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Comment on Watts et al.: Temperature station siting matters by Arch Stanton

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In Business, ten percent of the sales force will typically make ninety percent of the sales. Now what?


Comment on 2015 → 2016 by curryja

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Bill Hooke has an excellent new years essay:
http://www.livingontherealworld.org/?p=1387

From history’s rearview mirror, it seems we may have placed too much effort too early trying to jolt political leaders and the public into specific actions with respect to climate change. Hard to tell but it seems some of our exertions polarized and alienated these audiences rather than unifying and galvanizing them. The result may have been a delay in the kind of global groundswell that may finally be materializing from the Paris climate-change summit. In any event, this seems to be not just a hole but a vast pit where as a community we might stop digging and return to our science and see where that takes us.

Comment on A War Against Fire by climatereason

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Thomas

Russell is something of a blog gadfly, alighting to make assertions on subjects as varied as Scottish wine to north pole heat bursts, but rarely stays long enough to develop his theme and answer rebuttals.

It’s a shame as he does have a keen sense of humour and makes interesting points on occasions, but needs to learn how to hover over his chosen blog target As he rarely develops his theme.

Tonyb

Comment on 2015 → 2016 by climatereason

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I hadn’t heard about Pekka’s passing. A sad loss.

Tonyb

Comment on 2015 → 2016 by David Springer

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Let’s see who’s “qualified” and who isn’t using the scientific method.

I hypothesize that you’re an easily recognizable crank and your notifications to physics departments at major universities will be ignored.

Let me know how that works out.

Comment on 2015 → 2016 by David Springer

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So Mosher, the english majorette blog warrior extraordinaire, better defines those he represents. It’s not everyone, just everyone with a brain.

Amazing.

Comment on A War Against Fire by Alberto Zaragoza Comendador

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Good point TE. Let’s expand on it (I assume you already know a lot of what follows but it will be interesting for other readers):

-The IPCC didn’t expect forcings to grow exponentially. However, it did expect them to increase, and the subsequent stagnation/decline in fact made yearly forcing increases fall below their range of forecasts (as your 2nd chart shows).

-This mismatch is NOT because CO2 emissions are lower than expected. In fact they are higher than expected. Rather, they are higher than expected or at the high-end of the expectations range – see figure 1.
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/011006/pdf

-The reason emissions are above-forecast while concentrations are below is that the airborne fraction has plunged in the last 20 years or so. It is very important, in my opinion, that forcing estimates failed not because emission reduction policies were successful, but because the IPCC doesn’t understand the carbon cycle.

-A 25% decline in the airborne fraction makes any ‘carbon budget’ 33% bigger. A 33% decline makes it 50% bigger and so on. So the plunge since the 1990s matters a lot. Now, how many specialists expected this? None that I know of – they can’t even explain it now that it’s happened! (But they feel very comfortable about forecasting how much CO2 will remain in the atmosphere by 2500, or how much we need to reduce our emissions before concentrations stabilize – come on)

-The second figure you posted is very telling. The decline in the airborne fraction combines with the logarithmic effect of CO2 to reduce yearly forcing growth. The result: CO2 emissions have exploded by 70-80% since 1990, but CO2 forcing increase has remained about the same. And of course, when combined with the methane stagnation and CFC phase-out total forcing growth is way below what it was then.

-Previous dips in the airborne fraction in the 1960s and 1990s coincided with big volcanic eruptions (it’s not totally certain but it’s theorized these actually help photosynthesis, hence atmospheric CO2 in their aftermath grows less). That there hasn’t been any big eruption since Pinatubo makes the current AF slump even more perplexing.

-Estimates of methane concentrations are also way below expectations, though in this case there’s far more uncertainty regarding the human role and exactly how much we are emitting.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/clip_image018_thumb.png?w=550&h=417

-Something is off with Montreal Protocal greenhouse gases. The chart you posted (from the Hansen paper) shows them as a significant factor, but the IPCC in 2013 pretty much dismisses them.
https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/ts_fig1_annotated.png?w=800&h=520

-Same with tropospheric ozone. I understand it’s a significant positive forcing so why isn’t it in the IPCC chart?

-Those claiming the airborne fraction is stable or even increasing are on very shaky ground. Look at the chart I just posted, which groups together CO2 from land use with other GHGs from land use. Compare it now with the airborne fraction I posted above and do some numbers. Even if you assume all these emissions are CO2 rather than for example methane, you will find that the airborne fraction, at least using the IPCC numbers, is in fact lower than in 1970 – and much lower than in 2000.

-Land use emissions are basically a guess: the IPCC has them for 2010, iirc, at 0.9GtC (for CO2 alone, not other GHGs)… but the confidence interval is +-0.8!

