Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
Politicians from around the globe gather annually in the UNFCCC meetings so they can propose and fail to come to worthwhile agreements on how to limit global warming and its impacts. Year in, year out, same thing. For the results of the most recent failed gathering, see the WattsUpWithThat post GWPF Welcomes Non-Binding And Toothless UN Climate Deal. One of the primary factors that drive the politicians is an attempt to limit global warming to 2-deg C above preindustrial values, where preindustrial is considered the mid-to-late 1800s.
But where did that 2 deg C limit come from?
Some people might be surprised to discover that it started with a Professor of Economics, Dr. William Nordhaus of Yale, back in 1970s, not from a comprehensive analysis of climate, weather, sea levels and so on by climate scientists. At least that’s what was presented in a blog post that has gained attention around the blogosphere.
The blog post is Two degrees: The history of climate change’s ‘speed limit’ by Mat Hope & Rosamund Pearce at ClimateCentral TheCarbonBrief. They write:
In the 1970s, Yale professor William Nordhaus alluded to the danger of passing a threshold of two degrees in a pair of now famous papers, suggesting that warming of more than two degrees would push the climate beyond the limits humans were [sic] familiar with:
And they quote Nordhaus:
“According to most sources the range of variation between between distinct climatic regimes is on the order of ±5°C, and at present time the global climate is at the high end of this range. If there were global temperatures more than 2° of 3° above the current average temperature, this would take the climate outside of the range of observations which have been made over the last several hundred thousand years.”
Hope and Pearce then note how James Hansen discussed “dangerous” climate change during his 1988 presentation to Congress, but didn’t present a threshold, and that it wasn’t until 1990 that there was a study to support the 2-deg limit. It came from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), in their report Responding to Climate Change: Tools for Policy Development [Part 1 of 2]. As noted in its introduction, it was:
…devoted to three specific aspects of the issues involved in developing policies for responding to climate change.
Oddly, the First IPCC Assessment Report was published a year later and it was inconclusive, inasmuch as the scientists could not differentiate between manmade and natural warming.
Hope and Pearce’s post at ClimateCentral TheCarbonBrief then run through the remaining history of studies working to support the 2-deg limit, one first presented by an economist.
That brings us to the post here by Pierre Gosselin at the NoTrickZone. It includes a number of quotes from members of the climate science community about the 2-deg C limit. My favorite is the translation of a speech by Dr. Hans von Storch, in which von Storch is reported to have said in 2011 (my boldface):
We are in a time where scientists and politicians claim, or at least suggest, the science, in the form of the IPCC, or the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), has shown that the 2°C target is scientifically mandatory, and is thus no longer a political question that has to be negotiated by society, but rather a target that policymakers only must execute – quasi an order. However the IPCC has never in any way presented the 2°C target as mandatory. Rather this was done by a few scientists, or shall I say: politicians disguised as scientists.
That reminded me of a quote from Dr. Richard Lindzen, an Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology (emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A recent April, 2014 presentation to the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) by Dr. Lindzen can be found on YouTube here. Early in the presentation, Dr. Lindzen states:
…it should be recognized that the basis for a climate that is highly sensitive to added greenhouse gasses is solely the computer models. The relation of this sensitivity to catastrophe, moreover, does not even emerge from the models, but rather from the fervid imagination of climate activists.
The following is the graph being used as the feature image at WUWT.
Charlotte, N Carolina 22°C High 9°C Low present
Louisville, Kentucky 20°C High 9°C Low present
350 miles apart. This is the climate catastrophe we are expected to spend the next few centuries sacrificing to avoid.
I think we should ask Louisville residents what their feelings are as to their great great great… progeny being subjected to that damn Charlotte weather.
Louisville is 6b and Charlotte 7a. Partly different plants grow well at different zones, even when there are times the zone requiring ‘hardier’ plants happens to be colder than the zone requiring less ‘hardy’ plants.
There are lots of variables that actually effect on plant growth. People often think it is the average temperature or max/min temperatures, but really it depends on what species we talk about, soil, moisture, sunshine, wind and nutrient conditions as well as what fungi, diseases and pests are around.
However, you can bet there is a difference between 6b and 7a and that affects if you are planning to grow something which lives on its edge. For every plant, there is a commercial and technical limit. Commercial limit means the plant can’t be cultivated outside its limit in a profitable, efficient way. Technical limit means the plant just won’t survive. These limits are affected by climate and that’s why it is important to know what will happen to central climatic variables, like average temp, mins, max, amount of rain, heat sums, winds, air humidity, etc. Usually single zone difference does not make a huge difference to any single plant species (like 6b-7a) but OTOH, 6b-7a cities may be situated so that the difference is actually almost three zones. That does make a difference.
