Bob Park and Global Warming

[Diamond]

Diamond,
You do realize that nothing you said above, including the contradiction of things that I didn't say, presented any evidence that what I did say was wrong in any way, didn't you?

Your "argument" was a series of logical fallacies, and devoid of actual evidential proof. I did the best I could in the circumstances.

 

[Morchella]

I'm back.
Diamond, Your foaming fervor is absolutely evangelical. Still got your head in the sand I see. Did you see the graph? Uh "What Graph". You know, the one that shows a RAPID increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution. As you might deny, the burning of hydrocarbons produce CO2 and water. (Need I cite evidence) Megatons of this stuff is dumped into the atmosphere everyday by humans. CO2 acts like a blanket in the atmosphere and absorbs infrared thus retaining the heat from the sun. That is high school science. If you need evidence for that than you are in incorrigible denial. Like every evangelist, you cannot be swayed. I find it a waste of time arguing with zealots.
Thank you all for backing me up. It seems your efforts have been futile though.

 

[Diamond]

I'm back.
Diamond, Your foaming fervor is absolutely evangelical.

Welcome back to the Science forum, the epicenter of rational debate and discussion.

Still got your head in the sand I see.

Shhh. There's an elephant in the living room I trying to avoid....

Did you see the graph? Uh "What Graph". You know, the one that shows a RAPID increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution.

Yes I did.

As you might deny, the burning of hydrocarbons produce CO2 and water.

Yes it does.

(Need I cite evidence) Megatons of this stuff is dumped into the atmosphere everyday by humans.

...and megatons get taken out of the atmosphere by life on earth and by dissolution in rainwater, leaving a tiny fraction of the atmosphere at any one time.

CO2 acts like a blanket in the atmosphere and absorbs infrared thus retaining the heat from the sun.

Is this inept metaphor week? Blankets cause heat retention by suppressing convection. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not act like a blanket at all.

Oh and by the way, the gas responsible for practically all of the heat re-radiated back to the surface of the earth is called WATER VAPOUR. Repeat after me: "Water vapour". Carbon dioxide enrichment has never caused temperature rise even when levels in the atmosphere were much higher than today

Bad science begins with bad assumptions.

That is high school science.

I'm sorry but if my high school had taught rubbish like that, I would have been encouraged to abscond.

If you need evidence for that than you are in incorrigible denial. Like every evangelist, you cannot be swayed. I find it a waste of time arguing with zealots.

I'm swayed only by facts. When you produce some instead of ad hominems, inept metaphors, poor grasp of basic scientific principles, argumentum ad populum and composition fallacies then please let us all know.

Thank you all for backing me up. It seems your efforts have been futile though.

When will Morchella receive her Nobel Prize? Its surely only a matter of time...

 

[CapelDodger]

From Diamond:

See the comment above. To make the case you would have to look at the methodology used to reconstruct the CO2 levels and the error bars.

You claim that measurements of CO2 show no correlation with warming while denying the accuracy of CO2 measurements. The data is accurate when it suits your purpose and inaccurate when it doesn't.

With regard to the Japanese and Chinese historical accounts which you regard as equivalent to the European experience, please cite a few. Your accusations of racism are contemptible. It seems you are unable to comprehend my position that non-European historical and literary accounts are relevant. Your position - that modern attempts to reconstruct climate history by proxies are more relevant than the observations of the time and place - is unjustifiable.

 

[CapelDodger]

From Diamond:

But in a chaotic system like the climate, large rises (and falls) can happen for no reason (apart from the flap of a butterfly's wing, perhaps).

There are different types of chaoic system. One type, of which climate is an example, involves the concept of a "strange attractor", a volume of phase-space within which the chaotic system follows a non-repeating path. Other kinds of system are highly chaotic, which is the kind you are trying to evoke (or perhaps you actually think it applies to climate). The idea that a blast of gas from a rat's ass in Belfast causes glaciation in Manhatten doesn't seem to fit common observation.

 

[CapelDodger]

From Diamond:

Again a guess. Because the climate is a loosely coupled chaotic system, NOTHING at all could cause a rise like that

Spoken like a true zealot.

