Physicist and historian, Spencer R. Weart, recently penned an article for the popular blog RealClimate in which he explained:
“Physics is rich in phenomena that are simple in appearance but cannot be calculated in simple terms. Global warming is like that. People may yearn for a short, clear way to predict how much warming we are likely to face. Alas, no such simple calculation exists. The actual temperature rise is an emergent property resulting from interactions among hundreds of factors. People who refuse to acknowledge that complexity should not be surprised when their demands for an easy calculation go unanswered.”
This is an admission that we are nowhere near a scientifically proven result with regard to the effect of CO2 on our climate.
In another article at RealClimate Gavin Schmidt suggests that all can in fact be explained in six easy steps.
Schmidt’s explanation is in conflict with Weart’s article and skips over some key points.
Following are the steps proposed by Schmidt, with my objections:
Step 1: There is a natural greenhouse effect.
Here Schmidt notes the average incoming IR (area of the disc divided by the surface area of the world = ¼) X 1366 = 341.5 W/m2 this is reduced to ~240 W/m2 by assuming an average albedo of 0.3 . Unfortunately this completely ignores reflection by clouds which covers approximately 65% of the globe.
The actual incoming radiation which is absorbed by the earth’s surface is, therefore, much less. Schmidt’s next assumption is the surface radiation by Stefan’s law (15 deg C avg.) is ~390 W/m2 and the TOA radiation is ~240 W/m2 thus he concludes ~150 W/m2 heats up our atmosphere. But, firstly we know that a fourth power law cannot be averaged and Stefan’s law is for black body radiators thus an emissivity factor must be assumed which reduces the 390 W/m2. Even more curiously it appears the entire heat balance consists of radiation.
Where are conduction, convection and evaporation factored in, these are just a few of the complexities that Weart was referring to.
Step 2: Trace gases contribute to the natural greenhouse effect.
Schmidt explains that with the latest technology (as of 1995) the spectrum from space can be analyzed line by line to detect the energy absorbed by CO2. However there is a qualifier, “For some parts of the spectrum, IR can be either absorbed by CO2 or by water vapour and so simply removing the CO2 gives only a minimum effect.”
Put another way, remove the CO2 and the water absorbs more energy, or take away the water and the CO2 absorbs more.
Step 3: The trace greenhouse gases have increased markedly due to human emissions.
This claim is based on extrapolating from ice core data which some claim underestimates past carbon dioxide levels by 30% to 50%. There is also the leaf stomata proxy work, Beck’s paper – 180 Years of Atmospheric CO2 Gas Analysis by Chemical Methods – and mass balance calculations based on the IPCC carbon cycle data none of which provide the necessary proof that the recent increase in carbon dioxide is unquestionably anthropogenic.
Step 4: Radiative forcing is a useful diagnostic and can easily be calculated.
I disagree and Spencer R. Weart would disagree. Here Schmidt trots out the only formula they have, RF = 5.35 ln(CO2/CO2_orig). So, if we use 385/280 for the CO2 increase we get RF= 1.7 W/m2 now at 0.75 deg C per 1 W/m2 we get an increase of 1.28 deg C.
However, if we look at the global temperature change since 1850 it is only 0.7 deg C. So something is wrong with the calculation as a measure of temperature increase based on radiative forcing from more carbon dioxide.
Step 5: Climate sensitivity is around 3ºC for a doubling of CO2. ( IPCC 4AR Pg.666)
Following on from my comments in step 4, this claim is an average based on data provided in the IPCC 4AR which provides a range of sensitivities generated from the IPCC formula and computer programs which attempt to evaluate the interaction of other factors such as water vapour.
Step 6: Radiative forcing multiplied by climate sensitivity is a significant number.
Schmidt explains “that current forcings (1.6 W/m2) x 0.75 ºC/(W/m2) imply 1.2 ºC that would occur at equilibrium. Because the oceans take time to warm up, we are not yet there (so far we have experienced 0.7ºC), and so the remaining 0.5 ºC is ‘in the pipeline’.”
This statement by Schmidt appears to be saying that the oceans absorb heat but do not experience a temperature change or the oceans absorb the heat but it takes time for the temperature change to affect the atmosphere.
The first concept is illogical, with regard to the second a convincing demonstration of the rapid reaction of global temperatures to ocean temperature changes was the effect of the super El Nino of 1998.
To illustrate the response of the globe and atmosphere to the sea surface temperatures the following graph shows anomalies for the global average (top) , the global sea surface (middle) and the global lower troposphere (bottom) temperatures from 1996 to 2008 showing the rapid response to the super El Nino of 1998.
No pipeline effect here.
Furthermore, where exactly is all the extra heat? The oceans cannot store heat “in the pipeline” without increasing in temperature which would create an immediate increase in atmospheric temperatures. Maybe it just does not exist in which case if we recalculate their formula the constant changes from 5.35 to 2.935. This is quite a change.
In conclusion, I agree with Weart, there are no easy answers and the IPCC case is far from proven. Attempting to explain climate changes by taking global averages and deriving empirical formulae is an extreme oversimplification of a very complex subject and is not valid proof.
Barry Moore P. Eng.
Calgary Canada.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Come on Barry this is all tedious
(1) “But, firstly we know that a fourth power law cannot be averaged” – ruse argument – you need to solve the energy balance on a grid – which is what is done
“entire heat balance consists of radiation. ” – in the end it has to – does the Earth conduct, convect or radiate into space?
(2) anthropogenic CO2 don’t you find it strange that all global network of CO2 measuring stations show a steady line upwards yet Beck’s data would make that graph suddenly have a discontinuity? hmmmm
Why does the changing atmospheric composition have an isotopic signature of fossil fuels. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87 Why can we detect a slug of anthropogenic CO2 being sunk to depth in the world’s oceans http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5682/367
This is a bit off topic, but following Luke’s query about anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide, I’ve been meaning to post something about this, following my interest in this post from Roy Spencer at Anthony Watt’s blog:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/spencer-pt2-more-co2-peculiarities-the-c13c12-isotope-ratio/
Luke says they solved the energy balance on a grid. Is that the same GRIDdle that you make your flapjacks on??
Yeah, the temp data isn’t good enough to show the hot spot , BUT, it is good enough to populate this vacuous grid!!!
Luke, why did Mona Loa just decide to start AVERAGING their monthly data to cover 20 DAYS of missing data??? Why do they THROW OUT DATA!!!!! Yeah, there’s another excellent resource from which to elicit knowledge!!!!
Seen any of the AIRS data yet??
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
“Physics is rich in phenomena that are simple in appearance but cannot be calculated in simple terms. Global warming is like that. People may yearn for a short, clear way to predict how much warming we are likely to face. Alas, no such simple calculation exists.”
Haven’t we all been treated like Soviet peasants and propagandized too so much? I mean just basically bashed by propaganda? Here is Weart and he has been so pulverized that though he be physicist and historian he words things in such a way as he’s assuming warming and isn’t even allowing for the POSSIBILITY of cooling. Completely on the wrong track he is.
One must always guard against the deleterious effect of the leftist tribes collective abuse.
“In conclusion, I agree with Weart, there are no easy answers and the IPCC case is far from proven.”
Barry what is the matter with you? You’ve worded it in such a way as it amounts to a difference in opinion and not a clear example of science fraud. Don’t soft-peddle these monsters. It leads people to thinking that risk management consists of destroying, rather than beefing up, our energy production.
LUKE SEZ:
“(1) “But, firstly we know that a fourth power law cannot be averaged” – ruse argument – you need to solve the energy balance on a grid – which is what is done..”
Don’t be a complete idiot Luke. If you don’t understand something ask. Gavin Schmidts explanation does not put things into a grid. Any aggregated explanation like Schmidts totally ignores the disaggregated effect of Stefan-Boltzmanns law.
And what is this “grid” in any case? How big are the squares and why?
Dumb.
We see the ignorance of the marginalist approach particularly with these predictions of BOTH widespread drought and large average temperature rises. An utter impossibility when disaggregation and Stefan-Boltzmanns is applied.
Just a reminder I am posting community type information, including about new website and books here:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/category/community/
OK I’m deleting a few posts. Lets add something new, or not comment.
Barry’s done well to miss Wearts point compeltely- that there is no simple answer to the degree of temperature rise we can expect – deliberately of course, so he can morph it into an “admission” that it’s the role of CO2 that Weart was referring to .
Pure sophistry.
Hi, can anyone tell me how this equation is calculated?
RF = 5.35 ln(CO2/CO2_orig)
RF has the units of w/ m2 so i take it 5.35 is also W/m2
There is also a major problem with the IPCC assertion that absorbance increase in a linear fashion with each doubling of CO2 (which it does) and at the same time the power W/m2 doubles in a linear fashion. This is wrong. they have confused absorbance with absorption. The increase in energy and temp is related to the absorption of energy, not the absorbance!
The increase in absorpion (w/m2) diminishes in a logarithmic fashion with each doubling of concentration
Absorbance is given by the equation
absorbance = – ln (final intesity/initial intensity)
Each doubling of concentration will absorb half of the remaining energy. simple stuff but it appears the IPCC have confused their calculations
A table of the relationship is
absorbance % of energy absorbed, proportion remaining
1 50% 1/2
2 75% 1/4
3 87.5% 1/8
4 93.75% 1/16
And so on.
The amount of power(w/m2) is not linearly proportional to the absorbance as the IPCC has claimed.
Additionally CO2 will have no effect since the atmosphere has an absorbance of 9.
cheers
“Barry’s done well to miss Wearts point compeltely- that there is no simple answer to the degree of temperature rise we can expect -”
But its a pointless point since he’s done a wrongway Corrigan. I don’t think Barry has misunderstood it at all.
But there won’t BE any warming so Weart is barking up the wrong tree entirely.
Always pulling this thing down argument cul de sac creates the impression that this is a two-sided argument. But it isn’t.
In respect of the isotopic ratios, as well as Spencer’s piece which Jennifer has linked to, there is the issue of biological imput into CO2 ratios; both Julian Flood and Steve Short have noted that plankton preference is for C13; so the issue may not be the production end but the extraction by oceanic biology. The whole issue of CO2 levels needs to be looked at, not just because of Beck’s good work, but also because of doubts on the ice-core records; an interesting paper which looks at possible flaws in the conventional ice records is here;
http:homepage.ntlworld.com/jdrake/Questioning_Climate/userfiles/Ice-core_corrections_report_1.pdf (// excluded)
Barry’s post is also correct in pointing to the abuse of SB by AGW; I have referred to the Pielke snr paper before where he looks at regional differences in SB and consequent IR flux, and the inadequacy of asserting a global radiative blockage when regional disparities in the energy of IR flux can prevent this.
Barry mentions the oversight by AGW of conduction and convection; this was addressed in the Chilingar paper, which also touched on atmospheric pressure; which has been ignored completely by AGW. As to forcing; both lucia and Christy and Douglass have done recent analysis removing ENSO and volcanos from the 20thC temperature history; both have found a 21stC decline; and over the 20thC Christy found a possible anthropogenic forcing of 0.062C per decade (compared with the AGW CO2 consistent prediction of 0.2C); changes in insolation could be responsible for that, so arguably there has been no temp increase over the 20thC other than from solar forcing. The issue of stored/accumulating heat in the ocean has always been a red herring, and Barry’s post addresses that. There is really no substance, outside of the models, to AGW.
Barry Moore…the first thing you have to ask is, “who is Gavin Schmidt”? I have been able to find no qualifications for him that make him an expert on atmospheric physics. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a mathematician with some training in climate science, aimed at programming computer models.
IMHO, this is THE problem with CO2/warming theory. Computer modelers have been given far too much credit for their hair-brained theories. Most of them are mathematicians and computer programmers. I am even wondering about Hansen’s ability. He’s trained as an astrophysicist and seems to spend a lot of time with models and history. I wonder what his credentials are exactly in the field of atmospheric physics.
Besides, I just came across a reference that is way beyond RC…the Farmer’s Alamanac. 🙂
http://www.digital-almanac.com/digitalalmanac/2009/?folio=68
They claim it is cooling, end of arguement.
Rob Mitchell said…”Hi, can anyone tell me how this equation is calculated?
RF = 5.35 ln(CO2/CO2_orig)”
As you probably know, the ln is the natural lograrithm which you can find on a scientific calculator. It is looking for a number inside the brackets so the CO2 densities (ppmv) will cancel. The only other value on the RHS of the equation is 5.35, so it must be in w/m.m.
In any equation, when a scalar like 5.35 shows up it has been calculated to balance the equation, so it must come with the proper parameters. This is the cute (or ugly) part of science. Almost every equation has a human parameter in it. Those that bother me most are the parameters with time, which is an invention of the human mind. In other words, we invented a parameter to relate natural phenomena. Pretty cool of us, huh? Or scary.
Exactly right Gordon; AGW was a time-based effect; it had to be because the CO2 mechanism had no validity; noone has verified Arrhennius’s experiment. When the time based correlation between CO2 and temp disentergrated with the demolition of Mann’s machinations and the 21st divergence, all that is left is ocean storage; which Barry has snookered; as I say AGW has nowhere to go.
“The amount of power(w/m2) is not linearly proportional to the absorbance as the IPCC has claimed.”
The IPCC has never claimed such a thing.
Luke actually there is no discontinuity between Beck’ graph and the Mauna Loa curve. Beck’s graph finished in 1960 at 325 ppm and Mauna Loa is 322 ppm in 1970 I would also like to point out that in Beck’s graph there was a period from 1870 to 1925 when the concentration flat lined between 300 & 310 ppm.
The Identification of anthropogenic CO2 by isotopic analysis is completely bogus since both plants and plankton have different absorption rates of C12 and C13 so to try and differentiate the 8 GT of anthropogenic from the 300+ GT of carbon absorbed by plants and oceans per year is nonsense. There is no “signature” since the CO2 is “well mixed” or so IPCC says.
Sure all the energy leaves the planet by radiation but how much comes from the surface and how much comes from the clouds which cover 65% of the earth and how did the energy get from the surface to the clouds.
Graeme, maybe I misunderstood Weart’s concluding statement but I took it to mean that the causes of the varying temperatures both up and down were multiple and to a large extent poorly understood so to zero in on one possible cause is totally without logic or reason. I thought it was quite refreshing to hear someone from the other side say we haven’t got a clue instead of “The debate is over”. I must admit I prefer to think of all the discussion that is going on as a search for all the different reasons the climate varies and the degree to which they effect the climate. I know we must put up with the steady stream of hysterical nonsense that comes from the AGW gang but it is important to know how and what they are thinking so that we can beat them down in the public forum.
Michael I am afraid you have read something in that was not there Weart did not single out CO2 he was talking about climate change in general.
“This is a bit off topic, but following Luke’s query about anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide, I’ve been meaning to post something about this, following my interest in this post from Roy Spencer at Anthony Watt’s blog:”
If you read all the posts, Ferdinand Engelbeen, has already cleared up Spencer’s errors. There is no issue with the ratio or anthropogenic contribution.
