…and the sun:
I applaud Meehl’s reluctance to go beyond where the science takes him. For all I know, he’s right. But such humility and skepticism seem to manifest themselves only when the data point to something other than the mainstream narrative about global warming. For instance, when we have terribly hot weather, or bad hurricanes, the media see portentous proof of climate change. When we don’t, it’s a moment to teach the masses how weather and climate are very different things.
No, I’m not denying that man-made pollution and other activity have played a role in planetary warming since the Industrial Revolution.
But we live in a moment when we are told, nay lectured and harangued, that if we use the wrong toilet paper or eat the wrong cereal, we are frying the planet. But the sun? Well, that’s a distraction. Don’t you dare forget your reusable shopping bags, but pay no attention to that burning ball of gas in the sky — it’s just the only thing that prevents the planet from being a lifeless ball of ice engulfed in darkness. Never mind that sunspot activity doubled during the 20th century, when the bulk of global warming has taken place.
What does it say that the modeling that guaranteed disastrous increases in global temperatures never predicted the halt in planetary warming since the late 1990s? (MIT’s Richard Lindzen says that “there has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.”) What does it say that the modelers have only just now discovered how sunspots make the Earth warmer?
It says that there is some other agenda going on.
Well, as I’ve always said, the reality of anthropogenic global warming was always a best case scenario, because it said that our climate was under our control. The far scarier proposition was always that the causal connection between CO2 and the temperature was reversed: that something else — like the Sun — not under our control was warming the Earth, and the CO2 concentration was rising in response to the temperature change, as of course it would, since the solubility of CO2 in the oceans would go down with rising temperature. just like the CO2 bubbles out of your soda when it warms up.
That implies there is very little we can do about it, except adapt, and hope the Sun does not simply make Earth uninhabitable, as of course it easily could in a few short millenia.
Indeed, the record of species extinctions on the planet is not encouraging. This could be the solution to Fermi’s Paradox: there are no communicating ETs because advanced civilization is too fragile to withstand the normal variations in a star’s output.
The CO2 concentration is rising because of fossil fuel combustion. This point cannot be disputed. We know how much coal, etc. has been burned. We know atmospheric CO2 levels. Since the early 1900s, more CO2 has been released by fossil fuel combustion than has accumulated in the atmosphere. All other effects add up to negative CO2 emission (the dominant ones likely being absorption of CO2 into the oceans and into increased biomass).
To argue that something else is causing the CO2 increase, you have to imagine the carbon in combusted fossil fuels is magically whisked away instead of entering the atmosphere.
Nonsense, Paul. There are a large number of equilibria between CO2 in the atmosphere and various sinks, including biomass and the oceans. The rates of transport back and forth between the sinks and the atmosphere is, like all rates, highly sensitive to temperature. So if the temperature changes, the equilibrium concentration in the atmospehre changes. Which way? The obvious guess is up, since transport out of the biggest sink (the ocean) would be considerably accelerated. But it’s far from obvious what would happen.
You’re taking a very simplistic view of things, and it’s not sustainable in view of the complexity of the systems involved. You do know, I hope, that the amount of CO2 emitted by human beings is completely dwarfed (by a factor of roughly ten) by the massive amounts exchanged through natural processes, right? Also that the amount in the atmosphere at any one time is dwarfed by the amount in the various sinks? The amount in the atmosphere is essentially the small difference between huge numbers, and the amount contributed by combustion is another small number thrown into the mix. It may have tipped the balance one way (or even the other), but this is not a simple conclusion, and since it relies on understanding a complex global process, a conclusion that it has can very easily be disputed.
Stop thinking like a priest. Nothing is “indisputable” to the scientist.
If CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion were to be stopped right now, atmospheric CO2 levels would immediately begin to dramatically decline. This is because the enormous bolus of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion has not come into equilibrium with the oceans and biomass,
For this reason, it’s flat-earth science to propose that something else is causing CO2 to increase right now. All the other effects put together are swamped by the CO2 release from fossil fuel combustion. Not even the oil companies are trying to argue otherwise (although they will rightfully point out how important coal is as a CO2 source).
If CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion were to be stopped right now, atmospheric CO2 levels would immediately begin to dramatically decline.
CO2 is absorbed and released in a constantly dynamic system. You can not make a statement like that with any certainty. Believing doesn’t make it true.
