Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A study published in AAAS “Science Advances” has attempted to resurrect discredited claims of a dangerously high climate sensitivity, by suggesting that climate sensitivity increases as the world warms.
Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be ‘game over’, scientists warn
New research suggests the Earth’s climate could be more sensitive to greenhouse gases than thought, raising the spectre of an ‘apocalyptic side of bad’ temperature rise of more than 7C within a lifetime.
It is a vision of a future so apocalyptic that it is hard to even imagine.
But, if leading scientists writing in one of the most respected academic journals are right, planet Earth could be on course for global warming of more than seven degrees Celsius within a lifetime.
And that, according to one of the world’s most renowned climatologists, could be “game over” – particularly given the imminent presence of climate change denier Donald Trump in the White House.
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In a paper in the journal Science Advances, they said the actual range could be between 4.78C to 7.36C by 2100, based on one set of calculations.
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The abstract of the study;
Nonlinear climate sensitivity and its implications for future greenhouse warming
Global mean surface temperatures are rising in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The magnitude of this warming at equilibrium for a given radiative forcing—referred to as specific equilibrium climate sensitivity (S)—is still subject to uncertainties. We estimate global mean temperature variations and S using a 784,000-year-long field reconstruction of sea surface temperatures and a transient paleoclimate model simulation. Our results reveal that S is strongly dependent on the climate background state, with significantly larger values attained during warm phases. Using the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 for future greenhouse radiative forcing, we find that the range of paleo-based estimates of Earth’s future warming by 2100 CE overlaps with the upper range of climate simulations conducted as part of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). Furthermore, we find that within the 21st century, global mean temperatures will very likely exceed maximum levels reconstructed for the last 784,000 years. On the basis of temperature data from eight glacial cycles, our results provide an independent validation of the magnitude of current CMIP5 warming projections.
Read more: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/11/e1501923
The money quote from the study full text;
… This paleodata-based TCRP is now applied to the RCP8.5 forcing scenario until year 2100 CE, following the equation above for deriving an estimated global mean SAT response. The anthropogenic forcing results in a global mean SAT anomaly of 5.86 K by year 2100 with respect to PI values. The uncertainties in S and the ocean’s heat uptake efficiency as discussed above result in a likely range of 4.78 to 7.36 K for the global mean SAT anomaly. Comparing our paleo-based estimate of future warming to the multimodel ensemble mean projections of the CMIP5 (52), we found that our projection results in a slightly higher global mean SAT anomaly. The current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)/CMIP5 projection under the RCP8.5 scenario results in a global mean SAT increase of 4.84 K for the year 2100 (with respect to PI values). The corresponding multimodel ensemble values range from 3.42 to 6.40 K. …
Read more: Same as above
My question – if a warmer world is more sensitive to CO2, why was the Cretaceous, which ended 66 million years ago, only 4C warmer than today, despite a CO2 level more than 4x higher than today’s CO2 level? If we apply the conclusions of the paper, temperatures in the warm Cretaceous should have been 14c higher than today’s temperatures – an absurdity which should excuse this paper from further serious consideration.
For the millionth time —->>>>
“Climate Scientists Predict the Imminent End of the World”
…over reach world perhaps
Wait, there is a bright side to this..
GAME OVER.
If the game is over, then there is nothing left to do. This is what we’ve been waiting for!! Game Over Man! And now back to our regularly scheduled program. No point to funneling billions of dollars into a week long party at an exotic location, no more renewable subsidies, and no more models that are only as good as the bias directing them. Game Over. We are off the hook from the guilt because we already lost. And once lost can never be found. So go ahead Greenwar and make your last dying words about how we can still “save” the planet, because it won’t do you much good. We know what Game Over means…it means ot is time to save ourselves.
See? This is a good thing. 🙂
Whats lost can never be found…stupid autocorrect…
Can’t wait January, hopefully Trump will defund all there unscientific AAAS-holes.
It’s not only worse than we thought, it’s worse than we thought the last time we said it was worse than we thought.
This time it’ really, really REALLY worse than we thought. It’s so much more worse than we thought that we can’t think how much worse than we thought we could possibly think it could be.
You heard it first here: the journal AAAS “Science Advances” is being renamed “Science Retreats” in keeping with its editorial policy.
Anybody found out who is this most renowned climatologist?
Every academic is “renowned”, just as every company and product is “leading”.
Now the lefty academics need to lose the “ren”. With Trump, they’ve been owned.
Excellent news. So the Paris accord really is totally irrelevant and can be shredded and recycled to earth friendly toilet paper. I’ll go ahead with my purchase of stocks in sun screen and beer coolers.
On a side note, the protests today are very darkly hilarious. Take the rioting in Oakland, for example: “Hey, some people in other states voted in a way we don’t like! Let’s all go out and burn down our own houses! That’ll show ’em!!!”
