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?
Silver Ralph says:
March 2, 2013 at 9:46 am
kim says: March 2, 2013 at 6:08 am
Well, the obvious next step, sacrificing virgins.
_________________________
Can’t we sacrifice some old geezer instead? I kinda like the temple-priestess Vestal Virgins, and would like to show them the errors in their theology.
Sorry, old geezers, no offence, but….
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Why don’t you and a truckload of yer pals come on over and try to load me up to drive me to the volcano… I’ll show you how to really thin the herd.
kim says:
March 2, 2013 at 6:08 am
Well, the obvious next step, sacrificing virgins.
=========
No Kim,
the next step is to find some virgins to sacrifice.
cn
Scrap every Globull warming model,and take the name of scientist away from all the frauds,and poof,problem gone.Do most of us truly realize what idiots we are for letting these snake-oil scam artists and legal frauds get away with the crap called cAGW(or whatever name they use now).Did we learn nothing from the Romans or Greeks?
[snip. Try commenting without using “denialists” — mod.]
[And “me2” needs to use a valid email address the next time. Mod]
An interesting addition to the knowledge of our climate!
I am not a global warming sceptic in the normally accepted sense, but I am in the second half of my eightieth decade on this planet and it seems quite obvious to me that there has to be significant scope for error in climate change projections, simply because we probably understand a minute fraction of one percent of the way in which our planet and the species on it work, let alone the universe (or multiverse) in which our planet resides. It seems to me that Scientists should constantly remind themselves of this to prevent a not uncommon tendency to arrogance.
An example of how little we know was shown on BBC news this week when two scientists who had just returned from a deep dive ( can’t recall which ocean) to study undersea vents, reported that they had spent a considerable time on vents that they initially thought they had seen before, only to find hat hey were entirely unexplored ones! They were running at 400c – how many more are there I wonder?
I was wondering when this would turn up. So the science isn’t settled then.
Mosher,
There you go again. Putting words into people’s mouths.
Wamron has hit the nail on the head.
Bearing in mind that volcanoes are natural, you also need to bear in mind the following.
Game, set and match.
The above abstract talks of moderate while the IPCC talks of something bigger. Something is wrong with the models not the climate.
The only problem with CAGW (aka “Climate Change,” etc) is that it is not being allowed to fail. Rather, like a dead cornstalk that has been blown over by the winter winds, it is propped up again and again so that the scarecrow can protect it…
@ur momisugly RockyRoad / March 2, 2013 at 10:04 am “No, Martin–they didn’t say there was standstill before the past 15 years, just within the past 15 years. Is reading comprehension or logical thought your problem? ”
I’m afraid that it is you that has to learn to read or think: people like Monckton and Morano show only the years with standstill (since 1997), and not what was before 1997, the years with temperature rise (early eighties into the late nineties culminating in 1998;
here is a link to a graph with the temperature in the last 150 years or so:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
Jimbo says:
March 2, 2013 at 10:39 am
Right. This is the death knell for the claim of consensus. Anytime the claim is brought up, one need only produce testimony from the article to falsify the claim. Of course, the IPCC and other professional spinners will spin exponentially. But the ball is in their court and it has gone flat.
sorry, Im not that old – should read eight decade!!!
So UNDERSEA small volcanic vents and eruptions (that no body the past 15 years has even noticed or bothered to publicize or write about) are supposed to be producing STRATOSPHERIC and tropospheric AEROSOL “pollution” (that nobody previously has noticed or written about) sufficient to make all of the world’s global circulation models useless and void by “cancelling” all of the 100% of the “catastrophic” CO2 calculations those very same models have been using since 1978 ?????
But of course, there were NO such small volcanic vents and undersea eruptions between 1973 and 1997 when CO2 was the only influence on climate … ????
