A simple proof that global warming is not man-made

Guest post by Dr David Evans
PDF at sciencespeak.com

Now that ClimateGate has buried the fraudulent hockey stick for good, it is easy to prove that global warming is not man-made: just compare the timing of our carbon dioxide emissions with the timing of global warming.

Human Emissions of Carbon Dioxide

Emissions of carbon dioxide by humans are easy to estimate from our consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas, and production of cement:

Human carbon emissions

Figure 1: Carbon emissions by humans. Source: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.

The vast bulk of human emissions occurred after 1945, during post-WWII industrialization. Half of all human consumption of fossil fuels and cement production has occurred since the mid 1970s.

Temperatures

Global temperature proxies (sediments, boreholes, pollen, oxygen-18, stalagmites, magnesium to calcium ratios, algae, cave formation, etc. over a wide geographical range) show a warming trend starting around 1700, with warming and cooling periods about the trend:

Midieval Warming Period - Loehle Graph

Figure 2: Mean global temperature reconstruction based on 18 non-tree-ring proxies, to 1935. Only 11 proxies cover the period after 1935, dotted line. Sources 1, 2, 3, 4: Dr Craig Loehle, National Council for Air and Stream Improvement.

Global thermometer records are more reliable and precise, but only go back to 1880. They confirm that the warming trend extends back to at least 1880, and show warming and cooling periods of about thirty years in each direction:

Akasofu Graph of last 200 years and IPCC predictions

Figure 3: The global instrumental temperature record to 2000, in the yellow box. Simply draw a trend line through the data. In 2009 we are where the green arrow points. .  Source: Dr Syun Akasofu, International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Compare the Timing

The timing is all wrong for the theory of manmade global warming:

  • Temperature increases started in 1700, and the underlying rate of increase has been roughly steady (though there have been warming and cooling fluctuations around the trend).
  • Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850, and really only took off after 1945.

If human emissions of carbon dioxide caused global warming, then there would be massive and accelerating global warming after 1945 and almost no global warming before 1945. Obviously this is not the case.

Conclusions

  1. There is almost no relationship between human emissions and global temperature, so global warming is not mainly due to human emissions of carbon dioxide.
  2. Something other than human emissions caused the global warming prior to 1850.
  3. The steadiness of the underlying temperature trend since 1700 suggests that whatever caused the warming prior to 1850 is still causing warming, and that the effect of human emissions of carbon dioxide is relatively insignificant.

QED

Notes

  1. This only proves that the recent global warming was not mainly due to human emissions of carbon dioxide. It does not rule out all possible man-made influences, but since the popular debate is overwhelmingly about the role of our carbon dioxide emissions this simplification is justifiable in this context.
  2. Obviously the proxy global temperature in Figure 2 is deadly to the idea of man-made global warming. The alarmists tried to replace Figure 2 with their hockey stick graph, which shows global temperatures falling slightly since 1000 AD then suddenly increasing from 1910. The hockey stick graph does not show the little ice age or the medieval warm period—it reckons that the world was about 0.8°C cooler than present in the medieval period. The hockey stick graph is now firmly established as a fraud:
    • Last week’s Climategate leaks (see here, here, here, and here) include computer code that shows blatant fudging to create the hockey stick shape (see here).(By the way, the leaked documents and emails were carefully selected, which would have taken a considerable time. Hackers quickly grab what they can before being detected, so it probably wasn’t a hack.)
    • Steve McIntyre showed that the original hockey stick graph created by Michael Mann was invalid, based on cherry picked data and biased statistical processing (if you feed stock price data into the software used to create the graph, a hockey stick usually emerges). The US Congress appointed a committee led by Edward Wegman to investigate, and it concluded “Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.”
    • Another hockey stick graph was constructed from tree ring data by Briffa in 1995. When his data was finally divulged in late 2009 after years of denied requests, it was found that his graph essentially relied on one freakish tree in the Yamal peninsula of northern Russia. See here, here, and here.
    • The medieval warm period is real, according to 768 individual scientists from 454 separate research institutions in 42 different countries, and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers see here). Here (on page 9)  is a map of the world showing how much hotter than today it was in many various parts of the world, according to these studies—there are many warmer results (and a very few cooler results), in every continent except Australia (which had no studies).
    • It is easily verifiable that it was a lot colder in the 1700s. Example 1: During the 1700s the Thames River in London would regularly freeze over, and people would hold fairs on the ice—the last time the Thames froze over was 1804. Example 2: There are many reports of it being so cold in Europe in the 1700s that animals in barns would die of cold—which never happens any more. The little ice age is also real.
    • The IPCC prominently displayed the hockey stick in six diagrams in their Third Assessment Report (2001), and the IPCC adopted the hockey stick graph into their logo. Then it was revealed as a fraud by McIntyre and Wegman. The Fourth Assessment Report (2007) omits any reference to the hockey stick graph, and the IPCC dropped the hockey stick graph from their logo.
  3. Now that ClimateGate has proven the hockey stick is a fraud beyond any credibility, perhaps the alarmists will finally have the decency to admit that Figure 2 is as good a picture of the past as we have. The conclusions of the proof above are then obvious and undeniable: human emissions of carbon dioxide are not the main cause of global warming.
  4. To quote the hockey stick graph—and thereby deny the temperature reconstruction in Figure 2, the medieval warm period, and the little ice age—is anti-science fraud. But that’s what the alarmists had to do to prevent the obvious truth of the proof above.
  5. Even without Figure 2, the global thermometer record in Figure 3 is sufficient to cast very considerable doubt on the idea that human emissions of carbon dioxide cause global warming: the temperature rise from 1880 to 1950 is roughly the same as that from 1950 to the present, but the human emissions were very different. In a similar vein, there have been a 29% increase in carbon dioxide emissions since 2000 but satellites show that the global temperature has fallen since then.
  6. Tree rings are easy to use as a temperature proxy, but are unreliable because tree growth varies strongly in response to many factors other than temperature (such as water, carbon dioxide, fertilizer, tree age), because the width of tree ring to temperature is not linear, and because trees adapt genetically to climate changes and change basic properties like size and root-to-shoot ratio. See here (p. 1050). The temperature reconstruction in Figure 2 simply combines all the best non-tree-ring data that is available.
7.8 out of 10 based on 38 ratings

138 comments to A simple proof that global warming is not man-made

  • #
    Mattb

    “Proof”??????

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  • #

    Yes, “proof”. Not in the mathematical sense, but in the legal sense. Proof beyond reasonable doubt.

    So, I take it you’ve got no problem with the reasoning then? Can’t find a flaw?

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  • #
    Mattb

    Well I was wondering what the skeptic handbook is for, if it is this simple.

    Furthermore I think that the choice of a start date of human influence as 1850 is convenient, given that pre 1850 there were changes attributable to other consequences of increasing population: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/agricultural_revolution_01.shtml
    http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/new-paper-changes-in-the-asian-monsoon-climate-during-1700-1850-induced-by-pre-industrial-cultivation-by-takata-et-al-2009/

    ““Between the 1700s and the 1850s, the major anthropogenic disturbance to the climate in Asian Monsoon region was caused by cultivation. There were no marked trends in the concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols between the 1700s and the 1850s”.

    This seminal study should put to rest claims that added well-mixed greenhouse gases are the only first order climate forcing.”

    You should like this one as it is on Pielke Sr’s site…. so on your side, and he is exited as this study shows that the warming pre 1850 was due to human influence other than CO2…. but no claim it was just a natural cycle, rather anthropogenic.

    I guess Jo that years of being a sceptical science type has taught me that when someone tries to counter the weight of peer reviewed science with a back of the envelope “proof”… then they are usually wrong.

    So in summary the flaw in the reasoning is to claim that a lack of GHG emissions pre say 1850 proves that warming is not manmade… and as evidence I offer you a BBC summary (not really up to scratch I admit as it is just journalism), but also a 2009 publication being championed by your own Pielke Sr.

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  • #
    Jeff

    Well MattB,
    At least your consistent, you still believe in IPCC fairy stories.

    Why don’t you visit your alternative blog at Brave Neutered Climax and leave some comment there. At present they are being ‘deniers’ about EA CRU.
    They need some heroes over there. Someone who wears the same brand of blinkers.
    Having just come from Steve McIntyre’s site, I find your one word response to Dr Evan’s post ‘trivial’.

    And MattB, from the EA CRU emails on the death of Australian researcher, John Daly, I find disgusting and disgraceful. Hopefully this is not the kind of response that would come from the true scientific community.

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  • #

    Matt, thanks for the links, but we’re talking about man-made climate change due to carbon.

    See Notes point 1 above. David is a step ahead of you.

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  • #
    Jeff

    G’night MattB,

    As your always asking for peer reviewed sceptic data, a little present for you

    http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html

    You may have to put your money where you keyboard is, hey that’s life.
    Enjoy !

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  • #
    Baa Humbug

    Mattb, you said….”““Between the 1700s and the 1850s, the major anthropogenic disturbance to the climate in Asian Monsoon region was caused by cultivation. There were no marked trends in the concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols between the 1700s and the 1850s”.

    Caused by cultivation ha? So point me in the direction of the billions being spent on mitigating “cultivation” as opposed to cutting CO2. Remember that benign odourless colourless trace gas used as food by plants? Your mates at the IPCC have been pushing (nay, scaremongring) the world into CUTTING CO2, nothing to do with cultivation.

    Until these last couple of weeks, we were the “deniers”. Whos the denier now?

    Spend a little time at the web site of the LATE GREAT AUSTRALIAN JOHN DALY, and educate yourself my friend, lest you make a dill of yourself 🙂

    10

  • #
    J.Hansford

    MattB…. But what caused the Cooling between 1400 and 1600 then Matt?…. Forget that bit? or just failed to acknowledge the whys and wherefores of that particular global Cooling did you?

    For Climate scientists, there are glaring knowledge gaps all round…. Not the sort of expertise I’d be excepting advice on for changing the Australian economy…. Hmmm?

    10

  • #
    Mattb

    Tell you what Jeff I’d like some email spy software the day after James Hansen dies… I invented a word the other week on a blog… “Fauxtrage”. It means the faux-outrage expressed by people when someone is exposed for doing something that is wrong, but we know we’ve done ourselves in the past, so had better go way over the top with our reactions so no one guesses we’ve done it ourselves.

    Sorry Jo, the suggestion is that because it was warming a bit before 1850 then carbon post 1850 can;t be causing any warming. nonsense. But of course, for Jeff, if David gets that published in Nature I’ll gladly eat my hat.

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  • #
    Mattb

    Actually Mr Humbug, these things – ” and ” mean that I was quoting the journal… I didn’t say that at all.

    If you are not aware of the efforts being made to help cultivation be as good a carbon sink as it can be, then maybe you are not qualified to comment on climate change mitigation.

    J.Hansford. I didn’t actually realise the LIA was in dispute by mainstream science. But clearly it had nothing to do with anthropogenic CO2… can you explain what you were asking? It doesn’t really make sense to me. Maybe you should say “Hey look there is a gorilla over there wearing a pink dress… didn;t think about that did you!”

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  • #
    J.Hansford

    MattB… Gorilla? pink dress?… Puleeese. Now c’mon, you are pointing at unicorns…. My point is, AGW Climate science has not explained the mechanism for the cooling in the “little ice age” either…. It seems they can’t do anything right. That’s my point.

    When asked they simply say it’s complicated…. Yup. Very sc-un-tific;-)

    However you have stated that CO2 is clearly not implicated for the cooling… But if there was no change in the CO2 content of the atmosphere, why the change in global temperatures?… By the Logic of the AGW Hypothesis there must have been a reduction of CO2 in order to account for a reduction of Global temps… ‘eh?

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  • #

    Sorry Jo, the suggestion is that because it was warming a bit before 1850 then carbon post 1850 can;t be causing any warming. nonsense.

    Matt – what part of “It’s been warming since long before SUV’s and coal powered plants” don’t you follow? Can you tell us what caused that warming? You can publish your own paper. Maybe you can find a factor that warmed us from 1750 – 1950, then eased off as CO2 took over?

    The IPCC actually says in AR4 that “they’ve ruled out all the other causes and CO2 is what’s left”. Since they argue from ignorance, they can’t afford to “get caught” with periods of history that they can’t explain (like anything from 500 million years ago til 1880 and some of what’s after it).

    But of course, for Jeff, if David gets that published in Nature I’ll gladly eat my hat.

    Mattb, your hat is safe – we aim higher than journals that let in fraudulent articles and won’t correct them.

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  • #

    Mattb,

    I think you are a bit confused. YOUR hypothesis is that global warming is caused by man emitting CO2. It is YOUR responsibility to prove your case IN FULL CONTEXT of geological history AND the physical sciences. All we have to do is come up with ONE counterfactual to destroy your hypothesis. Care to count how many counterfactuals we have presented? Even if you could falsify ALL of our counerfactuals, it still would not constitute proof of your hypothesis. It would just mean we would have to work a little bit harder to poke still one more hole in your hypothesis. Care to look at the ClimateGate files? They poke a hole large enough for the Earth to pass through with room to spare for the Moon besides.

    Like I said, it was never about the science for you nor the AGW alarmist crowd. If you think you are gaining nutrition from drinking all that AGW KoolAid, think again. AGW KoolAid is made up of 100% artificial non-nutritive additives. The only natural part is the water and even it is highly processed. BTW: your *sacred* simulations cannot even begin to deal with the water part of your KoolAid.

