Guest essay by S. Fred Singer
(originally published on American Thinker reprinted here with permission of the author. I endorse this opinion, though not the personal labels. We can all do with less labeling and name calling but for this piece I’m making an exception as it helps to illustrate the point – Anthony)
Gallia omnia est divisa in partes tres — This phrase from Julius Gaius Caesar about the division of Gaul nicely illustrates the universe of climate scientists — also divided into three parts. On the one side are the “warmistas,” with fixed views about apocalyptic manmade global warming; at the other extreme are the “deniers.” Somewhere in the middle are climate skeptics.
In principle, every true scientist must be a skeptic:
That’s how we’re trained; we question experiments, we question theories. We try to repeat or derive independently what we read in publications — just to make sure that no mistakes have been made.
In my view, “warmistas” and “deniers” are very similar in some respects — at least their extremists are. They have fixed ideas about climate, its change and its cause. They both ignore “inconvenient truths” and select data and facts that support their preconceived views. Many of them are also quite intolerant and unwilling to discuss or debate these views — and quite willing to think the worst of their opponents.
Of course, these three categories do not have sharp boundaries; there are gradations. For example, many “skeptics” go along with the general conclusion of the “warmistas” but simply claim the human contribution is not as large as indicated by climate models. But at the same time, they join with “deniers” in opposing drastic efforts to mitigate greenhouse (GH) gas emissions.
I am going to resist the temptation to name names. But everyone working in the field knows who is a “warmista”, “skeptic”, or “denier”. The “warmistas”, generally speaking, populate the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and subscribe to its conclusion that most of the temperature increase of the last century is due to carbon-dioxide emissions produced by the use of fossil fuels. At any rate, this is the conclusion of the most recent IPCC report, the fifth in a series. Since I was an Expert Reviewer of IPCC, I’ve had an opportunity to review part of the 5th Assessment Report. AR5 published in 2013 uses essentially the same argument and evidence as AR4 from 2007; so let me discuss this “evidence” in some detail.
IPCC-AR4 uses only the global surface temperature (GST) record (shown in fig. 9.5 on page 648).
It exhibits a rapid rise in 1910-1940, a slight decline in 1940-1975, a sharp ‘jump’ around 1976-77 — and then a steady increase up to 2000 (except for the temperature ‘spike’ of the 1998 Super-El-Nino). No increase is seen after about 2001.
Most everyone seems to agree that this earlier increase (1910-1940) is caused by natural forces whose nature the IPCC does not specify. Clearly, the decline of 1940-1975 does not fit the picture of an increasing level of carbon dioxide; nor do the ‘jump’ and ‘spike.’ So, the IPCC uses the increase between 1978 and 2000 as evidence for human (anthropogenic) global warming (AGW).
Their argument is somewhat strained and their evidence is questionable. They claim that their models simulating the temperature history of the 20th century show no warming between 1970 and 2000 – when they omit the warming effect of the steady, slow CO2 increase. But once they add the CO2 increase into the models, they claim good agreement with the reported global surface temperature record. Ergo – evidence for AGW.
There are three things wrong with the IPCC argument: It depends very much on detailed and somewhat arbitrary choices of model inputs, e.g., the properties and effects of atmospheric aerosols, and their temporal and geographic distribution. It also makes arbitrary assumptions about clouds and water vapor, which produce the most important greenhouse forcings. One might therefore say that IPCC’ evidence is nothing more than an exercise in curve fitting. According to physicist Freeman Dyson, the famous mathematician John von Neumann stated: “Give me four adjustable parameters and I can fit an elephant. Give me one more, and I can make his trunk wiggle.”
The second question: Can IPCC fit other climate records of importance besides the reported global surface record? For example, can they fit northern and southern hemisphere temperatures using the same assumptions in their models about aerosols, clouds and water vapor? Can they fit the atmospheric temperature record as obtained from satellites, and also from radiosondes carried in weather balloons? The IPCC report does not show such results, and one therefore suspects that their curve-fitting exercise may not work, except for the global surface record.
The third problem may be the most important and likely also the most contested one. But first let me parse the IPCC conclusion, which depends crucially on the reported global surface warming between 1978 and 2000. As stated in their Summary for Policymakers (IPCC-AR4, vol 1, page 10): “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
But what if there is little to no warming between 1978 and 2000? What if the data from thousands of poorly distributed weather stations do not represent a true global warming? The atmospheric temperature record between 1978 and 2000 (both from satellites and, independently, from radiosondes) doesn’t show a warming. Neither does the ocean. And even the so-called proxy record — from tree rings, ice cores, ocean sediments, corals, stalagmites, etc. — shows mostly no warming during the same period.
Now let me turn to the “deniers”. One of their favorite arguments is that the greenhouse effect does not exist at all — because it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., one cannot transfer energy from a cold atmosphere to a warmer surface. It is surprising that this simplistic argument is used by physicists, and even by professors who teach thermodynamics. One can show them data of downwelling infrared radiation from CO2, water vapor and clouds, which clearly impinge on the surface. But their minds are closed to any such evidence.
Then there is another group of deniers who accept the existence of the greenhouse effect but argue about the cause and effect of the observed increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. One subgroup holds that CO2 levels were much higher in the 19th century; so, there really hasn’t been a long-term increase from human activities. They even believe in a conspiracy to suppress these facts. Another subgroup accepts that CO2 levels are increasing in the 20th century but claims that the source is release of dissolved CO2 from the warming ocean. In other words, they argue that oceans warm first, which then causes the CO2 increase. In fact, such a phenomenon is observed in the ice-core record, where sudden temperature increases precede increases in CO2. While this fact is a good argument against the story put forth by Al Gore, it does not apply to the 20th century: Isotopic and other evidence destroys their caset.
Another subgroup simply says that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is so small, they can’t see how it could possibly change global temperature. But laboratory data show that CO2 absorbs IR radiation very strongly. Another subgroup says that natural annual additions to atmospheric CO2 are many times greater than any human source; they ignore the natural sinks that have kept CO2 reasonably constant before humans started burning fossil fuels. Finally, there are the claims that major volcanic eruptions produce the equivalent of many years of human emission from fossil-fuel burning. To which I reply: OK, but show me a step increase in measured atmospheric CO2 related to a volcanic eruption.
I have concluded that we can accomplish very little with convinced “warmistas” and probably even less with true “deniers”. So we just make our measurements, perfect our theories, publish our work, and hope that in time the truth will out.
Quotes:
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.” — …Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
“The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.” — …Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” — …Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” — …Sir John Houghton, First chairman of IPCC
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” — ..Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, specializing in climate science and energy policy. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committeeon Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute and of the Independent Institute. In 2007, he founded and chaired NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change). For recent writings see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and Google Scholar.
“D*niers”?
Really?
Katabasis, yes I know, We can all do with less such labeling. But for the purposes of this piece, I’ve made an exception and noted a caveat as to why.
Of course the denier epithet in the mouths of warmists is nothing but a scurrilous ploy. No need to debate with people who aren’t even accepting of reality. It’s on a par with the ludicrous “anti-science.”. What is Michael Mann even saying when he calls a superb scientist like the Judith Curry “anti-science.” I have great respect for Dr. Singer, but he does the skeptical cause no good by using…and thereby legitimizing… such terms. I don’t see much point in this post anyway. There’s nothing here most us don’t already know.
Want to take back my crib of the general import of this piece. There are plenty of details that are helpful concerning the case the IPCC is trying to make.
argg. sorry, not “crib”…crit
Denying what?
Denying what?
============
Greenhouses warm by limiting vertical circulation of air. They do not rely on downwelling radiation for their warming.
Thus, it is scientifically correct to deny that CO2 causes a greenhouse effect, because the mechanism behind which CO2 is claimed to cause warming is not the same mechanism as found in greenhouses.
This is basic, fundamental science that is ignored time and time again when arguments over belief levels in global warming are raised. CO2 does not restrict vertical circulation of air and thus cannot warm the earth in a manner similar to greenhouses.
Agree with Anthony on both points – this was worth republishing ‘as is’ – and if anything I’d go further than Katabasis. As I put it on Bishop Hill eleven months ago:
I’d prefer Fred Singer adopted this approach but it’s worth remembering this is a problem created by those who first used denier and made the analogy with Holocaust denial explicit. On just how inappropriate such language is for scientific debate I doubt anyone will improve on Science of Doom in February.
I think the idea is to identify blind extremists in the debate using terms warmistas and deniers. Both do not care about the evidence or any rational discussion, their positions are faith based in their particular ideologies.
Using the term denier still is a mistake, as it assumes a flawed premise. The label denier is derogatory, it has an established singular purpose in the debate. The term denier is broadly accepted and used against anyone who does not rigidly toe the IPCC line on AGW. When it has been used to create an atmosphere of fear in challenging that line, it cannot magically be transformed into a term that only identifies extremist, non-evidenced based views.
The warmistas the article describes are extremists but they are only following the IPCC lead. The IPCC conclusions on AGW are an extremist view. Even though popular the conclusions are not reasonable, nor supported by evidence.
It would be nice if we could weed-out extremist non-evidence based views, but then there would be no debate since the primary source of half of the debate, the IPCC, would be “weeded out”.
Unfortunately, it’s human nature.
A crank on our side is just a crank.
A crank on the other side is proof that everyone on that side is crazy.
You’re just codifying the use of a slur, and every other person that uses it can now refer back to your support as evidence that slurs are justifiable with the proper “context”. Big mistake IMHO.
My point is that if you call someone a ‘denier’ you have to frame what it is that they are denying. The word is far too general EVEN WITHIN climate talk, as is witnessed above by saying, “Then there is another group of deniers.” I (and lots of others here) deny that catastrophe will occur as a result of our emissions of CO2. But i don’t deny that we have some effect on the environment from our actions, though I think the effect is small. I don’t deny the physical process of how CO2 works within the atmosphere, but negative feedbacks work too. If I am to be labelled a denier, then I want to know what that person is saying I am denying.
The caveats are illegitimate . This is a dark day in WUWT.
The problem is more than just the use of labels.
Why do the alarmists get the less inflammatory “warmistas” label, and skeptics get the holocaust inferred “deniers” label. Especially when in truth the alarmists are denying a whole lot more than the skeptics.
Yes. Deniers. There are some who deny that CO2 absorbs electromagnetic radiation and hence a whole slew of thermodynamic effects that follow, including a surface temperature that is warmer with a CO2 containing atmosphere than without. Effects that have been documented and carefully measured in great detail by many researchers, most of whom don’t really care a whit about climate. They design other things, like blast furnaces, radiant heaters, cooling towers. Things that work. Things that assume CO2 is, for want of a better term, a greenhouse gas. The sky dragons deny science that is so settled we call it engineering. They give the rest of us a bad name. And that name is denier.
Singer casts the net quite wide, for example, there are the various groups he categorises as follows:
“Then there is another group of d*niers who accept the existence of the greenhouse effect…” – I see some legitimate lines of inquiry in that paragraph.
CO2 absorbs electromagnetic radiation
==================
CO2 also absorbs IR radiation from the sun, and radiates some of this to space. This has a net effect of cooling the earth, as some energy that would have otherwise reached the earth is otherwise intercepted by CO2 and radiated to space.
Also, CO2 absorbs energy from rising air, and radiates some of this to space. This has the effect of cooling the atmosphere, which ultimately cools the surface when the air descends, as compared to an atmosphere without CO2.
Both these factors to some degree offset the warming that results from CO2 absorbing IR from the surface and radiating this back to the surface.
Whether to sum of these effects is positive of negative depends on the ratio of LWR/SWR from the sun, as well as the rate of vertical circulation of the atmosphere. Neither of which depend on CO2 concentrations.
Katabasis: Did we read the same article? The line you quote . . . Factually correct. There are those who claim CO2 levels, as seen over the last 50 years, are attributable entirely to increasing warmth, while also claiming that temperatures haven’t increased. As Dr. Curry says, my cognitives are dissonating. There are those who “support” this claim, yet deny the fact that we can find clear evidence that a proportion of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere contains carbon, long isolated from cosmic rays,atomic bomb tests, etc., that is, carbon dioxide with carbon from fossil fuels. These people too give the rest of us that bad name. Singer is pointing out that one need not deny science to prove that CAGW is a myth (emphasis on the C). Convincing people who are not well versed in science that science tells us that there really isn’t anything to worry about is a lot easier when one doesn’t deny science.
I don’t know of these people who deny the law of thermodynamics in the debate. Anyone denying the laws of thermodynamics may also believe the earth is 6,000 years old and so who cares. It would be dishonest to conflate people who deny simple natural laws with people who feel the laws of thermodynamics are mis-applied.
A capable designer knows that if you do not understand the relationships between components of the design you will never have a good design. It is what differentiates a poor design from good design, a well designed blast furnace (or anything else) from a badly designed one.
The green house effect is only one component of climate. It is ignorant to claim understanding of how the climate works because we understand thermodynamics. It is like claiming to know how a combustion engine works because we understand fire. Or understanding how the human bodies work because of an understanding of fluid mechanics.
Yes. Climate. One heck of a system.
what are they … like 3 people in the world ?
Fredberple. Your assertion that CO2 absorbs energy coming from the sun is correct. However. The wavelengths of absorption tend to the longer wavelength end of the EMR spectrum. As such, a lot of energy gets through the CO2 coming in and warms the surface. The energy radiating out from the hot surface is at longer wavelengths, hence CO2 (and water) tend to force a hotter “hot side” to allow for thermal equilibrium.
It seems like you’re forgetting that CO2 is a very, very small part of what makes up our “greenhouse gases” when water vapor is included, and only an absolute fool would not include water vapor in their argument.
I am reminded in these debates over whether the Laws of Thermodynamics support or refute CAGW of some really funny stories my father, an electronics engineer back in the 3rd quarter of the last century, would tell after a day working on US Navy ships as a contractor in San Diego. The Navy EEs were very well trained in electronics theory, but they just couldn’t get their heads around the fact that when you scale from the abstract molecular level to an actual radio, you introduce a whole slew of unintended consequences of material juxtapositions and interactions that my father included in his mental “model”, even for a “simple” function, but which the Navy guys left out of theirs. He would make a setting on an instrument that the EEs knew was outside theoretical bounds for the parameter, and yet perfect operation always ensued. He never put the Navy guys down, just said that he had perfect confidence that over time they would learn to enhance their knowledge of the physics as they encountered the way electrons flow in multi-component, multi-material manufactured artifacts.
My point is that, measuring what the observers believe are the same process in the laboratory setting and the real-world setting, we may find context to have some importance. Some of the d*niers who pick up on this kind of problem with CAGW exegeses, it seems to me, may not actually be d*nying the GHE, merely d*nying that it alone, in an atmosphere of rising pC02, neatly explains GW. However, the rhetoric on this point does usually miss any subtle points related to context, and it is easy to encounter in such findings the fallacious claim that since a specific result on one atmospheric measurement does not match a (supposedly) analogous measurement in the lab setting, that there cannot therefore be any such thing as “the GHE” in the atmosphere.
Luckily, here at WUWT, as soon as anyone posts any such “basic physics” sermons that either mischaracterize the actual physics, or make logical oversteps, one of our many “basic physicists” sets the record straight forthwith.
As a labeled denier i can prove you wrong. We dont deny the properties of co2. the only thing we deny is the automatic asumption you all seems to have that backradiation must convert to heat at the surface. The surface has a higher temperature than the back radiation represent and thus no energy is exchanged form air to ground. And that we learned from the law of thermodynamics.
If you are going to label me a denier please use the correct reason….
Alx April 16, 2015 at 6:49 am
” Anyone denying the laws of thermodynamics may also believe the earth is 6,000 years old and so who cares. It would be dishonest to conflate people who deny simple natural laws with people who feel the laws of thermodynamics are mis-applied.”
It would also be dishonest to conflate people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old with anyone denying the laws of thermodynamics.
SR
“””””….. But laboratory data show that CO2 absorbs IR radiation very strongly. …..”””””
Well I’m a Fred Singer fan, but I did find this statement from his essay to be troublesome.
I have not one scintilla of doubt, that a CO2 molecule can and does “Strongly absorb IR radiation.” Notably in the Long IR spectral region around 15 micron wavelength, and also in the region around 4.0 microns as well as other places.
My problem with the “laboratory demonstrations of ‘strong IR absorption by CO2’ ” is that these measurements DO NOT typically use a laboratory source Of LWIR radiation, that is appropriate to the effect in the atmosphere.
The sun for example emits approximately 99% of its total radiant energy as it arrives at earth, at wavelengths no longer than that 4.0 micron CO2 absorption band. So some of that solar radiant energy will actually get absorbed by the atmospheric CO2; which means it WILL NOT reach the ocean surface as solar radiation, nor the land, so that is actually a surface cooling effect of CO2.
My Infrared handbook also shows CO2 absorption bands at about 1.4 microns (1.3-1.5) and also at 1.9 microns (1.8-2.0) and between 2.3-3.2 microns, so presumably somewhat more than 1% of the solar spectrum incoming energy gets absorbed by atmospheric CO2 and thus never reaches the surface as solar spectrum energy.
Now all of those bands I just mentioned, also have H2O bands at the same places, so how much of those regions is water absorbed and how much is CO2 absorbed I cannot tell.
No they do not both absorb the same wavelengths, because the individual spectral lines do not match for CO2 and H2O.
Just coincidently, these wavelength from 1.3 to 3.2 microns, happen to be extremely strongly absorbed in sea water, within way less than 50 microns of the surface, So they Would tend to cause enhanced evaporation if they did reach the surface. So those wavelengths are not going to become deep ocean stored energy (in my view).
In any case this results in less solar spectrum energy at the surface so it must be a cooling feedback, as is the associated water vapor absorptions of solar spectrum energy going back to as short as 700 nm wavelength.
But an important point is that the Long Wave Infra Red Radiant Spectrum emitted by the earth surface or atmosphere at a global mean Temperature of 288 K contains virtually NO IR radiant energy at wavelengths shorter than 5.0 microns, so the 4.0 and shorter wavelength CO2 absorption bands are completely inactive, as regards involvement in CO2 inspired feedback of surface emitted LWIR via “back radiation” or “down welling radiation” or whatever you want to call it.
It can only be the 13.5 -16.5 micron CO2 band that is in anyway involved in the so-called green house effect; and whether greenhouses work the way they do or not, we ALL know exactly what is meant be the greenhouse effect as it involves IR active gases in the atmosphere.
But meanwhile, back at Dr. Singer’s laboratory measurements of very strong CO2 absorption of IR Radiation.
Well I agree completely; BUT I’ll wager that NOT ONE of those laboratory IR absorption experiments ever used an LWIR radiation source that is operating at a black body Temperature of 288 K which would be the appropriate source to use to find out just how much (or how little) actual Temperature increase of the sample actually occurs.
The “globar” or similar sources of infrared radiation operate at Temperatures of hundreds of deg. C and those will in fact emit screeds of 4.0 and shorter wavelength IR wavelengths that are CO2 active.
The totally ludicrous CO2 demo done by “The Science Guy” , Bill Nye using a 100 Watt incandescent light bulb, is a source that operates at one half of the Temperature of the solar surface, so it is 1/16th the surface brightness of the sun (total spectrum). That is 10,000 times as bright as a 288 K atmospheric or surface of the earth source, and the peak spectral radiance, is at 1.0 micron wavelength rather than 10.0 microns wavelength, and at that peak wavelength, it is 100,000 times brighter than the surface of the earth at 15 deg C or 288 K.
1.0 microns is a wavelength that is very strongly absorbed by water vapor, and I doubt that Nye’s air samples were dry enough to have excluded water absorption heating from his experiment.
In any case, I think Dr. Singer should be careful about relating laboratory measurements of CO2 infrared absorption with the real world practical sources of 10.0 micron LWIR emitted from the earth surface or from the atmosphere.
Yes CO2 does absorb at 10.0 microns; but as to just how much that increases either air Temperature or subsequently the ground Temperature due to back radiation, is another question altogether.
A related problem with the accepted model of reality, as exemplified by the Kevin Trenberth et al global energy model, that has always bothered me, is that he mentions surface to atmosphere conducted (heat) energy at so many W.m^-2 and also surface to atmosphere Latent “heat” of evaporation both of which are of course “heat energy” amounts; but then he blithely sums these with other “forcings” which are actually power densities of EM radiant energy sources, from the sun or elsewhere.
It seems to me to be erroneous to add Temperature changes in the atmosphere from actual heat energy inputs, to those that might result from non radiative absorption of EM radiation sources.
The heat sources should directly result in Temperature changes. The Radiation source absorptions have to go through additional gyrations before becoming atmospheric Temperature changes.
Am I the only one bothered by this. It seems to me that all forcings are NOT the same.
G
Then you must deny the Gas Laws, to start with. Indeed, it is such Process Engineers who make the most cogent arguments for ‘denial’. Brett
“””””……
John Eggert
April 16, 2015 at 7:17 am
Fredberple. Your assertion that CO2 absorbs energy coming from the sun is correct. However. The wavelengths of absorption tend to the longer wavelength end of the EMR spectrum. ……””””””
So John; what is your source for such an assertion ?? I ca find no basis for supporting such a claim.
The solar spectrum extra-terrestrially is fairly close to a 5760 K black body radiation spectrum, with some anomalies at the UV end.
Such a spectrum, has its peak spectral radiant intensity (per micron) at 500 nm wavelength.
Everybody who claims to have some understanding of the Planck theoretical black body radiation spectrum (there is ONLY a theoretical model, since BBs are not real); knows that a BB spectrum has 25.0% of its total radiant energy at wavelengths shorter than the peak which is a half micron for the solar spectrum, and therefore 75% of the energy is at wavelengths longer than the peak wavelength.
Moreover only 1% of the total energy is at wavelengths shorter than half od the peak wavelength, or 250 nm for the sun, and only 1% of the total energy is at wavelengths greater than 8 times the peak wavelength which for the sun is at 4.0 microns.
So there is considerably less than 1% of the solar spectrum energy that falls in the 4.0 micron CO2 asymmetrical stretch mode band of CO2, but somewhat more available at the shorter wavelength CO2 bands between 1.3 and 3.2 microns wavelength.
By the time you get to the all important degenerate bending mode of CO2 at 13.5-16.5 microns, which is the cause of all the global warming fuss, the solar energy remaining is many orders of magnitude down from its peak, so that mode is not involved in solar radiation absorption.
So there really is NO available solar spectrum energy to be absorbed by CO2 beyond 4.0 microns, and as I explained, less than 1% for that 4 micron band.
The earth LWIR radiation spectrum, which cools us down, has a peak wavelength at 20 times that of the solar spectrum or 10.0 microns corresponding to a 288 K effective BB Temperature, which is the supposed 15 deg. C mean surface or lower Troposphere Temperature of the earth. That is the number which has skyrocketed to dizzying heights of less than 1.0 degree C since the 1850s start of the modern records. Why that matters when the total daily temperature range on earth on any day is perhaps 100 deg. C from coldest to hottest places, and could in extreme cases be as much as 150 deg. C.
So whether the 165 year change is one deg. C or 2 deg. C seems pretty irrelevant to me.
