Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[aleCcowaN]

More about models involved in recent (and future) discussions in this thread:

GFDL CM2.1 (very important in IPCC 4th assessment)

Temperature projections (from GFDL site)

I couldn't find information about the scenario used for this image (other figures using A1B or RCP4.5 have similar output)

 

[aleCcowaN]

More about models involved in recent (and future) discussions in this thread:

Now, leaving 1992-2005 behind and looking toward IPCC 5th assessment

GFDL CM3

The major development effort for CM3 focused on the atmosphere component. The update from the CM2.1 atmospheric component (AM2; GFDL GAMDT, 2004) to the new AM3 component in CM3 (Donner et al., 2011) was intended to allow us to address important questions such as:

• What are the roles of aerosol-cloud interactions, specifically indirect effects of aerosols?
• What are the dominant chemistry-climate interactions?
• What is the role of coupling to the stratosphere (and stratospheric chemistry)?

In particular, AM3 includes new treatments of deep and shallow cumulus convection, cloud droplet activation by aerosols (i.e., aerosol indirect effect), subgrid variability of stratiform vertical velocities for droplet activation, and atmospheric chemistry and aerosols driven by emissions with advective, convective, and turbulent transport.



Source

Temperature projections (source GFDL web site)

 

[aleCcowaN]

More about models involved in recent (and future) discussions in this thread:

Looking toward IPCC 5^th assessment

ESM2M and ESM2G

GFDL has constructed NOAA’s first Earth System Models (ESMs) to advance our understanding of how the Earth's biogeochemical cycles, including human actions, interact with the climate system. Like GFDL's physical climate models, these simulation tools are based on an atmospheric circulation model coupled with an oceanic circulation model, with representations of land, sea ice and iceberg dynamics. ESMs incorporate interactive biogeochemistry, including the carbon cycle. Building the ESMs has been a large collaborative effort involving scientists from GFDL, Princeton University, Department of Interior and other institutions, to study climate and ecosystem interactions and their potential changes, from both natural and anthropogenic causes.


The atmospheric component of the ESMs includes physical features such as aerosols (both natural and anthropogenic), cloud physics, and precipitation. The land component includes precipitation and evaporation, streams, lakes, rivers, and runoff as well as a terrestrial ecology component to simulate dynamic reservoirs of carbon and other tracers. The oceanic component includes features such as free surface to capture wave processes; water fluxes, or flow; currents; sea ice dynamics; iceberg transport of freshwater; and a state-of-the-art representation of ocean mixing as well as marine biogeochemistry and ecology.


While carbon is necessarily included as the basic building block of ecosystems undergoing terrestrial and oceanic chemistry, associated chemical and ecological tracers which control nutrient limitation, plant biomass, productivity, and functional composition are also included. Chemical tracers are also tracked in the atmosphere. ESMs capture numerous types of emissions, variations of land surface albedo due to both natural vegetation changes and land use history such as agriculture and forestry, and aerosol chemistry. Adding these different components to the ESM represents a major step forward in simulating the Earth's ecological systems in a comprehensive and internally consistent context.


http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/earth-system-model

Some comparisons (taken from "Influence of Ocean and Atmosphere Components on Simulated Climate Sensitivities")

This one for RCP4.5:

This one for emissions growing 1% a year until it reaches 4x CO2

In both figures the red line represents CM3.

I'm not adding more models and references yet to avoid a tangle. I think we have enough to start a nice discussion about future warming.

