What Do We Think About Climate Change

[alanrockwood]

Originally Posted by Boston

no he is desperately trying to distract from the corner you had the deniers in

its not a mater of random posts
Hoyt is no slouch
what you are experiencing is a deliberate attempt to escape the only logical conclusion of our previous topic
the one that directly refutes that particular aspect of the deniers diatribe

the ocean isn't responsible for the rise in atmospheric co2 content just like there is no relevant level of co2 saturation and no sufficient variation in the suns output to explain the recent warming event.

its a distraction from another failed argument Allan and nothing less

Hoyt knows what he is doing with the inanity of his posts and Jim knows what he is doing by bugging out just when he is cornered and letting Hoyt take over for a while

sorta the same thing with G once his Misclowszi paper ws found to be in error he also simple bugged out for a while rather than admit any error

its a typical response and one of the reasons they earned the name "Deniers"

Very interesting analysis. It explains a lot.

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by hoytedow

I think we were speaking(writing) English, were we not?

You and I speak and write English as Americans. In case you hadn't noticed, in other countries they use the English language differently -- like in England, for example. Are you really going to tell the English they don't know how to speak English?

To quote an online dictionary:

billion [ˈbɪljən]
n pl -lions, -lion
1. (Mathematics) one thousand million: it is written as 1 000 000 000 or 109
2. (Mathematics) (formerly, in Britain) one million million: it is written as 1 000 000 000 000 or 1012
3. (often plural) any exceptionally large number

That isn't hard to understand. And as Alan pointed out, it's a complete non-issue anyway, and has nothing to do with AGW. Or anything else, for that matter.

[hoytedow]

No you tagged us with the purjoritive term denier, just as you tag those with whom you disagree as teabagger or nazi. You who are the first to whine when your feelings get bruised have noooooooo problem labeling others with demeaning nicknames, with the not so subtle attempt to link us to holocaust deniers or worse.

Okariahta:ne

[Boston]

without getting to wrapped up in the distraction I think its fair to say that neither I nor anyone else on this page coined the term denier

but if the shoe fits

simple truth is that Jim got schooled again and your just trying to be a good if misguided sort by covering his tracks

no worries
and no need to take it personally
its just the way it is

some folks understand the science and some folks dont

I might be a bit fuzzy on some of the more arcane aspects as its been so long since I've been at university but at least I can discern what smells right and what smells like a rat

kinda like that co2 saturation tripe that was being spread not so long ago

at some point even if its not in your field you can sorta feel if its right or not and then investigate from there

sooooooo

now that we have established that the oceans didn't do it

maybe we should go over the isotopic mas balance again just to make sure we all understand that the excess co2 has been positively identified and by multiple methods of analysis.

the excess co2 is clearly the result of the burning of fossil fuels

[Boston]

how about a short primer validating the previous points that the recent increase in co2 is verry nearly 100% caused by human activities

if anyone would like to follow the links please see the original post at Realclimate
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...an-activities/

How much of the recent CO2 increase is due to human activities?

Contributed by Corinne Le Quéré, University of East Anglia.

This question keeps coming back, although we know the answer very well: all of the recent CO2 increase in the atmosphere is due to human activities, in spite of the fact that both the oceans and the land biosphere respond to global warming. There is a lot of evidence to support this statement which has been explained in a previous posting here and in a letter in Physics Today . However, the most convincing arguments for scientists (based on isotopes and oxygen decreases in the atmosphere) may be hard to understand for the general public because they require a high level of scientific knowledge. I present simpler evidence of the same statement based on ocean observations, and I explain how we know that not only part of the atmospheric CO2 increase is due to human activities, but all of it.

On time-scales of ~100 years, there are only two reservoirs that can naturally exchange large quantities of CO2 with the atmosphere: the oceans and the land biosphere (forests and soils). The mass of carbon (carbon is the “C” in CO2) must be conserved. If the atmospheric CO2 increase was caused, even in part, by carbon emitted from the oceans or the land, we would measure a carbon decrease in these two reservoirs.

