skiskyrock

In any event It is more data to go over Interestingly the Met Office has a response to the piece cited above: "Today the Mail on Sunday published a story written by David Rose entitled “Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about”. This article includes numerous errors in the reporting of published peer reviewed science undertaken by the Met Office Hadley Centre and for Mr. Rose to suggest that the latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15 years is entirely misleading. Despite the Met Office having spoken to David Rose ahead of the publication of the story, he has chosen to not fully include the answers we gave him to questions around decadal projections produced by the Met Office or his belief that we have seen no warming since 1997." http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/met-office-in-the-media-29-january-2012/

I'm a liberal. I enjoy building and shooting AR-15s. I mostly call them ARs or rifles.

No. Climate scientists have done the math, and they have established how many years are necessary to define a trend (30) and they use this value for trend calculations. Again, three different organizations have taken the climate data, adjusted it to remove instrumental bias, and generated a trend (the raw data used by each groups differs, but there is some overlap). You can claim "institutional bias" but the code used by at least two of these groups is available, and the process is sufficiently simple that a couple of bloggers have been able to replicate the results using their own code. A fourth group composed of climate skeptics has also been able to replicate the results, and that paper is in peer review. In addition to the analysis of temperature data described above, there are two sets of satellite data that also cover the time period in question. The final result is that all five analyses give a 30 year temperature trend that is consistent within the limits of experimental error. In a recent paper, Foster & Rhamsdorf did a multivariate regression on the 30 year data to remove the contributions from the solar cycle, volcanic eruptions, and the el nino/ la nina cycle. The result reveals a steady upward trend (figures 4 & 5 in the link). Interestingly, when you remove the contributions from internal variability, the warming trend for the past 10 years is statistically significant (barely). http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022

Amazing how 10 years of flat temps isn't statistically significant, but 10 years of ice data is incontrovertible proof of warming. We currently have about 30 years of sea ice extent data from satellites. As a general point, if the noise in the sea ice extent data were low enough, you could establish a statistically significant trend over 10 years.

Or other processes overrule the effect, or the absorption bands are already blanketed (believe there was a paper about that), or... Other processes such as? There was a paper in 1900 by Angstrom that indicated the bands were saturated and overlapped with water absorption bands. This experiment was later shown to be faulty. Appeal to authority fail. Feel free to get with Dr. Trenberth about that 'missing heat' that is such a travesty, in his words. It isn't an appeal to authority, it's a citation and observation that the theory has a long track record. Trenberth's comment was not about lack of warming, but about a lack of instrument networks to observe the warming

So if I burn a gigaton of coal, how long would I have to wait for the global temperature to go up so the fire could produce CO2? Lame, and faulty logic, besides. Now we have established that CO2 can be released by processes other than a temperature rise. For CO2 to not affect the earths temperature it would either have to not absorb IR, or the earth would have to not radiate heat into space at the wavelength CO2 absorbs at. Which are you claiming is the case? Note that this was worked out by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. If he is wrong, no one has noticed for while.

How much will it slow it down? Since global temps have been flat for the last 10 years it looks as if the switch to CF light bulbs have already done the trick. due to the amount of noise in the data, 10 years is far to short to evaluate a temperature trend. The difference in trend for the last 10 years and the last 30 years is not statistically significant.

So if I burn a gigaton of coal, how long would I have to wait for the global temperature to go up so the fire could produce CO2?

The causes of the PETM are unclear, but it is associated with the release of around 2800 to 6500 gigatons of carbon. We currently have added 370-670 gigatons to the atmosphere and it is increasing at a rate of 8 gigatons per year. Just because it has happened in the past doesn't mean we should do it again, deliberately.

as a start, implement any 7 from the following list 1. more efficient vehicles − increase fuel economy from 30 to 60 mpg (7.8 to 3.9 L/100 km) for 2 billion vehicles, 2. reduce use of vehicles − improve urban design to reduce miles driven from 10,000 to 5,000 miles (16,000 to 8,000 km) per year for 2 billion vehicles, 3. efficient buildings − reduce energy consumption by 25%, 4. improve efficiency of coal plants from today's 40% to 60%, 5. replace 1,400 GW (gigawatt) of coal power plants with natural gas, 6. capture and store carbon emitted from 800 GW of new coal plants, 7. capture and reuse hydrogen created by No. 6 above, 8. capture and store carbon from coal to syn fuels conversion at 30 million barrels per day (4,800,000 m3/d), 9. displace 700 GW of coal power with nuclear, 10. add 2 million 1 MW wind turbines (50 times current capacity), 11. displace 700 GW of coal with 2,000 GW (peak) solar power (700 times current capacity), 12. produce hydrogen fuel from 4 million 1 MW wind turbines, 13. use biomass to make fuel to displace oil (100 times current capacity), 14. stop de-forestation and re-establish 300 million hectares of new tree plantations, 15. conservation tillage − apply to all crop land (10 times current usage). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_mitigation

