Here are some numbers for you.

At the peak of the last glaciation, sea levels were 120 meters below what they are now, with global average temperatures 5 C less than today, giving a rather imprecise estimate of 24 meters sea level rise per degree C of warming.

But since there is only about 70 meters or so, sea level wise of ice left to melt, and will probably take 5 C to melt all of it, this gives about 10 meters of sea level rise per degree C of warming. Obviously, linear extrapolations are wrong and there is a considerable time lag between the increase in temperature and the eventual sea level rise, but given that and your estimate of 1.3 C temperature increase between now and 2100, how much do you think sea levels will rise?

In his comment of 17th Nov. at 6:26 am. John O’Sullivan talked about Andrew Skolnick’s dismissal from Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). What John omitted to mention is that Andrew had successfully held a position as associate editor with JAMA pretty-well throughout the 1990s when that journal was highly regarded globally under the leadership of George Lundberg (http://www.bmj.com/content/318/7178/210.extract).

Investigative journalist Andrew has never had any hesitation in providing evidence to substantiate his claims about his qualifications, his achievements and his articles. On the other hand I am still waiting for lead “Slayer” John O’Sullivan to provide “ .. links to irrefutable evidence of your educational, academic and professional claims and telling us precisely which articles of yours featured in the National Review and which appeared in China Daily and The India Times .. ” (see my comments of 25th Oct. at 9:27 am and 19th Nov. at 2:43 pm.

On 10th Nov. John O’Sullivan said “ .. The Law Society of British Columbia (LSBC) has now ruled that green activist Andrew Skolnick’s official complaint concerning Dr. Tim Ball’s libel attorney, Michael Scherr and science writer, John O’Sullivan, was baseless .. ” (see http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/41331.html and numerous other sites). John then provided a link to the copy of the LSBC decision that Andrew made available on his web-site (http://www.aaskolnick.com/global_deniers/BC_LawSociety_4-nov311_Skolnick.pdf).

My interpretation of that LSBC decision is somewhat different to John’s, as it apparently found that there was no misconduct by Mr Scherr. In its “Analysis” the LSBC said that “ .. There is no evidence that Mr Scherr .. was responsible for the false assertions published by Mr O’Sullivan .. ”. That does not seem to me to support John’s claim that the “ .. lies filed against me with the British Columbia Law Society has now been dismissed in its entirety .. ”. It appears reasonable to me to understand the LSBC to consider that Mr. O’Sullivan made false assertions. Of course I could be misreading what the LSBC said and if so I will apologise to John.

Before doing that I’ll await the response that Andrew gets from the LSBC to what appears to be his complaint about John (not Mr Scherr). As Andrew has advised us (29th Nov. at 12:23 am.)
QUOTE: ..
John O’Sullivan spins another whopper: “Skolnick and Ridley need to face the facts that the British Columbia Law Society thoroughly investigated all the above allegations against me and then dismissed them all as baseless.”
The Law Society of British Columbia confirmed today that the complaint I had filed against John O’Sullivan – not Michael Scherr – was NOT closed. It is still being investigated:
“As we are in the midst of reviewing a complaint of unauthorized practice, we cannot comment specifically. … The Law Society investigates complaints of people who aren’t lawyers engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. These investigations are based on specific facts and circumstances. Where there is a question of public protection the Law Society seeks undertakings from unauthorized practitioners that they cease. If someone refuses to sign an undertaking we may seek an injunction from the courts.”
.. UNQUOTE.

Best regards, Pete Ridley

I know that now. But like most of the naive public, until recently, I thought there were just honest differences of opinion. To see the level of deceit and fraud should be shocking to anyone except the ones who participated in it.

When in doubt Joshua you get to fall back and claim you’re more “science” focused? It’s pathetic.

You seem as usual to be confused about what “authority” is involved here and who is trying to do what with such authority. No surprise, you are #3 on the inane list; #1 Robert, #2 Martha whom have added troll qualities of vindictiveness to go with blind agenda hatred and ignorance.

It isn’t mostly about science since the agenda was always about building global state authority. After 30 years what “science” could you possibly be talking about? Cooked IPCC statements? Hockey sticks? Cherry picked spagetti charts? Failed models that can’t be related to real world inputs?

You have squat science Joshua and a see-through contrived green Utopian agenda (fantasy).

Mosh

I don’t follow the minute detail of the emails but Deep Climate clearly says in his second paragraph that it was Trenberth not Jones who said ‘ He Has done a lot but I don’t trust him’ and then makes disparaging remarks about McKitricks version of events.

