It's all over but for the sweating?

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Old Tele man

..."Mother Nature" has already done that many times over the eons: A = Glacial Cooling and B = Savannah Sizziling (wink,wink)...we just weren't around to notice it.

Sorry, but no. Mother Nature has not dumped large amounts of fossil CO2 into the atmosphere many times over the eons. In fact, she has - as well as we can read the fossil record - done it only once. That was the Permian-Triassic extinction event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian...tinction_event

[NeilBlanchard]

Volcanoes are the only large source of additional carbon dioxide from "nature" and as the continents were moving "quickly" (after Pangaea split up), they were producing carbon dioxide more quickly than the weathering process could sink into sediments only up until India collided with Southeast Asia and started pushing up the Himalayan mountains. After that, the weathering process brought the level of carbon dioxide down to the 170-270 plateau that was the "naturally balanced" range that persisted right up until we humans started burning fossil fuels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGFAWzjO378

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Volcanoes are the only large source of additional carbon dioxide from "nature"...

A video by James "Adjustments - past down, now up" Hansen. Enough said

Just for fun - Jimmy isn't any obviously - he won't even admit mistakes in his own sums or even who found them - lets have a look at a scientists view on the effect of CO2 on climate.

First some prologue. One of the annoying facts for alarmists is that ice cores with a sufficiently high resolution generally show that CO2 variations lag temperature variations by typically several hundred years. Thus, the ice cores cannot be used to quantify how large is the effect that CO2 has on the climate. In fact, there is no single time scale whatsoever over which CO2 variations can be shown to be the origin of temperature variations (not that such an effect shouldn’t be present, but because of its size, no fingerprint was actually found yet, even if you hear otherwise!). This fact stands as a nasty thorn in the alarmist story.

Sorry guys but the wheels are coming off this, please carry on if you like though.



Run for the hills, just leave your stuff so we can recycle it.

[NeilBlanchard]

I've gone over that several times - it depends on what the driver of the change is. In the warming period about 125,000 years ago, when it was the earth's orbit and angle that drove the warming, the carbon dioxide was released from the ocean *because warmer water cannot hold as much carbon as colder water*.

This current change, the carbon is leading the temperature *because the carbon is coming from us humans burning fossil fuels*. We know that it is coming from burning fossil fuels in three ways:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXgDrr6qiUk

* We humans are producing 50-100X carbon dioxide as much as volcanoes.

* Volcanoes produce carbon dioxide by melting rock which is not burning any oxygen - the rise of carbon dioxide matches the fall of oxygen.

* The carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere is carbon 12 which is from old plants. Volcanoes produce more carbon 13 than we see in the atmosphere, and carbon 14 only comes from plants that grew recently.


Geddit now?

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

I've gone over that several times - it depends on what the driver of the change is. In the warming period about 125,000 years ago, when it was the earth's orbit and angle that drove the warming, the carbon dioxide was released from the ocean *because warmer water cannot hold as much carbon as colder water*.

Its a theory. Like a lot of theories it has problems and unexplained issues, like CAGW. AGW is a stronger theory, that C bit is weaker. No evidence of extra catastrophies or disasters, no additional floods or droughts, no sudden new Arctic passages opened compared to history.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

This current change, the carbon is leading the temperature *because the carbon is coming from us humans burning fossil fuels*.

What current change?

Temps rising since WW2 ? Most of it happened before the world (outside the USA) had recovered.

Temps rising since the 1850s - except for that bit in the 1930s of course which were warmer than today. The "warmest year on record" for the 20th century was in the 1930s, how can that be ?

Temps rising since the 1750s which is the end of the LIA ?

Temps higher in the MWP ? How can that be ?

Temps higher in Roman times ? What ?

The "Adjustments" - older temps always go down, newer ones go up with Dr Hansen (and others) ? What is that all about, how - what - where - why ?

And what is a world temperature anyway given the stations have never been constant and a lot have been removed ?

And why has this CO2 induced distaster laden warming "stopped" based on the scientists own parameters, which they now think doesn't matter or want to redefine ?

And why are "scentists" now thinking maybe the climate is less sensitive - because maybe it doesn't match the models ?

And why are the models' projections being adjusted downwards anyway ? Because the world doesn't match them before and they need more deep thought ?

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

* We humans are producing 50-100X carbon dioxide as much as volcanoes.