CO2 is absorbed and released in a constantly dynamic system. You can not make a statement like that with any certainty. Believing doesn’t make it true.
Oh good grief. We can measure the amount by which CO2 increases in the atmosphere each year. We can determine how much fossil fuel is being burnt each year, and how much CO2 that produces.
The second quantity of CO2 is much larger than the first (and both quantities are small compared to the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere). The observation that atmospheric CO2 levels would immediately begin to decline if the fossil fuel source were cut off follows with mathematical inevitability.
CO2 isn’t even a major greenhouse gas.
Paul, you have your head thoroughly up your ass. Google “carbon cycle” and get started at least familiarizing yourself with the numbers. Then try “chemical equilibrium” and “solubility of gases” and “chemical kinetics.”
As for measurement being so easy, ye gods, you’re like the polluting company who sticks a probe in some back pool of the local river and says, nope, this sample is clean, so all this talk of the river being full of crap is crap. Google “atmospheric mixing” while you’re at it. Or just ask yourself how you, personally, would go about measuring the average humidity (water content) of the Earth’s atmosphere. If your answer is to go out on your back porch and consult your hygrometer and then extrapolate — well, that would explain a lot.
Paul, you have your head thoroughly up your ass.
I’m off to pop some corn.
Carl,
The last number I saw on human vs natural emissions of CO2 was that human emissions were about 4% of the total.
B. Brewer is correct. The overwhelming greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor. In the bands of interest water vapor overlaps the absorption bands of CO2 except in one area and there there is a partial overlap.
Apart from being necessary for life, CO2 in the atmosphere may not be doing very much to warm the planet.
The simple solution is to deal with the main offending greenhouse gas –
Water Vapor. I suggest we build devices to sequester this offending gas in its less harmful form. I furthermore suggest that we define the sequestration locations by their size. I recommend calling them Ocean, Sea, Lake, Pond, and Puddle.
I also have a bridge in Brooklyn that I can see to you for a VERY good price.
Carl:
We can tell that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is anthropogenic because we can measure the shift in the isotopic composition of the carbon. I’m a skeptic — not just about anthropogenic climate change, but about most science you read in the newspapers — but there is really no case for the view that the CO2 concentration change is not mostly anthropogenic. This CO2 is not emanating from volcanoes or evaporating from the oceans or landfills. It is due to burning of fossil fuels. Whether that’s a problem for climate is a very different topic.
Where I part company with the IPCC is on the prognostication front. As far as I have been able to determine, there is no single global climate model that can retrodict the last 100 years of climate data. The IPCC reports that averages of some subset of the models come close to successfully retrodicting the 20th century, but I will state categorically that averaging incorrect models does not validate any particular model. I can’t believe these folks are able to publish this stuff in refereed journals. If I tried to publish a Phys Rev Letter that said, “I don’t have a model that explains the correlation length in the Heisenberg antiferromagnet, but if I average the output from four out five of these different algorithms, I come close,” the referees would rip me to shreds.
The general circulation models themselves are spatially coarse, exclude some major land features, have missing physics, and as far as I can tell have not undergone a thorough review of numerical stability. Not to mention that the inputs are epistemic parameters which could vary significantly from the assumed ranges.
My attitude, in brief: I believe (1) mankind’s actions can affect the climate, (2) we have changed the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, but (3) we don’t understand enough of the physics, and are practically unable to model the earth with sufficient granularity to retrodict the past, much less predict the future. And according to the report that justified this thread, apparently we are still discovering major inputs to the climate system.
BBB
…and bbb… (4) models tend to support prejudices.
The Drake equation is a simple type of model. With it you can show that no star has intelligent life or all of them do (or anything in between) just by your choice of parameters.
Until our political masters start living simply, AGW is a power grab.
Paul, you have your head thoroughly up your ass.
Apparently Carl, you don’t believe in conservation of mass. Really, the inference I am talking about is extremely elementary. I really have a hard time figuring out how you fail to see it. Let me go through the argument in even more excruciating detail.
There are processes removing CO2 from the air. There are processes, including combustion of fossil fuel, that are adding CO2 to the air. The rate at which CO2 is flowing to/from the air to/from these other sources depends on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. On the scale of a year, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is changed very little by fossil fuel combustion. To first order, whether any fossil fuels are burned this year will have no effect on these other flows. We can infer, therefore, that if fossil fuel combustion were to suddenly cease, the rate of change of atmospheric CO2 would change by the same amount (since the other sources and sinks do not change). The argument is independent of the fine details of the other sources and sinks.