A guess: were you referring to the constitution of the atmosphere? Nitrogen 78%, oxygen 20%, noble gases 1.3%, others (including all greenhouse gases) 0.7% - a trace. Courtesy of William R Mead, Professor Emeritus of Geography, University College London. So it's an authoritative guess.

Was a 30C greenhouse effect a guess? Were the planet's surface at the black-body temperature - with no greenhouse effect - it would be around -17C (that's not mysterious, just well-known physics). In fact it's around 15C, a difference of more than 30C. Courtesy of a trace part of the atmosphere.

What's a losely-coupled chaotic system? Why is it unable to accomodate a rise of 2% in the total greenhouse effect?

 

[kookbreaker]

From Diamond:
With regard to the Japanese and Chinese historical accounts which you regard as equivalent to the European experience, please cite a few.

Some of these are accounts, some other evidence:

Korea (warning, only the intro is in English)

For Japan there were historical weather diaries:

Mikami, T. 1993. Summer temperature variabilities in Japan reconstructed from diary weather records during the Little Ice Age. Chigaku Zasshi [Journal of Geography], 102 (2):144-151.

China <--- A study, not accounts.

ALso there are accounts of Chinese Orange groves in the Jiang-Xi province that had been present for centuries dying off from the cold.

Another study, this time Peru. Glaciers hitting their maximum advance point isn't a sign of a warm climate.

General studies of climate in Asia regarding the Little Ice Age. admittedly, these are not historical accounts, but studies.

 

[CapelDodger]

kookbreaker:
Thank you for that. The Korean one is interesting in that population falls correspond with cool periods, which is potentially significant, but the rest isn't convincing at all. To quote the introduction:

This paper attempts to identify the Little Ice Age in Korea ...

The Little Ice Age in Europe doesn't need looking for, it reaches out and grabs you. There was some global cooling at the time, but it cannot be presented as being similar to the European experience world-wide, yet that is what is implied when dealing with global temperatures now. And one more quote:

This period is roughly coincided with that of Little Ice Age in Europe, and in Japan in Asia with minor differences in time

What's "minor" in the context of a global event? If events are correlated with a global event they will be coincident with each other.

ALso there are accounts of Chinese Orange groves in the Jiang-Xi province that had been present for centuries dying off from the cold.

This is the usual reference provided by denialist sites, and is inteersting for its obscurity. If this has been found, a pretty deep trawl through Chinese history has been performed.

The story as I understand it was that an orchard of non-native trees were presented to a Ming Emperor. As Imperial property it will have had a staff and budget available to tend them and keep off frosts. (And the Ming were about for centuries.) When the Ming were overthrown that situation would have changed. The incoming Manchu were into pocketing all they could find, and an orchard presented to the Ming by a vassal wouldn't be getting any allocation. Within fifty years these non-native trees, unsurprsingly, were dead. Not convincing evidence of drastic climate change.

As for the China "study", one quote:

Also, their statement that "the global warming at the beginning of this century continued until the 1940s" does not bode well for the climate-alarmist claim of "unprecedented" warming over the latter part of the 20th century.

I think we know where these people are coming from. I'll look at it in more detail later.

Appreciate my point: if people in China were trying to prove a drastic climatic event in Europe between 1650 and 1750 it wouldn't be hard. There were icebergs off Yarmouth (actually Arctic pack-ice, but to your normal Norfolk folk ...). In fact, the abnormal incidence of ice, including Greenland ice, at lower latitudes in the North Atlantic during that period is some of the strongest evidence that a temporary change in North Atlantic circulation happened at that time. In a system like the Atlantic - which is essentially a tube of fluid, warm in the middle and cold at the ends - a change like that is going to be amplified. Just as heat-flow is amplified in current conditions - the relative warmth of Western and Northern Europe - any such negative change would be amplified.

The same wouldn't apply in the Pacific, which is an utterly different system: a bowl essentially enclosed at the top and open at the bottom. So its relatively mild experience of climate change in the last millenium may well be far more representative than the experience of the North Atlantic. Let's face it, it is, and that's the truth of the matter.

 

[Diamond]

From Diamond:

You claim that measurements of CO2 show no correlation with warming while denying the accuracy of CO2 measurements. The data is accurate when it suits your purpose and inaccurate when it doesn't.

