Note: my response below is primarily for the benefit of the ASA list
and Burgy. I have copied Glenn as a courtesy since he is off list
again (which IMHO is a shame because his background with respect to
oil is unmatched on the list or for that matter universally).
On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 3:39 PM, j burg <hossradbourne@gmail.com> wrote:
Not being a climate scientist, nor privy to how the IPCC scientists
worked, Ther is little I can respond to. Glenn may be right. But if he
is, why is nobody in the climate scientist community pointing this
stuff out?
Of course they are not negligent. Glenn is only commenting on certain
temperature stations. The same trend shows up in the middle of the
ocean and in the lower troposphere radiosonde and satellite records
which don't suffer from UHI effects. If AGW is true there should also
be a decrease in the lower stratosphere and sho' 'nuff it's there too.
The measured record also matches the computer models *only if* you
include the effects of increasing CO2. I'll talk a little more about
this below but the greatest warming is in the polar regions where
there is no UHI effect.
Look at this of the lower troposphere:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/data/amsu_daily_85N85S_chLT.r001.txt
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+001
And this for the lower stratosphere:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/data/amsu_daily_85N85S_ch09.r006.txt
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+006
During the time that there was supposedly no warming -- after 1998 --
the lower troposphere has warmed. June 9 data shows that 2008 is the
warmest in 10 years and greater than the "20 year record". That's not
surprising because in the last month we have now changed from La Nina
to neutral ENSO. The Real Climate people want to take a bet that it
will be warmer in 5 years with the people that recently predicted
otherwise. My read of the data is this is a real sucker bet because
even though we had La Nina and were at solar minimum we still are on
track for a top 10 out of 150 year for 2008.
> There are feed back loops which people don't take into account.
Hotter air, holds more water. Hotter seas gives off more water, but
high in the atmosphere, the water will cool and should form more cloud
cover to reduce the insolation hitting the earth.
Burgy again. I think my response here is much the same as #1. Did the
IPCC take int account feedback loops? Or not? Without expertise in
climate science, I don't have the tools to address this question.
The climate models include these negative feedbacks. The positive
feedbacks are the ones that are the most troublesome because we may be
underestimating the future warming. From 1980 to 2007, the minimum
polar ice extent differed by the area of the entire continental United
States minus the state of Arizona. This in turn decreases the albedo
and increases warming. There is also -- as predicted by global warming
theory -- what is known as polar amplification. The warming is far
more pronounced in the polar regions where we don't have to tease out
the signal from the noise. The melting of the permafrost releases
methane which is another positive feedback.
See here to see what it looks like:
http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/images/20071017_meltseasona.mov
and:
http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/images/20071017_timeseries.png
Finally, I commnented:, "On tectonics plate theory, the "herd" was
wrong. OTOH, the "herd" > > is more often right than wrong. We all
depend on this every day. Let
> > me suggest that MAYBE you are right, the "herd" is wrong ."
Glenn responded:
"I pointed you to a picture of the deuterium temperature record from
Vostok ice core which I personally downloaded and plotted.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/WeatherVostokPostglacialTemp.jpg
You can easily repeat my download and plot. The fact is that the
earth was hotter than today prior to 3200 years ago all the way back
to 10,800 years or so. This is fact. Who cares what the herd thinks
after facts have been established. If it isn't to be fact, then one
needs to explain how in a colder world back then, more heavy water was
evaporated from the colder oceans--that is ass-backwards physics."
>
> I also showed you plots of CO2 throughout the Phanerozoic which
don't correlate at all with the O18 record. Why no mention of that http://home.entouch.net/dmd/WeatherPhanerozoicTempCO2.jpg
Glenn accuses people of not correcting their data and then fails to
correct for pH. Royer et al (2004) said this:
Recent studies have purported to show a closer correspondence between
reconstructed Phanerozoic records of cosmic ray flux and temperature
than between CO2 and temperature. The role of the greenhouse gas CO2
in controlling global temperatures has therefore been questioned. Here
we review the geologic records of CO2 and glaciations and find that
CO2 was low (<500 ppm) during periods of long-lived and widespread
continental glaciations and high (>1000 ppm) during other, warmer
periods. The CO2 record is likely robust because independent proxy
records are highly correlated with CO2 predictions from geochemical
models. The Phanerozoic sea surface temperature record as inferred
from shallow marine carbonate δ18O values has been used to
quantitatively test the importance of potential climate forcings, but
it fails several first-order tests relative to more well-established
paleoclimatic indicators: both the early Paleozoic and Mesozoic are
calculated to have been too cold for too long. We explore the possible
influence of seawater pH on the δ18O record and find that a pH-
corrected record matches the glacial record much better. Periodic
fluctuations in the cosmic ray flux may be of some climatic
significance, but are likely of second-order importance on a
multimillion-year timescale.
>
> Do you think we can get a good daily temperature from a thermometer
on top of asphalt? If so, please explain why.
Again, I have no intention of getting a Ph-D in climate science.
Whether or not the above is pertinent I have no idea. Assuming they
are. where are the sceintific peer-reviewed papers that address the
subject? I am told they do not exist. That says, to me, that either
they are NOT pertinent OR that those points have been addressed by the
IPCC or other climate scientists.
