High chance that current atmospheric GHGs commit to warmings greater than 1.5C over land
From the CENTRE FOR ECOLOGY & HYDROLOGY
Current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations already commit the planet to air temperatures over many land regions being eventually warmed by greater than 1.5°C, according to new research published today (27 July 2016) in the journal Scientific Reports.
The results of the new study have implications for international discussions of what constitutes safe global temperature thresholds, such as 1.5°C or 2°C of warming since pre-industrial times. The expected extra warming over land will influence how we need to design some cities. It could also impact on the responses of trees and plants, and including crops.
The research was carried out by scientists from the UK’s Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the University of Exeter, UK.
The research team found two main reasons behind the result.
First, even if it was possible to keep carbon dioxide concentrations fixed at their current 400 parts-per-million concentration levels, then the planet would continue to warm towards new equilibrium higher temperatures. At present, the climate is out of equilibrium, with the oceans drawing down very large amounts of heat from the atmosphere. However this will decline as the planet is bought towards a stable climatic state.
Second, warming rates over land are far higher than those when averaged globally which include temperatures over the oceans. This is a feature observed in meteorological measurements and reproduced across a large suite of climate models.
Lead author Dr Chris Huntingford from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology said, “It would certainly be inappropriate to create any additional fear over climate change. However, what this paper does is re-iterate that the oceans are currently acting as a very strong sink of heat. Even if carbon dioxide was somehow stabilised at current levels, additional warming will occur as we move towards an equilibrium climate state. Furthermore, both data and computer models all indicate enhanced temperatures over land, compared to global mean warming that includes temperatures over the oceans.”
Co-author Dr Lina Mercado, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter, said, “Our findings suggest that we are committed to land temperatures in excess of 1.5°C across many regions at present-day levels of greenhouses gases. It is therefore imperative to understand its consequences for our health, infrastructure and ecosystem services upon which we all rely.”
Dr Chris Huntingford added, “Central to our methodology is analysis of predictions made by a large number of independent climate research centres from around the world. Although many simulations exist for climate stabilisation, these tend to be at future higher greenhouse gas concentrations. We were able to scale these back to see the warming levels we are already committed to, even if present-day concentrations increased no further. Such computer models capture how the ocean heat sink would be slowly lost as a stable climate is approached, implying that temperatures would continue to increase temporarily even if greenhouse concentrations were fixed at current levels.”
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First ECS was projected to be 10C, then 6C, then 5C, then 3C, then 2C now 1.5C….
I see a pattern…
Eventually they’ll get ECS right at about 0.5C~1.0C with a higher probability towards 0.5C…
At what ECS can we finally call an end to the biggest and most expensive polical scam in human history??
Always unbiased emotionless scientific presentations :
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/2016/5739e742b98fc.jpg
Looks like one chimney on the left is putting out some smoke.
The other plumes seem to be water vapour.
As a photographer with long experience with Photoshop, I would say that this photo is a great example of someone else who is well-versed in its use. There is a good reason why this photo seems almost surreal.
is “bought” a typo or freudian slip?
Not possible. Observational ECS to a CO2 doubling is 1.5-1.8. And CO2 will not have doubled until 560 ppm.
How do you have “observational ECS to a CO2 doubling” when “CO2 will not have doubled until 560 ppm”
Did you observe something that hasn’t happened yet?
By measuring the change in temperature over the CO2 increase to date and extrapolating.
MarkW says below:
“By measuring the change in temperature over the CO2 increase to date and extrapolating.”
So it wasn’t observed over a doubling of CO2, correct?
Am I allowed to extrapolate on this same “Observational ECS” in the opposite direction? The claim is that a doubling of CO2 results in 1.5 – 1.8 of Observational ECS. Consider Earth’s current atmosphere, now remove all CO2, so 99.96% of the atmosphere remains. There would be zero Observational ECS due to CO2, correct? Now let’s add in a single molecule of CO2. This single CO2 molecule is being tossed around by gravity, and I’ll leave it to you to quantify how much heat it’s trapping. Now show how two molecules of CO2, a doubling of CO2, results in 1.5 – 1.8 of Observational ECS.
