Those deniers just won’t let it go…
The strong effect of cloud processes on model sensitivities to greenhouse gases was emphasized further through a now-classic set of General Circulation Model (GCM) experiments, carried out by Senior and Mitchell (1993). They produced global surface temperature changes (due to doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration) ranging from 1.9°C to 5.4°C, simply by altering the way that cloud radiative properties were treated in the model. It is somewhat unsettling that the results of a complex climate model can be so drastically altered by substituting one reasonable cloud parameterization for another, thereby approximately replicating the overall inter-model range of sensitivities.
IPCC AR4 overview of the history of climate change science, cloud modeling and climate sensitivity. (More commentary at the link).
(Related: For those who want to do their part)
1) “scientists” can’t tell you what the weather will be like 2 weeks from now but claim to be able to tell you the weather 2 decades from now.
2) economists and computer scientists can’t come up with models detailed enough to predict the economy (man made) so the entire natural world should be a breeze!
Any model that seeks to explain a complex system must have good data and the relationships between the data must be fully understood and programmed into the model with no computer, relationship or data errors for a model to work. That is why they can’t predict complex systems like the economy or the weather.
Computer models all use a simple formula:
Crap in, Crap out.
Politicians and activists use an even simpler formula:
Crap out.
I remember post graduate math majors at UofT in 1975 fiddling with computer programs in attempts to forecast the weather.
Has that gotten any better in 30+ years?
Let alone climate change……………
It’s mathematicians and programmers doing these computer models. Got anymore faith in them as say MicroSoft in predicting weather AND climate?
‘Accordingly, says AR4, “The scientific community realized long ago that using adequate data to constrain models was the only way to solve this problem” (p. 116). “However,” AR4 acknowledges, “existing data have not yet brought about ANY reduction in the existing range of simulated cloud feedbacks” (p. 116, emphasis added). Far from being predictive, the most important thing the models reveal, it seems, is how little we know about clouds.’
In short, you change your boundary conditions on the cloud cover and the model results change accordingly. Unfortunately, for the “cloud cover deniers” (aka Kyoto enthusiasts) their modeling is deficient.
What a way to run an economy! THE SKY IS FALLING, THE SKY IS FALLING.
So we the great unwashed are supposed to fall for the Carbon Credit Swindle based on deficient cloud cover modeling. Not bloody likely.
This is great science farce, but hardly a responsible government modality to base policy on.
Thus Anthropogenic Global Warming depends entirely upon a cloud cover modeling which remains unsolved.
In short, the AGW is far from a NECESSARY TRUTH but rather is a CONTINGENT TRUTH based on a subset of cloud modeling which is thus far incomplete.
Hence the GORACLE pronouncements that the ‘planet has a fever’ is induced by the inability to see through the clouds he has placed to obscure our vision.
The GORACLE’s assertions of an “Inconvenient Truth” may indeed turn out to be inconvenient for the taxpayers wallet but have no basis as a necessary truth.
This is more simply described as a LIE.
Actually Warwick, the formula for activists and politicians is
Crap out, Crap in. Win an Oscar.
I have heard gore state that the deniers are using old information. And how old is the info in his movie. Nobody ever mentions when it was made, how long it took to be made, how old the info used the movie was. The info in the movie is old and therefore should be discredited.
He claims 2 billion people will watch his great concerts. Is he buying/selling the carbon credits that will be created by thses concerts.
Only the Rio concert is free, what is the cost of the others. The one in Washington was not allowed on the Senate, or Congress grounds.
Oh, I forgot, his mantra, do as I say, not as I do.
I believe that trying to reason with the enviro-doom-pushers is pointless.
My own phrenological computer modeling has conclusively shown that the skulls of lefties have already developed the air pockets necessary to insulate them from having to think for themselves anyway.
My plan is to ridicule and ignore them until the MSM inevitably concocts a new method to try and scare us into buying more product. Africanized, bird-flu carrying, rogue honeybees driven insane by cellphones or what have you.
