[dave-r]

The climate change evidence made easy to understand. It even has an animation with voice over.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci ... 386319.stm

[Tim]

This is interesting and well written, but I’m not sure I fully agree with the conclusions.

The article explains how carbon emissions are measured historically, and how there has been a sharp increase in the amount of CO2 recorded over the last hundred years or so.

But the article is titled ‘A journey through the Earth’s climate history’, presumably referring to fluctuations in atmospheric temperature. There’s no link. The article should be titled ‘A history of carbon emissions’ or something similar.

As I understand it, when CO2 levels and atmospheric temperatures are plotted carefully and accurately, what you see is an increase or decrease in mean temperature, followed by a corresponding increase or decrease in CO2 emissions. In other words, a temperature increase causes an increase in CO2’s, not the other way around. There is no hard evidence to support the hypothesis that temperature changes can be caused by a change in CO2’s.

The article concludes, “The intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes it is more than 90% probable that the warming seen in the second half of the 20th Century is mainly driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases.”

“90% probable” based on what? The IPCC was set up by the UN. The whole thing is unwittingly paid for by the UK tax payer. The IPCC takes its findings directly from the UN. Many of the UN’s calculations have since been found to questionable, or completely wrong, but still form the basis for the IPCC’s recommendations.

Climate change (note: buzz phrase changed from ‘global warming’ some years back, so that it now encapsulates any change in mean temperature) is not new. The climate has always changed. It always will. In the UK, when the base for Nelson’s column was excavated in London, the engineers discovered bones from native lions and hippos. Several thousand years ago, the UK had a climate similar to an African savannah. In the early 1800’s it was so cold the Thames froze over and people skated on it. In medieval times, vineyards were commonplace in London because the climate was sufficiently warm enough to support Mediterranean vines. 10,000 years ago, the whole country was covered in thick ice, as far down as Wales and the West Midlands. In 500 years time, it’ll be different to what it is now. 500 years after that, it will be different again. We might not like what it changes to, but change it will.

My worry is that opportunists have leapt onto the climate change bandwagon for their own ends. Scientists can obtain grants to study pretty much anything if they can show even the most tenuous link supporting the currently accepted causes of climate change. Conversely, scientists who question current thinking, or provide research results that do not support current policy, are ostracised and ridiculed.

Political parties see it as an opportunity to strengthen their political standing, and draw attention and funding to their causes. The original founder of Greenpeace has quit his own party because he couldn’t agree with extremist views creeping in on the back of support for drastic change.

Our own government has increased taxes (called climate levies) on petrol, diesel, road usage, parking, oil for central heating, air flights, all forms of electricity generation (even if they don’t emit CO2) and a multitude of other commodities loosely associated with the production of CO2’s, and then expect us to thank them for ‘helping’ with the environment. Incidentally, the UK is responsible for 2% of all global emissions.

To summarise, if there is a genuine (hard data) concern with climate change, it’s long been lost beneath scientific and political agendas. We are not being given the full picture, assuming anyone really knows what it is.

Now, can anyone help me down of my soap box- it’s really high up here.

[dave-r]

There is no hard evidence to support the hypothesis that temperature changes can be caused by a change in CO2’s.

Oh there is. The term "greenhouse effect" has been used long before we even suspected there was global warming and has been used since the 50s or 60s to describe what has happened to the planet Venus.

What I do not see evidence of though is how much CO2 you need in the air before it effects temp.

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

[Tim]

There is no hard evidence to support the hypothesis that temperature changes can be caused by a change in CO2’s.

Oh there is. The term "greenhouse effect" has been used long before we even suspected there was global warming and has been used since the 50s or 60s to describe what has happened to the planet Venus.

What I do not see evidence of though is how much CO2 you need in the air before it effects temp.

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

No there isn’t. There are theories (which may be valid for all anybody knows), but there is no hard evidence. To have evidence that a change in CO2 can result in a change in temperature, you must first be able to show a correlation. Nobody has successfully done that yet. Early attempts have been pulled to pieces.

[dave-r]

No. Hang on Tim. You are saying natural warming is causing CO2 emmisions. Not the other way around.
That has to be poppycock.

The earth temp is clearly in proportion to CO2 levels. That has been proved.
But you cannot say warming caused the CO2 emmissions because we as a race are putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than any current volcanoes, forest fires or melting peat bogs.

But the worry is that those "natural" sources WILL add to and eventually overtake the smaller problem we have kick started.

In the past the warming events have always been caused by giant volcanic erruptions on a scale not seen for millions of years. We have been doing what volcanoes in the past have done.

[dave-r]

To have evidence that a change in CO2 can result in a change in temperature, you must first be able to show a correlation. Nobody has successfully done that yet. Early attempts have been pulled to pieces.

