Is it on the verge of collapse?
We can only hope so.
[Afternoon update]
The latest climate conspiracy theory. Tough words from Professor Curry:
Get over it, your side lost. Changes of Presidential administrations occur every 4 or 8 years, often with changes in political parties.
Get busy and shore up your scientific arguments; I suspect that argument from consensus won’t sway many minds in the Trump administration.
Overt activism and climate policy advocacy by climate scientists will not help your ’cause’; leave such advocacy to the environmental groups.
Behave like a scientist, and don’t build elaborate conspiracy theories based on conflicting signals from the Trump administration. Stop embarrassing yourselves; wait for the evidence.
Be flexible; if funding priorities change, and you desire federal research funding, work on different problems. The days of needing to sell all research in terms of AGW are arguably over.
I repeat: We can only hope so. But “behave like a scientist” seems to be beyond many of them.
The forefront, perhaps.
But I’ve just put two daughters through high school, and there was a full year of ‘Earth Science’ freshman year. A lot of the most problematic pieces are baked into the texts at this point. Even when the slice of STEM students move on to figuring out what’s actually going on… the vastly larger non-STEM crew are being firmly set on the path of “This is your generation’s crusade.”
Don’t worry, Phil Plait will always be around to nag the unconcerned.
So Here’s Another Thing Global Warming Causes: Catastrophic Glacial Avalanches
But global warming is relentless. It continues, year after year, in many ways subtly changing our climate. We get more extreme weather, more wildfires, more ocean acidification, and, of course, rising temperatures over time.
More earthquakes too Phil, come on.
Speaking of fake news; wasn’t it obvious when Al Gore showed up, followed a few days later by Leo “I fly a lot and put my friends on a different plane” DiCaprio showed up to Trump Tower, what was going on. Yeah, the NYT and others wrote; “Trump is backpeddling on his stance against global warming” or “Ivanka wants to make global warming her issue!” It was an all out attempt to convince Trump, as Pinch tried when he talked face to face; to save their phony scam that the oceans were going to rise several feet if we did nothing.
I love Trump’s simple response: Scott Pruitt to head the EPA!
Did I mention, Hillary Clinton is toast? You can add Al Gore to that list.
It’s amusing to see the “climate scientists” going bananas and trying to “save” their data. Folks, we asked for the data for years, but you wouldn’t give it to us because you were afraid we’d try to “find something wrong with it” (Phil Jones).
And the request for volunteers with large bandwidth/storage appears on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), with one contributor saying how large those datasets can be. Preservation, not dissemination nor publication. Not surprising when you hear that while many of the datasets are smaller than a gigabyte, some are Yugeeee…we’re talking petabytes and beyond…
Off topic, yet the moderators are silent…
Anyone want to refute the argument here? You can listen or read as you wish.
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4549
Two concerns — are humans responsible for the 20th century increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, and is that increase in CO2 causing the temperature to go up?
First, the source of atmospheric CO2. Whereas there is a seeming inexorable trend of increasing CO2 concentration, there are shorter-term variations. The annual swings in CO2, attributed to seasonal growth in vegetation followed by decay, are of small amplitude but rather steep slope, indicating that plants have the capacity of drawing down large amounts of CO2 and the dead plant matter in the soils and forest floors has the capability of decaying and releasing large amounts, large in relation to the anthropogenic emissions.
In addition to the seasonal variation, there is also year-to-year variation in “net CO2 emissions to the atmosphere” in the form of the slope of the CO2 curve — not the absolute amount, but the slope. This variation suggests a variable source of CO2 emission of comparable magnitude to the emissions of our industrial civilization and land-use patterns. The variable source is inferred to be natural because even with deep economic recessions, fossil fuel burning doesn’t modulate that much on a year-to-year basis.
The variable source of emission is highly correlated with variation in global temperature. So there is a temperature-stimulated natural source of CO2 emission. Bond-Lamberty and Thomson http://www.biogeosciences.net/7/1915/2010/bg-7-1915-2010.pdf identify such a source in the soils, and they pose this as a worrisome “positive feedback” where CO2 raises temperature, which stimulates more CO2 emission from the soil, which in turn raises temperatures more.
