Let's compare what we really know to what is either as yet unproven or already proven false. In the post below: several statements of accepted fact are made. These are followed by speculations presented as though they were facts. The speculations, however, run counter to observation. Facts: Atmospheric CO2 can be measured with surprising accuracy, and the present increase of 2.9 ppm is an average for many measurements made well away from man made sources of CO2 in an attempt to see if CO2 is rising of falling in the atmosphere. 2.9 ppm is a 0.7 % increase year to year. A meaningless figure if only a few observations are made, but depending on the sample size, 0.7% may be significant. There is no way to tell from the article, so let us assume that the increase is real. Of course, and regardless, 2.9 ppm is far too small an increase to create an observable effect, even assuming the Hansen hypothesis to be correct. So there is no information in this single observation alone that can help sort out whether CO2 changes over the last century have had an effect on temperature. We know that man has produced the right amount of CO2 over the last century to be in surprisingly good agreement with an observed increase in atmospheric CO2. (This is an observation that tripped up many early researchers into Hansen's hypothesis.) More recently, however, we have learned that CO2 disappears from our atmosphere much more rapidly than was previously thought. The current thinking is that about half of man produced CO2 is absorbed rather rapidly by the environment, as noted in the article below. (This is a distinct break from what was thought by early adherents to Hansen's hypothesis, who assumed that the take up of excess CO2 produced by man would be extremely slow. They also assumed that CO2's effect as a greenhouse gas was significant, and therefore that man might cause a cumulative increase in CO2 that could lead to catastrophic global warming, particularly if positive feedback via warming oceans were involved. They developed models based on these premises that predicted exponentially rising future temperatures! Current research, however, has shown the premises on which the early work was based to be incorrect.) If the estimate in the article for the fraction of anthro CO2 taken up naturally by the environment is correct, then the very good agreement between the observed rise in CO2 and the amount of Anthro CO2 released over the last century can result only fortuitously, and only if considerable natural sourced CO2 is also being released. This is consistent with or realization that temperature has been the primary driver of observable changes in atmospheric CO2. Anthro CO2, if it is important at all, is secondary to natural sourced CO2. We now know, for example, that natural sourcing and sinking of CO2 is about two orders greater than anthro sourced CO2. We also know that temperature changes lead CO2 concentration changes! It is difficult, therefore, to imagine a mechanism in which, as surmised, increasing CO2 is responsible for increasing temperature; yet the temperature rises before the CO2 concentration! The phase relationship between rising temperature and rising CO2 is is a primary disproof of the Hansen hypothesis; yet the hypothesis refuses to die. Speculation: "The latest figures from the WMO’s monitoring network “are considered particularly significant” because of unprecedented buildup or concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are immune to natural dissipation, The Washington Post reported today." Probably one should not waste much time trying to figure out what this statement is about, as it is apparently nonsense. If the statement is about greenhouse gases "immune" to natural dissipation then the statement is obviously not about CO2! "“We know without any doubt that our climate is changing and our weather is becoming more extreme due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels,” WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in a statement accompanying the WMO’s annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. But Mr, Jarraud, I am sorry to have to inform you that we have plenty of doubt and more of it each day. “Past, present and future CO2 emissions will have a cumulative impact on both global warming and ocean acidification. This statement is eminently consistent with the Hansen hypothesis and the premises underlying climate models predicting catastrophic temperature rise due to increasing CO2. It isn't supported by actual observation however. Observation indicates that CO2 has little to no net impact on warming. Observations indicate that global warming is driven by something other than a CO2 greenhouse effect, so it is mere unsubstantiated conjecture that CO2 emissions over time will have a cumulative impact on "global warming". It would seem to require that Hansen's hypothesis be true for such a conjecture to be true, but the hypothesis has already been shown to be false, i.e., increasing CO2 is not responsible for increasing temperature. A cumulative affect on ocean pH is also conjecture at this point.