    10

  • #
    Grant

    Since they argue from ignorance, they can’t afford to “get caught” with periods of history that they can’t explain (like anything from 500 million years ago til 1880 and some of what’s after it).

    Or the recent cooling that they couldn’t explain which “is a travesty”.

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  • #

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  • #
    dssf

    Matt: “I guess Jo that years of being a sceptical science type has taught me that when someone tries to counter the weight of peer reviewed science with a back of the envelope “proof”… then they are usually wrong.” Never heard of Occam’s razor? In point of fact, quite often the “back-of-the-envelope” (read: simple, elegant solution) is the best explainer of even complex events. As the emails reveal, the CRU researchers — and their cohorts in the USA, NZ and Australia — had to go through all kinds of back-braking gyrations with the data to get those data to agree with their hypotheses. At some point the honest researcher admits that their hypothesis is wrong. Unfortunately, these researchers, and some other “sceptical science type[s]” like yourself, never learned that lesson.

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  • #

    During the late ordovician period 350 mya the CO2 content was 4,400 ppm and yet the world was in the grips of one of the worst ice ages ever. MBH98 (Mann’s hockey stick) has been debunked as well as Briffa’s et al hockey sticks. THe AGW crowd is loathe to release its raw data because they will be exposed as the fraudsters they are and most of the raw data for the CRU was deleted because of a “data storage” problem. How convenient! We now know that data was altered and manipulated to produce the AGWers desired effect. It appears that the Kiwis were fudging their data, as well. All the ice core data shows that temperatures rose hundreds of years before CO2 levels did and CO2 declined hundreds of years after temperatures dropped (no runaway greenhouse effect.) In fact, there is not one shred of empirical evidence to prove that rising CO2 levels cause temperatures to rise. Also, because the effect of CO2 is logarithmic the first 20 ppm has more effect on temperatures than the other 367 ppm combined. The real graph to look at is the one that goes back several hundreds of millions of years. There has never been a correlation between CO2 and temperatures. I do not trust scientists who deride skeptics for their lack of peer review published papers and then conspire to keep them from getting published!

    20

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  • #
    co2isnotevil

    While this doesn’t qualify as a proof, it certainly demonstrates how uncorrelated temperature is to CO2 levels. The burden of proof should be on the AGW believers to explain why a CO2 driven climate, which fits the data worse, is a better model.

    George

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  • #
    co2isnotevil

    Jeff,

    Matt may not accept the peer reviewed climate science you pointed to. As Climategate has recently confirmed, there’s no such think as peer reviewed climate science …

    George

    20

  • #
    Maggie

    I am not a scientist but I am a man-made global warming skeptic. Usually, when I hear people attributing all and sundry to “climate change”, my BS meter begins to tick. As a result of all of this confusion, thanks to the IPCC and the fraudulent reports, we now face a situation where governments are wanting to tax us to pay for something where we have little or no impact. It is crazy.

    Since Climategate erupted I have taken a lot more in the way of notice with regards to the reports that were produced, and the so-called peer review process. I was led to a site that has some articles written for the Wall Street Journal as far back as 1996 about the IPCC report and the peer-review process.

    http://www.congregator.net/articles/majordeception.html

    Now, whilst I cannot attest to the veracity of the site, especially some of its other content, and there is no link to the actual articles that were written, I do think that what is written is interesting, because it throws a real curve-ball at the notion that the peer-review process for the 1996 IPCC report was squeaky clean. It seems that between the time the papers were reviewed and the IPCC report was released there were changes in at least one chapter – and those changes removed the skeptics conclusions. The published version of the report excluded at least these three conclusions:

    # “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.”

    # “No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes.”

    # “Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.”

    It seems that someone with a political agenda within the IPCC removed these passages from the report. Interesting….

    Fred Singer also wrote a report in the Wall Street Journal, in 1997, where he highlighted that it was Bill Clinton who claimed that “The overwhelming balance of evidence and scientific opinion is that it is no longer a theory but now a fact that global warming is real.” and Clinton cites the 2500 scientists who are supposed to have agreed on the subject. If the report was manipulated so that the dissenting opinions were eliminated from the 1996 report, then Bill Clinton and Al Gore were wrong then, just as Al Gore is wrong now.

    Anyway, these articles are very interesting because they do throw into doubt the methodology of the IPCC reports, especially when the published reports were massaged to remove anything that went against the conclusions of a very small panel of scientists. The articles point to the growing scientific dissent as far back as 1996, and Fred Singer mentions that 100 climate scientists signed the Leipzig declaration in 1996 that questioned the computer modeling and the conclusions of the IPCC. Interesting….

    10

  • #
    Jules

    We should change the name of the scam to “Urban Warming”.

    Siphoning off large amounts of money from soon to be impoverished western nations as a penalty for their past production of CO2 will not improve the lives of the poorer countries one jot.

    If you are so misguided as to think improvement will happen, explain why any Australian aborigines live in poverty in third world conditions in 2009? We have been pouring billions in the last 40 years to supposedly improve their lot. Lots of scientists, anthropologist, public servants supervisors etc in nice cushy jobs but aboriginal kids are still dying of diseases unheard of in the rest of the community, and adults years before the rest of us.

    Imagine the size of the bureaucracy the UN will create!

    Climate change and its cohort “global warming” are great rip offs, using excuses believed only by those who need a reality check.

    10

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  • #
    CyberForester

    Time to secede from the Commonwealth.

    10

  • #
    Coolio

    A historic increase of 9.0°C caused a 100 ppmv CO2 increase, as shown in the
    Vostok ice core.
    So the evidence of a modern 0.6°C increase causing another 100 ppmv CO2 fails
    at any whatsoever proof.

    There are only 2 choices:

    a)
    CO2 correlates to temperature, then we should see an actual 23°C global mean
    temperature. -> de facto WRONG.

    b)
    a temperature incline of 0.6°C since 1800 is man-made, then the CO2 must
    definitely be very much lower at an incline of 6.7 ppmv. -> de facto WRONG

    This proves man-made doom theory to be completely WRONG.
    This also proves absolutely NO CORRELATION between CO2 and temperature.
    This proves further, that modern +100 ppmv CO2 doesn’t affect temperature in
    any way.
    This proves further, that the oh so evil industrial revolution is simply a
    spurious argument, only just fitting their imagination.

    The assumed correlation is seemingly an unhappy coincidence, resulting from
    too short and cherrypicked time periods.

    http://sceptics.umweltluege.de/vostok/vostokdata.php

    10

  • #
    Lea

    Proof,David?

    Fig 1 needs to be teamed with a graph of trend in atmospheric CO2 concentration over the same period,as we know that global sinks have responded to anthropogenic increases by absorbing more. Anthro increase of CO2 [and CO2e] after accounting for enhanced sinking is the critical fact.

    Fig 2 is one reconstruction of many;its choice needs to be justified by linking to more than ‘blog “science”‘sites in footnotes. The main question your graphic poses is why were the Vikings so tardy in getting to Greenland,given the best of Loehle’s purported MWP was behind them by 1000AD! Another point is that Loehle reconstructs to 1935,though a good number of his chosen proxies continue past that date. So Loehle ‘hiding an incline’,in his very tentative pecked graft of the modern instrumental record post 1935? As well it is simple misrepresentation to suggest the ‘hockey stick’ does not show the MWP or LIA; they’re both present,just simply in a way that seems insufficiently dramatic to yourself.

    Fig 3..well,if the trend and many details of the modern global temperature record has been ‘proven”fraudulent’ by ‘Climategate’,as many claim,then Akasofu’s effort is useless! The general consensus among those who actually have to base their findings on ALL the palaeo data gathered seems to suggest that global temperature has been trending gently downwards for the last 7000 years,and the LIA coincides with periods of frequent strong tropical vulcanism and groups of weak solar cycles. Akasofu has no idea when we could claim to have ‘finished ‘ a ‘rebound’ from the LIA,given the relative sparsity of major tropical vucanism since 1883,and flat to weakening solar since the 1950s,and the very natural variability that he labels as ‘multi-decadal oscillations’,without even mentioning GHG increase. The IPCC AR4 acknowledges long-term natural variability,but they’re projecting longer-term trends under varying scenarios.

    Conclusions? 1. Logical fail. Both crude indices are trending upwards, insufficient support for your claim. 2. So what? 3.Evidence please.

    Your notes are bunk,for instance note 1. A get-out clause that hints coyly at what? land use changes/waste heat/UHI/it’s the sun?..certainly the title of your piece is not coy. Note 2 is ‘Mann is evil’chanting,plus fatuous claims about animals dying from cold. Note 3 and 4 doesn’t discuss Loehle’s shortcomings,while presenting a false dichotomy.Note 5 claims,while sneakily implying that CO2 rise and the temperature trend should proceed in lockstep,that satellites show that global temperature has fallen since 2000. They show no such thing,as a simple visit to Woodfortrees will demonstrate. Note 6 claims tree rings are ‘easy’ to use as temperature proxies,then goes on to point out that they aren’t easy to use! Go and teach the dendro people how to suck eggs,David! Let’s rush your proof to Copenhagen.

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  • #
    Rod Smith

    @Mattb: A true story.

    I was privy to a “peer review” right under my nose just last month. I had taken a document from the government to my doctor, and commented that that something was amiss here, and that the paper was a bit strange. My doctor is from Taiwan and has degrees from MIT and John Hopkins.

    His peer review went something like this. He looked at the paper, read the key elements under scrutiny, and then pointed to the signature block and said, “Look at that! Signed by a PhD. He doesn’t know anything about this?” That ended the review!

    10

  • #
    David O

    Surely the most interesting aspect of this world-wide exposure is the absence of the Man-Made Global Warming Prophet.
    Where are you Al Gore?
    It’s now time to defend the indefensible.

    10

  • #
    Neil Fisher

    “Another point is that Loehle reconstructs to 1935,though a good number of his chosen proxies continue past that date. So Loehle ‘hiding an incline’,in his very tentative pecked graft of the modern instrumental record post 1935?”

    Not at all – if you bother to check, you’ll find that the proxies stop around 1950 and Loehle stops earlier because of “end point” distortions introduced by low-pass filtering. It’s standard statistical practice – unlike Mann et al who use “padding” of the data to get results up the end of the data. They too use a symetrical filter, so the “future” values they use distort the value and trend of the proxies – change the padding method, change the final values and trend. Loehle’s method does not use any “guessed” data and so does not distort the real trend or end values. This is all explained in Craig’s paper – which you obviously have not read.

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  • #
    kasphar

    What was that correlation again between temp and CO2?
    From 1880 – 1910 there was a CO2 increase of 9ppm which resulted in a 0.15C drop in temp.
    From 1910 -1940 there was a CO2 increase of 10ppm which resulted in an 0.5C increase in temp.
    From 1940 – 1975 there was an increase of around 25ppm which resulted in a drop of 0.1C in temp
    From 1978 – 2008 there was an increase of around 50ppm which resulted in a rise of 0.5C in temp.

    Que?

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  • #

    Now that ClimateGate has buried the fraudulent hockey stick for good,”
    Don’t bury the fraudulent hockey stick, David. It shows who are (0r were) the climate change deniers.

    Mike Mann tried to prove that climate hadn’t changed for 1000 years.

    I am sceptical of anthropogenic climate change. Let the real Climate Change Sceptics please stand up.

    10

  • #

    Wow Lea,that’s the most confused post I’ve seen here.

    Did you even read David’s post? Loehle says there are only 11 proxies after 1935 and they are the dotted line.
    Are you admitting the surface temperature record is fake by attacking Akasofu’s conclusions? You can’t have both ways.

    If you are who I think you are it sounds like the whining of somebody who’s rice bowl is about to be taken away. Let alone yet another demonstration of how second and third raters infest this field which has now been shown to be largely based on fakery.

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  • #
    Ross Brisbane

    Warped viewpoint on graphing. What is the period of spike temperature increases dotted? Why does C02 delay follow upswing post 1940? What does the trend upward of C02 follow increases of temperature? Why is the IPCC prediction not a real graph as a non-related, created and falsified C02 even waveform of increase. Beleivers in AGW well know the wave form is uneven and CHUNKY with El Ninos and La Ninas.

    My personal opinion: I find your web site full of trashy science and denial that smells like as person with obssessive compulsive diroder called CD. Make that OCD. Obssessive Climate Denial.

    Here the shrill to follow……………wait for it. Fellow brotherhoods and sisterhoods of denial.

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  • #

    Ross, tell us what we deny. Name and explain THAT paper.

    Until then Ross Brisbane stands as a bully boy apologist for big bankers.

    We will of course welcome your conversion to the real world when the logic and evidence hits you like a brick and you realize that you’ve been scammed.

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  • #
    Dom

    Whilst your second and third conclusions may be correct, I disagree that this can be regarded as a proof that global warming is not man-made.

    Whilst the other causes of warming (and cooling) that you refer to are unidentified and unmeasured, your logic rests on the assumption that they are still in effect.

    You need to eliminate that assumption before you can call it a proof. Well, not just you, but anyone who tries to prove either the positive or negative case.

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  • #
    Ross Brisbane

    Dear Joane,

    I again out to you yet again and this time in reference to two graphs you have posted:

    1. Fig 1 Is good, sound and accurate.
    2. Fig 2 Is using some trickery in the graph. Why is the temperature increase projections dotted?
    3. Fig 3 Why do you show a false misleading projection graph of the IPCC? There were three projections.
    4. Fig 3 Why do you show a fake even waveformof slight increase?

