Polar Temps... warming... all guesswork

[nitro]

Thanks.

Unfortunately I am not qualified to debate these numbers. However, that it is stated in your post in a quantitative way, a climate scientist would easily be able to refute it or not. I don't think anyone on ET is qualified to do this. For example, I could not possibly account for temperature variations based on subtle Earth rotation arguments over hundreds of years.

What we need is a scientist debate of deniers vs affirmers where all these points are brought up and debated on C-span, not on ET. I am easily able to follow an argument in this manner.

The talk is from February 2012 and is not peer reviewed literature.

The shortwave radiation from the sun (called "SW in") is estimated to be 340.2 +- 0.1 watts/m^2. The amount that is immediately reflected (called "SW out") is estimated to be 100.0 +- 2.0 W/m^2, and the amount of longwave radiation (called "LW out") is 239.7 +- 3.3 W/m^2.

The net imbalance is estimated to be 0.6 W/m^2 but this is dwarfed by the errors in the amount of shortwave and longwave radiation that the Earth emits. Consequently, it's not possible to make a reasonable estimate of the number of Hiroshima bombs (LOL) that the earth is absorbing per year. The truth is that we have no idea because the amount of heat we're talking about is so small (compared to the size of the earth). The claim is that the heat isn't being seen because it's being absorbed by the oceans. If that is correct, then it means that the effects of global warming will not be seen for centuries because the oceans are really big compared to the very small amounts of heat.

I get my numbers from an article that is peer reviewed, and which is more recent than your not peer reviewed informal talk by a famous alarmist:

The Global Annual Mean Energy Balance
Stephens, Li, Wild, Clayson, Loeb, Kato, L'Ecuyer, Stackhouse, Lebsock and Andrews
Nature Geoscience Volume 5, pp 691-696, September 23, 2012

This small imbalance is over two orders of magnitude smaller than the individual components that define it and smaller than the error of each individual flux. The combined uncertainty on the net TOA flux determined from CERES is ±4 Wm−2 (95% confidence) due largely to instrument calibration errors12, 15. Thus the sum of current satellite-derived fluxes cannot determine the net TOA radiation imbalance with the accuracy needed to track such small imbalances associated with forced climate change11.

 

[futurecurrents]

Seriously. You're claiming that rising CO2 *might* cause extinctions *someday* and that to avoid it, we have to quit emitting CO2. Earth to futurecurrents! The replacement for fossil fuels are biofuels. And biofuels require land to grow them on. Of course this is a modification of the environment.

Before the ethanol industry grew large, the environmentalists were all about mandating ethanol in the gasoline supply. It was only after they saw the consequences (thousands of square miles of factory farms) that they got on the bandwagon against ethanol. As more biofuels are brought under cultivation, the same thing will happen again.

Here are some links. You should note that these are from people who believe the alarmist paradigm on global warming:

Is energy cropping in Europe compatible with biodiversity?
Pedroli, Elbersen, Frederiksen, Grandin,Heikkila, Krogh, Izakovicova, Johansen, Meiresonne and Spijker
Biomass and Bioenergy, Volume 55, August 2013, pp 73-86
...
We conclude that increased demand for biomass for bioenergy purposes may lead to a continued conversion of valuable habitats into productive lands and to intensification, which both have negative effects on biodiversity.
...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0961953412003947


The impacts of biofuel production on biodiversity: A review of the current literature
United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMD) is the biodiversity assessment and policy implementation arm of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the world's foremost intergovernmental environmental organization.
Campbell and Doswald (2009)
...
The biodiversity impact of biofuels will depend on the biofuel crop and the previous land use. Biofuels can be beneficial to biodiversity when appropriate crops are grown in suitable areas. Furthermore, if they contribute to climate change mitigation, they have the potential to be indirectly beneficial to biodiversity as a whole. However, biofuels have already been shown to negatively impact biodiversity when direct conversion of natural ecosystems or indirect land conversion of non-degraded land occurs. The expansion of biofuel production in the tropics has resulted in the loss of tropical forest and wetlands, and in temperate regions biofuel production has encroached into set-aside lands. Biofuel feedstock plantations (particularly oil palm and maize plantations), have been shown to support far lower levels if biodiversity than natural ecosystems, and can cause soil erosion and the pollution of watercourses. How a feedstock plantation is managed influences the level of biodiversity impacts. Well managed plantations can in some instances prove beneficial to biodiversity especially if these are on degraded or marginal lands.
...
https://www.cbd.int/agriculture/2011-121/UNEP-WCMC3-sep11-en.pdf

