Eric, Eric, Eric, you are just devastating.
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Comment on How long is the pause? by kim
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Comment on How long is the pause? by tonyb
Rls
Thanks for your references to two of my papers. I think Mosh also appears to be a bit startled by the low temperature variability built into Shaun’s work. Having looked at boreholes and tree ring data in great detail they are not data that gives me confidence that they should be used as highly accurate proxies. They can not show the annual and decadal variability of the real world.
I wrote about the relative unrepresentative stability of such proxies compared to observational data in this article
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/26/noticeable-climate-change/
In looking at a global average supplied by proxy data or instrumental data covering only the last 125 years we are not looking at the real world over the last many hundreds and thousands of years, where variability is at times much greater than proxies or the modern record appear to illustrate.
I admire Shaun’s work and his vigour in supporting his highly theoretical findings covering such a short time scale, but my question remains . How can you put forward a case for in effect, only human made warming, when in the past it has been both warmer than today and cooler than today illustrating the range of natural variability that is possible that surprised even Phil Jones back in 2006.
tonyb
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Comment on How long is the pause? by Alexander Biggs
“by Judith Curry
With 39 explanations and counting, and some climate scientists now arguing that it might last yet another decade, the IPCC has sidelined itself in irrelevance until it has something serious to say about the pause and has reflected on whether its alarmism is justified, given its reliance on computer models that predicted temperature rises that have not occurred. – Rupert Darwall ”
Exactly.
But “heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation (HAC)” will not provide an answer, because it depends on stationarity. One has only to look at the history of temperature from 1900 to realise that a stationary system could never produce that shape. A stationary system would require that temperature in 1900 would have the same vital statistics as in 2014. Not even the mean is the same. Forget it.
Climate is an on/off phenomena, not a stationary one. James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron in the 1930’s can provide the answer to this on/off behaviour. It ia wrong to think of CO2 as a unique molecule in physics. in chemistry, yes. but not in physics, because it can have several isotopic forms, each of which can absorb different amounts of IR radiation.
The other great driving force is simply the time constant of the oceans. compared with the atmosphere. Following the 0.5C rise in atmosphere temperature between 1910 and 1940, we could expect this to flow through to the oceans about 30 or 40 years later. Unfortunately the IPCC never had a broad enough sweep of history
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Comment on How long is the pause? by wrhoward
Dave Andrews,
Actually the predictions of global cooling were communicated mostly in the media and in some policy circles. The scientific community as a whole did not articulate a predominant view on the future direction of climate. The behaviour of CO2 as a “greenhouse” gas was well known by the 1970s, but it was not clear when and if it would become a dominant driver of climate. In 1965 a report to the Johnson Administration anticipated warming due to CO2: Environmental Pollution Panel (1965), Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, 133 pp, President’s Science Advisory Committee, Washington D.C.
see
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Comment on How long is the pause? by wrhoward
AK “Don’t you think most of the biome has had plenty of time to adjust, and evolve new features without the risk from a higher global pCO2?”
For a good part of the late Pleistocene pCO2 has fluctuated between ~ 180 ppm (glacial stages) and ~280 (interglacial). Most extant species (obviously not individual organisms), including us, have adapted to this range. We have now taken pCO2 well beyond that Pleistocene range, more into Pliocene levels.
A good thing? A bad thing? I don’t know, but I think it will be interesting.
Lüthi et al. (2008), High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000-800,000 years before present, Nature, 453(7193), 379-382, doi:10.1038/nature06949.
(Fig 2 shows the whole 800,000-year CO2 reconstruction)
Seki, O., G. L. Foster, D. N. Schmidt, A. Mackensen, K. Kawamura, and R. D. Pancost (2010), Alkenone and boron-based Pliocene pCO2 records, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 292(1-2), 201-211, doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2010.01.037.
“during the warm Pliocene pCO2 was between 330 and 400 ppm, i.e. similar to today. The decrease to values similar to pre-industrial times (275–285 ppm) occurred between 3.2 Ma and 2.8 Ma”
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Comment on How long is the pause? by beththeserf
O we are all ignorant fools, sometimes even
radiant fools … the glare that obscures.
Good enuff fer Socrates,
good enuff fer Thurber,
good enuff fer serfs.
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Comment on How long is the pause? by climatereason
wrhoward
It is not correct that the concerns over cooling were a media creation.
Lamb, Mitchell, Budyko, Ladurie etc etc sparked the concerns.
