But, why if that is true, why are we in a pause, when there’s been an increase in CO2 the last decade and no correlation with temperature?
From the Institute of Physics:
CO2 warming effects felt just a decade after being emitted
It takes just 10 years for a single emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) to have its maximum warming effects on the Earth.
This is according to researchers at the Carnegie Institute for Science who have dispelled a common misconception that the main warming effects from a CO2 emission will not be felt for several decades.
The results, which have been published today, 3 December, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, also confirm that warming can persist for more than a century and suggest that the benefits from emission reductions will be felt by those who have worked to curb the emissions and not just future generations.
Some of these benefits would be the avoidance of extreme weather events, such as droughts, heatwaves and flooding, which are expected to increase concurrently with the change in temperature.
However, some of the bigger climate impacts from warming, such as sea-level rise, melting ice sheets and long-lasting damage to ecosystems, will have a much bigger time lag and may not occur for hundreds or thousands of years later, according to the researchers.
Lead author of the study Dr Katharine Ricke said: “Amazingly, despite many decades of climate science, there has never been a study focused on how long it takes to feel the warming from a particular emission of carbon dioxide, taking carbon-climate uncertainties into consideration.
“A lot of climate scientists may have an intuition about how long it takes to feel the warming from a particular emission of CO2, but that intuition might be a little bit out of sync with our best estimates from today’s climate and carbon cycle models.”
To calculate this timeframe, Dr Ricke, alongside Professor Ken Caldeira, combined results from two climate modelling projects.
The researchers combined information about the Earth’s carbon cycle–specifically how quickly the ocean and biosphere took up a large pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere–with information about the Earth’s climate system taken from a group of climate models used in the latest IPCC assessment.
The results showed that the median time between a single CO2 emission and maximum warming was 10.1 years, and reaffirmed that most of the warming persists for more than a century.
The reason for this time lag is because the upper layers of the oceans take longer to heat up than the atmosphere. As the oceans take up more and more heat which causes the overall climate to warm up, the warming effects of CO2 emissions actually begin to diminish as CO2 is eventually removed from the atmosphere. It takes around 10 years for these two competing factors to cancel each other out and for warming to be at a maximum.
“Our results show that people alive today are very likely to benefit from emissions avoided today and that these will not accrue solely to impact future generations,” Dr Ricke continued.
“Our findings should dislodge previous misconceptions about this timeframe that have played a key part in the failure to reach policy consensus.”
From Tuesday 3 December, this paper can be downloaded from http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/12/124002/article
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One useless model was not enough, so we used two, and we get the answer we wanted.
It’s an honour to live during the new normal science and see it descend into farce
It’s models on top of models, all the way down into the abyss of of non-critical junk climate science.
In other words….”loopy science.”
In the real world this should confirm that CO2 is far from the main climate control knob but in the bizarro world of “climate science” this study shows that “it’s worse than we thought.” Stunning and appalling.
I love these kinds of studies! If surface temperature fails to rise in the next decade we can all look back and laugh. PS they got all bases covered though. Warm now or warm later they win.
Yes, It would seem two photons with identical frequency would have double the heating effect.
Hi Richard. I think this is what you meant,
The line by line, monochromatic subtraction of opposing radiation vectors integrated over the entire spectrum yields the net radiative flux in Watts per square metre. (The only radiative energy lost from the warmer surface).
Spot on nuworld, (I think). If I spoke those words to my neighbours I would get blank looks. 🙂
I think I would earn blank looks from mine as well :-).
The point is that a few hundred years of experiment has taught us that with radiation, although the complexities perplex, we know the rules of engagement. In order to describe, diffraction, refraction and interference we are required to view radiation as an electromagnetic wave. As such it is a vector quantity and equal but opposite therefore cancel upon addition. As such the notion of every surface emitting ‘photons’ of energy that can only be additive leads to inevitable misconceptions and evades reality.