* Volcanoes produce carbon dioxide by melting rock which is not burning any oxygen - the rise of carbon dioxide matches the fall of oxygen.

* The carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere is carbon 12 which is from old plants. Volcanoes produce more carbon 13 than we see in the atmosphere, and carbon 14 only comes from plants that grew recently.

I'm not in the "volcano" camp myself - smacks too much of Scientology But lets go on - CO2 has risen in a straight line - well according to the one station in Hawaii we all seem to use. Temps have not. What causes that if the relationship is so simple ?

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Geddit now?

Do you ?

Are you not in the least curious about this stuff, are you against science finding out the answers ?

Seriously if we stopped thinking and questioning science then there are loads of "what if" and "how does that work" questions that would not have been answered - which could mean no cars, no power and no internet.

[freebeard]

Can't we just turn it all into alcohol, consequences be danged.

(Not formic acid, that's nasty stuff)

[NeilBlanchard]

97% of all climate scientists agree on what is happening. Temperature is rising overall right now - about 0.8C/1.4F over the last 100 years and most of that in the last 35 years, and there are reasons for why it is not linear - the sun's output varies, we have volcanic eruptions which put up ash which temporarily cools things, and as I have said, there is a 30-40 year lag because it is the accumulation of more heat over time. There is a lot of "momentum" in the system.

There have been many climate changes in the past, and they were caused by different things in different combination. The temperature increase we are currently in now is being caused by a new and different thing that has never happened before - and that is we humans burning fossil fuel.

These past changes only matter because of what we can learn from them. This current very rapid change (rapid in the geological sense of the word) is not like those previous events, and yes that means that we can't know *precisely* what will happen in the future - but we *do* know generally what will happen.

There is massive amount of data from all around the globe - keeping each and every one of them all through the data set is not required. We have new methods of collecting data being developed all the time - we now know how to date when an ancient glacier melted.

All science keeps finding more questions than it answers, and the more we learn, the more intelligent questions we can ask. But, we know enough about what is happening now to be very concerned. We are causing most of the increase in carbon dioxide, which is the main driver of the current warming climate - and that means we can do things differently and begin to mitigate the worst of what could happen.

I seek to learn as much as I can, all the time. I learned several new things watching these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLYqzIhhT6o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEPVy...4A9EE2&index=1

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

Sorry guys but the wheels are coming off this, please carry on if you like though.

Sorry yourself :-) The problem here is that you don't bother to understand the fairly simple physics at work in that feedback cycle. Or perhaps the problem is more that you deliberately refuse to understand the physics at work, since that would blow your facile word games to tiny bits.

Simply put (you can find much better explanations in any good reference), there is X amount of CO2 in what we might call the geosphere (atmosphere + oceans + biosphere). That amount is virtually constant across multi-million year time scales: sometimes more is dissolved in the ocean (when orbital cycles move into a cooling phase), which in turn reenforces the cooling. Sometimes more is in the atmosphere, which adds to warming. But all this only happens within limits of cycles, dictated by orbital movements and the fixed amount of CO2. (And over longer periods, by things like the movement of continents.) It's really no different than the smaller scale annual CO2 cycle: one phase of the orbital cycle produces northern hemisphere warming, which causes CO2 uptake. The opposite phase produces cooling, and release of CO2.

But what humans are doing now - adding more CO2 to the system by burning fossil fuels - is something completely outside these normal cycles. Since it hasn't happened before (except, arguably, at the PT extinction), the only guide to the consequences is physics.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Can't we just turn it all into alcohol, consequences be danged.

(Not formic acid, that's nasty stuff)

Seems like a plan.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

97% of all climate scientists agree on what is happening. Temperature is rising overall right now - about 0.8C/1.4F over the last 100 years and most of that in the last 35 years, and there are reasons for why it is not linear - the sun's output varies, we have volcanic eruptions which put up ash which temporarily cools things, and as I have said, there is a 30-40 year lag because it is the accumulation of more heat over time. There is a lot of "momentum" in the system.

There have been many climate changes in the past...

The 97% figure is often put forward, it sometimes comes down to 77 out of 79 responses, or 75 out of 77 in the case of the AGU survey. Self selecting surveys with responses under 100 don't make good percentages - unless you are after a good headline. And a lot of the questions match my statement a few pages ago, even I would be in the "97/98%".

The obvious question moving forward though is where has the heat gone because surface temps are not showing it. The seas ? Where is the evidence for that ?

