While looking for quotes on an upcoming post about Ocean Heat Content, I ran across the press release for a new paper (in press) by Neely et al, which blames the recent slowdown in global warming on smaller more moderate volcanos.
ADD ANOTHER REASON TO THE NON-CONSENSUS
Many readers will recall the October 2011 article by Paul Voosen titled Provoked scientists try to explain lag in global warming. The article presented the different responses from a number of climate scientists, including John Barnes, Kevin Trenberth, Susan Solomon, Jean-Paul Vernier, Ben Santer, John Daniel, Judith Lean, James Hansen, Martin Wild, and Graeme Stephens, to the question, “Why, despite steadily accumulating greenhouse gases, did the rise of the planet’s temperature stall for the past decade?” The different replies led Roger Pielke, Sr. to note at the end of his post Candid Comments from Climate Scientists:
These extracts from the Greenwire article illustrate why the climate system is not yet well understood. The science is NOT solved.
Judith Curry provided running commentary in her post Candid Comments from Global Warming Scientists. If you haven’t read it, it’s a worthwhile read.
NEW STUDY BY NEELY ET AL PRESENTS ANOTHER REASON
Neely et al 2013 (in press) blames moderate volcanos. According to a press release from the University of Colorado Boulder:
A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder looking for clues about why Earth did not warm as much as scientists expected between 2000 and 2010 now thinks the culprits are hiding in plain sight — dozens of volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide.
The study results essentially exonerate Asia, including India and China, two countries that are estimated to have increased their industrial sulfur dioxide emissions by about 60 percent from 2000 to 2010 through coal burning, said lead study author Ryan Neely, who led the research as part of his CU-Boulder doctoral thesis. Small amounts of sulfur dioxide emissions from Earth’s surface eventually rise 12 to 20 miles into the stratospheric aerosol layer of the atmosphere, where chemical reactions create sulfuric acid and water particles that reflect sunlight back to space, cooling the planet.
The paper (in press) is Neely et al (2013) Recent anthropogenic increases in SO2 from Asia have minimal impact on stratospheric aerosol.
The abstract reads:
Observations suggest that the optical depth of the stratospheric aerosol layer between 20 and 30 km has increased 4–10% per year since 2000, which is significant for Earth’s climate. Contributions to this increase both from moderate volcanic eruptions and from enhanced coal burning in Asia have been suggested. Current observations are insufficient to attribute the contribution of the different sources. Here we use a global climate model coupled to an aerosol microphysical model to partition the contribution of each. We employ model runs that include the increases in anthropogenic sulfur dioxide (SO2) over Asia and the moderate volcanic explosive injections of SO2 observed from 2000 to 2010. Comparison of the model results to observations reveals that moderate volcanic eruptions, rather than anthropogenic influences, are the primary source of the observed increases in stratospheric aerosol.
Bottom line: There’s still no consensus from climate scientists about the cause of the slowdown in the warming rate of global surface temperatures.
And of course, the sea surface temperature and ocean heat content reveal another reason: there hadn’t been a strong El Niño to release monumental volumes of warm water from below the surface of the tropical Pacific and shift up the sea surface temperatures of the Atlantic, Indian and West Pacific Oceans. Refer to my essay “The Manmade Global Warming Challenge” and my ebook Who Turned on the Heat?
D.B. Stealey says:
March 3, 2013 at 6:53 pm
“Bedford says:
“The mechanism remains the same. I thought so. Thanks for affirmation.”
Could you be any more insufferable? Dr Engelbeen has forgotten more about this subject than you will ever learn.”
I’m not sure that the vitriol is helping me to learn. There are some people on this site who simply try and get concepts across to others. And for some, it seems, that goal is a very secondary one.
davidmhoffer says:
March 3, 2013 at 6:58 pm
“Evan Bedford;
Sorry, that was my unfamiliarity with the site. No attempts at cherry-picking.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
But no admission that the correlation you insisted was there, isn’t,”
The correlation is obviously there (ie, those red and green lines). But if I took the wrong data to do it with, then I apologize.
Evan Bedford;
I understand that higher and higher concentrations of co2 have less and less effect on temperature. But the mechanism is there.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
Of course it is there.
How much is it?
Different question. Data suggests… not much.
