Can the atmosphere really warm? Atmospheric gas retention.

[thankyouOB]

can the atmosphere really warm?

go to Venus and find out that the answer is yes.
--

also too-what AndyH said.

 

[Stoaty]

Haven't you guys figured out yet that Bill/Reg is simply a shill, a troll, and will continue to link-spam denial-sourced propaganda? This is straight out of the playbook - add confusion, add doubt, use legitimate sounding words even if they have no basis in reality?

Guilty as charged Your Honor. If given probation, I will refrain from this behavior in the future.

PS I found the data on Temperature Extremes Indices for the year 2013 (starting on page S12) quite interesting:

http://www2.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/bams-state-of-the-climate-2013/?utm_source=pr&utm_medium=pcon&&utm_campaign=stateofclimate2013" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[klapauzius]

No , no, no... you have got this all screwed up. YOU people are saying this stuff exists, then when I go look I can't find it and YOU then tell me that you don't know where it is and that's my fault.

...
You people would prefer to gnaw off your own knee caps than give a hint of anything that you have any doubts of that might conflict with what you THINK the 'consensus' is.

I'm done here, because whatever is put forward that you can't explain, you say someone else has done it, even though you've never seen it. Not a hint of self-doubt. Then you ask for me to back up something, I do, and then you simply say 'NO'.

Donald, that is obviously not the case. WetEV is right and you are not, you can easily go back in this thread if you want proof...you keep asking questions, but when you get answers you just move on the next question.

What about your statement that AGW cannot be tested? What about your questions about ocean/air temperature baselines. All your smart comments on CO2 in the oceans?
You got a ton of answers, you even got spoon-fed links to articles in this thread .
To claim you cannot find it is thus a flat out lie.

I didn't think you had genuine interest in learning something new from the start, but it was curious to see what turns this debate would take.

The good thing is, most people don't share your views, so convincing you of something is really irrelevant.

 

[klapauzius]

Haven't you guys figured out yet that Bill/Reg is simply a shill, a troll, and will continue to link-spam denial-sourced propaganda? This is straight out of the playbook - add confusion, add doubt, use legitimate sounding words even if they have no basis in reality?

By continuing to bat the ball back to him you keep adding energy and life to his efforts. The only way to stop a troll is to ignore it.

The last thing anything alive on this planet needs is for any of us - well meaning or not - to continue to feed the denial fire that's killing us.

Yes, I knew that from the start. Call it indulgence.
I am actually wondering if at least Reg is a real person?

It could be a clever Koch-Industries designed chat-bot, like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Goostman" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

just this version does AGW denial.....

Maybe Donald too....I think this is how ELIZA kept the conversation going, by endlessly asking questions...
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false

 

[Stoaty]

Yes, I knew that from the start. Call it indulgence.
I am actually wondering if at least Reg is a real person?

I am pretty sure Reg is a real person, because he posted a lot of useful information over the years. My working hypothesis is that someone hacked his account and is posting the Climate Change Denial stuff under his handle to ruin his reputation on the forum. Could be wrong, of course.

 

[WetEV]

No measurement record is ever correct. The question in science always is how wrong are they.

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[Nubo]

Donald, that is obviously not the case. WetEV is right and you are not, you can easily go back in this thread if you want proof...you keep asking questions, but when you get answers you just move on the next question.

What about your statement that AGW cannot be tested? What about your questions about ocean/air temperature baselines. All your smart comments on CO2 in the oceans?
You got a ton of answers, you even got spoon-fed links to articles in this thread .
To claim you cannot find it is thus a flat out lie.

I didn't think you had genuine interest in learning something new from the start....

No, the interest was in "proving" that nobody "really understands this stuff". From whence flows the fudly notion that the scientists could be making up anything they want.

