Manmade Climate Change Discussion

[knocker]

And I quite enjoyed this. But then that's me.

 

Revealed - Anthony Watts Stealth Plan to Make Us Accept Climate Change Science

 

Today I can exclusively reveal that Anthony Watts is in thrall to evil climate change scientists and runs his site WattsUpWithThat to push their agenda of mitigation and Agenda 21 and world government and everything the right wing nutters don't want. How do I know?  I'd like to say I have hacked his email account, anthonywatts1500@tiscali.org.us but that hasn't happened.  Instead, like trying to read the vacuous but dangerous mind of Vladimir Putin, I have to examine his every utterance, dissect his behaviour and try to discern his motives.

 

http://ingeniouspursuits.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/revealed-anthony-watts-stealth-plan-to.html

[knocker]

Really a bit of a hatchet job on Soon with the link.

 

A topsy turvy world of climate proxies

[knocker]

Climate change: Don't wait until you can feel it

 

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence for the impending dangers of human-made climate change, policy decisions leading to substantial emissions reduction have been slow. New work from Carnegie's Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira focuses on the intersection between personal and global impacts. They find that even as extreme weather events influence those who experience them to support policy to address climate change, waiting for the majority of people to live through such conditions firsthand could delay meaningful action by decades. Their findings are published by Nature Climate Change.

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140425093601.htm

 

The paper

 

Natural climate variability and future climate policy

 

Here is how Katharine Ricke explains it:

 

 

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n5/full/nclimate2186.html

Edited April 26, 2014 by knocker

[knocker]

Beefed up or toned down? Judith Curry, David Rose, Anthony Watts spin on the IPCC

 

Professor Robert Stavins has a blog post complaining about how much text was deleted from WGIII SPM. He's posted an article with a letter he wrote to the IPCC Chair and the Co-Chairs of Working Group III.  He also posted selections from the Summary for Policy Makers from which text was removed, as Item a (before) and Item b (after). He was concerned that governments chopped out almost all of the explanatory text under the key headings. Most of you will have read about this already, but it's interesting to compare the versions side by side. For further comparison, you can get the final Summary for Policy Makers and the full report here.

 

http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/04/beefed-up-or-toned-down-judith-curry.html

Edited April 27, 2014 by knocker

[knocker]

http://forum.netweather.tv/topic/76448-scepticism-of-man-made-climate-change/page-62#entry2961310

 

 

“The theory is that the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuel is the ‘greenhouse gas’ causes ‘global warming’ – in fact, water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04 per cent.

 

I think it quite outrageous that nobody thought to inform the world's leading climate scientists about this.

 

Anyway he's educating, with his stunning insights, the pernicious folk at Climate depot. I'm not sure he's not a reincarnation of Spike Milligan. No can't be Spike spoke more sense.

Edited April 27, 2014 by knocker

[Devonian]

http://forum.netweather.tv/topic/76448-scepticism-of-man-made-climate-change/page-63#entry2961340

 

From Keith's link come this completely bonkers statement: "There is no reproducible scientific evidence CO2 has significantly increased in the last 100 years." it's 'dragons slayers' grade bonkers in fact.

Edited April 27, 2014 by Devonian

[Devonian]

http://forum.netweather.tv/topic/76448-scepticism-of-man-made-climate-change/page-62#entry2961286

 

"Judith is spinning this as the IPCC process is flawed. In fact, it's flawed in the wrong direction for Judith (but she doesn't admit that). Robert is complaining that the report was toned down, not beefed up."

 

How's your foot?

 

edit: which is the same link that knocker posted

Edited April 27, 2014 by Devonian

[knocker]

Discounting for the moment the number of premature deaths per year world wide due to pollution: it's around 500,000 in China alone.

 

Fossil fuel subsidies 'reckless use of public funds'

 

The world is spending half a trillion dollars on fossil fuel subsidies every year, according to a new report.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24833153

 

 

The IEA, within the framework of the World Energy Outlook, has been measuring fossil-fuel subsidies in a systematic and regular fashion for more than a decade. Its analysis is aimed at demonstrating the impact of fossil-fuel subsidy removal for energy markets, climate change and government budgets. The IEA’s latest estimates indicate that fossil-fuel consumption subsidies worldwide amounted to $544 billion in 2012, slightly up from 2011 as moderately higher international prices and increased consumption offset some notable progress that is being made to rein in subsidies. Subsidies to oil products represented over half of the total.

 

http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/resources/energysubsidies/

 

 

Two years ahead of a crucial UN climate change summit, global fossil fuel subsidies now top half a trillion dollars. This ODI report argues that it is time to 'change the game' on fossil fuel subsidies.