I think the 2.0C limit is really about keeping CO2 below 450 ppm. That is where it really came from – keep CO2 below 450 ppm.
The 3.0C per doubling formula gets to +2.0C at 450 ppm in the long-run.
TempC Increase = 4.33*ln(CO2ppm)*C – 24.4C
+2.05C = 4.33 * ln(450)C – 24.4C
You can plug any CO2ppm number into this formula and it produces the temperature increase expected from the global warming theory.
Yeah, or you can look at my actual fit to the data above, which makes the number out to be more like
, or 1.8 C per doubling. That is, 
C, which is an excellent match to 
. OTOH, 
C, which is off by a factor of 1.65, too high.
Having the actual data handy (open in a window on my computer as I type this) really helps. I would say that the 3 C TCS hypothesis is soundly rejected by HadCRUT4 itself, unless one wishes to assert that our knowledge of CO_2 concentration in 1850 is off by a rather substantial margin. In which case all is chaos and we have no bloody idea what is going on. Not that I really believe the Laws Dome data — it varies too much relative to Mauna Loa, and in unexplainable (or at least, unexplained) ways. But the data itself clearly indicates that all things being equal, and assuming that our knowledge of 1850 conditions is accurate TCS is less than 2 C per doubling, with a most likely value of 1.8 C.
This is from fitting the two parameter curve to the actual data, something you would think that people like Hansen might have done first, before making egregious statements about absurdly high TCS.
rgb
Your prior post criticized my knowledge of history, and then proceeded with a tedious lecture on history.
It appears I can’t reply to that specific post, so I will place my reply here following your next post.
.
My source was Forbes magazine and it included many quotes from William Bradford’s book, “History of the Plymouth Plantation”:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/27/thanksgiving-economy-history-oped-cx_jb_1127bowyer.html
Since that respected magazine supports capitalism, which may mean you don’t trust it, here are some quotes from a respected left wing source that favors socialism, the New York Times (November 2010):
(the left wing point of view is the Pilgrim’s early form of socialism actually “worked” and that was not the reason they got rid of it — there is agreement among both the left and right-wing points of view the Pilgrims had socialism and then they dropped it. You seem to have a unique point of view.
From the New York Times:
“Historians say that the settlers in Plymouth, and their supporters in England, did indeed agree to hold their property in common (socialism) — William Bradford, the governor, referred to it in his writings as the “common course (socialism).”
“One man’s laziness is another man’s industry, based on the agricultural methods they’ve learned as young people,” he said. … Bradford did get rid of the common course (socialism)…”
In summary: The Plymouth “Plantation” was socialist.
The pilgrims apparently didn’t like it.
So they dumped socialism.
“Fervid imagination of climate activists”
That’s a good one. I’m gonna use it right here on WUWT.
Fevered also works.
I prefer “fetid” 😉
Temperature has behaved similarly in both pre-industrial and post-industrial time at Tornionjoki valley between Finland and Sweden. About steady rise of 0.9 degrees centigrade per century has been recorded since 1802. I tried to fit a curve consisting of linear change plus exponential change (tau = 50 years resembling the CO2 change) to the data. That exponential part got near zero coefficient meaning no relation to CO2.
Green is linear trend. Red shows the exponential change.
Sorry. The chart does not seem to show. The last last line explaining the chart can be dismissed.
The warmists have to be careful not to make dire predictions that can be easily verified and falsified. So they tend to predict in small increments, big enough to be a little scary, but small enough to hide “in the noise” so to speak.
Here’s how I think this can be done. The “2C°” threshold fits the CAGW scheme ideally because it’s the typical range of uncertainty for any large collection of temperature measurements. So really big temperature-caused catastrophes in the future can be simply constructed as a series of many smaller “undecidable” steps, starting now. Each step proposes an increase of a degree or two, so is undecidable, because certain subsets of temperatures will support “increase” while another subset will support “no change”, and a third might indicate “decrease”. It’s just too noisy to decide.
Sound familiar?
So, mathematically speaking, it’s like a filtered white-noise process, where the 2C° uncertainty is the white-noise generator, from which the desired increasing signal can be manufactured by application of appropriate filters in the pipeline, similar to way rising-pitch speech can be synthesized from vocal-chord noise by applying time-varying filters with increasing frequency response.
It’s such a stupid goal. Not least because the warmist agenda has little to do with actual temperatures. Given that this is really about the redistribution of wealth, the goal should be expressed in economic rather than climate terms.