A simple experiment to concentrate by optical convergence the ‘photons’ from a large emitter onto the focus at a small target at the same temperature yields the illusion. The re converged and supposedly concentrated packets of ‘energy’ we suppose are emitted and have concentrated, fail to heat the smaller target. The radiation equilibrium temperature represents the kinetic distribution of the emitter.
“Lead author of the study Dr Katharine Ricke said: “Amazingly, despite many decades of climate science, there has never been a study focused on how long it takes to feel the warming from a particular emission of carbon dioxide, taking carbon-climate uncertainties into consideration.”
Amazing, isn’t it………until this research was done. Now we know that this exclusive and profound research was worth every penny of the funding.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124
“To calculate this timeframe, Dr Ricke, alongside Professor Ken Caldeira, combined results from two climate modelling projects.”
Well, this does need to get sorted out. For too long now people I argue with have used the ocean as a dodge. Oh, we’re warming just as predicted, only the energy is in the deep ocean. Really? If it is, and if that’s how it’s going to work going forward, why should I care about it? On the other hand, if you expect to see some surface warming, and lest we forget we live on the surface of the planet and not in the depths of the ocean and we care about surface temperatures and not hundreths of a degree 700 meters down, how much, when and why?
Clarify the claims, so I can either verify or refute them with observations. I’m all for that.
You are forgetting about the giant burp!!
Hi Al,
By giant burp I take it you mean El Ninos. Well, that needs to get sorted out too. Otherwise mainstream science might as well be talking about giant burps for all the good it will do anybody except the progressive politicians and grant seekers.
Ahhh, so now we know why the pause in global warming has happened for the last 18 years – the greenhouse effect of CO2 reached its peak effect in 1996 and we have nothing to worry about from now on. Brilliant, I must say.
“CO2 warming effects felt just a decade after being emitted.”
lol
Unless it’s playing hide-and-seek in the oceans. Or perhaps the class of 2004 heat has found some new place to hide (along with the feedbacks).
Wait – it’s hiding in the magma…
I saw the word “models” and I stopped reading.
Yes, the warming goes on exactly as scheduled and agreed upon at the last IPCC meeting. I can feel it in my models. And the computer gets hotter all the time, since I learned from Al Gore how to turn off the AC. Very gratifying.
“I can feel it my models.” Classic! That ole rheumatism is coming back and it’s going to rain. I can feel it in my knee.
Decadal time scales? How about monthly time scales, given the fact that GHG infrared can penetrate surfaces hardly at all and the slow, incremental yearly increases in CO2.
So what has the IPCC done? Project it anyway.
It’s been a disaster.
Lead author of the study Dr Katharine Ricke said: “Amazingly, despite many decades of climate science, there has never been a study focused on how long it takes to feel the warming from a particular emission of carbon dioxide, taking carbon-climate uncertainties into consideration.
Say WHAT?
The IPCC constructed various RCP scenarios for CO2 concentrations ranging from major cut backs over time to “let’s burn everything there is to burn” in order to forecast CO2 concentrations into the future for the specific purpose of using those scenarios to generate global temperature predictions/projections/forecasts into the future. There’s many threads making fun of those results because they got them so wrong!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zLZvFvWqy8Y/U8REucSDlfI/AAAAAAAAASg/-f_VHXdfaQY/s1600/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1.png
The IPCC AR4 and AR5 reports both (IIRC) have chapters TITLED “Near Term Projections” or words to that effect. Did entire bodies of literature form the IPCC, not to mention many dozens of peer reviewed papers simply disappear in order to make Ricke’s statement true? Obviously not! Is Ricke a supposed climate scientist who just managed by some extraordinary set of coincidents to not know about this massive body of literature? Or did Ricke know about it an come up with some tortured definition of sensitivity and euilibrium response that is so narrow that her’s is the only paper that falls into that category? What?
Such an obviously “that’s not right, that’s not even wrong” statement ought to get ripped to shreds by anyone with even a passing familiarity with the literature, let alone her peers who have studied to death the very thing she says hasn’t been studied before. Not that I expect we’ll hear any squabble about it in the public, but holy mackeral, what a claim!