If this is still too hard for you to grasp, consider an analogy. I have a bathtub containing several hundred gallons of water into which I am pouring 2 gallons/minute of water. I measure the volume of water in the bathtub, and I see it is increasing by 1 gallon/minute. If I were to suddenly stop adding water, what would be the rate of change of water in the bathtub? It would be -1 gallons/minute, since the process that is removing 1 gallon/minute — which I know must be there, by conservation of mass — would still be operating.
bbbeard points out that the fact that the current CO2 increase is due to fossil fuel combustion is well supported by isotope evidence. It’s also supported by direct measurement of the change of the oxygen content of the atmosphere. This is much harder to measure (since the relative change is smaller) but the techniques are now good enough to detect the gradual decline in O2 that goes along with the production of CO2 and H2O from fossil fuels.
The problem with your analogy is that it is static and so does not represent a dynamic system (where the amount of water added would affect the amount of water being removed.)
BTW, you do know they had smog in Los Angeles long before they had cars? See wild fires (currently much in the news.)
Not understanding the difference between a dynamic and static system is exactly where you fail.
It would also help to keep some perspective. Anything that changes on the order of a degree per century does not justify the wrecking of the economy that is supposed to deal with it.
Actually it’s not just dynamic vs. static (where you assume rates don’t change) but it’s a chaotic dynamic system that seems to do a damned fine job of keeping the temperature over thousands of years relatively constant. Good thing for us.
It is possible for a sudden state change (that’s implied by chaos.) But it would be unwise to start shouting the sky is falling until more rational thought and research is applied.
Actually, the sky is falling and a much greater threat to our survival than temperature. We had better be prepared BEFORE the next rock hits.
The problem with your analogy is that it is static and so does not represent a dynamic system (where the amount of water added would affect the amount of water being removed.)
And your evidence that the rate at which CO2 is removed is a function of the first derivative of the concentration of atmospheric CO2, rather than just the concentration, is…? I’d like to see the physical justification for this as well. The processes that likely are acting here (dissolution of CO2 into the ocean, uptake and release of CO2 by plants) are functions only of CO2 concentration, not its first derivative.
In any case, the magnitude of the first derivative of atmospheric CO2 at any time is usually dominated by the annual CO2 cycle from production/oxidation of biomass in the northern hemisphere. (This is not to say time-averaged first derivative is dominated by natural processes, just often the magnitude of the instantaneous first derivative.)
It’s hopeless, Rand will continue linking to stupid things about climate, and many commenters will go even deeper.
The NRO article even trots out the old strawman lie that people thought only CO2 would end the ice ages, and orbital forcings wouldn’t do anything. Ugh. Where would the CO2 even come from suddenly? Are you proposing that the prevailing theory was volcanoes ending ice ages?
No, CO2 has been understood as the *positive feedback* that amplifies the difference between glacial and interglacial states. But you need an initial forcing, that comes from orbital parameters. Then the CO2 starts being released from the warming oceans.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Vostok-ice-core-petit.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
The current change is different from that, since the oceans are not releasing CO2 because of warming, they are absorbing it (because the atmospheric concentration of CO2 (because of humans) is rising faster than the ocean temperature rising is shifting the equilibrium towards CO2 release). Though we could be in deep sh*t if the oceans stopped absorbing, and shifted to releasing… But that’s quite far off AFAIK. Ocean acidification will turn into a problem before that.
This post is just for curious onlookers, I don’t expect Carl Pham, Ken Anthony or Mike Borgelt to budge, they are simply not interested in evidence, logic or truth.
The NRO article also trots out the strawman along the lines that “suddenly it’s been discovered it was orbital changes, not CO2 that ended the last ice age”.
That’s what the standard theory has always been, orbital *forcing* and CO2 as a *feedback*.
Look up Milankovitch.
The article is total bs.
Paul and “gravityloss” clearly have no familiarity whatsoever with feedback systems. These are dumb people making superficial statements on matters they do not understand.
Paul and “gravityloss” clearly have no familiarity whatsoever with feedback systems. These are dumb people making superficial statements on matters they do not understand.