Right. There is always this story that someone else has the objections covered.
“We’ve dealt with that at Deltoid” goes the assertion.
Explain it in your own words SJT. And while your about it come up with some evidence of your own for the racket.
SJT; Ferdinand, who is very interesting, says that Spencer’s views on isotopic CO2 distinctions, as a means of seperating anthropogenic imput, need refinement at the very least, and he puts a convincing case for that; however, you obviously didn’t continue reading to see that Ferdinand also is convincing in rebutting Ruddiman and showing the lack of correlation between temp variations and CO2 levels; he also shows that the sink capacity of the ocean hasn’t been touched, and that, contrary to IPCC estimates, anthropogenic CO2 doesn’t hang around in the atmosphere very long.
BTW – Spencer’s post on CO2 was a thought exercise which he has since abandoned. I saw quoted recently saying he does not question that the CO2 in the atmosphere is anthropogenic.
Well it hardly matters what he says. We know that all of the CO2 in the air isn’t put their by man. For goodness sakes say what you mean!!!!
Are you meaning to say that its a significant statement that SOME AMOUNT of CO2 in the air is there by human action?
Obviously the “debate” if it wasn’t just morons saying stupid stuff and people wrong-footed trying to counter this….
….Obviously the debate would be about HOW MUCH is human or otherwise.
” I saw quoted recently saying he does not question that the CO2 in the atmosphere is anthropogenic.”
Surely you saw no such thing. I mean the guy isn’t totally insane is he?
Get your act together fella.
This is just so tiring and depressing to see this sort of idiocy minute in, minute out.
Sigh – try the ocean Barry. Ref above.
And Barry don’t you find it puzzling that Beck’s numbers are all over the place yet the entire SIO network seems to have a monotonously similar trend.
What do you mean they are “all over the place?”
Thats the point of his findings you idiot. That CO2 is not uniform throughout history and pre-industrial history.
So you mean to say “don’t you think its strange that his results don’t conform to my prejudices.”
You are an idiot Luke. Others have pointed out that even in Becks study there were long periods of very stable CO2-levels.
What is your point Luke? Posts are supposed to have a point to them. So he’s saying the trend doesn’t always remain the same. So thats your argument.
Do you have another argument because thats a feeble argument if ever there was one.
Beck just investigated the matter and this is what he found. What did you expect him to do? He’s not in your crowd so you cannot expect him to flatten out graphs if he doesn’t like the way they look.
Now is there some actual argument against Beck or are you admitting defeat in this matter?
Once again we see that this is a serious matter. Along with the fact that our hydrocarbon industries GO THE YEAR ROUND yet CO2 levels fall steeply each year…… This means that CO2 levels can fall and will fall in due course. More is the pity.
1) Reflection by clouds is included in the net albedo. Any problems with averaging can (for this simple explanation) be resolved with conservation of energy. Conduction, convection & evaporation can’t transfer heat to space.
2) In some spectrum lines. Not in most.
3) No, it’s based on isotopes. Beck’s work has about as much validity as a claim that the value of pi changed from 22/7 to 3.14159…. since the ancient greeks.
4) As schmidt pointed out, actual warming is less than CO2 forcing because of aerosols.
5) yes, and? All those complexities are why the IPCC use computer models. That was the point of spencer’s article.
6) as I understand it the heat is percolating downwards and causing thermal expansion.
Given that Weart expressly cites Schmidt’s explanation as a good “technical explanation in a few paragraphs”, your contention that they disagree is horse manure.
Physics is rich in phenomena?
This is wrong.
Nature is rich in phenomena which appear simple etc.
Luke,
You have just failed science 101. Beck’s data is DATA and so is the data produced by the SIO network.
You cannot ignore any data and if some appear spurious then that has to be explained but you don’t ignore this data.
“1) Reflection by clouds is included in the net albedo. Any problems with averaging can (for this simple explanation) be resolved with conservation of energy.”
NOT THEY CANNOT. This is so stupid it amounts to a lie. Stop lying. If you disaggregate things and then reaggregate them after applying Stefan-Boltzmanns law you get a radically different results.
“Conduction, convection & evaporation can’t transfer heat to space.”
You idiot!!! They can transfer the heat above your head or above your house or above the troposphere. From where the energy will be lost in due course and is as good as lost right there.
“2) In some spectrum lines. Not in most.”
How about going in for some detail here.
“3) No, it’s based on isotopes. Beck’s work has about as much validity as a claim that the value of pi changed from 22/7 to 3.14159…. since the ancient greeks.”
No in fact thats just a lie and idiotic. Haughton you are just a moron mate.
“4) As schmidt pointed out, actual warming is less than CO2 forcing because of aerosols.”
You’ve got no evidence for that. And if there was evidence for it someone would have found it.
You are just incompetent mate. You are an idiot and you ought not be employed anywhere in a scientific capacity.
5) yes, and? All those complexities are why the IPCC use computer models. That was the point of spencer’s article.
6) as I understand it the heat is percolating downwards and causing thermal expansion.
Given that Weart expressly cites Schmidt’s explanation as a good “technical explanation in a few paragraphs”, your contention that they disagree is horse manure.
James Haughton,
You don’t understand what Beck did – he collated all the historical chemical determined CO2 data which met specific accuracies and then pointed out that atmosphere CO2 values fluctuated historically.
Your point 6 is physically impossible – the thermal gradient Hot to Cool is upwards, and heat cannot do this unless CO2 is at a higher temperature than the solid earth underneath it.
However as the earth itself transferred its heat to the CO2, then it is patently absurd for CO2 then to warm the earth.
Graeme,
You will find that when you argue with idiots you will be dragged down to their level at which they then win the debate by having more experience.
“5) yes, and? All those complexities are why the IPCC use computer models. That was the point of spencer’s article.”
What was the point of that comment? Either way the IPCC hasn’t come up with any evidence whatsoever.
“6) as I understand it the heat is percolating downwards and causing thermal expansion.”
What are you talking about here? Is this a virtual matter or are you talking the real world?
“6) as I understand it the heat is percolating downwards and causing thermal expansion”
This is just bizzare. You can have thermal expansion but the joules will cause a compromise between more thermal expansion and higher temperature.
What is Haughton saying here? Is he alleging some timing thing? That the expansion is going on deeper than the Argos floats can measure? Since the Argos floats are telling us cooling?
If the expansion is going on deeper you wouldn’t be blaming any recent effect of CO2 would you?
Well if its a timing matter thats one thing. But Haughton appears to be saying that those crafty joules have all decided to go into expansion alone, forsaking all warming. It sounds like he’s saying the joules have hidden themselves in expansion. The crafty little fellows.
I think they are hiding down the well with the 13th Imam of Shiite myself. I think this all could be Shiite. What do you think Haughton?
“Beck’s data is DATA ”
It most certainly is.
Data is not information.
Information is not Knowledge.
Knowledge is not Wisdom.
Beck’s problem is that he doesn’t know how to get past the first stage.
Atmospheric CO2 has been increasing since 1989 at about 0.47%; anthropogenic sourced CO2 has been increasing at a rate of between 1.3 and 3.3%; the anthropogenic component is therefore not responsible for the total increase.
SJT
Your post is silly – data IS information.
Reading the rest of your soliliqy confirms it. Your silliness.
Its an important matter why the timing of imbedded ocean joules and sea level would be different if indeed it is. Well you have ice melting from Greenland sure.
But it would be hard to think of other factors why they might not co-incide as to their timing. I just take it as a given now that the timing of all these various peaks will differ and don’t have a broad enough base knowledge in every case to have a good guess of why.
Any ideas anyone? I mean we ought to go forward and try and nail some of this stuff down rather than always be responding to silliness.
I thought there might be some possibility that if in the warmer times, the gulf stream is down-welling a greater volume of water deep below the Labrador Sea than usual what could happen is this:
So you’ve got more heavier, saltier water going underneath colder water. Perhaps the water that downwells is warmer than usual. But at the very least there will be more of it. More of it for example from solar cycles 19-22 inclusive. And if I’m right about viscosity, more of it even in 23 although 23 is a lesser solar cycle by 20th century standards (putting aside the solar wind issue for the moment)………
… So anyway, even if the downwelling water may not be greatly warmer than usual there ought to be more of it and that means more joules being taken down there.
And perhaps that would have this delayed effect of expansion in the deeper water when the warming isn’t really showing up at the Argos level.
I don’t really know how plausible or implausible I’m being here. I’m just putting out a few thoughts for folks to ponder.
Still another matter is how different is the time between expansion and imbedded energy as measured by the Argos floats? Maybe its not that different at all?
After all, from what one hears and sees the energy loss so far hasn’t been all that much except perhaps very recently (I’m thinking of Barry’s graph above) and the sea level appears to have peaked at about the same level in both 2006 and 2007 after a steady upward trend. (Here I’m thinking of a CSIRO graph I dug up.)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
One thing about Barry’s graph. Notice how after the 1998 peak the temperatures reduce in all three plots, and they REDUCE BELOW TREND.
That requires some explaining too. I would think it would go like this:
Whereas a stronger solar cycle would be WITH the rythm-of-things as far as the oceans-sun dance goes….. a sudden forbush event that punched energy into the oceans might upset this rythm and this momentum.
So it might be that its like if you had someone pushing a kid on the swings and he suddenly tried to push hard but entirely at the wrong time.
I say this because I’m contending that its the ease of circulation that helps the ocean system retain heat. There doesn’t really seem much else of an explanation except for an issue of cloud-cover-feedback.
“. Unfortunately this completely ignores reflection by clouds which covers approximately 65% of the globe. ”
Not at all.
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Albedo
30% is about right, if all the factors that affect albedo are taken into account. There’s much more to it than just clouds. Why you would say he doesn’t take clouds into consideration, I have no idea.
“Your post is silly – data IS information.”
Data by itself is not. I have worked with data for years professionally, and raw data is always the first step to obtaining meaningful information about something. It takes us to do that. You did not read the rest of the saying, obviously. Beck is a prime example of taking a collection of raw data, and making an absolute mess of the getting some meaningful information out of it. He makes that mistake by not looking into the inherent problems with his data. Keeling did investigate CO2 readings, and Mauna Loa was the result. His data produces useful information which contributes to important scientific knowledge.
“Atmospheric CO2 has been increasing since 1989 at about 0.47%; anthropogenic sourced CO2 has been increasing at a rate of between 1.3 and 3.3%; the anthropogenic component is therefore not responsible for the total increase.”
The anthropogenic component is also being absorbed.
“Data by itself is not. I have worked with data for years professionally…..”
Thats deeply depressing data and information right there.
“…., and raw data is always the first step to obtaining meaningful information about something. It takes us to do that…”
Right.
“You did not read the rest of the saying, obviously. Beck is a prime example of taking a collection of raw data, and making an absolute mess of the getting some meaningful information out of it.”
No thats rubbish. Idiocy. Or at the very least you are in no position to say that.
“He makes that mistake by not looking into the inherent problems with his data.”
No thats just rubbish and lying mate. There is no indication that he wasn’t thorough and vigilant on this matter. How do you think you know this you lying filth?
Have you gone through all his gear? Sent away for it all and gone over it with a fine-tooth comb? If not you are simply lying. Because the pdf reveals no such lack of discrimination. And the internationalist alarmist team hasn’t brought forth anything of this nature.
You are filth mate. A dirty filthy liar.
Back up what you are claiming here. You cannot do it. Because you are lying.
“You are filth mate. A dirty filthy liar.”
Graeme, have you ever looked for professional help?
“Your post is silly – data IS information.”
Just look at the much revered Douglaas et al paper on the ‘missing fingerprint’. The first thing they do with the radiosonde data is use the RABOCORE process to adjust the data because of the errors in it. That’s right, they are quite happy to adjust data themselves.
No lets get this straight. You are lying filth. I’ve read Becks stuff available online and there is absolutely no indication of what you are saying within it. So either you have got more detailed data from him and gone through it all or you are lying filth.
It makes it worse that you work with data for a living. Since you have less excuse for your lying claims.
SJT
“Data by itself is not. I have worked with data for years professionally, and raw data is always the first step to obtaining meaningful information about something. It takes us to do that. You did not read the rest of the saying, obviously. Beck is a prime example of taking a collection of raw data, and making an absolute mess of the getting some meaningful information out of it. He makes that mistake by not looking into the inherent problems with his data. Keeling did investigate CO2 readings, and Mauna Loa was the result. His data produces useful information which contributes to important scientific knowledge.”
In a Monty Python frame of mind – Que ?
Well lets hear it than SJT. Don’t stop there. What is the flaw in Becks reasoning that you have perceived that makes you think what it is you are claiming. Obviously you HAVEN’T been through his data in detail so you would have to be going on the reasoning within what he has written thats available on the net.
Face it. The surprise of his take on the CO2 being “all over the place” and the lack of matching his methodology all the way through to the present is all you have right?
I mean the latter is something but its all you’ve got right?
Don’t be making out you’ve got more than you have. You’ve made the claim now back it up or retract it.
Or just sit there looking foolish with egg all over your face.
SJT
“Keeling did investigate CO2 readings, and Mauna Loa was the result”.
A Martian, who understood English, would conclude, logically, that Keeling’s work on CO2 produced the volcanoe Mauna Loa.
This is Looney Tunes?
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/09/light-dawns-there-are-styles-in-science.html
Luke,
Stupider and stupider.
Why?
What is the specific hypothesis you think is being supported here Luke? I mean I quite like Rabbets approach here. But in your own words what do you think is the specific hypothesis that his experiment is supporting?
GO!!!
luke; it doesn’t help matters when you keep linking to someone who refers to himself in the 3rd person; anyway what happened to my Philipona questions?
SJT; the issue of declining C13 and its anthropogenic cause does seem to have some correlative legs;
http://www.bgc.mpg.de/service/iso_gas_lab/publications/PG_WB_IJMS.pdf
Fig 9 (a) and (b) are the relevant ones, but the point is, this is just an indication that mankind is contributing a small amount of the increasing CO2; rather than confirming AGW, this tends to mitigate it because obviously the majority of the CO2 increase is natural; incidentally, as Fig 7.9 of AR4 shows, most of the C13 depletion, and therefore anthropogenic increase, cannot be distinguished between the burning of fossil fuels and the burning of vegetation; that is a seperate issue; here the main point is, that increase in CO2 is not correlated with temp trend; the modern evidence is conclusive; Jame’s nonsense about Schmidt’s aerosols is contradictory; either the decline in temp during the 40’s was due to increased aerosols or faulty buckets, or a -ve PDO; as well as happening during a time when CO2 was increasing, it also occurred when insolation was still increasing; historically, there is enough evidence to show that CO2 doesn’t cause temp increase, but here is another graph depicting CO2, ice and temp;
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimatt/eemian.html
Cripes; I’ll try that 2nd link again;
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/eemian.html
See Luke. This is where your thinking is so unclear. You won’t be specific about what it is you think you are retrieving evidence for. No doubt there is some hypothesis out there in the universe that Rabetts experiment is very good evidence for. But until we know what that hypothesis is there is not a great deal to respond to. I myself don’t want to try and read peoples mind here.