Quoted statements in organizational press releases, unfortunately, are generally meant for consumption of those outside the field and a naive public. Just another Gruberism.
I just love that graphic. 😉
Here is the graphic with confidence levels. Another disaster.
http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg
a bit of a tsunami of warmist news today – 2014 hottest EVAH in most of the UK MSM and then this from the Institute Of Physics – What is one to do when this is such a one-sided landslide of nonsense when the other side (correct, less wolf-crying) has little main stream voice?? One does one’s best through the comments but 1/2 the time they’re disabled and the other 1/2 the damage is done and the brain-dead proles have once again taken their CAGW methadone.
Jan to Nov 2014 was the hottest such 11-month period in the Central England Temperature record (which goes back to 1650 or whatever) and December would have to be unusually cold to prevent 2014 being the hottest annual average temperature in the CET series.
So how is the media supposed to present this? Waiting until the December data is in might be a good idea, I agree. But otherwise, how is it crying wolf to point out the fact that England has had its hottest year since records began?
funny, I seem to recall record grain harvests this year in the UK, abundant rains, and no reports of deadly heat waves. Is regional warming as the UK is experiencing calamitous as the IPCC alarmists would have you believe?
So, they use information about the Carbon Cycle, which don’t fully understand, if at all, combine it with results rom UNIPCC models, which so far show no predictability or forecasting skills sets, & the answer is taken as gospel! As my dear late mother would say, “& the band played “Believe It If You Like”!
What exactly are the scientists supposed to do? Only use information about things that are “fully understood”? If so, we wouldn’t have seen much progress!
How about not making proclamations presenting as “fully understood” things that clearly aren’t. Quit getting so far out in front of what their data actually says. Quit torturing data until it confesses what is desired. Quit ignoring your own data and observations that don’t comport with your models. Be true scientists and express your doubt.
Would you call the IPCC work Progress?
They understand what they are doing. It’s very specific and fools many. Do you?
So is this reality or are we playing models again? Just rhetorical we all know th answer.
Apologies, that should have read ‘which “we” don’t fully understand’!
Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that the global warmists were complaining that the only way to get people to care about global warming was to bring it to the hyperlocal level … then poof …. ask and ye shall receive, here comes the studies that bring it to the hyperlocal level, complete with “feelings” even. No one can “feel” the effect of a particular emission of CO2. Measure, probably not but maybe, but certainly not “feel”. Heck I can’t even “feel” the effect of 5 decades of global CO2 emissions, everything today seems pretty much the same as when I was a kid, as best as I can remember.
Anxiously awaiting “global warming is main cause of impotence” papers.
Oh, I dunno. Energy Leader Debbie Stabenow could feel it when she was flying.
Climate change. Feeling is believing.
“It takes just 10 years for a single emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) to have its maximum warming effects on the Earth.”
—
So, how did they track a single emission of CO2 for ten years? Did they use electronic ear tags like they would on a polar bear?
These people are just making things up! But if you accuse them of doing so, they’ll point to their models as if we’re supposed to believe that the models are independent entities that program themselves.
>“So, how did they track a single emission of CO2 for ten years? ”
They didn’t measure or track any real-world temperatures, which obviously have not increased for the last 18 years. (Instant falsification, if you ask me).
Instead they built a model which ingested other models, which in turn ingested more models, whose input parameters were adjusted (accidently or otherwise) such that the desired warming was clearly observed.
Yes, it’s “models all the the down”!
If you accuse them of making things up you will be vilified for not understanding and failure to compromise. Do you not appreciate the Noble Cause?
It’s simple, Since nobody really seems to care enough about what happens at the end of this century (after we are dead), they had to move the “crisis” into our lifetime in an attempt to create urgency.
Actually, when I fit CO_2 directly to HadCRUT4 from 1850 to the present, I include no lag at all. It isn’t necessary. The fit is excellent over the entire set of data.
, it goes down by 
of the remaining distance to equilibrium in each relaxation time.