Just for curiosity, take a look to the salinity animation generated using CM2.6 (at the bottom) . ESM2 departed from CM2.1

 

[aleCcowaN]

An interesting figure in the paper "Ocean heat uptake and its consequences for the magnitude of sea level rise and climate change" by T. Kuhlbrodt and J. M. Gregory, published this year in Geophysical Research Letters. They "quantify the differences in projections among atmosphere-ocean general circulation models of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project in terms of transient climate response, ocean heat uptake efficiency and expansion efficiency of heat"

The scenario is +1%/yr increased CO2. It's interesting to revise the concepts behind the calculated values:

ρ = κ + α --- climate resistance --- blue and red bars --- how much radiative forcing takes to increase mean air temperature 1°C
κ --- heat uptake efficiency --- blue bar --- how much radiative forcing are the oceans absorbing when the mean air temperature increases 1°
α --- climate feedback parameter (not uniformly used) --- red bar --- related to sensitivity, amounts to what the system return to space either as infrared radiation or as reflected radiation (by change of clouds, ice cover, etc)
ε --- expansion efficiency of heat
TCR --- transient climate response --- temperature change at the time of CO2 doubling

For the models described in recent posts:

model| κ | α | ρ | TCR
|Wm ^-2 °C ^-1 |Wm ^-2 °C ^-1 |Wm ^-2 °C ^-1 |
HadCM3 |0.5|1.12|1.62|2
HadGEM1 |0.55|1.27|1.82|1.9
GFDL CM2.1 |0.72|1.76|2.48|1.5
GFDL CM3|0.65|0.75|1.4|1.95
ESM2G|0.85|1.73|2.58|1.05
ESM2M|0.85|1.7|2.55|1.35

Don't forget the "transient" part. Even models like ESM2G and ESM2M show an average 1.5 m air temperature increasing a horrific 8.5°C for a CO2 level of 1200 ppmv once some 1200-1500 years have passed (and a great deal of it happens during the first 150). We are debating the "when", not the "if".

 

[aleCcowaN]

The denialist blinders are not a bad departure to analyse what is happening nowadays:

Denialists are not fond of doctoring figures but they carefully select the bits that help them to tell the story they like to be true. For instance, the world is no warming at all:

Of course, they also like to tell that CO2 has nothing to do with this as it has been climbing and temperatures haven't changed. Nothing better than adding more blinkers and show it together:

So "carbon dioxide effect is saturated" to them, or "nonexistent", or "overwhelmed by other factors that always have taken good care of our blessed planet". If they are told heat is building up in the oceans they show more figures -with the usual blinders-

Of course they don't care much about the periods not matching.

This was exactly what balrod666 (our most recent professional negationist) did in post #7008, with the worsening factor of that image being maliciously dropped in Wikipedia.

They won't be happy with only this and they'll propose theories: It's the pentatonic oscillation, it's gamma rays, it's the sun:

They are just blinders, but anyway those parts of the curves existed, so they require an explanation. Saying 6 years, 8, years, ... 14 years is too little to speak of trends is not enough and it's not even valid in the longest cases. Also saying that a lot of impending warming is around the corner and +2°C in 30 years will be counterpart of this apparently -and effective- stagnation, this is like saying "my big brother is coming for you ...".

 

[Mikemcc]

An interesting study highlighted on Science Daily. Looking at meeting electrical generating capacity using renewables and storage with the target of minimum cost. I'm not sure their ideas for storage are the most economical but will have to wait and see. It also doesn't address vehicle fuel usage and I'm not sure it includes heating costs.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121210133507.htm

 

[jimbob]

An interesting study highlighted on Science Daily. Looking at meeting electrical generating capacity using renewables and storage with the target of minimum cost. I'm not sure their ideas for storage are the most economical but will have to wait and see. It also doesn't address vehicle fuel usage and I'm not sure it includes heating costs.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121210133507.htm

One of the more interesting ideas to me is using plug in hybrids as a massive distributed storage system. Significant engineering and financial structuring will be needed to get it to work though.

 

[aleCcowaN]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121210133507.htm

The original paper is here.

One of the more interesting ideas to me is using plug in hybrids as a massive distributed storage system. Significant engineering and financial structuring will be needed to get it to work though.

In many places they are using two-way communication smart metres with that purpose. You can program your car in your garage to choose based on the spot price how to take advantage of the hours when electricity is cheaper either because of low use (4 A.M) or while there is overproduction (strong winds together with clear skies at noon). Or companies like Better Place can take advantage of the spot market -and thus help to level demand-.

