I’ll obviously have a lot more to say about this in the coming days, but it’s going to be a major battle of one “settled” science versus another:
The big consequences of a major solar calm spell…would be climatic. The next few generations of humanity might not find themselves trying to cope with global warming but rather with a significant cooling. This could overturn decades of received wisdom on such things as CO2 emissions, and lead to radical shifts in government policy worldwide.
We won’t just be firing up the SUVs. We’ll be burning fossil fuels for everything we’re worth, and not just for electricity–for heat. But unlike the watermelons who have been waging war against carbon, I don’t propose any massive government solutions, other than to get the hell out of the way, and let the market work. Oh, and I think I’d be shorting carbon-trading schemes. I wonder if Algore is?
<quietly pushes my new ACME® Sunspot Suppression Device out of view>
This just shows what I think any rational person has long-since realized: while greenhouse gas emissions undoubtedly put upward pressures on global temperatures, that is only one of a multitude of factors affecting climate. Solar cycles, ocean salinity, Earth’s albedo, cloud cover — these all play a role, and the degree to which each of them can have negative or positive feedbacks into one another is more complicated than many climate scientists are willing to admit.
That said, it’s pretty hard to deny that humans have influenced climate to some extent since the onset of the industrial revolution. Large-scale deforestation, expansion of agriculture, creation of concrete jungles… these all play some role in climate change, though whether that role is enough to overpower non-anthropogenic effects is the part that’s debatable.
BTW, years ago I started (but, as usual, neglected to finish) a science fiction story in which, among other things, there were discussions of a global program to produce greenhouse gases so Earth wouldn’t have to import so much food from its distant colonies.
The counter argument is already making the rounds at the AGW sites. The carbon and methane in the air will keep us nice and toasty during the next decade or two . . . and after that we’ll fry.
and after that we’ll fry
Only if you believe their bogus modeling.
regarding wappledoo’s comment: anyone remember SimEarth? If you played in the daisy mode, whatever it was called, you couldn’t really make longterm alterations to the climate, because the biomass would change the planetary albedo.
As far as a long-term cooling goes, wouldn’t it suck to wind up in the world of Fallen Angels?
whether that role is enough to overpower non-anthropogenic effects is the part that’s debatable.
No, it’s not. The perception most people have of the scale of the processes is fantastically distorted. We have hugely exaggerated ideas of our importance and influence on geological events. Human activities account for something like 0.007% of the Earth’s energy budget, and less than 2% of the annual movement of carbon between vegetation, the atmosphere, the oceans, et cetrera. We are a small part of the picture.
As long as everything else remains perfectly static, and on a short scale, then we are indeed the only moving piece, and our effects seem significant, if only in extrapolation. But let the nearby star change its output by 0.05%, or some similarly small fractional change happen in cosmic ray flux, the heat put out by the Earth’s core, et cetera happen, and the truth — that we are fleas on the back of elephants — will become alarmingly clear.
“We won’t just be firing up the SUVs. We’ll be burning fossil fuels for everything we’re worth, and not just for electricity–for heat. ”
So you do accept that increasing GH gases will cause an enhanced GH effect, you’re just skeptical of the “catastrophic” bit?
I was being tongue in cheek.
So you don’t accept AGW because it doesn’t suit your political views?
I don’t accept (nor do I “deny” — I am a skeptic) AGW because the science is crap.
As far as a long-term cooling goes, wouldn’t it suck to wind up in the world of Fallen Angels?
The cooling – eh. A society that retains flexibility of thought, wealth, science, can adapt to anything.
If we have snow in Wisconsin through spring, bike paths make dandy snow machine trails. I can ride a snow machine to work, no problem.
The culture in Fallen Angels had reverted to voodoo and peasantry. That is what would suck.
The basic radiation physics is testable and looks pretty sound, it requires finding mechanisms for that lab physics not to be applicable in the real world.
It’s interesting that the LIA began decades before the Maunder minimum and ended decades after, so if there were undetected changes in solar output that caused the LIA, those changes haven’t been taking place this century, there’s no start to another LIA preceding this quiet period.