Redistributive change in the same spirit of corruption as “oil for food” and “carbon credit exchanges”. Not to mention the multi-trillion dollar welfare schemes that leave Americans indigent, homeless, and unidentified. The evidence of extraordinary corruption, including normalization of abortion of a couple million human lives annually (in American and more globally), is enough to doubt their moral motives, and the unpredictable nature of the system is enough to doubt their scientific integrity. A combination of emotional appeals and leaps into universal and even extra-universal domains, should invite elevated and progressive scrutiny of their strategy and tactics.
Mike,
Good point. Given that most people in The US are indifferent to Climate Change and politicians and Warmist are looking to get their attention. Instead of stating Climate Change impacts in terms of 2C of
warming, how about framing it as: to achieve below the 2C target will require a 10-20k reduction of everyone’s per annum income. That will get their attention!
“According to most sources the range of variation between between distinct climatic regimes is on the order of ±5°C,…”
////////////////////////////////////////////
I do not understand that comment.
just take one country for example such as Canada where Eureka Nt which is classified as a polar desert climate has an average temperature of -20degC, whereas Abbotsford Bc, which is classified as cool temperate wet forest climate has an average temperature of 10degC. So in just one country one sees a range of some 29degC between different climatic zones/regimes, so where does this guy get his +/- 5degC figure from?
See: http://www.canada.climatemps.com/
If one wants to look at a different country mnore towards the tropics, Iraq is classified as subtropical desert (scrub) and many parts of it has an aveage temperature of 24degC. See
http://www.iraq.climatemps.com/
Jizan, in nearby Saudi Arabia,,is classified as tropical desert and has an average temperature of 30degC. See: http://www.saudi-arabia.climatemps.com/
I do not think people realise how nearby places can be that have a 2 degree difference in average temperature, nor what a wide difference in average temperatures exists between where peiople live and where they go on holiday.
For example, the UK (which is a very small country) varies from North to South by 6 degC. Such that Dalwhinnie in Scotland which is classified as Boreal Rain Forest has an average temperature of 6 degC whereas St Mary’s in the Scily Isles has an average temperature of 12degC. See
http://www.united-kingdom.climatemps.com/
I frequenetly point out that most people in the UK would consider it a God send for the UK to warm by 2 or 3 degrees. Scotland would become more like the Midlands, the Midlands more like the South West, the South West more like the South East, the South East more like the Scily Isles, and the Scily Isles more like Brittany in France. I would suspect that most people would think that a climate shift like that to be a wonderful thing (of course, the fact that the UK is surrounded by ocean would dampen and reduce any climate shift for the UK, there would have to be very substantial ocean warming before the UK, which is already warm for its latitude, would significantly further warm).
Many people from the UK go on holiday, or retire to Spain, where the Spanish costas have an average temperature of about 19 degC (with micro climates some areas are a degree or so hotter). Even though Spain is perhaps some 10 degC warmer than the UK, life goes on. people are not dying in the heat waves. Indeed some of the Spannish costas have the longest life expectancy for women in Europe and are amongst the top regions to live for not simply longevity, but also the age at which serious illness strikes. .
The whole 2 degree scare does not withstand even a cursory examination of life on planet Earth. We inhabit most of planet earth save that there are no major cities where it is extremely cold.
The coldest capital city is Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It has an annual variation of more than 80 degrees C. If warming is mostly in winter the stock losses would be reduced and they would like that a lot.
I live in Spain. I’m interested in controlling CO2 to make winters warmer. A hotter summer is fine, but the trick is to get it warm enough to extend the tourist season to say late October. If we could make it colder and rainier in Great Britain that would be a plus, because we can sell more real estate and give more cooking lessons to British retirees.
Fernando
Eventually the real estate will recover since the fundamentals that make Spain so appealling to those who are less fortunate and who live in colder northern climes (the English, the Dutch, Germans, Scandinavians etc) still exist. If the globe does cool over the next 20 or so years, more and more retirees will wish to head south, so long term the real estate will recover. That will only be a good thing for the local economy.
As you say, you need to teach the English all about Spanish food. Great cuisine and I understand that Spain has most Michelin star restaurants in Europe.
It is crazy that it is possible for a couple to go out and have a nice meal with ok wine for less than the price of sharing a Pizza Hut pizza and coke. No surprise that many enjoy that life style.
If only the Spanish would ensure title…but seafood Paella, to die for.
Further to my last post, Life expectancy for women in Europe ranks Andorra (the Principality in the south between Spain and France) as first in Europe with an avaerage age of 85.36 years, and Spain is ranked as second in Europe witha life expectancy of 85.16 years. These are listed as second and third in the world respectively. unfortunately, not so good for men (but as they say it is a woman’s world).
