By Larry Bell
Dr. Christian Schlüchter’s discovery of 4,000-year-old chunks of wood at the leading edge of a Swiss glacier was clearly not cheered by many members of the global warming doom-and-gloom science orthodoxy.
This finding indicated that the Alps were pretty nearly glacier-free at that time, disproving accepted theories that they only began retreating after the end of the little ice age in the mid-19th century. As he concluded, the region had once been much warmer than today, with “a wild landscape and wide flowing river.”
Dr. Schlüchter’s report might have been more conveniently dismissed by the entrenched global warming establishment were it not for his distinguished reputation as a giant in the field of geology and paleoclimatology who has authored/coauthored more than 250 papers and is a professor emeritus at the University of Bern in Switzerland.
Then he made himself even more unpopular thanks to a recent interview titled “Our Society is Fundamentally Dishonest” which appeared in the Swiss publication Der Bund where he criticized the U.N.-dominated institutional climate science hierarchy for extreme tunnel vision and political contamination.
Following the ancient forest evidence discovery Schlüchter became a target of scorn. As he observes in the interview, “I wasn’t supposed to find that chunk of wood because I didn’t belong to the close-knit circle of Holocene and climate researchers. My findings thus caught many experts off guard: Now an ‘amateur’ had found something that the [more recent time-focused] Holocene and climate experts should have found.”
Other evidence exists that there is really nothing new about dramatic glacier advances and retreats. In fact the Alps were nearly glacier-free again about 2,000 years ago. Schlüchter points out that “the forest line was much higher than it is today; there were hardly any glaciers. Nowhere in the detailed travel accounts from Roman times are glaciers mentioned.”
Schlüchter criticizes his critics for focusing on a time period which is “indeed too short.” His studies and analyses of a Rhone glacier area reveal that “the rock surface had [previously] been ice-free 5,800 of the last 10,000 years.”
More here: http://www.newsmax.com/LarryBell/warming-global-climate/2014/06/17/id/577481/#ixzz355f6L5y2
==============================================================
On Pierre Gosselin’s “No Tricks Zone” we have this:
Distinct solar imprint on climate
What’s more worrisome, Schlüchter’s findings show that cold periods can strike very rapidly. Near the edge of Mont Miné Glacier his team found huge tree trunks and discovered that they all had died in just a single year. The scientists were stunned.
The year of death could be determined to be exactly 8195 years before present. The oxygen isotopes in the Greenland ice show there was a marked cooling around 8200.”
That finding, Schlüchter states, confirmed that the sun is the main driver in climate change.
Today’s “rapid” changes are nothing new
In the interview he casts doubt on the UN projection that the Alps will be almost glacier-free by 2100, reminding us that “the system is extremely dynamic and doesn’t function linearly” and that “extreme, sudden changes have clearly been seen in the past“. History’s record is unequivocal on this.
Schlüchter also doesn’t view today’s climate warming as anything unusual, and poses a number of unanswered questions:
Why did the glaciers retreat in the middle of the 19th century, although the large CO2 increase in the atmosphere came later? Why did the earth ‘tip’ in such a short time into a warming phase? Why did glaciers again advance in 1880s, 1920s and 1980s? […] Sooner or later climate science will have to answer the question why the retreat of the glacier at the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850 was so rapid.”
On science: “Our society is fundamentally dishonest”
CO2 fails to answer many open questions. Already we get the sense that hockey stick climate claims are turning out to be rather sorrowful and unimaginative wives’ tales. He summarizes on the refusal to acknowledge the reality of our past: “Our society in fundamentally dishonest“.
– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2014/06/09/giant-of-geologyglaciology-christian-schluechter-refutes-co2-feature-interview-throws-climate-science-into-disarray/#sthash.z6pKzqtQ.dpuf
What was wrong with “driver”? That was the term that was commonly used previously, wasn’t it? Isn’t it still used in other sciences?
Read professor Christian Schlüchter’s full comments in English “Receding Glaciers Nothing New” at http://larepublicacatalana.wordpress.com/
You forgot the “imputed” rise. That is that amount that does not exist but is inserted into the records because of land rebounding. So there you go – imputed rise.
Then why did you call it incorrectly initially? You clearly stated “outside” 2 sigma. Now you say it is indeterminate (it is actually not – as others have told you the hard numbers show it clearly within 2 sigmas – but I guess you cannot read them).