It’s not radiation physics. AGW hysteria is based on climate models. Oversimplified for comments, a central feature of all these models is an unscientific assertion that CO2 has a positive feedback MULTIPLIER effect, usually via a hand wave that each CO2 molecule allows more water vapor to be held in the atmosphere and water vapor holds more heat than CO2. We called this kind of stuff “fudging” the lab results when I was in college.
The basic radiation physics is testable and looks pretty sound
HIV has been killed in a test tube by thousands of different molecules, too. Weird that we have no cure yet, huh? Turns out in vivo is a lot different from in vitro.
At some point you should try to grasp the distinction between theoretical models and the real world. How do I know this is your problem? Because you focus on radiation physics as the core issue here. It’s not. As you say, radiation physics is very well understood. It’s the reaction of complex systems to subtle tweaking of inputs that is the core issue — and which is not well understood at all.
“The basic radiation physics is testable and looks pretty sound, it requires finding mechanisms for that lab physics not to be applicable in the real world. “
No, it does not testable or particularly sound. The idea that there’s some greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide is not the main point of contention. It’s an incessant strawman by people who can’t believe there are people so stupid as to disagree with it, and thus can’t be bothered to even listen. The part that has actually been exceedingly difficult to show in the laboratory, and led top climatologists to say, “Well, we just don’t know.”(Trenberth, irc) is how large the water and cloud feedback portion actually is.
The direct effect of carbon dioxide on the absorption and emission is something we can get a rough grasp on. It’s not very large.
The key piece of the AGW idea is that the tiny bit of warming forces more clouds. And the new clouds then turn and cause yet more warming, making this an ‘open-loop unstable’ feedback position and frying us all. The models already acknowledge a number of small stabilizing factors, so for ‘catastrophe’, the water feedback needs to be both large and positive.
Unfortunately, the newest satellites actually indicate that the feedback is quite possibly negative. And more than a little. That is: We do indeed get a few more clouds, but the actual albedo of the top layers of the new clouds is substantially higher reflecting more energy before it even reaches the ground.
Even that ignores the complete insanity of climactic-anything on less than thirty years of decent data. Wait, what? We have temperature data to 1850! Yes, but it’s crap. And the proxies before 1850 are even worse crap. The proxy reconstructions can’t tell a 5-harvests-of-wheat-in-a-year period of history from a we-had-to-eat-(*&(*&-rye period. And the ‘best trees’ don’t happen to agree with the satellites for some reason.
Carl, you are at one end of the spectrum, while alarmists are at the other. I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Humans are causing measurable changes in global climate, but those changes are likely to be well within our species’ ability to adapt to, if any adaptation is even necessary.
Mankind has removed 50% of the forests during the past 200 years. Called the lungs of the Earth, I am made to wonder how well any creature would function with half of their lungs removed? Now at 6 plus billion people who exhale CO2 and
many who drive cars as well as use the Finite Fossil Fuel power plants electricity can say that there is no Anthropogenic
contribution to the Greenhouse Gas inventory.
Human activities account for something like 0.007% of the Earth’s energy budget, and less than 2% of the annual movement of carbon between vegetation, the atmosphere, the oceans, et cetrera.
For the half-million years before the industrial revolution that natural annual movement of carbon had little net effect, leaving atmospheric CO2 concentrations under 280 ppm. Burning fossil fuels has boosted that to over 390 ppm in less than two centuries. Human activities are having a dramatic net effect on the composition of the atmosphere.
Dramatic compared to what? Nitrogen?
“Burning fossil fuels has boosted that to over 390 ppm in less than two centuries. Human activities are having a dramatic net effect on the composition of the atmosphere.”
The range you correctly quote corresponds to a change in atmospheric composition of 0.011% over 200 years. The variation due to water vapor content is on the order of 5%, and can change globally in a matter of hours. The earth’s albedo changes by +/- 12.5% in days to weeks.
Your sense of “dramatic” must be attuned to underplaying…
Called the lungs of the Earth
Well, when you put it that way…. :eyesroll
So when a volcano goes off and flattens forests, do you blame humans or the volcano? Or do you acknowledge that the forests grow back? Do you realize that loggers, who cut down forest, are like any other agricultural farmer. If you only harvest wild plants, you’ll soon run out; so you replant what you harvest.