Before long, when the earth doesn’t ignite in a ball of fire, they will be the ones who want to change the subject.
Global Warning is one of those sciences where a great deal of study is needed to predict the outcome. Fortunately we have thousands of people who are relatively at leisure to do this since the Y2K bug ran into our own stupid timing limits, not very forward thinking by our crowd.
This has nothing to do with science as your ancestors knew it. It is, however, the science that got them through the dark ages. It is faith. It is religion. It is good. All else is evil. It is where magic intersects with reason, where Holy War meets corrupt politics.
They are winning children. I guess I think that without any evidence and without any logic they have already won. If I weren’t so damned set I’d buy a few shares of Al Gore’s stock or put Suzuki’s daughter on TV more If I had the power. That’s all they ever wanted.
According to the referenced link, the IPCC AR4 overview says, “[…] an increase in the black-body radiative equilibrium temperature of about 1°C […] roughly equivalent to the direct radiative effect of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration”.
Humans produce about 4% of the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Therefore, in order to produce a doubling of atmospheric CO2, to effect about a 1°C rise in temperature, humans would have to produce about 25 times as much atmospheric CO2 as they now do. For 1°C. Which would probably be good for the planet anyway.
I’ve said it here before – tinyurl.com/37zu6s – and I’ll say it again: man-made atmospheric CO2 vapour has an insignificant but probably slightly positive effect on the conditions for life on earth.
I predict that within the next 100years over 30 million Canadians will die.
I also predict that within 100years 6.5 billion people will DIE DIE DIE on this planet , from various causes.
450 of the last 600 years include what is commonly known as the “Little Ice Age” (approx. 1350-1850 with a noticeable lack of solar activity)
It is both logical and a good thing that temperatures have made a gradual increase over the last 100-150 years or so.
Medieval warm period. Approx 850-1250 AD (with higher solar activity)
Less than 800 years ago it was warmer than it is now, with Vikings in Greenland and the polar bears did just fine.
The Vikings in Greenland did not survive the Little Ice Age.
Warwick, the formula behind computer modelling is well-know: its the GIGO Principle. Anyone in computing is well aware of it.
Garbage in, Garbage out.
“Those deniers just won’t let it go…”
Well here’s a denier that ain’t going to let it go and Soozook will have to scarf my pud before I willingly spend a dime on phoney climate change hysteria.
The only think I’m hysterical about is what this is doing to my pocketbook.
LOL…..Love that carbon debit site.
I’m surprised that no-one has considered a model in which increased temperatures whether from greater solar output or higher greenhouse gasses cause increased evaporation of water from oceans which then cause more clouds which result in more radiation being reflected back to space which lower the temperature. The only question about this system is whether it is underdamped or overdamped (one would prefer overdamped as the underdamped system would oscillate). My gut feeling is that Gaia operates this way.
It appears that there are a very large number of climate models and only a small minority of them end up in disaster scenarious. The singular preoccupation of governments with those models that require a vast expansion of state power is no coincidence. I for one won’t go along with this environmental totalitarianism.
Al Gore isa confirmed gaia worshipping green crack-pot nut case he needs a padded cell and a streight jacket
Still can’t help but wish there were some old book around, some ancient text that mentioned things like floods and droughts – then people might realize that the weather has been around for a long time, at least a couple millenia…
A scientist acknowledges the Transcendent …
Excerpt from an ancient text:
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
Psalm 8
The scientist speaks: “No model will ever be as complex as nature.” …-
Global Warming: Not the End of the World as We Know It […]
“Clouds are still our biggest headache,” concedes Erich Roeckner of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.