My perspective on this is that 1) the temperature-stimulated CO2 emission has been going on already on account of the warming that is already taking place, 2) the atmospheric CO2 budget had already been “balanced” without taking into account this natural emission source, 3) to keep CO2 in balance with this new source, the sink of plant uptake of CO2 has to be stronger than previously thought, 4) changing the carbon balance model, that once explained the increase in atmospheric CO2 as entirely human caused, now blames humans for only half the increase, with the other half coming from this natural source, 5) this change to the model now matches the long-term trend CO2 trend as well as the year-to-year variations that correlate with changes in global temperature.
Commenter “Bart” may weigh in that I am neglecting ocean upwelling and that the anthropogenic contribution to the CO2 increase may be less, with more to be blamed on natural CO2 emissions driven by increases in global temperature. This raises the dog-tail question and what is driving the wagging? Is the temperature increase driven by CO2, and if so, why hasn’t this positive feedback “run away” in the past? Or is the temperature increase the result of long-term ocean current cycles, and this is what is driving the CO2?
As to CO2 and temperature, it is incorrect to say that the CO2 blocks the radiation of heat into space — that heat gets radiated one way or an other, but according to Lindzen, CO2 raises, slightly, the level in the atmosphere where heat is free to radiate into space, and the surface temperature increases, somewhat, by way of the adiabatic temperature lapse rate (as in the compression heating when you pump a bicycle tire) from the thicker layer from ground to the mean level of radiation into space. The real question is whether the positive-feedbacks to amplify this effect are real, and that increased surface temperature stimulates natural CO2 emission calls into question how large this effect.
the sink of plant uptake of CO2 has to be stronger than previously thought
Ya, the podcast guy assumes that plant life is static too. It isn’t.
Humans produce CO2? – Not under serious contention. People quibble over how much, but I don’t argue with it.
That CO2 is a greenhouse gas? – Also not in any serious dispute.
The trick is measuring “How much?” And then quantifying the underlying natural variability.
For any of this to matter, it has to not only be ‘Global Warming’, but ‘Catastrophic Anthropomorphic Global Warming’. Most all of the grim prognostications are tied into showing that the entire system is ‘open-loop unstable’. That is: A push on carbon dioxide must not only produce the direct, measured, -small- heating effect of the carbon dioxide directly, but also produce other large positive feedbacks. Specifically, more water vapor which itself should produce lots more heating.
The extremists, the ones promoting ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ as our obvious future, determined, promulgated (and then exaggerated over the top of that) a large Climate Sensitivity to reach that sort of catastrophic overheating.
The actual published papers, however, have pretty much picked numbers outside the lower limits of the previous papers estimates at every iteration. That is: As we get more data, we appear to be decreasing it nearly every time. The actual data is thus basically eliminating any chance that it will be catastrophic. Mild warming is a completely different discussion.
The unfortunate piece of this puzzle is the pathetic pre-satellite era temperature variability examinations. Surface stations, ocean measurements, and tree-proxies, all. The billions spent on modeling and current temperature/spectrum/etc monitoring lets us competently discus the satellite era. And kind of, sort of, vaguely discuss 1900-to-now. But, the homogenization techniques used to splice together known sketchy data nearly explicitly eliminates the exact sort of ‘climate shifts’ we’re looking for. It is thus totally expected that we get very low ‘climate variability’ when looking at old proxies, and observe higher climate variability when we -know- (aka: satellite period) that the temperature did actually shift 10 degrees overnight.
My refute is, “so what?”
The climate isn’t static and never has been. Nothing humans do can stop the climate from changing. We are exiting an ice age, or maybe we aren’t. It is an interglacial period of an ice age. A short time ago there were ice sheets that covered much of the north.
Absent humans, the climate would still be changing, and warming with some peaks and valleys.
That the climate changes isn’t necessarily good or bad. It’s a natural unstoppable process. Why does he think that a changing climate has to be bad or that it can be stopped? Why not talk about models that have been wrong?
His entire view of climate and what climate change means is shaped by things he wants to take off the table for discussion.
The alarmists want to get rid of the dams in the PNW and replace them with bird blenders. These are the same people who told us to use plastic bags to save the trees and drink bottled water because tap water is toxic. These are also the same people burning tires in ND to save the environment. How is it that policy is left out of the discussion?
How do we power humanity under these grand delusions? We don’t. They don’t want an empowered humanity.
His arguments don’t show humans are causing climate change. He makes four assumptions 1) That people don’t think the climate changes 2) The only way climate changes is by human action 3) That people don’t think humans can affect the environment 4) Change is inherently bad.
I think he is wrong to some degree on each of those four assumptions.