And this, my friend, is one of the best comments made on the list so far. This is precisely why I assert that the fluctuation-dissipation theorem is a key, ignored statistical tool when it comes to climate science.
One is caught between a rock and a hard place. There is no meaningful, causal (lagged!) short term first order correlation between CO_2 level and global average temperature across the entire thermometric record. There is even less over the geological record, where it appears, at least, that well-mixed CO_2 concentration generally lagged temperature rather than the other way around. That is, knowing how CO_2 concentration changed in the past is not a good predictor of the future temperature to the point where knowing how the temperature changed is a better predictor of how CO_2 concentration changed in the future. Yet in the same record there are an enormous number of fluctuations of temperature, often very large ones year to year, month to month. These temperature fluctuations “must” be connected to the modes by which the Earth dissipates the energy absorbed from sunlight. Indeed, the time scales of the dissipation of these fluctuations should be a direct measure of the time scales of the dissipative processes.
I just don’t understand why this isn’t the primary focus of the climate community. A direct, quantitative analysis of the fluctuations in the climate should provide direct, quantitative information about the lossy channels by which the Earth gives up heat to stay in a quasi-dynamical equilibrium. Models, for example, with the wrong fluctuation spectrum are simply wrong, wrong at a very deep, irreparable level. Furthermore, one can learn an enormous amount about the relative role of the various GHGs, as well as their absolute influence on the climate by looking at the short term responses to boluses of e.g. methane like the one accompanying the Gulf Oil disaster, to boluses of CO_2 like the ones accompanying major forest fires, to large measured variations in local humidity, correlated to equally local fluctuations in temperature.
As a single example, CO_2 doesn’t just almost exponentially increase in the Mauna Loa record, it has a substantial seasonal fluctuation. The fluctuation-dissipation theorem more or less requires this fluctuation in presumed forcing to be accompanied by a measured real-time-or-slightly-lagged response in global temperature. Note well that this correlation should be independent of, but strongly related to, the expected long term warming, because of the system can successfully dissipate the additional supposed forcing to where it is not resolvable in the short run, there is very little reason to expect it to be resolvable in the long run.
Of course, this particular signal, with an annual fourier component, will be very difficult indeed to resolve from the other annual drivers in the climate, including ones that directly confound forcing variations over two orders of magnitude larger due to the elliptical orbit of the Earth around the sun, which results in an annual variation in forcing over 90 watts/m^2 from peak to minimum, exactly in counterphase with the fluctuation in global average temperature. Given that direct forcing varies by this amount, the temperature varies the wrong way relative to the direct forcing, and the annual variation in CO_2 forcing is far, far less than 1 watt/m^2, what the Earth is trying to tell us is that it, like Honey Badger, just doesn’t give a shit about small variations in forcing, as it has more than enough negative feedback and structural variation to confound 90 watts/m^2, let alone 0.1 watt/m^2. In other words, it seems likely that the mean residence time of extra heat trapped by extra CO_2 is at this point very very short, lost within internal noise and dynamical fluctuations that routinely reject far greater amounts of heat very quickly to maintain dynamic equilibrium. Rather than move some slowly varying set-point as one imagines by ignoring the fluctuations, the fluctuations are already so large and nonlinear that the set point just doesn’t move much linearly in response to small additional forcing.
rgb
Bob Boder says:
August 10, 2014 at 8:48 am
“While much of what you say makes sense, your personal experiences with women is not a reason to make generalized comments about the gender”.
———————
My comment about gender was not per se “generalized”, it was based in/on scientific FACT.
Because it is a scientific fact that the majority of the females of the higher species are born with an inherited survival instinct to nurture and protect their offspring at all costs, even if it means putting their own life at risk.
Thus said, in the human animal species with its advanced mental abilities means the females are biologically influenced by their inherited DNA to make “emotional” decisions rather than “logical” decisions ….. to better insure protection of “their own”, … whatever “their own” might be.
And that “personality attribute” is a fact characteristic of the female members of the Homo sapien sapien species. And when and/or if a male of the species is nurtured by its parent or guardian to have or to exhibit the same or similar “personality attribute” they are sometimes referred to as “girlie-men”. To wit:
“In an article in the journal American Speech, linguist Edwin Battistella analyzes the development of the expression from ironic mockery of bodybuilding culture to an overt connotation of weakness and a covert connotation of effeminacy (effeminate)”.
