Studies of Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles based on sediments and ice cores back to 640 000 years (640 kyr) document abrupt initiation of global warming and cooling events over short time scales of decades to a few years, implying extreme instability of the Earth’s atmosphere, with implications for 21st century climate change projections.
Current rise rates of atmospheric radiative forcing toward ~450 ppm CO2 are tracking toward an ice-free Earth.
Time tables of carbon emission reduction targets which take little account of the rates of ice sheet melt/water feedbacks and carbon cycle feedbacks, including release of methane hydrates from sea bottom sediments and from bogs, are unlikely to be able to prevent runaway global warming on a scale similar to the last glacial terminations.
Extreme climate change events in the recent history of Earth include:
A. Intra-glacial warming cycles, termed Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O cycles), between 80 kyr and 20 kyr, including 21 ~1470 years-long cycles, each initiated over decades-scale time frames (Figure 1). The D-O cycles are attributed to interactions between weak solar radiation maxima and ocean current systems [1, 2].
Figure 1. An example of a Dansgaard-Oeschger abrupt climate event. 1 of 21 cycles during the alst ice age, 80 000 – 20 000 years-ago. Greenland ice core. From Rahmstorf, 2004.
B. Evidence for the last glacial termination based on deuterium and oxygen isotopes from the Greenland NGRIP ice core indicates sharp 3-years-long warming by 2 to 4oC at 14.7 kyr, sharp 1 year-long cooling at 12.9 kyr, and sharp 3 years-long warming at 11.7 kyr (Figure 2) [3].
Figure 2. deuterium-drived determinations of temperatures from Greenland NGRIP ice core for the period 14 740 – 11 660 years-ago, displaying abrupt warming and cooling changes between the ‘oldest dryas’ cold period, Allerod and Bolling warm periods, youngest dryas cold period and the Holocene. Note transitions occur over periods of 1 – 3 years. From Steffensen et al., 2008.
C. Evidence for the last glacial termination from the Greenland GISP-2 ice core, based on Nitrogen and Argon isotopes, indicates abrupt warming by 10±4oC at 12.8 kyr over a period of ~100 years and abrupt warming by 4±1.5 oC at 11.27 kyr over period of 70 years [4]. Sea level rose by 40 metres following the termination up to about 8500 years-ago [5].
Mean global temperature changes are estimated as about half the polar temperatures.
The origin of the D-O cycles is interpreted in terms of interaction between weak insolation signals and the thermohaline current system [2]. Glacial terminations at intervals of about 100 kyr, 41 kyr and 23 kyr (Milankovich cycles) were triggered by axial tilt toward the poles, elevating mid-June insolation by up to <60 Watt/m2 at latitude 65N [6]. The glacial terminations involved mean global solar radiation anomalies of 4 to 5 Watt/m2, triggering ice melt feedback loops and greenhouse gas release loops [6]. The intertwined synergy of these processes resulted in: (1) Ice sheet and glacier melt, reduced short-wave reflection (albedo) by sea ice and ice sheets, exposure of water surfaces absorbing infrared, further melting of ice by warming water, migration of boreal forest northward causing decrease in albedo. (2) Carbon gases (CO2, CH4) released from warming oceans, drying biosphere and fires; methane released from sea-bottom methane hydrates (clathrates: water-CH4 molecules) in sea bottom sediments and from drying bogs. Rapid release of methane hydrates is invoked as a mechanism for a runaway greenhouse effect and consequent mass extinctions through the history of Earth, specifically the Permian-Triassic (251 Ma) mass extinction and the Paleocene-Eocene (55 Ma) extinction (~ +6oC global warming) [7] The combined radiative synergy of ice melt-feedback and greenhouse gases-feedback triggering rapid polar meltdown affected pole-ward migration of the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ), subtropical arid zone and mid-latitude zones, affecting the ocean thermohaline circulation. The Greenland ice-melt flow result in abortion of the Gulf Stream which warms Europe and northeast America. Warming of the southern oceans weakens the Humboldt current west of South America and the trade winds, indirectly enhancing El-Nino events which result in droughts in the southwestern Pacific, India and Africa [8]. The rise in mean global temperature by several degrees Celsius over time scales of a few years to a century testifies to a high susceptibility of the atmosphere to minor to moderate energy forcings. According to Hansen et al. 2007 [6] the solar energy pulse from orbital variations which triggered the glacial terminations is up to 0.25 Watt/m2. Mean global atmospheric energy rise associated with the glacial terminations of +4 to +5 Watt/m2 (~ +5 to +7oC) are consistent with the upper range of the IPCC projections for the 21st century, +1.1 to +6.4oC. Comparisons between abrupt glacial-interglacial terminations and 21st century projections are complicated by the lower mean global temperatures at which the glacial terminations commenced and the large volumes of ice compared to the Holocene, including the Laurentian and Fennoscandian ice sheets. The fast rise of the greenhouse gas forcing component since the mid-1800s, at rates since 1960 reaching 387 ppm in 2007 at rates of >1.6 ppm/year, are two order of magnitude higher than CO2 rise rates of 0.012 ppm/year at the last termination. Where 1 ppm CO2 induces an atmospheric energy rise of ~0.02 Watt/m2, this equates to an increase of 1.7 Watt/m2 in atmospheric radiative energy since 1750, not counting carbon cycle and ice melt feedbacks.
The non-linear nature of atmospheric CO2 and CH4 rise, from 1.3%/year in 1990-1999 to 3.3%/year in 2000-2006 [9], combined with further ice melt and albedo decline and carbon cycle feedback effects, including release of CH4 hydrates, drying/burning biosphere, reduced CO2 sequestration by the oceans, threatens to move the Earth’s atmosphere into glacial termination-like conditions. Rapid ice melt rates in Greenland, the Arctic Sea and west Antarctica, the latter continuing through the southern winter, are documented from satellite and on the ground. The polar ice sheets, initiated about 34 million years ago, when CO2 levels declined below 450 ppm, are in danger.
The Earth’s climate is tracking into uncharted territory.
Andrew Glikson
Canberra, Australia
Andrew Glikson undertakes earth and paleo-climate research at the Research School of Earth Science, Australian National University.
[1] Broecker, 2000. Earth-Science Reviews 51, 137–154;
[2] Braun et al., 2005. Nature, 438)
[3] Steffensen et al., 2008. Science Express, 19 June, 2008 ;
[4] Kobashi et al., 2008. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett, 268, 397 ;
[5] Siddall et al., 2003. Nature 423, 853.
[6] Hansen et al., 2007. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. London 365A, 1925. Hansen et al., 2008. Am. J. Sci (in press;
[7] Zachos et al., 2008. Nature 451 (7176): 279; Ryski, 2003. Geology; 31, 741;
[8] Trenberth et al., 2002). J. Geophys. Re. 107, 4065..
[9] International Carbon Project 2006. Recent Carbon Trends and the Global Carbon
http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/ppt/774,1,
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This blog is a gathering place for people with a common interest in politics and the environment. I strive for tolerance and respect. I don’t always agree with what I publish, but I believe in giving people an opportunity to be heard. I take no responsibility for comments and hyperlinks that follow each blog post. Some content may be considered offensive by some people.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Stunned silence from the blogosphere?
Well that’s that then! Time to party like it’s 1999!
“Radiative forcing,” what a joke. Once you realize that radiating heat back to a source can’t raise the temperature of the source (1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics), the “settled science” of radiative forcing falls apart. Carbon dioxide levels are a response to climate change, not a stimulus. The earth might warm or the earth might cool, but CO2 has nothing to do with it.
Alan, what happens when you stand between two mirrors? Does the reflection stop occurring after the light has bounced once off each mirror? Or do you see an infinite extent of gradually shrinking and dimming images?
Replace light photons with IR photons, one mirror with the earth’s surface and one with the atmosphere, and you have a basic understanding of back-radiation.
It doesn’t break the laws of thermodynamics, which apply to closed systems. The earth is an energetically open system with heat pouring in constantly from the sun.
““Radiative forcing,” what a joke. Once you realize that radiating heat back to a source can’t raise the temperature of the source (1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics), the “settled science” of radiative forcing falls apart. Carbon dioxide levels are a response to climate change, not a stimulus. The earth might warm or the earth might cool, but CO2 has nothing to do with it.”
You seem to have no idea of what is being claimed, because you have no idea how it works. The progress of science has identified how this at first self contradictory process happens.
a) At the macro level, the laws of thermodynamics are indeed observed, the energy is transferred from hot to cold.
b) At the quantum level, the physical particles involved in transferring that energy do so, but at a statistical level. That is, over time, the radiation is going from the hotter body to the colder one, but there will be a number of particles emitted back from the cold body to the hot one. This effectively slows down the transer of radiation. For a system like the earth that has a constant stream of radiation pouring in, the nett effect is an increase in temperature.
So no laws of thermodynamics are broken, over time.
Is this one of those Keynesian ‘When the facts change I change my mind…’ moments? Guess I’ll have to wait and see.
“Once you realize that radiating heat back to a source can’t raise the temperature of the source…”
That’s a bit like saying that depositing $50 into a bank account from which you’ve just withdrawn $100 won’t increase your bank balance any, because the Laws of Conservation of Money say so.
If there were such things as Laws of Conservation of Money and they worked the way Alan thinks the laws of thermodynamics do, I’d definitely go into the banking business.
So essentially, Andrew is saying based on previous warming cycles and the associated positive feedbacks, we should be tracking the upper range of the IPCC projections for the 21st century, so it should be 6.4C warmer by 2100. Currently, that would require a warming of 0.3 to 0.4 C/decade before the other positive feedbacks kick in.
So, how are we going so far?
Well, good on Jennifer for posting from the ‘other side’.
Dr Glikson is a very well respected geologist.
It’s interesting to hear reports of increasing methane levels in Siberia. If that methane is released it will contribute greatly to any enhanced greenhouse, and it’s not something we will be able to prevent.
The greenhouse paradigm consists of one misconception built on top of another, and it’s as flimsy as a house of cards.
1. Does the earth have a radiative imbalance, an indication that it’s holding heat in? No, the earth radiates to space the same magnitude of energy as it absorbs from the sun.
2. Does a carbon dioxide (or methane) molecule trap heat? No, what infrared energy it does absorb it immediately radiates.
3. Is outer space icy-cold, but the earth is protected by insulating gases? No, unlike a cold object, space cannot absorb heat. The vacuum of space is a near-perfect insulator that has no temperature.
4. Can radiant energy originating from the earth’s surface, fractionally absorbed and fractionally (one-sixth) radiated back, raise the surface temperature? No, radiation from trace gases can only raise the surface’s temperature if they’re at a higher temperature — which by definition they cannot be, since they’re passive absorbers of surface energy. Heat transfer follows a gradient of greater to lesser temperature, not lesser to greater nor equal to equal.
But people like James Haughton and SJT believe that looking into a mirror will progressively heat your face — via back-radiation or statistical quantum reversal, y’know. At bottom, all the modern hysteria about warming from a “greenhouse effect” owes to confused, distorted and incoherent ideas about physics.
Gummo, refer to point 1.
With all due respect to Andrew Glikson and his studies, the IPCC said in TAR that future climate states could not be predicted. He is infering the opposite, that the past is known. He has dropped the adjective ‘theoretical’, and is making inferences that everything he claims in his article happened.
He even quotes James Hansen, who was funded by the known activist Al Gore. Hansen made a prediction in 1988 that we were in for a spot of bother if we didn’t cut CO2 emissions immediately. Twenty years later, we are in no more bother than we were then, and he has confessed to an error in his prediction. If he can’t predict climate with any accuracy 10 years later, why are we listening to his impressions of climate terminations millions of years ago?
To say the least, I think this article is way out there with Big Bang theory and I hope Jennifer stops this kind of experiment in fairness. I think she is being too sensitive to unworthy criticism.
Alan,
“Does a carbon dioxide (or methane) molecule trap heat? No, what infrared energy it does absorb it immediately radiates”
What’s the point of this statement?
“No, unlike a cold object, space cannot absorb heat.”
So if you were to step outside a space craft you wouldn’t get cold? You wouldn’t lose heat?
“Can radiant energy originating from the earth’s surface, fractionally absorbed and fractionally (one-sixth) radiated back, raise the surface temperature?”
No, it raises the AIR temperature.
I think you need to research your ideas more, as they don’t agree with physics.
Gordon, I think the point Andrew is making is that past climate changes tended to be abrupt. This means that potentially AGW could lead to abrupt changes in climate, rather than a slow upward trend.
Also there is no way of predicting ANYTHING, the universe is actually unpredicatble. Newtonian mechanics is merely an approximation.
What is wrong with the Big Bang theory? It’s the best theory we have (it explains an awful lot about the structure of the universe). I don’t think you’ll find many cosmologists that think it’s “out there”, it’s pretty much a simple theory.
Glikson article is BS. It completely ignores the fact that despite the dramatic rise in the % rate of increase in anthropogenic CO2 emissions over the last decade there has hardly been any upwards movement in the rate of rise of global mean atmospheric CO2 AND atmospheric CO2 over entire Southern Ocean below 30 S has been increasingly diverging in a negative sense,over the same period.
The climatic and biogeochemical record of the last decade is not of a system heading unstably towards a tipping point but of a system actively starting to push back towards its homeostatic steady state.
I’m gobsmacked! Tried twice to submit an articles the effects that oceanic cyanobacteria are likely to have on moderating ocean climate, and hence global climate. There is a wealth of supporting literature.
And what a disceptively humble subject matter too (marine algae) – just far too humble for the high flying Jennifer it seems.
Jennifer didn’t like the 1st draft – too long, too obscure, too many graphs. So I amended it. Then a deathly silence following by a renewed invitation to submit a 3rd amendment as a .pdf BUT with Jennifer stating categorically she would write the leading sections!
Somehow, I doing think I spent 35 years getting 3 degrees and doing/publishing lots of good hard science to cop that.
Yet, Glikson, whose many past diatribes on CCNet proved beyond a shadow of doubt his biogeochemistry is barely above 1st year uni level gets to publish this sweepingly dogmatic drivel in the ‘interests of fairness’.
Come on, what arrant hypocrisy is this?
Wow Alan.
Just wow.
You’ve like, totally not got your head around the very basics of thermodynamics, have you? Might be prudent to STFU
Shorter Short:
Waaaaah!
Steve,
“It completely ignores the fact that despite the dramatic rise in the % rate of increase in anthropogenic CO2 emissions over the last decade there has hardly been any upwards movement in the rate of rise of global mean atmospheric CO2”
Can you show this? Do you have any papers to back it up?