Number of observations of carbon decreasing in the global oceans: zero.

Number of observations of carbon increasing in the global oceans: more than 20 published studies using 6 independent methods.
The methods are:
(1) direct observations of the partial pressure of CO2 at the ocean surface (Takahashi et al. 2002),
(2) observations of the spatial distribution of atmospheric CO2 which show how much carbon goes in and out of the different oceanic regions (Bousquet et al. 2000),
(3) observations of carbon, oxygen, nutrients and CFCs combined to remove the mean imprint of biological processes (Sabine et al. 2004),
(4) observations of carbon and alkalinity for two time-periods combined with an estimate of water age based on CFCs (McNeil et al. 2002), and the simultaneous observations of atmospheric CO2 increase and the decrease in (5) oxygen (Keeling et al. 1996), and (6) carbon 13 (Ciais et al. 1995) in the atmosphere.

The principle of the last two methods is that both fossil fuel burning and biospheric respiration consume oxygen and reduce carbon 13 as they produce CO2, but the exchange of CO2 with the oceans has only a small impact on atmospheric oxygen and carbon 13. The measure of atmospheric CO2 increase together with oxygen or carbon 13 decrease gives the distribution between the different reservoirs.

All the estimates show that the carbon content of the oceans is increasing by ~ 2±1 PgC every year (current burning of fossil fuel is ~7 PgC per year). One method is able to go back in time and shows that the carbon content of the oceans has increased by 118±19 PgC in the last 200 years. There is some uncertainty about the exact amount that the oceans have taken up, but not about the direction of the change. The oceans cannot be a source of carbon to the atmosphere, because we observe them to be a sink of carbon from the atmosphere.

What about the land biosphere? We know that deforestation has contributed to the increase in atmospheric CO2. Yet because carbon needs to be conserved, observations of the carbon increase in the atmosphere and the oceans combined with estimates of fossil fuel burning tell us that deforestation has been largely compensated by enhanced growth by the land biosphere. For example, during 1980 to 1999, fossil fuel burning was 117±5 PgC, and the carbon increase in the atmosphere and the oceans were 65±1 and 37±8 PgC, respectively. Thus that leaves 15±9 PgC that has been taken up by the land. This 15±9 PgC includes deforestation (and other land-use changes) which reduced the land biosphere by 24±12 PgC, and an additional land uptake of 39±18 PgC in response to elevated CO2 and climate changes (Sabine et al. 2004). Here also there is some uncertainty about the exact amount, but there is no uncertainty that the land biosphere has taken up a quantity of CO2 that is roughly equivalent to the deforestation.

Why are the ocean and land taking up carbon, when we know that warming of the oceans reduces the solubility of CO2 and warming of the land accelerates bacterial degradation of the soils? The answer is that warming is not the only process that influences the oceans and land biosphere. The dominant process in the oceans is the response to increasing atmospheric CO2 itself. If the oceans had not warmed, they might have taken up even more carbon, although we cannot say for sure because warming may have other impacts, for example on marine biota. On land, bacterial degradation of the soils may have increased in response to warming, but for the moment this effect is smaller than the land response to other processes (for example fertilization by CO2 and nitrogen, changes in precipitation, etc).

Is this consistent with what we know of the glaciations? Yes. During glaciations, the balance of processes was very different. Cooling and other climate changes occurred first. The response of the oceans and land biosphere to climate caused the atmospheric CO2 to decrease, which caused more cooling (more on the feedbacks between temperature and CO2 can be found here). During glaciations, there were no external changes in atmospheric CO2 and the oceans and land biosphere responded primarily to climate change. In the last 200 years, there have been large changes in atmospheric CO2 as a result of human activities, and the oceans and land biosphere respond primarily to rising CO2.

In summary, we know that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is entirely caused by fossil fuel burning and deforestation because many independent observations show that the carbon content has also increased in both the oceans and the land biosphere (after deforestation). If the oceans or land had contributed to the rise in atmospheric CO2, they would hold less carbon. Their response to warming may be real, but it is less than their response to increasing CO2 and other climate changes for the moment.