But NO ! I do not discount the possibility that such a change has occurred in the last 165 years; but I do not place a lot of credibility in the recorded data prior to about 1980, since much of that data comes from rather ad hoc ocean water Temperatures, which don’t even correlate with oceanic air Temperatures.
So I believe that climate changes. I believe that it has NEVER not changed, and I believe that CO2 does delay the escape of LWIR radiant energy from the earth surface, but so does water vapor, and much more so than CO2 does.
I do not believe that water vapor needs to get kicked into action by an increase in atmospheric CO2. H2O is perfectly capable of interacting with both the solar radiation incoming, and the earth LWIR radiation leaving, and it needs NO assistance from CO2 or ANY other catalyst to get it up and running.
But that is just my opinion of the situation, and others will probably have different views from mine. Mine are based on reading the available literature on experiment weather / climate data recording, and my understanding of simple basic Physics concepts.
No I pay NO attention whatsoever to ANY and all supposed climate computer “models” of what is supposed to happen, as I see no evidence that the models do, or even attempt to reproduce what is already recorded history.
Assuming that the earth is an isotropically illuminated and isotropically radiating isothermal body, as in the Trenberth model, makes absolutely no sense to me.
The earth rotates and receives a beam of solar radiation at a mean level of 1362 Wm^-2 over the yearly cycle, which never stops, but varies a small amount with solar activity. It is not even remotely an isothermal body radiating at any constant effective BB temperature; in fact it radiates mostly from the hottest daytime tropical desert areas, with very little cooling going on from the earth’s coldest areas (by more than an order of magnitude.
So I’m a skeptic of the catastrophe viewpoint; mostly because I see no real basis for such alarm.
g
“””””…..
george e. smith
April 16, 2015 at 6:42 pm
“””””……
John Eggert
April 16, 2015 at 7:17 am …..”””””
I see a slip of the tongue down below.
I used the term “Spectral Radiant Intensity” in reference to the solar and BB spectra.
That is an error and should read “Spectral Radiance.” The Planck curve is not a plot of Radiant Intensity (W / steradian) per micron (of wavelength) but Watts per metre squared per steradian per micron of wavelength.
Chemists tend to use a plot of a frequency or wave number basis, which would be watt per metre squared per steradian per wave number. Such a plot of the solar spectrum would not have a peak at the frequency corresponding to 500 nm wavelength. I don’t use that form so I don’t know what the peak wave number is for the solar spectrum on a frequency basis.
G
@ george e. smith April 16, 2015 at 1:11 pm
george e., ….. I also found two (2) of the professor emeritus’s statements quite troubling …. and utterly disappointing as a matter of fact. To wit:
“DUH”, the per se “greenhouse effect” is determined by the measurement in the “change in temperature” …. and/or ….. the “thermal energy content” of the entity that is being measured, …. irrespectively of the direction the energy is flowing. It is the “quantity/direction” that matters, not just the direction.
Yeah, “Right”, and a sponge absorbs H2O very strongly ….. but iffen you dip a sponge in a large swimming pool it won’t affect the level of the water enough to measure the change.
the natural sinks
=============
what we do know is that natural sinks are increasing in size, and this rate of increase does not depend on the total CO2 in the atmosphere, rather it depends on how much humans are releasing each year, which is a fantastic co-incidence.
Every year 1/2 of human emissions for the year disappear into the natural sinks. But how is this possible, because the increase in the sinks should result from total CO2, not the human component. How can the natural sinks identify human emissions?
This argues strongly that there is something going on with CO2 that is poorly understood by science. Or there is a most amazing co-incidence at work, because if current theories are correct, the natural sinks must grow according to total CO2.
The enlarged CO2 sinks give me worries – if anthropogenic CO2 were to be suddenly reduced by political actions, the system would overshoot to low concentrations, in response. Low CO2 levels would be very bad for veggies, critters, and humans alike. GK
The ocean sink is based on the difference in concentration between the atmosphere and the ocean. As the atmospheric concentration increases, of course the oceans will be able to absorb more until equilibrium is reached again. (Since the area of transfer is limited to the surface, and the oceans are deep, it takes a long to reach equilibrium.)
Another major sink is plant life. As CO2 increases, so does the amount of plant material on the planet.
Another major sink comes from the weathering of rocks, as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the amount of CO2 being weathered also increases.
When they say that 1/2 of the CO2 generated by humans is being absorbed, they are just using lazy language, they mean that the increase in CO2 concentration is only half what would be expected given how much CO2 was generated by man. They are claiming that the sinks are differentiating between human and non-human sources.
By trying to make such arguments you fall into the category that Dr. Singer was talking about. People who make the rest of us look bad.
@MarkW – I was primarily thinking of the biosphere as the reason for the over-response. High CO2 (and wamth) promotes an expanded biosphere, by lets say 30%. Greens then reduce CO2 anthro-emissions, while the biosphere, is at an enlarged state (big sink) causing an overshoot in the negative direction. Any subsequent cooling would, of course, accelerate CO2 solubility into seawater.
Sorry I “make the rest of us look bad”. Interesting point to bring to a skeptical argument. GK
Plants?
J – Yes plants, bacteria, fungus, plankton which feed insects, reptiles and mammals. GK
G.Karst, I was replying to ferd, should have made that clear.
When they say that 1/2 of the CO2 generated by humans is being absorbed, they are just using lazy language
=========
no, you fail to grasp the argument. total CO2 is increasing at rate A. Human CO2 is increasing at rate B, which is a much higher rate than A.
The sinks should be increasing proportional to rate (A+B), according to theory. But they are not. Observations continue to show the sinks are increasing proportional to rate B.
This cannot be possible over any period of time according to AGW theory. But it is happening and has been happening for 60+ years.
Ferd,
The sinks are not responding to rate B neither to rate A+B, they are responding to the total increase in the atmosphere above the equilibrium for the current temperature. Thus sum(A+B-S) over time.
Where A natural emissions, B human emissions and S natural sinks.
That the increase in the atmosphere is near halve the human emissions per year is not fully coincidence, it is caused by the slightly quadratic increase of human emissions over time, which causes a slightly quadratic increase in the atmosphere and a slightly quadratic increase in sink rate. That all gives a quite linear ratio between human emissions/year and increase rate in the atmosphere…
Ferdinand,
Please indulge a school marm.
“To halve” is a verb. You mean “half”.
Cathy R,
Thank you. I didn’t want to correct Ferdinand, but he has been misusing ‘halve’ for ‘half’ all along. I didn’t say anything because he speaks at least four languages, so I’m not one to criticize.
I speak other languages, mostly badly, and would appreciate correction, except that in some languages there would be no time left over for conversation if every error were pointed out to me.
He is a scholar and gentleman, so I hope will not be offended. To a native English speaker, it’s a little jarring, so distracts from appreciating his lucid expositions.
Catherine,
Thanks for the correction, no offence at all, to the contrary…
Some mistakes seems to be rather hard to correct, if one uses the wrong one for a long time, half/halve is one of them in my memory… I had the same problem with often using wich for which, but the automatic spelling corrector then knocks on my fingers, which it doesn’t for half/halve…
I like to learn different languages, even if only a few words of the local language when we are traveling. Be it that it is getting more and more difficult with a fading memory…
We have the advantage here to live at the crossroads of different cultures: 150 km (100 miles) in any direction, they speak Dutch (little difference with Flemish, officially the same language – like English English and American English) or French or German or English (2 hours between Brussels and London with the high speed Eurostar train…).
“the natural sinks must grow according to total CO2”
I would have thought that they would have grown according to AVAILABLE/USABLE atmospheric CO2.
For plants, anything below 200-250 ppm is pretty much unusable so its the growth above this value, due partly to human activity, that has helped the biosphere expand.
The planet luv CO2.. it is one of the major building blocks of life on this planet, and it has been at very low values for a long, long time.
To see Dr Singer validate the denier slur is disappointing…
Dr Singer clearly shows he is not a politician. For a politician understands that to achieve a common desire that you unite people….not divide people. The alarmists agenda will do nothing meaningful to affect climate and will cause great harm to our economic life and reduce our personal freedoms. It is a titanic struggle of great importance. And Dr Singer is doing what? Attacking those who share his desire to stop the madness of the climate alarmists. Some communications unite people with a common purpose….this article divides people with a common purpose. Dr Singer’s article is one of 100% pure ego. Perhaps one day Dr Singer will regain control of his ego and look back with embarrassment that he wrote such an article…
“Dr Singer clearly shows he is not a politician. For a politician understands that to achieve a common desire that you unite people….not divide people. ”
—–
You really have missed the progressive’s primary tactic.
They like to divide people up every way they can.
Then you preach to each group differently.
1%, poor, women, race, religion, union busting or what you like to chew on at night etc.
They want everybody needing them..begging them to pass a law so they may be saved.
Somehow it has gotten lost that we have no constitutional right to not be offended.
So far only the progressives and media folks supports this.
For any politician to achieve a result, they need to build a coalition of at least 51%+. Even the alarmist politicians need to build coalitions of 51%+. The goal of skeptics is to convince at least 51%+ of the people that alarmists are not credible. Dr Singer’s attack on skeptics that think differently than him serves to divide the skeptic side which only serves to further the alarmist cause. If we pass purity tests on our own side, then Dr Singer and those that think like him can feel “right” however this is not about feeling right…it is about stopping the alarmists and their insane agenda… Let’s spend our time dismantling the alarmist arguments…rather than attacking people who share common goals with us skeptics…
John S. You convince those in the middle by convincing them that your side is the most reasonable.
Having unreasonable people pushing unreasonable positions pushes those who’s minds are not made up, into the other camp.
That is by protecting the 1%, you offend the 20% in the middle.
It’s been the extremist doomsayers who have done the most damage to the warmist camp.
I think it’s quite appropriate – and I’m astonished at how sensitive so many of the commenters here are. As far as I’m concerned he’s calling a spade a spade. I could go further and note that skeptic comment threads sometimes sound like the meeting of a witches’ coven – just like those of the warmistas. It looks like Osgood’s cognitive balance factors are, indeed, always in play, at least with many people. I.e. if your words don’t push the requisite feel-good buttons, many people begin to get uneasy and annoyed. Thus, the underlying message of many of these comments seems to be, “Fred, get back in line!”
Above everyone are those who know where the origo is and can also tag people around it. Once we have sunken to this level, they also need a label. Any suggestions?
What Anthony said.
[snip – pointless name calling – Anthony]
“Most everyone seems to agree that this earlier increase (1910-1940) is caused by natural forces whose nature the IPCC does not specify. ”
“A long-term increasing trend in solar activity in the early 20th century may have augmented the
warming recorded during this interval, together with internal variability, greenhouse gas increases and a hiatus
in volcanism.”
That’s not specifying, that’s guessing.
Would that be the same increase that continued and grew bigger in the latter half of the 20th century, not ending until the current solar cycle?
Hmm. The Solar Maximum (last one was ~450 BC, IRRC) manifested as recently as 1960. This makes for some correlation with the overall record, but I think there is not enough effect for a prime driver.
Besides, if you are going to lean on solar, you have to consider that there was a Gleissberg cycle early on and an overall increase after that. So if solar is an issue (which I doubt), it would have had an overall warming effect, and that would have to be subtracted from the attributed effects of CO2.
It is getting to the point where the CAGW (not mere AGW) argument is getting so untenuous that I can’t see an argument. As the recent NASA paper points out, the “missing heat” is not indicated to be residing in the deep oceans. And if it is being convected out or reflected back, then Spencer and Lindzen are vindicated, so that does the CAGW crowd no good.
I surmise, however, that you are middling high on the AGW scale, but are not at the stage where you are standing on the CAGW side of the line. I.e., that you think it is a crisis that needs immediate attention, but not an existential sword of Damocles.
Yes, there is a greenhouse effect. But it is a log effect, so at ≈400 ppm there isn’t much warming being done. Most of the warming has already happened:
And we can see that even if CO2 doubled from here, the rise in temperature would probably not even be measurable.
[snip – you aren’t going to bring your “pressure broadening” argument from the other thread onto this one – Anthony]
@dbstealey
Graph is a fake. As I can see it assumes temperature increase of about 0.4 Celcius degree per CO2 doubling.
Splice,
I take it you have done the laboratory experiment and know the exact value a doubling of CO2 concentration will provide. Or are you just spouting the consensus that climate sensitivity has to be about 3K? 280 to 400 is almost 2/3 of a doubling and the temperature has increased 0.7K. Of course we were coming out of the little ice age so some of that 0.7K is undoubtedly natural. 0.4K may be about right.
CO2 doubling is a red herring, as it makes us look away from the real world. As CO2 partitions 50 to 1 into water, we would have to add 51 times the amount of CO2 in the air to double the CO2 in the air. 50 out of 51 molecules would go into the oceans.
There is simply not enough available carbon for us to burn to do much more than raise CO2 by 20%. Talking about doubling is bogus and a waste of time.
The five-year half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere should also be mentioned, as it means that CO2 is very dynamic and our emissions do not accumulate. If CO2 could do what we say, ceasing all CO2 emissions would have no detectable effect on the climate, any possible effect being in the hundredths or thousandths of a degree.
Yeah… kinda.
ln 560/280 = ln 2 = 0.69
ln 400/280 = 0.36
So, on logarithmical scale, 143% is about half doubling. Clear? 🙂
J Peter,
It is more than ‘less than half of a doubling’. Not two thirds, but over one half on ln scale.
If I’m not demented, that is. That’s way I asked if I sounded clear 🙂
Hugh, log2 (400/280) = .5146….. About half a doubling assuming exponential growth. But is it exponential?
Isn’t everyone forgetting that CO2 is just considered a multiplier/amplifier of the real warming gas water vapor? And that multiplying factor in the models is mostly a guess?
If you are talking doublings then 2/3 of a doubling means 2^(2/3) = 1.5874
So 1.5874 x 280 = 444.47
So we aren’t even close to 2/3 of a doubling yet
I suggest using numbers we know, from the MLO record.
315 ppm in 1957/58 up to 400 today which is 0.34 of a doubling.
j.peter@baloney.com says:
Dbstealey has been demanding measurements of man made global warming now for a long time, and it seems that you’ve finally pointed out the measurements he was asking for.
Isn’t this little alarmist amusing? He actually believes that after years of asking for empirical, testable, verifiable measurements quantifying the specific fraction of global warming attributable to human CO2 emissions, that someone like Gates would suddenly produce what was asked for — when no one else has ever said they could produce any empirical, testable MMGW measurements? The MMGW scare has colonized the minds of some folks to the point that they will believe anything. j.peter is one of them. And of course, that isn’t what Gates did anyway. So far, no one has produced those measurements.
If we had a widely accepted measurement of AGW, then the central question would finally be answered: what is the climate sensitivity number?
The IPCC can’t answer that. They began guesstimating up to 6º+, but in the years since then they have done a major climbdown. Now they’re still too high, but at least they are going in the right direction.
Prof. Richard Lindzen, holder of the Alfred P. Sloan Meteorology Chair at M.I.T., states that the sensitivity number is ≈0.66 for a doubling of CO2. That seems to reflect observations. Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi states that the sensitivity is 0.00, based on measurements of LWR. Others estimate from zero to around 2º per doubling. But no one knows for sure.
There is no widespread agreement on the sensitivity number, for the simple reason that there are no real world measurements quantifying AGW. There are models. There are guesstimates. But there are no empirical, testable measurements.
That can be explained one of two ways: either AGW is too small to measure, or it doesn’t exist. I personally think AGW exists. But since it is too minuscule to measure, it can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes.
“If we had a widely accepted measurement of AGW, then the central question would finally be answered: what is the climate sensitivity number?”
how little you understand…..
When someone has absolutely zero evidence, or facts, but only their eco-religious belief, then they will write a content-free post saying something like:
how little you understand…..
It takes the place of thinking. No wonder Kuhn lost the argument. That is the sum total of his knowledge, evidence, or information.
Keep amusing us, Kuhn. You are a perfect example of a know-nothing numpty.
“315 ppm in 1957/58 up to 400 today which is 0.34 of a doubling.”
Log2(400/315)=.34464817…. So my first excursion into the math of this science tells me there are so many ways to manipulate the measurement scale that almost any number can be presented to an uninformed public.
Personally I think base 2 logs are a reasonable tool to calculate growth rates of many things; but feel free to correct me.
” so at ≈400 ppm there isn’t much warming being done.”
what is your evidence for this claim?
Kuhn (challenging dbstealey. Yet again.)
??? It is fundamental from the thermodynamic equations, the radiation equations and the kinetic energy calc’s of each gas molecule (CO2, O2, N2, water vapor), the gas concentrations of each, and the net earth heat balance.
And the fact that global average temp’s haven’t gone up as CO2 increased almost 34% just confirms that the equations (the class room) are following the real world.
Google Hansen’s model in the IPCC reports for a theoretical explanation. Monckton has a more complicated version of this simple formula.
RACookPE1978,
No, it’s just 0.5 * ln(CO2) with the coefficient literally pulled out of thin air. Here’s what fundamental thermodynamic, radiation and kinetic energy calcs have to say:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SZQS7bzEf1U/VMtageyyD9I/AAAAAAAAATk/QPvS-LfWFxs/s1600/TMEAN%2Band%2BCMIP5%2BRCP60%2Bvs%2BCO2.png
As Dr. Singer alludes in the head post, we’ve seen some pauses before:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MW_NJp28Udc/VNS3EAEqpOI/AAAAAAAAAUs/hjhuLZFkdoM/s1600/hadcrut4%2Bhiatuses.png
We’re 20 years into this one, or about half of the length of the two previous. Note that the slope of this one is slightly positive whilst the two previous were clearly negative. This is consistent with an 80ish year cycle of internal variability acting alternatively with/against the increased radiative forcing from CO2. The 80 year cycle correlates well with the the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is well-documented but poorly understood. Hence making predictions like “we’ve got 20 more years of ‘hiatus'” are not scientifically valid.
‘Tis a tempting wager, though.
Errata: slope of this one is slightly positive
s/b: …just slightly negative.
DK, do you believe that 400ppm CO2 (or 500, or 600) makes this planet more dangerous for humans, and other life?
What is your evidence?
do you believe that 400ppm CO2 (or 500, or 600) makes this planet more dangerous for humans, and other life?
As 550 ppm is twice the preindustrial level and will cause increase in sea level by at least 10 meters
http://www.floodmap.net/?ll=41.010686,-37.275281&z=4&e=10
???
When you want to learn why you and your graph are wrong.
you should ask Dr. Spencer.
this is an essential part of his work with the MSU/AMSU instruments.
if you are corret, the MSU/AMSU data is wrong and not working.
Ask him, he will give you all the experiments and measurements you need.
Splice, that’s not evidence, it’s speculation. Actually it’s pure fantasy.
Unless you’re trying to be funny.
Gates, the models have no hindcast ability. they only show agreement with the past because they are shown the past. the predictive power is the true test of the model, and the current version has failed in a more dramatic way than the previous attempts. the graph of temp observations against a models training period to attempt to show skill it does not have is just pure propaganda. omit the satellites? why?
why present us propaganda? we dont need lies with every graph you guys produce.
it would be nice to see just some real graphs from you guys for a change so we can see that you actually are trying to make some case, instead it just looks like you are just used car salesmen trying to flog of a beaten up car.
the facts are that no matter which way you look at it, the current batch of models fail to fit reality. they are wrong. the understanding is wrong. they need to be corrected, and no-one will believe the correction unless there is an admission of failure.
The temperature graph you post shows clearly how much more influence the ocean cycles have over global temperature. considering the warming started before 1800, and the sea level has been rising since 1900, well before co2 had any influence, i would think it would only be logical to conclude that there has been warming.. natural warming from multiple sources. if you remove both the rise from the little ice age and the ocean cycles, what do you have left over the past 60 years? peak to peak the rise from 1870s to 1930s was about 0.4°C (natural), the 1940s to 2000s was about 0.45°C(natural+120ppm co2), so you are in effect saying that co2 has caused the climate to change by 0.05°C from an additional 120ppm.
Basic physics
Your claim that a level of 550ppm will cause oceans to rise by 10m is not supported by any known science.
It is not evidence, it’s a projection based on faulty models.
Sure, at least. And immediately. Have you checked what scientists say?
For you to understand this perhaps you should think of a simple analogy. If you were sieving sand with a specific size of sieve and you kept adding the same size sieve underneath it what would happen? No extra sand would be sieved because the sieve you are using only has the ability to catch sand grains down to a certain size.
CO2 is the sieve in this loose analogy and CO2 only reacts with a narrow band of IR and there is a limited amount of this band of IR to be captured. As dbstealy points out, most of this absorption takes place with the first traces of CO2 in the atmosphere.
mobihci,
Ok, you’ve told me what you think is wrong. Tell me how you’d do it instead.
I haven’t written a thing about satellites in this thread. What are you talking about?
Your question and statement imply you know the actual truth. How about showing me your evidence?
All models are always wrong, else they would be reality.
How?
Well, I know for a fact that you don’t speak for everyone. Namely me.
That statement is extremely dependent on what timeframe one considers.
From 1800 to about 1840 the Sun is one candidate …
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/itsi_wls_ann.png
… which is not in dispute as a known natural forcing. What other natural factors are you thinking about?
I’m not saying that, you are. Here’s how the IPCC figures it since 1950 in AR5:
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig10-5.jpg
Figure 2. Assessed likely ranges (whiskers) and their mid-points (bars) for attributable warming trends over the 1951–2010 period due to well-mixed greenhouse gases (GHG), other anthropogenic forings (OA), natural forcings (NAT), combined anthropogenic forcings (ANT), and internal variability. The HadCRUT4 observations are shown in black with the 5–95% uncertainty range due to observational uncertainty.
Same chapter, showing what CMIP3 and CMIP5 do when only natural forcings are considered vs. natural + anthro:
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_FigFAQ10.1-1.jpg
Brandon Gates – in your post you have drawn a trend line of 13 years in length from the start of the current hiatus.
But, you have chosen to compare this with 40 years periods during which the temperature trend was negative. Is this fair?
You chose the start dates. 1870, 1935, 2001 – so let’s take a look at the first 13years of these periods.
And abracadabra – suddenly the 2001 period shows a decline and the other periods were periods of RAPIDLY rising temps.
And what this shows, I suppose, is that choosing dates for trend lines can be used to prove almost anything whatsoever.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/from/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1870/to:1883/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1935/to:1948/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/to:2014/trend
‘Splice’ says:
Graph is a fake
Baseless assertion noted.
There are other charts from different sources, which show exactly the same thing. Here is still another one:
Those charts accurately reflect observations. And I note that the chart Gates posted is no more than another future prediction, which shows a ≈1ºC temperature rise from another 100 ppm CO2. Since no alarmist prediction has ever happened, I have my doubts about that one, too. But even if global T rises another degree, on net balance it will be entirely beneficial.
Next, ‘Splice’ posted a fabricated map claiming that with only another 100 ppm CO2 rise, we will see a TEN METER rise in sea levels — 33 feet!!
The more wrong the alarmist crowd is, the more extreme their scares get. But their false alarms aren’t working any more. They’ve cried “WOLF!!” too much and too often, for too long. No one believes them any more.