Not sure if it’s even relevant to what he was talking about – that past climate changes have been extremely rapid.
Why do you think it’s relevant to his post?
NT said…. “No, it raises the AIR temperature.”….
NT, you mean it raises the temperature of N2 and O2… But considering that N2 and O2 are at numbers far exceeding that of CO2 (of 100 000 air molecules only 38 are CO2 and of that 38 CO2 only 1 is Athropogenic sourced CO2)…
So considering this and the fact that N2 and O2 are convecting from the surface in greater numbers…. What part is 1 molecule per 100 000 air molecules playing in warming the already warm N2 and O2 molecules….
So how does that single CO2 molecule at 1000 meters altitude pass energy back down to a now already warmer surface. it cant.
So now it’s night time…. What temperature is your CO2 molecule now? and how was it able to remain at a higher temperature given that it is in constant collisions with N2 and O2 molecules?
Doesn’t matter what you do…. You are going to need Water Vapor to derive meaning in GHG theory… and lots of it.
So what energy source liberates Water vapor from the surface…. The Sun…
It’s the Latent heat potential/capacity of water that is confusing y’all.
Alan? What?
Air is composed of N2 and O2 and other gases. So you are saying only the N2 and O2 warm up? That’s just weird.
Alan, seriously you need to read more about this as it is pretty plain you are either just making it up or have no idea.
No one is suggest that CO2 1000m up is warming the surface. Why would you bring it up?
We’re not confused. If you want to argue by yourself, that’s fine.
Excuse me?… I sent that not Alan.
I was talking significance…. Is convection significant in atmospheric warming?… Does a change in phase states occur in kinetic interations between molecules and is it significant?
If not a 1000mters… Where does your surface temp come from NT…. where would one need to measure a “temperature”?
You’re not confused… maybe I worded it wrong. Water vapor would be more significant in it’s effect than CO2… The sun is more significant in placing water vapor into the Atmosphere than CO2. Water is unique in it’s properties
The Tropical Troposphere shows very little to no warming according to Climate computer models.
“No, it raises the AIR temperature.”
Let’s test that assumption. As far as it mimics a perfectly absorptive blackbody, the earth’s surface heats up by a well-established 4th power relationship between light and temperature. Given a global surface irradiance of 168 watts per square meter, then, the average temperature will rise to 233 Kelvin. Now, you’d agree that if the air absorbed NO radiation from this 233 K object there’d be no increase of air temperature due to radiation, only by conductive contact with the surface. At best, the air could reach a similar temperature that way. But you wish to deal with radiant transfer specifically. Okay, take CO2. It’s a selective absorber. Of the earth’s 168 W/m², CO2 is able to absorb about 8%, or 13.44 W/m². Most of the energy passes right through. Fine. That’s better than no absorption at all. But 13.44 W/m² would raise it to 124 Kelvin, far below the freezing point of carbon dioxide. So you’ve got a problem, haven’t you? It’s still conductive contact with the surface that is raising CO2’s temperature above the freezing point.
Given a practical lower limit of about 3 K, there’s no doubt that the atmosphere gains some heat from the radiant absorption of CO2. But the amount we’re talking about is so miniscule, I’m surprised it even comes up in discussion.
Alan, do you have ANY qualification in physics? Did you study it in high school, and pass?
Alan writes:
1. Does the earth have a radiative imbalance, an indication that it’s holding heat in? No, the earth radiates to space the same magnitude of energy as it absorbs from the sun.
This is both wrong and misleading. In the first place, there is currently an imbalance of ~1 watt/metre squared between the energy earth absorbs and the energy it emits, which is what is warming the globe:
Hansen, James E., et al. (2005). “Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications.” Science 308: 1431-35. (and lets see your qualifications before you dispute Hanson’s)
In the second place, the flow of heat into or out of the earth doesn’t necessarily tell us the level of the earth’s surface temperature, any more than knowing that the flow of water into and out of a bucket is the same tells you the level of water in the bucket. If earth’s temperature were only governed by energy flow, we would be a lot colder than we are now – we’d be much the same temperature as the moon. The atmosphere’s heat trapping effect is what makes the difference.
2. Does a carbon dioxide (or methane) molecule trap heat? No, what infrared energy it does absorb it immediately radiates.
Not immediately, but at a random time interval later. The molecule re-emits the energy in a random direction. Alan’s model requires that the molecule of CO2 (or methane) somehow “knows” that in the direction of the earth things are warmer and so it shouldn’t emit an IR photon in that direction. That’s an awful lot of brains for a molecule.
3. Is outer space icy-cold, but the earth is protected by insulating gases? No, unlike a cold object, space cannot absorb heat. The vacuum of space is a near-perfect insulator that has no temperature.
Wrong. Vacuum cannot conduct heat by convection or conduction, but can do so by radiation. Consequently, space does have a temperature. Otherwise a) we could not detect cosmic microwave background radiation and b) Alan’s argument that heat can flow only from earth to space would make even less sense than it does now – if space is not cold, then why should heat flow there? If it’s a “near-perfect insulator” then there would be no way for all the heat arriving from the sun to escape. We would have achieved the same temperature as the sun many billions of years ago. For that matter, if space is a “near perfect insulator”, radiation from the sun couldn’t reach us in the first place. We wouldn’t even know that there was a sun, because it couldn’t radiate, because it was contained in a near-perfect insulator.
4. Can radiant energy originating from the earth’s surface, fractionally absorbed and fractionally (one-sixth) radiated back, raise the surface temperature? No, radiation from trace gases can only raise the surface’s temperature if they’re at a higher temperature — which by definition they cannot be, since they’re passive absorbers of surface energy. Heat transfer follows a gradient of greater to lesser temperature, not lesser to greater nor equal to equal.
Completely, flat wrong. Yes, it can. How is the surface supposed to know which IR photons come from the sun (and are allowed to warm it) and which come from CO2, methane etc (and aren’t allowed to warm it, according to Alan)? How do the gases know what direction to emit their photons?
Heat transfer occurs ON AVERAGE because hot things radiate more (or move more, in the case of convection or conduction) than cold ones. This results in more photons radiating from hot things to cold things than from cold things to hot things. Over time, in a closed system, the temperatures equal.
Alan’s argument is the equivalent of saying that if you put a mirror behind a light (as can be seen in any cheap torch), the area opposite the mirror will not get any brighter, because it is impossible for the photons from the light to head back in the direction of the light. If you want to test this, just take the mirrored bit out of your torch and see if the light level changes.
NT,
“No, it raises the AIR temperature.”
One would think, that the air temperature had been raised by the heat rising form the surface already, therefore it being warmer than the “backradiated!” heat, it could not absorb it, nay it would even prevent it coming down again!!!
Sorry J Hansford.
The ‘surface’ temp is a something we should define. For most Met stations it would be the air temp less than 2m off the ground. For satellite measurements it could be up that high.
“Water vapor would be more significant in it’s effect than CO2… The sun is more significant in placing water vapor into the Atmosphere than CO2. Water is unique in it’s properties”
Yes. this is ture, but so what? We are adding lots of CO2, so shouldn’t we consider it’s impact too?
“The Tropical Troposphere shows very little to no warming according to Climate computer models”
Ummm what models are you looking at?
Alan,
“Given a global surface irradiance of 168 watts per square meter, then, the average temperature will rise to 233 Kelvin.”
It’s the air temperature that goes to 233K, not the surface temp.
James Haughton said…. “Alan’s argument is the equivalent of saying that if you put a mirror behind a light (as can be seen in any cheap torch), the area opposite the mirror will not get any brighter, because it is impossible for the photons from the light to head back in the direction of the light. If you want to test this, just take the mirrored bit out of your torch and see if the light level changes.”
Your analogy is wrong… There is no Phase change in you Mirror analogy…. Because that is not what is fundamentally happening…
There is no “energy budget” constraints with your analogy…
Am I right James?
Jonathon,
It was in reference to Alan’s assertion that the surface heated the surface… What I was saying was that the surface heated the air, as you correctly claim.
J. Hansford, I’m not sure I understand your criticism. It’s a bit vaguely worded. I will reply to what I think you are saying.
If you’re saying that there is a difference between reflection (what mirrors do) and absorbtion and reradiation (what CO2 does) then you are correct. But this does not alter the analogy. Alan is claiming that it is impossible for an IR photon to travel back in the direction from whence it came. If this was true it would apply equally to visible light photons, and should apply whether or not they were reflected or re-radiated (since it makes no difference to the surface, or the area in front of the torch, where the photon came from, the point is that they are there).
On energy budgets: I agree that the total energy in and energy out of the earth have to balance in the long term (though they are currently out of balance, and therefore the earth is warming until it reaches the point where it radiates enough energy to equalise the flow). But the point I made with the bucket analogy is that the rate of flow of energy in and out does not necessarily determine the level of energy in the thing through which the energy flows.
In the case of the earth, a photon arriving from the sun can be absorbed and reradiated several times between the earth’s surface and the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere before re-escaping to space. That bouncing (or absorbtion/re-emission) back and forth between earth and sky keeps the temperature of the earth higher than it otherwise would be if we had no atmosphere (as the moon, the same distance from the sun as we are, does).
On water vapour vs CO2: while water vapour is the major greenhouse gas, the average water molecule only stays in the atmosphere a few days. The average CO2 molecule stays in the atmosphere about 200 years. Consequently CO2 can accumulate, which water cannot.
James, now you’re just getting silly. 240 W/m² in, 239 out? If a one-watt disparity were even measurable by satellite, AND if this one-watt disparity were responsible for heating the earth, it would be equivalent to a 0.27 increase of temperature above the accepted earth-system average of around minus 18 Celsius. (Note to others: It used to be thought that a profound radiative imbalance raised the earth’s temperature. After it was discovered that no such imbalance occurs, climatologists changed the theory so that the earth would be SEEN to be in balance yet really wouldn’t be. But the public still believes that the earth heats up because radiant energy is prevented from exiting to space. Not so.)
A vacuum conducts heat — a classic.
But enough. On to another subject. I can’t get over that this “very well respected geologist” doesn’t even grasp the point he is making himself. What does the statement, “abrupt global warming and cooling over time scales of decades to a few years, implying extreme instability of the Earth’s atmosphere” tell you? It tells you that the atmosphere has virtually no thermal stabilization properties at all. The earth’s temperature can turn on a dime, irrespective of the varying amounts of trace gases in the atmosphere.
“The Greenland ice-melt flow result in abortion of the Gulf Stream which warms Europe and northeast America.”
—————————————–
Hum oh, Andrew Glikson must have known that the Gulf Stream is due to wind & earth’s rotation and hence CAN’T be aborted.
I suspect that he knows it but the fact he made such sensationalist and false claim doesn’t give much confidence to his opinions.
Did Alan say that a photon couldn’t move back? I thought he said a photon moving back couldn’t have a significant effect…. Maybe you could answer it that way then?
On energy budgets….
So you are talking Delay….
Is the delay in temperature equilibrium of the atmosphere longer than a few days? or shorter?
Water vapor being constantly resupplied would simply balance out at an adjusted value according to total capacity of the atmosphere to retain energy within this “change in equilibrium” in transferring heat to the upper atmosphere….
Would it not?
“Hum oh, Andrew Glikson must have known that the Gulf Stream is due to wind & earth’s rotation and hence CAN’T be aborted.”
So winds can’t change?* Say, as a result of ocean temperature change from meltwater?
*Somebody tell the Scorpions!
“The average CO2 molecule stays in the atmosphere about 200 years.”
James, James, James. The current rate of human CO2 emissions is about 4 ppm per year. But the CO2 content of the atmosphere is rising at a rate of around 2 ppm per year. Irrespective of the inconvenient fact that natural emissions are estimated to be around 100 ppm per year yet the atmosphere isn’t rising at that rate, either, and even if you want to blame people for the CO2 trend, you have to acknowledge that half of emissions are removed from the atmosphere in a single year, utterly contradicting your claim of a 200 year average residence.
Try this on for size: We are seeing the same atmospheric trend as observed in ice-core records. A warming earth emits more CO2 than it absorbs. Carbon dioxide levels are a response to climate change, not a stimulus.
“The average CO2 molecule stays in the atmosphere about 200 years. Consequently CO2 can accumulate, which water cannot.”
James, I don’t think you’ll find a study which claim a 200 year lifetime for CO2. Even the IPCC doesn’t know it, and doesn’t even have a clear definition for it (“The atmospheric lifetime is basically a scale factor relating (i) constant emissions (Tg/yr) to a steady-state burden (Tg), or (ii) an emission pulse (Tg) to the time-integrated burden of that pulse (Tg/yr). The lifetime is often additionally assumed to be a constant, independent of the sources; and it is also taken to represent the decay time (e-fold) of a perturbation.” IPCC 4AR)
A compilation of studies made by Segalstadt conclude to a 5-10 years lifetime for CO2 : http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/4691/co2lifetimefa6.jpg
BTW, assuming that the atmosphere can’t accumulate water vapor doesn’t add much information: WV dwarfs CO2 in its GHG effect and even a 1% change – and there is no reason it doesn’t change, in either way: see how it has decreased here : http://tinyurl.com/3bgjmn – will overwhelm any anthropic “forcing”.
Alan: perhaps my choice of “conduct” as the verb meaning “pass through” was poor. “Heat can pass through a vacuum as radiation”. Does that satisfy you?
The disparity causes warming over a period of time. How, if you accept Stefan-Boltzmann’s law, do you explain the fact that we are _not_ living in a world with a -18 degree average temperature?
(Note to others. Alan provides no peer-reviewed, indexed journal citation for his claim that climatologists are somehow faking the physics. This is because there is no evidence for this claim. This is because he is wrong.)
It will be “enough”, Alan, when you realise that your understanding of thermodynamics and thermal physics is erroneous. I’m not asking for a public retraction or anything. Just go away and do some reading with an open mind. Start with the American Institute of Physics’ guide to Basic Radiation Calculations:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Radmath.htm
Actually, it tells me the opposite: that because the climate system is only meta-stable, perturbing it could have non-linear and catastrophic effects.
Can anyone give me the reference for the Dr Glikson’s Figure 1 as it is not listed in the references (Rahmstorf, 2004)? The temperature in Figure 1 never gets above -12 degrees centigrade which is still bl..dy cold and not melting any ice.
How do CO2 levels change with time on Figure 1? Do these lead or follow temperature?
Also, what is the cause for the abrupt cooling episode in Figure 2? Surely this can’t be correlated with a drop in atmospheric CO2? Perhaps a volcanic event? Did sea levels fall rapidly during this event?
