By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I have just had the honor of listening to Professor Murry Salby giving a lecture on climate. He had addressed the Numptorium in Holyrood earlier in the day, to the bafflement of the fourteenth-raters who populate Edinburgh’s daft wee parliament. In the evening, among friends, he gave one of the most outstanding talks I have heard.
Professor Salby has also addressed the Parliament of Eunuchs in Westminster. Unfortunately he did not get the opportunity to talk to our real masters, the unelected Kommissars of the European tyranny-by-clerk.
The Faceless Ones whose trembling, liver-spotted hands guide the European hulk of state unerringly towards the bottom were among the first and most naively enthusiastic true-believers in the New Superstition that is global warming. They could have benefited from a scientific education from the Professor.
His lecture, a simplified version of his earlier talk in Hamburg that was the real reason why spiteful profiteers of doom at Macquarie “University” maliciously canceled his non-refundable ticket home so that he could not attend the kangaroo court that dismissed him, was a first-class exercise in logical deduction.
He had written every word of it, elegantly. He delivered it at a measured pace so that everyone could follow. He unfolded his central case step by step, verifying each step by showing how his theoretical conclusions matched the real-world evidence.
In a normal world with mainstream news media devoted to looking at all subjects from every direction (as Confucius used to put it), Murry Salby’s explosive conclusion that temperature change drives CO2 concentration change and not the other way about would have made headlines. As it is, scarce a word has been published anywhere.
You may well ask what I might have asked: given that the RSS satellite data now show a zero global warming trend for 17 full years, and yet CO2 concentration has been rising almost in a straight line throughout, is it any more justifiable to say that temperature change causes CO2 change than it is to say that CO2 change causes temperature change?
The Professor headed that one off at the pass. During his talk he said it was not global temperature simpliciter but the time-integral of global temperature that determined CO2 concentration change, and did so to a correlation coefficient of around 0.9.
I had first heard of Murry Salby’s work from Dick Lindzen over a drink at a regional government conference we were addressing in Colombia three years ago. I readily agreed with Dick’s conclusion that if we were causing neither temperature change nor even CO2 concentration change the global warming scare was finished.
I began then to wonder whether the world could now throw off the absurdities of climate extremism and develop a sensible theory of climate.
In pursuit of this possibility, I told Professor Salby I was going to ask two questions. He said I could ask just one. So I asked one question in two parts.
First, I asked whether the rapid, exponential decay in carbon-14 over the six decades following the atmospheric nuclear bomb tests had any bearing on his research. He said that the decay curve for carbon-14 indicated a mean CO2 atmospheric residence time far below the several hundred years assumed in certain quarters. It supports Dick Lindzen’s estimate of a 40-year residence time, not the IPCC’s imagined 50-200 years.
Secondly, I asked whether Professor Salby had studied what drove global temperature change. He said he had not gotten to that part of the story yet.
In the past year, I said, four separate groups haf contacted me to say they were able to reproduce global temperature change to a high correlation coefficient by considering it as a function of – and, accordingly, dependent upon – the time-integral of total solar irradiance.
If these four groups are correct, and if Professor Salby is also correct, one can begin to sketch out a respectable theory of climate.
The time-integral of total solar irradiance determines changes in global mean surface temperature. Henrik Svensmark’s cosmic-ray amplification, which now has considerable support in the literature, may help to explain the mechanism.
In turn, the time integral of absolute global mean temperature determines the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Here, the mechanism will owe much to Henry’s Law, which mandates that a warmer ocean can carry less CO2 than a colder ocean. I have never seen an attempt at a quantitative analysis of that relationship in this debate, and should be grateful if any of Anthony’s readers can point me to one.
The increased CO2 concentration as the world warms may well act as a feedback amplifying the warming, and perhaps our own CO2 emissions make a small contribution. But we are not the main cause of warmer weather, and certainly not the sole cause.
For the climate, all the world’s a stage. But, if the theory of climate that is emerging in samizdat lectures such as that of Professor Salby is correct, we are mere bit-part players, who strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then are heard no more.
The shrieking hype with which the mainstream news media bigged up Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, ruthlessly exploiting lost lives in their increasingly desperate search for evidence – any evidence – as ex-post-facto justification for their decades of fawning, head-banging acquiescence in the greatest fraud in history shows that they have begun to realize that their attempt at politicizing science itself is failing.
Whether they like it or not, typhoons are acts of God, not of Man.