Would you prefer to qualify the claim that: “Observational ECS to a CO2 doubling is 1.5-1.8”?
Perhaps you need to define some starting point, some lower bound of CO2 concentration, below which your claim doesn’t hold? (Or you can just make one up.)
Phillip Bratby on July 27, 2016 at 11:30 am
The observations include many factors other than CO2.
:
Nasty observations, many factors distracting climate scientists from all that fascinating CO2 molecules.
Plot ECS vs log(CO2), if it’s a straight line the gradient will allow you determine the doubling time.
The observations include many factors other than CO2.
So, each CO2 molecule from 280 to 560 is worth .00535 degrees. From 140 to 280 each is worth what?
ECS is derived from models I believe. So, they vary from 1.5 to 4.5 for a CO2 doubling as I’ve read.
@ur momisugly Phil. July 27, 2016 at 9:42 am…………
Phil. If CO2 traps heat, why not use 100% CO2 instead of Argon in you windows?
The atmosphere has 0.04% and is supposed to “trap” “heat” so why not put 100% CO2 in you windows?
For physical reasons, you cannot have a vacuum, so an inert gas, Argon, is used.
Also I asked: Is it not true that CO2 absorbs LWIR at a certain wavelength; thermalizes; expands; rises and re-emits at all LWIR wavelengths?[or most].
You said:
No, that is not true.
OK. What is true?
Edmonton Al July 27, 2016 at 10:16 am
@ur momisugly Phil. July 27, 2016 at 9:42 am…………
Phil. If CO2 traps heat, why not use 100% CO2 instead of Argon in you windows?
The atmosphere has 0.04% and is supposed to “trap” “heat” so why not put 100% CO2 in you windows?
For physical reasons, you cannot have a vacuum, so an inert gas, Argon, is used.
It’s used because it’s inexpensive and has a lower conductivity than air, in thin windows Kr is sometimes used because it has an even lower conductivity (but is more expensive). Carbon Dioxide is sometimes used but mainly to reduce sound transmission.
Also I asked: Is it not true that CO2 absorbs LWIR at a certain wavelength; thermalizes; expands; rises and re-emits at all LWIR wavelengths?[or most].
You said:
No, that is not true.
OK. What is true?
CO2 absorbs LWIR at a certain wavelengths; thermalizes. It only likely to re-emit if it’s at high altitudes and then only at the same wavelengths (not all).
Phil, why has not the greenies and the government demanded that CO2 be used as insulation in all ceilings and walls of all homes and businesses …. given their claimed fact that CO2 is an excellent “heat trapping gas” and your above claim that CO2 reduce sound transmission?
What more could anyone hope for getting out of a “dirt cheap” insulating material?
Why has there not been any new businesses that perform “CO2 Home Insulations”?
Why hasn‘t the Fed Gov offered an energy-saving “cash rebate” to anyone who installs “CO2 Home Insulation”?
And ps, just what exactly does “high altitudes” have to do with CO2’s ability to emit or re-emit it’s absorbed IR “thermal” energy?
Phil, the vertical scale on the following graph is not “feet of altitude”, to wit:
http://cdn.greenoptions.com/b/bc/bcb92953_Greenhouse_Spectrum.gif
There is no such thing as a stable climatic state or an equilibrum between atmosphere and ocean. The shortest time the oceans could possibly equilibrate in is one complete turnover of the thermohaline circulation, i e 1,000-1,500 years. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (plus everything else that affects climate) never stays static for that long, so there can never be equilibrum or stability. Which everybody who has studied climate history knows, but apparently not “climate scientists”.
They use the tactics of the new owners of a company.
As in- “However things used to run here is to be forgotten because this department now has a new goal and purpose to the company.”
Climate science is nothing but a shameless regression towards natural variability. I put luke warmers in that basket too.