Since those naughty volcanoes are stopping us from frying (John Cook’s brain excepted) and making a mockery of predictions of frying, it is only logical* that deniers are thrown into the lava to appease the Volcano Gods who are mightily miffed by CO2. Behold;
Clearly volcanoes have nothing on us. They’re hardly a fluctuation on what we’re doing. So, the next time you hear someone trying to use that unfactoid to deny climate change, let them know what the truth really is**
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/22/as-arctic-ice-shrinks-so-does-a-denier-claim/#.UTI6iqMYbJs
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-may-increase
* remember this is a thought exercise and therefore I can say I will catch, gut and eat deniers alive as that’s okay. I am not agreeing with my own statements just putting the feelers out to see if we can get political traction and in the hope that compared to this life imprisonment for deniers will seem quite reasonable. This is the compromise we may have to accept.
** answers containing any doubt must refer to* as the only questions for science are how we ‘sustainably’ dispose of denier bodies. The scientific, media, political community are settled on human sacrifice [for some].
/sarc
Whoops : Eighth!
I have to laugh at Martin van Etten. He so craves runaway global warming, so he can say he was right.
Sorry, Martin. Planet Earth is making it clear that you are wrong.
Steven Mosher says:
March 2, 2013 at 6:23 am
“if they agreed youd bitch that it was a conspiracy or that consensus didnt matter.
If they disagree youd bitch that the science wasnt settled and remark that the sun explains it all.”
Remarkable. If they agreed, you’d trumpet the consensus. When they disagree, you blame us for attaching any significance to it.
Tom J says:
March 2, 2013 at 6:27 am
“‘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.’”
At the low end, 1.04^13 = 1.67, and at the high end, 1.1^13 = 3.45. The magic of compound interest. Are they really saying that it’s gone up between 67% and 245%?
Theo Goodwin says:
March 2, 2013 at 9:38 am
“When you are lucky early and establish a brand, you will tend to ride that brand until it is stone dead.”
They have no choice. They burned all the bridges, and passed the point of no return long ago with their strident, no-compromises rhetoric and take-no-prisoners policies of personal destruction. They are now surrounded by hordes of hostile facts, and it is a fight to the death against the forces of reality.
john robertson says:
March 2, 2013 at 10:06 am
“I shall christen it, Grant withdrawal Stress Syndrome.”
Grant Interruption Stress Syndrome = GISS
ok, so global cooling is natural…..global warming is unnatural
Are they also saying that all the temp reconstructions are correct?
That our present temps are an anomaly and are too high?..that the planet wants to be cooler?
…and what does that say about global warming?
Kübler-Ross predicted this. There are five stages of grief, and the first one is the D-word.
Et tu, Mosher?
@ur momisugly Don Easterbrook / March 2, 2013 at 6:24 am “The cool period ended abruptly in 1978 with no change in either atmospheric sulfur or CO2.”
don,
You should read this article: Anthropogenic sulfur dioxide emissions: 1850–2005
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/11/1101/2011/acp-11-1101-2011.pdf
please pay special attention to some of the graphs: they show a ‘peaking’ of sulphur emissions around 1975, then a decline;
(CO2 continues to go up as it did before and still does)
a little bit later- end seventies – the temperature is going up;
Martin van Etten says:
March 2, 2013 at 11:14 am
“a little bit later- end seventies – the temperature is going up;”
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Old’un says:
March 2, 2013 at 11:08 am (Edit)
But, kim is looking for virgins to throw on the volcano.
And the rest us are looking for old skinny geysers to throw in the volcano to thin out the herd whilst we look at (er, for) kim’s new virgins.
So, being eight, do you qualify as an old virgin geyser? Or are you just blowing smoke, and are really an old veteran geyser?
record snow fall in japan result of global warming http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21625702
Phil Beradley says
“It’s plausible that reduced sulfur emissions from vehicles played a role in the post 70s warming. And increased sulfur emissions from increased coal burning from the late 90s reversed this trend. ”
dje–You’ve overlooked the last part–“The cool period ended abruptly in 1978 with no change in either either atmospheric sulfur or CO2.” The climate reversal from cool to warm occurred within single year–much to abruptly for sulfur changes to have been the cause.