Merged AGW without HADCRUT3

[BenBurch]

Can you bag together more unrelated crap if you tried?

We KNOW that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes heating. This has nothing whatsoever to do with anything in the past other than the fact that you can see its effect in past climate and even in mass extinctions.

We know how much CO2 has risen and can COMPUTE from basic physical principles how much this changes energy retention.

I'm sorry if you want to disbelieve the facts so badly that you will embrace any lie to do it, but this does not change the laws of nature.

 

[AlBell]

Can you bag together more unrelated crap if you tried?

You wish it was unrelated, nor is it "crap".

We KNOW that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes heating. This has nothing whatsoever to do with anything in the past other than the fact that you can see its effect in past climate and even in mass extinctions.

Again, regarding CO2, the effect vs the cause is not so clearcut.

We know how much CO2 has risen and can COMPUTE from basic physical principles how much this changes energy retention

Agreed, and looking at climate, if other factors effecting climate did not change, could even compute warming as could be measured by thermometers.

I'm sorry if you want to disbelieve the facts so badly that you will embrace any lie to do it, but this does not change the laws of nature.

Lie is a strong word. Demonstrate I've 'embraced one' one, or retract the accusation.

 

[Megalodon]

True. So the answer, if models are ignored, is "none".

Congratulations! You have just discarded ALL of science!

 

[AOK Tiger]

Albel,

They just don’t get what you are saying.

Put simply CO2 IS the problem and WE made it.

They cannot understand that Global Warming and Cooling have happened in spite of man.

They cannot understand that we don’t know all the things that cause GW.

They know CO2 does and it doesn’t matter that it normally follows warming and it doesn’t matter that it is a mild GHG.. there is OBVIOUSLY some indefinable forcing or multiplying effect it has because GW is happening and we cannot find anything else causing it.

And never forget.. IT IS OUR FAULT !

 

[a_unique_person]

Albel,

They just don’t get what you are saying.

Put simply CO2 IS the problem and WE made it.

They cannot understand that Global Warming and Cooling have happened in spite of man.

They cannot understand that we don’t know all the things that cause GW.

They know CO2 does and it doesn’t matter that it normally follows warming and it doesn’t matter that it is a mild GHG.. there is OBVIOUSLY some indefinable forcing or multiplying effect it has because GW is happening and we cannot find anything else causing it.

And never forget.. IT IS OUR FAULT !

You've been told before, but i'll tell you again. The known forcings have all been taken into accout for the current change in climate. The idea that they aren't is laughable.

 

[Megalodon]

You've been told before, but i'll tell you again. The known forcings have all been taken into accout for the current change in climate. The idea that they aren't is laughable.

Forget it... the cat is out of the bag. Now everyone knows that climate science has been done with ouija boards and magic 8-balls

 

[a_unique_person]

True. So the answer, if models are ignored, is "none".

Read the IPCC report. They investigate many lives of evidence. If all we had was models, I wouldn't accept the evidence. If all we had was the temperature record, I wouldn't accept that either. Ditto for the glaciers, the Arctic, the changing crop patterns, the physical basis even. Any one piece of evidence, by itself, is not enough. Nor would it be enough for the scientists behind the IPCC report, since they investigated all these lines of evidence to see if they give consistent results. They do.

 

[Trakar]

True, but if a credible investigation reveals scientific impropriety, then under the bus they go!

In general, agreed.
IMO, however, that isn't "under the bus," that is balancing the scales of justice. If there is anyone who has jeopardized or knowingly defrauded/distorted the science then they will suffer the same fate as those they deride in those same emails for commiting the same offenses in the of a different master.

 

[a_unique_person]

Few dispute the GW part. The A part is where the controversy begins.

There are plenty who do. Watts does a fine line in denying it, while saying he believes it.

 

[a_unique_person]

True, but if a credible investigation reveals scientific impropriety, then under the bus they go! The key word there is "investigation" - the GW-deniers seem to think that simply spamming the Internet with a bunch of cherry-picked & out-of-context emails constitutes an investigation

What happened is they got caught up in McIntyre's attempt to trash science. It has worked spectacularly.

Much of what they are being accused of, though, is rubbish.

In the case of withholding data, they told the FOI people what they were doing and why. The FOI agreed with them. They didn't refuse to release data to people like McIntyre without getting approval.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

<snip>

We KNOW that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes heating. This has nothing whatsoever to do with anything in the past other than the fact that you can see its effect in past climate and even in mass extinctions.

We know how much CO2 has risen and can COMPUTE from basic physical principles how much this changes energy retention.

<snip>

That's why I find the deniers position so baffling.

Even if you were to believe (as many GW deniers seem to) that the temperature of the earth is totally driven by the activity of the sun, extra CO2 in the atmosphere is still not a good idea, just as having a thick duvet on your bed in the summer is not a good idea.

Or do GW deniers think we're heading into an ice age in the next 100 years and need as much heat retention as possible to lessen the impact?

 

[Megalodon]

That's why I find the deniers position so baffling.

Join the club...

Even if you were to believe (as many GW deniers seem to) that the temperature of the earth is totally driven by the activity of the sun, extra CO2 in the atmosphere is still not a good idea, just as having a thick duvet on your bed in the summer is not a good idea.

They don't believe that. ETA: By they I mean the people fueling the movement. I'm sure many of the people spouting nonsense in Internet forums believe it... and the opposite too, if somebody assures them it will defeat the commies

It was brought forward because the "the world is not warming" mantra was getting them nowhere. Watch how they ditch the sun now that they can clasp to the emails to deny warming again...

The main point is to delay action, because, in their mind, it might mean more taxes. In the end it boils down to this. Which is why you have the same people denying the data and dreaming of international socialist conspiracies.