I asked Professor Salby whether there was enough information in the temperature record to allow him to predict the future evolution of atmospheric CO2 concentration. He said he could not do that.
However, one of the groups working on the dependence of global temperature change on the time-integral of total solar irradiance makes a startling prediction: that we are in for a drop of half a Celsius degree in the next five years.
When I made a glancing reference to that research in an earlier posting, the propagandist John Abraham sneeringly offered me a $1000 bet that the fall in global temperature would not happen.
I did not respond to this characteristically jejune offer. A theory of climate is a hypothesis yet to be verified by observation, experiment and measurement. It is not yet a theorem definitively demonstrated. Explaining the difference to climate communists is likely to prove impossible. To them the Party Line, whatever it is, must be right even if it be wrong.
The group that dares to say it expects an imminent fall in global mean surface temperature does so with great courage, and in the Einsteinian spirit of describing at the outset a test by which its hypothesis may be verified.
Whether that group proves right or wrong, its approach is as consistent with the scientific method as the offering of childish bets is inconsistent with it. In science, all bets are off. As al-Haytham used to say, check and check and check again. He was not talking about checks in settlement of silly wagers.
In due course Professor Salby will publish in the reviewed literature his research on the time-integral of temperature as the driver of CO2 concentration change. So, too, I hope, will the groups working on the time-integral of total solar irradiance as the driver of temperature change.
In the meantime, I hope that those who predict a sharp, near-term fall in global temperature are wrong. Cold is a far bigger killer than warmth. Not that the climate communists of the mainstream media will ever tell you that.
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“Climate agnostic says:
November 10, 2013 at 7:53 am”
Thank you!
We saw the climate zones shift latitudinally as much as 1000 miles in certain regions between the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. It would surprise me if our emissions have shifted them by as much as a mile.
Dear Stephen,
You tell an engaging story, but the problem with engaging stories is that they can be engaging but not true, just as ugly stories can sometimes be true but not engaging. The other problem with the story is that it completely omits CO_2, which is not really reasonable. You say it would surprise you if emissions have shifted climate zones by a mile. Why? Exactly the same problem that plagues the GCM folks (if they are honest) plagues your even less developed hypothesis. We have multiple causes shifting around, some systematically, some not, with many overlapping timescales driving the dynamics. For example, it is not at all clear if your model (fully developed) will suffice to explain the entire dynamical evolution of GAST over the last N thousand years, the MWP and LIA and the gradual warming post LIA including the two “cycles” evident in the data from the last 150 years.
Some fraction of that warming was (if you like) natural variation, some of it appears to be modulated by decadal oscillations such as the PDO (which has roughly the right period to correspond to the variation in the data), and, because we do not know and cannot either predict the future or explain that past variation of the baseline, the post LIA warming, we cannot say whether or not it “should have” kicked over into cooling at some point and would have if it weren’t for CO_2, or if it “should have” continued warming at a nearly unchanged rate so that the role played by CO_2 in observed warming is dwarfed by it.
A second issue is — OK, so you have a concrete hypothesis. So take a GCM (say, CAM 3.0) and code in the hypothesized missing physics. You are making very specific assertions concerning e.g. stratospheric chemistry and movements of e.g. the tropopause and thermocline — these hypotheses are computable in a multiple slab GCM. Put them to the test. It won’t be easy because you cannot just turn off CO_2 and aerosols and water vapor in a GCM or things will come out egregiously wrong — you’ll have to try to solve the same problem that so far seems quite intractable, only worse with a presumed ozone/water vapor modulation in the stratosphere. One which I actually agree with, by the way — there is NASA data that fairly strongly supports it. But the question is one of degree, because you could be dead right, and we could have entered a natural cooling phase, but CO_2 could still be neutralizing the natural cooling we might have been experiencing so that we are temperature neutral instead. In the end, your hypothesis has to be quantitative and computable as well as plausible in order to be tested either via hindcast or (more usefully) in the future.
Mr. Monckton: Regarding Salby’s identification of the time integral of e.g. insolation or whatever as a causal factor in CO_2 concentration — which is essentially searching for a replacement to the Bern model IIRC — here the problem is one of mathematics. Let us suppose that the variation of atmospheric CO_2 concentration is described by a differential equation with several terms. There will be positive and/or negative terms associated with all of the sources and sinks for CO_2 — the general biosphere, soils, the ocean, and sure, human generated CO_2 produced from mined carbon or hydrocarbon. Each of these sources/sinks plus the atmosphere itself constitutes a massive reservoir for carbon. As one solves this coupled system (which will definitely have temperature dependence in its rates, and where the first order temperature dependence will always be, by the nature of Taylor series expansions of smooth functions, a linear one) one will inevitably do a time integral of the linear temperature pieces.
