Global warming?

[Fair&Balanced]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Unlike yourself, I don't have any conclusions, just data.

It has taken us three days for you to agree that your statement...



...is wrong, based on the actual data.

Is the warming being cancelled by anthropogenic forces? Maybe. The paper argues it's possible. I say it's possible.

The paper in question seemed clear to me in its conclusion...

"The finding that the recent hiatus in warming is driven largely by natural factors does not contradict the hypothesis: “most of the observed increase in global average temperature since the mid 20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations..."

I fail to see how this paper that focuses on how pollution emissions may mask variations in temperature changes the consensus of the vast majority of climate scientists on the anthropogenic contributions to climate change.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Is the warming being cancelled by anthropogenic forces? Maybe. The paper argues it's possible. I say it's possible.

You are saying what I also said. Then trying to put words in my mouth. So let's again discuss the details.

Your paper speculates for discussion purposes that oscillating anthropogenic forces have temporarily slowed global warming. An oscillation that is only speculated; without any numbers or facts. A speculation to only discuss the significance of pollution numbers. Your paper makes no valid claims about global cooling. Only defines how pollution might slow global warming. And how anthropogenic oscillations might vary the pollution predictions. But somehow you *know* oscillating anthropogenic forces exist? Your citation does not even *know* that.

Numbers from five responsible science organizations (as reported by The Economist chart) say global warming has continued. Numbers also confirmed by Dr Muller in a project funded by the extremist Koch brothers. Therefore when speculated anthropogenic oscillation goes the other way, then rising temperatures may increase even faster. How do you convert that from your own citation into global cooling?

Demonstrated repeatedly is why your numbers and claims are bogus. Only political newspapers claim global cooling. Even your own citation admits to no science for that claim. Posted was The Economist chart taken from numerous science organizations. Why do you ignore those numbers? Because you cannot dispute them. How do you explain why Dr Muller's analysis, funded in part by the Koch brothers, also contradicts your beliefs. Simple. You pretend those numbers do not exist. If facts are ignored, then your need not question your beliefs. I believe that is ostrich thinking.

Your citation even says mankind is creating global warming. Why did you conveniently ignore that? Why do only give credibility to obviously tainted numbers from political news sources (who sound so much like Fox News)? Why do you intentionally ignore numbers summarized by The Economist? Why do you ignore confirmation, in testimony before a Republican Congress? You cannot dispute facts. So you ignore them? This is Saddam’s WMDs all over again. Numbers from science are damning. So you ignore what you cannot explain? That is your proof of global cooling?

Your citation even says why temperature increases will continue. Somehow you even ignored that detail to *know* global cooling is occurring? Ok. Where are your numbers that dispute your own citation? Also not provided. Why do so many numbers from science just get ignored only when convenient?

[Undertoad]

Ah well it was worth a try, as it is about once a year.

[Fair&Balanced]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Ah well it was worth a try, as it is about once a year.

It seems to me that once a year (or more), skeptics point to a study and make claims that were neither the intent nor the conclusions of the authors.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by Fair&Balanced

It seems to me that once a year (or more), skeptics point to a study and make claims that were neither the intent nor the conclusions of the authors.

Once a year I engage with tw.

And now, twice a year with you.

[Fair&Balanced]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Once a year I engage with tw.

And now, twice a year with you.

There's not much I can do about that when you are unwilling to continue a discussion when your position is respectfully challenged.


Talk again around Christmas time?

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Once a year I engage with tw.

You cited one source about "air pollution". Your source even says global warming is created by mankind. And still you quoted a scientist out of context and then have the balls to claim that you were misquoted? Those PNAS authors were misrepresented by you.

Global warming exists no matter how many sources you or Blib27 quote out of context. Reality does not change because numbers and details are ignored.

Blib27 - you posted an opposite of what Prof Jones actually said in that BBC interview. You misrepresented reality using methods routinely implemented by extremists for political purposes. Methods that work when illiteracy is widespread.

[Fair&Balanced]

When skeptics aren't pointing to studies and making claims that were neither the intent nor the conclusions of the authors, there is always the old stand by of quoting a scientist out of context and then having the balls to claim that you were misquoted.

