Guest essay by Sheldon Walker
I recently read an article by Tamino aka Grant Foster of Portland, ME, called “Global Warming: the Relentless Trend“.
Many of the points that he made annoyed me, and I started to write an article to document his many errors. Half way through the article, I suddenly realised that some of the issues that skeptics and warmists argue about, like slowdowns and pauses, are caused by the terminology, and the definitions of the words that we use.
So that you can enjoy how I was going to trash Tamino’s article, I will leave in the half of the article that I had already written, before I had my revelation.
Quotes from Tamino’s article will be enclosed in square brackets – [like this]
<<< angry hat on >>>
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[When it comes to global warming, recent years have been so hot that it worries even those who deny the problem exists.]
Tamino starts off by claiming that even stupid deniers are worried by the high temperatures in recent years.Tamino has spent many years treating skeptics like dirt, and insulting them by calling them deniers. But suddenly all of the deniers are rushing to Tamino, to tell him how worried they are about recent temperatures. Are we really meant to believe this?
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[No one more desperately needs global warming to end than those most against doing anything about it. That’s why they cling so tight to the notion of a “pause” …]
We can apply Tamino’s logic to other situations. No one more desperately needs ballet lessons, than those who don’t want to have ballet lessons. Tamino, I have signed you up for ballet classes, starting next Monday. You will thank me when you are older.
Tamino, we cling so tight to the notion of a “pause”, because we believe that the evidence supports it (i.e. a warming rate of nearly zero for the 10 years from 2002 to 2012). You can do the linear regression yourself, if you don’t trust my figures. Show us why this isn’t a slowdown or pause. We are prepared to look at your proof.
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Tamino writes some poetic nonsense about the recent warm temperatures. In case you don’t know what “a highest high born” is, it is referring to the record high temperature in 2016.
[…, a highest high born of the unholy marriage of extreme fluctuation and relentless trend.]
What Tamino fails to mention, is that the “unholy” marriage is between a human and a mouse. The mouse’s name is “relentless trend”, and the human’s name is “extreme fluctuation”. Tamino would like you to think that the mouse and the human are equal partners in the marriage. But reality proves that they are not.
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[ It may become their new delight, this highest peak, a cherry more ripe and juicy than any before it.
And cherry-pick they will. That’s what happened after the 1998 el Niño.]
Tamino believes that skeptics/deniers will always use a new record temperature as the starting point for a new “pause”. He claims that they did it in 1998, and he is convinced that they will do it again with the record temperature in 2016 (which he calls a ripe cherry).
I don’t know about you, but I am getting a bit fed up with the warmist lie, that deniers claim that a slowdown or pause started in 1998. I have done a lot of work on this, and published a number of articles explaining that a strong slowdown/pause started in 2002, NOT 1998. It had a warming rate of almost zero, and lasted for the 10 years from 2002 to 2012. The slowdown didn’t become strong until 4 years after 1998.
I think that Tamino and the other warmists keep repeating the lie that skeptics believe that a pause started in 1998, because they know that nobody will ever find a pause there. They are like the drunk who searches for his lost keys under a street lamp, even though he lost the keys somewhere else in the darkness. In this case,the warmists don’t want to find the keys (a slowdow/pause), so they deliberately search for them in a place where they know that the keys cannot be found.
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Tamino has a novel way of guaranteeing that his biases are always confirmed by his simulations. For example, Tamino always starts looking for a slowdown or pause, starting from a temperature spike. He claims that deniers always do that. So when Tamino finds the “impression” of a slowdown or pause, he can always say, “look, it started with a temperature spike”. Of course it did, Tamino put it there.
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Tamino reveals a lot about how he does climate simulations, and how he makes sure that he never finds a slowdown or pause. Look at the graph that he has drawn of his simulation results, the one that covers just 14 years. It shows a regression line fitted to the 14 years of data, which is almost flat,like a slowdown or pause.
Now look at what Tamino has written.
[OMG! A fourteen-year stretch with no trend at all! If anything, the globe is cooling!!!]
Could it be that Tamino is finally going to admit that there could be a slowdown or pause? Don’t hold your breath. Here is what he said next.
[In spite of the fact that these data are the sum of random noise and that same relentless trend. The impression of a pause is a combination of random chance with the fact that we started off with a big early peak.]
Now, remember what I said before about the temperature spike (in this quote Tamino calls it a big early peak). Tamino put it there, and now he is using it to claim that the slowdown or pause isn’t real, it is only “the impression of a pause”.
Look again at the graph which gives the “impression of a pause”, and starts with a big spike. First off, notice that no statistical test was ever done to prove than this is not a slowdown or pause. Tamino has simply used his opinion, to deny that it is a slowdown or pause.
Now consider this. Remove the first data point (the temperature spike). You then have 13 years of top quality slowdown or pause. Does Tamino look at this. No he does NOT. Why would a person who doesn’t want to find a slowdown or pause, risk finding a real one.
Consider the words that Tamino uses. (I am repeating some of a previous quote, so that I can draw attention to certain words)
[OMG! A fourteen-year streth with no trend at all! If anything, the globe is cooling!!! That’s what we’ll hear repeated over and over, In spite of the fact that these data are the sum of random noise and that same relentless trend.]
Let me paraphrase that quote, to make its meaning clear. It is saying that [presumably] deniers will repeat over and over, that it is a slowdown or pause, or even a cooling trend, IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT THESE DATA ARE THE SUM OF RANDOM NOISE AND THAT SAME RELENTLESS TREND.
What Tamino is implying, is that this can NOT be a slowdown or pause, or even a cooling trend, because the temperature values are calculated from random noise and a trend. So Tamino can happily throw away the slowdown.
But wait. The parts of Tamino’s simulation graph which show a warming trend, are also calculated from random noise and a trend. Exactly the same as the slowdown was. If he is going to throw away the slowdown because it was calculated from random noise and a trend, then why doesn’t he throw the warming trends away as well.
Could it be that Tamino wants the warming parts, but doesn’t want the slowdown parts. So he uses his biased opinion to throw away the slowdown parts, and keeps the warming parts, even though both parts were calculated in the same way. And then to add insult to injury he says “see, stupid deniers think that there was a slowdown there”.
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<<< friendly hat on >>>.
Let’s start by defining some terms.
The global temperature series. This is the global temperature series that we try to physically measure. GISTEMP is one example of this, but there are many others.
The global temperature series can be influenced by many things. For example, El Nino’s, PDO, AMO, the Blob, and of course, global warming. There are many other possible influences as well, like solar input, albedo changes, land use, cloud cover, etc.
Another important influence on the global temperature series is a random, or pseudo-random element. There is also the question of the form of the random, or pseudo-random element. For example, the amount of autocorrelation.
We are trying to measure the global warming signal, by looking at the global temperature series. But it is difficult, because the global warming signal is not strong over shorter time intervals, and the other influences are stronger than global warming.
At times, the various influences, especially the pseudo-random element, make the global temperature series appear to slow down or pause. This is what the skeptics are talking about when they claim that there is a slowdown or pause over a certain timeframe. I cannot speak for all skeptics, but when I talk about a slowdown or pause, I am usually talking about a temporary slowdown or pause, and I am not suggesting that global warming had gone away, or vanished. Global warming is still happening, but its effect is being masked by the other influences.
I think that warmists look at a slowdown or pause from a different viewpoint. They know that global warming had not “gone away”. So they don’t like hearing about a slowdown or pause. They think that skeptics are claiming that global warming has slowed down or paused. This leads to “slowdown and pause” denial. So the skeptics insult the warmists, and the warmists insult the skeptics, and it starts a repeating cycle of abuse. All in all, it is a fairly toxic situation.
In summary, skeptics are generally talking about the global temperature series when they talk about a slowdown or pause. They are talking about what the temperature actually did.
Warmists are generally talking about global warming, when they refuse to believe that a slowdown or pause has occurred. It is hard to know whether warmists would accept a slowdown or pause in the global temperature series, if they were assured that global warming was still happening.
If any warmists read this article, could you please leave a comment after the article stating whether you would accept a slowdown or pause in the global temperature series, if accepting the slowdown or pause did not lessen global warming in any way.
So we are effectively arguing about different things. This means that we could both be right (or we could both be wrong).
I have just remembered a story from my school-days. Two knights were arguing about the colour of a sign that hung outside a pub. One knight (knight A), claimed that it was a silver colour. The other knight (knight B), claimed that it was a gold colour. The could not agree, so they decided to have a fight, and the winner’s colour choice would be accepted. So they had a fight, and knight A managed to blind Knight B in one eye. But Knight B managed to cut Knight A’s arm off. While they were recovering from their injuries, before they started fighting again, they rested on the wall of the pub, and looked up at the sign. I am sure that you will have guessed by now, that the sign turned out to be silver on one side, and gold on the other side. I am not sure what it is, but there must be a moral in that story somewhere.
So, we now have a workable solution to the argument about slowdowns and pauses. Warmists can choose their champion, and skeptics can choose their champion, and we will have a televised fight to the death, to decide whether there was a slowdown from 2002 to 2012.
Don’t worry, I am only joking. Single combat is far too boring, let’s have a Game of Thrones type of battle, with a cast of thousands.
Nature and time will end all of this. You can’t fool mother nature and no amount of adjustment is going to change what people are experiencing. Sooner or later the scam must collapse.
After trillions of dollars have been wasted and the usual suspects have been rewarded with OPM.
+10
You might not be able to fool Momma Nat but I can guarantee we can’t control her which even the alarmists acknowledge at the highest levels. They cannot control the climate with regulations on CO2 so all this media blustering is much ado about nothing. Hang on enjoy this theme park ride called Spaceship Earth powered by Mother Nature.
As regards adjustments you must admit they are giving it a pretty good go.
I thought all Sheldon’s are geniuses (sarc). Why waste your time reading Foster’s trash when you know its invalid and is only going to piss you off. Start concentrating on the impending Constitutional Crisis if the hard left players don’t go to jail.
We are in an interglacial period, during which the planet will gradually warm…until it slides back into another ice age. All this noise about new highs in earth’s temperature ignores the interglacial records of the past.
Yes, but we are supposed to be convinced that this slight warming will be harmful to us and the natural world.
The models apparently forecast unimaginably horrible consequences which we are supposed to believe, even though none of the forecasts have been anyplace near accurate to date.
I find it a little hard to be concerned about slightly warmer winter temperatures or slightly warmer summer nights. Nor do I find a slightly smaller ice extent in the Arctic to be particularly alarming.
BTW, I have been following the Antarctic temperatures in what is its midsummer when the sun never or barely sets. With an occasional exception of the peninsula, temperature seems never to be above the freezing point of water. How much would average temperatures have to rise for it to make an actual difference?
A lot.
To be more specific…a whole lot.
Global warming is a pack of lies (adjustments) and Tamino is an incorrigible rascal who should be given no quarter. I have no time for lukewarmism which simply validates the faulty science and quibbles about ‘estimates’.
A lukerwarmer limits how much warming CO2 could cause. I think doubling of CO2 causes at most 1 C of warming. Decades ago, I thought it might be as much as 3 C, but it seems to me that evidence has proven, it can’t be this high.
Also I think were global temperature were to become 5 C warmer, I see no problem with it, and probably a better condition. And I think the 1 C of warming from the depths of Little Ice Age has be significant advantage, or were global temperature to cool by .5 or 1 C, I would think that this would be a bad thing.