The catch is that under ordinary circumstances, doing these time integrals should lead to saturation on SOME time scale. After all, if we increase the Earth’s mean temperature by (say) 0.5 C, we don’t expect CO_2 to increase indefinitely, we expect it to increase from a former equilibrium to a new equilibrium, so we expect CO_2 to have a negative curvature once we get past the initial transient associated with the warming pulse. This in turn depends strongly on the time constants implicit in the system of equations describing the derivative of the concentration. If the most important of those time constants were years to decades in size, and if the human addition to the concentration was unimportant, we would have expected CO_2 concentration to have visibly changed curvature from very slightly positive to increasingly negative over the last 17 years. OTOH, if the most important time constants are indeed on the order of 50 years or longer — and I’m not talking about residence time, I’m talking about the time required for the ocean itself to thermalize to depth so that system has a chance to reach steady state in detailed balance with the atmosphere as a reservoir at its eventual steady state temperature — then the bulk of the rise we observe and its positive curvature could be due to the fact that we are still in the “transient” associated with the 20 year rapid rise that apparently ended with the 1997/1998 ENSO event.
Here we are handicapped by an appallingly short period of reliable and consistent measurement, just as we are handicapped throughout climate science. 30+ years is barely sufficient to get a crude glimpse of dynamical processes with relaxation timescales ranging from minutes to centuries. Our understanding of the system is further handicapped by profound covariance and confounding — the human contribution to the atmosphere competes with e.g. the oceanic reservoir’s contribution, and the ocean serves simultaneously as a source and a sink and has its own internal carbon cycle with at best approximately known, mostly assumed time constants. Eventually much of the CO_2 we add to the atmosphere will end up on the ocean floor in the form of oils and clathrates, to be subducted back under the tectonic plates and to perhaps emerge in a few hundred million years as oil and natural gas. But in the meantime it will go into solution at depth, it will be taken up by algae and eaten, it will follow many pathways back into the air and back out of it before finally settling out “permanently” (on a REALLY long timescale) at depth.
There are numerous differential models that can be built that agree with the Mauna Loa data, and some of them are as simple as a first order ODE with a rate dependent on temperature — an ordinary integral. Given a nearly monotonic observed temperature over the fit interval and a monotonic CO_2 increase, of course one can create a model that reproduces the data. This does not mean that the model is correct, and indeed isn’t substantial evidence that the model is correct. I could create a model that strongly suggests that global temperature AND CO_2 concentration variation are “caused” by my age, because the latter sadly increases monotonically, or I could find even more compelling correspondences among other more pertinent variables. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy, and remains a fallacy even when there is some compelling connection between one or more variables in a highly nonlinear multivariate process over some comparatively short period compared to the many known timescales associated with the system. Causality itself is by no means obvious.
Warming releases oceanic CO_2, which causes warming — ordinarily towards an new steady state or back to the original steady state after a transient. But the cause of the original warming could equally well have been a change in the external forcing or a bolus of CO_2, because CO_2 causes warming which causes the release of CO_2 which causes warming. We know that there are no runaway solutions in here (or the Earth would long ago have run away) but we do not know the time constants associated with relaxation to the ever moving new steady state in the multiple, coupled, channels that contribute. There are (as noted above in my reply to Stephen) many ways to balance natural vs CO_2 forced changes to reproduce any given stretch of training data, but the bulk of these, however successful they are on the training data, will not extrapolate into a trial set and hence predict the future correctly, and if one does not train any given model (“physics based” or not) on data that shows non-monotonic variation, the model is always going to find an “easy path” with linearity dominant even if the actual system is strongly nonlinear so that the linear behavior is essentially an accident.
This is not saying Salby’s reasoning or results are incorrect — it is saying that it is almost certainly inconclusive, like so much climate science is these days. It is premature by decades of observations. As long as CO_2 continues to increase monotonically with a slight upwards curvature, some fraction of this increase very likely comes from things like an equally monotonically warming ocean, and some fraction of it from other causes including the release of anthropogenic CO_2. It is determining what these fractions are that is the bitch, given relaxation times of up to centuries in different parts of the multiple coupled reservoirs and the ability to easily create multiple models (all different) that reproduce the tiny chord of human observation. If anything, the monotonic nature of the CO_2 rise argues against it being a simple integral of some sort of temperature change towards a new steady state. It doesn’t have the right shape, curvature, and has absolutely no “discrete” (smeared) structure associated with the changes in e.g. Bob Tisdale’s SST data.
