A curve fit is a curve fit. It can match the data or not. if it does fit or it does not fit, it does not prove anything. Curve fits most often extrapolate to numbers that are out of bounds to actual data. They say that what will happen is outside the bounds of what has ever happened. There is nothing in the data that indicates this is true.
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by Herman Alexander Pope
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by mosomoso
Is that an Afrikaans spelling? I’ll consult the English Cricket Team. They’re quite fluent in the language.
Comment on Ocean acidification discussion thread by Joseph O'Sullivan
The cases can be found here:
Feely et al 2004
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2633/feel2633.shtml
Sabine et al 2004
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/sabi2683/sabi2683.shtml
Orr et al 2005
https://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org/handle/1912/370
Comment on Ocean acidification discussion thread by klee12
Jim D wrote
However, we don’t see Idso saying much relevant to what Doney raised.
Idso’s document carries a date of Jan 5, 2010 which was written before Doney’s testimony. Ms Curry, as I understand it, just used the Idso document as a starting point to get both sides of the debate.
klee12
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by GaryM
” Absolute values are difficult for calibration reasons.”
That is climatespeak for:
The purported “imbalance” between the two is too negligible to register on the instruments we currently have.
Comment on Ocean acidification discussion thread by Joseph O'Sullivan
From the blog rules: “Be patient with people having less technical expertise or background than yourself.”
Willis Eschenbach:
“Joseph, you made the rules of the game. You made the statement that “if the EPA did settle in a “scam” there would be a counter-suit by the other side opposing regulation”. In response, I pointed out that there IS a counter-suit”
To be more patient and end this thread on a civil note, Willis is correct that there was a counter-suit. However, I was using the more limited meaning of counter-suit that is used in law based on my professional experience in this field. The term counter-suit has a more narrow definition in law than it does in common usage. It is like the way the term theory has a different meaning in science than in common usage.
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by Herman Alexander Pope
CO2 is not chopped liver. Manmade CO2 is a fraction of a trace of chopped liver. Something tiny is something tiny. Who knows what it does, but whatever it does is tiny.
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by Chief Hydrologist
I have no idea what you are talking about Jim – and I hold grave doubts that you do either.
‘Tropical variations in emitted outgoing longwave (LW) radiation are found to closely track changes in the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). During positive ENSO phase (El Nin˜o), outgoing LW radiation increases, and decreases during the negative ENSO phase (La Nina).’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
Bob Tisdale discusses to my knowledge the ENSO recharge oscillator.
‘Bjerknes (1969) first hypothesized that interaction between the atmosphere and the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean causes El Niño. In Bjerknes’ view, an initial positive SST anomaly in the equatorial eastern Pacific reduces the east-west SST gradient and hence the
strength of the Walker circulation, resulting in weaker trade winds around the equator. The weaker trade winds in turn drive the ocean circulation changes that further reinforce the SST anomaly. This positive ocean-atmosphere feedback leads the equatorial Pacific to a neverending warm state. A negative feedback is needed to turn the coupled ocean-atmosphere system around. However, during that time, it was not known what causes a turnabout from a warm phase to a cold phase. In search of necessary negative feedbacks for the coupled system, four conceptual ENSO oscillator models have been proposed: the delayed oscillator (Suarez and Schopf, 1988; Battisti and Hirst, 1989), the recharge oscillator (Jin, 1997a, b), the western Pacific oscillator (Weisberg and Wang, 1997; Wang et al., 1999), and the advective-reflective oscillator (Picaut et al., 1997). These oscillator models respectively emphasized the negative feedbacks of reflected Kelvin waves at the ocean western boundary, a discharge process due to Sverdrup transport, western Pacific wind-forced Kelvin waves, and anomalous zonal advection. These negative feedbacks may work together for terminating El Niño warming, as suggested by
the unified oscillator (Wang, 2001).’
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/cdeser/Docs/submitted.wang.enso_review.pdf
There are in fact many, many papers on the negative feedbacks that initiate La Nina.
How about quoting Julia Slingo and Tim Palmer?
‘The richness of the El Nino behaviour, decade by decade and century by century, testifies to the fundamentally chaotic nature of the system that we are attempting to predict. It challenges the way in which we evaluate models and emphasizes the importance of continuing to focus on observing and understanding processes and phenomena in the climate system. It is also a classic demonstration of the need for ensemble prediction systems on all time scales in order to sample the range of possible outcomes that even the real world could produce. Nothing is certain.’
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by Jim D
CH, all these people are talking about variability, not trends. Big difference that seems to escape you. Have any of these said variability has an amplitude more than a couple of tenths? How does this compare with the warming trend already and expected? Who has even quantified this variability anywhere near half a degree? Do you think the LIA was natural variability or solar or other forcing? Lots of questions, but it seems you haven’t answered these for yourself yet.
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by Chief Hydrologist
No it means you can’t solve the energy budget directly at all’
d(W&H)/dt = power in – power out
The two right hand terms can’t be compared at all. One is given in absolute terms – but has in fact been relatively recently adjusted by 5W/m2. Power out is given in anomalies. All that can be done is compare the trend in changes – much more accurate than absolutes – to see what is changing. Power in changes very little and so power out is the metric to look at.
Net trending up is warming by convention. SW trending down is less reflected sunlight – warming – which is the majority of the change in the CERES period. As indeed it was in the earlier records. This is Trenberth’s ‘missing energy’ and it has nothing to do with greenhouse gases at all. It is a scam and a rort.
But the data is very informative and the budget can be closed with ocean heat content.