More to the point, if indeed, excessive deforestation is occurring (I can do basic imagery analysis of Brazilian forest in and around the Amazon river); then what does cutting back on emissions in the US (read shutting down coal plants that provide heat to the poor in the winter) have to do with fixing the problem of excessive deforestation?
Your sense of “dramatic” must be attuned to underplaying…
Or perhaps he’s just innumerate.
Somehow dropped from the above was the observation that insolation varies by 6.9% from perihelion to aphelion (and then back) every 182.5 days. It’s the biggest variation having a constant frequency in the whole climate phenomenon.
Al Says:
June 15th, 2011 at 1:33 pm
The key piece of the AGW idea is that the tiny bit of warming forces more clouds. And the new clouds then turn and cause yet more warming, making this an ‘open-loop unstable’ feedback position and frying us all.”
The hypothesized positive feedback is from water vapor, as distinct from clouds. It would hypothetically be open-loop unstable, but there are larger negative feedbacks overall (e.g., from T^4 radiation) so, the net effect would be expected to be amplification rather than overall instability.
A number of detractors, however, have presented evidence for the hypothesis that clouds render the overall feedback to CO2 induced warming negative, which means you get net reduction in warming compared to what it would be with no feedback at all.
Jim Says:
June 15th, 2011 at 1:49 pm
“Burning fossil fuels has boosted that to over 390 ppm in less than two centuries Human activities are having a dramatic net effect on the composition of the atmosphere..”
That is the narrative, which superficially matches the observations – i.e., CO2 has increased with slightly positive curvature, and accumulated emissions show an increase with slightly positive curvature. The two curves are similar to one another in the sense that the latter accumulation to date is roughly twice the increase in the measured concentration relative to an arbitrarily defined base. But, this is hardly dispositive – it is always possible to make two time series with slightly positive curvature look similar to one another. All you have to do is perform a linear regression on the one versus the other to find the base level and proportionality factor which matches them best.
Additionally, the measured increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration does not resemble the accumulated emissions in the fine detail of the higher frequency portion of the overlaid spectral densities. There are harmonics in the latter which simply do not appear in the former, as they should if the one is driving the other.
For these reasons, I do not believe the climate establishment has a particularly good handle on where all the carbon sinks are, or how the Earth’s CO2 balance came to be, assuming it ever was balanced for any significant length of time. (The only evidence we have is from proxy measurements, which don’t generally agree with one another, and each process of which has its own issues. The IPCC has chosen to elevate ice core samples to the fore because it gives the answer they desire.)
Does this mean buying that land for a pineapple ranch in Saskatchewan was not a good investment?
then what does cutting back on emissions in the US have to do with fixing the problem of excessive deforestation?
Especially when there are more forests in North America now than there have been for several centuries. Like he says, if you have a problem with deforestation, take it up with the Brazilians and Indonesians and those who are the culprits.
That said, it’s pretty hard to deny that humans have influenced climate to some extent since the onset of the industrial revolution
That’s an opinion, not a fact. The controversy is because a lot of people have a lot invested (monetarily, emotionally and politically) in that being a fact, without the bother of having to prove it. Or, better yet, ignoring the scientific method and claiming that it’s incumbent upon “deniers” to disprove an hypothesis. (which is what you just did.)
Here’s the first thing that has always jumped out at me … CO2 comprises 0.038% of the atmosphere … yet somehow this 0.038% is supposed the driving factor of the other 99.962% of the atmosphere to retain massive amounts of heat. Just don’t see it.
Even more, none … not one … of the models have been anywhere near accurate to date. GIGO … garbage in —> garbage out. I’ve had some small computer modeling experience (not weather). My model had to match the real world. Until I finally had a workable product, I had to constantly go back and check my assumptions. Their models aren’t working yet they keep using them … stuck on stupid doesn’t win converts.
I don’t have a problem with the basic radiation physics but I don’t want to see another analysis of this that doesn’t deal with combined CO2 and water vapor in the concentrations present in Earth’s atmosphere.
