Global warming

[varwoche]

Varwoche, occasionally I use raw data and make my own charts. In this instance I don't recall if that's the case, but it was stored in my file as satellite temp data. If you doubt the data, look it up, or I'll post the raw data.

In other words, you're posting a chart and you don't know where the data comes from. Surely you don't expect this to fly on a skeptical forum.

On the 20 ft. sea level rise, it in fact was not the IPCC. Sometimes it gets confusing with so many different predictions. I believe the 20+ claim is Hansen; he may have even been higher.

You already made a mistake by attributing it to IPCC. I suggest you do your legwork instead of offering up this new speculation.

Nonetheless, IPCC downgraded drastically from 2001. In any event, several papers disagree with all of them.

I don't mean to give you incessant grief DR, but this is awfully vague. Precisely which papers? And what is "all of them"?

 

[David Rodale]

I notice that those who bring up the "is is" issue are much less didactic over parsing of words such as that done by Alberto Gonzales and President Bush--real lies versus blowjob lies.

David Rodale you are doing the woo dance... go after semantics and obfuscation so that you can miss the point entirely. Semantics goes two ways... but the truth is singular. Words all have shades of meaning, but the facts are the same. AGW is a fact and the longer humans deny that fact or segue off into politics and semantics the harder it is to address the problem in ways that we can address it so that worst case scenarios are less likely.

Whenever I see anyone bring up that stupid "is is" thing I know I'm listening to a right wing nutcake who only follows the party line-- blind to all facts that bespeak dishonesty and corruption in those you worship while grandstanding against the minor pecadillos of others.

There's nothing quite like the right wing nut cakes in America for noticing the non existent sawdust in another's eye while ignoring the huge branch sticking out of their own. Perhaps you ought to check out some more balanced news sources and not just those that parrot what you want to hear.

Capel Dodger is coherent and apologized for his error. You are using tactics on par with a defense attorney with a guilty client-- using language and graphs to say nothing at all but to imply that AGW is a left wing alarmist conspiracy. Speaking of alarmist... have you been listening to the President who tells much bigger lies than "is is" lies? He uses fear mongering to promote his corrupt administration and his minions of blowhards who have completely lost the ability to evaluate anything critically. Also, CapelDodger is not an American so your smarmy clintonesque rhetoric is particularly obnoxious and ethnocentric.

Oh you speak with such Authority with absolutely nothing substantive added to the subject matter.

I don't recall attacking anyone personally. To say I think someone's reasoning is silly is not on par with the vast majority of venomous rhetoric (such as yours) as is common in this forum when someone disagrees with the majority view. I thought this forum was supposed to be a haven for critical thinkers, but apparently was mistaken.

My response was critiquing the article, not the person who posted it. Capel Dodger apparently took it personally and responded in kind.

I don't particularly care for President Bush in many respects. Nice try though. Quite frankly, I don't care what flavor Kool Aid you drink.

Can you find an instance of when I used the word conspiracy? An article entitled "Greenland Ice Cap 'Doomed to Melting' " is not fear mongering or alarmist?

Capel Dodger claims he bases his belief in AGW on physics. He nor anyone else has yet to cite a paper explaining the physics (not consensus or opinion) of temperature rising 2+C due to doubling (or any amount) of atmospheric CO2. There is no empirical evidence for such a claim. There is no scientific evidence supporting the claim that atmospheric CO2 has a life cycle of 120-200 years.

Your statements of pending 'worst case scenarios' are just that....scenarios, no different than reading a fictional novel. Please be more specific. What exactly are these "scenarios" we can expect if we do nothing to curb CO2 emissions?

Great, now it is way past my bedtime.

 

[varwoche]

Wronger than wrong. We are dealing here with the specific sources provided by Safe-keeper and commented on by CP.

My comment pertained to DR's absurd word twisting regardless who posted the original cite.

You really need to consider the entire planet glacial balance, right?

I'm not sure what you're getting at since glaciers are in retreat globally.

There is no perfect understanding of that but what is monitored is found here. You are wasting your time pursuing the Greenland Alarm Bell.

I have no idea what you mean here.

Please either refute this or admit that Greenland melting doesn't matter one iota.

Refute or admit specifically what?

 

[mhaze]

In other words, you're posting a chart and you don't know where the data comes from. Surely you don't expect this to fly on a skeptical forum.

You already made a mistake by attributing it to IPCC. I suggest you do your legwork instead of offering up this new speculation.

No mistake, check section 10, chapter 10.