How accurate are the measurements of sea levels during these times? Sea levels relative to local coastlines can change dramatically over short periods because of tectonism. Uplift rates of many metres over short geological periods are well known in tectonically active areas.
Demesure, it’s just that James has swallowed Hansen et al hook line and sinker. Hansen himself claims that 20% of today’s emissions will still be in the air a thousand years from now.
James Haughton commented over at Brook’s Blog on a post by me where I referred to Brook’s assertion that the decade 1998-2007 was warmer than 1988 to 1997. I noted that was true, at 0.223 but not huge: “The implied sensitivity is delta T/delta C, or 0.012367 oC per 1 ppm. Multiply that by 357 to get the increased temp from a doubling of the average CO2 in 1988-1997 to 715.88 ppm, and we obtain a temperature increase from that doubling of 4.52 oC.”
James Haughton then attacked me as follows; “This is a linear projection. Tim is assuming that the temperature will increase linearly with increased CO2. This is NOT a logarithmic projection. In the real world case (what Barry is trying to point out) temperature forcing by CO2 increases linearly with the _logarithm_ of CO2 in the atmosphere. Tim’s calculation also neglects the positive feedback effects of e.g. water vapour, albedo decline, or permafrost melting, which are not captured by a simple linear projection. The projection is a) not logarithmic, despite Tim’s assertions and b) useless.”
As Barry Brook has banned me from his Blog even when I attempt to respond to yet another personal attack, I hope Jen won’t mind if I post my censored response here. It is also on topic and is read by James:
“James, Consider this to be from Ross Garnaut, as it is a cut and paste from his Draft Report and I have been expunged from this [Brook] universe:
“If concentrations keep growing, carbon dioxide added later will cause
proportionately less warming than carbon dioxide added now. The relationship
is approximately logarithmic. The same amount of warming will occur from
a doubling from 280 ppm (pre-industrial levels) to 560 ppm as from another
doubling from 560 ppm to 1120 ppm.” (Garnaut p.65)
James, Please elucidate why if successive 100% increments produce the same warming, why not successive 5%s? (that being close to the 4.9% increase in CO2 over the decades 1988-1997 and 1998-2007). With the actual temp increase of 0.223oC between those decadal averages, we then get only 4.5oC from doubling to 716 ppm.[from the average 358ppm in 1988-1997]”
Perhaps James you could also write to Team Garnaut explaining why they have got it wrong.
CO2’s life in the atmosphere: I should have said “50 to 200 years” – that’s what I get for relying on memory.
I get that from the table 2, page 5 of the main text of the US department of Energy report 2005
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/057304.pdf
a citation acquired from Cohenite no less. The DoE get it from IPCC 2001.
Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), pp. 38 and 244.
The fact that half the human emissions are absorbed by carbon sinks does not imply that the CO2 molecules being absorbed were emitted that year. The question is how long do they circulate between emission and absorbtion.
Tim: I apologise for my snark about your economics. It was childish of me, especially since you were unable to respond in that forum.
I’m afraid I’m out of time to respond. L8r.
Quote””If concentrations keep growing, carbon dioxide added later will cause proportionately less warming than carbon dioxide added now. The relationship is approximately logarithmic. The same amount of warming will occur from a doubling from 280 ppm (pre-industrial levels) to 560 ppm as from another doubling from 560 ppm to 1120 ppm.” (Garnaut p.65)
That is completely wrong! The CO2 forcing follows the beer lambert equation. each doubling absorbs half of the previous doubling (and half of the total remainder) It’s the law of saturation, ie the absorption becomes saturated, Duh!
“I get that from the table 2, page 5 of the main text of the US department of Energy report 2005”
Oddly enough, the same report on page 6 shows you that 98.52% of all CO2 emissions are absorbed in a single year. How do you explain that, James? How does that correspond to a 50-200 year residence time?
I think this paper is right in saying milankovitch cycles are significant in Glacial and interglacial periods…. But I can’t see how CO2 fits in….. I would be more inclined to point at albedo changes due to increased or decreased cloud and/ice cover.
The observation that change occurs fast when in happens, is not unknown to science… A boat will capsize when it’s center of gravity is such that it become unstable to the point at which it capsizes. The transition to being upside down is then quite fast and only takes seconds…. however it may have taken years to get enough water in the boat in order to capsize it.
Observations suggest that the Antarctic is increasing in Ice mass and that the Arctic is more or less stable in it’s ice mass…. There is nothing in the climate that would suggest anthropogenic changes as opposed to natural ones.
There is certainly nothing that shows CO2’s theorised effect to climate is melting Greenland.
When Arriving at a “Moment”…. It doesn’t mean to suggest that the last interaction was the “cause”.
This article is quite disgraceful as the author clearly tries to brush off a highly critical fact,
EVERY SINGLE WARMING EVENT OCCURRED AT A TEMPERATURE SIGNIFICANTLY COOLER THAN PRESENT!
The record clearly shows that to get dramatic warming you first have to dramatically cool the earth. Where is the evidence that dramatic warming has ever occurred from an interglacial period that we are currently in! Answer = never, as we are at the peak of the glacial cycle and its all down hill from here. Hasn’t anyone bothered to study equilibrium kinetics in climate science. Hasn’t anyone heard of Le Chatelier’s principle? A system at equilibrium will resist any forcing, feedback must be negative! Positive feedback can only occur when a system rebounds back to its equilibrium. The ice ages clearly show that either we are at equilibrium now ( and therefore a massive forcing causes the ice ages) or the (normal) equilibrium is at a cooler temp. Any potential energy for warming was clear expended at the end of the last ice age. The warming stopped because it met an equally powerful negative feedback.
Oh and I should point out that D-O events and the younger dryas event are not observed in the antarctic ice and so are not examples of global warming or cooling.
And those people arguing over the THC circulation/gulf stream, you should realize that is primarily driven by salt density. The salt density is caused by evaporation and brine formation from salt water refreeze (it speeds up when the earth cools). It is the likely candidate for the massive forcing that causes ice ages since it must transfer heat from the equator that has a high degree of insulation to higher latitudes where heat can escape. more easily. just like a radiator. the faster it flows the cooler the system runs. As far as I know lateral (or latitudinal) heat transfer mechanics has not been investigated as the cause of climate change as many climate scientist seem to be unable to comprehend the earth as anything other than a black body with even properties.
cheers
This is because
J Hansford
I think you need to get over the idea that CO2 can be blamed for every change in climate 🙂
But seriously, Dr Glikson is not trying to link these past changes to CO2 variations (or at least that’s what I see). The point of this post is to show how rapidly the climate shifts when pushed by ANY effect. If you are interested in what caused the changes you should read the relevent literature (use Google Scholar and search on the name).
“Observations suggest that the Antarctic is increasing in Ice mass and that the Arctic is more or less stable in it’s ice mass…. There is nothing in the climate that would suggest anthropogenic changes as opposed to natural ones.”
I’d like to see your references for this, as it looks untrue to me. I would suggest that the arctic is losing mass rapidly and the antarctic is at best neutral.
The reference to Greenland ‘melting’ is just because it is losing mass quite rapidly. It is melting.
The theory goes like this: Add CO2 and you heat the atmosphere.
A hotter atmospher means more ice melts.
It’s not complicated.
There appears to be a considerable misunderstanding in relation to IR.
First IR radiation from a black body is in the form of a spectrum with its average wavelength at the temperature of the body, however and ice cube will radiate some photons at 2000 deg C but it will also radiate at –100 deg C. Stefans Law clearly states that that the net energy exchange between two black bodies is proportional to T1-T2, the temperature of the two bodies, each to the 4th power. Thus the net heat loss from T1 is less so it cools down slower, it will not heat up. Now if a third component comes along T3 and is hotter than T1 there will be a net transfer from T3 to T1. Then T1 has to loose the extra heat by increasing its temperature which means it will transfer more to T2 and accept less for T3 until an equilibrium is reached.
I have already posted many times about residence time, clearly James totally ignores anything that does not comply with his vision of the world which is the entire philosophy of the IPCC, If you have a problem with anything I post don’t just continue posting the same nonsense challenge me. But bring along you references.
I posted my review of the IPCC carbon cycle (Pg.514) and the result of an accurate mass balance calculation indicates the total anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere is 29.22 ppm, even if we took 1.9 deg per doubling that gives us .00633 deg C per ppm thus the total influence of AGW is 0.185 deg C. No one has challenged my mass balance but all the AGW fanatics have seen it, one will never reach the truth by running away from it.
NT:
A paper on the increasing ice mass in Antarctica:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/308/5730/1898
Enough to lower the ocean levels by 0.1mm/year (or reduce the rise by 🙂
“So winds can’t change?* Say, as a result of ocean temperature change from meltwater?
*Somebody tell the Scorpions!”
FDB, Scorpions’ wind can change but the West wind responsible for the Gulf Stream will always blow as long as the Earth rotates. That’s the same West wind you find on the American West coast that makes Vancouver’s climate similar to the British Islands.
So Andrew Glikson’s claim that the “Gulf Stream WILL be aborted” is simply incorrect. See Seager or Wunsch papers about this myth.
It’s amazing,
All of a sudden the uniformitarians are recognising climatic disasters from palaeo-tipping points, while stridently rejecting Velikovsky’s hypothesis of recent past catastrophes, in order to add credence to their belief in future climate catastrophes based on the increase of a trace gas in the atmosphere.
Leyllian to the core and pseudoscience at its best.
“CO2’s life in the atmosphere: I should have said “50 to 200 years” – that’s what I get for relying on memory.”
—————————————
James, the IPCC’s TAR said that CO2 lifetime is 5-200 years (five to 2 hundred).
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/016.htm
The obvious conclusion is no definitive number can be stated. I’m afraid the “science” is a bad as this.
CO2 residence time is about 5 years, according to measurement. The 5-200 year number is from the proposition of an artificial buffer which Tom Segalstad has shown to be wrong. The buffer concept is a product of pseudoscience to make physical reality fit theory.
“A vacuum conducts heat — a classic.”
He didn’t say conducts, can’t you understand the simplest of concepts. How does the sun heat up the earth? Radiation. Radiation is made up of discrete particles.
Temp goes up and down all the time, and the fact that the warmers think we are in the anthropocene just shows the difference in thinking.
Carbon dioxide is gas. It lives in the atmosphere.
End of story? “Keep it simple stupid” doesn’t always work.
One thing is almost certain, carbon dioxide has been “done to death”, and the day we totally ignore this fascination is day we discover creativity and speculation (the other halve of science).
Tim:
Your introduction of a percentage (100% increase) is confusing things. This is a 100% increase over a shifting base.
To produce a linear increase in temperature, CO2 has to increase exponentially, like compound interest at 4.9%, not like simple interest at 4.9% (assuming that temperature is increasing linearly, CO2 is the only factor, we get the rate from 1997-2007 as you suggest etcetera, etcetera).
A quick excel spreadsheet shows that to increase temperature by 4.5 degrees, if your sensitivity was correct in the long term, CO2 would have to increase to ~886 ppm; or alternatively, 716 ppm would only increase the temp by 3.4 degrees or so.
This projection entirely neglects feedback effects of increased water vapour, changing cloud cover, reducing albedo, methane release from permafrost etc, which is where the interesting science is. There is no way to solve for these factors in a simple, analytical back-of-the-envelope way like this log/linear projection. This has to be done using numerical simulations, the more fine-grained the better, which is why the IPCC uses computer models. If you want a real projection, read their reports.
Alan: I already did explain. The emission and uptake rates of CO2 don’t necessarily tell you how long any individual molecule swirls around in the atmosphere first. The CO2 being soaked up now is, on average, the CO2 emitted 50 to 200 years ago.
Demesure: The measure is so vague (50 to 200 years, or 5-200 if that’s what the updated report says, I haven’t checked that reference) because there are lots of different uptake mechanisms which act at different speeds, and I believe we’re not sure yet of the proportion of CO2 which goes to each, although I haven’t read up on that recently.
Louis: Velikovsky now, is it? and you criticise others for believing pseudoscience! Is there anything published in Nexus or New Dawn that you DON’T believe? Let’s try a quick list. Do you believe:
Symes’ theory of the Hollow Earth;
That Antarctica was settled by Nazi flying saucers;
That AIDS was invented by the CIA;
That the catholic church is concealing evidence of Jesus’ children;
That aliens regularly abduct americans and probe their anuses;
any other pet theory you would care to advance?
If you don’t believe these things, please explain what your criteria are for deciding to disbelieve them, since the evidence for each is about as strong as the evidence for creationism, HIV not causing AIDS, the wrongness of the theory of relativity, push gravity, Velikovsky’s electric solar system, and most other things you have written.
‘Fraid I have to shake the dust from my feet – play nice.
Doug Jones
Some people haven’t got access to the *full* article you link to. It’s a tad disingenuous to take things out of context, but maybe that was your intent – a typical tactic of the ‘deny and delay’ brigade.
“Our results show that the East Antarctic ice-sheet interior increased in overall thickness within the ROC from 1992 to 2003 and that this increase is probably the result of increased snowfall. Both of these observations are consistent with the latest IPCC prediction for Antarctica’s likely response to a warming global climate (6).
However, the IPCC prediction does not consider possible dynamic changes in coastal areas of the ice sheet (they did not have the studies at time of publishing, but they alluded to the problem).
Moreover, these results (Davis et al) have only sparse coverage of the coastal areas where recent dynamic changes may be occurring (4). Thus, the overall contribution of the Antarctic ice sheet to global sea-level change will depend on the balance between mass changes on the interior and those in coastal areas.”
In other words, the paper you linked to did not study coastal or ice-shelf melt in the Antarctic, nor did it do comparative studies for the Arctic ice melt, Greenland ice melt or glacial ice sheet melts elsewhere.
Tim
You’re starting to behave like a kid with ADHD.
So you can’t play ball with Barry Brook – get over it, there are plenty of play-mates on Jennifer’s blog.
Doug, your paper is for East Antarctica, whereas mine is the whole shebang
Touche!
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5768/1754
SJT: “For a system like the earth that has a constant stream of radiation pouring in, the nett effect is an increase in temperature.”
No it doesn’t. The Earth’s surface only receives radiation from the Sun during daytime. At night there’s a nett outflow of radiation.
For general information, but especially Barry Brook. Here is a joint contribution to The Guardian by Gary Yohe and Bjorn Lomborg which in effect vindicates Jen but not Quiggin, Lambert & Brook. “The climate change debate, while very public and very political, is not the place for hyperbole and hysteria; it’s time to move onAll comments () Björn Lomborg and Gary Yohe guardian.co.uk, Monday September 01 2008 21:00 BST Article historyAfter a very public debate on the Guardian website over the past few weeks, we have learned some lessons. Here are a few that come to mind. First, even carefully-crafted prose can be misunderstood. Throwaway lines, even those inserted parenthetically, can carry as much weight as key sentences. Second, attributing motive is dangerous, distracting, and frequently wrong; it should be avoided, not only because it has consequences for us as individuals, but also because it easily distracts attention from the value of our analytical work.
