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Comment on The Curry factor: 30 to 1 by John

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What is happening to Judith here is like what happened to Roger Pielke Jr. at 538.com. Nate Silver is a thoughtful person who believes in data. So he published a mild and thoughtful piece by Pielke Jr on his new venture, 538.c0m.

The alarmist kamakazis then dive bombed 538.com comments, attacking Pielke personally, with huge vitriol.

So it seems that the newest game in town to to trash honest and thoughtful scientists wherever they might poke their head up in a place that tries to be both thoughtful and mainstream, and make it impossible for them to continue.

In the case of 538.com, a commercial venture, ESPN (the host) doesn’t want to have Nate Silver lose readership and thus advertising, so Silver probably won’t be allowed to try THAT again.

In Judith’s case, this new blog isn’t commercial, so they can’t make advertising go away. So it is back to same old, same old: attack the person, make it ad hominem, don’t really allow a debate, because that might (gasp!) legitimize an argument that the alarmists DO NOT want to have legitimized.

Free expression was a big deal when I was growing up. Not so much any more, very much to my regret. It is amazing how much these people will do to stifle honest debate.


Comment on The Curry factor: 30 to 1 by Jim D

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The longer the temperature follows the theory, the more confident they will get in their projections. The rise since 1950 is in the center of what they would have expected. That is how it works, and how it should work. Some want to scrap this theory that works for something yet to be determined. It just doesn’t cut it. In science, you don’t scrap a working theory unless you find something that explains the observations even better. This is hard to do for the unprecedented magnitude and speed of this temperature rise which is near 0.7 C in 60 years. There just isn’t another mechanism, and then they also have to explain why it isn’t CO2 with a positive feedback, which is even harder given the physical basis of that idea.

Comment on The Curry factor: 30 to 1 by Jim Cripwell

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Jim D. you write “No sign-up needed to read them.”

Thanks Jim. I misinterpreted what our hostess wrote.

Comment on The Curry factor: 30 to 1 by Brian

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Steven, In your stipulation, all you’ve really said is an average over temperatures is OK to use as an ‘index’. So a couple of question to you, if increasing temperature means “warming,” what does increasing “index” mean? Global “indexing”?

Comment on Slowing sea level rise by Alex Hamilton

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Mainstream physics tells us that there is a propensity towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The law that tells us this is the poorly understood Second Law of Thermodynamics. Yes, there is a corollary to that law which applies in a non-gravitational field, namely that heat transfer is from hot to cold in a non-gravitational field, or in a horizontal plane in a gravitational field.

Thermodynamic equilibrium does not imply isothermal conditions in a gravitational field, as Dr Roy Spencer thinks.

The state of thermodynamic equilibrium in a gravitational field has a thermal gradient which evolves at the molecular level and more than explains all that “33 degrees of warming.” This autonomous temperature gradient would cause surface temperatures (which are supported by the temperature at the base of the troposphere) to be at least 40 degrees higher in dry regions. But instead, water vapor plays a part in reducing the temperature gradient and keeping us cooler, just like carbon dioxide would if it had any noticeable effect at all, but it doesn’t.

People like Dr Roy Spencer openly claim that “greenhouse gases” (like water vapor) raise the temperature in the lower troposphere and lower the temperature in the upper troposphere. This would be a steeper “lapse rate” supposedly due to water vapor. What a joke!

Comment on The Curry factor: 30 to 1 by chris moffatt

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Nothing changed except that more CO2 was emitted into the atmosphere. This CO2 warmed the planet and postponed the natural temperature downturn that would have occurred as in every previous cycle – and we should be glad. Had it not done so climatologists would be trying to explain why we had slipped into another LIA. Were it not for increased carbon pollution we’d be freezing our tails off right now. Oh wait – 2005 and all that…..

Comment on The Curry factor: 30 to 1 by stevefitzpatrick

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Judith,
30:1?
Nope. They will accept no dissent at all. Which is why voices like yours are important.

Comment on The Curry factor: 30 to 1 by John

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Well, I just went to the CCNF website and read one of the first articles I saw:

http://climatechangenationalforum.org/dr-james-white-atmos-co2-changes-from-180-to-280-ppm-between-glacials-interglacials-we-just-hit-380-ppm-2009-last-time-we-had-380-was-3-million-years-ago-arctic-was-ice-free-sea-level-was-7/

Dr. White seems to think that we might get 75 feet of sea level rise because CO2 levels are now over 380 ppm, and he states “Bye bye to Florida for the most part.”

