Climate change

[onoway]

I suspect there will be nay-sayers. I suspect they will bring up the Hindenburg. :ph34r:

Car explosions/burning in the movies will be SO much easier to manage. Come to think of it, propane is maybe already pretty easy..such vehicles aren't allowed in underground parking lots (here, anyway) for fear of same.

[Gerben42]

Gerben,

It matters as to what action is needed and how soon. If mankind was responsibel for 10% of the warming, that would ewuate to ~0.08C over 130 years, and future warming would be almost indistinguishable from natural. On the other hand, if it winds up being 90%, then we are in for real hot times.

 

Overfishing and overhunting are different issues, which need much more attention - not to mention the human land grab that is forcing other species to the brink of extinction.

 

The only poison released during burning comes from the mercury and uranium compounds in coal. Therefore, replacing coal should be our prime attack. Unless we can somehow clean all the exhaust emitted during burning. Then there are the issues associated with strip mining. These are tangible issues, which have ramifications. If carbon dioxide can be shown to be another bad actor in the future, then we should address that too.

 

Fact: CO2 levels are shooting through the roof due to human interaction (highest value since 20 million years). This is going fast, and it changes the ocean pH. Even if CO2 wouldn't hurt the climate, it hurts the food chain.

 

And then there is the question if 2°C warming is a good or a bad thing. In fact, the Earth doesn't care. Really. It would accept 10°C warming without a problem. It's what's ON the planet that cares. Climate change shifts what grows where. 2°C warming puts a desert where is now the biggest corn fields, changes precipitation patterns, raises the sea level. On a global level this is negligible, but billions of people will be influenced by this.

 

I mean why should I care, I live in a place that will be very pleasant even if the global temperature goes up two or four degrees. Greenland is celebrating the warming. But the majority of people doesn't. And since the planet IS warming (regardless of why), better prepare.

[FM75]

I continually find it hard to believe that the human induced GCC supporters fail to recognize that if they are correct, that the singular most important cause of the problem - far and away - is the size of the human population! (alas - no, not the growth)

 

Governmental policies to restrict energy usage address the second order factor, instead of the first.

 

Can religion/philosophy catch up with a couple of millennia of scientific progress?

 

To paraphrase the Bill Clinton slogan...

 

It's the population, stupid!

[PassedOut]

Report: Global Warming Didn't Cause Big US Drought

 

Scientists say the main cause of the drought in the nation's midsection was the lack of moisture that usually pushes up from the Gulf of Mexico.

More trouble from south of the border...

B-)

[onoway]

Report: Global Warming Didn't Cause Big US Drought

 

 

More trouble from south of the border...

B-)

It's the wall...you dont want the people you don't get the rain B-)

[Al_U_Card]

Fact: CO2 levels are shooting through the roof due to human interaction (highest value since 20 million years). This is going fast, and it changes the ocean pH. Even if CO2 wouldn't hurt the climate, it hurts the food chain.

 

And then there is the question if 2°C warming is a good or a bad thing. In fact, the Earth doesn't care. Really. It would accept 10°C warming without a problem. It's what's ON the planet that cares. Climate change shifts what grows where. 2°C warming puts a desert where is now the biggest corn fields, changes precipitation patterns, raises the sea level. On a global level this is negligible, but billions of people will be influenced by this.

 

I mean why should I care, I live in a place that will be very pleasant even if the global temperature goes up two or four degrees. Greenland is celebrating the warming. But the majority of people doesn't. And since the planet IS warming (regardless of why), better prepare.

I am not sure that the recent "greening" of the biosphere could be considered to be hurting the food-chain. As for the effect of pH change on the ocean, that is also within natural variation so, maybe not so much. Cooling, OTOH is associated with drought and crop yield losses due to shorter growing seasons. Global influence as opposed to global catastrophe is quite a difference, especially when the money to be spent on adaptation is not to be wasted on pointless mitigation. (Especially when associated with banker-backed financial finagles like carbon credits and exchanges that are rife with all manner of fraud and chicanery.)

[billw55]

Scientists say the main cause of the drought in the nation's midsection was the lack of moisture that usually pushes up from the Gulf of Mexico.

So, they have discovered that main cause of drought was lack of moisture. Fascinating.

[Daniel1960]

Fact: CO2 levels are shooting through the roof due to human interaction (highest value since 20 million years). This is going fast, and it changes the ocean pH. Even if CO2 wouldn't hurt the climate, it hurts the food chain.

 

And then there is the question if 2°C warming is a good or a bad thing. In fact, the Earth doesn't care. Really. It would accept 10°C warming without a problem. It's what's ON the planet that cares. Climate change shifts what grows where. 2°C warming puts a desert where is now the biggest corn fields, changes precipitation patterns, raises the sea level. On a global level this is negligible, but billions of people will be influenced by this.