A 10 meter rise in sea levels, from only a 25% rise in CO2?? Since CO2 has already risen by about 35% with no unusual sea level rise or acceleration, how does that work, exactly?
If a skeptic had made such a preposterous statement, there would be other skeptics saying he was wrong. So where are the alarmists? So far, not a single one has reined in ‘Splice’ for his wild-eyed scare. No one has even questioned it.
That’s the difference between skeptics and alarmists. Skeptics criticize the occasional truly ridiculous (and rare) assertion from other skeptics. Anthony does that regularly. But alarmists never police their own. As they say, silence is concurrence.
So I suppose they all believe there will be a 33 foot rise in sea levels when CO2 reaches 500 ppm. Whatever is Algore going to do with his beachfront mansions? Sit on the roof?
indefatigablefrog,
I think it’s fair when the charge being rebutted is “18 years of no temperature rise”.
Yup, trend analyses will always be sensitive to endpoints. That’s where plotting the 1st derivative can help out:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/derivative/mean:360/scale:360/plot/jisao-pdo/mean:360
Gates, dont you find it interesting the even the IPCC use the same propaganda technique of showing the models training period compared with observations, and a tiny bit on the end which is prediction, a prediction that is fudged out in a mass of multi-model spaghetti? considing this-
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1.png
you must look at where the models are failing to have understanding, and that means everywhere the models predict. just turning a blind eye to the utter failure and only presenting a mess of models to obscure the truth to the viewer point to purpose, not science.
you of course will say that it is a different region than the IPCC graph etc, but the reality is, the models make that prediction above. it points clearly to the problem ie lack of understanding. this is how science is conducted and it is perfectly reasonable to expect this observation be dealt with before moving on with assumptions based on this understanding. next, a reason for this failure should be presented by those that create this obviously failed model.
as i said before, a correction and new model will do nothing to increase understand or apparent skill, it is not possible to show hindcast skill in a model that requires training until the current time. what needs to happen is an acknowledgement of the failures, and a true shift forward in understanding.
dbstealey,
That plot does also show observations between 280 and 380 ppmv inclusive.
lol, well yes, it’s not that difficult for someone to multiply the natural log of CO2 concentration by one-half then plot the first difference.
I see, so today it is possible to measure temperature response to CO2 forcing. Care to share with us the observations which finally convinced you?
mobihci,
I find it interesting that I asked you how you’d do it, and you have not answered.
I expect a lot of spaghetti due to the inherently unpredictable nature of internal variability, and I have zero issue with using model ensembles to create bounded estimates — not just for the “noise” of ocean/atmospheric couplings but for the high degree of uncertainty in the assumptions which go into producing the projections. That on top of all the things the IPCC are very open about saying could very well be wrong with CMIP5. See AR5 WGI, Box 9.2 | Climate Models and the Hiatus in Global Mean Surface Warming of the Past 15 Years: http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf
Nothing you’re saying to me is any more “interesting” than the IPCC have already told me.
One would think. However, since he habitually complains that my pointing out his gross logical fails constitute “nit-picking”, I infer that self-consistency is not one of his main operative constraints.
[Reply: Anthony told you to stop cluttering up the thread with your pressure broadening comments. Please have the courtesy to comply. ~mod.]
Why is it that … NO ONE …. has or wants to …… conduct a “closed system” environmental testing ……. in an actual outdoor “greenhouse” to measure the “warming” effect, if any, of the atmosphere inside of said “greenhouse” with different concentrations of CO2 ppm.
I mean like, construct two (2) identical “greenhouses”, one (1) containing 400 ppm CO2, the other one containing 500 ppm CO2, and begin the experiment with both at the same internal temperature …. and then let them be subjected to the “daily” environmental factors while monitoring their internal temperatures for the next 48 hours.
If the “added” CO2 causes any additional “warming” of the internal environment then the highly sensitive thermocouples (or whatever) will surely detect it.
Cheers
Hello db,
Nice graph, I have seen it many times here, as you know. Can you provide a source for the data? I am working on an idea which I will share here if it pans out.
Thanks.
First derivative of 0.5 * ln(CO2) with respect to CO2.
Source for the graph is probably here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
It is David Archibald’s guest post.
And the graph, to my eyes, looks horrible junk. You know, drawing a graph does not prove it is right nor convince the reader, if the point is quantitatively suspicious, let alone qualitatively unclear.
Put it another way: the graph looks so unconvincing that I don’t bother reading how Brandon assasinates it.
Thanks, Hugh.
That was most helpful.
Pretty accurate
@j.peter:
They are not ‘my’ graphs. They are graphs from different sources, and they all show the same thing because they are based on radiative physics. They accurately reflect real world observations.
So far I’ve posted three graphs, each from a different source, but all showing the same CO2/temperature relationship. Intelligent readers can learn a lot from those charts.
But from your comment, I see you’ve got nothin’ as usual. Just another site pest posting an ad hominem insult. You certainly won’t learn anything that way.
What about this graph from Thermal Physics by Stephen and Katherine Blundell, 2010, Oxford University Press, p. 454. It shows the radiative effect of a doubling of CO2.
http://s29.postimg.org/bu7rxdlxz/Infrared_Sky_001.jpg
The radiance of that 15 micron abosorption band at 220 K is indicative that they were emitted somewhere around the tropopause, ~10 km in altitude. The clear implication is that the atmosphere below that is opaque to radiation in that spectral region. It turns out at sea level, a few tens of meters is all it takes for transmission to drop to zero in that band.
This Beer’s Law effect refers to converting IR radiation to heat energy in the atmosphere, which on a sunny day is a wash because the same molecules can do the reverse and convert heat energy to IR radiation.
This has nothing to do with the supposed Greenhouse Effect, which stipulates that IR from the upper tropical troposphere at -17 deg C can warn Earth’s surface at 15 deg C. This is thermodynamically impossible, as the surface is ALWAYS hotter than the troposphere. Remember, the models are daylight only, solar input 24/7 because they are using a core program for star that they cooled down to a planet—stars do not do night time.
During the night, CO2, water vapor and the tiny amount of methane serve to convert heat energy in the air into IR which is lost to space. There is no solar input to counter this, so they serve to cool the atmosphere, as evidenced by how quickly the air cools down after sunset or under scudding cloud shadows on a partly cloudy day, when small local breezes kick up in the shadows.
As the warmists know that their hotspot in the tropical per troposphere has failed totally to exist, they conflate the Beer’s Law effects with it and pretend that’s the Greenhouse Effect, which it is not and does not exist under their model conditions.
They also prefer to completely ignore that evaporation and the convectional warm, moist air to altitude and the return of cold water to the surface constitutes a huge global heat engine. In their limited models, they assume that water vapor complements CO2 in it false Greenhouse Effect. Estimates are that about 85% of the solar energy input is moved away from the surface by this powerful heat engine that would ramp up in its activity with warming, serving as a negative feedback mechanism. They completely ignore this simply water cycle that we teach in grade school and does indeed exist.
Sigh, no matter how many times this nonsense is refuted, there are those who continue to cling to it.
It’s as bad as those who proclaim that we are all going to die based on the output of broken models.
higley7
You are confusing heat conduction with heat radiation. That is a pretty basic error. Radiation travels outward all the time from all things with a temperature above absolute zero. Before emitting radiation the objects have no way to detect the temperature of all other objects that might received it, whether it is 1 foot or 1 billion light years away. They just emit it. All surfaces receive all incoming radiation, whatever the temperature.
@MarkW — I’m sorry, but I’ve never seen this argument before. It follows that I have never seen it refuted. What about it is nonsense? Do you mean that warming would not increase evaporation, and/or that evaporation does not cause cooling?
Crispin’s answer is the correct explanation.
I think we’d wind up with a ~1C increase, like old Henny was saying back in aought-6.
And that amount of warming would result in what the IPCC quaintly refers to as “net benefit”.
I understood that the ‘d’nier term was used by team agw to represent anyone and everyone who merely thought humanity may not be the predominate cause of warming……
correct. the D word is applied to anyone that denies that the earth has warmed and humans are the cause, and if this process is not stopped great harm will result.
if you suggest that science doesn’t in fact know if this is true, then you are a D’er because the science is settled. labels like naysayer don’t describe the problem properly, because that is considering the problem from a science point of view, while belief and opinion are the provinces of religion and politics.
the science is never settled mor*n … this just proves you are the denier of science …
In fact, what can be stated empirically based upon geological data is that no level of CO2 in the atmosphere can have “catastrophic” effects. There is considerable “revisionist” drivel, primarily by “warmists” chasing grants that attempt, badly, to show that CO2 did bad things at various points in the geological record, but there has been no corroborative independent studies supporting any of these ideas. If CO2 in the atmosphere could cause a catastrophe, then the catastrophe would have taken place more than 250 million years ago. Constraining any discussion of CO2 effects to the last 1,000, 2,000, or even 800,000 years is cherry picking, regardless of the stance on AGW.
If CO2 does have some warming effect, and there is no sound reason to think it does not, then geological evidence suggests that on this planet that warming effect apparently tops out at a global mean temperature of about 25-deg. C, which is not a catastrophe. Similarly, due to entropic effects, there is less carbon available biologically now than there was two million years ago, and less then than 150 million years ago, and less then than at the appearance of complex life in the paleontological record. Life removes carbon from the atmosphere, much of it is loss in the deep oceans and will not become available again for a very long geologically, if ever. The vast majority of carbonate rocks on the planet are the result of biological removal of carbon from the environment, and there are immensely greater volumes of carbonate than of petroleum.
When CO2 starts getting around 4% of the atmosphere, people start dying.
However there is no chance of that happening.
I am part of the problem, I guess. I have no problem with ascribing recent warming to man. For my calcs., I “assume” that 100% of warming is anthropogenic and results directly or indirectly from CO2.
But even after all that, it is only mild lukewarming: No net feedback in evidence.
This is why I think it’s wrong to use d*nier at all. The slur was invented to tar all skeptics with the same brush, from our host to the Slay*rs whom he has banned.
To d*ny, ie be skeptical of, CACA, ie Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Alarmism, is good science. IMO the Slay*rs are unscientific. Maybe not as bad as anti-scientific biological creationists, but close. The Warmistas are also anti-scientific, IMO, because they change their data instead of their miserably failed models, among other violations of the scientific method.
“The atmospheric temperature record between 1978 and 2000 (both from satellites and, independently, from radiosondes) doesn’t show a warming. ”
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1980/to:2000/plot/uah/from:1980/to:2000/trend
I fail to understand this statement. What I see between 1978 and 2000, is warming. What I see after 2000, is insignificant warming.
Hugh,
and this is what we see since 2002.
“But once they add the CO2 increase into the models, they claim good agreement with the reported global surface temperature record. Ergo – evidence for AGW.” The same would be true if they would correctly add solar variability into the equation. Dips and spikes in TSI since 1880, match the surface temperature record quite well.
I’m sure there are other things that correlate too. The issue is that once they found that CO2 correlated they had their answer. This is CO2 as “the filler of the gap”.
Once they had positioned CO2 in the gap they had to make sure that nothing else could get a look in, because that would reduce the size of the gap and therefore the importance of CO2. (Real) scientists would say, “what else might be happening?”, while AGW pseudo-scientists say, “move along, there’s nothing to see here, it’s all settled”.
Only the left has enough blind ideological followers to run a scam this long. When you believe you are in the stratosphere of intellectualism just because of the way you vote this is the result. How this political faction got a hold of soft academia is a mystery to me. If this was the right or even a libertarian scam this phony propaganda hustle could mean the end of those two political parties. When the poop hits the fan most likely there will be a lot of” passing the puck” of blame and claiming “the science wasn’t there yet.” or “we were just being good environmentalists.” The blatant fraud and all the useless followers most be called out an dealt with in a fair and appropriate way. The breakdown of scientific integrity on this issue ans a few others is an epic violation that can’t be smoothed over.
As I told my friend Ebenezer Rabbet, I´m in the middle. THis is a very comfortable position to be in, because it allows me to listen to arguments flowing back and forth. I pick off the arguments I like, and use them to develop my own ideas, which are very practical and pragmatic. And I also integrate other issues.
Which brings me back to my favorite subject: it seems to me we are running out of fossil fuels. I realize this is a very controversial position to take, but it´s based on my own are of expertise (I have been in the business of extracting said fossil fuels for 40 years).
Anyway, when I couple the climate sensitivity described by Dr. Curry in her recent paper to accepted fossil fuel resource estimates, the global warming problem becomes a secondary issue ( it doesn´t really matter much which resource estimate one uses, except for the resource estimates prepared by the Alice in Wonderland Institute, or the guys preparing the IPCC´s RCP8.5 case).
Now I´ll give you an example of what I mean. Here´s a one page summary of the US Energy Information Agency´s 2015 Energy outlook, issued earlier this week. The URL takes you to the summary, and that links you to the 100+ page report, which makes an interesting read if you want to wade through it. I suggest you focus on the share of renewables in energy production by 2040, the CO2 emissions, and the fossil fuel prices.
The fossil fuel prices are particularly interesting. The EIA is aware we are gradually running out of easy fossil fuels to extract. They don´t make a big deal out of this, but the idea is reflected in their predictions. They predict prices will rise relentlessly in the future, in real terms. Such an increase means the industry will have to work extra hard (and at higher expense) to deliver the products to the market.
Their prediction is also a clear contradiction of the RCP8.5 oil production forecast, which climbs to an incredible 170+ million barrels of oil per day.
The URL to the EIA summary review is here.
http://21stcenturysocialcritic.blogspot.com.es/p/the-2015-energ.html
There seems to be an abundance of natural gas, also a fossil fuel.
There are still huge amounts of fossil fuels that could still be extracted, but up until recently only the relatively easily and cheaply extracted fuels have been used. Fracking is a way of getting at the not-so-easily extracted fuels and in the future we’re going to need to work out new ways of getting at the even harder to get at fuels. I remember when I was at school, my geography teacher telling my class that the Alaskan oil sands would never be an economical source of oil; time and technology changes our perspectives.
All sorts of claims have been made over time, including oil will never be found west of the Mississippi and there is no oil in the Middle East.
The fact that we are producing more fossil fuels than ever is proof that we are running out?
And what empirical evidence does Dr. Singer have that the GHE actually happens?
Dr. Singer wrote:
“One can show them data of downwelling infrared radiation from CO2, water vapor and clouds, which clearly impinge on the surface.”
You can do the experiment yourself. Buy an infrared thermometer. About $10 to $30 on Amazon. http://goo.gl/abOU6s.
Test that thermometer on various objects—stove top, boiling water, refrigerator, freezer, etc. When you are confident it works pretty well, take it outside at midnight and point it at the sky. It there is no greenhouse effect (no downwelling infrared radiation), it will read about -400 degrees Fahrenheit. If it reads a whole lot warmer than that, say it reads only -40 degrees, then something between you and outer space is radiating a lot of heat your way.
That is true, but, so what? The ground is radiating it right back. CO2 from TOA radiates in all directions, and the fraction that comes down is absorbed and thermalized miles above ground. Thus, increasing CO2 could warm up the atmosphere miles above the surface, but not the surface. Who cares? No one worries if your airliner is flying through -55 C instead of -54 C…
Oops, darned negative signs, “-54 C instead of -55 C”
So you are saying that the absorption and radiation of IR from gases only occurs in the upper atmosphere but not in the lower atmosphere?
Temperature is determined by the balance of energy flows. In this case radiative and conductive.
The fact that a small amount of radiation from the sky exists means your net temperature will be higher than if that flow wasn’t there.
That effect is purely caused by the presence of mass in a gaseous state, intercepting some of the solar flux after it has been re-emitted by the surface at night. For the gas to add heat to itself would be reverse entropy. Doesn’t happen, as has been demonstrated. Brett
For reasons not here or there, my job has given me tours of some of the finest Deserts our country (US) has. And the US has a bunch of desert BTW. I’ve always opined that if you really want to study CO2 AGW study in the Desert. Generally the Desert starts to minimize water vapor as a variable the equation. Deserts go from remarkably hot to remarkably cold, remarkably quickly. If CO2 is significantly damping the effect then you should be able to quantify it. Also disclosure I live in a place where humidity dominates the weather/climate
First problem: scientists need to agree on a definition for “Global Warming” (and stick to it).
Second problem: scientists need to agree on a metric to calculate “Global Warming” (and stick to it).
Once that’s done, we can BEGIN to address whether someone’s prognoses are indeed accurate (and whether the corresponding model(s) indeed have merit or not).
Only then can we rationally address whether there is a “problem” of sustained anthropogenic GHG emissions threatening the planet (as well as the relative wisdom and/or effectiveness of proposed measures to combat said problem).
BTW, the onus is on those proposing the phenomenon to define it and select the appropriate parameter to either confirm or reject it. (P.S.: there needs to be a rejection criteria, a.k.a. “falsifiability.”)
To date there has been far to much duplicity, goal post moving, reliance on re-analysis to massage data, etc.
Meanwhile, throwing around the “D” word does nobody any good.
My thoughts anyway,
Kurt in Switzerland
First problem: scientists need to agree on a definition for “Global Warming”
============
exactly. What does “Global Warming” mean? Is that all warming including natural, or only that caused by humans?
And what is “Climate Change”? Does that include natural change, or only that caused by humans? Does it include “Global Warming” or not? Is there “Climate Change” that does not include “Global Warming”?
Every other branch of science start with defining its terms. Where is the formal definition of Climate Science terminology? How can it be a science without a formal language?
Politics on the other hand relies heavily on imprecise language, allowing politicians to promise two mutually exclusive things to two different groups of people..
I agree, but to be even more so, I want to know what Climate is – and I don’t want that average weather over whatever period. I want to know all the functions (earth, ocean, solar, cosmic . . . whatever) and their relative quantitative contributions to the, I imagine, massively dynamic, complex, inestimable, function of Climate so that we can compute the first derivative of that big C with respect to time. I realize that this is completely unreasonable – that’s part of the point – so that then we can think about “well that came out positive, what the heck could that mean”?
Without clear definitions and precise language prerequisites to any arena of science, is it surprising that there is disagreement (not talking about faith or belief, alarm or denial)?
Ferdberple. I applaud your efforts to correct the terminology that is used in these discussions. When I was a young person trying to learn about the instrument and autopilot systems of aircraft we used up to three different names for the same component. It was very confusing.
Bubba Cow
April 16, 2015 at 6:31 am
+1
Bubba and Fred:
Thank you for your comments. If some clear ground rules (such as suggested below) were established (and adhered to), several positive results would transpire:
1) we would be able to have constructive debates (too often, one side merely “talks past” the other).
2) a great deal of the “misinformation” would be quickly called out and thereafter ignored by most.
3) we would actually have a basis to assess the effectivity of the myriad “policy alternatives” being suggested.
4) the science would progress.
This subject should be brought to the level of a main post – I would like to think that such a step would be welcomed by scientists and politicians alike (on both sides of the debate).
If it is considered important to put labels on those who have a deep interest in the phenomenon of man made climate alteration then OK, place me on the cusp between Sceptics and Deniers.
For what is nothing more than a theory which has been afforded international accord it has simply not earned.
AGW is a theory based on the non-existence of correlated evidence.
Scottish law has a good way of expressing this, Guilty Innocent or Unproven
I agree. That there has been no warming since 1980 is shown by satellite and weather balloon data is a bizarre claim.
The thermometers I have seen say different. So do both UAH and RSS. It was a positive PDO period.
It has been flat since 2001, when the PDO hit an apex, and went negative in 2007. It should be cooling a bit, but instead what we see is a flat period similar to the negative PDO of 1950s/60s.
In that sense, the “pause” is a statistical artifact. But the flip side of that is that only ~half the warming from 1976-2001 is anthropogenic. One must average both positive and negative phases to obtain the actual warming signal.
Have I got this wrong, or is Professor Singer saying that the satellite, radiosonde and proxy records show little or no warming in the late twentieth century but anyone who says there has been no warming is a denier?
Yep, you have it wrong.
There are two basic groups; Climate Realists, and Climate Liars. Now, you can divide those two basic groups into sub-groups if you like, though I don’t really see the point of that. One side is interested in the truth about climate, and the other isn’t. It is as simple as that.
But who decides truth…to an CAGW believer, they are the realists, to a CAGW skeptic, they are the realists. Each tends to think the other the liars.
Me, I think there are many CAGW scientists who truly believe they are doing good science in trying to tickle out a signal from hopelessly noisy data. I believe them misguided, but fundamentally honest. There are a few that are definitely lying and know they are lying as the famous email release showed. There are others that are following the crowd and looking for a niche to stake their careers on. This group I kind of feel sorry for as they may be getting a bit of a queezy feeling that something isn’t right, but their continued employment and advancement relies on toeing the party line and they can’t see a way to break out and continue to make a living.
I am unconvinced that the data is any where near good enough to say one way or the other, and I hate (let me restate HATE!!!) the very mention of the “precautionary principle”. If we followed the precautionary principle no one would have invented fire or the club or the sharpened stick because all these things can be misused to harm ourselves. With the precautionary principle, we would all live like the family at the beginning of the animated film “The Croods”. I, for one, do not wish to live that way.
Sugar coating it doesn’t change the situation. Participation in a lie makes you a liar by default. As for the truth, no one gets to decide that. The ultimate arbiter of the truth about climate is the earth itself. The Climate Liars have their models, which are based on what they think the climate should and will be doing. We have reality.
There are two basic groups; Climate Realists, and Climate Liars.
[*icy grin*] Why, yes. And they abound on both sides of the debate.
A problem is that how man-made CO2 affects the total CO2 in the atmosphere is not well understood.
We do not have a clear answer to the question of what effect the adding of x billion tonnes man made CO2 will have to the total CO2 in the atmosphere. The model currently assumes that CO2 is not re-absorbed.
A scientific approach as described by Feynman would require us to know this before we start modelling.
“The model currently assumes that CO2 is not re-absorbed.”
really? why do they talk about ocean acidification then?
Daniel Kuhn
You ask
Surely you do know that “ocean acidification” is merely the next attempt at a scare now that global warming has stopped.
Richard
“Why do they talk about ocean acidification then”.
Because they never took a college course in chemistry. The oceans are alkaline and ph changes both seasonally and regionally.
You assume with no proof that changes in ph are primarily caused by the absorption of man-made CO2 from the atmosphere.
We don’t have a good record of ocean pH. They are just seriously starting to measure it. The pH data is even more sparse than the ocean temperature data. The ARGO network is great but it still only samples a small part of the ocean and only for ~ the last ten years. Arguments about pH are just speculation.
Walt D.
first you say
“The model currently assumes that CO2 is not re-absorbed.”
then you say
“You assume with no proof that changes in ph are primarily caused by the absorption of man-made CO2 from the atmosphere.”
what is it now, is “the mdoel” currently assuming that CO2 is not re-absorbed or that it is re-absorbed (atleast partially) by the oceans for example?
make up your stupid mind.
Daniel Kuhn
“really? why do they talk about ocean acidification then?”
Because people have no idea what they are talking about. Really. There have been some appallingly bad claims attributed to AG CO2, and the ‘acidifying of the oceans’ is probably the worst (though it gets stiff competition).