I spent the last day or two stealing enough time from teaching to see if volcanoes mattered. They don’t. In fact, it is really stunning how much they don’t. Even very large volcanoes — VEI 6 eruptions like Pinatubo — have almost no effect on surface temperature averages even as they have a substantial effect on top-of-troposphere insolation as measured on Mauna Loa! There is absolutely zero question that what little effect they might have is basically lost in the noise plus any other systematic variations around what appears to be CO_2 driven warming.
This is really interesting for ever so many reasons. VEI is a log scale (which I accounted for) so explosions like Tambora (VEI 7, order of 100 km^3 of ejecta) might matter if we had thermometric estimates of global temperature for 1815, which we don’t. HadCRUT4 at least doesn’t go back that far, and it is already a bit shaky back in the mid-1800s.
Let me point out something that silly people who don’t actually understand the mathematics of relaxation seem to forget. Let us imagine that we have two processes working on a mass supported by a spring at some equilibrium height. One of them is like a shock absorber. It governs how long a system takes to exponentially approach equilibrium via relaxation/damping/energy rebalancing. If you “suddenly” increase the acceleration of gravity
The other is like a powerful external spring that shakes the system back and forth across both the old and the equilibrium ten or (say) twenty times faster than the nominal relaxation rate of the damping.
How long does it take the system to “relax” into equilibrium now? The correct answer is that it is basically (a fraction of) the period of the faster bounce force. Once you’ve crossed the equilibrium line under its influence the fact that you increased “gravity” and changed the height of equilibrium is completely irrelevant to all future motion. It “forgets” its former disequilibrated state. Indeed, relaxation now perforce drives it the other way back to equilibrium where “the other way” depends on precisely where one is in the randomly driven bounce process, and is almost entirely irrelevant to the motion.
This example isn’t perfect, or truly sufficient to describe the insanely complex system of mutually coupled oscillators and reservoirs that make up the climate, but they do make the point that the relaxation time of a damped driven (chaotic) system cannot naively be ascribed to be equal to the slowest relaxation time in the system, or the fastest. It can be much faster, as fast as the driven oscillatory part. In the case of the Earth’s climate, which oscillates by as much as 0.4C in a single year either way and almost never spends longer than 3 years on one side of its (probable) local “equilibrium” point before going across it to the other side, the paper above is off by around a factor of 3. Yes, heat continues to distribute and redistribute, the oceans slowly warm or cool, and so on. When we use the word “equilibrium” to describe the climate at all, well, we shouldn’t.
But remember that heating and cooling are immediate. The temperature is determined by a balance between incoming and outgoing heat. The rate of heat transport is very, very high, not very low. It warms up by 10 to 20 C every day, the cools by as much every night, depending on location and time of year, and average surface temperatures at many locations vary by this much or more over the course of a year. Most of the Earth’s surface is disequilibrated, sure, but not by radiative balance! That relaxes literally overnight, until the next morning sees it overdriven high once more time.
To put it another way, a car with bad shocks — ones that are overdamped relative to the vibrations produced by the bumps in the road — spends most of its time with the shocks overcompressed, not really at equilibrium. Long before it reaches “true” equilibrium — the equilibrium it would have after a week of being parked — it hits another bump. It hangs out around a partially compressed “pseudo”equilibrium, a dynamic equilibrium, that is in part determined by the rate at which it is getting bumped, in part determined by the strength of the bumps. Nobody cares what the relaxation rate is to true equilibrium, as the car is never travelling over a smooth enough road for it to matter. And if one makes a tiny change in the loading of the car while it is underway, it takes precisely one bump in the road to reach its new dynamic equilibrium.
This is, sadly, just another stupidity in a long line of stupid climate tricks (hey, d’ya think we could sell a TV show of that name?:-). It is right up there on a par with asserting that the average of an ensemble of simulated chaotic trajectories from system A is a good predictor for an actual trajectory of an entirely different and far more complex system B, which almost precisely describes the construction and application of both the perturbed parameter ensemble single-climate averages and worse, the multimodel ensemble superaverage of these averages.