A conscious or unconscious bias towards remaining relevant.
They have no idea.
Right now, the 0-2000 metre ocean is warming up by 0.002C per year. It is absorbing about 0.6 W/m2/year or 0.8 X 10^22 joules/year or the equivalent of 3/4 of a day’s worth of solar energy extra over a whole year (instead of absorbing 365.25 days, it is warming as those it is absorbing 366 days of solar energy over a year).
If CO2 stays at 400 ppm, when does the ocean stop warming and/or slow-down warming. There must be some simple formula for that. When does it reach equilibrium? how much warmer will it be? what does that mean for the land surface. I mean 0.002C per year is not much.
Wouldn’t that be 365.25 / (3/4) x 1.5 years (730 years)?
Bill Illis asks:
“If CO2 stays at 400 ppm, when does the ocean stop warming and/or slow-down warming. ”
Bill, iffen the CO2 stays at 400 ppm average …. then that signals that the ocean has stopped warming.
But the bi-yearly (seasonal) cycling of CO2 will continue as it normally does.
“Even if carbon dioxide was somehow stabilised at current levels, additional warming will occur as we move towards an equilibrium climate state.”
If he wishes his research to be taken seriously Dr Chris Huntingford should state when an equlibrum climate state existed.
Was it in “pre-industrial” times?
As far as I know there are no records showing climate to have ever been in an equilibrium state.
At least no unadjusted records!
A complete load of Horlicks.
These guys looking in wrong place. My analysis proves global warming directly linked to rapid increase in # of politicians. They’re all full of hot air and that’s what’s warming our planet!
Back to science. Earth’s CO2 concentration will teach lower equilibrium than they think because biosphere growing more rapidly in 400+ PPM CO2!
Bill
I was not aware it was possible for a gas to be out of equilibrium. I thought it mixed and reacted instantaneously, but alas, I am probably mixing up gases and solids. Oh no, the writer is. As gases mix instantaneously, having delayed reactions as a consequence of that is impossible without sequestration and later release. All those mechanisms would have to be identified.
“…safe global temperature thresholds, such as 1.5°C or 2°C of warming since pre-industrial times.”
So, a significant portion of 1.5°C was already in the bank before human CO2 was significant enough to result in warming (according to the alarmists). So how much warming is this article actually saying we are going to see from now till the so called 400 ppm equilibrium?
This suggests that long-term LST can rise independently from SST? I have my doubts
Look at the rapid response in LST to SST temperature change during the latest El Nino. It responded within weeks – up and down
A 5 second look at any climate sciency temp graph shows no commitment to anything.
Andrew
There’s also no commitment to the numbers the graphs are derived from. They can be adjusted post facto.
Andrew
Imarcus
I looked at the Huntingdon paper in Ecology and Hydrology, and I note this comment — “However what this paper does is to re-iterate that the oceans are currently acting as a very strong sink of heat.” This is just a repeat of Kevin Trenberth’s straw clutching statement early in the NST pause that the “missing heat must be hiding in the oceans”, a statement for which no known physical mechanism has been invoked, but is now lodged deep in warmista mantra. But its discovery might just be about to be ‘discovered’ if not invented because I also see in Nature GeoScience that they have under their job recruitment section under TRR181 they are looking for 32 PhD and 14 Research Associates to study ‘Energy transfers between atmosphere and oceans’. Obviously not a physics topic very well understood yet !
I wonder how long we will have to wait, to find out?
Very long indeed. During interglacials oceans act as a huge heat sink. During glacial periods oceans act as a heat source. As the Ice Age has been going on for over two million years and glacial time is about 80%, the oceans are almost as cold as they can be, with an average temperature of 3.9°C. No way they are going to warm significantly in the few thousands of years left before the glaciation returns.
more oceans ate the heat science
Where’s Heidi Cullen
If they keep going with this they’ll soon have to explain how the missing heat is hidden in the coming ice age. That ought to be fun.