There are places in the world with really high ocean temps, and low pH. They have lots of shellfish and coral just like the ‘regular’ oceans.
Crispin says:
Because people have no idea what they are talking about. Really.
Exactly right. There is a mountain of information in the WUWT archives, if Daniel Kuhn is really interested in finding out why ocean “acidification” is a baseless scare.
All he has to do is start reading. The threads are still open. He can ask all the questions he wants, in the proper place.
But the elevator speech is this: ocean “acidification” has not gained any traction in the mainstream scientific community because all the available evidence shows that it isn’t happening.
amazing how you stupids miss the point, first he claims current models assume that CO2 is not reabsorbed, when in fact, one of the “lies” from science is that the oceans absorb Co2 from the atmospehre….
but hey, just ignore that and bring the usual talking points from WUWT……
and i get my science from scinetific sources, not WUWT….
do you get your medical advice for your heatdesease from online homeopathy forums?
REPLY ~ Why howdy, ADC, old son. Fancy meeting you, here. Tell you what: we’ll drop the talking points if you-all stop with the sobbing points. ~ Evan
Is D. Kuhn saying that oceans do not absorb CO2? His comments are often confusing, and this one doesn’t make clear what he is saying.
One thing is clear, though:
i get my science from scinetific sources, not WUWT
Kuhn’s ‘science’ is as accurate as his spelling. In fact, WUWT has won the internet’s “BEST SCIENCE” award for the past 3 years. Thousands of professionals with advanced degrees in the hard sciences read and comment here. This is the best climate site on the internet.
But Kuhn denigrates it. Why? Because so many highly educated readers regularly point out that he’s wrong. So why would he comment here, if this isn’t a scientific source as he claims?
Daniel Kuhn is not only wrong about the supposed seriousness of man-made global warming, He is also a misfit who is trying to convince readers, without any success at all, that his MMGW conjecture has any credible, verifiable evidence supporting it.
It doesn’t. MMGW may exist as a minuscule and unimportant effect, but it can be completely disregarded for all practical and policy purposes. It is a tempest in a teapot, and the only reason it is still discussed is because of the immense financial resources keeping the scare on life support.
But the public is gradually realizing that the whole thing is a giant hoax. That will only happen more and more, because once people decide that they’re being lied to, the alarmist clique will never be able to frighten them again.
Nice try, alarmists, but you lost the debate.
” WUWT has won the internet’s “BEST SCIENCE” award for the past 3 years.”
yeah im sure the scientific isntitutions around the planet were all very impressed…..
what a joke
“This is the best climate site on the internet.”
LOL
“It is a tempest in a teapot, and the only reason it is still discussed is because of the immense financial resources keeping the scare on life support.”
yeah alex jones style conspiracy theory now?
“But the public is gradually realizing that the whole thing is a giant hoax.”
LOL
in what fantasy world are you living?
Daniel Kuhn is a very unhappy guy. His last comment denigrates and insults me, which is expected since I destroy him in every argument — and he insults the other readers of this excellent science site.
Readers come here to learn, and to contribute their knowledge. But a few misfits like Kuhn come here to sow discord. The only ‘knowledge’ they seem to have is what they cut and paste misinformation from their low-traffic alarmist blogs.
We see in Kuhn’s last comment that he has nothing to contribute except his hatred. It is a mystery why he comments here. He has apparently not convinced a single reader that he is right about anything — primarily because he’s wrong about everything. Don’t take my word for it. The planet is responding as scientific skeptics expected. It is certainly not doing what the alarmist crowd has predicted for years:
• The Arctic is not ice-free, and in fact it is gaining ice cover rapidly.
• Tuvalu is not sinkling beneath the waves.
* There are no credible measurements showing ocean “acidification”.
• Extreme weather events have been declining for decades.
• The IPCC head admitted that global warming has stopped, and they have ratcheted down their sensitivity estimates with every new assessment report.
• Sea level rise is not accelerating.
• Carbon dioxide is completely harmless at current concentrations, and there is zero indication or evidence that more will cause any harm.
• Agricultural productivity is rising in lock-step with rising CO2.
• Tens of thousands of scientists and engineers have co-signed a statement saying that CO2 is beneficial and harmless.
• And the original bugaboo, the man-made runaway global warming predictions, have been so thoroughly discredited that “global warming” is rarely mentioned; now it is the Orwellian term “climate change”, which means nothing.
In summary, Kuhn and his kind have been proven wrong about everything they’ve been saying.
When a skeptical scientist is wrong, he acknowledges it and tries to find out why. But as we saw in the Climategate emails, modern climate peer review has been thoroughly corrupted. It is a back-scratching system that rewards those who promote the MMGW Narrative, and it punishes those who try to conduct honest science.
So there you have it. Readers can take sides: either they are interested in finding the truth of the climate matter, or they are Kuhn’s type, which we can see in his last comment above. The overwhelming majority of WUWT readers, probably 97% of them, come here to learn from the many geologists, chemists, climatologists, mathematicians, engineers, and other knowledgeable contributors. The other 3% come here to cause disruption. Daniel Kuhn’s last comment shows he is part of that 3%. He’s angry, and the reason is obvious: he’s lost the debate, and his side is losing public support. I expect that trend will continue.
The Arctic sea ice is about 6% under the long-term average.
The Antarctic sea ice has been OVER 2x std deviations ABOVE average for most of the past three years. 25% to 35% ABOVE average for most of the past years.
Arctic ice rapidly increasing:
J. Peter,
Arctic sea ice is recovering because CO2 has little to nothing to do with its fluctuations, because air temperature is not the most important factor. Ocean temperature is.
When the satellite record began, the Arctic was near its high for the century, after three decades of cooling ocean temperatures, due to natural oscillations. During the 1920s to late ’40s, Arctic sea ice extent contracted, as during the interval from the late ’70s to ’00s. The cyclones of 2007 and 2012 also reduced coverage as measured by satellites.
But the PDO and AMO have flipped sign, so that Arctic sea ice extent should once again gain, as has indeed been observed since 2012.
The fact that Antarctic sea ice, which has a much greater effect on planetary albedo, has grown to record highs for the observational period despite supposedly warmer air temperature and higher CO2 levels, shows how little CO2 matters.
Fact: CO2 is reabsorbed into the oceans.
Fact: The models ignore this.
Why do you assume that the two statements are mutually exclusive?
OR are you just pulling a Kuhn?
“Fact: The models ignore this.”
“Compared with observation from Valsala and Maksyutov [Valsala and Maksyutov, 2010], the 13 earth system models of the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), which make their carbon cycle experiments outputs available, well capture the pattern characteristics and seasonal cycle of the air-sea CO2 exchange flux.”
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2015/EGU2015-6542.pdf
you know nothing about the models, yet make claims about “THE MODELS”
Walt,
The models not only assume that part of the extra CO2 (in mass, not in original “human” molecules) is re-absorbed, they take the estimates into account for the calculations of the carbon cycle:
Of the ~9 GtC/year human emissions, the sink rate is:
~1 GtC/year in the biosphere, proven by the oxygen balance
~0.5 GtC/year in the ocean surface, proven in a few longer series as an increase of total carbon (DIC) with decreasing pH.
~3 GtC/year in the deep oceans as net mass balance, partly proven by following tracers like the 14C bomb spike, the 13C/12C ratio, CFC’s,… at several depths of the oceans.
Give him a break, Deebs; being Swiss, he’s quite unamerican. I wish I could misspell German half as well as he misspells English.
This is perverse. I have never been given a sound reason as to why the actual temperature record is changing……always reducing past temperature while raising current temps and thusly increasing the slope of the rise. I am sick and tired of the moniker of “denier” and quite frankly wish someone would use it to my face as they would quickly learn not to do it again. I cannot acxept the “science” behind the failed hypothesis of CAGW as the hypothesis keeps getting reshuffled to fit the facts of the world today AND because of the Climategate embroglio AND because of gavin schmidt running a blog while being paid by me. I cannot watch a single natl geo show with my daughter because she is being abused and brainwashed by the meme.
I used to live in the High Rockies…..NOT ONCE did I ever get an accurate temperature forecast for any day or time of any day. Sometimes in the winter the temp forecast was off by 15 degrees. I now live in the Tampa area and rarely see accuracy of within 2 degrees. And every time I listen to, read, or watch anything that has to do with life in general…..I am told that we need to stop global warming now or in one hundred years our children will suffer from a couple degrees rise in temps….which is measured to the thousandths of a degree. Indeed, 2014 was supposed to be the hottest year ever…..by 0.004 degrees.
Who can believe that crap? Who wants to believe that crap? I don’t want to know you.
+1
Ciao
John
Why was there no mention of the benefits of CO2 with regards to plant growth or current levels helping to keep about 1 billion people from starving compared to pre-industrial levels ?
“Why was there no mention of the benefits of CO2…”
Because it would most likely negate the reason for a carbon tax.
When I’m feeling particularly contrarian, I tell people that CO2 should be subsidized, since it’s net effect is positive for man.
“I tell people that CO2 should be subsidized”
I don’t know if I’d go that far. My only fear of making CO2 “acceptable” would be; what next would the eco-loons demonize to save the planet.? children?
I don’t usually say it because I don’t believe the govt should be involved in such things. However, from time to time I get really irritated at those who are demanding CO2 be taxed. I point out all the good things that more CO2 is doing for us, and then tell them that by their logic, CO2 should be subsidized, not taxed.
Excellent article. It’s always amazed me that some of us get called deniers because we believe the warming rate will be 50% of the warming rate that they “project” even when we present solid science to support our position.
Denier is a political term used to denote belief. It is not a scientific term, and thus cannot be refuted by science.
The article is not excellent, but I agree with your amazement. Part of the problem might lie in the fact that the most stubborn people spread stories that are utterly wrong, then these are used agaist lukewarmers from both sides.
Guardian might be stubborn, but climate blogs are mostly worse.
So what is the bad name? Ken? Cecil? Montmorency?
If he’s going to insult one side by calling them deniers, shouldn’t he also insult the other side by calling them alarmists, armageddonists or chicken littles?
I’m a horrible denier and proud of it! Might as well go reverse psychology on these hustlers. The skeptic don’t need any propaganda tactics like provocative semantics. The science is free of human coercion and it speaks for itself. It just a matter of getting the scam to crumble more quickly because it’s a huge waste of time and energy. it is also a massive embarrassment for the scientific community.
I am also a palm reading denier
I am also a palm reading denier
You got something against proxies, sonny? #B^)
Seriously, When I was out on a date once, for kicks we dropped in for one of those 5$ readings (the only time I ever indulged in such nonsense). She held my palm in her hand and observed my dress, manner, and demeanor and came up with a concatenation of stereotypes accurate enough for a solid B-.
One of my closest friends scratched out a living for years as a tarot reader tele-psychic. He got the job by telling them that his grandmother they gypsy taught him how to read cards as a child. The reality was that she considered cards (especially tarot) to be instruments of the devil and would have burned them all if she could have. He was by far the best of his immediate colleagues.
He reported the following:
1.) All of his colleagues believed in psychic phenomena.
2.) None of them believed that they, themselves, actually possessed the gift.
3.) They all firmly believed that he was the only genuine psychic in the room.
He milked this for all it was worth, which was not nothing.
There is another aspect to climate science: the corrupt influences of the funding of research and the pandering to the ideological framework of the people who approve and deny academic appointment, tenure and peer review mechanisms
A sign of the corruption can be found in how easily people who insist they are “scientists” lapse into hyperbole when announcing this month’s new research findings. The signal for me is where the solutions that are demanded in the most urgent voice, all converge on a socialist worldview: statism, bigger government, higher taxes, less personal liberty, even fewer people. That bigger picture tells me all that I need to know about “climate science”.
For my part,I am waiting peer-reviewed research that shows the optimum climate for our biosphere. The first question that would naturally flow would be where is our current climate and trend in relation to this finding.
Strangely, nobody seems interested in this vital comparison.
I don’t think any optimal climate exists Buck. I have never heard of a detailed study or peer reviewed literature on what an optimal climate would be. The only thing I’ve heard is that most of our current vegetation has an optimal nourishment at about 800-1300 ppm co2. We are currently at roughly 400 ppm. i believe optimal climate is a figure of the human ego and imagination.
theBuckWheat
April 16, 2015 at 4:22 am
Get a text on basic paleontology, get a chart of the Geocarb III model of CO2 over the Paherozoic, plot extinctions, major and major paleontological events. You will find that first CO2 has never been stable ove planetary history. Nor has the climate, nor do they move in any sort synchronization. No such thing as an optimal climate except conditionally for some specific species or biota.
That “one minute flat” Feynman video is 1:02.
The :02 anomaly might be catastrophic.
Feynman tells a story about counting to 60 seconds in his mind while he does other things and admits that when doing so, his internal clock is off by a few seconds. Maybe he was counting secretly this time and meant to make it exactly 60 seconds. My counted 60 seconds is about 63 in reality. I think my heart rate perturbs my timing.
Here is the link to Feynman talking about his internal counting…time stamp 2:20. I stumbled on this a few years ago.
Feynman talks about counting
Thanks, Paul.
You use the religious term “deniers”. There is another category you have missed – “liars” people who deliberately produce research that they know is not based in sound science in order to promote an agenda.
Let ’em. Those studies go down in flame, nowadays. Those guys hurt their own side far worse than they hurt us.
“Another subgroup says that natural annual additions to atmospheric CO2 are many times greater than any human source; they ignore the natural sinks that have kept CO2 reasonably constant before humans started burning fossil fuels.” – Error: fossil fuels burned naturally very long before man learned to use them for his needs: “Oil, asphalt, and gas meantime had been known to be oozing out of the ground in the Baku region on the western side of the Caspian Sea for thousands of years. In lands like that, there and south 700 miles into Persia (approximately Iran’s domain today) and in part of the area of the Persian Gulf, the Biblical flaming bush was no miracle or apparition – some did just that. In some places there were columns of fire roaring and dancing 24 hours a day and the Zoroastrian religion made the phenomenon central to beliefs and rituals. Says Yergin, “…those pillars were, more prosaically, the result of flammable gas associated with petroleum deposits, escaping from the fishers in porous limestone.” In the 13th century says Yergin, “Marco Polo reported hearing of a spring around Baku that produced oil which ‘though not good to use with food,’ was ‘good to burn’ and useful for cleaning the mange of camels.” (http://ecocitiesemerging.org/2015/03/baku-azerbaijan-a-good-place-for-a-new-paradigm-conference/). Folk stories and myths tells that there were “seas of eternal fire”…
Error: fossil fuels burned naturally very long before man learned to use them for his needs:
=============
naturally released fossil fuels are also eaten (oxidized) by microbes for energy which produces CO2 in the process. no one really knows how much CO2 results.
There are coal seams that have reportedly burned for decades (hundreds of years) ignited by lightning. Same for peat bogs.
http://www.nature.com/news/2003/030630/full/news030630-10.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780444594129000107
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978044459412900003X
Ignas,
While there are a lot of uncontrolled natural emitters like volcanoes, wildfires, coal seems burning,… These seems to be rather controlled by natural processes that did bring the equilibrium back to what temperature dictated over the past 800,000 years. The more sure the later in the record.
It would be en enormous coincidence that natural CO2 levels start to increase in exact timing and ratio to human emissions since the start of the industrial revolution. As human emissions are already twice the increase in the atmosphere, the whole natural carbon cycle is a net sink for CO2, already over the past 55 years…
Sounds like Theists, Atheists and Agnostics, ya know?
Yes.
Generally a good article, however….. CO2 is not as simple as proposed in this article. There are really two halves to the CO2 debate and where it goes and how much man is responsible. One is physics where CO2 is just moved about from one source to a sink. The other is biological. We don’t actually know by observation which larger. Dr. Salby makes a fair argument that its “surface properties” with a 1/3 to 2/3 split man vs nature.. Even then, temperature is probably a secondary effect. But we don’t know. There are biological processes which rely on CO2 to consume more CO2 and these processes disassemble CO2 into C and O2. These processes require sunlight, more sun more heat = less CO2. These processes are also related to the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere more CO2 = more C and O2. Much of the disassembly does not necessarily make it back to a CO2 molecule. This is an active area of research with a lot of innovative experiments going on by all sides of the debate.
David,
The net consumption of CO2 by the biosphere (plants, bacteria, molds, insects, animals) is known with reasonable accuracy thanks to the oxygen balance: slightly more oxygen is produced than used since ~1990. That gives that the biosphere is a net absorber of about 1 GtC/year:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/287/5462/2467.short
and free:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
Ferdinand,
6 stations? Two research papers? Please that is hardly global, and does not apply to the entire biosphere as O2 concentrations in the ocean are highly variable. I think this area qualifies as an active area of research and in order to make broad claims you need to sample every different type of biosphere that exists, which they haven’t. Not that the paper wasn’t interesting or a good read, they are just reaching like a lot of scientists seem to do today.
v/r,
David Riser
David,
Oxygen is a well mixed gas, distributed with some delay from the sinks and sources towards height and between the hemispheres. Even if the data were from one station, its trend would be sufficient to do the calculations, as is the case for CO2. Using more stations mainly reduces the error bars, which are quite huge in the case of oxygen measurements.
There is no need to sample every biosphere, as all what one need is the overall oxygen change, as good as the overall emissions and overall CO2 increase in the atmosphere to know what the total CO2 sink capacity of the biosphere for each year is.
The biological processes in the oceans are quite different from these in the atmosphere, as CO2 is not a limiting factor, nutrients and trace elements like iron are far more important. But even so, what is produced or used as oxygen will exchange with the atmosphere and will be counted with the land biosphere, with a small correction for the solubility of oxygen at different temperatures. In general the ocean surface is saturated for oxygen…
Fernando you overlooked methane.
nc,
Not really, methane increased (in ice cores) somewhat earlier than CO2 (rice cultivation for an increasing population?), but boomed together with the start of the industrial revolution. Must be a hell of a coincidence for (a)biotic methane to start increasing at the same timing and size as human emissions…
Over the medium haul, methane has been increasing, but the the rate increase has been decreasing. A convex curve.
Methane is a minor player. Persistence of only ~20 years, and it abrades chemically rather than doing the CO2 sink dance, so when it’s gone, it’s gone.
[snip – you are welcome to resumbit leaving out the racial slur -mod]
Fred,
I have yet to read the article to it’s entirety, (i haven’t read the last few due to work) But the first few paragraphs struck me. I will come back to the rest later today.
I think I get your point, but the term denier is not a term of my making, and though I am a skeptic about most things, human caused global warming as an example, I am placed in the denier column only due to the efforts of those climate nazi’s who created the term denier in the first place. I believe that it is their intent to put all those who do not march to their beat in the denier column.
I willfully accept participation in the pejorative category since it is not of my definition nor control. Sticks and stones…
I will not judge myself by the term however, your mild adoption of the term is a bit troubling, particularly since you choose to parse it and assign nuance. I’d rather you, as a skeptic of man-made global warming, stick to terms of science rather than adopt the vernacular of those who wish we science-loving types ill-will. You may be attempting to establish ownership of the word and if so, forgive me, but then again, the word is corrupt beyond repair. IMO.
I’ll come back a bit later.
Agreed.
I won’t be adopting the “D” word(s) and it’s regrettable that SFS has gone down that road.
The atmospheric temperature record between 1978 and 2000 (both from satellites and, independently, from radiosondes) doesn’t show a warming.
????????????????
RSS and UAH both show warming between 1998 and 2000
1978
Steve Case.
That is what I found as well. Even if you take out the 1998 El Nino spike, RSS and UAH show warming.
harrytwinotter:
Wrong.
j.peter,
Go argue with arch-Warmist Dr. Phil Jones, of Climategate infamy. He was the one who designated 1997 as the start year for determining whether global warming has stopped.
In an interview in 1999, Jones was asked whether global warming had stopped, since it had not risen for two years. Jones replied, “Yes, but only just.” Jones explained that fifteen years were necessary to determine statistically whether warming had indeed stopped.
That brings us to 2012 (1997 + 15 years), at which time skeptics began reminding Dr. Jones and others of what he had said (the internet never forgets, to Jones’ chagrin).
So by 2012 it was clear that global warming had stopped, according to über-Warmist Dr. Phil Jones. It didn’t resume after 2012, either. Global warming remains stopped: 18+ years and counting.
Therefore, according to Dr. Jones — one of the central authorities in the AGW crowd — global warming stopped in 1997.
Naturally, anyone can cherry-pick a particular year like 1999 that shows something else. But that devious game playing ignores the experts.
If j.peter was sincere, he would write to Dr. Jones, and ask his opinion. Instead, he diddled with the Wood For Trees site until he found what suited his belief system. That is a common trait among the climate alarmist crowd, because the truth is not in them.
j.peter says:
Your first chart uses 2002 as a starting point
Yes, as an example to show people like you that the WFT site can be used to show anything. It’s not my fault you don’t pay attention.
Your second chart does not remove the El Nino spike.
Again, you deflect. What you either don’t understand or are deliberately misrepresenting is that Dr. Phil Jones designated 1997 as the start year, which includes the spike — not scientific skeptics. So you keep squirming around, trying to avoid Dr. Jones’ start year. Jones is available. Go argue with him if you don’t like it.
And it’s true that harrytwinotter didn’t mention Jones. Why would he? That would be taking in all the available information, and your side never does that. You argue by confirmation bias, which forces you to pre-select only those factoids that support your eco-religion.
Skeptics look at all facts and all the evidence. If they warrented concern over the rise in CO2, skeptics would be first in line demanding action.
But all available facts and evidence show that CO2 is completely harmless, and it is beneficial to the biosphere. Therefore, the MMGW scare is debunked nonsense. QED
Wellllll, I usually use the 20 years between 1976 – 1996 as the only time in the earth’s history when both CO2 and global average temperature rise at the same time, but if y9ou want to use 1978 and 1998, it seems a bit prejudiced towards the “El Nino” Supreme year of 1998 as that end ppoint. Nevertheless, lettuce assume 1998 is useable. We would then see a 20 year rise, followed by an 18 static period – while CO2 rose and the earth’s temperature remained steady.
Preceded of course, by the 23 year period between 1945 and 1978 when CO2 rose and global average temperatures declined.
And the long period before that between 1908 and 1945 when CO2 was essentially steady, but global average temperatures rose measurably.
Seems you don’t like to remember those other years, do you?
j.peter
Yeah. Eating dead green stuff the consistency and flavor of shredded green paper is a waist of time, money and effort.
Food = Maximum number of needed calories in the shortest time possible at the lowest possible price at the place and time I happen to be inconvenienced by hunger.
Provided with the lowest amount of time and effort possible.
Hell = I ate enough yesterday.
Why should I need to waste time and money eating something again today?
You did not read carefully, did you? 8<)
Speed, efficiency, time of consumption, total time of support and supply and logistics, availability and cost are all relevant.
Word salad.
j.peter called the WFT chart I posted “bogus”. Yet he posts WFT charts just like I do. A hypocrite, no? And criticizing me for mentioning Dr. Phil Jones, while making his off-topic comments? Really, j.peter makes it too easy for me. It’s like arguing with a child.
j.peter also whines about the chart date. So here is a chart with both dates; 1997 and 1998. Notice that they corroborate my other links.
j.peter is twisting himself into a pretzel trying to avoid the fact that even the head of the IPCC has admited that global warming has stopped, and that one of the true stars of the alarmist universe — Dr. Phil Jones — has designated 1997 as the start year for deterining whether global warming has stopped.
