Merged Global Warming Discussion II: Heated Conversation

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How's this for exciting?

Arctic News: A RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EVENT
by John Davies
The world is probably at the start of a runaway Greenhouse Event which will end most human life on Earth before 2040. This will occur because of a massive and rapid increase in the carbon dioxide concentration in the air which has just accelerated significantly.
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godless commie said:
Arctic News: A RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EVENT
by John Davies
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Arctic News: A RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EVENT is a very simplistic and wrong blog post.
The error is fitting a curve to the CO2 data and not noticing the absurdities that curve produces.
You get ~700 parts per million by 2040 (I assume his vertical axis is meant to be in 100's of parts per million). But extend this 10 years and you get a much higher value (~10,000?).
A few more years and you have an atmosphere that is 100% CO2!
​
The author ignores that human being are in the loop (he seems to think that this extra CO2 will appear by magic!).
We know about global warming and that it is primarily driven by CO2. We are trying to reduce CO2 emissions.
Thus the more probable growth trend is closer to a linear increase.
 
Oh dear! I must admit to not being very on-top of the global warming arguments, but I think I would like to share this anecdote with you.

A co-worker (not the 9/11 Truther in another thread) just came in and said, "Nice cool day today."

"Yes. It's nice."

"We are in for a fifty-year period of global cooling."

"Err...what?"

"Scientists have said. Sunspots. Global cooling for fifty years."

"Well..."

"It's global cooling!" *walks off*

I'd be interested to know what this is about but I am pretty confident that this is some BS he's picked up from one of his favourite daft right-wing sites.

This isn't the first time. He told me not long ago that Europe was about to have the coldest winter for 1000 years (we've just had the hottest summer on record here in Japan). The last time he made some claim like this I tried to follow up the claim which was again trumpeted by one of his cranky sites and discovered that, while it was probably nonsense, the claim was that global warming would trigger the coldest winter by melting the ice caps and forcing more cool water into the Atlantic and cooling the Gulfstream. In other words the claim was predicated on global warming happening.

In this case with the sunspots I would like to know how exactly it can be determined that there will be a 50-year cooling. But I am afraid to ask because the guy tends to do shouty-shouty-ranty-ranty rather than reasoned talk.
 
Reality Check said:
(I assume his vertical axis is meant to be in 100's of parts per million).
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There's your mistake right there.

It's clearly labeled. It's rate of increase.

As in, 1959 the yearly increase was 1 ppm, 1998 it was almost 3 ppm

It's still wrong, but just not like you are seeing it. Even with five times as much carbon now as in 1960 (fossil fuels, methane degradation, cement making and deforestation, etc etc) the rate of increase has not shown a direct relationship with emissions.

In fact, as the chart shows, rate of increase is tied to temperature, not emissions.

If there was direct connection to human increase, we would see 5 ppm already each year.
 
Are there any books that are particularly good for an understanding of AGW? It's a complex issue that I don't know much about, and I feel like a book would give me a more thorough overview than any given website.
 
angrysoba said:
In this case with the sunspots I would like to know how exactly it can be determined that there will be a 50-year cooling.
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I'm pretty sure solar activity cannot be predicted in any scientific way over the next 50-years. Only quite recently have solar scientists gained the instruments and the computing power to start getting a handle on what's going on with the magnetic fields and convective flows and all manner of stuff. Which is revolving. Tricky. Predicting ten years ahead is, I suspect, a bit of a gamble. However ...

The Sun has, of course, long been a subject of fascination for the woo-inclined and they have all kinds of predictive formulae sent to them in dreams. Those which predict an imminent Ice Age quickly get to the ears of right-wing blowhards.
 
angrysoba said:
Oh dear! I must admit to not being very on-top of the global warming arguments, but I think I would like to share this anecdote with you.

A co-worker (not the 9/11 Truther in another thread) just came in and said, "Nice cool day today."

"Yes. It's nice."

"We are in for a fifty-year period of global cooling."

"Err...what?"

"Scientists have said. Sunspots. Global cooling for fifty years."