Alarmist on other hand, think that were temperature to increase by 1 C, that this indicates a lot warming would occur, after this- they believe there is a runaway effect.
Anyways, I don’t think a world 5 C warmer, is a problem, but it won’t happen.
And seems to me that during early part of the Holocene period global temperature were about 2 C warmer than they are now. And during the last interglacial period [Eemian] global temperatures did get 2 C [or more] warmer than the present global temperatures.
If earth gets 2 C warmer, then we are still in an ice box climate- during Eemian earth did not leave the ice box climate, nor have left it for millions of years.
If earth was 5 C warmer and it was this temperature for a long enough period, maybe we will have left our ice box climate, but it need to get much warmer before we entered a Hothouse climate which has been a common climate over last 1/2 billion years.
I would say that a hothouse climate require the average *volume* temperature of the oceans to be warmer than 10 C. And currently the entire oceans temperature is about 3.5 C, and in last million years the oceans have become as warm as 5 C.
Now if our ocean to become as warm as 4 C, then our global air temperature will increase and sea levels will rise. And during Eemian period our ocean were around 4 C or warmer and sea levels were + 5 meters higher.
By definition of ice box climate is a cold ocean- 1 to 4 C temperature is cold though 5 C might be getting a bit warm for your refrigerator setting..
I also think this “oh! 2 C temperature increase will kill us all!” crud is pure bunkum. It was that temperature early in the Holocene and there sure was a great deal of life about. As Willis Eschenbach said on his mass extinction post “where are the bodies?”
” OweninGA
February 3, 2018 at 3:38 pm
I also think this “oh! 2 C temperature increase will kill us all!” crud is pure bunkum.”
Yes.
And a lot of bunkum about 2 C increase in temperature refers to an increase of temperature from the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, or as commonly said prior to industrial revolution- which started in England around 1750 US about 1850]. Or 2 C warmer as compared to times when there was yearly ice fairs on Thames river.
Or what governments are claiming to want to do is stop a 1 C increase as compared to current temperatures.
I would say they claiming to want stop, what is unlikely to happen, yet spend trillions of dollars with no result upon global temperatures. And no governance any where has actually resulted in reducing CO2 emission- unless you count government nuclear power programs which have done more to reduce CO2 as compared to any other “alternative energy”- wind. solar, vehicle restriction, wood burning and all the other governmental “solutions for global warming” which have already cost about trillion dollars,so far, and with “plans” to spend trillions of dollars of tax payer money on in the future.
Plus all disasters related to government bad governance- they want distract attention away by claiming it caused by “global warming”.
Example rather blame the monster of Syria, some like to say the civil war is caused by global warming
So yes, Bunkum, Fubar, TARFU, or simple wanton governmental corruption which serves as continuous plague.upon humankind. .
Since 2000, out of approximately 78 million deaths worldwide, less than 400k died from heat; 5.4 million from cold.
Go global warming! Lol
I add, your entire ocean have average temperature of about 3.5 C, but entire ocean surface temperature is about 17 C. And your entire average land surface temperature is about 10 C.
And 70% of surface is ocean and 30% land, and that average of all the surfaces is about 15 C.
And I think think the average temperature volume of ocean controls global average temperature in terms of thousands of year, and fluctuation of ocean water near the surface [up to hundreds of meter depth] controls global temperatures in terms of years, decades and centuries].
And in terms last few thousands of years. the entire ocean has cooled a bit.
Though a interglacial period is caused by entire ocean being warmed and recently, last century, our entire ocean is warming and probably continue to warm for decades and perhaps centuries- and in thousands of years we might return to having the entire ocean being as warm as it’s ever been in 20,000 or 200,000 years.
A psychiatrist would have a field day with Tamino.
Some years ago I had a bit of disagreement with Tamino aka Grant Foster on the ‘RealClimate’ blog. Eventually he lost the argument and as it is typical for most of the alarmists he turned to rather vulgar insults.
Gavin ticked him off and deleted his comments; Tamino went off in a huff and was away from RC for couple of weeks.
A year or so ago, Tamino took issue
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/misleading-trends-sea-level-version/
with a post I had made here on WattsUpWithThat.
When I attempted to respond my post immediately disappeared. No notice no nothing – I was banned.
This is a lie. The insults and slander come from this site.
As Eric Cartman says, you must respect his authoritaayy!
“When I attempted to respond my post immediately disappeared. No notice no nothing – I was banned.”
Wear it as a badge of honour like I do. Most people have to resort to extremes to achieve it.
Even better, Tamino has been caught deleting portions of comments, typically those which factually repudiate something he has said. It’s one thing to delete comments and block people…it’s another to be selective of what portions of a comment gets through for others to see and for him to respond to.
@ Donald
“This is a lie. The insults and slander come from this site.”
Correct, but your punctuation needs fixing.
“This is a lie: ‘The insults and slander come from this site.'”
Honestly, I do not know how or why you guys could be bothered to go to those nitwit sites and argue with that collection of fools and liars.
Deleting and editing comments is the oldest trick in the book for that lot, and should be expected.
It is literally pointless to engage those people on forums that they control, because the result will be, and has always been, the same.
Donald
Accusing someone of lying while hiding behind anonymity isn’t exactly the highest of moral principles.
However, if you wish to check facts go to RC blog post my comment and ask Gavin Schmidt to verify (subject discussed was CET- June temperature that Gavin himself had to verify as correct), and than come back and appologise.
You don’t win by engaging his excuses. You win by doggedly holding them accountable for 30 years of failed predictions.
I can’t speak for you, but for me it has to do with statements like “CO2 is the primary driver of climate change” and “Man made CO2 has overwhelmed any natural cycles and now accounts for the overwhelming amount of warming”. I do not know how to sit down and reconcile these notions so that everyone is happy with them.
If CO2 is the primary driver, and it is ever increasing, then how does one explain a pause? It is only possible if CO2 is not the primary driver, but just a contributor.
And again, if man-made CO2 has overwhelmed natural cycles, then warming should only be increasing, not pausing and taking its time. Again, CO2 releases are only increasing, so should the effects.
I understand why alarmists need to deny any pause – if falsifies their beliefs in how CO2 controls climate!
This focus on CO2 controls climate change, and climate change is occurring ever more rapidly, and it will cause untold misery and destruction is what I argue against.
The climate is changing and always will be, and its primarily a natural cycle but may have a CO2 component, and mankind must adapt to the changes over hundreds of years, and warming is generally a good thing, not a bad thing – these are believes and so far they have not been overturned by any proof that they are wrong (but in theory could be).
If climate change alarmists want to agree with me on these basic beliefs, we have nothing to argue about.
You should add that the highly negative correlation between CO2 and global temperature that occured in the 40 and 50’s during the industrial period, and also the lack of any obvious effect of the rapidly increasing CO2 levels on the rate of warming during industrialistion from 1800, shows just how little correlation there is in fact. No models required, and their assumptions are simply data denial by theoretical models. AKW wrong.
Also that CO2’s effect on back radiation in the Tropospere falls of logarithmically with concentration, so has high and increasing negative feedback built in, by the Band Saturation effect. Lots more CO2 gives ever less effect, 20-40ppm the same temperature effect as 200-400ppm, so 400-800ppm, no problem. No “tipping point”
Paraphrasing Feynman’s observation to the Senate committee, with the clamped and fattened O ring in his hand, “…….I believe that this has some significance for our problem” . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rwcbsn19c0
Yes Brian, and we can also look back to the Triassic some 250million years ago when we know from carbon nitride studies that CO2 levels were at 1000ppm. Obviously no tipping point was reached because…er…the earth has not turned into a fireball and flora and fauna are abundant. The warmists never seem to address this point.
The Triassic did end with a rather severe extinction event. But conventional wisdom is that the cause of the extinction was the CAMP volcanic eruptions along the line rift line that eventually became the Atlantic Ocean.
John, I’ve seen the warmists try to discount that by stating that the sun was weaker then. Of course, if CO2 had such heat trapping properties and CO2 levels were 1000 ppm for a million years, then it would be pretty obvious that in a million years Earth would have become a molten ball. That it did not become even uncomfortably warm (as indicated by the wide variety of fossil species) implies that CO2 is not the main control knob.
The sun was weaker, but only by a percent or two. Not enough to make a difference.
If I remember the calculations correctly, a 0.1% change in TSI results in a temperature difference of around 0.04C. I find it hard to believe a TSI change 10 times that is going to have more than 10 times as much impact on temperatue.
Tamino is a known data torturer using his statistics skills to promote an activist cause. The problem is that his cause is the wrong one, and Tamino’s arguments are not only absurd but wrong. He isn’t worth the time.
Playing with numbers won’t give you the answer about climate change. It is a far too complex system and involves too many aspects as to admit reduction to the type of numerical series that Tamino likes to play with. Pathetic, really.
Meanwhile temperatures have been decreasing for 24 months. This worries warmunists that were convinced that the long hoped acceleration in global warming was taking place. Well, the annual warming rate is now negative, and it is not impossible that temperatures go down to the 2002-2013 level in just a couple of years. Lord Monckton must be getting his text editor ready.
Can we all get along? No, because Tamino and his fellow Warmunists are serial Liars. The significance of the Pause was that, under Warmunist ideology, it wasn’t supposed to happen. It put a serious crimp in their mistaken notion that CO2 was somehow “forcing” temperatures up.
+10
Tamino (Grant Foster), Stoat (William Connelly), David Appell, etc., etc. etc… all deny the pause ever happened. Don’t waste your time trying to have a rational, logical conversation with them.
Hilarious. This from the site of Tony’s “Enterprise”.
Delusion lives here.
Donald,
That you are still allowed to spew your hateful bile here is proof positive that this site is not the problem. If any of us were to post what you just did on any of the warmunist blogs, we would be spam filtered and blocked so fast that we wouldn’t even know we posted.
Ouch!
Donald February 3, 2018 at 2:08 pm: “Hilarious. This from the site of Tony’s “Enterprise”. Delusion lives here.”
Well “Donald”, my standard question for alarmists: give me some evidence. I note that your nasty little comments are always completely evidence-free. (Been trying for years to get evidence for the alarmist story – never happened yet.)
Most of us knew years and years ago that arguing with warmista alarmists, and most particularly the jackass high priests of that religion, is a total and complete waste of time.
The only reason to dispute the wrongnesses that they spew is for the education and information of the people still on the fence or those who have not paid enough attention to have formed an opinion.
The warmista jackasses themselves have long since squandered any and every shred of credibility they had.
I think some of them for sure know that by now.
But they, along with their oblivious brethren… those still mired deep in cognitive dissonance…have left themselves no choice but to stick doggedly to the position they have staked out, having pushed their chips all in long ago.
None can ever admit they were wrong and emerge from the admission with any intact pride, ego, or professional reputation as a learned professional, let alone an expert or a scientist.
They are all victims of their own misplaced certainty, and have created and painted themselves into the deepest corner in scientific history.
And they know it.
They might as well go apply for jobs flipping burgers the day they admit the truth.
The heat of the arguments doesn’t pause. But the temperature does. The major problem for those claiming the temperature will keep rising because the CO2 concentration keeps rising is reality. The world is remarkably uncooperative when it comes to simplistic ideas founded on imaginative worry-warting.