Biofuels and Biodiversity
...
Biofuels have the potential to affect all of the major drivers of biodiversity loss identified in Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 (SCBD 2010): habitat loss and degradation; climate change; excessive nutrient load and other forms of pollution; over-exploitation and unsustainable use; and invasive alien species. Furthermore, although biofuels are partly intended to mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, many biofuels used today emit as much, or more, GHGs as fossil fuels or offer very limited savings, when taking into account their entire lifecycle, and when indirect land-use change is taken into consideration (e.g., Fargione et al. 2008; Searchinger et al . 2008).
...
Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, CBD Technical Series No. 65 (2012)
https://www.cbd.int/doc/publications/cbd-ts-65-en.pdf

Biofuels and biodiversity
Wiens, Fargionne and Hill
Ecological Applications, Ecology Society of America, Volume 21, Issue 4, 1085-1095 (June 2011)
...
Current biofuel production occurs largely on croplands that have long been in agricultural production. The additional land area required for future biofuels production can be met in part by reclaiming reserve or abandoned croplands and by extending cropping into lands formerly deemed marginal for agriculture. In the United States, many such marginal lands have been enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), providing important habitat for grassland species. The demand for corn ethanol has changed agricultural commodity economics dramatically, already contributing to loss of CRP lands as contracts expire and lands are returned to agricultural production.
...
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/09-0673.1

http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/09-0673.1

Also of interest:

Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Indirect Land Use Change
Michael O'Hare, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley
CARB LCFS Working Group 3, (2008)
http://www.arb.ca.gov/fuels/lcfs/011708uCBLuCB&W.pdf

Yeah the ethanol subsidies are bull shit. They are not economical in this climate of no carbon taxes. I have two words for ya sun. Nuclear power. And making sure all the costs of fossil fuel use are included in it's price. As it is, it is getting away with murder.

 

[futurecurrents]

The talk is from February 2012 and is not peer reviewed literature.

The shortwave radiation from the sun (called "SW in") is estimated to be 340.2 +- 0.1 watts/m^2. The amount that is immediately reflected (called "SW out") is estimated to be 100.0 +- 2.0 W/m^2, and the amount of longwave radiation (called "LW out") is 239.7 +- 3.3 W/m^2.

The net imbalance is estimated to be 0.6 W/m^2 but this is dwarfed by the errors in the amount of shortwave and longwave radiation that the Earth emits. Consequently, it's not possible to make a reasonable estimate of the number of Hiroshima bombs (LOL) that the earth is absorbing per year. The truth is that we have no idea because the amount of heat we're talking about is so small (compared to the size of the earth). The claim is that the heat isn't being seen because it's being absorbed by the oceans. If that is correct, then it means that the effects of global warming will not be seen for centuries because the oceans are really big compared to the very small amounts of heat.

I get my numbers from an article that is peer reviewed, and which is more recent than your not peer reviewed informal talk by a famous alarmist:

The Global Annual Mean Energy Balance
Stephens, Li, Wild, Clayson, Loeb, Kato, L'Ecuyer, Stackhouse, Lebsock and Andrews
Nature Geoscience Volume 5, pp 691-696, September 23, 2012

This small imbalance is over two orders of magnitude smaller than the individual components that define it and smaller than the error of each individual flux. The combined uncertainty on the net TOA flux determined from CERES is ±4 Wm−2 (95% confidence) due largely to instrument calibration errors12, 15. Thus the sum of current satellite-derived fluxes cannot determine the net TOA radiation imbalance with the accuracy needed to track such small imbalances associated with forced climate change11.

Why go through all of those hoops? It's easy to figure out how much heat the earth is gaining from the increasing greenhouse effect. One takes the heat gain from the oceans and adds about ten percent for the atmosphere and land and one gets the total heat gain rate of the earth.

I would like to see someone do the math. The following chart has the relevant numbers. Does this equal the stated atom bomb rate?

 

[futurecurrents]

Thanks.

Unfortunately I am not qualified to debate these numbers. However, that it is stated in your post in a quantitative way, a climate scientist would easily be able to refute it or not. I don't think anyone on ET is qualified to do this. For example, I could not possibly account for temperature variations based on subtle Earth rotation arguments over hundreds of years.

What we need is a scientist debate of deniers vs affirmers where all these points are brought up and debated on C-span, not on ET. I am easily able to follow an argument in this manner.

Yes, if there was only some way we could know what the climatologists think.

Maybe if there was just a debate on c span.

Or we could ask Google...


https://www.google.com/webhp?source...scientific consensus on global climate change


and then we could ask ourselves which of those sources are least likely to be biased because of entrenched interests. Like making huge amounts of money on the burning of fossil fuels.

 

[nitro]

Yes, if there was only some way we could know what the climatologists think.

Maybe if there was just a debate on c span.

Or we could ask Google...


https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=scientific consensus on global climate change


and then we could ask ourselves which of those sources are least likely to be biased because of entrenched interests. Like making huge amounts of money on the burning of fossil fuels.