Bart, care to point out a single error I made?
It is certainly the case that the rates of the other processes change as atmospheric CO2 levels rise. Oceans absorb more CO2 as the atmospheric CO2 goes up, and absorb less as the ocean surface waters become saturated, for example.
BUT… this is entirely irrelevant to the argument I was making. I was talking about the derivative of the atmospheric CO2 concentration (the rates at a given moment, or averaged over a short period like a year). In that case, atmospheric CO2 can be treated as near-constant. The feedback effects don’t matter at all.
Paul, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Nobody on this board who understands these things is in the least bit impressed, and you are only further cementing the perception that the AGW enthusiasts are largely emotionally driven naifs with an adolescent I-know-it-all-but-have-no-experience mindframe.
Bart: I didn’t think you could find an error. You’re all hat, no cattle, as they say.
Take your own advice and slink away. I tire of your garden-variety obtuseness.
If you look around you’ll find that the isotopic composition argument isn’t quite as definite as some here claim.
We’re still arguing about the magnitude of the global mean surface temperature rise also. The error bars on this are larger than the claimed rise. There doesn’t seem to be a tropical tropospheric hot spot either(fingerprint of CO2 induced warming with water feedback).
There’s no acceleration in sea level rise and the oceans haven’t warmed since 2003 (Argo buoys)and measurements before that have huge problems making any claim of long term ocean warming highly suspect(and please distinguish between ocean heat content and Sea surface temperature here, the latter is not necessarily a proxy for the former.
Even if you believe that human activity is the only thing increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere, where are the bad effects?
The extra CO2 is causing more vigorous plant growth according to satellite measurement.
I repeat, where are the bad effects?
I couldn’t find anything NOT in error, Paul. You are clueless, you have no technical depth, and it is therefore useless to attempt to clue you in.
Basic engineering: a simple water pool’s outflow rate usually depends on the pressure and thus water level in the pool, and the emptying orifice size. It does not depend on the instantaneous amount of water flow into the pool. It does not depend on the instantaneous derivative of the surface level either.
In comes mdot_in,
out goes mdot_out,
total mdot = mdot_in + mdot_out
in the pool, m = integral mdot dt
the relation is perhaps mdot_out = k * m
Anyone have a problem with that?
Now, the pool is the atmosphere, the outflow is to the ocean, and the water is CO2. With increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, there is increasing flow from the atmosphere to the ocean. The atmospheric CO2 concentration mostly designates the ocean CO2 uptake. (In the short term before the ocean becomes saturated with CO2 or its temperature starts changing too much.)
I don’t know what brand of engineers people here are, I have some familiarity with process technology and this is the most basic of basic things there.
http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/jonah-goldbergs-classic-know-nothing-non-denial-climate-denial/#comments
Things Break picks Jonah Goldberg’s article apart.
gravityloss, you didn’t go far enough. The total difeq is
mdot = -k*m + mdot_in
The -k*m term, where k is a positive number, is due to the increase in pressure, which expels water out of the drain faster. If mdot_in is constant, the total mass stabilizes (set mdot=0) at m = mdot_in/k. If you increase mdot_in by 3% and hold it steady, the steady state mass in the pool is 1.03*original_mdot_in/k, i.e., the total mass rises by 3%.
You can do this experiment in your bathroom lavatory. Close the drain a little so as to get little outflow and turn on the water. You will reach an equilibrium point. Now, nudge the water rate up another 3% (just tap the knob or lever). You will see the water level rise 3%.
The key is that k is a positive number, resulting in a negative feedback. If it were a positive feedback, the water level would rise without bound, and it would do so in the absence of any additional forcing. The climate is a far more complex system than this, but the pro-AGW side bases their argument on the hypothesis that positive, amplifying feedbacks exist in the system. Richard Lindzen at MIT has demonstrated that the relevant feedbacks are, in fact, negative. Hence, the pro-AGW side is basing their alarmism on a hypothesis that is wrong.
Uhh, Bart, we were talking about whether the sea is absorbing or releasing CO2.
In the climate, there are both positive and negative feedbacks. The Stefan-Boltzmann law (P=k*T^4) is the overviewing negative feedback (if you like to think of it that way) of course which stabilizes the temperature. Without it planets would heat up erratically. Ie it’s the one that makes stuff stable in the first order physical approximation.