One final comment (which I might have made before). You do your own argument a disservice when you put the CO_2 anomaly and the temperature anomaly on the same graph. If you want to make this point effectively, make two graphs. Put the absolute CO_2 concentration on one graph. It will vary by some 10-20% over the last 17 years, IIRC. Put the absolute temperature in degrees Kelvin on the other (with the same time axes). It will be a nearly perfectly flat line with barely perceptible noise (at the one pixel level on any reasonable graph scale) and still will be labelled with a neutral trend, essentially zero slope.
Be very careful what you conclude from this. The correct conclusion is first, “the GCMs used in AR5 are mostly incorrect models and should not be used to set expensive public policy”. The second justified conclusion is that if CO_2 is still a demon and the 0.5 K warming predicted by the hottest GCMs (with the highest climate sensitivity) is being cancelled by natural variations omitted in the models, then the assertion in AR5 that “the bulk of the warming observed over the late 20th century is due to CO_2, not natural causes” (which they assert with high confidence, although where and how they can compute “confidence” in failing models eludes me) is inconsistent. They cannot have it both ways. If natural variation can be responsible for 0.5 C of anomalous, systematic cooling to unexpectedly cancel the predicted 0.5 C of warming over 17 years, there is no possible way that they can conclude that the 0.3-0.5 C warming of the late 20th century is predominantly due to CO_2. Of course the observed warming from the first half of the 20th century also confounds this argument but it is good to make the argument twice on independent grounds.
It is not (as I know that you know very well) sufficient to prove that there is no GHE or any such thing, nor is it really sufficient to prove beyond any doubt that we could not be headed towards a CO_2 driven climate catastrophe — it’s a highly nonlinear, strongly coupled system and we do not know how to separate human influences, climate feedbacks, and natural variations out in its internal dynamics. It does more than suffice as lack of support for any asserted catastrophe, and it should be causing climate scientists to modulate their predictions for climate sensitivity down. This is even happening, although perhaps too slowly. The catastrophists are still hoping, not even particularly secretly, for another sudden surge in GASTA like that following the 1997/1998 ENSO and in the meantime are grasping for any straw as evidence of “climate change”, cherrypicking specific events shamelessly while ignoring general trends equally shamelessly. And sure, it could happen. But every additional year with no discernible warming, with warming at a pace far below the extrapolations of the GCMs, adds a preponderance of weight to Bayesian prior assertions of low climate sensitivity at the expense of Bayesian prior assertions of high climate sensitivity. At some point not even the most shamelessly dishonest climate scientist will be able to defend the hottest running models in CMIP5.
Personally, I don’t see how they can justify their inclusion in the AR5 SPM spaghetti graph already — 0.5 to 0.6 K too warm over a mere 15 years seems to me to be a compelling argument that the models that exhibit this much erroneous warming, at least, are broken and should not be included as being plausibly correct. Where exactly to make a cut-off for inclusion is subject to some argument, but excluding even the obviously incorrect models causes the “mean” GCM climate sensitivity in admissible, non-falsified models to plunge.
And then there is the really interesting question. A few of the GCMs are actually in decent agreement with the data, only a bit too warm. Where exactly do they end up in 2100? That spread should be the most reliable prediction out of the CMIP5 models, although the systematic disagreement should be sending everybody back to the drawing board to reconsider both the model physics and the computational accuracy anew. It would be nice to insist that all of the models ultimately included in any sort of “prediction” agree when applied to a toy problem such as an untipped “water world” or other baseline benchmark systems. It’s difficult to believe any of the models when they don’t even get the same answers for toy problems with none of the complexity of the Earth, even if we cannot check those answers to see if any of the (agreeing or not) are correct.
rgb
Patrick says: “Monckton, by his own words, had nothing better to do than be “science adviser” to Thatcher between 1982 and 1986.”
And what great piece of work were you doing in 1982, Patrick. Not that I’m knocking your career to date. Just that I have to accept that Monckton has a greater claim to my attention than you. Also, in claiming a higher authority for his mandate, most of us can see the irony in his riposte. The fact that you insist on missing it says more about you. Still, you can redeem yourself and come up with an argument that rebuts Chris’s piece. I’d be happy to read it and put it in the balance.