Evan Bedford;
The correlation is obviously there (ie, those red and green lines). But if I took the wrong data to do it with, then I apologize.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
What you should apologize for is claiming a correlation that you cannot demonstrate. When compared to global temps, there is no correlation. As I demonstrated to you. But you continue to claim otherwise, I know not why.
Evan Bedford,
You’re right, it’s easy to lump everyone together. If you are truly trying to learn, then I apologize.
But you really need to learn, and that means accepting reasonable and logical arguments. I have tried to be as clear as possible in explaining exactly why CO2 has no measurable effect.
That is not to say that CO2 has zero effect. But it is a small third order forcing, which is swamped by second order forcings — which are in turn swamped by first order forcings.
The “carbon” hype is 99% nonsense, sustained by $Billions in federal grants in addition to huge grants from scientifically illiterate billionaires and NGOs. The science does not support the carbon scare, and if the funding was not there, there would be no scare. It is a fabricated alarm that has very little basis in reality.
If you truly want to learn, pay attention to the null hypothesis: nothing observed today is unprecedented. It has all happened before, repeatedly, and when CO2 was much lower. Adding CO2 at this point produces no measurable warming, due to the diminishing returns. And a 1ºC rise in temperature would be entirely beneficial, opening up huge new swaths of farmland in places like Mongolia, Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and providing increased humidity, leading to more precipitation.
The “carbon” scare is a false alarm. Every last alarmist prediction has been falsified. Eventually, thinking people will realize that it is nothing but a self-serving scare story, sustained by money and intended to give the alarmists more political power. But it is not credible science.
@ur momisuglyBruce cobb / March 3, 2013 at 7:01 am
we discussed this fraudulous (‘cherry-picking’) figure here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/22/ipcc-railroad-engineer-pachauri-acknowledges-no-warming-for-17-years/
besides that, there is 0,5 degree C average continuous warming in this graph (compared with the decennia before)
@ur momisugly Wamron / March 3, 2013 at 4:22 pm
I shouldn’t have used that line from your entry, you are right,I apologise, but it was also to show your hostility, and what a hostile person you are!
@ur momisugly davidmhoffer / March 3, 2013 at 4:21 pm No further discussion with this sicko is warranted IMHO.
david, weren’t you the guy manipulating graphs from the IPCC and the climateprediction-project I did participate in?
was’nt that the discussion about the ‘spaghetti’graph?
did’nt you admit that you do not read scientific articles?
and didn’t you say that you are enthousiast about the rising of the CO2 concentration?
I told you there that we are not amused here about sea level rising too much and being drowned eventualy;
you have to tell the people here the whole story and not leaving out your own nasty part, please be correct;
@ur momisugly stealey
maybe you remember my earlier questions about arctic sea ice (in the Pachauri-matter);
after you said some nonsense I asked you wether you are famiiar with the work of Kinnard and Wieslaw Maslowski;
I never got – not even a beginning of – an answer,stealey, so dont start / continue blaming me;
@ur momisugly some of you
because of an incompatibilité d’humeur with you I will grant myselt a time-out
Martin, the post-war so-called aerosol effect is JUNK. To demonstrate this you need access to the GISS Zonal dataset (Land & Ocean). Now consider the following
1. Industrial aerosols are relatively short-lived in the atmosphere. The vast majority of aerosols are ‘rained out’ within a few days – or weeks at the most.
2. For reason given in (1) any effect that aerosols have on climate is “regionally specific”. This is a fact acknowledged by many cliamte researchers – including Mann & Jones (2004 – Section 5.1.4).
3. Given these facts post-1945 cooling should have been most noticeable in the industrialised mid-latitiude regions in the NH. It wasn’t. Cooling in the NH mid-latitiudes (See GISS Zonal data for 44N-64N) was no different to the global average.
4. Cooling was most pronounced in the ARCTIC (64N-90N). Here the rate of cooling was more than 4 times that of any other region.
5. While it’s true that some aersosols will find their way up to the arctic their effect on that region is not one of cooling. Study after study concludes that aerosols result in WARMING in the Arctic via a phenomenon known as Arctic Haze (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_haze ).
The distribution of cooling trends does not support the aerosol hypothesis.
Also recall that point (1) says that aerosols are short lived, i.e. they do not accumulate over time. This means that in the first year of cooling a massive pulse of aerosols must have been emitted which totally reversed the long established warming trend and set in motion the cooling trend. That massive pulse would need to be repeated year on year to replace the aerosols that had been washed out of the atmosphere. Volcanos eject aerosols high into the stratosphere so their effect is longer lasting but the effect of even the largest volcanos only lasts a year ot two.
