A handy primer:
CO2 levels were steady during these wild swings and throughout the Holocene at roughly 280 parts per million (ppm) until 130 years ago when a stuttering increase to 400 ppm today began. In other words, Holocene temperature changes, and the wild variations that preceded them, were not linked to CO2 changes. This prompts the question: if CO2 changes did not drive these temperature shifts, why all the fuss about CO2 emissions?
The answer owes much to the complexity of the climate system and the wish for simple explanations to explain its variability and with which to make predictions. But climate is not simple. There are many interacting parts that make it a ‘coupled non-linear chaotic system’ in which small variations of any part can create big, unpredictable changes. In the search for something simple to blame, like increasing CO2 levels, this ‘coupled non-linear, chaotic’ nature of climate is often played-down, overlooked or ignored. Things like solar variations, ocean heat transfers, cloud cover and the like – things that may well be the main drivers of climate – seldom get the respect they deserve.
The effect of the sun, the sea and clouds on climate is known and accepted – the Gulf Stream being a well known example – but more precise knowledge suitable for computer models is a different thing altogether. But what can be said for sure, is that the sun, the sea and the clouds are all very important and CO2 is only one player in a big game, not the control knob on the Earth’s thermostat. It is true that CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect, but its heating effect is small (when compared with water vapour, the main contributor) and drops off logarithmically as its concentration increases. The more there is, the less additional heating effect it has.
It’s almost as though there’s some sort of political agenda that has nothing to do with science or reality.
[Update a while later]
This is interesting: Pruitt doesn’t want to attempt to overturn the endangerment finding:
Pruitt, with the backing of several White House aides, argued in closed-door meetings that the legal hurdles to overturning the finding were massive, and the administration would be setting itself up for a lengthy court battle.
A cadre of conservative climate skeptics are fuming about the decision — expressing their concern to Trump administration officials and arguing Pruitt is setting himself up to run for governor or the Senate. They hope the White House, perhaps senior adviser Stephen Bannon, will intervene and encourage the president to overturn the endangerment finding.
Trump administration officials have not totally ruled out eventually targeting the endangerment finding. Conservative groups have petitioned the EPA to look at reopening it, one source said, and the agency may eventually be compelled to respond to the petition. Axios first reported the news of the petition.
“Getting rid of the Clean Power Plan is just not enough,” said Myron Ebell, the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the former leader of Trump’s EPA transition team.
I agree. It was based on junk science. In fact, they should be trying to get a rehearing of Massachusetts versus EPA when they get Gorsuch on the court.
It also tells us that our energy policies are not only mistaken, but futile. Nothing we do will change the climate. Increasing atmospheric CO2 is not a problem – and if it was, wind and solar would not fix it. It’s time we followed the Asian example and acted according to facts instead of fears and fantasies.
Yes! Chinese Leadership, as foreseen by Jimmy Hansen.
Checking in again with Mr. Bad Astronomy, we see he’s preparing to go apoplectic tomorrow over a house committee hearing:
On Wednesday, March 29, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology will hold a hearing entitled “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method”.
This hearing will be a sham.
Hooooohhhkay. Tell us more Phil.
This is a huge problem. Politicians should not and can not decide what makes scientific research “sound”. Scientific findings must not change with the political winds; if anything, the reverse is true.
Ummm, what’s the reverse Phil?
And the basic science of global warming is, in fact, settled. We know the planet is heating up. We know this is due primarily to the excess carbon dioxide in the air put there by humans since the Industrial Revolution. And we know this is affecting the climate. The only unknown is just how much it’s affecting the environment — and even then, we know the effect is strong.
And even if we didn’t know all these things (but we do thanks to you Phil), we can reliably infer them from the wonderful graphics that always accompany your work, Phil. Thank you so much for what you do. Tireless. Tireless Phil.
I haven’t read BA in years. I guess when your rice bowl depends on socialism…
I felt compelled to reply to some “sciency” commenter with:
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The whole alarmist thing requires you to believe a great many highly improbable things, such as:
1) The climate swings wildly, from deep ice ages to warm periods, with sea level changes on hundreds of feet. The planet has large fluctuations even during interglacial periods. Ancient Egypt was built when the area was savanna instead of desert, with lions and elephants running around. Many civilizations were built in the tropics and Mediterranean, while others were built in places just below the Arctic circle. So the development of modern civilization is only incidentally connected to these large swings in climate. We could just as well have been in an ice age when science was born.
Climate alarmism requires you to believe that we happened to form modern civilization right at the peaky peak peak of a warm climate, and that if it gets any warmer we’re all going to suffer and die. We already know that cold snaps are very bad, and the Little Ice Age killed massive numbers of Europeans due to crop failures. So alarmism requires you to believe that if the climate changes just a little bit either way, catastrophe will ensue. Yet our current state of development is in a random climate. It could be a lot warmer (and was during the Medieval, Roman, and Minoan climate optimums), or it could be tremendously colder. The belief that we are balanced on a knife edge is a reflection of Christian philosophy, with hell to either side of the thermostat setting and us hanging by a string. This is extremely unlikely and unscientific, and you might as well claim that God made the planet perfect for all mankind, and that even a small amount of sin will cause him to smite us.