No, I don't agree with you. Hansen has a minority opinion on the possibility of a Venus run away, which is an extreme case. He has a long and distinguished career as a climate scientist and his short term predictions are remarkably accurate. AS for the price of gasoline, how about free? When we as a society are willing to give up fossil fuels, even if they were free, because we understand the long term costs to the ecosystem, then we might stand a chance.

That would be significant, *IF* the data hadn't been 'adjusted' over and over and over again. The data are adjusted to give a global average with minimal influence from instrumental bias. Adjustments are improved over time so values may change slightly; this isn't a problem if done consistently Three groups have produced similar trends using different gridding and correction techniques, a fourth (from noted sceptics) is in the peer review process . These trends are supported by independent satellite and bore hole measurements. Like what? changes in the intensity of the sun, changes is the tilt of the earth's axis and the elipticity of it's orbit. Changes in the position of the continents. Changes in ocean currents. Changes in the amount of plant life. Changes in volcanic acitivity. You do realize that the highest CO2 peaks are in the Cambrian (prior to life on land) and Jurrassic periods, don't you? Current CO2 levels are higher than any time since humans evolved. CO2 was in the *thousands* during the historical record. and a good thing, too the sun was probably a good bit dimmer and without the extra CO2 we wouldn't have had liquid water If you think that CO2 *IS* the cause of the current warming, you have to show WHY we didn't have that 'tipping point runaway' during the historical record. You are the only one arguing arguing for a run away. Jim Hansen argues that if we burn all fossil fuels reserves we may go into a Venus runaway situation , but that is a more of a theoretical argument and he is in the minority on the subject. What is likely is that we have pushed the climate to the point where we will see big shifts in ecosystems and mass extinctions. The only comparable event in Earth's history is the Pliocene -Eocene thermal maximum (PETM). Temperatures shot up 6C over 20000 years and triggered extinctions in the oceans and changes land animals. We could see similar temperature shifts in 100-200 years.

Imagine you have two dice. You roll them and record the sum of the rolls. Every once in a while you roll a 12. after each roll I take the dice from you and hold them below the table for a while, then give them back to you. After a while you roll a 12. Looking back at you record you see that recently you have rolled only 8's, 9's 10's and 11's for the last 20 rolls. Would the fact that you have rolled a 12 in the past make you confident that I haven't changed the dice on you? Based on the global temperature data from the National Climate Date Center, 17 of the hottest twenty years on record have occured within the last 20 years (1991-2010). All of them have occured within the last 30 years. If you go back to the paleoclimate record, there are warmer times in the Earth's past, but other forces were operating on the climate then. As far as we can tell, those forces do not explain the current warming. CO2 produces warming of the atmosphere through well understood, basic physics. If you think that CO2 isn't the cause of the current warming, you have to come up with two unknown factors in climate: one that cancels out the CO2 based warming, and another that is responsible for the current warming trend.

Do you have an original source for this? Or are you just relying on what you've heard? Hansen has a different take on the subject: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/distro_Grandfather_70924.pdf

"Each Chevy Volt sold thus far" It's nice when they state how they are being deceptive right up front.

The proposed rules have nothing to do with global warming, they are related to sulfur dioxide emissions and eventually mercury emissions. Other plants have installed scrubbers, but the affected plants have decided that their plants are too old and decrepit (and profitable if they don't have to compete on a level playing field) to be worth retrofitting. If the consequences of shutting down these plants is really as dire as the industry claims, why are they entrusting our energy security to these creaking relics?

Or it might be due to the fact that IPCC first assessment report was published in 1990 and contained data up to that year, and that is the date used as the start date to calculate emission scenarios.

As I read it the cuts are expressed as a % of 1990 levels, not a cut to a % of 1990 levels. China produced about 2 billion metric tons of CO2 in 1990, and they are somewhere around 10 billion tons today (note numbers are ballpark, I don't have the exact numbers). So if they needed to reach a target reduction of 50% based on 1990 levels, they would need to reduce emissions by 1 billion tons, or 10%.

