People send me stuff.
Reader Kurt writes:
I just found your excellent website and have book marked it and will visit it often for updates. One simple question the global warm-mongers have never been able to answer is…
…that if in fact warming is taking place as they claim, what then is the optimum temperature of the Earth? Can they give us a number? is it 55 degrees? 78 degrees? 85 degrees? 98.6? Al Gore says the Earth has a fever – then what is the “normal” temperature?
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I thought about that long and hard, and thought to myself that it is sort of like a “Goldilocks” subjective temperature for porridge:
At the table in the kitchen, there were three bowls of porridge. Goldilocks was hungry. She tasted the porridge from the first bowl.
“This porridge is too hot!” she exclaimed.
So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl.
“This porridge is too cold,” she said
So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge.
“Ahhh, this porridge is just right,” she said happily and she ate it all up.
But what is “just right” for Earth’s temperature? Depending on who you might ask, I suspect you’d get different answers.
The Neanderthals, who lived through the last ice age, 10,000 to 70,000 years ago, might say “uggghaa bok mak!” or in present language “warmer than it is now!”.
Ancient Greece, living in their age of enlightenment, which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC might remark “είναι σωστό τώρα, τον πολιτισμό μας ευδοκιμεί” or “it is correct now, our civilization is thriving”.
The Romans, who lived through the Roman Warm Period from 250 BC to 400 might say “frigus quam praesens placere” or “cooler than the present please”.
During the Islamic Golden Age of expansion, 622-750AD, They might argue the temperature was “just right” for them.
In the Medieval Warm Period, from about AD 950 to 1250, when humanity started to thrive, they would probably say the porridge was “just right”.
Right after that, the Vikings in Greenland would probably have asked Onan Odin for some extra warmth.
During the Little ice Age, from 1300-1850 it would seem certain most people would ask for it to be warmer, especially since it had such a well documented negative effect on human history.
As for now for 1850 to present? Well, it just safe to call it the tail end of the Holocene Climatic Optimum although some people think it is too warm and are actively campaigning to reduce Earth’s temperature.
After thinking about how those previous civilizations in time might perceive their preferred temperature, and thinking about Kurt’s question, I realized that it might very well be an intractable problem, aka the Gordian Knot:
“Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter”
(Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1. 45–47)
Or as Dr. Judith Curry once remarked to Congress:
Climate change can be categorized as a “wicked problem.”
As to the answer to Kurt’s question, the best answer I can offer would be this:
A temperature at which the widely geographically varied and widely climate adapted human civilizations and cultures can go about their lives without undue hardship.
But what is that optimum “just right” temperature numerically? Well, first it is a local-versus-global problem. A local temperature suitable for the Eskimos isn’t likely to be suitable for the indigenous people of the Amazon. Second, it is a question of global average.
The average temperature of the Earth is said to have been and is:
Between 1961 and 1990, the annual average temperature for the globe was around 57.2°F (14.0°C), according to the World Meteorological Organization.
In 2011, the global temperature was about 0.74°F (0.41°C) above that long-term average, according to the WMO’s estimates.
Source: UCAR/NCAR
So if we are to accept those numbers, our current global temperature is 57.2 + 0.7 = 57.9°F
Between 1961 and the present, Earth’s human population has gone from 3 billion to 7 billion, more than doubling, and in that time the global temperature changed only 0.7F according to UCAR/NCAR. Given the population growth, you could say that slight temperature rise has increased the human condition to a more favorable environment.
But, honestly, I don’t think the global temperature matters much in the scheme of things, because despite gloom and doom predictions of global warming to kill millions by 2030, the projections are still upwards:
![pop_005[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/pop_0051.gif)
I think it is science and adaptation that matters more than global temperature:
![World_Population_Chart[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/world_population_chart1.jpg)
Source: http://econosystemics.com/AphetaBlog/?p=9
So probably, the best path forward from here is to shrug our shoulders at global warming, and to simply adapt, as mitigation (given the performance we’ve seen from current schemes to reduce Earth’s temperature) will be a true Gordian knot that will likely bankrupt us in the process.
Besides, our current warming from posited greenhouse gas effects may actually be helpful to us, because in climatic terms, there’s this maxim of mine:
If you don’t like the Earth’s climate, just wait a millennium.
And that is not too far ahead it seems, E.M Smith writes in Annoying Lead Time Graph
This graph from TheInconvenientSkeptic bothers me.
It bothers me because of what it says.
What it says, by two different modes of reading, is that we have no business being warm right now…
![LI-Holocene[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/li-holocene1.png)
Click to enlarge
That last graph bothers me too. It seems the past few interglacial periods have run 10-12K years. We are 12K years into this one. This was a concern in the 70s, until Jack bought his magic CO2 beans,and sprouted a hockey stalk. It has always nagged me that temperatures dive when CO2 is at its highest levels according to the ice cores. WUWT?
