Love him or hate him, he’s making an impact. I thought it worthwhile to make his testimony available to read.
Submitted Written Testimony of Climate Depot’s Marc Morano at Congressional Hearing on Climate Change: ‘The Origins and Response to Climate Change’
Morano to the U.S. Congress: ‘The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim — from A-Z — the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing, and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts.’
Read it here: http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/05/31/submitted-written-testimony-of-climate-depots-marc-morano-at-congressional-hearing-on-climate-change-the-origins-and-response-to-climate-change/
Ahhhhh.
These four people have done more damage to the good ship global warming than most of the sceptical climate scientists combined.
RockyRoad says:
June 1, 2013 at 6:02 am
If you have diagrams showing CO2 increased first followed by the temperature rise from the LIA, please produce them.
Physics of ocean waters tell us that 1°C doesn’t give more than 16 ppmv CO2 increase over the oceans. The long-term ratioas seen in ice cores is ~8 ppmv/°C for all influences combined.
The decrease in temperature MWP-LIA was ~0.8°C (less if you believe Mann’s HS). That did give a drop of ~6 ppmv, or again ~8 ppmv/°C in the medium resolution ice core of Law Dome:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_1000yr.jpg
with a lag of ~50 years after the temperature drop.
After 1850 or so, there is a steep increase of CO2 confounding with a slow increase in temperature, comparable to the drop in temperature after the MWP. If really temperature induced, that would imply an enormous influence of over 100 ppmv/°C, not seen in any direct or indirect measurement or proxy in the past several million years.
Moreover, the recent increase in CO2 is accompanied with a decrease in 13C/12C ratio, as well as in the atmosphere as in the oceans:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sponges.gif
Such a drop in 13C/12C ratio again is not seen in any proxy or ice core for millions of years. Even the difference between glacials and interglacials gives only a change of a few tenths per mil d13C, not the 1.6 per mil drop as seen in the past 160 years.
Thus in my informed opinion, most of the CO2 increase is caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
It is NOT the good ship global warming!
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 1, 2013 at 12:35 am
“…Henry’s Law gives an increase of about 16 ppmv/°C for seawater…”
Static analysis fallacy. Surface seawater today is not the same as that yesterday, much less that a decade ago. There is a continuous circulation between the surface and the depths.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 1, 2013 at 11:20 am
“Thus in my informed opinion, most of the CO2 increase is caused by humans burning fossil fuels.”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman
Temperature accounts for almost all of it, and the superficial affine resemblance between emissions and atmospheric concentration is diverging as global temperature rise takes a holiday.
Dr. Murray Salby, who literally wrote the book on climate science, has officially published in his latest textbook the reasons that CO2 is governed by temperatures. The video is also instructive.
Symantec reports:
SWF_DLOADER.ZTS [Trend], SWF_DLOADER.YVN [Trend], SWF_DLOADER.YVM [Trend]
When accessing this thread.
I have had similar reports accessing other threads the last few days.
Bart says:
June 1, 2013 at 11:38 am
Static analysis fallacy. Surface seawater today is not the same as that yesterday, much less that a decade ago. There is a continuous circulation between the surface and the depths.
Henry’s Law is true for static as well as dynamic analysis. Increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere with 100 ppmv needs either 12°C higher average global seawater temperature or 12°C lower average global temperature at the moment that the waters were sinking, which is impossible, as that means mostly ice.
I had several discussions in the past with Bart on the same subject. The main problem is that he uses one time constant that should fit all changes, while in nature several mechanisms with different time constants are at work.
– the oceans surface changes its total carbon content (CO2 + _bi_carbonates) with 10% for a 100% change in CO2 of the atmosphere, because of the Revelle factor. The time constant there is 1-3 years. Similar for fast changes in vegetation. That is the cause of the fast response of the CO2 rate of change to temperature (at 4-5 ppmv/°C on short term, 8 ppmv/°C on very long term).
– the deep oceans exchanges are much slower with a time constant of ~50 years. Similar for the long term uptake of carbon in vegetation (roots, peat, coal). That is the cause of the slow rise in uptake capacity, directly related to the difference between current CO2 level and equilibrium setpoint level, the latter temperature related. But as we are already 100 ppmv above equilibrium, any temperature change has less influence on the absorption rate.
Thus at least two quite different time constants are at work: one fast, but limited in capacity, the other slower, but far less limited in capacity (deep oceans), if not unlimited (vegetation).
Further, any non-human origin of the increase I heard of violates one or more observations, including the oceans: these have a too high 13C/12C ratio, thus any substantial release of the oceans would increase the 13C/12C ratio of the atmospheric CO2, but we see a decrease, both in the atmosphere and the ocean’s surface, far beyond natural variability:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sponges.gif
Last, but not least: if you compare human emissions with the increase in the atmosphere, will you please use the same scale for both? Then it would be clear that human emissions still are about twice the increase in the atmosphere. That the latter is flattening only shows that nature now is a larger sink for CO2, still not a source…
Marc, you are a fact filled tireless warrior. Keep it up.