2) That the climate system has strong positive feedbacks. The slight warming from increased CO2, the effect of which exponential weakens with increased amounts, will hardly be noticed. Much of it has already happened over the past century. So to alarm everyone the climate scientists propose strong positive water-vapor feedbacks that will amplify the slight warming from CO2 into a wide range of catastrophic scenarios. However, a relatively stable climate can’t exist if the feedbacks are strong and positive. We wouldn’t be here because the planet would have pegged the needle one way or the other millions of years ago. And indeed, evidence points to the feedbacks being negative, not positive. For example, the Northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere should have wildly different albedos, with wildly different energy fluxes, because the vast bulk of the land surface is in the northern hemisphere. Yet satellite data tells us that the northern and southern hemispheres have albedos that are the same within less than 1 percent. That’s due to strong negative cloud feedbacks. That means CO2 isn’t going to have much effect, and logically it can’t or the planet would have become a mess long before we ever got here. Believing the planet is extremely sensitive is not logical.
3) Even if the worst of the IPCC predictions are true, nobody is going to care. Nobody actually cares about climate. When some newly unemployed Obama official in DC gets job offers from New York, Miami, LA, Phoenix, and Chicago, they’re going to evaluate the salary, the perks, state and local tax rates, crime rates, school ratings, the arts scene, the restaurant scene, and the commute. Climate will figure almost last on their list, even though the difference in climate between those cities is so great that they might as well exist on entirely different planets. That’s because nobody actually cares about climate.
And indeed, in the temperate zones between the tropics and the poles, the temperature goes up on average one degree C for every 90 miles toward the tropics. 2 C of warming, which represents “catastrophe” to the alarmists, is what already exists a three hour drive to the south. I’ve driven three hours to the south and everybody seemed pretty darn content with that climate. I can also just move a couple hundred feet higher on the hill and skip the whole global warming thing.
4) Temperatures already vary wildly from year to year and day to day. I pulled up my local weather station and punched every single day’s high and low for the past decade into a spreadsheet. I took the decade’s high and low to be the natural range for my area. I then added 2 C to every day’s reading for that decade to see what my range would be in an altered world. Over an entire decade, the new, warmer temperatures will be entirely within the old range of temperatures for all but three afternoons. I figure I can watch a few reruns of Battlestar Galactica those three afternoons and just skip the entire catastrophe.
Climate Science, or rather alarmist climate science, looks like science but it’s not science, it’s apocalyptic paranoia masquerading as science.
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There are more, but my comment was already getting quite long.
I pulled up my local weather station and punched every single day’s high and low for the past decade into a spreadsheet.
Just pull up weather underground’s wundermap and look at the variations from one end of town to the other.
I’ve used that argument before, to show people that the predicted warming is less than they have just in their own city – where they’ve likely never once noticed it.
Anyway, a person tried a point by point rebuttal to the above comment, so I replied point by point.
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Not sure if this comment will precede or follow Black Cat’s reply, but here goes.
Who are these physicists? Oh, Freeman Dyson, Ivar Giaever, Fred Singer, and many others. Nobel prize winning physicists. As Dr. Giaever said, ““When you have a theory and the theory does not agree with the experiment then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory.”
Pew has never polled physicists. It’s not the kind of thing they do.
At the end of the last ice age the sea level rose in jumps of over 2.5 meters per century, average 1 meter per century over the several thousand years, for a total increase of about 120 meters. That rate is 25 cm per decade. The current high-end estimate of sea-level rise is 3.5 cm per decade. That’s 7 times slower than the peak sustained rates during the end of the ice age, and one third the average rate back then, and little different from the rate in 1880. It is impossible for humans to spread dirt or pavement at a rate that slow. One 5″ thick pass with an asphalt truck, in one afternoon, wipes out about 35 years of sea level rise. Anyone who worries about drowning is certifiably insane.
If you think science supports the idea that a tiny shift in temperatures either way will doom us, then you don’t believe in science, you believe in a wacko religious cult. Humans are a tropical species. Most of the places we live would be too cold to support us if we hadn’t learned how to sew furs together and build fires and shelters. Yet some of the most densely populated areas on the planet are on the equator, where all the heat is. That’s because we’re built to thrive in heat that sends African predators scurrying for the shade. If we feared heat we wouldn’t all fly to Cancun for vacation, we’d fly to Alberta.
The positive feedbacks aren’t there because we’ve plummeted into ice ages when the CO2 levels were ten times higher than present, and climbing. CO2 can’t drive temperature because CO2 follows temperature with a 90-degree phase lag. If it also drove temperature then the math blows up and the planet’s temperature would be completely unstable. The equations wouldn’t work.