More on the carbon budget can be found in the last IPCC report here, which includes budgets and uncertainties for different time periods and additional numbers for the small contribution of volcanoes and other geological reservoirs.

References:
Bousquet et al. (2000), Regional changes of CO2 fluxes over land and oceans since 1980, Science, Vol 290, 1342-1346.
Ciais et al. (1995), A Large Northern Hemisphere Terrestrial CO2 Sink Indicated by the 13C/12C Ratio of atmospheric CO2, Science, Vol 269, pp. 1098-1102.
Keeling, Piper and Heimann (1996), Global and hemispheric CO2 sinks deduced from changes in atmospheric O2 concentration, Nature, Vol 381, 218-221.
McNeil et al. (2003), Anthropogenic CO2 uptake by the ocean based on the global chlorofluorocarbon data set, Science, Vol 299, 235-239.
Takahashi et al. (2002), Global sea-air CO2 flux based on climatological surface ocean pCO2, and seasonal biological and temperature effects, Deep Sea Research, Vol 49, 1601-1622.

[Boston]

one link in the previous hit the nail on the perverbial head so well I think it deserves its own post

specifically I stated that a variety of measurements all corroborated the rise in co2 as being directly attributable to human activities

May 2005, page 16 physics today

I was puzzled when I read the exchange of Letters on global warming in the January 2005 issue of PHYSICS TODAY (page 13). George Smith suggested that the recent carbon dioxide increase could be the result of a century of global warming—in particular, by the degassing of the ocean. Spencer Weart answered (correctly, but see below) that scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have calculated the budget between the carbon input with the sinks in different reservoirs of the carbon cycle: ocean, forest, soil, and so forth

Besides technicalities implying that the global CO2 budget still has second-order uncertainties, I'm surprised Weart didn't cite first-order proofs demonstrating that the recent CO2 increase cannot be due to ocean warming. Those killing proofs are well-known in the climatology community—for example, in the IPCC—but it is crucial to emphasize them again for a wider audience.

The recent CO2 increase—280 to 380 parts per million by volume between 1800 and 2005—is accompanied by three phenomena that completely rule out ocean warming as the main cause:

* Parallel decline of the 14C/12C ratio of atmospheric CO2. Strictly speaking, this is the "Suess effect," first observed, and correctly interpreted, by Hans Suess of the University of California, San Diego, in the early 1950s. The Suess effect occurs because fossil fuels do not contain 14C precisely because they are fossil—much older than 10 half-lives of 14C.
* Parallel decline of the 13C/12C ratio of atmospheric CO2. This phenomenon is linked to the fact that fossil fuels, forests, and soil carbon come from photosynthetic carbon, which is strongly depleted in 13C.
* Parallel decline in the oxygen concentration of the atmosphere, which is the inescapable signature of an oxidation of carbon. If ocean warming were responsible for the CO2 increase, we should also observe an increase in atmospheric O2.

Nonspecialists will not easily be impressed by model calculations and complex budgets that contain often large uncertainties. Moreover, I have seen dishonest skeptics using "old hat" arguments such as ocean CO2 outgassing to refute the responsibility of human activities in the recent CO2 increase and the forthcoming large global warming.

One crucial note about the global budget of inputs and outputs that Weart should have stated: Known CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation largely exceed (by about a factor of two) what remains in the atmosphere. Hence, if warming were the cause of the CO2 increase, how would we account for the hundreds of gigatons of carbon generated by human activity?

[Jimbo1490]

Originally Posted by alanrockwood

Please explain why T+1073 invalidates the warmers.

