolation and the 333W/M2 from back radiation due to water vapour, CO2 etc; 501 W/M2 in total. To increase the equilibrium temperature by 1C would need an increase of 0.35%, an extra 3W/M2.
By their percentage contribution to the greenhouse effect on Earth the four major gases are:
water vapor, 36–70%
carbon dioxide, 9–26%
methane, 4–9%
ozone, 3–7%
For CO2 we’ll assume a conservative 10%. 10% of the back radiation is 33W/M2, CO2 is providing about 7% of the total ground insolation, and enough energy to directly contribute 10C to the temperature.
Increase CO2 form 0.035%( in 1957) to the 0.004% due soon, an increase of 14% would add 4.6W/M2, equivalent to an increased temperature of 1.53C. Since the sea and the Arctic are still warming, the observed temperature change so far should be less. The 0.54C shown in the NASA/Goddard data since 1957 ( 1/3 of our calculated increase) suggests that we have another century before the effect of the CO2 released to date is fully apparant in the temperature record.
This is my own back-of -the envelope calculation, done to show how to do it yourself.. All of my starting figures are checkable in the literature.
The key points:-
1) The amount of energy needed to drive temperature and weather changes is a relatively small proportion of the total energy in the system.
2) Changes in CO2 since 1957 are sufficient to account for the changes we are seeing.
I always taught my pupils to check for themselves, and do so myself. Hence my 2.57pm calculation, and others before it.
Waving charts at me without bothering to explain them properly is following the “appeal to authority” fallacy, especially since you do not always seem to understand them yourself.
I liked the picture. Two small changes. My glasses are silver, not green, and you forgot the Campbell tartan on my kilt. 🙂
Smokey says: August 9, 2012 at 10:06 am
More bad news for
the believers in scary Arctic meltingSmokey.The linked graph is woefully short on information (what sort of melt season is being plotted?).
The linked graph is woefully short on time scale (7 years).
Here is a BETTER graph of the melt season ( [date of minimum sea ice area] – [date of previous maximum sea ice area] showing 30+ years of data. No trends at all in the start, the end, or the length of the sea ice area melt season. https://sites.google.com/site/sciencestatsandstuff/misleading-graphs
Smokey says: “Since I have posted numerous charts showing the same thing … ”
Yes, they all seem to show incorrect data and/or incorrect interpretation.
“Folkerts is going nuts nitpicking occasional tiny, insignificant fluctuations and going, “AHA!!”, as if he’s found anything other than natural fluctuations.”
No, I am pointing out HUGE errors. Would you consider it “insignificant” if an “AGW activist” mistook decades for centuries? Or said a graph was linear when in fact it was parabolic? Or said that data agreed with expectations when it actually fell outside expectations?
And now, even after having the obvious short-comings of a graph pointed out to you, you re-post the same flawed graph as if you had learned nothing from this thread.
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This new graph (http://i27.tinypic.com/25fuk8w.jpg) is interesting — could you explain what it means and where it comes from?
* Why does the horizontal axis (CO2) suddenly seem to change near 400 ppm (from numbers with odd decimal places to nice round number)
* Why does the “expected logarithmic warming trend line for CO2” switch from curving upward before 2007 to a straight line after 2007? What method is used to generate these expectations?
* The “IPCC projected warming trend” seems to be exponential, but I have always heard it should be logarithmic. Which specific projection is this based on?