It is to be hoped that Prof Friedlingstein will not be the subject of any personal attacks as a result of his work.
Comment on Week in review – science edition by Peter Davies
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Rhyzotika
Listening to the Friedlingstein talk, Nic Lewis lobs a couple skeptical questions. Dr. F reiterates the correlation between T and CO2, affirming that co2 drives a positive feedback, … but never comments on which comes first when.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Mike Flynn
“We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.”
From The Atlantic magazine.
Might have relevance to climate scientists.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Don Monfort
(Poor guy can’t help himself.)
You are obsessed with Mosher, Gary. Try to ignore him, like you ignore me. He only causes you pain. I am trying to help you. Mosher is using the Jedi mind trick on you, Gary. Run away!
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Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by Ferdinand Engelbeen
PA,
The ocean-atmosphere carbon cycle is a dynamic system, which reacts both on temperature and pressure.
Temperature is important as that changes the partial pressure of seawater (pCO2) at the surface with about 8 μatm/°C, that is the equilibrium pressure with the above atmosphere at the temperature of the seawater.
Pressure is important, as the difference in partial pressure of CO2 (ΔpCO2) between seawater and air is the driving force for a flux into or out of the oceans. If pCO2(oceans) = pCO2(atmosphere), nothing happens (or more accurate: the number of molecules going in and out are equal).
Now, at the source and sink places, there is a continuous huge ΔpCO2 between oceans and atmosphere: a lot of CO2 comes in from upwelling places near the equator and a lot of CO2 goes down in the sink zones near the poles. As long as these two fluxes are equal, nothing happens in the atmosphere: there is a “dynamic” equilibrium between the oceans and the atmosphere, the carbon cycle is in “steady state”.
If you start from steady state and increase the temperature of the oceans, the ΔpCO2 at the upwelling places goes up and at the ΔpCO2 at the sink places goes down. Thus more CO2 is entering the atmosphere and less is removed by the sinks. That means that the pCO2 of the atmosphere increases, until the ΔpCO2 at the sink and sources is restored. At that moment the influx and outflux are equal again. That is at about 8 μatm/°C increase in the atmosphere, which is about the same as the ppmv (the difference is in water vapor, ppmv is measured in dry air).
In graph form for realistic pressures and in/out fluxes:
No matter how much CO2 is in the oceans, all what counts is the difference in (partial) pressure, not the quantities in the oceans. To bring the atmosphere at 8 ppmv more CO2, you need ~17 GtC extra, that is all. Even if the (deep) oceans contain 100 times more carbon in different forms, that doesn’t matter.
In 1960 the extra pressure in the atmosphere was already ~40 ppmv above equilibrium, today we are at 110 ppmv above equilibrium for the corresponding temperatures. Thus in all cases of the past 55 years, the oceans were more sink than source…
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by genghiscunn
JCH, oops, yes.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by mosomoso
Melbourne’s sea level terror.
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Comment on Tackling human biases in science by krmmtoday
To my understanding the discussion is not whether temperatures go up or down but by how much. If you make a forecast that temps go up 2.5°C until 2050 with a 10-6 probability of “no change” and we have “no change” then that won’t falsify the model in any way.
Since you have only one observation you can’t assess the pdf.
Making probabilistic model based predictions of a single event doesn’t make scientific sense. The only way to interpret them is subjective level of confidence.
I see no other way to tackle the problem as bottom up research about what may influence climate in what way, deciding whether there may be a big enough risk and whether to take precautions. Hedging an unknown risk.
Identify low cost precautions and implement them.
High cost precautions will have considerable tradeoffs. Evaluate the tradeoffs and chose how much to invest in hedging which risk.
So policy should focus on identifying low cost hedges and bringing the costs down. Not installing any imaginable technology in volume for the sake of it.
A rational discussion would be another good idea. Currently climate change mitigation is sold together with the liberal policy package of abolishing all evils which will require near unlimited resources.
That won’t work together. Better to be honest that some austerity will be needed so people are prepared.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by beththeserf
I’d give yer an up – tick Moso but there ain’t any.
One of the Melburnite serfs. )
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by mosomoso
Just warn all your periwinkle-picking serfs not to scavenge the Port Phillip mud on the rising tide, for it is said by scholars that a great sea will come. If need be they can shelter in the Melbourne Desal. It’s very quiet and dry in there.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by beththeserf
We serfs do not trust top – down -authority initiatives…
(from long qui – bono experience.)
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Barnes
What business people, like warren buffet see, is an opportunity to manipulate naive or just plain stupid politicians into providing them with tax breaks for green energy initiatives, like wind farms, that as buffet stated, would make no sense without the government subsidies. If fossil fuels are so evil jimd, why don’t you just stop using them? Oh, I forgot, without fossil fuels, the manufacturing of green energy solutions like wind and solar would not be possible.
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Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by captdallas2 0.8 +/-0.2
Ferd, I will just let you enjoy your complete understanding of what I believe is part of a more complex system.
btw, the new wais core data is pretty interesting. Based on that, the published uncertainty of the Law Dome reconstruction looks to be overly optimistic as is so common in climate science.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Ken Denison
How about this idea? I have a hypothesis that one can use sophisticated techniques to generate a “global mean temperature” metric by combining data from multiple sites that are poorly distributed and poorly sampled. Can one design an experiment to test this hypothesis Mosher?
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Jim D
I am not talking about the Warren Buffets. I am talking about young investors looking at where to put their money for the next few decades. Green is trending up. Black is trending down.
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Comment on Tackling human biases in science by Jim D
The temperature rise is conditional on the CO2 rise. If someone made a prediction in 1950 using 2 C per doubling, they could have said that the temperature rise by the time it reached 400 ppm (whenever that was) would be about 0.7 C, and they would have been proved right. The CO2 rise itself depends on policy and global development and that can’t be predicted easily, so all you can do is predict consequences, known as scenarios, and these can be helpful to policy decisions too so there is a feeding back.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Week in review – politics and policy edition | Enjeux énergies et environnement
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Comment on Tackling human biases in science by Michael Harris (@MichaelMJHarris)
To keep science honest it must be scrutinised by the public. The most harmful dishonesty to humankind comes from trying to keep the public from scrutinising scientific work. The public are kept honest by things outside of their control, (e.g the powers of the universe against theirs), blunt trauma from such forces stop the public being dishonest with themselves. I don’t expect I’m right with this, but as a nobody I don’t want a somebody telling me what is and isn’t true, without proof and explanation, but only that he/she is a somebody.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by cgs
Thanks for the links! I found The Hill article on the China and India partnership very interesting. More interesting, in fact, in light of an article I was pointed to on Moyhu’s blog that your readers may also find interesting related to 2013 emissions drop in China:
Other links there point to reports of reductions in mined coal also.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by JCH
I did not say 30 years; I said a decade. To be dominate, El Nino has to happen about as often as La Nina.
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