I have travel today, hence this open thread.
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focoloco on April 3, 2013 at 4:39 pm
Ok, now global warming is the culprit of our nice spring winter:”….
Even if if was true that AGW caused cold weather, this kind of thing is hard if not impossible for the average person to believe. If they claim CO2 causes global warming and it’s 100F then sure, everyone can believe it. But when it’s April and it’s 25F outside they just look like total fools to the average person.
The true believers of course lap it up like warm milk.
On Real Climate today, tamino has responded with a link to his own site (see below) to comments by skeptics that a spike in the paleoclimate record, similar to what has been seen in 20th century would not be visible in the results of Marcott. His analysis (supposedly replaying Marcott style averaging and Monte Carlo) claims to show that spikes on a duration as short as 100 years of increasing temp followed by 100 years of decreasing temp (by 1/2 degree C) would still be visibie (only slightly reduced peak). I wonder what the thinking on this analysis is among the technically savvy on WUWT, familiar with the Marcott methods?
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/smearing-climate-data/
Jim S says:
“Can someone explain how, if CO2 levels are rising — and are expressed as an increase in ppm — then what atmospheric gas(es) are decreasing? What gases are going down in ppm?”
Answer:
Over the last 100 years the CO2 level has gone up by about 100ppm. If Nitrogen, the most abundant gas in the atmosphere, went down by that much it would change in concentration by about 0.01%. I doubt that they could reliably measure the amount of Nitrogen in the atmosphere to 0.01% 100 years ago. That is why they call CO2 a trace gas, the other constituents of the atmosphere are so large by comparison, any corresponding reduction in the other gases my be unmeasurable… the day to day changes in the concentrations my vary by more than 0.01%.
Professor Murray Salby form Macquarie University in the ‘Australian’ newspaper this morning Thusrsday edition (4/04/2013) has blasted the Oz Climate Commission for their Australia’s “Angry Summer” announcement recently. He maintains that last summer was not “angrier” than other summers and presents data to prove the point.
But he goes further and states (quote)” The Climate Commission was enshrined as an ‘independent panel of experts’. It was installed and paid for by the government. The panel is comprised of biologists and ecologists, a materials engineer and members of the business community. It has no demonstrated expertise in the physics or chemistry of climate, or even meteorology, the scientific underpinnings of its conclusions.” (unquote).
In assessing the Commissions report he notes” This report is but the latest in a series of dire proclamations from the [Commission] panel. It just happens to buttress the government’s controversial carbon tax, a maladroit policy that will be pivotal in the forthcoming federal election.”
At last some sensible and truthful assessments from a true climate expert and august University.
Incidentally I recommend reading Salby’s book “Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate” Cambridge University Press. 665 pages. It’s a heavy going academic tome with a lot of supporting maths but an exhaustive and comprehensive survey of this field.
got an automatic transmission?
you already have a hydraulic hybrid.
I see the UPS is accumulator stored type, wonder how big a bang that will make 🙂
Richard Courtney, I agree with everything you wrote, and would enjoy receiving a reprint of your paper (pfrank_eight_three_zero_AT_earth_link_dot_net, all run together).
In addition to what you wrote, the compensating uncertainties in aerosols and climate sensitivity should be propagated as uncertainties through every step of every single global temperature projection. Any proper physical discipline would do so. The result would show that climate models are immediately — within the first year — unable to predict anything.
I recently gave a seminar at Stanford, on error propagation through global temperature projections. In that case it was cloud error, but it just as well could have been the uncertainty in aerosols/climate sensitivity. It showed exactly what you have described: climate models predict nothing whatever about the future climate of Earth.
Mosh said that the forcing from a change in CO2 concentration is 5.35*ln(C1/C0), C0=initial concentration and C1=final concentration.
So this formula is not valid for all concentrations of CO2? Then what is the proper relationship as calculated from physical laws? There must be some formula that works at all concentrations, even if it is much more complex than the very naive formula that contains the factor ln(C1/C0) which blows up when C0=0.
Steve, you said that it is stated “without any evidence”. Well, I would like to see the evidence.
Can anyone provide a link to the correct computation that relates temperature change to CO2 content change. I really want to know because I am bothered when I see a formula that is obviously incorrect.
Physics Major
—
I think even Arrhenius realized that the log relationship couldn’t hold at low concentrations (for obvious reasons), and suggested that at some point it transitions to linear, and intercepts zero. He wasn’t very clear about the details. I don’t now for sure, but I don’t think anybody’s done any really good work since that (about 100 years ago) about just exactly what the details of that transition are.
