By Andy May
This post has been translated into German by Christian Freuer here.
You won’t find much in the IPCC AR6 report on the atmospheric CO2 concentration evolution during the Holocene. They talk a lot about how CO2 concentration compares to global temperature during the years since 1850 and over the past 800,000 years, but very little about the changes since 12,000 years ago. On page 44 of the Technical Summary, we see the figure shown below as Figure 1.
Figure 1 is designed to hide the relationship between CO2 and global atmospheric surface temperature (GAST), not illuminate it. It was designed to hide abundant, credible, and well-known evidence that through much of Earth’s history CO2 concentration goes down as global temperatures go up. Figure 2 is from Javier Vinos’ book (Vinós, 2022, p. 145). It shows the data in a much clearer and more honest way.
The AR6 plot tries to imply that temperature follows CO2 concentration and uses clever temporal scaling and cherry-picked data to make that point. Figure 2 shows all the data for the Cenozoic Period using one time scale, and shows the truth is the opposite. Usually, CO2 and temperature move in opposite directions.
The circled area in Figure 1 shows the CO2 concentration increasing during the Holocene, as temperatures rise about five degrees from the last glacial maximum. This crams the entire Holocene into less than a millimeter. AR6 tells us that the “intent of [Figure 1] is to show that CO2 and temperature covary, both in the past and into the future…” But the truth of the relationship between them is cleverly hidden in Figure 1 by the design of the figure, the weird time scale, and the choice of the data used. It is not a scientific illustration meant to illuminate the truth; it is a clever bit of propaganda.
In Chapter 2 they plot Dome C and WAIS Divide CO2 from 21,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago in a very small plot (AR6, page 301). It is shown in Figure 3.
Why are they avoiding showing the CO2/temperature relationship during the Holocene Epoch? They cram it into less than a millimeter in Figure 1 and chop it off in Figure 3. The Holocene is the last 12,000 years, the proxy data quality in that period should be high, relative to the rest of the Cenozoic. Let’s look at other sources of Holocene CO2 data, like Monnin, 2004.
As Figure 4 shows, CO2 and CH4 (methane) atmospheric concentrations have increased for the past 5,000 to 6,000 years as global proxy temperatures dropped. This is the opposite of IPCC’s stated intent for showing Figure 1. The global proxy temperature curve shown in Figure 4 is from Marcott’s proxies but reinterpreted by Vinós (Vinós, 2022). Both the climate model temperatures and the CO2 concentrations move opposite to the proxy temperatures for most of the Holocene Epoch.
The CO2 concentration in Figure 4 is from Eric Monnin and eleven co-authors (Monnin, et al., 2004) in an article in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Their Figure 1 is a plot of available Antarctic ice core CO2 proxies for the Holocene, it is shown as our Figure 5. In this plot the present is to the left and the beginning of the Holocene is to the right, just opposite of the previous figures.
The Dome C ice core shows the entire Holocene. It is plotted in Figure 6, oriented like Figures 1 to 3, with the present to the right.
In Figure 7 we compare three temperature reconstructions. We use the Vinther reconstruction for Greenland (Vinther, et al., 2009), the Rosenthal reconstruction (Rosenthal, Linsley, & Oppo, 2013) from the Indonesian Throughway in the tropical Pacific Ocean, and the Antarctic Dome C temperature reconstruction (Jouzel, et al., 2007).
Figure 7 shows that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere decline over the past 5,000 to 6,000 years or longer, a period known as the “Neoglacial.” While Rosenthal’s reconstruction is based upon 500-meter-deep ocean temperatures in the Indonesian Throughway between Borneo and Sulawesi, the water temperatures are thought to primarily represent ocean surface temperatures in the tropical and Northern Pacific Ocean. This makes some sense as they track Vinther’s Greenland ice core temperatures fairly well.
Antarctica dances to a different drummer. It moves opposite Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the Holocene Climatic Optimum (roughly 8000BC to 4500BC) and while Northern Hemisphere temperatures drop after 4,500BC, Antarctic temperatures are flat. After 5000BC CO2 concentration increases, as shown in Figure 6.
Discussion
Renee Hannon noticed the deceptive plot shown in Figure 1 and pointed it out in the comments to my post on Javier’s interview with Tom Nelson. See her comment here. The IPCC’s stated objective is to “provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies.” Is cherry-picking data and creating deceptive illustrations “scientific?” Is ignoring and hiding valid, peer-reviewed, relevant data “scientific?” I think not.
I’m reminded of a time I was researching an article for another publication and found that AR6 managed to discuss the famous Iris Effect (see here, Lindzen and Choi section), discovered by Richard Lindzen, Ming-Dah Chou, and Arthur Hou in 2001 (Lindzen, Chou, & Hou, 2001) and managed to do it without once mentioning any of them, check it yourself, see pages 972-973 in Chapter 7. They do mention Lindzen, et al., 2001 later in Chapter 7 in another context, so you will find the paper in the chapter bibliography. Cherry-picking, ignoring contrary data, “forgetting” to reference the discoverers of key concepts has risen to epic heights in this IPCC. I find it disgraceful.
Works Cited
Jouzel, J., Masson-Delmotte, V., Cattani, O., Dreyfus, G., Falourd, S., & Hoffmann, G. (2007). Orbital and Millennial Antarctic Climate Variability over the Past 800,000 Years. Science, 317, 793-796. doi:10.1126/science.1141038
Kobashi, T., Severinghaus, J. P., Brook, E. J., Barnola, J.-M., & Grachev, A. M. (2007). Precise timing and characterization of abrupt climate change 8200 years ago from air trapped in polar ice,. Quaternary Science Reviews, 26(9-10), 1212-1222. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2007.01.009
Lindzen, R., Chou, M.-D., & Hou, A. (2001, March). Does the Earth have an Adaptive Iris. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 82(3). Retrieved from https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/82/3/1520-0477_2001_082_0417_dtehaa_2_3_co_2.xml
Monnin, E., Steig, E. J., Siegenthaler, U., Kawamura, K., Schwander, J., Stauffer, B., . . . Fischer, H. (2004). Evidence for substantial accumulation rate variability in Antarctica during the Holocene, through synchronization of CO2 in the Taylor Dome, Dome C and DML ice cores. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 45-54. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2004.05.007
Rosenthal, Y., Linsley, B., & Oppo, D. (2013, November 1). Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 years. Science. Retrieved from http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617
Vinós, J. (2022). Climate of the Past, Present and Future, A Scientific Debate, 2nd Edition. Madrid: Critical Science Press. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363669186_Climate_of_the_Past_Present_and_Future_A_scientific_debate_2nd_ed
Vinther, B. M., Buchardt, S. L., Clausen, H. B., Dahl-Jensen, D., Johnsen, S. J., Fisher, D. A., . . . Svensson, A. M. (2009, September 17). Holocene thinning of the Greenland ice sheet. Nature, 461. Retrieved from http://users.clas.ufl.edu/rrusso/gly6932/vinther_etal_nature09.pdf
They are supplying talking points for their political masters to put out to reporters who majored in Poli Sci or Journalism, and have a MEGO reaction to science. Given their success, the project is doing as intended.
The IPCC shills/clowns will all be along shortly to nitpick some minor point in Andy’s eye-opening exposé.
Just another evidence that they KNOW their CO2 as a climate driver is unsupportable thus play their dishonest game to hide the evidence by not mentioning it!
It is a racket pure and simple, money rules their world.
IPCC6 completely ignores the extensive literature on geothermal activity in Antarctica. Clearly there is an effect on the Thwaites/Pine Island Glacier complex, but why rock the boat and make things more complicated. We can’t lose sight of the preferred narrative.
The local warming of some ice shelves and the peninsula is offset by global cooling of the rest of Antarctica. Antarctica, on average, obviously does not warm from increased greenhouse gases.
The IPCC is hopelessly focused on the CO2 control knob fantasy, just like children dream about the Tooth Fairy. Once they acknowledge Solar cycles which actually control climate change (like the Bray and Eddy cycles) and related Sunspot cycles (like the DeVries and Feynman cycles), then their reports might be more believable.