Greg Goodman
Greg rightly asks of me on what basis I make the assertion;
“ (CET) … over the years has been shown to be a reasonable proxy and indicator of Northern Hemisphere temperature.”
I had a meeting with the Met office a couple of weeks ago to discuss this and other matters. I had the pleasure to meet, amongst others, David Parker who created the 1772 CET Hadley set I referenced. He and others confirmed that this assertion was generally held to be correct and are giving me tacit assistance in preparing a paper that will demonstrate (or not) this proposition.
tonyb
I’m surprised at the credulity given by so-called “skeptics” towards the proposition that the main source of rise in CO2 might be something other than human activity. I have three pieces of advice for people who still don’t believe the source of CO2 rise is mainly anthropogenic:
* No matter how desirable the theory, if it disagrees with observations, it’s false.
* Those who fail to perform arithmetic are doomed to talk nonsense.
* Shop keepers can reliably tell whether stock is being stolen from their shops without watching every item on every shelf and every customer in every shop every hour of the day, which also means we can tell if the CO2 is coming from us without accounting for every single CO2 event in every forest and ocean on the planet.
Rather than repeat the whole Mass Balance argument here, I’ll link to a previous discussion on NoTricksZone: [
http://notrickszone.com/2013/06/10/murry-salbys-presentation-in-hamburg/#comment-528413 ]
If you have the anthropogenic emissions figures from CDIAC and the the CO2 from MLO then you have all the facts you need. We can know that Dr Salby’s overly complicated analysis is wrong, because we already have an answer from the simplest way to answer the question.
Further, the conclusions of the paper by Humlum et al are, in my humble amateur experience, erroneous.
Their lagged correlation technique was new to me, but I’ve made an air/plants/ocean/industry model in a spreadsheet which confirms my first impression. It is only an approximate model running over 8 simulation years, but the essential relationships are all there, conservation of mass included. The derivative of 12-month smoothed SST and CO2 for this simple model shows a correlation between SST and CO2 which is strongest if CO2 lags 8 months behind temperature change, just like in Humlum’s results, except in my model there was an anthropogenic CO2 emission constantly pushing up the air CO2 levels. Same analysis result from a cause different to what they inferred, so their attribution conclusions do not necessarily follow from their analysis. For me that’s enough to prove their technique is bogus and cannot be used to identify the CO2 source. What’s really happening is… The yearly changing temperature of the ocean modulates the rate at which nature absorbs our CO2, which causes the correlation they find in the derivatives.
In short, a correlation of derivatives only tells you what is most rapidly modulating the derivative, not the cause of the original observed quantity. Or in more plain terms…. If your car’s speed shows lagged correlation with the position of the brake pedal, you would not conclude the brakes are driving the car forward.
Those who have refrained from jumping on the Natural CO2 bandwagon have already shown proper and justified skepticism.
“No one should have to deny their faith to discuss science.”
I am not suggesting that, but I am suggesting that discussing science is better done without invoking gods, mythical (or otherwise) – because those that argue that Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is true and real will simply focus on the god stuff and say there you go – nutjobs, the lot of them.
Believe whatever you want but keep to a scientific approach when discussing science – otherwise the opposition will trash the argument without engaging it.
“Our Lord” writes:
“…Murry Salby’s explosive conclusion that temperature change drives CO2 concentration change and not the other way about would have made headlines. As it is, scarce a word has been published anywhere.”
Maybe the reason is that only a few take Salby’s hypothesis seriously (the same goes for Humlum).
Fred Singer had this to say in an article in American Thinker:
“From time to time, skeptics have claimed that the CO2 increase was mainly due to global warming, which caused the release of dissolved CO2 from the ocean surface into the atmosphere. (A recent adherent of this hypothesis is Prof. Murry Salby in Australia.) However, the evidence appears to go against such an inverted causal relation. While this process may have been true during the ice ages, the isotope evidence seems to indicate that the human contribution from fossil-fuel burning clearly dominates during the last 100 years.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/a_tale_of_two_climate_hockeysticks.html#ixzz2h7ZyRVmo
rgb.
I appreciate the time you have spent on your comment but aver that you have fired off without having fully appreciated my hypothesis.
I do not set out an ‘engaging story’.
It is actually a description of what really happened in the real world in the correct sequence.
Nor does it omit CO2. I actually accept GHGs as having a role in atmospheric circulation but given that the so called greenhouse effect is a result of the kinetic energy required to be at the surface to hold the gases of the atmosphere off the surface it is inevitably a consequence of atmospheric mass and not the radiative capabilities of GHGs.