    Finally why are you are denier at all. Is this this not some politically biased bent of yours.

    I am well aware of the Kangaroo Court happening on the internet concerning the stolen and illegal release of the emails proporting to undermine all data from the UK surface temperatures.

    I am awaiting a proper enquiry on this as YOU should also being such ardent conservative afterall.

    I am well of all conflicting evidence posted on this blogg. You are very choosey and selective at what you post to the untrained novice data miner from the internet.

    The pro and cons demand for a long time here a fair handed treatment. On this blogg no such treatment is afforded.

    You are are denier of the science. This is about not brick throwing.

    Kind Regards,

    Ross Brisbane – DAGW believer.

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    Lea

    Neil @29,I was being facetious,though it seems Dr Loehle’s corrected paper has the problem of aggregating the assumptions made in each handling of proxies by the original studies. As for Mann,padding the end of very long time series isn’t going to affect the trend much; it’s just a visual tease for those hypersensitive to the “future” 😉 There’s a lot-a whole lot-of recons out there,Loehle is barely cited. Yes,yes,of course it’s ‘Team’ suppression…

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Argue and debate all you like about WHY the climate is changing – you all seem to enjoy it a lot and if it keeps you entertained, great.

    But the climate IS changing and that will have consequences more far-reaching, complex and difficult to resolve than this petulant little squabble. Deny that.

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    Coolio

    Rumble Mourdre, nobody denies a climate change.
    But claims like “will have consequences more far-reaching, complex and difficult to resolve” should be banned into realm of fancy.
    None of us is able to see the future, and the only thing that will be sure, is a 50% chance for both sides of a progression.

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    Mike W

    Posted a similar series of questions on the blog earlier and they’re now up on physicsforums.com in this format. No answers as yet. I’m really struggling to find answers on the web, not through lack of trying either I might add! Anyway, here it is….

    I understand that CO2 molecules absorb infrared at 2.7, 4.3 and 15 microns, this makes them become vibrationally excited (rocking, stretching, bending, I don’t know all the modes).

    I have a few questions from this point.

    1. When the CO2 molecule re-emits that energy is it obliged to do so at wavelengths similar to its absorption spectrum; I had assumed so but I don’t know for certain that this is the case despite googling the hell out of it. CO2 does not behave in anyway like a blackbody when it re-radiates, correct?

    2. In a gas, can the vibrational energy be passed from the CO2 molecule to other molecules during collisions, or can it only pass on as radiation? I understand there’s a lattice effect in solids, but I don’t think its relevant in a gas. Can molecular vibration ‘turn into’ translational kinetic energy?

    3. Assuming that the CO2 molecule re-radiates at 2.7, 4.3 and 15 microns, I imagine that H20 may ‘feel’ that radiation at 4.3 microns, but I guess what I’m really asking is, can vibrationally excited CO2 molecules, do work on the rest of the molecules in the gas? Or is the vibrational energy of a CO2 molecule limited to doing work on other CO2 molecules?

    P.S. forgot to mention, the gas isn’t an ideal gas, it’s air.

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    Daniel

    Hahahahaha, a simple proof explains everything ?

    I apologise, i’m not going to get sucked into this argument, as the majority of you all are obviously not climate scientists and have no idea what you’re talking about.

    All the hard work climate scientists have been putting into this for years and years ??

    Try listening to the climate scientists, the people who are actually *paid* to study these effects, the majority of them have an opinion here.

    This is misleading, and obviously ignores a lot of hard science. I could also write up a simple proof that man did not land on the moon. Would you believe me ?

    Try reading some magazines for the general public that are scientific minded, not economically minded, such as many of the readers in this.

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    Lea

    No,Mike @32 Is Loehle a good recon because you like his results? What if they suggest climate sensitivity is higher than best estimates? Why is he uncited? Because of the impregnable Galileo defense?
    Akasofu’s projecting chart depends on the surface temperature record courtesy of GISS and HadCRU. I’m making no claim about the surface temperature record,just pointing out that if some people are claiming that the UEA CRUhack proves that the record is a complete fraud (and many are),how credible is the work of anyone,not just the conspirators, who uses it in some way? In Akasofu’s case, his ‘recovery from the LIA’ will have finished at the end of the 1930s..or will it be earlier? Who knows! Of course he’s used the data in good faith but the IPCC haven’t,and it serves them bloody well right 😉

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    Patrick G

    Mattb said at 29/11/2009 @ 9:23pm

    “Furthermore I think that the choice of a start date of human influence as 1850 is convenient, given that pre 1850 there were changes attributable to other consequences of increasing population”

    Given that the major European powers all started transitioning to CO2 producing industries at around this time, I think it can probably be seen as a suitable arbitrary point to start the comparison. Not all European powers adopted technologies such as steam power at the same time (or as early) as England did. Your BBC link is somewhat useful in support of your point, but only if you contend that England was the only European country in the 19th century (clearly NOT the case).

    “So in summary the flaw in the reasoning is to claim that a lack of GHG emissions pre say 1850 proves that warming is not manmade”

    You appear to have been reading a different post to me. I can see nowhere in David Evans’ post where he makes this conclusion. As Jo has pointed out, David does not rule out (in Note 1) that pre-1850 warming may be attributable to agriculture/land use changes. You may need to read David’s conclusions again.

    What David IS saying, firstly, is that pre-1850 warming was not caused by human CO2 EMISSIONS as these were practically non-existent (but he is leaving open the possibility of land use changes) and, secondly, that the underlying trend from 1700 to 1850 is matched in rate of change by the trend from 1850 to the present day. David is saying that CO2 emissions appear to have had no measurable effect on the rate of change of temperature from 1700 to the present day.

    This is quite interesting, inasmuch as we know that CO2 emissions supposedly have greater *relative* temperature forcing abilities at lower concentrations than at higher concentrations (i.e. a rise from 100ppm to 200ppm has greater effect than an increase from 300ppm to 400ppm). So the *initial* rise in CO2 concentrations from pre-industrial levels should have produced the most disruption to the temperature trend – yet it did not.

    Mattb said 29/11/2009 @ 11:33pm

    “Sorry Jo, the suggestion is that because it was warming a bit before 1850 then carbon post 1850 can;t be causing any warming. nonsense”

    Again, you do not appear to have read the post by David Evans. I refer you to conclusion 3

    “3.The steadiness of the underlying temperature trend since 1700 suggests that whatever caused the warming prior to 1850 is still causing warming, and that the effect of human emissions of carbon dioxide is relatively insignificant.”

    What is it about this conclusion that you cannot understand? David is saying that, despite increasing CO2 emissions, the rate of change of trend from 1700 to the present day (i.e. the slope of the line) has not been significantly affected.

    Lea said 30/11/2009 @ 10:41am

    “Fig 1 needs to be teamed with a graph of trend in atmospheric CO2 concentration over the same period,as we know that global sinks have responded to anthropogenic increases by absorbing more. Anthro increase of CO2 [and CO2e] after accounting for enhanced sinking is the critical fact.”

    The global sinks, large as they were in the early industrial period, did not prevent a rise in global CO2 concentrations from pre-industrial levels (i.e. 1700s) of approx. 275ppm to levels of 300ppm by the turn of the 19th century. Despite this rise in CO2 concentrations, there was no discernible effect on the rate of change of temperature. David’s “proof” still seems to stand.

    A quick search for historical reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 concentrations turned up this page. If you wish for an overlay, here it is.

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    Patrick G

    Link didn’t post for some reason.

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    Patrick G

    Having some trouble posting the link in my first post

    http://www.esr.org/outreach/climate_change/mans_impact/man1.html

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    Rumble Mourdre

    “nobody denies a climate change”
    Oh yes they do.

    “Among the public as a whole 41 per cent agrees that it is established that climate change is largely man-made. Tory voters are more dubious, at 38 per cent, than Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters (at 45 and 47 per cent). A third of the public (32 per cent) agree that climate change is happening but believes it has not yet been proven to be largely man-made, while 8 per cent think that the view that climate change is man-made is environmentalist propaganda. Fifteen per cent believe that climate change is not happening.
    http://skipper59.blogspot.com/2009/11/climate-change-denial-cause-for-real.html

    Or at least they sneakily hint at it:
    Senator Nick Minchin, Four Corners:
    “For the extreme Left it provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, to sort of deindustrialise the Western world. You know the collapse of communism was a disaster for the Left, and … they embraced environmentalism as their new religion.”

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Here’s more of Minchin’s evil scientific plot to overthrow what’s left of the global economy after the finance industry couldn’t quite stuff it entirely: I invite you all to read it – really, read it: if you think this issue is important, just take the time to read it,

    http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.org/

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    Patrick G

    @ Rumble Mourdre at 9:22pm

    The adoption of the term climate change seems to have largely supplanted the term “global warming”. This has caused more than a little bit of confusion amongst the public.

    For the 41 per cent who claim that climate change is man-made – what would happen if you were to challenge them with “So what caused the last Ice Age then?” – What do you think their response would be?

    I mean, that’s climate change too…

    Climate change has been an innate part of Earth’s history since there’s been a climate TO change.

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Global warming is what is happening now. From what we can read of the planet’s history, that signals instability in the starem. Tt may continue warming for a while then suddenly swing back into an Ice age. History shows that this can happen within just a few decades. What you don’t want to happen is the destablising – that’s climate change.
    The sea fell and rose 120 metres in the last big instablity just 23,000 to 15,000 years ago. I wouldnl’t like to live through that. Goodbye Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, New York, London . . .
    Hey but if you want reject the vast majority of world science and take a gamble on Ian Plmier, be my guest – it’s a free planet. Plimer says climate change is good for us, hmmmm. I don;’t think I’m prepared to take the chance on asking my children to let me be the judge of that.

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    Dom

    @Patrick G

    “What is it about this conclusion that you cannot understand? David is saying that, despite increasing CO2 emissions, the rate of change of trend from 1700 to the present day (i.e. the slope of the line) has not been significantly affected.”

    You can’t make this conclusion (and thus the proof) unless you know what the slope of the line would have been without industrial emissions. How is this known? The data doesn’t seem to be present, so this is unacceptable as a “simple proof that global warming is not manmade”.

    If you can make a climate proof by assuming that all the natural factors influencing climate have or will remain constant, when we can see from the historical record above that temperature varies significantly without industrial emissions, then you have significantly lowered the bar for scientific climate proofs, for all sides.

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    Jeff

    co2isnotevil,
    I know that peer review is usually referred to as the ‘old boys club’, but as our mate MattB has always belched up “peer review” whenever I post anything, I thought it was relevant to post that list of 450 peer reviewed dissident scientists works.
    MattB thinks peer review is a sign of legitimacy in climate science, with everything else illegitimate. Most times I just read the post and smile, “MattyBuckels is at it again”.
    – Sigh –

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    Patrick G

    Dom, I understand what you’re saying, but CO2 emissions did ramp up very sharply in the late 19th century. Surely this would have had some effect on the rate of change of temperature? The only conclusion that I can draw from an unchanged rate of temperature change is that the pre-industrial climate forcings that David refers to disappeared AT THE SAME TIME that CO2 emissions ramped up. How plausible is this?

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    Mattb

    Patrick G please read:

    “Note 1) This only proves that the recent global warming was not mainly due to human emissions of carbon dioxide. It does not rule out all possible man-made influences, but since the popular debate is overwhelmingly about the role of our carbon dioxide emissions this simplification is justifiable in this context.”

    I’m sorry but this does not translate to your interpretation: “As Jo has pointed out, David does not rule out (in Note 1) that pre-1850 warming may be attributable to agriculture/land use changes. You may need to read David’s conclusions again.” sorry, Note 1 is clearly about recent global warming.

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    Jeff

    Just a little bit of history to throw into the ring.
    In Nov.1791, Governor Arthur Philip reported that the Tank Stream (a major water supply for the Sydney colony)had stopped flowing for some months. It did not flow again until 1794.
    The colony was in a severe drought at the time, after a few years, there was another drought started in around 1807.

    From a reference, Amateur Meteorological Society (Nichols, Bull)

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    Dom

    @Patrick G:

    I’m not saying the conclusion is wrong, nor unlikely, I’m saying it is not the proof it claims to be. The title of this blog post is inaccurate.

    I’m not qualified to guess how plausible it is, or how synchronised the events would have to be. Certainly I do know that many strange events happen and assumptions are dangerous.

    I’m just saying that David is ruling out one variable factor without quantifying the others, which are significant and proven to be variable, and then calling it a proof. If that’s the standard science is now accepting, then I’m not happy with that. I don’t think my standards are particularly high.

    Who here accepts this as a proof? If so, would you accept a proof based on a similar assumption (ruling out one variable without quantifying the others) from the IPCC?

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    Mattb

    Patrick in 32… no CO2 levels did not ramp up very sharply in the late 19th century (see figure 1). They were a trickle relative to the concentrations of the time. As Dr Evans tells us more than half our emissions have been since 1970.

    Also the industrial revolution came at a time when most of Europe (for examples) agricultural land use had already taken place… so the rate of change due to land use dropped I guess, and rate of change from CO2 increased.

    As David Evans well knows, there are quite comprehensive modelling programs that show the effect of land use change on emissions, I wonder if he could estimate the impact of the agricultural changes globally in the period 1700-1850, and see if they could explain the slope in figure 3?

    And Jeff do you have a cite for “peer review is usually referred to as the ‘old boys club’”?

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    Mattb

    Dom didn’t you read post #2 ” “proof”. Not in the mathematical sense, but in the legal sense.”