Detailed greybody corrections for the radiation balance in the atmosphere were worked out by Simpson over 80 years ago.

How about this? http://www.alexmeske.com/Essays/globalwarming2.htm Again, the argument is laughably wrong. First, our entire energy output does not go into producing heat. Secondly, the atmosphere does not exist in isolation, it is exchanging heat with land, oceans, and space. So the argument is totally invalid. Really Brent, you should familiarize yourself with the Dunning Kreuger effect before putting too much stock in people who claim to have overturned 150 years of climate science based on what they learned in freshman physics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

He Simple science like this? http://westinstenv.org/sosf/2010/05/30/undraping-the-blackbody-model/ The blackbody argument is laughably wrong. I encountered a variation of this question on a heat transfer final 20 years ago. The blackbody radiation law is fine, the definition of the control volume was incorrect. The argument is also a strawman, since all but the most basic climate models use a greybody model that accounts for deviations from idea blackbody behavior.

You show data for the MWP. You circle the last point on the graph and and exclaim sarcastically "unprecedented warming" but the point you circle is in 1855. When you add the current temperature reference to the graph, as was done in the skeptical science article I linked, you find that the MWP is cooler than the current temperature at that location i.e. it wasn't warmer in the middle ages. Well by all means, please provide the records from that station for the MWP, so we can all see it. again, already provided in the link Plenty more than one site showing the MWP was warmer. As I showed previously, there are 10 published reconstructions that show globally we are now warmer than the MWP. quoting is getting unmanageable at this point I'm not sure what you are arguing with the 800 year lag ... are you saying that the MWP caused the current increase in CO2? or that we have to wait 800 years after the temp goes up before we can emit more CO2 to the atmosphere? Please explain what you think should happened to CO2 and temperatures based on your lag idea. Again the amount of energy deposited in the atmosphere by CO2 is no different than the energy reflected by aerosols. The system doesn't know where energy is coming from, it just responds. That's why the various climate inputs are described as forcings, in W/m^2 regardless of the source, since it is all energy in the end. In the 20th century we put a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere; the temperature went up. No 800 year lag, because CO2 is acting as a forcing. We don't have previous examples of this, since it has never happened before (with the possible exception of the Pliocene-Eocene thermal maximum). The rise due to CO2 is superimposed on a background of internal variability and other forcings so it is not a monotonic increase, but the effect is clear. Hence the IPPC finding that the late 20th century warming is man made. Hansen is not predicting a runaway at 500ppm, just that the climate will transition to a regime that we (humans) haven't experienced before. The fact that CO2 and temperatures were higher in the distant past doesn't mean that we could survive as a species or civilization under those climate conditions.

Please read my previous response about the ice core carefully. The latest point in the Greenland ice core data you present is 1855. The year of our lord eighteen hundred fifty five. The presidency of Franklin Pierce. Pre civil war. Early in the industrial revolution. When you compare the data from a weather station 28KM away from the point the ice cores were taken from, it is obvious that the site is warmer now than in the middle ages. But even if was cooler, it is one site. On an icesheet. up to this point you've been claiming that in the paleoclimate record CO2 lags temperature, so it can't be the cause of warming. Now you are claiming temperatures lag 800 years behind CO2. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. CO2 is both a forcing and a feedback. If the temperature goes up, CO2 is less soluble in water, so atmospheric CO2 rises (causing additional warming along the way). If CO2 is released from fossil fuels, it immediately absorbs infrared and begins forcing a temperature increase. This is based on black body radiation and the absorptivity of CO2 in the infrared( Svante Arrhenius figured this out in 1896). The CO2 doesn't wait 800 years to start absorbing infrared and forcing the climate. And the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo shows that the global temperature reacts quickly to a forcing. I don't claim that, and I'm unaware of any published research that does. Keep supplying the strawmen though... good source of carbon neutral fuel.

Can you tell us when, in the past, any species pumped 30BILLION tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, year after year. So the MWP was due to those damned Vikings and their SUV's? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png The attached plot shows 10 reconstructions that indicate that the mwp is NOT as warm as current conditions. In any case the claim that if anthropogenic CO2 doesn't explain every previous change in the climate it can't explain this one is just deliberate ignorance.

The histo5.png you keep posting... you are aware that the most recent point in the data is 1855? It has gotten warmer in central Greenland since then. Warmer than any point in the record, in fact. http://www.skepticalscience.com/10000-years-warmer.htm