Tom Friedman
interviewed the President about climate change last week, and the conversation was vintage Obama -- rational, calm, grown-up, focused on the possible. Here is what I found to be the key passage:
“The most important thing is to guard against cynicism,” responded the president. “I want to make sure that everybody who’s been watching this program or listening to this interview doesn’t start concluding that, well, we’re all doomed, there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s a lot we can do about it. It’s not going to happen as fast or as smoothly or as elegantly as we like, but, if we are persistent, we will make progress.”
There's that word
persistent again, that Obama uses so often to describe his approach to politics. As to what he has to be persistent about, and where he has to focus, Obama was also clear: public opinion. The key is to convince people that this matters, and the way to do that is to go for the American jugular:
the way to shift public opinion is to really focus in on the fact that if we do nothing our kids are going to be worse off.
Carbon dioxide is an odorless, tasteless, transparent gas that is absolutely mandatory for all life on earth. Change to its current level has no significant effect on climate. Calling it pollution is scientific incompetence. Calling it carbon makes it sound more ominous and distracts from attending to real atmospheric pollutants from coal such as particulates, mercury, NOX and sulfur (as the Chinese are discovering. The US uses precipitators to remove the real pollutants).
ReplyDeleteSearch using keywords AGW unveiled to discover the two drivers that explain measured average global temperatures since before 1900 with 95% correlation and credible values back to 1610.
CO2 change is not one of the drivers.
This is nonsense. Yes, carbon dioxide is essential for life; so is iron, but a sword can still kill you. In fact one of the ways carbon dioxide is vital is as a greenhouse gas; if the planet had no CO2 or methane in the atmosphere the oceans would freeze solid. We all depend on the greenhouse properties of CO2 for our survival. There is absolutely no scientific argument at all about this -- CO2 does influence the climate, and the only question is by how much.
ReplyDeleteIt is also true that over the few thousand years before 1870 the CO2 temperature correlation was weak; but there there wasn't much variation in the CO2 level across that period. For the absolutely clear relationship across the longer time scale, see here: http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/400000yearslarge.gif
The reason competent scientists are worried about CO2 levels is that the industrial burning of fossil fuels has raised them to a level not seen in millions of years. Temperature curves for the past few thousand years are no help in predicting what the really high levels we are creating will to the planet. But the best science we have suggests that it will be very bad.
Look closely at the chart that you linked. It clearly shows that CO2 change occurred after temperature change.
ReplyDeleteI did this comparison 6 years ago at http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/pangburn.html
Monte Hieb shows a graph for the last 600 million years at http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
Paraphrasing Richard Feynman: Regardless of how many experts believe it or how many organizations concur, if it doesn’t agree with observation, it’s wrong.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), some politicians and many others mislead the gullible public by stubbornly continuing to proclaim that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is a primary cause of global warming.
Measurements demonstrate that they are wrong.
CO2 increase from 1800 to 2001 was 89.5 ppmv (parts per million by volume). The atmospheric carbon dioxide level has now (through March, 2014) increased since 2001 by 27.04 ppmv (an amount equal to 30.2% of the increase that took place from 1800 to 2001) (1800, 281.6 ppmv; 2001, 371.13 ppmv; March, 2014, 398.17 ppmv).
The average global temperature trend since 2001 is flat (5 reporting agencies http://endofgw.blogspot.com/). Graphs through 2013 have been added.
That is the observation. No amount of spin can rationalize that the temperature increase to 2001 was caused by a CO2 increase of 89.5 ppmv but that 27.04 ppmv additional CO2 increase had no effect on the average global temperature trend after 2001.
Dr. Roy Spencer shows how the GCMs have failed to predict the average global temperature at http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means/
Before you think cherry picking, examine http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com/ . It considers all measurements since before 1900 and corroborates that CO2 change has no significant influence on climate.
Do you deny that carbon dioxide in the air warms the planet? Because it does. The greenhouse effect is real; you can measure it directly in a laboratory without any need for arguing about climate history. Take a look at Venus and you see how hot a planet can get.
ReplyDeleteAnd since we know, with as close to absolute certainly as anything gets in science, that the greenhouse effect is real, and CO2 in the air makes the planet warmer, doesn't it worry you that the amount of CO2 is rising to levels humans have never experienced? Yes, I know that there are several 19th-century readings, now regularly dismissed, above 300 ppm; but even if most of them are right, 400 ppm is still unprecedented in the Holocene.