Separately and distinctly, and for different reasons, this claim has been made by Hansen in his typical alarmist mode. Separately again, it has been made repeatedly by people in this forum who heard it numerous places.

 

[mhaze]

Another shameless distortion.

First, these are the words of a journalist, not the scientists who conducted the study. Second, if you had actually quoted the article, it would have have helped readers see how utterly ridiculous your criticism is.
Why in Odin's name are you citing goofy sources such as CO2 Science and the Marshall Institute?

Further, you need to quote the precise text that supposedly makes your point. A list of links doesn't cut it.

Straw man.

Why in Odin's name are you pointing to an unattributed graphic at an image hosting site?

Your information is outdated:

Evidence?

You are confusing weather with climate.

Funny how the 9 just happens to include the el nino year! This is cherry-picking in the absurd extreme. From NASA:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_225846b35451642ea.jpg

(I'm not ignoring the Willerslev study -- I'm still reading up.)

Ignoring the stern, foreboding and lecturing tone reminiscent of certain preachers....



Here are northern, southern and global temperatures from satellite data by Spencer and Christy, 2006. The data may be downloaded from their website if I recall correctly. Further, the data has been audited and several errors noted and corrected. Therefore, we can presume that it's pretty good data, right?



Here is the chart you preferred, from Hensen, a known alarmist. It is described as follows:

(Left) Global annual surface temperature relative to 1951-1980 mean based on surface air measurements at meteorological stations and ship and satellite measurements for sea surface temperature. Error bars are estimated 2σ (95% confidence) uncertainty.
​

It is a mismash of satellite and ground temperatures. Unless there were some satellites back in 1900...

It mixes up tropospheric and ground data? How can that be good science?

The answer is quite obvious - to get a pronounced rise at the right hand side.

Statistics are fun aren't they?

 

[David Rodale]

Ignoring the stern, foreboding and lecturing tone reminiscent of certain preachers....

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_1422446b480efd5ded.jpg[/qimg]

Here are northern, southern and global temperatures from satellite data by Spencer and Christy, 2006. The data may be downloaded from their website if I recall correctly. Further, the data has been audited and several errors noted and corrected. Therefore, we can presume that it's pretty good data, right?

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_1422446b485e3631a3.gif[/qimg]

Here is the chart you preferred, from Hensen, a known alarmist. It is described as follows:

(Left) Global annual surface temperature relative to 1951-1980 mean based on surface air measurements at meteorological stations and ship and satellite measurements for sea surface temperature. Error bars are estimated 2σ (95% confidence) uncertainty.
​

It is a mismash of satellite and ground temperatures. Unless there were some satellites back in 1900...

It mixes up tropospheric and ground data? How can that be good science?

The answer is quite obvious - to get a pronounced rise at the right hand side.

Statistics are fun aren't they?

UAH is likely where I got the graph from. Thanks.

Here is the raw data I believe. It is pretty straight forward using Excel or OO to create the graphs.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2/uahncdc.mt

 

[varwoche]

No mistake, check section 10, chapter 10.

Can you post a link?

 

[mhaze]

Can you post a link?

It's an 18mb download for the pdf, (which somehow only becomes about a 100 pp file) but there is about two thirds of the way through the projections to the year 3000. There is a summary with the pretty grarphs somewhere else, I think it was in the back of the summary for policymakers.

[SIZE=-1]ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/suppl/docs/AR4WG1_Pub_Ch10-SM.pdf[/SIZE]

 

[mhaze]

UAH is likely where I got the graph from. Thanks.

Here is the raw data I believe. It is pretty straight forward using Excel or OO to create the graphs.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2/uahncdc.mt

Those are darn good data points!!! got the sea data in there too.

Here is a question related to your question about proving that CO2 changes in the atmosphere affect or cause surface temperature increases.

Let's say I take a radiant lamp and put it 4 feet above a tank of water with suspended solids. Turn the lamp on and the water heats up. Turn the lamp off and feel the air - is it hot? No. Now wait a while and do it again, and the air is hot. Because of evaporation and convection from the air/water interface. Energy went from the lamp to the water and thence to the air. Given this, it seems that a change in CO2 would be a tiny part of the overall heat transfer, not a major part.

Conclusion: Air is pretty hard to heat up directly from radiant energy. Water is easy. Well, anyone who has gone swimming or scuba diving knows that; the top six feet of the ocean or lake are warm (when the sun is out), but as you go down, the water gets cool, then downright cold pretty quick.