Nope. It demonstrates a willingness on your part to suspend any critical examination of evidence when it suits you, which brings us to...

With regard to the Japanese and Chinese historical accounts which you regard as equivalent to the European experience, please cite a few. Your accusations of racism are contemptible. It seems you are unable to comprehend my position that non-European historical and literary accounts are relevant. Your position - that modern attempts to reconstruct climate history by proxies are more relevant than the observations of the time and place - is unjustifiable.

Really? What is the carbon dioxide graph that you've been waffling about if not a modern reconstruction based on proxies?

 

[Diamond]

From Diamond:

There are different types of chaoic system. One type, of which climate is an example, involves the concept of a "strange attractor", a volume of phase-space within which the chaotic system follows a non-repeating path. Other kinds of system are highly chaotic, which is the kind you are trying to evoke (or perhaps you actually think it applies to climate). The idea that a blast of gas from a rat's ass in Belfast causes glaciation in Manhatten doesn't seem to fit common observation.

Not I but the IPCC Working Group 1 called the climate a "coupled non-linear system". So butterfly wings do matter. In point of fact climate variables are so sensitive to initial conditions it makes it impossible to model on a scale of years ahead, like some people pretend.

There are millions of variables that make up the thing we call climate, and no-one at all can say which are significant and which are not.

 

[CapelDodger]

kookbreaker:
Damn, it's too hot to sleep and I've cracked the last tinny on auto-pilot, so I looked at the Peru thing and immediately caught this:

These data imply that the tropical Atlantic was possibly 5-6°C cooler during the LGS

We're back with the Atlantic, you see, and that's sort of covered in the previous. But note the extent of the cooling - 5-6C. In the reference Diamond so triumphantly made to Science April something 2002 (I remember it well, I went straight to the article thinking "this is going to shake some turkeys off the truck", but frankly it didn't), the cooling effect quoted for Australia was 0.2-0.3C. These, in combination, are actually better arguments for an essentially North Atlantic (yes, people, some of the tropics are in the north) Little Ice Age. Leaving the global experience as a mild one, and the current experience anomolous.

 

[Diamond]

kookbreaker:
Thank you for that. The Korean one is interesting in that population falls correspond with cool periods, which is potentially significant, but the rest isn't convincing at all. To quote the introduction:

The Little Ice Age in Europe doesn't need looking for, it reaches out and grabs you. There was some global cooling at the time, but it cannot be presented as being similar to the European experience world-wide, yet that is what is implied when dealing with global temperatures now.

Racism, with a cherry on top. "There was some global cooling at the time" but not the same cooling but a different cooling happening at the same time.

The same wouldn't apply in the Pacific, which is an utterly different system: a bowl essentially enclosed at the top and open at the bottom. So its relatively mild experience of climate change in the last millenium may well be far more representative than the experience of the North Atlantic. Let's face it, it is, and that's the truth of the matter.

Except that the Pacific is bounded to the South by Antarctica. However because most of the extreme South of the world was uninhabited means that proxies have to fill in the gap of what happened down there. Guess what? The same events happened as well as the North Atlantic.

The truth of the matter is that proxies have been measuring the same signal but you only pay attention to proxies when it suits you.

 

[Diamond]

kookbreaker:
Damn, it's too hot to sleep and I've cracked the last tinny on auto-pilot, so I looked at the Peru thing and immediately caught this:

We're back with the Atlantic, you see, and that's sort of covered in the previous. But note the extent of the cooling - 5-6C. In the reference Diamond so triumphantly made to Science April something 2002 (I remember it well, I went straight to the article thinking "this is going to shake some turkeys off the truck", but frankly it didn't), the cooling effect quoted for Australia was 0.2-0.3C. These, in combination, are actually better arguments for an essentially North Atlantic (yes, people, some of the tropics are in the north) Little Ice Age. Leaving the global experience as a mild one, and the current experience anomolous.

Thrilling. There is no doubt that tropical seas would cool less than those at higher latitudes. But the signal of cooling was there all the same. As it was in the Pacific Rim, and South Africa. And glaciers in the Peruvian Andes also grew during the LIA. Are we still in the North Atlantic?