If this is the level of science on that blog, then count me out. This particular blog post is unfortunately, quite ignorant of solid, recent science.

To try to be fair to CCNF, there is some gentle dissent to White’s prognostications. Dr. Schmittner says “The 380-400 ppm is a good estimate, although 75 ft seems a little high…” And Dr. Pelto says “Will just point out some recent research indicating soils that have been buried continuously beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet for the last 3 million years….”

But these comments are far too mild. Any scientist knowledgeable about sea level rise in the last several million years would be aware of the recent science on Greenland. To wit, during the Eemian, the previous interglacial, Greenland was 8 degrees warmer than today for 6,000 years, 60 centuries. And during that considerably warmer time period it lost about 1/4 (one quarter) of its ice. That is less than two meters of sea level rise over 60 centuries, or a bit over an inch a century. Here is the link:

http://www.nbi.ku.dk/english/news/news13/greenland-ice-cores-reveal-warm-climate-of-the-past/

And the key quote: “But despite the warm temperatures, the ice sheet did not disappear and the research team estimates that the volume of the ice sheet was not reduced by more than 25 percent during the warmest 6,000 years of the Eemian.”

Surely that says that Greenland will contribute very little to sea level rise in a warmer world, even a warmer world that stays warm for two or three centuries.

What Dr. White seems to think is that both CO2 and temperatures will continue to rise for, seemingly, many centuries to millennia. But surely the world will switch to solar as soon as it becomes cost effective, which is likely to start somewhere between 10 and 20 years from now for urban locations (sides and tops of buildings) in places like the US.

Solar is already the electricity technology of choice in rural Africa and India; it is even possible that as with cell phones (which leapfrogged land line technology, making it obsolete before it was built in places like Thailand), solar panels might make an electric grid obsolete, at least for a while, in many rural and developing parts of the world. All the while becoming cheaper with more manufacturing.

The point that Dr. White studiously ignores is that society isn’t going to keep on burning fossil fuels at an ever increasing rate. His scenario cannot come about unless we continue, as a world, to keep increasing CO2 for several centuries to come, and no one wants or will allow that to happen.

So it is hard for me not to see this new web site as tending toward alarmism.


Comment on An alternative metric to assess global warming by manacker

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Pierre-Normand

The SL data we have (from tide gauges) is pretty good since the mid-19thC, and shows no real increase in the rate of SL rise since then. Holgate 2007 suggests that the “average annual rate” over the 20thC was around 1.7 mm/year, with decadal periods showing fluctuations from -1 mm/year to +5 mm/year. The first half of the 20thC saw a rate of rise of 2.0 mm/year, while the second half saw a rate of rise of 1.4 mm/year. The current rate of 2.5-3.2 mm/year lies well within the decadal range seen over the 20thC.

Comparing SL measurements made since the early 1990s by satellite altimetry with tide gauge records before this time, is fraught with problems (the two use basically different methods to measure basically different scopes, so are not really comparable).

In a reconstruction from 1700 Jerjeva et al. 2008 showed a drop in average annual SL of -0.35mm/year from 1700 to 1800, a rise in average SL of 1.5 mm/year from 1800 to 1900 and an increase of 1.7 mm/year over the 20th C

During the LIA the rate of rise was apparently much lower (although data are more sparse). Tony B has done some studies on past rates of SL rise during historical times, which show some fluctuations with warm periods, such as the MWP, showing accelerated SL rise and colder periods showing a fall in average SL.

So, while a multicentennial average might be much lower than the current decadal average, most of this discrepancy might just be in the high level of multidecadal variability in SL over the centuries rather than in some underlying acceleration.

Max

Comment on An alternative metric to assess global warming by Greg

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“One robust metric is global sea ice.”
Ice area/extent? Metric of what? what about Antarctica?

Comment on An alternative metric to assess global warming by edbarbar

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“Thus, the difference in ocean heat content at two different time periods largely accounts for the global average radiative imbalance over that time (within the uncertainty of the ocean heat measurements).”

