Land use can influence climate more than greenhouse gases
WUWT reader T.G. Brown writes:
My monthly copy of Physics Today arrived today with a cover story on ‘Land Use and Climate Change’, co-authored by Roger Pielke Sr., Rezaul Mahmoud, and Clive McAlpine. While it is largely preaching to a warmest crowd, the message is compelling: …even if global average temperatures were contained, human impacts on climate would manifest in other potentially dangerous ways. . Piehlke et. al. are talking specifically about land use: deforestation, various farming practices, etc.
Toward the end of the introduction, there is a compelling quote by Gordan Bonan (NCAR) NASA Earth Observatory: Nobody experiences the effect of a half a degree increase in global mean temperature … land cover change is as big an influence on regional and local climate and weather as doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide–perhaps even bigger.
It’s a nice article, and available here: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/69/11/10.1063/PT.3.3364
Land’s complex role in climate change
Excerpt:
To date, most reporting on climate has focused on the possibility of catastrophic warming due to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. The assessment of climate change risk has essentially been distilled to a single metric: the global average surface temperature. That reality was evident at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, where the central negotiating point was whether the global temperature rise should be limited to 1.5 °C or 2 °C. Indeed, a 2016 opinion piece by Simon Lewis (University College London and the University of Leeds, UK) states that, “by endorsing a limit of 1.5 °C, the [Paris] climate negotiations have effectively defined what society considers dangerous.”1
But the reality of humans’ impact on climate is exceedingly complex.2 Even if greenhouse gas emissions could be eliminated completely, other harmful anthropogenic sources of climate change would remain. And even if global average temperatures were contained, human impacts on climate would manifest in other potentially dangerous ways.
One often overlooked human factor is land use. Deforestation, dryland farming, irrigated agriculture, overgrazing, and other alterations to the natural landscape can disrupt Earth’s natural balances and change weather patterns. As with the addition of CO2 into the atmosphere, the effects can last for decades or longer and affect regions distant from the original offense. Given continued rapid population growth, they threaten to be irreversible.
The article: Download PDF
Nothing like changing definitions on the fly.
“Climate Change” now includes all land use whether it causes any changes to climate or not.
I notice that comments above make reference to land use changes but this is even more in scope than that.
I also see that the notorious land use changes are now guilty of the crime of “Climate Change” whether they cause any changes outside of immediate local areas or not.
Semantic games like this really do not do anybody any good at all.
“Climate Change” now includes
=====================
what does it not include? for example, what do we call naturally occurring climate change? The sort of climate change that gave rise to the Little Ice Age or the Roman Warming. What is that called?
Hi Anthony – Thank you for posting on the article. Interested readers can did more deeply into this issue in our papers
Mahmood, R., R.A. Pielke Sr., K. Hubbard, D. Niyogi, P. Dirmeyer, C. McAlpine, A. Carleton, R. Hale, S. Gameda, A. Beltrán-Przekurat, B. Baker, R. McNider, D. Legates, J. Shepherd, J. Du, P. Blanken, O. Frauenfeld, U. Nair, S. Fall, 2013: Land cover changes and their biogeophysical effects on climate. Int. J. Climatol., DOI: 10.1002/joc.3736. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/r-374.pdf
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/12/r-354.pdf
Pielke Sr., R.A., A. Pitman, D. Niyogi, R. Mahmood, C. McAlpine, F. Hossain, K. Goldewijk, U. Nair, R. Betts, S. Fall, M. Reichstein, P. Kabat, and N. de Noblet-Ducoudré, 2011: Land use/land cover changes and climate: Modeling analysis and observational evidence. WIREs Clim Change 2011, 2:828–850. doi: 10.1002/wcc.144. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/r-369.pdf
Mahmood, R., R.A. Pielke Sr., T.R. Loveland, and C.A. McAlpine, 2015: Climate relevant land use and land cover change policies. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., e-View doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00221.1
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00221.1
My minority AGU report (when I served on that committee) is discussed at
Pielke Sr., R.A., 2013: Climate Change Position Statement – Dissenting View. Eos, Trans. AGU, 94(34), 301, Copyright (2013) American Geophysical Union. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/r-376.pdf
My actual minority statement was prohibited from being published in EOS, contrary to their own rules on opinions. But it can be read here
Pielke Sr., R.A. 2013: Humanity Has A Significant Effect on Climate – The AGU Community Has The Responsibility To Accurately Communicate The Current Understanding Of What is Certain And What Remains Uncertain [May 10 2013]. Minority Statement in response to AGU Position Statement on Climate Change entitled: “Human-induced Climate Change Requires Urgent Action” released on 8/5/13.