Because, the mathematical anaylisis of the data proves that the lag between rising CO2 concentration and rising temperature is not just an artifact but the result of a real temporal sequence, to wit, warming comes first, then CO2 increase always follows. The best fit for the lag is 1073 years. When the 't+1073' is applied to the Vostok data points, the data points then produce the shotgun plot which is statistical dead ringer for the inverse of the CO2 solubility curve, therefore temperature is the driver, not CO2. CO2 concentration is but a lagging proxy for temperature. The warmer's assertion that the CO2 surely augmented warming that was kicked off by another cause is also refuted, as there is no evidence from the shotgun plot that CO2 concentration has ever done anything but follow temperature with a lag averaging 1073 years. If a positive feedback loop operated, where then is the evidence? The assertion is yet another 'rescue' assertion anyway, since the warmers originally (back in the late 1980's) predicted that better cores and analysis would surely show warming lagging a rising CO2 concentration, meaning temperature is a proxy for CO2 concentration. But that's not how it worked out.

Jimbo

[Jimbo1490]

Originally Posted by alanrockwood

By the way, I haven't read the whole Glassman paper, but in skimming through it one of Glassman's big assertions seems to be that the thermohaline flow has been left out of the IPCC-related modeling studies, or at least insufficiently considered. This may be so. I don't know. However, it would surprise me greatly if it were left out because I know about the thermohaline flow, and it has figured into my own thinking about climate issues, even though I am not an earth scientist.

If Glassman has stumbled onto something here (i.e. that the thermohaline flow is being ignored) then he may have stumbled onto something important with regard to the prehistory of climate change.

However, if anthropogenic global warming is occurring then the thermohaline flow has virtually nothing to do with it because the time scale of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is that it is occurring in the last 150 years (and especially that last few decades), whereas the time scale of the thermohaline circuit is an order of magnitude longer. Thus, any significant effects of the thermohaline flow on anthropogenic global warming would not yet have time to kick in. Hence, the thermohaline flow is essentially irrelevant to current events, with one possible exception, i.e. events that happened a thousand years ago (perhaps the midevil (sorry for the spelling error) warming period) may be echoing in the climate today.

Read the paper; it's an aye opener! For instance, why in the world should there be a lag of ~1100 years between temperature and CO2 concentration? Guess what the time interval is for one 'turnover' of the thermohaline circulation

Jimbo

[Boston]

Jim I might recommend that rather than take off on an entirely different question you might think of accepting that you were mistaken again on the issue of the ocean co2 sink being responsible for the rise in atmospheric co2. Which it has been clearly shown to not be the case.

If you wish to now discuss another issue rather than resolve the first where in the end will you be other than still confused

I think the readers can all see whats going on here when you try this switch and bait kind of tactic rather than engage in a meaningful and productive discourse concerning the origins of the excess co2 in our atmosphere

I also might note that you are deliberately ignoring the pages and pages of effort a number of people put into explaining ice permeability to you

maybe this PDF will jog your memory

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sourc...z6xou1UR1CDkXA

in the end it is no wonder that your views have fossilized in some far away place when you so adamantly refuse to allow anyone to explain your errors to you

[Boston]

and in case you missed my post from so long ago I will reprint it for you

The lag between temperature and CO2. (Gore’s got it right.)

When I give talks about climate change, the question that comes up most frequently is this: “Doesn’t the relationship between CO2 and temperature in the ice core record show that temperature drives CO2, not the other way round?”

On the face of it, it sounds like a reasonable question. It is no surprise that it comes up because it is one of the most popular claims made by the global warming deniers. It got a particularly high profile airing a couple of weeks ago, when congressman Joe Barton brought it up to try to discredit Al Gore’s congressional testimony. Barton said:

In your movie, you display a timeline of temperature and compared to CO2 levels over a 600,000-year period as reconstructed from ice core samples. You indicate that this is conclusive proof of the link of increased CO2 emissions and global warming. A closer examination of these facts reveals something entirely different. I have an article from Science magazine which I will put into the record at the appropriate time that explains that historically, a rise in CO2 concentrations did not precede a rise in temperatures, but actually lagged temperature by 200 to 1,000 years. CO2 levels went up after the temperature rose. The temperature appears to drive CO2, not vice versa. On this point, Mr. Vice President, you’re not just off a little. You’re totally wrong.