John Shewchuk
You are correct in saying that the CO2 Control Knob is a Fantasy; but so is your claim that Solar Cycles and Sunspot Cycles actually control our climate.
The actual Control Knob for our Climate is simply the amount of reflective (dimming) SO2 aerosols circulating in our atmosphere. There are millions of tons of Industrial SO2 aerosol emissions, and their climatic effect cannot be ignored.
So how did Industrial SO2 produce the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age?
Both of you have points about inputs to the earth’s temperature. But it is much more complicated than simply stating that a single input control’s the earth’s temperature.
On the same note, CO2 very likely has some impact to heating the earth, but IMHO, it is not the major input to temperature.
I am very disappointed with the vilification of fossil fuels and CO2. Fossil fuels have allowed our society to advance and live a very comfortable life. Higher CO2 levels have made the earth more green and increased crop yields.
SO2 emissions do cause cooling
It is one of many climate change causes
Not a climate control knob
First, if SO2 caused some of the cooling — what was the primary cause? Second, what caused the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods?
I think the best definition of climate is
A chaotic multi-input multiple feedback system of which we know very little.
Those thinking that there’s a CO2 control knob are defaulting to the Sherlock Holmes ” if you’ve eliminated everything else whatever is left is the cause”. That may work in fiction, but in the case of science it can lead to some horrendous errors, add personal beliefs and you end up with Ancil Keys influencing government policy for seven decades.
Can’t say I’m optimistic that Net Zero will go away any time soon
Richard Greene:
“SO2 emissions do cause cooling”
Yes, and what you, and everyone else, it seems, fail to understand is that when SO2 aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere are reduced, warming WILL occur, making SO2 aerosols the actual Control Knob of our climate, now and back through the Ice Ages..
First, what’s wrong with warming? It was great for early civilisation. The tropics don’t warm so it means more farmland.
Second, SO2 is not a major impactor compared with other fundamentals, one being the huge cooling provided by the ozone hole in Antarctica. It is largely mediated by oceanic boron and cosmic rays.
Missing from recent IPCC forcing charts (to my great surprise) is the cooling provided by biomass combustion. It was present in the early charts for forcing agents. Biomass fire emit black carbon and organic carbon. The net effect is strongly negative (cooling). If the combustion of wood in heating stoves across the world – a very important use of renewable fuel – were made much cleaner, there would be a strong warming effect because most of the OC would be burned to CO2 and water vapour. I say “strong” relative to the effects of things such as SO2 (from coal), H2SO3 (from wood), H2SO4, H2S (from both, if burned badly).
Any claim for positive or negative forcing by some molecule has to me made with reference to the altitude because the effects vary with height.
Thank you for mentioning SO2, however with respect to reflection of incoming energy, I believe you intended to refer to “sulfates”. Most sulfates come from the oceans. Human activity cannot hold a candle to the ocean’s contribution.
A great portion of all rain drops form around a sulfate molecule of some kind. If we rid the atmosphere of them entirely there would likely be global droughts.
John Shewchuk;
Obviously, there were no industrial SO2 aerosol emissions during those times
However, SO2 aerosols from volcanic eruptions were the Control Knob for the climate of those eras.
The Roman Warm period and the Medieval Warm period were both caused by an almost complete absence of volcanic eruptions and their SO2 aerosol emissions (only 31 eruptions in 300 years, for the MWP, for example)
For the Dark Ages, and the Little Ice Age, their cold temperatures were caused by increased volcanism, with every temperature decrease being due to volcanic SO2 aerosols…
See “The Definitive Cause of Little Ice Age Temperatures”
.
https://doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.2022.13.2.0170
Data showing volcanism as a primary driver is very weak with short durations, and is often the result of sea level change and ice sheet loading. Here is an excellent summary from Javier Vinos’ book (Vinós, 2022, p. 201), Conclusions … “Volcanoes produce a short-term weather effect from radiative and meridional transport changes, and a long-term climate effect from delayed meridional transport changes. Climate change has an important effect on volcanic activity, that follows ice-volume changes associated with the glacial cycle, which is driven by Milankovitch forcing.”
John Shewchuk;
The “excellent summary” from Javier’s book is pure nonsense.
“climate change has an important effect on volcanic activity”
No, volcanic activity has an important effect on climate change. Etc. Etc..
And I have the data to prove it.
Wonderful. Publish your findings and see how many buy it. Good luck. In the meantime, Javier is on his way to becoming famous for his ground-breaking studies on climate change — and how the sun is in charge of the vast majority of climate actions.
John Shewchuk
Check Google Scholar for a list of publications under my name. You will find that increases and decreases in SO2 aerosol emissions are in charge of every climate action, no hint of any CO2 or solar effects.
You are both wrong!
I have a list of nine climate change causes.
The usual suspects.
Other lists may differ.
No one knows the exact effect of each cause of climate change. There will even be disagreements over the list itself:
Honest Climate Science and Energy: Nine causes of climate change
The bottom line: Climate change is the net result of all local, regional and global climate change causes. The climate change in my lifetime (since 1953) has been good news (warmer) and constant. Nothing I can do to stop climate change. But while I am celebrating the warmer climate, I can’t tolerate leftist scaremongering about climate change, used to seize more political power and reduce our personal freedoms. So I won’t stay silent.
Richard,
In your list your must stress the roles of:
You have a wish list of ideas with no supporting data. Regarding the Sun versus Volcano forcing, the Sun/Sunspot cycles show very high earth temperature correlations, while Volcanoes only show little and short lived correlations. And now you have to ask yourself … did the sun affect volcanic activity — or did the volcanoes affect solar activity. Common sense and logic rule the day.
Richard Greene:
As I had mentioned earlier, SO2 aerosols were the Control Knob for the earlier historical warm and cold periods. So why do you insist that they play only a minor role in the temperature changes since the start of the Industrial revolution?.
How did human-generated aerosols cause the ~15 °C warming and cooling in global average temperature as observed from ice core proxies and ~120 meters of increase and decrease in sea levels over ~100,000 year cycles in the last million years?
A couple of observations. The further back in history you go the harder it is to identify maximum and minimum values so don’t make too much of the growth in amplitudes as you get closer to present time. This is obviously a cyclical process. The climate change advocates *should* be working on figuring out the combinatorial functional relationship of all the contributing factors instead of just focusing on one as the “control knob”.
In another thread, someone looked at a Fourier Transform of the temperature record to try and identify at least some of the cyclical factors. I’m amazed someone hasn’t done a wavelet analysis to try and isolate the time and spatial relationships of all the cyclical products.
https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6/fourier
It was amusing to see how not one of the trendology “experts” realized the last step here, the IFT.
Here is the result of just the FT by itself on the UAH6 LT, quite interesting (I’m not sure what the units of the x-axis should be, the original UAH x-axis is decimal years):
I see that you got at least one down check on this. I’m not surprised. When you bring up something that’s hard for the CAGW crowd to address, they just give you a down check instead.
When the sophistry fails, it is all they have left.
Presumably if the UAH x-axis was in seconds, the FT x-axis would be Hertz. This raises another point about how the UAH is divided into months, which are not equal length in time (Jan is 10% longer than Feb)—the time samples are not even.
I’m amazed someone hasn’t done a wavelet analysis to try and isolate the time and spatial relationships of all the cyclical products .
Here’s a spectral power analysis of benthic forams d18O over the past 500,000 years. The dominant periodicity is Eccentricity followed by Obliquity.
What nobody appears to have noticed is that the eccentricity and obliquity periodicities in d18O data are coming from different parts of the data. Eccentricity from the high values and obliquity from the low values.
Eccentricity is responsible for the ice-sheets cycle, while obliquity is responsible for the interglacial cycle.
Low eccentricity like we are having is a promise for a cold long glacial period with very extensive ice sheets when the next glaciation comes.
Interesting comment on the high and low values.
Also, the strength of the periodicities observed in the paleo record are completely opposite of July insolation. The low strength of precession associated with glacial and interglacial cycles suggests it is not well preserved in the past or plays a minor role.