Empirically, the null hypothesis of warming caused “instantly” by CO_2 (in the specific sense of resetting the near-mythical set-point equilibribium for a poincare cycle in some absurd number of dimensions) plus rapid motion of the strange attractor in cycles around this set point is indistinguishable from the data, and while one can propose or demonstrate ad hoc improvements from this or from that, there is really very little reason to pursue them on the basis of the data at hand.
rgb
HadCRU is more than a bit shaky all the way, since it cools the past and warms recent years. It is unreliable at best and cannot be trusted across any portion of its time period.
You could try using the CET, which goes back to the 17th century and has been reconstructed back to the Medieval Warm Period, but it too has been manipulated by the Wet Office.
Better to rely on proxy data than the intentionally rigged data sets. That the adjustments are intentional can be inferred from the fact that they always make the recent warmer and the past cooler. Amazingly, even GISS’ long-secret UHI adjustment algorithm, when finally pried lose, warms rather than cools.
Hadley’s Jones admitted that they warm the oceans to bring them in line with the land temperature “record”, which itself of course has been heavily “adjusted” upwards in the first place. HadCRU is thus not suitable for statistical analysis, IMO.
There is no correlation between CO2 (above perhaps 200 ppm) and temperature, except that hotter seas will give up more of it to the atmosphere (making the gas an effect, not a cause of warming) and the first ~150 ppm are vital to life on earth. At times, the earth has warmed while CO2 rose, as during c. 1977-98. At other times it has cooled as CO2 rose, as during c. 1944-76. Earth can also cool or warm as CO2 falls, or stay about the same temperature for decades as CO2 rises or falls.
On longer time scales, the planet can be cold under very high CO2 (~4000 to 7000 ppm), as often during the Cambrian, Ordovician and early Silurian Periods. And it can be low during hot intervals, although eventually warmer seas will cause it to rise.
Agreed, or at least mostly agreed. The difficulty is that proxy records are horribly inaccurate as well, and in order to use them one typically has to normalize to an assumption of know temperatures in the present, and if those are corrupt they corrupt the proxies as well. IMO, the only part of the temperature record that is halfway reliable is the last fifty or sixty years, and the only part that is actually reliable on a global basis is the last 30+ years of direct satellite measurement.
But HadCRUT4 is still useful for my purpose, which is to demonstrate that CO_2 is a perfect lovely explanation for post-1850 warming within the acknowledged error bars of the data (which we likely agree underestimate the actual error, possibly by quite a lot). Then the argument goes like this:
* IF one assumes HadCRUT4 is an accurate representation of the global temperature anomaly from 1850 to the present, then
* Is CO_2 a sufficient explanation of its observed variation (in a 1+1 parameter direct fit of the logarithmic form expected from theory)? and
* If so, what is the total climate sensitivity to doubling of CO_2?
My results are then:
* Yes, it is not only sufficient, it works rather well with only two parameters, one of which is irrelevant and only matches up the (arbitrary) two anomaly vertical scales.
* The total TCS the best fit predicts is roughly 1.9 C.
There is some uncertainty in this beyond the uncertainty of lack of human bias in the data. There is a small (order of 0.1C) systematic/harmonic deviation of the temperature from the CO_2-only curve, and allowing for that variation reduces the TCS by 0.1-0.2 C. Volcanoes can explain a tiny bit of the variation relative to this base, maybe, but really not so much. They are omitted from the null hypothesis above and I can find no good reason to include them. Ditto the PDO — when I try using the PDO as an explanation for residual variation it explains almost nothing (yes, there is almost nothing left to explain, but it doesn’t even explain that, it explains less than almost nothing:-).
What it doesn’t leave room for is any possible point or purpose to General Circulation Models. Or to any vastly more complex explanatory model. I can equal or beat each and every one of the models in CMIP5 with an effectively single parameter model based on the assertion that CO_2 is well mixed and that there is no lag at all between adding it and altering the equilibrium temperature.