As Steve Mosher could have said, “I loved Evanston Ill winters. I really miss that, living in the SF Bay Area, where the average mid-January daily low temp is 38 F, versus 20 F in north Chicago, and in the day time wearing a light jacket, versus down coat, cap, gloves and under layers. I’m moving back as soon as I can. As soon as global warming raises Chicago to light-jacket mid-winter conditions. Until that happens, I can’t move back home.”
Was it Michael Mann who said, “We shut our house off from fossil-fuel energy ten years ago. When it gets down to 5 F in winter, we pile on wool blankets. When it gets to 90 F in summer, we open windows. I demanded, and got, from PSU, a concession that my office would never be heated or cooled by fossil fuels.”
He did these things, did he not? If he didn’t he might be labeled a fraud artist, and we know he’s not a fraud artist.
/We need a lot better prediction than globalized, homogenized Manmade Catastrophic Global Warming Forces Us Power-Mad Control Freaks to Take Over The World.
Examples: What will be the average Jan 15 and July 15 temps, in 2050, in Helsinki? In Berlin? In Athens? In London? In ChicagoI? n Los Angeles? In Toronto? In Vancouver? In Rio de Janeiro? In Buenos Aires? In Sydney? In Brisbane? And then to address UHI, take a 100 mile radius line from these cities.
What is going to happen where you live? The IPCC has no reports on this. Manitoba CA produced x megatons of wheat in 2015. What is the expected tonnage production in 2060, with 1.5 C projected global warming?
The atmosphere’s causing the Earth’s surface to be 33 degrees C warmer then it would be otherwise can all be explained by the heat capacity of the atmosphere and the gravitational gradient. There is no room for an additional radiant greenhouse effect caused by greenhouse gases. Such has not been observed. If CO2 really affected climate then the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years should have caused a change in the natural lapse rate in the troposphere but that has not happened.
By “gravitational gradient” I assume you mean the argument that Venus is so hot because of it’s ~90x greater surface pressure than that of Earth’s.
No. Yes, increasing the pressure of a gas will raise its temp. We know that when we hand-pump up our bike tyres. The valve gets hot.
Err, but the tyre doesn’t stay permanently hot.
The work done on the atmosphere is a “one shot” event.
Work is not continually being done by gravity.
It was compressed once. It was worked on once. The work was the ACT of compression NOT keeping it compressed.
Then It cools via radiative escape of LWIR to space.
I do wonder at the basic scientific ignorance on display here.
IDIOT !!!
Yes I know you are.
Do please tell me where I can buy the machine that works on the perpetual work done by gravity.
Because by gainsaying my explosion of the common fake skeptic myth of why Venus is hot …. that is what you involk.
It would solve all our energy needs if there were my friend.
Just what exactly do you think causes the center of proto stars to heat up enough to start fusion?
You are bathed in that energy all day long.
So Toneb, you are opening the door on planetary resonances?
The convective greenhouse effect has been observed on all planets in the solar system with Thick atmospheres. The lapse rate is a function of the heat capacity of the atmosphere and the pressure gradient and has nothing to do with the LWIR absorption properties of so called greenhouse gases. Remember that heat transport by conduction and convection dominates in the troposphere. At the Earth’s surface there is on average a .2s delay between a CO2 molecule’s absorption of a photon in the 15 micron band and its radiating away that same photon. In that .2s that same molecule will have on average one billion interactions with other molecules, sharing energy with each interaction. That is why LWIR absorption has nothing to do with the lapse rate which is a measure of the insulation properties on the atmosphere. The initial calculations of the climate sensitivity of CO2 were to high by a factor of 20 because those who made the calculation forgot to include that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will actually lower the dry lapse rate which is a cooling effect. Then there is the idea of H2O feedback which has to be negative for the Earth’s climate to have been stable enough to permit life to evolve. The climate sensitivity is actually very close to zero and that is why there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate.