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/rpt-851.pdf
Finally, with respect to the comment on the text on the sentence
” And even if global average temperatures were contained, human impacts on climate would manifest in other potentially dangerous ways.”
I agree that “could” is a better subjunctive tense word. I did not catch in the proofs.
Roger A. Pielke Sr.
clue for yoooooo
The subjunctive tense is used to form sentences that do not describe known objective facts. …
it would be good if you knew that mr pielke.
Dr. Pielke, congratulations, you have a personal troll.
see, you should have kept madonna’s promise for her and elected hillary, marko
Finally someone takes notice. In the past 150 years humans have gone from using 4% or the land surface of the earth to using 40%. Our cities alone take up 4% of the land surface. With this change in land use comes a change in albedo, evaporation and cloud formation, which is directly tied to a change in local climate. For example, increased cloud formation downwind of cities.
Change the climate locally and the rest of the world doesn’t notice. However, if you change the local climate repeatedly over the globe, you have global climate change.
Ferdburple, Those numbers you gave for human land you use are utterly wrong. 40% of the land surface?
Seriously? What is your source for those extremely exaggerated numbers? Use accurate sources in the future. This information is available, but must be gleaned from the statistical records of various countries, as to how much of the land is actually in use, and how much is wild.
Interesting! An actual paper http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016JD024969/abstract points into the same direction. The net-forcing due to landuse is possibly not negative ( as supposed by IPCC- AR5 forcings which only account for albedo-changes) but slightly positive or at least around zero. This has some implications on the TCR, it lowers due to the influence of landuse to the GMST. The warming was not muted as the forcing data suggest but amplified by landuse.
In the essay at the back of State of Fear, Michael Crichton specifically said he believed a small amount of warming will be attributable to human activities – mostly through land use.
Twenty years later, I still believe that to be true.
In Australia land use CO2 emission data was used to offset increasing emissions from energy and transport etc. Emissions from energy etc. were measured while those from land use were estimated using IPCC formulae.
As required this process resulted in Australia meeting it’s emission reduction target of less than 8% growth under the Kyoto Agreement, even though measured energy emissions had increased by some 50%.
In 2010 energy emissions had increased by some 150 Mt while those from land use had reduced by some 105 Mt, resulting in a 45 Mt increase, QED less than 8%.
Land use savings were estimated based on assumptions that converting forests to national parks, farms to grasslands etc. would save emissions just by changing names and signs.
The Department of climate change and environment responsible for this creativity has since been shut down but has recently reappeared in a different form..
If for some reason it was found that land use changes helped the CO2 warmists, ECODEFCON 2 would immediately declared and the historical temperature adjustment crew would being scrambled to drastically lower past temperatures to make the CO2 issue “much worse than we thought”. But since that is not the case, nothing happens, and we can go on blissfully unaware that anything happened.
Interesting discussion. The interesting thing is that much of the “forest primeval” in the Americas is in fact feral, as in formerly managed by the Indians, and currently differently managed by anglos who do not recognize their ancestors never saw “natural” forest. “Natural” in the green sense of not managed by man, as if people were somehow outside nature.
And thank you also to T.G. Brown for alerting Anthony on my Physics Today article!
This coincides nicely with the WUWT article from last Thursday, “Study reveals how particles that seed clouds in the Amazon are produced”. According to the study referenced, it appears that at least some plants produce the means to influence cloud formation and, as a result, rainfall. It would be nice to see a mashup of these two articles to get a more complete picture.
pbh
So what’s the solution?
Voluntary human extinction?
Is that where fashion-forward progressives are now migrating?
