NZCLIMATE Truth Newsletter No. 313

This isn’t the first place I’ve said this, but temperature is a piss poor proxy for energy balance. What we need to know is that for every joule that arrives on Earth at least one joule leaves. That is balance. It won’t show up in the temperature record – quit looking.

dp says:
June 21, 2013 at 11:19 pm
….a flawed record at that, too short in duration to be meaningful as well. We are talking about “THE climate”, there is only one. Earth’s. And it is as old as the earth. So what the hell are we doing pretending we can conclude anything from 0.00000003333333 of all time? The debate is basically a niggling over the hubris of a few druid-like “scientists” who presume to represent climate behaviour with guesses.

Well when I was back at the U of A doing some experiments, my supervisor had this idea, that if I was going to figure out what was going on in a circuit, using know physics to calculate currents flowing between nodes, it was highly desirable to measure the Voltage at EVERY node all at the same time. No good measuring some today, and some others tomorrow, and expecting the intermodal Voltage differences to remain where they were.
So why do climatists think it doesn’t matter when you measure each of your weather station Temperatures. If by chance, all of them were exactly the same Temperature, you might assume there was no heat energy flowing in any direction anywhere Well unless those Temperatures are all taken at the same instant, you can’t be sure of where heat energy is flowing. And as for averaging; on average, a hurricane doesn’t do much damage. Only if you cherry pick the data, and only look at structures, during the minutes or hours, when the storm center is passing over them, then you might mistakenly assume that the storm is wreaking havoc everywhere. Coming across from Africa it was a mere pussycat.
Nobody, ever observed the average value of something real, anywhere at any time. It’s a fictitious made up number.

Meteorological weather stations based at airports are designed to give advice on the conditions AT THE AIRPORT and in the immediate area for air movements. In turn airports can be very untypical of the wider area , with there wide amounts of open flat tarmac areas .
There misuse to cover wider areas is because there available , not that the information then give is typical of that wider area .

For what it’s worth;it’s Macquarie University.

Thank you Vincent Gray, again, having followed you for years at the NZCPR. Your first paragraph says it all, they can’t even measure it! I sleep better knowing you are out there speaking common sense and more.

“I might also add that the central line is also meaningless.”
Sorry, but I beg to differ. The central line has significant meaning, because it show just how BADLY the models, in general, perform compared to reality.

“Patrick says:
June 21, 2013 at 11:35 pm
Like Sandy on the east coast of the US, I wonder if the recent, record breaking, storm that struck Wellington the other day has been attributed to AGW?”
Our own near equivelent of the UK Met Office, NIWA. Might have to revise part of this June-August 2013 Climate Outlook. Since Winter isn’t over yet and we’ve all ready have had the most flooding in 20yrs in parts of the South Island and near record snowfalls. 🙂
Overall, temperatures for winter 2013 (June – August) are very likely to be above average across the entire country. However, occurrences of cold snaps, frost and snow conditions should, of course, still be expected in many areas from time to time, as is typical of winter. Sea surface temperatures around New Zealand’s coasts are also forecast to be above the climatological average for the coming three months.
Winter rainfall is likely to be in the normal or above normal ranges in the north and east of the North Island, and in the near normal range for the remainder of the country. Soil moisture levels and river flows are likely to be above normal in the north of the North Island, normal or above normal in the east of the South Island, normal or below normal in the west and south of the South Island, and near normal in other regions.
Overall picture
Rainfall, soil moisture and river flows
Rainfall for the June–August period as a whole is likely to be in the normal or above normal ranges in the north and east of the North Island, and near normal for the southwest of the North Island and for all the South Island. Soil moisture levels and river flows are likely to be above normal in the north of the North Island, and normal or above normal in the east of the South Island. Elsewhere, soil moisture levels and river flows are likely to be near normal, except in the west and south of the South Island where normal or below normal conditions are likely.
Temperature
June to August temperatures are very likely to be above average across the entire country. Sea surface temperatures around New Zealand are also forecast to remain above normal over the coming three months.
http://www.niwa.co.nz/climate/sco/seasonal-climate-outlook-june-august-2013

Patrick says:
June 21, 2013 at 11:35 pm
Like Sandy on the east coast of the US, I wonder if the recent, record breaking, storm that struck Wellington the other day has been attributed to AGW?
==================================================
Record breaking? Que?
What was record breaking about it?
According to NIWA (NZ Herald June 22nd, 2013) this storm was
NOT as strong as the storm in 1968 which sank the inter-island
ferry TEV Wahine.
Having directly experienced both, it also did not feel (subjectively,
to me) to be as bad or as destructive as Cyclone Bola in 1988.
Cyclone Bola hammered the whole of the North Island for several
days. This storm did its damage over the night of the 20th mostly
around the Wellington and Nelson areas. (The lightning and hail in
Auckland was spectacular!)
The violence in this storm was caused by the extreme cold air sucked
up from the edge of the Antarctic ice pack. (Src: NIWA)
According to American statistics, the only record Sandy broke was
the area it covered. It’s impact was significantly less than other extreme
weather events to hit New York in previous decades as you will see if you
search this blog for discussion and articles on Sandy.
(Wahine. pronounced Waa-HEEN-ee)

Most of the heat in the biosphere is trapped, and moves about, in the 1,300,000,000 cu km of ocean water. The tiny amount in the atmosphere is never going to properly reflect what is happening in the oceans.
I cannot imagine how mankind could ever really influence the heat in the oceans, we are too tiny compared to this vol of water

Is biosphere the correct term? I am not a scientist.

I have seen the second Salby video. He starts well but his final claim goes back to the same old flat earth AR4 model that spawned the GHE theory in the first place, ie., ignoring the reality of a rotating spherical earth with day and night. So 4/10.