"Well..."

"It's global cooling!" *walks off*

I'd be interested to know what this is about but I am pretty confident that this is some BS he's picked up from one of his favourite daft right-wing sites.

This isn't the first time. He told me not long ago that Europe was about to have the coldest winter for 1000 years (we've just had the hottest summer on record here in Japan). The last time he made some claim like this I tried to follow up the claim which was again trumpeted by one of his cranky sites and discovered that, while it was probably nonsense, the claim was that global warming would trigger the coldest winter by melting the ice caps and forcing more cool water into the Atlantic and cooling the Gulfstream. In other words the claim was predicated on global warming happening.

In this case with the sunspots I would like to know how exactly it can be determined that there will be a 50-year cooling. But I am afraid to ask because the guy tends to do shouty-shouty-ranty-ranty rather than reasoned talk.
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The short version is that changes in the Suns energy output are small enough in comparison to what our greenhouse gasses do that it’s essentially background noise at this point.

There is a known 11/22 year sunspot cycle. The Suns magnetic field reverses every 11 years which causes sunspot activity to drop than increase. This is actually a 22 year cycle by the time the Suns magnetic field returns to its original state, but the solar activity for each half of that looks similar.

There is some suggestion that these 11/22 year cycles also follow a repeating pattern lasting several hundred years, but I doubt there is enough data to confirm or refute this since we only have observations going back 400 years. You will see predictions of future sunspot cycles based on this premise, but someone else will have to flesh that out for you, I’ve never found it credible enough to dig into it.

During the course of the 11 year cycle the Suns output changes in a roughly sinusoidal pattern. The amplitude of this is +/- 0.5W/m^2 (1 W/m^ peak to peak). This suggests that even if a prolonged period of zero sunspot activity like the Maunder Minimum occurred the average drop in solar output would be ~0.5W/m^2.

To compare this to the impact to greenhouse gasses, current greenhouse forcing is thought to be ~2W/m2 but it’s important to realize that greenhouse gasses act in all directions while solar activity comes from only 1 direction. IOW the m^2 for solar activity is the area of a circle while for greenhouse gasses it describes the surface area of a sphere. The conversion between them is *4. So 2W/m^2 of greenhouse forcing is equivalent of 8W/m^2 change in solar output or ~15X larger than a sunspot minimum.

At most a hypothetical “new maunder minimum” would cause a small slowdown in warming for a decade or two.
 
On another forum I frequent there's been an on again, off again debate about climate change. Recently someone posted a link to the following article from the Watts Up With That? site: Unwarranted Temperature Adjustments and Al Gore’s Unwarranted Call for Intellectual Tyranny.

Two questions for the knowledgeable folks who participate in this thread: (1) what citations can you provide that refute this specific article; and (2) what citations can you provide that refute this site in general as a reliable source for climate change information. I doubt any cites you can provide will persuade the person who posted the link to this article but it may help with lurkers following that thread.

Thanks in advance. :)
 
Corsair 115 said:
Thanks in advance. :)
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See http://blog.hotwhopper.com/. Of course, a glance at WattsUpMyButt is enough to get the picture.

Good to see Al Gore back in the picture, the deniers seem rather to have gone off him recently. They're simple folk and have had Mann to focus on - gotta sort out that Hockey Stick once and for all.

Check out Al Gore's "call for intellectual tyranny" and be amazed. Of course, for the average Wattsupian Al Gore is a titanic figure on the world stage, not the sad-act politician who couldn't even beat Bush.
 
I think most here would not even bother with the tripe from the retired weatherman especially since he was exposed as taking money from the fossil fuel companies.

May 21 - 23, 2012

Anthony Watts was a speaker at the Heartland Institute's 7th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC7).

DeSmogBlog researched the co-sponsors behind Heartland's ICCC7 and found that they had collectively received over $67 million from ExxonMobil, the Koch Brothers and the conservative Scaife family foundations.