Re … Land use change drives climate … 11/8/2016:
Pielke, Sr., et al, Land’s complex role in climate change, linked in the article, says,
The assessment of climate change risk has essentially been distilled to a single metric: the global average surface temperature. Pielke Sr. (2016) p. 40.
Challenge for Pielke, et al.: create a meaningful metric for climate (not climate change), one that scales elements of Earth’s surface in proportion to their significance to climate (not to warming or storms). Credit the metric, for example, for solar absorption, albedo, and heat capacity, for long wave radiation, for cloud cover variability. Discount it for latitude and altitude, and chronic cloud cover. Relegate human emissions to a footnote, recognizing that it does not accumulate in the atmosphere, that instead the ocean regulates atmospheric CO2 concentration according to its surface temperature. Henry’s Law.
Now draw a global map of Earth with the surface scaled according to the new metric, analogous to the cortical homunculus. See for example
https://braindecoder.com/post/emotional-body-map-1055548822
and
Prediction: As the human appendix does not appear in the cortical homunculus, Earth’s land mass will appear as a tiny island, a spec in the ocean.
Spot on Jeff.
More than a decade back I presented the role of land & water use and cover changes part of climate change — see my book online “climate change: myths & realities”, 2008, chapter 7: Ecological changes. I coined rural-cold-island effect along with urban-heat-island effect.
In fact my boss [KNRao] at IMD was a co-author of a manual “climate change” published by WMO in 1966. in early 70s, I started work on natural variability and my collegue was asked to see whether Simla deforestation changed the rainfall pattern?
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
CO2 has no significant effect on climate. Thermalization and the short relaxation time of some rotational modes for water vapor molecules explain why. Terrestrial EMR absorbed by CO2 is simply rerouted to space via water vapor.
Increased irrigation, especially after about 1950, is substantially increasing water vapor. The WV increase has been measured by NASA/RSS using satellites and has been reported since 1988. (http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com contains graphs and links to the data). Water vapor is the most important ghg and has made the planet warm enough for life. Currently the increasing WV is countering the cooling that would otherwise be occurring.
NASA/RSS measurements show WV increase rate trend of about 2.3E13 kg/yr which is the approximately 2% which stays in the atmosphere of the 110E13 kg/yr used for world irrigation. The other 98% apparently rains out. The data on irrigation was calculated using information mostly from here: http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/didyouknow/index3.stm
WV from energy production (fuel & cooling) is tiny (about 1E13kg/yr) compared to WV from irrigation. (‘Alternate energy’ won’t help significantly)
Rapidly receding water tables in some places and increased flooding in others as increasing water vapor rains out, is compelling evidence humanity needs to aggressively attend to rational management of fresh water … and stop wasting time and resources on the mistaken perception that CO2 has a significant effect on climate.
Dan Pangburn, in a nutshell, human irrigation systems are dwarfed by natural evaporation in lakes, rivers and oceans. Why is it that people MUST believe our human activities have huge effects? We don’t. We are a flea on an elephants back. Small local impacts on the surrounding environment that we are constantly trying to mitigate? Yes. An affect on climate or atmosperic water vapour ? No.
Holly – The world’s oceans and natural lakes have pretty much always been there and contribute the water vapor and nearly all of the huge effective thermal capacitance that has made the planet suitable for life. The dramatic increase in irrigation is relatively recent (started about 1950).
NASA/RSS measurements show WV increase trend of about 2.3E13 kg/yr which is the approximately 2% that stays in the atmosphere of the 110E13 kg/yr used for world irrigation. The other 98% apparently rains out. The data on irrigation was calculated using information mostly from here: http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/didyouknow/index3.stm
WV from energy production (fuel & cooling) is tiny (about 1E13kg/yr) compared to WV from irrigation. (‘Renewable energy’ won’t help significantly)
Any addition of WV will raise average global temperature but the effect is self-limiting because of increased clouds. My calculations show the temperature is about 0.26 K warmer now than it would be with no increased WV. (Table 1, file #E)
Dan Pangburn on 11/8/16 at 8:11 pm said,
CO2 has no significant effect on climate. Thermalization and the short relaxation time of some rotational modes for water vapor molecules explain why.
My preference would have been for Dan to have said, “CO2 has no significant effect on climate change.” There are three reality checks.