    Apparently it is the legal side of things that determines science nowadays.

    I note my 1st post has been voted down so many times it has been auto-censored:) funny – I’ve broken new ground there!

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    Patrick G

    @ Dom

    Yes I am in agreement with your assessment that it is dangerous to rule out one variable without quantifying the others.

    But isn’t it equally as dangerous for the IPCC to forward a proof based on one variable without quantifying the others?

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    Patrick G

    @ Mattb

    Figure 1 in David’s post is NOT a graph of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

    CO2 concentrations appear to have risen from pre-industrial levels of approx. 275ppm circa 1850 to 300ppm circa 1900. That’s still a rise.

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    Dom

    @Patrick G:

    I think it is dangerous for anyone to do so, I hope I didn’t give the impression that the standard should vary or that anyone should lower themselves to another level. I would encourage taking it up with them.

    However, my comments on this post are about, well, this post. Let’s stay on topic.

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    Mattb

    Patrick in 59 – I know it is not an image of atmospheric concentrations – I certainly didn’t say it was… it is an image of emissions – but it is pretty clear there is no major spike in emissions in the late 1800s, especially when compared to the concentration that was in the atmosphere at the time (pre industrial levels). Figure 1 clearly shows there is no major spike in emissions – but it has to be relative to existing concentrations (which I refer to and assume as a given at the level of this blog at least).

    275 to 300 is a rise…. but you said “ramped up”…. 10% is not “ramped up”… and given the sensitivity is 1 degree per doubling, or 2-3 with feedbacks, then a 10% increase would not have a particularly impressive impact on temps as you suggest in #52 (sorry I said #32 above).

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    Jeff

    Aah MattB,
    Do I really have to find citation for that? Not at midnight. How about a good example of how it can be corrupted:
    On Michael Mann:
    He is now the Lead Author of the `Observed Climate Variability and Change’ chapter of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR-2000), and a contributing author on several other chapters of that report. The Technical Summary of the report, echoing Mann’s paper, said: “The 1990s are likely to have been the warmest decade of the millennium, and 1998 is likely to have been the warmest year.”

    Mann is also now on the editorial board of the `Journal of Climate’ and was a guest editor for a special issue of `Climatic Change’. He is also a `referee’ for the journals Nature, Science, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, JGR-Oceans, JGR-Atmospheres, Paleo oceanography, Eos, International Journal of Climatology, and NSF, NOAA, and DOE grant programs. (In the `peer review’ system of science, the role of anonymous referee confers the power to reject papers that are deemed, in the opinion of the referee, not to meet scientific standards).

    He was appointed as a `Scientific Adviser’ to the U.S. Government (White House OSTP) on climate change issues.

    Mann lists his `popular media exposure’ as including – “CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, CNN headline news, BBC, NPR, PBS (NOVA/FRONTLINE), WCBS, Time, Newsweek, Life, US News & World Report, Economist, Scientific American, Science News, Science, Rolling Stone, Popular Science, USA Today, New York Times, New York Times (Science Times), Washington Post, Boston Globe, London Times, Irish Times, AP, UPI, Reuters, and numerous other television/print media”
    EA CRU docos should show him as an impartial referee for peer review on any “sceptical” climate studies.
    Text in italics from John Daly’s “Still Waiting for Greenhouse” site.

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    Mattb

    Jeff – I was just winding you up;)

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    co2isnotevil

    Mike,

    The energy absorbed by CO2 may be re-emitted at the same frequency, a different frequency, or be transferred to other molecules via collisions. Most of the energy that CO2 absorbs is transferred to other molecules in the atmosphere, otherwise, the atmosphere wouldn’t heat up and GHG wouldn’t be a factor at all.

    It also seems that a single 15u photon has enough energy to increase the temperature of one CO2 molecule by 100’s of degrees C. This is largely why the Venusian atmosphere is so hot, since it’s mostly hot CO2 and there are few other gases to share the energy with.

    The absorption spectrum is more complex than 3 fat lines and is really many thousands of overlapping narrow lines. The probabilities regarding how absorbed energy is released depends on the line, which in coarse terms is known as the partition function.

    George

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    co2isnotevil

    There’s a lot of noise that this isn’t a proof. While I certainly agree that it doesn’t rise to the level of a formal proof, it raises a contradiction to AGW that can’t be brushed off and is expressed in a way that even simple minds can grasp. It’s more of a negative proof that the AGW hypothesis is flawed and not a proof of something else.

    The problem is that a real proof, that is, a derivation of the climate sensitivity, is too complex for most to understand. If you want a real proof, look at the Lindzen Choi paper which uses satellite data which measures the Earth’s energy balance to prove that the climate sensitivity is low (<1C for doubling CO2) and that the net feedback acting on the system is strongly negative. This paper also shows that the atmosphere responds according to the Stefan-Boltzmann Law (not theory, not hypothesis, but law).

    Another proof is here, http://www.palisad.com/co2/eb/eb.html, which uses weather satellite data supplied by GISS to show the same things. but in a completely different way. This quantifies the sensitivity as 1.6 +/- 15% (energy/energy), which represents about 0.7C for doubling CO2. BTW, climate sensitivity only makes sense as a ratio of energy to energy and not as a ratio of temperature to energy. The reason is that power/energy is proportional to temperature raised to the 4’th power, i.e. Stefan-Boltzmann Law.

    George

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    co2isnotevil

    Rumble,

    As you pointed out, the climate has changed dramatically in the past, but warming or cooling is not the signal of a pending catastrophic change or instability. If anything, climate change is a measure of stability as dictated by Conservation of Energy. If the planet is too warm, relative to received energy, it cools. If it’s too hot relative to the received energy, the planet cools. This is how it’s supposed to work, what’s the problem? BTW, the greenhouse effect doesn’t negate COE as many AGW’ers seem to think.

    If you take the time to understand the physics, you will see that the Law of Conservation of Energy and the Stefan-Boltzmann Law are mutually exclusive with AGW. I choose to believe in the physical laws, rather than in the speculative conclusions driven by pro AGW agendas.

    Your concern about passing this on to the next generation tells me that you’ve bought in to the fear mongering. Fear mongering is a technique used when an agenda can’t stand on it’s own merits. It plays on emotion, rather than logic, to drive a favorable outcome. It’s very important to take a critical look at the tactics used to support AGW. The fear mongering is obvious and on it’s own should raise suspicion. Climategate has revealed that other tactics include denigrating those with opposing viewpoints, fudging data and colluding to avoid FOI requests. All of this should raise a red flag for any thinking person.

    George

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    Dom

    Hi George

    I enjoy your contributions.

    I’m glad you agree with me that this blog post is not a proof. It’s important that anything posing as such is called for what it is. This is an important issue, and science must strive to remain science, even in the shadow of ClimateGate.

    I’m inclined to agree with your point that this post is meant to appeal to simple minds, but I would be afraid of offending anyone. As you say, we should avoid denigrating those with opposing viewpoints, let alone those with shared ones.

    Cheers

    Dom

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    co2isnotevil

    Dom,

    Putting this into terms that simple minds can grasp is the hardest part. If this wasn’t so hard, there wouldn’t be so many people who believe that AGW is a threat. The ‘sky is falling’ arguments from the AGW believers hit enough emotional triggers to override logic, so from the AGW skeptic side, we need more simple arguments like this to overcome irrational fears.

    There’s a lot of noise from the AGW camp that the climate is very complex. This isn’t entirely true. At its core, the science is very simple and unambiguous – Conservation of Energy. The complexity is at the boundary between too much and too little energy, relative to the steady state – weather. In the final analysis, any difference between Ein and Eout is energy that is either going in to or leaving the Earth’s thermal mass, causing its temperature to increase or decrease, thereby adjusting Eout to match Ein.

    To put the complexity in perspective, the physics of a gasoline engine is about as complex as the climate relative to a fluid dynamic model of the combustion cylinder. However, the high level operation of the engine is so easy to grasp, that the gasoline engine was invented before the fluid dynamic considerations of combustion were even considered relevant.

    George

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    Mike W

    George to the rescue, thanks mate, that’s the closest thing I’ve had to a straight answer. Answers beget more questions of course.

    Most discussions of heat transfer in the atmosphere with regard to CO2 seem to treat it soley in terms of radiative transfer, that’s an incomplete treatment, right?

    So we’ve got a situation where some of the absorbed energy is radiated, and some of the energy is distributed through collisions with other molecules?

    What little I’ve been able to find about infrared emission spectrums still seems to suggest that emission occurs at or near the absorption wavelengths, still a sticking point for me until I can find more detailed information.

    With regard to the energy distributed through collisions, is there a model or something I could read that describes the transformation of molecular vibration into translational kinetic energy.

    Ok, so now we’ve got 380 ppm CO2 trying to heat up, or raise the average kinetic energy of the remaining 999,620 ppm. And this where my knowledge of things like molar weight and specific heat start to leave me a bit short, but i’ll get onto it.

    Can you suggest where I could find more information, I’m not finding too much.

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    Dom

    Hi George

    I haven’t heard it explained in terms of CoE before. I’m happy to claim to have a simple mind. There’s certainly a lot of crap flying around, from all sides, mind you.

    My rusty high school physics nags me now to think about about CoE and whether the Earth is a closed system. Surely not, as we receive almost all our surface energy from the Sun. The greenhouse gas effect means that we retain a certain bonus level of heat. NewScientist tells me that if we all painted our roofs white, we could adjust this effect. I’m not so sure about that, but at some very large level of reflection it sounds plausible. Ein doesn’t vary too much in the long run, Eout has to keep up.

    Over time, much of the Sun’s energy (Ein) has ended up as oil and coal rather than being reflected out. We are burning it in a much shorter timeframe. Will that make a difference, and over what time scale? I’m not sure. You say that it is simple and unambiguous, though, which is heartening.

    Certain of the AGW arguments make sense, as do many scientific theories (eg – Evolution). Observations don’t seem to back up the predictions though. There’s no evidence in my neighbourhood of any new or improved species, although there’s some wacky looking poodles. There’s also no obvious evidence of warming, just some bad weather from time to time – poodles, if you will. Mind you, I’m OK with the evolution stuff.

    I have heard that the Earth was for long periods significantly hotter and colder than now. I’m not sure how long the CoE seesaw takes to right itself. If you are sure about this, I envy you.

    Cheers

    Dom

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    Mike W

    Before someone picks me up on it, I know there’s other GHG besides the 380 ppm CO2.

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    co2isnotevil

    Mike,

    Here is a plot of the atmospheres transmittance.

    http://www.palisad.com/co2/absorb.gif

    The gray line is the average distribution of energy emitted by the Earth, as seen from space. The multi-colored line is the atmospheres average transmittance, where each color represents a different gas. When multiple gases contribute to the same wavelength, the color represents the gas with the largest contribution. You might notice some energy in the 15u band while the average surface to space transmittance is 1. The transmittance between cloud tops and space is less than one owing to lower H2O concentrations (nearly 0) and fewer CO2 molecules. The grey line accounts for surface and clouds and was calculated (along with the absorption spectrum) from the latest HITRAN data. If you google HITRAN, that should point you to some good references for how atmospheric absorption works. This is another good link, nit.colorado.edu/atoc5560/week4.pdf

    On issues of core science, wikipedia is a good source, however, be warned that their editorial staff inappropriately biases subjective and controversial issues. For example, they bias climate related science towards AGW, in much the same was as RC censors posts from AGW skeptics.

    George

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    co2isnotevil

    Dom,

    The Earth is a closed system. Energy comes in from the Sun and leaves through the atmosphere, via radiation. Energy is rearranged by collisions, but the energy leaving the Earth is the BB radiation from the surface and cloud tops that passes through the transparent regions of the atmosphere. Comets, asteroids and internal heat are the only real outside influences of the solar energy in, equals the radiated energy out, balance.

    The greenhouse effect means that energy that was emitted by the surface is delayed from leaving the planet. It eventually leaves, but needs to be transferred to another gas molecule, that then transfer it’s energy to the surface, which then re-radiates it as a component of its Plank spectrum of photons, corresponding to the surface temperature, some of which ends up passing through transparent portions of the atmosphere and leaves the planet. This may take many hours per pass, but if the Sun were to stop shining, all of the energy currently retained by the atmosphere would disappear within a matter of days.

    Only a small fraction of the incident energy ends up as fossil fuels, however a larger amount does sequester away carbon as biomass, as algae (at the base of the food chain) consumes CO2, water and energy and is eaten and/or dies, ultimately sequestering this carbon in ocean sediments, which if near a subduction zone, will eventually become fossil fuels.

    The time constant for how fast the COE seasaw operates is about 2 months. The physical manifestation of this is is the approximately 2 month lag between max/min energy at the solstice and max/min seasonal temperatures.

    BTW, Labradoodles, Cockadoodles, Wackadoodles and other funny looking poodles should theoretically improve the gene pool, as poodles are one of the smarter breeds. Genetic engineering is really only speeding up natural selection, except that we control the selection criteria.

    George

    [ George, again, an excellent summary. Your indepth familiarity with the physics shines through. — JN]

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    Wayne

    Anyone who’s silly enough to think that climate change and global warming are are man made, please go to http://www.drroyspencer.com very soon.