Notice how you’ve absorbed the sentiment of the post, got all excited about it, and there you are thinking its evidence. Well sure it is. But for what?
We have evidence that you are putting scientists sentiment over scientific evidence right there. Once rabett spells out exactly the hypothesis he thinks he’s got evidence for well I’ll try and take it on board. But had he put the foil over the ground or over the water I don’t know what it is that he would have found. Whether it would have backed up the hypothesis as well. Since we don’t have the hypothesis.
Graeme’ “and there you are thinking its evidence. Well sure it is. But for what?”
That’s easy: A nice shiny on the inside thermos will keep your coffee hotter than it would if in a cup.
Birdy – you have a small problem. I only now read 10% of what you write – wasting your time mate. Nobody is responding to you. Howling at the moon.
“but here is another graph depicting CO2, ice and temp;”
You still don’t get it, do you? CO2 can be a forcing and it can also be a feedback. You are looking at a long history of different forcings and feedbacks, that are occuring for different reasons at different times. You can’t just generalise from that history that simply. Every case has it’s features, some similar to other times, some distinct.
At present, CO2 is acting as a forcing.
You have to consider Milankovich, biological, chemical, solar and other forcings, that can in turn trigger feedbacks positive and negative. You also have to take into account that we weren’t burning fossil fuels at a huge rate at all those other times.
So CO2 can be a feedback? A -ve feedback I presume? How quaint.
Yes, cohenite, CO2 is a feedback, currently a negative feedback to CO2’s positive feedback, thus it is driving global temperature down. See? It all makes perfect sense!
So now the idiot Luke thinks that if he doesn’t read it that will make it not true.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
SJT. A forcing is a highly processed hypothetical.
So you must be saying that CO2 can warm right? So where is your evidence? You don’t have it dopey.
“So CO2 can be a feedback? A -ve feedback I presume? How quaint.”
You presume wrong. Doesn’t really surprise me though.
Well actually SJT, CO2 can be a -ve feedback in at least 3 ways; warming SST promoted increase in evaporation causes a decline in SST and partial pressure increase in CO2 absorption of CO2, thus producing a slight cooling of the atmosphere through a decline in the pressure gradient; increased CO2 also promotes cynaobacteria growth with a commensurate increase in both SS albedo and cloud formation; Increased CO2 also produces a lowering of RH and a decrease in the wet lapse rate.
So there is this rather strange guy, let us call him Ernst, who walks into the public library each day and borrows a book, only to return it the next. The librarian, let’s call him Eli, wonders what Ernst does with the book cause some of them are REALLY thick and he couldn’t be reading them, so one day Eli gives Ernst the local telephone book.
Sure enough, the next day Ernst returns the telephone book, and Eli asks him how he liked it. Ernst replies, “No story, but a hell of a cast”
Beck wrote a telephone book with no meaning because he did not critically evaluate the methods which INCLUDES the locations and meteorology of the locations where the measurements were made and the associated measuring protocols. Doing so is what made Callendar and Keeling great scientists (and please note that Callendar was an amateur).
“So you must be saying that CO2 can warm right? So where is your evidence? You don’t have it dopey.”
I would give it to anyone else but you.
“warming SST promoted increase in evaporation causes a decline in SST ”
Now you’re just getting weird.
You seem to be claiming that if I heat a saucepan of water it will never boil, because the evaporation of water takes up the energy I am using to heat it.
This is getting just as weird as the people who claim energy can’t go from a cool body to a warmer one. Therefore anything that is cooler than me is invisible.
Let Eli now quickly deconstruct Moore’s nonsense.
Pt 1. Arthur Smith showed that the result is MORE extreme if you do not average over the globe, in other words an isothermal temperature is the most conservative assumption you can make for calculating the global surface temperature increase due to ghgs. In his words:
“A planet without an infrared absorbing atmosphere is mathematically constrained to have an average temperature less than or equal to the effective radiating temperature. ”
Note the less than. We will use the Smith Scale to rate these: Other errors of logic: “Nonsense”
Of course the comments about conduction and convection are: Irrelevant conclusions and non sequiturs: “Red Herring” cause Moore don’t like the results either when these are considered in models.
Pt. 2 Whilst if you took away greenhouse gas A, ghg B would absorb more energy, if you take away A, the total absorption is less than the total absorption of A+B. On the Smith Scale this is : Irrelevant conclusions and non sequiturs: “Red Herring”
Pt. 3 Since many of the trace greenhouse gases (CFCs, perflurocarbons have NO natural sources) and others like tropospheric ozone can be directly associated (as in you can watch them form as the cars drive by) with human emissions such as tropospheric ozone from NOx, and still others like methane we know the lower limit for emission from the amount leaking from pipelines and vented from oil wells, this amount to Moore arguing from personal ignorance. On the Smith Scale: Errors of fact: “Wrong”
Pt. 4, 5 and 6 are Moore arguing that he knows better than everyone who studies this stuff.
On point 4 there is an interesting NAS (US) report which points out that while not perfect TOA radiative forcing is useful for global characterization but weak in dealing with regional effects so that other metrics should be developed. This is one of Pielke Sr.’s favorite hobby horses btw
Pt. 5 is a complete, Smith Scale: Arguments that only work for specially selected data: “Cherry Picking”. The IPCC report does not say 2x CO2 forcing would result in a 3 C global range, it says that it would result in a change of global temperatures between 2 and 4.5 C with 3 C being the most probable. These estimates are the results of observations, and modeling which includes convection and conduction. Moore might ask himself where that factor of 5.35 comes from which he quotes in Pt. 4
These misstatements by Moore are typical of what is found in your average industrial strength engineering report: misleading simplicity stated with absolute certainty about complex issues. Oh yes, they charge for it. Big bucks.
Eli notes constant demands that he live here. Anyone so interested should put up the big bucks. Contributions to the Bunnytown Needlework Society are acceptable. We take Paypal
Cohenite, the evaporation of water from the surface of the oceans, cools the oceans and warms the atmosphere. Think about which molecules escape from the surface.
Jeeaz
Eli I think you should take reading comprehension 101 over again. Frankly your summary is a litany of misrepresentation and pompous drivel.
I said that one cannot use an average when considering Stefan’s Law I made no claim that the correct result would be higher or lower just it was an error and you confirmed that.
I certainly did not infer that there was no such thing as warming due to an atmosphere. So your Arthur Smith quotation is meaningless.
Pt 2 is a misquote again. I acknowledge I was too cryptic here and what I really wanted to say was that from the John Nicol analysis using the classical laws of physics all CO2 resonant frequencies are absorbed and converted into kinetic energy in the first 50 meters of atmosphere thus concentrations become inconsequential. A small amount of these frequencies are detected at TOA but they do not come from the surface they come from the reradiation of aerosols at altitude.
I made absolutely no reference to the trace greenhouse gasses we are discussing the effect of CO2 only, so here you have introduced the red herring.
Your next comment only highlights your pompous arrogance I was merely commenting on the dangers of oversimplification which you have clearly demonstrated.
The 3 deg C was not my number. Neither is the 5.35 which I note the IPCC do not even attempt to justify in 4AR they just use it extensively in their rudimentary computer models which only goes to emphasise their lack of credibility.
I have a big problem with the assumption that the Oceans have temporarily forestalled the warming expected with increased GHGs.
I added the word “temporary” because by raising this argument, the warmers are really saying “the Oceans have temporarily absorbed some of the increase and the Oceans will release it to the surface later.” There is no reason to raise the argument otherwise.
I have no problem understanding that the Oceans will warm up slower than the surface, but the Oceans will not permanently give back the heat they have absorbed.
Now, Surface +0.7C ; Oceans +0.5C
50 years from now Surface +1.2C ; Oceans +1.0C
The equation 50 years from now cannot be Surface +3.0C ; Oceans 0.0C
Surface warms, oceans warm but they warm together since they are connected.
“Warming in the pipeline” is faulty logic. It has already warmed as much as it will at 385 ppm CO2 and the sensitivity figure is much lower than 3.0C.
“A planet without an infrared absorbing atmosphere is mathematically constrained to have an average temperature less than or equal to the effective radiating temperature. ”
That CANNOT be right Eli. I know you know Stefan Boltzmanns law and that simply cannot be right. You ought not have quoted Joe Blow or Arthur Smith but made his argument in your own words.
If we disaggregate to colder and warmer areas, that is to say to REALITY, the colder areas radiate less but the warmer areas radiate disproportionately more and you knew that.
So right from the getgo your critique was nonsense. And the rest was just an add-on to that.
Maybe you want to try again and make the case in your own words rather than rely on this mysterious Arthur Smith.
Hang on. It wasn’t your quote that made no sense. It was your lead-in that made no sense. And the quote in no way relates to your lead-in. Your lead-in Eli was the problem:
“Pt 1. Arthur Smith showed that the result is MORE extreme if you do not average over the globe, in other words an isothermal temperature is the most conservative assumption you can make for calculating the global surface temperature increase due to ghgs. In his words:”
Thats not right Eli. The result you get IN THEORY from extra non-water vapour greenhouse gasses is LESS mathematically than whatever you get if you average everything out over the globe.
As soon as you disaggregate you lose a great deal of that alleged extra heat in the one-step calculation since the warmer areas will radiate disproportionately more.
Not forgetting that this is an hypothetical in the first place.
Notice also that the drier places are also those where hypothetical extra warmth in this hypothetical example can be less expected to lodge itself in the oceans and accumulate.
So supposing if you get a bit of extra warmth in the air some many metres above the Sahara or above the Antarctic. These areas are free from water vapour. Its hard for these alleged extra joules to somehow get down and accumulate in the deep oceans.
Whereas over the oceans there is typically already a great deal of water vapour and if you were disaggregating the extra CO2, in this hypothetical, would have to be counted less effectual. Furthermore, to the effect that this extra CO2 WAS effectual at the surface of the oceans, it would cause more precipitation and therefore most of the difference would be neutralised in the negative feedback of the evaporation/refrigeration effect.
Everything changes once you disaggregate.
Continuing on with an examination of the magic formula RF = 5.35 ln (CO2/CO2orig)
If we look at a doubling of the CO2, ln = 0.693 so RF = 3.708 increase for doubling the CO2, at 0.75 deg C/W/m2 we get 2.78 deg C per doubling. Starting at 1 ppm and doubling to 2 gives us an increase of 2.78; to 4 , 5.56; to 8 , 8.34; to 16, 11.21; I think you can see where I am going. Could one of the mathematical geniuses in the AGW camp explain this because we certainly do not have 23 deg C warming due to CO2. I have to assume that there is some magical transition point derived empirically at which this formula kicks in no doubt you have “solid scientific proof” of that too.
Well GB, the real problem is the lack of definition of “isothermal temperature” wrt a thermodynamic system. Without an asuumption of the thermodynamic qualities of the system. just what is his isothermal temperature? Can any such system be reeal in an atmosphere? As a thought problem, the assumptions and constraints tell someone more than do the conclusions of such a system.
Its a flat earth for starters. A flat earth, always noon, twice as far from the sun.
Flat earth science. And there is the beloved Professor Brook talking about the frightening likelihood of a 6 degrees increase in temperature by the end of the century, not knowing whether he’s talking about an otherworldly flat earth that exists nowhere in the galaxy or this one.
These dummies must be sacked. Time for them to put some overalls on and do some real work for a change.
This is all very interesting. Science is supposed to be the process when some observation has to be explained.
Oddly, global warming was never observed requiring a CO2 theory for it. Given past ice ages when the temperatures dropped, subsequent warming would be similar to someone falling through the ice into a perishingly cold warer, fished out, and then then put into a warmer environment. That person would be warming.
The crucial issue what causes ice ages, not that the earth warms after an ice age.
The AGW crowd have simply got it all back to front but given their misanthropic attitudes, one cannot ignore their present shenanigans.
“Cohenite, the evaporation of water from the surface of the oceans, cools the oceans and warms the atmosphere. Think about which molecules escape from the surface.”
I think his problem is that he literally means the oceans will be cooler than they were before they were heated.
“I have a big problem with the assumption that the Oceans have temporarily forestalled the warming expected with increased GHGs.
I added the word “temporary” because by raising this argument, the warmers are really saying “the Oceans have temporarily absorbed some of the increase and the Oceans will release it to the surface later.” There is no reason to raise the argument otherwise.”
I think the point is that they act as a damper on the warming, they have delayed the warming but not stopped it. That is different to what you are saying.
But where is the evidence for this temporary warming. As you see in the graph above the oceans are cooling. As cohenite says, this AGW has nowhere to go. It was an hypothetical in the first place. And in authentic science good scientists have many such hypotheticals, most of which don’t turn out like this one. The difference being that when an hypothetical turns out to be wrong they realise it and its back to the drawing board.
No I don’t SJT, at least not with a constant insolation. The thing about saucepans, thermal blankets and greenhouses and all the metaphors generated by AGW is that they are so simplistic; Smith has become a bit of a hatchet-boy wander for AGW with his attacks on the Gerlich paper and Monckton; in his anti-Gerlich paper Smith generates a defence of the greenhouse as being responsible for the whole 33K; he does so by averaging albedo and SB; this is simply wrong and until AGW proponents can understand that the earth’s temp is not entirely, or even dominantly, due to the GHG component of its atmosphere we’ll remain looking at boiling saucepans.
“this is simply wrong and until AGW proponents can understand that the earth’s temp is not entirely, or even dominantly, due to the GHG component of its atmosphere we’ll remain looking at boiling saucepans.”
It’s not, GHGs are only responsible for about 10% of the earths temperature. Most of the temperature is due to the sun.
From SJT “… Oceans have delayed the warming but not stopped it. That is different to what you are saying.”
“Delay” again implies the Oceans will give the heat back a later date – that the atmosphere will continue warming if we stopped adding GHGs to the atmosphere
now.
That could only be true if the Oceans absorbed 1.0C of warming while the surface has increased 0.7C – which is not the case. It is not delayed, it is less.
Either that or the theory never took into account that oceans would absorb some of the increased warming from the atmosphere (which I don’t believe the theories did – it should have already been taken into account.)
““Delay” again implies the Oceans will give the heat back a later date – that the atmosphere will continue warming if we stopped adding GHGs to the atmosphere
now.”
No, it doesn’t. It just means they absorb heat, and retain it. Like crush a plastic body, it absorbs the energy, but stays in that shape. You are assuming an elastic reaction, where it bounces back to it’s original shape.
Another metaphor; crushed plastic bodies; anyway, you say “GHG’s are only responsible for about 10% of the earth’s temperature.” Is that 10% of 33K, or 10% of 288K?
“Smith generates a defence of the greenhouse as being responsible for the whole 33K; he does so by averaging albedo and SB; this is simply wrong and until AGW proponents can understand that the earth’s temp is not entirely, or even dominantly, due to the GHG component of its atmosphere we’ll remain looking at boiling saucepans.”