Misdirection, deflection, misinformation, moving the goal posts, and ad hominem attacks are the tools of the alarmist clique. That’s because they have lost the basic argument: their incessant predictions of runaway global warming and climate catastrophe have been so thoroughly debunked that whenever they’re mentioned, people laugh at them. They’ve even given up on their original scare: global warming. Now it’s the Orwellian term “climate change” — which means nothing.
Finally, RACook is correct, and j.peter has no answer. So he changes the subject. Typical misdirection. Alarmists have lost the debate, and I think they know it. We certainly do.
Christy and Spencer acknowledge that UAH data need adjustment and are working on the problem.
Meanwhile, RSS, though run by alarmists, shows global cooling, although not statistically significant back to the 1990s.
So, yeah, what’s not for skeptics to like in their observations? But for the sake of humanity, let’s hope that the Modern Warm Period continues at least until fusion works commercially.
Since j.peter cherry-picks the WFT charts he likes, while saying others cherry pick WFT charts he doesn’t like, I think we can just ignore him. Hypocrites are not worth listening to.
I prefer to listen to the head of the IPCC, who has stated that global warming has stopped, over an anonymous site pest.
J. Peter,
You apparently don’t know what confirmation bias is, despite practicing it with such reckless abandon.
I didn’t pick either. I pointed out that RSS is presently preferable to UAH because the latter needs some justified adjustment, as recognized by its operators.
DB,
Right. And in neither data series is there statistically significant warming for going on twenty years, despite steadily rising CO2.
[snip -fake poster using multiple IP addresses that are physically impossible in time and space – all your posts and replies to it will now be deleted, punk – Anthony]
No one complains about open, justified adjustments, with good reason.
A one time adjustment to surface station data to account for the switch to digital thermometers, for instance, would be acceptable. As would adjustments for time of observation, etc. But the climate criminals continually make the past cooler and present hotter. They use UHI adjustments to make the record hotter rather than colder. They adjust the oceans higher to bring them in line with the falsely heated land “record”, for instance.
GISS, HadCRU and their fellow unindicted co-conspirators for long have committed unjustified, continual adjustments, mainly in secret until forced to make public their ludicrous algorithms. Dragged kicking and screaming, more like.
I suspected that Peter pulled a boner. Probably Denial in drag.
“peter” is someone who co-opted another user’s identity. He’s been deleted and banned.
As you have been repeatedly shown, the cooling is from the late 1990s, not since the 1980s.
Anthony Watts
April 17, 2015 at 1:09 pm
Thanks for your vigilance. I won’t ask how that outrage is committed but can think of some possible means.
I feel slightly culpable even when using the ID on my phone instead of my name on this computer. I let people know who I am when I do.
I am not sure why dbstealey shows a temp dataset chart with different years. He has to post something I guess, even when it is wrong.
I can’t believe dbstealey has trotted out the Phil Jones says global warming has stopped hoax again. Phil Jones was misquoted, he did not say global warming had stopped (read the whole article for context).
“BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
BBC: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
Phil Jones: I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.”
@harrytwinotter,
What I wrote to another numpty applies to you, too:
warrenlb is incapable of identifying any global harm from the rise in (harmless, beneficial) CO2. Therefore, CO2 is “harmless”. QED
There is ZERO empirical, testable scientific evidence showing that what we have observed globally over the past twenty years is outside of past parameters.
Therefore, what is observed is nothing more or less than natural variability. You see a “human fingerprint”, but that is entirely in your imagination. People constantly see patterns that aren’t there. That’s why we use the Scientific Method.
Go back to you eco-church and tell them about the climate Null Hypothesis, which has never been falsified. They probably have some canned response for their lemmings, which should keep you in line.
For thinking folks, though, all you are doing is searching for cherry-picked factoids to support your MMGW confirmation bias. That may impress unthinking acolytes. But real scientific skeptics know better.
As for your eco-religious belief, Phil Jones shows conclusively that there is nothing happening now that is any different from what has happened before:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/hadley/Hadley-global-temps-1850-2010-web.jpg
I laugh at you religious numpties, seeing an imaginary “fingerprint of MMGW” where none exists. Fools will beleive anything told to them by climate charlatans, and credulous folks like you are what keeps those Elmer Gantrys in business.
Go peddle your nonsense where unthinking folks hang out. Here, we know better than anonymous numpties who are afraid to identify themselves.
dbstealey charging around the field with the goalposts, shouting insults all the way.
RSS and UAH both show warming between 1998 and 2000
That, being a huge whipsaw, is a meaningless interval for general purposes. Be very wary about any start or end point that occurs in that interval. Two-way street for cherrypicking (skeptics like 1998 for start-point, while alarmists favor 1999-2000).
Anthony and I use start and endponts of our subseries in both 1998 and 1999, but we do not claim either is representative of overall trend: we are deliberately selecting that breakpoint so as the examine the effects of warming vs. cooling on stations/microsite. But 8 times out of 10, 1998-2000 is an inappropriate start/endpoint.
1978
~1650
97%
What do we call the warmistas who are adjusting the basic climate data in order to keep their warming belief system on the table. If not for these adjustments, the warmistas would have had to admit already that the theory is off. The same goes for the aerosols forcing estimates which are slowly being re-estimated downward.
There is a big ethical question here that the three simple categories does not fully address.
Its the “liars” vs “deniers”
“What do we call the warmistas who are adjusting the basic climate data in order to keep their warming belief system on the table.”
Doesn’t the term “anti-science” float around in these discussions?
“What do we call
the warmistasanyone who are adjusting the basicclimatedata in order to keep theirwarmingbelief system on the table.”My preference is liar. But fraud, fake, and charlatan also apply.
The real climate criminals, guilty not only of fraud, theft, waste and abuse, but arguably mass murder.
I don’t care what you call me. The problem is Dr. Singer is playing their game.
We know for a fact, by real world observation, that any (or none) impact of changes in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to date are overwhelmed by natural forces. There is no requirement to know what those natural forces are. Man made global warming, to the extent that it is dangerous, is false on its face.
Yes, the ethics of tampering with temperature data, removing thermometer stations cutting these by more than 50% in Canada, the US and elsewhere, the use of computer models that never change when incoming data proves these to be rigged to show only warming, etc.
The collapse of ‘science’ here is entirely one sided. The warmists have their fingers on the temperature scales and are making the past colder and the present warmer via computers. This flies in the face of reality where it is getting rapidly colder on the real planet we live on.
There is no ‘pause’ we are now entering a true cooling cycle and we have no idea where the bottom of this cooling lies or how long it will be.
” This flies in the face of reality where it is getting rapidly colder on the real planet we live on.”
IMHO, once huge reductions in fossil fuel usage is forced upon us, that same cooling will be attributed to those reduction mandates. Once the hook is set, there is no going back.
Thank you, prof. em. Singer. Whether nature abhors a vacuum or not, I don’t know, but I do know I abhor extremists at whatever side.
Your arguments are the kind I as a skeptic need to reasonaby argue with what you call “warmistas”. That in itself is difficult enough. But then come along what I will call (after dr. Spencer) the “Dragonslayers” (I wish to avoid the D word), and that of course gives the “warmistas” all the opportunities they need to invoke the straw man argument.
I keep running across the word “believe” in this thread. Believe is a religious term, and has no place in science. So I have to conclude you guys are having a religious debate, which leaves me out. Environmentalism, BTW, is a fundamentalist religion, not a field of scientific inquiry.
Excellent post.
It always helps to be reminded of the lay of the land by a serious person. Trading gotcha’s has become tedious.
Not to take away from anything else Dr. Singer said, but I felt it was particularly good to be reminded of the following:
Everyone makes mistakes, but the difference between true scientists and charlatans lies in how they react when they’ve made them. True scientists admit their mistakes. Charlatans bluster, evade, ignore, misdirect, or attack the messenger: anything but face the issue head on.
I personally think it’s the warmist camp that is more densely populated by charlatans, but charlatans should be called out no matter what side of the debate they’re on.
There is no “greenhouse”
==================
correct. greenhouses work because they block vertical circulation of air. they are not the result of down-welling radiation. thus to say the greenhouse effect warms the earth is wrong scientifically.
But ‘greenhouse effect’ can mean whatever the CO2-obsessed want it to mean. Just like ‘climate change’.
Well then we should stop talking about GHG’s.
+!
Wouldn’t a real (i.e., not laboratory) atmosphere just “fluff up” more when it warmed?
ferdberple wrote: “greenhouses work because they block vertical circulation of air. they are not the result of down-welling radiation. thus to say the greenhouse effect warms the earth is wrong scientifically.”
At worst, that means that “greenhouse” is a bad analogy. Both a physical greenhouse and the atmospheric “greenhouse” work by influencing heat transfer: convective heat transfer in the case of the former, radiative in the case of the latter.
ferdberple’s argument is like arguing that Conservation of Energy is scientifically wrong since we all know that when we burn gasoline we use up the “energy” in the gas.
Words mean different things in different contexts. Sometimes unfortunate, but unavoidable.
mellyrn
April 16, 2015 at 6:23 am
+!
Wouldn’t a real (i.e., not laboratory) atmosphere just “fluff up” more when it warmed?
In fact, it does. One of the less discussed aspects of the current stable or even slightly cooling period is a reduced necessity to adjust the orbits of satellites in low orbit (e.g. GPS satellites which have very low orbits).
Duster April 16, 2015 at 11:00 am
mellyrn
April 16, 2015 at 6:23 am
+!
Wouldn’t a real (i.e., not laboratory) atmosphere just “fluff up” more when it warmed?
In fact, it does. One of the less discussed aspects of the current stable or even slightly cooling period is a reduced necessity to adjust the orbits of satellites in low orbit (e.g. GPS satellites which have very low orbits).
==========================================================
Check out: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/15jul_thermosphere/
This is NASA acknowledging that CO2 cools the upper atmosphere, and that instead the Sun is in control of the upper atmosphere’s temp and volume.
“But the numbers don’t quite add up,” says Emmert. “Even when we take CO2 into account using our best understanding of how it operates as a coolant, we cannot fully explain the thermosphere’s collapse.”
According to Emmert and colleagues, low solar EUV accounts for about 30% of the collapse. Extra CO2 accounts for at least another 10%. That leaves as much as 60% unaccounted for.”
I submit the reduced solar wind during solar minimum was a major part of the unaccounted 60%, and thus was a major part of the warming effect when solar activity was high. Solar wind is one factor not included in TSI.
SR
‘red-kneck dogmatists’ is what Singer seems to be talking about, but really there aren’t many of them, perhaps a few thousand mostly in the US. And that is the context he should have set.
– Yes alarmists generally seem to seek to caricature ALL Climate SKEPTICS as a particular type of ‘red-kneck dogmatists’ who have certainty in the mirror image of the extreme alarmists ie perhaps believing in such things that GHG effect is certaintly zero and an ice age is starting in a few years. However their mirror image whose certainty includes things like 6C rise by 2100 is certain and/or that solar/wind are credible replacements for real power within 30 years, are certainly MANY MORE in number. Add that to the fact that the rest of the entire warmist side has dogmatic certainty. Whereas the rest of the skeptic side just don’t go beyond the evidence and only have certainty about things that have actually been proven, which leaves a wide range of possible scenarios with probabilities that you can argue about.
Perhaps we could put the context as..
: 3% of skeptics give skepticsm a bad name.
: 80% of warmists give warmism a bad name
: the remaining 20% give warmism a criminally/insane name.
regardless if the ignorant uneducated right wing or blind denier types are mainly in the US or not(I hardly think that) the only people we have to worry about are the well informed on the subjects science or lack there of. Of these people we have the skeptics or “saners” who mostly don’t have any monetary or political skin in the game. That would be most people on this blog. We also have the well informed “warmists” who by simple logic have to know this is a scientific scam and continue to push it do their political and monetary interests. They may think that the science is secondary to their other interests due to to feelings of ideological grandiosity. This is another type of ignorance on the other side of the spectrum. The red necks and yuppie know it alls or not really important. Tribal uninformed ideologs should not be part of the issue.
I go beyond being a denier and think nicer weather and more abundant crops would be great. I pray that the extreme warmists are right but think we’ll get zero detectable warming. I am, however, a climate alarmist on the subject of the imminent end of the current brief interglacial. What should we call such people? Sane? Non-idiots? People who aren’t morons?
Seems to me that Singers meaning of a climate ‘denier’ is someone who is not a warmista but does not have an open mind.
why invent a new word when the words already exist and they are much more accessible and explanatory ?
There are those of us who are convinced for various reasons that CO2 does not warm the planet and that the 33 degrees warming due to “back radiation” is just not true. Since there is a banned group who happens to also believe as I do, not for exactly the same reasons, I can not mention my reasons as it is not allowed on this blog.
I can mention, without violating the site policy, that I think Dr. Singer is wrong on how this planet’s weather system works. I offer no defense of my beliefs other than my beliefs were pretty commonplace before James Hansen spread his fear mongering. So, I’ll now go away for this thread.
The purpose of this little exercise is to illustrate the power of water vapor in controlling the climate’s heat load.
For this example 350 W/m2 is the approximate heat flux at ToA.
A watt is a power unit, energy over time, and equals 3.4 Btu/h.
In 24 hours the entire atmospheric volume will rotate through this heat flux and accumulate x.xxE? Btus.
For dry air, no moisture, 0% RH, to absorb this heat would result in a temperature rise of 1.34 F.
The evaporation of water into vapor at 950 Btu/lb without any increase in temperature, i.e. isothermal, would increase the atmospheric water content by about 14%, i.e more clouds, more albedo, less heat.
It’s the H2O thermostat that controls the greenhouse, not CO2. It’s the H2O thermostat that controls the simplistic blanket analogy as well.
Power Input, W/m2 350
Btu/h per W, Btu/h 3.4
Heat Input, (Btu/h)/m2 1,190.0
Earth Cross Sectional Area, m2 1.28E+14
Time, h 24.0
Heat/Energy Input over 24 Hours, Btu 3.64E+18
Atmospheric Dry Air, lb 1.13E+19
Dry Air Heat Capacity, Btu/lb-F 0.24
Dry Air Temp. Rise over 24 Hours, F 1.34
Water Vapor Heat Capacity, Btu/lb 950
Water Vapor Increment, lb 3.83E+15
Water Vapor in Atmosphere, lb 2.80E+16
Incremental Water Vapor, % 13.70%
Miatello explains water vapor using calculus.
http://principia-scientific.org/publications/PSI_Miatello_Refutation_GHE.pdf
http://www.writerbeat.com/articles/3713-CO2-Feedback-Loop
Personally it is the lack of scientific rigor that is lacking these days. Where is The Scientific Method being applied for climate research inside the IPCC and out side of the organization?
I see models as a research TOOL,not something that can fully answer questions,since the underlying information is often incomplete, not adequately understood enough,to make a credible case for a position.
There are simply too many loose ends in climate research to be making all kinds of far into the future scenarios,and call it good science.
Hi Fred: I have put up a response to your post on my blog:
http://claesjohnson.blogspot.se/2015/04/fred-singer-about-nay-sayers-like-me.html
I would appreciate a comment by you on my blog.
Nice reply to Mr. Singer. I do hope he drops by over there and makes a reply. Time will tell.
edX is now hosting a climate science denial course and of course the normal idiots like John Cook, Scott Mandia and Dana Nuccitelli are running the show. I think we need people to signup to show that these “deniers of science” are the problem not the solution.
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About this course
In public discussions, climate change is a highly controversial topic. However, in the scientific community, there is little controversy with 97% of climate scientists concluding humans are causing global warming.
Why the gap between the public and scientists?
it is because many people in the public understand the science. That would be both scientists and other intelligent people who took the time to do the research. it is quite clear for anybody who does proper research of just the science that the propaganda is way off, It is also clear that the 97% consensus is completely contrived. i would suggest researching the science and staying away from the journalism and polls. From my own experience the scientific community as a whole does not in an way support this movement from a scientific point of view. i hope soon that at least this phony consensus propaganda will be cleared up.
All this talk of warming, why is there no mention of thawing? The great North American ice sheets used to extend well into the United States. The ice has been steadily thawing for thousands of years. One would think that if thawing is at work, then night time temperatures would account for most of the global temperature rise over time.
As Feynman explained in a minute, the “warmistas” were and will remain forever, wrong.
And the “deniers” were correct- and that also for forever, and really does not matter what reasons a denier choose to give.
And people on fence were not correct.
The so called Deniers may be annoying. But if someone trying to lead everyone in a gas chamber, whether person who object to the idea is ill mannered or whatever reason is oppose to it, the important point is they are correct.
And forever correct.
“One can show them data of downwelling infrared radiation from CO2, water vapor and clouds, which clearly impinge on the surface. But their minds are closed to any such evidence.”
Downwelling IR, fine, but it is reflected, not absorbed. That’s a huge difference. The energy levels equivalent to the IR emitted by the cold upper troposphere are already full in Earth’s surface and thus will simply be reflected back upward. Thermodynamics is still valid here.
Concur.
+1
But this would still slow down outbound heat transport, wouldn’t it? The IR photon is bounced back to lower levels of the atmosphere and has to begin its upward travel once again. Whether it’s absorbed by the earth surface or by another CO2 molecule doesn’t make that much of a difference.
@Michael: The theoretical energy value of that ‘DWLR’, if it could be kineticised, would only ‘heat’ us into a frozen block. That is, not at all. Brett
What?
You’re on it Michael, he’s talking gibberish.
No it’s mostly absorbed at the surface either land or water.
‘laboratory data show ‘
If in the lab you do not replicate honestly that which is seen in reality they any ‘data’ you get has issues .
And it does not matter what your actually measuring,
Otherwise we back to square chicken vacuum situation, where you try to side step your lack of knowledge of reality by claiming ‘it works in the lab so most be OK’
There is good reason why weather forecasts are so often wrong , despite the many teraflops of computing power throw at it and despite the fact its area that has been studied for hundreds of years .
There is nothing ‘magical ‘ about climate ‘science’ that makes these problems go away because of wishful thinking .
To Anthony and the Moderators:
Kudos to all of you for your patience in reading the large number of posts that this article rightly encourages that trigger moderation.
The only problem I have with the GHE analogy is that water vapor creates and controls it not CO2.
In a nut shell: 1) SWIR warms the earth, 2) the earth emits LWIR, 3) LWIR excites CO2 molecule, 4) excited CO2 molecules cannot “down well” aka emit LWIR without violating entropy. Per Einstein’s photoelectric relationship, CO2 emits “every welling” lower energy, longer wavelength, i.e, microwaves. And we know what microwaves do to water.
Water vapor is 2,500 ppm compared to CO2 400 ppm. Guess which one rules? How effective is 400 ppm at warming 2,500 ppm?
CO2 helps plants grow, but pull the water vapor out of the GHE and what’s left is a solar oven.
nickreality65 April 16, 2015 at 6:52 am
In a nut shell: 1) SWIR warms the earth, 2) the earth emits LWIR, 3) LWIR excites CO2 molecule, 4) excited CO2 molecules cannot “down well” aka emit LWIR without violating entropy. Per Einstein’s photoelectric relationship, CO2 emits “every welling” lower energy, longer wavelength, i.e, microwaves. And we know what microwaves do to water.
This has nothing to do with the photoelectron effect! When a CO2 molecule absorbs an IR photon it is vibrationally and rotationally excited, making it very high in the Boltzmann distribution for that temperature. Consequently it will lose that excess energy, at high pressure (1bar) predominantly by collisions and as pressure drops loss via radiation increases (both IR and microwave). That’s the proper thermodynamics, no ‘violation of entropy’.
In my opinion, the article attempts to redefine acceptable skepticism to the warmest side of center, while defining all other skepticism as unacceptable and applies the term deniers to prejudice the reader. To make it seem reasonable he sacrifices only the most extreme faction of the warmest spectrum.
What dbs44 said
SR
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I am back in familiar territory once again ( standing against the consensus ). I had high hopes for the skeptic side. The bullies are everywhere, even here. Legal threats will also encourage one to change ones views. “Multiple forcings”, one might say, in the climate change game.
Release the third batch. Risks must be taken.
As a non scientist I am actually fascinated by how the whole argument has ever arisen . If man did not exist and the world did ,what would the climate have looked like over the last 100 years? I suspect very much like it does now. I think that sceptics have been too ready to concede certain linkages. Mans activity has added to CO 2 . The world has warmed because of that but not dangerously. Why concede that linkage.? How do we know that the natural cycles ( perhaps influenced by the sun) would vary by even a fraction of a degree ie as close to zero as possible if CO2 hadn’t increased. I do wonder if without the great explosion in financial remunerative incentives that have been available to various alarmists since Al Gores movie that the global warming scare would have died before it was born. I don’t believe I have read about or seen evidence to show that weather is anything but natural. The only concession I would make in relation to mans influence is the UHI effect where it is obvious that buildings and infrastructure generate heat above what would be experienced otherwise.
“The atmospheric temperature record between 1978 and 2000 (both from satellites and, independently, from radiosondes) doesn’t show a warming.” I’m not sure about this statement. When I plot a trend line of the UAH satellite data from 1979 to 2000 I get a slope of 0.105 C/Decade.
S. Fred Singer builds a straw man. I am disappointed.
RSS and UAT do show warming between 1978 and 2000 (I even removed the 1998 El Nino spike to be sure).
Saying the 1978 – 2000 surface measurements MIGHT be wrong is a red-herring and speculation.
Anthropogenic Global Warming can be deduced without using climate models – so AGW is not dependent on climate models.
I am also puzzled by the references to the IPCC AR4 report, that report has been superceded by the IPCC AR5 report.
And lets not mention the quote-mining. A “sceptical” scientist does not resort to quote-mining.
This is also an old article from 2012. I can see the bits that were edited to obscure that fact. The IPCC AR5 report was not finished in 2012.
I did the same thing (removed 1998), only you got 1978-2000 right
He should have noted that this entire issue has turned into a purely political dispute – and we should note that it has become a political dispute BECAUSE the warmistas have chosen to use Governmental powers to enforce their agenda, without the need for any broad based support.
When something enters the political arena, it becomes a binary problem. There are those who are for it, those who are against it, and those who try to stay in the middle and who end up having no effect on anything but who take a great deal of personal abuse from both sides. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, I’m just saying that is now the nature of this fight, and nothing we can do can change that.