To the extent that we have both been guilty of imprecision and attribution of motive in the heat of this debate, we are happy to report that cooler heads have prevailed. We recognise that despite our differences in view, we respect each other’s commitment to robust public debate informed by different perspectives. To that end we both have agreed to forswear recent comments, and to wipe the slate clean. With this essay we’d like to show how people who disagree on policy options can still agree to collaborate productively, even under the hot glare of the very public, and very political, debate over climate change.
And so, we offer here a mutually accepted rehearsal of the major conclusions of the challenge paper on climate change from the Copenhagen consensus, a review of the outcome from the expert panel deliberations, and some insight into what each of us thinks that this all means for policy.
We agree that global warming is real, important and something that needs to handled.
We agree that the risks of climate change are felt unevenly across the globe and even within countries. It is clear to both of us that many of the world’s most disadvantaged – many of whom face the stark ramifications of the other problems considered in the Copenhagen consensus exercise – will bear a disproportionate share of the burden of climate change even as others enjoy some benefits born from modest warming.
Gary, along with three co-authors, produced the challenge paper on climate change for the Copenhagen consensus 2008, where some of the world’s top economists, including five Nobel laureates, offered their opinions about how to allocate a fixed amount of money to best solve the world’s biggest problems. After reviewing briefly the impacts of anticipated climate change over the next century, the authors of the challenge paper considered three alternative policy responses.
The first, a constrained “mitigation alone” option, failed the cost-benefit test because discounted benefits fell short of discounted costs. In the authors’ opinion, however, this failure could be traced to faulty design. Allowing for more efficient allocation of mitigation efforts over time (with the major part of a reduction in the second half of the century), recognising uncertainty (including emissions scenarios that were higher and lower than the baseline), and/or including more timely participation by rapidly developing economies like China and India (the authors assumed that only developed countries constrained emissions before 2100) all pushed estimated benefits significantly above cost.
Authors of the challenge paper ultimately recommended a portfolio of policies that included mitigation, significant early investment in research and development (R&D) designed to accelerate the development and diffusion of carbon-friendly energy technologies as well as carbon capture and sequestration, and targeted adaptation in the health sector. This option produced discounted benefits that were 2.7 times higher than cost.
The expert panel ranked all of these options at the bottom of their priority list. They did not, however, dismiss climate change as a problem. They inserted an R&D-only option into the 14th spot, based on work by another climate economist, Chris Green of McGill University. Here we do disagree about the relative weight of the solutions. The panel and Chris Green found that investing in energy R&D would have much higher benefits, at possibly 11 times the cost. As Bjorn has emphasised many times, what matters is getting low-cost, low-carbon technology available faster. If R&D would make the price of renewables drop below the cost of fossil fuels by the middle of the century, everyone – including the Chinese and the Indians – would switch.
The authors of the challenge paper, however, were disappointed because, in their minds, R&D as a stand-alone policy was inferior to the portfolio approach. Their work showed that the benefits of such a policy would depreciate over time if economic incentives to adopt new carbon-friendly energy sources were not forthcoming. Indeed, carbon capture alternatives would have no market value if carbon were to be priced at zero.
As we have moved to common ground, we take these results, the expert panel’s deliberations, and our different opinions as strong evidence that policy design matters. We therefore agree that economic analysis has a significant role to play in making it clearer what policies should be implemented in order to tackle global warming most efficiently. Which emphasis is more appropriate? We will only find out if we keep pushing the questions forward. In either case, we agree that adaptation, CO2-cuts and R&D in some combination are all necessary to tackle global warming.
And now, we turn to our “throw-away lines”. We agree emphatically that there is no place for hyperbole or hysteria in discussions about climate policy; panic isn’t helpful for choosing the best policy responses. Moreover, we both see no place for mindless repetitions of the contrarian rhetoric that humans are not to blame every time climate policy is discussed; we are beyond that point.
Perhaps the most important lesson that we already knew but should not have forgotten is even more fundamental and can be simply stated. The climate debate – and indeed the entire Copenhagen Consensus exercise – is not about us. It is about the future of the planet.”
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday September 01 2008. It was last updated at 21:00 on September 01 2008.
Hat tip for link: Benny Peiser.
So, can views differ while their holders are reasonable human beings? Not at Barry Brook’s.
James Haughton
“Louis: Velikovsky now, is it? and you criticise others for believing pseudoscience!
LH: I don’t criticise people for believing pseudoscience, I criticise them for doing it.
Is there anything published in Nexus or New Dawn that you DON’T believe? Nexus or New Dawn? Heard about Nexus, never heard about New Dawn, and don’t bother with Nexus, and not knowning about New Dawn is self explanatory.
Let’s try a quick list. Do you believe:
Symes’ theory of the Hollow Earth;
No
That Antarctica was settled by Nazi flying saucers;
No
That AIDS was invented by the CIA;
No
That the catholic church is concealing evidence of Jesus’ children;
No
That aliens regularly abduct americans and probe their anuses;
No
any other pet theory you would care to advance?
Yes, your palpable stupidity.
If you don’t believe these things, please explain what your criteria are for deciding to disbelieve them,
I do believe the latter – you have a problem with that?
James Haughton,
If you don’t believe these things, please explain what your criteria are for deciding to disbelieve them, since the evidence for each is about as strong as the evidence for creationism,
Creationism is a belief or faith – there cannot be evidence, in terms of science, for this.
HIV not causing AIDS,
Henry Bauer has collated the evidence on this,
the wrongness of the theory of relativity,
Relativity is a mathematical construct divorced from physical reality, and was never derived from physical reality, let alone proved in physical reality
push gravity,
Gravity is purely an attractive force, it cannot repel.
Velikovsky’s electric solar system,
You forget about Kristian Birkeland, Hannes Alfven and others before Velikovsky
and most other things you have written,
LH: For which you supply zero evidence
As I wrote above, I don’t believe you to be, you are…..
Dear James haughton. Thanks for the apology, appreciated.
You said:
1. “The fact that half the human emissions are absorbed by carbon sinks does not imply that the CO2 molecules being absorbed were emitted that year. The question is how long do they circulate between emission and absorbtion.” With respect, I do not agree. All accept that atmos. CO2 is “well mixed”, that means there is no knowing which of any particular molecules (of any known longevity)close to the surface are available for solution in the ocean or uptakes by either or both oceanic and terrestrial photosynthesis. The IPCC ref. you mention shows just how bad they are, as my point here is no more than elementary inventory analysis, especially when it is known that the annual average flux between atmosphere and total biosphere is up to 12% of the atmospheric stock of CO2 (c. 760-800 GtC, Houghton 2004)
You later said;
2. “To produce a linear increase in temperature, CO2 has to increase exponentially, like compound interest at 4.9%, not like simple interest at 4.9% (assuming that temperature is increasing linearly, CO2 is the only factor, we get the rate from 1997-2007 as you suggest etcetera, etcetera).”
I was merely basing myself on that quote I gave from Garnaut, which was actually taken by him from IPCC AR4 WG1. You added:
“A quick excel spreadsheet shows that to increase temperature by 4.5 degrees, if your sensitivity was correct in the long term, CO2 would have to increase to ~886 ppm; or alternatively, 716 ppm would only increase the temp by 3.4 degrees or so.”
It is not my sensitivity but that defined by IPCC, Hansen, Rahmstorf etc. What they mean by “logarithmic”, rightly or wrongly, is that any given % increase in CO2 concentration increases T by the same ABSOLUTE amount whenever repeated by the same %. That is why it is not linear or exponential. The real reason why Barry Brook cannot abide my stats is that on the data he proposed, doubling from ave CO2 in 1988-1997, it would take 170 years (2178) to reach (at his and the current IPCC admitted linear growth rate for atmos CO2 of 1.0041% pa) the 4.5oC that the IPCC reckons is probable by 2100.
Tim Curtin
Be as it may, are there any physical experimental data demonstrating the mathematical relationship between CO2 and temperature, or is it all within the realms of imaginative speculation?
It’s the absence of experimental, and the abundance of rhetorical, data that seems to be of concern here.
Oh dear! Andrew Glikson said in his amazing piece of theology above, ‘The non-linear nature of atmospheric CO2 and CH4 rise, from 1.3%/year in 1990-1999 to 3.3%/year in 2000-2006 [9]…’. This exhibits shoddy reportage that would certainly get him fired even by Fairfax, a specialist in that field. Atmospheric CO2 has been growing only at 1.0041 percent pa since 1958, according to the IPCC, and easily checkable by referring to the Mauna Loa readings at Marland et al (CDIAC) or direct from Mauna Loa via Google. The 3.3% mentioned by Glikson is correct for the recent annual growth in CO2 emissions, but they are not the same thing as the rate of increase in the atmospheric level. But then dear Andrew has never heard of photosynthesis or sunspots, both absent from his piece. It is bad luck for Andrew that his source (Carbon Project’s Canadell, whom I had the doubtful pleasure of seeing in action at the Shine Dome in Canberra this evening) cannot calculate growth rates. Clearly Andrew himself cannot spot the difference between emissions and concentrations, but that is what passes for Science at the CSIRO and ANU these days. I think Rudd was right to take $35 million from CSIRO in this year’s budget and give it to Toyota, they can at least do sums.
“The non-linear nature of atmospheric CO2 and CH4 rise, from 1.3%/year in 1990-1999 to 3.3%/year in 2000-2006 [9], combined with further ice melt and albedo decline and carbon cycle feedback effects, including release of CH4 hydrates, drying/burning biosphere, reduced CO2 sequestration by the oceans, threatens to move the Earth’s atmosphere into glacial termination-like conditions. Rapid ice melt rates in Greenland, the Arctic Sea and west Antarctica, the latter continuing through the southern winter, are documented from satellite and on the ground. The polar ice sheets, initiated about 34 million years ago, when CO2 levels declined below 450 ppm, are in danger.
The Earth’s climate is tracking into uncharted territory.”
This statement cannot be sustained on the evidence.
Over the period 1989 – 2007 i.e. fully covering the period over which atmospheric CO2 (NOT CH4 – that is a Glikson untruth) rose, from 1.3%/year in 1990-1999 to 3.3%/year in 2000-2006, the (offical NOAA) average rate of rise of mean global atmospheric CO2 was 1.7304 ppmv/year to a relatively high degree of LINEARITY (R^2 = 0.9640 for the full NOAA monthly dataset).
Furthermore, over the same period 1989 – 2007 i.e. fully covering the period over which atmospheric CO2 rose, from 1.3%/year in 1990-1999 to 3.3%/year in 2000-2006, the average rate of rise of mean atmospheric CO2 over the entire Southern Ocean from 30 S to the Pole was 1.6922 ppmv/year, also to a relatively high degree of LINEARITY (R^2 = 0.9882 for full NOAA monthly dataset).
If the global atmospheric climate system is being perturbed by input of ANY key forcing agent such as CO2 at an INCREASING and NON-LINEAR rate, yet is then DEMONSTRABLY responding to that perturbation by:
(1) controlling the CONCENTRATION of that agent in the atmosphere to a LESSER (than 1.3 – 3.3%), albeit increasing BUT STILL HIGHLY LINEAR rate; AND
(2) can also be shown to have DIFFERING degrees of control (both better and worse) over significant global fractions of the atmosphere BUT which are ALSO invariably manifest everywhere by LESSER (than 1.3 -3.3%) AND LINEAR RATES,
then BY DEFINITION the global atmospheric climate system simply CANNOT be described MATHEMATICALLY as a system that is….’spinning out of control’, ‘deviating increasingly non-linearly’ or ‘heading for a tipping point’ (or whatever other post-modernist garbage spin jargon you choose to use to freak out the mug punters).
The above is merely a simple demonstration of the mathematical naivety of that argument.
On the contrary, the NOAA atmospheric CO2 data record for the period 1989 – 2007 (or the whole 1980 – June 2008) is a high quality, quantitative dataset of a holistic system which shows the global biogeospheric system (‘Gaia’) is doing precisely the reverse of what is claimed for it i.e. it (she) IS demonstrating a HIGH DEGREE degree of relatively precise control of the CO2 perturbant.
This strongly suggests that in due course the perturbant may well be controlled more effectively according to whichever fraction/part of the biogeosphere adapts to it most rapidly. And there is clear evidence that some parts are already more adapted than others e.g Southern Ocean. I have posted elsewhere in this blog on the finer details of just one (biological) aspect of how this adaptation appears to be taking place. There are others far more intelligent than I showing how other physical parts of the system are also acting towards homeostasis.
There is simply no point mouthing trendy words like ‘tipping points’, ‘uncharted territory’, ‘Gaia’ etc if, mathematically, you really don’t have a clue about complex homeostatic systems and thus be able to interpret how they respond parametrically.
Unfortunately, all the truly great books on systems analysis were published before the ‘modern academic era’ got it’s nasty grip on our unis and started churning out bulk dunderheads.
And this was a short answer ? 🙂
Steve,
excellent!
SJT: ‘You seem to have no idea of what is being claimed, because you have no idea how it works. The progress of science has identified how this at first self contradictory process happens.
a) At the macro level, the laws of thermodynamics are indeed observed, the energy is transferred from hot to cold.
b) At the quantum level, the physical particles involved in transferring that energy do so, but at a statistical level. That is, over time, the radiation is going from the hotter body to the colder one, but there will be a number of particles emitted back from the cold body to the hot one. This effectively slows down the transer of radiation. For a system like the earth that has a constant stream of radiation pouring in, the nett effect is an increase in temperature.
So no laws of thermodynamics are broken, over time.’
Sounds like a very plausible hypothesis. Has it been tested?
Lazlo,
Not disagreeing with your post at all, but remodel it in terms of electricity – radiation from the hotter body is instead an electric current, etc.
Would this be a simpler explanation?
A little simple math, if CO2 has a residence time of 200 years and there is 840 GT in the atmosphere the exchange rate is 4.2 GT a year. Now for anyone who knows anything about this subject this type of statement is totally ridiculous which clearly establishes Haughton’s credibility as zero for all his bluff and bluster and cut and paste. Even Segealstad’s 5 year residence time gives us 168 GT a year which I think everyone now recognizes is too low.