Nobody is going to even be able to measure climate change on spans of less than 20 years, assuming you have carefully calibrated thermometers and multiple decades of data. You cannot physically notice a temperature change that you can’t even measure beyond saying that it’s the weather. You already have temperature swings from year to year and decade to decade that are vastly larger than the slight warming the IPCC predicts. Are you still here? Did you have to become a refugee? If you do, you’ll need to drive north at about 180 miles per century to stay alive, assuming the IPCC’s goal of a 2 C limit over 100 years. That’s 1.8 miles per year, or about 1 foot per hour. Two-legged turtles crawl a hundred times faster than that.
Wildfires, floods, and droughts are apocalyptic nonsense, not science. Science would predict a decrease in extreme weather events because extreme weather is driven by large temperature gradients. Global warming reduces those gradients by spreading the same temperature change over a larger distance toward the poles. You get less wind and storms. Indeed, the worst hurricanes ever recorded occurred in the depths of the Little Ice Age, around the time of the Revoutionary War. Those wiped out entire islands, stripped bark of trees, and destroyed naval fleets at anchor.
What you refuse to believe is that mankind could escape punishment for sin, because the punishment for sin must be bad, by the definition of punishment, and all sins are punished. It’s primitive human nature to believe such things, down to your core, even though there’s nothing remotely scientific about them. If we’d have developed science during the last ice age, the same bug-eyed apocalyptics would have been screaming that the collapse of the ice sheets will make the Earth uninhabitable.
Don’t mistake the trappings of science, the lab coats and computers and charts and graphs, for real science, which is based on skepticism, real data (not faked, tweaked, and fudged), and the idea that if theory doesn’t match data, you change the theory, not the data. Climate scientists change past data as a matter of routine. NOAA automatically decreases past recorded temperatures as part of their homogeneity adjustments, even though any physicist could tell you that it’s physically impossible for a current temperature measurement to ripple back through time and effect temperatures in 1930.
It’s paranoid garbage, related more to primitive human psychology than to anything the climate is doing. We have angered the gods and will suffer the consequences!
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Not surprisingly, my comment ended up in “moderation” probably because now I’m a known bad actor who must be silenced, lest I confuse the group with facts and logic.
Not surprisingly, my comment ended up in “moderation”
They always say the debate is over but it is only because the other half of the debate is stuck in moderation.
What wild swings in temperature during the Holocene? They’re not on the graphs I can find, the Holocene does not average 2 degrees warmer than today, the temperature rise since 1880 has been 1.2 C, not 0.8 C. The article in unclear as to whether the author has heard of the Milankovitch cycles.
The article is politically motivated fiction.
Thus, we know that Holocene temperatures were often warmer than now and varied constantly – and wild temperature swings occurred just prior to the Holocene period.
What’s the political motivation you’re referring to Andrew? Vast sums of money provided to the author and his co-contributors by evil big oil? Would you feel better if the article was accompanied by a big oil derrick graphic? Or a picture of a vast abandoned wind farm?
What wild swings in temperature during the Holocene? They’re not on the graphs I can find, the Holocene does not average 2 degrees warmer than today, the temperature rise since 1880 has been 1.2 C, not 0.8 C. The article in unclear as to whether the author has heard of the Milankovitch cycles.
And? The great problem here is that we don’t know how well the “graphs” reflect what actually happened during the Holocene.
The article in unclear as to whether the author has heard of the Milankovitch cycles.
And yet there have been dramatic temperature swings outside of these cycles.
Wow, the temperature rise has been 1.2 deg C not 0.8 deg C, based on dodgy thermometers with dodgy ever changing siting.
A better statement would be “we think it may a have warmed a small essentially unnoticeable amount around half to one deg C since 1880 but we aren’t sure”.
Ever been involved in measuring anything Andrew?
I personally collected a small part of the climate record i.e stole er borrowed the Senior Air traffic controller’s bicycle and went out on the airfield to the met screen.
I can tell you there wasn’t a whole lot of quality control and in 3 years I don’t remember our thermometers being calibrated. Perfectly fine for flying operations though.
That’s the thing. Most thermometers are perfectly adequate for everyday use. No one will notice if it is 85 or 85.03. Even if the thermometer says 84 when its 85, no one would care. It wouldn’t impact their decisions. But when people claim the world is ending because of a global average increase of .01, then all of a sudden accuracy becomes pretty important.
This is why the climate “scientists” use adjectives like hottest ever rather than actual numbers.
Dinosaurs were not at south pole. Or Antarctica was not at the south pole during time of the dinosaurs.
And this is not mere not picking. Or Antarctic at south pole, when the sun remains our sun, and earth retains roughly it’s present orbit around a star like our sun, can not have anything like tropical or warmer temperate zones conditions.
Or one basic problem with it is it, is it roughly has six months of night.
Another problem is Earth’s thick atmosphere blocks a large part of sunlight when the sun is low on horizon- as it is at the poles.