PS – I watch Marc weekly on SUN News Canada.on Climate realist/news Ezra Levant Show = Great stuff week after week.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says: June 1, 2013 at 12:35 am
“BTW, Henry’s Law gives an increase of about 16 ppmv/°C for seawater, ”
We appear to have reached similar conclusions. Glassman explains the relationship between temperature and CO2 concentration here:
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
You will find a curve in my “dog that did not bark link” that looks a lot like the link you sent. The “Keeling Curve” created from ice core data. If CO2 drives climate change as suggested by Al Gore you would need a sensitivity of 16 Kelvin per doubling for the last 800,000 years and then after 1850 the sensitivity would have to fall by an order of magnitude (to 1.6 Kelvin per doubling).
Ferdinand Engelbeen,
I like your web site. Here is something that caught my eye:
“Why “responsible”? I think that it is prudent to reduce the use of fossil fuels, not for the amount of CO2, but for other pollutants. And as it is a finite resource, to reduce the dependency of not-so-stable countries. And it is prudent to spend a lot of money into research of fossil fuel alternatives.”
While I am convinced that CO2 emissions will never cause “Catastrophic” climate change I recommend leaving fossil fuels to our descendants who will find better uses for them. Having lived in London during the 1950s I know what you are talking about when you mention “Other Pollutants”.
We should be developing alternatives such as “Generation IV” nuclear reactors which have the potential to sustain our industrial society for at least another 100,000 years.
Freeman Dyson recommends making the design of nuclear reactors a fun activity again. Some greybeards may need to step aside to make that happen. I retired from physics research over ten years ago but am excited by what the young upstarts are proposing:
htttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3rL08J7fDA
Here is a link to my (pathetic) web site.
http://www.gallopingcamel.info/
Ooops! I messed up that link to Kirk Sorensen’s LFTR presentation:
If Michael Mann were to see a dead horse falling off a cliff, would his hockey stick be able to tell how high the dead horse bounces?
Work just about the same says me.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 1, 2013 at 1:28 pm
“…needs either 12°C higher average global seawater temperature or 12°C lower average global temperature at the moment that the waters were sinking…”
This is incorrect. You are still imagining a static situtation. If a quantity of water which downwelled long ago at higher CO2 concentration upwells today, it will give that excess up to the atmoshere. You could then claim that, that water had given up all it could.
But, tomorrow, there will be a whole new quantity of ancient waters upwelling. And, the next day. And, the next. Every single day, more goes into the atmosphere in a continuous accumulation. It only stops when an equilibrium is reached, or a regime change in the CO2 content of upwelling waters occurs.
“The main problem is that he uses one time constant that should fit all changes, while in nature several mechanisms with different time constants are at work.”
It isn’t a question of time constants, it is a question of high pass and low pass transmission. What you are suggesting is that the temperature input is high pass processed (filtered), and so has no long term effect, while emissions are low pass filtered, and so account for the low frequency characteristics. This is implausible for the following reasons:
A) It requires dismissing the near perfect match of both long and short term components here as mere happenstance. That is highly unlikely.
B) It requires that the high pass process which removes the low frequency components of the temperature response has essentially zero phase lag across the spectrum, so that the plot at the preceding link exhibits no discernible differential phase lag between components. That simply does not happen in natural systems.
C) It does not explain why the long term emissions and concentration are currently diverging. If this divergence continues, and it will as long as temperatures fail to increase further, then it will not be long before you have no correspondence, superficial or otherwise, to hang your hat upon.
“…these have a too high 13C/12C ratio…”
There are far too many deconstructions of this argument readily available on the web for me to take the time to refute it. Simply put, there are many ways in which this observation could come about. It is consistent with the narrative, but not proof of it, and it is not inconsistent with other possibilities.
“That the latter is flattening only shows that nature now is a larger sink for CO2, still not a source…”
This is the same fallacious “mass balance” argument you have been making forever, and it is wrong at an elementary level. I thought I had finally gotten through explaining it to you at one point, but you appear to have regressed.
Bart,
Thanks for that link to Murray Salby’s presentation. I hope that Barry Brook ( Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change) at the University of Adelaide will take note. I won’t be holding my breath on this.
Bart says:
June 1, 2013 at 9:25 pm
If a quantity of water which downwelled long ago at higher CO2 concentration upwells today, it will give that excess up to the atmoshere.
The amounts released depend on the partial pressure difference between pCO2 in water and pCO2 in air. The former depends of concentrations, pH and temperature. The latter on concentration only.