Renee,
Thanks for the graph. I’m not familiar with it so I’ll have to study it for a while. I’m assuming the terms “eccentricity” and “obliqueness” have to do with orbital mechanics, correct?
Yes, there are three key orbital parameters- eccentricity, obliquity and precession. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2948/milankovitch-orbital-cycles-and-their-role-in-earths-climate/
Stinkerp:
They were not human generated. They were from volcanic eruptions.
“The IPCC is hopelessly focused on the CO2 control knob fantasy” … It shouldn’t be surprising, though. The IPCC charter requires exactly this.
IPCC fraudulent operations were exposed with the Climategate email scandal — and nothing has changed because no one was fired or went to jail; but with the Watergate scandal people were fired and went to jail.
The reconstruction in your figure 2 of Cenozoic CO2 concentrations, lifted from Vinos’ book, seems to be sourced from the compilation of CO2 proxies from Beerling and Royer, 2011, but the proxies seem to have been cherry picked to omit some records that rather significantly alter the indicated relationship between Cenozoic temperature and CO2:
Any idea why Vinos made this glaring and inappropriate omission? Shall we assume malice or simple incompetence?
What an absurd accusation. Here is a superposition of my rendering of the Beerling/Royer data over that figure in pine green color, and the upper curve of their figure (Zachos temperature) in orange.
As you can see my curve and Beerling/Royer’s curve are only significantly different for two periods for which there is very little data: 63-60 Ma and 54-45 Ma. Excluding Liverworts and Nahcolite-trona data from the analysis is the only sensible thing to do. They have only two data points each in 64 million years, and they are widely divergent from the other proxies, so they are essentially only adding to the uncertainty and giving a peak at 50 Ma that is very likely spurious as stomata data, used to construct a great deal of the ancient parts of the graph, completely disagrees. The question is why Beerling & Royer included such data, only to have more CO2 during the Early Eocene warm period?
B/Ca data is absolutely redundant. There’s a great abundance of data during the last 20 million years and as you can see both curves are identical during that period.
The temperature curve in orange confirms the result of my analysis. There is more disagreement than agreement between CO2 and temperature for the past 60 million years. They expend more time going in opposite directions for millions of years. That is what the data says. What Beerling and Royer say is misleading, to say the least.
The 52 Ma peak is supported by unreliable data and Antarctica glaciation coincides with some of the highest CO2 levels in the entire Cenozoic.
Shall we assume malice or simple incompetence in your comment, AlanJ?
“ they are essentially only adding to the uncertainty”
Ah, yes, let’s delete those pesky data points that muddy the picture you want to present. Can’t be any uncertainty if the inconvenient data are simply brushed under the rug and ignored!
I admire your candor, at least.
AlanJ,
With or without the points, there is no correlation between CO2 and temperature. CO2 dropped when the Antarctic ice cap formed, why did temperature go up then? CO2 dropped after that (20 Ma to 16 Ma), and during the Holocene Climatic Optimum, and temperature went up? You can see these contradictions even in the deceptive and vague Beerling and Royer graph you posted above.
I agree with Javier on the outliers, but even if we use all the points, as you want to do, the conclusion is the same. There is no correlation between CO2 and temperature.
The data have vastly too much uncertainty to be making the claims you are making about the fine details. The only picture we can assess is whether the proxy data support or exclude the idea that CO2 and temperature covaried during the Cenozoic, which they undeniably do support (more properly, it is well within the bounds of uncertainty), unless you choose to cherry pick which proxies you want to show.
AlanJ,
You write:
Completely disagree, you are clearly incorrect. With or without all the Beerling and Royer (B&R) proxies, they do not covary as Javier has shown with his overlay. Only the very deceptive plots in Beerling and Royer and AR6 make it look that way.
Perhaps you did not look carefully enough at his overlay. I added some annotation to it to make it clearer. My annotated version is attached.
This underlay is the B&R version, with all their proxies. Overlain is Javier’s in dark green. It is almost the same, except the Eocene hump is moved later in time. The B&R temperature curve is shown in orange. They clearly disagree in trend from 38 million years ago to about 5 million years ago, over half the time.
I see you don’t understand proxy analysis. If you are getting a very different result from two proxies that are supposed to be measuring the same thing, it is clear that at least one of them is not measuring what you think is measuring.
Adding problematic proxies to a multiproxy analysis just muddles the result and makes the whole point moot, unless your point is to deceive people.
Proxy selection is the most important part of a multiproxy analysis. This is a reality. I question Beerling & Royer inclusion of Liverworts and Nahcolite-trona data, and you question my exclusion of them. I explain why Liverworts and Nahcolite-trona data should not be included. Perhaps you have a scientific or statistical reason to defend why they should be included since Beerling & Royer are not going to do it.
But you don’t know which of the proxies is right. Thus, there is uncertainty, and what you are doing is sweeping the uncertainty under the rug and presenting a wholly misleading picture. The uncertainty allows that CO2 and temperature covaried closely during the early Cenozoic. You’ve now admitted publicly to committing this deceit purposefully, so I’m not sure what there is left to discuss. I’m glad you were frank about being dishonest.
Oh, yes, you explained clearly that including them distorts the picture you wanted to present so you thought it best to leave them out, else people might not be so easily misled. Everyone reading this discussion and petulantly downvoting my comment knows fully well that if you were excluding data that indicated the opposite pattern they would be rounding up the torches and pitchforks. Hypocrisy and denial.
AlanJ,
You write:
Nobody knows which of the proxies is correct. Javier is clearly showing his data, the uncertainty, and provides a very reasonable explanation for the proxies he chose to use. That is clearly not sweeping anything under the rug.
His analysis is transparent and honest, something that cannot be said for either the IPCC or Beerling and Royer unfortunately. You are way off base here. The figures made by both are very misleading and both hide the differences that Javier has clearly shown.
The “reasonable explanation” he provides is that the additional proxies introduce too much uncertainty. The problem is that the proxies, well, exist, so the uncertainty is real. Not addressing this fact is indeed sweeping things under the rug. The evidence from the proxies quite clearly shows that peak Cenozoic warmth corresponding with peak Cenozoic CO2 is well within the bounds of uncertainty.
AlanJ,
You write:
Two problems with this. You don’t know the proxy uncertainty, and no one else does either, all we have are proxies, we don’t have accurate measurements to compare them to prior to circa 1850AD.
Second your claim of a match between the B&R temperature and CO2 curves is not correct, as you can see attached.
The trends disagree over half the time.
In science, what matters is that the author explains the methods so what he does is repeatable. In my case, it is very clearly labeled in the figure the proxies I used, so your accusation of deceit bears no substance and the only one being malicious here is you.
Every scientist is entitled to his interpretation of the evidence. My interpretation of the proxies excluded is within my right. Then anybody is entitled to think if I was right or wrong in excluding them, but that opinion should in no way be accompanied by a personal judgment of my persona. Only additional data on the periods affected can decide if I am right and Beerling/Royer are wrong or the opposite.
Your thinking that I am hypocritical and in denial is another baseless accusation. I only care about being more correct than other scientists, and the only way of achieving that is by being as truthful as possible to the evidence. If the evidence was supportive of CO2 being a first-order factor in climate determination I would be defending it, the same way I defend that recent glacier demise bears a strong human signature. I care not about the opinion of others as any good scientist should. If the evidence was supportive of CO2 being mostly responsible for recent climate change, as the IPCC defends, I would be on the other side of the fence and equally happy. I don’t have any ties to any energy industry, no investments in fossil fuels interests, and no strong political convictions. I am truly independent and committed to continue being so. I didn’t choose my side, the evidence did that for me.
Would you mind citing the discussion of this choice from your book, citing page number(s)? I’ve done extensive searching to see where you describe your justification for omitting part of the proxy datasets from Beerling and Royer, which you cite as the data source, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.
AlanJ,
Now you are just being annoying. As both Javier and I have pointed out repeatedly, and you have ignored, it doesn’t make any difference whether you use Beerling and Royer’s proxies or Javier’s proxies, either way the proxy CO2 curves and the proxy temperature curves anti-correlate over the Cenozoic. Your nitpicking about 4 proxy points makes no difference as the attached plot makes crystal clear.