Source ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girlie_men
Cheers
Actually, Nick is not a “groupie”, he’s (in my opinion) rather honest, sincere, and well informed in physics and climate science in general. I respect his opinions and statements even where I disagree with them. I absolutely do not think he is parroting Hansen — I hope not, since Hansen’s assertions are in my opinion indefensible and a general embarrassment to the climate “warmist” community in the same way that the Dragonslayers are an embarrassment to the climate “skeptic” community. I have cheerfully taken correction from Nick before, and imagine that I will again, and on many issues — such as the reality of the GHE and the non-physicality of arguments against it — we completely agree.
We disagree — I think — on how much we can rely on climate models, and on how accurately we know the actual state of the Earth’s climate present or past. Nick seems to put a fair amount of faith in the climate models in spite of their profound and serious statistical and computational warts. He also makes assertions such as (paraphrased) “we know the state of the climate, e.g. initial conditions and forcings, in the last century pretty well” which I disagree with profoundly, again on a statistical basis.
In fact, if I had to characterize our disagreement, it is my stance that we are profoundly ignorant of the present state of the climate and forcings, and our knowledge of its past state is (naturally) far worse, and further that our ability to predict the future accurately given a perfect knowledge of the Earth’s climate state and what e.g. volcanoes and human industry and the sun are going to do as external inputs is basically nonexistent (within the resolution of all reasonable proposed warming or cooling by 2100). Nick seems to think otherwise, that we actually know the present state and forcings pretty well, and that we can reasonably guestimate the future climate independent of variations in vulcanism, human industry, and the state of the sun (or rather, perhaps, allowing for it within some reasonable range).
At this moment, I think that the evidence heavily supports my stance and that his is based on an optimistic belief unsupported by comparison with our enormously imprecise observations (such as they are) that we’ve managed to solve the Navier-Stokes equation in two coupled-fluid systems at a spatiotemporal resolution 5 to 7 orders of magnitude above the Kolmogorov scale for the microdynamics and that in the end all we get is that CO_2 acts as a linearizable driver of global average surface temperature that we might as well estimate with a simple one layer model. I don’t even think this is a priori plausible, and of course a direct comparison of global average surface temperature and the model predictions of the same (or any other significant climate parameter) over the last century even in regions where Nick asserts that we know the state and forcings at this point rather strongly suggests that it isn’t, in fact, the case.
This is precisely the sort of honest disagreement scientists can, and should, have. In time one stance or the other (or more likely, both) will prove untenable as more data (and better data!) is accumulated, better models are built, and so on. In the meantime, one place I think Nick and I would agree is that we could either or both be wrong in terms of any simple assertion of the future based on models, data, forcings, etc. I rarely if ever hear him asserting things like “the 2014-2014 El Nino is 75% likely to lead to a huge burst of global warming, proving that the models were all right after all” such as one can almost quote Mann stating a few months ago, before the “legendary” coming El Nino fizzled into the current La Nada. I would like to think that both of us respect the possibility that nonlinear, chaotic nature can confound even very short term predictions of collective phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina that do indeed have an enormous impact on the Earth’s climate, quite capable of warming the planet or cooling the planet a few tenths of a degree sustained in a matter of a year or two and giving lie to the notion that there is some simple linear set point in the process.
rgb
Mods, can you elevate RGB’s comment to an article. It is the most cogent explanation I have seen:
Mods:
Richard Sharpe says at August 11, 2014 at 12:20 pm
Seconded!
Richard
I have known for years , and that from my reading of History, the AGW was a total crock.
What is taking scientists, even those skeptical of the AGW brouhaha, so long.
just read some history written by people who were there
rgbatduke says: August 11, 2014 at 11:16 am
“He also makes assertions such as (paraphrased) “we know the state of the climate, e.g. initial conditions and forcings, in the last century pretty well” which I disagree with profoundly, again on a statistical basis.”