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    Neil Fisher

    Lea:”As for Mann,padding the end of very long time series isn’t going to affect the trend much;”

    Not the linear regression trend, no; it does, however, make a BIG difference the the final part of the graph – depending on the padding method you choose, you can make a straight line, an uptick, or a downtick. Mann chose one that makes an uptick and left the whole line the same, while Leohle chose to show the data as dotted, which indicates a change in methodology. IMO Leohle’s method is more honest and upfront about what the graph actually shows. Think about it – if Mann’s graph showed a downtick at the end, wouldn’t there be some rather pointed questions from the politicos?
    In case you are unaware of it, Leohle actually posted a draft of his paper at Steve McIntyre’s CA blog, where it was critiqued and significantly improved thanks to many of the regular posters there such as bender, RyanO, JeanS etc – these are people who, in some cases, are professors and teach stats. AFAIK, no-one has managed to find a methodological flaw in Leohle’s work – unlike Mann’s work. Meanwhile Mann et al, while saying they are not statisticians, ignore those who are; then they claim that as climate specialists they should be listened to on climate. I’d like to know why they do not apply the same logic to stats.

    IMO, we need the climate equivalent of medicines epidemiology – ie, people highly trained in stats, and with basic to moderate training/experience in climate. Oddly enough, Steve McIntyre, despite fitting this bill to a tee, is regularly ignored and even denigrated for his efforts. The climate community in general, and Mann in particular, should be doing as Leohle did and use this resource for the benefit of science and the accuracy of their papers, instead of wasting time and energy trying to debunk him. SM has offered this to several climate researchers, and has been consistently refused. You’d have to wonder why – here is someone who finds errors offering to help you make a paper better, so why would you refuse the help? Because you don’t like him? Because he embarassed you or your colleges? Pretty petty and unscientific, don’t you think?

    [ Very well said Neil. Thanks. I hope you don’t mind me bolding a few bits. — JN]

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    Jeff

    Aah MattB,
    ‘Course you were (63)
    You win, I lose. Prize for winning is the Sheryl Crowe prize – one square of recycled toilet paper per sitting.

    But the rest of us win – Tony Abbot as Opposition leader and an unsupported ETS into the Senate.

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    Dom,

    The title of this blog is not inaccurate.

    I’m glad you agree with me that this blog post is not a proof.

    There are two different levels of meaning for the word “proof”. The mathematical kind – the purest meaning – does not apply to the rest of science (think Popper) which can only talk about “disproof”.

    For the rest of us out here in the real world, the word means it can be shown beyond all reasonable doubt that something is true (or false). Given that there is no meaningful correlation, nor empirical evidence to back up the catastrophic claims made about man-made CO2, it is fair to say “proof”.

    The supposed correlation in the last 130 years is frequently lauded as evidence, but even this turns out to be a spurious coincidence. The turning points don’t match up, and the magnitude doesn’t pan out either.

    But Dom, thanks for your input. It’s bringing out some great answers. Those are valuable questions.

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    co2isnotevil

    I would characterize this as more of a disproof, or falsification, of the AGW hypothesis. Proofs are much harder to do, but there’s no reason to prove AGW is false anyway. All hypothesis are false by default and become increasingly more valid as more falsification attempts fail and more supporting results are independently replicated. A proof would be useful to elevate a validated theory into a Law.

    George

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    Dom

    @Joanne Nova

    I’m not so sure the author did not mean to use a mathematical proof, given that he completes it with “QED”. Anyway, let’s call it a “real world proof”.

    Given that there is no meaningful correlation… it is fair to say “proof”.

    David has not shown that there is no meaningful correlation – he has shown that the temperature varies by some unknown mechanisms, and he charts temperature varying over time, and concludes that one particular unproven mechanism was not in effect.

    This is an invalid conclusion, not matter what type of proof you are considering this to be. It is similar to saying that “If my client was embezzling, then the level of money in his bank account would have risen dramatically. It didn’t, therefore he wasn’t”. You must quantify the other money movements, or there is reasonable doubt, and it is not a valid conclusion, and you haven’t proven anything.

    It’s not a proof or disproof of anything. His own chart shows that the temperature can drop by 0.5 degrees in 50 years without industrial emissions. Is this happening now, and something else is cancelling it out? Probably not. Could a reasonable man doubt it? Without knowing what causes the variations, yes.

    If you allow people to make false conclusions like this, and call it a proof, you are opening the debate to all sorts of wacky theories. You could conclude that the presence of Vikings make it colder in Greenland, a clear case of AGC (Anthropogenic Greenland Cooling). It’s all there in Figure 2.

    Cheers

    Dom

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    John Caley

    I think this blog should be alerted

    Global Climate change is happening… Global warming was a prelude to global cooling.

    There is a ubiquitous layer of petroleum oil identified by marine biologists, in the marine micro-layer. This layer of oil is reducing water evaporation, which has resulted in cloud cover loss up until now.

    The world’s landmasses have now dried out sufficiently (tipping point) to start the next phase of the oncoming Ice Age. Ice Clouds are now proliferating in the stratosphere… these reduce solar radiation… maybe up to 50% at times..

    Oil is US$ linked.. all fraud science was contrived to hide the truth… no oil, no industry..world demise

    BigOil is in a Mexican stand off….. oil v human race extinction

    Don’t sit their and crow… this world is in much more serious trouble that almost all people realise.

    see a compilation at http://www.omegafour.com/forum2/viewforum.php?f=25

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    Dom

    Thank you John Caley for illustrating my last point.

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    Rumble Mourdre

    co2isnotevil says:
    “Your concern about passing this on to the next generation tells me that you’ve bought in to the fear mongering. Fear mongering is a technique used when an agenda can’t stand on it’s own merits . . . all of this should raise a red flag for any thinking person.”

    This is from the Sydney Morning Herald 25 April 2009

    Ian Plimer’s much talked-about new book – Heaven And Earth: Global Warming And The Missing Science – may already be a best-seller, but another of his books, A Short History Of Planet Earth , published in 2001, made it plain where he thinks the planet is heading.

    He may differ with colleagues about why the climate is changing but he does not contest that it certainly is and even he thinks the consequences are potentially alarming.

    Sea levels have been rising in an erratic stepwise pattern for the past 18,000 years, and will continue to do so, according to his earlier book. “In the West Antarctic the recession rates of the fast-flowing rivers of ice indicate a rapid erosion of the slow-moving inland ice sheet driven by the same factors that drove the 120-metre sea level rise over the last 14,700 years.

    “It would not be surprising if sea level rose a few metres over the next century causing untold suffering in low-lying areas such as Bangladesh, Holland, north Germany and many non-coralline islands . . . Low-lying parts of England, where many atomic reactors are sited, will be inundated.”

    He might have added that fair chunks of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth wouldn’t be looking too flash either.

    That won’t be the end of it. The collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which began about 7000 years ago, means the sea “has another six metres to rise”. At least he agrees with the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, on that. Sea levels are not affected when sea ice grows or shrinks, because it’s already in the water, but the melting of sheet ice on the land matters a lot.

    A six-metre rise will “disrupt coastal populations” and “if global warming occurs and sea level further rises” worse will follow, he wrote, but there’s a bright side, at least after the global mayhem subsides. “Warmer, wetter times have led to great renaissances in human history.”

    No one should be complacent because global warming may, ironically, switch off the North Atlantic Drift. It brings warm water and air to northern Europe, and he warns that its halting may cause temperatures to plunge by more than 5 degrees. Even if that doesn’t happen, Plimer has another vision of the future, scarier than that of the climate change scientists.

    He uses the history of recent climate change to suggest Earth will “soon lurch into another glaciation, possibly only in 300 or 400 years time but certainly before 2800”. The same history shows such a change can occur very rapidly, in less than a human lifetime. “Past ice ages have led to famine, disease, population reduction and warfare, but have not led to the extinction of humans. Depopulation will occur by disease pandemics. As in the past, urban communities will drift into subsistence agriculture and cities will be vacated.”

    If the next ice age is as bad as the last one, ice sheets – kilometres thick across much of the northern hemisphere – will cover 60 per cent of the land now occupied by humans, and the sea level will drop 120 metres.

    Two-thirds of Australia’s trees will die. Centuries of cold dry winds will follow. The east coast will be smothered in dust and sand as massive dune fields resume their smothering slow-motion march around the continent’s centre.

    The abandoned ruins of Sydney will be atop a craggy ridge, overlooking a deep valley where the harbour used to be. A coastal plain will stretch 40 kilometres to the east before it reaches the sea.

    Plimer is a geologist and good geology does not make good policy. His vision reinforces the fact that humans are deeply vulnerable to climate. And it underscores our failure to face up to the collective need to change the way we live. We need to keep our options open and give our environment and our society as much resilience as we can muster.

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    co2isnotevil

    Rumble,

    Yes, climate change has occurred in the past and will again in the future. whether we are still here or not. We should be prepared to adapt to inevitable future change, rather than trying to establish blame. Even if we burn all the known reserves of fossil fuels at once, we will not be able to stop the next ice age. At best, man’s technology might be able to push the onset ahead or behind by a few decades, which for a 100K year period, is only a few hundred ppm effect at most.

    An ice age will return, of that you can be absolutely certain, where km thick sheets of ice covering most of the Northern US, Canada and Europe will be a lot more inconvenient than a few meters rise in sea levels. Modern man has survived through several ice ages and will survive the next one, but this time, the population will not be centered on the equator, whose climate is relatively insensitive to glaciation cycles. I wouldn’t say the next Ice age is in the foreseeable future, but it’s likely that man will be around to experience it. Climate tends to cool slower than it heats, so future generations should see it coming.

    George

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    Rumble. All effects. None of them tell us the cause of the warming.

    If the solar magnetic effect, or ocean cycles, or cosmic dust was affecting the climate, pray tell how humans reducing CO2 would make any difference, except to impoverish many and give some bankers new yachts?

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Joanne,
    Two things:
    1. My point is that while we argue about theory and causes, the effects are real and they are upon us.
    2. Okay, so you don’t believe we are contributing to climate change and thus you don’t believe we can make a jot of difference to the present warming trend by reducing our carbon-based (CO2/methane) gas emissions. But why don’t we have a discussion on the other good reasons for doing so? For example:

    d) Half the vast amount of CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere is being soaked up by the oceans, which in turn are gradually and measurably becoming more acidic: there’s good reason to be concerned that this could start to disrupt the marine food chain within a few decades (try soaking a sea shell in vinegar for a simple demonstration of the effect). That dissolved CO2 probably will remain dissolved for thousands of years at least. Can you or anyone else predict the consequences of that with enough confidence to say it won’t matter if we keep pumping out increasing amounts of CO2?
    a) carbon reduction requires energy conservation and efficiency, which ultimately SAVES money;
    b)carbon reduction conserves dwindling supplies of finite fossil fuels, which is prudent and plain sensible;
    c) carbon reduction will promote the development of new alternative energy sources, which won’t be taxed and which makes us less vulnerable and less captive to the oil-rich nations.

    Barnaby Joyce goes feral over how this “massive $120 billion energy tax” that will impoverish the poor and fatten the rich: “it will cost working families $1,100 a year” he says. Big deal, $20 a week – that’s about the same as today’s interest rate rise. The hit on the economy would be less than half that of the GST – and that didn’t kill us.

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    You’re sure attracting the mouth frothing crowd Jo.

    The oceans are becoming more acidic? Got any real measured long term, properly sampled and averaged data on that? This is somewhat more difficult than the surface temperature. Better figure out how all those shelled creatures evolved when the CO2 level was far higher than today’s, while you’re at it.

    Vinegar is acetic acid. Not what you get when CO2 dissolves in water.

    Energy conservation doesn’t save money when the capex to do it exceeds the cost of the energy.
    Carbon reduction won’t do a damned thing for the dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. At current oil prices there’s more fossil fuel than you can poke a stick at. Coal or gas to liquids are both economic at current prices which bear very little relationship to cost of oil production, for political reasons.

    The best and only alternative energy source that works is fission. $120 billion would get this country a bunch of nuclear reactors.
    Good intentions, pixie dust and unicorn farts won’t produce grid electrical energy.

    The GST, BTW, got rid of sales tax. Obviously you never had to deal with that. Quite likely as it was a WHOLESALE tax and the dumb consumers never got to see it in action at all.

    Anyway it isn’t the money directly. It is the distortion of the economy by fairy tales and the re direction of investment away from things like power stations which actually work. When the lights go out are you going to count the economic impacts then?

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    co2isnotevil

    Rumble,

    If anything is causing ocean acidification it’s acid rain caused by burning high sulfur coal. Rain is the predominate way to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. The partial pressure analysis often used to justify CO2 induced ocean acidification assumes an infinite surface to volume ratio, which is approximated by a rain drop, but not the surface of the ocean. Nonetheless, the pH of rain is close to 7, except where high sulfur coal is burned, where it can be quite acidic. Even so, the pH of major river outflows is quite alkaline, even where high sulfer coal is burned. The overall pH of the ocean is also relatively alkaline (over 8.1). Claims that it has dropped by as much as .075 since 1750 (i.e from 8.175 to 8.1) make gross assumptions about what the oceans pH was 100’s of years ago in order to establish enough precision to discern an effect this small, even considering the logarithmic scale of pH.

    Energy efficiency is a good thing and market forces are doing a good job in promoting it. We don’t need flawed science to push us in this direction. In fact, we need to deplete the supply of hydrocarbons to get it’s price up so that green alternatives make economic sense. Until then, market forces will continue to push green alternatives to become more cost competitive.