Nooo the Tropical Atlantic is also the North Atlantic. I feel the strain of trying to contain too much contrary evidence is starting to tell...

 

[CapelDodger]

From Dimaond:

There are millions of variables that make up the thing we call climate, and no-one at all can say which are significant and which are not.

There are not millions of variables that make up climate. There are vast numbers of particles that are involved in the whole damn thing, but they are not variables. The variables that will make a difference to climate are those that change the relative efficiencies of different potential systems of energy-transfer. The single most important aspect, as far as climate is concerned, is the arrangement of continent and ocean on the planet's surface. This is not something that is currently in rapid flux. Orbital changes are going their usual sweet way (which just reminded me of something, must be off shortly) which would, if Malenkovich(sp?) had anything to say, see us entering pre-glacial cooling, and solar variation ain't up to it without some major extra theorising. The volcano front has been quiet, so no great injection of CO2 or aerosols from there. (Volcanic CO2 is provided by subducted carbonaceous rock, so there's a tendency towards balance. Cows fart after eating grass, and again, there's a balance effect.)) But atmospheric composition is changing quite rapidly down at the trace end where the geeenhouse effect happens, so suspicion might well be directed there.

 

[kookbreaker]

kookbreaker:
Thank you for that. The Korean one is interesting in that population falls correspond with cool periods, which is potentially significant, but the rest isn't convincing at all. To quote the introduction:

The Little Ice Age in Europe doesn't need looking for, it reaches out and grabs you. There was some global cooling at the time, but it cannot be presented as being similar to the European experience world-wide, yet that is what is implied when dealing with global temperatures now. And one more quote:

What's "minor" in the context of a global event? If events are correlated with a global event they will be coincident with each other.

It seems to start a little later and ends a little later. I have no explanation for this.

This is the usual reference provided by denialist sites, and is inteersting for its obscurity. If this has been found, a pretty deep trawl through Chinese history has been performed.

The story as I understand it was that an orchard of non-native trees were presented to a Ming Emperor. As Imperial property it will have had a staff and budget available to tend them and keep off frosts. (And the Ming were about for centuries.) When the Ming were overthrown that situation would have changed. The incoming Manchu were into pocketing all they could find, and an orchard presented to the Ming by a vassal wouldn't be getting any allocation. Within fifty years these non-native trees, unsurprsingly, were dead. Not convincing evidence of drastic climate change.

I would like to know this myself. However, the glaicial data does sem to bear it out.

As for the China "study", one quote:

I think we know where these people are coming from. I'll look at it in more detail later.

That's an editorial comment about the study itself, noit from the writers of the study. Do not hold this against the conclusions.

Appreciate my point: if people in China were trying to prove a drastic climatic event in Europe between 1650 and 1750 it wouldn't be hard. There were icebergs off Yarmouth (actually Arctic pack-ice, but to your normal Norfolk folk ...). In fact, the abnormal incidence of ice, including Greenland ice, at lower latitudes in the North Atlantic during that period is some of the strongest evidence that a temporary change in North Atlantic circulation happened at that time. In a system like the Atlantic - which is essentially a tube of fluid, warm in the middle and cold at the ends - a change like that is going to be amplified. Just as heat-flow is amplified in current conditions - the relative warmth of Western and Northern Europe - any such negative change would be amplified.

The same wouldn't apply in the Pacific, which is an utterly different system: a bowl essentially enclosed at the top and open at the bottom. So its relatively mild experience of climate change in the last millenium may well be far more representative than the experience of the North Atlantic. Let's face it, it is, and that's the truth of the matter.

This goes against the Japan account, the Peruvian Glacier advance points and other things I linked to. There'a also the 1975 NAS report that I wish I had a copy of since it had extensive records on the global nature of the LIA. Unfortunately, the nautr eof the document is a concern for the "global ice age" that was trendy during that time.

There's also the various exhbits in John-Daly's webpage

 

[CapelDodger]

Oh, not John Daly. I did all that before with someone called Titanpoint. Just look at it as if you didn't like it; would you find it convincing? I look at everything that way.