Perhaps voting stations should not only require voter ID, but also voter IQ.
And voter pulse rate (no voting from beyond the grave). And voter proof of residency (no voting on a bus). And voter proof of citizenship (no voting as a resident foreigner, legal or otherwise).
If they did, I expect Mrs. Clinton’s popular vote count would have been significantly behind Trump’s.
Any evidence that any of the protesters / rioters actually voted?
Remember back when Obama was first elected they were predicting riots by all those ‘racists’ who didn’t vote for him. It didn’t happen. The political right is far more respectful of law than the political left and generally doesn’t throw a temper tantrum when they don’t get their way. Like so much of the rhetoric that comes from the political left, those claims were a classic manifestation of psychological projection as demonstrated by riots by the left arising because they didn’t get their way this time.
wws, it has been darkly hilarious (hiLLarious?) for some time. We knew that the liberal MSM had it completely reversed when they predicted violent protests of a Trump loss. It is the entitled left that riots when things don’t go their way. Stay tuned for more incitement by our “thought leaders.”
When you want to know what a liberal is up to, just check what he’s accusing a conservative of.
Liberals assumed that conservatives would riot when they lose, because they know that is what they would do.
If they show a climate model that has been correlated, so when you input the known climate factors from the past ( CO2 levels, solar activity, etc) and the predictions match the temperatures we have seen, and the predictions for the future from this correlated model are this 7 C warming by 2100 then there might be some credibility to those claims. They talk about the “possibility” of this happening, not knowing because of the unknowns, well, thats why you correlate your models to past known data so your model temperature predictions match real temperatures by adjusting the unknowns like feedbacks. If you make those adjustments and match the past, then you have some case to say this is what might happen in the future.
In the engineering field I work in the first thing anybody wants to know before they consider looking at my data is, “is the model correlated, to tests or real operations?” If the answer is no, and then I were to show them plots of my model’s predictions against real measured data like these climate models, I would get the tongue lashing of a lifetime and then get fired for incompetence. But these climate models are not created to make accurate predictions, they are made to drum up money for more climate studies by creating fear. If they correlated their models so they predicted the flat temperature response of the last 20 years then they would show very little warming for the next 50 years and it would be “game over” for the climate change money train.
It is the scammers pumping out fraudulent and dangerous lies like this that really do need to be locked up. Now.
The simplest of sums shows that their lower and upper end scenarios (4.78 and 7.36) when divided by 84 (years to 2100) produce annual (linear) expectations of 0.057 and 0.088 deg C increase in temperature per year. Such values would surely be noticed in a very few years. If this does not happen the linear requirement to reach their expectations will increase gradually to ridiculous amounts. At some time their guesses will have to be abandoned.
Is this too simple?
Robin, this has boggled my mind for years. Yes; it really is that simple!
As the predicted warming trends for the 21st Century did not appear, it was simple for anyone to recalculate what the trends would have to be to reach their unchanging “target” future temperatures. Their failure to update models with actual temperatures through 2005 was an attempt to justify high outyear projections.
“In parallel investigations, we cherry-picked a different segment of the paleo record in which CO2 level and temperature were inversely correlated, and obtained a CO2 sensitivity of minus 7 degrees per CO2 doubling.
So on balance our advice to president Trump is to do nothing about CO2 (except enjoy the tomatoes).
Well, they are correct in one sense; it’s “game over” for the climatists. There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s got them quaking in their boots, going hog wild in desperation. It’s a beautiful thing.
This paleodata-based TCRP is now applied to the RCP8.5 forcing scenario
Why oh why do they keep using that stupidly ridiculous and impossible scenario?
It’s a rethorical question, I don’t mean to be answered. I know the answer pretty well.
Another spectre of “unprecedented harm” imagined by those who don’t care to learn from the past because they are trying to convince us of “Humanity’s growing stress on fragile Gaia”.
A scientific apostasy which stems from mortal vanity.
The political left conveniently forgets history all the time, and wants you to forget it, too.
So much BS it boggles the mind. But then again, this seems to be the purpose. If this was thought through clearly, CAGW would not be an issue.
The claim that the sensitivity increases with temperature is trivially falsified with both theory and data. The T^4 relationship between temperature and emissions coupled with the immutable fact that in LTE, emissions == total input forcing should make it obvious that the sensitivity MUST decrease with temperature.
Starting from 0K, the planet is an ideal BB and the first W/m^2 of input increases the temperature from 0K to 65K for a sensitivity of 65K per W/m^2 (no GHG effect, no water, no ‘feedback’). The next W/m^2 of forcing increases the temperature by 11K for a sensitivity of 11C per W/m^2. Each additional W/m^2 of forcing has a smaller effect than the average of all forcing and that effect diminishes as 1/T^4. All that happens as GHG’s and clouds come in to affect at higher temperatures is that the ratio between planet emissions and surface emissions decreases (i.e. the effective ’emissivity’ decreases).