We live in a climate optimum. A warmer global climate could be just as beneficial in the future as it is right now compared to how things were 15,000 years ago. Rather than using neopagan beliefs about appeasing Mother Earth, we should use Mother Nature’s creation, the human brain, to adapt to the changing environment just as we have for hundreds of thousands of years.
The notion that we can stop the climate from changing is human arrogance and hubris on the scale of Greek fables. The Earth won’t be helped or hindered by alarmists’ preferred policies but they will be tragic for humanity.
Even if he was right, the way to deal with the problem is to fight our way out not shackle the creativity and power of humanity through flagellation. This is because the future is always uncertain and the climate is always changing. Policies that claim to stop this will prevent us from actually adapting to what nature throws at us by creating a false sense of security and control.
People disagree about the causes of climate change but the only people I have encountered who think the climate naturally doesn’t change or that we can stop the climate from changing are in the AGW alarmist camp. There are two other areas where people disagree; what a future climate will be like and what policies should be taken to live in that climate.
There are great uncertainties in all of these areas and we shouldn’t limit discussion to just admitting that the climate is changing and using that admission to claim predictions of apocalypse are true or that punitive anti-human policies will stop the climate from changing. And alarmists shouldn’t take the position that because people disagree with their preferred policies or dire predictions of impending death and destruction that people don’t think the climate changes or that humans have no impact on the environment.
The natural climate isn’t static, but I doubt you’d like the natural climate that existed at the height of the Permian-Triassic boundary extinction. Equatorial regions appear to have been denuded of much of what we’d call higher life forms.
https://origins.asu.edu/sites/default/files/sun_wignall_hot_end-perm_science_2012.pdf
I am sure that there are a lot of climates from the past, recent or otherwise, that I wouldn’t like. It doesn’t change the facts that climate changes naturally and that humans can’t stop the climate from changing.
According to the article you link, water temperatures were deduced by oxygen and carbon isotopes found in the fossils of extinct animals. Certainly there are some error bars here? The article also has some charts which are good examples of great ways to portray information in misleading ways.
But the problem with your link is that it implies you think there will be a climate apocalypse and that warming has to be bad. Will there and will it? Did warmer temperatures during this time period cause the extinction you reference? What caused the warmer temperatures? Was warming what caused problems for wildlife? Needless to say, there are lot of uncertainties here, which I assume you already know.
Your link claims rapid warming over something like 800,000 years was the problem. But it shows what looks like two different data sets, one of them that isn’t as extensive as the other. One data set shows a constant warming over millions of years. The other appears to mirror the slope of this warming but measured from a different location. Warming had a 13-14 point swing, with some peaks and valleys. Do any of the current, and wrong, climate models predict a 14 degree increase? If so, over what time period? And do these models predict other factors like volcanism and asteroid strikes?
During this time, many species were alive and sample sizes increased with temperature increases. Species samples increased with temperature estimates.
They were certainly doing well at a water temperature higher than off the coast of Hawaii today.
This contradicts the claim made in the article and also claims that warming equals apocalypse.
It wasn’t until after the peak temperature estimate that species began to die off. At that same time, temperature dropped. The temperature drop was much more rapid than the temperature increase.
Even at the peak of cooling, it was only a little cooler than in previous periods. Both the peak in warming and the peak in cooling suggest something other than temperature was at play.
The real problem in terms of extinction didn’t occur with the warming period but with the cooling periods. The peak went from 100-104 degrees fahrenheit to 68 degrees!
It was in this drastic cooling period that the main loss of life occurred. Considering that species were dying off in temperatures that they had previously survived, it suggests that more was going on than just temperature change.
The planet has gone through different stages. The volcanism of the past, we hopefully wont see again. But who knows?
20,000 years ago, I would be sitting under 400 feet of water. When one of the floods that washed through 14,000 years ago I would have been 800 feet under water. The floods scoured away all of the soil, leaving behind basalt thousands of feet up to miles thick. The lava flows that created the bassalt traveled almost as far as the flood waters, hundreds to a thousand miles and is about 14 million years old.
It’s believed that the same hotspot that created Yellowstone created the basalt. This hotspot is much farther to the east than it was west in the past.
Past climate is determined by more than just warming or cooling, just as future climate will be. It is a complex mix of a variety of variables that determines the climate. We can’t say that warming will continue linearly or that warming leads to apocalypse. Your own link shows that life did just fine, and even increased, under warmer conditions than what we have today.
I’m glad I didn’t waste my time. Many have shown ability discuss one way or the other, but not Jim.