All of this will boil down to one thing. There was a cooling period between 1650 and 1750. This is not in dispute, the extent is. Diamond et al will provide evidence of cooling - of an entirely different order - outside the North Atlantic. This will then be presented as evidence that the European experience of climate variation is the same as the global one, and - since our experience has been highly variable - the global experience we are currently, er, experiencing - look, I really do have to go - is not unusual.

Which is bollocks.

 

[kookbreaker]

Oh, not John Daly. I did all that before with someone called Titanpoint. Just look at it as if you didn't like it; would you find it convincing? I look at everything that way.

That's not much of a riposte.

Seems there's plenty of evidence of cooling over the planet during the LIA, and just looking at something in a manner of dislike isn't making the evidence dissapear.

I don't exactly recall you winning the arguements with Titanpoint, so I really can't say that's convincing either.

Edit to say: I don't want to sound hostile about to either side of this, I'm actually a quite neutral.

 

[Soapy Sam]

There does seem to be a certain begging of the question going on here, with entrenched views causing increased temperature and blood pressure among the participants.

There is abundant evidence that the climate has been , on average, warming for the last 11-12,000 years. This puts it way beyond the influence of industrial civilisation-

This does not mean we are not a contributor NOW.

But if we are to argue about gases like CO2 and H2O, lets correct for natural sources first.
Post Industrial Revolution we might mention Lakigigar, Krakatoa, Pinatubo, Mt.St.Helens as explosive eruptions. There were hundreds of lesser and slower degassing events which occurred in that period. Anyone got any numbers on the amount of CO2, H2O,H2S,F and numerous other nasties they put out? Compared with - say, Britain from 1740 to 2003?

The Dark, Satanic Mills have been producing pollution in England since about 1720, but I have yet to find a single 1000ft ashcone in the English Midlands. The year without a Summer in the Europe of 1783 was not caused by industry, but by the Laki eruptions in Iceland, which caused mass deaths among livestock and human populations.

Remember- the atmosphere is only part of the cycle. All atmospheric water ultimately vapour comes from mantle degassing. And I don't think we can blame ourselves for volcanoes just yet.

 

[davefoc]

Soapy Sam,
I don't think there's anything that you said there that is in dispute. I believe that volcanic activity can be responsible for staggering releases of CO2 in the air. I believe that Pinatubo was credited with releasing half as much CO2 as all the human activity combined in the year that it erupted and it might have been more

I think though that some information that seems to be pretty well excepted by both sides in the global warming debate has been disputed in this thread.

Namely these:
1. There has been an unusual and perhaps unique (in the last hundres of thousands of years) runup in the concentration of CO2 that began about the time of the industrial revolution.

2. The sea level has been rising faster lately than it has in the last several thousand years. I was not able to find a perfect source for the above but it was stated approximately on several web sites.

Here is one source:
http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/dougla01/dougla01.html

and a quote:
"Recent analyses indicate that global (i.e., eustatic) sea level has risen at something close to 2 mm per year for at least the last century or so [ Peltier and Tushingham, 1989; Trupin and Wahr, 1990; Douglas, 1991], and probably at a much smaller rate for the previous several millennia [ Flemming, 1978; Flemming and Webb, 1986; Kearney and Stevenson, 1991; Shennan and Woodworth, 1992; Varekamp et al., 1992]. In contrast, for the next century various authors plausibly argue that global sea level will rise at a much faster rate than at present because of global warming.

 

[Diamond]

Oh, not John Daly. I did all that before with someone called Titanpoint. Just look at it as if you didn't like it; would you find it convincing? I look at everything that way.

All of this will boil down to one thing. There was a cooling period between 1650 and 1750. This is not in dispute, the extent is. Diamond et al will provide evidence of cooling - of an entirely different order - outside the North Atlantic. This will then be presented as evidence that the European experience of climate variation is the same as the global one, and - since our experience has been highly variable - the global experience we are currently, er, experiencing - look, I really do have to go - is not unusual.

Which is bollocks.

Denialism writ large. "The Cooling elsewhere was of an entirely different order because these foreigners wrote in in funny handwriting and we can't use proxies because they're nasty and bad except when the proxy is measuring carbon dioxide when its good"