As Budyko himself says (who seems to have subsequently changed his mind about cooling as did Lamb-as scientists should do when new evidence comes to light) in his book “The earths climate past and future’ pages 148 ;
‘it was generally accepted that a tendency towards climatic cooling appeared during the last few decades; since the sign of temperature fluctuations changes relatively rarely, the scientists concerned with climatic change almost UNANIMOUSLY (my capitalization) believed that the temperature would continue to decrease in the near future…Lamb 1973 mentioned that more than 20 forecasts of the early 70’s concerning climatic change predicted a cooling trend in the next few decades, but (then) indicated a lack of sufficient scientific grounds for these forecasts and two years later obtained the FIRST (my capitalization) evidence of a possible climatic change towards warming.”
(The temperature cooling can be seen in the Willett/Mitchell curves of the time)
Budyko continues;
‘in the 1940’s the warming trend was overcome by a cooling trend which intensified in the 1960’s and in the mid 60’s the mean air temperature of the Northern Hemisphere (once again) approached the level of the cold seasons of the late 1910’s .”
To summarise, here is what seems to have happened; As you know there was a very substantial warming from the 1920’s to 1940’s. This reversed itself. By 1962/3 the dropping temperature made Callendar himself doubt his greenhouse theory. Budyko, Lamb and an almost ‘unanimous’ agreement of climate scientists believed we were heading into a significant cooling phase . Lamb eventually pointed out in 1973 that the cooling was not sufficiently long lived to be a scientifically meaningful climatic trend of at least 30 years. The widespread scare of cooling changed into a scare of warming as temperatures started to recover.
Here are a couple of additional links and a quote;
“The second important group analyzing global temperatures was the British government’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, founded by Lamb in 1971 and now led by Tom Wigley. Help in assembling data and funding came from American scientists and agencies. The British results agreed overall with the NASA group’s findings — the world was getting warmer. In 1982, East Anglia confirmed that the Northern Hemisphere cooling that began in the 1940s had turned around by the early 1970s.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm
Also see;
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GISSTemperature/giss_temperature2.php
So the 25 year long (very real) cooling scare was most rife during the 1960’s and came to an end in the early 70’s.
tonyb
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Comment on How long is the pause? by genghiscunn
“The next 20 kyr will have an abnormally high greenhouse effect which, according to the CO2 values, will lengthen the present interglacial by some 25 to 33 kyr.” Whatever discount rate you use, that would have to be beneficial. What possible dangers from further warming could possible justify not extending the interglacial by 25,000+ years? Who would support reducing GHG emissions if this is well-validated and disseminated?
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Comment on How long is the pause? by Tom Fuller
Hey, me–you leave kim alone or I’ll sic Mosher’s mobile on you.
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Comment on Week in review by dennisambler
Whenever this evergreen topic comes up, (Kevin Trenberth first started talking about missing heat in 1998), I like to remind people about the critique of Levitus et al 2000, written by the late Dr Robert Stevenson, a distinguished and “hands on” oceanographer.
“Yes, the Ocean has warmed, No, it’s not Global Warming”
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/ocean.html
This is just an extract from his comprehensive article:
“How the Oceans Get Warm”
“Warming the ocean is not a simple matter, not like heating a small glass of water. The first thing to remember is that the ocean is not warmed by the overlying air.
Let’s begin with radiant energy from two sources: sunlight, and infrared radiation, the latter emitted from the “greenhouse” gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and various others) in the lower atmosphere. Sunlight penetrates the water surface readily, and directly heats the ocean up to a certain depth. Around 3 percent of the radiation from the Sun reaches a depth of about 100 meters.
The top layer of the ocean to that depth warms up easily under sunlight. Below 100 meters, however, little radiant energy remains. The ocean becomes progressively darker and colder as the depth increases.
The infrared radiation penetrates but a few millimeters into the ocean. This means that the greenhouse radiation from the atmosphere affects only the top few millimeters of the ocean. Water just a few centimeters deep receives none of the direct effect of the infrared thermal energy from the atmosphere! Further, it is in those top few millimeters in which evaporation takes places. So whatever infrared energy may reach the ocean as a result of the greenhouse effect is soon dissipated.
The concept proposed in some predictive models is that any anomalous heat in the mixed layer of the ocean (the upper 100 meters) might be lost to the deep ocean. It is clear that solar-related variations in mixed-layer temperatures penetrate to between 80 to 160 meters, the average depth of the main pycnocline (density discontinuity) in the global ocean. Below these depths, temperature fluctuations become uncorrelated with solar signals, deeper penetration being restrained by the stratified barrier of the pycnocline.
Consequently, anomalous heat associated with changing solar irradiance is stored in the upper 100 meters. The heat balance is maintained by heat loss to the atmosphere, not to the deep ocean.