(1) The Greenhouse Effect, formerly the Callendar Effect, while a misnomer is nonetheless real. Certain atmospheric gases form a blanket that keeps the surface warm, more than about half due to water vapor and a quarter plus due to atmospheric CO2. Thus CO2 has a major effect on climate.
(2) The problem arises however that it doesn’t accumulate in the atmosphere. It’s concentration is regulated according to Henry’s Law and its coefficient for CO2 dissolved in water (which are not represented in the GCMs). Man couldn’t change the atmospheric concentration of CO2, up or down, for good or bad, even if all the governments of the world were able to cooperate in the task and emptied all the treasuries in the attempt. Revelle’s large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past or reproduced in the future was a figment of a fund-raiser’s imagination. Man’s puny CO2 emissions (6 GtC/yr) are immeasurably small in the ocean reservoir (~35,000 GtC), and would remain so if they were increased an order of magnitude or two, and that is neglecting the rate of natural sequestration.
(3) The concentration of atmospheric water vapor is governed by the Clausius-Clapeyron effect, which is represented, or better misrepresented, in the GCMs. When the surface temperature increases, water vapor increases, cloud cover increases (CCNs being always in superabundance), cloud albedo increases, and solar radiation to the surface is diminished. This effect and its reverse, the companion cloud burn-off effect that amplifies solar variation, are the most powerful feedbacks in all of climate, and neither is represented in the GCMs. So even if CO2 were to increase by some fantastic mechanism, dynamic cloud cover, not molecular absorption, would mitigate the warming.
Jeff – There is compelling evidence that CO2 has no significant effect on climate. Five observations which support this are noted in http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com . My findings are that the ‘greenhouse’ effect is essentially all by water vapor. EMR absorbed by CO2 is simply rerouted to space via water vapor. The mechanism is described in the blog.
The Clausius-Clapyron equation relates the pressure P, enthalpy of vaporization, DHvap, and temperature T where P is the partial pressure of the water vapor in the boundary layer at the water-atmosphere interface. But flow of the water vapor molecules into the bulk atmosphere is limited by diffusion and assisted by wind and turbulence. Thus IMO the assumption that WV partial pressure throughout the bulk atmosphere (after accounting for lapse rate) is the same as that calculated by the Clapeyron equation is flawed.
Validity of assumptions and methods are demonstrated by the 98% match 1895-2015 between calculated and measured temperature trajectories..
Dan Pangburn on 11/9/16 at 8:16 pm relied on his blog, where he provides “Five observations which support” “that CO2 has no significant effect on climate.” The first two are of the Ordovician Period [490 – 445 mya] and the Phanerozoic eon (542 mya – present), which includes the Ordovician and the Mesozoic Era (the dinosaur era, including the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous). The state of the climate and of the oceans in these ancient times can be no more than a coarse conjecture inferred from the same fossils that gave us today’s fossil fuels. Surely some climate assumptions are safe enough for that eon, like the spectrum of the Sun and the spectral absorption pattern of gasses, but they cannot include the dynamics of either climate or the oceans nor the response of climate to CO2.
Pangburn’s next three observations, dealing with trends, are about climate change, not climate in general:
3. During the last and previous glaciations AGT trend changed directions before CO2 trend.
4. Since AGT has been directly and accurately measured world wide (about 1895), AGT has exhibited up and down trends while CO2 trend has been only up.
5. Since about 2001, the measured atmospheric CO2 trend has continued to rise while the AGT trend has been essentially flat.
Being about climate change, these observations do not support a conclusion about climate per se.
Pangburn then said,
The Clausius-Clapyron equation relates the pressure P, enthalpy of vaporization, DHvap, and temperature T where P is the partial pressure of the water vapor in the boundary layer at the water-atmosphere interface. But flow of the water vapor molecules into the bulk atmosphere is limited by diffusion and assisted by wind and turbulence. Thus IMO the assumption that WV partial pressure throughout the bulk atmosphere (after accounting for lapse rate) is the same as that calculated by the Clapeyron equation is flawed.