The emails are confusingly laid out but it seems to me it was Phil Jones who made this remark.
http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=664

It therefore appears that Deep climate makes a mistake from the start. You probably follow this a lot closer than me, so who is right, Deep Climate or McKitrick?
tonyb

Joel, thanks for your reply and for raising the interesting question of what establishes an ELR. You give the explanation that self-correction through convection means it has to be less than the adiabatic lapse rate. So one imagines convection gradually working to create the equilibrium of the ELR. But it’s not like that. Day and night are totally different. The water vapour driven SALR destabilises. One can easily imagine a sunlit hemisphere continually covered with a roiling mass of convective thunderstorms desperately shedding heat in their chase for equilibrium while the nightside remains calm, quietly cooling. (It’s not like that of course; there are also many thunderstorms at night for a variety of reasons). But a theory that fails to treat day and night as chalk and cheese is in my opinion gravely deficient. To think in terms of averages is ludicrous. And basing climate theory on the properties of trace GHGs when water is overwhelmingly the dominant sun-driven agent causing the chaos of weather, leaves me, shall we say, sceptical.

Fair enough Phil. You should bone-up on “Agenda-21″ and review your George Orwell http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/ and reconsider Soviet Science authority and history if you want to understand the AGW “consensus” and what it is trying to achieve.

Bryan, you have simply posted this twice. I replied to it above.

I’ll try to explain my position a bit more precisely in the specific context of the dry adiabat and no convection. The position I am describing isn’t really mine; it is the position of anyone using line by line calculators like MODTRAN. Dr Curry uses such tools as well and has been pretty definite on their validity; and on the scientific vacuity of the issues we are addressing here.

You asked me how our “slab” model worked in a neutral atmosphere with the lapse rate at the dry adiabat, and I answered that. But there are some important implications I still want to emphasize.

If you fix the atmospheric profile at a dry adiabat, there is nothing to drive convection. A dry atmosphere also doesn’t have any energy flow by evaporation and condensation.

There is still radiant energy flow, and I explained how to calculate it. MODTRAN calculations, or other similar programs, do this by considering many small spectrum bands, since gases have very different characteristics at different wavelengths, and they repeat calculations at many successive altitudes (layers).

But you can appreciate the general result by recognizing some general principles.

(1) The atmosphere, and the surface, are radiating in the IR.
(2) In bands where there is little interaction with the atmosphere, most of the radiation simply passes out to space from the surface, and similarly the atmosphere radiates very little in those bands.
(3) In bands where there is interaction, the atmosphere absorbs radiation coming from below, and above;
(4) The amount of IR radiation coming to Earth from outside the atmosphere is negligible
(5) At any level of the atmosphere where the adiabat applies (the troposphere, essentially), there is more radiation coming from below than from above, as the lower levels are warmer. Since radiation varies as the fourth power of temperature, the effective net temperature all incoming IR is going to be less than effective temperature of the layer where it is measured.
(6) The effect of radiation, therefore, is to cool the atmosphere.

The situation is therefore not technically stable. It takes quite a long time for the atmosphere to cool down by thermal emissions; but cool down it does. This is a necessary consequence of basic thermodynamics.

End result is that in the absence of any convection, the temperature profile will be relaxing towards the radiative equilibrium, which is a steeper lapse rate than the dry adiabat. The atmosphere is still considered stable, as there’s nothing driving convection and the air is still. But it is not in equilibrium; it is slowly cooling down, and if somehow left to cool for an extended period of several weeks, the departure from the dry adiabat would be substantial. Of course, long before you get significant departure, you get convection working to relax back to the dry adiabatic lapse rate.

So. We certainly CAN apply the usual models to an atmosphere with a lapse rate given by the dry adiabat. The atmosphere in that condition is stable against convection; but there is a net energy loss by radiation from the atmosphere, which is slowly relaxing towards unstable profiles

A more realistic model would use the normal environmental lapse rate, which tends to be closer to the moist adiabat; but just a bit steeper. That is, the normal state of the atmosphere is very slightly over the edge towards being unstable to convection; and convection is a normal part of how our atmosphere works, with a very substantial net flow of energy upwards as a result.

The question for YOU is as follows.
Convection, and energy moved by latent heat of evaporation and condensation, all carry energy up into the atmosphere. Where does that energy end up? How does the atmosphere get rid of the energy it is gaining from convection?

On the other points people have raised. There is no “double counting” in the models we use. Many applications, like aviation for example, don’t really care about accounting for all energy flows; they mostly just need to know about convection and air flows. The complete picture however, is well established physics and taught without quibble or reservation in more fundamental atmospheric physics course.

Bryan, the link you give is to a very detailed and sensible consideration of atmospheric physics, but in the stratosphere, where the radiative equilibrium is the basis for the lapse rate; not the adiabat. Your link discusses greenhouse gases without any particular concern.

I am 110% confident that if you were to contact the author directly and ask about the greenhouse effect, they would confirm that it is real, and that the stable condition in the lower atmosphere — the troposphere — is a radiative/convective equilibirum, with convection and latent heat replacing the energy lost by radiation from greenhouse gases. The corresponding lapse rate is very close to adiabatic, because relaxation times for convection are so much faster than relaxation times for radiation.