I think you meant Odin, Onan was famous for something rather “different”.
But a good thread. What should the optimum look like? Just because someone today thinks things were perfect 50 years ago , say, doesn’t mean that we all would agree. Seems like another imposed halcyon ideal being imposed for our own good by our betters. *tugs forelock*.
We all think that things were at their most excellent when we were growing up. Every kid in every time agrees that those were the best conditions under which to grow. Even our grand children will feel that way, it’s human nature.
Send me a bunch of money and I’ll study that for you . PS Let me know in a secret email what you want the answer to be .
Onan, 2nd son of Judah …
The biblical person who masturbated, doesn’t exist in Norse mythology …
It is probably Odin (Oden) you seek, who together with his brothers Vili (Vile) and Vé (Ve) created the earth.
The Earth reaches an equilibrium temperature when the energy it loses to space as infra-red radiation is the same as the energy it receives from the Sun. This equilibrium temperature is -18C. The actual average surface temperature of the earth, as you say, is 14C, – a difference of 32C. This 32C difference is the greenhouse effect. Ferenc Miskolczi has shown that the physics and mathematics demand that this is a saturated greenhouse effect. We have been conducting an unplanned experiment. Every year we have been dumping billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. As levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased, levels of water vapour have declined. Miskolczi has shown that the optical thickness of the atmosphere, that is the number of times a photon of infra-red energy will be captured and released either by a molecule of CO2 or by a molecule of water vapor, has been unchanged since 1949. We have added more CO2 to the atmosphere and water vapour has declined to keep the greenhouse effect constant.
Nah.
The Vikings knew Onan was just going twist the handiest knob on his thermostat …. 8<)
Absolutely right Anthony. Humans can adapt (by technology, mitigation and migration) to whatever is thrown at us. A larger question would be: do we have the right or the ability to try to ‘freeze-frame’ the world as we know and like it, or let the constant change of Nature take its course? I don’t know the answer to that.
Happy New Year to you, mods and everyone!
Onan!
Careful, Anthony. There might be children reading this.
I guess if Onan replaced Odin that might explain why the Vikings had a hard time. 🙂
The “optimum” would be anything but the temperature cliff from which the earth recovered at the start of the Holocene (your first graph). Obviously, the earth will repeat that truly catastrophic* dive into the temperature abyss sometime in the future and Warmistas will be pining for the good ol’ days of relative global warmth.
*catastrophic: Most of the earth’s population will starve to death. The billions unavoidably killed by the next Ice Age will dwarf the Warmist’s fanciful prediction of millions killed by “climate”. And it will happen so fast that starvation will be the major cause unless we first annihilate ourselves through war.
Oh, and Happy New Year! (A very sobering one, I might add.)
Adaptation:
I once looked up the rate at which the coastal sea level advanced at the end of the last ice age, as witnessed by our ancestors of “Sealand” whose archaeological remains are today scattered [across] the bed of the North Sea. I forget precisely the figure, but itwas something like SIXTY FEET PER WEEK! You may want to check that. Could be Im out by a factor of ten. Hmmm, that would still be six feet per week. Out by a factor of a hundred: still more than half a foot per week. That’s more than we are supposed to see this century, PER WEEK!
Kind of knocks the scare mongering of present Neo-Environmentalist hysteria into a cocked hat.
Meanwhile, just when are those Pacific islands going to finally be inundated? We are about ten years late on that I [believe.]
… but Jörð (Fjorgyn / Jord [transl. Earth]) is the goddess of Earth (and mother of Thor), who is even a better choice.
I frequently see this question asked, and I’m sort of amused by the answers. Why? ‘cuz it don’t much matter! The earth’s temperature has varied from planetary hot house to ice age. Even if we knew what the “optimum” temperature was, how would we do anything about it? When it comes to temperature swings like that, we’re the germ on the flee on the elephant’s putootie.
The question is, in my mind at least, what do we do about any temperature swing large enough to be problematic? That, at least, has answers within our capacity to act.
The NH summer energy: the 21,000 year tilt wobble?
What is most important about the NH summer energy shift, as the TOA TSI changes by 6.8% or 91 W/m2 (45 W/mw whole Earth, daytime 12 hours, 22 W/m2 full Earth-24 hour) during the course of every year, because of orbital eccentricity, is that the Earth doesn’t just stay at a stable temperature, but that the NH is actually 2C warmer than the SH even though the NH summer occurs during the aphelion stage of the orbit, the point furthest from the sum, when the energy reaching the Earth is the lowest. So although 3.4 W/m2 (13.6 W/m2 TOA TSI equivalent) is said to bring the Earth’s temperature up 2C (CO2 theory), a negative 22 W/m2 difference creates a positive 2C change in the NH.