    If we do something stupid, like legislating that the cost of green is artificially low, we will be needlessly stuck paying more than we should for energy and any incentive for making green cheap goes away. Meanwhile, any effect this does have on reducing the demand for oil will only make oil cheaper and the gap even wider.

    The best course towards energy independence is nuclear, which seems to be opposed by the same factions that oppose oil and demonize CO2. The greenies don’t gain any credence by dismissing the best solution on grounds that are nearly as silly as those used to vilify CO2.

    George

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    Rumble Mourdre

    The CO2 content of the oceans increased by 118 ± 19 Gt (1Gt = 109 tons) between the end of the pre-industrial period (about 1750) and 1994, and continues to increase by about 2 Gt each year (Sabine et al. 2004). The increase in ocean CO2 has caused a direct decrease in surface ocean pH by an average of 0.1 units since 1750 and an increase in acidity by more than 30% (Orr et al. 2005: McNeil and Matear 2007; Riebesell, et al. 2009). Calcifying organisms and reefs have been shown to be particularly vulnerable to high CO2, low pH waters (Fabry et al.
    2008).
    New in-situ evidence shows a tight dependence between calcification and atmospheric CO2, with smaller shells evident during higher CO2 conditions over the past 50,000 years (Moy et al. 2009). Furthermore, due to pre-existing conditions, the polar regions of the Arctic and Southern Oceans are expected to start dissolving certain shells once the atmospheric levels reach 450ppm (~2030 under business-as-usual; McNeil and Matear 2008: Orr et al. 2009).
    There is new evidence for a continuing decrease in dissolved oxygen concentrations in the global oceans (Oschlies et al. 2008), and there is for the first time significant evidence that the large equatorial oxygen minimum zones are already expanding in a warmer ocean (Stramma et al. 2008). Declining oxygen is a stress multiplier that causes respiratory issues for large predators (Rosa and Seibel 2008) and significantly compromises the ability
    of marine organisms to cope with acidification (Brewer 2009).
    Increasing areas of marine anoxia have profound impacts on the marine nitrogen cycle, with yet unknown global consequences (Lam et al. 2009). A recent modeling study (Hofmann and
    Schellnhuber 2009) points to the risk of a widespread expansion of regions lacking in oxygen in the upper ocean if increases in atmospheric CO2 continue.

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Sorry,
    should have cited
    The Copenhagen Diagnosis, 2009: Updating the world on the Latest Climate Science. I. Allison, N. L. Bindoff, R.A. Bindoff, R.A. Bindschadler, P.M. Cox, N. de Noblet, M.H. England, J.E. Francis, N. Gruber, A.M. Haywood, D.J. Karoly, G. Kaser, C. Le Quéré, T.M. Lenton, M.E. Mann, B.I. McNeil, A.J. Pitman, S. Rahmstorf, E. Rignot, H.J. Schellnhuber, S.H. Schneider, S.C. Sherwood, R.C.J. Somerville, K.Steffen, E.J. Steig, M. Visbeck, A.J. Weaver. The University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC), Sydney, Australia, 60pp.
    http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.org/

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Hello? Anyone got a response?
    Lefty/science conspiracy? Inconvenient detail?

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    Allan

    I don’t see how fig. 2 disproves AGW.

    According to that graph, we started coming out of the little ice age around 700AD. By 1800AD, we had returned to a fairly typical mean temp level, which proceeded with some variability (tending towards a decrease rather than an increase) until some point after 1900. By the time we get past 1950, the temp is clearly on the increase – just as one would expect in accordance with our post-war industrial boom.

    It appears that David is conflating the natural emergence from the LIA with the post 1950 warming, ignoring the fact that temps had returned to fairly typical levels by 1800 and remained at that usual level (and even a little lower) for the next century or more. In other words, there’s a distinct 100-150 year cessation of warming that he is ignoring in order to lump the end of the LIA in with our recent warming.

    And then his approach is labelled ‘proof’ that our current warming is nor man-made? Really? Isn’t it possible that whatever cooling effect was responsible for the LIA eased around 700AD, thus allowing temps return to normal over the next 1100 years (simply due to the absence of that cooling effect, rather than the addition of a warming effect), and that we are now seeing a separate warming effect that kicked off around 1950, pushing temps above the mean?

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    Richard S Courtney

    Rumble Mourdre:

    You demand a response to your assertions. OK. I will respond to one set of them and, thus, demonstrate why nobody thinks it worth the bother to discuss any of them.

    You assert:
    “The CO2 content of the oceans increased by 118 ± 19 Gt (1Gt = 109 tons) between the end of the pre-industrial period (about 1750) and 1994, and continues to increase by about 2 Gt each year (Sabine et al. 2004). The increase in ocean CO2 has caused a direct decrease in surface ocean pH by an average of 0.1 units since 1750 and an increase in acidity by more than 30% (Orr et al. 2005: McNeil and Matear 2007; Riebesell, et al. 2009). Calcifying organisms and reefs have been shown to be particularly vulnerable to high CO2, low pH waters (Fabry et al.
    2008).”

    No! The change to average ocean CO2 content is not known. It cannot be measured and is estimated from assumptions.

    Think about it, for a moment. How many sample sites would be required in 1750 and 1994 to measure it? How many were there and are there? How typical a sample of the globe’s oceans were they and are they?

    So, it is simply not true that anybody can reasonably claim what ocean CO2 change has occurred since “about 1750” or that happens each year.

    In other words, you assert assumptions as a facts when only a few moments of thought would have told you they cannot be known to be facts.

    Then you assert that this change to ocean CO2 content has caused an ocean pH change of 0.1. But this cannot be known either because ocean pH icannot be measured as a global average with sufficient accuracy: it varies both with place and time within the range 7.91 to 8.33.

    However, chemistry suggests that the equilibrium values of surface ocean and atmospheric CO2 equilibria have an equilibrium surface ocean pH value. Therefore, as the papers you cite assume, it can be calculated that if atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased from ~280 ppmv (preindustrial) to 385 pmv (now) then ocean surface layer pH will have reduced by 0.1.

    But the opposite is also true. If ocean surface layer pH has reducd by 0.1 (e.g. as a result of historic variations to emissions of sulphur and chlorine from sub-sea volcanism) then atmospheric CO2 concentration would have increased from ~280 ppmv (preindustrial) to 385 pmv (now).

    Nobody can know which – if either – of those possibilities is correct. But Beck’s data suggests that natural change to ocean pH determines atmospheric CO2 concentration (see http://www.realCO2.de) because other causes cannot explain the recorded fluctuation in atmospheric CO2 concentration around 1940.

    Then you go on to assert;
    “New in-situ evidence shows a tight dependence between calcification and atmospheric CO2, with smaller shells evident during higher CO2 conditions over the past 50,000 years (Moy et al. 2009).”

    Twaddle!
    Have you never heard of the White Cliffs of Dover. They are made of chalk. Chalk is a very pure form of limestone and all limestone is a sedimentary rock composed primarily of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in the form of the mineral calcite. It most commonly forms in clear, warm, shallow marine waters. It is usually an organic sedimentary rock that forms from the accumulation of shell, coral, algal and fecal debris. It can also be a chemical sedimentary rock formed by the precipitation of calcium carbonate from lake or ocean water. But chalk is almost pure remains of shells (of cocolithophores).

    Limestone continues to form but most was deposited in the cretaceous period when atmospheric CO2 concentration was 550 to 590 ppmv.

    Scaremongers claim that ocean pH decline will harm formation of shells. They ignore the fact that many hills and mountains around the world are remains of shells of creatures which existed at much higher atmospheric CO2 concentration than now.

    Your references are to peer reviewed papers. Peer review does not stop a paper from being plain wrong, and the papers you cite do not pass the ‘smell test’. Please think before citing rubbish.

    Richard

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Your references are to peer reviewed papers. Peer review does not stop a paper from being plain wrong, and the papers you cite do not pass the ‘smell test’. Please think before citing rubbish. Have you never heard of the White Cliffs of Dover. They are made of chalk.

    Nice one! Peer-reviewed science versus thinking about chalk.
    I’m thinking . . .
    Chalk. Chalk. Chalk.
    This is deep.
    Hey, you’re right! It’s twaddle: chalk clearly disproves the whole AGW conspiracy! Why didn’t I see this before? Damn your ETS! Damn your science! Chalk!

    Hmmm, but how about you actually read the paper? Here it is:

    Reduced calcification in modern Southern Ocean
    planktonic foraminifera

    Abstract
    Anthropogenic carbon dioxide has been accumulating in the
    oceans, lowering both the concentration of carbonate ions
    and the pH (ref. 1), resulting in the acidification of sea
    water. Previous laboratory experiments have shown that
    decreased carbonate ion concentrations cause many marine
    calcareous organisms to show reduced calcification rates2–5.
    If these results are widely applicable to ocean settings,
    ocean acidification could lead to ecosystem shifts. Planktonic
    foraminifera are single-celled calcite-secreting organisms that
    represent between 25 and 50% of the total open-ocean marine
    carbonate flux6 and influence the transport of organic carbon
    to the ocean interior7. Here we compare the shell weights of
    the modern foraminifer Globigerina bulloides collected from
    sediment traps in the Southern Ocean with the weights of
    shells preserved in the underlying Holocene-aged sediments.
    We find that modern shell weights are 30–35% lower than
    those from the sediments, consistent with reduced calcification
    today induced by ocean acidification. We also find a link
    between higher atmospheric carbon dioxide and low shell
    weights in a 50,000-year-long record obtained froma Southern
    Ocean marine sediment core. It is unclear whether reduced
    calcification will affect the survival of this and other species,
    but a decline in the abundance of foraminifera caused by
    acidification could affect both marine ecosystems and the
    oceanic uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

    Anthropogenic CO2 changes the carbonate chemistry and the
    pH of the surface ocean including decreasing the saturation
    state of carbonate minerals in sea water1, thus making biological
    precipitation of carbonate shells more difficult8. The ecological
    effects of this change in ocean carbonate chemistry are largely
    unknown and need to be quantified9. Increased CO2 in laboratory
    manipulations results in reduced calcification rates in planktonic
    foraminifera2 and other marine carbonate organisms including
    some, but not all, coccolithophorids3,10, corals4 and pteropods5.
    Earlier studies of down-core and core-top sediment in the
    North Atlantic suggest that higher atmospheric CO2 reduces the
    calcification rate of planktonic foraminifera11, although other
    variables such as temperature, salinity and nutrient availability may
    also influence calcification rates12,13.
    The Southern Ocean shows large surface-ocean gradients in
    carbonate chemistry, primary production, temperature, salinity and
    nutrients, and contains 40% of the global ocean inventory of
    anthropogenic CO2 (ref. 1). Anthropogenic CO2 enrichment of
    60 mol kg

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Part 2
    as dissolved inorganic carbon in the subantarctic
    Southern Ocean1 corresponds to a carbonate ion concentration
    (TCO2

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Anthropogenic CO2 enrichment of
    60 mol kg

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Ah sorry, I can’t cut and paste it but here’s the paper if you can be bothered to actually read the sloppy and clearly wrong peer-reviewed science:
    http://www.swrcb.ca.gov/rwqcb3/water_issues/programs/tmdl/303d/comment_letters/CBD/attachment_5.pdf

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    Rumble Mourdre

    By the way: this “smell test” – you’re right again, of course, never mind that bothersome detailed science, just sniff it and see if it smells like one of your prejudices or not! Great basis for policy debates. And so much less trouble. That – and the chalk test! Woo hoo!

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    Richard S Courtney

    Rumble Mourde:

    My post here began by explaining why I was willing to waste my time answering one of your posts. That explanation said to you;
    “You demand a response to your assertions. OK. I will respond to one set of them and, thus, demonstrate why nobody thinks it worth the bother to discuss any of them.”

    Your responses demonstrate that my effort was a complete waste of time.

    Of course, I could spend days swapping references with you, but there would be no point because people can do that forever and it never proves anything. Such exchanges are merely excuses to avoid thought and rational debate.

    So, I merely repeat my request for you to think before posting rubbish.

    Surely, you must know that anybody with more than one operating neuron can see you are spouting nonsense. It does not make you look good. But it does distract from the subject of this discussion (i.e. Evan’s paper) so I suppose you think it is worth it.

    Richard

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    co2isnotevil

    Rumble,

    All I see in the paper you quoted is a bunch of hedging around a bunch of assumptions based on unwarranted extrapolations of data, where I would bet that the raw data is ‘unavailable for proprietary reasons’.

    In climate science peer review speak, phrases like “If these results are applicable to …”, “… could lead to …”, “It’s unclear whether ..”, “… could effect …” are all carefully selected key phrases that allow interspersing speculative conjecture with plausible facts in order to lend false credence to the speculative conjecture.

    George

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    I will repeat. It is not about the science. It was never about the science. It was about the complete takeover of the world’s economies and the destruction of modern technological civilization. Hence, still one more distraction from a troll named, this time, Rumble. Who he is, I doubt even he knows. Robin? MattB? Who? Doesn’t matter. Its nothing but random noise. A distraction of fake flashing lights.

    Let’s get back to the science, its proper methods, and educating ourselves and everyone else that what actually is, is the only thing that matters. They are fighting reality. In the long run that will make them irrelevant. If we become trapped by the irrelevant, we become irrelevant too.

