Jim Cripwell | March 29, 2012 at 7:18 am |
More precisely, there are infinitely many climate sensitivity figures, varying with the time and the time scale selected. Do the calculation yourself. Extract the CO2 change over the time period (be it an hour or a millennium or more), put it in terms of doublings, and compare it to the change in global temperature. There you go, there’s your momentary (or millennial, or more) climate sensitivity.
To my way of looking at things, this isn’t unexpected; what would be astounding would be if climate sensivity remained fixed.
We know climate sensitivity must be subject to feedbacks, meaning it must change over time just due to its very nature. However..
To be very precise, you would seek to adjust the global temperature figure to remove for known effects: seasonal variation (which is fairly regular due North-South topology differences, but not perfectly so due influence of initial conditions in any season), solar variation (which is tiny on even the millennial scale, but still demonstrable), volcanoes, influence of ocean basin oscillations, albedo effects (ice and cloud), particulates, etc.
And you can’t remove for these other signals. They’re too noisy. There’s too many of them. They’re too little understood. Nowhere near enough data is gathered. All of these are practical physical limitations on our knowledge.
Failure to know enough to produce a simplification describing an effect — a calculation as you call it — is hardly proof the effect doesn’t exist. That’s one of the vainest arguments possible. When did we get so wise that anything we can’t calculate we must deny exists?
Utter reductionist vanity with no basis in reason.
You demand impossible perfection. Your argument is hubris.