How much energy is it worth putting into this, given the biases in the data, HadCRUT4’s lack of a UHI correction at all and GISS’s correction that somehow manages to actually cool the past and warm the present (good trick, that:-), given that for the bulk of the record, there are no samples at all of a rather huge fraction of the Earth’s surface and that they use black magic involving white chickens and virgins but not much in the way of defensible statistics to extrapolate, interpolate, infill, and otherwise pretend to correct for the fact that a lack of knowledge is, in information theory, basically pretty much a lack of knowledge? I dunno. My next project is to tackle the CMIP5 mean head on. In doing so, it will be very helpful to have the results of the null-hypothesis CO_2-only one-meaningful-parameter fit if only as ammunition, since it is the thing to beat when constructing a vastly more complex model.
If you can’t beat a one parameter fit to a physics-motivated model, you should pretty much hide your head in shame and admit that you have no idea how anything works. That’s the point of the null-hypothesis. It says: “Hey, dudes, we have no idea how all of this volcanic stuff and aerosol stuff and oceanic coupling works. So let’s just assume that it averages out to zero most of the time and look at how the system responds to just CO_2 before we conclude that we NEED any or all of it to explain the data.”
rgb
IMO your exercise has value. Please don’t get me wrong. It’s just that the “data” are so bad that they don’t IMO allow any conclusion to be drawn from them about physical reality.
However, using IPCC’s own “data” to draw the conclusions you have is IMO entirely valid. I now agree that for your purposes proxy data lack resolution.
IMO there is evidence that large volcanic eruptions can affect weather, but not climate. That is, the effects are short-lived, on the scale of years at most, not decades. The very biggest events might however have longer-lasting climatic effects, but are too rare to be studied.
If IPCC were to consider your curve-fitting finding, then HadCRU, if not the real world, puts an upper limit on TCS under two degrees C. Or since you go back to 1850, ECS. Even just the period of rapidly rising CO2 since the end of WWII has arguably lasted long enough for equilibrium to be reached, although the rate of gain has perhaps accelerated a bit.
But there are certainly other factors involved than CO2, so climate sensitivity must be lower still. If it’s ~1.2 degrees C, that would imply no net positive feedback, as falsely assumed in GCMs. Less than that, and there is net negative feedback, as IMO is likely.
I’d like to add that if HadCRU were accurate, it would IMO show no warming from 1934 to 1998 peaks (although with downs and ups in between) and none since then. There was however probably warming from the end of the LIA until the 1930s.
Thanks for your good work fit into so much other work.
I mentioned the CET. Here is how well Central England Temperature tracks global CO2 emissions:
http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/01/cet-temperatures.html
Not very well at all.
The article includes a discussion of the data set’s problems, including “adjustments”.
Thank you for the CET v CO2 graph….
You are welcome.
Here’s a guy who found somewhat the opposite of Dr. Brown. He matched the temperature record without considering CO2 at all, just by using the time integral of sunspot number for the basic trend, then ocean oscillations for the cyclical wiggles around the secular line.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.se/2013/11/the-sun-explains-95-of-climate-change.html
Concrete vibrators do exactly what you describe; used every day at concrete construction site jobs. Vibrating the concrete allow the viscous concrete to flow and fill voids (i.e relax) in a physical system. The cement setting time is too short and thus would set long before flowing to voids otherwise. The “driven oscillatory frequency” serves to rapidly induce higher pore pressures, and the concrete is momentarily forced to a liquefaction state.
Earthquake-induced ground liquefaction, with intense shaking driving the water-bearing soil pore pressures to liquify the ground, is also a similar physical representations of a driven oscillatory relaxation to find new equilibrium states.
The diurnal heating-cooling frequency of our planet’s climate is likely a major forced vibratory oscillator on the system.
Why sure. In fact, I’ve operated them for just that purpose. I’ve also employed an even more primitive version of this system, called “a spoon”, which greatly reduces the diffusive and chemical relaxation time of a system that is very important to me, my “morning coffee” and its cream and sugar.
which deviates from HadCRUT4 quite systematically by a single harmonic component with amplitude 0.1C and period of 67 years and which isn’t visible or present in any of the models, which don’t even get the right mean curvature for carbon-dioxide-only warming over most of their range.