Roeckner is a conscientious man and a veteran of climate research, so he, of all people, should know the limits of simulation programs. Roeckner, who constantly expects surprises, neatly sums up the problem when he says: “No model will ever be as complex as nature.” …-
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1833705/posts
Vitruvius: In regards to your comments being that humans produce about 4% of the CO2 concentrations you miss the point. It can be shown (and I would be willing to do it if you care to work through the math with me) that we are responsible for all the current increases in CO2 concentrations.
Loki: In fact your idea has been considered and a model was proposed by Lindzen that he called the iris hypothesis. The unfortunate thing is that data does not support this. As temperatures go up, the absolute humidity goes up but the relative humidity goes down.
John
John – you can work through the math with me. Please begin with referencing the CO_2 sources, sinks, rate coefficients and coupling parameters.
Tenebris: Thanks, you have us off to a good start. My main problem is getting people to admit that there are sources and sinks. However you are complicating the issue. rate coefficients, coupling parameters and other factors are important if you are interested in looking at the global carbon cycle.
But that is not the question. the issue is very specific – are we responsible for the current rise or not.
The simple solution is to work through the following.
Take the fossil fuel consumed over the last year. Calculate the CO2 released in the consequent burning. Convert that into a delta atmospheric concentration. Now, did the actual concentration go up by more than the released CO2 or not.
In fact it turns out to be “not” since the “natural” sinks are able to accommodate some of the surplus anthropogenic CO2. Thus the only logical conclusion is that we are responsible for the rise. (There are experimental ways to do this as well using isotopes, but this way is the most rigorous).
Consider this (admitadely somewhat poor) analogy. There is a communal bank account that any number of people can use. They can put in money or take it out. We observe at the start of a year there is $380. We contribute $4 over the year and at the end of the year the balance is $382. The question is what would have been the balance if we had not contributed anything?
Regards,
John
Opps, please forgive my type above. It should read:
Consider this (admittedly somewhat poor) analogy.
And John? While you’re at it, kindly explain why a rise in CO2 is an important datum, but melting ice caps on Mars isn’t. This perplexes me.
Phantom: Of course. We know very little about the climate of Mars. There is lots of discussion about earth’s climate and we are able to observe and measure it quite carefully. (We might have had some better information about Mars but NASA and the ESA don’t play well together.)
The implication from your question appears to be the idea the warming must be due to an increase in solar output that would cause warming on both Earth and Mars. The problem with this is that we have not observed any longterm increase in solar output sufficient to cause the warming on Earth let alone Mars.
The best guess for the changing icecaps on Mars is that we are observing a response to its orbital mechanics.
John Cross,
You appear to be knowledgeable. Can you explain why the graph of the CO2 record from Hawaii has ripples?
Whimpy: I am not knowledgable compared to the professionals but I do like science.
Regarding the ripples, I would guess that you are observing the seasonal changes in CO2 up-take. Since most of the Earth’s landmass is in the Northern Hemisphere there is an increase of CO2 up-take during the NH summer when things are growing.
Regards,
John
John, not biting eh 🙂
It appears to me that the CO2 level peaks in the summer
http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/climate_change/sinks.htm
I wonder how much albert gore is paying john for his smoke and mirror BS?
Wimpy: Nice site – good find. I will read it over later on. If I was 25 years younger I would be trying for a job with Schlumberger. I like what they do and how they do it.
In regards to the CO2 peaking in the summer, if you look at the graphical data it appears to peak in May then decrease until September or October. Link here if HTML works here.
Regards,
John
Thanks for the tabulation, mucgh better than visually eyeing a graph.
Free: Damn you and your crushing jaws of logic. When faced with such irrefutable evidence I am left without an answer.
John,
Do the ice core sample graphs (referred to by gore) show CO2 following or leading the rise in temperature?
Irwin, the current scientific point of view is that CO2 rise lags temperature rise by about 800 +/- 600 years. Now this is not a topic about which I know a great deal, but I did have a skim through this recent paper New constraints on the gas age-ice age …
They say that their findings suggest that the lag time is much less and may even lead the rise. Now, this is only 1 paper but it will be interesting to see who can punch holes in it.