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    Rumble Mourdre

    Dear Joanne, co2isnotevil, Richard et al,
    I do apologise to you all. My last operating neuron informs me that I stumbled clumsily into your cosy little club of like-minded people to discover you settled into comfy chairs enjoying a deeply absorbing debate about why the climate is changing and trying to outdo each other with authoritive pronouncements, really clever questions and swapping ever-wilder conspiracy theories about it all.
    Naturally, I pointed out the window and said: “I say, chaps, that’s all very well but the sea is actually rising towards the clubhouse and the local fishermen say they may not be able to provide you with smoked salmon for much longer. And haven’t any of you noticed how muggy the air is becoming in here? Could we suspend debate for a time and, ah, you know, figure out whether the clubhouse will still be here tomorrow?”
    You say: “Rubbish, prove it! You’re only trying to scare us out of here so that you can take over the clubhouse for yourself and your mates!”
    I say: “Um, well I can’t PROVE it but, you know, judging from the tide marks the waves are getting closer; judging from the reduced catch in their nets, the fishermen seem to have good grounds for concern; and this thermometer does suggest the temperature has gone up in here.”
    You say: “Rubbish! You’re part of the conspiracy! You’ll say anything to support your outrageous claims. High tides are natural. Fish come and go. And you’ve obviously put your thermometer too close to the heater. Go away! You’re an idiot, a liar and a nuisance. You’re distracting us from our fun.”
    I say: “But wait: I’ve got a report from one of the fisherman about his rising tide measurements and falling fish catches.”
    You say: “Him? He can’t be trusted. He’s part of the conspiracy too and in any case his ruler and scales probably aren’t properly calibrated. Stick your report, mate! Go away.”

    Lionell: You are right. I am an alien from the planet Gargoid just messing with your head while I wait for the mothership to arrive and we take over the planet.

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    Richard S Courtney

    Rumble Mourdre:

    Thankyou for your explanation saying;
    “I am an alien from the planet Gargoid just messing with your head while I wait for the mothership to arrive and we take over the planet.”

    I now understand the nature of all of your comments.

    Richard

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    co2isnotevil

    Rumble,

    No one is arguing that change doesn’t happen, or that man can’t affect the environment. The real point is that we must focus our attention on what matters, for example real pollutants like SOx from coal, building nuclear power plants, efficiency, etc. We should stop wasting time and money bitching about man made CO2, which for all intents and purposes is more helpful to mankind than harmful. This would be true even if the increase from doubling CO2 was the 3C predicted by the IPCC and not the .8C predicted by the physics.

    As for conspiracies, I don’t think that there’s this grand conspiracy going on here, just a bunch of overlapping self interested parties whose agendas support and bolster each other. This house of cards was bound to come crashing down.

    BTW, we aren’t chasing you away. This isn’t like Gavin’s site, where dissenting opinions are summarily censored. Feel free to make a case, but you better be prepared to back it up, because we won’t let you get away with the usual tactic of spouting talking points and quoting papers with dubious pedigrees. My point of view is that if you can’t explain something without referring to the work of others, you probably don’t understand it yourself, in which case, I’m more than happy to help you figure it out.

    George

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    Lea

    George @103..”my point of view is that if you can’t explain something without referring to the work of others,you probably don’t understand it yourself..” Priceless.

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    Scott

    Hi Jo

    Just found your website. All I can say is thank god there are sane people like you around to raise awareness of this gigantic fraud.

    Keep up the great work and thanks I was feeling a little alone!!!

    Scott

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    Co2 emission reduction in itself does not matter.
    why? One word: peak oil.

    This phenomenon will force us all to take about the same measures that global warming would force us to take.

    No science or politics or free choice necessary for THAT major overhaul of our society. It will just slam in our faces, and our response will be nothing less than a scramble for survival.

    Our consumption of oil is skyhigh. The reserves will run out. It is already happening. It will hit ever harder over time.
    And to make this interesting ‘dynamic’ even more interesting is that it is not only about oil, but also about land, top soil, water, all kinds of raw materials, fish, forest.

    Your individual and local community adaptations of systems for the conservation and generation of resources like food, energy, raw materials, water will make your experience of these interesting times one of thriving, not surviving.

    You can make it your sport, hobby, livelihood to adapt to generating the resources you need for yourself and the people around you. To decimate your personal dependence on everything you use that is now produced, transported and sold to you with the help of generous amounts of oil. Starting now will make it fun, will keep the process stressfree and will keep you ahead of the coming changes, ahead of the herd, already adapted to the new situation.

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    Neil Fisher

    Rumble: “I do apologise to you all. My last operating neuron informs me that I stumbled clumsily into your cosy little club of like-minded people to discover you settled into comfy chairs enjoying a deeply absorbing debate about why the climate is changing and trying to outdo each other with authoritive pronouncements, really clever questions and swapping ever-wilder conspiracy theories about it all.”

    Oddly enough, this seems to me to be a rather accurate description of the alarmist brigade – “the science is settled”, followed by “it’s worse than we thought”, with no thought that if the science was settled, how could things be any different, let alone worse than we thought; when published Australian science shows that drought causes warming and the minister says warming causes drought, where are you and what are you doing? Are you correcting such mis-statements, or are you cheering her on for “doing something about climate change”?
    You ask us to follow the money and see who is opposing climate change legislation, so I ask you to do the same and find out who wants climate change legislation – the answer is the speculators and investment bankers and big oil and big coal. These people stand to make a fortune off of any cap and trade system. See what their reaction is to this potential solution to the problem: since the consumer is ultimately the one doing the paying, tax carbon as near as possible to the source (ie. at the mine or at the import terminal gate) and keep it revenue neutral by dividing the revenue up evenly to all tax payers. This still puts massive incentives in place to reduce carbon emissions, but does not disadvantage the most vulnerable in our community, and is not open to speculators producing an artificial bubble that they can make money from. It can also be as rapidly changed in rate as any cap on emissions can be changed. You will find that this is not supported by anywhere near as many of the big money people as cap and trade – for obvious reasons. Yet it is clearly a “market based” system, and is clearly less amenable to being “scammed”. The conclusion should be obvious, but I’l state it anyway: big business does not support the ETS because it gives them certainty (tax and rebate would also give them that), but because they can make money from it (which they can’t from tax and rebate)

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    Btok

    Attention, American and Canadian citizens we are so close to losing our Sovereignty and our Freedom, is barely hanging by a thread! Make your voice and your rights known, as you are the boss not the politicans you voted into power!
    Time is getting short and it is coming down to the fact, that soon ( December 7 to December 18 ) I will have to pray to the good Lord to maintain our freedoms and that God will not allow our leaders to sign the Copenhagen Treaty, which will take away our liberties, let go and let God, this being a challenge to our Lord and Saviour? However, while there is still time to prevent the loss of a lifetime, perhaps loss of life it’s self – I will do what I am able to fight for our freedoms! The whole Climate Change agenda is a proven fraud and racketeering, but the United Nations and Globalist governments don’t care as that is just the excuse instrument they have used to ensnare us, they are going to try to push it through anyway! Has everybody out there become a tree hugger? The tree will be standing 100 years from now, but will you be looking at the tree, from inside the fence of a Concentration Camp? Anyone out there want to fight to maintain their freedom anymore? Please do all you can to preserve freedom in North America!

    Check out what Government is doing behind your back at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VebOTc-7shU

    Canadians: To request that PM Harper doesn’t sign the Copenhagen Treaty, thereby causing
    Canadians to lose their Sovereignty and Freedom, email the PM at: [email protected]

    Any lawyers want to help out by filing this Copenhagen Treaty, be classified as an illegal Treaty, in order to, help save Freedom in North America? ( Unlimited Promotion Opportunity Here For a Law firm to Gain a favorable high profile credibility! )

    Protest the inaccuracy and Fraud of Climate change measurements that are going to be used in the Copenhagen Treaty: http://www.gopetition.com/online/32485.html

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    Your “proof” is wrong for a simple reason. Recovery from the little ice age might occur at a rate of 0.1C/century at best, whereas the trend in the last 30 years is probably around 2C/century. It is in fact the case that temperatures started to increase largely after the 1950s-1970s. (Your tiny observational data box appears intended to obfuscate this reality.)

    Consider the following statistical proof which finds just the opposite:

    http://residualanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/12/statistical-proof-of-anthropogenic.html

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    Joseph:
    Oh please!

    Figure 3 shows about 0.7C of warming from 1900 to 2000, and Figure 2 shows about 0.5C of warming from 1700 to 1900. So there might have been about 1.2C of warming over three centuries, for average warming of 0.4C/ century since the depths of the little ice age. Which about matches Akasofu’s trend of 0.5C/century (Fig 3).

    So your claim of “0.1C/century at best” from the little ice age is just silly.

    The “tiny observational data box” shows the entire global instrumental record, and Akasofu obviously intended it to distinguish the recorded period from the extrapolated periods before and after. Not “obfuscating”, but drawing attention to a vital feature.

    The “increase largely after the 1950s-1970s” is the latest 30 year warming period, extrapolated by the IPCC in 2001 broadly as shown by Akasofu. Speaks for itself really. And we seem to be tracking into a cooling period, as per the usual pattern.

    Sorry Joseph, but your comments appear to be alarmist nonsense that could have easily been avoided by reading the graphs presented.

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    Neil Fisher

    Joesph, perhaps you would care to read the thoughts of Lubos Motl, who is a theoretical physicist and extremely well versed in stats. You can find his take on this subject here:
    http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/07/carbon-dioxide-and-temperatures-ice.html
    I would remind you that this is someone who does not need to be informed on what technical terms are used to describe his statistical methods, unlike the writer at your link. It’s a rather compelling arguement and does not require much, if anything, in the way of stats knowledge to understand.

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    John Caley

    >>>> the case that temperatures started to increase largely after the 1950s-1970s. >>

    WW11, oil………… and again with Kuwait burning…… now the tipping point has past and cooling is happening

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    BTW – In reference to questions about the warming out of the little ice age.

    http://www.co2science.org/subject/b/summaries/boreholes.php

    Pollack et al. (1998) reconstructed a surface temperature history for the past five centuries from 358 boreholes spread throughout eastern North America, central Europe, southern Africa and Australia. Nearly 80% of these locations experienced a net warming over this period; but 20% of them experienced a net cooling. Consequently, the mean warming of this large area over the past 500 years was about 1°C, most of which occurred well in advance of the lion’s share of the past century’s anthropogenic CO2 emissions, suggesting that most of the 1°C of reconstructed warming was non-CO2-induced.

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    […] guest post at JoNova makes a strong claim, but has some interesting graphs and […]

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    Mattb

    Hey Jo – off topic but I honestly think the “Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.” looks a bit childish. I assume it is the blog software, but in your guys world it strikes me as quite similar to you problems with the IPCC – dismissing other opinions just because the “in crown” think they are wrong. I don’t think it adds to the blog, and makes it read quite strange.

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    Sharpshooter

    First off, I’m not a scientist. I’m an engineer.

    As such, I’ve read tons of engineering materials over the past thirty years. NTL, the two disciplines are inexorably aligned, they overlap.

    Mattb, Rumble and the AGW crowd in general don’t write like scientists and don’t approach data in proper form, nor do they assess ALL the data.

    Watch, for example, the Apollo astronauts being interviewed, how clearly and simply they phrase their answers, and how UNEQUIVOCAL they are. Do likewise with anyone from the hard sciences.

    Sorry, fellows, your writing and your approaches are much more in sync with political “scientists” and liberal arts types than “hard” scientists.

    Jo – Keep up the astounding work and don’t give these hysterical types an inch.

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    MattB

    SS I’ll have to go back and ask my physics and engineering lecturers from my degrees how they failed me so. As an Engineer and a Scientist I have to say nothing gives me the Sh*ts more than a post that tries to give itself authority by saying “I’m an engineer” as though there is any single attribute or characteristic of an engineer. Come in all shapes and sizes with opinions as varied as any other two randoms off the street.

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    Sharpshooter

    MattB:

    How does my disclaimer seek authority? Quite the opposite.

    For having (claimed) both attributes, your writing comes off as neither.

    As a “scientist”, you know full well you evaluate ALL data, not just the data points that suite your fancy. On that you FAIL, FAIL, FAIL.

    Foremost, a proper analysis integrates all the input, and on this you FAIL miserably.

    So cut the posing, because your stance is more soft science than hard.

    As for scientific credentials, the CRU crowd has violated EVERY tenant of sceince; every…last…one. They’re far from alone.

    You also might wish to take a perusal through the Logical Fallacies lists, too.

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    MattB

    And of course to you you pass with flying colours. I think you are proving my point for me thanks ss.

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    normw

    It seems to me that you are all discussing just 2 variables in isolation in an ecosystem that that many more variables. For instance the little ice age of the 1700’s was caused by a decrease in solar irradiance. Hence CO2 emissions were of no consequence. To imply that the only factor controlling temperatures is CO2 emissions is I believe inaccurate.

    thanks

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    John Caley

    The whole AGW is a BigOil scam….. but that then implies WHY ?

    Global Climate Change is happening… so don’t go away thinking everything is ok

    The problem is BigOil, it is criminally negligent… and the governments have been unwitting accomplices (tax from petrol)… and the public love their cars !!

    much like BigTobacco and its addictive/negative health effects that BigTobacco tried to hide in a criminal manner (also using corrupt scientists, falsefied data etc) …. and the government went along for the money ride (and still is)

    BigOil has been successfully diverting blame towards coal.. oh soooooooooooo dirty and polluting

    CLASSIC QUOTES FROM CLIMATE SCIENTISTS (personal contact)

    >>> Oil on the sea… I don’t know of any oil on the sea !
    If you think there is oil on the sea, you go out and do the research and save the world>>>

    >>> Oil on the sea…. yes, but its only a very thin layer>>>>

    I am appalled..if the fate of this world hangs upon insane earthlings… end.

