IT’S WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT~ctm
Public Release: 31-Jul-2017
From Eurekalert
University of Colorado at Boulder
Even if humans could instantly turn off all our emissions of greenhouse gases, the Earth would continue to heat up about two more degrees Fahrenheit by the turn of the century, according to a sophisticated new analysis published in Nature Climate Change. And if current emissions continue for 15 years, odds are good that the planet will see nearly three degrees (1.5 C) of warming by then.
“This ‘committed warming’ is critical to understand because it can tell us and policy makers how long we have, at current emission rates, before the planet will warm to certain thresholds,” said co-author Robert Pincus, a scientist with CIRES at the University of Colorado Boulder and NOAA’s Physical Sciences Division. “The window of opportunity on a 1.5-degree [C] target is closing.”
During United Nations meetings in Paris last year, 195 countries including the United States signed an agreement to keep global temperature rise less than 3.5 degrees F (2 C) above pre-industrial levels, and pursue efforts that would limit it further, to less than 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 C) by 2100.
The new assessment by Pincus and lead author Thorsten Mauritsen, from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology is unique in that it does not rely on computer model simulations, but rather on observations of the climate system to calculate Earth’s climate commitment. Their work accounts for the capacity of oceans to absorb carbon, detailed data on the planet’s energy imbalance, the climate-relevant behavior of fine particles in the atmosphere, and other factors.
Among Pincus’ and Mauritsen’s findings:
- Even if all fossil fuel emissions stopped in 2017, warming by 2100 is very likely to reach about 2.3 F (range: 1.6-4.1) or 1.3 degrees C (range: 0.9-2.3).
- Oceans could reduce that figure a bit. Carbon naturally captured and stored in the deep ocean could cut committed warming by 0.4 degrees F (0.2 C).
- There is some risk that warming this century cannot be kept to 1.5 degrees C beyond pre-industrial temperatures. In fact, there is a 13 percent chance we are already committed to 1.5-C warming by 2100.
“Our estimates are based on things that have already happened, things we can observe, and they point to the part of future warming that is already committed to by past emissions,” said Mauritsen. “Future carbon dioxide emissions will then add extra warming on top of that commitment.”
###
The research was funded by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
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What changed is a new script writer in town with terms like ‘committed warming’, ‘baked in’ and ‘window of opportunity.’ The old script writers moved on to detergent commercials and smart car advertising.
The science is dubious in the extreme.
Do an experiment: calculate the total amount of energy (in ergs) every single nuclear (fission and fusion) device could release.
Then calculate how much energy from the sun reaches the earth per day.
Mine come out within an order of magnitude to 1:1
We are so important???
E=Mc^2
If you want the earth’s sensitivity to man’s influence, then divide the mass of the earth by the mass of the sun and multiply man’s projected contribution to warming by this mass ratio. Finally, round the result to the nearest tenth degree Celsius.
The self importance we place on ourselves is comedic.
So China is baked in and adding more. Does this mean Paris was a money play at the expense of real change.
I eagerly await their website betting casino. Since this is a sure thing they should be willing to offer favorable odds. Until then they blow smoke.
The article states, “• Even if all fossil fuel emissions stopped in 2017, warming by 2100 is very likely to reach about 2.3 F (range: 1.6-4.1) or 1.3 degrees C (range: 0.9-2.3).”
Well, we know that won’t and can’t happen so why the dire warning? There is nothing we can do about it so therefore, the warning, even if based on solid science, is useless. Why all the hurry to do nothing?
Humm. Could it be that the noted warming is primarily controlled by the sun? Is that the reason that stopping all fossil fuel production and use today, would have negligible results?
It seems like these authors are trying to suck and blow at the same time…
Once more, and likely at great expense, the pseudoacademics have delivered what well fed cattle can produce in abundance at very little cost. The bovine version of this is also useful for gardening. Not so much the “academic” version.
I predict there will come a time when bovines bred specifically for methane production will be touted as a sustainable natural resource.