To say that I am incorrect in that assertion you must invalidate the Gas Laws which contain a term for mass but not for radiative characteristics.
Given that the greenhouse effect is a matter of mass and not radiative characteristics how far do you think our emissions could shift the climate zones?
Please provide your workings 🙂
I attended this from a political perspective, and the implications of his talk, if true, are extreme. From my notes at Westminster:
Prof. Salby went through his talk in detail, from the long term past which showed that temperature conclusively drives CO2 levels. The most interesting part was the demonstration that recent and short term CO2 levels do not directly follow temperature swings, but are induced by and dependent upon the time integration of the temperature changes.
If this is true, and the resultant integration plot does almost exactly follow the atmospheric CO2 level increase, then the assertion that CO2 levels affect global temperature cannot possibly be correct. Further, all those computer models programmed to show CO2 and temperature correlation are simply wrong.
This completely undermines any basis whatsoever for political campaigns for CO2 reduction or ‘decarbonisation’. The UN IPCC and its ARn reports are similarly rendered pointless. The subsidies for renewables are not needed. Carbon trading, green taxes, carbon energy price floors, the Climate Change Act 2008, carbon capture research, UEA and the global warming institutes, the premature closing of coal fired powered stations, manufactured hairshirt angst, and restrictions on shale gas exploration, are all history.
All the while that this systematic and stiletto-blade scientific dismantling of the case for AGW was unfolding in the Gladstone room, the debating chamber annunciating screens in the corner were flicking up some familiar names. The learned debate in the Commons was the ‘Energy Price Freeze’, with Caroline Flint and Ed Davey no doubt displaying their familiar level of understanding of energy fundamentals.
There is a heavy political fallout coming.
Thanks, Christopher, Lord Monckton. Good article.
Professor Salby has been doing good science, may we listen to him!
FrankK says:
November 10, 2013 at 6:53 am
Yes this also “concerned” me. But is this not just a question of resolution. Ice cores can only point to very long-term changes as they “average” or smooth out shorter term variations like those that have and are occurring in the 20th and 21 Century.
Different ice cores have different resolutions, depending on the snow accumulation speed. The Law Dome DSS core has a resolution of ~20 years and covers the past 1000 years, thus including the MWP-LIA transition:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_1000yr.jpg
The drop of ~0.8 K between the MWP and LIA caused a drop of ~6 ppmv in the ice core with a lag of ~50 years. Thus about 8 ppmv/K, the same as seen in the Vostok and Dome C ice cores over 420 and 800 kyears.
That means that the current increase in temperature out of the depth of the LIA is only good for maximum 8 ppmv CO2 of the 100+ ppmv increase we see today. Humans meanwhile emitted over 200 ppmv CO2 all together in the same period…
climate agnostic said:
“While this process may have been true during the ice ages, the isotope evidence seems to indicate that the human contribution from fossil-fuel burning clearly dominates during the last 100 years.”
I used to accept the isotope evidence but no longer do so because the creation and destruction of different CO2 isotopes is not as simple as when the idea was first proposed. For example biological activity in the oceans can affect the isotope type of CO2 released by the oceans to the air.
And then there is this:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/evidence-that-oceans-not-man-control-co2-emissions/
Which shows that the sources are sun warmed ocean surfaces and that there being no CO2 plumes downwind of human populations it seems that our emissions are quickly scrubbed out locally and regionally by the biosphere.
Whenever I see a set of data, I ask two questions:
1. How was it collected?
2. What was done to it after collection?
I get very nervous, maybe suspicious is a better word, when I see the words “selected data”, “extrapolated”, “transformed” (even when proper), “adjusted” (particularly this word – so calm, so serene, so safe….so potentially deadly to the truth), “manipulated”, and the like, regarding the collection and analysis of a particular dataset. And, in all my decades as a biologist I have never been more suspicious of data than that related to historical global temperature and CO2. No dataset has been more ripe for exploitation because of the amount of money and power associated with its use.
Unfortunately, most of the general public (and the MSM, it seems) only see/hear the data, and more often just the selected “conclusions” and do not know to ask these two questions; furthermore, our journals may be on the same path as “peer review” takes on new meaning. Maybe the satellite data will alleviate these concerns but only if those involved, and those watching, insist on the highest standards of data collection and analysis. The “Methods” section is the first referee and remains the most important part of any paper, and always will.