See gender female at:
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/life-expectancy-europe
Not to be overly picky, but shouldn’t the “Deg K” left axis scale of the BEST Absolute Global Mean Surface Temperature Graph just be “K” or “Kelvin”?
It’s a unit not a degree, right?
Just askin.
As we saw in the Nature comment on 1 October 2014 by David Victor and Charles Kennel, the semi-sentient AGW believers realize the 2ºC limit needs to be abandoned, largely due to the 21th Century hiatus/pause invalidating the IPCC GCM outputs.
Here is the cute graphic Nature cartoonists designed for that piece.
http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.20139.1411992443!/image/Climate1.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_630/Climate1.jpg
See their Nature comment here:
As socialists at heart, they are now advocating to cut straight to heart of the matter. That real matter is hard controls on the energy sources (oil, natural gas, coal) that control the world’s economic engines by using CO2 emissions as the flux valve.
So forget the 2º C temperature nonsense, nature isn’t cooperating with their best-laid scheme.
The 2ºC goal was never about climate. It was about control of economic engines, throttling the extraction economies that fuel those engines, and re-apportioning the wealth they create.
Damn skippy. And “control” by the energy companies, who make more money than anybody else from the panic. Please don’t throw me into ‘dat briar patch….
rgb
Want to know why we don’t go to the moon?
This BS flushing trillions down the drain in regulations alone.
The term “pre-industrial temperature” is one of the worst cases of “propter nomen”. It springs from profound and dangerous ignorance and seeks to transmit and spread that ignorance. It’s a virus of dumbness.
What AIDS is to the immune system, this monstrous phrase is to real understanding of climate. It’s a phrase designed deliberately to undo and destroy such knowledge. As well as being a crass political tool, the phrase represents a violent assault on the intellect of others.
This odious and utterly ignorant term should be discarded and condemned along with similar historic rejected terns such as “servant races”.
Precisely.
Why would one pick a temperature that was in the midst of the LIA, a time of stress at least in the Northern Hemisphere.
The rate of change today is glacial when compared to the “speed limit” at end of the Younger Dryas:
=====
The end of the Younger Dryas, about 11,500 years ago, was particularly abrupt. In Greenland, temperatures rose 10° C (18° F) in a decade
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data4.html
=====
How much has the global temperature risen in the last 100 years?
“Averaged over all land and ocean surfaces, temperatures warmed roughly 1.53°F (0.85ºC) from 1880 to 2012, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”
10C warming within a decade VS 0.85 C warming within a century. Those figures tend to silence the average alarmist.
Great post.
And it gets even better when you compare apples to apples: How was the 10C rise measured? Ice-core data? In which case the comparison since c1850 should also be based on ice-core data. This would produce a comparable rise of… somewhere around zero deg C! Just think how much that end-Younger Dryas rise would be if the same instruments which measure today’s ‘global temperature’ were used!
CAGW alarmists are slowly realizing their 2C target is working against them.
The longer global temp trends remain below 0.14C/decade between now and 2100, the more likely ECS will be less than 2C, which means there is absolutely NO reason whatsoever to waste $trillions on CO2 sequestration measures to supposedly keep GW below 2C, when governments can spend $0.000 and achieve the same result.
Moreover, technological advancements in LFTR technology or perhaps even Lockheed Martin’s new Compact Fusion Reactor technology will make fossil fuels and CO2 emissions irrelevant in the relatively near future (20 years?):
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html
Either one of these technologies produce zero CO2 emissions and are cheaper than fossil fuels in generating energy for just pennies per kWh for ever and ever, amen.
Historians will not treat this generation kindly. They’ll be absolutely amazed the CAGW hypothesis lasted as long as it did….
I agree with you on historian comment. History will record this era as one of crazed, misguided eco-alarmists worrying over the wrong things. Mankind’s other very destructive activities bear far more attention than CO2 emissions.
I disagree with you on the Lockheed CFR. That is pipedream. A defense company looking to cash in. The science, let alone the technology to make it happen with the pressures, temperatures, material degradation, and radiation blasting, is still science fiction. Lockheed is not to be trusted. Simply drawing some pretty CAD pictures of a supposed CFR is fanciful. Put it in a Marvel comic book or Popular Science. Study it in the national and university labs, and maybe in 20-40 years we might have something on a compact fusion reactor.
Until then we need Thorium-liquid fueled reactors to replace the coal-powered generation plants that Obama is quite ignorantly shutting down. But history will also record Obama as an ignoramus US President.