Observations of the climate system over the last 40 years show that any warming has come ONLY from El Nino and ocean events.
Between those events.. no warming. (ignoring the manipulated claytons-warming in GISS et al.)
El Ninos, even in the most fevered AGW cult mind, are nothing to do with CO2 , anthropogenic or otherwise.
The sun will continue to lead the temperature, and that is looking like downwards for the next several decades
Gotta love it – this is a “sophisticated” new analysis. Damning all those previous studies as unsophisticated, unworldly, naive, simple, innocent, ignorant, green, immature, callow, inexperienced, childlike, artless, guileless, ingenuous.
The planet has already warmed by more than +2 degrees C.
since the cold Maunder Minimum period in the late 1600s
— possibly + 3 degrees C.
Completely harmless.
Actually very beneficial, especially from more CO2 in the air.
People in the late 1600’s would have preferred a permanent
+2 degree warming instantly, so one could say the wait
was too long for them.
Let’s keep adding CO2 until we reach 800 to 1,200 ppm
to optimize C3 plant growth, with LOWER fresh water requirements.
Optimum C3 plant growth will provide the most food for
humans and farm animals possible, while using the least amount of
fresh water to grow that food.
Only a fool would want less CO2 in the air.
Or a leftist.
I repeat myself sometimes!
Give us more of that good old CO2 please !
If it brings any night time warming, that’s even better !
In 4.5 billion years the only potential evidence that CO2 controlled
the climate was from the early 1990s to the early 2000s when there
was a rapid ramp up of the average temperature of about +0.5 degrees C.
to a new warmer / higher range.
That warming even fooled me, for a few minutes anyway,
when I began reading about global warming in 1997.
That’s 10 years out of 4.5 billion years!
That’s incredible data mining !
(You could also say warming from 1975 to 2000 — 25 years —
rather than the 10 years from 1993 to 2003,
that my eyes focus on, f you wanted to make the leftists feel better)
Here’s what the global warmunists actually mean by “climate change”:
(a) Natural climate change for 4.5 billion years,***
(b) 1940: Natural climate change stops,
(c) 1940: Man made aerosols take over as “the climate controller”,
(d) 1975: Man made aerosols disappear,
(e) 1975: Man made CO2 takes over as “the climate controller”,
(f) 2000: Man made CO2 stops warming,
(g) 2015 / 2016: Pacific Ocean “El Nino” takes over as “the climate controller”
*** There was a failed attempt to claim there was no
climate change before 1940, but the warmunists had forgotten
about the peak glaciation about 20,000 year ago,
allegedly because a pack of dogs ate their climate history papers
… right after getting a Freedom of Information Act request for raw data.
Only a fool would believe the warmunist claims from (a) to (g) above,
and the Grifter,
and S. Masher.
I repeated myself again !
Climate blog for non-scientists:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
With the science settled, it’s interesting that there is need for a new ‘sophisticated’ analysis. Nic Lewis is happy with 0.9 correlation between CO2 and temperature rise from pre-industrial times. Is he happy that CO2 similarly declined from its high during a warmer Middle Ages (Barley growing in Greenland, wine grapes in Scotland etc, etc) to lead the temperarure to its low in the LIA?
Having been taken by complete surprise by the rapid greening of the planet – a reaction that perforce reduces THAT CO2 residence time to weeks and is an endothermic reaction to boot, have their ‘observations’ been adjusted for it given it is an exponential function. This alone, totally invalidates the residence time of CO2 using the bomb data which occurred when flora were bordering on starvation. We will see that no one in the klimaте klaтch klaи is in a hurry to calculate the moderating effect of the greening over the 21stCentury. You won’t even see much mention of it. This, the most notable effect on the climate, ‘hit’ in 2007 when Nasa reported it to a silent climate fraternity. After a decade the earliest offerings from the debate-is-over monks was that greening was a terrible thing to happen. I see from that that someone Did do the calculations and didn’t like the result.