Counter-intuitive, or what?
The key point here is that the Earth’s atmospheric and oceanic system works very hard and very efficiently to redistribute solar energy. This cannot be emphasized enough. The system of energy redistribution is so powerful that it overwhelms the intuitive solar radiative forcing that would make the SH warmer by perhaps 1.5C, instead of cooler by 2.0C than the NH. A counter-intuitive negative 3.5C difference of about 6 W/m2 whole-Earth-24-hour, or 24 W/m2 TOA TSI.
This key point cannot be emphasized enough for this reason at least: as the energy redistribution system is more powerful (energy over time) than TOA TSI changes, any fluctuation in the energy redistribution system will have a greater effect on regional temperature differences than any other forcing mechanism considered by the IPCC. If you cannot identify the energy redistribution systems to a level of 0.5 W/m2 over a 30 year period within a system that routinely handles 24 W/m2 over a 1 year period, you cannot say that currently anything other than normal processes are controlling global temperatures.
One in 480. That is the level of both accuracy and precision you need. We don’t have it.
The global temperatures show significant regional differences. A global number is not very meaningful unless it occurs globally. Which it doesn’t. Regional differences are the condition of the planet.
The world has warmed since the end of the LIA. Was this a heat redistribution change? We say that the GHGs create a 13.5C or so additional heating of the planet, but under what conditions of radiative heat discharge is this true? Can the heat redistribution system that is so obviously stabilizing our planet each day vary by several degrees in its natural variability, so that we have a variable thermostat?
It is the human desire for certainty and cause that created the Greek gods of weather and fate. This desire seems to have created the climate change god, CO2, today. Gore admitted that he became a climate change activist in a moment of existential doubt (the illness of his son), seeing it as a positive movement to give meaning to his life. I see his conversion on the road to Damascus as a leap to find certainty and cause in an uncertain and somewhat arbitrary world. A world in which fluctuating energy redistribution brings, at times, the tropics to the poles and the arctic to the equator.
Al Gore, David Suzuki, Harold Camping. What is the difference?
500 millions years ago we had 15 times the current amount of CO2 so could you look for another answer? We do not have high levels of CO2…if anything we have too little. The average CO2 from Cambrian times to present day was probably around 2,100ppm. Simple question: Did we burn up or green up? We greened up. So 390ppm can in no way harm the earth…simple commonsense.
This old Tom Swanson cartoon of Goldilocks seems apropos:
http://home.netcom.com/~swansont_2/goldilocks.jpg
Pilots, by use of the International Standard Atmosphere (ISA), work with a baseline temperature and pressure of 15ºC (sea level) and 1013mb.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Atmosphere
Seems as good a baseline as any. So how to the temperature anomalies compare to that?
I think this video is appropriate, including the bit at the end.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgHM98rfE28?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360%5D
You wrote: “Between 1961 and the present, Earth’s human population has gone from 3 billion to 7 billion, more than doubling, and in that time the global temperature changed only 0.7F according to UCAR/NCAR.” Warmists apparently hate people, so that increase in people count is a disturbing figure for them… Since (I think) it is commonly accepted that one person at rest gives off about 100 watts of heat, that 4 Billion person increase represents well over (people exert too) 400 Billion watts of additional heat. 🙂
There is an interesting discussion of that last graph over at E. M. Smith’s website:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/annoying-lead-time-graph/
What that graph should tell you is not so much the “current temperature” as it should tell you the propensity for ice to melt or accumulate globally. We are already at the point where we have accumulated significant ice over the past 5000 years. While we get minor ups and downs, the general trend has been to cooling. We have valleys in the Alps that are currently glaciated that were forested 5000 years ago, we know that because we are finding 5000yo wood at the termination of the glacier. We know that mines in the alps that were working prior to the LIA are still iced over. We know that fields that were worked in Scandinavia at that time will not support a crop today. We know that areas of Greenland once supported grazing of animals and that those areas are frozen today.
If we were trying to farm the US Midwest with varieties of grain the settlers first arrived with, we would have no winter wheat today, it is too cold for those varieties.
Keep an eye on the Columbia Ice Field in Canada. When you begin to hear reports of Athabasca Glacier advancing, worry. The problems will come in the form of unexpected killing frosts, first in Canada and Russia, wiping out grain crops. Look for increased summer snow cover across northern Canada and Alaska. It won’t happen all at once, it will be very gradual with ups and downs along the way. We will have a cold spell like the LIA. It will warm after but not quite as warm as today just as today’s warming is not quite as warm as the MWP and the MWP not quite as warm as the Roman and the Roman not quite as warm as the Minoan.