Personally, while I agree with much of what Francis Menton says in the linked article, I’m not at all in favour of trashing all the research that’s going on. One, sooner or later somebody is going to figure out alt energy’s storage problem, and I’d like at least some of the solutions to come from the USA and be built in US factories. Besides, I’m against the wholesale elimination of R&D programs in general. After all, what could have happened if the USAF had been allowed to continue the Dyna Soar program, or if the old NERVA nuclear rocket program had been allowed to move on to actual flight testing? We’d have a very different spaceflight infrastructure than what we have now. Two, I’ve never been convinced that the human race doesn’t contribute to Global Warming. James Watt ironed the kinks out of the steam engine in the mid-18th century and helped move the industrial revolution into high gear (no, I’m not against the IR, I think it’s one of the best things ever to happen for the human race), which resulted in a big jump in coal production. Another factor is population increase. Since around 1900 the human population has grown from around 1 billion to over 7 billion today. We have to be having some effect on the climate, but exactly how much is still unclear. What’s always bothered me is the possibility of a rubber band effect when it comes to climate-everything looks normal until the rubber band finally snaps. If that turns out to be the case, the good guy free market, individual liberty types better have something ready to go into action fairly quickly. Otherwise, the Left will win elections until the end of time.
One question is the scale of the human effect on atmospheric gases and in turn climate in relation to natural effects.
The ocean inventory of “soluble” CO2 is 50 times that of the atmosphere. If you have two reservoirs that started out (pre-industrial) more-or-less in equilibrium, the capacity of the reservoir in proportion to the amount of “stuff” already in it. We are not going to substantially alter the concentration of CO2 in ocean water any time soon.
OK, people like on the linked Web site say, the “turnover time” to the deep ocean “is on the order of 500-1000 years”, and the well-mixed surface layers that equilibrates with the atmosphere has a CO2 inventory and hence capacity on the order of that of the atmosphere. We are going to fill up the ocean sink in short order and then see the CO2 zoom.
Well no, people who say that would fail the related exam question in my electric circuits class. The CO2 gas exchange coefficient between surface and deep ocean is roughly the same as that between atmosphere and surface ocean — it is just that the surface ocean is so vast that makes the turnover time so long. If you keep the same resistance R but greatly increase the capacitance C, the RC time constant increases in proportion — the long “turnover time” does not at all mean that a pulse of CO2 added to the surface ocean will take that long to dissipate into the deep ocean.
Now, if the ocean sink is so large, why hasn’t all of the CO2 added to the atmosphere been swallowed up in the ocean? Were the atmosphere, surface ocean, and deep ocean modelled by electric capacitors and the gas-exchange-with-concentration-difference modeled by resistors, charge (CO2) dumped into the atmosphere capacitor would quickly drain into the surface and deep ocean. Quickly is on the order of 7-20 years, and we know this from the atomic bomb testing C14 tracer, added during the 1950’s and abruptly ended by international agreement in 1963.
Furthermore, “skeptoid.com” and other sites telling us “every fool knows that humans have altered the atmosphere on the basis of the carbon isotopes fingerprint of fossil fuel” don’t answer this. If “we” have increased the total CO2 in the air from 290 up to 400 ppm over the 20th century, why is it that the change in the C13 ratio, this “fingerprint”, suggests that the fossil fuel combustion contribution to this change is about a fifth of that increase. These purportedly setting-the-record-straight sites don’t go into that.
When you press someone on the quantified isotope ratios, either the “bomb test” curves of the radioactive C14 and the fossil fuel inventories of altering concentration of the non-radioactive C13, the claim is that the “isotopes equilibrate between air and ocean reservoirs by the exchange of gas molecules whereas the rate of equilibration of a bulk amount added to the atmosphere is different.”
Oh yeah, why? Almost no one, especially the most vocal “warmist” partisans cannot tell you, they just “flap their arms” when asked.
It took determined “digging” to find out, but the answer is the “Revelle buffer” after oceanic scientist Roger Revelle. Most of the “soluble” CO2 in the ocean is not as “aqueous CO2” as in a soda bottle but rather bound to other chemicals forming the “soluble carbonates.” The reaction rate in forming or removing this carbonate molecules flows a power law, not a linear law with the partial pressure difference in CO2 between air and ocean. On account of the lengthy chain of chemical reactions, even though those reactions happen nearly instantaneously, they follow a 10th power law where the number 10 is the “Revelle factor.”