Joel– I think it’s too early to say Lockheed Martin’s CFR concept is just an unfounded pipe dream, although it’s certainly justifiable to be skeptical at this stage, which I am.
If CFRs don’t work, I share your enthusiasm on LFTR technology and hope to hear positive developments regarding China’s first test LFTR, which is scheduled to go online next year.
You’re right about Obama, too. He’ll be a footnote in history for being the first black president, but will likely be better known for adding $10+ trillion to the national debt, and perhaps being the sitting president during the start of the US$ collapse/Great Depression 2.0.
I remember 50+ years ago reading we were just a decade or two away from “cheap, unlimited, safe fusion power”. And here we are, after all those years and probably several trillion dollars spent on fusion research with the end goal no closer. Nothing wrong with the theory, but current state of engineering is not adequate to achieve a safely contained and sustained fusion process. We are at least one major technological breakthrough away from overcoming that hurdle.
So I remain extremely skeptical regarding fusion claims, although I will be delighted if/when someone proves me wrong.
In the meantime, fission in proven technology. So is coal. Improvements to both are possible and will happen if we continue to use them.
Why do you waste time showing that idiotic linear trend from BEST? It is totally uninformative. Monthly and weakly data are available. They should be used and you probably have the facilities to show them. A semi-transparent colored band over them will show what the temperature really does. That jaggedness will disappear and the ENSO sawtooth will turn out to have rounded corners. And actual global mean temperature can be elicited if you apply the technique shown in figure 15 in my book. There actually are linear segments out there in their data set but you will never know from BEST because despite the effort they put into creating their data set they have no idea what to do with it.
BEST is just another climate science Self-licking ice cream cone (SLICC).
SLICC definition: a process or tool that produces an end product and provides a justification unto itself with little or no external utility. (i.e. waste, a Progressive job program)
You will love this one then:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/12/16/after-years-nasa-opened-its-349m-rocket-tower-then-promptly-shut-it-down-unused/
$349 million for a test facility for a program that had been shut down 4 years earlier. Just like cagw, it has a financial momentum and even the people who know the thing is DOA can’t stop themselves from working on it.
The same BEST data using a Y-scale with better perspective
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/scale:3/plot/rss-land
Satellite data are included, and overlap the BEST graph from 1979.
The BEST data Y-scale (scaling) is presented on the larger scale to approximate the measurement error intrinsic to the data. Satellite data have less error, so appears as a “flatter” line.
Conclusion,
There is no signifcant warming since 1900. The 1930s warm decade is barely visible. Post 2000 temps are not warmer than the 1930s
Hell of a graph, actually. Although one has to worry about the zeros.
Is BEST really so much of a hockey stick? HadCRUT4 is not. Don’t answer — I can do W4T myself… or (probably) download BEST directly and stick it next to my HadCRUT4 data to play with.
“this would take the climate outside of the range of observations which have been made over the last several hundred thousand years.”
Did I miss the invention of a practical time machine?
Who exactly was making these observations hundreds of thousands of years ago?
Where were/are the records kept?
What medium were the observations recorded?
In what language?
Odd that you chose to stick a linear trend through 100+ years of data (and the BEST series at that!) for the headline chart.
Could we not get a better idea of when, if ever, a 2C warming limit might be reached if we considered extending the current pause or hiatus? And should we not prefer the reliable and trusted satellite data?
Dr Ross McKitrick has recently established (Open Journal of Statistics, 2014) that the trend of the RSS dataset is not significantly different from zero over the past 26 years. So what would it look like if we extended McKitrick’s 26 year “hiatus” as a linear trend. When, if ever, would we reach a level of 2C above pre-industrial levels?
As generally accepted and confirmed in your chart, by the start of McKitrick’s hiatus, we were already around 0.7C above pre-industrial levels. So we’d need to rise another 1.3C to reach the 2C “danger level”.
During McKitrick’s 26 year hiatus for RSS data, the trend is statistically insignificant, but it is, nevertheless, positive, and has a value of 0.1184 degrees per decade. Extending that forward, how many years would it take to add another 1.3C?
The answer is (drum roll…) 110 years. And as we’ve already enjoyed 26 years of hiatus, that would mean another 84 years to go. So we’d reach the 2C level in around 2099.
So if the current hiatus continues, we reach the 2C level by 2100.
Can anyone spot where I went wrong?
During McKitrick’s 26 year hiatus for RSS data, the trend is statistically insignificant, but it is, nevertheless, positive, and has a value of 0.1184 degrees per decade.