I’d like to make a distinction there. I think we know the forcings fairly well. I don’t think we need to know the initial conditions well (and we don’t). I keep coming back to what we can expect of GCMs. As traditionally run, they are started from long ago when we know the initial conditions poorly, and then run to a state where unphysical stuff in the initial conditions has dissipated, and we have a strating point that does not correspond to a known starting point, but has little physical inconsistency. Then that is run with known or scenarioed forcings. It shows the climate effect of the forcings, but doesn’t attempt to realise actual weather. So when you ask, what model has done best over the last decade in matching weather, that is the wrong question. They weren’t trying to do that, and didn’t have the information. The proper use is to put together an ensemble to gather climate statistics.
There is a newish attempt to get back to trying to match an initial state with the hope of tracking for a decade or so. I’m not sure how well that is currently doing.
I have some background here. I’ve worked for a long time in CFD, including particle methods (rocks etc). There we almost never know the initial conditions. Sometimes we look for a steady state, but more often it is for statistics. For example, wear in a rock mill. Or flow over an aeroplane wing. In turbulent flow, of course, you never know the initial state (unless you are modelling onset of turbulence, but that is chaotic).
Nick Stokes writes “I keep coming back to what we can expect of GCMs.”
I appreciate your participation here. As you answer questions and challenges it adds to my own knowledge or at least awareness of what is on people’s minds and why it is there.
It seems to me that researchers would use a General Circulation Model hoping for error, because in error is a clue to something new and interesting to be studied. I am dismayed by the excessive faith and billions of dollars being moved by these models, but their utility in furthering climate science can hardly be disputed.
When the GCM accurately tracks climate change then I believe you can say you understand the science. I realize that the time scales you consider for accurate tracking differ from mine, but governments have not waited 30 years to make decisions, so the model must track well enough within the time frame of government decision, whatever that may be (five years seems reasonable). In other words, GCM’s ought to track real climate changes within 5 years for me to give government decisions based on them much faith.
When a hurricane comes along, it’s “climate change”. My father complains about blackberries no longer growing in Oregon, it’s “climate change”. Well, yes, I suppose it is — on a regional or local scale indisputably. The fact that the population of the Willamette valley has grown dramatically in the past 30 years seems to be ignored when people say “climate change”. So, yeah, there’s a little bit of climate change and a whole lot of new pavement. What’s he willing to do to bring back blackberries? De-populate Oregon?
I suspect logging, or the cessation thereof, probably also has something to do with it. Burning the wood chips used to fill the Willamette valley with smoke which sometimes gets trapped and is very unpleasant. Smells like skunk all the way from Portland to Medford. But that smoke also fills the air with particulates seeding rainfall in the Cascade mountains. Not so much now that pollution is controlled.
rgbatduke says: August 11, 2014 at 10:50 am
“There is no meaningful, causal (lagged!) short term first order correlation between CO_2 level and global average temperature across the entire thermometric record.”
People have looked at this. Lucia developed a model
Lumpy which compares HADCRUT with total Model E forcing, with an exponential lag filter. It correlates pretty well. GHG forcing is a large part of the total. Stephen Schwartz published something similar. Tamino did a similar (“two-box”) model.
H Grouse did not appear until rgbatduke started to get over on Stokes.
Because I like this argument so much I decide to try to see if there was anything wrong with it.
At what point do increases become too large for the system to handle? Is it 4.7W/m^2 or 90W/m^2 or 330W/m^2 or 1460W/m^2?
It would seem that an approximately 300W/m^2 swing below the max is not too much for the system to handle, but what arguments can we develop about how far above the current max insolation the system can handle?
Nick Stokes:
At August 12, 2014 at 3:56 am you write
So, you say independent work by Lucia, by Stephen Schwartz, and by Tamino each failed to obtain a “meaningful, causal (lagged!) short term first order correlation between CO_2 level and global average temperature across the entire thermometric record”. This is confirmatory of the quoted statement from rgbatduke.
Any data series can be modified to agree with anything.
Richard
Michael 2 says:
August 12, 2014 at 10:38 am
The GIGO GCMs designed to produce man-made GHG warming are worse than worthless, except to show how badly CACA “climate science” stinks.
It’s news to me that blackberries no longer grow in Oregon. IMO they’re as hard to get rid of as ever.
milodonharlani wrote “The GIGO GCMs designed to produce man-made GHG warming are worse than worthless, except to show how badly CACA “climate science” stinks.”