Pierrehumbert in his online text Principles of Planetary Climate, (2008), provides a differential equation for the CC relation where the variables are temperature (T), saturation vapor pressure (p_sat), latent heat (L), and two density terms (rho). With a few simplifying assumptions, he approximates this to a temperature dependent ratio for the saturation vapor pressure. Id,, p. 87. IPCC approximates it further to about 7% for every 1ºC rise in temperature. AR4, FAQ 3.2. The CC equation does not rely explicitly on enthalpy.
The CC equation at the core is an idealization from thermodynamic principles. It depends on thermodynamic equilibrium and reversible phase changes, conditions that GCMs represent but which do not exist in the real world. Nevertheless, atmospheric water vapor is a byproduct of the ocean, and it is certain to have a piecewise linear first order linear, temperature dependent approximation. That is no more than is implied by reliance on the CC equation.
I stand by my observations about CO2 and climate vs. climate change.
Jeff – I am familiar with and have critically considered a lot, if not all, of the perceptions and reasons why CO2 is perceived to be a significant factor in climate change and therefor necessarily climate per se. Any one of them can be challenged as you did and as I have done with similar arguments.
1. The ancient data showing decline into and recovery from an ice age while CO2 level was many times the present has been argued that the sun was cooler back then, CO2 and temperature were estimated by proxies which might be wrong, etc. But the findings of the experts are that the CO2 level was high and there was an ice age. If we assume the Andean/Saharan ice age to have been caused by CO2 change, what caused the CO2 to go down and then up again so drastically? There was little or no life on land yet. Physical laws have not changed (a confident assumption). Ratio of land area to ocean area hasn’t changed much (a fairly confident assumption).
2. The complete lack of correlation between CO2 level and average global temperature (AGT) over the Phanerozoic eon. To consider this as not relevant we need to allow as the experts who arrived at the methods and proxies must be mistaken. But they have survived challenge.
3. AGT trend changed direction before CO2 trend. Perhaps some as yet unidentified factor has changed the timing.
4. Up/down trajectory of AGT with progressive up for CO2 (since both have been accurately measured world wide, about 1895). Perhaps other factors over-rode the influence of CO2. Some have blamed the downtrend 1941-1973 on aerosols but why did they suddenly quit having an effect and what about 1877-1909? Setting the SSN anomaly time-integral to zero and combining an assumed CO2 effect with an approximation of the effect of ocean cycles works fairly well until about 2005 but fails drastically after 2005.
5. Step change in the rate of AGT increase (it suddenly slowed) in about 2005 resulting in a growing separation between the rising CO2 level and much slower rising (if at all rising) AGT. I don’t have even a partial explanation of why this does not refute any significant influence of CO2 on climate.
IMO considering all of these together provides compelling evidence CO2 has no significant effect on climate.
So what is going on now? The assertions by EPA, the IPCC (Dr. Tim Ball note at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/07/16/does-ipcc-practice-willful-blindness-of-water-vapor-to-prove-a-scientific-point-for-a-political-agenda/ ) and others that water vapor doesn’t stay in the atmosphere long enough to have an effect has dissuaded most folks from considering it. Willis brought up WV in two WUWT articles a few months ago and he and Anthony are going to present about it at AGU. Some folks are so convinced of the doesn’t-stay-in the-atmosphere-long-enough-to-matter concept that they reject any evidence to the contrary.
There is also the argument that the oceans are so big that any input to WV from humanity is insignificant. The oceans have always been big and their contribution of water vapor with its absorption of terrestrial EMR has made the planet warm enough for life. Fine as long as average global WV remains constant. However, the observation is WV has been increasing. NASA/RSS have been measuring it via satellite since 1988 and report monthly. Willis graphed the data into 2016. I have extended it graphically through Sept 2016 in my blog and include links to the source data.
WV partial pressure vs water temperature is widely available e.g. http://intro.chem.okstate.edu/1515sp01/database/vpwater.html from which the rate of (13.6-12)/2/12/8*100%=6.25% per Kelvin degree is easily calculated. This same % increase/K° was used to estimate the part (about 33.6%) of the TPW increase due to AGT increase.
In looking in to possible sources for the increasing WV, it is obvious that irrigation accounts for nearly all (about 200 times energy related). It appears that irrigation has had a slight but increasing effect for hundreds of years with a substantial increase in rate starting in about 1950.