You can’t simply look at the means of the proxy records without taking any consideration of the range of variability. The data are too uncertain for the kinds of detailed comparisons you are trying to make (to make no mention of uncertainty in the temperature reconstruction itself). At best we can make broad claims about the general timing, where we see good correspondence between peak CO2 and temperature during the Cenozoic as well as good agreement during cooling periods:
(image from Royer et al., 2014)
If you want to argue that some proxies should be excluded from analysis you can do that, but you need to have very strong justification for doing so, and claiming that retaining all of the proxies creates “too much uncertainty” is a completely invalid response to this, because the proxies exist and the uncertainty is real. Javier is simply choosing to sweep it under the rug.
AlanJ,
Pardon me, but that is dumbest thing I’ve read in a while. You are saying the proxies are accurate for the IPCC and Beerling and Royer, but the same proxies are not accurate for Vinós. Sorry man, same proxies.
Besides you keep ignoring the clear fact that it doesn’t matter if you include or exclude the 4 questionable proxies, the CO2 trend is still opposite the temperature trend for most of the Cenozoic, and nearly all the Holocene.
Nope, not even remotely what I’m saying. Try and keep up. The proxies have significant uncertainty, and within the bounds of that uncertainty, it is completely possible that CO2 and temperature covary very closely across the Cenozoic. By omitting a portion of the proxy records and completely ignoring this uncertainty, Vinós is claiming that there is no possibility that CO2 and temperature covary across the Cenozoic. So he is lying by omission – and has admitted that this is intentional.
The proxies are not “questionable,” that is language you and Vinós have inserted based on exactly nothing whatsoever. It’s quite conniving. And the trends are not opposite, they covary closely:
Peaks correspond with peaks, minima correspond with minima, well within the bounds of proxy (and, I would imagine, stratigraphic) uncertainty.
AlanJ,
You write:
Clearly they do not covary closely, or at all. That is your imagination, as the attached plot shows. You cannot cherry-pick 4 points out of 55 million years of data and call that “covarying.”
Try overlaying your curves as any decent scientist would do first thing.
No one knows how accurate these proxies are millions of years ago, we have less than 200 years of data. Your “judgment” that four points are accurate, and the rest are incorrect is silly.
I’m quite happy to say all the data older than the Holocene is inadequate for this comparison, or all of it is adequate, but cherry-picking the data you want to make your point is not allowed.
We can also use the Beerling and Royer proxy dataset or Javier’s dataset. I don’t care, they both show temperature and CO2 do not covary.
The CO2 data deteriorates with time. But it is decent in Holocene, and CO2 and temperature do not covary at all during the Holocene, which was the point of the post in the first place. I suspect that is why AR6 didn’t show the Holocene at all.
I eagerly await you informing Javier of this.
AllanJ,
He already knows and agrees. Do you? Your cherry-picking is not allowed either.
It is the consensus among the climate change crowd that all error is random and therefore cancels out so it can be ignored. The points you are speaking of are obviously random outliers and therefore should be able to be ignored.
If you are going to speak to uncertainty then why don’t you speak to the uncertainty in *all* of the current temperature data sets that make them unfit for purpose?
“all error is random”
Soon to be analytically refuted, Tim.
Sounds like something we should be looking forward to. Timing?
Working on the manuscript, Frank, thanks. I hope it’ll be ready to go in Spring. Then, after 6 years … 🙂
Looking forward to it Pat!
Thanks, Tim. 🙂
CAGW prediction is 100% error
And deliberate, not random
That is not any consensus of anyone that I am aware of, and is certainly not my own position (you seem to disagree with it yourself so attempting to base a rebuttal on this point seems rather stupid).
AlanJ,
All multiple regressions and the respective statistics of the regression assume that observations are independent and not serially correlated. Neither is true for climate data, yet the entire CO2 hypothesis is based on regression and averages. The impact of CO2 (manmade or natural) on climate has never been observed.
CO2 has been shown to be a greenhouse gas, and we can show (if nothing else changes in the meantime) that doubling CO2 may increase global temperatures about a degree or so, but everything else will not remain the same. It can also be shown that increasing CO2 will make the world greener and cause crops to grow faster.
Taking averages and multiple regression assume that error is normally distributed about the mean. Tim is exactly correct. Reading AR6 carefully, shows the authors do not understand basic Statistics 101. They all need to go back and retake undergraduate statistics. Perhaps you should as well.
“All multiple regressions and the respective statistics of the regression assume that observations are independent and not serially correlated.”
100% true.
“Taking averages and multiple regression assume that error is normally distributed about the mean”
100% true.
This is why they always assume that all uncertainty cancels. They also assume zero systematic bias in the data. Neither do they understand the difference between multiple measurements of the same thing and a conglomeration of single measurements of different things.
The average of multiple measurements of the same thing can (it must be justified) lead to a good estimate of the true value being the mean of the measurements. The average of a grouping of single measurements of different things can *not* lead to a true value being the average – by definition there is no true value when you have different things. The average of a 6′ board and an 8′ board is 7′ – yet the 7′ board doesn’t exist so how can it be a “true value”?
The same thing applies to temperatures. If you average 100F in Phoenix with 100F in Miami you get an average of 100F. Yet those temps have vastly different implications for the amount of energy in the atmosphere. Yet to the climate alarmists there is no difference between the two temps and the average of 100F is a “true value” of something.
Right on, Andy. The nothing else changes was right there in the Charney Report and has been at the center of climate modeling ever since.
The random error assumption is at the center of the published temperature record like nothing else changes is at the center of the climate modeling record.
Self-serving. Never questioned. Wrong.
Of course it is the consensus. That’s why you *never* see a proper uncertainty analysis in climate studies.
Consider a data set of temperatures consisting of 21 values. Assume 2/3 have an uncertainty of +/- 2C and the other 1/3 have no uncertainty.. Now assume 1/3 have a -2C value and 1/3 have a +2C uncertainty. Do you think the standard deviation of the stated values and the standard deviation of the modified values will be the same? Climate warming advocates do. Climate modelers do.
This is just a simplistic example to try and lead you down the right path. Two truisms need to be understood. 1. error is not uncertainty. 2. Average uncertainty is not the uncertainty of the average.
AlanJ,
Beerling and Royer’s paper and data are very good and very useful, but their Figure 1, which you show, is incredibly deceptive. It places the temperature curve well away from the CO2 curve, with a scale that makes comparisons difficult. Javier’s display is much more honest and illustrates the comparison as accurately as possible.
As for leaving out the Liverworts data and the Nahcolite-trona data? This is a judgement call, I agree with Javier they should be excluded as outliers, but it makes no difference. With or without these points, there is no correlation between temperature and CO2.
It’s not a judgement call. If you are going to exclude data from your analysis you need to have strong justification for doing so, presumably stacks of published papers refuting the Liverworts and Nahcolite-trona records as valid CO2 proxies, which Javier decidedly does not have. What he is doing is nothing less than pure cherry-picking, and he admits to doing so deliberately.
Every proxy reconstruction is a cherry-picking of the proxies included and excluded, whether by Beerling & Royer, Marcott et al. or by me. Why do you think different reconstructions say different things? Each proxy has its problems and in many cases they are unknown. That doesn’t say Beerling & Royer’s reconstruction is better than mine. It is probably worse given the poor constrain of the Liverworts and Nahcolite-trona records they include.
What doesn’t bear scrutiny is the affirmation that temperature records correlate well to CO2 records. The only thing we can say for certain is that during ice ages CO2 levels are very low.
You clearly have no idea how to do a proxy analysis. It is all about choosing the proxies. I’ve written about this with regard to Marcott’s proxies. Read this post: A Holocene Temperature Reconstruction Part 1: the Antarctic – Andy May Petrophysicist
You might want to read the following few posts as well, there are four parts. Search for “Holocene Temperature Reconstruction.”
Remember, no one knows how accurate a proxy reconstruction is, you don’t even know how accurate each proxy is, that can change over time. You can estimate the error of the computed result (how the proxies compare with one another), but that is not the true error, which is unknown.