 

I mean why should I care, I live in a place that will be very pleasant even if the global temperature goes up two or four degrees. Greenland is celebrating the warming. But the majority of people doesn't. And since the planet IS warming (regardless of why), better prepare.

 

Yes, our planet will shrug off any temperature change. Life on the planet will change to accommodate, although I am not sure that the changes you listed will occur. Warming typically increases precipitation, enhances plant growth, and raises sea level due to glacial melting. Deserts would be likely to continue to shrink, as they have since the planet emerged from the most recent ice age. Any major climate shift will affect life - some may be for the better, others for the worse.

 

The ocean is a rather large buffer, and it would take much more CO2 to cause a noticeable pH change.

[Al_U_Card]

So, they have discovered that main cause of drought was lack of moisture. Fascinating.

 

That's "Climate science" for you... :blink:

[onoway]

Deserts would be likely to continue to shrink, as they have since the planet emerged from the most recent ice age.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification One note out of the article:

 

The Sahara is currently expanding south at a rate of up to 48 kilometers per year

 

and another:

Desertification has played a significant role in human history, contributing to the collapse of several large empires, such as Carthage, Greece, and the Roman Empire, as well as causing displacement of local populations. end quote

 

How much present day desertification has to do with climate change and how much to simply abusing the earth is debatable but unpredictable shifting weather patterns make food production much more difficult, especially if the land is aleady under stress.

[blackshoe]

So, they have discovered that main cause of drought was lack of moisture. Fascinating.

The Gulf of Mexico is still there, and still wet. So why did the moisture not come north like it used to? Clearly something changed, even if only temporarily.

[Al_U_Card]

The Gulf of Mexico is still there, and still wet. So why did the moisture not come north like it used to? Clearly something changed, even if only temporarily.

 

Natural variation dependent on oceanic cycles (AMO, PDO etc.) much as in the 50s and the 30s. The dustbowl was exacerbated by agricultural practices but the drought was totally natural, as are all climate phenomena. Weather, OTOH, is local and highly dependent on those location circumstances.

[Al_U_Card]

Things that make you go "hmmnn"

 

Environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr. wrote a superlative blog post yesterday. This is how it ends:

Misleading public claims. An over-hyped press release. A paper which neglects to include materially relevant and contradictory information central to its core argument. All in all, just a normal day in climate science!

Those of us who take the trouble to delve into the bewildering world of climate change soon discover a wheelbarrow full of questionable practices and sloppy research. That doesn’t invalidate the entire field, but it does give one tremendous pause.

If I thought the fate of the planet hinged on the work I was doing, I’d be bending over backward to meet the highest standards possible. I’d triple-check my math. I’d use widely recognized procedures – rather than making up new ones. I’d dot every ‘I’ and cross every ‘T’.

But as Pielke says, quite the opposite seems to be the norm in climate science. His post is about a practice called science-by-press-release. Last October, the reinsurance company Munich Re issued a press release that said its researchers had found evidence of a “climate-change footprint” in the financial losses associated with natural disasters.

Media outlets such as USA Today wrote up the story. Joe Romm, over at his ClimateProgress blog declared it a “seminal” piece of research and fell for its conclusions hook, line, and sinker. So did Theo Spencer, a senior staffer with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

You’d think that people claiming to have found evidence no one else has yet managed to locate would back up their claim with hard data. You’d think they’d submit the paper to an academic journal, navigate the peer-review process, and then announce their findings. But this was just another case of “trust us.”

According to Pielke, the study wasn’t readily available for outsiders to examine at the time the press release appeared. To this day, only the 12-page executive summary can be accessed on Munich Re’s website. The final page of that summary advises that the full 274-page document “was produced exclusively for clients of Munich Re” and therefore can’t be viewed by the general public.

A news story three months later reported that Munich Re’s researchers had, in fact, “submitted a paper” to a journal. That paper has now been published and Munich Re has issued a second press release.

In Pielke’s words:

As one looks a little bit closer at the public representations made by Munich Re about the paper and the paper itself, one quickly finds - as is all too common in climate science – that the strong public claims simply cannot be supported by the actual research, and the paper suffers from an obvious fatal error.

…The paper says nothing conclusive about attribution. It is not an “initial climate change footprint.”…In fact, the paper says much the opposite: attribution of losses to climate change was not achieved in the paper. [bolded added, link in original]

Pielke says the published paper fails in three significant ways. But the public is unlikely to hear about that. As he observed in a piece he wrote for the Denver Post last October, we are instead being fed a steady diet of climate misinformation.

Corporations such as Munich Re, activists such as Romm and Spencer, and sensation-seeking journalists are all to blame (see this Huffington Post piece and this Bloomberg Businessweek cover story).