Its not just wrong its insane. Falsifiable by the two hours walking up a mountain.
The mountain summit is also after all a surface. Or if that doesn’t count the Atherton tablelands not long after dark ought to and we have proof positive that the air pressure is important when it doesn’t feature in the flat earth model.
“It’s not, GHGs are only responsible for about 10% of the earths temperature. Most of the temperature is due to the sun.”
And look how far gone and lost SJT is. We were talking about the alleged 33 degrees difference between the surface of a black body, flat earth, twice as far from the sun. But if the sun was switched off the difference would be maybe 290 degrees . Is SJT therefore asserting that the greenhouse contribution is almost all of that 33 degrees? 29 degrees then?
So SJT is just being lying filth reasserting almost all of this 33 degrees between this imaginary otherworld and our world as being the doing of greenhouse, or he’s totally lost within a pyramid of hypotheticals built on imaginations built on hypotheticals.
These people really are extremist idiots.
Why would we expect ourselves to account for the difference between our world and an imaginary one in the first place?
SJT being lying filth is in effect saying that no gravity, air pressure, backradiation from other sources, overturning, or anything else makes a significant difference. This has gone beyond argument and the sackings have to start. Because these guys have proven a willingness to obsessively lie to the public.
You filth SJT. Prove this ten percent lie.
“Most of the temperature is due to the sun.”
all of it except the barely noticeable geothermal is du to the sun.
“No I don’t SJT, at least not with a constant insolation. ”
OK, so the oceans will warm. What then is your problem?
As Eli points out, the released water vapour will then be warming the atmosphere, it will also act as a GHG itself. Positive feedback.
I think you are confusing resistance to change, as distinct to a negative feedback. A resistance to change will only slow it, but never stop it. A negative feedback will also eventually stop the change.
“You filth SJT. Prove this ten percent lie.”
LOL.
“As Eli points out, the released water vapour will then be warming the atmosphere, it will also act as a GHG itself. Positive feedback.”
Nonsense. Its negative feedback. You are isolating the atmosphere from the oceans but its all one system. You cannot bring all processes down to an averaged 1 second and one watt.
The refigerated ocean will then have implications for the air down the track. The latent heat is conveyed to space.
If it was a positive feedback there would be just no end to it. The planet would have careened to overheating a long time ago.
Its clearly a negative feedback. The oceans sweating and cooling themselves. Its part of homeostasis. The warmth conveyed to the atmosphere along with the water vapour.
There is no positive feeback here unless you try and bring it down to a momentary thing thus cutting out the full context of what is going on.
Prove your 28 degrees SJT you filth.
Where are you pulling this 28 degrees from you lying prick!!!!
SJT: “I think you are confusing resistance to change, as distinct to a negative feedback. A resistance to change will only slow it, but never stop it. A negative feedback will also eventually stop the change”
You talk rubbish negative feedback resists change it does not stop it unless input signal stops changing.
Its frustrating because this constant lying cannot affect those who have looked into this matter with some persistence (although there is this tendency to try and compromise with the lunatics).
But the general public are just sitting ducks for this obsessive group lying.
An SJT or a Karoly will just come out and say that the greenhouse component is about 30 degrees. And the general public are powerless to resist such a flat out lie.
Cohenite!
Where’s your deconstruction of Mann 2008???
NT. Where is your evidence more generally. There is no need to deconstruct someone who has no evidence in the first place. Thats a argument cul de sac.
We need something to work with NT. I’m not fussy and any evidence will do just fine for starters.
Cohenite,
“noone has verified Arrhennius’s experiment.”
Are you serious?
On another note, look they’ve had 25 years to disprove AGW, It’s becoming a pretty solid theory
http://ia331319.us.archive.org/3/items/carbondioxideand003586mbp/carbondioxideand003586mbp.pdf
“GHGs are only responsible for about 10% of the earths temperature.”
More like 13% of the temperature. But this only pertains to a vague system estimate. Just taking albedo into account, earth is expected to average 255 K rather than 288. Such an estimate makes no sense, however, as it assumes that average temperature will conform to average irradiance. In fact, a spherical object with a 30% albedo and exposed to 1366 watts per square meter would reach a maximum average temperature of 303 K on the day side and who knows what temperature on the night side. As Moore suggests, the emissivity of this object is a vital parameter. Without knowing its emissivity and without factoring in its rotation period, one cannot claim to know the object’s average temperature.
As the radiation budget has it, by the way, the earth’s surface rises from a solar irradiance value of 168 W/m² to a final value of 390 W/m², so that would make GHGs responsible for increasing surface energy 2.32 times, a far shot from 10%.
Graeme, still a moron as ever.
Mann et al 2008 uses evidence… Oh wait, sorry you don’t accept it as evidence.
Very handy having this internal ‘evidence acceptance filter’.
NT: “It’s becoming a pretty solid theory”
There is a world of difference between becoming a well entrenched myth and a solid theory.
Jen, methinks you need to give Graeme a time out.
“You talk rubbish negative feedback resists change it does not stop it unless input signal stops changing.”
Negative feedback can limit a change, resistance can’t.
Barry, the trace greenhouse gases are NOx, NOy CH4, O3, CFCs, etc. not CO2 and H2O. As to Beck’s stuff, as is constantly pointed out, he is saying that 50ppm is emitted and absorbed in one or two years, that is risible and anyone who believes it can’t multiply and figure out how much gas has to be moved.
Its not risible at all. Why would it be? We see that every year a great deal of CO2 is absorbed even though our hydrocarbon industries are working the year round.
You explain why such an absorption could not have happened in the early 40’s as a delayed reaction to cooling?
You are going to have to actually come up with a real argument against it rather than merely saying its “risible.”
“How much gas has to be moved”; or not moved as the case may be;
http:www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11832936 (// excluded)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/281/5374/240
McPhaden and Zhang noted that the tropical Pacific upwelling and consequent meridional overturning circulation had decreased by over 30% in 1976, and stayed weak/reduced until after the 1998 super El Nino; this process was entirely natural, and must have had major impact on not only SST and global temp generally, but also CO2 ocean/atmosphere flux. The natural process caused increased heating and extra CO2; the extra CO2 has reduced RH, and increased cynoabacterial activity, both of which are -ve feedbacks to temperature;
NT; Mann redeconstructed; he’s a goose; satisfied?
“Cohenite,
“noone has verified Arrhennius’s experiment.”
Are you serious?”
Of course he’s serious you idiot. Perhaps cohenite ought to have said “hypothetical thought experiment”
But its just a fact that it was falsified and not verified.
If not why don’t you verify it right here right now. You see what lying filth you are NT. We just had four threads specifically to do with this and you came up with nothing at all.
Then you wait until enough time has passed. You try to bluff a verification. And you link a wild goose chase.
LETS HAVE THAT EVIDENCE NOW. Or swear off dishonesty for all time.
Eli, are you living in an alternate reality? Even the IPCC estimates that of the more than 100 ppm of CO2 emitted every year, about 98% is absorbed in that year.
98% in a year.
What you have to do Eli is come up with some evidence. Stop playing this dotty old man all over the internet and actually come out with it or retract.
Its least excusable in your case because of your wide general knowledge. Stoat and the others are just maths-boy idiots.
“Graeme, still a moron as ever.
Mann et al 2008 uses evidence… Oh wait, sorry you don’t accept it as evidence.
Very handy having this internal ‘evidence acceptance filter’.”
No I’m afraid that Mann has NO EVIDENCE for the main thesis.
Where is your or Manns evidence for the likelihood of catastrophic warming. For the idea that a little bit of human-induced warming during a brutal and catastrophic ice age is a BAD thing.
Or yet even that industrial-CO2 can warm the planet globally more than just a little bit?
So no you are lying. Not you NT, nor Mann, nor anyone else have come up with any such evidence that could affect rational policy.
Barry, you say:
“But, firstly we know that a fourth power law cannot be averaged and Stefan’s law is for black body radiators thus an emissivity factor must be assumed which reduces the 390 W/m2. ”
The emissivity of the earth in the IR beyond 5 microns is > 0.9, and yes, the emissivities are measured and included in even MODTRAN calculations. It is curious that you were not aware of this in your engineering quality report. You go on to say:
“Even more curiously it appears the entire heat balance consists of radiation. Where are conduction, convection and evaporation factored in, these are just a few of the complexities that Weart was referring to.”
They are in the GCM calculations silly. However for a rough back of the envelope calculation what Gavin pointed you too was perfectly fine, and yes, Arthur’s calculation that you attempt to handwave away is also on point.
Barry, originally you said:”Put another way, remove the CO2 and the water absorbs more energy, or take away the water and the CO2 absorbs more. ”
You now back away from the clear meaning of this when I pointed out the logical fallacy to: “all CO2 resonant frequencies are absorbed and converted into kinetic energy in the first 50 meters of atmosphere thus concentrations become inconsequential. A small amount of these frequencies are detected at TOA but they do not come from the surface they come from the reradiation of aerosols at altitude.”
Again, your engineering quality report somehow manages not to include the fact that CO2 molecules in the atmosphere will also EMIT at those resonant frequencies. Further, your invocation of aerosol emission somehow does not explain how the aerosol emission matches the line like spectra of CO2. Here is a hint, aerosol emissions are very very broad, not line like.
For a clue, play with David Archer’s MODTRAN model. Look up to see the emission from the CO2 and water vapor at different altitudes, and down to see the absorption. Look with and without clouds.
Eli: “The emissivity of the earth in the IR beyond 5 microns is > 0.9,”
Measured where? At the surface not from above TOA.
“The emissivity of the earth in the IR beyond 5 microns is > 0.9, and yes, the emissivities are measured and included in even MODTRAN calculations.”
So where is the extra-CO2-warming? When you do detection-and-attribution it cannot be found. And how could you calculate it? On what scale? How many pixels across? We are talking about hot and cold on the ocean and land surface. Not someone setting up an arbitrary grid for a computer model.
“It is curious that you were not aware of this in your engineering quality report. You go on to say:
“Even more curiously it appears the entire heat balance consists of radiation. Where are conduction, convection and evaporation factored in, these are just a few of the complexities that Weart was referring to.”
They are in the GCM calculations silly.”
But there is an order of calculation the alarmist goes through. There is a steps one two and three. The alarmists otherworldly model is at the centre of it and the start of the process. The other factors are add-ons. Fudge-factors. They are not integral to the model. They don’t enter into first calculations. They are only adjusted for after the fact.
The alarmist always starts with flatland and only later makes feeble adjustments.
If you started with conduction, convection-overturning, insulative properties of air, and air pressure in your core model and only came in with backradiation later, forsaking all flat-earth assumptions entirely, you would derive a completely different result.
“Again, your engineering quality report somehow manages not to include the fact that CO2 molecules in the atmosphere will also EMIT at those resonant frequencies..”
True true. They’ll help emit some of this gear more easily into space surely.
Eli knows that the empirical data doesn’t bear the models out. Because to cover it he was hypothesising that the planet itself had swallowed a bunch of zeta-joules since the industrial revolution.
So he knows the data just isn’t there. Since he assumed the joules were hiding.
Eli go back to comprehension 101 you really need it. I did not back away, the statement still stands because ALL the resonant frequencies are absorbed in the first 50 meters of atmosphere so it is inconsequential whether water vapour or CO2 does the absorbing there is only x amount of radiation which can be absorbed and it is all removed from the spectrum. Beer’s law applies to the outgoing radiation and the reradiation back, so again, once you get over 50 meters no radiation in the resonant frequencies of CO2 and H2O get back to the surface therefore there is no forcing from water vapour or CO2 above 50 meters.
I am perfectly aware of the trace gasses you were referring to and that CO2 and H2O are not trace, again your comprehension is appalling.
With regard to emissivity the 2 major frequency bandwidths for CO2 are in the 2.3 and 4 micron range you may notice both are below 5 microns. The CO2 molecules will emit radiation at their resonant frequencies but when you consider they are out numbered 25 000 to 1 by the other molecules in the atmosphere the vast majority of the energy is lost by kinetic transfer.
With regard to aerosol emissions I posted some time ago that there are 2 types of emissions, molecular ( line specific ) and aerosol ( full spectrum) so I really do not need your condescending hint. In fact you have just verified my statement that radiation in the CO2 line specific frequencies at TOA come from the aerosols not the surface.
I note that your ridiculous 50ppm has already been blown away, that would give us a 17 year retention time for carbon in the atmosphere. You were probably off on a magic mushroom trip when I posted some of the results of my mass balance calculation based on 4AR pg 515 Fig 7.3 After getting the natural to anthropogenic carbon ratios in the sinks ( air, water and land) and in the fluxes between the sinks to balance, using the IPCC numbers where possible, the retention time for all the atmospheric CO2 comes in at 1.81 years which means the total anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere is 29.22 GT or 12.59 ppm try constructing the model yourself and you find out how erroneous the 4AR is. 450 GT of carbon uptake and emission per year is reasonable and can be supported.
“McPhaden and Zhang noted that the tropical Pacific upwelling and consequent meridional overturning circulation had decreased by over 30% in 1976, and stayed weak/reduced until after the 1998 super El Nino; this process was entirely natural, and must have had major impact on not only SST and global temp generally, but also CO2 ocean/atmosphere flux. The natural process caused increased heating and extra CO2; the extra CO2 has reduced RH, and increased cynoabacterial activity, both of which are -ve feedbacks to temperature;”
Natural cycles don’t change the overall state of the system. Forcings do. That’s why scientists are interested in forcings. The natural cycles are interesting, but they are along for the ride, like with us.
Eli, it’s nice to see you here. But this blog has no status and by posting here you are giving it far more than it is worth.
As to Jen actually running this blog, that’s a laugh. She actually restarted the blog, claiming it would have new standards. Nothing has really changed.
That being said, it is nice to have someone who can actually articulate a decent counter argument. There are people here who believe that simply publishing a counter argument is a complete refutation of a theory. Others think a blog post like this ‘demonstrates’ that the Greenhouse Effect is flawed.
NT et al. On the first actual page of the 4th.AR (P.95) it says “when Albert Einstein was informed of the publication of a book entitled – 100 Authors Against Einstein – he is said to have remarked. If I were wrong, then one would have been enough! ( Hawking 1988 ); however, that one opposing scientist would have needed proof in the form of testable results”
Please note no whining about peer review or status just the plain honest truth is good enough. How many times has Graeme asked for evidence and proof. After 10 years and $50 Billion spent on world wide research how much new evidence and proof has been added to the IPCC Assessment Report the answer to that is zero. All the 4AR consists of is a collection of statistics, computer simulations and wild assumptions with no rational. If I program a computer to add 2+2 and return a result of 5 then I ask the computer to solve 2+2 one can hardly claim the computer has proven 2+2=5. Computer programs cannot prove their original programming. 10 years on and the predictions of 1998 by the IPCC have been proven to be totally wrong by measured data. Why can you not accept this abject failure.