Right I understand futurecurrents. It would be great to have all of these points argued publicly by the deniers top scientists vs the affirmers once and for all. It would be the hottest ticket in town, pun intended. Then every time these debates came up, we could point to an actual video in an actual debate. Here, all we do is keep posting the same peered reviewed articles, with counter arguments by the deniers, etc. Instead, if these guys were head to head live, it would make it far easier to follow.

I don't need convincing because I trust the scientific community at large. But I admit, when someone posts something that is counter what I know, I am not really able to debate it since I don't have the subtle arguments required to refute it.

For example, all I have to do to a flat earth believer person is take him on a flight and show him the earth. Or, I can show people with horrible lung or throat cancer to show the ills of smoking cigarettes. There is no equivalent of that in HFGW. It is all subtle statistical data, and pictures of melting icebergs, all happening on scales that most human beings can't relate to. That people don't get it is easy to prove. When the price of gasoline goes down, people trip over each other to get monster gas guzzling SUVs.

 

[nitro]

What we need is the equivalent of this for HFGW

Then, even if the price of gasoline droped to $30/barrel, and people didn't rush out to get their monster gas guzzling SUVs, then we know the message had arrived.

Of course, the problem is that by then the earth might be charred.

 

[futurecurrents]

Right I understand futurecurrents. It would be great to have all of these points argued publicly by the deniers top scientists vs the affirmers once and for all. It would be the hottest ticket in town, pun intended. Then every time these debates came up, we could point to an actual video in an actual debate. Here, all we do is keep posting the same peered reviewed articles, with counter arguments by the deniers, etc. Instead, if these guys were head to head live, it would make it far easier to follow.

I don't need convincing because I trust the scientific community at large. But I admit, when someone posts something that is counter what I know, I am not really able to debate it since I don't have the subtle arguments required to refute it.

For example, all I have to do to a flat earth believer person is take him on a flight and show him the earth. Or, I can show people with horrible lung or throat cancer to show the ills of smoking cigarettes. There is no equivalent of that in HFGW. It is all subtle statistical data, and pictures of melting icebergs, all happening on scales that most human beings can't relate to. That people don't get it is easy to prove. When the price of gasoline goes down, people trip over each other to get monster gas guzzling SUVs.

I hear ya. The science is not well described I feel. The media have done a terrible job of presenting the basic facts involved.

But if there was a debate between the world's top climatologists there would be no debate over the fact that man is responsible for warming the earth with greenhouse gas emissions.
It would literally be hundreds of climate scientists on one side and none on the other. It would be funny to see.

And again, the reason is this; CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas and we have raised it's level by 40% and the temps are going up. That is all one needs to know. It is not subtle statistics.


The bolded statement above should be repeated over and over again by the media. They have NEVER said it. Perhaps they are afraid to confuse people by using percentages and science. Makes people turn the channel.

 

[nitro]

...
And again, the reason is this; CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas and we have raised it's level by 40% and the temps are going up.

I would add this statement, "and this is what you get over time"

http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSci102/NatSci102/lectures/venus.htm

 

[TooOldForThis]

Why go through all of those hoops? It's easy to figure out how much heat the earth is gaining from the increasing greenhouse effect. One takes the heat gain from the oceans and adds about ten percent for the atmosphere and land and one gets the total heat gain rate of the earth.

I would like to see someone do the math. The following chart has the relevant numbers. Does this equal the stated atom bomb rate?

All these things are estimates based on the other values. If you actually look at the heat emitted by the earth (as measured by satellite) and the heat arriving from the sun (as measured by satellite), you end up with errors that are much much larger than the quoted heat gain.

You only get the quoted heat gain (so many atom bombs) if you assume that the measurements of the heat gain of the oceans are correct. Unfortunately, the error bars on the ocean heat measurements are also huge. This happens because the temperature changes in the ocean are exceedingly small. Here is a recent Nature Climate Change article showing the details:

Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade
Llovel, Willis, Landerer & Fukumori
Nature Climate Change 4, 1031-1035 (2014)
...
Finally, we combine our estimate of upper-ocean warming (above 2,000 m) with the ocean heat content change in the lower layer (below 2,000 m) to estimate the heat uptake by the entire ocean. We find a net ocean warming equivalent to a radiative imbalance of 0.64 ± 0.44 W m−2 since 2005. Here we have included the potential systematic uncertainties and assume that errors are uncorrelated between estimates of warming above and below 2,000 m depth. Our estimate of full-depth ocean warming is in good agreement with a recent estimate of Earth’s net energy imbalance of 0.50 ± 0.43 W m−2 for the period from 2001 through 2010 28. Nevertheless, our full-depth ocean heat content change and its contribution to global mean sea level relies on a strong hypothesis. We have assumed that each observing system is independent and that errors are uncorrelated over timescales longer than one month. If this assumption is invalid then the error bounds quoted in our analysis might be underestimated.
...
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n11/full/nclimate2387.html

Now the figure "0.64 ± 0.44" shows that they can't distinguish between oceans absorbing 0.64-0.44 = 0.20 and 0.64+0.44 = 1.08 W/m^2. This is more than a factor of five between the top end of their estimate and the bottom end. But it gets worse. They made their error estimates assuming that the various measurements are independent. The universe is almost never that kind.