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by Jim D
OK, so the LIA, Ice Ages, and Eocene were also random fluctuations, or…what? I at least agree that the ocean heat content does close the budget on the long term. The energy imbalance means the OHC has to steadily increase in the absence of a surface temperature change, and that is what is happening. I prefer dF=dH/dt + lambda.dT.
Comment on Ocean acidification discussion thread by Latimer Alder
FerdiEgb
‘It shows a pH drop of 0.04 pH units within the huge seasonal noise over a period of nearly 30 years. That can be directly coupled on CO2 levels in the atmosphere – ocean solubility – buffer (Revelle) factor – CO3– levels – pH. So, it isn’t difficult to backcalculate the pH to what it was before the industrial revolution…’
And are you so convinced of the strength of each link in this chain of reasoning that there resultant estimate is a. reliable? and b. globally applicable? Did you make any allowance for errors, both individual and cumulative in the steps of the process?
I’ve got this spare bridge you might be interested in…See how the fine coating of snake oil glistens in the sun…….
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by Beth Cooper
We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
Robert Frost.
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by Chief Hydrologist
‘The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past. We are trying to understand how the earth’s climate system is engineered, so we can understand what it takes to trigger mode switches. Until we do, we cannot make good predictions about future climate change… Over the last several hundred thousand years, climate change has come mainly in discrete jumps that appear to be related to changes in the mode of thermohaline circulation.’
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2246
‘The global climate system is composed of a number of subsystems | atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere – each
of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’ http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/tcd/PREPRINTS/Math_clim-Taipei-M_Ghil_vf.pdf
Over the past 2.58 million years most climate change has been episodic, abrupt and nonlinear – emergent behavior of a dynamically complex system in complexity theory. Over the past century the trend has been from warmer to cooler to warmer to cooler – demonstrably natural for the most part – chaotic climate shifts according to Tsonis and colleagues – and resulting from more modest changes in ocean and atmosphere circulation. Your trend from greenhouse gases is an illusion of having 2 warm periods in the instrumental record combined with what seems like a quasi 1000 year peak. Your big failing I keep saying is the failure to understand complexity theory a it applies to climate. Without which no understanding is possible.
You are on a physic mill Jim – around and around in circles wearing a rut in the ground. But it is time I got off.
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by Richard Drake
Thank you for the quote from, and link to, Russell Mead. Restrained and because of that all the more devastating.
… more certainty than the frustrating facts can give
If I wanted a synopsis of climate science (the non-JC version) in eight words I think that would be it.
Comment on Addicted to cool (?) by johanna
“Necessary” is a very personal decision, as I have said in many ways above. Why the Puritan view that using energy-powered climate control is a bad thing? You might think that Sydney has a “mild” climate, but for me, Sydney in February is hell on earth – hot and sticky, little sleep and feeling like crap during the day absent air conditioning.
What is it with people who claim that genuine discomfort to do with temperature and humidity (in either direction) is just a sign of personal weakness?
Comment on UK Met Office on the pause by R. Gates
Chief Hydro incorrectly said:
“We are well within the limits of this system.”
–
This is exactly where you are wrong. We are well outside the limits of what natural variability or known external forcings (without GH gas increases being included) would cause. Your lack of acknowledgement of this is either out of ignorance or something even less forgivable. This long term chart of Arctic sea ice tells the story quite well:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/files/2012/09/naam-ice-031.jpg
Yes, there are little wiggles on this chart caused by natural variability, but the big downturn at the end– the majority of that is now the anthropogenic fingerprint. Your blowhard and insulting prevarications simply inflate your ego, when what you need is to really take a look at the human fingerprint on the climate being seen first and foremost in the highly sensitive Arctic.
Comment on Ocean acidification discussion thread by Eli Rabett
You need considerable energy too.
Comment on Disaster economics by johanna
I think that the answer is nuanced. There are benefits from some disasters, including opportunities to more efficiently utilise land which was previously frozen by planning and built heritage restrictions – a kind of forced “creative destruction.” As others have pointed out, it can also force governments and companies to renew crumbling infrastructure which needed renewing anyway. But destroying and replacing an asset before the end of its economic life is a net loss to the economy.
It is also worth noting that the construction boom that typically follows disasters in the West means that we pay more for things than we would in more settled times, because of skills shortages and so on. While this is good news for those in the building and allied industries, it does not always represent good (or sometimes any) value for money to those who are paying the bills. I highly recommend Carl Hiaasen’s “Stormy Weather”, a very funny novel about the aftermath of a Florida hurricane, on this subject.
Comment on Ocean acidification discussion thread by Willis Eschenbach
Robert | July 24, 2013 at 2:04 pm |
Wow, Willy, you’re exceptionally whiny today, even for you.
Willy? Is that what we’re doing, playing childish name games? OK, Roberta, great hearing from you.
Is it just that the mere suggestion that you learn some science, something you have studiously avoided so far, enrages you? Why would that be?
Oh, Roberta, you say such cute things when you’re upset, it’s quite endearing actually. But me enraged? I politely asked carrotbreath to spit out what he’s trying to say. I’m more than happy to learn, but Eli just saying “Google Scholar could be your friend Willis” is meaningless.
Or at least I was as polite as one should be to bunnies like him playing childish games. But that’s all just in fun. If I get enraged at Eli, Roberta, you won’t be in any doubt about it, your hair will start self-combusting just from watching him fry.
But that would be like smashing cockaroochies with a Louisville Slugger, so you likely will never see that come to pass. Eli’s small fry, not worth wasting my blood pressure on.
All the best,
w.
PS—As to whether I’ve ever learned any climate science, Nature magazine thought so when they published my peer-reviewed “Communications Arising” … and you?