And then it's only a hop skip and jump away from the illuminati.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-0TEJMJOhk[/youtube]

 

[AndyH]

The claim that climate models are unreliable is the 6th-most popular contrarian myth. The argument is generally based on the claim that climate models didn't predict the slowdown in global surface warming over the past 15 years. That's in large part because during that time, we've predominantly experienced La Niña conditions. Climate modelers couldn't predict that ahead of time, but the models that happened to accurately simulate those conditions also accurately predicted the amount of global surface warming we've experienced.

http://skepticalscience.com/climate-models-accurate-when-reflecting-natural-cycles.html

Papers:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7467/full/nature12534.html
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2310.html

 

[RegGuheert]

No measurement record is ever correct. The question in science always is how wrong are they.

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

As shown, GISS is quite often VERY wrong, as even the slope of temperature is changed from cooling to warming in many, many areas.

I would say that CAGW is very close to the "flat-Earth" beliefs described in the Asimov essay. It's not a good theory that needs refinement, but it is a politically-motivated belief system that is leading science astray. Like all ruses of this sort, there is a bit of truth mixed in to keep the believers believing, but they have gone way overboard in claiming that small changes due to CO2 will lead to huge changes because the CO2 will co-opt water vapor in a positive feedback loop. I have provided many, many avenues of evidence that water in our system provides strong negative feedback, rendering the already-small contribution of CO2 to our Earth's temperature to be even smaller.

Climate models that still predict today SEVEN TIMES as much warming in the lower troposphere in the recent 35-year period as actually occurred gives a very clear indication of how far-afield this field really is.

The additional CO2 in our atmosphere has proven to be extremely beneficial to virtually all life on Earth, in spite of the many, many dire predictions made by some scientists-come-activists.

 

[RegGuheert]

It seems the most recent casualty of the CAGW scare is the belief that the energy content of the oceans is rising at an alarming rate. In this paper, Dr. Carl Wunsch (Harvard) and Dr. Patrick Heimbach (MIT) detailed the extreme difficulty scientists currently face when trying to determine the heat content of the oceans using the sparse data which exists today, including the ARGO data.

So they took the approach of using a simulator which actually enforces the laws of physics as they apply to the problem of ocean heat content rather than simply averaging data with a a huge range of values to obtain a tiny result.

In fact, they are quite critical of previous attempts to determine ocean heat content:

Data assimilation schemes running over decades are usually labelled "reanalyses." Unfortunately, these cannot be used for heat or other budgeting purposes because of their violation of the fundamental conservation laws; see Wunsch and Heimbach (2013a) for discussion of this important point. The problem necessitates close examination of claimed abyssal warming accuracies of 0.01 W/m based on such methods (e.g., Balmaseda et al., 2013).

They briefly describe their approach here:

The ECCO2 "state estimate" has been described in a number of places (e.g., Wunsch and Heimbach, 2007, 2013a,b). In summary, it is a weighted least-squares fit of a general circulation model (an evolved version of the MITgcm; see Marshall et al., 1997, and Adcroft et al., 2004, for early forms) to the quasi-global data sets (which include the atmospheric forcing) using Lagrange multipliers. The estimate has 1 degree zonal resolution and a meridional resolution ranging from about 0.25 degree near the equator and poles to 1 degree at mid-latitudes. An initial (then-adjusted) meteorological forcing is derived from the ECMWF ERA-Interim reanalysis (Dee et al., 2011). A numerical algorithm for fitting using the Lagrange multipliers is sometimes known as the "adjoint method" or in meteorology as "4DVAR." The specific estimate used is labelled version 4, revision 5, and in contrast to earlier estimates includes a full sea ice model (Losch et al., 2010; Fenty and Heimbach, 2013), and extends to the North Pole (see Forget et al., 2013, in preparation, for full details).

They further explain:

Note that over the great volume of the oceans, the ECCO-state is in slowly time-evolving geostrophic, hydrostatic balance that, unlike most "data assimilation" products, satisfies the model equations without any artificial sources or sinks or forces. The state estimate is from the free running, but adjusted, model and hence satisfies all of the governing model equations, including those for basic conservation of mass, heat, momentum, vorticity, etc. up to numerical accuracy.