So, Nic, the greening wouldn’t happen to have a 0.9 correlation with the Dreaded Pause would it. The Pause was the only other climate happening of note in the life of climate science and what did they do about that? “Well they adjusted it out of existence – two prime learning moments and what did the Climate Synod do? What they are paid to do.
“This alone, totally invalidates the residence time of CO2 using the bomb data which occurred when flora were bordering on starvation. We will see that no one in the klimaте klaтch klaи is in a hurry to calculate the moderating effect of the greening over the 21stCentury..”
The models used by the IPCC do indeed make insufficient allowance for the fertilising effect of CO2 on plant life; they also appear to overestimate the adverse effects of warming on the land CO2 sink. Hence what I wrote:
“I also find, using a simple but scientifically reasonable model, that carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration, and hence the radiative forcing it exerts, can be expected to grow somewhat more slowly with cumulative emissions than the complex climate models used by the IPCC assume.”
The Pause was IMO largely caused by internal climate system variability. It followed a period over which warming had been unusually rapid. The Little Ice Age was presumably caused by some mixture of solar, volcanic and multicentennial internal influences.
Nick
Sorry. Formatting error. Only the first para was intended to be blockquote.
nick
I am sure that you are familiar with the Hansen et al 1981 paper. the Hansen plot is taken from Fig 3 in that paper on page 961. When commenting on this plot 9the data) Hansen states:
So it is clear that as at around 1980 Hansen consider the Northern Hemisphere to be about 0.3degC cooler than it was, in 1940, and the satellite data suggests that it has warmed by about 0.4degC since then with almost 0.3degC of which being a step change in temperatures coincident with the Super El Nino of 1997/98 which is a natural event not a CO2 driven event.
Hansen referenced, inter alia, as the other analyses the National Academy of Science 1975 paper which contains the NAS plot that I exhibited above. He also cited the Jones and Wigley 1980 paper (which I mistakenly stated was a 1981 paper, it was not. It was 1980)
Did you know that when the British took Manhattan in the Revolutionary war, there were a number of American cannons stored in a warehouse under their noses. Washington sent commandos to spirit them away on the ice, rolling them on solid sea ice to New Jersey. So the climate warblers want to get those good old days back, huh? I’m afraid we are going to have to settle for the Garden of Eden earth, oh woe are we! Crack open another bottle of Palm d’or Scottish red.
“according to a sophisticated new analysis”
Wow, I’m glad they ditched the clumsy new analysis they were going to use.
Translation: “The models will NOT be denied!!!”
Two Degrees! Oh the horror. That’s the difference in the average temperature of Cincinnati versus Cleveland, Ohio. And we all know that Cincinnati is unbearable.
/sarc/
The idea that there is pent up warming in the pipeline is pure bunk. If the climate responded that slowly to change, we wouldn’t notice any difference between night and day or even between winter and summer.
This is absoloute rubbish. It is like saying that the sun coming up, with its forcing of 1000 watts, will continue to cause warming after it goes down.
It doesnt, and CO2 acts just as quickly.
There is no ‘dialled in warming’, no ‘warming commitment’, it is a lie concocted to hide the low temperature response to CO2.
The analysis results are wrong. There is no evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate. There is no such evidence in the paleoclimate record. The climate sensivity of CO2 is zero. A radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed anywhere in the solar system including the Earth. Since the radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction so is the entire AGW conjecture.
That there is no evidence is not proof that there is no impact.
The impact could very well be there, just less than our ability to detect it.
Can’t scare people if you just give them facts! They have to be massaged properly.
The uncertainty in temperature data is so huge. We don’t know if the world has warmed by less than 1 C or over 2 C since 1750s. So we spend trillions of dollars to stop something that might have already happened. And we can’t even tell the difference between 1 and 2 degrees warming, so why is 2 C bad?
http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/decadal-comparison-small.png
I find the notion that we know the earth’s temperature in 1750 to within 3C to be unsupportable.