Javier is much more honest and scientific about what he has done than either the IPCC and Beerling and Royer. But analyzing proxies is always subjective.
Everything you say about Javier applies to the other two as well, it’s just that they conceal their methods and obscure the result, inappropriately in my view. Javier is much more upfront, and his displays conceal nothing.
What is the source for the AR6 high paleocene co2 values, and why do they differ with vinos so drastically ?
Hans,
AR6 uses some very anomalous proxies that Javier removed from his analysis. Javier removed the Liverworts (yellow triangles) and Nahcolite-trona (black boxes) proxies because they did not agree with the other proxies as shown in the attached plot from Beerling and Royer. But, even using the AR6 proxy set, most of the time the CO2 trend and the temperature trend go in different directions during the Cenozoic. AR6 conceals the disagreement with clever formatting, Beerling and Royer do the same.
This is shown in previous comments, look up the comment chain.
Andy,
Lots of back and forth here on Beetling and Royer. I’m under the impression that the CENOGRID data (Westerhold et al), once they are put in context with tectonic plate movements. are pretty definitive in showing that CO2 ain’t no climate control knob.
Paleocene CO2 is highly uncertain. Pedogenic carbonate proxies indicate very high CO2 levels. Plant stomata proxies indicate relatively low CO2 levels.
Stomata indicate 400 ppmv, with a single excursion to 800 ppmv. Pedogenic carbonates indicate 2,000-3,000 ppmv.
A similar same phenomenon occurs in the Middle Miocene…
Alkenones indicate 200-250 ppmv. Stomata indicate 300-380 ppmv. Forams indicate 400-450 ppmv,
Stomata data actually overlap the instrumental record and generally reflect the same pattern. The other methods can’t be directly tied into instrumental data. I tend to trust stomata… But they have serious limitations. I don’t things have changed much since my historical geology textbook.
[…]
Dott, Robert H. & Roger L. Batten. Evolution of the Earth. McGraw-Hill, Inc. Second Edition 1976.
Good points David.
Andy,
It is unfortunate that carbon dioxide and methane are shown at different scales in Figure 4. A casual reader might miss that carbon dioxide has an abundance 1,000X greater than methane.
This is true, but off subject. I just wanted to show, as clearly as possible, that the methane trend was up, not down, during the Neoglacial Period.
This is the first time I’ve ever seriously looked at paleoclimatology, but you’re telling me the Earth’s temperature averaged 77 F at one point? What was the world like back then (ecosystems, oceans, etc.)?
The tropical temperature was about the same, but there was no ice at the poles and there were crocodiles and palm trees in the Arctic.
Ahhh, the good old days 😉
Walter, When temperatures were that high, many new species evolved, including the first primates, our very distant ancestors. Primates quickly spread through the new warm world, as well as many new lizards and turtles.
From my discussion of this period here: The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM – Andy May Petrophysicist
“as well as many new lizards and turtles.”
The turtles made sure that later climatology was not lizards all the way down.
That’s mind blowing. I wouldn’t mind going back to such a climate. It probably won’t happen if our life times though.
Walter, I doubt it. At the time Antarctica was a huge forest. It was probably cold in the winter, but may very well have been a paradise in summer.
Walter:
Historically, the warmer the weather, the wilder it gets, with droughts, famines, heat waves, cold waves, fires, and floods, etc, all of which occur at El Nino temperatures
See “El Nino in History”, by Cesar Cavides (2001)
BurlHenry,
You have it exactly backwards. Wilder storms and weather occur in the winter and in colder times. See the attached plot of storminess from Javier’s book, page 117. The black bars are storminess in 17 separate studies. Peak storminess was during the very cold Little Ice Age. This is a worldwide thing.
Good article that I will recommend first today on my list of 12 to 24 good climate science and energy articles:
Honest Climate Science and Energy
Three points the article makes to me, but maybe does not state directly in very simple language:
(1) The IPCC was launched ONLY to prove the conclusion that manmade CO2 emissions are causing rapid, dangerous global warming. It was intended to support the +1.5 to +4.5 degrees C. 1979 Charney Report ECS wild guess and did so until a few years ago. A few years ago, the IPCC arbitrarily changed the ECS wild guess to +2.5 to +4.0 degrees C. Suddenly the Russian INM model was no longer in the new range, rather than near the bottom of the old range. So INM is it is ignored. Those pesky Russians.
IPCC confirmation bias causes them to ignore contrary evidence. Being leftists, they also have no aversion to lying by arbitrarily changing or ignoring data. The 1940 to 1975 global cooling disappeared. The Holocene Climate Optimum will disappear too.
(2) There were virtually no manmade CO2 emissions until the 1800s and not much before 1940. So CO2 levels in the past (ice core era) were not a direct cause of temperature changes. CO2 levels in the atmosphere changed as a result of large changes of ocean temperatures, caused by natural causes of climate change. Those natural causes still exist, although are arbitrarily dismissed by the IPCC as “noise” by the lying IPCC.
Since 1940, manmade CO2 emissions should cause some amount of global warming, and almost certainly have. But there are many periods since when other causes of climate change offset the warming effects expected from CO2. Such as 1940 to 1975 and 2015 to 2023. Those inconvenient data periods have been “adjusted awayor will be adjusted away by the Climate Howler Global Whiners.
(3) Local climate proxies are inaccurate estimates of past temperatures. They probably tell us less than claimed, due to likely large margins of error. How large? In my opinion, averaging local temperature reconstructions for the past 5,000 years can not prove any centuries were warmer than other centuries. There almost certainly were warmer and cooler centuries, but the averages of local proxy averages don’t change enough to exceed a reasonable margin of error — let’s say +/- 1 degree C.
And what difference do these climate reconstructions make? We already knew our planet is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, so the average temperature is always changing.
The real argument is over the effect of manmade CO2 emissions since about 1940, and the 1940 to 1975 period of global cooling (as originally reported in 1975) gets ignored.
In summary, a mere 40 years of climate change history, out of all 4.5 billion years — 40 years that were actually good news climate change, are changing the world. That is insane.
So we have had global warming from 1975 to 2015.
How much was caused by CO2?
That is the unanswered question.
But I have an answer:
Even if all the 1975 to 2015 warming was caused by manmade CO2, the warming has been beneficial:
(A) Warmer winters in colder nations,
(B) Faster growth of C3 photosynthesis plants, and
(3) No melting of Antarctica.
Three elements of good news are treated as bad news., meaning Climate Howler Global Whiners are insane.
And last, but not least, is the most important advantage of global warming, and the subject of 97% of my climate research:
Honest Climate Science and Energy: February 2023 Global Warming Fashion Show
Mostly good points Richard, but I will quibble a bit with this one:
“The IPCC was launched ONLY to prove the conclusion that manmade CO2 emissions are causing rapid, dangerous global warming.”
There are two UN organizations, the UNFCCC has the mission statement you give above, not the IPCC. See the statement I refer to here:
About the secretariat | UNFCCC
The IPCC has the mission I quote in the Discussion.
By 1995 when the IPCC declared all natural causes of climate change were “noise”, it was no longer a scientific organization.
I’m not sure they ever took natural causes of climate change seriously between 1988 and 1995.
I think the IPCC started with a conclusion even if they declared themselves to be fair and balanced in the beginning. The IPCC was intended to give the UN more influence and power. That could be aided by a crisis, so they invented the crisis of manmade global warming.
After 4.5 billion years of 100% natural climate change, why would an IPCC be launched to study that?
Do you really think the IPCC was a fair and balanced science organization? Not what they claimed about themselves, but based on what they did.
There were long term wild guess ECS climate forecasts since 1979, with huge margins of error, made by people who could never forecast the future climate. That’s not science, INMO, that’s climate astrology. And that’s where the IPCC started.
Richard,
I agree that 1995 was the turning point. That is when the politicians took over, as I wrote here: SAR, the Turning Point – Andy May Petrophysicist
But I rather liked the Charney report and FAR (the first IPCC report). They were decent scientific summaries of the science at the time. After that, the rest of the 47 reports they put out were SOSDD (for the non-English speakers, that means same old sh*t different day).