Well yes, that is sort of my point but with a more positive spin. I sometimes am faced with a “blackbox” situation in telecommunications or computers and I must guess at what is inside the box. So I simulate or make a model, either actualized in a computer program or just in my mind. So long as real inputs in the real thing produce outputs and my model with the same inputs produces the same outputs I can conclude that the model is a reasonable mimic of the real thing. But when the real thing deviates from the model one can take the easy road and simply say the model is “wrong” but it is more useful to explore the details of the wrongness as it reveals some hidden aspect of the “black box”.
Software testing is somewhat similar in concept and you test at the margins, boundaries or edges since that is where your model (the software being tested) is going to deviate from expectations (the customer-provided specification).
“It’s news to me that blackberries no longer grow in Oregon. IMO they’re as hard to get rid of as ever.”
This is likely an instance of confirmation bias. If you were born and raised so far “left” that Oregon is east then you see climate change (and neocons) *everywhere*. As it happens his new house is adjacent to a freeway; his old house was 3/4 mile from the Willamette River. Different biome.
“Work on a serious disease of black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis) in Oregon demonstrated the presence of Black raspberry necrosis virus in declining plants… It is transmitted by the large raspberry aphid (Amphorphora agathonica) and the green peach aphid (Myzus persicae).”
Combine that with Oregon’s environmental sensitivity (pest spraying, anyone?) and viola! Climate change. There is no escape, the goalposts are moved — why do viruses and aphids now exist? Climate change! It is a safe bet since I doubt anyone can stop climate changing.
richardscourtney says: August 12, 2014 at 10:40 am
“So, you say independent work by Lucia, by Stephen Schwartz, and by Tamino each failed to obtain…”
No, I’m saying, very clearly, that they succeeded. RGB rightly emphasised a lagged response as being the only physically feasible possibility. A response that acted as a pulse one year later also makes no physical sense. The only realistic option is a response to forcing which tapers over time, and that is what they used.
Nick Stokes:
Your post at August 12, 2014 at 1:40 pm truncates what I quoted and disputes the truncated version.
THE WORKS YOU CITED FAILED ACCORDING TO YOUR ACCOUNTS.
The actual quotation from rgbatduke was
You said in response to that
And I replied
My response was and is true.
Richard
Richard Sharpe said @ur momisugly August 11, 2014 at 12:20 pm
Agree!
milodonharlani said @ur momisugly August 12, 2014 at 10:57 am
Having battled Ribes spp for over 30 years, you do need a strategy. First, knock the tops off (fire/slashing) and hit the sappy new growth in Spring with glyphosate when the shoots are about 300 mm long. Hit them again in the Autumn and, if needed, again the following spring. This uses a much smaller amount of glyphosate than spraying a whole bush and works far more effectively.
Hint: Leave a few to make fruit for winemaking. Delicious as a dry red and also makes a very nice desert wine when fed extra sugar slowly to bring the alcohol level up to 15-18%.
Cougar says
Seriously? scientific fact? you know someone is a women by the way the argue online! All women act the same way because your read a study that says so?
i really think you are over the top with that but you go on believing what you want its your life. it does make me question other things that you state as fact though.
Bob Boder says: “Seriously? scientific fact? you know someone is a women by the way the argue online! All women act the same way because your read a study that says so?”
It is easy enough to identify personality characteristics in writing. Some characteristics have a gender component. An example is the T/F axis of the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator.
http://www.knowyourtype.com/myers-briggs-percentages/
A person could argue that “T” should always be a male principle (facts, figures, science) and “F” should always be a female principle (emotions, empathy, feelings) — in which case reality is that you and I have both male and female “principles” with one being dominant at any moment depending on the circumstances; but one will be more dominant more often.
In my experience this is most acutely experienced in Cisco network engineering where women simply do not choose this profession. I attended a free luncheon at a seminar on Cisco quality of service features. Free seminar, free lunch! Several dozen men, no women. Not one. I have no explanation and really don’t concern myself with it much.