The fact that Munich Re’s research hadn’t yet been published and wasn’t available for examination didn’t prevent the media from trumpeting its results.

Yet when a fully peer-reviewed study by Pielke and colleagues was published demonstrating that the financial damage associated with US tornadoes has actually declined since 1950, the media wasn’t interested. In Pielke’s words, there was “a complete blackout of coverage.”

Here’s a bit more from Pielke’s October op-ed:

Along with colleagues around the world, I’ve been studying climate change and disasters for almost 20 years…What we found may surprise you: Over the past six decades, tornado damage has declined after accounting for development that has put more property into harm’s way.

Researchers have similar conclusions for other phenomena around the world, ranging from typhoons in China, bushfires in Australia, and windstorms in Europe. After adjusting for patterns of development, over the long-term there is no climate change signal — no “footprint” — of increasing damage from extreme events either globally or in particular regions.

[Al_U_Card]

Models vs. Reality

 

 

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-global-LT-vs-UAH-and-RSS.png

[Daniel1960]

Models vs. Reality

 

 

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-global-LT-vs-UAH-and-RSS.png

 

The problem is that most of the models were "verified" using the data from 1979-1998. The resulting predictions are now 0.5C too high, indicating that modelled predictions out to 2100 coudl be several degrees too high. Hopefully, rational thinking will prevail, and a more accurate scenario will be presented. This will probably play out in the science, but I am not too sure about the political arena.

[Al_U_Card]

And this "blast from the past" about that "model" man himself, Ben Santer: (Yes, THE Ben Santer that wanted to punch-out Pat Michaels for his skeptical views on anthropogenic climate change...)

 

The IPCC's Climate Change 1995 was reviewed by its consulting scientists in late 1995. The "Summary for Policy Makers" was approved in December, and the full report, including chapter 8, was accepted. However, after the printed report appeared in May 1996, the scientific reviewers discovered that major changes had been made "in the back room" after they had signed off on the science chapter's contents. Santer, despite the shortcomings of the scientific evidence, had inserted strong endorsements of man-made warming in chapter 8 (of which he was the IPCC-appointed lead author):

 

There is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcing by greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols ... from the geographical, seasonal and vertical patterns of temperature change. ... These results point toward a human influence on global climate. [ch.8 p.412]

 

The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate. [ch.8 p.439]

 

Santer also deleted these key statements from the expert-approved chapter 8 draft:

 

"None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."

 

"While some of the pattern-base studies discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed] to [man-made] causes. Nor has any study quantified the magnitude of a greenhouse gas effect or aerosol effect in the observed data - an issue of primary relevance to policy makers."

 

"Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced."

 

"While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification."

 

"When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, `We do not know. "'

 

 

Santer single-handedly reversed the "climate science" of the whole IPCC report--and with it the global warming political process. The "discernible human influence" supposedly revealed by the IPCC has been cited thousands of times since in media around the world and has been the "stopper" in millions of debates among nonscientists.

 

Source

[Gerben42]

The problem is that most of the models were "verified" using the data from 1979-1998. The resulting predictions are now 0.5C too high, indicating that modelled predictions out to 2100 coudl be several degrees too high. Hopefully, rational thinking will prevail, and a more accurate scenario will be presented. This will probably play out in the science, but I am not too sure about the political arena.

 

Well it COULD be of course that the current lack of warming has something to do with the current lack of solar activity. The current solar maximum is falling WAY behind the previous ones. So we might be having a positive and negative effect counteracting eachother. So if this keeps up for some time, warming won't continue with CO2 way up there. Then when the sun activity goes back to normal... climatic Chernobyl.

[Al_U_Card]

Let's recall that one of the tenets of catastrophic anthropogenic warming is that the sun's variation is small and of little effect on terrestrial climate change... :blink: (This coming from the "forcing" in Watts/sq. m attributed to incoming solar radiation.)

[hrothgar]

Let's recall that one of the tenets of catastrophic anthropogenic warming is that the sun's variation is small and of little effect on terrestrial climate change... :blink: (This coming from the "forcing" in Watts/sq. m attributed to incoming solar radiation.)

 

As usual, Al is completely incapable of providing an accurate narrative.

 

There is a remarkably large difference between "the sun's variation is small and of little effect on terrestrial climate change" and "solar forcing is insufficient to explain the increase in temperature over the last 50 years".

 

With this said and done, the most plausible explanation for the leveling off in atmospheric temperature is the corresponding dramatic increase in the temperatures of the oceans (particularly deep water)

[Daniel1960]

As usual, Al is completely incapable of providing an accurate narrative.

 

There is a remarkably large difference between "the sun's variation is small and of little effect on terrestrial climate change" and "solar forcing is insufficient to explain the increase in temperature over the last 50 years".