The concentration of the upwelling waters depend of the CO2 concentrations over the downwelling waters (as far as not mixed with the bulk of the deep oceans) of long ago and their temperature. While the temperature in general might have been different (but not at the downwelling places which are near freezing), the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were 100 ppmv lower than today. Seen in ice cores with a resolution of ~20 years over the past 1000 years.
Worst case, the concentrations were 8 ppmv higher (for 1°C warmer during the MWP), that would give an increase of 4 ppmv today, not 100 ppmv.
Every single day, more goes into the atmosphere in a continuous accumulation.
No. As CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, the pCO2(air) increases and the CO2 flux at the upwelling places decreases (the CO2 flux is directly proportional to the pCO2 difference between water and air). At the poles, the increased pCO2(air) increases the CO2 flux into the downwelling waters. With an increased pCO2 of the upwelling waters, the resulting increase of CO2 in the atmosphere increases with halve that increase and is again back in equilibrium.
It requires dismissing the near perfect match of both long and short term components here as mere happenstance. That is highly unlikely.
The short term match is real, the medium term match is based on an completely arbitrary baseline.
It requires that the high pass process which removes the low frequency components of the temperature response has essentially zero phase lag across the spectrum
Again, you are thinking in one process that fits all. In the real world the fast processes and the slow(er) processes are near independent of each other. The fast processes are temperature dependent, but quantity limited, the slower processes are far less temperature dependent, but near quantity unlimited.
It does not explain why the long term emissions and concentration are currently diverging.
As the seawater temperatures around the equator didn’t change much in the past years, the main possibility is that the larger open area near the North Pole absorbs more CO2 in an extra amount of sinking waters and/or that vegetation had a growth boot for unknown reasons. That doesn’t change the fact that nature still is a net sink for CO2, even a larger sink, not a net source.
There are far too many deconstructions of this argument readily available on the web for me to take the time to refute it.
None of the arguments I have heard of hold water. There are no huge sources of low 13C/12C on earth except from the current biosphere or the fossil biosphere (except some probable abiogenic methane, but methane levels are quite stable in the past decade). The current biosphere is net growing, thus not the cause of the 13C/12C decline. And again, the too high 13C/12C ratio of the oceans effectively excludes them as source of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.
This is the same fallacious “mass balance” argument you have been making forever, and it is wrong at an elementary level.
The mass balance must be obeyed at all times, as no carbon can be destroyed or created in the whole system. And human CO2 isn’t preferentially absorbed at a different rate than natural CO2.
Take that the oceans are the main source of the increase, at a 90/10 ratio with human emissions. For the two endpoints of the Mauna Loa era, that gives (with the estimated natural flows at start):
For 1960 (all expressed in GtC):
increase = human emissions + ocean emissions + vegetation emissions – ocean sinks – vegetation sinks
1.4 = 2.6 + 90 + 50 – x – 50
Before 1990, vegetation was observed to be more or less in carbon balance. That gives:
x = 91.2 and the oceans show a net uptake of 1.2 GtC as CO2.
For 2011 (atmospheric increase approximated):
4.3 = 9.4 + 325 + 50 – x – 51 (vegetation is a net growing sink since about 1990)
x = 329.1 and the oceans show a net uptake of 4.1 GtC as CO2.
In all years of the past 50+ years, the oceans were net sinks for CO2. The only result of assuming an increased CO2 release from the oceans, is that the throughput of CO2 from oceans via atmosphere back to oceans increased some 3.6 times and still is net decreasing the atmospheric CO2 levels. The alleged increased throughput is not observed in any measurement.
@ur momisugly June 2, 2013 at 2:30 am
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
Ferdinand
On a previous thread here I tried to make the point that in summer cold Arctic Ocean open water can act as a sink to carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
In your reply to me here you said
Do you now acknowledge that there is indeed a role played by the inorganic absorption into the cold open Arctic water in depleting the high latitude atmospheric levels of CO2 in summer, as well as the conventionally recognised role of organic vegetation in the circumpolar Taiga forests of Canada and Siberia?
I dislike his presentation style — indeed, I would consider it disastrously inappropriate for the U.S. Congress, as likely to work in the opposite direction to what he intends — but his analysis of the facts is spot on.
Sadly, this isn’t the way to present something convincing to people who are uncertain and who have other supposedly competent advisors telling them the exact opposite. I just don’t understand why nobody articulates this well. As a single example, he talks about energy poverty in the third world and the impact of global warming policy on it, he quotes (quite correctly) a Japanese scientist who asserts that deliberate or not, European energy policy keeps the third world “barefoot” and in economic shackles (and as I pointed out, isn’t too good for the European economy itself, either), but he doesn’t present a simple, factual, cost-benefit analysis that shows the real costs right now of ameliorating the imagined CAGW “catastrophe” 87 years from now. They are enormous. Truly stupendous. We could have ended world poverty with the money pissed away on this already, especially if we threw in the money pissed away in the Iraq war (indirectly part of the same energy constellation, at issue global control of Iraq’s oil resources).