The problem is governments and big companies. In Argentina it was created a flexible yet heavily controlled system for natural gas on vehicles that became an immediate success. It was implemented in 1984 -the first accidental explosion was in 2000 when a French couple had their caravan butane tank filled with natural gas at much more pressure- and the country remained in first position until 2007, now surpassed by Iran and Pakistan, and followed closely by Brazil. A 22% of local vehicles doing some 40% the of total the mileage use CNG which implies not only money savings but some 4 MT less or carbon dioxide thrown into the atmosphere.

Why am I telling this when the subject was wind and solar? Because a lot of systems are successful but local and even international interests have managed to entangled everything. Part of that entanglement is preventing people to know about what is going on elsewhere.

 

[Mikemcc]

The original paper is here.



In many places they are using two-way communication smart metres with that purpose. You can program your car in your garage to choose based on the spot price how to take advantage of the hours when electricity is cheaper either because of low use (4 A.M) or while there is overproduction (strong winds together with clear skies at noon). Or companies like Better Place can take advantage of the spot market -and thus help to level demand-.

The problem is governments and big companies. In Argentina it was created a flexible yet heavily controlled system for natural gas on vehicles that became an immediate success. It was implemented in 1984 -the first accidental explosion was in 2000 when a French couple had their caravan butane tank filled with natural gas at much more pressure- and the country remained in first position until 2007, now surpassed by Iran and Pakistan, and followed closely by Brazil. A 22% of local vehicles doing some 40% the of total the mileage use CNG which implies not only money savings but some 4 MT less or carbon dioxide thrown into the atmosphere.

Why am I telling this when the subject was wind and solar? Because a lot of systems are successful but local and even international interests have managed to entangled everything. Part of that entanglement is preventing people to know about what is going on elsewhere.

Thanks for the link, I'll have a good look at that.

I think there will be a range of measures required at all levels. I've lost the link now, there was a program in the UK where a village effectively 'owned' a wind turbine (I think it was in Yorkshire). The profits were plowed into schemes to insulate the homes, the village hall, etc. I've managed to find a similar scheme:

http://www.westmill.coop/westmill_home.asp

But there will always be the need for strategic overview to plan improvements to the grid, generating capacity, interconnectors, etc. The hardest thing will be transforming transport infrastructure, in the UK this has been disasterous. Privatisation has effectively destroyed any central control.

 

[aleCcowaN]

http://www.westmill.coop/westmill_home.asp

Interesting read. I was surprised the capital grant was so tiny and not necessary to put the project in motion. Also interesting the bunch of fellows that contributed up to 13 million ₤ for the project to become what it is today. I -like many people- also can contribute a few tenners to capitalize this kind of project expecting no capital refund and a book value raising inflation plus 0.5% a year. The problem would be to raise 13 billion ₤, with billion having its original meaning, that is, US trillion, as it seems to be what we need to restructure the world's matriz energética (energy mix?).

Denialists have been extremely successful in delaying the debate 10 or 15. In the next few years, in face of the future developments on the climate angle, they'll probably abandon their masks of pseudo-science to show their true face as i-could-not-care-less-about-the-environment obstructionists. That is why it's so important to move onto the social and political debate.

The problem is in fact extremely simple -and yet so complicated-: We have a lot of experience in doing bad businesses for the general wellbeing. And I'm not referring to education, or health -in those countries who care-. I'm speaking of undergrounds, metro systems and urban highways. I live in a large city with an pretty small underground system (only 6 lines and total 48km) that charges you 0.40 euro (longest trip exactly 20 km). They gather some 150 million euro a year for a system that would cost today some 3 milliards to build. That is hardly the cost of the interests on a bank loan taken to build the system. So, the public sector (the first two lines of underground, opened in 1913 and 1929, were private but they were eventually nationalized) has invested to avoid the system the cost of capital. Certainly different government levels have (under)invested in the metro and highways some, say, current value 14? "billion" for some 14 million people to have a third-worldy system. That is some thou euros per capita. Certainly, you can add Boston with just her Big Dig of 15 billion and Kinshasa and her urban scarcity and come up with a few "trillion" of subsidized capital for cities with more than one million inhabitants throughout the world. The key strategy is applying that concept to the more environmental friendly part of the energy sector, but also make it to be known and rationalized that way. And fora have a role to play in this.