There is no limit to the skeptic tactics, but they become tiresome when repeated so often.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Blib27

If you do not, I shall report you.

I'm sorry, I believe you mean put you on report.


Though it's not going to work, in any case.

[Undertoad]

I said good day.

[Undertoad]

A return to thread topic

The usual prologue: I believe in global warming, I understand the theory of greenhouse gas and why it's plausible man has had a factor in this increase.

However, as a born skeptic, I have to apply that too, and the debate fascinates me. Let's test these ideas with the right kinds of questions, and as the questions are answered correctly, so the truth becomes evident. Or doesn't!

The most interesting skeptical question has become more and more prominent as time has gone by: Why hasn't there been any additional global warming since 1998? Why haven't climate scientists' models proven out?

A new U of Alabama study, involving NASA data, now suggests more energy i.e. heat is lost to space than climate scientists' models originally predicted.

(I hope that this is correct but I do not know if this is correct. Nevertheless, it will probably be the focus of global warming debate for a while.)

bold by undertoad

Originally Posted by U of Alabama Climate Scientists

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (July 26, 2011) — Data from NASA’s Terra satellite shows that when the climate warms, Earth’s atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change have been programmed to “believe.”

The result is climate forecasts that are warming substantially faster than the atmosphere, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

The previously unexplained differences between model-based forecasts of rapid global warming and meteorological data showing a slower rate of warming have been the source of often contentious debate and controversy for more than two decades.

In research published this week in the journal “Remote Sensing” http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf, Spencer and UA Huntsville’s Dr. Danny Braswell compared what a half dozen climate models say the atmosphere should do to satellite data showing what the atmosphere actually did during the 18 months before and after warming events between 2000 and 2011.

“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”

Not only does the atmosphere release more energy than previously thought, it starts releasing it earlier in a warming cycle. The models forecast that the climate should continue to absorb solar energy until a warming event peaks. Instead, the satellite data shows the climate system starting to shed energy more than three months before the typical warming event reaches its peak.

“At the peak, satellites show energy being lost while climate models show energy still being gained,” Spencer said.

This is the first time scientists have looked at radiative balances during the months before and after these transient temperature peaks.

Applied to long-term climate change, the research might indicate that the climate is less sensitive to warming due to increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere than climate modelers have theorized. A major underpinning of global warming theory is that the slight warming caused by enhanced greenhouse gases should change cloud cover in ways that cause additional warming, which would be a positive feedback cycle.

Instead, the natural ebb and flow of clouds, solar radiation, heat rising from the oceans and a myriad of other factors added to the different time lags in which they impact the atmosphere might make it impossible to isolate or accurately identify which piece of Earth’s changing climate is feedback from manmade greenhouse gases.

“There are simply too many variables to reliably gauge the right number for that,” Spencer said. “The main finding from this research is that there is no solution to the problem of measuring atmospheric feedback, due mostly to our inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in our observations.”

For this experiment, the UA Huntsville team used surface temperature data gathered by the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Great Britain. The radiant energy data was collected by the Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments aboard NASA’s Terra satellite.

The six climate models were chosen from those used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The UA Huntsville team used the three models programmed using the greatest sensitivity to radiative forcing and the three that programmed in the least sensitivity.

[Coign]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

A return to thread topic

The usual prologue: I believe in global warming, I understand the theory of greenhouse gas and why it's plausible man has had a factor in this increase.

Here is an article with math and science and everything trying to explain why CO2 gas cannot be the reason for Global Warming. And if the only way that man is causing Global Warming is by putting CO2 into the air, then we cannot be the reason for Global Warming. Thus why do we have to hamstring our economies fighting CO2 emissions?

http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/global-warming-01.html

Here is the summary of the article if you don't want to read the very large and sometime mathamatical discussion.