Alarming calls for ‘action’ will continue no matter how cold it gets in the coming twenty years. With cooling will come unbelievers. Rather than trying to convert them to believe their own eyes, we should rather get on with protecting mankind from the consequences. Each village should create a storehouse and start a strategic reserve of funds and food. There are many social benefits to doing this and it will create food security where perhaps none now exists. The impact of cold is really all about food. Secondarily it is about staying warm. Realists should start playing first fiddle. Tamino can keep beating his drum in timpani.
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” The laws of physics will always bite you on the bum.
The smell of horse shit is getting so bad people will have to clear the stables at some point, where is our Achilles?.
BTW Dougas Adams understoof this racket before it was even applied to climate change, watch and learn. We have high priests, a super computer modelling a complex insoluble problem, and spm “working thinkers” yer “experts” summed up so neatly by this enjoyable insight. You could quickly rescript this for climate change, and all religions and ideologies., .
https://twitter.com/catandman/with_replies
There’s no point denying there’s global warming, as there’s global cooling. All true. But there’s no Man Made Global Warming, it’s all, 100% natural.
Another thing, less than 4% of the annual CO2 emissions comes from humans and when there’s no warming at all it’s not hard to conclude, – there’s no Man Made Global Warming, never was, never will be.
Temperature is the result of incoming energy from the sun, conserved by pressure, gravity and mass. Air composition play no role ..
It has never been about the climate, it is only about “carbon” taxes, it’s all.
Human emissions amounting to 4% is a result of counting natural sources without counting natural sinks. Within any 1 year period worldwide, natural sinks exceed natural sources, and nature as a net removes from the atmosphere roughly half of manmade CO2.
Natural sinks react to combined natural and anthropogenic forcing. Therefore, a portion of sink activity is a reaction to anthropogenic forcing that would not exist if the anthropogenic forcing were not there.
That sink activity must be apportioned as anthropogenically induced sink activity, and counted on the anthropogenic side of the ledger.
For attribution, we must compare natural sources to naturally induced sink activity only. When we do that, we find nature by itself is a net source.
You are assuming that natural sinks are static capacity. But that is not the case as the greening of the planet shows, there are more plants hence more photosynthesis. The sinks are continually increasing in capacity, the problem comes when less CO2 is added by the sources and the concentration in the atmosphere is rapidly reduced by the sinks to fatal levels of 150ppm or less.
“You are assuming that natural sinks are static capacity.”
The main thing is that they are tied to sources. In this “4% emissions” calculation, there are two main ones. One is the oxidation of photosynthesis products. But that is tied to prior photosynthesis; it returns carbon to the air that was recently reduced. The other is ocean outgassing. But that is just seasonal; CO₂ dissolves in the winter when it warms, and comes out in the summer. These cycles have been going on since forever, and do not permanently increase or decrease CO₂.
Increase of vegetation does have a lasting effect, but not much. We have emitted about as much C as there is in the entire mass of vegetation. Small changes there won’t help much.
Doesn’t a 27% increase of the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere have any effect on its dissolving into and outgassing from the ocean? At a higher pressure, the ocean at any given temperature will hold more CO2 than at a lower pressure. At least, Henry’s Law says so.
“have any effect on its dissolving into and outgassing from the ocean”
It increases the amplitude of the cycle by about 27%. It’s still a cycle.
And yes, it does make a one-time increase in total CO₂ dissolved. That’s the flip side of the “airborne fraction”. It doesn’t create an ongoing net flux.
Bart’s reasoning is only possible if the natural carbon cycle increased in exact lockstep with human emissions, for which is not the slightest proof. To the contrary: the increase in the atmosphere makes that the residence time for any CO2 molecule, whatever its origin, in the atmosphere slightly increased over time. That points to a rather stable natural throughput.
Moreover, as human emissions increased a fourfold since 1960, so did the increase in the atmosphere and so did the net sink rate. If the natural cycle was the cause, it had to increase a fourfold too to dwarf human emissions, but it didn’t.
Further, both the ocean surface and the biosphere show increasing carbon masses, in ratio to the increase in the atmosphere. It would be difficult to have oceans and biomass at the same time as net sink and net source of CO2, whatever the amounts that are cycling.
Last but not least: the sink rate doesn’t depend of the momentary emissions (natural or human) of one year, they depend of the extra CO2 pressure (pCO2) in the atmosphere above the dynamic equilibrium (“steady state”) between the average ocean surface temperature and the atmosphere. Which is currently about 110 μatm above that equilibrium. That results in a sink rate of ~2.15 ppmv/year or an excess CO2 decay rate of ~51 years or a half life time of ~35 years, surprisingly linear over the past 60 years.
That is not fast enough to remove all human emissions of ~4.5 ppmv/year, thus (near) the whole increase and (near) all extra sinks are caused by human emissions.
Nick Stokes,
The one-time extra flux is only the case if saturation happens. That is certainly true for the ocean surface, which gets in fast equilibrium (exchange rate less than a year) with the atmosphere at about 10% of the change in the atmosphere, due to its buffer working.
That is not the case for the deep oceans, which get not saturated in the very far future, as the pCO2 of the oceans at the sink places is far below any value in the atmosphere. The same for the biosphere, which has unlimited capacity which only depends of CO2 levels for the same constraints in other necessities (water, minerals, fertilisers).
The Bern model used by the models is wrong on that point, but until now not provable wrong, as the Bern model and the linear decay observations are quite similar.
Even if human emissions were having zero impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide growth, it would still be the case that natural sinks exceed natural sources…
NOTHING that Bart stated in his comment is untrue. As such, he left open the possibility that the rise could be anthropogenic or, for that matter, could be natural.
(ferdinand is up to his old obfuscatory tricks again)…
not only the greening of the planet but the huge variation in plankton numbers. in periods of negative nao for instance there is an order of magnitude increase in plankton production in the north east atlantic. this was the main driver of the gadoid outburst. given the recent long period of negative nao and the amo moving further into the cool phase a similar incraese in plankton numbers has already occurred.
numbers of bait fish like sprat and herring have rocketed in recent years.
“We have emitted about as much C as there is in the entire mass of vegetation”
Having spent many a day overflying vast continents covered by vast areas of towering trees and lush carpeting of other types of vegetation, not to mention the even larger ocean area with their hidden forests of seaweeds and abundant microflora…I seriously doubt that that statement is anywhere close to being true.
In fact it is laughable.
Nick wrote
I was going to reply but Ferdinand nailed it.
Ferdinand
“That is not the case for the deep oceans, which get not saturated in the very far future”
That is just saying that the one-time extra flux may have a long tail. It doesn’t mean a sustained future flux. The deep oceans can take a trickle of CO2 for a long time. If they took more than a trickle, they would not be unsaturated after the 10 millennia of raised Holocene levels.
menicholas February 4, 2018 at 2:33 am
“We have emitted about as much C as there is in the entire mass of vegetation”
Having spent many a day overflying vast continents covered by vast areas of towering trees and lush carpeting of other types of vegetation, not to mention the even larger ocean area with their hidden forests of seaweeds and abundant microflora…I seriously doubt that that statement is anywhere close to being true.
However, you don’t see all those vast pools of oil and vast piles of coal that we have burned, in fact if you look at the numbers it is an accurate statement.
Nick Stokes,
Humans emitted about 370 GtC since the start of the industrial revolution. Nowadays about 9 GtC/year.
The deep oceans contain some 37,000 GtC. If human emissions ultimately get in equilibrium between atmosphere, biosphere, ocean surface and deep oceans, the latter and the atmosphere may contain maximum 1% more CO2 or for the atmosphere: 293 ppmv i.s.o. 290 ppmv for the current average ocean surface temperature. Even if we burn again the same amounts, that will get 2%… Simply negligible.
There is zero change in sink capacity over the past 60 years, and if any, it is an increase (mainly in vegetation) not a decrease. It is in surpisingly linear ratio with the extra pCO2 in the atmosphere with a decay rate of ~51 years.
My impression is that the Bern model assumes a saturation of the deep oceans in analogy with the ocean surface, but they didn’t take into account the large sink capacity of the THC at the coldest ocean places, where the pCO2 of the oceans is around 150 μatm, while the atmosphere is over 400 μatm. Once in the deep, the pCO2 of the water doesn’t play any role, as it is isolated from the atmosphere and only gets back some 800 years later, but already (partly) mixed with the rest of the deep oceans.
afonzarelli,
Bart says:
For attribution, we must compare natural sources to naturally induced sink activity only. When we do that, we find nature by itself is a net source.
Here we have the net result of the largest natural fluxes over two periods:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/seasonal_CO2_MLO_BRW.jpg
The net result of the huge natural fluxes did hardly change over the decades and at the end of a full seasonal cycle the residual CO2 in the atmosphere increased from 0.5 ppmv/year in 1960 to 2 ppmv/year today. In the same period, human emissions increased from 1 ppmv/year to 4.5 ppmv/year.
There is an indictation of a samll increased seasonal carbon cycle from the increased biomass over the decades, but that is not the cause of an increased residual after a full cycle: the biosphere is an increasing sink, not a source. Neither are the oceans with increasing CO2 pressure in the atmosphere… As human emissions are about double the increase, all increase is due to human emissions and all extra sinks are due to the resulting increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Nick writes “The deep oceans can take a trickle of CO2 for a long time. If they took more than a trickle, they would not be unsaturated after the 10 millennia of raised Holocene levels.”
There is a lot of ocean in the mixed layer!
If natural sinks exceed natural sources, then there would have been no CO2 in the atmosphere until man started putting some there.
Ferdinand Engelbeen @ February 4, 2018 at 9:28 am
This is circular reasoning.
The confusion is between signal and noise.
The claimed global warming, AKA Global Average Temperature, is less than the error of our historical temperature record.In electronics this is noise.
Our historical temperature record is so short and narrow with respect to geological time and events to be again considered noise.
The perceived manmade warming is thus noise on noise on noise.
You are correct much of the “discussion” is different view same object, however the crew proclaiming a measurable signal of human caused warming have consistently refused to define their terms.
No rational discussion is possible,when the terms of reference keep moving.
The actions, arguing from authority,name-calling,slander and doom speaking.
And of course claiming absolute certainty.
Twain; “Science is so wonderful,one can produce endless speculation from just a few facts”.
Naturally I forget the exact words.
Thousands of years ago we had a priestly caste who claimed exclusive knowledge of “THE TRUTH” by examining sheep entrails or chicken bones. Now we have climate “science”. The only difference is the cost and the animals are spared.
Not remotely true. Insistence on nonsense is counterproductive.
The other Phil
Gee, TOPhil, this is the part where comparing nature’s actual performance to predicted results breaks down and is replaced by “adjusted” model results.
Ancient witch-doctors could at least accurately predict solar or lunar eclipses.
“The confusion is between signal and noise.” As a geophysicist colleague once noted: You can’t see the signal until you see the noise.
Its cherry picking distortion and utter BS – whatever it takes to justify the position already taken.,
The Guardian has outdone itself.
Some freelance guy in NY writes an alarming story about 5 out of 9 Polar Bears (is this even statistically significant)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/01/polar-bears-climate-change
Dr Susan Crawford has more thoughtful comments
https://polarbearscience.com/
Robert says [denies?]: ‘ statements like “CO2 is the primary driver of climate change” and “Man made CO2 has overwhelmed any natural cycles and now accounts for the overwhelming amount of warming”. I do not know how to sit down and reconcile these notions so that everyone is happy with them.’