NT; this blog has status and numbers, which is why eli is here.
Yes I agree SJT, but you miss the point; with the upwelling cessation the SST rose and released CO2; but the extra CO2 is not the forcing agent; it is a product of the forcing from less deep cold water.
It IS nice to see Eli here because he is more immersed in general science than the other alarmists. Most of whom have no affinity for science generally and are narrow computer, maths or statistics specialists.
When I was trying to figure what was going on in this matter Eli would often come up with some extraneous angle that I found useful but not for his general purposes.
But Eli is perplexing. He seems to be even more tendentiously motivated to twist things in favour of this racket than most who are merely unscientific and just plain stupid.
Eli you will be judged by the company you keep and there is just no gainsaying me on the fact of this.
Yes Graeme, eli is a bit of an enigma; he certainly is well versed; he gave me an interesting lecture about soft and hard X-Rays once, and I learnt that N2 and O2 can absorb IR in the far spectrum from him; the optical depth for for N2 and O2 is such that only about 10% of IR photons are absorbed by them; but that is over the full height of the atmosphere; the optical depth of CO2 is about 10m, which tallies with Barry’s repeated observation that CO2 relevant IR exhausts close to the ground. Having said that, however, I thought eli’s analysis of the Essex paper was ordinary, and he seems enamoured of the semi-infinite model of the atmosphere that Weart likes, which is simply contrary to what he should know about how CO2 works.
Yes, Cohenite, it has status. Which is why I am here. To try and stop the mighty Juggernaut 🙂
Have you discovered that publishing something with an opposing view does not equal refutation yet? I think you should do a post on what it means to “refute” something.
Its hard to refute an hypothesis that doesn’t have any evidence in its favour at all. Where do you start? Because trhe scientific process has come to an end as far as that hypothesis is concerned. A new set of hypotheses have to come forward over the dead one but the fraud is preventing that.
I think myself I’ve come up with a few ideas. Not that I think they are all that clever. Only that those who ought to have sorted these things out a long time ago are being held up by the racket.
Thats the whole secret to this scam. That its already been disproved and that to disprove it over you just have to repeat yourself and sooner or later people get sick of the repetition.
The hypothesis is disproved and that ought to be the end of it. But people simply want to continue.
Its like guys who have been banned by the ghost of Popper in ever having inductive inferences. And when they break the famine they go hog wild, because in their unfamiliarity with inductive inference they do not realise that most of them don’t pan out. And thats OK. Just so long as when they don’t pan out its the end of the matter.
It doesn’t matter how good the inductive inference seems at first. How elegant and how plausible. Most of them just don’t work. And the Arrenhius one didn’t work and thats just the way it is.
A lot of his other stuff did work. But any good scientist will have some of their theories pan out and most of them not pan out.
It seems that the alarmists will accept inductive inference if it is combined with the cult of personality and if its someone else’s inductive inference.
Graeme, what is the AGW hypothesis? I mean we have gone over the popperian thing many times.
I see AGW as being a composite of different hypotheses. Namely
The Greenhouse Effect
Increasing CO2 levels (and other greenhouse gases)
Increasing Human generated greenhouse gases.
It is the inevitable result of those three aspects.
Scientific hypotheses are proposed to explain empirical facts.
The AGW hypothesis is the inverse of Arrhenius’s proposal that ice ages were caused by a reduction in atmospheric CO2 which caused temperature to drop.
Hence the AGW hypothesis is that an increase in atmospheric CO2 will cause temperature to rise.
Holy deja vu; ok NT; evidence for;
1 The greenhouse; ie. are GHG’s entirely responsible for the 33K?
2 Increasing CO2 levels; is the pre-industrial fig of 280ppm correct, and are Beckian variations incorrect?
3 What percentage of increasing CO2 levels are attributable to anthropogenic sources?
4 Last, but most importantly; point to ONE unequivocal indicator of AGW.
“the optical depth of CO2 is about 10m, which tallies with Barry’s repeated observation that CO2 relevant IR exhausts close to the ground. Having said that, however, I thought eli’s analysis of the Essex paper was ordinary, and he seems enamoured of the semi-infinite model of the atmosphere that Weart likes, which is simply contrary to what he should know about how CO2 works.”
You just said it only takes 10 metres for CO2 to trap all the IR it’s going to trap. CO2 is found how high up in the atmosphere? That’s a long way to go for that IR to finally escape. Not infinite at all, but it goes up a long way.
SJT; read Chilingar and adiabatic convectional exchange between warm surface parcels of air and higher cooler ones; even eli agrees with that process; and consider, heat transfer by diffusion is a few cm/s, whereas heat transfer by vertical convection is many metres per second. IR escapes through band windows, and there are more of them higher up, which is where the convection exchange takes the surface CO2.
With respect,
But what physical factor is responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2? The AGW hypothesis reckons it is anthropogenic.
Given geological history, what caused previous fluctuations inferred from proxies, in atmospheric CO2?
As humans are as natural as any living thing on this planet, anything we do has to be also natural.
So why distinguish anthropogenic activity separately from the rest of biological activity.
“regionalism is the Achilles Heel of AGW.”
They don’t even pretend to address regionalism, they don’t have the resolution to do so. Some indication of regional effects can be detected. To say that it’s an achillees heel is absurd, because the models are intended primarily to tell us the climate sensitivity and the gross changes in climate that will result. The new generation of hardware will allow the creation of models with much finer resolution, and more relistic depiction of clouds.
“The proponents of this theory take into
consideration only one component of heat transfer in atmosphere, i.e.,
radiation.”
That is a lie, or ignorance.
“This weird result stimulated Syukuro Manabe to develop a more realistic one-dimensional model. He included in his column of air the way convective updrafts carry heat up from the surface, a basic process that nearly every earlier calculation had failed to take into account. It was no wonder Möller’s surface had heated up without limit: his model had not used the fact that hot air would rise. Manabe also worked up a rough calculation for the effects of clouds. By 1967, in collaboration with Richard Wetherald, he was ready to see what might result from raising the level of CO2. Their model predicted that if the amount of CO2 doubled, global temperature would rise roughly two degrees C. This was probably the first paper to convince many scientists that they needed to think seriously about greenhouse warming. The computation was, so to speak, a “proof of principle.””
Back in the 60’s, people were starting to work on convection. That’s the problem with people working outside their area of expertise, they know very little of the science they are taking on, and it shows.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/simple-question-simple-answer-no/langswitch_lang/in#more-595
That is not correct SJT; in a recent, scaremongering, ‘tipping point’ post, Glikson extrapolated from Dansgaard-Oeschger events to a supposed rapid global change; 2 papers show that regionalism, in the sense of localised rapid climate shift, need not be reproduced in type elsewhere ;
http:www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7193/full/nature06949.html (//excluded)
http:www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_06/ (// excluded)
And there’s more.
“WTF!!!! What does the amount of energy produced by humans have to do with AGW? The authors actually claim that anthropogenic impacts on atmospheric temperature are LIMITED by the energy generated by humans, as though the AGW theory relies on ‘human-generated’ energy as the driving force behind warming. How could peer-review have missed such garbage? It’s not like it’s overly complicated. Solar irradiation is the dominant energy supply, AGW theory or not. Put simply, CO2 prevents solar energy from escaping from the Earth, thus causing warming. Jeez, they could have just looked at Wikipedia if they couldn’t understand the concept:”
Once again, ignorance or lies? Which one is it, because anyone has even the most basic knowledge of the science of AGW, (take me for example), knows that the there is no claim that it’s the energy put into the atmosphere by humans that is the source of AGW. The 4AR talks about greenhouse gases absorbing radiation that is solar in origin, not human sources of energy.
There is only one complete and exact computer of global climate and that is the planet itself. By definition it complies with all laws of nature including physics and quantum mechanics. Einstein said “no number of tests can prove I’m right but only one is needed to prove I’m wrong”. That one test, that proves to be wrong the theory that added atmospheric carbon dioxide causes global warming, was run on the planet computer and the results are archived in the Vostok ice cores and other proxies. They show that, repeatedly, a temperature increasing trend changed to a decreasing trend with the carbon dioxide level higher than it had been when the temperature was increasing. For those who understand how feedback works, this trend direction change proves that there is no significant net positive feedback. All that is needed to determine if there is net positive feedback is a temperature trace for a long enough time to average out cyclic variation from random noise and other factors. The temperature trace does not even need to be correct in absolute terms just reasonably accurate in relative terms time-wise.
While determination of the magnitude and even the sign of feedback in climate is difficult using climatology, it is trivial, as described above, for someone who understands feedback to deduce from the temperature record that net positive feedback does not exist. Many climatologists apparently don’t know how feedback works so they don’t realize this. Unaware of their ignorance, they impose significant net positive feedback in their GCMs which causes them to predict substantial warming from carbon dioxide increase. Without significant net positive feedback, the GCMs do not predict significant Global Warming.
As the carbon dioxide level continues to increase and the temperature doesn’t many people are looking more and more foolish.
However, I must agree with you. Chilingar et al is one of the top ten ‘Sceptics’ papers.
Sad, isn’t it?
“As the carbon dioxide level continues to increase and the temperature doesn’t many people are looking more and more foolish.”
If you look at the existing temperature record, there have been previous periods of similar falls and rises in temperature. The trend however, has been distinctly upward.
Dan P Don’t confuse the equational positive feedback with the positive (forcing) feedback. A simplification of what it done to produce a climate senstivity number is to asssume an equilibrium, and if the parameter you are looking at cuases a net increase, it is positive; if a net decrease, it is negative. But it is not the positive f in a control loop.
SJT says “Back in the 60’s, people were starting to work on convection. That’s the problem with people working outside their area of expertise, they know very little of the science they are taking on, and it shows.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/simple-question-simple-answer-no/langswitch_lang/in#more-595 ” Perhaps you can get GS to explain to you, so you can explain to us, how you can do convection properly by running viscosity to hyperviscosity (unreal), have a model that develops negative mass unlesss you do, and still claim your model has the physics right. No need going to the thermo PDE stuff, if you can’t get the ODE for viscosity right when talking about convection.
NT; I’ve just been following McIntyre’s attempts to fathom how Mann2 produces proxy correlation with instrument data; apparently, in a convoluted, and one must assume, deliberately obscurantist procedure, Mann2 does this;
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3720#comments
The trick, after you have selected a proxy which matches the desired temp trend, is to then match it, not with instrument data in the same proximity, but anywhere in the world. And you wonder why Graeme gets upset.
Graeme has no idea why he gets upset. He just is upset.
Cohenite,
Proxy correlation with instrument data relies on having coeval datasets. Ie you have to have instrument data for period A to B, and proxy data for period A to B.
Mann has none, so it cannot be done.
“That one test, that proves to be wrong the theory that added atmospheric carbon dioxide causes global warming, was run on the planet computer and the results are archived in the Vostok ice cores and other proxies. They show that, repeatedly, a temperature increasing trend changed to a decreasing trend with the carbon dioxide level higher than it had been when the temperature was increasing. For those who understand how feedback works, this trend direction change proves that there is no significant net positive feedback.”
There are many forcings that change climate. In this very brief span of time that we are interested in, CO2 is the principal forcing. I have no doubt that over time, the situation will change, or that there are more powerful influences on that climate than CO2 (depending on it’s concentration), the principal one being the sun.
“In this very brief span of time that we are interested in, CO2 is the principal forcing.”
To quote Graeme “ where is your evidence or proof” I note no one responded to my question regarding the magic formula. And the extensive experiment in the Antarctic involving 460 weather stations over the past 45 years has shown zero temperature increase for the last 40 years, but the CO2 has gone up. As I have said bfore the Antarctic is an excellent testing ground because it does not have so many of the other influences, such as urban heat islands etc. to act as noise. Thus the one place where you expect to see clearly the forcing effect of CO2 there is zero.
“Thus the one place where you expect to see clearly the forcing effect of CO2 there is zero.”
The antarctic is a unique example of a micro climate on the planet. The polar vortex keeps it isolated to an extent for the rest of the planet. The peninsulas, which are beyond that vortex, are showing the normal signs of warming.
“There are many forcings that change climate. In this very brief span of time that we are interested in, CO2 is the principal forcing.”
STOP LYING YOU HUMAN EXCREMENT.
Lets go over it again. Forcing is not a real thing. Its a highly processed hypothetical.
So we are talking about CO2-warming. Ok you scab? Where is the evidence that CO2 warms globally?
Remember that lies don’t count and circular reasoning is no reasoning at all.
So SJT admits that his argument comes down to CO2-warms because CO2-warms. The evidence behind it is that CO2-warms.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Only to get beyond this pattern of them lying and making things up and others merely attempting to respond to this aggressive lying….. Here is someone claiming that the ground can absorb and store joules.
“Earth’s climate is the product of a dynamic system encompassing interactions among the atmosphere, oceans and land. Consequently, any global-scale change in surface air temperature affects the other parts of the system, including the rocky continental landmasses.”
This fellow contends that warming goes down as far as 600 feet. But its a bit hard to know how he can say that since he wouldn’t have the 19th century data.
Still if its true it can help account for some delays.
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=313
“STOP LYING YOU HUMAN EXCREMENT.”
LOL!
No stop lying. Just stop lying you filth.
Now you’ve claimed that CO2-warms. Which is your only alleged evidence for the idea that…………. CO2-warms.
So where is your ACTUAL EVIDENCE that CO2-Warms.
Get to it or make your retraction you rotting afterbirth.
Is there anybody out there sane who thinks this is not science-fraud yet?
Graeme; don’t worry about SJT; he is a sophist; the nonsense he wrote about Antarctica is typical; there is no evidence in the West, penninsulas or anywhere in Antarctica consistent with AGW.
Graeme Bird do you read climateaudit?? It would give you a bit more information.
Information about what exactly Pittman? About the pressing reality and high magnitude of AGW?
We ought to move on. These guys have nothing and the focus ought to be on bringing them down and getting on with energy-production. Thats the real looming disaster. Decades of energy stress bearing down on us.
But I’ll take up your suggestion and take more of a look at climateaudit. My impression was that they fought on the defensive and passively unravelled bad data and statistics practices.
Which is a necessary thing but won’t by itself destroy this ghastly movement.
SJT;”The polar vortex keeps it isolated to an extent for the rest of the planet.”
So why do we see the same CO2 atmospheric content as the north pole or the equator. There are no AGG’s released in the continent of Antarctica, the CO2 increase has been the same in the last 40 years as everywhere else but there has been no temperature increase now this is hard evidence of the total failure of the IPCC hypothisis. Now what is your explanation for this 40 year event.
“No stop lying. Just stop lying you filth.”
LOL.
“So why do we see the same CO2 atmospheric content as the north pole or the equator. There are no AGG’s released in the continent of Antarctica, the CO2 increase has been the same in the last 40 years as everywhere else but there has been no temperature increase now this is hard evidence of the total failure of the IPCC hypothisis. Now what is your explanation for this 40 year event.”