 

http://www.odi.org.uk/subsidies-change-the-game

 

 

Fossil fuels subsidies are the most pernicious and distorting of subsidies. The biggest in Australia is the fuel tax credit scheme, which is worth $2 billion per year to mining companies, the equivalent of each taxpayer in Australia handing over $182 to the mining companies.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/southern-crossroads/2014/feb/02/fossil-fuel-subsidies-tony-abbott-spc-ardmona-corporate-welfare

[poseidon]

http://www.npl.co.uk/news/better-climate-predictions-within-grasp

[knocker]

Ocean Acidification – the other big CO2 problem

from oceanacidification.net

 

Ocean Acidification is not a peripheral climate issue, it is the other CO₂ challenge. The world’s leading marine scientists are warning us that our current rates of carbon emissions are making our oceans more acidic. This is happening so fast that it poses a serious threat to biodiversity and marine life.

 

Left unchecked, Ocean Acidification could destroy all our coral reefs by as early as 2050. It also has the potential to disrupt other ocean ecosystems, fisheries, habitats, and even entire oceanic food chains.

 

For resources and everything you need to know about ocean acidification go here.

 

 

http://uknowispeaksense.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/ocean-acidification-the-other-big-co2-problem/

[knocker]

Oh, ATTP has come across the article in Breitbart.

 

Critically analysing horse super duper

[balmaha]

Oh, ATTP has come across the article in Breitbart.

 

Critically analysing horse onions

:lol:

 

 

Some good links in here knocker. Find the climate change  debate an extremely interesting subject , although i have much to learn.

[knocker]

:lol:

 

 

Some good links in here knocker. Find the climate change  debate an extremely interesting subject , although i have much to learn.

 

I think we all do balmaha but then that's part of the fascination.

[Gray-Wolf]

The thing is, and I'm paraphrasing,

 

(i) if the slow down is natural and ...

(ii) CO₂ is the major climate forcing

 

How is is that natural forcings are poweful enough to override an exponential rise in CO₂?

 

I realise that, in debates such as these, 2+2<>4, but 2+2=10?

 

(That'll be the feedbacks and feedforwards, then, which are the most uncertain parts of climate science)

 

I thought there was a healthy wallop of man-made in the slowdown Sparks??? I can't get away from the NASA report , a few years back, showing that particulate and sulphates could be taking 50% of the 'man-made' away? 

 

So if the warming is already pegged back by the flip side of the man-made coin then such a conflagration of naturals must further impact temp rises? The concern is what the pole is now bringing to the table after the temp reconstruction we saw a few months ago? If all those negatives ( man-made and natural) are just pushed aside by the 'natural' Albedo Flip now ongoing up there. What the heck are we to expect with man-made cooling forcings removed, natural augmenting warming and an ice free Arctic?

 

I fear folk do not have long left to 'play games' with the rate of warming before we enter a period where dangerous warming is apparent to all?

[knocker]

As there have been many papers written on the subject one must bear in mind  this is Sparkicle's opening gambit and as he will be expecting the usual Sicilian defense I strongly expect a variation with the next move.

[knocker]

Is 'override' appropriate?

 

A study by Kosaka and Xie recently published in Nature confirms that the slowing rise in global temperatures during recent years has been a result of prevalent La Niña periods in the tropical Pacific.  The authors write in the abstract:

 

Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability tied specifically to a La Niña like decadal cooling. 

 

They show this with an elegant experiment, in which they “force†their global climate model to follow the observed history of sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific. With this trick the model is made to replay the actual sequence of El Niño and La Niña events found in the real world, rather than producing its own events by chance.  The result is that the model then also reproduces the observed global average temperature history with great accuracy.

 

There are then at least three independent lines of evidence that confirm we are not dealing with a slowdown in the global warming trend, but rather with progressive global warming with superimposed natural variability:

 

1.  Our correlation analysis between global temperature and the El Niño Index.

2.  The measurements of oceanic heat uptake.

3.  The new model calculation of Kosaka and Xie.

 

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/what-ocean-heating-reveals-about-global-warming/

 

And perhaps of interest.

 

On Forced Temperature Changes, Internal Variability and the AMO

 

Abstract

We estimate the low-frequency internal variability of Northern Hemisphere (NH) mean temperature using observed temperature variations, which include both forced and internal variability components, and several alternative model simulations of the (natural + anthropogenic) forced component alone. We then generate an ensemble of alternative historical temperature histories based on the statistics of the estimated internal variability. Using this ensemble, we show, firstly, that recent NH mean temperatures fall within the range of expected multidecadal variability. Using the synthetic temperature histories, we also show that certain procedures used in past studies to estimate internal variability, and in particular, an internal multidecadal oscillation termed the “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation†or “AMOâ€, fail to isolate the true internal variability when it is a priori known. Such procedures yield an AMO signal with an inflated amplitude and biased phase, attributing some of the recent NH mean temperature rise to the AMO. The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming. Claims of multidecadal “stadium wave†patterns of variation across multiple climate indices are also shown to likely be an artifact of this flawed procedure for isolating putative climate oscillations.