I would happily reconcile with Robert, at least, were he to add a statement like ‘Climate change is the greatest threat we face’ (more than war, famine, plague, terrorism, violations of the US Constitution’s 4th Amendment privacy rights, imperialism, volcanos, earthquakes, meteor strikes, solar flares, runaway computer Artificial Intelligence, illiteracy, political nepotism, GMO FrankenFoods, innumeracy, racisim, nuclear waste disposal, thimerosal vaccinations, gun shows, sexism, transphobia, fluoride in the drinking water, pregnancy-engineering, soil erosion, trigger-happy police forces, Africanized South-American honeybees, mad slashers, voter suppression, the obscene lyrics in popular music, prison rape, mansplaining, micro-aggressions against social justice activists, Jordan Peterson, automated red-light camera ticketing, Donald Trump, hostile life-forms invading our solar system from distant realms, demonic forces, and Hollywood remakes of movies that weren’t really successful in the first place, and violations of the US Constitution’s 3th Amendment? You claim that the climate is in first place? Climate control is the cause into which you pour all your political donations?)
It is far from clear to me why I should privilege the concerns of climate scientists over the worries of other very smart people who worry about a lot of various threats.
It’s also far from clear to me how such concerns are to be assumed to correlate. What predictive value does knowing Michael Mann’s (for instance) stance and priority on meteor strikes offer in determining his unknown stance on the lyrics of rap music?
You had me at “war”.
But, I sure am glad you did not toss in the dreaded “chicksplaining”.
The good news is, the US Democratic party may be on the verge of going the way of the Whigs.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
The Sun Cycle/Ocean Cycle people maintain that the recent El Nino event of 2016-16 masked the current, ongoing cooling trend.
I do not necessarily subscribe to the “cycles” notion, but I do acknowledge that they make a good case. Their point of view is at least as valid as “Global warming is still happening”.
POINT: Global warming is still happening
What is this “Global Warming” you refer to? Is it a Man-made catastrophe from poisoning the atmosphere which will kill us all, or is it merely a bit of warm up as we continue to emerge from the Little Ice Age?
SPEECHLESS!!
Let’s throw away logic, reason, and all the facts as we know them.
“Will you agree with me if I change my position so my position no longer means anything?”
Bizarre.
I rather thought the same.
Science says that Global Warming should be happening.
The problem is that the level of Global Warming being caused my anthropogenic CO2 is so small compared to natural variation that we can’t separate the two at this time.
Regarding this: “I don’t know about you, but I am getting a bit fed up with the warmist lie, that deniers claim that a slowdown or pause started in 1998. I have done a lot of work on this, and published a number of articles explaining that a strong slowdown/pause started in 2002, NOT 1998.”:
Many have claimed that the pause started in 1998 or even slightly before. The example that I best remember is the monthly posts in WUWT by Christopher Monckton about a flat linear trend in RSS starting shortly before 1998. One of these articles is at:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/04/the-pause-lengthens-yet-again/
I think the most recent one in that series is this one:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/09/warming-stays-on-the-great-shelf/
Meanwhile, I agree with 2002. Although I want to mention an argument in favor of an even later start time – the time when a rapidly rising linear trend meets a flat or nearly flat one. That time varies with what dataset and what version of that dataset is used but is generally around 2004.
There are two issues. One is when did warming stop and the other is how long of a pause. I think the warming stopped around 2005. However, since it started to cool after then it was possible to create a trend line that was flat from an earlier date. The satellite data shows the pause could be viewed as starting in 1997.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6/from:1997/to:2015/plot/uah6/from:1997/to:2015/trend/plot/uah6/from:2001/to:2015/trend
That makes it 18 years and it only stopped due to ENSO which is rapidly dissipating. The claim this is based on a one year spike in 1998 is a lie as the data shows. The trend is almost identical if you start in 2001. Once Tamino chooses to lie you can then disregard anything else he has to say.
The cooling is likely to continue. The AMO will turn negative in a few years and we will be able to create a longer and longer pause.
“When it comes to global warming, recent years have been so hot …”
When a person’s position is so exaggerated as this there can be no compromises.
Of course, as anyone who had ever watched Johnny Carson knows, the question back at that statement is:
“How hot is it?”
It is so hot that:
the cows are giving evaporated milk.
the chickens are laying hard-boiled eggs
you realize that asphalt has a liquid state.
the birds have to use potholders to pull worms out of the ground.
the trees are whistling for the dogs.
your dream house is any house in Alaska.
etc, etc, etc
The press and the warmists want you to stress over hundredths, possibly even tenths of a degree rises (during a super El Nino).
They don’t want you to see that the error bars often exceed the temp change.
It appears what he is saying is that a relentless trend + random variation could produce a seeming pause, therefore what we have is a relentless trend + random variation.
This is faulty logic.
It is a relentless variation plus a random trend.
The same sort of logic produced a headline on MSN a few days ago: “Will nothing stop the relentless rise of the stock market?”
I think we got the answer to that one friday !!
Bartemis February 3, 2018 at 10:22 am
It appears what he is saying is that a relentless trend + random variation could produce a seeming pause, therefore what we have is a relentless trend + random variation.
You have it backwards, what he is saying is that “a relentless trend + random variation” is capable of producing an apparent pause therefore the existence of such a pause does not show that there is not a CO2 driven warming.
This is faulty logic.
I don’t know about you, but I am getting a bit fed up with the warmist lie, that deniers claim that a slowdown or pause started in 1998.
And yet that’s exactly what Monckton’s long series of posts on here about the pause did, didn’t you see them?
Not just Monckton, for example:
How Imminent is the RSS Pause? (Now Includes January and February Data)
justthefactswuwt / March 14, 2017
Guest Post by Werner Brozek, Extended Comments from Barry and Edited by Just The Facts
For the 1998 trend to return to flat or negative values by the end of this year, the annual average anomaly for 2017 would have to be -0.16C.
Whitehouse refers to a ‘hiatus period’ starting in 1998:
2016 Global Temperature: The Pause Never Went Away
Guest Blogger / January 19, 2017
The Met Office yesterday confirmed that the warm record of 2016 was mainly driven by a very strong El Nino.
Guest essay by Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
Fig 1 shows the HadCRUT4 data for the so-called “hiatus” period.
Middleton also shows ‘the pause’ starting in 1998:
Santa Pause may be coming to town… The “pause” might be back by December.
David Middleton / July 12, 2016
If the RSS global temperature anomaly continues to drop at its current rate, the pause will be back just in time for Christmas…
Note: I am not predicting that the pause will return by the end of the year. I’m just pointing out the fact that the most recent 5-month trend of the RSS anomaly will bring the pause back, if it continues through the end of the year.
So, why is the trend almost exactly the same if you start in 2001? How did 1998 affect that trend?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6/from:1997/to:2015/plot/uah6/from:1997/to:2015/trend/plot/uah6/from:2001/to:2015/trend
They also showed the flat trend line starting in 1997 before the El Nino of 1998 caused spike. Those who keep saying 1998 or that those pauses were plucked cherries didn’t read the articles or did not understand what they were reading! The pause dates were picked by calculating backwards to the farthest date that yielded a 0 trend. If the trend became non-zero before 1997 those databases used that date EVEN IF A ZERO COULD BE ACHIEVED FARTHER BACK. Of course it is much easier to keep the cocoon if you pretend they said something they didn’t.
I think these people have been over-educated in academics to the point that they think they’re smarter than they actually are.
Lots of people can repeat memorized facts and apply memorized algorithms. That does not mean they have any analytical skills.
Once again we see that knowledge does not, in it self produce wisdom. Knowledge is for sale. Wisdom can’t be bought and sold, and is the gift of intuition.
It is difficult to miss the point more completely. The Pause was an important event because it called into question the whole “Global Warming” concept.
Remember, GW does not exist in the world, in any meaningful form. GW is entirely a creature of the models! If these unvalidated, unverified models go away, then so does GW. That is the point!
None other than Dr. Tom Karl, director of the Atmospheric Sciences division at NOAA said that the models would not run into trouble unless the Pause lasted over 15 years. {Read all about it in the Climategate emails.} Nobody then thought the Pause would last that long. At the 15 year mark, the goalposts were moved to 17 years. When the Pause lasted over 18 years, all the models were invalidated, because the model projections could not be reconciled with a lack of warming for such a duration.
That was the whole point of the matter.
What does the author propose? “Agree with us that the Pause happened, if we agree that it does not mean anything”?
*sigh*
+100 Exactly.
A few years ago we were assured that CO2 was so powerful that it had completely swamped natural variation.
Which was how they dismissed those who complained when they took credit for using all of recent temperature rises as being caused by CO2 when they were tuning their models.
Now they want to save their models by declaring that the pause is the result of natural variation.
They can’t have it both ways.
“I don’t know about you, but I am getting a bit fed up with the warmist lie, that denιers claim that a slowdown or pause started in 1998.”
This is, umm, airbrushing history. Lord Monckton had a monthly series running prominently for years at WUWT on The Pause (as measured in the troposphere by the trusty RSS V3.3). Here is a typical example. They all start some time in 1997. You can get the last months of the series by searching WUWT for “The start date is not cherry-picked: it is calculated”.
Nick, seems like you are the history airbrusher here, not Monckton.
1) His series start in 1997, not 1998, as Grant claimed. That’s _before_ the huge peak in 1998, making the resulting pause even more impressive.
2) “Calculated” is not the same as “cherry-picked”. The purpose of the calculation was to find the longest pause, not to pick some pre-determined date. In other words, it was a “search”, looking for the longest pause (i.e. a period containing no statistically significant change in global temperature). He didn’t care where the series started or ended, only that it was the maximally enduring pause.
The motive for performing such a search is no more questionable than searching for the maximum or minimum temperature in an arbitrary climate record.
“Calculated” is not the same as “cherry-picked”.
It’s scientific cherry-picking. It’s not a coincidence that the start is in 1997 (which is when the El Nino actually started). It gives maximal effect to the peak on the trend.
It’s true that, as Sheldon says, you can get a low trend starting in 2002 or so and finishing judiciously. It’s just not as long. Lord M, as he says, was calculating for maximum length.
@Nick: “It’s scientific cherry-picking.”
Then any search could be called cherry picking, if somebody doesn’t like the results. The mere existence of an 18-year “hiatus” in the temperature record was an “inconvenient truth” for warmists, which annoyed them and weakened their predictions.
“The mere existence of an 18-year “hiatus” in the temperature record”
If you cherry-pick records. There isn’t one in the surface record. Lord M’s 19 years was in troposphere RSS V3.3, but as he lamented, it has gone away, although it has now been given a home in UAH 6 (it wasn’t in 5.6).
@Nick: There isn’t one in the surface record.
There you go again, cherry-picking records. :-]
As I recall Monckton’s pause series, it was calculated backward from current, not started at an arbitrary date.
The “start date” you both use and Nick says he “cherry picked” was actually how far back in the anomaly record you can go starting from the current anomaly data, in order to have a zero warming trend line. Not a “start date” and not a cherry pick at all.
He could have “cherry picked” a start date that resulted in a negative (cooling) trend – he was looking for how far back you need to go to get a zero trend.
It proved a point – that the warmists were disingenuous hacks, prone to shifting the goalposts and changing the data rather than accepting falsifying empirical data and correcting their hypotheses.