It’s not, for the reason already stated. The peninsula’s are warming, and losing ice. The polar vortex tends to keep the central Antarctic isolated from the global climate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex
SJT; For a start many of the 460 weather stations are situated around the perimiter so they are included in the no temperature increase in 40 years. In addition are you saying that your radiative forcing is not applicable in the Antarctic, this you really must explain, is there no atmosphere? is there no sunlight? You really are showing yourself up to be a real loony tunes on this one.
SJT try http://www.climate4you.com/ for real time data from authentic sources not tabloid nonsense. There has been a loss of ice from one peninsular which happens about once every 50 years however the total sea ice area has been increasing for the last 3 years and basically is unchanged in 30 years.
“SJT; For a start many of the 460 weather stations are situated around the perimiter so they are included in the no temperature increase in 40 years. In addition are you saying that your radiative forcing is not applicable in the Antarctic, this you really must explain, is there no atmosphere? is there no sunlight? You really are showing yourself up to be a real loony tunes on this one.”
For much of the year, there is no sunlight. Did you read the link? It’s an interesting area, with ozone depletion adding to the mix. There is no prediction that there will be uniform warming across the globe, to think so would be crazy, with the variations in local conditions that are possible. In this case, the polar vortex and ozone depletion. I would guess there are other factors as well.
SJT; At the pole you have 6 months of sun and 6 months of dark at the circle you have 1 sunless day and 1 nightless day. so it is 50/50 not much of the year. What the heck has polar vortex and ozone depletion got to do with radiative forcing, You really are making yourself look more ridiculous with every post.
The loss of ice from the Western penninsula of Antarctica as a product of global warming is one of the lessor fibs of the passing lie parade of global warming;
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2007GL032529.shtml
It is beyond doubt that the Eastern and central part of the Antarctica (ie 90%), and Antarctica sea ice is expanding; as well as the reasons postulated in the above paper for the lessor EXPANSION in the West, here is another reason;
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/antarcticvolcanoes2.jpg
Although the numerical values and formulation are different between equational positive feedback and positive (forcing) feedback, positive feedback means the same thing in both. The response is greater with positive feedback than it would be if there were no feedback. Net means the combined effects of all active feedbacks whether known or not.
Other assessments from entirely different perspectives also determine that there is no significant net positive feedback. They can be seen at http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2008/01/index.html , http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm and http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm .
Cohenite, have you read those criticisms of Chilingar yet?
SJT; you are made of flubber; I have read eli’s critique of Chilingar’s convectional paper at the behest of luke, and rebutted that critique which confused heat creation with heat transfer, and inappropriately criticised Chilingar for ignoring the wet lapse rate (which he doesn’t), and supposedly being inconsistent with radiative transfer in the atmosphere, and therefore at odds with Miskolczi; which he isn’t either.
I know it’s pointless asking you to produce anything consistent with AGW because you tend to sophistry.
That was on critique of one part. Did you read the others I linked to?
He makes so many errors it is hard to keep track of them all.
When in doubt, ask a scientist 🙂
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/02/antarctica-is-cold/
Scientists have been aware of the role of convection for 40 years now, for Chilingar to claim otherwise is ignorance.
Your RC link is nonsense because there is no ocean warming, and most importantly, as Barry’s graph shows, no lag between SST and land temperature; if the heat isn’t stored in the ocean where is it stored, between Hansen’s ears?
“Your RC link is nonsense because there is no ocean warming, “?
Don’t know how you get that idea? Of course there has been.
cohenite, do you acknowledge scientists became aware of the importance of convetion in the 1960s?
Has the IPCC ever claimed it is the heat generated by humans that is the cause of AGW?
Cohenite, you need to do more research on what it means to refute something. Just posting opposing views isn’t a refutation.
As to your deja vu questions. I have answered them to the best I can – which is basically that I can’t. This is because I refuse to pretend I have knowledge that I don’t have. However, I don’t have to defend AGW myself as there are plenty of scientists advocating it.
Hell you were advocating the optical density version when clearly this doesn’t agree with the Paleoclimate evidence. You agree with a model that doesn’t actually fit evidence.
As to your unequivocal evidence of AGW, I see the Arctic melt, the global ice balance loss, the expansion of poleward and vertically of ecological niches all as evidence. Even the global temp anomaly shows good warming over the last century, you may quibble over UHI, but essentially 4 data sets show the same warming (GISStemp, HadCrut3v, RSS, UAH).
Cohenite, do you still stand by your assertion that Arrenhius’ experiment hasn’t been replicated? That was one of the funniest things I have read.
NT; your advice about contrariness is better directed towards SJT who blithely pronounces that there is evidence of ocean warming; I don’t know where it is. You’re pretty good at the pronouncement style of debate yourself; so Miskolczi’s model is contradicted by Paleoclimate evidence? What? Snowball Earth, which I presume you will hold up as evidence that Arrhenius is vindicated. I have given you the Berner historical CO2/temp graph before and the Luthi et al paper which finds a distinct lack of correlation between levels of CO2 and glacial periods in recent geological history. But just to show something new, unlike you guys stuck in your timewarps, here is another graph which shows the lack of correlation between CO2 temp and ice sheet formation;
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/eemian.html
The Oceans are Warming
http://www.csiro.au/news/OceansWarming.html
“I have given you the Berner historical CO2/temp graph before and the Luthi et al paper which finds a distinct lack of correlation between levels of CO2 and glacial periods in recent geological history. But just to show something new, unlike you guys stuck in your timewarps, here is another graph which shows the lack of correlation between CO2 temp and ice sheet formation;”
It’s a pretty pointless graph, since it doesn’t describe the other forcings on climate.
The Domingues paper has been refuted;
http://climatesci.org/2008/06/20/diagnosis-of-global-sea-level-and-upper-ocean-heat-content-on-seasonal-to-interannual-timescales-paper-willis-et-al-2008-published
Haven’t you heard of ARGO?
“Haven’t you heard of ARGO?”
Sure it shows warming.
ARGO;
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=8926a1d3-f43f-4f8b-811d-0a0daa3e1012&k=39580&p=1
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027033.shtml
You’re a troll SJT; under the 3 strikes rule.
https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2008/NR-08-06-07.html
We could also note the correction.
http://oceans.pmel.noaa.gov/Pdf/heat_2006.pdf
Cohenite,
You yourself amitted as much to me last time we wrote about it. I said any optical density model (or whatever it’s called) would need to adequately explain paleoclimates. You said something like – yes, it’s a problem…
From the icehouse to the hothouse climates of the past gh theory is pretty good. Did the atmosphere suddenly get denser after the slushball or snowball earth? Greenhouse theory does pretty well at explaining the paleoclimate. That would probably be why it’s the favoured model.
You seem to throw the word “refute” around a lot, when what you really mean is “disagree”
Do you mean that they have disproved or that they merely disagree?
“The Domingues paper has been refuted;”
Willis et al updated themselves. Pielke needs to update his topic.
“From the icehouse to the hothouse climates of the past gh theory is pretty good. Did the atmosphere suddenly get denser after the slushball or snowball earth? Greenhouse theory does pretty well at explaining the paleoclimate.”
No it doesn’t. It CANNOT explain it. Goddard tried with snowball earth and nothing they could input into their computer could explain it.
The paleo-climates can be explained by ease of circulation, air pressure, strata-and-heat-budgets, and cosmic rays.
But it cannot be explained via CO2-based models.
Mostly you would want to be looking at the ease of circulation of the ocean currents.
But some people talk about the cosmic ray level being dependent on the suns orbit around the spiral arms of the galaxy.
CO2-based models simply cannot reproduce the paleo-climates and have been falsified by them.
“CO2-based models simply cannot reproduce the paleo-climates and have been falsified by them.”
There is no such thing as a “CO2-based” model.
NT; I’ll treat your comment about Miskolczi as genuine, unlike SJT, who I think is disingenuous; I guess we can be thankful that he didn’t raise Barnett as evidence of ocean warming; simply, the papers revising the findings of cooling are very suss, and I note he doesn’t look at the Johnson paper which, grudgingly, looks at the far wider warming bias in the XBT data, compared with the alleged cooling bias in a small fraction of the ARGO floats.
But in respect of Miskolczi I think you are stuck on optical depth; the optical depth at CO2 wavelengths is about 10 m; you can’t change that very much with surface warming because of the fractional response by Wien; the key point from Miskolczi was that he used basic principles, conservation of energy the virial theorem and Kirchhoff to show there would always be internal radiative equilibrium with only internal variations in radiative indices; Kirchhoff showed there would be a thermal equilibrium between the surface and the atmosphere as a consequence; some have quibbled about the Kirchhoff equations, and there is a case against the universality of Kirchhoff based on Stewart’s Law (I have previously posted the Robitaille paper), but this will not effect the thermal equilibrium suppostion of Miskolczi because absorption will equal emission over the system; the point about Miskolczi is that his predicted -ve feedbacks such as a decline in RH and cloud variation are being empirically verified; AGW indicators on the other hand, such as the THS are not occuring, and their absence also verifies Miskolczi; as to past Paleoclimate fluctuations; internal variation requires external energy variation; the CO2 models simply have not done a good job at excluding significant variations in insolation. It is also the case that a massive asteroid impact or a massive volcanic eruption can offset the system, but these do not impact on Miskolczi’s theory because these are not changes that depend on an alteration to radiative balance such as the CO2 model does (did SJT really say there is not a CO2 model!).
“(did SJT really say there is not a CO2 model!).”
I certainly did. There is no such thing as a “CO2” model.
Well, that’s that for you SJT; I just googled CO2 atmospheric models and got 358,000 responses; then there is the daddy of them all penned by your hero Spencer Weart, the semi-infinite opaque model. You have no credibility at all.
There are many atmospheric models, usually CO2 is a component in them. CO2 is just one more greenhouse gas, there is nothing remarkable about that requires someone to model only CO2. There is a particular interest in CO2, because that is what we are adding gigatons of to the atmosphere. But the modelers don’t build CCMs, they build GCMs.
They build them on the basis that CO2 has this unproven hypothetical FORCING effect. And they have falsified themselves constantly on the paleo record.
Goddard did everything they could to simulate the snowball earth. But the computer wouldn’t do it. Therefore their assumptions have to be counted wrong. But they didn’t see it that way because they aren’t scientists. They are idiots.
“There is no such thing as a “CO2-based” model.”
They are ALL CO2-based. Someone might be labouring away with one that isn’t. But if so they haven’t received any publicity. All of them appear to be CO2-driven. And this is why they will all be falsified by the paleo-record.
http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2007/05/20/the-goddard-institute-the-curse-of-the-lone-paradigm/
Here is Goddard falsifying their own computer model but being too damn idiotic to realise it.
Look there may be one or two models out there that don’t assume any CO2-forcing. Let us know if you find one.
Its all a daily senseless waste of money since they don’t run competing paradigms in parallel.
Anytime you have water moving away from the noon-day sun, warmer water downwelling under colder water, colder water upwelling, water moving away from the equator…. and like occurences in the air or in the magma under the sea, you have the potential for a heat buildup.
Hence the factor they ought to be looking for, along with the cosmic ray record, is the ease of circulation.
Its so obvious, this assumptions is always popping up in the paleo record. But these dummies are always attempting to run these CO2-driven monstrosities with parallel or supercomputers and they just get nowhere.
Its an embarrassment.
Graeme Bird said…re climateaudit “But I’ll take up your suggestion and take more of a look at climateaudit. My impression was that they fought on the defensive and passively unravelled bad data and statistics practices”.
That’s a bit of an understatement, Graeme. Here’s a summary from McKitrick:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/APEC-hockey.pdf
As you know, he’s the other half of M&M. McIntyre runs climateaudit, McKitrick is an economics prof at the University of Guelph.
Here’s a quote from McKitrick’s abstract:
“At the political level the emerging debate is about whether the enormous international trust that has been placed in the IPCC was betrayed. The hockey stick story reveals that the IPCC allowed a deeply flawed study to dominate the Third Assessment Report, which suggests the possibility of bias in the Report-writing process. In view of the massive global influence of IPCC Reports, there is an urgent need to bias-proof future assessments in order to put climate policy onto a new foundation that will better serve the public interest”.
Eli Rabbet said…”Beck wrote a telephone book with no meaning…”
That was Beck’s intention. He is a biologist, not an atmospheric physicist. His intention was to collate many studies on CO2 by legitimate scientists (including Nobelists) to show that the IPCC had cherry picked only those that supported their paradigm. They totally ignored any study on CO2 that contradicted the 270 ppmv pre Industrial density and any that contradicted the present density as being the highest since the pre Industrial era.
Yeah he’s insufficiently angy. Barely restrained homocidal anger is the appropriate attitude here. Like he didn’t emphasise that the whole lot be sacked and banned from public appointments, effigies of them left hanging in the abandoned offices with their faces in grimacing pain.
““At the political level the emerging debate is about whether the enormous international trust that has been placed in the IPCC was betrayed. The hockey stick story reveals that the IPCC allowed a deeply flawed study to dominate the Third Assessment Report, which suggests the possibility of bias in the Report-writing process. In view of the massive global influence of IPCC Reports, there is an urgent need to bias-proof future assessments in order to put climate policy onto a new foundation that will better serve the public interest”.”
That’s one lie. The hockey stick is only about 10% of the case. The obsession witht the hockey stick puzzles me. The IPCC knows that the case is comples, and difficult, so it has pursued several lines of support for it’s case. If you read any of the reports, they are very broad in their research. Off the top of my head.
Modelling.
Ice/Glaciers.
Temperature.
The Physical Basis.
Correlation.
Sea level.
The hockey stick was proved to be either fraud or incompetence and you guys won’t let it rest. It cannot go away until you guys let it. Lambert said it was mostly ok as did Robin Williams. It cannot go away until you guys let it die a heathen death.
“This statement by Schmidt appears to be saying that the oceans absorb heat but do not experience a temperature change or the oceans absorb the heat but it takes time for the temperature change to affect the atmosphere.
The first concept is illogical, with regard to the second a convincing demonstration of the rapid reaction of global temperatures to ocean temperature changes was the effect of the super El Nino of 1998.”
This is just an inability to understand what Gavin is saying. What Gavin is saying is that the oceans are so large, they have a huge capacity to absorb heat without warming a lot. It’s like warming a small block of metal or a large block, it takes longer to warm the large block with the same rate of radiation being applied to it. That is one of the concerns, the amount of warming that will happen once the initial inertia is overcome in the system.
SJT
And what caused the oceans to warm to produce the El Nino of 1998?
A homopolar motor?
SJT
In other words you don’t know, which is not bad – the first time you have admitted error, albeit in an obtuse way.
It’s an impossible task Louis; the faithful cannot admit error about their faith; SJT is particularly stricken; it’s like arguing with John Cleese; although not as amusing.
Cohenite, you can’t help laughing at Louis and his monpolar motor, can you? It’s what keeps the earth spinning. Without that motor, it would stop.
As for Chilingar, he’s wrong about climate scientists not being aware of convection by about 40 years.