What you are saying doesn’t make sense to me. I put an ice-cube into a room at room temperature, it takes a long time for the thing to melt and come to equilibrium with the room’s temperature. I think the assumption only makes sense if heat mixes into the oceans quickly (such as on decades timescales, as opposed to hundreds of years timescales).

And if it is decades, rather than hundreds of years, then, due to the high specific heat of water, it’s going to take a long time for radiative forcing on account of CO2 to heat up the atmosphere to a dangerous point.

Comment on An alternative metric to assess global warming by Pierre-Normand

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“Amusingly, the satellites measure no change in average sea level. Data processing with the inclusion of (the calculated) post glacial rebound leads to the supposed sea level rise.”

Not true. The correction for the GIA amounts to just 0.3mm/year, which is smaller than the +-0.4mm/year uncertainty of the estimated sea level rise, and just one tenth of it value over the last 20 years. See the page “What is glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), and why do you correct for it?” on the University of Colorado Sea Level Research Group web page. Furthermore, the expectation from the GIA is that sea levels would drop relative to the rebounding coasts. But not only aren’t they dropping at the expected rate (-0.3mm/year, assuming zero TOA radiative imbalance), they are rising 11 times faster (3.3mm/year), on average.

Comment on An alternative metric to assess global warming by Scott

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Pielke Sr
Thanks for the papers links. It is always good to see readable papers that address some of the issues and laypersons can get information rather than arrogant statements when the discussions link up with data.
Regards, Scott

Comment on An alternative metric to assess global warming by Joe Born

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Leonard Weinstein: “Since the ocean takes a very long time to reach new equilibrium from rapid changes from glacial to interglacial or back, then any condition where the average ocean temperature is rising or falling cannot necessarily be blamed on global warming or cooling. The time to reach equilibrium needs to be established first, and the deviation from this condition found.”

I’m interested in understanding what you mean.

If we indeed did have a good measure of the complete ocean heat content (a proposition I’m agnostic about), are you saying that something other than radiation imbalance, e.g., glacier melt, is currently affecting it significantly over long (say, decade or more) time scales that it would not at least greatly constrain what the imbalance over such a period could be?

If you’re not saying that, and if we have a good sense (as everyone says we do) of the pre-feedback radiative effects of increased CO2 concentration, wouldn’t the ocean heat content then at least impose some upper limit on what those feedbacks might be?

Comment on An alternative metric to assess global warming by edbarbar

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“If we are going to communicate “global warming”, we should use the proper physics metric of heat. :-)”

Is joules of heat storage a good indicator of the catastrophes we’ve been warned about? Plague and pestilence. Climate wars. Flooding. Hurricanes and other natural disasters (weren’t earthquakes on the list at one time)? If it is the best indicator of how CO2 will influence these things, then joules is it. If not, I want the measure that will tell me about these things.

Perhaps there is no such measure, in which case I would like to understand why my electricity bill keeps going up so much.


Comment on An alternative metric to assess global warming by WebHubTelescope

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RG, the skeptics are so embarrassed about scoring own goals that they attempt to deflect the criticism towards a debate on civility.

Too late, the own goals have already been scored and tallied.

As long as thermal energy gets absorbed at approximately the rate the measurements say, the consensus climate scientists will continue to have their AGW theory substantiated.

Comment on Stavins and Tol on IPCC WG3 by dynam01

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Alarmism has faced two distinct challenges — the Great Recession and the “boy who cried wolf” effect — and failed to meet either one. People who are unemployed or underemployed, sitting on a mountain of debt, aren’t losing sleep over a fraction of a degree Celsius that may never happen. And the long list of predicted catastrophes that also haven’t happened makes folk skeptical of anything alarmists say anymore.

Comment on Slowing sea level rise by JCH

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<a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/04/24/slowing-sea-level-rise/#comment-531680" rel="nofollow">Read this comment.</a>

Comment on Slowing sea level rise by Scott

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Eric,
You are brave. Good luck.
Scott

Comment on An alternative metric to assess global warming by Edim

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Greg, the whole ‘global warming’ scare is based on the global temperature anomaly indices, so let’s stick to that. But if the warmists or alarmist want to change the metric, I suggest global sea ice area or extent. I would give them that.

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