5,000 years from now there will be more ice than there is today and in 20,000 years from now we might have permanent snow cover over most of Canada above 50N. This next glacial looks to be about 50% longer (120K years vs 80K years) with a “double dip” of cold that looks to be colder than the maximum of the last glacial but with a rather warm period between the two dips.
It took about 30,000 years for Eastern NA glaciation to reach its maximum with several episodes of advance and retreat in the interim and it stayed that way for about 10ky. Western NA had two maximum with about 40,000 years between them. Glacial periods are LONG and it can take twice as long as this current interglacial for significant ice to build up in some place. During the LGM, Eastern glaciation was actually already in retreat but the second Western maximum added to the overall ice. This was likely due more to shifts in precipitation patterns than temperatures where Pacific storms changed their track and a persistent Aleutian Low brought storms across California, Nevada and Utah year-round, not just in winter.
The question of ‘what is the optimum temperature for the earth’ is an ill posed question. It’s like asking what is the optimum speed of a car. The notion of “optimum” as you can see from the last question carries with it the notion of purpose or goal. So, the optimum speed for best fuel ecomony may be one speed. the optimum speed for ‘avoiding speeding tickets’ may have several values or a range of values. The real question is this: Is there an optimum temperature for humans? And even here, the question is ill posed. for which humans?. the right question is this. Are there boundary conditions that we don’t want to cross, if we dont have to.
So, just some simple observations. From the time we evolved, from the time we adapted to our environment and adapted our environment to suit our needs, the global average temperature has
varied from roughly 10C to 16C. Maybe less, maybe more. If we take todays temperatures to be roughly 14-15C (on average) we have estimates for the LGM that range around 2-4C cooler, and ranges for the holocene optimum that range 0-1C warmer. humans have evolved and adapted in the range. Moved where it is warmer, or constructed an environment to thrive where it is colder.
Now, comes the question, is it safe, is it wise, to go to a world that is 20C. That is, if you had the power to suddenly make the global average 20C, would you do it without thinking twice. Last time the earth avergae 20C, there were alligators at the north pole. no prudent person would argue that is a good idea to go to 20C. If you could turn the temps down to 10C would you?. No prudent person would argue for this, as North america would be covered by an ice sheet.
Consider now, that during the LGM when it 2C-4C cooler than today, the primary supply of energy, the sun, delivered the same TSI as today. Insolation was the same. c02, however, was about 200ppm, or half. C02 has doubled from the LGM and temps are about 2-4C warmer. Thats a very rough and crude approximation to give you a sense of how sensitive the climate is to doubling c02. 2-4C per doubling. Question. We are now at 400ppm, do we want to burn all the fossil fuels and go above 1000ppm. At 800 ppm, the evidence suggests, we get a world that is somewhere between 17C and 19C, if not warmer. some think (me included) we will get there at lower concentrations. Seems to me, that we don’t want to run the risk that may occur at 800ppm. Simply put, we don’t want to burn all the fossil fuels. A plan to avoid that would be a good thing.
Comes the question, how much more can we safely burn? up to 450ppm? 600ppm? 350? like mckibben argues. And who decides? If china, drives emissions up to 600ppm and AGW is true, and our country suffers a disproportiate outcome, are folks ok with that? who’s air is it?
because there is a risk, we should not ignore pathways to mitigation. we should not unthinkingly dump C02 into the air if we have other choices or can develop other choices. Neither should we adopt mitigation plans, where adaption can work.
That is all pretty vague. My sense is that if people can’t agree to these rather vague principles then we will just continue with BAU and future generations will pay the price.
Keith AB says:
January 1, 2013 at 11:43 am
“I think you meant Odin, Onan was famous for something rather “different”.”
I don’t know Keith, the way “The Team” operates is a bit of a circle jerk. 😉
This was the wisdom about the little ice age and the present warmth we used to hear by way of BBC 30 years ago, before the world was commanded to go mad:
@James Baldwin Davidson (the on-duty Skeptical Science rebuttal clerk)
Your 1st sentence is a statement of the obvious.
Can you show me empirical proof of your second sentence? (Not someone’s theory, however often it is repeated doesn’t turn it from theory to fact).
The remainder of your post is superfluous. Why not ask your handler how a cooler object (the atmosphere) can cause net warming in a warmer object (the surface).
I’m all ears.
Right after that, the Vikings in Greenland would probably have asked Onan for some extra warmth.
I think you mean Odin. Onan was not someone the Vikings would have asked for anything. He even has an ‘ism’ named after him.
Now?
I’d say it is too cold.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TemOpt.htm