There are numerous instances of “cherry picking” on the part of the CAGW proponents, as well as the well-known and documented downward adjustments to known and recorded historical temperatures to make it seem like we had been steadily warming for over a century and it sped up recently, the speed-up of course “evidence” that CAGW is happening. This speed-up coinciding with stepwise increases in “anomaly” due to strong El Nino in addition to the massaging of the historical data is irrelevant – they manufactured a hockey stick to “prove” their beliefs are “Truth.”
There was early 20th Century warming, recorded globally, into the 1940’s. There was cooling, recorded globally, until the late 1970’s, followed by warming until the early 2000’s, followed by cooling which has not yet completed the PDO -caused 30-year pseudocycle. Overlaid on that was the 70-year-or-so pseudocycle of the AMO which was in a warming phase and is turning to its cooling phase. Natural variations which the alarmists leveraged to support their wild claims of looming disaster due to “carbon.” But that wasn’t good enough for the alarmists.
Where did that recorded history of warming/cooling cycles go, in the current “official” global datasets from GISS and East Anglia? Well, they “hid the decline” and took care of the annoying 1940’s “blip” by messing with the data, didn’t they… which resulted in even more “proof” that man was causing extreme warming (even though there’s no extreme warming “in real life.”)
And we are supposed to blindly accept that Nick Stokes is right, based on this faulty “evidence” and a dream that CO2 is a magical molecule that can cause disaster at levels that just begin to allow plants to recover from their CO2-starved state at the supposed “pre-industrial” levels of CO2 we are supposed to simply accept as being the “right” levels… or else we’re “deniers.”
jstalewski wrote
Yes. That is how it was always portrayed. But the likes of Nick, Grant and David seem to have a blind spot to this and they’re the ones doing the cherry picking. They cheery pick a date to create a strawman argument.
That’s all right Nick because now there is a giant El Nino on the end of the time series since 1997 to balance it out. BTW, the IPCC takes the ‘hiatus’ (IPCC) from 1997 also – perhaps they’re cherry-picking the start date as well?:
Box TS.3 | Climate Models and the Hiatus in Global Mean Surface Warming of the Past 15 Years, page 61, Technical Summary, Working Group I The Physical Science Basis, IPCC AR5 report, 2013.
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_TS_FINAL.pdf
Sorry I forgot to mention, the ‘hiatus’ has now resumed amongst the RSS & UAH datasets, & will likely resume in the remains datasets early this year now the current La Nina is starting to make it’s presence felt.
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html
Also, the ‘hiatus’ (IPCC) started before the1997 El Nino in 1996 according to the satellite records. The start date is currently at 1997, but it should return to 1996 again in the next month or so.
Nick, I’m trying not to use any rhetorical devices with you in this post because every time I do that, you tend to avoid or evade my main point or question.
Recently, Bill Nye claimed that 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere (stipulated that the climb from 280 to 400 is mostly due to human emissions) physically prevents the next glaciation. Do you agree with that assertion?
If you do agree with Bill Nye, and if we have, by virtue of adding enough CO2 to the atmosphere to prevent the next glaciation, shouldn’t we be jumping for joy instead of wailing and moaning in despair? Seriously, isn’t preventing a glaciation of thousands of years of mile deep ice a tremendous positive benefit for people of the future, even if we added the CO2 without having had that goal in mind?
If you do not agree, please explain why you think Bill Nye is wrong, and how CO2 based warming can be defeated? What physical changes might be responsible?
I think averting glaciation is good. It prevents something that might have been a problem a few thousand years hence. But warming is happening on a much faster scale.
Thanks for the straight answer, Nick. So yes, you agree with Bill Nye, and yes 400 ppm CO2 prevents the next cycle of Pleistocene glaciation, But not only that, those 400 (or up to 500-600) ppm also guarantee unhelpful warming before the prevented glaciation would have otherwise occurred?
Are you going full James Hanson, here? Are we talking Venus level runaway warming, the oceans boiling away?
.
Nick, thanks for the direct answer. If I may ask a followup, are you in full-on, James Hanson, Venus runaway warming, oceans boiling away territory? Is that what you fear?
MR
“runaway warming”
I think that is unlikely. However, you’d want to be 100% sure. But I think it’s quite likely that sensitivity may vary as we change the atmosphere.
Mr. Stokes, you are in luck.
The end of the world is cancelled…I am 1005 sure.
Good night, drive safely.
Nich, how can you be 100% sure?
“Nich, how can you be 100% sure?”
I’m not. Runaway warming would of course be a planetary disaster. One would like to be 100% sure that it won’t happen. How can you be 100% sure?
Nick, yes, science teaches us that we’re never 100% sure about anything. But I’m about 99% sure that 400 or even 1000 ppm of CO2 will not cause runaway warming, because the Earth has experienced MORE then 1000 ppm in the past and it didn’t happen. Ergo, feedback must be negative, not positive. I personally feel that It’s cloud albedo that does the real work.
While we wait to either positive or negative feedback from water and clouds, having 500 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere will be a boon for all living things on our planet (1000 ppm would be even better) . Malthusian worry-warts will be pleasantly surprised. Except for those who selfishly want disaster to strike everyone, just to prove their catastrophic predictions correct. I can’t imagine a more misanthropic point of view. I hope you share my opinion on that.
But if my views about CO2 and water feedback are correct, that also means we’re still in the Pleistocene ice age, and since CO2 doesn’t greatly affect warming, it almost certainly won’t stop the next glaciation, either. But humans MIGHT be able to stop it when the time comes, merely by sprinkling sand or soot or fly ash on any budding ice sheets in summer (on an industrial scale).
Last time I checked, 1997 is not 1998.
So your complaint is itself a lie.
Sometimes I kind of picture people like Mann, Tamino, Gavin,or Kathrine, etc. being interviewed 25 or more years in the future. They have long since retired and craving the attention they once basked in readily agree to be interviewed. And after the pleasantries the interviewer asks “So how does it feel to have spent your entire professional career trying to prove a hypothesis that has now been disproven?”
I would be happy if the keepers of the data sets would just be scrupulously honest about their error bars and admit that the temperature averages can’t be done to better than x.x±0.5°C.
The Law of Large Numbers cannot be used to improve precision, for two reasons: first, even though there are thousands of temperature measurements, they are not the same measurement of the same location at the same time. Rather, they are one measurement of thousands of different locations; not the same thing at all. It’s the difference between taking a thousand measurements of a single board, and taking one measurement of a thousand different boards: one can use the LLN to improve the precision in the first case, it can’t be used in the second to claim that one knows the average length of the thousand different boards to three significant digits.
Secondly, the other LLN is for probability-based calculations; and predictions, no matter how many “rolls of the dice” one has, are not data. They are predictions, and as such, not measurements to be included in the data set.
“Law of Large Numbers cannot be used to improve precision, for two reasons”
Both are spurious. The LoLN simply reflects the fact that if you add a whole lot of numbers, each of which may deviate high or low, for whatever reason, the highs and lows tend to cancel. It is the adding that is the key. The LoLN just quantifies the effect of cancellation.
“the law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times.” [Wikipedia]
Nick, please don’t abuse that law.
Nick,
Your claim is valid for normally distributed variations. That is, if random events are solely responsible for the highs and lows, they will cancel. However, for data series that are trends, or for noise that is not randomly distributed (that is, highly skewed), they do not cancel and an increase in reported precision is not warranted. What the Law of Large Numbers really says is that for probabilistic outcomes, one needs to have a large number of observations for the series to converge on the theoretical value. That is, one is really talking about accuracy and not precision.
“Nick, please don’t abuse that law.”
It’s actually a law about numbers. It doesn’t have any proviso about “same location same time” or, for that matter, about being normally distributed. In fact, as Wiki notes further down, it doesn’t even require the variance to be finite. Here is the actual Wiki statement
Nick,
What you quoted says nothing about the precision improving. It says that the “sample average converges to the expected value.” That is, the accuracy improves as the size of the sample increases. If you examine the Wiki examples, you will see that small samples are typically quite inaccurate and any citation of precision (or number of significant figures) is meaningless when the average value is very inaccurate! Actually, an inverse implication of the Law of Large Numbers raises the question of the reliability of small sample sizes and interpolated values for areas such as the poles and most of Africa and South America.
Nick, the mean will converge upon the expected value only if there IS an expected value. If I’m measuring the same board a thousand times, the “expected value” is the length of the board. If I measure the temperature at a thousand separate sites, what is the “expected value” I’m converging on? The temperature at Seville Airport? The temperature at Battery Park in NYC? The temperature at Alice Springs?
In the very first sentence of the article, Wikipedia says “the law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times.” Is measuring the temperature at a thousand different sites “performing the same experiment”, or it is performing a thousand different experiments one time?
It goes on to say “The strong law applies to independent identically distributed random variables having an expected value.” Again, what is the “expected value” from measuring the instantaneous temperate at Santa Barbara’s town center, Minneapolis’ Mall of America, Tokyo’s giant Ferris wheel? There IS no “expected value” there.
This invalid application of statistics is done because, as Steven admitted a while ago regarding the extrapolation of temperatures across areas where no instrumental measurements exist, a global average anomaly can’t be derived without doing so. Well, if a global average anomaly can’t be derived without using statistics to infill vacant areas or generate precision where none exists, then perhaps we’d all be better off without one — or at least, give one with the proper precision, which in this case is no better than &plusnm;0.5C.
James,
“If I measure the temperature at a thousand separate sites, what is the “expected value” I’m converging on?”
This is an interesting question, but it has an answer, not adequately appreciated. It relates to a problem widespread in applied science, not just climate. You have a continuum field (here temperature anomaly) to characterise, probably by an average, but you can’t measure a continuum. You can only measure samples at finitely many points.
The average you are looking for is the spatial integral, divided by volume or area. And there is a whole theory of numerical spatial integration that helps you get there. The original proof of convergence is due to Riemann, mid 19th Cen, but there are many improvements. The integral is eventually expressed as a linear combination of point values, so that is where the LLN comes in. In terms of convergence proof, there is a slight issue that you don’t always have samples at the same points, but that doesn’t change anything much. You could force estimating at those points (as USHCN did).
The basic reason LLN works is shown by the proofs in Wiki. For independent samples, variances add. This is how cancellation is quantified. So the sum increases with order N for N samples, but when you take sqrt and scale, the standard error of the average diminishes as 1/sqrt(N). If the variables are dependent, there is a correlation matrix involved, but basically the sum of variances can’t increase faster than order N.
@Nick: “The LoLN simply reflects the fact that if you add a whole lot of numbers, each of which may deviate high or low, for whatever reason, the highs and lows tend to cancel. ”
…
“The basic reason LLN works is shown by the proofs in Wiki. For independent samples, variances add. This is how cancellation is quantified.”
No, you are wrong. LLN is defined only for random variables which are both independently andidentically distributed. Your statements above imply, incorrectly, that LLN works for any sets of random variables, as long as they are independent.
You “forgot” to mention the bit about the identical-distribution requirement.
You are ignoring the fact that the local temperatures surrounding each [properly calibrated and positioned] weather thermometer in the world are absolutely not identically distributed. Yes, there certainly are useful shared trends over a larger scale, but local conditions in general prevent these local distributions from being identically distributed over large (approaching planetary) scales.