Ceetee says:
Augie Auer, a voice of sanity, may he rest in peace.
I would like to second that.
Somebody who knew his trade, a true professional unlike Jim Salinger.
Sorely missed here in NZ.

@marstoval
There obviously are, otherwise there would be no debate. We owe a great debt of gratitude to those brave men and women who have stood up for truth.

I look forward to Professor Salby’s work being published so that it can be studied in detail.
If correct, his work is a game-changer for the “CO2 controls everything/humans control atmospheric CO2” belief.
I have not spotted any fallacies in what he says and so far I have had no difficulty reproducing the graphical results he presents by doing my own processing of downloaded CO2 and temperature data.
–

As to the meaninglessness of an “average global temperature”, here is a great post on the subject by E.M.Smith:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/28/uah-prelim-january-temp-may-be-below-normal-globally/#comment-585521
I hope that he will not mind my posting this link.

Tango – I’ve followed up your link to the report on Australia’s Climate Action Summit, currently being held in Sydney.
The opening featured the following speakers.
1. Professor Lesley Hughes
An ecologist in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University and an expert on the impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems. She is the co-convenor of the Terrestrial Biodiversity Adaptation Research Network, Chair of the Tasmanian Climate Action Council and a member of Climate Scientists Australia and the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists. Lead author, IPCC working group II that assesses the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change.
(I could not find any reference to her qualifications)
2. Assoc/Prof Erica Bell
Associate professor – Deputy Director
University of Tasmania.
University Department of Rural Health
Ph.D, M.A (Qual), B.A. (Psych)
3. John Cook
University of Queensland, Bachelor of Science Honours, 1989
Research Areas
Psychology And Cognitive Sciences
4. BUTLER, PROF COLIN
ARC Future Fellow, Public Health
Faculty of Health
BMedSci(Hons) (Newcastle, 1984)
BMed (Newcastle, 1987)
DTM&H (Royal College of Physicians, 1990)
speaks for itself really!!

I’ll never understand how so many people were convinced to panic….
…over a fraction of a degree

So it all boils down to pretty much what I’ve been saying all along:
1. Global Average Temperature is a mythical number, improperly measured and of dubious quality. Even the satellite measurements, which are significantly better than thermometers on the ground, aren’t really a completely valid measure of atmospheric energy content.
2. Even so, the temperature record, inaccurate and faulty as it may be, in fact shows the opposite of what we’re told. It does NOT show a wild, out of control warming, or cooling, or anything… in fact, it would be more accurate to say that the record shows an astoundingly stable average temperature.
3. Temperature rises and CO2 are not correlated. They don’t match. There may have been a stretch there where it looked like they did, but that was a coincidence.
4. Even though atmospheric CO2 appears to be increasing, and this is the one that even a lot of people on WUWT disagree with me on, it would be incorrect to attribute that rise to human activity, specifically the use of so-called fossil fuels. This one is important. Human activity just isn’t all that important compared to the gigantic natural CO2 flux of this planet.
5. Ice core CO2 records are not nearly as accurate or even representative as we are led to believe.
Seems to me that together these points pretty much demonstrate that the entire “AGW” theory has to fall flat on its face, because NOT ONE of the main foundations of that theory even match real-world data.
So go ahead, watch the Mauna Loa CO2 levels, and follow the monthly temperature anomalies, whether from ground or satellite measurements, and examine the ice cores. In fact, even follow the Arctic sea ice extent, and place bets on it.These are all interesting, no question. But what do they mean? Not really as much as we want them to, if anything at all.
Sadly, the majority of the people on this planet believe the narrative, not the reality.

Latitude says:
June 22, 2013 at 5:24 am
Because the claim of dangerous global warming was repeated over and over, by so many public figures in the major media, for so many years.
The same could be said for why did so many Americans believe Iraq had a link to 9/11: because the claim was repeated so many times in the months leading up to the invasion.
Not everyone has an inherent skeptical nature, so if so many ‘important’ people make a claim then it must have some merit. The major media tends to be non-confrontational so just about anything from a public figure gets published with little question, because their advertisers just want more sales, not a riled audience.

dave……..systemic brainwashing
this looks scary, right?
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo61.png
does it still look scary?
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo4.png

@ Latitude; June 22, 2013 at 5:24 am
“I’ll never understand how so many people were convinced to panic….”
Panic rules when facts don’t. This “science” project was about control – an opportunity to force ones social philosophy and life style on everyone else. Didn’t work. Bunch of (Snip) (Snip).
Can’t wait to see what Joel D. Shore and that new kid Jai something or other has to say.
Ron Richey

I too understand variable control. In brainwave research (back in the old days before MRI’s) we used surface electrodes on skin. For deep brain activity we had to abrade the skin to increase conductivity. But before we did any of that, I had to check the impedance of each and every electrode I used. Any differences would result in meaningless data. Why? Brainwaves are noisy and I was looking for an evoked signal at the brainstem level. If one of the electrodes was or began to show a difference I had to go through new ones to find one that matched the impedance of the current set. And then after I had collected data from someone’s brain, I had to check the impedance again.
So here we are spending $billions$ of OUR money, the PEOPLES’S money, on mitigation factors based on “electrodes” that have not been checked, calibrated, or even removed because they stank! If I was looking for a brain tumor along the auditory pathway, do you think my patient would want me to use anything like the surface temperature devices? Yet we are by majority vote, willing to have our pockets picked of ALL our hard-earned dollars based on just such a device.

He shows that for the MSU record, carbon dioxide is completely unrelated to temperature,

This is not really correct. Salby shows that carbon dioxide can be predicted extremely nicely from the temperature record: it’s linearly related to the integral over time of the temperature anomaly.

You mention C12 and C13 trapped in ice core samples. Is it possible to “tag” atmospheric Carbon to determine it’s origin?