Very thoughtful stuff RGB,
” If anything, the monotonic nature of the CO_2 rise argues against it being a simple integral of some sort of temperature change towards a new steady state. ”
in fact it’s not that monotonic if we can get away from dumbly staring at the basic time series. The interesting detail is in the derivatives, which will of course inform an ODE or other model.
I posted this earlier but it’s still stuck in moderation because I put TWO links in the same post !
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=233
The second link: http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=223
Chris Wright wrote:
“I think Salby’s theory is very interesting, but I am a little – shall we say – sceptical.
So, is there observational evidence, e.g. in the ice cores, that supports the theory?”
To answer that he’d best wait for the release of video on Youtube or the PDFs of the lecture – in the next few days. The basic answer is yes to his queries.
Stephen Wilde says:
November 10, 2013 at 4:06 am
Your climate theory sequence begins with and depends wholely on changes in solar activity. It seems that accurate solar activity predictions are necessary for weather/climate models to actually work. A true climate theory to be comprehensive must include external solar forcing.
My focus of personal research for nearly seven years has been the causes of solar activity and its effect on people, weather and climate (climate equals the time-integral of daily weather.) I saw that solar flares, CMEs, filament eruptions, and coronal holes emit vast amounts of charged particles that accelerate outwards towards the planets. These particles, mostly protons, interact with our magnetosphere, charge up the Van Allen belts, and ultimately discharge to ground here on Earth via various pathways creating weather. I call this sequence the electric weather effect.
Years later I found out others recognized this concept too. A good primer on the subject is “Solar Rain” by Mitch Batros (2005). I was pleasantly surprised to see many citations in that book to a real pioneer in the Sun-Earth climate science, astrophysicist Piers Corbyn from WeatherAction long-range weather forecasters. I had already known of Piers’ for a few years at that point and had seen him sucessfully predict solar activity levels and Earth weather.
Corbyn’s forecasts are not that expensive and I find it interesting to watch it all play out every month. For instance he forecasted 30 days ahead the highest solar activity level for the last week of October, and we had all those x-flares. His weather forecasts for that period were correct for both sides of the Atlantic. There are so many great examples of electric weather – I’m working on something to reveal all that…
Greg Goodman says:
November 10, 2013 at 8:45 am
The second link: http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=223
Thanks Greg.
The apparent link between AO, SSTs and CO2 fits my general climate description perfectly.
Andrew McRae says at November 10, 2013 at 8:28 am
Quite right we should not just ignore the possibility that CO2 changes are caused by man’s burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use.
But your shopkeeper analogy is fundamentally flawed. The “shop” is a warehouse that is far bigger than the observed sales and has many flows in and out.
It is more like the Amazon warehouse. You can’t tell if total stock in the warehouse is rising or falling by looking at your own purchases on your own PC. The total flows dwarf your own purchases.
And that is why you can’t just assume the 20th Century change in CO2 is anthropogenic.
Sme additional thoughts on former professor Salby’s presentation can be found here: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2013/11/09/thrust/
Stephen Wilde says:
November 10, 2013 at 8:42 am
For example biological activity in the oceans can affect the isotope type of CO2 released by the oceans to the air.
Any substantial release of CO2 from the oceans would increase the 13C/12C ratio of the atmosphere. Biological activity in the ocean surface increases the 13C/12C ratio even more, both in the ocean surface as in the atmosphere (if there was more release than uptake). But we see a firm decrease in ratio in both, in lockstep with human emissions:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sponges.gif
The CO2 “evidence” of AIRS is for July only. If you look at the December plot, it shows just the opposite change in CO2 levels. Human emissions are not detectable in the AIRS data, as the resolution is too coarse (+/- 5 ppmv) and the human contribution is about 0.07 ppmv/month, even if that is concentrated in the NH.
Patrick: “Is the RSS system subject to satellite orbit decay and thermometer device error and is there any evidence to support that claim?”
Eh. The basic claim is that we aren’t competent to place thermometers on spacecraft. And, really, I’d discard the idea at once if it weren’t for the other examples of brilliance in engineering that come out of climate set. So let’s just say, without proof, that it’s entirely plausible that we’ve lofted a large mass of useless into orbit.
However, if there are any systematic biases in the spacecraft instruments, then we do have local ‘anchors’ to get the data in order. That is, well sited Stevenson screen in the middle of nowhere that the satellite has an unoccluded view of, as well as various ballon measurements. Given that the local points are local, but can’t measure the unknown empty miles between. And given that the spacecraft measure all the spaces, but have an unfixed reference or systemic bias, then it’s sufficient, to various degrees, to fit the spacecraft map to the well known and unquestionably good local points. This is an adjustment, without question, but it’s not remotely as specious or tenuous as well known adjustments in TOBS, avg temp as (min+max)/2, gridded interpolations, and so on.