June 30-July 1, 2011

Keynote speaker at the Heartland Institute's Sixth International Conference on Climate Change. [6]

March, 2011

Watts recently praised the Berkeley Earth project, which was chaired by Richard Muller and set out to "resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses, and to prepare an open record that will allow rapid response to further criticism or suggestions." The study also evaluated Watt's concerns about weather station locations.

Watts had declared he was "prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.
" Muller testified before congress on March 31, 2011 where he released preliminary results showing "a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups [NOAA, NASA, and the Hadley Center Climate Research Unit (CRU)s]." [7], [8]

Muller addressed Watts's concerns, mentioning how "Many US stations have low quality rankings according to a study led by Anthony Watts. However, we find that the warming seen in the 'poor' stations is virtually indistinguishable from that seen in the 'good' stations."

Instead of accepting the results as he promised, Watts dismissed the hearing as "post normal science political theater." And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed Professor Muller as "a man driven by a very serious agenda."

2011

According to documents from the Heartland Institute, the think tank paid Watts $88,000 for his efforts on the "Weather Stations" project in 2011, with additional funding promised for 2012.
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http://www.desmogblog.com/anthony-watts

If you provide this to your viewers

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/

and they are honest enough to watch it you'll see the depth of the manufactured doubt - many the same players as fogged up the tobacco causes cancer reality.

Watts...even when his own hired gun said the world is warming.....is shown to be simply a shill for the $7 trillion dollar fossil fuel industry. There is no science in his work....only an attempt to cast doubt......and being paid for it by the vested fossil interests despite his many protestations of being "neutral" ...fat chance.

Anyone who really doesn't get it by this stage is willfully ignorant.

What to do about the reality of climate change is the difficult problem.
 
Are there any books that are particularly good for an understanding of AGW? It's a complex issue that I don't know much about, and I feel like a book would give me a more thorough overview than any given website.
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The underlying fundamentals are not complex....sort of like the underlying principle of fire. Even a desktop lab can demonstrate it and it's been known for over a century.

The consequences of AGW are very complex as the forces involved are enormous.

This is very good for the history and basics
Background/history
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/summary.htm

These are very good to watch
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/12/online-video-lectures-on-climate-change/

and there is a plethora of good links here all by working climate scientists.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/

A book is likely to be outdated by the time it prints tho some books covering the potential consequences are scary indeed.

It even put off this reviewer
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Review-2084-Oral-History-Great-Warming-James-Powell.html

But that was it's purpose after all...."could it really be that dire".....well....maybe ;)
 
CapelDodger said:
I'm pretty sure solar activity cannot be predicted in any scientific way over the next 50-years. Only quite recently have solar scientists gained the instruments and the computing power to start getting a handle on what's going on with the magnetic fields and convective flows and all manner of stuff. Which is revolving. Tricky. Predicting ten years ahead is, I suspect, a bit of a gamble. However ...

The Sun has, of course, long been a subject of fascination for the woo-inclined and they have all kinds of predictive formulae sent to them in dreams. Those which predict an imminent Ice Age quickly get to the ears of right-wing blowhards.
Click to expand...

lomiller said:
The short version is that changes in the Suns energy output are small enough in comparison to what our greenhouse gasses do that it’s essentially background noise at this point.

There is a known 11/22 year sunspot cycle. The Suns magnetic field reverses every 11 years which causes sunspot activity to drop than increase. This is actually a 22 year cycle by the time the Suns magnetic field returns to its original state, but the solar activity for each half of that looks similar.

There is some suggestion that these 11/22 year cycles also follow a repeating pattern lasting several hundred years, but I doubt there is enough data to confirm or refute this since we only have observations going back 400 years. You will see predictions of future sunspot cycles based on this premise, but someone else will have to flesh that out for you, I’ve never found it credible enough to dig into it.

During the course of the 11 year cycle the Suns output changes in a roughly sinusoidal pattern. The amplitude of this is +/- 0.5W/m^2 (1 W/m^ peak to peak). This suggests that even if a prolonged period of zero sunspot activity like the Maunder Minimum occurred the average drop in solar output would be ~0.5W/m^2.