^Did piehole just have another loss of sphincter control? I'm not even going to bother to read it. Come out of it all smelly with nothing of any value. I don't have waders that tall. Speaking of AGW's effects on Agriculture.... WASHINGTON — Climate change could have a drastic and harmful effect on U.S. agriculture, forcing farmers and ranchers to alter where they grow crops and costing them millions of dollars in additional costs to tackle weeds, pests and diseases that threaten their operations, a sweeping government report said Tuesday. An analysis released by the Agriculture Department said that although U.S. crops and livestock have been able to adapt to changes in their surroundings for close to 150 years, the accelerating pace and intensity of global warming during the next few decades may soon be too much for the once-resilient sector to overcome. "We're going to end up in a situation where we have a multitude of things happening that are going to negatively impact crop production," said Jerry Hatfield, a laboratory director and plant physiologist with USDA's Agricultural Research Service and lead author of the study. "In fact, we saw this in 2012 with the drought." The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said 2012 was the hottest year ever in the USA since record-keeping began in 1895, surpassing the previous high by a full degree Fahrenheit. The country was battered by the worst drought in more than 50 years, and crops withered away in bone-dry fields across the Midwest. In the report, researchers said U.S. cropland agriculture will be fairly resistant to climate change during the next quarter-century. Farmers will be able to minimize the impact of global warming on their crops by changing the timing of farming practices and utilizing specialized crop varieties more resilient to drought, disease and heat, among other practices, the report found. Crops also may benefit by increasing the use of irrigation when possible and shifting production areas to regions where the temperature is more conducive for better output. Depending on where they live, some farmers could benefit financially at the expense of others. By the middle of the century and beyond, adaptation becomes more difficult and costly as plants and animals that have adapted to warming climate conditions will have to do so even more — making the productivity of crops and livestock increasingly more unpredictable. Temperature increases and more extreme swings in precipitation could lead to a drop in yield for major U.S. crops and reduce the profitability of many agriculture operations. The reason is that higher temperatures cause crops to mature more quickly, reducing the growing season and yields as a result. Faster growth could reduce grain, forage, fiber and fruit production if the plants can't get the proper level of nutrients or water. Among the biggest threat to crops from rising temperatures and accelerated levels of carbon dioxide is an increase in the cost for the agricultural industry to control weeds, a challenge that tops more than $11 billion annually, according to the study. Warmer weather provides an ideal atmosphere for weeds to thrive, but at the same time, it can stunt the growth of traditional plants like grain and soybeans. The entire USA is likely to warm substantially during the next 40 years, increasing 1-2 degrees Celsius over much of the country, according to the study. The warmth is likely to be more significant in much of the interior USA where temperatures are likely to increase 2-3 degrees Celsius. The USDA review said climate change will affect livestock by throwing off an animal's optimal core body temperature, which could hurt productivity and limit the production of meat, milk or eggs. A warmer and more humid weather pattern is likely to increase the prevalence of insect and diseases, further diminishing an animal's health and output. The 146-page report, written by a team of 56 authors from the federal government, universities, the private sector and other groups, stopped short of providing answers on how to stop or curtail global warming. The analysis was done by reviewing more than 1,400 publications that looked at the effect of climate change on U.S. agriculture. In a separate report, the USDA looked at literature reviewing the impact of climate change on the country's forests. The data indicated the most visible and significant short-term effects on forests will be caused by fire, insects, invasive species or a mix of these occurring together. Wildfires are likely to increase throughout the USA, causing at least a doubling of area burned by the mid-21st century. "That's the conservative end," said Dave Cleaves, a climate change adviser with the USDA's Forest Service. "We can't just stand back and let these natural conditions occur." http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/05/climate-change-agriculture-study/1893455/
You might want to take note of this. Most of the dire consequences mentioned in your quote from USA Today are based on the assumption that the Hansen hypothesis is true. But that hypothesis has convincingly been shown to be untrue. The hypothesis, and all of the model projections based on the assumption that it is true, must be rejected. What does that do for the likelihood that the predictions in the USA Today article are correct?
MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot on September 27, 2013: I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence. They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase. Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans. However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability. Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified. Finally, in attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there being nothing to be alarmed about. It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going. End Lindzen statement Lindzen is an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. Lindzen has published more than 200 scientific papers and books. He was a lead author of Chapter 7, ‘Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,’ of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change.
From a 2009 article in WSJ. Note that this is 2009, but the warming hiatus is still with us! The Climate Science Isn't Settled Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted. By Richard S. Lindzen Updated Nov. 30, 2009 7:44 p.m. ET Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned. Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes. The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%. Enlarge Image Getty Images The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming. That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let's refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called "climate forcing." There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern. The IPCC's Scientific Assessments generally consist of about 1,000 pages of text. The Summary for Policymakers is 20 pages. It is, of course, impossible to accurately summarize the 1,000-page assessment in just 20 pages; at the very least, nuances and caveats have to be omitted. However, it has been my experience that even the summary is hardly ever looked at. Rather, the whole report tends to be characterized by a single iconic claim. The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc. Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false. The Climate Emails The Economics of Climate Change Rigging a Climate 'Consensus' Global Warming With the Lid Off Climate Science and Candor Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively. But even if the IPCC's iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about. Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible. There is some evidence of a positive feedback effect for water vapor in cloud-free regions, but a major part of any water-vapor feedback would have to acknowledge that cloud-free areas are always changing, and this remains an unknown. At this point, few scientists would argue that the science is settled. In particular, the question remains as to whether water vapor and clouds have positive or negative feedbacks. The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth's climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today's. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the "Early Faint Sun Paradox." For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2. There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model. What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree. The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors. Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well. ... Mr. Lindzen is professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Wow, so it's difficult to imagine a mechanism that would explain how CO2 would cause an increase in temperature yet the data shows its lag. Here's a very simplified explanation: Why CO2 lags temperature Here's a simple rule: If you have a republican mind, don't comment on science. You people should just stick with the faux scandals and reposting of ZeroSense articles on topics you know very little about.
Good article, makes sense. So long as we don't increase CO2 levels above long-standing norms, 200 ppm, we should be ok.
what a bunch of crap that article is covert. you article takes our argument... that natural forcings such as the sun cause the oceans to release CO2. But it then goes on to say that the co2 amplifies the warming... This assumption is made without any science backing it up. This whole point of the argument. There is no science saying man made co2 is currently causing warming. We have no proof we are warming outside natural variability We have not science showing man made co2 is warming. We do have science showing co2 lags warming as ocean temps goes up. We also have science showing co2 lags cooling as ocean temps go down. So there is not a whole lot of room for you to prove amplification. It is possible... we are just waiting for science not speculation.