I'm glad you like to find out about things, did you see the recent discussion about climate sensitivity ? If only I understood all those hard sums...

Sorry to go on about it, but this prior thing this is an important issue. So here are my 7 reasons for why climate scientists should *never* use uniform priors for climate sensitivity, and why the IPCC report shouldn’t cite studies that use them.

It pains me a little to be so critical, especially as I know some of authors listed in Nic Lewis’s post, but better to say this now, and give the IPCC authors some opportunity to think about it, than after the IPCC report is published.

1) *The results from uniform priors are arbitrary and hence non-scientific*

If the authors that Nic Lewis lists above had chosen different coordinate systems, they would have got different results. For instance, if they had used 1/S, or log S, as their coordinates, instead of S, the climate sensitivity distributions would change. Scientific results should not depend on the choice of coordinate system.

2) *If you use a uniform prior for S, someone might accuse you of choosing the prior to give high rates of climate change*

It just so happens that using S gives higher values for climate sensitivity than using 1/S or log S.

3) *The results may well be nonsense mathematically*

When you apply a statistical method to a complex model, you’d want to first check that the method gives sensible results on simple models. But flat priors often given nonsense when applied to simple models. A good example is if you try and fit a normal distribution to 10 data values using a flat prior for the variance…the final variance estimate you get is higher than anything that any of the standard methods will give you, and is really just nonsense: it’s extremely biased, and the resulting predictions of the normal are much too wide. If flat priors fail on such a simple example, we can’t trust them on more complex examples.

4) *You risk criticism from more or less the entire statistics community*

The problems with flat priors have been well understood by statisticians for decades. I don’t think there is a single statistician in the world who would argue that flat priors are a good way to represent lack of knowledge, or who would say that they should be used as a convention (except for location parameters…but climate sensitivity isn’t a location parameter).

5) *You risk criticism from scientists in many other disciplines too*

In many other scientific disciplines these issues are well understood, and in many disciplines it would be impossible to publish a paper using a flat prior. (Even worse, pensioners from the UK and mathematicians from the insurance industry may criticize you too ).

6) *If your paper is cited in the IPCC report, IPCC may end up losing credibility*

These are much worse problems than getting the date of melting glaciers wrong. Uniform priors are a fundamentally unjustifiable methodology that gives invalid quantitative results. If these papers are cited in the IPCC, the risk is that critics will (quite rightly) heap criticism on the IPCC for relying on such stuff, and the credibility of IPCC and climate science will suffer as a result.

7) *There is a perfectly good alternative, that solves all these problems*

Harold Jeffreys grappled with the problem of uniform priors in the 1930s, came up with the Jeffreys’ prior (well, I guess he didn’t call it that), and wrote a book about it. It fixes all the above problems: it gives results which are coordinate independent and so not arbitrary in that sense, it gives sensible results that agree with other methods when applied to simple models, and it’s used in statistics and many other fields.

In Nic Lewis’s email (number 89 above), Nic describes a further refinement of the Jeffreys’ Prior, known as reference priors. Whether the 1946 version of Jeffreys’ Prior, or a reference prior, is the better choice, is a good topic for debate (although it’s a pretty technical question). But that debate does muddy the waters of this current discussion a little: the main point is that both of them are vastly preferable to uniform priors (and they are very similar anyway). If reference priors are too confusing, just use Jeffreys’ 1946 Prior. If you want to use the fanciest statistical technology, use reference priors.

ps: if you go to your local statistics department, 50% of the statisticians will agree with what I’ve written above. The other 50% will agree that uniform priors are rubbish, but will say that JP is rubbish too, and that you should give up trying to use any kind of noninformative prior. This second 50% are the subjective Bayesians, who say that probability is just a measure of personal beliefs. They will tell you to make up your own prior according to your prior beliefs. To my mind this is a non-starter in climate research, and maybe in science in general, since it removes all objectivity. That’s another debate that climate scientists need to get ready to be having over the next few years.

Take a walk on the other side for a while

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Sorry yourself :-) The problem here is that you don't bother to understand the fairly simple physics at work in that feedback cycle.

I understand the "simple physics" the problem is that the world doesn't seem to be acting like a simple experiment says it should. If there was a super positive feedback and CO2 lasted so long, why aren't the levels much higher ? World emissions haven't declined although some countries (like the US) have managed to do so.