Although I consider myself a climate skeptic, I don’t agree with a lot in this article. Especially the first 8 paragraphs are IMO completely wrong. At least initial concerns about relation between climate and CO2 concentrations were right and it was right that they were brought to attention and under study. Methods devised at the beginning definitely were not wrong and they were the best what was available at the moment. What went wrong was that it became a new kind of worldwide religion instead of being object of objective and meticulous scientific study.
Another thing I would like to point out is continuing misenterpretation of Spencer and Christy’s graph. First of all – it is nothing new. Read the fine print: it compares middle troposphere temperature in tropics. What’s the thing climate models predict there is the well known hotspot and this is just not happening, or at least at way smaller scale than models are forecasting. The lack of hotspot formation is discussed for several years already and Spencer’s graph shows just that and nothing more. It is not an ultimate proof that models are wrong. It is one of many and we will probably still need more because there are still many parameters in which models are not that significantly different from reality.
Regarding Dr. Salby, I have great respect to his work. I have seen both videos and what I see as the greatest conclusion from them is that they provide very good evidence that CO2 is not driving temperatures but temperatures are driving CO2 concentrations. What is however NOT his conclusion is that “The CO2 increase is from natural sources.”. He does not prove anything like that. He does not even open that question and does not even try to show what CO2 concentrations would be doing if there would be no human emissions. But the conclusion from his talk applying elementary math is that in that case, temperature would be now rising despite CO2 concentrations dropping.

I have tried to send Dr Murry Salby an email using the email address murry.salby@mq.edu.au as supplied by the Macquarie University web site but it gets bounced with an address unknown message. I contacted the university and they tell me he no longer works there but have never sent me a current email address. Can anyone help me?

“””””…..Mike jarosz says:
June 22, 2013 at 6:58 am
dave says:
June 22, 2013 at 5:45 am
Latitude says:
June 22, 2013 at 5:24 am
“Because the claim of dangerous global warming was repeated over and over, by so many public figures in the major media, for so many years.
The same could be said for why did so many Americans believe Iraq had a link to 9/11: because the claim was repeated so many times in the months leading up to the invasion.”
We must have watched different news channels. It was all about WMD’s. The justification was provided under UN Resolutions requiring inspections that were stopped by Saddam Hussein, who had demonstrated use of WMD’s on the Kurds. As for the Global Warming stuff, concur completely……””””””
You couldn’t possibly be referring to the chemical WMD that was trucked into Syria, while the UN hummed and hahed; and that Assad has recently been using on his people; could you. I seem to recall that SH even bragged about his WMD capabilities.
Then there was that poor sap Joe Wilson; hubbie of Valerie Plame, top secret master spy clerk; who was sent to Niger to investigate rumors of attempts by SH to get yellowcake from Niger; or maybe it was a deal to try and sell some to SH, that he (SH) thought was a CIA scam. Poor Joe, diplomat extraordinaire, couldn’t even get the name of a good French restaurant in Niger. They made sure he never got to talk to anybody, who actually knew anything.
Well my memory fades Quick(ly), but my copy of the 911 official enquiry, has a whole chapter about the origins from splinter groups, that became the founders of El Qaida in Irag
Well these stories like global warming too, do seem to have legs, and take on a life of their own.

Seb says: it probably will be scary.
======================
are you putting me on…
…add a fraction of a degree to this
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo4.png

While I respect much of what Prof. Salby says, he is quite wrong about the origin of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Since plant material prefers C12 this means that the additional CO2 comes from plant material.
That is right, but there are two main differences between fossil and recent plant materials: the fossil plant materials are completely depleted of 14C, as much too old, and how much recent plant material is burned or formed can be calculated from the oxygen use and fossil fuel use.
The 14C level declined in lockstep with fossil fuel use, so that since about 1870 the tables for carbon dating needed to be corrected. Until 1950, when the atomic bomb tests disturbed the 14C record completely.
The oxygen use shows a small deficit, if one calculates its use from fossil fuel burning efficiency. Thus the whole biosphere (land and seaplants, animals, insects and microbes) is a net sink for CO2 of currently some 1 GtC/year. Not a source. Thus the current increase of CO2 is NOT from recent plant material.
About the ice core CO2, sorry, but let the late Jaworowski rest in peace, together with his ideas about ice cores. Ice core CO2 measurements are reliable, as long as the necessary measures are taken, which was not always the case in Jaworowski’s time. But since then the technique did get better, but Jaworowski’s ideas didn’t change. Even if much of his objections were answered by Etheridge e.a., already in 1996, with three drillings at Law Dome, two of them with a resolution of less than a decade and an overlap of ~20 years with direct measurements at the South Pole.
So on the point of the origin of the extra CO2, Prof. Salby is completely wrong. About the influence of CO2 on temperature, we do agree to a large extent…
BTW, as I am travelling in beautiful Greece, looking for the roots of most of our Western Civilisation, with very limited Internet access and not the normal access to my documentation, it will take more time to respond…

It would seem to me that a simple empirical test could be set up to replicate Ice Field layering under differing CO2 concentrations. All that is needed is
A large freezer kept at -30 with a reasonably high relative humidity to prevent sublimation.
A 10 x 10 foot square form that is 10 feet tall
A pressure inducer that can fully but slowly compress the 10 x 10 form to create the Firn layering
Snow
CO2 control source
Slowly compress layers of snow at varying levels of ambient CO2 until your stack reaches the top of the form. Core the ice and compare the CO2 at the varying layers and compare the findings to the ambient levels at the time the layer was created. If they differ from the source levels, then the difference could be used to determine the amount of Bleed Through of CO2 from earlier layers to later layers and help to clarify the quality of the CO2 layering in the Paleo Ice Core data