    >>>The paper covers some results of laboratory and nature experiments on studying the effect of oil films on water evaporation rate and oxygen concentration in sea water.

    It is demonstrated that oil films on the sea surface reduce the rate of water evaporation by 15 to 33% due to diffusion resistance of the oil film as well as the energy resistance of a monolayer of surface active substances at the marine film-water interface.

    Large oil spots may cause, in areas oversaturated with oxygen, increase of oxygen concentration in sea water under the oil spot due to decrease of gas exchange rate at the sea-atmosphere interface.>>>
    http://www.springerlink.com/content/v1n51112t0470m58/

    NASA, US Coast Guard and many others can attest to the fact… and yet Climate Scientists know nothing. (The oil membrane was first identified back in the 1930’s by marine micro-layer biologists)

    Oil Consumption barrels/day
    Total: 85,085,664 bbl/day

    The amount of petroleum products ending up in the ocean is estimated at 0.25% of world production = 212,500 barrels per day,

    or Oil pollution = 77,640,668 barrels per year onto the oceans

    http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_o…onsumption

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    So how much is from natural oil seepage, John?

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    John Caley

    So how much is from natural oil seepage, John?

    the figures quoted are just anthropogenic petroleum oil… analysed and identified

    Natural seeps occur in places in the world.. see Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Mexico and others, but they are small.

    It could be that previous “natural Ice Ages” have been initiated by meteor hits cracking open oil deposits and spilling them into the surface environment… see Younger Dryas

    The problem is the oil has a long resident time… and with all the tanker sinkings, burning of Kuwait, WW1 and WW11… and more
    the potential for EXTRA future pollution is extreme… even if all oil was declared noxious and treated as a dangerous substance.

    The oil membrane on the sea can not be removed.

    Now, natural oil fractions are a problem…but if the source was stoppered they would be remediated by micro-organisms given time, maybe 20 to 30 years
    (BUT this is the true time bomb… if the oil was removed, the heating oceans diluted by ice melt would result in an almost instant Ice Age through massive cloud banks)

    However man in all his wisdom is now manufacturing oil that ain’t oils… they are designed NOT TO BREAKDOWN.

    How this is going to turn out is very difficult to determine…. but rest assured the cause of Global Climate Change is NOT CO2…it is far more serious.

    While temperature readings in North America dropped back to about the level of 1996 last year,

    it would have been even colder without the underlying effects of human-induced climate warming,

    said co-author Martin Hoerling of the Earth System Research Laboratory of the government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

    Meanwhile

    According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius

    The quote I posted earlier re acknowledgement of an oiled sea, show the woeful state of knowledge by the proponents of AGW.

    To undo what has been done will take some very careful measures…. it is not as simple as I have outlined.

    A dry dying Earth or an Ice Age…. these are the options…. and ultimately an Ice Age.

    Goodbye civilisation,,,, goodbye LIFE… welcome extinction.

    all links at
    http://www.omegafour.com/forum2/viewforum.php?f=25

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    Gregory Fegel

    Thank you, Joanne, for posting this splendid article. I found that I wasn’t able to read this article on the Science and Public Policy Institute website, so I was pleased to find it in readable form here.

    The peer review process has obviously been hijacked by dishonest and powerful interests whose aim is replace science and democracy with a political dictatorship. With ‘Climategate’ the Internet has served the purpose of exposing this massive and dangerous fraud.

    In future, a law should require that all scientific journals be published on the Internet, free for public perusal. For every science article that is published, a professional comments section should be provided (this could be restricted to registered ‘professionals’) as well as a separate comments section for the general public.

    Such a system would not only make science more transparent, it would also make all scientific discussions readily accessible to everyone, thus enhancing science education.

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    John Caley

    Just to put some meat on claims made in last post

    The Younger Dryas is an abrupt cooling event in Earth’s history. It coincided with the extinction of many large mammals including the woolly mammoth, the saber toothed jaguar and many sloths.

    This cooling period is generally considered to be the result of the complex global climate system, possibly spurred on by a reduction or slowdown of the thermohaline circulation in North America.

    “There is a black mat [CARBON] layer across North America which is correlated to the Younger Dryas climatic shift seen in Greenland ice cores dated at 13 thousand years ago by radio carbon,” explains Paquay.

    This is a smoking gun….however there are other possible explanations.

    http://www.physorg.com/news179489405.html

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    John Caley

    Disinformation, misinformation and bullying are all fare of the day

    Include in that censorship, censure and precious data
    all are destroying the integrity of scientists and defame science.

    Unfortunately the only winner is BigOil… they have oiled the waters of the world..literally… and have so far gotten away with it

    “”” Bombing of Lebanon 2006….caused the discharge of 15,000 tons of heavy fuel into the sea, generating an oil slick, measuring 150 kilometers by 220 km, .

    The Mediterranean Sea got oiled 2006, the seawater thermograph at the time graphically shows extreme seawater heating at and around the spill site… and also shows ribbons of hot sea extended via water circulation

    [the marine thermograph of the Mediteranian Sea at that time see
    http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/coamps-web/d … 72_t25.gif

    Then there is a recent report that the seawater temperature of the Mediterranean Sea is 3C above normal, so the hot seawater hasn’t lost the excess heat via evaporation… its been a few years, so its not unreasonable to conclude that a film of petroleum oil covers the surface, preventing/reducing seawater evaporation

    (Why was the sea hot ?…because the oil slick prevented seawater evaporation.. which is the mechanism whereby the sea loses heat…. this is happening all over the globe… but its more complicated than you may realise)

    Recently the Mediterranean Sea is reported to be about three degrees warmer than normal. (massive temperature increase)

    and now that whole Mediterranean area is at risk of desertification

    Quote:
    38 percent of the world is made up of arid regions at risk of desertification. The eight natural areas at risk are coastal areas, the Prairies, the Mediterranean region,………

    This unfortunate micro climate experiment shows quite clearly that in a short time-frame climate can become very adverse to the existence of human beings

    It also shows quite clearly a vision for the future of the whole planet.

    However the induced dry climate/regional weather, resulting from a thick oil slick is only the the result of the first oscillation swing/convulsion… the following climatic oscillations/repercussions become even more severe/convulsive.

    Lord Martin Rees and all climate scientists had better wake up…. they need to understand that Global Climate Change is far more severe than any believes.. and that the final oscillation swing will be terminal….. its better to start late than never

    If climate scientists pretend to know/don’t understand climate and yet they dictate dogmatically to LIFE/people on Earth… then it is no wonder that some elements will lash out.

    It is more than obvious to this scientist, that the IPCC et al and most if NOT ALL climate scientists on this Earth don’t
    ….. know what they are talking about.

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    […] (at least not for half the globe), and didn’t correlate at all with our carbon emissions, the vast majority of which occurred after […]

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    John Caley

    Amazing that this thread is still current

    Latest from me in brief

    Global warming was/is due to over-hot oceans, setting a high general overnight temperature to the atmosphere.
    This over-hot ocean is due to the layer of petroleum oil in the marine micro layer.

    The oil film reduces heat loss from the ocean, represented by seawater evaporation.

    Freshwater inflows into the sea changes this equilibrium… as does over over-hot spots, thus storms can spring from nowhere very suddenly.

    The latest petroleum oil blowout into the Gulf of Mexico, will add extra thickness to the resident marine oil layer. Up until the blowout, the ocean temperature was levelling out… indicating an Ice Age was imminent

    Now this extra oil will delay the onset of the oncoming Ice Age, as the oceans will need to get that much hotter before breakout water evaporation commences again.

    Europe will become particularly cold… Arctic meltwater, hot ocean, increased evaporation—-> massive ice/snow storms.

    The global picture is looking extra bleak. IMO, the Northern Hemisphere (because of Arctic freshwater inflows) will become relatively uninhabitable.

    The extra oil on the ocean surface will make the Southern Hemisphere even drier.

    Anyway good luck all.

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    Nettie

    I am so sad when I read internet-conversations about these kind of topics. But I couldn’t resist, I just had to say something.
    Don’t pick on MattB, I also might not agree with EVERYTHING he says, but I mostly agree with nothing of the ‘our current global warming isn’t anthropocentric’ stuff.
    For those of you who didn’t realize, it is not a debate, it is already an established fact based in cold hard evidence taken by numerous scientist. There is a VERY strong correlation between population growth and CO2 emissions and then CO2 emission has a strong correlation with higher temperatures. That is what, per definition, GHG-gasses does it stores heat from the sun. We, humans, people, you, me, the world, consumerists (call it what you like) are consuming too much and dumping too much waste/GHG/toxins/etc into the biosphere. Shifting our current climate into a state several degrees warmer.
    No one, cares if you think global warming is not man-made, everybody who matters knows you are wrong. And lets say you are right; that this global warming is just, coincidentally, the same time the world population and GHG emissions exploded and is not caused by it. Why should that be a reason for humans to keep on living like pigs, consuming too much, destroying other species, polluting everything possible, etc?

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    • #

      AAWWWW BLOODY HELL JOANNE NOVA, HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I ASKED YOU NOT TO INVITE GETUP TYPE KIDDIES TO THIS BLOG.

      I’ve said it once if I’ve said it a thousand times. First we wait until these kiddies grow up and mature. This will happen when they’ve got real jobs in the real world and have had a few hard knocks from life.
      Then they will be able to relate to the real world and will be worth listening to.

      HEY NETTIE, here is your first knock in life…

      ANYONE WHO THINKS A GAS IN AN OPEN SYSTEM CAN STORE HEAT IS A MORON, THAT IS SPELLED M. O. R. O. N. MORON.

      As a first step, you should hand back all the ribbons and medals and certificates you got for coming 7th and 12th in whatever you competed in.
      Contrary to what your pinko huggy kissy leftard teachers told you, when you came 7th in a race of 8, YOU FAILED, YOU LOST, YOU WEREN’T GOOD ENOUGH, NO IT WASN’T A GOOD TRY, IT WAS A FAILURE IN THE MOST CLEAR DEFINITION OF THE WORD.

      Once you accept that, you will have taken your first baby step into the real world.
      Next lesson I’ll teach you how to THINK FOR YOURSELF. but I warn you, I might smack you over the head a couple of times, just to make sure it all sinks in.

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        MattB

        Fair dinkum it was my son’s pre-primary sports carnival last month. He came home with three ribbons pinned on him that say “I ran in a race”. Anyways, nice to know I have a steady fan base.

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          BobC

          MattB
          December 9, 2011 at 11:08 am

          Anyways, nice to know I have a steady fan base.

          Not to worry, MattB — there will always be sheep who have been taught not to think for themselves. (Like Nettie, who has been kept completely ignorant of the rules of logic — probably thinks they’re “right wing” or something.)

          If you were really ambitious (like Al Gore) you would figure out how to make money from them (the sheep, not the rules of logic).

          Oh, and Mark D. — come on in, the water’s fine!

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    Jay

    I agree with Nettie here. Who cares if global warming/climate change is human driven or not? Using fossil fuels and polluting like madmen is ridiculous anyway. If we cut the use of fossil fuels and find alternatives we ensure the future of the human race. If we do not find alternatives our fuel system will collapse, and as soon as it starts to do so wars will increase in intensity and then we witness the fall of mankind.

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      Utopian J says….

      If we cut the use of fossil fuels and find alternatives we ensure the future of the human race.

      I can see clearly now the rain is gone.

      What Utopian J is about is the saving of mankind (ooops sorry J that was unPC, Peoplekind? Personskind? Humankind? Please don’t sue me for sexism)

      If I had of known this before, I wouldn’t have made fun of Utopian J.
      Thank you J from the very bottom of my bottom, where would human/person/peoplekinds be without concerned saviours like you?

      Can I help you distribute pamphlets door to door? Surely you have a store of pamphlets at home titled “We must save human/person/peoplekinds from themselves”?

      We can ride pushbikes in tandem and go door knocking to “save” people.

      I learned a good sales method at one time. You record yourself preaching (ooops freudian slip)saying all these things about saving human/people/personkinds then listen to yourself. IT’S A REAL EYE OPENER.

      G’head, try it.

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      BobC

      Jay
      December 8, 2011 at 5:02 pm

      I agree with Nettie here. Who cares if global warming/climate change is human driven or not? Using fossil fuels and polluting like madmen is ridiculous anyway. If we cut the use of fossil fuels and find alternatives we ensure the future of the human race. If we do not find alternatives our fuel system will collapse, and as soon as it starts to do so wars will increase in intensity and then we witness the fall of mankind.

      Sounds like someone (your teacher?) has sold you a bill of goods. Because you can imagine the above sequence is not evidence that it will occur. In fact, it is a completely bogus theoretical claim (probably inspired by Marxism).

      Look at real history, and find me one example of a (mostly) free society where anything similar happened. How about when we ran out of whale oil? What happened to the Great Horse Manure Crisis?

      I suggest you study up on how your society really works — you won’t be such a sucker for these Marxist claims. (How many times has Marx been right about any of his predictions? Hint: less than once.)

      A good start would be to browse the website I linked above — The Foundation for Economic Education. You are in desperate need of some.

      (Or, you could call up the courage of your convictions and get rid of all those nasty energy sources from your life — revert to a short, brutish life in a cave. Just don’t expect us to follow suite.)

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    Mark D.

    Damn, Why didn’t I get invited to this party?

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