This whole picture we have drawn ( with Peter Morgan's help ) illustrates both how little CO2 there is in the atmosphere, and how relatively little of the radiation it is capable of absorbing and "heating" the atmosphere. We know that most of the other IR radiation bands slips through and doesn't get to do any heating at all. (We've all seen the nice IR photographs taken from the space station.) But some scientists such as Dr. Heinz Hug who specialize in study of this stuff claims that all of the heat in these particular spectra are indeed absorbed in a relatively short distance, so adding more CO2 to the atmosphere can't affect anything at any rate. Other scientists, such as Dr. Roy W. Spencer at NASA - and one of the leading experts in the field of climate science - doesn't completely agree

We've decided to be exceptionally generous to all concerned in the debate and look at the worst-case scenario, where we'll say that all of the available heat in the CO2 absorption spectrum is actually captured. We know that man is responsible for about 3 % of it, so with the simplest of math, we have .03 x .08 = .0024. And remember that 8% figure was actually larger than reality, since the two side peaks don't have much energy to capture.

Man-made CO2 doesn't appear physically capable of absorbing much more than
two-thousandths of the radiated heat (IR) passing upward through the atmosphere.

And, if all of the available heat in that spectrum is indeed being captured by the current CO2 levels before leaving the atmosphere, then adding more CO2 to the atmosphere won't matter a bit.

In short, the laws of physics don't seem to allow CO2 it's currently assumed place as a significant "greenhouse gas" based on present concentrations. The other "greenhouse gases" such as methane, nitrous oxide, tetrafluoromethane, hexafluoroethane, sulfur hexafluoride, trifluoromethane, 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane, and 1,1-difluoroethane exist only in extraordinarily smaller amounts and aren't even up for serious discussion by any segment of the scientific community. And, since the other components of the atmosphere (oxygen, nitrogen, and water vapor) aren't materially affected by human activity, the "greenhouse effect" is essentially a totally natural phenomenon, unaffected by human activity. We could repeat the spectral analysis and calculations for Oxygen, or O2 ( The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere remains exactly the same at all heights up to about 85 km, and is about 20.9% by volume ) and Nitrogen (N2) which is the whopper at 78.1% - but we won't. We'll leave that as your homework problem now that you know how to do it. Just look up the atomic absorption spectra for both, and do the math. You'll discover that Oxygen and Nitrogen aren't even "greenhouse gases", so that leaves the principal greenhouse gas... you guessed it.... Water Vapor. Curiously enough, the UN IPCC reports don't even mention water vapor, since it is technically not a "gas" in the atmosphere. Dr. Roy W. Spencer has one of the best comments we've read on this subject:


"Al Gore likes to say that mankind puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. What he probably doesn't know is that mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas -- water vapor -- into the atmosphere every day, and removes about the same amount every day. While this does not 'prove' that global warming is not manmade, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest control over the Earth's greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor and clouds."

[ZenGum]

Since Coign is actually engaging in debate, I'll join in.

The link includes the following claim:

We know that man is responsible for about 3 % of it [Carbon dioxide]

Here is the graph on CO2 in the atmosphere called the Keeling Curve.



Note that the vertical axis does not start at zero so this isn't quite as dramatic as it may look at first.

However, the level of CO2 has risen from around 315ppm to 385 ppm in the last 50 odd years. This is an increase of 70ppm, or 22%. As far as I know, all that increase is due to human activities - mostly burning fossil fuel, but also deforestation, making concrete, refining aluminium etc.

So the claim that only 3% of the CO2 is due to humans is ... unsupported.

I read a bit of the original link. It's an op-ed blog from an obscure website. The language is rhetorical, the author presents no qualification, and worst of all, no references are supplied. There are plenty of mistakes. For example, about half-way down, it asks how we can know the temperature of the earth. It does show how by cherrypicking individual measuring sites, you can make any number you like. It then drops the question as if there is no better answer. Of course what real scientists would do is take a weighted average from all weather stations and cross reference it with all other sources of information about temperature.

Thanks for your civility Coign, but the mere presence of numbers and graphs does not guarantee the study has been done properly.

Peace out.

[Coign]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

So the claim that only 3% of the CO2 is due to humans is ... unsupported.

This isn't unsupported. It is actually .03%. (See the equation that immediately follows it.)

And it is not that Man only contributed .03%. The argument is that we contributed ALL of it. All .03% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we put there. And EVEN then, there is only .03% of carbon dioxide and the math says that amount/percentage with the narrow band of absorption is still ONLY two-thousandths of an effect on Global warming.)

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Coign

And if the only way that man is causing Global Warming is by putting CO2 into the air,

Who is saying that?