Jeff – It is unclear to me if GCMs assume vapor pressure in the bulk atmosphere is that calculated by CC or not. IMO that would be an unrealistic assumption.
I have assumed as a best estimate that the % change of TPW with AGT change is the same as % change of WV partial pressure with water temperature change. Doing so results in about 33.6% of TPW increase being due to AGT increase.
Chine used more cement in 3.5 years than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2014/12/05/china-used-more-concrete-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-used-in-the-entire-20th-century-infographic/#3f85c2d17194
That’s got to have a huge impact on the average global temperature. Then add in India, Brazil, and all the other developing countries. CO2 is not the issue. It’s humans everywhere wanting to live better
“Given continued rapid population growth, they threaten to be irreversible.” Why must they be reversible? What else on the planet is reversible? We are PART of the earth, not invaders, and our changes are no different from a species eating out all the forage in one area and moving on. Should we determine the static condition we think is right (forget evolution, we want static, absolutely) and force things to confirm to that ideal?
There is nothing that says the changes will be in a negative direction, except political correctness, and there is no evidence the earth was ever static. Everything changes—except, apparently, this irrational belief that nothing should ever change.
Roy Spencer’s study of population density vs temperature supports this quite elegantly:
As you can see at population densities even as low as 25 people per sq. km the ‘UHIE’ is about 0.8 C, which is roughly the same as all of the global temperature rise last century. At that level of population density the effect must correspond to land use changes, since there just could not be enough in the way of buildings and roads. So perhaps UHIE should be changed to HHIE, for ‘human heat island effect’.
Iain Murray’s book, “The [i]Really[/i] Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want Yon To Know About–Because They Helped Cause Them,” includes a chapter on farming-driven catastrophic climate change in Kazakhstan. The world’s 4th largest inland sea, the Aral Sea, has almost completely dried up, and the result on summer temperatures is that they now reach 140 F. This is one real example among many.
Books on permaculture show that the land can be largely healed in a dozen years or fewer, with restoration of year-round streams in Jordan’s desert, the preservation of the cork trees in Portugal, increased agricultural productivity in China, and improved rainfall patterns in Italy and the US.
Potentially, we have a wonderful future ahead with plenty of food for humanity even at twice our current numbers, hugely improved nutrition, much greater longevity and vitality, and a big increase in the total carrying capacity of the Earth for life in all forms.
But you have to get over this arrogance of we-are-right-and-they-are wrong. Skeptics can point to temperature records and other facts to prove their case, but it is some of the Greens who have discovered the real problems and their solutions. They need to separate from the humanity haters who scream with horror at a tree growing in the Arctic and want to “reduce their carbon footprint.” Those greens have admitted that they are desperate to kill human beings, and the truth is, they hate all forms of life from people, animals and plants all the way down to the bacteria. We are carbon-based life forms and CO2 is the basis of life on land. All life.
As to Paris, it had the usual nonsense about fossils–but they also want to increase the carbon content of soil and THAT is what is actually needed. This site WUWT commenters has had little interest in the life-enhancing positives; only in being so smart and sneering at others. Until you can overcome that, you are worthless.
So grow up and get much more interested in how food is grown and how land use can drastically IMPROVE climate by agricultural breakthroughs. I think creating real changes is MUCH more fun than complaining. You can create and see wonders in your own lifetime.
warmist crowd…
Dan Pangburn, 11/16 at 2:48 pm, #1, includes this:
If we assume the Andean/Saharan ice age to have been caused by CO2 change, what caused the CO2 to go down and then up again so drastically?
The Andean/Saharan ice age (450–420 Ma) is almost equivalent to the Silurian Period (445–415 mya), and it encompasses the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event (450–440 mya). One shouldn’t assume that CO2 or CO2 change cause any age, ice or other. If that period comprised a snowball Earth, the high CO2 content could be due to accumulation of volcanic gasses over millions of years because the surface ocean was frozen, minimizing, if not shutting down, ocean uptake. Moreover, water vapor would have been near zero, locking Earth into that state of maximum surface albedo and solar immunity. No wonder there was an extinction event!