Or do GW deniers think we're heading into an ice age in the next 100 years and need as much heat retention as possible to lessen the impact?

That would be less strange than some of the things I saw put forth in this forum.

 

[Reality Check]

The isotope graph says nothing. You have the correlation - causation hurdle to jump before anything is said about the A part of AGW. And that problem just opens the door to other equally difficult problems, not least of which is the actual temperatures during the MWA and to a lesser extent LIA.

The isotope graph is quite simple - it basically shows the amount of CO2 that is in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuel and trees. A decrease in the ratio of ¹³C and ¹²C is caused by the burning of fossil fuel and trees. This is basic physics as explained in the links.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...ities-updated/

Sequences of annual tree rings going back thousands of years have now been analyzed for their 13C/12C ratios. Because the age of each ring is precisely known** we can make a graph of the atmospheric 13C/12C ratio vs. time. What is found is at no time in the last 10,000 years are the 13C/12C ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the 13C/12C ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase — around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning. Furthermore, we can trace the absorption of CO2 into the ocean by measuring the 13C/12C ratio of surface ocean waters. While the data are not as complete as the tree ring data (we have only been making these measurements for a few decades) we observe what is expected: the surface ocean 13C/12C is decreasing. Measurements of 13C/12C on corals and sponges — whose carbonate shells reflect the ocean chemistry just as tree rings record the atmospheric chemistry — show that this decline began about the same time as in the atmosphere; that is, when human CO2 production began to accelerate in earnest.***
***There is a graph illustrating the sponge data posted here. Thanks to F. Boehm for providing this link.

http://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2009...ioxide-levels/

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/iso-sio/iso-sio.html

What is the cause of the burning of fossil fuel and trees - us!

 

[CoolSceptic]

Hey, cool - Ben is doing some SCIENCE. Let's check it out!

Hmmm, Ben has plotted a graph. Nice! But wait a minute - what's that? No error bars? No confidence interval? Oh dear, Ben. In SCIENCE, a measurement without error bars or CIs is worthless. You did know that, didn't you? Whoops. Ben's first effort fails.

But wait - Ben has more! Look, three data sets, all showing REMARKABLY SIMILAR^TM results. The variability here should give us at least some kind of an indication of the sort of errors involved, right?

Errr... no. In fact, two of those lines are based on almost identical input data (RSS and UAH only differ in the last year or two where UAH have moved to the AQUA satellite, RSS are still using NOAA satellites). Because they are based on the same input data, the fact that these two show similar trends doesn't really teach us anything.

And even worse, the third line (GISS) doesn't measure the same thing as the satellites; the satellites measure the lower troposphere temperature and the GISS product is an estimate of the near-surface air temperature. But these are still about the same, that's good isn't it? Not really, because under AGW theory, these two measurements should be different, with the lower troposphere having a higher trend. Of course, it is possible that these differences are contained within the error bars... but of course, we don't know that, because BEN DIDN'T PLOT ANY. Did I mention that?

So far, Ben's SCIENCE is not really holding up too good. But since I have decided to unilaterally declare it INTERNATIONAL BE NICE TO BEN day, let's pretend there are CIs, and they are small enough not to include "no effect", and large enough to cover the expected difference between the satellites and GISS.

That it was predicted FAR in advance by physics, matches that physics, and has no other valid explanation is why we have consensus that there is an "A" in AGW.

Ah... wonderful. The age old argument-from-ignorance. "I can't think of any other explanation, therefore it MUST be god - oops sorry - CO2".

Problem with that Ben. I've already shown you articles from the peer reviewed literature which show an alternative mechanism - the Hurst phenomenon in the hydrological cycle - which appears quite capable of producing trends of this magnitude. (cf. "Naturally Trendy", Cohn and Lins 2005, Rybski et al, Koutsoyiannis et al etc. etc.)

I seem to remember Ben's educated response to this. Ah yes - "That hasn't got a snowballs chance in hell of being right" - that's what you said, wasn't it Ben? Well, of course, we all have our preferred theory, and I can see you prefer the CO2 explanation. That as it may be, even though you prefer the CO2 explanation, it is quite incorrect to argue that there are no other possible physical explanations, when there clearly are valid alternatives documented in the scientific literature.

Sorry Ben. I've got to grade you with an F on this one. But since it is be nice to Ben day, I'll bump it up to an E.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

CoolSceptic,

What would be the surface temperature of the earth without greenhouse gases?

 

[DogB]

...since I have decided to unilaterally declare it INTERNATIONAL BE NICE TO BEN day

Bet you get put on ignore for that one.

 

[DogB]

CoolSceptic,

What would be the surface temperature of the earth without greenhouse gases?

All greenhouse gases or just CO2?

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

All greenhouse gases or just CO2?

All of them.

 

[CoolSceptic]

CoolSceptic,

What would be the surface temperature of the earth without greenhouse gases?

And what would JREF be without straw men? I'm not claiming the greenhouse effect doesn't exist. I'm claiming unforced natural variability from non-ergodic behaviour in the hydrological cycle is greater than the direct effect from CO2; and once this is correctly accounted for many of the claims (e.g. feedbacks) disappear into the uncertainty of science. And what you have left doesn't amount to much.

Bet you get put on ignore for that one.

Yeah, I wouldn't blame Ben for doing that either. But I had fun writing it

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

And what would JREF be without straw men? I'm not claiming the greenhouse effect doesn't exist. I'm claiming unforced natural variability from non-ergodic behaviour in the hydrological cycle is greater than the direct effect from CO2; and once this is correctly accounted for many of the claims (e.g. feedbacks) disappear into the uncertainty of science. And what you have left doesn't amount to much.

<snip>

Do you not know the answer to the question?

I'll ask again:

What would be the surface temperature of the earth without greenhouse gases?