For what it’s worth, I find the claim that we know what the earth’s temperature in 1950 to within a tenth of a degree to be laughable.
isn’t any better now.
But it doesn’t require a GMST to understand how the atm works, and what’s causing the changes in temps we’ve seen, and it’s mostly natural ocean cycles, which drives the global distribution of water vapor. And it’s water vapor that regulates daily min T
You’re mistaking precision and accuracy. Additional work is required to deal with the fact that the way we measure temperature has changed to try to deal with valid skepticism (heat islands & the like) — but it’s possible to take the temperature the same way each year and see how if it changes year-over-year. If it does, you have data suggesting change — even if you don’t know the “average” temperature to a tenth of a degree.
(How you determine average is also complicated, but saying it’s complicated is different from saying that you can’t make a meaningful model to try to understand the world around us.)
The more the science collapses around them, the scarier the projections get.
So the next Maunder Minimum will still have the baked goods inside it. And the same goes for the 60-year AMO cycle deep dive?
Scientific American which stopped publishing science long time ago and just does junk science and hype picked it up. I feel sorry for my generation in a few decades looking back at all the idiocy AGW alarmists today.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-almost-certain-to-warm-by-2-degrees-celsius/
On a happier note, if AGW was true, it would be a good thing
It would make a great anthropology dissertation project, if it were not so perilous to young careers.
This is a very good video but goes off track when discussing the total elimination of CO2.
The cAGW crowd do not want to eliminate all CO2, merely to bring it down to pre-industrial levels said to be around 250-260 ppm.
Of course CO2 at this level is critically low for the biosphere, and in particular plants on the edge of habitable land/climate zone. Plants can inhabit more extreme/hostile environments when CO2 levels are higher, and as they do so they act as a negative feedback creating an expanding natural CO2 sink.
I believe that even the IPCC admits there is no way to prove that the temperature rise from 1750 or whatever to 1945 had anything to do with human co2 or other substances. The total amount of CO2 pumped in before 1945 is 6% of the amount after 1945.
So, the climate change should be maybe 1/16th of the amount after 1945 attributable to CO2. Even if you say that all the 0.35C (by satellite) increase since 1945 is because of CO2 then the heat associated before 1945 to the pollutants before 1945 is 0.02 or 0.04C at most.
Yet interestingly the heating from 1750-1945 is actually about double the heating after 1945. They like to utilize this heating as being “man-made” even though there is no way to associate it with man-made effects.
The most likely reason for the heating after 1750 is continued recovery from the LIA moving to another peak associated with the roughly 1000 year cycle that has wobbled temperatures for the last 8,000 years.
This means that some of the heating between 1945-2010 is probably also associated with this wobble. So, even the 0.35C gained since 1945 is probably more than what humans / Co2 contributed.
The net result of this is that they can’t use the 0.8C before 1945 as part of the “rise” that they claim is human caused. They can reliably only say somewhere between say 0.2C and 0.35C between 1945-2017 with one sigma probability.
Hansen refers to the momentum of the climate system. Such momentum has not been established. In order for there to be constant linear increase in heat we have to exponentially increase CO2 otherwise temperature will fall to sublinear growth. We will see deceleration.
In order for the rate to increase beyond linear the climate system would be needing to store heat somewhere. No such storage has been described. Without such storage we have a conservation of energy problem with having any more heat generated than we have gotten so far.
In other words, the last 70 years produced about 0.2-0.35C from CO2. The most we can expect in the next 70 years is the same amount and this can happen only if we keep exponentially increasing Co2 output for the entire 70 years.
So, the maximum additional heat is between 0.2-0.35C even in pretty much the worst case.
Climate Alarmism depends on 3 things to all be true or the alarmism is 100% not happening. In other words if any one of these things doesn’t turn out to be true then we wont face any consequences;
1) exponential rise of co2 has to continue for the entire 70-100 years. Given technology advancements this is quite risky assumption. Not just because we might replace fossil fuels but because as population levels out and our energy efficiency increases we will use LESS energy. So, exponential increase is unlikely but they have to have it.