It is certainly true that the relationship between temperature and CO2 levels is complicated; it is not a simple matter of 20% more atmospheric CO2 makes the planet 20% warmer. Lots of things affect the climate besides CO2 levels and the two graphs do not track exactly. But CO2 in the ice core graphs does not always lag temperature; look again if you think it does. And with something as complicated as the atmosphere, a correlation as tight as that one is scientifically amazing. You imply that only politicians and the IPCC believe in anthropogenic global warming, but that is not true. The vast majority of scientists in the US and Europe have looked at these graphs and agreed that they show a causal relationship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_of_scientists'_views_on_climate_change
That of course doesn't make it true, but don't trouble us with anti-politician rhetoric. Most scientists accept that human activity is a significant cause of climate change, and they do so for three reasons: 1) the basic science showing that greenhouse gases warm the planet is solid; 2) the correlations in the historical data are close enough to demand a causal link of some kind; and 3) very sophisticated climate models, models of the same class that many scientists rely on in their work, all predict that more CO2 will lead to more warming. To think that this is all politics you pretty much have to think that science as currently practiced is bunk, because science as currently practiced says putting more CO2 in the air will make the planet warmer.
As for the numbers you keep throwing out, they are meaningless because the time scale is too short. Just a glance at any of those graphs shows a large amount of year to year and decade to decade variation. You have to consider the long term. (I looked at that 500-million-year graph, and considering how bad the data that old is, the CO2-temperature correlation looks strong to me.)
My position has never been that a warming climate is certain; read over my posts on climate if you don't believe me. My position is that we are doing a gigantic experiment with the only atmosphere we have. Since there is at least a good chance that the result will be a catastrophe, why would we want to do that?
CO2 in the air contributes to the ‘greenhouse’ effect (I know enough about heat transfer analysis to be certain that those who think there is no greenhouse effect are wrong. I also know that the ‘greenhouse effect’ is not why greenhouses work.). But rational change from the current CO2 level has no significant effect on average global temperature (AGT). That is what the calculations (which have a 95% correlation with measurements since before 1900) determine. The calculated AGTs are credible back to the beginning of regular recording of sunspot numbers (1610). Any assessment prior to that requires proxies for both sunspot numbers and AGT. Proxies exacerbate uncertainty.
ReplyDeletePerhaps some day there will be sufficient credible world wide data. I haven’t attempted to determine anything prior to 1610 and would be suspicious of the accuracy of any attempt for earlier in the Holocene. The larger changes associated with the Milankovitch cycles are another matter.
I included CO2 change as a factor in early variants of the equation. Including it or not made no significant difference in the coefficient of determination, R^2 (also referred to as accuracy). It is a measure of the difference between values calculated using a formula and measurements. The form used allows comparison of the up and down trajectories of calculated and measured. (This corroborates that CO2 change has no significant effect on AGT.)
The lab measurements determined that CO2 absorbs EMR in the wave length range 14-16 microns (compared to the range of significant EMR flux from the planet 5-100 microns). Lab measurements also determined that water vapor absorbs EMR over a much wider wave length range than CO2. The CO2 influence was always tiny and rational change to the current level has no insignificant effect on AGT. Nearly all of the ‘greenhouse effect’ is from water vapor.
The lab measurements can be misleading. They do not include the atmospheric circulation which results from thermalization of some of the absorbed EMR. Thermalization of a molecule results in warming of the surrounding molecules. This atmospheric circulation includes updrafts which glider pilots and soring birds exploit
Excluding Milankovitch cycles, the real regulator of average global temperature on this planet is water. The huge amount of it provides effective thermal capacitance that absolutely prohibits the reported year-to-year AGT changes (I discuss this under ‘ocean oscillations’ at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html). Average global temperature is extremely sensitive to changes to the clouds that result from its condensation. I show that at http://lowaltitudeclouds.blogspot.com/ (Venus has no liquid water and is a lot closer to the sun)
Regarding the Geocraft chart, in the late Ordovician the planet plunged into the Andean/Saharan ice age, and recovered from it. The lowest value on that graph at that time is more than 4 times the current CO2 level and is 1/2 of the expected value.
ReplyDeleteThe “very sophisticated climate models” are worthless for predicting anything more than a week or so in the future. The reasons are given at http://consensusmistakes.blogspot.com/ . This is demonstrated in their epic failure to predict the flat temperature trend since 2001.
The mob think of the vast majority of scientists is addressed at http://www.paulmacrae.com/?p=204 Part of their shortfall is a lack of familiarity with heat transfer analysis and feedback control theory. Many are ignorant and unaware of their ignorance.
This does not mean that I perceive that all current science is bunk. Quite the opposite. But here is the problem. Most of the ‘Climate Scientists’ are actually trained in meteorology. Meteorology is a study of how energy moves around the planet. It has very little to do with change to AGT.
They decided that CO2 was the culprit because they couldn’t think of anything else. They wrote the GCMs completely ignoring the inherent limitation of that type of computer model. They trained the models to go up with CO2 increase and decided that they had figured it out when the model predictions and measurements agreed. But that only worked for 1979-1998. They continued with aerosols trying to extend the correlation. They never got good hind-casting and have exhibited epic failure since before 2001.
Catastrophe is inevitable but it will be from cold and it shouldn’t happen before 2050.