Ernie—Just to be clear, those weren't my comments. They're copied directly out of the book. I'm not smart enough to know what to do (as you know, I favor nukes and natural gas short term, maybe fusion will save us long run). I think Rick said it well when he said we needed to start 20-30 years ago, though I doubt the science then was strong enough (I might be wrong). I do remember that in the 60s/70s, the fear was an ice age.
I came at GW as a skeptic, one who was too busy earning a living to pay close attention. I am always skeptical (politics, religion, everything) and I think the approach taken by GW advocates, which I'll crudely summarize as “The sky is falling, we're doomed, all we can do is raise taxes” was pretty off-putting to me and I think many people. I know many very well educated people who were and/or are skeptics. It shouldn't matter who is the “face” of a topic, but Al Gore puts me off a lot, too. Especially his insistence on living large while expecting us “reglur folk” to sacrifice didn't do much to inspire me, either. And I know his film contained a great many exaggerations. One particularly sickening moment for me was when his film won the Oscar and the movie stars all cheered and gave a standing ovation. I couldn't help but realize what VERY LARGE carbon footprints each of them had and how hypocritical they were. But, one can't judge truth based on who is on one side. Sometimes even the creeps can be right. lol
Anyway, at the same time, I am an engineer. Facts matter. CO2 IS a greenhouse gas. Too many experts agree. I have come to accept that AGW is real. Muller's book gives, to me, a nice summation of the case for AGW and it discusses alternate forms of energy. If Muller's book is accurate regarding the consequences of accepting the treaty still would lead to CO2 in excess of 1,000 ppm, it seems to me that we're screwed already, I hope not. Hey, it'll cheapen the price of saunas!
I think one very unfortunate fact is that politicians have to spend so much time sucking up to their bases that truth suffers. They can't just be honest, it'll annoy someone they depend upon for votes. So, we only trust those whom we agree with.
Climate Change
The book Willy recommends, Energy for Presidents, is available on Amazon Kindle for $10.00 and Paperback for $13. Author is a Berkelety Professor but so far has not shown a lot of Liberal bias. I have read the preface and forward, and both more or less agree with what Drobarr and I have expressed, as far as showing some common sense.
Reviews from 5 star down to 1 star and a self described important Physicist is very critical of the book because of poor research. Others think it is a wonderful book, including Willy.
I will read it and then express my opinion of it.
Ernie
This message was edited Mar 26, 2014 12:44 PM
Willy, I have engineering in my blood, no wonder we agree.
I had a training session today that mentioned a site some here may like. Procon.org, for this issue the link is
http://climatechange.procon.org
The training was presented by our excellent State Library staff. The site ProCon is one they refer people to because the site tries very hard to give both sides of many controversies, and be unbiased. In class we looked at vaccine safety, another hot button.
Part of public libraries mission is giving people free access to information. And not censoring that information. Free access so people can make their own judgements.
Sally, The procon article was interesting, and considering the imbalnce in the budgets between the Governmental Organizations and the Non Governmental groups, i thought it was more balanced than i would have expected.
I saved the site for further study.
Ernie
Interesting link; I've bookmarked it. Thanks sallyg. Long live engineers!
Vaccines. I can't believe they are being protested. Small pox. Polio. Vaccine. Shingles. Easy choice for me. I also understand that some object to the smart meters that radio electricity use to power companies. Not sure what that's about.
Smart meters, I think they either give you brain cancer or catch fire....according to some. I love my smart meter, it allows us to participate in cycling the AC and we get money back for that. It just makes so much 'engineering' sense to me. (And probably makes it easier for them to cut off those who don't pay their bill, but after all they have to have revenue. There has not been any mention anywhere of that use)
Yes, our State Library librarian mentioned to the class that government sites (CDC) can have bias towards their position on vaccines.
Sally, thanks for that link! I'll read it. I can't get flu shots because I had GBS once. I think that protects the vaccine vendors from me suing them.
Willy said:
>> Btw, the study at Cal was funded by, amongst others, Bill Gates, Gordon Getty, and Charles Koch. The book addresses pretty much any form of energy and does so in an impartial way.
Thanks for proving me wrong about the Koch brothers! I already had a good impression of Getty.
>> I do remember that in the 60s/70s, the fear was an ice age.
>> I think the approach taken by GW advocates, which I'll crudely summarize as “The sky is falling, we're doomed, all we can do is raise taxes” was pretty off-putting to me
I agree about the flip-flop from the 70s to the 80s, and also the fact that they followed up with "and also enact our long-standing anti-technology and anti-industry and anti-consumerism agendas" was off-putting for EVERYone.
I just want to save the climate and make prosperity truly sustainable in the long run (100s of years, at least). I do distrust corporate managers, but only the same way I distrust almost any group of people that is larger than 3-4 people, and has a lot of power. (Except, I guess, scientists. That's my biggest bias, a strong pro-science and technology bias.)
Gore:
>> when his film won the Oscar and the movie stars all cheered and gave a standing ovation.
Try to find and watch the South Park episode where Hollywood created a super-cell of "Smug" that almost poisoned the whole country. Smug alert! I think that was the one where hybrid car owners' smugness also poisoned the atmosphere, because they were so smug that they started huffing their own farts (which, of course, did not stink).
>> the consequences of accepting the treaty still would lead to CO2 in excess of 1,000 ppm
That I don't know about, but I guess I need to find a copy! I would try to make a distinction between "rate" and "amount". I have read that the amount that we have already pumped out (now living in air, soil, ocean and sediments) will (probably will) take 100s of years to "work off" and that the leverls in the air MIGHT keep climbing even if every power plant and car switched to the power of positive thinking ogverngiht (I don't knw about THAT "might"!)
But say the treaty reduced the rate of new emissions from 9 billion tons annually down to 4 billion tons. Sure the level in the air will keep climbing, and if you extrapolate an upward curve far enough, it will eventually cross 1,000. Not having read it yet, i can't say.
Were they claiming that even reducing emissions by, say, 50%, would NOT slow the slope of the keeling Curve? That would surprise me.
My take is that sure, we ARE in a deep hole, and getting out of it will take a long time or some technical or religious miracle. But we need to start doing whatever we can to recue the rate-of-getting-deeper, then eventually find ways to make it slowly get LESS deep, and then keep pressing until the climate stabilizes at some level that is consistent with enough agriculture to feed the population.
Having more time could help (we might invent fusion power or find a cheaper way to build solar power satellites, or some other science fiction miracle).
Making the rate-of-getting-worse slower might let us "ease our way" into adapting globally to average crop yields dropping by 20%, 50% or 70%. Ways that avoid very many very bug wars, for example, and mass starvation. Who knows, birth control might catch on.
So I don't think that treaties, or ocean fertilization, are futile because neither one can "solve the problem" by itself. Every little gigaton per year helps! Ten billion tons here, ten billions there, eventually it will add up to a noticeable amount of CO2.
>> politicians have to spend so much time sucking up to their bases
Yup. As Ernie and Pogo said, "we have met the enemy, and they is us".
Ernie said:
>> If it continues on the warming trend indefinitely, we are in deep doodoo. But if this is just part of the historic fluctuations, we may not need to get our knickers in a twist.
Hmm! I mostly agree with that. My main disagreement would be to add something like
"as long as the fluctuations over the next 50 years ARE NOT much more serious than the historical fluctuations from the last few hundred or few thousand years, we may not need to get our knickers in a twist."
If, on the other hand, the Warmie predictions of UNPRECEDENTED or too-violent fluctuations cause extremes that we have never seen before, or extreme weather so often that it cuts very seriously into crop yields, then the twisted-knicker scenario might occur.