Tim the guardian is well known to be extremely pro AGW, I would be far more impressed with this type of journalism which hides behind a screen of respectability if it genuinely evaluated the negative impacts of GW and the positive aspects, of which there are many. There is the problem of rising sea level which at 16 cm per century is completely over exaggerated by the alarmists, extreme weather events have no supporting statistics over the last 200 years and maybe longer when the royal navies 120 000 ships logs from 1670 have been analyzed. All computer models indicate 90% of the world will have more rain and soil moisture 10% less, for every 1 deg C the demarcation line between viable agricultural land non viable land moves 100 km north exposing considerably more useful land than is given up for deserts. Historical records show that warmer times are more affluent and settled times so the images of mass migrations has absolutely no foundation in facts. The point I find most disturbing is the automatic assumption that significant Global Warming is a direct result of anthropogenic emissions. I still feel this point has to be proven by true science not by correlation of highly suspect and distorted data. The fact that the world has experienced a warming trend in the last 250 years is indisputable the magnitude and causes of that increase is far from certain. Mitigation of the potential warming effects is a reasonable precautionary measure, if research can up with more efficient generation and use of our energy it should be supported by all means but I see no cause to decimate our economies without solid proof from an unbiased body of scientists. Currently we have very biased opinions from a politically controlled body who’s research grants and livelihood rely on pleasing their political masters I do not think this is a satisfactory situation we need more balance.
I was simply asking if the hypothesis had been validated, rather than explained in a different way..
Lazlo,
OK, so we wait for the expert validation…. 🙂
Put your skates on kiddies, it’s hockey season again.
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0901-temperatures.html
“Radiative forcing” is a phony science’s attempt to mimic legitimate science. Radiation from a hotter body raises the temperature of a colder body on a logarithmic basis. But the term ‘radiative forcing’ refers to the wholly imaginary phenomenon of a colder body raising the temperature of a hotter body. This phenomenon doesn’t exist, which is why no one can agree on radiative forcing estimates. Debating the subject amounts to arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The premise is absurd to begin with.
“In climate science, radiative forcing is (loosely) defined as the change in net irradiance at the tropopause. “Net irradiance” is the difference between the incoming radiation energy and the outgoing radiation energy in a given climate system and is thus measured in Watts per square meter. The change is computed based on “unperturbed” values, as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the measured difference relative to the year 1750, the defined starting point of the industrial era…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
I think this one fits the bill too
“Radiative forcing
As a general concept, the term radiative forcing in climate Climate science means any change in the radiation entering or leaving the climate system. It can be due to changes in sunlight arriving, or to differing amounts of radiatively active gases. It also has a more specific technical definition – see “IPCC usage” section. A positive forcing tends to warm the system while a negative forcing tends to cool it”
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Climate
Gavin: “…the measured difference relative to the year 1750”
How do they measure it?
And how did they measure it back in 1750?
BTW, you make a good point Tim. What Glikson claimed was a rise in atmospheric CO2 of 1.3% over 1990-1999 and then 3.3% over 2000-2006 is actually the rate of rise in global anthropogenic emissions, NOT rate of rise of atmospheric CO2.
FYI, the ‘official’ rate of rise of atmospheric CO2 concentrations as disseminated by the NOAA global mean data published since 1980 is not quite the same as the rate of rise at Mauna Loa Station. Using an exponential fit to the monthly global mean CO2 data from (say) 1989 – 2007 to bracket the period Glikson refers-to, the instantaneous (e-folding) rate of rise computed from those mean monthly values has been very close to 0.47%/year (R^2 = 0.9658) not the value of 1.0041 you quote. The earlier IPCC rate you quoted was just an annual multiplier, not a rate (i.e. 1.0041 = 1.000 + 0.41%).
So, if the atmospheric CO2 concentration has been rising at about 0.47% since 1989 to a high degree of statistical confidence, yet the average rate of rise of anthropogenic CO2 emissions has been rising (increasingly non-linearly) between 1.3 and 3.3%/year over the same period how the hell can anyone plausibly claim that the bulk system is spiralling (non-linearly) out of control into ‘uncharted territory’?
As Steve McIntyre, David Stockwell, Lucia and others have demonstrated over and over again, most of these AGW alarmist ‘scientists’ have an almost congenital difficulty with the practice of mainstream statistics – especially the R parameter.
I guess this just tells us most of these bozos flunked Statistics 101 etc (or didn’t even have to go more likely).
Many people just don’t get complex science, or even basic science.
http://perlnet.umephy.maine.edu/research/qm_narst.pdf
Live with it, people. You can’t all be Einstein or Galileo.
As for Louis using an electric current as a model for radiation, he’s missing out on the important point. A hot body radiates, a cool body also radiates, but just not as much. That means the hot body still makes the cool body warmer, but the radiation from both still happens at the same time, since the cooler body radiates less.
I hate to disagree with Steve Short, but he is like Glikson confusing CO2 emissions to the atmosphere with what is retained in the atmosphere; the former is growing at over 3% pa, the latter at 0.41% p.a. In absolute numbers, the total emissions were averaging 9.1 GtC p.a. in 2000-2006, and the latter only 4.1 GtC pa. The gap is the “missing sink”, at 5 GtC, which is the next extra takeup of CO2 by the oceans and land biosphere. That is growing at around 3% p.a. These numbers come from Larland et al at CDIAC and are in Canadell et al 2007 Table 1. They err only in their inability to compute growth rates; they say the atmospheric concentration is growing at 1.89% p.a. even when their data show only 0.41%, ie four time faster than the actual rate. If the atmos CO2 was growing at nearly 2% pa there might be some basis for alarm, but it is not, and from July 07 to July 08 it was only 0.2 percent. It is much more closely related to El Nino (droughts, less CO2 take up) and La Nina (rain, more CO2 takeup) than to CO2 emissions. Glikson should know this but chooses to ignore it or so it seems.
Barry, your post at 11.51, sums up my thoughts perfectly…only better put than me.
Bernard, the moment i saw who was responsible for writing your “mongabay” link i was sceptical. Interestingly all 7 comments posted about it point out errors in his logic. …posted here for you to see.
Here we go again, Michael Mann trying to resurrect his discredited Hockey stick.
The team lead by Mann has lost all credibility. They way they have deliberately obfuscated errors in their results, refused to disclose their methods, publish their data and kept on pushing flawed analysis makes anything they publish highly suspect. That their latest publication confirms their earlier results is neither surprising nor informative. It is just a continuation of their standard behavior.
No doubt this latest effort will be as full of fudges as their normal work.
Chris Maddigan
——————————————————————————–
Mann’s new approach is welcome: Tree rings should be avoided if possible. But if you remove the instrumental records from that graph then there is no hockey stick except for Mann’s 2003 tree ring graph; which was just a rehash of the flawed 1998 paper. Without those instrument records we’d clearly see a return towards temperatures of an earlier time but not a dramatic rise – as is being hyped. Crucially though the proxies and the instrument records still don’t match well in the 20th century, where uncertainty is supposed to be lowest. Thus the proxies are not properly calibrated, so grafting the instrument data on the end is not scientifically justifiable and so is intentionally misleading. In order to keep the instrumental record they’d need to alter the weighting or scale of the proxies to roughly match the instrument scale. Then the graph would show a higher warm period earlier. You’d still see unexplained divergence between proxies and instruments though so the case is far from proven.
JamesG
——————————————————————————–
But then having another look at the graph, at least two of the reconstructions match the 1st period of the 20th century instrumental record rather well without any re-weighting but they diverge greatly in the latter half of the 20th century. So is this telling us that the instrument records are flawed? Certainly 0.6 degrees of that later rise in the instrument record comes from adjustments made to the raw data to compensate for a supposed TOBS error. If the proxies are actually correct for the 20th century then it must cast doubt on these data adjustments.
JamesG
——————————————————————————–
since when has the temperature record as determined by proxys, which necessarily is low resolution, been comparable to a high resolution instrumental record such as HADCRU. Dispense with the instrumental record from the end of the graph and the late 20th century doesn’t look anomalous at all – and when you consider the well known divergence problem that exists between the instrumental record and post 1980 proxy constructions: then you really are left wondering how Mann comes to the conclusions that he does?
Gary Moran
——————————————————————————–
Does Mann have any proxies that agree with the 20th century instrumental record? If not, isn’t this just garbage in, garbage out?
mugwump
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It is interesting to note that the CRU temperature rise (red line in above post) is 1.3 deg C, vs .65 or so for IPCC–that is twice the rise everyone else is using for the 20th Century. How convenient to end with 1998 data, an El Nino year. Note that the Hadley data in gray (and recent proxies) are almost invisible under the red line. Also, with proxies you lose detail, so a single warm decade won’t show up 1000 years ago. Again they are comparing multidecadal smoothed proxy data to annual data–apples and oranges.
Craig Loehle
——————————————————————————–
There seems to be something wrong in the graphs, with some confidence intervals completely separated from the trend lines. Just look at it: the bands and lines don’t seem to match. But maybe it is just me – as a color blind (challenged) person I must strongly protest at all those hues of red and green.
Matti Virtanen
I hope those who posted do not mind me reprinting their comments in full with their names.
Bernard to me the saddest thing about AGW is that wether real or not, I have lost my trust in scientists. Now rather than initially believing what they have said, my instinct is the opposite. And from a layman that is a sad sad thing.
“As for Louis using an electric current as a model for radiation, he’s missing out on the important point. A hot body radiates, a cool body also radiates, but just not as much. That means the hot body still makes the cool body warmer, but the radiation from both still happens at the same time, since the cooler body radiates less.”
Obviously SJT has not worked out how an electric fire works like the ones you can buy from Harvbey Norman, Retravision, Myer or even from your credit card bonus scheme – and he complains about scientific ignorance here.
Tim Curtin at September 3, 2008 08:30 AM
The IPCC have for the 1980’s 5.4 emitted and 3.3 retained, and for the 1990’s 6.3 emitted and 3.2 retained all in PgC/year, which I assume was about 8 years for the 1990’s from the quoted sources. Using your ratio from Larland et al at CDIAC, We get based on these numbers that in the 1980’s, 61.1% was retained in the atmosphere, in the 1990’s, 50.7% was retained in the atmosphere, in the 2000’s, 45.1% retained in the atmosphere. The interseting part is that the sinks are increasing not decreasing relative to concentration/emission inputs aren’t they? Doing some quick estimations, and mid point assumptions, it appears that the sinks are increasing 0.892% absolute per year from the 1980’s to 2006. I note that the data from IPCC indicate that the net biome production (NBP) was the major factor. Did Larland have any NBP numbers. It was -.2 PgC/yr in the 80’s and increased to -1.4 PgC/yr in the 90’s. There are large error bars, I know. I do know of an article that indicated that the biomass in the tropic rainforests had increased dramatically in this period. Or perhaps Steve Short has some data. Do we have some numbers on the realtive increase in CO2 biological uptake NBP in the 2000’s?
Arggh, verballed by James; the 2 links I posted which he asserts prove that CO2 has a shelf life of up to 200 years are;
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/057304.pdf
Table 3 is relevant here;
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/glob_c2.pdf
Exhibit 2-1 is relevant here;
Combining the 2, the only possible conclusion is that the ANNUAL atmospheric retention of anthropogenic CO2 is 3% of the 1.5% of the total natural/man output which is not reabsorbed, which is 0.04% of the total annual natural/man emissions. Since the warmers, NT especially, along with James, have been throwing compounding heat theories at everyone it should be pointed out that the chances of any one CO2 molecule being retained for more than one year is 1 in 4.0609137^-04. Thanks to Alan to already partially rebuting James.
There is so much that is wrong with Glickson’s reprehensible alarmism one doesn’t know where to start. It interesting to see James and SJT and NT have reverted to the old Weart semi-infinite, vertically opaque atmospheric model, and its radiative, TOA imbalance; even if this were true, and Stewart’s Law and Kirchhoff’s Law makes it a nonsense, it wouldn’t necessarily matter as Pielke’s paper using SB shows;
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/publications/pdf/R-321.pdf
You cannot have a global radiative imbalance because the SB determined temperature emissions vary depending on the temperature of the surface. Chilingar’s paper describes vertical heat transfer; weather describes lateral heat transfer; given the paucity of wavelength interception by CO2 and its uneven mix, there will always be windows to prevent a ‘radiative imbalance’.
There is much more to criticise tipping point Glickson’s piece, but I note NT has raised the melt spectre in connection with the Antarctic. Velicogna’s linked paper says; “Most of this mass loss came from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.” This is the part of the Antarctic which is underpinned by a circle of active volcanoes;
http://www.wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/antarcticvolcanoes2.jpg
Some other papers about the Antarctic;
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2007GL032529.shtml
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/308/5730/1898
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2007JC004254.shtml
The Philipona back-radiation has also resurfaced; I thought the deficiencies of Philipona’s paper, the small selective 7 year period, the simple linear regression analysis and his use of base period anomalies, had put that to bed. The simple fact is that near surface radiative exchange is dominated by water vapour, and as we all know that is a temperature modifier not enhancer.
Then we have the overlooked role of N2 and O2 and atmospheric pressure in creating and maintaining atmosphermic thermodynamics.
Cohenite I am just happy you have at last acknowledged the Grrenhouse Effect… That’s a big win.
I love your accounting Skillz Cohenite.
And the DOE say this: “The calculation of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels is straightforward: emissions are calculated by
multiplying reported energy consumption by the estimated carbon content of fossil fuels.”
See it’s pretty easy!
And look they even consider increases in natural absorption:
“It is particularly striking that there was a sudden slowing in the growth rate of atmospheric concentrations
of CO2 and methane over the period 1990-93, which cannot be explained by changes in fossil fuel
consumption, suggesting that either natural sources of emissions have declined or natural absorption has
increased.”
And I didn’t raise the spectre of Antarctica, that was J. Hansford. Well he said the Antarctic ice mass was increasing. I was just alerting him that it was actually decreasing. I don;t see it as melting anytime soon.
You’re raising volcanoes again Cohenite, you should actually look and see what their activity is. Volcanoes normally leave evidence of their eruptions.
Very slippery NT; and I love your spelling; the grrenhouse; a lot more people are going to be going grrr before very long; a volcano doesn’t have to be erupting to have a heating effect on its surrounds. As to the greenhouse; as I have explained many times the IPCC use of the greenhouse analogy is just plain wrong as this article demonstrates;
http://junkscience.com/Greenhouse/Kondis-Greenhouse.html
The basic fact is this; a CO2 molecule absorbs in a narrow spectrum; it remits and losses kinetic energy by collision with N2 and CO2; ergo the CO2 molecule must cool; CO2 is properly described as a heat transferor not a heater per se; as Chilingar has shown that near surface radiative heat transfer is swamped by convective heat transfer mechanisms and latent heat effects through water vapour evaporation and condensation; if there is a greenhouse, that is a gas based heat retention/insulating effect, CO2 is a miniscule part, and the effect of water means the enhanced greenhouse clap-trap is exactly that; it irritates that AGW does not recognise atmospheric weight and pressure as playing a role, especially given the glaring example set by Venus and Mars.