Yes, something other than a CO2 change can kick off the initial warming but then the oceans start outgassing more CO2 and H2O. Since the CO2 is the non-condensing of the two, this will continue on in a limited positive feedback fashion until it reaches the S-B negative feedback limit for CO2 sensitivity. It can also reverse course at any time because if the CO2 can be liberated by outgassing of the oceans, it can also re-absorb upon cooling.

The crucial distinction that we have right now (and one that hasn’t occurred historically) is that anthropogenic CO2 is pure excess concentration that will only sequester back in the environment at a geologically slow pace.

In other words, the thought is that this process has started in motion and can’t easily reverse itself. By analogy, the climate has always had the sensitivity to accelerate in either direction but now we have lost the braking power to shift into reverse. That’s the way I understand it, and YMMV.

did I say his post was good? I choose my words carefully.

I have an odd response to the second tranche of emails – I somehow feel it should be an occasion for everybody to have a ‘time-out’ from tribalism. It seems so predictable that one group of people is saying it represents the end of the AGW movement (or should) and another saying that they can’t see that the emails represent a problem at all.

Surely it isn’t too hard to put them in some kind of reasonable perspective? They don’t say very much about the fundamental science except perhaps that in private a lot of the Team players are vastly more uncertain than they state publicly. Then of course there is the bullying of editors, gatekeeping, and various unpleasant but largely irrelevant behaviours…

From my point of view some of the most important revelations are about the mechanisms and processes of the IPCC being man-handled for political ends, but hey, I think that should have been obvious! It’s politics!

We may have more context for how the Hockey stick was defended beyond reason or common sense, but aren’t we over that? The TAR was ten years ago for Gods sake!

Durban – I have to say that in the UK its hard to be sure anything is occurring there at all. Does anybody have any hopes of anything actually happening?

Judith – get onto Forbes, say that since you are referred to in the article you wish to put the record straight and submit your pont of view in your own article.
(a) I am sure people here will help (but some bits will be unfit for publication (need toning down))
(b) Insist that it must be published unedited and without Forbes comment.

Gavin’s cleared it up at RC. -2.2ºC is the average amount of cooling only in the areas where they had data. Gavin thinks the global average which was used to constrain sensitivity was -3.5ºC though the authors themselves seem less sure.

I love Orwell (even though he was a big socialist, his books are the most anti-socialist outside of Ayn Rand). And I know about Agenda 21. I do not hold out any myopic visions of politicians being this way. I know they are unethical and unscupulous b*st*rds. However, I was giving you a view of a naive person of 2 years ago (when I started researching the subject of AGW). Who I was then is who most people are today. These emails are their wake up call – for the ones not comatose.

Idle thoughts of an idle fella. If we haved a series of dates of discontinuities, is it possible to electronically search all the data bases in cyberspace, to see if this series coincides with ANYTHING.

Joel Shore says

…..”That being said, Mann’s work was clearly path-breaking in that particular field”…

I’m not exactly sure if this was the first blatant fraud in climate science.
Mann’s ‘Hide The Decline’ is exactly the same scientific fraud as the ‘Piltdown Man’. In both cases selected parts of two different items were spliced together to provide a misleading scientific conclusion.
If this is not scientific fraud then what is?
I have a feeling that if the Piltdown Man was important to the “cause” then Joel could be relied on to find some merit in that fraud as well.

Joel also says
“I haven’t taken any position on the firing of editors”.

Referring to concerted underhand efforts by members of the team to get an editor fired for daring to publish papers that conflict with the cause.
Well my position (and the position of anyone who values academic freedom) is to despise those creeps involved in destroying open science.
Hiding data, cut and paste graphs,bribery, behind the scenes lobbying are all hallmarks of the clique that determine IPCC policy.

This is not exactly on-topic but interesting none-the-less. I am a Nova Scotian grade 12 student, and, like many school boards, ours has a “school firewall” (or internet “filtering”, as some may call it. Or even just flat-out censorship. But anyways…). Ordinarily, although I do not like the concept (to say the least!), I do not mind too much the content filtered, as it has little effect on school-related topics. (It tends to be mainly webcomics, gaming sites, social networking sites, and the like – for example Youtube is blocked for students but not teachers, and Facebook is blocked for everyone including teachers.) Then I decided to visit your blog today, and noticed something. It appears that several of the individual full posts are blocked, with some recent examples being “Discussion thread: Durban, emails”, “McKitrick on the IPCC”, and “Expertise: breadth vs depth”. Does anyone have any ideas why?

I have to admit that I read the first paragraph of Dr Douglass and at once did a search for Tomas Milanovic, to see his reaction, which is how I ended up here.

Nature’s certainly fascinating enough to keep us dedicated.

What a lovely way to put it. Happy Christmas