I’ve heard Richard Lindzen’s work is not taken as very credible, but I haven’t researched it that thoroughly myself. There are lots of other well based physical models that give higher numbers. Perhaps there is something to it, perhaps there is not. There are millions of claims, but as long as the public in the comments can’t even understand where the CO2 is from, it’s useless to concentrate on such details…
“I’ve heard Richard Lindzen’s work is not taken as very credible…”
Sure. Tenured professor with zillions of peer reviewed publications at the #1 technical college in the nation, if not the world. But, given the crowds you choose to hang with, I’d be surprised if you had heard otherwise.
“The Stefan-Boltzmann law (P=k*T^4) is the overviewing negative feedback …”
Come on, GL. You’ve admitted yourself that you have only “some familiarity with process technology”. This has to be some sort of joke. Are you really claiming you know better than Dr. Lindzen? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Uhh, Bart, we were talking about whether the sea is absorbing or releasing CO2.”
Were we? I thought you were making an analogy by discussing “a simple water pool’s outflow rate usually depends on the pressure and thus water level in the pool, and the emptying orifice size.” You definitely said “orifice”. Let me look again…
Yep. Still there. Orifice. Close eyes… look again… still there. Is it my computer acting up here?
“In comes mdot_in,
out goes mdot_out,
total mdot = mdot_in + mdot_out
in the pool, m = integral mdot dt
the relation is perhaps mdot_out = k * m
Anyone have a problem with that?”
I had a problem with that. But now, you say you weren’t talking about what you were talking about. Hmmm…. I give up, dude. Your thought processes are just to intricate for a guy like me to follow.
…too intricate. I thought I’d better fix that because guys like you tend to leap on clumsy fingers to dismiss arguments when you are losing badly.
Too bad you don’t understand.
The water pool analogy was for those who did not understand the relation of rate and stock in the atmosphere and ocean CO2 problem.
If you had a problem with that, you certainly didn’t voice it, as you started talking about climate feedbacks, not ocean CO2 absorption.
Your comments about the Stefan-Boltzmann law get really weird. I don’t think even Lindzen disregards that. (And it’s a point *for* low sensitivity, not against.)
It was just general talk. If the radiation wouldn’t grow so strongly with increasing temperature, runaway greenhouse effects would be more common.
“The water pool analogy was for those who did not understand the relation of rate and stock in the atmosphere and ocean CO2 problem.”
And, you clearly did not understand your analogy. I tried to help you with that, but apparently it is beyond your level of comprehension, which makes me wonder from where you cribbed it.
“If you had a problem with that, you certainly didn’t voice it, as you started talking about climate feedbacks, not ocean CO2 absorption.”
Apparently, you can’t understand the shared characteristics of feedback systems. Which is odd, since you tried to make an analogy to explain your perspective, but then seemed to forget that you had done so. Early stages of Alzheimer’s, perhaps? More likely, you copied it from somewhere where you gave the author the benefit of the doubt of knowing what he was talking about.
I never brought up ocean CO2 absorption. Why did you leap to that conclusion? And, gimme a break. I doubt you even know how to pronounce “Stefan-Boltzmann”, much less understand the statistical framework of blackbody radiation. The climate system is very complex. There are many, many feedbacks, both positive and negative. Here is a link to Lindzen’s paper, not that it will do you any good, since you apparently lack the proper background to evaluate it.
gravityloss, you didn’t go far enough. The total difeq is
mdot = -k*m + mdot_in
The -k*m term, where k is a positive number, is due to the increase in pressure, which expels water out of the drain faster. If mdot_in is constant, the total mass stabilizes (set mdot=0) at m = mdot_in/k. If you increase mdot_in by 3% and hold it steady, the steady state mass in the pool is 1.03*original_mdot_in/k, i.e., the total mass rises by 3%. etc etc
So? This is trivial (you can have some different sign conventions). What’s the point? What are you harping about?
The water pool analogy was just to demonstrate how the ocean absorption rate is dependent on the atmospheric concentration of CO2 (since the ocean’s CO2 capability is much larger, it’s CO2 concentration doesn’t change so quickly and can be approximated as near constant in a first look). Not dependent on the derivative of the atmospheric CO2 for example, or not a complex or chaotic phenomenon.
You then bring in Lindzen and positive feedbacks and whatever stuff that’s completely irrelevant.