This means there is a chemical reaction-rate barrier maintaining the partial pressure and hence gas concentration of atmospheric CO2 from collapsing into the oceans. Owing to a Revelle factor of 10 that follows from a length calculation from Physical Chemistry (no, I take this on authority and haven’t double-checked the math yet), it takes a 10-part increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration to get a 1-part increase in ocean CO2 concentration.
Owing to the vastness of the ocean reservoir, Revelle and Suess in their 1957 paper claimed that adding 6 units of CO2 to the atmosphere should partition into 1 part to the atmosphere and 5 parts to the ocean (the ocean is 50 times bigger but you divide by the Revelle factor of 10 to come up with 5). This suggests that only 15 percent of the CO2 we add to the atmosphere should stay there, not the 50 percent we observe.
The consensus is that instead of 85 percent of emitted CO2 ending in the oceans, only 25 percent goes into that “sink” with the other 25 percent going into the terrestrial “sink” involving absorption by growing vegetation balanced by rotting of dead plants. The explanation offered is that the ocean is not well mixed, slowing down absorption, but again, the “500-1000 year turnover” for the deep ocean is misleading — my model calculation show that the time constant for the surface layer exchange with the deep ocean is on the same order as its exchange with the air.
But . . . there is the matter of the large year-to-year variability in the increase in atmospheric CO2 that was the subject of my prior comment. I am not telling you that humans have had no impact on the CO2 level in the atmosphere, but I am telling you that the fraction of the increase attributable to what we are doing varies from at most 50 percent and downward. And that the industrial activity is not the sole and maybe not the primary driver of atmospheric CO2 contradicts “Catastrophic Global Warming”, that increase in temperature stimulates increase in CO2 to increase the temperature. If this positive feedback were a problem, we likely would already be living on the surface of Venus.
Could you relate this to beer?
When I was in high school one of my best friends had a part-time job taking weather observations for what was called, at that time (mid and late 60’s) the Environmental Science Services Administration (now NOAA). I often tagged along when he took the “Midnight Ob.”
There was a weather station atop the three-story U.S.Post Office building in our hometown and my friend lived just a short distance away. The weather station was one of those classic white-painted, louvered, peak-roofed boxes on legs with a weather vane mounted at the peak of its roof and an anemometer and rain gauge off to one side. My friend would take all the readings from the instruments, write them on a form and also call them in.
By rights, there should be a veritable mountain of such forms dating back to the founding of the Weather Bureau in 1870 slowly mouldering away somewhere in Banker’s Boxes, perhaps in Warehouse 13 next to the Ark of the Covenant. I suspect they no longer exist, though – probably long-since transferred to microfilm and then to digital storage media. Whether anything reasonably resembling “original” data still exists in non-compromisable form seems to be very much an open question these days.
I’m inclined to suspect it does not. For the last two generations or so the custodians of these datasets have been the same climate activists with PhD’s who have invented a succession of opaque justifications for “adjusting” said data to better serve their policy agenda. The only data likely still extant is the doctored stuff. The original stuff likely went down the memory hole – or was consumed in a weather data “Reichstag Fire” if you prefer a different metaphor – quite some time ago. It’s exactly the sort of thing people do when they think they’ll be the ones in charge forever.
The current sudden hysteria about the incoming Trump administration putatively “endangering” the accumulated data is exactly the sort of pre-emptive meme strike one would expect of people unexpectedly out of power and influence who know the jig will shortly be up and wish to displace blame for wholesale data-fudging and scientific fraud onto the new guys in town.
I wish Team Trump success on this particular journey. Unfortunately, they will be up against a stiff wall of resistance – on the inside.
There is nothing more recalcitrant than the Civil Service and, just because you hold the leadership positions, it does not mean that the bureaucrats will actually do what you want. They will go right on, doing the job exactly the way they have been their whole careers. They will respond to “Executive Orders” in a white mutiny fashion, unenthusiastically and unfaithfully executing commands in a very literal fashion without reason, all the while leaking everything to the press in the worst possible terms.
Fire them? Silly boy!
Maybe, if Congress can find their gonads, they can make major funding cuts to large sections of the agencies involved. That is the only way to rid us of enough public servants to make a difference. Hard to believe they would, however.
This has always been the stumbling block on the way to smaller government.
Ronald Reagan demonstrated pretty conclusively in his handling of the PATCO strike that even unionized “public servants” can be fired en masse and replaced. That’s exactly what needs to be done a whole lot of places in government – IRS, EPA, etc.