The point is that systems with multiple dynamical timescales cannot be analyzed in any sort of naive way. Relaxation will be via the fastest available process, and when non-stochastic dynamical timescales of important processes are shorter than the smallest stochastic relaxation times, all bets are off because a whole world of hurt emerges mathematically.
That’s why it is so very funny when people assert shirt, murde, carp, axcrement about how “climate models only work over periods larger than X” where X is very much a moving goalpost, while trying at the same time to claim that it is only CO_2 that matters because natural variation doesn’t. And you know this precisely how, one might ask? Climate models don’t work over any timescale, at least no better than
And then, we could talk about the fluctuation behavior of the individual runs of the individual models in CMIP5 and the simple fact that it bears not the slightest spectral resemblance to the actual way the climate fluctuates.
Oops.
rgb
Springs and shocks are paired together to keep tires of a certain pressure, pressed against the uneven surface they encounter.
Traction, temperature, abrasion, weight transfer speeds, wind flow, driver attitude, all effect the ultimate performance of the vehicle.
They try to model NASCAR, the results are verified every weekend. 🙂
I love watching the results of the inputs.
You will upset Dana. 🙂
‘Volcanoes may be responsible for most of the global surface warming slowdown’
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/dec/03/volcanoes-responsible-for-lot-of-global-surface-warming-slowdown
rgbatduke December 3, 2014 at 9:55 am:
To put it another way, a car with bad shocks — ones that are overdamped relative to the vibrations produced by the bumps in the road — spends most of its time with the shocks overcompressed, not really at equilibrium.
+++++++++
You mean, over damped rebound, which causes the springs to pack down. Really bad shocks usually implies under damped and worn out which allows the spring to over oscillate. Just sayin’.
The rest of what you are saying suggests you see CO2 correlate over time with increasing temperatures right? Just trying to understand what you are getting at.
The “discovery” here is a backhanded attack on the IPCC models. No warming model can be run without a specific idea of the time interval between emissions and warming. At a minimum, the work deep sixes all scenarios that have excessive delays.
Each modification of action parameters should reduce the range of scenarios. Why do we not see the range of outcomes falling?
Since there has been no significant warming for well over ten years, the decadal effects of steadily rising CO2 apparently don’t include warming. That means the authors must be falling back on the supposed effect of CO2 to make weather more extreme, which of course it can’t, even if it did warm, which it hasn’t.
CO2 – the magic gas that causes climate disruption, without ever actually any warming.
If this is correct, doesn’t that make the pause in warming an even bigger poke in the eye for the entire AGW theory?
No, because there are other things that cause the temperature to vary besides CO_2, some of them rapid and powerful, others slow and weak (but cumulatively quite strong). It is our lack of understanding of the dynamics on all timescales that is the fundamental problem. One can — as I can easily demonstrate — fit the post-1850 thermometric record, for whatever it is worth, with a model that suggests nearly all of the 0.8C of warming observed from that time is due to increased CO_2 plus around 0.1-0.2C of unbiased/symmetric fluctuation around the CO_2-only curve. However, due to the miracle of fitting five parameter elephants and their ability to wiggle trunks, as soon as you start adding ad hoc terms to mess with that “fluctuation”, you discover that you can almost certainly fit the data with a model where nearly all of the warming is due to something besides CO_2, with CO_2 a comparatively small correction, or you can fit it with a model where the CO_2 driven warming is 2 or 3 times as great but has been fortuitously cancelled by large and also systematically growing terms.
All of these are big players in the IPCC game. If you want more extravagant claims of disaster, all you need to do is employ a model where CO_2-only warming is much stronger but where aerosols plus uncomputable natural cooling have for some reason cancelled most of it. Then you turn off, or just limit the growth of, the aerosols in the future, you assert that the natural cooling period is ending, and boom, off takes CO_2 driven like a rocket. Or one can play the exact opposite game and assert that more CO_2 makes more water vapor, which makes more clouds, which makes more albedo, which prevents it from having as much of an effect (and make up any differences with unprovable trunk-wiggling terms).