It seems that the water should heat the air up, not the other way around.
I haven't done the thermal transfer calculations, just wanted to present the issue in a "dumb question" type of way.

 

[dakotajudo]

It is a mismash of satellite and ground temperatures. Unless there were some satellites back in 1900...

It mixes up tropospheric and ground data? How can that be good science?

That's not quite right, is it? Apparently, you only read the caption, not the text. Or did you not track down the original?

This is what I found - from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005/

Our analysis, summarized in Figure 1 above, uses documented procedures for data over land (1), satellite measurements of sea surface temperature since 1982 (2), and a ship-based analysis for earlier years

Your contention seems to be with the satellite measurements. If there were a discontinuity at 1982 - when satellite measurements of sea surface temperature replace ship-based measurement, then perhaps you'd have a point. But it appears that the current linear rise goes back to at least 1975 (and it's a very nice straight line, as these things go). Since there's a clear demarcation between the satellite and ship-based measures, you can't call it a mish-mash, can you?

Following the citations, it would appear that the satellite measurements are calibrated against ship-based measures, so this mixing is a non-issue.

Why would you assume the graph mixes tropospheric and ground data?

I'm also kinda confused - you seem to be contrasting the two data sets, Spencer and Christy vs Hensen. But if it looks to me that if you plot the two on the same scales, they'd be in pretty good agreement - jot down in '85 and '92, peak in '98, overall about a 0.4 degree increase from 1980.

It seems that the water should heat the air up, not the other way around.

Uh, duh?

The key part you seem to be missing is that air is transparent to most energy coming from the sun, but is more opaque to the energy re-radiated from the surface. Sure, CO₂ is not that important w.r.t. absorbing incoming light, but it acts to limit the escape of energy back to space.

If you've been in the country on a clear winter night, you might have noticed that it gets much, much colder than on an overcast night. Less heat is lost to space.

That's what greenhouse gases do. Consider the moderating effects of the atmosphere on earth, compared to the surface temperature swings from day to night sides of the moon.

Or did you intend to misstate the obvious?

 

[varwoche]

[SIZE=-1]ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/suppl/docs/AR4WG1_Pub_Ch10-SM.pdf[/SIZE]

I'm confused. I don't see DR's chart. I don't see any raw data that DR's chart may have been derived from. And I don't see any sea level projections.

 

[mhaze]

I'm confused. I don't see DR's chart. I don't see any raw data that DR's chart may have been derived from. And I don't see any sea level projections.

Section 10 chapter 10 goes into a lot of detail about sea level. Summary for PolicyMakers - about pp. 11 in the pdf, not sure of the actual page number in their report - notes the 7 meter rise for complete melting of Greenland and various other aspects of it. I'm still looking for the pretty chart of projections to the year 3000, will get back on that. Charts are nice....well, except for those nasty spaggetti charts

Not quite sure what the big deal is about noting the effective sea level if Greenland melted, since that's just a matter of dividing one number by another, which leads me to wonder where the "news" was in the article quoted by Safe-keeper, referencing New Scientist (not too great a ref) referencing in turn Nature (which I don't get and thus can't read, so give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe there is some "New Stuff" there in the original article).

DR's chart.


Found and discussion here.

I found it in Christy and Spencer's work on satellite temperatures. He notes it as being from the UAH website and references the data set in a link.

I had that chart from a government website, though, and will have to look for it a bit later....just ran out of time.

 

[robinson]

Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate's Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with "the overwhelming science out there, the deniers' days were numbered." As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. "I realized," says Boxer, "there was a movement behind this that just wasn't giving up."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20122975/site/newsweek/

 

[David Rodale]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20122975/site/newsweek/

I'll make of note of that for 30 years down the road. It should be good enough for 'Nature' to publish though.

Can we come to agreement there were no satellites in 1880? Hansen's rendition showing a steep rise since 1980 is laughable. With enough resolution a .001 deg rise can be made to look like a cliff.

For those who questioned my original posting of the global satellite temperatures, the raw data is here as noted earlier:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2/uahncdc.mt

A quick entry into Excel from the raw data matches:

Any questions?

 

[robinson]

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/mpg/169068main_temp_anom_w_date_320x240.mpg

Animation based on temperature data.

Official sources of data and stuff.
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/global_warming_worldbook.html
http://geology.com/news/labels/Global-Warming.html

Any questions?

 

[CapelDodger]

The title of the article is, if I'm not mistaken Greenland ice cap 'doomed to meltdown'

Oh no, there's nothing implying certain doom in the title.