In short Evan Bedford you don’t know. Thanks for clarifying. Have a nice day and stop your speculations.
Reminds me of an old cliche: They’re grasping at straws. Next, it will be comet dust that has put the hiatus on global warming.
@ur momisugly John Finn
Your answer crossed my message that I want a time-out from some hostile and insulting people here; since you have a reasonable entry I will answer:
Your point 4 “Cooling was most pronounced in the ARCTIC (64N-90N). Here the rate of cooling was more than 4 times that of any other region.” must be arctic amplification because of albedo and so on;
Neely is about volcano-aerosols; in the time concerned (fifties until eighties) scientists talked about ‘dirt’ and SO2;
personnaly I remember the acid-rain and the forest dying of Scandinavia for instance, what means that SO2 / H2SO4 stayed long enough in the atmosphere to go from industrial centra in Western-Europe (London / Rotterdam) to do harm in Scandinavia;
John Finn says:
March 4, 2013 at 1:56 am
……
Hi John
Number of very good points in your post.
Now consider this:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AGT.htm
MARTIN VAN ETTEN having been noted above as having perpetrated a traduction upon
my personality was, as can be seen above, offered a resolution face to face and, as can be seen above promptly “left the building”.
Quite clearly, MARTIN VAN ETTEN is [trimmed].
[Yes. Mod]
D.B. Stealey says:
March 3, 2013 at 7:51 pm
Evan Bedford,
“That is not to say that CO2 has zero effect. But it is a small third order forcing, which is swamped by second order forcings — which are in turn swamped by first order forcings.”
So what are the 1st and 2nd order forcings? From this source, it looks like they’re saying albedo and co2 uptake by plants.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/200105_senate/page4.html
Typo:
WHAT WOULD FALSIFY AGW????? This is the THIRD time you have been asked.
Martin van Etten;
because of an incompatibilité d’humeur with you I will grant myselt a time-out
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
posting a video of a pig being suffocated to death in a gas chamber is your idea of humour?
Evan Bedford, “the mechanism is the same, whatever the concentration” may appear trivially true, but only in the sense that CO2 will still have absorption bands in the Infra-red.
What does not remain remain true is the integration of different mechanisms responsible for heat transport and IR radiation. The consequences of varying amounts of H2O, CO2, aerosols, clouds, albedo, atmospheric&oceanic convection, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, are not trivial.
In essence, assessing the relative contributions of these many factors over time and space and temperature is what the non-political part of the debate is about.
But MOD…your “trim” makes it look like I called MARTIN VAN ETTEN something more intemperate than I actually did.
I thought I was merely being descriptively precise.
Evan Bedford says:
March 3, 2013 at 6:42 pm
The mechanism remains the same. I thought so. Thanks for affirmation.
Evan, if we may assume that the US military Hitran and its free available derived Modtran calculating programs are right, then a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial values (from 280 to 560 ppmv) gives no more than 0.9°C increase in temperature. That is all that the basic mechanism of absorption by CO2 in the presence of water does. The rest of the 1.5-4.5 IPCC range is from feedbacks. Some of those feedbacks may be right, like an increase in water vapour (gives a total of 1.3°C, without other feedbacks). Some are certainly wrong, like the effect of clouds in a warming world (positive, according to the models) and some are very uncertain. As is the case for aerosols. Even the sign of the total effect of aerosols (white, reflecting, brown/black, absorbing) may be wrong in the models.
Thus the absorption characteristics of 100% CO2 in a lab or 400 ppmv CO2 in a real atmosphere are basically the same, but the effect is in no way comparable without knowing all the other variables which influence the effect, both as driver and as feedback…
Martin van Etten says:
March 4, 2013 at 4:23 am
personnaly I remember the acid-rain and the forest dying of Scandinavia for instance, what means that SO2 / H2SO4 stayed long enough in the atmosphere to go from industrial centra in Western-Europe (London / Rotterdam) to do harm in Scandinavia;
That was another scare that was largely overblown: the percentage of trees with suboptimal health didn’t change in The Netherlands after SO2 levels were reduced… But the scare had (for that time) a positive result: power plants had to reduce their sulphur emissions, which also reduced other emissions like particulates, NOx, mercury… For transport mainly SO2 emissions were reduced by low-sulphur gasoil and gasoline.