Bryan A says:
June 22, 2013 at 8:54 am
It would seem to me that a simple empirical test could be set up to replicate Ice Field layering under differing CO2 concentrations.
No need to do that test: nature did it already. The migration of CO2 in firn (not completely closed ice) was measured at Law Dome, top down for each layer. That shows that at 72 meter depth the composition of the CO2 is about 7 years older than in the atmosphere. There is an overlap of about 20 years between the fully closed bubbles in the ice core below 80 meters and direct measurements of the atmosphere at the South Pole, all within the 1.2 ppmv (one sigma) of the ice core measurements.
Migration over time was calculated from the Siple Dome ice core, where remelt layers were found. That shows a migration which broadens the resolution of the ice core from 20 to 22 years at medium depth and from 20 to 40 years for full depth (some 70 kyears old). No such broadening is seen in the 420 and 800 kyears, far colder, ice cores of Vostok and Dome C…

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 22, 2013 at 8:36 am
BTW, as I am travelling in beautiful Greece, looking for the roots of most of our Western Civilisation …
You’re more likely to find the roots of the future failure of the EU.

Brooks Bridges – it was predicted Arctic sea ice would be zero by NOW! here’s the latest sea ice extent for the Arctic, it is above average for the past decade. It’s not declining rapidly.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Yes – arctic sea ice extent has been decreasing yet antarctic sea ice extent is expanding, last year being a record.
Obviously something is occurring in the arctic but there is NO evidence it’s CO2 or man’s actions..

@Peter miller –
The alarmists don’t and can’t control the historical records that unequivocally demonstrate the warmth of the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Climate Optimum and the Hittiite-Minoan-Mycenean Warm Period. There is no way they can get around those records, and that makes their efforts to make these earlier warm periods go away the more ridiculous.

Marian says:
June 22, 2013 at 1:44 am
….Overall, temperatures for winter 2013 (June – August) are very likely to be above average across the entire country…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Do you believe them? Or do they have the same reputation as the UK’s MET.

Ceetee says: @ June 22, 2013 at 3:28 am
We owe a great debt of gratitude to those brave men and women who have stood up for truth.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I will second that.
“We are like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants, and thus we are able to see more and farther than the latter. And this is not at all because of the acuteness of our sight or the stature of our body, but because we are carried aloft and elevated by the magnitude of the giants.” ~ Bernard of Chartres
Climastrologists are nasty little narrow minded dwarves with chainsaws and axes and chisels and hammers chopping away at the legs of the giants they fear and despise.

Re warming oceans below 700 m. Far more likely that cloud free SW infrared warmed those deeper layers via mixing. CO2 related warming would be buried in the noise of natural mixed warming at deeper layers.

P. Berkin says:
June 22, 2013 at 4:47 am
…here is a great post on the subject by E.M.Smith… I hope that he will not mind my posting this link.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I doubt it very much. At present he is settling into a new job after driving cross country. His website is : http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-fallacy-of-trapped-heat/

Mike McMillan says:
June 22, 2013 at 4:53 am
….What I gathered about the ice core record is that non-conservative processes are at work on the CO2 fraction, which I didn’t quite get….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I would suggest Lucy Skywalker’s information:
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/CO2-ice-HS.htm
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/CO2-flux.htm
And these two by Jeffrey A. Glassman, PhD
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2007/06/on_why_co2_is_known_not_to_hav.html#more
Also Dr Segalstad’s site: http://www.co2web.info/
ESPECIALLY: http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf
And some info on/by Dr. Jaworowski
http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/51653381/CO2-the-Greatest-Scientific-Scandal-of-Our-Time
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=25526754-e53a-4899-84af-5d9089a5dcb6 (Story of Dr. Jaworowski being denied funding and then fired for not toeing the CAGW line)
Last there is tons of information at on CO2 at http://www.co2science.org/

CodeTech says: @ June 22, 2013 at 5:32 am…..
I think this says it all:
Raw CO2 data (graphed)
CO2 data after ‘Adjusting’ (graphed)
And the reasoning as outlined by Mauna Loa Obs.

4. In keeping with the requirement that CO2 in background air should be steady, we apply a general “outlier rejection” step, in which we fit a curve to the preliminary daily means for each day calculated from the hours surviving step 1 and 2, and not including times with upslope winds. All hourly averages that are further than two standard deviations, calculated for every day, away from the fitted curve (“outliers”) are rejected. This step is iterated until no more rejections occur.
How we measure background CO2 levels on Mauna Loa.

One of the critical ASSumptions is that CO2 is uniform in the atmosphere. Without that assumption CAGW falls flat on its face because of the early historical CO2 measurements.
The actual data from chemical testing for CO2 GRAPH 1 Note the tendency to select low values for the CO2 concentration in the 19th century atmosphere despite values as high as 550 ppm and above.
A closer look at the cherry picked results used by warmists from above graph. GRAPH 2
World data/maps from Japanese satellite:
September 2009
July 2009 and January 2010 side by side comparison
August 2012

Vincent, You have misspelt your late friend’s name. It’s Jaworowski not Jaborowski.
Here’s a couple of links:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/zjmar07.pdf
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/2006_articles/IceCoreSprg97.pdf
I regard them as very good papers, despite the Wikipedia entry: “However, Jaworowski’s views are rejected by the scientific community.”