What Glickson’s scaremongering shows is that nature is quite capable of being destructive and that humanity’s efforts at contributing to these destructive events are insignificant.
“Obviously SJT has not worked out how an electric fire works like the ones you can buy from Harvbey Norman, Retravision, Myer or even from your credit card bonus scheme – and he complains about scientific ignorance here.”
If I follow your logic, any body that is cooler than me would be invisible?
“. As to the greenhouse; as I have explained many times the IPCC use of the greenhouse analogy is just plain wrong as this article demonstrates;”
Any analogy is going to be wrong, becuase it’s going to be a very short phrase that to explain something that is highly complex. When they taught you in secondary school that atoms were like little red balls, they were wrong. Imagine that, they lied to you.
If you want, another good analogy for the AGW effect is the ‘leaky bucket’. But that would be wrong also, because there aren’t any leaky buckets floating up there in the sky, either.
SJT
I don’t think you have been following anyone’s logic from the torrent of non sequiturs you post here.
In the past few years a new theory about a piece of a comet hitting the Laurentide Ice sheet in Canada 12,900 years ago has been very well developed. This event lines up with DO cycles and was most likely the cause of the Younger-Dryas cooling period.
I went searching for an astronomical cause for a cycle of 1,470 years. Comet Encke has an orbit of 1,460 years. Encke crosses paths with a meteor field every 10,000 years. You may know the meteor showers from this one comet: Taurids, beta-Taurids, and the Southern Taurids. The chunks of Encke are probable spread out over 400 to 500 years. Tunguska could have just been the first one.
I used the historical sunspots for a timeline to look at Bond events and Encke’s cycle because I have wondered whether or not comet impacts with the oceans created holes in the sunspot record.
[img]http://www.bnhclub.org/JimP/jp/his_ss.JPG[/img]
If my graph doesn’t come through you will have to cut and paste.
For those who want to read the complete paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/02/0805721105.full.pdf+html
The view that CO2 cools is now accepted by AGW supporters;
http://news.smh.com.au/national/big-chill-a-symptom-of-climate-chaos-20080901-46yx.html
IMO this catastrophism is criminally culpable.
Cohenite, I love you. Great work.
“a volcano doesn’t have to be erupting to have a heating effect on its surrounds.”
So what? Did the volcanic activity suddenly increase? Was there a measured increase in heat flow? You are again appealing to the unknown. A pointless exercise.
Seriously that stuff about the greenhouse effect not being a greenhouse. WOW.
“The basic fact is this; a CO2 molecule absorbs in a narrow spectrum; it remits and losses kinetic energy by collision with N2 and CO2…”
Yes, see the IR comes from the surface. This is how the surface heats the atmosphere. It’s called the greenhouse effect… You seem to be under the impression that once CO2 transfers it’s energy, that it is lost. Not so, it has energised nearby particles (which are now “warm”). These nearby particles don’t suddenly cool down. This is why the atmosphere is nice and warm. And now that CO2 is available for IR absorption from the surface again, so it can actually repeat the process.
Ok.Nice spelling of Transferrer too.
So what you’re saying is that
1. CO2 merely transfers heat, it’s not hot.
2. that convection is the main method of heat transfer.
3. that water vapour evap and condensation transfer heat.
4. that if the greenhouse effect exists, CO2 doesn’t matter because it’s small.
5. that any greenhouse effect we see is due to atmospheric pressure…
Right.
1. CO2 gets hot due to absorption of IR (The Grrrreenhouse Effect!)
2. Yes convection is a method of heat transfer, but convection doesn’t mean the atmosphere gets hotter. What is the source of the extra heat? (One clue is in 1. see above)
3. Yes, yes they do. And Water is a more potent greenhouse gas. But as it gets warmer, the atmsophere’s capacity to hold water increases… Oh no! A feedback loop!
4. But wait, I thought you were claiming no greenhouse? Or is it a partial greenhouse? Or maybe CO2 is not a greenhouse gas… What was it again? From little things, big things grow.
5. Atmospheric pressure… Hmmm has the atmospheric pressue been rising over the past century? Why would the transparency of the N2 and O2 to IR be affected by atmospheric density? If the atmosphere was only composed of O2 and N2 can you quantify the density effects?
Cohenite
I was wondering when cooling was going to be attributed to CO2 – this is definite proof the theory is pure bunkum.
SJT: ‘Live with it, people. You can’t all be Einstein or Galileo.’ So this seems to be your sole response to queries about the testing and validation of the theory of radiative forcing – condescension.
One of these days, people are going to look back in awe at the 21st century global warming hysteria. Some will giggle uncontrollably and others will just shake their heads in utter amazement, but none of them will believe that their ancestors actually attributed the temperature of the earth to… trace gases.
Alan Siddons:
“But people like James Haughton and SJT believe that looking into a mirror will progressively heat your face — via back-radiation or statistical quantum reversal, y’know.”
LOLOLOL…
Just like cooking a Chicken with a flashlight.With accumulating heat energy.That would impress the originally cold muscles of the poor old bird.
He he…
I am amazed that people still fall for the incredibly long CO2 residence time in the atmosphere.The IPCC’s own numbers makes it less than 8 years.
Professor Keeling in 1985 stated it was about 5 years.
There is a long list of researchers who have posted similar conclusions over the years.
5-200 years is simply bogus because of the massive uncertainty the large range indicates.
ROFLMAO!
The IPCC 4th. Assessment Report Chapter 1 Page 96 Fig.1 shows the long term average radiation energy balance for the earth.
Lets take a look at the numbers as published by the IPCC.
Incoming radiation 342; Outgoing 235 + 107 = 342; net balance Zero.
Energy absorbed by the earth, Incoming 168 + 324 = 492 Outgoing 390 + 78 + 24 = 492. Net balance Zero.
Question, if the incoming and outgoing at the top of the atmosphere and the absorbed and radiated at the surface are both net balance Zero, where does the energy come from that is allegedly heating up the world. Certainly not from the Atmosphere. These are the IPCC’s numbers not mine.
From Cohenite’s link:
“The freezing temperatures are proof of the urgent need to cut carbon pollution, according to WWF development and sustainability program manager Paul Toni.”
There you have it folks.
Co2 can warm the planet.It can cool the planet.
Also known as ….. climate change.In an instant even……
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
“One of these days, people are going to look back in awe at the 21st century global warming hysteria. Some will giggle uncontrollably and others will just shake their heads in utter amazement, but none of them will believe that their ancestors actually attributed the temperature of the earth to… trace gases.”
Alan I am in awe already.Hysterically even……!
Imagine that a cool “greenhouse gas” can warm up outgoing photons.It is a free lunch energy source that keeps escaping earth!
I wonder why they do not build the “cool gas” generator and fill it with CO2 and shoot IR photons at it.To generate steam heat and drive electric turbines.
Imagine the gratitude of the suffering masses who have to use ordinary energy sources such as awful Thorium.Along with Coal,NG and other legitimate “dirty” energy sources.
“As for Louis using an electric current as a model for radiation, he’s missing out on the important point. A hot body radiates, a cool body also radiates, but just not as much. That means the hot body still makes the cool body warmer, but the radiation from both still happens at the same time, since the cooler body radiates less.”
SJT:
What is the temperature of a CO2 molecule.Before a IR photon strikes it?
Then what is the temperature of a CO2 molecule after it absorbs the “heat” of the outgoing IR photon?
Sunsettomy,
I’ll take a guess…
Is it 47 degrees C
and 1,897 degrees C?
🙂
barry; excellent;
NT; have you read the Chilingar paper? Or Miscolczi or Minschwaner? No matter; let’s assume that CO2 is capable of heating; it is a subdued effect which even IPCC recognises, hence their enhanced greenhouse you say “water is a more potent greenhouse gas. But as it gets warmer, the atmosphere’s capacity to hold water increases..Oh no! A feedback loop!” Exactly wrong. Sensible heat is the thermometer heat of the air; latent heat is the product of the phase change water has undergone to get into the atmosphere; specific humidity is the moisture content of the air and relative humidity is the capacity of the air as a function of temperature to hold moisture; IPCC assumes that RH remains constant for sensible heat increases and increases in SH; it doesn’t;
http://mls.jpl.nasa.gov/library/Minschwaner_2004.pdf
As a consequence, while there is slight positive feedback due to the increase in SH, this is swamped by the -ve feedback due to the decline in RH; a good analysis of this is here;
http://landshape.org/enm/greenhouse-thermodynamics-and-gcms/
http://landshape.org/enm/greenhouse-thermodynamics-and-water-vapor/
It is clear that AGW and its models do not understand the phase boundaries of water; as Spencer has shown the parametrics of water are not understood by AGW because AGW assumes a one-way linear causality between CO2 heating and a water feedback; this results in a bias of between 0.3-0.8Wm2k1. A further thing to consider is that a higher SH combined with higher temperature will, given that the temperature at the tropopause is fixed, lower the lapse rate and cool the surface; so both the increase in SH and the decrease in RH have cooling effects.
That handful of posts related to cohenite’s SMH link are just more nonsense.
Further back we see; “There is so much that is wrong with Glickson’s reprehensible alarmism one doesn’t know where to start” then
“The simple fact is that near surface radiative exchange is dominated by water vapour, and as we all know that is a temperature modifier not enhancer”
oh yeah?
Shorty was up on the soap box too about linear relationships v the non linear and that had me thinking again about what we can recognise from all that scattered data and filtered curves. CO2 at Cape Grim is all we need to follow.
After a career in instruments and hunting for signs of positive feedback in any process a couple of events remain quite vivid. One was a rapid rise in sulphur gas H2S in mineral floatation, another was some clown dropping our latest hand held 2 way radio in the briny on their training opp. That little beauty swelled so much after the multi layers of copper track corroded it almost split the case.
Perhaps to most important feedback to avoid though was ANY positive pressure in the furnace fire box. The effect is much like the odd occasion when somebody tries to weld an empty fuel tank. All these events are quite short in duration and quite unlike AGW.
NT said…”Newtonian mechanics is merely an approximation….What is wrong with the Big Bang theory?
Let me try to convey the Big Bang theory to you through my Monty Python-type humour. Astrophysicists get paid to sit around and stare at the universe. But they can’t see too well with optical telescopes, so they use radiotelescopes, which are used mainly to observe gas spectra. Out of that, they oberved that the stars were in motion with respect to each other and there is an unexpected 3 or 4 degree background warmth in the universe when absolute zero was expected.
So they started theorizing as to what might cause those conditions. “An explosion, by gum!! A mother of all explosions!! Yes, that’s it!!” (said with a Michael Palin flair). “But what would have caused that explosion”?? (Asked like the villagers being queried in The Holy Grail as they are trying to reason why the woman is a witch).
More Michael Palin, with a bit of John Cleese. “I’ve got it…there was nothing there and…boom!!…suddenly huge gobs of mass appeared out of nowhere, spreading concentrically. Along the way, clouds of dust suddenly formed stars, and rings of dust around the stars condensed into planets. Yes…that’s it!!”, Just about then, the policeman steps in and breaks up the skit…because it’s silly.
Hey NT…I’ve got a sense of humout too…but come on. Do we need a theory? Can’t we just say, “I don’t know”.
Newton is an approximation?? Well, Feynman pointed that out, but in the limit. When you get near to infintesmal measurements it is approximate, but they can put a tiny lander on Mars using it, or a build a space station with it. They don’t use quantum theory for engineering.
Can you imagine them building a bridge using quantum mechanics? Let’s see, the probability of that beam needing to be there is…um, ah…100%.
Cohenite, lets try and stay on topic here. I was busy on something and now you’ve spun off onto water vapour.
You were insisting CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas… Is it?
Hmmm Minschwaner and Dessler think it is.
Gordon, if that is your understanding of the Big Bang Theory then no wonder you think it’s silly.
Have you actually read anything on it?
I think your homework for the day would be to list the day to day gadgets that depend on Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory to function.
There’s your challenge. How many can you name?
Gordon – there are only two things wrong with your Monty-Python type explanation of the Big Bang theory.
One: you’ve got your historical facts wrong. The expansion of the universe was discovered through observations of the red shift of astronomical objects using optical telescopes.
Two: it’s nowhere near as funny as Monty Python.
Three: you don’t really have a sense of humour at all.
Oh bugger, now I’ll have to start again.
gavin says; “The handful of posts related to cohenite’s SMH link are just more nonsense.” No mate, what is in the SMH link is the nonsense.
NT; I can’t make it plainer; even if CO2 is a ‘greenhouse’ gas its pathetic heating (transfer) capacity is negated by Miscolzian -ve feedbacks; the IPCC, in their black hearts, know this, so the ISSUE is the enhanced greenhouse which is entirely to do with obstensible +ve feedback from water vapour; which is why I explained that there is no +ve feedback from water; so, that temp difference of 288K – 255K = 33K which is attributable to GHG’s, IMO, needs to be apportioned between CO2, let’s give the CO2 a temp affect of approx 1-2K, and something else. So, NT, do you think all the 33K is due to CO2?
Cohenite. That was a very lame conclusion.
Is CO2 a greenhouse gas?
The problem with your assertion that it is ‘pathetic’ is that you are ignoring a lot of literature (most of which you yourself provided) which says otherwise. geologically speaking (and Andrew Glikson is a Geologist) CO2 is very important, generally considered 3rd after water and methane.
My answer to your questions is: No.
I suggest a note of caution re the usage and “sensible heat”
see an example below by
R. L. Snyder, Biometeorology Specialist
Department of Land, Air and Water Resources
University of California
Davis, CA 95616, USA
“Nighttime Energy Balance and Inversions
During nighttime, there is a net loss of long wave radiation from the surface to the sky. This causes the surface to cool and sensible heat, which is measured with a thermometer, is convected downward from the air to the surface to partially replace the heat loss. However, the surface cools faster than the air above and this usually leads to an inversion (i.e., the temperature increases with height). Also, heat is conducted upward through the soil to partially replace the heat lost to radiation. The net radiation is relatively constant during the night, but the volume of air supplying heat to the surface increases during the night and so the net rate of heat loss of air near the surface decreases with time during the night. Similarly the net rate of heat loss of the soil layer near the surface decreases with time because heat is being transferred from deeper in the soil. As a result, the air temperature drops fast immediately after sunset, but the rate of temperature drop slows near dawn.