There are quotes around "doomed to meltdown", so all it implies is that the piece is reporting on a claim. It makes no claim itself. Apart from that, it's a headline, written by a sub-editor, meant to draw attention. Not a bad effort; "doomed" draws the average eye. The quotes indicate that this sub had at least skimmed the piece itself. Which is not something you can depend on in a sub.

When you're reduced to decrying an article by its headline and are misrepresenting (or misunderstanding) even that, desperation is a line that's been crossed.

 

[CapelDodger]

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/mpg/169068main_temp_anom_w_date_320x240.mpg

Animation based on temperature data.

Official sources of data and stuff.
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/global_warming_worldbook.html
http://geology.com/news/labels/Global-Warming.html

http://geology.com/news/images/climate-change-graph.jpg

That's pretty much the way it's felt to me in my lifetime. I can't say the same for David Rodale's version - the summer of '82 was a good one, but warmer than last year? Not by a long chalk. And the winter of 82-83 was way colder than last winter.

Of course, my experience is of one insignificant island, but it's a very average, moderate island. Reasonably representative, I think.

 

[CapelDodger]

I'll make of note of that for 30 years down the road. It should be good enough for 'Nature' to publish though.

Ooh, that's bitchy. Feeling rejected, are we?

 

[mhaze]

There are quotes around "doomed to meltdown", so all it implies is that the piece is reporting on a claim. It makes no claim itself. Apart from that, it's a headline, written by a sub-editor, meant to draw attention. Not a bad effort; "doomed" draws the average eye. The quotes indicate that this sub had at least skimmed the piece itself. Which is not something you can depend on in a sub.

When you're reduced to decrying an article by its headline and are misrepresenting (or misunderstanding) even that, desperation is a line that's been crossed.

But where is the NEWS?

 

[mhaze]

That's not quite right, is it? Apparently, you only read the caption, not the text. Or did you not track down the original?

This is what I found - from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005/



Your contention seems to be with the satellite measurements. If there were a discontinuity at 1982 - when satellite measurements of sea surface temperature replace ship-based measurement, then perhaps you'd have a point. But it appears that the current linear rise goes back to at least 1975 (and it's a very nice straight line, as these things go). Since there's a clear demarcation between the satellite and ship-based measures, you can't call it a mish-mash, can you?

Following the citations, it would appear that the satellite measurements are calibrated against ship-based measures, so this mixing is a non-issue.

Why would you assume the graph mixes tropospheric and ground data?

I'm also kinda confused - you seem to be contrasting the two data sets, Spencer and Christy vs Hensen. But if it looks to me that if you plot the two on the same scales, they'd be in pretty good agreement - jot down in '85 and '92, peak in '98, overall about a 0.4 degree increase from 1980.

Which is why I noted "statistics is fun". By changing the y and x axis scales and picking a starting chronological point for x, the presentation and apparent conclusions change dramatically.

Hensen mixes up several sources of data in the graph and does not even distinguish them by colored lines. Therefore, I use the phrase "mismash" to describe it. Reading the way that he developed the numbers one could easily be critical of the methods, including the numerous data adjustments and so forth. But that isn't the point I was trying to make - rather it is simply the "how to lie with statistics" issue.

Uh, duh?

The key part you seem to be missing is that air is transparent to most energy coming from the sun, but is more opaque to the energy re-radiated from the surface. Sure, CO₂ is not that important w.r.t. absorbing incoming light, but it acts to limit the escape of energy back to space.

If you've been in the country on a clear winter night, you might have noticed that it gets much, much colder than on an overcast night. Less heat is lost to space.

That's what greenhouse gases do. Consider the moderating effects of the atmosphere on earth, compared to the surface temperature swings from day to night sides of the moon.

Or did you intend to misstate the obvious?

Of course, I am familiar with the theory that you have presented, and with a number of interpretations of it. There does seem to be a shortage of actual literature showing the calculation of the Callendar effect though; Plass 1956 comes to mind.

Instead of taking that for granted (no one has in this forum answered David Rodale's simple question -

He nor anyone else has yet to cite a paper explaining the physics (not consensus or opinion) of temperature rising 2+C due to doubling (or any amount) of atmospheric CO2.

​

I just thought, well, why not start with a blank sheet of paper here. That led me to the above mentioned desktop example. To that example one must add one or manyother factors, right?

But just looking at the simple desktop experiment, it would look like the heat capacity of water would drive the air's temperature, not the other way around. Of course this is a very simplified scenario and hunches of this sort can easily be wrong.