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.
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“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.
@ur momisugly 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
@ur momisugly 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.
@ur momisugly 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