But you are using these “shared trends” (aka “mean local anomalies”) to construct “global mean anomalies”, which are indeed useful for weather/climate analysis, but are often (carelessly/deliberately) misconstrued as “mean global temperatures”. And, which certainly does abuse the definition of the law of large numbers because the random variables in question are not always identically distributed as required for a strict interpretation of the LLN.
The obvious use cases showing this abuse are local trends which are oppositely signed with respect to their assigned global mean anomaly. For these cases, an attempt to reconstruct local temperatures by adding the mean anomaly to a mean base value with be unreliable.
The truth is that local temperatures cannot reliably be accurately reconstructed from these mean anomalies, no matter how many measurements are taken, to the extent that local temperatures are distributed “non-identically” around the planet.
As has been explained to you hundreds of times the LoLN requires two prerequisites.
1) The measurement be of the same thing.
2) The error distribution is truely random.
Taking measurements at different times using different instruments violates the first requirement.
The second is never proven, indeed what research has been done shows that most errors tend to the warm side.
The two most important requirements needed to use LoLN are violated right out the gate.
Curley the warmist: “Soitenly. So-called global cooling is simply downtrend global warming (nyuk-yuk).”
Note: downtrend global warming is simply my feeble attempt to come up with a term that encapsulates the fact that global cooling is actually global warming. Any suggestions for a better term will greatly enhance climate communications.
“Curley the warmist: “Soitenly.”
Thanks for that good laugh! 🙂
The pause, or the appearance of any apparent cooling trend, is merely unadjusted data that has not been “corrected” by “climate experts” yet.
How’s that?
They assume that all sensors should show a warming trend.
Any sensor that doesn’t is adjusted until it does.
They then use that fact that all sensors are showing a warming to prove that their initial assumption was correct.
Compromise or reconciliation aren’t possible with the alarmists. They believe (on the basis of rather flimsy evidence) that CO2 is the major driver of climate. Until recently, CO2 was the ONLY driver of climate, but they have slowly come to realise that the earth existed before 1850, or 1750 (there was initially a preference for 1750 but that more or less puts us at plus 2°C already and the sky hasn’t fallen, so the start date seems to have moved to 1850) and that temperatures actually went up and before the industrial revolution.
So the current theme is “CO2 is the main driver of climate but short-term natural variations can mask it and make it look like a slowdown”. They know this because they know it. You can’t argue or debate with that; it’s a clear case of “don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up”. And we’ve seen published papers demonstrating that the natural temperature variation component at any time is the difference between the modelled global temperature
predictionprojection and themeasuredadjusted temperature. A child can see the flaw in thatAlarmists have started to acknowledge that atmospheric CO2 concentration varies in response to temperature changes, due to its quasi-equilibrium with CO2 in the oceans. That is physical chemistry. I argue that if CO2 increase is a response to warming, increased CO2 can only be, at most a very minor cause of warming. If it were even a significant cause of warming, we would have an inherently unstable system which would always be sliding off towards uncontrolled warming or cooling with no obvious way of recovering. Whereas, global climate has stayed within the range that allows life to prosper for several billion years. And external disruptions like meteor impacts may cause climate chaos but the earth always manages to get back into that narrow “goldilocks” range.
“Could it be that Tamino wants the warming parts, but doesn’t want the slowdown parts[?]”
This is from the emails released just before the Copenhagen summit: Hide the decline.
“They think that skeptics are claiming that global warming has slowed down or paused.”
Which is indeed often the case.
For my part, I have very little interest in trying to distinguish past “pauses”. In any series of trend plus variation, there will be some. The interest in a pause, while it lasts, is, what happens next. At school you learn a curious term for a maximum, which is a “stationary point”. That is because the derivative is zero – a common way of finding a maximum. But it is more general. x² has a stationary point at x=0, but so does x³. So if temperatures ever did reach a maximum, the first sign would be a pause. But once the “relentless trend” resumes, that point of interest subsides.
If there’s a strong forcing you won’t see any pauses. What the pause shows is the forcing is weaker than was being claimed. That was the whole point.
“If there’s a strong forcing you won’t see any pauses.”
Doesn’t follow. Every year, Spring is a time of strong forcing. The sun is higher in the sky every day, and prevails in the end. Summer always comes (well, in most places). But there can be plenty of (temperature) pauses along the way.
Nick, we are at a pause in cooling, which ice and sediment core studies show began at the Holocene Climatic Optimum ~5,000 ywca go and paused at the Minoan, Roman, Medieval, and current warm period. These studies show we are now in the coolest period of the past 10,000 years. The corollary to your point is that if temperatures ever did reach a minimum, the first sign would be a pause, but as studies show, the “relentless” cooling trend resumes, so that point of interest subsides.
“The interest in a pause, while it lasts, is, what happens next”
And the modelers and scaremongers have utterly failed to predict what happens next, which is why the pause is so significant.
“But once the “relentless trend” resumes”
And there you go again. You have repeatedly failed to predict the future, yet you still presume to know that this “relentless trend” will resume. How about first admit that you were wrong in the past, your claimed certainty was wrong, and that we all need better understanding of the science in order to determine if it’s even a problem or not? Stop with the political advocacy, and just try to understand.
“yet you still presume to know that this “relentless trend” will resume”
I’m not presuming. It did.
Nick, I assume you mean this trend.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2015.75/to/plot/rss/from:2015.75/to/trend
“Nick, I assume you mean this trend.”
Exactly as the post says
“he is convinced that they will do it again with the record temperature in 2016”
And there you go.
No, I meant this trend.
so we’re looking at less that 2/100th of a degee a year
“No, I meant this trend.”
Come on Nick. Once again you are showing a graph with a convenient starting point. There were warnings of an imminent Ice Age then. And too short a time period to have relevance to the REAL global climate.
I always get a laugh from the convenient coincidence that the Little Ice Age and the ‘beginning of the industrial age’ which supposedly kicked off the CO2 CAGW ‘crisis’ are at about the same time, and the even shorter periods now used make me laugh even harder.
I don’t think the pause is significant to the real climate though Mr. Sun tells me it probably represents a peak. Rather it is very significant in showing how useless the simplistic CO2 driven models are.
So based on the average of all those models, how far from the observed (and adjusted) temperature are we? How far off do we have to get before your team acknowledges they are useless?
Monty Python’s Black Knight comes to mind.
Nick;
“But once the “relentless trend” resumes, that point of interest subsides.”
Definition of relentless (the Webster)
: showing or promising no abatement of severity, intensity, strength, or pace : unrelenting relentless pressure a relentless campaign”
The term is obviously being misused, if there was any significate slowdown/pause . . One could rationally speak of a long/longer term trend resuming, but not a relentless one. If’n basic meanings of terminology are abandoned to make a point, me thinks the point is most likely to keep the scary sounding lingo flowing.
By my (crude) estimate, going from ~280 ppm CO2, to ~400 ppm, means we are already experiencing about half of whatever effect a doubling of CO2 from preindustrial times would entail, in terms of “greenhouse gas” warming itself. So far, at least, it seems we face the powder puff potential of crawlaway global warming ; )
I think, and am sure that I am correct, that what we face is whatever was going to happen anyway.
Only now, we have lots more plant food in the air, and an industrial civilization that can keep us from being killed by the unforgiving randomness of Mommy Nat.
Nick Stokes still hasn’t discovered how to calculate gas temperatures- or he would know all claims of CO2, warming any volume of atmospheric air, violate the gas laws assigning CO2 lower energy density than air.
You can also identify these Grant/Stokes fakes is their deplorable lack of knowledge of Earth temperature history: warm periods are known as ‘optimums’ directly due to the warmth, and the cold is what limits and destroys life.
Thermodynamics violations litter the warmists dishonest minds like the dead bodies that mark the paths of serial killers.
Anyone who would try to claim warmth is undesirable overall on earth, or even that unusual warmth might be possible is a transparent pseudoscientific fake.
L.V.
Nick Stokes has avoided replying to an earlier comment of mine that concerned knowledge of climate history. His point is that a pause in warming is just an expected point on a relentless trend. My point is that Earth has been on a “relentless” cooling trend for over 5,000 years, since the warming maximum was reached during the Holocene Climatic Optimum. Stokes and Tamino don’t seem to notice that Earth’s climate is not defined by the occurrences of the past 30 years. At least they should harken back to the Little Ice Age, and ponder that it was the coldest period of the past 10,000 years, and miserable for humanity.
“At least they should harken back to the Little Ice Age, and ponder that it was the coldest period of the past 10,000 years, and miserable for humanity.”
Surely misery for humanity is what the Blob seeks. Or am I missing something?
Odd thing is that they claim the world would be a better place if it wasn’t for human activity. And at the same time are upset because CAGW is gonna kill us all.
Lynn Vivaldi February 3, 2018 at 2:30 pm
Nick Stokes still hasn’t discovered how to calculate gas temperatures- or he would know all claims of CO2, warming any volume of atmospheric air, violate the gas laws assigning CO2 lower energy density than air.
Exactly which ‘gas laws’ are those and how are they violated?
“At least they should harken back to the Little Ice Age, and ponder that it was the coldest period of the past 10,000 years, and miserable for humanity.”
Rather overstating your strawman I’m afraid.
Here is the CET record, where you can ‘see’ how “miserable” it was for the English.
As a FI – the coldest winter (DJF) on record (-1.17C) for England was that of 1683/84, yet just 2 years later we had the 6th warmest (still) on record (6.33C)……
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-March.gif
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/ssn_HadCET_mean_sort.txt
Nice try Toneb, but we all know that this is a faked record and the real one was accidentally on purpose disposed of so it can never be used to show how wrong the wrongistas are.
“Nice try Toneb, but we all know that this is a faked record and the real one was accidentally on purpose disposed of so it can never be used to show how wrong the wrongistas are.”
Oh, of course the fall-back “faked” comspiracy theory.
Which is why it is impossible to talk with the extreme on here.
And of course the fact that there is no evidence of that …. is, err, evidence of that.
Please provide citations for the CET record being faked.
Yes, it has some assumptions, derived from non-instrumental data early on in the record.
But I recall with amusement that the CET is just dandy when supporting the contrarian narrative.
I find the discussion about the pause nonplussing. Data shows a longer term general warming with bouts of pausing or in fact cooling (1940s – 1970s). This has occurred throughout history and any upward spikes in the general long term warming trend are simply not alarming. Arguing strongly for the pause diverts the appropriate discussion which is “global warming – not new, not much, not a problem, and naught to do about it.”
Your “friendly hat” needs to explicitly state and identify global warming with the pitch that any and all warming is a direct result of carbon dioxide. Otherwise the “friendly hat” is a fail and if the “friendly hat” should state that then it is also a fail.
Count me as an “angry hat”. Give Tamino (aka Grant Foster) ballet lessons in front of the bus and I’ll drive the bus. A marriage of mice and men.
The reality is the pause is the best that warmists can do despite gross manipulation of facts, one by drawing changes in temperature as differences so they exaggerate the minimal trend. If one plots the graph as absolute temperatures the warming trend is almost undiscernable to the eye. The second point is that the temperature data is manipulated via biased adjustments to even get the trend that is claimed . My guess is that if temperatures were unmanipulated raw data the claimed rise prior to the pause could be even a cooling trend or a more substantive pause. When one engages in a communal brainwashing exercise the need to promote the predetermined narrative leads to a level of dishonesty that requires bigger and bigger lies to be told.