Post 1 of 4 re Dan Pangburn, 11/16 at 2:48 pm, who said this:
1. If we assume the Andean/Saharan ice age to have been caused by CO2 change, what caused the CO2 to go down and then up again so drastically?
The Andean/Saharan ice age (450–420 Ma) is almost equivalent to the Silurian Period (445–415 mya), and it encompasses the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event (450–440 mya). One should not assume that CO2 or CO2 change causes any age, ice or other. If that period comprised a snowball Earth, the high CO2 content could be due to millions of years of volcanic gasses, accumulating because the surface ocean was frozen, minimizing, if not shutting down, ocean uptake. Moreover during this time, water vapor would have been near zero, locking Earth into that state of maximum surface albedo and solar immunity. No wonder there was an extinction event!
Post 2 of 4 re Dan Pangburn, 11/11/16 at 2:48 pm:
2. The complete lack of correlation between CO2 level and average global temperature (AGT) over the Phanerozoic eon. To consider this as not relevant we need to allow as the experts who arrived at the methods and proxies must be mistaken. But they have survived challenge.
Rather than not relevant, that correlation was not likely measurable, lacking time records for either parameter with which to calculate the delicate correlation function. All of this heightens one’s skepticism, perhaps well above the level of a virtue. The challenge window at the IPCC is a trompe l’oeil.
P.S. Please consider my post of 11/14/16 at 6:22 pm superseded by that of 11/15/16 at 12:32 am.
Post 3 of 4 re Dan Pangburn, 11/11/16 at 2:48 pm:
3. AGT trend changed direction before CO2 trend. Perhaps some as yet unidentified factor has changed the timing. Bold added.
That is as the trends appear in the Vostok ice core reduction, and as they should be, because, contrary to the AGW model, GAST is the Cause & gCO2 is the Effect, not the reverse. IPCC has the causation arrow backwards because it interpreted its 1988 charter to be to show the effects of humans on climate, and because it had no alternative to CO2 emissions. IPCC writes about causes and effects but never bothers to check if any cause actually precedes its effects, as the causality principle of science requires. For example, IPCC defines
equilibrium climate sensitivity [ECS] as the equilibrium change in the annual mean global surface temperature following a doubling of the atmospheric equivalent carbon dioxide concentration. Bold added, AR4, Climate Sensitivity, Glossary, p. 943.
Never mind that nothing in climate is ever in thermodynamic equilibrium, and the only kind of equilibrium IPCC defines is with respect to climate models. The relevant point is that the rise in temperature contemplated for AGW is due to the ECS, and by definition it must follow the rise in gCO2. Instead, investigators estimate the rise in CO2 and in temperature, and then take the ratio as the ECS, never bothering to confirm that CO2 leads temperature. The toast fell jelly-side-up for the public since the magnitude of the estimated ratios published is small, about 0.7 which, being at the 3% confidence level according to IPCC predictions, invalidates the AGW model. Actually, the sign of the ratio should be negative, so the estimates are in fact completely off–scale. If they had been much more negative, the investigators’ algorithm would have produced faux evidence supporting the upcoming faux catastrophe.
Dan P.’s factor (in bold) is well-known outside of the IPCC family of climatologists. It is the carbon pump — not the organic carbon pump (AR4, Figure 7.10, p. 530) and neither the biological carbon pump (id.) nor its equivalent, the marine carbon pump (Hofmann, et al., cited in AR5, Ch. 6, p. 559.) — but rather the extended, global MOC that carries 380 GtC/y, of which nominally 42% is outgassed at the Equator, CO2 which is subsequently reabsorbed as the MOC travels across the surface layer to cool and sink at the poles.
This uptake and outgassing of CO2 in the ocean is physics, a manifestation of Henry’s Law, and not found in IPCC Assessment Reports. CO2 is highly soluble in water, its partial pressure in the atmosphere being proportional to its concentration in the water and inversely proportional to the coefficient of solubility in g/100g H2O. That coefficient is inversely proportional to the water temperature. If man wanted to increase the concentration of gCO2, all he’d have to do is warm the ocean. And if he didn’t, all other attempts would prove futile.