There's another possibility that Glenn doesn't take into account. The
people he is currently talking to are lying to him just like the YEC
people did earlier in his life. There is a HUGE amount of peer
reviewed literature. My quote above was done in a few seconds with a
Google Scholar search. Burgy, there's a better way than this trading
of "talking points". Don't trust me. Go to the IPCC reports themselves
and look at the references section. Then ask Glenn for similar peer-
reviewed studies in on-topic journals from his friends, and not the
Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Here's the chapter on paleoclimate:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf
Note this from the chapter:
When comparing the current climate change to earlier, natural
ones, three distinctions must be made. First, it must be clear which
variable is being compared: is it greenhouse gas concentration or
temperature (or some other climate parameter), and is it their abso-
lute value or their rate of change? Second, local changes must not
be confused with global changes. Local climate changes are often
much larger than global ones, since local factors (e.g., changes in
oceanic or atmospheric circulation) can shift the delivery of heat
or moisture from one place to another and local feedbacks operate
(e.g., sea ice feedback). Large changes in global mean temperature,
in contrast, require some global forcing (such as a change in green-
house gas concentration or solar activity). Third, it is necessary to
distinguish between time scales. Climate changes over millions of
years can be much larger and have different causes (e.g., continental
drift) compared to climate changes on a centennial time scale.
The main reason for the current concern about climate change
is the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration (and
some other greenhouse gases), which is very unusual for the Qua-
ternary (about the last two million years). The concentration of CO2
is now known accurately for the past 650,000 years from antarctic
ice cores. During this time, CO2 concentration varied between a low
of 180 ppm during cold glacial times and a high of 300 ppm during
warm interglacials. Over the past century, it rapidly increased well
out of this range, and is now 379 ppm (see Chapter 2). For compari-
son, the approximately 80-ppm rise in CO2 concentration at the end
of the past ice ages generally took over 5,000 years. Higher values
than at present have only occurred many millions of years ago (see
FAQ 6.1).
Temperature is a more difficult variable to reconstruct than CO2
(a globally well-mixed gas), as it does not have the same value all
over the globe, so that a single record (e.g., an ice core) is only of
limited value. Local temperature fl uctuations, even those over just a
few decades, can be several degrees celsius, which is larger than the
global warming signal of the past century of about 0.7°C.
...
A different matter is the current rate of warming. Are more rapid
global climate changes recorded in proxy data? The largest tem-
perature changes of the past million years are the glacial cycles,
during which the global mean temperature changed by 4°C to 7°C
between ice ages and warm interglacial periods (local changes were
much larger, for example near the continental ice sheets). However,
the data indicate that the global warming at the end of an ice age
was a gradual process taking about 5,000 years (see Section 6.3). It
is thus clear that the current rate of global climate change is much
more rapid and very unusual in the context of past changes. The
much-discussed abrupt climate shifts during glacial times (see Sec-
tion 6.3) are not counter-examples, since they were probably due to
changes in ocean heat transport, which would be unlikely to affect
the global mean temperature.
Further back in time, beyond ice core data, the time resolution of
sediment cores and other archives does not resolve changes as rapid
as the present warming. Hence, although large climate changes have
occurred in the past, there is no evidence that these took place at
a faster rate than present warming. If projections of approximately
5°C warming in this century (the upper end of the range) are re-
alised, then the Earth will have experienced about the same amount
of global mean warming as it did at the end of the last ice age; there
is no evidence that this rate of possible future global change was
matched by any comparable global temperature increase of the last
50 million years.
And on the temperature record:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf
Which has a interesting comment:
Urban heat island effects are real but local, and have
not biased the large-scale trends. A number of recent studies
indicate that effects of urbanisation and land use change on
the land-based temperature record are negligible (0.006ºC per
decade) as far as hemispheric- and continental-scale averages
are concerned because the very real but local effects are
avoided or accounted for in the data sets used. In any case, they
are not present in the SST component of the record. Increasing
evidence suggests that urban heat island effects extend to
changes in precipitation, clouds and DTR, with these detectable
as a ‘weekend effect’ owing to lower pollution and other effects
during weekends.
Finally, the survey referenced by Glenn is the infamous Oregon
petition. Burgy, see more information on this here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition
Much of this was clearly fraudulent. Note this:
The article that accompanied the petition was written in the style and
format of a contribution to Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, a scientific journal.[5] Raymond Pierrehumbert, an
atmospheric scientist at the University of Chicago, said that it was
"designed to be deceptive by giving people the impression that the
article...is a reprint and has passed peer review." Pierrehumbert also
said the article was full of "half-truths".[12] F. Sherwood Rowland,
who was at the time foreign secretary of the National Academy of
Sciences, said that the Academy received numerous inquiries from
researchers who "are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink
them."[12]
After the petition appeared, the National Academy of Sciences said in
news release that "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that
this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences
and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed
journal."[13] It also said "The petition does not reflect the
conclusions of expert reports of the Academy." The NAS further noted
that its own prior published study had shown that "even given the
considerable uncertainties in our knowledge of the relevant phenomena,
greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt
responses. Investment in mitigation measures acts as insurance
protection against the great uncertainties and the possibility of
dramatic surprises."[14]
Rich Blinne
Member ASA
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Received on Wed Jun 11 08:59:23 2008
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