Brooks Bridges,
For an index to WUWT see Ric Werme’s Guide to Watts Up With That All the discussions on arctic sea ice are listed here and the discussions on the Antarctic here. (On the left is a listing of catagories you can click on to get links to those articles)

Ram says:
June 22, 2013 at 9:23 am
Can anyone tell me how much dishonest scientific activities is there ?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I can give you lots of links.
peer reviewed paper: How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data
Scientific fraud and the power structure of science
US Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research, Study Finds
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
Retraction Watch
Top Science Scandals of 2011
Scientific American – Dr. No Money: The Broken Science Funding System
Science Fraud: Highlighting Misconduct in Life Sciences Research

Faked data that makes the headlines:
NY Times: A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform
Guardian UK: False positives: fraud and misconduct are threatening scientific research, High-profile cases and modern technology are putting scientific deceit under the microscope
10 Scientific Frauds that Rocked the World.
Fox News: Oops! 5 retracted science studies from 2012
Fox News: One in Seven Scientists Say Colleagues Fake Data
Telegraph UK: Scientist jailed for faking medicine test results
http://medcitynews.com/2011/07/fda-says-cro-cetero-faked-trial-data-pharmas-may-need-to-redo-tests/
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57357036/red-wine-researcher-flagged-for-fake-data/
http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20111103193525126
WUWT discussion of Study: Fraud growing in scientific research papers that made the AP news service.

Kasuha says:
June 22, 2013 at 7:33 am
Those were nice and evenhanded thoughts. However, you go astray when you say: ‘…they provide very good evidence that CO2 is not driving temperatures but temperatures are driving CO2 concentrations. What is however NOT his conclusion is that “The CO2 increase is from natural sources.”’
If temperatures are driving CO2 concentrations, then anything other than temperature is not a major contributor. When a piece of fruit is an apple, then it is not an orange.
Donald L. Klipstein says:
June 22, 2013 at 7:59 am
“Although there is a large flux of CO2 among the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere, the hydrosphere and biosphere are *net removing* CO2 from the atmosphere despite warmer global temperatures. The carbon budget:”
The “carbon budget” is not something measured. It is something drawn up based on a particular paradigm – basically, how the authors think the bins should be filled. It is not evidentiary.
You first sentence smacks of the fallacious “mass balance” argument, which so may people ignorant of feedback systems have latched onto. Here is a discussion which explains why it is in error.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 22, 2013 at 8:36 am
Please see above. You are completely wrong.

“””””…..Dr Burns says:
June 22, 2013 at 3:06 pm
Vincent, You have misspelt your late friend’s name. It’s Jaworowski not Jaborowski……..”””””
Well I happen to know a real Jaworowski; as in a Polish one. He just happens to be the best damn technical fly caster I know of; he’s a fly casting genius.
And he absolutely insists that his name is pronounced Jaborowski. I suspect that the spelling is not original Polish anyway. I have no problem with spelling Jaborowski in a manner that will get it pronounced correctly. We Anglicize everything for our ease of communication.
So there !

·They are unrepresentative of the earth’s surface, and worse the further back you go.
Their locations are mainly close to cities,
Only maximum and minimum temperatures are measured,,
It is unlikely to be true that they are worse the further back you go. The quality of the thermometers themselves is not that different from a calibration of a few historic ones I have seen comparisons for. The locations were in those days very much in the gardens of big houses an in towns that were by current standards scarcely villages.
Current measurement are often as you say in cities where the USCRN shows clearly there is a temperature differential greater than the supposed global warming. that this is ignored is a measurement of the lobby power of the renewable energy industry which has the big name political families behind it much as big oil did in its heyday cowboy industry era.
As you say merely max and min are recorded but equally importantly there is a very significant effect of the clean air acts which raised max temperatures by nearly half a degree according to tests by the same people who gave you the data that resulted in the clean air and SO2 information. That was before they were dumped by the climate scientists and told to “go back to fixing washing machines or whatever engineers did these days as a response to rejecting the idea that any positive feedback was possible.” Of course these test used boxes with light transmission sensors to measure particle levels and not fancy computer models because the scientists were getting the big budgets and engineering the hand me downs as is even more true now.

Gail Combs says:
June 22, 2013 at 1:26 pm
Most of what you linked at about ice cores is based on the misinterpretations of the late Jaworowski. I had some personal correspondence with him about the “artificial” match of the ice cores with the Mauna Loa data. According to him, there is no difference between the average age of the CO2 in the bubbles and the surrounding ice at bubble closing depth. Even if there are years of open connection of the pores with the atmosphere. Quite remarkable for an ice core specialist.
But what closed the door for me is that he insisted that CO2 levels would migrate from lower levels to higher levels. Sorry, that is impossible (and there is no reverse osmosis at work between the ice pressure at 2000 m depth or 1999 m depth…).
See my comment on Jaworowski at:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html

Gail Combs says:
June 22, 2013 at 3:05 pm
You might try reading http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/the-trouble-with-c12-c13-ratios/
You may try to explain why at the very moment that humans start to emit larger amounts of fossil fuel CO2, the natural sources start in lockstep with human emissions and influencing the 13C/12C ratio’s in complete fixed ratio with human emissions. Not seen for 800,000 years in ice cores or over the past 600 years in the ocean surface by coralline sponges or any other proxy…
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sponges.gif

If GHGs truly trap heat, and if there truly has been little variation in the levels of CO2 during the Holocene but for the recent rise from about the 1800s onwards, which I understand to be the warmists’ contention, why and how has planet Earth cooled from the Holocene optimum? We need to begin to understand this cooling before we can begin to understand the present day warming.
In fact, I would say the same about the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods. Where and how has the heat been lost from the system?
The only temperature data of any real and scientific importance is that of the oceans, and there is no quality data on ocean temps pre ARGO. ARGO is too short a duration to know what is happening still less to extrapolate trends.
Globally, there are only two climate states, namely glacial and inter glacial. We do not have high resolute data of previous inter-glacial eras, we have no idea whether what we are seeing at this stage of the Holocene is not normal still less unusual and something to be concerned about. We really need high resolution data from many glacial/inter-glacial cycles before we can draw any relaible conclusions.
All we know is that based upon observational data and proxy evidenced there is no first order correlation and temperature and CO2 has not driven the past changes into or out of glacial and inter glacial eras. We can be reasonably certain that, even if CO2 is a driver (and there appears no observational evidence supporting that it is a temperature driver), CO2 is not a strong a driver as natural variation.