Of course, those who’ve been paying attention will recognize that Gore is not wrong at all. This subject has been very well addressed in numerous places. Indeed, guest contributor Jeff Severinghaus addressed this in one of our very first RealClimate posts, way back in 2004. Still, the question does keep coming up, and Jeff recently received a letter asking about this. His exchange with the letter writer is reproduced in full at the end of this post. Below is my own take on the subject.

First of all, saying “historically” is misleading, because Barton is actually talking about CO2 changes on very long (glacial-interglacial) timescales. On historical timescales, CO2 has definitely led, not lagged, temperature. But in any case, it doesn’t really matter for the problem at hand (global warming). We know why CO2 is increasing now, and the direct radiative effects of CO2 on climate have been known for more than 100 years. In the absence of human intervention CO2 does rise and fall over time, due to exchanges of carbon among the biosphere, atmosphere, and ocean and, on the very longest timescales, the lithosphere (i.e. rocks, oil reservoirs, coal, carbonate rocks). The rates of those exchanges are now being completely overwhelmed by the rate at which we are extracting carbon from the latter set of reservoirs and converting it to atmospheric CO2. No discovery made with ice cores is going to change those basic facts.

Second, the idea that there might be a lag of CO2 concentrations behind temperature change (during glacial-interglacial climate changes) is hardly new to the climate science community. Indeed, Claude Lorius, Jim Hansen and others essentially predicted this finding fully 17 years ago, in a landmark paper that addressed the cause of temperature change observed in Antarctic ice core records, well before the data showed that CO2 might lag temperature. In that paper (Lorius et al., 1990), they say that:

changes in the CO2 and CH4 content have played a significant part in the glacial-interglacial climate changes by amplifying, together with the growth and decay of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, the relatively weak orbital forcing

What is being talked about here is influence of the seasonal radiative forcing change from the earth’s wobble around the sun (the well established Milankovitch theory of ice ages), combined with the positive feedback of ice sheet albedo (less ice = less reflection of sunlight = warmer temperatures) and greenhouse gas concentrations (higher temperatures lead to more CO2 leads to warmer temperatures). Thus, both CO2 and ice volume should lag temperature somewhat, depending on the characteristic response times of these different components of the climate system. Ice volume should lag temperature by about 10,000 years, due to the relatively long time period required to grow or shrink ice sheets. CO2 might well be expected to lag temperature by about 1000 years, which is the timescale we expect from changes in ocean circulation and the strength of the “carbon pump” (i.e. marine biological photosynthesis) that transfers carbon from the atmosphere to the deep ocean.

Several recent papers have indeed established that there is lag of CO2 behind temperature. We don’t really know the magnitude of that lag as well as Barton implies we do, because it is very challenging to put CO2 records from ice cores on the same timescale as temperature records from those same ice cores, due to the time delay in trapping the atmosphere as the snow is compressed into ice (the ice at any time will always be younger older than the gas bubbles it encloses, and the age difference is inherently uncertain). Still, the best published calculations do show values similar to those quoted by Barton (presumably, taken from this paper by Monnin et al. (2001), or this one by Caillon et al. (2003)). But the calculations can only be done well when the temperature change is large, notably at glacial terminations (the gradual change from cold glacial climate to warm interglacial climate). Importantly, it takes more than 5000 years for this change to occur, of which the lag is only a small fraction (indeed, one recently submitted paper I’m aware of suggests that the lag is even less than 200 years). So it is not as if the temperature increase has already ended when CO2 starts to rise. Rather, they go very much hand in hand, with the temperature continuing to rise as the the CO2 goes up. In other words, CO2 acts as an amplifier, just as Lorius, Hansen and colleagues suggested.