The CO2 hypothesis had some legs until the big ocean oscillations, planetary waves, the big stratospheric winds and how they affected the polar vortex were discovered. Then it eventually became obvious (thanks to Javier) that natural variability explained most, if not all, the recent warming.
“Science” driven by politics, not politics driven by science.
The now-deceased Stephen Schneider explained the situation quite clearly. Here’s his full quote, that Schneider included in his rebuttal of an article in the Detroit News, whom he accused of ‘cherry picking’ just a part of his quote, to make it look worse than it is.
Apparently, one of the mistakes of the Detroit news, is that they left out the final sentence, of Schneider’s quote: “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/DetroitNews.pdf
“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to
reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any
formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
In this post, I’ll address the following extract from Schneider’s quote.
“And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change.”
This part of his quote might imply that Schneider believes that reducing CO2 emissions from fossil fuels will reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change, but the quote itself doesn’t state that. We can only assume that’s the case, from his other writings.
So, the point I want to raise for discussion, is the problem of persuading whole populations to change their behaviour in order to reduce the effects of any impending disaster, whether caused by extreme weather events, volcanic erruptions, surging gas prices which are currently ‘in part’ due to the Russian/Ukranian war as well as the drive towards renewables, and finally the unavoidable surge in energy prices, within a few decades, if the entire world population were to continue to rely upon fossil fuels whilst increasing prosperity for everyone and eliminating poverty.
Nuclear power is certainly part of the solution for maintaining affordable electricity. We could have nuclear-powerd ships for transportation of goods, and millions of EVs charged by electricity from Nuclear power plants, as wll as solar roofs on individual homes.
Whilst fossil fuels are still relatively cheap, we need to use them to protect ourselves from extreme weather events, and the negative effects of ‘natural’ climate change in any particular area.
However, as the affordable and easily extractable fossil fuel reserves diminish, in the future, forcing up the true cost of energy, we will be less able to spend money on developing alternative energy resources.
That could be the real catastrophe for human civilization. Whilst fossil fuels are still relatively abundant, let’s use a portion of them to develop alternative energy supplies, as well as a portion of them to protect ourselves from extreme weather events, by relocating houses which were stupidly built in flood plains, and building dams and desalination plants to tackle droughts.
Such measures will be much more difficult if we wait until fossil fuel reserves dwindle and become very expensive to extract. That would be the real catastrophe, rather than climate change.
To summarise, energy supplies are essential for everything we do. Unless you are a ‘hunter-gatherer tribal person’, when you walk down the street, or do any activity, or are even just lying on the couch, you are indirectly consuming energy from fossil fuels, and/or other forms of energy which were used to produce and transport the food you eat, as well as support the food shop where you bought the food, and the energy you use to cook the food.
We must develop alternative energy supplies, but that process will be more difficult and contentious if we shut down the currently affordable energy from fossil fuels.
Vincent, you write:
You misunderstand markets here. Much more oil and gas exists on Earth than we need. As you write, the cost of extracting that oil and gas will increase with time and consumption, but we will not run out, it will just get too expensive. When it becomes more expensive than the alternatives it will be replaced, but we will not run out.
Rushing this process by subsidizing politically correct alternatives is foolish, all it does is make energy more expensive, it doesn’t change anything else, and it is a tax with no benefit. See here for a discussion of the oil and gas situation: Replacing the World’s Fossil Fuels – Andy May Petrophysicist
Okay, Andy. I’ll address the following extract from your article which emphasises what I see as the real problem.
“Figure 1 shows that the increase in global energy consumption since 1960 is quite linear (R2 = 0.99) and increasing at a rate of 1.1 billion BOE/year. Modern renewables, contrary to popular belief, are not even increasing enough to keep up with the growth in consumption. As a result, fossil fuel use is increasing, not decreasing globally. Total growth in renewables is so small, it only covers 7% of the increase in energy consumption. You can only produce and install so many solar panels and windmills, and they don’t last that long in the open.”
Fig 1 shows that between 1960 and 2019, almost 60 years, world energy consumption has increased by around 350%. If it keeps on increasing at the same rate, without a significant contribution from renewables, then in another 60 years, energy prices will be a lot higher than they are today, because of diminishing reserves, and it will be much more difficult and expensive to begin research and development of renewables.
A transition to alternative energy sources is a long and expensive process of experimentation. Hopefully, in 60 years time, the costly experiments we’re doing today will eventually bear fruit. It would be foolish to wait until a forseeable energy crisis occurs, before taking action.
‘Hopefully, in 60 years time, the costly experiments we’re doing today will eventually bear fruit.’
If by ‘costly experiments’ you mean wind and solar, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Both of these ‘sources’ have real physical limitations and are inherently intermittent. In other words, they are a complete dead end and a diversion of resources away from potential real solutions to fossil fuel depletion.
I’m surprised that so many people posting on this site seem to have so little confidence in the potential marvels of modern technological development.
We skeptics tend to criticise the alarmists for ignoring the obvious benefits of CO2 and a warming climate. The ‘alarmists’ need to ignore the benefits in order to push their own agenda (whatever you think that agenda is). This is clearly a bias.
However, I get the impression that certain skeptics are also ignoring the ‘potential’ benefits of renewable energy, and only concentrate on the failures of renewable energy projects.
If we want a prosperous future for our children and grandchildren, then we need to use a mix of a number of different energy sources, and not rely upon one, or just a couple of major sources.
I think politicians and business people are smart enough to eventually realize that windmills that produce only 20 or 30% of their name-plate capacity, on average, are not economically viable, unless they can be reliably integrated into another system.
The following site describes such a system where windmills are planned to be used in conjunction with hydro-power
https://www.ge.com/news/reports/unique-combo-wind-hydro-power-revolutionize-renewable-energy
Regarding solar power, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s not ideal for all locations. However, as solar and battery technologies progress, it could provide very cheap and reliable power for individual home owners who live in a sunny climate, as well as for businesses and any building with a large roof area.
For example, the development of ‘Solar Tiles’ looks very promising. If one is building a new house, the entire roof could be built with solar tiles, instead of adding solar panels to a small section of a standard, tiled roof, which is usually the case in Australia.
If the entire solar-tiled roof were oriented towards the sun, and the house had a battery storage room with safe and affordable batteries, such as Sodium-Ion, rather than Lithium-Ion, and the owners used an EV instead of an ICE vehicle, then the owner would not only have cheap energy for the EV, but could also be selling surplus energy through the grid connection. During the 40 year warranty of the solar tiles, a profit could be made.
I bet you think that’s impossible and could never happen.(wink)
I have a lot of confidence in the current and potential marvels of modern technical development. But one can’t ignore history – most, if not all, of the technology that we take for granted, and that our ancestors would have marveled at, have come to fruition during a relatively brief interval in time when individuals have been free to pursue their economic interests and governments had no role in picking winners or losers.
What makes me ‘skeptical’ of renewable energy, your solar tiles, batteries, EVs and everything else you mentioned, is that none of it has arisen spontaneously in a free market. Rather, it has all been driven on a top-down basis under the aegis of shoddy climate science in order to advance the political power of the Left. And if the Left ultimately succeeds, your progeny will be too busy poking in the ground with a sharp stick to think about technical development.
“For example, the development of ‘Solar Tiles’ looks very promising.”
“If the entire solar-tiled roof were oriented towards the sun”
Sodium-ion batteries are heavier and larger than lithium batteries thus affecting building costs.
Everything you mention comes at a cost premium. Are you willing to force that on to *everyone*, even those families trying to get into a starter home? Are home prices not yet high enough for you? How about the annual property tax increases this would result in for residential homeowners?
The actual “marvels of modern technological development” are what keep us from running out of oil & gas… Those and the fact that there’s a lot more economically accessible oil & gas in the ground than anyone imagined just a few decades ago.
Some day, more economically effective sources of energy will be developed (like nuclear fusion). However, solar and wind can’t replace fossil fuels because the “potential marvels of modern technological development” can’t alter the laws of physics.
There are thousands of years of energy available to us in the form of methane hydrates. If we spent money on perfecting how to mine it rather than wind and solar we would be far better off.