What is the accepted increase in thermal energy in the atmosphere for each doubling of CO2. I vaguely recall something like 4.7W/m^2 or something like that …
Why? The uncertainty in nearly everything “global” increases substantially as one moves back in time. There is a lot of debate over just what CO_2 levels were 150 years ago, because (like temperature) the instrumental measurements were not taken at a place or in a way that permits us to properly compare them to today’s. Things get even worse when one switches over to a proxy or to ice core data, because one then usually confronts the low-resolution problem plus the various other problems with ice cores or proxies. Aerosol levels in general would be even more poorly known. If one goes back over 100 years, even tracking world vulcanism becomes difficult because it is difficult today. 70% of the Earth’s surface is ocean, another 10% of it is land that was difficult to access before the invention of the airplane.
If by “fairly well” you mean “with large error bars”, then sure, but that’s not the way I interpret the phrase.
To continue with your comment, I understand how the GCMs work and the argument concerning the transient. But if one looks at the actual tracks produced by perturbed parameters ensemble runs with a GCM, one sees that the tracks often diverge substantially for decades. They don’t make anything like a high resolution bundle. This reflects the fact that the Earth’s climate system isn’t “stable” as in a linear oscillator plus noise, it is nonlinear and chaotic — plus noise.
I’ve remarked before on the need to analyze the fluctuations in the climate models, both per run and collectively. Figure 9.2a in AR5 is very instructive. Even though it is a “spaghetti graph” that a cynical person would assert is presented primarily to obfuscate the obvious failure of (most of) the models one at a time, one can still glean a number of really useful things from examining it. For example, PPE mean results, averaged over an unstated but usually “large” number of runs, still have far, far too much variance, the time dependence (e.g. autocorrelation) of the variance is wrong, and of course these means are individually and collectively diverging from the actual climate in most if not all cases. So while yes, it is a noble effort and a reasonable thing to try, the GCMs are not working. They fail at many different levels, the most important of which is that according to the models, the current climate is very unlikely given the models, where good science and statistics suggests that the current climate is the most likely outcome of correct models and that a hypothesis tests suggests that the models are incorrect.
I’ve also given, many times at this point, arguments that suggest that it would be surprising if the GCMs “work” to predict long term climate in a chaotic nonlinear system. For one thing, they don’t have the computational granularity to be able to succeed given the known dynamical timescales of the system — by many orders of magnitude. For another, they contain egregious and easily biased approximations of large, cancelling terms that cannot be computed on the overlarge spatiotemporal grid, which is numerically asking for trouble once one gets outside of the reference period against which the parameters of these terms are set. Small errors in big cancelling contributions in a non-Markovian model grow over time, and if those small errors contain a systematic component or bias they will tend to grow in just one direction. I think it is very plausible that this is the explanation for the growing divergence between the climate models and reality — they overemphasized the role of CO_2 in the reference period, which was the one period of strong warming in the latter half of the 20th century. This forced them to exaggerate the role of other atmospheric components to keep things balanced — e.g. aerosols, clouds, albedo. In the end, one ends up with a plausible dynamical model in the sense that it makes future climates, but unfortunately those future climates diverge from the real climate, which has a different balance (and doubtless has significant dynamics at the length and time scales to short to be represented in the existing GCMs and that isn’t being correctly approximated at scale).
We could go down a list of physics computations that have similar problems, and how difficult it has been to semi-phenomenologically solve them — electronic structure being the one I personally am most familiar with. Hartree has systematic errors. Hartree-Fock has systematic errors. Non-relativistic computations have systematic errors. The actual many electron problem is non-computable for even very small systems with only a “few” electrons. It wasn’t until Kohn and Sham showed how to do a single electron computation with a semi-empirical density functional potential that had sufficient “universality” to allow one functional to compute at least a moderately wide range of electron densities, atoms, and molecules that we began to get consistently close results. And we still don’t have (AFAIK) a universal single-electron density functional that will work for everything from hydrogen to uranium.
I am reminded of early fears of the nuclear bomb setting off a global chain reaction and turning the Earth into a sun (or the LHC creating a black hole and imploding the local Universe). People just don’t understand statistical mechanics. If the temperatures/pressures created by a nuclear bomb could “ignite the atmosphere”, we would have been extinct long ago, because natural events generating this magnitude of temperatures and pressures have occurred with annoying regularity every time an asteroid fell over geological time. Similarly if high CO_2 levels could cause a climate catastrophe, one would really think that there would be a climate catastrophe signature in the phanerozoic record associated with all of the multimillion year periods where the Earth has had CO_2 levels in excess of 1000 ppm. But we don’t. We don’t even find that these intervals are meaningfully anticorrelated with the onset of ice ages. We do find that periods of low temperatures have low CO_2 in the more recent record (e.g. ice core data) for perfectly apparent reasons, validated by the observation that in general the CO_2 change lags the change in temperature by centuries — it certainly doesn’t lead the change in temperature in such a way that we can imagine that it causes it.