More interesting is the effect of the reduction of SO2 emissions on regional temperatures. SO2 indeed has a short life: about 4 days as dry deposit, shorter if raining out. That makes that most of the effect would be within 10% of the earth’s surface and there 10 times stronger than in less affected areas. That also means that Scandinavia had most of the deposit from the upwind West-European industrial countries.
I obtained a graph from a calculation by the HadCM3 model, which shows where the regional effect of a reduction of SO2 (and ozone depleting, not of interest here) would occur: some 6°C increase in temperature near the Finnish-Russian border for the period 1990-1999, because of a 40% reduction in SO2 emissions over that period. This should be visible in the temperature trends, but is not. Only a sudden jump around 1990 in all stations, upwind and downwind of the main industrial areas, probably due to a switch of the NAO to strong positive. See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/aerosols.html
This simply shows that the effect of human aerosols is largely overblown in the models. Even the sign may be wrong… The consequence is that the real effect of 2xCO2 also is largely overblown, or the slightly cooling period 1945-1976 can’t be fitted by the model.
Ferdinand Englebeen;
This should be visible in the temperature trends, but is not. Only a sudden jump around 1990 in all stations, upwind and downwind of the main industrial areas,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In Canada, some tough questions got asked as to why the acid rain effects seems to be due north/south of the main industrial areas rather than aligned with the prevailing winds. The answer turned out to be geese. They were changing their migratory patterns to go around rather than over the industrial areas. That in turn meant they were making their overnight stops on different lakes. So the lakes that were no longer getting the benefit of a twice annual does of highly basic goose guano shortly became highly acidic due to run off from the pine trees (highly acidic resin) which predominate most areas.
So, I suppose that industrialization was at the end the root cause of those lakes becoming acidic…just not from “acid rain”.
tsFerdinand Engelbeen says:
March 4, 2013 at 12:37 pm
“Some are certainly wrong, like the effect of clouds in a warming world (positive, according to the models)”
So they should be negative? This is a Lindzen or Cristy argument, if I recall. Thanks. More fodder for my investigations.
Martin van Etten says:
“@ur momisugly stealey
maybe you remember my earlier questions about arctic sea ice (in the Pachauri-matter); after you said some nonsense…”
van Etten, you blinkered fool, you start out like that and then demand that I answer your questions?? Your concerns are not my problem, they are your problem, along with the fact that the planet is debunking your entire belief system.
Evan Bedford says:
March 5, 2013 at 6:23 am
So they should be negative? This is a Lindzen or Cristy argument, if I recall. Thanks. More fodder for my investigations.
Have a look at what happens on sunny days (only a few in a year where I live…): the day starts cool and sunny, without any clouds. When it warms up, after a few hours some small low level clouds start to form, growing over time and eventually leading to thunderstorms.
The difference in insolation at ground level between direct sunlight and (low level) clouds: easely 200 W/m2 difference. Compared to that, the 4.7 W/m2 from a CO2 doubling is peanuts. If a small CO2 caused warming leads to more water vapour and that leads to more clouds, the net effect of the latter is a cooling feedback, not a warming one…
Most models include less clouds in a warming world:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101122172010.htm
But others think that it is in the other direction, less clouds cause warming:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091218122631.htm
Anyway, in several discussions of the past, cloud specialists were very surprised that the models incorporated clouds as a positive feedback, not a negative one…
I live in Australia where much fuss was made of the recently revised temperature scale implemented to cover the range that has existed here since records began. Why was it not done before? Because it was scaled to the coastal regions initially. Much ado has been made of this change but really it is only to justify the Carbon Tax imposed here. I saw an article on-line
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/In_prehistory_CO2_and_warming_went_in_lock-step_999.html
quoted from the US journal Science about a team led by French glaciologist Frederic Parrenin who has been examining ice cores from 5 deep drilling expeditions in Antarctica. They stated:
“By analysing the isotopic composition of the nitrogen gas in these samples, the researchers said they were able to filter out the confusing signal from the data. During the last deglaciation, the temperature rose by 19 degrees Celsius (34.2 degrees Fahrenheit) while at the same time CO2 levels in the atmosphere rose by about 100 parts per million, they said.”