I think the LEAST well-answered question isn't "whether" or "how bad" the change will or won't be.
It isn't even "what can we do about it technically that won't destroy the economy as we know it?"
It is "how will we make anything happen POLITICALLY and internationally, even if we do figure out some plausible actions that have a chance of being accepted by 51% of the people in 90% of the countries?
I have zero idea of how to bring that about.
Even if I invented a death ray in my basement and made myself Emperor of the World, that "cure" would be worse than most twisted-knicker scenarios.
And even if I had total power over every person and power plant and commercial transaction, we still don't know what COULD be done technically and economically that would not cut everyone's "quality of life" by a huge factor.
Mass famine would be "bad", but throwing the entire developed world back 100 years in "prosperity" and freezing the Third World where they are now would also be "bad".
I think it proves that I'm a scientist at heart even if not by trade when I say that I would fund more research and start some experiments.
Amen on the science is good stuff. Replace lawyers in Congress with scientists.
Willy,
Be careful what you wish for. Remember Rick says 97% of the Government Scientists agree with each other.
So it would depend on whether the Scientific Congress agreed to lead the Country Up or Down, because for sure, whichever way it went, we would get there a lot quicker. LOL.
Ernie
Some more comments about the book. I know something (not an expert) about some of the subjects he addresses (nukes, solar) and enough about some others to satisfy me that the book is unbiased and accurate. I do not know a lot about climate change beyond the popular media stuff and I am fairly ignorant about some other topics in the book, so my presumption of Muller's accuracy on those subjects is just that. After Ernie noted the Amazon ratings, some of which were low, I did a search for Muller and learned that he is intensely disliked by some. Not sure why, but it sounded fairly political. I did determine that he was a GW skeptic prior to his research, so, to me, his "conversion" makes him more credible. His critics don't see it that way. Again, not sure why. My bottom line is that the book is very useful for getting factual info regarding various energy schemes and I will trust it until proven wrong.
Rick, I don't have as poor an impression of the Kochs as you, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Koch funding was based on the hope that Muller's skepticism would prove right.
Willy,
I read the book last night through the GW section, and am really amazed that such a down to earth, common sense and unbiased person could hold a faculty position at Berkeley, which has been on the farthest edge of the extreme leftist nonsense in CA for 50 years.
Reading the book is like reading the script of the debate Rick and i have been having. He presents all of the points that both of us have made, is brave enough to criticize the Charts that the Government Scientists cooked up when their original model showed the Globe was cooling, alongside the changes. Just one proper thing after another.
He also defined our respective positions and i hope Rick reads it so he will finally understand that i am a Skeptic, not a Denier.
I agree bad stuff MAY happen, but if such changes as a 2% increase in the Cloud Cover, or another huge Volcano eruption happens, that appears to mitigate the damage from Carbon considerably.
Overall, it did not change my position, but clarified and supported both my beliefs as well as Rick's. So, as so often happens with big problems, only time will tell what the right solution for it is.
So thanks for posting the name of the book.
Ernie
Ernie--Very glad you read it! The sections on nukes, solar, and wind are worth a read as well. Btw, I was a fan of nukes long, long before I read the book.
I didn't perceive what I'm guessing you perceived as support for anti-GW, at least not to a large degree. I wonder if that "flavor" is why some folks dislike Muller so much.
The Cal connection is somewhat ironic or contrary to expectation, but, hey, the guy is a physicist, not a social science guy/
Willy, I did not mean to imply he was Anti GW. He just seemed to me to be Anti Panic and Hyperbole, I did see that he was skeptical in the beginning. We all agree the Globe has warmed or is warming slightly, and the author seemed to me to be trying to stick to the facts more than get caught up in the conjecture. He mentioned some of the counter arguments, like Warming will increase the humidity and may increase the cloud cover, and things like that. He just seemed interested in the actual evidence that is available now. But when it is still just conjecture, whether it is imminent doom or Cloud cover that will save the world, i am going to remain skeptical for quite a while yet.
I am no expert on the California University System, as there are so many different schools, but Berkeley is usually just called Berkeley, and the name CAL seems to be reserved for one just North of L A that is very high tech and deals mostly with Space programs and Physics, i think.
I have always been in favor of Nuclear Power, think solar is fine in places where Electricity is not available and therefor Solar is cheaper, and of course i have loved Windmills and Wind turbines since they were common when i was a boy. I just do not like to burden the economy with power costs that are a lot more expensive than fossil fuel. A lot of boaters have used solar power for forty years to good advantage, and i had a Wind Turbine on my boat for a while, but a diesel powered generator is better and cheaper and more reliable than either.
It is probably Muller's being truthful as regards each side that causes almost half of the people to dislike him, as people do not like there fears and fantasies cluttered up with facts and truth.
I enjoyed every thing he said, learned some new things, and wound up satisfied with being skeptical about castastrophe being a 100% certainty.
Ernie
Ernie--My misinterpretation. You read it like I did.
Now I know that Cal isn't UC Berkeley, thanks to you (always thought it was!?). I agree, catastrophe isn't certain, I don't think any reasonable person thinks it is certain. Per Yogi, it's tough to predict, especially about the future. And, as sallyg pointed out, what do we do? There is where I sure as heck don't have an answer and where I think no one else is proposing anything sensible or, more importantly, practical. I do think switching to nukes (20 years ago, nod to Rick) is wise, conservation is wise, natural gas is wise. Research into alternatives is wise. Expecting people to lower their lifestyle isn't in any way reasonable or logical/sensible, pending obvious, visible doom.
If Muller is right, and I suspect he is, whatever we in the US do is mostly irrelevant anyway unless the rest of the world hops on board. And again, it just isn't going to happen.
I hope you continue to enjoy Muller's book; I just reread some of it myself this afternoon. Amazing how much one forgets in a year or two.
OK--Off topic
I just finished grinding up a few dozen Ghost and Trinidad Scorpion peppers that I had dried after harvest last fall. Whopping yield of maybe two tablespoons of powder. Despite using latex gloves and doing it all out doors, I am coughing and hacking and (very) afraid to use the little boys room.
Spicy foods ahead!
Laugh all you want.
Willy,
I hope i was not wrong about Cal Tech being called Cal. It seems to me i have heard it referred to as that, but when i Googled to confirm it, i could not find an example of any college being referred to as just CAL, So be safe and do not quote me.
Ernie
.
Interesting Op-Ed from this morning's WSJ:
By
Matt Ridley
March 27, 2014 7:24 p.m. ET
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of climate change. Government representatives are meeting with scientists in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary of the scientists' accounts of storms, droughts and diseases to come. But the actual report, known as AR5-WGII, is less frightening than its predecessor seven years ago.
The 2007 report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm. This led to a critical appraisal of the report-writing process from a council of national science academies, some of whose recommendations were simply ignored.
Others, however, hit home. According to leaks, this time the full report is much more cautious and vague about worsening cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees, and the overall cost of global warming.
It puts the overall cost at less than 2% of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade (or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature increase during this century. This is vastly less than the much heralded prediction of Lord Stern, who said climate change would cost 5%-20% of world GDP in his influential 2006 report for the British government.
The forthcoming report apparently admits that climate change has extinguished no species so far and expresses "very little confidence" that it will do so. There is new emphasis that climate change is not the only environmental problem that matters and on adapting to it rather than preventing it. Yet the report still assumes 70% more warming by the last decades of this century than the best science now suggests. This is because of an overreliance on models rather than on data in the first section of the IPCC report—on physical science—that was published in September 2013.