Sheldon, since you mentioned the “source” in the last sentence of your article, I’m sure that you are aware there is a growing consensus—strike that, population—of AGW climate skeptics that believe there is global (sic) truth in the phrase “Winter is coming!”
The warmists constantly accuse skeptics of being anti-science. Considering the fact that many peer-reviewed articles have been published attempting to explain the “pause” it seems to me that Tamino’s claims that there was no pause is truly anti-science.
There was never a single thing about the warmista jackassery and their various and varied shenanigans that was even faintly scientific.
Let’s be clear on that…it was a conclusion reached without evidence and maintained despite being falsified.
It is literally the opposite of scientific to believe in CAGW.
Every word of their drivel and every slanderous lie from their mouths is a conglomeration of psychological projection, cognitive dissonance, and outright lying.
That assumption is completely wrong. Here’s a definition for random:
The climate doesn’t act that way at all. Tomorrow’s temperature is much more likely to be close to today’s temperature than to take a big random jump. In other words, given the set of possible temperatures, each item in the set does not have an equal chance of occurring.
There are a lot of climate cycles. People are pulling new ones out of the temperature record all the time. So, at best we have ‘relentless trend’ plus climate cycles plus something like random noise.
There’s more than one kind of random noise. There are many kinds of noise. It turns out that the climate exhibits pink noise. That means that lower frequencies predominate. That means that it is likely that our supposed ‘relentless trend’ is just an artifact of a low frequency climate cycle.
Suppose that a 500 year cycle exists. If it were the only cycle the temperature would be relentlessly going up for 250 years and relentlessly going down for 250 years.
The supposed ‘relentless trend’ is indistinguishable from the artifact of a long climate cycle or from a low frequency component of pink noise.
We really don’t understand the natural climate and that means we have zero chance of distinguishing it from human caused warming. Tamino should not be able to get away with the sentence quoted at the top of this comment. It is, being charitable, a gross over simplification.
commieBob February 3, 2018 at 12:25 pm
In spite of the fact that these data are the sum of random noise and that same relentless trend.
That assumption is completely wrong
It’s not an assumption, that’s exactly what he did.
A pause in the 5,000 year cooling trend that began with the Holocene Climatic Optimum occurred at about 1850, at the end of the Little Ice Age,. the coldest period of the past 10,000 years. this cooling trend also previously paused at the Minoan, Roman, and Medieval warm periods, but relentlessly resumed each time. The end of our current mild warming will probably mark the beginning of the next ~100,000-year glacial period, and the end of our runaway warming worries.
The important thing about a pause is not when it started or stopped or how mongnit was, provided sufficiently long to be significant. The important thing is that IF AGW is real and significant, then natural variation must be also. And that raises the attributiin problem and shows the anthropogenic attribution of the IPCC and warmunists is false.
According to the trend calculator below, the ‘hiatus’ (IPCC) has returned to the satellite datasets which show no statistically significant warming since 1997.
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html
As the lower La Nina temperatures start to be seen in the temperature data, the ‘hiatus’ (IPCC) will likely return again to all temperature datasets sometime early this year.
It has been my experience that most philosophical questions turn on the definition of the topic of concern. Any time you want to describe the behavior of something, or explain why it behaves as it does, it is essential to provide an accurate, comprehensive description of the thing being discussed. That gets overlooked in all the hand waving about ‘climate science.’
No amount of Cherry Picking of Data, fabrication of Data from areas without data, or continual adjustment of Data will have any effect on Nature’s relentless change from warming to cooling. In the end, Mother Nature will have the last word and the placards can all go away. Adjustments, etc are not going to change what people experience outside. The scam will die with the fraud.
“Nick, I assume you mean this trend.”
OK, so your idea of “relentless” is 2 and a bit years is it?
No, in climate a sig trend is one that is over at least 30 years.
Like this one……
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1987/to/plot/rss/from:1987/to/trend
The Earth is four-and-half billion years old. To think that thirty years of data can somehow give us scientific insight into climate trends, or identify anomolies is frankly ridiculous. LOL
Mears admitted that RSS wasn’t accurate or reliable. Why would anyone believe him now?
And has been relentlessly cooling for those ~4.5Bn years. For most of that time the temperature(s) have been much higher than present, yet life somehow coped, even though the Blob seems to believe it has lost that capacity.
” yet life somehow coped, ”
Why is it so difficult to realise that of course “life will cope” (bar some extinctions – especially in the acidifying oceans).
It is about the upheaval to mankind who already number 7b +.
“especially in the acidifying oceans”
From the OED: acidify: “To make acid or sour. Chem. To convert into an acid by combination with any substance.”
Last I looked the oceans were everywhere basic (pH above 7). Nowhere do they appear to be acidic (pH below 7). For mankind to be “upheaved” by acidifying oceans, they will first need to become acidic.
Pompous Git February 4, 2018 at 1:24 am
“especially in the acidifying oceans”
From the OED: acidify: “To make acid or sour. Chem. To convert into an acid by combination with any substance.”
In chemistry it means to increase the [H+] usually by adding an acid, it does not mean to convert into an acid.
“For mankind to be “upheaved” by acidifying oceans, they will first need to become acidic.”
No, that is just bad chemistry. pH 7 is the neutral point of pure water. It is not the mid-point of a buffered solution, which is what we have. H+ is present in very small quantity and is not an important reagent. The reacting species are CO₂ and the carbonates.
Blood pH is about 7.3. If it drops below 7.2 you are not well. You have acidosis. At pH 7 you are “upheaved”.
“In chemistry it means to increase the [H+] usually by adding an acid, it does not mean to convert into an acid.”
As you well know, it means in the context I talk of … going towards the acidic end of the PH scale.
Reducing PH.
@ Phil. and Nick Stokes
You guys are going to have to point me to an authoritative reference for these claims.
Back in the late 60s when The Git was studying chemistry at uni. we weren’t taught that a decrease of pH = acidification. The only time pH change earned a descriptor was when we were titrating a solution and then the word used was neutralisation.
I was taught that the pH of pure water can be anywhere between 6.14 and 7.47 depending on temperature. When did it become fixed at 7?
The pH of human blood and medical nomenclature has nothing whatsoever to do with the pH of seawater.
According to RA Horne’s Marine Chemistry (1969) “a shallow Texas bay” varies between pH 8.2 and 8.9 daily during the summer. During winter the diurnal variation is between 8.0 and 8.4. A pH change of 0.11 over 250 years seems trivial compared to these changes.
Toneb sez: “It is about the upheaval to mankind who already number 7b +.” And there lies the problem. You Alarmists have this brainless, and frankly whacko notion that somehow, the slight warmup from the LIA we’ve experienced, instead of being a boon to mankind has been some sort of “upheaval”. Oh yeah, and for good measure throw in your totally debunked Ehrlichian myth of the planet being (or becoming) overpopulated. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
“You Alarmists have this brainless, and frankly whacko notion that somehow, the slight warmup from the LIA we’ve experienced, instead of being a boon to mankind has been some sort of “upheaval”. Oh yeah, and for good measure throw in your totally debunked Ehrlichian myth of the planet being (or becoming) overpopulated. Yeah, that’s the ticket.”
The LIA wasn’t an “Ice Age”. It was a few colder episodes in an otherwsie benign climate, mitigated largely by a large number of volcanic events. (And low solar which favours colder winter weather in Europe). And we emerged out of it centuries ago.
You deny that there are 7bn on Earth?
You reckon that it will not sig increase by 2050?
You reckon those extra peeps will not make it harder to adapt to any consequences?
Like relocating billions away from coasts?
Give me strength!
We don’t need a “boon”, (even if there were one) as the said 7 bn peeps got here just fine as we were with 280 ppm atmos CO2 concentration, and it is a strawman to talk of it.
The projections of any sort of “upheaval”, firstly depend on the emissions scenario we follow and then they come that far into the future that we could only wait and look for the signs of them, and cross fingers that the science is wrong otherwise.
Pompous Git February 4, 2018 at 7:59 am
@ Phil. and Nick Stokes
You guys are going to have to point me to an authoritative reference for these claims.
Back in the late 60s when The Git was studying chemistry at uni. we weren’t taught that a decrease of pH = acidification.
The only time pH change earned a descriptor was when we were titrating a solution and then the word used was neutralization.
That’s the special case when the [H+] is adjusted to exactly match the [OH-]
I was taught that the pH of pure water can be anywhere between 6.14 and 7.47 depending on temperature. When did it become fixed at 7?
When the temperature is 25ºC
So “That’s the special case when the [H+] is adjusted to exactly match the [OH-]” is a reference and “25°C” is a date? Interesting… not very persuasive, but interesting.
Foster believed a story about a cold nitrogen bath being a magic heater.
End
of his
Bulls**t.
L. V.
Lynn, if you have the time and inclination it would be very nice to see a guest post from you explaining some of the basics about atmospheric physics and thermodynamics. As you know quite a few of the participants here need , shall we say, a little REDIRECTION.
I am happy to report, that since reading my article, Tamino has started using a much more objective method of looking for slowdowns.
Now, when Tamino finds a possible slowdown, he takes it to the local duck pond, and throws it in. If the slowdown sinks to the bottom, and never comes to the surface, then Tamino begrudgingly admits that it might have been the “impression” of a slowdown (but it is now dead). If the slowdown rises to the surface of the pond, then Tamino removes it from the water, and ties it to a stake. He then burns it to death for being a false slowdown.
I don’t understand why Tamino is still not finding any real slowdowns. His old method used his personal bias, but this one is completely objective.
good stuff lol
If you accept that the pause or slowdown has no effect on the rate of warming, then I’d have to ask why have you and so many other people been banging on about it for the past decade?
Of course everyone accepts that there are short periods where a trend line is very different to the underlying rate of change. If you want to call any period with a lower rate, regardless of significance, a pause or slowdown then I’d accept that definition, but I would have to make it clear that in no way does that mean I accept any other definition.
By the same token I will define a period with a much greater rate of warming as an “acceleration”. So for example will you accept the acceleration of the last 10 years, warming at a rate of over 4C / century, bearing in mind that this does not increase global warming in any way?
Another argument rages in our society, that of what we should eat, which is related to the global-warming/global-cooling argument, and I wonder if the same people benefit from both while we the people will not. https://feinmantheother.com/
Mary, I’m not sure whether people benefit from a belief in CAGW, or the converse. There’s a dichotomy between libertarians and authoritarians, but this doesn’t appear to reflect the dichotomy between CAGW believers and sceptics.
Interesting link BTW. Friend of mine was an early advocate of diet and exercise to treat chronic illnesses that were “untreatable” with conventional medicines. She told me that she had received exactly one lecture on diet in the 5 years of training to become a GP. Sounds like nothing much has changed in the last 50 years.
Is “Tamino”, or what ever this individual’s silly name is, really a scientist?
If not, why do I care what he says about global warming (or whatever er’er calling it this week)?
Is anyone on this site a real scientist? If not, why do I care what they say about global warming (or whatever er’er calling it this week)?
[???? .mod]
In your opinion, what is a “real” scientist? Please define your terms and then we can have a discussion.
Some many angels dancing on the heads of pins.
Meanwhile out in the real world people are becoming evermore acquainted with what ‘global warming’ is, as new cold temperature records are recorded.
History shows us when the planet was a little warmer life thrived.
When CO2 levels were higher life thrived.
When both CO2 and global temperatures were 1-2° above current all life thrived very well.