We also could have done something constructive about the use of fossil fuel resources to hedge our bets in the meantime, if it weren’t for the demonization of nuclear power and the unjustifiable promotion of wind based power. This entire issue lacks an articulate spokesperson, one who can fairly balance both sides of the issue and focus on weighted risk and cost-benefit, not whether or not the predictive science one way or the other is right.
SLR is a perfect example of how a rational argument can proceed. Hansen makes egregious claims. The actual data fails to support them. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t or won’t eventually be correct, but it is nevertheless quite clear that we shouldn’t be basing current public policy or spending current public money building seawalls now against a possible 1 meter or more SLR in 80 years. Even if the sea level does rise, it isn’t going to go up a meter overnight — there will be plenty of time to build seawalls and so on once it accelerates the way Hansen predicts that it will. And if Hansen is actually completely wrong, batshit crazy, and self-serving in his predictions and passion — whether or not you believe that this is likely to be the case, it is hard to argue that it would be good not to have wasted all that money on what would prove to be a monument to fiscal idiocy over the ages in the event that this SLR fails to come to pass.
Precisely the same thing is true for global temperatures and so on. It has been 16 years or so since we have had any discernible warming, and most of the warming we did have over the last 40 years was discrete and associated with a single event, the 1998 super-ENSO. Most of the “climate change” we have observed is more likely correlated with or explained by secondary phenomena such as solar state and/or the phase of other multidecadal oscillations. Humans affect many atmospheric parameters associated with climate change, some warming, some cooling, and we cannot yet meaningfully predict or explain observed global temperatures on the time scale of centuries at all. CAGW might or might not resume at some point — we don’t know why if it is a true hypothesis in the first place, and if it is we don’t know why it stopped and so cannot predict when it might resume — but if it does it probably isn’t going to just jump up to disaster, because the Earth has an enormous heat capacity and buffering system. In the meantime, as is the case with SLR, perhaps there will be catastrophic warming, perhaps not, but at the moment there is no warming at all and it is difficult to see how the lack of warming can be disastrous. Surely we are better off spending our money on sure things — reducing energy poverty and the real, ongoing catastrophe in our time of millions of preventable deaths, billions of lives lived in uncomfortable poverty.
rgb
Philip Mulholland says:
June 2, 2013 at 5:40 am
In your reply to me here you said
“Most of the change BTW is in the mid-latitudes, but the Ferrell cell brings the depleted air masses to near the poles.”
That still is the case: the main seasonal change is from vegetation in the mid-latitudes, as can be seen in the huge change in 13C/12C over the seasons. That is about 50-60 GtC extra that is absorbed when leaves begin to grow, every growing season again. Most of it returns in fall and the following year(s) when the same leaves are falling down and rotting.
The current debate it is about CO2 that is extra absorbed by nature, that may be caused by the larger free surface in Arctic waters, but that is for an about 1 GtC/year more that goes into the deep oceans (or vegetation, the cause is unknown for the moment)…
@Konrad
May 31, 2013 at 7:55 pm
What a lovely turn of phrase, “soggy grey literature”. Right on. Exactly: it is all wet.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 2, 2013 at 2:30 am
I am sorry, Ferdinand, but there is not a single correct statement in the above that I can find. I would have to spend all day correcting your mistakes.
As the divergence in the superficial match accelerates in coming years, you will be forced to accept the truth. For now, I am tired of arguing the patently obvious against you when you do not want to be convinced.
Bart says:
June 2, 2013 at 10:20 am
To make the difference in ideas clear, here the basic graphs:
Here from Bart
and the same data (as yearly average increases) plotted in the same units for all variables:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em2.jpg
If one plots the data in the same units it is clear that the emissions were larger than the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and that nature was a net sink for CO2 for every of all 50+ years. There is no way that nature can have been a substantial net source of extra CO2 over that period without violating the mass balance…
The variability in increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is caused by temperature variations. Temperature influences the net sink rate of oceans and vegetation, the main natural net sinks for CO2.
gallopingcamel says:
June 1, 2013 at 8:17 pm
Thanks for the links of the thorium reactors. Good that at least some of the youth is thinking more realistic about future energy production that this “windmill generation”…
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 2, 2013 at 12:26 pm
“There is no way that nature can have been a substantial net source of extra CO2 over that period without violating the mass balance…”
A true mass balance, yes. Your absurd pseudo-mass balance, no. In a dynamic system in which feedback increases or decreases the size of the sinks in response to the rate of influx, your simplistic accounting does not work.
We have been over, and over, and over this. At one point, you seemed to have seen the light. What happened?