“The lapse rate is a function of the heat capacity of the atmosphere and the pressure gradient ”
Like I said it has nothing to do with the pressure gradient.
Once done, whatever the mass of atmosphere, it has no effect on heating.
The LR is a function of heat pumping due to the constant motion of the atmosphere (convection, mechanical turbulence, isentropic up-gliding into baroclinic features) on a rotating planet subject to convergent motion due to rotation (Coriolis, differential heating).
Air is forced to rise – it cools, then descends – it warms. A LR is formed, modulated by LH release aloft ( LR modulation via GHG’s negligible), and of course by surface warming (DALR) and by surface cooling (inversions).
Proved daily by NWP models, using physics that are NOT up for argument.
“That is why LWIR absorption has nothing to do with the lapse rate …”
And…
“adding CO2 to the atmosphere will actually lower the dry lapse rate …”
Uh!
You were right the first time – the GHE doesn’t alter the LR – what it does is shift it warmer such that the surface level in a non GHG atmosphere is now at around 7km ( ~ ave -18C level ).
Oh, and another empirical science fact. The H2O feed back is +ve as the world warms …. A fact that even Willis acknowledged in a thread very recently……
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/07/25/precipitable-water/
The feedback has to be negative for the Earth’s climate to have been stable enough over at least the past 500 million years for life to have evolved. In their first report the IPCC published a very wide range of guesses as to the climate sensitivity of CO2. Only a single value can be correct. In their last report the IPCC published the exact same values. So after more than two decades of study the IPCC has learned nothing that would allow them to refine their guesses. Some real evidence that CO2 actually affects climate should allow the IPCC to calculate a specific number for the climate sensitivity of CO2 but apparently the IPCC has yet to find such evidence.
Different thing.
Crushing atoms together crates heat, as does compressing gas in an atmosphere – however in a star of sufficient mass, at that point another heat source is lit-up – that of nuclear fusion.
Your bike tyre will not stay permanently hot after you’ve pumped it up even though your tyre does the work of gravity in keeping it at pressure.
As I’ve said, it is the act of compression that does the heating. Once done it will cool ….. In the case of a star unless heated from within by fusion or in the case of an atmosphere unless compressed from rarity again.
Science knows this my friend and have done since ….
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_laws
“Crushing atoms together crates heat,”
No it doesn’t.
“as does compressing gas in an atmosphere”
Nor does that.
“So Toneb, you are opening the door on planetary resonances?
No, I am simply – sad though it is that I have to – “opening the door” to the gas laws.
nuwurld,
As an example, consider any planet or moon without an atmosphere where BB physics describes their behavior exactly. Adding an atmosphere does not change the temperature dependence of surface emissions and the same laws must apply, except as a gray body (to the extent that the planets emissions are reduced by the atmosphere) rather than a black body.
Yes, LWIR emitted by the surface does not heat the N2, O2 and Ar in the atmosphere in any significant manner, but it can heat the water in clouds, but then again, air molecules contribute nothing to the planets emissions and do not heat the surface while only radiant emissions from the Sun, GHG’s and clouds that gets to the surface does. You see little effects of LWIR emissions by the surface in the atmosphere because most of the atmosphere is completely transparent to those wavelengths. Only GHG’s and clouds get in the way of complete transparency at nearly all relevant wavelengths.
Another point is that the temperature of the N2, O2 and Ar in the atmosphere is largely irrelevant to the radiation emitted by the planet since as I pointed out previously, the transmittance of N2, O2 and Ar is nearly 1 for both VIS the LWIR radiation and the emissivity of these gases is near 0.
Of course air molecules “heat the surface”, ….. by conduction, ….. but not to a great extent.
When a “warm” breeze/wind blows in or when a “warm front” blows in those “warm” air molecules will, upon contact, conduct some of their “warmth” to whatever they come in contact with that is cooler/colder than they are.
I’m starting to think it’s warm water vapor that’s what is actually driving temperature. I’m trying to see if there is enough evidence to prove this.