-Exactly one recent paper (Raupach et al 2014) finds a slightly increasing airborne fraction since the 1960s. They do this by assuming very high land use emissions – but then they quote the fraction WITHOUT taking into account these emissions (if you included them, the fraction would be in the 30s not in the 40s). Very misleading.
http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/pdf/pep/Raupach_2014_The%20declining%20uptake%20rate%20of%20atmospheric%20CO2%20by%20land%20and%20ocean%20sinks.BG.pdf

-Scientists have been desperate to see the natural sinks ‘saturate’ and the airborne fraction increase for a long time. See this article from 2009.
http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/archive/2009/UniversityBristol_UK.pdf

-If somebody is going to use land use emissions to claim the airborne fraction is not falling, then he has to be consistent and ALWAYS talk about land use emissions, i.e. when dealing with emission reduction strategies, when talking about per-capita emissions, etc. Furthermore, if emissions have been greater than expected (because of land use emissions), but our estimates of concentrations are the same, then necessarily residence time is lower than thought.

-One can get pretty much any result one wants, both in terms of airborne fraction and residence time, by playing around with land use emissions.

-Which makes you think: when someone posts a chart of a model showing cumulative emissions vs temperature, what the hell is this showing? CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement? CO2 emissions including land use? CO2-equivalent emissions (i.e. all GHGs) from all manmade sources? Please specify!

(This comes from a Nic Lewis post, thought the fault is not Lewis’ but the model’s for failing to specify this)

-One cannot simply say something like ‘total emissions are fossil fuel CO2 x 1.5’. You cannot simply ‘scale up’ because the ratio of emissions of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions to total CO2 emissions to total (i.e. according to the IPCC it’s gone from 55% in 1970 to 67% in 2010 to probably a higher figure now). Combined with the variability in airborne fraction, this makes me very skeptical of the ability of any model to ‘forecast’ temperatures as a result of ’emissions’.

Yeah, it didn’t have much to do with your comment. But I’ve been reading up on carbon budgets and I just had to get it out of my chest.

TL; DR: carbon budgets that don’t specify airborne fraction (and ECS) are a waste of time. Climate models that ‘estimate’ temperature increase from cumulative emissions are probably a waste of time as well.

Comment on A War Against Fire by Alberto Zaragoza Comendador

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Ok, I made a mistake with the Raupach et al paper. I’m not exactly sure what they mean with the 0.44 airborne fraction, but I’m pretty certain the way they get this ‘stable’ or even increasing fraction is by assuming higher-than-the-IPCC land use emissions, at least for the early period.


Comment on A War Against Fire by physicistdave

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Geoff wrote:
>Ergo, there has to be an overall negative feedback. Its target does not exclude a return to zero change. Indeed, zero might be the most logical target.

Geoff, a negative feedback does not give zero change: it just reduces the effect from what it otherwise would be — i.e., the multiplier is positive but less than 1.0.

The reason is simple to explain to anyone who understands control theory: indeed, anyone who understands control theory already knows the answer.

To try to explain it non-mathematically, well… if the total effect ended up being exactly zero, then there would be nothing there to continue driving the negative feedback. You need some non-zero residual effect to keep the negative feedback occurring and thereby continue to cancel out much of the initial effect.

This is obvious in the math, but I realize it takes some thought for those who do not know the math.

My “gut feeling” as a physicist turned engineer is that you are correct that the feedback effect is probably negative.

On the other hand, I have learned over the decades not to trust my “gut feeling”!

Incidentally, your argument could actually be made mathematically rigorous except, as my fellow physicist John Baez has pointed out, for a basic non-linearity in the Stefan-Boltzmann law which needs to be taken into account.

Which leaves us, alas, with “gut feelings.”

Dave Miller in Sacramento

Comment on 2015 → 2016 by teerhuis

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Mike Flynn,

With an appropriate IR lens the glacier can heat your cup of tea.

Comment on 2015 → 2016 by itsnotco2

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And still no valid physics presented by David Springer in support of the easily recognized carbon dioxide hoax that he and others like him (with a pecuniary interest) continue to promulgate. Where is your experiment with 16 radiators producing twice the absolute temperature that one does, David Springer? Did you win a scholarship from a university physics department as I did about 50 years ago? Demonstrate that you understand the process of maximum entropy production, and thus (using your “understanding”) pinpoint where you think my hypothesis fails.

Comment on A War Against Fire by itsnotco2

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<b>Judith Curry:</b> You write <i>"And we still don’t have a good way to separate unforced (internal) from forced climate variability."</i> Yes we do, because valid physics comes to the rescue and the Second Law of Thermodynamics helps us to understand why it's not carbon dioxide after all, as I have explained <a href="https://itsnotco2.wordpress.com" rel="nofollow"><b>here</a></b> and nobody can prove this valid physics wrong without proving the Second Law (that entropy does not decrease) to be wrong.