Thanks for the link.
Phantom, and the brightness of Neptune varies, with a 10 year time lag, along with the earth’s “temperature”, with a correlation coefficient of 0.9.
Two stunning things about this: The strong corrrelation and the 10 year lag.
Wimpy: Do you have a reference for the brightness of Neptune vs temperature correlation you mentioned?
It doesn’t matter if we are producing all the current increases in CO2 concentration, John, because the Earth’s atmosphere has long passed the point where increases in CO2 concentration have any significant effect, due to the Beer-Lambert law.
Coming right up John. I bought the paper, $9 but can’t send it to you as no e-mail.
http://atmoz.org/blog/2007/05/08/a-correlation-between-neptune-brightness-earth-temperature-and-total-solar-irradiance/
also
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/05/08/neptune-news/
Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
– Michael Crichton
That’s interesting Wimpy. Any observations on the increased storm activity we see in the gas giants?
My snide remark to John Cross was just a bit of needling about the unlikelyness that a 4% rise in CO2 since the 1950s could have worked to raise temperatures this fast, vs. the high likelyhood that the same sun which is apparently warming Mars (and Jupiter, and Saturn, and etc.) is warming us.
Slightly.
Vitruvius: That line of thought puts you just about 100 years behind the current theory of global warming. To quote from Weart’s excellent reference:
A still weightier objection came from a simple laboratory measurement. A few years after Arrhenius published his hypothesis, Knut Ångström sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide. He put in as much of the gas in total as would be found in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere. The amount of radiation that got through the tube scarcely changed when he cut the quantity of gas in half or doubled it. The reason was that CO2 absorbed radiation only in specific bands of the spectrum, and it took only a trace of the gas to produce bands that were “saturated” — so thoroughly opaque that more gas could make little difference.
Of course science moves on and we are able to see that the system is much more complex and yes, adding more CO2 does indeed raise temperatures.
Phantom: which brings us back to the fact that we have not observed any increase in solar output that would account for the warmings we are seeing. Also, I would dispute your 4% increase number, I would put it more at 20 – 25 but that is based on memory which I admit is not what it used to be.
Wimpy: Thanks for the info. I will see if my local library can get the paper for me.
John
Have any of you seen this film?
The Great Global Warming Swindle
Sorry, my link didn’t work. Trying again.
The Great Global Warming Swindle
The question is: how much of an effect will a change in the portion of CO2 vapour have in terms of change to temperature. In other words, we’re interested in the first derivative of temperature with respect to concentration, dT/dc, over the range of concentrations covering the current values and reasonable variances thereto.
Lars Kamél, from the Department of Astronomy and Space Physics at the University of Uppsala, writes that: “The main reason why CO2 can only have a small impact on the climate of the world is called saturation. This is a phenomenon well known from theory and observations of spectral lines in stellar atmospheres. An atom or a molecule does not absorb light and other electromagnetic radiation at all wavelengths. It only absorbs in narrow regions in the electromagnetic spectrum. Every atom or molecule has its own characteristic sequence of spectral lines.
“Carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has exactly one important spectral line in the infrared part of the spectrum. This line is clearly saturated. If you increase the number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere, not much will happen. The amount of infrared radiation, that is, heat, that will be absorbed changes only by a minimal and insignificant amount. Only if we increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by orders of magnitude, will there be a noticeable change.”
As Mr. Borrello wrote (private correspondence): “According to the atmospheric transmission data (H.W. Yates and J. H. Taylor, “Infrared Transmission of the Atmosphere,” U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, NRL Report 5453, 1960) carbon dioxide has a very strong absorption band between 13.5 and 15.5 microns wavelength. Earth radiates as a blackbody with a mean surface temperature near 300°K and has a peak energy wavelength at 10 microns. Earth’s radiation energy in the 13.5 to 15.5 band is 8.4% of Earth’s total blackbody radiation.