Sensible and Latent Heat
Gaseous water molecules consist of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. When in a liquid state, the water molecules form strong hydrogen bonds between the molecules. In order to evaporate water, heat must be supplied to break the hydrogen bonds and allow individual molecules to break off as a gas. This is what happens when water is boiled. The heat supplied by your stove breaks hydrogen bonds and the liquid water is rapidly evaporated. Therefore, heat must be supplied to break hydrogen bonds and evaporate water. If air is the source of the heat (called sensible heat), then the air temperature will drop and the energy is stored as chemical energy in the water molecules (called latent heat). When water vapor condenses into liquid water, the hydrogen bonds form again and release latent heat, which increases the sensible heat and causes the air temperature to rise. This exchange between latent and sensible heat is one of the most important factors controlling our climate and environment. Much of the heat transfer on a global scale results from water evaporating at the surface near the equator and condensing into clouds and moving poleward to redistribute the energy. The main point is that sensible heat is removed from the air and the temperature drops when evaporation is occurring and latent heat is converted to sensible heat and the temperature rises when condensation occurs.
Dew Formation
When the surface temperature reaches the dew point temperature, dew will form. Note that dew does not fall from the sky. Water vapor, like other gases, moves at sonic speeds and continually strikes the surface. When the surface temperature is at the dew point, more water molecules will condense onto the surface than evaporate from the surface. Hence, dew forms when the number of water molecules striking the surface and forming hydrogen bonds with other water molecules is bigger than the number of molecules breaking hydrogen bonds and separating off as a gas”
http://biomet.ucdavis.edu/frostprotection/Measure%20Dewpoint/fp003.html
NT
I am also a geologist and your sentence – “geologically speaking (and Andrew Glikson is a Geologist) CO2 is very important, generally considered 3rd after water and methane” is nonsensical.
What do you mean?
Louis
In terms of Paleoclimate reconstructions.
Cohenite linked a bunch of papers trying to show me that CO2 is from ‘natural’ sources, sadly (for him) these papers also confirmed the existence of a greenhouse effect and that it is used in paleocliamet reconstructions.
It may because the comment is an answer to a question you didn’t read.
“Atmospheric CO2 has been growing only at 1.0041 percent pa since 1958”
Tim,
Steve short was right saying that the annual CO2 concentration (and not emissions) growth is 0,41%. His number is closer to the truth (around 1,35ppmV or 0,4%/year with huge annual variability correlated to PDO and volcanoes activities, source CDIAC) that your “1.0041 percent” and of course much closer than Andrew Glikson’s “atmospheric CO2 and CH4 rise, from 1.3%/year in 1990-1999 to 3.3%/year in 2000-2006”.
Note that Glikson did not make just one blunder in this above sentence but two: atmospheric CH4 has not risen, it has been stable over the past 10 years !
NT the big bang is a paradox and a paradox can only be found in the human mind. Al-AGW is much the same. I’d be much more alarmed as to what sunnyboy is up to than some piddling human CO2 emissions.
Louis; NT is verballing me; it’s the tactic of the day; let’s get some perspective about these paleoclimate reconstruction papers which ‘prove’ a greenhouse, bearing in mind that I posted them to indicate that the bulk source of CO2 is not humanity; first a CO2 historical level graph after Berner et al;
http://www.junkscience.com/images/paleocarbon.gif
I won’t bother with the Beck link confirming oceanic outgassing today, but these are the 3 links; in descending age;
http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~jzachos/pubs/Rea_etal_90.pdf
this deals with the Paleocene-Eocene boundary extinction event 55.8 MYA
http://jgs.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/138/2/183
this deals with 350MYA
http://sp.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/199/1/231this deals with the hadean era.
The first 2 can be correlated with the CO2/temp Berner graph; the last goes beyond the scale of the graph, but a quote from the Hadean paper is instructive;
“hence surface temperatures can become very low if CO2 is the only greenhouse gas apart from water.”
This is the Clayton’s greenhouse, but if NT wants to torture the language then he is a true acolyte of AGW. The Rea Paleocene paper does speculate about a volcanic led blow-out of CO2 and this is visible on the Berner graph, but it also mentions severe alterations to the thermohaline which were independent of the CO2 blow-out, which, incidentally, is completely independent and uncorrelated with temperature; a stretch there to promote greenhouse. The middle paper to do with the Paloezoic does invoke high CO2 and while it refers to high temperatures (with a ?) the Berner graph shows no correlation between CO2 and temp; the Mackenzie paper in fact refers to sulphur releases.
There is no doubt that the Zahnle paper about the Hadean refers to methane as a heater, but this paper suggest that methane too has a saturation limit;
http://ecen.com/eee55/eee55e/growth_of%20methane_concentration_in_atmosphere.htm
A better question to ask NT and the other verballers (!) is whether they think the 33K is entirely due to GHG’s/
Cohenite, not verballing, I am trying to get you to understand that those authors all accept the reality of the greenhouse effect and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
It’s not some new thing that CO2 has varied in the past, this is something you learn in undergrad.
” bulk source of CO2 is not humanity”
This is a strawman.
The problem is that you a looking for an ‘out’ for anthropogenic CO2. A pretty strange thing to do.
So I’ll try again.
Lets say your bank account varies between $180 and $280 after expenses, you get a pay rise, you notice you monthly account is now slowly rising.
Do you:
a) Decide this monthly increas is due to your payrise?
b) Decide the bank must have lowered their fees?
C) Decide some mysterious benefactor is putting money in your account and there is no record of it.
You have claimed that the mysterious source is Oceanic CO2. Where is the evidence? Has the concentration of CO2 in polar waters dropped recently?
ohhh so now the question changes… Is the whole 33k from GHG’s, that’s a tough one… This is a very poorly disguised distraction, as this debate was actually over whether or not CO2 is a greenhouse gas (and whether there is a greenhouse effect). Why do you keep changing the topic?
Anyway, I’ll blunder into your trap(ette). I don’t think I am capable of answering it. I do know that the insolation figure for the sun would be lower in those earlier periods, and the atmosphere was a lot richer in methane, and SO2 so… It’s probably close.
This is actually why the Berner graph is pointless. There are many factors affecting climate,one of which is CO2. Continental arrangements, the sun, atmospheric composition etc.
So Cohenite. Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? All those authors think it is…
Look at these periods of abrupt climate change more closely.
They are to do with one thing and one thing only. Changes in the resistance to circulation. We aren’t talking Maunder-minimums and periods of unusualy powerful solar activity here.
We are talking about PHYSICAL…….KINETIC……EVENTS.
Actual catastrophic events that happen in a specific time that physically impact the ocean currents and almost always the gulf stream.
The people who imagine that this is about anything else must be sacked. They are incompetent, malicious or full-on retarded science-grant whores.
NT,
Thanks for that clarification.
Cohenite,
NT seems to think that science is based on majority vote – the majority believed the sun went round teh earth not so long ago until a certain telescope was deployed, but that is the Whig way – determination of fact by consensus.
You moron NT. Its clear that you are trying to conjure the Sasquatch ontologically.
By your implied definition CO2 IS NOT A GREENHOUSE GAS. By you implied definition.
Got that idiot?
You cannot change reality through wordgames.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YOU MORON. OR ARE YOU AND SJT TRYING ON THIS SAME IDIOCY EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT 50 YEARS YOU FILTH?
DON’T TRY AND ONTOLOGICALLY CONJURE THE SASQUATCH YOU TOTAL BLOCKHEAD NT.
Its not that its dangerous to do so. Its just that it cannot be done and you are an annoying idiot trying it on.
Can somebody track down NT and have him sacked for idiocy?
Does anyone ELSE here imagine that they can change the fundamental nature of physical reality by pseudo-syllogistic wordgames like NT and SJT apparently think they can?
Only mass-sackings can free us of this vermin. This is no honest disagreement. This is societal vandalism by spineless insects.
Imagine that industrial-CO2 CANNOT warm the climate as the evidence suggests it cannot.
Supposing I then construct this syllogism:
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas
2. Greenhouse gasses warm the climate
3. Ergo industrial-CO2 will warm the climate.
This is conjuring the Sasquatch ontologically. And its pretty clear that SJT and NT have to be euthanised. Since it has been pointed out to them that this practice CANNOT change reality outside their own head and they have not corrected themselves.
What a senseless waste of life that will be.
Onward.
Graeme, I don’t want NT sacked; he’s putting money into my bank account; apparently.
Graeme
You cannot warm a climate – it isn’t a physical object. It is an interpretation, or an abstraction, of the physical state of the earth’s surface over the predetermined span of 30 years.
Graeme
Sacking them also puts them onto the dole qeue which isn’t useful either.
But it’s a belief system we are dealing wih, not science per se though NT and SJT think it’s science.
Take the Big Bang theory – supposedly based on the interpretation of red shift – but as Chip Arp has shown, red shift is actually a measure of age not distance.
Religion is a touchy issue at the best of times but Big Bang theory is simply compatible with the religious beliefs of a great number of scientists, and for any culture or civilisation that has a religious foundation, explanations for Creation cannot be otherwise.
It is pertinent to note that Sir John Houghton is a devout Christian as was Sir Charles Lyell two centuries ago and Lyell profoundly altered the science of geology by a couple of rhetorical sleights of hand.
1. By insisting that the Old Testament was literature and not historical fact and,
2. By shifting Creation back in time by some arbitrary period of time by interposing an expanded time scale.
Lyell visited the Canada and the US and recorded his impressions and ideas in a journal. Of interest to me as a geologist was his estimation of the yearly recession of the Niagara falls. He quotes a Mr Bakewell who, based on measurements for the period 40 years before 1830, estimated that the rate was about one yard per year. Lyell however wrote “but I conceive that one foot per year would be a much more probable conjecture, in which case 35,000 years would have been required for the retreat of the falls from the escarpment of Queenston to their present site, if we could assume that the retrograde movement had been uniform throughout”. (1)
Here we have the case of a measured rate of headward erosion of the Niagara falls of 3 feet per annum deemed unsatisfactory by the father of geology and replaced by his conjecture that it’s 1 foot per year.
Bakewell’s empirical data point to some 10,000 years while Lyell’s conjecture 35,000 years.
This same Whig mindset is behind AGW, in which technically sophisticated conjectures about the physical behavior of CO2 are preferred to the empirical facts of physical measurement. And just as Lyell’s group won the day politically, so will the AGW supporters with their specious science.
Now this is a real tragedy if we allow that to happen.
1. Chapter II, p 34.
Here’s another headline for gavin about those crazy, fun-loving, logic-scrambling warmister/cooler’s;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/01/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange2?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront
Cohenite leads us to “Geo-engineering ‘better than doing nothing’
and Fake clouds among ideas in Royal Society papers”
But best of all is that green muck in the AP seaside photo
Gavin
Most of us could have reached this conclusion by the simple expedient of reading Cohenite’s url.
Is your post thus a need to be noticed, just in case we forgot you?
Louis:
“Now this is a real tragedy if we allow that to happen.”
Any ideas how *we* are going to stop it happening?
Louis Hissink.
When you say “By insisting that the Old Testament was literature and not historical fact…” you agree with the statement, do you not?
I’m trying to be clear about the meaning of your post.
Bernard J.
The Old testament is Jewish history and thus based in historical fact but how its authors interpreted those facts and recorded them is another matter, as well as the editiing performed during the ages, not the least being mistranslations from the Greek.
The Joshua Ben Nun story of stopping the sun in midday is absurd from our stance today, but if human intelligence evolved with time, then it might be better explained as the observations of a naive observer.
But your post is recognised for its motive – hoping I might, with some rhetorical slip, identify myself as a closet Creationist.
Wrong. back to square one.
Steve Schapel
History tells me that we can’t though with the existence of the internet, and hence our interaction here, this conclusion might be wrong.
As the AGW is holy writ in the liberal parties in Oz, dealing with their union bosses and the physical/metaphorical knee-cappings remains a real and present danger. They are in charge and compulsion by evidence is not something they understand.
So, no, I don’t think we can change the direction of a spooked herd of bison by simply kneeling and invoking the divine.
Sterner methods would lower us to their levels, so that isn’t an option either.
So I would advise to work out how to ride the storm.
Well darlings if you weren’t at the 11th International River Symposium in Brisbane you obviously aren’t serious and not on the “A”-list. Perhaps you never will be.
But speaking of uncharted territory, Minister Penny Wong opened the conference adding these words in a masterpiece of a speech. God she’s good. We’re so lucky to have Penny.
“In the southern Basin, that is the southern part of Australia, the evidence is growing that indications are that climate change is with us, here and now. And given IPPC scientific projections of further global warming, its impacts may become even more severe in the decades ahead.
For example over the last two years, inflows to the River Murray have been half the previous historic minimums.
In five of the eight catchments in the southern Basin, the last 10 years have seen inflows around CSIRO’s – the Commonwealth’s scientific body – worst case projections for 2030.
Let’s just reflect on that; in over half of the eight catchments in the southern part of Australia, what we are seeing is worse than the worse case climate change projections for 2030.”
IMAGINE THAT ! 2030 now…
Wow …
Much more here for devotees:
http://www.getfarming.com.au/pages/farming/speeches_view.php?sId=9200020080902102056&hId=2000&nlHTId=h000901
Bernard J; ‘Put your skates on kiddies..’
One wonders whether the IPCC has again appointed Michael Mann as Lead Author to review his own work on his resurrected “Hockey Stick”?
The ultimate in “Peer Reviewing”, AGW style.
So Luke is waxing lyrical over Penny Wrong.
She’s wrong mate!
Deja Vue..
We’ve seen it all before.
And full marks to Brenden Nelson for having the guts to say so.
So Luke is waxing lyrical over Penny Wrong.
She’s wrong mate!
Deja Vue..
We’ve seen it all before.
And full marks to Brendan Nelson for having the guts to say so.
Luke,
As the head of the ‘B’ Team you are here to correct our sins?
snigger……………
Luke,
Idolising the messenger is the modern-day version of idolatory – you are nothing but a latter-day pagan.
Now I understand – history does repeat!
Louis,
I was afraid you were going to say that. For a very long time now, I have been hoping for a flash of inspiration for a way for truth to prevail, but it doesn’t come. Communing in blogs is all very well, but the information has to get wider.
I am in New Zealand. I just read in our local newspaper that our Prime Minister was spooking some school kids, who she encouraged to be “concerned about climate change and global warming issues, with the threat to small, low-lying atoll nations, desert nations getting drier and more arid, droughts in Australia getting worse, and our own crazy erratic weather.” She want on to promote the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Sheesh! Surely somebody has to so something about people like her propogating that sort of stuff.