So if they are saying that it’s unreliable, then sure, maybe. But if it is unreliable, it’s still trivially recoverable into a useful shape without half the shenanigans as elsewhere. Has that been done? Not to my knowledge. I’ve seen complaints about the satellite data. But I’ve not seen complaints about how it is corrected to local fixed points.
Humlum et al’s data and analysis in “The Phase Relationship between Carbon Dioxide and Global temperature” supports Salby’s assertion that warming of the ocean caused the majority of the increase in atmospheric CO2 in the last 70 years rather than anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Humlum et al’s detailed analysis of the timing of temperature changes and CO2 changes determined that 7 out of 8 times in the recent past atmospheric CO2 rose after planetary temperature increased. There are two paradoxes related to the observational fact that effect follows cause rather than cause following effect 1) Some other forcing mechanism is causing the increase in planetary temperature rather than CO2 and 2) the increase in planetary temperature is causing the increase in CO2. Further support for the second paradox was the study’s analysis to determine the physical location and timing of the CO2 increases. That analysis showed that the increase in atmospheric CO2 started in the Southern Oceans rather than in the Northern hemisphere where the majority of the anthropogenic CO2 is released which provides support for the assertion that the cause of the increase in atmospheric CO2 was the increase in ocean temperature rather than the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. (see below for an explanation of the mechanism that is related to the heat is hiding in the ocean hypothesis).
The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature
http://www.tech-know-group.com/papers/Carbon_dioxide_Humlum_et_al.pdf
http://scholar.google.ca/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/18208928/233408642/name/phase%2Brelation%2Bbetween%2Batmospheric%2Bcarbon%2Band%2Bglobal%2Btemperature.pdf&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm2_FClsSVBbTLdzlwJJytToRLHpNw&oi=scholarr&ei=ybZ_UvDjLcTuyQHJxYGgAg&sqi=2&ved=0CCoQgAMoADAA
“Summing up, our analysis suggests that changes in atmospheric CO2 appear to occur largely independently of changes in anthropogene emissions. A similar conclusion was reached by Bacastow (1976), suggesting a coupling between atmospheric CO2 and the Southern Oscillation. However, by this we have not demonstrated that CO2 released by burning fossil fuels is without influence on the amount of atmospheric CO2, but merely that the effect is small compared to the effect of other processes. Our previous analyzes suggest that such other more important effects are related to temperature, and with ocean surface temperature near or south of the Equator pointing itself out as being of special importance for changes in the global amount of atmospheric CO2.”
If the heat hiding in the ocean hypothesis is correct then there is sustained mixing of surface ocean water with deep ocean water. As there is 32 times more dissolved CO2 in the ocean than in the atmosphere, if a portion of the deep ocean is replaced with surface ocean water (this must occur if there is mixing) then there is a vast sink and source of CO2 which works to resist surface forcing changes in CO2 due to volcanic activity or lack of volcanic activity and due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
rgb said:
“As long as CO_2 continues to increase monotonically with a slight upwards curvature, some fraction of this increase very likely comes from things like an equally monotonically warming ocean, and some fraction of it from other causes including the release of anthropogenic CO_2. It is determining what these fractions are that is the bitch,”
With CO2 plumes downwind of sun warmed oceans and no CO2 plumes downwind of human populations there is no ‘bitch’.
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/evidence-that-oceans-not-man-control-co2-emissions/
All that is necessary is slow, multidecadal / centennial sea surface warming as a result of changes in solar activity altering global albedo to skew El Nino events relative to La Nina events and thereby increasing the proportion of ToA insolation able to enter the oceans.
Which is what we observe to have happened.
Gareth Phillips says:
November 10, 2013 at 7:19 am
“You seem to want power returned to the UK, via UKIP, but are vehemently opposed to the people of Scotland having a say in self determination.”
Curious interpretation, I thought he meant quite the opposite when he said “… turning the daft wee rubber stamp into a real parliament at last.”
“You utilise this site to campaign for a for your own right wing masters in UKIP, then whine when someone calls you to task on it.”
No, he campaigned against tyranny. It appears your comprehension could do with a polish. And “whining”? … You do like to exaggerate, don’t you?
“When you are in a hole, stop digging.”
Perhaps you should take your own advice.