Anyone who thinks that feedback can effect on the T^4 relationship between emissions and temperature needs some remedial math and physics training. All that is possible is to vary an effective emissivity or the scale factor between surface emissions and emissions by the planet. This is a linear relationship to emissions and not big enough to override the 1/T^3 dependence of the sensitivity on input. The temperature relationship of the effective emissivity would need to decrease at a rate greater than T^4 in order for the sensitivity to increase as the temperature increases.
People who aren’t aware of, haven’t studied or refuse to accept the geologic and written history of CO2, temperature and human civilization say the stupidest BS! They should be forced to take Geology, History and control theory all over again! But it’s obvious that their profit motivation is high!
Friedrich and Timmermann (U.o. Hawaii) churn our this kind of paper all the time. Axel Timmermann was the Lead Author of the IPCC’s AR5 WG1, Chapter 5 (Information from Paleoclimate Archives).
It is increasingly obvious to all except the wagon-circling Alarmists, current Global Warming is but a chronologically microcosmic part of one Paleo-climatic cycle of successive ice-sheet advances and retreats, involving huge swings in atmospheric CO2 and temperature, and energy fluxes which absolutely dwarf anthropogenic warming.
I’m sure our ‘egg-heads’ here can identify a no. of points on various paleoclimatic cycles where sensitivity was (theoretically, as now) increasing to the cataclysmic ‘tipping-point’ …. at which time extinguishing all life. But we’re still here, tagging-along with — in the driving-seat — natural forces determining climate changes and trends, hugely greater than any impact Anthropogenic Warming can make. Gaia is far more robust a system than the Alarmists claim, and their theories FAIL.
I’ve always thought climate sensitivity was non-linear but in the other direction via negative feedbacks. Physics tends to indicate that positive feedback leads to destruction. I.e., we wouldn’t be here right now.
“I’ve always thought climate sensitivity was non-linear but in the other direction via negative feedbacks.”
The concept of feedback, per Bode, is not applicable to the climate system, where the bogus model developed by Hansen and Schlesinger considers both the stimulus and the implicit power supply to be the Sun. In this case, the maximum power that can be delivered to a load can never exceed the input power from the Sun. Consider an amplifier where the input and power supply are connected to the same thing. Will any amount feedback, positive or negative, allow the maximum power that the amplifier can deliver to exceed the input power?
What can happen is that joules that were prevented from being delivered to the load in the past can be delivered to the load in the present (for example, temporarily storing them in a capacitor), but like progressivism/socialism, you eventually run out other joules. GHG’s kind of work this way by preventing joules from escaping and returning some of them to the surface in the future, although not without letting some eventually escape out the other side of the atmosphere and into space (about half each direction based on geometric considerations). Because the source of excess joules is the past, a steady stream of them arrives, but only to the extent that they were prevented from leaving in the first place. There is no ‘amplification’ involved, it’s just the sum of joules originating from various times in the past.
What you consider to be negative feedback is the T^4 dependence of temperature on joules/sec (power) and since joules must be conserved, it takes more of them to increase T by a constant amount as T gets larger. This is not negative feedback, but the natural consequence of the physical laws underlying radiation physics.
Exactly!!! In paleoclimatic record, how many “Tipping-Points” has Gaia survived without self-destructing??
The current hypothesis by the Alarmist/Charlatan Camp is that “the ultimate Tipping-Point and the Cataclysmic End is Nigh”. Empirical evidence *absolutely* disproves this hypothesis.
QED.
And Mars should be hot as Venus.
Did anybody else notice the caption underneath the photo in the Independent news piece…….
Quote:
“If the Earth’s temperature rises seven degrees Celsius, it could trigger the kind of runaway global warming that may have turned Venus from a habitable planet into a 460C version of hell…..”
I didn’t know that Venus was a habitable planet at one time. Huh, was there any life on the planet at the time of its habitability? If so, what did the Venusian life look like? Were they like us?
Inquiring minds want to know.
According to current theory, Venus never cooled down enough for liquid water to form.
When the Sun is up for 116 days as on Venus, the surface is baked out to about 500C on the very first day. As in, the water is turned into water vapour by 7:00 am on our relative time on the very first day 4.5 billion years ago and everything in the surface rocks which can be baked into a gaseous volatile is turned into a gaseous volatile by 8:00 am our relative time on the very first day 4.5 billion years ago.
And this process does not really stop for the next 4.5 billion years.
Result, extremely thick atmosphere which only allows enough energy to escape back to space so that the equilibrium surface temperature is 500C.
Great! Let’s party like there’s no tomorrow! Yay! 🙂
It has gone up 12C here today at Gamecock’s palace.
There they go again using the discredited RCP 8.5 for their prediction. Will they ever learn?