 

[CapelDodger]

One of the more interesting ideas to me is using plug in hybrids as a massive distributed storage system. Significant engineering and financial structuring will be needed to get it to work though.

An attractive aspect from the network operator's point of view is that they aren't bearing the up-front cost of the batteries, which are being bought anyway. An attractive aspect from the hybrid owner's point of view is that they have first call on the stored power should (heaven forbid) the network ever go down. Which, given that much of it was designed for a climate which is now a memory, is increasingly likely.

This sort of scheme can mobilise huge amounts of private capital in relatively small packets, as we see with home solar panels. It does not fit easily with the established models of massively centralised and bureaucratically planned supply networks (of all sorts) but those models are already floundering in the backwash of the internet. No wonder Al Gore had to prise it out of their cold dead hands ...

I suspect that the Western zeitgeist will strongly advantage systems of distributed (and even private) supply as against supply be huge central institutions, which people have lost a great deal of faith in recently. If not all.

 

[CapelDodger]

Interesting read. I was surprised the capital grant was so tiny and not necessary to put the project in motion. Also interesting the bunch of fellows that contributed up to 13 million ₤ for the project to become what it is today. I -like many people- also can contribute a few tenners to capitalize this kind of project expecting no capital refund and a book value raising inflation plus 0.5% a year. The problem would be to raise 13 billion ₤, with billion having its original meaning, that is, US trillion, as it seems to be what we need to restructure the world's matriz energética (energy mix?).

Adjusted for growth that's not out-of-line with what's been invested in the current system, much of which will still remain useful. If only for the rights-of-way . It'll happen over years, and if people can be mobilised to invest their own small but numerous bits of capital in something physical, visible and obviously productive (such as a community windmill or their own solar panels) it strikes me as easily doable without being centrally planned and dictated.

Denialists have been extremely successful in delaying the debate 10 or 15. In the next few years, in face of the future developments on the climate angle, they'll probably abandon their masks of pseudo-science to show their true face as i-could-not-care-less-about-the-environment obstructionists.

In my crystal ball I see them denying that some geo-engineering folderol won't harm the environment and only eco-nazis are holding it back from saving the world. Monckton will be the movement's public face and it will be popular in certain circles.

We have a peculiar thing going on in the UK centred on windmills, with the right rallying around the standard of opposition to them. They have become a symbol, somehow, of foreigness and the European menace. And hippies. It would be funnier if they didn't have close followers in the bloody cabinet.

Noticeably, though, AGW denial is not at all central to their current message. The weather has been too weird for too long for that to be a credible line any more. The assault now is directly against the transition from the established and familiar system to the future one of renewables, which is being made symbolic of uncomfortable and often incomprehensible change.

The same sort of thing is happening across Euroips and beyond, and as a student of history I find the link with nationalism slightly disturbing and definitely worth keeping an eye on.

In the rational political world responses to the changed and changing weather will increasingly feature in electioneering, because that's something people will increasingly be asking about. It had to come to this, and sure enough it has come.

I trust we're all well-prepared for too little too late? Denial or not we'd have had the same diplomatic and political failure, with one IPCC report leading inexorably to the scheduling of another at ever-increasing intervals. The denial movement didn't cause that; any similarly horrifying prospect would have met the same inertia and the same delay.

 

[Pixel42]

Talk about grasping at straws.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/dec/14/ipcc-climate-change-report-leaked-online

The draft of a major global warming report by the UN's climate science panel has been leaked online.

The fifth assessment report (AR5) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is not due to be published in full until September 2013, was uploaded onto a website called Stop Green Suicide on Thursday and has since been mirrored elsewhere on the internet. Several scientists who helped to write the report have confirmed that the draft is genuine.