To compare this to the impact to greenhouse gasses, current greenhouse forcing is thought to be ~2W/m2 but it’s important to realize that greenhouse gasses act in all directions while solar activity comes from only 1 direction. IOW the m^2 for solar activity is the area of a circle while for greenhouse gasses it describes the surface area of a sphere. The conversion between them is *4. So 2W/m^2 of greenhouse forcing is equivalent of 8W/m^2 change in solar output or ~15X larger than a sunspot minimum.

At most a hypothetical “new maunder minimum” would cause a small slowdown in warming for a decade or two.
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Thanks for your answers. What I find interesting is how quickly global warming deniers are to completely pooh-pooh any models which seek to predict the climate unless the ideas agree with theirs, in which case very tiny data-points can with 100 per cent certainty determine the climate for the next 50 years!
 
Is the LIA put to bed these days as volcanic as opposed to solar? This is one of four eruptions I believe.

Mystery 13th Century eruption traced to Lombok, Indonesia
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists think they have found the volcano responsible for a huge eruption that occurred in the 13th Century.

The mystery event in 1257 was so large its chemical signature is recorded in the ice of both the Arctic and the Antarctic.

European medieval texts talk of a sudden cooling of the climate, and of failed harvests.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24332239
 
angrysoba said:
In this case with the sunspots I would like to know how exactly it can be determined that there will be a 50-year cooling.
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By crackpot science only.

angrysoba said:
Thanks for your answers. What I find interesting is how quickly global warming deniers are to completely pooh-pooh any models which seek to predict the climate unless the ideas agree with theirs, in which case very tiny data-points can with 100 per cent certainty determine the climate for the next 50 years!
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Indeed. As others have pointed out:

1. Solar scientists cannot consistently give accurate predictions of the next solar cycle never mind 50 years ahead. Any such long term prediction would be exceedingly unreliable.

2. Even if Sun was to go into a Maunder Minimum mode it would not stop the global warming caused by greenhouse gases, not even if we allow by assumption a strong effect for it.
(Sidenote: Additionally we don't know if the Maunder Minimum in 1645-1715 sunspot records actually is the explanation for the co-incident cooling of the period. On it's surface it may sound like a reasonable assumption to make but it's lacking in details and I'm not convinced at all. Solar contribution could as well have been very small. For example, the MM could have been a manifestation of the possible Livingston&Penn effect.)

I'll add to those this very important tidbit:
3. The claim that we have an accurate 400-year record of sunspot numbers is incorrect (as claimed in the thread by batvette, IIRC).

Let me elaborate on that.

How do we know solar activity?

Definition: solar activity is Sun's magnetic activity.
It's manifested in numerous solar phenomena such as: solar wind, Sun's magnetic field strength, aurorae, solar corona, radio flux, sunspots, cosmogenic isotopes modulated by solar activity etc. Observations of those phenomena give us different indexes (or proxies) of solar activity.

It's important to note that those indexes capture different phenomena of the magnetic activity and also different physics behind them. It's also very important to note that none of the indexes of solar activity capture actual sunshine or Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) but may correlate with it.

Here's an analysis how different indexes of solar activity are linked with TSI (=composites in red):
Can the Total Solar Irradiance be reconstructed from solar activity proxies?

Goqfcac.png

(okay, maybe it's not as impossible as it may sound)

How do we know past solar activity?

Different indexes of solar activity cover different periods, for example:
Cosmogenic isotopes C-14 and Be-10 as proxies (~10000 years but new techniques will likely extend it)
Observations of aurorae (BCE)
Observations of sunspots (1610- but there are much older random naked eye observations back to BCE)
Observations of solar corona during eclipses (at least 1715-)
Geomagnetic measurements with solar wind signal (18/19th cent.)
Disk photographs (19th cent.)
CaK photographs (1890-)
Cosmic rays (1925-)
10.7 cm Radio flux (1945-)
etc.