Quantifying the water vapor as the metric to determine climatic effect is something that no one seems to want to do. I watch the tropics, not always because of cyclones, but because my father who is a degreed meteorologist taught me the interaction between the tropics and the temperate regions was the source region for much of the global weather pattern. It should be intuitive when one looks at mixing ratios. Look at the mixing ratios of the a parcel of air at an 80 wet bulb vs -20 wet bulb. A slight movement at 80 has a much greater effect on the mixing ratios than a much larger one at -20! One can look at the drop of the mixing ratios over the tropics since the PDO flip, and the blowing away of the trapping hot spot theory, as well as the diminishing of the global ace. Given the heat capacity of the ocean vs, the air, the result is seen in mixing ratios. But no one wishes to quantify these, instead we are fed global temperatures and their movements which are much greater where its cold and dry, where even if it warms 5 degrees, its still cold and dry, vs the oceans and the result over top of them. Hence the idea that the tropics push around the temperate regions. We live further north and scream look at this or that, but the fact remains that in this eternal cycle the unmoved mover, and this Grays idea with his outstanding paper http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf
I think co2 is boxed in by all around it. I think the term “Greenhouse Effect” is a misnomer, conjuring up improper ideas on how the blanket of gasses, most dense near the earths surface, not a “trapping pane” that inhibits circulations, work. No one “denies” the affect of this wonderful blanket that make life as we know it possible, its that it seems to me alot of study into this is missing the main aspect to measure. I would hope someone would take the bull by the horns and attempt to quantify global mixing ratios in the satellite era, perhaps starting at 400 mb, above the density mid point, and aim first over the tropics, to see what kind of relationship is there. Generally the big muscles in the weather will produce the biggest effects on the weather and over the longer run, the climate
Yeah, sorry, this is a lot of crap. It looks to me like a subtle attempt a positioning with a little backspin thrown in to get a dig at people who’s theories don’t agree with the author’s.
+1
I’m sorry people like myself are making you look bad. Actually no Im not. Your so called proof of a greenhouse effect shows nothing more than a change in the frequencies of radiation as energy passes through different mediums not a redirection of heat flow.
Atmospheric pressure is what causes the surface of our planet to have a higher mean temperature than that of our moon. If you find people like me to be insulting, well, tough luck on that too. Quite frankly us deniers get kind of fed up trying to open the eyes of warmists and skeptics to something that should be blaringly obvious to anyone who hasn’t had them sewn shut!
It occurs to me upon reading the post that we might some day determine what was happening with global temperature in the latter 20th century. It occurs more readily that such conditions will change yet again and temperatures and weather along with them. Then, they will all change again.
“The atmospheric temperature record between 1978 and 2000 (both from satellites and, independently, from radiosondes) doesn’t show a warming. Neither does the ocean.”
That is the worst possible denial, as it concerns the period of warming that the whole attribution debate is about.
I cant figure out why more people aren’t pointing that out.
Probably because they are not paying attention, and also loyalty.
“John Eggert April 16, 2015 at 4:59 am
Yes. Deniers. There are some who deny that CO2 absorbs electromagnetic radiation and hence a whole slew of thermodynamic effects that follow, including a surface temperature that is warmer with a CO2 containing atmosphere than without. Effects that have been documented and carefully measured in great detail by many researchers, most of whom don’t really care a whit …”
Reply
Are there? I haven’t seen any here and if that is the basis for Singer’s argument (and I think it is when you peel back the covers) then see my earlier post.
Anthony, I am surprised that you gave this article your seal of approval.
There is a one hell of a difference. There are no deniers in any position of power. Therefore which group is much more dangerous?
Thanks for the Richard Feynman clip, may I play another?
I think the second half of this clip is an excellent perspective stretcher as to why some of the misunderstandings occur on this blog.
https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y
S. Fred Singer said: “The atmospheric temperature record between 1978 and 2000 (both from satellites and, independently, from radiosondes) doesn’t show a warming.” But have a look at:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/to:2000/plot/uah/from:1979/to:2000/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2000/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2000/trend
I was disappointed with the article.
Using the video of Feynman was great, I’ve used that very same video in an attempt to get people to not get caught up in their beliefs and simply follow the evidence. I don’t think Singer takes Feynman’s message to heart.
Ground-based temperatures are obviously crap – siting issues and poorly reasoned adjustments make their value so questionable they’re essentially worthless. I’ve stopped considering them entirely. Satellite measurements seem to be of higher quality but their records are so short it’s difficult to gauge a proper perspecitive of their worth. But I do know that temperatures have flatlined (as well as sea ice being above avergae) despite CO2 continuing to go up so that should be raising alarm bells in all those who unquestioning believe that atmospheric CO2 at the levels today cause warming. Feynman had a famous quote – “Don’t fool yourself because you are the easiest person to fool” – basically he’s saying don’t fall in love with your hypotheses, if actual observations contradict your hypothesis then you need to move on and form a new one. The willingness to move on from a failed hypothesis doesn’t make a person a denier, it makes them a realist.
I have no idea what controls the climate but due to observed evidence I believe it highly unlikely that atmospheric CO2 is the “control knob”.
As someone who practices law and understands how rules of evidence works, I can tell you that the maxim “just follow the evidence” is easier said than done. So many lawyers have bleached their bones white on the beach by following evidence in the wrong direction, because they neither know nor care how to interpret evidence and make it useful and understandable. The idea of knowing HOW TO INTERPRET is the most important, because there are plenty of times where a piece of evidence can show you multiple different possibilities for interpretation or use, or can prove more than one separate proposition. Do not take this as a criticism of yourself or Professor Feynman (God rest his soul, I admired him as a brilliant thinker and scientist), just as a caveat about where following evidence can lead you.
Larry in Texas on April 17, 2015 at 4:22 pm
– – – – – – – –
Larry in Texas,
If there was a ‘comment of the week’ feature here at WUWT then I would nominate your comment.
Thank you for your clear thinking.
John
We bought a “Soda Stream” for Christmas that lets you make your own carbonated drinks. Based on my experience with that, it really is true that warm water holds less CO2. With a Soda Stream it’s very noticeable how much better the CO2 works when you start with cold water.
Thanks, Dr. Singer. A good article.
The D word seems to have been accepted as a label by some labeled with it.
No by me, because denying something implies that something is real and I just don’t accept that it is real. I cannot deny what is not real, I just reject it as wrong.
But sometimes it’s not only wrong, but an intentional deception. In this “liars” category I place the IPCC.
There is definitely a problem in that the cranks on each side of the argument cast discredit on their side, but only in the eyes of the other side. Unfortunately, Fred Singer is a poor choice to make this argument since he so often sounds like a crank himself.
For example, he wrote: “But what if there is little to no warming between 1978 and 2000? What if the data from thousands of poorly distributed weather stations do not represent a true global warming? The atmospheric temperature record between 1978 and 2000 (both from satellites and, independently, from radiosondes) doesn’t show a warming. Neither does the ocean. And even the so-called proxy record — from tree rings, ice cores, ocean sediments, corals, stalagmites, etc. — shows mostly no warming during the same period.”
The surface temperature record is certainly imperfect. But by 1978 we had pretty much global coverage, so to say that the surface trend is entirely spurious is to sound like the people Singer labels with the d-word. Claiming that the satellites show no trend is simply contrary to the facts. Think about it: periodically WUWT posts updates on the “pause” in the RSS data, which extends back to the mid-90’s, not 1978. Then Singer cites the radiosondes; I don’t know if they show a trend or not, but they are surely more poorly distributed than the surface measurements. Then he claims, contrary to fact, that the ocean shows no warming. Then he cites proxies, which are both much more poorly distributed and much less reliable than surface stations. This sort of stuff gives skeptics a bad name.
But Singer is one of our cranks, so its OK.
Actually the radiosonde data since 1958 are global:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/weather-balloon/radiosonde-atmospheric-temperature-products-accessing-climate
milodonharlani,
Thanks for the link, I think I’ll take a look at the data. But that link if is a total of 85 stations, not all of which are available for the whole time period. That can hardly be truly global. There is a much more extensive network available, a map is at: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/weather-balloon/integrated-global-radiosonde-archive
milodonharlani
I took a quick look at the radiosonde data and the lower altitude data, up to 250 mbar show an upward trend (stronger at 500 mbar and below), intermediate altitudes (200 and 150 mbar) look pretty flat, and higher altitudes (100 mbar to 30 bar) show a downward trend. I think that is what mainstream theory predicts.
I have not tried any trend fitting or statistical tests. It might be that the period 1978-2000 is too short to get a statistically significant slope. But that would not provide any evidence against mainstream theory.
So I repeat my charge of Singer acting like one of the cranks who discredit skeptics.
If you think that a few dozen sites in Africa and one or two in Antartica make the system “pretty much global”, then you and I have a different definition of “global”. And let’s not get into the fact that about 70% of the planet that is covered by water was virtually unmeasured.
I read the essay by Dr. Singer but only few comments..
I couldn’t find myself in any of the sub-groups. I do not care what CO2 does, I just look at data and present what I find relating to natural variability inputs: solar, geodynamics, tectonics, geomagnetism etc .
Often there is a bit left unaccounted for, it could be CO2, water vapour or other internal feedbacks.
Here is an example from geodynamics where CO2 came strongly:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GLT-CO2a.gif
Am I warmist? definitely no.
Am I sceptic, definitely yes but foremost of my own findings and mostly ignoring of anyone’s else. That makes me an ignorant sceptic.
So Dr. Singer if you are around, perhaps you may wish to add yet another sub-group – ignorant sceptics – but you may not find many volunteers for the membership.
vukcevic
April 16, 2015 at 9:15 am .
I do not care what CO2 does, I just look at data and present what I find relating to natural variability inputs: solar, geodynamics, tectonics, geomagnetism etc .
———————————
Hello vuk..
Please allow me to offer you a little advice……you do not have to take it or accept it.
Please do let go and drop the albedo and the “Sun is doing it” ……
As far as I can tell, you can be better of with your skepticism with the rest there (geodinamics, tectonics and even with geomagnetism)/
In the second graph at your above post albedo is considered by putting the cart infront of the horse, so to speak.
And for as long as surface warming is higher than the atmospheric warming you lose your lovely Sun as a cause of warming and climate change…..
cheers
I never saw it as “three” camps, a spectrum but not really three identifiable positions.
First-off, I don’t think “deniers” exist in nature, so to speak; but then again, I guess I am a denier-denier. I have never heard anyone state that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist for whatever reason or some such nonsense, nor have I heard any one argue that the climate does not change. On a completely intuitive level, the words of George Carlin should have set people straight some time ago:
“…there is nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are f*cked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doin’ great! It’s been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what? A hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand and we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids, and meteors, world-wide floods, tidal waves, world-wide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference?”
Of course to some it will sound like that’s an excuse to to pollute and not care for the environment, but I don’t think that’s what Carlin was suggesting. He simply was telling people to stop falling for the the bullsh*t ideas that are based on panic and fear mongering from an arrogant crowd of people who are seemingly disconnected from the reality of the natural world which they live in.
Across the spectrum of thought in regards to climate change, we have unsoundness on one end and soundness on the other, with graduations in between. I’m being overly generous with the “unsoundness” label because I truly suspect that some individuals are just intellectually dishonest and politically motivated; which technically is “sound” reasoning in that narrow sense.
Come on. In this very thread, some deny CO2 could warm ground. Their line goes since air up is colder than air down, air up, with or without Co2, can’t warm air down. Then some bubbling on lapse rate and downwelling IR.
Usually they explain that the effect is against thermodynamics. Boring. I try to skip.
That’s not quite the same as “denying” the mechanic of the greenhouse effect. The C02 radiative forcing factor is more a marginal disagreement on one tributary while rightfully debatable, it’s tertiary.
One side seeks to give as much weight to CO2’s role as a warmer, while the counter is to suggest that CO2 isn’t all that and a bag of chips, especially at the levels we are talking about.
It’s always easy to find people arguing about how many angels can sit on the head of a pin; but such debates often only adds to the noise which drowns out the more obvious inquiries like, “Do angels even sit on pins?”
In this case, we start mulling over CO2 at the expense of everything else and serving up the ludicrous notion that there is one thing on earth that drives our climate.
But, as I said in my original post, it’s a spectrum, there’s enough room for “wrong” on any side of a debate, I just don’t think the conclusion of overall debate will revolve around such minutia even though science (rightfully) thrives on such details.
Surely it is necessary to specify a hypothesis before it can be “denied”. What am I denying? That CO2 is a greenhouse gas? No. That man is adding to the amount of C02 in the atmosphere? No. That this small addition may have an affect on global temperatures? No. That CO2 released by man can override other temperature changes resulting from other natural phenomena? Dubious. That any mathematical model has yet been created which can, with any degree of accuracy, foretell global temperatures decades into the future? This I deny utterly. As a one-time mathematician I am doubtful if any such model could ever be created since there are too many unknowns and there will always be too many variables. I therefore proudly lay claim to being a “DENIER”.
Tiny random variations of the average temperature, a very difficult to compile accurately statistic, are most likely a combination of inaccurate measurements, random variations with no relationship to CO2, “adjustments” to the data that make it less accurate, and economic growth affecting the environment near thermometers.
.
More CO2 greens the earth with little or no effect on the average temperature.
.
There is no scientific proof CO2 caused the slight warming in the past 135 years since CO2 levels and average temperature do not correlate.
.
There is no accurate experimental evidence that CO2 increasing from 400 to 500 PPMV would cause enough warming to be measurable with current margins of era … or ANY more warming at all.
.
Another 100 PPMV of CO2 in the air is equivalent to putting a fifth opaque window shade over a window that already has four window shades over each window — will the fifth shade really make the room darker?
.
Will 500 ppmv of CO2 absorb any more radiation than 400 ppmv?
.
Most of the so called “greenhouse effect” is from the first 20 ppmv of CO2 in the air!
.
The coming global warming catastrophe is nothing more than a false boogeyman used by leftists to increase the power of their beloved central governments — all leftists issues, from DDT to acid rain to the hole in the ozone layer — have BIGGER GOVERNMENT as the “solution”.
.
More Co2 in the air is good news for green plants and good news for green plants is good news for humans.
Slight warming is also good news for humans — especially warming during winter nights in the northern half of the northern hemisphere — which describes most of the warming measured by satellites so far.
.
Leave it to leftists to take good news about the climate in the past 135 years and turn it around into a “coming climate catastrophe” that only BIG GOVERNMENT can solve!
They have been doing that scam since DDT the 1960’s, and I’ve watched long enough so they can’t fool me.
Dr. Singer is off base in accusing “deniers” of refusing to acknowledge evidence of downwelling IR radiation, as he is in stating that such evidence disproves the argument that greenhouse warming violates the second law of thermodynamics. If downwelling (scattered) IR radiation were in fact absorbed by Earth’s surface, then it would indeed disprove that argument (and the second law!), but to my knowledge, there is no evidence that it is absorbed, and therefore the argument stands, as does the second law, thank goodness!. Solar irradiance measurements at Payerne, Switzerland indicate that the total downwelling (positive) IR flux at 10m in September is ~ +300W/m^2, and that the total upwelling (negative) flux is ~ -400W/m^2, giving a net negative (upwelling) flux to space of ~ -100W/m^2. From this, it seems clear that the -100W/m^2 is entirely Earth’s primary IR radiation and that all of the +300W/m^2 of downwelling IR is reflected at the surface, as predicted by the second law of thermodynamics.
Anything that can emit a frequency, can also absorb that same frequency.
True, but absorbing at the same frequency doesn’t result in warming. Warming can only occur if higher frequencies are absorbed (color temperature principle/Wien’s law). Earth can’t warm itself with its own radiation.
“Earth can’t warm itself with its own radiation.”
Darn and double darn. I guess my perpetual motion project is not going to turn out so well after all. 🙁
The notion that atmospheric pressure is what warms the surface is the perpetual motion.
An absorbed photon imparts an energy gain, always. Do not confuse transfer of energy with net movement of heat, and you will not violate the 2nd law either.
Good one. I think of it this way: photons do not have temperature, they just have energy. Were it not so, we would catch fire going outside on a sunny day … and starlight would put pinhole burns in our clothing …. 🙂
SkepticGoneWild,
I believe he’s quite clear on the difference. What I read him saying is that the photons coming out of that LED impart the same energy to whatever they impinge on no matter what the temperature of the emitter. The atmosphere works the same way. A photon from 10 km up emitted by a 220 K CO2 molecule at 15 μm carries the same energy as a photon kicked out by 290 K CO2 molecule near ground level at the same frequency. Only difference is that the warmer molecule will be emitting more of them. Result: net energy flux is toward the cooler body, hence heat transfer is toward the cooler body — however:
Both bodies are perfectly capable of absorbing energy from each other regardless of their relative temperature difference.
This is BASIC first year thermodynamics. No object in the universe cares about the temperature of the emitter (how would it keep track????), only that it has been impinged by a photon at an angle of incidence and wavelength its molecular structure and surface features are disposed to absorb rather than reflect.
Were it a strict requirement of the laws of physics that a cooler body cannot “warm” a hotter one, we would have no use for clothing on a very cold day. In point of fact, we would DIE in anything less than an ambient temperature very near that of our bodies’ core — for darn sure “room temperature” is far less than 310 K. The proper way to think of this is in terms of net energy flux.
This discussion (MarkW, Brandon Gates, j.peter, SkepticGoneWild) illustrates how poorly understood EMR is. Some points: 1. Photons don’t travel through space. EMR is transmitted only as frequency (invariant) and amplitude (diminished as square of distance). Waves can only exist in a physical medium, which is absent in space. Photons are created when EMR is absorbed by matter, at which point Maxwell’s wave-based equations take effect. 2. When matter receives EMR of the same frequency as that which it is emitting, any energy gain due to absorption will be balanced by energy loss at the same frequency. Only EMR of higher frequency can add energy. 3. Energy perceived by rods and cones is not energy absorbed unless the source is at a higher color temperature than the receiving eye. 4. Starlight doesn’t riddle our clothing because the amplitude of the higher-frequency energy we absorb from it is greatly attenuated by distance. 5. Heat transfer to a cooler body by EMR depends only on frequency, not on amplitude. It doesn’t matter how much EMR of a given frequency is present; heat transfer will only occur if the ambient EMR is of a higher frequency than that being emitted by the receiving matter. 6. Clothing doesn’t warm us. We warm ourselves with our own energy-generating metabolism. Clothing only retards the loss of the metabolic heat that our bodies generate.
Brandon,
Need I remind you of the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
“Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time”
That is BASIC first year physics. There is no “net energy flux” term in the Second Law. Heat transfer is one way, hot to cold. By the time one takes a thermodynamics course, this should be already ingrained in your head.
A block of ice next to you will not warm you up even though it is emitting thermal EMR.
You are also confused about insulation. Insulation reduces the flow of heat transfer by limiting conduction, convection, or both. A radiant barrier also limits heat loss by radiation. This is High School physics. Hot coffee at 90 degrees C poured into a thermos will not warm up. Insulation is purely passive.
You stated:
“Both bodies are perfectly capable of absorbing energy from each other regardless of their relative temperature difference.”
If a cooler body warmed up a warmer body, the warmer body would in turn warm up the cooler body. That would be a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics as well, leading to what’s known as perpetual motion of the second kind.
David Bennett Laing
2. When matter receives EMR of the same frequency as that which it is emitting, any energy gain due to absorption will be balanced by energy loss at the same frequency. Only EMR of higher frequency can add energy.
Take a steel plate at ambient temperature. Its emissions “color” will be broadly in the far IR, including the 15 μm band. Take a CO2 laser, emitting a lot of EMR in the 15 μm band only. Direct the beam towards the steel plate: it will melt and at the same time emit light in the visible range. It seems to me that something is wrong in your description…
3. Energy perceived by rods and cones is not energy absorbed unless the source is at a higher color temperature than the receiving eye.
As far as I know, TV and computer screens, LED lights emit light at exactly the three frequencies (RGB, red, green, blue) where the eye has its maximum sensitivity. Not one of these frequencies is from the high part of higher color temperature…
@ SkepticGoneWild
Agreed, and nice simple explanation.
SkepticGoneWild,
For the love of all that is logical, why do you feel colder standing in a walk-in freezer than you do in “room temperature” air — which is decidedly less than your body’s core temperature?
David Bennett Laing,
!!!
How is it that you can see stars at night? Are you imagining them? Did those photons get here via teleportation?
Luminiferous aether theory is dead, killed and gone. The only waves which don’t travel in a vacuum are sound.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment
Learn something.
David Bennett Laing,
PS:
Yes. You’re on to something good there. A “room temperature” environment is still cooler than your core. But after an hour outside in sub-freezing weather, do we not still say, “I’m going to go inside for a bit to warm up”?
Brandon,
Will your next “proof” state, “the sun revolves around the earth!”, because we say the sun “sets” and “rises”?? After all, we sense with our eyes that the sun rises in the morning, and sets in the evening.
You are not looking at the physics of insulation. It’s passive. No energy is added per the First Law of Thermodynamics. Insulation provides for a reduction in one, or a combination thereof, of the three methods of heat transfer: conduction, convection and radiation.
Human skin makes a poor thermometer. Walk barefoot on a tile floor at “room” temperature. If there is a piece of carpet on that tile floor, step on that as well. They are both the same temperature. Which feels colder? The tile floor. Why? Tile is a good conductor of heat compared to the piece of carpet. More heat is conducted from your skin when in contact with the tile, so your skin feels colder with the increased loss of heat.
What happens when you wear a jacket on a cool day? Your skin warms up the cold layer of air trapped between your body and the inside of jacket.so your skin feels warmer. The insulative properties of the jacket reduce conductive and convective heat losses so that warm layer of air can be maintained. Your skin will also warm up the cooler points of contact with the inside of the jacket, and the jacket insulation reduces the rate of heat loss, so your skin is losing significantly less heat when compared to contact with the cold air.
You stated:
“For the love of all that is logical, why do you feel colder standing in a walk-in freezer than you do in “room temperature” air — which is decidedly less than your body’s core temperature?”
Are you serious? Based on my comments, I don’t even know why you are asking this question? This puts the common statement, “there is no such thing as a dumb question” to test. Answer the question yourself based on the physics of heat transfer.
The argument about bodies at different Temperatures emitting radiation that may travel to either a cooler body or a warmer body, is exemplified by the sun and the moon, both of which subtend an angle of about 30 arc minutes as seen from earth.
So when the moon is on its way to an eclipse rendezvous in angular space with the sun, The TOTAL amount of earth emitted radiation (of whatever species) that is impinging on the moons cold surface, is almost exactly the same as the total earth emitted radiation that will eventually arrive at the sun albeit maybe 8 minutes later.
The point is that if the sun or the moon can see earth’s radiation from their position, then it is a requirement of geometrical optics, that the earth can simultaneously see both the moon and the sun from where earth is (eclipse hasn’t happened yet).
Therefore the earth can and does receive simultaneously from both the sun and the moon, a beam of EM radiation that may be the thermal emission spectrum of those two bodies, at their vastly different Temperatures.
Both sun and moon are receiving identical amounts of radiant energy from the earth, but the earth is receiving vastly more radiant energy from the hotter sun, than it is receiving from the relatively cold moon.
Therefore, the earth will have a net energy gain from the sun’s energy compared to what it sent sunwards, while the moon will likely have a net energy gain from the earth compared to what the moon sends to us.
So the Second law sanity is retained, and nobody is doing anything illegal.
The NET transport of “HEAT” energy is always from hotter to colder, but the movement of some energy in the opposite direction is not forbidden, and it is always less in net.
Rudolph Clausius, was one of the first to derive the “Optical Sine Theorem” , the Rosetta stone of geometrical optics from the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
It says in effect that NO optical system can make an image that is brighter (higher radiance) than the source is. Because of reversibility, it also can’t make an image that is less bright than the source.