Here is the correlation. It has not been pulled to pieces at all.

[Tim]

Blimey Dave. Now you’ve got me thinking!

“You are saying natural warming is causing CO2 emmisions. Not the other way around.
That has to be poppycock.”

Not quite mate. What I’m saying is CO2 emissions (natural or otherwise) do not cause temperature increases. The increase in CO2 emissions is caused by a combination of natural warming (temperature increases, ice melts, releases naturally stored CO2), and man- made CO2. What proportion is down to what cause is open to debate. I’m not sure if anybody has done a study on it.

”The earth temp is clearly in proportion to CO2 levels. That has been proved.”

It is in proportion, but again, CO2 lags behind an increase in global temperature. We shouldn’t confuse ‘in proportion’ with ‘caused by’.

”But you cannot say warming caused the CO2 emmissions because we as a race are putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than any current volcanoes, forest fires or melting peat bogs.”

I’m not sure if that’s true, to be honest. Globally, we produced 26.7 gigatonnes of CO2 last year, which is a lot by any estimation. But, there are a lot of natural phenomena which contribute- the sea, plankton, any tiny thing which dies releases CO2 as it decays, trees. They’re all constant.


”But the worry is that those "natural" sources WILL add to and eventually overtake the smaller problem we have kick started.”

Good point. That is a real worry. But, the original estimates for how much our CO2 output would change temperature (if at all) were grossly over-exaggerated. Depending on whose measurements you believe, there hasn’t been an increase in global temperature for the last 10 years.

[Tim]

To have evidence that a change in CO2 can result in a change in temperature, you must first be able to show a correlation. Nobody has successfully done that yet. Early attempts have been pulled to pieces.

Here is the correlation. It has not been pulled to pieces at all.

That graph is sourced from UN calculations. Here are some of the problems with it. It's not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea:-

First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.
Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "
So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:
• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).
• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.
• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".
• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".
The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.
Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.
The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost.
The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.
In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming. Here's how:
• The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.
• Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar forcing.
Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably. But recent solar changes have been big.
Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.
The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure.
The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.
Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger.
Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30 years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books called The Cooling.
In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere, 20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's fast-disappearing temperature stations.
The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in 1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve, and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather than facts.
Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing.
You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass.
The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C.
On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined 20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to "predict" 20th-century temperature correctly.
A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a depth of at least a mile and a quarter.
Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic "flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is misplaced.
Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C.
.

[dave-r]

If you think I am going to read THAT you have another thing coming!

From my perspective the world ends when I die.
I don't have kids or any other descendants to worry about.

So I couldn't give a damn really.

Now if my life could be measured in centuries I might give a shit.
Or if I wanted to be remembered forever as some people do.

But the way things are I have 25 years left if I am lucky. Maybe less that that.

and no-one will remember my name.
So stuff it.

[Alaskan_TA]

http://www.junkscience.com/

[dave-r]

How CO2 traps heat.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8394168.stm

[Tim]

Dave said:

"But the way things are I have 25 years left if I am lucky. Maybe less that that."

You'd better be around longer than that mate, who's going to help me play the nurses up when they put us in the Home for the Permanently Befuddled?


There's a couple of good links gone on the end of this thread, each showing an informative facet of this subject. I've learned some new pieces of the puzzle.

Whilst it's tempting to jump on the 'Climategate' e- mails as proof positive that the whole thing is a sham, unfortunately at best it just shows that one small group of individuals may be at fault.

Similarly, in 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). This doesn't disprove that there's a problem, just that the available data needs looking at in closer detail.

I'd love to think that we don't have a problem to face in years to come. Sadly, I don't think it's the case. But- it won't help us tackle the problem if the evidence is overstated.

At the end of the day, who are you going to trust, me or a smarmy little nerk called Ed Milliband.

[dave-r]

I trust no-one!

[Tim]

I trust no-one!

All is well in the world.

[Alaskan_TA]

Worth watching;

http://www.kusi.com/home/78477082.html?video=pop&t=a

[patrick]

I'm with John Coleman.

[dave-r]

It's a bit chilly here at the moment. The worst winter for 20 years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8448399.stm

[drewcrane]

wow mother nature has put an icy grip on all of us this winter, cant wait for spring

[dave-r]

Here is an interesting man made weather effect.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8309629.stm

[drewcrane]

that one is amazing , some people think that those are chemicals that the government is testing on us,down in the desert south west,arizona,newmexico,texas (the fly over states due to better weather),they claim that they are "chem trails" and they see dozens of them everyday, i told the one guy they are simply condensation trails,and my buddie at the time was an FAA certified mechanic, and he chuckled and said "there is no room for those chemicals on a plane" and the guy thought we were nuts