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0493(2003)131%3C1189:SEVAAS%3E2.0.CO%3B2&ct=1
“ABSTRACT
Simulations of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Mark 3 coupled climate model, which is not flux adjusted and has an ocean north–south resolution of approximately 0.9°, are described. Major indices, periodicity, and spatial patterns of the modeled ENSO compare well to those observed over the last 100 yr. This good simulation is achieved despite some deficiencies in the model climatology, in particular the climatological tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST). The model SST climatology has a “cold tongue” that is too strong and extends too far into the western equatorial Pacific, a common problem experienced by many climate models. Although this cold tongue problem also affects the model rainfall climatology over the tropical ocean, the ENSO–rainfall teleconnection pattern is realistically simulated, particularly over the Indonesian and northeast Australian regions, where in reality rainfall is significantly affected by ENSO cycles.
Comparisons between modeled and observed equatorial thermocline structure reveal that the model thermocline depth (depth of the 20°C isotherm) is shallower, whereas the spread or thickness (depth difference between 16° and 22°C isotherms) of the modeled thermocline is greater, than the observed. The former is favorable, whereas the latter is unfavorable, for generating strong ENSO variability, because a shallower thermocline with smaller spread of isotherms and steeper slope makes it easier for the equatorial upwelling to draw the colder subthermocline water to the surface. On balance, the model is capable of producing ENSO cycles with realistic amplitude. This model capability is further highlighted by what is called here a “super-ENSO” pair: a super-El Niño event followed by a super-La Niña event, both with a Niño-3.4 index (SST average over 5°S–5°N, 120°–170°W) exceeding 3°C in amplitude.
The pairing of the two superevents is unique, and the dynamics are explored. It is found that during the super-El Niño event, the surface zonal wind stress, SST, and the equatorial upwelling anomalies are proportionately large. In contrast, during the super-La Niña event, the response of SST anomalies to easterly and upwelling anomalies is disproportionately large. It is demonstrated that this exceptionally large cooling of SST is linked to an exceptionally strong shallowing of the equatorial thermocline depth, and that the shallowing is induced by the exceptionally strong westerly wind anomalies associated with the super-ENSO. In the context of the recently proposed recharge–oscillator paradigm, which is shown to operate in the present model, the strong shallowing can be seen as a result of the discharge of the equatorial Pacific warm water volume in response to the exceptionally strong westerly anomalies associated with the super-El Niño event.”
In your own words SJT. What caused the El Nina?
Dear AGW alarmists: please read the following and realise that (i) there is no scientific consensus on mankind causing climate warming & (ii) without evidence that we are you are ‘flying a kite’ – read and weep!
Global Warming – The other side of the argument.?
Scientists in this section conclude that natural causes are likely more to blame than human activities for the observed rising temperatures.
•Khabibullo Ismailovich Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovskaya Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the supervisor of the Astrometria project of the Russian section of the International Space Station: “Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy – almost throughout the last century – growth in its intensity…Ascribing ‘greenhouse’ effect properties to the Earth’s atmosphere is not scientifically substantiated…Heated greenhouse gases, which become lighter as a result of expansion, ascend to the atmosphere only to give the absorbed heat away.” (Russian News & Information Agency, Jan. 15, 2007 [9]) (See also [10], [11], [12])
•Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: “[T]he recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air.” (Capitalism Magazine, August 22, 2002)[13] Baliunas and Soon wrote that “there is no reliable evidence for increased severity or frequency of storms, droughts, or floods that can be related to the air’s increased greenhouse gas content.” (Marshall Institute, March 25, 2003) [14]
•David Bellamy, environmental campaigner, broadcaster and botanist: “Global warming is a largely natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.”[15]
•Reid Bryson, emeritus professor of Meterorology: “It’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.” [16].
•Robert M. Carter, geologist, researcher at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia: “The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown.” (Telegraph, April 9, 2006 [17])
•George V. Chilingar, Professor of Civil and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California: “The authors identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate: (1) solar radiation …, (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities … . The writers provide quantitative estimates of the scope and extent of their corresponding effects on the Earth’s climate [and] show that the human-induced climatic changes are negligible.” (Environmental Geology, vol. 50 no. 6, August 2006 [18])
•Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: “That portion of the scientific community that attributes climate warming to CO2 relies on the hypothesis that increasing CO2, which is in fact a minor greenhouse gas, triggers a much larger water vapour response to warm the atmosphere. This mechanism has never been tested scientifically beyond the mathematical models that predict extensive warming, and are confounded by the complexity of cloud formation – which has a cooling effect. … We know that [the sun] was responsible for climate change in the past, and so is clearly going to play the lead role in present and future climate change. And interestingly… solar activity has recently begun a downward cycle.” (The Hill Times, March 22, 2004 [19])
•William M. Gray, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University: “This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential.”[20]) “I am of the opinion that [global warming] is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people.” [21]) “So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing—all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more.”[22])
•Yuri Izrael, vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “There is no proven link between human activity and global warming.”[23]
•Zbigniew Jaworowski, chair of the Scientific Council at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw: “The atmospheric temperature variations do not follow the changes in the concentrations of CO2 … climate change fluctuations comes … from cosmic radiation.” (21st Century Science & Technology, Winter 2003-2004, p. 52-65 [24])
•David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware: “About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming.” (May 15, 2006 [25])
•Marcel Leroux, former Professor of Climatology, Université Jean Moulin: “The possible causes, then, of climate change are: well-established orbital parameters on the palaeoclimatic scale, … solar activity, …; volcanism …; and far at the rear, the greenhouse effect, and in particular that caused by water vapor, the extent of its influence being unknown. These factors are working together all the time, and it seems difficult to unravel the relative importance of their respective influences upon climatic evolution. Equally, it is tendentious to highlight the anthropic factor, which is, clearly, the least credible among all those previously mentioned.” (M. Leroux, Global Warming – Myth or Reality?, 2005, p. 120 [26])
•Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: global warming “is the biggest scientific hoax being perpetrated on humanity. There is no global warming due to human anthropogenic activities. The atmosphere hasn’t changed much in 280 million years, and there have always been cycles of warming and cooling. The Cretaceous period was the warmest on earth. You could have grown tomatoes at the North Pole”[27]
•Tim Patterson [28], paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada: “There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth’s temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century’s modest warming?” [29]
•Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology, The University of Adelaide: “We only have to have one volcano burping and we have changed the whole planetary climate… It looks as if carbon dioxide actually follows climate change rather than drives it”. [[30]]
•Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences: “So we see that the scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities.” (Environment News, 2001 [31])
•Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “[T]he truth is probably somewhere in between [the common view and that of skeptics], with natural causes probably being more important over the past century, whereas anthropogenic causes will probably be more dominant over the next century. … [A]bout 2/3’s (give or take a third or so) of the warming [over the past century] should be attributed to increased solar activity and the remaining to anthropogenic causes.” His opinion is based on some proxies of solar activity over the past few centuries. [32]
•Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia: “The greenhouse effect is real. However, the effect is minute, insignificant, and very difficult to detect.” (Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 2005) [33] “The Earth currently is experiencing a warming trend, but there is scientific evidence that human activities have little to do with it.”, NCPA Study No. 279, Sep. 2005 [34]. “It’s not automatically true that warming is bad, I happen to believe that warming is good, and so do many economists.” (CBC’s Denial machine @ 19:23 – Google Video Link)
•Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: “[T]here’s increasingly strong evidence that previous research conclusions, including those of the United Nations and the United States government concerning 20th century warming, may have been biased by underestimation of natural climate variations. The bottom line is that if these variations are indeed proven true, then, yes, natural climate fluctuations could be a dominant factor in the recent warming. In other words, natural factors could be more important than previously assumed.” (Harvard University Gazette, 24 April 2003 [35])
•Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London: “…the myth is starting to implode. … Serious new research at The Max Planck Institute has indicated that the sun is a far more significant factor…” (Global Warming as Myth [36])
•Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center: “Our team … has discovered that the relatively few cosmic rays that reach sea-level play a big part in the everyday weather. They help to make low-level clouds, which largely regulate the Earth’s surface temperature. During the 20th Century the influx of cosmic rays decreased and the resulting reduction of cloudiness allowed the world to warm up. … most of the warming during the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in low cloud cover.” [37]
•Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, Professor Emeritus from University of Ottawa: “At this stage, two scenarios of potential human impact on climate appear feasible: (1) the standard IPCC model …, and (2) the alternative model that argues for celestial phenomena as the principal climate driver. … Models and empirical observations are both indispensable tools of science, yet when discrepancies arise, observations should carry greater weight than theory. If so, the multitude of empirical observations favours celestial phenomena as the most important driver of terrestrial climate on most time scales, but time will be the final judge.” (In J. Veizer, “Celestial climate driver: a perspective from four billion years of the carbon cycle”, Geoscience Canada, March, 2005. [38], [39])
[edit] Believe cause of global warming is unknown
Scientists in this section conclude it is too early to ascribe any principal cause to the observed rising temperatures, man-made or natural.
•Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks: “Thus, there is a possibility that only a fraction of the present warming trend may be attributed to the greenhouse effect resulting from human activities. This conclusion is contrary to the IPCC (2007) Report, which states that “most” of the present warming (+0.7°C/100 years) is due to the greenhouse effect.”[40]
•Claude Allègre, geochemist, Institute of Geophysics (Paris): “The increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere is an observed fact and mankind is most certainly responsible. In the long term, this increase will without doubt become harmful, but its exact role in the climate is less clear. Various parameters appear more important than CO2. Consider the water cycle and formation of various types of clouds, and the complex effects of industrial or agricultural dust. Or fluctuations of the intensity of the solar radiation on annual and century scale, which seem better correlated with heating effects than the variations of CO2 content.” (Translation from the original French version in L’Express, May 10, 2006 [41])
•August H. “Augie” Auer Jr., retired New Zealand MetService Meteorologist, past professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming: “So if you multiply the total contribution 3.6 by the man-made portion of it, 3.2, you find out that the anthropogenic contribution of CO2 to the the global greenhouse effect is 0.117 percent, roughly 0.12 percent, that’s like 12c in $100.” “‘It’s miniscule … it’s nothing,'”. [42]
•Robert C. Balling, Jr., director of the Office of Climatology and a professor of geography at Arizona State University: “[I]t is very likely that the recent upward trend [in global surface temperature] is very real and that the upward signal is greater than any noise introduced from uncertainties in the record. However, the general error is most likely to be in the warming direction, with a maximum possible (though unlikely) value of 0.3 °C. … At this moment in time we know only that: (1) Global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. (2) Mid-tropospheric temperatures have warmed little over the same period. (3) This difference is not consistent with predictions from numerical climate models.” (George C. Marshall Institute, Policy Outlook, September 2003[43])
•Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland: “There is evidence of global warming. … But warming does not confirm that carbon dioxide is causing it. Climate is always warming or cooling. There are natural variability theories of warming. To support the argument that carbon dioxide is causing it, the evidence would have to distinguish between human-caused and natural warming. This has not been done.” (The New Zealand Herald, May 9, 2006 [44])
•David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma: “The amount of climatic warming that has taken place in the past 150 years is poorly constrained, and its cause–human or natural–is unknown. There is no sound scientific basis for predicting future climate change with any degree of certainty. If the climate does warm, it is likely to be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful. In my opinion, it would be foolish to establish national energy policy on the basis of misinformation and irrational hysteria.” (Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, December 6, 2006 [45])
•Richard Lindzen, Alfred Sloane Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences: “We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 °C higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of CO2 have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds). But–and I cannot stress this enough–we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to CO2 or to forecast what the climate will be in the future.” [46] “[T]here has been no question whatsoever that CO2 is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas — albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in CO2 should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed.” (San Francisco Examiner, July 12, 2006 [47] and in Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2006, Page A14)
•Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville: “We need to find out how much of the warming we are seeing could be due to mankind, because I still maintain we have no idea how much you can attribute to mankind.” (George C. Marshall Institute Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, April 17, 2006 [48])
Still convinced that this new religon is right?
“In your own words SJT. What caused the El Nina?”
I’m quite happy to ramble on at my own level of incompetence, but the scientists who investigate the climate and the papers that result from their research carry a lot more weight than I do.
SJT,
It isn’t a monopolar motor, and you admit in reply to Graeme Bird’s request that you personally know nothing about the science. You can’t even supply a concise reference to a paper which might support your position.
Yet you consistently reply with ad hominems and make statements not supported with data.
And you are employed as a computer programmer at the AGO?????
What do you know about the AGO and Aspendale?
“It isn’t a monopolar motor, and you admit in reply to Graeme Bird’s request that you personally know nothing about the science. You can’t even supply a concise reference to a paper which might support your position.”
No, unlike a lot of people here, I am aware of my level of competence.
SJT; Since the beginning of time we have all followed the same path, you try things, some are successful some fail. You learn from your successes and failures. But you must evaluate logically with an open mind or you will never learn anything. Things will never be the way you want them to be so be realistic. The reason I follow the blogs is to read and learn and I hope I will keep learning until the day I die, I have benifited greatly from this blog because of its diversity and to be perfectly honest if anyone from your side could come up with irrefutable evidence I would definitely reconsider my position.
“I have benifited greatly from this blog because of its diversity and to be perfectly honest if anyone from your side could come up with irrefutable evidence I would definitely reconsider my position.”
Science is rarely about irrefutable evidence, especially at the bleeding edge. That’s what research is all about, discovering the unknown.
SJT said…”What Gavin is saying is that the oceans are so large, they have a huge capacity to absorb heat without warming a lot”.
What you fail to understand is that Gavin Schmidt is a mathematician who programs computer models. What could he possibly know about oceans or thermodynamics?
Read this article by Glassman in which he exposes Schmidt’s lack of understanding of feedback and physics in general:
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/11/gavin_schmidt_on_the_acquittal.html
Here’s the original article by Glassman for which the above link is a response to Schmidt’s critique of the link below:
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html#ABSTRACT_
“What you fail to understand is that Gavin Schmidt is a mathematician who programs computer models. What could he possibly know about oceans or thermodynamics?”
On the basis that a mathematician is being criticised by a rocket scientist, I find your logic flawed.
SJT
Another one of your famous Non-Sequiturs.
Mathematicians are not scientists because they don’t practice the scientific method. They are masters in logic and symbolism.
So here we have a physicist telling a mathemtician that the maths master has it wrong.
“What does Gavin say about solubility and CO2 on his website, http://www.realclimate.org? First, Google says: Your search – “solubility pump” site:realclimate.org – did not match any documents. So apparently he completely neglects the CO2 physics of the solubility pump!”
Have to love that logic. Gavin is wrong because a google search of a website for the genearl public did not throw up the phrase he was looking for. This could be the same method that Chilingar used to decide that convection is not used in climate models, and is the same method used by Barry Moore. Realclimate is an attempt to ‘dumb down’ the science so that the general public can understand what is the science behind AGW, it is not “the science”. If you want “the science”, read the papers.