Ergo, Radiance ( more strictly “etendue” ) is an invariant under all optical transformations.
In fact, the most important is to understand that climate can only have impacts through weather. And climate change can only have impacts through changes in weather. So the warmists have to prove, in their wording, that weather is climate. They have to prove that changes in weather are highly correlated with the increase in global temperature or the increase in CO2.
IPCC AR5 & WMO define climate as weather averaged over thirty years.
And that is a wink of an eye in the interglacial cycle.
Perhaps the definition is base upon average PHD career cycles…
And here I thought it was the PDO cycle!
Sad but true.
“But laboratory data show that CO2 absorbs IR radiation very strongly.”
Dr. Singer, would you please supply a reference for this assertion? Tx.
Many years after graduating from the mother-ship of propaganda, the Wharton School, I was chatting with one of the alpha marketing professors, and I asked what he thought was the most fundamental point to emerge from the school’s long and preeminent history of marketing research.
People see what the expect to see,
not what is really there.
Sorry … what they expect …
In fact, that’s what makes proof-reading one’s own work so challenging.
Good one.
“People see what they expect to see,
not what is really there.”
Singer Paul Simon sang it better, “Man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.”
Calling skeptics Deniers is an insult. For Singer to us this word to describe skeptics is arrogant and simple minded. Singer has shown himself to be a bully just like the Alarmists. As far as I am concerned his credibility has been severely tarnished with this schoolboy article. I don’t need to be lectured by a bully, whether they are Alarmist or a skeptic. If that’s the best you can do Singer, then keep it to yourself.
I see the three camps of believers, skeptics, and deniers, as it applies to climate variability, as one whale-sized red herring.
Isn’t the real issue whether people are believers, skeptics, or deniers of the forecasting power of mathematical models?
We are not arguing about climate; we are arguing about mathematics.
* * * * *
Incidentally, are there any fellow drummers out there who are familiar with the rudimental drum solo Three Camps?
Yes, sir. I always thought the ending to it sounded a bit like, “One, two, three strikes! You’re out!” My forte, though was Connecticut Halftime. Boy, that was a long, long time ago. There were only 26 recognized rudiments back then. They must number in the forties, now.
” Now let me turn to the “deniers”. One of their favorite arguments is that the greenhouse effect does not exist at all — because it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics”
——————-
Let me correct the above to a way that will turn Such “deniers” to be right and probably put the author of this blog post at the spot of accepting it or no, and there for deciding his own position.
Now let me turn to the “skeptics”. One of their favorite arguments is that the greenhouse effect does not at all exist as a climate changer or a cause of warming–because that it violates the Second Low of Thermodynamics.
Unless proof or evidence of a possible such a violation shown than there is no chance of AGW or ACC, either benign or catastrophic to really be considered as probable…..
cheers
[That argument (that “claim”, actually) is made some readers here. It is disputed by other writers.
It is absolutely NOT true for “all deniers” nor even “most deniers” nor even “many deniers”. “Some deniers”? Yes. A few. .mod]
Anthony,,,, are you going to allow my comment waiting moderation to be shown here?…..please do understand once you do allow it, I will label the author of this blog post by the same arrogance and manner he has employed…according to my understanding……
Thanks Anthony………..
As I promised, I will now label the author of this blog post or the originator of the blog post, or whoever the below selection belongs to.
For lack of a better wording and in accordance to this blog post and the arrogance and and the manner employed, the labeling of the one targeted consist of a range been somewhere in between a naysayer and a denier….
Explanation:
According to this said:
——-
“Now let me turn to the “deniers”. One of their favorite arguments is that the greenhouse effect does not exist at all — because it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., one cannot transfer energy from a cold atmosphere to a warmer surface. It is surprising that this simplistic argument is used by physicists, and even by professors who teach thermodynamics. One can show them data of downwelling infrared radiation from CO2, water vapor and clouds, which clearly impinge on the surface. But their minds are closed to any such evidence.”
————-
Anyone that does not work with or even work around the accepted physical laws, but instead goes for a bitching around and hand waving, either that been in a supposed academic manner or not, is one that supports and instigates anarchy in science and learning.
Any one, that stands in front of an immortal like Newton and contest his laws better be better than Newton himself and offer better laws to replace the long established standing ones, otherwise the contesting one is only a stupid bubble confronting an immortal, regardless of his tittles and Phd or Nobel prize.
Also by another saying in the same blog post prior to the above one:
——–
“That’s how we’re trained; we question experiments, we question theories.”
—————-
You are not trained to question the physical well established laws, unless you are better than whoever contributed and offered such laws, and also you must offer better replacement…….otherwise you will be only a fool.
You can question an experiment or a thesis or a theory, but you can not replace a well established physical low with a thesis or a theory or a experimental conclusion no matter how appealing that may seem to you or your supporters,
Therefor I have no problem as considering whoever the above selections belong to as at the very least a naysayer and at the most a denier…..regardless of his tittles and invested authority in physical science…
The ones called deniers have a point (a very valid one) standing in established physical law not theories, regardless how improper or shallow the point made.
That is one of the most stronger points against AGW, either that AGW being benign or a catastrophic one….
Anthony, I am really sorry if I have being harsh……and thank you in advance.
cheers
From the article:
“Finally, there are the claims that major volcanic eruptions produce the equivalent of many years of human emission from fossil-fuel burning. To which I reply: OK, but show me a step increase in measured atmospheric CO2 related to a volcanic eruption.”
Doesn’t this reply contain more questions than answers? If we allow that a large volcanic burp of CO2 doesn’t even cause a transient spike of atmospheric CO2 levels, how does this fit with the idea that continuous, steady human emissions are exceeding the capacity of natural sinks?
What about the geothermal heat flux and volcanic activity on the ocean floor that 1) heats the ocean & 2) adds CO2, SO2, CH4. IPCC is uncertain about the ocean below 2,000 meters which is half of it.
Most of that is absorbed by the deep oceans, which show high C levels, but no observed increase over time…
Michael,
The largest eruption of last century after 1960 was the Pinatubo, the CO2 emission of that eruption was not noticed in the CO2 levels, to the contrary: there was a drop in the rate of increase, as the temperature drop and/or extra uptake by vegetation (from light scattering) had more effect…
@ferdberple — It was once believed that greenhouses worked by allowing visible light to enter while preventing the IR light from leaving. My father taught me that as a child and like many things we thought we knew, it was wrong.
Understanding that context helps to see how the mis-named atmospheric greenhouse effect got it’s name. But the name has stuck. CO2 still is widely believed to be a “greenhouse gas,” regardless and it’s pointless to argue over how it retains heat.
“But laboratory data show that CO2 absorbs IR radiation very strongly.” Alas, I expect BETTER than this from Dr. Singer. This is an open ended statement, which leads one to think “superficially” that CO2 is a predominate influence. A more precise statement needs to be made. A look at the various atmospheric absorption curve representations illustrate that CO2, is an element, a PART of the absorption, and not a major part. See:
%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.randombio.com%252Fco2.html%3B490%3B401 ) Secondarily there is evidence that in terms of its net effect at the current levels, it has reached somewhat of a saturation. Third, a BLANKET STATEMENT implying that CO2 is an IR absorber neglects over 80 years of data and measurements that show CO2 shifts from a “downflux” agent in the troposphere, to an “upflux” agent in the upper reaches, or stratosphere, and to calculate the net exchange in the atmosphere correctly, this shift must be accounted for. Sorry, the old “engineer” in me demands “precise speak” (instead of New-Speak) even at the risk of serious “MEGO”. (My Eyes Glaze Over).
the John Houghton quote is wrong
(although, it paraphrases something similar, by Houghton)
Climate scientists who continue to exhibit climate alarmist views, are giving climate science a bad name, if not a bad name to science in general.
That seems like a firm statement about something we know very little. We aren’t sure of the CO2 levels before the 20th century.
We only have proxies, and ice cores that may well smooth the readings.
We do know the Carboniferous had high CO2 levels so it’s not impossible they can be different to now naturally.
In my judgement we don’t know what Singer asserts is certain.
Just out of interest, I would like to address one of the comments of Prof. Singer and combine it with the second graph displayed by Brandon Gates April 16, 2015 at 5:25 am. Together, they find warming/cooling periods starting and ending on roughly the following dates [estimated by my eye from Brandon’s graph]:
1880 – 1911 cooling – 31 years
1912 – 1943 warming – 32 years
1944 – 1975 cooling – 31 years
1976 – 2006 warming – 30 years
I would like to point out that these transition dates [between warming and cooling] seem to occur roughly eleven years after the transition dates for 31/62 year Perigee-Syzygy cycle between 1865 and 2015.
[For a description of the Perigee-Syzygy seasonal lunar cycle see this blog post:
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/evidence-that-strong-el-nino-events-are_11.html%5D
These dates are:
Epoch 1 – 15th April 1870 to 18th April 1901
Epoch 2 – 8th April 1901 to 20th April 1932
Epoch 3 – 20th April 1932 to 23rd April 1963
Epoch 4 – 23rd April 1963 to 25th April 1994
Epoch 5 – 25th April 1994 to 27th April 2025
Adding eleven years to these lunar transition date [possible caused by the thermal lag of the oceans, although some might invoke Hale sunspot cycle] then you get:
1881 – 1912 – 31 years
1912 – 1943 – 31 years
1943 – 1974 – 31 years
1974 – 2005 – 31 years
The match is not perfect but it does point towards a ~ 31 year modulation of the world mean temperatures by the ratio of frequency/intensity of El Nino event compared to La Nina events. Indirectly, it also suggests that this ratio is determined by the 31 year Perigee/Syzygy seasonal lunar tidal cycle.
Wilson, I.R.G., 2013, Are Global Mean Temperatures
Significantly Affected by Long-Term Lunar Atmospheric
Tides? Energy & Environment, Vol 24,
No. 3 & 4, pp. 497 – 508
http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/03n7mtr482x0r288/?p=e4bc1fd3b6e14fd8ab83a6df24c8a72d&pi=11
I found your analysis quite interesting Ian Wilson. Thanks.
Ian Wilson,
Very interesting. It looks like the Perigee-Syzygy cycle dates are pretty close to the transition dates between AMO warm and cool phases. Many of us believe that the latter is connected to global T as part of the “stadium wave”. So is that somehow lnked to the moon? Strikes me as unlikely, but it would be fascinating if true. Such a short data set is insufficient to establish a connection, but proxy data on the AMO, and some other stadium wave components, go back much further. It would be interesting to see if the relation holds going further back in time, but I am not going to undertake that.
Reference on the stadium wave: Marcia Glaze Wyatt and Judith A. Curry, “Role for Eurasian Arctic shelf sea ice in a secularly varying hemispheric climate signal during the 20th century”. Alas, I only have a preprint that says it was submitted to Climate Dynamics in September 2013.
Ian Wilson,
You may be interested in the work being done by Vaughan Pratt at Stanford:
http://boole.stanford.edu/pratt.html
See esp. the first link, “An Ekman Transport Mechanism for the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (poster)” which is a .pdf file of a poster he presented at last year’s AGU meeting in San Francisco. I’ve fiddled with the length-of-day data from here …
http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/earthor/ut1lod/lod-1623.html
… myself and can confirm the correlations he’s seeing. I won’t pretend to be able to explain the proposed physical mechanism. Whether it will have any predictive value remains to be seen. I gather from asking around that developing a reliable analytical prediction for ENSO/AMO etc. might be feasible, but getting it to play nice with an AOGCM … not so “easy”.
Of course, if my hypothesis is right we should expect ENSO driven warming of the world mean temperatures to start again some time around 2036. Unfortunately, I will probably not be around to see if my hypothesis is correct or not. Although the transition in the El Nino frequency/strength compared to La Nina frequency/strength should start taking place in the mid 2020’s (possibly around 2027 or so), so there is hope yet!
Tony,
Highly summarized from your post, there are two types of “denier”:
1. Greenhouse effect does not exist at all;
2. Greenhouse effect exists, but either (a) CO2 levels were much higher in the 19th c. or (b) increasing CO2 comes from the oceans or (c) CO2 is insufficient to change global temperatures or (d) natural additions supersede anthropogenic sources.
How do you define skepticism relative to denial? And how different is the skeptic viewpoint of AGW from 2(c)? From what I gather, you just painted yourself into a corner of supporting AGW. Am I wrong?
In my opinion homeopathy is as unethical (first-line treatment for life threatening diseases) as placebo. I have similar issues with anthropogenic CO2-scare. Does that make me a denier?
How does this slurring of various groups as “deniers” square with the recent post by Monckton showing the numerous levels of evidence that would be required to convert climate skeptics?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/09/how-to-convince-a-climate-skeptic-hes-wrong/
Are there 10 different flavors of Deniers, or are those people all skeptics because they are swayed by a legitimate concern about the specific details of the climate scare?
On a fundamental level I think it’s very foolish to go down this rabbit hole and allow the slur-hurling people on the other side and in the media to frame how this issue gets discussed. Reject and rebuke those who call people Deniers, then perhaps we can talk about the value of certain arguments on either side with some semblance of civility and legitimacy.
It would help a lot of people on this site to take a class in radiative heat transfer. They would learn, for example, that photons have no temperature…but they do have energy. And that surface emission characteristics have nothing to do with material conductivity. And that the laws of thermodynamics apply to radiative transfer only with circumspection. And that quibbling over the meaning of “greenhouse effect” is puerile, when the term is meant to signify a radiative phenomenon. And that, radiatively speaking, the atmosphere is best considered as a beam splitter of no thickness at all. But what the hey! I’m only speaking from the standpoint of someone who used to figure out for a living how to throw megawatts of laser power through the atmosphere for interesting terminal effects. What would I know? (And if you want a REAL “greenhouse effect,” consider the planet Venus. Though there is interesting room for controversy even among those who know what they are talking about.)
Comparing the atmospheric temperature of Venus to Earth at the same pressure level, and similarly Mars to Earth suggests that if surface pressures on Earth were the same as either, life on Earth would likely not be possible no matter what percent was CO2.
Science is not the problem. Most people are ignorant of things scientific. “Scientific” people are usually dedicated to their subject and proud to be so, whatever their subject; there is nothing wrong in that of course. You can tell that the people who write here are mostly concerned about what is the best thing to concentrate on in order to genuinely resolve a problem but if you look beyond the “science” (forget science for one moment) you will see that there is actually NO problem at all. (Bear with me please).
Imagine that Albert had never produced his “hockey stick graph” and no-one ever considered such a thing.
The problem is MONEY and who has spent, is spending and will continue to spend “Other People’s Money” (OPM): it always is !
The main culprits are the United Nations, the UN IPCC and all the governments who have signed up for to their Great Global Warming CON.
There are only two hundred and forty “comments” here in respect of S. Fred Singer’s excellent article and of those, the total number of “commentors” is (obviously) really just a handful and it is mainly because we “commentors” are all interested enough to care about the article, however, most ordinary folk just do not care, or, they are simply oblivious to it all.
What is needed is truth: real, political truth and then … a “truth” explosion of such magnitude that it will affect the value of the money in your bank account and in pockets overnight ! The actual “truth” concerning Global Warming, Global Cooling, Climate Change will be exploded soon by way of a public shock so “viral” (worldwide), that it will cause governments to collapse. (Oh, please don’t just take my word for it: all you have to do is find out who is doing what and for the benefit of whom: it is NOT a riddle I assure you).
The Tennessee politician in the U. S. A. and a “qualified railway engineer” and other highly paid puppets have caused your / our money to be used irresponsibly in a way that beggars belief. The amount of money wasted is far in excess of the total monetary cost of fighting the Nazis: we should know; we British folks have only just fairly recently finished paying for the generous “USA lend-lease” agreement (and that seems to have faded from people’s memories quite soon).
Luckily for me, when the time comes that none of us can afford to switch on the electricity at home because of the cost, I can at least use candles, lamps and also burn the wood and the coal here to keep warm with a bit of light. The computer will be redundant of course (no electricity) but if the postal service is still operating I shall use pen and paper to re-write this missive to my grand-children – just so they know who fought for them before their mobile phones ceased to operate.
Like it or not, the “d-word” is a deal-breaker for many people; its use implies a mix of pretension and self-guilt. The “greenhousers” seem to have problems with clarity and definition. No matter how much you shuttle energy between the surface and the atmosphere the same energy can’t be in both places at the same time – beware of “double accounting”. And oh that complex interface! Furthermore, you have to look at the entire absorption spectrum – at average “Earth temperature” CO2 and water vapor are very poor absorbers (hence the term “atmospheric window”). Don’t forget how the “J-curve” turns into an “S-curve” as concentration increases. Plus there’s a lot more involved than radiation when we’re considering atmospheric heating – consider convection and latent heat of evaporation. There’s just too much convenient avoidance in the climate discussion.
A solid basis for denial:
Fundamental math using existing temperature and CO2 data can prove that CO2 has no significant effect on climate.
The CO2 level (or some math function thereof) has been suspected of being a forcing. The fundamental math is that temperature changes with the time-integral of a forcing (not the forcing itself).
Existing data includes temperature and CO2 determined from Vostok, Antarctica (or any other) ice cores for several glacial and inter-glacial periods. The temperature should change as a transient following CO2 level change instead of the two going up and down in ‘lock step’ as reported.
Existing temperature and CO2 (Berner, 2001) assessments for the entire Phanerozoic eon (about 542 million years) are graphed at http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
Additional proof showing that CO2 has no significant effect on climate and identification of the two main factors that do (95% correlation since before 1900) are disclosed at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com
Excellent article. Definitely the best I have read here so far. We really should focus on the data, even though we’re dealing with a highly complex system where many factors can introduce noise. Denying any influence of human CO2 emissions really means you have a lot of evidence stacked against you. The same thing holds for blindly sticking to the models.
S. Fred Singer has initiated a worthwhile dialog here on two important topics:
1) what is the nature in general of the whole scientific enterprise
2) what is the fundamental disagreement on the rational demarcation of: a) the very small magnitude of the ‘greenhouse gas effect’ unambiguously observed in situ in the Earth Atmospheric System versus b) the unrealized non-observationally based claims of significant ‘greenhouse gas effect’ that is only myth mimicking science (pseudo-science).
I thank our Anthony for allowing Singer’s article to be posted at WUWT.
However, although Singer stimulated this great dialog, I am extremely disappointed that he put the discussion in the misleading context using three questionable and low level intellectual categories (warmistas, skeptics, d*niers).
John
Development in Earth Science Volume 2, 2014 http://www.seipub.org/des 31
The Greenhouse Effect and the Infrared Radiative Structure of the Earth’s Atmosphere
Ferenc Mark Miskolczi
Geodetic and Geophysical Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Csatkai Endre u. 6-8, 9400 Sopron, Hungary
fmiskolczi@cox.net
“The stability and natural fluctuations of the global average surface temperature of the heterogeneous system are ultimately determined by the phase changes of water. Many authors have proposed a greenhouse effect due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. The present analysis shows that such an effect is impossible.”
“One of the most elusive problems of climate science is the correct handling of the radiative effects of the global average cloud cover. After decades of struggle with the cloud forcing parameter and other mixed physical quantities, the role of clouds in the climate system remains hidden.”
“In our view the greenhouse phenomenon, as it was postulated by J. Fourier (1824), estimated by S. Arrhenius (1906), first quantified by S. Manabe and R. Wetherald (1967), explained by R. Lindzen (2007), and endorsed by the National Academy of Science and the Royal Society (2014), simple does not exist.”
Meh. I read a couple of paragraphs and moved on. Not a serious article by a serious person. The primary point seems to be to make the author feel good about himself because he’s not extreme. Or something.
Name calling annoys me and this “Denier” tag irritates me beyond belief as I have seen very few who actually deny there has been warming over the past 200 plus years. It is pretty hard to deny what are proven facts. The question is why and why would we put such a huge price on uncertainty? I would put a Roy Spencer as a representative example. I find generally that the other side is pigheaded and will not accept one iota the possibility they have gone way too early and in fact little has been proven and certainly not with Scientific Method. Gavin Schmidt seem a good representation of this side. The biggest fear I have is that this fear and name calling mongering will carry on in Paris and reason will not succeed. I mean Obama still wants to save the climate! Good luck with that!
The basic argument is being lost in the terms.
AGW and CAGW are very, very different.
There are very few, if any, who dispute AGW. However CAGW is another fantasy, altogether…
This distinction is always lost early on in any argument and should not be forgotten.
So, like European royalty, warmism is not going to be quickly ended. The “revolution” will, as usually happens, be hijacked, this time by Determinists led by the likes of Fred Singer with, ultimately, Stochastists being hunted down, tortured and killed in ways undreamed of by warmists . . . By “stochasticists” I mean the followers of articles such as these : geomorphology.geo.arizona.edu/PAPERS/pelletier_97b.pdf
http://blackjay.net/?page_id=93
The Denier term is a term of denigration invented by the Warmistas in their struggle to strangle off inquiry, science, debate, and the public spotlight on their lies. Denier is on a par with “anti-science”. Dr. Singer is doing the cause of Truth no good by repeating and legitimizing these rogue terms.
There is no real point to his post, it would be more useful to investigate the gross distortions being made to the temperature record by Warmista Institutions to bolster their funding supply.
Yes, consistent with Singer being less interested in “doing the cause of Truth [any] good” than in feathering his own nest, hoping that he will one day be bigger than Gore and thus able to act against a new class of “deniers”, non-Determinists and so on.
JimS April 16, 2015 at 12:03 pm
Mike M. April 16, 2015 at 12:40 pm
Brandon Gates April 16, 2015 at 5:23 pm
Thank you for your considered thoughts – many good ideas and suggestions to mull over.
Brandon – please look at figure 1 of this paper [free download].
Are Changes in the Earth’s Rotation Rate Externally Driven and Do They Affect Climate?
http://gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Essays/View/3811
Figure 1 shows the the link that I found between the rate of change of LOD and the NAO index [which is related to the AMO index] back in 2008.
Also, please look at the following blog post:
The Connection Between Extreme Perigiean Spring Tides and Long-term Changes in the Earth’s [Core] Rotation Rate as Measured by the Rate-of-Change of its Length-of-Day (LOD)
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/connecting-planetary-periodicities-to.html
with particular reference to the first two figures.
Ian Wilson,
Thank you for the references. From the paper:
Unfortunately, the climate data does not allow us to decide whether it is the fluctuations in the Earth’s rotation rate that determine the phases changes in the NAO and PDO or the other way around. Nor does climate data tell us whether the observed changes in the Earth’s rotation rate are being driven by external forces. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the climate data is that long term changes in these two major climate systems has an effect upon, or is affected by, changes in the Earth’s rotation rate.
Which has been one thing I have been asking myself since becoming familiar with Pratt’s work. You go on to make a compelling argument for external timing via gravitational interactions with other planets, which is intriguing. Having a sub-century scale timing signal which was reasonably and reliably predictable 50-100 years in advance is something I think would be quite useful indeed — I note that these various modes of internal variability are often good for +/-0.25 K or so deviations about a climatologically-relevant running mean. 1/8th of the 2 K do not cross this line policy target is a residual which wants some attention.