2) the sensitivity of the climate system must be much higher than we think now. Even if CO2 rises by another 30% as it did in the last 70 years (exponential increase) 0.3C is not enough temperature change. They need the climate system to start acting much more sensitive to CO2. However, over 70 years 0.3C is what the climate system did. There is no scientific reason to believe that the next 70 years the climate system will respond differently to the next 30% increase in co2.
3) The damages from co2 and higher heat have to be incredibly huge to overcome the positive impacts of warmer weather on decreasing mortality and the hugely positive impact of co2 on the biota and animals that depend on plants. Already NASA has calculated that the 30% increase in co2 has created 30% more biota on earth and this has probably resulted in feeding 1 billion people / year besides countless animals who depend on this biota.
If any one or more of these 3 things turns out to be false then there is no climate alarmism to worry about. In fact all 3 of them appear to be absolutely false today. Thus the probability of negative consequences from co2 is ZERO.
It’s odd reading comments on a site like this.
I am skeptical of the software models and their specific projections, but we’ve continued to see increasing temperatures. I might be skeptical of those numbers — but the scientists who’ve gone into it with open minds (e.g. the Berkeley Earth Project, which received funding from the Koch brothers as well as others more amenable to the idea of AGW) have all concluded that anthropogenic climate forcing is in fact the best explanation for the temperature changes in the late 20th century and early 21st century. A significant part of your comment is taken up by an analysis of the temperature changes from 1750 to 1945 … but you’ve done this analysis without considering orbit or other information that should be included in any analysis. If we find changes in the Earth’s orbit and the Sun’s luminosity which explain that change but not the warming since 1945, then there’s no need to hypothesize “that some of the heating between 1945-2010 is probably also associated with this wobble”; Occam’s Razor should lead to the tentative hypothesis that the majority of the anomaly is due to human activity.
Anyway, in response to your numbered points:
(1) Technology changes quickly, but industry more slowly — only when there’s a pressing economic need. Carbon taxes might give industries a reason to reduce emissions but most models suggest that even if we stopped all emissions right now we’d continue to see warming. In this, I am more of an optimist — I think we’ll find technological solutions … but not if we continue to deny the existence or usefulness of basic science models to understand the situation.
(2) Buffering and other stabilizing effects are likely only effective within a limited range. Any other hypothesis fails to explain how the Earth’s climate has changed historically. And we do have some hypothetical ways that we could see feedback effects which destabilize the climate: if we see reduced ice coverage it will affect the albedo of the Earth which would have a big effect; and if we have significant methane emissions (from permafrost or otherwise), it could also substantially affect the atmosphere. In the 1970s, there was debate among scientists as to which would have more effect: cooling due to reflection from sulfate aerosols or warming due to green house gases. (Though scientists did not predict an ice age — that was just a sensationalist headline unsupported by actual papers.) Subsequent data has convincingly showed that we face warming, not cooling.
(3) The idea that overall co2 will be beneficial is possible but seems risky; I don’t believe that increased temperatures have increased biota by 30% (you say this is from NASA), or that increased co2 has made it possible to feed another 1b people. Sources? I do see alarmist articles that temperature increases can reduce crop yields (and moving food production north takes more time than we may have); and that increased temperatures may reduce nutrition (protein and iron) form certain stable crops. On the flip side, I’ve previously seen the hypothesis that increased co2 will allow more plant growth — which could be true if co2 is the limiting factor in a given ecosystem … but
Anyway, it seems odd to me that people would argue that we should risk our children’s future on this — I’d prefer to give my children a better life than mine. The Earth will survive, at least another billion years; but that doesn’t mean it will stay equally hospitable for humans.