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL059233/abstract

Edited April 28, 2014 by knocker

[VillagePlank]

I thought there was a healthy wallop of man-made in the slowdown Sparks??? I can't get away from the NASA report , a few years back, showing that particulate and sulphates could be taking 50% of the 'man-made' away? 

 

So if the warming is already pegged back by the flip side of the man-made coin then such a conflagration of naturals must further impact temp rises? The concern is what the pole is now bringing to the table after the temp reconstruction we saw a few months ago? If all those negatives ( man-made and natural) are just pushed aside by the 'natural' Albedo Flip now ongoing up there. What the heck are we to expect with man-made cooling forcings removed, natural augmenting warming and an ice free Arctic?

 

I fear folk do not have long left to 'play games' with the rate of warming before we enter a period where dangerous warming is apparent to all?

 

Yes, the global cleanup in the 1970s preceded the huge hike in temperatures during the later half (coincidence and correlation, perhaps not causation) and China's building one coal powered station/week (or whatever) is certainly pumping loads of particulates into the atmosphere which should cause global dimming.

 

Worryingly, perhaps CO2+pollution is better than CO2 alone?

[VillagePlank]

 

Is 'override' appropriate?

 

A study by Kosaka and Xie recently published in Nature confirms that the slowing rise in global temperatures during recent years has been a result of prevalent La Niña periods in the tropical Pacific.  The authors write in the abstract:

 

Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability tied specifically to a La Niña like decadal cooling. 

 

They show this with an elegant experiment, in which they “force†their global climate model to follow the observed history of sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific. With this trick the model is made to replay the actual sequence of El Niño and La Niña events found in the real world, rather than producing its own events by chance.  The result is that the model then also reproduces the observed global average temperature history with great accuracy.

 

There are then at least three independent lines of evidence that confirm we are not dealing with a slowdown in the global warming trend, but rather with progressive global warming with superimposed natural variability:

 

1.  Our correlation analysis between global temperature and the El Niño Index.

2.  The measurements of oceanic heat uptake.

3.  The new model calculation of Kosaka and Xie.

 

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/what-ocean-heating-reveals-about-global-warming/

 

And perhaps of interest.

 

On Forced Temperature Changes, Internal Variability and the AMO

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL059233/abstract

 

 

Yes, the AMO has long been of interest to those, ahem, of a more natural bent. Particularly, that with simply manipulation you can create ~60year cycles that coincide with the temperature record. I don't think anyone has conclusively shown it to be the dominant natural cause, and, even it were, the Atlantic doesn't simply emit energy, *that* has to come from somewhere ....

As there have been many papers written on the subject one must bear in mind  this is Sparkicle's opening gambit and as he will be expecting the usual Sicilian defense I strongly expect a variation with the next move.

 

Not against a variation of a Queen's opening, rather than a King's one ....

[knocker]

India’s rain woes grow bigger, scientists worried

http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/india-s-rain-woes-grow-bigger-scientists-worried/article1-1212673.aspx

[knocker]

Quite an interesting video.

 

Mud wrestling with a pig

 

People often say why don’t I debate with sceptics …. it’s a bit like mud wrestling with a pig. Firstly you get covered in mud and secondly, the pig loves it.

[Gray-Wolf]

Yes, the global cleanup in the 1970s preceded the huge hike in temperatures during the later half (coincidence and correlation, perhaps not causation) and China's building one coal powered station/week (or whatever) is certainly pumping loads of particulates into the atmosphere which should cause global dimming.

 

Worryingly, perhaps CO2+pollution is better than CO2 alone?

 

But only if folk know that it is occurring and do not mistakenly think we have the calcs on CO2 wrong?

 

The CO2 impacts last far longer than the impacts of sulphates/particulates but whilst the pollution continually replaces the 'dirty' pollution then the impacts appear permanent?

 

7 years for sulphates to drop out naturally so any 'clean-up', clean air acts stylee, will only slowly allow the full impacts of warming to appear as the 'old pollution' drops out of the picture.

 

Deaths due to poor air quality in China are focussing efforts to clean up , rapidly, their air quality so will this begin to impact and the fuller impacts of AGW forcing begin to slowly appear?

 

I worry that in the meantime folk will try and alter calcs to fit the current data without allowing for this 'known unknown'? I don't know if it's just me but I'd rather plan for the worse and find myself pleasantly surprised than water down my responces and be caught short by more dramatic impacts?

[VillagePlank]

I worry that in the meantime folk will try and alter calcs to fit the current data without allowing for this 'known unknown'? I don't know if it's just me but I'd rather plan for the worse and find myself pleasantly surprised than water down my responces and be caught short by more dramatic impacts?