In this space on Dec. 19, 2012, I forecast that the IPCC was going to have to lower its estimates of future warming because of new sensitivity results. (Sensitivity is the amount of warming due to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.) "Cooling Down Fears of Climate Change" (Dec. 19), led to a storm of protest, in which I was called "anti-science," a "denier" and worse.
The IPCC's September 2013 report abandoned any attempt to estimate the most likely "sensitivity" of the climate to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The explanation, buried in a technical summary not published until January, is that "estimates derived from observed climate change tend to best fit the observed surface and ocean warming for [sensitivity] values in the lower part of the likely range." Translation: The data suggest we probably face less warming than the models indicate, but we would rather not say so.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a London think tank, published a careful survey of all the reliable studies of sensitivity on March 5. The authors are British climate scientist Nic Lewis (who has no academic affiliation but a growing reputation since he discovered a glaring statistical distortion that exaggerated climate sensitivity in the previous IPCC report) and the Dutch science writer Marcel Crok. They say the IPCC's September report "buried good news about global warming," and that "the best observational evidence indicates our climate is considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate scientists had previously thought."
Messrs. Lewis and Crok argue that the average of the best observationally based studies shows the amount of immediate warming to be expected if carbon dioxide levels double after 70 years is "likely" to be between one and two degrees Centigrade, with a best estimate of 1.35C (or 2.4F). That's much lower than the IPCC assumes in its forthcoming report.
In short, the warming we experienced over the past 35 years—about 0.4C (or 0.7F) if you average the measurements made by satellites and those made by ground stations—is likely to continue at about the same rate: a little over a degree a century.
Briefly during the 1990s there did seem to be warming that went as fast as the models wanted. But for the past 15-17 years there has been essentially no net warming (a "hiatus" now conceded by the IPCC), a fact that the models did not predict and now struggle to explain. The favorite post-hoc explanation is that because of natural variability in ocean currents more heat has been slipping into the ocean since 2000—although the evidence for this is far from conclusive.
None of this contradicts basic physics. Doubling carbon dioxide cannot on its own generate more than about 1.1C (2F) of warming, however long it takes. All the putative warming above that level would come from amplifying factors, chiefly related to water vapor and clouds. The net effect of these factors is the subject of contentious debate.
In climate science, the real debate has never been between "deniers" and the rest, but between "lukewarmers," who think man-made climate change is real but fairly harmless, and those who think the future is alarming. Scientists like Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Richard Lindzen of MIT have moved steadily toward lukewarm views in recent years.
Even with its too-high, too-fast assumptions, the recently leaked draft of the IPCC impacts report makes clear that when it comes to the effect on human welfare, "for most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers," such as economic growth and technology, for the rest of this century. If temperatures change by about 1C degrees between now and 2090, as Mr. Lewis calculates, then the effects will be even smaller.
Indeed, a small amount of warming spread over a long period will, most experts think, bring net improvements to human welfare. Studies such as by the IPCC author and economist Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University in Britain show that global warming has probably done so already. People can adapt to such change—which essentially means capture the benefits but minimize the harm. Satellites have recorded a roughly 14% increase in greenery on the planet over the past 30 years, in all types of ecosystems, partly as a result of man-made CO2 emissions, which enable plants to grow faster and use less water.
There remains a risk that the latest science is wrong and rapid warming will occur with disastrous consequences. And if renewable energy had proved by now to be cheap, clean and thrifty in its use of land, then we would be right to address that small risk of a large catastrophe by rushing to replace fossil fuels with first-generation wind, solar and bioenergy. But since these forms of energy have proved expensive, environmentally damaging and land-hungry, it appears that in our efforts to combat warming we may have been taking the economic equivalent of chemotherapy for a cold.
Almost every global environmental scare of the past half century proved exaggerated including the population "bomb," pesticides, acid rain, the ozone hole, falling sperm counts, genetically engineered crops and killer bees. In every case, institutional scientists gained a lot of funding from the scare and then quietly converged on the view that the problem was much more moderate than the extreme voices had argued. Global warming is no different.
Mr. Ridley is the author of "The Rational Optimist" (HarperCollins, 2010) and a member of the British House of Lords.
Willy, {SATIRE}
It looks like your post at 7 AM today shut this conversation down. I have been waiting all day for Rick to apologize for all the scurrilous comments he has made about mean spirited, hard hearted Rednecks like me that would willingly sacrifice millions of future victims just to save the jobs of a few thousand expendable coal miners. In fact i have spent a lot of time in front of the mirror practicing how to accept those forthcoming apologies in a gracious manner.
But all I have heard since your posting is deafening silence. While i enjoyed all of the Op Ed you posted immensely, the one thing I enjoyed the most was learning a new name for people that believe as i do. While i thought the name Warmies was fine for the True Believers, I never cared much for the name i chose for Skeptics like me, which was :"Coolies" as that was reminiscent of the Chinese laborers. So, learning that people with my opinion of the problem were called Lukies, for Lukewarm believers, was a nice thing.
I am also looking forward to hearing how the 97% of the Government Scientific Choir change their tune to match the new report.
Ernie
I ordered the book. I have to leave soon, I'll have to read the last 2/3rds of you post Monday. But a fast-scan sounded very encouraging.
>> much more cautious and vague about worsening cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees,
That's VERY good news.
I wonder if there are end-dates on those predictions. Like, "not as bad as we thought for the next 50 years". I thought that most predictions except for the near-term "chaotic" instabilities simply got worse and worse as the CO2 level increased.
"Clouds" were a big variable or unknown in models (or were last I checked.) . What altitude, what temperature, what latitudes. What kinds will form where, and what effect will each have on atmospheric structure as that structure changes? Temperature gradient with altitude and latitude ... they must have made SOME progress in figuring that out, or at least forming and knocking down theories, in the last 5-15 years.
I was amazed that he said "2%". I thought 10-20% decreased solar radiation was needed to balance the CO2-warming over the next 50-100 years. I might be wrong about what was thought 5-10 years ago, or theories may have changed. If true, it makes "space mirrors" and stratospheric particulates 10 times less impractical!
P.S. I went hunting for info about "saturation" but was disappointed. The people that talked about "saturation" were ignoring the fact that the area of most interest for the greenhouse effect is not really the lower layers of the atmosphere, but rather the higher layers. (Compared to lower down, the higher parts are not only much thinner and colder, but also drier).
for example:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument/
The "saturation" idea was that, if there is enough CO2 in the air (added up over all altitudes), "all the IR will be absorbed anyway", so that more CO2 would not mean more greenhouse effect.
Unfortunately, it works differently. Heat has already been absorbed, re-emitted, absorbed again and re-emitted again in the lower atmosphere. (As well as being carried up and down by air convection.) The question is, "how high do you have to go before reemitted IR can actually ESCAPE to space?" The answer is "higher and higher as we add CO2". So if there is any upper limit to "how bad can increasing CO2 make the greenhouse effect?", it's far above what the "saturation argument" suggested.
P.S. The fact that IR only really escapes to space from high altitudes when we have extra CO2 also knocks another "saturation" idea in the head. Some people said that H2O also has IR absorption bands, which overlap with some of CO2 absorption bands. Absorption spectra at GROUND level do look like there's a lot of overlap, which would reduce the effect of CO2 to the extent that water is already absorbing some of what extra CO2 would absorb.
Unfortunately, that only affect which compound absorbs more near ground level. Up where the action is, thee are two big factors. One, the upper atmosphere is really dry, so CO2 is the only player, and changes in its concentration are not overshadowed by H2O where it counts. Two, the high atmosphere is low pressure compared to ground level. Dense gases have very "smeary" absorption spectra that look like hills and valleys. Low pressure gases absorb in clean, thin "spikes" or absorption lines. The absorption "hills" or bands at ground level DO overlap. At high altitudes, the pressure is so low that the spikes or lines no longer overlap, so the effect of CO2 is independent of whatever trace H2O is up there.
I think the really twisted-knickers scenario (improbable in all models) of "runaway" greenhouse effect is the idea that so much more H2O gets into the high atmosphere where IT'S greenhouse effect becomes serious at high altitudes. (Maybe one protective mechanism was that the water froze out before it could get that bad.) But, speculatively, NO IR would be escaping until you got so high that it's also really cold, so very little escaped at any altitude. At that point, "the pile of blankets" would be so thick that lakes and oceans would boil, and it would get even worse much faster, as some speculate happened on Venus. I don't think anyone is predicting pessimistically enough or far enough into the future to worry about that!
Here is another of the Ridley op-ed pieces. I will find the December one he mentioned and post it soo.
By
Matt Ridley
Updated Sept. 17, 2013 3:16 p.m. ET
Later this month, a long-awaited event that last happened in 2007 will recur. Like a returning comet, it will be taken to portend ominous happenings. I refer to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) "fifth assessment report," part of which will be published on Sept. 27.
There have already been leaks from this 31-page document, which summarizes 1,914 pages of scientific discussion, but thanks to a senior climate scientist, I have had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document. The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPCC thought in 2007.
Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet.
Specifically, the draft report says that "equilibrium climate sensitivity" (ECS)—eventual warming induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which takes hundreds of years to occur—is "extremely likely" to be above 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), "likely" to be above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and "very likely" to be below 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 Fahrenheit). In 2007, the IPPC said it was "likely" to be above 2 degrees Celsius and "very likely" to be above 1.5 degrees, with no upper limit. Since "extremely" and "very" have specific and different statistical meanings here, comparison is difficult.
Still, the downward movement since 2007 is clear, especially at the bottom of the "likely" range. The most probable value (3 degrees Celsius last time) is for some reason not stated this time.
A more immediately relevant measure of likely warming has also come down: "transient climate response" (TCR)—the actual temperature change expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide about 70 years from now, without the delayed effects that come in the next century. The new report will say that this change is "likely" to be 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius and "extremely unlikely" to be greater than 3 degrees. This again is lower than when last estimated in 2007 ("very likely" warming of 1 to 3 degrees Celsius, based on models, or 1 to 3.5 degrees, based on observational studies).
Most experts believe that warming of less than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels will result in no net economic and ecological damage. Therefore, the new report is effectively saying (based on the middle of the range of the IPCC's emissions scenarios) that there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm.
Warming of up to 1.2 degrees Celsius over the next 70 years (0.8 degrees have already occurred), most of which is predicted to happen in cold areas in winter and at night, would extend the range of farming further north, improve crop yields, slightly increase rainfall (especially in arid areas), enhance forest growth and cut winter deaths (which far exceed summer deaths in most places). Increased carbon dioxide levels also have caused and will continue to cause an increase in the growth rates of crops and the greening of the Earth—because plants grow faster and need less water when carbon dioxide concentrations are higher.
Up to two degrees of warming, these benefits will generally outweigh the harmful effects, such as more extreme weather or rising sea levels, which even the IPCC concedes will be only about 1 to 3 feet during this period.
Yet these latest IPCC estimates of climate sensitivity may still be too high. They don't adequately reflect the latest rash of published papers estimating "equilibrium climate sensitivity" and "transient climate response" on the basis of observations, most of which are pointing to an even milder warming. This was already apparent last year with two papers—by scientists at the University of Illinois and Oslo University in Norway—finding a lower ECS than assumed by the models. Since then, three new papers conclude that ECS is well below the range assumed in the models. The most significant of these, published in Nature Geoscience by a team including 14 lead authors of the forthcoming IPCC scientific report, concluded that "the most likely value of equilibrium climate sensitivity based on the energy budget of the most recent decade is 2.0 degrees Celsius."
Two recent papers (one in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society, the other in the journal Earth System Dynamics) estimate that TCR is probably around 1.65 degrees Celsius. That's uncannily close to the estimate of 1.67 degrees reached in 1938 by Guy Callendar, a British engineer and pioneer student of the greenhouse effect. A Canadian mathematician and blogger named Steve McIntyre has pointed out that Callendar's model does a better job of forecasting the temperature of the world between 1938 and now than do modern models that "hindcast" the same data.
The significance of this is that Callendar assumed that carbon dioxide acts alone, whereas the modern models all assume that its effect is amplified by water vapor. There is not much doubt about the amount of warming that carbon dioxide can cause. There is much more doubt about whether net amplification by water vapor happens in practice or is offset by precipitation and a cooling effect of clouds.
Since the last IPCC report in 2007, much has changed. It is now more than 15 years since global average temperature rose significantly. Indeed, the IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has conceded that the "pause" already may have lasted for 17 years, depending on which data set you look at. A recent study in Nature Climate Change by Francis Zwiers and colleagues of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, found that models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years.
Explaining this failure is now a cottage industry in climate science. At first, it was hoped that an underestimate of sulfate pollution from industry (which can cool the air by reflecting heat back into space) might explain the pause, but the science has gone the other way—reducing its estimate of sulfate cooling. Now a favorite explanation is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. Yet the data to support this thesis come from ocean buoys and deal in hundredths of a degree of temperature change, with a measurement error far larger than that. Moreover, ocean heat uptake has been slowing over the past eight years.
The most plausible explanation of the pause is simply that climate sensitivity was overestimated in the models because of faulty assumptions about net amplification through water-vapor feedback. This will be a topic of heated debate at the political session to rewrite the report in Stockholm, starting on Sept. 23, at which issues other than the actual science of climate change will be at stake.
—Mr. Ridley is the author of "The Rational Optimist" and a member of the British House of Lords.
Here is the third Ridley op-ed. As I searched for this, I noted that many people had written posts, articles etc. suggesting Ridley is wrong. So, not surprisingly, opinions range widely.
By
Matt Ridley
Dec. 18, 2012 6:09 p.m. ET
Forget the Doha climate jamboree that ended earlier this month. The theological discussions in Qatar of the arcana of climate treaties are irrelevant. By far the most important debate about climate change is taking place among scientists, on the issue of climate sensitivity: How much warming will a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide actually produce? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to pronounce its answer to this question in its Fifth Assessment Report next year.
The general public is not privy to the IPCC debate. But I have been speaking to somebody who understands the issues: Nic Lewis. A semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background, Mr. Lewis has made significant contributions to the subject of climate change.
He first collaborated with others to expose major statistical errors in a 2009 study of Antarctic temperatures. In 2011 he discovered that the IPCC had, by an unjustified statistical manipulation, altered the results of a key 2006 paper by Piers Forster of Reading University and Jonathan Gregory of the Met Office (the United Kingdom's national weather service), to vastly increase the small risk that the paper showed of climate sensitivity being high. Mr. Lewis also found that the IPCC had misreported the results of another study, leading to the IPCC issuing an Erratum in 2011.
Mr. Lewis tells me that the latest observational estimates of the effect of aerosols (such as sulfurous particles from coal smoke) find that they have much less cooling effect than thought when the last IPCC report was written. The rate at which the ocean is absorbing greenhouse-gas-induced warming is also now known to be fairly modest. In other words, the two excuses used to explain away the slow, mild warming we have actually experienced—culminating in a standstill in which global temperatures are no higher than they were 16 years ago—no longer work.
In short: We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide. We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models. Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in "radiative forcing" (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.
The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).
This is much lower than the IPCC's current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).
Mr. Lewis is an expert reviewer of the recently leaked draft of the IPCC's WG1 Scientific Report. The IPCC forbids him to quote from it, but he is privy to all the observational best estimates and uncertainty ranges the draft report gives. What he has told me is dynamite.
Given what we know now, there is almost no way that the feared large temperature rise is going to happen. Mr. Lewis comments: "Taking the IPCC scenario that assumes a doubling of CO2, plus the equivalent of another 30% rise from other greenhouse gases by 2100, we are likely to experience a further rise of no more than 1°C."
A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm. It will actually do net good—that much the IPCC scientists have already agreed upon in the last IPCC report. Rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland's ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.
Some of the best recent observationally based research also points to climate sensitivity being about 1.6°C for a doubling of CO2. An impressive study published this year by Magne Aldrin of the Norwegian Computing Center and colleagues gives a most-likely estimate of 1.6°C. Michael Ring and Michael Schlesinger of the University of Illinois, using the most trustworthy temperature record, also estimate 1.6°C.
The big question is this: Will the lead authors of the relevant chapter of the forthcoming IPCC scientific report acknowledge that the best observational evidence no longer supports the IPCC's existing 2°-4.5°C "likely" range for climate sensitivity? Unfortunately, this seems unlikely—given the organization's record of replacing evidence-based policy-making with policy-based evidence-making, as well as the reluctance of academic scientists to accept that what they have been maintaining for many years is wrong.
***
How can there be such disagreement about climate sensitivity if the greenhouse properties of CO2 are well established? Most people assume that the theory of dangerous global warming is built entirely on carbon dioxide. It is not.
There is little dispute among scientists about how much warming CO2 alone can produce, all other things being equal: about 1.1°-1.2°C for a doubling from preindustrial levels. The way warming from CO2 becomes really dangerous is through amplification by positive feedbacks—principally from water vapor and the clouds this vapor produces.
It goes like this: A little warming (from whatever cause) heats up the sea, which makes the air more humid—and water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas. The resulting model-simulated changes in clouds generally increase warming further, so the warming is doubled, trebled or more.
That assumption lies at the heart of every model used by the IPCC, but not even the most zealous climate scientist would claim that this trebling is an established fact. For a start, water vapor may not be increasing. A recent paper from Colorado State University concluded that "we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data." And then, as one Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a senior role in combating climate change admitted to me the other day: "We don't even know the sign" of water vapor's effect—in other words, whether it speeds up or slows down a warming of the atmosphere.
Climate models are known to poorly simulate clouds, and given clouds' very strong effect on the climate system—some types cooling the Earth either by shading it or by transporting heat up and cold down in thunderstorms, and others warming the Earth by blocking outgoing radiation—it remains highly plausible that there is no net positive feedback from water vapor.
If this is indeed the case, then we would have seen about 0.6°C of warming so far, and our observational data would be pointing at about 1.2°C of warming for the end of the century. And this is, to repeat, roughly where we are.
The scientists at the IPCC next year have to choose whether they will admit—contrary to what complex, unverifiable computer models indicate—that the observational evidence now points toward lukewarm temperature change with no net harm. On behalf of all those poor people whose lives are being ruined by high food and energy prices caused by the diversion of corn to biofuel and the subsidizing of renewable energy driven by carboncrats and their crony-capitalist friends, one can only hope the scientists will do so.
Mr. Ridley writes the Mind and Matter column in The Wall Street Journal and has written on climate issues for various publications for 25 years. His family leases land for coal mining in northern England, on a project that will cease in five years.
Willy,
I am sure lots of people disagree with Ridley,, as many of them have staked their careers on declaring it absolutely is going to happen.
I would suspect, as is usually the case, that the final truth will lay somewhere near the middle of the two most reasonable studies.
Thanks for finding and posting these OP EDs. I look forward to seeing if it causes any opinions to change. I hope the lower projections gain enough support that the huge expenditures that are now being undertaken to prevent the calamities hyped in the past, will be curtailed.
Ernie
enjoyed reading everyones comments...Sorry i havent said much...I'm busy working in the garden now so I wont be online as much.
John
Lest you think that the optimism is widespread...
(CNN) -- Your forecast for the next century: Hotter, drier and hungrier, and the chance to turn down the thermostat is slipping away.
That's the latest conclusion from the United Nations, which urged governments to address the "increasingly clear" threats posed by a warming climate before some options are closed off for good. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that taking steps to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions blamed for rising temperatures could buy more time to adjust to a warmer world.
Cutting emissions now "increases the time available for adaptation to a particular level of climate change," the report states. But it adds, "Delaying mitigation actions may reduce options for climate-resilient pathways in the future."
"In many cases, we are not prepared for the climate-related risks that we already face," Vicente Barros, the co-chaiman of the IPCC working group behind the document, said in a statement accompanying the report. "Investments in better preparation can pay dividends both for the present and for the future."
Expert: Sea levels make flooding worse
The summary for policymakers was released Monday morning in Yokohama, Japan. It's the second part of the IPCC's benchmark assessment of climate change, a document released every six years with the input of nearly 1,000 scientists. Without checks on emissions, the impacts of climate change will be more severe, more likely, and possibly irreversible, it concludes.
Monday's report underscores "that we have committed to a certain amount of warming," said Kelly Levin, an energy and climate expert at the U.S.-based World Resources Institute.
"Over the next few decades, we are going to lock ourselves into a climate change commitment that is going to paint a very different world, depending on what we choose today," Levin said. "The choices we make today are going to affect the risks we face through the rest of the century."
As a result, "Adaptation is emerging as central area in climate change research," Levin said. But adaptation -- steps such as building sea walls, conserving water and designing cities for warmer climates -- has its limits, she said.
"The report suggests some options are going to be too resource-intensive or too expensive," she said.
An increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other emissions have driven average temperatures up by about 0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) since 1950, the IPCC says. The first part of its report, released in September, concluded that even a best-case scenario would result in an increase in global average temperatures of 1.6 C; the worst-case scenario estimates a rise of 3.7 degrees Celsius (6.6 Fahrenheit).
The idea that carbon emissions are changing the Earth's climate is politically controversial, but generally accepted as fact by the overwhelming majority of scientists. And as emissions continue to rise, driving up CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, the impacts will be more severe, more likely and possibly irreversible, Monday's report states.
The summary of the full document -- which is more than 1,000 pages -- will be the premiere guide for lawmakers. It breaks down the expected impacts by continent and by categories such as marine life, agriculture and flood risks. And by diving into the specifics of the report, policymakers will be able to see what risks their specific locations face, as well as what adaptation and mitigation techniques could prove fruitful.
"The real highlight is how many impacts there are, how widespread they are and how pervasive they are around the world," said Heather McGray, who studies adaptation at WRI.
In most cases, climate change will exacerbate existing problems, such as the availability of fresh water in sub-Saharan Africa. The authors conclude that glaciers will continue to shrink "almost worldwide," affecting water supplies downstream.
Animals have begun shifting their habitats in response to a warming world, and key crops have been affected already, they wrote. Colder climates may see increases in crop yields from longer growing seasons and milder temperatures, but the negative effects are expected to outweigh the positive, the report states.
"In this report, the finding is the impacts of climate change are already widespread and consequential," McGray said.
The impacts won't be the same for everyone, and as usual, the world's poor are more likely to be hurt.
"Climate-related hazards affect poor people's lives directly through impacts on livelihoods, reductions in crop yields or destruction of homes and indirectly through, for example, increased food prices and food insecurity," the report states. Positive effects on the impoverished "are limited and often indirect."
For those people, the effects "will be catastrophic" unless emissions can be reduced, McGray said.
An increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other emissions have driven average temperatures up by about 0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) since 1950, the IPCC says. The first part of its report, released in September, concluded that even a best-case scenario would result in an increase in global average temperatures of 1.6 C; the worst-case scenario estimates a rise of 3.7 degrees Celsius (6.6 Fahrenheit).
Willy, I am still optimistic. And having been a General Engineering Contractor since 1954, I have come to prefer the precise way Engineers use clear words and numbers to state the facts, as in the preceding paragraph, rather than the Lawyerly way the rest of the CNN article was written. I have had considerable experience with Lawyers, too, So i speak and understand both languages.
That one clearly stated paragraph states that in September the estimated worst case temperature increase was 6.5 times as much as the actual increase, which was a measly 1 degree F. So it is very difficult to call a mistake that big an EDUCATED ESTIMATE .
So, while I am still optimistic that with that small an increase over the past 64 years, that it will not take much of a climate fluctuation or cool spell to reverse that trend, but you are correct that i should not be optimistic that the Government and UN Commission will tone down the spending, as that is how they make their living.
Ernie
This is a long thread!
Willy,
I agree, so please go ahead and start a follow up thread as you did last time.
Ernie
Matt Ridley
March 27, 2014 7:24 p.m. ET
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of climate change. Government representatives are meeting with scientists in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary of the scientists' accounts of storms, droughts and diseases to come. But the actual report, known as AR5-WGII, is less frightening than its predecessor seven years ago.
Read more: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1350831/#ixzz2xZeo82hn
=======================
>> all I have heard since your posting is deafening silence.
I take weekends off, Ernie.
Remember the GMO thread where someone would post a link to an article with a plausible headline, that was full of obvious bias? Just like that.
This one has better-quality hot air and BS - to the point where it might even be substantively right about the "leaked IPCC report. But too many BS-tactics are used for me to take his word for ANYTHING now. I have to read the report. If I were retired, I would say "read papers about the climate models", but I would need to learn a LOT of math.
However, he rests his whole argument on observations up to the current date. That's somewhere between dumb and picking the result by choosing the method. Like proving something is "toxic" by proving that it is "cytotoxic in tissue culture". So skewed as to be a from of deceit.
When major, future, change is being modeled, the whole POINT is that major change is being looked for (determined to be somewhat likely, or nearly certain, or unlikely, also depending on whether you mean the next few decades or 100s of years).
It's not even a "DUHH" argument to say that extrapolating the very first, slight, upward twitch does not "predict" major changes. That's just bogus. Then the question about the author is: wilful deceit, or an agenda? Either way, he invalids himself. And insults his audience, unless he's writing for an audience that would rather hear a predetermined outcome than look for the best-guess truth.
Like the first few drops of rain don't determine whether it will be a shower or a flood.
Falling the first 90 stories off a 100 story building doesn't predict anything but an exhilarating "flying sensation". It would be a "yoga flying" conclusion to extrapolate that just another 10 stories!
Similarly, the theory of AGW includes the possibility of changes to the temperature gradient in the atmosphere, deep ocean circulation, and who-knows-what-all ... until we HAVE so much new climate knowledge that we CAN predict the effect of never-before-experienced changes in greenhouse gasses.
It's such a bogus argument that he discredits himself. Too bad. I would love to know who was leaking what, and what their motives were. I need to to read the whole report and form my own opinion. From his reporting or distortions, caused by leaks and what seems his clear bias, even the IPCC is backing off the initial alarm. Did the scientists also back off due to improved models? Or did the deniers screams back in 2007 (some of which were justified screams!) motivate everyone to become cautious and only sat things that would not get them bad press?
>> I am also looking forward to hearing how the 97% of the Government Scientific Choir change their tune to match the new report.
That's one reason I'm curious to read the whole report. Has there been any change (even gradual evolution) in the science, or is the IPCC (UN Panel) taking a more cautious approach after the 2007 bias (or alleged bias - certainly there were inaccuracies).
Wikipedia is no final authority, but it says:
" The IPCC does not carry out its own original research, nor does it do the work of monitoring climate or related phenomena itself. The IPCC bases its assessment on the published literature, which includes peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed sources.[7]
Thousands of scientists and other experts contribute (on a voluntary basis, without payment from the IPCC)[8] to writing and reviewing reports, which are then reviewed by governments. IPCC reports contain a "Summary for Policymakers", which is subject to line-by-line approval by delegates from all participating governments. Typically this involves the governments of more than 120 countries.[9] "
I'll still read the long OP-ED pieces when I have time, but only as a source of ideas for what kinds of things I should look for in papers WITHOUT obvious bias.
>> That one clearly stated paragraph states that in September the estimated worst case temperature increase was 6.5 times as much as the actual increase, which was a measly 1 degree F. So it is very difficult to call a mistake that big an EDUCATED ESTIMATE .
The estimated numbers like 6.5 degrees are predictions about the future. (They should have said how far into the future they were trying to project). The 1 degree F number was a measurement about the present. It's not a mistake, it's a difference between "already measured" and "predicted for the future".
Willy,
Thanks for posting the review of the IPCC " summary for policymakers". I was surprised there were so few qualifiers. But the more technical body of the report will hopefully be more specific about how the modelling science is coming along.
>> " "Over the next few decades, we are going to lock ourselves into a climate change commitment that is going to paint a very different world, depending on what we choose today," Levin said. "The choices we make today are going to affect the risks we face through the rest of the century.""
That's what I've been thinking since 1980. So, I suppose I will have been proven wrong if we CAN still take actions that will keep the knicker RELatively un-twisted.
>> key crops have been affected already, they wrote. Colder climates may see increases in crop yields from longer growing seasons and milder temperatures, but the negative effects are expected to outweigh the positive, the report states.
That's the impression I had. However, changes in plant disease and pests my affect temperate growing regions negatively (or positively, if plants adapt faster than pests).
The news reports indicate that the just released report is very negative regarding the future. So, it still looks like one's political view might influence one's interpretation. My take on it so far is that Ridley has poor advance data, or wishes to twist facts, or the media are alarmist, or...whatever.
I own a book on evolution by Ridley (The Red Queen), so my experience says he's OK and is a scientist. The apparently huge difference between his articles and my perception of the actual IPCC reports is startling. I tried to read thru the IPCC stuff, but became overwhelmed with the jargon. I will try again later--it's happy hour now, for #%&**&%$$#@ sake.
Here is an observation on how far the average citizen will go to be "helpful" on environmental issues. My neighborhood was offered a new waste disposal service about a year ago. It was significantly cheaper than the one we had AND it offered recycling, which was not an option we had with the then current provider. Most of the neighborhood jumped on it. Last week, the new company discontinued the recycle option as it wasn't well enough supported. Things like this make me say things like "what can we do about it (AGW)?". I understand very well the skepticism; it often includes me. Most forecasters of doom have historically been flat out wrong (Ludd, Malthus, Erlich). Nonetheless, it seems prudent to try and reduce carbon emissions. I don't see it happening. No nukes, no natural gas, no GMOs, no biosolids, no vaccines, no smart meters, no research--let's be afraid of or oppose any technology that might help. I am pessimistic. I hope the IPCC is wrong.
Here's a link to the IPCC website: http://www.ipcc.ch/.
Michael Mann typically writes a letter to the editor following any WSJ AGW commentary, so I'll keep my eye out for that and post it if it happens.
An increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other emissions have driven average temperatures up by about 0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) since 1950, the IPCC says. The first part of its report, released in September, concluded that even a best-case scenario would result in an increase in global average temperatures of 1.6 C; the worst-case scenario estimates a rise of 3.7 degrees Celsius (6.6 Fahrenheit).
The above paragraph was taken verbatim from the CNN article. The 1 degree increase seems to be from impeccable sources. The projections were made in September and after peer review were changed in the December and later reports.
Rick,
How about limiting a couple of posts to discussing the above paragraph, which was from the latest report and was copied verbatim from the report without mixing in the liberal reporters bias.
Just as you read material on this subject as a Scientist wanting to be sure you are correct, i read them as an old contractor preparing to submit a bid, so i lookf for solid facts that i can trust, not at the Devloper or Promoter's Brochure or Projections..
So what i read t is that from 1950, to 2013, all of the Carbon and Freon and other junk that has been dumped into the atomosphere in the last 63 years has resulted in 1 degree of temperature increase, or about two hundreths of 1 degree per year. Since it is pretty obvious with such a small amount of average increase that many of the years must have showed a cooling trend. Or to put it another way, if the report had been taking on almost half of the other years, the report would have shown that the Temperature was stable or declining.
I have said before that Figures do not lie, but Liars can figure, and so i put my trust in the actual figures. I understand that words can be twisted and slanted to support almost anything, but when the basic figures are as simple as this, it becomes more difficult to convince anyone that the distortions are the truth.
So, Fact One, according to the report, admits that they have been wrong about dangerous Global Warming for the entire period of 63 years, But now, to continue to get their grants and budget awards, they need to convince us that suddenly the temperatures are going to rise to dangerous levels. If i was bidding the job, i would base my bid on the actual proven increase and not on some nightmare or fantasy that has no documented basis in reality.
Please limit your reply to this particular post to the relationship of thetemperature of the past 63 years and how it relates to the future conjectured rapid iincrease.
A side note. Anyone that has evrt extrapolated anything for any reason has surely learned that even the slightest error in the beginning rapidly increases as the erroneous information is projected forward. .
Ernie
>> My take on it so far is that Ridley has poor advance data, or wishes to twist facts, or the media are alarmist, or...whatever.
I got cranky about him at first, then came back to about the same point you did: I don't know what the report itself says, whether he is biased or just has some ideas that differ from mine ... in fact now i wonder how well the Executive Summary agrees with the scientists' input!
>> overwhelmed with the jargon
Yeah ... is that deliberate or just they way that in-groups always talk?
>> How about limiting a couple of posts to discussing the above paragraph,
>> with such a small amount of average increase
I've tired to say why I don't think that extrapolating the very earliest visible beginning of a change has any meaning for predicting climate CHANGE, "change" meaning new things happening that are different from the past and even from the very first stages of the climate reacting to being forced out of the old patterns and into finding some new patterns.
If you only extrapolate the past, you've started by assuming that the curves will NOT CHANGE. That's fine for you, if you want to assume that you already know the future without considering all the changed conditions, but please don't ask me to start out by agreeing that climate will not change in any way other than a very slow, very gradual creeping.
I think it likely that changing the CO2 levels as much as we already have (and adding 9 billions tons per year more, every year) will cause CHANGE, meaning new patterns. Not just flat extrapolation of the very first blush of initial trend that was even denied to BE a trend by so many Deniers.
Changed rainfall patterns,
changed air-temperature gradients with altitude and latitude,
changed cloud patterns in who-knows-what directions,
maybe even changed gradients of ocean surface temperature with latitude, which would change EVERYthing (note I did say maybe).
So I have no interest in using the first little twitch of the meter to "extrapolate" 50, 100 or 200 years into the future.
If we don’t reduce carbon emissions by more than anyone thinks we CAN, that kind of curve-changing change is what I mean by climate change, not infinitesimal changes of 0.02 degree per year. If that were all that was going to happen, I would not worry. Farmers and crops could adapt to that kind of "incremental, tiny, lukewarm change" which is not what I mean by "climate change".
P.S. I'm going on vacation for a week, so we don't really need to discuss why I would accept CNN as (apparently) impeccable in your eyes, and everything else including all of the science as "liberal reporters bias".
>> So, Fact One, according to the report, admits that they have been wrong about dangerous Global Warming for the entire period of 63 years,
No, no, no! If the Summary for World leaders is actually saying exactly that, it was written by idiots. More likely, someone with an agenda and few scruples expects to be able to get away with really lame BS to his intended audience.
Maybe in the very first year or two that anyone ever tried to model the entire global climate, there were simplistic ideas like that anywhere other than in newspapers color Sunday supplement. But realistic models expected a period during which the changes would be very hard to see. Then, many models thought there would, or probably would, or might be "tipping points" after which change would be more rapid and the traditional stability of the climate, recovering form extremes and trending towards long-term averages would just CHANGE, and it would chaotic until some new stability established itself, handling the greatly increased CO2 levels, but not necessarily being convenient for humans or crops.
>> But now, to continue to get their grants and budget awards, they need to convince us that suddenly the temperatures are going to rise to dangerous levels.
I forgot that you automatically assume that any scientist must be a liar motivated by salary and grants only.
You may be unaware that researchers GIVE UP the possibility of lucrative salaries and security when they decide to do research all their lives. Even tenure, if non-teaching researchers can get tenure, only means that you can RELY on making much less than industry employees, instead of making much less AND not knowing whether you'll have a job next year or not.
To clarify: since you start by throwing out all scientific opinions, because you already know they are all systematic liars, and consider CNN a Gold Standard by comparison, we aren't in the same conversation at all.
Don't expect me to take seriously or respond to ideas based on that assumption.
If I made a new thread, I would make two: "discussion of political assumptions and propaganda about climate change", and "discussion of the scientific attempt to predict and mitigate AGW".
>> Please limit your reply to this particular post to the relationship of thetemperature of the past 63 years
I'm not interested in straw-man arguments that presuppose nothing will ever happen that has not already happened.
>>
A side note. Anyone that has evrt extrapolated anything for any reason has surely learned that even the slightest error in the beginning rapidly increases as the erroneous information is projected forward. .
Yes, but that shows one blatant error in what you seem to want people to do: straight-line extrapolation. Accepting this paragraph, everything else you've asked me to do would be futile and almost certainly erroneous. I've pointed out that it ALSO guarantees a systematic error: simple extrapolation ASSUMES the weakest form of "Lukie" assumption.
Wait until we get into the (theoretical) rapid-chnage part of the curve, and THEN you would see that extrapolation of that would give predictions even worse than long-term models do. It will still BE theoretical until we go that far ... what I have in the past called "actually fallen OFF the cliff" or "the house has mostly burnt DOWN already" or the ship has sunk up to the gunnels but the mast is still visible".
By the way, in science, "interpolation" is a respected method. If you already have a curve that consistently describes a well-know situation, and you CHANGE NOTHING, then it's valid to INTERpolate between two known points, in the middle of the curve, where you have already established a steady, predictable relationship.
As soon as you EXTRAPolate OFF the end of the curve, a scientist has to acknowledge that now he's assuming unproven ideas, or asserting a theory or a model, that the curve CAN just be extrapolated from the known to the unknown, past to future, ASSUMING that the old relationship continues to be valid OUTside the range where it was observed in the past.
That is exactly what climate CHANGE theories point out is probably NOT going to be true.
You can assume that the last 15 years predicts the next 50 or 100 ... but why assume that? We already know that the conditions are changing hugely in ways that have never been seen before.
On second thought...
This message was edited Apr 2, 2014 12:38 PM
Rick,
You do sound like you very much need a vacation, and i am sorry if i was partly to blame for upsetting you, but in my own defense, many of the things you state that i said or think are not mine. They are YOUR idea of what i was thinking or what you imagine i was thinking or things that you accuse me of thinking or saying.
I will look forward to reading your thoughts and comments when you return.
Kindest regards,
Ernie
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-cooling-real-inconvenient-truth-140500879.html
Three months ago, it snowed in Cairo, Egypt for the first time in 112 years.
2013 was the largest one-year temperature drop ever recorded in the United States.
The extent of the Antarctic sea ice is at record highs.
It’s the Real Inconvenient Truth—right now the world is getting colder. And it’s likely to get even colder for the next 20 years—before a new, stronger cycle of sunspots begins, as they have for eons. They are statistically very, VERY accurate.
But there’s more, and it’s A Sad Truth: there is ample evidence that suggests private scientists and public servants have been manipulating the basic raw data that most everyone relies on to calculate climate change. (This story has great timing as the IPCC–International Panel on Climate Change–just released Part 5 of their most recent major assessment on climate science (even they can’t bring themselves to call it Global Warming anymore).)
There are some investment trends that come out of this new Truth, and some of it is as simple as get long snowmobile makers and get short lawn mowers. One trend is that Global Cooling should bring more seasonality in oil and gas prices, making energy ETF and commodity traders happy.
All of this is part of a new ground-breaking study completed by Unit Economics, an investment think-tank from Boston. They are a non-partisan group with no axe to grind on this issue; like me, they are here to make money for their clients. Show us a trend and we’ll figure out how to profit from it.
In Part I, you’ll understand the big swings in temperature the earth has experienced in the last million years, and the last thousand years, and the last 50 years. In Part II I’ll explain how sunspot activity directly correlates to ALL these temperature changes. And I’ll give you a hot, near-term investment trend to capitalize on this cool idea.
And in Part III, I’ll show you how some original research by Unit Economics has uncovered some disturbing data about the integrity of Global Warming science. And really, all they’re doing is adding to an already big pile.
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
Satellites first started measuring earth’s temperature in 1979. Over the next 20 years, temperatures did rise, by roughly 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9°F). In the 15 years since, that trend has reversed–rendering the total temperature increase since 1979 a mere 0.35°C (0.6°F), well within the range of statistical noise.
The real culprit for climate change is simply—the sun, through a complicated but predictable set of cycles.
Those cycles predicted today’s cooling trend – and they predict it will continue for another two decades and may well lead to the coldest period on earth in the last 1,200 years.
The Earth, the Sun, and the Temperature
The earth’s cycle around the sun stretches and contracts, creating 100,000-year temperature cycles. Our planet also slowly tilts one way and then the other, resulting in 41,000-year temperature cycles.
We know this because scientists have several methods to estimate historic weather, an effort that has produced this general result:
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A few things jump out.
1. The 100,000-year temperature cycles are very apparent – and the current one is peaking.
2. The timeframe of this chart covers ice ages and tropical periods, which means it takes only a small change in global temperatures – only two to four degrees – to separate a very warm world from a very cold one.
3. Through the cycles of the last 800,000 years, the average global temperature is creeping upwards.
4. The magnitude of each cycle seems to be increasing.
Now, this chart should be taken with a grain of salt because the methods we use to conjure these numbers are not perfect. But at least the chart lets us put recent climate changes into historic context – a context that deserves a closer look.
The key takeaway is that the earth has been through some very warm periods and some pretty cold ones. Take the years between 800 and 1200 AD, for example. During these 400 years it was so warm that vineyards spread across central England and bountiful harvests almost doubled Europe’s population.
Then it all changed. By the mid-1300s England’s vineyards were gone and sea ice expanded so much that polar bears crossed to Greenland. This short cold snap was truncated in about 1400, when warmer weather returned for 150 years. Get the idea? Up, then down, then up, then down. And then came the Little Ice Age.
Lasting from 1550 right until 1850, the Little Ice Age froze Austria’s vineyards, forcing parched Austrians to switch from wine to beer. Winter fairs were held on the frozen Thames River for 20 years (you’ve all seen the paintings) and Hudson Bay was littered with ice chunks in mid-summer.
This period of time was so cold it earned the moniker The Dalton Minimum—a reference to the very low number of sunspots then. In the year 1816, storms dumped snow across New England and Quebec in June, lake ice lasted until August in Pennsylvania, and failed crops led to food riots in Britain and France.
So when you get asked, is the world warmer over the last 200 years, since the Industrial Revolution started? Yes, but it has squat to do with industry. That just happens to co-incide with the smallest sunspot activity in “modern” times.
Eventually the world started to warm again. From 1890 to 1934 central Europe barely saw any snow. Another warm spell from 1942 to 1953 had scientists predicting the death of Europe’s glaciers, a forecast invalidated when the world once again cooled.
Here’s some interesting data as we get closer to the present day:
1. Temps continued to fall from 1953 until the mid-1970s – despite rising CO2 levels. This was during the single most industrializing time on earth—and temperatures fell while CO2 levels rose.
2. Another point: if CO2 emissions cause global warming the layer of the atmosphere 5 to 10 km (3-6 miles) above the earth where CO2 interacts with sunlight should be warming more quickly than the earth’s surface. In fact, temperatures at these levels have been unchanged since accurate balloon measurements became available 50 years ago.
3. There has been a large outcry about the decline of Arctic Ice. While Arctic sea ice extent is just above average levels, Arctic sea ice is near record thickness: the volume of ice in the Arctic last fall was 50% higher than 12 months prior, following a very cold summer in 2013 in which temps climbed above freezing only 45 days compared to an average of 90 days.
I bet you didn’t read about that.
4. There’s a lot of ice at the other end of the globe too. In eight of the last ten years global sea ice extent has bested the 30-year average, aided by an Antarctic sheet that in October hit its highest extent since record keeping started in 1979.
5. The Northern Hemisphere had its second, third, and fourth highest snow extents on modern record in 2010, 2011, and 2013. In the United States 2013 brought the largest year-over-year drop in temperature on record and the winter is on track to be labeled the third coldest in 200 years.
Evidence of this cooling is everywhere – even if politicians and the media try to pretend it isn’t. Of course, the media has short memories. Only 40 years ago, in mid-1974 Time magazine ran a cover story entitled “Another Ice Age?” noting a 12% increase in New Hampshire snow cover in 30 years.
Conclusion: over the last 1,200 years the earth has been through several pretty extreme temperature swings. What gives?
The answer lies with the sun. Cold periods coincide with solar minimums, which generally happen every 150 to 200 years. Warm periods coincide with solar maxima, which happen every 700 years or so.
In Part II, you will read about how accurately sunspot activity relates to earth’s temperatures, why the signs are indicating a deep cooling trend for the next 20 years (brrrrrr……), and one near term investment idea in the energy patch that should prosper greatly from this new trend.
I dunno, drobarr. Relying on an investment counselor for guidance on climate?
Drobarr,
That article certainly jibes with what i have seen in my lifetime, which has mostly been spent outdoors feeling both the heat and the cold.
Thanks for finding and posting it,
Ernie