One thing, in 60 years time the costly experiments we’re doing today will have to be redone 2.5 times as that is the half-life of renewable installations. So I’m afraid it will bear little fruit.
Vincent,
Government “experiments” with subsidies are foolish. The energy market will find alternatives that work, if allowed. Picking winners and losers is always expensive and foolish. When whales became scarce in 1858 and whale oil very expensive, kerosene was invented and took its place. When horse poop was choking the cities and threatening health, cars were invented, and people marveled at how clean they were. Let the markets work, I repeat we will never run out of oil and gas, they will only be replaced when a cheaper alternative comes up, and it isn’t wind and solar. If I were a betting man, I’d bet on nuclear.
See here for a discussion of the last energy transition:
The PBS Newshour Whale Oil Myth – Andy May Petrophysicist
“Cherry-picking, ignoring contrary data, “forgetting” to reference the discoverers of key concepts has risen to epic heights in this IPCC. I find it disgraceful.” [my emphasis]
I know this feeling very well thanks to Javier. This is exactly how I felt about Javier’s book and article series with respect to his redefinition of the Solar Modern Maximum, which I stated here first in WUWT comments as early as 2014 after my original discovery, and in many of my AGU presentations; one has been on Researchgate since 2018 and gets regular reads.
In fact I made a comment here years ago which Javier responded to positively regarding this plot below where I had defined the Solar Modern Maximum as being from 1935-2004, 70 years long.
What did Javier do? He redefined my definition to 1935-2005, which is 71 years long, one year too long, and he renamed it the Modern Solar Maximum. Do you think I found this disgraceful?
You may think this is as some special kind of nitpicking, but he didn’t reference my discovery of this key concept when he should have – just one among many of his “issues” imo.
Ignoring contrary data: recent TSI findings were ignored and kept out of sight by Javier.
It’s all well and good that today’s CO2 discussion came out of his book, but don’t think for one minute that Javier didn’t fall into the same habits that you complained about in your closing.
———————–
Renee Hannon provided convincing evidence on WUWT in the last two years that the firning process negatively influenced ice core CO2 measurements, suppressing the true CO2 variation.
It is clear from EPICA ice core measurements that CO2 lags temperature by 100s of years, so CO2 never was and still is not the climate control knob.
I guess you don’t read many scientific articles on climate unlike me. I didn’t rename anything.
Kobashi, T., Box, J.E., Vinther, B.M., Goto‐Azuma, K., Blunier, T., White, J.W.C., Nakaegawa, T. and Andresen, C.S., 2015. Modern solar maximum forced late twentieth century Greenland cooling. Geophysical Research Letters, 42(14), pp.5992-5999.
That was published before I got into climate. And they didn’t name it either. I believe the first who mentioned the Modern Solar Maximum are Damon et al. in:
Damon, P.E., Eastoe, C.J., Hughes, M.K., Kalin, R.M., Long, A. and Peristykh, A.N., 1997. Secular variation of Δ14C during the medieval solar maximum: a progress report. Radiocarbon, 40(1), pp.343-350.
Give credit where credit is due.
And, quite frankly, I couldn’t care less if the solar maximum ended in 2004 or 2005. That will never be a point of contention with me. Also, your opinion of me is unimportant to me. I wouldn’t be writing what I write if I cared what other people might think of me. Do you care that I think what you do is of little value? I hope not.
“Give credit where credit is due.”
Ok, where is my credit from you for computing the 1935-2004 period several years before you?
“I couldn’t care less if the solar maximum ended in 2004 or 2005.”
You should, 2005 is not part of it. You also claimed last year your 1935-2005 was a 70 year period. It was not 70 years, it was 71 years. So you were not precisely accurate, so I’m left with the impression that you are innumerate despite your PhD.
“Also, your opinion of me is unimportant to me.”
Until now I have never given my opinion of you so what are you talking about?
I’ve given my opinion on what you write, not on who you are. Now that’s changing.
It looks to me like you have established a cult of personality for yourself where other people objectify and excuse you no matter what you say.
You say you don’t care about my opinion. You should if you care about being right.
You attitude here is driven by your extra large sized ego, maybe because of your PhD.
From my POV you must not be very competent in your own field if you’re spending your time on this subject now. Why not take our climate advice from Dr. Fauci?
What you actually are is an ultracrepidarian. ie, noting or pertaining to a person who criticizes, judges, or gives advice outside the area of his or her expertise.
The reason why I care about what you say is because you’re wrong far too often on the most important subjects.
Until you rectify your mistake with me personally and in the skeptic world, I will always see you as hypocrite who complains about the very things you are guilty of. Your response to my claim is also extremely narcissistic, as you cannot even take responsibility for your own indefensible actions.
Its really puzzling. Why, given the historical record, does anyone think that it has been shown that CO2 is a driver of global temperature? Its clear from looking at the series that temperatures rise and fall without any preceding change in CO2 levels.
On the other thread, we have been having a discussion with Nick Stokes about whether the rise in temps of the last few decades can be shown to have been caused by the CO2 rise over the same period.
I cannot see how we can be confident of that, unless we understand what caused all the temperature fluctuations in the past, which happened without being caused by CO2 rises. Sometimes the temperature rises without a CO2 rise, sometimes it falls when there is a rise. At the moment the two rises seem to be happening at the same time, but how do we know CO2 is causing temp to rise?
The counter-argument seems to be roughly that we know CO2 rises will increase air temps (presumably from IR absorption). There have been air temp rises, there have also been CO2 rises, so don’t worry about the past, we know what has happened this time. CO2 has risen, temps have risen, one obviously caused the other.
My reaction to this is, lets wait another couple of decades. We may be on the verge of another of the historical falls of temps which happened in the face of high or rising CO2 levels. Without understanding why temps fluctuated historically we cannot simply assume that because there is something new happening, that caused the latest one.
I imagine, for instance, a Chinese scientist in 1850 confronted with another in the endless series of plague outbreaks. It doesn’t look much different from the others, maybe a bit more widespread. But his information on the previous ones is less certain and detailed than what he has on the present one.
Does he look around for something that has changed, and when he finds it, conclude that the present outbreak has a totally different cause than the unknown cause of the others? Like, for instance, the arrival of the Western traders?
Surely not. He treats the current episode like all the others and looks for the common cause of them all?
In his recent interview with Dr. Peterson on YouTube, Dr. Lindzen seems to imply that CO2 was selected as the convenient lever by the elites, who want control of the world’s energy industry, because they thought it would serve the purpose. Scientists who want to get paid positions and research grants in climatology are required to support the CO2-caused catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory, or risk being de-funded and cancelled. Lately there have been many expert scientists going public with the actual facts about CO2 and CAGW, but the narrative has been lost and a lot of world governments are self-immolating their energy industries and their economies on the altar of CO2 caused CAGW. The more recently appearing articles on the effect of the anti-CO2 efforts on the world’s poor are truly frightening.
The divergence of the temperature proxies, from Greenland Antarctica and Indonesia give cause to uncertainty about historic GAST temperature. The IPCC reports are ultimately the product of public relations professionals who want to communicate a story where science does not write stories. So yes the public relations start with the story and then choose the research and texts to support it. In fact the only non controversial story is that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and serious concern exists that increased levels of CO2 may cause changes in climate that are unknown and potentially problematic. Therefore an alteranative for energy from fossil fuels or a method for reducing CO2 emissions from burning fuels or a method for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere should be developed. Some credit to the IPCC, it is mainly the media and politics hyping the climate change.
Alexander,
CO2 is a greenhouse gas; we all agree on that. I think the data we have today tells us that the risk of adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is very small and the benefits of adding more CO2 are very large. I see zero evidence that recent and foreseeable climate changes (manmade or natural) are dangerous.
Coming up with additional, competitive energy sources is a good thing, but not required for our safety or wellbeing. See here:
Are fossil-fuel CO2 emissions good or bad? – Andy May Petrophysicist
Nope.
Political operatives write the entire summary for policy makers. Without referring to the science.
Egregiously wrong.