A little-known US-based climate sceptic called Alex Rawls, who had been accepted by the IPCC to be one of the report's 800 expert reviewers, admitted to leaking the document. In a statement posted online, he sought to justify the leak: "The addition of one single sentence [discussing the influence of cosmic rays on the earth's climate] demands the release of the whole. That sentence is an astounding bit of honesty, a killing admission that completely undercuts the main premise and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the fundamental dishonesty of the whole."

Climate sceptics have heralded the sentence – which they interpret as meaning that cosmic rays could have a greater warming influence on the planet than mankind's emissions – as "game-changing".

The isolation by climate sceptics of one sentence in the 14-chapter draft report was described as "completely ridiculous" by one of the report's lead authors. Prof Steve Sherwood, a director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, told ABC Radio in Australia: "You could go and read those paragraphs yourself and the summary of it and see that we conclude exactly the opposite, that this cosmic ray effect that the paragraph is discussing appears to be negligible … It's a pretty severe case of [cherry-picking], because even the sentence doesn't say what [climate sceptics] say and certainly if you look at the context, we're really saying the opposite."

 

[Mikemcc]

Talk about grasping at straws.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/dec/14/ipcc-climate-change-report-leaked-online

SkS has already eviserated this little bit of nonsense, it seems the original post has totally mis-construed the text of the report.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc-draft-leak-global-warming-not-solar.html

 

[aleCcowaN]

The answer to the denialist fluff about the leaked documents is not an explanation about the role, or lack thereof, of cosmic rays in determining the temperature of the planet, and its relation with the Sun and, in turn, the role of the Sun in determining the temperature of the planet.

The problem is just a huge cherry picking and a twisting coming from the typical epistemological hedonism of denialists. They took the text: "The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link." from page 43, chapter 7 draft and build a mountain over it. The two page analysis concludes in page 44 with the following:

7.4.5.3 Synthesis

Although there is some evidence that ionization from cosmic rays may enhance aerosol nucleation in the free troposphere, there is medium evidence and high agreement that the cosmic ray-ionization mechanism is too weak to influence global concentrations of CCN or their change over the last century or during a solar cycle in any climatically significant way. The lack of trend in the cosmic ray intensity over the last 50 years (Agee et al., 2012; McCracken and Beer, 2007) provides another strong argument against the hypothesis of a major contribution of cosmic rays to ongoing climate change.

Other parts of chapters 7 and 8 relate to this, with similar conclusion.

My major concern is that an individual of the intellectual stature of the person "leaking" the documents, who thought that the inclusion of the sentence in bold above in the second order draft implied "The Chapter 7 authors are admitting strong evidence ("many empirical relationships") for enhanced solar forcing (forcing beyond total solar irradiance, or TSI), even if they don't know what the mechanism is. This directly undercuts the main premise of the report, as stated in Chapter 8 (page 8-4, lines 54-57)" (written by Rawls in his website: www stop green suicide . com) is one of the 800 guys checking the papers of the whole Group I (The Physical Science Basis of AR5). What are we to expect of the quality of the remaining, say, 799? Goodness me!

 

[jimbob]

An attractive aspect from the network operator's point of view is that they aren't bearing the up-front cost of the batteries, which are being bought anyway. An attractive aspect from the hybrid owner's point of view is that they have first call on the stored power should (heaven forbid) the network ever go down. Which, given that much of it was designed for a climate which is now a memory, is increasingly likely.

This sort of scheme can mobilise huge amounts of private capital in relatively small packets, as we see with home solar panels. It does not fit easily with the established models of massively centralised and bureaucratically planned supply networks (of all sorts) but those models are already floundering in the backwash of the internet. No wonder Al Gore had to prise it out of their cold dead hands ...

I suspect that the Western zeitgeist will strongly advantage systems of distributed (and even private) supply as against supply be huge central institutions, which people have lost a great deal of faith in recently. If not all.

On a similar subject:

Our factory has a GBFO* flywheel uninteruptible power supply the size of a small house. The mains spins it up to a high speed in a vacuum and if there is a power outage it has enough stored energy for about 30-minutes, with marine diesel generator backup. We have agreed to go off grid during periods of high demand.