Doing anything put forward by the political left is the only threat to our children and grandchildren. The religious hoax called Man Caused Globall Warmining is just that, a hoax. Destroying the human race’s energy production, agricultural and manufacturing systems based on a hoax is stupid, and 0.01C is not rising temps it is a joke.
Ed K
You have been brainwashed by a tall tale of climate change
so bizarre that perhaps you don’t even realize
what the global warmunists are claiming
when they use the term “climate change”.
You should be skeptical about all climate predictions,
and predictions in general, because humans are so bad
at predicting the future.
Unfortunately, you’re not there yet.
You also don’t realize the climate on our planet
has been improving for hundreds of years
and is currently the best it has ever been
for humans and their domestic pets.
You write like a person who would get a high score on an IQ test,
but your thoughts about climate change
seem biased by a belief that humans are destroying the planet.
There is some evidence of that in China and India,
where pollution is rampant — I hope you speak up about that too.
But, adding more CO2 to the air has been,
inadvertently,
the BEST thing humans have ever done to improve the climate of our planet.
I guess you could say we are 180 degrees apart.
The only difference is that I’m right, and your wrong!
I have been reading about global warming for 20 years,
and have found absolutely nothing unusual about climate change
in the past 150 years.
I would be the first person to speak up if there was anything unusual happening.
Assuming we should trust the very rough average temperature compilations,
the average temperature has stayed within a 1 degree C. range since 1880.
That’s unusually stable climate for our planet.
In addition, there is no evidence in 4.5 billion years of climate history,
that CO2 ever controlled the climate,
and only a very short period, from 1976 to 2000,
when CO2 and average temperature had a positive correlation
AND the temperature rise was not leading the CO2 rise.
The climate blog for non-scientists at the URL below
provides my summary of what “climate change” means
to the global warmunists, based on their claims:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
I hope it does get 2 degrees warmer. Why do people think that wouldn’t be a good thing? Remember, this would mostly yield warmer winters.
I guess “worse than we thought” is like, sort of funny.
I hope it does get 2 degrees warmer. Who cares if 100 million south Asians starve because the monsoon failed again.
Tony,
Apparently you’re unaware that the more than two degrees C warmer Holocene climatic optimum was associated with peak East Asian summer monsoon precipitation.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379199000311
The elementary climatological ignorance of “climate change” cultists is staggering.
And you are obviously ignorant of how hubristic you sound.
Warming causes more moisture in the atmosphere, as evaporation is enhanced with a warmer ocean.
And then, because the geography and the topography of the planet does not change (on the short timescales that we are dealing with) this moist air hits the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau, and hey presto the final piece in the monsoon jigsaw.
Essentially to stop monsoons one would need to either alter the rotation of the planet, or get rid of the topographical features such as the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateaus. I know CO2 is a wonder gas, but even this mighty molecule cannot pull that out of the hat..
It is not a precondition to buy into every piece of propaganda scare tactics, and a little bit of common sense and the use of what you learned in school when you were 12 goes a long way to assessing the b*llsh*t claims made by activists.
tony mcleod August 2, 2017 at 8:10 pm
By “hubristic”, I guess you mean incontrovertibly correct.
Do you know how ignorant you sound, when even cockamamie CACA “theory” relies upon there being more moisture in the air when warmer than cooler. Or did you not know that the phony way in which IPCC gets scary sounding T increases is from water vapor feedback, since CO2 on its own doesn’t cut it?
Typical of antiscientific CACA adherents, trying to have it both ways.
To Mike Stay:
How dare you bring common sense into the climate change “debate”
and spoil all the fun (especially if you are right)?
Of course +2 degrees C. warmer would be wonderful — warming the night.
The problem is not +2 degrees C. — +2 degrees is perfectly safe!
You should read “science” more carefully.
The problem is warming that exceeds +2.0 degrees C.
When we get +2.1 degrees C. of warming, for example,
our planet is doomed.
You could look this up!
The are simply wrong. They have future emissions wrong, PPM wrong, feedbacks wrong, and Direct sensitivity wrong.
No one is perfect.