The reasons for discussing paleo temperatures is because there is nothing unique about today’s temperatures.
Especially since we are at the coldest periods in Earth’s known history.
Javier’s graphic makes this very clear for the past 70 million years. Earth’s temperatures and atmospheric CO₂ levels higher than 3000 ppm.
?w=910&ssl=1
CO₂ cause temperature unknown and problematic changes? That’s a laugh!
https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/lindzen_choi-copy.webp?w=1500&ssl=1
Water vapor is a very strong GHG molecule and water vapor infrared interactivity swamps the infrared spectrum.
Carbon dioxide, CO₂, is an extremely weak GHG molecule, relegated to a miniscule range of infrared frequencies.
More to the point, CO₂’s infrared emissions are extremely weak low energy infrared frequencies.
Warm climate periods have been known as optimums!
Because Optimums are ideal for life. Whereas, cold periods like the Little Ice Age are deadly to wildlife and mankind.
Hopefully, Earth will have several hundred years of Optimum as temperatures rise following the LIA.
Wasting trillions of dollars on inefficient pseudo energy producing devices known as “renewables” is disastrous to our economies and civilization.
Levelized Cost of Energy, (LCOE) is a fictitious manipulation of energy costs to present renewables as less expensive.
Easy to do when EIA and IEA charge all renewable subsidies and research costs against fossil fuels.
First they came for the Little Ice Age and I did not speak out, because I was not of the cold.
Then they came for the Medieval Warm Period and I did not speak out, because I was not Medieval.
Then they came for the Roman Warm Period and I did not speak out, because I was not Roman.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
~Posthumously attributed to the Holocene Thermal Optimum
Very good, thank you!
From the article: “Cherry-picking, ignoring contrary data, “forgetting” to reference the discoverers of key concepts has risen to epic heights in this IPCC. I find it disgraceful.”
I would call it criminal considering the amount of damage the IPCC’s lies about the Earth’s climate have done to the people of the Earth.
The IPCC Perps ought to be prosecuted.
Standard leftist behavior on all subjects.
And in more important breaking news the climate models are running hot in Adelaide-
Hundreds dress as Marilyn Monroe in Adelaide | Watch (msn.com)
A close study and understanding of the saturation vapor pressure vs temperature for water reveals that its properties tend to support more temperature increase if the long term temperature trend is increasing and more temperature decline if the long term temperature trend is declining. This is also indicated by the observation that increasing average global temperature (caused substantially by increasing water vapor) has been accompanied by slightly declining cloud cover. Average global temperature appears to vary in response to competing local areas of either of these, modulated also by other cycles such as Milankovitch and solar cycles. The comparatively short period since 1880 has seen little influence from Milankovitch or solar cycles longer than a few centuries.
Just Ask the Global Warming Fairy
The difference between Figures 1 and 2 is not only time scale. These two figures disagree with each other on CO2 concentration as a function of time. Figure 1 shows less CO2 around 35 million years ago and more around and before 40 million years ago than Figure 2 does.
As for CO2 and temperature moving in opposite directions: Figure 2 does not support such a claim, and Figure 4 shows late Holocene cooling because we’re due for an ice age. Figure 2 shows positive correlation between temperature and CO2 on time scale around or less than a million years, mostly in the most recent 35 million years, and CO2 data points for before 35 million years ago are looking sparse and flaky. I do remember when folks at WUWT showed that during the last 450,000 years through a few glaciations and interglacials, CO2 and temperature moved mostly in the same direction with CO2 lagging temperature on average by 800 years. During the first 449.850 of the past 450,000 years, when the sum of carbon (including as CO2) in the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere was essentially constant, ocean-atmosphere balance of CO2 was a positive feedback for temperature changes caused by something else.
52-45 opposite
45-38 same
38-34 opposite
34-33 same
33-26 opposite
26-23 same
23-18 opposite
18-16 same
16-5 opposite
5-0 same
34 million years opposite, 18 million years same. Looks to me as entirely random, i.e. no relation!
Not entirely random. At the times when the gaps between CO2 datapoint times (shown in the above Figure 2) are smaller, the correlation is mostly positive. The negative correlation is mostly with time scale large enough for movement of continents (which change ocean currents and global albedo) to be a significant factor.
Very good analysis highlighting the ‘surprising’ omission by the IPCC of the Holocene temperature and CO2 relationship. It certainly adds skepticism to any credence of their technical evaluation. Well done.
Thanks Renee.
There is an agenda, and an official narrative to support it. The agenda benefits only a very few, and the official narrative is, as always, a lie.
Through grade school, nine years of university education and seven years of post graduate training I was taught that science was an objective process to discover truths about how nature works. Apparently since my lengthy education (slow learner) it has become something a bit different, more resembling the methods used to write plots for reality TV or sales pitches for pyramid schemes.
Same reason and the same rationale. They are told to tell falsehoods to the public and their salaries depend upon that message.
This is but one of many examples where IPCC has been disingenuous. I wrote up the most egregious example from AR4, WG2, figure 4 and it’s accompanying table, in essay No Bodies in ebook Blowing Smoke. Sadly, AR5 WG2 did not amend, but rather doubled down. Like CO2 as the control knob, it is an IPCC article of faith that AGW will cause catastrophic extinctions despite having NO examples. Not polar bears, not pikas, not penguins not ring tailed lemurs. It is true that the golden toad of Costa Rica went extinct—from the fungal disease cytridiomycosis brought to the National Park’s Brilliante Ridge by tourists.
My understanding is that biologists did not bother to disinfect their boots as they searched for and found golden toad colonies. They carried the fungus from infected amphibians to uninfected amphibians lacking any resistance to that fungus.
Figure 2 is from Javier Vinos’ book (Vinós, 2022, p. 145). It shows the data in a much clearer and more honest way.
no error bars or sources i see
Steve,
The sources are in the original caption on page 145, the book is free.
These are multi-proxy reconstructions, and the error is unknown. It can only be estimated by assuming that the proxies are randomly distributed around the mean, which is assumed to be accurate. Neither assumption is valid as explained in the book. The gray shading around the CO2 curve is:
Thus, only the error in the calculation of a multiproxy reconstruction can be estimated, not the true error. The book is very good, and you should read it, download it here:
(3) (PDF) Climate of the Past, Present and Future. A scientific debate, 2nd ed. (researchgate.net)
None-the-less, proxies are useful, even multiproxy reconstructions can be useful, as long as these problems are taken into account. Personally, I prefer looking at each proxy individually, see Figure 7, for an example. Javier shows his selected proxies individually as well in Figure 2. He draws a line through the average which has resulted in some unfair or fair criticism, as you wish. Personally, I think both his proxy selection and his display are fine. They are certainly better than those in AR6 and Beerling and Royer, much clearer and much more honest.
through much of Earth’s history CO2 concentration goes down as global temperatures go up. Figure 2 is from Javier Vinos’ book (Vinós, 2022, p. 145). It shows the data in a much clearer and more honest way.
I am stunned by the willingness of so called skeptic to accept without question
global reconstructions of temperature to high degrees of precision derived from proxies
that cannot measure temperture directly and cannot be verfied against global temps derived from thermometers.
you’ll basicaly like the picture the data presents and you all drop your commitment to questioning data
Nonsense Steve.
Look at my previous comment and the read the book.
I repeat:
Only the error in the calculation of a multiproxy reconstruction can be estimated, not the true error.
None-the-less, proxies are useful, even multiproxy reconstructions can be useful, as long as the problems are taken into account.
Proxies, as error prone as they are, are all we have. No thermometers or CO2 monitors in the early Cenozoic. Geologists have used proxies ever since geology was invented in the 19th century. When I went to college, geologists studied climate and no one else did. And we did it with proxies. But, unlike AR6 and so-called “climate scientists,” we knew what we were doing.
Personally, I think error bars on proxies are misleading, they aren’t real.
“and cannot be verfied against global temps derived from thermometers.”
The irony! It burns.
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth – George Orwell 1984
Orwell just missed the date, not the reality.
There is a total lack of correlation between temperature and co2 as pointed out here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/12/a-look-at-carbon-dioxide-vs-global-temperature/