“Since CO2 absorbs all radiation in this band it absorbs and reradiates 8.4% of the total energy within 200 meters of the surface. Adding more CO2 does not increase this effect because it is at its maximum. Using the absorptivity function (Beer’s Law) for a gas, CO2 would only begin to lose this impact if CO2 concentration dropped below a few parts per million. It has been above 200 ppm for over a million years according to geophysicists. Thus I claim the heat retention as a percentage of Earth’s total radiation by CO2 is constant”.
What we have here is a double-whammy. Not only is the man-made CO2 vapour concentration contribution to the green-house gas effect minuscule, changes in concentration don’t have significant effect either.
Now compare this to the fear-mongering in the UN and the mass-market media. The IPCC says a change of a few degrees over the next hundred years will result in species being wiped out, crime rising, starvation killing hundreds of millions, disease becoming rampant, islands disappearing beneath the waves, and deserts consuming entire continents.
Funny how that didn’t happen the last time the earth’s atmosphere was a few degrees warmer. And the UN says that we must act now. Why? Even their models don’t say that all their conjectured warming will happen in the next 10 years. If the warming over the next ten years is only a few tenths of a degree, why can’t we wait a decade or two until we have a better understanding of the science and technology involved?
Vitruvius: As I said before, this is the state that our understanding was at around the turn of the century. I do not disagree with your comments about saturation. But those who you quote have not gone the next step. The atmosphere is a complex place but here is a very simplified description of the warming by greenhouse gases.
Lets say that the earth’s atmosphere is separated into layers based on their CO2 content (i.e. so much CO2 per layer). As we go up through the layers we eventually reach a point where the radiation from CO2 can escape into space. Now, if we look at what is happening in the layers below we can see that the bottom one is radiating upward, but also downward thus warming the earth a fair bit. However the next layer also provides energy to warm the earth’s surface (albeit it somewhat less than the first since the first is in the way). The same for the third and so on.
Now, we need to look at properties of the atmosphere. The atmosphere is not uniform and will be warmer at the bottom with temperature decreasing as we go up. Thus layer 2 is cooler than the bottom layer and so on. This means that the downward radiation from layer 2 is being emitted by a layer that is cooler than the bottom layer. The same for layer 3 which will be cooler than 2 – and its turtles all the way up.
Now, for simplicity sake, lets say that the layers act like blackbodies (they don’t but the effect is close enough for this simple look). Thus they radiate in proportion to their temperature.
To this system we add more CO2. What this will do in effect is to cause the layers to take up less vertical space (i.e. less space to get the same amount of CO2 – remember our layers are based on CO2, not elevation). In effect this moves all the layers lower. Lower layers will radiate at higher temperatures. Higher temperatures mean more IR radiation. This in turn means more IR striking the earth’s surface.
Now, of course the system is more complex but that is the main idea.
Note, John, that I have not claimed that increases in man-made CO2 will have no effect, I have simply claimed that they are largely not significant, and to the effect that they may be slightly significant, that the significance is probably good, not bad.
Return to the IPCC claim that doubling CO2 concentration will produce a 1°C increase in temperature. We agree, if I understand you correctly, that the reason this effect is so small (but non-zero) is that CO2’s absorption capacity is well past saturated.
I don’t think spending trillions of dollars, in the short term, to pursue claims of such a small, long term problem, based on partial information (it may not even be a problem, it may be a good thing), to be a wise investment.
Vitruvius: Yup, we can both agree that a doubling of CO2 by itself will cause about a 1C rise. To call it small is subjective treminology so I have no objection to it – I would have called it significant, but again that is subjective. Of course a rise in temperature will also cause a rise in absolute humidity which will add another 2 to 3 C. So we are looking at a rise of between 3 & 4 C which, of course, is what IPCC predicts. I am glad we agree.
In regards to whether this will be a benefit or not, if you have anything scientific to present I am all ears.
John