William Astley says:
June 22, 2013 at 4:06 pm
Salby notes that the increase in atmospheric CO2 (until equilibrium is reached) tracks the integral of temperature; looking at the current data and past data. Salby does not provide a physical explanation as to why that observation is correct;
Salby and Bart both use an arbitrary zero baseline for the temperature integration. That is curve fitting, indeed not based on any physical process.
The point is that a natural cause of the increase violates near all observations that have been known from past and present:
– the mass balance:
As humans emit about 9 GtC/year as CO2 and we see an increase of only 4 GtC/year, some 5 GtC/year is absorbed somewhere. The amounts did double over the past 50 years of accurate measurements, but in every year of the past 50 years, the increase in the atmosphere was less than the emissions. Thus if e.g. an increase in temperature of the oceans was the main cause, then the estimate of the ocean emissions would have increased from ~90 GtC/season to ~180 GtC/season over a year. But at the same time some of the sinks (oceans or vegetation) should have increased from 92 GtC/season to 184 GtC/season over a year. All what happened is that the throughput doubled in the past 50 years and that the total increase still is due to the human input.
But there is not the slightest observation that the throughput doubled in the past 50 years.
– the oceans have a too high 13C/12C ratio.
Any substantial increase of ocean emissions would increase the 13C/12C ratio of the atmosphere, but we see a steady decline in ratio with fossil fuel burning.
– vegetation is a net CO2 sink.
As can be calculated from the oxygen balance.
– vegetation is an increasing sink with higher temperatures (and higher CO2 levels).
– the oceans show a limited CO2 response to temperature changes.
According to Henry’s Law, the response is some 16 ppmv/K. As vegetation reacts the other way out, the short term response (seasons to years) is 4-5 ppmv/K. On (very) long term (decades to multi-millennia) the response is about 8 ppmv/K. That is all.
There is no way that the oceans can provide a continuous increase of CO2 for a sustained difference of a few tenths of a K over time. That violates Le Chatelier’s Principle, that any system in equilibrium tries to counteract a disturbance of the equilibrium. In this case: any increase of CO2 in the atmosphere will reduce the outflows from the oceans near the equator and increase the inflows into the oceans near the poles. Thus if the temperature of the oceans increases with 1 K, a new equilibrium will be met with maximum 16 ppmv increase, reinstalling the previous CO2 fluxes.

FerdiEgb says:
June 23, 2013 at 3:27 am
“As no matter can be destroyed or created from nothing, the “mass balance” argument still stands strong, no matter what the real fluxes are… If some natural process increased CO2 releases over time, that must be compensated with an equal or larger natural process that absorbs the extra input + half the human input in total CO2 mass, or the increase in the atmosphere would be larger than from the human input alone.”
No, no, no, no, no. This is not how a feedback system works. Read the link I provided. Please. I really do hate seeing such a nice guy make such a fundamental error, and keep making it time and time again without giving it proper thought.
Donald L. Klipstein says:
June 23, 2013 at 9:53 am
Same error. Read the link. Feedback systems do not work according to simple accounting.

I am surprised that very little discussion takes place on the influence of water through the good old ‘Rankine Cycle’. I reckon that for every kilogram of water that evaporates off the earth’s surface and later returns as rain, sleet, ice or snow some 680 wattHrs of energy are dissipated into space via the atmosphere.
The reason for this lies in the large Latent Heat of Evaporation of water; where huge transfers of energy take place AT CONSTANT Temperature.
The second reason is the non-intuitive fact that moist air is lighter than dry air and therefore rises. This is evident when one observes the Cirrus clouds up there some 40000 ft above, nudging the Troposphere, way way above any CO2 and as very cold ice crystals. How did all that water get there and where has all that energy gone? One may well ask.
The Rankine analogy may appear simplistic but I suspect has some validity within the highly complex process going as all this water cuts through the CO2 envelope.
The evaporation phase is the Boiler operating at the prevailing partial pressure of water.
The rising phase is the work done against gravity [as on a piston] whereby energy is converted to potential energy and also dissipated to the surroundings.
The condensation phase is the dissipation aspect, as above, together with radiation to space.
Finally we have the feed heater and pump phases where gravity takes control and increases the pressure using the potential energy lost during descent whist absorbing energy from the surrounding atmosphere.
The simple calculation being that 1 Kg of evaporated water has at least circa 700 WattHrs of energy in it. However when it returns to earth it only has about 10 WattHrs.
So Where has all that energy gone?