Now, it there is a minor criticism one might level at Gore for his treatment of this subject in the film (as we previously pointed out in our review). As it turns out though, correcting this would actually further strengthen Gore’s case, rather than weakening it. Here’s why:

The record of temperature shown in the ice core is not a global record. It is a record of local Antarctic temperature change. The rest of the globe does indeed parallel the polar changes closely, but the global mean temperature changes are smaller. While we don’t know precisely why the CO2 changes occur on long timescales, (the mechanisms are well understood; the details are not), we do know that explaining the magnitude of global temperature change requires including CO2. This is a critical point. We cannot explain the temperature observations without CO2. But CO2 does not explain all of the change, and the relationship between temperature and CO2 is therefore by no means linear. That is, a given amount of CO2 increase as measured in the ice cores need not necessarily correspond with a certain amount of temperature increase. Gore shows the strong parallel relationship between the temperature and CO2 data from the ice cores, and then illustrates where the CO2 is now (384 ppm), leaving the viewer’s eye to extrapolate the temperature curve upwards in parallel with the rising CO2. Gore doesn’t actually make the mistake of drawing the temperature curve, but the implication is obvious: temperatures are going to go up a lot. But as illustrated in the figure below, simply extrapolating this correlation forward in time puts the Antarctic temperature in the near future somewhere upwards of 10 degrees Celsius warmer than present — rather at the extreme end of the vast majority of projections (as we have discussed here).



Global average temperature is lower during glacial periods for two primary reasons:
1) there was only about 190 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, and other major greenhouse gases (CH4 and N2O) were also lower
2) the earth surface was more reflective, due to the presence of lots of ice and snow on land, and lots more sea ice than today (that is, the albedo was higher).
As very nicely discussed by Jim Hansen in his recent Scientific American article, the second of these two influences is the larger, accounting for about 2/3 of the total radiative forcing. CO2 and other greenhouse gases account for the other 1/3. Again, this was all pretty well known in 1990, at the time of the Lorius et al. paper cited above.

What Gore should have done is extrapolated the temperature curve according this the appropriate scaling — with CO2 accounting for about 1/3 of the total change — instead of letting the audience do it by eye. Had he done so, he would have drawn a line that went up only 1/3 of the distance implied by the simple correlation with CO2 shown by the ice core record. This would have left the impression that equilibrium warming of Antarctica due to doubled CO2 concentrations should be about 3 °C, in very good agreement with what is predicted by the state-of-the-art climate models. (It is to be noted that the same models predict a significant delay until equilibrium is reached, due to the large heat capacity of the Southern ocean. This is in very good agreement with the data, which show very modest warming over Antarctica in the last 100 years). Then, if you scale the Antarctic temperature change to a global temperature change, then the global climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 becomes 2-3 degrees C, perfectly in line with the climate sensitivity given by IPCC (and known from Arrhenius’s calculations more than 100 years ago).

In summary, the ice core data in no way contradict our understanding of the relationship between CO2 and temperature, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with what Gore says in the film. Indeed, Gore could have used the ice core data to make an additional and stronger point, which is that these data provide a nice independent test of climate sensitivity, which gives a result in excellent agreement with results from models.

A final point. In Barton’s criticism of Gore he also points out that CO2 has sometimes been much higher than it is at present. That is true. CO2 may have reached levels of 1000 parts per million (ppm) — perhaps much higher — at times in the distant geological past (e.g. the Eocene, about 55 million years ago). What Barton doesn’t bother to mention is that the earth was much much warmer at such times. In any case, more relevant is that CO2 has not gone above about 290 ppm any time in the last 650,000 years (at least), until the most recent increase, which is unequivocally due to human activities.
Below is the letter written to Jeff Severinghaus, and his response:

Sorry to be such a thorn in your side Jim but this tact isn't going to work out to well either.

simple reality is temp and co2 go hand in hand, so if you raise one you raise the other, just as our esteemed friends over at Realclimate have pointed out in numerous papers and publications

cheers
B

[Jimbo1490]

GAVIN SCHMIDT ON THE IMPLICATIONS OF VOSTOK

"Schmidt says of The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide, "nor [does the author understand] the implications of the Vostok record … ."