Comment on A War Against Fire by wijnand2015

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Mike,
to be fair, somebody asked for his credentials, he/she did not state it without being asked and/or did not use it as an argument.

Comment on A War Against Fire by Lucas Nicolato Pereira

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Hi, I’ve been thinking of something about AWG, and perhaps you folks can help me.
I’m not a scientist, but I have a degree in Engineering, for some time have worked with computer modelling of physiology, and have read a few papers on AWG, before becoming a skeptic, most for the reason that I can’t trust scientists with such a bad record on predictions with anything like hundreds of billions of dollars, specially when most of their predictions come from computer models which, in my own experience, are very easy to fit to anything.
My question is this: as I understand, most of the supposed AGW comes not directly from GHE of carbon dioxide, but from the amplification caused by positive feedback loops, like that of water vapor. My point is: these feedback loops don’t differentiate between the source of the forcing, they could as well amply warming from aCO2 as from solar cycles, volcanic eruptions etc. And it could also amplify cooling from any source.
The bottom line is: even if the whole AGW thing is real, and the most catastrophic scenario predicted by the IPCC reports are true, and even if we managed to zero emissions, we would still be extremely vulnerable to any random event that produced a small climate forcing, because a catastrophic scenario is only possible if the Earth’s climate is an intrinsically unstable system.

Am I right? If not, where is the mistake?

Thanks!

Comment on A War Against Fire by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.3

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ybutt, “I agree in theory ECS can be zero”

Not the way it is defined, which may make ECS not very useful. Transient response, however you like to define that, is at least useful.


Comment on A War Against Fire by andywest2012

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‘The most savage controversies are those as to which there is no good evidence either way. -Bertrand Russell’

Because the wide window of uncertainty allows emotive memes to take root and grow in society. Our knowledge of reality (as determined by science in the modern climate case, among others), is not sufficient to constrain these memes in such scenarios.

‘But the science has become far more politicized, raising a host of questions about implicit and explicit biases in the science.’

And because scientists are embedded within the society in which the emotive memes take hold, and (may) eventually dominate, then indeed powerful biases will result. Politicization is a mirror of the agenda* of the co-evolving memes, which usually conform to an overall narrative (in the climate case, ‘a certainty of calamity’).

Hence it is more accurate to say ‘culturalization’, rather than politicization; a culture will manufacture a social consensus. Typically, the narrative agenda will act to block a reduction of uncertainties (because this would eventually kill the narrative, should it be allowed). Hence science itself can be pushed from its theoretical objective path and may no longer provide emerging knowledge about reality, or at least this process may be heavily slowed and impeded, depending upon how entrenched the narrative has become.

* memes are not sentient nor agential; the ‘agenda’ emerges from differential selection.

Comment on A War Against Fire by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.3

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Yep, you are right. The way the problem is posed, CO2 could trigger a new ice age and temperatures would still be warmer than other wise thanks to CO2. But with one bit of physics the alarmist can justify taking control of global energy choices even though there may never be a net benefit in the normal usage.

Comment on A War Against Fire by David Wojick

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Lots of discussion of ECS here. Unfortunately the concept ECS is a bundle of confusions. To begin with it is an abstraction, like the rate of fall of an object in a vacuum. But we do not live in a vacuum so actual rates of fall will vary and may even be negative. If I drop a feather on a windy day it may blow upward. If I drop a bird it may fly upward.

By the same token, CO2 might double while the globe cools. Presumeably this does not make ECS negative, just irrelevant. Unfortunately the nature of the ECS abstraction is never specified, as far as I know.

Even worse, if the climate is a far from equillibrium system, a natural oscillator, which seems likely, then ECS simply does not exist, even as an abstraction, unless the abstraction from reality is very great indeed.

The point is that the greater the abstraction is, the less relevant it is to the real situation. So how great is the ECS abstraction? What real processes does it ignore? This is the first question to answer before we take ECS seriously, if we ever do.

Comment on A War Against Fire by Alberto Zaragoza Comendador

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http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2016/01/fishy-science-ocean-acidification/

This is pure gold:
New York Times: It’s very interesting, but in order to work for us it needs to be geared more toward the general reader. Can the authors give us more specific, descriptive images about how acidification has already affected the oceans? Is the situation akin to the acid rain phenomenon that hit North America? What can be done to counteract the problem?’

NOAA’s Shallin Busch: Unfortunately, I can’t provide this information to you because it doesn’t exist. As I said in my last email, currently there are NO areas of the world that are severely degraded because of OA or even areas that we know are definitely affected by OA right now. If you want to use this type of language, you could write about the CO2 vent sites in Italy or Polynesia as examples of things to come. Sorry that I can’t be more helpful on this!’

Comment on A War Against Fire by itsnotco2

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