Still, they caution that it is quite difficult to determine ocean heat content.

In any case, their approach gives the following results:

In other words, the results of this effort indicate that ocean heat content may have peaked about five years ago and retreated since that time. In their conclusion, they have this to say:

In a formal sense, the apparent trends show a warming in the upper ocean and a net cooling below 2000 m. For IH (-3600,-h,t); the cooling is about 0.01 degrees C over 19 years. As with many climate-related records, the unanswerable question here is whether these changes are truly secular, and/or a response to anthropogenic forcing, or whether they are instead fragments of a general red noise behavior seen over durations much too short to depict the long time-scales of Fig. 6, 7, or the result of sampling and measurement biases, or changes in the temporal data density.

No, there is no "settled science" to be found here, either.

 

[Stoaty]

Warning: Science Based Information

"A new study finds that when climate models factor in the temporary warming and cooling impact of El Niño and La Niña, they accurately predict recent global warming."

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/22/3462647/global-surface-temperatures/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[RegGuheert]

Warning: Science Based Information

"A new study finds that when climate models factor in the temporary warming and cooling impact of El Niño and La Niña, they accurately predict recent global warming."

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/22/3462647/global-surface-temperatures/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It's embarrassing that the scientific community could publish such a piece of crap! The Texas sharpshooter fallacy does not science make. (And in this case, the "sharpshooter" is so drunk he cannot even draw the bullseye around the places where the shotgun blasts impacted!) As more of this type of "science" is published, the reputation of science in general will continue to lose credibility.

Here is a very solid review by Bob Tisdale. Not least of his criticisms is that the so-called four best climate models got the trends for virtually every ocean basin on this planet completely wrong:

 

[Stoaty]

Poll: U.S. Leads The World… In Climate Denial

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/22/3462690/us-number-one-climate-denial/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[Weatherman]

It's embarrassing that the scientific community could publish such a piece of crap!

I'm, actually, a bit surprised this paper has gotten so much attention. I think it has more to do with a couple of the controversial authors than anything else.

There really isn't much here. To summarize:

1) Current climate models can't predict ENSO events (whether this does, or does not, matter is up for debate)
2) If you pick a small set of model runs, which, just by random chance, happen to get the ENSO cycle correct, they do a pretty good job at verifying the recent temperature trends.

All they have done is do some curve fitting with a strong hindsight bias. There's no guarantee (in fact it's extremely unlikely) that the four model runs selected will have any predictive value.


I don't think this is a win for the sceptics, since there already seems to be a consensus that the current crop of climate models don't get ENSO events right. So there's nothing new, here.

I, also, don't think it's a win for those who believe catastrophic global warming is inevitable, since all the paper demonstrates is that if, in hindsight, you just happen to pick the small number of model runs which, by random chance, get ENSO cycles right, then they also get temperature trends correct as well. There is no preditive value in this result.

 

[klapauzius]

I, also, don't think it's a win for those who believe catastrophic global warming is inevitable, since all the paper demonstrates is that if, in hindsight, you just happen to pick the small number of model runs which, by random chance, get ENSO cycles right, then they also get temperature trends correct as well. There is no preditive value in this result.

Since it is man-made, it is not (or was not) inevitable.

I havent read the paper in question, but if the model selection was purely random, you are right, this would not have predictive value (in the same sense that even a broken clock tells the time right, once each day).

If these models however were purposefully designed to take the El nino and la nina events into account, then they would have predictive value.
Prediction of past data of course is trivial, so future performance of these models would be of most interest.

Keep in mind though that these are dynamic models (rather than fitted curves, which in non-linear dynamic systems rarely predict anything), the fact that they accurately predict the past tells us at least that they could predict the future as well.