Somewhat minor point, but Eli always thought that Spencer and Christy figured out how to use the MSU data considerably after the launch and were not the instrument scientists on the NOAA satellites that carried the MSUs.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 24, 2013 at 2:45 pm
“All sinks are natural, there are hardly any human sinks.”
Incorrect. Portions of the available sinks expand as a response to human inputs. That growth would not have occurred without human inputs. Therefore, that expansion has created an assortment of, in every sense of the word, artificial sinks.
“I still wonder how intelligent people don’t understand what every housewive with a minimum of budget control knows…”
Because housewives are generally not versed in feedback theory. If you are operating on the level of an ordinary housewife, that should be a clue to you that you do not understand the problem.
“First a real world problem: most of the sinks that absorb CO2 don’t respond to the total concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, but to a difference in concentration with an equilibrium concentration.”
Trivial, as this is a linear system. Let Ceq be the equilibrium concentration. Then
d/dt(C – Ceq) = -a*(C – Ceq) + (N – a*Ceq) + A
Redefine Cd = C – Ceq, Nd – N-s*Ceq. Get
dCd/dt = -a*Cd + Nd + A
Now, you’re right back where you started from.
“At least the basic formula needs to be changed to:
dC/dt= -a*(C – C0) + N + A
where C0 is temperature dependent and largely responsible for the small wiggles over the seasons (4-5 ppmv/°C) to the larger ones over the ice ages (8 ppmv/°C).”
You’re just shuffling the deck chairs. Again, redifine Cd = C – C0, and you’re right back where we started. These manipulations are trivial, and simply obfuscating the problem.
“Some 50 years ago, the formula responded to (all in GtC and taking the current estimates for natural fluxes as base):
1.5 = a*(660-550) + 150 + 2.5”
What happened to the minus sign on “a”? If “a” is negative, you have positive feedback, and the system will diverge exponentially.
“Assuming that the factor “a” didn’t change over time (the sinks respond linearly to CO2 concentration differences with the temperature dictated equilibrium), the current fluxes should be:
4.5 = 1.37*(840-550) + x + 9
or x = 402
the overall net sink in natural fluxes in and out is 4.5 GtC/year.
The human “contribution” to that sink is 1.1% according to the ratio human/natural carbon in the carbon sinks.”
Even if you did not have the sign wrong, and your numbers were not all flaky, this is where you would have erred. Part of that 840 is due to the anthropogenic input over the years. You have to subtract that portion out before you actually get a measure of uniquely natural activity.
If you do not understand the elementary example I gave, you cannot hope to understand what is really going on, and you really should not be sticking your neck out so far.

Richard: So UAH and RRS are bad data and do not align with the nice thermometer record so they must by wrong. Still.
Actually at this point RSS and UAH align with GISS HadCRUT and NOAA very well thank you. Please do try and keep up.

Eli Rabett says:
June 24, 2013 at 5:50 pm
“Actually at this point RSS and UAH align with GISS HadCRUT and NOAA very well thank you.”
And, they all show that temperature is driving CO2 very well, thank you.

george e. smith says:
June 24, 2013 at 7:29 pm
“While old growth forests are carbon neutral. tree farming; aka agriculture projects are carbon sinks.”
Yes, but these are not the category of artificial sinks we are looking for, and they are a small part of the overall budget.
We are looking for sinks whose growth is fueled by the ready availability of anthropogenically released CO2. We send CO2 up in the air, and most of it settles back down, initiating biological and mineral processes which increase their activity based on the availability of CO2.
Had we not released that CO2, those processes would not have been initiated. So, in a very real sense, we created those additional sinks. They are artificial sinks.
This is the problem with the “mass balance” argument. It is not true that all significant sinks are strictly natural. If they would not have come into being without our activity, then they are artificial, as much as an airplane or a truck or a toxic waste dump is artificial, because we engaged in activities which brought them into being.
An automobile is made of iron, steel, aluminum, leather, glass, etc. It is, in fact, 100% natural content. Yet, surely an automobile is an artificial construct? Surely nobody would claim that automobiles are natural? Yet, this is precisely what Ferdinand et al., are claiming, that something which we created out of natural materials is necessarily “natural”.

Bart says:
June 24, 2013 at 5:24 pm
What happened to the minus sign on “a”? If “a” is negative, you have positive feedback, and the system will diverge exponentially.
Sorry, my mistake, of course it must be -a where -a*(C – C0) and N nearly compensate each other, -a*(C-C0) being slightly larger than N. The rest of the calculation still is the same, taking into account the change in sign.
Anyway, in all cases the “expansion” of the sinks due to human emissions is negligible and near all sink capacity is natural.

Bart says:
June 24, 2013 at 10:39 pm
We are looking for sinks whose growth is fueled by the ready availability of anthropogenically released CO2.
Either the contribution of human releases to the increase is trivial and so is the human contribution to the increase in total sinks, or human releases are responsible for the bulk of the increase in the atmosphere and thus responsible for the bulk of the increase in sink capacity, which for the fast processes still is only 3% of the total fluxes in and out of the atmosphere…
There are no sink processes that react extra on anthro CO2 releases only. All sink processes react on total CO2 and/or temperature. Pure theoretical, the total CO2 concentration near human sources can be increased near land plants, but that is mostly at night, when land plants are net sources of CO2, especially under inversion and low wind conditions. During the day, there is far more turbulence, effectively mixing the surface air layers with the rest of the atmosphere.

Further on Salby (quite difficult to follow by times):
After 17 minutes, he shows the increase of plant growth as result of increased CO2. That indeed happened, but is quite limited. Before 1990, there might have been a net contribution of CO2 from the total biosphere of about 0.5 GtC/year, after 1990 the biosphere is an increasing sink of about 1 GtC/year. Thus a difference of 1.5 GtC/year for an increase of some 140 GtC (70 ppmv) over the past 50 years in the atmosphere. Not negligible, but not the main sink of CO2, as other necessities are the limiting factors for plant growth.
Further, not applicable to marine biology, where CO2 is not the limiting factor at all.
After 25 minutes, he compares the amplitude of real variances in the atmosphere with the measured variance in ice cores for different frequencies. If I do understand his interpretation well, the higher the frequency in the atmospheric change, the better the variances in the ice cores reflect the variances in the atmosphere??? As far as I know, it is just the opposite, that even any full cycle with a cycle length less than the resolution would be invisible in the ice record and the longer the cycle length, the better it is conserved in the ice record…
Further on he has lost all sight on reality, as he says that the CO2 levels at longer times scales may be more underestimated than on shorter time scales. As example he gives that on a timescale of 10 kyr the ice core underestimates the variance of the atmosphere with a factor 2, making that a 20 ppmv peak and drop of CO2 in the atmosphere would only give a 4 ppmv variability in the ice core. Worse on a timescale of 100 kyr: a variance of 1000 ppmv in the atmosphere would only be seen as a 100 ppmv variance in the ice core.
That is without taking into account all the different resolutions of the different ice cores. Sorry, but that is a serious misinterpretation of what the distribution of CO2 variations in ice cores do.
Then after 30 minutes he looks at the suppressing of high frequency variations in the ice core. Again, while that is true, that highly depends of the resolution of the ice core in combination with the frequency of the variations, but his interpretation of a 10 fold suppression on time scales of 10 kyrs is completely out of reality for the higher resolution ice cores like Taylor Dome (~40 years over 70 kyears).
That all is based on some estimate of a huge CO2 migration in ice (shown after 32 minutes) which is not measured in any ice core. If that would be the case, the ice core CO2 record in the far past would get flatter and flatter for every interglacial back in time, which is not measured at all: the CO2/temperature ratio remains the same for all glaciations/deglaciations over 800 kyears.
I have the impression that Salby simply uses any possible interpretation to fit the equations from past and present, even if that is completely out of reality…