Everybody just hopes/prays that as the future evolves, their model will be the big winnah, and they will collect the prize, Nobly. Or is that Nobelly, I can never remember the spelling.
But remember — CO_2 only with no relaxation time at all works damn well to explain the data, no wiggle room at all, for a trunk or otherwise.
rgb
Not seeing how your answer contradicts my premise. You’re saying they will just continue to make things up as they go and claim they’ve always been right all along.
rgbatduke December 3, 2014 at 11:06 am
No, because there are other things that cause the temperature to vary besides CO_2,
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You are changing what the claim of the IPCC and warmists! They say that they are 90% certain that all of the warming from the 70’s through 1998 is due to CO2… in other words, the climate is essentially at some stasis without CO2 as the knob. That is what they are saying. We KNOW the climate varies… and it varies much more than any signal can be found from CO2 as the cuplrit. You’re sort of arguing a strawman here, me thinks.
Silly layman question but doesn’t the increase in atmospheric CO2 lag an increase in temperature? As I understand the basics, CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by man is miniscule vs. the natural release of CO2. So if an “emission of CO2” (assuming the author meant man made emission of CO2) is followed by an increase in temperature in 10 years can that temperature be measured? If it can be measured so what? I would think the temperature increase caused by the man made release of CO2 would be so small as compared to the natural release of CO2 it wouldn’t matter at all.
There is a huge amount of CO2 that is released by nature every year but there is also an equally massive natural absorption of CO2 every year. That’s why it is called the carbon cycle. However, in recent years, consumption of fossil fuels has added a small, but significant extra amount of CO2 into the system. The natural uptake of CO2 into the oceans has increased as a result, but only enough to absorb around 50% of the additional emissions. So the total of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen steadily, as evidenced by the Mauna Loa (and many other) observations.
The useful analogy is a bucket with a small hole in the bottom, being filled by a constantly running tap. The bucket fills to a level such that the water coming out of the hole in the bottom equals the water coming in from the tap, and stops there. Equilibrium. Lots of water coming in, lots coming out, but no net change. Now you start pouring a much smaller additional quantity of water into the bucket. What happens? The water level must rise until the amount of water exiting the bucket through the hole is equal to both the tap’s input and your additional input.
Fossil fuel combustion has created the additional supply of CO2 into the atmospheric bucket. Disposal of CO2 into the oceans has increased, but the water level is still rising and will continue to do for many decades so as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels in huge quantities.
Your water-bucket analogy fails on several levels.
Mankind-created Land use changes are more likely to induce regional climate changes than any global increase in CO2 trace gas from 3 molecules per 10,000 to 4 parts per 10,000.
Destruction of fisheries and pelagic food chains by over-harvesting the seas is far more likely to disrupt marine ecosystems than any minor regional temp increases, where fish can migrate and marine mammals do migrate, and marine ecosystems and reefs can and do adapt with new species as waters change temperature, as they have for tens of thousands of years, on abrupt time scales,
Even the great deglaciations into interglacials sea rises of the Pleistocene can and have been adapted to, that is self-evident.
Increased CO2 will help green the ecosystem, making more robust food crop production and ecosystem recovery after disrupting events (fires, floods, tree harvesting). More CO2 (if you accept that the GHG effect is real) will buffer the planet from devastating mini-ice age like cool downs as happened 1350-1850 AD.
The pluses of more CO2 still outweigh any negatives of more CO2.
And by your CO2-water bucket analogy…then please tell us what is the Earth’s ideal pCO2 level?
Thank you very much for your informed response. When you state “50% of additional emissions” are you referring to man-made emissions or natural variability? As I understand the current estimates, 50% of man-made emissions would be 1 – 2 ppm CO2. Obviously higher if it includes natural variations in CO2.
Because human CO2 release greatly increased after 1950, of course decadal scale response was needed in models in order to claim that the warming after 1975 was due to CO2. These researchers seem to have merely detected the rapid response which was programmed into the models, not detected a behavior in the actual climate systems.