= = = = = =
That’s a very, very, very, very precise figure, especially when you consider that the ever changing dynamic Earth, with its day and night and seasonality, with its icy poles and steaming tropics, never achieves thermodynamic equilibrium, and therefore doesn’t have a meaningful temperature to measure.
And yet, there it is: 0.1184 degrees C per decade stated with absolute confidence.
That figure probably should include an error margin of around +/- 0.52381593 C, so it’s probably not a good idea to use it for calculating future trends. (error 1)
Even if you could establish the real value of the trend with great accuracy and precision, it would be very naive to assume that the previous century’s trend will continue throughout the next one. (error 2)
The error margin over 26 years would also be +/- 0.1184 degrees C per decade. But why use 0.1184 degrees C per decade over 26 years when you can use Lord Monckton’s change of 0 over 18 years and 2 months to figure out when we reach the dreaded increase of 2 C?
I must say, my first question is: ‘based on the clearly repetitive nature of ice ages/interglacials, how much warmer do we have to get for historical precedent to suggest that the next ice age is now inevitable?’
Since steady temperature rise in interglacials is followed by equally steady temperature decline into and during an ice age.
The elephant in the room.
What is the “right” temperature for the Earth?
Saying that 2 degrees is a “mandatory” limit implies that the bloke who says it knows that a higher temperature would be bad. But in its turn that implies that said bloke knows what temperature would be good. How does he know it and what is it?
Obviously and not surprisingly these two questions have no answer.
The statement is therefore a purely political one, a belief.
Clearly there isn’t a “right” temperature for the Earth. The Earth wouldn’t care if it was as cold as Uranus or as hot as Mercury. That’s a silly straw man argument.
There is arguably however a “right” temperature (or at least some very “wrong” temperatures) for mankind. Our civilisation, all our cities, agriculture and infrastructure have been developed during a few thousand years during which the temperature was mostly a little below where it is now. Any major change (whether up or down) would have major consequences, including but not limited to sea level changes, rendering areas uninhabitable (or unfarmable) because of ice, cold, flooding, heat, drought, etc.
It’s complex and a lot of analysis has been done. The first few chapters of Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees give a reasonable summary of the likely impacts of a modest temperature increase. (I wouldn’t recommend reading beyond that as the science is far more speculative when it comes to increases of more than three or four Kelvin).
The early major civilizations were in Egypt, Mesopatania and Souther China. Areas with an average temperature substantially above the average. By several degrees in fact. The Roman era was at least 1 degree warmer than currently for most of its existence; it may even not be a coincidence that its demise was at the beginning of the colder middle ages. The idea that the “little below” now is, by implication, best is therefore demonstrably wrong. What your example demonstrates in fact is that humanity will adapt to whatever conditions it finds itself in and the evidence from Fireland to the equatorial regions to Greenland shows that the temperature range it can adapt to is well over 10 degrees. Whether it’s comfortable is another matter.
The idea that as the temperature is now, or little less, is best, that’s a pre-Copernican idea: best is what we find ourselves in because we’re fine with it (and we are at the centre of things).
Ed
You are correct. Everuything suggest that the globe is too cold today. Maximum bio diversity in warm wet environments and least bio diversity in cold arid environments. The world is largely uninhabitable for us as a species but for our ability to adapt ourselves and/or environment. Just look at the relatively sparse areas of the globe where people live without substantial clothes, or manmade structure and/or manmade heating. If we did not have that adaption skill man would be contained to only a few small regions on planet Earth.
I often point out that the history of civilisations can be seen to spread from warmer to cooler. Ditto the obtaining of skills such as the bronze and iron. Warmer climes obtain these skills first.
It is no coincidence that whiilst we in England were building Stonehenge, the Eqyptians were building the Pyramids. When it is warm, and a time of plenty, one has spare time to learn skills and pass these down the generations. Whilst back in England, most of the time was spent struggling to survive because of the cold, and no spare time to learn skills and educate the generations. That is why Stonehenge is a pile of rough rocks whereas the Pyramids are mamouth engineering process of dressed stone put together with a skill that we would have difficulty in replicating today (especially bearing in mind the primative tools available)..
The only example (in the European northern hemishere) of a dominating civilisation from a cold clime is the Vikings, and there is no coincidence that this was during the Viking Warm Period (MWP).
The 2 degree scare, is a complete deception. I do not understand how any sentinent person could take it seriously since it bears not even cursory scruitny before one sees that it is a complete load of b*ll*cks.
Incredible things these human beings.
some who are born in very cold climates go and live in very warm climates and vica versa – and those differences are a damned sight more than 2 degrees C.