CO2 has gone up from (allegedly 290ppm to 390ppm. Water vapor is present at 10,000 to 40,000 ppm. So a 100ppm increase in CO2 is a 0.25%to 1% increase in total GHGs. Big deal. I don’t see how you are going to separate out the efects of the CO2 when water varies so much anyway.
philw1776 is right. There is a claimed multiplier effect but there’s no observational evidence for it. Just like there’s no observational evidence for the equatorial mid troposphere hot spot.
Brian Dunbar:”The culture in Fallen Angels had reverted to voodoo and peasantry. That is what would suck.”
So how does this differ from what we have right now?
The temperature record of the 20th and first decade of the 21st century can, in fact, be interpreted as essentially the long term trend coming out of the LIA, plus a ~60 year cyclic phenomenon which also appears in proxy measurements going back 2000 years. Since the peak of the ~60 year cycle occurs in the early 2000’s, this interpretation easily explains the pause which has been observed in the last decade without all the hand-waving and epicycles demanded by the AGW crowd.
A downturn in measured global averaged temperature (whatever that measurement represents) within the coming decade would serve to confirm this interpretation as reflecting reality.
Bart, you wrote:
A downturn in measured global averaged temperature (whatever that measurement represents) within the coming decade would serve to confirm this interpretation as reflecting reality.
This sort of thing is why I advocate waiting for more data. If there is a long term heating trend due to anthropogenic global warming, we’ll see it. No need to go lemming over a cliff due to a threat that would be centuries in the making, unless you’re trying to hustle someone.
Karl Hallowell Says:
“This sort of thing is why I advocate waiting for more data. If there is a long term heating trend due to anthropogenic global warming, we’ll see it. No need to go lemming over a cliff due to a threat that would be centuries in the making, unless you’re trying to hustle someone.”
Oh but no!!!! Don’t you realize that if we don’t do something NOW we will reach the tipping point of no return in less than 10 years? We’ll all ffrrryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
What will really be interesting is the impact on the other planets which also appear to have been warming. Mars will be especially interesting.
Humans are causing measurable changes in global climate.
You don’t know that. What you know is that (1) humans have been burning fossil fuels for 200 years, and (2) Mauna Loa CO2 concentrations have risen over that similar time, and (3) maybe there has been a change in some baseline temperature, although the noise is far larger than the signal, if any.
You do recall that correlation is not causation, right? And that “seems reasonable to me!” is not a respectable scientific argument. After all, it certainly seems reasonable that time is experienced the same by all observers, that energy is not conserved, and that the Sun goes around the Earth.
For the half-million years before the industrial revolution that natural annual movement of carbon had little net effect, leaving atmospheric CO2 concentrations under 280 ppm
Little net effect? Oh read some data, ferfuxsake. Measured by Antarctican bubbles — and even assuming the absolute correlation here is right — the CO2 concentration varied by +/- 20% over that the past 500,000 years, during a time when modern humans were just a gleam in some hairy ape-Adam’s eye.
But the modern variation is so sharp! So sudden! Higher than any previous spike! I can hear you cry. Right. Except there are no data sources whatsoever that can tell us the variation on the time scale of a few years from 400,000 years ago. We can only tell how things varied over 5000-10,000 years. Were there sharp spikes far above (or below) the baseline, lasting decades? We have no clue. We certainly know there were moderate spikes above and below the baseline, lasting thousands of years. And common sense (and basic math, or a study of the stock market) tells you that the magnitude of excursions from the baseline is inversely proportional to how long they last — the shorter the duration of the excursion, the larger its deviation from the baseline.
Is the current change a spike or a new baseline? We don’t know. Is it due to fossil-fuel combustion? It’s a plausible hypothesis, but there is no empirical proof whatsoever. Jumping straight from plausible hypothesis to conclusion is not science — it’s religion. It’s hearing thunder and inventing sky gods playing tenpins, because, hey, that would explain the data.
“Mankind has removed 50% of the forests during the past 200 years. Called the lungs of the Earth, I am made to wonder how well any creature would function with half of their lungs removed?”
Uhhh…no! Most CO2 for O2 exchange occurs in the oceans. Forestsfor very little overall as a percentage.
Raoul Ortega Says:
“Especially when there are more forests in North America now than there have been for several centuries. Like he says, if you have a problem with deforestation, take it up with the Brazilians and Indonesians and those who are the culprits.”