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 25, 2013 at 12:11 am
“Anyway, in all cases the “expansion” of the sinks due to human emissions is negligible and near all sink capacity is natural.”
Mere assertion on your part, with no supporting evidence whatsoever. The temperature-CO2 relationship shows you are wrong.
FerdiEgb says:
June 25, 2013 at 1:36 am
“Further, this is a huge simplification of what happens in nature:”
I stated this in the first sentence of the example. It does not matter. Feedback acts in the same way regardless. You are not taking account of the influence of the anthropogenic output on the “natural” sinks, and you are including artificially driven components in the “natural” column for your accounting.
“Most of the CO2 movement in plants is the growing and decay of leaves and small stems. That budget is nearly in equilibrium for tropical forests, but largely seasonal in growth and decay for the mid and high latitude forests.”
Incorrect. When the forest expands, that carbon is sunk. It is not “unsunk” until the forest returns to its former size.
“Thus at least you need to split your formula in fast responses and slow responses.”
No. I have given an explicit counterexample to your “mass-balance” methodlogy. It does not matter how the actual system behaves. The principle is the same. You are not taking account of the influence of the anthropogenic output on the “natural” sinks, and you are including artificially driven components in the “natural” column for your accounting.
FerdiEgb says:
June 25, 2013 at 2:08 am
“There are no sink processes that react extra on anthro CO2 releases only.”
And, conversely, there are no sink processes which “react extra” on natural releases only. The anthropogenic releases induce sink expansion. Those portions of the sinks which expand due to human production are artificial sinks.
FerdiEgb says:
June 25, 2013 at 5:35 am
“Where he goes wrong, is on following points:”
You’re a nice guy, Ferdinand, but I must say, it displays a lot of gall for you to take on as accomplished a fellow as Dr. Salby when you apparently cannot even solve a simple, first order, ordinary differential equation and draw the appropriate conclusions.
“But there is no continuous change of CO2 levels if the temperature remains on a continuous high (or low) level above (or below) an arbitrary baseline.”
Yes, there is. It is evident in the near perfect correlation between integrated temperatures and CO2. It comes about because there is a continuous flow, and a temperature dependent pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere. An imbalance, for instance, in the CO2 concentration of upwelling and downwelling waters is a continuous CO2 pump, into the atmosphere if the former exceeds the latter.
“That is quite visible in the ice core record:”
The relationship is evident, and Salby went into much detail about how it comes about, and how it is consistent with the integral relationship. The mathematics are complicated, but straightforward to a control systems engineer, and irrefutable.
FerdiEgb says:
June 25, 2013 at 7:15 am
“Before 1990, there might have been a net contribution of CO2 from the total biosphere of about 0.5 GtC/year, after 1990 the biosphere is an increasing sink of about 1 GtC/year. “
This is all circular reasoning. Your numbers are based on the very presumption you are trying to establish.
FerdiEgb says:
June 25, 2013 at 8:23 am
More circular reasoning.
I do not want to be getting into these tortured interpretations with you at this time. I merely want to establish that your “mass-balance” argument is not compelling evidence in favor of human responsibility for the observed increase in CO2 over the last century. Once we have established this, we can move on to other things.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
June 26, 2013 at 3:46 am
Now, if we may assume that the deep ocean emissions (and sinks) increased from about 40 GtC in 1960 to 400 GtC in 2010 (all other fluxes remaining constant)
I made an error, as the fluxes in and out of the atmosphere may have increased from to 400 GtC over a year, but that is for all fluxes together. If the non-deep ocean fluxes remained the same, then the deep ocean fluxes had to grow from 40 GtC/year to 290 GtC/year, not to 400 GtC/year. That gives the following trend in d13C, compared to fixed deep ocean fluxes:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/deep_ocean_air_increase_290.jpg
The only difference with the 40-400 GtC/year increase is that the recovery from the low 13C human contribution is slower.

Bart says:
June 26, 2013 at 8:32 am
I understand that it is difficult for a lay person to understand why it the necessary conclusion.
While most of my theoritical knowledge is too far in the past, I had a lot of practical experience in processes to know what is possible or probable and what not.
The mass balance argument still holds but that seems to be an endless discussion.
Regardless of the mass balance argument, the isotopes argument I explained recently is as good, it shows that there is no substantial increase of CO2 from deep ocean upwelling. And the oxygen balance shows that vegetation is a net sink for CO2 (and thus a net sink for preferably 12CO2).
Further, as discussed before, atmospheric inputs and outputs from/to the oceans are fully pressure difference dependent. It simply is impossible that a constant difference in temperature will give an increasing accumulation without a negative feedback from increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere.