skiskyrock

Warming paused for a decade. CO2 emissions rose during that period. So, too, should have absorption and re-emission. It didn't. Apparently for no good reason - nothing that could be explained. Realclimate discussed it extensively in about 2009. THey had a pause and couldn't explain it. This is not my words. These are serious discussions. The IR absorbance of CO2 is an intrinsic property. It can't decide not to absorb in the mid-IR. The CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs more IR now than it did a decade ago since there is more of it (you do realize that the CO2 levels at Mauna Loa are measured by determining the IR absorbance of an air sample under controlled conditions). As for the 2009 paper, I think you may be refering to Lindzen and Choi which compared top of atmosphere IR to sea surface temperatures. A paper, which to put it mildly, hasn't stood the test of time. Lindzen has described it himself as containing embarrassing mistakes. Over suitably long time periods, CO2 tracks temperature very well. Again, take a look at the Foster and Rhamstorf plot from my last post. If you remove the contributions due to short term climate cvariability, it tracks well even over the last ten years.

I'm dying to hear your opinion on the IR absorbance spectrum bit, please please expand on your comment. Why don’t you expand on the fact that there have been 19 warmer first quarters, while there have never been higher co2 concentrations? If there is a causal relationship between co2 and temps don’t you think it would be a bit warmer than it is? As I have explained (and am getting tired of doing so) CO2 is not the only factor driving climate. We are seeing internal variability (el nino/la Nina) and other forcings (solar cycle, aerosols) superimposed on the increase due to CO2. There is a good article on the Houston chronicle website detailing the effects with respect to el nino. http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2012/04/about-the-lack-of-warming/ There is a great paper by Foster and Rhamsdorf that did multiple regression using solar intensity, aerosols, volcanic eruptions, and el nino/la nina. No models, just regression. They found a residual in the data that was increasing linearly over time, just like CO2, that could not be explained by any of the other factors. And the effect is the same for all five temperature datasets.

I'm dying to hear your opinion on the IR absorbance spectrum bit, please please expand on your comment.

GRL attachment missing from previous post

You just attempted to refute a peer-reviewed paper with an account in a magazine of what our consul in Norway says some fishermen said? This seems rational to you? Bringing an anecdote to a data fight is usually a bad idea. But to address your anecdote; the 1920's were a warm period. CO2 was increasing, but it was probably balanced by manmade sulfur aerosols. At the same time (since CO2 is not the only driver of climate) there was high solar activity and low volcanic activity. There may also have been a contribution from changes weather patterns. But the warming only lasted for a short period (about 15 years). Current sea ice extent has been on a downward trend for over 30 years.

from a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters: We find that the available observations are sufficient to virtually exclude internal variability and self-acceleration as an explanation for the observed long-term trend, clustering, and magnitude of recent sea-ice minima. Instead, the recent retreat is well described by the superposition of an externally forced linear trend and internal variability. For the externally forced trend, we find a physically plausible strong correlation only with increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration. Our results hence show that the observed evolution of Arctic sea-ice extent is consistent with the claim that virtually certainly the impact of an anthropogenic climate change is observable in Arctic sea ice already today. Notz & Marotzke, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L08502, 6 PP., 2012 The attached graphic is worth a thousand words.

While I fully agree that at motivated student could complete an A license in a week, I think you are selling some of the informal instructional aspects short. BSing around a bonfire is an instructional technique with 400000 of history to recommend it. In a formal course you get information, hanging around the dropzone you get perspective. More time at the dropzone= more time watching other people make mistakes, and these are the most comfortable kind to learn from. You get to watch other people land, you get to watch video of other jumps, listen to other students get debriefed, etc. Yes there is an opportunity to get bad information, but that is an important lesson, too. Again, nothing wrong with a 1 week course, but it does eliminate the opportunity for other kinds of learning.

Inasmuch as my text on Radiation Heat Transfer was the product of NASA Engineering, I beg to differ with your assertion that they are inexpert in the field. Anyone who puts forth a model which describes the climate as a single-input single-output (SISO) system is definitively inexpert. Latching onto one factor to the exclusion of all others is characteristic of someone who took a single watered-down "science" course in college and barely passed - someone like Al Gore. Though CO2 is a factor, Global Warming/Climate Change is based on the kind of science that keeps comic books in print. BSBD, Winsor It also appears to keep Science and Nature in print.

Just that alot of green energy places are going belly up. not even the people that are preaching going green are buying green. there is not enough demand for these things or enough advanced technology to make these ventures profitable and sustainable. Oh. When you said things like: it gave me the impression that maybe you didn't read the article carefully and thought this was the government's problem.

Maybe this has been covered before, but it looks like they missed the deadline and didn't get the loan. Not sure what your problem is with that.

I haven't read the actual papaer, but it seems like a poor study to me. The controls are not done correctly; the subject should be asked to look for people holding a ball while holding a ball, for a ball while holding a gun, for a ball while holding a gun, and for a gun while holding a gun. Then the differences would tell you something.

A study from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (a front group created to oppose spending on global warming mitigation) finds that spending on global warming mitigation is a bad idea? If this is stunning, I need to lower my stun threshold.

It is a very serious, top tier medical journal, but after a year of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, and strokes they like to lighten up for Christmas. Part of the fun seems to be the media reporting the Christmas issue as real news.

British Medical Journal Christmas issue ... it's like a April Fools issue.

I guess you missed the part where I said "no long term trend". Currently (last 30 years or so) the solar trend is in the opposite direction from the observed warming. There are dozens, if not hundreds of papers that deal with the effects of sun intensity on climate. In fact, variations in intensity during the solar cycle are one of the lines of evidence for a climate sensitivity of around 3C for a doubling of CO2.

You can't. The left side of the equation is incoming energy. Incoming is defined in the equation as (solar constant) x (1 - albedo) divided by 4 (25 percent of a disc getting energy). For a long time the solar constant was assumed to be constant. We now know it isn't. We've know about variations in solar intensity for the last hundred + years, but the variations are tiny. We have satellite data for the last 35 ears or so which shows no long-term trend that would explain current warming. The satellite data shows a variation between 1360 and 1363 W/M^2, so a calling it a constant is a good approximation.

Any chance you may have swapped bolts or bolt heads at some point? That could make one too tight and one too loose.

I've judged a lot of science fairs, this is the first time I've seen someone's experiment not work, so they accuse Al Gore and Bill Nye of fraud.

yes yes.... the earth is warmer than it used to be. The thing people argue over is the cause. Is it the tons of greenhouse gasses pumped out of cars and factories around the globe? Or is it the larger amount of greenhouse gasses coming out of active volcanoes? Were we (humans) REALLY that last straw? Or is this just another cycle in the warming/cooling trend we can see in historic temperature charts? And as you say... what will be the result? Let's compare the current earth with the experimental control that wasn't exposed to extra CO2 because of humans and we'll see what we can come up with. Oh wait... yeah, I lost that other one... my bad... I was drunk. Total volcanic emissions are less that 1% of human caused emissions. This is backed up with three lines of evidence: 1) we know how much fossil fuel we have burned, and we have good estimates of how much CO2 volcano emit 2) there has been a decrease in atmospheric O2 level consistent with the human fossil fuel use in 1 3) studies of the ratio of stable carbon isotopes indicates that the added CO2 is from fossil organic material, not inorganic carbonates

The pig is just to distract the eye from the fact that they worked three Strawberry Shortcakes into the design.

Gold mining is a toxic nightmare. In the developed world we use cyanide leaching to recover gold for low grade ores, and you get things like the Baia Mare spill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Baia_Mare_cyanide_spill In the developing world, they use mercury to amalgamate the gold, the separate the amalgam and boil off the mercury with a torch to give the metallic gold. This is the largest single use of metallic mercury in the world. Both practices are strongly opposed by environmental groups. Alternatives are used for gold wherever possible in industry. Back in the 80's I was part of a project (Berg GXT) to develop a replacement for gold in electrical contacts. In grad school I developed a catalyst based on gold, and my advisor told me to find another one that doesn't use gold. So I developed one using platinum. He was not amused. In science and engineering, gold is the metal of last resort, used when nothing else will work.

Thank goodness the Minoans, Romans and Vikings got rid of their SUV's...who *knows* where we'd be now! I just looked up the original data for your central "europe" temperatures and I have a couple of points 1) it's central England not central europe, England being an island warmed by the Gulf stream and perhaps not representative of europe as a whole 2) it includes data from the mid 1600's; using 250 years of data unaffected by anthropogenic CO2 will tend to skew the trend a bit 3) CO2 is listed as emissions, only about 50% of CO2 emitted winds up in the atmosphere, so the CO2 values are overstated by a factor of 2 4) the projected warming they show is 7C, which is on the very high end of the projections I've seen. 5) I ran the numbers in Excel... whoever put together that graph claims a .26C increase per century. Since 1946 (this is a cherry pick on the authors part, but I'll let it slide) I calculate it as .23C/ decade. In the last 30 years, the trend is .30C/decade. Clearly something has happened in the recent past, with more warming in the past three decades than in the last three centuries. 6) the author of the graph puts the CO2 on a large scale and the temps (in degrees C) on a small scale to minimize the fact that it has gotten a lot hotter in England recently. A plot from Hadley center that shows this nicely. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/

Thank goodness the Minoans, Romans and Vikings got rid of their SUV's...who *knows* where we'd be now! Ah, nice to see our old friend histo6 make and appearance. I like the red squiggly line. But the fact remains, the data end in 1855 not 1905. You've added the squiggly line to show the mean global temperature anomaly. That anomaly is based on a base period that does not appear in the data you show. To do it properly you'd have to add the difference between the anomaly in 1855 and the current anomaly. But wait; you're using the global anomaly, greenland is in the arctic, A region that is seeing very high temperature anomalies (up to 5C vs a 1971 to 2000 base period) compared to the rest of the globe. So perhaps your 0.6C warming might be a little low.

The data and code for one of the papers is available here: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/data-and-code-for-foster-rahmstorf-2011/#more-4571 feel free to wag away. That's really all I'm asking from the denialists. If it is all fraud, just dig in and publish a peer reviewed paper showing that. Show that the climate of the 20th century can be explained without CO2 as the dominant driving force. Show up at a scientific conference and give a talk. Hell just show up and ask questions. The skeptical science website published a summary of six, count them, six peer reviewed papers that arrive at the same conclusions using differing data and methods. I guess I just have a bias in favor of that sort of bias.

This statement is completely false. There is no tacit assumption. Climatologists look at anthropogenic forcings like: 1) Carbon dioxide 2) Ozone 3) Sulfate aerosols 4) Nitrogen oxides 5) CFC's an HCFC's 6) black carbon/dust 7) land use changes 8) methane and non manmade factors like 1) volcanic sulfates 2) orbital changes 3) changes in sun intensity 4) clouds/water vapor 5) non manmade CO2 6) short term shifts in climate due to AMO, PDO, el Nino/la Nina They haven't just fixated on a single factor; infact they are adding additional factors to the models as fast as computer capacity allows. Having considered a whole range factors, the consensus is that only hypothesis that explains the observed warming is that man made CO2 is driving it. If you want a good summary of recent work in this area I recommend: http://www.skepticalscience.com/a-comprehensive-review-of-the-causes-of-global-warming.html If you only have time for the sound bite, see the attached graphic. Six independent research groups using different techniques and data arrive at the same conclusion, that humans are driving the observed warming.