The Acquittal says that the shape of the Vostok relationship between CO2 concentration and the temperature traces is fully represented by the solubility of CO2 in water, with no constant offset (no "forcing" component), and is confirmed by the CO2 lag, which the article quantifies, and which is consistent with the transport lag caused by the oceanic thermohaline circulation. Has anything written by or for Schmidt contradicted these new findings in The Acquittal?

In support of his accusations, Schmidt refers us to three papers he authored, all on his website. None of these citations says that the Vostok record demonstrates the essential fact that atmospheric CO2 and any temperature are correlated!

Schmidt's first citation is "What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?", 12/3/04, http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...ities-updated/. With regard to the Vostok record, this paper says only what is NOT significant. That insignificant fact, Schmidt asserts, is the lag of the CO2 concentration trace behind temperature trace. If that fact were insignificant, it would weaken the discoveries in The Acquittal, depriving its thesis of the lag that tends to confirm the model of the ocean controlling the atmospheric CO2 content.

In reality, the lag is an inconvenient fact to AGW. Enthusiasts must discredit this lag because their AGW conjecture rests on manmade CO2 causing global warming. That causal conjecture is severely damaged by the reversed timing: temperature changes precede CO2 concentration changes!

The AGW advocates postulate a rehabilitating theory: CO2 amplifies global warming. But this residual amplification conjecture is equally bizarre. This model states that the amplified warming somehow releases more CO2, and hence the amplification is a positive feedback.

First, to the extent that this amplification could be so, the instability should soon cause the CO2 record to lead temperature. It never has. Schmidt has no data to confirm his amplification suggestion."


Jimbo

[Jimbo1490]

Another excerpt:

The Unprecedented Assumption

"The absence of evidence is not evidence of the absence, even when abundant samples have proved negative. A tenet of the AGW conjecture is that the present levels of CO2 are unprecedented, going back four million years. The Vostok data go back 420,000 to 780,00 years, but the sample interval is one to two millennia. The current surge in CO2 is known by a different method, and is only 150 years long, a seventh of a millennium. If there had been just one similar epoch to the present during the period covered by Vostok, the odds are strong that it would NOT have been detected.

The AGW advocates suffer from the same problem as creationists. Transition species are missing from the paleontology record, but fossilization is an infrequent event, much longer than the periods of speciation. The chances of discovering a brief epoch in gas concentration, like the chances for discovering transition species, is quite small. Neither proof of God's hand nor of man's lies in such sparse data. "

Jimbo

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by alanrockwood

Very interesting analysis. It explains a lot.

I'm reminded of the advice given young lawyers: "if your facts are weak, pound on the law. If your law is weak, pound on the facts. If your facts and law are both weak, pound on the table."

If you substitute 'data and theory' for 'facts and law' in that statement, it's understandable that Hoyt and a couple of others have been pounding on the table a lot lately.

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by Jimbo1490

Another excerpt:

The Unprecedented Assumption

"The absence of evidence is not evidence of the absence, even when abundant samples have proved negative. A tenet of the AGW conjecture is that the present levels of CO2 are unprecedented, going back four million years. The Vostok data go back 420,000 to 780,00 years, but the sample interval is one to two millennia. The current surge in CO2 is known by a different method, and is only 150 years long, a seventh of a millennium. If there had been just one similar epoch to the present during the period covered by Vostok, the odds are strong that it would NOT have been detected.

The AGW advocates suffer from the same problem as creationists. Transition species are missing from the paleontology record, but fossilization is an infrequent event, much longer than the periods of speciation. The chances of discovering a brief epoch in gas concentration, like the chances for discovering transition species, is quite small. Neither proof of God's hand nor of man's lies in such sparse data. "

Jimbo

That sounds suspiciously like, "you don't need any evidence for what I'm saying; just take my word for it."

Seems to be me there's a serious question about who's making assumptions.....

[Guillermo]

CO2 changes lagged temperature changes by 5 months for the last 50 years.