Not many people chose to move and retire to and live in a cold climate, whereas many chose to do the opposite.
Migration in retirement (when work is not an issue and one is looking for quality of life) is usually always to warmer climates. That tells you something about what we humans think about today’s temperatures. We would generally prefer it to be somewhat warmer.
No doubt a bit of extra warmth would be very nice in many parts of the world. But in some other places it would be most unwelcome. If that’s all there was to it, there would clearly be no problem.
We don’t build pyramids or stonehenges these days. We build huge cities with trillions of dollars of infrastructure and many of the major ones are barely above today’s sea level.
@Nigel Harris:
You wrote: “No doubt a bit of extra warmth would be very nice in many parts of the world. But in some other places it would be most unwelcome.”
Your future temperature projections seem to be rather linear which is maybe far too simple. I guess your argument is that hot areas of today would get unbearable hot after a further warming of the Earth. But this assumption is purely speculative. For instance: The mean temps of the Holocene climate optimum between 8000 – 4000 BC were significantly warmer than today. Following your simple linear approach the Sahara desert should have been even dryer and hotter than today. But the opposite is true: During the Holocene climate optimum the Sahara was a green savanna with regular monsoon rainfalls…
This example shows that linear thinking can be completely wrong because the possible changes in the climate system (regarding e.g. jet stream movements, changing monsoon patterns, variation in cloudiness or ocean currents and so forth) can be much more complex than we think. I’m convinced that the climate of the Earth is stronger influenced by negative than by positive feedbacks. Otherwise Life on Earth would had gone in extinction long ago…
The much talked about 2 degree limit certainly appears to be an arbitrary figure plucked from the air.
What is more, remember that this 2 degrees is measured from a baseline set in pre-industrial times, a period known as the ‘little ice-age’. During the little ice-age we had frost fairs on the frozen river Thames in London.
To be two degrees warmer than little ice-age doesn’t sound particularly scary, it sounds desirable.
What is the correct temperature for the Earth?
It seems ironic that about 8000 years ago, when temperatures were warmer than today, that period was called the Holocene Climatic Optimum. The following is from the IPCC’s Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (2005)
http://www.acia.uaf.edu/PDFs/ACIA_Science_Chapters_Final/ACIA_Ch02_Final.pdf
So what’s the problem with a measly two degreees warmer?
Polar bears loose weight.
The problem is that revisionists haven’t gotten around to “erasing” this, any more than they’ve succeeded in “erasing” the Eemian optimum that was apparently 2-5 C warmer than that. Without, as far as we can tell, the help of CO_2 in either case, and in the case of the Eemian in particular “it just happened” and we don’t have a clue as to why — a narrow spike of extreme warming that lasted for maybe 1000 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
The Holocene, in comparison, is positively benign.
The inter-glacials are repeating now about every 100,000 years. Previous inter-glacials appear to have been warmer the present one ( the Holocene). One could propose from that evidence not only that current warming is natural and to be expected but that it has not reached its peak yet.
Again, from IPCC’s Arctic Climate Impact Assessment
Now, if I was presented with something that repeated itself in a regular pattern over 3 million years and had to guess what would happen next , I would guess it would happen again. And lo, it is happening again just like before.
But this time we have got climate scientists, late on the scene, apparently oblivious to what happened in the past. They say it is not natural because their unproven, unverified, invalidated climate models cannot explain natural cycles. What’s more, wait for it, they say it is my fault because I drive a car and heat my home in winter.
I think there is some saying which goes “Those who forget the lessons of the past…well I can’t remember the rest but something nasty happens.
Trend lines are so fascinating, and so trendy.
From Dr. William Nordhaus of Yale:
“According to most sources the range of variation between climatic is in the order of ± 5C.,and at the present time the global climate is at the high end of this range. If there were global temperatures of more than 2 or 3C.above the current average temperature this would take the climate outside of the range of observations which have been made over the last several hundred thousand years. Within a stable climatic regime, the range of variation of ± 1C is the normal variation thus in the last 100 years a range of mean temperature has been 0.7°C.
On the other hand, studies of the effects of carbon dioxide on global temperature indicate that a doubling
in concentration would probably lead to an increase in surface temperature of between 0.6 and 2.4C
As a first approximation, we assume that a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of dioxide is a reasonable standard to impose at the present stage of knowledge.
First, according to the estimates of the effect on temperature, these temperature changes would be
somewhere between the change observed over the last century and up to perhaps four times this variation.
Although we do not know exactly what the effect is, we are probably not changing the climate more than
has been associated with the normal random variations of the last few thousand year.