 

[Alric]

For the proper way to think about models and climate change please watch this TED presentation by Gavin Schmidt

http://www.ted.com/talks/gavin_schmidt_the_emergent_patterns_of_climate_change" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[Nubo]

The additional CO2 in our atmosphere has proven to be extremely beneficial to virtually all life on Earth, in spite of the many, many dire predictions made by some scientists-come-activists.

Not sure I've noticed that personally. So far, age seems to have outweighed any CO2 benefits

 

[AndyH]

The year 2009 is viewed as the "last best chance" the Western world had to save itself, as leaders met in Copenhagen, Denmark, to try, for the fifteenth time since the UNFCCC was written, to agree on a binding, international law to prevent disruptive climate change. Two years before, scientists involved in the IPCC had declared anthropogenic warming to be "unequivocal," and public opinion polls showed hat a majority of people - even in the recalcitrant United States - believed that action was warranted. but shortly before the meeting, a massive campaign was launched to discredit the scientists whose research underpinned the IPCC's conclusion. This campaign was funded primarily by fossil fuel corporations, who's annual profits at that time exceeded the GDPs of most countries... Public support for action evaporated; even the president of the United States felt unable to move his nation forward.

Meanwhile, climate change was intensifying. In 2010, record-breaking summer heat and fires killed more than 50,000 people in Russia and resulted in more than $15 billion (in 2009 USD) in damages. the following year, massive floods in Australia affected more than 250,000 people. In 2012, which became known in the United Stats as the "year without a winter," winter temperature records, including for the highest overnight lows, were shattered - something that should have been an obvious cause for concern. A summer of unprecedented heat waves and loss of livestock and agriculture followed...

It is clear that in the early twenty-first century, immediate steps should have been taken to begin a transition to a zero-net-carbon world. Staggeringly, the opposite occurred. At the very time that the urgent need for an energy transition became palpable, world production of greenhouse gases increased. This fact is so hard to understand that it calls for a closer look at what we know about this crucial juncture.

The Collapse of Western Civilization, Oreskes/Conway, 2014

 

[WetEV]

they have gone way overboard in claiming that small changes due to CO2 will lead to huge changes because the CO2 will co-opt water vapor in a positive feedback loop. I have provided many, many avenues of evidence that water in our system provides strong negative feedback, rendering the already-small contribution of CO2 to our Earth's temperature to be even smaller.

Then how did the glaciers advance at the Last Glacial Maximum?

but it is a politically-motivated belief system

Not me.

This has been an issue I've closely followed since the 1970's. It wasn't a political issue then, it shouldn't be one now. I started with an interest in Geology, added in some Physics, and came to a reasonable conclusion. That's my motivation. That's all.

I'd like to know what yours is.

 

[RegGuheert]

The additional CO2 in our atmosphere has proven to be extremely beneficial to virtually all life on Earth, in spite of the many, many dire predictions made by some scientists-come-activists.

Not sure I've noticed that personally. So far, age seems to have outweighed any CO2 benefits

:lol: :lol: Ha! Ha! Me, too! I just hate to think what I'd look like without those benefits!

(I'm thinking it's a bit better for the plants! That would make the benefits more indirect for us.)

they have gone way overboard in claiming that small changes due to CO2 will lead to huge changes because the CO2 will co-opt water vapor in a positive feedback loop. I have provided many, many avenues of evidence that water in our system provides strong negative feedback, rendering the already-small contribution of CO2 to our Earth's temperature to be even smaller.

Then how did the glaciers advance at the Last Glacial Maximum?

More clouds, modulated by low solar activity.

but it is a politically-motivated belief system

Not me.

Also fair enough. It's clear you have looked at the data.

This has been an issue I've closely followed since the 1970's. It wasn't a political issue then, it shouldn't be one now. I started with an interest in Geology, added in some Physics, and came to a reasonable conclusion. That's my motivation. That's all.

I'd like to know what yours is.

No need to wonder. I've laid out the scientific data clearly here for all to see. Simply put, there is not a single alarming claim remaining which is not directly contradicted by the data. Not one.