Money quote. ^^
It is amazing how forests recovered when we stopped using them to cook our food and heat our homes.
With our current program of fire suppression, we really need an army of people in the woods pruning trees, clearing brush, and collecting fallen limbs. Sadly, most people who care for forests don’t know how to care for a forest.
There are a number of tree farms along the Columbia and they are more pleasing to the eye than the forest of windmills. What was once a mostly pristine environment is now covered in hulking metal monstrosities. I really resent the environmentalists ruining the environment.
Aside from arguing about the effects of a quieter sun on our terrestrial environment, what would it mean for space exploration?
Short answer: it makes it easier in the near term, which in turn makes it easier in the far term, by using the current break in the weather to establish infrastructure needed to protect against future storms.
Their models aren’t working yet they keep using them … stuck on stupid doesn’t win converts.
But it is great for winning government grants!
The “Harry Read Me” file in the ClimateGate release was the true smoking gun. It showed how the data was irreproducible and the computer code was a horrible mess. Hint: If you can’t reproduce the results, it ain’t science.
Hint #2: If the model doesn’t match reality, the model is wrong, not reality.
Dramatic compared to what? Nitrogen?
Molecular nitrogen and oxygen are not infrared active molecules you twit.
“Their models aren’t working yet they keep using them … stuck on stupid doesn’t win converts.”
They’re making them work, by using the fudge of aerosol forcing, which they can tune to anything they like to get the results they want, and nobody can tell them they are wrong.
Epicycles. Piled higher and deeper.
If somebody can show me a physically-based (not purely statistical such as principle component analysis) model that was calibrated for, say, 1900 to 1955, then turned it loose and was able to accurately reproduce 1956-2010, I will look seriously at its predictions another 30-50 years into the future. To my knowledge, nobody has yet produced such a model.
Carl Pham: Is it due to fossil-fuel combustion? It’s a plausible hypothesis, but there is no empirical proof whatsoever.
Whoa there. While I agree with most of the skeptical posts so far, this statement is not correct. Two things: (1) You can easily look up what the consumption of petroleum, natural gas, and coal is worldwide. Do the stoichiometry. You will find that the total amount of carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels is the right magnitude to account for the increase in the atmospheric concentration. But more importantly, (2) fossil fuels have a different isotopic composition that “baseline” atmospheric CO2. Folks have actually measured the isotopic abundances in atmospheric CO2 and it has been shifting by just the right amount for the excess CO2 to be due to the burning of fossil fuels. Bottom line is that it is no longer in doubt that the increase is due to fossil fuel use. The hard question is what that means for climate, if anything, and the models the climate community are using now are unvalidated — or “crap”, to use Rand’s more colorful term.
Bart: Epicycles. Piled higher and deeper.
Hey, don’t be dissing epicycles. In our more enlightened age we call them “Fourier modes” and we use them a lot.
Andrew W: The basic radiation physics is testable and looks pretty sound, it requires finding mechanisms for that lab physics not to be applicable in the real world.
That’s quite a powerful stride you’ve got there, to make such a leap so effortlessly. By “basic radiation physics” can we assume you mean the absorption spectrum of CO2 and other GHGs? There’s a limitless amount of complexity between a 1 dimensional absorption spectrum and the world’s climate system.
Consider an analogy. Many fluids can be modeled as Newtonian (linear shear-rate/shear-stress characteristic, constant viscosity). You can prove all sorts of dandy things about viscous fluids that are Newtonian. I can show that for flow in a circular pipe, the friction factor is 64 divided by the Reynolds number, for example (maybe you learned this somewhere along the way). I could even show you how to compute the momentum diffusivity in this case. Did we mention this only works for small Reynolds numbers? For steady flow? For fully-developed flow 140 diameters from the entrance? Near the entrance, only approximate methods give the local skin friction. For higher Reynolds numbers, the flow is intrinsically unstable and quickly breaks down into turbulent, unsteady flow. All the transport coefficients shoot upwards. The friction factor shoots up suddenly when the Reynolds number is between 2000 and 3000. It becomes notoriously difficult to solve the Navier-Stokes equation exactly in this regime, so a lot of effort has been put into this problem and various approximate solutions over the last 100 years. Turbulence remains a poorly understood phenomenon. In fact, it is the subject of a Clay Prize.