Of those indexes the sunspot record gets often used as a measure of past solar activity because it provides a long series of observations with the Relative Sunspot Number (aka R or SSN). Sunspots have been observed more or less systematically since 1610, though there are also some random older observations. The problem with historical sunspot records is that the observations vary from one observer to another, and the further back in time we go the less there's archived observations available.

The most used sunspot series are:

1. The International Sunspot Number (ISN, Ri, Rz; starts year 1700) kept by SIDC.

2. The Group Sunspot Number (GSN, Rg; starts year 1610) compiled by Hoyt&Schatten in 1998.

They get used a lot for example when trying and predicting upcoming solar cycle (esp. statistical methods), when inferring past solar activity, when calibrating C-14 and Be-10 paleorecord to more recent levels of solar activity, and when making estimates of past TSI.

And now, finally, on to the point. An important heads up about the historical sunspot series:

The most used historical sunspot series are not accurate. They have some serious errors in them.

1. The International Sunspot Number has at least one error of about 20%:
All numbers after 1945 are about 20% too high relative to the preceeding ones in the series. The reason is an undocumented 1945 change in the spot counting method discovered only recently.

2. The Group Sunspot Number has at least one 50% error:
All numbers before ~1885 in the series are about 50% too low. The reason is a set of inaccuracies when the series was first compiled by Hoyt&Schatten in 1998.

These errors have been discovered fairly recently (2011-), they have been confirmed to exist, their sources have been identified, the researchers have been able to quantify them, and the researches responsible for those series have admitted to them (or those still alive that is).

So what does that mean?

The first implication is that solar activity has actually varied much less than previously thought based on those series. For example this GSN record in the Wikipedia is wrong, and there likely wasn't any 'Modern Maximum' at all:
n8E5cfS.png


Here's a preliminary graph of the corrected sunspot record beginning from 1700:
TDzgBoz.png
(source)

The second implication will be that the arguments for solar contribution to the observed global warming get even weaker than before because there actually has been even less variation than thought (e.g. no 'Modern Maximum').

The third implication is that many papers regarding past solar activity will end up into the trash because they have used inaccurate records which exaggerate solar variation as their calibration backbone. For example, some papers claiming that we have had the most active period of solar activity in thousands of years have used the GSN which has at least 50% error in it. Additionally different estimates of past Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) have had huge variability depending on which sunspot series they have used as their backbone, and the estimates cannot all be correct. Just one example of the wide range marked in blue:
zctfTzK.png


The sunspot series themselves are not yet updated to reflect those errors. That is because it takes time to vet them for further errors. There's an ongoing effort to comb through all available historical observations to reconcile the series, and to form a more accurate historical sunspot series with relevant error bars and tools to use it. Group of prominent solar scientists around the world are working on it, and their results are expected to be published next year as a series of papers in a special topical issue of Solar Physics.

The project home page has more information: SSN-Workshop
For the layman here's a recent easy-to-read New Scientist article about the issue: Spot of bother
Relevant paper by Cliver et al. explains it in more detail: RECALIBRATING THE SUNSPOT NUMBER (SSN): THE SSN WORKSHOPS

Science's interesting, innit?
 
macdoc said:
Is the LIA put to bed these days as volcanic as opposed to solar? This is one of four eruptions I believe.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24332239
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It may well be multiple factors including anthropogenic factors like land use changes creating an artificially warm period before the “cooling”. No matter what the cause most reconstructions place the cooling from the medieval warm period to the little ice age was about 0.5 deg C and took ~300 years.

The Earth has warmed this much in the last 30 years, so even the cumulative forcing that caused the WMP and LIA are dwarfed by what the earth is currently facing.
 
macdoc said:
Is the LIA put to bed these days as volcanic as opposed to solar? This is one of four eruptions I believe.
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There was certainly a lot of vulcanism between 1250 and 1900 relative to just before and since. It was particularly severe in the late 18th and the 19thCE, when things got coldest in the North Atlantic region and probably worldwide. Warming in the early 20thCE can be partly (if not entirely) attributed to clearing skies before we managed to darken them again significantly.
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