 

With this said and done, the most plausible explanation for the leveling off in atmospheric temperature is the corresponding dramatic increase in the temperatures of the oceans (particularly deep water)

That would be fine, except that the oceans are displayed the same general lack of warming as the land. Although the solar effect is not sufficient to explain the entire temperature increase, it could explain a significant amount.

[hrothgar]

That would be fine, except that the oceans are displayed the same general lack of warming as the land.

 

Unadulterated Bullshit

 

Feel free to google temperature deep ocean climate change for any number of articles

[Al_U_Card]

Especially that deep water

 

Here we analyse observations of heat uptake into the deep North Atlantic. We find that the extratropical North Atlantic as a whole warmed by 1.45±0.5×1022 J between 1955 and 2005, but Lower North Atlantic Deep Water cooled, most likely as an adjustment from an early twentieth-century warm period. In contrast, the heat content of Upper North Atlantic Deep Water exhibited strong decadal variability. We demonstrate and quantify the importance of density-compensated temperature anomalies for long-term heat uptake into the deep North Atlantic. These anomalies form in the subpolar gyre and propagate equatorwards. High salinity in the subpolar gyre is a key requirement for this mechanism. In the past 50 years, suitable conditions have occurred only twice: first during the 1960s and again during the past decade. We conclude that heat uptake through density-compensated temperature anomalies will contribute to deep ocean heat uptake in the near term.

 

Bob Tisdale has an interesting take on the available data and how it is (or is not) reported and analyzed.

 

http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/figure-4.png?w=640&h=397

 

NODC Numerology

 

Figures don't lie but... :lol:

[Daniel1960]

Unadulterated Bullshit

 

Feel free to google temperature deep ocean climate change for any number of articles

THe Argo data does not show the rise you indicate. Some researchers have added correction factors to the data to achieve higher [lower] changes than the raw data. Your reference to puirified animal excrement has no bearing on the water temperature. Choosing data which supports your own beliefes and denying that which does not shows bias.

[hrothgar]

THe Argo data does not show the rise you indicate. Some researchers have added correction factors to the data to achieve higher [lower] changes than the raw data. Your reference to puirified animal excrement has no bearing on the water temperature. Choosing data which supports your own beliefes and denying that which does not shows bias.

 

For simplicity, I am going to go to Wikipedia. Here's what they have to say about Argo:

 

It is not yet possible to use Argo data to detect global change signals, as the dataset is not yet long enough to observe global change signals.[9]

Argo data result errors

 

During 2006, the Argo Network was thought to have shown a declining trend in ocean temperatures.[10] In February 2007, the author of the paper, Josh Willis, discovered that there were problems with the data used for the analysis.[11] After eliminating incorrect data, the trend to that time remained cooling, but below the level of statistical significance.[3]

Data results from year 2008 and after

 

Takmeng Wong and Bruce A. Wielicki published a paper on the Argo data corrections in the NASA journal "The Earth Observer, 20(1), 16-19".[12] Josh Willis, in an article published on the NASA Earth Observatory web site states that after correcting the errors in the Argo thermometer measurements, the results show that the world's oceans have been absorbing additional energy and have been warming.[3][11]Rebecca Lindsey (November 5, 2008). "Correcting Ocean Cooling". NASA. Archived from the original on 30 June 2011. Retrieved 18 July 2011.

 

Or, if you prefer, the actual Argo site:

 

How well is Argo able to observe global ocean changes?

 

A key objective of Argo is to observe ocean signals related to climate change. This includes regional and global changes in ocean temperature and heat content, salinity and freshwater content, the steric height of the sea surface in relation to total sea level, and large-scale ocean circulation.

 

The global Argo dataset is not yet long enough to observe global change signals. Seasonal and interannual variability dominate the present 7-year globally-averaged time series. Sparse global sampling during 2004-2005 can lead to substantial differences in statistical analyses of ocean temperature and trend (or steric sea level and its trend, e.g. Leuliette and Miller, 2009). Analyses of decadal changes presently focus on comparison of Argo to sparse and sometimes inaccurate historical data.

 

Simply put, you chose to cite a meaningless statistic. Even the most cursory examination of the Argo data starts with a disclaimer that this should not be used to analyze global climate change.

 

Another great example of your spewing *****...

[Al_U_Card]

Well, we can always go back to the "bucket adjustment" that stayed with the Hadley Centre sea-surface temperatures for 20 years and failed to account for the difference between over-the-side bucket samples versus engine inlet measurements...

Thousands of state-of-the-art ARGO probes taking millions of measurements...(and not just in shipping lanes etc.)

 

http://i54.tinypic.com/eu4pzq.jpg

 

I wonder who is paying for all this "unreliable" errrrr data?