*the obvious acronym

 

[aleCcowaN]

YOU MAY ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

Pixel42 called our attention on a recent and import development: denialist inc. started a series of publications departing from the "leakage" involving the drafts on IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report.

They are currently publishing in blogs and other internet properties a lot of garbage involving snippets taken out of context in a probable effort to repeat during Doha the "15 minutes of glory" of "Climategate" during Copenhagen.

I've just sent a mail to journalists in the second highest in circulation journal in my country -a class media conservative paper (called liberal here) which is "my paper" since I was 10- warning them about these developments in an effort to avoid them to repeat the mistakes they did when "Climategate".

I consider advisable the following:

-Write to any journal, news channel or news site you consider they need to be on guard against this
-Be active and counteract as soon as possible the loads of tosh they are publishing every hour (Wattsy is extremely active this moment and it looks like he has many truculent bull prepared beforehand)
-Discuss here -if you have no better place- this material for others to take advantage of this content and/or link to posts in this very thread
-Don't worry too much about the publishing policies in the drafts. It's all currently on line and spreading like wildfire. As this is inevitable, the IPCC will surelylook will good eyes any effort to counteract denialist bull.

 

[CapelDodger]

Talk about grasping at straws.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/dec/14/ipcc-climate-change-report-leaked-online

Time was we'd have had some WattsUpMyButt regular crowing about this directly, but something about this venue seems to have disagreed with them all over time. I miss being called a liberal.

'Tis the season for retrospectives on the year, and for the denier cause it does not make comfortable reading. Weather in the US was disastrous for them, on the back of several years of setbacks. It would be charitable to describe the Heatland billboard campaign as ill-conceived. The Arctic put on a great show. Monckton has become the face of the movement. Denial got the GOP no gains in the US elections, and the major economically-interested parties there have dropped it. (The new policy is to ignore climate change and focus purely on economics, reliabity and national interest arguments. The newly-emerged idea that the US could be energy-independent using traditional means may get developed, it bears watching.) One damn' thing after another.

The mainstream policy now is not to deny AGW but to ignore it, leave it out of the equations. If frackers are to achieve their dreams they will need to be regarded as sane and responsible corporations, so association with climate denial is undesirable. With the BP disaster they're starting from a hard enough place as it is.

This was the year that AGW denial hit the wall, at a run, and it's now staggering towards eventual oblivion. Decline will be swift, mark my words. We'll remain aware of them, of course, but their influence on events (such as it ever was) is gone. That scene at Doha with Inhofe, Monckton and someone who thinks the UN is the anti-Christ really put the lid on it.

 

[macdoc]

I'm actually rooting for responsible fracking as it just might eliminate some coal plants.

 

[CapelDodger]

I'm actually rooting for responsible fracking as it just might eliminate some coal plants.

Reasonable, but without a carbon price it would also eliminate some renewable projects. There's also oil-fracking as well as gas, which may retard the transition to new transport models (more public transport, less travel generally through localisation and suchlike).

There seems little if any danger of responsible anything from the oil and gas industry. The complete bollocks Shell made of its Arctic expedition this year alongside the secrecy and denial by the same deniers already shown over fracking makes that very clear, quite apart from the Niger delta over the last half-century. Shell knew for years they'd be going to the Arctic, but they didn't commission a support ship or two for that specific purpose. They tried to cut costs by converting an existing asset, which ended by costing them far more in the end. BP were cutting costs in the Gulf of Mexico to great effect until, you know, oops. And this while profits are stratospheric.

There's a fracking frenzy in UK political circles currently, amplified by the Chancellor's embrace of what he's been told is a magic escape-card from the horrible mess he's got himself into. Like North Sea oil for the Thatcher regime. Utter folly, but Osborne has a very tiny mind and a very tiny circle of friends, all like-minded. Geological realities are not things they give much consideration to, except perhaps on their own land. I kid you not, its like living in some weird time-slippage under this government, with bits of various decades and centuries overlapping each other.