And that’s just for a flippin’ pipe. You want to tell me you can predict the evolution of the world’s climate over a time scale of hundreds of years using a grid spacing of 100 km? Right, good luck with that. There are no climate codes validated to the standards that we use just to put people on a commercial airplane, much less to commit trillions of dollars of wealth on a fruitless quest to reduce CO2 output by a few percent. When the climateers can retrodict the 20th century and pass a chi-squared test for goodness of fit, give us a call. Then we can talk about more fundamental structural problems with their approach.
There have been treaties adhered to by some countries (e.g., Kyoto) aimed at affecting CO2 increase. Since the goals are set to reduce CO2 concentration, they should be at least changing the trend at which CO2 is increasing.
Does anyone know if during the time frame of Kyoto there was a measurable change in CO2 increase trend? The curve I typically see doesn’t have any noticeable change.
If no change in CO2 trend is measured, that’s evidence that the humans are not the principal source of the CO2 increase. Either that or any CO2 reduction due to policy has been exactly offset by an increase in CO2 production by non-compliant countries.
I doubt that any policies coming out of CO2 treaties are having any measurable effect which is evidence that humans are not the source of CO2 increase.
I see the Anthony Watts et al paper that had the purpose of proving that faults with the US surface temperature data was causing a warming bias has concluded that shortcomings in data collection methodology are not causing a warming bias.
Does this mean buying that land for a pineapple ranch in Saskatchewan was not a good investment?
Well Raoul, if you’ve got the mineral rights, then you’re in luck – there’s a good chance your pineapple ranch lies somewhere between the Alberta Oil Sands and the Bakken Field.
If somebody can show me a physically-based (not purely statistical such as principle component analysis) model that was calibrated for, say, 1900 to 1955, then turned it loose and was able to accurately reproduce 1956-2010, I will look seriously at its predictions another 30-50 years into the future. To my knowledge, nobody has yet produced such a model.
Cthulhu, this is absolutely the correct way to do climate modelling if following the Scientific Method. Sounds like a good idea for an X-Prize.
I realized the difference between what we, as engineers, normally contend with in our various FEA models, as closed systems (for instance, in CFD there is an airfoil or perhaps a finite 3D wing in a fixed, defined fluid, and that is it) vs. what the climate scientists are trying to do in modeling an open system like the earth and its atmosphere when I heard about the fact that plankton significantly affect the the earth’s climate and temperature. But how can one model the waxing and waning of the plankton population accurately? If we do, in fact, save the whales then the plankton population will decrease, if we don’t save the whales then the plankton population will go unchecked. How can all of this be “scientifically” predicted and modeled?
Andrew, if you’re an engineer or scientist, please poke around in how, exactly, the surface data is accumulated into a “Global Mean Surface Temperature”. Particularly follow the error measurement and propagation. The methods used make this number at best a proxy measurement with a demonstrably mediocre accuracy when actually cross-calibrated to satellite data. The GMST ‘correlates’, sure. That’s a frequently-adjusted, anomaly-based geographically dispersed average. Individual gridcells track … markedly less well.
And the individual point-source readings are still extrapolated to fill an entire gridcell with only the instrumental error (0.1C).
IOW: The methods do not lead to an ‘engineering quantity’, like ‘total heat content of the first meter of atmosphere above the surface expressed in Kelvin’. They’re instead a conveniently-named proxy that innately, and repeatedly, makes the assumption that a anomaly-based point-source reading tracks gridcell temperature even when there are known weather shifts, and expected climactic shifts in progress. To the accuracy marked on the physical instrument (0.1C).
And the adjustments: “There’s a marked shift in temperature between this set of five years, and that set of five years. They must have moved the thermometer and not marked the log book. Let’s split the record, shift one piece, then slice it back together.”
Wait, aren’t we -looking- for shifts in the patterns?
Andrew W.
Nice. Oh , look ! A unicorn!
I forget to add: Did you volunteer to be warmist troll here? Or was this just an assignment.
To the rest of you: Sorry but I’ve had it with these people.