Best regards.
Singer wrote “Another subgroup accepts that CO2 levels are increasing in the 20th century but claims that the source is release of dissolved CO2 from the warming ocean. In other words, they argue that oceans warm first, which then causes the CO2 increase. In fact, such a phenomenon is observed in the ice-core record, where sudden temperature increases precede increases in CO2. While this fact is a good argument against the story put forth by Al Gore, it does not apply to the 20th century: Isotopic and other evidence destroys their caset.”
I’m in this camp. Sort of. The oceans are warming and if left long enough, atmospheric CO2 levels would indeed rise. This is what history shows through the ice cores. The difference is that at this point in history, we’re speeding up that process by getting the CO2 level into equilibrium much faster than it would have done naturally. Actually beyond equilibrium probably and so the biosphere and oceans are actually sinking some of it rather than releasing it.
But does that mean it “causes” most of the observed warming? No, that doesn’t follow. It might, but not necessarily and certainly not with the certainty the warmists give it.
I think that Curry makes a very good point: we don’t know enough. Certainly we don’t know enough about the oceans, because too little effort has been put into measuring them.
One graph we really need to see often is the gap between predicted best model, predicted worst model and actual raw temperatures, temperatures adjusted by climate scientist ideas and temperatures adjusted by ratio of the gap between the USCRN and used US figures. These five plots will tell pretty objectively how much trust to place in climate science.
Wish I had seen this earlier….
This piece isn’t a science piece… its a piece of propaganda designed sololy to reframe the debate in a way that benefits the author.
The main purpose of this propaganda piece is the attempt to re-class lukewarmers into skeptics and de-class skeptic from deniers. The secondary purpose is to promote censorship.
Right now according to the main stream propaganda you have 2 groups of ppl… the hardcore cultist of doom and the evil denier of said doom.
For the non-main stream view you have 3 groups the cultist, the lukewarmer and the skeptic. Singer is attempting to change lukewarmer into skeptic and skeptic into denier…
“In my view, “warmistas” and “deniers” are very similar in some respects — at least their extremists are. They have fixed ideas about climate, its change and its cause. They both ignore “inconvenient truths” and select data and facts that support their preconceived views. Many of them are also quite intolerant and unwilling to discuss or debate these views — and quite willing to think the worst of their opponents.”
This has to be some of the most retarded and ignorant statement ever of this debate.
“They both ignore “inconvenient truths” and select data and facts that support their preconceived views. Many of them are also quite intolerant and unwilling to discuss or debate these views ”
This is nothing more then lewandowsky moon landing paper all over again… a tiny handful of non-warmist believe some crazy shat and thus he swing around a simply massive brush to everyone.
” and quite willing to think the worst of their opponents.”
yes god forbid anyone call a spade and spade…
The vastly majority of people in the denier but not lukewarmer grouping don’t have some crazy ideas other then we demand proof and that said proof comply with the scientific method. We are also not so closed minded as to simply dismiss those evil sky dragons just because they maybe on the crazy side…. WE ARE WILLING TO LISTEN TO THE CRAZY AND JUDGE FOR OURSELVES. Something that singer would deny us the chance to just like the cultist would deny us the chance as well.
Singer frankly goes well into his own definition of what a denier is because he is very intolerant and unwilling to talk about such evil sky dragon views…
The other issue is, if the evil sky dragons are wrong…. so what? Are they are demanding billions of dollars or control of most of the planet… no, so let them flop around with whatever view they think is right and STFU about it. Singer is in classic “I want rule this paradigm mode and don’t you dare challenge me”. He piece does everything that a scientist should oppose… most of all his piece heavily pushes for mass censorship.
Yes. Very good analysis.
Temp writes “For the non-main stream view you have 3 groups the cultist, the lukewarmer and the skeptic.”
No. Apparently you’ve misunderstood scepticism all along. Lukewarmers are sceptics. They’re sceptical the IPCC has a correct value for sensitivity. Some warmists are sceptics too. Almost everyone is sceptical of some aspect or another of “AGW” even the die-hard warmists may be sceptical about some papers.
Its just that “sceptics” like me tend to find on balance the AGW argument doesn’t have enough fact to make it as certain as the warmists would have the world believe.
TimTheToolMan
April 17, 2015 at 3:48 am
“No. Apparently you’ve misunderstood scepticism all along. Lukewarmers are sceptics. They’re sceptical the IPCC has a correct value for sensitivity. Some warmists are sceptics too. Almost everyone is sceptical of some aspect or another of “AGW” even the die-hard warmists may be sceptical about some papers.
Its just that “sceptics” like me tend to find on balance the AGW argument doesn’t have enough fact to make it as certain as the warmists would have the world believe.”
I’m sorry but you must be very new to this debate. Lukewarmers ARE NOT skeptic. The vast majority of lukewarmers including the owner of this sight follow into to the lukewarmer group as follows.
1. Were almost all foaming at the mouth cultists
2. Ran into a skeptic who said “hey let debate and I will show you your religion is wrong”
3. After debating a skeptic found out “yeah the vast majority of the “science” isn’t science”
4. Even though skeptics showed that AGW was never even close to being scientifically proven, they still believe in the core beliefs aka that humans are causing a noticeable amount of the current warming.
5. All lukewarmer believe AGW is real.
6. They further can be broken down into 2 groups of this noticeable amount of human caused warming A. The warming is no threat to humans or B. The warming is a threat to humans but not in the insane cultist propaganda kind of way and we don’t need world government to fix it.
Skeptics ARE NOT LUKEWARMERS. Skeptics do not believe their is any basis for any action because the whole of the science has not yet met even the most basic of standards to be called science. Skeptics do not believe that a simple hypothesis is justification to take action. We have converted many rabid cultists to both skeptic and lukewarmers… the problem is you have many lukewarmers attempting to claim they were always lukewarmers from the start and they don’t want to be lumped in with the more mainstream extremism that is standard AGW “science”. At the same time they don’t want to credit skeptics with showing them the error of their ways because by doing so they must admit they were wrong, irrational and anti-science. Unlike Mr. Watts who is open about his past failures, the vast majority of lukewarmers can’t take the ego hit that a bunch of people took them to the wood shed using nothing more then middle school level scientific knowledge….aka the demand that one must follow the scientific method.
In the simplest terms a skeptic is someone that doesn’t believe in AGW. They have many reasons for not believing but for the vast majority it is because of the scientific method. That in simplest term for the AGW debate is a skeptic. A lukewarmer can never be a skeptic because they believe AGW is proven in science.
No point in getting hung up on the nomenclature, if that’s all you are picking up on then you are missing the important bits
I have written up my thoughts.
The latest ones in
http://www.tech-know-group.com/papers/vacuum.pdf
In that paper you will find the references to earlier ones.
There are not 3 camps – warmists, skeptics, deniers. By allowing them to claim this, you are feeding into their propaganda. They warmists have referred to skeptics as deniers since day one, and now that the Pause has them scrambling, they want you to forget about all those slurs and insults. Hence their need to break out skeptics into 2 camps. Its an old political tactic and you are giving up hard won ground if you fall for it.
When science is advancing thanks to people like Curry and Nic Lewis convincingly showing a low climate sensitivity to CO2, Singer’s strawman about CO2 sounds stale.
Bottom line, pressure comes from everywhere to ignore science and force green totalitarism onto populations. Visibly pressure bears some fruits…
Of the many dozens (hundreds?) of variables that affect the climate, POLITICS is by far the most important variable.
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POLITICS decides which temperature measurements are used (surface) and which are ignored (satellites).
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POLITICS decides that climate proxy studies are usually ignored, while computer models are”worshipped”.
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POLITICS decides that character attacks (“denier – denier”) are a fair substitute for debate.
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POLITICS decides that phony surveys (the 97%) will be parroted by our President in speeches.
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The only logical explanation of why climate models would be taken seriously, when models are not data, and real science requires data … is politics.
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Leftists have always exaggerated things to morph them into “crises” … intended to scare people into demanding their central government take charge, and “solve” the “crisis”.
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DDT, acid rain, hole in the ozone layer, global cooling, global warming, CEO salaries, men earning more than women, policemen looking to shoot black men, etc = all phony “crises” designed to convince the sheeple that the central government must make new laws, and seize more power over the citizens.
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The global warming “crisis”, like all other now forgotten environmental crises going back to DDT in the 1960s, is scaremongering that has nothing to do with real science … but billions of dollars spent by governments on global warming propaganda each year, including scientists bribed with grants to predict a coming climate catastrophe, have brainwashed a lot of ordinary people.
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Instead of celebrating the slight warming in the past 135 years, assuming that’s not all measurement error, and celebrating the greening of the Earth from more CO2 in the air, too many people are worried about the future climate for no logical reason.
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And they are worried simply because leftists are not happy unless they have a “crisis” to scare people with — global warming is their most popular “crisis” today … and of course BIGGER and STRONGER CENTRAL GOVERNMENTS are the “solution” for every leftist “crisis”.
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The reason this post is mainly about politics, rather than science, is because predictions of a coming climate catastrophe are 99% politics, and only 1% science (and that 1% is ONLY because some of the people involved have science degrees — not because their computer games are real science — their climate models are nothing more than climate astrology wasting the taxpayer’s money).
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The global warmists are science deniers, climate astrologers, climate scaremongers, and deserve those names — if Mr. Singer, whose SEPP website first got me interested in climate back in 1997, wants to use the “D-word” (denier), then he ought to use the words “climate astrologers” too.
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In my opinion, no one involved in predicting the future climate deserves to be taken seriously — how many wrong predictions are required over how many decades before the predictors are finally seen to be people desperate for attention and power … and government grants?
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The climate is better than it was 135 years ago for both humans and green plants.
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The future climate is unknown and unknowable — debating the unknown future is for people with too much spare time on their hands.
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People REALLY interested in the environment ought to focus on pollution in China, not beneficial airborne plant food CO2 … but then global warming scaremongering is not about the environment, or about science — it’s all left-wing politics to further empower central governments!
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Logical climate facts for non-scientists,
at the only climate website in the world
with a centerfold:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.blogspot.com
Very much correct its why I have argued for years that winning the science debate is meaningless. Being right or scientifically correct doesn’t keep one out of an oven or a mass grave. If anything you will be the first one in.
Arguing over what is or isn’t a greenhouse effect is not that helpful. Nor is arguing over who is a denier.
What skeptics need to be pushing is the fact that skeptics do in fact believe the earth has warmed in this century and since the Little Ice age. Nor do skeptics think climate change is not happening. Climate change has always occurred and it is certainly a fact that man has an impact on climate change.
We need to point out that the main difference between skeptics and alarmists is that alarmists say that the overwhelming conclusion of “science” is that anthropogenic greenhouse gas will cause calamitous warming and calamitous climate change. A skeptic is anyone that does not believe that the conclusion of science is that greenhouse gases will cause calamitous warming or climate change.
The tactic of alarmists is to paint skeptics as “deniers” of science. In order to do this, they say that skeptics deny climate change and deny the earth has warmed. The reason that they do this is that these positions seem extreme and unscientific to average person who knows little about the specifics of the debate.
Skeptics need to always say that the characterization is incorrect:
Skeptics and alarmists agree on the points that the climate is changing and man has an impact on climate change and we agree that the earth has in fact warmed. Rather, it is the alarmists who believe something not supported by the data. That is that anthropogenic sourced CO2 will cause calamitous warming and climate change.
I think skeptics need to preface many arguments and blogs by making the above points in the prior paragraph over and over again as simply and concisely as possible.
Skeptics also disagree with alarmists over the extent of warming and its primary causes.
Clearly, earth has warmed since the depths of the Maunder Minimum and since the end of the LIA. It is warmer now than 320 and 160 years ago. But is it warmer than 80 years ago? We don’t know because the “surface” station record has been so corrupted, and satellite and balloon data don’t go back far enough.
Not only do skeptics doubt that there will be catastrophic consequences from more CO2, but that it is the control knob on climate. Whatever warming has actually occurred is not primarily because of human activity, whether since AD 1700, 1850 or 1950.
Brandon,
You might have missed an important point because of a mistake I made in the 2008 paper:
“A comparison between the upper and lower graph in figure 8 shows that, again, there is a
remarkable agreement between the years of the peak (absolute) deviations of the LOD from the
long-term trend and the years where the phase of the PDO reconstruction is most positive. While
the correlation is not perfect, it is convincing enough to conclude the PDO index is another good
example of a climate system that is directly associated with changes in the Earth’s rotation rate.” on page 15.
If look closely at the deviation of LOD from the long term trend and the PDO index in figure 8, you will notice that the peaks in deviation of LOD from its long term trend take place ten years earlier (on average) than the peaks in the PDO index. So, unlike the NAO index, where the rate of change of LOD takes place at the same time as changes in the NAO index [i.e. there is no phase lag between these two parameter), the peaks in the deviations of the LOD from its long term trend precede the peaks in the PDO index, suggesting causality.
The paper also shows that the times for the peaks in the deviation of LOD from its long term trend here on the Earth match the times for the peaks in asymmetry of the Sun’s motion about the centre-of-mass of the solar system.
Dr. Singer’s approach here is, from a debating point of view, tactically disastrous. When the catastrophists call people “deniers” they mean precisely people like him (and people like me). They are not one bit confused about that.
Now Dr. Singer starts pointing at a handful of very obscure people (whom the catastrophists have never heard of) and saying, “No, we’re not the deniers, these people over there are the deniers.”
Just what does this accomplish? Well, it shows that Dr. Singer totally agrees that it’s fine to call people “deniers” because you disagree with their opinions. Secondly, it gives a kind of validation to the untruths of the catastrophists, who talk as though climate skeptics dispute standard physics. Third, it encourages the false view (which you will see more and more in the media as catastrophism crumbles) that the skeptics have retreated from a position they used to hold, of disputing the possibility of a greenhouse effect.
Just disastrous.
This is a cute little essay but in my experience alarmists call everybody a denier that strays even a little bit from “all in ” on catastrophic climate change. I never expereincedf them tolerating for any leeway there.
This article is in very poor form.
Anthony, please pull down my ClimateGate video from your site. I no longer wish to be associated with you.
“Give me four adjustable parameters and I can fit an elephant. Give me one more, and I can make his trunk wiggle.”
When you can also homogenise the data you can get the elephant into the finals of So You Think You Can Dance.
The ‘derivative’ of the temperature anomalies is the monthly change in temperature divided by the change in time (in years). If the error in monthly anomalies is Δ then the error in the derivative is √2 Δ/month (square root of the sum of the squares). The error in the difference in derivatives is 2Δ/month or 24Δ/year. The actual standard deviation for the differences from the measurements (δ) should be half of this, 12Δ/year (the convention is to use 2xSD for the error).
The δ for the differences in the derivatives of GISS LOTI and RSS from 1979 is 0.14°C/year. This gives an estimate of the uncertainty of each monthly anomaly of about ±0.01°C. Remember, this estimate is for repeats of the same experiments making the same measurements where the error for each month, Δ, is 2 times the SD of repeat measurements. The two experiments aren’t that.
There is a slow drift apart in the actual anomalies so that the GISS data appear to support warming has continued but the closeness of the derivatives is unrealistic. Someone copied the others homework and added some noise with a bit of drift. They probably forgot to convert from per year to per month.
If the data is tainted, there is no science and there are no categories of scientists, just zealots.
I understand Dr. Singer’s concern. I cringe whenever I read a Skydragon’s incoherent rant, and truly wish they would go away.
The fact of temperature increase by radiative impedance is well established. So well established that this type of insulation is used routinely. The equations are textbook, and they work for simple systems requiring thermal regulation.
The argument over anthropogenic attribution for observed increases in atmospheric CO2 is, however, not so well established. Or, more accurately, at all. Dr. Singer claims that, “Isotopic and other evidence destroys their case.” However this fails on two counts:
1) It presumes that we understand the carbon cycle to a degree which has not been established. It is begging the question.
2) It ignores the pollution effect, and the slow diffusion of low C13 into the atmosphere, and thence to the sinks. A small source of pollution can infiltrate an entire watershed, and take a long time to dissipate, even as it has virtually nil effect on the overall quantity.
It is a fact that the rate of change of CO2 matches temperature to a high degree of fidelity. It is a fact that this temperature relationship accounts for both the short term and long term change in atmospheric CO2. It is a fact that human emissions cannot be added to this relationship in significant quantity without producing too large a trend in the rate of change of CO2 than can be reconciled with the observations. It is, therefore, proven that human inputs cannot have a significant effect on atmospheric CO2.
There is no way around it. There is no doubt about it. Human activity is not contributing substantially to atmospheric CO2 content.
Nice ‘bait and switch’, of course the Arctic has also been more than 2 sd below average, as much as ~3 sd below at maximum. If you were to be honest you would present the data in the same units but that would be too much to expect.
So, the IPCC uses the increase between 1978 and 2000 as evidence for human (anthropogenic) global warming (AGW).
And that is an egregious cherrypick, right at the heat of CMIP.
I can (morally) justify use of a 1978 start point until the PDO was described by science: you don’t know what you don’t know. But use of the 1978 start-point anytime after 1996 — when the PDO cycles were known — is an inexcusable lapse, to be neither ignored nor tolerated.
The CO2 era began in 1950. Look at any CO2 graph. That is the valid start-point for all this, even if begging the question of the 1900-1950 period.
Points against 1950 as start point:
— 1950 is a low start point, coming after a sharp drop 2 to 3 years prior.
This creates a moderate spurious increase in warming trend.
— 1950 -2014 contains 35 Negative PDO years vs. 30 positive, and the last few years of positive PDO (ending abruptly at the outset of 2007), were on the neutral side.
This creates a slight spurious decrease in trend. This is partially dissipated by the fact that the strongest warming occurs toward the middle of the series, where it will have maximum effect on trend.
Points for:
— It is the beginning of the modern CO2 era. Look at the 20th-century mainstream CO2 graphs. It’s obvious. It is a cherrypick to cut the 1950 – 1977 period out of consideration, and if it had showed heavy warming, it would certainly have been included. But it is flat, and was brushed aside, incorrectly and carelessly attributed to aerosol masking.
— There are a roughly equal number of positive and negative PDO years and covers at least 60 years, even though the skew is slightly negative. But this is made up for by the too-low 1950 startpoint.
Therefore, 1950 is the best start point of the CO2 era. Luckily, the bad points balance. Just a matter of luck. Like one of our regions with only two stations — that turns out NOT to be an outlier either way! (Phew!)
If one insists, the start and endpoints could be ramped back three years (to 1947) so as to solve both of the “points against” (low start point, unequal PDO balance). That would create (not spuriously) a distinct reduction in warming trend.
But 1947 was a lean year all ’round, if you’ve read about it. Food was short. Everything else (including FF and electricity) was worse. War does that. 1950 was a bigger CO2-year, the true start of significant anthropogenic CO2.
So what are we left with?
— Well, the surface stations say that it has warmed ~0.7C (adjusted). We dispute the “(adjusted)” part and, taking ocean are into account, knock it down to ~.55, bringing surface readings into line with “upper bound” factor of LT warming as measured by the satellites. Surface warming (lower bound effect) warming should be at least 20% less than Lower Troposphere (upper bound effect). Our study brings that into line, as did our pre-release in 2012.
— Methane has accompanied CO2 release. But it is a minor player because
a.) It’s overall forcing effect is only 10% of CO2. A much stronger GHG, but present at much lower levels than CO2.
b.) Methane is increasing at a decreasing rate, a convex curve (as the arctic circumference of effect has diminished). It’s GH effect is subject to diminishing returns, same as CO2.
c.) Methane has only 20 years of persistence, and chemically abrades, so when it’s gone, it’s gone.
— It is asserted that perhaps 25% of warming since 1950 is due to aerosol unmasking. And a significant amount of Arctic warming appears to be caused by soot and resulting albedo loss, not CO2, which can be easily controlled without cutting CO2 emissions.
Bottom line: Whatever warming caused by other factors come directly out of the “CO-warming budget”.
— I ignore solar in this argument because I am convinced neither by arguments for and against. Quien sabe? Wait a Schwab cycle and find out the hard way works for me. But you can drop that in if that’s your bag. Don’t get me wrong, I’m just ignoring solar — not snubbing it. Yet. They do seem to hold you to higher standards, so I will look at the graphs closer when i have time.
— Talking Point Challenge, “The Pause”: The “pause” is at least largely spurious. We are in a negative PDO (cooling) phase now. We should be cooling, but we are not. trends are flat. CO2 pushes steadily up, but is countered by negative PDO pushing down.
— Talking Point Challenge, “Tipping Points”: But skeptics, take heart: That there 1978 start-point period is equally spurious. Sure, if there is continual CO2 forcing, you get a flatline during a negative PDO. But the positive PDO trend is spuriously doubled as well. You have an equal measure of extra natural PDO warming piled onto CO2 forcing. So what is actually a plodding, steady forcing all of a sudden looks like a Tipping Point (but it is not). That’s the flip side.
Bottom line:
— ~0.55 empirical warming 1950 – 1914 (plus-or-minus god-knows-what).
— ~30% increase of CO2 since 1950. CO2 increase was ~10%, 1880 – 1950. The rest since then.
— Rate of raw CO2 warming: ~.11C/decade (Arrhenius, 1906)
— Some of this potentially attributable to Aerosol unmasking, soot, etc.
— Little-to-no positive feedback showing up in the global data. (i.e., Arrhenius-style TCS/ECS, not IPCC TCS/ECS).
This seems reasonably in line with Arrhenius (1906) raw CO2 forcing, but with little net feedback showing up in the data. It is an optimistic-sounding scenario, but I think it is realistic.
Bah. Too many can’t see the forest for the trees – and you all need to have an easy to understand elevator speech when talking to the average person.
Let’s forget about CO2 for a moment. If all of our science, equipment, data, models, and climatologists were around in the year 1250, would they have been able to predict that less than 50 years later the MWP would be cooling down? If they existed in 1600, would they foresee the ending of the LIA, and gradual warming? No and no.
They have no clue how natural variation will affect the climate in ten years, let alone 100. So the MOST they can claim wrt CO2 is that, IF their assumptions are correct, the average global temps will be about 2 degrees warmer THAN IT WOULD OTHERWISE BE. What that resulting temp would be, natural variation + CO2 warming, is anyone’s guess.
All you can do is put a 50% chance of warming and an equal 50% chance of cooling. The past trends mean nothing; history shows they can turn quickly and for no discernible reason.
If we get cooling, then CO2 warming is a (very) good thing. CO2 sensitivity would be a moot point – that is dependent on an absolute increase in temps over today’s climate.
If we get warming, the 2 degrees of CO2 warming won’t do much. Tipping points and positive CO2 sensitivity are unproven and speculative. Put whatever confidence level you want on it, but the overall chances of the climate warming AND tipping points existing is less than 50% – and that is what is required for CAGW. Do you want to destroy economies to avoid speculative disasters stemming from an event with less than a fifty percent probability?
The last question to ask someone is: climatologists have been making climate models for over a decade. A year later they are wrong. Ten years later, they are still wrong and to a greater extent. Do you really think the models will be right after ninety more years? If so, in what decade do you expect them to change from being wrong to being right?