 

Yes, the precautionary principle. However, one must not forget that we currently live at the pinnacle of human achievement. Science has made an awful great deal of us very comfortable indeed, thank you very much, and, as such, we have ever increasing life expectancy, woman's deaths during childbrith is virtually never heard of, disease is on the retreat. There never has been, in terms of human welfare, a better time to live. Of course, this is in the (very) rich west, and it's not at all the case for the poorer regions of the planet.

 

What you have to remember is that this is paid for by capitalism: the simple premise that by abstracting bartering into currency (so instead of exchanging eggs and goats, we exchange pounds sterling) and the existence of a free market. A lot of the poorer regions of the world still do not allow free trade and thus remove themselves from the larger markets. One counter example is, of course, China. By opening up their markets, and, in turn, opening up the West's they're now beginning to make real grounds (ie excess capital) where they can now concentrate on reform with such things as human rights. The point being, you need excess capital in order to be able to achieve this: otherwise you are going to spend all of your time growing food, dying early, and, frankly, not much else.

 

This is what the evidence tells us. It tells us the flow of capital isn't from the poor to the rich, it is the other way around. Again China is the perfect example: most of the dollar is now owned by China because of the cost of debt America has taken on from the Chinese. Take the recent horror stories of children working in sweat-shops in the far-East for Apple. Yes, well, they are true. But the facts  - ie the context - is that those kids are now earning enough money to have a surplus, a surplus can buy them an education, and life expectancy is on the up in those areas. Do you think that kids in England working on zero-hour contracts is much different? The sympatheic West reading their Guardian newspaper over tea and toast on a pleasant Sunday morning in leafy Surrey would rather they went back to foraging on rotting global rubbish dumps for any scrap of food they can find, and, after all, who cares if they make it to their 18th birthday? As long as it's not on Newsnight, and we don't have to hear about it.

 

So, since capital can flow from the rich countries to the poor countries, should they choose to open up their markets, they will pull themselves (without our intervention) out of poverty. But we would 'charge' them for our excesses. We would create a carbon market where their energy costs should be the same as the West. We should limit, or impose tariffs on free trade, where countries use coal power. Of course, we do it in the name of Climate Change, and, indeed, we - those who know what's best for them - will make them do it - as, in 100 years time - it will be clear to all that it was the 'right' thing to do. That we took the right precautions at the right time.

 

Make no bones about this, GW. This is a human story. I do realise that some wish that human beings never evolved (and some that wish God never created us?!) I do not have the answers, I do not pretend to have the answers: but I do know one things: the precautionary principle should be held to protect the poor, not the rich, who sit around forever using expensive technology, no doubt created on a bowl of rice a day, to argue whether this or that is right or wrong.

[knocker]

Interesting post Sparkicle. If I remember correctly, keeping something similar to this in mind, the Montreal Protocol put a moratorium on the ban on production of CFCs for five years in the developing countries.

 

Regarding coal and China. Thousands of miners are killed every year because of the complete lack of H & S and the abundance of privately run mines. In many ways one is reminded of a similar situation in the west in the 19th century when coal was the main driver behind the expansion of growth. It would thus seem to be a touch hypocritical for the west to attempt to put restrictions on countries attempting the same to counter balance the damage already inflicted.

Edited April 29, 2014 by knocker

[VillagePlank]

This is no time for do-gooders; this is time for evidence based action (>99%), and evidence based planning (>95%) An example of pure politik (for the sake of pure politik) is since the late 1960s the Green movement has opposed nuclear power[1] even though the evidence to support CO₂ caused warming started to gather pace as early as the 1950s [2]. If an ardent arch-enemy of nuclear power and rabid environmentalist, Monbiot, can change his mind according to the evidence, so can just about anyone else. [3][4] The shock, no that's too polite - the scandal -  of course, is that the Green powerful parliamentary lobby across the western world is now directly responsible for, perhaps, 30 years of escalating CO₂ emmissions on the basis that 'they just don't like nuclear' offering no evidence to support such a position and ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

 

Yes, the chickens, as it were, are coming home to roost - they might be roosting a few degrees higher (or lower) in latitude.

 

Perhaps the Greens were just exercising the precautionary principle?

 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science#Increasing_concern.2C_1950s_-_1960s

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world?guni=Article:in%20body%20link

[4] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/28/arrested-myself-supporting-nuclear-power-george-monbiot

Edited April 29, 2014 by Sparkicle

[knocker]

Michael Mann Receives NCSE Friend of the Planet Award

 

Climate change deniers have faced a similarly impressive foe: Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State. More than almost anyone else, Mann has been the public face of climate science. The author of more than 160 peer-reviewed papers, Mann has appeared before countless Congressional committees, battled climate change deniers in court, and written breakthrough books (such as The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars). Along the way, Mann co-authored the report that won the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. NCSE’s Friend of the Planet award will join a crowded trophy case.