P-chem is like that. Long on fuzz, short on precise details.
tried to post the comment below on hansen/nuclear thread for hours yesterday, with no success.
also now getting “compatibility view” problem every time i open WUWT which causes the page to refresh before i can read anything:
as we know, hansen has been a nuclear shill all along. it’s also well-known that the guardian’s george monbiot is extremely pro-nuclear, as is long-time CAGW-advocate, the widely-published fred pearce. CAGW-followers (and some sceptics) pretend not to notice:
27 Nov 2011: UK Daily Mail: Fred Pearce:
Nuclear power? Yes please!: A former opponent calls on Chris Huhne to
embrace the energy source that’s cheap AND good for the environment
I never thought I’d say this – but the future is nuclear. Or it should be…
In fact, I see no sensible low-carbon future that does not involve a lot of
nuclear power…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2066726/Nuclear-power-Yes–A-opponent-calls-Chris-Huhne-embrace-energy-source-thats-cheap-AND-good-environment.html
Wikipedia: Fred Pearce
Pearce is currently the environment consultant of New Scientist magazine and
a regular contributor to the British newspapers Daily Telegraph, The
Guardian, The Independent, and Times Higher Education. He has also written
for several US publications including Audubon, Foreign Policy, Popular
Science, Seed, and Time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Pearce
as for me, no nuclear until cold fusion is doable.
Physics Major;
Can anyone provide a link to the correct computation that relates temperature change to CO2 content change.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
As I tried to explain upthread, there is no such thing. If you want the explanation from the IPCC as to how it is calculated:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-2.html
Now if you can figure out a way to physically measure such a thing in order to verify it…. good luck with that.
DavidMHofferTe (Is that you, David?) has an excellent post on climate sensitivity.
Climate sensitivity is not something that can be directly observed or directly measured. There is nothing like a thermometer reading for climate sensitivity. It is a purely theoretical concept. And to suggest that it can be measured as temperature can be measured is highly misleading.
Climate sensitivity is determined by the sum total of all GHG forcings minus all feedbacks. At this time in the history of climate science, no one has a clue what the sum total of all GHG forcings and feedbacks is. To know the sum total, we would also have to know all other factors that influence the global average temperature, itself a highly theoretical concept. We would have to know these others factors so that we could confidently assert what changes in temperature are caused by them, along with the magnitude of the changes, and then subtract them from the sum total of forcings and feedbacks from GHGs.
I am sure that a figure for climate sensitivity will be established no later than 2100 and no earlier than 2075.
But the devil is in the details. Show me the correct formula and it’s derivation from physical law. Otherwise the whole thing is bogus.
davidmhofferTe says:
April 3, 2013 at 3:43 pm
It is even more complicated than you suggest.
In the tropics due to the humidity the atmospheric enthalpy is very high and it takes many more kilojoules to raise a volume of atmosphere by 1K than at the poles where the humidity is close to zero. Therefore, a volume of air temperature at the poles will rise more per KiloJoule than the same volume of air in the tropics. Using temperature to measure atmospheric sensitivity shows ignorance. Averaging the atmospheric ‘sensitivity’ to CO2 by quoting temperature and not heat content or consideration of enthalpy is a nonsense.
Something I noticed a few weeks ago and found time to summarize last week:
multidecadal heliosphere structure, solar cycle deceleration, & terrestrial climate
Superposed is figure 5 (p.198) from section 8 (pp.196-198) of:
Obridko, V.N.; & Shelting, B.D. (1999). Structure of the heliospheric current sheet derived for the interval 1915-1996. Solar Physics 184, 187-200.
http://helios.izmiran.troitsk.ru/hellab/Obridko/189.pdf
“[…] quasi-periodic oscillations […] The convergence region of the field lines moves up and down with the same period. […] results in secular variations of the entire structure of the heliosphere.”
Compare with Figure 4:
Wyatt, M.G.; Kravtsov, S.; & Tsonis, A.A. (2011). Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Northern Hemisphere’s climate variability. Climate Dynamics.
Physics Major
I don’t have any desire to go hunting for it, but I recall several years ago Lubos Motl did a reasonable explanation for the logarithmic rationale. It’s based on statistical arguments of the likelihood of a photon being intercepted. He likened it to coats of paint on a window.
speaking of that….does anyone know what the temp would be…if man hadn’t created global warming?
….and exactly what is the temp at that zero line?