-…….to be heading for the danger zone. It appears that the doubling will come around 2030.
………..Put differently, according to the cost schedules assumed in the model, it does not pay to curtail carbon dioxide emissions until the time, or almost the time, when the limit is reached; and for the three cases examined this time comes in the period centered on 2020.”
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The above is a paste copy from the paper of Dr. Nordhaus… … a little further expantion of the quote shown in this blog post.
Hopefully Bob wont mind that.
Dr. Nordhaus work, as related in this blog post, for as much as I can tell is a superb scientific work in principle., as same as the Calendar’s one.
While in both cases the scientific work is about the potential effect of CO2 emissions and the greenhouse effect on climate in the consideration of the anthropogenic forcing, both guys do not fail but clearly explain their belief also. Is clearly stated in both cases that none of them believes in AGW or the possibility of man changing the climate, even while their work points at it and considers it.
It is strange but a careful consideration leads to a conclusion that none of them really believes that man can cause climate change. For example Guy Calendar puts the tiping point at 2000 years in the future, while Nordhaus puts it at around the year 2030, but in both cases they treat the conclusion reached as a no AGW, in a way that while actually man may effect the GW by a kind of amplifying it, stil it would not be .able to cause a climate change.
In both cases the tipping point is considered, and in both cases there is a large degree of no worry implied.
In the case of Dr. Nordhaus you can see it very clearly at the last part of the selected copy-paste above, and in the case of the Calendar it can be seen at the belief of him that man will adapt his technology long before the mark of the tipping point.
If that seems doubtful and not as clear as I claim it to be, I will not mind but to explain it further if anyone asks, but my main point in this comment is about how much a real scientific work can help even when considered in error in many parts….
The errors in the Nordhaus paper are very easy to spot, simply because the numbers and the data used to calculate the tiping point (the ~2C mark increament above the current average global temperatures at his time) are wrong by a very significant margin.
He uses a numer in the order of ± 5C for variation between climatic, which means a 10C variation BETWEEN the extremes, while actually these days is considered as something between 4.5C to 7C (with a average of ~5.5C to 6C), which still seems to be exaggerated.
That can be even more clearly understood while considering that to him the 0.7C warming observed up to 1975 from a 100 years earlier is considered as a normal climatic variation because it was inside the 1C max mark possible.
Actually that seems to be wrong also as the 0.7C is beyond the max mark variation, simply because that happends to be no more than the half of what he considered as such,…….. that mark is at ~0.5C (probably even less than) for a period above the 100 years and closer to a 150 years mark. That is the very basic reason of the modern latest AGW furore.
Than the error surfaces again, against any odds, he estimates the 2030 as the tipping point when the CO2 emissions will double. Very very odd.
One thing to really consider here is that actually he sides with the CO2 emissions as a correct pointer of the tipping point not the degree of the warming, which actually shows his care of been as correct as possible, especially while the range of CS he considers is 0.6C to 2.4C for a doubling.
Meaning that the best metric he considers for the tipping point is the CO2 emissions not the temps..
To summerize it…. he must have considerd a CS not above the 1C for a doubling and the CR much more significant than the one propagated by the very numbers he used to calculate the ~2C increment as possible, ……..while coming up with the 2030 as the tipping point..
So if we correct for his errors, we come up with a ~1C warming above the main climatic trend as a tipping point (instead of 2C to 3C), which actually is round about our present time,the ~1C warming as the tipping point, while considering the temp variations.
While considering the CO2 emissions it means that the tipping point may be well as he has estimated the ~2030 but only if the CS considered as a value of ~0.6C of variation for ~ 200ppm variation (close to 1C for a doubling) , ……meaning that if this correct we will be in a hiatus at least till the 2030 and a tipping point at 460ppm, ……….no AGW.
Simply put, somehow his CO2 tipping point does not agree with the ~2C warming as a tipping point….. and also it does not agree with the CS above 1C for a doubling (therefor not with ACC-AGW), but strangely, against any odds, it agrees with the actual CR and the hiatus.
Combining his work and the latest data about climate we are already in a tipping point from present to at least till 2030…..no ACC-AGW there.
While considering the tipping point in climate, the matter becomes simple to estimate……after that point we either have a ACC-AGW as so much claimed or the climate will not care to change to our will and will impose it’s will on us.
Also a hiatus happends to be very possible in the case of a climate that does not change according to our will, and quasy impossible in the other case.
I am sure that many will not get my point, but anyway I have made it…:-)
don’t mind any typos or grammar errors, please. 🙂
Cheers