So why do do people get so upset by a little warming, or the minuscule increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? Are they anti-life?
maybe in social sciences both people can be “right” … but never in real science …
Nick Stokes wrote:
“Increase of vegetation does have a lasting effect, but not much. We have emitted about as much C as there is in the entire mass of vegetation.”
This is a first time I have seen this claim. I have not done the calcs but my immediate instinct is saying BS! Substantiate it please
My 66 year-old brains may have this wrong, but it would seem there’s ~375 * 10^12 kg of C in the biosphere and anthropogenic C emissions since the Industrial Revolution amounts to ~2 * 10^12 kg of C.
Happy to be corrected.
Current annual anthropogenic C emissions are about 9×10^12 Kg so I think your numbers are off.
@ Phil.
You are correct. I have the figures arse backward. What I attributed to the biosphere is what anthropogenic emissions amount to. Data used is from WMO.
“Substantiate it please”
From here,
” Collectively, the Earth’s plants store approximately 560 PgC, with the wood in trees being the largest fraction. “
1 Pg = 1 Gton.
From CDIAC, cumulative emissions to 2011 were 374 Gtons CO2. We have been emitting, as Phil says, about 9 Gtons/year recently, so that brings it up to 430 Gtons emitted from fossil fuel. But there are also another 160 Gtons from land clearing (Houghton, CDIAC), making 590 Gtons total emitted.
Disingenuous as usual.
You have ignored the much larger CO2 sink comprising the flora and fauna in the oceans, especially the CO2 sequestered by the animals that incorporate it as carbonates, coccolithophores for example.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6267/1533
So I consider from a back of a fag packet calculation that you are underestimating the CO2 stored biologically by at least an order of magnitude, maybe more.
Some time back, a couple of scientists whose names I cannot recall made the following suggestion: The Great Death, the appalling epidemics in the Americas starting with European invasions, killed so many people (90% according to Mann) in the Americas that enormous tracts of land being used for food went back to forest. The trees sequestered so much CO2 that it began or exacerbated the Little Ice Age. I have no idea how that might be proven, or even approached, but the timing is suggestive.
So, cometh Paul Bunyan and his friends….
I recall reading a memoir of somebody going from Boston to NYC about 1820 and saying he didn’t see a tree the whole way. Between building and burning (you get really tired of being cold, even of being cold that doesn’t cause frostbite, you get really tired and you want a fire), forests took a hit, not to mention clearing for agriculture, and sequestered carbon returned to the atmosphere.
The timing is suggestive, but the proposed solutions are not pleasant.
The way I see it: Its the existing increase in C in the atmosphere during the IR (+37%) .
that should be related to C in vegetation. I have found a few figures but need to double check my calcs
Technically we should include photosynthetic organisms as well as these have the potential to increase in growth rates and population too
Some time back Bill Ill’s presented an equation to estimate global average temperature anomaly and compared with the observed data. They match quite close. This also includes global warming component. It can be easily shown the real trend of global warming (if any) and from the pause pattern.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
It blows me away that to this day there are supposedly educated alarmists that still push this nonsense about 1998 being a cherrypicked year that holds the entire Pause together…when its very clear that a huge La Nina came after 1998, largely wiping out that 3 year period as being some short term cherry picked warming spike. But they absolutely refuse to concede a point.that will damage their beloved religion.
Repeating re THE PAUSE, for those who have not read my previous post (or do not want to accept the obvious):
“Incidentally, the Nino34 temperature anomaly is absolutely flat over the period from 1982 to present – the only apparent atmospheric warming during this period is due to the natural recovery from two major volcanoes – El Chichon and Mt. Pinatubo.”
The Nino 34 anomaly is a very good predictor of global LT temperatures four months in the future. I predicted the recent atmospheric cooling correctly, as noted below.
I suggest the real Pause extends back at least to 1982 and possibly earlier. Based on Equatorial Pacific SST’s, we should see atmospheric temperatures cool to about the 0.0C anomaly within a few months – which means NO net warming over the 30-year baseline.
I use UAH LT temperatures because there have been too many unjustified “adjustments” in the surface temperature data.
There is no real global warming crisis.
Regards, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/02/01/the-planet-continues-to-cool-after-an-el-nino-induced-string-of-warm-years/comment-page-1/#comment-2732366
As I recently predicted:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/01/salmost-half-of-the-contiguous-usa-still-covered-in-snow/comment-page-1/#comment-2707499
[excerpt]
Global Lower Troposphere (LT) temperatures can be accurately predicted ~4 months in the future using the Nino34 temperature anomaly, and ~6 months using the Equatorial Upper Ocean temperature anomaly.
The atmospheric cooling I predicted (4 months in advance) using the Nino34 anomaly has started to materialize in November 2017 – with more cooling to follow. I expect the UAH LT temperature anomaly to decline further to ~0.0C in the next few months.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1527601687317388&set=a.1012901982120697.1073741826.100002027142240&type=3&theater
Data:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/sstoi.indices
Year Month Nino34 Anom dC
2017 6 0.55
2017 7 0.39
2017 8 -0.15
2017 9 -0.43
2017 10 -0.46
2017 11 -0.86
Incidentally, the Nino34 temperature anomaly is absolutely flat over the period from 1982 to present – the only apparent atmospheric warming during this period is due to the natural recovery from two major volcanoes – El Chichon and Mt. Pinatubo.
________________________________________________________
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/03/what-you-wont-find-in-the-new-national-climate-assessment/comment-page-1/#comment-2655247
LT Tropical temperature should cool to ~0.0C within ~6 months.
LT Global temperature should follow ~1 month thereafter.
Global warming alarmists believe the IPCC, and especially its politically-rewritten Summary for Policymakers. I do not. Repeating, these people have a perfectly negative predictive track record, and thus negative credibility. Nobody should believe them.
Regards, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/25/2017-was-warm-the-next-few-years-will-be-more-important/comment-page-1/#comment-2727849
[excerpt]
I have two engineering degrees in the earth sciences, have studied the subject of “global warming” since ~1985, and published papers and articles that have survived intact since 2002.
My problem with the IPCC and the warmist camp is their perfectly negative predictive track record – every scary prediction they have made has failed to materialize. The IPCC’s enthusiastic embrace of the fraudulent Mann hockey stick severely damaged their credibility, and it has deteriorated further and further since then.
The essence of science is the ability to predict, and the global warming alarmists have consistently failed.
In contrast, all our predictions written in 2002 have now materialized in those countries that adopted the full measure of global warming alarmism – save one – and that is for global cooling to resume starting by 2020 to 2030.
My last prediction, for imminent global cooling, is still looking pretty good. Solar Cycle 24 is a dud and SC25 is predicted to also be weak. The PDO is peaking and poised to drop. Equatorial Pacific Sea Surface temperatures are dropping sharply, and are a good predictor of near-term atmospheric temperatures.
[Global warming alarmists] believe the IPCC, and especially its politically-rewritten Summary for Policymakers. I do not. Repeating, these people have a perfectly negative predictive track record, and thus negative credibility. Nobody should believe them.
ALLAN MACRAE February 4, 2018 at 7:35 am
The Nino 34 anomaly is a very good predictor of global LT temperatures four months in the future. I predicted the recent atmospheric cooling correctly, as noted below.
Global Lower Troposphere (LT) temperatures can be accurately predicted ~4 months in the future using the Nino34 temperature anomaly, and ~6 months using the Equatorial Upper Ocean temperature anomaly.
The atmospheric cooling I predicted (4 months in advance) using the Nino34 anomaly has started to materialize in November 2017 – with more cooling to follow. I expect the UAH LT temperature anomaly to decline further to ~0.0C in the next few months.
That’s an accurate prediction?
Yes it is Phil – and an easy prediction – except that the atmospheric cooling delay took a bit longer than 4 months after Nino34 SST’s in this case, due to the large size of the last El NIno. I corresponded with John Christy about this, and he reached the same conclusion.
Reference:
“Lethal Weapon” Uncle Bennie: “That’s fRied Rice, you plick!”]
That’s because you are prepared to use GISTEMP. A lot of skeptics here insist that GISTEMP is incorrect and only UAH 6 is valid. If your goal is to find the longest possible pause, you use the data with the strongest spike in 1998 and start just before that.
[No one more desperately needs global warming to end than those most against doing anything about it. That’s why they cling so tight to the notion of a “pause” …]
No one more desperately needs global warming to continue than those most in favour of doing something about it. That’s why they cling so tight to the notion there is no pause.
When you can change a few words and make the argument say the opposite, you know it is no argument.
Sheldon: Respectfully, talking about the central estimate for the trend in noisy data is meaningless without including confidence intervals. Go to Nick Stokes blog and get the trend and confidence interval for a period with little warming and period with more warming. Given the confidence intervals, is there a significant difference between these two periods? Probably not.
The proper way to compare two trends is to calculate the confidence interval for the difference of two means. If the confidence interval includes zero, the real difference could be zero and the apparent difference caused by a chance arrangement of noise in the data. (When you do a linear fit to data, you are assuming that all deviations are due to chance.)
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability/significance-tests-confidence-intervals-two-samples/comparing-two-means/v/confidence-interval-of-difference-of-means
“Pause” or “No Pause”, the Achilles Heel in CAGW is that Man’s CO2 is the cause.
That is what has been hypothesized will lead to disaster and that is what has never been shown to be true.
I do like the graphic from R. Clutz’s site…
Lets see where the CO2 fingerprint of warming is hiding?
Or is it just a popular lack of perspective?
See more at https://rclutz.wordpress.com/
Really, tom0mason? That tired “argument” again? Rebuttal: http://denialdepot.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-to-cook-graph-skepticalsciencecom.html
Really, Tom Dayton.? That tired “old failed” rebuttal again.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2018/01/28/what-is-global-temperature-is-it-warming-or-cooling/
OK when …
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif
did CO2 control this planet’s average temperature.
Here is a great look at the effects of water vapor in action, effects that can only come from water vapor and not CO2 being that CO2 is so well mixed. Surface winds carrying water vapor northward from the Black and Caspian Seas and warming an area by some 25+ degrees F. …https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=31.42,48.46,1107/loc=43.557,48.420
Most such fierce disagreements do come down to people assuming slightly different meanings to a couple essential words, terms, or concepts. Sometimes it is a matter of taking connotations as denotation, derivative or metaphorical uses as basic core meaning…because that is the way someone always heard a term used in his family or neighborhood.
The problem is right here: “The global temperature series.”
There may be such an abstraction, but all we humans have are various aggregated estimations, based on personal impressions and various kinds of instruments, and the further back, the less precise, accurate, and believable are the readings and estimations on which the global aggregate estimationa are based. And no one quite wants to lay out in detail every bit of the fiddling that has to go on from the solid ground up to build the “global temperature series” floating up there in conceptual imagination.
OTOH, I never thought of “skeptic” or “denier” as insults. When I forward the URL of a posting from WUWT (or any other such) to someone and they reply, “but that person is a skeptic” I just shrug and ask, “So?” Why do they think anyone else would be impressed? Why do they think that should be a convincing argument?
Anybody person reasonably educated in statistics and trends should know, if for a period of measurement you have a cluster of data points on one side of the trend line immediately followed by a cluster of data points on the opposite side of that trend line, then what you are seeing is a disruption — or pause/slowdown/acceleration — in your trend. Even middle school students can grasp that.
https://imgur.com/pefOSYD
2nd try