On the other hand, apparently the leader of one of our minor political parties made a speech in Parliament today, saying “the entire climate change – global warming hypothesis is a hoax, that the data and the hypothesis do not hold together, that Al Gore is a phoney and a fraud on this issue, and that the emissions trading scheme is a worldwide scam and swindle.” Heartening to know that this viewpoint has actually been articulated so bottom-line in the parliament, but at the same time knowing it will not be reported in the mainstream media, or have much impact in any way.
Luke should tell Ms Wong that torrential rains are forecast for the MDB northern catchement over the next 2 days; maybe she and luke can go swimming together.
Back to Glikson and his reprehensible scare-mongering; he says 8500 years ago sea-levels rose 40 metres after the termination; a comparison with these 2 graphs about sea-level and historical CO2/temp levels makes his pronouncements problematic;
http://sahultime.monash.edu.au/explore.html
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html
It is clear from the Monash link that sea-levels did not rise precipitously 8500 years ago; the Geocraft link shows us that, typically, CO2 follows temperature up and down. Another paper puts this into perspective;
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7193/full/nature06949.html
The authors note their data reveals a significant deviation from a strong stationary relationship between Antarctic temperature and CO2. They go on to state the “AIM events are counterparts of the short and more pronounced warming events in the Northern Hemisphere known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events, and hence are a manifestation of the bipolar seesaw with oceanic and terrestrial processes likely contributing to the reconstructed CO2 variations.” Two points flow from this; firstly that CO2 is a product of climate change and that climate change is expressed regionally; this is manifest in a another paper;
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_06/
The authors note “that the reduced brightness of the Sun during the Maunder Minimum causes global average surface temperature changes of only a few tenths of a degree, inline with the small change in solar output. However, regional cooling over Europe and North America is 5-10 times larger due to a shift in atmospheric winds.”
Thats a 5-10 times greater regional response! So, assuming that Glikson’s ice-core data is correct, and we won’t refer to Jaworowski’s sterling work, there is no justification for his litany of catastrophic global events (which are problematic anyway given the Monash and Geocraft links), because the effect may just have been regionalised.
Luke
I’m shocked. It has only been a week or so since they were uttered, but already you seem to have forgotten those completely apt(for you) recent words of wisdom from the one and only Willie Nelson:
‘I have outlived my dick.’
Not a bad haul for a night’s work. Dusts hands. Walks off.
Sidebar for Cohenite – who cares – has to rain eventually. Or does it? BTW when are you putting Mrs Cohenite on.
Steve too true but just as well really.
Mrs Cohenite there?
Seems this old men’s club needs inspiration and
sahultime needs a projection
Minister of Climate Change: Penny W(r)ong.
If not for so-called ‘climate change’, she’d be out of a job – just what do you expect her to say?
“Not a bad haul for a night’s work.”
“BTW when are you putting Mrs Cohenite on.”
Socratic ironies……?
Dust hands. Walks off.
Yes, Mrs Cohenite; she’s actually an expert on algorithms; she’s working on one now to stop me wasting so much time on this stupid issue of AGW; it’s called the Lysistrata algorithm. I’ll be between a rock and a hard place. No contest really. Rubs hands together.
Sunsettommy:
“What is the temperature of a CO2 molecule.Before a IR photon strikes it?
Then what is the temperature of a CO2 molecule after it absorbs the “heat” of the outgoing IR photon?”
NT:
“Sunsettomy,
I’ll take a guess…
Is it 47 degrees C
and 1,897 degrees C?”
Sunsettommy:
No and not even close
Sunset… I was so sure I’d be right.
Hey Cohenite, figured out if CO2 is a greenhouse gas yet?
And did you work out where anthropogenic CO2 is going?
NT you are such a dork you should sign yourself NUT because that’s what you are. Yes by the definition CO2 is a greenhouse gas so is water vopour so is methane etc because they absorb specific outgoing radiation wavelengths. However CO2 is saturated before it gets to 100ppm as is water so they have no more effect on forcing after they become saturated.
With respect to where is the anthropogenic carbon I posted regarding the mass balance program I wrote starting with the IPCC’s farce of a mass balance on Pg.514 of 4AR. however unlike the great IPCC my results balanced. There has been 244.16 GT of carbon emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it is dispersed as follows.
Air 29.22 GT
Land 84.94 GT
Surface Ocean 30 GT
Sequestered in the Deep Ocean 100 GT
And these numbers balance.
By the way the Air carbon gives 12.59 ppm as the total anthropogenic atmospheric content as I told Luke if you want to challenge me put your money where your mouth is mate and I hope you have got a lot of money because you have a very big mouth.
NT said…”I think your homework for the day would be to list the day to day gadgets that depend on Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory to function”.
I can’t think of one gadget that gives a hoot about either. Then again, I suppose you think a watch measures a phenomenon called time. Are you trying to tell me we can’t live without relativity or quantum theory? If so, I’m getting a better picture of the hallucinatory world you live in.
I studied astrophysics for a year and the Big Bang was covered adequately. The evidence I listed is all there is. If you know of more, maybe you could submit a paper.
Barry it’s Cohenite you need to convince as to the existence of greenhouse gases, not me.
Gordon,
Ha ha, so there’s no more evidence for the Big Bang? Crikey, a lot of people take it seriously though don’t they? They must be mighty stupid.
Hey did you hear about the big experiment they’re running next Wednesday? The big supercollider thing? The Large Hadron Collider. Yeah it’s supposed to give more clues about the Big Bang, so I guess next Wednesday there’ll be more evidence!
Here look: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24292397-30417,00.html
El Luko dipstick:
“For example over the last two years, inflows to the River Murray have been half the previous historic minimums.”
Playing pea&thimble time grabs again … ho hum
NT; you’re such a verballEr; I bet you haven’t even read the Chilingar paper; this one is bit simpler; just for you, and try to avoid any bad puns; more seriously, barry what do you think of Drake’s thesis?
But Louis we’d raise the tax free threshold and cut the dole. Thus forcing the newly fired science frauds and public servants to get real jobs.
And no its no comparative problem having them on the dole. They are cheaper that way and its harder for them to pretend to be experts.
As for Big Bang theory its only evidence for the idea that the very stupid are upwardly mobile in high physics as well as in many other areas of life.
I consider that rightful certitude comes from convergence. Whereas the very stupid seem to think that it comes from deductive or mathematical exactitude.
See how the idea that the universe is expanding and accelerating in its expansion rests on red shift alone. Thats pathetic when all is said and done. And one wonders how things could have fallen so far. They ought not have locked in the orthodoxy unless the distance of remote objects could have been calculated on the basis of at least two more methodologies. And they ought to have been on the lookout for reductions-to-absurdity that would tip them off to the fact that their reliance on a single line of evidence had been a risk that didn’t pay off.
The reductions to absurdity came thick and fast. But the academy was not predisposed to recognise them. With the singularity and the “inflation” theories intact, the received version of the Big Bang is clearly the most ridiculous creation story yet invented bar none.
It’d help if I gave the link;
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jdrake/Questioning_Climate/userfiles/Ice-core_corrections_report_1.pdf
NT
“Ha ha, so there’s no more evidence for the Big Bang? Crikey, a lot of people take it seriously though don’t they? They must be mighty stupid.”
Evidence usually means observation of some physical phenomena – but as the Big Bang is before the appearance of anything capable of observing anything, and thus collecting evidence, your explanation is pure, 100%, baloney, as is your explanation for a imaginary atmospheric greenhouse effect.
I assume the initials NT are a compression of NitwiT.
Cohenite/Jan – for you guys (re Miskolczi etc)
Page 18
http://www-ramanathan.ucsd.edu/publications/Ram_ILEAPSnewsletter-apr08.pdf
For those who believe that the ‘Big Bang’ is gospel, reading this may give them pause for thought-
http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/archives/mgmirkin08/060108_incorrect_assumptions.htm
but maybe not, for it takes a giant step to displace a belief
Julian,
Science is about explaining observations with known processes – in the Electric Universe case the equations of Lorentz and Maxwell can describe them in terms of, say, spiral galaxies.
Proponents of relatavistic theory need to invoke ad hoc additions to explain observation – black holes, dark matter, and other mathematical abstractions to make the belief work.
Empiricists are limited to what we know and according to the principles behind Occam’s Razor, EU theorists have a better explanation.
Thanks Steve; clouds throw a big shadow over AGW; your paper asks was Earth’s albedo always 29%; this paper speculates it wasn’t;
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5873/195
The biological connection is interesting.
Cohenite… You keep linking to papers that use a Greenhouse Effect… This is getting embarrassing.
The stupid Barry Brook blog (bravenewclimate sick)
has an encomium today for the fatuous book by his mate, Ian Enting (Twisted). This claims that both Sir David King and James Lovelock predicted that by 2100 the human race would be restricted to a handful of breeding pairs in the ARCTIC. Presumably wewould have evolved by then into dolphins or polar bears. What jerks not to be aware, neither Enting nor Brook, that the Arctic has no landmass, and if they are to believed is already ice free. Enting also claims that King is a Brit, he is in fact originally South African (like me).
Tim, did you see the spray he gave Drongo?
Wow, that was a power serve!
NT; I have asked you what part of the blackbody differential of 33K you think is due to GHG’s, and you squibed it. I, on the other hand, think that GHG’s contribute to it; but in a miniscule way. I’ve said it before, so you’re still verballing.
I said I didn’t know… But I suspected it would be most of it.
I wouldn’t want to pretend I knew…
James Haughton said…”Replace light photons with IR photons, one mirror with the earth’s surface and one with the atmosphere, and you have a basic understanding of back-radiation. It doesn’t break the laws of thermodynamics, which apply to closed systems.
James…what does break the laws of thermodynamics is the flow of heat from the atmosphere at 0.25 C to the calculated 0.6 C average of the surface. Satellites are showing the atmosphere is 1/3 of the surface temperature and it has been pretty well established that the higher we go in the atmosphere, the cooler it gets.
You’re talking about heat flowing from the cooler atmosphere to the warmer surface. Unless you have an external means of doing that, like the motor in a refrigerator, you have the basis of a perpetual motion machine.
In this paper:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161v3
it is explained why realclimate’s Rahmstorf’s has the concept mixed up. See Page 44 of 114 and 77 of 114.
The authors of the paper call his concept a ‘perpetuum mobile of the second kind’.
They go on to say:
***The second law is a statement about heat, not about energy. Furthermore the author introduces an obscure notion of “net energy flow”. The relevant quantity is the “net heat flow”, which, of course, is the sum of the upward and the downward heat flow within a fixed system, here the atmospheric system. It is inadmissible to apply the second law for the upward and downward heat separately redefining the thermodynamic system on the fly.***
It is understandable for the heat of the Sun to flow from a much hotter source to the cooler Earth’s surface but not from the cooler atmosphere to the surface, unless the Sun is heating the atmosphere to a higher temperature than the surface.
In fact. I am wondering if the model theory that a hot spot is being created in the troposphere due to CO2 warming is not based on that apparently faulty theory. The satellites are not showing that warming.
NT said…”The Large Hadron Collider. Yeah it’s supposed to give more clues about the Big Bang…”
NT…I didn’t know about the big hadron collider in the universe, so I guess that might explain the Big Bang.
You said something about red shifts being measured with an optical telescope. Do you know what they are? When atoms and molecules have transitions in their shells, they emit signature radiation at a specific frequency/wavelength. That spectra is normally collected with a radiotelescope but I imagine they have ways to do it with an optical telescope. It doesn’t seem like a great idea, however, since optical telescopes on Earth are not nearly as large as radiotelescopes. Their ability to collect that kind of radiation is limited.
When the spectra are collected, they are examined for their signature wavelengths. If they are shifted toward the red end of the visible spectrum, that’s a red shift, and if toward the blue end, that’s a blue shift. What can that possibly tell us about a Big Bang?
Red and blue shifts are Doppler shifts. In other words, if a celestial body is moving away, the emitted wavelength is at a lower frequency than it should be, and the difference is due to its relative velocity compared to us.
You put way too much faith in that kind of science. I’m not knocking the science because someone has to do the research and good on them for doing it. However, the amount of information out there is scant, and I’m afraid many physicists are claiming way to much knowledge for what is available.
I asked a question recently, “what’s on the other side of the universe”? Can you answer that, or can any scientists answer it? We haven’t the slightest clue as to the size of the universe, so how can we talk about a centre where a Big Bang might have happened? The relative motion measured by red and blue shifts is meaningless in the overall picture.
BTW, NT…a humourous story about astrophysics. On the first day of classes, I showed up to the lecture theatre only to find it over-flowing. I was disappointed because I had looked forward to the course and thought I might not get in.
I fought my way to the front and asked the prof what was up. He grinned and told me he’d sort it out fast when the bell went. When it rang, he called for quiet and explained to the crowd that the class was for astronomy, not astrology. He explained the difference. There was a huge groan and about 80% of the people left, most of them being arts students.
I don’t know why I had been looking forward to the class so much because it was about the driest class I have ever taken. It was all about calculating hydrogen gas, brightness and mass of stars, celestial mechanics, etc. It was interesting enough, but I was looking for a bit of sci-fi, which I quickly realized had very little to do with the reality of the universe.
The Big Bang Theory isn’t so much a theory as a totally baseless and mindless piece of work that would do fine as a reduction-to-absurdity.
But to what extent we can show the stupidity of the believers as correlated to the stupidity of the belief is a matter entirely other.
This is where idiots like you are coming off the beam NT. You look for everything to be evidence except for actual evidence.
Only evidence is evidence. And non-evidence is not evidence.
Whether really brainy people believe in various stupid beliefs is not evidence for those stupid beliefs.
Plus its instituionally harmful for idiots like yourself to be encouraging people to substitute the alleged beliefs of allegedly brainy people for evidence.
All that this is evidence for is that allegations exist that brainy people believe this or that.
This is not evidence for the proposition at all. But only evidence for the allegation that certain people hold certain beliefs.
And since the person I’m arguing with might be one of the creators of these allegations of beliefs we see ourselves getting further and further away from actual evidence.
Can you find evidence for the Big Bang NT? No you cannot. So your belief amounts to a mindless superstition.
But its worse than that. Because the Big Bang as presented is far more stupid than any other creation myth yet invented.
Jen, your pics have gone from this post.
link
Hope your break in Japan was good for you. Seems to have been an enjoyable trip.
🙂
Clothcap
Belay that, they just appeared after commenting. Must be a browser/server glitch!
As you were.
🙂