Thermohaline circulation is responsible for the formation of the bottom-water masses in the world’s oceans: the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) originates basically in the region of the Labrador Sea; the Weddell Sea is the source of the deep-water in the circumpolar Southern Ocean; and the Pacific Deep Water originates in the Ross Sea. In many other places in the oceans, and seas, as well, surface waters are carried into the depths by thermohaline circulation.
So, it is not surprising that those modellers who “need” to get warm surface waters to move into the depths of the oceans, and remain sequestered there for long periods of time, would turn to the physical mechanism of this vertical circulation system. Their hope (claim) is that there can be occasions when salinity, rather than temperature, is the prime determining factor in the density of the surface waters. Then, warm water, made dense by an increase in the sea’s salt content, would sink.
It does not happen!
The primary physical factor in determining the density of sea water is the temperature (Sverdrup, Johnson, and Fleming, 1943). In the open ocean, top or bottom, salinity differences are measured in a few parts per thousand. Thermohaline circulation takes place where the surface waters become colder than the waters beneath. The large vertical movements occur in polar seas, where accelerated radiation makes the surface waters greatly colder than the deeper waters.
In these waters, surface water temperatures are about -1.9°C, the normal salinity of the water keeping it from freezing into ice. The deep waters, being warmer than such surface waters, rise to the surface, as the upper layers sink slowly into the dark ocean depths. Because only very cold surface water is able to sink, it is simple to understand that the deep ocean can never warm up, regardless of how warm the surface ocean around the world may become. No deep lying “thermal lag” is going to take place.”
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Comment on How long is the pause? by beththeserf
We have different world views TF but I have regard fer yr
integrity.Yr comments are duly noted.by serfs.
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Comment on How long is the pause? by mosomoso
Tonyb is correct, as far as I can see. The CIA wrote that paper, and it concerned cooling, but also cooling related disruption, including warm spells.
CIA, August 1974. And it might well be deemed a major paper. Simple as that. It was indeed tagged for internal use, but it was prepared by the CIA. Maybe they were impressed by the loss of much of the Soviet wheat crop in 1972. Some agricultural follies in China might have got them thinking also.
Obviously the agency got someone to do it. It was either that or wait for a million monkeys to type it by accident. The paper was theirs, under their letterhead.
Why fudge this?
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Comment on Trenberth’s science communication interview by John M
Thanks, Matthew. As you suggest, the problem is there are no shortcuts in true comprehension. But that is the issue with science communication; how do we do it? There seems to be a general consensus (heh) that how it is done today isn’t doing what it needs to (informing the public), but I’m not sure there’s a way around it. Like with anything we don’t want to expend a great deal of effort on, we’ll either pick a source that seems trustworthy and run with it or “go tribal” and back whatever group we best identify with. Unfortunately I don’t think there are any easy answers, but I do appreciate that more scientists seem to be willing to stick their necks out to try to improve the status quo. Particularly given that Internet discourse is rather rough and tumble.
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Comment on Trenberth’s science communication interview by Scott
For those interested in climate change expenditures of the federal gov Government accountability office, GAO, prepared a summary issue paper plus lots of reports. Costs from 2003 to 2013 very high with last estimate from the graph at the site at $8,000,000,000 (Billion) dollars annually. Lots go to support the various institutes and the ships and satellites collecting data. Still a very big number.
Still interested in how much BP(beyond petroleum, Shell and Exxon spend to encourage carbon emissions. Also coal industry and electrical industry.
Scott
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Comment on Trenberth’s science communication interview by Scott
http://www.gao.gov/key_issues/climate_change_funding_management/issue_summary#t=0
Here is the issue link
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Comment on Trenberth’s science communication interview by hunter
Trenberth speaks more like a con artist than a scientist. Let us see him document “well funded disinformation campaigns.” He is deceptive in deliberately confusing “agreemnt with his opinion” and “sceintific knowledge”.
He still pushes a phony null hypothesis, for goodness sake.
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Comment on Trenberth’s science communication interview by Matthew R Marler
John M: “In all, 140 foundations funneled $558 million to almost 100 climate denial organizations from 2003 to 2010.”
I don’t know which money you wish to include on this side and on that side, but that is less money than the Solyndra bailout. The money that is spent on lobbying and advertising by organizations that have PV panels and wind turbines to sell is enormous, and much of their return gets funneled (corrupting influence of money comment coming up) to Democratic candidates (as was some of the Solyndra bailout money.)
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Comment on Trenberth’s science communication interview by darrylb
Real But—–Agreed. I find I must do it daily.
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Comment on Trenberth’s science communication interview by Matthew R Marler
even correctons are in errr: it shud be “caricature”.
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Comment on How long is the pause? by Rob Ellison
Absolutely Tony.
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