David, as I’m sure you know, that link does not answer my query. If, as you state, “there is no such thing” as a computation that relates temperature change to CO2 change, then what is the point of the “climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling” calculation?
OldWeirdHarold,
No offense intended, but if you can’t be bothered to “go hunting for it”, then don’t bother to post..
Physics Major says:
April 3, 2013 at 7:11 pm
davidmhofferTe says:
April 3, 2013 at 6:12 pm
“David, as I’m sure you know, that link does not answer my query. If, as you state, “there is no such thing” as a computation that relates temperature change to CO2 change, then what is the point of the “climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling” calculation?”
There is no point. At this time in the history of climate science, the calculation has no empirical meaning whatsoever. If you want the mythic version, David gave you the correct IPCC reference. The mythic version is all there is at this time.
Latitude says:
April 3, 2013 at 7:06 pm
Roughly what it is today.
ThinAir says:
April 3, 2013 at 5:15 pm
“His analysis (supposedly replaying Marcott style averaging and Monte Carlo) claims to show that spikes on a duration as short as 100 years of increasing temp followed by 100 years of decreasing temp (by 1/2 degree C) would still be visibie (only slightly reduced peak).”
You must have misstated something. That up and down interval is 200 years. It won’t work for a century. Are you saying that the left side of such a 200 year interval can be measured in a century? Or maybe you are not talking about the uptick?
Well, I guess that I was hoping that someone like Steven Mosher would enlighten me. But silence speaks volumes.
Agreed, with caveats. It serves the purpose of ‘framing’: It leads discussions, and the unwary, where the modellers wish to lead them.
Warm a glass of carbonated drink and it loses CO2 to the atmosphere. You can choose to define CO2 sensitivity to climate; it is just as valid as the converse. In a model world you are master of the universe, and can choose the definitions that suit you.
Physics Major;
Well, I guess that I was hoping that someone like Steven Mosher would enlighten me. But silence speaks volumes.
>>>>>>>
I’m not certain what it is you are asking for. Or are you trying to make a point? If so what? If you’re looking for an explanation from Mosher… good luck with that too 😉
The IPCC definition doesn’t answer the question, and cannot be verified by measurement in any event. In fact, if you read carefully, they even say that the concept of Radiative Forcing cannot be directly reconciled with Surface Forcing.
I suppose we could go back to the Third Assessment Report where they talk about sensitivity in the context of the Earth’s “effective black body temperature”. That’s different from the surface temperature. If you were to measure the “temperature” of earth from space using an IR thermometer, you’d get something in the range of -18 C because you’d be measuring (well sort of anyway) an average of the temperature from earth surface to TOA (top of atmosphere). So -18 C is the temp of earth as seen from space while +15 is the temp of earth at surface.
Now, we turn to CO2 in the absence of water vapour, feebacks, etc, and double it. In that scenario, the effective black body temperature of earth changes by, once equilibrium is returned to the system… exactly zero. So what has changed?
The amount of w/m2 entering the system (from solar radiance) and the amount leaving (from earth radiance) balance out exactly both before and after CO2 doubles. What changes is the number of times any given photon bounces between the CO2 molecules themselves. With twice as much CO2, the photons get absorbed and re-emitted in a random direction a greater number of times before they finally hit a path where they can escape to space. So, even though the amount leaving and the amount coming in are the same, there are more of them after CO2 doubles and equilibrium is once again established.
Now if we calculate through some statistical methods that I was once adept at several decades longer ago than I care to admit, you can figure out how many “extra” downward travelling photons there would be at any given point in time. If you turn that into a total energy flux over time, you will get about 3.7 w/m2. There’s plenty of slop in that number depending on how you do the statistical analysis in the first place, but it is a decent approximation in my judgement.
So, take SB Law, plus an additional 3.7 w/m2 into a temperature of -18 C, and you will get something on the order of 1 degree for a doubling of CO2.
Now there’s plenty wrong with that approach too, but I think that is roughly where the original CO2 doubling = 3.7 w/m2 = 1 degree came from. The reasoning is faulty because the effective black body temperature doesn’t actually change. What changes is the average altitude at which the effective black body temperature occurs. From there you have to make some assumptions about lapse rate and how uniform it is to arrive at an estimate of temperature change at surface… which as I’ve already explained, calculating an average of is a fool’s game.
Sorry there’s no clear answer. But that is exactly why this is such a complex field of science, and why you should be immediately suspicious of any explanation that seeks to give you a simple answer.
I forget the author, but the quote applies:
Complex difficult problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.