The layer in contact with the atmosphere is the global MOC, a density-isolated, fluid stream. It emerges from the deep ocean, saturated with CO2, drawn to surface at the Equator by the Ekman pump. There the Sun warms the water to as much as about 35ºC, where it outgasses, and being now warmer and depleted in CO2, it floats on the surface on its return, seasonally to one pole or the other. Along the path, it cools by longwave radiation and recharges with CO2, until at the poles, saturated again with CO2 and cooled to 4ºC or less, it plunges to the deep ocean to return along the ocean bottom to the Equator. The cycle requires about one millennium.
Post 4 of 4 re Dan Pangburn, 11/11/16 at 2:48 pm:
4. Up/down trajectory of AGT with progressive up for CO2 (since both have been accurately measured world wide, about 1895). Perhaps other factors over-rode the influence of CO2.
Accurately sampled, yes, but crudely reduced by climatologists into a pair of biased and minimally skilled macroparameters.
At the Equator, the global MOC splits into two branches, a river of atmospheric CO2 and a light-weight ocean surface layer drawn to one or the other of the twin main drains at the poles. Estimates for the North Atlantic MOC flow are between 15 to 30 Sv [TAR, §7.3.1, p. 436], though IPCC seems not to have an explanation for the terminus of the MOC. No wonder it thinks sea level is rising!
On the other hand, a published and confirmed estimate for upwelling at the Equator is 50 Sv [Kessler (2006), Wyrtki (1981)], but that flow has no origin. A reasonable and necessary model is to link the two flows as part of the same global phenomenon, an extended MOC, plus, tentatively, some local upwelling.
If the 15 Sv headwaters of the MOC is at 4ºC and the corresponding discharge at the Equator is at 20ºC, Henry’s Law and Henry’s Coefficient for CO2 in water predict that 158 GtC/y/MOC will be outgassed to the atmosphere. This is 75% more than IPCC’s “massive exchange” of 90 GtC/yr. AR4, Are the Increases in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases During the Industrial Era Caused by Human Activities? FAQ 7.1, p. 512.
At the same time, IPCC estimates the minimum CO2 increase at 3.2 GtC over the past 25 years. Id.. At that rate, the Carbon Pump requires a temperature trend of 0.0187ºC/yr, which would tend to confirm the 0.0179 admitted by IPCC. Brohan maximum slope, AR4, Fig. 1.3, Published records of surface temperature change over large regions, p. 101.
http://rocketscientistsjournal.com/2010/03/_res/AR4_F1_3_GASTp101.jpg
The Carbon Pump and Henry’s Law are thus consistent with gCO2 being caused by global warming, whether previously due to human activities or something else. The answer to the rhetorical FAQ 7.1 question is “No”, and the postulated local upwelling is negligible.
At the headwaters of the surface branch of the global MOC and before outgassing, the aqCO2 concentration is dominantly proportional to that of the polar concentration 1000 years ago. By the time the MOC reaches a pole, the concentration is approximately restored, gCO2 having been reabsorbed into the surface layer that cools en route. The final concentration at the poles differs from the polar concentration 1000 years ago according to the change in an effective global average surface temperature. Thus the change in gCO2 is due to Henry’s Law and to the change in temperature over a millennium.
The slope changes in GAST/AGT and CO2 Dan reports are due to decadal scale noise, not climate scale phenomena. IPCC definition of climate is weaselly, scarcely a definition at all, having a period … ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. AR4, Climate, Glossary, p. 942. CO2 has an influence on annual plant growth, and on climate, too, but on time scales from millennia to geological eras. The best model for solar activity (due to Y. Wang, et al. (2005)) predicts HadCRUT3 with time major lags of 150 and 50 years and with an accuracy approximating IPCC’s 11-year smoothed estimate for HadCRUT3 itself.
SST has an influence on gCO2 on time scales of about 5 to 10 centuries, in agreement with the MOC period and the Vostok reduction. So the extent to which GAST/AGT influences gCO2 depends on the extent to which GAST predicts SST. The long time constants associated with the surface temperature response to the Sun and the dependence of gCO2 on the one millennium period of the carbon pump, dictate that the lower limit for climate should be at least several centuries if not one millennium. Regression fits, or trends, at less than climate periods are not reliable.