If that relationship is to be believed then from what I understand we should have experienced during the last 3 centuries at least a 20c increase in global temperatures due to the 123 ppm (approx) increase in carbon content of the atmosphere in that period. The anomaly is the CO2 in the bubbles does not correspond to the level of warming indicated by the surrounding snowfall of that time. They go on to say:
“The discrepancy comes from the physical process by which CO2 bubbles are formed in successive layers of snow. “The gas bubbles are always more recent than the ice that surrounds them,” France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said in a statement.”
Err, I am a layman so my interpretation of this is: The ice that formed trapping the CO2 within it formed before the air it trapped inside it? Maybe that’s the case but it sounds dubious.
Bottom line is I believe the CO2 paranoia is just a scheme to tax the last thing left to tax. Air. There’s big dollars in this CO2 scam and the pigs are gathering at the trough. It has not been lost on me that it is predominantly independent scientists that question the dogma. Now it’s the volcanoes that have saved us from doom. Seems to me that there is always something that can be bent and or twisted to explain the failings of the predictive models.
Mud says:
March 5, 2013 at 8:08 pm
“By analysing the isotopic composition of the nitrogen gas in these samples, the researchers said they were able to filter out the confusing signal from the data. During the last deglaciation, the temperature rose by 19 degrees Celsius (34.2 degrees Fahrenheit) while at the same time CO2 levels in the atmosphere rose by about 100 parts per million, they said.”
If that relationship is to be believed then from what I understand we should have experienced during the last 3 centuries at least a 20c increase in global temperatures due to the 123 ppm (approx) increase in carbon content of the atmosphere in that period. The anomaly is the CO2 in the bubbles does not correspond to the level of warming indicated by the surrounding snowfall of that time. They go on to say:
“The discrepancy comes from the physical process by which CO2 bubbles are formed in successive layers of snow. “The gas bubbles are always more recent than the ice that surrounds them,” France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said in a statement.”
Err, I am a layman so my interpretation of this is: The ice that formed trapping the CO2 within it formed before the air it trapped inside it? Maybe that’s the case but it sounds dubious.
Mud, I am also a layman, but have been since longer struggling with the debate, so here some points I learned on the subject: the confusion comes from the wrongful display of ice core data, showing temperature and CO2 variations, without showing that CO2 lags behind temperature with about 800 years gap.
CO2 is soluble in water, therefore rainwater contains a lot of CO2 taken from the atmosphere.
The oceans are the biggest CO2 known reservoir, CO2 is continuously emitted by volcanoes, submarine vents or other geological sources:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.at/2012/09/new-paper-finds-large-geologic-source.html
however the variations seen in the ice core come mostly from the ocean, as warmer water contains less CO2:
http://docs.engineeringtoolbox.com/documents/1148/solubility-co2-water.png
The relationship is reversed. When the oceans warm, they degass and let the CO2 in the atmosphere increase, this is what is seen in the ice cores.
It is not an increase in CO2 that causes the oceans to warm.
Warmista claim that CO2 is then increasing at its turn as a feedback the temperature even more, however if this would be the case the degassing would continue and even more CO2 would come in the atmosphere.
The CO2 effect facilitates heat transfer through radiation in certain bandwidth. The explanation of the CO2 greenhouse effect would be that more and more strata of CO2 are needed to “evacuate” the heat from the surface to space, and the last emission level goes higher, which would cause the lower level to heat-up.
The skeptics point out the fact that the heat transfer through CO2 is minimal, that heat transfer in the atmosphere is more complex, dominated by the water cycle and calculated CO2 effect to the whole of the atmosphere is around 1°C for a doubling of the CO2 (for CO2 reaching something around 2X 280 ppm = 560 ppm).
Having now about 390-400 ppm, if by the end of the century we will have another 160 ppm increase, we might expect 0.4°C temperature increase by then, if feedbacks are not negative (the effect is logarithmic, which means another 1°C would be achieved with 1120 ppm which would be the ideal level for plants and possibly never to be achieved doesn’t matter how much we struggle to do it) . On the other side, maybe by 2200 we have new ways of generating and storing energy?
Meanwhile no reason to panic, quite the contrary:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/08/surprise-earths-biosphere-is-booming-co2-the-cause/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/24/the-earths-biosphere-is-booming-data-suggests-that-co2-is-the-cause-part-2/
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=9768
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-greening-of-the-planet.aspx
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/plantgrowth.php
And we should focus on real problems like malnutrition, access to potable water and electricity for all, achieve basic hygiene standards and civilization levels, combat malaria…