“I’m quite happy to ramble on at my own level of incompetence, but the scientists who investigate the climate and the papers that result from their research carry a lot more weight than I do.”
Neither you nor they carry any weight at all. You are an idiot. You admit you know nothing. They are idiots who also have no evidence but they won’t admit it. The differences are irrelevant. They are not scientists so stop lying and calling them scientists.
You can call them science-workers, research-grant whores. These are acceptable names for such people. You can call them people who are masters at passing tests via the use of nemonics.
Nemonics. The Australian approach to higher learning.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Now one of you dim bulbs had some sort of derision on the fly for a paradigm that I gather Louis put up one time or another.
I’m supposing that you are aware that derision is not a reliable methodology when it comes to human reason.
Can you tell me why you think it isn’t a worthy paradigm?
Is it because it relates to gravity and you think there is nothing further to be said about the subject?
You would have to be a complete moron to imagine that this the case. We know that gravity isn’t pinned down because they keep on coming up with these feeble excuses like dark matter and for the love of stupid buxom blondes “dark energy.”
So given that the state of the theory of gravity is no reason to be dismissive of this paradigm what is your reason?
I’ve never heard of it before. So you tell me its weak points?
If it has no weak points you know of why isn’t it under consideration?
You see you alarmists will never be scientists. You’d have to die and be born again.
“Neither you nor they carry any weight at all. You are an idiot. You admit you know nothing. They are idiots who also have no evidence but they won’t admit it. The differences are irrelevant. They are not scientists so stop lying and calling them scientists.”
I didn’t say I know nothing. All I said was, unlike you, I am aware of the limits of my knowledge.
AGW propogandists have ‘manipulated’ large numbers of people into believing that we, mankind are causing the world to warm. That the world has warmed (as it’s done many times before) is not in doubt, however there is no clear, observable, testable evidence that any or all of the recent warming (which has now stopped) has been caused by mankind (and CO2). To be able to prove beyond doubt that we have caused the warming you would have to have significantly more knowledge about all the factors that influence climate change than mankind currently has – any scientist has to admit that we don’t have this level of knowlewdge at the moment. Computers are very useful for modeling but as we know their ability to predict future events with accuracy a few days out is limited – look at how the most powerful ones fail to accurately predict the weather or financial markets.
Therefore, AGW is just a claim, a weak theory, a supposition; it’s way off being a theory that has passed all traditional scientific evidential criteria.
Let’s remember that over the last twenty years ‘experts’, politicians, the media & pressure groups (a consensus?) told us that we were going to have an new Ice Age, AIDS, bird flu and SARS epidemics, that a Y2K computer failure would ‘stop’ the world, that Saddam had WMD etc, etc. What happened – very little – storm in a tea cup – scaremongering and brinkmanship on a grand scale. Mankind may have had an impact on climate change (he certainly does on the environment at a local level) or may do so in the future, however there is no substantive, observable, or verifiable evidence that we have as yet had any global impact or that we understand why we might in the future.
“Stop pretending your side has ANY evidence you jerk. You don’t have anything. You have nothing.”
LOL
SJT said…”On the basis that a mathematician is being criticised by a rocket scientist, I find your logic flawed”.
A Ph.D in math studies undergraduate courses that lead him to a bachelor’s degree in math, then he specializes in math through his graduate studies. He might encounter problem of applied mathematics that lead him into physics at a superficial level but his expertise in physics is literally nil.
A Ph.D in physics studies general physics for 5 years to get a bachelor’s degree, then he specializes in physics. He is an expert in the same by the time he gets his doctorate. Schmidt does not list physics among his qualifications and I think it’s because his expertise is in computer modeling, not physics.
Degrees in climate science were not available much before 1980. Dr. Joanne Simpson was the first scientists to get a doctorate in meteorology, back in the 1950’s. Meteorologists and atmospheric physicists specialize in climate related sciences both during their undergraduate courses and their graduate courses. Scientists like Spencer, Christy, Michaels, Trenberth, et al specialized in atmospheric physics during their 8 years of getting a degree.
Glassman is another kind of cat altogether. He’s an engineer who specializing in electronics, applied mathematics, applied physics, communication and information theory.
Engineers go through a thorough undergraduate program in math, physics and chemistry as well as specializing in their field of engineering, which is in the field of physics. When I studied engineering for a couple of years, the courses were all honours-level and the academic burden was twice that of other disciplines. For example, a straight physics undergraduate degree required 15 hours of class time per week plus labs and tutorials. Engineering required 21 hours of class time plus labs and tutorials, for a total of over 40 hours per week.
While physics student took one math course and one physics course, we took two of each. Engineering is about problem solving and many engineers who get their Ph. D’s can go into other disciplines fairly easily because they have studied a broad spectrum of sciences and have learned problem solving to an expert level.
Glassman was not arguing with Schmidt on climate science, he was arguing on subjects he knew well, like feedback theory and computer modeling. Schmidt could not possibly have the in-depth training in physics that Glassman has.
One of the scientists Schmidt and the AGWers love to discredit is Fred Singer, yet he’s one of the most brilliant scientists of the bunch. He has a degree in electrical engineering, one of the most difficult degrees to attain due to the work content and the difficulty encountered academically. Furthermore, he is an expert on the atmosphere. I find it pitiful to hear Schmidt putting him down because Schmidt is not even in the same league as Singer academically or on the atmosphere.
Cohenite
are you going to acknowledge that Chilingar was wrong about scientists not being aware of the role of convection in climate, when they first became aware of it 40 years ago when their first simple models weren’t working?
You are laying on this dishonest conflation between pre and post energy-deprivation-crusade scientists AGAIN!!!!!!
There are alarmist scientists and there are real scientists and the two are not to be confused.
Here is an answer to an email from a thermista in the Canadian Civil Service.
By Lord Monckton
Dear Sir Humphrey – The “Abundance of scientific statements” that you mention is no sound or logical basis for deciding or believing anything. The question is whether the scientific statements have any rational justification, and whether those making them are in effect making statements that are political rather than scientific, rent-seeking rather than objective. After all, this is the age of reason (or it was).
Therefore, one should not accord to “scientists” the status of infallible high priests merely because they mumble a hieratic language with which one is unfamiliar. There is clear, compelling evidence that many of the major conclusions of the IPCC, your new religion’s constantly-changing Holy Book, are based on evidence that has been fabricated. The “hockey stick” graph that purported to abolish the mediaeval warm period is just one example. So let me try to lure you away from feeble-minded, religious belief in the Church of “Global Warming” and back towards the use of the faculty of reason.
Let us begin with the “devastation of New Orleans” that you mention. Even the High Priests of your Church are entirely clear that individual extreme-weather events such as Hurricane Katrina cannot, repeat cannot, be attributed to “global warming”. Even the Holy Book makes this entirely plain. There was one priest – Emanuel (a good, religious name) – who had suggested there might be a link between “global warming” and hurricanes; but he has recently recanted, at least to some extent. Very nearly all others in the hierarchy of your Church are clear that ascribing individual extreme-weather events to “global warming” is impossible. Why? Well, let’s take the question of landfalling Atlantic hurricanes such as Katrina. The implication of your attribution of Hurricane Katrina to “global warming” is twofold: that “global warming” is happening, and that in consequence either the frequency or the intensity of tropical weather systems such as hurricanes is increasing. Neither of these propositions is true. Yes, there has been “global warming” for 300 years, since the end of the 60-year period of unusually low solar activity known as the Maunder Minimum (after the celebrated Astronomer Royal who studied it). But there has been no net warming since 1995, and Keenlyside et al, in the theological journal Nature a few months ago, say they do not expect a new record year for global temperatures until 2015 at the earliest. If these theologians are correct, there will have been a 20-year period of no net “global warming” even though the presence of the devil Siotu in the ether grows inexorably stronger. And, secondly, the number of Atlantic hurricanes making landfall has actually fallen throughout the 20th century, even as temperatures have risen. Indeed, some theologians have argued that warmer weather actually reduces the temperature differential between sea and sky that generates hurricanes, reducing their frequency, and that the extra heat in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system increases wind-shear in tropical storms, tending to reduce their intensity. Certainly the frequency of intense tropical cyclones has fallen throughout the 30-year satellite record, even though temperatures have increased compared with 30 years ago. Also, the damage done by Hurricane Katrina was chiefly caused by the failure of the Democrat-led city administration to heed repeated warnings from the Corps of Engineers that the levees needed to be strengthened.
Next, you mention the recent earthquake damage at Galveston, and you imply that this is something new and terrible. Perhaps you would like to do some research of your own to verify whether the High Priests of your Church, some of whom have blamed the Galveston incident on the wrath of the devil Siotu, are likely to be telling the truth. And how, you may ask, may a non-theologian such as yourself argue theology with your High Priests? Well, the Galveston incident will give you just one indication of the many ways in which a lay member of the Church of “Global Warming” may verify for himself whether or not the Great Druids of his religion are speaking the truth from their pulpits in the media. Cast your eye back just over a century, to 1906, and look up what happened to Galveston then. Which was worse – Galveston 2008 or Galveston 1906? Next, check the global mean surface temperature in 1906: many theology faculties compile surface temperature data and make it publicly available to the faithful and to infidels alike. Was the global mean surface temperature significantly lower or significantly higher in 2008 than in 1906? What implications do your two answers have for your proposition that Galveston 2008 can be attributed to “global warming”?
Next, you mention fires in California. Once again, you can either sit slumped in your pew, gazing in adoration at the Archdruids as their pious faces flicker across your television screen, or you can do a little research for yourself. It may, for instance, occur to you to ask whether droughts were worse in the United States in the second half of the 20th century than they were in the first half. Once again, you may want to check with your local theological faculty to obtain the answer to this question. Or you may like to pick up a copy of The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. And you may want to verify whether temperatures in the second half of the 20th century were warmer than in the first half. Once again, what are the implications of your two answers for your proposition that “global warming” is causing forest fires? You could also talk to the Fire Department in California and obtain its data on the causes of forest fires. You might be mightily surprised by the answers you get.
Next, you talk of beetles in your forests destroying natural resources. Here, you could ask the Druids just a couple of simple questions. What evidence do they have, if any, that whichever species of beetle you have in mind has not wrought havoc in the forests before? And, even if your clergy think that they have evidence that the beetle-damage is new, what evidence do they have, if any, that the beetle-damage is greater because of “global warming” than it would otherwise have been? Of course, you could ask them the wider question what evidence there is that anthropogenic “global warming”, as opposed to solar warming, is the reason for the temperature increases that have occurred over the past 300 years. The more honest parish priests will admit that for 250 of the past 300 years none of the inferred warming can be attributed to human industry. They will also be compelled to concede, if you press them, that the warming of the most recent 50 years has not occurred at a rate any greater than that which was observed before, so that it is in fact very difficult to discern any anthropogenic signal at all in the temperature record.
Next, you talk of people migrating from one place to another because in some places water has become scarce. Once again, it is easy for a layman, whether a true believer such as yourself or not, to verify whether such migrations are as a result of “global warming”. For instance, you could ask whether there have been changing patterns of drought and flood before in human history. Once you have collected some historical data – most theological faculties have quite a lot of this available, though you may have to dig a little to get it – you could compare previous migrations with those of which you now speak. And you could also ask your local parish priest whether a theological phenomenon known as the Clausius-Clapeyron relation mandates that, as the atmosphere warms, the carrying-capacity of the space occupied by the atmosphere for water vapor decreases, remains static, or increases near-exponentially. Once you have found the answers to these not particularly difficult questions, you may like to spend some of your devotional time meditating on the question whether, or to what extent, the changes in patterns of flood and drought that have occurred in the past give you any confidence that such changes occurring today are either worse than those in the past or attributable to “global warming”, whether caused by the increasing presence of the devil Siotu in the atmosphere or by the natural evolution of the climate. During your meditation, you may like to refer to the passage from the 2001 edition of the Holy Book of the IPCC that describes the climate as “a complex, non-linear, chaotic object” whose long-term future evolution cannot reliably be predicted.
If you are willing to reflect a little on the questions I have raised – and, with the exception of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, I have done my best to avoid anything that might be too technical for a layman to find out for himself – you will perhaps come to realize that there is very little basis in scientific fact for the alarmist, hellfire preaching in which your clergy love to indulge. And you may even find your faith in your new religion beginning to weaken a little in the face of the truths that you will have unearthed by the not particularly difficult process of simply checking those statements of your clergy that you can easily and independently verify. There are, of course, many environmental problems posed by the astonishing recent success of humankind. If you were concerned, for instance, about deforestation, or the loss of species whose habitats have been displaced by humans, then your concerns would have a good grounding in fact. But, given the abject failure of global temperatures to rise as the Druids had forecast, it must surely be clear to you that the influence of the devil Siotu on global temperatures – your theologians call this “climate sensitivity” – must be a great deal smaller than your Holy Book asks you to believe.
Finally, you may wonder why I have so scathingly described your pious belief in your new religion as founded upon blind faith rather than upon the light of reason. I have drafted this email in this way so that you can perhaps come to see for yourself just how baffling it is to the likes of me, who were educated in the light of TH Huxley’s dictum that the first duty of the scientist is skepticism, to see how easily your hierarchy is able to prey upon your naive credulity. I do not target this comment at you alone: there are far too many others who, like you, are in positions of some authority and whose duty to think these things through logically is great, and yet who simply fail to ask even the most elementary and blindingly obvious questions before sappily, happily, clappily believing in, and parroting by rote, whatever the current Establishment proposes. I do not know whether you merely believe all that you are told by the Druids because otherwise you will find yourself in conflict with other true believers among your colleagues or, worse, among your superiors. If you are under pressures of this kind, I do sympathize. But if you are free to think for yourself without penalty, may I beg you – in the name of humanity – to give the use of reason a try?
Why “in the name of humanity”? Because, although the noisy preachers from the media pulpits have found it expedient not to say so, there have been food riots all round the world as the biofuel scam whipped up by the High Priests of your religion takes vast tracts of agricultural land out of food production. Millions are now starving because the price of food has doubled in little more than a year. A leaked report by the World Bank says that fully three-quarters of that doubling has occurred as a direct result of the biofuel scam. So your religion is causing mass starvation in faraway countries, and is even causing hardship to the poorest in your own country. Can you, in conscience, look away from the sufferings that your beliefs are inflicting upon the poorest and most helpless people in the world?
“There is clear, compelling evidence that many of the major conclusions of the IPCC, your new religion’s constantly-changing Holy Book, are based on evidence that has been fabricated. The “hockey stick” graph that purported to abolish the mediaeval warm period is just one example. So let me try to lure you away from feeble-minded, religious belief in the Church of “Global Warming” and back towards the use of the faculty of reason.”
Strange, I find the AGW argument to have been one of consistency. “Monkton” makes this assertion, then provides no evidence to support it. On the other hand, AGW deniers are quite content to believe mutually contradictory statements, and a constantly changing set of statements on why AGW is wrong.