No, I’m afraid that we have to seek other causes to explain the significant variability of the climate over all time scales. CO_2 is not the only knob. It may not even be an important knob once it passes 200 to 300 ppm — IMO the effect of CO_2 is on global average temperatures is saturated and buffered by negative feedback in other channels, e.g. water vapor.
I know you will probably disagree with this, as you think that water vapor is a positive feedback, but note once again — GCMs that implement this assumption have annual to decadal variation that is nearly an order of magnitude too large (based on the graphs I’ve seen of single runs and estimates based on the visible variations in 9.2b of AR5). I would gently suggest that this is because they have the wrong sign in the water vapor feedback, and have to “fix” this error by strengthening negative feedback from other things in order for the climate to not just run away. Those other things, of course, have the wrong dynamical time scale and so the climate overruns both warming and cooling while waiting for their lagged response.
rgb
The Pompous Git says:
August 12, 2014 at 9:31 pm
Excellent tips. Thanks. Staking out goats to eat the vines hasn’t worked all that well so far. I might go for killing the roots, since they’re spreading despite all my control efforts. Not sure I want total eradication. So far the goats haven’t spread the seeds.
I always have plenty of blackberries for wine & flavoring beer, but they’re not my favorite fruit stock.
rgbatduke says:
August 13, 2014 at 5:32 pm
(not rgb): “I’d like to make a distinction there. I think we know the forcings fairly well.”
rgb:
” I would gently suggest that this is because they have the wrong sign in the water vapor feedback, and have to “fix” this error by strengthening negative feedback from other things in order for the climate to not just run away. Those other things, of course, have the wrong dynamical time scale and so the climate overruns both warming and cooling while waiting for their lagged response.”
Surely we should be starting the whole exercise with the idea that, since the earth’s climate has not only NOT run away with itself in 4B or so years, that this is stronger evidence for what is happening in the climate than anything else we know. I consider it as good a law as we are ever going to be able to propound on climate science that the earths climate system has proven stable throughout its history. It varies between remarkably constrained upper and lower temperatures spread only 8-10C apart (or so).
The very fact that we have been struck by large asteroids, globally rocking the planet, darkening the skies for perhaps more than decades and then inexorably recovering back into the surprisingly narrow band of its approximately same maxima and minima is a 4th of July fireworks of evidence about the behavior of climate.
The billion+years continuity of life, heck, I have a 470 million year old Ordovician nautiloid fossil, a gastropod fossil with a central Archimedes-type screw convolution of its shell more than a foot long in limestone that a co-worker drilled off for me on one of my birthdays a few decades ago in northern Saskatchewan (I wish I knew how to put a picture of it in this post). It is a member of the highly diverse phyllum mollusca – the most abundant of shell fish today in the oceans . A look at the fossil record gives an unbroken continuum of this phyllum for almost half a billion years. I proffer this phyllum as a poster child for climate. It, too, survived the asteroids, the ice ages, the tropical eras of no ice, pole to pole the transit though the space junk of the spiral arm we occupy…. Hey, and it used the lime-CO2 of the oceans to make the same carbonate shells.
http://www.tonmo.com/community/pages/nautiloids/
Why can’t we agree on this stable foundation of climate and progress from here. At this level, it removes the non-linear, chaotic aspect of short term climate. The evolution of this creature, in harmony with its environment, is, well … more of a linear thing with no error bars and if there was chaos, it was like the chaos of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – riotous but in key.
It was rgb’s description of a tiny 15 years in the history of climate in which a few percent of CO 2 added by humans and a modest half a degree of warming was going to tip us into extinction that inspired this rant and that 15 years following during which there was no warming, indeed some cooling of late, and they are still going on about it and they want us to spend trillions more. rgb, you are too kind to these guys. There can be no question that the planet has experienced longer, more dramatic bouts than this a million times or more. It really is all very silly.