The more mature branches of physics have learned that signals need to be ignored until they reach about 5 or 6 sigma. For example, the elementary particle physicists didn't announce the Higgs boson until they were 5-sigma sure that their figures were correct. The reason they wait this long is because they have a long and embarrassing history of announcing incorrect results at the 2 or 3 sigma level.

The climate scientists haven't gone through that long history of bad results yet. Instead, they're in the midst of their first big screw-up, the "pause". The reason they were so sure there would be no pause is that they had hundreds of simulations by dozens of different groups and 99% of them showed strongly rising temperatures. They didn't realize that these estimates were not, in fact, independent. And so they concluded that there was going to be a huge temperature rise. When temperatures didn't rise for the first 5 years they ignored it, then they denied it for another 5 years, and now they're trying to wish it away and no two groups seem to agree on the same excuse, LOL.

If you come back and look at how climate science does business 20 years from now they'll undoubtedly be a mature science and will keep quiet until they are 99% sure of their results *and* are sure that they are independent (and so that their statistics are real). Right now they repeatedly make statistical errors in the direction of more certainty than actually exists.

Here are some links on the 5-sigma "gold standard" that is used in elementary particle physics, and why it's used:

5 Sigma What's That?
Evelyn Lamb, Scientific American Blog, July 17, 2012
Chances are, you heard this month about the discovery of a tiny fundamental physics particle that may be the long-sought Higgs boson. The phrase five-sigma was tossed about by scientists to describe the strength of the discovery. So, what does five-sigma mean?

In short, five-sigma corresponds to a p-value, or probability, of 3x10-7, or about 1 in 3.5 million. This is not the probability that the Higgs boson does or doesn't exist; rather, it is the probability that if the particle does not exist, the data that CERN scientists collected in Geneva, Switzerland, would be at least as extreme as what they observed.

High-energy physics requires even lower p-values to announce evidence or discoveries. The threshold for "evidence of a particle," corresponds to p=0.003, and the standard for "discovery" is p=0.0000003.

The reason for such stringent standards is that several three-sigma events have later turned out to be statistical anomalies, and physicists are loath to declare discovery and later find out that the result was just a blip.
...
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/five-sigmawhats-that/

Shifting Standards Experiments in Particle Physics in the Twentieth Century
Allan Franklin, University of Pittsburgh Press (2013)
(Prologue pp xiv-xv)
According to the story, which received wide circulation within the high-energy physics community, Rosenfeld pointed out that given the large number of graphs that were plotted each year by experimenters, one would expect to see a significant number of three standard-deviation effects even if the data were distributed randomly and no particles or resonances were present. Rosenfeld (1975) discussed the issue in print. In discussing the existence of the kappa(725), a K Pi resonance that had been reported five times, but subsequently disappeared, Rosenfeld stated the following: "We compiled and histogrammed (by computer) 60,000 new K Pi events, and found no substantial further evidence and went on to ask how frequently such striking statistical fluctuations should be expected at some given mass in the K Pi system. (At the time about 2 million bubble chamber events were being measured annually, and about a thousand physicists were hunting through 10,000 to 20,000 mass histograms each year, in search of striking features, real or imagined,) We concluded that the five kappa claims were just about what we should expect" (564-65).
http://www.amazon.com/Shifting-Standards-Experiments-Particle-Twentieth/dp/0822944308/

 

[gwb-trading]

I hear ya. The science is not well described I feel. The media have done a terrible job of presenting the basic facts involved.

But if there was a debate between the world's top climatologists there would be no debate over the fact that man is responsible for warming the earth with greenhouse gas emissions.
It would literally be hundreds of climate scientists on one side and none on the other. It would be funny to see.

And again, the reason is this; CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas and we have raised it's level by 40% and the temps are going up. That is all one needs to know. It is not subtle statistics.


The bolded statement above should be repeated over and over again by the media. They have NEVER said it. Perhaps they are afraid to confuse people by using percentages and science. Makes people turn the channel.

CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas whose level has increased to a mere 400ppm in the atmosphere causing no global temperature increase for two decades.

FTFY